Beverly Gray's Blog: Beverly in Movieland, page 93

What a Little Moonlight Can (and Can’t) Do

While a small indie called Moonlight was being nominated for every award in sight, I went to see The Beauty Queen of Leenane. This very dark, very Irish comedy is  the first play of Martin McDonagh, who has also made his mark in the film world by writing and directing In Bruges. That well-regarded 2008 film focuses on two Irish hitmen on the lam, hanging out in the medieval Belgian city. The brogues are thick and the mood is macabre. These characteristics also mark McDonagh plays like the astonishingly bloody The Lieutenant of Inishmore. The Beauty Queen of Leenane is a family story, but hardly one that’s warm and fuzzy. Unfolding in a rustic village outside Galway, it illustrates the mortal combat between a lovelorn middle-aged daughter and a  mother who—though physically feeble—rules the roost.
It’s curious, really, that this play brought me back to my earlier viewing of Moonlight. The similarities are not obvious. The Beauty Queen is rural and Irish; Moonlight is urban and African-American. But both take place in small, tight social enclaves whose members feel themselves shut out of mainstream society. In Beauty Queen it’s poor Irish folk so economically stressed that they need to take lowly jobs among the despised English. In Moonlight it’s a section of Miami where black Americans scramble to get by, often resorting to jobs that border on (or slip over the border into) criminal behavior. That being said, the characters in Moonlight can’t be judged solely by their relationship to the rule of law. The film’s one sympathetic father figure, the man who provides a stabilizing influence in the life of a young outcast, is also – and unabashedly – a drug dealer. (He, played by the charismatic Mahershala Ali, is the one gently cradling young Chiron in the ocean after his first swimming lesson; it’s the visual image most often used to advertise Moonlight, and it captures the film’s blend of tenderness and terror.)
The Beauty Queen pinpoints the complex love/hate  relationship between mother and (grown) daughter. For me possibly the most interesting strand in Moonlight is the relationship between an overstressed mother and her growing son. She (in the person of the magnificent Naomie Harris) is trying hard to raise and to love this young boy, whose shyness and gender confusion make him a natural target for bullies. At the same time, she’s dealing not only with poverty but also with her own drug habit, which causes her to lean over-heavily on a young man who needs her to be strong.   
Both Maureen in The Beauty Queen and Chiron in Moonlight have secrets they won’t admit even to themselves. Chiron’s is that in a world where machismo is prized, he is attracted to men, not women. Director Barry Jenkins’ sensitive handling of this topic is part of the reason this film has gotten so much acclaim. He also does beautiful things with a true ensemble cast, one that includes three young actors playing Chiron in boyhood, adolescence, and young manhood.
But there’s one unfortunate way that the film resembles the play I saw at the Mark Taper Forum. This was a true Irish production from Dublin’s Nomad theatre ensemble, and the accents of the all-Irish cast were at times too opaque to be understood. And Moonlight left me equally flummoxed. I’ve heard the film praised by a critic who mentioned that he’d seen it three times. Frankly, it may take three tries to understand some key plot points that the actors’ style of enunciation – however authentic – kept me from understanding. How frustrating to be shut out by language! 

