Chris Willmantag:www.bullypulpit.com,2010-06-27:/chriswillman//112011-05-26T12:00:16ZMovable Type 4.34-enChely Wright Comes Out, as a ... Thinkertag:www.bullypulpit.com,2010:/chriswillman//11.572010-05-03T16:57:57Z2011-05-26T12:00:16ZHas the "don't ask, don't tell" generation made enough of a shift into the "don't ask, but telling is okay" future for Wright to continue to enjoy the full acceptance of the armed forces and their families?Chris Willman
book I was writing on country music and politics, she was a hero to the right and pariah to the left. And not tremendously happy about that. More than any other entertainer except Toby Keith -- and you'd have to count that as a tie -- Wright was identified as a champion of the American armed forces, with her constant visits to entertain the troops in Iraq or cheer the wounded in military hospitals. Her autobiographical 2004 hit "Bumper of My SUV" stood up for military families against mindless attacks from the angry antiwar left. She had a defensive streak about the nation's defenders. But it pained her to think this caused her to be identified with the pro-war right.
At the same time, I sensed a slightly provocative streak in her, the way she talked about getting a red-carpet welcome to Sean Hannity's show... where she spoke in defense of gay rights.
"I've been told by people, 'Hey, way to go, I'm glad you're pro-Bush.' And I tell people I've never endorsed a candidate," Wright told me shortly after the 2004 election. "I'm a country singer that likes to support my troops. I was on Sean Hannity's show and he said, 'You're a good Republican girl. I like that.' I said, 'Ahhh, easy there, Sean. I did an event with Senator Clinton this morning.' I had been grand marshall of the Veterans Day parade in New York City. He went, uhhhhh. I said 'She came out and shook my hand and said "Thank you for all you've done for the troops," and she seemed very genuine to me.' He just berated her and went off. I said, 'That really bothers you that I touched a Democrat today, doesn't it?' He said, 'It really does. I feel like I need to go wash my hands. I feel dirty. Come on, you're a Republican. You've gotta be. Your brother's a gunnie! You've performed for the troops for 10 years.' I said, 'I never reveal who I vote for. I have issues with both candidates.' He said, 'What are your issues with President Bush?' I said, 'Thank you for asking me that! I think his whole angle on amending the constitution to preserve the sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman is just ludicrous, and just shy of a hate crime.' And a vein popped out in his neck and he said, 'Do you realize what show you're on?' I said, 'You wanted me to talk about my song, and when I say in the song that I'm not a Democrat or Republican, I'm not a liar.'"
Fairly strong words for a mainstream country singer at the height of polarization over social issues. Not quite as strong, of course, as Wright actually coming out as a lesbian this week. The woman who reached No. 1 on the country charts in 1999 with "Single White Female" finally revealed a good reason why she remains (legally, at least) single: Her position about the defense-of-marriage act had a very personal basis.
This had been rumored for years. As one Tweeter going under the name of @DrunkenMartina tweeted today, "Chely Wright's gayness is the worst-kept Nashville secret since Gary LeVox's girdle." Ba-dum-bum.
Pundits are reaching for precedents and parallels here, whether it's one-time country favorite k.d. lang coming out as a lesbian or the Dixie Chicks endangering their career by revealing their non-right-iness. In both cases, there are interesting similarities and crucial differences. Ms. lang had pretty much left country in her rear-view mirror for a few years by the time she outed herself -- and was openly butchy enough from the start that she probably didn't leave too many red-blooded, blue-balled male country fans stunned or heartbroken in the wake of her exit from either the genre or the closet. Wright, on the other hand, is what they used to call a fox, heterosexually speaking, and does stand to lose something from no longer benefiting from being the stuff of "I've got a shot with her" male fantasy.
As for genre, that's a bit of a tossup. Wright is still identified with mainstream country, but hasn't been on a major Nashville label since 2003. Her new album, Lifted Off the Ground, is coming out on Vanguard, a label pitched more toward singer/songwriters, and certainly without a country radio promo squad. Tellingly, perhaps, it is produced by Rodney Crowell, an avowed liberal who made the move from mainstream hitmaker (and sex object) to Americana cult favorite, quite happily. So musically, at least, she already had one foot outside the mainstream door, making it hard to rate this against the commercial impact it would have if, say a Reba or Faith or Martina were to come out. (Although I do expect Twitter's @DrunkenMartina to make an announcement any day.)
Some are already wondering if Chely will get "Dixie Chick-ed." And again, by already having moved to the Americana or alt-country margins, musically, her new material wasn't destined to get a shot on country radio anyway. So there will be no "boycott," covert or otherwise. It might be interesting to gauge whether "Single White Female" and her other oldies get less recurrent play as a result of the announcement, but there will be only anecdotal evidence for that at best.
The only way in which Wright truly stands to potentially be "Dixie Chick-ed" has little to do with radio, and everything to do with her standing with the American military. Has the "don't ask, don't tell" generation made enough of a shift into the "don't ask, but telling is okay" future for Wright to continue to enjoy the full acceptance of the armed forces and their families? It would be ironic if the Chicks got dissed for being made out to be anti-troops and Chely, whose rep is as the most pro-troops person in all of popular entertainment, somehow came to be unwelcome because of completely unrelated reasons. It'll be interesting to see what the reaction will be when Wright does her next USO tour or her next visit to a veterans' hospital. There's no reason to suppose she won't be greeted happily, other than perhaps our own prejudices about military prejudices. But it's clear that there really is a lack of precedent here, because for a lot of country music-loving soldiers, even after she stopped being a radio favorite back in the States, Chely Wright was the closest thing they had to a WWII-era Betty Grable pinup girl.
"We typically think, if you sing about the military or if you have military in your family, you're a Republican," I quoted her as saying in my book. "And I'm very much not. I'm very much not a Democrat either. I hate political parties. I told G. Gordon Liddy on his show, 'I think it's gang warfare at its finest -- corporate funded gang warfare." He said, 'Okay, explain yourself.' I said, 'Well, it's like you're a member of the Bloods out in east L.A. and you see a brother getting beat up by a Crip, and you'll go over and beat up the Crip to get him off the Blood, and you don't know what happened or what the fight's about. But you're gonna defend your brother because he's wearing the same do-rag on his head? That's retarded. How can people go down a ticket and go "Republican" in one fell swoop?' People may think my family sits around and says, 'Go, President Bush! Start a war! Kill people!' But I really love that I grew up not knowing which political affiliation my parents were. I never heard the words Republican and Democrat in my house as one being the good one and one being the bad... It's not some big secret I'm trying to keep, that I really do have a political affiliation and you have to guess it. In high school and college, I was kind of a jock, kind of a scholar, kind of a band geek. I had subsets of friends. I never believed in cliques."
She told me the real story behind "Bumper of My SUV," which became a sort of rallying cry for the right, though it wasn't intended that way, and certainly stands up as a great snapshot of a polarized moment in time. The real-life incident described in the lyrics happened simply as a result of her having a USMC decal on her bumper in honor of her brother, as she related in Rednecks & Bluenecks.
"The war was a few months old," remembered Wright, "and that's when this lady flipped me the bird and then got me to pull over at the red light and mouthed 'Roll down your window!' I was like, okay, I don't think I'm gonna get shot; she's in a minivan with a car seat in the back, and we're on West End, near Bowling Avenue, where rich people live. I rolled down my window and she said, 'Your fucking war is wrong. You're a fucking killer!'
"It's not as if I had a pro-war sticker or 'I love Bush!' or 'Kill people!' on the back of my car. Just the eagle, globe, and anchor -- that's it. I got flipped off, and I couldn't grab that lady by the throat and drag her over here [to the coffeehouse] and buy her a cup of coffee, so I wrote a song about it.
"I'm a mouthy person. Typically I would have something to say back. I don't know if you've ever been in a wreck, where your legs feel like jello and you've got to pull over. But I had no response. But as she pulled away, I was looking at her two bumper stickers, and one was of a private school here in town, religious in nature, and one was a Bush sticker with a line through it. It shocked me that she was so angry, but didn't shock me that she had something to say. Because people at that time were just really, really being outspoken, vocally and with the stickers and banners about which side they were on. They can both be American sides. You can be against this war and still be pro-American, don't get me wrong. I've got a lot of questions about it myself. Like I say in the song, 'Yes, I do have questions, but I get to ask them because I'm free.' "
Cause I've been to Hiroshima
And I've been to the DMZ
I've walked on the sand in Baghdad
Still don't have all of the answers I need
But I guess I wanna know where she's been
Before she judges and gestures to me
Cause she don't like my sticker
For the US Marines
On the bumper of my SUV
So I hope that lady in her mini-van
Turns on her radio and hears this from me
As she picks up her kids from their private school
And drives home safely on our city streets
Or to the building where her church group meets
Wright's dad was in the Navy in Vietnam from 1967-71, on the USS Mimitz. Her granddad got a purple heart; he was in the Army division that hit the beach of Normandy in WWII. Her Marine brother is the one who sent her the sticker, recently promoted from staff sergeant to gunner. Wright herself grew up playing taps on the bugle at over a hundred military funerals, and she'd been entertaining the troops and visiting VA hospitals as a country star for 10 years by the time "Bumper of My SUV" came out. But GI Jane she wasn't.
Her music has grown tremendously. Wright's first independent album, The Metropolitan Hotel, was a huge leap forward for her, as is the new Lifted Off the Ground. She's much more of a songwriter now than anyone could have imagined during the days when she was enjoying her biggest hits. And now she may naturally find a smaller but even more dedicated fan base among the politically progressive, folksy-rock set. Yet it's impossible to imagine her shedding her identification with the troops and their families. Will it be possible to maintain two such disparate fan bases?
"Bumper of My SUV" was not a rallying cry; you could read it as a plea for tolerance... from the left. Now Wright may be testing the tolerance of some on the right. By challenging all of our assumptions, whether it's about who gay people are or who military supporters are or what a country singer does or should represent, Chely is being a true artist, off the record as well as on.
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Nick Jonas: A Kid After a Boomer's Own Hearttag:www.bullypulpit.com,2010:/chriswillman//11.582010-02-08T22:10:18Z2011-05-26T12:00:17ZThe danger for young master Jonas is that, as seriously as he takes music, he's on a career carousel that will encourage him to indulge himself as a multi-hyphenate at the cost of being an artist.Chris Willman
Who I Am. ("Solo" may or may not need an asterisk next to it, since the billing for this album and tour goes to a group name, Nick Jonas & the Administration.) You may recall the famous blues lyric "The men don't know, but the little girls understand." Nick is in such a consciously throwback vein, you might want to reverse that famous equation back, to account for the music's boomer-friendliness: The little girls may not know, but their middle-aged aunties and uncles will understand.
And what there is to understand is this: Nick Jonas is reinventing himself, at the advanced age of seventeen and a half years old, as a soul man. The Jonases have always been a little bit retro for contemporary teen idols, mind you, but this is a slightly different, even more retro brand of pop revivalism. On the brother group's best album, 2008's A Little Bit Longer, they had perfected the frantic power-pop style of the late '70s and early '80s, and seemed on the verge of becoming a more earnest Cheap Trick for modern youth. But they more or less abandoned that style on their last album, and it wasn't quite clear what Nick, the creative mastermind of the trio, was going for. Now it's clear: He wants to revert back past late '70s new wave to early '70s pop-R&B. What a difference a few years make, when you're time-traveling to the recent (but still before you were born) past, right?
