G A N Z E E R . R E V I E W S

prose

by Peter Biskind o-o-o-o-o

When the two [John Wayne and Dennis Hopper] were working on True Grit, Wayne once flew his helicopter in from the minesweeper he kept at Newport Beach, landed on the Paramount lot, swaggered onto the soundstage with his .45 hanging from his belt, and bellowed, “Where's that pinko Hipper? That goddamn Eldridge Cleaver's out there at UCLA saying 'shit' and 'cocksucker' in front of my sweet daughters. I want that red motherfucker. Where is that commie hiding?”

Like the war between old gods and new in Gaiman's AMERICAN GODS, EASY RIDERS, RAGING BULLS chronicles the battle between Old Hollywood and New. Well into the 60's, Hollywood was still churning out the glamorous musicals and John Wayne Westerns that were popular in the 50's, but America was a different place that the big studio bosses didn't quite get or understand. Anti-War protests and the Civil Rights movement were taking hold. The already popular Nina Simone began addressing racial inequality in her songs, and Bob Dylan became the most popular singer/songwriter in the country, second possibly to The Beatles, who, even they –mere pop artists– couldn't avoid addressing the horrors of the Vietnam war. Television was new, and it was on TV that you could get a glimpse of people like Bob Dylan and The Beatles, who neither looked, sounded, or behaved like anyone on the silver screen. Television was also where you could see mad, groundbreaking ideas for the first time. Things like Star Trek and The Twilight Zone were miles ahead of any feature-length film starring John Wayne or Elizabeth Taylor.

As the studios began to lose a lot of money, the control enacted over film-making was relinquished to smaller production outfits, which started giving directors full control over how they made movies. So radical were the results that first time filmmakers like Dennis Hopper, Francis Ford Coppola, and Martin Scorcese became stars almost overnight.

And yes, you read that right. Dennis fucking Hopper. EASY RIDER is America's first biker movie, and thus spoke to Americans at the time in a way that no other film ever had. According to Biskind, it largely involved Hopper dicking around on set. The “set” being America's open roads. Nevertheless, it cost $501,000 to make, and brought $91.1 million in rentals. A huge, and very unexpected, return on investment. It won the First Work Award at the Cannes Film festival and was nominated for two Oscars, and Hopper was subsequently christened by LIFE magazine as “Hollywood's hottest director.” It was 1969, and the gates of Hollywood finally swung open to welcome American counter-culture for the majority of the 70's. Arguably, the best decade in American film-making until Spielberg and Lucas showed up to introduce the formula for what would become the, ugh, summer blockbuster.

The book is a treasure trove of “New Hollywood” history, and delves with great detail into some of the horrors, trials, and tribulations involved in making some of America's greatest films. Warren recommended it to me, after I had listened to this NPR interview with Coppola about the difficulties faced in making THE GODFATHER. And let me tell you, what is revealed in that interview is nothing compared to what's in this here book. Not just in regards to Coppola, but pretty much every American filmmaker who rose to prominence in the 70's.

Paul [Schrader] made the call to his agent, Michael Hamilburg, said, “This is The Godfather meets Bruce Lee. It's gonna sell for sixty grand. You get a third of the money, I get a third, and Leonard [Schrader] gets a third.”

Hamilburg gave them $5,000 on the spot. The brothers arrived in L.A. around Thanksgiving and rented a tiny apartment on Bicknell in Venice, a block from the beach, for $90 a month, which Hamilburg paid for. They took the bedroom doors off the hinges, stole some cinder blocks from a construction site, set up two desks, one in each bedroom, facing each other. The only other piece of furniture was a massive butcher block coffee table with wrought iron legs. They rented two electric typewriters, wrote three drafts in about eight weeks. They wrote around the clock, twenty, twenty-two hours a day, worked ten hours, slept one, very little food.

Toward the end, around Christmas of '72, they were running out of money, even though they were spending less than a dollar a day, $7, $10 a week for food, stealing plastic envelopes of ketchup from restaurants, making tomato juice.

“We sat down, took a good look at the script, and said to each other, 'We gotta write it one more time,'” recalls Leonard. “We were just wiped out, needed to find the energy to write one more draft. For us, the only surefire source of that big a jolt was guilt. We talked about, 'How we gonna get' – you didn't wanna go out and rob somebody – 'the guilt?' My brother said to me, 'We'll go to Vegas, lose our money, we'll feel so guilty, so pissed off, we'll come home and finish the script.'”

And sure enough, they did. And a couple paragraphs later:

Says Leonard, “There was an auction, sixteen bidders, it was the highest amount for original script ever sold at that point: $325,000.”

The film that came out of it, THE YAKUZA, directed by Sydney Pollack, is... well, alright. But it did open the gateways for Paul Schrader who went on to write TAXI DRIVER and RAGING BULL, and eventually direct his own films, like HARDCORE and AMERIAN GIGOLO. But not before screwing his brother over.

When the dust settled, instead of an easy three-way split, The Yakuza money was split 40-40 between Paul and Hamilburg, with Leonard getting only 20 percent. “I wanted to have that sole screenwriting credit, so I made him take shared story credit,” says Paul. Leonard looked the other way, pretended it hadn't happened.

