Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
your ear, and about the ability to think through a problem to make a moral judgment. He said I was wasting my time. Because "the future belongs to John Trav~olta.'' Not, of course, to Travolta as...
...but I'd rather conclude that the power of a hollow, dis-spirited dominant culture is all the more reason for the Fordhams and Rockhursts and Georgetowns to get a renewed sense of how badly they are needed--to preserve what is valid in traditional culture (like medieval monks copying and illuminating manuscripts), and, if necessary, to establish a counter culture (like the French Resistance in World War II or the Apostles in the upper room), all the while making friends with that "shaft of light," open to the men and women of each new generation with whom we can share books, bread, and wine...
...Screen SINGINGTHE BLUES HOLLYWOOD'S BIG SPENDERS s I WASpointing out in the last issue, Airplane...
...The trim is itself a spin-off of the double-platinum album Belushi and Ackroyd have already made with their singing act...
...The sheer magnitude takes the edge off its funniness...
...The kids from Milwaukee who made Airplane: may find that they have a tough time resisting a Blues Brothers budget on their next project, even if they want to...
...When you've got that kind of money, you just can't believe that your ideas might be cliches--that seeing Conrad's Heart of Darkness as relevant to Vietnam is something any high-school sophomore might have done in an essay for English class...
...In our century Maritain, Mauriac, Bloy, Eric Gill with his Thomistic aesthetic, were considered seriously by the establishment...
...Those for Airplane...
...Yes, the movie is funny...
...Kentucky Fried Movie's budget was only ten times that amount, but it was enough to promote the kids from Milwaukee to ~irplane!, while Landis and his producer, Robert Weiss, worked their way up to The Blues Brothers...
...that is all...
...Production expenses for The Blues Brothers were $32 million...
...The F-14 costs about $30 million," Belushi quips,"-- no laughs there...
...Sixty automobiles were demolished in staging the 300 collisions which occur during the film's frenzy of chase scenes...
...But modest profits are not enough to make the high anxiety of the movie business worthwhile to investors...
...This single shot had cost $300,000...
...Steven Spielberg's 1941, which also stars Belushi, is such a dud that on his thirty-firstbirthday friends gave Belushi a button reading, "John Belushi, 1949-1941 ." Like The Blues Brothers, 1941 cost around $30 million...
...That's a pretty good line...
...Malcolm Cowley's Portable Faulkner made a selection of his works easily available...
...So did Coppola's Apocalypse Now...
...And I find it hard not to sympathize with Belushi's sarcasm here, No one who's been listening to the debate over the MX missile should begrudge $30 million spent on a little anarchism...
...Only when considered in the context of the rest of the film do the expenditures for a scene like this seem normal instead of outrageous...
...Cheap f'dms that score big inevitably lead to expensive films with the same ambitions...
...f~-<tycars going into a thing...
...You give someone $32 million, and he's bound to start taking himself seriously...
...nery O'Connor could still say plaintively: "I have found that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic...
...It seems that Apocalypse Now may at last creep into the black, as may The Blues Brothers eventually...
...The hitch in the comparision between the two films is what they cost to make...
...She refused to meet James Baldwin in Georgia...
...Coles is not a doctrinaire social-worker-do-gooder...
...But in general the ambivalence inherent in the Blue Brothers' act tends to be problematical when the act is expanded into a story...
...Catholics and their works and ideas had had the ear of much of the Western world's secular press, partly because of the temper of the times, partly because of the number of talented Catholics working then...
...Five million dollars were spent in Chicago on mayhem alone, and another $5 million to repair the damage, which included the destruction of an entire shopping mall (damaged merchandise was paid for at wholesale while undamaged was returned...
...This confusion ofR & B with the FBI or CIA is, I suspect, the key to the Blues Brothers' appeal...
...Not two cars going into a thing...
...It is the third unsuccessful blockbuster in less than a year made by a golden boy touted as a "genius...
...Like many popularizers in the music business, Belushi and Ackroyd have succeeded phenomenally not by the quality of their music, which is mediocre, but by projecting a more saleable image than the genuine article does...
...funny...
...It is an interesting phenomenon, be-cause it embodies two opposing views of the South at that period, and of all Southern history and values...
...Who that has read it can forget the imbecilities of the pseudo-Confederate General Sash in "A Late Encounter with the Enemy," or the fatuous efforts of his granddaughter to make the old fraud into a hero for Commonweal:532...
...her unexplained objection must have been based on the misinterpretations such a meeting would almost call for...
...They have lost that reckless, thrown-away quality which makes Airplane...
...Dependent now on other people's dreams of avarice, Hollywood must cater to those dreams with blockbusters that attempt to achieve notjust a high rate of return, but an obscene amount of it...
...The tension between the world view of the Southern girl raised in Savannah, living in a country village, and the Harvard psychiatrist is never quite resolved...
