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The Film Director Prepares
(Lone Eagle, 256 pages, $21.95)
By Myrl A. Schreibman
n our increasingly media-saturated world, with images and stories coming at us from every direction and in every medium, creatively oriented young people of every ilk now believe they have it in them to become great film directors. They can’t all be right, however. It’s hard to know what percentage of film school graduates end up working in movies and television, but it’s doubtful the figure even hits 20 percent. Many of those who ended up in other careers might have saved time and money if, before making such a commitment, they’d read Myrl A. Schreibman’s The Film Director Prepares.
Schreibman, an adjunct professor at UCLA and author of the Indie Producers Handbook, conveys not merely the range of responsibilities a director must assume, but also the number of different people he or she must be: an astute businessperson and financial planner; a project manager; a creative artist alert to the needs of writers, cinematographers and editors; an astute psychologist (especially in dealing with actors); and a person combining improvisatory flexibility and an iron-fisted sense of discipline. The job of directing, his book tells us—with many examples culled from his own stage, screen and TV experiences—takes more than a pair of jodhpurs, a bullhorn and an ego.
As his Stanislavski-derived title suggests, the most important aspect of film direction is preparation, the myriad tasks and obligations that must preoccupy a director before a millimeter of celluloid is exposed or a single role cast. And he’s not just talking about storyboards. He means a total immersion in the dramatic needs and tonal nuances of the script, an understanding of logistical and budgetary demands, and a sense of how the finished product should look.
In one of his most intriguing chapters, Schreibman shows us the essential fragility and precariousness of the relationship between the director and his actors, exploring issues of trust and empathy. If the key process of casting has gone well, the main problem, he says, is maintaining the tenuous emotional links between actor and role and between actor and director—and no one else, he wisely adds—even when no cameras are running.
Schreibman’s well-paced, comprehensive survey doesn’t just address itself to the neophyte; it should also prove useful to seasoned directors wishing to reacquaint themselves with basic methods and evergreen tenets of the trade. He even has some practical advice about feeding the crew: they “get more done before lunch than after.” Overall, this book presents an essential outline of what is needed to get an unbelievably complex and demanding job done.
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Leni Riefenstahl: A Life
(Faber & Faber, 368 pages, $35)
By Jurgen Trimborn
(translated by Edna McCown)
oward the end of her long and controversial life (she died at age 101 in 2003), German director Leni Riefenstahl, forever infamous as “Hitler’s filmmaker,” began to earn some grudging respect—if only for her longevity. Her self-serving, monotonous 1987 autobiography and the lengthy 1993 documentary The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl made some progress toward granting her a belated rehabilitation, much of it based on her two most famous works, Triumph of the Will and Olympia. This did not sit well with German film historian Jurgen Trimborn, an authority on Third Reich cinema. He felt a revised, balanced look at the well-documented facts and the bald lies that Riefenstahl had long-peddled about her work was needed. Many of her false claims had gained wider traction through incessant repetition. So in 1997, Trimborn approached her in good faith but found her imperious, stubborn and largely unapologetic. He shut off contact and embarked on his own biography. The result is a long overdue consideration of whether Riefenstahl’s artistry can ever be separated from the moral stain of her relationship with Hitler. All things considered, Trimborn finds that it cannot. He rehashes her many egregious deeds: credit theft (erasing a Jewish collaborator’s name from one prewar feature, then setting the Nazi race law authorities on him); abject denial (she witnessed a 1939 massacre in Poland, yet her ardor for Hitler remained undiminished); use of forced labor (including gypsies who later died in Auschwitz), and sheer mendacity before the postwar de-Nazification tribunals. Although Trimborn commends her energy, her technical inventiveness and her undeniably stunning cinematography, especially in the supposedly apolitical Olympia, he finds all of this is outweighed by her grotesque self-absorption, self-pity and moral myopia. Admirably well-sourced, consistently evenhanded, and remarkably succinct at 368 pages, this is now the authoritative biography of an appalling, albeit fascinating figure of cinema.
