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Will David Cronenberg’s opera fly?

July 2nd, 2008 by Scott Marks

Daniel Okulitch performs in a scene from David Cronenberg’s first opera, THE FLY

David Cronenberg, the father of modern horror, has an opera debuting in Paris tonight that’s creating quite a buzz.

Mr. Cronenberg will direct a new version of The Fly with Placido Domingo conducting a score by Oscar-winning composer Howard Shore.

Shore, a childhood friend of Cronenberg’s, first teamed with the director on The Brood (1979). This marks the duo’s fifteen collaboration. According to The Associated Press, the composer “who also wrote the film’s original music, said he started picturing The Fly as an opera as soon as the movie was released.”

Shore said he sampled only two themes from his 1986 work.

Another Cronenberg crony, Tony Award-winning playwright David Henry Hwang (M. Butterfly) wrote the melodramatic libretto. The Fly marks not only Cronenberg’s operatic debut, but also the LA Opera debut of Marty’s production designer of choice, Dante Ferretti.

The opera will have its world premiere Wednesday at Paris’ Theatre du Chatelet and its U.S. premiere Sept. 7 at the Los Angeles Opera.

The plot is said to follow the film’s basic storyline, only the setting has been shifted from the 80s to the 50s, the time of the original version’s release. The AP’s Angela Doland writes, “ The retro set design is evocative of 1950s horror flicks. And there’s something thrilling about the old-school special effects—terrifically gruesome costumes, a singing teleport machine and a giant fly scaling an opera set.”

When asked what attracted him to a story of a man forced to vomit on his food before consuming it, world class tenor Placido Domingo said, “Why not? I couldn’t resist.”

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Dig A Hole: IRON MAN director dies!

May 29th, 2008 by Scott Marks

Joseph Pevney: Man of Ten Camera Setups

No, not Jon Favreau. That would really be a scoop! We lost Joseph Pevney, the director of the original Iron Man, a 1951 boxing clunker that starred Jeff Chandler as an ambitious coal miner who finds a more lucrative career as a pugilist.

Joseph Pevney, or “Peeny” as this ten-year-old and his friends used to call him whenever his name appeared in The Munsters credits, died May 18 at his home in Palm Desert, according to his wife, Margo. He was 96.

Born September 15, 1911, in New York City, Pevney began his 60-years showbiz career as a boy soprano in vaudeville. Between 1936-46, Pevney acted and directed on Broadway. He made his movie debut playing a killer in 1946’s Nocturne. He acted in three solid film noir (Body and Soul, Thieves Highway and The Street With No Name) before turning to directing with 1950’s Shakedown.

Pevney was a hack from way back and of the 35 features he directed, only a few are worth looking at for some ripe unintentional laughs. Far from her worst vehicles, Foxfire and Female on the Beach showcase Joan Crawford at her butch best. Aside from watching how Pevney managed to keep feuding Dean & Jerry apart during most of Three Ring Circus, it remains the duo’s worst film. Meet Danny Wilson is second rate Sinatra while Tammy and the Bachelor is top drawer Debbie Reynolds.

If I tell you how much I enjoy Man of a Thousand Faces, you must believe me that it’s for all the wrong reasons. Growing up on pan-and-scan TV viewings, Jimmy Cagney’s hydrocephalic anamorphic noggin cried out for Ultra-Panavision 70.

The stuff concerning Lon’s deaf parents has all the compassion and sensitivity of a 1940’s print ad for Aunt Jemimah pancakes.

“All my life, kids tagging after my mother and father, hanging signs, making faces, yelling ‘Hey, Dummy! Hey, Dummy!‘ So proud they could speak they had to be cruel.” (I don’t have a video copy to consult. Don’t need one. Every word and inflection of Cagney’s “dummy” dialog is trapped inside my head.) When his wife Cleva (Dorothy Malone) cautions Lon to keep his voice down out of respect for his parents, Cagney bellows, “They can’t hear you!”

Even Malone joins in the parade of pathos. When contemplating giving birth to a handicapped child, she breaks down crying, “I don’t want to be mother to a dumb thing.” All this and a young Robert Evans playing Irving Thalberg make for a grand guilty pleasure. (On the plus side, it’s photographed in black-and-white ‘Scope by Russell Metty.)

After directing Portrait of a Mobster in 1961, Pevney turned his back on pictures. Or was it the other way around? Turning to the small screen from 1961 to the mid-80s when he retired, Pevney directed numerous TV series including Ben Casey, Bewitched, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, eleven episodes of The Munsters, The Fugitive, Mission: Impossible, Marcus Welby, Bonanza, Adam 12, Fantasy Island and The Rockford Files.

