White Hunter, Black Heart

From early on in his career, Clint Eastwood has been interested in taking the path less traveled when it came to his career, taking on roles and making films that often subverted his Hollywood icon image. In particular, the films he has directed explore the darker side of humanity with topics ranging from stalking (Play Misty for Me), drug addiction (Bird), violence (Unforgiven), and child abuse (Mystic River). White Hunter, Black Heart (1990) is no different. Based loosely on Peter Viertel’s experiences working with legendary film director John Huston on The African Queen (1951), Eastwood plays John Wilson, a filmmaker more interested in hunting down and killing a wild elephant then making his next motion picture. He becomes fixated on this quest and Eastwood uses this story as an opportunity to explore the notion of obsession and how it can consume someone at the expense of everything else in their life.


White Hunter, Black Heart played several prestigious film festivals around the world and was admired by many critics but was never a commercial hit with audiences perhaps expecting an exciting adventure. What they got instead was something more akin to an art film that saw Eastwood yet again subvert the Dirty Harry persona that has defined his career for many years. White Hunter has become something of a forgotten effort in his filmography and considered a minor work but I’ve always felt that it was one of his more interesting pictures.

From the get-go, it is easy to see what drew Eastwood to this film. The opening voiceover narration describes his character John Wilson as “a brilliant, screw-you-all type filmmaker who continually violated all the unwritten laws of the motion picture business yet had the magic, almost divine ability to always land on his feet.” These words could easily be describing Eastwood and his career – one that saw him frequently go against prevailing trends to make the kinds of films he wanted to do. Wilson is gearing up to make a film in Africa and enlists the help of his good friend and screenwriter Peter Verrill (Jeff Fahey) to give the screenplay a rewrite. Pete’s not so sure as he’s working on a book and Wilson tells him, “There are times when you can’t wonder whether it’s the right or wrong thing to do … You just gotta pack up and go.” While they are there making the film, Wilson wants to go on safari and bag an elephant.

Wilson and Pete meet with the film’s producer Paul Landers (George Dzundza) who implores the writer to come on board if only to keep Wilson focused on the task at hand. It’s an entertaining scene as we see Wilson’s open disdain for Landers and the money men, especially when one of them informs the director that they’ve talked about replacing him with someone else. Wilson knows that all Landers cares about is that the film makes money no matter how just so long as it does. As he tells the exasperated producer, “You’d sell your mother down the river to make a deal.” Pete observes it all with the bemused expression of someone who has seen Wilson act this way before and is just enjoying the ride. The director doesn’t care about the business side of filmmaking – dealing with nervous producers and studio executives and every person who pitches him a lame idea for a film.

The chemistry between Clint Eastwood and Jeff Fahey is excellent in these early scenes as we see how well they play off each other, Wilson trying to convince Pete to do this film with him and the writer not really needing much convincing. The two actors do a nice job of conveying two men who have been friends for years by the way they act towards each other. In a nice, self-flexive bit, Wilson lays out his filmmaking philosophy but it could easily be Eastwood as he tells Pete that there’s two ways to go about it: “One is you can crawl and kiss ass and write their happy endings, sign their long-term contracts and never take a chance on anything and never fly, never leave Hollywood. Save all your goddamn money, every cent of it … The other way is to let the chips fall where they may. Refuse to sign their contracts and tell off the guy who can cut your throat and flatter the little guy who’s hanging by a thread that you hold.” Wilson is the quintessential film maverick and on the surface he certainly seems like one of Eastwood’s usual anti-authority protagonists – the cynic with a heart of gold. Wilson talks a good game, like how much he hates the movie business, but Pete knows him well enough to know that the curmudgeonly director wouldn’t have it any other way because he enjoys and thrives on conflict. It stimulates his creativity.

Once Wilson and Pete arrive in Africa, Eastwood opens the film up visually with stunning shots of the wilderness courtesy of long-time collaborator Jack N. Green and this gives a real sense of place. It’s a sharp contrast to the stuffy opulence of Wilson’s English mansion. There are also gorgeous aerial shots of herds of wild animals running across the plains. Eastwood really shows the exotic locale in all of its diverse glory: large lakes, jungle and dense wooded areas.

Wilson and Pete encounter quite a bit of racism from their English hosts. For example, there is the man who curses out and chastises the local team of football players for easily beating his team of all whites, or the posh wealthy woman who criticizes the Jewish people that lived in Soho during the Blitz in World War II. Wilson is disgusted with both of their attitudes and gets into a fist fight with the former and tells off the latter by recounting a hilarious story that really puts her in her place. Eastwood does a fantastic job of delivering this monologue with a mischievous twinkle in his eye as Wilson stands up for his friend Pete (who is Jewish). With the fist fight scene, we get a glimpse of Wilson’s self-destructive tendencies. Drunk and clearly outmatched physically, Wilson gets in a few good shots before being beaten down by the larger, stronger man. However, he feels justified in doing what he did because he stood up and fought for what he believed in.

While Pete continues to fine tune the script, Wilson plans their safari with the occasional detours to pre-production on the film. The director is all about testing his own limits, whether it is challenging a large man to a fight or taking a rusted out old river boat through dangerous river rapids. For him, that is what life is all about – experiencing it to the fullest with no regrets, much like I imagine Eastwood’s own outlook on life. Wilson thinks that bagging one of those giant elephants is a life experience he’s meant to have and becomes obsessed with it. Pete lets him know that he doesn’t want to shoot one because they are beautiful animals, a rare link to life before humans, which deserve to exist. There is something pure about them and shooting one would destroy that nobility, which is a rarity in this world. Over the course of the film, Wilson and Pete’s friendship is put to the test as the writer tries to keep the director focused on making the film.

Some critics felt that Eastwood miscast himself as a John Huston-type filmmaker but I think that what he does in White Hunter, Black Heart is fuse parts of Huston’s sensibilities with his own. In some respects, the two men are very much alike: larger than life icons that continued to make films well into the twilight of their lives, constantly bucking expectations and latching onto projects that interested them whether they were commercial hits or not. Eastwood understands the nature of obsession and how it can lead to self-destructive behavior.

Jeff Fahey is well cast as the audience surrogate and voice of reason. Pete may be Wilson’s friend but he won’t blindly follow him on every grand adventure that the director wants to pursue. Fahey brings an intelligence to the role, playing a character that has his own strong convictions and just doesn’t follow his friend around without question. The actor was on the verge of becoming a breakout star in the 1990’s with this film and The Lawnmower Man (1992) but for whatever reason his career didn’t take off like it should have and he ended up making a lot of forgettable genre films and television shows until as of late when he landed significant roles in high profile projects like Lost and Planet Terror (2007). It’s good to see this underrated actor enjoying a resurgence of sorts.

To say that The African Queen had a checked production history is a massive understatement. Most of the film was shot in Uganda and the Belgian Congo. Producer Sam Spiegel mortgaged his home in London and borrowed the rest while Huston made him sweat right up to the moment of filming with his indecisive nature. Spiegel put the film’s stars Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart (along with his wife Lauren Bacall) in an expensive hotel with no way to pay their bills. The cast and crew flew to their first location only to find out that the rains had come, which delayed filming. Instead of preparing for the project, Huston got the urge to shoot an elephant and took off on safari. The river that the director decided to shoot the film on was infected with bilharzias, a parasitic disease, Spiegel was bitten by a tarantula and almost died, while Hepburn drank only water and was stricken with dysentery. Peter Viertel, a novelist and screenwriter, had been hired to work on James Agee’s screenplay. He witnessed, first hand, Huston’s behavior and two years later published a little-read novel that fictionalized what had gone down. Incredibly, Huston actually liked Viertel’s book, signed off on it and even recommended a more tragic ending.

