I despise QT's idea that all artists are subject to "diminishing returns."
That's been my basic line about QT's views on this topic too. Ultimately there's age-ism involved here: QT has definitely got in his head the idea that directing movies after you're about 60 (the age when Hitch made Psycho and Wilder made The Fortune Cookie) is a bad idea and he's often used the phrase 'limp dick' to characterize his point. Allow some slippage for better health care etc. and perhaps the moral QT wants to draw is that once you are 60 you should be looking to wrap up your directing career with a final film within the next few years. QT is currently 61.
As personal policy there's nothing wrong with that. For example, it seems to have worked out well for Ingmar Bergman. His final film was Fanny and Alexander (1982), a masterpiece, when he was 64, and he busied himself for the next 25 years with writing scripts for a bunch of people including his son to direct, as well as directing lots of theater and TV (some of which even got theatrical releases around the world, most notably Saraband (2003)).
But taken as a general prescription QT's policy seems spectacularly stupid, and you don't have to 'go foreign' to see this. Altman was 60 in 1985. His big 'comeback' film, The Player (1992), didn't drop until he was 67, and his post-75 output included Gosford Park, The Company, and Prairie Home Companion, all very good to excellent. Sure, Altman made some pretty bad movies all though his career, including a final down period after Short Cuts and before Gosford Park, but, *my* policy, who cares about those (bad stuff just gets forgotten about)? I *need* (the world needs) the eggs of his good ones right up to the end.
But maybe this doesn't matter. QT may be making a mistake to try to tie off his directing career the way Bergman did, but like Bergman he plans to stay creatively active so any diamonds he later turns up will make it into the world somehow.
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roger1 (3703)
7 months ago
I despise QT's idea that all artists are subject to "diminishing returns."
That's been my basic line about QT's views on this topic too. Ultimately there's age-ism involved here: QT has definitely got in his head the idea that directing movies after you're about 60 (the age when Hitch made Psycho and Wilder made The Fortune Cookie) is a bad idea
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I think, yet again, that QT seems to have "locked in" on a handful of American directors who sort of ran out of gas in the 60s and 70s and..in focussing on about 20%of directors(Hitchcock, Ford, Hawks, and Wilder were true giants in their time) forgot about the other 80 percent.of directors
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and he's often used the phrase 'limp dick' to characterize his point.
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There is 1972 movie about a US Senator race in California called "The Candidate." At a certain point in the story, Young Candidate" Robert Redford's handlers tell him that the hidden message of his campaign against the incumbent, a much older but handsome man played by Don Porter(TV suave) should be: "the other guy can't get it up." Redford reacts with distaste -- "that's what you think, huh?" -- but it remains a very tough gauge of male power the extent to which physiology can affect potence as a politician. Or a movie director. (And hey...Viagara!)
So you've got QT insulting people about age AND sexual prowess. Nice going there!
(By the way, I catalogued all the QT movies I LOVE, and WHY I love them -- to counteract the fact that in his interviews, he gives every reason to REJECT those movies. I can't. The writing is too special, the films are too entertaining even as they have a very brutal undertow to them_
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roger1 (3703)
7 months ago
Allow some slippage for better health care etc. and perhaps the moral QT wants to draw is that once you are 60 you should be looking to wrap up your directing career with a final film within the next few years. QT is currently 61.
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Well, only he knows how he feels physically now that he is that age.
I think that Clint Eastwood's career of dircting across his 70s, 80s and into his 90s actually reveals something a bit embarrassing: how EASY movie directing may well be.
You sit in a chair. You watch OTHER people light the set, take on the camera work, ACT . Usually, someone ELSE wrote the script. You say action. You say cut. You're done.
I will never forget some critic's stray line in a column around 1973 that I read. The auteur era was peaking -- not only with old masters like Hitchcock and Ford, but a TON of "new auteurs" like Coppola, Friedkin, Bogdo and a young Marty Scorsese.
