PAMELA GENTILE
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Festival rewind A look back at the Mill Valley Film Festival—at 24 frames per second! by M al Karm an
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Documentary legend Ken Burns avoids a mouse during his onstage Q&A.
are considered fairly sophisticated, but they turned on their bygone juices when Nicks stepped from her limo onto the red carpet in front of the Rafael Film Center. For those of you soooo young you think Fleetwood Mac is a Cadillac with a computer, the onetime Menlo-Atherton High School and San Jose State University student has collectively produced more than 40 Top 50 hits, sold more than 140 million albums, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998. Chatting openly and at a mile-a-minute with strangers after the film, she talked about recently losing her mother, whom she still “calls on” for advice, about leading (by choice) a rather cloistered life, and about her battles to overcome cocaine addiction and dependency on tranquilizers. She confessed to having “the best time in rehab—because it’s real” and said it is a lot more challenging to get up in front of 10,000 people when you’re sober. Yeah. We can identify with that... High Noon: During a noontime screening of The Sinners, co-producer/screenwriter Sam Gharibian quickly dispelled the notion that his film, a cop thriller from Iran no less, signaled a loosening up of hard-screws censorship associated with his government. “It’s actually worse than ever,” he said. “Maybe the theater owner doesn’t like the ending. Or Hezbollah doesn’t like the way the women are dressed. I can show somebody using drugs, but we can’t show (a lock of) a woman’s hair. We submitted the script and the censorship office didn’t like the final scene. So I literally wrote something in two minutes right there and they approved it. After we finished shooting, they told us to take out the final scene.” The film has yet to be shown in Iran (and will it ever?) but is on its way from Mill Valley to the fest in the Windy City...John Hawkes tells us that to prepare for his role in The Sessions, in which he plays Mark O’Brien, the late Berkeley poet who spent most of his life in an iron lung, he did more than 100 hours of research (including reading O’Brien’s poetry and his book, How I Became a Human Being, viewing Jessica Yu’s documentary Breathing Lessons and learning how to type with a mouth stick). By contrast, for his
Stevie Nicks ‘goes her own way’ into the Rafael Film Center.
part as a terrifying cult leader in Martha Marcy May Marlene, he did practically no research. Oh... Many years ago, in a galaxy far far away, we were mesmerized by a performance by an unknown actor in an off-off-off Broadway play called The Journey of the Fifth Horse and had the good fortune to talk with him after the show. His name was (and still is) Dustin Hoffman and he seemed very much at this festival as he was back then—unassuming, self-deprecating and strikingly charismatic. Asked what it feels like now to be a magna-star, he replied, “It’s always a disquieting feeling for me to be thought of that way because I feel separate from celebrity and I just want to do good work.” To an enthralled audience at the tribute screening of his first directorial effort, The Quartet, he reminisced a bit about those early days when he, Robert Duvall and Gene Hackman hung out together in Manhattan. “We were all struggling,” he said, “and we were all studying with extraordinary teachers—Stella Adler, Sandy Meisner and Lee Strasberg. And we would fight among us about who was the best [Hoffman studied with Strasberg].” But on a night celebrating his tremendous success, Hoffman talked a lot about failure. “There is a narrow distance between success and failure,” he explained. “After shooting The Graduate I was back in New York collecting unemployment. [Director] Mike Nichols had screenings of it and people told him, ‘You would’ve had a great film if you didn’t miscast the lead.’ They wanted Robert Redford. I think Nichols cast me because he was casting himself in the part. The more original you are, the less chance you have of getting hired. Directors want to play it safe, [do] something they’ve seen before. But we had such an arrogance and a derisiveness against being derivative. I’m reminded of a line by
Samuel Beckett: “Fail. Fail. Fail. And then fail better!” Meanwhile, David O. Russell, who wrote the screenplay for his don’tmiss-it opening night film Silver Linings Playbook, reminded us that the original material for his story came from a novel that was given to him by the late Sydney Pollack, who directed Hoffman in Tootsie and played his perplexed agent in one of the movie’s funniest scenes. As for Playbook male lead Bradley Cooper’s reaction to Russell’s writing: “I read a very scary script and thought I was totally wrong for the role,” he said. And that, folks, is what the movies are all about... Well, get some sleep. It’s only 11 months until the box office opens again. < Hoffman’s been failing better and better since 1969.
OCTOBER 19 – OCTOBER 25, 2012 PACIFIC SUN 23
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ntroduced at the 35th Mill Valley Film Festival as “arguably the most watched filmmaker in the history of motion pictures,” multi-award-winning documentary director Ken Burns noted that the city of New York is among his most ardent “watchers,” having “subpoenaed all our notes, papers and outtakes for Central Park Five,” his film about the city’s rush to judgment to arrest and condemn five black youths for the rape and brutal beating of a white female jogger. Burns, whose docs include the 11-hour Civil War, the 15-hour The War (about World War II) and the 18-hour Baseball, says, “I love the fact that I do really, really long films and people write me every day to tell me what I left out. ‘You will rot in hell for not including more on (’60s Minnesota Twins slugger) Harmon Killebrew or the ’40s (St. Louis) Cardinals.’ Honestly, that’s what I get.” Isn’t it heartwarming to know those who have no idea what it takes to make a film can be so appreciative? Senior Squeals: If you think 64-year-old mystical songstress Stevie Nicks has seen better days, you weren’t at the full house for her documentary In Your Dreams, during which viewers—many of whom we’re guessing have grandchildren—were bouncing out of their seats and shrieking the way they did for Elvis decades ago. MVFF audiences