He was old, overweight, drunken, ill tempered and profane. He had no friends save for an elderly Chinese man and a cat named General Price. But he was a lawman and a good one. And from the very first moment he showed his eye patch on the big screen, it was evident that Rooster Cogburn was the role that John Wayne had been waiting sixty years to play.

Created in 1968 by former journalist Charles Portis, U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn first appeared in the pages of The Saturday Evening Post in the serialized Western, True Grit. When an expanded version was later published as a novel, Paramount Pictures and producer Hal B. Wallis came calling and True Grit was headed for the movies.

The film tells the story of young Mattie Ross (Kim Darby) who hires Cogburn to track down the man who killed her father. Things go bad for the Marshal almost immediately when Mattie insists on riding along with Cogburn and they both get saddled with an inexperienced Texas Ranger (Glen Campbell) who is also on the trail of the killer Tom Chaney (Jeff Corey).

Director Henrey Hathaway infused True Grit with a lot of terrific stuff to enjoy, but the real pleasure is in watching John Wayne breathe Rooster Cogburn to life. For his efforts, he won both the Golden Globe and the Academy Award for Best Actor. Accepting the Oscar, a delighted Wayne snarked, “If I’d known this, I’d have put that eye patch on 40 years ago!”

An unsatisfying sequel, Rooster Cogburn, followed in 1975. Here, Wayne is paired with Katherine Hepburn, who is looking for both her father’s killer and missing shipment of nitroglycerin. Though less successful than True Grit, development began on Sometime, a third Cogburn film. Alas, Sometime never came as John Wayne completed just one more movie (The Shootist) before his death in 1979.

The next step for the character the Duke left behind was television. In May of 1978, ABC aired True Grit: A Further Adventure. Written and produced by Sandor Stern (The Mod Squad) and starring Warren Oates as Rooster Cogburn and Lisa Pelikan as Mattie Ross, the two-hour movies was a pilot for a proposed Rooster Cogburn TV series that never materialized.

Rooster Cogburn had hit the end of the trail. And that’s the way it’s been for over 30 years.

Now, thanks to directors Joel and Ethan Coen, True Grit is headed back into movie theaters. After auditioning more than 15,000 teenage girls, Paramount says the new Mattie Ross is 13-year old Hailee Steinfeld. She will join Josh Brolin (as the killer Chaney) and Matt Damon (as the Texas Ranger) in a new adaptation of the original Charles Portis novel. Filling the big boots of John Wayne as U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn will be Jeff Bridges.

I say bring it on. The character of Rooster is so strong and so deep and so inherently cinematic that it’s almost a shame we’ve had to wait this long to see him again.

Brilliant or bad, there’s nothing that Jeff Bridges and the Coens can do with their Marshal that will diminish John Wayne’s. Like Ringo in Stagecoach and Ethan in The Searchers, Rooster is one of the few John Wayne characters that is bigger than the Duke himself.

So let’s raise a flask and wish the new True Grit and the Coen Brothers well. I hope they make a great movie. And to Jeff Bridges, with all due respect and great anticipation, let me echo the words of Rooster Cogburn himself and say: “Fill your hands, you son of a bitch!”

“All you need for a movie is a girl and a gun…”
Jean-Luc Godard

I’m sure that when Luc Besson sat down to write the first few scenes of would become the film La Femme Nikita, he had no idea that he was creating a piece of intellectual property that would get made and re-made no less than five times over the next seven years.

The 1990 French action film, written and directed by Besson, told the story of Nikita Taylor (Anne Parillaud), a petty criminal and drug addict who was arrested for the murder of a cop, convicted and imprisoned. At that point, Nikita was approached by France’s top spy agency and offered a deal: Die in prison or work as a government assassin.

That Nikita inspired a slick 1991 Hong Kong action remake called Black Cat, which closely followed the original film’s storyline. Jade Leung played the Chinese street girl turned living weapon in both Black Cat and the 1992 sequel, Black Cat 2.

