Jeff Beck & Tal Wilkenfeld — Cause We Ended As Lovers

Crossroads Guitar Festiival, Chicago, 2007

Tal Wilkenfeld at Wikipedia

Very late the ‘Hero’

About twenty-eight years ago a friend whose taste and opinion were generally on the money recommended I see Hero at Large (1980). The friend, who I’ll call JR to save my time and his embarrassment, introduced me to studio-era Hollywood movies when I was a teen (he loved Warners and RKO). An avid moviegoer, he appreciated the smaller pictures that were then bypassing the public, such as Lamont Johnson’s The Last American Hero (1973), which he probably saw three or four times in the theater (I went twice with him), and David Greene’s Hard Country (1981), JR grooving on the beauty and talent of newcomer Kim Basinger.

    Drunk and disorderly, I burned bridges and killed valuable friendships with crazy attitudes, sharp words and harsh actions. (Don’t fret: I’ve been clean for over twenty years.) A casualty of the fallout, JR and I haven’t spoken or crossed paths since the early 80s, but I recently remembered him and Hero at Large. One of a handful of sleepy efforts that failed to elevate John Ritter from TV to movie star, it undoubtedly struck my optimistic friend with its Capra-esque story of a down-on-his-luck actor (Ritter) who disguises himself as a comic book superhero to stamp out crime and denounce cynical posturing in New York City.

    It’s a modest feel-good movie steeped in the low rent district of late 70s American cinema. (The director was Martin Davidson, of the shrill Lords of Flatbush.) Poised somewhat awkwardly as cuddly beefcake, the frequently bare-chested Ritter doesn’t overplay things as he did on Three’s Company, and Anne Archer fits nicely into the Jean Arthur part. A soft-spoken and squinty-eyed beauty who should’ve been the next Angie Dickinson, Archer was 33-years-old at the time, a veteran of TV guest spots, Chuck Norris’s Good Guys Wear Black and Sylvester Stallone’s Paradise Alley (both in 1978). By 1987 she’d be in her first megahit, preposterously miscast as Michael Douglas’s wife in Fatal Attraction (1987). Why Douglas would cheat on her for the comparatively gamy Glenn Close remains a riddle of the ages.

His Name Was Gene Palma, portrait by Bruce Barone (click to enlarge)

    The one bizarre aspect of Hero at Large is its sundry connections to Taxi Driver (!). Two radically different sides of the same coin, both pictures are about nobodies cleaning up the streets. However, I doubt that director Davidson or screenwriter A.J. Carothers (fresh off the Disney payroll) were responsible for inserting these scattered references to Schrader and Scorsese’s urban nightmare: Ritter is a part-time hack driving a Yellow Checker cab; both films have loving exterior shots of the late Belmore Cafeteria, a famous cabbie hangout (“I once went there at about 2am,” remembers Nelhydrea Paupér, “and suddenly felt like I was tripping…weird place”); street drummer Gene Palma — he of the slick, black-dyed hair and heavily-blushed cheeks — appears in both; as does Leonard Harris, then the movie critic on WCBS-TV in New York, who played Senator Palantine in Taxi Driver and the Mayor in Hero at Large, his only two acting credits.

    Above all else, Hero at Large was filmed on the streets of the Manhattan that transfixed me throughout the 70s. Beginning in 1969, my older sister acclimated me to the place and had me stay at her apartment on weekends, away from our parent’s cushy Long Island digs. I was hitting the DVD freeze-frame to savor the storefronts and buildings long since hit by the wrecking ball, and to look at the occasional passerby staring directly into the camera. Plus, those fleeting shots of faces from long ago: Rolland Smith, Penny Crone, John Roland — mainstays on local TV before cable reformatted syndication into soulless superstations. The last time I was in New York was five years ago and, by and large, the place seemed colder, detached and beyond my comprehension — Blade Runner territory. I really have no interest is going back, whereas, thirty-five years ago, you couldn’t keep me away.

For an update and photo of Gene Palma posted on 12.4.09, click here.

