The House Next Door

By Aaron Cutler

It’s rarely noted how fundamentally Jewish Jerry Lewis’s humor is. I don’t mean the urbanely intellectual name-dropping of Woody Allen, but rather the sheer raving fear and terror, the sense the world is out to get you, that permeates the fiction of Jewish writers like Franz Kafka and Leonard Michaels. At his best, Lewis convinces you that everyone is dangerous and that the most you can do is run away, shrieking. It’s impossible for me to watch Jerry Lewis films without thinking of the Holocaust.

You may balk at the previous sentence, wondering whether it’s meant to be funny. I’ve often had the same reaction to Lewis’s films. Lewis ruled the box office in the 1950s with a series of comedies co-starring Dean Martin and directed by Frank Tashlin (Artists and Models is probably the best-known). After his partnership with Martin ended, Lewis became his own writer, director, and general metteur-en-scéne. A recent Anthology Film Archives retrospective devoted to his directorial efforts showed how Lewis took the persona he’d cultivated—a sort of cross-eyed, arm-swinging man-child, given to spluttering nonsensical outbursts along the lines of “Grupdideebooboowabumwacha”—and simultaneously used it while distancing himself from it, commenting on it. He uses not humor, but “humor,” raising your awareness of the gags as they’re unfolding. Eric Henderson, writing in Slant, points to a sequence from 1961’s The Errand Boy where Lewis’s character, Morty S. Tashman (shades of Tashlin), keeps bringing a great glass candy jar down from a high shelf, then back up. Audiences have been conditioned by slapstick—everything from the blind man shattering the shop in It’s a Gift to the cream pie-and-spritzer of a Three Stooges routine—to expect Jerry to drop the jar. When he doesn’t, the joke goes from being on him to being on us.

What does the distancing effect of Lewis’s humor have to do with its sense of trauma? The split between Lewis the character and Lewis the creator generates both. Lewis plays multiple roles in several of his movies, but in his first four films as a director—1960’s The Bellboy, 1961’s The Ladies Man and The Errand Boy, and 1963’s The Nutty Professor—you’re acutely aware of two Lewises in particular. One is the famous adult who has created this world; the other is the anonymous kid dodging the mines that the adult has set for him. Lewis’s 1972 film The Day the Clown Cried (omitted from the Anthology series—for legal reasons, the film still can’t be seen), in which Jerry tries to smile through an actual Nazi death camp, was doomed conceptually by avoiding its author’s gifts. Lewis’s best films don’t take place in the real world, but specifically and explicitly in a fantasy world he’s created.

The child Lewis flees celebrity, while the adult Lewis grumpily inhabits it. His main role in The Bellboy is as Stanley, an open-mouthed, essentially silent hotel employee, but he also plays himself. Jerry Lewis arrives at the hotel wearing dark sunglasses and a tightly-pressed frown, with a gigantic entourage trailing him. He doesn’t even know who its members are, he says, they all just started following him. In the movie’s best sequence, he delivers a speech about how good everyone has been to him, continually interrupting himself to bark “Hold it!” as they charge forward. At one point he takes out a cigarette and asks for a light; after the ensuing crush, we see the cigarette smashed against his face.

The infantile Stanley has no awareness of the agita that Jerry Lewis goes through daily. Herbert H. Heebert of The Ladies Man comes closer to understanding. After getting his heart broken, young Herbert retreats from the world into working at a boarding house for young actresses. One (Hope Holiday, the ditz Jack Lemmon picks up in the previous year’s The Apartment) asks him to play a scene with her and gets so into the part that she beats the crap out of him. At another point in the movie, the house’s matron appears on television and Herbert, fascinated by the camera, keeps wandering into the shot with her, disrupting her interview. Herbert is fascinated by the appeal of celebrity, but the scene’s greater joke is that Herbert is always on camera, regardless of whether he wants to be. Late in the movie, Herbert runs away from one of the women, frightened, and the camera pulls back, revealing the Ladies Man’s set.

The protagonist in Jerry Lewis’s films is always a character, but one that bleeds over into the Lewis offscreen. In a key Errand Boy scene Morton, a former sign-painter on a Hollywood studio lot, tells a talking puppet his life story. He says he was a kid who grew up in New Jersey, changed his name, and came out to Hollywood to work at Paramutual Pictures. In real life, Lewis grew up in Newark with the name Joseph Levitch and broke into vaudeville after getting thrown out of high school (he’s said he punched out his principal for making an anti-Semitic remark), ultimately becoming a star with Dean Martin at Paramount Pictures. At the end of the movie Morton, now a movie star, sees a sign-painter handling the job incorrectly. He climbs up onto the painting platform and starts lecturing the kid, saying that he was once a sign-painter himself. The kid turns around. Jerry Lewis plays him, too.

Lewis and Martin were the world’s biggest box-office draws for six straight years in the 1950s. Lewis himself was America’s most profitable movie star in 1957, 1959, and 1961-64 (he continued to make films with Tashlin while directing his own). Aside from his pure talent, combining a silent comedian’s physical gifts with an unmistakable, goofily sibilant voice, I suspect he appealed to audiences so strongly because he cultivated a myth: The hapless, helpless fella who, through persistence and goodwill, climbs out of the shit and grows up to be a star.

The Nutty Professor didn’t perform as well as Lewis’s other films had. In this movie, even more so than in his others, the schnook and the celebrity are squashed into one. Lewis plays Dr. Julius Kelp, a buck-toothed, floppy-haired, painfully shy professor in love with one of his students. To impress her, Kelp concocts a potion that turns him into a singer named Buddy Love (Lewis without makeup—read into that as you will). Unlike in the 1996 Eddie Murphy remake, where Murphy’s charismatic energy as a stand-up performer turbo-charges the audience through Buddy’s darker moments, Lewis’s stiffening body and thick-voiced reliance on flat hipster lingo (“Hiya, chicky baby”) keeps Buddy Love both repugnant and repulsive, good-looking but ultimately hollow and charmless—and so, too, the movie seems to say, is fame. While Murphy’s Everyman Sherman Klump ultimately accepts himself, returning to the voluminous folds of his blissfully farting fat family, Julius Kelp still feels sad and lonely at the end of Lewis’s film, even though he’s got the girl. It’s as if Lewis has constructed two possibilities for himself, and neither one works.

Stanley the bellboy became a TV comedy star in Lewis's 1964 film The Patsy. After Stanley falls to his death at the end of the movie, Lewis walks on and shows us that we're looking at a movie set. Lewis’s screen work would subsequently darken, achieving twin high points in 1983. In that year he both played a cold, distant prick of a talk show host in Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy and wrote, directed, and starred in Cracking Up (a.k.a. Smorgasbord), about a hapless nerd who wants to kill himself. As a friend remarked, Cracking Up at times feels like your grandfather shouting the same joke over and over—the film piles so many gags on top of each other that it achieves a brilliantly desperate strain. The two movies show the two sides of the Lewis icon that audiences had flocked to 20 years prior: The schmoo who wanted to be famous, and the schmuck who actually was.

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Aaron Cutler has written about film for Slant Magazine and The Believer. He is working on a book about New York’s repertory cinemas.

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The quote above is from an interview with Umberto Eco at Spiegel Online International. Appropriate in light of the encroaching/already published end-of-the-year roundups.

