Joe's View

The story of exploitation filmmaker Roger Corman — and the big breaks he gave to some now-major directors and actors — has been told in many books and Hollywood documentaries.

But no one has told the story as well or with as much emotion as director Alex Stapleton in the 2011 documentary “Corman’s World,” which has just debuted on DVD.

Through the 1950s and 1960s, Corman ground out B-movies designed primarily for young drive-in audiences.

The producer-director made hot rod movies, Edgar Allen Poe adaptations and sci-fi thrillers — anything he could serve up cheaply and with the potential for a lurid advertising campaign.

Most of the Corman films are unwatchable now, but he holds an honored place in Hollywood history for giving big early breaks to directors such as Francis Coppola, Martin Scorsese and Jonathan Demme, and actors like Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, Pam Grier and Bruce Dern.

The clips in “Corman’s World” from “Bloody Mama,” “The Trip” (below), “Wild Angels” and the rest are of the so-bad-they’re good variety, but the documentary gets its real power from the high caliber of the interview subjects who clearly still believe they owe Corman a lot for helping to launch their careers.

Nicholson gives a terrific interview in which he laughs about how quickly and cheaply movies like “The Terror” and “Little Shop of Horrors” were made, but then bursts into tears when he tries to express his gratitude to Corman.

Stapleton supplies us with a truly happy ending when we see Corman and his wife Julie at the Oscars a few years ago where the producer received an honorary award for his contributions to the industry.

If I was asked to pick the most unjustly neglected film of the past decade, I would probably cite the 2004 Jonathan Glazer picture “Birth” which has remained off most people’s radar despite a strong cult following.

The British critic David Thomson hosted the film in 2010 when the New York Film Festival asked him to sponsor a recent under-heralded title, but it was far from a hot ticket. The movie features one of the finest performances Nicole Kidman has ever given, but “Birth” was such a financial flop and so divisive critically that she didn’t receive an Oscar nomination for it.

It was only with the passage of time — and cable and video screenings — that “Birth” began to attract a growing cult of admirers, including David Thomson.

The drama about reincarnation opened to some very strong reviews (some terrible ones, too), but did not deliver the “Sixth Sense”-style supernatural thriller that early multiplex audiences expected. The box-office returns were so bad that the film was gone before it had time to find an appreciative audience.

There are tragic elements in “Birth,” but no horror or violence, so many of the people who saw the picture in its opening weekend dismissed it as boring or wildly improbable.

The commercial problem with this quite remarkable film is that it treats a supernatural experience with deadly seriousness — the upper class New York woman Anna played by Nicole Kidman has to confront the idea that the soul of her late husband has returned a decade after his death in the body of a 10-year-old boy, Sean (Cameron Bright).

Anna is still grieving but has agreed to marry Joseph (Danny Huston), who has been after her for years.

Jonathan Glazer wrote the original screenplay with Milo Addica and Jean-Claude Carriere (the latter writer worked on the 1972 Luis Bunuel classic, “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie”).

“Birth” combines a provocative premise with superb craftsmanship — the movie’s wintry Manhattan looks stunning as shot by Harris Savides and the music by Alexandre Desplat subtly heightens the emotion in many scenes.

What really carries the movie, however, is the brilliant and daring performance by Kidman who makes us believe Anna is in the middle of a hellish dilemma — the man she adored and lost has come back in the form of a 10-year-old boy.

If you go on the IMDB site, there are absurd claims that “Birth” becomes a form of “kiddie porn” in the scenes depicting Anna’s growing realization that her husband has returned as a pre-teen.

The contact we see between Anna and Sean is unsettling but not due to any sexual subtext — we are unnerved because Kidman makes us believe what her character believes and we can see that there is no rational way out of the situation.

The wintry look and the extended close-ups of Kidman are reminiscent of the work of Ingmar Bergman who thought the human face was just about the most interesting thing you can look at in a movie and who therefore gave us up-close-and-very-personal views of Liv Ullmann, Bibi Andersson and all of those other great Swedish actresses he worked with.