Jonas has said repeatedly that he's a huge Elvis Costello fan, and he did a joint Q&A with Costello in Rolling Stone a couple of years ago. And when it came time to explain the "...& the Administation" name he chose for his backup band, he referred to his fondness for Elvis Costello & the Attractions. So I had some hope he might be trying to make this side project a stab at making an adolescent My Disney-Radio-Ready Aim is True. But taste in ampersand-group names aside, it turns out that Who I Am couldn't rely any less on his Costelloian instincts. He's relying on another guy with glasses that he's hooked up with before: Stevie.
Yes, young Nick is determined to make his wonder years sound like his Wonder years.
Not that he's aping just one guy or even just one style, but the era he wants to evoke is unmistakable. The album opens with "Rose Garden," the tale of a girl who grew up in tough circumstances, the toughness designated by... wah-wah guitar! By the third track, "Olive & an Arrow," it's clear we will be in for heaping doses of Wurlitzer organ and little or no synthesizer. He does actually wait till track 8, "State of Emergency," to introduce what sounds distinctly like a Stevie-esque clavinet, although the earlier "Last Time Around," which is based around funk guitar instead of keyboards, has a very Wonder-struck vocal hook. "In the End" is a very subdued, bluesy ballad that has Nick calling out "Take it, Tommy" to keyboard player Tommy Barbarella, and you won't be surprised to know that the piano solo that follows is (to these ears) all about the Fender Rhodes. Several of the players are alumni of Prince's old bands, so it's surprising that Jonas doesn't make much effort to cop from the man from Minneapolis--instrumentally, that is. Vocally, his falsetto leaps and occasional yowlings are right out of the Purple Handbook.
How deeply felt is all this? Emotionally, Jonas is on about his hundredth song about being betrayed by some young femme fatale, so either he has had an active love life full of opportunists, or he is still just milking one very bad third-grade experience. It doesn't all sound like schoolboy conjecture, though: When he sings "I want someone to love me, for who I am," in the title song and first single, it seems pretty clear he's been loved for who he isn't at some point or another, and the stricken-dead sentiments of "Vesper's Goodbye," although a little drama-queen-ish, convince me that whatever else he is borrowing from his elders on this album, it's not somebody else's broken heart. The closing number, "Stronger (Back on the Ground)," moves beyond the tropes of romantic torture into possible gospel territory.
And musically? I've always hated to grade on the age curve, because there are enough young people doing good work that "pretty good for a teenager" doesn't cut it anymore. (And I've maintained that A Little Bit Longer held up just fine against the work of much more veteran power-pop bands.) Yet Jonas is leaping into such mature styles here that I am inclined to cut him a bit of a break here, when the results are only moderately and not quite overwhelmingly successful. If a 30- or 45-year-old had made this record, there are things we would like about it and things we'd consider hackneyed. But a 17-year-old? Come on.
We've already come to think of Jonas as a veteran, since the Jonases had four studio albums before this. But that shouldn't get in the way of some astonishment that a fellow of this age even has these instincts, let alone will follow them--possibly to his own commercial detriment, as these sounds may feel a little peculiar to the "Party in the USA"-trained ear. Natural talent aside, Jonas deserves credit for being smart enough to rip off the past, and also smart enough to do it in subtle enough ways that the references and influences won't be quite so blatant as I've made them sound.
The danger for young master Jonas is that, as seriously as he takes music, he's on a career carousel that will encourage him to indulge himself as a multi-hyphenate at the cost of being an artist. He's spoken of squeezing this album in during a two-week break last year--which makes you want to grade it even higher on the curve, but also makes you wonder what he could have done if he'd devoted more time to the project. He put the band on the back album sleeve, to sell it as a true group project, but by his own admission only met them as they were going into the studio. Something may have to be sacrificed if he really wants to emulate his musical heroes.
(That said, I'm hesitant to suggest he call off his acting career, because JONAS, the Disney Channel sitcom, is actually a pretty funny series. And miraculously, they even figured out what to do on it with Nick's non-smiling, earnest persona, versus his brothers' comedic goofiness... which was: have fun with and play off that very too-soulful-for-this-world quality.)
It's always tempting to compare the teen idols of today with the ones of yesteryear, particularly among those who think they're doing today's young stars a favor by pointing out that Svengali-driven fluff has always been among us. And certainly there are a lot of terrific pop records being made by Disney-derived singers like Miley, Demi and Selena, who don't have strong artistic temperaments and are only as good as their collaborators, which is often very good indeed and sometimes not so.
But what we do have now that we didn't in the Bobby Sherman era is a couple of teen auteurs, in the form of Nick Jonas and Taylor Swift. (Taylor just graduated from that category by turning 20, but she's counted for the last four years.) These two will be around the music scene in some capacity for the next couple of decades whether you like it or not. I suggest older music listeners opt for the former, because their combination of DIY career independence and reliance on solid musical traditions bodes well for the future, in a time when there aren't always many encouraging signs. One young man or woman alone does not the future of music make, but listening to Who I Am, I'm again encouraged to believe that the kids are all right, after all.
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Is Paranormal Activity the Next Blair Witch?tag:www.bullypulpit.com,2009:/chriswillman//11.592009-09-19T00:15:53Z2011-05-26T12:00:17ZBased on a scream-filled screening I caught at the Telluride Film Festival, Paramount's faith may not be misplaced, though it's anyone's guess whether lightning (or pesky demons) can strike the same public fancy twice. Chris Willman
The Blair Witch Project gave way to the diminishing returns of Cloverfield, Rec, Diary of the Dead, Quarantine, and other thrillers purportedly pieced together from amateur footage shot by the victims of monsters, zombies, and wraiths. You thought wrong, oh, ye of little faith in the enduring power of mini-DV. (And for that, you'll have to go stand in the corner, just like that guy at the end of Blair Witch.)
Next up on the docket is Paranormal Activity, an $11,000 shocker that Paramount hopes will develop into a Blair Witch II, in a way that the real Blair Witch II obviously never did. Based on a scream-filled screening I caught at the Telluride Film Festival, the studio's faith may not be misplaced--though it's anyone's guess whether lightning, or pesky demons, can strike the same public fancy twice.
The story behind the movie's haphazard path to multiplexes is almost as mysterious as the on-screen haunting. The micro-budgeted cheapie unspooled for a minimal amount of people at the Slamdance Festival in January 2008, then was bought by DreamWorks and promptly stashed in the closet, its cult reputation as (purportedly) one of the scariest movies ever made growing ever stronger as it gathered dust. Horror fans eager to see whether it lived up to its legend were ticked off upon hearing that the studio planned to squelch the original in order to get a remake underway. If that was ever the plan, someone thought better of spending millions of dollars trying to recreate something that won't even work if it doesn't look as cheap as possible.
Now Paramount, which inherited the project in its split with DreamWorks, is finally prepared to give it a push. That launch began with its re-premiere at Telluride--a nice stamp of approval for the movie, since that high-class festival rarely goes slumming with pure genre fare. The print was approved too late to get it into one of the festival's regular slots, so the film unspooled as a sneak preview in the Telluride town park, where an audience of shriekers sat on blankets in a steady drizzle that only occasionally gave way to a full moon over the mountains. Seeing a film like this with an appreciatively vocal audience is a kick, but its spookiest venue will be in the quietude of home theaters, without any walk to the parking lot afterward to buffer the tension before you settle in for a nice nightmare.
There are two types of supernatural horror film: the pure thrill ride, where the funhouse elements are unaffected by any concert for Fortean "reality" as anyone knows it--a la Poltergiest... and, less common, the movies that really do mean to strike a chord for anyone who believes in this kind of stuff, like The Exorcist and The Entity. Paranormal Activity belongs squarely to the latter subgenre, with plenty of verisimilitude for anyone who's a "fan" of real-life demonizations. Writer-director Oren Peli has clearly read up on his possession cases, and also clearly watched a lot of Ghost Hunters or Paranormal State-type reality shows, in order to figure out exactly what things that go bump in the night might sound and feel like. Hauntings homework has been done.
The vast majority of the picture portrays just the two principal characters, a none-too-brainy boyfriend and girlfriend who cohabitate in a modern house in a crowded San Diego suburb. The only two other actors briefly portray a sympathetic friend and a medium who's hired to stop by a couple of times before he becomes too freaked out by the sinister vibes to stick around. There is no studio logo, at least on the print we saw--just an opening scroll of thanks to the families of the two victims portrayed, setting up, as is typical in the genre, the idea that they presumably don't survive.
The doofus boyfriend has bought an expensive camera, equipped with night vision, to document the weirdness in their new home, we're informed straight off. Since the proceedings take place over a period of weeks, you may wonder why they don't just call a taxi, run out into the street, and leave the bank to foreclose at any given tortured moment. The answer is that the young woman believes the demonic force has already followed her from home to home since childhood, and would likely follow her again. The better answer is that her b.f. is an idiot who's determined to prompt the sinister force into doing something cool on camera -- not unlike the "pros" on Ghost Hunters and Paranormal State who constantly try to provoke Beelzebub's minions into giving them a poke, a chair push, or a deep-throated gurgle.
Did we mention that dude plays with a Ouija board? Dude plays with a Ouija board. Hello, Captain Howdy!
The filmmaker does a hell of a job of doing a lot with a little, which is to say, you'd be surprised at how much suspense can be drawn out of a static black-and-white shot of two people asleep under a sheet, with a time code in the corner. It's really not until the very last long shot of the picture that Peli, a little too eager to reward the audience's patience and deliver the goods, goes over the top into a more cornporn kind of horror. The literalism of that finale spoiled some of the theretofore subtle fun, for me, though I don't doubt it'll be a satisfying payoff for audiences who want to be goosed in grander fashion.
Looking at Paramount's initial plans for the film, it's not clear whether they really want to test the waters before doing a big rollout or really do have a carefully planned rollout in mind. Following another high-profile "premiere" at Harry Knowles' festival in Austin, the movie will have midnight showings Sept. 24 in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, Atlanta, Seattle, and several other major cities. The film's website will also have a mechanism for you to check in and beg to have the movie brought to your city, which I guess you'd call viral-by-encouragement.
The drawback to drawing things out over this extended a period of buildup is that the film might not seem quite as terrifying as its legend. At Telluride, we were told we'd be too shaken to walk back to our hotel rooms by ourselves; suffice it to say that I was able to make it home alone. At the same time, though, I felt Paranormal Activity giving me a few nice horror wedgies that, inured to the genre as I am, I haven't experienced in a while. Moviegoers who've spent fewer man-hours than I have in fright-film mode may be even more happily horrified and start the word o' mouth Paramount needs to turn this into a phenomenon.
More than anything, in this era of hyper-editing and hyper-budgeting, I'm just delighted to find a film that can transfix viewers even as untold minutes of its running time are devoted to watching grainy footage of a couple asleep in bed. Andy Warhol would be proud, and so would William Castle.
