Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind (2020) (TVM)

People knew she was smart and exceptionally well organised, says Mia Farrow of her late friend, Natalie Wood. Wood’s daughter, Natasha Gregson Wagner has produced this personal tribute to her mother, assembling film clips, home movies, photographs and interviews with friends, co-stars and her younger sister Courtney Wagner (who says her famous mother is difficult to access), as well as Robert Wagner, to whom Wood was married for the second time at the time of her death in November 1981. Wagner celebrated her 18th birthday with her after she had admired him aged 10 and their subsequent relationship and marriage played out on the covers of magazine, love’s young dream. They co-starred in All the Fine Young Cannibals and fellow cast member George Hamilton says, She made you feel important, not her. Her career ascended to new heights on Splendor in the Grass where she met Elia Kazan’s production assistant, Mart Crowley, extensively interviewed here, who became fast friends with Wood (and subsequently worked on Wagner’s smash hit 80s TV series Hart to Hart.) Contrary to popular belief he and Wagner both deny Warren Beatty broke up the marriage – it was already in trouble. Wagner puts it down to the pressures on her as she went straight to work on West Side Story without the rest of the cast’s rehearsal time. His career was experiencing a lull. They split, he moved to Rome and remained there for 3 years, and had daughter Katie with his next wife, Marion Marshall, Stanley Donen’s ex, becoming stepfather to her sons, (the late) Peter and Joshua Donen. Natasha reads from a letter she found written by her mother, an essay that was intended for publication in Ladies Home Journal but wasn’t released. She describes the two-year affair with Beatty as a collision from start to finish. She was involved with (among others) Frank Sinatra, Henry Jaglom, David Niven Jr and Michael Caine, as well as getting engaged to Arthur Loew Jr and Ladislav Blatnik the shoe king of Venezuela as someone amusingly recalls. She married British writer/producer Richard Gregson and had Natasha but was so besotted with her newborn that Gregson slept with Wood’s secretary and that was that. She and Wagner met at a party, sparks flew, they both cried afterwards and they remarried in July 1972, creating a large happy home on Canon Drive, Beverly Hills where they had a new baby together, daughter Courtney, hired beloved nanny Willy Mae, and had a very busy guest house with his stepsons, her stepchildren and various friends visiting. Josh Donen even moved in at Wood’s invitation, with movie stars and family attending their fabulous parties. It seemed to me that they should be together, says Josh. Friend Richard Benjamin says, It made you feel good to be there. Wood took her foot off the gas in terms of her career rearing her daughters even if Courtney sadly remembers that Wood was Natasha’s mother, while she relied on Willy Mae. She was totally happy. There’s a rewind to Wood’s own childhood, second daughter to a pushy Russian mother who got her noticed during the location shoot for a film in Santa Rosa which led to the family moving to Los Angeles and Orson Welles says in a TV interview, I was her first leading man, referring to Tomorrow Is Forever, when little Natalie Wood as Natasha Gurdin became, was line perfect while he kept fluffing his. Critic Julia Salamon says of her performance in Miracle on 34th Street, there’s no artifice … she was very sure-seeming in who she was. She injured her wrist on a set and covered it up forever after with a big bangle. Her mother constantly told her that a gypsy foretold that her second daughter would be world famous but beware of dark water, inculcating total fear in Wood. She was the sole breadwinner from 12 when her father Nick got injured and at the same time she entered regular school but had no airs or graces as her schoolfriend recalls. Daughter Natasha says, Being the daughter of a narcissistic controlling mother …. that’s played out in so many of her films, on the subject of the hysterical, dramatic, superstitious mother Maria who ran her life, living vicariously through her beautiful and successful child, pushing her on until Wood herself chose to do Rebel Without a Cause, the film which made her finally realise she could act and on the set she had an affair with director Nick Ray, decades her senior. Robert Redford admits she was responsible for his screen career beginning, insisting after she saw him on Broadway that the theatre actor be cast opposite her in Inside Daisy Clover and she just carried me along to This Property Is Condemned. Before that she had discovered on the set of comedy