I Ain't Talking About Oscarmayer

The following column is reprinted from the Feburary issue of Providence Monthly (including the stuff my youthful editors somehow deem necessary to leave out):



Eyes Wide Open
By Scott Duhamel






Despite the steady proliferation of Award’s show, despite the ongoing barrage of awardees, festival winners, on-line accolade bearers, despite the indisputable presence of The Grammy’s, the Tony’s , the Emmy’s, the Golden Globes, the Razzies, even the Eeenie, Meenie, Miney and Moes, none of the competitors hold a candle as a far as prestige, importance, and actual historical significance like the Academy Awards.

The 83rd Annual Oscar show looms in the near distance, and while I should be donning my coolest threads and stepping out to the VMA on Feburary 27th at 6:30 to catch what promises to be an enjoyable and gussied up night of big screen television viewing presented by the Rhode Island International Film Festival group, I’ll be home safely ensconced on the couch, muttering about the pairing of presenters, waiting for the every-so-often potential moment of weirdness or controversy, and feverishly checking off categories on my well-thought-out Oscar ballot. Yes indeed, I’ll be unabashedly basking in my longtime out-of-the-closet inner cinephile nerdiness. Below, a quick overview of the major awards.


Best Picture
127 Hours
Black Swan
The Fighter
Inception
The Kids Are Alright
The King’s Speech
The Social Network
Toy Story 3
True Grit
Winter’s Bone

Should Win: The Social Network. It’s racked up $95 million at the box office , and among the Best Picture Nominees, only True Grit and Toy Story 3 have earned more, but the former was helmed by the Coens, recent award recipients, and the latter is an animated, and Hollywood just isn’t ready to hand out the Grand Wazoo to an animated feature. Also The Social Network is director David Fincher’s best achievement so far, and it danced its dexterous fingers all over the current zeitgeist.

Will Win: The King’s Speech. Hollywood adores all things British, costumed, and historical, and the this one is right up the alley to the vast majority of over-the-hill Academy voters.
Overlooked: The Ghost Writer, The Town, Carlos.

Best Actor
Javier Bardem-Biutiful
Jeff Bridges-True Grit
Jesse Eisenberg-The Social Network
Colin Firth-The Kings SpeechJ
James Franco-127 Hours

Should Win: Javier Bardeem. A power house piece of acting that only James Franco came close to matching, and the acting side of the Hollywood elite (including Julia Roberts and Sean Penn) has been touting Bardeem’s turn all over town.

Will Win: Colin Firth. See aforementioned Oscar predilection for all things British.
Overlooked: Ryan Gosling (Blue Valentine), Mark Wahlberg (The Fighter), Robert Duval (Get Low), Michael Douglas (Solitary Man).

Best Actress
Annette Bening-The Kids Are Alright.
Nicole Kidman-Rabbit Hole
Jennifer Lawrence-Winter’s Bone
Natalie Portman-Black Swan
Michelle Williams-Blue Valentine

Should Win: Annette Bening. A tremendously modulated and affecting performance, plus she’s been nominated three times (The Grifters, American Beauty, Being Julia) and came up short.

Will Win: Natalie Portman. A bravura, showy turn from a good citizen that has grown up on camera in front of the assembled, her votes will be multiplied by a huge dose of her colleague’s good will.

Overlooked: Julianne Moore (The Kids Are Alright), Isabelle Huppert (White Material), Lesley Manville (Another Year).

Best Supporting ActorChristian Bale-The Fighter
John Hawkes-Winter’s Bone
Jeremy Renner-The Town
Mark Ruffalo-The Kids Are Alright
Geoffrey Rush-The King’s Speech

Should Win: Christian Bale. The eye-popping, in-yer-face, take-this-roll-and-grab-it, most magnetic role playing of the year, hands down, in the strongest category, as Hawkes and Renner did splendid work, and Ruffalo just about (despite Benning’s excellence) walks away with his picture.

Will Win: Geoffrey Rush. Hate to say it (or think it) but add another one to the win column for The King’s Speech.

Overlooked: Andrew Garfield (The Social Network), Matt Damon (True Grit).

Best Supporting Actress
Amy Adams-The Fighter
Helena Bonham Carter-The King’s Speech
Melissa Leo-The Fighter
Hallee Steinfield-True Grit
Jacki-Weaver-Animal Kingdom

Should Win: Melissa Leo.

