To start his day, Jerry Mulligan, the hero of Vincente Minnelli’s 1951 musical An American in Paris, does a curious thing. He’s an ex-G.I. in Paris who lives in a studio above a restaurant and café. It’s a cheap spot—small, like his income, with what little room there is being overwhelmed by clustered bouquets of old paint brushes and studious stacks of better artists’ books. Starting the day at home means, first, giving himself a little room to maneuver.
And so, in order to work, he hoists his bed up to the ceiling with a pulley, grabs a towel from the clothesline above his bed, kicks a stool aside to make way for a fold-out table, corners an overlarge den chair to replace it with one smaller. He opens the patio doors and, taking in the sun for a moment, greets the day—then he hops back to business, setting the table, picking an outfit, setting out the coffee pot. This all happens in a matter of seconds, an automatic series of kicks, spins, and slaps, nimbly matched to the cosmopolitan orchestral swing of George Gershwin’s eponymous jazz suite. Mulligan does it without thinking. And Minnelli’s amused, astonished camera gently pans to and fro, eager to capture what happens in one long and, despite the cluttered setting, spacious image.
It is a ritual: practiced, well-worn and precisely choreographed, with no pretensions to appear otherwise. But Mulligan’s body goes through these motions with refreshed spontaneity, subsuming the practical need to get ready beneath his wary joy at the prospect of a new day and the unlikely possibilities it might provide. It seems he cannot help but infuse the ritual with feeling.
Mulligan may be a failed painter, but he is nevertheless, in the film’s view, an artist, a man who naturally inflects a routine as banal as tidying up his apartment with a sense of complex expression. He’s an artist by virtue of being played and designed by one: the dance-auteur Gene Kelly, whose peculiar talent as a choreographer and performer was for fashioning the everyday into an excuse for his characters’ creative impulses to run amok. That was his genius—he could make a dance, or a prop, out of anything.
Disappointment is powerful and insidious. When an object of desire slips away, particularly something we believe we deserve, the sense of loss can be intense. Its not that we failed to get something; that thing was taken from us. The characters in Eric Bogosians 1994 stage play SubUrbia, and the 1996 film version by Richard Linklater, boil with this disappointmentfor perceived promises unfulfilled, for the stacked odds against fame, success, happiness. The emotion is transmuted into a sense of victimization, and anger.
The venomous spit of SubUrbia wasnt out of place in 1996 as the mainstream accommodated an influx of indie culture in the arts, but the film played like the bitter b-side to Linklaters sunnier Dazed and Confused. What can we glean from a bunch of malcontents, high school friends now in early adulthood, who express feelings of futility and pain plus racism as they drink away their nights in a parking lot? Few of the characters are likable, with many exuding an odious sense of entitlement. This skewed snapshot of the stereotypically disaffected Generation X has largely fallen off the radar, in part due to years of poor home video availability, despite Linklaters growing reputation as a major American filmmaker.
Looking at the film anew two decades years later, SubUrbia howls with middle-American anxiety, the same voices that have been resounding through political rallies for the past six months. This movie is more than a mid-90s time capsule: Its a potent advance warning of the crippling sense of American loss and failure that fueled the political rise of Donald Trump.
Trump courts a voter base made up of a spectrum of Americans dissatisfied with economic status, security, and race relations.The long-since eroded American middle classadults whose early 20s might have looked a lot like characters in SubUrbiais his feeding ground. He galvanizes moderate and conservative voters without college educations who believe theyve been abandoned by a system skewed toward elites, especially in racially tense states.Only a bit of clever editing would be required to make SubUrbia look like a Trump campaign ad.
As a precursor to the abrasive post-rock soundtrack that accompanies most of the film, Linklater opens SubUrbia with the more gently ominous Town Without Pity by Gene Pitney. How can anything survive? in a place like that, Pitney sings. Indeed, as so many citizens we see in fictional Burnfield, Texas turn their anger and frustration outward, rather than devoting energy to fixing their own problems, we watch what little community they have wither away.
