AND THE WINNER IS…

Young Joy Page begs Humphrey Bogart for advice in Casablanca (1942)

Some sad news crossed the wires today: Joy Page, the stepdaughter of the late Warner Brothers’ studio head Jack Warner and second-to-last surviving cast member from the 1942 classic Casablanca (Madeleine LeBeau is still living), has died at the age of 83 following a stroke and bout with pneumonia.

Page, whose mother divorced her father and remarried Warner, was a 17 years old senior in high school when her stepfather cast her in the role of Annina Brandel, a Bulgarian refugee who, like everyone else in Casablanca (except Humphrey Bogart’s cynical bar owner Rick Blaine) is desperate to obtain exit visas so that she and her husband Jan can escape to the Free World and raise a family. Unbeknownst to her husband, Annina (like many other attractive young women who pass through Rick’s) has been offered that very opportunity by Claude Rains’ Captain Louis Renault, but at a price that leaves her feeling very conflicted—she would have to sleep with him. At Renault’s urging, she seeks out Rick to ask him about whether or not she can trust Renault to hold up his part of the bargain…

ANNINA: “Will he keep his word?”

RICK: “He always has.”

and also whether or not he could ever forgive a woman in her position for doing the wrong thing for the right reason…

ANNINA: “Oh, Monsieur, you are a man. If someone loved you very much, so that your happiness was the only thing that she wanted in the whole world, but she did a bad thing to make certain of it, could you forgive her?”

RICK, staring off into space, obviously still reeling in pain from his abandonment by his own love, Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman): “Nobody ever loved me that much.”

Rick then proceeds to offer his own cold advice—”Go back to Bulgaria”—before surprising all of us, in one of the film’s most touching scenes, by showing that he really does have a heart when he fixes the Roulette table at which her husband is gambling, allowing him to win enough to buy two exit visas outright, and sparing Annina from having to make a gutwrenching decision…

RICK, standing behind Jan at the table, says to him: “Have you tried 22 tonight? I said, 22.”

Rick exchanges looks with the croupier. Jan places all his chips on 22. The croupier spins and…

CROUPIER: “22, black, 22.”

Renault looks on in amusement, and Sasha, a waiter at Rick’s who appreciates the situation, in joy. As Jan reaches forward to claim his chips…

RICK: “Leave it there.”

Jan reluctantly does so and the croupier spins and…

CROUPIER: “22, black.”

The croupier pushes forward the chips to Jan, to whom Rick says…

RICK: “Cash it in and don’t come back.”

Annina runs up and hugs Rick. She and Jan arrange with Renault to meet the next morning to claim their exit visas. Sasha kisses Rick on both cheeks. Renault, meanwhile, is more amused than angry with Rick…

RENAULT: “As I suspected, you’re a rank sentimentalist.”

RICK: “Yeah? Why?”

RENAULT: “Why do you interfere with my little romances?”

RICK: “Put it down as a gesture to love.”

RENAULT: “Well, I forgive you this time, but I’ll be in tomorrow night with a breathtaking blonde, and it will make me very happy if she loses.”

Warner decided not to sign Page to a studio contract. She still appeared in a few other movies, including Kismet (1944), but she worked only rarely after marrying future WB TV head William T. Orr in 1945, and never after 1959. For the past fifty years, she was largely reclusive, guarding her privacy and refusing all interviews. I believe I got closer than anyone to convincing her to talk about her career a few years ago, when I emailed her son, producer Gregory Orr, and told him how much I hoped to be able to include her in my book of interviews about film history for young people. He agreed to lobby her on my behalf, and for a few days it looked like something might work out, but eventually she decided otherwise.

A performance to watch: Michelle Monaghan in Trucker

Michelle Monaghan is having quite a moment—the sexy Gone Baby Gone actress is not only set to star opposite Patrick Dempsey in next week’s sure-fire blockbuster hit Made of Honor (5/2, Sony), but is also generating sizzling chatter for an outstanding performance in James Mottern‘s low-budget indie Trucker, which I caught at it’s world premiere screening last night at the Tribeca Film Festival. If this very solid film gets picked up and is given a decent release, as it almost surely will be—The Weinstein Company’s Harvey Weinstein and LionsGate’s Tom Ortenberg were among the potential buyers in attendance last night—then Monaghan’s perf could generate some serious critical and awards attention.

