That Would Be Me (dot net)

On a radio show recently, the question was put forth, “does art have the power to change a life?” Although I’ve always thought a life without art is a dead life and a society without art is a dead society, I’d never considered the question quite in that way. It started me thinking about my own journey.

I graduated from college with a Bachelor of Arts degree in theatre. The plan after college was to spend a year in Northern California with my brother and his wife while getting acclimatized to life outside of school, then move to San Francisco and disappear into some rep company or other and spend my days happily ensconced in a life in theatre.

I often visited San Francisco with my brother and sister-in-law, seeing plays, visiting museums, drinking in the Bohemia of it all, preparing for my eventual move there. As Robert Burns said to the wee mouse, “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men/Gang aft agley…” Okay, so my schemes weren’t all that well laid out to begin with, but they did gang a bit agley.

Soon after lighting in Northern California, I got a job at the Round Table Pizza parlor at Brunswick Plaza, half way between the small towns of Grass Valley and Nevada City. I was quickly promoted to assistant manager and moved into a tiny house in Grass Valley. I didn’t have a car, almost everything I needed I could get to by walking or riding my ten-speed bike. Everything but movies. There was one movie theatre that served both towns. It had three screens and was fairly close to me, but their usual fair tended to ooze a little too much testosterone for my taste. The nearest alternative was in Sacramento, a forty-five minute drive down the highway. If I wanted to see something that didn’t have Sylvester Stallone in it I would need to find someone else who wanted to go who also had a car.

One afternoon I decided I needed to see a movie but no one I knew wanted to go. My friend Vern, however, who lived right across the street from me, offered the use of his car. I decided on The China Syndrome, which was playing at one of the bigger complexes in the outskirts of Sacramento, gathered up the keys and journeyed hence.

The movie, staring Jane Fonda, Michael Douglas, Jack Lemmon and Wilford Brimley, was a political thriller very loosely based on the Three Mile Island incident. A young, naive reporter (Fonda) accidentally stumbles upon evidence that the safety inspections for the building of the local nuclear plant were fudged and those responsible ranged from the halls of corporations to the government. The script was tight, the direction flawless. The tension built slowly but steadily to a fever pitch. Jack Lemmon, an actor I always admired, was never better. I was moved. Stunned might be a better world. On the ride home in that borrowed car, I decided I wanted to be part of an industry that could produce something so powerful. The next day I put my notice in at the pizza parlor.

I saw the movie two more times that week, convincing friends they had to go. None of them seemed as moved as I was, but they humored me. It wasn’t until the third viewing that I realized that there was no background music in the film, only incidental music occasionally coming from a car radio or in a party scene. How tight must a movie be to not rely on music to manipulate your emotions? How courageous must a director be to make that choice? If I’d had any doubts about my impending relocation, they vanished.

I bought a car, a Ford Grand Torino station wagon, bright orange, that I named Stanley (two points to anyone who can guess why), loaded all my belonging in back and literally a month after that initial viewing of the movie I was on my way to Los Angeles. I lived in the car those first few days, parking on side streets in this unfamiliar town, until I tracked down some friends from college and camped out on their living room couch. I stayed with them until I found a small room in a building just north of Hollywood Boulevard, got a job at an answering service and became a Los Angelian. Before watching that movie, it was completely unpredictable that I move to this town, one I’d never even visited. I liked San Francisco. Whenever I visited there, it felt like home, yet here I am. I tell people I was headed for San Francisco but took a wrong toin at Albuquoique.

That was in 1979. My acting dreams have transformed, I am now a writer, but I still live quite happily and productively in Los Angeles after all these years, working in and around the industry that made such a powerful film. I look upon that evening in a movie house in Sacramento as a major turning point in my life.

To answer the question posed by the radio show, yes, I say. Art does have the power to change one’s life. I often wonder what that original trail would have been like, but the one I chose has thus far been wildly diverting.

P.S. Along with this, a sad goodbye to Paul Newman, one the greats, who will be remembered for his incredible body of work, his humility, humor and dedication to contribution to humanity.

