By Jonathan Rosenbaum
The only full-scale junket I ever participated in–which I’m not proud of either–was in late 1981, when an old college friend who was an editor at Omni arranged to have me visit British Columbia, where John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing was being shot. The offer came almost immediately after I was fired from the Soho News, a Manhattan weekly where I’d been working for over a year as a film and book reviewer–my main source of income at the time–so it was hard to turn down this opportunity. Like many freelancers participating in the game, I needed to pay the rent. I flew to Seattle in mid-December, staying over in a hotel at my own expense (with the promise of an eventual refund), then flew to Ketchikan and took a bus to Stewart (where I first discovered the 100-proof Yukon Jack, bottled in Connecticut). There I was put up at a motel along with the only other journalist on the junket, Bob Martin, who edited three teen magazines (Starlog, Fangoria, and Twilight Zone). The next morning we rode in the darkness up a mountain, were given special jumpsuits to prevent us from freezing, and were led to the remote site where Carpenter, cast, and crew were shooting, assisted by artificial wind and snow machines. Martin and I got to witness the explosion of a cabin and say hello to the star, Kurt Russell, but Carpenter was too busy to talk to us. This proved to be no problem; as soon as I returned home Carpenter phoned me, and all I was expected to do, according to junket protocol, was pretend that whatever he said to me was said on location. (It was a lot harder to get my refund for the Seattle hotel room; it came down to placing collect calls at odd hours to the publicist and eventually the producer.)
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
To my mind, the fawning over The Phantom Menace was no more egregious or grotesque than the front-page coverage accorded to, say, Oliver Stone’s JFK or the American Film Institute’s “One Hundred Best American Films” in the New York Times, or the kind of promotional reviews Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan received almost everywhere in the U.S. when they came out. Media overkill of this kind was fully operational well before The Phantom Menace was a gleam in Lucas’s eye, though his movie may have made it more obvious. Newsweek ran a cover story on it complaining about the media overkill, though it fully acknowledged that it was part of it–unlike Time, which simply went along with the drift.
One of my oldest and dearest friends, Meredith Brody, is a cinephile who lives in Hollywood and frequently writes about movies. She’s as addicted to movie lists as I am and keeps a scrapbook devoted to all the films that open locally, pasting in newspaper ads of them.
No less typical was the refusal of the New Yorker to give even capsule reviews to either Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man or Andre Techine’s Thieves, two of the most important U.S. releases of 1996 and the two movies I wanted to discuss on Chicago Tonight. Neither feature was deemed important enough by its film reviewers, yet Dead Man was distributed by Miramax and Thieves by Sony Classics. I don’t think Sony Classics could be blamed for the New Yorker ignoring Thieves; that neglect undoubtedly has much more to do with an overall neglect of foreign-language movies spearheaded by Pauline Kael during her last years as critic there, something that’s become commonplace in virtually all mainstream magazines since. But I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that Miramax played a role in the neglect of Dead Man, especially given that it was the first of Jarmusch’s features to be snubbed by the New Yorker and that it happens to be his best feature. As soon as it became apparent that Jarmusch, protected by his contract and by his ownership of the film’s negative, refused to allow Miramax to recut Dead Man for its American release, the distributor’s lack of enthusiasm for the film became obvious. When, for instance, the programmer of a Jarmusch retrospective contacted Miramax about showing the film, he was advised not to because it was lousy. Jarmusch himself publicly denounced Miramax’s handling of the film when he accepted an award for Robby Müller’s cinematography at the New York Film Critics Circle’s annual dinner and was supported in his protest at the same event by Albert Brooks, who had dark stories of his own about how his own first feature, Real Life, had been handled by its distributor.
So I wasn’t surprised to hear it said of Siskel shortly after he died that he “loved movies”–an assertion made repeatedly, including on the cover of TV Guide, by Whoopi Goldberg on the 1999 Academy Awards telecast, and by Janet Maslin (whose own lack of interest in movies, apart from the movie business, may even surpass Siskel’s) in the New York Times. If he did love movies independently of his professional duties, he did a superb job of hiding this from his colleagues. The only extended conversations I ever had with him were on the subjects of Anita Hill (at the time of the Clarence Thomas hearings) and his show, and I never heard about him casually discussing any movie, new or old, with any other colleague.
I can’t say I agreed with Macdonald’s taste in everything–my favorite film in the mid-60s, F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise, bored him to tears. But he provided much of my initial route into film as an art form, and I was as enthusiastic about his polemical prose style as I was about his taste and critical perceptions. Yet by the time he compiled his film pieces in the late 60s, in a collection called On Movies, my feelings about his work had changed. Partly this was because Macdonald’s positions seemed to have changed: he’d essentially launched his Esquire column by heralding and defending Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima, mon amour, Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, John Cassavetes’s Shadows, and Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura, but he concluded his stint as a reviewer by denouncing films such as Resnais’ Muriel, Antonioni’s Eclipse, and Orson Welles’s The Trial while ignoring the subsequent films of Godard. But I also had a growing suspicion that Macdonald’s grasp of film history was limited and in some ways superficial. This was eventually brought home to me by the juxtaposition of two statements in On Movies. The first is: “I know something about cinema after forty years, and being a congenital critic, I know what I like and why.” The second occurs 17 pages later, in a passing remark on a letter James Agee sent him in 1927: “‘Why was movie jargon puzzling?’ [Agee] begins and proceeds to explain the ‘lap dissolve’ (which I must confess it’s taken me forty years to realize doesn’t refer to holding the camera in the lap but to overlapping; should have read his letter more carefully).” It’s characteristically refreshing of Macdonald to cheerfully concede his ignorance about a technical term, but his candor is also highly revealing, exposing how little is expected of film critics and how little many of them expect of themselves. Try to imagine a respected literary critic writing at the end of his career, “I know something about literature after forty years,” and then confessing without embarrassment a few pages later, “I’ve just discovered that a semicolon is something other than part of the lower intestine.” It might be argued, I suppose, that the importance of the semicolon in literature exceeds the importance of the lap dissolve in cinema, but I would counter that the lap dissolve is every bit as important to the work of Josef von Sternberg (a director Macdonald treats fairly dismissively) as the semicolon is to the work of Henry James. I would argue further that the importance of lap dissolves and superimposed images in Sunrise is fundamental to its art. This doesn’t mean that an acquaintance with the term lap dissolve would necessarily have altered Macdonald’s appreciation for Sunrise, but it does suggest that his objections could have been voiced in a more sophisticated and intelligible fashion.
