Nathan Rabin's vastly entertaining "My Year of Flops" blog on the AV Club Website has inspired me to attempt my own experiment. Anyone who's seen my myspace page knows I love thinking about movies, writing about movies and more than anything scrutinizing and analyzing the output of hard working auteurs who most likely don't give a shit what I think about their movies. Well too bad - I'm going to think about them anyway, and I'm going to tell you about it...
Here's what I'm going to attempt to do (another thing people familiar with my past write-ups know is that I'm always behind or end up half-assing my entries, so I emphasize the word "attempt.") What I want to do is pick a handful of directors - no less than three, if inspiration strikes as many as ten - whose careers have been horribly frustrating. What that means, specifically, are filmmakers about whom, when asked if I'm a fan, my response tends to be, "Ummmm - yes? I dunno, it's complicated. Leave me alone, I'm trying to watch Patriot Games." There's something about these directors that make their careers much more interesting and diverse than sluggers like Kurosawa, Fassbinder and Peckinpah, whose failures tend to be very much on their own terms (or, infamously with Peckinpah, the fault of brainless studio heads.) Sure, Rio das Mortes sucks, but it's definitely got its place in Fassbinder's oeuvre. Those three directors have solid reputations. The guys I'm interested in are all renowned directors whose filmographies are bloated with curiosities, missteps and flat-out shitfests that have threated (and, in some cases, ruined) their reputation in the field so that they are rarely counted among the great giants. Their paths are scorched with the remnants of commercial backlash and their own self-indulgence.
I'm going to select directors like that, and I am going to watch every movie they made in chronological order. Some for the first time, some for the twelfth. What do I wish to accomplish with this? Well, other than Rabin's proven fact that it's just as interesting to revisit and reexamine a bad movie as a good one (Magnolia being the exception), I'm hoping to find answers as to why these filmmakers, all of them praised at one point of their career or another, still deserve attention. Recent posters and previews for the film Bug proudly toting "from the director of The Exorcist" tags conveniently fail to mention The Guardian, a horror film made during a time when William Friedkin was taken a little less seriously. As my lovely girlfriend pointed out, Friedkin's name is also rarely mentioned on Bug's promotional material, and when it is it's certainly not displayed the way "Martin Scorsese" is stapled all over The Departed as if the movie were one huge box of Marty's old porno mags. Yet at one point these two craftsmen enjoyed the same seemingly universal high regard and accolades: it even took Scorsese thirty-five years longer than Friedkin to win an Oscar. What happened to Friedkin's career in those thirty-five years that he can't get his name attached to a fucking Ashley Judd vehicle? Why is he even directing an Ashley Judd vehicle?
I'm going to steer clear of directors who obviously blew their career, either from getting lucky their first time out of the gate and becoming the film equivalent of one-hit wonders (Bob Rafelson, Hal Ashby, Neil Labute) or clearly burning out and fading away early (Michael Cimino, Wim Wenders, Nicholas Roeg.) In addition, there are also directors who've pretty much cemented their reputation and can ultimately do no wrong, albeit being guilty of doing very, very wrong: Roman Polanski and David Cronenberg are in no danger of ever being written off, despite bogglingly bad choices (Pirates, Fast Company) and recent letdowns (Oliver Twist, A History of Violence.) And no, there is nothing redeemable in the work of Alan Rudolph, Oliver Stone and M Night Shaymalan: they sucked from the beginning and any critical down spiral they experienced later on was just the rest of the world catching on late.
I'm going to delve deep. Apart from watching each of the selected director's movies that are readily available, I'm going to do my best to research the given film as well as its reception beyond my existing knowledge of them through biography, critique and interview. I don't know if anyone has taken the time to write a book about Walter Hill, but it they have I will find it. I doubt anyone was still interested enough to record a retrospective audio commentary for the Blue Chips dvd, but if they did I'll listen to it.
