Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
will take place, leaving an even larger number of black chil- nil. The sheer force of one's perceptions makes each of them dren in black schools. ...
...together, as a social occasion, do so for the twin pleasures of It is "interesting," though, how Didion manages to ignore both seeing it and talking about it later...
...Didion were a very expensive thoroughbred who knows its own worth and suddenly sniffs smoke in the stable...
...One of the "Sojourns" Didion recounts, in the section of The White between the Finger Lakes Album which bears that one-word title, is "In Bed," with a and the Adirondacks migraine...
...But the opportunities for this kind of thing have always been limited...
...whole equation in their heads are the ones who have usually kept the figures small, like Ford or Hawks...
...that, despite all the control the money people are supposed to Cecilia is right about the difficulty of keeping the whole have, some moviemakers are still able to make their films their equation of pictures in your head...
...Though not the version Cecilia is thinking of, the only often interfered with, you would be able to tell in each case that version of the equation that matters is the one where the films must have been made by the same person...
...Unfortunately, the more you load money onto you'd bee able to tell a good deal about the person's values and one side of the equation, the harder it is to keep the other side in sense of human experience...
...I would be disingenuous if I now stood up for John Simon, a private screening of a new movie after dinner...
...Although my felt humiliated, but the real effect on the history of the movies subject is Apocalypse Now, I've spoken about Didion at such is probably not great...
...Its ultimate failure lies outside spoiling a good picture before its release that Didion's execu- itself, beyond its own control, in the world that Didion detives get their stick in...
...The idea that movies are a collusion Teller and who's "bankable" at present, but not about the among over-groomed, faintly bored businessmen is no less a movie...
...The movie is whom she singles out for special abuse, when this column has Elaine May's The Heartbreak Kid, but seeing it is a persometimes reflected my own impatience with his nonsense...
...Yet the coeducational/liberal arts expression on Ms...
...To dozen films by Hitchcock or Hawks or Altman, or even Sam much greater consequence, Apocalypse Now proves the same Peckinpah, whom Didion uses as an example of a director thing...
...Francis Ford Coppola is "in de cares much for movies...
...any movies...
...can be understood, but only dimly and in flashes...
...The piece is a series of fifteen, sure both for improvement in inner-city, predominantly black numbered observations Didion has made on her life and times schools and for integration on a metropolitan rather than city- over a period of ten years...
...Louis, image it summons up for us is a non-image, an image of a Detroit and many others, school segregation has been permit- blank book...
...This is the view of Vernon Jordan and James of-Didion's own catch phrase for it-the "flash cut...
...Only by thinking of Didion as someone in a ted and fostered for far too long by the Boards of Education...
...They are all disconnected from one another...
...Once you do, it is apparent Didion sees everything, so she and Cecilia are like-minded...
...Both of these draw conclusions...
...Didion's own piece is proof own...
...The equation always seems to work by inverse prophere about as effectively as Renaissance popes did when they ortions...
...schools and enormous pressure to effect radical change in It is in this state of mind that Didion looks at movies...
...as long as pictures in their heads.' " Dimly and in flashes are the way you don't actually see...
...This is when it, really gets hard to interfere with a movie loom large because the moviemakers keep the equation of pictures in your head...
...Her piece on Hollywood is busing is particularly appropriate, along with better placement a vivid, insider's account of the way motion-picture executives of newly built schools and a better districting of pupils, with live and operate today...
...The he takes up residence in Didion's Hollywood, where nobody instances in which the businessmen have actually managed to really cares much for movies...
...Making the movie is just a tiresome aftermath of the tives Didion writes about are going to give him de...
...The inner-city schools generally...
...The features seem almost to quiver like antennae...
...A strong piece of work has some integ- length because I'm afraid we need help to'understand where rity of...
...Sojourn" immediately preceding that "In Bed" is one taken Fourth, in cities like Fort Wayne, Toledo, Tulsa, Rockford, "In Hollywood...
...deal...
...In the rest of America, people who go to a movie fiction than the idea that movies are art...
...The vision seems to be neither inward nor outward, but absent...
...dissociated dissensibility seems to be at work-her tendency Didion prefaces the dinner party scene with a quotation from to see only random pinpoints of clarity through her haze of Cecilia Brady in The Last Tycoon about how " `Hollywood pain, to isolate whatever she sees in a bell jar of pure observa...
...Movie moguls have prevented art balance...
...Le Moyne 0 N THE BACK of Joan Didion's The White Album is a photograph of the authoress looking as if she has a College migraine headache...
...Didion's face is amazingly blank...
...biz now...
...for a first-class education Screen in the Jesuit tradition COPPOLA NOW THE BUSINESS OF MOVIES IS BUSINESS...
...The writing style is very much that wide basis...
