Armchair Commentary

MOD of the Week: "The Tall T" and "Ten Little Indians"

At first blush, director Budd Boetticher's The Tall T (1957; Sony Choice Collection) plays like a conventional Western - rancher Randolph Scott (in his second and best of seven celebrated collaborations with Boetticher) is held hostage along with newlyweds Maureen O'Sullivan and John Hubbard by outlaw Richard Boone and his gang (Henry Silva and Skip Homeier). But when O'Sullivan is revealed as the heir to a family fortune, the conflict enters noirish psychological waters, with Scott and Boone revealed as less antagonists than flip sides to the same coin and Hubbard as a craven opportunist more than happy to trade his bride to save his own skin. Adapted by Burt Kennedy from Elmore Leonard's short story "The Captive," The Tall T is a tense, exceptionally gritty Western-thriller hybrid that presages the moral complexity of latter-day revisionist efforts like The Wild Bunch and Unforgiven.

Meanwhile, Warner Archives has reissued Ten Little Indians (1965), which was previously released as a pressed Warner Bros. disc in 2006. Though it doesn't hold a candle to Rene Clair's And Then There Were
None (1945), this version of the Agatha Christie mystery about guests to a remote retreat preyed upon by an unseen killer, produced by the notorious Harry Alan Towers and directed by George Pollack (who helmed the Miss Marple films with Margaret Rutherford) is fizzy fun, thanks to an eclectic cast of suspects that includes two Bond Girls - Shirley Eaton and Daliah Lavi - Brit film vets Dennis Price, Leo Genn and Stanley Holloway and Americans Hugh O'Brien and Fabian (as well as the unmistakable voice of an uncredited Christopher Lee), many of whom would go on to work for Towers on his more exploitative efforts with prolific cult director Jess Franco. The disc includes the William Castle-esque "Whodunnit Break," which interrupted the film during its theatrical run to give audiences a chance to guess the identity of the killer. Towers would remake the film in 1989 with an even more offbeat cast, including Donald Pleasance, Frank Stallone and Herbert Lom. -- Paul Gaita

Writer/Director Callie Khouri on Creating "Nashville," and the Role Music Plays in the Show

Oscar-winner Callie Khouri (Thelma & Louise) this year made the jump from feature films to series, creating Nashville for ABC. Not surprisingly, music is at the heart of the show, but it’s about much more, operating at the crossroads of art, business, technology, and politics, in a world where many of the old rules no longer seem to apply. There are a lot of players in this game, but the two at the core are singers at opposite ends of their careers: Connie Britton as Rayna James, the established star working to remain relevant, and Hayden Panettiere as Juliette Barnes, the hot newcomer reaching for respect — and grabbing hold of Rayna’s guitarist and former lover, Deacon Claybourne (Charles Esten).

Khouri took some time out from production to talk about the story, the setting, and the biggest differences between working in feature films vs. series. “It’s kind of like riding a horse,” she says. “You get on, they shoot a dart into its ass and you’re just heading out into the great unknown and it’s running as fast as it can. You’re learning to ride, and the whole thing is ‘just don’t fall off.’”

Some highlights:

What made you want to tell this particular story about these particular people?

It kills a lot of birds for me. Starting with the obvious, it talks about a time in our business where all the models are changing, the business has just gone through this drastic shift, and I think everybody is struggling to find their place and figure it out. It feels like there’s a changing of the guard in a way, and the old business models, to quote myself, “are no longer relevant.” That was a line I wrote in the pilot. It’s just a challenging time for people in all kinds of businesses obviously, but certainly this one, where the way it’s been working for however many years has suddenly become extinct almost. People aren’t making a living the way they used to.

There’s a few cities where stories about business changes could be told ... why Nashville?

Well, one, Nashville is a place that I love and adore, so anytime I can find a reason to be here, I do it. But two, it’s a town that is so full of incredibly talented people, just amazing music everywhere you go — almost too much not to have a lot of pain and heartbreak attached to it. Not just the music, and the songs can be about that, but with so much talent here, and such a narrow conduit to get it out in the world, there’s a lot of people here who probably should have made it and didn’t and great, great songs that you’ll never hear. … It’s a town that really loves and respects its traditions and history, for good and bad, so it’s just a really fertile ground for me for storytelling. And I have family here, and I just have a deep attachment to the place.

How does the music affect the storytelling process?

The first thing is that I’m constantly looking for the song that I feel is the right song for the character, whether it’s something they’ve written … how does the song fit into the narrative of the story? Unlike a lot of the other shows [featuring musical performances], we get to show the inception of a song, and the birth of a song, and the trajectory of a song … because here we’re at ground zero, where the song is being written or the event happens in somebody’s life that gives them the idea to write the song that they go on to write. … To me, that’s just a great device for revealing character.

