J. J. KANDEL: THE HURT LOCKER

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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."

KARL MALDEN: NY TIMES JULY 3, 2009

July 3, 2009

An Appraisal

A Character Actor of Intensified Normalness

By A. O. SCOTT

It’s a face that you can’t help noticing. Not handsome in the usual movie-star way, by any means, but — befitting a man who defined what it meant to be a character actor — full of character. The jutting chin and oft-broken nose curve toward each other as though affixed to a Punch-and-Judy puppet, but Karl Malden’s face was not made for comedy. Like his voice, pitched between a honk and a growl, it was an instrument full of gravity and dignity, capable of showing strong measures of menace, passion and hurt.

Like most people who came of age after Mr. Malden’s big-screen heyday, I first saw that face on television, in a series of terrifying dramas about vacations gone awry that doubled as advertisements for American Express traveler’s checks. In the wake of a mishap involving American tourists menaced by brazen thieves, surly waiters, incompetent gendarmes or other nasty foreigners, Mr. Malden would stride into the frame in a trim suit and a sharp fedora, a figure at once reassuring and slightly threatening, an embodiment of probity, seriousness and practical no-nonsense Americanism. If you had to leave home — maybe not the best idea, all things considered — you’d better have a brusque, fatherly guy like this to back you up and bail you out.

This patriarchal capitalist pitchman persona was a variation on Mike Stone, the detective Mr. Malden played in the 1970s on “The Streets of San Francisco.” That show’s clean, mean sensibility holds up well against the arty forensics of the current “CSI”-dominated network crime-drama landscape. For most of the program’s run, Mr. Malden’s foil and partner was Michael Douglas, and the generational and stylistic contrast between them — counterculture versus old school, slick against gruff, pretty-boy next to plug-ugly — is no less satisfying for being a little too easy.

But Mr. Malden, who died Wednesday at 97, specialized in being uneasy, playing men who are variously worried, angry, disappointed and defeated. Like many other actors who distinguish themselves in supporting roles and whose charisma consists of a kind of intensified ordinariness, he has often been referred to as an everyman. That doesn’t seem quite right, though. In his best movie roles, mainly in films directed by Elia Kazan, Mr. Malden is specifically the other man, the guy defined partly by his lack of certain attributes abundantly present in the protagonist. The other man is never ruthless, or dangerous, or dashing, or cool. His regret may be that he could never have been a contender, but he makes up for it with a stoical sincerity that is all the more affecting for being so easy to discount.

Twice, in “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “On the Waterfront,” the magnetic protagonist was Marlon Brando, and in embodying Brando’s antithesis Mr. Malden achieved an unusual kind of heroism. In “Streetcar” he was Mitch, fumbling suitor for the favors of Vivien Leigh’s Blanche DuBois, his awkward gentleness a quiet rebuke to Stanley Kowalski’s brutish self-confidence. And in “Waterfront” his Father Barry, full of righteous rage and social concern, serves as the angel on Terry Malloy’s shoulder, a figure of conviction and moral clarity in a world lousy with corruption and double-dealing.

Mr. Malden’s blunt features, combined with the subtlety of his craft, helped provide a crucial ballast of realism in Kazan’s feverish fables of American life. His finest, strangest and most heartbreaking performance came in “Baby Doll,” in which he plays Archie Lee Meighan, the dull-witted, sexually frustrated (to put it mildly) proprietor of a decaying cotton plantation who is driven around the bend by the caprices of his child bride (Carroll Baker) and the machinations of a wily business rival (Eli Wallach). The film, like “Streetcar” a collaboration between Kazan and Tennessee Williams, is a pungent hothouse, ripe with free-floating eroticism and Southern Gothic motifs. That Mr. Malden seems so manifestly out of place in this environment — baffled, earnest and sweaty, a can of tomatoes dropped into a flower garden — is exactly what makes him so perfect in the film, which depends on his anxious, uncomprehending discomfort.

Mr. Malden’s achievement as an actor was both substantial and modest. The paradox of great character actors is that they are at once adaptable and unmistakable, irreducibly individual yet able to be typecast. And Karl Malden, especially in the 1950s, was one of the best. No other guy could ever be the other guy the way he could.(Link)

FROM LA TIMES: PRODUCERS

From the Los Angeles Times

Producers struggle to stay productive

Michael London, Gary Lucchesi, Marshall Herskovitz and Gale Ann Hurd discuss current challenges in making films.

By John Horn

June 3, 2009

What does a movie producer really do?

Before you start with the jokes, the Producers Guild of America wants to have its say. This weekend, the PGA will present its first-ever Produced By Conference, an open-to-the-public (although sold out) gathering on the Sony Pictures lot with seminars on such topics as independent film financing, digital rights, viral marketing and -- why not? -- booking private jets.

Ahead of the three-day conference, kicking off Friday, four experienced producers sat down to discuss the many challenges they face in these turbulent economic times: Studios are cutting producer deals, taking fewer risks, and finding more reasons than ever to say no. Our panel -- Groundswell Films’ Michael London ("Sideways," "Milk"), Lakeshore Entertainment’s Gary Lucchesi ("Underworld," "Crank"), Marshall Herskovitz ("Blood Diamond," "The Last Samurai") and Gale Anne Hurd (" The Incredible Hulk," "Terminator") -- covers an array of filmmaking styles.

Here are edited highlights from the conversation:

Q: What does it say about your business when well-reviewed, star-filled adult dramas like "Duplicity" and "State of Play" don't work?

London: I think there is something sobering about it. I think right now there is a premium on escapist material that makes people feel good. I don't believe for a moment that adult movies are going away, but it definitely has given me pause -- not to abandon the things I am most inspired by, but to make sure I am not out of step with what people are feeling.

Lucchesi: Having once been a studio president [at Paramount] and trying to turn the business into a science, I know that it's impossible. Last fall, I looked up the top movies of the '30s, during the depression. They were the Marx Brothers, comedies, escapist movies, "King Kong" was big then. You had "It Happened One Night," so you had romantic comedies. And then you had musicals, and then gangster movies like "White Heat." So, there were certain types of genres that were working during a recession.

Q: Is the passage through which you have to squeeze narrower than before? Gary, your last two films were "Crank: High Voltage" and "Underworld: Rise of the Lycans." Is there a future where you make Philip Roth's "American Pastoral"?

