Jamm on It: Jon Glaser talks "Parks and Recreation," "Girls," & more at AADL

Thu, 11/30/2017 - 11:00am by christopherporter

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Michigan native and U-M grad Councilman Jamm -- nee Jon Glaser -- sat down with us to discuss his television and comedy career on Nov. 26 at AADL's downtown branch.

He created, starred in, and co-wrote the TV shows Neon Joe Werewolf Hunter, Jon Glaser Loves Gear, and Delocated. He is perhaps best known as the aforementioned Councilman Jamm on Parks and Recreation and and Laird on HBO's Girls. Other TV credits include

Inside Amy Schumer, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Wonder Showzen.

Film credits include Trainwreck, Be Kind Rewind, and Pootie Tang. Cartoon voice work includes Bob's Burgers, Archer, Lucy: Daughter of the Devil, TV Funhouse, and Aqua Teen Hunger Force. He appeared as Video Cowboy in the ESPN web series Mayne Street, and he created, wrote, directed and starred in a series of web shorts for Comedy Central called Tiny Hands.

As a writer and consultant, Jon's credits include Inside Amy Schumer, Late Night with Conan O'Brien, The Dana Carvey Show, Human Giant, and Cheap Seats. He has written several stories for The New York Times Magazine, and his writing has also appeared in ESPN The Magazine, The Onion A.V. Club, and online for New York magazine.

His first book, My Dead Dad Was in ZZ Top, was published by Harper Perennial, and he wrote and directed the music video for Bob Mould’s "Star Machine."

For more videos of AADL events, visit aadl.org/videos.

Glowing Highlights: Laverne Cox at U-M's Center for the Education of Women symposium

Mon, 11/20/2017 - 9:15am by christopherporter

When Orange Is the New Black's Laverne Cox walked out onto the Rackham stage, my immediate thought is that she is even more beautiful in person than on screen or in photos, and I don’t exactly understand how this is possible. She looks as though the sun is shining directly on her. I think maybe this is what actually mastering the art of highlighting looks like, but I’m also sure I could put on all the makeup in the world and I would still never look like that.

I’d like to say that as soon as she started speaking, all such frivolous thoughts left my head, but frankly, that would be a lie. I did settle in with the rest of the sold-out crowd that has come to see her as the keynote speaker on Nov. 15 for the 2017 CEW Spectrum of Advocacy & Activism Symposium put on by the Center for the Education of Women at the University of Michigan, and for the next hour and a half, listened to a great (if slightly scattered) talk that encompassed gender and race theory, her life story, and how the Ann Arbor community should respond should white supremacist Richard Spencer come to campus.

Cox opened her speech with an emotional acknowledgment of the standing ovation she was met with when she walked out on stage: "To see a whole room of people standing, applauding for a black transgender woman? I don't know, it still feels revolutionary." And it did to me, too, to see a whole room of people react to her speech as though they were in church, clapping and snapping along to her powerful words. The crowd was extremely diverse and I was moved to see so many folks of all ages, races, and genders listen so intently to Cox without questioning her right to speak.

Cox titled her talk “Ain’t I a Woman,” after Sojourner Truth’s famous 1851 speech at the Women’s Rights Convention. White Americans have manipulated, exploited, and questioned the womanhood of black women since the day our country was founded, and now cis Americans do the same to trans women. Cox described how she, like Sojourner Truth before her, has been told that she isn’t really a woman, then executes a perfect hair flip and asked, “And ain’t I a woman?” The crowd went wild. The applause kept coming as Cox seamlessly transitioned from bell hooks to Cornel West to Judith Butler. I was trying to keep a list of every academic she mentioned and I wrote so fast that my hand cramped. I also had to ask my seatmate to borrow extra paper.

In recounting her life’s story, Cox told one particularly disturbing tale of her third-grade year, in which her teacher warned her mother that if she didn’t act soon, Cox would “end up in New Orleans wearing a dress.” Following this, Cox was forced to see a therapist who suggested injecting her prepubescent body with testosterone to make her more masculine. Luckily for Cox, her mother rejected this proposal, but that didn’t stop her childhood from being riddled with bullying, a church that branded her a sinner, and a suicide attempt at only 11 years old. Cox said she was lucky to get an excellent education and escape the violence of her youth. This is not, however, the experience of most trans women of color, a point that Cox was quick to make. She reminded the audience that 2017 has been the deadliest year on record for transgender Americans, and trans women of color are hit the hardest by this violence.

Despite this upsetting truth, Cox seemed genuinely hopeful about the future. She argued for bringing people into conversations rather than calling them out. Cox truly seems to believe in finding the humanity in everyone, although when asked about Richard Spencer’s possible visit to the University of Michigan campus, she was clear that certain beliefs and behaviors couldn't be tolerated. She stated that her current focus is on voting rights and working against gerrymandering. She implored the audience to “vote, vote, vote,” and she left us with the advice, “Stay woke and stay strong!” At that, the crowd rose as one to clap. Cox did one more hair flip, then turned and walked off stage, leaving behind some of the sunshine that she brought in.

A (partial) list of the scholars, artists, and activists Cox referenced in her speech:
Simone de Beauvoir
Brené Brown
Judith Butler
Ava Duvernay
Johan Galtung
bell hooks
Jen Richards
Angelica Ross
Sojourner Truth
Cornel West

Evelyn Hollenshead is a Youth Librarian at the Ann Arbor District Library.

Catching a Classic: "Casablanca" is 75 & everybody has seen it ... right?

Tue, 11/14/2017 - 10:15am by christopherporter

Casablanca is 75 years old.

I was invited to see the film at Saline's extra fancy Emagine movie theater, with its leather recliners and cafeteria-style concessions. Casablanca is a beloved favorite of the person who invited me, and despite watching it numerous times, he was looking forward to seeing the film on the big screen.

I, on the other hand, was embarrassed by my reaction to his invitation. A normal person, a person with better manners would have answered the invitation with a polite "yes" or a polite "no." Instead, I said, “I bet I could write about it from the perspective of a first-time viewer.”

I am one of those people who hasn’t seen a lot of the things that other people assume that everyone has seen. Despite being ranked among the best movies of all time, despite having won three Academy awards, Casablanca was a film I hadn’t seen until this weekend. Still, I knew about some of its elements -- barely. I was aware that there was a love story in the film. My understanding of the film had been that it was essentially propaganda. With this in mind, I fully expected to come out of the film thinking about the parallels between today’s political speech and that from the 1940s.

Instead, I was stricken by the love story.

Rick Blaine, the cynical saloon owner played by Humphrey Bogart is the sort of character I love in a movie. Blaine is handsome with a cool exterior, stylish and emotionally unavailable. He had me hooked from the moment I saw his face on the screen; immediately, I wanted him to have whatever motivated him in the film. As the other characters speculated about Blaine’s past, what that past meant, and that he had an idealist inside of him, I wanted everyone else to leave him alone. He was able to successfully operate this business where many people were able to come and enjoy themselves; why did they have to ask more of him? Why did they have to poke at his exterior shell?

“With the whole world crumbling, we pick this time to fall in love.” --Ilsa Lund

When, Ilsa Lund, Rick’s former lover makes her way to Rick’s Café Americain seeking the papers that would allow her and her husband to escape Casablanca for the West, we see a glimpse into Rick’s interior. The film then walks the viewer through the love and heartache that Rick experienced because of Ilsa. The romance between these two characters had been born within the context of World War II and shaped by the events of the war. As I was moved by the chemistry between these two characters, the way they looked at each other, the way they touched, and I wondered what it must have felt like to fall in love during the war. I contemplated how similar or dissimilar it might be to falling in love in an era where you might crawl out from underneath a shared sea of blankets to check your phone and find out that, say, eight people were killed in a terrorist attack in New York City.

As the film progressed, the viewer traveled through themes of patriotism, loyalty, and good vs. evil as they played out against the backdrop of gambling, petty theft, and the questionable use of influence. But love kept things complicated.

“Oh yes, the world will always welcome lovers / as time goes by.”
--lyrics from "As Time Goes By," a song strongly associated with Casablanca.

Victor Laszlo a renowned figure in the anti-Nazi resistance approaches Rick to purchase the papers; Rick refuses to sell them to him. When asked why, he tells Victor to ask his wife, alluding to his Rick’s romance with Ilsa. Ilsa later -- after a conversation with her husband about the topic -- confronts Rick, threatening to kill him for the papers in order to get herself and her husband to safety. Rick calls her bluff and finds Ilsa unable to shoot him, finding that she still loves him. Victor acknowledges that he and Rick are in love with the same woman and bargains with Rick to find an arrangement that would tip the scale in terms of her survival. Rick makes the decision that lets the woman he loves to escape with her husband. They all stick their necks out for love right there in the midst of world war.