Will Win: Melissa Leo. She’s a great journeyperson actress, she’s campaigned unabashedly for the honor, and someone has to break up the momentum generated by The King’s Speech.

Overlooked: Greta Gerwing (Greenberg), Barbara Hershey (Black Swan), Mia Wasikowska (The Kids Are Alright), Ellen Page (Inception).

Director
Darren Aronofsky-Black Swan
David O. Russell-The Fighter
Tom Hooper-The King’s Speech
David Fincher-The Social Network
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen-True Grit

Should Win: David Fincher
Will Win: David Fincher. Its Fincher’s turn, although Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech) will be looking closely over his shoulder.

Overlooked: Christopher Nolan (Inception)

Original Screenplay
Mike Leigh-Another Year
Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy, Eric Johnson; story by keith Dorrington, Paul Tamasy, Eric Johnson-The Fighter
Christopher Nolan-Inception
Lisa Cholodenko and Stuart Blumber-The Kids Are Alright
David Seidler-The Kings Speech

Should Win: Inception. Writer/director Christopher Nolan non-nomination for Best Director is one of the more blatant snubs in recent Oscar history, there may be enough sympathy or fairness votes to throw him the bone that is Best Original Screenplay.

Will Win: The King’s Speech.

Adapted Screenplay
Danny Boyle and Simon Beaufroy-127 Hours
Aaron Sorkin-The Social NetworkMichael Arndt; story by John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, Lee Unkrich-Toy Story 3
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen-True Grit
Debra Granik and Anne Rosellini-Winter’s Bone

Should Win: The Social Network.

Will Win: The Social Network. Hollywood loves it when a premier, big-timey screenwriter like Aaron Sorkin (For a few Good Men, Charlie Wilson’s War )hooks up successfully with a brainy, independent sort of filmmaker like David Fincher (nominated for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, equally as well known for The Fight Club and Se7en ) and they make hay, and heavy duty ticket sales, together.

Greek Coffee

(Reprinted from PopKrazy)


Leslie Buck passed away, at the ripe old age of 87, during 2010, and inexplicably enough, not that many paid much attention to his passing.

Born Lazlo Buch in Khust, Czechoslovakia (now part of the Ukraine), he was a Holocaust survivor who made good in the US, first starting up a paper-cup manufacturing company in Mt Vernon, New York called Premier Cup. It was during the 1960’s that Buck joined the Sherri Cup Co. of Kensington, Conn, and he created one of the most iconic delineation’s of everyday American life, particularly the East Coast version, the exquisitely appealing Anthora paper coffee cup (Buck couldn’t quite pronounce “amphora” correctly), the design adorning coffees served at diners, deli’s, construction sights, factory yards and food carts, sales which peaked at 30 million pieces a year in the 1990’s.

Buck’s coffee cup became an instantly recognizable American artifact, a fairly improbable accomplishment considering its creator was both an immigrant, and artistically untrained. The cup, with its above-and-below border of Greek urns framing a bill boarded white background with a slightly ornate outline, three images of piping coffee cups and the phrase “WE Are Happy To Serve You” etched in a font meant to resemble ancient Greek, remains a totemistic likeness of the highest order.

Buck’s cup immediately conveyed what it set out to: coffee making and drinking as a daily (or hourly) pleasure of the simplest, yet most satisfying order. The years have made it’s lasting image, particularly when gripped in hand (shaky or firm), sends an immediate vibe of well-being, of order, of universal familiarity, of celebratory and tragic times, when a hot cup of Joe served to cure a multiplicity of ills, a direct on-the-spot cure, as countless eyes drank in its serene depiction of everyday classicism.

Fashioned to be tossed away, these cups always held firm and prodded the user back to solid ground (with grounds) and an inherent sense of lean functionality, freezing the moment, typically punctuated by the cups drainage and disposal. (There ain’t nothing more Zen than the exquisitely dream-like state one enters upon completing the purchase, lifting the thin yet perfectly fitted plastic cover, and peering into the perfectly quantified portion of liquid gold before focusing on the task at hand—the first sip translating into direct, immediate sustenance.)