Monaghan’s role strikes me as something of a cross between Charlize Theron’s in North Country (in which Monaghan also had a small part) and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s in Sherrybaby.She portrays Diane Ford, a hardened woman who leads a life on the road as a trucker and does everything she can to avoid the domestication that threatened her as a teenager when she accidentally became pregnant. She gave birth to a son, but was too scared of motherhood to stick around, and reached an agreement with the father (Benjamin Bratt) that he would care for the child and she would not have to see him.Now, eleven years later, the kid’s father is in the hospital with cancer, his new girlfriend is unable to care for the kid, and guess who (played very well by 12 year old Jimmy Bennett) shows up at the door? The film chronicles the evolution of Monaghan’s relationship with not only her son but all of the people and world around her (including Nathan Fillion of Waitress and Desperate Housewives, who plays a key role), and packs a surprising punch.

Madonna considers answering my question along the red carpet before the premiere of her new film

Yesterday, my 2008 Tribeca experience kicked off with the red carpet premiere of the Madonna documentary I Am Because We Are—well, sort of. You see, members of the press were invited to cover the red carpet, but not to join the Material Girl and her friends inside for the screening. Truth be told, that was fine with me, because I had a number of other things to do yesterday; I just figured I shouldn’t pass up this rare opportunity to see and maybe even question the most popular female music artist of the last thirty years. So what’s it like to cover a Madonna red carpet? This was my experience…

• I pay $15 for a taxi cab ride from one side of the city to the other.
• I arrive at 4:30pm to “check-in” (TV, print, and online media have assigned spots, but photographers work on a first-come-first-serve basis, so they had apparently been lining up since 5:00am).
• The red carpet is shaped like three sides of a square, with the journalists on the enclosed side and the red carpet running along the other. By 5:00pm, all journalists are “loaded into their pens” and the wait begins.
• I request to have my spot on the red carpet moved from near the end to the very end, convincing myself that I will have a better chance of standing out, or at least appealing to the sympathies of kindly celebs… also, I suspect that retaining my post right beside the National Enquirer‘s will probably not aid my efforts of getting them to stop by.
  
• Bad move. Now I’m stuck next to a C-level TV reporter who spends the next hour and a half talking about herself to her videographer, who hardly says a word in response. (Incidentally, he situates his camera right in front of my face, and also has appalling body odor, which everyone in our cramped little area struggles to zone out.)
• From my vantage point at the end of the red carpet, I cannot see who is arriving at the start of it, but can tell that someone has when lots of flashes go off there. After one barrage of flashes, I ask some fellow, taller journalists if they can deduce who the commotion is for, but they can’t see and, believe it or not, are not all that anxious to play telephone to try to help me find out. The wait continues.
• And he or she’s rounding the corner and coming towards us… and the answer is… a couple of well-dressed, good-looking women who none of us recognize. “Oh, they’re just a bunch of nobodies,” the aforementioned New Yawka TV reporter says, unconcerned that she is within earshot of them.
• Now we find out who people were getting excited about—look, it’s Rosie O’Donnell! Rosie is a close friend of Madonna (probably from back in the days of A League of Their Own) and has come out to support her… and she actually is very nice, stopping to shake hands and chit chat a little with each of us. (As she walks away, the TV reporter cannot help herself from saying, “Rosie, I interviewed your mother-in-law once!” to which Rosie responds, “Oh, it must have made her life!”)
• Next up is noted stage actress Bernadette Peters. (Someone from the festival runs a few yards ahead of her and mouths her name at us, just to make sure we know.) She is nice enough to stop and answer a question from each person. The TV reporter asks “What do you like about New York?” and then an even more profound follow up,”What other cities do you like?” I figure I’ll take a higher road and ask her what she hopes people will come away from this film thinking. She laughingly responds, “Well, I haven’t see it yet.” I now resort to my follow-up: “Yeah, but you know what it’s about…” to which she says, “No, actually, I have no idea.” I drop the issue.
• Before long, the flashes begin going off at an unprecedented level and—as if we need confirmation of what that means—the photographers (some of whom have mounted tall ladders to get a clearer shot from over the heads of their competitors) begin frantically screaming, “Madonna! Madonna! Madonna!” After probably about twenty minutes, Madonna finishes up with the photographers, and then spends about a quarter of that time speaking with select reporters (select, as in, selected by her publicist/protector) along the red carpet.
• And then the panic! Madonna and her publicist finally realize that (a) they’re very late for their screening and/or (b) the rest of us shmucks who have been waiting further down on the red carpet aren’t all that valuable to her. So, joined by festival co-founder/actress Jane Rosenthal, they begin a calm but forceful walk towards us and the theater doors. The camera flashes rain down upon us as she gets closer. The TV reporter jostles into position and, like everyone else, starts screaming questions. I stick out my handheld recorder and, as Madonna nears me, ask the one question that I have been plotting for the entire wait—a question that I have convinced myself is of rare substance, deliberately flattering, and therefore inviting: “Madonna! When did you first realize that you could use your celebrity for good, like you have done with this movie?” Wait… She hears me over the noise! She pauses for a split second! She opens her mouth to respond! And then… her “handlers” guide her away, back—to paraphrase Rod Serling, I think rather appropriately—“to a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to a man… a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity… it is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition… and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge… this is the dimension of imagination… it is an area which we call… celebrity! (As for me? I go to McDonald’s.)

