Saturday, August 8, 2009

How Much Is Woody Allen's Good Name Worth? American Apparel Replies, "What Good Name?"

"What is this," Woody Allen asks in Love and Death after receiving a couple of hard pats to the cheek, "Slap Boris Day?" Almost 35 years since writing that deathless scene, Allen may be feeling a little slap-happy himself. As we reported here a year ago, Allen is suing American Apparel for having used his likeness in its advertising without his permission. The case is only now coming to a boil, and in court papers filed yesterday, representatives for Allen complained that American Apparel has “adopted a ‘scorched earth’ approach”, threatening to drag his name through the mud, bringing up details of the disastrous, tabloid-friendly end of this relationship with Mia Farrow back in 1992. At worst, the company is clearly intent on doing its best to reward Allen for dragging them into court by making his left absolutely miserable. (Little do they know: he seems to kind of like it that way.) At, well, other worst, their official position appears to be that Allen is such an unredeemed slimeball that he has no rights at all, either as a human being or a marketable image. "“Certainly," says American Apparel lawyer Stuart Slotnick, "our belief is that after the various sex scandals that Woody Allen has been associated with, corporate America’s desire to have Woody Allen endorse their product is not what he may believe it is.”

Nasty comments about Woody the person are nothing new; once upon a time, Woody himself made his living as a chief dispenser of them. (Did you hear about the time he beat up the toaster?) But harsh judgements of the artist, though not unheard of, have a weird tendency to build to a sort of crescendo, then to fall away when he has an acclaimed international success big enough to count as a "comeback" (such as 2005's Match Point), only to rise up again, fiercer and more unforgiving than ever. A couple of weeks ago, in the course of lamenting the difficulty that Abel Ferrara's Chelsea on the Rocks has had finding a distributor, Danny Leigh in the Guardian really stuck the knife in: "[Ferrara] and we are left with the exact inverse of the fate of that other New York institution, Woody Allen: a veteran director making films that deserve to be seen, but which no matter how good simply can't get into cinemas." No offense to Ferrara, who is one of our favorite New York street crazies with a camera, but if Vincent Canby were to rise from the dead, the discovery that anyone in the English-speaking world could get away with suggesting that anything his beloved Woody made might have less reason to be shown than anything from the director of New Rose Hotel would only kill him all over again, just so he could spin in his grave. (Vincent Canby is dead, isn't he? I'm trying to cut back on the number of times a day that I have to go running to Wikipedia.)

Another Guardian writer, Andrew Pulver, ain't having it. Pulver writes that "what really makes me sad is that it's now so easy, and so acceptable, to give Allen a hard time. His faltering output in recent years has coincided with a general perception that he's foolish (at best) and a sleazebag (at worst). Of course we can advance arguments that an artist's life shouldn't be confused with their work, but Allen didn't help himself by regularly casting himself opposite nubile young actresses. (Thank God he seems to have packed that in.) He seemed wilfully to want to confuse the two himself; just like, in his 'early, funny' period, he used to get tetchy at people who seemed to think the nebbishy little characters he played on screen could be anything at all like the real Woody Allen. (How could anyone have got that idea?) I prefer to remember the glory days."

It is an honorable sentiment, and it perhaps speak well to the dense variety of Allen's output in the last forty years that we will be able to spend forever arguing about which days those were. (Pulver thinks that Allen's hot streak fell between 1979's Manhattan and Husbands and Wives, his last film with Farrow, which was released into the teeth of the media flare-up over their domestic messiness.) "Now, as the likes of Martin Scorsese and Clint Eastwood (his direct peers) have put their rowdy youth and questionable escapades behind them, and are relaxing into elder-statesmanship, Allen is heading the other way" in terms of his reputation and public image. That may be a bit much. (And it definitely fails to acknowledge that so many people felt betrayed, and therefore comfortable to judge Allen's morality, back in 1992 because he fell from such a high place in terms of personal reputation: however he compares to Scorsese or Eastwood as a filmmaker, he was, at his peak, an intellectual culture hero of a kind that they never were.) Ultimately, Allen's reputation, like that of every prolific major filmmaker, shifts a little with every new movie he turns out. Which way will it shift after his new Larry David picture sees the light of day? We've got our fingers and toes crossed.

