Discussing Film- making: Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and George Lucas - Coursework Example

Journals Table of Contents Week 8 3 Week 9 5 Week 10 7 Week 11 9 Week 12 11 Week 13 13 Week 14 15 1Works Cited 18 Week 8 A large portion of this week’s lecture was about Martin Scorsese, and from Boxcar Bertha in 1972 to Mean Streets in 1973 to Goodfellas we see a kind of evolution in the artistry of Scorsese, and in a way also a kind of exposition of an extraordinary talent that was unique and already in full flower even at that early age. One can argue that these early works were the pinnacle of Scorsese’s genius and artistry, and what came after were not as good, but nevertheless contained enough of Scorsese’s magic to sustain him through the subsequent decades. There are some artists and directors who, by virtue of the spectacular way in which they enter the public consciousness because of the undeniable originality of their work, become overnight legends with or without the official recognition of the awards bodies. Scorsese is one of them. When one looks at Mean Streets in particular, one sees the main outlines and the key aspects of Scorsese’s genius already budding and ripening, and ready to be deployed to great effect, and to great public recognition, in Goodfellas. The lecture makes it abundantly clear that in the case of Scorsese, his early works were not in any way inferior, but that those early works shine and affirm the talent of the director when viewed retrospectively, after the director has become famous. The aha moment is in seeing how, even when the early films of Scorsese were not box office successes, that the intimations of future greatness were already there, and all that was left was for the right movie project to come along for an unwitting public to come to grips at last with the genius that was already there right from the very beginning, from the very first movies. Scorsese’s work is like that. Goodfellas for instance makes sense, the crafting of it, the way it elicited something wonderful and awe-inspiring from the very first scene and as the movie proceeded, its sheer brilliance, viewed from the perspective of Scorsese’s early works already showing that talent displayed in the hit movie already in flowering (“The Gospel According to St. Martin”). On the other hand, it is little surprise too, reading up further on Scorsese, that the director’s genius is also the result of an uncommon passion and interest in film. The literature notes that Scorsese did not learn film making in an academic setting basically, but by immersing himself in the viewing and re-viewing and the intense scrutiny of many great films. The literature notes that he would watch and re-watch great films many times in a single week, and in so doing was able to absorb the technical aspects of the works of the great directors, and apply those to his own body of work. He would learn in other words from the works of masters such as Renoir and Hitchcock. His idea of education is watching and mastering ‘Million Dollar Movie’ over and over again, daily. In other words his genius lay partly in this intense interest in details, in mastering the forms and the techniques tied to filmmaking, and to such a degree that would leave others with lesser stamina and less pure passions for the arts and for cinema fatigued and overworked. He seemed to live to watch and make films, and the literature reinforces the idea that even at some of the lowest periods of his professional career, this intense work ethic and this passion for watching films sustained him. It is not hard therefore to see where part of his genius and his success came from. In good times and in bad times his intense work ethic and passion remained the same, on the same high-pitched level, and one therefore sees his films as the natural perfection that may be achieved by say, an already gifted violinist playing and practicing tirelessly for years, through good times and bad. Even an ordinary filmmaker would become very good at his craft like that. In Scorsese, that work ethic and passion translated into works of unequalled greatness (Ebert; “The Gospel According to St. Martin”). Week 9 The life and career of the Steven Spielberg is so fascinating. He got into University at Cal State, which means he has the academic chops to pursue higher education, but he did not graduate. He would become one of the heavyweights of American film though. He is an addition to a long line of American mavericks and nerds, from Steve Jobs to Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg, who eschewed school and just pursued their passions. He was a nerd, a Jew in a school environment that had no Jews, an outsider, weird and gifted, and in so many words a classic nerd. He grew up away from the glitz and the glamour of Hollywood too, having been raised in Phoenix while coming into this world from Ohio. On the other hand, what he lacked in terms of formal training and immersion in the conventional circles of art, he made up for with practical exposure into film making at an early age, going to get his training in the movies at Universal Studios instead of university, and there coming into the tutelage of Sid Sheinberg. One recalls, from a cursory look at this kind of background and early life, and the way he exploded the Hollywood scene and entrenched himself as one of the greats with the massive successes of works such as Jaws in 1975 and Close Encounter of the Third Kind in 1977, how much of Spielberg’s talents and gifts