By D.K. Holm
May 31, 2005
[nota bene: The following column, by necessity, contains some spoilers! If you don't want to know the ending of the movies mentioned, don't read on.]
Small Town Gossip
EMPIRE FALLS
There was an encouraging moment at the beginning of HBO's adaptation of Richard Russo's novel EMPIRE FALLS, broadcast for the first of no doubt many times last weekend. The moment occurs in the Empire Falls high school, where one of the main characters, nicknamed Tick (Danielle Panabaker) faces a confrontation with her ex-boyfriend, the bully football player who is also the son of the local cop. One of the bully's posse is a lanky, slinky brunette with a slow, slouchy walk and a sideways smile that I can still see in my head. I got the impression that she was the bully's current boyfriend, and that she even had a name, but it turns out that she was just an extra and vanished from the film.
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I wouldn't say that EMPIRE FALLS went entirely downhill from there, but it came close. Panabaker was fine and believable as a sensitive, arty, yet popular kid who in the film's last 30 minutes, faces a horrific tragedy. But the bulk of the four-hour tale is taken up with her father, Miles Roby, played with engaging quietude by Ed Harris. Miles runs the local diner and does the odd painting job; meanwhile his wife Janine (Helen Hunt, in a "comeback" role) is divorcing him to marry the local gym owner (Dennis Farina); Roby is also estranged from his former best friend, the bully's father Jimmy Minty (William Fichtner, in an unusual "weakling" role), his father Max (a miscast Paul Newman), and from the grand matriarch who quietly rules the town, the hypergamous Francine Whiting (Joanne Woodward).
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There is a ton of back story in EMPIRE FALLS, and the film, directed by Fred Schepisi, from Russo's credited script, spends the first two hours telling it, mostly through dialogue as characters tell each other things they should already know. I did in fact guess one of the film's two big secrets about 25 minutes into the first half (it played too cutesy with the actual physical appearance of Francine's dead husband). With its woodsy, autumnal, bucolic Northeastern setting, I thought that EMPIRE FALLS might be another PEYTON PLACE, an examination of small town values and hypocrisies conducted within an impossibly clean setting. Instead, it is something of a soap opera, but without the arias.
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Not that people don't speak. In fact, one of the annoying things about the adaptation is that everyone in the city seems to think that Roby needs a lecture. His ex-wife yells at him. His brother (Aiden Quinn) lectures him. Whiting tells him what she thinks. Everybody knows what's best for the passive, expressionless Roby, and if ever there was a deterrent to moving into a small town this film is it.
Since MOHAWK, Russo has written a string of novels about small town New England life, a sort of Stephen King without the gore, and I am sure that they are all fine novels (I skimmed EMPIRE FALLS after I saw the film). Russo is very forgiving toward his characters, loving them for their foibles (unlike, say, William Kennedy, who, in his Albany novels, has a somewhat more cynical or despairing state of mind). There are no true villains in the films made from his books, not even the kid who pulls a Kip Kinkle and blows away several of the high schools kids and teachers.
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I guess my main complaint about the film (which follows the book closely) is its other big secret, the Columbine subplot. When that aspect of the narrative emerged it felt imposed on a story that didn't need it, even thought Russo had carefully set it up with a succession of clues. My problem with it is that once the Columbine-style massacre occurs you fear that the whole movie is just about that. The event tilts the movie toward social protest instead of a Tolstoyan or Hardyesque examination of ordinary people with their dreadful failures and quiet victories.
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My other complaint is the last 30 minutes. There is so much backstory in the film that once the story story begins there is little time left, or as Joe Bob would say, too much plot is getting in the way of the story. The film's last seven minutes is a rush of dialogue that brings you up to date on the fates of various characters (but not all) and if you aren't listening carefully you're gonna miss it. And it's a big disappointment. After watching Roby get beat up for two hours, you want to see him get a little back, and the script pisses it away with bunch of dialogue (show, don't tell) and leaves one mammoth plot point dangling. It's almost as if Russo intends to write an equally lengthy sequel.
