8/7/23
Newsletter #420
The Crack of Dawn
I wrote an essay about 25 years ago called The Lifespan of Creativity, a subject that has always fascinated me. This interest began in the 1960s when I was a kid. There was a slew of “one-hit wonders,” like The Boxtops with The Letter, or Steam with Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye, or Western Union by the Five Americans. My internal question was: how could these folks make such a good song, then never be able to follow it up?
Or why, for instance, a band like the Rolling Stones could put out one good song after another after another for 25 years, then one day they stopped being able to write good songs, and that was the end of that. Nor were they all that old when the end came, either. With all the love and respect that I have, the Rolling Stones last good album was Tattoo You in 1981, with the hit, Start Me Up. That was 45 years ago. Mick and Keith are now both 80. Both of these assholes haven’t had one good fucking idea since they were 35 years old? What happened? Did they somehow go brain dead in 1981?
First of all, should you ever have a single great idea, it’s a miracle and a blessing. Most of us humans will go through our entire lives without ever coming close to having a great idea. We probably won’t even ever know anybody who had a great idea.
But to have a great idea, then another, then another, is very rare.
Bringing the subject back to movies, where it ought to be, careers come and go without anyone noticing. Now, if you’re lucky, you get a YouTube video asking, “Whatever happened to Kathleen Turner?” Or Michelle Phillips, for instance, formerly the cutest girl in rock & roll in the late-’60s, but now dowdy and fat at 80. My Yiddishe grandma from Budapest looked 80 when she was 50.
As a director, or even more problematic, a writer-director, should you ever have a moment in the sun, it won’t last for more than a moment. Luckily for me, I still haven’t had my moment, so it’s possible that it could still be coming. Alas, I can state categorically that nobody hits it big after they’re 65 years old. Shit, nobody will even hire you in Hollywood when you’re 65. And why should they? At 65 it’s time to retire. Young folks are supposed to step in and replace you.
When I was born in 1958 there weren’t quite 3 billion people on the planet. Now there are over 8 billion people. It wasn’t until 1998 when I was 40 years old that the population had doubled to 6 billion. My feeling at the time was, “Shouldn’t we have two Alfred Hitchcocks and two Stanley Kubricks now? Why don’t we have any? We got rooked.”
Part of why I like and admire William Wyler so much was not just that he made good movies, but that he made good movies for 40 years, from 1929, with Hell’s Heroes (which I’ve mentioned before that I believe was the Best Picture of 1929, and strangely I’ve never found anyone who would argue this point), to 1968 with Funny Girl.
William Wyler’s really good buddy was Billy Wilder, and the two were mistaken for one another their entire lives in Hollywood. It probably didn’t help that both men were short Austrian Jews of the approximately the same age.
Billy Wilder also had a long career of about 40 years, which is really the longest career possible in Hollywood. Most careers in Hollywood don’t last ten years. But after ten years of struggle, by the late 1930s, Billy Wilder was one of the top screenwriters in Hollywood, with two big comedy hits in 1939, Midnight with Claudet Colbert and John Barrymore and Ninotchka with Greta Garbo (advertised as, “Garbo laughs,” meaning, finally). Wilder became a director as soon as he possibly could with one of the silliest movies ever, The Major and the Minor (1942), with Ginger Rogers and Ray Milland. Ginger Rogers, who never got the respect she deserved as an actress (though she did get an Oscar for the particularly serious film, Kitty Foyle (1940]), pretends to be a 12-year-old (she’s 31) to get a discount on a train ticket, then gets stuck having to stay that 12-year-old girl, ending up at an all-male military school, where Ray Milland is the Major, and every boy falls in love with her. It’s ridiculous, and entirely based on the title.
20 years later – in 1959-60 – those two guys, both with a ton of great movies behind them, were at the top of their games. Wyler made the Best Picture of 1959 with Ben Hur, and Wilder made the Best Picture of 1960 with The Apartment.
Maybe the only director with a prosperous 50-year career was Alfred Hitchcock. His first hit film was The Lodger in 1926, and his last his last hit film was Frenzy in 1972. Hitchcock did make one more film after Frenzy, The Family Plot (1976), which rightly took a shit at the box office. I was attending the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor when that film was released. I skipped class and went and saw it the day it opened. When it ended my initial thought was, “You should have stopped at Frenzy.”
Aye, ‘tis a gray rainy day.
But another day, nevertheless.
We made it.
Family Plot is a disaster, with a really awful tone -- it's not serious and it's not funny. But it does have one terrific, Hitchcock scene: when Barbara Harris is being abducted in the garage, kicks over a can of paint, and it runs under the garage door and past the feet of the folks looking for her.
I vividly remember being absolutely dumbfounded when I saw Family Plot. Which raised the same question for me as well....how does creativity work? For lack of a better feeling it was almost like a betrayal after seeing his last film. Not all films will be great for sure but holy cow it was down right painful to watch.