Joe's View

The terrible civil rights setback represented by the passage of the gay-bashing Proposition 8 in California earlier this month could prove to be an unexpected boost to the Gus Van Sant film, “Milk,” set to open in New York and Los Angeles Nov. 28 and around the country in December.
The bio-pic about the life and 1978 murder of the pioneering San Francisco gay politician Harvey Milk was already generating Oscar buzz when liberal Hollywood and the gay community around the country were stunned by Prop 8.
Now, the film could become a rallying point for the national movement to repeal the discriminatory proposition.
With a dearth of obvious year-end awards contenders, “Milk” seems on track to be a all-too-timely audience and critic hit.
One of my favorite Manhattan performers, Justin Bond, attended a screening at the Tribeca Grand last night and kicked off a new blog (http://www.justinbondisliving.blogspot.com/) with a long posting today.“The real uncanny thing, to me, is the timing. It reminds me of when The China Syndrome came out right when the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant went all funky…I think this film comes at a time time when the LGBT community needs a shot of inspiration and if nothing else the story is truly inspirational,” Bond writes in a smart and witty account of the screening (and his gate-crashing the celebrity party afterwards).
With a strong supporting cast that includes rising stars James Franco (above, embracing Penn) and Emile Hirsch, “Milk” should be able to crossover quickly from limited art-house release in early December to wide multiplex play by Christmas. I’ll report on the film here after I see it next week.

Tonight at 7, I’m hosting a screening of the 1957 Elia Kazan-Budd Schulberg drama, “A Face in the Crowd,” as part of the monthly “Martini and a Movie” series at the Fairfield Theatre Company.
The picture is the second in a three-film series devoted to “Politics & Hollywood.”
Last month’s movie “State of the Union” was a look at the way politicians often have to bend their beliefs to get elected.
“A Face in the Crowd” was made at a time when smart people were starting to worry about the negative impact of television on almost every aspect of American life — in particular, the way that TV was changing political campaigns (and even the choices of potential national candidates).
Kazan and Schulberg looked at the issue three years before John F. Kennedy brought a new youthful “charisma” to the presidential race, changing some of the ground rules of what the public looked for in a leader because he used TV so brilliantly as an image-building tool. Everyone knows the story of how radio listeners believed the sweaty and far-from-charismatic Richard Nixon won his election season debates with Kennedy, but that the vastly larger audience that saw the debates on TV thought the cool and handsome senator from Massachusetts was the winner.
“A Face in the Crowd” is about the creation of a national celebrity out of a rather sleazy backwoods country singer named “Lonesome” Rhodes.
A small-town radio personality played by the wonderful Patricia Neal discovers Lonesome in an Arkansas jail and turns him into a local star. Soon, he becomes a regional sensation via a Memphis TV show. Lonesome is brought to New York where he builds a huge national audience and thoughts of a political career.
A key scene involves the critiquing of some footage of a national political aspirant by corporate types and ad men .
One of these hucksters says, “Instead of long-winded public debates, the people want capsule slogans: ‘Time for a change!’ “The mess in Washington!’ ‘More bang for your buck!’ (They want) punchlines and glamour!”
Andy Griffith plays Lonesome in a truly scary performance — the moral opposite of the country sheriff he would play on TV a decade later.
“A Face in the Crowd” was a financial flop in 1957, but has been elevated over the years in the same manner as another cynical “flop” that year, “Sweet Smell of Success.”
Kazan and Schulberg were free to attack TV 50 years ago because the movie studios saw the relatively new medium as their enemy. Now that the same global corporations own film production companies and broadcast and cable TV networks it would be much tougher to mount a major film that is this savage about the way “home entertainment” has changed every aspect of private and public life in this country.
“A Face in the Crowd” still has the power to provoke, so there should be a very interesting discussion after tonight’s free showing.
(The Fairfield Theater Company is at 70 Sanford St. in Fairfield. The doors and the bar open at 7. The film will be shown at 8.)