Linklater doesnt tame Bogosians characters (the playwright scripted the film), but the directors slowly roving camera reveals sympathetic notes in the small-town group of friends, who hang out near a convenience store drinking and talking and harassing the stores immigrant owners. Linklater amplifies the humanity of the going-nowhere characters without diluting their bile. Several may be unlikable, but they are not at all inscrutable.
Disappointment is powerful and insidious. When an object of desire slips away, particularly something we believe we deserve, the sense of loss can be intense. It’s not that we failed to get something; that thing was taken from us. The characters in Eric Bogosian’s 1994 stage play SubUrbia, and the 1996 film version by Richard Linklater, boil with this disappointment—for perceived promises unfulfilled, for the stacked odds against fame, success, happiness. The emotion is transmuted into a sense of victimization, and anger.
The venomous spit of SubUrbia wasn’t out of place in 1996 as the mainstream accommodated an influx of indie culture in the arts, but the film played like the bitter b-side to Linklater’s sunnier Dazed and Confused. What can we glean from a bunch of malcontents, high school friends now in early adulthood, who express feelings of futility and pain plus racism as they drink away their nights in a parking lot? Few of the characters are likable, with many exuding an odious sense of entitlement. This skewed snapshot of the stereotypically disaffected Generation X has largely fallen off the radar, in part due to years of poor home video availability, despite Linklater’s growing reputation as a major American filmmaker.
Looking at the film anew two decades years later, SubUrbia howls with middle-American anxiety, the same voices that have been resounding through political rallies for the past six months. This movie is more than a mid-’90s time capsule: It’s a potent advance warning of the crippling sense of American loss and failure that fueled the political rise of Donald Trump.
Trump courts a voter base made up of a spectrum of Americans dissatisfied with economic status, security, and race relations.The long-since eroded American middle class—adults whose early 20s might have looked a lot like characters in SubUrbia—is his feeding ground. He galvanizes moderate and conservative voters without college educations who believe they’ve been abandoned by a system skewed toward elites, especially in racially tense states. Only a bit of clever editing would be required to make SubUrbia look like a Trump campaign ad.
As a precursor to the abrasive post-rock soundtrack that accompanies most of the film, Linklater opens SubUrbia with the more gently ominous “Town Without Pity” by Gene Pitney. “How can anything survive?” in a place like that, Pitney sings. Indeed, as so many citizens we see in fictional Burnfield, Texas turn their anger and frustration outward, rather than devoting energy to fixing their own problems, we watch what little community they have wither away.
Linklater doesn’t tame Bogosian’s characters (the playwright scripted the film), but the director’s slowly roving camera reveals sympathetic notes in the small-town group of friends, who hang out near a convenience store drinking and talking and harassing the store’s immigrant owners. Linklater amplifies the humanity of the going-nowhere characters without diluting their bile. Several may be unlikable, but they are not at all inscrutable.
You know theres others like us out there. Eric, Elephant
On April 20th, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold executed a massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado, killing 12 of their fellow students, a teacher, and finally themselves, while wounding about two dozen more. Much would be reported in the aftermath about their motives and other particularsprecious little of it true, according to Dave Cullens definitive accounting, Columbine, published a decade later. But the incident was one of those where-were-you-then moments, a horror that unfolded on television and forever colored our thinking on school safety, gun violence, bullying, and a catch-all of possible toxins within the culture, from first-person shooting games to Marilyn Manson records. According to their journals, Harris and Klebold intended mass murder on the scale of the Oklahoma City bombing, and while they failed in that respect, the event nonetheless put an exclamation mark on a decadeand a century, and a millenniaof violence.
