Film Flam

Essays on Hollywood

Larry McMurtry

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781439129708
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

A noted screenwriter himself, Pulitzer Prize–winner Larry McMurtry knows Hollywood—in Film Flam, he takes a funny, original, and penetrating look at the movie industry and gives us the truth about the moguls, fads, flops, and box-office hits. With successful movies and television miniseries made from several of his novels— Terms of Endearment, The Last Picture Show, Lonesome Dove, and Hud— McMurtry writes with an outsider's irony of the industry and an insider's experience. In these essays, he illuminates the plight of the screenwriter, cuts a clean, often hilarious path through the excesses of film reviewing, and takes on some of the worst trends in the industry: the decline of the Western, the disappearance of love in the movies, and the quality of the stars themselves.From his recollections of the day Hollywood entered McMurtry's own life as he ate meat loaf in Fort Worth to the pleasures he found in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, Film Flam is one of the best books ever written about Hollywood.

Movie-Tripping:
My Own Rotten Film Festival

SEVERAL WEEKENDS AGO, FOR REASONS THAT HAVE already been obscured by the mists of time, I hied myself to Times Square and saw seventeen movies, one more or less right after the other. I say more or less because there was a gap of some seven hours, between 4 and 11 A.M., when the Times Square theaters were closed. Fortunately I managed to fill part of the gap watching the Late Late Late TV Movie, in this case Istanbul, a film which would normally be of no interest to anyone except perhaps a very diligent student of the School of Casablanca. I assume that with the recent catastrophic growth of Film Studies there are now as many students at work on the School of Casablanca as there are on the Matter of Troy—perhaps more.

Nonetheless, there was one thing that interested me in Istanbul, and that was the undisguised grimness with which Errol Flynn regarded his leading lady, Miss Cornell Borchers. Miss Borchers, in 1957, was probably as lovely as she was ever to be, on screen. She moved through the silly role with a kind of mature insouciance, easy with herself and neither too young nor too old. The greatest Robin Hood of them all was not so lucky. Somewhere along the way he had quaffed a drink called Age, and it was obvious that it had proved a bitter potion. He was sad and visibly heavy of foot, and he could not look easily upon so much female.

The lessons to be learned from bad movies are many and varied, but sic transit gloria is first among them. Such movies as Istanbul give us views of mortality more distinct and more unnerving than anything to be found in serious films. In great movies the strength and radiance of the images contradict mortality, even when that is what they are designed to show. Great images of suffering always seem to ennoble the poor human subject who is doing the suffering, and even humiliation can be dignified by good direction—as witness Umberto D. It takes overlighting and bad make-up men to reveal, unequivocally, the stitches of age. Errol Flynn’s pained grimace was not the worst I was to see on this particular trip. The next afternoon I watched a really ghastly Atlantis film called Latitude Zero, in which Cesar Romero, Joseph Cotten and Patricia Medina had to grope their way around a kingdom under the sea. All three were so embarrassed at being caught in such a picture that they could hardly meet one another’s eyes. Not the least of their humiliations was a group of the most absurd monsters ever to flounder across the screen. They looked like they had been picked up in a discount toy store; their stuffing was so cheap that whenever they were meant to be particularly fierce their legs usually folded under them. No actor alive could have looked convincingly frightened of such tawdry monsters. Cesar Romero, a man of some pride, regarded them throughout with the slightly strained look a grandfather might wear when called upon to admire one of his grandchild’s more obnoxious toys. Latitude Zero is an awful film, but a perfect example: this is the pit actors must writhe in when they have failed to provide.

It need hardly be added, I suppose, that all the films I saw that weekend were bad. All but one, at least. Seventeen good movies in a weekend—even if they could be found—would be beyond anyone’s endurance, especially mine. I did have one quick twitch of intellectual conscience, as I was on my way from Deep Throat to Hannie Caulder, and it caused me to step into Frenzy, a little dishonesty I immediately regretted. Seen in isolation, Frenzy might have shone like a diamond, but sandwiched between Throat and Hannie Caulder it was hardly even noticeable. By that time I had already seen six or eight movies in which I didn’t have to believe a thing, and I was very happy in my disbelief. I resented being asked to suspend it, particularly for a film that wasn’t a great deal more believable than Hannie Caulder anyway, and I left in a state of moral annoyance, partly with myself, partly with Hitchcock.