seem to have arrived fully formed already from the very beginning of his film career, and he certainly seem to have escaped into a kind of lasting success that few artists and directors of any period in American film history have achieved. When one talks of Spielberg one talks about this kind of background partly to see that genius in the arts will bloom where it can, and that it does not matter whether a person is ordinary in the outward characteristics of his early life. What does seem to matter is an original vision of the possibilities of cinema, and Spielberg, from Jaws and his other seminal works, seems to have burst into the scene with a vision and a way of telling stories in film that are unique and absolutely stunning (AETN UK; “The Revenge of the Nerd”). In the life of Spielberg there also seems to be a kind of trajectory that is uncanny when viewed in retrospect. He landed in Universal Studios by accident and set up shop there literally as a college student, and the unmistakable signs of genius in his short film ‘Amblin’ was enough for the studio executives to draft him right there and then into a career in directing for television. It is difficult to imagine that such a lucky break would occur to anybody else at any time, but it seems too that from the way his early genius shone that maybe there is an aspect to his career that is about fate too. There is no other way to explain how a college kid could have gotten away with befriending the security personnel at Universal, of all places, and practically finding hi way at the very heart of one of the largest dream factories in the world. On the other hand, what he would do once there, and the kind of impression that he made on studio executives in such a short period of time, attest to the particular precocious gifts of the young Spielberg. Jaws would establish his career as one of the Hollywood blockbuster makers and Oscar pedigreed- artists to boot, and it is not difficult to see how, when Jaws came out, it must have been amazing and absolutely fresh. In other words, he was an original and ahead of his time, in the way he crafted the narrative and the musical score, and in the way he framed the movie scenes for maximum suspense and impact, that would mark the kind of films that he would direct and create from then on. At the same time, great and seemingly in the Hollywood throne of the gods forever, one can also see from his beginnings and early life that Spielberg was also just an ordinary nerd in a way, as a young man, who happened to be at the right place at the right time(AETN UK; “The Revenge of the Nerd”). Week 10 Week 10 was an eye-opener in terms of unearthing writing talent that was overshadowed in large part by the intense focus on the bright lights of directing, in Scorsese in particular, as typified by the credit given to Scorsese for ‘Taxi Driver’ for instance, while dimming the focus on an equally stellar talent in Paul Schrader. Having written the brilliant ‘Taxi Driver’, one sees in retrospect that Schrader deserved as much credit for some great masterpieces that have come to mark the careers of Scorsese and Robert de Niro, namely ‘Taxi Driver’ and ‘Raging Bull’, as well as other films that have received critical acclaim, such as ‘American Gigolo’ in 1980. Most people would focus on the talents of the actor and the director, and even in awards shows the best actor and the best director awards get the most attention from fans and the press. On the other hand, the consistency in the quality and talent found in those two movies’ scriptwriting an unmistakable hallmark of a man of great talent in Schrader, to the point where one can argue that without Schrader’s pen De Niro and Scorsese arguably would not have shone as much as they did. It took Schrader for the entire thing to work in other words, and in this sense too ‘Taxi Driver’ was not an accident but a highlighted artifact of a body of work from a talented artist in Schrader. The literature notes that his success in this movie would propel him into his own directing career, that while not as popular or distinguished as Spielberg’s or Scorsese’s, is acclaimed for its originality and for the way it pursued projects with little to no regard for commercial considerations. While one can argue that this is a very generic statement and that Scorsese and Spielberg are proofs that great artistry and commercial success are not mutually exclusive, there is that sense we get from re-examining Schrader’s work and life, and especially his directing career, that he was propelled by motivations that went beyond the money. It is amazing that on his own he was able to direct a large body of work in this way. That huge number definitely attests to the assertion that he was first and foremost an artist who was self-propelled, or motivated by non-financial rewards (“Citizen Kane”; Flixster). Another revelation this week was Terrence Malick. What makes him stand out from Scorsese and from Spielberg, as well as others in the group of directors discussed in the lectures, was that he was great in school. He was a Rhodes Scholar, and he went to Harvard. While that does not necessarily imply that he had the credentials to make a great film, in the way that Scorsese primarily learned filmmaking by self-study and the absorption of great films rather than by going to school, Malick’s academic credentials do get notice and do get him some measure of respect in terms of being a man of rigor and some measure of intelligence and learning. That he is included in the lecture