Eleanor Coppola

2024 FAREWELLS: behind the camera

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Roger Corman

The prolific low-budget producer Roger Corman has died at 98, leaving behind a legacy far greater than the 491 titles that he produced. Corman’s great gift to us all is his mentorship of young and talented filmmakers.  Filmmakers who got their first assignment from Corman (called “the Corman Film School”) include Oscar winning directors James Cameron, Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme, Curtis Hanson, Ron Howard and Martin Scorsese.  Not to mention cult directors Paul Bartels and Monte Hellman. And Chinatown screenwriter Robert Townsend. And movie star Jack Nicholson In the 70s, Corman combined making lowbrow American movies with distributing highbrow foreign films, including  Bergman’s Cries and Whispers, Fellini’s Amarcord, Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzawa and Schlondorff’s The Tin Drum.  In one decade, he distributed more Best Foreign Film Oscar winners than all the Hollywood studios combined.

Robert Towne is best known, justifiably, for his Oscar-winning screenplay for Chinatown, one of my Greatest Movies of All Time; but director Roman Polanski perfected the script by changing the ending over Towne’s objections.  However, Chinatown was only one of a string of brilliant screenplays penned by Towne between 1973 and 1982 – The Last Detail, The Yakuza, Shampoo and Personal Best. Starting in 1967, Towne was also the uncredited script doctor who polished Bonnie and Clyde, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Godfather and Heaven Can Wait.

Casting director and producer Fred Roos enhanced the films of Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas by advocating for then unknown actors like Al Pacino, Harrison Ford, Tom Cruise, Carrie Fisher, Richard Dreyfuss, Rob Lowe, Cindy Williams, Patrick Swayze, Matt Dillon and Mackenzie Phillips.

In his second act, Marshall Brickman co-wrote Woody Allen’s two masterpieces: Annie Hall and Manhattan. Brickman had success before (creating Johnny Carson’s Carnac the Magnificent and co-writing The Muppets) and after (creating the Broadway shows Jersey Boys and The Addams Family).

Documentarian Morgan Spurlock broke through with his McDonalds exposé Super Size Me.

Eleanor Coppola was the wife of director Francis Ford Coppola and the mother of director Sophia Coppola. Eleanor Coppola herself directed perhaps the best ever documentary film about the making of a movie, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse.

PARIS CAN WAIT: female fantasy (disputed) and tantalizing food

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PARIS CAN WAIT
PARIS CAN WAIT

Here’s an entertaining piece of fluff.  In Paris Can Wait, Diane Lane plays Anne, the neglected wife of movie mogul Michael (Alec Baldwin).   A show biz emergency has short-circuited their European vacation in Cannes, and the Michael’s French partner Jacques (Arnaud Viard) offers to drive Anne to Paris.   It should be a seven-hour drive, but Jacques stretches it out to take in as many fine dining experiences as he can pack in.

The flirtatious but gentlemanly Jacques is an expert gourmand and a militant epicurean.  And he has resolved to make Anne feel special in ways that her husband doesn’t, at least anymore.  Anne enjoys the attention, but she is anything but naive.  She and the audience are expecting Jacques to make a pass at any moment.

As the closing credits rolled,  most of the women in my audience applauded.  Above all, Paris Can Wait is a fantasy from a woman’s point of view.  That woman is director Eleanor Coppola, who, at the age of 81, has made her first fiction film.  Coppola had previously made what is perhaps the best ever “making of” documentary, the 1991 Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, which chronicled the making of her husband Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now!.  Eleanor and Francis have been married since 1963, and their daughter Sofia just won Best Director at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival for her remake of The Beguiled.

The great and underutilized Diane Lane is such a masterful and magnetic actor.  Anne is an unchallenging role, but it’s still hard to imagine anyone better.   In the 1980s,  Lane started her run of The Outsiders, Rumble Fish, The Cotton Club and as Paulette Goddard in Chaplin.  Her most unforgettable role was probably as Lorie in the 1989 classic miniseries Lonesome Dove.  My own favorite Diane Lane performance was the one for which she was Oscar-nominated, in 2002’s Unfaithful.    I’ll watch her in anything.

Arnaud Viard, a French actor whose work, mainly on French TV, I wasn’t familiar with, is perfect as the debonair but vulnerable Jacques.  As we would expect, Alec Baldwin is excellent as the self-absorbed blowhard Michael.

Paris Can Wait is probably even more of a travelogue than a romantic comedy.  France is a beautiful country, and Jacques and Anne get to drive and picnic through the most scenic parts.  And then there’s the food – serious food porn!  This is by no means an excellent movie, but if you enjoy France, and if you enjoy eating anywhere, this is a harmlessly fun 90 minutes.

[NOTE: The Wife disputes a) that this is a widespread female fantasy and b) that is was the women clapping in the theater, and she finds my “female fantasy” characterization to be offensive.  On the first point, she says that the story here is NOT something that would appeal to all or most women.  I remain convinced that a story in which a woman is found desirable by a non-threatening man who lavishes attention on her does appeal to women, at least more than to men (who I believe prefer non-platonic screen relationships).  On the second point, it is true, as she points out, that I always have us sit in the very front of the theater, and, with our backs to the rest of the audience, I did not actually see who was applauding.]