And this critic wrote "Exactly how hard IS it to direct a movie, anyway? You photograph some actors and some scenery."
Maybe yes, maybe no. But if you can do it at 90...not THAT hard.
I recall seeing Eastwood's averted-airline-disaster movie "Sully" a few years back(starring Tom Hanks in white hair.) The film had many impressive CGI shots of a plane crashing(in a dream) and of course, the crash in the Hudson River that everyone survived and I thought -- "did Clint Eastwood REALLY direct these CGI action sequences?" No he probably just signed off on the Silicon Valley work.
OK. that's the "directing isn't that hard" argument. But on the other hand clearly great directors have directed GREAT films by properly vetting the script, casting right, working with actors well, overseeing(if you are Hitchocck, Scorsese, or DePalma) some great shots and camera movements -- it IS a profession that can create popular art for the ages and maybe it IS good to be younger and healthier when you do it.
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roger1 (3703)
7 months ago
QT has definitely got in his head the idea that directing movies after you're about 60 (the age when Hitch made Psycho and Wilder made The Fortune Cookie) is a bad idea
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Revisiting that phrase from a different angle.
Writer-director Cameron Crowe(Jerry McGuire, Almost Famous) tried to do a "Hitchocck/Truffaut" book with his favorite writer-director, Billy Wilder. It was OK, but Wilder was much older than Hitchcock when he did the interviews and hence a lot less sharp in memory and phrasing.
Still I remember Wiilder saying of The Fortune Cookie: "That was my the beginning of my downfall, right there.I was downhill from there."
The year was 1966. The same year Hitchcock made Torn Curtain which was sort of HIS downfall start. The Fortune Cookie won an Oscar (Supporting) for Walter Matthau. Torn Curtain had big stars Paul Newman and Julie Andrews. And the NEXT movies that Wilder and Hitchcock made (Sherlock Holmes/Topaz) did NOT have major stars and indeed portended some decline(but not entire decline. There are fine scenes in Sherlock Holmes and in Topaz, and fine scores for both.)
What's more impressive to me is that both Hitchcock and Wilder kept getting funding for movies. It was easier for Hitchcock: Lew Wasserman protected Hitchcock at Universal and funding was allways available for a film --IF Wasserman greenlighted the idea and Hitchcock kept the budget low. Wilder had to struggle -- it was, indeed, Lew Wasserman who ENDED a Universal contract with Billy Wilder after The Front Page(which, I've read, actually made some money.)
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roger1 (3703)
7 months ago
But here is the interesting thing I read: in Billy Wilder's case, a famous but aging producer named Walter Mirsch(of The Mirsch Brothers and The Mirsch Corporation which had produced big movies like West Side Story and In the Heat of the Night) NEEDED Billy Wilder to keep making movies --whether good or bad -- so as to pick up a "producer's fee" and pay the mortgage. In short, these aging directors in decline were "kept afloat" and making movies by guys who NEEDED them to make movies so...they could earn fees themselves.
But I guess Buddy Buddy -- after Fedora and The Front Page and Avanti and Sherlock Holmes -- was finally a "last straw" and Billy Wilder never got greenlighted again.
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roger1 (3703)
7 months ago
But taken as a general prescription QT's policy seems spectacularly stupid, and you don't have to 'go foreign' to see this.
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Interesting: the "don't have to go foreign" angle, swanstep. On the one hand...I guess not. On the other , I guess I was just sort of wondering if it is harder to survive in the cutthroat world of big budget Hollywood.
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Altman was 60 in 1985. His big 'comeback' film, The Player (1992), didn't drop until he was 67, and his post-75 output included Gosford Park, The Company, and Prairie Home Companion, all very good to excellent. Sure, Altman made some pretty bad movies all though his career, including a final down period after Short Cuts and before Gosford Park, but, *my* policy, who cares about those (bad stuff just gets forgotten about)? I *need* (the world needs) the eggs of his good ones right up to the end.
