Tail Pop

by Paul Hirsch, ACE

My fascination with the movies started in Paris when I was a child. My father was a painter, and my mother was a dancer. We lived in Paris for four years, and part of my connection to “the States” was going to American movies. The French have a real love/hate complex about America, and though they claim feelings of cultural superiority, Paris is in love with Hollywood.

(When Jean-Luc Godard made his film Masculin-Feminin, he included a card that read: “This film could also have been entitled ‘The Children of Marx & Coca-Cola.’”) Luckily for me, they insisted on showing pictures VO (original version), ie, with subtitles (in French of course). So we American ex-pat kids loved going to the movies. One of my favorites was King Solomon’s Mines. I also recall seeing Scaramouche, Ivanhoe, The Greatest Show On Earth, The Crimson Pirate with Burt Lancaster and Road to Bali with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby.

I remember going to An American In Paris numerous times. When I was a kid, if I found a movie I liked, I would see it over and over again. I wonder if this capacity for repeated viewings was an early indicator of my future career. In any event, this film was a natural for me, since it told the story of a painter (like my Dad) who falls in love with a dancer (like my Mom), and of course, I was the American in Paris!

So it is altogether fitting that I saw the movie that propelled me into my career while in Paris. A senior in college, I was already enrolled in Columbia Architecture School in the fall, but I needed a few more credits to qualify for my degree. By luck and good timing, I was able to do this by taking two French classes in Paris. Class was over each day by noon, and I often would spend my time seeing old Hollywood pictures that played in art houses on the Left Bank. The auteur theory and the Cahiers Du Cinema in full tilt, there were festivals devoted to the work of a single director––like Raoul Walsh or Howard Hawks. It was the first time I paid any attention to who the director of an American movie was.

The breakfast scene, with dazzling economy, told the story of Kane’s deteriorating marriage as it demonstrated time passing.

That summer, the Cinematheque at the Palais de Chaillot was having an Orson Welles Festival. I had seen him once or twice, as an actor on TV. He would make himself up onstage while reciting a scene from Othello, or as Falstaff, but I had never seen any of his pictures. So I went on a Monday night to see Citizen Kane, which I had vaguely heard of. To my surprise, although the print had no subtitles, film enthusiasts filled the theatre nevertheless, even though they didn’t speak English.

With no foreknowledge about the film, I was thrilled to the core. The joy of discovery is hugely underrated, and I have never understood why people want to know beforehand the story of a movie they are going to see. I was thunderstruck. From the opening sequence, with Kane breathing, “Rosebud” on his deathbed, to the final revelation of what that word meant, I was in its thrall. The brilliant manipulations of time and space, and the fascinating character exploration of this tragic “great man” excited me to no end about the potential of film as a medium.

In particular, I was fascinated by the breakfast scene, which, with dazzling economy, told the story of Kane’s deteriorating marriage as it demonstrated time passing. The framing device of the newsreel researcher, the various points of view of the recollections of Kane’s associates, the fascinating visual compositions, the evocative lighting, the magnificent sets, that music, the camera moves––like the one that went through a rooftop sign and down through a skylight––and especially that final shot: flying over all the art he had collected in his lifetime right to the shattering realization of what Rosebud meant, told through visual means. All were part of the magic for me.

Citizen Kane affected me profoundly. I returned every night that week, and saw The Magnificent Ambersons, The Lady from Shanghai and Touch of Evil!  On Friday, the Master himself was appearing with Macbeth, and you couldn’t get near the place. Those pictures, all in a week, excited an ambition in me to participate somehow in making movies.

When I went back home, and enrolled in Architecture School, I knew deep down that it was not for me. After a couple of months, I dropped out and was able to land a shipping room job at an industrial film house in New York City. But it was in Paris that my career really began.