Update by Nelhydrea Paupér: Busker Do!

I used to see Gene Palma around on 6th Ave. He was a truly scary looking guy. Not only the pomade but also the tons of red stuff (rouge?) on his cheeks. He looked like he himself was a Travis Bickle waiting to explode.

    There was also an old bearded, disheveled man — what we used to call a bum — on the lower east side near the Bowery, who slowly moved up and down the street (maybe east 3rd or 4th St?) with two sticks tapping them on the street, slowly waving his hands in the air, bringing one stick down at a time, as if in a dance. He would do it all day long. On one hand you could say he was just crazy. But it really seemed like it was his art form. He lived each day giving this performance for hours. It was quite remarkable. This was in the early '70s.

    I remember the Flying Rabbi. He rolled his upright piano over to Washington Square, located himself under the arch and played glistening arpeggios (i.e. muzak). Some (all?) of the keys were covered with strips of red velvet.

    One of the most famous was Moondog, who left NYC and moved to Germany where he became a very highly respected composer. He married a German woman who took care of him (he was blind) and helped create a career that allowed him to write and have his works performed by symphony orchestras. There's a recent bio of him I'd love to read.

    A documentary on these guys would be wonderful. I would give anything to see them all again. But I doubt there's very much existing footage and I assume they're all dead now. A real shame.

    Funny, I can relate to these guys better than just about anything I see going on today in the arts.

Sucking in the 70s

This is my contribution to Goatdog’s Movies About Movies Blogathon

A Decade Under the Influence (2003; directed by Richard LaGravenese and Ted Demme) A dizzying glance at an intriguing epoch, A Decade Under the Influence hums with a sycophantic spirit. Armed with dozens of interviews and film clips, directors Richard LaGravenese and the late Ted Demme adore their subject — “the 70’s films that changed everything,” according to the picture’s tagline — at the risk of sacrificing objectivity. And, to be perfectly honest, who cares? Originally a three-part series for the Independent Film Channel, clocking in at 180 minutes, it’d be captivating if it were triple that length.

    It opens on the demise of the studio system, the mid-century passing of the baton when the moguls (Warner, Zanuck, Selznik, etc.) retired and sold their interests to lawyers and accountants. Television and a collective move away from outmoded values ultimately killed the dinosaurs of old Hollywood, sending the place down in gaudy, graceless denial. LaGravenese and Demme disinter footage of the star studded premiere of Hello, Dolly! (1969), where yesteryear’s celebrities whoop it up for a white elephant that nearly dispatched a studio into bankruptcy.

    “The film business was a decadent, decaying, empty whorehouse, and it had to be assaulted,” reflects Paul Schrader, one of the film’s jubilant interviewees. Like many who either worked in television during the 50’s or spent too much of their adolescence at the movies, Schrader embraced an impending upheaval. “You had that student-film mentality: let’s pick up the banner of Godard and walk in there and take over!”

    They had a ready-made audience, one supportive of foreign and experimental films and apprehensive of conformity. “It was an audience that had been politicized by Vietnam and Watergate, whose consciousness had been changed with drugs,” explains Julie Christie. “It was an open audience.”

    Or, heady films for heady viewers. Approaching the terrain skewed earlier by Peter Biskind in his book, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), A Decade Under the Influence recognizes the groundbreaking advance of mature themes in Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and the improvisational work of John Cassavetes, when American drama became visibly affected by European naturalism. The writers, actors and directors who’d be most influenced the were then working at the opposite end of the spectrum, honing their craft in low budget exploitation pictures. Martin Scorsese, Dennis Hopper and Bruce Dern (here providing a killer Jack Nicholson impression) have no shortage of stories about “Roger Corman’s guerilla university of filmmaking,” as Peter Bogdanovich calls it, churning out movies remembered chiefly for their meager budgets and tight shooting schedules than any aesthetic or socially redeeming values.

