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TOMBSTONE

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In the wake of my friend Kevin Jarre's recent death, I decided, fearfully, to re-watch the movie that might have been his masterpiece, Tombstone, released in 1993 as “A George P. Cosmatos Film”.

I watched it for the first time, when it came out, in a state of sorrow, but this time I watched it in a state of rage.  Then, one could see it as a lost opportunity for cinema, for the Western, and for Kevin.  Now that he's gone one has to view it as the last opportunity for Kevin, who had the ability once to resuscitate not just the Hollywood Western, but Hollywood itself.



When I read his original 138-page draft of the script, not long before Kevin went off to start directing the film, I believed I had encountered something momentous.  “This movie,” I said to him, “is going to be like Jackson's flank march at the Battle of Chancellorsville.”  That march was a recklessly bold move by most of Lee's available forces to strike the rear of the overwhelmingly superior Union forces confronting him.  While Jackson was on the move, Lee would be totally vulnerable to even a modest Union advance.  If the march had been detected while in progress, Lee's whole army could have been crushed in detail.



It was not detected, it took the Union forces totally by surprise and sent them into a full-on rout.  It turned what was a stalemate at best into an impossible victory.

I associated this with the movie Kevin was about to make because I knew that Kevin had conceived of a film which would be both stunning, artistically, and wildly commercial.  Hollywood would not know what had hit it.  Kevin had revived the craft of storytelling from Hollywood's Golden Age, brought it forward into the modern era and opened a way back into films that were both entertaining and powerful, exhilarating and profound.



Kevin (above right, on the set) lasted only a few weeks as director of the film.  I can't say of my own knowledge why he was replaced.  There are stories of eccentric behavior on his part, and of falling behind schedule.  I do know that the power on the production shifted to mediocrities, and that they trashed his vision.  Enough of it remained to make the film beloved by fans of the Western and a solid hit at the box office, but enough of it remained also to make clear what it could have been.



Kevin cast the film, of course, and supervised the design of the production.  Every choice he made on those fronts was pitch-perfect.  Some of the footage he shot remains in the film, and all of it is breathtaking, worthy of John Ford, a comparison I don't make lightly.  The rest of the film looks like crap, like a high-class TV movie.  About 30 pages of Kevin's script were discarded, and Kurt Russell and Val Kilmer worked with the director who replaced Kevin, George Cosmatos, and with a journeyman screenwriter named John Fasano to “improve” existing pages.

Everything done after Kevin was fired cheapened and diminished the film.  After the film was favorably received by critics and audiences, the mediocrities were proud to take credit for the cheapening and diminishing, as though these things had actually been what “saved” the picture and made it work.

These people didn't just want to take the miraculous gift Kevin had given them — they wanted to pretend that they had given it to themselves.



In his director's commentary on the DVD, George Cosmatos (above) takes full credit for the historically authentic details of the story and look of the film, even though he had nothing to do with these things.  He also reveals the secrets of his approach to shooting the film, which involved using multiple cameras to record each scene, so the editor could make the choices he didn't know how to make on the set, and varying the style of the shots as much as possible, to create “interest”.  This is the craft of a journeyman, at best.  Cosmatos was a competent journeyman.



After Cosmatos died, Kurt Russell “revealed” that in fact he himself had directed the film after Kevin left, using Cosmatos as a front.  He did it by stealth, giving the stooge Cosmatos shot-lists the night before each day's work and executing his ideas on the set by a series of hand signals he and Cosmatos had worked out.  This would constitute the first time in film history that a movie has been secretly directed by someone without anyone else on the production suspecting the fact.  The idea that you can direct a film with shot-lists and hand signals is beyond ludicrous — it's pathetic.

Russell and Cosmatos seem to have known so little about what directing a film actually entails, or I should say what directing a film well actually entails, that they may have believed their sad fantasies of themselves at the true auteurs of Tombstone.  In any case, Cosmatos probably knew he could get away with retailing his fantasies on the DVD because Kevin was never much interested in re-fighting the battle of Tombstone in public.  Russell certainly knew that he could get away with trashing Cosmatos's contribution to the film, such as it was, because Cosmatos could not argue back from the grave.

