Platform

Daniel Wu

Last year, when Daniel Wu came back to his native Bay Area with his directorial debut, “The Heavenly Kings,” which screened at the 50th San Francisco International Film Festival, SF360.org contributor Jennifer Young reminded us of the joke that had been circulating online—that a Chinese law exists requiring Daniel Wu to be featured in every Hong Kong film. Still one of Hong Kong’s most prolific actors, Wu is visiting the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival this week with Alexi Tan’s “Blood Brothers.” Young got a chance to visit again with the actor when the film screened at the Castro this past Friday.

topics: asian american cinema, asian cinema, bay area, castro theatre, center for asian american media, critics, cult cinema, film festivals

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Experience

'A Genuine Tribute to Peter Bogdanovich'

There’s a scene a third of a way into Peter Bogdanovich’s debut film Targets (1968) in which the director seems to directly address his future critics. The film, an early mash-up of serial killing and cinematic reflexivity made under Roger Corman’s watch, stars an aging Boris Karloff as a romanticized version of himself. A slick-haired Bogdanovich stands in to play the part of…the young celluloid-mad director trying to revive the Karloff character’s star with a couple of quickies for an independent producer. I’m not sure even the Coen Brothers would be arch enough for such a ploy, but Bogdanovich plays it beautifully in a scene in Karloff’s hotel room. One of the old actor’s first films, The Criminal Code (1931, directed by Howard Hawks), plays on television, and Bogdanovich’s director is immersed within moments. Before long, he’s shushing the real actor in favor of his black-and-white likeness.

topics: castro theatre, critics, directors, dvd, exhibitions

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Film '07 -- Bests and more from the Bay Area's scene-makers

The critics have spoken, and the American West is winning in many year-end polls. But a quick survey of Bay Area programmers, curators, distributors, and filmmakers reveals a much richer picture of 2007’s best movie events, from avant-garde showcases to locally programmed extravaganzas. SF360.org offered some of the Bay Area’s leading voices a chance to weigh in on their film favorites and disappointments for the year, as well as their hopes for the next. We present an edited selection of their comments here.

topics: argentine cinema, bay area, castro theatre, critics year end polls, digital filmmaking, film festivals, filmmakers, gay lesbian cinema, jewish cinema, midnight movies, queer cinema, roxie

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Crispin Glover

In a show of independence that really is a show, actor-writer-painter-filmmaker Crispin Hellion Glover has been touring the country with his new film, “It Is Fine! Everything Is Fine” (part two of his “It” trilogy, produced by his company Volcanic Eruptions), thus circumventing the standard corporate-dominated model of film distribution with his own horse-and-buggy extravaganza. There are solid reasons for doing so. “Everything Is Fine” is already the kind of idea that does not come out of a major studio alive — at least not in the eyes of a tenacious visionary like Glover — and its delivery to movie audiences requires a little loving care.

topics: actors, castro theatre, filmmakers, independent film

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Jesse Hawthorne Ficks on his midnight movie empire

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks is the founder, curator and host of Midnites for Maniacs, a frequent one-night event on the historic Castro Theatre‘s calendar these days. "Emphasizing dismissed, overlooked and forgotten films," MfM might be said to focus on the populist yet esoteric-genre and exploitation flicks that for the most part long since disappeared into the netherworld of discarded VHS rental tapes.

These cultural artifacts have included such rarities as "Joysticks" (a let’s-save-Pop’s-video-game-store opus from 1983) and 1987’s flabbergasting "Troll 2," a quasi-horror fantasy made in the U.S. by Italians, but deliciously senseless in any language. Among the nearly 30 marathon triple bills Ficks has presented at the Castro to date were such tasty theme nights as "Supernatural Swirly Stuff," "Are You Goin’ to Prom?," "So Straight It’s Gay," plus tributes to the cinema of aerobics and roller-disco. There have been evenings devoted to the screen oeuvres of Crispin Glover, Dolly Parton, and "underage Jodie Foster."

Getting his own such retrospective this Friday (though not in person) is none other than the apex of hairy 1970s masculinity. Billed as " Three Moustache Rides with Burt Reynolds," the night features his starring turn (opposite Dolly) in the 1982 film of Broadway musical "Best Little Whorehouse in Texas," and a midnight showing of his 1977 redneck megahit "Smokey and the Bandit."