Even the cynical viewer’s heart is moved and just like that, I fell in love with a movie.

I left, mutating in my mind a famous line from the film:

"We’ll always have Casablanca."

Sherlonya Turner is the manager of the Youth & Adult: Services & Collections Department at the Ann Arbor District Library. She can be found diving headfirst into all sorts of projects over at sherlonya.net.

"Casablanca" is available to borrow from AADL.

Active Culture: "INAATE/SE" meditates on Sault Ste. Marie's Ojibway tribe

Thu, 10/12/2017 - 12:30pm by christopherporter

Adam and Zach Khalil’s INAATE/SE is not a film to view if you’re looking for escapism. INAATE/SE is about the Ojibway community in Sault Ste. Marie and the movie bends and flexes filmmaking conventions and linear storytelling in order to tell about this tribe’s past and present as well as ask questions about its future. This film will make you think about our relationship to time and history, about the stories we tell, and the stories that are silenced.

On Wednesday, Oct. 11, Ypsilanti Experimental Space (YES) screened followed INAATE/SE, followed by a Q&A with Adam Khalil. The day before, Khalil was generous enough to meet me at Henry Ford Museum and spend a portion of his afternoon talking with me about his film and his process, opening himself up to an organic and wide-ranging conversation centered in this work. He allowed us to think together for a moment. We talked about survival, representation, what it meant for him and his brother to create this work and how, in some ways, both the past and the future live within us in the present.

This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.

“Tradition is something that’s historical. Culture is something that active, dynamic, can change, and should change.” --Adam Khalil

Q: The setup for this interview is the funniest thing. A black lady and a Native American man meet at the Henry Ford Museum to talk about culture, storytelling and who owns history.
A: Yeah.

Q: And how museums have some fraught practices. What do you wish people would ask you as they engage with your material?
A: I know the questions that I don’t want to be asked.

Q: What are those?
A: Really the stuff that always drives me nuts is when people want to talk about the environment.

Q: But your movie’s not about the environment.
A: I know! We just screened in Toronto and we did this really great Q&A with Bonnie Divine who is this awesome Ojibway artist. She’s this older woman who’s really cool, and there was all of this talk about contemporary indigenous identity and stuff like that, and this well-intentioned hippie white lady afterward was like, “Thanks so much for doing that. I think that it’s cool that your people have a special connection with the environment.” I was like, “That’s a huge generalization.” And she was like, “But, yeah, it’s a good one.” And I’m like, “You just didn’t listen to what we said for 45 minutes about these kinds of generalizations." She’s like: "No, you don’t understand; I’m saying something good." I’m like: "No. You don’t understand. We talked for 45 minutes and you heard nothing."

That’s the stuff that really makes my blood boil. Like, why am I talking if you just want something specific out of this? So, in terms of questions that we’d want to be asked, we’re pretty open. The film has a lot in it. We’re trying to say a lot to a lot of different people in a lot of different ways all at once.

Q: Who do you see your audiences being?
A: This is something that me and my brother thought a lot about making the film, trying to figure out a way to code the film that could communicate different things to many different audiences. Personally, we have an investment in the documentary, experimental, and art film communities in and around New York. But the film was made first and foremost for our tribe back home. And then, Native people in general. But also we were trying to find this sweet spot where it wasn’t hermetic and it could be assessable or approachable. We like thinking of our work as Trojan horse-y. You know, having enough sugar to make the medicine go down.

So, that’s what took the most time in making the film. Figuring out what are we communicating to whom and how are we doing it. Because there’s also this weird thing with indigenous communities where there’s this history of being an informant on your own culture and not wanting to play that role in terms of giving up too much. A big thing, also, in thinking about the film is the difference between information and knowledge.

Q: Talk to me about that.
A: This is popular in indigenous information ecologies. The idea is that information should be for all and that’s good, but knowledge is something that has to be earned or given. It has a different kind of cultural currency. And there’s such a history of ethnographers and anthropologists trying to extract knowledge from our communities. So we wanted to be really sure to be careful to not do that work for them.

There are metaphors and allegories that form the film, like the pills for the sacred medicines, which is a McGuffin; it’s not real. We didn’t want to ethnographically show our actual ceremonies because that not knowledge that we felt that we should be giving up. But the information in terms of the stories, the history, and the place we felt was really important to share.

Q: What responsibility do you feel as somebody who has done whatever work you did to get to the point where you’ve got this voice? What does that mean for you?
A: It’s a huge amount of responsibility. It’s something that my brother and I really think a lot about and we’ve built it into our practice. These kinds of speed bumps to make sure that we’re not going too far, too fast without the rest of our community on board.

Q: What does that process look like?
A: In terms of the speed bumps and making sure we don’t go too far, we did way too many interviews with no specific goal. We did like 40 interviews. Each was two to four hours a pop.

Q: That is a lot of investment.
A: Yeah. It made the editing process really tricky. And maybe there are eight people that are interviewed who are in the film. We interviewed everyone else because we didn’t want to come in and dictate what the film was about. And that’s why this story, "The Seven Fires Prophecy," is perfect. It allowed for enough openness that we could use it as a structure to hang things on, but not pre-determine what we needed to make it a good film or a real film.

Q: When I watched your movie, I found myself wondering what white people think when they watch it. Then, I was immediately mad at myself because I felt like even I put white people at the center of everything.
A: We thought about that making it. Especially because with these esoteric film communities it’s predominantly white. Being in experimental film is like the most white of white. And that’s changing though, too. You can see it in the people who are getting programmed and what’s being celebrated now. It’s actually really exciting. There’s a really great filmmaker, Sky Hopinka, he’s indigenous, and finding Sky’s stuff and being able to meet him talk with him and think about film in these formal ways, but also the content and the responsibility that we have as Native filmmakers too has also been really empowering and has made me feel more sane.

Q: So, this is a question that I always want to ask other people of color: Do you feel like you get to enjoy your culture?
A: Well, I’ve got a pretty complicated background. I’m half Egyptian. I wasn’t really raised with the Egyptian stuff. My dad was sort of out of the picture. So it’s being raised in Sault Ste. Marie. To complicate it further, my mother moved us up there when I was 10.

Q: Really. Where were you before then?
A: I lived in Boston and for a little time in Cairo with my dad.

Q: What years were you in Sault Ste. Marie?
A: I believe it was like 10 until finishing high school. So that’s like all of my formative experiences there, too. My mom moved us up there because she wanted us to connect with the culture and she was like, “The rest of the world is pretty fucked; I’m gonna get you guys back in.”

Our mother passed away about four years ago and it was really important to her for us to reconnect there or make a connection there because we weren’t born there. For us, the act of making the film was a way for us to reintroduce ourselves to the community. And to be like, “Hey, we’re from here. Our mother isn’t here anymore, but now we’re our own selves. We’re individuals. We’re not just her children, and we still want to be a part of this community."

Q: What is it like to work with your brother on a creative project? And you’ve kind of grabbed the torch from your mom, right? Because she was doing this research and trying to really reclaim the story.
A: She was really specifically trying to build in safeguards for indigenous agency in museums and library science practices. And she ran youth education activities for the tribe for 10 years. Also, the tribal politics are pretty gnarly, so to keep a job anywhere in that tribe, or in any tribe, gets pretty tricky quickly. But she meant a lot to a lot of people, and our place was like an open space. Where there were constantly people from the community coming in and out and it was almost an extension of it in some kind of way.

Q: Do you view this as a family project?
A: Big time. I think it’s a collaboration with our mother. Also, our aunt shot some of this stuff that’s in the movie, like the stuff in the boarding schools. She was doing the Ojibway language intensive at Bay Mills Community College and she was also coming from a film background. She was like, “I filmed this.” And I found the tape after she took us to visit that site in the present day. All of these weird family coincidences kept popping up. So it only makes sense also for me to make it with my brother.

Q: Who are your influences?
A: Craig Baldwin is this guy who has been running this microcinema in San Francisco. He makes these really insane paranoid, political montage films from found footage stuff. He made this feature film called Tribulation 99 which is about the CIA’s intervention in Latin America as if the CIA was an alien race.

It’s also using the apparatus of storytelling to talk about real politics with something that really just got me hooked and is also an inherently Ojibway form of communicating. Look, Walter Benjamin has this thing about the angel of history that always moves forward but looks back at the destruction. It’s a very western notion or conception of history. Whereas an Ojibway version of it would be the "Seven Fires" prophecy where it’s an oral story that’s meant to change over time so it’s not this monolithic tower of history. It has this malleability and that the story should always be in service to the present moment or the people’s needs at that time.

