Quips and Quotations (Uncommonly Good Edition)

 

1946-2025

Choosing the freedom to be uninteresting never quite worked for me.

--Diane Keaton (née Hall)

 

Vital Viewing (Preach Therapy Edition)

 

 

Not to be confused with a one-time cast member on Law and Order, screenwriter and director Richard Brooks was born on this date in 1912 (he died in 1992.) Among several well-known movies that Brooks wrote and directed were Blackboard Jungle (1955), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), In Cold Blood (1967) and Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977), all worthwhile films, but the one I want you to recommend to you today is this 1960 adaptation of a best-selling novel of the Wild (Mid)West: 

Academy Award voters of the day seem to second my recommendation. But first a word from Bob:

I like Kitty's gown, but that's neither here nor there. What IS here or there is the trailer for the movie, a movie that also won Oscars for leading man Burt and the future Mrs. Partridge:

Elmer didn't get to become Pope either.

Quips and Quotations (Time Heals All Oscars Edition)

 

June 18, 2022

Dear Sacheen Littlefeather,

I write to you today a letter that has been a long time coming on behalf of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, with humble acknowledgment of your experience at the 45th Academy Awards.

As you stood on the Oscars stage in 1973 to not accept the Oscar on behalf of Marlon Brando, in recognition of the misrepresentation and mistreatment of Native American people by the film industry, you made a powerful statement that continues to remind us of the necessity of respect and the importance of human dignity.

The abuse you endured because of this statement was unwarranted and unjustified. The emotional burden you have lived through and the cost to your own career in our industry are irreparable. For too long the courage you showed has been unacknowledged. For this, we offer both our deepest apologies and our sincere admiration.

We cannot realize the Academy’s mission to “inspire imagination and connect the world through cinema” without a commitment to facilitating the broadest representation and inclusion reflective of our diverse global population.

Today, nearly 50 years later, and with the guidance of the Academy’s Indigenous Alliance, we are firm in our commitment to ensuring indigenous voices—the original storytellers—are visible, respected contributors to the global film community. We are dedicated to fostering a more inclusive, respectful industry that leverages a balance of art and activism to be a driving force for progress.

We hope you receive this letter in the spirit of reconciliation and as recognition of your essential role in our journey as an organization. You are forever respectfully engrained in our history.

With warmest regards, David Rubin
President, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

 

Vital Viewing (Weimar Republic Edition)

Actor-singer-dancer Joel Grey was born on this day in 1932. Diana Ross and James Coburn invite the Cleveland native up on stage in this clip from the 45th Academy Awards (held in 1973 for movies made in 1972):

It was an unusual Oscars presentation that year. There was Native-American activist Sacheen Littlefeather famously, or, in the subsequent onstage opinions of Raquel Welch and Clint Eastwood, infamously, turning down the Best Actor award on behalf of no-show Marlon Brando. Eastwood himself was on stage twice that night, planned and unplanned. Planned was his reading of the Best Picture nominees (The Godfather, starring Brando, won.) Unplanned, Eastwood was pressed into service earlier that night when it looked like Charlton Heston might not show up to read the voting rules because of a flat tire on his way to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion (after a few Ten Commandment jokes obviously not written with Eastwood in mind, Heston showed up and took over.) Of course, neither Littlefeather or Eastwood is in the above clip. So what I find unusual is that year's Oscars set direction. I don't mean who won for Best Set Direction. I mean Diana Ross' and James Coburn's immediate surroundings. They look like they're backstage or in the wings or something, don't they? That was kind of the idea. The opening musical number had a plainly-dressed Angela Lansbury informing us, via song and dance, that moviemaking is really just another job and the stars are merely working stiffs. It's actually an entertaining little number, and I might show it here sometime, that ends with Lansbury, now all gussied up in a glamorous gown, singing "make a little magic." Except once she's finished, we're stuck with the nonmagical faux-backstage set, and have to rely on occasional shots of the star-studded audience for gussied-up glamour. Unless those stars come up on stage to accept or hand out awards. And just how glamorously gussied-up do you find Ross (who had hoped to both accept and hand out but ended up only doing the latter) in that tuxedo? I have absolutely nothing against unisex fashions but the normally super-femme Miss Ross is the last person who I would expect to see take up crossdressing. But Ross is no Marlene Dietrich. Rather than provocative, she comes across as merely a cute curiosity. Still, it's appropriate that she would be dressed such a way when presenting an Oscar to Joel Grey, who himself was both provocative and unisexual in the film that won a whole bevy of Oscars that night.