"We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That's why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It's a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don't want to die."

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"Links for the Day": Each day (more or less) the House editors post a link/links to an item that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to keithuhlich@gmail.com and to converse in the comments section.

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By Lauren Wissot

Russian Film Week, like the Eastern-European films it shows, runs at an absurdly frustrating, devil-may-care pace (at least for this New Yorker). Screenings of sweeping 160-minute epics often begin an hour late, which admittedly comes in handy if you show up at the School of Visual Arts on the east side instead of the SVA Theater on the west side, as too many of us confused movie-goers did for a sold out Anna Karenina. But if you’re willing to brave the stampeding, Russian-barking crowds at the entrance, followed by a sponsor-thanking trailer, followed by a live sponsor-thanking Russian, followed, of course, by the English translation, then by a gratitude-spewing director (or five or six if you went on the sold-out opening night), then by that English translation, to finally see whichever film you’ve by now forgotten the title of, you might just catch some meaningful cinema.

Anna Karenina is one case in point. To complain as my Ukrainian friend did that Sergei Solovyov’s film—based on Tolstoy’s masterpiece about a married woman whose overwhelming passion for her lover steamrolls right over high society morality—is too long is a bit like claiming an AC/DC concert is too loud. (Did she want a YouTube version?) With this latest take’s exquisite costumes, lush production design and sharp cinematography there’s nothing to do but resign oneself to getting lost in the wondrous images for a couple hours. (It’s a shame that Tolstoy’s trashy soap opera never got the Douglas Sirk treatment it deserved.) Then there’s the earthy and sensual Tatyana Drubich in the title role (she looks like a Russian Raquel Welch), the spectacular ballrooms, the riveting classical music, the blinding white winters and white 19th-century dresses. Solovyov’s ample use of bright daylight only serves to heighten the inevitable dark plunges to come.

The dialogue not only holds up, but keeps the film on its toes, with bon mots such as, “Maybe people should be vaccinated for love,” or “I think there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts,” or “Respect was invented to cover the empty place love should be”—all heartbreaking in their eternal truth. By the time Anna Karenina degrades into a trippy haze à la The Doors, you half-expect Jim Morrison to meet the morphine-addled Anna at the train station, reciting the words of her long-suffering, cuckolded husband: “When I doubted I had hope. Now there is no hope. And still I doubt everything.” Da, this is the end. And like the very best melodrama, so fake it’s real.

Or is that the other way around? It is for Kira Muratova, the grand dame of Eastern-European cinema, and the director of the Ukrainian film Melody for a Street Organ (Melodiya dlya Sharmanki). Though I was unfamiliar with Muratova’s work before attending the invitation-only screening for her latest gem, I plan on putting the 75-year-old director’s movies at the top of my must-Netflix list. After seeing Melody for a Street Organ I felt as if I’d discovered the missing link between De Sica and Fellini. (Though I could have done without the Russian film scholar flown in all the way from Pittsburgh to introduce the film and to gravely proclaim, “This is not an allegory of Russia. This is an allegory of homo sapiens.” Later she suggested we view the movie’s art salon scene as a stand-in “for the art-house cinema we’re sitting in,” though we were stuffed to capacity in the commie-drab New York Film Academy screening room.)

The film follows little Alyona (Lena Kostyuk, resembling a young, fair-haired version of Christina Ricci) and her even younger half-brother Nikita (a spellbinding Roma Burlaka) as they set out for the big city on an existential, Christmastime journey straight out of Dickens to find their respective fathers after their mother’s death. Along the way they encounter crazy colorful folks spewing religion and selling useless items—characters only a director like Emir Kusturica could love. Muratova’s camera remains in constant movement even as nothing momentous happens, floating in, out and around scenes, lingering on faces, restless in a sort of madcap gypsy style. “One woman left a dead man in a suitcase here,” a baggage handler in a train station declares. “There are as many violinists in this town as there are dogs,” another guy later states. Human lives are worth a dime a dozen in this frostbitten post-Soviet world.

The innocent Alyona and Nikita slog through this bitter reality, snow crunching loudly under tiny boots (the only sound to be heard as they peek in the windows of festive families celebrating the merry holiday). When they do find money they get robbed. Food is forever plentiful around them, yet always just out of reach. The two find themselves marooned inside a grand railway station—cramped quarters with the feel of a lunatic asylum where the answer to every question is “no idea”—and where no one ever seems to leave, as paralyzed as if at a Buñuel dinner party. “Nobody knows it even though it’s just a step away,” a tux-clad man in a limo tells the kids in answer to their inquiry about the location of a particular lane.

And the decadence thrust into the faces of the exhausted starving children grows ever more absurd as the film nears its fantastic climax. An overhead shot of multicolored balloons tied to Nikita, as he trudges along holding tight to an abandoned cat tucked safely inside his frayed jacket, seems plucked from a Fellini dream. (As does the “Palanquin service” of Chinese immigrants, who carry a costumed socialite through a traffic jam.) Melody for a Street Organ reaches a fever pitch during a shoplifting event in a supermarket provided for the amusement of the wealthy—where the richies get to slum by salaciously stuffing produce down their panties (while Alyona gets hauled away after hungrily shoving too much bread into her mouth). Yet by the time we reach the finale we’re fully prepared. The film’s ending is so shocking not because we didn’t see it coming—but because we didn’t want to! It's a perfect allegory for these cruel, self-absorbed times.

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Brooklyn-based writer Lauren Wissot is the publisher of the blog Beyond the Green Door, the author of the memoir Under My Master's Wings, and a contributor to The Reeler.

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This is just too good not to share early. I think the Muppets just pwned Wayne and Garth. Happy Turkey Day, all!

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"Link for the Day": Each day (more or less) the House editors post a link to an item that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to keithuhlich@gmail.com and to converse in the comments section.

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My Time Out New York compadres David Fear and Joshua Rothkopf, in addition to 11 other colleagues and friends (Stephen Garrett, Andrew Grant, Aaron Hillis, Kevin B. Lee, Karina Longworth, Maitland McDonagh, Troy Patterson, Nicolas Rapold, Lisa Rosman, Nick Schager and S. James Snyder), have just published our picks and blurbs for the top 50 films of the decade. I don't consider myself a list guy, but it's in the job description so I went really personal with my choices (different day, different rules, sure to be a different list). I'm happy with how it turned out, and that I got to blurb for Abbas Kiarostami's Five Dedicated to Ozu and John Gianvito's The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein in particular. (The latter film is the image you see above.) Click here to read the feature. I've reprinted my ballot submission below, with links to pieces I've written on the films or, in cases where I haven't put pen to paper, to related pieces/other goodies I find particularly inspiring. Hope it all sparks discussion and interest. (KU)

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Keith Uhlich's Ballot

1. The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein (2001)
   
2. The New World (2005)
   
3. Miami Vice (2006)
   
4. Five Dedicated to Ozu (2003)
   
5. Inland Empire (2006)
   
6. Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003)
   
7. The Sun (2005)
   
8. Youth Without Youth (2007)
   
9. The Limits of Control (2009)
   
10. Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters (2007)
    

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By Jack Patrick Rodgers

Unless you’re an executive at NBC, it’s been a great fall season for TV. Despite the many editorials earlier this year heralding Jay Leno’s primetime talk show as the death of scripted television (some of them quite convincing), this season has seen a number of new shows become breakout hits: NCIS: Los Angeles, Modern Family, Cougartown, The Cleveland Show. And the debuting show that’s generated the most pop-culture buzz is easily FOX’s Glee. On the surface it’s about the misfits in a high-school glee club as they train for a national competition, but it’s really a delightfully bizarre hybrid of teenage soap opera, musical melodrama, larger-than-life comedy and meditation on the unrealistic dreams of kids and the sad compromises of adults. In style and substance it feels like nothing else on television, but unlike most oddball, one-of-a-kind shows, Glee has managed to pull off the hat trick of achieving critical praise, a passionate cult following, and most importantly, impressive ratings. Although it’s aired just ten episodes thus far, it’s already earned a cover story in Entertainment Weekly and its cast members recently performed the national anthem at the World Series.

