Eric Sherman: 2 Weeks With Orson Welles

In late January the Guardian UK and other media outlets announced the news that a previously unseen movie by Orson Welles – The Other Side Of The Wind – could finally see the light of a projector.  As die-hard Welles fans know, there are several lost/unseen projects out there in various states of completion including his version of Don Quixote, The Deep and others. 

This isn’t the first time (and may not be the last) that someone announces the imminent release of The Other Side Of The Wind.  It seems like every five years or so the movie resurfaces, like a cagey old trout that rises to the bait but won’t be caught.

The aura of mystery surrounding these uncompleted projects (most of which have been screened, at least in fragmentary form, at various cinematheques and museums world-wide) is one of the ways in which the Welles legend is kept alive, and maybe that’s not a bad thing.  There’s an argument to be made that keeping some things out of sight keeps them powerful, and that no unseen Welles film, no matter how good, could live up to the one we see in our minds.  (Witness the general disappointment a few years ago at director Jess Franco’s bastardized reconstruction of Don Quixote.) 

Beyond their actual movies, great, charismatic directors tend to gather groups of people around them – collaborators, friends, film buffs and scholars – who also help keep the legend alive after the directors are gone.  There’s still a powerful circle of Peckinpah admirers and collaborators (Peckinpahites?) here in Los Angeles who keep the torch lit.

As with so many other things, Welles may throw the longest shadow on this score.  And one of the many ironies is that The Other Side Of The Wind is about the last hours of a great, charismatic filmmaker – played by John Huston, himself no slouch in that department – who’s been widely interpreted as Welles’ alter-ego.

By lucky coincidence, right around the time news surfaced of this latest Welles project, I got an e-mail from an old friend, Eric Sherman, who asked if I’d be interested in talking with him about the two weeks he worked on … The Other Side Of The Wind.  As things happen our conversation wound up covering Bonnie & Clyde, big cigars, George Bush … and yes, Welles.

I met Eric years ago through the American Cinematheque where he helped organize retrospectives on directors Roberto Rossellini, Sam Fuller and others.  One of the most fascinating, erudite and colorful guys I’ve met in Los Angeles, Eric has written several seminal books on filmmaking and the film industry including The Director’s Event and Directing The Film; he currently teaches production, film business and directing at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and California Institute of the Arts (Cal Arts).  You can read much more about him at his own website here.  Himself an acclaimed filmmaker and producer of the Peabody Award-winning PBS Series "Futures With Jaime Escalante," Eric grew up on the inside of the film industry.  His father Vincent Sherman was a highly successful studio director in the 1940’s and 1950’s who made such beautifully crafted films as Mr. Skeffington with Bette Davis and Claude Rains and The Damned Don’t Cry with Joan Crawford.

Two of Eric's heroes:  his Dad and Sam Fuller

Eric greeted me in the driveway of his new home in the east Pasadena hills.  “We’re still absorbing stuff,” he said, pointing out rooms filled with boxes.  “We’d been renting for over 30 years, we never owned a house before.”

He led me inside through the garage, which now serves double-duty as his office – a convenient arrangement since Eric, a life-long cigar smoker, refuses to smoke inside the house, so instead he lights up downstairs with the garage door open.  He proudly showed off a collection of DVDs of his father Vincent’s films:  “We’ve got over 15 of his movies released on DVD so far,” he said with a son’s true love.  An original Frank Stella hangs in the corner, near a cartoon from Sam & Christa Fuller … nearby is a photo of Roberto Rossellini with two of his “pupils,” Vittorio de Sica and Federico Fellini … 

It’s a house filled with totems of art and film.  In many ways Eric is an unrepentant hippie idealist who still believes in the power of art to transform us all.

A son's proud collection:  his Dad's movies

One photo that stuck out in this pantheon of great filmmakers and artists was a shot of Eric with his college classmate, George W. Bush.  He smiled, pointing at it:

“I went to college with Bush, he was a fellow Yalie with me and Lloyd Kaufman of Troma.  Bush used to come to our Yale Film Society screenings with a case of beer and a big busty blonde on each arm.  I met him a few years ago at the White House … You know me, I’m a real leftie from a Jewish background.  I was totally charmed by the guy.  Very intelligent.  I don’t know if he’s gotten bad press or what, but in person he’s incredibly friendly.”

