Not About Anything

I have this idea of writers in the first half of the 20th century: completing their art, packaging a copy carefully, sending it off through the mail to a publishing house (or two or ten), and waiting to be discovered by an editor (or their assistant). By the 1960s, however, publishing had become an industry (small presses aside), where literary agents became the buffer between artists and the increasingly profit-searching publishing companies who drew a stern line between "publishable" and "marketable". How many amazing pieces of literature have been lost because they weren't deemed marketable? About as many pieces of trash published yearly because they will make money.

By 1964, the tide had definitely started taking that sharp turn from creative to commercial. One young writer had spent the previous year on a U.S. military base in Puerto Rico with a lot of time on his hands and a new typewriter. He believed in his novel so much, he only sent it to one publisher. An editor at that publishing house was impressed, amazed and very encouraging…at first. But under closer examination, he believed the novel had problems. It was a treasure of rich characters, but the plot was loose, as meandering as the Mississippi River as it flows past the French Quarter. The editor wanted to know the point of the novel, but the author conceded with no reservations: it wasn't about anything. Just life, just people, just a sense of place and time.

Ultimately, that wasn't enough for the editor; the novel was not published; and five years later, the author was found dead on the Gulf Coast, a hose tied from the tailpipe leading back into the car.

The fact that this eventually had a happy ending could never erase the tragedy of any artist whose work is rejected and they feel it is a personal sign from the gods. It's a modern-day miracle the author's mother found the manuscript ten years later and relentlessly bothered anyone and everyone who could recognize her son's talent. That she got the attention of an established Southern author was borne of luck and determination along the journey to the book's publication and subsequent awarding of the Pulitzer Prize for Literature.

As much as the world now celebrates A Confederacy of Dunces and its author, John Kennedy Toole, underneath remains a dark, cautionary tale about not only the harsh realities of making the transition from art to product, but also the sometimes (often) fragile states of the artists drowning in its wake. Artists are not only now required to be brilliant and talented, but they must also have amazing traits in self-marketing and business acumen, always be agreeble to alter their work to "appeal" to a wider audience. I suspect there are many brilliant novels sitting in drawers and boxes the world over, created by artists too sensitive, too hapless, not savvy enough to navigate the rivers of commercial art.

Or perhaps they don't want to. Perhaps the drive to create, as ceaseless as it can be, is strong enough that no one ever has to see the result. Some say writing is the purging of demons; once they have been purged, nothing more need be done with the project. If other people enjoy it - fine. If it can make money - all the better.

1964 drew a curtain on what was then known as the "literary establishment", probably the last era where the "writing life" was considered an admirable profession not only supported by a glamorous social network but also attached with some type of superior cachet. By the 1980s, hip lit was often nothing more than brief, staccato observation and blunt prose - worlds away from Toole's filigree of personality and description. It's tempting to believe had Toole lived today, he would have simply self-published on Amazon.com. The world seems to have curiously reversed itself, where anyone can first publish, but they immediately still have to have gifts of promotion, networking and relentless self-esteem to get an audience. Ironically, Toole was just the sort of person who would have liked nothing better than to spend his nights creating and his days marketing - he would have been a 21st century literary superstar.

No One Behind the Wheel

On the road downward, an artist would be smart to pick up younger friends along the way…not necessarily the free spirits hitchhiking, but the ones who spend their weekends in car lots, inspecting the shiny new convertibles, knowing how good they'll look compared to the guy in his beat 50's wreck with all that mileage and all that baggage.

By 1964, Allen Ginsberg, recently lifechanged while padding around India, easily made friends with the hippies and the'd hold him high on their shoulders as they marched throughout the decade; William Burroughs, in another ten years, would make acolytes of the punks and they'd sit at his feet. Jack Kerouac did none of this. In 1964, booze-n-weed Jack despised the young acid tripping generation - the ones who'd hang an American flag on the wall as art, or worse - as a sofa cover. Jack would be damned sure to fold that American flag neatly and reverently. His former travel buddy, Neal Cassady, touched base one last time, driving the bus that helped usher in the 1960's (this is not metaphor; Neal was the one driving Ken Kesey's dayglo road trip bus, Further, as it made its way cross country on-the-road style.)