That’s a really empowering understanding of history. History is a story that we tell ourselves. And so to be able to assert one’s own knowledge of how that history functions and literally change the history through narrative and storytelling devices just opened up this whole new way of thinking for us. And these stories have deep ideologies embedded within them.

Q: And they have purposes and they have things that they’re intending to communicate. And they change. And things aren’t getting told. And things are getting told. People get mad if you even try to tell a story that messes with their story.
A: I mean Columbus Day was yesterday. And the stuff with the statues. "Heritage not hate" is the slogan they’re throwing around.

Q: See, I have so many mixed feelings about the statues. I feel like when you think about the idea of a post-racial America that people were talking about several years ago, that’s crazy to me because it’s like, “Mmmm ... that’s not where I live."
A: Yeah. This idea that we’re all one is nice but to actually have to get that point there’d have to be an actual equality.

Q: But it’s just not a lived reality
A: And properly equitably dispersed and I feel like that’s not there.

Q: And I feel like a rush to burn and destroy all of these statues in some ways is dangerous because ...
A: There’s an erasure of the problematic history of the foundation of this country.

Q: And I think that it’s just a dangerous thing to play with.
A: It’s a slippery slope for sure.

Q: People want to have a story where it’s a neat story and with a beginning, middle, and end.
A: Tidy.

Q: It’s like, what do you lose? What do you lose by thinking about the fact that other people have experiences and stories?
A: One thing that’s happening these days that I find really scary is this notion of empathy construction.

Q: Talk to me more about that.
A: I feel like there’s real limits to empathy. Empathy is always relating someone else’s experience to oneself as opposed to approaching it in a more humble way where it’s actually just listening to someone’s experiences and not trying to say, "Oh, now I understand it." Those things can’t be understood or communicated. Since the stuff at Standing Rock, where everyone’s so empathetic to indigenous causes but still can’t get to the point where they’re acknowledging that this other colonial state still exists in this way. Or this desire for indigeneity because they feel so empathetic toward indigenous causes. And this happens with other groups, too.

Q: Where’s the line between empathy and an attempted possession?
A: I think that they’re kind of the same thing because you create empathy in relation to someone’s outside story for trying to understand it from your inside story. But it’s all about the self at that time, too. As opposed to literally coming at it from a more humble experience and just listening. And not saying I get it now. Or I know what this person or this history is about. You can’t really internalize those things unless you’ve come from that place.

Q: What have your audiences looked like?
A: It’s interesting. We’ve done big museums. We’ve done big film festivals. But then we’ve also toured a lot of schools and community centers. And also microcinemas, the whole gamut. It always varies, and again in terms of how we’ve tried to code the film in terms of what we’re communicating to what group all at the same time. ... I was just at Cranbrook and it was all art students and they were much more interested in the formal stuff.

Q: Like your artistic choices
A: Yeah, and that’s cool because we thought a lot about that stuff, so it’s great to have that engaged with. But then showing it to an Ojibway middle school on the res, we’re talking about the importance of these stories and how they resonate in the contemporary moment. And how these young people can continue to tell these stories in their own voice. So it really varies with the context of what the screening is. But for us, it’s really meaningful because the film doesn’t really exist or function unless it’s engaged with. And independent filmmaking sucks. There’s no apparatus to really support it, so that’s part of the reason we’ve been touring the movie to create that there’s an actual connection one at a time.

Q: Everything that I read about this film talked a lot about how it was not linear. I was expecting that maybe it wasn’t going to be accessible. I thought that this might be the time that I bit off more than I can chew. And then I felt pressure, as a person of color interviewing a person of color, wanting to do a good and respectful job, to do this right. Then I watched the movie and was like, "Oh, OK. Accessible film."
A: That means a lot. Seriously. We want to make movies. WE don’t want to make documentaries. We don’t want to make experimental film. We don’t want to make these things that have limits to access. Everyone watches movies. Everyone knows the language of movies.

Sherlonya Turner is the manager of the Youth & Adult: Services & Collections Department at the Ann Arbor District Library. She can be found diving headfirst into all sorts of projects over at sherlonya.net.

"INAATE/SE" Fall 2017 Tour Dates:
Oct. 16 - Grand Rapids, MI | Grand Valley State University
Oct. 19 - New York City | UnionDocs (w/ Karrabing Film Collective and Elizabeth Povinelli)
Oct. 26 - Thunder Bay, ON | Confederation College
Oct. 26 - Thunder Bay, ON | Docs on Bay
Nov. 1 - Northfield, MN | Carleton College
Nov. 2 - Northfield, MN | St. Olaf College
Nov. 4 - St. Paul, MN | East Side Freedom Library
Nov. 5 - Minneapolis, MN | Cellular Cinema
Nov. 6 - Minneapolis, MN | University of Minnesota
Nov. 7 - Minneapolis, MN | Hamline University
Nov. 8 - Minneapolis, MN | Augsburg College
Nov. 9 - St. Paul, MN | Macalester College
Nov. 15 - New York City, NY | CUNY Grad Center
Nov. 17 - Philadelphia, PA | Lightbox Film Center
Nov. 20 - Annapolis, MD | US Naval Academy

Universal Horror: Classic monster movies at the Michigan Theater

Sun, 10/01/2017 - 1:30pm by christopherporter

In the '30s and '40s, the most horrific words in Hollywood were "Dracula," "Frankenstein," "Mummy," and the names of the iconic creatures that implanted themselves into the popular culture.

For people who love cinema, an even more horrific word reigns supreme in Hollywood's marketing lexicon today: universe. This is the idea that several movies can be grouped together in order to manipulate ticket buyers into seeing films they might otherwise skip. We have the Marvel Universe (Avengers, Iron Man, Thor) at Disney and the DC Universe (Man of Steel, Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, Wonder Woman) at Warner Brothers, and Universal attempted to launch their "Dark Universe" last summer with the Tom Cruise vehicle The Mummy. Yes, Universal plans to make a series of films connecting their classic monsters.

Thankfully, the Michigan Theater comes to the rescue every Monday in October by offering up the Classic Monsters series featuring the Universal originals: 1931's Dracula (Oct. 2, 7 pm) and Frankenstein (Oct. 9, 7 pm), 1935's Bride of Frankenstein (Oct. 9:45 pm), 1932's The Mummy (Oct. 16, 7 pm), and 1941's The Wolf Man (Oct. 23, 7 pm).

"Horror movies are about the things that bump in the night," says Michigan Theater Senior Film Programmer Brian Hunter. Looking at Tom Cruise's underperforming Mummy gives us a glimpse of how these classic tales of terror refuse to adhere to modern blockbuster conventions. "There's nothing really creepy about it. It's a Mission Impossible movie with a supernatural storyline," Hunter explains.

Many people who have never seen these black and white classics probably think they actually have. Considering how many movies utilized their ideas and iconography, it's easy to see how these groundbreaking works have been taken for granted by so many. It's not just familiarity that breeds complacency, it's also about these landmark achievements never quite getting their due as classic films, not just classic horror movies. "Up until five years ago there were probably a lot of really terrible prints of these floating around," Hunter says. "What you saw was a scratchy image and a hissy soundtrack that doesn't do the films justice."

The Michigan is showing these films in sparkling new 2K transfers, and Hunter believes they will allow people to discover the richness they possess to this day. Hunter argues that people think they know Bride of Frankenstein because of Elsa Lanchester's definitive updo, but unless you see the film, the inventiveness of the entire project, not just the hair, goes unnoticed. Hunter hopes that the series will show people "how progressive these movies were for the time they were made." From the sexy, predatory seducer of Dracula, to the attempts of science to alter nature in Frankenstein, to the split-personality nightmare of The Wolf Man, the elemental themes these movies address speak to us as clearly as ever.

Sitting in a dark theater, surrounded by strangers, and letting a film play on your dread of the unknown is an experience that no home viewing could replicate, no matter how good the movie. Universal will do its best to drag its most revered titles into the 21st century with the Dark Universe, but the Michigan Theater is giving you the chance to reconnect with the original films' greatness first hand.

If all of that isn't a good enough reason, then by all means see each Universal Monsters classic so that you can appreciate all of the jokes and references in the cult classic The Monster Squad (Oct. 30, 7 pm), which caps the entire series.

Perry Seibert is a movie lover, freelance writer, and founding member of the Detroit Film Critics Society. Follow him on Twitter @Perrylovesfilm.

The Classic Monsters series shows are "Dracula" (Oct. 2, 7 pm), "Frankenstein" (Oct. 9, 7 pm), "Bride of Frankenstein" (Oct. 9:45 pm), "The Mummy" (Oct. 16, 7 pm), "The Wolf Man" (Oct. 23, 7 pm), and "The Monster Squad" (Oct. 30, 7 pm). Visit michtheater.org for information and tickets.