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EMPIRE FALLS is for the most part very nicely acted (except for Newman, who relies on charm for a character who should remain charmless), and in reviewer terms you do "care about" many of the characters. Many of them don't get much to do but rub their vivaciousness in Roby's face (Theresa Russell, for example, and Kate Burton as Francine's disabled daughter), but they do it winningly.
Still, there is a lot of padding. Did the director really need to supply so many shots of Roby walking through town? Did there need to be quite so many flashbacks to a pivotal incident in Roby's life (in which Robin Wright Penn and Philip Seymour Hoffman figure)? If the script had been streamlined, there would have been more room for a more crowd-pleasing denouement.
A great cast and an essentially interesting story are frustratingly allowed to wither in this otherwise noble and well-meaning adaptation. It's very much in the spirit of films by Hal Ashby and Robert Benton, in which no one ever really wins or gets what they want but continue to lead lives of quiet desperation and slump-shouldered resignation. I guess that is realistic, but so is life that goes in the other direction. Sadly, EMPIRE FALLS is as self-defeating as its passive characters striving futilely to change.
Media Notes From All Over
I was both delighted and chagrined to see Miranda July win a Cannes award for best first feature a week or so ago, this award coming after a special Sundance prize win, both for her debut feature ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW. As Gore Vidal says, whenever someone I know succeeds, a little something in me dies — I can't really say I know July, though we've worked together.
Here's what happened. About two years ago, I was at work one day when this shy, vulnerable, possibly even terrified creature approached me with the opening line, "This may sound a little weird but … " She even said something along the lines of, "I don't know if you've heard of me, but my name is Miranda July." Naturally I'd heard of her. While based in Portland, Oregon in the late 1990s July had earned an international reputation (she was a huge hit in Rotterdam, it seems) as a video and performance artist doing, three big pieces that combined monologues and video. Anyway, I indicated to her that indeed, yes, I had heard of her and that we had a number of friends in common, among then graphic artist and 'zine editor Sean Tetjarachi.
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It turns out that July needed an actor for one of her pieces and needed him fast. The piece was called THE SWAN TOOL, and it was an autobiographical monologue about her time working in the insurance trade, unlocking car doors for people whose keys were left inside (for being so young, about 31, July appears to have lived about nine lives). A "live movie," the 45-minute piece presented July interacting with two half screens, one raised behind her, the other one lower and in front of her hiding her legs. The SWAN TOOL tells of a woman named Lisa who buries herself in her backyard and then magically is able to face the real world, getting a job at an insurance company and experiencing various forms of training.
My role in this was to be the old garage hack instructing Lisa in how to unlock car doors with various devices. I stand with my back to the camera, explaining what the various tools do, then quizzing her on the makes and distinguishing characteristics of various cars. I'm probably in the thing for about a minute, and you don't even hear me: July speaks all the lines.
At that first meeting, July comes across as an ethereal, vulnerable girl, more human, if you will, than anyone else you might meet. On the other hand, in the real world she is a canny promoter of herself: she's had short stories in THE PARIS REVIEW, directed a rock video for Sleater-Kinney, the achingly hip Portland girl group, and was herself part of a rock band called Kill Rock Stars. July is also no stranger to big movies, as she had a bit part in JESUS SON as an abused nurse. This month, the filmmaker appears on the cover of at least two different magazines simultaneously. July has also been a determined advocate of women filmmakers, and has helped get cameras into the hands of newcomers and overseen a distribution network. Born in Barre, Vermont in 1974 (real named: Miranda Grossinger), July went to the arty-alt college Evergreen in Washington, and ended up in Portland in her early 20s. July now lives in Los Angeles, a better home base for a movie career.
July told me that they just didn't have anyone to play this one role and asked if I would be willing. I said sure (again, as Vidal says, never turn down the opportunity to have sex or be in the movies). She gave me a sheet with the salient dialogue for my "part," and her address, where I was suppose to arrive on Sunday afternoon, two days hence. I tried not to dwell on the implied comment she was making on my appearance, though it was clear that July was looking for someone old, fat, bald, and slovenly. If my shift partner at work had not been preoccupied at the moment she came in, he might in fact have made a more perfect visual equivalent of what she was looking for.
