Let's Play Two!

Meteorologically, today is the nicest day we have had in Chicago since a freakish 65-degree sunny day came and went in early January. The calendar says spring, but the Cubs played their first home game last Monday in a 45 degree mist. With the exception of today it still seems like spring is a ways off. However, today's nice weather got me thinking about baseball and more specifically baseball films.

Baseball pictures by and large stink. I like Field of Dreams and Bull Durham and a lot of The Natural. Eight Men Out is great, but that is more historical than anything else- plus who can resist John Sayles and our friend Studs Terkel as the writers Ring Lardner and Hugh Fullerton. But more often than not baseball films are garbage- especially if you are a baseball fan. William Bendix as Babe Ruth? Gary Cooper as Lou Gehrig? The worst is Anthony Perkins as Jimmy Piersall in Fear Strikes Out. Trust me Perkins is scarier as a ball player than as a motel keeper in Psycho.

A problem I have with baseball films is that even the best baseball film is not better than the experience I have going to an average mid-season major league game. (Major League, the film is not a great movie, either.) And going to a minor league game is even better. It's just a blast and so much less commercial and more "joy of the game" than Big League ball-and way better than a bad baseball movie.

The best baseball film I have seen is a documentary HBO did years ago called When It Was a Game. They used home movies from fans from the 1930s- 1960s and voice over of real ball players to describe the experience. Some highlights include 16mm color film from the 1938 World Series between the Cubs and Yankees- color footage of Lou Gehrig. Take that Gary Cooper! Also, ball players like Enos Slaughter talk about how they played for the love of the game. They even had to bring their own sandwiches to eat between games of doubleheaders.

For you youngsters doubleheaders are what teams used to play on holidays and most Sundays so they could take the next day for travel. The owners wised up and realized they could maximize profits by playing 81 home dates, hence the opening days on in snowy March and a World Series that bumps into Halloween.

But of course you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

PeterH

p.s. I know that is a photo of Jackie Robinson and not Ernie Banks-the source of "Let's Play Two." Robinson is the most important player in baseball history- he is emblematic of the idea of when it was a game. His picture deserves to be here- just as it is a good thing that his number 42 has been retired by all major league teams.

Film Production 2

The Flashpoint Academy film students just finished production on their second films. This is a picture from the set one day last week.

Before they embarked on these films I sat in on a series of production meetings and was struck by how much the students have grown since their first productions last November. I would like to chalk it up to brilliant teaching on my part, but in fairness I think the students did most of the heavy lifting on this one. Of course they learned from their first films, but then in January and February they observed and worked with professionals on the set of The Intruder, our Production-in-Action film, and finally in the weeks leading up to this production they pulled it all together.

We had a group meeting before they set out where all the Film and Recording Arts came together and I told them how I was witnessing their transformation from film students into filmmakers. This transformation was evident all over the place; in their language- I have never heard as many people throw around the term "script lock" before and in their demeanor- they stood taller, they were more confident. They didn't assume anything, but sought out answers to problems. This attitude was a big difference from their last productions.

This week and for the next two the students are huddled around their Avids editing the films with delivery set for April 18. It's exciting to watch their progression, but at the same time I hope the students reflect on their own personal growth and development. They have come a long way in a very short time.

PeterH

David Lean

Perhaps my favorite part of the last Oscar telecast was when Jon Stewart pulled out an iphone and said he was watching Lawrence of Arabia. In that moment everything good about technology and bad about the film business came into focus. Funnier yet was when he turned the phone on its side and said you really have to see it in wide screen.

David Lean, Lawrence of Arabia's director, would have turned 100 on March 25. Lean is the person who comes to my mind when I think about directors who make BIG pictures. David Lean was the epic director.

David Lean began as a film editor. Michael Powell, another one of my favorite directors, said David Lean was the best editor he ever worked with. And Powell knows something about good editors- he was married to Thelma Schoonmaker who has won three Oscars for editing Martin Scorsese films.

In his early films as director Lean worked with Noel Coward- no slouch either. In Blithe's Spirit Lean actually makes the ghost a little scary, not something Coward probably had in mind. Lean then went on to direct perhaps the two best film versions of Dickens' novels- Great Expectations and Oliver Twist. Those opening images of Great Expectations are beautiful and haunting- no mean feat as the opening pages of the book are about as good an start to a novel as you will find. Twist, too, is great despite Alec Guinness' over the top and perhaps anti-Semitic Fagin.

Powell, Coward, Dickens and Guinness are great for starters but come on dumb filmmaker get to the big films. OK. How's this for big films: Summertime (1955), The Bridge on the River Kwai, (1957) Lawrence of Arabia, (1962), Dr. Zhivago (1965). That's a pretty decent career in that one ten year stretch. If you haven't seen those films do yourself the favor- just not on an iphone.

To illustrate some of Lean's directorial genius I am going to share a couple of interesting (to me at least) attention to detail moments from Lawrence of Arabia. 1) In the famous scene in the desert when Ali appears- while it seems like all we see is sand- Lean's art department has put coal in the desert helping us draw our attention down the darker lines and towards the character. Lean was forcing us to see what he wanted us to see. 2) The costume designers put Peter O'Toole in more translucent robes as the film progressed to make Lawrence more Angelic.

Those are details that aren't taught in film schools, but perhaps should be. (Note to self, start teaching it!)

One more thing about David Lean. He made his last film when he was 76 years old- A Passage to India. For that film he was nominated for Oscars as Best Director, Editing and Adapted Screenplay. Has anyone ever been nominated for an Oscar for writing AND editing the same film? No bad for an old man. I hope to do that when I am 76.

