THE SCREEN
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
and read Fine Woodworking are going to work it out. Eight dollars a year from The Taunton Press, Box 355, Newtown, Conn. 06470. With some temerity I invite your suggestions of publications...
...Eighty-five thousand/Lt I think I staggered...
...Lina Wertmuller got her start as Fellini's assistant director on La Strada, and has gone on to become the Robert Wise of la dolce vita...
...The sub-title of Welcome to L.A...
...R OBERT FROST called himself a "God-damned son-of-a-bitch . . . . a selfish person who had dragged people roughshod over life . . . always a person who had his way, a God-damned son of a bitch and don't let anyone tell you different...
...At least, I think Rudolph is pretty uncomfortable about it at times...
...As the film progresses, however, the characters grad...
...Wise was editor on Citizen Kane and Welles's assistant on The Magnificent Ambersons, for which he supposedly directed a few scenes...
...For the most part the good directors begin as writers, or even, like Welles, as actors, rather than as apprentices in direction itself...
...And the man with whom the wife does this cheating in both films is a pop singer played by Keith Carradine...
...the third, final, posthumous volume (co-authored and completed by Thompson's assistant R. H. Winnick following the former's death in 1973 and covering the years from 1938, which marked the death of Frost's wife, to 1963, the year of his own death) continues to amass further depressing evidence.* What Frost had in mind when he called himself by his proper name he didn't say and we can't know, but it is not unreasonable to suppose that at *ROBERT FROST: The Later Yeors, 19381963 by Lawrance Thompson and R. H. Winnick (Holt, Rineher~ & Winston...
...The attitude Rudolph is trying .to turn away from is the cynical and ridiculing one that typifies Altman's own films...
...THOMAS POWERS WELCOME TO HARD TIMES 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 THE SCREEN The problem of assistant directors is almost as knotty as the problem of assistant professors...
...The annual production of articles on chemical engineering is now at 400,000 and still growing...
...how many electrical engineering articles are published each year anyway...
...Such a mentor is sometimes so influential, a preferred assistant may find himself wondering whether he'll be able to move out from under that influence...
...he had found a style more suitable to his true, fel!ow feelings for his characters, Welcome to L.A...
...If his picture is no good or, worse still, he can't handle success, the powers that be in the movie business can always topple him back to the cutting room floor again...
...Unfortunately, however, Altman's antic, vignette style is suited only .to Altman's own, icier view of such a world...
...Besides, we've...
...Are we supposed to feel the system works, for instance, because it produces dubious success stories like Robert Wise...
...But at the same time, making money in the movie business can't be given much more credence than losing it...
...Unlike Altman, Rudolph didn't work his way into feature filmmaking through years of industrial films and TV work, and consequently Rudolph doesn't have Altman's jaundiced view of Hollywood and the entertainment industry in general...
...Even the characters are the same in Rudolph's film...
...The one that Ned Beatty played in Nashville--the executive who's cheating on his wife - - i s played here by Harvey Keitel...
...Keeping up is already a full day's work but I'd hate to miss anything...
...To give Rudolph his due, he has learned I April 1977:214 Altman's technique well...
...Rudolph's first feature seems to leave him wondering at any rate...
...There is some c6nsolation, I guess, in the fact that you don't stand to lose so much money by promoting an assistant professor as an assistant director...
...The entire life-time earnings of the former, including grant awards and fringe benefits, seldom come to a fraction of what will be chanced on the latter in a first, modest feature...
...He answered: 85,000...
...that same pop music scene which Nashville exploited so successfully...
...Bereft, "abandoned," terrified, "in a reckless mood and a dangerous one left thus lying around loose in the world," he felt panic and behaved wildly, erratically, demanding that his well-married friend Katherine Morrison leave her husband (and his friend) Theodore Morrison forthwith ~nd marry him...
...Some assistant directors have had worthwhile directorial careers of their own...
...is really very close--uncomfortably close--to Altman's Nashville...
...That difficulty I was just mentioning is that it's not easy to have a rich and influential mentor like Altman to help you with your career...
...If you sacrifice plot, then to hold on to your audience you have to give it some other way to get from one scene to the next...
...That's nothing, he said...
...The difficulty is that the only directors who ever seem to have prot6g6s are extremely powerful ones like Griffith, Welles, Fellini, or, now, Robert Altman...
...What to do with either of them, that's the problem...
