“Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social, and the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both. Now, when I say question the whole society, it means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. These are the triple evils that are interrelated.” – Martin Luther King

“I think the people who made this movie ought to be ashamed of themselves…” sez Roger Ebert in one of his classic anti-FRIDAY THE 13th rants that most provoked his outrage during the 1980′s. And Paramount was indeed ashamed to a degree they downplayed the series’ massive success, leading to the MPAA asking for severe cuts (pun yes) to the gore and violence, no doubt prodded by Siskel and Ebert’s two-man war on the genre. I understood their general point about the misanthropic nature of the films, but as teens, we went to the films to be scared and laugh, a ritual as old as I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF, albeit with spears impaling young lovers and an eyeball popping from a skull in 3D. Of course, FRIDAY THE 13th: THE FINAL CHAPTER is easily one of the best in the series, with Tom Savini back for some nifty effects, including Jason’s awesome head-sliding-down-the-machete demise (sic), which had my audience stomping and cheering: we wanted to see the brutal killer get his own prosthetic comeuppance. Good times. The man who wrote BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS and UP! should have found a different stance, but it made for an interesting era…

Happy Friday the 13th from the rarest Thompson Twins song, one of my favorites…

Charles Bronson is a curious actor who made himself memorable from his first starring role in Roger Corman’s MACHINE GUN KELLY (1955) and tough guy icons in THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (1960) and THE GREAT ESCAPE (1963). He turned down Sergio Leone’s offer to appear in A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS (1964), eventually wising up to do ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1969) and it took him until almost age 50 to become a bona-fide, box-office star with DEATH WISH (1974). And you can’t talk about the 1970′s action genre without referencing Bronson, although some of his films of this era almost look like documentaries given the cynical, naturalistic style of the day. Vince Majestyk reads on the page as Bronson would play him on the screen (and ironically, the role was intended for Clint Eastwood) and his stoic, stone facade serves him well as the farmer who just wants to cultivate his melons.

Leonard gives Majestyk a simple goal, which becomes funnier as the danger increases, represented by a local punk named Bobby Kopas (dependable character actor Paul Koslo) and a cold assassin named Frank Renda (Al Lettieri) who vows vengeance after crossing paths with Majestyk. Fortunately, our hero gets support and eventually love from one of his laborers, a defiant woman named Nancy Chavez (Linda Cristal). The plot culminates in a car chase/shoot-out at Renda’s mountain hideaway, and the film version is fairly faithful to the book, including the best part which is Leonard’s great dialogue: “You make sounds like you’re a mean little ass-kicker,” Majestyk tells the weaselly Kopas. Better still is Renda’s put-down of poor Kopas. My only complaint is that Letteri plays Renda like a ripe goombah whereas the novel version is cold and calculating. The relationship betwixt Majestyk and Chavez is obviously better developed in the book and their scenes together are not as compelling nor well-directed. However, the action scenes are dandy, with some terrific shotgun blasts in the mix. And Charles Bernstein contributes a catchy, fantastic theme. MR. MAJESTYK represents the counterculture anti-hero of the 70′s and it was fun to read, then watch. If you haven’t done either, what are you waiting for? Those melons won’t pick themselves…

David O. Russell: Flirting With Hollywood

Neither of David O. Russell’s two independent films, the uncomfortably amusing SPANKING THE MONKEY (1994) or the oddly hilarious FLIRTING WITH DISASTER (1996), seemed to pave the way for his THREE KINGS, a 50 million dollar Warner Brothers summer movie starring George Clooney. Best described as a Political Action Black Comedy (based on a high concept script called SPOILS OF WAR by John Ridley), THREE KINGS deals with a quartet of US soldiers attempting to steal millions in Kuwait gold during the Gulf War. In the course of their thievery, they realize that much more is at stake as they witness the brutal after-effects of our hypocritical foreign policy against Saddam Hussein–once our friend and the heroic centerpiece of a LIFE profile in the late 60′s. Times do change.

Mixing humor, pathos and violence, THREE KINGS is reminiscent of 1970′s films such as MASH, LITTLE BIG MAN, and THE LONG GOODBYE, in that black humor and moral complexity were the order of the day.

Russell also let his visual imagination run wild, filming the movie with a saturated stock, shooting action scenes in quick slow-motion cuts or depicting the effects of a bullet inside someone’s stomach. Certainly not a typical action movie, and producer Lorenzo Di Bonaventura deserves much credit for giving Russell the freedom to make a truly brave and impressive film.

At the time of this interview, Russell had just returned from the White House after screening the film for President Clinton. David O. Russell proved to be generous with his wit, time and honesty as we discussed all things THREE KINGS and more.

How did you get invited to the White House to show THREE KINGS for President Clinton?