In this age of lightning-fast cutting, and movies that use actors as expensive props, it is such a pleasure to see Kidman have the chance to use the camera as a tool and to have so many close-up oppportunities. There is an incredible sequence early on in which Anna and Joseph arrive at the opera late and the camera moves in for a tight shot of Kidman’s face that is held for a few minutes so that we can watch Anna’s dawning realization that her husband might be back in a new form.

Last year, I came across a very sharp assessment of the film from Chicago blogger Nick Davis, who wrote, “So how does a movie like Birth still get made? The auteurist formal control of the movie, awash with directorial signatures at every level and in every nook, feels anachronistic in itself, redolent of an emotional drift that hasn’t much been felt much in American movies since ‘Five Easy Pieces’ or ‘The King of Marvin Gardens.’”

“…Alexandre Desplat’s roiling, sonorous score, the most beautiful thing heard in years of movies, ebbs and rolls with a confidence to match its beauty, as if movies have been scored this way forever…And the script, which came to such grief among so many critics, resembles nothing so much as those gorgeously stuck, impacted stories of Henry James, like ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ or ‘The Altar of the Dead.’ Does the film take itself too seriously? Does it admit too little about too much? Maybe, but such bold and gorgeous reticence is a rare gift.”

Director Jill Andresevic delivers a classy variation on reality television in her documentary, “Love Etc.” debuting tonight at 8 p.m. on the Oprah Winfrey Network.

Andresevic spent a year tracking five big city love stories — from an elderly Brooklyn couple who have been married for a half century (below) to two high school seniors worried about college separating them (above).

Because of the cross section of classes and occupations we get in the film, “Love Etc.” is as much about the continuing melting pot of New York City as it is about love.

In putting the film together, Andresevic clearly spent a lot of time coming up with people who would illustrate the amazing variety of lifestyles in the city. The high school students are very well-heeled — he lives in a SoHo loft, she lives on the Upper East Side — but the elderly Brooklyn couple is just scraping by.

We also follow two very different single men — a straight construction worker in Queens who is divorced but has custody of his two teenage children, and the gay stage director Scott Ellis, who decided to have a child by a surrogate despite the absence of any long-term partner in his life.

The two single men plotlines are perhaps the most interesting because they are about guys looking for but not finding romantic love who instead channel much of their time and energy into parenting.

The construction worker searches for interesting women on the Internet dating services but finds a better match through his teenage son — the mother of one of the boy’s friends.

“Love Etc.” never tells us what goes wrong between these two — the woman simply disappears from Ethan’s life without any explanation — a development that will probably annoy fans of the let-it-all-hang-out school of reality television.

Scott Ellis gives the documentary some show biz razzle dazzle when friends like Julie White and Debra Monk turn up in backstage glimpses of the shows Ellis was directing while waiting for his surrogate to give birth. Whatever was going on in Ellis’ love/sex life during the year is kept off-screen as we watch him contemplate the challenges of single gay parenthood.

Nothing tragic happens in “Love Etc.” — the one couple that breaks up remains friends and the medical problems of the elderly couple eventually fade into the background — so it is perfect feel-good entertainment for the lead-up to Valentine’s Day.

Some will say Andresevic sees her people and the city they live in through rose-colored glasses, but it sure beats spending two hours with a bunch of shrieking, narcissistic reality TV harpies.

Something very special is going on at The Flea Theater in downtown Manhattan between now and Feb. 26.

The wonderful resident company at the Flea — The Bats — is presenting a five-hour piece called “These Seven Sicknesses” that compresses and updates all seven surviving plays of Sophocles.

The spellbinding performance of the plays by a super-energetic and charismatic company of actors would be more than enough to thrill any theatergoer, but The Flea and director Ed Sylvanus Iskandar have added a second level to the evening by having the cast serve food and drinks during the two intermissions.

Iskandar has also asked the actors to interact personally with audience members during breaks — not in a pushy way, but in the friendly manner of a cocktail party where there are a lot of interesting new people you’d like to meet.