...But later, when a photographer he's also involved with (Lauren Hutton) strips as well to work in her darkroom, though she does so with her back to us she turns abruptly to face the camera once her top is off...
...In academia, on the other hand, a promoted assistant professor becomes a power that be, and be and be and be to the last syllable of recorded time...
...In effect his film is the road show of Nashville, moving to L.A...
...This is the only world Rudolph has ever known, at least professionally, and so he's more insular in his view of it and fonder of its peculiarities...
...This is what Mr...
...For Welcome to L.A...
...When Keith Carradine's maid (Sissy Spacek) strips to the waist to do the vacuuming, the whole scene is played from behind...
...The film begins with Viveca Lindfors having her injured back massaged, and in the first half of the film almost every character has a key scene played facing away from the camera...
...No assistant professor has ever gone on to a more purely academic achievement than that...
...468...
...Federico Fellini, for example, got his start as a scriptwriter on Rosselini's Open City and went on to become one of cinema's great directors...
...He introduced Joan Crawford in Tragedy of the Circus, made the original version of Dracula, and did at least one truly classic film, Freaks...
...Altman's prot6g6 is a young man named Alan Rudolph who was Altman's assistant on The Long Goodbye, California Split and Nashville, and who is now making his directorial debut with Welcome to L.A., which Altman has produced...
...Here the music is rock instead of country and western, but the setting of recording studios and overly impressive offices is the same...
...For neither film really has a plot...
...Rudolph does it by having his characters turn their backs on us and, by implication, on each other...
...Altman did this in Nashville by turning the coincidences in his characters' lives into a chain-reaction wreck, an endless collision of both automobiles and personalities...
...You have to play on some central action, or some view of the action, that recurs again and again with variations and glues all those fragments of scenes together...
...By the end Rudolph wants his whole movie to "feel pretty good" in that confiding, parenthetical way...
...And from these humble origins came a career that was to be capped off directing The Sound o] Music...
...probably would have been The Sound ot Music all over again...
...That's interesting...
...Yet it is not ultimately in some particular character or situation that Rudolph's film is most like Altman's, but rather in its manner of execution, its style...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...With some temerity I invite your suggestions of publications I've overlooked...
...To paraphrase Ecclesiastes, I guess it is: Of the making of magazine articles there is no end...
...Chaplin now, is again cheating on her husband as well...
...The first two volumes of Lawrance Thompson's immense biography contained much supporting evidence for the charge...
...Recalling her long punitive silences he took her final silence as a final reproach and punishment...
...Griffith on Intolerance, went on to make distinctive features in his own right...
...Each has only a series of coincidences, chance encounters and overlaps in the lives of more characters than any 100-minute plot could contain...
...Rudolph seems a bright and likely ladnbright and likely enough, anyway, to be uncomfortable merely duplicating Nashville...
...is City ol the One Night Stands, and the lyrics of one of Baskin's songs for the film go in part, "Sure it hurts (still it feels pretty good) to be livin' in the city of the one night stands...
...The personnel is pretty much the same too, with Keith Carradine, Geraldine Chaplin, Allan Nichols and Richard Baskin all reappearing from the earlier film (Baskin again in the dual role of on-screen performer and offscreen musical director...
...17.95) the time of his wife's death he was casting a long backward glance, not at fond memories, but ever the darker side of his life...
...Grief--and he suffered a terrible bereavement, a kind of madhess--was not his only emotion or even, on tile evidence, his principal one: he was tormented that in her waning hours she d i d - n o t call himto her bedside, nor offer to "forgive" him for the anguish he had brought her...
...These three scenes plot the course of an arc that passes through many other scenes as well turning the film around,.literaUy changing the attitude we seein it 180 degrees...
...But Browning is the most recent example I can think of...
...Tod Browning, from being assistant to D.W...
...But his is the usual assistant director's dilemma...
...The wife, played by Lily Tomlin before and by Ms...
...And in the film's penultimate scene Geraldine Chaplin announces to Carradine from off camera, "I'm naked now," whereupon the shot cuts away to a frontal view revealing that she is indeed...
...Not long ago a friend told me about his new job publishing abstracts of articles on electrical engineering...
...ually turn around...
...Of course, in the movie business there is no such thing as tenure, so there's not so much harm done if you promote an assistant director...
...Their friendship never having been in any sense amorous, the startled and shocked woman of course refused him and went on to say that, were ethe free and Commonweal: 215...
...got it easy compared to the scientists...
Vol. 104 • April 1977 • No. 7
