Don't Make a Scene: Say Anything

The Story: Okay. A little story on this...and a rant...but, we'll get there.

First off, one of the few remaining "Classic Scene" articles from "Premiere Magazine" that I haven't done is from Say Anything (or Say Anything..., I've seen it both ways), Cameron Crowe's 1989 directorial debut. I'd never seen it. It wasn't in my demographic and I wasn't all that interested in "teen-angst" movies (having narrowly survived my own and not wanting to get nostalgic about it), even if they were comedies, or even if they were filmed in my hometown of Seattle (which this genuinely was). 

 

So, I watched it. And that published "Premiere" scene left me unimpressed—I found it a little self-congratulatory*—but I did find two scenes (neither involving a boom-box—which is the film's most iconic image), which I did want to do, both of which I found interesting and relevant.

 

The one we're doing today was prompted by a recent discussion (I believe we were talking about Barbie, of all things) with a conservative-leaning acquaintance who as a defense mechanism came up with "I'm just worried about what's happening to our young men." I decided not to reflexively play the smallest violin in the world. I know that this is nothing to make light of. The impulse is to say "man-up", "grow-a-pair" or wax stupidly that "they're just slackers" which is an excuse both sides use when they want to dismiss or demonize a slice, and usually a disadvantaged slice, of the populace. That's not helpful. 

But, then, I could've pointed out (all things being unequal) that women still make 84% of what a man would make in the same position (in 1963, it was 56%, so progress has been made, but still...). Women, in their careers, have to consider the effect of their home-life (especially in the instance of pregnancy) more than a male does (and I'm sure that pops up in the minds of recruiters even if they don't admit it). Systemically, that's a disadvantage women have always had, career-wise. And although things may appear to be changing, they do so slowly. And change hurts. Change takes adjustments. And...change is the one constant. No matter how much one complains about it (that never changes, either).

 

But, I've held up as a basic truth one phrase that always manages to raise hackles (and that I've amended slightly because the word "privileged" is a "red flag" these days): "to the advantaged, equality feels like oppression."

 

So, with that in mind, here's this scene from Say Anything, which is admittedly, a bit of a cheap shot, but still feels real. And is funny as hell.

 

The Set-Up: Nice Guy Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack), has fallen in love—so much that he's even SAID the word—with his High School class valedictorian Diane Court (Ione Skye), even if she IS going to be going overseas for college. Despite the limited time and his limited prospects in the eyes of her father (John Mahoney), things have been going alright in the romance department. Until Diane's dad gets investigated by the IRS, and then things get serious. Lloyd and Diane break up. Although his closest friends have been girls in his class, Lloyd has never sought advice from guys. But, he knows where he can find them. Drinking in the parking lot of a convenience store on Saturday night.

 

Action.

 

A note: Crowe's screenplay is a bit simpler in construction. But, the four dudes ("like magpies" Crowe says in the commentary) added their own comments beyond the lines, dramatically as a way to bolster each others' confidence, but also because the main lines in isolation would have sounded staged and unnatural. They beef up each other and the scene. Those additions are (in italics).

 

EXT. GAS 'N' SIP - NIGHT All of the guys are sitting against a wire fence drinking and eating crisps. As each of them talks, the rest agree with him. 

JOE Lloyd man, no babe is worth it, you know. (No. No.) Listen, hang with us man, we'll teach you bibles full of truth.(Right, right)

GUY 1 Right. Lloyd man, you can't even trust them man,(That's right, man!)

GUY 1 because you know what it's about?  They spend your money, and they tell their friends everything man, it's economics.(That's valid, man!)

GUY 2 Man, all you gotta do is find a girl who looks just like her, (Do that) nail her, and then dump her, man, (Dump her) get her off your mind. (Yer right)

MARK Your only mistake is that you didn't dump her first. (Right!)

MARK Diane Court is a show-pony. (That's right) You need a stallion, my friend. Walk with us and you walk tall. (Walk tall, m'man!)

LUKE Bitches, man! 

(We're gonna give that kid a complex)

LUKE Hey dude, I'd better bail. See you later. 

They all say goodbye. 

MARK Later for you, Luke. 

(He's cool, man).

LLOYD I got a question. 

LLOYD If you guys know so much about women, how come you're here at like the Gas 'n' Sip on a Saturday night... 

LLOYD ...completely alone, drinking beers, no women anywhere? 

Silence. 

JOE By choice, man! 

GUY 2 Yeah man, conscious choice. 