In John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (a pro-forma college text in my higher education days), he discusses some of the effects of what he calls the “publicity image”:

“We are no so accustomed to being addressed by these images that we scarcely notice their total impact. A person may notice a particular image or piece of information because it corresponds to some particular interest he has. But we accept the whole the total system of publicity images as we accept an element of climate…Yet despite this, one has the impression that publicity images are continually passing us, like express trains on their way to some distant terminus. We are static; they are dynamic…”

The Anthora cup is a bonafide artifact, a pop cult object d art, an image and form fused to analogous contents. It was, and remains a simple, pure design worthy of its own Warholization, and if it was framed square in front of a glossy black background in a Soho gallery it would be dissected and discussed with heady terms and suggestions that it directly symbolized both desire and consumption.

Perhaps the vagaries of time will eventually erode the power of this seemingly pedestrian image--Solo Cup, Co out of Illinois, who took over Sherri, only makes the originals upon receiving a special order--but you can be sure the Leslie Buck’s terrific creation will never truly be replaced.

The mental stirrings evoked by it’s pure, straightforward imagery, as one’s hands are warmed by the brimming hot coffee temporarily housed within the container, conjure the type of internal shivers caused by yet another viewing of Citizen Kane’s cinematic perfection, yet another listening of Sinatra’s sonorous emotionalism, yet another glance at one of Edward Hopper’s twilight tableau’s, all of them simple and transcendent, eternally evocative, with Buck’s Anthora cup potentially remembered as among the most unique blendings of form and function, of artful commerce, to ever literally hit the mean streets of America

Bad is Good, Awful Even Better

The following column is reprinted from the Feburary issue of Providence Monthly (including the stuff my youthful editors somehow deem necessary to leave out):



Eyes Wide Open
By Scott Duhamel


To many of those of us who follow the wonderfully weird world of commercial cinema there is nothing quite as fascinating as a movie train-wreck or an outright film bomb, that shaggy dog species of pure cinematic failure on either the artistic or commercial plain ---or in the best/worst case scenario, both. Of course, film flops provide a lot of heightened film nitcrit rhetoric, and often an equal amount of finger-pointing and ha-ha fodder for a variety of media types and the general public, although they can be pure talk-talk nirvana for your run-of-the-mill barstool film buff (and I am definitely looking in the mirror as I utter that).

Thus, I bow my head with a combo of deep and overwhelming envy and admiration towards Nathan Rabin of The A.V. Club (the sister publication to The Onion) who published one of the more entertaining and erudite movie books of 2010, My Year of Flops (264 pp. Scribner. Paper, $15)), an extremely humorous but strangely respectful small tome devoted to being a largely effervescent look into film flops both big and small, both heralded and obscure, both at the box office and laid out as targets at the movie reviewer’s collective shooting range.

Even the casual filmgoer has some knowledge about big-time movie floparamas, particularly in this era when a film’s weekly intake of cashola gets examined on the pages of USA Today and on the nightly TV entertainment wrap-ups. Any moviegoer with a modicum of knowledge outta be to able to come up with a quick list of infamously failed flicks, from Cleopatra to Gigli, from Paint Your Wagon to Heaven’s Gate, from Ishtar to Waterworld (all of which Rabin examines). Flops are yet another way to peer into the constant push-and-pull between art and commerce that is omnipresent (and often vastly under evaluated) when interpolating the art and craft of moviemaking. What makes an exceptional filmmaker go so strangely astray? How can so many dedicated and truly knowledgeable artisans contribute their earnest and hard-earned efforts to a project that seems so spectacularly stupid? Why green light such obvious crapola? Does more popcorn get consumed during the screening of yet another Hollywood misfire rather than that dripping-with-sincerity offering playing down at the near empty boutique art theater?

Rabin doesn’t have the answers, but he delves into the good, the bad, and the very, very weird without adopting a hipster pose, and with an eyes-wide-open enthusiasm that makes for some trenchant and amusing reading. Calling each movie reexamination a Case File, he positions himself as a cinematic sleuth with puppy dog eagerness, attempting to place each failure in one of the following categories: Failure, Fiasco, or Secret Success. (Or in once case, “a semisecret fiascopiece.”) Thankfully, particularly with such a potentially ripe subject, Rabin can be legitimately funny without being overtly snarky, as in his attempt to explain the way-out acting turns in the final chapter’s of acting great Marlon Brando’s onscreen career: “…sometime in the mid-70’s, Marlon Brando began taking marching orders from The Great Gazoo, the tiny effeminate green alien only Fred Flinstone could see.”