I hate to admit it, but a part of me is uneasy about Glee's success. Don’t get me wrong, I love the show (and I’ve got the songs on my iPod to prove it). But I almost wish it was struggling in the ratings and that its creators were scrambling to wrap up the plotlines before the end of the season in case renewal wasn’t a sure thing. After all, how long can Glee last? Can this show sustain its strange vibe of whimsy and melancholy for five years, or even two?

What’s even more frustrating is the show’s barn-burning pace, its tendency to think up interesting storylines and character arcs and ditch them after a single episode. Take “Mash-Up,” which depicted an unexpected romance between bad-boy jock Puck and fame-seeking diva Rachel (they fall into each other’s arms after Puck casually asks her, “wanna make out?” during a break from practicing a song). It’s a coupling that’s rich with dramatic potential, since both Puck and Rachel are in love with other members of the glee club, and their attraction at first seems like a way to stir up jealousy. But their relationship brings out the tenderness in both of them, particularly in a scene in which Rachel washes slushee out of Puck’s mohawked hair (getting a slushee to the face is repeatedly portrayed on the show as the social cost of being lame enough to join glee club).

By the end of the episode, though, they’ve already broken up, and we never get to find out the full implications of their hook-up, like what Puck and Rachel really wanted out of it or how their crushes responded to it. I get the feeling that the two will never acknowledge their brief relationship to each other again (and if they do, I’ll stand corrected), which leads to another problem with Glee: It’s not yet clear that the overarching story is cohering into anything larger than a series of interesting character vignettes. I’m not sure I can blame Glee too much for this. The boom of serialized dramas in the wake of Lost’s success yielded too many duds, reinforcing the maxim that television episodes must be self-contained stories in order to find an audience (this is a crucial reason why procedurals have come to dominate the major networks’ lineups). Glee has worked around this problem by rotating different cast members into the spotlight on an episode-by-episode basis and examining their personal lives (a shy girl deals with a hopeless crush, a teacher forms an a cappella group for adults, etc.), with a few recurring plotlines like the road to the national competition providing the framework of the series. So far so good, but some of these character-based stories, though well-written, seem too quickly resolved and forgotten, which is preventing the show from really exploring who the characters are.

Fellow House Next Door contributor Todd VanDerWerff pointed out a fascinating behind-the-scenes aspect of Glee in his recaps for the A.V. Club: Unlike most television shows, which tend to be plotted by a staff of writers working together, Glee appears to be a collaboration between three creators working independently, each of whom have very different takes on what the show should be. That likely accounts for its wild tonal shifts, as some plotlines are too ridiculous to be taken seriously (primarily, a wife faking a pregnancy), while the teen drama is played for pathos. Strip away the musical numbers and the kids feel like they’re in an episode of Freaks and Geeks, while the adults are in an episode of Arrested Development.

I realize it seems like I’m harping on the show endlessly, so let me repeat: I’m a big fan of Glee. The show has so much going for it. The premise is gold, their budget is large enough to pull off some pretty impressive song-and-dance numbers (even if they have yet to top their cover of “Don’t Stop Believin’,” which closes out the pilot), the cast is phenomenal from top to bottom, and the writing, at its best, is sharp, insightful and very funny. But Glee is still only really good, and I think it has the potential to be great, to enter the same league as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Veronica Mars, two shows that mashed up adolescent angst and genre tropes and used that weird synthesis to drill deeper into the sometimes nightmarish pain of growing up.

Both shows took universal problems—having your heart broken, the fragile trust between parents and children, betrayals from close friends—and elevated them to an operatic level. Nowhere is this more apparent than in similar plotlines on Buffy and Veronica Mars that explored how our first sexual experiences can make us feel confused and terribly vulnerable. The most iconic storyline on Buffy was an arc from the second season in which the main character loses her virginity to her boyfriend, a reformed vampire named Angel, only to discover that sex removes his soul and turns him into a sadistic monster. Angel spends the next few months taunting Buffy, terrorizing her loved ones, and eventually, murdering someone in her circle of friends (this entire arc feels both more resonant and darkly hilarious after Twilight reimagined vampires as studly, chaste boyfriends), forcing Buffy to get over her heartache and take the fight to him.

Veronica Mars examined this same theme through the lens of film noir, casting Veronica’s first time as a horrific mystery she must solve after she’s drugged and raped in her sleep at a house party. But in the end, she learns that the liquid ecstasy she consumed wasn’t meant for her, and that her rapist was actually an ex-boyfriend who didn’t know she had been drugged and misunderstood her behavior as consent. A shattered Veronica realizes there may be no one she can seek revenge on for what happened to her; in a noir world, things are never black and white.

Glee has its own storyline in the same emotional vein, in which cheerleader Quinn loses her virginity to Puck and gets pregnant, but tells her actual boyfriend, none-too-bright football quarterback Finn, that he’s the father (they haven’t had sex, but she convinces him that a grinding session in a hot tub is to blame). Quinn’s actions are selfish and cruel, but they’re also almost understandable: Even if she agrees to give the baby up for adoption, she still must deal with her parents’ disapproval and the ridicule of her peers, and she desperately needs the support of her boyfriend. Yet while this plot puts everyone involved through the ringer—Finn, Quinn, Puck, and even Rachel, who’s fallen in love with Finn and is crushed by his devotion to Quinn—I’m not sure that Glee will be able to use the format of a musical to hit the same emotional peaks that Buffy managed with gothic horror or Veronica Mars with film noir. Glee is more of a drama interrupted by musical numbers than a drama that expresses its character development through music, probably because it has to use recycled songs rather than original material (and a recent announcement that the show will be pulling stunts like an all Madonna episode does not seem like a step in the right direction).

In spite of this, Glee does have one massive advantage that Buffy and Veronica Mars can no longer claim: It feels extremely timely, tapped into our current attention-whoring culture that’s given us reality television, Balloon Boy, viral YouTube clips and celebrities famous for being famous. Even as it deals with the same rites of passage as its predecessors, Glee is fundamentally a reflection of how the Internet, and its potential for giving us our 15 minutes of fame, has taken over our lives. Indeed, the three shows form a rough timeline of how our relationship with the Internet has evolved over the last decade and a half.

