Tag: film

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When Imagination Perseveres

JV Hart, (SAM Photography)

James Von Allmen Hart, lovingly referred to as “JV” by his family and protégés, is the creative force behind several of our nation’s most prominent family films, including “Hook,” “Tuck Everlasting,” “Dracula,” and “August Rush.” Well before he began his career as a Hollywood screenwriter, he grew up on drive-in movies and Saturday matinees in Fort Worth, Texas. His whimsical childhood adventures and deep connection to his family helped to shape him into the great creative that he is today.

In 1952, when JV was 5 years old, his father built a two-story Cape Cod house overlooking several acres of land, called “the field” by him and his brother. “It became our fantasy world, our Neverland,” said JV. “We built forts, tree houses, slayed dragons, buried and unburied treasure. It was literally a field of dreams for the imagination.” It would be the place where, at only eleven years young, he would film his first eight-millimeter movie.

Every Saturday at 10 a.m., JV’s mother would drop him and his brother off at the Gateway Theater, a classic Art Deco style cinema with a large marquee and tall neon sign. “For 25 cents we got a truckload of cartoons, two serial installments like Flash Gordon and Commando Cody, and then a double feature,” said JV. These Saturday mornings would serve as the foundation for his future creative endeavors in the film industry.

There is something so extraordinarily authentic about the characters that JV dreams up. “There is always part of me in everything I write,” he said. Though JV attributes this iconic authenticity to letting his characters, rather than his pen, take the lead, it is obvious that there is a tremendous connection between writer and character. Take, for example, Peter Banning of Hart’s quintessential swashbuckler adventure film, “Hook.” When asked which character in the picture he relates to most, it’s no surprise that it is Peter Banning, the grown-up version of Peter Pan. Banning’s childlike wonder is nearly a mirror image of JV’s own disposition.

(SAM Photography)

“Certainly the grown-up Peter Banning who pursued success at the expense of his family came from my personal fears about losing [my] imagination as an adult and missing [my] children’s milestones.” This idea deeply resonated with Dustin Hoffman, Robin Williams, and Bob Hoskins, who marvelously acted in “Hook,” and Steven Spielberg, the film’s director.

Always on the lookout for a good idea to turn into a story, JV credits his family with providing him with the most inspiration. After all, it was a game of “What If” in 1985 at the dinner table with his son, Jake, then 6 years old, that inspired JV to develop “Hook.”

“This is now part of our family mythology as Jake, now grown up and one of my writing partners, claims he does not recall this evening. It went something like this:

Jake: Hey Dad, did Peter Pan ever grow up?

Dad: Now that’s a really dumb question. (Good Parenting.) Of course he didn’t grow up. He was the boy who couldn’t grow up.

Jake: (Defiant.) Yeah, but what if Peter Pan grew up?”

As soon as he asked the question, something clicked. Jake had unlocked the code of the Peter Pan story that so many talents in Hollywood had been trying to crack.

“We cobbled together the story based on Jake’s innocent and brilliant question. Captain Hook would kidnap grown-up Peter Pan’s kids and force the adult Pan to return to Neverland with all his adult hangups, and having forgotten how to fly (since all adults do), and having to face his old nemesis Captain Hook in order to save his kids.”

The next day, JV wrote a story treatment and called his agent, who then shopped the project around. Every producer and studio passed. The following years were misery for JV as “Hook” was, in his own words, “the best idea [he] had ever stolen from [his] kids.” His family remained ever supportive; they tried lifting JV’s spirits by gifting him with Peter Pan themed presents at holidays and birthdays.

Finally, the year 1989 brought a break. A producer read the script and believed it to be one of huge potential. The script was then taken directly to Robin Williams and Dustin Hoffman, who attached themselves immediately. And the rest is history.

“Hook” went on to generate over $300 million at the box office and is globally known as one of the most exemplary American family films of all time. He explains, “I never would have written ‘Hook’ had I not been a father with Jake and Julia to inspire me.”

JV is constantly preparing new content and brainstorming new ideas in order to bring more joy to the world. Of all the lines he has ever written, one of his favorites is, “Music is proof that God exists in the Universe.” This comes from his Oscar nominated film, “August Rush.” The picture traces the life of a boy (played by Freddie Highmore) who uses his musical talent as a clue to find his birth parents.

When reflecting on the important themes that are artistically woven into his works, JV believes Americans should pay most attention to “Tuck Everlasting.” The story of Winnie Foster, a girl on the cusp of maturity who must ultimately decide to live forever or let her life continue as planned, instills in the audience a sense of the importance of a life well lived on one’s own terms. “Don’t be afraid of death, be afraid of the unlived life,” said JV. “You don’t have to live forever, you just have to live.”

