50 YEARS OF THE BEATLES

“In the increasingly mechanized, automated, cybernated environment of the modern world,… man’s need for his biology has become much more intense… Enter the Beatles – soul by proxy, middlemen between the Mind and the Body.  A long way from Pat Boone’s White Shoes.  A way station on a slow route travelled with all deliberate speed.” – Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (1965).

     When the Beatles first came to the U.S. in February 1964, the Cold War was raging.  Our country had invested in rich and diversified public school programs, reasoning that even lower middle class kids might contribute to the space race or to building bigger bombs.  One such program brought a string quartet to entertain our “assembly” at P.S. 165 in Queens, New York, shortly after the fab four’s appearances on Ed Sullivan.

     I listened to the recital politely.  But my true love (or childhood crush) was rock ’n’ roll and I couldn’t wait to ask the classical players what they thought of my new heroes.  Their response: “Fifty years from now no one will remember that these lads from Liverpool even existed.”

     The quartet’s not-so-great Paganini, of course, proved to be better than their prognostication.  Beatles music has remained enormously popular for half a century.  And it transformed all of pop culture right from the start.  The band’s influence remains powerful not just in music, but in film, video, art and literature.

      When the fab four came on the scene, pop records were immediately disposable.  “I’ll Get You,” for instance, B-side of the 1963-64 hit “She Loves You,” was released with a glaring mistake:  John Lennon, unsure if the lyric was “make you mine” or “change your mind,” settled on “mange your mind.”  This, no doubt, resulted from having a budget for only one take per tune.  But a mere few years later, the band would spend months in the recording studio on each album, with lots of editing, overdubs and electronic effects.  Rock music took on a perfectionism it hadn’t known, except, perhaps, on a few Phil Spector singles.

     The cultural sea change, however, entailed more than just higher quality records, as Eldridge Cleaver suggested in Soul on Ice. The Beatles weren’t a healing balm after the JFK assassination, Cleaver asserted.  They represented continued rejection of the Eisenhower years, initially signaled by Kennedy’s election.

     Underlying this rejection was African-American pop culture.  Cleaver quoted Norman Mailer:  “It’s no accident that the source of Hip is the Negro… For the Negro’s equality would tear a profound shift into the psychology, the sexuality and the moral imagination of every white alive.”

     Thus, after Brown vs. The Board of Education at Topeka, which outlawed segregated public schools, the sanitized, disembodied pop culture of the 1950’s began to unravel.  “It is significant,” Cleaver wrote, “that the Twist and the Hula Hoop came at the end of the Eisenhower era.” And then the Beatles arrived.

     “The popular music of urban Negroes – which was known as Rhythm and Blues before whites appropriated and distilled it into a product they called Rock and Roll,” the author of Soul on Ice continued, “is the basic ingredient, the core of the gaudy, cacophonous hymns with which the Beatles of Liverpool drive their hordes of… fans into catatonia and hysteria. For Beatle fans, having been alienated from their own Bodies for so long and so deeply, the effect of these potent erotic rhythms is electric.”

     Add to this erotic surge the fact that most of the band’s audience were post-War “baby boomers” – the oldest, then, being eighteen, all of them a roiling jangle of adolescent and pre-adolescent hormones – and electric became explosive.  The girls had to scream.  The boys never got that image out of their heads.

     Fifties and early sixties pop music had been dominated by the likes of Pat Boone, who covered r ’n’ b tunes but whitened them so much Pepsodent could have shared producing credit.  Deracinated, emasculated and disembodied interpretations of songs like “Ain’t That A Shame” (by Fats Domino),  “Tutti Frutti” and “Long Tall Sally” (both by Little Richard) made Boone the number two record seller of the period, just behind Elvis Presley. 

    

     The King, to be sure, paved the way for the Beatles.  As Cleaver saw it, “(The beatniks and) Elvis dared to do in the light of day what white America had long been doing in the sneak-thief anonymity of night – consort on a human level with blacks.” But Pat Boone and Elvis Presley coexisted peacefully. Not so Boone and the Beatles; the fab four’s preeminence abruptly ended his career.

     In a 2012 interview, the fifties star confided, “they had 5 of the top 10 records at once and were selling about 40 or 50% of all pop records… It knocked my record royalties into a cocked hat.” Once a superstar, Boone stopped performing, and turned to selling prints of Beatles oil paintings, some of which hang in Liverpool’s The Cavern to this day.

     So… 50 years ago, white audiences were ready to hear black music played blackly.  John Lennon said in an interview back then that his favorite act was an r ’n’ b girl group called the Shirelles (“Will You Love Me Tomorrow”), whose approach to vocal harmony can be heard in every song the Beatles performed during their first Ed Sullivan show. They opened their third Sullivan gig, on February 23, 1964, with “Twist and Shout” by Motown’s Isley Brothers.  And a few weeks later, Capitol Records released The Beatles Second Album, featuring six rhythm and blues covers: “Roll Over, Beethoven” (Chuck Berry), “You Really Got a Hold on Me” (Smokey Robinson), “Money” (Berry Gordy), “Long Tall Sally” (Little Richard), “Please, Mr. Postman” (The Marvelettes) and “Devil in Her Heart” (The Donays).

