Pauline Kael On "Why Movies Are So Bad"....and (Separately) On Psycho
In another thread discussing Pauline Kael, swanstep found this:
@ecarle. I just found Kael incidentally reviewing Alien in her 'Why Movies are So Bad The Numbers' essay:
It would be very convincing to say that there's no hope for movies—that audiences have been so corrupted by television and have become so jaded that all they want are noisy thrills and dumb jokes and images that move along in an undemanding way, so they can sit and react at the simplest motor level.
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I found two books that followed up on Kael's discussion above (with rebuttal from a movie executive) and in the same book, I found Kael's most detailed reaction to Psycho( a movie that came out long before she became a critic; it was a rememberance.
I got these from an anthology of Kael writings (mainly from the New Yorker) called "For Keeps," but the opening salvo is from former United Artists executive Steven Bach, in his book "Final Cut" (1985) about how Michael Cimino's "Heaven's Gate" almost sank that studio and lost Bach(and other execs) their jobs:
From Final Cut by Steven Bach:
"I pulled the shiny green folder from my script bag. Inside (my secretary) had clipped an article two or three weeks old from the New Yorker: Pauline Kael, answering her own question "Why Are the Movies So Bad?" with "The Numbers." Oversimplifying every step of the way, she trashed the conglomerates ..that owned the movie companies. Her sweeping denunciations seemed unlikely to lighten the mood of the meeting(with execs) I was attending. ..unless I was interested in letting Pauline Kael guide corporate policy. The strength of Kael's argument, possibly even in its correctness, precluded my using it."
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Though this writing in some ways attacked Kael ,it in other ways supported it. So when KAEL wrote HER review of this book ("Final Cut" -- and I recommend it), she both smacked Steven Bach around AND praised him a bit. Her final paragraph in the review:
BEGIN:
"I admire the senstitivity and taste that Steven Bach shows in this book, but these are not the qualities that make a studio head. Whether artists have self-discipline or not, executives are supposed to be disciplined people with the strength and the smarts to impose discipline on others when its needed. That's what they draw their astronomical salaries for."
So both Bach and Kael dumped on each other while also showing some respect to them. That's the way it should be.
In her Final Cut review, Kael also writes this: "The book is a short course in the realpolitick of how projects come to be accepted:; it is set in a cutthroat business where betrayal is the rule, not the exception."
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THAT quote makes more sense when you realize that Kael could not get ANY of her projects accepted in her Paramount job, because they brought her out TO reject her.
BTW, the funniest moment in Final Cut is when UA finally sends a tough lawyer out to the Heaven's Gate location to tell "artiste director" Michael Cimino that he will be PERSONALLY responsible for cost overruns. Cimino says he can finish the movie on time "now" -- and yells out "Ask Clint!" He means Clint Eastwood, who let Cimino direct "Thunderbolt and Lightfoot" but told him near the end of production: "there are three days left on the production schedule. But I'm leaving tonight. So you gotta film three days in one." Which Cimino did and could NOW do on Heaven's Gate, sure. The lawyer's response is brutal: "We are sad to see that it took our studio months to convince you to do what Mr. Eastwood got you to do in a day."
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