    Members of the then-“new American cinema,” this far-from-beat generation remain enthusiastic about their art and generally respectful of those who came before. When asked to name their influences, Bogdanovich replies, “There was Renoir, and then there was everybody else.” Robert Altman, conversely, has his own distinct slant: “The filmmakers who influenced me the most, I don’t know their names. Because I would go see a film, hate it, and say ‘I’ve got to remember never to do anything like that again!’”

    Young, bursting with ideas and inexpensive to hire, they were a persuasive lot who finagled a degree of autonomy from broadminded backers and distributors. One important factor that allowed their films to display sexuality and use profanity was the MPAA ratings system, which had been initiated in 1968. Curiously, A Decade Under the Influence overlooks that milestone entirely. Without it, no distributor would’ve touched The Last Picture Show (1971) for its nudity, or Deliverance (1972) for its homosexual rape. And Robert Towne wouldn’t have had the dispute he relates here, an amusing quandary with producers over how many times the term ‘motherfucker’ should be used in his script for The Last Detail (1973).

    The liberation and creativity under the ratings system allowed Francis Coppola and Sidney Lumet to expand the parameters of drama, and enabled Altman, Hal Ashby and Bob Rafelson to subvert traditional forms. “The director was trump,” says producer John Calley, then presiding over Warners. Studios and financiers and directors, William Friedkin declares, “were all on the same page.” This is not to say that mindless fluff movies evaporated entirely — this was the heyday of the disaster picture, after all. But for approximately seven years, beginning with Easy Rider (1969) and lasting through Network (1976), an environment existed where, to borrow from Sissy Spacek, “the artist ruled,” when a new branch of cinema turned the glamour and safety of old Hollywood inside-out.

Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver

    But the artist ruled for only so long. Metaphysic, satiric, introspective and nose-thumbing films like Hi, Mom! (1970), The Panic in Needle Park (1971), The King of Marvin Gardens (1972) and Chinatown (1974) were also intellectually and emotionally exhausting. Money, power, cocaine and excess would soon harm the reputations of superstar directors: Scorsese’s New York, New York (1977), Bogdanovich’s At Long Last Love (1975), Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), and Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980) all fell victim to (highly publicized) unrestrained budgets and egos. By the time they hit the theatres, not enough people were interested in seeing them.

    After the remarkable popularity of The Exorcist escapism was king, and when A Decade Under the Influence reaches Jaws (1975) we witness the dawn of yet another new Hollywood. Here the documentary palls in tone and spirit: is that grief in the voices and faces of Monte Hellman, Julie Christie and Francis Coppola? For almost overnight, mature themes and characters were tossed out in a candy-coated epiphany. Jaws isn’t a bad movie — indeed, it’s one of the best things Spielberg’s ever done — but it opened the floodgates for epic bubblegum. With Star Wars (1977), a picture devised at the lowest rung (the vacuous Saturday matinee serial gussied up as celebratory event), the crossover to superficiality was manifest, marking the arrival of the producer as auteur. Which, in turn, shifted the concerns of the media and public from art to capital: budgets, merchandising, ‘opening weekend,’ franchises and the unintentional double-entendre of ‘back end’ deals.

    Richard LaGravenese and Ted Demme close at this point and rightfully so. Where else can you go? Coppola, Bogdanovich, Towne, Scorsese and Friedkin wandered out of the 70’s in a fog. Altman dipped into obscure filmed stage plays, Clint Eastwood found his voice as an artist, and Sidney Pollack abided by the rules and made a fortune. Ellen Burstyn sank below radar, while Dennis Hopper served up anger issues (Blue Velvet) and yarns about drug abuse, a who’s who for a depressing chapter for a future volume of Hollywood Babylon we hope will never be written.

    A Decade Under the Influence neglects some areas entirely — the arresting psychological fringe of early Henry Jaglom and Milton Moses Ginsberg’s Coming Apart (1969); the controlled violent horror of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) — and gives short shrift to the rise and commercial viability of 70’s black cinema. (Gordon Parks and Melvin Van Peebles go unmentioned, while a brief inclusion of Pam Grier concentrates on her “hooties in the jungle” flicks for Roger Corman.) Though these omissions are not minor, LaGravenese and Demme shouldn’t be faulted for shortsightedness. (At the end, they apologize for any exclusions.) It was a long, arduous decade, and the uneasy alliance of high- and lowbrow films is too vast a subject for any one documentary. Indeed, A Decade Under the Influence is miraculous for covering as much ground as it does.