A scene from I Am Because We Are, the Madonna-produced doc about AIDS orphans in Malawi

Chris Marquette and Shannon Lucio in director Michael Mayer‘s debut Graduation

Congrats to Michael Mayer, a director acquaintance whose first feature Graduation (5/2, Magnolia, trailer) will make its debut at WorldFest Houston tonight (Thursday) and then hit select cities on May 2. The film is about four friends—Chris Marquette (Alpha Dog), Shannon Lucio (The O.C.), Riley Smith (24), and Chris Lowell (Veronica Mars)—who, in order to save a sick friend’s life, decide to rob a bank owned by one’s father (Adam Arkin)… on the day of their high school graduation! As Mayer put it in an email to me, “The film is not only about the heist, but about four lifelong friends facing the end of their high school days together.” Based on this description and the film’s trailer, I sense elements of two of last year’s best films, The Lookout and Superbad, and if it’s even half as good as they are then it will be well worth a look.

I’ve been meaning to post this video for weeks, since it seems like no one else has picked it up—it is underground footage of presumptive Best Actor contender Sean Penn and presumptive Best Director contender Gus Van Sant filming presumptive Best Picture contender Milk (11/TBA, Focus Features), a Harvey Milk bio-pic, in San Francisco back in March. This footage captures Penn-as-Milk delivering a rousing speech on the steps of City Hall… as well as the tedium that is much of the movie-making process.

Melik Malkasian as “The Kubrick of Porno” in The Auteur, showing at Tribeca this week

This week, I checked out a screener of The Auteur (no distributor yet), an intermittently hilarious film written and directed by video store clerk-turned-director James Westby that will premiere at Tribeca this Friday evening and will screen there again several times over the following week as part of the “Midnight Madness” slate. The film centers around Arturo Domingo (Melik Malkasian), a pioneering director of adult films known as “The Kubrick of Porno” whose personal life is falling apart at the same time his professional life is being celebrated with a retrospective tribute.

Westby and Malkasian have clearly modeled Domingo on Sacha Baron Cohen’s immensely funny Borat character—a bumbling foreigner who doesn’t realize how ridiculous he is and unknowingly emits homosexual vibes to others—which is funny for a while but can wear thin. What keeps this thing afloat and makes it worth a look are several outrageous scenes that are played completely straight and will literally make you laugh-out-loud, especially those that parody well-known filmmakers (Francis Ford Coppola melting down on the set of Apocalypse Now, etc.) and films (including My Left Nut, Requiem for a Wet Dream, and Domingo’s masterpiece, Full Metal Jackoff). J.K. Simmons-look-alike John Breen steals every scene he’s in as Domingo’s former muse Frank E. Normo, Michael Fetters is sufficiently creepy as a hippie named “Friend,” and real-life porn icon Ron Jeremy also makes a cameo.