Kesey to Kerouac: your place in history is assured.
Kerouac: i know.

According to his letters, Kerouac wouldn't be a film with former friends Ginsberg and Gregory Corso because they were now "political fanatics". Jack wanted his writing to bring him back to a time and place where more conservative morals were respected. His former colleagues and their writing were a "betrayal of any truly 'beat' credo." and at their age, Jack saw them all as "frustrated hysterical provocateurs". Kerouac's back-to-basics autobiographical work did indeed go back to his childhood (Visions of Gerard - Gerard being his dead brother), and the critics were not kind to this elegy. Desolation Angels, although pieced together some years before, was still in the process of being "discovered" and would be released the following year.

During the summer of 1964, Jack went to live with his mother in once quiet St. Petersburg, FL. (Kerouac biographer Dennis McNally perpetuates the myth that the city was the "world's largest open-air mausoleum") Jack worried about his new address becoming public ("a 70-year old mother's house is not a PAD for krissakes!"), but still wrote that 1964 St. Petersburg life was all "baseball games, bars, pool games, beach parties…wild dances…" By Thanksgiving, he'd also be visiting St. Petersburg jail after urinating in the street.

Jack and his mother spent the days excelling at being functioning alcoholics, their states of mind further tested when Jack's sister died suddenly, giving Jack even more to ruminate about days rushing by, writing John Clellon Holmes about the "red-neoned funeral parlor" at the end of everyone's road. Photos of Jack from 1964 show the 42 year old looking some 15 years older. Kerouac couldn't last much longer like this - and he didn't - becoming yet another artist who drank themselves into an early grave. (His former muse, Neal Cassady, had already been a victim of the times a year and a half before Jack's final whiskey.) Was he a man out of time, unable to come to grips with a new generation who still carried dog-eared paperbacks of On the Road in their back pockets? Or had he run out of different versions of his life story in order to feel more relevant in a year of blunt hyperreal fiction like Hubert Selby Jr's Last Exit to Brooklyn?

His last years were spent with young hangers-on bilking him out of drink money and cheating at poolgames behind his back. Any one of these younger generation could have been the spark to bring him out of his post-hasbeen funk and into a newer understanding in a decade where the world was going wild. Instead, he bailed out without appointing a designated driver.

Flying by umbrella is not a drug metaphor

She slid up the banister yet no one connected her with the experiments Harvard man Timothy Leary was doing with LSD. Cold war enthusiasts will be sad to know that 1964's most ironic and iconic image doesn't belong to Dr. Strangelove, but to an unauthorized home practitioner who was known to dose children on sugar in order to get them to take their meds.

When I think of children's books made into film - up until the '60s, I assume there wasn't a whole lot of conflict, that filmmakers needn't have worried if the sweet verses of Lewis Carroll or A.A. Milne would hold their audiences in as much thrall as their literary origins. Walt Disney Co. had appropriated but not fully controlled the future merchandising for neither Peter Pan nor Alice; Pooh Bear continues to be a legal battle worth exploring in another blog; but Pamela Travers takes the cake when it comes to control freak and all-around ungrateful author.

JK Rowling can probably attest to the firm hand wielded while films were being created out of her property. Roald Dahl's estate has made no secret of disappointments following the first big screen presence of Willie Wonka. Travers, on the other hand, went head-to-head with the force of nature that was Walt Disney when he set his sights on her creation, Mary Poppins.

Walt's daughters had enjoyed Travers' stories back in WWII and a deal was almost struck at the time, except Travers wanted script approval and Walt refused, wanting to distill a film from only the best scenes in the series. (Interestingly parallel to today, in the books, not only is Mary P a purveyor of magic, so are members of her family.) Almost 15 years passed and Travers was savvy enough to hike her financial demands considerably, remaining difficult to work with, no matter how much Walt tried to appease her, and she literally scowled all the way to the bank. The road from book to film replaced the lead character's saltiness with sweetness, her coldness with warmth. Travers fumed right up to the film premier, where she reportedly took Walt aside to bitch about the innovative animation sequences. All Walt could do was remind her what was done was done.