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Telluride Report: Nic Cage Gets Wack with Crack in Bad Lieutenant; Viggo Hits The Road; Clooney's Comically Existential Up in the Airtag:www.bullypulpit.com,2009:/chriswillman//11.602009-09-07T17:12:52Z2011-05-26T12:00:17ZBefore we decamp from the Colorado mountains, here's a brief look at some of the 36th annual confab's more notable or notorious entries.Chris Willman
Before we decamp from the Colorado mountains, here's a brief look at some of the 36th annual confab's more notable or notorious entries, which included the world premieres of Jason Reitman's Up in the Air, The Last Station, and Bad Lieutenant (Nic Cage version), as well as North American premieres of the highly anticipated The Road, Todd Solondz's Life During Wartime, and An Education.
UP IN THE AIR
Last year, Telluride had the world premiere of Slumdog Millionaire, which went on to win the best picture Oscar. The odds of that happening again with a movie from this year's slate may be slim. But the contender with the best chance of getting several top nominations is Jason Reitman's Up in the Air. It's the director's followup to Juno, which had its world preem here two years ago before going on to do boffo business and nearly becoming the first teen comedy to win the top Oscar. (For my interview with Reitman, click here.) Is a Telluride bow Reitman's lucky Academy charm, at least as far as getting multiple top nominations goes?
That question is up in the air, of course, but not too far up: The movie has a combination of big laughs and seriously treated existential dilemmas, and what Oscar balloteer can resist that combo platter? George Clooney plays a corporate terminator, someone whose stock in trade is relieving others of theirs and making the newly disenfranchised feel just a little less suicidal when they get the bad news. Our hero almost literally lives on the road, and enjoys every aspect of his life except the rare moments he has to come home. Two women disrupt the fabric of this itinerant existence. One of them is Vera Farmiga (The Departed) as a fellow frequent flier who meets him in an airport bar and is soon joining him for athletic hotel trysts at mutual points of expedience... or Expedia-ance. The other is Anna Kendrick (Twilight) as a youthful office hotshot whose advocacy for a cost-effective downsizing-by-teleconferencing system threatens Clooney's wanderlusting ways.
Reitman's ability to handle dramatic tonal shifts in comedies has won him acclaim as a new Cameron Crowe, or even, in greater flights of hyperbole, a Billy Wilder successor. Those shifts get trickier in Up in the Air, which has some sobering turns--starting with the real-life laid-off Americans cast for the firing scenes, and ending with Clooney's sense of sad solitude--that won't send America out of the multiplexes quite as cheerful as they were at the sweet climax of Juno. If you've been waiting for a movie that wipes the knowing smirk off Clooney's face, this is it, in the end. But it was hard to find anyone at Telluride, snob or plebe, who didn't get a lift from Up in the Air, which deftly balances its twin engines of mirth and loneliness.
The big question here: How's the apocalypse gonna play in Peoria? Surprisingly well, I suspect, after talking with some of the Telluride Festival's non-cognoscenti, middle-American passholders, whose love for the movie should give the Weinstein brothers just a little bit of assurance before its October bow. (The film was having its American premiere here after its world preem a couple of days earlier in Venice.) Director John Hillcoat's film is as faithful to the Cormac McCarthy novel as an adaptation could possibly be, and doesn't skimp much on the grueling elements, as if that were even possible in a movie about the end of humanity. But viewers will detect subtle shifts--in the scripting, the editing, the scoring, and certainly, tangentially, the all-important ad campaign--that make the Road movie feel like slightly more of a triumph-of-the-human-spirit-type experience than the book did. And because of that nearly subliminal tonal tweak, I have a feeling this otherwise relentlessly downbeat movie about death and disaster will play more as an "audience picture" than an across-the-board critics' favorite. Who'da thunk?
There was moderate sniffling at the premiere, as all the issues about what fathers can and can't do for their children come to the climactic fore. Will it be best-picture-nomination-level sniffling when The Road starts screening for Academy members? Will it be punished for being too grim... or for not feeling quite as grim as it could've? These all remain to be seen. But again, before writing it off as too tough for Kansas, remember that the novel really got its commercial jumpstart when it got the Oprah seal of approval. And though critical response is already far from uniform, I think Hillcoat has made the first movie involving cannibalism that Oprah's audience can take to its collective bosom.
(You can read my interview with Viggo Mortensen, John Hillcoat, and now-13-year-old costar Kodi Smit-McPhee and the director on Huffington Post in the coming days...)
BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS
If you're tired of Nicholas Cage playing it safe as an emotionally placid action man in National Treasure sequels, and your fondest desire is that he would just go completely off the known acting grid again, have we got the movie for you. He's a flagrantly unhinged crackhead cop in director Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant, which is neither a sequel to or remake of Abel Ferrara's 1990s Bad Lieutenant... but why shouldn't this movie's incalculable nuttiness start with its very name?
In the opening stretch, Cage gets a promotion to lieutenant right about the time a doctor nonchalantly informs him that he's got an unspecificied back problem that will cause him "moderate to severe" pain the rest of his days. It's not clear whether he already had a drug problem, but he's soon not just popping Vicodin but stealing Oxycontin, cocaine, and crack, even doing a bit of heroin by mistake in his enthusiasm to snort or smoke anything white that isn't in a Morton's Salt container. A murder investigation serves mostly as a chance for him to ingratiate himself with drug lords to help pay off his massive debts, stay flush with blow, and keep up his visits with the world's most fantastically good-looking (and of course golden-hearted) hooker, Eva Mendes. He's bad.
But he's lovable, partly because his perpetually stooped-over posture reminds us of great Americans like Ed Sullivan and Richard Nixon. And the more crack he does, the more you want to party with him. Late in the film, he indulges in substance abuse with a deadly gangsta, and keeps erupting in unexpected gales of gaseous laughter in the fellow's face, a little like Jack Nicholson's famously gleeful guffaws as the Joker. It's exhilarating to see a major actor let go of the slightest restraints on screen, even as you have that "Uhhh, I don't know if you should be doing this" feeling as much for Cage as for his character.
Also letting himself go: Werner Herzog, who directs most of the proceedings in a straightforward, matter-of-fact, luridly entertaining, lowdown crime-film fashion (this is the Herzog film least likely to ever get tagged an "art film") but occasionally indulges in some flights of fancy. You get long takes of wild alligators and pet igunanas that are so closeup, they're nearly lizardly p.o.v. shots. Cage related this at a Q&A following the first Telluride screening: "Werner said, 'Nicolas, I must have three minutes of my iguanas in the movie. If I can't have my iguanas in the movie for three minutes, I will be so upset, I will never make another movie.'" He got his wish, including shots in which Cage and an iguana have an extended staredown.
I'm afraid to give away any spoilers, but since the film has no distribution deal for America yet, maybe it's not a sin to describe the most gloriously over-the-top scene: A drug dealer shoots a bookie dead, but Cage insists that the guy be shot one more time, because he can still see his soul dancing. Cut to a shot of the deceased bookie breakdancing, on his head, before having his soul killed as well. Needless to say, every line between good and bad filmmaking ideas and intentional and unintentional comedy gets crossed. Who knows whether it'll ever get any kind of rollout here, but it may go over like gangbusters in Europe, where the film is already pre-sold, and where we hear they like their Americans ugly.
UP NEXT: In the next part of my Telluride report, you'll read about potential best actress-winning performances by Helen Mirren in The Last Station and Carey Mulligan in An Education, along with Todd Solondz's hilarious and weirdly moving Life During Wartime, and an unnerving spookfest that Paramount is betting will be the next Blair Witch phenomenon, Paranormal Activity.
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Clooney's "Up in the Air" Premieres at Telluridetag:www.bullypulpit.com,2009:/chriswillman//11.612009-09-06T20:04:31Z2011-05-26T12:00:17ZOne of this year's most anticipated movies had its world premiere this weekend 9,545 feet above sea level, in a screening room at the Telluride Film Festival.Chris Willman
Up in the Air, one of this year's most anticipated movies for grown-ups, had its world premiere this weekend... up in the air. More specifically, the George Clooney vehicle made its bow 9,545 feet above sea level, in a screening room at the Telluride Film Festival that is accessible primarily by taking a ski gondola to the top of a mountain. In the film, directed by Jason Reitman (of Juno and Thank You for Smoking fame), Clooney plays an itinerant exec whose goal in life is to amass 10 million frequent flyer miles. Telluride Festival passholders who spent a lot of time going in and out of clouds on that gondola began to know how he felt.
Reitman said he only finished the film two days before bringing it to Telluride, where the dramatic comedy was shown as a "sneak preview" in advance of its official world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival. "You were already in line when I was still working on this movie," the filmmaker joked to the audience. It had already been touted as an awards contender sight-unseen, but now that the movie has actually been seen by an audience, it's safe to say its Oscar buzz is... elevated. (Non-festival-goers will have to wait till Dec. 4.)
The director started writing Up in the Air six years ago, based on Walter Kim's novel. Fortuitously for him, in a way, but unfortuitously for the nation, it's grown about a hundred times more timely in the intervening years, because Clooney's job in the movie is being a terminator -- someone brought in by cowardly corporations to handle the actual in-person firings of employees in a mass layoff. But that nutshell description risks making the movie sound a little more high-concept than it is.
"No, I don't think I make high-concept movies," Reitman told me after the screening. "The fact that he fires people for a living is kind of one of six plotlines in the movie. The fact that it's relevant as a movie very much of 2009 is not only the result of it being about a guy who fires people for a living. I think it's also a result of a guy whose life experience is very 2009. The way that he travels, the way that he texts people -- I think all of it makes him a man of the moment."
There are romantic, sexual, familial, and purely professional entanglements along the way. Reitman didn't take much from the novel beyond the central character and his carefree philosophy about the superiority of perennial rootlessness. Major characters invented just for the screenplay include the ones played by Vera Farmiga, as Clooney's equally itinerant love (or possibly just sex) interest, and Anna Kendrick, playing a young upstart who disrupts Clooney's happy flyboy existence by bringing in a new system of downsizing-by-teleconference-call. Clooney finds his formerly chilly feelings about love and home changing as the result of attending his estranged sister's wedding, another element not found in Kim's source novel.
Reitman is the first to acknowledge the frequent changes of tone in the film; he says he thinks of the first act as being like Thank You for Smoking's corporate satire, the second act as like Juno's more intimate comedy, and the third act as something much more personal for him. At various points the movie feels very Cameron Crowe-esque, with its exec-finding-his-soul overtones harking back to Jerry Maguire or Elizabethtown. At other times it feels like it's leading in the direction of being a romantic comedy, but what it offers in the end is something far less conventional than that. It's not actually a "feel-good" movie, finally, though Telluride attendees left feeling awfully good about it. "I'm trying to take the audience in a certain direction so that when the ending happens, you really feel the impact of it," Reitman said -- and to be any less cryptic than that would be offering spoilers.
The main character definitely involves Clooney playing to suave, commitment-phobe type, up to a point. "I feel that this is a movie very much in his voice," Reitman said. "And I thought--I presumed, and I found myself to be correct--that this movie, this storyline and its characters, really speak to him, and that you can feel that in the authenticity and vulnerability of his performance." If people see parallels between Clooney's intelligent playboy image and the movie's alternately glib and soulful terminator, so does Reitman. "It's interesting, the connections between him and this character... I think he saw this as a chance to stare that straight in the eye."
The director says the film is "truly about connecting with other human beings... For the first time ever, [the Clooney character] realizes he's alone in the universe, and I wanted to leave you with that feeling." But he sees that as upbeat, mind you: "When you realize how alone this character is, you want to reach out and love other people."