In 1993, Warner Bros. remade Nikita for American audiences as Point of No Return, with veteran director John Badham stepping in for Luc Besson (who declined the offer). This time, Bridget Fonda was the girl wielding the gun (now known as Nina).

Next up: La Femme Nikita, a 1997 television series produced by Warner Bros. and Fireworks Entertainment. The USA Network series ran for five seasons. Created by 24’s executive producer Joel Surnow, the series starred Peta Wilson as Nikita.

And now, word comes from the folks at the awkwardly named The CW that a new Nikita is on the way. Hawaiian-born Maggie Q has just been cast in a pilot being prepped by Warner Bros. Television and McG’s Wonderland. The story this time is that a new Nikita has been trained to replace the original one after she goes, y’know, rogue.

Will it work? Who knows? But I wouldn’t bet against it. The track record for the Nikita franchise has almost single-handedly proven Godard’s adage.

Tags: Anne Parillaud, Bridget Fonda, Jean-Luc Godard, Joel Surnow, Luc Besson, Maggie Q, Peta Wilson
Posted in Screening Room

Back in the dim, dark days before home video, Netflix, DVRs, on-demand and streaming, movies fans had only two places to look to view and study older, out-of-circulation films.

Place Number One was late night television. Before the midnight TV landscape was crowded with a half-dozen white guys sitting behind desks, there were branded movie showcases with names like The Million Dollar Movie, The Great Entertainment, Chiller Theatre, The Movie Loft, Classic Horror, Science Fiction Theater, Comedy Classics and Creature Double Feature.

If you were in the mood to watch James Cagney, Boris Karloff, Judy Holliday, Abbott & Costello,  Godzilla, Maria Montez or Klaatu do their thing, you stayed up late and you watched.

And Place Number Two for old movies? Well, if you were lucky enough to live in a city big enough to support a couple of major colleges and/or universities, then you probably had the option of venturing out from the house and down to the local repertory cinema.

We had a great rep cinema in the town where I attended college. They ran double features and changed their bill every two or three days. Inside of a week, you could drop by the cinema three different nights and see The Marx Brothers starring A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races; two film directed by Bob Fosse, Lenny and All That Jazz; or Roman Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers paired with George Romero’s also-a-vampire-movie, Martin.

I was a film student at the time. If I wasn’t in class screening Buster Keaton in Sherlock, Jr. or Anna Karina in Pierrot le Fou or Orson Welles in F for Fake, then I was down at the rep cinema, popcorn in hand, catching a double feature of Woody Allen or Michael Powell or Brian De Palma.It was pure, unadulterated movie geek heaven.

Fast forward. Digital technology (your DVDs and DVRs and online streaming) emerges and virtually wipes out the nation’s repertory cinemas. Who needs to schlep across town to see Richard Rush’s brilliant The Stunt Man on the big screen when you could simply have Netflix or Amazon or DirectTV deliver to your home? Only a movie maniac.

Enter Quentin Tarantino, movie maniac.

The news broke this week that the writer-director of Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill and Inglourious Basterds recently purchased The New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles’s Fairfax district.

Formerly a vaudeville house, a mob nightclub and a porn theater, The New Beverly Cinema opened on May of 1978 as a two-fer repertory cinema. In the 32 years since the New Bev ran its first Marlon Brando double feature, hundreds of film students and novice filmmakers have flocked to the theater. One of them was Quentin Tarantino, who started visiting the New Bev just a couple of years after the place opened.

And so, when the financially-strapped New Beverly Cinema was recently threatened with closure, Tarantino swooped in and bought place to ensure that the New Bev, its programmers and its audiences would always have a home.

The full story (recounted by Vanity Fair) is here. The official site of the New Bev is here.

Check ‘em out. And if you live or regularly visit Los Angeles, think about dropping by The New Beverly Cinema to check out whatever double-bill happens to be playing. If Quentin Tarantino chooses to exert some influence over the programming, the results could be fascinating.

Before he created The Twilight Zone in 1959, Rod Serling wrote dozens and dozens of dramas during the Golden Age of Television. Serling’s work appeared on both NBC and CBS  on live anthology series like The Fireside Theater, Hallmark Hall of Fame, Lux Video Theatre, Kraft Television Theatre, Suspense and Westinghouse Studio One.

