Discussing books on movies … almost as good as watching them, and without the sticky floors!
Though you may not believe it kiddies, there was – for a time – a perfect movie magazine on the market. A magazine that hovered in the nexus between the mainstream ho-hum-nity of PREMIERE and the self-congratulatory pretentiousness of FILM COMMENT – one that never published an issue that didn’t sacrifice a sacred cow or two, but that also never went to print without championing at least one grand lost cause. A magazine whose famously scabrous wit could not hide the genuine affection its editors and contributors had for the art and history of filmmaking. It was called MOVIELINE and it was a wonder to behold.
But like all beautiful things, it was not built to last. As sales began to fall, it was decided that the irreverence that made the magazine great was alienating potential readers who were more interested in seeing pretty pictures of movie stars than reading amusingly snarky articles about the glories of movie buffdom. Knowing it could not compete with PREMIERE as a more straightforward film journal, it instead looked to IN STYLE magazine as its new role model and became the sad, travesty that is HOLLYWOOD LIFE.
And Jesus wept.
Still, for those of us who remember MOVIELINE and what it once was, all is not lost, as a small handful of books sprang forth from its pages and remain with us today. Of these, the truest in spirit remains Edward Marguiles and Stephen Rebello’s BAD MOVIES WE LOVE, an anti-Medvedian ode to those wonderful cinematic disasters to which only two gay dudes could give their proper credit. And then there’s the equally memorable, if much more heterosexual IF YOU’RE TALKING TO ME, YOUR CAREER MUST BE IN TROUBLE, a collection of essays and interviews that appeared in MOVIELINE as written by professional malcontent Joe Queenan.
Both of these books will be the subject of future reviews in this column, but today I’m going to focus on the second book Queenan published as a result of his work with MOVIELINE, a hilarious look at what happens when a self-admitted asshole movie critic decides to stop talking the talk and start walking the walk.
In his introduction to THE UNKINDEST CUT: HOW A HATCHET-MAN CRITIC MADE HIS OWN $7,000 MOVIE AND PUT IT ALL ON HIS CREDIT CARD, Queenan writes that as boy growing up in Philadelphia, he would wile away his hours at the local movie house watching vampire flicks, dreaming of the day he would be old enough to sink his own fangs into the necks of gorgeous blond virgins. “But not once,” he writes, “did I dream about growing up to direct, produce, script, or star in my own motion picture.”
What then drives him to make the decision try and outdo Robert Rodriguez by making a movie for $2 less than the $7,000 EL MARIACHI? The very same feeling that should gnaw in the gut of any person who makes a living criticizing others for doing something they themselves have never had the balls to do: After years spent living in an affluent Connecticut suburb and putting his children through private school with the wages he had earned writing such sentences as “Casting Madonna as a girl who’s supposed to be pixielike is like casting Heinrich Himmler as the Tooth Fairy,” it seems only natural for him to want to explore what would happen if he actually made a movie of his own.
It turns out that this was a very bad idea.
This is a book that should be handed to every person who has ever suggested aloud that they “could make a better movie than that CLERKS guy!” (In fact, I’ve done just that on a couple of occasions.) In THE UNKINDEST CUT, Queenan lays bare the truth behind some of the myths of independent filmmaking propagated by those rare films that manage to make it to video, much less into theaters. It didn’t take him long to discover that the reason Rodriguez could make EL MARIACHI for so cheap was because he had free access to film equipment (and no one ever mentioned the $100,000 that was later spent fixing the movie’s soundtrack before it was released).
Soon, Queenan’s planned $6,998 feature becomes a $65,193.67 investment (remember, this was 1995 and long before the digital revolution) and the result is a movie that is screened twice (once at a film festival in Dallas and once in the town where he lives) before being stuck in his closet to rot in obscurity. But in documenting his failure, Queenan is able to both teach and amuse (and it’s not like he didn’t get a freaking book out of the whole disaster).
Every step of the making of TWELVE STEPS TO DEATH (a dark comedy about an ex-New York detective trying to solve the murder of a psychiatrist by one of his patients) is described in length (to the point that the film’s complete screenplay is included as part of the text) and is filled with many painful moments that remind us that sometimes it is okay to give up on a dream. Yet, in the end, the book does leave the reader with some regret that they will never get to see the film that resulted from all of this futile effort. Sure, it’s probably awful, but it sounds like a lot of fun to watch.
In the end, for all his work and investment, Queenan’s only victory comes when a glowingly positive review for TWELVE STEPS TO DEATH appears in MOVIELINE, the very magazine that inspired its creation. But even this proves bittersweet when Queenan admits that he himself wrote the review under a pseudonym. Still, one must give the man credit for trying. That alone puts him ahead of all the other asshole movie critics of this world any day of the week. –Allan Mott
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