But the initial focus will surely be on the incredible timing of the unemployment angle. Most of the "actors" Clooney lays off in the film -- who respond by swearing, threatening suicide, weeping, or with real resignation -- are people who really were recently fired. The filmmakers placed an ad, saying they were making a documentary about job loss. They narrowed the field down to 100, filmed 60 people, and 25 of those made it into the movie as firees. The closing end-credits song is also written and sung by a regular guy in his mid-50s who handed Reitman a cassette of a sad tune he'd written about his own job loss and the subsequent search for purpose. Jason Reitman: He's Hollywood's one-man stimulus plan.
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One Last, Strange Night With David Carradinetag:www.bullypulpit.com,2009:/chriswillman//11.622009-06-04T19:11:22Z2011-05-26T12:00:18ZI bore witness to what was probably David Carradine's last public appearance, in late March. It turned into a riveting hour of near-chaos.Chris Willman
Such was my hope when I bore witness to what was probably David Carradine's last public appearance, in late March. He was participating in a panel after an American Cinematheque screening of his 1976 film Bound for Glory, the sort of film-buff affair that usually promises a modest amount of inside-baseball Hollywood illumination but nothing in the way of actual fireworks. Instead, this dry-sounding discussion turned into a riveting hour of near-chaos, with fellow panelists or audience members seething or screaming at Carradine and the actor yelling back. (I gave a full account of the bizarre proceedings in a Huffington Post blog at the time, which you can read here.) Carradine wasn't the only person in the theater who was acting just a little kooky as things got out of hand that night, but he was the trigger for the craziness, and his behavior left the stunned crowd wondering whether the guy they remembered and loved from Kung Fu was an endearing maverick or a sad nutter.
Now that we've learned of his apparent suicide, would it be all right to think of him as a little bit of both those things? I'm the last one who wants to put a smiley face on mental illness, especially the terminal kind. But I kind of fell in love with David Carradine that night in Santa Monica, as aghast as I was at some of the things that came out of his mouth. His unbridled candor was probably the result of either not taking enough medication or being too self-medicated--those of us standing around on the sidewalk outside afterward couldn't agree on which was more likely. But, without fully embracing the stereotype of Crazy Guy as Truth Teller (see Revolutionary Road for the latest fictional example), there's something to be said for those unexpectedly air-clearing moments when you're shaken out of a torpor by someone whose self-censorship mode is, for whatever reason, malfunctioning. And something to be said just for "Hollywood characters," of which Carradine was very decidedly one.
I won't go into a full recount of what strangeness transpired at the American Cinematheque, since you can read it elsewhere on this site. But the outline of how things unraveled, comically and anxiously, is still burned into my mind. Bound for Glory, as a Woody Guthrie biopic, is naturally a pro-union screed, among other things, so everyone expected Carradine to behave as a proper liberal. Instead, he started talking about how different things are than they were in the '30s, proposing that, in this near-depression, unions needed to cede some of their power and make concessions so that companies could stay alive. An enraged woman in the audience began shouting him down, at length. He shouted back at her--and his points were lucid ones, and yet he seemed to lack the self-awareness to know that yelling into a microphone made him appear to be a bully. Some of the crowd began to turn on him. Fellow cast member Ronny Cox muttered "That doesn't sound like Woody Guthrie to me!" and walked out on Carradine. Perhaps finally sensing that he wasn't coming off well, Carradine stood up for his audience antagonist's right to argue, and tossed his microphone in her direction, so that she could use it. It struck someone in the front row in the head. This wasn't going to be his night.
Things had barely calmed down when Carradine seemed to want to pick a fight with the remaining panelist, cinematographer Haskell Wexler, a firebrand in his own right. The actor said repeatedly, with a smile on his face, that Wexler "got an Academy Award for ruining my movie." Rather than capture the grit of the Depression, Carradine said, Wexler had come up with a soft look for the film that made everything look "like it was shot through a glass of milk." It's actually a legitimate criticism some people have made of the film over time--that it's too pretty, too gauzy--but it seemed either refreshingly candid or a little bit evil for Carradine to be making it in front of Wexler. And then he said that director Hal Ashby had tried and failed to fire the cinematographer. Naturally, the legendary director of photography snapped--confirming that he'd been momentarily fired, but saying that he got "unfired" when he made a fuss over how much cocaine everyone on the set was doing. Carradine denied joining in the coke use supposedly rampant in the production, but defended Ashby: "Hal was a fucking genius. I don't like anybody to put him down and say the drugs got in the way... They got in the way of him living longer, but they did not get in the way of his movies." He then spoke up for directors who've been able to do good work while being "cocaine freaks"--lumping Quentin Tarantino in with Ashby. You could hear a couple of hundred jaws scrape the theater floor at that moment.
Thinking back now on Carradine talking about what got in the way of Ashby living longer, you've got to wonder what kind of demons got in the way of Carradine living longer. His was not an easy mindset to get into, either that night or during some other quirky exchanges he was known for over the years. Did he relish being the kook who speaks truth to power and/or bullshit artist? Was he even capable of the self-awareness to sense that half the audience for the panel discussion loved him, and half thought he was out of his gourd (not counting the dozens of walkouts)? In the days to come, I expect those who knew him well will be able to speak to his depression, and whether, as I assume, we were seeing a manic episode of it that night in March.
But my most memorable takeaway moment from his last public appearance, at least emotionally, is how, when the fracas had reached its tensest moment and there was suddenly a dreadfully awkward silence, he decided to smooth things out by picking up the guitar he'd brought along for an unscheduled musical interlude. He encouraged everyone to join in with him on Guthrie's "Bound for Glory," in what he clearly hoped would be a "Kumbaya" moment. But nobody did, that I could tell--the mood in the room was just too tense to be that easily broken for a campfire interlude--and Carradine was up there wailing away by himself. It was a funny and brave and poignant moment, and I found myself feeling an honest affection for this utterly charismatic and strangely transparent guy... notwithstanding the disorder he'd passive-aggressively instigated and was now trying to clean up.
I can't imagine what was going through Carradine's mind in his last moments, if indeed he did take his own life. But I hope it wasn't the feeling that he'd created a mess in his life and no one was singing along.
UPDATE: Police in Thailand have said Carradine also had a rope around his genitals, which lends credence to an autoerotic asphyxiation theory, a la Michael Hutchence. Carradine's manager is telling journalists he was found with his hands tied behind his back, which, if true, would certainly indicate the possible involvement of a sex worker. This blog will be updated to reflect the unlikeliness of a deliberate suicide. It's hard to be "rooting" for an alternate theory, exactly, but it's reassuring to know that, whatever eccentricities Carradine may have been known for, he was not necessarily despondent in his final days.]]>
Bound for Hell, Or Glory? David Carradine and the Feistiest Film Panel Evertag:www.bullypulpit.com,2009:/chriswillman//11.632009-03-23T06:12:58Z2011-05-26T12:00:18ZBy popular request from film buffs who are kicking themselves they weren't there, I'm providing a blow-by-blow of just what a nerve-wracking, weird and wonderful night out at the fights this was.Chris Willman
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? a couple of years ago have I experienced a night of live theater quite as riveting as the three-way cage match between David Carradine, Haskell Wexler, and the audience that transpired at an L.A. repertory filmhouse after a screening the other night. If there's anything that wouldn't seem to scream "fireworks!," it'd be a panel discussion about the 1976 Woody Guthrie biopic Bound for Glory, yet it's just this innocuous-sounding an event, held at the American Cinematheque in Santa Monica the other night, that may go down in Hollywood feud lore. By popular request from film buffs who are kicking themselves they weren't there, I'm providing a blow-by-blow of just what a nerve-wracking, weird and wonderful night out at the fights this was. Beware: This train is bound for bedlam -- this train!
At this date, Bound for Glory probably counts as one of the less remembered works of the late, great Hal Ashby (director of Being There, Shampoo, and Coming Home). Much as I love Ashby, I'd always missed this one, and despite a readily available DVD, I have a hard time forcing myself to watch slow-moving 147-minute period pieces unless I've committed myself to a seat in front of a big screen. I knew there'd be a discussion afterward with Carradine, but my plan was to skip out on it and go from there to a late show of Watchmen in Westwood. (Two two-and-a-half-hour movies in a row, you say? Well, that's just the kind of tough guy I am.) But, imperfect as Glory is, it does a fantastic job of plunging you into the (previous) Great Depression, and it's so utterly and engagingly human that I feel like washing its taste out of my mouth with a comic-book extravaganza would be inviting eternal damnation. So I stay for the discussion, narrowly averting what might have been one of the great regrets of my life.
Even before the panel, there has already been some weirdness during the screening itself. During a scene where a radio guy reminds Guthrie that he's not allowed to sing any controversial material on his program, somebody very loudly exclaims, "I hate guys like that!" It gets a big laugh from the audience. But soon the same fellow is following up with a line of patter, which I can't make out because he's on the other side of the auditorium. Very quickly there are cineastes yelling at the rube to shut the hell up, and some kind of verbal altercation seems to ensue. Of course, as soon as the lights come up, Carradine is walking down the aisle with his acoustic guitar in hand, already caught up in a celebratory spiel, and everyone immediately realizes he was the one providing live commentary for his movie. I get a sense that formerly offended patrons are feeling embarrassed to realize that moments ago they'd been shouting The Star Of The Show down like a common heckler, although some of these sympathies are about to diminish...
The screening is part of a "Kevin Thomas' Favorite Films" series, hosted by the former L.A. Times film critic, who I knew back in my own Times days. I don't know what Kevin has been like as a moderator on the other nights, but during the ensuing 70 or 75 chaotic minutes, he seems to go into shock and utters all of about 50 words. The first nine of them being: "I understand Ronny Cox is in the audience tonight?" Indeed, Carradine's costar, Cox, has shown up just to see the film, and, thus bidden, agreeably ambles toward the stage. There, he joins another unannounced guest, Haskell Wexler, one of the half-dozen most revered living cinematographers, and recipient of one of the two Oscars the film received. Carradine and Cox warmly embrace, the leading man enthusing about how he couldn't have gotten through the shoot without his supporting actor as a partner. And the lovefest begins!
Or the monologue, actually. For the first 20 minutes or so, Carradine does 98% of the talking -- hell, maybe 99% -- and it's entertaining as all-get-out, in a rambling, had-too-many-highballs-before-dinner kind of way. The anecdotes he's telling are good ones, but he's not leaving room for anyone else to get a word in edgewise, and Cox is probably thinking he could have stayed in his cozy original seat out in the house, while Wexler keeps slinking further down in his chair, as those of us who know this particular d.p. does not suffer fools gladly wonder what kind of storm clouds might be forming in his head. Wexler actually knew Woody Guthrie, who died in the 1960s -- not that we'll hear a chance to hear anything about that tonight. He does pipe up to say how wonderful a sign of change it was that Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen got to sing the full, controversial version of "This Land is Your Land" at the White House recently, which prompts Carradine to break into that very song, with the aid of some lyrical assists from the crowd. The actor talks about how Richard Dreyfuss was originally cast as Guthrie, but a salary dispute got in the way, and he was able to talk his way into the role by convincing producers that "I am Woody Guthrie!" -- a bravado he adopted despite the fact that, by his own admission, "the only thing I knew about Woody Guthrie when I was cast was that he wrote 'Goodnight Irene.'" The kicker to this joke is supposed to be "And I was wrong," but an irritated Wexler, thinking Carradine isn't aware of the mistake, suddenly perks up and steps on the actor's punchline, half-disgustedly interrupting, "No, Leadbelly wrote it." Anyway, so far, so benign.