Paul Hirsch is an Academy Award-winning picture editor and a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the American Cinema Editors (ACE).

by Christopher Cooke, ACE

Growing up in Southern California’s San Gabriel Valley was like living thousands of miles away from Hollywood. I had no connection with the movie business growing up, but I loved the movies. My family and I would go all the time, even midweek if I could get my homework done early. Westerns, (The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, The Wild Bunch) cop dramas (Dirty Harry, Bullitt), comedy (Bananas, The Producers), musicals (A Hard Day’s Night, Woodstock)…I loved all of them.

My greatest film-going experience was seeing Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey at Hollywood’s Pantages Theatre in 1968. It was my first reserved seat screening of a movie. I went with my oldest sister and her date (who somehow tolerated my presence) to a weekday matinee. I was amazed to be shown our seats in the nearly empty theatre by a uniformed usher. It was the largest movie theatre I had ever seen.

The preview was of an MGM epic called Krakatoa: West of Java (the island is actually east of Java), complete with 18th century balloons flying over exploding volcanoes, grand adventure music and noisy eruptions. It was spectacular on the huge Cinerama screen format. (This was really a 2.2:1 aspect ratio not the true three-camera Cinerama of How The West Was Won.) The curtains closed and silence fell over the theatre.

But, suddenly, there was a sound…an overture of strange, atonal, modern classical music lasting three minutes in the dimly lit theatre. It set the perfect mood for what was to follow. The lights went out and the curtains opened. Richard Strauss’ Thus Sprach Zarathustra fanfare filled the theater as a line-up of the moon, Earth and sun appeared on the massive screen.

This was the first movie I couldn’t figure out. Every time I saw it I thought I had discovered its meaning…but then I would see something new.

This was unlike any movie I had ever seen. The movie unfolded with a slow, measured pace, revealing image after gorgeous image. The opening 20 minutes is about ape-men discovering a strange black monolith that seems to teach them how to kill. The second sequence is about the monolith being discovered on the moon with ominous international significance. Finally, almost an hour into the film, we meet the star, Keir Dullea, who travels with his crew and a cold, murderous computer named HAL 9000 to “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite,” as the final section title card reads.

The final 20 minutes of the movie is a phantasmagorical journey. A rock ‘n’ roll lightshow of intensely colorful splitscreen images exploits the widescreen format fully. Dullea travels through time and space to a bizarre room––where he quickly ages and is reborn as a space child, who ends the film hovering over earth with an enigmatic but peaceful expression.

Two and a half hours later, I emerged onto Hollywood Boulevard transported by the film to a new level of fandom. I bought the booklet in the lobby (which I still have); it’s very cool in its Cinerama format. I bought the Arthur C. Clarke book. I played the soundtrack album of classical selections over and over (Kubrick discarded the original score and employed the temp tracks he had used in editing). I have seen the movie over 30 times in the theatre––and more on TV, videotape and DVD.

This was the first movie I couldn’t figure out. Every time I saw it I thought I had discovered its meaning…but then I would see something new. I know many people used to see the film on drugs, as it was the late ‘60s and the images were so wonderful. I tried that once and all I got was a headache.

Like many foreign films I would see in the future, Kubrick’s art film works below the surface––something most Hollywood films didn’t. I thought a lot about the images, the conflict between man and machine (the apes learned to make the first tools) and the implications of extraterrestrial interference in human history. I thought about man’s quest for truth, about how cinematic the storytelling was (the first word is spoken 22 minutes into the film and there is no dialogue for the last 20 minutes).

Kubrick used extreme methods to achieve the level of quality in his visual effects (all of which were done in camera over a year’s time). These effects took decades to reproduce as successfully.

Finally, what I took from this film is what I take from all great films––a love of what movies can accomplish as art, and a desire to go to the movies again and again.

by Paul J. Coyne

Though I will always appreciate my film classes at Fitchburg State College (Massachusetts), the greatest educator of cinema history I ever knew was a gentleman named George Allen.