Lucchesi: Before that, we made [the adaptation of Roth's "The Dying Animal"] "Elegy." We're a very practical company. We're going to keep making commercial movies and then occasionally we're going to make those movies that are very, very difficult to make.

London: My company has worked primarily in adult drama. And right now there is such an enormous challenge in getting studios to assign a distribution slot to a movie that they perceive as belonging to this shrinking market. Right now, the number of distributors has shrunk dramatically, and of the distributors that are still in business, they are reserving those distribution slots for movies they feel appeal to the so-called four-quadrant [young and old males and females] audience. It's hard to give them a rationale to devote one of their precious eight or nine distribution slots to one of our movies instead of holding it back for a tent-pole, a comic-book, pre-sold franchise.

Herskovitz: There's a structural problem that permeates the entire media business in America, which is consolidation. In the last 15 years there has been this very interesting opening up of the movie business because you could make films independently -- there were a lot of distributors, there were a lot of different ways to get a movie out there. That's starting to shrink now, and now there's starting to be a bottleneck in the distribution area. This happened to us last year with " Defiance." We had independent financing, all we needed was a domestic distributor -- which was very hard to find. We finally found one, they did a great job, but they were the last -- we wouldn't have gotten the film made if it wasn't for them.

Q: Why was it so hard?

Herskovitz: Companies fear taking risks. The perception was that it was a World War II Holocaust film, and therefore would be difficult to find an audience. A lot of people said "Sorry, no thanks. Been there, done that."

Q: Does that mean marketing is now more important than ever?

Hurd: Everything really is about marketing. What is going to get people to leave their homes to go see a film? The industry has changed. It used to be that a film didn't need to have a huge Friday night, but now everyone looks at the grosses Saturday morning. And that determines a lot: "Well, that movie bombed, I'm not going to go see it."

Q: When you start making a movie, do you have to know how you'll sell it before you even shoot a foot of film?

Lucchesi: I think the process of getting a green light is so complicated that you pretty much have to know who your audience is before you start shooting.

Herskovitz: The audience is inundated by inputs from the culture -- from television, online and films. Marketing has become so difficult -- to penetrate the clutter. And you don't always succeed, even if you have good materials. So I have to know what is going to be the imagery or the sensibility of the film that will attract people.

Q: When studios are less willing to take risks, how does that affect you?

Lucchesi: When Universal greenlit "Duplicity" and "State of Play," it also was greenlighting "Fast & Furious." They didn't know that one wasn't going to work, that one was going to overperform and another was going to underperform. They didn't know that. No one can read the future. But producers are the greatest optimists in the world. I mean, that's who we really are. We are the people that find some material and actually imagine that it could be a movie. What are the odds of that? And then not only do we imagine it can be a movie, we imagine it could be a hit, and maybe even win an award. We are the ones with the machetes going through the Amazon jungle to the places we've never been before.

Q: Can you try to crystal ball the national mood in two years? What do you think people will want to see?

Hurd: I hope my movies!

Lucchesi: My gut tells me that people are desperate for emotion.

Q: How has industry belt-tightening affected you? Does it change who you hire and how much you pay them?

Herskovitz: The studio belt-tightening has had a direct affect on many producers because they cut producer deals. Producers not only create but also nurture intellectual properties for the five, seven, 10 years it takes to get movies made. I don't think we can afford to lose that as an industry. The studios have to cut their overhead, they have to deal with their bottom line. But in terms of the future, that army of producers that was creating new properties is going away. I think that is a problem for all of us.

Q: But don't good ideas rise to the top?

Hurd: What's a good idea? Who could have predicted "Slumdog Millionaire"?

Herskovitz: The reality is that most producers are financially struggling and being driven out of the business, and you have fewer and fewer independent producers. There are a whole bunch of young people trying to come up, but in terms of experienced, independent producers just trying to get by, it's very, very difficult right now, and a lot of them are being driven out of the business. If you begin to say, "The American film industry is starting to look less creative," you have to look at the causes of that in a lot of different areas. And one of them could be that it's really difficult now for creative people to get a movie made.

Q: Are there now more awkward conversations with actors about how they are not going to earn what they are used to?

Lucchesi: Here's something that I learned as an agent. Many years ago, clients would do movies and television and they would also go back and do New York theater, and make maybe $500 a week. With the more art-type movies, it's very easy to go to somebody and say, "We know you get X amount of dollars for your big studio movie, but this is a different animal, this is like you are doing equity theater, and you've got to cut your price to do it." Most people get that.

London: I think that everyone is so cognizant of the world we live in. I'm sure there's a lot of agents who are unhappy about the fall in that pay scale, but anyone who's got their eyes open recognizes that what's important now is to keep working.

Q: Michael, you're dependent on outside financing, and that money seems to be in jeopardy too.

London: From a business perspective, I'd like to have a successful business that rewards my investors and keeps my company afloat. But we're in a culture now, a movie culture, where so little premium is placed on original ideas, as the studios veer more and more toward this notion of something that has a pre-sold element, whether it's a comic book, or a remake of a movie or a television series. Well, what do we do? What have we all done our whole lives but find and champion and support original ideas? The truth about producer deals being cut is that [the studios] are not interested in original ideas. But you are talking to a group of people who when we leave here will go to a meeting, or lunch, or a movie this evening and fall in love with something that completely defies the analysis that we are talking about here.

Hurd: Let's go back to "Slumdog Millionaire," perhaps the most profitable film out there. If you start thinking, "Who is the audience for that? A film that takes place in India?" It was clearly a struggle to get it made, and yet, if you had gambled on that film you would have the greatest return of any film last year.

Q: "Milk" won a couple of Oscars, but didn't do all that well at the box office.

London: We had certainly thought at many points that it might follow more in the path of something like "Brokeback Mountain" and some of the other Oscar movies that sort of exploded. "Milk" bore a certain burden in terms of its seriousness and its themes, and its perception in terms of the audience that it spoke to. The pop culture has become really unpredictable and really resistant. People are not going to want to stop going to see movies about grown-ups. They might be slightly different movies about grown-ups, they might not be $45-million movies about grown-ups, they may not be led by movie stars, but people are always going to want to see those good stories.