Over the years, the rights to the novel passed from producer to producer with Burt Lancaster showing interest at one point. Several screenplays based on the story were commissioned but it wasn’t until Eastwood was given a copy of the novel by veteran film producer Ray Stark that there was an actual possibility it would get made into a film. He read it on the way back from Italy where he had been promoting the Charlie Parker biopic Bird (1988). In the past, filmmakers had stayed away from the project because Huston was still alive, the lead character wasn’t very likeable and it didn’t have a happy ending. This didn’t seem to bother Eastwood who used his clout with Warner Brothers to get it made. He was drawn to the story because he liked Huston’s attitude and his speeches about taking chances, not being afraid to try something different, and not caring what the audience thought. He also had an understanding of the Wilson character. “Now, I’ve never felt I wanted to kill wildlife,” Eastwood said in an interview with The Guardian, “or anything like that, but I think there’s a bit of him in my nature … You want to break out of what you’re doing and live differently sometimes. It’s something you have to prove to yourself.”

Early on in development, Eastwood restored the book’s unhappy ending because he felt that it was more faithful to the source material. Originally, he looked at shooting White Hunter, Black Heart in Kenya but the authorities there wanted input on the script and he had heard that there was real demand for bribes in order to do business. Zimbabwe was much more filmmaking friendly with the government being very accommodating to the production and so most of the film was shot there.

White Hunter, Black Heart divided mainstream critics. Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars and wrote, “In the early scenes of White Hunter, Black Heart, Eastwood fans are likely to be distracted to hear Huston's words and vocal mannerisms in Eastwood's mouth, and to see Huston's swagger and physical bravado. Then the performance takes over, and the movie turns into one of the more thoughtful films ever made about the conflicts inside an artist.” Time magazine’s Richard Schickel praised Eastwood’s performance: “Eastwood has dared to attempt a faithful impression of the director, his growling drawl, his loose-limbed stride, the arrogant tilt of his head. The result is a stretch for him as an actor, and fun for the audience.” In his review for the Globe and Mail, Jay Scott wrote, “White Hunter, Black Heart is a beautifully made elaboration of a thesis that has thankfully lost its antithesis to time.”

However, in her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, “And none of it works as fully as Mr. Eastwood obviously wants it to, as a consequence of the sheer sweep and colorfulness of the man being portrayed. But even in this relatively stiff, sometimes awkward form, the John Wilson character is as compelling as Mr. Eastwood's desire to play him.” Entertainment Weekly gave it a “C+” rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, “In the end, though, White Hunter, Black Heart emerges as little more than a plodding shadow of the great film it could have been. An actor making a stretch is one thing. As Huston, Eastwood is so out of his depth he seems to have lost his entertainer's instinct, not to mention his modesty.” The Toronto Star’s Peter Goddard found fault with Eastwood’s performance but not Jeff Fahey’s: “It is Fahey's Verrill who has the power of self-absorption that Eastwood's paper-thin Wilson lacks. Any question about Eastwood's insecurities should probably stop with this film because – as its director – he's given Fahey, a vividly handsome actor, every chance he can to steal scenes. And Fahey, aware of what he's been given, does just that.” USA Today gave the film two-and-a-half out of four stars and Mike Clark wrote, “Yet despite one of Eastwood's more respectable directing jobs, we never sense the method to his madness – or even if it is madness. Nor can Jeff Fahey lick his own character's novelistic origins: the first-person narrator (and Trader script doctor) who by himself isn't too compelling.” Finally, the Washington Post’s Rita Kempley felt that, “White Hunter, Black Heart is not about the making of The African Queen. It's Mondo Machismo, Hollywood on safari, a self-aggrandizing epic reeking of man scent.”

In the end, Wilson realizes that he’s not the rugged protagonist from one of his films but a film director who is sabotaging his own motion picture with this foolhardy quest. He finally acknowledges that nothing good can come of his obsession and that he must make a decision – continue to pursue it despite the consequences or let it go and focus on things that really matter. Unfortunately, he learns this at a painful cost and Eastwood doesn’t let Wilson off easy. His obsession has terrible consequences and the shameful expression on his face at the end of White Hunter, Black Heart suggests that it is something that will haunt him and that he will have to live with for the rest of his days.


Also, check out Joe Valdez's excellent look at this film over at his blog, This Distracted Globe.

Grace of My Heart

Grace of My Heart (1996) is Allison Anders’ unabashed love letter to three decades of popular music, from the doo-wop era of the late 1950’s, to the rise of girl groups in the 1960’s to the psychedelic era of the 1970’s, all seen through the eyes of a female songwriter cast in the mould of Carole King, among others. Anders’ passion project finally gave a substantial role to character actress Illeana Douglas who, finally freed from the shackles of numerous supporting character roles over the years, delivers a career-defining performance. Despite the pedigree of having Martin Scorsese as executive producer and the likes of John Turturro and Matt Dillon in supporting roles, Grace of My Heart was not a commercial hit, and was quickly eclipsed by another nostalgic look at popular music from the ‘60s that came out the same year – Tom Hanks’ That Thing You Do! (1996), which, incidentally, wasn’t a huge hit either but had much more advertising muscle behind it. For all of its flaws, which include a weak third act, Grace of My Heart is a fascinating look at a time when the craft of writing a good song mattered. It is a film that deserves to be rediscovered.


Edna Buxton (Illeana Douglas) comes from a wealthy suburban Philadelphia family whose mother has her life all figured out – marry a man from another wealthy family and live the rest of her life as an obedient housewife. Let’s not forget that the film begins in 1958 where this was the prevailing attitude. However, a chance encounter with a talented singer by the name of Doris Shelley (Jennifer Leigh Warren) backstage at a local talent contest inspires her to pick a different path in life for herself, one that is not planned by her controlling mother. Edna wins the contest, receives a recording contract and moves to New York City to make it as a singer.

However, Edna finds out that there are all kinds of women who sound just like her and sing the same kinds of songs. A kindly yet condescending engineer (Richard Schiff) tells her that guy groups are where it’s at. Her life changes when she meets Joel Milner (John Turturro), a brilliant record producer who convinces Edna to write songs for others. She figures that this will do until she can record her own material. He also changes her decidedly unglamorous name to the catchier Denise Waverly. They work out of the legendary Brill Building, the headquarters for pop-music during the ’50s and ‘60s and which saw the likes of Burt Bacharach, Neil Diamond, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Phil Spector and many others write some of the biggest hits at the time.

With Denise’s insistence, Joel records one her songs with a girl group known as the Stylettes and it is a hit, bucking the prevailing trend of popular guy groups. Joel then pairs her up with Howard Caszatt (Eric Stoltz), a Beatnik poseur who injects social issues into the songs he writes with her. I like that Anders shows Denise and Howard writing a song together and we see them coming up with ideas for lyrics and melodies. They soon become romantically involved and get married after she becomes pregnant. After she has the baby, Denise continues to work, quite unusual for the times, but it becomes obvious that she has a real knack for creating hit songs while Howard appears to be holding her back. This causes tension in their personal lives and it’s not long before she catches him in bed with another woman.

The next man in Denise’s life is popular radio disc jockey John Murray (Bruce Davison) who becomes smitten with her and uses his show to promote a controversial song she wrote. He’s a nice enough guy and seems like the one she should be with instead of the pretentious Howard; it’s just too bad that he’s married. During the course of the film, Anders also shows the rivalry between fellow female songwriters, like when Joel brings Cheryl Steed (Patsy Kensit) in to write hit songs and Denise immediately sees her as direct competition. Cheryl even gets a better office then Denise who has been there longer. Cheryl quickly becomes Joel’s new favorite songwriter, much to Denise’s dismay but she puts on a brave face in public.

Joel then decides to team her up with Cheryl as an experiment and the two women are instructed to write a song for bubblegum pop singer Kelly Porter (Bridget Fonda channeling Leslie Gore). Initially, they don’t know what to write about but after being privy to a secret part of Kelly’s personal life they figure it out. Cheryl and Denise bond over the Porter song, become close friends, and generate a hit. After years of writing songs for other people, Joel reminds Denise that she started working for him to create her own music and sets her up with Jay Phillips (Matt Dillon), a brilliant yet temperamental musician from the West Coast, to produce her single. It is at this point that Grace of My Heart shifts from songwriters working in the Brill Building to the experimental West Coast psychedelic scene and some momentum is lost. It may be that Jay and his world is just not as fascinating as Joel and his. It also doesn’t help that John Turturro’s performance is so strong and memorable, while Matt Dillon seems miscast as the mercurial Brian Wilson-esque Jay.

