Nicole Kidman on Stanley Kubrick

This 1999 interview that Paul Joyce did with Nicole Kidman following the release of Kubrick's final film, Eyes Wide Shut, is one of the greatest interviews that I have ever seen. It is almost a movie in itself, made so by the excellent interview questions posed by Joyce, by Nicole Kidman's naked honesty and enthusiasm for answering the questions, and by the pressure they were getting from Kidman's handler to wrap the whole thing up, which Kidman is unwilling to do, and which gives the whole thing an edgy energy. Kidman seems so real, and so much the conflicted artist, far more complex than I might ever have imagined. This is a spectacular look into the impact on a sensitive soul who had the rare privilege of working with perhaps the most important filmmaker of the 20th century. - RAR

DOCUMENTARY FILMS

Rick Hall was not an easy guy to work with, and the film traces The Swamper's departure from FAME studios to create a studio of their own, in Muscle Shoals, which would compete directly with Rick Hall's business. To Hall it was an act of war. He hired a whole new, largely black studio band, while The Swampers struggled to get traction with their new facility. Then the Rolling Stones came to town to work in the Swampers' studio, where they recorded "Wild Horses", "Brown Sugar" and two other tracks for their Sticky Fingers LP. An avalanche of big name recording stars recorded in the Muscle Shoals studios after that, and new ones were created, most notably The Allmann Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd. Muscle Shoals, figuratively speaking, was the place where Southern Rock - roughly meaning Duane Allmann slide guitar style rock - was born.

It is the strange, damaged personality of Rick Hall that makes this film intriguing, on some levels. It is a little sketchy trying to figure out what it was about Muscle Shoals that made it a place where music magic happened, except possibly that it must have been an inexpensive alternative to other big town studios. The style of recording that came from those studios was fat and greasy and carried its own raw signature; it had a certain brand of southern soul. It was a place known for its elimination of music charts, and in that was a place of a sort of illiterate expression, which most certainly captured a certain underclass sound of the deep south. What effect that might have had on the string of pop bands that passed through the area is pretty hard to tell, and the inability of the film's producers to create that link is certainly the weak part of this film. Was Muscle Shoals of those early years really just a state of mind? A southern fried musical legend? Or did the surrounding swamp somehow seep into those who recorded there to give birth to some kind of musical voodoo?

Director: John Scheinfeld (2010)
Harry Nilsson was arguably the "best" pop singer of the post-Beatles era, which may extend through to today. It is hard to think of what modern vocalist really ever had his crystalline range; who could go from a soft bottom to a lilting high with such purity. The world has been full of belters of high notes, but that's quite different from what Harry Nilsson had, which might be described as a piccolo to Freddie Mercury's trumpet. Listening to Harry Nilsson, one tends to hang on every note because they are all so delicate. Someone in the film calls it the musical equivalent of watching a tight rope walker, always uncertain whether or not Harry would fall, though he never did. His A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night  LP, with Gordon Jenkins directing the London Philharmonic Orchestra through early 20th Century standards, may be the greatest recorded vocal performance of the last hundred years.

Nilsson recorded that album over the protest of his producer Richard Perry, with whom he had achieved breakthrough success with Nilsson Schmilsson. Nilsson, who showed up in L.A. as a 15-year old homeless Brooklynite, a high school dropout, had been carving out a niche for himself in west coast music circles since 1962. He had done studio work with Little Richard, and then caught the attention of The Beatles when he released a 22-track LP titled Pandemonium Shadow Show, that included a cover of "You Can't Do That" along with a batch of Harry's own tunes. He wrote the Three Dog Night hit "One". He scored a hit with "Everybody's Talking", which became the theme song to the hit movie Midnight Cowboy. Nilsson, who never toured to perform live based on his feeling that no one would be interested in seeing him, did appear on a number of television shows in the 1960s, including the short-lived Playboy After Dark, where he did "living room" performances. Richard Perry had turned Nilsson into a commercial product, but Nilsson destroyed their relationship by putting out Son of Schmilsson which largely ignored Perry's direction. Nilsson was then determined to do his standards album, with an orchestra, while his vocal abilities were at their finest. Perry felt it wasn't the right time in Nilsson's career for him to be doing an album like that, and the disagreement ended their association.

Nilsson's story is often recounted as a tragedy: the upward and downward arc of an alcoholic, drug addict, rock animal. The documentary consists largely of music celebrities telling outrageous Harry Nilsson stories. Everyone seemed to know that he was a personal disaster and yet none seemed inclined to remove themselves from his influence. Nilsson's close relationship with John Lennon, who produced his Pussy Cats LP (Nilsson, Lennon and Ringo Starr lived together for a time during the making of this LP), eventually led to the destruction of Nilsson's golden voice, and after Lennon was killed Harry Nilsson dropped his music career altogether to become a gun control advocate.

