Many years ago I interviewed the lively and legendary Rosalind Russell as the actress was being driven into town from Dulles Airport—a breezy encounter that blew by in a happy rush. Nothing is ever perfect, however, and at one point, Russell, talking about the ravenous appetite for cinema that serious filmmakers must have, said it was necessary to love the way film smells, feels and tastes. She mimed a gesture meant to suggest a chipmunk or a squirrel—or a very odd person—munching on a strip of celluloid.
“Numnumnumnumnum,” she went, pretending to nibble away. It was one of those squirmy moments when you think: “Rrrrright. But maybe one needn’t love film quite so much that one wants to eat it.” We moved on to another subject.
Early in the premiere of “Boffo!”—a manic paean to motion pictures that airs tonight on HBO—Danny DeVito has a moment that flashed me back to Russell’s misfired metaphor, although, of course, Russell was about a trillion times more ingratiating than DeVito will ever be. Making a movie isn’t merely making a movie, DeVito declares: “It’s a cathedral that’s being built,” a holy edifice of stone and mortar and so on.
Cathedral, huh? “Going Ape!,” “The Gong Show Movie,” “Death to Smoochy,” “Screwed,” “The Big Kahuna,” “Throw Momma From the Train,” “Hercules,” “Space Jam,” “Look Who’s Talking Now,” “Last Action Hero,” “Matilda” and “Hot Dogs for Gauguin.” Cathedrals all? No, but all among DeVito’s lousy movies.
DeVito gets “Boffo!” off on a misleadingly wrong foot, although there are several other times, not involving him, when the documentary (full title: “Boffo! Tinseltown’s Bombs and Blockbusters”) sails over the top, and over the cuckoo’s nest, too, as it yodels praise of the medium and, directly or implicitly, those brave, tortured, dedicated, selfless souls who labor within its boundaries. Few of them, contrary to what “Boffo!” says, are starry-eyed dreamers who regard celluloid itself with wonderment and awe.
They might feel that way about the images and performances and ideas captured on film, but—as several of the luminaries interviewed for the show point out—they are often frustrated and irritated by the filmmaking process as it’s evolved in the United States. The studio system is gone (and now lamented) but the movies are still a big business, and big business runs it. Daring independent filmmakers struggle mightily to get noticed, and a small percentage are allowed membership in Club Hollywood. But when that happens—as with, say, “Napoleon Dynamite”—the filmmakers are rewarded by being sucked into, and corrupted by, the very system they thought they had been defying.
The documentary, which has some drab, draggy stretches, was produced partly to mark the centennial of the great Hollywood trade paper Variety and directed by artful whiz Bill Couturie. Among the familiar Variety bylines involved are editor Peter Bart and senior editor Timothy M. Gray, who writes hilarious and incisive columns but only on occasion. Once or twice a year, Gray lists the most egregious examples of critical hypergush—those breathless blurbs churned out for use in movie ads and commercials—and they are always a wickedly funny hoot.
Couturie and colleagues induced an impressive cast of experts to talk about the craft and business of the movies. Dashing producer Peter Guber says, “You have to be prepared to fail,” and actor-producer George Clooney says, “There are a million ways to [mess] this up, so to me, when it works, it’s a miracle.” Sydney Pollack agrees that “There’s a lot of luck connected with making movies,” and with admirable candor says, “I’ve made big hits and I’ve made terrible flops, and I don’t know the difference, I swear.”
Flops and failures can be fun
He says he falls “just as much in love” with the bombs as with the beauties.
Watching the filmmakers analyze flops is more entertaining than when they dissect successes. Guber laments that “The Clan of the Cave Bear,” which was based on a bestseller, had an A-1 cast and many a seeming element to guarantee success, proved instead to be “a complete failure.”
But many surprises are happy ones. “An old black man and an old Jewish woman? Come on,” scoffs Morgan Freeman. “Nobody wanted to make it,” says producer Richard Zanuck, who had to raise the financing. But “Driving Miss Daisy,” the film in which Freeman co-starred, was a richly rewarding hit—for everyone who saw it as well as those involved in making it.
When a film defies so much of the reigning commercial gospel of the day and scores a tremendous success despite the scoffing of “experts,” that’s when there really does seem to be something magical about the movies and when calling it a “business” is almost insultingly mundane. What’s frustrating for those who’ve been going to the movies for decades, or those who love to watch the great ones reappear on Turner Classic Movies or on DVDs, is that we sense the business-ness a lot more than the magic in the clankety-bang, high-tech, cold-blooded stuff coming out of Hollywood now.
Jodie Foster says she is happy to have lived through what she considers a golden age of filmmaking, the ‘70s, the last decade before the deluge of computerized special effects, when humans still dominated the stories on the screen. “Star Wars” lowered the boom (and the boom-boom-boom) on one kind of filmmaking even as it ushered in another. The problem today, one expert says, is “they don’t know what kind of stories to tell with this new technology.” Even so, no matter how many new machines invade the process, filmmaking will still be more art than science, and luck will continue to play as large a role as skill.
The pithiest and smartest credo ever crafted for Hollywood was probably the three little words put together by brilliant screenwriter William Goldman: “Nobody knows anything.” That’s Hollywood’s top bottom line. It should be inscribed above the Paramount gate and written, perhaps in Latin, on the curlicues that encircle Leo the MGM Lion. That element of mystery, of uncertainty, of the fact that it’s still largely a crapshoot, might ultimately be the audience’s best protection against movies that are not just high-tech but all-tech—films made not just by machines and about machines, but for machines, too.