Illeana Douglas is an unconventional choice to play Denise. Her speaking voice doesn’t really match up with the person cast as her singing voice (the fantastic sounding Kristen Vigard) but it is refreshing to see someone who doesn’t look or act like your traditional A-list movie star and it would only happen in an independent film like this one. Douglas makes it work, using her considerable talents to show the different sides of her character – her doubts, fears and aspirations – while also running through the spectrum of emotions. There are scenes where she breaks down completely, is romantic, funny, and really digs deep within herself to fully inhabit Denise. The veteran actress shows a vulnerability that is fascinating to watch, especially the scene where she records her first single, the soulful and soaring “God Give Me Strength” (written by Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello no less!). This is a criminally underrated performance that should’ve won her every acting award the year it came out.

John Turturro, with his black suit, goatee and sunglasses, plays a nicer, more neurotic version of Phil Spector, the legendary record producer and pioneer of the Wall of Sound production technique, mixed with Don Kirshner, a rock producer who gave Neil Diamond and Carole King their starts. Of all the men that pass in and out of Denise’s life, he is a consistent presence and the voice of reason, constantly reminding her about her considerable talent while never candy-coating his opinions on her music or her life. He plays a flashy personality and one of the film’s pleasures is watching how he plays off of Douglas. There is a wonderful scene between them where Denise apologizes for her first single leading to Joel’s financial ruin but he dismisses that notion, reminding her that she wrote his first hit and many after as well as inspiring him to take chances he would have never done otherwise. It a touching moment between the two characters – one in which we see Joel let his guard down for moment and in doing so it reveals a lot about him. It is so rare that Turturro plays nice, decent guys and so it is a real treat to see him refreshingly cast against type in this film.

In 1994, Allison Anders was gearing up to direct Paul Is Dead from an autobiographical screenplay with Hugh Grant lined up to star. Then, a month before the start of filming, the actor pulled out and with it the financing, which was contingent on his participation. Understandably upset, Anders was woman without a film. In stepped Martin Scorsese who had written a fan letter to Anders after seeing Gas Food Lodging (1992). He was eager to team up his then girlfriend and actress Illeana Douglas with Anders for a film that he would produce. After making Cape Fear (1991), Douglas had acted in but was ultimately cut out of a string of impressive films: Jungle Fever (1991), Husbands and Wives (1992), and Quiz Show (1994). Feeling depressed as a result of these snubs, she talked to Scorsese who recommended she start developing relationships with directors. Douglas went on to make a low-budget film called Grief (1993) and went to the Sundance Film Festival with it. There, she met Anders and they became friends. Afterwards, the two women kept in contact in the hopes of making a film together.

Initially, they wanted to do a biopic about American poet Anne Sexton but couldn’t get the film rights to her life. They were both obsessed with music, in particular Anders with girl groups from the ‘60s. Douglas told her about how she used to work in the Brill Building as an assistant for infamous New York publicist Peggy Segal and that maybe they should do a film about it. As a result, Anders wrote the role of Edna/Denise specifically for Douglas. When it came to writing the screenplay, both women put a lot of personal details into it. For example, Denise’s relationship with Jay was reminiscent of Douglas and Scorsese. When Anders thought of Douglas for the film, she was looking for an actress to “embody all sorts of contradictions. I have to find the right woman to speak to other women.” However, the actress was worried about how women would react to Denise’s habit of getting involved with men who aren’t good for and tended to sidetrack her dream of recording her own album, “because women don’t want to think Edna would let a guy interrupt a career. But that’s the big secret: Women always think that being loved is much more important than being talented.”

The script originally started as the story of one singer/songwriter but then Anders and Douglas started to add aspects of others: Joni Mitchell, Phil Spector and the Beach Boys. Legendary songwriter Gerry Goffin, who was married to Carole King at one time, was brought into write three songs for the film (including one with his daughter and recording artist Louise Goffin) and also gave Anders a lot of autobiographical information, which she incorporated into the script. Instead of using actual songs that came from the time period, Anders decided to have new songs that sounded like they came from that era because “it would have been very confusing to have these fictional characters writing songs that were already well-known to the public.” Originally, Douglas expected to do her own singing, having started out doing musicals, but the studio wanted to make a lucrative record deal and she had to lip-synch to Kirsten Vigard’s voice.

Grace of My Heart is a treasure trove of hidden gems for music fans who are hip to the music and the musicians of the eras it depicts. For example, towards the end of the film Denise uses her skill for crafting pop songs towards creating very personal ballads, much like Carole King did with her top selling record Tapestry, which inspired some of the songs. In her previous films, Anders used alternative rock (Gas Food Lodging) and hip-hop (Mi Vida Loca) as the soundtrack for stories about young women. While Grace of My Heart is about music from a bygone era, she had contemporary indie rockers team up with seasoned veterans. Gerry Goffin, the inspiration for Howard Caszatt, wrote a song with Los Lobos. Brill Building veteran Carole Bayer Sayer teamed up with Eurythmics guitarist Dave Stewart on a song. Easily the best collaboration on the film’s soundtrack saw Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach pen the signature song “God Give Me Strength,” which went on to become more successful than the film itself.

Grace of My Heart was made on a small budget and there wasn’t much money to advertise it. The film opened in only 39 theaters in North America and failed to make back its $5 million budget. To make matters worse, it was quickly overshadowed by Tom Hanks’ That Thing You Do!, which came out shortly after. It received mostly mixed reviews with critics praising the time spent on the Brill Building era but criticizing the last third where Denise moves out to the West Coast to be with Jay. Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “B” rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, “Once Grace of My Heart leaves the Brill Building, the movie gets stranded in a parade of '60s clichés. It turns into the most banal of melodramas, complete with a ''tragic'' finale that plays as borderline kitsch. Still, there's no denying Anders' talent. She should have been content to make a catchy single and not stretched it into an overblown rock opera.” The Globe and Mail’s Rick Groen gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote, “In its embracing of easy melodrama, of the wronged woman who endures and then prevails, Grace Of My Heart hopes to emulate the elegant simplicity of the pop music it celebrates. But that combination, as potent as it is rare, is hard to bring off – like her hired melody-makers, Anders gets the simplicity yet misses the elegance. All the trite notes are there, but none of the redeeming grace.” In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, “Ms. Anders, who displayed such effortless, down-to-earth feminism in Gas Food Lodging, has to strain harder to make a heroine out of Denise. Ms. Douglas plays her eagerly, but the film casts her as an old-fashioned victim in many clichéd ways … This story offers so little novelty that the film's musical score and great retro costumes easily upstage its drama.”

The San Francisco Chronicle’s Edward Guthman wrote, “Anders is very good to her actors and writes smart, well-rounded characters. Her problem is loving them too much, embracing them too tightly and not knowing when to let go.” Roger Ebert gave the film two-and-a-half stars out four and wrote, “I would have preferred a more limited story that went deeper, instead of a docudrama that covers so much ground, so relentlessly, that we grow weary.” The Washington Post’s Richard Harrington wrote, “One major problem is that Grace of My Heart feels like a preview reel from some upcoming miniseries. Despite its two hours, events seem to unfold too quickly and in too little depth. Anders never really captures the communal bustle, competitive friendships or astounding productivity of the Brill Building's golden age.” In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Jack Mathews wrote, “Grace marvelously re-creates that atmosphere of sweatshop creativity, both the pressure and the joy, and Douglas' portrayal of a woman fighting for her own identity and a piece of the action gives the story a solid emotional footing.” USA Today gave the film three out of four stars and Susan Wloszczyna wrote, “Allison Anders (Gas Food Lodging) infuses her epic with joy and a keen eye for pre-feminist details, before the pill and pantyhose set us free.”

Ultimately, Grace of My Heart is the story of a survivor. Denise endures all kinds of ups and downs in her personal and professional life with music as the constant thread that runs throughout. It is always there for her whereas the men in her life come and go. Her personal journey propels the film and when it hits a lull this mirrors the lull in her life until someone like Joel comes along and gets her going and the film’s narrative starts up again. By the end of the film you really feel like you’ve been on a journey with this character. Denise channels all of her life experiences into her music and so it makes sense that the film climaxes with her finally recording and releasing the full-length album she had always wanted to do. It is rare when you see a film that is such a labor of love as this one. Anders and Douglas poured so much of themselves into this project and it shows. Grace of My Heart may strain at times under its own ambition but one has to admire its desire to do so in a day and age where so many films and filmmakers play it safe.