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The Playboy Interviews: The Directors
(M Press, 300 pages, $22.95)
Edited by Stephen Randall
and the editors of Playboy magazine
only read it for the articles” has long been the familiar alibi for anyone caught toting Hugh Hefner’s pioneering skin-mag, but an equally acceptable excuse might be, “I only read it for the interviews.” The Playboy face-to-face encounter is remarkable in several ways. For one thing, the lengthy, in-depth interviews are well researched and more penetrating than standard-issue media chatter. For another, Playboy has an enviably sure instinct for catching people at important turning points—those felicitous, fleeting moments when self-examination and frank reassessment seem likelier to occur. These principles were evident in famous 1960s interviews with Malcolm X just before his assassination or Albert Speer just after his release from Spandau, and they work just as well for the 16 moviemakers in The Playboy Interviews: The Directors.
The sheer range of interviewees here is dazzling: Robert Altman needling his interlocutor in the aftermath of Nashville; Billy Wilder and Ingmar Bergman interrogated in 1964 (though not together, sadly); Roman Polanski’s first interview after the Manson murders; Scorsese after Goodfellas; and Francis Coppola after The Conversation and The Godfather II. The sparkling 1968 conversation with Stanley Kubrick reminds one that there was a time, before his self-enforced media silence, when he was downright gregarious. John Huston is encountered in his bohemian dotage, the interviewer having to endure unpaved roads and a three-hour boat ride simply to reach the ailing master in his remote Mexican refuge—a worthwhile journey it turns out, as Huston freely drops names, anecdotes and indiscretions in his wake. Orson Welles, “grown fat from spreading himself thin,” is encountered in 1967 by Kenneth Tynan, and is a sharper judge of his own efforts and shortcomings than the dozen biographers who have since picked over his grave.
Although one might have appreciated pictures of the subjects, and not a single woman director is included (it is Playboy, after all), this collection is truly a Roman banquet of interviews, and its pleasures and surprises never seem to end.
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Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only: The Life of America’s First Great Black Filmmaker
(Regan Books, 384 pages, $29.95)
By Patrick McGilligan
ny modern independent filmmaker who began his or her career maxing out 10 credit cards will find their efforts and tribulations put starkly into context by Patrick McGilligan’s exhaustive biography of the shadowy, half-forgotten yet indomitable African-American film pioneer Oscar Micheaux. At a time when blacks lived severely restricted lives in Jim Crow America (Micheaux died broke in 1951 at age 67), this ambitious original managed, against incredible odds, to pump out up to four features a year between 1919 and 1940, finally making nearly 40 all-black musicals, melodramas, detective stories and ghost stories, two-thirds of which are now thought lost. Many of them embraced daring topics such as “passing” for white, interracial romance, nudity, sexual frankness, Klan violence and lynching; none were likely to pass muster with racist censors, especially in the South. Micheaux distributed them himself, toting the four or five prints he could afford to the nation’s far-flung black communities, which enthusiastically embraced the only films then being made that addressed their own lives without stereotyping or racial insult. All the while, Micheaux was beset by creditors, scornful reviewers (among many admirers), amateurish performers, and the insults visited upon him daily as an ambitious, unretiring black man. The leaders of the Harlem Renaissance treated him with condescension, perhaps because Micheaux was a self-made striver in the Booker T. Washington mold, his works aiming to “uplift the race.” By today’s standards, his work seems unpolished. But his contribution was so significant that he was posthumously presented with the DGA’s Golden Jubilee Special Award in 1986, along with Fellini and Kurosawa, in celebration of the Guild’s 50th anniversary. Micheaux-related research has preoccupied scholars of early black filmmaking for three decades now, but McGilligan has deftly assembled their many sterling efforts, including disinterred prints and 1970s interviews with surviving Micheaux collaborators, into an enormously moving and compelling account of a quixotic life defined by arduous toil and perpetual optimism.
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