_______________________________
Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

As you can probably tell, I love movies. I love them unapologeticly. I would often rather go to a movie than have a good meal or sit by a roaring fire with a brandy or watch the waves of a blue and green ocean spread toward me an a beautiful summer day. As I say, I love movies more than is reasonable for an adult person. Because of that, I will often forgive in movies what might be seen as flaws. I also love passion and artistic risk, so some of my favorite films are those that don’t quite work but the attempt was grand, movies like Altman’s Quintet (was I one of perhaps three people who ever saw this film?) and 3 Women (which was inspired by a nightmare Altman had one night). Robert Altman is a film maker who often takes grand risks, sets himself grand challenges. Usually, the risks pay off and he conquers the challenges, but even when he fails, he does so brilliantly. It’s no wonder all the big stars in Hollywood are willing to play cameos (and often parody themselves) in his movies.

The first Altman movie I ever saw was Nashville. It was sprawling and unwieldy and breathtaking, the story of several musicians, both established and new, talented and not, performing in and around Nashville during a political campaign and their fans and fanatics and the wannabe hangers on. Although Altman denies that it was his intent, it presents an odd, compelling, satirical cross section of Americana. (Barbara Harris is a revelation - why did she quit acting and become a casting director, I wonder.) From the opening credits, which hilariously resemble a frenetic television ad for a music compilation, to the political rally at the end, nothing is predictable, everything surprises and I was swept along the ride down the rapids.

The next movie of his I saw was A Wedding, which was much smaller in scale and didn’t quite hit the mark as well. I still liked it of course. In that movie, Altman set himself the challenge of presenting a huge cast of characters in a single setting in such a way that the audience ends up knowing and following them all. On this point he was very successful and I really admire him for the attempt, but the movie itself didn’t quite flow as well as Nashville did.

Another thing I admire about Altman is that he continues to produce, no mater what. He simply doesn’t care. If people stop liking his movies, he does television. And it’s always innovative television (Tanner ‘88 has been copied many times by lessor talents). If he can’t get television work, he directs theater. And then he comes back to the big screen and produces something stunning like Gosford Park, which pretends to be a murder mystery but is really a biting examination of class distinction and social mores in 1930s England, just as the “privileged class” was beginning to disintegrate.

Altman has dabbled in surrealism (Brewster Mccloud, 3 Women), social commentary (Nashville, The Player, Short Cuts), war (M*A*S*H), character study (Vincent & Theo), translations of theater (Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean and Streamers) and translations of cartoons into movie musicals (Popeye). Although I haven’t yet seen everything he’s done (he’s done so very much) I will see anything he does.

Geoff Hoff is co-owner of Joseph Coaler Productions and, with Steve Mancini, co-wrote the satirical novel “Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend“.

This week’s entry is a short one. It started as another email conversation with my father, poet Rowell Hoff, who currently lives with his wife Carol in China.

Dad:

We just watched last night the Paul Newman movie “Nobody’s Fool“. We sort of think he may be, if there is one, the best actor around. What I notice is that I forget about Newman; the person I am seeing is the person in the movie.

I read a review of this movie, the reviewer mentioned that Newman and Brando started out at the same time, the same classes, etc. But what happened to Brando after all? He started maybe imitating himself, maybe just tired of it all, maybe confused (certainly confused!) maybe whatever. Newman perfected his art, there is no other word for it. Did you see him in the movie about Earl Long (don’t remember the title)? Cool Hand Luke? Butch Cassidy? The Sting? etc. etc. etc.

Me:
That movie was called Blaze, but no, I haven’t seen it. Interesting that you should mention Paul Newman. He is by far my writing partner’s favorite actor, Cool Hand Luke his favorite film. And of course both Butch Cassidy and The Sting are two of my absolute top films. I too think he is close to the best actor around. Nobody’s Fool was not a great film, but certainly a very good one, and he was fine in it. That particular class at the Actor’s Studio produced a lot of wonderful actors, not the least of which were my two acting instructors in college who met and married there. (In other words, my training was second hand the same as Newman’s and Brando’s. Sort of… Okay, that’s really inconsequential to the conversation at hand, but what the hell.)