     On “Long Tall Sally,” Paul McCartney didn’t so much adapt Little Richard as channel him, just as he did Fats Domino a few years later on “Lady Madonna,” his homage to the great South Carolina singer/songwriter. And what became known as “the British invasion” in the wake of the Beatles appearance on Sullivan consisted, essentially, of English rock bands releasing and performing faithful renditions of African-American r ’n’ b tunes. 

     Half the tracks on the Rolling Stones’ first U.S. LP were just such covers: “Carol” (Chuck Berry), “I’m a King Bee” (Slim Harpo), “Can I Get a Witness” (Holland-Dozier-Holland), “I Just Wanna Make Love to You” (Willie Dixon), “Walking the Dog” (Rufus Thomas) and “Route 66” (Bobby Troop, a white writer whose composition had already been recorded by Nat King Cole and Chuck Berry).   Their second album featured Berry’s “Around and Around” and “Come On,” as well as Bobby Womack’s “It’s All Over Now,” The Drifters’ “Under the Boardwalk” and Willie Dixon’s “Little Red Rooster.”

     The Animals had a big hit with Sam Cooke’s “Bring It On Home to Me,” and great success, live and on record, with John Lee Hooker’s “Boom Boom Boom Boom” and Ray Charles’ “I Believe to My Soul.”  Even the Dave Clark Five had a deserved Billboard chart-topper with their soulful version of Berry Gordy’s “Do You Love Me.”   

     All of these English rockers had completely assimilated African-American pop music, then re-presented it in a way that enabled white Americans to hear it for the first time as it truly was – un-sanitized, sensual and and sexy. Europe had been starved for records from the U.S. throughout World War II and the immediate post-war period.  When budding musicians like John, Paul, George and Ringo; Mick, Keith and Brian; the Erics (Burdon and Clapton) and, yes, even Dave Clark and Mike Smith finally got their hands on vinyl from the States in the fifties, they couldn’t stop listening.  Their obsession with black American pop, and their reproduction of it, became infectious.  White America rediscovered the music, along with its physicality and subversiveness.

     Years later, while in college, I realized that British bands' passion for  rhythm and blues was similar to French New Wave directors' passion for Hollywood cinema in the late fifties and early sixties.  Having had no access to U.S.-made films during the German Occupation, young auteurs like Francois Truffaut and Jean-luc Godard consumed them ravenously after the war, then reintroduced Americans to the cream of the crop with articles in Cahiers du Cinema and with their own movies, filled as they were with homages to Hitchcock, Ford, Hawks, Fuller and Lang, among others.

     It was inevitable that groundbreaking New Wave filmmakers and British invaders would meet.  Expatriate director Richard Lester’s A HARD DAY’S NIGHT, like French films of the period, was shot in black and white and energized with jump cuts. When the Beatles contemplated a documentary about themselves, John Lennon wanted Jean-luc Godard to direct it.  Paul preferred Michael Lindsay-Hogg (son of Orson Welles, a god to the New Wave), who ultimately directed LET IT BE.  Godard, instead, helmed ONE PLUS ONE/SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL with the Rolling Stones.

     What early sixties French cinema and English rock ’n’ roll had in common was a new sense of internationalism in the aftermath of World War II.  The planet had shrunk.  16 million American men and women lived in Europe for over 3 years during the war, spreading U.S. culture and absorbing that of the continent.  This was in sharp contrast to the xenophobia both fueling and fueled by U.S. isolationism between the world wars.

     When the Beatles arrived at Idlewild airport on February 7, 1964, regularly scheduled transcontinental jet travel was only five years old.  Their PanAm Boeing 707 from London shared the tarmac with large, commercial turboprop planes.  The rapid and continuing increase in international mobility also contributed to post war globalism that fused British and American rock and roll.

      So did scientific advances.  Cold war investment in education, referred to above, increased exponentially when the Soviet Union put Sputnik into space in 1957. And five years later, a mere nineteen months before the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan, AT&T and Bell Labs launched Telstar, the world’s first communication satellite.  Hard to imagine a world before communications satellites!  But that technology was so new, the band would  participate in the very first transnational telecast, seen round the world performing  “All You Need is Love” live via satellite on June 25, 1967.

     By then, three years after Sullivan, the Beatles had changed the world and it had changed them.  No longer “disembodied,” their white fans embraced black music and moved from the Twist and the Watusi to writhing at Grateful Dead-driven “acid tests” as well as to the music of the fab four.  The boys themselves took LSD and recommended it to one and all. George Harrison wandered the streets of Haight-Ashbury during the “summer of love” while, in England, Paul McCartney helped introduce the world to Jimi Hendrix.  John preached “love and peace,” later earning the enmity of J. Edgar Hoover and getting on Richard Nixon’s “enemies list” as an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War.  All the while, the group's music became stunningly bold, as songs incorporated sitars and tablas, orchestras, sound effects, complex time signatures and avant-garde experiments, and they pushed the bounds of existing recording technology.