It's pretty to believe Travers wrote only for the children and was hellbent on protecting her characters or that even Uncle Walt was more concerned about making movies for a family audience, but the truth is surely more than money or literary merit. Travers distanced herself from the claim to wealth and legacy, cited Beatrix Potter as the inspiration of writing "to please myself. Was Pooh really written for Christopher Robin," she asked in the Saturday Eve Post, "or Wonderland for Alice Liddell?"

Although the reviews were ecstatic, the idea of a modern film portraying a lack of adult concerns created many ruffled critics who saw this throwback to a less sophisticated cultural time out of step with what audiences wanted in 1964 (wait till they got a load of The Sound of Music, Nazis notwithstanding). Attesting to the millions of fans of the movie worldwide, even those who have seen the nanny airborne over the Broadway stage (similarly wired Mary Martin of Peter Pan fame was one of Travers' first choices for Mary P), the musical is forgiven for whatever inconsistencies it has from the line of books, which Travers went on churning out until the 1980s.

The rise and rise of Mary P's portrayer, Julie Andrews, is also a favorite film story from 1964. In one of those amazing tales of the underdog turning the tables, Julie was unceremoniously dumped by the film industry after bringing the role of Eliza Doolittle to life in My Fair Lady. Her acting and singing abilities had made her a theatre star, but Hollywood didn't want an unknown - they had rather bring in Audrey Hepburn and let someone else sing for her. Julie was back onstage wowing audiences in Camelot when Disney spotted her. On Oscar night, it wasn't even a matter of Andrews and Hepburn competing - Hepburn wasn't even nominated. Julie won best actress while My Fair Lady won best picture. For another outstanding Andrews performance in 1964, check out The Americanization of Emily, a comedy she starred opposite James Garner. By the next year, Andrews would be in charge of even more children in The Sound of Music, a film she got because Hollywood didn't think the woman who created the role onstage, Mary Martin, had any box office draw.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Read More

Flanagan, Caitlin. "Becoming Mary Poppins: P. L. Travers, Walt Disney, and the making of a myth." New Yorker, 19 Dec. 2005. Web.

Gabler, Neal. Walt Disney- the Triumph of the American Imagination. Vintage Books, 2006.

Perry, Danny. Alternate Oscars. Dell Publishing. 1993.

Travers, P. L. "WHERE DID SHE COME FROM? WHY DID SHE GO?." Saturday Evening Post 237.39 (1964): 76-78. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 12 Nov. 2010.

Watts, Steven. The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life. Houghton-Mifflin, 1997.

Disaster and blackout - the long farewell of the playwright

It reads like a synopsis from a Tennessee Williams melodrama: amid the palms of the swarthy Florida Keys, a famous artist past the prime of his powers lives with a much younger companion while his former partner lives upstairs, dying of inoperable lung cancer.

For most of 1964, Tennessee Williams was a recluse. His partner since 1948, Frank Merlo, had died in a New York City hospital the previous September. After Merlo died there were no more Tony Awards, no more Pulitzers, no more NY Drama Critics' Circle Awards. Williams and Frank had been together for 15 years, shepherding 8 plays and countless films while creating a pseudo-domestic, settled homelife between Key West, New York, New Orleans and Rome. By 1964, the milk train didn't stop there anymore.

Occurring at the same time as his personal tragedy, there was another memorial service to attend: the end of Williams as master playwright and American theatre superstar. 1961's The Night of the Iguana squeaks by in anthologies as his last masterwork, according to critics of the day. By 1964, a rewritten version of his next play, The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, with Tallulah Bankhead, bombed, closing after 4 performances. (TW's next venture - 2 shorter plays under the title Slapstick Tragedy - would also close after 4 performances in 1966.) When Milk Train was rewritten, it became a more naked treatise about death and life's ultimate futility. The main character rails: "What the hell are we doing? Just going from one goddamn frantic distraction to another, till finally one too many goddamn distractions lead to disaster and blackout?"