Weekdays after school, long ago in the early 1980s, Allen took the time to show me cinema’s finest. It was he who introduced me to celluloid titans such as Casablanca, Citizen Kane, Sullivan’s Travels, Psycho and The Sweet Smell of Success. He also wasn’t averse to screening lesser-known films. I appreciated the chills of Targets or Night Must Fall and obscure comedies such as Champagne for Caesar, Start the Revolution Without Me, Lord Love a Duck and, what has become a personal favorite, A Thousand Clowns. My only issue with Allen was that every 15 minutes, he’d pick up the phone to give away money. I suppose as host of the Dialing for Dollars Movie, it was his job.

I first became interested in film as a kid when I uncloseted mom’s 8mm movie camera while searching for hidden Christmas gifts. Also, the local Kmart sold abridged 8mm versions of feature films. I purchased as many as my paper route salary could afford, which was a grand total of two: The African Queen and, new to Super-8, The Empire Strikes Back. In a fit of creative boredom, I eventually spliced them together into a single tale. Now, Bogie was averting asteroids and Germans were firing on X-Wings. Quite unexpectedly, I had discovered the magic of editing. I thus began to pay closer attention to juxtapositions on screen. In particular, I was most interested in the way editorial choices created new elements of story, humor and character.

That’s when Allen first screened A Thousand Clowns, starring Jason Robards, Barry Gordon, Barbara Harris and William Daniels. Released in 1966, Clowns received Oscar nominations for Best Picture and Best Editing (Ralph Rosenblum), and a win for Martin Balsam as Best Supporting Actor.

It often makes no linear sense and yet the sudden bursts of editorial energy reveal Murray Burns’s character more clearly than volumes of dialogue.

Clowns tells the story of electively unemployed comedy writer Murray Burns (Robards), and his semi-adopted son, Nick (Gordon). Nick’s mother, Murray’s sister, abandoned Nick years earlier and has since communicated “almost entirely by rumor.” In this relationship, Nick is clearly the parent. Murray spends days scouring junkyards for eagle statues, celebrating deli owner birthdays and organizing imaginary volleyball matches. Nick, who lacks an actual surname but must choose one by his 13th birthday, informs Murray that Social Services will soon pay a visit.

When officious inspectors Daniels and Harris arrive, Murray’s irascible nature finds an ample target. Daniels storms out, Harris stays, love begins and Murray faces a tragic dilemma: Gain responsibility or lose Nick. Clowns is a hilarious, startling mix of stage-bound dialogue scenes and wildly inventive montages scored by marches, Dixieland jazz and, occasionally, Robards strumming a ukulele.

When first we meet Murray and Nick roaming Manhattan, all manner of traditional cutting is eradicated. Single conversations span multiple locations, sometimes relocating mid-sentence. Location dialogue becomes voiceover. Sudden bursts of incongruous music catapult the viewer across time and space.

Later, as Murray ventures into the urban jungle to find employment, an escalating montage of pedestrians culminates in a literal shot of meat thrown to lions. An automat sandwich arrives with a side of The Hallelujah Chorus. It’s perfectly unstructured madness. Aside from enjoying Clowns’ humor and heart, it was an eye-opening experience for me. It often makes no linear sense and yet the sudden bursts of editorial energy reveal Murray’s character more clearly than volumes of dialogue.

Rosenblum’s autobiography, When the Shooting Stops…The Cutting Begins, details the road taken to find Clowns’ free-form style, after months of mundane, stagey rough cuts. As he later proved on films like the original The Producers and Annie Hall, the edit room is not the end of a process. It is a new beginning where convention is never limited by innovation. Rosenblum, like Murray, offered spontaneity and the invention of celebration. To my fertile eyes, he had smashed the boundaries of what I understood to be traditional film language. It was both inspired and inspiring.

Clowns is a hilarious, startling mix of stage-bound dialogue scenes and wildly inventive montages.