I’m now in a world that’s so different from what I’ve been doing most of my life, which is feature films, where you’re telling a story with a beginning, middle and end. This is an ongoing thing, I hope — I hope it’s ongoing for a long time. And it’s a new way of storytelling for me. It’s kind of like you’re writing a novel and you just have to let everybody read it as you go along. There’s a lot of risk involved in that. And because it’s not just a singular endeavor.  There are 11 writers, and we’re doing it at at breakneak speed. And it’s an incredibly demanding show.

Basically, if you were just doing a show that had five songs, and that was the show, nothing but five songs, nothing in between, it would still be kinda hard. And we’re doing both of those things. And it’s moving way more quickly than anything I’ve ever done. There’s very little time for reflection. … It’s a whole new way of thinking for me. And it’s really exciting, and really fun, and really embarrassing and really terrifying. Everything that making art is supposed to be, I guess.

Read more interviews and exclusives on the Amazon Studios Hollywonk blog.

Screenwriter Derek Haas on the Three Things You Can Do in a Novel But Not Onscreen

Derek Haas is a writer of movies (3:10 to Yuma, Wanted), creator of TV series (Chicago Fire), and acclaimed novelist (the just-released The Right Hand). In this exclusive guest post for the Amazon Studios Hollywonk blog, Haas explores the ways in which storytelling varies by form:

I was once asked:  what are three things you can do in a book that you can’t do in a movie or TV series?  An interesting question… a. because why three?  Why not 5 or 7 or 1?  And b. because there actually are three main things you can do in a novel you can’t do in a movie or TV series. How did my interviewer know the exact number to ask?  Anyway, here are my answers.

First, you don’t have to worry about a budget. At all. If you want to write that the main character drives a motorcycle through the biggest earthquake ever to strike Los Angeles, have at it. If you want to have characters jumping from Russia to Prague to London to Washington DC to LA, no one is going to stop you. If you want five-hundred assassins attacking the Olympic Opening Ceremonies … all you have to do is put it down on paper. Of course, you can’t do that in a movie script or you’ll give the President of Production at the studio a heart attack. Unless you have Brad Pitt and Johnny Depp in the movie together, then you can do anything.

Second, you get to move inside the heads of your characters.

See the rest of his answer here.

MOD of the Week: "The Show" and "Vitaphone Varieties Volume 2"

Though not quite the same jaw-dropping spectacle as Freaks (1932), director Tod Browning's silent melodrama The Show (1927; Warner Archives) offers its own array of startling and contextually loaded visual images, as well as a robust performance from its lead, John Gilbert. Set in a Hungarian carnival, the film's central love triangle, between barker/rogue Gilbert, former flame Renee Adoree and the malevolent Greek (Lionel Barrymore), is really just the framework on which Browning hangs his true interest: the macabre denizens of the carnival sideshow, which includes the disembodied hand of Cleopatra (who collects tickets), a mermaid, half-lady, and most arresting of all, "Arachnadia, the Spider Lady," a baleful, glaring woman's head atop a huge spider body (played by Edna Tichenor from Browning's London After Midnight). It's a marvelously perverse showcase for the director's particular brand of erotically charged horror, as is the recreation of Salome's Dance, with Adoree smothering the severed head of John the Baptist (Gilbert) with post-decapitation kisses. The rest of the picture is moderately engaging, thanks in part to the leads and a genuinely bizarre moment involving a poisonous lizard, but the picture's real passion lies behind the sideshow curtain.

Only slightly less head-spinning is Vitaphone Varieties Volume 2 (Warner Archives), a two-disc collection of vaudeville shorts made by Warner Bros. and First National in the late '20s and early '30s using the titular sound-on-disc system. A wide variety of acts, from Hawaiian music quartets, jazz orchestras and early comic teams to the indescribable Chaz Chase, are showcased in the 35 shorts included in the set, as well as established stars of the period, like comic Joe E. Brown and actress Blanche Sweet. The shorts also provide a glimpse at name performers in the natal stage of their careers, like Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, Wizard of Oz co-stars Jack Haley and Bert Lahr (in separate shorts), radio icon Fred Allen, actor Pat O'Brien and a young Natalie Schafer decades before her turn as Mrs. Howell on Gilligan's Island. The clips are energetic and more than a bit off-beat - how else to describe Guido Deiro, "The World's Foremost Piano-Accordionist" or the aforementioned Chase, whose act hinges on his consumption of paper and other found objects? Though the technology is dated, the sheer drive of the performers featured in the set outshines even the most ardent hopefuls on American Idol and the like, and makes for a fascinating glimpse at what kept audiences entertained nearly eight decades ago. -- Paul Gaita