Theatrical Projections: Major plays and operas are just a movie ticket away

Fri, 09/22/2017 - 7:35pm by christopherporter

If you don’t live in New York City or London, and perhaps don’t have the money to go to The Metropolitan Opera or the National Theatre on a regular basis, you might feel like you’re missing out on some amazing arts events.

But HD broadcasts of productions from these venues to movie theatres around the world are a way for people all around the world to see legendary works like La Bohéme, Hamlet, Everyman,Der Rosenkavalier, and more, performed by legendary performers such as Helen Mirren, Benedict Cumberbatch, Ralph Fiennes, Plácido Domingo, Vittorio Grigolo, and Renée Fleming. NT Live has been broadcasting shows from the National and other theaters in London to movie theaters since 2009, and The Met: Live in HD has been broadcasting operas since 2006.

“We want to make the arts more accessible to everyone,” said Ray Nutt, CEO of Fathom Events, the entertainment content provider that often broadcasts live theatre, music, and dance events to movie theatres, and that broadcasts The Met: Live in HD. “The Met: Live in HD provides an opportunity to see it right from their hometown at an affordable price," Nutt said. "Not only do they get to see the production live, but they see every detail, multiple camera angles, and even get behind-the-scenes access that is not available anywhere else.”

UMS is the Michigan Theater’s partner in bringing the National Theatre broadcasts to Ann Arbor. Mallory Shea, marketing and media relations coordinator for UMS, said she appreciates the chance to share these productions on a wider scale. “These incredible performances would normally require a trip overseas, but it's wonderful to be able to expand our offerings and provide an opportunity for local theater lovers to experience them right here in our own backyard,” Shea said.

This season, both the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts and the National Theatre Live broadcasts will have intriguing offerings. Quality 16 on Jackson Road and The Michigan Theatre on Liberty Street will be showing most of them; here are some of the most exciting.

The Met: Live in HD at Quality 16

The Metropolitan Opera’s broadcast season begins with Norma, Vincenzo Bellini’s 1831 tragedy about a druid priestess whose love of a Roman soldier is tested in myriad ways. American-Canadian soprano Sondra Radvanovsky, a Met mainstay who has made a name for herself particularly in 18th Century Italian opera, stars as Norma, and faces off against soprano superstar Joyce DiDonato as Adalgisa, her rival in love. Celebrated tenor Joseph Calleja stars as Pollione, the object of their affection. October 7, 12:55 pm.

One of Mozart’s most famous operas, Die Zauberflöte or The Magic Flute, is brought to life in this enchanting production directed by Julie Taymor. Metropolitan Opera music director Emeritus James Levine conducts. October 14, 12:55 pm.

“One of the titles I’m personally most excited about this season is The Exterminating Angel in November,” said Nutt. “The opera is getting its American premiere at the Met this season and is based on the acclaimed 1962 film of the same name. It’s a surreal fantasy about a dinner party from which the guests can’t escape -- the premise is very intriguing and we know the Met Opera will do the piece fabulously.” November 18, 12:55 pm.

Puccini’s powerful and stirring Tosca appears this season with a new production from Sir David McVicar. Sonya Yoncheva makes her debut in this role as tortured singer Tosca, and Vittorio Grigolo and Bryn Terfel as rivals for her love. January 27, 12:55 pm.

Franco Zeffirelli’s production of Puccini’s classic, sweeping drama/romance, La Boheme, returns to the Met stage with some fresh faces: Sonya Yoncheva as Mimi, and Michael Fabiano as Rudolfo. February 24, 12:55 pm.

Mozart’s sweeping comedy/romance Cosi fan tutte examines the fragility of faithfulness and devotion. Kelli O’Hara, the Tony-winning Broadway star who made her Metropolitan Opera debut in 2015’s The Merry Widow stars as Despina. March 31, 12:55 pm.

Legendary tenor/baritone Plácido Domingo returns to the Met once more alongside Sonya Yoncheva in Luisa Miller, an oft-forgotten Verdi piece about a father’s love and worry for his child as she falls in love. April 14, 12:55 pm.

To close out its season, the Met will bring Massenet’s Cendrillion, a Cinderella retelling, to its stage for the very first time. Met superstar Joyce DiDonato stars as Cendrillion alongside Alice Coote, Kathleen Kim, and Stephanie Blythe.

NT Live at the Michigan Theater

Follies, Stephen Sondheim’s classic musical about aging dames of the Ziegfeld Follies remembering and reliving their former glory days comes to the National Theatre in a highly anticipated revival starring Imelda Staunton, Tracy Bennett, and Janie Dee. February 11, 7 pm.

Angels in America, Tony Kushner’s epic, Pulitzer Prize-winning story set against a backdrop of the AIDS crisis, probes the lives of New Yorkers, gay, straight, Jewish, African-American, and others, and connects them all with masterful insights on death, religion, sexuality, marriage, politics, and more. This celebrated revival stars Nathan Lane, Andrew Garfield, James McArdle, and Russell Tovey. Part 1 is September 24 at 6 pm, and part two is October 1 at 6 pm.

Simon Stone directs Billie Piper in an Olivier Award-winning performance as the title character in Yerma, desperate in her longing to have a child. This revival of the 1934 drama by Frederico García Lorca is set in modern times. Note: This production uses strobe lighting. October 22, 7 pm.

Ben Wishaw, David Morrissey, and Michelle Fairley bring to life Julius Caesar, Shakespeare’s timeless tragedy of greed, power, and politics, in this new production directed by Nicholas Hytner. May 6 at 7 pm.

Emily Slomovits is an Ann Arbor freelance musician, theater artist, and writer. She plays music with her father and uncle (aka Gemini) and others, is a member of Spinning Dot Theatre, and has performed with The Encore Musical Theatre Company, Performance Network, and Wild Swan Theater.

For more information about these broadcasts, visit michtheater.org, ums.org, goodrichqualitytheaters.com, fathomevents.com, metopera.org, and nationaltheatre.org.uk.

"The Zodiac Killer" comes alive in 4K at the Michigan Theater

Wed, 09/20/2017 - 11:30am by christopherporter

Many filmmakers have tackled the true crime saga of the Zodiac Killer, who stalked Northern California and stole national headlines in the late '60s, but only one has been brave enough to try to face the murderer himself. That distinction belongs to Tom Hanson, an L.A. fast-food-magnate-turned-amateur-director who made his 1971 debut, The Zodiac Killer, with the express purpose of catching the actual Zodiac.

When he wasn’t managing a successful pizza restaurant chain, Hanson moonlighted as an actor in exploitation movies like the '68 female biker flick The Hellcats. He was inspired to make The Zodiac Killer by two wildly disparate motives: to make a quick buck and to rid society of evil by luring the real Zodiac to one of the film's screenings. Given the Zodiac's apparent love of media attention, exemplified by his frequent cryptic letters to the San Francisco Chronicle, Hanson presumed the killer would be vain enough to show up to a screening of a movie bearing his namesake.

For the film's premiere, Hanson devised what has to be the weirdest raffle in history. He convinced Kawasaki to donate a motorcycle as the grand prize. Audience members who attended the opening night screening at San Francisco's RKO Golden Gate Theater on April 7, 1971, were asked to write their answers to "I think the Zodiac kills because ..." and drop their entries into a large box. What the unsuspecting filmgoers didn't know was that there was a volunteer crouched inside the box comparing their handwriting with samples of the Zodiac's and that there were goons (including members of the film's cast) waiting in the wings ready to apprehend and interrogate anyone whose penmanship raised a red flag. Hanson obviously never nabbed the Zodiac, but his low-rent retelling of the infamous murders still looms large among exploitation movie lovers.

The Zodiac Killer was recently restored in 4K and released on Blu-Ray by Austin, Texas' American Genre Film Archive (AGFA) in partnership with Something Weird Video. The Michigan Theater will screen the film on Sunday, Sept. 24, to celebrate Art House Theater Day, and we chatted with AGFA Director and The Zodiac Killer superfan Joe Ziemba about his fondness for the film, how he got the opportunity to restore it, and whether or not Tom Hanson knows the true identity of the Zodiac.

Q: I just watched this movie for the first time last night, and I can't wait to see it again on the big screen because there's so much to unpack. How would you describe The Zodiac Killer to someone who has never seen it?
A: For most of us, when our community is being threatened by something we watch the news, make sure our doors are locked, make sure our loved ones are safe, but we don't take action. This is one of the only times in the history of the world where someone actually picked up a movie camera and said, "I'm going to save my community by making a movie and catching a serial killer." I think that pretty much says it all. And it was also made by a guy who ran pizza restaurants, which is completely insane. The level of thinking that goes into making this movie, imagine what came out of it and you get The Zodiac Killer.