     All of which makes it feel a little weird to celebrate the Beatles’ semi-centennial with cuddly grandpas Paul and Ringo leading us in sing-alongs of the band’s safest songs.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.  It’s sweet to watch audience members who clearly fell in love while listening to this tune or that chiming in with such gusto.  Delightful to see how deeply the two surviving Beatles love each other and how fondly they recall John and George.

     But what I remember is the fab four as agents of change.  I remember discovering Motown and Howlin’ Wolf and all kinds of great music because of the Beatles and the Stones.  I remember coming to expect that each new record, from “Rubber Soul” on, would take me to places I’d never been.  I remember, as a young teen, learning the term “consciousness” from the Beatles, and also learning that it was something to “expand.”   I remember getting the idea from them that popular artists grow by taking risks, in and outside of their work.  And that risk-taking was a good thing. 

REST IN PEACE, PETE SEEGER (1919-2014)

     When I heard that Pete Seeger had passed at age 94, I realized I’d seen him perform live more than I had any other musician. It’s not because I always raced out to get tickets for his shows.  It’s because for decades, if there was a demonstration or a benefit concert for a good cause Pete lent his services.  Enthusiastically. 

     Whether the event was to protest the Vietnam War, an infringement of civil rights or the Kissinger-engineered coup in Chile -- whether it was organized to demand cleanup of the Hudson River, to end nuclear proliferation or to protect the disenfranchised from the privileged in any way -- I knew I was going to hear Pete Seeger, and be happily singing along with him.  If I was close enough to the stage, I could read the inscription on his banjo: “This machine kills Fascists.”  That always tickled me as much as the sound effects we all made with our mouths when Pete had us do our parts on “Coming ‘round the Mountain.”

     Indeed, Pete Seeger inspired everyone in my generation who ever wanted to do some good while working in the entertainment industry. Sure, many of us, long ago, read Jean-Paul Sartre on the subject of artistic “engagement.” Most of us are familiar with the Zen idea of “right livelihood.”  And we all admire the writers, poets, musicians and actors who generously donate time, energy and money to promote good causes. But for Pete, the good of the planet and the death of Fascism were fulltime occupations; he was the one to emulate.

     He weathered the McCarthy era blacklist (refusing to name names to the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955) and CBS censorship (when they cut his Vietnam War protest song “Waist Deep in Big Muddy” from a 1967 appearance on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour).  His refusal to compromise was downright heroic. 

     Both his personal stands and his music roused people to action.  And many of his songs -- including “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” “Turn, Turn, Turn,” “If I Had a Hammer,” “Bring ‘em Home” and “We Shall Overcome” -- became so anthemic people forgot he wrote them.  

     In addition to entertaining with his great original tunes, Pete Seeger taught his listeners the basic twentieth century folk canon.  Most of us who know Woody Guthrie’s songs (from “Union Maid” to “This Land is Your Land”), Leadbelly’s (from “Goodnight, Irene” to “Blue Tail Fly”) and those of rebellious slaves and labor organizers, heard them first when Pete sang them.

      So, too with what is now called “world music.”  In 1950, his adaption of the Hebrew folk song, “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena” became a Number 2 hit for his quartet, The Weavers.  A year later, the group had another top seller with Pete’s adaptation of the South African chant, “Wimoweh,” which I first heard morphed into The Tokens’ “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”  In 1966, his adaptation of the iconic Cuban ditty “Guantanamera” became a hit for a band called The Sandpipers. 

     Of the above, I’m fondest of “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena.” In the extremely assimilationist Jewish household of my childhood, it was the only Hebrew-language record.  So I not only learned folk music and world music from a political hero, he taught me a little Hebrew as well.

     Many young film buffs, I’m sure, think they don’t know Pete Seeger’s music. But they probably do without knowing it. The banjo, whistling and yodeling theme played throughout RAISING ARIZONA is Carter Burwell’s arrangement of Pete’s “Goofing Off Suite.”  Joel and Ethan Coen grew up listening to the record and knew, even in pre-production, it would be a perfect underscore for their yarn about the ne’er-do-well H.I. McDunnough.

     Pete had other connections to cinema, too, and I found them all exciting.  He played himself, at Woody Guthrie’s bedside, in Arthur Penn’s ALICE’S RESTAURANT, and he lent the scene warmth and authenticity… his warmth and authenticity.  In Murray Lerner’s 1967 documentary, FESTIVAL, later excerpted in Martin Scorsese’s 2005 Dylan doc NO DIRECTION HOME, Pete looks on, beaming like a proud father, as Bob Dylan leads a songwriting workshop.