Four years later, when Gus Van Sants Elephant, a thinly disguised meditation on Columbine, picked up the Palme DOr and Best Director at Cannes, critics were fiercely divided over the question of representation. Was it even appropriate to make a Columbine movie at all? And was Van Sant successful in adding some perspective to the incident without succumbing to artsploitation or immortalizing the falsehoods that flourished in the aftermath? Writing for the Boston Globe at the time, Wesley Morris, one of the films most fervent champions, summed up the controversy thusly:
The film is either a tightlipped essay on the Columbine massacre or a sub-pornographic piece of exploitationist hooey. Its either a pretentious art director showing off what he can do or the grisliest John Hughes movie ever. The brilliance of Van Sants movie is that it’s all of those things.
At the time, there was a too-soon-ness to Elephant that seemed to fuel the criticism against it, like Van Sant had answered one obscenity with an obscenity of another kind. But what does it look like in 2016, when school shootings have become so commonplace that only a handful of the worst ones make the news cycle? Everyone remembers Virginia Tech in 2007 (32 killed), Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 (28 killed, 20 aged six or seven), and Umpqua Community College in 2015 (10 killed), not to mention the recent horrors at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, a black church in Charleston, and regional center in San Bernadino, California. And yet, can we even remember the names of the perpetrators? Its like a cancer thats metastasized across the entire country: The sickness is so widespread now that any one case cannot be examined in isolation for too long. The days when pundits could safely bloviate about violent video games on cable TV now seem positively quaint.
“You know there’s others like us out there.” —Eric, Elephant
On April 20th, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold executed a massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado, killing 12 of their fellow students, a teacher, and finally themselves, while wounding about two dozen more. Much would be reported in the aftermath about their motives and other particulars—precious little of it true, according to Dave Cullen’s definitive accounting, Columbine, published a decade later. But the incident was one of those where-were-you-then moments, a horror that unfolded on television and forever colored our thinking on school safety, gun violence, bullying, and a catch-all of possible toxins within the culture, from first-person shooting games to Marilyn Manson records. According to their journals, Harris and Klebold intended mass murder on the scale of the Oklahoma City bombing, and while they failed in that respect, the event nonetheless put an exclamation mark on a decade—and a century, and a millennia—of violence.
Four years later, when Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, a thinly disguised meditation on Columbine, picked up the Palme D’Or and Best Director at Cannes, critics were fiercely divided over the question of representation. Was it even appropriate to make a Columbine movie at all? And was Van Sant successful in adding some perspective to the incident without succumbing to artsploitation or immortalizing the falsehoods that flourished in the aftermath? Writing for the Boston Globe at the time, Wesley Morris, one of the film’s most fervent champions, summed up the controversy thusly:
The film is either a tightlipped essay on the Columbine massacre or a sub-pornographic piece of exploitationist hooey. It’s either a pretentious art director showing off what he can do or the grisliest John Hughes movie ever. The brilliance of Van Sant’s movie is that it’s all of those things.
At the time, there was a too-soon-ness to Elephant that seemed to fuel the criticism against it, like Van Sant had answered one obscenity with an obscenity of another kind. But what does it look like in 2016, when school shootings have become so commonplace that only a handful of the worst ones make the news cycle? Everyone remembers Virginia Tech in 2007 (32 killed), Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 (28 killed, 20 aged six or seven), and Umpqua Community College in 2015 (10 killed), not to mention the recent horrors at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, a black church in Charleston, and regional center in San Bernadino, California. And yet, can we even remember the names of the perpetrators? It’s like a cancer that’s metastasized across the entire country: The sickness is so widespread now that any one case cannot be examined in isolation for too long. The days when pundits could safely bloviate about violent video games on cable TV now seem positively quaint.
Last year, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, celebrated its 40th anniversary, a landmark marked by a cast reunion, online retrospectives, a new Blu-ray edition of the film, and news of a planned TV remake for Fox featuring, among others, original star Tim Curry. And, of course, there were the usual celebrations via the midnight gatherings of fans who dress-up, talk back to the screen, and reenact the film as it plays on the screen behind them, a still-thriving tradition even as the landscape of midnight moviegoing shifts. This October will see the arrival of another, related, anniversary, albeit one sure to pass without much fanfare: the release of Shock Treatment, a Rocky Horror sequel that arrived in theaters in 1981. But instead of assuming its place alongside the original, it lives deep in the shadow of Rocky Horror, beloved by a few, shunned by others, and unknown to most of the world.
