Joe's View

Your faithful blogger has been on vacation for the past week, but I’ve also been in a whirl of cultural activities that I am looking forward to writing about here when I return Tuesday.

I watched the new DVD of HBO’s fantastic “Rome” series, saw the first part of the three-part Horton Foote epic at the Signature Theatre and attended the exciting “The Brother and Sister Plays” at the Public Theater. Also got a big kick out of Lisa Scottoline’s hilarious new collection of her Philadelphia Inquirer columns.

Tomorrow I’ll be blogging about ”Easy Rider,” the 1969 classic that is being screened at the “Martini & a Movie” event I’m hosting at the Fairfield Theatre Company Tuesday night. 

Can’t wait to write about all of this stuff and some of the movies I saw, too.

Obviously, none of the week’s new films were as good as the picture for which the poster above was created in 1962. Yes, I watched “The Manchurian Candidate” for the umpteenth time last week. Would that we were in an era where the movies and the posters were that interesting!

(From Jan. 2008:) The jury has always been out on Otto Preminger’s merits as a director —most critics see him as a minor figure, but a loyal cult following believes there are great visual and thematic qualities in pictures such as “Advise and Consent” (1962) and “In Harm’s Way” (1965). Everyone agrees Preminger was a great showman who knew how to sell his films and a fearless opponent of film censorship.

The producer-director is the subject of a juicy new Knopf biography, “Otto Preminger” by Foster Hirsch.

In his prime, Preminger was second only to Alfred Hitchcock in his ability to personally generate news stories and to book important talk show appearances for each one of his pictures. Moviegoers knew the Preminger name and face (at a time when most directors were behind the scenes figures) because he was such a frequent and amusing TV talk show guest.

Like another hammy director, John Huston, the Vienna-born Preminger took on a very high visibility acting job — as a Nazi officer in the Billy Wilder classic “Stalag 17” (1953) — that gave him a leg up on the competition.

Throughout his Hollywood heyday running roughly from the late 1940s through the early 1970s, Preminger was also well known for his dictatorial manner on the sets of his movies. Tom Tryon who starred in “The Cardinal” (1963), Dyan Cannon who starred in “Such Good Friends” (1971) and Keir Dullea of “Bunny Lake is Missing” (1965) were just three of the many actors who went public with their horror stories of being mistreated on Preminger sets.

Hirsch’s book is much juicier than the average Hollywood biography because he was able to get on-the-record interviews with actors and crew members who were more than willing to tell battle stories.

Keir Dullea pointed out to Hirsch that no actor ever gave the best performance of his or her career in a Preminger film: “How could you? Everybody was watching his back. If part of you is busy protecting yourself, you’re not in the role entirely: you can’t be. Because I was so tense my voice is in a higher register than it is in any other film…I don’t hate him; it’s too long ago. But the experience was the most unpleasant I ever had.”

According to Hirsch, Preminger only met his match in the nastiness sweepstakes a few times.

On the set of “Hurry Sundown” (1967), cast and crew couldn’t decide who was worse, Preminger or the pre-“Bonnie and Clyde” Faye Dunaway.
Tensions were already high because of the oppressive Louisiana location heat and threats from the Ku Klux Klan over the black actors staying in the same hotel with the white cast and crew:

“For the only time in his career, Preminger’s ‘whipping boy’ did not have the sympathy of the cast and crew, because Faye Dunaway, hard-bitten, competitive, and self-centered, managed to alienate everyone.”
One member of the crew reports: “She took over an air-conditioned trailer and banished dear Diahann Carroll who was to have shared the trailer with her. She made Diahann learn her lines outside the trailer, in the heat.”

“Otto Preminger” mixes gossipy anecdotes from the director’s sets with smart reassessments of the qualities of each film. Hirsch believes Preminger was always underrated and he makes a reader want to return to pictures like “Exodus” (1960) and “Advise and Consent” for another look.

(From Sept. 2008:) Farrar, Straus and Giroux will be ending 2008 with a major literary event — the publication of the first of three volumes of journals and notebooks by the late great Susan Sontag.

