Sample And Hold: Brian Eno And The Future of Rock

Throughout the seventies, Brian Eno helped produce some of most rock’s most influential albums. His career basically started with him glammed-out in Roxy Music, playing synthesizers and helping shape the band’s unique sound. After one too many clashes – and a gig where he realized he cared more about his laundry than the music he was playing – Eno split, first releasing the oddball pop duo of Here Come the Warm Jets and Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) before almost single-handedly creating ambient music on Another Green World and Music For Airports. And he found time to work with David Bowie, The Talking Heads and Devo, played an infamous series of gigs with 801, recorded instrumental albums with Robert Fripp and recorded and compiled the seminal No New York collection.

Basically, between 1974 and 1980, Eno was a pretty busy man. While his music from this period is occasionally pretentious, sometimes feels half-finished and can be a chore to get through (sometimes all three at once) it’s legacy is hard to deny: anytime one stumbles across a list of The Most Influential Albums Ever, you’ll see a bunch of his solo albums scattered therein, not to mention the stuff he produced. Still, have you listened to the second half of any of his albums? Eno was a guy who usually kicked his albums off with a few very good tracks but they usually ran out of steam about halfway through.

But for all the critical success of his seventies stuff it wasn’t until the early eighties that an album of Eno’s really feels revolutionary. And that’s because, for once, he didn’t have to do the heavy lifting.

How One Flop Killed UA: Steven Bach’s Final Cut

Final Cut by Steven Bach

It’s not often that a movie is qualified as an unmitigated disaster. There’s flops, sure, and the occasional stinker (see: Movie 42). Sometimes a movie is even a trainwreck, something that derails a career (see: Halle Barry’s career post-Catwoman). But a complete, total diaster? Those only come along once in a long, long while. And they might never have come bigger than Heaven’s Gate.

The late 1970s in Hollywood was the last gasps of a director-fuelled scene. Francis Ford Coppola was taking his sweet time to edit, re-edit and edit Apocalypse Now. Martin Scorsese was preparing Raging Bull, a dark movie about the troubled boxer Jake La Motta. And Michael Cimino had just won praise and acclaim for The Deer Hunter and was shopping around a new movie, a western about the Johnson County War. All three films would be released by United Artists, the studio founded by Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, DW Griffiths and Douglas Fairbanks. The first two are constantly ranked among the best movies ever released. The third would kill the studio.

Stephen Bach’s Final Cut is long look at the chaotic making of Heaven’s Gate and the downfall of a Hollywood studio. It’s  absorbing, detailed and messy. Bodies are thrown under buses, dirt is slung. After all, the downfall of United Artists is often blamed on the singular failure of Gate, but as Bach’s book shows, there was a lot more it than just that.

The late 70s were not a great time for UA, even if they had several hits. Owned by Transamerica, an insurance company that wanted to change the studio’s name to Transamerica Films, so more people would see their name. They had acclaim for movies like Last Tango In Paris or Midnight Cowboy, but these were rated X, meaning theatre chains passed. And so went a large share of the profits. And that was with movies which saw release: the editing of Apocalypse Now was a train wreck, with Coppola allegedly hiding a copy in his house to keep it away from studio execs. Their spring 1978 movie wouldn’t see release until 1979.

Meanwhile, the studio was ripping itself apart. Longtime executive Arthur Krim lost a power struggle to Transamerica and fled, along with other high-ranking execs, to form Orion Pictures. The company was unstable, as is this side of Bach’s book: executives come and go with surprisingly regularity. It’s a wonder anything got done in this messy chaos.

But things got done and UA did have some success. During this struggle, Woody Allen shot and released Manhattan, arguably his best movie. Rocky was a surprise hit and it’s 1979 sequel did even better at the box office. And several Bond movies – notably Moonraker and For Your Eyes Only – were box office hits. And while Raging Bull wasn’t a hit, it garnered critical acclaim from nearly corner.

It’s a confusing tale, but Bach is always at the centre and tries to keep things level. His book offers several points where if UA acted differently, they could still be in business. They range from everything from the unique contract they gave Gate writer and director Michael Cimino that allowed him final cut to a string of executives leaving the company to a number of risky but high-yield movie bets failing on them. They weren’t just gambling on Gate being a success: they were hoping it’d be part of a number of successful movies. Not only did none of these pan out, but they passed on some films that did.

But maybe it wouldn’t have made a difference if these pictures did get made and were successful. UA, as Bach paints it, was a chaotic organization, headed by a CEO who didn’t inspire his underlings and marred by in-fighting between executives, who constantly complained about being undercut and conspired against. It’s sometimes hard to keep track of who’s who in Final Cut because so many people quit, get fired or just change jobs.

