Welcome to the House of Crouse. Fifty episodes! Over 100 interviews! That’s a lot of talking. We continue the HoC tradition of bringing you the best in wordy ramblings and informative recitations as we welcome Emilia Clarke and Jojo Moyes, the star and author, respectively of “Me Before You,” a three hanky romantic film in theatres now and Phillip Norman, the legendary biographer who tells us everything we need to know about Mick Jagger. Stop by, have a listen and get some satisfaction.
January 25th at 7:00 pm will feature a special screening of Gimme Shelter at the Revue Cinema. Due to the Revue’s inability to obtain the rights to Don’t Look Back, special guest Geoff Pevere will be interviewed by Richard Crouse as they discuss what many consider to be the most impactful music documentary ever produced. Geoff and Richard long-time friends and television co-hosts will discuss the history of rock music as a visual medium and Gimme Shelter’s role in that history.
Gimme Shelter
1970 91 mins
A harrowing documentary of the Stones’ 1969 tour, with much of the focus on the tragic concert at Altamont.
Called the greatest rock film ever made, this landmark documentary follows the Rolling Stones on their notorious 1969 U.S. tour. When three hundred thousand members of the Love Generation collided with a few dozen Hells Angels at San Francisco’s Altamont Speedway, Direct Cinema pioneers David and Albert Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin were there to immortalize on film the bloody slash that transformed a decade’s dreams into disillusionment.
Geoff Pevere is one of Canada’s leading pop culture commentators and movie critics. Geoff was a former host of CBC Radio’s Prime Time program, a movie critic with the Toronto Star for ten years, a TV host and a lecturer on film and media and is currently a movie columnist with the Globe and Mail. He is the co-author of the national bestseller Mondo Canuck: A Canadian Pop Culture Odyssey, his books include Toronto on Film and Donald Shebib’s Goin’ Down the Road, his latest book is Gods of the Hammer – The Teenage Head Story.
Geoff will be signing copies of Gods of the Hammer! If you don’t have your own copy you can pick one up at the Revue before and after the screening.
Robert Rodriguez, co-director of Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, has assembled an impressive cast of marquee names for the long awaited followup to 2005’s Sin City.
Actors like Jessica Alba, Rosario Dawson and Bruce Willis are returning from the first instalment, while newcomers to the series include Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Eva Green and Josh Brolin.
Rodriguez welcomes back another name, Lady Gaga, who he first cast in Machete Kills.
“When I asked if she was interested in acting she said, ‘I studied acting and I always wanted to be in one of your movies because of the theatricality and the showmanship.”
When she finished shooting her role of a deadly assassin in Machete Kills, Rodriguez tweeted, “Holy Smokes. Blown away!” and promptly cast the singer in A Dame to Kill For.
For years, directors have looked to musicians to bring their natural charisma to the screen. Perhaps no one more than Nicolas Roeg has explored the potential for rock stars to become movie stars. “They have,” he said, “a greater ability to light up the screen than actors.”
In 1970 Roeg and co-director Donald Cammell made the psychedelic crime drama Performance, starring Mick Jagger in his first on screen role. The Rolling Stone played the mysterious Mr. Turner, a jaded former rock star who gives shelter to a violent East London gangster (James Fox). In 2009 Film Comment declared Mick Jagger’s Turner the best performance by a musician in a movie.
Next came The Man Who Fell to Earth, an existential sci-fi film about an extraterrestrial named Thomas Jerome Newton, starring a perfectly cast David Bowie in his feature film debut. Roeg says he “really came to believe that Bowie was a man who had come to Earth from another galaxy. His actual social behavior was extraordinary. He seemed to be alone — which is what Newton is in the film — isolated and alone.”
Finally, Bad Timing was advertised as a “terrifying love story” and called “a sick film made by sick people for sick people” by its own distributor. Art Garfunkel, of 60s folk duo Simon and Garfunkel, stars as a psychology professor living in Vienna whose sadistic relationship with a pill addicted woman (Theresa Russell) ends with a battle for her life. The sexually explicit film was difficult for the actors, and at one point Garfunkel even wanted out. Over martinis Roeg told his nervous actor, “I must ask you to trust that I know where I’m going. It’s a maze, but there is an end to it.’”
Garfunkel stayed on, delivering a performance that the New York Times called “very credible.”
He was called many things. The Godfather of Soul, Soul Brother No. 1, Mr. Dynamite, and The Hardest Working Man in Show Business but he preferred to be called Mr. Brown.
James Brown is probably best remembered as the hit maker behind “Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine” and “I Feel Good”; a larger-than-life, cape-wearing showman who made funk a household word over a career than spanned six decades.