The approach is spelled out in notes that accompany the playbill: “Using the intervals necessary within (Sean) Graney’s marathon play, Ed means to level the playing field between artist and audience by ‘staging’ opportunities for artist and audience to interact, first of all, as friends.”

“Over the evening, his intention asks each audience member to be re-cast as guest and allows each participating performer to take on the additional role of host. With dinner, drinks, and dessert to facilitate these transformations, Ed hopes spending an evening will become as much about the party as it is about the play.”

I’m sure there are uptight people out there who might bristle at the notion of any actor breaking the fourth wall and engaging in conversation, but patrons of the Flea are used to seeing the young actors handling tickets and the bar out front, and enjoying plays in the two intimate performance spaces that often involve up close and personal contact with the cast.

What Iskandar has encouraged The Bats to do before the show and between acts is not some hokey audience-involvement scheme, but a wonderful way to appreciate actors as individual personalities and then to watch their transformation on stage into Sophocles’ larger-than-life characters.

The play is still the thing at The Flea — Iskandar and playwright Sean Graney and The Bats make Sophocles as vivid and as exciting (and as frightening) as the work of any contemporary downtown writer — but the party aspect makes it an experience you won’t find at any other Manhattan theater. Don’t miss it.

(For performance and ticket information, go to www.theflea.org)

Dori Berinstein used her status as a stage producer to make the very revealing 2007 documentary “Show Business” which follows one stormy season on Broadway.

The movie only received limited distribution, but the DVD is superior to the theatrical version because of the high quality of the many deleted scenes on the disc.

Berinstein used the classic William Goldman book, “The Season,” as her inspiration.

Back in the days before he was an Oscar-winning screenwriter, Goldman decided to follow one season on Broadway in detail as the framework for a book about the inner workings of the Great White Way.

Like Berinstein, Goldman had an insider’s advantage — he had worked on shows with his playwright brother James Goldman — so he was able to go places and to talk with people unavailable to the average journalist.

Although Goldman’s account of the 1967-1968 season is now, of course, “dated” in terms of finances and trends-of-the-moment, “The Season” remains one of the very best examinations of the inner workings of Broadway (the accounts of the creation of shows such as “Hair” give the book a wonderful time capsule quality, too).

Berinstein chose to follow the 2003-2004 season on Broadway, with a special emphasis on four musicals that debuted then — “Taboo,” “Wicked,” “Avenue Q” and “Caroline, or Change.”

The film takes us to rehearsals, out-of-town try-outs (“Wicked” had a pre-Broadway run in San Francisco), opening night parties, and serves up interviews with some very excited, very anxious theater artists and the critics who would judge them.

Berinstein lucked into the tremendous drama of Rosie O’Donnell personally producing “Taboo” (below) — and losing $10 million of her own money in the process — as well as one of the biggest Tony upsets in modern history when the underdog show “Avenue Q” took the top prize from “Wicked” (above).

The documentary reminds us that “Wicked” opened to mediocre reviews and was not viewed as a blockbuster-in-the-making by theater insiders.

One of the most amusing aspects of the film is the way it exposes the cluelessness of the New York theater press when it comes to predicting hits and flops and forecasting the Tony winners.

Berinstein shows us several restaurant gatherings of writers such as Michael Riedel of The New York Post, Charles Isherwood of The New York Times and Linda Winer of Newsday who predict that “Avenue Q” will fail to make it on Broadway — after transfering from the off-Broadway Vineyard Theatre downtown — and who dismiss “Wicked” as an over-produced bore. Then when Tony season arrives they all predict that “Wicked” will win the best musical prize!

The film packs an amazing amount of material in, from the recording of the original cast album of “Wicked” to videotapes showing us the earliest backers auditions for “Avenue Q” — almost a decade before it opened on Broadway — when it was also being considered as a cable television series.

