Released after “The Godfather” in 1972, the same year as “The Godfather II” in 1974, and five years prior to “Apocalypse Now,” “The Conversation” represents one of four bona fide masterpieces writer/director Francis Ford Coppola brought to the screen during his incredible run throughout the 1970s. This low-key, character driven thriller might be the least famous title on that esteemed list, but it is more than worthy to be remembered among them.

The Mighty Gene Hackman plays Harry Caul, a San Francisco-based surveillance expert willing to take most any job that pays well. Harry never questions his employers because he doesn’t want the answers. You give him the job and he’ll give you the tape. It’s all very simple and clean… until it isn’t.

Though he moved a couple thousand miles away, the one thing Harry can’t escape is his past. Somebody was killed once upon a time, and Harry isn’t about to allow himself to shoulder the blame. But this devout Catholic is punishing himself, probably without even realizing it. He lives alone, is alone and he’s only willing to let himself get as close to someone as his suspicions and guilt will allow — which isn’t very close at all.

Harry’s latest job seems simple enough. All he’s been asked to do is record a young couple’s conversation as they stroll through a busy park during the workday lunch hour. This is the easy part for a man known as the best in his profession. A microphone here, a microphone there, put it all together and what you have at first appears to be a rather innocuous and even dull conversation. The difficult part comes later.

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Read part one of this series here.

In William Strauss and Neil Howe’s Generations, the babies born 1925-1942 are classified as members of the “Silent Generation.” These were the kids who grew up during the crises of the Great Depression and World War II, entered young adulthood at the postwar high of the 1950s, and hit middle age during the cultural chaos of the late 1960s and ’70s. This life sequence puts them in Howe and Strauss’ “Adaptive” archetype, a recessive generation less populous in numbers than the ones before (the GI Generation) and after (the Baby Boomers.)

When this generation started making movies they transformed Hollywood. Peter Biskind’s 1998 book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and Rock ‘N Roll Generation Saved Hollywood lays out the popular narrative. The tail of the Silent Generation and the beginning of the Boomers (filmmakers born 1939-1946) put out major dramatic work that challenged the more bland conventions of mid ‘60s Hollywood cinema. The 1970s were the R-rated decade. Francis Ford Coppola made “The Godfather.” Martin Scorsese released “Mean Streets” and “Taxi Driver.” New serious actors like Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Jon Voight, and Robert De Niro delivered legendary performances. This was a film generation inspired by the French New Wave to treat movies as serious art.

Oscar Nominated-screenwriter, award-winning mystery novelist, and now Pajamas Media CEO Roger L. Simon was a member of this clique. Born in 1943, Simon is like others born at the edges of generations, a blending of both appears in his re-titled memoir Turning Right at Hollywood and Vine, recently released in paperback with new material. (more…)

“Never get out of the boat.” Absolutely goddamn right. Unless you were goin’ all the way…

Why it’s a left-wing film

With a script loosely based on Joseph Conrad’s novella “Heart of Darkness,” co-writer/director Francis Ford Coppola moves Conrad’s existential tale from the 19th Century African Congo to the 20th Century Vietnam War and portrays America’s involvement there, and our military men in particular,  in the harshest and most disturbing ways imaginable. At best, we are forever indifferent to everything and everyone, most especially human suffering. At worst we are murderers of women and children and our government is involved in the kind of secret Black Ops the Left was sure Wikileaks would finally reveal when the just the opposite turned out to be true.

We also epitomize the term Ugly American, treating our South Vietnamese allies like children or as though they don’t exist, and there is no amount of brutality we won’t rain down on our enemies in the North.  We are borderline terrorists willing to indiscriminately lay down intense air-strikes on villages where children scramble for cover just so we can surf. We use the dead in ways to strike fear into the hearts of the enemy and casually toss around racial slurs to describe anyone who doesn’t look like us.

Coppola’s monstrous vision of the American military has never been equaled, not even by Oliver Stone. In the realized vision of this great director’s cinematic nightmare, the most terrifying boogeyman of all is The American Presence.

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These people rely on us in Hollywood to come up with stuff to get them through the week. Hollywood has lost sight of that. – D.B. Sweeney

Actor D. B. Sweeney wasn’t trying to find his inner director. The fickle finger of fate – and some cold Hollywood realities – forced his hand. The result? The charming “Two Tickets to Paradise,” getting a new DVD release today, Sept. 14.

Sweeney, best known for roles in “Eight Men Out” and “The Cutting Edge,” tried to snare the right director for his first screenplay. His first two choices weren’t available, and several other directors open to the project were a bit too green for his taste.

“I didn’t really plan to direct it, or have a desire to direct it. It was the only way to get it done,” Sweeney tells Big Hollywood. “You don’t get a front-line director to make this small movie.”

So Sweeney directed the tale of three longtime buds (Sweeney, John C. McGinley and Paul Hipp) whose bumpy road trip spark some serious navel gazing, not to mention a rock soundtrack to die for.