It opens with a movie that perhaps hasn’t been seen in SF since its disastrous 1975 theatrical release: Peter Bogdanovich’s "At Long Last Love," another musical that had Burt, Cybill Shepherd and others kicking up their heels to Cole Porter tunes in a tribute to 1930s Hollywood glamour. A critical whipping post and commercial dud, "Love" was (somewhat unfairly) branded as so awful that it became a virtual "lost" film, never released in any home format. Its extremely rare screening at the Castro comes courtesy of Ficks. In a roundabout way, we felt the need to ask him: Why?

SF360: You teach Film History at the Academy of Art. How does your curriculum balance the required likes of ‘Potemkin’ against, say, your confessed all-time favorite ‘Ski School’(a 1990 sexploitation comedy complete with lambada jokes)?

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks: I was always frustrated in my film classes when the teacher would teach the same old films, pointing out the same old things. I remember one time when I was in school, I compared Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’ to Steve Miner’s ‘Friday the 13th Part 2’ and my professor reacted as if I had personally offended him. That kind of snobbery doesn’t fly in my classes. Film history for me encompasses ALL films, not just those that theory books have been deemed to be ‘important’.

SF360: You’ve been programming midnights since you were 16, starting then in SLC. What kind of stuff were you showing then, and for who?

Ficks: Salt Lake City is a tuff place to grow up in if you are yearning for more. Midnite films in Salt Lake were (and still are) extremely important for this reason. Being exposed to movies that mainstream programming shies away from helps you in ways you don’t even realize. When I was programming films with my manager, we had teenagers to 40-somethings coming out in droves! David Lynch had just become a household name with ‘Twin Peaks,’ so ‘Blue Velvet’ and ‘Wild At Heart’ were huge hits. As were staples like ‘Pink Floyd’s The Wall’ and ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail.’

SF360: How did Midnite for Maniacs start?

Ficks: I moved to SF in 1998 and scored the greatest job of my life at the Four Star Theatre. The manager Frank Lee and Uncle Lam became mentors, giving me opportunities as a projectionist, programmer, and host. This was toward the end of the heyday of Hong Kong cinema, so I started programming midnite shows of everything from old fantasy films like ‘Encounters of a Spooky Kind’ and ‘Zu: Warriors on Magic Mountain’ to new Johnnie To films like ‘Love on a Diet’ and ‘The Mission.’ Not only did people actually come out, I realized there was a late-night movie community in San Francisco! Then one day I programmed ‘The Garbage Pail Kids Movie,’ and it sold out so hard we ended up having to turn people away who had driven all the way from Oakland! From then on, I was able to mix and match just about anything.

SF360: You’ll only show 35mm prints — and a lot of these movies aren’t exactly in high demand by rep cinemas and such. How do you go about tracking down prints?

Ficks: This is becoming more and more difficult, because many of the films that deserve to be screened are so obscure that finding a 35mm print is almost impossible. Oftentimes, if you can track down which distributor actually owns the rights to a film, the archive will pull out the cans of the film — and it will be unrunnable. The studios don’t seem to care about their old 35mm prints. And when it comes to the type of programming I’m interested in, they often ask why I even want to run the title, as was the case with Andy Kaufman’s ‘Heartbeeps’ and George Lucas’s ‘Howard the Duck.’ A very special story is behind the print of ‘Troll 2’ I screened as a part of a ‘Vertically Challenged Monsters’ triple bill. After confirming its availability with a distributor, I contacted the film’s lead actor Michael Stephenson in hopes of him attending the screening. I will never forget his absolute amazement when I told him that a 35mm print existed. [Note: ‘Troll 2’ was a direct-to-video release.] Not only was that the print’s theatrical world premiere, it has gone on to screen in thirteen cities since.

SF360: A lot of films you’ve shown have been ones that made an impression on you when you were growing up. Were you attracted to exploitation-type cinema early on?

Ficks: I watched a lot of films as a kid. I give my Mom most of the credit. She would take me to the video store every Friday and rent four movies of my choice. And since I was scouring every magazine about movies I could find (‘Fangoria,’ ‘Starlog’, even ‘MAD’ and ‘Cracked’), I acquired quite an obsessive appreciation for movies ranging from ‘The Evil Dead’ to ‘Return To Oz,’ ‘First Blood’ and ‘Transylvania 6-5000.’ And since I was so young, I wasn’t affected by what I ‘should’ or ‘shouldn’t’ like. Which I know happens all the time as we get older. How many times have you said to a friend, ‘I kinda wanna see that movie’ and they respond by contemptuously rolling their eyes at you?

