 Hello, welcome to Solioid Mirror. I'm your hostess, Betty St. LeVeau. On this show, we discuss film definitions, do a little bit of film history and theory, and then we go straight into the movies. Today is our first episode of City of Angels for doing movies made in Hollywood or made in Hollywood about Hollywood. So I'd like to just start off with talking about the movies today. So this first movie is a personal favorite of mine. It's called A Star is Born. It's one of those movies that get remade frequently, just like The Three Musketeers and What's That Other One. There's a couple of them that get remade constantly, but A Star is Born is one of them. As a matter of fact, a new version is about to come out, and I probably won't go to see it. But this version that I love, Star is Janet Gaynor, Frederick Mosh, Lionel Standish, Lee Devine, Mae Robson, and Adolf Menue, who during the Red Scared Hollywood, he turned actors in. So he's sort of not really one of my favorite actors. He plays the studio head. And Lionel Stander, who plays Liddy, the publicity guy, was married five or six or seven times. When you look at this guy, he's handsome in his own way, but he had this really gravelly voice, so I think he must have been quite a ladies' man back in the day. So Janet Gaynor stars as Esther Victoria Blodgett, and on her rise through the Hollywood ranks, they change her name to Vicki Lester. She meets Frederick March, Norman Maine, who is a down and out actor who actually is, when she meets him, he's on the way to his slippery slope, his downward spiral. So this is a beautiful, dreamy, tragic story all about Hollywood and the snake pit that it is. So whenever I used to say to my mom, I'm going to LA, she would be like, I don't know. I can't make movies here. So then I would say to her, what about Star is Born? And she told me a better mousetrap had never been made. So movies like this, when you feel sentimental about them, you start to thinking, wow, anyone could make it in Hollywood. When Esther arrives in Hollywood, she basically has a one in a million chance of making it, all right, literally one in a million. But she happens to meet Norman Maine at a party and he does a screen test with her. After a while, they're in first movie together and of course they fall in love. So Dorothy Pawka and Robert Carson and another writer, I didn't write his name down, are credited with writing the script. But Dorothy would say, she couldn't really remember what she contributed to it, which I thought was really honest of her. This was directed by William Wellman. It was up for seven Oscars and only one won. And that was by Mr. Wellman for Best Story. So part of Esther's motivation and her ambition to be somebody is the fact that she starstruck. She looks at movies whenever she can. And she's grown up in North Dakota and she knows that there's more to the world that's out there, which is one of the reasons why I find that, sure, there are a lot of Hollywood movie stars that are from New Jersey, Tom Cruise is one of them. But a lot of them come out of the Midwest, like Greg Kinnear and Brad Pitt. So I always like to, well, she comes from North Dakota, but I like to see those references to those outposts Midwestern and Western states that produce such great actors and actresses. Now, part of the humor behind this movie is that the prices. So when upon Esther's arrival to Hollywood, she rents a room. It's $6 a week and it says no cowboys. Now $6 a week and right underneath the listing for her room, there is an apartment for something like I think $23 a month. So I love that part of when you see an old movie and they say fill it up and the gas attendant goes, the guy goes, how much is it? The gas attendant goes 50 cents, man, okay, fulfilling up the tank. So the other funny part about this movie is that you get to see how studio heads and PR men and the people who so much aren't in front of the camera, but who are back of the camera, they run it and how they make decisions. And I think it was an early movie for that type of reflection. This is a great Hollywood movie about Hollywood, even though Sunset Boulevard and the player are also great movies. This one's a gem, especially the love story behind it. So Orson Wells will say that David O. Selznick, who produced this movie, he ruined the game for everyone in Hollywood. He said that the minute that the producer put their creative touch on it, the producer became the boss. And Orson said that back in the old days the director was the one who was the creative force and the producer basically showed up to make sure that the movie