Milk Train covers a lot of same ground sowed a few years earlier with Sweet Bird of Youth: an aging, rich woman lamenting her loss of youth, a younger man who is both artist and paid sexual companion. He actually may be the angel of death, so the subtle metaphors are becoming less subtle...but, he's also referred to as a beatnik, so at least the play's trendy. Flora Goforth, however, is much more crude and grotesque than TW's previous heroines, and the conversation, set on a terrace on the Italian coast, ambles around a missing "sense of reality" as well as Flora's always imminent death. It is well known that after writing a play, Williams was convinced it would be his last and he was not to survive long enough to write another. Eventually, he would be correct, but not in 1964. Was Milk Train derailed by too much talk of death? (The San Francisco production had actual plaster skeletons scattered throughout the audience) Can't be - much of modern American theatre has focused on death, from 'Night Mother to Angels in America.

It was more than just the nagging spectre of being washed up that many successful artists experience. Those artists who dare to deviate from the hitmaking machine they have invented are condemned to the inevitable vegetable medley audiences and critics like to throw. TW had been writing about washed up characters from the get go. Blanche Dubois in 1947's A Streetcar Named Desire refers to herself as "played out"; Rev. Shannon in Night of the Iguana is defrocked and disassembled. Actresses Karen Stone and Alexandra del Lago are at the end of their careers as women of a certain age denied the roles of younger actresses and they acted out accordingly (although Alexandria, like TW himself, with a whole lot more pills and liquor). By 1964 Williams was beyond complaining about age, vitality and being relevant.

The state of theatre in the early 1960s showed experimentation becoming mainstream. Except when Williams attempted it. TW was a fan of Beckett's minimalism, Albee's rapid-fire dialogue (Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf) and Orton's sex farce (Entertaining Mr. Sloane). TW enjoyed employing more humor in his plays, although the humor was far more grotesque than the sophisticated breezes of Neil Simon's 1963 night on Broadway, Barefoot in the Park.

In addition, unknown to most people was Williams' discovery of the Japanese theatre of Noh. He had visited Japan in 1959 and was affected by Kabuki theatre enough to write a play subtitled An Occidental Noh Play. Noh plays are, by their definition, full of minimalist dialogue, archetype characters (often without identities beyond their description), and pointed silences. Milk Train begins with stage assistants hoisting a flag, identified only as "One and Two" and actually refer to themselves as "theatrical devices...with occidental variations." Many of the plays TW wrote in the last 20 years of his life follow these attributes and were roundly panned by audiences and critics alike.

NY Times theatre critic Richard Gilman wrote: "It was clear to us that Williams was in flight from his own powers, that he was in fact beginning to parody them." Critics began attacking his plays for being too personal - but TW always claimed "all true work of an artist must be personal". This is the old argument about art vs. commercial art, or in this case, art vs. commercially-funded business of theatre. By contrast, in 1964, Arthur Miller had no qualms about presenting the fragmented memory play After the Fall - ostensibly about his marriage to Marilyn Monroe. Intensely personal, sure, because writers write from their experience.

The vicious circle of bad reviews = more drinking = worse writing = more bad reviews. Williams would spend the remainder of mid-60s whacked out on a combo of speed injections and handfuls of downers until he ended up in rehab by decade's end.

Recent reassessments say critics are often wrong to expect an artist to keep producing the same art as they did at the height of their powers - that TW turned abstract as his world closed in on him. Perhaps these plays were not good commercial theater - or even good theater - but as art, they definitely have merit.

