SF360: Why Burt Reynolds? His peak stardom would have been a little before your time.

Ficks: Burt Reynolds is just as amazing and important to film history as Cary Grant or Jean-Paul Belmondo. Yes, my students have to study The Moustache Man. He not only is one of the smoothest and most charming actors to cross the movie screen, he represents a time period when men could be sexy, funny and furry—and that includes on his back!

SF360: ‘At Long Last Love’ is a very rare film-partly because it was so despised at the time. You recently spoke to Peter Bogdanovich — what did he have to say about it?

Ficks: This film is a true rarity. It has never been released since its theatrical run in 1975. Not on VHS, DVD, Beta, nothing. And this is the original print from that release! It represents the type of film that Midnites for Maniacs showcases: Dismissed, underrated, and overlooked. People hated this film when it came out. It’s a musical shot in the tradition of Ernst Lubitsch, where all the musical numbers were filmed live. And in this film’s case, all the actors were singing in their own untrained voices. And if you’ve noticed, this concept has inspired many films from Woody Allen’s ‘Everyone Say I Love You’ to Lars Von Trier’s ‘Dancer in the Dark.’ Now ironically, the writer-director Peter Bogdanovich also has some difficulty embracing the film. After talking with him recently over the phone, he still seems to feel that the film missed its mark. I tried to explain to him that the film may not have achieved exactly what he wanted, but that it did achieve something quite refreshing and unique, something that people have obviously been inspired by. His response: ‘Let’s talk about my good movies!’ This happens all the time, when the creator doesn’t realize how wonderful their creation actually is.

SF360: What are some favorite guests you’ve had at Midnite for Maniacs shows to date?

Ficks: Just last month I hosted the 25th anniversary screening of Greydon Clark’s ‘Joysticks’ in Los Angeles at the New Beverly Theatre. The sweetest programmer down there, Phil Blankenship, helped me put together the reunion of actors Jonathan Gries (King Vidiot), Jim Greenleaf (McDorfus) and director Clark. They were all so happy to be there. It was the best.

Then there was the utter surprise of experimental filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky and director Richard Lerner attending the screening of their 1976 T&A spectacular ‘Revenge of the Cheerleaders.’ They didn’t tell me they were there until after the movie ended! The director Richard Lerner was surprised at how well the film played to contemporary audiences. He also told me that at least three minutes of full-frontal-bush had been cut out of the print I screened. Brilliant. Plus to top that, Dorsky (who wrote the screenplay) authored a book about Robert Bresson and Roberto Rossellini entitled ‘Devotional Cinema’ that I use in my Film History classes.

SF360: What guests and films are on your wish list?

Ficks: I would love Peter Bogdanovich to come out and host a retrospective of his contemporary classics. And I am trying to get Allan Moyle to release a director’s cut of ‘Times Square’ (a 1980 proto-riot-grrl-power teen flick).

Someone recently told me that at a recent Pat Benatar show she introduced her ‘Invincible’ from ‘The Legend of Billie Jean’ (a 1985 teen epic) by saying, ‘This is the theme to one of the worst films ever made.’ How heartbreaking is that? I’d like to get her here for a screening and teach her a thing or two!

The next Midnites for Maniacs programs at the Castro are Dec. 7’s ‘Three Moustache Rides with Burt Reynolds’ and a Feb. 8 ‘Bringin’ on the Heartbreak’ triple bill featuring ‘Lucas,’ ‘Say Anything’ and ‘My Bloody Valentine.’

topics: castro theatre, film festivals, midnight movies, q&a

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Breaking the Silents, in three programs

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival‘s third annual Winter Event, a one-day mini-fest taking place Saturday at the Castro Theatre, is meant as a lower-key complement to the festival’s longer outing each July. But this year’s compressed exhibition, consisting of three separate programs and an evening mixer with live music, is an especially impressive affair. If the nonprofit festival’s mission means showcasing silent era films with the power to enthrall and delight as well as enrich popular understanding of cinematic art and culture, this wide-ranging lineup, introduced by notable authorities throughout, does it thrifty justice. What follows is a commentary-filled list of the lineup in reverse chronological order.