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Yes, but this raises another point: for the most part, ALL of Altman's movies -- less the wide-in-scope Nashville and maybe, MASH - -were small scale, actor-driven movies, "little movies" in production difficulty.
I like to note that the entire movie of Frenzy was probably easier for Hitchcock to direct in 1972 than just the ten-minute Albert Hall sequence in Man Who Knew Too Much '56. He made The Man Who Knew Too Much '56 when he was a younger man and had the stamina to supervise such an intricate sequence. You can throw in the crop duster sequence and the Rushmore sequence (TWO sequences) in NXNW for the same kind of hard work and youthful energy to get those done (and Hitch had to go on location, outdoors to get the crop duster scene on film.)
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roger1 (3703)
7 months ago
Hitchcock seems to have been attracted to Frenzy because its three central set-pieces were small scale and indoors: an office(the murder of Brenda Blaney), a stairwell(the unseen murder of Babs Milligan -- involving a moving camera shot LESS strenuous than the hanging camera following Tony Perkins up the stairs in Psycho) and then -- in a real trick -- an entire sequence inside the storage area of a POTATO TRUCK -- really an enclosed platform on a sound stage.
See, Hitchcock VISIBLY declined from the "big sequences" in Strangers on a TRain(berserk carousel) , The Man Who Knew Too Much 56(Albert Hall), NXNW and..The Birds to.. the minimalism of Frenzy.
And that's noticable . Robert Altman making small scale actors' movies over the decades had less to lose.
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roger1 (3703)
7 months ago
But maybe this doesn't matter. QT may be making a mistake to try to tie off his directing career the way Bergman did, but like Bergman he plans to stay creatively active so any diamonds he later turns up will make it into the world somehow.
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We shall see. If QT writes plays..they won't be as widely seen as his movies. But maybe someone ELSE will buy those plays to make into movies?
His novel of "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" was a fun, different read. He re-wrote entire scenes(Al Pacino's agent warns Rick Dalton about playing TV heavies in HIS OFFICE, not at Musso and Frank's over lunch), added a bunch of new scenes and(as I've noted before) give's Brad Pitt's
Cliff Booth a much more brutal and displeasing back story(a few years as a pimp in Paris, for instance -- as if QT is just riffing on the most outrageous thing he could think of.)
Though QT isn't that much younger than me, I suppose younger people than me will get to see QT take his career to its full closure and then his death. He's not THAT young anymore, so once he makes his "final movie," he better get cracking on those books, plays and TV episodes!
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swanstep (2723)
7 months ago
I think, yet again, that QT seems to have "locked in" on a handful of American directors who sort of ran out of gas in the 60s and 70s
I suspect that that's what happened too, and, to be fair to QT, if you're a big fan of some director (or other artist) to see them suddenly producing genuinely inferior work is shocking, galling, gutting, traumatizing, a betrayal, pick your epithet. My biggest experience of this kind (and from the same period that seems to have burned QT) was with Stanley Donen. As a budding film buff I worshipped Donen but then I got to see my first hot-off-the presses Donen film: Saturn 3 (an ugly, plodding, embarassment). I vividly remember the feeling of a kind of hour-long, full-body-cringe in the cinema. You don't forget that sort of experience. As a result, I couldn't bring myself to pay money for Donen's final film a few years later, 'Blame it on Rio', notwithstanding that it had one of my fave actors, Michael Caine as lead. I did catch BIOR on vhs a few years later, however, and, my God it was awful. While BIOR was more enjoyable and certainly more technically competent than Saturn 3 it was evidently trying to be a kind of late-addition to the wave of middle-aged guy sex-comedies that began with '10' only with a downshift of lust to high-school age/daughters. There's some undeniably luscious teen nudity but it all leaves you feeling pretty icky (and it makes the genuine teen sex-comedies that were around at the time seem pretty innocent by comparison). And if you're there for Donen and Caine you can't help thinking something along the lines of 'What are we doing here?' and 'Thank god I didn't pay real money for this'.