As an editor and producer, A Thousand Clowns inspires my work daily. Rosenblum and Clowns taught me that with imagination, there’s always a way to make an edit work, to make it funnier, to make the emotions more sincere and to deliver greater depth of character and story.

A Thousand Clowns concludes with a freeze frame, both tragic and exultant. When I first watched the film, that exultation enveloped me. The only thing that would have made it more glorious was if George Allen had phoned to offer me money.

by Calvin Yocum

When I was a teenager in the 1960s, my father and I were separated by a stereotypical generation gap and several other gaps unique to us. He was a Dust Bowl immigrant who barely made it through high school, and I was some kind of anti-establishment egghead. Nonetheless, we always found common ground watching John Wayne movies.

Rio Bravo, a Western directed by Howard Hawks, was my favorite. In a strange way, watching Rio Bravo was like taking communion in church. By consuming the wine and wafer, we vicariously channel the divinity of Christ, and, by watching Rio Bravo, I was vicariously channeling the courage of John Wayne. I watched it so many times I had memorized the entire movie by the time I graduated from high school.

As a freshman at Yale College, I didn’t dare admit I was a fan of either John Wayne or Rio Bravo. Wayne, who had just done a very pro-Nixon, pro-Vietnam War interview in Playboy, seemed utterly out of touch with my anti-Nixon, anti-war generation. It was both politically and intellectually safer to align myself with the European cinema. For a movie to be art, I figured it had to be turgid and inaccessible. American movies were way too much fun to be art.

Since absolutely no one on campus owned a TV, I gravitated to the Yale Film Society at least two or three nights a week. For an admission price of around a dollar, I got to watch scratchy 16mm prints of vintage films, both European and American, in a converted lecture hall. It was a great introduction to directors like Bergman, Kurosawa and Renoir, but I was also exposed to Hawks, Ford, Huston and Wilder. When Rio Bravo was screened on a rainy Wednesday night, I didn’t expect anyone else to show up. But, to my astonishment, every seat was filled. People even sat on windowsills and the floor. Even more miraculously, we all spontaneously started reciting dialogue in sync with Wayne, Walter Brennan, et al. It was an intoxicating communal experience.

Armed with a new framework for appreciating the artistry of Howard Hawks, I finally started to understand how my childhood exposure to the movies of the 1930s, `40s and`50s had shaped my personality, my value system and even my sense of humor.

I was amazed to be among a large group of people who obviously loved Rio Bravo as much as I. The diverse collection of fans crossed all social and political lines. On the way out, I ran into a couple friends and, over coffee, we discussed the movie in the same analytical way we’d deconstruct a Henry James novel in an American Lit class.

We talked about the themes linking Hawks action movies like Only Angels Have Wings, Red River and, of course, Rio Bravo: redemption, the dynamics of male bonding, and performance under pressure. One of my friends mentioned Hawks’ influence on the French New Wave directors. Indeed, Jean Luc Godard called Rio Bravo “a work of extraordinary psychological insight and aesthetic perception.” Godard wrote, “Hawks has made his film so that the insight can pass unnoticed without disturbing the audience that has come to see a Western like all the others.”

In other words, Rio Bravo really is art, but Hawks’ seemingly casual, straightforward storytelling allows it to pass as popular entertainment as well. In a sudden epiphany, I realized that art doesn’t have to be expressed in some kind of tortured code that only the educated elite can decipher. The truth and relevance of the message are more important than the mode of expression. The beauty of a movie like Rio Bravo is that both a simple blue-collar guy like my father and a brilliant French director like Jean-Luc Godard can derive the same message. And they can both have a good time in the process.

Armed with a new framework for appreciating both the artistry and craft of Howard Hawks and the other great American film directors of his generation, I finally started to understand how my childhood exposure to the movies of the 1930s, `40s and `50s had shaped my personality, my value system and even my sense of humor. Since these movies also connected me to my parents, I gained a sense of cultural continuity that helped shrink that generation gap.