The book’s subtitle is “One man’s Journey Deep Into the Heart of Cinematic Failure”, allowing the author to utilize his cinematic detection talents to equally scrutinize such diverse degrees of badness as Inexplicable Directorial Lead Ballons ( Robert Altmam’s O.C. And Stiggs, Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown, Preston Sturges’ The Great Moment, and Paul Mazursky’s Scenes From a Mall), Truly Execrable Efforts (Freddy Got Fingered, The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, and The Love Guru), or more Fascinating Failures ( the 1962 and 1997 versions of Lolita, The Rocketeer, or the truly gonzo Tough Guys Don’t Dance).

Rabin can indeed be cutting (on Sgt Peppers Lonely Heart Club Band: “ But Stigwood’s film reduces the Beatles diverse, literate humor to history’s dumbest variety-show skit. …It ransacks vaudeville and silent film for its hokey jokes, grossly exaggerated performances, and groaning stupidity, but adds disco flourishes and special effects that wouldn’t look out of place in a Rudy Ray Moore movie.”), but his lack of film snobbery and general authorial high spirits make it all palatable, as do the constant stream of descriptive bon mots and eye-winking one-liners. (The book’s appendix, a scene by scene dissection of Waterworld, is something of a comic tour de force.)

Critic and film historian David Thompson once called Heaven’s Gate “a wounded monster”, and Rabin is bright and blithe enough to place it and it’s fellow monstrosities into a cage with plenty of water and food, and, yup, popcorn. After all, the scary monsters of commercial cinema ought to be watched and enjoyed as much as the holy beasts that we spend so much time endlessly analyzing, handing out awards to, or compiling all-time lists about. My Year of Flops, may not be a highly illuminating, sturdily academic study probing directly into the heart of film flop darkness, but it is an exceptionally witty read and an undeniably cool concept.

Style and Substance: Aronofsky and Russell

The following column is reprinted from the January issue of Providence Monthly (including the stuff my youthful editors somehow deem necessary to leave out):


Eyes Wide Open
By Scott Duhamel

This relatively short space won’t quite allow me to do justice to two late season releases, both already appearing on a majority of film nitcrit’s top ten lists and also garnering various nominations by the great spate of end-of-the year awarding bodies. Both films, Black Swan and The Fighter, while quite different in tone and execution, share one common element: They are helmed by on-the-rise directors with considerable talents, who both boast relatively small but sharp and intriguing bodies of work.

Darren Aronofsky, the director of Black Swan, made his initial splash with the much praised Pi in 1998, followed up by the vivid Requiem for a Dream (’00), the admirably grand failure that was The Fountain (’06) and then his popular comeback effort The Wrestler (’08). He has become an assured stylist, and Black Swan is swaggering with style, and yet another of Aronofsky’s patented tales of despair and self-destruction, despite the fact that it is set in the seeming delicate world of ballet.

David O Russell initially made a name for himself with the idiosyncratic Spanking the Monkey in 1994, with his follow-up the low-key and equally quirky Flirting with Disaster (’96), then the superb Three Kings (’99) and the overtly droll and sadly unseen I Heart Huckabees (’04). While The Fighter is ostensibly a boxing film, it actually can rest quite assuredly on the shelf with Russell’s prior self-puncturing character studies, and it is indeed crafted with a potent mix of directorial dexterity and razor sharp acting.

The acting in Black Swan is commendable too, particularly the full goose-looney central performance of Natalie Portman (easily her best screen work so far, which is truly saying something), the type of acting turn that brings on both Oscar nominations and also a fury of hipster hating. Accused by some cinephile’s of pandering with the success of The Wrestler, Aronofsky is back in more rarified territory here, and the film is peppered with references to the greatest ballet film of all, The Red Shoes, but also to another memorable movie made by the same director Michael Powell, Black Narcissus, and it also unabashedly alludes to both the high brow psychological frisson of Roman Polanski and the pulpy machinations of Brian DePalma. A weird and potent mix. Barbara Hershey registers strongly as a very smothering stage mother, while Mila Kunis is something of a revelation as a fellow ballerina who is hard to distinguish as friend or foe.

