Joe's View

Things move so quickly in our country these days that there doesn’t seem to be much room for movies about the process of politics.
Back in the pre-cable news era, audiences enjoyed movies that lifted the curtain on Washington, D.C. In many cases, the films were based on popular novels and Broadway plays such as Allen Drury’s blockbuster book, “Advise and Consent” (1959) and Gore Vidal’s stage hit “The Best Man” (1960).
As a kid, I remember reading long-forgotten pop novels such as Fletcher Knebel’s “Convention” (1963) in order to find out more about how our political parties came together to nominate candidates.
Now, CNN and Fox News cover the back-breakingly long run-up to our elections in such minute detail that there is virtually no interest in fictional accounts of the process.
This is too bad because the political dramas of yesteryear were — if nothing else — great showcases for actors. Lee Tracy was Oscar-nominated for his juicy turn as a Harry Truman-style ex-president in the film version of “The Best Man” (1964) and Angela Lansbury gave the best peformance of her movie career as the ruthless senator’s wife in “The Manchurian Candidate” (1962).
For the monthly “Martini and a Movie” series that I host at the Fairfield Theatre Company I thought it would be fun to mark this presidential election year with a three-film series devoted to “Politics and Hollywood.”
We’re kicking off the series tomorrow night with a showing of the 1948 Frank Capra film “State of the Union” (above), the once topical drama about a Republican businessman (Spencer Tracy) who is convinced the country can use his common sense and financial knowledge in the White House.
In typical Capra style, the movie’s hero quickly learns that the mighty forces behind our elections will push him to compromise his ideals and bend to their corporate interests.
Just as Capra’s naive Sen. Jefferson Smith (Jimmy Stewart) had a smart woman (Jean Arthur) to guide him out of the mess he faced in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” (1939), the Tracy character has an idealistic wife (Katharine Hepburn) who urges him to question the compromises he is being asked to make.
The movie remains funny and challenging and it should be interesting to discuss what it might still have to say about the way we choose our presidents.
“State of the Union” definitely made a strong impression on Ronald Reagan.
32 years later, when Reagan was campaigning in New Hampshire for the 1980 Republican nomination, and was threatened with the loss of control of his debate forum, he was cheered after quoting one of Tracy’s big lines: “I paid for this microphone!”
(The doors for the free “Martini and a Movie” screening will open at 7 p.m. and the film will be shown at 8 p.m. The Fairfield Theatre Company is at 70 Sanford St. in Fairfield Center.)

There’s a wonderfully nostalgic exhibit of the show business photography of Kenn Duncan running at the Lincoln Center branch of the New York Public Library through Oct. 25.
Duncan was not the greatest photographer in the world — most of his stuff was studio work done with rather flat lighting — but he left behind an amazing record of the theater, film, TV and recording scenes in Manhattan during the period from roughly 1968 through 1980.
Those years are now considered the bad old days — in terms of crime and financial distress — but it was a pretty great time in other ways. Movies (and theater) were shaking off their last conservative restraints, so revolutionary material seemed to open every week — from “Hair” (left) to “Midnight Cowboy” to “Deep Throat.”
The Duncan exhibit is a classic demonstration of the high/low arts scene of New York City — with glossy shots of Broadway stars such as Angela Lansbury juxtaposed with Andy Warhol “superstars” like Joe Dallesandro.
It was the period when a bundle of talent from Hawaii named Bette Midler (a favorite Duncan camera subject) could launch her career by singing in the cabaret space inside a gay bathhouse (a feat immortalized in Terrence McNally’s mid-1970s play and movie, “The Ritz”).
Because of the sexual explosion in the city (and the country) at the time, Duncan shot a lot of nudes but he gave them the same high gloss treatment he afforded to the big mainstream star portraits. In retrospect, Duncan can be viewed as a pioneer in the merging of commercial entertainment and porn that is now central to our pop culture.
Much of Duncan’s work appeared in a rather bizarre magazine called “After Dark” which presented itself as a mainstream entertainment magazine but was loaded with barely sublimated sexual content. It was a sign of the times that stars like Lansbury and Chita Rivera would grant interviews — and sit for Duncan’s photo sessions — for a publication carrying ads for the porn films that were just starting to get commercially exhibited in New York (the “porn chic” era launched by “Deep Throat” in the summer of 1972).
Anyhow, as I walked through the exhibit, my mind flashed back to the wildly enthusiastic reviews a woman named Norma McLain Stoop used to write for “After Dark.” Norma never saw a movie she didn’t like and she helped spread the name of her magazine by being a pioneer in the quote-whoring that now fills ads for new movies.
Few people read Norma’s reviews — I was off in a college town in Pennsylvania and then in a small beach resort in Delaware during her peak years — but her quotes were everywhere in the early and mid-1970s. She would give distributors enthusiastic comments so far in advance that her name would appear in the trailers for art films that were distributed around the country. Norma was so hyperbolic — and so unknown outside New York — that audiences in arthouses around the country would crack up when her name (and her gush) appeared on the screen. Who the hell was she?, we wondered.
I hadn’t thought about Stoop in 30 years, but the Duncan show had me rushing back to my computer to see what had happened to this movie advertising pioneer. Sadly, I found out that she died in May of last year, but here is a terrific tribute from the nameless movie industry blogger on a site called “Zoom in Online”:

“…It got me thinking about the critics who love to be quoted, the critics who labor to not to be quoted, and the publicists who spread exclamation points like sprinkles on an ice cream cone. Caught up in my reverie, I suddenly thought of the greatest quote-seeker of them all, a woman who turns the other quote-seekers into mere pretenders.
Norma McLain Stoop was a very slight, elegant woman of a certain age (late 60s? 70s?) who provided us with quotage on a regular basis in the Seventies. She was the film and dance critic for the entertainment nightlife magazine ‘After Dark’ (not officially gay, but really really gay). Before our films came out she would send us these neatly typed copies of her upcoming reviews. (I think they were made with carbon paper.) You didn’t have to wait for the new issue of ‘After Dark’ to come out; you didn’t have to bug Norma to send you something like other critics. Her quotes were deposited at your door as reliably as the Sunday Times, and were ready for immediate placement in your ad! Somebody once said, ‘If Norma McLain Stoop didn’t exist, someone would have to invent her.’ Well you didn’t need to invent Norma because Norma invented herself and she did a damned good job.
Norma was a kind of graying version of a Factory Girl. Rail-thin, she was proud and stately like the other legendary Norma, Norma Desmond (if Norma Desmond hung out at Studio 54). She was immersed in the gay-tinged world of the performing arts. She had New York attitude. She loved NY culture with all her heart and soul, and if people wanted to laugh at her because she was a bit too promiscuous with her affections, then so be it…She was aware of how people perceived her and she didn’t care…Norma is gone now, but her quotes live on. They shout out from the posters in vintage stores; they charm on 70s DVD covers.”

Connecticut theater audiences are very lucky to have one of their greatest native sons — Brian Dennehy — at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre through Nov. 16 in the Eugene O’Neill one-act, “Hughie.”
It’s the fourth time Dennehy has worked on the play with director Robert Falls; the production has the feeling of a distillation of all the O’Neill work they’ve done together over the past decade on “The Iceman Cometh” and “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre and elsewhere in this country (the Falls/Dennehy “Long Day’s Journey” landed on Broadway five years ago in the finest of the many productions of that play that I’ve seen).
“Hughie” charts an hour in the life of a quintessential O’Neill man — the gambler and rogue and alcoholic “Erie” who is “carrying a torch” for one of the only friends he’s ever had in his 59 years, the recently deceased hotel night clerk who gives the play its title.
Erie returns to the shabby hotel in the hour just before dawn and starts bending the ear of Hughie’s nameless replacement (Joe Grifasi).
We quickly realize that despite all of his bluster, Erie is a terribly lonely man who can’t face going up to his crummy room alone.
Dennehy brings a lifetime of stage experience — and an acute understanding of O’Neill second only to that of the late great Jason Robards — to the very sad and very funny hour that Erie and Hughie’s successor spend together.
It was pin-drop-silence time at Long Wharf at last night’s official opening where I once again came to the conclusion that Dennehy is our greatest tragic actor because he somehow manages to mine all of the black Irish humor out of O’Neill’s punishingly bleak view of life.
Years ago at Long Wharf, Dennehy was the best Walter Burns I’ve ever seen — in the Chicago newspaper classic “The Front Page” — because in that case he found the heartbreak under the bluster and hilarity of the aggressively single managing editor.
Dennehy is heading out to Chicago for another O’Neill play — “Desire Under the Elms” — early next year and it’s one of the very few things that could get me to return to my native city in the dead of winter.

