Thursday, December 13, 2007
Film How the auteur half lives
Posted by J.R. Jones on 12.13.07 at 06:29 PM
Last month filmmaker William Richert sent out a mass mailing to Chicago critics with DVDs of his 1986 drama Aren't You Even Gonna Kiss Me Goodbye? and copies of a feverish 17-page letter detailing the movie's tortured genesis. Based on Richert's autobiographical novel and produced by Island Pictures, the movie was a coming-of-age story, set in 1962, about a high school lothario (River Phoenix) seducing various women and clashing with his abusive father as he tries to scrape up money to ditch his native Evanston for a new life in Hawaii. It featured a score by the great Elmer Bernstein, an original Johnny Mathis tune over the title credits, another number over the end credits that was written and sung by Phoenix, and the film debut of Matthew Perry, in a supporting role as the hero's hapless pal. You can sample them all when the movie makes its online premiere Saturday, December 15.
But as Richert asserts in his letter, he lost control of the movie after Island went bankrupt and sold the property to 20th Century Fox. According to Richert, the Fox marketing department decided to reposition the movie as a "teen exploitation picture" in order to take advantage of Phoenix's newfound fame in Stand by Me and The Mosquito Coast. The Bernstein score and original songs were replaced with a selection of vintage pop hits, a six-minute section near the end of the movie was excised, and Phoenix redubbed the voice-over narration that Richert himself had supplied in the original cut. The movie was finally released in February 1988 as A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon and sank without a trace.
I can't vouch for the accuracy of Richert's story, but of course the auteur school is deeply invested in the legend of the visionary director having his work snatched away from him and defiled by money-grubbing suits. It stretches at least as far back as Erich von Stroheim's Greed and even generated a drama of its own—Blake Edwards's S.O.B. Whether the movie is Rebecca, The Magnificent Ambersons, Heaven's Gate, or Brazil, it's always the same story with the same lonely hero, and by now the movie-going public has absorbed it well enough for the bean counters to cash in on a movie twice by marketing first the studio release and then the director's cut.
After watching both versions of Richert's movie back to back, however, I must confess that I find the Fox version superior in almost every respect. Bernstein's score is great (especially the uptempo car chase about 80 minutes in), but it's scaled to a much grander movie than Richert's funky little adolescent memoir. The same goes for the director's sonorous Orson Welles narration, the text of which gets a more natural, low-key reading by Phoenix. The excised six minutes includes a key scene in which Jimmy reveals his romantic vulnerability, but the rest of the footage digresses badly as the movie is trying to build to a climax. Phoenix's closing tune, "Heart to Get," is horrendous, and Fox did the young star a favor by leaving it on the cutting room floor. Even the replacement title is better, though you have to wonder how anyone expected to get either of them onto a marquee. Perhaps in the 80s the marquees, like the hair, were just bigger.
Comments (8)
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Now I'm curious to know if there's a lost River Phoenix album collecting dust in some record label's vaults. I bet he would've been big in Japan ...
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seems to me auteurism stands well enough on its own without some "martyred visionary" angle cluttering up the works * since arguably the starting point isn't directorial identity per se (i.e., "artist's" vision isn't a given, you don't PROCEED from that assumption) but evidence from the FILMS themselves that point in that direction * ideally, it should work as a blind test (though in a practical sense--from industrial marketing, publicity, myriad forms of compromising awareness, etc--that's just not possible): watch the movie, then identify the "creative" agent (generally but not always the director) from the internal clues * that this actually CAN be done, at least in a limited sense, even in compromised circumstance, ought to be evident from personal experience: e.g., in my case, the benicio del toro episode in rodriguez/miller's SIN CITY--something ODD's definitely happening here, in the sudden spatial spread, the relaxed characterizations, the deft spot coloring in the details, etc, that speaks of a much more sophisticated talent * "i've been hating the damn thing, and now all of a sudden i like it," i remember thinking to myself, and it wasn't till later i learned that quentin tarantino had been responsible for that particular segment * well of course, makes perfect sense in retrospect, but: shouldn't i have GUESSED his participation simply from the mise-en-scene? * maybe so, but what does seem clear is that it COULDN'T have been the work of rodriguez/miller, certainly not in visually hands-on moviemaking terms * a different sensibility was at work--and i'd say it pretty well showed sarris always liked singling out the films of douglas sirk as the only "proof" the auteur theory needed * sure worked for me that way, i have to confess--so how about y'all taking another look?
I would say your SIN CITY example proves my point--film is most often a collaborative medium. The idea that a vision might be SHARED doesn't sit well with critics, who generally enhance their credibility by being as fractious as possible. There's nothing wrong with auteurism except that it's become the default position--certainly in the Reader, where the only person who must be credited in a capsule review is the director, and the highest star rating translates as "masterpiece," which connotes a single master at work.
you're right about collaborative agency--thing is, the auteur theory's intended for cases (and was in fact created to address your very premise) in which that's clearly an insufficient view, where a single "creative" sensibility, that (and here's where we likely part company) can dependably be traced from film to film, imprints itself on the work * so you can say yes, this is tarantino's "signature" in SIN CITY, not that of the credited directors or other collaborative agents not that this in itself is sufficient guarantee of "artistic" credibility or value--e.g., bertrand blier's clearly an "auteur" ... but are his FILMS any good?--but it does acknowledge something that ought to be quite visible, that has "testable" (if primarily after the fact) results * that the theory--which is probably less that than a kind of divination--has been applied indiscriminately (william richert? barry sonnenfeld?) does seem a valid complaint ... which doesn't detract from the sort of insight it can produce, as a particular way of looking, or what, with varying degrees of certainty, we can inferentially suss out
