The fourth annual Noir City Film Festival may have finished its run at SIFF Cinema last week, but conversing with Eddie Muller–Noir City’s enthusiastic ringmaster–still feels as bracing and entertaining as one of the Film Noir sagas he labors so tirelessly to preserve.
He’s led an interesting enough life to fill a pretty rich book on its own. Long before becoming Film Noir’s most vocal and eloquent steward, Muller studied film with (and acted in several films for) underground legend George Kuchar in the late seventies. He made Bay City Blues (an award-winning 14-minute, 16mm valentine to the hard-boiled universe of Raymond Chandler) as a class project next, then dove into the world of print journalism, slugging it out in the footsteps of his dad, a sports writer for the San Francisco Examiner. A decade-and-a-half in the ink-stained trenches honed his investigative and storytelling skills, assets he brought to bear when he started writing books.
The first, Grindhouse: The Forbidden World of “Adults Only” Cinema, opened the door to several written forays into fiction and cultural archaeology, as well as the formation of his own graphics firm, St. Francis Studio. Through St. Francis he wrote and designed The Art of Noir, a stunning and essential coffee table book of vintage Film Noir poster and promotional art. Muller has also written scripts and stage plays, co-written and produced a documentary on Adults-Only cinema (Mau Mau Sex Sex), and bartended professionally (he jokes that the latter marked his “one positive contribution to society”).
But when I sit down with Eddie Muller at the bar in the Sorrento Hotel’s swank Hunt Club, he’s all about Film Noir. His passion for the compelling cinematic sub-genre burns brightly: Every work of fiction he’s written has been informed by it; his non-fiction books Dark City and Dark City Dames stand as definitive studies of it; and he started the Film Noir Foundation to preserve and champion its importance as a uniquely American art form. Incidentally, if you’ve bought or rented a Film Noir DVD, don’t be surprised to hear a meaty and informative commentary track by Muller: He’s done a lot of them. Not for nothing was he anointed the Czar of Noir.
Tall, dressed in black, and sporting Reed-Richards-style slashes of white at each of his temples, Muller cuts a figure almost as imposing as one of the Noir toughies he’s chronicled in those books and countless DVD commentaries…until he starts talking. His regular-guy demeanor leavens that wordsmith’s combination of charm, curiosity, and investigative persistence, and his banter’s peppered with frequent laughter and engagingly labyrinthine side trips. His knowledge of film in general–and his most beloved genre mistress in particular–is voluminous but never stuffy; and like most good writers he’s articulate and insightful without ever putting on airs. Muller’s one of those guys who can (and does) literally converse with anyone: In the minutes preceding our chat proper, he’s cracking jokes with the server and comparing notes on mixed drinks and San Francisco watering holes with key members of the Sorrento staff. It’s all in the service of a mind that never tires of telling–and hearing–great stories.
My interview with the Czar of Noir spans almost two hours, but it zips by at lightning pace. Damon Runyon, one of Eddie Muller’s heroes, would be proud.
This is the fourth year you’ve done Noir City here in Seattle. Has the festival increased in popularity here since you began doing them? You seemed a little surprised at how packed last night’s double bill was…
That was great. I wasn’t exactly sure why it hadn’t done better, sooner than this, but it took a little time…. Speaking frankly, I think a lot of people weren’t sure. They thought that maybe I was an interloper, intruding on Greg [Olsen]’s territory, because he’s had the series at SAM for so many years.
…Yeah, thirty years…
My opinion about that is, there’s an urgency on my end to doing this and getting the film seen. Because I have to look at it from the perspective of being on a rescue mission to save as many films as we possibly can. Part and parcel of that is proving that there’s an audience for these films…
…And that they’re worth preserving.
This is what I was doing upstairs today. It’s like, well, we found out that a studio has elements of a couple of these films. They don’t have prints; but we have to make a case for why they should make new prints of these films. They won’t just do it because it’s the right thing to do. That doesn’t actually exist in this culture. In France, they would just do it. Because it would be a national embarrassment for a French film to completely vanish: “Oh, my God, we were poor stewards of our film history!”
In this country, we don’t care: We can’t make money from it, we really don’t care. Then it must not have value if we’re not making money from it…So we have to show them that you can make money from them. So that means two film series in Seattle, so be it. It means two bookings. I told Greg, “You know, sometimes we just have to book the same film. I don’t care if it looks bad–you know, who booked it first or whatever. It’s two bookings, and that means the studio is gonna say, “Yeah, we’ll strike the new print.” If we want the best course of action, which is that the studios themselves are paying for these new prints, that’s the best. Then I don’t have to raise money to do it.
I wanted to ask you a little more about the mechanics of your film preservation mission. This seems like a pretty intense undertaking for the Film Noir Foundation…
Much more than I ever realized! [laughs]
Is there any way you could summarize, for a complete layman, what the Foundation goes through to accomplish this? Maybe you could use a single movie as an example.
Well, the thing is, it’s never the same. Because it all varies according to the history of each individual film. Films are like people–they all have the same basic structure, but they’re all very different and you have to rescue them in different ways.