Q: How did you first discover this film, and what about it appealed to you?
A: I first discovered it through [exploitation film distributor]
Something Weird. Something Weird for me was one of the big entryways into movies when I was in college. A lot of my friends in college were into Godard and art films and important cinema. I thought that stuff was cool and I enjoyed it to a certain extent, but when I walked into a video store called That's Rentertainment, which was in the town I went to college in, I saw on the back wall they had this huge display that said: "Something Weird." It was all these neon, dayglo colored VHS boxes and I was just completely taken with that and the insane titles of these movies that I'd never heard of. Something Weird really became, at that young age, a film school for me. Along with books like Incredibly Strange Films and the Psychotronic Video Guide, that became how I learned about movies.

The Zodiac Killer was a little later after that because I think The Town That Dreaded Sundown, where there's true crime happening and someone's trying to document it but also add their own spice to the movie so that it will attract people with exploitation. I find that endlessly fascinating. I like the idea that filmmakers take reality and bend it to their needs, and make something completely new about it. The Zodiac Killer looked so cool to me. I actually didn't even know the first time I saw it that it was made as an attempt to catch him. I just thought it was an exploitation movie. But I loved the movie when I first watched it. When I found out the story about it, it just got even better.

Q: You interviewed Tom Hanson for the Blu-Ray special features. Do you have a favorite anecdote regarding the production of the film or any of the screenings where Hanson tried to catch the real killer?
A: Before we even started filming I said, "How did you come up with these ideas, because they're so outrageous? Did you have some insight with the FBI to know the things that you were putting in this movie about the Zodiac?" And he looked at me, took a sip of coffee, and said, "It's all made up shit." It could not have been a better response. It was so perfect.

Q: What does he think about his movie taking on a second life all these years later?
A: He always saw this as a business opportunity. It was never about art. It was never about making a movie. It was just about making money. His hope was that he would make a couple of million dollars off of it and then keep making movies where he could catch criminals with them. He's always a business-minded person, especially from having a huge pizza restaurant empire in L.A. He doesn't care about what people look into the movie or what they think about its place in history. His first thought is always, "We can still catch this guy." I think he's sincere. He never wavered from that when we talked with him. I think that's totally amazing. After all these years he still feels that it maybe still has the power to catch the Zodiac.

Q: I've read that he believes he may have actually identified the Zodiac.
A: We talked a lot about that. There was a guy at one of his screenings that he thought had matched the profile of the Zodiac. So he had his guys jump out of the freezer at the box office and pull this guy into the bathroom and punch him a few times. One of the guys was Bob Jones, who plays Grover in the movie.

So they were interrogating him, but they ended up just letting him go because they had nothing on him. There were all these different clues that lined up. Apparently, he looked just like the "Wanted" photo. [Hanson] was so convinced that it was this guy that for the next 15 or 20 years he kind of followed this guy around and kept tabs on him. It's mind-blowing, the things that he would do to follow this guy, breaking into his storage facilities … just insane stuff. He really believes to this day that that's him and that the guy is still out there.

One of the last things we asked him before he left was, "So you know who this guy is? So who is it? Tell us?" And he's like, "That's privileged information for me and the FBI only." To this day he's still got that showmanship about him, which is very cool.

Q: Watching the movie already knowing the backstory, I still questioned how sincere his motives were.
A: He found a way to do both, which is the perfect ideal for exploitation. If you can make a ton of money off of exploiting something and do something good for society then you're winning. Very few exploitation filmmakers, if any, did that. "I wanna make money, and I want to catch this fucker," that's what he'd say.

Q: The statement that opens the film was written by Paul Avery, who famously reported on the Zodiac case for the San Francisco Chronicle. Did Hanson actually have any interaction with him? How much was Avery actually involved with the film?
A: That's legit. He actually met a lot with Paul Avery. And he was with Avery around the time that the Zodiac or someone left that sign that said, "Boo! I'm watching you," by Paul Avery's hotel room.

We asked [Hanson] about that. We said, "You were so close to it. Weren't you getting scared?" He said that Paul Avery was scared to death, as he should be. But Tom Hanson said he was never scared because he was always packing a .38. He was like, "The Zodiac never had the guts to come up to me, and if he did I'd just shoot him."

Q: How did AGFA acquire this film, and how much work did you have to put into restoring it?
A: When Mike Vraney of Something Weird Video passed away in 2014 after a really long battle with lung cancer, and his creative partner Lisa Petrucci was left with the company. We were at a crossroads where AGFA was purely an archive to keep genre prints safe and to make them available for theaters. We were very antsy to take it to the next level. We thought, "Why don't we start a theatrical distribution arm and a home video arm?"

We did a Kickstarter to get a 4K film scanner for AGFA, and that was successful. A little before that we had started talking with Lisa about what would be available from Something Weird. She gave us a huge spreadsheet with her whole archive on it and said, "This is all available to AGFA. Let me know what you want." I opened it and was thinking to myself, "Please let The Zodiac Killer be on this list. Please let it be here." It was, and I was super excited. I was like, "That's the first one. That's the one we gotta do."

As far as actually doing the transfer, there's only one print in existence. I think Tom Hanson said maybe 20 were actually struck, but they're all lost. The original negative is lost. He has no idea where they are, mostly because he had a couple of bad distribution deals and the distributors took everything. There's one print that was blown up from the 16mm negative, and that's our master. Luckily the print itself was in really nice shape. It was mostly [AGFA Chief Archivist] Sebastian del Castillo doing color grading and cleanup work, and I do the audio work for AGFA.

We really don't believe in making things pristine. We want the film feel to be there. We want to replicate the theatrical experience as much as possible. We like these prints to bloom. We don't want to add anything to them, but we don't like to take away. That's what we did with Zodiac. It pretty much replicates seeing it in a theater in 1971 as close as we can.

Q: I'm excited to check out AGFA's second release, Tom Savini's long-lost Effects, and I hope we can get a screening of it in Ann Arbor soon. What else do you have in the pipeline?
A: We have two more [Blu-Ray releases] this year. On October 17 is Bat Pussy, the world's first X-rated parody movie. It's basically what happens when a porn producer has $5 and wants to make a version of the Batman television show himself. It feels the most like a movie that came from another dimension of all time. It feels like it was made by extraterrestrials. We're really excited about that movie. And then on November 21 we have Ed Wood's The Violent Years, which is a movie that we really love. In January we have The Sword and the Claw The Dragon Lives Again!," which screens at 8 pm. Ticket packages for both films are $14 for non-members and $11 for members. Ticket info can be found at michigantheater.org.

Right on the Chin: Bruce Campbell on B movies, "Evil Dead," and hosting a game show

Fri, 08/18/2017 - 9:00am by christopherporter

Actor Bruce Campbell has had some iconic roles in his life, but at age 65 he seems to have finally landed on the role he was truly born to play: that of a game show host.

The Royal Oak native is best known as the cocky zombie-dismemberer Ash Williams in the three original Evil Dead movies and the more recent Starz series Ash vs. Evil Dead, and as the washed-up military man Sam Axe on Burn Notice. But after hosting a charity game show for the military in 2015, Campbell was inspired to start pitching what he calls "a game show for geeks": Last Fan Standing. The comic con-themed streaming platform CONtv produced 10 episodes of the show, which may now be viewed online. Campbell is clearly in his element on the show, mercilessly razzing his contestants, handing out dollar bills from his own pocket to those who do well, and generally reveling in his role as an elder statesman -- or perhaps just a dorky old dad -- of nerd culture.

Campbell has continued Last Fan Standing in select promotional appearances for his newly released second autobiography, Hail to the Chin: Further Confessions of a B Movie Actor. Following up on his 2001 New York Times bestseller, If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor, Campbell's latest tell-all proves that he's still just as willing to turn his smart-aleck sense of humor on himself. From his tale of wrecking a tank while on a USO tour in Iraq to his epic story of almost getting cut from his minuscule role in Evil Dead director Sam Raimi's Oz the Great and Powerful, Campbell maintains a level head, a sense of humor, and a true passion for his business.

Campbell will appear at the Michigan Theater on Wednesday, August 30, to host Last Fan Standing and talk about his latest autobiographical book. We chatted with him about game shows, changing perceptions of B movies, and whether he really cares about reviews.

Q: So we're excited that you're doing Last Fan Standing here in Ann Arbor.
A: Heck yeah. It's at the Michigan Theater.

Q: Are you excited about that?
A: We want to get the word out. We want the savages to show up. It's a fun show. One of the best parts about it that people need to know is nobody special gets to go up on stage. Anybody who walks in that theater gets a clicker, so anybody who walks in could take it all. It's really fun. We've done the show enough now that we know you can have come-from-behind victories, neck-and-neck finishes. The audience tends to pick someone that they like or sympathize with, especially if they're losing. So they'll get -- not physical, but they'll get involved. It can be a lot of fun, where some schmo not thinking really much of anything was going to happen winds up winning it all. And they're going to get an amazing certificate. I mean, this thing is so worth 10 cents that they're going to love it.