The essayist, novelist and filmmaker died four years ago, after three battles with cancer.

Her incredible wide-ranging interests included photography, European literature, movies and history, all of which she wrote about with peerless insight and style.

I’ve been reading an uncorrected proof of volume one of the journals — “Reborn,” covering the years 1947 to 1963 — over the past few days and have been appreciative of the way the notes take us into the earliest stages of Sontag’s life and career as a thinker.

The first two lines in the book, written on Nov. 23, 1947 are very strong:
“I believe:
(a) That there is no personal god or life after death.”

Sontag may be gone in a physical sense, but her “life” as a writer will continue with indelible books such as “On Photography” and “Illness as Metaphor.”

“Reborn” starts with a remarkable introductory essay by Sontag’s son, David Rieff, who has edited the three books despite some personal reservations about the project.

“I have always thought that one of the stupidest things the living say about the dead is the phrase ‘so-and-so would have wanted it this way’ At best it is guesswork; most often it is hubris, no matter how well intended. You simply cannot know,” Rieff begins.

“Reborn” is “not the book she would have produced” Rieff says of his mother: “— and that assumes she would have decided to publish these diaries in the first place.”

Rieff says he wishes he did not have to become involved with the project, but that Sontag died without leaving any instructions as to what should be done with her papers. Before her death, Sontag did sell her papers to the University of California at Los Angeles library, without any restictions on access to her papers.

“I soon came to feel that the decision had been made for me,” Rieff writes of deciding to edit the three volumes. ““Either I would organize them or someone else would. It seemed better to go forward.”

Few editors have ever been as honest about their work as Rieff is in the introduction: “My misgivings remain. To say that these diaries are self-revelatory is a drastic understatement…One of the principal dilemmas in all this has been that, at least in her later life, my mother was not in any way a self-revealing person. In particular, she avoided to the extent she could, without denying it, any discussion of her own homosexuality or any acknowledgment of her own ambition. So my decision certainly violates her privacy. There is no other way of describing it fairly.”

I think Rieff is a bit too hard on himself. The entries in volume one are very frank about Sontag’s early confusion over her sexuality, but she never delves into this side of her life in a salacious manner.

In her “public” writing, Sontag seemed willing to analyze and question almost any facet of life — she was pilloried for writing one of the very few challenging essays to appear in the immediate wake of 9/11.

The journal writing seems of a piece with Sontag’s other ruthlessly direct work — I doubt that she would have passed the material along to UCLA if she felt it went beyond the bounds of her own character and morality as a writer.
Who knows, perhaps Sontag decided to preserve the material so that she could write about sexuality in a more direct manner if she had been given another few years of life.

(From March, 2007:) Joshua Ferris has written a funny and horrifying first novel about workplace paranoia, “Then We Came to the End” (Little, Brown).

The book takes place at a Chicago advertising agency in 2001 — when the collapse of the dotcom boom is beginning to have a savage effect on the bottom lines of the marketing and ad firms that fed at the Internet trough in the late 1990s.

Lay-offs start and the workers begin to live in fear that they will be “walking Spanish” any day (the term is derived from a Tom Waits song about pirates who forced their prisoners to walk the plank).

Ferris captures the distinctive atmosphere of office life where casual friendships and alliances change from day to day depending on the mood that filters down from management.

“We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise. At least those of us who smoked had something to look forward to at ten-fifteen. Most of us liked most everyone, a few of us hated specific individuals, one or two people loved everyone and everything. Those who loved everyone were unanimously reviled,” Ferris writes at the start of the novel’s opening chapter, “You Don’t Know What’s in My Heart.”

Ferris presents most of the story in the first person plural which fits the narrative perfectly; the novel is about the weirdness of spending eight hours a day with a “family” that only exists as long as a corporation continues to fund it.

“Then We Came to the End” charts the feuds and the fears of highly educated, upper-middle class people who have no real sense of their worth to their bosses and assume the ax could fall at any moment.