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It’s inevitable that every television show becomes a period piece, yet it’s shocking that Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which only debuted in 1997, already looks like it takes place in another era. The characters make pop-culture references that are pretty dated, of course, but it’s even stranger to watch them track down their friends when they’re in danger rather than call their cell phones.

More than that, Buffy is a defiantly pre-Internet show. That’s not to say that it doesn’t acknowledge the existence of the Internet, or that the characters never use it at all. There are a few instances when Willow, the book nerd of the group, is required to hack into a website in order to find out more information on demonic conspiracies. (Remember when just about every thriller in the ‘90s used hacking into a website as a shortcut for its characters to discover crucial information? I’ll bet a lot of screenwriters are pissed that audiences are too computer savvy now to find that believable.) But what’s missing is any sense that the Internet can be used as a medium for social interaction, or more accurately, that you can use the Internet to communicate and not be a total weirdo.

The show makes clear its Luddite point of view in the first-season episode “I Robot, You Jane,” in which a centuries-old demon gets uploaded onto the Internet after a spellbook is scanned into a computer. The episode gets off to a clumsy start with a scene in which a computer geek brags about the power of the Internet: “The only reality is virtual. If you’re not jacked in, you’re not alive!” In other words, the only people who spend their time online are raving lunatics.

Meanwhile, Willow begins talking on the Internet with a boy named Malcolm who’s smart, caring and genuinely interested in her, but Buffy and their friend Xander are alarmed that Willow is developing feelings for someone she’s never even met. Once again, the dialogue sounds incredibly dated: When Willow admits that she met Malcolm online, Buffy replies, “on line for what?”

As the episode progresses, Willow gets increasingly wrapped up in her cyber love affair, blowing off classes to chat with Malcolm and ignoring Buffy when she argues that it’s dangerous to trust someone online. And while it’s no surprise that Malcolm turns out to be a malevolent demon, what’s striking is that the show seems committed to making the Internet look not just like a potential tool for deception, but as something sad and lonely.

In all fairness, “I Robot, You Jane” is considered by fans to be one of the weakest episodes in the show’s seven-year run, and Buffy was still figuring out its identity in its first season and can be forgiven a few awkward, message-of-the-week stories. Yet for years afterward, the characters rarely used the Internet for anything other than research on the occult, and by the time the final season rolled around five years later, they were just as computer illiterate. In the episode “Help,” which aired in October 2002, a high-school student is convinced that she’s going to die soon, and Buffy, who’s since become a guidance counselor, tries to find out more information on the girl. Apparently no one thinks to check the Internet until Willow suggests, “have you Googled her yet?” Cue Xander with the punchline: “Willow, she’s 17!”

The Google search leads to the girl’s personal website, which is filled with dark, death-obsessed poetry, natch, and Xander in particular is convinced this is proof she’s suicidal. While Willow defends the girl, arguing this is just a phase everyone goes through, the show obviously still believes spending your free time on the Internet is worrying behavior.

Buffy creator Joss Whedon has admitted in interviews that he’s not very adept at using computers or the Internet (ironic for a guy known for his pop-culture savvy), but the other major reason why the show feels so dated is because it went off the air just as another sea change was taking place. Its finale aired in May 2003, about a year before the launch of Facebook and two years before YouTube came into existence. By contrast, Veronica Mars debuted in September 2004, just 14 months after Buffy ended, but it clearly feels like it’s on the other side of a dividing line in our culture.

The pilot episode of Veronica Mars sets up the mystery that would drive the first season—the murder of Veronica’s best friend, Lilly Kane, who was also the daughter of a local computer-software tycoon. There’s a brief but telling moment in the episode in which a crime-scene video of Lilly’s dead body, her skull bashed in, is uploaded onto the Internet and viewed by the students at Veronica’s school, transforming her death from an abstract idea into grisly reality. This detail is echoed in plotlines from later in the season in which two different students are humiliated to discover that compromising videos of themselves have been posted online. In one, a boy is seen organizing a series of bum fights, while the other shows a girl performing a sex act for the viewing pleasure of her boyfriend. (The series finale also deals with Veronica getting revenge on someone who posted a sex video of her online, but by that point it’s unclear if the show is examining a recurring theme or merely recycling old material.) The characters of Veronica Mars, unfortunately, have to learn that there’s no such thing as privacy in the age of the Internet.

It’s not surprising that a film noir would be interested in how difficult the Internet makes hiding secrets, but the hugely underrated second season of Veronica Mars twists this theme even further into something deeper and more heartrending. At the time, the season was heavily criticized for centering on a mystery with less of a personal connection to Veronica: Instead of obsessing over the murder of her best friend, she investigates a bus crash that killed two adults and six students onboard, only one of whom was a friend of hers.

As Veronica searches for clues as to who planted an explosive on the bus, she’s forced to learn more about who these students were and why somebody might have wanted them dead—she becomes closer to them in death than in life. And the key to her investigation is what they’ve left behind on the Internet. One of the deceased boys, Marcos, is remembered as a wallflower who never said a word, but it turns out that he was the host of a pirate radio show (clearly a series of audio podcasts, although never identified as such) that aired the dirty laundry of everyone at school. (A typical dig from one podcast: “So it seems Taylor read the fine print on her abstinence pledge and found a few loop-something. Oh right, holes.”) Another student on the bus was a frequent contributor to a password-protected message board for gay students to discuss their thoughts, which is later infiltrated by a blackmailer threatening to out the posters unless they pay up. The Internet has, in effect, turned everything upside down: Online we can say how we really feel and embrace our true identities, but in reality we’re expected the play a stereotypical role or face the consequences. The Internet has become in some ways more real than the real world.

Yet there are also limits to what these online journals and podcasts can ultimately reveal about us. Desperately seeking a breakthrough in the case, Veronica takes to carrying around her iPod all day at school and listening to the pirate-show podcasts, but in the end she realizes that’s she's still no closer to understanding who Marcos was, much less why anyone might want to kill him. Her frustration carries with it a scary message: We might think that we’re baring our souls to the world, but once we’re gone, maybe no amount of autobiography can tell someone else who we are.

If Buffy dismissed the Internet as weird and unimportant and Veronica Mars depicted it as a medium for self-expression, then Glee sees it as a medium for confirming our self-worth and seeking the fame we so richly deserve. Telling other people who we are on the Internet has been replaced with telling other people why we’re important.

More than any other character on Glee, Rachel believes in this philosophy, stating in the pilot episode that “nowadays, being anonymous is worse than being poor.” To that end, she spends much of her free time recording videos of her singing and posting them to YouTube, in the hope that someone will notice them and elevate her to the level of a celebrity. Not all of her fellow glee-club members are this obsessed with fame, but they’re aware of how easily it can be obtained and that fame has, in many ways, replaced wealth as the true yardstick for success in our culture. Finn, for instance, vows to become famous in order to do right by his single mom, who has been lonely ever since his father was killed in the first Gulf War. If it’s not exactly clear how fame will solve this problem, that’s the point—it’s become a catchall for our troubles.

Nor have the adults escaped from the influence of the Internet. The new director of the glee club, Spanish teacher Will Schuester, justifies restarting the club by telling the principal, “these kids all feel invisible. That’s why they all have a MySpace page!” Yet only a few episodes later he’s trolling on MySpace himself, looking up a popular girl he had a crush on in high school in order to find out what she’s up to now. The school guidance counselor looks at Will sadly as he acts out a scene that’s become commonplace in real life: he attempts to get over his insecurities from high school by “reconnecting” with someone he’s never said two words to before. How many of us have done something along those lines?