It was just such a twitch of intellectual conscience, years ago, that diverted me from Goliath and the Barbarians, which I had meant to see, and led to my encounter with the much-feared L’Avventura. Intellectual conscience kept me in my seat for what felt like months; finally leaves began to fall within me, I experienced a sense of equinoctial release, and got up and left, although those Italians were still poking around on that island, to what end I was not sure then and am not sure now.

In time I came to be grateful to L’Avventura, because it freed me forever from the conviction that I had to be polite to Art. I have never afterward been able to feel that any work of art had an automatic claim to my attention; it is up to the given work to seize my attention and hold it as best it can. Fortunately art exists in great surplus; there are centuries of it from which one may select, and more coming all the time. Naturally I would expect readers of my fiction to be as impolite as I am. If a book of mine bores them let them fling it out a window and find themselves one that doesn’t. Others more fit than I have shown themselves able to appreciate L’Avventura; no work of art is likely to suffer from my indifference and on the whole it is far better to save one’s courtesy for people, who seem always to need it.

It must be admitted, however, that where movies are concerned L’Avventura cast me into a downward spiral from which I have yet to pull up. I have seldom, since then, willingly gone into a good movie, or one that announced itself as serious at all. Friends whose principles are more strict than mine have led me into a few, but they’ve usually been sorry. Left to myself, I subsist on a diet of the coarsest trash—four or five bad movies a week will usually suffice me, and I glean most of those from television. Indulgences on the scale of the one I am about to describe are fairly rare.

Until recently I had accepted my somewhat disgusting taste in films pretty much as I accept my other failings. It has been with me since adolescence and there is no use kidding myself that I am suddenly going to change and start liking all the Right Things. I can seldom tolerate even ten percent of the Right Things. Good movies press upon one, much like Reality, and I will do almost anything to escape them. Curiously, with my reading, just the opposite is true. I may read one junk book in ten, but I seldom see more than one good movie in fifty, and this imbalance between what I read and what I watch has begun to intrigue me. A new curiosity is always nice, and I am most curious now as to why it is so often the cheapest celluloid lies that seem to draw me in.

The roots of this peculiar affliction of taste, I have come to believe, lie in the fifties, and in a literal sense are somewhat related to slumming—Kerouacian slumming, to be precise. Long before I knew that I actively preferred bad movies to good I recognized that I much preferred the places bad movies played to the places where art films were usually shown. I have always hated art theaters, art audiences, screening rooms, suburban theaters, and, indeed, decorous moviegoers of any ilk; apparently some severe Methodist suspicion of all fanciness still lurks in my psyche. My favorite theaters in the whole world are the Yale on Washington Avenue in Houston and the New Isis, near the stockyards in Fort Worth. Real ghetto theaters have finally become too dangerous for a white person to visit comfortably—I made the mistake of seeing Sweet Sweetback in a ghetto theater, not realizing what kind of movie I was walking into, and I saw the last half of it from well down in my seat—but all across America there are fringe theaters like the Yale and the New Isis, usually in border areas where blacks, Chinese, chicanos and rednecks mix, and for anyone with either a taste for street life or participatory theater, these are the places to see movies. The audience will more than compensate for whatever turgidities there may be in the film.

In such theaters, anything can happen. I once saw a girl dragged out of a Doris Day movie because she was audibly in labor; and, more extraordinary, a man sitting six rows in front of me in The Magic Voyage of Sinbad shot himself dead during the previews while playing a friendly game of Russian roulette with his wife and a friend. His wife and the friend were not a little surprised when the gun turned out to be loaded. The panic that ensued gave one new respect for human cunning. Most parties assumed, not unnaturally, that the race war had begun, and chose to go under the seats rather than dash for the exits. The management fled, as did the friend; the wife delivered herself of a last tirade on masculine selfishness, over the corpse; and, a little later, when the panic had abated, a number of people under the seats showed their disrespect for death by getting laid. Meanwhile The Magic Voyage of Sinbad continued, as it had to, the projectionist having apparently been the first man out.

Two weeks later, in the same theater, at the end of The Wild Bunch, a white kid behind me giggled and said to his girlfriend: “Man, I could sit here and watch that massacre all night.”