I had a great time at the seventh annual New England Crime Bake over the weekend — about 200 writers (and aspiring writers) gathered at a Hilton in suburban Boston to talk about the state of crime fiction.
The Crime Bake is one of the best small conferences in the country and a great way for me to catch up with old and new Connecticut novelists.
The organizers of the Crime Bake included the fine Madison writer Roberta Isleib and I had a chance to moderate a panel that included Chris Knopf, an Avon mystery novelist who was new to me.
Also on my panel was Brunonia Barry, the Salem, Mass., novelist who achieved one of the year’s great publishing success stories by having her self-published novel, “The Lace Reader,” bought by William Morrow in a multi-book, multi-million dollar deal.
The guest of honor was best-selling thriller writer Harlan Coben who delighted the aspiring writers in the crowd with tales of his tough early days working on a paperback series that featured sports agent Myron Bolitar.
Coben thought then that having a 15,000 copy print run of the first Myron novel was fantastic, along with the $5,000 he was paid. The author said he likes to attend conferences and help new writers because of the gracious way he was treated a decade ago by highly esteemed crime writers such as Lawrence Block and Mary Higgins Clark.
Having attended several Crime Bakes and Bouchercons (the annual international gathering) and the ThrillerFest in New York City last summer, I can vouch for Coben’s assertion that the folks who write the most popular mysteries and thrillers and suspense novels are unusually nice and accessible.
Coben was part of a group of newcomers in the 1990s that included Dennis Lehane, Laura Lippman, Lisa Scottoline, and Lee Child, all of whom take time out of their very busy writing lives to give back to the crime fiction community (Child was the guest of honor at Crime Bake last year and Scottoline was the star attraction at the 2006 gathering).
Coben did two panels, a dinner at which he was mildly roasted and then a Sunday morning breakfast gathering. He also authorized a screening of the hit French version of his novel, “Tell No One” (above), which has been a huge art house hit in this country since it opened in the summer.
The writer spoke about the irony of his novels languishing in Hollywood — or being threatened with massive changes — until the French director Guillaume Canet decided he wanted to make a movie out of the book. Now that “Tell No One” has been a huge hit in Europe and the U.S., Hollywood is once again very interested in the writer.
While I was in Dedham I learned from Stamford mystery writer Rosemary Harris the exciting news that there will be a new two-day Connecticut crime fiction event called “Murder 203” at the Easton and Westport libraries next spring — April 18 and 19.
Details will be posted as they come in on the event’s Website: www.murder203.com.

The Eugene O’Neill play “Hughie” is often performed like a virtual one-man show with a star dominating the action as the desperately lonely Erie Smith who is killing time in the lobby of a fleabag hotel in New York City nearly a century ago.
Erie spins stories to a new nightclerk who remains silent most of the time.
Erie’s best years are behind him and the death of the previous hotel desk clerk, Hughie, leaves him without one of the few pals he has left who is willing to listen to Erie’s tales of Manhattan high life.
12 years ago, Al Pacino did the play at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre and then on Broadway with the estimable actor Paul Benedict, but due to the way the piece was staged your eyes rarely left the star.
What is so fantastic about the current production of “Hughie,” running through Sunday at Long Wharf, is that director Robert Falls and star Brian Dennehy have made the play into a real two-character piece by moving the clerk’s desk to a center stage position and by calling on the great character actor Joe Grifasi to work his magic on a role with very few lines of dialogue.
For Grifasi, the show has been a chance to return to his career roots, He was part of the 1970s halcyon era at the Yale School of Drama that included fellow students Meryl Streep, Sigourney Weaver, Christopher Durang and others.
Since his Yale days, Grifasi has worked on more stage, TV and movie projects than most of us can count — ranging from “Splash” (1984) to “Moonstruck” (1987) to “13 Going on 30” (2004).
Grifasi and Dennehy have a long working history together in the theater and in film. One of my favorite pairings of the two actors was in the wonderful New York-set 1986 thriller, “F/X.”
I talked with Grifasi a few days after “Hughie” opened and he said lots of people have mentioned the way Falls has emphasized the desk clerk’s reactions to Erie’s boozy monologue.
The teamwork between Dennehy and Grifasi occasionally suggests a black comedy variation of Laurel & Hardy.
The 64-year-old Buffalo native said Dennehy has kept the production sharp and fresh in the multiple productions of “Hughie” that they have done together.
“It changes every day. We keep tuning it up so that it’s a little bit different,” he said.
Dennehy asked for Grifasi to play the role and pushed for having the hotel desk front and center rather than its position off to the side in most other productions.
“I think it’s generally played on a deeper stage but I don’t know the other productions. I hope the relationship comes through,” Grifasi said of the connection that slowly forms between O’Neill’s two strangers.
Although “Hughie” is not a comedy per se, there are many dark Irish laughs in Erie’s monologue and in the night clerk’s reactions to what he is hearing. Grifasi said there is a lot of room for day-to-day differences in the way his character relates to the talkative night owl.
“Some days I play the role more passively. I do think about who he is. Working in service, wanting to go back to what he originally wanted to do. I think his attention ebbs and flows,” Grifasi said.
“Brian really throws the focus toward some of the comic possibilities but he varies them day to day,” he added.
The actor loves the tightness of the play — which runs around an hour.
“A lot of plays have a brilliant first act and then come to ruin,” Grifasi said, with a mordant chuckle.
“There have been a lot of playwrights in this town who have labored mightily over second acts for the past 75 years,” the actor added in reference to New Haven’s glory days as a try-out town for shows headed into New York.
Grifasi is a director, too, and will be staging a workshop of a new play by Lewis Black in the city next month.
There is also talk that “Hughie” might be produced on Broadway early next year.
Meanwhile, you do not want to miss this chance to see two of the best American actors playing off each other at Long Wharf.
Some tickets are still available for the last three days of the run and can be ordered by calling 203-787-4282 or online at www.longwharf.org

