Movie Nite 96: Left v Right

Late October, 29 years ago. A different world, but not that different. Here’s a press release, and the basis for print and TV advertisements, for one of the special events of the American Film Institute’s Los Angeles International Film Festival.

THE AFI FEST MOVIE MARATHON. All Night: Left Wing Versus Right Wing. Got a bad case of Reds-under-the-beds? Bring your pillow down to the Monica Theater for our annual all-night movie orgy! Complimentary champagne and catered breakfast!

Most of these Marathon films (with one or two blatant exceptions) are not deliberately political in the usual sense; rather, they show how the widely held attitudes of any era, the propaganda of its time, pervade every form of entertainment, even the supposedly apolitical genres of crime, two-fisted action, and science fiction.

An AFI staffer accompanied me to PBS to watch my taping of a festival promo for the Marathon, my first visit to the KCET lot on Sunset Boulevard. This was once the home of Monogram Pictures, the East Side Kids, and The Bowery Boys. The interview went okay; half of the clips we'd laboriously prepared would eventually be cut into the show for airing the following week.

The first film clip, Zabriskie Point (1970) was screened as a tribute to that year's AFI Fest guest of honor, master director Michelangelo Antonioni. This emblematic L.A. movie is a bemused European intellectual's hallucinatory vision of Sixties America: billboards, freeways, riots, guns, and endless Western landscapes.

Next up was Mission to Moscow (1943), which explained Soviet Russia, by then a wartime ally, to American audiences. U.S. Ambassador Joseph Davies (Walter Huston) talks up the loveable side of misunderstood mass murderer Joseph Stalin, while Mrs. Davies discovers Moscow's marvelous daycare facilities.

In Big Jim McLain, John Wayne, who personally invested in the film, smashes a Communist spy ring infiltrating labor unions on the Honolulu waterfront. One of the few movies that favorably portrayed the House Un-American Activities Committee.

My nervous minder at AFI was already getting some flak over the somewhat heterodox Marathon, but the controversy wouldn’t get me fired—provided our box office held up nicely.

The big event of the day was the Mexican opening of "Miracle Alley" (El Callejon de los Milagros), and that turned out sensationally. Sold-out house, and there were four TV cameras, covering the ceremony for various Spanish language networks. We went over to the Miramar Hotel, two blocks away, not realizing that the Mexican Consulate had laid on a huge, sit-down dinner more appropriate for Cannes. I was at the table with the head of the Mexican Film Institute, Carlos Lozoya, and Salma Hayek, sitting through the speeches. It seemed more like a Washington diplomatic evening than a Los Angeles movie premiere, but we needed every boost we could get.

At the same time, the Christopher Walken event happened without incident, though he was, by all accounts, a stiff and uncomfortable interview subject. Still, when I ran into the big bosses, the atmosphere was cheerful. We got back to the theater after the show had let out; there were still hundreds of people coming down the Academy's grand staircase and we seamlessly blended with the mob.

My big moment was when Michelangelo Antonioni's assistant called me out to the curb to meet the great man and shake his hand; we stood around together for a couple of minutes and then they were off to the Monkey Bar, Jack Nicholson's private club on Beverly Boulevard. I drove over there as well. In essence, it was a command performance. The Monkey Bar is a strange, rather sinister place. It is very dark and smoky; the anti-smoking laws (and, seemingly any laws) didn't penetrate the star's lair. The women were uniformly young, beautiful, and dressed to display.

The men were a motley assortment of actors, models, and scuzzy-looking young dictators of the film and music industries, all shouting over the loud music. The effect was what I'd imagine the bar in a whorehouse to look like. The surroundings weren't cheap but had no taste. We made our way to the Antonioni table, where he had celebrated after his special Oscar, in March of that year. It took me a minute to realize that Nicholson was sitting right there with us. I fell into conversation with director Jerzy Skolimowski and his young girlfriend (nothing out of place about that at the Monkey Bar), made my excuses, and left: after all, I had a show to put on.

On my way out, I passed Nicholson again. He'd moved on to another table by then. The image is fixed in my mind like a flash photo: he was sitting, silent and remarkably dissipated, in the center of a bunch of excited people in their twenties and thirties, looking like a self-parody of the roles he's played in films like The Shining and The Witches of Eastwick. I still couldn't quite believe what I'd seen.

