An Odyssey in Bits: The Fantasy Department

A spacecraft floats/falls through frame and at the exact moment we realise were going to lose it from view, the big blue balloon of Planet World drifts into view to replace it.

A series of different satellites and vehicles are picked up, as Johann Strauss’s The Blue Danube begins, not without controversy, to play. Here’s Quincy Jones:

“But you can’t get too cute with that sort of thing. I was really bugged by the over use of Strauss waltzes in 2001. That would have been OK as a one-liner, but it bugged me when it developed into the main theme. I knew that Frank Cordell had written Mahler variations for a year and a half for that picture, and they threw it all out. Then Alex North came in and wrote about six reels, and everything he did was thrown out too. I’m sure that between them, those two composers came up with something a lot hipper and a lot more appropriate for a picture that important than what we finally saw. Kubrick had already made that kind of musical point in Dr. Strangelove with “Try a Little Tenderness.” I personally think 2001 is too important a film for this kind of cute musical self-indulgence.” 

Leaving aside the inaccuracies — there’s only one Strauss waltz in the movie and it isn’t the main theme, except of the two sequences it’s used for — does Jones have a point? I doubt anybody today has a problem with the use of library music here. Jones seems concerned that it’s too cheap-sounding for an “important” film.Kubrick’s treatment of his two composers was awful: Cordell was put to work with practically no instructions, whereas North only found out his score had been cast aside in favour of the temp track when he attended the premiere. Imagine sitting there and hearing Also Sprach coming up instead of your close-but-no-cigar title theme. And then thinking, “Oh well, he’ll have used the rest of it.” And then along comes Ligeti. And then The Blue fucking Danube. And on and on until, only after three hours can you be sure that your entire score has been binned. Ouch.

However, I think Kubrick was correct to prefer the Strauss and quite right to say those who had a problem with it were being affected by the associations the piece had for them: ball gowns and tuxedos and waltzing. Whereas he was merely trying to evoke “grace in turning,” which is what the music seems to do. Certainly putting it up over shots of the actual Danube, as Duvivier does in THE GREAT WALTZ, isn’t nearly so effective. Did Jones also object to Clouzot’s use of it in THE WAGES OF FEAR, where it partly accompanies a dance, and partly a truck lumbering homewards?The first spacecraft we see are a bit 2D: they move like photographic cut-outs. But then the big wheel space station hoves into shot and its rotary motion, and the shadows cast over itself by its spokes and ring give it a majestic sense of solidity.

The Pan American spaceliner reminds us that corporations will always let us down: like the neon Atari ads in BLADE RUNNER, they date the thing, although modern audiences probably haven’t even heard of PanAm so they won’t care. The bestest shot in the whole space ballet is when we, out of nothing more than sheer joie de vivre, we fly BETWEEN the rings of the space station. It’s not any of the five normally accepted motivations for camera movement, it’s just WHEE! And maybe making the camera behave like a spaceship. It never flies into position and stops in this sequence. Sometimes it observes from a sort of geostationary point, sometimes it sails past or towards or around the action. It’s a proper zero-gravity camera.This docking bay is VERY Death Star, isn’t it? About the only design trait Lucas’s film shares with Kubrick’s. Love the little windows, all showing, Escher-fashion, different gravities (because the station creates gravity by centrifugal force, and the docking bay is in the hub, gravity is pulling outwards in all directions.

Meet Dr. Heywood Floyd! He’s asleep at the moment but you might as well meet him now as he doesn’t get much more interesting when he’s awake. “I like to work with the best actors in the world,” Kubrick told Michel Ciment, so naturally he got the guy from GORGO and DEVIL DOLL. An American who happened to be a UK resident. But I’m OK with him. W.S. always seems both matter-of-fact and chummy, which suits the character of a space spook, a government guy and scientist. One of the bureaucrats ultimately responsible for HAL’s nervous breakdown, though the movie doesn’t make that clear.The floating pen is such a neat effect: it’s stuck to a big rotating pane of glass in front of the camera, and the stewardess gives it a very slight twist to detach it.

I don’t so much dig how the lines of seats are sunken either side of the central aisle, like a slave galley. Makes me fear that stewardess Edwina Carroll Heather Downham might step on his drifting hand with her grip shoe. Or trip over him and go literally flying.

But I guess the seats being in trenches is an excuse for the low angle showing off the grip shoes.Edwina Heather is very attractive: a flashback to those days when all airline stewardesses were young and pretty, to distract the anxious hetero male passenger, via her pulchritude, from his fear of a fiery death. As one lot of pretty girls retired to get married, the airline could replace them with new, younger models. No more.

TV screens. In-flight movies, shot specially for this movie, and computer read-outs, all running on 16mm. Here’s an extract from John Baxter’s Kubrick bio ~

‘He called me and Ivor Powell into his office one day on 2001,” recalls Andrew Birkin. “He had all these international model directories, and he’d gone through them, marking up all these girls.’

“‘We could get them in,’ he said, ‘for an audition.’

Birkin and Powell looked blank. ‘For what?’

‘We could always say we have to shoot one of those 16mm docking sequences,’ Kubrick mused. (The films of sports and news that appeared on TV screens in the PanAm shuttle sequences were all back-projected 16mm.)

‘But it was all a fantasy,’ Birkin says, ‘He never did it. He also had an obsession about meeting Julie Christie. He was always trying to work out some sort of scheme whereby he could audition her. I knew her a little, and I said, “I’m sure she’d come up if you just called her.” But he didn’t want to do that. It all had to go through the Fantasy Department.’

