Offscreen Notes
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Ted Kotcheff (1931-April 10, 2025)
Ted Kotcheff was a stalwart Canadian film director who excelled in action, drama, and comedy. First Blood (1987) set the template for many later post-war films that dealt with PTSD and holds up well forty odd years later. When watched today if feels more drama than action, unlike the later sequels. And with an obvious social message about the unpopularity of the Vietnam War and the scapegoating of soldiers who suffered at war and then again at home. His best film might be the Australian shot Wake in Fright (1971), a surreal descent into toxic masculinity and what happens to a group of men who can not contol their base desires when confronted by alcohol and an untamed nature. Kotcheff directed two of the best adaptations of Canadian literary icon Mordecai Richler, The Appreticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974) and Joshua Then and Now (1985). His touch for humor evident in the two Richler stories fleshed itself out in broader comedies like Fun With Dick and Jane (1977) and Weekend at Bernie's (1989). Kotcheff was 94 when he died.
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Wings Hauser 1947-2025
With over 100 credits Wings Hauser was the epitome of your hard working actor who never achieved stardom but earned his keep as a nearly leading man (whose blond looks could see him mistaken for namesake Rutger Hauser) who worked consistently in supporting roles in major films/TV shows and lead roles in lower budget films. His most memorable role for me was his turn as the ghostly carpenter Ed in The Carpenter (David Wellington, 1988), where he supports (or is a subjective projection of?) a mentally unsound housewife Alice Jarrett (Lynne Adams, dead ringer for her sister Brooke) left to supervise her husband's renovation of their country home. When a worker tries to rape Alice, Ed comes to her defense, using his power tools to dispatch the rapist in the first of many grisly murders.
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Tony Todd (1954-Nov 6, 2024)
Look into the mirror and repeat five times, "Tony Todd is dead." Words that are hard to fathom, but the physically imposing (standing 6'5") Candyman himself has died at the (too early) age of 69. Todd was one of the busiest actors in Hollywood, with over 250 film and TV credits. Obviously best known for his commanding role as the titular Candyman in the original and sequel (1992, 1995) Todd starred in a variety of roles but will be best remembered for his genre roles in the noted Candyman films, the Final Destination franchise, Hatchet, Hell Fest, the black horror anthology feature Horror Noire and repising the groundbreaking Duane Jones role in Tom Savini's 1990 remake Night of the Living Dead. Those were awfully big shoes to fill and Todd did Jones proud. RIP big man.
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Latina-Canadian Filmmakers at the NFB
A second post by NFB curator Camilo Martin-Florez about first generation Canadian or Latino born women filmmakers at the NFB. Some fascinating workshop diretced shorts, animations and documentaries that can be streamed for from from teh NFB website.
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Carlos Ferrand at the NFB
Another great post by NFB curator by Camilo Martín-Flórez on the Peruvian filmmaker Carlos Ferrand, and the recent rediscovery of his 1982 film Cimarrones.