The shooting, done in her cramped apartment over a restaurant supply shop, took about four hours. I think I quietly impressed July with the fact that I had actually memorized the lines. I was the model of patience as I waited between takes and kept quiet and respectful while she shot other parts of the video elements of the piece. The only burst of thespian intemperance came when I finally wearied of the cinematographer calling me by the wrong name ("Dirk"), but then I instantly also felt guilty.
It all seemed to go swimmingly and I left her apartment with the heady satisfaction of having helped a young artist achieve her high ambitions. Then I got a call about a week later informing me that we had to re-shoot all my material, but this time in front of a green screen. Tomorrow. I hauled out the two pages of text and tried to memorize it all again.
The next day July picked me up in a car crammed with two other people and we drove to the unostentatious studios of Will Vinton, where in something like 55 brightly lit tiny carrels they were filming THE P.J.S. With my inimitable incorrigibility I took the opportunity of the drive to meditate on the essential fraudulence of performance art. I think I thought I was drawing her into the mutual conspiracy of thinking, but when I realized that I was irritating July I shut up. No hope of a romance here, I signed inwardly. Yes, that is the way men think. Men generally have two or three tracks of inner talk going at once, and one of them will unrealistically ponder the possibly of romance sparking between even the most disparate people. But it wasn't just my general mediocrity that prevented the flowerings of love; every time I saw July, both during the shooting and on happenstances later, she was with achingly pretty Eurotrash men of sleek design and black garb waited patiently in her orbit while she went about her business. This is a phenomenon I've noticed in female cult figures, who run their boyfriends ragged as they pursue their self-absorbed interests.
Over in Vinton's, July's directorial style proved to be paradoxically tentative yet insistent, with a lot of attention to detail. I tried to help her realize her goal but also kept making mistakes. She'd tell me not to do something and I'd keep doing it anyway (but what the hell, it's only videotape). It was also very interesting to try and "act" and take direction and it is only through the experience that you appreciate what actors do and go through, and the ineffable qualities that make some actors great or charismatic on screen.
I must have irritated July more than I imagined. She never even invited me to the grand opening of THE SWAN TOOL. I used to run into her on the street occasionally, and once teased her about the effusive nature of a critical essay on her work in the inevitably incomprehensible FILM COMMENT. Another time she appeared to be ill, and I learned from a local newspaper that July has suffered from periodic bouts of hysterical blindness. But then I heard that she had vacated Portland and my fleeting brush with fame evaporated in the wake of her high ambition. I haven't seen the ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW yet, but from the synopsis the film sounds Altmanesque, much more conventional (or just human?) than you'd expect from the maker of NEST OF TENS and other complex video shorts. I look forward to seeing it and very much expect July to ensorcelled the Academy next February just as much as she has the judges at Sundance and Cannes.
Come with us now to the days of yesteryear when Huntington Beach was not rife with body builders and life guards, and California was a sunny summer holiday for a small boy from a rain swept city who spent an energizing few weeks there in the summer of 1961. At least I think it was energizing. I actually don't remember too much of it now. As usual, I recall the movies more than the people. We were staying with an uncle, my mother's brother, and I have almost zero memory of him, his wife, or their kids, beyond the fact that they were a wretched pair of spoiled brats with whom I had nothing in common but the accident of DNA.
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So for me the most significant thing that happened was that I saw THE PARENT TRAP. At that time, Disney still had a great allure for the Holm household, and one of the key pilgrimages of this vacation was to Disneyland in Anaheim (a second stop after Knox's Berry Farm, where I vomited a corn dog onto the red brick surface of the welcoming courtyard).
Coincidentally the summer of our visit also saw the release of what would prove to be one of Disney's key cultural contributions, the Hayley Mills vehicle based on a 1949 German kids book by Erich Kastner, who also wrote EMIL AND THE DETECTIVES and THE FLYING CLASSROOM (just as Barbi, the doll, began life as a German sex toy, one of Disney's most iconic film began life as a parable about a divided Germany). The IMDB credits Kastner with inventing the 16mm Ariflex camera, but his most important invention is the brash Luise Palfy from Vienna, and the shy Lotte Körner.
