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It's hard to find information on Prodigal Sons, Kimberly Reed's documentary about her truly dysfunctional family, that doesn't reveal too much of the story. The majority of the reviews and even the official trailer gives away more than I think is appropriate. Since I live a life of NO SPOILERS--what's in the baaaaaahhhhxxxx?--I direct you to the review above (also because I agree with their recommendation of The Ghost Writer) and warn you to seek out further info at your movie-ruining peril.
It's not a spoiler to say that filmmaker Kimberly Reed grew up as a boy named Paul, a popular dreamboat who never felt quite right in a quarterback's body. So as an adult, Paul became Kimberly, and the film follows her as she returns to her Montana hometown for a high school reunion. But she's also reuniting with her older brother, Marc, who she's been estranged from since their father's funeral. Marc is the family's eldest of three sons, but he's also adopted (crazy) and suffers from the long-term neurological effects of a car accident (double crazy). And it is the absolute worst when a crazy person has some sort of vague idea that there's a reason (read: excuse) for acting crazy. That's tough to deal with as it is, let alone when he's your brother who has identity issues of his own....
[Don't miss Part 1. In Part 2 of the SunBreak's Eddie Muller interview, the Czar of Noir elaborates on the story behind one of his favorite undiscovered Film Noir vehicles, the role of women in the genre, and some of the screen legends with whom he's rubbed shoulders.]
You've unearthed a lot of overlooked movies over the years. Is there one that stands out in particular for you?
Woman on the Run. Have you seen it?
No.
It's absolutely fantastic. It really is one of those undiscovered, great films. Sometimes, you find these things and it's like, "Well, it's good," but you know why it's not a classic. But Woman on the Run really is a terrific film. Universal [Pictures]...had to go physically look for the film, because it was an independent, and it wasn't in their database. They looked [in their vaults], and said, "I'll be damned! [laughs] We do have this film."
We had to sign a letter of indemnity in order to show it; saying that if the rights holders were still existent, they would sue me and not sue Universal for showing a film that they didn't have the rights to. I said, "Fine! Bring 'em on." It was Howard Welch's company, and he'd be, like, 97 years old. If they come out of the woodwork, I'm fine with that. Hey, I made a thousand dollars on this screening, you want half of it? Fine, I don't care! [laughs]
When [Universal] sent the film, it was one of those great moments where the projectionist said, "Can you send Eddie up to the booth?" I was thinking the worst; that it actually isn't projectable. This was at the Castro Theater in San Francisco. And the projectionist says, "I just want you to see this, because this never happens." He'd taken the film out to inspect it, and he said, "This is the original band that was put on this film when it came from the laboratory. It has never been taken off this film; this film has never been projected." It was amazing! So we actually had the thrill of showing that print of that film for the first time ever.
So here's the deal: It came time to ship the film back. I said to myself, this film is really great. I can't, in good conscience, send this back without making a copy of it first. So I took it to a guy I know who runs a lab in San Francisco. I said, "I know this is against the law, but I'm asking you, as a steward of film history, to make a digital copy of this film--a Digi-Beta copy of the film." I couldn't do a 35 millimeter copy--I don't have that kind of money. I paid for this out of my own pocket. This is not the Foundation: This was before the Foundation existed. It was one of the things that led to the creation of the Film Noir Foundation. I couldn't send the film back, knowing that it could get lost in the bowels of the company, without making a copy. Not that I intended to do anything with it. I just wanted to know there was a copy somewhere else. So we did it.
I put the copy in my closet. For six years I sat on it. And then Universal had that big fire on June 2, two years ago. I waited a week or two because I knew what pressure these guys were under, and then I called. This was seven months before the next big festival in San Francisco. I was asking about the titles in the festival, and Universal said, "Don't worry about it--we'll make good on all of them because we have all the negatives. We'll just make new prints of everything."...
$5 Cover: Seattle Trailer from MTV New Media on Vimeo.
On Monday, the Seattle version of $5 Cover premiered all twelve episodes to a SIFF Cinema packed with cast, crew, volunteers, MTV producers, and Seattle music fans. The installments, along with short documentaries about each of the bands and B-side films about Seattle, won't start appearing online until June. Since everyone else will have to wait, I won't say too much beyond reporting that the finished product is so much better than the long-circulating trailer (above) suggests.
When Audrey and I last discussed this matter, a map of band relationships had sparked delight and the preview footage had raised modest skepticism. Seeing the preview, I worried about how uncomfortable it might be to see musicians reading scripted lines to portray slightly more dramatic versions of themselves in service of thinly contrived plot devices. Happily, most of the moments of forced narrative are shown in the trailer itself, and the rest of the project quickly begins to feel more like a gently observed documentary than forced reality programming. ...
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....
The Film Noir Foundation's Noir City Film Festival began its fourth annual stop in Seattle at SIFF Cinema last weekend, to deservedly-packed houses.
The Fest has always earned major props from film noir hardcores for bringing obscure but top-drawer examples of the genre to light, and Friday's opening double-feature delivered a couple of honest-to-God undiscovered gems in Pitfall and Larceny.
