Veteran actor Ben Gazzara, best known for his collaborations with director John Cassavetes, has died at 81 after a battle with pancreatic cancer.

From The New York Times:

Mr. Gazzara studied with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio in Manhattan, where the careers of stars like Marlon Brando and Rod Steiger were shaped, and like them he had a visceral presence. It earned him regular work across half a century, not only onstage — his last Broadway appearance was in the revival of “Awake and Sing!” in 2006 — but in dozens of movies and all sorts of television shows, including the starring role in the 1960s series “Run for Your Life.”

If Mr. Gazzara never achieved Brando’s stature, that was partly because of a certain laissez-faire approach to his career: an early suspicion of film, a reluctance to go after desirable roles.

“When I became hot, so to speak, in the theater, I got a lot of offers,” he said in a 1998 interview on “Charlie Rose.” “I won’t tell you the pictures I turned down because you would say, ‘You are a fool.’ And I was a fool.”

And yet Mr. Gazzara’s enduring reputation may well rest on his film work, specifically the movies he made with Mr. Cassavetes, the actor and director revered by cinephiles for his risk-taking independent projects and a directorial style that encouraged spontaneity.

There are small but key roles in great movies that make a crucial difference in the way a film turns out. Think of Marlon Brando getting the top billing in “Superman” for less than 15 minutes of time as Jor-El, the Man of Steel’s father.

In the new Oscar-buzzed film “The Descendants” by Alexander Payne (“Election,” “Sideways,” “About Schmidt”) George Clooney may be getting all the glory for his terrific lead performance as Matt King, a real estate mogul who has to deal with his comatose wife’s wishes to die at the same time he is forced to become a better father to his two daughters.

But it’s when he learns that his wife had been cheating on him with a smarmy-looking real estate agent named Brian Speer that the film really takes off, as he sets out to find Speer in order to gain closure.

It would be easy to play Speer as a heartless cad, and a lout who callously disrupted the family life and betrayed the marriage of another man. But as Speer, actor Matthew Lillard delivers a powerfully nuanced performance that actually makes viewers feel his pain as he begs for forgiveness from King and also begs King not to tell his own wife what he had done.

(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.

(more…)

We’ve all watched well-known, highly regarded actors for the umpteenth time on screen — perhaps even raucously enjoying both their performance and the movie — and thought about how painfully derivative and self-referential they’ve become. Somewhere along the way, over a period of many years, these talented thespians stopped surprising us. They ceased bringing to life fleshed out individuals and  began using and reusing tired sets of predictable quirks and tics.

Mind you, they’re still charismatic and entertaining to watch, but in an almost clownish way. We now go to see them not to be wowed by their acting, but to be entertained by their chewing the scenery and hamming it up. Whereas in the past they lost themselves in a part, now their well-known, theatrically overblown personalities overwhelm everything else on screen.

Who are the worst offenders? My own Top 5 list was compiled with two ground rules: each candidate had to be alive (so James Dean and Marlon Brando each get a reprieve), and they have to have won at least one Academy Award for acting (which spares modern, less-laurelled hams such as Robert Downey Jr., Johnny Depp, Woody Allen, Jeff Goldblum and Mel Gibson.) Again, the following actors are not necessarily unpleasant to watch — raw charisma goes a long way — but they have become predictably one-note parodies of themselves. (more…)

In the Age of the Hollywood Sucker Punch, betting your time and dollars on movies and TV is more perilous than ever.

As often as not, you can expect to fork over $20-$40 at the theater expecting to laugh, cry, and be entertained. . .

. . . only to find yourself trapped in a widescreen, 3D, surround sound, stadium-seated liberal indoctrination chamber.

With TV, you can dedicate months and years to becoming a dedicated fan of a series. . .

. . . only to suddenly start getting lectured on what creeps you and your family are by dint of your politics/religion/gender/race/fill-in-the-blank.

Closing in on two years patrolling the mean streets, Big Hollywood already has dozens of posts that document these lies, cheap shots, and propaganda in grim detail. Amidst the cultural carnage conservatives step ever more gingerly, sifting through the rubble for scraps worth investing in.