Disney writer and director David Swift transmogrified the pair into Sharon McKendrick and Susan Evers, two twins whom the vivacious if tomboyish Hayley Mills could dually embody.
I don't know if it was the movie itself or my situation in life, but I fell in love with the movie and became obsessive about it, or did so at least the way little kids do, which is to dream about it, or rather, have ones native dreams supplanted by a "cultural production." What it came down to was that I wanted to find my own twin.
Gore Vidal talks periodically about the twin as the real object of the search for love, and the "perfect love" from his own past was a melding of opposites making a "perfect" whole. In my case it was probably a desire for rudimentary human contact as I had no friends and essentially did nothing but watch movies and TV shows or read books and comics. A complete isolate, I was a sort of male Carrie, reviled by all the neighborhood kids and everyone at school. If I had had access to a gun I would probably have been the first Kip Kinkle.
Seeing THE PARENT TRAP later as an adult I realized that I remembered nothing of the original film except that it had twins in it. I'm not quite sure how the tiny mind works, but clearly some nugget extracted from the film loomed large, superseding the film text itself and looming larger than all of its constituent parts. In reality the 1961 PARENT TRAP is a coarse if occasionally charming argument for marital unity in the face of a changing society (and boy did it change; in just a few years the hippie movement, drugs, rock, and anti-war activism would make Disney comatose for 25 years).
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What I appear to have done as an adult is transferred the obsession with a twin to a fixation of Lindsay Lohan, as the modern manifestation of the old McKendrick-Evers dyad, dubbed Hallie and Annie in Nancy Meyers and Charles Shyer's 1998 remake, THE PARENT TRAP: SPECIAL DOUBLE TROUBLE EDITION (Disney DVD, 1998, $19.95, Tuesday, May 31, 2005), now enjoying special edition re-release on DVD (the first disc of the film from March 1999 having gone out of print).
This wasn't the first movie I'd seen with Lohan. That was CONFESSIONS OF A TEENAGE DRAMA QUEEN. And in fact, I didn't see the movie first, but the electronic press kit. I was struck by Lohan's preternatural poise and, yes, appealing cuteness. I was only vaguely aware of Lohan before that, but made sure to see CONFESSIONS itself, and then after the triumph of MEAN GIRLS, made sure to get as many Lohan films as available on DVD.
And there is no need to be coy about Lohan's appeal even back when she was 11. Society, despite the efforts of the repressors, is much freer than it was back in 1937 when Graham Greene wrote a review in NIGHT AND DAY of Shirley Temple in WEE WILLIE WINKIE, noting that for the young star "infancy is a disguise," that the knowing seeming Temple was a "fancy little piece" whose eyes "had a sidelong searching coquetry." The Temple handlers brought suit against the publication (and won) but now we can see how canny and frank Greene was in his assessment of Temple, or at least Temple how she was manipulated by her corporate masters.
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Greene noted that the "owners of a child star are like leaseholders — their property diminishes in value every year. Time's chariot is at their back; before them acres of anonymity." True for the future Ambassadress of the Nixon administration, but not so for Liz Taylor, nor, I predict, for Lohan, who has a euphonious name, and the sly confidence of a dancer and a roué. The essence of Lohan's durability lies in her dancing skills. To see her dance her co-stars off the stage in MEAN GIRLS, and the way she relished dancing at the MTV movie awards is to see someone who has the bedrock, the foundation of supremely agile body to rely upon. Even at the age of 11, in the saucy handshake code her character shares with her butler Lohan shows a joyful arrogance and pleasure in moving her body. In this, Lohan's template may be Ann-Margret rather then Taylor, Natalie Wood, or Meg Foster.