Q: How do you actually pick the four contestants who will be on stage?
A: You do some preliminary rounds, and then you pick the best four, and they come up. So the ones who come up are the ones who are the best in the building.

Q: The whole Last Fan Standing concept is still pretty new. It just got started a few years ago. But you've been such a natural at the whole game-show host role right from the start.
A: Well, I'm ready for it now. You've got to get to that Wink Martindale phase in your life. I wear the dumb outfits. I'm a middle-aged man now. It's time to torment younger people. It's just fun to do that. It's fun to mess with fans. And honestly, it's a very fan-friendly game show. We ask questions like, "How much does Thor's hammer weigh?" You're not going to find that question on Jeopardy! -- that boring old loser show that didn't do anything for anybody. Kidding, kidding.

Q: So are you doing Last Fan Standing on other dates this tour or is this a one-off?
A: Seventeen out of 35 cities. LFSlive.com. Come and see it. It's fun. We're trying to give people another little fun activity to do, rather than watch me sign some smelly old book. They can get a smelly old book and they can play this wonderful new show.

Q: As we can tell from the stories you tell in your books and your personality on Last Fan Standing, you have such a penchant for practical jokes and just generally making fun of people. Where does that sense of humor originate from? Does that come from your family?
A: My dad was kind of like that. My dad was an ad guy, so he was kind of a glad-hander. He worked for an ad agency called Campbell Ewald, but it was no relation to him or any of us. But my dad took every advantage of that.

Q: So, you're on your third book now. Do you enjoy the writing process?
A: I love it because, as an actor, the world treats you like you're a spoiled child, like you're kind of an idiot, like you can't really do anything, which is partially true. But if you're an author they actually treat you with more respect, and I kind of like it. And I like the creative process. There aren't as many chefs in the kitchen. It's kind of more of a personal event that takes place. If you really want something to stay, you can talk to your editor and work something out. A lot of times in a movie, if an executive has a woody for some scene or he has a bug up his butt, that scene is going to go. You'll never see it again. So there's a lot more control that funders exert when you're in movies, probably because it's more expensive. I think if a book costs $200 million to make, I'd have more people in this car that I'm traveling with. I'd have another car behind us full of nervous studio executives, making sure I didn't say something stupid at this book signing. The stakes are just different. I don't know. I just like it. It's a very pleasing process. And you know, movies can be an absolute pain in the ass to make. The writing is just not as gnarly.

Q: How long did it take you to assemble this latest book?
A: This was about three years. I knew we had to do a slightly different approach or I knew it was never going to get done. I hooked up with the guy who wrote the book with me, Craig Sanborn, and I said, "Craig, I'm afraid this book's not going to get done and I want to get it written. There's a lot of stuff I want to write about, but I need help." So I went up to Portland, Oregon, where he lives, and we just sat down for a week and recorded everything. All the stories, everything I could remember, I'd tell it in as much detail as I could. Then he transcribed it all and we'd each take a whack at a chapter and share them. It sped up the process tremendously and it was very helpful, so I'm tempted to do that again. I took that cue from Sammy Davis Jr., of all people. He wrote a book the first time, and he had other books he wanted to write, but he started to get really busy. He was like, "Crap! How do I do this?" So he found a married couple that were fans of his, and he could pitch his ideas to them and they would often do the first drafts and he would come in and give them notes and stuff. So I thought, "Hey, I could do that," because it was either that or not write the book. And I wanted to get this book out.

Q: You note with some irony in the book that the Evil Dead franchise has finally received critical acclaim as of Ash vs. Evil Dead, which premiered 23 years after the final Evil Dead movie. What do you think it is about the new series that finally has critics on your side after all this time?
A: It's not cheesy anymore. You can't make fun of the special effects because they're actually really good now. You can't make fun of the crappy photography because it's actually really good, really trained professionals. We're better actors than we were back then. We have more experience to bring. We're trying to work with good directors and good writers, trying to be very fan-friendly. But mercifully, the reviews have been much better than we normally get. Normally the Evil Dead movies, about half the reviews suck. It's just the law of averages. But this time I think we're about 98 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. It's us and, like, House of Cards and Game of Thrones, crap like that. The response from the fans has been just great. I'm really grateful that they showed up because you just never know.

But television succeeds by being popular. Your show has to be popular. And we're coming up against what I think might be the limits of our fandom because, yeah, they're watching it. But how many fans are there, actually, of the Evil Dead movies? They've always been these little cult movies. Are they meant to be a mainstream thing? It remains to be seen. If they want to finish after

Q: What does critical acclaim actually mean to you at this point in your career? You've made a lot of movies that you've had a lot of fun with -- say, the Evil Dead movies -- but critics didn't respond to them. How much significance does it even have to you to get a positive critical response at this point?
A: Unlike some actors, I actually do read the reviews because I do want to hear what people say. But I've learned to temper my response to them much more now. I know that with a great review, I know that the show's not that great. And with a really crappy review, I know that it's not that bad. I always tend to find the truth somewhere in the middle. But over time you can figure out if reviews are going to be generally good or generally bad. Look, it's nice to have a good review.

Q: How does it feel for you to be playing the character of Ash on a regular basis again, now 25 years after Army of Darkness came out? Did you ever expect you were going to be doing that?
A: Uhhh, weird. It feels weird. But what's great about it is I've got 25 more years under my belt to be able to work with that character. Now, after having a few more tricks in my bag, I can make Ash a better character. I feel like George Lucas going back to fix my stuff. I can go back and fix Ash.

Q: You did very briefly play Ash at the end of the 2013 Evil Dead remake. How did that come about? Was there a plan for bringing Ash into a sequel or did you just intend it as a fun Easter egg?
A: No, that was

Q: You talk in the book about how all movies are basically B movies now in the sense of subject material. But you also express this great fondness for the people who used to make B movies prior to that modern shift, the way they combined passion with sometimes a questionable level of competence. Now that you've got some of the most experienced people in the industry making material that would have once been considered B movies, how does that change the nature of those films?
A: It makes them more mainstream. When it looks like a quality piece -- when it looks good, sounds good, and the actors know what's going on, with decent writing -- even if it's cult-like in its material, it still makes it more mainstream. And we can thank shows like The Walking Dead. They have helped make horror mainstream. You know, horror used to be one rung above porno. If you were in a horror movie in the '70s, like I was, that's a pretty shitty place to start. And all the porn that I did, no one will ever see that. I brought all the negatives back. I destroyed it. So I won't have to worry about that.

But conventions used to be guys only. Now 50 percent of the clientele is women, so women have come literally out of the closet to support horror and sci-fi. Women didn't go to horror movies. Women didn't have tattoos. Now they're all sleeved. I've never seen more tattooed chicks. One chick has crossed shotguns right over her pubic region and it says, "Hail to the King," right above her pubes. I'm like, "When some guy is having sex with her, what the hell does that look like?" And he's got to know that he's not tattooed on her. I'm tattooed on her. I hope that I've screwed up some sex lives.

Q: Your friend Sam Raimi is one of those guys who went from being one of the original B-movie guys to being one of those top-of-the-line directors making B material on a big studio budget. How do you think his movies have changed as a result?
A: Well, they're not as crazy or offensive. When you start spending all that money, you're going to shave some of the edges off your movies. No one's going to die too horrible of a death. Nothing's going to be too ugly or too gross or too violent. When you get into the big leagues there's a lot more chefs. He's got to manage a lot more opinions. So it gets a little more tricky. There definitely are some downsides to that whole thing, being in the "A" world.

Q: Do you miss the crazier, more offensive nature that those movies used to have before they went more mainstream?
A: It's both. I miss them a little bit. What I miss is the people who made movies in the '70s, where it was all very physical and you physically spliced and edited. You had to rent the equipment. You couldn't buy it because it was too expensive and too difficult to operate. You had to have insurance and all that stuff. Now you go to frickin' KMart and make a movie. It's all digital. It's so much easier than it used to be. But what that used to do is it kept the riff-raff out. If you weren't really dedicated to making that movie, it wasn't going to happen. Now any schmo with a video camera can go out and make a movie, which is good. On one hand, it's very empowering. But on the other hand, now lazy bastards can make movies. And that pisses me off. It used to just be industrious, hard-working people. Now you can be a schmo and make a movie. Which is fine.

Q: Lastly, are you foreseeing a third autobiography to round out the Chin trilogy?
A: I am. Fifteen years from now I'll do the final one. It'll be called The Final Confessions of a B Movie Actor. When I'm an old gummer on the front porch I'll write that one.