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James Earl Jones (1931 - 2024)
“When you wake up in the morning, before you look in the mirror, do you see an ethnicity? I don’t—and if I did, I’d be in trouble, because that has blinded me to who I might really be. Even waking up seeing myself as a male blinds me to who I might really be.”—James Earl Jones
James Earl Jones was an interesting and likable actor: a force of nature, he could play doctors and ministers and writers, men who represented culture and morality, as well as gutsy, sensual laborers. Jones gave strong performances in Claudine (1974), The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings (1976), Matewan (1987), and, among others, Field of Dreams (1989) and Cry, the Beloved Country (1995). James Earl Jones had a distinctive voice, for which he became famous as an actor and a narrator for a variety of artistic and commercial projects. Yet, it was a voice he had not always used. Jones published a thoughtful biography, James Earl Jones, Voices and Silences in collaboration with the scholar Penelope Niven, an expert on Thornton Wilder: direct and honest, James, the son of actor and boxer Robert Earl Jones but reared by his grandparents, recalled his Mississippi childhood, his challenges (vocal difficulties, including a severe stutter that led to a period of silence), and his training with the American Theatre Wing; and he tells the stories behind his accomplishments, while offering sometimes surprising responses to artistic and social issues. James Earl Jones had been an English major at the University of Michigan, and he began to explore drama. In 1957, Jones debuted in Sunrise at Campobello, a play about Franklin Roosevelt and the onset of the politician’s polio. In 1964, Jones starred in Othello for Joseph Papp’s Shakespeare in the Park. James Earl Jones’s late 1960s Broadway appearance as a version of boxing champion Jack Johnson and his fight with the white boxer Jim Jeffries—but Johnson is renamed Jack Jefferson—in The Great White Hope, written by Howard Sackler and directed by Edwin Sherin. The play had premiered in Washington, D.C., in 1967, before moving to Broadway in 1968, and that was the actor’s first great success; and Jones would appear in a film of the play in 1970, directed by Martin Ritt, who like filmmakers King Vidor, John Berry, and John Sayles had a liberal humanist orientation and presented black actors and characters of complexity and dignity, a transcendent perspective (when many others were still offering stereotypes). In Claudine (John Berry, 1974), Jones plays a sanitation worker who becomes engaged with Diahann Carroll as the working mother of several children—it is a believably realistic yet lovely and memorable film. The lives of ordinary people are explored for their depth, their humor, their challenges and their loves. The performance of James Earl Jones as a minister who must come to terms with the troubling realities of apartheid South Africa in Cry, the Beloved Country (Darrell Roodt, 1995) -- Jones shows persuasive restraint and resonance as a minister whose spiritual calm is shaken by the circumstances of his son's disappearance and trouble. He would continue appearing onstage, and in films and on television. Jones became even better known for his voice work as Darth Vader in Star Wars (1977, 1980, 1983); and as the voice of Mufasa in The Lion King (1994 and 2019). Jones was part of a tradition of actors that included men such as Paul Robeson and Canada Lee and Sidney Poitier, a tradition that includes Morgan Freeman, Danny Glover, Laurence Fishburne, Forest Whitaker, Dennis Haysbert, Blair Underwood, Seth Gilliam, Jeffrey Wright, Ving Rhames, Jamie Foxx, Terry Crews, and, among many others, Jonathan Majors and Jocko Sims—men who sometimes worked with little encouragement to deliver work of dignity, intelligence, and social value. James Earl However, Jones was the recipient of various awards, the Tony (for The Great White Hope and Fences), the Grammy (for Great American Documents), and the Emmy (after being nominated for the 1960s East Side/West Side, Jones won twice in 1994 for the series Gabriel’s Fire and the mini-series Heat Wave)—and he got an Academy Award (Oscar) for lifetime achievement in 2011. Jones starred with Cicely Tyson in a stage production of The Gin Game in 2015; and was King Jaffe Joffer in the film Coming 2 America (2021). Let us remember, revere, and rediscover the work of James Earl Jones (January 17, 1931 – September 9, 2024), a significant artist.
Daniel Garrett
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Diversity in Film
I love films of beautiful imagery, thoughtful dialogue, dramatic events, and historical purpose—films that reveal human complexity.
