DVD Review | The Deer Hunter (1978)

Deer Diary

by Thomas Delapa


After only two movies, more than a few pronounced him a directorial genius. Two years later, he underwent one of the fastest fade-outs in Hollywood history.

Following 1978’s Oscar-winning The Deer Hunter, Michael Cimino was considered a sure shot to join the growing superstar ranks of Scorsese, Altman and Spielberg—led by top-dog Francis Ford Coppola. But not only did Cimino’s colossal follow-up, Heaven’s Gate, flop, his career quickly went to hell in a bamboo hand basket.

Nominated for nine Oscars and a winner of five, including Best Picture and Best Director, The Deer Hunter was one of those incendiary epics that divided audiences along political battle lines in the post-sixties hangover, a.k.a. the 1970s. Though the movie was victorious over Coming Home—and star/activist Jane Fonda—it didn’t win the hearts and minds of left-leaning audiences; while both dramas dealt with the Vietnam War, Cimino’s epic was, in Fonda’s acerbic, pre-aerobic words, “a racist, Pentagon version of the war.”

While many critics fulsomely declared Deer Hunter to be a masterpiece (“Surely one of the most powerful films of the seventies,” trumpeted Stephen Schiff in the Boston Phoenix), others were more circumspect, even derisive. Nearly 35 years later, contemporary audiences may draw a blank, given that it’s aged only somewhat better than leisure suits and disco. If The Godfather, Jaws, Chinatown and Star Wars are still bright in our memories, The Deer Hunter crouches languidly on the endangered classics list.

With only one directorial effort to his credit (the underrated buddy drama Thunderbolt and Lightfoot), the Yale-educated Cimino set his sights on the definitive story of America’s lost, pre-Vietnam War innocence—not so unlike George Lucas’s nostalgic American Graffiti five years previous. But whereas Lucas’ bittersweet comedy was fresh and unpretentious, screenwriter Deric Washburn seemed to cut and paste from The Godfather, Deliverance, and Scorsese’s Mean Streets—along with a few dusty plucks from The Four Feathers—for his meditation on male camaraderie and bravado in wartime.

Cimino took a bead on a band of blue-collar buddies in a flinty, Russian-American Pennsylvania steel town. Enlisting right after his searing success in Taxi Driver, Robert De Niro is Michael, the group’s stoic alpha male, with John Savage, John Cazale and newcomer Christopher Walken sturdily bringing up the rear. (Terminally ill with cancer during the shoot, Cazale died months after its completion.) In only her second movie role, Meryl Streep spryly plays Walken’s betrothed, one of the women left waiting on the home front.

In the 2005 Universal DVD release, the gifted Hungarian/American cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond talks about his part in creating Cimino’s striking widescreen visuals, from the fiery blast furnaces to the golden interiors of the Russian Orthodox church, where the signature wedding scene takes place. A la The Godfather’s ritualistic bookends, Cimino frames his three-hour saga with the ironic pairing of one wedding and a funeral.

Sandwiched between the over-praised naturalism (several of the scenes were improvised by the cast), Washburn and Cimino shoot for the heights, yet their aim is scattershot. The overarching metaphor is Michael’s cryptic Spartan philosophy to bag a deer with “one shot,” and one shot only. As embodied in De Niro’s stolid, goateed machismo, Michael stands head and shoulders above his less-than-steely friends, a heroic coupling of James Fenimore Cooper and Ayn Rand.

In one of cinema’s most shocking jump cuts, we’re lifted from the airy Pennsylvania (actually Washington) mountains instantly into the sweltering jungles of Vietnam. In the first of a load of dubious coincidences, De Niro, Walken and Savage meet up as soldiers in the middle of a battle, and just as quickly find themselves in riverfront tiger cages, imprisoned by the Viet Cong. There, in the film’s most controversial sequence, the trio is forced to take part in their captors’ depraved game of Russian roulette.

Embedded within Cimino and Zsigmond’s vivid realism, this harrowing, wholly fabricated sequence can be viewed, at best, as symbolic of America’s self-destructive death march in Vietnam. At worst, it’s pernicious, booby-trapped propaganda that points the blame for the American tragedy in Vietnam squarely at sadistic, jabbering (“Mao! Mao!”) monsters who have nothing better to do than torture and kill defenseless G.I.s.

After a cathartic, shoot-’em-up escape that would make Dirty Harry’s day, the trio parts ways, their roads home emblematic of the wildly different fates of returning veterans (and intriguingly resonant of the dilemmas of the three soldiers in William Wyler’s far less bombastic The Best Years of Our Lives three decades earlier). While Michael returns die-hardened, if tempered, his brothers-in-arms face grimmer prospects. In perhaps the movie’s most poignant and authentic section, De Niro tracks down Savage to a V.A. hospital, where their friendship is re-forged in the face of crippling tragedy.