Created by former Canadian broadcaster Fletcher Markle, Westinghouse Studio One premiered on CBS radio in April of 1947. The network moved the series to television a year later, where it was sponsored by the Westinghouse Electric Corporation for ten years, using the network commercial time within the show to sell washing machines and refrigerators. (Side note of interest: The Westinghouse Electric Corporation acquired CBS Inc. in 1995 and eventually renamed the combined company assets the CBS Corporation.)

Like other anthology shows of the day, Studio One offered up a wide variety of play-like dramas over its 466 episodes (including 12 Angry Men, later adapted as a feature film). Rod Serling wrote six episodes of Westinghouse Studio One. Two of them, The Strike (June 7 1954) and The Arena (April 9 1955) were released this week on DVD under the utilitarian name Rod Serling Studio One Dramas. The Arena concerns itself with a junior U.S. Senator and the moral choices he has to wrestle with in his new job in Washington. The Strike deals with an Army Major running out of options during the Korean War.

Both of these Studio One dramas were directed by Franklin Schaffner, who would later direct the film Planet of the Apes, from a script co-written by Rod Serling. Like most of what was broadcast on television in the 1950s, The Arena and The Strike were presented live. Staged like plays in the CBS broadcast studios, they were produced to be seen once (mistakes and all) and never again. Thankfully,  the folks at the Archive of American Television decided that these pieces of TV history needed to be preserved and studied.

Rod Serling Studio One Dramas is a follow-up to Studio One Anthology, the Archive’s 6-DVD set containing 17 dramas from the series, including (including The Arena and The Strike). You can see a promotional trailer for that collection down below.

Made just a couple of years after the birth of network television itself, these dramas offer us a unique opportunity to go back in time to see TV the way American viewers in the 1950s saw it.

It’s well documented that, in the days when George Lucas was just beginning his film career, he was interested in making small, personal films. And he was also interested in employing new technology to make new, experimental forms of cinema.

We got his small, personal film in the form of American Graffiti. And his pioneering efforts on the techno geek front led to the Star Wars franchise.

To many, George Lucas has been an inspiration.

Now there’s a new filmmaker on the horizon. He’s made a small, personal film and he’s harnessed the techno geek playground called the Internet to get it made.

And it’s called The People vs. George Lucas.

The filmmaker is Alexandre O. Philippe. He was a fan of Lucas’ space opera, but like a lot of Star Wars fans, he didn’t like what Lucas had been doing with the franchise.

Those fans beef about all the changes Lucas has made to the original Star Wars trilogy as new technologies have emerged. They beef about the talky, boring second trilogy. They beef about Jar Jar Binks. They beef that Lucas himself has pimped out his characters and his vision for everything from toys to games to collectibles to apparel and home furnishings.

Filmmaker Alexandre O. Philippe decided to harness that fanboy rage and turn into the cinematic indictment that is The People vs. George Lucas.

Back in 2007, Philippe launched a website to announce his film project and make an open call for fan contributions. What he got back was over 700 pieces of media, including webcam rants, fanedits of Star Wars movies, TV shows and commercials, comedy sketches, puppet skits, 3D and claymation animation, kids’ drawings, digital shorts and old school Super-8 films.

Philippe combined all of that homegrown material with his own doc-style interviews with dozens of Lucas colleagues, critics and consumers to amass a whopping 600 hours of footage, spread out over 14 terabytes’ worth of drive space.

All of that material has now been whittled down into a finished film and Alexandre O. Philippe’s The People vs. George Lucas will make its debut as a Spotlight Premiere at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas, running from March 12th to March 21st. You can check out all the details at the SXSW2010 website.

As for an advance look at The People vs. George Lucas, there are a numbers of different trailers floating out there in cyberspace. The one below is my favorite.

I wonder what George Lucas thinks about this?