A new film, “Get on Up,” aims to fill in the blanks, detailing Brown’s rise from poverty to the top of the R&B charts.
Chadwick Boseman, who, after earning accolades for his performance as Jackie Robinson in”42,” seems to be making a career of playing 20th century legends on screen, plays Brown from age 16 to 60.
In non-linear, cut and paste style, the film tells of an abusive South Carolina upbringing at the hands of his sharecropper father (Lennie James) and a mother (Viola Davis) who abandoned the family early on to career highlights like the incendiary T.A.M.I. Show performance where he upstaged the Rolling Stones, (whose singer Mick Jagger produced this movie). It covers his close friendship with singer-songwriter Bobby Byrd (Nelsan Ellis), a brush with death on a USO show and a young James pulling two-tone loafers off a lynched man.
“Get on Up” is the second musical biopic of the summer but the first one to vibrate with energy, spirit and soul. Where “Jersey Boys” felt staid and straightforward, “Get On Up” is as loose-limbed and funky as one of Brown’s groove-heavy singles.
Some may find the non-linear time jumping scenes that bookend the film arrhythmic, but the randomness of those sequences—it jumps, willy nilly from the 1940s to Brown’s 1970s heyday to a wild scene that lead to his 1988 arrest—breaks the standard rags-to-riches-to-arrests biopic formula. Director Tate “The Help” Taylor takes an impressionistic view of Brown’s life, integrating some magic realism and fourth wall breaking dialogue direct to camera in a bold approach to a very mainstream genre.
Stylistic flourishes aside, there are the usual biographical “one day everyone will know your name” show biz clichés, but the movie is smart enough not to rely on those elements to tell the story. Instead Tate relies on an extraordinarily charismatic performance—one guesses it’s a liberal mix of fact and fiction, life and legend—from Boseman to illuminate Brown’s angels and demons.
He’s called a musical genius more than once, and given his legacy it’s hard not to agree, but some of the more unsavory parts of Brown’s life are glossed over. The drug use and domestic abuse that checkered his life (and arrest record) are touched on but not explored with the same interest as the upward trajectory of Brown’s musical career.
Like the expert backing bands that supported Brown throughout his career, here the character is supported by very good actors. As life-long friend Bobby Byrd, Nelsan Ellis shows he has more range than simply playing Lafayette Reynolds on “True Blood” every week and Dan Aykroyd has fun with the role of Brown’s manager. It’s a shame that good performances from Craig Robinson, as sax legend Maceo Parker, and Viola Davis as Brown’s mother, are limited to extended cameos.
“Get On Up” is one big chunk of funk with a gold standard performance from Boseman and music that will make you want to… er… get on up.
After mid-1970s success of two “midnight movies” called “El Topo” and “The Holy Mountain,” renegade director Alejandro Jodorowsky was offered the chance to make any movie he wanted. He toyed with a number of stories, including “Don Quixote,” the story of an hidalgo with lofty, but unrealistic ideas.
Instead the Chilean born Jodorowsky chose to make “Dune,” the science fiction epic by Frank Herbert. As it turns out, however, the director may have been better suited to the story of Cervantes’s impractical idealist than the maker of a giant Hollywood film.
To hear Jodorowsky tell it, his version of “Dune,” which never made it past preproduction due to budget and Hollywood’s reluctance to work with the avant-garde director, would have been more of a mystical journey than a film. He collected “spiritual warriors” like Salvador Dali (who demanded to be paid $100,000 an hour to appear as the Emperor of the Known Universe), Orson Welles (who was promised a private chef), special effects wiz Dan O’Bannon and conceptual designers Chris Foss, H.R. Giger and Jean “Moebius” Giraud, to fulfill his vision, creating an amazingly detailed storyboard of the proposed film.
The story is mostly told by the people who in the room, lead by the 84-year-old Jodorowsky. It’s a talking head doc, punctuated by preproduction art and storyboards. For movie geeks it’s an essential glimpse into the mind of a legend. For others—including fans of Frank Herbert who gets a bit of a short shrift here—it may sound like the ramblings of a madman. Which it is, but an endearing madman who values art and spirituality above all else. He was so committed to making this movie, a movie he says might have changed the very fabric of humanity, that he was prepared to die for it.
Of course, that didn’t happen. David Lynch made the movie and one of the pleasures of “Jodorowsky’s Dune” is watching the elderly director describe his delight in realizing that Lynch’s film was a bit of a disaster.
As for whether or not the director’s vision for “Dune” would have been feasible, we’ll never know. Like many lost or never made films, it feels as though the legend of the project might be more entertaining than the film itself could ever have been.