This film is available from Amazon

Happy birthday, Halle

My wife says it's OK for you and I to date.

No, really, she does...she really, really does!

The cover of the new issue of Mad

...just wanted to share it with you...

Portraits by Sebastian Kruger

Gérard Depardieu

Goldie Hawn

Klaus Kinski

Travis De Niro

Romy Schneider

Sophia Loren

Steve McQueen

Sylvester Stallone

Walter Matthau

Buy from Amazon

Artwork copyright © by Sebastian Kruger

New on DVD: Down the Establishment!

Primarily a colorization and restoration house, Legend Films has been issuing a hodgepodge of major studio pictures on DVD, three of which I hadn’t seen since their original theatrical release. Bereft of extras, they appear to be struck from original prints (ironically not restored, of wavering optical and audio quality) at sell-through prices. Of the new titles, it was good to see Jacques Demy’s The Pied Piper (1972) rescued from limbo. Made directly after Donkey Skin (1970), it continues in his medieval fairy tale mode albeit without the grandeur and elegance of the earlier work. (Seeing it back in ‘72 at the age of fourteen, I was unimpressed and bored: released a year after Willard, I was hoping for less sociopolitical allegory and more rats.) 1960s pop star Donovan plays the countercultural title muse, but his pivotal character is overshadowed by a corrupt government presided over by Donald Pleasance, Roy Kinnear and John Hurt, whose personal greed, religious posturing and vanity override the needs of an overtaxed and restless people. Released at the height of the anti-Establishment movement, it served the mindset of its generation as much as it mirrors sundry current events and ills.

Set in the trendy inner sanctum of late 1970s encounter groups where narcissism overtakes self awareness, Bill Persky’s Serial (1980) is as safe as an episode of Love, American Style peppered with four-letter words, Sally Kellerman’s boobs and Lalo Shifrin’s quaint muzak score. (With some embarrassment, I confess the theme, “A Changing World,” rattled around in my head for days after.) It’s a quietly amusing time capsule of Marin County after the fall of The Sixties, where middle age and middle class values are perpetually analyzed by quack psychologists and individuals fearful of commitment. An intriguing companion piece to Phil Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1979), this slice of Left Coast lunacy includes Tuesday Weld, Martin Mull, Bill Macy, a coked-out therapist played by Peter Bonerz, the woefully undervalued Barbara Rhodes, and Christopher Lee — Christopher Lee! — as a gay biker named ‘Skull.’

Released a year before The Exorcist, Waris Hussein’s The Possession of Joel Delaney (1972) uses spare genre trappings to explore the deterioration of middle-class/white American credibility and values during Vietnam and the Civil Rights Movement. Joel (Perry King) distances himself from sister Shirley MacLaine’s lofty Upper East Side world, opting for Manhattan’s low-income Puerto Rican neighborhoods and the powerful influence of a young Hispanic and suspected murderer. Tighter direction and a better script are sorely needed here, as the picture seems hesitant to embrace its own hefty themes of xenophobia and shifting cultures. Still it’s worth a look, because even in those weak moments there’s enough percolating between the lines to hold one’s attention.

You only blog twice

Giving 'Birth'

“Descending from European modernism’s project of locating ‘objectivity’ in subjectivity, Birth re-affirms the primacy of perception, that something or someone is there because someone is seeing. In the era of digitization, this is an important shift, reinserting human consciousness amid vistas of inanimate pixels.” Richard Armstrong ponders the Jonathan Glazer film.

Childhood issues

In the mid 1960s, NBC was selling these posters to promote the shows I Spy and Man from U.N.C.L.E., and they were tacked on my bedroom wall for years. I can’t seem to find larger jpegs of them, and I have no idea who did the artwork, but they’re still pretty cool to me.