Aronofsky, working with his regular cinematographer Matthew Libatque, follows Portman around with a highly affecting stalking camera, a camera that also dances and pirouettes with a distinctive fluidity. Black Swan starts out as a classic glimpse into a particular arena of the arts, a movie ostensibly about commitment and artistic passion, but it slowly evolves into a nightmarish tour de force, cheekily transforming from a god’s eye view of a dancer’s intensity and grace to a Grand Guignol probe into the psychology of repression. It’s a visceral ride and a hallucinatory one, accented by dozens of subliminal directorial touches and a strange, just this side of supernatural, suggestion of doubling and doppelgangers: an art film that is streaked with blood, passion, and an ever mounting touch of delirium.

On the other hand The Fighter, marketed and understandably categorized as a another entry in the age old boxing film sweepstakes (it would be pure redundancy to go through the list of stellar Hollywood boxing movies capped by the acknowledged masterpiece, Raging Bull), is one of those genre excursions that is made better by most of what takes place outside the ring. It can be linked directly to another first class 2010 movie, Ben Affleck’s The Town, as another study of a certain type of peculiarly Massachusetts provincialism. The movie depicts that true tales of boxing half brothers Dickie Eklund (Christian Bale) and Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg), their steel-eyed (and willed) Irish-American mother/manager (Melissa Leo), and Mickey’s townie-with-some-smarts girl pal (Amy Adams), and, perhaps the most important character--the suffocatingly gray, arid, and potentially toxic air of their own personal playground/prison, Lowell, MA.

The Fighter may not quite scale the boxing film tower of greatness, but it is a rousing melodrama with galvanizing performances by all of the abovementioned. Best of all, the movie neatly balances itself between the all-the-way, astoundingly showy depiction of the herky-jerky ball-of-misspent-fire that is crack-addicted Dicky by Bale, and the admirably restrained, astonishingly vanity-less, and largely reactive (but heartfelt) choices of Wahlberg as Micky.

The Fighter works as uproarious glance at the type of familial love that is linked directly to familial dysfunction, it also works as a spritely boxing tale, and it may work best as an exploration of the socio-economic and psychological restraints, burdens and inherent contradictions brought on when one is part of a blue collar, stay-at-home, urban culture. (Really.) The Fighter is wonderfully ambivalent about it all, a movie both crackling and kinetic, yet brushed with deserved pathos. It’s obvious, that David O. Russell, like Darren Aronofsky, is currently working on all cylinders, thus the devout and ever hopeful faithful filmgoer should be already brimming with anticipation over their respective next movie moves.

Have an Existential Christmas (Circa 1965)

(Reprinted from PopKrazy)




Yessir there’s plenty of Christmas pop and rockers, do-wop-a-doers, and soul twisters. They never stop coming, every year brings more remakes and holiday pastiches and original turns, a few good uns too; the rock and pop Christmas tune never going out of sight or out of style. Had a million different favorites myself, liked ‘em serious, solemn, sexy, soulful, antic, blasphemous, tawny, jazzy, woeful, sarcastic, folkifized, solo Beatle, real Beatle, Beatle-like, corny, powerpoppish, reflective, heartfelt, satirical, rebellious, preachy, old school, trad, subversive, and even sweet.

Right now, today, this December, my current absolute fave rave, the one spinning repeatedly on my internal holiday season turntable, the current Tops of the Christmas Pops is The Sonics 1965 “Santa Claus.” It’s a propulsive and molten stomp all over the still ruddy cheeked Santa archetype, a plaintive holiday yelp with a backbeat (signaling “Farmer John”) where the lead vocalist (with a truly glorious garage rock guttural howl) asks Santa for no more than “a brand new car, a twangy guitar and a cute little honey with lots of money.” The cool daddy holiday surprise is that this early 60’s version of Santa lays the shattering truth on the entitled-mondo- boot-wearing-rebel-with-a-bleat–it’s-always-about-me-shaking-my-hair-budding-protest –kid with a stark indifference, as the dumbfounded singer exclaims in the chorus:

“And he just say nothing,

Nothing

Nothing

Nothing

Nothing

Nothing

Nothing

Nothing”

Right after the first delivery of the in-yer-face chorus sputters a pluck and warble guitar solo, engulfed in garage rock bravado, with pure torture-the-chicken fidelity, finally roaring its way into some emblematic Christmas fuzz. Who knew? The Sonics are certifiable sonorous Christmastime carolers, not only just one of the very first of the garage rock pioneers. I never really understood the great American northwest, but The Sonics are among those indigenous discoveries that help make think that that portion of this country is downright mysterious, impenetrable, pure left field baby. Like me, on this just passed-over Christmas, the Sonics fiercely just said nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing …in a Merry Christmas kinda way.