As a story analyst, I’ve had the opportunity to work on a number of movies with serious artistic aspirations, but I’m just as proud to help crank out popular entertainment. In both cases, the goal is the same: linear, coherent and efficient storytelling. I own Rio Bravo on Beta, VHS, laserdisc and DVD. Every new viewing of the movie still magically echoes each precious time I watched it with my father in the 1960s and the time I saw it through new eyes at the Yale Film Society. Nothing else in my life resonates quite the same.

by Pam Malouf

Forty years ago, Los Angeles had the Watts uprising, Lyndon Johnson was the US President, black voting-rights demonstrators led by Martin Luther King, Jr., were gassed and whipped by Alabama State Police and more than 180,000 troops were deployed to Vietnam by the end of the year. But as a little girl, my only concern was whether or not Billy Mumy would be rescued from Lost in Space.

Barbra Streisand was on Broadway in Funny Girl, Gemini space missions made me dream about men going to the moon, and the miniskirt (which I would later wear as a teen) lit up runways. On television was Gidget, starring my idol Sally Field, and Beatles records blasted from the bedroom of my older sister. In those days I would dance around the house pretending I was Audrey Hepburn singing “I Could Have Danced All Night” from My Fair Lady.

My dad loved Jane Fonda—who was at the height of her sex-kitten days—so he took us kids to see her in the sleeper hit Cat Ballou. I didn’t know it at the time, but the movie would change my life. At the beginning of the film, the Columbia Pictures logo lady tosses away her torch and toga and morphs into a cowgirl shooting with both barrels! This is your first clue that it’s a Western like no other!

Yep, it’s a comedy/sex/Western spoof with one-of-a-kind performances from Fonda and Lee Marvin, who has two roles—drunken former gunslinger Kid Shelleen and his twin brother Strawn, a cold, noseless assassin. Marvin, in one of his finest film performances, steals the movie and won himself an Oscar for his fabulous work.

The bold courage and willingness to stand up to authority displayed by Cat showed me that all it takes is guts for anyone [including women] to stand up for her rights.

To our amusing surprise, there are also wandering minstrels (Nat King Cole and Stubby Kaye) who sing: “The Ballad of Cat Ballou” (Academy Award nominee for Best Song). “It’s hanging day in 1894… She killed a man, it’s true, and that’s why they’re hanging Cat Ballou.” We first see the sweet young thing-turned-outlaw, Catherine “Cat” Ballou (Fonda), in prison wearing a sexy slip as she prepares to be hanged. (Isn’t that standard garb for all prisoners?) Then the minstrels (who frame the picture like a Shakespearean chorus) sing, “How come they’re now gonna hang you and how did you begin?” as the movie flashes back to tell Cat’s story.

Innocent schoolteacher Cat Ballou returns home to find that her father won’t sell the water rights to his farm, and that his life is being threatened. Cat assembles two petty criminals: a wisecracking ranch hand and a hired killer, Kid Shelleen, to protect her father. But in spite of their best efforts, gun-toting assassin Strawn murders him. At that moment, Cat shows more strength than every man in the movie when she rides after the killer and confronts him in town with the sheriff.

Ah, but the sheriff (Jay Flippen) provides an alibi for the guilty gunfighter and lies directly to Cat’s face! We watch her innocence melt right before our eyes as the minstrels sing, “There are teardrops in her heart, but they can’t make her cry.” Seeking revenge, Cat embarks on a life of crime. When Kid Shelleen learns that Strawn threatened to kill Cat, he decides to sober up and, in an excellent series of scenes, transforms from a drunken slob into a genuine gunfighter. Director Elliot Silverstein shot these scenes with a metro-nome and the timing and editing is impeccable.