Jackie, We Hardly Knew Ye

Like most Baby Boomers, I remember exactly where I was on November 22, 1963. That, of course, was the dark day when President John F. Kennedy died in Dallas. Everyone I knew stayed glued to a TV set for the whole grim aftermath of that death: the slaying of apparent assassin Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby on November 24; the heartbreaking funeral procession (complete with a riderless black horse and a little boy saluting his father’s casket) on November 25. For most of us young people, it was the saddest few days we’d ever known.
Central to that whole experience was our memory of the sad and lovely Jacqueline Kennedy, only 34 years old, bearing up under pressure with extraordinary grace. Seconds after the assassination, which took place while the two were riding in a Dallas motorcade, she was cradling her dying husband’s head in her lap. Then we caught a glimpse of her in news photos, standing shell-shocked in a blood-stained pink designer suit, as Kennedy’s successor was sworn into office aboard the plane bearing the late president’s body back to Washington DC. During the whole protracted funeral ritual, she was a somber but stately figure, a sheer black veil covering her exquisite face, one tiny child clutching each of her hands. In the iconic images of that time, she was the chief mourner, standing in for all of us as we dealt with our own sorrow.
Many years later, I visited the LBJ Library in Austin. Though it was a fascinating place, most of the exhibits have slipped my mind. But one letter on prominent display was unforgettable. It was from Jackie Kennedy to Lady Bird Johnson, apologizing for not having vacated the White House living quarters more quickly, because gathering up her youngsters’ toys and clothing was a big job. That letter was sent (as I recall) less than a week after the events of November 22. Jackie’s stiff-upper-lip graciousness continues to astound me; it has always made me wonder what kind of woman she was, beneath it all.
Now in Pablo Larrain’s new film, we are invited to ponder the Jacqueline Kennedy enigma. The focus is on the week following the assassination, with time-trips back to the glory days when her televised tour of the redecorated White House had the nation enthralled. The stunning portrayal of Jackie by Natalie Portman hints at a highly complicated woman, both vain and self-deprecating; both public-spirited and resentful of the public’s demands on her; both preturnaturally poised and coming unstrung. The film shows how, in the maelstrom that followed JFK’s death, Jackie strove mightily to hold the country together, and to preserve her husband’s legacy by introducing the metaphor—Camelot—that continues even today to be used to delineate the Kennedy years.
I have no way of knowing how closely this film follows the actual decision-making process that led to the pageantry of Kennedy’s very public funeral procession. But it makes sense that many governmental forces, wary of threats to the new president and other world leaders, would staunchly oppose the massive march from the White House to St. Matthew’s. It’s fascinating watching Portman’s Jackie negotiate (and sometimes re-negotiate) all the choices, sometimes in a state of barely tamped-down hysteria. Most unforgettable: watching her burning through a collection of shimmering gowns while simultaneously sweeping up the leavings of her family’s White House quarters.
One gripe, though. Peter Sarsgaard is a fine actor, but he doesn’t make a very convincing Robert Kennedy. In no world I know of was Bobby Kennedy a head taller than brother Jack.

The Movie-Star Summer of Robert Hicks

When I went to Atlanta on business, I had no idea I’d end up chatting with a bestselling Southern novelist about the joys of Southern California living. Robert Hicks—born in Florida and now a resident of Tennessee—made the New York Times bestseller list with his very first novel, a Civil War saga called The Widow of the South. His two other novels are also set on Southern soil, immediately after the War Between the States. Hicks is passionate about historic preservation and the city of Nashville, and he has commemorated the 150thanniversary of the Battle of Franklin by releasing his own small batch of what he calls Battlefield Bourbon. No question he’s a Southern gentleman through and through.
But when he heard I was an L.A. native, Robert Hicks waxed lyrical about the magic summer he once spent in my neck of the woods. He was twelve years old at the time he enjoyed what he likes to call “my summer in the land of dreams.”
It seems Hicks had an uncle who was a successful architect, a member of the Southern California firm headed by the great Paul Williams. (Today Wililams may be best remembered for his design of the iconic theme building at L.A. International Airport.) The uncle and his wife were childless, but felt an obligation to treat young family members to extended stays in their Beverly Hills home. When Robert arrived, he was taken on a whirlwind tour of the local attractions, like Disneyland and Universal Studios. He dined in style at the original hat-shaped Brown Derby, which his uncle had designed. Then one morning he awoke to find a $20 bill, a map, a bus pass, and a note warning him to stay out of the home of neighbor Ramon Navarro, but otherwise to have fun.
 Totally intimidated, young Robert barely budged from the house for several days. Finally he ventured outside, and discovered an attractive woman washing her car in the driveway next door. It was one of TV’s brightest stars of that era, singer Dinah Shore. They launched into a conversation, and eventually she invited him inside for a tunafish sandwich. What he didn’t know was that she was then going through a bitter divorce from husband George Montgomery. For the rest of the summer, she was happy to have Robert’s companionship. They even drove down to Rancho Mirage, where he stayed in a trailer on her property. When he finally returned to Florida, they kept in touch. For the rest of her life, Dinah remembered him on Christmas and on his birthday.
Before that summer was over, he met Ramon Navarro too, but never went inside. And he had other adventures, like a misguided attempt to get to the Watts Towers by bus. He became hopelessly lost, but was “adopted” by an African-American family who took him home for what he recalls as a “bodacious barbecue lunch.”
Robert Hicks’ new novel, The Orphan Mother, is a follow-up to The Widow of the South, just after the freeing of the slaves at the end of the Civil War. Hicks is gutsy enough, as a white male, to take as his central character a black midwife recently freed from slavery. Hicks’ prior novels have been optioned by Hollywood, but never filmed. Given the hue and cry when The Confessions of Nat Turner, a Pulitzer-winning account of a slave revolt by white author William Styron, was due to be made into a major motion picture, I don’t think The Orphan Mother is going to go Hollywood anytime soon. 
 