In terms of raw acting ability, I do think Brando far outweighs Newman, but Brando got very bitter about the industry very early on and Newman just dove in and made it work for himself, becoming a director, producer and better actor. After just “phoning in” (I hate that phrase, but it does describe it) performances for many years, and doing things just for the money, (such as Superman for goodness sakes. A fun film, but what the hell is he doing in it? Not much. Feh) Brando did kind of disappear. He didn’t make a movie for almost ten years after Apocalypse Now (what a performance that was!) and The Formula. You can see that he probably had resistance to his whole life by looking at his physical body over those years. Then he started doing some small roles in things and it looked like he was choosing movies he wanted to do and really did his homework. He had only one scene in a movie called Dry White Season with Donald Sutherland in which he never stood up from his chair but walked away with the film. (It was one of those films that bother me a bit because it is about a non-white ethnic group, but seen through White Man’s eyes as if that were the only way to communnicate the strange, bizarre Other. Or as if to say, the white oppressor isn’t all that bad, see? Look how he feels for the downtrodden. Feh. In this case, the movie is about the struggle of blacks in South Africa but seen through Sutherland’s eyes, who plays an upper middle class Afrikaner. But Brando is so wonderful, subtle, he almost makes up for that.) Of course, he followed that up with The Freshman, a movie even he disparaged.

Brando did a slightly bigger role in a caper film a few years before he died called The Score that was a hoot (although one major plot point didn’t make a lot of sense) with two other actors that are close to being in Newman and Brando’s league: Edward Norton and Robert De Niro. (De Niro was also an Actor’s Studio alum, although much later.) I think it was Brando’s last movie. Before that he went back and forth between great stuff and trash, following Don Juan DeMarco, a delightful film in which he is delightful, with The Island of Dr. Moreau, a dreadful film in which he is dreadful.

Newman has done some clunkers (don’t see Twilight, even though it has another couple of favorites of mine in it, it’s almost unwatchable…) but I will see anything he’s in and I rarely see a film just because Brando is in it.

Geoff Hoff is co-owner of Joseph Coaler Productions and, with Steve Mancini, co-wrote the satirical novel “Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend“.

I recently saw the end of Field of Dreams on television, one of those movies that whenever I stumble across it I end up watching from that point to the end. (Two others are The Usual Suspects and Shawshank Redemption. I’ve watched the end of those movies more times than I can count.) When Field of Dreams first came out I almost didn’t go see it because I thought it was a movie about baseball and I simply wasn’t interested. I did go, it was the only thing playing at the time that a friend wanted to see, and I’m very glad I did. It’s sort of a modern fairly tale, I guess, and it’s about a lot of things but mostly it’s about father’s and sons. I’ve probably seen it all the way through twenty or more times and I doubt I’ve ever made it to the end without crying. Okay, my mother used to say she cried at supermarket openings and I am her son. Don’t get me wrong, it’s funny and charming, not sad at all, but the emotional impact always hits me broadside.

Interesting that I was objecting because it was a baseball movie; turns out three of my favorite films (of which there are hundreds, I must confess) are baseball movies: Field of Dreams, of course, then Bull Durham (another movie with Kevin Costner, who I insist I don’t like, but really love in both of these films) and The Natural with Robert Redford (who I almost always love.) League of Their Own is another good baseball movie, not high on my favorites list but good in any case.

Bull Durham is interesting for many reasons. It was the first time I saw Tim Robins, who I have come to think is one of the bigger talents of the last few decades, and who is close to the top of the list of people I want to meet and work with. The next thing I saw him in was Jacob’s Ladder (a strangely compelling, surreal contemplation on war, responsibility and individual redemption that stays with me even though I’ve only seen it a very few times) and I was shocked to realize it was the same actor who played the punk kid in Bull Durham.