     He was the subject of the 2007 film, PETE SEEGER: THE POWER OF SONG, and he graced the screen in Lewis Lapham’s THE AMERICAN RULING CLASS.  He was featured in LOMAX THE SONGHUNTER, ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE: THE STORY OF POPULAR MUSIC, THE BALLAD OF RAMBLIN’ JACK ELLIOT and LET FREEDOM RING: HOW MUSIC INSPIRED THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT.  Whenever he appeared on screen he was more than just an avuncular presence; he seemed to personify an essential goodness, a true and profound heroism.

     So… another great hero, made from a mold that was broken long ago, is gone.  He will be missed.  His many achievements, including a radical cleanup of the Hudson River, will be remembered and rightly lauded.  And, thank goodness, he’ll be discovered and rediscovered because his work has been preserved in recorded music and movies.

    

THE 30TH ANNUAL SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL

     A few months before the second annual Sundance Film Festival -- held in January 1985 -- Joel and Ethan Coen, chain-smoking Camel lights in the tiny editing room I shared with sound designer Skip Lievsay, said in a very offhand manner, “Redford has this festival in Utah where you ski all day and watch movies all night.”  They mentioned it because BLOOD SIMPLE had been accepted to compete at this very odd venue. Lifelong schussmeisters from Minnesota, the Coens seemed more excited about the days than the nights.  For Skip and me, their announcement simply meant we had to be ready to mix the film’s sound in time for festival presentation.

     We were.  The boys skied, BLOOD SIMPLE won the Jury Prize… good times! Exciting times! Independent cinema was an embryo.

     Now, for better or worse, it’s a grownup. The festival has become a sales venue – a place where agents sell independently financed films to studios, large and small. There’s a Fred Segal franchise at the foot of Park City’s chairlift.  In a town where drinking was illegal, after-screening parties are now sponsored by booze manufacturers.  A tiny room in a tiny cabin, miles from Park City, can be more expensive than a suite in a trendy New York hotel.

     What hasn’t changed, though, is the fact that it’s incredibly exciting to have a film in competition at the festival.  So I’m very excited, again this year, indeed.

     INFINITELY POLAR BEAR, written and directed by Maya Forbes, which I edited, has its worldwide premiere on January 18th, during opening weekend of the 30th annual Sundance Film Festival.  It was delightful working with Maya on the film.

     I met her about a year ago – a few months before the start of principal photography – after reading and falling in love with her screenplay and “mission statement.”  The script tells the tale of a manic-depressive father who, in the early 1980’s, becomes the primary caretaker of his two young daughters.  He must rise to the daunting task of raising the girls regardless of his mental illness.

     What I loved about the mission statement was Maya’s clear intention to make comedy an essential part of the film’s overall tone.  It would be too easy and probably too dark, she said, to focus on how bleak the narrative of a mentally ill father could be.

     While cutting the film, I was reminded of an interview with cinematographer Gordon Willis that appeared in Premiere Magazine many years ago. Gordon, with whom I was privileged to work on MANHATTAN and STARDUST MEMORIES, said that an essential part of his job was reminding the director of her/his original goals.  A given location might make it impossible to shoot what had been planned, for instance, but Gordon had to find alternatives that were in sync with the director’s vision.

    And so, in the POLAR BEAR cutting room, as we shaped scenes in which authentic and beautiful performances by Mark Ruffalo and Zoe Saldana captured the seriousness of the father’s situation, I found myself -- along with Maya – mining material to enhance the lighter tone originally intended.

     I think we pulled it off.  At least well enough to be one of the 16 films selected, from more than 12,000 submissions, to compete for the jury prize at the 30th annual Sundance Film Festival.

     Sundance is my favorite of all the galas, because it’s still, basically, a Mecca for motion picture lovers.  Over the years – having edited seven “official Sundance selections” -- I’ve met film fanatics from all over the world who trek to frigid Park City just to see what’s fresh and new and non-formulaic in contemporary American cinema. The marketplace notwithstanding, most people attend Sundance just to enjoy themselves at the movies.  It reminds me of what rock musicians love about playing far-flung venues:  audiences don’t come, as they might in Los Angeles or New York, to “be impressed.” They come to have a great time. I know that this year, once again, they will.

A NEW INTERVIEW WITH OLIVER STONE PART I: JFK AND THE UNKNOWN HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

     In early September, noting that nearly fifty years have passed since President Kennedy's assassination, I sat down with Oliver Stone to discuss his masterpiece, JFK.  My first question for the esteemed filmmaker was rather broad.

     “The president was murdered in Dallas half a century ago,” I said, “and it's been 22 years since JFK was released. Yet the film remains pertinent to our lives. What - in the world and in the film - accounts for its ongoing immediacy and power?”

