Jason Mann still plugging away

I poked around the internet to see what Jason Mann was up to, to see how he was faring years after the nightmare of Project Greenlight. Found a reel of his work as cinematographer. He's trying to find work doing that. He's clearly from a wealthy family. If he could feign enthusiasm for very low budget film he could be a major figure in that field. I searched his name and his old addresses came up. I looked them up on Zillow. People have made pretty good movies for what he pays in rent every month.

The premise of Project Greenlight was that Matt Damon and Ben Afleck were boy geniuses perfectly suited to discover geniuses like themselves and get them started in the movie business.

You know, Sylvester Stallone wrote the script to Rocky in just a few days and it was a far bigger hit than Good Will Hunting. You think HE should have gotten a show like this?

Early Robert Downey Sr on The Criterion Channel

I don't know how he parlayed his early underground films into a middling Hollywood career. Robert Downey, Sr, made a number of absurdist underground films in the 1960's, some of them just under an hour long. They LOOKED interesting, in black and white 16mm, but the content wasn't serious or funny although I think he wanted them be both.

In one movie (No More Excuses) he stole Buck Henry's gag and briefly shows a guy calling for animals to wear clothes in the name of public decency. That movie threw in a random rape scene, then the rapist turns out to be a priest. I understand why people target the Catholic Church---it's the largest single denomination in America---but Downey is Jewish. Attacking Catholicism doesn't necessarily make him an atheist. He needs to make at least a token attack on his own religion if he's trying to be anti-religious and not just a terribly rude Jew.

Available on the Criterion Channel.

Young Noah Beery, Jr

You know "Rocky" from The Rockford Files? He was fifteen years older than James Garner but played his elderly father.

Knowing him only from that show, it came as a shock to see him at 22 playing a Tarzan-like ape man in a serial, The Call of the Savage (1935). He was born in 1913.

You can recognize him. He was in pretty good shape.

Available on Pub-D-Hub. 

Tom Hanks, propagandist

From https://www.spyculture.com/

Billy Jack, 1971

It's easy to make fun of now. A 1971 youth film about young pacifists at the Freedom School protected from violent rednecks by Billy Jack, a former Green Beret Vietnam veteran who hated the war. There's cultural appropriation. Obviously white actors play Indians. They weren't even Italian. They'd put a headband on a Caucasian and now she's an Indian.

Bernard Posner hates his wealthy father who dominates the town. Bernard might have been friends with the hippie kids at the Freedom School if he hadn't been a racist and a serial sex offender. Perhaps an important lesson for the kids. Hating your father is not enough.

It predated the wave of kung fu movies in the early '70's. They used Korean Hapkido master Han Bong-Soo as Tom Laughlin's stand-in in some of the martial arts scenes.

Rather conservative in some respects. Right off the bat, a pregnant teen condemns free love and the local sheriff is a nice guy and a friend to the young.

On the other hand, I don't think you'd see a movie now with the hero shooting it out with police. 

I did a search on Roku and found only one streaming video channel that had it.

Derek Jarman's Edward II (UK, 1991)

When he was working on the script to Ben Hur, Gore Vidal realized that Masala (Stephen Boyd) needed a more plausible motive for his actions.

The movie starts with Masala and Ben Hur reuniting in Palestine after Masala had been away for years. They have a ninety second argument about Palestine and the Roman Empire and Masala spends the next thirty years persecuting Ben Hur and everyone in his family.

Vidal figured that Masala and Ben Hur had been teen lovers. When they meet again, Masala wants to continue the relationship but Ben Hur's not interested.

Vidal told Stephen Boyd this and that's how he played the scene. They were being subtle. So subtle that Charelton Heston had no idea what was going on.

Of course, there was no reason for Derek Jarman's Edward II not to be blatant about it. Edward and Gaveston reunite while two naked men with crew cuts are going at it in bed a few feet away.

The anachronisms in Jarman's Caravaggio a few years earlier seemed weirdly natural. Edward II was in modern dress on minimal medieval sets. One was clearly wearing polyester and Edward's son wore what I think was a cotton-polyester blend. Now the fashions are 30-years-old which makes it worse not better.

It was far bloodier with a lot more torture and murder than I expected. I didn't know anything about Edward II in history but I shouldn't have been surprised. As with Caravaggio, I didn't really have any feeling about the characters except that I would never want to be around any of them, but, realistically, how appealing should they have been?

I had my own brush with period drama in modern dress nearly half a century ago. I was in the fourth grade. A girl in my class wanted to put on a play. It was only about two minutes long based on a story we read in one of those terrible primers---those books we used to practice reading. 

A princess is looking for a husband. Some noblemen come in giving her expensive gifts, but she decides to marry the one who was either a peasant or a down-and-out aristocrat who brings her some worthless crap. We were Americans. I don't know why they wanted to make royals look sensitive.

We did the play in the classroom. The set consisted of a chair. Maybe two chairs. But the director wanted the boys to wear tights and white undershirts to represent medieval finery. I thought my regular clothes were good enough and would have refused to change in any case. She drew a mustache on me. I would have gone with a pencil thin mustache like Errol Flynn, but she just drew hairs on my lip, like a teenage mustache.

It was the early seventies. Even children's clothing was somewhat Mod. I was wearing these pants that were a shade of purple---flairs that were cut in such a way that they required extra sewing---and a button-down shirt with an ornate striped pattern. It was timeless.

Years later, a friend of mine was in a Shakespeare play in high school. A (different) girl did the costumes for it. He was playing a wrestler and it may have been both functional and historically accurate, but his leather codpiece got a big laugh when they did a preview at a school assembly and he refused to wear it again.

The Executioner (Spain, 1963) Luis Garcia Berlanga director

A dark, dark comedy. 

It reminded me a little of Ida Lupino's The Bigamist. Through a complex set of circumstances, a young fellow is forced to do something no right-minded person would agree to. 

Good-looking young Spaniard Jose can't find a girlfriend because of his job as an undertaker. He's hired to remove the body of an executed criminal from the prison. He and his partner give the executioner a ride home and he meets his daughter who can't find a man because of her father's ghastly occupation.

Soon, the couple has to get married. Because the bride's father is retiring, the only way they can keep their apartment is for Jose to get a government job as an executioner himself which he really, really doesn't want to do. 

If you're willing to do it, you only have to work a few days a year. There are a couple of executioners in the movie and they seem like nice guys. 

We learn that Spain under Franco executed prisoners by strangulation with a garrotte. The older man argues that this is far better than America's electric chair or the French guillotine. Even now, Arizona is "refurbishing" its gas chamber, preparing for executions.

Available on The Criterion Channel.

Make it a double feature. Watch it with Season 1 Episode 32 of Bonanza, "Death at Dawn" (1960). The Cartwrights blithely take it upon themselves to execute an especially obnoxious prisoner (Gregory Walcott) after the sheriff is killed. The episode is public domain so it shouldn't be hard to find.