series on great films and great directors who belong to the rebels of Hollywood reflects the way he has garnered some critical respect. He is mentioned in the same breath as Schrader and Scorsese after all. Of course it does not hurt that his work ‘Days of Heaven’ would win an Oscar in 1978. Add to this the fact that he had studied philosophy when he was in Harvard, and that he had made a reputation as a strict recluse who hid from the crowd for 20 years after that Oscar win, and we have a figure who is very interesting and very mysterious in his persona to say the least. Who but an artist would do such a thing, and hide from the limelight and literally drop out at the height of his success? Who goes to Harvard and becomes a Rhodes Scholar, and drops all that to become a filmmaker? Malick, that’s who (“Citizen Kane”; Flixster). Week 11 George Lucas appeals to that part of me who secretly cheers for people who just want to tell a good story, and who are not self-conscious and who are not aspiring to be great artists explicitly, by design. There is something after all that is stuffy and boring about great men and great artists too, something about their over-seriousness and their lack of humor that is suffocating at times. Sometimes people just want to hear a good story, and see a good film where the director’s smoldering genius and artistic eye is not reflected in every single screen, making the movie too much of an intellectual exercise, something too conscious to the point of being contrived. This week’s lecture was fascinating for the way it put side by side Scorsese and the failure of his artistic work ‘New York, New York’, and the blockbuster movie ‘Star Wars’ by George Lucas. Personally I love Star Wars and I love too that there are so many people who look to the Star Wars series as major milestones in their lives. Star Wars is cool, is mainstream, is about the story rather than the director or the actors, and is about some aspects of the story, the good versus evil perspective for instance, that hits at some universal core of understanding of what the world is about. Wars between countries are actual living life Star Wars, with each side no doubt seeing themselves as the rebels and the enemy as the Dark Side. The story of Lucas too is very heartening in this respect, in that while from an artistic point of view he is not regarded as an auteur in the same vein as Malick, Schrader and Scorsese, in his own way he is a kind of genius too, being able to propel an original movie with an original script, with no stars like de Niro to banner the films, into the heights of box office super achievement. It is hard to imagine Scorsese thinking up merchandise deals for ‘Raging Bull’, or Malick turning his movie characters into action figures, yet for Lucas this was part and parcel of the entire package, and the entire world is so much happier, especially for legions of Star Wars fans, because of it. Who says we have to sit through endless streams of great films by great directors? Who says we can’t watch the movies that bring out our fun, adventurous, and even geeky sides? The week’s discussion opened my mind about the entertainment possibilities of cinema, and how audiences can decide the course that cinema-making can take by voting with their wallets and not pretending to aspire for higher artistic values when watching films. Many people just want to have a good time, be immersed in adventure through film, to escape into fantasy, and Lucas provided just that with a tale that resonates with large audiences worldwide (“Star Bucks”). In the lecture there was a great point made about the way Star Wars was partly about marketing movies too, and partly about exploring the possibilities of films to extend revenue generation beyond the box office. As discussed above, it is hard to imagine artistic films being made from a marketing point of view. Artists like Schrader and Malick shunned marketing and showed little interests in commercial success. On the other hand in Star Wars marketing is front and center. It is interesting to note that in many ways the discussion on Lucas is about exploring the possibilities of good special effects and good stories that have universal appeal rather than containing artistic values that are hard for laymen to understand. In modern contexts movies like ‘Avatar’ come to mind, and Disney movies that come with merchandising as vita aspects of the film experience. It is an eye-opener to see that Lucas with Star Wars, in recent history, was responsible for putting into profitable practice this great insight into films made for entertainment and for likability rather than for artistic values (‘Star Bucks”). Week 12 Where the previous week discussed the advent of a new kind of film making, which is geared towards courting blockbuster status at the tills, this week was about examining the countercurrent of new cinema, in the tradition of the serious director-artists of the previous weeks, of Scorsese and Malick and Schrader. It is fascinating how the discussion is contextualized within this larger movement of blockbuster films by Lucas seeming to dominate all thinking about cinema from Star Wars onwards, especially since the financial aspects of film making loom large in considerations of what films were to be made and what films were not to be made at least among the big studios and among the financiers of films. Moreover, Star Wars was a welcome respite from the heaviness of serious films, in a way, as has been discussed in the previous week’s