Then the subject of unions arises... and everything goes gonzo, never to return. Carradine says that these are different times from the 1930s and unions no longer serve the purpose they once did, or words to that effect. Almost immediately, as if coiled and ready to spring, a woman in the back starts shrieking that nothing about unions' importance has changed. Carradine reiterates his position. Cox, who has barely said a word up until now, starts shaking his head and mutters, "That doesn't sound like Woody Guthrie to me!" The woman I'll call Union Lady starts marching down the aisle, and now Carradine is shouting back, which might be okay if he wasn't yelling right into the microphone, which does not sound pretty. For about two minutes both of them are going at it at once, and she's the more obnoxious one. But because Carradine's mike makes him five times as loud, he's coming off as the bully. Some audience members are telling Union Lady to shut up; some angrily holler "Let her speak!" Two guys in my vicinity start shouting "Let's hear from Haskell Wexler!" About a dozen people get up and walk out in the midst of this -- one of them, almost unnoticed, being Ronny Cox, who manages to effect the smoothest getaway of all time.
At this point, Carradine reminds me of poor Tucker Carlson, standing in front of that conservative PAC a few weeks ago, realizing that, in defending the New York Times, he has lost the sympathies of his audience to the hecklers. A woman in the front row, who we will later learn is Cinematheque publicist Margot Gerber, stands up, turns around, and twice yells that Union Lady should be thrown out. But no, Carradine insists, dissent is great. "You're not one of the people!" shouts the lady. "I am one of the people!" Carradine shouts back, saying that he's had to cut back on the groceries he buys for his family, and because of the mistakes made by Hollywood unions, he hasn't had much work. "I AM NOT A RICH PERSON!" he growls, seemingly genuinely enraged as well as loud for the first time. He talks about how it's a problem when workers in Tennessee making Toyotas make $10 an hour while GM workers in Detroit make $60 an hour--which makes Union Lady even more outraged, naturally. Everything we know is out the window in this economy, Carradine argues, and every aspect of the bartering we do in our daily lives, be it personal or corporate, has to be up for renegotiation. These are actually lucid, reasonable points--or would be if he had any control over his tone. Someone yells "Let her have the mike!" So Carradine half-heartedly tosses the mike into the audience--bonking a woman in the front row in the head! Ironically, the woman he bonks is the Cinematheque's publicist, Gerber, who'd just been defending him moments earlier. This has to count as some seriously strange karma for her, but fortunately for Carradine, she's probably the person in the audience least likely to file an assault charge.
The head-strike was an accident, but a groan goes up from the audience, and I get the sense that some people think he deliberately intended to lash out at the crowd, as opposed to just having really shitty aim. Suddenly it strikes me that it would only take one more bit of weirdness for things to get completely out of hand. It's a holy cow, anything could happen right now kind of pregnant moment. Fortunately, there is slightly more confusion than hostility afoot, so no brawl ensues. Union Lady and her entourage finally take their leave, with Carradine calling out that he loves her, even though he knows she hates him.
There's a moment of calm. The presumptive moderator is silent, either because he's enjoying this too much to stop it or has mentally gone to a better place. So an audience member takes it upon himself to shout out a question about cinematography. Who knew this would be a more dangerous subject than unions? Wexler talks about color desaturation ("You'll notice the movie gets more colorful when we get to California") and gives some very technical details. Carradine breaks in and starts talking about crane shots. Wexler, annoyed, goes back to the specs. And this is the point at which Carradine really goes off the rails, albeit it in a more subdued, passive-aggressive kind of way. He brings out a line -- which he'll repeats at least two more times -- about how Wexler "got an Academy Award for ruining my movie." You can feel the audience holding its collective breath as Carradine goes on to say that the film "looks like it was shot through a glass of milk." When he explains what he wished the look of the film had been -- which is grittier -- again, it's a lucid point, which some critics might even agree with. But the insulting way he's making it is either tone-deaf or just evil.
Then he tells the story of how Ashby, the director, hated the look of the film, too, and had frequently expressed the wish that he could fire Wexler. Gasps go up. Carradine then says he talked Ashby out of firing Wexler, "because if you fire somebody, they just go out in the parking lot and steal your hubcaps." I'm pretty sure that's a metaphor, but the audience doesn't know what to do with this image other than to nervously titter. There will be a lot more of that--oh, yes, there will.
Naturally, Wexler is enraged by Carradine's story. Speaking at some length for the first time, he retorts: "I didn't know that I was going to be confronted with a story which I don't think is necessarily a public story. But since it is public, I have to say something. Hal Ashby sent somebody to fire me, and he said 'You're fired,' okay? And then after I heard that and got the message, I went to Hal and I said 'Hal, just take a minute and STOP SNIFFING THAT STUFF UP YOUR NOSE!' And if David will tell me there wasn't heavy duty doping on that film, and that that wasn't the comradeship he was talking about..." He lets that thought trail off, but adds: "When I showed up the next day, I went to work, and I was the UNFIRED director of photography. Now, that's the goddamned truth!"
Carradine (drolly): "Okay. I don't think that changes my story at all. Except that Haskell is a little down on people who snort cocaine." That gets a good, nervous audience laugh. He goes on to tell a story about visiting Ashby's mammoth trailer, and picking up a copy of the L.A. Times, which he hadn't seen during many weeks of location shooting. "Underneath it there were about six lines of cocaine... Hal was looking at me and I said 'Hal, do you do a lot of this stuff?' And he said 'As much as I can get.' And I said 'I'll talk to you later,' and I left the trailer. Because it's not my thing. And yes, Hal was a great user of cocaine. It does not change the fact that he was... " Carradine goes for the superlatives. "Quentin Tarantino doesn't beat Hal Ashby, and he's one of my favorite directors. Quentin is incredible. And he's a big cocaine freak, too!" Okay, you want to talk about nervous laughter... (Just for the record, I'm not sure you can tell with 100% certainty from the tape whether Carradine says the present-tense "He's a...." or, possibly, the past-tense "He was a...") The actor continues: "But Hal was a fucking genius. I don't like anybody to put him down and say the drugs got in the way or anything else, because they didn't get in the way. They got in the way of him living longer, but they did not get in the way of his movies. There is not one movie he made that you cannot say it's one of the best fucking movies that has ever been made..."
In the midst of all this, I find myself wondering if the audience is rapt because we're watching a train wreck -- to continue with the Guthrie-esque metaphors -- or because it's a wreck coming at us right of what was arguably Hollywood's last golden age, the 1970s, white lines and all. We're witnessing a rumble, but we're also in the presence of lions... very pissy lions. In 30 years, will there be a free-for-all Watchmen panel, and will anybody care if they rip each other's eyes out? But I digress...
"Hal was a fucking genius," Carradine is repeating, like a mantra. "And so is this guy," he adds, gesturing toward an ungrateful-looking Wexler. "I happen to disagree with the way he felt about Bound for Glory, about the look. And it was beautiful, but it was not what I wanted. I wasn't the boss, right? ... This guy was out there working his fucking ass off, there's no doubt about it, right? And he wasn't doing exactly what I would have asked him to do. I would have said, turn up the contrast, show the grit under the fingernails, don't make any beauty about it, make it fucking ugly! And you know what, if he'd done what I told him to do, he would probably have not gotten his Academy Award, because it wouldn't have been pretty. So maybe he was right and I was wrong... Somebody will talk to me about Haskell and I'll say 'Oh yeah, he's the guy who got an Academy Award for ruining my picture.' It's one of my favorite lines, and it gets a laugh. And then I see the picture and I just forget all that." (Arguably.) "Because the picture is just so fuckin' great. That's the thing that's amazing to me, is a collaboration between a director and a cameraman and a star who absolutely disagree with each other on almost everything, and yet they make a movie that will be a permanent fucking classic. Is that okay, Haskell?"
Long pause. Wexler finally responds: "I just want to say that after Bound for Glory I made three or four pictures with Hal Ashby."
Carradine: "And I didn't get to make one!" At last, we all agree, and can laugh together! (Even though Wexler's not laughing.) Hooray!
Even this modest moment of harmony is short-lived. Carradine talks about how the homeless camps they set up for the film were "livable" and attracted people from out of state who actually resided in the tents for a time. Wexler makes faces at the audience, suggesting that everything Carradine is saying is cuckoo. (He also made a coke-snorting motion at one point, though I can't remember when. It might have been when Carradine said that an entire day's worth of work was unusable because too much dust in the Dust Bowl scenes made the shots impenetrably murky -- a memory that Wexler clearly does not buy at all.) Setting the stage for the next battle, Carradine waxes enthusiastic over the use of a hidden "suitcase camera" that allowed the crew to get great takes of the extras in the camp scenes, unaware they were being filmed. This is when Wexler really begins to take offense again, thinking that Carradine is trying to give the camera operators credit for his work.
Carradine: "We had this incredible guy... Do you remember the name of the guy that was the handheld camera guy, that used the suitcase camera?"
Wexler (rising to righteous indignation): "Do I remember it? How do you think it got in this film, David? Who do you think planned it? Who did the shots? Look it, David, you fuckin'..."
Carradine: "I'm not talking about credit, I'm just asking for the guy's name."
"Wait a second, David..."
"What did I do? I just asked for the guy's name."
"Do they (the audience) know what a director of photography does...?" Wexler goes on to list all the collaborative relationships a cinematographer has with other crew key members. "Hearing David with his explanations about all these cameras and the suitcase camera... Where the hell did you get all this expertise?"
Carradine (drolly): "Uh, I was there. My only question was, what's the name of that guy who operated the suitcase camera?
"YOU WERE IN THE TRAILER TILL YOU GOT CALLED OUT!"
"Do you know it?"
"I didn't come here for combat," Wexler announces, deliberately, "but I also didn't come out here to be demeaned for what my contribution to that film is."
"Okay, anyway, since he doesn't know the name of the guy," Carradine goes on, getting a dig in, "he had a suitcase that had a camera in it and he could push it and make it go... " Haskell buries his face in his hands as Carradine goes on a bit more about the glories of the suddenly contentious suitcase camera, which was so brilliantly operated by whatsisname.
Wexler: "I'm gonna give up now. First of all, half the shots in [those scenes] were not from the suitcase..."
Carradine (vindicated): "Half of 'em!"
Wexler: "David, I don't know if I can take any more of this bull."
There is a very pregnant silence. Then Carradine picks up his guitar and starts into a long rendition of Bound for Glory's title song, urging the audience to join in. There is a bare minimum of singing and clapping, but the audience is a little too stunned, if not alienated, for a "Kumbaya" moment.
Carradine starts packing up his guitar, a process that mysteriously seems to go on for minutes as the actor tries to put a more gracious cap on the evening. "We never agreed -- we're sort of like enemies -- but the fact is, I know his fuckin' talent, and I know his drive and insistence on making the movie the way it was that got him his Academy Award.... I wish that I'd been able to work with you again. The fact that we don't get along has nothing to do with it, nothing whatsoever. I got along great with your kid! I'm honored to be here," Carradine proclaims, suddenly almost touchingly wistful. "And anybody else that ever wants to do an event for Bound for Glory, I'll be there."