I knew Cosmatos slightly, and I know he was extremely proud of having directed Tombstone.  It's not easy to replace a director while a shoot is in progress, and Cosmatos got the job done, however one might evaluate the quality of his work.  I have a lot of respect for Russell as an actor, and he gave a fine performance in Tombstone — but even if he did secretly direct the very badly directed film, the fact remains that decimating Cosmatos's legacy the way he did, when Cosmatos was no longer around to defend it, strikes me as just this side of nauseating.  Russell should have put his name on the film as its director or kept his mouth shut.  If the film had tanked at the box office and had no reputation today, I strongly suspect that he would have kept the secret of his extraordinary accomplishment to himself.

People are used to merely throwing up their hands at dishonorable behavior like this because “it's just the way Hollywood works”.  But it only works that way because enough people throw up their hands, and in many cases actually respect the yacks for possessing enough power to behave like insolent curs and get away with it.

In the interview in which Russell revealed his secret authorship of Tombstone, he said he respected Kevin Costner for trying to prevent the release of Tombstone, so it couldn't compete with Costner's (far inferior) version of the tale, Wyatt Earp.  “He was playing hardball,” Russell said.  No, he wasn't playing hardball.  In hardball, as Earl Weaver once said, “you've got to put the ball over the plate and give the other fellow his chance”.  Men play hardball.  Collapsed males play the Hollywood game.



I think the rage I felt watching Tombstone again is useful — following the principle that “the tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction”.  The moment has come when filmmakers, and the culture, need to say, as Wyatt Earp says in Kevin's script, when he's had enough of the insolence of the curs, “You tell 'em I'm coming . . . and hell's coming with me, you hear?  Hell's coming with me!”

Anyone who has a problem with this can step right up and get their time.  I'm your huckleberry.

JEFFREY JONES

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Jeffrey Catherine Jones died yesterday at the age of 67.  Born male, Jones had a sex change operation later in life.  Her style of illustration often echoed Frank Frazetta's, though she had great range and Frazetta once called her “the greatest living painter”.  The influence must have gone both ways.

Jones admired the illustrators of the generation before hers and Frazetta's, especially those of the Brandywine school, and the image above, Black Rose, from 1972, is a kind of homage to the greatest of the Brandywine artists, N. C. Wyeth.

ROAD TO NOWHERE

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If John Ford had ever made a rock and roll road picture, it would probably have looked a lot like Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop, from 1971 — which is a crude way of trying to evoke Hellman's unique blend of formal mastery and eccentric invention.

Hellman was one of the directors who re-invented American movies in the Sixties, applying a deep understanding of film history and film technique to new subjects and attitudes.  Unlike a number of the other rebels of his generation, Hellman never became a mainstream commercial director.  His highest profile film, Two-Lane Blacktop, became an instant cult classic and remains one to this day, considered one of the seminal works of Seventies cinema, but the studio distributing it refused to promote it and it did not make money.



Hellman has made a number of highly-regarded independent features since then, but there was a twenty year gap between the last of them and his new feature Road To Nowhere, which was released in 2010 on the festival circuit and has been hailed as Hellman's return to the height of his powers.  It has been theatrically released in France and is about to get a limited theatrical release in the U. S.



It's an extraordinary film — the first feature shot on the Canon 5D, essentially a still camera with breathtaking HD video capabilities, in locations all over the world, but mostly in North Carolina, and starring the stunning Shannyn Sossamon, who here achieves the status of an authentic screen goddess.



It's a film about filmmaking, in which a real-life crime infects a movie being made about that crime.  The tale becomes a hall of mirrors, a complex intellectual puzzle that nevertheless delivers a shocking visceral jolt at the climax.  You won't, however, walk away from the film dwelling on its devious structural intricacies.  What you will remember instead, I suspect, is a film that delights and amazes from shot to shot, sequence to sequence, with the pure joy of making images, pictures that move, spaces that seduce you into emotional involvement with characters and situations with or without your conscious consent.



I think you will feel privileged to have spent a couple of hours with a cinematic master, someone who reminds us that it's still possible to make real cinema today.  This is a proposition that can only be argued on screens in darkened theaters, by an advocate who is both passionate and supremely skillful — by an artist like Monte Hellman.

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

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[Warning — plot spoilers below . . .]

The first time I saw No Country For Old Men, in a theater when it originally came out, I found it extremely disturbing.  I couldn't quite identify a coherent theme or point of view, and part of me wished I hadn't seen it, because it was so harrowing.  It was much the same reaction I had the first time I saw Taxi Driver.