JV Hart with filmmakers Rachael (R) and Laura Doukas. The Doukas sisters are working on turning their award-winning short into a feature film, “The Ryan Express.” The story is about a boy with autism who loses his right to play on his little league team after a violent outburst, working on building a time machine in his bedroom so he can go back in time and apologize.  SAM Photography)

Rachael Doukas and Laura Doukas are sisters and filmmakers currently working their first feature film, “The Ryan Express,” based on their award-winning short, “Rocket Man.”

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Arts & Letters

The Moral Certainty of Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Rope’

(Shutterstock)

Director and producer Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 masterpiece, “Rope,” begins deceptively, with fine lilting music and scenes of an idyllic New York City block. A woman walks her baby in a stroller, a car glides down a one-way street, and a policeman escorts two boys through the light traffic. Despite omnipresent brick, glass, and concrete, the view is almost bizarrely pastoral.

Then as the credits finish, a fierce scream is heard, but all too briefly. The scene changes and two young men in a plush Manhattan apartment are strangling a third.

“Strangulation has more vivid pictorial qualities,” Hitchcock explained in macabre detail. “It is considerably more horrifying to watch a man struggle and strain under the agonizing pressure of an effective throttling, than to see one slump and flow with bullets in his midriff or a shiv between his ribs.”

Their task completed, the two young men stuff the dead body into a chest. Exhausted and exhilarated, one of them sighs deeply and lights a cigarette while the other stares in stunned bewilderment and confusion. Not only have they just murdered their close friend, David Kentley, but they have also invited his family, his fiancé, his closest friend, and their old prep school housemaster to a dinner party, to be held almost immediately after the murder. They even serve dinner from atop the chest in which Kentley’s body now lies.

“Good Americans usually die young on the battlefield, don’t they?” one of the murderers rhetorically asks. “The Davids of this world merely occupy space, which is why he was the perfect victim for the perfect murder. Of course, he was a Harvard undergraduate. That might make it justifiable homicide,” he smugly jokes.

The Technical Details

Based on “Rope’s End,” a 1929 play by Patrick Hamilton (itself thought to be loosely based on a real 1924 murder case), the rest of the story follows the dinner party’s several participants in real time. That is, the film’s action takes place entirely within a continuous 80-minute span of a single evening.

Hitchcock admits that the whole idea was a bit experimental, as each scene in the movie—with not a single break outside of the street scene run under the opening credits—happens in consecutive 10-minute segments, exactly the capacity of each individual film canister.

I undertook “Rope” as a stunt; that’s the only way I can describe it. I really don’t know how I came to indulge in it. The stage drama was played out in the actual time of the story; the action is continuous from the moment the curtain goes up until it comes down again. I asked myself whether it was technically possible to film it in the same way. The only way to achieve that, I found, would be to handle the shooting in the same continuous action, with no break in the telling of the story that begins at seven-thirty and ends at nine-fifteen. And I got this crazy idea to do it in a single shot.

Almost as important, “Rope” was Hitchcock’s first color movie. Color was no mere gimmick for the great director, but rather a necessity to highlight the dramatic qualities of the murder, the story falling into twilight, and ultimately the dark night. “I wouldn’t make a Technicolor picture just for the sake of using color,” Hitchcock admitted. “I’ve waited 17 years to find a story of my type in which color actually plays a dramatic role.”

The employment of color was, Hitchcock said, all about mood. “We must bear in mind that, fundamentally, there’s no such thing as color; in fact, there’s no such thing as a face, because until the light hits it, it is non-existent,” Hitchcock believed. “There is no such thing as a line; there’s only the light and the shade.”

Hitchcock had not only directed the movie, he had—through his new but short-lived company, Transatlantic Pictures—produced it as well. Sadly the movie failed to show well at the box office, and reviews of it at the time were mixed.

“At all events, the picture takes on a dull tone as it goes and finally ends in a fizzle which is forecast almost from the start,” lamented The New York Times in 1948.

Less prestigious papers, such as The Post-Standard out of Syracuse, claimed that “Rope” held “some of the best acting, directing, and photography in Technicolor that has recently slipped across the local screen,” while Abilene Reporter-News proclaimed that “the expert use of Technicolor and Hitchcock’s wizardry at building a plot to explosive excitement make ‘Rope’ one of the screen’s most sensational films.”

