A Commonplace Book

...we go about our business or we take to dope, the dope which is worse by far than opium or hashish--I mean the newspapers, the radio, the movies. Real dope gives you the freedom to dream your own dreams; the American kind forces you to swallow the perverted dreams of men whose only ambition is to hold their job regardless of what they are bidden to do.

"You will have the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood."

For commercial reasons the film's [Dr. Caligari] producers changed the ending -- which had originally involved Francis's unmasking of Caligari -- so that Francis's 'anti-social paranoia' about those in power would not harm the public.

[of film writing]: "And the best short scene I ever wrote, by my own judgement, was one in which a girl said "uh-huh" three times with three different intonations, and that's all there was to it."

'The search' is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. This morning, for example, I felt as if I had come to myself on a strange island. And what does such a castaway do? Why, he pokes around the neighborhood and he doesn't miss a trick. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair. The movies are onto the search, but they screw it up.

By embodying an aspiration, a reaching for an alternative to the existing order, beauty can challenge the present -- but only if, as Godard's does, it acknowledges rather than dissembles the activity and the conditions that make for it.

Defeat is always glorious on film. The loser is ennobled by suffering and death. No camera can resist the man going down to defeat. He commands every mechanism and the attention of every mind.

[Hollywood] is a place where they pay you 50,000 dollars for a kiss and 50 cents for your soul.

Movies are action. In movies things happen. You are what you do. What's inside your head means nothing until you act. Gesture, expression, action. You don't think. You act. You react. To things. Events. You make things happen. You make your history and your future. You cut the wires that defuse the bomb, you lay out the villain, you save the community, you throw your badge into the dirt and walk away, you fold your arms around the girl and slowly fade to black. You never have to think. Your eyes might dart from the alien monster to the fizzing power cables as a plan comes to you, but you never have to think. The perfect stage hero is Hamlet. The perfect film hero is Lassie.

   An historian finds it difficult to re-see films after their initial releases and his memory is not always reliable. I can offer various examples of the fallibility of memory.

   The film which made the strongest impression on me at the end of the "silent" period was Sternberg's Underworld (1927). I therefore felt it important to discuss it in detail with my students at the IDHEC (Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques, Paris) where I taught film history with Jean Mitry after 1944. I described to them in considerable detail an apartment, a stairway, stuffed birds — the lair occupied by the gangster (Bancroft). I described this repeatedly for five or six years until Henri Langlois discovered a print of Underworld for the Cinémathèque Française. As soon as possible I had it projected at IDHEC. But the apartment in the film bore no relation to that in my memory — which I had, I suppose, recalled from The Drag Net, an exactly contemporary film of Sternberg's in which Bancroft also appeared.

   Even the film maker himself does not always have an exact recall of his own work. In 1941, the anti-fascist German writer, Friedrich Wolf, was a war correspondent for the Russians during the fighting near Moscow. He became separated from his unit during the terrible battle and ran into a Soviet patrol who took him for a Nazi parachutist spy because of this strong German accent. In order to identify himself he said he was the script writer of Professor Mmlock, a 1938 Soviet film which had had considerable success in the USSR. He was asked to recount the story for the many soldiers who had seen it, but they judged his summary so inaccurate that he might have been shot if other military personnel had not arrived who identified him. Since I was unable to discuss this dramatic episode with Friedrich Wolf, I can't say whether his own memory was at fault or whether it was the soldiers who had rememered the film inaccurately.

   In his book The Art of Film, Ernest Lindgren cites Pudovkin's 1928 analysis of a sequence from his own film Mother (1926) in which he described sequences which apparently didn't exist. Initially, I thought the British theoretician was right and agreed with him that the film maker, writing his text without re-seeing his film, had included scenes deleted at the editing stage or scenes in the shooting script which were never shot. Then, in Moscow, I saw the original Soviet version of Mother — very different from the English and French versions. I now think Lindgren was mistaken because he didn't know the original work but a distorted British adaptation in which sequences had been re-edited and several shots deleted.