Another one of those Oscars went to Liza Minnelli (she beat out the aforementioned Ross, nominated for Lady Sings the Blues), allowing her to finally, and deservedly, emerge from the shadow of her famous mother. I'll examine her signature performance at some later date. For now the man of the hour (or for however long it takes you to peruse this post) is Grey. A mainstay of the New York stage for about 20 years at that point (despite looking like he was still in his 20s), the Cabaret win made him, for a time, a household name, though the character he played, the nameless Master of Ceremonies of a between-the-world-wars Berlin nightclub, isn't one you would have found hanging around very many American households. Watch:

 

The movie does not exploit decadence; rather, it gives it its due.

--Pauline Kael, The New Yorker

Before it was a movie musical, Cabaret was a stage musical (and before that a stage play and before that a book of interrelated short stories by Christopher Isherwood.) Among its feature players was a woman who a few years earlier tried but failed to kill James Bond in From Russia with Love, a man who at the same time he was appearing in hit Broadway musicals also appeared in a series of Cracker Jack commercials on TV, a woman who spent the 1970s appearing in British-made horror films and doing guest shots on American TV crime shows like Baretta and Vega$, and a man who later hosted the game show Tattletales (I admit to being fascinated by performers career arcs.) And then there's Joel Grey, the only one to appear in both the stage and film versions. And for good reason. Though on the original Broadway poster his name appears below the actors I just mentioned, the critics of the day praised his performance, which brought audiences into the theater, and he was and is seen as the main reason the stage version became a hit in the first place.

Here's a blurry clip from the 21st Tony Awards (held in 1967 for productions that debuted in 1966.) That's Larry Hagman's mom who introduces a legendary husband-and-wife dance team (though not so legendary they didn't eventually divorce), who in turn have come up on stage the then-35-going-on-19 Grey:

Joel Grey more-or-less reprised his Master of Ceremonies role for television in 1976. The atmosphere is much less decadent, but, to paraphrase Ms. Kael, it gives whimsy its due:

 

I have a sudden craving for a Kit Kat bar.

And the Winner Is...

Three dead writers. It happens, but at least two of them earned Oscars before going to that great big OfficeMax in the sky. Now the one in the middle, Norman Mailer, won nothing and was just at the 49th Academy Awards in 1977 (covering the year 1976) as a presenter, but before you feel too sorry for the man, trust me, he had a very lively literary career anyway. Mailer died in 2007, and he may pop up again on this blog sometime in the future (indeed, I'm remiss in unintentionally having ignored him up to now.)

The man to the right of Mailer is Paddy Chayefsky, who won Best Original Screenplay for Network, a film that, though it takes place in the 1970s, basically predicts 21st century political and media landscapes, minus the tweets (unless the tweets ended up on the cutting room floor.) This was Chayefsky's third Oscar win. He had previously won Best Adapted Screenplay of his own television play Marty at the 28th Academy Awards in 1956, and, at the 44th Academy Awards in 1972, Best Original Screenplay for The Hospital, a film that, though it too takes place in the 1970s, basically predicts the 21st socioeconomic landscape, minus the corporate and big bank bailouts (which again may have very well ended up on the cutting room floor.) Chayefsky died in 1981, but not without first establishing himself as a modern day Nostradamus. 

The man to the left of Mailer is William Goldman, who won Best Adapted Screenplay for 1976's All the President's Men, originally a non-fiction book by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein about the Watergate scandal. Now, if you're too young to remember Watergate, it was basically an attempted hit on the Bill of Rights, though unlike current attempted hits, the main hit man, one Richard M. Nixon, tried to do it surreptitiously before the Post reporters (as well as his own voice on tape) made it publicly known. So what did screenwriter Goldman contribute to the cinematic retelling of this nonfiction? "Follow the Money!", which is what an informant nicknamed Deep Throat (who we all found out 12 years ago was actually FBI Associate Director Mark Felt) tells Woodward, played in the film by Robert Redford. Except in real life Felt didn't exactly say that to Woodward (played by himself originally.) He did tell the young journalist to follow up on a lot of others clues, and some of those clues did involve money, and so Goldman simply and cleverly brought all that together in a single, memorable sentence. This was Goldman's second Oscar. In 1970 at the 42nd Academy Awards, he won Best Original Screenplay for the comedy-drama anti-Western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which with its snappy dialogue, breathed new life into the buddy-buddy movie. Though he was better known as a  screenwriter, Goldman was also a successful novelist, having wrote The Princess Bride, Marathon Man, and Magic, all of which became movies, and, yes, he also wrote the screenplays. He died eight days ago. R.I.P. William Goldman.