Dogtown and Z-Boys / Lords of Dogtown

In the mid-1970’s, California was hit by a crippling drought that made it impossible to surf any kind of decent waves. The locals that lived in an area of West Los Angeles known as Dogtown always had skateboarding to fall back on when the surfing wasn’t any good. They all hung out at a local surf shop that reflected their surroundings: a rough seaside slum that fostered a proudly anti-establishment image because they all felt like outcasts. The surf shop was a place where these kids felt like they belonged.

The core group consisted of 12 kids who rejected the tried and true skating techniques of the 1960’s for a more aggressive, stylish approach inspired by the way they surfed. Amazingly, no one had thought of doing this before and it blew the world of skateboarding wide open. Dogtown and Z-Boys (2001) is a documentary that traces their origins and the rise and fall of this group, known as the Zephyr team (or Z-Boys for short), from the perspective of its members.

At the time, there were no skate parks so the Zephyr team had to skate in deserted schoolyards and then, once they discovered them, empty swimming pools drained by the drought. They ended up being the perfect spots for skating and ushered in the era of vertical skating thanks to the influence of surfing and the vision of one of their own, Tony Alva. The only problem with skating in background pools is that the Z-Boys weren’t supposed to be there and a session would end suddenly when the owners or the cops showed up.

Finally, skateboarding enjoyed enough of a resurgence that a national competition surfaced in Del Mar in 1975. The Z-Boys got a team together and came in with their punk rock aesthetic and blew the minds of people used to the hopelessly outdated ‘60s style. However, the downside came in the form of rich skateboard companies that broke up the Z-Boys with the lure of money and fame. Within a year, their beloved surf shop was out of business.

The documentary goes on to trace the rise of several of the Z-Boys, like Alva, Stacy Peralta and Jay Adams, into superstars. They were treated like gods in the skateboarding world and went from living on the streets to having all kinds of money, fame and women thrown at them. Some of them, such as Adams, couldn’t handle the sudden fame and fortune. It’s a shame because he was the most natural and spontaneous of the team, a brilliant “athletic stream-of-consciousness,” as one person puts it. However, Alva and Peralta were able to diversify and take control of their careers and still skate today, capitalizing on their early success.

The impetus for this documentary came from an article that appeared in Spin magazine about the Z-Boys. Within a week of it hitting newsstands, six major Hollywood studios contacted Stacy Peralta wanting to buy the life rights to their story and make it into a fictional film. Executives were able to get Tony Alva and Jay Adams on board but Peralta agreed only on the condition that he would have some input. The studio refused and he decided to do a documentary on the Z-Boys himself. Peralta was able to get Vans, a skateboarding gear manufacturer, to finance the film for $400,000 and give him complete creative control. With his connections to the scene, he was able to get access to all the key people who were around back in the day.

There is an infectious energy to this documentary that mirrors its subject. Gone are boring talking heads mixed with standard stock footage. Instead, we are presented with stills and vintage footage taken back in the day and that comes to life thanks to kinetic editing and period rock ‘n’ roll music setting just the right tone.

Like its subjects, the doc’s style lets it all hang out. For example, at one point, the film’s narrator, none other than Jeff Spicoli himself, Sean Penn, clears his throat in mid-narration. Most slick docs would have edited this out but director Stacy Peralta keeps it in. It is these little touches that make Dogtown and Z-Boys distinctive.

What also gives Dogtown and Z-Boys such authenticity is that it was made by one of their own, Peralta, and this gives the documentary unprecedented inside access that an outsider would never have. This is a fascinating look at these maverick skaters and how they influenced contemporary skateboarding that we now take for granted.

Dogtown and Z-Boys was a hugely successful documentary chronicling a group of wild skateboarders in Venice Beach, California in the ‘70s. Why dramatize an already great documentary that pretty much says it all? Naturally, Hollywood got interested and wanted to make a fictional version (because hey, no one watches docs, right?) with Fred Dirst (of Limp Bizkit fame) directing and David Fincher producing.

Fortunately, someone came to his or her senses and Dirst was out with Fincher taking over but the budget for his vision was too large. So, the studio opted for a low budget take with independent film darling Catherine Hardwicke, fresh from the success of thirteen (2003), taking over as director. In an effort to keep it real, Stacy Peralta, who made the Z-Boys doc, wrote the screenplay for Lords of Dogtown (2005) and worked closely with Hardwicke in order to remain true to what he and his friends went through all those years ago.

The film takes us back to the heady days of 1975 when the Venice Beach locals would surf the dangerous waters where you could easily get brained by a piece of the nearby pier. These were tough kids growing up in a tough neighborhood and out of it came a group of young surfers who adopted the same style they used to attack the waves to skate asphalt and concrete: Jay Adams (Emile Hirsch), Tony Alva (Victor Rasuk) and Stacy Peralta (John Robinson).

One of the reasons why Lords of Dogtown works so well is because of the superb casting. The actors who play the three lead Z-Boys are dead ringers for their real-life counterparts. In fact, the entire cast looks and sounds like the real people. In particular, Emile Hirsch is excellent as Jay Adams, a naturally gifted skater who comes from a troubled home. Hirsch is wonderfully cast against type as an edgy, brooding teen — it’s a world away from his naïve dreamer that he played in The Girl Next Door (2004).

Thankfully, the film’s producers didn’t raid the WB cabinet for the young cast. Instead, they got Hirsch, Rasuk (from indie fave Raising Victor Vargas) and Robinson (from Gus Van Sant’s Elephant) who have some actual acting chops but not a high enough profile so as to distract. They disappear into their roles as does, surprisingly, high profile actor Heath Ledger. He does an excellent job of becoming his character, one of the Zephyr skate shop owners who is a burnt out drunk but has vision and tries to protect his team of young skaters.

According to Peralta, he made sure to teach the actors how to “look comfortable on a board.” To this length, the actors portraying skaters underwent a three-month training course led by none other than Alva with surfing in the morning and skating in the afternoon. Of the three lead actors, only Rasuk had no board sport experience before the film. The actors not only had to learn the distinctive skating style of the ‘70s but also had to do it on vintage equipment from that era. Not surprisingly, the actors suffered all kinds of skating-related injuries during the course of training and filming but there hard work paid off as is evident from the final result.

Hardwicke adopts a down ‘n’ dirty approach to the look of her film. She uses a lot of hand-held camerawork and grainy film stock that makes you feel like someone who was there shot it. The film’s warm color scheme is filled with yellows, browns and reds for an almost sunburnt look with grey-blues for the ocean/surfing scenes. The style of the film is never gimmicky; the story dictates the style. The attention to period detail is flawless: the pool surfing, the convenience store cuisine and the music.

These kids aren’t driving around in brand new Mustangs or Woodies but beaten-up junkers as befitting their social status. The film uses period music that is typical of the era but doesn’t rely on the really popular, obvious tunes except during appropriate times like at a party where you would listen to crowd-pleasers like that and so it is justified.

The trailers for this film totally misrepresented it as an over-processed, heavily edited piece of lunchmeat. Instead, Lords of Dogtown perfectly evokes the times it depicts with unerring authenticity. It portrays skaters as they were back then — stylish and below the radar, just before the sport took off to the wildly popular institution that it is now.

Lords of Dogtown shows how fame eventually broke up the Z-Boys. It was inevitable. These kids came from nothing and were suddenly thrust into the spotlight and all kinds of money was thrown at them. Alva and Peralta became hugely popular and went corporate, constantly competing with each other while Adams stayed true to his roots and walked away from it all because he was in it for the love of skating and the thrill of the ride. This film will bring back a lot of memories for people who grew up and skated during these years, making this film more than just a simple retread of the Z-Boys documentary.

MGM MOD DVD of the Week: Defiance / Patty Hearst

Defiance (1980) is an early Jerry Bruckheimer production, back when he was interested in making gritty crime films like American Gigolo (1980) and Thief (1981). Unfortunately, Defiance was given a limited released where it promptly bombed at the box office and failed to connect with a mainstream audience, relegating it to late night cable television. MGM has recently resurrected the film and finally given it a DVD release with the Movies On Demand program.