Oh, yeah. He also directed a few episodes of Star Trek, if you go for that sort of thing.

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Director John Woo back in action!

May 29th, 2008 by Scott Marks

Where in hell has John Woo been hiding? It’s been five years since Paycheck and fans of the beloved Hong Kong action director are getting restless.

Hollywood began pitching Woo shortly after the international success of The Killers (1989) made him a cult favorite in the States. Woo, the first Asian filmmaker to direct a mainstream Hollywood film, was sold to Universal execs by none other than Jean-Claude Van Damme who pitched him as “the Martin Scorsese of Asia!”

With Hard Target (1993), his first American film, Woo achieved the impossible by directing a watchable Van Damme movie! Broken Arrow was a stiff, but a follow-up Travolta picture, Face/Off (1997) proved that Woo could handle a blockbuster without compromising too much of his respectability. M:I-2 was an improvement over the DePalma, but not enough that I’d ever watch this Cruise missile again.

Windtalkers, an exceptional WW II action drama , flopped and gave Hollywood its first indication that it was time once again pitch Woo, this time out the door. He had one more attempt at a blockbuster, the agreeable Ben Affleck futuristic yarn Paycheck, before disappearing from the radar.

Over the past five years, several projects were discussed with very little in the way of results. Woo directed an unsold TV series pilot for a remake of Lost in Space, a segment in a French film and — God help us — a video game.

Woo is currently at in Hong Kong work wrapping up a $75 million adaptation of Luo Guanzhong’s popular Chinese novel Red Cliff. The film stars Tony Leung, who replaced Chow Yun-Fat after he dropped out of the film the day principal photography began, and Takeshi Kaneshiro. No release date has yet been set.

The drought appears to be over. It has been announced that upon completion of Red Cliff , Woo will helm the romantic war epic 1949. Based on true events at the end of WWII and the final years of the Chinese Civil War, the film will star Chang Chen and Korea’s Song Hye-kyo. Wang Hui-ling (Lust, Caution) penned the screenplay.

Filming commences in December with a theatrical release scheduled for December 2009 to honor the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China.

As my KPBS Film Club partner said when I told her of the news, “Woo starts so many projects that never come to light that I’ve grown jaded about such announcements. I just want to see Red Cliff finished.”

If you haven’t seen a John Woo film recently, why not? The man is responsible for some of the best action films of the 80s and The Killer, his version of Melville’s Le Samourai, is a terrific place to start. You can find the rest of the Spanish Lobby card set here.

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Dig A Hole: Sydney Pollack

May 27th, 2008 by Scott Marks

On September 8, 2007, Emulsion Compulsion quoted a National Enquirer piece that reported Mr. Pollack’s stomach cancer had metastasized. This blog entry not only attracted the attention of scores of Mr. Pollack’s fans and admirers, it also became a gathering place for the director’s former classmates to post their memories and get well wishes.

I was also introduced to Gracie Parker, Mr. Pollack’s granddaughter. Gracie first left a comment assuring everyone that “My Grandpa is a great man. He is strong and will fight till the end.” Earlier this year she contacted me to tell me that her grandfather’s health has not improved and that he was currently hospitalized.

Gracie asked Emulsion Compulsion to help put Mr. Pollack in touch one of his old high school cronies. Two weeks ago she wrote “Thanks so much for your kind words.. They mean a lot…”

Sydney Pollack, director, actor, producer and champion of independent films, died of cancer Monday afternoon at his home in Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles, surrounded by family. He was 73.

He was born on July 1, 1934, in Lafayette, Indiana, to a family of Russian-Jewish immigrants. His mother, Rebecca Miller, was a homemaker, his father, David Pollack, a professional boxer turned pharmacist. His parents divorced when he was young and his alcoholic mother died when she was 37 and Sydney was 16. After graduating from his HS in 1952, Pollack moved to the New York City and enrolled in the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater.

For two years young Pollack studied acting under Sanford Meisner and eventually became his assistant. After serving two years in the army, he returned to the Neighborhood Playhouse where he taught acting.

Pollack appeared in several Broadway productions before turning his attention to television directing in 1961. For four years Pollack broke his bones on popular shows like Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Defenders, Ben Casey and the unavoidable Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre.