One way most of us navigate this minefield is by discerning which actors — big, well-known, picture-opening actors — are worth trusting on name alone. No one has a perfect record, but the best gain our confidence by routinely choosing projects that hew to some modicum of quality, decency, and fair play. You may not agree with the underlying message or political slant of their movies, but that’s not the point — it’s completely possible for conservatives to love great liberal movies and vice versa. Rather, these actors convince us over the course of their careers that they aren’t likely to sucker punch their fans, or to embarrass their country, profession, or family by allowing politics and prejudices to tarnish their public reputations and filmed entertainments. (more…)

Pop quiz: what do the following movies have in common?

Gone with the Wind (1939), Star Wars (1977), The Sound of Music (1965), E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), The Ten Commandments (1956), Titanic (1997), Jaws (1975), Doctor Zhivago (1965), The Exorcist (1973), Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1939), 101 Dalmatians (1961), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Ben-Hur (1959), Avatar (2009), Return of the Jedi (1983), The Sting (1973), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Jurassic Park (1993), The Graduate (1967), Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace (1999), Fantasia (1941), The Godfather (1972), Forrest Gump (1994), Mary Poppins (1964), The Lion King (1994)

If you said they all made scads of money, bravo — they are the top twenty-five domestic box-office champions of all time (adjusted for inflation, of course).

But consider another similarity: surprisingly few of them relied on established A-list movie stars — the most famous, the highest paid — for their moneymaking prospects. Gone with the Wind had Gable, yes. The Sting had Newman and Redford. The Godfather, Brando.

As for most of the rest, they either featured no A-listers at all, or used them before they became bonafide movie stars. In fact, many of those pictures can take credit for sending now-famous actors into the celestial Hollywood firmament in the first place. Gone with the Wind made Vivian Leigh known to the world. The Ten Commandments did it for Charlton Heston. The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman. The Godfather, Al Pacino. Star Wars, Harrison Ford. Mary Poppins, Julie Andrews. (more…)

One of George Stevens’ filmmaking maxims was: “The camera is not the instrument. People are always the instrument.” Nowhere in his oeuvre is this more evident than in Shane, perhaps the most peculiarly cast A-grade Western in Hollywood history.

It all started with a memo from Paramount Studios, where the director was currently under contract: “Herewith story and treatment entitled Shane, which we would like you to consider for one of your two remaining pictures. . . This property is now being supervised by one of our studio producers, but no serious problem would be involved in re-assigning it to you, and we are prepared to do so if you like it. . .” Stevens did like it, and soon began reading both the novel and existing script, marking them up with marginal notes that contained the seeds of dialogue and shots that would go on to become immortal.

As packaged, the movie was set to star Alan Ladd, Paramount’s most popular star — only John Wayne eclipsed Ladd’s popularity in moviegoer polls during those heady years. But Stevens initially considered other options. Many of his jotted notes about the character of Shane referenced “Monty,” showing that Stevens was thinking of using Montgomery Clift, the young, tight-jawed brooder then appearing in the director’s tragic love story A Place in the Sun (1951). Gregory Peck was also in the running. Meanwhile, author Jack Schaefer wanted “a dark, deadly person” — someone more like tough-guy gangster actor George Raft — to portray his hero. For the part of Joe Starrett, the homesteader and father of the young boy, names like Broderick Crawford, Burt Lancaster, and William Holden were bandied about. (more…)

CBS won’t comment, but the NY Times reports that on Tuesday night’s episode of the ”The Good Wife” the story revolved around an artist killed by a bomb after he drew a cartoon featuring Muhammad. It looks as though the episode used a number of camera dodges to ensure no one got a good clean look at Islam’s founder:

In a plot line on Tuesday’s episode of “The Good Wife,” the show’s law firm deals with a suit brought by the widow of a newspaper editor who was killed by a bomb after he published an editorial cartoon showing the Prophet Muhammad being searched by airport security officers. In scenes like the one above, the editorial cartoon is depicted only in small portions, obscured by shadows or pieces of paper, and never revealed in its entirety.