journal. Star Wars had mass appeal, had great merchandise, and people loved to watch it over and over again. It satisfied a need for ordinary people to commune and bond over a shared experience that is benign, fun and is a great piece of storytelling. It also allowed for young people and old people both, adults as well as children, to bond over a movie that has appeal across all ages and demographics too. On the other hand, from the perspective of cinema as art, the week was about exploring art cinema in the wake of Star Wars. In the previous week Scorsese was quoted as saying that in the wake of Star Wars, all Hollywood became about big blockbusters and new cinema and serious art films like those by Scorsese were not just marginalized, but taken out of the picture altogether. This week however was about seeing how, in the midst of the blockbuster-ification of Hollywood, serious movie followers, and those who were in charge of handing out the awards and of being the gatekeepers of great films so to speak continued to honor and to acknowledge great film making in the mold of the great directors of the past decade. This week was therefore about Francis Ford Coppola, who in the late 1970’s was symbolically made the torch bearer for film as great art. Coppola would respond, we learned, with ‘Apocalypse Now’ in 1979. Far from being a blockbuster-oriented film focused on money , costs and revenues at the tills, this was over budget by a large margin, and was shot for the better part of a year when the original plan was to shoot it for just a number of months. In short, this was not a practical film. It was an art film done in the great tradition of the past decade or so of groundbreaking art film. The year prior to this, too, Michael Cimino’s ‘The Deer Hunter’ would get the Best Picture nod, and here too one can see, from the imagery of the film, the title, the gritty realism of the scenes, that this was not a movie made for selling merchandise, but to evolve and to further explore cinema as great art. One is hard pressed to imagine that Lucas would make a movie like this at that time, nor would Spielberg aim for the same deliberately artistic ambitions of Schrader’s ‘Blue Collar’, which also came out in 1978. On the other hand, what is clear from the discussions from this week that art films in the mold of the new cinema was not dead, with works from great directors still coming out and getting official recognition from the critical press and from the awards bodies as late as 1981, with Warren Beatty’s ‘Reds’. Hal Ashby, discussed in previous weeks and recognized as one of the great directors of this wave of Hollywood art films in the new cinema fashion, would come out with ‘Coming Home’ in 1978, and generate Oscar nods for its key actors John Voight and Jane Fonda. This adds to the weight of the evidence for the thriving of new cinema even in the wake of the blockbuster wave that swept through Hollywood from the time of George Lucas’ ‘Star Wars’ and even Spielberg’s ‘Jaws’ onwards (“Coming Apart”). Week 13 By week 13 the juxtaposition between two waves of filmmaking, art films in the New Hollywood style on the one hand and the blockbuster filmmaking styles on the other, was clear and made for a very compelling discussion on what caused the waning of new Hollywood. Star Wars and Jaws showed the way forward for what is possible in terms of creating blockbuster movies that made tons of money. They were not art films, but films that appealed to popular tastes, that aimed to entertain rather than to espouse what seemed by that time to be old-fashioned artistic values that few people comprehended anyway, movies made for critics, film school types, and awards bodies. The sentiment in the 80’s seemed to be who cares? and why the hell are you making such art films on Hollywood contexts, where the language that compels executives to listen is not made up of things like art and experimental, but by words like blockbuster and merchandise sales and big stars. The discussion during this week showed that by this time in the 80’s, the costs of making Hollywood films were on a steep upward trend, and that in this light it became more and more impractical and archaic to continue to make movies that did not have making money as their primary motivation for being made. Where is the money? How does this work in the box office? In one slide during this week’s lecture it became clear that movie making by the 1980s had come to be dominated by marketing language rather than artistic language, and in this universe where is the place of people like Ashby, Malick, Schrader, and even Scorsese? To the question of whether this amounts to a deterioration of Hollywood moviemaking, one can cite the examples of Lucas, who brought great delight to movie goers worldwide with his Star Wars series while at the same time lining up his pockets and those of the financiers as well, as an example of why the move towards marketing-oriented movie making is not necessarily bad. Sure, catering to certain target markets may mean that movies are made to pander to more mundane tastes, but the upside is that by addressing certain target markets of movie goers, movies have a guaranteed audience. In this way too, one can imagine art films as having their own demographics of viewers and buyers, and that in this sense new cinema style films in the mold of Scorsese can continue to be made catering to specific target market markets (“Eve of Destruction”). This week also discussed how in the 1980’s there was a power shift away