To understand what Shock Treatment didnt become, its necessary to first consider what Rocky Horror did. Its an unlikely series of events that led to The Rocky Horror Picture Show turning into a sensation, then an institution: a combination of a specific group of talented creators and a general set of cultural trends. Raised in New Zealand on a steady diet of horror movies and comic books, the English-born Richard OBrien returned to the country of his birth in the early-60s and attempted to make it as an actor. As OBrien tells it in the 1995 documentary The Rocky Horror Double Feature Show, he fell into writing almost as a happy accident:
It was the very first thing Id ever written and I didnt even see it as writing, really. To me it was just like doing a crossword puzzle or painting a picture or making a collage. I just wrote some songs, which, I liked. I wrote some gags which I thought were funny. I put in some B-movie dialogue and B-movie situations and I was just having a ball.
The resulting play, The Rocky Horror Show, opened on Londons West End in June of 1973, under the direction of Jim Sharman. With a cast that included OBrien, Patricia Quinn, Nell Campbell (a.k.a. Little Nell), and, in the central role of Dr. Frank N. Furter, Tim Curry, the show became a smash. It also attracted the attention of Lou Adler, an American music manager and promoter who attended a show with his girlfriend, the actress Britt Eckland.
Smitten, Adler acquired the American theatrical rights and opened The Rocky Horror Show in Los Angeles, importing Curry to star in the production. In L.A., the show earned new fans including Elvis Presley and its success allowed Adler to strike a deal with 20th Century Fox to turn the play into a film. Filming commenced in England in October of 1974, with Sharman at the helm and Curry, Quinn, Campbell, and OBrien reprising the parts theyd originated. Joining them were the American singer Meat Loaf, whod been part of the L.A. cast, and Susan Sarandon and Barry Bostwick, actors cast in the roles of the whitebread couple Janet Weiss and Brad Majors at the suggestion of Fox, who wanted American actors for the parts.
After filming wrapped, The Rocky Horror Show then moved to Broadway where, ominously, it flopped. So, too, would the film when released in September of 1975 under a slightly new title: The Rocky Horror Picture Show. An ill-received preview screening in Santa Barbara led to a timid roll-out and a canceled Halloween opening in New York. It looked like the lights would go down on The Rocky Horror Picture Show before most of the U.S. had a chance to see it.
Last year, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, celebrated its 40th anniversary, a landmark marked by a cast reunion, online retrospectives, a new Blu-ray edition of the film, and news of a planned TV remake for Fox featuring, among others, original star Tim Curry. And, of course, there were the usual celebrations via the midnight gatherings of fans who dress-up, talk back to the screen, and reenact the film as it plays on the screen behind them, a still-thriving tradition even as the landscape of midnight moviegoing shifts. This October will see the arrival of another, related, anniversary, albeit one sure to pass without much fanfare: the release of Shock Treatment, a Rocky Horror sequel that arrived in theaters in 1981. But instead of assuming its place alongside the original, it lives deep in the shadow of Rocky Horror, beloved by a few, shunned by others, and unknown to most of the world.
To understand what Shock Treatment didn’t become, it’s necessary to first consider what Rocky Horror did. It’s an unlikely series of events that led to The Rocky Horror Picture Show turning into a sensation, then an institution: a combination of a specific group of talented creators and a general set of cultural trends. Raised in New Zealand on a steady diet of horror movies and comic books, the English-born Richard O’Brien returned to the country of his birth in the early-’60s and attempted to make it as an actor. As O’Brien tells it in the 1995 documentary The Rocky Horror Double Feature Show, he fell into writing almost as a happy accident:
“It was the very first thing I’d ever written and I didn’t even see it as writing, really. To me it was just like doing a crossword puzzle or painting a picture or making a collage. I just wrote some songs, which, I liked. I wrote some gags which I thought were funny. I put in some B-movie dialogue and B-movie situations and I was just having a ball.”
