Movie Hog Heaven

The year I was born, Charlie Chaplin filmed a classic scene in "The Gold Rush," boiling and eating his shoe while snowbound. This month, as driveways are piled high, I know just how he felt, consuming not footwear but an overdose of many movies made since then.

In the grip of cabin fever, the mind reels at thoughts of lowering the deficit, Winning the Future or understanding Egypt or Tunisia and just wants to settle into two-hour hammocks of alternate reality in which people behave the way you want them to and, most of the time, end up happy.

Thanks to the Christmas present of a device that streams movies from computer to TV, and reliable old Turner Classic Movies, it has been a month of contentment in the past, reliving again a pre-World War II childhood of vicariously experiencing American life through shadows on a screen.

Back then for a ghetto dweller, every week at Loews or RKO there were new places and new people to see, in restaurants and offices, at beaches or in woods, in cars or trains or ships, singing, dancing, joking. Book-lined rooms wrapped them in warm light, and oh how they talked! They moved through the world in a cloud of words, clever and sure, and even when their hearts were breaking, they knew just what to say and how to say it.

Social scientists had filled ten volumes titled "Movie-Made Children" to prove that movies were ruining kids like me, teaching us to lie, cheat, steal and sin. They did shape us but not in that way. Our childhood was spent in the dark, studying American life: how people dressed and talked and ate, what their homes were like, the looks on their faces and the words they said when they were happy, angry or sad. Movies taught us how to be in a world where the ways of our immigrant parents would never do and made us see that life could be more than working, worrying and trying to stay out of trouble. They showed us how to be American and hope for more.

Now, in a new century, movies have come full circle to brighten old age but with a curious twist. As I spend time with old friends like Paul Newman, Paddy Chayevsky and Nora Ephron, my computer is spying on me as surely as the FBI or CIA but trying to play Big Brother for my own benefit.

Based on previous choices, Netflix is trying to narrow down new selections but, as in all attempts to divine the human heart and mind, not quite getting the subtleties.

Based on watching "Notting Hill" and "IQ," it concludes that I like romantic pairing of opposites but fails to see that the latter's attraction is a sly performance by Walter Matthau as a match-making Albert Einstein.

The computer rightly suspects a leaning toward British movies but fails to grasp that "Howards End" is more than that, a revisit to one of the 20th century's great novels.

But not to worry, such spying is benign. Until the snows melt, it's comforting to be living in the past and see the past parading before my eyes. Happy watching to all!

Bah, Humbug and All That

If he wrote "A Christmas Carol" today, Charles Dickens might take flak for insidiously promoting a welfare state that could lead to higher taxes and SCHIP programs for the likes of Tiny Tim.

But after more than a century and a half, Scrooge and his ghosts will be all over TV this week without protest, except from lovers of the classic who feel strongly about the dozens of movies based on it.

Christmas eve, TCM will be showing the 1938 MGM version, which ranks high in memory, with an asterisk to protest liberties taken with the plot, including Bob Cratchit heaving a snowball at Scrooge and being fired before the holiday (always a touch of Andy Hardy in the Louis B. Mayer era).

You'll have to check local stations or Blockbuster because no network showing is scheduled for arguably the best, a 1951 darkly beautiful British tour de force with Alastair Sim, a grand actor who was born to play Scrooge, or for my Yuletide guilty pleasure, the 1970 musical with Albert Finney.

With an undistinguished score (we're not talking Stephen Sondheim here), the singing and dancing somehow seem just right for a tale to lift our hearts and make believing children of us all. Peopled with great actors--Edith Evans, Kenneth More and Alec Guinness as the campiest Jacob Marley ever--it's a thing of visual beauty, culminating in a joyous scene of dancing, bell-ringing celebrants against a snowy background that is pure Breughel.

There have been "Christmas Carols" by all the icons of pop culture from Mickey Mouse and the Jetsons to Star Trek's Patrick Stewart and the Muppets and, in 2009, there will be a live action-computer graphic version with Jim Carrey as Scrooge and all three ghosts.