I find, often, that I am loath to go to a movie in a theater where I know there will be no kids; in the fringe theaters there is no problem, because kids are in every movie, no matter how raunchy. (Once, during the brief heyday of skin flicks—a genre not to be confused with porno films—I watched a strange erotic Western called Hot Spur over the heads of a close-knit young family: a mother, a father, three children under five, and a babe at the breast.) I enjoy watching kids watch movies because kids are even less polite to Art than I am, and are also, apparently, harder to con. The pressure is on the artist every minute, which so far as I am concerned is the way it should be; the moment a film lapses into inanity the kids will immediately resume their own lives, giggling, taunting one another, throwing popcorn, and making many collective trips to the johns to work out prepubertal sexual strategies. There is a kind of Elizabethan ambiance to such scenes. Everyone there is in the pit, and the pit is as crowded as ever with whores and cutpurses. The films have a lot to compete with—namely life—and I think that’s fair enough. Blacks, senior citizens, kids, dozing hitchhikers, slum goddesses and fugitives from god knows what justice or injustice: taken together they make an audience whose responses can educate one.

I sometimes think it is unfortunate that film artists normally live and work at such a remove from this audience. In the fringe theaters, if there is a great clash on the screen between good and evil (more and more often these days this is being visualized as a clash between black men and white men), the passions in the audience become such as one might associate with a Latin American soccer game. It would be interesting, now and then, if a director could be there to witness this level of response. He certainly won’t get it from the respectable, apparently lobotomized audiences in the middle-class theaters, and without it he may never fully appreciate to what extent the proletariat—if I may use the word—insists upon seeing all drama as moral drama. Art is a meaningless word to them. Its rules and processes run tangent to their lives. The value of a movie to them is that it provides them with visions of beauty and justice which life itself will seldom or never provide. Film artists, for the most part, inhabit an ivory tower of literacy. Their producers may be boors, but they can all read. The comments filmmakers hear are those of their friends, their eminent critics, their intelligent and educated patrons; they remain largely unaware of the illiterate response to what they are doing, and perhaps never really confront the more primitive resources of film.

Unfortunately the sociology of moviegoing has been left largely in the hands of sociologists, which means that most of it is unreadable. I have never read anything good on the world of cheap movies, second-run theaters, drive-ins, or any of the differences in gestalt that an inveterate movie-tripper will encounter in pursuit of his kicks. I do know that from the standpoint of the bad-movie head America has changed a lot in the last decade. There has been a marked increase in modest and fashionable theaters, where popcorn is either confined to the lobby or forbidden altogether. The two most invidious developments, however, have been the increase in saturation bookings and the pornography boom. It was not by accident that I chose Times Square for my little glut of junk films; there is no other place left in America where one can see seventeen different non-pornographic films in a weekend without doing an immense amount of driving around.

Times Square’s two great rivals in terms of cheap film resources were Market Street in San Francisco and downtown L.A., both now faded badly. Downtown L.A. has been ceded to the Mexicans, who deserve better, and most of its theaters show Spanish-language films now. Market Street, whose theater life has always been the most spectral in America, has its specters still, only now most of them are watching sex films—long since a grinding bore. Not the least of the reasons I have come to despise pornography is that it has virtually wiped out second-run movies in America; scores of theaters that once had interesting reruns now show nothing but pudendagra. Even drive-ins, once respectable gathering places for the lower-middle class, have started closing their playgrounds on certain nights and running what might be called foreplay films, a genre slightly dirtier than the old-fashioned skin flick and slightly cleaner than hard-core hump and grind.

Startled as I am to find myself turning censor, I find this really too much. There ought to be some place left in America where one can sit in the car and eat junk and watch the wrestling match in the car to the right or the family fight in the car to the left, or the horses galloping across the screen, or the vapor trail of jets flying into the dusk, or teenagers polishing the chrome on their dragsters during the comedy, or something besides endless sequences of foreplay, with a dissolve just prior to intermission. Plenty of drive-ins now offer Saturday night specials of six such films, heavy fondling from dusk until dawn. I have never felt up to investigating one of these, but I probably ought to sometime, just to see who is still sitting there at 4 A.M.

During my recent movie-trip I stepped into three Times Square porno houses and came out feeling darkly misanthropic. The first and most depressing was something called Eroticon, a musty relic of days when pornography had to be disguised as sociology. It was a kind of interview pornography, in which a drone bee went around interviewing the various queens of the sexual revolution. Between the interviews one got to see various actions illustrative of the many deviants of the sens genital. This film and the two others left me with the firm impression that what pornography has really contributed to film art is a kind of heightened seediness, a quality which the masterpieces of the realistic school have yet to approach. It may simply be that the world’s least attractive people make pornographic films; or it may be, as they used to hint in Sunday School, that sexual excess produces bad complexions; or it may only be that the film stock is unusually cheap, but whatever the reason, the fact remains that most people in pornographic films look like they have measles, and visually this can be a downer.

