Joe's View

The other day on a local radio show — when I thought I would just be talking about the new plays and movies I had seen — the host threw me with a question about the Tiger Woods affair.

Then in a sort of radio stream of consciousness segment we somehow got into the tangled romantic/sexual lives of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy.

Suddenly, I felt like I was on that TMZ TV show where the “editor” (above) with the oversized soda cup is grilling his “reporters” about the latest Hollywood scandal.

I tried to explain on the radio program that I’ve always thought movie stars and sports celebrities exist in an entirely separate realm from the rest of us.

Christopher Walken put it well once when he told an interviewer that he believes he has spent most of his life on “planet show business” and that things are done differently there.

The show biz lifestyle and its excesses don’t change much as time passes, just the names of the players.

Every two or three years, I like to re-read Richard Condon’s brilliant Hollywood satire “The Ecstasy Business” because it is so funny and because so little that is essential about celebrities has changed since the book was published in 1967.

Condon is best known for the 1959 novel that launched his career — “The Manchurian Candidate” — but before he became a popular novelist he spent more than 20 years working as a publicist for a number of different Hollywood studios, including Disney.

Condon drew on his PR experience to craft a portrait of an out-of-control movie star named Tynan Bryson who could easily exist in today’s celebrity culture.

Bryson is so popular that he wants 100 percent of the gross of his pictures and the star is so sexually insatiable that he has never been able “to remain faithful for more than seventeen hours.”

Condon writes: “Despite his former wife’s celebrated allegation, ‘Scratch an actor and you’ll find an actress’…Bryson had slept with all but one of his leading ladies, the discard having turned out to be a female impersonator, the best-kept secret in worldwide show biz.”

“Bryson sometimes tried to seize reality, but he had to grasp upward beyond his reach through the quicksand of his existence,” Condon says of his fictional movie star. “(Bryson) wanted to be what he played, not for his art, for he was not a Method actor, but because according to the laws of being a hero in an American motion picture, he must always win.”

“The Ecstasy Business” has been out of print for many years, but Condon’s vision of celebrity madness remains as fresh as today’s TMZ or Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood Daily.

Pedro Almodovar has been making great films for such a long time that he is starting to be taken for granted by critics and moviegoers. The shock now would be if he made a dud.

For more than two decades, the Spanish director has put out one memorable movie after another, and his new picture, “Broken Embraces,” maintains his consistently high level of achievement.

The 60-year-old native of La Mancha made his first feature film in 1980 (“Pepi, Luci, Born y otras chicas del monton”), but he didn’t really break through internationally until “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” opened in 1988.

The success of that movie at the New York Film Festival and in art houses across the country led to the U.S. re-release of two very strong earlier Almodovar movies — “Law of Desire” (1987) and “Matador” (1986).

Since the late 1980s, Almodovar has won two Academy Awards — an original screenplay prize for “Talk to Her” (2002) and the best foreign language film Oscar for “All About My Mother” (1999) — and delivered such modern masterpieces as “Volver” (2006) and “Bad Education” (2004).

Almodovar has also advanced the international careers of the Spanish actors Antonio Banderas and Javier Bardem — who received early career boosts from the filmmaker— and, of course, Penelope Cruz, who has been the director’s muse in recent years. Cruz was a rare recipient of a best actress Oscar nomination for a foreign language performance for her work in “Volver” and she stars in “Broken Embraces.”

Almodovar has resisted the temptation to make movies in the United States (Jane Fonda tried and failed to lure him here for an English version of “Women on the Verge” 20 years ago). The director’s dedication to his work and his ability to explore new and personal material in each movie sets him apart from American peers like Martin Scorsese and Brian DePalma who have been spinning their wheels since they moved into the Hollywood mainstream.

“Broken Embraces” digs into some of the same themes as earlier Almodovar pictures — the difference between moviemaking and “real life,” the dangers of obsessive romantic love — but the gay filmmaker examines heterosexual relationships with a new depth and seriousness.

In an age when global corporations have absorbed much of the international filmmaking scene — stripping a lot of “foreign” films of their regional identity — Almodovar has managed to continue making films his way in his country for more than two decades. His persistence is as impressive as his artistry.

(“Broken Embraces” is playing at the Sunshine Cinemas and the Lincoln Plaza in Manhattan. The film is set to open in Connecticut later this month.)

Tarell Alvin McCraney is only a few years out of the Yale School of Drama, but he has scored one of the major New York stage hits of the season with “The Brother/Sister Plays” at the Public Theater.

The size and ambition of the two-evening, three-play piece recall Tony Kushner’s 1990s landmark double-header “Angels in America,” but McCraney’s voice and fluid mix of realism and stage poetry are all his own.

The show which was supposed to close Dec. 13 has been extended a week and I urge you to get into the city to see it during the next three weeks (although I have a hunch we have not seen the last of these plays if “Brother/Sister” does not get a second extension at the Public).

One of the most immediately appealing facets of the production is that it is purely theatrical.

Unlike too many other new plays in Manhattan, McCraney’s work could never be mistaken for a film or TV try-out script — the material would have to be completely reworked to be adapted to another medium.

McCraney (below right) takes us into the lives and aspirations of a large group of people living in and around a housing project in Louisiana in what the writer calls the “distant present.”

The play opens with Oya (Kianne Muschett) making a name for herself as a high school track star. A white college scout offers the girl a college scholarship, but she doesn’t want to leave her seriously ill mother. The scout cautions her that the offer might not still be on the table in a year’s time.

Through Oya and her family and friends we enter a vibrant, surprising and funny culture that would be closed to most of us in real life. McCraney keeps the characters and story real but uses an interesting device to connect us to the show — the actors tell us their stage directions before they speak their dialogue.