If you combine this with Comedy Central’s over-the-top censoring of a recent “South Park” episode, we’re really only left with two explanations, right? Either Hollywood’s had a massive change of heart and has suddenly decided to treat religion with respect or they’re terrified of becoming the next Theo Van Gogh.

Right?

We should all be rippling with anticipation over how one or both of these moral revelations will alter upcoming Tinseltown product. If The Former Religious Bigots Known As Hollywood have finally come around and changed their ways when it comes to insulting people of faith — just for starters, who will the new bad guys be on all four of those “Law & Order” series? Who will be the new whipping boys in the independent film world?  (more…)

Marlon Brando once visited the Prime Minister of Canada, Pierre Trudeau, to request money for a film about the First Nations that he and Abby Mann were working on.

Following the very unfruitful meeting with Trudeau, Brando declared,”That’s the most frightened I’ve ever been in my life. He’s the most intimidating person I’ve ever met.”

Hmmm … well, that remark, which I first read quite awhile ago in a much longer article about that meeting, has stayed with me, particularly since I now live in Canada, and have done so since Jean Chretien replaced Trudeau as Prime Minister.

Chretien, in fact all of Canada, seems to still sit in the shadow of Pierre Trudeau. In light of what Trudeau has done to Canada and what Obama is now doing to the United States, the size of their still-growing legends is not surprising since they’re doing exactly the same thing: instituting or rather forcibly injecting socialism into a Federalist Nation in the guise of Democracy.

“Make them an offer they can’t refuse!” (more…)

I have yet to see a show business person give the acceptance speech they should at the Oscars. Instead, some turn the moment into a narcissistic stunt of protest, global outrage or badge of honor for whatever social injustice they have chosen that year. Rarely do they get it right.

Peachiness is nothing new to Oscar; it has been going on as far back as when those in Tinseltown hid in a Red closet while whispering “Government borscht for all.” The only thing that’s changed is the lack of awareness the winners have to the people who pay for their product, the product being they and their films, and the level of daftness that some accepting the award go to in an effort to feel more powerful than the money and fame they already have. Speaking out can be a good thing, especially when the speakers motive is to lift the awareness of all. Yet in Hollywood, a self-important attitude is hard for most to drop, as is the party line.

Last year, Sean Penn, a man with numerous felony charges including charges of violence against woman, and one who panders to tyrants the world over, preached to Americans after his win of the horrible and hateful state of mind that has fallen upon those who do not see the world as he does. The people of California came to their decision on gay marriage freely by vote, twice. Nevertheless, to Sean Penn the will of the people is only ever served when it slants in his favor or gives way to a photo op of him in a New Orleans boat shotgun in hand. Even his recent Haiti trip ultimately became just a reason for him to have face time on Larry King while hitting “Wiffle Ball” questions out of the park in the hopes of improving his public image, which is limited.

More often winners become so emotional that they lose it on stage like a Springer Spaniel wetting the carpet of its Masters home. Then becoming unable to articulate an awareness needed to give an educated speech in regards to the character they portrayed and how that role may be transferred to a larger audience for greater exposure. The speech they should have given gets lost in the moment of the self. (more…)

I was a mere teenager in the fifties when it was broadcast widely that the Chinese “don’t really have the same love of life that we do.”

Apparently the Americans at Jonestown were part Chinese, eh?

Here is the Last Will and Testament of Jonestown: 

Dear Comrade Timofeyev, 

“The following is a letter of instructions regarding all of our assets that we want to leave to the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. 

Enclosed in this letter are letters which instruct the banks to send the cashiers checks to you. I am doing this on behalf of Peoples Temple because we, as communists, want our money to be of benefit for help to oppressed peoples all over the world, or in any way that your decision-making body sees fit. 

The letters included listed accounts with balances totaling in excess of $7.3 million to be transferred to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. 

Hmmm …. Communism. (more…)

Our President’s favorite movie is The Godfather.

“You disrespected me …” says Don Corleone to a favor-seeker.

That’s one of President Obama’s favorite phrases from Marlon Brando’s Godfather.