got under budget. So I happen to like Selznick movies, Notorious being one of them. I can think of a couple off the top of my head. So Frank Nugent, a critic who gave an early review for this movie said, Hollywood has no need to go to Routinha when it has lots of stories in its backyard. And this is part one of two of my City of the Angels episodes. And I find that very true. I find that when Hollywood tells stories about itself, it's never a dull moment. So this story of the up-and-coming star going up in the world while her husband goes down has some parallels in real life. Some people say that this story is based on Barbara Stanwyck and Frank Faye's relationship, Colleen Moore and John McCormick's relationship, and a producer named Tom Foreman. Also, in my book Flesh and Fantasy, it said that Ruby Keeler and Al Jocin's love story was also possibly based on this movie. Now, there's an interesting Hollywood myth that Lana Turner was an extra on the set. For the last two weeks here at ORCA, the crew has been so helpful with me. I kept forgetting my Lana Turner notes. I want to talk about Lana as a preclude to the City of Angels because Lana is a startling example of the pitfalls and traps of Hollywood. But I have a feeling like her ghost just didn't want me to talk about some of the scandals in her life. So we taped one a couple of weeks ago and it didn't pick up. And then the last time we taped it, I kept forgetting my notes. You know, I walked all the way home, just forgot my notes. So I like the fact that Lana is supposedly an extra in the 1937 version of Star is Born. She always said no, she was not an extra. She discovered months after the movie came out. So this movie costs something like a mill. It said it costs over a million to make, but there's a profit of $181,000, which I thought was odd because it didn't seem like it was much of a profit. It was filmed October to December in 1936. Can you think of any movie in the last two years that was made in two months, okay? Filmed from October to December 1936 came out. The LA premiere at Grumans was April 20th, 1937, and it did well at the box office. A lot of people like this movie. There's nothing not to like about it. And the fact that Janet Gaynor is consistently described as cute, pretty, intelligent, strong, it's kind of nice because she doesn't look like Ava Lana Orita, but she has a certain charm that I think works well in this movie. So check that out and you can catch it on YouTube. Okay, so now we're going to head to 1980s LA. And this movie is not about Hollywood per se, but it's definitely an LA movie and it's called To Live and Die in LA. It has William DeFoe, William S. Peterson, John Pical, John Dottoro, Robert Downey Sr., and a couple of other people I can't recall off the top of my head. So this is a William Friedkin movie. He's our director who did French Connection. Okay, he was one of the maverick filmmakers that got to Hollywood in the 70s. One critic described this as his comeback movie. William Friedkin never went anywhere and a lot of directors go highs and lows, but I don't view this as a comeback movie. I just view it as another one that he docked out of the park. So basically, it's a story about how the line between the outlaw and the law gets blurred. I love that type of plot. So William DeFoe plays this guy named Rick Masters. So he's an artist which is an excuse for the really horrific bad soundtrack by Wang Chong. Okay, if you can get through the soundtrack, you can get through anything. Okay, so he's an artist, but he's also a counterfeiter and he's a really bad dude. Okay, he's a really, really bad dude. And he kills William S. Peterson's partner who was about to retire in three days. Now, I watched this movie years ago with my grandmother. We had a really good time just checking it out because movies like this weren't really made. They're not really made. They weren't really made a lot back then, and they might be made now, so it's a template. But back then, this was rather cutting edge. Also a great quote in the movie, The Player. Two writers are pitching a movie and they say to Griffin Dunn, no stars. And Griffin goes, what? And the guys go, no stars. Okay, so this movie literally didn't have any stars. William S. Peterson, I think he's from Nebraska, but he was Canadian actor. And Freakin gave him a couple pages and he had the part within just reading a page and a half bit. He, William Peterson suggested his friend John Paco, who was a Chicago theater person. And I also think that Mr. DeFoe was too, you know, he did stuff in New York City. So I guess this was