Machete

BLOGGER'S NOTE: This post originally appeared on Edward Copeland's snazzy blog, Edward Copeland on Film. He and a very impressive collection of writers post daily ruminations on film, T.V. and loads of other cool stuff.

When he made his half of the Grindhouse double bill (2007), Robert Rodriguez also put together a trailer for a film he would like to see. And so, Machete (2010) was born – a Mexploitation action film about an ex-federale who is set-up, double-crossed and left for dead. However, the origins for this project go back even further to 1995 when Rodriguez made Desperado, the second film in his Mariachi trilogy. It would be the first time (but certainly not the last) he worked with veteran character actor and professional badass Danny Trejo. He’s someone you’ve probably not heard of but have definitely seen. If you need a tough-looking tattooed henchman, he’s your man. While working on Desperado, Rodriguez envisioned Trejo starring in a series of action films as Machete but at that time the director did not have the clout to get someone to bankroll a Latino action film that didn’t feature someone with movie star looks like Antonio Banderas.


Rodriguez never forgot about his pet project and over the years cast Trejo in several of his films. Even though the Grindhouse films were a commercial failure, audiences loved the faux trailer for Machete. Rodriguez managed to convince a Hollywood studio to finance it with a modest budget and used his connections to assemble an impressive cast that included the likes of Robert De Niro, Jessica Alba, Steven Seagal, and “introducing” Don Johnson. However, what worked as a movie trailer be too much of a good thing as a feature film?

The prologue sets up everything we need to know about Machete (Danny Trejo) – he’s a badass Mexican federale set-up by his corrupt superior and left for dead by local druglord Torrez (Steven Seagal). It also sets just the right tone as we see Machete hacking and slashing his way through a house of bad guys with bloody abandon. Meanwhile, in the United States, a corrupt, ultra-conservative Texan senator named John McLaughlin (Robert De Niro), campaigns on a platform of preventing illegal immigrants from crossing the border. He even employs a border vigilante group, led by the brutal Von Jackson (Don Johnson), to enforce his policies.

Sartana Rivera (Jessica Alba) is an upstanding Immigrations enforcement officer investigating the problem through legal channels and ends up crossing paths with Luz (Michelle Rodriguez), a no-nonsense taco stand operator who moonlights as a revolutionary operating an underground railroad of sorts for her Mexican brothers and sisters. Machete, now a day laborer (or, at least that’s his cover), is hired by Michael Booth (Jeff Fahey), a local businessman, to kill the Senator for $150,000. Machete is set up, shot and forced to go into hiding. With the help of Rivera and Luz, he plots revenge on the men that betrayed him.

It’s awesome to see Danny Trejo finally get to carry a film for once and play a character that doesn’t get killed off. He brings his customary intensity as the strong, silent man of action and in many respects the film is Rodriguez’s present to the actor as he has him take down tons of bad guys, look cool doing it, and hook up with many of the film’s lovely ladies, including Michelle Rodriguez, Jessica Alba and Lindsay Lohan! Robert De Niro is a lot of fun to watch playing a John McCain meets George W. Bush-esque xenophobic politician. It’s also great to see Steven Seagal as a powerful criminal and Machete’s arch-nemesis, not to mention appearing in a mainstream film that didn’t go straight-to-home video.

Michelle Rodriguez adds another tough chick role to her resume as she portrays the female Mexican equivalent of Che Guevara but with a dash of Snake Plissken from Escape from New York (1981). Another fun bit of casting is Lindsay Lohan playing the messed up celebutante child of Booth. She and Rodriguez have some fun riffing on her public persona and kudos to the director for not bowing to peer and public pressure about her party girl reputation and showing that regardless, she still has the acting chops. Rodriguez regulars Tom Savini and Cheech Marin show up in memorable bit parts as a deadly assassin and Machete’s ex-federale now-priest brother.

It’s no secret that Rodriguez is a filmmaker that wears his influences on his sleeve. For examples, Desperado was a homage to the Hong Kong action films of John Woo and From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) and Planet Terror (2007) evoked the films of John Carpenter and George Romero. Growing up in the 1980s, Machete is Rodriguez’s love letter to the films produced by Cannon Films during that decade. They were responsible for cranking out an endless stream of generic action films starring the likes of Charles Bronson, Chuck Norris and Michael Dudikoff. In these films, the action stars were often a one-man army capable of wiping out the fighting force of a small country seemingly single-handedly. The same goes for Machete who is an unstoppable killing machine bent on revenge.

Machete is full of outrageous, over-the-top violence and inventively staged action sequences, like one scene where Machete bungee-jumps from one floor of a hospital to another with the aid of an evil henchman’s large intestine. In this respect, the film has the same gonzo, go-for-broke action that Rodriguez orchestrated in the underrated Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003). Living up to his namesake, Machete finds all sorts of ways to kill the bad guys with a vast assortment of sharp weapons. Machete is a lot of fun and never outstays its welcome as Rodriguez knows how to keep things moving so that things never get boring.

Machete not only features all kinds of wild action sequences but also has something on its mind, commenting on the rampant immigration problems that continue to plague the states along the United States/Mexico border. Along the way, Rodriguez plays up and makes fun of Latino stereotypes (they are all day laborers and love tricked out cars) only to twist them into a rallying cry, a call for revolution that takes full bloom by the film’s exciting conclusion in a way that has to be seen to be believed. Best of all, Rodriguez has created yet another awesome Latino action hero. Forget Sylvester Stallone’s The Expendables (2010), Machete is the real deal and a no-holds-barred love letter to ‘80s action films. As great as it was to see many of the beloved action stars from the ‘80s and 1990s, I felt that Stallone’s film never went far enough. Rodriguez’s film doesn’t have that problem as it gleefully goes all the way with its cartoonish violence. Let’s hope that he and Trejo get the chance to do more Machete films but the next one should be direct-to-video if they really want to get in the spirit of the kinds of film they are championing.