But Cimino isn’t satisfied with subtlety or even naturalism. He’s after bigger game. Back in Saigon during its chaotic 1975 fall to the North Vietnamese, Walken’s Nick has gone bananas, plunging into his own heart of darkness. Lured by a decadent Frenchman, the traumatized Nick is now the chief combatant in high-stakes backroom games of Russian roulette.

Whatever the nationality, Cimino gambles on lurid sensationalism, and it doesn’t pay off—now or then. In place of a sharp focus on the war and its victims, he aims for xenophobic myth; in place of cathartic realism, he shoots for muddled pulp. In the ambiguous—or laughable—last scene, Cimino waves the flag to the tune of “God Bless America,” betting that Academy Award voters would stand up and salute. They did.

Armed with his Oscar trophy and a bloated $40 million budget, Cimino nearly broke the bank (and United Artists) in his elephantine western Heaven’s Gate, one of the biggest disasters in movie history, which was instrumental in killing off the “New Hollywood” halcyon days of experiment and artistic risk. Cimino’s career has never recovered, in hindsight perhaps another indirect casualty of the hellish Vietnam War.

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3/11/12

Book Review | Mr. & Mrs. Hollywood: Edie and Lew Wasserman and Their Entertainment Empire (2003)

The Empire Strikes Back

by Thomas Delapa


When Hollywood histories are usually written, surprisingly few shine any light at all on the late Lew Wasserman. Even in Ephraim Katz’s essential Film Encyclopedia, Wasserman doesn’t merit his own entry, whereas Lassie and Rin Tin Tin fetch several paragraphs each.

Yet modern Hollywood as we know it wouldn’t exist without Louis “Lew” R. Wasserman, the secretive super-agent-turned-mogul who transformed Universal from a broke, low-budget studio into a worldwide multimedia colossus.

From the 1940s to well into the 1990s, Wasserman and his wife Edie were one of the U.S. entertainment industry’s high-voltage power couples, consorts and counsels to everyone from stars to presidents. A king and queen among Los Angeles royalty, this matched pair finally got their close-up—warts and all—in Mr. & Mrs. Hollywood: Edie and Lew Wasserman and Their Entertainment Empire (2003), by Kathleen Sharp.

Not that Wasserman (1913-2002) would have wanted the scrutiny, even after death. A famously behind-the-scenes puppet master, he shunned the spotlight, preferring to pull strings from the wings. Few know that it was Wasserman who, as James Stewart’s agent in 1950, negotiated a momentous deal with Universal that gave the star a big chunk of the profits on his film Winchester ‘73. A model for “above the line” talent contracts to this day, it was a shot heard ‘round Hollywood, and one that would be another nail in the coffin of the old studio system.

Sharp traces Wasserman’s personal and professional trajectories from his childhood in Cleveland and marriage to the zesty Edith Brickerman, and on to his near-lifelong association with the formidable—and feared—Chicago-born talent agency MCA (Music Corporation of America) founded by Jules Stein. For every Wasserman success and triumph along the way, Sharp uncovers shadowy counterpoints, from antitrust investigations to mob connections and underhanded labor tactics, once in concert with a minor 1950s actor named Ronald Reagan.

At MCA, Wasserman was Stein’s indispensable right-hand man as it grew into Hollywood’s most powerful and aggressive talent agency after World War II, signing a galaxy of such A-list clients as Stewart, Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, Dean Martin, Judy Garland and Charlton Heston, as well as directors Alfred Hitchcock (a close Wasserman friend) and Billy Wilder. But as the old Hollywood studios began to eclipse in the late 1940s, buffeted by the TV revolution and antitrust busting, Wasserman and MCA saw the future before anyone else. In 1950, he engineered a deal to create Revue Productions to make TV shows, renting space at Universal’s massive, 367-acre lot in the San Fernando Valley. By 1958, MCA/Revue was so successful it bought outright the cash-poor Universal City lot for virtually a song. Wasserman’s prescient Midas touch would also include the purchase of undervalued studio film libraries (like Paramount’s), which would turn into a gold mine owing to TV showings and eventual re-releases through the post-1970s home-video bonanza.