Werner Herzog Remembers the Good Old Days in Peru, the Bad New Days in New Orleans

Fitzcarraldo, the 1982 epic that Werner Herzog shot in the jungles of Peru, using a team of locals to pull a 320-ton steamboat up a mountain, may have been the most troubled production of the director's long and adventurous career, though the competition for that title is fierce. (Herzog had shot an estimated forty percent of the film when his star, Jason Robards, was sidelined by amoebic dysentery, after which his co-star, Mick Jagger, had to abandon the project to fulfill a commitment to tour with his day job, the Rolling Stones. Herzog wrote Jagger's role out of the script and replaced Robards with Klaus Kinski, the only known instance in movie history of someone bringing Klaus Kinksi in to stabilize a situation.) It's probably the most well-documented production in Herzog's career, though. The director Les Blank recorded it all in his won 1982 feature documentary Burden of Dreams, and now it's reported that, in June, Ecco Press is bringing out Herzog's journals written during the production, under the title Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo. For those of you who can't wait, The Paris Review has a selection in their Spring 2009 issue. ("These texts are not reports on the filming --of which little is said. Nor are they journals, except in a very general sense. They might be described instead as inner landscapes, born of the delirium of the jungle. But even that may not be entirely accurate--I am not sure." Coming from anyone else but Werner, this sort of thing would count as discouraging.) The excerpt isn't available online, but hey, it's a good magazine, so throw them twelve bucks if you're so inclined.

Herzog also just checked in with John Patterson, giving him a quick rundown of the current busy state of his movie career at his Laurel Canyon home, because he still considers himself to be a filmmaker and all this "man of letters" business is making him nervous. Herzog, who credits his global viewpoint to the fact that he "had seen much of the world before I was 20, and I had experienced it in a very fundamental way - being on foot, in Africa, in danger," actually had to take his age into account--he's now 66--when deciding not to imperil his life by shooting some icy underwater footage himself on his Antarctica documentary Encounters at the End of the World. However, he braved New Orleans, Nicolas Cage, and the wrath of Abel Ferrara on the movie he recently finished, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. Werner insists that, previous reports to the contrary, this is not a remake or a reboot of or a sequel to Ferrara's 1992 scuzzball classic, which came complete with rape on a church altar, visions of Jesus, and full-frontal Keitel. It seems that producer Ed Pressman owns the rights to the title and just wanted to use it on a new project. "I was assured," says Herzog, "that this was not related to another film of a similar name. I told them, 'If you swear on the heads of your children.' I also had hints from Nicolas Cage that he wouldn't sign unless he knew I was directing, which is a good way to start a film." Herzog was keen to shoot in New Orleans "because, after Katrina, you were in a situation where civil life came to a breakdown. Not merely because the hurricane caused a lot of material destruction, but it also created a collapse of civility - looting and, by the way, the police were heavily involved in that, too." And the producers were hot to shoot there too, because of "the tax incentives."

Herzog is "also in the process of wrapping up another film, My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, produced by David Lynch and loosely based on a gruesome matricide in San Diego in the 1980s, starring Michael Shannon...This being a Herzog movie, the suburban footage is interspersed with scenes - visions, perhaps - captured in Central Asia and Peru. He calls it 'sort of a horror movie'." This all amounts to the most time Herzog has spent working with actors and scripts for quite some time, now; most of his filmography for the last several years has been devoted to nonfiction filmmaking. (The biggest and most recent exception, 1996's Rescue Dawn with Christian Bale, was based on the same story that Herzog had already used a decade earlier for his documentary, Little Dieter Needs to Fly.) Not that he sees much difference, of course; this is a guy who, in 1991's Lessons of Darkness, presented footage of the smoking, apocalyptic aftermath of the Gulf War as a science fiction film, and who later, in 2005's The Wild Blue Yonder, intercut NASA footage with film of the actor Brad Dourif improvising a monologue recounting his life as an extraterrestrial immgirant. "The distinction between fiction and documentary," says Herzog, "is the last thing I would spend a sleepless night over."