Those coming to Final Cut looking for a detailed look at the making of Gate will be a little disappointed. It’s a book about how one of the major players in Hollywood fell apart and sold. It’s closer to Barbarians at the Gate than it is a Hollywood tell-all.  But that’s the book’s charm: Bach didn’t have a directorial background and he wasn’t there for the day-to-day shoots. Coming from him, a behind-the-scenes look at this movie would be a little suspicious. To be fair, he does have the occasional glance, like Cimino banning people from the set, shooting millions of feet of film and relentlessly battling executives over his schedule and budget. Or the lasting image of Cimino: someone determined to produce something on his own terms, even if it meant destroying it in the process. At least he’s found a willing company in Criterion, who’ve indulged him with a deluxe box set, conspicuously absent of any controversial statements (save the occasional shot at American critics).

Rating: 8/10. Final Cut is a fascinating look at the inner workings of a movie company: how it interacts with the bosses, with directors and producers and how, in so many words, the sausage gets made. Or in this case, un-made. Recommended for film fans, especially those who splurged on the deluxe Criterion set and want to hear the other side of the story.

Breaking Down Grantland’s Oscar Tragedies, Part Two

In Part Two, Sarah from Deconstructing Hollywood takes the bracket to task! To read part one, click here.

Sarah

Grantland’s Oscar Travesties bracket self-identifies as “a battle for the most egregious Oscar moment ever”. The bracket contains 32 Oscar moments, paired together at random, and voted on by Grantland’s readers. The final vote determines a “champion”—the act the Academy should be most ashamed of.

While I admire Grantland’s willingness to question the authority and judgement of the sovereign Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, I was disappointed in the bracket’s execution. Little to no contextual information was provided for any of the pairings prior to polls, and the moments themselves lack logic and consistently; “Best Song Category” and “Every Dance Number Ever” are too encompassing for realistic consideration, and “Björk’s Swan Dress” is a commentary on one person’s fashion choice, not a decision or act made by AMPAS. Oscar Travesties is a clear attempt by Grantland to appear clever, insightful and witty; in practice, this bracket does little more than pander to ignorant fanboys, indignant and rebellious simply for the sake of it.

The bracket’s shallow nature is made apparent by a simple exercise in deconstruction—examining the etymology of key words. The title of the bracket is Oscar Travesties. “Travesties” is the plural of the word “travesty”. Travesty originates from the French travesti, which means “to disguise”.

In English, the word was first used to mean “dressed so as to be made ridiculous, parodied, burlesqued.” In modern use, “travesty” has developed a number of meanings, all of which have negative connotations and contain a form of imitation.

The Oscar moments listed in Oscar Travesties are historical events, not literary or artistic burlesques, grotesque likenesses, or absurd imitations (with the exception of Billy Crystal as Sammy Davis, Jr.). Oscar Travesties is neither a balanced discourse nor an exploration into the history of the Academy Awards; rather, it is an exercise in being obnoxious and dumb.

In short, the bracket is so poorly constructed, even the title doesn’t make sense.

More of Sarah’s work can be found at Deconstructing Hollywood dot ca. Follow her on Twitter, too!

Breaking Down Grantland’s Oscar Tragedies, Part One

It’s fun to argue about movies. As Drew Magary might say: NO ONE DENIES THIS. And movie awards are fun to argue about: they present this idea of finality, that because this movie won this award, it’s the best movie. Even though it doesn’t really mean anything other than just saying a movie won an award. After all, there’s so many awards and so many deserving movies that never won an award and honestly, most awards are pretty self-congratulatory anyway.

Enter this weekend’s award show, the Oscars. It’s going to put a cap on the 2012 movie season. Whatever movie wins Best Picture will probably be called the year’s best movie, even though there’s so many other awards, acclaims, reviews, etc. It doesn’t do much more than fuel the argument fire.

So I wasn’t surprised to see Grantland whip out a convoluted bracket for the Oscars, encouraging arguments about all kinds of trivial bullshit: a Letterman joke, a Rob Lowe duet, etc, etc. In one way, it’s a very Bill Simmons idea: reduce years of movie arguments to a one-vs-one bracket, with each winning by popular vote. At the end, one of them will be crowned the Biggest Oscar Tragedy Of All Time or whatever, a title that means even less than any award.

And here at Extended Play, we’re calling bullshit on this. Not just because it is BS, but because some of these choices are godawful and only there to stir up fanboys and move the needle. We’ve gotten the old Flashfact crew back together, plus later we’ll add Sarah from Deconstructing Hollywood to defend one travesty and call out another.