In 2021, looking back over the history of movie making, it’s extremely difficult for any cinephile to understand The New York Times’ dismissal of the film. Not only is “Rope” a great Hitchcock movie, it must also be one of the greatest movies in cinematic history. The direction is compelling, the acting is extraordinary, the dialogue is crisp, and the unraveling of the murderers’ arrogance is downright gripping.

The Lesson Learned

In hindsight, it’s also impossible not to be struck by how objectively moral the story is.

As teenagers, the two murderers had spent many late-night hours discussing ethics and morality with their housemaster, Rupert Cadell (Jimmy Stewart). As a follower of Friedrich Nietzsche, Cadell had taught them that morality and ethics existed only to keep the masses in check. The elite—or the supermen—were above and beyond good and evil, and furthermore had the privilege of not just believing, but acting as such. After all, victims are “inferior beings whose lives are unimportant anyway.”

Who then are the elite? According to one of the murderers: “The few are those men of such intellectual and cultural superiority that they’re above the traditional moral concepts. Good and evil, right and wrong were invented for the ordinary average man, the inferior man, because he needs them.”

When Cadell figures out what his two former students have done, the reality of his teaching and philosophy becomes unbearable for him.

Justice, it seems, is absolute. So is the greatness of Hitchcock’s “Rope.”

Bradley J. Birzer is Russell Amos Kirk chair in American Studies and professor of History, Hillsdale College.

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Arts & Letters

Flickering Flames: The Primordial Power of the Movies

Beautiful little girl looking fascinated eating popcorn watching a movie at the local movie theatre snack bucket junk food tasty childhood entertaining entertained emotions kids concept

Night. Somewhere in Northern Europe. (8,000 B.C.)

Picture a cave with a fire burning just outside its mouth. Prehistoric men, women, and children are seated on the cave floor, every face alit with awe and wonder, under the spell of a master storyteller. Before them, an elder, dressed in animal skins and a headdress with antlers stands near the flames, gesturing and talking. He’s retelling the story of a recent hunt. The fact that everyone already knows how it ends doesn’t spoil it; if anything, it enhances it. It’s all there: the suspense of the stalk, the rush and fury of the kill, the sustaining power of life-giving flesh, gained at the cost of animal life, and perhaps the life of one of their own. One of their number, moved by the power of the imagery, illustrates the story on the cave wall, trying to hold onto some of the magic lest it be forgotten.

This scene from a “movie”—one made countless millennia before our current form of movies was invented, and replayed countless millions of times throughout those lost eons, is so deeply ingrained in our collective consciousness that we aren’t even aware of it. Yet many of us moderns have had similar experiences in our youth: sitting cross-legged with siblings or friends around a campfire, parents or counselors telling stories by the magical light, sparks rising to the stars, our imaginations transfixed and painting the pictures of the story on the cave walls of our minds.

Mankind’s need for storytelling is timeless and universal. Stories connect us with myths and legends, tradition and history; they tell us truths about ourselves and where we come from, and give us common ground with our fellow man. By sharing triumph and tragedy, love and hate, fear and courage, sadness and joy, stories show us the meaning of life and our place within it. They show us how we should act and choose and the rewards and pitfalls of those acts and choices. Priests, preachers, politicians, and public speakers throughout the ages have all known that nothing drives home the point of their message like a good story. We even do it to ourselves, instinctively assigning the significant events of our personal lives to various “stories,” whether it’s the story of our getting our driver’s license, going off to college, and finding or losing love. Everything fits into some sort of story.

Yet just as universal as our need for storytelling, is our need for those stories to be received in the company of others. Aristotle described the appeal of theater in his “Poetics,” the first serious study and analysis of drama. He contrasted it with the performance of the sacred mysteries, yet ascribed to it a similar conveyance of insight, purification, and spiritual healing through visions, called the “theama.” Thus the location of such a performance was named “theatron.” In other words, Aristotle defined theater as the place where humanity receives the wisdom of stories through visions. And much of the power of drama comes from its communal nature—the fact that we consume it as part of an audience, which attains its own collective consciousness for the duration of the presentation.

For plays, the “truth” of a particular presentation was necessarily limited to one particular time and place. And the quality of the experience varied immensely, based on whether Hamlet was being played by Olivier, or Fred the neighborhood butcher. But for films, where the same presentation can take place over vast reaches of time and space, and where we can all make a claim to sharing the same experience, we all have a chance to belong to the same tribe. We all get to share the same sense of wonder as we enter the massive gates of Jurassic Park, and see those giant dinosaurs made real—even if we intuitively know they’ll soon be hunting our emotional stand-ins—the cast—so convincingly that we’ll forget about our popcorn until the action lets up for a moment.