everyone's big breakout, including John Totoro, who I'm on the fence about because he's not my type of, he's just not my type of actor. I sometimes I don't even feel like he's acting. But because his cousin Ada, who is so brilliant that she literally, I mean, you can't tell when she's acting. You think she's really the person. So I'm kind of thinking that Mr. Totoro, when he goes into a role, he's doing the same thing. But I don't know. Robert Downey Sr., who is Bob Jr.'s dad, directed the iconoclastic Putney Swope back in the 70s. You need to check that out. And he occasionally shows up in the movie. So it was great to see him as William S. Pearson and John Panko's boss. Now partly, you know, I'm watching with my grandmother and, you know, checking out the end of it and the beginning, their parts of the movie, they're confusing because Friedkin and the man who wrote the novel, who's a former Secret Service man, Gerald Petrovich. Gerald Petrovich, I think, wrote the book and they collaborated on the script together. So sometimes there's more Friedkin in the script and sometimes there's Mr. Petrovich. Mr. Petrovich actually got into trouble where he was working with the Secret Service. Someone, they didn't want to give him a promotion. There was Chelsea because he was making a movie. I mean, just ridiculous stuff. Okay, Secret Service, Secret Service, but this is Hollywood, okay? So the plot can be a little uneven, you've got to follow it. When it's the beginning of the movie and there's the retirement party for William's then-partner there, the partner is seeing going off on his own to stake out William Defoe's counterfeiting, what do you call it, domain there, compound. And he gets shot because he goes into the dumpster to find where the money is usually hid and the garbage bags full of grass and one of William Defoe's minions shoots him. So my grandmother, I could never figure out, was William S. Pearson's partner dirty or was he just being a cowboy and going to try and bust the bad guys. And we came away with the feeling that he was dirty, okay? So the movie's about good and bad, but it's also about blurring the distinction between bad. So as Mr. Pearson's character there, Rick Chance is going through the motions. The guy is a bungee jumper, he's a base jumper. He lives through thrills. All he wants to do is catch the guy who shot his buddy, right? So he gets into trouble frequently through the movie. He flouts authority. There's this crazy car chase that is one of the best car chases I've ever seen. And I started thinking about French connection. Actually Mr. Friedkin had thought of the car chase back in 1963. He was driving home from a wedding or going to a wedding and he fell asleep and he found himself in the wrong lane with oncoming traffic. So he backed up. Already he was really lucky. He almost killed himself. So he got to thinking, how can I use that in a movie? So we see that in the movie. We see that idea of a backup car scene. They had to film in all types of crazy ways. It took six weeks to shoot. And I like it. I really like the scene a lot. There's also a foot chase scene where William S. Pearson is running after John Tertullo in the airport. William S. Pearson is doing his own stunts. They got in trouble with airport security because airport security thought that Pearson was going to break his butt on the floor. So they pretended to act as we asked to the airport official's demands. Pretend to run it through as rehearsal but they actually had the camera going. It's stuff like that that I love about Hollywood. So we haven't really talked much about William Defoe's character. But that's because he's just a really bad guy. He's scary. He's one of my top 50 movie villains of all time. The Joker, of course, is number one. But I don't know where Rick Master fits in. But he fits in like top 25 or something like that. So the differences between them or the similarities are both Peterson and Defoe's characters are killers. But one has a license to do it and the other one just does it because he's a psychopath. The premiere was November 1st, 1985. It had a $3.6 million opening that weekend, which is not bad back in the 80s. It ended up grossing $17.3 million in North America and then made an additional $6 million somewhere else. So that was pretty good. It made a profit. I'm not going to blow the ending today but the studio did not like the ending. Freakin had to change. He had to film another ending because the studio heads were hollering. So I was reading one critic saying, to live in Diane L.A., he said something about to live in Diane L.A. is