Alfred Hitchcock was not just a guy who spent a great deal of time making movies; he was also a guy who spent a lot of time thinking about movies. He was constantly refining his approach to what he called “Pure Cinema…telling a story in a very medium-specific way, with no effective equivalent in written narrative. It is an emphasis on visual elements, rather than the verbal.”

Hitch talked about that many times in many interviews, but I think he expressed it best in producer-director Richard Schickel’s 1973 documentary series, The Men Who Made The Movies. Here’s Sir Alfred Hitchcock:

“When I say that I’m not interested in content, it would be the same as a painter worrying about whether the apples that he’s painting are sweet or sour. Who cares? It’s his style, his manner of painting them…that’s where the emotion comes from. It’s the same as in sculpture.

Any art form is there for the artist to interpret it in his own way and thus create an emotion. Literature can do it by the way that the language is used or the words are put together. But sometimes you find that a film is looked at solely for its content without any regard for the style or manner in which the story is told. And, after all, that is basically the art of the cinema.

One reads a book and providing all the story elements are there and the characters are there, it’s best, then, to lay the book aside and start with Scene One in cinema terms. In other words, we don’t have pages to fill or pages from a typewriter to fill; we have a rectangular screen in a movie house. Now, this rectangular screen has to be filled with a succession of images. And the mere fact that they are in succession, that’s where the ideas come from.

One picture comes up after another. The public isn’t aware of what we call montage or the cutting of one image to another. They go by so rapidly so the audience is absorbed by the content that they look at on the screen. But such content is created on the screen and not necessarily in a single shot…”

Ryan Gallagher and his fellow cinephiles Travis George and Rudie Obias over at their The Criterion Cast report that Netflix has added at least 35 Criterion Collection titles to its streaming Watch Instantly feature.

Back in the early days of home video, when movie studios were dumping low-quality, pan-and-scan versions of their movies on the growing VHS marketplace, The Criterion Collection video company took the high road, leading the way in creating special editions of films.

Criterion took a great deal of pride and, more importantly, care in releasing movies with the correct aspect ratio preserved, filmmaker commentary tracks, missing scenes recovery and hours of film restoration to present definitive versions of cinema classics, all on laserdisc.

Eventually, Criterion migrated their library of titles to DVD and Blu-Ray. Two years ago, The Criterion Collection began offering video-on-demand downloading services for their films in association with The Auteurs.

Criterion has now teamed up with Netflix and whether you’re looking to experience Fritz Lang’s M, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear, Jean-Luc Godard’s Tout Va Bien or Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters for the first of fiftieth time, they’re all just a click away with, we are told, more to come.

This is nothing but good news for cinema fans.

Tags: Fritz Lang, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Jean-Luc Godard, Paul Schrader
Posted in Newsroom, Screening Room

For movie fans lucky enough to live in Southern California, there’s no end to the film societies, screenings and lecture series devoted to All Things Cinema.

One example would be the UCLA Film & Television Archive’s sporadic series, The Movie That Inspired Me, wherein working directors, writers, actors and other filmmakers screen and talk about films that have influenced their life and inspired their creativity. The Movie That Inspired Me is hosted by the Film & Television Archive’s Honorary Chairman and series curator Curtis Hanson (director of L.A. Confidential, Wonder Boys, 8 Mile).

This Friday (January 22), Hanson’s guest will be director Kathryn Bigelow, whose most recent film, The Hurt Locker, was one of the best reviewed American films of 2009, just the latest in a career making innovative films like Near Dark, Blue Steel, Point Break and Strange Days.

For Friday evening’s film screening and discussion, Bigelow has selected 1969’s The Wild Bunch, directed by Sam Peckinpah.

The story is a simple one: In the weeks prior to World War I, a band of aging Western outlaws led by Pike Bishop (William Holden) attempt to rob a Texas bank, with the idea of using the money for retirement. When the robbery goes wrong, this wild bunch runs to Mexico with Bishop’s reformed ex-partner, Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan) on their trail. There they meet a violent Mexican general who wants them to rob a U.S. train carrying arms. They take the mission, but it leads to a violent final battle in which their lawless pasts finally catch up to them.

