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.