Donen lived for another 30+ years after these twin debacles (most of that happily cohabiting with my ideal woman, Elaine May). It's sad in a way that he didn't direct again except a little TV, but I'm pretty sure that most of Donen's biggest fans were glad that there were no more S3s or BIORs.
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roger1 (3703)
7 months ago
I think, yet again, that QT seems to have "locked in" on a handful of American directors who sort of ran out of gas in the 60s and 70s
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I suspect that that's what happened too, and, to be fair to QT, if you're a big fan of some director (or other artist) to see them suddenly producing genuinely inferior work is shocking, galling, gutting, traumatizing, a betrayal, pick your epithet.
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Take Howard Hawks. His Rio Bravo of 1959 is truly classic in a great way: a laid back, very warm, very upbeat "hang out movie" that takes time to take its Western plot seriously, but plays perhaps better as a buddy comedy(with a buddy woman, Angie Dickinson.) 8 years later, Hawks pretty famously reworked El Dorado into Rio Bravo remake. John Wayne with Robert Mitchum instead of Dean Martin. James Caan instead of Ricky Nelson. Arthur Hunnicutt instead of Walter Brennan -- and it worked AGAIN (but a little more soundstagey, a little less "big.")
Then 3 years later -- Rio Lobo. Wayne again, but the studio wouldn't pay for another star this time. Weirdly, they cast a Mexican actor as a "former Rebel" after the Civil War, and it just didn't work, and the movie seemed(to me at the time I saw it in 1970) terribly basic and derivative. Third time WASN'T a charm. That was Hawks final movie. 1970. Two years before Hitchcock did Frenzy -- with Family Plot 6 years away, too.
One thing I read: Working on Rio Lobo, the aged Hawks lost track of the days (as we all do sometimes) and thought it was Saturday so went to hang out by his pool. But it was really a WEEK DAY ,and the entire cast and crew of Rio Lobo was waiting for Hawks to show.
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roger1 (3703)
7 months ago
My biggest experience of this kind (and from the same period that seems to have burned QT) was with Stanley Donen. As a budding film buff I worshipped Donen but then I got to see my first hot-off-the presses Donen film: Saturn 3 (an ugly, plodding, embarassment). I vividly remember the feeling of a kind of hour-long, full-body-cringe in the cinema. You don't forget that sort of experience.
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Stanley Donen is a great example of QT's theory WORKING. I suppose it is a hit or miss theory -- and having just seen some passionate verbiage AGAINST QT's theory, I won't wallow in the "I told you so" rightness of Donen's career PROVING QT's theory. Perhaps the issue is: "sometimes directors can keep going strong to all ages -- sometimes they cannot."
I think the hidden reason taht modernly directors CAN go on longer -- other than my health rationale -- is they are surrounded by professionals who can make movies LOOK and SOUND great, by CGI that can do anything...its as if a modern movie is a perfectly made contraption which can make ANY director, ANY age, look at least competant.
Stanley Donen was famous for musicals -- co-directed on key occasions. Singin' in the Rain is the big one (with Gene Kelly as co-director and star.) Damn Yankees -- my favorite of 1958 --(with George Abbott) is another. (I'll concede Rain as the much more important classic than Damn Yankees but my Number One for 1952 is High Noon; Singin' in the Rain's probably Number Two that year.)
My favorite Donen movie -- which I have downgraded from Number One to Number Two for 1963 -- is Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn in "the greatest Hitchcock movie Hitchcock never made" -- Charade. (To which Donen angrily replied in the press: "Who says only Alfred Hitchcock can make a mystery-suspense picture?" )In the same interview, Donen noted that he liked North by Northwest ONLY as far as the auction scene. He felt all the Rushmore business went on too long. Nah.