A device that could be alienating in a lesser writer’s hands draws us in closer to the story and the remarkable cast of actors who are telling it.

The three plays are divided into two different parts. “In the Red and Brown Water” is a whole evening unto itself — “Part 1” — and the other two plays (“The Brothers Size” and “Marcus: or the Secret of Sweet”) are presented as “Part 2.”

McCraney’s talent has already been recognized outside the United States — he is the Royal Shakespeare Company’s international writer in residence. 

(For complete schedule and ticketing information on “The Brother/Sister Plays” go to www.publictheater.org)

Bridie Clark’s charming new novel about life in Manhattan’s best zipcodes — “The Overnight Socialite” (Weinstein Books) — is powered by a simple but clever premise: moving the plot and the characters of “My Fair Lady” from long-ago London to contemporary New York City.

We meet the Eliza Doolittle stand-in — aspiring designer Lucy Jo Ellis — at a crisis point.

The lower-middle-class Middle American has been slaving anonymously in Manhattan for a rather nasty designer named Nola Sinclair.

When Lucy is handed an invite to Sinclair’s big show at the Park Avenue Armory, the poor girl thinks she’s been asked to see the show — instead Lucy is expected to work as a cater-waiter with no hope of making the personal connections that might help her career.

A serving disaster by Lucy disrupts the show, and gets her fired by an enraged Nola. The friendless (and soon to be penniless) young woman heads out into the rain where she encounters her Henry Higgins: the rich and handsome anthropologist Wyatt Hayes.

Hayes is getting tired of the social scene — and has just dumped his PR-addict socialite girlfriend Cornelia — and he sees a terrific book project in the drenched and hopeless Lucy. Transform the soggy nobody into a beautiful and charming socialite in time for a big gala in two months at the Metropolitan Museum.

Wyatt makes a bet with his best friend Trip — the Col. Pickering of “The Overnight Socialite” — and we are off on a fast-paced, surprising and very entertaining glimpse into the frenzied lives of rich women in Manhattan’s fast lane.

Unlike Eliza — a poor flower girl who became Henry’s powerless pawn — Lucy has a good reason to agree to the deal. She wants to use Wyatt’s experiment as a way of getting her fashion designs known by the rich and famous people she could never hope to rub shoulders with as an unemployed prole.

I think the novel will delight readers with no knowledge of “My Fair Lady,” but for fans of the classic musical a big part of the fun is seeing how Clark uses her source material in a new time and place.

Lucy gets her equivalent of Eliza’s shallow suitor Freddy Eynsford-Hill in the form of Max Fairchild, an heir who has a lot more going for him physically than Freddy did, and Wyatt’s mother is a livelier and funnier version of Mrs. Higgins.

“The Overnight Socialite” cries out to be made into a movie — it has the style and substance that are woefully missing in most contemporary Hollywood romantic comedies.

Some movies start out great and then age like fine wine (the first two “Godfather” pictures fall into this category).

Other movies are dismissed by critics, bomb at the box-office and only become “classics” many years later (i.e. the fate of the wonderfully cynical newspaper drama, “Sweet Smell of Success”).

Then there are the hits and zeitgeist-definers that seem to fall off most people’s radar after a decade or two.

“Easy Rider” fits into that third category. It was a huge commercial and critical hit as soon as it opened in the summer of 1969 and is fondly remembered by baby boomers as a landmark movie of the counterculture era.

But, you don’t hear many film buffs under the age of 40 talk about the drug/road movie as a must-see in their movie education.

Has the Dennis Hopper-Peter Fonda-Jack Nicholson hit turned into a musty relic from a long gone era?

That’s the main question to be answered tonight at the “Martini & a Movie” screening of “Easy Rider” at the Fairfield Theatre Company. I haven’t seen the picture in at least 20 years, so I’m curious to see how it plays now.

There is no denying the historic importance of the film, however, because of the huge impact it had on Hollywood 40 years ago. Over the weekend I re-watched the wonderful IFC documentary, “A Decade Under the Influence” — about the revolutionary American films of the late 1960s and 1970s — and a good chunk is devoted to “Easy Rider.”

The Dennis Hopper-directed movie was one of several key 1969 films that pointed the way to more adult and “relevant” Hollywood films in an era that was still dominated by John Wayne and Doris Day pictures (Wayne had his last big hit, “True Grit,” the same summer that “Easy Rider” opened and, ironically, Hopper played a small role in the comic western.)

The IFC documentary shows how the major studios were in chaos in 1969 due to declining audiences and a series of mega-budgeted musicals that all bombed at the box-office (1969 would end with the opening of the $20 million dud “Hello, Dolly!” which followed hard on the heels of another big bomb musical that fall, “Paint Your Wagon”).

“Easy Rider” cost less than a half million dollars to produce and went on to gross more than $30 million. The older executives at the studios didn’t know what to make of this rock-scored ode to traveling across America high as a kite, but the huge cash return on such a small investment led to a wave of cheaply produced, R-rated pictures that would transform the whole tone of Hollywood fare in the next decade.

“Easy Rider” was also an early example of a Hollywood film scored with pre-existing rock tunes (which made the soundtrack album almost as profitable as the movie).

Without “Easy Rider” and “Midnight Cowboy” (another oddball, X-rated 1969 hit that would win the best picture Oscar in the spring of 1970), many of the classic movies made in the 1970s would never have seen the light of day.

As Hopper says, laughing, in the IFC documentary, “Since I had directed a movie, that must mean anyone could!”

(The Fairfield Theatre Company is at 70 Sanford St. in Fairfield Center. Doors will open for the free “Martini & a Movie” screening at 7 p.m. tonight. “Easy Rider” will be shown at 8 p.m. and will be followed by a discussion with Westport novelist and historian Lawrence Goldstone. For more information, visit www.fairfieldtheatre.org)

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.