Patrick Dunn is an Ann Arbor-based freelance writer and the managing editor of Concentrate.

Bruce Campbell will host "Last Fan Standing" at the Michigan Theater on Wednesday, August 30, at 7:30 pm. Ticket prices range from $35 to $65. All tickets include a signed hardcover copy of Hail to the Chin: Further Confessions of a B Movie Actor. Campbell will sign books after the event. For more information, visit michtheater.org.

Red Scare: Glenn Frankel's "High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic"

Thu, 06/22/2017 - 9:30am by christopherporter

Each year we hear about how political the Oscars are, but this may have never been truer than in 1953 when High Noon scored big with critics and moviegoers the year before (and earned seven nominations), but also found itself in the crosshairs of the House Un-American Activities Committee.

“There was a campaign to make sure (High Noon screenwriter Carl Foreman) didn’t win, because that would be too embarrassing,” said Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Frankel, who just published High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic.

Frankel will talk about his latest book at the Westgate branch of the Ann Arbor District Library on Friday, June 23 from 7-8:30 pm.

High Noon, now considered an American classic, starred Gary Cooper as an Old West marshal (William Kane) who’s about to retire and leave town with his new, young, Quaker bride, Amy (Grace Kelly, in one of her first movie roles), when he receives news that a killer he caught and sent to prison has been released and is on his way back to town, on the noon train, to seek revenge, alongside three of his henchmen. Kane tries to form a posse, but as he makes his way around town, he quickly realizes that, despite his service to the town, no one is willing to stand with him.

There were some similarities between the initial four-page treatment for High Noon and a published short story by John Cunningham called “The Tin Star,” so Foreman purchased the story’s film rights. But when Foreman received a subpoena to appear before HUAC during the month-long filming of High Noon in fall 1951, the character of Will Kane secretly, but pointedly, evolved to become a fictional stand-in for Foreman, who found himself being abandoned by friends and colleagues in Hollywood.

“(Foreman) was careful not to tell anybody that or it would have killed the movie,” said Frankel. “But a couple sets of people figured it out. You had right-wingers like John Wayne and columnist Hedda Hopper doing the math of, Foreman was once a member of the Communist Party, he wrote High Noon, therefore, High Noon is a communist movie. That was their sense of how the world worked.”

But Foreman, who self-exiled to London after refusing to provide names to HUAC, wrote a letter to New York Times movie critic Bosley Crowther, who’d already sung High Noon’s praises in a review. “That next weekend, there was a Sunday weekend piece talking about the movie, saying that courage is what it was really about and that people in Hollywood could learn a lot about courage from watching High Noon,” said Frankel.

As is often true with McCarthy Era tales, a friendship came apart as High Noon was coming together and the rift was never mended. Producer Stanley Kramer built a highly successful independent production company, working alongside Foreman, whom he’d gotten to know while working in the Army’s film unit during World War II. High Noon, as it happens, was to be Kramer’s last indie production before jumping into a big contract with Columbia Pictures -- one last, quick, cheap hurrah -- but Foreman’s refusal to cooperate with HUAC caused a rift between him and Kramer. Even so, Kramer couldn’t kick Foreman off High Noon while it was still in production, for financing reasons.

The screenwriter emigrated to England before the movie’s release in theaters and the two men reportedly never spoke again.

“Kramer’s people didn’t want (Foreman) to win, and (director Fred) Zinnemann didn’t win,” said Frankel of the 1953 Oscar race. “Cooper won best actor, but he was part of Hollywood’s royalty, and a conservative, so even though he was an ally of Foreman’s, they were happy to support him. It also won best theme, best score, and best editing. So it won the safe ones, the easy ones. It didn’t win the ones that would have validated the movie. And that’s no accident. There was a lot of quiet campaigning going on.”

High Noon was distinctive for being a western that broke genre rules. It didn’t have beautiful landscapes, but instead had a gritty, documentary feel; there’s little action, until the iconic gunfight at the end; a woman saved her man, instead of vice versa; and at a time when most movies were in color, Zinnemann chose to film in black and white. Plus, before the movie even appeared in theaters, its opening theme, “Do Not Forsake Me,” was a huge hit.

So it had an awful lot going for it; but Foreman -- who, after two Oscar nominations for other films, had drawn more attention to himself -- had been part of the Communist Party more than a decade earlier, and that was enough to temper its success.

“The real attraction of the Communist Party, and the left in general, was during the Depression when things were breaking down and people were looking for answers,” said Frankel. “After the war, things began to change. The war ends, the Soviets develop the atomic bomb, a nuclear arms race gets underway, there’s brutal fighting in Korea -- by 1951, it’s hard to overestimate how much anxiety and fear of communism there was, and people in power exploited that.”

Frankel places some of the blame for HUAC’s successful, sustained reign of fear at journalists’ feet, but he also notes that politicians used what they’d gleaned about journalism’s conventions, parameters, and timelines to put their cause in an advantageous position.

This still occurs, of course. And in an interesting twist, conservative talking head Ann Coulter recently compared Donald Trump to none other than Cooper in High Noon.

“Works of pop culture can be used and abused in all kinds of ways,” said Frankel. “But it’s helpful to know where a work comes from. … I like writing about pop cultural history and its relationship to the larger culture, because I think we learn things from that, and it’s interesting to see how they interact.”

Jenn McKee is a former staff arts reporter for The Ann Arbor News, where she primarily covered theater and film events, and also wrote general features and occasional articles on books and music.

Glenn Frankel will talk about "High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic" at the Westgate branch of the Ann Arbor District Library on Friday, June 23 from 7-8:30 pm.

Back to the Future: Kevin Smokler, "Brat Pack America: A Love Letter to '80s Teen Movies"

Fri, 06/09/2017 - 2:00pm by christopherporter

The 2010 Academy Awards telecast devoted a nearly seven-minute chunk of airtime to commemorating the life and work of John Hughes, a director/writer/producer who never received an Oscar nod in his life.

Kevin Smokler's recent book, Brat Pack America: A Love Letter to '80s Teen Movies, explains why those Hughes films stand the test of time. But his interests run much wider than just Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Throughout his enjoyable survey of the decade, Smokler persuasively argues that, during this time, setting began to matter more to teen films than ever before.

Smokler will return to his original hometown of Ann Arbor on Monday, June 12, at 7 pm for an appearance at Literati. I spoke with the author about Reagan-era high-points as varied as Risky Business, The Lost Boys, and Back to the Future, as well as the Hughes canon.

Q: How did the concept of Brat Pack America come to you?
A: I had been wanting to do a book about '80s teen movies for a long time because I always saw them as a group, and not just because of John Hughes or because of the label Brat Pack that was unceremoniously given to this group of young actors. I had been an early teenager at that time and had recognized that there was a bumper crop of movies made about people my age and slightly older than me. I'm not the first person to come to that realization. The movies have been written about in one way or another several times, and several times admirably. I didn't quite see what I had to add to that story. So since that's usually where I begin most of my books -- having an idea off in the distance like the green light at the end of the dock -- I just sort of wander toward it and hope when I get there the path I've taken is clear, and I have something to report back once I get there.

In this particular case, I spent a lot of time with a stack of DVDs, and what I noticed is I kept circling back to this memory I had of my father, who had grown up in Detroit and really liked telling me and my brothers about all of the things that came from the middle of the country. One of those things was John Hughes; he was enormously proud of the fact that John Hughes was a Michigander and made all of his movies proudly about the Midwest. I remembered thinking to myself, you say "Chicago filmmaker" and you could say William Friedkin or John McNaughton, or a hundred other people, but in my mind, the first name that comes forth is John Hughes. So I started thinking about that and thinking about the movies at that time that were self-consciously about the places where they happened. One night, late into the night and three iced coffees to the wind, I scrawled "Brat Pack America" down on a pad and fell asleep. That's where the idea started from. I've always been an Americana buff, so I'm always trying to work the word "America" into the things I do and actually, in this case, it made sense.

Q: Your examination of the early hip-hop movies being specifically about New York was eye-opening.
A: I'm sort of dubious of culture writing that assumes a part is actually a whole so I think there are books that say, "I'm going to write about the indie-rock movement of the 1980s," and they say so up front, and they set their boundaries by that, and that's what they stick to. Then there are books that say the same thing but say, "I'm going to write about the music of the 1980s," but they only write about white guys with guitars. That's just sloppy at best, and at worst it's making a lot of assumptions. I was very careful not to assume an '80s teen movie meant John Hughes and his closest disciples because I think the category is much richer than that. When I went looking, there were these two strands that popped out at me, the doppelgangers of the John Hughes movies -- the dystopian dark comedies like Repo Man and Heathers, and also the early generation of hip-hop movies, because hip-hop was a young artform perpetuated by young people.