1. Evening
At the top of the program comes “Flesh and the Devil” (1927), a great Greta Garbo-John Gilbert match-up, in fact their first, and the one that notoriously started their fiery real-life romance pretty much on screen for all to see. In this steamy, censor-tempting adaptation of Herman Sudermann’s novel, “The Undying Past,” about two German army buddies divided by a willful enchantress named Felicitas, MGM and Louis B. Mayer struck gold with the fateful pairing of stars (even if it cost Mayer more than he bargained for in agro down the line). Bunkmate to Gilbert’s Leo as the story opens is beloved friend Ulrich (played by Garbo’s fellow Swede and former costar Lars Hansen, looking a bit goofy if well coiffed beside the rakish Gilbert). Meeting Felicitas at a train station, Leo is hopelessly smitten. But a duel and a stint in Africa later, Leo returns to find his best friend married to the woman he loves. This being, supposedly, Calvinist Germany, there’s naturally a pastor nearby. “My boy,” as this moral authority explains to Leo in a theme-spelling inter-title, “when the devil cannot reach us through the spirit, he creates a woman beautiful enough to reach us through the flesh.” Having said this like it’s a bad thing, the pastor feels compelled to add (strangely enough, while puffing away on a cigar stuffed into a pipe molded to resemble a leggy nymph), “Once before that woman led you into temptation and you sinned. … Aren’t you afraid of what she may do to you a second time?” Sure, it’s a dumb question. But dialogue and plot points are naturally secondary in Flesh and the Devil, gratefully making way for the groundbreaking lovemaking on (and off) the screen, including a sequence in Church where Garbo memorably turns communion into something less than holy and a lot more interesting.

Garbo’s Felicitas, a heartless temptress, followed fast on the heels of her previous MGM film called, not coincidentally, “The Temptress.” That came after playing yet another vixen for MGM. If it sounds like type casting, it’s important to remember that Garbo, as biographer Barry Paris points out, was also inventing a whole new type, something post-vamp, post-flapper, and something immediately captivating to audiences: a mercurial spirit that could shift so startlingly from aloof beauty to avid desire, all behind a face that was riveting. Of course, few faces have been so seriously, exhaustively contemplated. The Face even became a nickname. (“It is indeed an admirable face-object,” as Roland Barthes has inimitably put it). And though it’s been said ever since her early silent pictures for MGM were first released, seeing “Flesh and the Devil” confirms the impression that Garbo and the screen were made for one another, both enlarging the other. Moreover, given how she managed so successfully the transition to sound dialogue films (a graduation her costar and lover, the hitherto immensely popular Gilbert, famously flunked), it’s striking that one doesn’t miss her distinctive voice here. She’s perfectly complete on the silent screen, as the able director Clarence Brown (who worked with her many times) knew full well. “Flesh and the Devil” — which screens at the Castro in a pristine 35mm print from the Library if Congress (an institution whose name takes on an unusually erotic resonance in this context) — will be introduced by the Library of Congress’s Christel Schmidt.

2. Afternoon
The afternoon program, meanwhile, proves at least as alluring: DW Griffith’s masterpiece “Intolerance” (1916), a film as outlandishly unique as it was radically innovative and path-breaking, and one that fairly demands the big screen. “Intolerance” was DW Griffith’s lavish answer to his critics in the wake of his cinematically radical but politically reactionary and vehemently racist, if vastly influential Civil War and Reconstruction saga, “Birth of a Nation.” It was also another cinematic revelation, pioneering among other things the multi-story narrative. Injustice and inhumanity are the themes linking four disparate stories spanning multiple centuries and civilizations. Each story unreels in its own special tint, with the colorized result looking not so much modern as unto itself, peculiar and weirdly beautiful. What Babel wanted to be “Intolerance” was.

3. Morning
Finally, starting things off in the late morning is an intriguing and uncharacteristically chatty program called Vitaphone Vaudeville, a set of shorts from the “Vitaphone Varieties” series, which consisted of almost 2000 sound films put out between 1926 and 1930 using the same technology as the first talking feature, “The Jazz Singer” (1927). Introduced by Robert Gitt, of UCLA’s Film & Television Archive, the selection offers a mix of enduring and forgotten names, including a hokey little Depression era scene featuring a young Spencer Tracy on the cusp of future fame. But first come more classic vaudeville acts like a little frolic entitled “Chips of the Old Block”(1928) featuring the Foy Family. It opens on a young man with a guitar and a vaguely dyspeptic expression standing passively between two singing and dancing young women, presumably fellow chips of some unseen block. (Let’s just say the choreography here could have benefited from a movement coach, or maybe just a moving coach.) Enter the rest of the Foy clan, fancy steps, pratfalls, false teeth and other yucks at the ready. Amusing if only in its nostalgic glance back at the more piffling performances that defined the vaudeville era, “Chips” leaves little mystery why the Foy Family is not a household name.