“Wonderful Town”: Making Beautiful Music with My Sister Eileen

Last week I rang in the holiday season by trekking through heavy traffic to Downtown L.A. (now fashionably known as DTLA). My destination: the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, where some Broadway and L.A. Opera stars appeared in a semi-staged concert version of Wonderful Town. Though this musical boasts music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by the incomparable Comden and Green, it should not be confused with the similarly-titled On the Town. That 1945 Broadway hit – about three sailors on shore leave in the Big Apple -- launched a very young Bernstein, Adolph Green, and Betty Comden (along with choreographer Jerome Robbins) on brilliant careers.  Wonderful Town, also set in New York City, came along in 1953; Bernstein, Comden, and Green were asked to step in, on short notice, to replace Leroy Anderson’s original score. Working quickly, they more than filled the bill with a nifty combination of comic songs, love ballads, Irish ditties, and a tour-de-force conga number that had playgoers tempted to dance in the aisles.
The genesis of Wonderful Town was a series of autobiographical stories by journalist Ruth McKenney. Her wry tales of moving from the Midwest to a basement apartment in kooky Greenwich Village, accompanied by her winsome younger sibling, were eventually collected into a popular 1938 book, My Sister Eileen. This was soon adapted into a stage comedy of the same name, starring Shirley Booth as the acerbic older sister struggling to find both a job and a man. (Feminists would cringe at the basic set-up: the smart sister goes dateless for most of the play while the adorable young Eileen quickly has men groveling at her pretty feet.) Ten years later, the musical was launched, with Rosalind Russell and adorably blonde Edie Adams in the starring roles.
Hit musicals of that era generally ended up as movies, often with a good deal of reworking. When On the Town was filmed in 1949, it rated a truly wonderful cast. Gene Kelly, Jules Munshin, and a very young Frank Sinatra were the singing, dancing sailors; their girls were memorably played by Vera-Ellen, Ann Miller, and feisty Betty Garrett. I love this film, despite the fact that Bernstein’s original ballet music was deeply trimmed, and several of the catchy Comden and Green songs were swapped out. As for Wonderful Town, it was never exactly filmed at all. Instead there was a film titled My Sister Eileen that scrapped all of the stage show’s original music, substituting unmemorable new tunes by Jule Styne and Leo Robbin. (Betty Garrett, Janet Leigh, and Jack Lemmon were the major players, with soon-to-be famous Bob Fosse in a featured role.) 
The real Ruth McKenney, as a teenager, had considered herself so homely that she attempted suicide. But in later years she truly did make her mark as both a journalist and a writer of fiction. She married, got interested (for a while) in leftwing politics, and raised two children.(I’m told her daughter eventually became a justice of the New York Supreme Court.)
Eileen eventually married the talented Nathanael West, who shook up the literary world of the 1930s with darkly satiric short novels like Miss Lonelyhearts. Hollywood soon came calling, an the experience gave West the material for the most devastating of movieland novels, 1939’s The Day of the Locust. In late 1940, West and Eileen were driving back from Mexico when he ran a stop sign in El Centro, California. There was a collision, and both were killed. So the real Eileen died four days before Wonderful Town was scheduled to begin its Broadway run. Talk about ending on a sad note.   