Q: One of my earliest moviegoing memories was walking down to the local one-screen theater in my hometown and being denied a ticket to see The Breakfast Club because it was rated R. It was the only Hughes film to have an R rating, and I was curious if you have any thoughts about that.
A: In my research about Hughes, and in talking to his family, it didn't come up all that often, that ratings were an issue. Hughes largely made movies with one or two studios. For someone who was a savvy businessman, he didn't have a whole lot of patience for or interest in the business of making movies. I think he dealt with studios as little as possible, and the agreement he had with them, even if it was unspoken, was largely that he would bring in something on time and on budget that they can use and make money on without spending a ton on marketing. He delivered on that promise over and over again.

I think when he wanted to do something that was more challenging, like The Breakfast Club, he, in fact, wanted to make The Breakfast Club first, but the studio sort of said, "How exciting is seeing a bunch of teenagers sit around all day going to be?" So he very smartly chose to make Sixteen Candles first, which is a lot more high concept and whose appeal is more straightforward. Not that Sixteen Candles was such a box office success, it wasn't, but it was proof of concept that Hughes was a self-sustaining unit who could do things his way and good actors wanted to work with him.

I think they [the studios] sort of counted on him to deliver the goods affordably. I don't think they worried too much about ratings. Maybe they just assumed that if the R rating was prohibitive for teenagers seeing The Breakfast Club in the theater it would bounce back on video, and it turned out it was a box office hit anyway.

Q: Have you rewatched these movies with kids?
A: I don't have kids, but I've watched them other people's kids, which has been pretty interesting. I watched both and Back to the Future with a friend's young teenagers, and the two things that jumped out at them are that the kind of bullying you see in The Karate Kid isn't done much anymore, at least not in their San Francisco public school world. It's more of the spreading vicious rumors on social media kind of bullying. The thing I have to say about Back to the Future is, the chronology was very confusing for them because to them 1985 is the past, and 1955 is the way past, so most of the time travel jokes were lost on them, and the social mores surrounding parents and kids were lost on them, too. I think they mostly thought it was funny, and the DeLorean was cool.

Q: I have two teenage girls, and I know the ones that speak to them as closely as they did to me at that age are The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller, both of those really work for them still.
A: I didn't notice this until I read some biographies, but John Hughes always operated from sort of an archetypal, slightly mythic, instead of grounded in realism, approach. He clearly makes use of lots of Hollywood archetypes. What is Sixteen Candles if not a Doris Day/Rock Hudson movie? What is Ferris Bueller if not On the Town but with high school students instead of sailors? I think the fact that those movies hold up is in part due to plots and tropes that have been with us since the beginning of moviemaking. Another part of it is due to John Hughes skill at being specific and archetypal and relatable and mythical at the same time.

Q: When you mentioned the time frame in Back to the Future it made me think of one of my favorite passages in your book about how Francis Ford Coppola's adaptation of S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders is a film shot in the '80s, set in the '60s, with the iconography of the '50s, from a master of the '70s.
A: And filmed like it was set in the '30s, like it was in CinemaScope like Gone With the Wind. I think a lot of that had to do with how young S.E. Hinton was when she wrote it. She was writing a book about her peers, it was published when she was 20, so she was doing on-the-ground reporting. It was not nostalgic when it was written. This may be me being elitist, I think because the book was set in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and not in some major urban area, I think the iconography is not the leading edge. There is a reference in some of S.E. Hinton's later work to hippie kids, but even though The Outsiders was published the same year as the Summer of Love and Sgt. Pepper, it feels like it comes from an earlier era. It was coincidence that the movie was made in the '80s, 15 years after it was published. That's when it came to Coppola's attention. He had kids just the right age to read the book in school. It did dovetail nicely with the fascination with cars with tailfins, and leather jackets and greasers that was part of the early '80s culture.

Q: After revisiting all of these movies doing research for the book, I'm curious what movie were you surprised by how your feelings toward it changed, either positively or negatively, since you saw them as a teenager.
A: The chapter on horror movies didn't make the final manuscript of this book. As a kid, I was too scared to go see horror movies, so I was shocked at how great a movie Halloween is. I just thought it would be trashy and cynical and gross, and I think Halloween is a masterstroke of modest budget filmmaking, of making something out of nothing. I think Halloween is genius. I remember being crazy about The Lost Boys, and I think The Lost Boys is now your basic teen vampire movies. It's only 90 minutes, so by the time it gets ridiculous, it's over. But I think it looks great; that's mostly Joel Schumacher's doing, and it makes spectacular use of Santa Cruz. There's been a dozen movies shot since in Sana Cruz and they all work to varying degrees, but when you go to the Yelp reviews of the Santa Cruz boardwalk nobody mentions Killer Klowns From Outer Space or Riding Giants or any of those movies; they all mention The Lost Boys. I don't think The Lost Boys is a great movie; it's a greatly produced movie. I think it looks great, and the use of setting is fantastic.

I think it really would have helped had I seen Gremlins at that age. I didn't. In retrospect, there's not much to it. It's fun, it's well cast, it's naively racist, which is annoying. Many Steven Spielberg acolytes at the time were playing with this vaguely racist idea of a poor helpless group of white kids menaced by a mean outside non-white force. Gremlins is an example of that; Adventures in Babysitting is an example of that. I don't think those movies were intentionally prejudiced, but they were playing with a lot of notions that seemed at best dated and at worst terribly closed-minded. I don't think those movies wear very well. And I'm not the kind of person who opposes showing kids movies with outdated ideas; it's a good excuse to have an honest conversation with them. But I think if your kid is watching Sixteen Candles and guffawing at Jake Ryan's date rape joke, that's a teachable moment.

Q: What's the best movie that you couldn't work into the book that you really wanted to?
A: Risky Business. I had a whole chapter that was fun to write, I hated to let it go, about Risky Business, Adventures in Babysitting, Midnight Madness, the whole kids-let-loose-on-the-big-city-at-night kind of movie. It was too similar to other chapters and the manuscript was too long and it had to go. Risky Business is one of my absolute favorite movies. I think that movie is fun to watch, it's a masterstroke of satire of '80s youth and ambition. It's sexy as hell. It's one of the most inspired scores in movie history.

Q: One of the most intriguing concepts of your book is that place matters. You really get at how these movies defined where they took place, and that was a necessary element to the overall story. I'm curious, post-Brat Pack America, what films do you see are worthy of a spot on that map?
A: I don't think they use place in exactly the same way. If we're just talking about teen movies, a movie like (2015's) Dope is a really interesting reconfiguring of the map of Los Angeles where working class black and Latino kids live. If Dope was made a decade before, it would take place in South Central. Dope, made in 2015, takes place in Inglewood. Very self-consciously Inglewood. That's not just the interest of the director -- who set his film The Wood (1999) there as well -- but also showing that sort of archetypal working-class black and Latino teenage story has moved there geographically. I think that's really interesting.

I think a movie like (2012's) The Perks of Being a Wallflower and (2015's) Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, which are both set in Pittsburgh, is infinitely more interesting having been set in Pittsburgh and is an exemplar of how Pittsburgh is the revitalized former rust belt city. Is it crucial those films take place in Pittsburgh? No. Does it say something interesting about what place Pittsburgh holds in our national consciousness? Yes. What other movies self-consciously takes place in Pittsburgh? The Deer Hunter. That's a totally different Pittsburgh than the one in Perks of Being a Wallflower. It says a lot about how far we've come that the last shot of Perks of Being a Wallflower is -- the music swells [David Bowie's "Heroes"] -- and they emerge from the Fort Pitt Tunnel and there they are driving into downtown Pittsburgh. If that movie was made in 1987, it would have them going the other way through the tunnel and driving away from downtown Pittsburgh.

In the '80s we were coming out of an era where moviemaking seemed like a very coastal thing and that was largely the interest of Coppola's generation of filmmakers. My argument in Brat Pack America is the opening of the image of growing up in America at this time. It becomes a life cycle event that happens all over America, not just in the Mid-Atlantic, the Northeast, and California. There's a democratizing effect on the stories of being young in America at that time. That becomes less necessary once A) It's done, and B) Once we have the Internet and we can travel further, faster in our minds without ever leaving home.

Perry Seibert is a movie lover, freelance writer, and founding member of the Detroit Film Critics Society. Follow him on Twitter @Perrylovesfilm.

Kevin Smokler will talk "Brat Pack America: A Love Letter to '80s Teen Movies" at Literati on Monday, June 12 at 7 pm. Read our previous interview with Smokler as part of a preview for the Michigan Theater's "Kids in America: '80s Teen Classics" series.