FOTW Audio Productions

The Mant — half-man half-ant — from Joe Dante’s 1993 film Matinee

Director Joe Dante was recently a guest at the Melbourne International Film Festival, with a retrospective of his work that included Gremlins, The ’Burbs, and his early film for Roger Corman, Piranha. He was interviewed on Radio National’s Movie Time show with Julie Rigg. http://www.abc.net.au/rn/movietime/stories/2010/2974270.htm

In recent years Joe Dante has run a project called Trailers from Hell, where directors talk about their favourite films for the duration of the film’s trailer: http://www.trailersfromhell.com/

“When I was a little boy, I lived with my parents in what was then a small suburb of Los Angeles called Hollywood. My father was general manager in charge of production for Firmament-Famous Artists-Lewin. It was a mouthful, but I used to have to remember the whole thing for the your-father-my-father arguments I was always having with a kid down the block whose old man was only an associate producer at Warner Brothers.”   
                                                                                          – From Some Faces in the Crowd

Budd Schulberg, who passed away last year at the age of 95, was one of the first true Hollywood insiders, a great novelist who wrote the screenplay to On the Waterfront, and a key figure in the blacklisting of Hollywood writers during the McCarthy era.

His father, B.P. Schulberg, a founding mogul of Hollywood, relocated his family from New York to Los Angeles when Budd was just a boy to share a film studio with the infamous Louis B. Mayer (who would later become his rival). B. P. Schulberg was responsible for evolving the art of the screenplay (known as ‘photoplays’ at the time), as well as launching the careers of some of Hollywood’s most famous stars, like Clara Bow and Gary Cooper.

Roaming the studio lots with the sons of other studio heads, Budd had a privileged chilhood, pelting the stars with figs and collecting autographs; all the while, the movie business growing up around him. At his family home in Malibu, his parents nurtured in him a love of literature; his father, a once aspiring writer would read classics to the family every Sunday, while his mother would pay him 25 cents for every book he read.

During his summer breaks he worked with the Paramount publicity department, writing copy for movie magazines, interviewing everyone from Gary Cooper, to the great Russian director Sergei Eisenstein (who was planning, unbelievably, to make a Western for Paramount).

But Budd Schulberg’s dream was to escape Hollywood and become a more traditional type of writer. He had seen how the wordsmiths working for his father operated – mismatched collaborators in cramped rooms, drinking and gambling, under tremendous pressure from the studio chiefs.

After graduating from Dartmouth College, he initially worked for the studios; but by age 26 he had completed his first novel What Makes Sammy Run?, the story of the unscrupulous Sammy Glick who claws his way to the top of the Hollywood food chain at the expense of his friends and colleagues. 

Budd’s father, thinking of the future problems the book could cause his son, advised him not to publish it: Schulberg’s unique Hollywood childhood had given him an unprecedented insight into the world of silver shadows and its secrets, and there were those in the business that would not be happy to have their dirty laundry aired.

But having witnessed his father’s ill-treatment at Paramount – demoted, despite being one of their top producers, Budd was keen to expose the hypocrisy of a system that promoted family values in its films, yet was saturated with backbiting, vice and infidelity. 

The book launched his writing career, but as his father had predicted, it alienated him from the community he had grown up in.

He would later experience a second round of alienation during the McCarthy-HUAC investigation into the communist influence in Hollywood. Named as a former member of the party, Budd in turn named others, and it was perceived as a severe betrayal by those around him. 

However, Budd Schulberg always had a strong social conscience, identifying with the underdog in society. In the aftermath of the Watts Riots of 1965, he set up a writers workshop for the mostly African-American community of Watts.  It attracted the support of Robert Kennedy, and Budd later acknowledged that this was the thing he was most proud of in his life.   

LINKS:

IMDB Entry for Budd Schulberg: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0775977/

Trailer for Midnight Express (1978); dir. Alan Parker, screenplay by Oliver Stone. 

LINKS:

Wikipedia entry for Giorgio Moroder: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giorgio_Moroder

Giorgio Moroder’s Official Website: http://www.giorgiomorodergallery.com/

Thanks to Mal and Amber’s Video Service.

Back in 1983, a trilogy of feature-length telemovies were made by the ABC called Scales of Justice. Written by Robert Caswell, and directed by Michael Carson, each story was a fictional examination of corruption at three levels of the Australian legal system.

The first story The Job started at the ground level of the legal system, the police force, with a new rookie Constable Leonard Webber (Simon Burke) joining an inner-city Sydney police station. Fresh out of the Police Academy, with the police ethos of right and wrong and what it means to be perceived in the community as a police officer – the blue uniform representing the conscience of society – he is gradually exposed to age-old corruption.

It starts out small, while out on duty with his senior officer, Constable Borland (John Hargreaves). Although an efficient teacher, showing him how to carry himself while saving a mentally ill lady from committing suicide, he also teaches him the first of what could be a series of lifelong bad habits: drinking on the job, ignoring small misdemeanours in order to avoid excessive paperwork; as well as the dubious difference between a “bribe” and a “gift”. He also describes the police uniform as an unofficial “discount card” for making purchases.

But at a much deeper level, he is also being taught the importance of looking after your friends, which is more of a social code of not dobbing in co-workers. When some money in the station goes missing, the evidence of a bribe, all the on-duty officers are forced to chip in a few dollars to make it back up, rather than report it missing and bring in outside scrutiny on their policing.