...It was a period of battles and crusades and a fair share of victories...
...this represents a smashing success, whereas for The Blues Brothers it is rather disappointing...
...But this was not her province...
...Flannery was not a racist...
...O'Connor has to the unknowing appeared a bigot...
...But it undoubtedly has ways to mitigate a poor showing at the box office...
...Around the turn of the decade, as the Civil Rights movement burgeoned, Robert Coles and his wife went South, the psychiatric social scientist, the teacher of English, to Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia...
...Stanley Kramer released It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World back in 1965, on the eve of the Vietnam War...
...In practice, someone with $32 million to spend wreaking havoc in a movie is almost as intimidating as the Pentagon itself...
...Stunt co-ordinator Gary McLarty, Hollywood's "King of Crash and Bash," had to drop two test Pintos just to prove to the FAA that no one would be killed...
...It is the ultimate punk-rock conceit...
...Films with so much riding on them always do these days...
...Robert Coles worked with a tape recorder (in this book are recorded passages by a black nurse and a white itinerant preacher), a tool that Flannery's art never needed...
...Forty cars require some kind of real commitment to destruction...
...They met her briefly in the hospital where she was playing out the next to last act of her struggle with lupus erythematosus...
...Landis, Ackroyd, and Belushi get quite self-defensive about the film's expense...
...The one way in which they are not alike, however, is that for Airplane...
...Behind both is a 977 film called Kentucky Fried Movie, which was dreamed up by three kids from Milwaukee and directed by John Landis, whose only credit until then had been a $60,000 monster spoof...
...There is a moral to this story, if only Hollywood could figure out what it is...
...A film has to play everywhere at once in order to take sufficient advantage of its promotion...
...It's one of the few places that still does, and that, rather than celebrity, is the glamour on which Hollywood feeds...
...Her late, successful years also overlapped the period of new and intelligent Northern interest in the South...
...She allowed that Martin Luther King was doing what he had to do, what had to be done...
...I said in my last column that there was a messa~gefor Hollywood in the relative performances of Airplane...
...Their only real originality was their outfits: black suits with narrow lapels, narrow-brimmed black fedoras, and shades...
...The scene has a scary, surreal side to it...
...she had an ear...
...Since then, Kramer's title has seemed too literally true for a movie like his to be quite as funny...
...Uncle Tom's Cabin and Tobacco Road were displaced as authentic pictures of life below the Mason-Dixon Line...
...But in Mystery and Manners Fish...
...Not the least of the ways in which these two parody-comedies are alike is that at the peak of the summer season, each was earning roughly the same amount...
...But it turns out that there's a qualitative difference on the screen between two and forty...
...but drawing upon autobiography as Ackroyd's script does, basing itself upon reactions to personal experiences, the movie is also too serious...
...and The Blues Brothers...
...They worked along different lines, their paths crossed briefly...
...More than half was money Coppola put up himself so that he could keep total control of his f'dm...
...Recalling the night Ackroyd and Belushi tried out their act as a warm-up for Steve Martin, Blues Brothers manager Bernie Brillstein says that when Ackroyd came out with abriefcase handcuffed to his wrist, "It was all over...
...Two cars are a wise-ass symbolic gesture we can laugh at...
...This had begun in England, in English, with the Emancipation Act, which within a generation made it possible for Newman and yon H//gel to be heard, and allowed the work in England and Ireland of the Ward family...
...Sisters wrote theses on the art and faith of Graham Greene and we all loved Ronnie Knox...And, as they say, so much more.., some of it initiated, all of it chronicled in much of the Catholic press, and in particular, in Commonweal...
...This in-locoparenlis really is loco...
...The jokes are too elaborate and self-important...
...He may be right...
...And once the press hails some twenty-eight-year-old kid as a genius, he'll get nervous and start spending lots and lots of money...
...Operating in this high, wide, and handsome style tends to be wasteful...
...We can feel the actual nightmares bubbling beneath the surface...
...This was the sort of thing that gave the film its astronomical budget...
...But the fact remains that the Blue Brothers are a second-rate version of the singers they imitate...
...But the consequence is that a film has a very brief life in first-run...
...More than ever before, Hollywood's motto is THINKBIG...
...were $3.4 million, almost $5 million below Paramount's original estimate...
...Katherine Anne Porter, EudoraII FLANNEllY 0"C0NNOR'SSOUTH Robert Coles Iamislana State, $14.95, 166 pp...
...It is not by itself that The Blues Brothers is significant, but as part of a trend...
...Despite the allusion to Roy Orbison, these are the clothes of the straight world, the uniform of an institutional, authoritarian society at the furthest possible remove from the counter-culture of blues singers...
...and The lues Brothers have a lot in common...
...It also has to be an in-joke between Ackroyd and Belushi, both of whom came from the kind of strict, conservative Catholic background that produces real FBI and CIA types...
...James Brown himself doesn't agree...