The Prowler, for instance, was a film that wasn’t really lost, but there was only one print. And every time I wanted to convince people of the value of this film, I would show the same print. So I was basically killing the film, myself. Every time it went through the projector it deteriorated.The people who owned it, didn’t take very good care of it. Nor did they feel the necessity to do what I did, which was to restore it…So I told UCLA. I consciously wanted to partner with them, because they are a big magnet, and they’ll get stuff without asking for it: Containers with film [in them] will just show up, and they’ll sift through it–“What’ve we got here?” Because that’s their mission, we’ll accept it. Don’t throw it away–they’ll take it, because there might be a treasure in there.
So I’d go to my contact there and say, “What about The Prowler? Do you have anything on The Prowler?” He knew this was a film I really wanted to find. He types it into the database and he says, “Oh, my God…we just inventoried it! We HAVE it!” And sure enough they were junking something from an old Technicolor lab, and just shipped all this stuff to UCLA. And there was a banged-up, old inner-negative of The Prowler. And we were able to use that as the basis for a restoration. That’s how that came to pass.
So have you considered personally distributing DVDs of some of these movies?
Well, I consider it every single day! [laughs] And then I think–am I insane? But we’re working on it. You can just fly off and do whatever you want to do, full-speed ahead, damn the torpedoes…Let’s just do it, because that’s what’s required to save the films. To put them out on DVD is a different thing. I’m conscious of this, because we’re going to reach the point where all of these goodhearted people who support the Film Noir Foundation actually give us [money] to do this stuff, but I can’t keep saying this is a good thing if they can’t see the film, unless they come to one of these festivals. So we have to get with the modern age and actually digitize these things at some point, and make them available.
A lot of film scholars think of Film Noir as a movement that just sort of materialized out of thin air in the wake of World War II. You’ve always asserted that its roots go further back, to ‘Lit Noir’ like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, and the German Expressionists. Could you detail that more?
I’ve always found it very interesting that, if you really want to put too fine a point on it, Film Noir is this cross-pollination of a purely American style of storytelling and language and attitude, married to this very fatalistic but romantic European theatrical sense. How intriguing is it that Film Noir incubates as a film style during World War II? And how intriguing is it that most of the guys writing the stuff in America are Jewish? And of course, a lot of the filmmakers that came over from Europe were Jewish as well, but they were brought up in the German culture. It’s pretty fascinating.
Part of the reason that there’s a misinterpretation of how Film Noir grew out of World War II is because of a lot of faulty scholarship. It’s fixated on the auteur theory, which states that the directors created all of this. Well, you’re forgetting one little thing: Every one of these movies started with a screenplay. And all of these screenplays were informed by works that were written in the 1930’s; not really in the 1940’s. So…all the writers who influenced Film Noir came from the Twenties and the Thirties, including guys like Ben Hecht, who was the most successful screenwriter in Hollywood history–he was a newspaper man. Guys like Hecht and Damon Runyon had as much to do with the voice of Film Noir as anybody else…They had a lot to do with how snappy it was, how urban it was; that whole “No one’s gonna get over on me!” rhythm. That flavor, it didn’t start in the 1940s.
One of the most interesting things about Noir is that unlike a lot of film genres whose significant examples are rooted in the past–musicals, westerns–Film Noir don’t seem to possess that warm-and-fuzzy patina of nostalgia. The movies feel really gut-level, and rooted in a lot of contemporary/timeless issues. Do you think that’s a fair assessment?
I think that’s a very fair assessment; and I always say, they don’t deal in toothless nostalgia. That’s a term that I’ve used quite often. The films [have] bite. Everybody feels that. I do think that a lot of people are drawn to the films for nostalgic reasons that are very superficial: They like to look at the cars, they like to look at the clothes; They love the music; the way American culture was in the mid-twentieth century. But once you’re into the films, you realize that these are completely contemporary in a lot of ways. Pitfall, the movie we screened opening night…works on an audience today exactly as it worked on an audience in 1948.
Pitfall‘s a film that people want to laugh at, but they can’t, because of the whole domestic situation. You want to chuckle at it the way you chuckle now at Father Knows Best (that’s a Jane Wyatt inference, obviously), but you can’t. It’s so well done, and [Pitfall director Andre] DeToth is such a smart filmmaker, it’s like, “OK, have the one quick chuckle, and now it’s not funny anymore…”
I was really floored at the awkward genuineness of the relationship between the Dick Powell and Jane Wyatt characters. It’s almost like writing out of a Paul Mazursky movie…there’s a real sense of reality to it.
The writing’s strong. And that scene towards the end, when he finally admits to her what happened, it’s so amazing. She is furious, and that’s very powerful. She just stares at him, and there’s that silent take of her…. Her whole world is just collapsing around her. She’s an amazing character.
Bertrand Tavernier and I have talked about that film a lot, because he absolutely loves it, and he loves the two women. He just thinks that’s the best, most realistic depiction of those character types in Film Noir. Liz Scott is not a femme fatale in that film, and he humanizes what typically is a very cardboard character. It’s the same with Jane Wyatt as the loyal wife. That is a nothing character in most movies. But in [Pitfall], they’re both exceptional characters. What’s so great about that film is that after it’s all over, you realize that the most Noir character, if you have a Noir protagonist in that film, is Mona Stevens [the Lizbeth Scott character], because she is screwed every which way.
[In part two of this interview, Eddie Muller discusses the role of women in the genre, more about his archaeological mission to save Film Noir, rubbing shoulders with screen greats, and his Top Five Film Noir Essentials.]