They all agree. 

(We choose to be here...)

(Because we wanna be here)

GUY 1 I'm choosing it.

 

Say Anything

 

Words by Cameron Crowe

 

Pictures by László Kovács and Cameron Crowe

 

Say Anything is available on DVD from Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment.  

 

* I will do it eventually because...I don't want it undone.

JFK

JFK (Oliver Stone, 1991) 

 

"To sin by silence when we should protest makes cowards of men."

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

 

At the time of this film's release, Stone's movie-collage of Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories was more than controversial, it was inflammatory. Experts in "the field" criticized it for playing fast and loose with facts and some went so far as to call it dangerous in its implications. There was so much flummery going on, some of which contradicted other speculations of the film, that it was considered a new form of propaganda, where new possibilities popped up before previous assertions were followed up on, that one was simply overwhelmed with the slew of speculations so that, finally, nothing was ever concluded. There were no answers, merely a mountain of questions, all of them vague and unsubstantiated. Stone was merely throwing stuff up at the screen and seeing if anything stuck.

Stone answered these charges by saying that he was making a new kind of film, and that he was trying to build a new narrative for the Kennedy assassination, not provide a definitive answer, but to ask questions, merely. The evidence of film bears it out—at least at first glance—as it's so filled with theories and goes down so many rabbit-holes, unchecked and unverified (Stone has stated he was using the films Rashomon and Z as his models). But, one only has to see how Stone starts the movie to know where he thinks the center of the conspiracy lies. After that quote by author and spiritualist Ella Wheeler Wilcox, he introduces Kennedy's predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower's final address as President, in which he warns of "the military-industrial complex". Like so many openings of so many movies, it is the director's thesis statement, providing that one bit of detail before launching into a history of Kennedy's recent history (narrated by Martin Sheen, who has played both John and Robert Kennedy in the past).

"I'm ashamed to be an American today."

The film proper begins the day of Kennedy's assassination as New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner, who had, in 1998's Bull Durham, delivered a speech in which his character states "I believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.") sees the assassination coverage on television initially in his office, then watches mournfully from a nearby bar where the local booze-hounds are free to weep in their beers or grunt their approval of the President's death. At the same point he cuts away to an argument between two men in the bar, New Orleans private detective Guy Bannister (Edward Asner) and an operative Jack Wheeler (Jack Lemmon),* which leads to a fight in Bannister's office when Martin brings up past suspicious activity. Meanwhile, Garrison starts looking into local links to the assassination and brings in pilot David Ferrie (Joe Pesci), who might have had links with Oswald. And despite Ferrie being sketchy and giving conflicting stories, they let him go.

"It's all broken down, spread around, you read it and the point gets lost."

It is only after the Warren Commission Report on the assassination is released that Garrison picks up the threads of the case again. A chance airplane encounter with a Senator (Walter Matthau), whose skepticism —"That dog don't hunt!"—about the report sparks Garrison to again call in Ferrie, but also Martin, who had seen Lee Harvey Oswald in Bannister's office and follow up leads not explored after the initial inquiry was dropped. One name keeps popping up—"Clay Bertrand" but nobody knows who that is. Turns out that "Bertrand" is an alias of Clay Shaw (Tommy Lee Jones), well known in New Orleans business circles as a wealthy benefactor and who had connections with Ferrie and thus Oswald. Garrison and his team have Shaw picked up for arrest despite their inquiries producing only denials.

 

"Oh, you are so naive"

 

One aspect of the film that is both a high achievement and problematic is the way that it mixes archive footage with deftly re-created new footage in such a way that it is nearly impossible to determine one from the other. Stone and his cinematographer, the wizardly Robert Richardson, mix and match formats, color and black-and-white, 35mm and 16mm, and all sorts of film stocks to create and re-create source footage and the results are nearly indistinguishable, especially the way they are cross-cut between each other. It lends the air of verisimilitude—and certainly adds a dynamic tension between the transitions—but one is never sure if one should believe what one is seeing. Is that press footage from the day of the shooting or is Stone just fabricating something he wants you to see?

It's troubling. There's a fine line between making it look right and obfuscation and given that film, by its very nature, is manipulative—even with documentaries—the level of distrust this attention to detail evokes is extremely high. What are we to believe? The answer is whatever the director wants you to believe. And given Richardson's deserving Oscar-winning work on this film to match the look, the grain and the confusion of archive footage, some of which might even be familiar, distinguishing the true from forgery is almost impossible. And audiences become susceptible.