Works Cited

Gilman, Richard. "The Drama is Coming Now". The Second Coming of Tennessee Williams. Yale University Press.
Hale, Allean. "Tennessee's Long Trip," Gale Research volume 45 of Contemporary Criticism. 1984. http://www.tennesseewilliamsstudies.org/archives/2003/5hale.htm
Rader, Dotson. Cry of the Heart. Doubleday and Company, 1985.
Williams, Tennessee. Memoirs. Doubleday and Company, 1975.
Williams, Tennessee. The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore. 1964.
Williams, Tennessee. Notebooks. Margaret Bradham Thornton, ed. Yale University Press, 2006.

When Art Film Smiled at its Own Reflection

Cinephile sounds like a dirty word; I wonder if you called someone a cinephile on the street back in 1964 if they would slug you or invite you for an espresso. The '60s were the beginning of a new breed of audience who not only worshipped film but loved discussing it as one would discuss a novel or, more apt, a work of art. The studio system was on its way out; the era of the director-as-filmmaker-as-auteur arrived.

Considering the art film of the early 1960s – especially those coming out of Europe (and most were; to understand a history of American independent film in those years, you can usually start and stop with Cassavettes) – they were a cure from Hollywood churning out predictable product. If you lived in a large enough city, you had access to at least one old movie palace refurbed as the "art house". Since U.S. movie magazines catering to housewives and starry-eyed teenage girls didn't cover events like Italian Neorealism and the French New Wave, it was up to the audiences themselves to keep the conversation going, to influence friends to see films few newspapers and magazines would even review. By 1964, backlash was inevitable. Art film didn't go mainstream, but they were now commonplace enough to "jump the shark", and no one personified shark jumping better than Federico Fellini.

"What are you working on now? Another film without hope?"

In 1964, Fellini was an international prince of cinema thanks to 8 1/2, released the previous summer. Its success wouldn't make his next film any easier to make, nor would it make it a success, but it did help bring American audiences into avid discussion about world cinema and this movie about the making of a movie. I believe most 21st century Americans would fail to see anything odd about a film director being accused of self-indulgence. As if any artist would choose to create for themselves instead of the all-consuming public. Films are not personal canvasses - they are financed heavily, employ hundreds or thousands of people and live or die on the words of critics, reviewers and word-of-mouth audiences. It is doubtful Fellini made 8 1/2 for himself; his role had always been as entertainer. However, his stock had risen after the triumph, in 1960, of La Dolce Vita, a time capsule of life among the new glitterati in Rome.

Throughout the previous decade, Italy was experiencing an amazing bout of economic success - washing the world with vespas and kitchen appliances, Jackie Kennedy's Cassini suits and Anita Ekberg dancing in Rome's Trevi Fountain. La Dolce Vita was such a sensation that it was inevitable his next project would be closely dissected. The lack of linear narrative was a huge problem for those who were not used to movies employing vignettes, where daydreams and reverie were not bracketed by the convention of wavy lines letting the audience know what was reality or not. How could a movie about making a movie ascribe to reality anyway? 8 1/2 spends the bulk of its time lounging with the film's hero in a health spa - which in postwar Italy had more in common with the shrine at Lourdes than a weekend resort getaway. When we are finally shown a glimpse of movie set, it's a rocketship launch pad out in the middle of nowhere.

The idea of making the main character a film director evolved after the entire plot had already formulated in Fellini's mind. He originally had a Joe Everyguy escaping to a health spa, stressed from juggling wife, mistress, clergy, daydreams, flashbacks, psychoanalysis and mindreading. By the time he got the brainstorm to look in the mirror and make his hero a successful film director, he added muse, producer, critics and journalist to the circus.

In 1964, Fellini was busy on his next film with a similar theme: this time having his hero trying to find herself not through cinema but through the occult. Juliet of the Spirits asked some of the same questions concerning self-analysis - except from a female point of view. In contrast to a film about a famous man who has too many women, this film would focus on a woman who shares her husband. Divorce was illegal in Italy when the film was made, so there was really no big mystery about how the relationship would end up. The project had the added bonus of putting Fellini's wife back to work, the amazing Guilietta Masina, who hadn't had a hit film since she last worked with her husband 7 years earlier.

phantasmagoria (fanˌtazməˈgôrēə)
a sequence of real or imaginary images like that seen in a dream