It’s not yet clear if Glee will continue to explore these themes on a regular basis—the show already has 12 main characters and an ever-expanding number of subplots to focus on, so it’s possible that it could all get lost in the shuffle. But that would be a real shame, since no other television show on the air feels quite so tapped into the zeitgeist. Very few TV shows or movies have tried to understand how the Internet has changed our social lives, arguably because it’s not very cinematic (or telegenic, as the case may be) to show someone updating their status on Facebook. Yet in many of its smaller, quieter moments, Glee has captured a shift in not just how we interact online, but how the potential spotlight of the Internet has changed the way we think about ourselves. While the show’s detractors claim that the characters of Glee are nothing but a bunch of caricatures, I think they look much more like us than we want to admit.
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Jack Patrick Rodgers is a freelance writer based in Philadelphia. His work has been published in Slate, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Geek Monthly and Popmatters. You can follow him on Twitter or contact him via email at RestlessJack@comcast.net.

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Our man Steven Boone unleashes another video essay/collage. This one is about wolves. It's a reminder, yes, to be thankful tomorrow, but it's also just angry and sad. I, RWK, think it's stunning. Better let him describe it, as he did at his blog, BIG MEDIA VANDALISM:

"Hippy dippy Woodstock director Michael Wadleigh made only one narrative feature film, the majestically weird horror fable Wolfen. Having not seen it since Late Late Show screenings in the 1980's, I remembered Wolfen, faintly, as that other, lesser, wolf flick of 1981.

"Not until screening it recently with a horror afficionado pal did I come to understand it as a reeling peyote vision of New York City's Third World future, the one I'm staggering through presently. Damn. This video is my parting shot as I prepare to join a sad, strange exodus from the city that used to feel like home."

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"Link for the Day": Each day (more or less) the House editors post a link to an item that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to keithuhlich@gmail.com and to converse in the comments section.

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By Matt Zoller Seitz

A celebration of cooking and eating on film. The first version (top) is a straight-up montage with movie titles listed chronologically at the end. The second version is annotated, using text to identify film clips, music cues and offscreen lines as they appear. To watch the videos at the Moving Image Source web site, or to read my written introduction, click here. Happy Thanksgiving! -- MZS

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Matt Zoller Seitz is the founder of The House Next Door.

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By Aaron Cutler

Andrew Sarris wrote of Elia Kazan in The American Cinema that “his career as a whole reflects an unending struggle between a stable camera and a jittery one.” Historically that’s more or less been the rap on Kazan—a highly-acclaimed filmmaker with many strong titles, but one whose work was too simultaneously bland and conflicted for the critical establishment to elevate him to auteur. The son of Greek immigrants and eventually a famed Broadway director, Kazan began filmmaking with a group-directed short called People of the Cumberland, broke into feature directing with 1945’s adaptation of Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and left it 18 films later with a version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon. He came close to greatness on film, though rarely reached it: At his peak period he was at the high end of the middle bracket of several frankly liberal directors, many of whom had crossed over into movies from film and TV. He's lighter and earthier than the leaden, sententious cinema of Stanley Kramer and Richard Brooks, though he never achieves the pure ecstasy and reverie of the best Nicholas Ray.

In the 1950s Kazan made many enemies for naming names before the House Un-American Activities Committee (he then filmed On the Waterfront, his best-known work, in apology). The current generation of cinephiles also disdains him for his beliefs, but more their square-jawed sincerity than for any hurt feelings: We live in the age of irony, after all, and don’t need movies to tell us that anti-Semitism is bad (Gentlemen’s Agreement), that racism is worse (Pinky), that the media’s out to get us (A Face in the Crowd), that family is important (Tree), or that you should always do what you know is right (Waterfront). Yet, as Film Forum’s recent Kazan retrospective showed, rather than raise an eyebrow or let burst a guffaw it’s worth marveling at all the not just strong but terrific movies that Kazan actually made: Panic in the Streets, A Streetcar Named Desire, Waterfront, East of Eden, Baby Doll, Wild River. (Viva Zapata!, Face in the Crowd, America America, and Splendor in the Grass all also have staunch supporters, the films’ sluggish sentimentality be damned.) His claustrophobic compositions and squeezed, stumbling editing—a typical Kazan sequence shows people entering a room, followed by multiple back-and-forth close-ups as their words build to an argument, then a sudden cut to a long shot as they physically attack each other, followed by people entering another room—tend to suffocate me. Yet how is it a bad film director made so many good films?

The answer, I think, has to do with arrangement: Kazan had a superior ability for assembling talented collaborators, even if he often failed to integrate them into a focused, coherent whole. This applied to his offscreen fellow artists—Boris Kaufman’s wintry Waterfront docks photography makes you want to watch with your coat on—but was especially true of his actors. Kazan directed 21 different actors to Oscar nominations, with nine winning. One could rightly respond that the Oscars are wrong, constantly, but would still have to concede career-best performances from James Dean, Carroll Baker, Vivien Leigh (Blanche DuBois bests Scarlett O’Hara), Karl Malden, Celeste Holm, Lee Remick, and above all, Marlon Brando. It’s always a tricky question how much of a performance is due to the director and how much is due to the actor—in Kazan’s case, frankly, I haven’t read enough to judge. In his book Movie Love in the Fifties, James Harvey quotes Kazan refusing credit for Brando's work ("it was like directing some genius animal"). But Kazan was known for researching his character backgrounds exhaustively, and his notes for the original Broadway production of Streetcar, in which he analyzes each character based on close reading, is vital for dramatists today. Yet as the bad, grotesquely hammy turns in his movies prove (Andy Griffith in Face in the Crowd, Lee J. Cobb in Waterfront), the actor still needs to nail the part. Perhaps the bottom line is that actors always perform in collaboration. On Streetcar and Waterfront in particular, Kazan and Brando collaborated to create two of the most indelible performances in film history.

Many critics have spouted about how Brando brought the Method, a more overtly psychological, raw emotive style of acting than previous modes, to the screen (untrue—Montgomery Clift appeared in Red River two years before Brando's fo;m debut in The Men), but I suspect that what wows most viewers even today is the actor’s sheer physical energy. Oftentimes the physicality is explicitly sexual—while in the 1930s and 1940s Cary Grant and James Stewart walked alongside their leading ladies, hands firmly in pockets, in the 1950s Brando constantly violated their personal space. He often did so tenderly—picking the lint off of Kim Hunter’s sweater in Streetcar, slipping Eva Marie Saint’s glove onto his hand in Waterfront—so that throwing women onto beds or breaking their doors down later would seem all the tougher. The physical threat of sex wasn’t new to Hollywood movies (a peek at Barbara Stanwyck stroking Henry Fonda’s hair in The Lady Eve shows how screwball comedy thrived on it), but Kazan probably went further than any A-list director in making assaults a key part of his drama.