So take your choice and Bah, Humbug and Merry Christmas to all.

Writers Strike: Not Just the Money

In the ideas-and-images industry, there has always been a gulf between labor and management. Seeing writers on picket lines now only confirms where, in our society, the money and power always goes.

On one of my first magazine jobs, the editor was Wade Nichols, a writer at heart, who created a family-like atmosphere where on Friday afternoons everyone on the payroll gathered in his office to drink and talk their way toward their weekend lives.

When the publisher died, Nichols took that that job too. "Do you really want to do all that business stuff?" I asked. "No," he answered," but I don't want to see some son-of-a-bitch do it and ruin what we have."

When I became editor, they put me on the company's board of directors, and I felt like an atheist in church, watching even the best people take on a quasi-religious fervor for maximizing profit. They seemed to be under the influence of a narcotic that suppresses conscience and brings out low cunning that might make a carnival pitchman blush.

Such zealotry may explain why the current strike, which is costing organizations millions, is now in its tenth day with no end in sight. What the writers are asking won't put a dent in their huge profits but, for the corporate true believers, it isn't the money, it's the principle that's at stake.

They have to keep their faith.

Exits: Paul Newman and Robert Redford

“Certain friendships,” Robert Redford once said about Paul Newman, “are too good and too strong to talk about.” This month, Redford broke his silence to say that the final movie they planned to make together was not to be:

"It's not happening, sadly. Paul and I were planning to do a film version of Bill Bryson's wonderful book ‘A Walk In The Woods.’

"I got the rights to the movie four years ago, and we couldn't decide if we were too old to do it. Then we decided, 'Let's go for it.'

"But time passed, and Paul's been getting old fast. I think things deteriorated for him. Finally, two months ago he called and said, 'I gotta retire.' The picture was written and everything. It breaks my heart."

Like their other work together, it would have been about the friendship of men, two old college buddies walking the Appalachian trail from Georgia to Maine.

Toward the end of life, biology is destiny. A British actor of the past century, A. E. Matthews, who worked to the age of 90, explained, “I get up every morning, look at the obituaries in the Times and, if my name isn’t there, get dressed and go to work.”

But last spring, the 82-year-old Newman told an interviewer, "I’m not able to work at the level I would want to. You start to lose your memory, you start to lose your confidence, you start to lose your invention. So I think that's pretty much a closed book for me."

Redford at 71 has a new picture coming out next month, “Lions for Lambs,” which he directed and plays a leading role in. More polemical than his previous work, Redford hopes the movie will encourage young people “to take command of their voice" in American politics.

Over long careers, Newman and Redford personified an alternative American manhood to the full-throttle macho of John Wayne and the young Clint Eastwood--a more complex mix of strength, wit and sensitivity. (Newman turned down "Dirty Harry.")

Off-screen, they lived away from Hollywood--Newman in Connecticut, Redford in Utah--lives of social responsibility rather than movie-star celebrity.

In 1968, my path crossed Newman’s as we both stepped out of our working lives to oppose the war in Vietnam. When I invited him to lunch with a dozen magazine editors, he told me the prospect of talking about himself was so unnerving he had stayed too long in a steam bath to calm down. Sitting next to him, I had to titrate the balance of beer and ice water to keep him relaxed and hydrated as he eloquently described his feelings about the war.

In the early 1980s, our mutual friend A. E. Hotchner wrote about their light-hearted efforts to bottle and sell Newman's salad dressing. Since then, a line of Newman's Own products has earned $200 million for charity.

Meanwhile, Redford was creating a mecca for independent film makers in Sundance, Utah and giving their work recognition and commercial opportunities.

As Newman exits from the public stage and Redford keeps working for the public good, those repeated showings of "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" on TV are reminders of how much actors can accomplish in what we call real life.

Deborah Kerr

The woman who died this week was part of an American legend that will live forever in the Hollywood movies of the mid-twentieth century.