In any case, Field of Dreams is about a man “who never did a crazy thing in his life until he heard The Voice,” which tells him to plow a third of his corn field under and build a baseball diamond on it so that Shoeless Joe Jackson (played by Ray Liotta fairly early in his career) can redeem himself from the 1919 Chicago White Sox scandal. But, as is often the case where it’s used in American stories from Bernard Malamud on, baseball is really a symbol for something else, something often quintessentially American, but also something universal. Baseball is the one thing Costner’s character had to connect with his father, who died before they reconciled, and is something he teaches to his daughter. It is the one thing he can use to connect on a personal level with his favorite author (played magnificently larger than life by James Earl Jones), even though the author refuses to admit he ever liked the sport. It makes me want to be a fan of the sport so that I can have that same connection with my father. Of course, that wouldn’t help, as my father isn’t a fan of it, either, as far as I know, so we’ll have to stick with movies and writing as our bond.

Often, there is something intangible that makes a movie work. In the case of Field of Dreams, a lot of its success was due to the passion that everyone who made the film had for the project. They all believed in it and that belief practically glows from the screen. Passion is my favorite word and I am attracted to that kind of passion even when it is directed toward something I am not passionate about.

In Bull Durham, I think, baseball stands in for passion. And it’s a very passionate film. It’s a very different movie from Field of Dreams, much more lusty, and Costner is again quite good in it. It was where I fell in love with Susan Sarandon and, as I say, where I discovered Tim Robins. (It seems it was where Susan Sarandon discovered him, also, they’ve been living together ever since.) It makes the distinction between youthful, undisciplined passion, embodied by Robins’ character, and that of Costner’s, no less lusty, but grown up, matured, partly because of the added element of respect. One of the best speeches Costner has ever delivered on screen is the “what I believe in” speech. What he believes in includes the hanging curve ball, the soul and the small of a woman’s back. Every time I watch that film, by the end of that speech, I believe in all those things, also.

Where Field of Dreams finds a powerful emotional core in its gentle examination of family ties and following a dream, Bull Durham is simply a delight from beginning to end. It is delightful to watch this young buck (Robins) be forced to grow up and this slightly over the hill ringer (Costner) fight against making his peace with the world. And Kevin Costner is in both of them, of all things. Who knew?

Geoff Hoff is co-owner of Joseph Coaler Productions and, with Steve Mancini, co-wrote the satirical novel “Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend“.

Some people don’t like, or don’t get Woody Allen and wonder why he is so revered. I think he can be brilliant. The films of his that I have liked, I have loved. Manhattan is one of my favorites. Yes, it is, as some might say, about “whiny aimless people with boring neuroses”. That, I think, is part of the point. It has always fascinated me that the most mature, stable and intelligent character in it is the teenager played by Muriel Hemingway. The thing I find amazing about it, though, is that practically every shot is a work of art. This is the beginning, I think, of Allen’s experimentation with cinematic technique, and it pays off handsomely. I think you could pull any one frame at random from the film and it would be composed brilliantly. And it is composed that way in order to tell the story, not as an end. I find directors that show off beautifully lit and angled shots often get in the way of the film. I find that often of Allen, actually, (take a look at the nausea inducing hand held camera work in Husbands and Wives) but not in Manhattan. In fact, Allen insisted that it be presented on television, VHS or DVD only in widescreen format to keep the integrity of the shots intact, the first (perhaps only?) film maker to ever do so.

And, yes, given that, most of his stories are about whiny aimless people with boring neuroses. I do recommend “Broadway Danny Rose,” though, as a charming tribute to spunk. It is (very) loosely based on a real New York talent agent who actually had a roster much like the one portrayed in the film, an agent who took on the oddest of talent, but who believed in them and supported them beyond all reason. The real agent that it’s based on had Andrew “Dice” Clay among his talent pool, but most of his acts were odd variety and specialty acts. I haven’t seen it in a while, but remember being utterly charmed by it. It is told as a series of tales by actors and performers sitting around a table at a New York deli, trying to outdo each other telling “Danny Rose” stories, until one comes up with the ultimate tale. And there is one scene in a hanger full of Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade floats that I remember as making me almost choke with laughter. Love and Death is also a good film; a fairly silly but intelligent comedy about Napoleon of all things.