His first feature as a director was The Slender Thread starring Sidney Poitier as a crisis center worker who receives a call for help from suicidal Anne Bancroft. Pollack made his big screen acting debut in War Hunt where he met fellow actor Robert Redford. He gave the actor the lead in his second film, This Property is Condemned, and the two began a professional relationship that blossomed into a lifelong friendship. Over the years, Redford appeared in seven films for Sydney Pollack:This Property is Condemned, Jeremiah Johnson, The Way We Were, Three Days of the Condor, The Electric Horseman, Out of Africa and Havana.

As a director, Mr. Pollack has always been a hit and miss affair. He never should have gone near a remake of a film as perfect as Sabrina and Tootsie’s message that men make better women than women do curdles the proceedings. Nor was I blown away by the picture postcard pyrotechnics of Out of Africa, a plodding melodrama with good acting at its finest.

They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? is arguably his most accomplished piece of filmmaking. Pollack squeezed every drop of emotion he could from a cast ranging from Jane Fonda at the brink of superstardom (and still capable of turning in a performance) to a possessed Gig Young, Red Buttons and “Grandpa” Al Lewis. The director’s use of space in production designer Harry Horner’s studio mock up of a depression era dance hall reveals more about his characters than any number of his other films combined.

The one Sydney Pollack film that I continue to return to is Absence of Malice. One of Pollack’s greatest virtues as a director was his ability to edit in his head. There is not one continuity error in the entire piece and watching the character and camera movement mesh as they advance from shot to shot is a sight to behold.

As a director, Pollack made an equally capable producer lending his backing to such worthy causes as Songwriter, The Fabulous Baker Boys, Flesh and Bone, Sense and Sensibility and one of this decades ten best films, Tom Tykwer’s Heaven.

While a much more gifted director than Garry Marshall, I admire both filmmakers equally for their work in front of the camera. Next to Charles Durning, Pollack’s the funniest thing in Tootsie. Woody Allen wisely gave him his only lead role in Husbands and Wives and he gives the best performances in both Eyes Wide Shut and Michael Clayton.

I was fortunate to meet the man once about four years ago. Pollack was entering the building just as I was leaving a friend’s office. He didn’t seem to be in that much of a hurry because we spoke for a good ten minutes. Of course I got right to the point and asked him about working with Al Lewis. He said he was “a very serious actor” who at the time was trying to break away from his Munsters mold.

Much of the talk was spent on a mid-80s cable show that he hosted called In Search of Independents. For the life of me I can’t recall who aired the show and a search of both imdb and Google proved fruitless. It was a showcase for short independent films that introduced me to a lot of superb experimental works that made for essential classroom use.

I wanted to expose my students to inexpensive shorts that anyone with a video camera and an imagination could bring to the screen. JGLNG is a five-minute abstract short that hypnotizes the viewer by superimposing two images of a juggler juggling. There was also a William Wegman film that choreographed his two Weimaraners following an off-camera tennis ball. Mr. Pollack remembered both shorts and spoke with great passion when the subject of independent films came up.

In 1958, Pollack married his former student Claire Griswold and the two remained in love for fifty years. In addition to his wife, Mr. Pollack is survived by two daughters, Rebecca and Rachel; his brother Bernie; and six grandchildren. His son Steven Pollack died in a plane crash in 1993.

Our prayers go out to you and your family, Gracie. For those of you who would like to leave a message, I’ll see to it that Gracie gets them.

Links:
Sydney Pollack photos

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Paul Verhoeven writes book claiming Jesus conceived through rape

April 24th, 2008 by Scott Marks

paul-verhoeven.jpg
Paul Verhoeven

As if writing the script for one of his upcoming movies, director Paul Verhoeven (Turkish Delight, Showgirls, Black Book) has come up with a new Bible story chock full of gore, brutality, sexual assault and degradation, all filmed in the grandeur of Panavision and Technicolor.

In his upcoming biography, Verhoeven suggests that Jesus might have been fathered by a Roman soldier who raped Mary.

An Amsterdam publishing house announced Wednesday that Jesus of Nazareth: A Realistic Portrait will hit bookstores in September. The Associated Press reports, “Marianna Sterk of the publishing house J.M. Meulenhoff said the book includes several ideas that run contrary to Christian faith, including the suggestion that Jesus could be the son of a Roman soldier who raped Mary during a Jewish uprising against Roman rule in 4 B.C.”

Take that, Mel Gibson!

שלאָגן מײַן קאָפּ!!!

The book also gives Judas Iscariot a free ticket by claiming he was not responsible for Jesus’ betrayal.

Biblical scholars remain skeptical. John Dominic Crossan, a Jesus Seminar founder said, “It’s an obvious first retort to claims that Mary was a virgin. If you wanted to do a hatchet job on Jesus’ reputation, this would be the way.”