Forty years later, I still find myself thinking about Cat Ballou. I lost my innocence right alongside Cat that day when the sheriff lied about her daddy’s death. The bold courage and willingness to stand up to authority displayed by Cat showed me that all it takes is guts for anyone (including women) to stand up for her rights. If a young, innocent girl could ride fearlessly after a noseless killer, then nothing could stop me! Cat Ballou was an inspiration to throw caution to the wind and fight for what I believe in. This 1965 parody of Westerns, which received five Academy Award nominations, including Best Editing (Charles Nelson), hasn’t lost any of its humor or fun with the passing of time. Fonda stars in one of her most playful roles and Lee Marvin alone makes this movie worth viewing.

by Holly Sklar

Maybe it was fate, maybe it was luck, but somehow or other, I grew up three New York City blocks from a movie theater that showed nothing but Hollywood classics. I spent nearly every weekend of my high school years at the Regency Theater, a modest revival house on Broadway and 67th street.

Back then, unless you owned an early-model VCR or Sony Betamax, the only way to see black-and-white classics was on late-night TV, at a museum or a place like the Regency. But what a way to see ‘em. I first experienced The Philadelphia Story on a summer afternoon in 1981––with the shared pleasure of communal movie-going, and the thrill of gazing up at the six-foot-high faces of Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn and Jimmy Stewart.

What I saw was a romantic comedy so sophisticated, smart and funny that I wanted to walk into the screen and be part of it. In the glamorous world envisioned by director George Cukor and writer Donald Ogden Stewart, the only true aristocracy is one of wit: conversation is what matters, and being able to keep up your end of it. In my humdrum adolescent universe, nobody talked like that––and I had inkling that maybe in Hollywood, I could find people who still did.

In the movie, based on Philip Barry’s Broadway play, Hepburn plays Tracy Samantha Lord, a beautiful but demanding Philadelphia heiress on the verge of marrying smug, self-made millionaire George Kittridge (John Howard) after her divorce from Grant’s wealthy, formerly alcoholic C.K. Dexter Haven, who’s still carrying the torch for her. Into the mix come Stewart as tabloid reporter/would-be serious writer Macauley “Mike” Connor and his partner/would-be girlfriend, photographer Liz Imbrie (Ruth Hussey). In story terms, the result of all this isn’t a romantic triangle, but a five-sided star. It’s anybody’s guess just who is going to end up with whom.

For Katharine Hepburn, the movie was a career saver. For me, it was the spark that started a career.

That the plot surprises you––far beyond boy meets girl/loses girl/gets girl clichés––is one of the film’s many pleasures, and one I’ve come to appreciate more now that I’m a story analyst. Lately, many scripts in the genre set their aspirations no higher than to be instantly graspable from a one-liner on a poster or DVD box. Only the British, and writer Richard Curtis in particular (Love, Actually; Four Weddings and a Funeral; Notting Hill), seem capable of executing scripts that harken back to The Philadelphia Story’s complexity.

It would be enough if the story and dialogue were all that are consistently engaging in The Philadelphia Story. But the characters grab you too. They’re shaded and subtle, their flaws gradually yet clearly revealed. And here’s the sweetest bit: They really change. Especially Tracy, whose father Lord (John Halliday) at one point tells her, “You have everything it takes to be a lovely woman except the one essential––an understanding heart. Without that, you might just as well be made of bronze.” Later, Tracy has the humility to admit, “I’ve made a terrible fool of myself…which isn’t unusual.” Tracy, Dexter and Mike learn to be more open to––and capable of––love. How optimistic, how hopeful, how quintessentially romantic a notion it is that when challenged by the right person, you can get better at loving. It’s something I deeply yearned to believe even as a teenager, when I was just beginning to make mistakes in the romance department.

The Philadelphia Story earned six Oscar nominations in 1940, and won two: for acting (Stewart) and writing. It revived Hepburn’s career; she’d bought the rights to the play (which Barry based in part on Hepburn’s family), insisted on starring in it and had the guts to ask for her choice of leads: Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable. Good thing it didn’t work out that way, or we’d never have the classic moment of Stewart singing “Over the Rainbow” as he carries Hepburn after a wee-hours dip in the pool, or Hepburn telling him, “Put me in your pocket, Mike” or Grant offering to help her save face in the climax, saying, “It’s a nice little face.”