Hannah and Her Sisters is another one that I liked a lot. Allen seemed to grow up in an odd way with that film. I mean Allen himself, not necessarily his art or film making. There seemed far less neurotic, juvenile behavior and the situations, characters and issues presented in it also seemed, somehow, more mature.

The latest by Allen, Match Point, surprised me. It was placed in London rather than New York, which everyone seems to think is the main point of departure and the most notable thing about the film, but it was other things about it that surprised me. It is unrelentingly nihilistic, I think, the whole point being that you win or lose completely by chance, by where the ball falls after it hits the top of the net, not by any endemic goodness or strength of character or act of redemption or even effort on your part. This seems to me to be the biggest point of departure from his other films. (And perhaps he needed to travel to London to make that departure.) Yes, his characters have often been obsessed with death (especially the characters he plays) and have been neurotic and frequently even selfish, but there has usually been an underlying goodness, even sweetness in all of his people. Even the animalistic brutes in Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy played by Jose Ferrer and Tony Roberts (what ever happened to him? He used to be the quintessential white bread foil for Allen) learn about the higher levels of love and human relationships by the end of the movie. The performances in Match Point are quite good (not unusual for Woody Allen, who has gotten the best performances ever from many of his actors) and the story is compelling, but his departure of mood and intent left me a bit cold.

There are so many other Allen films that I love (how could I not talk about Zelig or Purple Rose of Cairo, for goodness sake?) but they will have to wait for some future post. Anyway, I think Woody Allen is revered partly because he has experimented with the art of film making and brought it places other film makers haven’t had the foresight or courage to go, partly because he tells compelling, interesting and unusual stories, partly because he gets such intimate performances, but mostly because there is simply no other film maker even remotely like him.

Geoff Hoff is co-owner of Joseph Coaler Productions and, with Steve Mancini, co-wrote the satirical novel “Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend“.

The following is part of an email conversation I had recently with my father, poet Rowell Hoff, who now lives in China with his wife, Carol.

Dad:

We watched, on recommendation of a friend, “Once Upon a Time in America“, Sergio Leone’s long movie about — about what?? Me, I didn’t like it at all. What should one think of a movie about four people, in reality only two; one of them (Max, the character played by Woods) a stone sociopath, another (Di Niro’s character) in a sense worse, for he has some human sensibility and tenderness, which he invariably puts behind him in favor of criminality and nastiness in general, and ends up smiling on opium. And the directing: Feh, as you say. The perhaps comic in intention sequence about the police captain and his baby–not funny, just stupid. The scene in the empty-but-for-Niro-and-the-girl restaurant, a hundred waiters, an orchestra for Heaven’s sake. The story of Max (the stone sociopath) who fakes his own death, takes the money and disappears for 30 years, during which time he becomes a U.S. cabinet member. Come on! And so on. Nobody in the story was worth a counterfeit Confederate dollar as a human being, except “Fat Moe”. What was the message? Was there a message? Why did our friend like it? Why did Ebert like it? Leone should have stuck to spaghetti westerns. “Fistful of Dollars” was better (not good, but better than “Once Upon…”, and mercifully shorter), and Eastwood’s character, besides cleverly arranging for the massacre of most of the inhabitants of the town, who indeed were pretty bad persons, did at least one kind and self-sacrificing thing.