(From Richard’s book, “The 100 Best Movies You’ve Never Seen,” ECW Press 2003)
“It’s a fucking good film, Robert, but if it ever shows in America we’ll never be allowed in the country again.” – Mick Jagger to director Robert Frank
You probably haven’t seen one of the best movies about rock and roll ever made, and Mick Jagger wants to make sure you never do. “Cocksucker Blues,” the legendary documentary about the Rolling Stones, is so raunchy it even made the Fab Five blush. Although it was produced with the full cooperation of the band, they still took director Robert Frank to court to block distribution.
The Rolling Stones first met the Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank at a mansion in Los Angeles during the sessions for “Exile on Main Street.” As Europeans they shared a common fascination with American culture. The Stones were walking encyclopedias of Southern blues, while Frank had travelled the States in the mid-1950s snapping a series of photographs that would be released as a book titled ”The Americans.” By the time of their meeting in 1972 the Stones were the biggest rock band in the world and “The Americans” was already regarded as one of the classic photography books of the century.
After their initial meeting Frank was hired to provide cover art for “Exile on Main Street.” He gave them a photo h had taken in 1950 of a collage of circus freaks from the wall of a tattoo parlor on Route 66. The cover photo was met with such critical acclaim that the Stones decided to expand theoir working relationship with rank and hired him to shoot a no-holds-barred documentary of their 1972 American tour, to be produced by the legendary owner of Chess Records, Mashall Chess.
The Stones had not performed I the U.S. since the December 1969 debacle at the Altamont Racetrack, the final date of the tour that was filmed by Albert and David Maysles and released as a full-length feature titled “Gimme Shelter.” Shot in the waning moments of the 1960s, “Gimme Shelter” not only documents the actual end of the decade, but it ideological end as well. During the Altamont concert the Hel’s Angels, hired as security by the Stones, used pool cues and knives to beat an 18-year-old African-American audience member to death. AS the band played “Under My thumb” and Meredith Hunter lay dying on the ground, the image profoundly signaled the end of the era of peace and love. It was an historical moment and the Rolling Stones had it on film.
“Gimme Shelter” is an above-average rockumenary, and the inclusion of the controversial Altamont footage assured it would be successful. Three years later it was time for a follow-up. Jagger decided to call the movie “Cocksucker Blues” after a rough-and-ready tune he had written about a gay hooker in London, and gave Frank a full access pass to shoot wherever and whatever he wanted. That was a decision that would later come back to haunt the band.
Frank chose to shoot the film cinema verite style in black and white (with the odd bity of colour thrown in), which lends a stark newsreel feel to the movie. His dispassionate eye neither judges nor comments, preferring the viewer to draw their own conclusions as he films Keith Richard’s descent into heroin addiction or a battered woman trying to hide her face from the camera. There are many outrageous sequences in the film: saxophonist Bobby Keyes and Keith indulge in one of the great rites of passage for any rock star—throwing a television out of a hotel window; Keith advises Mick on the best way to snort cocaine; naked groupies masturbate for the camera—and one gets the feeling they are genuine, despite the Stones’ later claim that Frank stages some of the more decadent scenarios. As part of a legal settlement with the band rank was forced to add a disclaimer at the beginning of the movie stating, “all scenes except the musical performances are fictitious.”
To my mind the thing that makes this documentary special, setting it heads above the other anything-that-is-worth-doing-is-worth0-over-doing music movies is not the sensational sex, drugs and rock and roll footage, but the shots of the band in the downtime between concerts. This, I suspect is the side the myth-hungry Rolling Stones didn’t want you to see.
Frank unblinkingly shows us the tedium of life on the road, and allows the real lives of the band members to be revealed. Mick, the ultimate rock star, for example, is seen trying to deal with his high maintenance wife Bianca, who is often seen crying and playing with a small music box. The band is shown killing time between gigs be ordering room service, engaging in inconsequential conversations, or simply not speaking at all. This was hardly the high glam life that would be expected from the “World’s Greatest Rock and Roll Band,” although these are the scenes that humanize the group and put a pinprick in the bubble of fame that surrounded the Stones in their glory days. Director Jim Jarmusch called “Cocksucker Blues” “definitely one of the best movies about rock and roll I’ve ever seen. It makes you think that being a rock star is one of the last things you’d ever want to do.”
There are also some great in-concert moments, although “Cocksucker Blues” is by no means a concert flick. In one memorable sequence Frank intercuts backstage antics at roadies snorting coke with the Stones on-stage, creating a hypnotic tableau that shows both the public and private dichotomy of the group and life on the road. Other standout performances include an “Uptight”/”Satisfaction” medley (with Stevie Wonder), “Happy” and “Street Fighting Man.”