It was out of the blue and a real treat, quite frankly. It was the day the test-ban treaty had been vetoed so when we met (Clinton) was all on fire about that. He was really eloquent. Then we went to see the movie in the screening room–which needs to be updated. It’s not state of the art. There was about 30 or 40 people…people they probably feel they owe invitations. We showed the movie and it was a real quiet house. I was dying. The humor is not like THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY humor in big block letters: HEY, LAUGH AT THIS! LAUGH AT THIS! The material is as disturbing as it is funny. So I think people were self-conscious about laughing at stuff in front of the President so they wouldn’t commit a faux pas.

Like the note in the ass. I was curious how that went down…

Right. There were a couple times where Clinton guffawed really loud and my wife elbowed me and said, “Bubba likes that.” After the movie, to my pleasant surprise, he held a two-hour impromptu seminar about the history of Iraq policy going back to the 20′s when the artificial borders were created. He’s a bright guy and he was cool. He said, “Apart from being a fabulous movie, this is an important movie because people need to know how this war really ended.” He’s not shy about that shit.

Not to bash Clinton, but I find it interesting how we arbitrarily decide which countries to bomb.

The film definitely takes a slam at the American habit of doing that.

How did you set THREE KINGS up at Warner Brothers? It’s a very brave film for a major studio. Did they come to you?

Yes. It was a very odd and serendipitous process: David’s Adventure in Studio Land. I thought, what would this be like to work with something from their candy box? They opened up their log book to me and this one log line jumped out at me, which was a heist set in the Gulf War, a script by John Ridley. A pretty straight action movie. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. In fact, I was researching another script, a turn-of-the-century story, and I didn’t feel I had cracked it, so I started buying books about the Gulf. Photojournalist books that had amazing images in it like hundreds of soldiers being stripped in the desert and Bart Simpson dolls on grills of cars. All this incongruous stuff. There was once a scene where they ate animals in the zoo–

I remember reading that–

You’ve seen the script? Where did you get a copy?

My editor sent it to me.

How did he get it?

(Mysteriously) Scripts come his way.

That was an early draft. They do go around at a certain point.

So you found the log line–

It took me by surprise and eventually to everybody’s surprise, I said, “I think I want to do this.” And everybody’s eyebrows went up. Including my agent’s. They were all like, “What?” I said it’s going to be crazy textured, with all the politics and everything. To me, the heist is the least interesting part. So I went off, researched and wrote it for 18 months. It was a fun scriptwriting process, like no other I’d ever done. I would make columns of things I found fascinating, and then I would build the script that way. So it’s not character-driven, which is obvious from the movie. There was very volatile material which hadn’t been put in the face of Americans about what really happened there. I read papers, talked to veterans and Iraqs. Then I sewed together the quilt of this script. It was liberating, because it was blank as the desert, a palette where I could do a lot of different things, including action, which I hadn’t done before. I wanted to click on lots of information, like click on their day jobs, click on the wife at home, click on how this punk sees violence as opposed to how violence really is. I’ll do it and see how it works in the editing.

You used to be an activist, so did you purposely set out to spotlight our foreign policy?

Definitely. That was one of my main motivations. It wasn’t dealing with characters so much like I did in my other movies, it was being driven by the political charge of the material. I couldn’t believe that no other filmmaker had gone after this and I couldn’t believe that Warner Brothers was going to let me do it.

Why did they?

They were hungry to work with independent filmmakers. They’ve done it before. Joe Gerber and Lorenzo Di Bonaventura were all jazzed about working with me. They were happy to let me do my thing.

In terms of action movies, are you a fan or was it new territory?

I’m not a huge action movie fan, although the other idea that was a big motivater was violence. There hadn’t been a war film since PLATOON, so I thought, “Great! I’m going to explore this territory in a totally different way.” So while I’m writing it I find out that Spielberg and Mallick are doing these epic war movies! Yet mine was contemporary and nothing like theirs. The whole process of resensitizing violence cinematically captivated me at the time. I felt that bullets had become glib and cartoonish, even in really smart independent movies, so I wanted to render their impact more real. Sometimes I write in friend’s homes, you know, the horrible isolation of the writer, and I have a friend who was a doctor in an emergency room. I was writing and I said to him,  “What exactly does a bullet do?” We talked about it and I thought, “I’m going to write this, show this and if it doesn’t work we can cut it later.”

I thought that was a brilliant moment. Where did this rumor come up that you used a real corpse?

(Laughs) This researcher from NEWSWEEK was talking to me and saying, “How you going to market this anyway? My friends don’t get the trailer. What about this fight you had with George Clooney?” He was being really aggressive. I got annoyed and decided to take my revenge. I said that we used an actual corpse…and we had only one take using a high-speed camera to get that bullet going right through and the toughest thing was getting a light in there. So he writes the thing up and the next thing the mortician’s association is calling Warner Brother’s and protesting the unethical use of a corpse. It was kind of fun. Harmless.

There’s a great scene where they destroy the helicopter with the armed football. It’s a cool action scene, but you cut away to the aftermath of the crash and it’s not a triumph at all. There are human beings in there.