Teamed with cinematographer Lucien Ballard, film editor Louis Lombardo and a cast that included Ernest Borgnine, Warren Oates, Ben Johnson and other familiar Western faces, Sam Peckinpah ushered in a new style of cinematic violence that blew up Hollywood’s romantic notion of the Old West even as it rejuvenated the Western genre.

The Wild Bunch was shot in 81 days, on a budget of six million dollars. The climatic gun battle sequence itself took 12 days to stage and shoot. The film is reportedly made up of roughly 3000 edits in about 138 minutes of action. John Wayne may have complained that The Wild Bunch shattered the myth of the Old West, but in 2007, the American Film Institute ranked Peckinpah’s masterpiece as the #79 Greatest Movie of All Time.

I’m sure all of that and more will be discussed this Friday night when, thanks to the UCLA Film & Television Archive, Kathryn Bigelow and Curtis Hanson deconstruct the most famous of all deconstructionist Westerns, The Wild Bunch.

For tickets and info, go here.

If you’re a Netflix subscriber, you probably love checking the mailbox in search of whatever DVDs your ordered up a day or two before.

And, as a seasoned Netflixer, you’ve probably noticed that the company has really been ramping up their Watch Instantly streaming video service. They’re not there yet, but Netflix is working toward a day when the DVDs can go away and they deliver your movies to you through cyberspace. That’s why they called the company Netflix and not DVDs-By-Mail.

The trouble is, as it stands now, you can’t tell which movie, TV show, documentary or concert title is designated as a Watch Instantly movie unless you happen to search for a specific title and you stumble onto the Watch Instantly option. Netflix doesn’t have a page dedicated to identifying titles coming to Watch Instantly, nor do they provide a way to search for those titles.

Well, now there’s a free website called Streaming Soon that provides all the information on those movies that Netflix says are headed your way via their Watch Instantly portal.

The good folks behind Streaming Soon manually search Netflix’s site each day looking for titles that are identified as “streaming coming soon” as well as those with a specific streaming-on date. They then add all that information to their Streaming Soon site and encourage other Netflix subscribers to share news of new titles as well.

So whether you’re looking to stream Samuel Fuller’s 60’s crime classic, Underworld U.S.A. or you want to study Madonna’s Judy Holliday-inspired performance in Who’s That Girl or you simply want keep the brats quiet with Brad Bird’s animated The Iron Giant starring Jennifer Aniston, well, Streaming Soon is the online resource for you.

You can check it out right here at Streaming Soon.

Tomorrow is Martin Luther King Jr. Day and many of us have the day off. To celebrate, the folks over at Syfy (”the media destination for imagination-based entertainment”) is presenting an 11-hour marathon of the 1960s sci-fi cult TV classic, The Invaders.

And, no, I don’t know what Dr. King and UFOs have to do with one another, either.

Regardless: The Invaders ran for two seasons on ABC from January 10 1967 to March 26 1968 for a total of 43 episodes. The series was executive produced by Quinn Martin (The Fugitive, The F.B.I., The Streets of San Francisco, Cannon and Barnaby Jones) and created by Larry Cohen, a TV scripter who went on to write and direct low-budget feature schlockers like Hell Up in Harlem, It’s Alive and A Return to Salem’s Lot.

For The Invaders, Cohen imagined a scenario that had architect David Vincent stumble upon evidence of an alien invasion of Earth already well underway. Vincent then traveled from town to town (like The Fugitive), trying to expose the alien plot while warning an unbelieving public about the destruction yet to come.

The Invaders starred Roy Thinnes (who actually claimed to have witnessed a UFO during the filming) and he was supported by a variety of the day’s popular character actors as guest stars (Gene Hackman, Roddy McDowall, Peter Graves, Susan Strasberg, Ed Asner, Suzanne Pleshette, Michael Rennie, Arthur Hill, William Windom, Susan Oliver and more).

If you want a peek at some of the sixties sci-fi in store for tomorrow, here’s the main title sequence (what was once called a “premise open”) for The Invaders...