For Hepburn, the movie was a career saver. For me, it was the spark that started a career. Beyond that, the meaning of its story is an article of faith that has sustained me in my own romantic life: the power of love to transform. But I’m still looking for the place where people talk that smart; I still want to live in that world.

by Guy Phillippi

I grew up in a town…well, calling it a town is an overstatement. There was no “town”; it was 2,000 people sharing a zip code. There was no McDonald’s and the movie theatre was a drive-in that was only open four months every year.

Thus, movies weren’t an integral part of my youth. A movie was an occasional night out to be entertained–escapism and not missed if we didn’t go. At school, I worked for high grades and to impress my teachers. Then, as a young teen, I saw a film called The Paper Chase.

It was a well-acted story about Harvard Law School student James T. Hart (portrayed by Timothy Bottoms) and his attempt to impress Contracts Law Professor Charles W. Kingsfield, Jr. (an Academy Award-winning role played by John Houseman), and I saw a lot of myself in Hart…although I will admit I don’t remember anyone as good-looking as Lindsay Wagner, who played Kingsfield’s daughter Susan, giving me a second glance. In his first year at Harvard, Hart is sure the key to success is making an impression on Kingsfield. Susan argues against this, telling Hart he will never be anything more than a name and a face on a seating chart to her dad. Subplots deal with other first year law students, from the arrogance of Bell or the slide into depression that envelops Brooks, a student with a photographic memory.

Hart ultimately learns that Susan is right. To Kingsfield, Hart is merely another body in the tiered classroom. The lesson seemed to be that if you want a challenge, challenge yourself, don’t look to impress a professor. Hart learns that life is more than collecting pieces of paper. At the end of the movie, Bottoms folds his unseen grades into a paper airplane and tosses them into the ocean.

A good film can still make me consider perspectives I’d never given much thought to previously. The Paper Chase was the first movie experience that actually had such an effect on me.

To me, this was a revelation. The idea that if you’re not careful, life can turn into one big “paper chase” from birth certificate to death certificate, was something I had never considered. I decided to put this lesson to work. At school, only subjects that interested me now mattered. If I didn’t want to answer a question, I did as Hart does at the end of the movie and requested they ask someone else. That didn’t go over well with my teachers, but I did know enough to quickly curtail such behavior. My lack of application to some studies resulted in lower grades. Needless to say, my parents weren’t pleased.

In college, I was determined to learn, not just get grades. However, rather than be allowed to learn by trying and failing, even if it was just by not putting music under the credits of a video on how to use a Bunsen Burner, I was told “do it this way because everyone does.” Then there was the grad school professor who claimed interest in rock music wanes by age 30. I argued, but was told it was just a hard rule of life. I didn’t see this as having my mind molded á la Kingsfield, just the arrogance of a pompous fool. Of course, said pompous fool had the ability to downgrade me, but the “paper chase” remained of no interest. Like Hart, I didn’t open my final grades. Eventually, my mother did.

Of course, few authority figures react to rebellion the way Kingsfield does in The Paper Chase, inviting Hart to rejoin the class, seemingly pleased that a student has had an original thought. But the film did prove a valuable lesson as I began a career in TV and film. I realized that affecting an audience was as important as entertaining it. The Paper Chase may not be one of the greatest films of all time” but it is a good story with a message about life. There are laughs with Bell’s proclamation that his course outline is “better than the text book” and tragedy in Brooks’ attempt at suicide.

Movies and television are entertainment, but even entertainment can have a long-lasting effect. We don’t want fluff, but beating the audience over the head with a message also isn’t necessary. It’s the difference between Rick giving a nod after Victor asks the band leader to play “La Marseillaise” in Casablanca and Rick saying, “Let’s drown out those Nazi bastards!”