Herskovitz: There's no doubt in anybody's mind that some of the above-the-line people in this business have been overpaid for a very long time to the point where it was very deleterious for the business itself. In fact, the business-model movie, when you look at it from the outside, often looks a little bit crazy where you have a star making four or five times more profit on the movie than the studio did. The studio risked all the money and the star risked zero. That's just not a sustainable model, and it's been one of those things that's been very hard to talk about.

Hurd: The interesting thing is that the tent-pole films don't generally star the top box-office names. Having been part of negotiations, they're very tough on actor compensation because there's a dynamic there, which is for actors to raise their fees for the next film, they need a huge breakout box-office hit. So the trade-off there is, well, if you star in this tent pole we may even pay you less than your quote. If there's a next film, you'll get a significant increase.

Q: Does that mean you're having to spend more time trying figure out deals than work on scripts?

London: In the independent world, we have to do it ourselves, and that's a nightmare. It's just like the movie business has become this incredibly intricate house of cards with so many different elements. And unless you're professionally devoted to spending morning, noon and night figuring that out, it's complicated and yet it's important to understand.

Herskovitz: But let's remember that no matter how odious it is, relatively speaking it's a small part of the process.

Hurd: On the other hand, if you are too close to the process, you are blamed for having an actor unhappy with the compensation package. Then it's your fault, as opposed to the person in business affairs.

Q: What are the things that take up your days that you would not have wasted more than a few minutes doing five or 10 years ago?

Lucchesi: It's the panning for gold that's the hardest part -- you wade through a ton of material. You know, you don't have pitches anymore, so you've got a lot of spec scripts and sometimes there might be a kernel of an idea in a spec script, even though it may not be completely well-written, that you feel is worth chasing.

Herskovitz: It is very difficult to pitch these days. I spent 20 years going in a room and telling stories and making deals based on a story that I told. But we're not in that business anymore. Right now there is a project that we're trying to sell, and there's really no way to sell it other than tell the story in the room. It's an amazing, wonderful story, and it's a struggle now. And I feel like there's a potential this great thing will be lost because that means of getting that development money is gone. They don't want to hear a pitch because they are not going to pay to have a script written.

Q: How do you think technology is going to change your business?

Herskovitz: I fear that we are on the precipice right now of . . . a huge rise in piracy in America. I think that the era of illegal downloading of films is about to begin in a major way. Beyond that, what I've seen in the last two years in terms of delivery systems is utter confusion. And I think that nobody knows anything yet. I think that what's clear is that people want to go out to the movies and will continue to want to go out to the movies for a long time to come. I think that we just don't know how this whole multi-platform thing is going to sort itself out. And everybody that I talk to just throws up their hands and says, you know, "I can look at four different models and I don't know which one is going to work."

Lucchesi: Had "Milk" come out on video on demand eight weeks after its theatrical release, would it have done better? I don't know, but I'd be curious about that.

Q: What gives you reasons to be optimistic?

Hurd: What I find exciting is that my 17-year-old daughter and her friends don't want to give up going out to movies. Their choice of films is much wider than we would expect. They get excited about some foreign films -- and they forget that they are reading subtitles. We are at times underestimating the younger filmgoers and what entertainment interests them.

London: The indie world is not as healthy as we'd all like, but there is a huge wave of new directors that are creating a lot of excitement, and audiences are excited about movies that take them out of their day-to-day lives.

Herskovitz: There's a huge diversity in the kinds of movies being made, and that allows for change to happen, and that to me is the healthiest sign.

Hurd: Being at Comic-Con last summer, everyone knew at that point the response to Robert Pattinson, in Comic-Con, heralded a new star is born. It was unbelievable, I haven't seen a reaction like that since the Beatles. . . .

Q: Don't you think also that there has been a shift in the traditional notion of stars? The studios are more open to new faces, new kinds of stars. Obviously, we cycle through them a little more quickly too, but it feels like the traditional movie star notion is changing.

London: Does everybody get that, though? Do the studios get that? Do the agents get that?

Hurd: It's harder to quantify that now. If you look at television and you look at ratings, that's not necessarily capturing the audience that is viewing a particular TV series, especially something like "Gossip Girl." My daughter couldn't even tell you what time it's on, she watches it online, on demand, and every one of the actors in "Gossip Girl" is a huge star to her and her friends, which is not something that you can quantify so easily just based on . . .

Q: It seems as if the studios care most about concepts -- "Transformers," " Star Trek," " Harry Potter."

London: I think execution is king. I really do. I saw "Star Trek" last week -- I'm not in particular a tent-pole movie guy -- and I loved it. It was alive and funny and moving and imaginative, hot and smart.

Herskovitz: A lot of these high-concept movies fail when they are not done well. This notion that concept is king is already 25 years old. I think the audience is more discerning about it now. But there is a danger here that is analogous to the auto industry. More and more of the studios have placed their bets on these high-concept films, but there could be a moment where people just get tired of those films. My fear is the studios are essentially getting rid of the apparatus for creation of new content.

john.horn@latimes.com

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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."

FROM NY TIMES : NEO-NEO REALISM

Photo: Oscilloscope Laboratories, of Kelly Reichardt on the set of ‘‘Wendy and Lucy.’’

(CLICK ON IMAGE FOR PRINTER FRIENDLY VERSION OF ARTICLE)

March 22, 2009 Neo-Neo Realism By A.O. SCOTT

IT IS NOW ALMOST A YEAR SINCE “Wendy and Lucy” played in Cannes — not a watershed moment in the history of cinema, perhaps, but a quiet harbinger. Kelly Reichardt’s third feature, about the struggles of a young woman and her dog stranded in an Oregon town en route to Alaska, was certainly among the more admired films in a strong festival, where it showed out of competition. But by the time it opened in New York last December, the movie, a modest, quiet, 80-minute study in loneliness and desperation, seemed like something more — not so much a premonition of hard times ahead as a confirmation that they had arrived.