Adrift in Manchester by the Sea

Manchester by the Seaand its star, Casey Affleck, have been winning awards left and right, of late. I’ve recently been struck by how many films use a very specific place name as a title. An upcoming Jim Jarmusch indie (starring Adam Driver as a bus driver who’s a secret poet) is called Paterson, after both the last name of the leading character and the town he lives in: the unlovely Paterson, New Jersey. Last year it was Brooklyn, a period piece about an Irish lass who comes of age (in more ways than one) when she travels across the sea from her homeland to a place of adventure and opportunity. In 2013 we had Nebraska, which set the story of an elderly man against the backdrop of a low-key state to which I’d previously given absolutely no thought.
Big cities, too, inspire movies that try to encapsulate the spirit of a particular geographical and social environment. Take the Oscar-winning Chicago: about crime, spunk, and all that jazz. Or Manhattan, Woody Allen’s valentine to the romance that’s possible in a city that never sleeps. I hope that Philadelphia, a drama focusing on the firing of an AIDS-stricken attorney, doesn’t reflect the core values of the City of Brotherly Love. But La La Land sounds like it grasps the essence of my beautifully crazy hometown.
The Coen brothers, who enjoy capturing the mood of a locale in all their films, turned to their native soil when making Fargo. They hail from Minneapolis, where much of their tale unfolds, but -- within the context of a grim and bloody crime story -- Fargo, North Dakota looms as a mysterious destination marked by shifting allegiances, loose morality, and lots and lots of snow.
Manchester by the Seais set on Cape Ann, Massachusetts, in a picturesque seaside community that’s been lovingly photographed to bring out its beauty in all seasons. In this film, the town is very much a central character. We pick up on the local sense of pride and independence, as well as the feeling that the 5000 fulltime residents are very much a part of one another’s lives. They may be working-class folk, but they’re not poor, either in money or in spirit.
The story by writer-director Kenneth Lonergan focuses on one Manchester native, Lee Chandler, who has left town to work as a janitor in Boston. At the start of the film, he’s summoned back home by the news of his brother’s death, followed by the discovery that he’s been appointed the guardian of his brother’s son. Lee means well, but his stay in Manchester is haunted by his recollection (and the town’s) of the tragedy that drove him away in the first place. Casey Affleck’s strong performance conveys the grief and the guilt of a taciturn man who can’t get past the event that upended his life years before. The heart of the film is his interaction with his sixteen-year-old nephew, Patrick (Lucas Hedges), who has his own way of coping with sudden loss. Much of their interchange is surprisingly comic – Lucas is deftly juggling intimate relations with two high-school girlfriends – but the scene in which Lucas melts down while wrestling with a load of frozen food in his home freezer is as powerful as they come. 
Clearly, Lonergan (who’d made the well-regarded You Can Count on Me) knows about grief, and about how a community can try to rescue a member who’s in need of help. The only false note? The sudden appearance of Matthew Broderick in an unlikely small part generated chuckles from the knowing audience. 

A Farewell to Florence, and a Pair of Sylberts

I’m going to miss Florence Henderson, whom I associate less with The Brady Bunch than with the forays into musical theatre she made early in her career. As a youthful fan of all things Broadway, I listened repeatedly to the singing of Mary Martin on my Sound of Music cast album. But when  I was taken to L.A.’s creaky old Philharmonic Hall to see the show for myself, it was a young Florence Henderson who wore the wimple.                                    Paul Sylbert, unlike Florence Henderson, became far better known for his work than for his sparkling personality. But in the course of his long career he was revered throughout the industry as one of Hollywood’s premiere art directors and production designers. He brought imagination and craftsmanship to such big-name films as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Kramer vs. Kramer, and The Prince of Tides. For creating a misty celestial waiting-room and other more earthly locales in Heaven Can Wait, he was awarded an Oscar in 1979.
Once upon a time Paul was married to Anthea Sylbert, a costume designer who nabbed Oscar nominations for her striking period work on Chinatown and Julia. But the relationship that most interests me is the one he had with his identical twin brother, Richard. They were born on April 16, 1928. A close-knot duo, the two Sylberts served together in the same Army infantry unit in Korea, and then studied art together at Philadelphia’s Temple University. Sylbert’s L.A. Times obit notes that “when [Paul] Sylbert landed a job at CBS in New York, his brother found work at NBC. 
I don’t know of any other Hollywood art directors who came as a matched set. Their big break arrived when Elia Kazan hired them both to re-create a steamy Southern town in the controversial 1956 film, Baby Doll. Eventually, though, they learned to work apart. While Paul was busy elsewhere, Richard created designs for such powerful dramas as The Manchurian Candidate and The Pawnbroker. Then he was lucky enough to hook up with Mike Nichols for his very first film, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? This 1966 assignment won Richard an Oscar, the last ever given for specifically black-and-white set design and decoration. It also won him the job of production designer on Nichols’ second film, The Graduate. To capture the narcissism and sterility of Southern California living, the two decided on a limited color palette dominated by lots of murky blacks and stark whites, and they tricked out their sets with all manner of glass and mirrored surfaces. They also played with the idea of water, choosing as a visual metaphor that bedroom aquarium that seems to reflect Benjamin Braddock’s place as a prize specimen in his parents’ world. The film’s striking visuals were surely Oscar-worthy, but no nomination was forthcoming. Nonetheless, TheGraduate won Richard a reputation as a masterful interpreter of California living. He would go on to re-create L.A. on screen in such powerfully atmospheric films as Chinatown and Shampoo. But he also made intensely New York films, including  Rosemary’s Baby and The Cotton Club. And his second Oscar honored a movie that captured the look of the Sunday morning funny pages: Dick Tracy.
Richard Sylbert was working almost until his death in 2002. (Aside from his design career, he spent three years as chief of production at Paramount.) Paul, who also tried his hand at writing and directing films, left Hollywood in 2008 for a teaching post at his Philadelphia alma mater.  When he died, at 88, he’d outlived his twin by 14 years. Right now I’m mourning them both. 

