Shadows Over Hollywood

Hollywood was once a magical place where it seemed dreams came true. During the golden age of the studio system from the 1920s to the 1950s, the public was fed a steady diet of glamorous stars and starlets, primped and manicured to perpetuate the myth that making movies was a fantasy lifestyle full of guiltless hedonism.By the end of the 1960s when the studios had lost most of their power and influence due to television and the rising costs of production, filmmakers encouraged by this new independence, ushered in another so-called "golden" era exploring the darker more irreverent aspects of American culture. Inevitably, they turned their attention to Hollywood itself, and the earlier days of an industry that had long disappeared. The lens through which they focused upon "Tinseltown" was much less rose-coloured than their film-making predecessors, but the glamour and excitement still held allure despite the generation gap. The DVDs cited below are a sampling of the films made about Hollywood by those whose distance from this period provides a modern perspective for audiences of the 21st Century.

Sunset (1988)

Born into a film industry family, his grandfather, a silent film director, and his father , a production manager, Blake Edwards was raised in the atmosphere of old Hollywood. After a lackluster stint as an actor in the Forties, he found initial success writing screenplays. By the late Fifties, he had graduated to director where he made a slew of popular comedies, while at the same time creating the influential detective series Peter Gunn for the rival medium of television. Three decades later, after a bumpy career filled with financial flops and feuds with studio executives, Edwards must have been irresistibly attracted to Rod Amateau's story of 1920s Hollywood. This nostalgic tale concerning a fictional mystery solved by the partnership of movie cowboy Tom Mix and legendary lawman Wyatt Earp, afforded Edwards the perfect opportunity to combine some of his favourite genres while enabling him to lift the veil on this largely overlooked era. This was a time when the studio bosses ran Hollywood as their private fiefdom, fiercely protecting their empires from scandal. Not surprisingly these movie moguls were often as debauched as their employees and given their unlimited power within the community they posed a dangerous threat to individual welfare. Lives could be written off with the stroke of a pen, and it is Edward's zeal in exposing this hypocritical abuse of authority that is at the core of this deceptively light film. Completely forgotten since its release, this lost treasure can now be fully appreciated on DVD, where Anthony Richmond's burnished widescreen cinematography is well displayed, as are the charming star performances of Bruce Willis as Mix and James Garner as Earp, a role he originally embodied as a younger more embittered hero in John Sturges' Hour of the Gun (1967).

The Rocketeer (1991)

During the 1930s, the stars, more than the stories were what the public flocked to see at the movies. Handsome leading men like Clark Gable, and Errol Flynn were sold to audiences as the same devil-may care personalities off-screen as well as on, but the true tales of their sordid behavior was always kept under wraps until Flynn's rape trial in the Forties. This fantasy adventure film takes place in 1938 and concerns a young pilot played with earnest heroism by Bill Campbell, who accidentally acquires a rocket pack sought by Timothy Dalton, winkingly cast as a "fictional" mustachioed swashbuckling actor and secret Nazi spy. Flynn himself was once wrongly accused of similar treachery, but despite the truth, rumors have lingered and are cleverly exploited for this tongue-in-cheek portrait of Hollywood. The witty screenplay by Danny Bilson and Paul DeMeo adapted from Dave Steven's legendary graphic novel effortlessly recreates the superficiality of an era when the polished veneer of fame could hide the treasonous activities of a saboteur. This non-anamorphic DVD from Disney does little to display the lush elegance of Hiro Narita's cinematography and James D. Bissell's sumptuous production design, and the lack of bonus features for such a high profile release is shocking, even accounting for the film's surprising unpopularity.

Barton Fink (1991)

By the 1940s Hollywood had now established itself as a booming film factory attracting novelists and playwrights with promises of sunny weather and fat paychecks that could sustain these struggling artists during periods of creative inertia. This feature from the film-making team of Joel and Ethan Coen, is a mocking evocation of this time, following the surreal adventures of New York playwright Barton Fink in Los Angeles circa 1941. There he encounters various stock characters including manic studio executives, a washed-up drunken novelist, and a psychopathic insurance salesman. As played by John Turturro, Fink, whose physical appearance resembles socialist writer Clifford Odets, is a pretentious windbag, whose obsession with the "Common Man" is belied by an almost complete lack of interest in anything outside of the self-involved atmosphere of the theatre. The Coen Brothers may be satirizing the artistic ignorance of Hollywood, but their real barbs are reserved for their hapless protagonist, a creator of art whose myopic naivete leaves him easy prey to an industry gorged with avaricious egos. Unfortunately as per the habit of the filmmakers, there are few in the way of bonus features on the DVD. The paltry offerings here amount to a collection of deleted segments that do little to expand one's understanding or enjoyment of the film itself.

White Hunter Black Heart (1990)

After the victorious end of World War II, Hollywood discovered the benefits of overseas locations for their productions. Jungles no longer had to be artificial and with the advancement in air travel, the actors themselves could be transported to these exotic places where the realism of a film could be immeasurably improved. However, profitability of these expensive excursions often depended on the courage and determination of the director. John Huston possessed these qualities in spades, having demonstrated them with his masterful Mexico-shot classic The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. In 1950 he set out for East Africa to film The African Queen, where his larger-than-life approach to film-making created no end of troubles, a unique experience later fictionalized by his co-screenwriter Peter Viertel in the novel White Hunter Black Heart. Filmmaker Clint Eastwood also sees himself as a maverick both on-screen and off, so the character of self-destructive director John Wilson in Viertel's roman a clef must have seemed like a seductive challenge to a actor known more for the size of his gun than the range of his talent. Whereas Huston's verbosity often got him into trouble, Eastwood's silence typically kept him out of it. Therefore in impersonating the loquacious filmmaker, Eastwood under his own direction, successfully performed the most formidable role of his acting life. Fortunately with his loyal crew, careful preparation and quiet tenacity Eastwood also triumphed where Huston failed, by reducing the potential pitfalls of the African locations and delivering the film on schedule and budget. Unfortunately the story of the making of an acknowledged classic can never compete with the art of the original work, nevertheless this dark journey into the troubled soul of a cinematic genius makes for compelling entertainment, and is Eastwood's most overlooked masterpiece.