The extra footage on the DVD gives us a much fuller account of the sad failure of the off-Broadway hit “Caroline or Change” to survive on Broadway, as well as interviews with several stars who didn’t make the theatrical cut from Donna Murphy to John Lithgow (who shares a poignant anecdote about the early closing of “Sweet Smell of Success”).

“One for the Money” opened Friday with two big strikes against it — the distribution company’s decision not to press-screen the film in advance of its premiere and the presence of Katherine Heigl in the starring role.

The absence of critics’ screenings before a movie debuts — particularly something that “opens wide” as “One for the Money” did on more than 2,000 screens — gives a film an aura of damaged goods that usually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy among annoyed reviewers.

Katherine Heigl is an actress with talent and considerable camera appeal who has developed one of the most poisonous reputations in show business — deserved or not.

She broke a cardinal rule of her industry by publicly criticizing aspects of two major projects — the series that launched her career, “Grey’s Anatomy,” and the film that made her — for a time — a movie star, “Knocked Up.”

What Heigl said about both vehicles was true, but nevertheless gave her the reputation of being “difficult” and “diva-like” and…you fill in the negative adjectives. She is hated by people within the TV and movie industries and that contempt has filtered down to the press that covers and reviews movies.

You might piss off some very powerful people with a negative review for a highly touted Meryl Streep or George Clooney picture, but no one is going to get hostile feedback in 2012 for blasting Heigl.

The actress has been further damaged by appearing in several ill-advised — to say the least — movie vehicles that have given her critics lots of ammunition and weakened her box office clout.

The reviews that began appearing over the weekend for “One for the Money” were, predictably, bad, but the film got a B- rating from exit polling of moviegoers and came in at number three in the box-office rankings with a gross of over $11 million (as Hollywood pundit Nikki Finke put it, “It came on stronger than the disaster which Hollywood thought it would be”).

What’s sad about all of this bad marketing and bad buzz is that “One for the Money” is faithful to the best-selling 1994 novel by Janet Evanovich about a young Trenton woman — Stephanie Plum — who reluctantly takes a job at her cousin’s bail bond company.

Stephanie surprises her family and friends by becoming good at “skip tracing” (bringing in people who haven’t paid their bail and have failed to show up for their first court date).

Evanovich has gone on to write 15 more novels about Stephanie and the people in her personal life and her dangerous career — the books have been huge bestsellers and inspired many other women writers to break out of the confines of “cozy” mysteries in favor of much sexier, funnier material.

Series mystery fiction about women seems to scare off Hollywood, however.

Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta books have been in various stages of “development” for more than 20 years (when I interviewed Demi Moore for “A Few Good Men” in 1992 she spent much of the time talking excitedly about her company producing the first Scarpetta book as a film).

The genre took a huge hit in 1991 with the release of “V.I.Warshawski” based on the great Chicago detective character created by Sara Paretsky in a series of wonderful books. The movie mashed together the plots of several Paretsky stories, featured a woefully miscast Kathleen Turner in the lead, and horrified fans of the novels who watched a would-be franchise go down in flames.

You can debate Heigl as Stephanie — I thought she was convincing enough as a working-class New Jersey woman. But what really impressed me about the movie was the loving care that went into the casting of all the people around Stephanie (who could have stepped right out of the pages of Evanovich’s first novel) and the way that the working class characters and settings were presented without a trace of condescension (which is also true of the book).

We are so used to Hollywood telling us that the only life worth living is a deluxe one that it’s refreshing to see a film that recognizes the value in the lives of the other 99 percent.

The movie Stephanie lives in precisely the sort of apartment Evanovich’s character could really afford, dresses the way that pretty, stylish working class women do, and has made up in street smarts for what she might lack in conventional education.

“One for the Money” sticks close to the plot of the original novel and respects the characters a very funny and very talented writer created, and for that it deserves to be saluted.

Warner Archive has just released a DVD-on-demand version of the 1960 comedy that gave Jane Fonda her first screen role — “Tall Story” — and while it by no means qualifies as a good movie, as a Hollywood and pop culture time capsule it’s fascinating.