The novelist’s honesty about working groups pushes us to the edge of tastelessness:

“We hated Karen Woo. We hated hating Karen Woo because we feared we might be racists. The white guys especially. But it wasn’t just the white guys. Benny, who was Jewish, and Hank, who was black, hated Karen too. Maybe we hated Karen not because she was Korean but because she was a woman with strong opinions in a male-dominated world. But it wasn’t just the men; Marcia couldn’t stand her and she was a woman. And Marcia loved Donald Sato, so she couldn’t be a racist. Donald wasn’t Korean but he was Asian of some kind, and everybody liked him as much as Marcia did even though he didn’t say a whole lot.”

The book shifts from black comedy to tragedy in a bravura chapter in which the office leader contemplates cancer surgery and realizes she has nothing in her life other than her work.

But, the overall tone of “Then We Came to the End” is the unexpected hilarity and mad scheming of dog-eat-dog business, including a classic bit in which one stressed-out man decides to limit his office speech to dialogue drawn from the first two “Godfather” pictures:

“At the conclusion of a morning meeting, during which he had remained perfectly silent, as everyone was packing up their things, Benny turned to Heidi Savoca and said, ‘I spent my whole life trying not to be careless. Women and children can be careless, but not men.’ Heidi’s expression indicated she didn’t know where Benny’s comment was coming from, but more pressing than her confusion was her distaste for the remark itself, ‘That’s a very sexist thing to say, Benny,’ she replied. Later that morning, Seth Keegan stopped by Benny’s cube to ask him a question about some revisions for a project the two had been working on over the course of the previous few weeks. ‘Do you have a minute?’ Seth asked Benny. Benny swiveled in his chair. ‘This one time,’ he said. ‘This one time I’ll let you ask me about my affairs.’”

(From Sept. 2006:) The story of how America went restaurant and gourmet food crazy over the past 40 years is told with great page-turning style by Vanity Fair contributing editor David Kamp in his wonderful book “The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation” (Broadway Books).

“The United States of Arugula” shows us how a few key figures such as cookbook authors James Beard and Julia Child and restaurant innovators like Wolfgang Puck and Alice Waters changed the whole American food landscape.

Kamp points out in his introduction that food is now “a cultural pastime, something you can follow the way you follow sports or the movies…the food world has its own ESPN (the Food Network, founded in 1993), its own constellation of marketable stars (Emeril Lagasse, Rachael Ray, Bobby Flay, etc.)… its own literary lights (Ruth Reichl, Calvin Trillin, Anthony Bourdain)…You can be a non-cook and still be a food obsessive, attending new restaurant openings like a theatergoer, religiously consulting the Zagat guides (launched in 1979) and ordering the finest prepared foods from Whole Foods, Dean & DeLuca, or Williams-Sonoma.”

Clearly, we were long overdue for a book explaining how this all came to pass in a country where TV dinners and Howard Johnson galvanzied the populace only 50 years ago.

Kamp’s book details the huge changes in home cooking brought about by the star food writers (Child et al) and the introduction of devices such as the Cuisinart food processor (created 30 years ago by the Connecticut inventor Carl Sontheimer). The rising interest in food led to greater expectations from restaurant dining as well as the availability of better ingredients from grocers.

Kamp is a great storyteller who starts with the arrival of French chefs for the 1939 New York Worlds Fair — who were soon to establish most of the chic Manhattan restaurants of the 1940s and ’50s — and then leads us through all of the great restaurant trends and introduces us to most of the major players who made us into a nation of food lovers.

The book reminds us that such contemporary home and restaurant staples as salsa, sushi and — yes — arugula were considered revolutionary innovations only a few decades ago.

“The United States of Arugula” is so well written that you don’t really have to be a foodie to enjoy it: Kamp makes a strong case that the story he tells is as important as the rest of the cultural history of the past half-century.

(From 2007:) Part travelogue, part fashion study, “The Tokyo Look Book” (Kodansha) is one of the most entertaining tomes of the fall — it is quite spectacular to look at and informative on levels that few fashion books approach.

Like that wonderful regular street fashion feature done by veteran New York Times photographer Bill Cunningham, the book shows us stylish clothes as they are worn by “real” people, not carefully lit and posed models.