PeterH

Check out Anthony Lane's article on David Lean in the current New Yorker. Lane's piece was the inspiration for this post.
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2008/03/31/080331crat_atlarge_lane

Bathing with Bierko

Yep, that's my friend Craig Bierko washing John Malkovich's head. I am so proud of him.

I have known Craig for 25+ years. For four of those years we were either roommates or next door neighbors. We walked around the city of Boston- literally around the perimeter of the city- one night in support of a relationship gone bad. We made a short film together as seniors in college and then a few years later he starred in my film Victimless Crimes.

While I have been making TV commercials, documentaries and shaping the minds of young filmmakers, Craig has been in Hollywood and New York starring in films - In Cinderella Man he gets to be the bad guy opposite Russell Crowe, he did a season of Boston Legal, and is currently starring in the Fox show Unhitched. He has also starred in a couple of Broadway shows, most notably Harold Hill in The Music Man, for which he was nominated for a Tony award.

Last year about this time I was in L.A. and we were having breakfast (Craig and I have probably spent more time over Ham and Cheese Omelets (me) and Tuna Melts (him) than any two people should) when he told me of this idea of a talk show set in a bath tub.

Lo and behold a year later what shows up on my "Internets" than this talk show starring my friend Craig in a bath tub.

Check out all 2:45 of Bathing with Bierko here.
http://www.superdeluxe.com/sd/artist/craig_bierko


PeterH

A Loss

The writer and director Anthony Minghella died the other day from complications of surgery to remove cancer of the tonsils and neck. He was 54 years old.

When you think of the great filmmakers of the end of the 20th century and the beginning of this one, Minghella is probably someone you overlook but shouldn't. Between 1990 and 2006 he made seven films which were nominated for a total of 24 Oscars, winning ten. The biggest of the bunch was The English Patient for which he won best director. He also directed Cold Mountain and the not yet released The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency. That's not a bad track record for the son of ice cream factory owners from the Isle of Wight.

My favorite film of his is The Talented Mr. Ripley which felt as if it could have been directed by Alfred Hitchcock, which is no surprise because the Ripley was adapted from the novel by Patricia Highsmith who wrote Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train. The common thread of all the Minghella films mentioned here is that they were adapted from novels and not originally created for film. This is ironic because Minghella was a great writer, his first film Truly, Madly, Deeply was from his original screenplay and is perhaps his most personal work.

He will be missed.

PeterH

Gone Baby Gone

I can't believe it has been two weeks since I last posted. It must be the late winter, spring will never come to Chicago, doldrums.

When I think of young, contemporary American filmmakers Ben Affleck is not a name that immediately comes to mind. However, he owns an Oscar for co-writing Good Will Hunting and he directed the terrific, yet hard to watch film Gone Baby Gone. He is someone I have to take seriously as a filmmaker.

Gone Baby Gone is one of those films that when it's over you have a debate about the character's actions. Are the choices Patrick (Casey Affleck, great as a serious lead) makes the right ones? You can argue both sides of it forever and that to me makes a great film.

Gone Baby Gone is based on a novel by Dennis Lehane, who also wrote Mystic River, which Clint Eastwood (another often overlooked American filmmaker) made into an excellent film. Lehane's milieu is the dirty, underside of Boston- the Roxburys and Dorchesters, far from Back Bay, Beacon Hill and Copley Square. He creates these morally ambiguous characters, yet fills them with depth and dimension.

It's a excellent film well worth checking out- and I haven't even mentioned Amy Ryan's Oscar nominated performance as the mother whose missing daughter starts the plot in motion.

PeterH

The Oscars

It has been a week so I think it is about time the dumb filmmaker weighed in on the Oscars. The truth is I didn't see enough of the nominated films to make an informed decision, but I can say this: I loved Juno, have always been a fan of P.T.Anderson, thought Once was great, and Ian McEwan, author of Atonement, is one of my favorite novelists- Saturday from a couple of years ago is brilliant. This preamble brings me to No Country for Old Men by Joel and Ethan Coen.

In the early and middle 1980s there were a series of New York-based filmmakers that meant a lot to me- Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch, Susan Seidelman among them. Those filmmakers and others from the time helped usher in the second great post-studio era wave of American filmmakers. But for me the Coen Brothers were the sine qua non of independent American Cinema.

Blood Simple, their first feature was literally a text book example of how first-time directors could get a film made. I am not kidding, how Blood Simple got produced was used as an example in a Film as Business class I took near the end of my college career. For those who don't recall, the Coens and their DP Barry Sonnenfeld shot a trailer for the film and used it to get financing. The trailer was moody and atmospheric. It highlighted the creepy aspects of the film and showed no stars (it hadn't been cast yet). Lots of driving down the road at night and gun blasts coming through a wall. It was a brilliant (and now much imitated) plan and it worked.

Since then the Coens have won 4 Oscars (can it be 12 years since Fargo came out?). I compare the Coens to those fringe bands that gathered a small but loyal cult following and over the years hit it big. Compare the Coens career arc to those of REM (college radio got them their start) and U2 (Boy and October anyone?). Small fringe acts, competing against the big boys and mainstream hit machines, but 25 years later, look who is left standing.

I don't have any one favorite film- I love Barton Fink and O Brother... and there is a little of Dude from The Big Lebowski in me (yes, I had Creedence tapes, too.) Raising Arizona always makes me laugh. What I like about them is that they are original and familiar all at the same time. This variety of work is why I appreciated Joel Coen's comment at the Oscars thanking people for allowing them to play in their own little corner of the sandbox.

I want to thank them for 20+ years of great films.

PeterH