“Wendy and Lucy,” with Michelle Williams in one title role (the other belonged to Reichardt’s dog), had a successful art-house run and found its way onto many critics’ year-end best-of lists (including mine). There was some talk of an Oscar nomination for Williams, who was so believably ordinary in her look and so rigorously un-actressy in her manner that you could easily forget her celebrity. But “Wendy and Lucy,” released by Oscilloscope Laboratories, a small and ambitious new distributor started by Adam Yauch, a member of the Beastie Boys, would have looked a little awkward alongside the other Academy Award nominees. It’s true that the big winner, “Slumdog Millionaire,” concerns itself with poverty and disenfranchisement, but it also celebrates, both in its story and in its exuberant, sentimental spirit, the magical power of popular culture to conquer misery, to make dreams come true. And the major function of Oscar night is to affirm that gauzy, enchanting notion.

The world of “Wendy and Lucy” offers little in the way of enchantment but rather a different, more austere kind of beauty. And while Wendy, at the end of the film, is poignantly, even devastatingly alone, the film itself now seems to be in good company. This spring, as the blockbuster machinery shifts gears from “Watchmen” to “Wolverine,” a handful of small movies from relatively young directors are setting out to expand, modestly but with notable seriousness, the scope of American filmmaking.

“Goodbye Solo” is the third feature directed by Ramin Bahrani, a New York-based filmmaker whose previous movies, “Man Push Cart” and “Chop Shop,” explored corners of the city rarely acknowledged by Hollywood. In the weeks following its debut at the end of this month, Bahrani’s movie will be joined by — and, given the beleaguered state of distribution for noncommercial movies these days, may have to compete with — Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s “Sugar” and So Yong Kim’s “Treeless Mountain,” each a second feature. All of these films — like “Wendy and Lucy” and Lance Hammer’s “Ballast,” which came out last fall — were highlights of the 2008 film-festival calendar, showing up at Cannes, Sundance, Toronto and elsewhere.

The lives they illuminate, of fictional characters most often played by nonactors from similar backgrounds, are not commonly depicted on screen: the Senegalese cabdriver in Winston-Salem, N.C., whose friendship with a customer is at the center of “Goodbye Solo”; the aspiring baseball player in “Sugar” who is transplanted from the Dominican Republic to rural Iowa; the African-American shopkeeper in a sparsely populated stretch of the Mississippi Delta whose grief is the dominant mood of “Ballast”; the two very young Korean girls abandoned by their mother in an unfamiliar provincial town in “Treeless Mountain.” But these people and their situations are nonetheless recognizable, familiar on a basic human level even if their particular predicaments are not. And if the kind of movie they inhabit is not entirely new — the common ancestor that established their species identity is a well-known Italian bicycle thief — their unassuming arrival on a few screens nonetheless seems vital, urgent and timely.

WHAT KIND OF MOVIES do we need now? It’s a question that seems to arise almost automatically in times of crisis. It was repeatedly posed in the swirl of post-9/11 anxiety and confusion, and the consensus answer, at least among studio executives and the entertainment journalists who transcribe their insights, was that, in the wake of such unimaginable horror, we needed fantasy, comedy, heroism. In practice, the response turned out to be a little more complicated — some angry political documentaries and earnest wartime melodramas made it into movie theaters during the Bush years, and a lot of commercial spectacles arrived somber in mood and heavy with subtext— but such exceptions did little to dent the conventional wisdom.

And as a new set of worries and fears has crystallized in recent months — lost jobs and homes, corroded values and vanished credit — the dominant cultural oracles have come to pretty much the same conclusions. Remember the ’30s, when we danced through the Depression with Fred Astaire and Busby Berkeley and giggled amid the gloom with Lubitsch and the Marx Brothers? (Not many of us do, of course, which makes this kind of selective memory easier to promote.) Then as now, what we wanted most was to forget our troubles. In recession, as in war — and also, conveniently, in times of peace or prosperity — the movies we evidently need are the ones that offer us the possibility, however fanciful or temporary, of escape.

Maybe so. But what if, at least some of the time, we feel an urge to escape from escapism? For most of the past decade, magical thinking has been elevated from a diversion to an ideological principle. The benign faith that dreams will come true can be hard to distinguish from the more sinister seduction of believing in lies. To counter the tyranny of fantasy entrenched on Wall Street and in Washington as well as in Hollywood, it seems possible that engagement with the world as it is might reassert itself as an aesthetic strategy. Perhaps it would be worth considering that what we need from movies, in the face of a dismaying and confusing real world, is realism.

In 1940, Otis Ferguson, the plain-spoken film critic of The New Republic, saw unbounded democratic potential in this still-young art form’s connection to the everyday. “Like the novel,” he wrote, “the fiction film is wide open to anyone who can use it to advantage. Unlike the novel . . . it has taken all of actual life to be its province.” By “all of actual life,” Ferguson meant the ordinary modes of existence idealized in the political idioms of the time as belonging to the common man. The faithful representation of “the majority of people” was the very substance of what Ferguson grandly called “the promise of the movie in America.”

But in the decades that followed, American movies had other, gaudier promises to keep. Which is not to say that realism was altogether forsaken as a practice or an ideal — it strutted its hour on the Broadway stage with Arthur Miller and Elia Kazan in the ’40s and ’50s, and some of its theatrical cachet migrated briefly from there to Hollywood. But more radical and innovative cinematic explorations of “actual life” occurred elsewhere, most notably in Italy, where filmmakers during and after the Second World War, driven by a mixture of necessity and inspiration, invented Neorealism.

Their methods included the casting of nonprofessional actors, often portraying characters close to their real selves; the use of unadorned, specific locations and an absorption in the ordinary details of work, school and domesticity. Some of the first Neorealist masterpieces — Roberto Rossellini’s “Open City” and “Paisan,” for example — were stories of war staged in the immediate aftermath of the fighting. But it was in the late ’40s, a moment of economic crisis and political turmoil, that the movement achieved its characteristic form in movies like Luchino Visconti’s “Terra Trema” (1948) and Vittorio De Sica’s “Bicycle Thief” (1948), an international sensation at the time and still perhaps the single best known Neorealist work.

