Quote of the Day (Mstylslav Chernov, on Ukraine’s Anguish, History, and the Responsibility of Filmmakers)

“I cannot change the history. I cannot change the past. But we, all together, you—some of the most talented people in the world—we can make sure that the history record is set straight and that the truth will prevail and the people of Mariupol and those who have given their lives will never be forgotten.”— Ukrainian filmmaker Mstylslav Chernov, accepting a Best Documentary Feature Oscar for 20 Days in Mariupol, quoted by Dan Heching, “Winners, Stars Tout Peace Over Politics at ThisYear’s Academy Awards,” www.cnn.com, Mar. 11, 2024

Movie Quote of the Day (Nora Ephron, on ‘When You Slip on a Banana Peel’)

“When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you, but when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it’s your laugh. You become the hero rather than the victim of the joke.”—American essayist, novelist, memoirist, and screenwriter-director Nora Ephron (1941-2012), in the documentary Everything Is Copy, written by Jacob Bernstein, directed by Jacob Bernstein and Nick Hooper (2015)

Quote of the Day (Folk Music’s Eric Andersen, on How Books Opened ‘Palatial-Sized Windows for Me’)

“I’m pretty much self-taught in the literary jewel-eye of interest department. My dad retired early and went back to college to study under Robert Creeley at the University of Buffalo. My small circle of musical high school friends and I created folk groups with guitars and banjos and harmonies. We also loved poetry. Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and the Beats including Ferlinghetti. I read a lot of Russian literature on my own. Kerouac’s On the Road was a big deal to any kid like me who harbored dreams of travel and adventure. Books gave you the sense there was a big world out there beyond your backyard waiting for you to visit and take part. Books opened giant palatial-sized windows for me. Where most of my high school friends enjoyed armchair lit. adventures, they would eventually finish their education, get jobs, make families, settle down in the straight, striving secure square life with dreams of serenity. I took every word of these books personally and acted on it. I got away. But alone, on the road would soon come the high lonely risk of getting drafted in a bogus war. Later would come Eliot, Kafka, Ibsen, Hamsun, Joyce and Burroughs. And I loved Whitman.”—Singer-songwriter Eric Andersen quoted in John Kruth, “Eric Andersen: Beat Sensibility in a Folksinger Crowd,” PleaseKillMe blog, Apr. 20, 2021

A documentary about Andersen, “The Songpoet,” will play on PBS’ “All Arts” station this week. I have not previously listened to his music, but based on the interview in the link above, maybe I should pay more attention. In any event, I will try to catch this show.

(The image accompanying this post, of Andersen on Apr. 20, 2006, came from Infodek at English Wikipedia.)

Quote of the Day (Ernest Hemingway, on ‘What a Writer in Our Time Has To Do’)

“What a writer in our time has to do is write what hasn't been written before or beat dead men at what they have done. The only way he can tell how he is going is to compete with dead men.”— American Nobel Literature laureate Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), “Monologue to the Maestro: A High Seas Letter,” Esquire, October 1935, reprinted in Hemingway on Writing, edited by Larry W. Phillips (1984)

I watched the first episode of Ken Burns’ new PBS documentary on Ernest Hemingway absolutely enthralled. I had known the general outline of his life and career, but the details divulged in these first two hours—particularly about his anguished relationship with his family in Oak Park, Ill., and the lift to his career and spirits given by his first wife, Hadley Richardson—shed new light on this endlessly discussed American legend.

But Burns, collaborator Lynn Novick, and series writer Geoffrey Ward keep in mind, above all, that they are telling us a story, and this first episode ends with a quote that can’t help but feel ominous, given how we know this will all turn out. “Hem,” wrote friend and fellow novelist John Dos Passos in 1929, after the publication of the acclaimed A Farewell to Arms, “do you realize that you're king of the fiction racket?”

From this point on, it’s all that Hemingway can do to hold onto his balance as he remains atop this mountain of celebrity. From the moment he returned from WWI to his hometown, puffing up the actual story of his wound in Italy to a fake one involving him then carrying a wounded soldier to a first-aid station, he couldn’t resist embellishing his real achievements for an audience.

By the mid-1930s, when he was sending material (including today’s quote) to Esquire editor Arnold Gingrich, the temptation to posture and perform loomed even larger. He could try to resist—writing “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” for instance, as a warning to himself on being led away from his gifts.

But now, it wasn’t just a matter of writing “the truest sentence” he knew, but also of “getting in the ring” against prior literary greats like Turgenev, Maupassant, and Stendhal. And the more Hemingway felt obliged to construct his own myth to compete against them, the harder it was to live up to that image. He might have been better off, as difficult as it might sound, to “write what hasn't been written before.”

So, one has to ask: was the tragedy of Hemingway’s life simply his suicide, or was it how the need to embody machismo sapped him of the iron self-discipline and critical judgement that produced the great work that secured his reputation in the Twenties—The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and his short stories?

Film Review: ‘Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice’

I only saw Linda Ronstadt once in her roughly 40-plus career as a singer, and though it was still at a relatively early stage, the impression she made at the Garden State Arts Center on that night in 1976 still lingers: a petite, dark-eyed singer caught out by a single spotlight, her voice filling the amphitheater until it had engaged every heart with songs of longing, joy and loss.

I did not know until watching Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice that this queen of rock ‘n’ roll doubted her ability so much that, if she saw one audience member talking to another, she might assume they were conversing about the bad show she was putting on.

How wrong she was. The documentary, in general release for several weeks now, reminded me that this voice created an indelible portion in the soundtrack of my youth in the mid-to-late Seventies, and I’m sure many Baby Boomers feel similarly. She was inescapable on the radio and in the print outlets that made rock ‘n’ roll so enormously essential back then—not just a Time Magazine cover but glamorous Rolling Stone photos by Annie Liebowitz. 

All of this was not without struggle. The film painstakingly sets out two challenges she faced in her career, particularly starting out in the late Sixties and Seventies: being taken seriously by the male-dominated community of musicians, and convincing record executives to permit her to try new artistic challenges, especially when they did not seem initially to be commercially viable.

To tackle the first challenge, Ronstadt became instrumental in creating a de factor musical sorority consisting of Bonnie Raitt, Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, and singer-songwriter Karla Bonoff. 

Perhaps not coincidentally, these artists shared her broad musical tastes. Throughout the Seventies and Eighties, Ronstadt displayed an almost unmatched versatility with different musical genres. 

Already having displayed her facility with country, folk, R&B, pop, and New Wave, she became even more adventurous as she entered middle age, trying her hand at Gilbert and Sullivan (Pirates of Penzance), the Great American Songbook (three LPs in collaboration with producer Nelson Riddle), and Mexican ranchera. 

As the documentary makes clear, she imbibed her eclectic tastes at an early stage from her immediate family. Canciones de mi Padre (“Songs of my Father”), the biggest selling non-English language album in American recording history, paid tribute to her German-Mexican father, who, the singer remembers, was gifted with a rich baritone that reminded her of Frank Sinatra. Ronstadt’s mother bequeathed to her an appreciation for Gilbert and Sullivan. Her siblings fed her interest in country (Hank Williams was a great favorite), pop and folk.

Without dwelling on it, the documentary takes note of her offstage private life (California Gov. Jerry Brown and singer-songwriter J.D. Souther were, for a time, romantic interests, and in the Seventies speed and diet pills were her principal forms of self-medication). 

But it is more interested in aspects of her life that rock ‘n’ roll’s patriarchy, for one, did not take as seriously as it should have until her career was effectively over: her abundant talent and significant influence in the music industry.

Fond reminiscences and high praise for her skill are offered in interviews conducted especially for the film with friends and associates such as critic-turned-filmmaker Cameron Crowe and performers Raitt, Parton, Harris, Bonoff, Souther, Don Henley, and Jackson Browne.

In one of the interviews, Browne—whose early song “Rock Me on the Water” was covered by Ronstadt—labeled the singer “an auteur” who could make a song her own, even if she didn’t write it herself. In the most compelling segments of the film, abundant footage of her concerts and TV guest spots demonstrates not only her feel for lyrics but her magnetic stage command, even dating back to her first appearances at L.A. music meccas like the Whiskey A-Go-Go.

Ronstadt last performed in concert in 2009, as she realized that Parkinson’s Disease was undermining her vocal range. But her CDs confirm the beauty and purity of her voice when she was healthy.

Directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman might have asked more bluntly why it took male-dominated electors nearly 20 years after her eligibility to enshrine her in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But they do underscore her continual role in widening the vistas of the music industry. She leaped over genre barriers even as she helped pry the doors open to emerging singer-songwriters and female artists.

At long last, we can now reckon how much we are in her debt, more than we could ever have imagined at the time.

Quote of the Day (David Crosby, on What He Will Do With His Remaining Time)

“People don’t talk about death, or they adopt some fairy tale like sitting on a cloud playing a little harp. Hogwash. No matter how long you have, the question is the same: What are you going to do with it? I want to make the world better, and the only thing I can contribute is music. I can make good music that will lift you up. That’s what I’m supposed to do.”—Rock ‘n’ roller David Crosby quoted in Alan Paul, “Weekend Confidential: David Crosby—A Legend Faces the End by Making Music,” The Wall Street Journal, July 6-7, 2019

I have watched very few first-run movies in theaters in recent years, but I do greatly desire to see David Crosby: Remember My Name, a documentary about the rock ‘n’ roller which opened in limited release this weekend. 

Not only is it the product of Cameron Crowe, a filmmaker I have greatly come to admire over the years, but it is about a musician that I and so many other baby boomers haven’t been able to resist watching and listening to for a half century: David Crosby. 

Crowe interviewed “The Croz” as a young rock ‘n’ roll journalist in the 1970s for Rolling Stone Magazine, so the director is familiar with his accomplishments—and all the ways he fell short. 

If the musician is even a tenth as candid with Crowe as he has been in his recent spate of interviews—talking not only about his CSNY partners but also his deepening health concerns (including several heart attacks and worsening problems with diabetes) and his intense commitment to music—this should be one of the more eye-opening documentaries.

His well-known drug problems cut entire years out of what, for other artists, would have been their primes. 

But, as I discussed in this blog post from last year of a concert he gave in my hometown, Crosby has approached his youthful peak in terms of output and creativity. If his health is as precarious as he suggests, he will have gone out with a flourish.

Film Review: ‘Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened’

Longtime readers of this blog know that I am an aficionado of Stephen Sondheim. The first original-cast album of his that I ever bought—and took to heart—was not one of his Broadway successes (e.g., A Little Night Music), but instead Merrily We Roll Along. In prior posts, I considered this 1981 musical’s disastrous initial Broadway run (so bad that the lyricist-composer did not work again with longtime producer-director Harold Prince for another 20 years), and reviewed a wonderful revival of this work, four years ago, by the New York musical series Encores.

Even for those like me who are at least somewhat familiar with this decidedly mixed history, however, the 96-minute documentary Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened yielded many surprising insights. I missed a performance at the IFC Center in Greenwich Village a few weeks ago that featured several members—or, I should say, survivors—of the 1981 run. But I was fortunate enough to catch up on it at an afternoon showing at the Film Society of Lincoln Center last week.

One of those survivors was Lonny Price, one of the three original leads, narrates and directs this retrospective in a spirit that, like an earlier Sondheim song, might be termed “sorry-grateful.” Several years into making the film, he learned that footage long since believed lost—tapes for a “making-of” TV documentary that was shelved after the musical’s failure—had been rediscovered. That, together with some private footage (including a priceless scene where Sondheim, at a birthday party, previews a song that will appear in the show) allows for a contrast that mirrors the perspective of the musical itself: the sunlit hopes of theater-mad youth versus middle-aged disappointment and disillusionment.

Although both Sondheim and Prince open up about why they believe the show closed after only 16 performances (critics could not abide the two collaborators being both mavericks and successes, Sondheim says), it is fellow cast members who offer Price the most fascinating insights.

Some went on to prominent careers in entertainment, including “Seinfeld”s Jason Alexander, Tony Award-winning actress Tonya Pinkins, singer Liz Callaway, actor Giancarlo Esposito, and Jim Walton, a longtime Broadway fixture. Others struggled on the margins of the industry or even dropped out altogether, such as Ann Morrison, the principal female cast member; Jim Weissenbach, the show’s original Franklin Shepard, who now runs a talent agency; and Abby Pogrebin, who became a CBS producer and successful author. No matter how they turned out, a sense of acrid failure over the show’s failure clings, to one extent or another, to virtually everyone.

While Weissenbach reacts, with quiet bewilderment, to his firing and replacement in the principal role by Walton (claiming that neither Prince nor Sondheim gave him any sense he was doing anything wrong beforehand), the dominant note throughout is poignant, sometimes painful or even teary-eyed, particularly in the cases of Morrison, Pogrebin, and Price.

The musical’s previews—so disastrous that actors were sometimes singing to the backs of audience members heading for the exits—necessitated a blizzard of major last-minute changes unusual even for a major Broadway opening. Partly because of the decision to take the show straight to Broadway without an out-of-town tryout, rumors of problems multiplied, and critics pounced at the opening, ignoring larger facts in front of them: the brilliance of Sondheim’s score and the marvelous young talents in front of them.

Against all odds, the musical has gone on to a wondrous afterlife, continually performed around the world—including,  the film’s postscript notes, by children of the original cast members. But it’s hard to see how any of these performances could have topped the 2002 concert revival that reunited the original cast members. The exhilaration from that event, still palpable onscreen here, was such that Sondheim and Prince even reunited for a new musical (alas, also not successful), Bounce.

Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened has been out a couple of months already and therefore likely to appear on DVD, public television or cable station soon. If you have a chance, I strongly urge you to see this look at a musical that became famous for its spectacularly public death, only to enjoy an unexpectedly triumphant afterlife.

Flashback, December 1941: Wartime Film Short Marks Ford-Hepburn Affair

A little more than two weeks after Pearl Harbor, Hollywood swung into action behind the war effort with Women in Defense, a short documentary directed by John Ford and narrated by Katharine Hepburn (pictured). Their relationship had led Ford, then Hollywood’s hottest director (two consecutive Best Director Oscars), to a painful moral dilemma and, more recently, a surprising resolution.

Hollywood’s gung-ho attitude toward the war might seem hard to believe nowadays, but there was surprisingly little anti-war dissent in the film community, for these reasons:

* The U.S. had suffered a surprise attack by the Japanese, so there was no question who was the aggressor;

* As the children of immigrants--or even immigrants themselves--Hollywood’s studio moguls, a heavily Jewish group, were understandably anxious to demonstrate patriotism to a public that still evinced all too much anti-Semitism;

* The moguls also wanted to defeat Hitler, whose mistreatment of Jews in both his country and lands conquered by his forces was already manifest (even if the Holocaust was only barely beginning);

* The most leftist elements in Hollywood--Communists and fellow-travelers--switched from opposition to support of the war following Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union.

As my friend, fellow blogger Dennis Brady, noted in a recent post about the 8^th Army Air Force, a number of Hollywood stars, notably including Clark Gable and James Stewart, served with distinction in the war.

Writers and directors presented special cases. Their talents consisted of presenting stories and crafting images were deemed crucially important in creating films for a mass audience. Over the next four years, Ford, Frank Capra, John Huston, George Stevens, and William Wyler would cooperate with the War Department, the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Marine Corps, the Army Pictorial Services, the Army Educational Program, the American Armed Forces First Motion Picture Unit, and other units in explaining, both to servicemen and their worried families, “Why We Fight” (to use the title of Capra’s seven-film series). They would counter the black art of propaganda, as practiced by Josef Goebbels and Leni Riefenstahl, with a more benign variety.

Women in Defense, released on Christmas Eve, was a good case in point.  The 10-minute film, with a script by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, depicted women as instrumental in preparing for the coming war, working in scientific, industrial, and voluntary-services activities such as sewing parachutes in silk, testing chemicals on mice as part of health programs, shaping bullets and other munitions, and giving out blood that might be used later with wounded soldiers.

Viewers caught up in aspects of the film that would seem familiar to them—Hepburn’s upper-crust diction, Ford’s homey images of communities coming together—would not know at the time that the relationship between the star and her onetime director contained its own love, longing, and pain, tried by circumstance and the passage of time.

Five years before, shortly after filming concluded of their flop Mary of Scotland, Hepburn and Ford seemed on the brink of marriage, particularly following their idyllic trip to her family home, Fenwick. But the devoutly Catholic Ford interpreted the death of his father immediately afterward as a divine judgment on their illicit relationship, and Hepburn’s offer to his wife Mary--$150,000, in return for ending the marriage and granting him access to his beloved daughter Barbara—only hardened Mary’s opposition to their union. “Jack is very religious, he’ll never divorce me,” Mary predicted confidently. “He’ll never have grounds to divorce me. I’m going to be Mrs. John Ford until I die.”

That is how it turned out, but for the next five years, the Ford-Hepburn affair had a curious half-life. They never spoke of marriage again, and by 1938 Hepburn had decamped for the East Coast while Ford stayed in Hollywood. But they remained fond of each other, and, even as the actress was pursued by billionaire aviator Howard Hughes, the possibility of a permanent union between the two seemed out of the question so long as Ford figured in the background.

Then, in 1941, several developments changed the nature of the relationship between Ford and Hepburn for good:

* Ford’s sense of betrayal over Hepburn’s affair with Spencer Tracy. Ford gave Spencer Tracy his first break in Hollywood with Up the River (1930), but relations between the two cooled after the actor rejected the lead in Ford’s adaptation of The Plough and the Stars. Within a week of the start of production of Hepburn’s first film with Tracy, Woman of the Year, as industry insiders began to gossip about the possibility of an affair between the two MGM stars, Ford traveled cross-country to Washington, D.C., where he would begin serving as part of what later became the Field Photographic Unit under William “Wild Bill” Donovan, head of the CIA’s precursor, the Office of Strategic Services. Cast and crew members on his films, long given to interpreting what his sometimes mysterious actions (or even lack of them) betokened, had no doubt that this was his way of registering disapproval.

* The death of Mary’s first husband. Though Ford and Mary had married in 1920, it had not been a Catholic ceremony, because the bride was divorced and Protestant. By 1941, Mary’s ex-husband had died. Her conversion to Catholicism removed the only obstacle to the religious ceremony that Ford had long wanted.

* Pearl Harbor. Mary, complaining of loneliness, had traveled to DC to see her husband off to his new naval job when the Japanese attack on December 7 occurred. Perhaps the prospect of death in a war now at hand decided John. Before the month was out, the couple was at last married by a Catholic priest in the National Cathedral in Washington.

Ford, who would be promoted to Captain in the U.S. Naval Reserve by war’s end, continued to create films of distinction while n the armed forces. He won two more Oscars, this time for Best Documentary, with The Battle of Midway (1942) and December 7^th (1943). (At Midway, where he was wounded in the shoulder and elbow so badly that he was temporarily knocked unconscious, he is said, while filming in an exposed watertower at the height of the battle, to have yelled “at the attacking Zeroes to swing left or right--and curs[ed] them out when they disobeyed directions.”)

Ford’s World War II works, concluding with the fictional full-length feature They Were Expendable (1945), depict the conflict less as a matter of glory than as sacrifice for an ideal. That might also characterize his relationship with Hepburn. Given his devotion to Catholicism, marriage to the star, at least while his wife was alive, was out of the question.

But the great director, crusty to cast and crew to the point of abusiveness, still carried a noticeable soft spot for the actress. His rollicking 1952 valentine to Ireland, The Quiet Man, featured a chief female character named Mary Kate Dannaher. It’s impossible not to read those the first and middle names without thinking of the two most important women in his life. When Hepburn came to visit, as he was dying in March 1973, he threw her off-balance first by telling her she was beautiful, then by asking if she knew that he loved her.

It is one of the curiosities of Hollywood biography that unconventional, freethinking Connecticut Yankee Kate Hepburn gave her heart to two Irish-American Catholics unwilling to divorce their wives and bent on self-destruction: Ford and Tracy. The only way that I can begin to understand this is by thinking that each relationship began with admiration for two film professionals who had virtually no equals at their craft, then passed into an understanding and love for the sensitivity that these men hid as much from themselves as from the world.