The resulting play, The Rocky Horror Show, opened on London’s West End in June of 1973, under the direction of Jim Sharman. With a cast that included O’Brien, Patricia Quinn, Nell Campbell (a.k.a. “Little Nell”), and, in the central role of Dr. Frank N. Furter, Tim Curry, the show became a smash. It also attracted the attention of Lou Adler, an American music manager and promoter who attended a show with his girlfriend, the actress Britt Eckland.
Smitten, Adler acquired the American theatrical rights and opened The Rocky Horror Show in Los Angeles, importing Curry to star in the production. In L.A., the show earned new fans — including Elvis Presley — and its success allowed Adler to strike a deal with 20th Century Fox to turn the play into a film. Filming commenced in England in October of 1974, with Sharman at the helm and Curry, Quinn, Campbell, and O’Brien reprising the parts they’d originated. Joining them were the American singer Meat Loaf, who’d been part of the L.A. cast, and Susan Sarandon and Barry Bostwick, actors cast in the roles of the whitebread couple Janet Weiss and Brad Majors at the suggestion of Fox, who wanted American actors for the parts.
After filming wrapped, The Rocky Horror Show then moved to Broadway where, ominously, it flopped. So, too, would the film when released in September of 1975 under a slightly new title: The Rocky Horror Picture Show. An ill-received preview screening in Santa Barbara led to a timid roll-out and a canceled Halloween opening in New York. It looked like the lights would go down on The Rocky Horror Picture Show before most of the U.S. had a chance to see it.
The biblical character of Samson was a man divided. The story goes that he was chosen by the almighty before birth to be separate and consecrated from those around him. He would lead the Israelites to glory, and to do so, he would be given superhuman strength, but this strength would have bound within it a weakness. It was tied to his hair, and Samson was forbidden from cutting it if he wanted to remain strong. He was given a heros power, but a mortals pride, and no victory could keep him from downfall. He fell in love with the wrong woman, bragged about the source of his gift, and awoke one day to find his head shorn and his muscles worthless. The allegory lends itself to many lessons, maybe none more poignant than this: knowing your limitations is often the only way to achieve greatness.
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Samson Raphaelson was born in New York City in 1894, a year before the Lumiere brothers held their first screenings of projected motion pictures, and three years after Edison held the first public demonstration of his prototype kinetoscope. This is one of those historical connections that winds up feeling portentous in hindsight but is actually just a fluke of great timing. Raphaelson by his own account a skinny guy with glasses who just wanted to figure out what his talent was and put it to use had the good fortune to grow up with the movies, and to come of age with a new medium. After he graduated high school, he spent a year doing menial clerical work for Sears Roebuck before taking a chance on himself. Recounting his youth to Bill Moyers on a PBS documentary in 1982, he said, I rented a typewriter. Something happened, and I knew I could do it. I put it on the dining room table and I bought white paper and I put it in and I started to think of something. I didnt plan it out. Short stories led to rejection slips, but a year later he managed to make an impression on a publisher, who encouraged him to keep working. I became a person at that moment, Raphaelson said. He wrote a short story called Day of Atonement, about a young Jewish man who changes his name and finds success as a pop entertainer, only to return home and reconcile with his family and heritage when his fathers health fails. Raphaelson then turned that story into a stage play, which is when he felt a revelation and found his calling. I knew I was a playwright, he said of the experience. The play was a hit, so much so that, two years later, it was adapted by Warner Brothers into what would become a landmark of cinema history: it was the first sound film, and it was called The Jazz Singer. Raphaelson was 33.