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How the heck did the filmmakers end up with Lohan, anyway? That is one of the mysteries that the special edition fails to address (and Lohan is not around contemporaneously to comment on her recent past). On the disc Meyers and Shyer don't say much about the casting of Lohan for the film, but in a retrospective "making of" little Lohan recalls being part of a huge casting call. This hints at the triumph Lohan enjoyed and the acuity of the producers in seeing her talent. But then, by the age of four or five Lohan was already a seasoned performer, very familiar with show biz and advertising, with performance and appearances, and probably knew intuitively how to shine.
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The transfer for this new PARENT TRAP disc is enhanced for widescreen televisions, and the sound has been upgraded to DD 5.1. Supplements include a brisk yak track from Meyers and Shyer along with DP Dean Cundey, and a handful of making ofs. "Updating a Classic" (18:32), is an efficient summary of the film which may well be the original electronic press kit; "The Accent on Fun" (3:58) address the art of dialect coaching; "How Hallie Became Annie" (8:22) goes into the special effects aspects of the film. Finally there is a deleted scene, "Meeting the Queen (2:47)," whose title is sufficiently descriptive, and comes with an optional commentary. Shyer alludes to at least two other deleted scenes that don't appear on this disc. A one-page insert offers chapter titles and ads for other Disney product.
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Released on DVD simultaneously is GET A CLUE (Disney DVD, 2002, $19.95, Tuesday, May 31, 2005), a film Lohan made for Disney cable (two years after an earlier DVD release, LIFE SIZE). Here, she plays Lexy Gold, the daughter of a shockingly well paid journalist who lives in a penthouse and sends her to private school, where Lexy is a writer for the school paper (whom no one takes seriously). When one of her stories becomes city wide news, she and her friends and foes are dumped in the middle of a complex (or perhaps just poorly thought out) mystery in which the fate of a favorite teacher lies in the balance.
This is one of those "fun" kids movies in which the star, needing no visible means of support, can enjoy 500 costume changes and remain virginal (it is a Disney film) while flirting with the first high heeled steps toward romance.
As an "after school" movie there is a lot of hubbub about class conflicts, and Lexy must "grow" by realizing that there are many less privileged than herself. The filmmakers or the Disney executives seemed to think that Lohan's appeal is as a Hepburn style aristocrat whom we relish seeing "humiliated" when in fact she is an egalitarian, as both CONFESSIONS and MEAN GIRLS suggest, with a wide swath of tomboy that the forthcoming HERBIE movie may exploit before she enters the realm of the art-house cinema.
The adequate full frame transfer is accompanied by good DD 5.1; the only supplement is an alternate ending, some 20 minutes long, that recasts the film with a different villain. The sequence suggests that someone somewhere along the line didn't really know what they were doing, unable to nail down a story for their charge from the get-go. What's curious is that the deleted scene is in widescreen while the movie itself is not.
I also want to state frankly that I was teary eyed all though this movie. Even though it is not the PARENT TRAP of my youth, it is a surprisingly effective version, with high production values (Dean Tavalouris was the designer).
Lohan is making the right move by signing up for a Robert Altman film. Though I don't care for him personally, he is widely respected amongst critics, and though the film may be a flop it will give Lohan some credibility among "intellectuals." If she can maintain her popularity among her constituency, Lohan could have the same power as Tom Cruise, who has worked with every major director alive, belying his "pretty boy" pigeonhole. Lohan could follow a similar path. It's rather sad to contemplate the fate of teen stars who don't establish that stranglehold on their young fans (or who change too much physically to maintain consistency).
Thus we come to Melissa Joan Hart and CLARISSA EXPLAINS IT AL: SEASON ONE (Paramount, 1991, two discs, $27.95, Tuesday, May 17, 2005). CLARISSA lasted for five award winning seasons on Nickelodeon (from 19910 to 1994) before Hart transitioned to a teenage witch.
It's an easy going show that deals with teen problems in a slightly mature fashion that treads a fine line between true teen knowledgability and parental fears. Among its peculiarities is the fact that Clarissa has a neighbor named Sam who climbs into her bedroom whenever he pleases, not unlike Joey climbing the ladder in DAWSON'S CREEK.