The motion picture experience is never funnier, never more terrifying, and never more satisfying than when we experience it as part of an audience. But now, as we emerge from this global pandemic, we have to ask ourselves: Are we on the verge of losing the primordial impact of film in theaters? Will our fear of contagion bring about the demise of this extraordinary experience and its potential to inform and inspire mankind? Might the so-called progress of internet-streamed “entertainment” inure us to what we’ve become used to this past year: consuming endless hours of it, sheltered in the safety of our homes?

For our part, we hope not. Because if we decide that we’re no longer willing to venture out to join our local tribe in a dark cave and receive the true power of story by the light of a flickering flame, then we will have lost something. It’s been said that sooner or later we become the stories we tell. But maybe it’s even truer that we become the stories we’ve shared. And no matter how many times we revisit a favorite movie in the comfort of our own home, we’ll always fondly remember the first time we saw it—the when, where, and with whom—in a theater.

Cary Solomon and Chuck Konzelman have been writers and producers in the entertainment industry for 30 years. They have worked with Warner Brothers, Paramount, Sony-Columbia, and 20th Century Fox. 

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Features

Child of Deaf Adults, Paul Raci Brings a Lifetime of Experience to an Oscar-Nominated Role

Paul Raci, nominated for best actor in a supporting role for "Sound of Metal", at the EE British Academy Film Awards 2021 on April 11 in Los Angeles. (Rich Fury/Getty Images for ABA)

“I didn’t realize it at first, but it slowly dawned on me that I had been rehearsing for this role my entire life,” says actor, singer, and performer Paul Raci. “Being a CODA (child of deaf adults), my whole life has been spent working with the deaf community, especially my parents.”

“I only wish they could be here to see this,” said an emotional Raci.

Raci was recently nominated for an Academy Award in his role as Joe in the film “Sound of Metal”—a departure from his usual television spots here and there..

“I worried and wondered if I could handle a role of this magnitude,” says Raci of his role as Joe, the “late-deafened” Vietnam veteran and alcohol counselor.

But as Raci wrestled with the role, he realized his life’s story was Joe’s story.

“My father was born deaf and was a proud member of the NAD (National Association of the Deaf) as was my mother, who was deaf from about the age of 5. I saw the setbacks, the frustration, the taunting, and the bullying,” he said. As a child, I watched my mother, a most studious woman, who was an expert lip-reader. I mimicked many of her movements for the role. I myself suffer from bouts of tinnitus from my time in Vietnam, as did many of my brothers who worked on the flight deck with me. They gave us a piece of cardboard as hearing protection. Many of those guys are fully deaf now, so this role was me—it literally mirrored my life.”

The Role

Actor Riz Ahmed (“Shifty,” “Four Lions,” “Nightcrawler”) portrays a heroin-addicted heavy metal drummer who’s going deaf after refusing to protect his ears and who is struggling to keep “clean.” His girlfriend, portrayed by actress Olivia Cooke (“Thoroughbreds,” “Ready Player One”), fearing a relapse, sends him to a deaf-sober house. It’s at this point that Raci makes his entrance.

“Riz’s sponsor finds a deaf-sober house run strictly for the deaf community, which was founded by, and run by my character, a Vietnam vet who is deaf from the war and who is also an alcoholic,” Raci said. The script originally called for Raci’s character to have been an Iraqi war veteran, but in a request designed to help him give as authentic a portrayal as possible, Raci asked that the character mirror his real-life service in Vietnam. “It really made the part come alive for me.”

“I thought about my parents all through this,” Raci added. “And I thought about all the wonderful deaf people I had known growing up.”

“I just hope I honored them all,” he said.

Paul Raci, nominated for best actor in a supporting role for “Sound of Metal”, at the EE British Academy Film Awards 2021 on April 11 in Los Angeles. (Rich Fury/Getty Images for ABA)

Real People

Raci says that he is sensitive to the needs of the deaf community.

“I had to be the conduit for my dad. I saw the way hearing people treated him. My father always felt oppressed. I was the one who had to negotiate contracts, even as a little kid. If this role was that of a person fully deaf from birth, as my father had been, do you think that I could have given this same kind of performance? I couldn’t have taken that role, it would’t have been me. It wouldn’t have rung true,” he said. “But this was my life.”

Paul Raci explains the part of Joe. (Courtesy of Paul Raci)

You might think that a role which doesn’t spotlight the positive side of the deaf culture might have offended Raci. You’d be wrong.