Thankful for a “Loving” Decision

Thanksgiving is a holiday that encourages us to be grateful for the blessings we’ve been given. So Thanksgiving weekend seems an apt time to discuss Loving, a film that celebrates both love and political progress. I’ve long been aware of Loving v. Virginia, the case that led the Supreme Court, back in 1967, to roundly reject the notion that any state could ban marriage between persons of different races. Loving v. Virginia grew out of the prosecution of a young Virginia couple, Richard and Mildred Loving, for the crime of being married, in violation of the state’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924. He was white; she was black. They wed in nearby Washington D.C., but were pulled from their bed and jailed after they set up a household in their Virginia hometown.
Richard and Mildred were by no means rabble-rousers, nor campus intellectuals with something to prove. Rather, they had both grown up in a workaday rural enclave where blacks and whites mixed easily The Virginia countryside was a place of quiet beauty where a hard-working man like Richard (a bricklayer) could  buy a plot of land and -- with his own hands -- build a house for himself and his family. The new film, shot in the very place where a hugely pregnant Mildred was locked for days in a jail cell, conveys the simple desires of two unassuming people who will not stop loving one another, no matter what the law mandates.
It’s an interesting coincidence that the year of the Loving decision was also the year of the release of Stanley Kramer’s landmark film about interracial romance, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Kramer’s widow, Karen Sharpe Kramer, likes to say that her husband’s movie influenced the decision of the Supreme Court in the Loving case. Not so: the decision came down (on June 12, 1967) while the film was still in process of being completed. It effectively rendered moot a line in the script about how the union being contemplated by John Prentice and Joanna Drayton would be considered illegal in 17 states. Obviously, the marriage of the fictive John and Joey would be very different from that of the flesh-and-blood Richard and Mildred Loving. Their story takes place in San Francisco, where Joey, the daughter of a liberal-minded newspaper publisher played by Spencer Tracy, comes back from an Hawaiian vacation with Dr. John Prentice in tow. She (played by Katharine Houghton) is rich and beautiful. He (played by the era’s inevitable heroic black man, Sidney Poitier) is a medical doctor whose sense of mission leads him to travel the world, curing those afflicted with exotic diseases. So in marrying him, Joey will be safely removed from home-grown bigotry, and will not have to deal with “What will the neighbors think?”
 Critics of the film (and there were many) complained that Poitier’s character was impossibly noble. Kramer himself countered that the focus of his film was squarely on the way even the most progressive parents have to grapple with a grown child’s marital choice.  By making the black husband-to-be little short of sainthood, Kramer saw his film as pointing up the foolishness of using race as the overriding criterion when it comes to picking a mate. He deliberately made Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner an amiable comedy of manners, populated by likable and beautiful characters. It worked: the film was a massive hit all across the nation.
Loving  is far more real, except in one respect. Lead actor Joel Edgerton is Australian, while actress Ruth Negga hails from Ethiopia and Ireland. But that’s something you’d never guess.  