The Great Race that both Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis were paid more and she insisted on parity. But she was in trouble, attending a psychiatrist five days a week, a practice she continued for 8 years, and ODd on pills one weekend during the shoot going to Mart Crowley’s room in her house calling for assistance. She went to hospital and returned to work the next Monday morning. Scenes on the psychiatrist’s couch from Splendour and Penelope are played, as if to state that without Method training Wood was sublimating her problems in the roles she chose. She was brave too. She was the emotional engine behind Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, as Elliott Gould says, Natalie brought what the film needed. She had points in the film, which was very successful and she could afford to pick and choose her projects thereafter. She took a break of almost 5 years to rear her daughters and then made headlines with her return in the big TV movie event, The Cracker Factory. She reinvented herself in terms of cosmetics and styling with Michael Childers, the photographer who made her look as beautiful as she deserved entering her forties, never a good age for an actress. She appeared in From Here to Eternity, a water-cooler mini-series remake of the famous film. She shot The Last Married Couple in America with George Segal and he comments, She was very wise about how she dispensed herself. She was going to be making her first stage appearance in Anastasia. She went to North Carolina to shoot Brainstorm with director Douglas Trumbull. On the subject of their rumored affair, he says with no fuss, There was no physical charisma between her and Christopher Walken. [We can infer what we will given the obvious and forgivable lacunae in the telling of this life]. There is TV coverage of her disappearance off Catalina. Natasha’s face to face chat with Wagner, which dominates the interviews, gets to the point of what happened that fateful night after Thanksgiving 1981 when both stars were home from location shoots, Wood on Brainstorm, Wagner on Hawaii with Hart to Hart. The weather was terrible, stormy and rainy. Walken was a house guest and the arguments between him and Wagner were apparently so awful that people were embarrassed and her friend Delphine Mann wouldn’t go on the boat to Catalina which she now regrets. Josh Donen encouraged Wood to go, which he says he wish he never had. There are tears streaming down Natasha’s face as she listens to the man she calls Daddy Wagner recount what he believes might have happened. It’s a highly uncomfortable sequence as though they’re playing out a therapy session. I was a little high at the time.  It’s devastating. The scene at the house afterwards was surreal, with news crews maintaining a vigil and Elizabeth Taylor and Shirley MacLaine showing up with a crystal ball.  It doesn’t explain anything, certainly not in terms of his being described as a Person of Interest by the LAPD in the reopened case. The family appear to have come to terms with Wood’s loss, although Courtney resorted to drink and drugs as a coping mechanism in the aftermath: she was just seven years old when Wood died. The party was over, she says ruefully. She wound up in rehab. Wagner followed his therapist’s advice following the funeral. They went to Switzerland and celebrated Christmas with his friend David Niven. They went to England and had New Year’s Eve with Natasha’s father Richard Gregson and his wife and children. It was the return to school that was tough.  Nobody handled Wagner dating Jill St John particularly well. St John says she had experience of loss herself – her husband died in a helicopter crash. She says of Wood, Natalie was a life well-lived. For fans of Wood like myself nobody other than Mia Farrow attempts to get to what it was that Wood communicates in her extraordinarily emotive performing style:  Natalie was unique. She doesn’t have a false moment in her movies. The family dismiss the ongoing speculation and are particularly harsh about Wood’s younger sister Lana who clearly believes Wagner knows more than he’s letting on as she restates in interview after interview. Natasha claims that whenever Lana visited she had no interest in her or her sister, just Wood. Perhaps this film is a salve. Natasha is 50 years old this year with a memoir of Wood published and she says she takes comfort in her daughter, Clover, the most healing thing for me. The last image is of Natasha, Clover and Courtney watching clips of Wood onscreen. It doesn’t tell us anything new except to explore Wood’s family’s pain which is searing and affecting and a little raw, 39 years on. Directed by Laurent Bouzereau. Everything went upside down