As he made a pot of strong black coffee, Eric kept talking:

“I’m at the age where I ask myself what we’re really doing here.  As Jack Warner said, we’re here for the 3 E’s:  to Educate, to Entertain, to Enlighten.

The greatest art is genre art.  Shakespeare was genre.  Bach was genre.  A movie is a universe because it contains space, time, energy and matter – which are the components of this universe.  Every movie presents an alternative universe to this one … I don’t think this universe likes film because it’s too threatening.  So the artist really has to be a tough guy.  Real big balls.

When my dad’s autobiography came out, Studio Affairs, we had a book signing at Sam French.  Sam Fuller hobbled in – Sam had had the stroke – he and my dad embraced, they were both studio survivors.  One of my students came over and thanked Sam, said he’d been a great inspiration.  Sam responded with great effort, ‘what … do you want to do?’  My student responded he wanted to make films.  ‘Then you gotta have … big balls,’ Sam said with great difficulty.

In 1967 – when you were 2 years old – Bonnie & Clyde was released.  It was absolutely panned by critics.  We saw it opening weekend and thought it was a major event.  We were in the middle of the Vietnam War.  We found Arthur Penn on his farm in Massachusetts.  Arthur Penn was a very sweet man, very intelligent.  We were 20 years old.  He was quite sad about the reaction to the film.  We asked him what he thought, he said ‘I’m disappointed in the reception to the film, I was trying to provide a wake-up call to the American public that if you live by the sword, you die by it.  Don’t think you’re going to live by the sword and make the world safe for no swords.’  Most filmmakers I know base their failure or success on box office, even though they’re artists.

We did an extensive interview with Penn and published it in the Yale New Journal, a monthly magazine.  Joe Morgenstern of the Wall St. Journal, then-critic for Newsweek who was also a Yalie – he got a copy of the interview we did with Penn and re-reviewed the film for the first time.  He said thanks to an interview done with Penn by two Yalies, I realized I’d completely missed the boat on the message of the film.  On the strength of that review, Warners re-released the film with a different ad campaign.  And Arthur had already sold his points to Warren Beatty because he thought the film wouldn’t make anything.  And he never gave Arthur even a tip.  (That’s why Lucas is loved on Star Wars.  I know a number of people who get generous checks from Lucas.)

In 1967 because my dad was in the industry, I was able to get these guys’ phone numbers.  We went over to Sam Fuller’s house, his wife at the time had just divorced him.  He was moving all his stuff out, he had this big Cadillac.  He said ‘Guys, c’mon and give me a hand!’  We arrived at 2 PM and helped move him out until midnight.  Then he said, ‘What can I do for you?’  We said we wanted to interview him, he said ‘Okay but let’s eat first.’  He threw 3 big steaks on the grill – one for me, one for Marty [Rubin, Eric’s partner at the Yale Film Society] and one for him – it’s some of the last meat I’ve eaten, I’ve been a vegetarian for decades.  He said what’ll you drink?  I’ve never been a drinker – Marty said I’ll have whiskey, Sam said ‘No you don’t, you’ll have vodka’ and poured us 3 huge vodkas.  ‘Have a rope?  Your dad smokes doesn’t he?’  Sam pulls this cigar out – this big, like a kosher salami – and he pulls out a railroad spike from his belt, like a guy would carry a knife, and poked the end of the cigar.  He shoved it in my mouth, I was green.  By 2 AM, Marty had had 3 or 4 glass fulls of vodka.  Sam finally says ‘whaddaya wanna talk about??’  And we talked for 18 hours straight, and that was the interview that went in the book.  We became friends and were friends for his whole life.  In fact Christa gave us Samantha’s baby clothes – so my boys grew up wearing Samantha’s clothes.”

Eric took a pause.  “We came here to talk about Orson Welles, right?”  He jumped up and fished around for a video – a few moments later he showed me a clip of Welles on “The Dick Cavett Show.” 