October 28, the second Saturday of the festival, was the biggest box office night, more than enough to put us in the black, and ensure that my neck stayed off the chopping block. Our biggest shows sold out. I did the Marathon introduction while three other shows played on screens elsewhere in the film festival’s circuit.

We gave each Marathon-goer an official-looking theater passport, a gesture toward the Checkpoint Charlie experience. For the first couple of shows, our volunteer ushers were costumed. For left-wing films, they wore badly fitting gray suits and looked skeptically at every passport. For right-wing films, they wore sunglasses and white jackets, like Miami club barkers. The audience liked them. The first people to enter were on TV news. Not everyone got the details of the political/historical theme, but I was content; I'd joked about doing Left Wing/Right Wing for years, after all. Here it was.

During the intro, I explained the house rules, went over the slate of films, explained the distinctive marathon attitude, and dedicated the event, as I always did, to the memory of the first movie Marathon and the film festival’s mercurial, difficult, gifted founder.

“The past is another country; they do things differently there." The central assumptions of an era are often invisible to the people living in it. That's why old films, even good ones, often look and sound funny to us. The most basic attitudes about women and men and everyday life have changed so much that we wised-up people of today condescend towards the world we see in the movie. We rarely infer the obvious and eternal lesson that all too soon we, too, will seem quaint, even comical.

“Yes, we too! Are there hip styles, sound social values, and p.c. attitudes that are self-evidently right to you now? Your children's children will find some of today’s Nineties to be as dated, false, and limiting as those Fifties TV commercials we laugh at because they feature women talking to each other about their waxed kitchen floors. You don’t believe it could happen to you; no one ever does. And with that cautionary note out of the way, let's enjoy a serious and funny look at some of yesterday's most cherished political ideals.”

Zabriskie Point hit the screen, the last Antonioni film of the festival. It begins with Black Panther leader Kathleen Cleaver leading a campus meeting and ends with a famous scene of private property being symbolically blown to bits in slow motion. The intervening plot (such as it is) involves a chance encounter between a student on the run from a murder he didn't commit and a young woman driving to Arizona.

At midnight, we did the complicated dance of getting crowds from our other theaters out of the lobby while we were simultaneously carrying tables, cake, and barrels of chilled champagne into the large auditorium. It was clumsy, but it worked, and I did another brief intro before we rolled Mission to Moscow. I watched a few minutes--the crowd was roaring with laughter.

In the middle of the night, we ran an old favorite of mine, Destination Moon. You could call it "1950: A Space Odyssey." Rarely seen on the big screen, the first American space movie is a fascinating could-have-been alternative to the Apollo program. One of the most unabashedly libertarian films ever made in Hollywood, Robert Heinlein's story involves a group of concerned American industrialists who finance a privately run trip to the Moon. Great-looking, thoughtfully designed sets and effects are occasionally let down by the dialog, but the ideas are genuinely interesting.

Now we hit the wee small hours of the morning. Trial is a dynamic and intelligent 1955 courtroom drama scripted by Don Mankiewicz. A Southern California murder trial with overtones of race is ruthlessly exploited by left-wing forces, symbolized in a once-famous "Sea of Green" mass rally. The journeyman director was Mark Robson.

Big Jim McLain unspooled its low-budget, genial HUAC plot. In 1950’s I Married a Communist, a Soviet agent blackmails a shipping executive trying to hide a radical '30s past. Moody, noir-ish, and paranoid, it’s not a bad thriller in its own "right."

We ended with another old favorite of mine, Seven Days in May. This 1964 political thriller, considered to be highly credible in its day, concerns a lone colonel's desperate attempt to stop a military takeover of the USA. An intelligent defense of early Sixties liberalism, its hammy speeches and scenery-chewing performances put it firmly in the over-the-top mainstream of the Marathon.

After a night of suspicion, shadows, and paranoid adventure, the house lights came up for the last time. Pulling the doors open to a lavish breakfast buffet, we invited the Marathon audience to "stride into the bright sunlight of freedom.”

The festival gets into the press when it's about to open and becomes of interest to the city at large for two weeks. By the end of the festival, there are still lots of people coming to the movies, but the publicity parade has moved on to something else. There's little visible change at the festival office. But the phone doesn't ring. It's ringing across town, or across the world, on someone else's desk.

1995 was a time of high pressure and a big payoff. The political aspects of the Marathon made it riskier. At the beginning of the festival crunch period, there were always dozens of killer issues, all of which could be fatal to the festival, or to my career. By the end of the fest, the final few critical ones are crossed off, day by day, until none are left.