British anthropologist Philomena Keet teamed up with photographer Yuri Manabe to capture the outrageously colorful and culturally diverse fashion scene on the streets of Tokyo. As the cover blurb puts it so well, “Stylish to Spectacular, Goth to Gyaru, Sidewalk to Catwalk.”

I caught up with Keet by phone when she was in New York several weeks ago and she said “The Tokyo Look Book” began as a lucky accident.

“It was a chance meeting with a book editor. I happened to be doing my PhD in street fashion (in Tokyo) and it was just an opportunity too good to miss,” she said.

“Of course, the question then was: How to do it?,” the writer said, with a laugh.

Keet narrowed her work on the book to a very small slice of the Tokyo fashion scene — youth street fashion.

“I met most of the people for the first time on the street,” the writer said of her journey through the various youth street cultures in Tokyo, from the rather conservative look of “young men at work” to kids who dress like their favorite anime characters and others who have adopted wildly theatrical variations on punk and Goth styles.

Reporters often find “man in the street” features to be tough assignments — first you have to get a stranger to talk, then get him or her to agree to be photographed.

Keet said her work was “hard at first but once I got used to it, it was lovely as well.”

The work was aided by the fact that Tokyo street kids often expect to be photographed by friends and tourists.

“They are all readers of fashion magazines and they are used to being asked for photographs…I think in our case, the combination of an English girl and a Japanese girl (photog Manabe) was particularly good…a lot of the people were intrigued by us,” Keet said of walking the streets with the native photographer.

“The Tokyo Look Book” introduces us to top Japanese designers such as Kazuhisa Komura and we also journey into wild boutiques with names like “Dog” and “Sex Pot Revenge.”

Although it often seems that fashion has become one of the top interests of Americans in recent years, Keet says Japan dwarfs the U.S. and the U.K. when it comes to style worship and living to shop.

“There are so many more fashion magazines in Japan than in the U.K. or U.S.,” the writer points out. “What’s in my book is just one tiny niche of the (total Japanese) fashion scene.”

Keet said the Japanese have few of the hang-ups about fashion that persist in England and America: “We tend to think fashion is a trivial and stupid thing to spend money on. There is less guilt in Japanese society in respect to spending money on fashion…you have the phenomenon of young people living at home but doing a part-time job in order to buy clothes.”

When I urged Keet to put together similar books on New York and London — to start with — she laughed and pointed out that she still has to finish the PhD thesis that was interrupted by the Tokyo fashion project.

“I’m not sure what I’m going to do next, but I did really enjoy doing this one. I am half thinking about a London book in time for the Olympics,” she said of the 2012 international event.

(Your faithful blogger is off recharging his cultural batteries until Dec. 1. In the meantime, I thought it would be fun to re-examine some of the most interesting books from the four years of “Joe’s View.” First up, a terrific biography from 2008 now available in paperback.)

Biographies tend to fall into one of two categories — trashy cut-and-paste affairs that stress personal scandal over professional accomplishment, or exhaustively footnoted tomes that keep us at a slight remove from important figures.

What makes Julie Kavanagh’s “Nureyev” (Pantheon Books) so special is that the writer gives us a full account of Rudolf Nureyev’s life and career on stage at the same time that she provides an unsparing view of the man’s wildly dramatic — and sometimes sordid — personal life.

Kavanagh trained in ballet before she turned to journalism, so she has a special appreciation of Nureyev’s devotion to dance and the excitement he generated in the West after his defection from the Soviet Union in 1961.
Nureyev had already established himself as one of the great young dancers in Russia when he decided to bolt in Paris, from a state-sanctioned tour.
Because this happened at the height of the Cold War, the decision made headlines all over the world and gave Nureyev instant international celebrity.

What Kavanagh makes clear is that the young man’s decision was a purely aesthetic one — he was desperate to break out of the classical tradition of Russian ballet and to explore what was happening in the world of modern dance and to connect with innovators such as his fellow Russian George Balanchine (whose mixture of classical technique and innovative choreography made New York City Ballet into what was perhaps the greatest dance troupe of that time).