Eric shook his head, smiling as he remembered.  “Welles was a giant, nearly 6 foot 4, in black silk pajamas … Peter Bogdanovich, who I’d met 3 years earlier when I was interviewing him for my book, called me.  He said, Eric – do you still have your 16 mm. camera?  Yes.  You still have your friend Felipe Herba?  I said, yes.  Well come right over, and Peter gave us an address in Trousdale Estates, which was kind of a nouveau development in Beverly Hills which was already nouveau enough.

Orson had rented and taken over this house as a location for the film he’d started in 1970 and was still working on in 1985 at the time of his death, it’s called The Other Side Of The Wind.  It’s about a cult movie director who’s having trouble finishing his last film.  The movie director was played by John Huston.  The picture is essentially finished – Gary Graver, the DP who was a buddy of mine, used to show scenes from it from time to time at the Fairfax. Talk about an eye popper.

So we arrive at Orson’s house and God himself steps out.  We used to say 'There but for the grace of God goes God.'  He was gigantic.  You can see his size, he just towered over everybody.  Not just physically, you could sense when he was near.  Mentally and spiritually, he was huge, huge.  I had become an avid cigar smoker since I was around my dad and Sam – according to afficianados, Orson was the second most famous cigar smoker after Winston Churchill.

I had bought for Orson the largest commercially available cigars at the time, a couple Double Coronas, 7 and ¾ inches long.  I presented them to him, ‘Mr. Welles – from one cigar smoker to another.’  With great kindness he said, ‘Oh no thank you, Eric, I only smoke large cigars.’  He reaches in his pocket an pulls out an enormous honker ...  I said where on earth did you get that?  He said they make them for me.  There was no commercially available size that would be more than a cigarette for him.

Let me describe the environment at this house.  There was Welles, this giant figure in black, in black silk pajamas and a black robe, which is the only clothing I saw him in for 2 weeks. Various beautiful men and women were walking and running around the house, 24/7, and some of them were completely naked.  It was another universe, Dennis – I was 23 at the time.

I learned that one of the beautiful women was Oja Kodar, his consort for the last 10 or 15 years of his life, with whom I’m still in touch.  And it was not as though I’d died and gone to heaven, but it was as if I’d been transported to a different universe.  These people were not marching to the same drummer as most.

This is how Orson would direct – he’d never look through the camera.  He’d say give me a 16 right here, holding his fingers out in a circle.  If I set it up here or there, he’d say ‘No!, that’s not what I said.’ He never looked at the camera but he knew if I was an inch off.  And he never paid too much attention to it – except he KNEW.  The certainty, the absolute knowledge that he had, was pervasive.  I’m talking about a level of human intellect and awareness way above the norm.  I call it learning by permeation rather than study.

I worked on The Other Side Of The Wind for 2 weeks.  I was one of 2 cameras – and I acted playing a camera crew with Felipe, portraying what we were doing, which was kind of experimental for those days, a multi-camera shoot. 

The general description is, we pre-lit the entire house, every room in the house.  And Orson said, ‘all right, Gary – when I say roll, you roll from here, give me a 17 here,’ – holding his finger in a circle – ‘and after a minute, Eric, you start from here, and give me a 15’ – and he hold up his fingers again.  A roll of film is 10 minutes long – so when Gary would roll out I’d have one minute left.  Gary would race to camera position three which had been pre-planned, replace his magazine of film.  He would start – and I would have one minute left and do the same.

So we’d leap frog through the house for an hour.  The actors HATED this – they’d have to remember an hour of dialogue.  So we’d set up over an hour of shooting – it was the party scene which was still in the movie. 

Now, two sub-stories within it:

You know the famous pregnant pause in acting?  Dennis, this is the pause … ‘To be or not to be, that is the question ….’ Pause … ‘whether tis nobler in the mind …’ Pause, look in the other direction.

Every place Orson looked on a pause was a cue card man.  You know the famous story of Brando in Last Tango In Paris where he’s weeping over the coffin of his wife?  There were cue cards in the coffin.

There were about a dozen cue card guys for Orson.  One was on a ladder, another was on the ground.  It was clear to me that Orson never read the cards though he looked in their direction.  It was the ultimate security blanket.  The cue card company was called Barney Cue Cards, and Barney just passed away a few years ago, wonderful guy.