Fonda plays June Ryder, a freshman who has enrolled at Custer College for only one reason — to seduce and marry basketball star Ray Blent (Anthony Perkins).

In the opening scene June explains to two of Ray’s professors — played by Ray Walston and Marc Connelly — that she is a home ec major, but wants to enroll in their very challenging science and ethics courses simply to be near Ray.

When the profs ask June why she is in college if she isn’t really interested in studying, she tells them, “I’m in college for the same reason every girl goes to college — if she’s honest — to get married.”

“Tall Story” was directed by Joshua Logan who did some of the prestige films of the 1950s — “Picnic” and “South Pacific” among them.

According to a few film scholars, the director took on this second tier assignment largely as a favor — to launch the screen career of the daughter of his old pal Henry Fonda.

The movie has the look of a rather low-budget affair — shot in black-and-white in generic Southern California settings.

And while the movie was based on a fairly recent Broadway hit by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, “Tall Story” looks and sounds like a campus tale that might have been sitting in a drawer at Warner Bros. since the 1930s. The students sing as they carry conquering hero Ray around campus and while they don’t wear raccoon coats, we do see one group of campus cut-ups exiting a Model T that pulls up at a pep rally.

The star casting is the real fascination of “Tall Story” — watching Fonda in such a retrograde role and seeing Anthony Perkins in the film he made just before Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” changed his image, turning his career upside down (he went from being a teen heartthrob to being typecast as a wacko).

It’s fun to see some good actors in the supporting roles, including Anne Jackson and Murray Hamilton (the latter would be part of the cast of the revolutionary 1967 film “The Graduate”).

“Tall Story” also has some oddball delights, such as seeing Tom Laughlin show off considerable light comedy skills as an oversexed married college student. A decade later, Laughlin would become famous for scowling his way through the “Billy Jack” pictures.

“Tall Story” now is startling and amusing as a demonstration of the vast changes Hollywood and Jane Fonda would go through between 1960 and 1969 — by the end of the decade, Fonda would be an Oscar nominee for “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” and one of the most controversial political activists in the country.

Tonight’s “Lifetime Original Movie” — “The Pregnancy Project” airing at 8 p.m. — is a bizarre based-on-fact soap opera about a Washington State high school student who pretended to be pregnant for her senior class project.

Gaby Rodriguez (played by Alexa Vega) said she wanted to explore the treatment and stereoptyping of high school girls who get pregnant.

Rather than do research and interview other students, however, she fooled all but one of her friends and many members of her own family into believing she was actually pregnant.

It’s a story for the age of social networks and reality television where people are so eager to be famous — or notorious — that they often don’t stop to think about the downside of narcissism and self-generated sensationalism.

Gaby’s stunt caused her to lose friends — and who knows what the parents and family of her boyfriend thought of the ruse to which he was a party? — but it also won her a guest shot on “Today,” a Simon & Schuster book deal, and now tonight’s Lifetime dramatization.

Perhaps we are all too quick to judge girls who get pregnant in high school, and what the future might hold for them and their children, but in some scenes Gaby carries on as if she should be congratulated for not thinking about birth control (and/or insisting that her boyfriend wear a condom).

Is it wrong for the people around the high school student to think that her young life has just gotten much more complicated — and difficult — and that she might not be able to juggle a job and college and caring for her kid at the age of 18?

The Lifetime movie would have us believe that a lot of the hostility Gaby faces is just mean girl-style nastiness and, of course, we get to share her obnoxious morally superior stance because — unlike most of the people around her — we are in on the trick she is pulling.

It’s hard to believe that Gaby’s teachers and the school administration would go along with her idea and its potential to cause the girl so much emotional harm. Gaby is, in a sense, on an undercover spy mission in her high school — something that could have disrupted her own studies and charged the atmopshere around her.

“The Pregnancy Project” is slickly produced and well acted by the entire cast but I spent the whole movie wondering what Gaby really expected to learn from her senior project and why the school leadership went along with what she did to her friends, family and acquaintances.