Living the Dream

PREFACE

After working in Hollywood as a set lighting technician for the past four years I came across a dusty box from college in my parent’s garage. As I flipped through the folders and binders I realized I had come across a small treasure: all the notes, research and essays I had written in film school. In the gray light of a New York winter afternoon, my eyes caressed papers excitedly discussing the films of master directors like John Ford, Howard Hawks, Federico Fellini, Andrei Tarkovsky, Jean-Luc Godard, and many more. The essays, basically caffeine induced film theory and criticism papers, were an interesting read especially from the vantage-point of living the dream of making movies in Hollywood. I have been extremely fortunate since writing these essays to have worked on films with exceptional directors and actors whom I've admired and studied, such as John Frankenheimer, Clint Eastwood, Sam Raimi, Kevin Costner, Dennis Hopper, Barry Levinson, Faye Dunaway, and Michael Cain, to name a few. I have been able to combine the countless hours of lecture, critique, study, theory, and writing on the aloof university level with personal vivid experiences on movie sets where I was not only able to study firsthand the complex process of a director creating a movie, but to be a part of that process as well. Reading through these essays today gives me a greater appreciation for my studies at Boston University simply because the knowledge I acquired there has allowed me to appreciate my on-set experiences here in Hollywood to a much greater degree in my aspirations of becoming a writer/director.

Who exactly is a director and what exactly does he do? The answer is a paradox of simplistic complexity varying with the opinion of a speaker. When I recently asked director Barry Levinson what he thought the essential function of a director was, he told me that a director must be able to fuse together all the technical and political tools of the filmmaking process with the less concrete tools of drawing out the best possible performance from an actor in order to ultimately tell a compelling story. Shortcomings in any of these three areas will certainly detract from a film. On the set of "For Love Of The Game," I found myself chatting with director Sam Raimi in between setups, and took the opportunity to ask him what he thought was the best path in becoming a director. His answer was basically, "shoot, shoot, shoot-- it doesn’t matter if it’s on film or video, just shoot." There's definitely value in that school of thought, as Sam has proved with his own career, although I can't help to think of Orson Welles' preparation prior to directing his first film at the age of 25, "Citizen Kane." As I recall from a lecture class, Orson acquired a print of John Ford's then recently released masterpiece "Stagecoach," and viewed it countless times studying every aspect of John Ford's work from the editing, story development, and sound score, to the lighting, camera angles, and photography techniques. In essence, Orson Welles was a student in the world’s first film theory class. Those studies continue to resound today as "Citizen Kane" remains as one of cinemas greatest examples of excellence some seventy years later.

The nagging question I've been haunted by these past years of working on film sets is this: how much preliminary planning on a creative level by a director actually comes to fruition by the time he tells the script supervisor to circle and print takes three and seven, let alone whether or not the final cut of the movie has any reflection on his wishes as the director. The once clear naïve notion of who and what a director is, as seen through the eyes of a film student admiring ideal examples like Truffaut, Hawks, Ford, and Fellini, was crushed as I began working on film sets and watched directors, both big and small, being manipulated and forced into compromise and submission by apparently everyone around him from bond companies and budgets, to cinematographers and actors, not to mention unions, location managers, publicists, extras casting, the weather, the peanut gallery in video village, and the worst of them all, the visiting writer/producer who hasn’t the nerve to take the directors chair himself. Even if you weed out small-time directors who are obviously kept on short leashes by a team of puppeteers and focus your attention on A-list directors who are Hollywood "Players," the same rules apply simply on a grander more complex stage. It doesn't become a question of whether or not a director can make it through nine months of work from preproduction to editing without making compromises, but how many compromises he can avoid making in an attempt to maintain his initial vision. Yes, of course filmmaking is undoubtedly a unique artistic /technical endeavor in that it is truly a team effort with many individual elements being focussed together where the word "compromise" cannot be considered a negative element, rather a necessary one. Ultimately, though, when a director walks out of the world premier screening of his film and waves and smiles at all the cameras, only he can answer honestly to himself whether or not he achieved a reflection of the vision he long ago set out to create.

The question remains: do the great films of yesteryear that are collected by film lovers and taught in film schools across the country have an equal in today's cinematic world? Yes, I think they do. What does that say about today's great filmmakers? Mostly, like any form of art, directors try to incorporate into their own films elements which they have admired on some level from other films, just as Orson Welles did with John Fords' "Stagecoach." Directors Walter Hill, Clint Eastwood, and Lawrence Kasdan certainly remind us of John Ford, Sergio Leone, Howard Hawks, and Sam Peckinpah. Some will say Quentin Tarantino is a modern day Sam Fuller, and John Woo openly tips his stylish guns to John Melville. The Awesome Four of the 1970's film schools--Spielberg, Lucas, Coppola, and Scorsese--expanded beyond Hollywood's archetypal films and collectively embraced the whole of cinematic world history from the French New Wave and Italian Neo-Realists, to Japanese and Russian films in order to bring to the world a new standard of filmmaking excellence. If Godard and Truffaut were still writing for "Cahiers du Cinema," they would have many auteur directors to study and admire in today’s cinema.

Within the collection of essays herein, you will find an eclectic range of films, both foreign and American, dating from as early as John Ford’s "Stagecoach" in 1939, to as recently as Edward Zwick's "Legends of the Fall" in 1995. The essays, from a purely observational point of view of one who at the time of completing the collegiate writings had never set foot upon a film set, comment upon a director's use of technical filmmaking capabilities in his attempt to express his own artistry in telling a story to his audience. How much "truth" is in the theories and observations throughout these essays? Only the directors of the discussed films can answer that, and, unfortunately, you'd need a Weegee Board to get in touch with most of them. What remains is an educated assumption of what the director's intention was in working towards his vision. None the less, the films discussed are all exceptional examples of their genre, whether Western, Action, or Drama, and afford the reader with insightful explorations of what may have been the director's intentions.