Nureyev’s explosive entry into the West raised the profile of dance and made the Russian a household name, what one chronicler quoted by Kavanagh called “ballet’s first pop star, the long-haired icon for the decade’s spirit of rebellion and sexual freedom.”

The dancer was on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” was photographed by Richard Avedon and hobnobbed with the international jet set.

Behind the scenes, Nureyev became infamous for his explosive temper and often whimsical demands, but Kavanagh presents him as a phenomenal work horse, maintaining a punishing schedule that kept him traveling almost constantly for 30 years.

Even the man’s critics admit he brought new life to the ballet, sparking a personal renaissance in the career of his superstar partner Margot Fonteyn (who seemed to be nearing the end of her distinguished career when Nureyev pushed her to a new plateau).

Kavanagh writes of Fonteyn: “She claimed that it was her belief that the audience was looking at him, not her, that had allowed her to relax, and ‘really dance for the first time.’”

Nureyev and Fonteyn were swept into the 1960s lifestyle revolutions along with pop stars, generating page one news when they attended a San Francisco party that ended with a drug bust.

The book delves into Nureyev’s apparently insatiable sex drive, but in a way that makes it clear that hedonism was one of the dancer’s few personal outlets. Kavanagh separates the many one night (one hour?) stands in the artist’s life from his great love for fellow dancer Erik Bruhn and other attachments that were nearly as intense.

The sadness of any dancer’s limited time on stage was intensified by Nureyev finding out in the early 1980s that he was HIV positive. He spent the subsequent decade filling his schedule with as many jobs as he could find, with sidetracks into theater (a disastrous tour of “The King and I”) and conducting classical music. The way that he kept going right to the bitter end (in 1993) is both poignant and inspiring.

Kavanagh tells Nureyev’s story so dramatically — and tells us so much about the world of dance beyond her subject’s life — that few readers will complain about the 698-page length of her account.

I enjoyed the documentary “Every Little Step” when it opened in theaters last spring, but I was very disappointed by the film’s account of the creation of the original landmark production of “A Chorus Line” in 1975.

The movie was subtitled “The Journey of ‘A Chorus Line’” but it devoted more of its 93 minute running time to the audition process for the mediocre 2006 Broadway revival than it did to the creation of the original.

Producer-directors James D. Stern and Adam Del Deo dug up tons of archival material on the original show — including the long informal dancer rap sessions that inspired Michael Bennett (below, with Marvin Hamlisch) to want to do a show on Broadway chorus dancers — but it was brutally trimmed to make way for reality TV-style stuff on the young dancers who hoped to be cast in the revival.

Some of the audition footage is interesting — the producers were very lucky to get a first-ever waiver from Actors Equity allowing cameras into auditions — but too much of it is the standard self-dramatizing of people who know they are being filmed.

Fortunately, the extras on the just-released DVD version of “Every Little Step” serve as a corrective to the theatrical cut by including nearly an hour of material on Bennett and the original show.

There’s a wonderful 20-minute mini-documentary on Donna McKechnie (above, with Robert LuPone) who won a Tony for playing Cassie in the original production (and who came up from the chorus line with Bennett in the shows he did before becoming a behind-the-scenes talent).

McKechnie is honest about the complex and troubled relationship she had with Bennett after “A Chorus Line” became a blockbuster.

Although Bennett was gay, he decided to marry his star and the result was a disaster for both parties — they weren’t speaking when the director-choreographer died from complications of AIDS in 1987.

The extras also include long excerpts from the original dancer interview tapes that Bennett used to create the show.

One of my disappointments with “Every Little Step” was the absence of any interview footage with Kelly Bishop who won a Tony for playing Sheila (the extras don’t include new interview footage with Bishop but there is a long and fascinating segment from the interview tape she made before the show went into production).

The historic importance of “A Chorus Line” is also explained on the extras in an expanded interview from former New York Times drama critic Frank Rich who went to an early preview of the show when he was still a young aspiring critic in New York (he joined the Times five years later).

DVD extras are often not worth watching — let alone talking about — but in this case they make “Every Little Step” into a major documentary about Broadway history, as well as an account of the casting of the 2006 revival.