It’s Still a Complex World

The following column is reprinted from the December issue of Providence Monthly (including the stuff my youthful editors somehow deem necessary to leave out):

Eyes Wide Open
By Scott Duhamel



Twenty years ago Providence was abuzz in the wake of the release of Complex World, a sly home grown satire with a dose of rock and roll set at Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel, featuring the songs and acting contributed by the likes of Roomful of Blues, NRBQ, and one time kings of the downtown scene, The Young Adults. Co-written and directed by Jim Wolpaw, who had already managed to grab a vaunted Oscar nomination in 1985 for Best Documentary Short Subject for his droll and insightful Keats and His Nightingale: A Blind Date, the movie and its attendant screenings at the Cable Car sent a whole lotta the downcity (a term that truthfully hadn’t been disseminated yet) artists and hipsters into a temporary collective tizzy. The movie was funny and original, and all signs pointed toward eminent national success. It didn’t exactly go down that way, but Wolpaw survived the experience, completing the equally sharp Loaded Gun: Life and Death and Dickson in 2002, and currently ushering out a newly released DVD Complex World, which has long been unavailable. We recently met and talked at Providence’s Nick-a-Nee’s, wherein (only in La Prov) a stranger, overhearing our conversation, promptly began a long and thoroughly unsolicited recititation of one of H.P. Lovecraft’s works.

SD: What prompted the new DVD release?
JW: I lot of people have asked about the movie and it’s availability over the years, a lot of people quite regularly. It was never really available, although copies floating around here and there, over the years I’ve probably bought about a dozen, so I kept thinking about it. With the 20 year anniversary happening it seemed like the right time. Of course, hopefully it will raise a little money too.


SD: Any major changes, scenes deleted, scenes added?
JW: Did you know there were originally two versions? After showing it at in New York it got a good deal of buzz, but no one knew what to do with it. Eventually the US Film festival, which is now Sundance, called us up and they wanted to screen it even though their entry period was closed. Errol Morris was touting it, and the upshot was that we decided to some reediting and we got involved with Jeff Dowd, whose claim to fame at the time was association with The Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple (and who become the model for the Dude in The Big Lebowski) He and I ended up in this long distance 6 month business relationship where he tried to push me more towards making a so-called traditional film and I think that ultimately, the end result was better in a lot of ways. At the same time there were a lot of good scenes in the original version, and it some ways maybe that version is better. Anyways, both versions are on the DVD. There is one more Young Adults song, one more Stanley Matis song, and a scene set at a biker’s birthday party in the parking lot with an exploding birthday cake.


SD: Tell me about the circumstances of the original release.
JW: Well we showed it at the Cable Car, and at one point we got a call from Warner Brothers and we sent them a print, and of course they didn’t know what to do with it. Then John Daley from Hemdale contacted us, and while it was playing at the Cable Car we were negotiating a deal which we signed probably in early 1991. It took about a year and it was released in a dozen major markets, including New York and LA. You know it open it two strong potential markets, Boston and Austin with very little support. If you looked in the papers that day you couldn’t find where it was playing unless you read the reviews, which were generally positive.


SD: If I remember correctly, more than one reviewer likened it to a purposefully crafted so-called “midnight movie.” How did you feel about that?
JW: They called it a cult film, which I can see, but basically anything that is non-traditional gets labeled as a cult film.


SD: How do you think it fits into the rest of your work?
JW: To me it’s something I do, I try to push the limits of what the genre it is, so I think it fits right in, but it also hold’s it own.