What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael (2019)

People don’t tend to like a good critic. They tend to hate your guts. Film critic Pauline Kael had an unimaginable influence in the world of thumbs up, thumbs down reviewing and accumulated acolytes and rivals as she cultivated what she believed was an expressive art form. She was a failed playwright from California who moved to New York City, had an illegitimate daughter by experimental filmmaker James Broughton and returned to Berkeley where she started talking about movies on a radio show. What she failed at in her theatre writing she achieved in reviewing. Something just clicked, as one interviewee recalls. She loved Shoeshine, damned Limelight and got herself in print with a book called I Lost it at the Movies which made her a name. And that title underwrites everything about a woman who regarded every movie as a date. She worked at McCalls’ until she was asked to leave because she did not sit on the fence and was not in tune with the mainstream. She crucified some films, like Hiroshima, mon amour and Lawrence of Arabia. She deplored American cinema at the time. Bonnie and Clyde is the review that made her famous in the wake of Bosley Crowther’s famously damning criticism. Her review was rejected by The New Republic and when The New Yorker published it it was a sensation and she got a job there on a six-month on, six-month off contract.  Robert Towne, who consulted on the film, describes how it helped the film. She loved movies and famously wrote Trash, Art and the Movies where she delineates the difference between the good and the bad as she saw it. She experienced sexism, as she stated on a 1973 TV show:  It is very difficult for men to accept that women can argue reasonably. She had her favourites – Woody Allen, Robert Altman, Warren Beatty among them. Camille Paglia shudders and says she can’t understand why she went to the mat for Last Tango in Paris:  she bought her own ticket at the New York Film Festival and stole the march on her rivals, giving it a rave that weekend. Mean Streets she loved and Scorsese was one filmmaker who benefitted from her cheerleading. She crucified films she thought were phony – she described Shoah as having a lack of moral complexity and summed up Apocalypse Now as white man – he devil. She would not be intimidated. She hated horror movies – she lived in New York City and said she had a hard enough time living in such a scary place without having to contend with The Exorcist and its ilk. There’s an excerpt of a TV interview with author William Peter Blatty saying that Kael’s reviews are full of personal poison. She got herself a great big house in Massachusetts and would spend a week at a time in New York at screenings. She enhanced some careers,  damaged others. She had her camp followers and encouraged Paulettes like Paul Schrader who would take on a job on the LA Weekly and then jump on the bandwagon for a particular film at her request. She had a rivalry with auteurist critic Andrew Sarris whom she castigates in her essay Circles and Squares. His widow Molly Haskell says of Kael, No male critic had as much testosterone as Pauline. While this is quite good on context it never really nails the nitty gritty of what it is to be a journalist and to go out on a limb giving the only viciously – and presumptively – perceptive account of a film that other critics are afraid to give what she would call a con. Her famous book about Citizen Kane‘s authorship rehabilitated the reputation of forgotten screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz and his role in creating that masterpiece.  But just as Beatty sought to keep her quiet by giving her a job in Hollywood it showed she had blind spots and was perhaps rather naive:  she had come to believe her own publicity much as she professed to scorn the studios’: She was a virgin who was very willing to be seduced. Those six months made her bid a hasty retreat to the rather safer confines of critcism. When she loved something, you knew it:  she came out in a big way for Casualties of War. After 24 years and suffering from Parkinson’s she retired from The New Yorker. Readings from letters and telegrams that celebrities wrote to her capture some of the devastation she wrought including one from Gregory Peck:  You may have cost me good roles in the most productive phase of my career. Her review of Blade Runner was so damaging that director Ridley Scott hasn’t read a review since. On the other hand, Steven Spielberg wrote, 1000 reviews later you are the only writer who really understood Jaws.  It is interesting  – and impossible to credit in the democratised, non-edited non-hierarchical space and era of social media and the internet in which nobody has any particular importance – that one critic could have held such sway over popular opinion in a world where limited opening dominated. For Pauline Kael everything was a conversation. There are a lot of interviews here but their content feels circumstantial rather than deep or meaningful. It’s something of an irony. Written and directed by Rob Garver.  The movies needed her

 

Bugsy (1991)