OK, but not unless you want a studio head to kill you because he doesn't like the ending movie, something like that. So this is a great action flick, cops and robbers, you all aren't going to like the music. Sorry, the music's really blaring and there's lots of greens and reds because it's the 80s. It's Reagan time, everyone had a dollar in their pocket back then. So if you can deal with the music that's going to sound dated, you're going to love this flick. And as Pearson looks awesome, I mean, I think he's sexy to me anyway, but to see him whip cord thin like that running around, it's really cool. He looks really, really cool. So check that one out. The last movie we're going to do today is the penultimate to me, Hollywood movie. Some say Sunset Boulevard is, and for certain reasons, Sunset Boulevard is the penultimate Hollywood movie, but this one takes the cake. As with our Star is Born movie, they started the movie off a medium shot of a screenplay and they're describing the opening sequence. So the movie, The Player, starts off as if they're filming the movie, See the Clacka, and they're go take one, or it's like take 11 scene for something like that. So The Player is Robert Altman's best movie in the whole world. It has everyone. He usually uses an ensemble cast when he does his flicks. So in this particular movie, you see, and did I write everyone's names down, okay. So you see Vincent D'Affronio, Sidney Pollack, Dinah Merrill, Tim Robbins, Harry Belafonte, Sherry Belafonte, Jack Lemon. This is a movie about Hollywood people and it's about Hollywood people making a Hollywood movie. So to talk a little bit about Mr. Robert Altman, he's one of the few directors, only directors who's won a Gold Bear in Berlin, the Golden Lion of Venice, the Golden Palm at Kahn's. He's won a Bahta Award, a Lifetime Filmmaker Award, Canis Film Festival Award, and New York Film Critics Award. He's one of those directors who of course had a lot of ups and downs, but he had a few of them because he was the Mavik Autour producer, Mavik Autour director. He would let his actors improvise. He frequently fought with studio heads. He didn't get along with them and he didn't have a lot of respect for writers either because he felt that you should be flexible when the actors putting the writer's words into the mouth. It's the way the actor, the way the actor is translating it can work to a filmmaker's best advantage and of course Mr. Merlin Brando is the best example of that. So Robert Altman made MASH and that was like his first big movie. He hated and despised the TV show and I did too. I couldn't stand watching that show as a kid because it was dull and boring and I hated the can laughter. There was nothing funny about war to me. Yada, yada, yada. So he found the television show racist. So that he knocked out of the park. That is also considered one of his finest movies. Nashville, I happened to see at Drive-In and Jackson Hole the year that I turned, I was 11 but I was turning 12 and we must have watched that three or four times at the Drive-In. That's a great movie and again, Ensemble Cast, Julie Christie, Warren Beatty, Ronnie Blakely, some people playing themselves and some people are playing characters telling a story and Nashville is a day in the life of about 20 people. So the Cabanus is Miller is another one of his little gems and that's Warren Beatty and Julie Christie and they're both taken on Sears and Roebuck. That's a western gothic and a seriously scary movie, not a date movie but a movie if you want to sit back and watch about how, you know, if you're a fan of Deadwood and you like to see movies about the West you'll love the Cabanus is Miller. So one of the last, and then there's three women which is this crazy story that I can't remember and then one of his last movies that he made was Kansas City which has Harry Belafonte, Dumbledore McGrillney, Jennifer Jason Lai, and a whole bunch of other people and that set in Kansas City in the 30s and mainly deals with the politics of the Democratic Party, all right. So all these movies that I just said, Nashville, Mesh, Cabanus Miller, three women, Kansas City, please check that out but the one that is my favorite is the one that we're about to talk about. So a player is a term for someone who's a hungry studio executive who is probably wanting to be a studio head and the player in this movie is Griffin Mill. Griffin is a character near and dear to my heart and everybody knows his story. A lot of people know the story but I'm spending a summer in Verschert. My mom says she's got a surprise for me and I get dressed up, we