Tom “Tommy” Gamble (Jan Michael Vincent) is a tough merchant seaman who finds himself suspended with a six-month stay in New York City until he can get another job at sea. Broke and bummed at having to spend all this time in a city he can’t stand the sight of, he walks the dirty streets to the strains of “Bad Times” by Gerard McMahon (one of seven he wrote and performed for the film), which tries to capture the blue collar aesthetic of Bruce Springsteen but to a funk beat. He’s closer to Eddie and the Cruisers (1983) than Springsteen, however. A bartender that Tommy knows hooks him up with an apartment to crash in and it has all the slummy allure of a cesspool.

He spends his spare time (of which he has plenty) learning Spanish in the hopes of getting a ship bound for Panama. Despite his best efforts to keep to himself, Tommy befriends his chatty neighbor upstairs, Marsha Bernstein (Theresa Saldana), his noisy next-door neighbor Carmine (Danny Aiello), Abe (Art Carney), the savvy local shopkeeper, and a snotty-nosed street urchin (Fernando Lopez). This cozy collection of ethnic stereotypes are being harassed by a street gang populated by rejects who didn’t make the cut in The Warriors (1979) and led by the silent but deadly Angel Cruz (Rudy Ramos). Even though Tommy makes it clear that he wants to be left alone, the gang roughs him up (they take his art supplies!) and terrorizes the neighborhood (for kicks they throw bottles and cans at a street cleaning vehicle and disrupt a bingo game which is pretty innocuous on the deviant scale) until the merchant seaman reaches his breaking point and opens up a can of whoop-ass on these punks.

Defiance is the kind of urban revenge film that Cannon Films would have made in the 1980’s, probably starring Charles Bronson, complete with a xenophobic view of the big city. Instead we get Jan Michael Vincent, fresh from his iconic role in the Big Wednesday (1978). With his lean, chiseled features, he is well cast as the decent man who is pushed too close to the edge. As envisioned by the actor, Tommy is a tough guy but underneath is a real softy as the charm of the tenants in his building – in particular, Marsha and the kid – eventually break through his gruff exterior. Danny Aiello appears in an early role as a genial local bringing his own unique brand of charm to the role as only he can. Art Carney is slumming it as a stereotypical storeowner. Look closely and you’ll see Tony Sirico (Paulie from The Sopranos) in an early role and Lenny Montana (Luca Brasi from The Godfather) in small but memorable roles as respectable members of the neighborhood.

Director John Flynn orchestrates everything with his trademark no frills style that wouldn’t look out of place on an episode of Hill Street Blues. It is the kind of meat and potatoes filmmaking that is ideally suited for Defiance. Let’s be honest, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out how the story is going to end but that’s neither here nor there. The purpose of this film is to tell a simple yet entertaining story.

 

Coming off the commercial and critical failure that was Light of Day (1987), Paul Schrader went on to direct Patty Hearst (1988), a low budget docudrama about the kidnapping of Patricia Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) in 1974. Based on her 1982 autobiography Every Secret Thing, the film is a gritty account of how the SLA attempted to brainwash the newspaper heiress and force her to rob a bank and become a revolutionary. The film made its debut at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival but was given a very modest release and pretty much dropped off of everyone’s radar soon afterwards. It has finally been given a Region 1 DVD release thanks to the MGM MOD program, which restores the original aspect ratio and features a fine transfer.


Schrader wastes no time in showing the Hearst kidnapping and in doing so doesn’t spend much time establishing who she is or letting us get to know her, which makes it a little hard, initially, to empathize with her plight. He proceeds to show the relentless indoctrination the SLA did on Hearst – keeping her in a closet, opening the door occasionally to spout chunks of their radical left-wing manifesto. The tag-team of sensory deprivation and being force-fed SLA dogma wears down her defenses. Schrader shoots these scenes in shadowy rooms with distorted lenses and skewed shots accompanied by creepy, atmospheric music that evokes the claustrophobic feeling of a horror film.

Natasha Richardson does a good job of conveying the gradual breaking down of Hearst’s mental state to the point where she would be receptive to the SLA’s propaganda. The actress not only looks physically haggard but you can see it in her eyes – that glazed look of desperation. Richardson also captures the pampered softness of a woman born with a silver spoon in the mouth – the granddaughter of publishing tycoon William Randolph Hearst. If we didn’t sympathize with her early on then we do while watching her get brainwashed. This innocent, young woman is bullied and treated like a prisoner of war. They get her to the point where she wants to join their cause and has no problem regurgitating their beliefs. In addition to Richardson, Schrader assembled an interesting cast of character actors to play SLA members: Ving Rhames as their militant leader, William Forsythe as a guy who wishes he was black and also Dana Delany and Frances Fisher.

With the rise of domestic terrorism in the last ten years, Patty Hearst remains eerily relevant. By the end of the film she goes from being programmed by the SLA to being programmed by doctors, lawyers and medical experts. For a low budget film, Schrader gives it a slick, cinematic look. The locations are sparse with no pretty details, just stark by design. This is contrasted with stylish lighting and color schemes. The film’s focus is on Hearst and the insular world of the SLA, which makes sense as the outside world’s reaction to what happened is well-documented. This is Hearst’s story told mostly from her perspective. Is she merely a spoiled rich brat or brainwashed revolutionary? Patty Hearst makes a case for both and leaves it up to the viewer to make up their own mind.

 

Domino

Tony Scott has had a wildly uneven yet fascinating career that has seen him dabble in art house horror (The Hunger), jingoistic propaganda (Top Gun), and the buddy action film (The Last Boy Scout). He has always lived in the shadow of his older brother, Ridley, who makes epic, prestige films with A-list movie stars. Tony, on the other hand, has a more B-movie sensibility but is able to realize his films with large budgets and marquee names like Kevin Costner, Brad Pitt, and Denzel Washington. The studios like him because of the talent he attracts and his films consistently make money. In the 2000’s, he reinvented the look of his films with Man on Fire (2004) in an attempt to stay relevant with younger audiences with limited attention spans and raised on music videos, but risked alienating fans of his past films. The result was an intensely fractured editing style that propelled action thrillers like Domino (2005) and Déjà Vu (2006). It got to the point where this hyperactive editing began to distract from the narratives of his films. However, with Domino this approach oddly enough works because the film’s style attempts to approximate its protagonist’s stream of consciousness. After all, she narrates her own story and so most of the film is told from her point-of-view.


Film director John Ford famously said, "When forced to pick between truth and legend, print the legend." This certainly applies to Scott’s biopic about the life of Domino Harvey, daughter of actor Laurence Harvey and supermodel Paulene Stone. Her father died when she was four-years-old and was unable to fill the void by his passing. By her teens, she had been kicked out of four elite boarding schools. At 20, she moved to Los Angeles and lived with her mother in the Hollywood Hills. She went into rehab for a drug addiction that started in her teens. Soon after, she reinvented herself and tried her hand at being a ranch hand in San Diego and a volunteer firefighter. From there, she ran a London dance club and even gave up a promising career as a model to become a bounty hunter, partnering with Ed Martinez. She helped him capture 50 fugitives and, in the process, also renewed her drug habit.

You couldn’t have created a better story and Scott and screenwriter Richard Kelly (Donnie Darko) run with it, assembling a balls-out attack on the notion of celebrity that is part satire and part action film. Think of it as Scott’s Natural Born Killers (1994). Like Oliver Stone’s film, Scott throws all kinds of disparate elements into a stylish blender and what comes out is an intriguing mess of a film. Domino was blasted by critics and flopped at the box office but one has to admire the casting radically against type of Keira Knightley as Domino. She delivers one of the strongest performances of her career and is supported by Mickey Rourke and Edgar Ramirez, a veteran actor and up-and-coming one. In turn, they are surrounded by an eclectic cast to say the least – Lucy Liu, Tom Waits, and Christopher Walken, along with Beverly Hills 90210 alumni Ian Ziering and Brian Austin Green playing themselves (sort of).