One should always be aware that it's a fictional film of real-life events. And rather than speaking truth, it can only come up with conjecture.

 

"And the truth is on your side, bubba."

 

Stone makes his own case on what happened in a middle sequence where Garrison goes to Washington D.C. to meet an informant, a former military official who only identifies himself as "X" (Donald Sutherland, who's brilliant in a role of pure exposition). That Garrison would fly to D.C. to meet an anonymous source strains credulity (he surely must know his name before agreeing to meet, but then, the reality is Garrison never met this character, communicating with him in un-cinematic exchanges of letters).

It is 'X''s contention that Kennedy was making feasibility studies for withdrawing troops from Vietnam—"X" was doing the inquiries—and that this rattled the cages of the Pentagon and the CIA. "X" is unexpectedly assigned to...Antarctica...and only learns of the assassination the next day when he reads a New Zealand newspaper that has a full run-down on Oswald as the assassin when he hadn't even been charged yet. To "X" this smacks of "black ops" work (which he also used to do). Oh, and did I mention that "X" was also part of Kennedy's security detail? "X" seems to have got around.

Anyway, by the end of his exposition, "X" has a conspiracy that could involve the Pentagon, "the military-industrial complex", FBI, CIA, Cuban exiles, the Mafia, the Secret Service and Lyndon B. Johnson—he was in the fired-upon motorcade, after all—and all of them had grudges against Kennedy, but mostly, they didn't want to cease operations in Vietnam which was making a lot of people a lot of money. This is the same Vietnam War that Oliver Stone fought in from 1967 to 1968 with the 25th Infantry, which was a traumatic experience for him, and that he has made the subject of three of his films.

"X" refuses to come forward with this information and flat-out refuses to be a witness for Garrison's prosecution, but "X" tells him that his best chance is that he's the only guy conducting a trial involving the Kennedy assassination. "Your only chance," he says "is to come up with a case. Something. Anything. Make arrests. Stir the shit-storm. Hope to start a chain reaction of people coming forward. Then the government will crack." And, with those words of encouragement, he walks away, leaving Garrison hanging. Stone cuts to the Eternal Flame at Kennedy's grave. When Stone gets in trouble, he goes for sentimentality.

The film's last hour is that most deadly of momentum killers, a trial, with Exhibit A being a long speech by one character...in this case Garrison.* That speech wouldn't stand in a court of law and it isn't made clear if it's a closing argument (that barely mentions the defendant Clay Shaw) or a part of Garrison's evidentiary overview (it starts with objections from the defense and then they are never heard from again), but Stone is dramatically stretching truth...and credulity...to make his point. And it goes on forever, like the stultifying final speech in court in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. It's only Stone's direction, Richardson's chameleon cinematography and Joe Hutshing and Pietro Scalia's quick-silver editing that keeps it interesting as film. And almost impossible to make counter-arguments against the assertions, they come so fast and furiously.

Stone's film ends with "what's past is prologue." Okay, so let's look at the past. All previous American political assassinations, successful or otherwise, before and after Kennedy's own, have been due to "lone gun-men" (or women). The most suspicious shooting is that of Martin Luther King, Jr.  And most damning of all, recent events have seen Presidents and Vice-Presidents questioning or ignoring, even humiliating their own intelligence or military agencies...but manage to remain very much alive. Kennedy was less of a threat...he merely wanted to wind down a war...as has been done recently...and Stone would have you think he was killed for it.

Yet, History doesn't bear that out. In fact, though they may rebel (or at least write a book), they don't assassinate. "That dog don't hunt."

Remember, "what's past is prologue."

But, the film did have an impact. 99% of the documents that were sealed after the assassination have been brought to light, particularly to the issues raised in the movie (The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 was passed in 1992, the year after the movie's release). Although the stated goal of the act was to release all documents by October 2017, some still have not been released. Trump went back on a promise to release them pushing it back to when he was out of office, then Biden delayed them (COVID...for some reason) then released some in 2022 and 2023.** We're at 99% except for those that would cause "identifiable harm... to the military, defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations... of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure."

Same old excuse. "It'll keep us from doing our jobs" they say, even if those jobs have dramatically changed in 60 years. But, if JFK is worth anything, it is for its shaming of our government agencies' lack of transparency to commit them to act in that 1992 law. Six decades is two generations of secrets. Too many people and too many prominent people have expressed their doubts to not have as many answers as possible to wash away as many questions as possible.