Almost everything about Raphaelson his career, beliefs, gifts, impact, and goals can be found in that moment, and the way he handled it. Hed written a story about something he knew firsthand (the intersection of Jewish faith and popular culture), and hed done so with grace and insight. Hed written a story inspired by humor and pleasant entertainment, specifically by the shows of Al Jolson, whose verve and skill Raphaelson loved; Jolson was the only natural choice to star in the film. Yet Raphaelson didnt write the adaptation, and he was dissatisfied with the movie version of his story. He knew the play hed written was sentimental and melodramatic, but he also felt the movie was overwritten and did awful things. He was obsessed even then not just with story, but with style. In art, its not what you say, but how you say it, and Raphaelson realized that technique was going to be as important to him as anything else. Most importantly, though, he started to realize what he actually liked. As he told Moyers, My notion of being a good writer was to write something that the critic on The Nation would praise. Now, did I like the Schubert books with the little gags and the little skits in them? Sure I did. Now, would I care to be the author of them? No. I was above that. Until one day I said to myself, who the hell do you think you are? What do you like when you go to the theater? I love Jolson shows! Thats what made me write The Jazz Singer. So I had that out with myself. I said, why am I above that? Im only a snob because Im impressed by what I read in those things. But I am creatively not up to those guys. This is my level.
Raphaelson wanted to be a workman, the guy who picked up his tools and got his hands dirty, and though he never claimed greatness, he took pride in his abilities. His work was funny and warm, sophisticated and sharp. Raphaelson himself was eager to please and determined to succeed.
Raphaelsons most fruitful cinematic collaboration was his creative partnership with Ernst Lubitsch, who directed nine films based on Raphaelson screenplays, including The Shop Around the Corner and Heaven Can Wait. Yet Raphaelson also wrote the screenplay for Suspicion, directed by Alfred Hitchcock; continued his work on stage with plays like Accent on Youth and Skylark; and taught and wrote for the rest of his life, including a University of Illinois class in the spring of 1948 that was turned into the book The Human Nature of Playwriting, which is as much an examination of the psychology of storytelling as it is the nuts and bolts of dramaturgy. He pursued relentlessly the essence of human nature in his work, crafting some of the finest comedies of Hollywoods golden age, and his influence on film history is inescapable. Were all still walking on the tracks he laid down.
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Raphaelsons first screenplay was also the first time hed work with Lubitsch. The Smiling Lieutenant, released in 1931, starred Maurice Chevalier as a Viennese army officer who falls in love with the leader of an all-female orchestra (Claudette Colbert) before becoming inadvertently entangled with the princess of a neighboring country (Miriam Hopkins). Its a breezy little picture that relies on Chevaliers winking charm to skip along through 89 pleasant minutes, and Lubitschs deft touch with romantic comedy blends perfectly with the pleasure Raphaelson clearly takes in sending his characters spinning around each other. The next years One Hour With You is basically just a tighter, better version of the story. In that film, Chevalier plays a doctor whos in love with his wife (Jeanette MacDonald) but surprisingly willing to flirt with her best friend (Genevieve Tobin). Throughout both films, Chevaliers character makes regular overtures to the viewer, breaking the fourth wall in a way that seems unusual now but feels right at home given Raphaelsons background in stagecraft and fondness for revues. One Hour With You finds Chevalier turning to camera to sing Oh That Mitzi, in which he declares his fidelity to his wife while also reveling in the idea of cheating on her:
This is, of course, an almost startlingly direct way to approach moral ambiguity. The filmmakers got away with so much sexuality because they were making these movies in the final days before the institution of the Hays Code, but its Chevaliers cavalier attitude toward his lovers and their acquiescence to his wishes that feels most unpredictable, even today. Its part of what would come to be branded as the Lubitsch touch: a blend of melancholy and whimsy, witty ripostes sandwiched in sight gags, sexual misadventure leading to ultimate reconciliation. And while theres no denying Lubitschs brilliance as a director, it does a disservice to writers like Raphaelson to imagine it all came from one man, especially given how collaborative the creative process can be. He wrote some of my best lines, Raphaelson said, and I contributed more than a few of those silent things that are famous as Lubitsch touches. You couldnt help it if youre working together.