     Mr. Stone responded:  “There’s the film, on one hand and, on the other, Kennedy’s reputation. Mainstream American media have for the most part depicted him a ‘minor president’ who wasn’t in office long enough to make a difference. Lyndon Johnson, in that narrative, came in and fulfilled JFK’s vision with the Civil Rights Act and so forth, and basically continued his policies. I vehemently disagreed with this view back in the nineties and I continue to disagree with it as I’ve deepened my own awareness in the last five years while working on THE UNTOLD HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES. In Part 6, ‘Kennedy to the Brink,’ (co-writer) Peter Kuznick and I show JFK to be a great president.  Not a near-great or glamorous one, but a great, great one who, next to Franklin Roosevelt, effected the biggest change in the U.S. government and its attitude toward the world.”

     UNTOLD HISTORY is a documentary series directed by Mr. Stone for Showtime and broadcast in 2012.  On October 15^th, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment will release all ten episodes, along with hours of previously unaired material, on Blu-ray.  The high quality of these one hour shows – from “World War II” to  “Bush & Obama: The Age of Terror” – place them squarely in a tradition of excellent nonfiction films made by the best fiction directors. Martin Scorsese’s THE LAST WALTZ, MY VOYAGE TO ITALY, NO DIRECTION HOME and LIVING IN THE MATERIAL WORLD epitomize this tradition today. But decades before Mr. Scorsese, such renowned storytellers as David Lean, Carol Reed, John Ford, John Huston and Frank Capra crafted superb fact-based motion pictures.

     Mr. Stone’s program is a direct descendent of Mr. Capra’s Second World War series, WHY WE FIGHT.  Using voice-over narration, newsreel footage, clips from feature films, re-enactments, maps (some of them produced by the Disney Studios in the 1940’s), and original as well as classical music, UNTOLD HISTORY pays homage to Frank Capra.  Early episodes feature clips from WHY WE FIGHT itself, MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON and Sergei Eisenstein’s ALEXANDER NEVSKY, which Mr. Capra “quoted” in his two-part “The Battle of Russia” (1944).

     The Showtime series is thus stylistically conservative, in marked contrast to  motion pictures like THE DOORS, NATURAL BORN KILLERS and, especially, JFK, in which the director exhibited groundbreaking technical virtuosity.  But a mainstream, even old-fashioned approach suits UNTOLD HISTORY.  Partly because of the show’s Capra-esque feeling, Oliver Stone’s love of country comes across clearly. Not a jingoistic patriotism or love based on “American exceptionalism.” But a love of ideals like FDR’s “Four Freedoms” (freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear) and of heroic figures like FDR’s progressive vice president, Henry Wallace (1941-1945), and, of course, President Kennedy.

     Which brings us back to Oliver Stone’s reflections on the 35^th chief executive.  “As we show in UNTOLD HISTORY,” said Mr. Stone, “Kennedy was, at first, a typical cold warrior.  From 1952 to 1960, when Eisenhower’s budgeting cycle was complete, there was a huge build-up of hydrogen bombs, and JFK supported it. He continued to do so early in his own presidency. But he changed after the Bay of Pigs debacle and even more so after the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, when the world teetered on the brink of nuclear war. He changed radically.”

     Thus, the director said, “Everyone today owes the simple fact that they’re alive to JFK. Because the situation created during the Cold War -- with first strike nuclear capability over the Soviets and the ’brinksmanship’ policies of Allen Dulles and Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950’s -- made the US overwhelmingly armed, shockingly aggressive toward the USSR and willing to use those first-strike capabilities to destroy the Soviet Union and communist China forever.

     “(Air Force Chief of Staff) Curtis LeMay and other generals were ready to go whole hog, urging the president and Secretary of Defense McNamara to bomb Cuban missile sites. If you’ve seen DOCTOR STRANGELOVE, you know the scenario. Bombing Cuba would have resulted in the end of life as we know it. And Kennedy understood that.”

     The president expressed his view of nuclear war concisely but dramatically in a September 1961 address to the U.N. General Assembly, excerpted in episode 6 of UNTOLD HISTORY:  “Today, (everyone) must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable.  Every man, woman and child lives under the sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, or miscalculation, or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.”

     With that perspective, Kennedy stood up to the military brass.  Oliver Stone explained: “Kennedy -- and UNTOLD HISTORY goes into detail about this -- actively resisted the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA.  Eisenhower weighed in heavily in favor of going into Cuba, to attack them and the Soviets. So for Kennedy to say no to the CIA at the Bay of Pigs was enormous.  To say no during the missile crisis was enormous. To say no to the Joint Chiefs of Staff when they wanted to invade Laos, was enormous.”  Kennedy’s leadership – his fearlessness and forcefulness in the face of nearly rabid, united opposition -- changed the course of human events.