Lynndie England and prisoner in a photo discussed in Standard Operating Procedure

Last Thursday evening, I attended the North American premiere of Errol Morris‘ Abu Ghraib documentary Standard Operating Procedure (4/25, Sony Pictures Classics) at Brandeis University’s Edie and Lew Wasserman Cinematheque, thanks to an invitation from my friend/the event’s organizer, Prof. Alice Kelikian. As you may recall reading here, a little over a year ago I was part of a small group of film folk from the Boston area that was shown a bunch of rough footage from the film and then discussed it over dinner with Morris. I wrote afterward that “although I haven’t seen every minute of the film—nobody has, because it’s not yet complete—I can say that it appears to have the makeup of an Oscar nominee.” I’ve now seen it in its entirety, and I feel the same way.

Earlier this year, SOP became the first documentary ever accepted into competition at the Berlin Film Festival, where it was awarded a Silver Bear in February. Now, following the Brandeis screening, it will be phased into release stateside over the next month, beginning with a screening this Thursday, April 24 at the Tribeca Film Festival, followed by the first “Conversations in Cinema” of this year’s festival, in which Morris will discuss the questions: “Can a photograph change the world? Can an exposé also be a cover-up?”

These are the questions at the core of Morris’ deeply disturbing but very impressive film, its companion book (which shares the same title and is co-written by Morris and New Yorker writer Philip Gourevitch, who had a fascinating discussion at October’s New Yorker Festival), and “Zoom,” a blog that Morris has been writing for the New York Times sporadically since July that has generated more traffic and comments than any other on their popular site… questions that can never be fully answered, but that I find absolutely fascinating. What is truth? What is reality?

A year ago, Morris explained that he has had a lifelong interest in “iconic images,” from the photo of the flag-raising at Iwo Jima (which recently inspired Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima) to, most recently, the photos from the Abu Ghraib prison, which he believes have come to symbolize the entire ongoing war in Iraq in the public’s consciousness. What spurred him to make a film about these particular iconic images, he explained on Thursday, was his amazement that although everyone has seen these images, nobody really knows anything about them.

Who are the soldiers and prisoners in them? Who took them? For what reason were they taken? Why would any soldier agree to pose in photos of this nature? Did some refuse to? Who was the intended audience for them? Who was aware they were being taken? How many were taken? Why, of all of them, has the public repeatedly only been shown the same few? Were they cropped or altered in any way? If so, why and to what effect? What sorts of punishments did the soldiers depicted receive? Did soldiers who participated in similar acts but were not photographed receive equivalent punishments? Would the public be as enraged about the acts depicted if we had never seen visual evidence of them? Would we feel the same way if we knew more about the people whose behavior they exposed? What if we learned about those who, thanks to better luck or smarts, were never photographed—even if their responsibility for the captured acts was much greater than those who were—and were consequently never prosecuted? How would we feel then? And how, above all, would we feel if we were to learn that some of the most heinous and repulsive acts photographed at Abu Ghraib are, to this day, officially regarded by the United States not as prisoner abuse, but rather as Standard Operating Procedure?

These are among the weighty questions that Morris asks and nearly all of the principal players in the photographs answer in the film. Among those interviewed: former Brig. Gen. Janice Karpinski, who oversaw Iraq’s prisoner detention facilities until she was relieved of her duties following Abu Ghraib; Special Agent Brent Pack, who was charged with examining the photos to determine whether or not they contained evidence of crimes; and photographed soldiers Jeremy Sivits, Ivan Frederick, Javal Davis, Jeffrey Frost, Roman Krol, Megan Ambuhl, Sabrina Harman, and, most (in)famous of all, Lynndie England. The only individual who is seen in the photographs but is not in this film is Charles Graner, the orchestrator of many of the acts, who is and will remain behind bars, not permitted to be interviewed, until he completes a ten-year sentence.

As always, Morris’ interviews seem to reveal the souls of his subjects, in large part due to the use of his patented Interrotron camera (which employs a complex series of mirrors to enable subjects to look directly into the camera while still feeling as if they are looking him in the eye) and his patience in allowing awkward silences following some of their responses (which they often feel compelled to fill with addendums, many of which reveal more about themselves than their initial comments). The interviews in this film, especially with the soldiers, pack a particularly great punch because although we are familiar with the subjects’ faces, we realize that we have never before heard them speak, and that speaking humanizes them, and forces us to confront the reality that, however animalistic we believe their behavior to be, they are humans.