David Cronenberg Blogathon: Naked Lunch

BLOGGER'S NOTE: This post originally appeared over at Tony Dayoub's blog Cinematic Viewfinder as part of his fantastic David Cronenberg Blogathon. If you haven't already, I highly recommend you check out all the wonderful submissions and links that he's posted.

Widely regarded as unfilmable because it defied normal narrative logic and for containing some of the most perverse, often disturbing passages of sex and violence ever committed to the page, William S. Burroughs' seminal novel Naked Lunch was the ideal project for filmmaker David Cronenberg. In many respects, the themes and subject matter the book explores parallel many of the preoccupations of his films: the merging of flesh with machines, human transformation, and secret societies. One only has to look at an early film like Videodrome (1983) to see Burroughs’ influence — the mix of pulpy exploitation with high concept ideas. The characters in Cronenberg’s films, like the characters in Burroughs’ fiction, are morally ambiguous. It is not as easy to identify with them as it is with characters in more mainstream entertainment.

As Cronenberg was the first to admit, a conventional adaptation of Naked Lunch is impossible as it would be banned in every country. So, he wisely merged key elements from the book along with bits and pieces from the author’s early novels, chief among them Junky and Exterminator!, with aspects of Burroughs’ life, tempered with black humor as we are taken to surreal places. The end result is a fascinating collaboration between two like-minded artists and a film that is ultimately about the writing process as it defines the film’s protagonists much as it did Burroughs – writing acts as a catharsis, a way of dealing with guilt.

Ornette Coleman’s freaky, free-form jazz complements Howard Shore’s ominous score to create a film noir vibe right from the start which is in keeping in tone with Burroughs’ early work that often parodied badly written pulp crime novels. When he’s not spraying for bugs at people’s homes to pay the bills, Bill Lee (Peter Weller) hangs out with his friends, and fellow writers, Martin (Michael Zelniker) and Hank (Nicholas Campbell) who are introduced arguing about the writing process. Hank (a thinly-veiled riff on Jack Kerouac) argues that to rewrite is to betray ones own thoughts as it disrupts the flow of words while Martin (a stand-in for Allen Ginsberg) counters by saying that one should rewrite so that they consider everything from every possible angle in order to produce the best work possible. Hank sees this as censorship and a betrayal of one’s own best, honest and most primitive thoughts. When asked for his opinion, Bill simply replies, “exterminate all rational thought.”

Bill is in danger of losing his job because he keeps running out of bug powder. It seems that his wife Joan (Judy Davis) is shooting it up. When he confronts her about it, she deadpans, “It’s a Kafka high. You feel like a bug.” Pretty soon she’s doing so much of it that all she has to do is breathe on a cockroach and it dies. Bill soon starts shooting up bug powder too and begins to imagine giant talking insects that tell him he’s actually a secret agent. He’s instructed to kill his wife who happens to be a rival agent for Interzone Incorporated, a shadowy organization. The boundaries between what are real and what are Bill’s elaborate hallucinations become blurred, leading him into the mysterious realm of Interzone where everyday objects, like his typewriter, transform into mechanized insects that talk to him. The line between what he is writing and what he is living becomes blurred beyond recognition, much like Max and his relationship to television in Videodrome.

In real life, Burroughs accidentally shot his wife in 1951 while they were living in Mexico City and it was this tragic incident that motivated him to become a writer as a way of dealing with the guilt over what he had done. He said, “I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death.” Cronenberg understands what a pivotal part this played in Burroughs’ life and incorporates it into his film. In a nice touch, there is a scene where Bill goes to a pawnshop and trades in the gun he shot Joan with for a typewriter. It’s a symbolic transition from one phase of his life to another.

Bill uses drugs to escape the horror of what he has done and his mind creates an elaborate alternate reality known as Interzone where he is a secret agent that writes reports (a.k.a. his book) about his “mission” on a creepy bug/typewriter hybrid that gets aroused by his forceful typing. He travels through a shadowy world where he is reunited with Joan, this time around a femme fatale type, Yves Cloquet (Julian Sands), a suave businessman that sexually preys on young men, and the notorious Dr. Benway (Roy Scheider), who initially seems to want to help Bill but turns out to be the powerful puppetmaster of Interzone.

Thankfully, Cronenberg retains Burroughs’ dry, sardonic sense of humor as well as touching upon his self-loathing about being homosexual. He’s aided in these endeavors by Peter Weller’s excellent performance as Burroughs surrogate Bill Lee. No stranger to fantastical genre films (see RoboCop and The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai), the actor nails Burroughs’ unique cadence – the lazy drawl and the dry wit. Hearing him recite several amusing stories right out of Naked Lunch, coupled with his tall, gaunt appearance, only reinforces how well cast he was in this role. Weller also does a good job conveying the lonely desperation of a strung-out junkie and the almost zombie-like state he achieves when zonked out of his head on junk. Along with her role in Barton Fink (1991), Judy Davis plays the doomed muse of a writer consumed by his obsessions. As Joan Lee, Davis is quite good as an almost vampiric drug addict complete with sallow complexion and haunted look. As Joan Frost, Bill’s Interzone version of his wife, she’s healthier and more confident but the end result is still the same.

In 1984, producer Jeremy Thomas met David Cronenberg at the Toronto Film Festival where he had bought the rights to Stephen Frears’ film The Hit (1984). Thomas had heard that Cronenberg wanted to do a film adaptation of Naked Lunch and he wanted to produce it. This wasn’t the first time someone expressed an interest in turning the book into a film. In 1971, long-time friend of William S. Burroughs and painter and writer, Brion Gysin wrote a screenplay. Antony Balch was going to direct and Mick Jagger was going to star in it but the project never got past the planning stages. Burroughs said of this version that the script was “long burlesque and includes a series of music-hall comedy songs.” In 1972, television producer Chuck Barris, of all people, gave it a go with writer Terry Southern as the proposed screenwriter but it too went nowhere (the mind boggles at what those two would’ve come up with!). In 1979, Frank Zappa approached Burroughs with the notion of doing Naked Lunch as an off-Broadway musical but again this never materialized.

After Cronenberg and Thomas met, the producer optioned Burroughs’ novel. That same year, Cronenberg met the legendary author at his 70th birthday party at the Limelight Night Club in New York City. He had seen and admired several of Cronenberg’s films and also had an affinity for many of the themes they explored. Burroughs said, “when I heard that David was interested in doing the film I thought … he’s the one that can do it if anyone can.” The next year, Cronenberg, Burroughs and Thomas traveled to Tangier, the city where the book was written, in order to retrace its creation.

Cronenberg and Thomas began the process of adapting the book into a film in 1985. Not surprisingly, they had a difficult time getting financing for the film because of the book’s notorious reputation of being unfilmable. Cronenberg said, “a literal translation just wouldn’t work. It would cost $400 million to make and would be banned in every country in the world.” During the five years of the film’s development, Cronenberg kept in contact with Burroughs and explained that the film would be about the act of writing Naked Lunch. He finished the first draft of the script in 1989 while on location in England, acting in Clive Barker’s Nightbreed (1990).

He gave the book’s fragmented collection of set pieces a more traditional narrative structure. While the Mugwump creatures are a Burroughs invention from the book, the insect typewriters were created by Cronenberg to bring to “the screen things that can’t be shown in a mainstream movie.” In addition to drawing from Naked Lunch, he also incorporated elements from other books by Burroughs, like Exterminator!, Queer and Letters to Allen Ginsberg. Burroughs read the script around the Christmas of 1989. He called Cronenberg and told him how much he liked it. The filmmaker finished the script in June 1990 and then scouted locations in Tangier with Thomas, production designer Carol Spier and director of photography Peter Suschitzky.

While working on the script, Cronenberg received a letter from actor Peter Weller. He had heard about the project while making RoboCop 2 (1990). Weller was a big fan of both Burroughs’ books and Cronenberg’s films. In his letter, he inquired about any involvement with the project. The two men met in New York City nine months later and the actor landed the lead role. To prepare for the film, Weller met Burroughs several times in the fall of 1990. When Judy Davis read the script she was so horrified by it that she threw it against the wall. She ended up reading it eight times and talked to Cronenberg on the phone before she agreed to do the film. She said, “I felt there was something I could learn as an actress through doing it, through facing my fears.” She did not read the novel but did read a lot about expatriate American writers and perfected an American accent.

One week before principal photography was to begin, the Persian Gulf War started and the three-week shoot in Tangier was canceled. Cronenberg rewrote the script over the weekend and decided to shoot the film entirely in Toronto over three months in 1991. According to the director, the film became “more internalized and hallucinatory, so that one understands by the end of the film that Lee never really leaves New York City.”

For the film’s special effects, Cronenberg reunited with Chris Walas and his company, responsible for the gruesome effects on the remake of The Fly (1986). Cronenberg met with Walas nine months before principal photography to discuss his ideas for the film. Three months later, Walas and his team submitted their designs to the director. When Peter Suschitzky first read the script, he felt that it should have an expressionistic look reminiscent of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) but Cronenberg wanted his film to look normal because the “craziness is interior.” To reflect the film’s dark subject matter, Suschitzky suffused the film with shadows and gave it a “sense of romanticism … a slight sickness that you find in late Romanticism in German literature and art between 1900 and 1930.”

Before the film came out, Cronenberg was misquoted in The Advocate as saying that Burroughs was not a homosexual and the magazine told its readers not to expect much from the film. The director tried unsuccessfully to contact the article’s author. Naked Lunch received predictably mixed reviews from critics. Newsweek magazine’s David Ansen wrote, “Obviously this is not everybody's cup of weird tea: you must have a taste for the esthetics of disgust. For those up to the dare, it's one clammily compelling movie.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “B+” rating and Owen Gleiberman praised Peter Weller’s performance: “Peter Weller, the poker-faced star of Robocop, greets all of the hallucinogenic weirdness with a doleful, matter-of-fact deadpan that grows more likable as the movie goes on. The actor's steely robostare has never been more compelling. By the end, he has turned Burroughs' stone-cold protagonist — a man with no feelings — into a mordantly touching hero.” In his review for the Village Voice, J. Hoberman wrote, “Cronenberg has done a remarkable thing. He hasn't just created a mainstream Burroughs on something approximating Burroughs's terms, he's made a portrait of an American writer.” The Chicago Reader’s Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote, “David Cronenberg’s highly transgressive and subjective film adaptation of Naked Lunch ... may well be the most troubling and ravishing head movie since Eraserhead. It is also fundamentally a film about writing — even the film about writing.”

However, Roger Ebert gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote, "While I admired it in an abstract way, I felt repelled by the material on a visceral level. There is so much dryness, death and despair here, in a life spinning itself out with no joy". In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, “for the most part this is a coolly riveting film and even a darkly entertaining one, at least for audiences with steel nerves, a predisposition toward Mr. Burroughs and a willingness to meet Mr. Cronenberg halfway", but she did praise Peter Weller's performance: "The gaunt, unsmiling Mr. Weller looks exactly right and brings a perfect offhandedness to his disarming dialogue.” Time magazine’s Richard Corliss called the film, “tame compared with its source.” In his review for the Washington Post, Desson Howe criticized what he felt to be a “lack of conviction.”

Burroughs saw the film and liked it, saying, “of course, it’s a Cronenberg film. I think he’s done a great job. Nothing at all what I would’ve done, but that’s as it should be.”

Ultimately, Naked Lunch is a hallucinatory nightmare with no escape for its protagonist. Try as he might, Bill cannot escape what he did to his wife as much as he can escape who he is – a junkie and a homosexual. There is some sense that by the film’s conclusion he has come to terms with what he’s done and who he is. Everything else – Interzone, etc. – is just window-dressing or, rather, Bill trying to work things out. Writing provides a way for him to come to terms with the guilt he feels. Think of it as writing as a form of catharsis and finishing Naked Lunch offered some kind of closure on a painful part of his life. Cronenberg’s film, along with Barton Fink, are two of the most fascinating films about writers and writing as they explore what motivates one to write. In those two cases it comes out of a great pain and an inner turmoil that, at least in Burroughs’ case, leads to some kind of redemption.

SOURCES

Indiana, Gary. “The Naked Lunch Report.” Village Voice. December 31, 1991.

Snowden, Lynn. “Which Is the Fly and Which is the Human?” Esquire. February 1992.

Weinrich, Regina. “Naked Lunch: Behind the Scenes.” Entertainment Weekly. January 17, 1992.

All the President's Men

The 1970s was a fertile time for challenging, politically charged movies. Thanks to Easy Rider (1969) a lot of riskier material was getting made by the major Hollywood studios and, in some cases, they were commenting on the current political climate and being socially conscious. One of the best examples from this decade is All the President’s Men (1976) – the Citizen Kane (1941) of investigative journalism films. It’s the benchmark by which all other films of its genre are compared to, from The China Syndrome (1979) to State of Play (2009). Its influence can be felt in the films of Steven Soderbergh (Traffic) and David Fincher (Zodiac).


All the President’s Men was immediate and topical, dramatizing Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s investigation of the Watergate Hotel burglary and the resulting scandal that would rock the White House and forever taint President Richard Nixon’s tenure there, effectively sending him home packing before his term was up. Alan J. Pakula’s film struck a chord with audiences of the day (and continues to do so) and is credited with inspiring future generations of journalists. Of course, it didn’t hurt that the film starred Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford, two of the biggest movie stars in Hollywood at that time. Fortunately, they left their egos at the door to deliver thoughtful and intense performances. These are complemented by Pakula’s no frills direction and Gordon Willis’ moody, atmospheric cinematography.

The film begins, rather fittingly, with the actual break-in. We see the burglars at work in the gloom of the hotel, often from a distance which, somehow makes it actually creepier than it should. Pakula juxtaposes this with the next scene which takes place in the brightly-lit offices of the Washington Post. Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) gets the tip about the burglars and goes to see the charges brought up against them in front of a judge. It is here that he meets the first of many people that will try to stonewall him. Woodward starts talking to a man named Markham (Nicolas Coster) sitting in front of him. He tells Woodward that he’s not there as the attorney of record but reveals who that is and leaves. Woodward follows Markham outside into the hallway and continues to question him. Markham tries to confuse and evade Woodward through dialogue and while not actually saying much of anything he does pique the reporter’s curiosity.

Back at the Washington Post offices, Woodward meets with his editor Harry Rosenfeld (Jack Warden) and fellow reporter Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) who has been calling around getting information of his own. However, neither of them have much and Rosenfeld calls them on it: “I’m not interested in what you think is obvious. I’m interested in what you know.” One of the things that is so great about All the President’s Men is that they show the legwork these guys do in order to get the facts and the details to flesh out their articles. For example, there’s the scene where Woodward calls around trying to find out who Howard Hunt is and his relation to the White House. Pakula has Redford in the foreground but utilizes deep focus photography so that we can make out the hustle and bustle in the middle and background of the scene, which is a nice touch. It makes the scene more than just about dialogue and about what’s being said as Pakula keeps things visually interesting.

The way Woodward and Bernstein team-up is also well done. Woodward hands in a copy of his article to be proofread only for Bernstein to immediately take it and give it a polish. Woodward is upset at Bernstein for doing it without his permission, gives him his notes and says, “If you’re going to hype it, hype it with the facts. I don’t mind what you did. I mind the way you did it.” In an amusing bit, right after he says this, Rosenfeld walks by and tells them that they’re working together on the Watergate story. Early on, Woodward and Bernstein know that they are onto something and the more people evade them or deny any kind of knowledge of what went down at the Watergate, the more they realize that they’re onto something big. I also like that once they team-up, Pakula doesn’t try to make them too buddy-buddy. They work closely together but it is purely professional. They don’t hang out together or go to nightclubs. They are completely consumed by their investigation and getting to the truth.

Woodward and Bernstein show their story to the newspaper’s executive editor Ben Bradlee (Jason Robards) and the way he picks apart their article is devastating, especially if you’ve ever worked at a newspaper or a magazine. But, deep down, they know he’s right – they don’t have the story or the hard facts to back it up. Woodward and Bernstein approach every contact they know that might have even the most remote connection to their investigation. But they are persistent and keep plugging away at the story.

For a film that is ostensibly about two guys talking on the phone and interviewing people, All the President’s Men is always interesting to watch because of Pakula’s no-nonsense direction coupled with Gordon Willis’ textured cinematography. We get one engaging visual after another, like the scene where Woodward and Bernstein pour over index cards at the Library of Congress and the camera starts off with a tight overhead shot of them and then gradually pulls back to reveal the circular design of the building while also showing how insignificant these two men are in comparison to the task they are undertaking. In addition, Woodward’s meetings with his enigmatic informant known only as Deep Throat (Hal Holbrook) in a deserted parking garage at night illustrates why Willis was often referred to as the “Prince of Darkness.” We first see Deep Throat in the distance, enshrouded in darkness. He briefly lights a cigarette that does little to illuminate his identity. Even when shot in close-up, he’s still mostly in shadow except for a very film noirish strip of dim light across his face so that we can at least see his eyes. This emphasizes the ominous nature of this clandestine meeting. Never has a parking garage looked so menacing.

Another visually interesting phone scene has Woodward doing some more legwork at his desk. As he’s talking, off to the left in the background, a group of people are watching something on television. As the scene continues, the camera ever-so gradually moves in on Woodward until a close-up of his face dominates the screen. Pakula flips this in another scene where we get a close-up shot of a T.V. covering Nixon getting voted into the White House for four more years while in the background Woodward works away on the story. The juxtaposition of visuals is particularly striking as the T.V. absolutely dwarfs Woodward symbolizing just how marginalized he is in comparison to Nixon. He has regained the most powerful position in the free world while Woodward is still trying to get some decent facts. Willis’ lighting goes beyond adventurous as he continually pushes the boundaries of available light. For example, there’s a scene where Woodward and Bernstein have a conversation while driving in a car at night and it looks like the scene was done with only naturally available light. There are significant portions of the scene where we can barely or not see Woodward and Bernstein. You would never see that in a mainstream studio film today as it goes against the conventional wisdom of making sure the audience can always see the heroes clearly.

It goes without saying that All the President’s Men features an impressive cast. Redford and Hoffman do a good job showing the incredible pressure that Woodward and Bernstein are under. Not only are they trying to find people to go on the record but are also trying to prove to their editors that they are doing a good job and deserve to be on this story. In addition, they also have to make sure that a rival newspaper like The New York Times doesn’t scoop them first. Redford and Hoffman are not afraid to show the friction that sometimes surfaces between Woodward and Bernstein, especially when they hit dead ends in their investigation. Their frustrations come out as they try to get someone to go on record and give them some crucial information that they can use.

Supporting Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford are the likes of Jack Warden, Jason Robards, Martin Balsam and Hal Holbrook who bring their real life counterparts to the big screen in such compelling fashion. Robards brings just the right amount of world-weary gravitas necessary to play someone like Ben Bradlee. He plays the editor as the gruff father-figure that gives Woodward and Bernstein tough love and in doing so pushes them to work harder and dig deeper on the Watergate story. There’s a nice scene where Bradlee sits down with the two reporters and recounts a story about how he covered J. Edgar Hoover being announced as head of the FBI. The story and how Robards tells it humanizes Bradlee and makes him relatable to Woodward and Bernstein.

Hal Holbrook is coolly enigmatic as the shadowy Deep Throat, giving Woodward cryptic clues and vague encouragement. His brief but memorable appearance would go on to inspire like-minded characters in Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991) and the popular T.V. series The X-Files. And, if you look close enough, a young and very good-looking Lindsay Crouse plays a Washington Post office worker that helps out Woodward and Bernstein. Also, look for Stephen Collins, Ned Beatty and Jane Alexander in small but memorable roles.

From the age of 13, Robert Redford disliked Richard Nixon after meeting the man at a tennis tournament when he was only a senator. These feelings persisted when Nixon became vice-president and during his first term as president. While promoting The Candidate in July 1972, Redford became aware of Woodward and Bernstein’s articles in the Washington Post documenting the break-in at the Watergate Hotel. Four Cuban-Americans and CIA employee James McCord broke in and burglarized the Democratic Party’s headquarters. It was later revealed that they were funded by the Republican Party. Redford asked various reporters on his promotional tour why they weren’t covering the Watergate break-in and he was met with cynicism and condescension.

After his promo duties ended, Redford returned home and continued to follow Woodward and Bernstein’s progress in the Washington Post. In October 1972, Redford read a profile about the two reporters and began thinking about making a film about them. His original notion was to make a low-budget, black and white film with two unknown actors and he would produce it. Redford tried to contact Woodward and Bernstein but they did not return his calls. He tried again six weeks later while making The Way We Were (1973) but was rebuffed by them and decided to shelve the project.

In April 1973, a link between the burglars and the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP) was uncovered and all of Woodward and Bernstein’s hard work had finally paid off. Redford contacted Woodward again and was able to convince him to meet the next day in Washington, D.C. Redford pitched his idea and passion for the project and Woodward agreed to meet him, along with Bernstein, at the actor’s apartment in New York City. Redford told his friend, and screenwriter, William Goldman about the meeting and he asked the actor if he could tag along. Redford agreed and in February 1974, they met with Woodward and Bernstein. They told Redford and Goldman that they were about to expose, and thereby cause the resignations of, chief of staff H.R. Haldeman, assistant for domestic affairs to the president, John Ehrlichman, and Nixon’s lawyer, John Dean.

Redford asked Woodward and Bernstein for the film rights to their investigation of the Watergate Hotel burglary but they were hesitant to do so and told him that they were working on a book. He told them that the film would focus on the early stages of their investigation. He said, “the part I’m interested in is not the aftermath so much as what happened when no one was looking. Because that’s what no one knows about.” Redford also wanted to tell the story from Woodward and Bernstein’s point-of-view. They agreed to give him the film rights but with the stipulation that work on it could not begin until they completed the book in eight or nine month’s time. During this time, Nixon resigned and “an amazing story unfolded while I was waiting to do this movie,” Redford said.

The book’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, demanded $450,000 for the film rights which was a very high price at the time. Redford’s dream of a low-budget film with unknowns was no longer possible and so he had Warner Brothers raise $4 million while his production company, Wildwood Productions, contributed another $4 million. As a result, the studio insisted that All the President’s Men would be a commercial film and that Redford would have to agree to be in it. He still wanted Woodward and Bernstein to be played by unknown actors but the studio refused and the actor would have to play Woodward. So that Bernstein would not be overshadowed as a result, an actor of equal star power would have to be cast opposite Redford and Dustin Hoffman was hired for the role.

William Goldman wrote a draft of the screenplay that Redford was not thrilled about: “Goldman writes for cleverness and was still leaning all over Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. He was borrowing heavily from the charm of that piece and it didn’t work. It was written very quickly, and it went for comedy. It trivialized not only the event but journalism.” The actor wanted Elia Kazan to direct the film but the veteran filmmaker did not like it either and turned down Redford’s offer. Next, he approached William Friedkin because Redford felt that the film needed “a visceral kind of emotional energy, and Friedkin had that.” The director actually liked Goldman’s script but felt that he was the wrong person for the job. Bernstein also joined the ever-increasing list of people who did not like what Goldman had written and with then-girlfriend Nora Ephron, wrote his own draft. Not surprisingly, their version had Bernstein as a dashing, heroic figure while Woodward was a passive follower. Redford was unaware that Bernstein was doing this and when he read their draft he realized that too much emphasis had been placed on Bernstein and rejected it.

Impressed with his work on Klute (1971), Redford asked Alan J. Pakula if he would like to direct All the President’s Men. Initially, the actor was worried that Pakula was too cerebral a filmmaker and lacked the visceral edge that he wanted for the film but when he met with him, Redford “felt so comfortable about our ability to communicate that I just decided to go for it.” Pakula read Goldman’s script and, big surprise, did not like it (these also included executives at the Washington Post). In order to prepare for the film, Pakula spent more than a month hanging out at the Post offices observing the daily routines of the editors and reporters. In addition, he hung out with Bradlee for three days, joining him on phone conversations and news conferences. Afterwards, he insisted that Goldman’s script be rewritten and the lighthearted tone changed. Redford spoke to Goldman and told him that he had to work on the script more and spend time in Washington, D.C. and, in particular, at the Post. However, the actor found out that Goldman was also writing Marathon Man (1976) and realized that the screenwriter would not be devoting the time needed for the All the President’s Men’s script. He confronted Goldman over the issue and the two men had a falling out over the script. In his defense, Goldman claimed that Pakula was “unable to make up his mind” when it came to discussing scenes in the script and as a result he was unable to write productively.

Goldman soldiered on, writing many drafts so much so that he later said, “I’ve never written so many versions for any movie as for President’s Men. There was, in addition to all the standard names, the ‘revised second’ version and the ‘prehearsal version. God knows how many.’” This friction between Goldman and Redford may explain why in recent years the latter has taken credit for supposedly rewriting most of the former’s script, which Richard Stayton convincingly refutes in the April/May 2011 issue of Written By magazine, documenting that much of what Goldman wrote appears in the finished film.

Originally, Pakula and Redford had hoped to shoot All the President’s Men in the offices of the Washington Post and use actual employees as characters in the film but the newspaper’s publisher denied them access and was afraid that it would destroy the periodical’s reputation. A replica of the Post’s newsroom was built on two large soundstages at the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, California at a cost of $450,000. This put a strain on the budget forcing three planned scenes to be cut. However, the Post offices were recreated in the most exact detail. Around 200 desks were ordered from the company that the Post also used. They were then painted in exactly the same color as the real desks. The attention to detail is incredible as the offices of the newspaper look, sound and feel like an authentic newsroom.

Principal photography began on May 12, 1975. Early on, Redford had difficulty portraying Woodward because he found him to be a “boring guy. He’s not the most exciting guy in the world to play, and I can’t get a grip on the guy because he’s so careful and hidden.” Pakula told Redford, “you’ve got to concentrate and you’ve got to think, and the audience has got to be able to see you think and they’ve got to be able to feel your concentration.” The director noticed that for awhile Redford was uncomfortable in the role and was frustrated trying to get a handle on the character. Pakula used this to his advantage early on in filming to convey a more reserved and controlled Woodward. Once Redford got comfortable in the role, Pakula filmed his scenes in the newsroom and saw that the actor’s concentration had improved.

All the President’s Men received very positive reviews from critics of the day. Roger Ebert gave the film three-and-a-half stars out of four and praised Redford and Hoffman: “They sink into their characters and become wholly credible. There's not a false or ‘Hollywood’ note in the whole movie, and that's commendable – but how much authenticity will viewers settle for? To what secret and sneaky degree do they really want Redford and Hoffman to come on like stars?” Newsweek magazine’s Jack Kroll wrote, “Pakula's Washington, as photographed brilliantly by Gordon Willis, is divided into the dark world of the Watergate conspiracy and the forces of light, whose symbolic headquarters is the vast gleaming newsroom of The Washington Post ... Pakula is driving home the point that at the heart of Watergate was a battle between opposing forces for the public consciousness.” Film Comment’s Richard T. Jameson wrote, “All the President’s Men is committed to an infectious celebration of professional diligence and (more or less coincidentally) righteous action.” In his review for the Washington Post, Ken Ringle wrote, “But what survives endures, warts and all, as an extraordinary motion picture. Twenty years after the fact, it's still a remarkable portrait of Washington, and of journalism doing the very most that it can do.”

Pakula does the seemingly impossibly by making what is essentially a film about people talking and make it incredibly compelling. This is because of the material and the actors that bring it to life. With the help of Willis’ camerawork, Pakula keeps things visually interesting. This is not an easy thing to pull off and may explain why there aren’t many good journalism films like this one. And that’s because you run the danger of getting bogged down by excessive expositional dialogue that tells us too much instead of showing us. Or, the filmmakers try and spice things up with clichéd genre conventions like a car chase or a shoot-out. Pakula’s film also doesn’t rely on an overtly dramatic score that tells us what to feel. David Shire’s score is refreshingly minimalist and used sparingly by the director. What makes the film work so well is that it shows all the hard, tedious legwork that Woodward and Bernstein had to do in order to break the case: countless phone calls and knocking on doors trying to get anybody remotely linked to the burglary or those arrested to talk. All the President’s Men was a watershed film that would go on to inspire other hard-hitting, investigative journalism movies like The Insider (1999) and Shattered Glass (2003).

Also, check out filmmaker Steven Soderbergh's appreciation of the film in The New York Times.

SOURCES

Brown, Jared. Alan J. Pakula: His Films and His Life. Back Stage Books. 2005.

Goldman, William. Adventures in the Screen Trade. 1982.

Shales, Tom; Tom Zito; Jeannette Smyth. "When Worlds Collide: Lights! Camera! Egos!" Washington Post. April 11, 1975.

Stayton, Richard. "Telling the Truth About A Lie." Written By. April/May 2011.

The Relic

The late-great Stan Winston was responsible for some of the most memorable monsters in modern cinema: the endoskeleton robotic killing machine in The Terminator (1984), the ferocious Queen Alien in Aliens (1986), the alien that hunts Arnold Schwarzenegger in Predator (1987), and, of course, the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park (1993). I don’t know where the Kothoga from The Relic (1997) fits in the pantheon of Winston’s creatures but it is one of my favorites of his creations. Based on the best-selling horror novel of the same name by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, The Relic was a modest hit at the box office and predictably received mixed reviews by critics but remains one of my favorite creature features. Peter Hyams’ film has no other ambitions other than to tell an entertaining, things-go-bump-in-the-night story and does so in refreshingly no-nonsense fashion.


A ship arriving from Brazil is stopped by the Coast Guard in Lake Michigan and they find out that everybody on board has been killed. This doesn’t sit too well with Chicago police detective Vincent D’Agosta (Tom Sizemore) who has been put in charge of the investigation. Meanwhile, at the Museum of Natural History in Chicago, evolutionary biologist Dr. Margo Green (Penelope Ann Miller) is trying desperately to get a grant so that she and her team can continue their work. However, a co-worker (Chi Moui Lo) is doing his best to steal her grant away to fund his own work. They both get a chance to impress a crowd of the city’s wealthiest patrons at the gala premiere of a new exhibit. As luck would have it, D’Agosta will also be attending as he investigates a gruesome murder that occurred at the museum the night before. Could it be an ancient creature known as the Kothoga which, legend has it, is the offspring of South America’s answer to Satan? It seems that it was in one of the crates on the ship from Brazil and has now decided to snack on some bluebloods during the gala. It’s up to D’Agosta and Green to stop this creature.

Tom Sizemore brings a solid, matter-of-fact vibe to his character that feels like he carried it over from his role in Heat (1995). D’Agosta isn’t some wisecracking cop trying to make the moves on Penelope Ann Miller’s cute biologist. He’s interested only in solving the murder. However, he does have one distinctive trait: he’s superstitious. Sizemore manages to insert it here and there throughout the film without belaboring it to the point of being painfully obvious. I like that he gives D’Agosta a genuinely inquisitive nature. He’s not some burn out or a stereotypical loose cannon but a guy good at his job. He’s also savvy enough to realize that the murder at the museum hasn’t been done by your garden variety psycho and doesn’t let anybody, not some jerk rent-a-cop or even the condescending mayor of the city, distract him from his investigation.

Sizemore enjoyed a good run in the 1990s, appearing in films like Natural Born Killers (1994), Heat, and Saving Private Ryan (1998) before a myriad of personal problems burned a lot of bridges in Hollywood and relegated him to direct-to-video hell. He’s quite good in The Relic, his first leading man role and the cheap shots by critics back in the day that blasted him as resembling an overweight George Clooney were unfair. Sizemore certainly has the presence and the intensity to be a credible leading man and his blunt cop anticipates a similar one he played in the short-lived television show, Robbery Homicide Division. He was attracted to The Relic because he finally got to play the male lead in a film: “I had the responsibility of pushing the narrative forward.”

Penelope Ann Miller is just fine as the plucky heroine and thanks to action producer Gale Anne Hurd (The Terminator, Aliens) Margo Green is smart and proactive. She’s no damsel in distress and is actually quite resourceful, which is a refreshing change in a film like this one. It is nice to see characters using their intelligence in a horror film. For example, at one point D’Agosta takes Green to her lab so that she can figure out what the creature is and how to stop it. He opens up a little bit and tells her why he’s so superstitious. It’s a brief scene but it gives us some good insight into these characters. In the ‘90s, Miller made a significant push to be regarded as an A-list leading actress in high profile studio films like Awakenings (1990), Carlito’s Way (1993), The Shadow (1994), and The Relic, but none of them set the world on fire in terms of box office and she never became much of a critic’s darling either. I always found her kind of annoying and often miscast (see Carlito’s Way) with the notable exception of The Freshman (1990) in which she was perfect as Marlon Brando’s spoiled daughter. Before The Relic, Miller had not done a horror film but was drawn to director Peter Hyams’ desire to have a strong and smart female lead.

Hyams does a decent job establishing The Relic’s premise and introducing the characters, all the while building towards the climax: gala night at the museum with the creature on the rampage. He cuts between the guests trying to escape the museum while D’Agosta and Green attempt to stop the monster. Journeyman director Hyams epitomizes meat and potatoes filmmaking with his straightforward camerawork devoid of any distinctive style. Guillermo Del Toro he is not but that’s okay. Hyams keeps things moving along while plugging in the requisite jolts at certain moments throughout the film. Once the power goes out in the museum, he uses the darkness to tease us with glimpses of the creature until the full reveal during the final showdown. If I had one complaint it is that he relies too much on the dark and sometimes it is hard to tell what is happening.

Also of note is the solid supporting cast including Linda Hunt as the pragmatic director of the museum and James Whitmore as Green’s kindly old colleague and mentor. Genre veteran Clayton Rohner (G vs E) has a nice role as the junior detective working with D’Agosta. He’s put in charge of taking the mayor and a few others to safety. It’s not a flashy role but he does the best with what he’s given.

The original novel was written by Lincoln Child and Douglas Preston, an ex-journalist and former public relations director for the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Because their book portrayed the museum’s administration in an unflattering light, they turned down the film’s producers’ request to film there. Paramount Pictures, the studio backing the production, even approached the museum and offered them a seven figure amount to film there but ultimately the administration was worried that a monster movie would scare kids away from the museum. So, the filmmakers were faced with a problem as only museums in Chicago and Washington, D.C. resembled the one in New York. Fortunately, the Field Museum in Chicago loved the film’s premise and allowed the production to shoot there. In addition to shooting on location in Chicago, a set was built in Los Angeles of a tunnel flooded with water for a sequence later on in the film. Sizemore and many of the cast spent most of the shoot either damp, cold or soaking wet. He caught the flu twice and the production shut down briefly when Hyams became too sick to work.

Hyams reviewed makeup artist Stan Winston’s early drawings of the Kothoga and his only suggestion was to make the monster more hideous looking. The director suggested certain invertebrates for inspiration and Winston came up with an arachnoid outline for the creature’s face. He and his team made three creatures with two people moving the heads and people on the side working the electronics to move the arms, claws, mouth, and so on. In the scenes where the creature is running or jumping, a computer-generated version was used.

Film critics of the day gave The Relic negative to mixed reviews. In his review for the Washington Post, Richard Harrington wrote, “the DNA speculation that supposedly fuels the plot feels right out of Beavis and Butt-head.” Entertainment Weekly gave it a “C+” rating and wrote, “If you can stagger around the plot holes (how'd a Brazilian cargo ship with a dead crew get to Lake Michigan?), the last 30 minutes are pure, dumb monster-movie fun.” In his review for the Globe and Mail, Geoff Pevere wrote, “The movie is a shameless cut-and-paste of a half-century of bogeyman-movie clichés.” USA Today gave the film two out of four stars and Susan Wloszczyna wrote, “amid caviar-quality Oscar contenders, it’s a palate cleanser – if you have a taste for explicit decapitations and loopy macabre humor.” However, Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars and wrote, “All of this is actually a lot of fun, if you like special effects and gore. To see this movie in the same week as the hapless and witless Turbulence is to understand how craft and professionalism can let us identify with one thriller heroine and laugh at another.” In his review for The New York Times, Stephen Holden wrote, “Yes, we've seen it all before. But The Relic proves that the hoariest clichés, when stirred together with enough money, shaken vigorously and artfully lighted, can still make the adrenaline surge.”

Ultimately, The Relic is barely a notch above the cheesy creature feature films that popular the SyFy Channel but so what? The dialogue at times is kinda clunky and most of the characters never go beyond their stereotypes but that’s what you get when you have four screenwriters credited with writing the damn thing. That being said, the film is relatively devoid of narrative fat, which I like, Stan Winston’s monster looks pretty cool, there’s decapitations a-go-go for the gorehounds, Sizemore plays a gruff, superstitious cop, and Miller’s pretty scientist gets to kick ass. The Relic is a well-oiled thrill machine that delivers on its promise of providing a rollercoaster ride. What more do you want from this kind of film?

SOURCES

Cohen, David S. “Locked in Realm of Monstrous Terror.” South China Morning Post. March 16, 1997.

Slotek, Jim. “They Created a Monster.” Toronto Sun. January 12, 1997.

Williams, Sue. “Actor Immerses Himself in the Part.” The Australian. May 1, 1997.