Cinema's Soothsayer

Many feel that this is the golden age for the true film buff. DVD, HD, and digital projection are making the image more immediate and life-like than ever before. As we abandon stories in favour of special effects, technology influences public tastes like never before. In the 1950s when formats such as 3-D and Cinemascope were introduced to entice audiences away from the new medium of television, the motivation was to elevate visual storytelling by altering the nature of the frame. These were finite improvements that depended on the artistic innovation of the directors in order to make them last longer than the latest fad. As a result a new visual language was created and filmmakers advanced their method of expression. We are now at the dawn of a purely digital age when perishable celluloid is about to be replaced by the passionless intangibility of pixels and hard-drives. The question is whether these impersonal tools can cultivate new film artists, or is the technology a literal dead-end, where the soul of the film itself is buried under so much digital artifice that the physical connection to the humanity of its creators is lost. As recently as this year, prominent directors such as Steven Spielberg and Paul Thomas Anderson have expressed their desire to continue working in the old film strip tradition, but many other respected auteurs such as David Fincher and Michael Mann have already relinquished this approach, embracing an image so digitally malleable that it threatens the very fabric of cinematic reality. What happens when these very technologies evolve to the point when they themselves can create without the need for human input? When do the tools of a civilization become its masters? Novelist and filmmaker Michael Crichton has been exploring these and other similar issues for nearly forty years. His films, often adapted from his own well-researched fiction, are sometimes startlingly augural works that are the type of canary-in-a-coal mine warnings that western society so desperately needs to heed. With virtually all of his movies on DVD, the following are a sample of the most prescient of his oeuvre.

The Andromeda Strain (1971)

Based on a novel Crichton wrote while still in medical school, this story of a small group of scientists combating
a virulent space organism that the military wishes to use for nefarious purposes, became the template for most of Crichton's subsequent work. With its dire vision of cold science helpless in the face of that which it cannot comprehend, Crichton gets to the heart of human frailty and exposes the hubris that ultimately leads to ecological disasters. Although stylishly made by veteran director-producer Robert Wise, Crichton was unhappy with the methodical pacing of the film and vowed to maintain more hands-on control of any future film versions of his work. The DVD extras contain an informative profile of the author as well as a making-of that includes footage of a surprisingly young Crichton talking about the film and its themes.

Pursuit (1972) a.k.a. Binary

Crichton himself stepped behind the camera to direct this made-for-television adaptation of his own novel. Instead of the extraterrestrial threat posed by the previous film, the scenario is now one of urban terror, as a group of right-wing extremists utilize sophisticated nerve gas technology to further their own political agenda while threatening mass extermination. Well crafted, with a nail-biting climax, this freshman effort from Crichton demonstrated that his directorial talents were more than equal to his literary gifts. It would however be his next film that finally proved his critical as well as box office success as a feature filmmaker.

Westworld (1973)

An instant sci-fi classic written specifically for the big screen, this was Crichton's obvious first draft of the Jurassic Park formula. It was conceived as his warning to a public mesmerized by the latest robot and computer technology introduced by Disney in its theme parks. Crichton posits the horrifying possibility of a malfunction at one of these holiday destinations that transmutes the safe movie-like atmosphere into one of deadly survival. Featuring a bravura fifteen minute chase finale with Yul Brynner as a lethal robotic version of his Maginificent Seven persona, this tightly constructed low-budget gem established Crichton as a formidable talent with much to say about the entertainment-craving "ME" generation of the 1970s.

Looker (1981)

After being passed over to direct the adaptation of his novel The Terminal Man, Crichton furthered his film career by helming the hugely popular medical thriller Coma, based on the book by Robin Cook. He followed that up with a distinct change-of-era film, adapted from his Victorian heist novel The Great Train Robbery. Its commercial failure made him return to more familiar thematic territory of the impact computer technology was having on commercial media. Looker was originally written as an all-out comedy, but studio executives wanted a thriller, so Crichton reluctantly complied with the result being a unique hybrid of black comedy and futuristic suspense. Completely misread at the time of its release, this is a film of surfaces, satirizing plastic surgery, computer generated imagery and slick politics with an often astoundingly prophetic eye to their eventual abuse in the following decades. Crichton's imaginative casting continued to serve him well, with his dumpy plastic surgeon hero played by Albert Finney, up against the polished presence of ruthless entrepreneur James Coburn. Crichton, demoralized by the compromises required to get the film made, originally disowned the finished product when it failed to find an audience. In the years since, he has come to endorse this singularly entertaining piece of cinematic divination. The DVD contains an informative director's commentary and a beautiful wide-screen transfer of this very witty film.

To date Crichton has directed only two more films, Runaway (1984), a slight but imaginative sci-fi cop movie with robotics once again the focus, and Physical Evidence (1989), a boring court-room thriller. Since then he has concentrated on his career as a novelist, selling his books to the big screen for exorbitant fees with often middling results. For his fans, the wait continues for his next foray as a filmmaker. With the world technologically dominated more than ever, visionaries like Michael Crichton are a resource we cannot afford to lose.