From the 1930s on, the studios there manufactured what John Updike has called “those gargantuan, crass contraptions whereby Jewish brains project Gentile stars upon a Gentile nation and out of the immigrant joy gave a formless land dreams and even a kind of conscience.”

Louis B. Mayer at MGM, the chief dream maker, son of a scrap-metal scavenger who became the most highly-paid man in the U.S., had an idealized vision of womanhood--beautiful, British and well-bred. He went to London and found Greer Garson to embody her in “Goodbye Mr. Chips,” “Pride and Prejudice,” “Random Harvest,” “Mrs. Miniver” and “Madame Curie.”

After World War II, when Garson was becoming matronly, Mayer replaced her with Deborah Kerr, starting with “The Hucksters,” in which she played a high-born British widow who tames the American rough-and-readiness of Clark Gable.

Kerr kept playing the part with grace and wit until the early 1950s when Mayer lost control of the studio. She left MGM in 1953 to play an Army officer's alcoholic, sex-starved wife washed over by waves in the adulterous embrace of Burt Lancaster in “From Here to Eternity.”

American reality was changing, and so were the movies but, looking back, Mayer’s dream world had its charms, and Deborah Kerr was a lovely part of it.

Bad Bush Movies

If this Administration were a Hollywood studio, it would have been shut down after the “Heaven’s Gate” of wars in Iraq and the “Ishtar” of disasters in New Orleans.

No one wants to watch, but they still keep grinding them out. Alberto Gonzales is starring in an extravagant remake of “Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia,” with a cast of thousands as the bounty hunters.

This week, the cameras roll on a new version of “Into the Mouth of Madness” with Condoleeza Rice and Robert Gates as the intrepid couple looking for answers in places where reality and fantasy are indistinguishable.

Meanwhile, in the White House, George Bush himself is doing a final cut on “Battlefield Earth,” while Dick Cheney prepares for his close-ups in “Godzilla, the Musical.”

Ingmar Bergman

For a generation whose childhood was shaped by Hollywood movies, he opened the door to a new world of film as art. In the years after World War II, Bergman taught us how to think and feel and see in a new way.

He was an artist of images, but ideas were always there. All the words in books about existentialism came into focus for me only after watching “The Magician” in the 1950s.

His obituary in the New York Times today tells about the fifty films he made in the course of a long dream-like life, but behind the names and numbers is the story of an artist who helped shape the sensorium of several generations.

“I have maintained open channels with my childhood,” he once told Michiko Kakutani. “I think it may be that way with many artists. Sometimes in the night, when I am on the limit between sleeping and being awake, I can just go through a door into my childhood and everything is as it was--with lights, smells, sounds and people...”

For new generations, Ingmar Bergman’s dreams will always be there on DVDs and cassettes. Start with “Fanny and Alexander.”

Once on an airplane ride I sat next to a Jesuit priest who wrote best-selling books. We spent the entire time talking passionately about Bergman. It was what we had most in common.

Ahmadinejad, Oliver Stone Trade Barbs

The movie-maker who never met an anti-American he didn’t want to film has met his match. The president of Iran has refused to cooperate with Oliver Stone, his flack saying that Stone may be “considered part of the opposition in the U.S., but he is still part of the Great Satan."

A friend of Fidel Castro who is unaccustomed to being turned down by tinpot dictators, Stone responded with the unkindest cut of all, comparing Ahmadinejad to George Bush.

"I wish the Iranian people well,” Stone said, “and only hope their experience with an inept, rigid ideologue president goes better than ours."

Then again, Ahmadinejad may be a film buff who has seen JFK, Nixon and other paranoid biopics of Stone’s. On his blog a while back, the President praised “Iranian filmmakers who refused to participate in a Denmark film festival in protest at the blasphemous caricature published by a Danish newspaper against Prophet Mohammad (Peace Be Upon Him) last year.”

The man is a tough critic.