These movies, made by directors closely (if not always comfortably) aligned with the Italian Communist Party, concerned themselves with the plight of the poor, in Visconti’s case a family of Sicilian fishermen, in De Sica’s a Roman man fighting to keep himself, his wife and their young son from destitution. Neither “La Terra Trema” nor “The Bicycle Thief” is exactly subtle in its politics: they paint a somber picture of a society ruled by exploitation, mistrust and an imperious bureaucratic state. But if they were merely didactic — simple indictments of the system or hymns to the nobility of the proletariat — the postwar films of Visconti and De Sica would now most likely be regarded as historical curiosities rather than as artistic touchstones. Their art lies not in their messages but in their discovery of a mysterious, volatile alloy of documentary and theatrical elements. Simple, fablelike tales unfold to the beat of quotidian rhythms — the morning bustle and noontime stillness of Roman streets; the implacable movement of the tides on a primordial stretch of coastline — and the faces of characters show not only emotion but also the natural reserve of people whose dignity is at stake. The “star” of “The Bicycle Thief,” a steelworker named Lamberto Maggiorani, is hesitant and inarticulate in ways that capture, with a gravity few professionals could approximate, the character’s struggle to maintain some control over his circumstances.

That character, Antonio Ricci, wants to work and finds a job pasting movie posters to empty stretches of roadside wall. He gets the job because he owns a bicycle, and when it is stolen, everything else starts to unravel — Antonio’s status as a father and a husband, his confidence in the efficacy of the law and the decency of other people, his ethical grounding. Antonio’s dream of autonomy, humble as it may be, is cruelly untenable — a fate he shares with the fishermen of “La Terra Trema,” whose attempts to own and operate their boats founder in the face of social injustice, poor planning and plain bad luck. Though these stories end in disappointment, they are somehow the opposite of depressing. Neorealism rests equally on the acknowledgment that life is hard and the recognition that life goes on, that there is something in human nature that will persist in the face of defeat.

In the ’50s and after, Visconti and De Sica — and Italian cinema generally — moved on, to bigger stories and more elaborate productions. The Neorealist impulse, however, proved remarkably mobile and adaptable. It might be thought of less as a style or genre than as an ethic that finds expression in various places at critical times — touching down in Bengal in the ’50s and early ’60s and infusing the work of Satyajit Ray; migrating through Brazil in the ’60s, Senegal in the ’70s and ’80s and Iran in the ’90s; surfacing in the recent waves of post-Soviet cinema from Romania to Kazakhstan. But in the United States, Neorealism has sent up only fragile shoots, popping up at the edges even of what is habitually and somewhat misleadingly known as independent film. Historians will point to outliers like “The Exiles,” Kent MacKenzie’s 1961 drama about Native Americans living in the Bunker Hill section of Los Angeles, or Charles Burnett’s “Killer of Sheep” (1977), a small masterpiece steeped in the details of black working-class life in Watts. These films, and a handful of others like them — David Gordon Green’s “George Washington” (2000) and Jim McKay’s “Our Song” (2001) serve as more recent examples — offer not only bracing, poetic views of real life but also tantalizing glimpses­ of a cinematic tradition that might have been. Their local, intimate narratives remind you that, in spite of the abundance of American movies, there is an awful lot of American life that remains off screen.

“The Exiles” and “Killer of Sheep,” long known more by reputation than firsthand, were recently revived in theaters. Burnett’s film is finally on DVD, and MacKenzie’s will be later this year. The timing of their availability — and the appreciative attention they received from critics and cinephiles — hardly seems coincidental. American film is having its Neorealist moment, and not a moment too soon.

“WHY SHOOT THIS WAY?” That was the question Ramin Bahrani, the 34-year-old director of “Man Push Cart,” “Chop Shop” and “Goodbye Solo,” asked when I sat down with him in the back corner of a West Village cafe on a frigid afternoon not long ago. It was our third meeting. Two weeks earlier, we ate lunch together at a noisy Dominican restaurant in a workaday, relatively unhipsterized corner of Williamsburg not far from his apartment, and more recently I spent most of a day following Bahrani from a classroom at Columbia University, where he was teaching a graduate course on directing, to a downtown screening room, where he was checking the color on new prints of “Goodbye Solo.” On those occasions, our conversations had ranged far and wide. We had discussed Dostoyevsky and Persian poetry, the logistics of location shooting and the mysteries of effective casting, the shortcomings of “Slumdog Millionaire” and the virtues of “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.”

But it seems we had not quite gotten to the heart of the matter, and Bahrani, politely reversing the usual protocols of journalist-subject relations, e-mailed me to request a further interview. Tall, thin and stoop-shouldered, with a calm voice and gracious demeanor that only partly disguise an almost-feverish intellectual intensity, Bahrani greeted me with the question I had been asking myself somewhat obsessively over the past few years, inspired by the appearance of movies like “Chop Shop” and “Man Push Cart” at festivals and on art-house screens. “Why realism?”

When “Man Push Cart” surfaced in 2006, those who saw it had the experience of discovering something that they couldn’t quite believe hadn’t been done before. The film follows a Pakistani immigrant named Ahmad — played by Ahmad Razvi, whom Bahrani discovered in the Midwood section of Brooklyn, home to many South Asian cabdrivers and pushcart vendors — through the dramas and routines that define his working life. Ahmad, who operates a coffee cart, is hardly an unusual figure on the streets of New York but rather the kind of guy nearly everyone who works in a Midtown office building has encountered many times. He is also a dreamer, a lover, a hustler, a former pop singer and, not incidentally, a Muslim man making his way through a city still gripped by post-9/11 anxiety.

But if “Man Push Cart” can fairly be described as an immigrant’s story, a home-front tale from the War on Terror, it is none of these things in the usual way. It is not, in other words, a parable of the melting pot or a lesson in tolerance. And even though Bahrani’s subsequent films are also about immigrants working their way toward some version of the American dream — a Dominican doing odd jobs amid the low-rent mechanics and auto-body repair technicians of Willets Point, Queens, in “Chop Shop”; an African man ferrying passengers through the North Carolina night in “Goodbye Solo” — their multiculturalism is not a theme but a fact.

Bahrani describes these characters as outsiders, but in a sense that designation is as much existential — the image conjured by the title “Man Push Cart” was inspired by Albert Camus’s “Myth of Sisyphus” — as sociological. Bahrani, whose parents emigrated from Iran before he was born, grew up in Winston-Salem, with only a few other Persian families in the area. In 1998, Bahrani went to Tehran, planning a six-week stay in his parents’ homeland, which he had never visited, and ended up living there for almost three years. He was, he says now, amazed by the complexity and energy of the city, the way it scrambled all different types of people together and forced them to deal with one another. “This is the part of New York that reminds me of Tehran,” he said to me one windy afternoon as we walked east under the train tracks in Williamsburg. He did not mean the demographic particulars — a smattering of arty establishments among the bodegas, chop shops and dollar discount stores, with blue-collar Latino blocks flanking one side of the avenue and Hasidic enclaves on the other — so much as the hectic, patchwork ambience of work and idleness, affluence and hardship.