And I'm pretty sure Wexler and Cox won't.
Just in time to send everyone home, Kevin Thomas finds his voice: "I must say, I've got some fresh insights into the collaborative effort of filmmaking." It's an arch comment, but it has some truth to it. As the audience stands to regain its collective existential bearings, Wexler turns to Carradine and says, "I knew you would not disappoint," and -- incredibly, after the passions that have just transpired -- they briefly hug.
Outside on Montana Ave., clusters of frazzled attendees form. Metaphorically, or maybe literally, we're all just trying to pat down the hair that's been standing on end for the last hour. "Between the aggressive panelists and audience and a moderator who wouldn't stop anything, it was a perfect storm," announces one guy, gratefully, I think.
One stranger I catch up with on the corner says he found the entire experience to be a deeply uncomfortable immersion in unalloyed anxiety. His friend counters that it was an exhilarating peek past the usual scrim of Hollywood bullshit. Me, I have to go with... both. Either way, I suspect the 50 or 60 of us who stuck it out, like survivors of some massive accident, will be invisibly bonded in forever hereafter experiencing reality through a slightly different, somehow more knowing prism than the untraumatized loved ones to whom we return.]]>
Facebook's Lousy Facelifttag:www.bullypulpit.com,2009:/chriswillman//11.642009-03-16T17:27:15Z2011-05-26T12:00:18ZIncredibly, Facebook -- until last week, the Apple of social-networking services -- decided to react to the Twitter "threat" by trying to turn itself into its relatively puny challenger.Chris Willman
is the new Facebook redesign? Imagine that Apple panicked over the press the Google G1 phone was getting last fall and abruptly decided to remake the iPhone in the image of its upstart competitor--dropping the most desirable features and adopting the G1's bigger bulk, smaller screen, skimpy memory, lack of apps, and mediocre interface. We all know that could never happen: Apple has too much confidence in its own market dominance and design brilliance to blink like that. Yet, incredibly, Facebook--until last week, the Apple of social-networking services--decided to react to the Twitter "threat" by trying to turn itself into its relatively puny challenger. It's like Meryl Streep getting plastic surgery in order to more closely resemble Malin Akerman. Who'd have guessed that Facebook, of all the beloved services, could be capable of such a needlessly lousy facelift?
I think web historians can mark down March 13, 2009 as "the day they broke Facebook." Not that it's easy to pin it down to one date, because some users started getting shifted over a day or two earlier to "New Facebook." (Allusion to "New Coke" intentional.) But there's something unluckily apt about Friday the 13th being the completion date for everyone's home page involuntarily giving way to... The Change. (Menopausal allusion also intentional.) From every indication I can gauge, the reaction among Facebook partisans has been overwhelmingly blistering, making me wonder if they did any kind of market research at all that didn't involve sampling groups made up entirely of Twitter triumphalists. Earth to 24-year-old Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg: As of last month, Twitter was getting 54 million monthly visits, which sounds impressive, except that this genius thing you invented was getting almost almost 1.2 billion visits--or, in other words, was still about 20 times as popular as the nascent challenger. Remind us again, Mark, what it was you didn't like about that math?
Scrolling through all my friends' status updates in one 24-hour period between midnight Friday and midnight Saturday, I counted 40 unsolicited complaints from my pals about the changes. Some were generalized grumbling: "Bill Holdship wonders why the geniuses at Facebook felt the need to fix something that wasn't broken"... "Carla DeSantis wants the old Fecebook back! This one stinks"... "Mike Denneen thinks that when you have an update that 150 million users weren't waiting for, you ought to get it right the first time"... "Alison Bracker is thinking that if she wanted to be on Twitter, she'd be on Twitter"... "Mark Harris is glad to see that the plunging economy has not affected the gratuitous-redesign industry." And so on.
So my friends are naturally resistant to any change and, as former senator Phil Gramm would surely say, we're really just a nation of whiners... right? Not really--the complaints get pretty precise. Using my status update to poll pals about any specific objections they had to the remade Facebook, I was quickly besieged by dozens of very detailed responses. Some had to do with cosmetic changes like fonts and layout, to be sure. But what came through most clearly was that Facebook had broken a cardinal rule of business: When in doubt, offer the consumer more choices, not fewer. The new Facebook eliminates a good number of the channels users could formerly choose to receive information about their friends, in favor of diminished options and a bland, filterless uniformity. "My selectivity is gone," said one friend, Lesley Bracker, "now controlled by Facebook."
Why did Facebook take away so many of the options that users loved? That's easy--they want you to focus on your home page's main "stream," because, um... it'll remind you of Twitter's singular stream of info? It's difficult to catalogue all the ironies here. In some ways, Facebook and Twitter have long provided the same service, with FB's "status updates" being equivalent to the younger service's 140-character "tweets." The difference was, that's one of seemingly about a hundred things Facebook offered, whereas that's pretty much the only thing Twitter does. Rather than relish in the diversity of choices it gave users, though, Facebook is forcing everything into the same channel, and then trying to make these items look as indistinguishable from one another as possible. Links look like status updates look like wall posts look like wall-post responses--and with every tiny or large item now accompanied by a superfluous user photo, they all look like tweets.
What else is bugging my Facebook friends (who tend to be involved in the publishing, movie, and music industries, with some token teenagers mixed in)? Let them count the ways...
* Now gone is one of Facebook's most compelling features: the "live feed," which let users watch everything their friends did on the site, as they did it, instantaneously. To quote one friend of a friend: "'Live Feed' was my TV alternative. It was fascinating to watch. And even though they're touting this new FB 'Home' page as a real-time update, it does NOT automatically update itself." Even now, Facebook's help page continues to make this illusory promise: "The stream shows you all posts from your friends in real-time." Another friend used her status update to rebut that one: "Gayle Fine thinks someone needs to explain to Facebook that 'real-time' is only real time when you don't have to hit any buttons to refresh."
* Also missing is the ability to look at your friends' status updates as a distinct list, without having links or wall posts or other data mixed in. The scroll of status updates was always my first Facebook go-to. Yes, they're very similar to Twitter's tweets, but there was something about Facebook's elegant typography and layout that encouraged users to intermittently indulge in philosophical haiku or droll bon mots--as opposed to the constant barrage of overinformational "About to scratch myself" posts that Twitter seems to encourage.
* As far as I can tell, everyone hates having user photos show up alongside each link or wall post as well as status update--with the corners shaved off, like the tacky matte prints you or your parents used to pick up from the Fotomat in the 1970s. One of my friends made a different comparison: "James Sposto wonders, why are my corners rounded? That's so 2003--we all look like State Farm logos. (Believe me, I know.)" Another friend used his update to try to lobby for a mass demonstration: "Mark Philip Venema says: Join me in posting a blank thumbnail as an official protest so we can thumb our noses at FB's over-thumbnailing."
* As for the uniformity of type styles: "Ty Visconti thinks the big print is like playing bridge with the blue hairs. BINGO!!!!!" But in the interest, I did have a bare handful of friends who expressed neutrality about the changes, including this brave soul: "Ari Karpel isn't fazed by the new F'book look. So, the font is bigger. He's old anyway." So there's at least one demographic that's satisfied with the changes, then: Everyone who'd been hankering all along for "Facebook: Large Type Edition."
• "The feed no longer tells you when friends add new friends," writes journalist-pal Roy Rivenburg, "which was one of the main ways I discovered new friends. And it doesn't tell you when people join groups, etc. The 'Highlights' thing is useless -- not reader-friendly and rarely seems to change, so easily ignored." The "Highlights" referred to here--which is not for children, but ought to be--is the narrower column to the right of the main stream, which contains a mixture of... well, honestly, I'm still not sure what. It's where advertisements appear, along with a completely random mixture of other alerts that you used to be able to look up as a separate category. (Right now, my "Highlights" column is ironically informing me that five of my friends joined the group "The New Facebook Layout Sucks!," right below an invitation to "Become a Fan of Papa John's Pizza.")
* "Previously," my friend Jan Breslauer wrote me, "you had to go to a person's page to see something else someone posted on their wall, building in a level of semi-privacy. Now it's all part of the same grabbag feed. I am now disinclined to post any status updates or write on anyone's wall."
* Writes my friend Bracker, "Here's something new: it wouldn't let me send a private message containing a link without typing a code first--and not once, but twice!! Like I was buying from Ticketmaster, or something."
* As for games, fuggehdaboutit. It looks like Facebook has, unless they're just doing a really good job of hiding 'em. Evan Serpick devoted his status update to asking, "How do i see/get to my applications --I need Scramble!" Similarly: "Anne Hurley just wants to know where Word Twist is! I love you guys, but don't hide my games."
Wait, did you hear that: "I love you guys, but..."? Implicit in all this reproof is the idea that users feel let down by something with which they'd fallen hopelessly and intractably in lust. More than one of my friends even used the "B"-word: "I'm not using it as much because I hate the way it looks. I feel betrayed." It'd become so much a part of our lives that some of my friends feel like they've been disappointed by... dare we say it?... a friend. "Zuckerberg (AND his roommate) created Facebook," writes my friend Mark Hanser. "But he's immature and over his head. When something grows so large and becomes such a shared experience, it becomes a covenant. And once a covenant of millions concurs, the guy the created it can't go changing the previously agreed-upon conventions that everyone seemingly knows, uses and loves."
Well, yes he can, actually. Facebook is privately owned, not a governmentally controlled trust. It's free, too, so it's not as if we can threaten to take our subscription dollars elsewhere. As Ruben Pla wrote on a friend's page, "Never look a gift horse in the Facebook." I got to wondering a while ago what would happen if something so many of us have come to think of as almost like another appendage were to suddenly get arbitrarily amputated. Would we all collectively move over to another site--as some threatened to do during the recent "terms of service" controversy--or would this unlikely national community of tens of millions simply disperse and go back to bowling alone, as it were? It hasn't come to that; I don't know anyone who's actually dropped out. Most of us will stick with Facebook, to some degree, even if the service becomes two-faced, shitfaced, or simply faceless.
But as my friend Nick Redman writes: "It must be galling for the folks at FB to have news anchors and other assorted TV people constantly tweeting on air and pushing it, since these changes are a rather desperate attempt to Twitterize FB. It's a shame because the humor and uniqueness have been diluted, and once something ceases to be fun, it merely becomes tedious."
So, Sir Zuckerberg, please, even though we can't quit you, face up to the mass discontent and don't let Facebook die a slow death from gradual neglect. My friends just gave you about $10 million of market research. Consider the preceding blog as something akin to another popular feature you apparently just dropped: a friendly superpoke.
]]>
Jamey Johnson and John Rich Help Country Radio Get Realtag:www.bullypulpit.com,2009:/chriswillman//11.652009-03-12T19:54:29Z2011-05-26T12:00:18ZCountry radio isn't always known for its daring social relevance, but two singles that are currently rising up...Chris Willman
I spent time with both singers during the 40th annual Country Radio Seminar, an industry confab that brings together thousands of DJs and programmers who act as gatekeepers for what is still the nation's No. 1 music format. Successful as country radio continues to be (and, contrary to rumor, not just in the flyover states), it's proving as susceptible to downsizing as any other medium, and panelists inevitably disagreed about whether the current focus on tight playlists, aging superstars, and a core demographic of middle-aged moms will be the format's ongoing salvation or ultimate doom.