Saying "I love you" is easy, a piece of piss, and more or less every man I know does it all the time. I've acted as though I haven't been able to say it a couple of times, although I'm not sure why. Maybe because I wanted to lend the moment that sort of corny Doris Day romance, make it more memorable than it otherwise would have been. You know, you're with someone, and you start to say something, and the you stop, and she goes "What?" and you go "Nothing," and she goes, "Please say it," and you go, "No, it'll sound stupid," and then she makes you spit it out, even though you'd been intending to say it all along, and she thinks it's all the more valuable for being hard-won. Maybe she knew all the time that you were messing about, but she doesn't mind, anyway. It's like a quote: it's the nearest any of us gets to being in the movies....

I like a filmmaker who walks you into a story. Some directors, rushing to get started, prefer to fly you in by helicopter--a popular choice for stories set in New York or Miami, where the camera can come skimming in over the water. Other filmmakers float you down on a crane, so you can survey the scene while a car pulls up to the suburban house, a train to the country station. Maybe you come into the picture by riding along with the characters (by rocket, if George Lucas is in charge); or maybe, if Spielberg is running things, the early shots reveal that you have no need to travel, because you were already inside the movie. You discover that your nose is somehow pressed against Liam Neeson's torso as he's getting dressed; or you realize that your eye is really the eye of Tom Hanks, who is watching how his hand shakes during the boat ride to Omaha Beach.

The primary purpose of the Academy Awards is not to honor the best work of the year, it is to publicize movies.

...in this town [Hollywood] there are two kinds of writers: established and emerging. If you're among the latter, you begin not with the written word, but with an idea.

I think there are two kinds of writers working in Hollywood. The first is the kind we hate to admit exist, but they do. He calculates the odds, analyzes the marketplace, and writes a paint-by-numbers script that, shock of shocks, gets bought and produced and heUs got a career. As a hack. It's a job, like making rivets or putting bolts on car axles. The writing is probably solid, serviceable, but without passion, and it shows.

The second is someone who loves writing or loves the film business, wants to write from the soul. Probably does write from the soul. And somehow squeaks through that barely open door to a sale and a career. And then takes tons of meetings: "we adore your work, we want to be in business. We've got this idea, it's about two cops who go undercover as women, Lethal Weapon meets Tootsie. Lots of crude jokes, hijinks and action, you want to write it for us? Warner's loves the idea and Tom [Cruise or Hanks, it doesn't matter] is dying to wear a dress. Guaranteed greenlight, whaddayasay?" The right answer, obvious to those of us watching at home, is "NO!!! AAAAGHHH!"

I went to a late movie after a while. It meant nothing. I hardly saw what went on. It was just noise and big faces.

A less obvious way in which the corporatization of movies blunts our responses is to train us to see films only in terms of those we've already seen -- to such a degree that we don't want them to be different from those we've seen before. More alarmingly, when they are different, we don't recognize the difference.

As a culture, we always prefer our movies to tell us exactly how characters should have behaved, so we can stand in judgment of social transgressors. We are ill at ease with movies that give us moral fumblers rather than outright villains, movies that remind us that a simple twist of fate would land us in those fumblers' shoes.

I raised questions in "JFK." The movie never said we had the answers. It deconstructed history, if you will. The Warren Commission is the myth, my movie was counter-mythology.

Psychoanalysis and cinema were born in the same year.

Movies, like detective stories, make it possible to experience without danger all the excitement, passion and desirousness which must be surpressed in a humanitarian ordering of society.

But in all, I don't like to engage in telling stories. I don't like to arouse the viewer emotionally or give him advice. I don't like to belittle him or burden him with a sense of guilt. These are the things I don't like in the movies.

I think that a good film is one that has a lasting power and you start to reconstruct it right after you leave the theater. There are a lot of films that seem to be boring, but they are decent films. On the other hand, there are films that nail you to your seat and overwhelm you to the point that you forget everything, but you feel cheated later. These are the films that take you hostage. I absolutely don't like the films in which the filmmakers take their viewers hostage and provoke them. I prefer the films that put their audience to sleep in the theater. I think those films are kind enough to allow you a nice nap and not leave you disturbed when you leave the theater. Some films have made me doze off in the theater, but the same films have made me stay up at night, wake up thinking about them in the morning, and keep on thinking about them for weeks. Those are the kinds of films I like.