A good thing he did, since the wrestling matches are the most exciting parts of his movies: Carroll Baker paddling her husband’s neck flab in Baby Doll, or James Dean throwing his brother at their mother in East of Eden, say far more about characters’ relationships than the film’s overwritten scripts do. The best moments in Kazan's films are inevitably full two-shots, bespeaking his theatrical training. Unlike the work of the great film stylists (Murnau, say, or Von Sternberg, or even a theaterphile like Renoir), we watch Kazan not for the shots but for the struggles in them. The acting style he favored doesn't work in abstraction—the actors need something concrete to work against. Finding fruitful ways for people to punch, block, and counterpunch each other can be difficult and exhausting, and in his movies it doesn't always come off.

Kazan faced an even greater, more basic challenge in staging his bouts—to entertain, the fighters had to be equally matched. One actor needed to be strong enough to assert what he or she wanted, and the other strong enough to deny it, for the scene to crackle. Skilled as he was at eliciting good performances, Kazan didn’t consistently get good connecting performances. Three movies from throughout Kazan’s career—a failed early film, a failed late film, and a successful middle film—show both how important the lead couple’s chemistry is to his movies and why it doesn’t always succeed.

1947’s Gentlemen’s Agreement, Kazan’s fourth film, catapulted him upwards, winning Best Picture and Best Director awards at both the Golden Globes and the Oscars (as On the Waterfront would seven years later). The movie concerns a Gentile reporter (Gregory Peck) who goes undercover as Jewish to investigate anti-Semitism for a magazine story, and the strain this causes for his country-club girlfriend (Dorothy McGuire). Never mind that an actual Jewish character doesn’t appear until 40 minutes in, or that the anti-Semites are almost all grinning walk-ons: The movie’s chief fault isn’t with its peripheral parts, but with its central relationship.

McGuire is a competently concerned-looking actress, given to wringing her hands and widening her eyes, but Peck is catatonic. Unlike the murder Peck’s slow deliveries and stiff posture would commit, six years later, on what might have been a nice comedy called Roman Holiday (I dare anyone who likes Holiday to substitute Cary Grant and Howard Hawks for Peck and William Wyler), his Gentlemen’s casting is in a way useful to the movie’s purposes—if you’re going to have a black-and-white message, it’s good to have the least morally ambiguous actor possible delivering it (cf., a decade later, Atticus Finch). At the same time, Peck’s robotic rectitude drains the movie of human drama; when he learns late in the film that his mother’s fallen sick, Peck delivers the line “A stroke” as he might “Coffee please.” When McGuire grabs his arm to talk him out of the job, he just stares steely-eyed, not touching her back, no hint of sex whatsoever. The risk he takes by accepting the assignment stays purely intellectual because we don’t sense he has anything physical to lose.

In The Last Tycoon the roles are reversed—here it’s the man longing, and the woman out of reach. Robert De Niro plays a 1920s Hollywood studio head who lives only for pictures: As he says at one point, “They’re my life.” He sits at his desk. His hands idle. He stares out a window. His most animated moment comes when he’s acting out a scenario for a writer: His step quickens, his hands race, his eyes laser in. As in many other roles, De Niro projects a brick wall, but here vulnerability and need shine through the chinks. J. Hoberman has called it De Niro’s best performance in a non-Scorsese movie, and though I'm hesitant to agree, he has a point.

The movie flops because De Niro has no other person on whom to focus his energy. Despite a wealth of good supporting actors—Tycoon also features Robert Mitchum, Tony Curtis, Jeanne Moreau, Jack Nicholson, Dana Andrews, and Donald Pleasance in small parts—the lead actress is an ethereal blond wisp named Ingrid Boulting, whose subsequent career highlight would be a 1980s thriller called Deadly Passion. Boulting, who plays a mysterious woman about to leave town to get married, is in less than half the movie, and when she appears tends to stand apart from De Niro, at the other side of the frame. Indeed, the film’s very point is that her character is an unattainable ideal, the screen heroine De Niro searches for in his everyday life. Yet Kazan fails to move his hero’s longing out of inertia. The movie begins with De Niro wanting, and ends with him still wanting. Kazan, whose motto may as well have been “No ideas but in things,” thus has nothing specific to focus the movie on.

That’s not the case with 1960’s Wild River, Kazan’s fourteenth film and one of the great underappreciated heterosexual screen romances (it’s unavailable in the States on DVD). Montgomery Clift plays a 1930s Tennessee Valley Authority rep who comes to a small town to buy out a family’s home so the TVA can build a dam. The family lives on an island that he has to row to, and as he’s pulling away after a visit one of the group’s young women (Lee Remick) leaps onto his raft. He stares at her, amazed, and she explains hurriedly: She barely ever leaves, and she’s lonely.

Kazan contrasts performers to great effect. Remick was 25 and healthy, with a round, full face and deep water-blue eyes. Clift was 40 and angular; he’d been in a car crash four years earlier that left his lips pressed tightly together after facial reconstruction, his eyes wide and nervous, looking traumatized (an effect Stanley Kramer would vulgarly exploit by casting Clift as a Holocaust victim in the following year’s Judgment at Nuremberg). The movie amazingly gives us none of the Clift character’s back story, yet we still sense that we know all that there is to know about him. He’s young, business-minded, and given to suit-wearing. “You’re a hard man to love,” the Remick character says.

She hopes he’ll take her away, he hopes she’ll marry him; as Arlene Croce wrote of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, he gives her class, she gives him sex. But River's tension is dramatized as being between an open person and a closed person. We frequently see Remick staring ahead, leaning forward, her mouth open, while Clift stands back, a statue doing his best not to crumble (I can’t help but think of Clift’s real-life homosexuality helping his unease). Unlike in both Gentlemen’s Agreement and The Last Tycoon, where who was in the shot when seemed a matter of utility, here Kazan cuts back and forth between the pair early on, uniting them in the frame more frequently as the film progresses. A key image shows Remick resting her head on his shoulder. Her arms encircle his waist below the shot. His own arms are crossed, and his back is to her. His head is caught between his chest and his back, uncertain whether to look at her or look away. Unlike with Peck-McGuire, we sense that the people truly desire each other, and unlike with De Niro-Boulting, the conflict comes from their drawing towards each other despite their best attempts to pull away. Clift wants to stay uninvolved, above the locals’ troubles, but Remick brings him down to Earth, literally. When she wraps her arms around him in another scene, he surrenders to her by collapsing to the floor.

In all three of these films, Kazan casts assertive supporting players as foils to his ambivalent leads. Because the central relationships don't sparkle, both the liveliness of John Garfield and Celeste Holm in Gentlemen’s Agreement and the certainty of Theresa Russell and Jack Nicholson in The Last Tycoon end up overwhelming the stars. There is such a thing as being too ambivalent, to the point where Peck-McGuire and De Niro-Boulting evaporate into air. By contrast, though far from a perfect film (its treatment of race relations feels overly simplistic), Wild River finds the right balance. Clift and Remick’s needs, wants, and fears are so well established that the convictions of Jo Van Fleet and Albert Salmi underline their struggles rather than distract from them. It’s tough to say how much of a hand Kazan had in shaping the two lead performances, but Wild River ends up being his most successful movie—better than Streetcar, or Waterfront, or Eden—largely because it’s the purest presentation of a situation he excelled at presenting: Two people who can only get what they want from each other.