In Tehran — whose metropolitan area has almost double the population of New York — this atmosphere was overwhelming, he said, and he tried to make his first feature there. It was going to be an urban romance, “something like what Wong Kar-wai did in ‘Fallen Angels.’ Not like an Iranian movie at all.” After Sept. 11, it proved impossible to secure financing for such a movie. Bahrani came back to America and, as he put it, instead of making “a Taiwanese-style movie in Tehran,” set about shooting “an Iranian-style movie here in New York.”

“Man Push Cart” is just that, which is to say that it shows the influence of Iranian filmmakers like Abbas Kiarostami and Amir Naderi, who refined the old Neorealist spirit through the 1990s and into the next decade. Most of the scenes in the film take place outdoors, and while there is a clear, poignant story, it takes shape not through expository dialogue but through gestures, actions and details that the camera absorbs in long, patient shots.

“Chop Shop,” released last winter, is, if anything, even more deeply Iranian in mood and method, in part because its protagonist is a child — something of a hallmark of Kiarostami’s mid-’90s work in particular — and also because it seems at once utterly naturalistic and meticulously composed. The main characters are Ale (short for Alejandro), an energetic 12-year-old, and his older sister, Izzy (short for Isamar), who comes to stay with him in his makeshift quarters above the car-repair shop where he does odd jobs. There is no back story — no flashbacks or conversations about how they arrived at this state of virtual orphanhood in the shadow of Shea Stadium — and, at first, only the whisper of a plot.

A conventional way to explain what this movie feels like is to say that it’s like a documentary, but this is misleading. To some degree, the sense of uninflected realness comes from the authenticity of the setting. Bahrani and his cast and crew spent months in the area of Willets Point, known as the Iron Triangle, and some of the workers and business owners in the neighborhood appear in the film. But Bahrani also spent a long time rehearsing with Alejandro Polanco and Isamar Gonzales, the amateur actors who play Ale and Izzy, and when it came time to shoot, he pushed them through 20 or 30 takes of each scene. Every camera movement, nearly every bit of incidental business — a plastic bag blowing along a dark, empty street like a tumbleweed; a pigeon fluttering into the frame — was blocked out, controlled, adjusted, repeated.

All of this, he explained, was in the interest of clarity — the necessity of communicating, at any given point in the story, what the characters are doing and why. It was a notion Bahrani impressed rigorously, perhaps even ruthlessly, on his students at Columbia, whose three- or four-minute scenes (drawn from longer scripts they had written) he took apart shot by shot, word by word. His insistence on the tiniest details of camera movement, expression and composition was a reminder to them — and also to me — that transparency, immediacy and a sense of immersion in life are not the automatic results of turning on a camera but rather effects achieved through the painstaking application of craft.

And movies, even as they take their audiences on virtual journeys into hidden pockets or unexplored reaches of experience, are also frequently responses to other movies. “Goodbye Solo,” for instance, is in part an answer to, or a variation on, some of the themes and problems suggested by Kiarostami’s “Taste of Cherry.” That film, which shared the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1997, explores the uneasy bond between a driver and passenger, one of whom turns out to want the other’s help in committing suicide.

A similar relationship is at the center of “Goodbye Solo,” in which Solo begins to suspect that a regular customer, a crusty old Southerner named William, is preparing for his own death. But the link between “Solo” and its precursor is not one of quotation or allusion — the viewer who has not seen Kiarostami’s movie does not miss anything essential in Bahrani’s; nor is the moviegoer who spots the connection rewarded with the self-admiring frisson that comes, say, when you decode a King Hu or Godard reference embedded in a Quentin Tarantino film.

“In Persian culture there’s something called tazmin,” Bahrani told me, “which is a longstanding tradition of poets taking one line or one beat or one idea from an earlier poem, picking it up and putting it in their own poem and going on from there.” His own borrowings are not acts of imitation or homage but rather attempts to absorb and extend what other filmmakers have done. And you can see a similar process of appropriation and modification going on in “Wendy and Lucy,” for instance, which seems to pick up an idea from De Sica’s “Umberto D” — a lost dog as symbol and symptom of an increasingly heartless society — and follow it from the bustle of Rome into the silence of the Pacific Northwest. And Reichardt’s film, based on a story by her frequent collaborator Jonathan Raymond, also shows some affinities with “Rosetta,” Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s groundbreaking and relentless 1999 film about a young working-class Belgian in a state of stubborn, futile revolt against her circumstances.

“Rosetta,” whose heroine is unforgettably vivid and not entirely sympathetic, was the movie that inspired “In Between Days,” So Yong Kim’s debut feature, an almost painfully intimate immersion in the life of a Korean girl drifting through adolescence in a wintry North American city. Kim, who started out as an experimental filmmaker, was drawn into narrative filmmaking partly through the example of her husband, Bradley Rust Gray, also a director. To make her second film, “Treeless Mountain,” Kim, who came to the United States when she was 12, returned to her family’s hometown in Korea. The story — two sisters must learn to cope with life as unwelcome wards of their moody, alcoholic aunt — had been on her mind for some time, but it was “Nobody Knows,” a 2004 film by the Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda, that persuaded her to try to bring the story to the screen. “Nobody Knows” is also about abandoned children — four kids left by their mother to fend for themselves in a small Tokyo apartment — but the inspiration Kim drew from it was as much practical as thematic. That Kore-eda managed to draw such delicate, authentic performances from very young children encouraged Kim to try something similar.

“I was in Toronto, with ‘In Between Days,’ ” Kim said in an interview, “and I saw Kore-eda, and I went up to him and asked him: ‘How did you do it? How did you work with those kids?’ ” The language barrier prevented her from getting the answer she wanted — “he was giving all these long answers, and the translator turned around and said, ‘Kore-eda san says, “Everything is good with Super 16,” ’ and that was it!” — but further research helped her figure out what to do once she found the right children. The girls who play the sisters, 5 and 7 when shooting started, did not know anything about the story they were enacting. “We set up rules, like a game or something,” Kim explained. “There were four or five rules: You can’t look at me, you can’t look at the camera, you can’t leave the set until I say ‘cut’ and you have to repeat whatever I say, with all the other rules still applying.”