from artistic directors who made great films, and towards movie producers who made films that catered to mass markets, who were driven by entertainment and profit values rather than artistic values that were increasingly hard to justify given the shrinking market for such films and given the exploding market for unmet target customers who wanted new kinds of films, such as fantasy films starred in by macho men in the mold of Bruce Willis and Sylvester Stallone. These are not cerebral films but films that appeal to more mundane audiences who wanted to see such films. In a way one can say that the 80s was about the end of an era where the director made films with no consideration for their pragmatic values, and the ushering in of an era that was about making movies that sell, and that were about being artistic and beautiful only as an afterthought, or only if the target audience wanted the movies to be made that way. In my mind this is not necessarily about debasing the beauty of the old films in the new cinema mode. It is just that new and more powerful market-based trends were proving to be more compelling for movie producers, who after all had the financial viability of movie projects in mind. This decade in the end is arguably about the movie producer gaining the upper hand and gaining control of the making of Hollywood films from the Scorsese’s and Ashby’s of the world (“Eve of Destruction”). Week 14 Week 14 all told was about summing it all up, not by way of making generalizations and judgments about the 70s and new Hollywood, but by way of providing perspective and some insights into what the dynamics of change was. It is to be understood from this looking back exercise that arguably there are no right and wrong answers in the end, but that certain insights make more sense than others. Spielberg and Lucas, as the lecture notes discuss and as has been discussed in journal entries in previous weeks, signaled a new way of making Hollywood films that were primarily geared for entertainment rather than for the elevation of artistic values or what not. This new mode of making films was purely pragmatic, numbers driven, marketing oriented, and geared towards satisfying and entertaining specific audiences. Lucas very tellingly points out that in the wake of the massive profits that the movie houses raked in from Star Wars, a large sum went into the construction of multiplex facilities. The implication is that since Star Wars worked, the movie houses, and the rest of the industry, geared themselves into making more Star Wars films, and showing films that entertained with special effects and great stories catering to both young and adult crowds. The further implication of course is that where movie houses spent their money on such entertainment facilities, the expectation is that Hollywood would provide the ammunition so to speak, and favor producers over artist-directors when making decisions about what movies to make and how to make them. It is hard to imagine Scorsese taking instructions from a movie producer on what film to make and how to make them, but in the same vein, it would be near insane to expect the movie houses and theater owners to screen Scorsese films at a loss on expensive new facilities, when Lucas and Spielberg films that were perfect for such facilities would be able to rake in the money (“We Blew It…”). On a personal note, I would like to repeat a sentiment here about how the new direction in Hollywood films that was heralded by the arrival of Lucas and Spielberg was not necessarily a turn for the worse. One can argue that even the more successful movies in recent memory, the new Star Wars trilogy, the Star Trek movies, Lord of the Rings, Superman and Spiderman reboots and trilogies, and even Avatar are blockbuster-oriented movies that have given the world immense entertainment and fun. The high-minded people of the world may complain, but surely Star Wars and the generations of fans and rabid followers of the movies are not worse off for being able to see them? And besides, I heard somewhere that sometimes stories that entertain reach people better than high-minded but boring stories that arguably few people can relate to. On the other hand, it is also wrong to say that the 70s and the time of the great artist-directors were all a big mistake and a foolish phase in American cinema. Raging Bull and Taxi Driver, the works of Ashby and Coppola, and the written works of Schrader continue to be compelling fare, and Scorsese remains one of the most respected directors and figures in Hollywood. What may have happened is that the marketing executive has come to be as important a part of Hollywood as the director and actor, and that the result is not necessarily bad cinema, but cinema that caters to more varied tastes, with entertainment as a primary value. Only time will tell whether this is the end game for Hollywood, or if something else will overtake it and grab control (“We Blew It…”). . 1 Works Cited AETN UK. “Steven Spielberg Biography”. Bio. 2015. Web. 19 April 2015. “Citizen Kane”. Lecture Notes. 2015. “Coming Apart”. Lecture Notes. 2015. Ebert, Roger. “An Excerpt from Scorsese by Ebert”. University of Chicago Press. 2008. Web. 19 April 2015. “Eve of Destruction”. Lecture Notes. 2015. Flixster. “Paul Schrader Biography”. Rotten Tomatoes. 2015. Web. 19 April 2015. “Revenge of the Nerd”. Lecture Notes. 2015. “Star Bucks”. Lecture Notes. 2015. “The Gospel According to St. Martin”. Lecture Notes. 2015 ‘We Blew It…”. Lecture Notes. 2015. Read More