I don’t go by what other men have done. Gangster Ben ‘Bugsy’ Siegel (Warren Beatty), who works for Meyer Lansky (Ben Kingsley) and Charlie ‘Lucky’ Luciano (Bill Graham), goes west to Los Angeles and falls in love with Virginia Hill (Annette Bening) a tough-talking Hollywood starlet who has slept around with several men, as he is regularly reminded by his pals, who he meets on a film set where his friend George Raft (Joe Mantegna) is the lead.  He buys a house in Beverly Hills and shops at all the best tailors and furnishes his house beautifully while his wife Esta (Wendy Phillips) and young daughters remain in Scarsdale, New York. His job is to wrest control back of betting parlours currently run by Jack Dragna (Richard Sarafian) but life is complicated when Mickey Cohen (Harvey Keitel) robs one of his places – Bugsy decides to go into business with him instead of punishing him and puts him in charge of casinos, while Dragna is forced to admit to a raging Bugsy that he stole $14,000, and is told he now answers to Cohen. On a trip to a deadbeat casino in the desert Bugsy dreams up an idea for a casino to end all casinos, named after Virginia (Flamingo), bringing the stars to Nevada but the costs overrun dramatically and his childhood friend Lansky is not happy particularly when it seems Bugsy might be aware that Virginia has cooked the books … Looks matter if it matters how you look. Warren Beatty’s long-cherished project was written by James Toback and Beatty micro-managed the writing and production and the result is one of the most powerful and beautiful films of the Nineties:  a picture of America talking to itself, with a gangster for a visionary at its fulcrum, building a kingdom in the desert as though through damascene conversion while being seduced by Hollywood and its luminaries, watching his own screen test the most entertaining way to spend an evening other than having sex. It sows the seeds of his destruction because his inspiration is his thrilling and volatile lover and making her happy and making a name for himself but it’s also a profoundly political film for all that, as with most of Beatty’s work. It’s undoubtedly personal on many levels too not least because the legendarily promiscuous man known as The Pro in movie circles impregnated his co-star Bening who was already showing before production ended. They married after she had his baby and have remained together since. His avocation of the institution is an important part of the narrative and gangsterism is a version of family here too but he chases tail, right into an elevator and straight to his penthouse too. Perhaps he wants to show us how it’s done by the nattiest dresser in town. It’s a statement about how a nation came to be but unlike The Godfather films it’s one that demonstrates how the idea literally reflects the image of the man who dreams it up in all his vainglory:  he enjoys nothing more than checking his hair in the glass when he’s kicking someone half to death (perhaps a metaphor too far). He is a narcissist to the very end, charming and totally ruthless while Ennio Morricone gives him a tragic signature tune. Impeccably made and kind of great with outstanding performances by Beatty, Bening and Kingsley. Directed by Barry Levinson. I have found the answer to the dream of America

Rules Don’t Apply (2017)