Mel Gibson Plans to Co-Star with Wife in Lavishly Budgeted Remake of "Let's Make a Deal"

The news that Robyn Gibson, Mel Gibson's wife of 28 years, filed for divorce last week has inspired a certain amount of snickery coverage in the media from those who regard the highly regarded actor and Oscar-winning director as a bit of a reactionary religious loon, and we'd hate to get left out of that completely. Gibson is famous for his Traditinalist Catholic views, which are stubbornly pre-Vatican II. In 1999, Gibson created the A. P. Reilly Foundation in order to build his own church in Malibu, where mass is conducted in Latin, women are required to wear skirts and dresses and keep their heads covered, people wear shoes on their hands, and hamburgers eat people. (Some of this may be inaccurate. I was pretty drunk the day I stopped by to use the restroom.) Obviously, a divorce would not get Gibson many green stamps in the more-Catholic-than-thou sweepstakes, but he probably deserves a lot of credit for having put in almost thirty years with a woman who won't be able to fetch his pipe and slippers for him when he's in Heaven. In a notorious interview with an Australian newspaper, Gibson acknowledged that his wife's soul is beyond saving, but tried to adopt a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger attitude towards the whole thing: "There is no salvation for those outside the church. I believe it. ... Put it this way: My wife is a saint. She's a much better person than I am. Honestly. She's, like, Episcopalian, Church of England. She prays, she believes in God, she knows Jesus, she believes in that stuff. And it's just not fair if she doesn't make it. She's better than I am. But that is a pronouncement from the chair. I go with it."

Some of us who remember reading that interview when it came out, and who also remember reading it again and looking up and thinking, "Nahhhh..." and then reading it yet again, might have assumed that one reason Robyn Snyder finally called the lawyers is that she was tired of her husband constantly spraying her side of the bed with Lysol to try to get rid of the smell of sulphur. So it was a bit of a shock when word hit the papers that the old boy, "who was spotted frolicking with a blonde woman on his $26 million Costa Rican ranch Tuesday, who may or may not be engaged in an affair with a Russian musician...While it's unclear if possible infidelity on the 53-year-old actor's part led to [his wife's] decision to end their marriage, recent photographs of Gibson with women in Boston and Costa Rica, and reports that he engaged in a relationship with Russian singer Oksana Pochepa have fueled speculation that he wasn't faithful." Whatever the case, Gibson is worth an estimated $900 million, Bird on a Wire or no Bird on a Wire, and because Robyn married him in 1980, when his personal assets consisted of a beer cooler, a pair of flip-flops, and 250 complimentary Betamax copies of Summer City, there was no spoilsport pre-nup to nip the festivities in the bud. Stay tuned.

Fat Actor Watch at New York Times: Paper of Record Alleges That When Russell Crowe Sits Around the House, He Really Sits Around the House

Always looking for a fresh angle on the really important movie news of the day, Michael Cieply uses his perch at Thew New York Times to ask" what's with all the male movie stars who are porkers? Who does he have in mind, exactly? Russell Crowe and Jeff Daniels, sharing a screen in State of Play ("Two men. One notebook. Four chins."); Denzel Washington, going "cheek-to-jowl with the bulky John Travolta" in the trailer for the remake of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three; Hugh Grant; and "Even Leonardo DiCaprio, the young heartthrob from Titanic"--Photos from the set of Shutter Island, a thriller on tap from Paramount Pictures and the director Martin Scorsese in October, show a little bit more to love." Oh, snap! Are they handing out chocolate bunnies to whoever can be the biggest bitch at the Times these days?

Cieply briefly notes that there's a gender-based double standard regarding the weight and age rules in Hollywood so far as leading players are concerned, but after dropping Kathleen Turner's name, he seems to feel that he's discharged his duty, as if the subject bored even him. He seems more taken with the idea that this is an utterly new phenomenon, but despite the historical examples he digs up, that may be a non-starter. "Photos of midcentury stars — Humphrey Bogart, James Stewart, Clark Gable and others — show them to have remained rather gaunt at an age when many of the current crop are anything but." Good thing those photos are handy, since it's not as if movie actors left behind filmed records of their performances so we'd be able to remind themselves what they looked like. That said, it seems a little callous to drag Bogart, one of the best-known victims of cancer sticks ever to go down coughing, into a discussion of how movie stars used to keep themselves svelte. (One well-circulated story has it that, when illness had left Bogie too weak to handle the stairs in his own home, he used to navigate from one floor to another by stuffing himself in the dumb waiter.) It's also worth remembering that Gable, who died of a massive heart attack after completing his last film, The Misfits, had lost 35 pounds on a crash diet to get his weight below 200 before shooting began. If there's any less of that sort of thing going on nowadays because more stars feel comfortable about appearing in public looking something other than whisper-thin, surely it's for the better.