From this simple, mechanical process, a luminous, poignant story takes shape. And the accessibility of the story, the vividness of the emotions within it, is an important feature of the kind of realism that Kim and her peers practice. “Treeless Mountain” is not a difficult or an obscure movie. Nor, for all its lyricism, is “Ballast,” in which Lance Hammer uses the reticence of his actors and the strangeness of the Delta landscape to lay bare complex, primal feelings of loss, loyalty and fear. And “Sugar,” Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s new movie, is in some respects a classic sports picture, its narrative engine the familiar, quintessentially American drive to make it in the big leagues. You will recognize a lot of what you see, if you take the time to look.

AN INTEREST IN MOVIES from other countries is too often, even among people who should know better, taken as a sign of snobbery, an overrefined devotion to the esoteric and the difficult. There may be some commercial benefit as well as creative satisfaction in aspiring to be the next Tarantino or Scorsese — or even the next Spike Lee, Kevin Smith or Wes Anderson. But to set out to be the next Dardenne Brothers, the next Kore-eda or the next Kiarostami is to court stares of incomprehension from your peers and polite demurrals from financial backers. American filmmakers who decline to follow the standard career path, in which a low-budget, independent debut leads to festival exposure and, eventually, work for hire in Hollywood, are themselves outsiders of a kind, subsisting on the edges of the entertainment marketplace. This marginality is a challenge for filmmakers — some of them, like poets and novelists, support themselves between projects by teaching, as Bahrani and Reichardt do. But it is also, more important, a loss for the moviegoing public, which finds itself at once glutted with choices and starved for meaning. There are so many movies. How do we know which ones matter?

Nearly every movie, good or bad, commercial or independent, asks a version of that question: What matters? It’s a big question sometimes most effectively addressed on a small scale. “Goodbye Solo” is a film that, in its final moments, contemplates death, nature and the fragility of human identity in an indifferent universe. But it is also the story of a man striving to improve his lot, to move up, quite literally, from taxi-driving to a career as a flight attendant. This ambition is not just a matter of better working conditions or more money; work is never only about those things. Solo’s upward striving is an expression of his optimism, which in turn is crucial to his sense of himself as a man, a husband and stepfather, a friend and, though he would never put it so bluntly, an American.

Similarly, the main narrative of Lance Hammer’s “Ballast,” like that of “Goodbye Solo,” is not directly concerned with money or work. It dwells on the stricken reaction of Lawrence, a stolid bear of a man (played with heartbreaking stoicism by Micheal J. Smith, another remarkable nonprofessional) to the suicide of his twin brother and his subsequent rapprochement with the brother’s son and former wife. But at the center of this family drama is the store Lawrence and his brother owned, a small commercial enterprise whose continued existence becomes a tangible metaphor for enigmatic, ungraspable questions of life and death.

Money is never just money; a job is always more than a job. In “Chop Shop,” young Ale is saving to buy an old van that he plans to convert into a food-vending truck, in effect an expanded version of Ahmad’s coffee cart in “Man Push Cart.” Once this happens, everything will fall into place; Ale and his sister will have the comfort and security that is so evidently lacking in their lives. Wendy in “Wendy and Lucy” is, like Ale, almost entirely preoccupied with money. The notebooks where you might expect to find a young woman’s spiritual reflections or earnest love poems are instead filled with numbers. Wendy is budgeting her supply of cash, calculating how much will go for food and gas. Once she reaches Alaska, Wendy hopes to find work in a fish-canning factory. After that, everything will be fine.

The young Dominican pitcher in “Sugar” may seem, at first, to harbor a loftier, more glittery dream — he is working for a shot at the major leagues — but it is based in some pretty earthbound desires. He wants to help his mother finish a small addition to her low-ceilinged, cinder-block house, and to give her a new table. He might also want fame, glory, money and women — he is 19, after all — but these are expressions of that basic impulse to get ahead.

I don’t want to spoil any plots, but if you have read this far, it will hardly surprise you to learn that, in these movies, dreams generally do not come true. Antonio Ricci never did recover his bicycle.

“They all of them, in a way, can be connected to the myth of Sisyphus,” Rahmin Bahrani said to me, as our conversation ranged from his own films to those of his peers and precursors. “Because it’s like, that’s it: you will push the stone up to the top, and it will come back down again.” In contrast, Bahrani said, Hollywood wish-fulfillment tales — or the faux-independent dramas of adversity followed by third-act redemption — did not strike him as hopeful at all. “They just don’t make any sense,” he said. “They create massive confusion.” To which his own films (and films like “Ballast,” “Wendy and Lucy,” “Sugar” and “Treeless Mountain”) might serve, in their very different ways, as an antidote. Not because they offer grim counsels of despair or paint lurid tableaux of desperation but rather because they take what has always seemed seductively easy about moviemaking — the camera can show us the world — and make it look hard. Their characters undergo a painful process of disillusionment, and then keep going. The disappointment they encounter — the grit with which they face it, the grace with which it is conveyed — becomes, for the audience, a kind of exhilaration. What happens at the end of a dream? You wake up.

A.O. Scott, a chief film critic at The Times, last wrote for the magazine about the impact of the small screen on the movies.

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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."

NATASHA RICHARDSON

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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."

THE WORLD OF YOUR STORY: CHECK YOURSELF. HOW ARE THESE ELEMENTS AT PLAY?

CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE
(Well sort'of)

The question is: How are these elements at play in your story, throughout all phases of the creative process?

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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."

AMY FREED: WHAT'S FUNNY

Robert Gauthier, Los Angeles Times

Amy Freed on what's funny and how to get there.

LA TIMES
JANUARY 4, 2009

Someone once said that dying is easy, comedy is hard. As her new play, 'You, Nero,' is set to premiere at South Coast Rep, the writer talks about what it takes.