A good film can still make me consider perspectives I’d never given much thought to previously. The Paper Chase was the first movie experience that actually had such an effect on me. I don’t look for that experience in every project I evaluate, but I do look for something out of the ordinary: a good laugh, a good thrill, a character I’ve never met before. Much like Professor Kingsfield or James T. Hart.

by David Bruskin

When asked to consider what movie made me want to get into “The Business,” I was surprised how quickly Jerry Lewis’ The Nutty Professor popped into my mind. The speed and quirkiness of the answer speaks to the enduring visceral and emotional power of movies on the psyche.

The Nutty Professor might seem to be a childish choice, but that’s partly because I fell in love with movies as a child, starting with comedies. (My first film was an 8mm fourth grade geography project in which I played Charlie Chaplin visiting Paraguay.) As my tastes expanded, my favorites fell into categories such as sentimental favorites, sinful pleasures and an eclectic array of favorite moments. Perhaps one reason The Nutty Professor made me want to get into the movie business is because it uniquely falls into all three of these categories. It also consistently elicits a profound emotional response in me.

Excluding France, the rest of the world either loves or hates Jerry Lewis. I was always a fan. As I grew old enough to perceive the huge differences between his screen and showbiz persona, I became curious about the dichotomies of his personality––perhaps because at some level I identified conflicting drives in myself. In The Nutty Professor, Lewis examines his contradictions by way of Professor Julius Kelp, who––in a Jekyll/Hyde turn––discovers a formula that brings out a hidden, obnoxious, yet compelling alter ego: the devastating lady killer named (with extemporaneous unwitting irony) Buddy Love.

Like many Lewis movies, The Nutty Professor contains moments that run a gamut from sublime (the first-person tracking shot leading up to our first look at Buddy Love) to hilarious (Kelp’s gloriously irrepressible, goofy dancing on the senior prom sidelines) to embarrassing (numerous overplayed gags and awkward pacing). The climactic revelation to the university community that Professor Kelp and Buddy Love are the same person occurs when Kelp, suddenly and unexpectedly unmasked, offers an apologetic, surprisingly moving monologue that sums up the movie’s theme of self-love while the crowd sobs for him.

That level of emotional identification spoke to me in a subliminal yet powerful way about the potential of movies.

This is a paradigmatic climax of a Lewis film––the abject humiliation of the Kid/Stooge followed by contrition and subsequent adoration by the masses. Apparently, Lewis’ vaudevillian father jealously withheld appreciation of his son’s stardom, which seems to indicate that the son spent much of his career trying to work out an insatiable need for acceptance and a quest for self-love. If this is so (and if the character of Buddy Love owes anything at all to Dean Martin, as some critics assert), then The Nutty Professor might be the quintessence of Jerry Lewis, the man and the performer, as far as the public can know him.

Lewis made his mark as an adult playing a kid, so it made sense that even as a child, I understood that The Nutty Professor was a revealing movie. Here was Jerry Lewis, whom I liked and who made me laugh, being dark and conflicted in a way I found surprisingly understandable. That level of emotional identification––not just with the character but also with the performer who’d created and executed a more personal vision than perhaps he realized––spoke to me in a subliminal yet powerful way about the potential of movies. They were fun and entertaining but they could also make you feel.

Beyond the crucial element of emotional identification, I was a ham who identified with Lewis the performer. I was a kid who was curious about how things worked, so I identified with Lewis the filmmaker. I wanted to be and do the things Jerry Lewis was and did. So when my mother, on a fateful day she must still rue, brought home a paperback book titled The Total Filmmaker by Jerry Lewis––a collection of edited transcripts from his filmmaking lectures at the USC School of Cinema––the fuse was lit. Before the decade was out, I was a human cannonball, hurtling west to Hollywood…