I suspected in both cases that I had seen a great film, an important film, and subsequent viewings have confirmed those suspicions.



The link between the films has to do with violence, of course, and the way it is presented, which is unusual.  It is not in either film overly aestheticized, and it's not used as an occasion for relief from suspense or moral outrage.  It is there to disturb and sicken, to create suspense rather than resolve it, to raise moral questions rather than answer them.

Many films, such as the classic Western, use violence to resolve a moral conflict, and I don't object to this, because the Western, like the fairytale, is a fable, a dream — and the violence found in both forms is read as fabulous, as it is in dreams.  I do object to most modern thrillers, in which violence is used for sensation — in which a villain is demonized only to arouse our blood lust, to make us rejoice in his demise, with no deeper moral issues involved.



On subsequent viewings it's become clear to me that No Country For Old Men makes a very deliberate and calculated break from the usual formula of a modern thriller, violating convention in a shocking way, and that this is the key to its meaning.  In the first two-thirds of the film, the story sets up a duel between a vicious psychopathic killer and a sort of anti-hero, likable but morally compromised.  Hovering in the wings is a moral presence, in the form of a thoroughly good local sheriff, who is not directly involved in the duel.



Then, without warning, at the beginning of the third act, the anti-hero is killed, and the decent man takes his place as the film's protagonist.  He never engages the psychopath — doesn't outwit or outfight him, doesn't bring him to justice.  He simply stands against him as a kind of witness.

Things get almost mystical towards the end.  It seems as if the mere presence of goodness can make the killer vanish into thin air — as if the fact of goodness diminishes him, makes him vulnerable, saps his power.  He “gets away” but seems to have lost his existential substance.



The universe of the film is very bleak, its violence incomprehensible and thus utterly terrifying.  We are not told that countervailing violence on the side of justice can defeat it, only that moral rectitude can stand in the way of such violence becoming the definition of human existence.  The film's denouement is purely spiritual, not practical.

It's not much, I guess, but it's so much more than the lies about violence told in most movies today, which do not prepare us for the world as it actually is and thus do not offer us any authentically hopeful or honorable way to live in it.

ROPED INTO IT

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An amusing publicity shot of Ben Johnson and Mamie Van Doren, courtesy of Paula Vitaris, who hosts a great Ben Johnson fan site here.  Paula thinks the photo probably dates from 1949, when both actors were working at RKO, and observes that Mamie seems to be having a grand old time while Ben is wishing he was somewhere else.

Paula recently posted a series of screen caps and a review of Cherry 2000 on her site, to which I contributed some memories of my brief encounter with Johnson on the film.  You can find it here, under the date of 8 May.

REVELATIONS

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John Ruskin, the Victorian art critic, never consummated his marriage, which was annulled after a few years.  He said his wife was “not as other women”, physically, and one biographer has speculated that Ruskin was put off by the sight of his wife’s pubic hair.  Knowing the female nude only through art, he might never have seen such a thing, and might have thought it was an anomaly.  His wife later remarried and had several children, so she must have been “as other women” in most respects.



The convention in most Western art, before the 20th Century, has been to present the female genitalia as a hairless mound of flesh without an orifice.  (The ancient Greeks, who found the depiction of female genitalia shocking, usually presented them draped, rather than denatured.)

One major convention in modern fashion photography is to present half-clad women who are almost revealing, threatening to reveal, but not quite revealing their genitalia, or nipples.

The photograph at the head of this post is from the notorious ad campaign for American Apparel, which made a splash by violating this convention.  It shows pubic hair, and other American Apparel ads have shown nipples.



I myself find this explicitness refreshing.  There’s tease involved — the ads don’t show everything — but they don’t fetishize the naughty bits.  Indeed, they celebrate them.  They also show women as whole beings, rather than as custodians of desirable but forbidden body parts.

Most fashion photography uses sex to sell clothes.  To me, the American Apparel ads use clothes to sell sex, which is often the real point of clothes, and seems a far healthier approach.

Rescuing the female body from commercialization and commodification is one of the great tasks that lie before our civilization.  The American Apparel ads can’t be said to contribute much to this task, but perhaps it can be said that they’re a modest step in the right direction.