Johnson's and Rich's songs make programmers nervous, being ostensible downers that aren't easily squeezed in amid the feel-good fare that pays a station's bills. But I believe they're the kinds of songs that ultimately bring people to country radio, and which reinforce its original reputation--forged over a century, and really only recently lost to sentimentalism--as a form of popular music that deals, entertainingly, with hard truths that other genres can't or won't. Whether you like these performers or not, they're risk-takers, in troubled times, putting out topical tunes that offer an escape from all the rampant escapism.
My conversations with Johnson and Rich follow...
***
Jamey Johnson was the belle of the ball at this year's Country Radio Seminar, drawing sizable crowds to three different performances. And what a scruffy belle he is, rocking a bit of a Joaquin-on-Letterman look with his long hair, unkempt beard, and shades. He looks and sounds like a refugee from country's 1970s outlaw movement, when it briefly became difficult to tell a Nashville millionaire from a biker. Johnson was not the only guy I heard do a cover version of Waylon Jennings' classic "Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way?" during CRS week. But he was the only one of whom it could have been said, yep, I think Waylon might've done it this way.
In spite of his rough, throwback look, he's being embraced by mainstream country fans and programmers as well as the alt-country crowd. "In Color," the first single off his latest album, That Lonesome Song, was a top 15 hit, making him the hottest newcomer in the genre. But the fate of his followup single, "High Cost of Living," is still undetermined. When was the last time you remember hearing a song that mentioned hookers 'n' blow on country radio? Johnson's tune champions sobriety over substance abuse, but still... "That Southern Baptist parking lot/Is where I'd go to smoke my pot/Sit there in my pickup truck and pray... /As soon as Jesus turned his back/I'd find my way across the track/Lookin' just to score another deal/With my back against that damn eight ball/I didn't have to think or talk or feel." Can I get an amen? Or just a whoa? The confessionals keep on coming: "I had a job and a piece of land/My sweet wife was my best friend/But I traded that for cocaine and a whore."
"I don't make commercial music," Johnson tells me, sitting in the back of his bus while an autograph queue waits outside. "Those terms are after the fact. I don't think about something in terms of how big a hit this could be or how much money it could make, and I never will. " This is almost difficult to believe, because Johnson has spent most of his career as a Music Row tunesmith, turning out hits for other singers (most notably George Strait's brilliant divorce ballad "Give It Away"), and it's rare to find a guy like that who hasn't been trained to keep an hourly watch on his ASCAP earnings. But Johnson looks like he could beat the living hell out of anyone who'd challenge his integrity, so I'm inclined to take him at his word. And I should anyway, since That Lonesome Song really does sound like the product of a don't-give-a-crap country maverick.
He swears he was never in on any label conversations about the risk of releasing "High Cost of Living" as a single. "The only conversation that I had about that song wasn't about radio," says Johnson. "It was a conversation I had about my daughter with her mother--my ex-wife--on the phone one day. She had already heard the record, and I just asked her, 'Is this something that's gonna come back to bite me, putting this song on my album?' But I'd rather raise my daughter knowing where her dad stands and knowing that I'm doing the best that I can, than to raise her up in this sunshine world and have her discover on her own that life really don't work out to be that way all the time. So that's the only conversation I had about that song. I think every time from now on, I'm gonna err on the side of reality. I think that's what people need. We don't get to come back here and try this again. We can't screw up by putting nothing but musical Prozac on the radio. You have to have something that feeds people emotionally and mentally and spiritually. And if you fail to do that in music, why the hell are we doing this?"
Preach it, brother. One additional thought, though: It strikes me that people in addiction programs will approach "High Cost of Living" as a recovery anthem. At the same time, I saw him sing it three times during CRS, and every time, people whooped in approval at the drinking and dope-smoking references, if not necessarily the eight-balls. That dual reaction is fine with Johnson. "I think the same lines in the song that make one person holler out like it's a party make another guy cringe with pain," he says, before going out to sign CDs. "And maybe that's what music is supposed to do. They get to make up their own interpretation of what that song means to them, because that doesn't come from me. I just told the story."
***
John Rich didn't leave "Shutting Detroit Down" so open to interpretation. His voice is smooth and calm but his feelings raging as he croons about "fat cats" benefiting from the bailout plan for the big three automakers. And this one is an unqualified smash, by the way. Meeting with him in his manager's office, I ask him if he considers his hit to be an old-fashioned protest song. "Absolutely!" he nearly shouts. "I am squarely pissed off. And the people that I have seen in the last 100 towns that I've been in over the last four months all feel exactly like I do. You go out and find somebody that's having a blast right now watching the news and I'll give you a dollar. You ain't getting my dollar! Nobody's happy about it. And this song puts a fine point on it."
Mind you, "Shutting Detroit Down" can be read as a conservative protest song, even though Rich insists it's a populist anthem that crosses ideological lines. The song is currently No. 14 after just six weeks; at that rate, it's a likely contender for No. 1, which will be a rare feat for an outrightly topical song in any genre. That might have seemed unlikely for a tune a bummer of an anti-stimulus chorus: "Well pardon me if I don't shed a tear/'Cause they're selling make believe/And we don't buy that here/Because in the real world they're shutting Detroit down/While the boss man takes his bonus pay and jets on outta town." Although the subject is ostensibly the downfall of the auto industry, the lyrics go on to address America's ongoing financial crises in broader strokes. If you know that Rich is a hardcore Republican who did more stumping for John McCain than any other entertainer (including writing and performing an original campaign song, "Raising McCain"), you may be able to guess that his attitude toward so-called bailout programs is not a charitable one.
"I think my personal story is millions and millions of people's stories," Rich tells me. He's eager to speak to the Huffington Post's audience, not all of whom, he knows, may belong to his fan club. "Grew up barely above poverty level, as far as the IRS was concerned. Went to the food bank every couple of months, if we had to. A double-wide trailer in Amarillo, Texas. There are millions of us. There's nothing wrong with growing up lean. And there's nothing wrong with earning what you get. If you listen to the lyrics of 'Shutting Detroit Down,' the very first line in the song says 'My daddy taught me in this country everyone's the same. You work hard for your dollar and you never pass the blame, if it doesn't go your way.' In other words, when you're born in this country, we all have the same shot at the American dream. We weren't guaranteed happiness in our constitution; we were guaranteed the pursuit of it. And I think the sense of entitlement in this country right now that people seem to have is what's driving us into the ground. And it's what this song talks about. We work hard, if it doesn't go our way, we take that lick, and we keep on ticking. I was watching the news and saw the story about the Merrill Lynch CEO who had just spent 1.2 million dollars of bailout money we had just given his company to decorate his office, with a $38,000 toilet. The American way is not that some fat cat politician sends a big fat check to another fat cat and they sit up there laughing at all of us as they go blow it all, and that's why this song is a runaway hit. Nobody is too big to fail, out there in the Wall Street world. Someday I would like to take a piss in a $38,000 toilet! A $38,000 toilet that I bought at a garage sale for a quarter."
"Shutting Detroit Down" could be viewed as in the tradition of some of the conservative anti-welfare songs that came along in the 1960s, like Stonewall Jackson's "Welfare Cadillac" (a historical strain that I covered in my book, Rednecks & Bluenecks: The Politics of Country Music). Of course, this particular song is railing against corporate welfare, a cause that can unite righties and lefties alike. But that begs certain questions: If we resist all stimulus or bailout programs because of the potential abuse by "fat cats," won't the little guys in Detroit, and elsewhere, who'll suffer right along with the suits, if nothing is done? "To be perfectly honest with you, I think that level of finance and politics, and understanding a company the size of the big three, is so far above my head that for me to comment on it would not even make sense. What my song deals with is the absolute rage that the American people feel by watching how recklessly their tax dollars are spent. If Americans saw their tax dollars being spent very carefully in a bailout or a stimulus package that was streamlined and so A-B-C that everybody, even I ,could understand it, with a back end of 'Oh, by the way, Mr. CEO, if we give you this money and you mishandle it, we will let you go down'..." Rich trails off, unable to envision such a scenario. "I think the cross purposes between D.C. and big business are so corrupt and entangled that that's why you see these things coming through with--what's the last number?--8,000 earmarks. When's the last time one of those guys proposing one of these bills had to decide whether he was gonna put gas in his tank or food on his table? When's the last time they went to Costco and bought 300 chicken nuggets, frozen, all at one time in a big plastic bag, and eats 'em for a month every day?"
Regardless of what you might make of the politics of the song, it's encouraging to see something so of the moment get rushed into production and zip to the top of the chart. Rich's album, his first solo effort since the formation of Big & Rich, was already completed and ready to press, with its first single already sent to radio, when he came up with the tune. Going out on a radio tour to promote the other ballad, he started playing "Shutting Detroit Down" acoustically on the air, and a viral recording began to spread to other stations, even outpacing the single he was already pushing. So Rich and his label made an emergency decision to back off the other tune, create a studio version of "Detroit," and switch gears.
"That is old school country music radio like how they used to do it back in the day. How they did it in Motown. Somebody would write a great song, they'd all rush into the studio, record it, put it on vinyl, get in their car and drive to the radio station and play it and, bam, they had a smash. This will be the biggest song of my career, and it gives me hope that the music industry still is susceptible to a song that says the right thing at the right time. Just when you thought the radio industry is so corporate and so sluggish that it kills a lot of creativity, if the artist is saying the right thing and willing to follow up on it, these kinds of things can happen."
***
Not everyone in country music is as worried about the fate of Detroit as Rich is, judging from the brand-name auto references--product placement?--popping up in some other current hits. In Rodney Atkins' "It's America," as part of the U.S. way of life, besides invoking lemonade stands and God, Atkins sings, "It's a high school prom/It's a Springsteen song/It's a ride in a Chevrolet," leaving you to wonder which bitingly critical Bruce song and which soon-to-be-discontinued Chevy he means. Meanwhile, Jason Michael Carroll can be found crooning about "Where I'm From," and that would be "where the quarterback dates the homecoming queen/The truck's a Ford and the tractor's green/And 'Amazing Grace' is what we sing."
These are songs that take a laundry-list approach to American triumphalism. Which are only slightly different from the genre's ubiquitous South-beats-all anthems. The chart also has one of those now, in the form of Jason Aldean's "She's Country": "She's a party-all-nighter from South Carolina... a bad mamajama from down in Alabama... a juicy Georgia peach..." And so on, until Aldean has invoked every state in the union--or, rather, every state that isn't in the Union. It seems that Aldean likes his girls to get around... as long as they never cross the Mason-Dixon line. The kind of regional pride anthems that seemed so refreshing earlier in the decade, when Gretchen Wilson was extolling the wonders of being a "Redneck Woman," now roll off the assembly line like so much unwittingly xenophobic hokum. The South has risen again, and kicked the rest of the nation's ass--okay, country music, we get it!