...The Coleses were deeply involved in the Civil Rights movement...
...Since the sky was the limit, one stunt the f'dmmakers pulled was to drop a Ford Pinto into downtown Chicago from an altitude of 1400 feet...
...WESTERBECK,JR...
...That was perhaps the last moment at which Americans could laugh wholeheartedly at such maniacal, unrestrained destructiveness...
...Because "the future belongs to John Trav~olta.'' Not, of course, to Travolta as an individual, but to the culture, swelling inexorably before our eyes like the green blob in a science fiction movie, that Travolta's persona has been created to represent: the unending thump of disco beat, vinyl, neon, fast food, ear-splitting stereo, precocious sex, assertive pseudomasculinity validated by paying to ride a mechanical bucking bull in front of the gang at the bar...
...What inspired Universal Pictures to have $32 million worth of confidence in Landis was his track record...
...Nearly twenty years and many volumes later, Robert Coles was asked by Louisiana State University to give the Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History, and this book is the result...
...in New York City, she thought, it might work...
...In a country willingto spend limitlesslyin order to insure real mass destruction, why quibble about what it costs to rip things up for fun...
...I think this is one reason why the film hasn't benefited much from word-of-mouth...
...Perhaps this was inevitable...
...Under these conditions films such as The Blues Brothers are, like the legendary oogle-oogle bird, in danger of flying up their own rear ends and disappearing...
...They lived for a while in Cobb County, Georgia, north of Atlanta, and there found themselves taming frequently for illumination on the people among whom they worked to the stories and two short novels of Flannery O'Connor...
...Hollywood itself could disappear with them.COLINL...
...Books: COMPLEXITIES& IRONIES F LANNERYO'CONNOR ( 1925-1964) lived, flourished, matured, and died toward the end of the Catholic miniRenaissance that was already fading by the time of the Second Vatican Council...
...Nor was she writing about blacks...
...It's not the public who believes such hype in the press, but the Hollywood executives...
...Landis takes the attitude that biggerpratfalls get bigger yuks: "It's things I find funny--that sort of excess...
...The paradox is that the only thing holding The Blues 26 September 1980:529 Brothers back, preventing it from living up to the expectations which all the money spent on it represents, is the money itself...
...The Agrarians took their (various) stands...
...Animal House, the fifties frat-club comedy starring John Belushi and directed by Landis, was made for less than $3 million, and has earned a whopping $160 million...
...Some of the most spectacular pyrotechnics never even got into the film...
...MargaretWimsatt Welty, even Carson McCullers, were read and esteemed far beyond their parish boundaries...
...The trouble is that I find myselfsympathizing with Belushi only in principle, and there are no laughs there, either...
...O'Connor had the problems of any alert Catholic of her period, but she had also courage, a sense of humor, the gift of irony--and talent...
...But that kind of thinking has a Catch-22 built into it now...
...So films like The Blues Brothers are not solely the faultof twenty-eight-year-old Commonweal: 530 kids with inflated egos...
...When the president of Universal-MCA objected to the original running time of well over two hours, one of the cuts made was of a gas station blowing up...
...When the movie companies had their own capital with which to finance their films, the business was not as unstable...
...Figures like that produce mysticism in Hollywood, so the partnership of Weiss, Landis, and, now, Belushi was given carte blanche on The Blues Brothers...
...He thinks the movie did him and the other black performers a service...
...It was his next feature that made him a legend, though...
...G. K. Chesterton embraced the faith with gusto...
...she understood and respected the elegance and variety of their defenses against overwhelming racism, but in her work they appear as a chorus at the most, more often as parts of the stage set...
...Advertising and distributing a film have become so expensive that they can be justified only bysaturation bookings...
...One of the Blues Brothers' guarantees is the sound-track album...
...The other Brother, Dan Ackroyd, contributed a 400-page script...
...Even his monster flick made several million dollars, and Kentucky Fried Movie has grossed around $45 million...
...This means that while the amount of money that has to be recouped on a blockbuster gets larger and larger, the amount of time each one has to do it in becomes smaller and smaller...
...The entire industry is run on the Peter Principle...
...The lines in the script should have been that good...
...To an extent, this guarantee has backfired on the f'flm, for some key reviews were unfavorable because critics were offended at the way these two imitation blues performers used originals like James Brown, Aretha Franklin, and Ray Charles in their movie...
...She is not interested in the pitiably swaggering remains of the antebellum South...
...One of the more manic scenes in the film, and the one which provides the premise for the whole plot, occurs when the brothers pay a visit to the nun who raised them...
...People who've seen it haven't found it as funny as they hoped...
...What attracts money to this risky business is the opportunity it offers for almost unlimited greed...
...Well, this is it...
...As Airplane/'s producer, Jon Davison, points out,"Artists, directors are by nature insecure people...
Vol. 107 • September 1980 • No. 17