Philip Kemp, writing in Sight and Sound, said: "'Felliniesque' ... usually means nowadays is 'overblown, self-indulgent, sentimental and featuring monstrously fat women and dwarves'. Less than fair." During the fallout reviews for 8 1/2, critics probably did not know that the film was a direct result of Fellini's forays into psychotherapy: the film is like one long therapy session or a Catholic confessional (same thing). It was also influenced by the fact that Federico had started keeping a journal of his dreams. He even gave a shot at celebrity-endorsing that mysteriously controlled experiment of the 60's, LSD, to unlock his creativity, but somehow did not allow his onscreen counterpart to indulge in anything nearly as trendy. A modern critique of 8 1/2 in Cineaste magazine claimed you could make good use of watching the film on DVD by running the scenes in random order.

Most European critics were unanimous in their praise (although, Derek Malcolm mentioned in The Guardian: "When it came out, the film seemed incomprehensible to many who had hitherto loved his work. In one Italian town, the audience attacked the projectionists."); in America, there were culture clashes. Time magazine thought 8 1/2's "stream of consciousness" fascinating, but "is that a reason for showing it publicly?" It wasn't a problem with sophistication or innovation; it was the idea of European films being told so differently than Americans were used to. Also showing in U.S. art houses circa 1964: Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert - another collaboration with his muse Monica Vitti - it received the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. Set in a factory-laden Italy, a neurotic young wife feels disconnected from pretty much everything. The film was mostly monochrome with very exact uses of color and not a whole lot happens. However, it's Antonioni, so it is a classic of world cinema.

Critic Pauline Kael was having none of the Fellini love. (It wasn't that she had it out for any foreign film in 1964; she thought Godard's Bande à Part was a "charming" gangster movie.) According to Kael: "Someone's fantasy life is perfectly good material for a movie if it is imaginative and fascinating in itself, or if it illuminates his non-fantasy life in some interesting way. But 8 1/2 is neither..." Then again, she believed 8 1/2 was one of the first movies that some in the audience intentionally showed up stoned.

American cinema wouldn't catch up with the idea of the film director-as-artist until the 1970's when guys like Coppola, Spielberg, Lucas and Scorsese made film a subject one could study in school, like literature and art. We call it independent film now, or just: indies - supposedly small projects bereft of huge financing and studio interference. The advent of DVD means the playing field has evened out for all of world cinema. If you avoid the multiplexes and watch film based on interests and preference, it won't matter what studio is attached to it any more than it will matter how much money was spent on it.




























Works Cited:

Affron, Charles, ed. 8 1/2. Rutgers Films in Print. Rutgers, the State University, 1987.

Celli, Carlo and Marga Cottino-Jones. A New Guide to Italian Cinema. Palgrave MacMillan, 2006.

"Cinema: Director on the Couch." Time. 28 June 1963.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,874998,00.html

Cowie, Peter. Revolution! The Explosion of World Cinema in the Sixties. Faber and Faber, Inc., 2004.

Kael, Pauline. I Lost It at the Movies. Little Brown & Co, 1965.

Kemp, Philip. "FEDERICO FELLINI (1920-93)." Sight & Sound 19.9 (2009): 27. Art & Architecture Complete. EBSCO. Web. 6 Oct. 2010.

Kezich, Tulio. Federico Fellini: His Life and Work. Faber and Faber, Inc., 2002.

Malcolm, Derek. "Federico Fellini: 8 1/2." The Guardian. 22 April 1999.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/1999/apr/22/derekmalcolmscenturyoffilm.derekmalcolm

Monaco, James. "Federico Fellini's 8 1/2." Cineaste 27.3 (2002): 46. Art & Architecture Complete. EBSCO. Web. 6 Oct. 2010.

Mordeen, Ethan. Medium Cool: the Movies of the 1960s. Knopf, 1990.

Stone, Alan. "8 1/2: Fellini's Moment of Truth." Boston Review. 1995.

http://bostonreview.net/br20.3/stone.html