“Films that embrace diversity are more likely to resonate with audiences, leading to box-office success and ultimately long-term sustainability for the industry,” wrote Darnell Hunt, the UCLA administrator, upon the release of a survey on the American film industry in March 2024. “The study found that in 2023, films with casts that were 31 to 40 percent people of color earned the highest median global box office receipts, while films with casts that were 11 percent people of color were the poorest performers,” summarized National Public Radio’s Andrew Limbong (online at NPR, March 7, 2024). That follows the greater attention paid to film diversity as a result of the “Oscars So White” movement, inspired by the 2015 87th Annual Academy Awards season – when it was clear that little diversity was being recognized or rewarded; and, also, by the renewed discussion of American history, injustice, and brutality following George Floyd’s death by police action in 2020. Hollywood racism had been examined in Donald Bogle’s Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks (Bantam Books, 1973), and more recently in Reel Inequality by Nancy Wang Yuen (Rutgers, 2016), The Hollywood Jim Crow: The Racial Politics of the Movie Industry by Maryann Erigha (NYU Press, 2019) and the Encyclopedia of Racism in American Films (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), books that document discrimination against African-Americans behind and before the camera, and the repression of multiculturalism in American film. (Of course, that is part the legacy of colonialism, enslavement, and prejudice written about by W.E.B. Du Bois, Eric Foner, John Hope Franklin, Orlando Patterson, Eric Williams and other historians.) It is that history that the film industry and its academy and the academy museum have been attempting to address with public works, including the creation of new art.
How does one create a new future? By looking at the opportunities of today, and by being honest about the limitations (or suppressed glories) of the past. The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, its building supervised by Renzo Piano, part of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art campus on Wiltshire Boulevard, opened in 2021, and included artifacts such as the ruby slippers from the Wizard of Oz and the sled from Citizen Kane and the shark from Jaws; and its inaugural galleries included exhibits focusing exploring the people who work on film credits and the director Hayao Miyazaki as well as on Citizen Kane and directors Spike Lee and Pedro Almodóvar, and the movements Black Lives Matter and #Me Too, and on labor relations, Bruce Lee, movement, and film editor Thelma Schoonmaker. The museum took ten years to complete. “We are keenly aware that we’re working towards the opening of the Academy Museum during a time of great challenge. Over the past century, motion pictures have reflected and impacted major historical issues and events. The stories we tell in the Academy Museum are part of those bigger stories, and we are committed to highlighting the social impact of motion pictures. We look forward to brighter days for everyone, everywhere,” Bill Kramer, director of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, had said in 2020 (online at museum site, April 5, 2020).
On its September 30, 2021 opening day, the museum screened the film The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939), starring Judy Garland; and a year later for its first anniversary, September 30, 2022, it screened The Wiz, directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Diana Ross, who had performed with the Supremes before a stellar solo career that included the film Lady Sings the Blues (Sidney J. Furie, 1972), with co-stars Michael Jackson, Richard Pryor, and Lena Horne; and about The Wiz, critic Wesley Morris, writing in the New York Times, said, “The film was a peculiar study of urban melancholy in general and of Ms. Ross’s blackness in particular. Here was this rich, black star looking to get home to Harlem. And she was doing so alongside three black men whose bodies were missing essential organs. They were lost, numb, scared.” Fascinating. Morris went on to say, “The film was post-blaxploitation and post-black power. It was as much about communal self-belief as the stage show, but Mr. Lumet provided a touch of trauma,” and about its near-closing song “Everybody Rejoice / A Brand New Day,” Wesley Morris wrote, “The soundtrack version of the song is the best, post-Motown-era studio singing that Ms. Ross has ever done. She performs with an abandon that makes me cry. It’s the joy of freedom. You feel as liberated as she does” (December 4, 2015). Diana Ross, the recipient of the American medal of freedom and a Grammy lifetime achievement award, would perform live at the museum’s anniversary gala, October 15, 2022 (the gala raised $10 million).
