User:TPoole/sandbox

YEARS AGO, I MET SOMEONE WHO HAD MADE A DOCUMENTARY FILM called How Much Paint Does a Painting Need? What a great title. It not only stuck in my memory, but it dovetailed with questions that have plagued me for years about the history of cinema, and, more particularly, the cinema’s history of itself.

Consider, for example, Francois Truffaut’s remark that he liked Hollywood films because they were so similar to one another. Despite technological changes, aesthetic evolutions, and generic boundaries, it is easy to argue that Hollywood films always have more in common with one another than they have differences. By extension, the same could be said of all narrative cinema, whenever and wherever it is produced.

Mikhail Bakhtin once referred to the novel as a genre (3–40). Foregoing my early devotion to auteur theory and the uniqueness of particular film directors, I might well be led to a similar conclusion about the cinema, at least on some days of the week.

In years past, I have given many lectures on the importance of modern filmmakers recognizing and understanding film history. So many films have been produced over the last 120-odd years that they constitute not merely a well or a reservoir from which to draw, but oceanic depths of ideas and approaches to consider and understand. I believed those words as I spoke them, and most of the time I still do. I am both a film historian and a filmmaker, so I probably have little choice in the matter.

After all, the best film education is viewing films, and viewing them repeatedly. Orson Welles did just that with Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) before he directed Citizen Kane (1941).Over six decades later, a graduating film student that I knew—one who was highly astute and very talented—told a university program director that he believed the money he spent on tuition would have more wisely been used to purchase the entire Criterion Collection on DVD. The program director did not appreciate or understand his argument but, well, that is hardly surprising. Most of the stupidest people I’ve ever met have the letters “PhD” after their names.

At any rate, let’s come to the point and make sense of these random thoughts. Let’s ask a question that—in the tradition of the very best questions— probably has no answer: How much film history does a film need?

I like being winked at, whether in a pub or at a movie theatre. Filmmakers have often winked at filmbuffs over the years, providing allusions in their films to earlier films. Appropriation becomes homage. We are part of the game of film history, the repurposing of some particular character name or line of dialogue. During the lengthy crane shot in The Player (1992), we know that Altman is thinking about Touch of Evil (1958) and that, in turn, he knows that those of us “in the know” will be thinking about it as well.

In the past two decades, the environmentally conscious state of California’s most financially successful recycling project has been the Hollywood remake. Old television programs into movies (the Beverly Hillbillies ride again). Old movies into movies (there is more than one ticket on the 3:10 to Yuma). And even old movie genres into modern movie genres (The 1970s horror film is the horror film of today). These examples brim with film history.And then the cup overfloweth; it spills onto the floor with maybe little more than instant coffee from a cheap vending machine. In other words, we might also ask if a film has too much film history?

As fascinating and as maddening as these questions of film history are to me, I do know whether they held much interest for Norman Mailer. As a writer, Mailer towered over the twentieth century. That he is not more studied in Departments of English at American universities is to their discredit, not his. But I suspect that his novels will outlast his critics. They already have a good track record in that regard.

Mailer’s film career is another matter. Cinematic adaptations of his literature began with The Naked and the Dead (1958), and continued with such films as See You in Hell, Darling (1966), Marilyn: The Untold Story (1980), and The Executioner’s Song (1982). But then there is also the quartet of films that Mailer directed over a period of two decades: Wild 90 (1968), Beyond the Law (1968), Maidstone (1970), and Tough Guys Don’t Dance (1987). At the time of this writing, the first three are not available on DVD in the United States.

Tough Guys Don’t Dance is readily available, as are its many bad reviews. In fact, it is easier to find to negative reviews of all of Mailer’s films than worthwhile analyses of them. “Not the most wretched movie ever made, but close,” so claims one Maidstone viewer on the erstwhile InternetMovie Database, that regularly inaccurate online encyclopedia which doubles as a commercial for Amazon.com (“Maidstone”). Of Beyond the Law, another amateur reviewer tells us it is “a vanity project of the most arrogant sort” (“Beyond the Law”).

But enough of self-anointed internet critics. Their ease of accessibility on the World Wide Web is matched by their equally limited depth and shelf life. And judgments of what is “good” and “bad” are all-too-often opinions that say as much about the persons who offer them as they do about the work of art under consideration. Instead of ill-formed posts on the internet, Mailer’s four films need something else. They need to be reclaimed by film historians, because, while they have held a place in Mailer’s biography, they have usually been ignored in tales of the cinema.

The first three of Mailer’s films bear a great deal of commonality to one another, but—at least in his mind—little resemblance to most, if not all, of the films that preceded them. Recounting the production of Wild 90, he claimed, “We got the idea we would do fiction in documentary form” (Wild 90). The specific documentary form he had in mind was direct cinema as practiced by D. A. Pennebaker, who had directed Don’t Look Back in 1967 and Monterey Pop in 1968, a film that Mailer greatly admired. Pennebaker shot Wild 90, which came—as the film’s credits tell us—“from a script which did not necessarily exist.” Pennebaker also later worked as one of the cinematographers on Beyond the Law and Maidstone.

Mailer later admitted that Wild 90 was “tremendously amateurish,” but he was also firm in his belief that there were “elements in it that . . . were different from all the movies” he had ever seen (Wild 90). “Together with all the rough hewn sloppiness of the film,” he said, “there was also in it something vital that I liked” (Wild 90). It was that same kind of vitality that he tried to explore in Beyond the Law and Maidstone. As he claimed onscreen during a scene in Maidstone, “We made a movie by a brand new process.”