That’s kind of sweet, or as sweet as casting couch ambitions can be said to get. We could guess from EYES WIDE SHUT that fantasies of adultery were a part of Stanley’s very successful second marriage.The auditions for CLOCKWORK ORANGE don’t sound so sweet.

 

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The Sunday Intertitle: Style and Title

Getting back to Edinburgh on Thursday, I returned to work the following day to see a talk by Jan Harlan, Kubrick’s brother-in-law and producer, director of the Malcolm McDowell documentary O LUCKY MALCOLM! etc (pictured above with Head of Film & TV Emma Davie).

Harlan is a delightful fellow, and the theme of his talk — music in cinema — was one he was well-qualified to discuss having worked with Kubrick on all his scores from 2001 on, and having an extensive knowledge of classical music. The wide range of film clips he presented illustrated how music can be used as a storytelling tool, to control the pace, to enhance character and to generally beautify the film. Harlan was, in effect, proselytizing for classical music and suggesting that all filmmakers should study it and fall in love with it. “If you don’t love it, you’re likely to ruin it,” was his mantra. And, “If you want to know how you acquire ownership of art, it’s very simple: you just fall in love with it and it becomes yours.”

It’s a huge and tricky subject. My advice has often been to never use a piece of music you know from another film. TV magazine shows do this — so that you couldn’t escape PULP FICTION’s surf guitar for at least a year on TV — and many documentaries do this, because to a large extent documentaries haven’t learned to take themselves seriously as art — hence they recycle titles from other movies, or slightly adapt them, which otherwise only porno movies do. There are exceptions to my rule — years before Kubrick made the Blue Danube his own, Julien Duvivier had used in memorably in THE GREAT WALTZ, where obviously you couldn’t avoid it, but more excitingly, Clouzot had used it with great imagination in THE WAGES OF FEAR, where Yves Montand slewed his truck all over the road in waltz time. But Kubrick had confidence that he could trump those films, and he was right.

But when that plinky-plonk bit of Carl Orff that forms the theme of BADLANDS gets used in TRUE ROMANCE and MONSTER, the filmmakers don’t think they’re superceding BADLANDS. They’re just copying BADLANDS. And the thinking seems to be, “Young couple, road movie, murders, therefore we need the music from BADLANDS.” Absurd. The deliberate placing of your film in second-best position. A failure of imagination. A dive into the mediocre.

Harlan’s suggestion to study the field is sound advice, because filmmakers have exhibited a dreadful tendency to repeat the same few pieces of the repertoire until they become unsuitable for any use save parody. Barber’s Adaggio is an obvious victim (David Lynch used it beautifully before PLATOON, and when Harlan showed the PLATOON clip I was struck by the obscenity of it — whose tragedy is this music expressing? As the American soldiers burn a Vietnamese village and separate civilian families, we are being asked to feel sorry for the soldiers, the poor youth of America who are being corrupted by violence). Lahkme by Delibes has been done to death not just by Tony Scott, who in fairness obviously loved the piece, but by everyone else who can’t be bothered selecting something less hackneyed (Brian DePalma and CARLITO’S WAY, stand up).

The counter-argument to Harlan and Kubrick’s suggestion that the best music ever composed is all available to us, is that it may be the best music but is it right for the film you’re making? It’s notable that FULL METAL JACKET uses not only considerable original score, performed by Kubrick’s daughter on the Fairlight synthesiser, the rest of its music is period-appropriate pop of a particularly and deliberately moronic nature (I like some of those songs a lot, but taken as a group I think they’re making a not-too-subtle comment of the dumbness of pop culture). Maybe PLATOON and APOCALYPSE NOW forced Kubrick’s hand — using classical pieces would have invited invidious comparisons — but I think Kubrick’s ultimate decision also skirts the western-centric solemnity and false dignity that could come from pasting high culture all over barbaric acts.

Mad bastard!

The William Friedkin interview on the BUG disc is a classic of its kind. We start with some guy pinning the mic to Bill’s fibrillating chest, while B.F. quietly suggests they should use this footage. “Show the process.” Friedkin in quiet mode is so terrifying they obviously felt they had to obey.

Within seconds, Friedkin is explaining how he’s made “an ever-diminishing number of films”. How does that work? Each time he makes one, there’s one less? MAD FUCKING IDIOT.

“How do I find my projects? They find me,” he smarms. That’s right, because he sits on his fat ass having heart attacks while skivvies run back and forth with screenplays. Bill’s films, apparently, can be inspired by anything, perhaps “an overheard conversation,” which would imply that Friedkin is some kind of WRITER, which he isn’t. Which of his films was inspired by an overheard conversation? Maybe he heard somebody talking about their possessed child, or maybe he heard somebody saying that only a complete ass would attempt to remake Clouzot’s THE WAGES OF FEAR and he thought, “That’s me!”

Actually, Friedkin might be even more brilliant at extemporizing random bullshit than Spielberg.

Then he talks about checking every cinema in America that was to show THE EXORCIST, and told them they wouldn’t get the film unless they fixed their screens and sound systems. “Now, I didn’t have the authority to do that,” he remarks with a cherubic smile, before going into ALARMINGLY specific detail about exactly what that entailed, for like, ten minutes. “Now, does that make you a control freak?”

Fiona says: “Stop being mean to him. He’s an old, mad bastard.”

Nevertheless, BUG is actually rather fine — more on it later.