It was fun to see the first performance of the new Metropolitan Opera production of “La Damnation de Faust” last Friday night – French Canadian director Robert Lepage made his debut at the august Manhattan institution with a multi-media approach that clearly divided the house.
You could tell that the older traditionalists in the audience felt the former Cirque du Soleil stager’s elaborate video projections overwhelmed the acting and the singing of the live performers. The buff, non-singing male acrobats, dressed as devils, who swung around the stage on ropes also gave the performance a distinct Las Vegas feel.
The cultural trendsetters who tend to think “new” equals “genius” could be heard buzzing in the lobby during the one intermission in the two-hour-and-forty-five minute show.
I thought my young friend Francesca put everything into perspective on our way up the aisle when she suggested that most of the projected visuals were so repetitious — and mind-numbingly protracted — that Lepage had turned the stage of the Met into the world’s largest screen saver.
“You’re absolutely right!,” a stranger behind us chimed in when he overheard my friend’s spot-on comment.
The Met program notes point out that composer Hector Berlioz’s version of the Faust story is generally presented as a concert piece rather than as a fully staged opera because of the long orchestral passages.
The opera also suffers from the fact that the plot has become so religiously archaic and socially conservative (Hell is the exclusive preserve of men who have catted around on Earth and Heaven is a place for female virgins).
Lepage inexplicably drops the special effects projections in the final scene where poor old Marguerite (the fantastic soprano Susan Graham) ascends to Heaven by slowly climbing a giant ladder all the way to the top of the Met’s very tall prosenium arch. Just when we need a burst of light and excitement the production peters out (the rigid formation of choral singers around the ladder put me in mind of one of those Pentacostal church services you still see on some cable channels).
It might be a sign of the basically conservative nature of the opera world — and the art form’s need to build broader and younger audiences — that The Met would hire a director who includes in his Playbill bio a “permanent show” in Vegas called “KA.”
You could feel a great deal of warmth in the house for conductor James Levine — who has been ailing recently — but people seemed to be sitting on their hands during most of the opera.
You can make up your own mind about this “Faust” without traveling into Manhattan. Saturday’s matinee performance is being presented as part of the live Met HD transmission series at 1 p.m. at Fairfield University’s Quick Center for the Art. There will be an encore HD showing at 7 p.m. at the Quick. Tickets are $22 for adults, $20 for seniors, and $15 for students and children. For more information call 254-4010.

Tonight the Bow Tie Criterion in New Haven will be cult horror fan central as B-movie legend Bruce Campbell arrives in the Elm City to appear at the 7:30 and 10 p.m. screenings of his latest opus, “My Name is Bruce.”
In case you are out of the loop, Campbell is the star of several key cult films going all the way back to “The Evil Dead” (1981) and “Evil Dead II” (1987) and “Army of Darkness” (1993) – right – all of which were directed by Sam Raimi (who would go on to a huge mainstream career with the “Spider-Man” series).
Campbell has 95 actor credits on the imdb Website as I write this and another 35 film and TV credits under the category “self” (various cult items in which he breaks the “fourth wall” by appearing as “Bruce Campbell”).
The actor’s cult renown and connections with rising star directors has resulted in cameo work for the Coen brothers and voice work for major animated films (“The Ant Bully” in 2008).
The film opening in New Haven tonight was directed by Campbell and is a mock love/hate letter to himself.
Borrowing heavily from the 1985 horror hit “Fright Night” — in which Roddy McDowall played a TV horror host who is pressed into service as a real vampire hunter — “My Name is Bruce” follows a teen fan of Campbell’s who decides that the actor is the only one capable of vanquishing a Chinese demon in the boy’s remote Western town.
We meet Campbell in the middle of the filming of his latest B-movie, “Cave Alien 2,” another cheap and silly picture the actor can walk through with few regrets (the mock B-movie is indistinguishable from “real” Campbell films like “Man With the Screaming Brain” and the forthcoming ““Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs”).
“My Name is Bruce” is so self-deprecating that it’s critic proof, but I can’t imagine a non-Campbell acolyte making it through more than ten or fifteen minutes of this broad send-up of cheap horror films and their fans.
Still, Campbell is a hilarious storyteller — he has a best-selling memoir to his credit — and it should be fun to hear what he has to say for himself tonight. He has become the Vincent Price of the current horror era.
(The Bow Tie Criterion is at 86 Temple St. in New Haven. For more information call 498-2500.)