The, by now very boring, Judeo-Christian civilization has raised us to “disrespect” criminals, bullies who rule the world by force and force alone and cold-blooded killers such as the Islamic Jihad.

Somehow our President is willing to give a pass to Don Corleone because … well … “The Don” is performed by the same actor who portrayed John McCain’s favorite movie hero, Emiliano Zapata.

Marlon Brando. (more…)

Martin Luther King, Jr. was a clergyman, tireless activist, civil rights leader… mountain mover.  He even became the youngest-ever recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize (back when they gave Peace Prizes for real, hard-fought accomplishments).  And wherever he traveled he generated big crowds.  Nothing could compare to the crowd assembled at the National Mall in 1963 for the March on Washington.  King would deliver his famous speech and four words would ring in history forever:  ”I Have a Dream.”

My book Hollywood on the Potomac, chronicles many historic moments when Hollywood took a stand on the biggest political issues of the day — from World War 2 to Iraq, International Relief to Civil Rights.  In 1963, it was stars such as Marlon Brando, Paul Newman and Harry Belafonte at the Lincoln Memorial with Dr. King.

Actor Marlon Brando at the Civil Rights ‘March on Washington’ (to his right are playwright James Baldwin and actor Charlton Heston).  Brando also participated in the ‘freedom rides,’ protests that publicly tested segregation court decisions in the South.  After the death of Martin Luther King Jr., Brando scrapped his upcoming movie telling The Joey Bishop Show, ”I felt I’d better go find out… what it is to be black in this country; what this rage is all about.” (more…)

The star of Smokey and the Bandit was, of course, Burt Reynolds, a man of great passions, great flaws, and ultimately great loyalty to the people and place he came from. “I love the South,” he emphatically states to this very day. His is a career that — sometimes for worse but more often for better — stands as a testament to that simple heartfelt sentiment.

The man who would become one of the most popular movie stars of the last quarter century was born in 1936, the son of a small-town police chief in Florida. He grew up handsome and tough, randy and reckless — by fourteen, he had lost his virginity to a much older woman, and soon after knocked up the prom queen (his attempts to cajole her into marriage were rebuffed by the girl’s society-maven mother, who forced her daughter to abort the baby). Such antics were an early harbinger of both the charismatic charm and voracious, self-destructive appetites that would define (and sometimes decimate) his later career (a typical joke — Q: Why didn’t Burt Reynolds ever take Loni Anderson out to dinner? A: He made it a rule never to date married women.) (more…)

Editor’s Note: After the publication of this piece we made an internal discovery that this interview was not a one-on-one interview between our writer and Quentin Tarantino, and that some of the questions attributed to “Big Hollywood” were asked by other journalists in what was a roundtable interview.
 
Upon discovering this, we temporarily removed the piece from the site until all the facts were known and a proper correction could be added.

Quentin Tarantino exploded on the world film scene in 1992 with “Reservoir Dogs,” a brutally profane yet ingeniously plotted and often funny deconstruction of the heist-film genre. He took things to a whole other level in 1994 with “Pulp Fiction,” reviving the foundering careers of superstars John Travolta and Bruce Willis while launching the star careers of Samuel L. Jackson and Uma Thurman while winning a Best Screenplay Oscar himself. 

Yet in the 15 years since that classic, Tarantino hasn’t been able to score quite as big an impact. 1997’s “Jackie Brown” made just $39 million, while the two “Kill Bill” films scored $70 million each yet were considered hyper-violent trifles compared to what he was really capable of. And he really bottomed out with 2007’s “Death Proof,” which made up half of “Grindhouse,” a three-hour homage to the trashy drive-in films of America’s past. Its 21st-century audience didn’t get the joke and largely ignored it, earning just $27 million at the US box office.  (more…)

So many big name stars, singers and sports legends have visited Washington over the years, the city is often referred to as “Hollywood on the Potomac.”  So, that’s the title of my new book (available now at Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Borders) featuring over 200 photographs and stories that detail the fascination between Hollywood stars and Washington power-players — from Presidents Truman through Obama. 

Here’s an excerpt: (more…)