The documentary is one of redemption, in some respects, as the abandoned child Harry Nilsson grows up over time and becomes a doting father. That is, of course, the least interesting aspect of his story.

Director: Tom Donahue (2012)
Documentaries have long focused on subjects who have done great things, but somehow not been properly recognized, and the maturation of cable television has created an outlet for these hagiographies. Their merit is now judged on how effectively they skirt around the essence of what they are, which is usually a tribute to someone who is well-known enough in the first place for someone to want to make them the subject of a film. In that, they are a little like halls of fame. Both make one wonder why these cinematic or brick-and-mortar recognitions are really needed.

What makes Casting By, the story of seminal movie casting professional Marion Dougherty, interesting in the least is the light it shines on how the movie stars we have known over the past 50 years became movie stars. An incredible number of them, in their New York youths, used to haunt the hallways of Dougherty's New York City brownstone, where she proposed them to fill various roles in big feature productions. These would include Jon Voight, Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, Diane Keaton, Christopher Walken, and many others.

Dougherty was around when the west coast movie studio system crumbled in the 1950s. The movie business had been developed as a sort of cottage industry, where studio moguls kept large rosters of actors under contract. In the studio system, actors were hired to represent iconic types, and so actors who were hired because they looked like doctors were cast in doctor roles in movie after movie, and so it was for each character type. People weren't cast in parts so much as they were selected from menus. And, of course, in those formative years the studios were cranking out low-budget features by the trunk load.

Everything changed in the 1950s, when big budget epic films started to become the rage, and when mature hype machines turned individual stars into products too big to be controlled by the old studio system. After the system crumbled, there developed a need for a new type of casting professional, who would work with film directors to design the character of a film through the careful selection of freelance actors who could breathe life into character parts. Dougherty had an uncanny sense for promoting actors who audiences would come to think of as indispensable to the roles they played. This documentary concentrates on getting Dougherty a special Academy Award for her work in casting, for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has never awarded a casting category. In fact, filmmakers like the obnoxious Taylor Hackford have fought against such an Oscar category on the insistence that casting is subordinate to the movie director role, a subset, not a separate function. So it is that Dougherty and others in her field have had to satisfy themselves with screen credits, which they have not always received. Does that in itself make this documentary interesting? Not really.

Director: Denny Tedesco (2008)
There was something sort of fundamentally dishonest about the music coming out of L.A. in that golden period of the late '50s and early '60s. It was a contrived, canned product, in many respects, and the output of a couple dozen highly-developed studio musicians who played the music tracks behind virtually every act that came out of L.A. in that period. Few of the new generation of song stylists were doing anything more than singing their own parts on their records, while the studio band called "the Wrecking Crew" recorded the tracks. The Beach Boys, The Byrds, The Monkees, and other major acts of the day, could tour and play live, when the quality of their performance was less critical, but for studio purposes the difficult work was handled by the professionals.

The general public was not told this. In fact, signed bands would show up for their first recording session to find that their instruments would not be needed. Roger McGuinn and his Rickenbacker 12-string, which gave The Byrds their signature sound, was allowed to work with the crew, but he was the exception.

The Wrecking Crew had recording down to a science. As guitarist Tommy Tedesco told someone who was astonished at the quickness with which they grasped and executed a piece of music, "We practice a lot during the day". In fact, the members of the Wrecking Crew played together every day for years, starting with morning sessions in one studio, moving to another for an early afternoon session, another for a late afternoon session, and then on to evening performances and sessions that would go on into the early morning hours. They worked virtually around the clock, and this group of musicians, which included Glenn Campbell on guitar, would become well-to-do men just collecting union rates because they worked so many hours. There was one woman among them, the bassist and guitarist Carol Kaye, who somehow fit seamlessly into this otherwise all male fraternity.

This film is really carried by Tommy Tedesco, to whom it is dedicated. Tedesco was a good-humored, blue-collar type of guy, who took up the guitar later than most but became a sight reader and a transformative figure in modern pop music. He was key to making the Wrecking Crew the epitome of music professionalism. He and his mates laid down perfect tracks for an astonishing range of artists. Of course, when The Beatles arrived things started to change. They were music pros who played their own tracks (though Ringo Starr was famously dropped on their first recording date in favor of a studio drummer), and with their success came a new generation of self-supporting songwriting acts. Time eventually passed the Wrecking Crew by, and so came the end of an era. For a time, pop music became more of a personal singer-songwriting type of an affair, though eventually there once again developed an era of canned acts (e.g., Boys to Men, The Spice Girls), that returned the focus to singers and dancers, and recreated a certain breed of largely anonymous studio musicians.