Thankful for a “Loving” Decision

Thanksgiving is a holiday that encourages us to be grateful for the blessings we’ve been given. So Thanksgiving weekend seems an apt time to discuss Loving, a film that celebrates both love and political progress. I’ve long been aware of Loving v. Virginia, the case that led the Supreme Court, back in 1967, to roundly reject the notion that any state could ban marriage between persons of different races. Loving v. Virginia grew out of the prosecution of a young Virginia couple, Richard and Mildred Loving, for the crime of being married, in violation of the state’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924. He was white; she was black. They wed in nearby Washington D.C., but were pulled from their bed and jailed after they set up a household in their Virginia hometown.
Richard and Mildred were by no means rabble-rousers, nor campus intellectuals with something to prove. Rather, they had both grown up in a workaday rural enclave where blacks and whites mixed easily The Virginia countryside was a place of quiet beauty where a hard-working man like Richard (a bricklayer) could  buy a plot of land and -- with his own hands -- build a house for himself and his family. The new film, shot in the very place where a hugely pregnant Mildred was locked for days in a jail cell, conveys the simple desires of two unassuming people who will not stop loving one another, no matter what the law mandates.
It’s an interesting coincidence that the year of the Loving decision was also the year of the release of Stanley Kramer’s landmark film about interracial romance, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Kramer’s widow, Karen Sharpe Kramer, likes to say that her husband’s movie influenced the decision of the Supreme Court in the Loving case. Not so: the decision came down (on June 12, 1967) while the film was still in process of being completed. It effectively rendered moot a line in the script about .how the union being contemplated by John Prentice and Joanna Drayton would be considered illegal in 17 states. Obviously, the marriage of the fictive John and Joey would be very different from that of the flesh-and-blood Richard and Mildred Loving. Their story takes place in San Francisco, where Joey, the daughter of a liberal-minded newspaper publisher played by Spencer Tracy, comes back from an Hawaiian vacation with Dr. John Prentice in tow. She (played by Katharine Houghton) is rich and beautiful. He (played by the era’s inevitable heroic black man, Sidney Poitier) is a medical doctor whose sense of mission leads him to travel the world, curing those afflicted with exotic diseases. So in marrying him, Joey will be safely removed from home-grown bigotry, and will not have to deal with “What will the neighbors think?”
 Critics of the film (and there were many) complained that Poitier’s character was impossibly noble. Kramer himself countered that the focus of his film was squarely on the way even the most progressive parents have to grapple with a grown child’s marital choice.  By making the black husband-to-be little short of sainthood, Kramer saw his film as pointing up the foolishness of using race as the overriding criterion when it comes to picking a mate. He deliberately made Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner an amiable comedy of manners, populated by likable and beautiful characters. It worked: the film was a massive hit all across the nation.
Loving  is far more real, except in one respect. Lead actor Joel Edgerton is Australian, while actress Ruth Negga hails from Ethiopia and Ireland. But that’s something you’d never guess.  

Togetherness is Put to the Test in "Don’t Think Twice"

Don’t Think Twice sounds like a Bob Dylan song, which of course it is. But it’s also a clever little feature film, the kind of indie that combines humor with heart, about the inner workings of a New York improv troupe. (The title comes from a legendary improv precept: Don’t think.) The Commune is made up of six close-knit performers: a pretty young woman, a not-so-pretty young woman, a waif, a steady guy, an insecure nerd, and a zany named Jack. All are adept at making stage magic out of thin air, but after eleven years they’re not gaining much ground, either artistically or financially. Says one, “Your 20s are all about hope, and your 30s are all about how dumb it is to hope.” Then, just as they’re being booted from their long-time theatre space, Jack (played by Keegan-Michael Key of  Key and Peele) is invited to join the celebrated cast of TV’s Weekend Live. Suddenly the troupe’s us-against-the-world spirit seems to have sustained a death blow.
Personally, I’ve always loved improv. Decades ago, when I was part of the dating scene, a favorite destination was the Sunset Strip’s Tiffany Theatre, where a troupe called The Committee held sway. I used to laugh myself silly when they pantomimed a death-defying trapeze act called The Flying Walloons, while never actually leaving the ground. But they were equally adept at responding on the fly to audience suggestions. My absolute favorite committee member was Howard Hesseman, who for some reason performed under the name Don Sturdy, before going on to a solid career in TV comedy.
Years later, I was lucky to interview a troupe led by improv guru Paul Sills. Such talented wackos as Richard Libertini, Hamilton Camp, Richard Schaal, and Avery Schreiber all vied humorously with one another to see who could sound most pretentious on my tape recorder. In performance, though, they seamlessly worked together, turning simple prompts from Sills or the audience into complicated performance art before our eyes. On the night I attended a Sills & Company show, the troupe was welcoming a special guest performer, none other than Robin Williams. Williams was, of course, brilliant in his own eccentric way, but he seemed unwilling, or unable, to function as one of the gang. He lacked the ability of the others to work as a unit, blending into a whole much greater than the sum of its parts.
It is that tension between the group dynamic and the power of individual ambition that is explored by Don’t Think Twice. When Ben Stiller (playing himself) attends a performance and goes out with the cast afterward, their fawning desperation isn’t pretty to watch. But writer-director-cast member Mike Birbiglia, when speaking to aspiring artistses, tends to focus on inspiration rather than despair. In fact, he’s come up with six tips for those eager to make it (somehow) in the dramatic arts. Here they are, in brief:
(1) Don’t Wait – try doing something, anything, NOW
(2) Fail – you won’t ever succeed without a lot of less-than-excellent attempts
(3) Learn From Failure – ideally by finding a supportive community
(4) Maybe Quit – be honest about your abilities and your chances
(5) BE BOLD ENOUGH TO MAKE STUFF THAT’S SMALL BUT GREAT – I love this! (6) CLEVERNESS IS OVERRATED, AND HEART IS UNDERRATED – Here’s what Birbiglia himself adds to this point: “Plus, there are fewer people competing for heart, so you have a better chance of getting noticed. Sometimes people say, ‘One thing you have to offer in your work is yourself.’ I disagree. I think it’s the only thing.”