This transcendent seediness has been a distinguishing feature of all the pornographic films I have seen except one, that one being the famous Candy Barr movie, which can be seen today in an anthology film called The History of the Blue Movie. That little film shines with something. It might be that what gives it its unique light is Candy Barr herself; in those days she was a young woman of unusual grace, quick humor and a kind of undauntable playfulness. Unselfconsciousness, some have called it, but I disagree; ladies that sexy are never, so far as I know, without an acute and ever-present sense of self. What Candy Barr had was a quality of debauched innocence—which, after all, is part of the classic vocabulary of pornography—combined with an engaging and quite mature womanly ruthlessness about getting what she wanted. Also, she was a fine dancer; she moves beautifully. She is never still, never caught; expressive though she is, she is also elusive. She has the man, and the man has a lot of fun, with and through the courtesy of Miss Candy Barr, who has herself.

It is a strange, accidental film, one has to think. A lady of some ambiance engages in a happy bit of carnal play, and it leaves one a little triste, rarest of feelings to get from a blue movie. There is enough fiber to Candy Barr’s affections to give one something of the sense of temporality that is, on occasion, a part of sex itself—the sense that gates open but to close, and that what is most fine is also most temporary. No other pornographic film I know conveys such a sense of the lift and droop of life. It is a small but classic example of a film transcending its intentions, through the favor of a spirited lady.

Certainly nothing comparable occurs in Deep Throat, despite the critical raves it has enjoyed from Screw magazine. A movie whose heroine has her clitoris in her throat might be said to telegraph its basic strategy, which in this case it certainly does. Yet my experience of Deep Throat was not uninteresting. After Istanbul I had a pleasant six hours sleep and got up and strolled back to Times Square and saw Deep Throat early on a Sunday afternoon. I felt relaxed, clearheaded and completely neutral, and in that I seemed to be at one with the rest of the audience, which consisted largely of middle-aged couples, most of them very well dressed (it cost $5), most of them obviously married. Deep Throat was in its way the Godfather of American pornography, the best, technically, that the porno industry could do, and when it began the audience gave it thoughtful attention. It was to an unusual degree an audience without a sense of shame; unusual because the atmosphere in skin flicks or smut films is usually thick with guilt and frustration, even in these liberated days. This heavy sense of group unhappiness has kept me out of sex films for years. I love to be part of audiences that are enjoying themselves, and a characteristic of the sex film is that instead of pulling the audience together into a unit, as good films or good-bad will usually do, it fragments the audience into X number of lonely human units who are, for the moment, as unhappy in their fantasies as they are in their realities. Movies designed for the furtherance of masturbation rather than love-making produce a collective isolation of the most oppressive sort; but in Deep Throat, surprisingly, this was largely absent. It was a reflective, even ratiocinative audience, and what it was looking for in Deep Throat was not immediately easy to know. When the movie began, however, the audience was definitely open to something. Thirty minutes later it had closed; we were by then so many apathetic clams. I don’t believe that anyone in the theater was the slightest bit titillated by what was happening on the screen. No one had become hostile, but there was in the theater a group apathy of a weight I had previously only experienced in certain classrooms. It was not hopelessness, exactly, or even depression; most of the people there looked too mature to be very depressed by anything as junky as Deep Throat. The mood was one of mild disappointment, which the endless images of fellatio did nothing to alleviate. To this audience, at least, Throat choked, and many, like myself, left long before it was over, $5 or no.

They left, I think, because of the commonness, the ordinariness of what they were seeing. There again were the bad complexions, the not overly attractive people. Deep Throat bored because it lacked beauty, and here we draw nearer to the point of this investigation. Do people go to movies seeking Truth, or seeking Illusion? I certainly go seeking Illusion, and I would bet that most of those who saw Deep Throat with me do too. Images of gods have largely vanished from our iconography, but the next thing to gods are Stars, and the next thing to Stars are Beautiful People. The movies, in a way, have teased us all these years; what they have always seemed to promise is that sooner or later we would get to see the Stars making love. The people who came to see Deep Throat that afternoon weren’t kids, nor were they over the hill. Most of them had probably do...