That’s a scene I debated right up to the shoot whether I was going to keep that. There were some who wanted me to nail home the point about black quarterbacks or give skin to the Iragi guy. I was like, “No way.”

In the script they do high-five each other.

I think that was a draft with Troy and they punch their fists together. Then it’s something you get close to and realize it doesn’t feel good.

You took the least obvious approach. In a typical action movie, the characters would blow up the chopper and say “Spike”!

Right.

In the script, you also indicate a lot of visual directions.

That took a lot of work to translate that to the camera department.

So when you’re writing, you see exactly how you want to shoot the scene.

Yes. Then you have to make that technically happen. You have to experiment. Definitely with the shoot-out. When we looked at the first cut of the shoot-out, I didn’t think it was going to work. I said, “Thank God, we covered this normally.” And the editor says, “But you guys didn’t cover it normally.” I was shitting in my pants thinking we were going to reshoot!

There are a lot of cool visual touches in the film.

I’m totally a beginner filmmaker, and I’m learning. My motives were political and informational, but also visual. I’d never been so visually motivated in any screenplay I ever wrote. Any flaws in the film are attributed to this, as well as its assests. I was experimenting with being a more visual writer. We studied these photojournalists, like Kenneth Jarecke’s book JUST ANOTHER WAR…and it’s amazing, haunting black and white photos of the Gulf War. A brilliant book. We strove for that look in the film: a big, blank empty landscape with a person here and a truck way far away, that kind of thing. It was a little bit film school for me, so I’ll take a lot I learned and go back to something that’s closer to my ballpark.

I think the dark heart of the movie is the interrogation scene. You get to hear the other side’s version of things. It’s horrifying what happens to Mark Wahlberg, but you can’t hate the interrogator.

One of the things that inspired me was that the war was like a computer picture from an airplane. So who are the people? It’s a dangerous think because you can dehumanize the enemy. What would it be like to meet an Iraqi who didn’t want to serve in Saddam’s army (which most of them don’t want to) and have him face to face with an American. That was exciting to me.

Did you interview any Iraqi soldiers?

We did. A lot of the people in the movie were Iraqi and we cast them out of Deerborn, Michigan, where’s there’s an Iraqi community…I met a lot of them after I finished the script and asked if this was right, or this. But as a writer, you’d be surprised at how many of one’s instincts are right, strictly from intuition. I don’t know if it was Henry James…who said as a writer, you should be able to walk by a house, and if the door opens for a moment and you get a glimpse into the kitchen where people are eating, then when the door closes, you should be able to write a story about that house.

Despite the passion, writing can be a drag.

Yes, it is. (Laughs) Spoken like a true writer.

Do you have certain habits to get yourself in the mood?

I have to write down all the things about an idea that excite me and I have to have the whole menu at my disposal. Sometimes I have charts on the wall. Once I outline, and I outline and outline, I have to insist that I write 8 pages a day. Otherwise, I’ll never finish the script or I’ll go over a couple pages a million times. Then I give it to another friend of mine so I can’t go back. You have to keep marching forward or you’ll never get it out of your head.

Tom Wolfe says that he makes himself write 10 pages a day. Do you write on a computer?

I write longhand and I transcribe onto the computer.

Do you use the web as a research tool?

I have to stay away from the web. It’s a great procrastinating tool.

How long did it take to write THREE KINGS?

I had about a 200 page script after six months, but I wasn’t happy with it. I put it down for a few months before it became closer to my own version.

You gave it to the studio and they said go ahead.

At the beginning, they said “Where’s the script? We paid you the advance and we normally expect a first draft in 12 weeks.” And I said, “That’s why most of your movies suck.”

That explains WILD WILD WEST. What was it like going from indie to studio?

Warner Brothers had this great tradition of giving artists a lot of room. Once they got how I was going to be, they just let it be. I hope that tradition lives on now that Terry (Semel) and Bob (Daly) are gone. It may become more corporate. My next film will probably be far more independent. But I’m loyal to Lorenzo because he was completely supportive the entire time.

THREE KINGS has done pretty good box-office. Is the studio happy with the outcome?

They’re very happy with it. Of course, everybody gets all pumped up when the tests are good and the advance press is good. Before that, we had more realistic expectations because the movie is provocative. It’s going to make money for them, I think.

Did you make any changes after test previews?

They wanted me to take out the bullet in the cavity if the audience didn’t like it. But the audience loved it. We moved around the Nora Dunn sequences. At the White House, Clinton told her, “You were a good nail-spinner.”

What are the film or script influences on your work?

Definitely the films of the 70′s. I’m a big fan of Wes Anderson and Paul Thomas Anderson. All those Andersons. I love Alexander Payne. CHINATOWN. I watch a lot of movies. But I tend to watch movies I like over and over.

Do you have any ideas for the next script?

I have a lot of ideas, but I want to let the dust settle before I talk about them.