6/18/23
Newsletter #371
The Crack of Dawn
As I mentioned, I joined the Detroit Film Theater when I was 14. The DFT is located in the backend of the Detroit Institute of the Arts. This is where I saw all those old Kurosawa movies, as well as many other classics, and this was where they would show new foreign films. At that point I didn’t care what it was, I just saw it.
I was an avid reader of the movie reviews in The New Yorker magazine, where half the year went to my favorite film critic, Pauline Kael; the other half went to my far-less-than-favorite, Penelope Gilliatt. Whereas Pauline Kael only wrote movie reviews; Penelope Gilliatt had other literary aspirations beyond just writing movie reviews. She had written some books, and wrote a screenplay called Sunday Bloody Sunday that in 1971 had miraculously been made as an A-British picture with Peter Finch, the astounding, new young actress, Glenda Jackson (who just died), and was directed by the brilliant, John Schlesinger (who had just won a well-deserved Oscar for Midnight Cowboy [1969]).
Also, and this makes it slightly historically important, it was a frank, honest depiction of a menage-a-trois, in which two men are in love with the same woman but are sexually involved with one another. The other man was played by the young, handsome Murray Head, who would score a hit song years later with One Night in Bangkok. But the frank depiction of two men being homosexually involved in an A-movie was unheard of. In 1971, showing Peter Finch – who was a well-known, highly respected actor, who had co-starred in the great movie, The Nun’s Story (1959) with Audrey Hepburn – and Murray Head open mouth kissing was bold, scandalously shocking, and unheard of. Not a sex scene, mind you; a kiss.
Anyway, getting back to me, because I’m the real subject – forget Glenda Jackson and Peter Finch – I was 14 years old and I didn’t have a driver’s license, so I needed to hornswoggle one of my friends, all of whom were older than me, and none of whom gave a shit about foreign films, to drive me down to the Detroit Institute of the Arts. So, I said to my pal, Ivan Raimi, who was 16 and had a car (an old Buick called the Green Ghost), and my other buddy, Stanley Schwartz, “Hey, how would you guys like to see a movie Friday night called Sunday Bloody Sunday?” They both said, “Whoa, Sunday Bloody Sunday? Sounds cool. Sure,”
Cut to us at the theater watching Peter Finch and Murray Head snogging (as the Brits say), meaning really kissing, and I looked over at my friends who were both wide-eyed and slack jawed. Of course, they thought they were going to see something like Charles Bronson in Death Wish III. But hey, I needed a ride.
Another time at the Detroit Film Theater they showed the Detroit premiere of Akira Kurosawa’s late, late film, Ran (1985), and the theater was sold-out. Kurosawa had finally come into his own with the American public at the age of 80. Well, by 1985 I’d seen every Kurosawa film, which was no mean feat because the guy made about 25 movies, and I was a snob. “Oh,” I thought, “now you finally catch on that Kurosawa is a big deal, when he’s 80?” Anyway, Ran is the photographically gorgeous, incredibly overlong (2 hours and 48 minutes), adaptation of King Lear that is by far Kurosawa’s dullest movie. The entire movie I kept thinking, “One, two, three, cut. No cut. Really, Akira, cut. Seriously, dude, cut. Will you get the fuck out of this shot and just cut.” Ran is absolutely the movie of an 80-year-old.
The theater was so jammed that I could only get a seat way up on the balcony. I’ll be kind to the Great Master (his nickname), Akira Kurosawa, and say 90 minutes in, but it was probably more like 75 minutes in, when the head of the person directly in front of me, who was at my knee level on the steeply tiered balcony, suddenly dropped backward against my knees and they were dead asleep — against my knees. A moment later the head of the girl to my left, who I had never met, fell over onto my shoulder and she was dead-out asleep, and clearly didn’t care whose shoulder it was. Now I couldn’t move my knees or my left shoulder. Then the regular old kind of butch young man to my right passed out and fell against my right shoulder – only he went into homosexual panic, saying, “Hey, man, I didn’t mean anything.” I assured him that it was perfectly OK. A few minutes later he fell back against my right shoulder and went comfortably to sleep. I now had three people sleeping against me.
OK, I love Kurosawa, but that was my unique experience with Ran. About two years later in Hollywood, when my former partner Scott was acting like a dick and began writing The Rookie with Boaz Yakin, Boaz saw Ran and came into our little bungalow utterly effusive about how Kurosawa’s new film [it was his newest, but it wasn’t new], which was, “Kurosawa’s greatest movie.” I was speechless; agog; aghast. “You think Ran is Kurosawa’s greatest movie?” I asked. Boaz stated, “Absolutely.” I said, “Compared to the rest of Kurosawa’s movies, Ran is a piece of shit. With pretty photography.” Boaz was horrified – completely, utterly mortified – and stated, “You can’t say that. You can’t say Ran was a piece of shit.” I said, “It’s a piece of shit, it’s a piece of shit, it’s a piece of shit. And only an asshole who hasn’t seen any of his other great movies could say something as stupid as Ran is Kurosawa’s greatest movie.”
If I’m not mistaken, Boaz just walked out. Anyway, he and I never hit off anyway.
It’s 4:00 AM here in San Rafael, but it’s dawn in Detroit.