     What emerges, then, from Oliver Stone’s UNTOLD HISTORY and from his dialogue about JFK is not a rehash of Howard Zinn’s PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, which focused on historic contributions of “common” people rather than high ranking officials.  Nor is the Showtime series steeped in leftist paradigms one might expect from a supporter of Bolivarian socialism. Absent, too, are revelations of conspiracies behind earthshaking phenomena. Underlying UNTOLD HISTORY, instead, is a kind of “great man” theory of history.

     The theory, popularized by Thomas Carlyle in the 19^th century, holds that highly influential individual contribute to change by utilizing their special skills or power. But Oliver Stone’s take on this worldview is not that the actions of great historical players are fated or predictable. As Jon Wiener wrote in The Nation, UNTOLD HISTORY’s thesis is that “at many pivotal moments… history could have taken a radically different course.  The missed opportunities, the roads not taken – these are Stone’s central themes, which he argues with energy, passion and a mountain of evidence.”

     Therein lies the “untold history.” Mainstream texts usually present Henry Wallace, for instance, as a marginal third party candidate in the 1948 presidential race. The Showtime series, on the other hand, maintains that had Wallace won the Democratic nomination for a second vice presidential term in 1944 – which he almost did -- he would have become president in 1945. As a student of Buddhism, Mr. Wallace certainly wouldn’t have dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And the cold war and arms race might not have ensued.

     Similarly, conventional history texts hold that President Truman’s use of nuclear weapons against Japan ended World War II expeditiously.  The attacks are portrayed as wise, even humane.  But THE UNTOLD HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES reminds us that Generals Eisenhower and MacArthur, along with many of the scientists who developed the bomb, opposed Truman. They felt his decision was unwise and inhumane.  Hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved if the generals and scientists had held sway.

     In the series’ final episode, Oliver Stone argues that if George W. Bush had heeded a CIA brief entitled “Bin Ladn Determined to Strike in U.S.,” delivered to him 36 days before the 9/11 attacks, the world would be very different today.

      And in episode 6, the writers assert that if JFK hadn’t been assassinated in November1963, he would have withdrawn all troops from Vietnam and negotiated an end to the cold war. Which brings us back, once more, to my chat with the writer/director about President Kennedy. 

     “JFK’s position on Vietnam is much misunderstood,” he said. “He never sent combat advisors there, although that was recommended repeatedly; he sent non-combat advisors instead.  In fact, he tried to keep a distance from the Vietnamese conflict. In the end, when Kennedy issued National Security Action Memorandum 263, proposing the recall of troops, he made it clear to his closest advisors that if he won the election against Goldwater in 1964, he would with withdraw entirely from Vietnam. 

     “He was also moving toward the end of the Cold War with Khrushchev.  They signed a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963, of which he was most proud.  He tried to end the space race, proposing that the US and the USSR work together on a piloted mission to the moon.  He was attempting, through a secret emissary, to normalize relations with Cuba.  On every front, Kennedy would have been a great second term president.

      “He’s the only American president since Roosevelt to give a speech about the Soviet Union – at American University – paying homage to their sacrifices during World War II. He said that what happened to the Soviet Union was the equivalent of the United States being blown up from Chicago to New York. He empathized. He understood suffering because he had suffered his whole life. His brother was killed in the war, he was injured, and he behaved honorably in combat. That’s why men with three and four stars on their shoulders didn’t intimidate Kennedy - the guys who were telling him to go to war with the Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

     I became aware of the American University speech while watching JFK.  In a clip from the 1963 speech shown in that film, President Kennedy humanized the Soviet people in a manner unheard of at the time. He said that the U.S. wanted peace, but “not a Pax Americana,” because at our core, we were the same as the Russians.  “We all breath the same air,” he said, “we all want the best futures for our children, and we are all mortal.”

     Oliver Stone added, “Kennedy was the last American president who really stood for peace.”  Which, Kevin Costner’s character in JFK (Jim Garrison) slowly realizes, “made him a threat to the establishment.”  In the 1991 feature, this becomes motive for murder. A strong case is made that there was a conspiracy behind the killing and a cover-up of the crime. The Warren Commission Report is thoroughly discredited.  But in THE UNTOLD HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, Mr. Stone’s voice-over narration simply states that the public found “unconvincing” the commission’s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, killed the president.

     This isn’t to say that the director has any less conviction that a conspiracy lay behind the president’s murder than he had when JFK was released.  He made such a powerful a case in 1991 that Congress created the Assassination Records Review Board to continue collection and declassification of material related to the killing. And Mr. Stone still argues persuasively on the subjects of conspiracy and cover-up.

     In a few weeks, Part II of my interview with Oliver Stone continues with a discussion of the Kennedy assassination and Mr. Stone’s amazing film on the subject.

My Dad

     My father - Irving Miller - passed away on July 23d at 90 years of age.  I’ll miss him. He loved movies, and his passion for them was infectious and inspiring. Even as he neared the end, I could distract him with conversations about great pictures we’d seen together. Among his favorites were LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, early Brando films and anything in which James Cagney appeared.