I never set out to write comic plays. My themes as a writer are usually serious, even though the delivery is not. I'm often asked about this, which forces me to think about why I write in this way and what comedy is and how it works on me. Each time I do this, it's with some caution: A writer's voice is like a fingerprint of the mind, conscious and unconscious -- and it's dangerous to know too clearly what makes you tick. But when I sneak a peek between my fingers at my own process and voice, this much I see.

I wrote my first play, "Still Warm," standing up at the cash register in the hotel bar where I was working as a waitress. After some pretty crushing years, it was becoming clear to me that my talents were too frail and my courage too limited to ever fulfill my dreams of being an actress. And time was running out. The first image of the first play I ever wrote was that of a woman in Hell crawling out of an overturned car where she'd just drowned in 6 inches of muddy water. She could get out of Hell if only she could renounce her ambition.

My play was about the newscaster Jessica Savitch, of course, not me. Although the piece was incredibly flawed, wild and ugly, it was alive. Painful, sure. But because it was born of a need to expose -- and because exposure is bringing darkness to light -- it had a macabre exuberance to it, and was, in its weird way, celebratory. Comedy always moves toward the light, even when a character might be moving into the dark.

In comedy, we deal with the unmanageable person within -- the posturing ego, the inner crazy person, the howling child, the monster. When you write comedy, you must surrender your grandiosity and your aspiration to be thought important and beautiful, even though every person on the face of the Earth wants to be exactly that.

In my latest play, "You, Nero," which deals with the effect Nero had on the theater scene in ancient Rome, I wrote a speech for the Ghost of Agrippina, the emperor's mother. It was modeled on the great death speeches in Shakespeare. I wanted it to have the flavor of Gertrude's description of Ophelia's death in "Hamlet." The speech is satire, of course, but how I worked on it! It took me days. The phrasing at times brought a thrill and a flush of pride. I cherished it. I studied similar speeches, listened to the assonance, the matching sounds, the changes in meter, and I learned from them. I chose my words with as much elegance and precision as I am capable of. And now, undercut by a key phrase or two, they will become a source of comedy in the play, delivered by an actor who is blessed by the Ridiculous Muse.

My point is, the nature of the investment in comedy is as whole-hearted and emotionally sincere, up to the final tweak of consciousness, as in high art or tragedy.

This is equally true for comic performance and production. When a stage comedy is playing really well, the performers and the audience go into a kind of altered state. There's a sense that nothing can go wrong. Huge choices are not too much, and tiny choices explode the house into sheer delight. Everything seems to communicate, and a willing suspension of disbelief allows us to buy anything. At the same time, no false goods are being sold to us. Good faith on both sides of the footlights abounds. It's fantastic to watch how an audience hangs on each thought of gifted farceurs and seems to read their intentions and inner life even in the way they draw breath. . . .

But getting to that point of seeming effortlessness takes days and days of precision work. Previews are full of strange mysteries: Why did they laugh there? What was funny about that? Why didn't they laugh there? That should be funny.

Sometimes the answers are simple: They didn't laugh because they could see only one of the actor's eyes, and they need to see both. (That in itself is a mystery: For some reason, it's hard to land a laugh in profile.)

At other times, the line might not be funny (my fault) or it might be funny but not in a way that earns spontaneous laughs (also my fault). There's a variety of absurdity, for example, that works well on the page and in the rehearsal room but that flops on stage.

At still other times, the missing laugh has to do with the actor's delivery, which brings up a slew of intricate, maddening, fascinating questions about pacing, pausing, pointing by gesture after the key word, or sometimes before the word, more rarely on the word. The problem might be physical. An actor might diffuse a laugh by moving on the line -- or diffuse another actor's laugh by moving on the line, or stepping on it. Some actors even do that on purpose, to deny a laugh to a colleague. Those actors, thankfully, are the exception.

Finally, the problem could be in the setup, which means it's either my fault, or the actor's, or the director's, or a combination -- and we have to figure it out. The challenge is this: To set up a joke requires stabilizing the audience's attention in a misdirected focus, so that the departure of consciousness -- the unexpected juxtapositions upon which comedy depends -- can come with the force of surprise and delight. This requires control of the audience's attention and expectation, and it's both an art and craft. It's practically science. And it's why, incidentally, I have no great love of the "wacky," which to me is a low and unskilled glancing at comedy, depending on winking attitude and screwball sets to signal wit but with none of the real clarity of attitude that wit requires.

The work is never-ending. The question is not only can we get it right, but can we get it right in time? I'm writing this between rehearsals for "You, Nero" -- rehearsals that, I hasten to add, are going well. I have the deep and humbling pleasure of seeing some of the finest actors in the country (seriously) lending themselves to the realization of my fantasia -- and a terrific and unflappable director, Sharon Ott, coping with the task of actualizing a script that calls for leopards, sea battles, gladiatorial contests and the burning of Rome. But I know that, no matter what comedy you're staging, if you were to stop the rehearsal in midprocess, half the jokes would be lost, along with the show's overall themes and impact. The trial and error and rigor of what we're doing now are what's required to bring out everything that's in this comedy. We'll be ready for you when the doors open, and working every second until then.

An old comedian supposedly once said that "dying is easy, comedy is hard." Let's amend that cliché, once and for all, and say that comedy is seriously one great reason to stay alive. As anyone who ever took a theater history class remembers, the origins of comedy are festival. It comes out of the celebration of fecundity, fertility, the defeat of winter by the spring. Laughter is a fountain of renewal. It's not physiologically possible to really laugh and be in pain at the same time (which is probably why the old comedian was making wisecracks on his deathbed).

And yet comedy is intricately mixed up with pain, from the early delight a child experiences in watching someone else take the pratfall: A pratfall, by definition, is somebody else's problem.

And so: A dog makes a meal of a cream pie. Buster Keaton spots the dog, whose muzzle is now dripping with whipped cream, and thinks the dog is rabid. Buster takes off at a dead run, and the dog, excited, chases him around and around a construction sight. The chase includes the dog crawling up a ladder after Buster and continuing the pursuit around the perimeter of an uncompleted house. At the end of the short ("The Scarecrow"), you want to stand up and cheer both performers, human and canine, for their commitment, athleticism and ability to transform hydrophobia and panic into anesthetizing comic ecstasy.

My hat's off to the comics and the comedians who help keep our nightmares at bay.

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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."