The second story was this… You understand I have an obligation to have my lens exactly where Orson said, right?  My camera position three was very awkward, I’d be crouched like this bent over, too high to sit.  On about my 3^rd or 4^th camera position – 30 or 40 minutes into this – even though I was 23 and in good shape, my back starts really cramping, I grab my back and stand up.  Orson says CUT!  Eric, how do you expect me to concentrate with all that motion???!  Now Dennis, there are a dozen guys running around, guys with cue cards, guys on ladders – I make one motion and he says cut! 

I say Mr. Welles, there’s 30 guys running around all over the place.

He says ‘Yes – but I didn’t plan yours.’  He could tolerate infinite motion – if he put it there.  But one motion of 12 inches he couldn’t tolerate.

I said that’s genius.  Now I know what a genius is.  That’s the way the shoot went.

The crew turnover was 50% a day, because not everybody could take that degree of intensity.  I lasted two weeks.

Our call time every morning was 6 am.  Wrap time was 2 am.  Meaning we had a 20 hour work day, which was quite illegal.  But nobody complained, they just quit.  When we wrapped at 2 am, Orson would be sitting at his typewriter typing the pages for tomorrow.  We’d go home, take a shower, lay the body home for an hour.  We’d come back at 6 am – and he’d still be sitting at the typewriter.  Meaning I didn’t see him sleep for 2 weeks.  You get that image?   In the same goddam black silk pajamas and robe.

We had one meal break every day, it was a 2-1/2 hour lunch.  Catered by the Beverly Hills Hotel or Chasen’s.  When it was Chasen’s they’d bring buckets of their famous chili.  I never saw Orson eat.

While we would be eating he’d be recording Eastern Airlines and Gallo Wine commercials.  Am I describing to you an eccentric man?  Gigantic in size, I never saw him eat, I never saw him sleep.

There’s a famous scene in the movie.  The female lead is played by Oja Koda.  She has sex with the driver of the car – I think played by Bob Random, in the Boetticher film A Time For Dying, and they really go at it, it’s one of the more erotic scenes ever.  We were driving through Century City at 5 am one morning.  Remarkable point:  Orson – this is the days before video monitors – Orson wanted to be present in the car.  Not because he feared anything sexual – but he directed by permeating a setting, and he just infused in us all the knowledge of what he wanted.

Now a man Orson’s size couldn’t fit into the car really.  It was a Lincoln Continent Town Car, which had the largest trunk of any car made at the time.  I hope this doesn’t sound insulting because I really love the man – he insisted we lower him into the trunk, and cut a little hole in the trunk through the back seat so he could see.  It took us about 2 hours to lower him into the trunk.  But given his size and height and weight, it took over 2 hours to get him in.  And then we closed him in.  I was afraid he’d suffocate but he didn’t.  So we drove around Century City while Oja and Bob Random were simulating fucking in the front seat.

So the 2 weeks go by and we wrap that sequence of scenes.  And this led to the Event that inspired me to contact you and say I’ve got an L.A. After Midnight story.  All of this was a preamble:

It was around midnight and we wrapped.  Orson said, ‘Eric, you seem to know the town pretty well – what’s open late?  I want to take everybody to a wrap party.’

There was a Mexican restaurant – still is, I think, in the Silverlake area called Nayarit, near Barragan’s, on Sunset near Alvarado.  So 15 or 20 of us drive over there and we start dinner about 2 am.  And the place is normally open till 4 am but they stayed open for us until 6.  And that’s when I saw Orson consume more food and drink than I’ve ever seen anybody eat.  He ate continuously for four hours.  Every form of Mexican food, just platter after platter.  And pitcher after pitcher of margaritas.  During that four hours, I sat next to Orson – we talked about everything I wanted to talk to him about.  Art and film and women and politics. 

I’d like to tell you three things he told me that night that always stayed with me:

Number one, his favorite artist was Duke Ellington.  Duke was to music as Orson was to film.  He spoke so lovingly of Duke.

The second thing he told me was that he hated Richard Nixon for one reason.  My generation used to burn the American flag as a protest.  Nixon made that illegal and would pursue anyone who’d burn the flag.  Orson said, ‘how stupid could you be?  A flag is a symbol.  How could burning a symbol be a crime?’