Not that that will make a difference. We've reached the Age of Un-reason where nobody believes their own eyes anymore. If everything was released, unredacted and transparent, it is doubtful that the truth would be accepted...especially by those who make their livings as professional doubters and skeptics.

The true conspiracy has always been theirs. As in the mantra of All the President's Men, one merely has to "follow the money."

"It's up to you."

 

* The film is awash with cameo's and "guest-stars" in what Stone intended to be like the roster of The Longest Day, but it feels more like the many odd cameos in The Greatest Story Ever Told, that seem ill-though-out and are actually distracting and pull you right out of the movie. John Candy? 

** This is just part of Garrison's summation from the film:

The Warren Commission thought they had an open-and-shut case. Three bullets, one assassin. But two unpredictable things happened that day that made it virtually impossible. One, the eight-millimeter home movie taken by Abraham Zapruder while standing by the grassy knoll. Two, the third wounded man, James Tague, who was knicked by a fragment, standing near the triple underpass. The time frame, five point six seconds, determined by the Zapruder film, left no possibility of a fourth shot. So the shot or fragment that left a superficial wound on Tague's cheek had to come from the three shots fired from the sixth floor depository. That leaves just two bullets. And we know one of them was the fatal head shot that killed Kennedy. So now a single bullet remains. A single bullet now has to account for the remaining seven wounds in Kennedy and Connelly. But rather than admit to a conspiracy or investigate further, the Warren Commission chose to endorse the theory put forth by an ambitious junior counselor, Arlen Spector, one of the grossest lies ever forced on the American people. We've come to know it as the "Magic Bullet Theory." This single-bullet explanation is the foundation of the Warren Commission's claim of a lone assassin. Once you conclude the magic bullet could not create all seven of those wounds, you'd have to conclude that there was a fourth shot and a second rifle. And if there was a second rifleman, then by definition, there had to be a conspiracy.

*** Whether Trump will release any more documents in his next term one can only speculate. I don't believe a word the man says so even if he says he will, I'd be looking at updates on the website: https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk

The Big Combo

The Big Combo (Joseph H. Lewis, 1955) A girl (Jean Wallace) runs away in the dark. Down murky corridors and naked open spaces where she can't hide, she runs through a stadium promenade and nobody notices her because their eyes are on a boxing match, where every light of the facility seems to be focused. But, she's not the only one running, as she's followed closely by two goons, Fante (Lee Van Cleef) and Mingo (Earl Holliman), who have split up and are trying to catch her in a pincer move. That's their job tonight, to look after the girl, Susan Lowell, who's the girl of Mr. Brown (Richard Conte), who's attending the fight—it's a business matter for him—and Mr. Brown wants her to see it. But, she's run out in Round 3 and he's mad about it. When Mr. Brown gets mad, that's when Fante and Mingo enter the picture and they finally catch up to her and try to man-handle her back to the fight. But, she decides she's hungry and although Mingo wants to drag her back to the fight-crowd, Fante tells Mingo to hail down a cab. "Mr Brown says to keep her happy." Fat chance.

Down at the 93rd precinct, they're not happy, either. There's an ongoing investigation into Mr. Brown that's been going on for too much of a time and two people are frustrated by it: the first is Capt. Peterson (Robert Middleton) who's mad at all the tax-payers' money he's been laying out for no results; and then there's Detective Lt. Leonard Diamond (Cornel Wilde) who's been spending all that money and who's come up with bupkis except for frustration and the captain breathing down his neck. Diamond wants to turn the heat up on Brown, but the boss has his job on the line, too, and he wants to drop the whole shooting match. Plus, he thinks there might be something more to this for Diamond—he reminds him that he's been tailing Susan Lowell wherever she goes and when Diamond gripes that he paid those expenses himself, the Captain brings the hammer down: "But, I'm not in love with her! You are!" The Captain is starting to think it's all personal and a wild-skirt chase.

But, it's more than that. It's a grudge match. Find a crime in town and it eventually snakes up to Brown. Take down Brown and the 93rd gets a lot quieter. Then, when Susan shows up in the hospital for swallowing pills, Diamond thinks he has something: Susan keeps talking about an "Alicia" from Brown's past and when Diamond hauls in every Brown flunky for questioning and puts Brown under a lie detector, "Alicia" makes the needle jump the Richter scale but there's no answers from the big man. Just more patter from the mutual contempt society. "A righteous man" Brown scoffs to the old boss (Brian Donlevy) he took over the gang from. "Makes $96.50 a week—the bellboys at my hotels make more than that!" But, Diamond does get some respect, if you call taking the trouble to put him on a hit-list respectable.