The museum, as of August 2024, is featuring exhibits on Hollywood’s Jewish founders, Boyz N the Hood and Casablanca and The Godfather, Agnes Varda, animation, and composer Hildur Gudnadottir. What more might the museum do? How much of history will it present? One assumes it will continue to be informed by dynamic research, by new knowledge. Scholars and journalists, in various books and articles, have attempted to address neglected matters: Multicultural Films: A Reference Guide by Janice R. Welsch and J.Q. Adams (Greenwood Press, 2005); and Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity by Viola Shafik (American University in Cairo Press, 2017) and Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People by Jack Shaheen (Olive Branch Press, 2001); Native Americans on Film: Conversations, Teaching, and Theory by editor M. Elise Marrubio and Eric Buffalohead (University Press of Kentucky, 2013) and Native Americans in the Movies by Michael Hilger (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015); and Asian Americans and the Media by Kent Ono, Vincent Pham (Polity, 2008) and Heroes, Lovers, and Others: The Story of Latinos in Hollywood by Clara Rodriguez (Oxford University Pres, 2008) are some of the books that attempt to fill in the gaps of a significant history of culture. Of course, the museum has more work to do, as do other institutions, as do film and television and the other arts. The state of art of cinema and television, and the work still to be done, was attested to, for instance, by “Erased or Extremists: The Stereotypical View of Muslims in Popular Episodic Series” by Dr. Stacy L. Smith and the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative (Variety, September 7, 2022): “Muslims represent 1% of all characters (8,885) across 200 popular TV shows in four countries — and less than one-tenth of 1% of all characters were in comedy series (a total of five characters). To add insult to injury, Muslims are too often shown as perpetrators or targets of violence, and more than 30% are part of extremist groups. These stereotypes have been perpetuated for decades, and these egregious tropes can contribute to aggression toward, and fear of, this community,” wrote Smith with Al-Baab Khan and Katherine Pieper.
I remain curious about culture, and about how the art of film, and its dissemination and discussion, will become ever more true to human complexity.
By Daniel Garrett
FYI:
Hollywood Diversity Report 2024 (UCLA)
The Annenberg Inclusion Initiative (and Race)
Inequality in 1,700 Popular Films, 2007 to 2023
Hollywood Black: The Stars, the Films, the Filmmakers by Donald Bogle
Colorization: 100 Years of Black Films in a White World by Wil Haygood
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Roger Corman (April 5, 1926-May 9, 2024)
It was bound to happen some time soon but I always believed Roger Corman was immortal or at least would be one of those rare human species that lives productively well past the age of 100. He came close remaining active up until his death at age of 98 on May 9, 2024. Corman will certianly have as many obits written about him over the next few days and weeks as films he produced, which is close to 500 (yes you read right). Corman also has more nicknames than most film legends largely because of how he mastered every aspect of the film industry, priding himself on losing money on only one film, his 1962 anti-racist message film The Intruder, starring William Shatner, himself a 'young' whipersnapper of 91. He lost money with that film but learned a valuable lesson: never stake a claim on a film only because of its social message. This does not mean that Corman would never again interject social messages into his films -he did- but that it would always be at the service of exploitation and/or entertainment. Such as the youth and counter-culture films The Wild Angels (1966) and The Trip (1967). As a director Corman was at his peak in the early 1960s, with a run of remarkable (if not at least stylish and effective) horror and science-fiction films. Including his successful Edgar Allen Poe influenced (if not adapted) films House of Usher (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), The Premature Burial (1962), Tales of Terror (1962), The Raven (1963), The Terror (1963), (his masterpeice as a director, along with X-The Man With the X-Ray Eyes, 1963), The Masque of the Red Death (1964), and Tomb of Ligeia (1964). Corman was one of the first producers to cleverly employ older veteran actors at the end of their careers, realizing how their professionalism and eagerness to work were a perfect fit to his tight schedules constrained by budget and production strategy (reusing sets from one film in another, shooting with more than one film in mind). Actors who Corman brought back into the limelight (or at least back to earning an income) include Shelley Winters, Peter Lorre, Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney Jr., Basil Rathbone, Vincent Price, and Peter Lorre. To supplement the known and experienced thespians, Corman was an astute judge of future talent (or as some would rather say, a great labor exploiter!) surrounding the older actors with up and coming stars of the 'new hollywood' (or beyond in some cases). The list is way too long to be complete but some of these young actors, screewnwriters, directors include Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda, Robert Towne, John Milius, Paul Mayersberg, David Carradine, Francis Ford Coppola, Dennis Hopper, Susan Strasberg, Bruce Dern, Joe Dante, and Martin Scorsese. Corman was savvy to see how the landscape for exhibition was changing post-Hollywood Studio system and the increasing desire for serious adult fare, partly spurred by film studies courses and programs being offered for the first time at universities across North America, whetting the appetites of young adults to search out more adventurous cinema. Corman set aside his exploitation tastes to successfully distribute arthouse films in North America, including Amarcord (1972), Cries and Whispers (1973),The Tin Drum (1979), Breaker Morant (1980), My American Uncle (1981), Fritzcarraldo (1981), and Quartet (1982). In his later years Corman again re-invented himself or his penchant for crasser exploitation fare in the streaming age by producing cheap IPs (like the Sharknado films), knock offs and sequels (four Death Race sequels) exclusively for the SyFy channel. Safe to say that today's film landscape could never generate another figure even remotely like Roger Corman. One wonders what American cinema would look like today if Roger Corman had never been born?