A girl can get in trouble for having a case of the smarts. 1964 Acapulco:  a decrepit and isolated Howard Hughes is on the verge of making a televised phonecall from his hotel hideout to prove he doesn’t have dementia to dispute a claim by the writer of a book who may never actually have met him. Flashback to 1958, Hollywood:  Small-town Virginia beauty queen and devout Baptist Marla Mabrey (Lily Collins), under contract to the infamous Howard Hughes (Warren Beatty) arrives in Los Angeles with her mother (Annette Bening) to do a screen test for a film called Stella Starlight. She is picked up at the airport by her driver Frank Forbes (Alden Ehrenreich) only two weeks on the job and also from a religiously conservative background. He’s engaged to his seventh grade girlfriend. He drives them to their new home above the Hollywood Bowl where the sound of evening concerts wafts their way. She’s earning more than her college professor father ever did. The instant attraction between Marla and Frank not only puts their religious convictions to the test but also defies Hughes’ number one rule: no employee is allowed to have an intimate relationship with a contract actress and there are 26 of them installed all over Hollywood. Hughes is battling TWA shareholders over his proposals for the fleet as well as having to appear before a Senate sub-committee;  Marla bemoans the fact that she is a songwriter who doesn’t sing – so what kind of an actress can she be? And Frank wants to become a property developer and tries to persuade his employer to invest in him but Hughes is talking about a new birth control pill to him and when he meets Marla he talks to her about this thing called DNA that some English people discovered a few years back … It’s quite impossible to watch this without thinking of all the references, forwards and backwards, that it conjures:  that Beatty was tipped to play Hughes by Time after the mogul’s death, a decade after he had already espoused an interest in the mysterious billionaire who also lived at the Beverly Hills Hotel for a spell;  that he himself arrived in Hollywood at the end of the Fifties (via theatre) from Virginia and liked to play piano and got by with help from the homosexuals he impressed and the actresses like Joan Collins he squired about town;  Ehrenreich might be another aspect of Beatty as a youngster on the make, keen to impress mentors like Jean Renoir and George Stevens;  the motif of father and son takes a whole meta leap in his casting Ashley Hamilton, a Beatty lookalike who might well be his son (I think this is an inside joke, as it were), as a Hughes stand-in;  the dig at Beatty’s own rep for having a satyr-like lifestyle with the quickie Hughes has with Marla which deflowers her after she’s had her first taste of alcohol. It’s just inescapable. And if that seems distasteful, Beatty is 80 playing 50, and it has a ring of farce about it, as does much of the film which telescopes things like Hughes’ crash in LA for dramatic effect and plays scenes like they’re in a screwball comedy. There’s a lovely visual joke when he orders Frank to drive him somewhere at 3AM and they sit and eat fast food (after Frank says a prayer) and eventually we see where they’re seated – in front of Hughes’ enormous aeroplane (and Frank has never flown). This is too funny to merit the lousy reviews and too invested in its own nostalgia to be a serious take on either Hollywood or Hughes but it has its points of interest as another variation on the myth of both subjects. In real life it was long rumoured that Hughes had a son by Katharine Hepburn who allegedly had him adopted at the end of the Thirties. Timewise it picks up somewhere after The Aviator ends, but not strictly so. All it shares with that film is the banana leaf wallpaper. Tonally, it’s shifting from one generic mode to another (all that Mahler from Death in Venice is pointing to tragedy and age and decay, not youth and beauty and promise) but it’s difficult to dislike. It’s extremely well cast: Collins is terrific as the gauche naive young woman in the big city who’s given up her music scholarship and Ehrenreich is very good as the ambitious and conflicted guy who wants a mentor; Matthew Broderick does well as Levar, the senior driver jaded by long years of service to this eccentric and Oliver Platt (who did the great Bulworth with Beatty twenty years ago) has fun in a small role but Candice Bergen is wasted in the role of Nadine, the office manager. Bening is really great as Mrs Mabrey but she just … disappears. Beatty plays Hughes sympathetically, even unflatteringly (he knew him, albeit very slightly) and these young people’s relationship is ultimately played for its future potential despite its signposting as evidence of the hypocrisy lying directly beneath a church-led society. Written by Beatty with a story credit to him and Bo Goldman, and directed by Beatty, his first film in two decades.