Editor and critic Joseph Epstein — author of the classic “Snobbery” — has written a wonderful 187-page tribute/analysis, “Fred Astaire,” that will be published by Yale University Press on Tuesday as part of the “Icons of America” series.
As Epstein points out, Astaire has never been the subject of a major biography — perhaps because the great dancer led one of the quietest off-screen lives of any Hollywood star.
The dancer-actor-singer apparently lived to work and aren’t we lucky that he did?
“Pure joy is what he gave to millions of people who saw his movies and the large numbers of people who continue to see them nowadays on television or DVD,” Epstein writes near the end of his warm and smart and funny little book.
“It has been given to a small number of performers to make people feel happy in this way. Louis Armstrong is one; the young Judy Garland was another; Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton qualify; Ella Fitzgerald and Margot Fonteyn may be two others. A few more names could doubtless be adduced. But the number, in the end, will remain small.”
Epstein gives the reader a brief biographical account of Astaire’s rapid rise from a vaudeville/Broadway partnership with his sister Adele to his supreme position in the Hollywood of the 1930s through the 1950s.
The author delves into the mystery of Astaire’s perfect pairing with Ginger Rogers in those great RKO musicals of the 1930s. Rogers was nowhere near as good a dancer as some of Astaire’s other partners — Eleanor Powell, for one — but the chemistry between them was peerless.
Epstein writes: “Although every expert in movie musicals allows that there have been dancers in Hollywood superior to Ginger Rogers, although Fred Astaire went on to dance in the movies with the best among them, he never found a partner anywhere near so well suited to him as this woman who hadn’t had much in the way of training as a dancer and whom he didn’t much like.”
Epstein agrees with the dance critic Arlene Croce that it might have been Rogers’s skill as an actress that made the difference — she always danced in character and added an emotional and sexual quality to her pairings with Astaire that was lacking in his dancing with more technically accomplished partners like Powell and Vera Ellen.
Together, Astaire and Rogers had that mysterious “something extra” that Fred’s friend Noel Coward called “star quality.”
“If the Hollywood of those days was a dream machine, it never constructed a better dream than that of these two actors, a skinny likable guy who could move like no one else in the world and a dish who, though not a professional dancer, was in her own way a classic American type,” Epstein concludes.

The Fairfield Library is launching a new free monthly film festival Friday night called “Fringe & Foreign.” I am very happy to be co-hosting the series with my pal Drew Taylor, who writes for The Fairfield Weekly and who serves local movie buffs from his day job at the Media Wave store on the Post Road.
I’ve been assigned the “foreign” half of the series which will start next month.
Drew is in charge of the “fringe” movies and for Friday night he has chosen one of my favorite debut pictures, Peter Bogdanovich’s little-seen 1968 gem “Targets.”
Bogdanovich was a highly regarded New York critic in the early 1960s who became determined to crossover to filmmaking just as the French critics Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard did.
Bogdanovich moved west and hooked up with the B-moviemaker Roger Corman — who was famous for employing and exploiting ambitious young men such as Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese.
Corman put Bogdanovich to work as an assistant on several pictures and then came up with a unique challenge for the aspiring filmmaker. If Peter could figure out how to use some leftover footage from a Corman turkey called “The Terror” along with a few days’ work Corman was owed by veteran actor Boris Karloff, the B-movie producer would underwrite any picture that Bogdanovich could construct within those limitations.
The would-be director and his production designer wife Polly Platt pondered the challenge for a few days and came up with a brilliant solution — they would combine a story about an aging and increasingly irrelevant horror movie actor in Hollywood with a tale of a mentally unbalanced young man who goes on a killing spree with his collection of high-powered rifles.
The 1966 Charles Whitman massacre at the University of Texas inspired Bogdanovich’s character, Bobby Thompson (Tim O’Kelly), who has a dead-end job and an aggressively bland family life. One day, he flips, kills his family and then climbs onto a gas storage tank near an L.A. freeway and begins shooting people as they drive by.
Eventually, the two plot strands merge when the Karloff character goes to the premiere of his latest B-movie at the drive-in where Bobby has taken refuge in the screen tower. As the picture is projected, Bobby pokes a hole in the giant screen and begins to shoot moviegoers in their cars. (The headline for this blog item is derived from Bobby’s last line in the film.)
“Targets” managed to bring together Bogdanovich’s fascination with old movies and his unanswered questions about why “good boy” Whitman went on his Texas spree two years earlier.
Paramount thought “Targets” to be such an accomplished thriller that they bought the movie from Corman for national release. Unfortunately, right after they purchased the rights, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, and the timing could not have been more wrong for an emotionally cool examination of a mass gun killer.
The picture never received a wide release, but after Bogdanovich scored a huge success with “The Last Picture Show” three years later, revival houses started booking “Targets” and it built a sizeable cult audience.
If you’ve never seen this neglected gem, join Drew and me at the Fairfield Library Friday night at 7 p.m. “Targets” raises so many issues involving movies and violence that there should be a lot to talk about after the screening.
(The Fairfield Library is at 1080 Old Post Road in Fairfield Center. For more information call 256-3155.)

