IN the preface to the book, Best American Movie Writing 2001, edited by John Landis, Jason Shinder writes: “The next best thing to watching movies is perhaps to read about them.”
But how do we write about movies?
If movie magazines are the gauge, movie writing is basically about movie or film stars. They grace or gild the cover. When a director or writer is ever placed on a cover, there could be a major reason for such a spotlight. Somehow, to write about movies is to focus on glamor, female pulchritude or modes of masculinity.
It is thus refreshing to stumble upon this collection of essays done at the turn of the millennium, which Landis, the director behind such works as The Blues Brothers and Animal House, has divided into sections devoted to Actors, Censorship, Writers, Directors, Technology and Genre. I opted to take out from this list sections on “Nazis” and “Shangri-La” for the very reason that they are categories of essays one would never think of in terms of movie journalism. We will deal with them later.
For a film journalist to be assigned to talk about the most conspicuous elements of cinema, the performers, is to confound the person giving the task. Who shall I write about? What are my guides in the selection of the subject matter?
It seems in this book, that quandary has been solved. Tom Weaver, the author, looks into the Hollywood’s Greatest Ape. Weaver grew up fascinated with jungle films, with Tarzan part of this universe. Unlike other admirers of “ordinary actors,” Weaver made it his business to “find out who Hollywood’s ‘gorilla men were.” He sought out makeup guys. He noticed that every time he asked, he would be told of one name, Charlie Gemora. Weaver did not stop here with the knowledge. He offered to be one of the faces that makeup apprentices would practice their skills on. It was among these artists that he would find the opportunity to meet Gemora, who turned out to be Filipino. Gemora was so famous in his role as a gorilla that whenever the greatest gorillas of them all, King Kong, would be mentioned, people immediately thought of Gemora as the actor behind the ape suit. Even as he denied to being the King Ape, that honor stuck to his name all throughout his career, and long after his demise.
On censorship, Sam Staggs contributes excerpt from All About Eve: The Complete Behind the Scenes Story of the Bitchiest Film Ever Made. While the article sizzles with how the men and women behind the film ran away with all the caustic epigrams and witticisms that substituted for daily rants and conversations, the essay is about how the censorship in those years contributed to the trimming and editing of the dialogues of the film—from the “temporary script’ of 223 pages down to a temporary script with 180 pages. The book has this to say, however: Mankiewicz (the writer and director) and Zannuck (the producer), “while in basic agreement on The All About Eve screenplay, were not the final arbiters on all points. There was the imprimatur to be released by the chief administration of the Production Code.
The word “sex” could never be mentioned in the 1950s, not even with the sophisticated air wafting through the scenarios branded by Bette Davis herself. The Production Code found an offensive word in one scene where Margo Channing, played by Davis, delivers the line: “Ah don’ understand about all these plays about sex-stahved Suth’in women—sex is one thing we were nevah stahved for in the South.” In the end, “love” was substituted for “sex.”
Under movie writers, there is John Irving, with his own ruminations: “There is no language in a screenplay (For me, dialogue doesn’t count as language). What passes for language in a screenplay is rudimentary, like the directions for assembling a complicated children’s toy…A screenplay, as a piece, of writing, is merely the scaffolding for a building someone else is going to build.” Irving, known for his book The World According to Garp, later made into a film with the same title, closes his statement with: “The director is the builder.”
John Bailey talks about technologies in cinema in his essay, “Film or Digital? Don’t Fight. Coexist.” He recalls while serving on the foreign film committee of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, how films varied greatly in terms of those using elaborate digital techniques and those relying on film cameras. Along the way, he discusses a film exemplifying a sort of a hybrid—“a movie made by traditional filmmakers using tools and techniques of the new medium.”
Now, on to the two sections left out: Shangri-La and Nazism. Ian Buruma—intellectual, historian, and author of books like Behind the Mask: Sexual Demons, Sacred Mothers, Transvestites, and Other Japanese Cultural Heroes—revisits for us the illusion of geographies foisted upon us by cinema, the artifice and exoticism created by moving images. He asks a disarming research question: “What it [is] about Tibet that has made so many intelligent people go wobbly?” He proceeds from the phenomenon of Dalai Lama, the focus of what he terms as “Tibetophiles,” and says: “The problem for the Dalai Lama and his canny government in exile is that he needs the support of such Hollywood Buddhists, but cannot risk having his aura contaminated by too much contact with them.” Buruma then talks of Orville Schell, who wrote Virtual Tibet, on the set of the movie Seven Years in Tibet, where a replica of Lhasa had been built high up the Andes Mountains.
Landis introduces the section on Nazis with these: “Fascists have always understood the power of films. Mussolini built Cinecitta studio in Rome and Franco encouraged movie production in Spain. The Shah of Iran threw a fabulous film festival in Teheran, as did Marcos in the Philippines.”
So, you see movie articles are not all about screen idols. Or cheap gossip and cheaper starlets.