Paramount's two-disc set gathers the 13 episodes of season one, and first seasons are generally weak in comparison to later ones. I can attest to the fact that teen girls did love CLARISSA, at least if the testimony of my friend Chris Brandenberg is accurate about her teen daughter's one-time obsession with the show. The full frame transfers and stereo sound capture the show; as does a "Nick Time Capsule" featurette showing what the world was like 12 years ago. Also on hand is an adult Hart walking us through her house for an episode of MTV CRIBS, a hip person's version of ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST.
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And speaking of crushes, because that is what I have been doing, there is the release of yet more episodes of DARK SHADOWS VOL. 18 (MPI, 1968, $59.95, four discs, Tuesday, May 31, 2005). I will admit that when I was a kid I, too, like so many people, was a DW addict. But it wasn't because of Barnabas Collins. It wasn't for Alexandra Moltke_(later involved in the REVERSAL OF FORTUNE case) or Kathryn Leigh Scott (she of the incredible teeth). No, my obsession was with Angelique, embodied by the full-bodied Lara Parker.
Angelique did something for me, something I've never been able to explain. I was supposed to hate her. She was the villain. Yet I felt the little parts throbbing with excitement, and I was poised in this neverland of inexplicable feelings and desires. I was 12.
Lara Parker had (has) a great voice, a great and tremulous voice, plus a most delightful face, feminine yet capable of evil at the same time. Within the DARK SHADOWS universe she also keep winning. Alexandra Jacobs wrote an analysis of Angelina Jolie in a recent issue of the NEW YORK OBSERVER, concluding that American women liked her because she was a home wrecker. We are supposed to like the victim but really we like the victor. That's the thing with Angelique, back those many years ago. She was a winner: a home wrecker, a covetous cast aside woman who got her revenge. Who couldn't like that?
Lara Parker is still beautiful, as we can see from DARK SHADOWS REUNION (MPI, $24.98, 30 September, 2003), one of many post cancellation gatherings of cast and crew to celebrate the series. This one happened to be at the Director's Guild Theater on March 8th, 2001, where creator Dan Curtis and some 18 cast members from the show's dense five year history.
MPI has been diligent about releasing DARK SHOWS episodes in order, first on tape, now on DVD (except for the pre-Barnabas episodes). With Volume 18, they are up to episodes in the 900s, when strange alien creatures were incorporated into the show, and a sect called the Leviathans were threatening the fragile equilibrium of vampires and werewolves who were ruling Collinsport. As usual, the set offers 40 consecutive episodes of the show, plus a few extras (in this case interviews with Kathryn Leigh Scott, Christopher Pennock, Geoffrey Scott and soap opera critic Michael Logan.
Angelique first appeared in an elaborate digression in the regular series, in which one of the characters was sent back into the past, via a séance, to learn about the roots of the Collins family's modern day troubles — vampires and such. In this segment, recounted in volumes 4 and 5 of the MPI series, Angelique appears, a woman who wants Barnabas and who won't let his engagement to someone else stand in her way.
Angelique was totally hot. She turned every man she encountered in her slave, including Thayer David as a simpleton servant over whom Angelique had the power of giving and withholding speech. I'm not sure how Angelique's story ends up (though I did note that Parker played different versions of her and also different characters in the series), but she is unique in the annals of soap operas, indeed of all television, a villainess who is more popular than the good guys.
So if I dig Angelique, you'd think I'd really go for the independent, whip-wielding, aspiring writer Sybylla Melvyn (Judy Davis) in MY BRILLIANT CAREER (Blue Underground, 1979, two discs, $29.95, Tuesday, May 31, 2005), based on the novel by progressive spirit Miles Franklin published early in the century and early in the history of Australia.
But in fact, Davis's Melvyn is one of the most annoying characters ever put on screen: willful, self-destructive, argumentative, and not as smart as she thinks she is. Still, the film, directed by Gillian Armstrong, and one of the first of the big Australian films that placed the country on the cinematic map. Fortunately, one of the outcomes was MAD MAX.