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David Bordwell (1947-Feb 29, 2024)
One of the most important educators, teachers, and film academics of his generation, David Bordwell, has died at the age of 76. Along with being a great and motivational teacher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he taught in one of the most influential film studies departments in North America from 1973 to 2004, Bordwell wrote some of the most important film studies books in the field. Beginning with his seminal Film Art: An Introduction (1st ed., 1979), which he co-wrote with his wife Kristen Thompson, and in later editions, Jeff Smith. The latter book is probably the most widely adopted university textbook in the world and has shaped the way film is taught and thought about for generations (and I would add, for better or worse, as the book’s formalist approach has its virulent and in some cases excessively so, detractors). Many of his best books were fruits of exhaustive secondary research but his writing never steered far from a deep analysis of film at the historical, aesthetic, and contextual level (he innovated in the field of industry analysis with his groundbreaking 1985 The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960). Perhaps Bordwell was most passionate when he wrote about questions of film style, in such books as Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema (1988’s), Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging (2005); On the History of Film Style (1997), and The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies (2006).
Though Bordwell seemed to move farther away from film theory as he got older, he did write at least three key works of film theory, Narration in Fiction Film (1985), and his controversial Making Meaning Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema (1991), and its sequel in spirit, Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, co-written with Noël Carroll in 1996. Collectively these two works challenged the then widespread approach to film modelled on what he and Carroll labelled as ‘Grand Theories’ , a school of interpretative approaches to film based on mainly Continental theory and philosophy (German Idealism, phenomenology, existentialism, structuralism, post-structuralism, Marxism, etc.). As you might expect, the books stirred endless debate and venom.
In terms of his own methodological approach to film Bordwell is perhaps best remembered for his promotion of neoformalism, a return to the roots of Russian Formalism applied to cinema, most forcefully in Narration in Fiction Film, which he researched and practised along with his wife Kristen Thompson; and his notion of ‘historical poetics’, an approach which analyzes how broad cultural patterns influence the way films look and sound.
I was lucky enough to have met Bordwell on a few occasions and was struck by his boyish enthusiasm and boundless energy. He seemed like the kind of bloke that you would enjoy sitting down and chatting with about film. And from people who knew him much better than I, the one thing that Bordwell lived for more than anything, was watching and listening to film. Let’s hope wherever he is there is a projector or big screen TV not far away.
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Norman Jewison: 1926-January 20, 2024
A Canadian legend of countless Canadian and American productions, Norman Jewison, dies at age 97. Jewison will be remembered for a few key films but I will remember him as one of those old school Hollywood directors who was able to apply himself to any kind of script or genre, like drama (In the Heat of the Night, And Justice for All, Agnes of God, The Cincinnati Kid), musicals (Jesus Christ Superstar, Fiddler on the Roof), comedy (Moonstruck, The Russians Are Coming The Russiands Are Coming, The Art of Love, Send Me No Flowers), bio-pics (The Hurricane, F.I.S.T.) and science-fiction (Rollerball).