A side note: I was a bit surprised by the answer Morris gave to a question about the interviews after the film. The questioner, a noted journalist, asked him how he convinced these individuals to agree to be interviewed, and specifically if he paid them at all, “which is not okay in my profession.” Morris eventually acknowledged that he did, in fact, pay his interview subjects, jokingly explaining that he did so because “I have a lot of money and want to share it.” (He did not disclose an amount of money or if this is his standard practice.) I, frankly, don’t really have a problem with this—it got these people to sit down and talk about their behavior, and I don’t see how it would in any way encourage them to speak anything other than the truth—except for the fact that, to the best of my knowledge, this compensation was not openly acknowledged, as it should have been since this is a documentary that purports not to have any agenda other than seeking the truth, and in my estimation does not. I worry that because Morris did not do so, those who wish to disparage SOP, for whatever reason,may latch onto this as evidence of some secret agenda, just as they do in response to the use of re-enactments in his films, including this one. But back on point…

This film does not defend the misconduct at Abu Ghraib, but does leave us with the rather startling realization that many of our preconceptions about what happened there are a blurry version of what truly did, and with the sense that if we want to understand the full truth we need to focus our personal “lenses” not only on these images but also outside of their borders and on other people, as well.

SOP is in the same league as Morris’ best films from the past, Gates of Heaven (1980), The Thin Blue Line (1988), and the Oscar-winning The Fog of War (2004). For this reason, it is my hope that the media will not label it “another movie about Iraq” because, although Iraq is its surface subject, it is far from its only or even primary subject. This is a rare film that treats its audience like adults and doesn’t dumb down big problems and offer simple explanations; instead, it asks challenging and sometimes painful questions not only of its interview subjects but also of its audience. That, sadly, is anything but standard operating procedure.

I just got off of a conference call with a few other journalists and the actor Benjamin McKenzie, who is best known for his starring role on television’s The O.C. (2003-2007), and who will next be seen opposite Al Pacino in the crime thriller 88 Minutes (4/18, Columbia).

I was never as crazy about The O.C. as many of my friends were, but I do remember being struck by McKenzie’s portrayal of a troubled, brooding guy from a working-class family thrust into upper-class society. He played another outsider in the great little indie Junebug (2005) and again caught my eye—despite Amy Adams’ remarkable scene-stealing—as a Ryan Gosling/Heath Ledger type with loads of promise. I wish I could tell you how he does in this latest performance, but the film has not been screened for critics; there is some speculation that it is a bit disappointing and is only getting a theatrical release (as opposed to straight-to-DVD) as a courtesy to Pacino. Who knows?

What I can tell you is that I shot off two ‘bigger picture’ questions to McKenzie, who is 29, during the call—one about the challenges of playing other characters when one is so closely associated with one, and one about our culture’s obsession with celebrity—both of which he responded to insightfully, as you can hear by playing the podcast below…

Mark Feeney of the Boston Globe

This has been/will continue to be the busiest month of my life, which is why I have been scarce on the blog despite the recent barrage of major film-related news. I cannot stay away today, though, because I just read the breaking news that the Boston Globe‘s Mark Feeney—a friend, teacher, and mentor—has been awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism “for his command of the visual arts, from film and photography to painting” in a series of articles written over the past year, and I am absolutely thrilled.

I have had the privilege of knowing Mark Feeney for several years. I first met him when he gave a lecture about Nixon and the Movies, his excellent 2004 book that discusses the more than 500 movies that cineaste Richard Nixon saw during his time in the White House, and the fascinating correlations between what he chose to screen and what was concurrently taking place in his own life and in the world. He was later kind enough to deliver a magnificent lecture about “Movies and the American Presidency” at a film festival I organized. Since then, he became a professor at Brandeis University, and as I have worked with him inside and outside of the classroom, he has been a great role model for myself and other would-be journalists, both as a writer and a man. (Oddly, just over a week ago I interviewed him at length for a report I was composing. I learned a great deal about his life and work, and was more impressed with him than ever. Perhaps he’ll allow me to post the audio here so others can hear what I’m talking about.)

I can think of no one more deserving of the highest honor in the field of journalism than Mark Feeney, and I look forward to congratulating him in person when I see him on Wednesday.