The Big Combo may not be the best noir-mystery of the genre, there are no stars with bright futures of note (unless you count Van Cleef), the sets are cheap—heck, the director didn't know he was working on it until a week before shooting—but, it skirts the edges of acceptability for its time with an unsympathetic authority figure, a flashy villain (Conte is brilliant in it, rattling off dialog with a no-cares contemptuous smile), some nice hard-nosed dialog, and an artist's touch with the lighting. And, it suggests a lot more than it shows—like Susan's codependent sexual kink for Brown, the "longtime companionship" of Fante and Mingo, and some brutal violence that usually happens off-screen, but comes front-and-center in a scene that features torture-by-hearing-aid (they should have had Wilde's Diamond character shouting his dialog for the rest of the movie). The movie takes chances, at a point when many film-noir tropes were already played out.

But, the star of the show is cinematographer John Alton, who worked shadowy wonders for cash-strapped studios like Republic Pictures and eye-popping color scenes for the extravagant M-G-M, and brought rich dark spaces pierced by shimmering light to whatever set-up he touched. Born in Hungary, Alton began his camera work in the silent era and worked all the way up to 1960's Elmer Gantry. He was quick, economical, and created stunning images that arrest the eye and catch the breath. The Big Combo, for all its outlandishness, becomes more centered because of Alton's photography. You take it more seriously and things matter a bit more. Things "hit" harder because of the look of the thing.

Since 2007, The Big Combo has been in the public domain and, for that reason, we're featuring it in this post below.

The Bedford Incident

The Bedford Incident (James B. Harris, 1965) A veritable volume of Bartlett's Quotations fills my head after seeing The Bedford Incident. 

For instance, the astronaut's description of his job as "98% tedium punctuated by moments of sheer terror," and Elwood P. Dowd's "You can be 'oh-so-smart' or 'oh-so-pleasant'—I recommend "pleasant." Then, because the story is basically, "Moby Dick in The Cold War," there are all sorts of Melville quotes...and one bad joke: "Cook 'em, Dan-O."

It's that last one that sticks, though. The Bedford Incident is, basically, a terrible, terrible joke with a possible several mega-tonnage punchline. And director James B. Harris, who, before making this film, was Stanley Kubrick's film-making partner, can't have missed the thought as his ex was making an out-and-out comedy of errors out of the nuclear arms race.  

But where that one took to the air, The Bedford Incident plays out at sea in a cat-and-mouse game between a Soviet nuclear sub and a naval destroyer. In command is Captain Eric Finlander (Richard Widmark, steely with just a touch of baleful twitchiness that goes full-on berzerkoid in an interview), a determined commander who takes enormous pride in the proficiency of his crew, and in the hunt and pursuit of his targets. As an advisor is a former Nazi U-boat commander Wolfgang Shrepke (Eric Portman), who was responsible for the most tonnage (ours) sunk during the second World War. Also on board is reporter Ben Munceford (Sidney Poitier), who serves as an exposition conduit and Royal Pain In The Ass. Among the crew are Martin Balsam as the ship's new doc, James MacArthur as a too-eager ensign, Wally Cox as the sonar bat, and if you're watching early and quickly, there's a young Donald Sutherland as a garbage analyst—garbage being clues to conditions on the enemy boat, and age-analysis gives tracking position and history.

It shows how extreme the measures are on the Bedford, how detail oriented, how precise, how strategic and how puckered the thought processes go into keeping an eye on the enemy. And once found, Finlander will pursue chasing Soviet subs out of territorial waters, even forcing them to stay underwater until they're desperate for air, provoking confrontation. When your Nazi adviser tells you he's scared of your methods, it means you might be going so overboard as to pro-actively lower the life-rafts.

If you're immersed at all in pop-culture, you can see elements of Bedford in such disparate strategy plays as "Star Trek" and The Hunt for Red October. And such gamesmanship is all well and good in limited skirmishes. But, when the arsenal is nuclear? Do you really want a cigarette in a room full of gasoline?  

No, and that the game is played despite the mega-stakes makes the movie and its characters seem not just petty, but a little dim for all the talk of brilliance. The point of hubris is well taken, but the point was better made as an out-and-out black comedy about short-term, selfish interests in the face of global catastrophe.