“See, that’s the thing—that’s the thing that this movie is going to show you,” he said. “The world thinks about how deaf people are just the sweetest people. They’re so quiet. They wouldn’t rape anybody, they wouldn’t break a law … or smoke anything bad … or do drugs. But we’re people, like anyone else. And that’s what drew me to this role. These are real people. This shows you a recovery house with about 12 hardcore addicts who are deaf—and addicted,” he said.

Raci says he’d rarely seen the deaf portrayed as it was,warts and all, until he read this script.

“The deaf are addicts, they’re lawyers, they’re accountants, they’re good people and bad people,” he said.

(Courtesy of Amazon)

Raci’s Arrival

Raci is always looking for ways to introduce the deaf culture to new audiences, which is what attracted him to the band, “Hands of Doom,” a “Black Sabbath tribute band,” where he performs what the band calls “ASL (American Sign Language) Rock.”

Hands of Doom. (Courtesy of Paul Raci)

“I act out each song, and that really makes each song come alive, especially for the deaf community,” he said. The band has gained a strong following among the deaf community and Black Sabbath fans the world over. “I try and bring my experiences and my growing up with deaf parents, into every performance.”

Raci’s family has seen his band, and his turn in “Sound of Metal.” And they approve.

“My family has seen it, and they’re really happy with it. They knew it was real, and from the heart,” he said. “Especially the ending.”

While Raci has been acting for more than four decades, he says he’s been waiting for this role his entire life.

(Courtesy of Paul Raci)

“This role? Man, you have no idea. I’ve been acting for 40 years. I’ve got damned good acting chops. I came out here in 1989. I’ve done plenty of theater … but I’ve never gotten a big role in a movie, just bit parts. I’m 72 years old. I’ve been doing this 41 years.,” he said. They offered this part to Robert Duvall, but thankfully, he didn’t want to learning language.

They shopped it around. They wanted a “name” attached to it, and “Paul Raci” wasn’t a name.

“My agent, who’s also my wife, actually called them and begged them to look at my audition. She said, ‘Did you look at his audition?’ They said, ‘You know what? We’ve had so many people audition for this part … we’re just going to give it to a name.’ They said that. They actually said that!” said an incredulous Raci.

Not to be denied, Raci’s wife called the producers one last time and begged them to look at the screen test. She said, “Please, please, look at this tape, because this guy knows what he’s doing.”

Minutes later, Raci got the call every actor dreams of.

“They called me back five minutes later. The director said, we want to meet him right away.” Producers offered Raci the role right there on the spot.

“And now … if you’re a character actor too, you know, and so does every other day player in this town …I ’m going to be up for best supporting actor. Me! 41 years I’m doing this,” Raci said. “I’m being nominated for best supporting actor for this thing, because I kicked butt!”

“Everybody, and I mean everybody talks about the last scene. A few months ago, there was the press junket: I did 40 interviews of four minutes each: CNN, CBS, NBC, Phoenix stations, Minnesota, New York … and they were all asking, ‘How’d you do that…that last scene?’”

Raci credits director Darius Marder with allowing him to find the role within himself.

“Darius Marder, this was his first directing effort, although he wrote “Beyond the Pines,” and “Loot” and he was just awesome as a director. He’s sensitive, he’s wonderful, he’s smart. He let me do what I had to do. We talked about what he wanted from me. And after that last scene, I looked over and Darius was just weeping. I mean weeping. Riz and I laugh about it now … but it’s about two grown men being vulnerable. One reviewer in Toronto said, ‘I wanted to stop the movie because I wanted to see if the actors were ok.’”

The final scene should come with a “spoiler alert” to keep tissues handy. “I’ve had dozens of people ask me, ‘What about that last scene?’ One writer from The Chicago Tribune asked me about the last scene … he wanted to know how it was accomplished. He said, ‘You can’t teach that kind of acting can you?’ And I said, ‘No, no you can’t. I was made for this. Now, could I have done that scene 40 years ago? No. But now? That’s my whole life in that role … and it’s all in that last scene. Now people want to know where I’ve been,” he said with a laugh.

Where Paul Raci has been is waiting for a role like this his entire life. If the stars align and the portrayal is seen by enough of the right people, Raci knows exactly where he’ll be next: “The words ‘Academy Award winner Paul Raci,’ have a nice ring to them,” he said. “I like the sound of that.”

Paul Raci, nominated for best actor in a supporting role for “Sound of Metal”, at the EE British Academy Film Awards 2021 on April 11 in Los Angeles. (Rich Fury/Getty Images for ABA)