In his published essay “A Course in Film-Making,” which was ostensibly about the production of Maidstone, Mailer modulated his position. He noted that he was not the first to “do fiction in documentary form” (“A Course” 217). Some person or group of persons had evidently brought this fact to his attention. Various filmmakers had worked without scripts, including the likes of Charlie Chaplin. The faking of non-fiction footage had long roots, ranging from the early cinema period (with its fabricated images of the Spanish-American War and famous boxing matches) to newsreels of the thirties (as lampooned in MGM’s 1938 feature Too Hot to Handle with Clark Gable). And fictional films like Citizen Kane (1941) had employed documentary film aesthetics nearly three decades before Wild 90.

In some respects, John Cassavetes’ Shadows (1959) was a particularly important link to the chain that led to Mailer’s first three films. Shot on location in New York with an improvised story, the fictional film exemplifies the kind of raw and authentic vitality that Mailer would seek a decade later. However, Mailer’s visual style would be quite different than Cassavetes’ style.

Mailer’s departure from all of these earlier examples came in part due to his embrace of direct cinema. Handheld camera and existing lighting mark his first three films. While Pennebaker and others had already made direct cinema documentaries, they were still exploring its possibilities when Mailer began his filmmaking career. He directed Wild 90 and Beyond the Law in 1968, the same year that the Maysles Brothers completed Salesman (1968). Two years later, Mailer finished Maidstone at roughly the same time that the Maysles Brothers finished Gimme Shelter (1970).

In other words, rather than simply being inspired by a movement that had stopped moving, Mailer conducted his own fictional experiments while direct cinema was the prevailing force in documentary film. His films not only appropriated then-recent film history, but also engaged in a conversation with the unfolding present. Perhaps that is why, as Mailer tells us in “A Course in Filmmaking,” his ideas were a “conception which was more or less his own, and he did not feel the desire to argue about it” (217). Put another way, he did not believe his films incorporated very much film history.

Of Mailer’s first three films, the inaugural Wild 90 is the most austere. Onscreen text informs us, “Once three guys from Brooklyn were hold up in a room and couldn’t get out for various vague reasons.” These guys, who are “Maf Boys,” have already spent 21 days in that location when we meet them. One is Prince, played by Mailer. Another is Buzz Cameo, who shares his first name with Buzz Farber, the actor who portrayed him. The third is Mickey (aka, “20 Years”), who also bore the same first name as the man who assumed the role: Mickey Knox, the only one of the three who was a professional film actor.

The trio pass the time by talking, by arguing, by fighting. “If you ever find yourself in shit, don’t sing,” Mickey tells them, giving sage advice to the room’s prisoners. But they are not always alone. An array of guests visit the apartment, ranging from Mickey’s wife to a “bunch of bulls” who speculate that at least one of the three wouldn’t survive if he left the room. Someone wants to kill him (or them), and it isn’t the police, at least not the officers in the scene.

We have no idea how long we are in the room with the trio. Ranging from the nickelodeon era to the present, onscreen titles in films have usually been pedagogical. They teach us information we need to understand film narratives. In Wild 90, a repeated use of the same title cards tells us “Another Day” and then “Another Night.” We see these six times, but their appearances are spaced so randomly throughout the film it is difficult to trust them, or even—as a first-time view—to count them.

To a degree, time has lost its meaning. Like the characters, we the observers become lost in the relentless monotony of living in a single location. Wild 90 is boring, perhaps excruciatingly so, but in a manner that the Italian neo-realists would likely have appreciated. We share the boredom of the main characters. We experience the meaningless activities and trite conversation of criminals who, since they are not committing crimes, are in fact very dull, just like so much of everyday life.

Acting styles in the film vary from Hollywood norms (Knox) to the forced and exaggerated (Mailer). Together, they draw constant attention to the fact that what we are seeing is fictional, but that realization collides with the film’s aesthetics, which suggest that what we are seeing is genuine. Some of this is due to the handheld camera; some of it due to the use of imperfect audio and existing lighting. At one point, for example, we see a light bulb shadow on Cameo’s head. It is distractingly authentic.

Paranoia reigns as Mickey repeatedly worries about the lights in an adjacent building; he believes that they are being observed from afar. And indeed they are, but not by rival gangsters or by the authorities. A film camera watches them. Prince acknowledges that fact at the film’s conclusion, when he looks directly into the lens and says, “Goodnight,” thus violating a longstanding Hollywood taboo. The observed has become the observer. It is in that moment that Mailer best captures the tension between fiction and nonfiction filmmaking.

Shortly after completing Wild 90, Mailer wrote and directed Beyond the Law. In it, he plays Pope, a police lieutenant; his acting style is much more restrained than in Wild 90. Once again, he cast a combination of professionals and amateurs. Rip Torn notably appears as Popcorn. Mickey Knox (as Mickey Burke) and Buzz Farber return. Farber plays “Rocco Gibraltar,” a character name that highlights the film’s fictional roots.

Once again Mailer plays with onscreen titles. A series of different title cards tell us that Beyond the Law is a film with various alternate titles, perhaps more than any other in film history. The blank spaces below indicate the numerous changes of title cards: