I will do two entries tomorrow. This is Memorial Day weekend so we're on the holiday schedule. That means, as Rachel reminded me in an e-mail, "a talking entry."
That means going through the e-mails. Starting with community member Joe is among 15 I've counted who are writing about the montage for the Film Classic features at Third (it was used this morning for "Film Classics of the 20th Century"). They want to know what all is up there? Good question. I'll give it a shot.
Top row, Bogart and Lauren Bacall in Key Largo, Jane Fonda and Robert Redford in Barefoot in the Park, Danny De Vito and Billy Crystal in Throw Mama From The Train, Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn from Desk Set, Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway (Chinatown), Simone Signoret and Vera Clouzot (Les Diaboliques), Steve Martin and Goldie Hawn (House Sitter) and Whoopi Goldberg in Ghost, (sort of second row follows), Meryl Streep, Bruce Willis and Goldie Hawn (Death Becomes Her), The Graduate (Anne Bancroft's leg), Cher (Moonstruck), Walter Matthau and Elaine May (A New Leaf), Jeff Bridges and Barbra Streisand (The Mirror Has Two Faces), Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal (When Harry Met Sally . . .), (sort of third row) Woody Allen (Love and Death), Bette Davis (Now Voyager), Apocalypse Now, Johnny Depp (Ed Wood), (sort of fourth row) Diane Ross (Mahogany), Dressed to Kill, Goodfellas, Jon Voight and Jane Fonda (Coming Home), Judy Garland (Summer Stock), Goldie Hawn (Wildcats), Ruth Gordon and Bud Cort (Harold and Maude), Keanu Reeves (and Patrick Swayze which you can't see at Third, from Point Break), (sort of fifth row), Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart and Katharine Hepburn (Philadelphia Story), Tatum O'Neal and Ryan O'Neal (Paper Moon), Michelle Pfieffer (Fabulous Baker Boys), Terminator 2, Bette Midler, Goldie Hawn and Diane Keaton (First Wives Club), Marlon Brando (Streetcar Named Desire), Tim Robbins (The Player), Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Greta Garbo and Melvyn Douglas (Ninotchka), (next row) Diane Keaton and Woody Allen (Annie Hall), Marilyn Monroe, Betty Grable and Lauren Bacall (How To Marry A Millionaire), Fred MacMurray, Hattie McDaniel and Katharine Hepburn (Alice Adams), (and just above that) Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand (The Way We Were), Drew Barrymore (Firestarter), Winona Ryder, Christina Ricci, Cher and Bob Hoskins (Mermaids), Carole Lombard (My Man Godfrey), Jimmy Stewart (Vertigo), Meg Ryan (Sleepless in Seattle -- click on image if she's cut off above and you'll see it and Patrick Swayze), and (final row) Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner (Romancing The Stone), Jane Fonda and Jeff Bridges (The Morning After), Bette Davis (Dangerous -- her first Academy Award), Meryl Streep, Kurt Russell and Cher (Silkwood), (drop down a bit) Rosie Perez, Christian Slater and Marisa Tomei (Untamed Heart) and Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore (Ghost).
That's a fairly representative look at the films of the last century when you grasp the qualifiers.
1) All that fits on one posterboard.
2) Those are all cut outs from video sleeves. A friend is doing an art exhibit and using videotape (not to record, videocassettes are part of the exhibit). He asked if I had any old so he could 'recycle' and I have a ton because, like everyone else, I no longer use that format. He left with three trash bags (Hefty -- the biggest size) and discarded the sleeves because he didn't need them for his exhibit. At which point, Betty's daughter said (paraphrase), 'Remember those collages that you would do." Yes. At Third we did them for four years and got sick of them, they took forever. But Betty's daughter often helped on those and loved them. So I said I did and she said we could make a movie collage. Which was a great idea and allowed us to have an image for a regular feature at Third. We only used the empty sleeves.
3) How representative is it racially and gender wise? About as representative as films in the 20th century were which is not very. There are only three African-Americans featured. Betty and I argued for those. Jim wanted Lady Sings The Blues -- a triumph for Diana Ross, no question. But that's like Apocalypse Now -- you have to have the title in there or most will have no idea what they're looking at from the image (a microphone). When Ghost was decided on, Betty and I insisted that the back of the cover photo of Whoopi had to be included. No question that Diana Ross was the first African-American film superstar. (Dorothy Dandridge was a star.) Diana had to be represented. Mahogany was the crowd pleaser. Critics love Lady Sings The Blues and Diana was nominated for an Academy Award. Yes. But what people prefer to see is Mahogany. It's the film that touched the audience. It also helps that the cover is iconic (and runs with a minor motif in the collage of people tossing their hands in the air). Leaving out documentaries and TV work, Whoopi made over 43 films in the 20th century -- her first was in 1982. Whoopi's voice level on her politics have ticked off a lot of people -- I'm surprised she gets away with it, honestly, because she's gone beyond Rosie on The View. But whether you don't like her politics because you're not political, or you to the right of her or you to the left of her (like me) and wish she'd learn what she was talking about, Whoopi did something amazing.
There are a lot of bad movies in those 43 or so films. Some would include The Telephone. I love her work in that film. I think it's very hard to do what she did in that film -- basically an entire monologue for the length of the film. It's true the film is static and doesn't 'open up.' That's a criticism of the film. In terms of Whoopi, I think that's one of her great performances.
But what Whoopi did was work when African-Americans were not wining the Academy Awards or the lead parts. Denzel emerges at the end of the 20th century and really comes into his own in the '00s. Richard Pryor did something similar to Whoopi but briefly and it's pretty much confined to the 70s because the drugs took an impact long before the health crisis did.
What Whoopi, among other things, was guarantee that a set of children were not going to be raised watching movies on independent UHF or on cable and never encounter an African-American star. Or only encounter one in February (Black History Month). Her films in this period include The Color Purple, The Lion King, How Stella Got Her Groove Back, Fatal Attraction, Jumping Jack Flash (I love Jumping Jack Flash), Sister Act (and its sequel), Robert Altman's The Player, The Long Walk Home, Boys On The Side, Made In America, Girl Interrupted, Soap Dish, Corinna, Corinna, The Rugrats Movie, The Little Rascals, Burglar and The Deep End of the Ocean. That's not all of them from the 20th century. But if some station's programming a drama week -- Whoopi's got those. If they're doing comedy, she's got those. Action-Adventure, children's live-action films, children's animated films, tear-jerkers, Academy Award winners, you name it, regardless of the theme she pretty much had it covered. (That includes science fiction with Star Trek Generations. I don't think she's ever done a western -- so far.)
And the romance film Ghost is her biggest live action grosser and she won the Academy Award for it. That didn't happen very often in the 20th century.
In the 20th century, Sidney Poitier became the first and only African-American to win Best Actor (Lilies of the Field). In the 20th century, Dorothy Dandridge, Diana Ross, Cicely Tyson, Diahann Carroll, Whoopi Goldberg and Angela Bassett were all nominated for Best Actress but none was awarded the statue.
The 20th century saw Best Supporting Actor awards go to Louis Gossett Jr., Denzel Washington and Cuba Gooding Jr. In 1939, Hattie McDaniel won the Best Supporting Actress award for Gone With The Wind and became the first African-American to win an Academy Award (not just an acting award, the first to win any Academy Award). Though Ethel Waters, Juanita Moore, Beah Richards, Alfre Woodard, Margaret Avery and Oprah Winfrey would be nominated, Whoopi was the only to win. 51 years after Hattie McDaniel took home the award, Whoopi did. (Whoopi is also the first African-American actress to receive more than one acting nomination -- her lead nomination for The Color Purple and her supporting for Ghost. The first male to be nominated more than once was Sidney Poitier.)
After we'd argued the Whoopi thing, Ty said Hattie was on the Alice Adams cover so it made sense to include that as well -- the two African-American women who won Academy Awards.
In terms of foreign films only one makes it onto the collage. In terms of films directed by women in the 20th century? Elaine May's A New Leaf, Kathryn Bigelow's Point Break and Barbra Streisand's The Mirror Has Two Faces. That's actually pretty good because, obviously, this is studio films -- look at the others on the collage. The studios didn't allow a lot of women to direct in the second half of the 20th century. Women actually fared better as directors during the silent era -- strange when you consider that Dorothy Azner is usually credited with developing the boom mike.
Before Elaine May's A New Leaf (1971), you have to drop back to 1966 for the studios greenlighting a woman to direct (Ida Lupino's The Trouble With Angels). Elaine would direct two other films in the seventies (The Heartbreak Kid and Mikey and Nicky). She really was it for studio feature films. Ellen Burstyn could have been it. She could have directed 1974's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore -- the studio offered it to her. But she passed on directing and starring. (And went on to win the Best Actress Academy Award for her performance in the film.)
Another woman could have been a director in the 70s -- Barbra. I'm not referring to A Star Is Born but I'm talking about Yentl which she was ready to make in the 70s and couldn't. She had to eat pride, ego and ___ to finally get it made in the eighties and it is a classic film. She would go on to direct two more (so far) The Prince of Tides and The Mirror Has Two Faces.
Bigelow would emerge in the 80s with Near Dark, Point Break and Strange Days. Another director of that period was Randa Haines who most assumed would be the first woman to win the Academy Award for directing. 1986's Children of a Lesser God managed to result in no nomination for Randa. Then came The Doctor which turned people off (more for the actor than for the directing) and then came the nightmare that was Wrestling Ernest Hemingway. That was a nightmare production -- the stuff Jacqueline Susann could write a book on. Because the film bombed and there were more pressing tales when it was being filmed most people still don't how awful that shoot was but it legendary in entertainment circles. Randa was walked all over by one actor, a female actress tried to be supportive and ended up throwing in the towel feeling that she was fighting more for Randa than Randa was. Every day was a shout-fest with little being shot. Dance With Me should have been a hit but wasn't and it should have been seen as a nice bounce back for Randa but wasn't. Which is why she's TV now.
Two women came into directing during this period from other fields. Actress Penny Marshall established herself with Jumping Jack Flash. She wasn't really inspired by the material and, to hear her tell it, didn't have a great longing for directing. But she took the project and did an incredible job with it. She would go on to become the first woman to direct a film that crossed the $100 million mark in grosses (Big). Her other hits would include A League of Their Own, Awakenings, The Preacher's Wife and Riding In Cars With Boys. The other woman was journalist Nora Ephron who became a media critic for Esquire when reporting lost its appeal and then became a screenwriter and novelist. Scripts she wrote or co-wrote include Silkwood, Heartburn (based on her own novel and featuring Carly Simon's classic "Coming Around Again") and When Harry Met Sally . . . Following that, she moved into directing with This Is My Life (1992 -- great soundtrack by Carly) and her first big hit -- huge hit -- Sleepless in Seattle. Her other huge hit was You've Got Mail. Nora's biggest problem as a director was failing to realize that others couldn't do what Meg Ryan could. Michael did well, Bewitched did okay and Julie & Julia almost made it to a hundred million in this country (grosses). Nora got the respect denied to Barbra and Penny. But even she didn't get an Academy Award nomination for directing. She was nominated three times as a screenwriter (Silkwood, When Harry Met Sally . . . and Sleepless In Seattle).
So the choices on that poster board, I think represent the studio films of the 20th century -- warts and all.
The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.
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