Joshua Scher’s new play “The Footage” is being given an excellent production at the Flea Theater in Manhattan — it’s a provocative look at Internet networking, video gaming, YouTube, porn, Facebook and a bunch of other modern conveniences so many people are using to replace real connections.
The Flea is the wonderful two-theater space on White St. in Tribeca run by artistic director Jim Simpson for the past 12 years.
One of Simpson’s best ideas is to have a resident company of young actors — called The Bats — who are selected each year from over a thousand candidates coming out of NYU and other acting programs in the region and around the country.
The Bats are used in supporting roles in mainstage productions, but form the ensembles of the more experimental fare that is produced in the small basement space (an unusual oblong playing area that seems to push writers and directors to come up with bold cinematic staging concepts).
The players change each season but the work of The Bats has been consistently strong in every Flea production I’ve seen over the past few years.
Scher wrote “The Footage” with The Bats and the downstage space in mind. And director Claudia Zelevansky (a Yale Drama School grad) has used the space and guided the young actors with great skill.
The play is about a troubled group of teens and 20somethings who are linked by an online role-playing game and a YouTube sensation consisting of nightly uploads of a young woman who has been kidnapped and is being slowly tortured by her captors. Scher and Zelevansky use multi-media very creatively with a half-dozen monitors showing us what is going in in the alternate universe of the role-playing game, as well as chilling glimpses of the YouTube torture clips.
We learn near the beginning of the piece that the YouTube videos are a stunt produced by some ambitious would-be actors and dramatists who haven’t quite figured out how they can use the premise for career and financial gain (the “hits” keep going up every night but no money is coming in).
“The Footage” cuts back and forth between the country house where the YouTube hoax is being created and a group of intense male gamers who shift between the role-playing scenarios and the borderline porn of the abduction videos.
The Bats form such a tight ensemble that it would be wrong to single out one performer. Let’s just say that it was a pleasure to watch Jamie Effros, Michael Micalizzi, Nicolas Flower, Michael Guagno, Caroline Hurley, Elizabeth Alderfer, Blair Baker and Rachel McFee bring this gripping (and troubling) piece of theater to life.
“The Footage” is playing at The Flea Theater through Nov. 30 and tickets are a steal at only $20. For more information go to www.theflea.org

Last month, on the Amtrak ride back from the Bouchercon mystery writer’s gathering in Baltimore, I found myself in a car filled with crime writers and I had a chance to catch up with the wonderful New Haven mystery writer Karen E. Olson.
For the past several years, Karen has been writing novels about a New Haven journalist named Annie Seymour in a series that began with “Sacred Cows” and went on to include “Secondhand Smoke” and “Dead of the Day.”
The writer told me that she has moved on to a new mystery series — set to begin next year — about a Las Vegas tattoo artist.
So, the just-published “Shot Girl” (Obsidian) could be the last Annie novel for a while. I am very happy to report that Olson is going out on a high — the book features the same clever plotting, great local color and terrific personal touches that have been a hallmark of the series since it began.
Olson will be talking about the novel tonight at 7 p.m. at R.J. Julia Booksellers in Madison.
The stakes are higher than ever for Annie in “Shot Girl.” Her job future is, of course, as uncertain as ever due to the precarious nature of the newspaper business. One of the strongest aspects of the Annie books is the way that they have charted the changes in media over the last several years — Olson is a 20-year veteran of the business and she knows what she is writing about. There is a slightly melancholy air to the newspaper scenes in the four books because everyone working for Olson’s fictional New Haven Herald wonders if the next decade will mean the end of their profession.
“Shot Girl” tightens the screws on Annie in her always turbulent personal life, by opening with the death of her ex-husband Ralph in front of a New Haven nightclub.
Ralph was a mistake of Annie’s youth — a fellow journ student and aspiring news star who got lost along the way by fudging his reporting and falling into various addictions. Annie has found a new love in the last few novels but she is still haunted by her early and short-lived passion for Ralph.
Making matters worse is her own possible involvement in the death and the fact that it is tied into all sorts of other New Haven area corruption.
“Shot Girl” takes Annie into the nightworld of male strippers who work bachelorette parties and the “shot girls” of the title — gorgeous young women who make deals with bar owners to become a form of sexy entertainment by moving around the clubs selling marked-up liquor to bedazzled young men.
There is added fun for local readers in the way that “Shot Girl” mixes real places like Louis Lunch and the Anchor Bar with Olson’s fictional nightspots. The city of New Haven has become a major character in the Annie Seymour novels and Olson knows the place inside out.
The new Las Vegas series sounds very promising, but I hope that someday Olson is able to return to Annie — she will be missed.