The film begins with Domino (Keira Knightley) in police custody and being questioned by a criminal psychologist (Lucy Liu in an annoying cameo) and then proceeds to tell her story, about how she gave up her pampered, Beverly Hills 90210 life for that of an ass-kicking bounty hunter, through a series of flashbacks. Her father died when Domino was very young and she vowed to never let anyone get close to her again. She dabbled in modeling as Britain’s answer to Gia Carangi before her mother moved to L.A. and tried to mould her into a Beverly Hills socialite a la Paris Hilton, but Domino rebelled. These early scenes do a good job of selling Keira Knightley’s badass credentials and show how Domino got into bounty hunting. She went to a seminar and met Ed Mosbey (Mickey Rourke) and Choco (Edgar Ramirez), two miscreants who take off with the participants’ money. Impressed by her chutzpah, Ed agrees to take her on and show her the ropes despite Choco’s reservations. Knightley, Mickey Rourke and Edgar Ramirez play well off each other as she acts as the petulant younger sister to their older brothers – Ramirez, the macho man of few words and Rourke, the grizzled veteran with a swagger in his step.

Domino has a wicked sense of humor and this apparent in a scene that gleefully satirizes daytime talks shows by having Mo’Nique’s DMV worker go on Jerry Springer with her system of identifying mixed races entitled, the Mixed Race Categorical Flow Chart. For example, she identifies herself as Blactino (black and Latino) and then labels an audience member Chinegro (Chinese and black). This scene takes the circus-like atmosphere of Springer’s show and cranks it up another notch so that it rivals the sitcom parody in Natural Born Killers for zeroing in on one of the most ridiculous aspects of popular culture. And speaking of sending up pop culture, you have to give Ian Ziering and Brian Austin Green credit for being willing to laugh at themselves in this film as they play exaggerated versions of their public personas. Scott puts their “characters” through the wringer as he pokes fun at spoiled, washed-up T.V. stars. Scott felt that the film’s story was made up of two halves: Domino’s life up to and including her decision to become a bounty hunter and her stint on a reality T.V. show. He wanted to have comedic elements in the film and the second half with Ziering and Green gave him plenty of opportunities.

All of the people around Domino want something – a book deal, money, T.V. ratings, or to boost their Hollywood reputation – but she’s not interested in any of that. The film suggests that becoming a bounty hunter was a way of rejecting her family’s privileged lifestyle. She wanted to throw that all away and do something that involved honest, hard work but even that gets corrupted when she, Ed and Choco inadvertently get roped into going after four thieves who may or may not have robbed an armored truck containing money belonging Drake Bishop (Dabney Coleman), the billionaire owner of the Stratosphere Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, and who has links to mafia boss Anthony Cigliutti (Stanley Kamel). In a nice nod to the bank robbers masquerading as ex-Presidents of the United States in Point Break (1991), the armored truck robbers disguise themselves as several of the First Ladies. Eventually, our anti-heroes find themselves in a Mexican standoff reminiscent of the ones in past Scott films, True Romance (1993) and Enemy of the State (1998).

If Domino is the cinematic equivalent of an acid trip then the desert sequence is its peak. After inadvertently drinking Mescaline-dosed coffee, Domino and her crew (including her driver) crash their RV in the desert. Bruised and bloodied, Domino, Ed and Choco crawl out of the wreckage zonked out of their minds and are soon visited by none other than Tom Waits as the strains of his song, “Jesus Gonna Be Here” plays on the film’s soundtrack. He calls Domino an “angel of fire” and tells her that she and her companions must sacrifice their lives so that a young child may live. Waits’ character is clearly intended to be a holy man of some sort, a shaman putting the protagonists on a righteous path and proceeds to literally drive them to their destiny. Scott saw Waits’ character as a kind of Greek chorus that apparently has some kind of psychic connection with Domino and left it ambiguous if he was real or a figment of her imagination.

Knightley’s Domino is a fascinating package: a tough, gun-toting bounty hunter who also uses her stunning looks to get what she wants, like giving a gangbanger a lap dance to get the location of a guy she’s after. While that scene shows off her body, Scott turns it around in the next one, showing Domino watching Choco strip down to his underwear in a laundromat. He lingers just as long on Ramirez’s fine, chiseled physique so there’s eye candy for everyone. Knightley’s performance in Domino almost makes you forget how she was wasted in the Pirates of the Caribbean films. The actress’ natural beauty and British heritage make her an excellent, if not unconventional, choice to play a model turned bounty hunter. The big question was if should could convey the toughness required for the role and not look ridiculous holding a gun. Thanks to Scott’s stylized camerawork, Knightley certainly looks the part and her performance does the rest. This film, along with her role in The Jacket (2005), are among her strongest performances to date. Both are vastly underappreciated and amply demonstrate that she’s more than a pretty face – she as some actual acting chops if given the chance to use them.

Christopher Walken plays Mark Weiss, an energetic public relations man with an “attention span of a ferret on crystal meth,” as one character puts it, and is played with the actor’s customary gusto. It’s great to see Walken taking a break from forgettable fare that has plagued his career for years and appearing in a high profile film such as this one. His glad-handing vulture evokes Robert Downey Jr.’s vain tabloid journalist in Natural Born Killers and is nearly as entertaining. Like Mickey Rourke, Walken has done a lot of bad fllms in recent memory but his performance in Domino is one of the best he’s done in the last ten years.

The slapdash, fast and loose style of Scott’s actually works in Domino – the director messes around with the speed of the film, the color intensity and amps up the music during montage sequences in order to draw our attention to them because he is imparting crucial information. He tarts up the color of the film to garish levels that include sun-baked yellows, Palmolive liquid green and midnight blues. In doing so, Scott calls attention to the artificiality of his film. There is very little resemblance of reality in Domino and instead it resembles a fevered dream that resides in Domino’s head. Domino is densely edited with layers of images that hit us at an accelerated rate. Along with Natural Born Killers, Domino must hold the record for most insert shots in a film. In NBK, Mickey and Mallory Knox became anti-folk heroes as does Domino, Ed and Choco to the sleaze addicts in the world who watch reality shows just like the people who idolize serial killers in Oliver Stone’s film. Furthermore, there is a scene in Domino where her goldfish dies and like Mickey killing the Native American Indian, this is a pivotal turning point when things begin to go south for her.

Director Tony Scott first heard of Domino Harvey in the mid-1990’s when his business manager sent him an article about her. What really got Scott’s attention was her being actor Laurence Harvey’s daughter and that she came from a very privileged life only to turn her back on it. He immediately contacted Domino and invited her to his office. A week later, they were in discussions to make her story into a film. From the get-go, he was not interested in making a standard biopic about her life. Over the years, Scott befriended Domino and she became a surrogate daughter to him. He tried to warn her to be careful but she told him that she loved the adrenaline rush that came with the job. He also met her bounty hunting team and witnessed their dynamic together. Scott began taping interviews with her and they provided the basis of a screenplay. In 1995, she sold her life story to him for $260,000.

Scott had several screenwriters (including, reportedly, Roger Avary) attempt to adapt her life into a film but found that they were all much too straightforward for his liking. Scott saw Donnie Darko (2001), written and directed by Richard Kelly, and then read his script for Southland Tales (2007) and was taken with his “unusual and very imaginative approach in terms of his comedic elements and his darker, almost sci-fi side,” while also creating characters that were “real, breathing people.” Kelly came up with the genesis for his fictionalized take on Domino’s life while sitting at a Santa Monica Department of Motor Vehicles trying to correct an error with his driver’s license. He saw the place as a source of vast information and decided to use it as the center of each story within the film. Much like he did with Southland Tales, Kelly crafted a complex narrative that interweaved several stories with flashbacks and flashforwards. Scott described it as “a huge jigsaw puzzle. The audience has to pay attention in order to stay with all the beats of the story.”

Kelly envisioned the telling of Domino’s story as if it was a fevered dream, “a fabrication or as a satire, kind of,” and to tell it in the style of Rashomon (1950). When he interviewed the real Domino for two hours, she told him about going to summer school at Beverly Hills High and from that he wrote in the Beverly Hills 90210 aspects. He had grown up with the show and felt that “it was a lightning rod for the way teenagers were supposed to behave in the After School Special meets Rodeo Drive soap opera quality of that show.” To that end, two of its cast members – Green and Ziering came on board playing fictionalized versions of themselves.