While Sharp’s highly readable history glitters with accounts on Hollywood’s critical transition years, the book is a bit tarnished by the author’s resistance to chronological rigor. Rather than starting at the beginning of Wasserman’s life, she drops in jigsaw flashbacks to the 1930s and 1940s. Though strict biographical timelines might seem as prosaic as an old Andy Hardy picture, they’re also usually more complete. (Dennis McDougal’s 1998 The Last Mogul: Lew Wasserman, MCA and the Hidden History of Hollywood has a tighter focus.)

Most of Mr. & Mrs. Hollywood spans from the late 1950s to Wasserman’s death in 2002. (Edie died just this past year.) During that time, he reinvented himself at least once, dissolving from talent agent into studio mogul. When MCA tried to purchase the Universal studio in 1962, the government stepped in, charging that the deal violated antitrust laws; Wasserman would have to either get out of talent business or nix the deal. He and Stein chose Universal.

In the decades that followed, Wasserman and his executives—like production head Ned Tanen—transformed the former studio best known for monster movies and Deanna Durbin musicals into a conglomerate monolith. Not only did Universal become a major player on TV (with hits from Leave it To Beaver to The Rockford Files), and in the recording industry (Decca), it also morphed into a big-time movie studio, boosted into the stratosphere by such 1970s New Hollywood cash-cows as Steven Spielberg. Tearing a page from Walt Disney, Wasserman's multi-platform business genius also extended to his decision to start a small public tour of the Universal lot in 1964 (see Lana Turner’s dressing room!), which has since grown into one of Southern California's biggest tourist attractions.

As one of New Hollywood’s studio godfathers, Wasserman made his share of enemies, usually because of the lowball offers his many minions couldn’t afford to refuse. With a deadeye on profits, he has been cited as one of the originators of the notorious “Hollywood accounting” system, in which seeming financial winners are dubiously written off as money losers. James Garner, star of the lucrative, long-running Rockford Files, was rebuffed for years by Universal lawyers in his efforts to gain his rightful compensation.

Sharp plays a doggedly good flatfoot in this detailed investigation, finding her man (and woman). In The Last Tycoon, F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote that “not a half-dozen men have been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads.” Add up all the facts in this book, and it’s easy to figure that Lew Wasserman was one of them.

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DVD Review | THX 1138 (1971)

Where Were You in ‘71 and ‘72?

by Thomas Delapa


Forty years ago in a movie galaxy far, far away, George Lucas was just a bearded, bespectacled young filmmaker struggling to make it in Planet Hollywood. While today’s audiences may know that American Graffiti was Lucas’ mega-breakthrough on his road to mogul-dom, far fewer recognize that his debut feature was 1971’s THX 1138, a bleakly futuristic sci-fi fantasy that’s as distant from Star Wars as Alien is from E.T.

Lovingly restored by Lucasfilm and Warner Home Video in a two-disc DVD set first released in 2004 (and now out on Blu-ray), THX 1138 Director’s Cut Special Edition comes uploaded with stellar extras, including the director’s original student short that provided the seeds for the feature. For sci-fi fans, the film should be a revelation, not simply for a peek at Lucas’ early creative sensibilities but also for the pivotal part it played in the rise of a brave New Hollywood that would transform—and jumpstart—a stalled American movie industry.

If the meteoric path of Lucas’ career has by now entered into popular myth befitting Joseph Campbell, a review is worthwhile, if only because the Modesto, Calif.-born multi-media tycoon amazingly intended to shoot for a career as an avant-garde filmmaker. After a bumpy 1950s youth racing cars part-time, Lucas shifted gears to attend the burgeoning University of Southern California film school, where he sped into a prodigy during the premiere decade of the so-called “film brat” generation—movie-mad young turks like Steve Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, Brian De Palma, et al. Meanwhile, crosscutting to a parallel universe known as Hollywood, legacy studios like MGM and Warner Bros. were running on fumes in the 1960s, betting on elephantine old-school boondoggles like Dr. Doolittle and Cleopatra while largely dismissing the hip, youthful audiences that had hitched up to such anti-Establishment hits as Easy Rider and The Graduate.

At USC in 1968, Lucas made Electronic Labyrinth THX-1138 4EB, an award-winning experimental short about one man’s desperate escape from a sterile, automated Orwellian underworld. While obviously a cinematic whiz kid, the shy, slight Lucas lacked at least two parts necessary to mesh in Hollywood: fearless brio and bluster. Francis Ford Coppola, a heralded young Italian-American filmmaker at rival UCLA was hard-wired with both.