It's like being in a stuffy room and opening a window. You let the air come in and then you breathe. In my mind, our dreams are windows in our lives and the significance of cinema is in its similarity to this window.

James Cole [Bruce Willis]: The movie never changes -- it can't change -- but everytime you see it, it seems to be different because you're different -- you notice different things.

[Sue Clayton, lecturer in screen writing and directing at London University] analyzed frame by frame what elements were present in different film genres and what made certain films successful... According to Clayton the blueprint for the perfect film is for it to have: 30 percent action, 17 percent comedy, 13 percent good versus evil, 12 percent sex/romance, 10 percent special effects, 10 percent plot and eight percent music.... As for the film that matched the recipe closest, that honor went to "Toy Story 2."

And there, in retrospect, might lie the secret of the first "Matrix": beyond the balletic violence, beyond the cool stunts, the idea that the world we live in isn't real is one that speaks right now to a general condition. For the curious thing about the movie was that everybody could grasp the basic setup instantly. Whether it occurs in cult science fiction or academic philosophy, we seem to be fascinated by the possibility that our world might not exist. We're not strangers to the feeling that, for much of our lives, we might just as well be brains-in-vats, floating in an amniotic fluid of simulations. It doesn't just strike us as plausibly weird. It strikes us as weirdly plausible.

It wasn't that I had anything against the movies, but they had never been very important to me, and not once in more than fifteen years of teaching and writing had I felt the urge to talk about them. I liked them in the way that everyone else did -- as diversions, as animated wallpaper, as fluff. No matter how beautiful or hypnotic the images sometimes were, they never satisfied me as powerfully as words did. Too much given, I felt, not enough was left to the viewer's imagination, and the paradox was that closer movies came to simulating reality, the worse they failed at representing the world -- which is in us as much as it is around us. That was why I had always instinctively preferred black-and-white pictures to color pictures, silent films to talkies. Cinema was a visual language, a way of telling stories by projecting images onto a two-dimensional screen. The addition of sound and color had created the illusion of a third dimension, but at the same time it had robbed the images of their purity. They no longer had to do all the work, and instead of turning film into the perfect hybrid medium, the best of all possible worlds, sound and color had weakened the language they were supposed to enhance.

Senator [Steve Tom]: Mr. Dragon, you have a young daughter, do you not?
Peter Dragon [Jay Mohr]: Let's not go there...
Senator: Her name is Georgia, she's about 10 years old I believe.
Peter Dragon: Don't do this.
Senator: Has little Georgia seen your film entitled "Ripcord"?
Peter Dragon: She can't get in Senator, it's rated R.
Senator: Which contains 357 acts of violence, 175 profanities, and four scenes of lesbian sex. She proud of her daddy for that one?
Wendy Ward [Illeana Douglas]: I think we should just go.
Senator: How can you look that sweet little girl in the eye?
Peter Dragon: I manage. I never voted to subsidize the growing of tobacco, while turning my back on food programs for starving kids. I've never vetoed a gun control bill; all MY guns are fake, Senator. I've never rushed to the defense of Kuwaiti oil fields, while ignoring genocide in Africa, because big oil companies that line your fat pockets aren't concerned with black Africa. Those are all productions of YOUR company Senator, this company right here!
Senator: Now you are perilously close to being cited for comptempt, Mr. Dragon.
Peter Dragon: I'm already in contempt. I'm in contempt of all of you old whores and hypocrites. At least I'm giving the American people what they want.
Senator: And just exactly what is it that you think that they want?
Peter Dragon: I'll tell you exactly what they want, Senator. They want chase scenes and car crashes. They want firm breasts and tightass Latinto men. They want their cowboys to be strong and silent. They want their cops to bend the rules to get the job done. They want the boy to get the girl. They want the alien to be killed -- unless he's cute. They want the good guy to win. They want the bad guy to die -- hopefully in the biggest explosion the budget will allow. But most importantly, Senator, they want to walk into a theater and for ninty minutes forget the fucking mess that you have left of this nation.