Even though THE YAKUZA was originally Leonard's idea for a novel, before his brother convinced him to co-write it as a screenplay with him. Such personal stories aside, one can't help but see the overarching parallels between then and now. Like Old Hollywood back then, Hollywood today has been riding the wave of an old formula – the summer blockbuster – since well, the 80's really. Like Television in the 60's, the Internet has sprung up as the new media outlet through which one can experience things a little closer to today's equivalent of “counter-culture.” The internet became home to some of Cory Doctorow's first novels, it is where the art of Molly Crabapple first saw the light, where live video was being broadcast from the heart of the Arab Spring, where people are Tumbling their homemade unairbrushed porn, where kids are producing microfiction using cell phones, and where you can hear Kim Boekbinder sing Pussy Grabs Back in response to Donald Trump.

Again, there is a sense that big media outlets are stuck in their old ways, producing things that are far removed from the pulse of now. But if recent hits like MOONLIGHT and GET OUT are any indication, it seems like Hollywood may be catching up. MOONLIGHT is an honest portrayal of homosexuality in an African American community. GET OUT unapologetically tackles the horrors of racism by way of a popular genre film. One of them won the Oscar for best film, and the other is the highest grossing film by a writer/director in the history of American cinema. These are game-changers that tell us that the decade to come will be nothing short of a cultural revolution. And that excites me.

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By Kurt Vonnegut o-o-o-o-o

Finally got around to reading SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE by Kurt Vonnegut after every goddamn American I know recommended it to me upon finding out about my travels to Dresden. And for good reason. THIS BOOK IS FANTASTIC!

This has got to be the most non-linear thing I've ever read in my life, but it is not the least bit confusing. Also one of the most engrossing. I don't remember being so engrossed in a book since THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER AND CLAY.

It may also be one of the most quotable books. It is also a book with a heart, a book with a mission. It's an anti-war book. And one that manages to be laugh-out-loud funny.

But perhaps most astonishingly is that its an anti-war book that has no villains. This is World War 2. There are Nazis.

When was the last time you read or saw anything WW2-related that contained no villains to speak of? And the book is perfect, I tell you. Perfect!

Vonnegut even comments on that in the book.

I think about my education sometimes. I went to the University of Chicago for a while after the 2nd World War. I was a student in the Department of Anthropology. At that time, they were teaching that there was absolutely no difference between anybody. They may be teaching that still.

Another thing they taught was that nobody was ridiculous or bad or disgusting. Shortly before my father died, he said to me “you know – you never wrote a story with a villain in it.”

I told him that was one of the things I learned in college after the war. SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE by Kurt Vonnegut. Everyone should read it.

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By Haruki Murakami o-o

Y'know. I've decided that Murakami is just not for me. Between this book of short stories and the absolutely unnecessarily stretched out 1Q84, I think I can say that with absolute confidence. Sure there are aspects of Murakami's writing that I do like, like the peculiarities of his characters, even if those particular peculiarities have absolutely nothing to do with the story at hand. I absolutely love that. And I do like the magical realism vibes. His stories though, not so much.

My feeling is that his stories often start off most interestingly, but then towards the end –even the short stories– they sort of just lose steam and are thus killed. Meh.

I think its incredibly important to read authors of various cultures. There can be nothing more enriching. And I don't want my distaste for Murakami to put me off Japanese literature in general, so I'm going to have to very quickly attempt to find a substitute (or two) that is right for me.

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By Steranko o-o-o-c

Steranko, of course, is a magician. No, but really. He spent many childhood summers with his old man, who had his own magic act, doing circuses and carnivals until he became a side-show performer himself. By his late teens, he had already reaped a wealth of newspaper and TV publicity as an escape artist. This, I believe, may have helped hone Steranko's special talent at seeing through the mechanisms of how things work. This can be seen in every facet that makes up this pocket-sized novella from 1976. This, however, does not necessarily benefit the story as much as it benefits the rather ingenious visuals, design, and packaging of CHANDLER.

It is precisely because Steranko sees right through the mechanism of noir stories that CHANDLER is a wholly unoriginal run-of-the-mill crime noir tale with plenty of cheese. Where Steranko truly delivers, in my opinion, is in everything else: Crisp and beautifully composed and rendered full-color artwork. An ingenious grid format that gives the storytelling a beautifully steady pace and a very comfortable reading experience that a great many illustrated novels tend to lack, and a modern type treatment that is impeccably considered. It would be unfair to describe CHANDLER as an illustrated novella, because what illustrated novella features two illustrations per page? The illustrations and design of the entire thing are an in integral part of the storytelling experience, which makes CHANDLER far more than an illustrated novel but not quite a graphic novel either. It is a wholly unique experience, where Steranko sticks to 13 lines per column which deliberately correspond to a vertical panel right above. It is a work of illustration and design genius. And even if one was to throw away the story, the design, and just fixate on the panels, it's easy to imagine each and every one of them hanging in the MOMA or MAD completely on its own.

Fans of Steranko's art might be fooled into thinking the larger “deluxe” edition of this book is more worthy of their bookshelf space, but if you really want to experience CHANDLER the way Steranko's design solutions were intended for, then Pyramid's pocket-sized “pulp” edition is the only way to go.

And while I may not be entirely impressed by the story, I cannot possibly imagine Steranko creating the images without simultaneously writing the story for them, nor could I imagine him writing the story without simultaneously considering the artwork and design. Pulling something like CHANDLER off requires something of the cognitive abilities of a drummer, which I've discovered that Steranko also excelled at.

My brain now growls for more Steranko, and so should yours.

P.S. The story was later reprinted and repackaged as CHANDLER: RED TIDE.

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