Attending the annual international book conference known as the Bouchercon is a bit like an orgy for lovers of crime fiction.
For four days each fall, about 1,500 writers, publishing executives and fans gather somewhere in America to talk about mysteries, thrillers and suspense books. In an age in which reading and the book itself are supposed to be in peril, it is wonderful to be in a comfortable cocoon where everyone spends almost every minute of the day talking about their shared love of crime literature. (The event is named in honor of the long-dead New York Times crime fiction critic Anthony Boucher)
I just got back from Bouchercon 2008 in Baltimore last night and my head is still spinning — in a good way.
In the course of my four days in a Sheraton conference center hotel, I attended about 20 panels on various aspects of crime fiction, met and dined (and drank) with some of my favorite writers, and eavesdropped on publishing gossip concerning trends in the business.
Bouchercon sometimes has the feel of an Altman film, with too many characters to take in and too many scenes to absorb.
I’m sure I will be sharing information gleaned in Baltimore in this space for weeks to come, as I read some of the “hot” books that were launched at the event (the one everyone was talking about was “Trigger City” by Sean Chercover which William Morrow is officially publishing tomorrow).
Like so many other realms of contemporary American life, mystery writers and their publishers are in the middle of a period of future shock — book sales are down and no one is quite sure when and if consumers will begtin switching to hand-held devices for their novel reading.
The conference began first thing Thursday morning and ended shortly after noon yesterday, so of course word filtering in from Wall Street added to some doom-and-gloomers’ feeling that the disposable income many people might have for book buying was about to vanish.
Judging by the action in the very large book room — and the huge book-filled bags most Bouchercon attendees were seen taking out of the hotel yesterday — avid readers are still finding ways to budget for their favorite addiction.

Theater people have the toughest schedule in show business, but they still seem to do more to help other people than most of their peers in film and TV.
Almost every Sunday and Monday in New York City, there are charity benefits where you will find stage actors pitching in on their one night off each week.
When I interviewed the Connecticut actress Marissa Perry about her starring role in “Hairspray” several weeks ago, she had just performed at an AIDS benefit on Fire Island the night before.
Closer to home, the Broadway actress Kristin Huffman (right) — who lives in Milford — is hosting a benefit she is calling “Broadway Babes…with a twist” at the Bethesda Lutheran Church in New Haven Saturday night at 7.
Kristin found out that Debra Marchese of the City of Milford Recreation Department Adaptive Programs wanted to launch a theater troupe for special needs children and immediately got on the phone with some of her Broadway pals to set up a fundraiser.
Huffman lined up one of her fellow performers from the Tony-winning Broadway revival of “Company” — Katrina Yockey — along with Randye Kaye, Janine Ziegler, Candy Benge, Maggie Astrup, Dana Rhondel, Cailan Rose, and Mary Jo Duffy.
Kristin also rounded up fellow Milfordite Raissa Katona Bennett who has played the role of Christine in “Phantom of the Opera” on Broadway, and actress and cabaret star Maureen Hamill.
The show is free — donations will be accepted — and there will be a silent auction.
Since there are only 250 seats available, I would call 646-342-3200 for a reservation now. This should be a great night of show music.
Bethesda Lutheran Church is at 305 Saint Ronan St. in New Haven.

Thanks to the generosity of a visiting friend from Philadelphia, I attended the new season’s first performance of “Lucia di Lammermoor” at the Metropolitan Opera Friday night, and was knocked out by the production and, especially, German soprano Diana Damrau’s performance in the title role.
The crowd greeted each of Damrau’s arias with the cheers the actress-singer deserved — the ovation following Lucia’s death scene stopped the show — but at the end of Act 3 it was appalling to see so many beautifully dressed first nighters rushing up the aisles before the curtain call.
I’ve been noticing this rushing-out trend at too many performances in recent years.
It seems to me that part of the pact an audience makes with the artists at a live event is to stay and applaud the curtain call at the end.
To exit just as the show is ending is rude to the performers and to those audience members who want to acknowledge the cast’s work.
The weirdest aspect of this phenomenom is that it seems to occur more frequently at non-profit, subscription-driven venues. It’s as if frequent attendance in the choicest seats grants these frantic patrons the right to hustle out of the theater as quickly as possible.
Are people so used to watching canned media at home that they forget there are live people up on that stage who would like to take a bow at the end of a show?
Fortunately, for Damrau and her fellow “Lammermoor” cast members, the cheers of the audience members who stayed for the curtain calls were loud and sustained. It also was charming to see the great soprano get to break character and show her delight in the fantastic night she had up on that vast stage. As New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini put it in his rave review on Sunday, “During the rousing final ovation (Damrau) took to the stage like a rock star, looking exultant.”