The era when it would be possible to make a film like this showing a band at this level is over. Now publicists would run interference at every stop, and every media-savvy groupie would demand a release form and a fee. “Cocksucker Blues” may represent our last truly unfettered look into the lives of rock gods at the peak of their fame. The practice of celebrity journalism has been dealt a mortal blow by overzealous celebrity minders whose purpose in life is to sanitize their client’s images and make sure that compromising situations like the ones in the movie never make the light of day.
Not everyone agrees with my assessment of “Cocksucker Blues” as the greatest (and most revealing) rock movie ever, least of all the Rolling Stones. “I thought it was a piece of shit actually,” Bill Wyman, the Stones original bass player told me in 2001. “I thought it was so amateur and poorly done. I just couldn’t relate to it. [Robert Frank] was obviously just looking for anything sensational. That’s why me and Charlie are hardly in it, because we weren’t sensational. All the good bits, I thought, were cut out. It was just like a poor home movie, shot badly. I couldn’t relate to it. I had no interest in it really.”
The film has had very few public screenings. Frank’s vision of the rock and roll superstardom may have been too raw for the Stones, who sued to have the film shelved. Instead of suppressing the film completely, they reached a complicated settlement that allows Frank to show the film once a year, as long as he is in attendance. Bootleg copies—with a picture quality that “sucks as much as the groupies” as one critic joked—have bee widely distributed and are available for rent in many places.
UPDATE: “Cocksucker Blues” screens on Friday, January 17 at 6:30 p.m. at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto, and “Pull My Daisy” screens on Saturday, January 18 at 4:30 p.m as part of Hold Still – Keep Going: Films by Robert Frank — The Free Screen’s annual artists’ retrospective for 2014, running from January 17 to January 20. Programmer Chris Kennedy presents four programmes on the work of photographer and experimental filmmaker Robert Frank. Although best known for his photographic series The Americans, Frank is also considered one of the most important independent filmmakers in post-war America.
“You’re a con artist,” wrote Karina Halle in Sins & Needles. “A liar. A thief. An unredeemable soul.”
She might also have added to that colourful list really interesting movie character.
As despicable as flim flam artists may be, there is no denying they make good film subjects.
This weekend in American Hustle, Christian Bale plays Irving Rosenfeld, a con man forced to help the FBI ensnare a group of corrupt politicians in the ABSCAM sting operation.
Although American Hustle director David O. Russell says his film is a fictionalized account of events, the ABSCAM operation was headline news in the early 1980s and Hollywood took notice.
In 1982 director Louis Malle was making plans for a May start date on an ABSCAM film called Moon Over Miami starring Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi. Belushi was to play Melvin Weinberg, based on the same man as Bale’s character in American Hustle.
The movie was scuttled following Belushi’s death in March of that year.
That con man film never saw the light of day, but many others have.
Everyone knows The Sting and The Grifters, but lesser seen is David Mamet’s The Spanish Prisoner, a complicated story starring Campbell Scott as Joe Ross, a man who invents a process “to control the world market.” Concerned that he will not be properly compensated for his work he contacts Jimmy Dell (Steve Martin), a wealthy businessman who offers to help. Little does Ross know that he has just stepped into a world of deception that will change his life.
Steve Martin’s performance in The Spanish Prisoner was Oscar worthy, but it wasn’t the first time he played a confidence man on film.
In the comedy Dirty Rotten Scoundrels he starred opposite Michael Caine as a scruffy con man trying to muscle in on some high end business on the French Riviera. Caine’s suave grifter makes a bet with Martin. Whoever can con Soap Queen Janet Colgate (Glenne Headley) first will walk away with $50,000.
The movie was written for Mick Jagger and David Bowie who were looking to do a project together after the success of their Dancing in the Street video. The rock stars dropped out before cameras rolled — Bowie later said both were, “a bit tweezed that we lost out on a script that could have been reasonably good” — and replaced by Martin and Caine whose hilarious performances earned the movie a spot on Bravo’s 100 Funniest Movies list.
Welcome to the House of Crouse. Fifty episodes! Over 100 interviews! That’s a lot of talking. We continue the HoC tradition of bringing you the best in wordy ramblings and informative recitations as we welcome Emilia Clarke and Jojo Moyes, the star and author, respectively of “Me Before You,” a three hanky romantic film in theatres now and Phillip Norman, the legendary biographer who tells us everything we need to know about Mick Jagger. Stop by, have a listen and get some satisfaction.