After an apprenticeship with producer/director Roger Corman at the low-budget American International Pictures (famed training ground for a long list of future luminaries including Scorsese, Bogdanovich, Jack Nicholson, Jonathan Demme and John Sayles) and one audacious self-financed film (1967’s You’re a Big Boy Now), Coppola vaulted the studio moat, landing as a writer/director at Warner Bros. In one of the golden meet-and-greets in movie lore, Lucas wandered onto the set of the musty musical Finian’s Rainbow, where he so forcefully impressed Coppola that the brash young cineaste made Lucas his assistant.

Some of these bright flashbacks can be gleaned from A Legacy of Filmmakers: The Early Years of American Zoetrope, a 60-minute documentary included in the DVD set (along with Lucas’ THX student film and a smarmy “making of” studio featurette from 1971). As ringleader in a band of rebels battling a fading movie empire, Coppola enlisted Lucas in his grandiose plan to create his own independent studio, splicing together a classic studio model with an “auteur”-centered élan inspired by the great 1960s European directors like Godard, Fellini and Bergman. Coppola dubbed his studio American Zoetrope (after a 19th-century pre-cinematic toy), based it in counterculture capital San Francisco, and managed to attract such raw USC talents as screenwriter John Milius and the gifted sound designer Walter Murch. Zoetrope’s debut, backed by a semi-bamboozled Warner Bros., would be a feature remake of THX.

Forty years later, the digitally upgraded THX 1138.2 is a widescreen eye-opener, especially enhanced by the spirited tag-team commentary of Lucas and Murch. Then-unknown Robert Duvall (one year before Coppola’s The Godfather) stars as the titular THX, just a cog in a stark-white, high-tech totalitarian society where sex is verboten and citizens are controlled by drugs and Big Brother-ish video surveillance. Using such futuristic locations as the nearby Lawrence Livermore lab and the under-construction BART subway tunnels, the 25-year-old Lucas and his guerrilla crew fabricated a striking alternate reality on a shoestring budget, with eclectic bits and pieces cobbled from 2001: A Space Odyssey, Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus, and Godard’s Alphaville. Looking ahead, Lucas’ far-out vision appears to anticipate such dystopian milestones as Blade Runner, Brazil and The Matrix. (As in his digital tune-up of Star Wars, Lucas has slipped in stealth footage in spots, which may strike purists as a walk on the disingenuous dark side.)

Both Lucas and Murch say that the film was meant as a cautionary quasi-documentary “from the future,” which helps explain its deliberate foreignness as well as its chilly, off-putting absence of conventional plotting and character. Light years away from the warm-and-funny androids in Star Wars, THX’s black, baton-wielding robocops call up allusions to 1960s campus riots—as well as eerie flash-forwards to the incendiary 1991 Rodney King beating.

Betting on another revved-up Easy Rider, Bonnie and Clyde or maybe even 2001, the Warners studio suits reeled at their first look at the finished film. Far from the ultimate trip, they thought it was the ultimate bummer, demanding cuts and re-edits. Despite good critical reviews during a heady year that included such cutting-edge hits as The Last Picture Show and The French Connection, THX self-destructed in theaters, partially sabotaged by Warners’ lackluster marketing campaign.

Zoetrope’s misfire was not only a personal and professional blow to Lucas, but, worse, it caused Warner Bros. to pull the plug on Coppola’s dream studio (including a project written by Milius tentatively entitled Apocalypse Now). Yet like Star Wars’ rebel alliance, the Zoetropers would regroup to strike back against Hollywood, in both individual and collective sequels. Back at the front after a 1971 Oscar for co-writing Patton, Coppola reluctantly gave in to Paramount producer Robert Evans, who made him an offer he couldn’t easily refuse to direct a controversial novel about the American Mafia—a project that a dozen-odd elite directors had rejected. Much more the money-minded businessman than his mentor, it was Lucas who helped convince Coppola to take the job.

Over the decades in the duo’s leapfrogging rise to the top of a reborn Hollywood, Coppola has repaid his friend the favor several times over, most critically in his fronting of American Graffiti, made possible only because of Coppola’s clout after The Godfather became the biggest, baddest New Hollywood blockbuster until Jaws hit the beach in 1975. A jaunty semi- autobiographical comedy about hot-rodding teens in Northern California one night in 1962, American Graffiti was cool, fast and commercial, whereas THX was cold, grim and a black hole of humor. Riding the first crest of a 1970s nostalgia wave after a decade of tumult, the film would pass up Easy Rider on the list of the most profitable low-budget productions in history. Ever the anti-Hollywood outsider (even today), by 1974 Lucas had zoomed into the fast lane, ready to shoot for the moon—and far beyond—with cast and crew in a souped-up Millennium Falcon.

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1/23/12