Far be it from me to suggest, though, that the realism of "High Cost of Living" and "Shutting Detroit Down" is the only antidote for country's formulaicism. Sometimes even formulas as hokey as the ones I just described can still work, in the hands of an outstanding songwriter. At Country Radio Seminar, I heard two yet-unreleased new tunes that fit into those America-uber-alles or South-rules subgenres, which just happen to be terrific songs.
Superstar Tim McGraw used his live performance for the radio folks at CRS to debut an excellent new album, in its entirety (recorded last year, but not coming out till late this year, he said, due to his label dragging its heels). One of this forthcoming McGraw disc's highlights is "Southern Voice," and yes, it's another laundry list of what's great about the high-humidity states, but one that happens to rock and be very funny. (It also invokes Jerry Lee Lewis, which makes anything else forgivable.)
And in a separate performance, Brad Paisley premiered the title song of his June album, American Saturday Night, which, yes, is a party anthem about all the rowdiness and romance of a weekend in these United States. It may take the listener a minute or two into Paisley's soon-to-be smash to realize that every lyrical detail in his verses ironically refers to some completely foreign concept or brand name that we've cheerfully accepted into the great American melting pot. God bless you, Brad, for getting it, and for, in your own wry way, keeping country real.
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Jonas Haters, You Have Nothing to Fear But JoBro-Phobia Itselftag:www.bullypulpit.com,2009:/chriswillman//11.662009-02-27T17:19:18Z2011-05-26T12:00:18ZYou don't need a weather man to know which way the wind blows, to quote one 1960s teen idol of some renown. And as I use...Chris Willman
really not looking forward to taking their kids to the Jonas Brothers' 3D movie this week.
So, like Obama standing before the Congress, let me unwrap the noose from around your neck and extend a message of hope. Which is this: If all you proud parental kvetchers can just get over yourselves, you may find that both the Jonases and their concert movie are pretty good. No, better than that: The dreaded trio are, in fact, perfectly aces as a rock & roll band, and the film's a depth-of-field redoubling blast. It does occur to me that there is a history of people being sent to electroshock for saner talk, and that a teen-pop prophet is without honor in his own land. I would only urge you to open your ears and heart and realize what the men don't know, but the little girls understand: that well-crafted power-pop is well-crafted power-pop, regardless of the cheekbones and Disney contracts of the bearer.
Jonas Brothers: The 3D Experience kicks off with a staged sequence that will strike many chaperones of a certain age as nothing less than sacrilege. Under the main titles, we see the JoBros, trapped in a midtown traffic bottleneck on their way to a GMA appearance, escape from the sun roof of their limo and make a run for a nearby helicopter, pursued through the Manhattan streets by dozens of ravenous girls. There may be a little bit of Dawn of the Dead in there, but mostly it is a blatant homage to the famous kickoff to A Hard Day's Night, which found the Fabs similarly on the run from throngs of girls young enough to possibly not know what to do if they caught them. This should , of course, be taken as a playful nod to history and not the Jonases actually believing they're really in the same Beatleleague as their forebears in tween hysteria. And it's not as if we few, proud adult defenders believe they're three years away from making their Sgt. Pepper. The group's unofficial leader, principal songwriter and multi-instrumentalist MVP, Nick, is still a tender 16, so maybe we should give them at least seven or eight years before expecting them to come up with Side 2 of Abbey Road. But what they are coming up with is bloody impressive, and not just for their age. Listen to the dozen-plus songs performed in this concert movie (and it is a concert movie, not a pseudo-documentary, a few backstage bits aside) and you'll hear unpretentiously propulsive rockers like "Pushin' Me Away" that could have been hits even in the more demanding late '60s.
In fact, if many of the Jonas Brothers' songs appeared in a vintage compilation like Nuggets, the celebrated garage-rock collection that is a staple in every rock critic's household, the rock intelligentsia would have collective dry-mouth from slobbering over these newly discovered gems. Their music, especially the tunes from their third and by far best studio album, last year's A Little Bit Longer, are very much in the tradition of power-pop favorites like Cheap Trick and the Dwight Twilley Band. But there's a little bit of a problem. The Los Angeles Times review of the new film, which couldn't be bothered to definitely distinguish which brother is which, found the tuneage "mostly sounding like a modernized iteration of the glam-pop style of Cheap Trick or Redd Kross but minus the rust-belt roots or ironic self-regard." Sounds like a resounding endorsement to me, though the critic in question meant it as a slam. I loved Cheap Trick in the late '70s for the same reasons everybody else did: as a chance to recapture some of the glorious pop influences of the early Beatles, but with a wink that made it all okay, which came mostly in the form of Rick Nielsen's and Bun E. Carlos' hilarious utterly preposterous physical appearances. But two decades on, do we really require "ironic self-regard" as a prerequisite for enjoying the timeless virtues of nitty-gritty riffs, soaring hooks, clever bridges, and reasonably articulated puppy lust? Even if the purveyors are preternaturally talented, or at least largely self-made, teens? We once bought the earnest, adolescent glee of "Can't Buy Me Love" without forcing the song to pass some archness bar; perhaps it's not a nullification of everything we've learned about the world since to embrace it again.
I realize these kinds of statements are credibility killers, and any caveats about how I'm looking forward to the Leonard Cohen tour at least as much as the JoBros' may fall on dubious ears. So be a groan-up if you must, but if you have children with any kind of musical aspiration, perhaps you could find better targets for your scorn than kids who write their own songs (only a few of their recent numbers even credit a cowriter) and--urban myths to the contrary--play instruments. Proficiency may not be the reason your daughters are getting the vapors, and auteurism is hardly a requirement for great pop music, but the element of actual aptitude is a nice Jonas bonus, crucial swooniness notwithstanding. Do not give in to despondency, then, wary chaperones: You have nothing to fear but JoBro-phobia itself. And an imposing 3D eyebrow or sideburn or two.]]>
Joaquin's New Role?tag:www.bullypulpit.com,2009:/chriswillman//11.672009-02-12T23:16:00Z2011-05-26T12:00:18ZPhoenix's disheveled, catatonic appearance on Letterman could potentially be one of the greatest performances any modern actor has ever given -- or at least one of the most baldly courageous.Chris Willman
Walk the Line a few years ago, there was one thing he couldn't have been clearer on: You'd never find him pursuing a music career. "I liked playing guitar, but it's like everything that I do," he explained, as we chatted for an Entertainment Weekly cover story. "When I did Gladiator, I thought that I would carry a sword with me everywhere after that. When I did Ladder 49, I didn't want to let go of my turnout gear, and I didn't believe that I could go through life without smelling smoke. With Walk the Line, I played music all the time -- and then I left it." In prepping to play Johnny Cash, he'd made home recordings of some original compositions, but Phoenix said he knew he didn't have a fraction of the talent for music that he did for acting. "You have to really be motivated to complete a song," he told me then. "And without that motivation, I'd just get frustrated and go, fuck it, it's gotta be 'Dear Prudence' or else I don't want to do it. What I experienced [with music] wasn't as freeing as I imagined it would be.... Anyway, long answer short: No, I won't record an album."
What to make, then, of the grainy video footage of this erstwhile perfectionist stumbling around on stage in Las Vegas, kicking off his supposed new career as a rapper? Of the announcement that he was retiring from movies to achieve new levels of excellence in his true calling, hip-hop? The documentary cameras tracking his every suddenly awkward move? Even if Phoenix never previously seemed like Mr. Levity, it seemed easy enough -- to me, anyway -- to write off his intentions to be the new Eminem (or Everlast) as a very elaborate gag. But after his appearance as a heavily bearded, disheveled catatonic on Letterman Wednesday night, which ended with the host invoking Farrah Fawcett as a comparatively more lucid guest, the stakes suddenly got higher. Columnists and bloggers predicted the end of Phoenix's career, even if he should abandon hippity-hop and come crawling back to movies. Fans and detractors lamented his transformation from the potential Brando of his generation into the poster child for "just say no" (to drugs, Vanilla Ice, or both). Half the viewers thought the standoff with Dave was hilarious, and half deeply sad, but in either case, most figured the laughs or tears were on Phoenix.
Which makes this potentially one of the greatest performances any modern actor has ever given -- or at least one of the most baldly courageous. The closest comparison would have to be Andy Kaufman's utter commitment to his obnoxious Tony Clifton persona, but Phoenix is going Kaufman one braver here, by not slapping a fake name on the alter ego bur rather inviting the audience to mistake his damaged doppelganger for himself, over an indeterminate length of time that could leave his "real" career hanging in limbo. There is an end in sight: Phoenix's pal Casey Affleck is shooting all this for what insiders presume is a mockumentary about the breakdown of a burned-out actor. The risk, of course, is how lame it might turn out to be if Phoenix and Affleck remove the masks and say "just kidding" when it's time for their film to finally come out. My hunch is that if they're taking it this far -- and watching Letterman, it was clear that Phoenix is in deep, deep, deep cover -- they might take it all the way into and past the premiere and continue insisting that Phoenix's actorly dissolution was legit.
And maybe, in some sense, it will have been. On the Walk the Line set, I saw firsthand Phoenix's allegiance to his role. For a crucial performance scene in which Cash was supposed to come on stage limping, Phoenix rammed his leg into an amplifier, take after take -- even though these collisions all took place out of camera range; eventually, the director had to stop shooting for a few minutes so they could apply an ice pack to Joaquin's bruised and battered leg. At the same time, though, Phoenix would break character if he needed to, and he acknowledged to me how ridiculous it might seem, asking the crew to call him by Cash's name instead of his own. He had a sense of humor, and humility, about his own seriousness. To those who are determined to swallow this ruse, I would only say that Phoenix is absolutely the last guy who would ever commission a real documentary about himself -- or who'd honestly think highly enough of his new career to explain it by saying, "I wish there was footage of Public Enemy making It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back" (as he did in the Los Angeles Times today). It's tough to read Phoenix comparing his own alleged freshman album to one of the all-time hip-hop classics and not know this is hoaxier than a Howard Hughes autobiography.
Let's just hope it's not merely that. If the ruse is merely a prank, it'll wear thin by the time the eventual film comes out, but if Phoenix and Affleck actually intend to say something about Hollywood, celebrity, and the media via their presumed mockumentary, it could be instructive. I say "presumed" because there's 2 percent of me that's still not absolutely positive Phoenix isn't serious. It's that 2 percent uncertainty that can make the kind of confrontational performance art sometimes found in the theater thrilling. I still remember attending an early performance of the famously immersive play Tony 'n' Tina's Wedding, and, as a "guest" at the fake nuptials, being cornered by a groomsman-slash-drug dealer. For 10 minutes, he tried to talk me into buying some cocaine, and finally, beaten down, I agreed to meet him at a seedy location downtown later that night. I'm not ashamed to say that this actor was so good that I did a drive-by of the address in question, just because he'd been so unnervingly convincing that a faint part of me wondered if he'd really show up. I don't think Joaquin Phoenix will be there at the end of this ruse to earnestly sell me a bad white-rap album any more than the actor in Tony 'n' Tina's actor showed up to sell me cocaine, but it's creating the shadow of a doubt about where reality and illusion depart that makes for great acting. And in drawing this intriguingly offputting role out for months, with no end in sight, Phoenix may be pulling off a move so ballsy, they'll still be teaching it in 22nd-century Method class. So I'm going to stop correcting all my friends who think it's for real. How disastrous a performance would this be if they didn't?
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