Year-end eulogies
I have long since given up on my comprehensive sets of farewells at the calendar’s close. Still, I like to throw out the occasional few random nods to bright lights who have sadly been extinguished. Usually, I go for names that may be less familiar to many—particularly if there is a Dark Shadows or Babylon 5 connection to highlight—but this time, for my own particular reasons, I choose to salute three men who have already received plenty of posthumous attention.
The Last Emperor (1941-2018)
I first became aware of Bernardo Bertolucci the same way many Americans did. It had to do with a notorious movie which included Marlon Brando (the same year he was The Godfather), a woman young enough to be his daughter and butter. Last Tango in Paris was one of those European films that seemed deliberately calculated to set American tongues wagging. It was rated X and was featured on the covers of both Time and Newsweek. I was a college student, so of course I took my girlfriend to see it. She wondered why Brando remained fully clothed while Maria Schneider (19 years old at the time and now dead nearly eight years) was made to bare (and bear) all. “I’ve not really forgiven him for the way he treated me,” she would say say years later of Bertolucci. “Plus, he and [Brando] made a fortune from the movie and I made about £2,500. And Bertolucci was a Communist, too!” For his part, Bertolucci would later rationalize his treatment of her by explaining he had “wanted Maria to feel, not to act, the rage and the humiliation.”
Two decades later, in one of those strange twists in life, I would be able to claim the celebrated director as a friend of a friend. He came to Seattle to film portions of Little Buddha, a celebration of his own personal spiritual inclinations. A good pal of mine wound up becoming a production assistant on the movie, mainly because, as a Tibetan-American, she was handy for dealing with the Tibetan monks who had been recruited to essentially play themselves in the film. (One of them became the father of her daughter.) Through her, I got all kinds of vicarious scoop about Chris Isaak, Bridget Fonda and, especially, Keanu Reeves (cast as Siddhartha) whom she later would visit in Los Angeles. “Everybody thinks Tibetans are cool,” she told me, explaining how she was so easily accepted into the world of celebrity.
Spiritual, political and sexual themes recurred throughout Bertolucci’s oeuvre. The Conformist dealt with Italian fascism. The Spider’s Stratagem brought to life a story by Jorge Luis Borges. Bertolucci’s 1900 was a multigenerational saga featuring Robert De Niro, Gérard Depardieu, Burt Lancaster and Donald Sutherland. In Luna (alternate title in my own head: Who Needs Methadone?), Jill Clayburgh played an opera singer who initiates a sexual relationship with her 15-year-old son to cure him of his drug addiction. The Sheltering Sky was an adaptation of Paul Bowles’s novel. Stealing Beauty told the story of an American teenager and her (guess what) sexual awakening in Tuscany. Ever the provocateur, his 2003 adaptation of Gilbert Adair’s novel The Holy Innocents, The Dreamers, chronicled a wild few days during Paris’s 1968 riots as a French twin brother and sister, fueled by libido and love of film, enter into a kinky reltionship with an American student.
Bertolucci died in Rome on November 26 at the age of 77, having spent more than a decade confined to a wheelchair.
Butch Cassidy and All the President’s Men (1931-2018)
There first thing to get straight about William Goldman is that he did not write Lord of the Flies. That was the British author William Golding (born in Cornwall), who died in 1993 at the age of 81. Because of my aggravating knack for mixing people up, I have actually gone through brief periods when I thought that Lord of the Flies and The Princess Bride were written by the same person. They were not. Like Golding, William Goldman, an American (born in Illinois), did write novels, but he was also an Oscar-winning screenwriter.
I have no friend-of-a-friend connection to link me to him, but I am a great admirer of the many memorable phrases he contributed to the popular culture. You cannot think back on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid without recalling such smile-inducing lines as “I can’t swim!” and “Who are those guys?” When you watch it again, you’ll remember other ones that are equally good but that you had forgotten out. And who among us has not recited multiple times the following speech from The Princess Bride: “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” He also gets full credit for his famous line in All the President’s Men: “Follow the money.” After all, he invented it himself. It was never said in real life by “Deep Throat” (eventually revealed to be FBI Associate Director Mark Felt) nor did it appear in the source book by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. Yet, to this day, millions have a false memory of the famous informant saying those words.
Goldman’s novels Soldier in the Rain and No Way to Treat a Lady (adapted by others) were made into movies. He also wrote screenplays based on his novels Marathon Man, Magic, Heat and The Princess Bride. Other screenplays included Masquerade, Harper, Papillon, The Stepford Wives, The Great Waldo Pepper, A Bridge Too Far, Misery, Chaplin and The Ghost and the Darkness. Given his mastery of the language, Goldman was also sought after as a script doctor. Rumors persist—though he always denied them, as he would have had to—that he was the true author of the screenplay for Good Will Hunting, which won Oscars for Ben Affleck and Matt Damon.
Despite all the great lines from all of those movies, perhaps the most impressive thing Goldman ever wrote was the opening line of his 1983 memoir Adventures in the Screen Trade: “Nobody knows anything.” It is emblematic of his style. It is short, simple, direct, to the point, and absolutely unassailably true. That one line tells you everything you need to know about Hollywood and life in general.
Goldman died in his sleep at home in New York on November 16 at the age of 87.
The Man Who Fell to Earth (1928-2018)
One of the sad facts of life is that most of us do not get to see the great filmmakers of the world—the ones we have admired our entire filmgoing lives—in the flesh. But sometimes you do. For me one such memorable occasion was at the 2007 Galway Film Fleadh. I noticed in the programme that Nicolas Roeg had a yet-to-be-released feature film, called Puffball, in the festival, so of course I immediately grabbed a ticket for it. He had not released a full-length theatrical film for more than decade. As it turned out, it would be his last one. (He would, though, release a documentary called The Film That Buys the Cinema seven years later.) Sadly, Puffball was not exactly received enthusiastically. People did not know what to make of it, and as far as I could tell anyway, it never got much of a release. As for me, ever the contrarian, I liked it and, in fact, gave it three stars. It was kind of a rural, gothic ghost story that made the most of the damp, dark, soggy, mucky Irish hinterland.
I tend to think of Roeg as the bloke who built strange movies around rock stars. He started out as the co-director (with Donald Cammell) of Performance, a weird exploration of blurred identities starring James Fox as a London gangster on the run and Mick Jagger as hedonistic former rock star. (Line that has drawn audience laughs for decades, Fox to Jagger: “Comical little geezer. You’ll look funny when you’re fifty.”) Six years later he directed David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth, sealing that rock star’s androgynous alien credentials forever. Next came Bad Timing with Art Garfunkel as a psychiatrist in Vienna.
Mostly, though, we will remember Roeg as the master of the psychologically unsettling and the occasionally outright creepy or horrifying. After Performance he made the Australian outback coming-of-age tale Walkabout and then the classic adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now, which made lots of us scared to go to Venice and included a love scene between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie that has regularly been voted one of the most erotic things ever committed to screen.
Perhaps his most beloved movie is his 1990 adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The Witches, starring Anjelica Huston. Rarely have a writer and filmmaker been so perfectly matched in tone and theme. It is one of those scarce “family” entertainments that works creepily and effectively for viewers of any age. “His films hypnotized me for years and still continue to intrigue,” said filmmaker Edgar Wright on Roeg’s passing. Amen.
Roeg passed into immortality on November 23 at the age of 90.
-S.L., 14 December 2018
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