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roger1 (3703)
7 months ago
Charade had a great Peter Stone script and some great stars-to-be supporting Grant and Hepburn: Walter Matthau(soon to be a star), James Coburn(soon to be a slightly lesser star than Matthau), George Kennedy(soon to win an Oscar and do Airport movies.) Actually, Matthau, Coburn AND Kennedy all won Supporting Actor Oscars. (And I've moved Mad Mad World -- my favorite movie of all time as a kid -- to the Number One of 1963 slot. An era long gone. Jonathan Winters!)
Anyway, came the 70's, fond memories of Donen's past work indeed started to be betrayed. For a 1975 period action movie called "Lucky Lady," Donen had Gene Hackman and Burt Reynolds as "buddy stars" with briefly -hot(at the box office) Liza Minnelli in the female lead. It was a jinxed production. George Segal walked off the picture so Hackman had to be paid BIG bucks to come in quickly. The ending was re-shot(Hackman and Reynolds got killed in the original script and that WAS filmed, but they re-shot and brought the boys back to life..) Spielberg, coming off "Jaws" warned Donen not to make "Lucky Lady" at sea, but...no such luck. And frankly, Ann-Margret should have played Minnelli's sexpot role.
But "Lucky Lady" was Singin in the Rain compared to Saturn 3. Just as I have great memories of the movies I LOVED on first viewing, I have harsh memories of a movie like Saturn 3 that I hated on first sight. I recall that aging macho man Kirk Douglas looked too emaciated and saggy(including a naked butt scene) to be bedding sexy co-star Farrah Fawcett(Majors?) I remember an incoherent SciFi plot and terrible production values(I DON"T remember Harvey Keitel in it, but I guess he was.)
And I remember this specific disappointment: The title "Saturn 3" was meant by the studio to suggest a sequel of sorts to the surprise hit "Capricorn One" of 1978. I LOVED Capricorn One for what it was: a non-violent throwback thriller in the North by Northwest tradition, a lot of exciting fun. Saturn 3 brought NONE of that back.
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roger1 (3703)
7 months ago
s a result, I couldn't bring myself to pay money for Donen's final film a few years later, 'Blame it on Rio', notwithstanding that it had one of my fave actors, Michael Caine as lead. I did catch BIOR on vhs a few years later, however, and, my God it was awful.
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Yeah. Michael Caine is one of my favorite actors. He's literally been around in movies for most of my life. I saw Zulu(1964) ON RELEASE. At the drive-in with family. And then we all went to The Ipcress File the next year. I was forbidden to see "Alfie" but my "Caine love" was launched and there he's been across the 60's, the 70's(where he made his great R-rated movie Get Carter), the 80's(where he hung in and won his first Oscasr) the 90s(where he won his second Oscar) the 21st Century (where he got famous as Alfred in Batman movies AND worked with Batman director Chris Nolan all the time in other pictures, as a "lucky charm.".)
Caine is 90 now, yes? He finished one more movie but when he had to back out of Nolan's "Oppenheimer"("Enough's enough," Caine joked to the press) I figured retirement was imminent.
What a career. But it certainly has some bad movies in it. As Caine said at some event "I made all those bad movies for high pay so I could make good movies for free." Jaws 4: The Revenge is the worst I've seen, but I understand Caine also played the bad guy in a Steven Segal movie. That must have been bad.
Which brings us to Blame it On Rio...
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roger1 (3703)
7 months ago
swanstep wrote:
While BIOR was more enjoyable and certainly more technically competent than Saturn 3
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Yes to both...including that "more enjoyable" part. That's what makes BIOR kind of dangerous. Caine IS a great farceur and so was the comic actor playing his more macho friend , Joe Bologna(who was vetoed as Spielberg's first choice for the Roy Scheider role in Jaws.)
The "joke" of Caine having a sexual affair with his best friend's Bologna's daughter and trying to hide it WAS funny, 'cmon...it was. But of course, the age thing created issues.
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it was evidently trying to be a kind of late-addition to the wave of middle-aged guy sex-comedies that began with '10' only with a downshift of lust to high-school age/daughters.