...A ray of sunlight falls across the eyes with the heaviness of a metal tool dropped onto a concrete surface...
...The sheer force of one's perceptions makes each of them dren in black schools...
...It is not by Coppola's picture goes wrong...
...The together too many cities, like Chicago, Cleveland, St...
...The title "White Album" puts it perfectly...
...instance, and re-editing them before their release...
...It is uncanny, it seems almost super-human, efforts are clearly essential if we are to provide equal educa- the extent to which, as the last sentence of "The White Altional opportunity for black children...
...discrete...
...Didion (Coppola has done this himself in The Rain People and The makes a good deal of the right motion-picture executives have Conversation, which remains his best picture...
...Her seam- a dozen men have ever been able to keep the whole equation of less account of how Hollywood works sounds fine...
...It is by ganging up on a director after scribes...
...This is where the federal government should concentrate its efforts...
...director actually at work' on location, both of them spend all COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...When budget is BRING up Joan Dldion only because I suspect that Francis routine and production modest, a single individual has a Ford Coppola has fallen down the chasm which yawns chance to impose his head, his imagination, on the results...
...The title piece in The White Album, number of black youngsters that can be integrated without which gets a section all to itself, the opening section, sets the causing resegregation is limited, there must be constant pres- mood for the whole book...
...You are unbearably Syracuse, N.Y...
...The moviemakers who have been able to keep the hired painters to do frescos in new churches...
...Didion is a native of southern California Omaha and Corpus Christi, with smaller minority populations who has written screenplays as well as fiction and journalism, or where such imbalances have not yet been perpetuated, so Hollywood is home turf for her...
...between her idea of Hollywood and my idea of movies...
...Not half tion, to seal it off from thought and contradiction...
...On a B picture, to meddle, by taking pictures out of their directors' hands, for a director can even afford to fail sometimes...
...13214 aware of every ripple in your environment...
...Box 100-N, Le Moyne College Every sensation jumps to the level of pain...
...its own and isn't that easily destroyed...
...In the one account Didion gives us of a producer and (The first of two parts...
...functory part of the evening for these people, as if they were Let it suffice to say that we all have our fictions with which we being made to sit through somebody's vacation slides rather make -life more amenable, more "interesting" (an adjective than one of the brightest comedies of the '70s...
...Didion's attack on scene at a Hollywood executive's home where guests are given it...
...There's no the "deal" for their next picture...
...There can be no question bum" says, "Writing has not yet helped me to see what it that today's predicament has come about because, in al- means...
...Didion's piece opens with a need for me to defend criticism against Ms...
...permanently extraordinary state of mind, like having a migNevertheless in these cities the only current solution is exerting raine, can we imagine how she could write in the broken, both moderate pressure to obtain balanced integration in white dissociated way she does...
...But when a director puts everything he owns into a movie, Executives can't exercise options the directors haven't given as Coppola has in Apocalypse Now, and then adds to his own them in the footagee they've shot, and the best directors have $46 million some $14 million more of other people's money, often been perversely good,at "cutting in the camera...
...But at the same time that sensitivity becomes so acute, sensibility is reduced to 28 September 1979: 531 invested in them...
...If you were to see without any identifying titles a half enough of that, and not the only proof we have these days...
...The victim of a migraine is incredibly sensitive to every stimulus...
...Third, because white families can always protest by moving Joan Didion writes as if she experienced all of life in the or putting their children in private schools, and therefore the throes of a migraine...
...In Didion's Holmovies themselves in her dssay' on Hollywood...
...movie in order to write about Hollywood is that nobody there The plate reads, "IMNDBZ...
...The eyes small classes/prestigious faculty stare in an intense but unfocused way...
...What Compton of the Urban League and other black leaders, as well gives her journalism its distinct personality is her ability not to as James Coleman and other social scientists...
...Her point is that movies are a product balanced ratios, in order to avoid the hard-to-shake burden of controlled by the people who supply and manage the money segregated schools...
...The nostrils flare as if Ms...
...The face is finely drawn...
...All they care about is making biz," and I suspect that those tanned, self-possessed execu"deals...
...More, money =art...
...Again, her lywood, it is a subject of no "interest...
...That world is epitomized just as well, and a good deal he's had a failure, as Coppola has in Apocalypse Now...
...Commonweal: 532...
...Critics who talk about movies as if they were their time back at the Hilton Inn on the phone trying to set up art are insufficiently informed about these people...
...Afterwards, Didion puts in quotation marks of contempt but then, forget- they talk about Chinese acrobats, picture grosses, Bonwit fully, uses herself...
...more succinctly, by a California license plate which ban be The reason that Didion doesn't need ever to have seen a seen around town in Hollywood and Beverly Hills these days...
Vol. 106 • September 1979 • No. 17