     I never tired of hearing about Cagney entertaining GIs aboard the ship on which dad -- a World War II vet -- sailed to Europe after enlisting in the army.  The great star sang, danced and palled around with the troops, keeping spirits high and creating lasting memories. One afternoon, shortly after I started working in the industry, I saw Mr. Cagney walking to a screening room at Technicolor Laboratories to watch dailies of his cameo performance in RAGTIME. Lab employees lined the hallway to applaud the legend and I welled up, recalling my father’s stories; I couldn’t wait to tell him about my star sighting.     

     But mostly I enjoyed his anecdotes. In addition to tales of James Cagney, there were yarns from childhood about whole days spent in grand movie palaces under the “el” in Jamaica, Queens.  These spectacular theatres -- the Loew’s Valencia, the RKO Alden, the Merrick – had twinkling stars in the ceilings, ornate balconies, eye-popping chandeliers. Dad would arrive early with a cousin or a friend to watch, one after the other, a stage show, a newsreel, a B feature, promotional events for local businesses, “previews of coming attractions” and, finally, the A feature. Occasionally, he’d repeat the cycle.

     During my own childhood, holidays were marked by movies on television: YANKEE DOODLE DANDY on July 4^th and MIRACLE ON THIRTY-FOURTH STREET after Macys’ Thanksgiving parade. IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE was standard fare for Christmas, EASTER PARADE for its day.

     Of course, there were non-holiday favorites as well.  Among them was DEAD END, which reminded my father of the Broadway play on which it was based. The production meant a lot to him because, like William Wyler’s film adaptation, it featured his Jamaica neighbor Billy Halop, along with other “Dead End Kids” Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall.  (Michael Curtiz’ ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES hit a casting trifecta for my family: Billy Halop, Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney.)

     But my father loved stage actors who became Hollywood celebrities even if they weren’t from the neighborhood.  I had thought Busby Berkley’s THEY MADE ME A CRIMINAL, featuring the Dead End Kids and John Garfield, was in dad’s pantheon because of Halop.  But as we watched BODY AND SOUL or THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE, he would speak, lovingly and with awe, about seeing Garfield in a Group Theatre production of Clifford Odets’ AWAKE AND SING. He was only twelve at the time and the actor was then known as Julius Garfinkle; watching the play made him a fan for life.

     Dad also liked seeing stars in person, offstage.  I took my parents to The Russian Tea Room for dinner once, and we sat next to Joan Fontaine.  As good as the food and pepper-flavored vodka tasted, seeing Ms. Fontaine was the high point of our meal.  Afterwards, we laughed about how her dancing in DAMSEL IN DISTRESS was not up to the standard set by Ginger Rogers for co-star Fred Astaire, and we all agreed that her Oscar-winning performance in Alfred Hitchcock’s REBECCA was perfect.

     Hitchcock was one of the Miller family’s favorite directors. While my father had no interest in abstractions such as Andrew Sarris’s “auteur theory” he was, practically speaking, an “auteurist.”  He wouldn’t miss a film by Hitch and chatted enthusiastically about such great ones as THE LADY VANISHES, THE THIRTY-NINE STEPS, DIAL M FOR MURDER, REAR WINDOW and VERTIGO, even as we watched them on tv.  Dad pointed out the director’s use “The Merry Widow Waltz” when SHADOW OF A DOUBT aired, and suggested, as LIFEBOAT unspooled, that the Tallulah Bankhead/William Bendix kiss was the best in all of cinema.  (Talking while movies played in our living room was perfectly acceptable; the assumption was that I’d see the good ones again and again. No wonder that viewing a film many times, as editors must, always seemed normal to me!)

     Dad also saw Hitchcock pictures on the big screen. I was too young to be taken to see PSYCHO and the film was (correctly) believed to be “too gruesome” for mom, but I vaguely remember my father coming home, both shaken and enthralled, after seeing it at the Parsons Theatre in Kew Garden Hills, Queens.  A couple of years later, he saw THE BIRDS at the same venue and was affected the same way.

     But Alfred Hitchcock wasn’t the only auteur my father liked.  Michael Curtiz was another, even if dad didn’t know his name.  Curtiz’ YANKEE DOODLE DANDY, ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES and CASABLANCA were all “must watch” movies when they aired.  Dad would grin ear to ear during Cagney’s dance numbers and well up during Bogey’s “hill of beans” speech – every time.

     William Wyler made his mark in our home with DEAD END, THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES and BEN-HUR.  Elia Kazan’s GENTLEMAN’S AGREEMENT, ON THE WATERFRONT, A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, A FACE IN THE CROWD and SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS were greatly admired as well.

     While unaware that Sarris considered The Marx Brothers auteurs even though they didn’t direct (and probably unaware of Sarris himself), my dad was a big fan of theirs as well. His favorite set piece in any movie was the stateroom scene in A NIGHT AT THE OPERA.  And what a brilliant bit it is, with Groucho, Harpo and Chico at their best and staging on which Buster Keaton consulted!