The same might be said for “Dick Rich and his Melodious Monarchs,” an act preserved in a musical filmlet from 1929. The portly Rich, looking for all the world like a maitre d’, here lungs the lyric to “Ramona” before his comparatively lean (and one suspects underpaid) band kicks the tune into double time. An unidentified sequined woman joins Rich for the following number, “There Must Be a Silver Lining (That’s Shining for Me),” in a rather giddy pairing that quickly devolves into a ventriloquist act of questionable merit. At last, Rich, getting richer by the minute, introduces “Sunshine,” featuring the sequined woman again, index fingers in dimples, which brings matters to a merciful close.

But then there’s George Burns and Gracie Allen, strutting their stuff in “Lamb Chops,” also from 1929, in which the vaudeville and TV legends effortlessly carry the usual barrage of corny hit-and-miss humor with their trademark chemistry: shy, silly, and strangely enduring. A rare treat to see them thus on the big screen. Also of particular interest is “The Hard Guy” (1930) for its young and strapping star, Spencer Tracy. An amusingly clunky early Depression Era scene pitched somewhere between melodrama, social protest, and comedy, it unfolds in a rundown city apartment where an embittered ex-soldier and out-of-work breadwinner (a dutiful Tracy, still in no position to turn down work either) complains to his hungry wife and little girl about hard times and hard luck and all manner of hard things. “Guy, you’re getting hard boiled again,” she warns him. “Well, I been in hot water long enough to get hard boiled.” Etc. Etc. This Guy is one sour quipster. But perhaps suspecting a happy ending, his wife tries reassuring him with yet another straight line: “We’ll be back on easy street again,” she says. “I don’t know,” he fires back. “Easy street isn’t a one-way street by a long shot. There’s plenty of guys going the other way.” This Guy, for one. Spencer, on the other hand, was about to make a fat U-turn via a 1930 play called “The Last Mile” and a John Ford film called “Up the River.”

topics: castro theatre, film festivals, silent film

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The Castro turns 85

“It is the desire and ultimate aim of the management to create an atmosphere of refinement and comfort within the walls of this Theatre. This service contemplates comfort, courtesy, and contentment — delight in the best of pictures, and the interpretation of music to the highest degree.” Not that the Castro’s diva status has ever been in question, but this grandiloquent bit from the handbill announcing the theatre’s opening seems all too fitting: this particular theatre has always known it’s a peach. That first program — consisting of no less than eight segments, “Entire Orchestra and Balcony, 25c plus tax” — happened eighty-five years ago: June 22, 1922, to be precise. Audiences that night enjoyed a newsreel, novelty acts, an orchestral performance, Wallace Reid in “Across the Continent,” and — it wouldn’t be the Castro without it — an “organ offering.”

The Castro is celebrating its impressive anniversary with a similar sundry of live music, shorts, and swashbuckling features this weekend, August 10-12.

Movie-palaces were once commonplace in American cities, but a familiar pattern of neglect and re-development means that most are either gone altogether or ghosts of their former selves (one need only walk a few blocks of the stretch of Market Street around Civic Center to experience the loss firsthand). Odds be damned, the Castro perseveres, still every bit the queen.

The opening program card describes the theatre as the “New Castro Theatre,” and indeed the prolific Nasser family had previously operated two smaller cinemas down the block — one at 450 Castro opened in 1908 and another at 479 Castro (currently Cliff’s Variety Store) in 1910. The Nassers owned a fleet of long-forgotten movie-houses all around the city, but the “new” Castro was the crown jewel with construction tabs running up to $300,000. The brothers hired Timothy Pflueger to design their palace, an architecture prodigy born and raised in the Mission. He was all of 28 when he was set upon the Castro, and one senses his youthful exuberance in the theatre’s daring, gauche mix of styles: equal parts Italian Renaissance and Big Top Circus, Spanish Colonial fa

topics: castro theatre

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