Togetherness is Put to the Test in Don’t Think Twice

Don’t Think Twice sounds like a Bob Dylan song, which of course it is. But it’s also a clever little feature film, the kind of indie that combines humor with heart, about the inner workings of a New York improv troupe. (The title comes from a legendary improv precept: Don’t think.) The Commune is made up of six close-knit performers: a pretty young woman, a not-so-pretty young woman, a waif, a steady guy, an insecure nerd, and a zany named Jack. All are adept at making stage magic out of thin air, but after eleven years they’re not gaining much ground, either artistically or financially. Says one, “Your 20s are all about hope, and your 30s are all about how dumb it is to hope.” Then, just as they’re being booted from their long-time theatre space, Jack (played by Keegan-Michael Key of  Key and Peele) is invited to join the celebrated cast of TV’s Weekend Live. Suddenly the troupe’s us-against-the-world spirit seems to have sustained a death blow.
Personally, I’ve always loved improv. Decades ago, when I was part of the dating scene, a favorite destination was the Sunset Strip’s Tiffany Theatre, where a troupe called The Committee held sway. I used to laugh myself silly when they pantomimed a death-defying trapeze act called The Flying Walloons, while never actually leaving the ground. But they were equally adept at responding on the fly to audience suggestions. My absolute favorite committee member was Howard Hesseman, who for some reason performed under the name Don Sturdy, before going on to a solid career in TV comedy.
Years later, I was lucky to interview a troupe led by improv guru Paul Sills. Such talented wackos as Richard Libertini, Hamilton Camp, Richard Schaal, and Avery Schreiber all vied humorously with one another to see who could sound most pretentious on my tape recorder. In performance, though, they seamlessly worked together, turning simple prompts from Sills or the audience into complicated performance art before our eyes. On the night I attended a Sills & Company show, the troupe was welcoming a special guest performer, none other than Robin Williams. Williams was, of course, brilliant in his own eccentric way, but he seemed unwilling, or unable, to function as one of the gang. He lacked the ability of the others to work as a unit, blending into a whole much greater than the sum of its parts.
It is that tension between the group dynamic and the power of individual ambition that is explored by Don’t Think Twice. When Ben Stiller (playing himself) attends a performance and goes out with the cast afterward, their fawning desperation isn’t pretty to watch. But writer-director-cast member Mike Birbiglia, when speaking to aspiring artistses, tends to focus on inspiration rather than despair. In fact, he’s come up with six tips for those eager to make it (somehow) in the dramatic arts. Here they are, in brief:
(1) Don’t Wait – try doing something, anything, NOW
(2) Fail – you won’t ever succeed without a lot of less-than-excellent attempts
(3) Learn From Failure – ideally by finding a supportive community
(4) Maybe Quit – be honest about your abilities and your chances
(5) BE BOLD ENOUGH TO MAKE STUFF THAT’S SMALL BUT GREAT – I love this! (6) CLEVERNESS IS OVERRATED, AND HEART IS UNDERRATED – Here’s what Birbiglia himself adds to this point: “Plus, there are fewer people competing for heart, so you have a better chance of getting noticed. Sometimes people say, ‘One thing you have to offer in your work is yourself.’ I disagree. I think it’s the only thing.”