Director: Paul Justman (2002)
This is another of those documentaries that seeks to shine a light on the makers of a sound that was as much the product of a tremendous collection of music pros as it was the work of those who became stars and got all the credit. What makes Standing in the Shadows of Motown a little different is that the players who were brought together in Detroit by producer/songwriter Barry Gordy were guys right out of Detroit's Jazz clubs, which is to say guys from the neighborhood.

All of these musician-focused documentaries surface the same thing, which is that when the music is right the racial differences between the players is non-existent. This is one of the uplifting aspects of music, part of its magic. Music transcends everything.

The Motown studio band was known as the Funk Brothers, and like the Wrecking Crew on the west coast, the Funk Brothers were a biracial collective of guys who grooved on the same sounds. From a musician's perspective, the Funk Brothers' Motown style is most interesting to break apart and analyze. The band had discovered something elemental, a truth that has been passed from one musician to the next ever since, which is that it is more about how you play what you play than it is about what you play. And more than that, it is about not playing so as to give every instrument in the band its own space. There are no conflicting sounds in a Funk Brothers recording, no muddy parts caused by instruments competing with one another. The Motown records, which featured heavy bass and close-miked drums, breathed or pulsated like an organic expression. There was a naturalness to the Motown sound that was unparalleled. Where the west coast sound of the Wrecking Crew was all about rangy perfection, the Funk Brothers were all about feel. When one watches the band members perform, it is often striking how little they play. Their parts are simple, but perfectly calibrated to mesh with those of the other musicians. They spread the tones within each chord change over the full band. Musicianship, on that level, becomes all about listening to the folks around you, and capturing the feel and the beat.

Motown was chased out of Detroit by the riots of the 1960s, when Barry Gordy packed up Hitsville USA and moved the whole affair to the west coast. Motown was never the same after that. It became a more calculated, and in some ways more sophisticated thing. It became Marvin Gaye singing about social issues, where always before it had been about young people dealing with love and romance and dance. Some of the Funk Brothers tried to move to L.A. to continue their successful careers, but most didn't fit in on the west coast and returned to anonymity in the clubs of Detroit. As it had for the Wrecking Crew, the time of the Funk Brothers had passed as the pop music world moved on to a whole other set of motivations and circumstances.

This movie has much in common with a mockumentary, though not on purpose. Director Russell, who eventually married Frankie Banali, had access to Banali's conflicted interior, and her devotion to Banali's dream of holding this questionable musical act together into his later years reveals some really uncomfortable aspects of human behavior.

For one thing, Quiet Riot was a lousy band, and a band of execrable musical tastes. They surfaced as MTV surfaced and they scored a classic video with "Cum on Feel the Noize", which is a title that tells you all you really need to know about Quiet Riot. They were vulgar and stupid, all on the strength of Kevin DuBrow's outlandish metal vocals and his stage presence. He was a party animal and a narcissist who portrayed that on stage to maximum effect. He was, for all practical purposes, Quiet Riot. The band's history was one of constant changes in personnel, with DuBrow even being replaced at one point before reuniting with childhood friend Banali to keep Quiet Riot afloat in the music industry. When the cocaine and alcohol huffing DuBrow died in Las Vegas, at age 52, he made a remarkably pleasing corpse; in fact, looked better than he ever had in his prime, but a lifetime of drug abuse takes its toll and DuBrow apparently died one night in his sleep.

This movie becomes a perverse pleasure when Frankie Banali starts holding auditions to replace his deceased friend, in between sob fest visits to DuBrow's grave site. Quiet Riot is really all that Banali has in his life, other than a sweetly adorable young daughter. He is a widower as the film begins, a guy who has lost both parents and really has no choice but to somehow continue to make Quiet Riot viable as a source of continued income. At one point, he chooses a guy named Mark Huff, who had been vocalist with a Van Halen tribute band, to be their new lead singer. Banali chooses Huff because Huff could do that metal rock vocal screaming sound, but Banali seemed not to have considered what it would really take for someone to fill DuBrow's performance shoes. Huff has no stage presence at all, and sometimes forgets the words to songs. Banali berates him and basically tortures the guy into a puddle of goo until finally he starts to find his way. Banali eventually fires Huff and moves on to another guy, and another...

This movie is really kind of sad, not because anybody cares about Banali and DuBrow, or their brainless band, but because what surfaces is Banali's tortured psyche, which is not a pretty thing to behold. One imagines that his future wife, Regina Russell, saw it otherwise.

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