SD: What are your current projects?
JW: I just completed one for PBS, basically about the image of George Washington on the dollar bill, an image created by RI’s own Gilbert Stuart. It really centers around the idea that these two were almost exact opposites, Stuart being a something of a wild man and Washington being a man of extreme control; you know the whole idea of these two men in the same room responsible for this iconic image. I am also working on a film about HP Lovecraft, along with Cat Hainfeld, which is kind of a documentary/fantasy. (Incidentally Mark Cutler is helping to score both films.) I am also working on another film about the history of the Ladd Center.


SD: Are you still basking in the glow of your Academy Award nomination? Seriously did that help with your career at all?
JW: It should have, if I had done the normal things I was supposed to have done. I mean it’s helped me raise money but there were also a lot of opportunities I ignored because I just really wanted to do what I wanted to do.


SD: When you look at Complex World now, twenty years down the line, do you think you filmed what you set out to achieve. Do you consider it a successful film?
JW: (Laughing.) WeIl I’m not sure what I set out to do. I have mixed feelings, there are parts of it I find hard to watch, but there are certain things I’m very proud of. I don’t know, I have a very much of a love-hate relationship with it, part of it being that we had these expectations that it was going to break big, and for a while it really looked like it might.

Postcard from the Edge

Let’s get it right out of the way. As of late I’ve been suffering from strange case of malaise, manifesting itself as a feverishly wicked, temporary case of writer’s block, devoting nearly all of my energy to the always careening trials and tribulations of my real job as a so-called labor leader, letting my blog slip away, and only managing to get the Providence Monthly column I regularly contribute done because there is indeed a deadline and a job at stake.

The day before the holiday I had a reoccurrence of an ongoing medical condition I’ve battling with for over a year and plunged into the all-so-familiar well of sickness. I did my best to man up and get through Thanksgiving, helped along mightily by a perfect group of holiday guests, but my relapse on Friday into Saturday just about put me over the edge. Four days running without shoes, smokes, drinks, or solid food (My kingdom for a piece of cheese!), combined with a totally intermittent sleeping pattern had me actually questioning whether some of the despicable moral choices of my past or the once complete ignorance of my physical well being in the constant pursuit of fun, pleasure and gamesmanship had perhaps come back to haunt me. (Really, me, the guy who used to be so self-justifiably and in-yer-face guilt free.)

The mind plays weird tricks and I was tricked out all weekend, heading into a full blown, ever-deepening, and constantly swirling depression despite the unarguable fact that I have a great wife and a life-sustaining relationship, a good job, strong and lasting friendships, and, in direct contrast to so many Americans barely scraping through the holiday season the unadorned truth is that I am essentially a fat cat middle-class guy who doesn’t even have a dollop of the financial or emotional problems currently commom to the union members I serve; many of them literally poised on the brink of disaster if congress does not get it together to continue the unemployment extension.

Saturday I reached my lowest of lows, unable to make my good friend Mark Cutler’s gig at Nicks-a-Nees (my home away from home, my great good place, my tender bar) where I actually intended to give him give him a sincere holiday hug, an intention I don’t muster up very often. I woke (once again) as some godforsaken hour, enfeebled and infected, and scoured the TV only to find a Ken Burns executive produced series about one of my absolute favorite subjects-The American West- yet I watched through dour eyes, not seeing the examples of American spirit, individualism, and starry-eyed dreaming on display, instead concentrating on the heartbreaks, the broken spirits and disappearing cultures, the heavy foot of US imperialism, and I found myself silently weeping, sad for my woe-is-me self of course, but disheartened by a larger, blacker, feeling of despair and throat-tightening blackness. Dirt sick, poisoned of soul, hopeless in the grayness of the early dawn, I simply let both of my Boston terriers huddle against me, true pals in the disconsolate twilight, and willed myself and my mini-pack back to sleep, sick and damaged in heart, mind and stomach yet stengthened by that wierd unvarnished canine combo of companionship and devotion.

Still, came Sunday morn, cold and clear, the world hadn’t collapsed or imploded, and I at least got it together to bang out the above, and I requested my wife to drive my weakened self so that I might complete one of my most important self-rituals, the morning paper run. Outside the store I saw a proud male townie obliviously strolling through the parking lot in Cranston, RI, sporting shorts and sneakers with no socks pre-eight am with the temperature reading 27 degrees. Ah, a sign of normality I thought, somehow soothed. I went straight back to unwell HQ, where I drank my first cup of tea since childhood. (And it was ginger.)