It's also true that, as Cieply would have known if he'd put down the "photographs" and spent a couple of days watching Turner Classic Movies, there have always been counter-examples one could offer to his role call of manly waifs. Wallace Beery never looked as if he'd had trouble locating the desert cart, Spencer Tracey rolled into his onscreen middle age looking as if he'd swallowed a tether ball, James Cagney was getting pretty squared-off by the time of Yankee Doodle Dandy, Robert Mitchum often had an amorphous mass surrounding his midsection that he used to abruptly suck up into his chesticological region whenever he was required to take his shirt off, Gene Hackman's weight always flunctuated, sometimes wildly, depending on just how regular his latest "regular guy" character was supposed to be, and as for Jack Nicholson, in his mid-forties when he more or less officially entered his "middle-aged" period with Terms of Endearment--please. Of course, with movies as with everything else, memory can be a great deceiver. Lawrence Turman, "a veteran film producer who is chairman of the Peter Stark producing program at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts", told Cieply that "“John Wayne always looked a bit portly." I find it disturbing that the Peter Stark producing program at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts can do no better for its chairman than a guy who's never seen Stagecoach. It may be a tribute to the lingering effect of the image that Wayne cast from around the mid-1950s until his death in 1979 that even some professionals think he always looked like that, but I would propose that, unlikely though it may seem, that if Wayne had looked in his youth like a guy who was fated to someday look the way he did in True Grit, he never would have gotten the chance to grow into that later incarnation--at least, not on movie screens.

This still leaves the question of whether some of these stars, heavier though they may undeniably be, are as hideous to behold as Cieply seems to be implying they are. I will confess that when I saw Travolta, say, in the trailer for Pelham, I did not catch myself thinking, "Here comes Wide Load." (I did catch myself thinking, "Get a load of Weird Hairline with his Fu Manchu mustache. Each of us has his issues.) One possibility worth considering is that such stars as Travolta, Washington, and Hanks, who came up in the 1980s, when a perfect storm of society-embraced body issues and new technology in the gym led to a new species of Americans who seemed to be armor-plated in their own skin and muscle, some of whom hastened to show off their new packaging on the covers of magazines, such as that infamous shot of Travolta on the cover of Rolling Stone to promote Stayin' Alive, looking as if his abs were about to jump out of his torso and his brains had already leaked out of his ears. Maybe, having fallen for that when you had the energy and free schedule to pursue it all the way, you have to let yourself go a little later on or else you'll explode. But then, in the interests of full disclosure, I should concede that I am from The South, where we deep fry our veggie plates and the lost causes that we love to get misty-eyed about include our own arteries in their pre-clotted state. Because of my own cultural conditioning, if I had my way, every other movie made since 1984 would have starred Joe Don Baker, and the others would have been divided between Randy Quaid and the late Dub Taylor, with the result that Michael Cieply would be even more confused.

Jackie Chan Puts His Foot In It

I don't guess it's completely surprising that Jackie Chan could get himself in trouble by saying something that pissed people off, but considering the possibilities, it's kind of unexpected that he managed to do it while speaking his first language. Addressing a business group in the southern Chinese province of Hainan on Saturday, Chan said, "I'm not sure if it's good to have freedom or not. I'm gradually beginning to feel that we Chinese need to be controlled. If we're not being controlled, we'll just do what we want." In the past, Chan has criticized the mainland Chinese government for the 1989 crackdown, but in recent years he has avoided weighing in on political topics. This time, speaking before a receptive audience, he let himself stray into dangerous territory, even calling Hong Kong and Taiwan "chaotic" compared to the mainland.

Chan's comments went over well with his listeners but have provoked a fierce backlash from legislators in Hong Kong and Taiwan. One of them, Leung Kwok-hung, insisted that Chan has "insulted the Chinese people. Chinese people aren't pets. Chinese society needs a democratic system to protect human rights and rule of law." Another critic, Huang Wei-che, pointed out that the internationally beloved star "has enjoyed freedom and democracy and has reaped the economic benefits of capitalism. But he has yet to grasp the true meaning of freedom and democracy." Others called Chan's remarks racist. Ironically, Chan's comments received no coverage at all in mainland China itself. Chan is currently in talks to co-star with Will Smith's son Jaden Smith in a remake of The Karate Kid, to be shot in Beijing.