The rookie takes on some of the habits, and reacts against others; but his own dilemma begins when a friend in his football team who has been charged with petty-theft, asks him to put in a friendly word with the investigating officer on his behalf. After thinking about it for a while, the rookie mentions it to Constable Borland, who tells him to go see the detective; which he does. The detective he visits describes how the system of favours work, not explicitly; but lets the rookie know that his friend now owes him a favour, and suggests that he could help the rookie by becoming an informer.

But crunch time comes for Constable Webber when he is out on night-patrol with Sergeant O’Rourke (played by veteran Australian actor, Bill Hunter) and they investigate a robbery of a fur coat store. The sergeant tells the rookie to check around the back, and in the meantime, steals some of the coats. The rookie comes back out just as the seargeant is closing the boot of his car. He quickly works out what has happened.

The sergeant leaves him to guard the broken door to prevent any passerbys from helping themselves to the merchandise, while he returns to the station. Two detectives then show up who also help themselves to some of the coats. The rookie ignores it, but the next day, he finds that someone has put one of the coats in his locker as a “present” for his fiance.

He takes the coat home with him, and wonders what to do about it. He then asks the advice of a female officer who has just found out she is to be transferred to a remote police station for investigating a rape case that Sergeant O’Rourke had wanted her to ignore. She advises the rookie to get rid of it, throw it away, and don’t say anything.

But thinking he is doing the right thing - by the law at least, Constable Webber decides to report it to the head of the station, without naming his sergeant at first; but when pressured from an outside investigator, he does.

Sergeant O’Rourke is investigated by internal affairs by officers who are like him in age and attitude. The seargeant claims the reverse of what had really happened, that the rookie took the coats while the sergeant was out the back checking the store, and they accept it: it’s easier to write off a new rookie, who is disloyal, than indite a senior officer, and let it reflect badly on an organisation who, up until then, had not detected his corrupt ways.  

Thinking that it will all turn out in his favour, the rookie is stunned when he is asked to hand in his badge and leave the force; and although this ending is not explicit in terms of content, it is cold and brutal in a uniquely Australia way. 

If there is such a thing as a hardboiled Australian crime film, that bears a close relationship to reality without being sensational, then this it. This episode has elements of Serpico, but without a clearcut hero.

The series was shot in a documentary style, and had a big impact on Australian audiences when it was first shown; and over the years, it has become part of High School English curriculum for students sitting their final year exams.

This particular episode also contains some great night-time footage – the industrial areas, the harbour and shipping yards of Sydney (that are sadly disappearing). 

Here is a link to a short clip on the Australian Screen website, with some background information about the series.

Like film noir movies?

Then check out the Film Noir Foundation, a non-profit organisation dedicated to the preservation of film noir heritage. For a small donation you can receive their hardboiled bi-monthly electronic magazine The Noir City Sentinel and be kept up to date with articles, news, and events from the shadowy world of Noir City.

–Which is also the name of their annual film festival in San Francisco. Noir City 8 will take place in January next year and you can check out the movies on their program here. (You can also have a look at some of their fantastic past exhibition poster-art).

The Foundation also works in conjunction with Back Alley Noir, a movie site that has a weekly analysis of film noir movies and a higly active discussion board, the Foundation will also provide answers to any questions you might have for them about this dark underbelly of American Cinema.  

Late night shadows in RKO’s “I Walked With A Zombie” (dir. Jacques Tourneur, 1943) 

For those of you living in Australia, a great untapped resource for good films is the national broadcaster, the ABC.

Fluctuating between old British films from studios like Pathe and Rank - and what could almost be a complete collection of  RKO films (the now defunct American studio that created Citizen Kane, a truckload of film noir, and the classic Tourneur/Lewton cycle of psychological horror films) - the ABC after midnight is an almost requisite experience for film students, movie lovers, and anyone interested in the history of cinema alike.

Although RKO (1929–1960) sat on the outskirts of the Hollywood studio system, it contributed greatly to what is now regarded as the Golden Age of Hollywood. The majority of RKO films were made on a lower budget than the big studios like Warner Bros and Paramount, but still turned out quality films with great soundtracks from composers like Bernard Herrmann and Franz Waxman, and notable actors like Robert Mitchum and Loretta Young.

They made lots of genre films - Westerns, War stories, Detective dramas, and Gangster films — and helped to revitalise the horror genre, moving it away from the old world horrors of Frankenstein and Dracula, into a more modern and elegant form of horror, drawing on inroads made in the study of psychology, and techniques of suspense developed in thrillers and film noir. 

They also distributed Rashomon in the US, an early film by Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, a significant moment, signalling an American open-mindedness to foreign films (which is not always present today) at a very important time in film history - as well as world history (it was only five years after the close of WW2).

RKO now exists only as a small distribution and production company, and although its logo of a beaming broadcast tower is not as well known as the growling lion, the lady with the torch, or the roving spotlights, it occupies a significant place in movie history, one that’s worth having a look at. 

There is no need to subscribe to pay tv to watch classic and classy films; just stay up late with a cup of coffee, and you’ll have something good to think about while your boss is wondering whether to fire you for sleeping on the job the next day. 

ABC Program Guide