Happy 80th Birthday Warren Beatty! 30th March 2017

Actor, producer, writer, auteur, legend. Warren Beatty turns 80 March 30th. From his discovery by homosexual playwright William Inge to his part in the Best Picture debacle at this year’s Academy Awards he has never seemed too far from the significant centre of writing and cinematic artistry that is Hollywood. He hero-worshipped Jean Renoir, George Stevens, the directors he felt that mattered and who could help him. He starred for Elia Kazan in Splendor in the Grass, that startlingly emotive Freudian psycho-fest that commenced his relationship with Natalie Wood, one of a series of Oscar-nominated actresses to whom he hooked his star over the following two decades. He became an actor-auteur proper in the wake of Mickey One, that New Wave-inspired drama about a Lenny Bruce-type comic made by Arthur Penn. When he bumped into novice screenwriter Robert Towne at the office of their mutual psychoanalyst he found the right man to do a major overhaul of a script called Bonnie and Clyde and changed cinema history.  (For more on their working relationship and friendship see my book ChinaTowne:   https://www.amazon.co.uk/ChinaTowne-Elaine-Lennon-ebook/dp/B01KCL3YXQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1490790984&sr=8-1&keywords=elaine+lennon. ) The pair decamped to London and were part of the Swinging Sixties – those 200 or so people who all seemed to have sex with one another in 1967 – and when Towne saw a Restoration play there he thought up an idea for a movie about a heterosexual hairdresser based in part on an ex’s stylist who lived like a rooster in a henhouse. It became Shampoo several years later and it’s a profoundly caustic, sad, hilarious take on what was wrong in the US using Election Night 1968 as its fulcrum. Beatty plays George Roundy, the promiscuous motorcycle rider who is outwitted by absolutely everybody and he is superb in a role which yields unexpected pathos. It was a very personal story but also a political one, an interest which he’d espoused since he and sister Shirley MacLaine had campaigned for George McGovern. He had previously tried to express his worries with the government and the existential dread behind it with The Parallax View, a stunning look at the major conspiracy theories of the time. He pursued his interest in screenwriting (he’d persuaded Towne to give him a co-credit on Shampoo) with Heaven Can Wait, a light comic remake which had unexpected success following his brutal and rather low awards campaign.  He expended a lot of energy making Reds, about American communist John Reed, which despite its epic political text is really about free love, infidelity and naivete. Following the failure of buddy comedy Ishtar made by his friend Elaine May (who occasionally did uncredited script rewrites for him) he made the comic strip extravaganza Dick Tracy which didn’t do as well as everyone had predicted. He bounced back with the gorgeous gangster flick Bugsy about the notorious mobster, a film that introduced him to wife Annette Bening (which came as a surprise to his girlfriend of the time who allegedly found them in flagrante in his trailer one lunchtime). They starred together in Love Affair (with a script assist again from Towne) but he really bounced back with the hilarious political satire Bulworth, one of the best films of the Nineties. If he never backed the winning political horse – Gary Hart, John McCain (close friends) – he has taken his time, too much, perhaps, in making films that he wants to make a splash. His latest, Rules Don’t Apply, a paean to Hollywood and Howard Hughes that was a box office flop with an ill-advised wide release, was preceded by a rare interview in Vanity Fair. He revealed that he had been at a gathering at Peter Lawford’s the evening of Marilyn Monroe’s death which Lawford always said she hadn’t attended. He said that he had walked on the beach with her and played piano and she’d been drunk by sunset. He didn’t say what time she left but she was found dead in her home a couple of hours later. But that wasn’t the story that made the newspaper headlines – it was the ‘revelation’ of the number of women he’d allegedly slept with, which he’d debunked. Don’t look here, look there, has always been his mantra. David Thomson got it right when he constructed that half-biography, half-fiction about him, Warren Beatty and Desert Eyes. He has retained long friendships and associations and been loyal to collaborators and made a lot of astonishingly persuasive and lengthy phonecalls, usually commencing with the line, What’s new, pussycat? Which tells its own story. People never really see what’s in front of their eyes, or what really matters. That’s why Beatty kept the envelope on Oscars night. He knows what’s important. Life. Reality. Now that’s a real star.

Oscars 2017

Given that neither Cary Grant nor Alfred Hitchcock won an Academy Award (supply your own copyright symbol) the Oscars are basically a knees-up for well-paid advertising campaigns and schmoozefests that often finish up in a very long snoozefest round this time of year with all our Best Films overlooked. However … Oscar 2017 was a different animal. The opening number by Justin Timberlake (his song from Trolls) leading a team of dancers down the steps of the auditorium and winding up onstage was great fun; Jimmy Kimmel’s script and timing were immaculate, making great points without wearing everyone out (remember Chris Rock who just went on … and on … and on … throughout the three and a half hours last year? Because a snappy one-liner just wouldn’t do.) The awards were surprisingly well spread – the first eleven went to different films – and the LA LA Land juggernaut wound up with six awards for thirteen noms including Director with the sound and film editing going elsewhere making a Best Picture win less likely. It looked like seven for fourteen … and briefly was … but this year something odd happened. For the first time in living memory, Best Actor was called before Best Actress, which went to Emma Stone (Natalie Portman didn’t even show up.) And then Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway (allegedly – one couldn’t be entirely sure) came onstage to celebrate 50 years of Bonnie and Clyde and hand out the award for Best Picture. But the accountants (the only two people on the planet who knew the result) had unwittingly given them a duplicate of the Best Actress envelope. After the usual spiel, Beatty opened it and looked at it curiously. Then he made a show of checking for something else in the red envelope, looked at the card again, played for time, handed the card to Dunaway as if for confirmation, and she called out LA LA Land. The entire production team or so it seemed was in the midst of their speeches, when all of a sudden there were some people with headsets running around behind them, Beatty was handed another envelope, and when a bearded man, LA LA Land producer Jordan Horowitz said that the real winner was Moonlight, Kimmel looked chastened, Beatty puzzled. Horowitz pulled the card rather roughly from the new envelope the legendary Beatty was holding and showed it to camera where it clearly made the announcement, Best Picture: Moonlight. Horowitz called up the team from that film. The cameras showed the shocked and confused reactions around the auditorium. Beatty calmly explained he’d been given the wrong card and it had not been a joke. Horowitz repeated none of it was a joke, Moonlight was the real winner for Best Picture. Kimmel manfully took the blame, and in truth, he was probably regretting live-Tweeting/trolling the POTUS earlier because, after all, if this isn’t the biggest Fake News in history, what is?! You couldn’t make it up. Was it the Russians? No, it was PricewaterhouseCoopers. An accounting firm. That’s showbiz! Moonlight director Barry Jenkins was very gracious and referenced that the teams behind both films had done a lot of this awards show schlep together for the past few months and if this was a dream, that was okay. The little picture ($1.5m budget) that could went and did. Talk about a twist ending!  It was a great show. And, as ever, a very, very long one. And the best one in oh so many years. Kimmel was terrific, even if the tour bus from Star Line was a little OTT – but boy did those tourists handle their sudden stardom effectively. Overall, Oscar 2017 was a display of (mostly) impeccable behaviour, some fun running jokes and rising to the occasion when everything went hopelessly wrong even if Emma Stone bizarrely decided to throw some shade at hapless Beatty by waving her envelope around in the Press room before clarifying anything with the floor managers. (Maybe she really did watch Rebel Without a Cause:  she was like James Dean screaming “But I got the bullets!”). Beatty at least showed some class in comparison with both her and Horowitz. And I’m definitely getting new accountants:  to quote a former Celebrity Apprentice judge, You’re fired!