"Why would you want to see Blue Chips again?" is as legitimate a question as "Why would you want to see Blue Chips in the first place?" The relevance of catching up on the adventures of young Shaq, and for that matter this entire project, is that Blue Chips has a relation to The French Connection which is key to understanding the career of their creator. It's not as simple an inquiry into what went wrong: it's more a matter of examining the personal and artistic trek of these directors (all veterans of at least 25 years experience, some over 40) and the development of their careers in film as defined by what they've done and what they've tried to do. Moreover, it will allow me to revisit the supposed masterworks of these auteurs - the reasons they were able to keep getting money and making movies, for better or worse (and some of them enjoyed genuine popular comebacks) - and see how they hold up.
I hope you're with me so far, because I'm trying my best to cover the criteria without getting too far off topic. Taking after Rabin, I've created a series of terms to assign specific films from each director's body of work. Most films will be given one of three generic phrases: "hit," "miss," or "disaster." "Hit" indicates the film's overall critical and commercial success, "miss" a less successful but by no account devastating entry in the filmmaker's career, and "disaster" - pretty much speaks for itself. The more individual terms, which will be credited personally to the director (exam: "LaGorshia's Popular Masterpiece") are listed and defined as follows:
"Popular Masterpiece" - The reason the director is still remembered. For some of them, there was more than one.
"Genuine Masterpiece" - Not applicable to all directors: sometimes the popular masterpiece happens to be the real deal. But more often than not, it overshadows an underrated gem.
"Secret Masterpiece" - A true slam dunk hiding amidst the dreck, ignored even by cult enthusiasts.
"First Misstep" - The first sign of a coming storm. A bump in otherwise smooth pavement.
"Unforgivable Transgrassion" - This is a key term to this experiment: the first film a director made which is widely perceived as a sort of betrayal to his audience. Whether it' s a curious switch in genre or aesthetic, or a move into safer and less challenging territory, this is the serious lapse which endangered or wrecked said director's status as "auteur."
"Apocalypse Now" - Not necessarily a disaster, but a personal (read: indulgent) odyssey from which the director may or may not have returned with his swollen head shrunken.
"Unmitigated Disaster" - What if Orson Welles and Ed Wood were one and the same? A critical lashing that would mar the filmmaker's name the rest of his career.
"Film That Time Forget" - The one you would never remember if you tried to name every movie the director made.
"Fake Comeback" - An attempt by the director to rediscover his original fan base by returning to original formula, but not to original form. They try to woo the audience back to their side, which is very appropriate terminology considering John Woo is more guilty of this kind of thing than anyone.
"Genuine Comback" - A popular career resurgence after several flops almost powerful enough to wipe the slate clean.
Because some of them are based on my own opinion and others on the film's critical reception, more than one of these terms could potentially apply to a single film. Honestly, the terms are very loosely applicable and only vaguely justifiable, but they'll serve to more or less sum up each film's general impression, popular and personal.
Finally, I want to let everyone in on a secret: I'm no expert. These entries are hugely biased by my own thoughts on these films, most glaringly my love for certain disregarded oddities over the director's bigger hits that might be featured on AFI's 100 Greatest Music Played in a Comedy While a Character Sobs Hysterically Over a Delicious Pecan Pie: Seventy-Five Years of Laughter, Sobbing and Pies 1930-2005 list. Sometimes I agree with the popular reputation of a film, sometimes I don't. a good example is how I decided against doing Coppola for the simple reason that I didn't want to write about the goddamn Godfather movies, and wasn't about to sit through part fucking three again (let alone Jack.) I also avoided Altman, as any review of his complete work would be a project all its own, and can really be striped down to the following simple formula with minor exceptions: 1969-1977 great, 1978-1989 useless, 1990-2006 take or leave (the career of the Coen brothers can be similarly halved into "Simpsons"-esque golden/bugfuck-awful epochs.)
From the selections I've already made, the one thing these directors have in common is that they've forged ahead, beyond failure and scrutiny. That might make a case for filmmakers with lower turnout like Terrence Malick or Whit Stillman - it also might suggest that these guys are more fearless and determined (and, in several examples, more deluded and pigheaded.) At the end of the day, I have great admiration for all these filmmakers. As a kind of thesis, my question to them is: Why won't you let me love you?