jump in the car, she takes me to Hanover the Nugget, gives me some money and tells me to enjoy the show. So I just sat down and I loved every single second of this movie. I saw Griffin and me and I see, you know, Griffin is in a lot of us who love film and TV and want to work up the corrupt corporate ladder. So let's see. Angela Hall plays Tim Robin's secretary and Dinah Merrill plays Brian James's secretary. Brian James is head of the studio and my man Brian James, you can catch in a Blade Runner, he plays Leon, the guy who puts a hurting on Harrison Ford. I love Brian James so much, he can do anything. He's like an actor's actor. So for the reason why I mentioned Angela Hall and Dinah Merrill is because the secretaries and Huy would seem to outlast studio heads which is, I'm not sort of surprised they know where all the secrets vials are kept and Dawn Steele and Sherry Lansing are both examples of women who started, I think, out of secretaries and then became studio heads. So it was nice to see how the secretaries had a, they were rolling their eyes during some of these scenes. So Griffin is afraid that he's going to lose his job and he's nervous and he's ambitious, ambitious, but his secretary is observant and raw and Griffin's having not only trouble with his job, 50,000 scripts are shown to the studio once a year but only 30 or 40 get passed, get Greenlit, right? So he's worried about his job, there's someone sending him some anonymous postcards, the disgruntled writer saying that they're going to kill him because he didn't Greenlit a project of his. So Griffin's a nervous man and as he is nervous about his job, he has to deal with the likes of Peter Gallacher who is playing a character named Larry Levy, who is another player like Griffin who is warming his way in the studio. And Bonnie Sherrow, who's played by Cynthia Stevenson, who is Griffin's girlfriend who's, she's like a little lazy, pathetic snotty, but he's having problems with her too. So this sets the stage for number one, him trying to find out who's sending him these postcards. Number two, he wants to hit this movie at the park and number three, he wants Larry Levy to go back to follow because he doesn't want to look at Larry Levy at the bargaining table. Enter Richard Grant and Dean Stockwell, who both play writers pitching a script called habeas corpus to Griffin. As he's listening to the writers, and these guys are stealing the show by the way, playing the writers, as he's listening to the writer, he has the bright idea, maybe I'll stick these guys on Larry Levy, the movie will be a dog, and then I'll save the day and look like a knight in shining armor. He's betting on the fact that as the writers are saying them, they got this crazy idea. No stars. And Griffin is like, are you crazy? And Dean Stockwell goes, no Julie Roberts, no Bruce Willis. All right. So Griffin's like, these guys are crazy. So he decides to pitch it to Joe. He decides to give Larry, Larry the chance to pitch it to Joe. Brian James, the head boss, because Brian James has built his place in the studio on the motto of no stars, just talent. All right. Now that never happens in Hollywood. I'm sorry. I mean, it happens in the movies, like a star was born and then well, maybe the player, but it doesn't really happen in real life. Those studio heads want stars. Okay, they want real flesh and blood commodities that are going to bring in the bucks. All right. So this quite, this is a great little jam. You'll see lots of different stars playing themselves at various parties and functions. Cher, Gary Busey. And you'll see Tim Robbins do his thing. He really is a class act. I always, I take, I take Tim for granted. But he's, he's a, he's a fine actor. And I should check out more of his movies. So let me see. Yeah, aside from the people you'll see, you will see Bruce Willis and you will see Julia Roberts, but Buck Henry, Susan Sariden, Lily Tomlin, James Coburn, John Cusack, Angela Huston, Jeff Goldblum, Jack Lemon on piano, Scott Glenn, Peter Falk, Karen Black, and I think Robert Carradine. So it's, it's a great jam. And the movies about Hollywood and about Hollywood people are some of the best movies made. That's just about it for me. I'm your host, is Betty St. LeVoe. I'd like to thank our crew here at Walca for helping me out with the cameras today. I'd also like to thank Gendron Building for its continual support. And my first film, Professor Sharon Adela, Warfield, Oceana Clarke, who taught me to appreciate and articulate my thoughts on the silver screen. Until next time, darlings, stay away from those bad movies. Ciao.