The transformation of Dick Powell from apple-cheeked Busby Berkeley hoofer to noir tough-guy represents one of the great image overhauls in Hollywood history: Picture Zac Efron morphing into Clint Eastwood in an eight-year span, and you're about there. But Powell managed just such a hat trick with his hard-boiled turn in 1944's brilliant Murder, My Sweet. Pitfall hit theaters in 1948, and marked the continuation of Powell's exploration of the dark side.
In it, he plays a happily-married insurance agent magnetically drawn into a fling with fashion model Lizabeth Scott. This being a film noir, things go rapidly astray--compliments of a sloe-eyed monster of a private eye (future Perry Mason star Raymond Burr), Scott's jealous ex-con boyfriend, and fickle fate.
It's the most wrenchingly honest and unflinching portrayal of infidelity you'll probably ever see from a Hays Code-era movie. Scott and Jane Wyatt (the female points of this triangle) are both realistically-rendered and likeable characters: The former assumes far more complex (and unfortunate) shading than the stereotypical noir femme fatale, and Wyatt's an unexpectedly iron-spined (and, um, kinda sexy) little pistol. Powell finds a core of charm and sympathy despite his actions, and director Andre de Toth keeps things moving like a recklessly-fired-off bullet. Burr, the movie's metaphoric and literal heavy, coolly steals the show with a performance that's a glorious kin to his villainous, flambé-tossing turn in Anthony Mann's Raw Deal....
Tonight, SIFF Cinema's annual Noir City Film Festival begins with a double-feature, and everything you could want from Noir: Adulterers, Con Men, Grifters, Private Eyes, Ex-Cons, and of course, Dames.
Tonight's films, Pitfall and Larceny are both from 1948 and both not on DVD, so get yourself to SIFF Cinema (McCaw Hall at Seattle Center). Pitfall stars Dick Powell as an insurance man who has a disastrous affair with Lizabeth Scott; Larceny, with John Payne and Joan Caulfield, tells the story of con man who lets his romantic entanglements get in the way of his work.
Worth paying special attention to is dreamboat John Payne, an actor known to most of the world for playing the heart-of-gold lawyer Fred Gailey in the 1947 Miracle on 34th Street. But in my family, he's known as the guy my grandmother called "a terrible kisser." (Way to go, grandma.) Go see for yourself. Noir City continues through next Thursday.
SIFF Cinema is hosting three benefit screenings that just happen to be of films hoping to garner some bigtime buzz this season (and perhaps take home an award or two). The first up Sunday is A Single Man, the debut feature from Tom Ford, which got high praise at Toronto and Venice for Colin Firth's touching portrayal of a gay man dealing with his partner's death, along with luminous fag hag Julianne Moore. Not bad for a director previously best known for ads featuring him naked.
Coming up Wednesday, December 2nd is Me and Orson Welles, Richard Linklater's take on the early life of the auteur. I like Linklater, but I've got a hard time buying Zac Efron as a teenage actor who's lucked into working with Welles. And come Sunday, December 13th, the series rounds out with Emily Blunt as The Young Victoria, which is, yes, a period piece about the Queen of England.
- Award-Buzz Benefit Screenings at SIFF Cinema: A Single Man, November 22nd at 2 p.m., Me and Orson Welles, December 2nd at 7 p.m., The Young...
After wrapping up the film festival in June, SIFF Cinema went on hiatus, because of the economy and the monies and so on and so forth (see: the Northwest Film Forum scrambling for cash last month). But now that summer is over, the Cinema is opening up again, starting tonight with You, the Living, the latest from absurdist Swedish director Roy Andersson. I haven't seen it just yet, but it sounds as if it's a vignette-a-palooza:
Only the fourth feature from the great Swedish auteur Roy Andersson (Songs from the Second Floor), You, the Living is, like its award-winning predecessor, comprised of a series of meticulously wrought tableaux that illustrate the human condition. Both comic and sad, it’s above all a film about the vulnerability of human beings. The characters represent different facets of human existence. They face problems, large and small, that range from issues of day-to-day survival to the big philosophical questions.
Linked by recurring lines of dialogue and situations, the tableaux show...
About five minutes into her dance film Holding This For You, Marissa Rae Niederhauser throws herself against the wall, slides to the floor, and begins trying to untie a key knotted to the front of her dress. But Ben Kasulke's camera stays trained to her face; she squints a little as she works, purses her lips before biting the lower one, and only when she's mostly worked her way through the knot and closed her eyes does the camera trail down to her breast as she pulls the key off the ribbon. She holds it tightly in her hand for a long moment, her face, turned from the camera, slightly out of focus, and then drops it.
"Different stories work better onstage, and different stories work better on film," explained Niederhauser last week at Smith, near her home on Capitol Hill. "And I'm particularly drawn to small facial gestures and physical details. Onstage, dance is great to have these big, sweeping spacial patterns and geometric forms, kind of like a kaleidoscope. But this was kind of more a psychological drama,...
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