When Scott was ready to make the film, he contacted long-time friend and producer Samuel Hadida. They had worked together previously on True Romance with Samuel’s brother Victor, but it was not a commercial hit. This did not deter the Hadida brothers from taking a gamble on Scott’s new unconventional project. They gave the director the creative freedom to make the film the way he wanted. In 2002, Samuel met Kelly while the filmmaker was distributing Donnie Darko and he told the producer that he was writing the script for Domino. A few years later, Scott contacted Hadida and told him that he was trying to get the film made and had a small window of opportunity because actress Keira Knightley was only available from October to December.

The next day, Scott sent Hadida the script and a video of several clips from past films, commercials and television shows to give an idea of the look and tone he envisioned for Domino. He also sent a copy of Man on Fire and the next day Hadida agreed to finance the new film. The producer liked Kelly’s script with its dark humor and that “it was emotional and took you for a ride, but the character was still believable and three-dimensional.” The Hadidas sent the script to New Line Cinema, a company with a reputation for making challenging films, and they were interested in working with Scott and Knightley, the latter who was coming off the very popular Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003), which is where Scott first noticed her. He cast the then-20-year-old Knightley based on instinct. He felt that transforming the actress into Domino would be like the real Domino transforming herself into a bounty hunter.

In April 2004, she met Scott in Los Angeles and told him how much she loved the script with its “mad story. It’s got action, sexuality, violence, bad language … but it’s very funny.” She was excited at the chance “to do something a little crazy that I hadn’t done before.” The actress wasn’t interested in doing an imitation of Domino and Kelly’s highly fictionalized take helped in her approach to the role. Knightley actually met the real Domino a couple of times while filming Pride & Prejudice (2005). Knightley didn’t have enough prep time to study her and so Scott told the actress to make up her own character. So, Knightley based her performance on her best friend and taped interviews of the real Domino. During the last two weeks of filming Pride & Prejudice, Knightley was getting calls from Scott about costumes and other things to do with Domino and remembered, “I couldn’t get my head into it at all,” and this upset the actress because she never had this problem before. She decided to cut off most of her hair and physically rid herself of the previous film role.

Scott had known Mickey Rourke socially for years and felt that the actor shared a similar personality with the real Ed: “Mickey is the right age, he’s grown up on motorcycles and in a boxing ring.” Without hesitation, Rourke agreed to do the film. For the actor, the script didn’t come to life until he started working on it with Scott, Knightley and Ramirez. During principal photography, Rourke constantly refined his character and wanted to know more details of Ed’s backstory. In 2004, Edgar Ramirez introduced a screening of his film, Punto Y Raya (2004) to the Hollywood Foreign Press in L.A. Casting director Denise Chamian was there and suggested that Scott and Hadida meet with the actor. After doing so and conducting a screen test, the director cast him as Choco, the hot-blooded Latino bounty hunter.

For the bounty hunter details, Scott hired Zeke Unger, a 20-year bounty hunting veteran as the film’s technical adviser. He was involved during principal photography but also offered his expertise to Kelly and the three lead actors, putting them through a brief training program. Knightley had only come from her last film, Pride & Prejudice, four days before and started a two-day boot camp with Ramirez while also studying Kelly’s script, breaking it down and annotating the entire thing. Unger and his crew taught the actors about bail bonds, laws, self-defense, basic handling of firearms, marksmanship, and so on.

Filming began on October 4, 2004 in and around the L.A. area. In early December, the production moved to Las Vegas for a final total of 62 days. The pace was fast, mirroring that of the film itself, and, of course, to accommodate Knightley’s small window of availability. For the look of Domino, Scott wanted a color palette that was “all over the place,” including some shots in black and white. He wanted a “gritty, heightened reality” via brighter colors, darker blacks and whiter whites. The color palette often varied depending on the emotion of the individual scene. Scott utilized both 35mm and HD video cameras in the style of what he had done on Man on Fire. Scott also relied on multiple sources of inspiration, including magazines, newspapers, books, and magazines – building a reference library for his crew to draw from. He used frenetic camera movement and different film stocks to mirror what he described as the “21st century mindset” of the script, according to the film’s cinematographer Dan Mindel. To achieve the kinetic feel Scott wanted, Mindel employed hand crank cameras to shoot multiple exposures, which gave a distinctive look that came from varying exposures due to the inaccuracy of the camera speed. Many scenes utilized four to six cameras at a time in order to cut down on the number of takes the actors would have to do and to avoid having to go back for more coverage or inserts.

While Scott’s film was being made, the real Domino faced federal drug trafficking charges and a possible ten-year prison term. She was convinced that she had been set up. She told her former bounty hunting partner Ed Martinez that she wanted to make a documentary about her life in response to the highly fictionalized Scott film. She had been on the film set often, appearing briefly on-screen at the end, and even acted as a technical consultant. It was widely reported in the British press that according to an anonymous friend and her mother she was not pleased with how she was portrayed as purely heterosexual when she wasn’t and the liberties Kelly’s script took with her life. However, friends and family claim that she was happy with it. Domino died of a drug overdose on June 27, 2005. According to Scott, Domino never got to see the finished film but did see parts of it and loved what she saw.

Domino was very nearly universally despised by critics. In her review for the Washington Post, Ann Hornaday felt that the film was “occasionally funny and visually arresting, amount to absolutely nothing.” USA Today gave the film one-and-a-half out of four stars and Mike Clark wrote, “You can't accuse this film of bogging down in cheap psychology, yet you come out dissatisfied and without a clue about what made this person tick.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “D” rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, “Is a movie that works as hard to be badass as Domino does a contradiction in terms? As a packaged sensory onslaught of girl-gunslinger nihilism, Scott's film would seem to have everything, yet taken simply as entertainment, it is dreadful: less cool than ice-cold, its violence too dissociated to inspire a decadent tremor of excitement.” In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan wrote, “Of course, if you care about things like logic and coherence, you probably shouldn't be watching Domino in the first place. Its director, the flamboyant Tony Scott, says, ‘This movie is about heightened reality,’ which means it's a chance for him to blow things up, employ a lot of stunt people and fool around with a variety of film stocks and processing techniques.”

Roger Ebert was one of the few critics who gave it a favorable review with a three star rating: “Did I admire Domino? In a sneaky way, yes. It's fractured and maddening, but it's alive. It begins with the materials of a perfectly conventional thriller. It heeds Godard's rule that ‘all you need for a movie is a girl and a gun.’” The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis also gave the film a positive review: “What makes Domino the ultimate Tony Scott movie - or as a friend put it, ‘It's all the Tony Scott you could possibly want in a Tony Scott movie!’ - is its uncharacteristically sharp screenplay. Mr. Scott has worked with talented writers before, but this is the first time he has shot a film written by a screenwriter who both cops to the great enjoyment that can be had from the modern action movie - perhaps best illustrated here by the sight of Ms. Knightley unloading two machine guns at once - and blows the action-movie tropes to smithereens.”

Ultimately, it’s not important how much of Domino is true and how much of it isn’t. That’s really not the point that Scott is trying to make. This film may be his most personal one yet because of his close friendship with its subject. Coming from that perspective, he wasn’t interested in showing the more sordid side of her life – namely the raging drug habit, the going in and out of rehab, and so on – but rather he wanted this film to pay tribute to his friend by emphasizing the attributes he admired in her. One has to marvel at the chutzpah and clout Scott used to take a big chunk of someone else’s money and make a heartfelt tribute that was hated by most film critics and also bombed at the box office. Now that the dust has settled and some time has passed, Domino really needs to be re-evaluated and rediscovered for the wildly entertaining and oddly moving film that it is.

 

Hollywoodland

On June 16, 1959, actor George Reeves died from a gunshot wound to the head. His death was ruled a suicide with the official police report stating that he had been depressed over his failed career. Reeves’ claim to fame had been portraying Superman on television during the 1950’s. It was a very popular show but by the time he turned 40, the actor wanted to move on with his career. However, he could not shake his association with the iconic role. His mother Helen Bessolo refused to believe her son took his own life and hired private investigator Jerry Geisler. Both died before they could prove anything.