“The directing was great. The producing was a slog, especially when you use your own money,” he says of the project, a labor of love with just enough rough edges to sweeten the storyline. (more…)

I don’t know about you, but for me, the Fourth of July goes with war movies — you know, like Al Gore and happy endings.

Maybe it’s the “bombs bursting” in the Star Spangled Banner, or the evening fireworks, or simply that the smell of barbeque in the afternoon reminds me of napalm (actually, it’s either victory, or lighter fluid).

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So when the wiener hits the grill, I’m hankering for some Heartbreak Ridge.  I’m weak-kneed for a little Where Eagles Dare.  I’m jonesing for a piece o’ that… Johnny Tremain.  (You try and find a good war movie that starts with a “J.”)

Most of all, I pine for Patton.  Few celluloid moments can top that iconic opening scene for patriotic bliss.  First off, you’ve got that humongous American flag backdrop.  And you’ve got the general himself in full fruit-salad regalia, delivering the greatest pep talk since Henry V’s St. Crispin’s Day speech. (more…)

Since my scathing two-part Big Hollywood editorial on imprisoned Iranian film director Jafar Panahi nearly three weeks ago, I have found myself drawn neck-deep into the campaign to push for his freedom. In that cause I have email-blitzed the media, the Academy, all the major US film festivals and as many contacts in Hollywood as I know and could find. I sent out deep background on his case, petitions for his release, and heartfelt pleas for Hollywood voices to speak up on Mr. Panahi’s behalf, along with not-so-veiled threats of PR Armageddon should the deafening silence continue.

I also informed all parties involved that I would do the same for any of them under similar brutal and inhuman circumstances. Whatever it took, be it sweetheart pleas or promises of a nuclear PR war. I have since dropped the latter approach, as I have been informed by Iranians also campaigning for Mr. Panahi’s release that it was not helpful to his cause. So on Mr. Panahi’s behalf, I have traded in my sword for a plowshare for the duration. Not a problem. I’m not a total ideologue. Just mostly.

This past three weeks have also brought many valuable learning experiences as well. I have since found that Facebook, which I have avoided like the Plague because I have enough on my geek plate already, is an incredibly valuable social networking tool that reaches even into the heart of Iran itself. I have made many new friends behind the Islamist Curtain, among them a Panahi family member, by posting any good news I could find on the Jafar Panahi and Free Jafar Panahi Facebook pages. (more…)

Last week, I stirred some folks up with my Top Ten Most Overrated Directors of All Time.  To recap, they were: Ridley Scott, Michael Mann, David Lean, Darren Aronofsky, Mike Nichols, David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, and Alfred Hitchcock.  And by “stirred some folks up,” I mean faced down a virtual lynch mob.  Who knew that Aronofsky supporters were fans of the film Fury? 

A few quick items in response to that piece.  First, it was not about “bad directors” (although some were plain bad, including Aronofsky), but about overrated directors.  Alfred Hitchcock is nowhere near the worst director ever (I was probably too harsh to label him “slightly better than mediocre”), but it is a travesty to label him the greatest director of all time, as so many have.  The same holds true for David Lean (I appreciate Great Expectations, Brief Encounter, and swaths of Bridge Over the River Kwai, I just think he doesn’t deserve to make the top 20 list). Second, I neglected three directors who clearly should have made the list: Roman Polanski (somebody stop the Chinatown cult!), Spike Lee (how can he make race relations this dull?), and Tim Burton (damn you for ruining Sweeney Todd).  Third, two corrections: (more…)

Chris Crocker has nothing on most Che Guevara fans. His anguish in “Leave Britney Alone!” pales to what I’ve seen and heard from “hecklers”during many college lectures. The more painstakingly-documented the facts I discharge into the fog of ignorance that blankets many campuses, the more shrill and anguished comes the reactions, often from faculty! 

Facts matters little to diehard, teen-beat type Castro/Che fans. Many “document” their rebuttals to my blasphemies with scenes from Godfather II, that famous documentary on pre-Castro Cuba. “Fidel, I love you,” gushed a young Francis Ford Coppola. “We both have beards. We both have power and want to use it for good purposes.” Not that such sentiments could have possibly flavored his masterpiece. 

To depict Havana streets on New Year’s Eve 1958, Coppola cast more people than stampeded through a battle scene in Braveheart. For what it’s worth, Havana streets were deathly quiet that night. Not to be outdone, in his Havana, Sydney Pollack cast Cuban President, Fulgencio Batista, with light skin, blond hair and blue eyes. The late Cuban-exile novelist (and screenwriter for Andy Garcia’s The Lost City) Guillermo Cabrera Infante, later bumped into Pollack at a Hollywood party where the learned director flinched and went red-faced when a laughing Cabrera informed him that Batista was, in fact, a Black.  

“But these are merely movies, Humberto,” Some might counter. Yes, fine. But Pollack boasted of his knowledge of Cuba, often visiting Castro’s fiefdom starting in 1977 and even meeting with Fidel Castro himself.  (more…)