Closing the week still feeling as if I was worked over by a couple of debt collectors for some local
For a substantial portion of my life, I've chosen to experience fictional worlds on the level of their illusion. Novels. television, movies, comic books, even to some degree songs, I tended to take them as their own, pocket realities, living their for times appropriate to each medium as if they represented distinct universes. The flip side of this, was that to varied degrees, I avoided, even eschewed, information about the people whose craft was responsible for each. Generally didn't care that I didn't know.
Oh, I wasn't necessarily flatly ignorant of them, generally knowing the names, and being unable to divorce those names from my expectations of their work, but I generally didn't dig into the personalities and the work responsible. I only wanted the results. I've emerged more fully from that isolation to various degrees at various times depending on the medium in question.
With respect to actors, directors, and stagecraft in general - the movies and tv shows that are the focus of these weekly pieces - it's mostly been just within the past dozen years that I've gotten more directly interested in the movers, makers and emoters. Some of this has made me realize that I'd known more than I thought I did, picking details up along the way like a cat will dust-bunnies while scooting beneath the sofa, I just wasn't spending any time with the info, much less pulling threads to see what they lead to, and appreciating both what drove each person and what else was going on in their lives behind the scenes of each production.
In an earlier Friday piece I'd at least briefly extolled the 10-part series The Offer (Paramount+), which attempts to take us through the struggles involved with transferring Mario Puzo's novel, The Godfather, to the screen in 1972. In the end it was necessary to forgive artful choices to bend time and events a little along the way as storyteller's tweaks, as it was engaging and on the whole seemed to be a fair presentation. (I should note that there are many who passionately disagree with me on this, finding it too much a work of fiction.)
I suspect much of it's a matter of my own life. So much of it has become so much smoke. So much largely-vanished ephemera. Fewer people are still alive who Knew Me When. Few know, and almost no one really cares... and there's scant reason they should. Additionally, I've become more acutely aware of how I've much more drifted down the river of life than been an engaged participant or even mindful observer. My approach could have over-all worked, were I an immortal who could afford a half century or more of slowly waking up. Taking that in mind, it could be as simple as my now looking for the vicarious life experiences of people who leaned in and strove for something. Life by proxy. That's the core appeal of biographies and memoirs, right?I think I'm tired now? Actually living life must be freakin' exhausting.
Related to this theme, newly-arrived on HBO Max this week is a 6-part documentary about the careers and marriage of Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman. The title is via Gore Vidal, a close friend of theirs who noted decades ago, when we were seeing the rise of major tv network miniseries, bringing cinematic production standards to television, that Newman & Woodward might prove to be The Last Movie Stars.
It turns out that Paul Newman got heavily into having interviews conducted and recorded with himself, friends, family, and associates, directors, and even Newman's first wife, Jackie, all intended to build a resource for an eventual memoir. At some point, though, perhaps in some pit of nihilistic despair or a simple fit of pique, he hauled all of the tapes out and set fire to them.
Newman died in 2008, and somewhere along the line after that his children discovered that he'd had transcripts made of all of the interviews. Knowing that Ethan Hawke was interested in doing some sort of documentary of the couple, they reached out to him.
The project is distinctly an outgrowth of this pandemic stretch, with the now-familiar yet still odd blend of isolation and virtual connectivity. It's largely stitched together Zoom sessions, ranging from discussions to having a variety of famous friends assume the identities of the various players, recreating the burnt interviews by reading the transcripts aloud, visuals intercut with scenes from the couple's movies and other footage. George Clooney reads Newman's words, Laura Linney assumes the part of Joanne Woodward, Vincent D'Onofrio channels John Huston, etc.
The documentary tells multiple stories. It traces the arc of their relationship and marriage. It traces the paths of their careers, and how it affected each of them. It also traces them as indirect, legacy players for the likes of Hawke and his contemporaries, who are as susceptible as any of us to building imagined relationships with people who seem so familiar to us because we've closely followed their work. I've yet to begin six-part series (all of which arrived online this week), but I'm looking forward to it. And, again, I can't help but note that a dozen years ago I likely would have barely noticed a project like this existed.
I'm going to close this week with a bit of awful summer fun, a 1977 film that tried to grab some of the summer cash much as Jaws had gobbled two summers prior, when it established the idea of a "summer blockbuster."
A technically star-studded film,
I would have loved to see a film of just the pitch meetings taken with each actor. I can only guess that each was rich with fulsome praise, notions of Jaws-level (late-) career boosts, and all wrapped in the promise of a relaxing, free vacation in San Diego. I'd also love to see the shooting schedule for all this, to get a better idea of which actors got to get all of their scenes shot in the shortest possible amount of time.
(Hey, it's my piece, and there's only so many digressions I can keep bottled up. I have to indulge
Back to the movie: All of this was put together by an Egyptian-born, Greco-Italian film producer, director, and screenwriter Ovidio Gabriel Assonitis (there's a surname any aspiring 10-year-old proto-comedian could build a lunch period career on), who had already built a Roger Cormanesque career on seeing a big hit and arranging a low-budget production "styled after" the same. Step right up! Just one, thin dime!
He started doing it close to home, successfully (at least financially) aping giallo-style horror on the cheap back in Italy, before moving onto the international market with things like Man From Deep River (1972), styled after the Richard Harris vehicle A Man Called Horse (1970), and the possession story Beyond The Door (1974) after having failed to secure the rights to Peter Blatty's The Exorcist a couple years earlier. Door was reportedly made for $350K, and ended up raking in at least $15 million here in the U.S.; I don't know how much of that ended up disappearing into the lawsuit Warner Bros. won against him, though.
It's Tentacles (1977 1h 42m)
It's ready and waiting for any and all who are interested, free of charge (if you can weather some modest commercial breaks and the script, it's all yours, baby!) over on Tubi. As of May 2024 it's also available on Amazon Prime.
That's my abbreviated All for this Friday. I have too much to get done, and that sick, familiar feeling that I may not get to any of it. But, I have to try. Take care, find as cool and shady a spot as you can, and make it safely back here next week for the final Friday of July. - Mike
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