Over the years, more and more people refused to believe that Reeves would commit suicide. Forensic evidence surfaced that cast doubts on the official cause of death. Was he killed by his fiancée Lenore Lemmon, or was he murdered by order of Toni Mannix, the wife of MGM general manager Eddie Mannix who allegedly had Mob connections? Reeves had an affair with Toni but spurned her for another woman. Or, did Eddie find out and have Reeves killed?

Hollywoodland (2006) dramatizes Reeves’ suspicious death and documents the events leading up to it. The film is structured as a detective story with a private detective investigating Reeves’ death. The film was seen as a comeback of sorts for Ben Affleck who hadn’t acted for two years after the critical and commercial flops of Gigli (2006) and Jersey Girl (2006). After headlining several high profile studio films, he had wisely laid-low and took a supporting role in this film. Affleck portrayed Reeves to critical acclaim and hasn’t looked back since.

Louis Simo (Adrien Brody) is a low-rent Jack Gittes-type private investigator that specializes in cases of infidelity. His “office” is a fleabag motel as all of his money goes to an ex-wife (Molly Parker) and young son (Zach Mills). He used to be a police detective and his ex-partner turns him onto the Reeves (Ben Affleck) case. Perhaps influenced by his son’s upset reaction over the death of his T.V. idol, Simo decides to talk to Reeves’ mother (Lois Smith) who believes that her son did not commit suicide. He investigates further, interviewing people that knew him and this triggers a series of flashbacks to the events leading up to Reeves’ death.

The flashbacks give us more insight into Reeves. For example, while trying to be seen at a swanky Hollywood hangout, he meets Toni Mannix (Diane Lane), a beautiful woman married to a very powerful man, Eddie Mannix (Bob Hoskins). Initially unaware that she’s married and to whom, Reeves has an affair with Toni – partly because he’s attracted to her and partly because he thinks she can help his career. Toni becomes his sugar mama, buying him a nice house in the suburbs for him and their trysts.

The scenes between Ben Affleck and Diane Lane are quite good. They have decent chemistry and do a good job of conveying what their characters got out of the relationship. Affleck is excellent in this meaty supporting role. The rise and fall of Reeves must’ve spoke volumes to the actor who had also experienced both. Affleck knew what it felt like to be on the top of the world one moment and then considered a joke after a couple of high profile flops. Anyone who is a student of Hollywood lore knows that it has a long history of tragic deaths. What makes Reeves’ story so interesting is that he played such a wholesome, upstanding character with Superman but had an unhappy personal life. Affleck fleshes out Reeves and digs deep, providing a nicely layered portrayal of the man. Reeves just wanted to be regarded as a serious actor but did such a good job playing Superman that he couldn’t disassociate himself from the role.

Adrien Brody delivers a decent enough performance but his invented character feels like just that and seems out of sorts with all the actual historical figures he interacts with and investigates. Simo’s backstory and motivation is just not as compelling as say Jack Gittes in Chinatown (1974), a film whose legacy casts a long shadow over Hollywoodland. Brody is supposed to be a jaded investigator who thinks he’s seen it all but the actor comes off as a little too aloof. As a result, his character feels like a tacked on afterthought.

Diane Lane doesn’t have a lot of screen time but she makes the most of it. Toni is a powerful woman who gets what she wants and Lane plays her as a charming individual so long as Reeves makes her happy. It’s when he no longer does this that her true nature reveals itself. Watching the actress in this film makes me wonder how she would have done in L.A. Confidential (1997) if she had been cast in Kim Basinger’s role. In some respects, Toni is not a typical femme fatale and Lane does her best to flesh out her character and shed some light on her motivations.

Producer Glenn Williamson, at the time head of production at USA Films, bought Paul Bernbaum’s screenplay, Truth, Justice and the American Way in 2001. Williamson was drawn to the way the script “guides the audience toward a conclusion, but there is no definitive answer.” The project moved to Miramax Films for a short time with filmmakers Mark and Michael Polish (Twin Falls Idaho) attached to direct. At one point, they screen-tested Kyle MacLachlan to play George Reeves. Williamson wanted the film to have a more mainstream appeal – something that the directors, known for their dark, atmospheric films, weren’t interested in and so they decided part ways.

The project moved to Focus Features where veteran T.V. director Allen Coulter signed on. When his agent gave him Bernbaum’s script he wanted to do it after reading the first five pages. The director was drawn to the “great Hollywood noir milieu” and the complexity of Reeves’ life. He heard that Ben Affleck was interested in the role and ended up casting him as Reeves. To resemble the actor, Affleck put on upwards of 28 lbs., changed the shape of his nose with a prosthetic, altered his hairline, and changed the color of his eyes. If that wasn’t enough, during filming, he listened to several clips of Reeves’ voice between takes and also watched every episode of the Superman T.V. show.

Hollywoodland shot for six weeks in Toronto and two in Los Angeles. At some point, Warner Brothers, which produced the Superman films, applied legal pressure to have the name changed from Truth, Justice and the American Way to the current title because they wanted to disassociate themselves from the sordid details of Reeves’ demise with their vested interest in rebooting the Superman franchise.

Hollywoodland received mixed to negative reviews as most praised Affleck’s performance but had problems with the way the script juggled the two storylines. In his review for The New York Observer, Andrew Sarris wrote, “Hollywoodland gets a few laughs from the show’s cheesy Ed Wood–like production effects, but the dignity and sobriety that Mr. Affleck projects as Reeves keeps the sheer ridiculousness of his limited career options from ever becoming too campy.” The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis also praised Affleck’s performance: “Later, as defeat takes its grinding toll, Mr. Affleck lets weariness creep into his face, pulling his features down until it becomes difficult smile.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “B+” rating and Lisa Schwarzbaum wrote, “There's something simultaneously heartfelt, wised-up, playful, and fierce about the way the onetime Daredevil acknowledges that he knows that we know that he knows that we're bound to read something of the actor's own skids with fame in his expiatory portrayal of a star who couldn't quite steer his own image.”

However, New York magazine’s David Edelstein wrote, “the back-and-forth cutting between past and present would be clunky even if it weren’t so arbitrary, and it doesn’t help that Adrien Brody—as the film’s ­other protagonist, a burnt-out gumshoe—is more actorish than the supposed actor.” USA Today gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four and Claudia Puig wrote, “But then the narrative bogs down with a misbegotten subplot about Simo's personal life … Director Allen Coulter … missteps with this secondary story line. He flounders in his attempts to find parallels between Simo's life and Reeves' iconic place in Hollywood at that time.” In his review for the Washington Post, Stephen Hunter wrote, “For some reason, the director and the writer (Paul Bernbaum) have chosen an exceedingly awkward path into the material. They break the narrative into two strands, and play them off each other in cheap and easy ways for insubstantial effect.” The Los Angeles Times’ Kenneth Turan wrote, “For despite its virtues, Hollywoodland never fully succeeds due to the unfortunate air of artificiality that hangs over it. Caught in a netherworld between re-creation and reality, it only sporadically feels like it is actually happening.” Finally, in his review for the Village Voice, J. Hoberman wrote, “Coulter contrived a neat behavioral trick by inducing his star to play a comparably big-jawed bad actor. Surrounded as he is by canny professionals … it's an unexpectedly touching performance. In fact, Hollywoodland turns turgid whenever it switches to the gritty Louis Simo story.”

The attention to period detail is very good, from the vintage cars to the Coke bottle Simo drinks from in a scene. The filmmakers effortlessly transport us back to that time. Allen Coulter’s direction is solid but does little to differentiate it from other films of the genre. L.A. Confidential this is not. Maybe it’s just as well as the story is engrossing enough and Affleck’s performance keeps our interest. Ultimately, Hollywoodland lies somewhere between the ambitious but flawed Mulholland Falls (1996) and the masterful L.A Confidential. What it does do is paint a compelling and sympathetic portrait of George Reeves. His career serves as a sobering reminder of the dangers of being closely identified with an iconic film role and how it can affect the rest of your career. Some people embrace it while others spend the rest of their lives trying to get away from it.