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Note in passing: just as George Segal walked off Lucky Lady forcing Gene Hackman into his part, Segal ALSO walked off 10,..forcing Dudley Moore into his part and making Moore a star for awhile.
Those "walk offs," plus a drug problem, ended Segal's movie star career. as a leading man.
Meanwhile, yeah, I'm guess it got worse and worse to "downshift"(Hah) from the woman in these middle-aged crazy pictrures from being 20-something into a teenager but..ah...that young woman playing the object of Caine's affection? I mean...va va VOOM. This comedy drove a very hard bargain in its fantasy(for men at least): If Marilyn Monroe was a teenager( and a late-age teenager at that) well...and CAME ON to you like that? Well? I guess I'm saying that the actress was carefully chosen for her "adult sexuality" and the excellent Caine was chosen to "reduce the dirty old man factor" with his Nervous Nellie comedy performance and trademark charm(that Cockney accent allowed Caine to get away with a lot.).
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roger1 (3703)
7 months ago
There's some undeniably luscious teen nudity
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Yes, pretty much exclusively (less some Rio beach extras) by the woman -- Michelle was her name -- cast to play the teen seductress.
Folks may forget that playing CAINE's daughter was -- young Demi Moore. But she wore her long tresses strategically over her breasts. It was the OTHER gal who went all the way.
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but it all leaves you feeling pretty icky (and it makes the genuine teen sex-comedies that were around at the time seem pretty innocent by comparison).
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That's the real issue, isn't it? This was a remake of a French film, I think and arguments could be made "When the French do it, its sophisticated and adult..when an American studio tries to do it with mainstream stars...its dirty."
---And if you're there for Donen and Caine you can't help thinking something along the lines of 'What are we doing here?' and 'Thank god I didn't pay real money for this'.
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I watched it- on cable -- indeed because of Caine and Donen -- two favorites over the years. And I certainly thought it was better than Saturn 3. And personally, I just LOVE bossa nova music(hello, Sergio Mendes) and I found the movie quite colorful to look at, with its beautiful beach locations. And hell, Valerie Harper ("Rhoda") showed up. She wouldn't be in a dirty movie, would she?
But damn, it sure instilled then, and instills NOW, some serious unwanted guilt over the nature of the plot. I mean, as the kids say, that young woman was HOT. (Plus, if memory serves, Caine and the 'adult teen" only did it ONCE...he kept fending her off of the rest of the movie.)
Was this Donen's last film? If so, at least he went out with something more adult and sophisticated than Lucky Lady or Saturn 3.
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roger1 (3703)
7 months ago
Donen lived for another 30+ years after these twin debacles (most of that happily cohabiting with my ideal woman, Elaine May).
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Interestingly, before being with Elaine May, Donen was MARRIED to the much younger and extremely hot Yvette Mimieux (who advertised a TV movie called "Hit Lady" in a bikini around the time of the marriage.) I suppose with Yvette as an ex-wife, Donen saw nothing wrong with Blame it on Rio.
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It's sad in a way that he didn't direct again except a little TV, but I'm pretty sure that most of Donen's biggest fans were glad that there were no more S3s or BIORs.
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Well, that's a corollary to "QT's rule," isn't it? If/when they STOP making movies...no embarrassment. And unlike Hitchcock...who literally worked on a movie until less than a year from his death....both Donen and Billy Wilder lived on and enjoyed life for DECADES after making their final film. I guess each had made enough money to retire comfortably -- and with the lovely Elaine May for Donen?(I did not KNOW that - he must have had his charms.)
BTW, three years after the big success of Charade, Donen made ANOTHER "pseudo Hitchocck' movie" -- Arabesque. Like Charade , it had a great Henry Mancini thriller score(with a BETTER credit overture) and it also had two big stars -- Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren -- ALMOST in the Grant/Hepburn tradition. But the supporting cast wasn't as good as in Charade and the 1966 release "went psychedlic" and is hence more dated today. Still' Arabesque is a lot better than Lucky Lady, Saturn 3, or Blame it On Rio.
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