Me:

I saw Once Upon a Time in America shortly after it came out. When it was first released in the US, the studio re-arranged the narrative so it was told linearly and cut it down by (if I remember correctly) almost half its original length. I saw it when it came to cable and they showed both the theatrical release and the original cut. I remember being fairly in awe of the scope of the thing (I watched both versions and was appalled by the studio cut) and of what I remember as the very effective non-linear story telling. I love studying different ways of structuring a story, different ways to reveal the various threads in a story. (To see a really innovative narrative, and a really dark but quite good movie, see Momento. I warn you, it is very dark. It’s sort of told backward, but only sort of. It had an odd, lingering effect on me. After leaving the theater, it was literally several hours before actual reality seemed to be real.) However, I also remember having had some problems with the story itself in Once Upon a Time. It’s been a long time and I really don’t remember much about the specifics - the points you bring up seem valid but none of them ring a bell - but I do have a vague recollection of being a little annoyed at the depiction of Jewish people in it.

As for why so many people liked it, first of all Americans have a strange love for gangsters and the “romance” of the gangster life. Second, it was beautifully filmed and acted, which I have said before can almost make up for any other flaw. Again, from memory because it has been so long since I’ve seen it, I think a lot of the absurd story elements you point out are actually impressionistic rather than stark realism - they are the musings in he mind of De Niro. Isn’t it a lot about his looking back on his dark life? Also, a lot of films that have utterly reprehensible and unrepentant and unredeemable characters have had a lot of critical acclaim - take Raging Bull, a movie I really didn’t like, but that I could see a lot of wonderful film making in. No one in that film has any saving grace at all. They’re all complete a** holes from beginning to end, and the critics loved it.

Dad:

I am also happy with “non-linear” flicks, generally speaking. (What a good name for them!) Remember “Rashomon“? Although the technique was different, for a different purpose, really, and of course it grew out of the story by Akutagawa. (It is curious that the book of stories it came from had a story called “Rashomon” in it, but that was not the story that became the movie. I forget what the name of it was…) Zhang Yimou, in his “Hero“, may have been thinking of “Rashomon” a little.

The most interesting and technically and artistically fascinating non-linear film lately — that we have seen, anyway — is Syriana.

Me:

Believe it or not, I’ve never seen Rashomon! I know a lot about it and it is ALWAYS referenced when someone is talking about a story told from different perspectives. It is one I’ve always wanted to see, mainly because of the story telling technique. I often don’t like Akira Kurosawa and that’s one reason I’ve not yet seen it even though it has so heavily influenced so many other things. My main problem with Kurosawa is that his movies are visually stunning but seem somehow soulless and emotionally empty. (I find that with a lot of Japanese art, actually. Odd, probably, given my birth in Tokyo.) That’s probably a little unfair, I haven’t seen more than a few of his movies, but there you have it.

As for non-linear films, the first one I saw actually radically changed the way I wrote. There is a movie made in the sixties with Julie Christie and George C. Scott called Petulia. I can’t remember exactly when I saw it (probably when I was in high school, but it may have been even earlier), but it jumps around in time rather frenetically and it stunned me. You don’t really completely know what is going on until the very last scene. I tried for many years to see it again (this is way before video - and I’m not even sure it’s available on video in any case) without any success. Finally, several years ago now, I convinced an art house movie theater in LA to run it. I was thrilled. And very disappointed. It wasn’t nearly as good as I had remembered. Of course, how could it be? I had credited it with changing how I approached storytelling and I consider myself a story teller, so it was like some sort of religious or transformational experience in my mind - a walk to the peak, a flight to heaven. What could live up to that? I’d actually like to see it again, now, with the perspective of a little maturity and not as great an expectation.

I have not yet seen Syriana - it is top on my list. I had wanted to see it before it left the movie theaters, but alas, I think I’ve missed it there. Ah well. I want to see it for any number of reasons; the movie making is supposed to be superb, the emotional impact is supposed to be extreme and I have come to really respect George Clooney. (Who knew! That guy who goofed his way through ER on TV is actually an amazing man. - Speaking of Clooney, see Good Night and Good Luck.)

Geoff Hoff is co-owner of Joseph Coaler Productions and, with Steve Mancini, co-wrote the satirical novel “Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend“.