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Aaron Cutler has written about film for Slant Magazine and The Believer. He is working on a book about New York’s repertory cinemas.

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I'm sure most of you noticed that friend and fellow blogger Dennis Cozzalio's site, Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, recently celebrated its fifth anniversary. Now Dennis turns the thanks back at us in a lengthy post timed to Turkey Week. Yours truly is mentioned within. To answer your question Dennis, I have seen Orphan. Love Vera Farmiga. Think it's stellar in certain regards (especially visual) while still missing something for me. And I wish they had gone with that creepy Sunset Boulevard alternate ending instead of the "I'm not your fucking mommy!" climax. I'm always down with CCH Pounder going out like a champ, though. You a Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight fan, perchance? (See below.)

"When I was a young boy a very wise school teacher once told me to never keep all my thanksgiving bottled up for the official holiday but to spread it throughout the whole year. I certainly remembered that instruction (I was a second or a third-grader, I believe), but I sometimes wonder if I do very well at honoring it and living it out. If so, then good grades all around. But if not, then I can only ask for the indulgence and forgiveness of everyone around me who deserves better. Let this week be the reckoning and the restitution."

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"Link for the Day": Each day (more or less) the House editors post a link to an item that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to keithuhlich@gmail.com and to converse in the comments section.

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By Jeremiah Kipp and Preston Miller

[Editor's Note: The following is the tenth in a series of on-set reports by producer Jeremiah Kipp on God's Land, a feature film written and directed by Preston Miller, whose previous feature, Jones, was covered by The House Next Door here (review), here (interview), and here (podcast).]

Part I: Days Eighteen & Nineteen (Jeremiah Kipp)

The final days of principal photography are upon us. God's Land has been a long haul, exhausting but ultimately rewarding—it reminds me of when I used to run marathons. At a certain point in the middle of the run, the mind concentrates only on moving forward; as the finish line nears, there’s a surge of renewed energy.

Preston and I enjoy our location scouting in New Jersey, where we stumble across the perfect location for our hotel scenes. The King’s Inn has an outside décor that resembles a pyramid converted into a NASA space shuttle by way of 1950s Americana kitsch. In other words, we took one look at it and knew it was Preston’s cup of tea. The hotel owners were reasonable and supportive of low budget independent cinema, though they did enjoy telling long anecdotes about how MTV shot there, and the abundance of trucks and lights and personnel. Preston smiles, acknowledges the grandeur, and tries to make it clear that our mom and pop operation is nothing like that. We’re small potatoes!

The hotel shoot is an all-day affair. Shing Ka, who isn’t in many scenes, spends most of the day taking pictures and making plans for the second unit photography he and Preston are going to do in Garland, Texas. Yes, the actual, real-life location where Teacher Chen’s cult had their 15 minutes of infamy. They’re excited about it, and when Shing is asked about why he’s taken on this extra level of responsibility, even paying for his own ticket to Garland, he responds that this project has become very personal for him. He’s invested a lot into this character and project, and has brought so much passion to the work.

I have to laugh when I think back to his audition, believing Shing was more of an action movie guy. My exact words were, “If we need a hitman, let’s cast him!” As an actor, he has been typecast as a tough guy, since he exudes a kind of aloof strength. But watching him embody the role of Hou, it reminds me of the possibilities of what actors can bring, and the frustrating limitations of being typecast. Shing has had the opportunity to break out of the mold with this role, to do something different, more dramatic; it’s allowed him to paint with more colors than usual. And he and Preston have become friends along the way. Preston even has a saying that has become one of our on-set mantras: “It’s good to be Shing!”

***
We shoot some scenes in the hotel lobby, and the staff is easy to work around. It’s a slow weekday, and they let us know the hours when they have the least amount of customer service. We film scenes involving the Indian hotel owner (Ranjit Chowdhry, who has a recurring role on The Office and has appeared in such films as Mississippi Masala and Fire) and his pal Ostaro, who plays himself. Ostaro is an older gentleman who acts, directs, has celebrity friends, and offers life changing self-improvement through astrology. They watch the Asian cult press conference on television together while Ostaro bemoans, “What a load of bull!” and rambles on at great length about why this is a bunch of silly nonsense.

Ranjit is a pro, slightly testy and slightly curious about this low-budget shoot, since he’s used to working on much bigger projects. As an actor, he hits his marks and tries to offer subtle variations in his performance with each take. He’s meticulous in asking rigorous questions of Preston, so even if he walks through a door, he wants some precise direction as to his motivation. While Preston’s style of directing often feels more like he’s making a documentary and tapping into qualities within the real person he’s filming, he’s able to shift into Ranjit’s more “actor’s studio” temperament. It all works out fine, and Ranjit even brags about working with a crew of six later in the week when he’s on a bigger show. “What do we need all these people for?” he wonders aloud, and is reminded that Stanley Kubrick often used a crew of six when he was shooting certain scenes of Eyes Wide Shut.

On the other side of the solar system is Ostaro, who is more of a force of nature than an actor. His performance is incredibly funny, and he’s a good sport about munching on a bunch of potato chips as his character rambles on, but he relies heavily on the script in his lap when we’re filming his medium shots. When we switch to the wide shot coverage, Ostaro seems totally lost and unable to remember his lines, even after reciting them a dozen times. Ranjit is impatient to carry on with the scene, and sighs audibly. He’s worked with Ostaro before, so they have an entire dog and pony show together. I say the hell with it and create GIGANTIC CUE CARDS on the fly, holding them up and saying, “Hey, Ostaro! Read this! Roll camera!” Ostaro is happy, Ranjit is happy, Preston is happy—and we roll.

The lobby scenes offer some technical challenges—white walls, glass partitions that reflect, and crappy lighting. We’re happier to be shooting inside the hotel room, where a handful of family scenes take place. Preston’s favorite one to shoot is of the family’s first arrival in Garland, Texas, where Xiu (Jodi Lin) haughtily examines the new surroundings, kills a cockroach with her cigarette, and glares at her husband (who is resigned to being in the doghouse) while their son Ollie (Matthew Chiu) happily jumps up and down on the bed, having fun. The husband-wife tension in contrast to the oblivious, cheerfully gymnastic kid amuses Preston to no end.

***
Our final day of principal photography is a relatively easy one, shot in a controlled environment. Preston has set-decorated one of his bedrooms for the hotel owner and his wife, played by the delightful Geeta Citygirl (who appeared with Jodi Lin onstage in Chuck Mee’s Queens Boulevard). Geeta and Preston have a lively discussion about the character, and also about Geeta’s considerable efforts in supporting minority actors through her theater company, sponsoring events, and securing jobs for Indian actors. It’s easy to see why she’s so popular in the community; she has a buoyant personality, a winning smile, and determination in her eyes. She was involved in helping Preston cast Ranjit and Ostaro, and he’s profoundly grateful to her. Geeta remains modest about her considerable efforts, and on set she’s as much a pro as Ranjit.

They blaze through their one scene together very quickly, and before you know it, we’re wrapped on principal photography!

***
Preston still has a few more pickup shots of various characters, but it amounts to less than a page of the script and the shooting days aren’t even “days” but more like the thirty minutes it takes to bang out a shot. For example, he filmed actress Gloria Diaz working out on a treadmill, and it went very quickly. Preston is more or less self-sufficient from here on in, and my on-set production work is officially done on God's Land.