      Another fond memory of that film, for me, is “Alone,” a romantic duet sung by Kitty Carlyle and Alan Jones as the Marx Brothers’ ship sets sail.  Later in the movie, Harpo reprises the song with his magical mixture of grace and comedy.  And dad used to play it on the piano!  My cousin Barbara told me recently that at age 5 she’d sit at her Uncle Irv’s feet and ask him to play a piece he’d written, over and over and over.  (Yes, this dry cleaning supplies salesman wrote a very sweet song!)  The number I requested repeatedly was “Alone.”

     Dad’s love of music was as infectious and inspiring as his love of cinema. While his refusal to listen to anything recorded after the 1940’s could be maddening, his passion for opera, swing and show tunes affected me deeply as a moviegoer and as a filmmaker.  The emotional wallop packed by the intermezzo from “Cavaleria Rusticana” in RAGING BULL was magnified tenfold because I associated it with my father.  So, too, with “Rhapsody in Blue” and the entire soundtrack of MANHATTAN, as well as all the great songs in SWING KIDS!

     Most moving to me, though, was this: despite the fact that my dad didn’t listen to new music, he did go to see new movies, and he never missed one of mine.  Even when driving to the cinema became an ordeal, as it is for any nonagenarian, he’d go opening weekend. And he always had kind words to say – often out of proportion to the actual quality of the work. So… as I said earlier, I’ll miss him.

ROGER EBERT (1942-2013), REST IN PEACE

     Two days before his death, Roger Ebert wrote that he was about to take “a leave of presence.” He will be greatly missed. The depth of his passion for film and filmmakers made terms like “reviewer” or “critic” inapplicable; he was more of an advocate for movies he loved. And while he was an exceptional and witty wordsmith, he seldom seemed to revel in his own cleverness or profundity. The pictures came first.

     In 1967, along with The New Yorker's Pauline Kael, Ebert -- in his first year at The Chicago Sun-Times -- helped rescue Arthur Penn’s BONNIE AND CLYDE, writing a rave review after The New York Times and Newsweek savaged the film. Readers ignored the stodgier critics and came around. Now, of course, Penn’s movie is considered a classic, as well as a paradigm of modern film editing.

     A year later, Ebert went to bat for Sam Peckinpah’s THE WILD BUNCH, reviewing it twice! The first time, he called it, “an important act of filmmaking” and said it “presents violence in such definitive (indeed, even excessive) terms that it becomes, paradoxically, a statement against violence and a reaction to it.” The second time, he watched it with a paying crowd and mused that its hyperrealism and excess made viewers aware that they were watching a motion picture. As self-reflexive cinema, the critic wrote, it called into question cheering for traditional Western heroes played by the likes of Gary Cooper, John Wayne and Hopalong Cassidy.

     For such insightful and impassioned writing, Roger Ebert received the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1978. But he became truly famous reviewing films on television with colleague Gene Siskel, first on PBS’ “Sneak Previews” (also in 1978) and, subsequently, on “At The Movies.” Tuning in to Siskel and Ebert’s debates exposed audiences to the joys of discussing what they’d seen at the multiplex. Quentin Tarantino’s dialogue between Clarence and Alabama, early in TRUE ROMANCE, may be a lasting tribute to “At The Movies”:

Clarence: ...after I see a movie, I like to get a piece of pie and talk about it. It’s sort of a tradition I have. Do you like to get a piece of pie after you see a good movie?

Alabama: Yeah, I love to get pie after a movie. 

Clarence: Would like to go get some pie with me? Alabama: Yeah, I'd love some pie.

     Ebert consistently argued for accepting a motion picture on its own terms. “When you ask a friend if HELLBOY is any good,” he wrote, “you’re not asking if it’s any good compared to MYSTIC RIVER, you’re asking if it’s any good compared to THE PUNISHER.” Thus he didn’t expect ANACONDA to be CITIZEN KANE.

     Unlike most American critics, Roger Ebert had experience in the trenches of Hollywood. He wrote the cult classic BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS, directed by Russ Meyer, as well as Meyer’s BENEATH THE VALLEY OF THE SUPERVIXENS and UP!. So, to a degree, Ebert was an “industry insider.” This enabled him to love filmmakers, not envy them. And the feeling was mutual. Werner Herzog dedicated his 2008 film ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD to Roger Ebert. And in 2009, the Directors Guild of America made him an honorary life member.

     I was privileged to begin an occasional email relationship with Ebert when I started this blog. His response to the first post he liked was a pithy: “tweeted it.” More often, when he didn’t like a post, he simply didn’t tweet it. (He was so economical a writer, I told myself, he could say “meh” in less than one word.) When discussing a particular film, or baseball, on the other hand, he was more effusive.

     Roger Ebert was one of a kind: an American cineaste. Gone much too soon. Rest in peace.