I mock, but MY BRILLIANT CAREER is at least historically or sociologically important. It may not be to my taste actorially (at least Judy Davis didn't have purple lips yet) or visually (the movie looks like really good television) but you have to acknowledge it as the inaugural film in a string of important films (and even director Armstrong went on to do much better films, including HIGH TIDE and THE LAST DAYS OF CHEZ NOUS).
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Blue Underground's disc of the film is fantastic: it looks exactly the way it did when I first saw it in the theater back in 1979. BL pulls something of a "Criterion" with this release, confining the extras (except for an enthusiastic commentary track from Armstrong) to a second disc. In the commentary, we learn such nuggets of information as that the DP created the sand storm at the beginning by pulling wheelies off camera (this was a low budget film). Her attention seems to flag at about the one-hour point, with long pauses suddenly appearing. The second disc is only comprises about 25 minutes: it includes "The Miles Franklin Story," a four minute account of the novelist's life, followed by a video interview with the film's producer and mentor, Margaret Fink (09:00) and with Armstrong (09:00) and finally B-role TV material from the Cannes film festival, where the film was a contender (and where the TV interviewer asked incredibly stupid questions).
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I was never a fan of Bruce Willis until the DIE HARD series — like everyone else. So it is a revelation to see MOONLIGHTING: SEASON ONE AND TWO (Lion's Gate, 1985-86, six discs, $49.95, Tuesday, May 31, 2005) and realize that he had been like that the whole time.
Yet Willis turned out not to have too much fun on MOONLIGHTING, which aired on ABC for about three and a half seasons. At least, if Cybill Shepherd's autobiography is to be believed. There she recounts how Willis and the show's creator Glenn Gordon Caron eventually viewed her as the source of all the production's problems, even though Caron had begun the series fashioning it around Shepherd's skills. Willis formed something of a boy's club with Caron, and relations with the two stars deteriorated, feuding as much on set as off.
And that is all in the past, and now to be forgotten as everyone gathers to celebrate one of the key shows of the 1980s on a five-disc set comprising the shows first season and a half. The hectic screwball banter is as enjoyable as it was at the time, and one marvels (especially after reading Shepherd's account of doing the show) that they were all able to do it, both write it and enact it all.
Most ABC shows looked crappy and this one is no exception, though it looks better set designed and costumed than most; the full frame transfers are good; the DD mono is audible.
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Supplements are scattered among the many discs. The main extra is a making of, "The Making of MOONLIGHTING," divided into two parts. This is followed by an 11-minute supplement that looks at "The MOONLIGHTING Phenomenon" in which critics and fans grapple with the show's success. Five episodes have commentaries of varying degrees of interest: The pilot, with Caron, director Robert Butler, editor Artie Mandelgerg, and producer Jay Daniel; "The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice" with director Peter Werner, co-writer Debra Frank, and Caron; "My Fair David," with director Will Mackenzie and Willis; "‘Twas the Episode Before Christmas" with director Peter Werner, producer Jay Daniel and actor Allyce Beasley, who plays Miss DiPesto, and finally "Every Daughter's Father is a Virgin," with Shepherd and Caron,, which is a nice pairing, given that she complains in her book about being excluding from previous disc versions of the show, such as the laser disc. Finally, there are promotional ads for the pilot. The discs come in a book style DVD box, but none of the platters have conventional labels; just images of the moon, nothing to tell you which disc is which. Don't mix them up.
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And incidentally, if you are interested in KILL BILL, you might find my new book, KILL BILL: AN UNOFFICIAL CASEBOOK useful. It is now available in fine bookstores everywhere, or from Amazon.
And if you are interested in what I sound like, I can be heard on KBOO radio (90.7 FM) the second and the fourth Wednesday of the month, at 9 AM in the morning (Pacific Standard Time) on Ed Goldberg's show MOVIE TALK, which is available via streaming audio (in 20 Kbps Stereo). The next broadcast is Wednesday, June 8, at 9 AM.
COMING SOON: CRASH, MR. AND MRS. SMITH, WAR OF THE WORLDS, more Asian action films, several STAR TREKS, and more!
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