But now we move on to post-production, and as an executive producer once told me, “Now the real work begins!” Already, we’re discussing music rights and how to track them down. Preston has been diligently cutting the picture, and is about 45 minutes into his first assembly. He seems happy with the work we’ve done, and when I catch a few glimpses of the opening of the picture, I can see the rough spots (the first assembly always feels a little rough), but also feel he has a compelling picture on his hands, with emotional impact and great acting. The shifts between comedy and drama keep the movie feeling loose and unpredictable; I have a feeling it’s going to be a pretty wild ride, because just when we are settling into amusement at the antics of the cult, Preston throws in a powerhouse scene, sometimes conveyed in a very simple shot, that shakes our complacency. They say a director’s personality informs his films. That’s certainly true here. His style of filmmaking, a cross between documentary, absurdity and art-house, feels very present in the footage.

And there you have it. It’s been enjoyable writing these production diaries throughout the making of God's Land, which provides a frame of reference for the joys and struggles of no-budget independent filmmaking. I’m grateful to the cast and crew for their candor throughout, and their talent. But mostly, I’m thankful to Preston Miller for bringing me aboard this wild, exhilarating ride. He’s been a real brother, partner and friend. And finally, thank you for following our making-of anecdotes; we hope not to deceive you with the finished product. Watch for updates on screenings of God's Land in 2010. Happy trails.

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Part II: Last Days (Preston Miller)

In and around the completion of principal photography, other shooting also commenced. Mainly there were what we call “the press conference scenes.” These are the eight or nine scenes of supporting, non-cult characters that appear in the film watching an on-going press conference before the main Hou family arrives in Garland. I thought that this was a nifty way to see how folks in the Garland community reacted to the group's existence and final proclamation. Some were worried or amused; others just ignored them altogether. We were able to broaden these characters a bit, perhaps to show different shades of them outside of their primary interaction with the religious group.

For these shoots, each lasting a couple of hours, I generally was the camera and boom operator. The actor(s) and myself would set the frame and I would set up the on-screen monitor connection with a DVD player or laptop playing a pre-recorded “press conference.” Generally, the players and I would look over the scenes as written and then improvise, sometimes completely altering the page. These were some of the most enjoyable, liberating experiences for me on the shoot. Similar to the working style on my previous film Jones, the ideas and sense of play were anxiety free, especially since the shooting didn't last long, there was no pressure to 'move on,' and our number only occasionally exceeded three.

Moments: Carrie Kiamesha’s luminosity while humming gospel riffs in the loft of our costume director, Sharon Spiak. Gloria Diaz working out on a gym treadmill with a bum knee, lost as to “ACTION” and “CUT!” Mrs. Ka, Shing's mom, tsk-tsking the cult while sitting under a huge picture of herself and family from over 40 years ago. Nancy Eng breaking us up trying to do whatever it takes to get her off-screen husband to come downstairs and see the cult on the widescreen. All these add a texture that will realize something fuller in the performers' interpretations.

***
The end of principal photography has come and gone and with it the warm glow of expectations surpassed tempers into the feeling of sitting in a big bowl of your own cold porridge. The idea that now it’s just you, the computer and hundreds of clips which need to be logged, sorted, judged, ordered and bent is not one that produces easy sleep. To me, this is part of the game, just as grueling as shooting but perhaps even more rewarding. At this point you are closer to completion, to moving on, to catching up on movies, to sleep… But for some the sacrifice must continue, especially my family. They have been most tolerant and supportive of my folly and given up a great deal of their time to help see this through. Now I may not be out shooting, but, upstairs in full edit mode, I'm just as inaccessible.

Then why me and not someone else? I have had offers from other folks to help with the edit, but I honestly feel too important to the process. I was there for every frame that was shot and didn't take but a handful of notes. Plus, editing—next to directing—is my favorite aspect of the process. With apologies to Tarkovsky, editing really does feel like 'sculpting in time.' I have been editor for some time off and on since I was in college, so it comes somewhat naturally (when there is time).

If we use the tired metaphor that making a film is like having a baby, I hope lil' GL is not born with the proverbial peanut-in-the-head. For me that peanut would be too much attention being foisted on its obvious budgetary modesty. “They did the best with what they had…bless 'em” is like saying that your kid's pronounced limp will be an inspiration to others… Yes lil' GL certainly has its own aesthetic benefits, many of which are intentional, but I tried the very best I could to not allow the lack of funds to be a limitation or a distraction. While I edit, I am not so enamored with lil' GL that I can't see that some of the shots and scenes would score him in the lower percentile. I just hope that the strengths of other elements outshine the weaker ones. I think they do, but ultimately that is for the viewer to decide.

***
When I asked Jeremiah about a year and a half ago if he would read the script and be interested in producing, we sat at a bar table and had a defining exchange. He drew a big, fat ZERO on a pad and slowly pushed it in my direction and said, "This is how much money I can bring to the project." I looked down and gently pushed the pad back and said "and this is how much I can pay you…" From there we had an understanding that this project would be a labor of passion and that we were free to make a film that would contribute to our unspoken oath of 'Quality Cinema.' I want to thank JK for coming along and being an invaluable partner, consigliore and encourager. He is unrelenting, honest and thorough. Simply put, God's Land wouldn't exist without him. His diary idea was genius. They were well written and well appreciated. I learned so much from them, maybe best of all that, if you are going to work with a producer, try to get someone who happens to be a great writer. Good luck with that!

A final word on the cast and crew: We've mentioned their respective talents in earlier entries, but I'd like to add that this was the most big-hearted and generous group I've ever worked with. People stepped in effortlessly as casting agents, boom ops, chauffeurs, craft service, location scouts and crowd control (not to mention as look-outs and impostor department store employees!). Even the parents of our child actors, the Chiu and Suen families, had no reluctance when asked to perform in front of the camera. As we go through life, working on many more sets, with many more artists, growing professionally, getting paid (!), for me there will never be a more wonderful group of HUMAN BEINGS than those that worked on God's Land. I will never be this fortunate again. We were the right crew at the right time to take on an ambitious task that finally evolved into something that will exist longer than us.

***
This is our final diary entry for the production of God's Land. I want to thank Keith Uhlich for being so kind as to post these for the House's thoughtful audience. A number of milestones have been achieved. By the time you read this we will have over 350 Facebook friends on the God's Land page (could always use more) and 1000 views for the sneak peak on YouTube. I promise, and will try to convince JK to assist when he can, to report back regarding screenings, festival news, cast and crew spottings and updates in general, but that will be a few months off. Until then, thanks for your support and look forward to an exalting 2010!

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Jeremiah Kipp's writing has appeared in Slant Magazine, Filmmaker, Fangoria and other publications.

Preston Miller is the writer/director of Jones. His website is Vindaloo Philm-Wallah.

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By Jonathan Pacheco

[Editor's Note: Originally published at Bohemian Cinema.]

A video essay (my first), exploring the similarities between the ending of François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and the beginning and ending of Jonathan Glazer’s 2004 film, Birth. Based on an old essay of mine, The 400 Births.

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Jonathan Pacheco is a current web developer and future freelance writer. He blogs and reviews films at Bohemian Cinema.

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