Verhoeven, 69, has long dreamed of joining the illustrious ranks of Marty, Cecil B. DeMille, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Robert Bresson, Luis Bunuel, George Stevens, Walt Disney and Woody Strode in bringing the life of Christ to the screen.

Let’s see…Robert Davi as Judas, Dakota Fanning as the Virgin Mary (she’ll be old enough by the time this goes into production), Lin Tucci as Mary Magdalene, Rutger Hauer as Pontius Pilate, Michael Ironside as Jerobeam, Joe Eszterhas as Zebedee, Michael Douglas as John the Baptist and Neil Patrick Harris as Jesus.

Paul Verhoeven photos: Showgirls

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Dig A Hole: Actor, Producer Director and one of “Hogan’s Heroes,” Ivan Dixon

March 19th, 2008 by Scott Marks

HOGAN’S HEROES
Robert Clary, Bob Crane, Ivan Dixon, Richard Dawson and Larry Hovis

CHARLOTTE, North Carolina — Ivan Dixon, an Emmy award winning actor, director and producer best known for his role as Sgt. James ‘Kinch’ Kinchloe on the 1960s television series Hogan’s Heroes, died Sunday after a hemorrhage and of complications from kidney failure. He was 76.

Dixon began his acting career on the Broadway stage in plays including The Cave Dwellers and A Raisin in the Sun. After a role on The Armstrong Circle Theater, Mr. Dixon made his first big screen appearance as Sidney Poitier’s stunt double in The Defiant Ones (1958). The two men became lifelong friends.

He had a couple more stabs at the movies (Nothing But a Man, Porgy and Bess, the movie version of A Raisin in the Sun) before spending the 60s as a character actor on some of the decade’s most popular television shows including Perry Mason, The Twilight Zone, The Man from U. N. C. L. E., The Outer Limits, I Spy, The Fugitive and, of course, Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theater.

In 1965, Dixon earned a spot in the television hall of fame when he was cast as Sgt. James Kinchloe in Hogan’s Heroes. For a active Civil Rights activist, it’s hard to believe that Mr. Dixon agreed to appear on a sitcom set in a Nazi POW camp. In the early 40s, before America learned of the atrocities, Hollywood initially countered the Nazi menace by depicting them as a pack of blundering buffoons. Hogan’s Heroes hit the airwaves in 1965, many years after the Nuremberg trials, and claimed to be a “satire.”

“It was a pivotal role…because there were not as many blacks in TV series at that time,” Mr. Dixon’s daughter Nomathande Dixon told the Associated Press. No argument here. Not many African-American performers did as much to help change racial stereotypes in film and TV roles as Ivan Dixon.

Ms. Dixon added, “He did have some personal issues with that role, but it also launched him into directing.”

Col. Wilhelm Klink & General der Infantrie Albert Burkhalter
Working opposite wacky Nazi cutups Klink and Burkhalter, it’s a wonder Ivan Dixon didn’t die laughing

Too bad that so many will remember Ivan Dixon solely as the black guy on Hogan’s Heroes. In 1970, Dixon began his career as a director on an episode on The Bill Cosby Show. In 1972 he directed Trouble Man, the first of two feature films. I’ll be sure to look for it next time I’m at my local video store because his next film proved to be his greatest contribution to the visual arts, The Spook Who Sat by the Door.

Lawrence Cook starred as the C. I. A.’s first token black recruit. Cook spends five years “Uncle Tomming”  his way up the ranks before quitting and using everything he learned to stick it to “the Man.” Jonathan Rosenbaum called it, “Possibly the most radical of the blaxploitation films of the 70s.” Out of distribution for decades, the film is now available in a pristine DVD restoration.

Even though the film made money, it was to be his last director’s credit on a feature film. By the mid-70s, he had all but abandoned acting. Moving behind the camera, Dixon helmed numerous television series with an accent on cops and robbers shows like Get Christie Love, The Rookies, Starsky and Hutch, McCloud, The Rockford Files,  The A-Team, Magnum P. I. and In the Heat of the Night.

Honored throughout his lifetime, Mr. Dixon received four NAACP Image Awards, the National Black Theatre Award and the Paul Robeson Pioneer Award from the Black American Cinema Society. He was a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Directors Guild of America, the Screen Actors Guild of America and the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame.

In addition to his daughter, survivors include his wife of 53 years, Berlie Dixon of Charlotte, and a son, Alan Kimara Dixon of Oakland, Calif. Two sons, Ivan Nathaniel Dixon IV and N’Gai Christopher Dixon, died previously.

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