Shampoo (1975)

The unthinkable death of Carrie Fisher prompted me to put on one of my favourite Seventies film and the one which marked her striking debut.  She’s the spoiled precocious teenage daughter of Felicia (Lee Grant) and Lester (Jack Warden). The former is screwing her Beverly Hills hairdresser, George Roundy (Warren Beatty) and it is one of their couplings that opens the film in radical fashion – in the dark. Lester meanwhile is having his own adulterous affair with Jackie (Julie Christie) whose former BF is George, who is currently co-habiting with Jill  (Goldie Hawn). All the women think they are unique in George’s affections but one of the film’s good visual jokes is that he gives them all precisely the same hairstyle (and that’s not all he gives them…) They all meet up at a party  on Election Night 1968 and their complex roundelay of relationships and infidelities unravels piece by piece. Some of this arose from screenwriter Robert Towne’s experiences with a dancer whose former boyfriend was a Beverly Hills hairdresser, who, far from being gay, was like a rooster in a henhouse. Apparently there were quite a few of them around Hollywood at the time. The other influence was Restoration comedy.  Towne regretted giving co-writing credit to his star, Warren Beatty, but it does have a political component not evident in his other work. Directed with great finesse by Hal Ashby and boasting a host of marvellous performances in a naughty, caustic tragicomedy that just improves on every viewing, this is a key film of the period. You can read more about it in my book about Towne, https://www.amazon.com/ChinaTowne-Elaine-Lennon-ebook/dp/B01KCL3YXQ/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1482705700&sr=8-3&keywords=elaine+lennon. Rest In Peace, Princess Carrie.

Reds (1981)

Warren Beatty is emerging from his shell with another film this Fall (about Howard Hughes) and it’s been a long time coming. He takes his time (over some things, apparently) and it’s always worth waiting for. This epic film about American radical John Reed took a very long time to make – weather conditions were part of the problem, the script was the other. The spine of the story is his romance with a married woman, Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton), who was a dilettante journalist who left her husband to shack up with him,  and their love triangle with poet (later playwright) Eugene O’Neill (Jack Nicholson). He travels to Russia to document the Revolution and returns a Bolshevik. In any dimensional epic a romance is inscribed as the secondary line of narrative but this is really dominated by the personal story because it’s principally about characters who are diverted by ideas and ideologies – free love is just about escaping responsibility, not assuming it. Discovering too late in the day that Soviet rule is corrupt and corrosive and murderous (with Jerzy Kosinski a suitably intimidating Zinoviev), our heroes are incapable of being saved from their own foolishness. Notable for its cinematography (Vittorio Storaro who got an Oscar) and a score by Stephen Sondehim and Dave Grusin, this includes ‘witness’ interviews with personalities as diverse as Henry Miller and Rebecca West and is perhaps the kind of film Godard would have made if anyone had been silly enough to give him Beatty’s budget. Maureen Stapleton won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her no-nonsense Emma Goldman and Beatty won for Best Director.