The third thing was, I would say Orson probably had had his share of women, beautiful ones, being married to Rita Hayworth and consorting with Oja.  And he stated to me his view of women.  He said obviously, women are the superior gender.  Obviously.  They go through child birth – we men appear to be stronger but that’s because we puff out our chest.  Why are we doing it?  To impress women.  Physically, mentally and spiritually women are superior.

We embraced, we wrapped – and Orson continued to shoot the film for 15 more years.

I’m going to give you a coda.  Approximately 14 or 15 years later, Doug Edwards [former head film programmer at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences] called me.  A very good friend, a true gentleman in every sense of the word.

He called me and said, Eric, would you like to produce a film to be written and directed by Orson Welles?  I said Doug, was Christ Jewish?  Give me a break, what’s the script?  He brought me a copy of a script Orson wrote called “The Dreamers.”  It was a combination of three short stories written by Isak Dinesen, the character played by Meryl Streep in Out Of Africa, a Danish woman whose real name was Karen Blixen.  She’s the only person Orson spoke of, of whom he was in absolute awe.  He’d fly to Denmark and stand in front of Dinesen’s flat, awe struck.

So “The Dreamers” is probably the greatest screenplay that I’ve ever read … Mindboggling, huge, about an opera singer named Pellegrina in Europe.  It’s about the nature of creation.  All I can say is it’s an older artist’s testament like Bach’s the Art of Fugure or Beethovens 9^th, or Brakhage’s final works.  Stunning.

He had prepared a budget, at the time it was about $10 or $12 million.  I said to Doug, I’d love to talk to Orson about this.  So I had one more meeting with Orson, just before he died, in 1984 or 1985.

I said to him, ‘Doug has asked me to produce this, and I have a question for you.  If I produce it, I’m going to be responsible to the investors to watch their money.  And you have a reputation for being profligate with investors’ money, and I want to know, do you think I ought to take on this assignment?’ 

Orson looked up wistfully in the air, then he said:  ‘Eric, I don’t think you should.’  I said, why?

‘Because I hate people with money,” Orson replied.  ‘So if you produce it, I will abuse you – and the investors’ money.  I’ll keep writing scenes rather than finish the film.’

Dennis, do you get how moving this was to me?  He was stating right there the key to his life and career.

I’ve always thought that, on the one hand, I didn’t help a group of investors lose $10 million – and on the other hand, we don’t even have the shards of a lost masterpiece.  So I’ve had mixed feelings about that.

But I think I grew up really during that meeting, because I no longer looked at Orson as a blighted artist.  I looked at him as self destructive – with awareness.  That was a profound realization.”

Jane Russell: Memories of Robert Mitchum and "Macao"

Like many in Hollywood and beyond, I was saddened to hear the news of Jane Russell’s passing yesterday.  She was one of film’s enduring icons, a great star from an era when being a star seemed to somehow mean more than it does today.

Reading tributes to her from a number of bloggers, including Leonard Maltin’s very fine piece on her here, I was reminded of a tribute Russell herself shared with me a few years ago, to her co-star Robert Mitchum – a colleague and friend who’d stood up for her at a time when she truly needed it.  In 2005 I was involved in organizing a retrospective tribute to Russell at the American Cinematheque’s Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood.  One afternoon I received a last-minute phone call from Marvin Paige, a well-known casting director who was helping to coordinate the retrospective and Russell’s appearance there.  “I’m at Musso & Frank’s with Jane.  Come down and join us,” he said, then hung up.  I grabbed my colleague Gwen Deglise by the hand and we hustled across Hollywood Blvd. to Musso’s.

Russell was sitting with Marvin in one of the big red leather booths, wearing an eye-popping green blouse and pants outfit she’d designed herself – and clunky white sneakers.  It was an incongruous pairing that fit her personality well.  She was an actress and icon who seemed to have no illusions about the film industry, or life in general.  She talked openly with us about serious eye problems she’d been dealing with:  for the past year and a half she’d been suffering from macular degeneration, and had been coming down to L.A. for experimental treatments at UCLA medical center which involved “sticking a needle into my eye,” as she said matter-of-factly. 

While discussing which films to show in her upcoming tribute, she mentioned Macao, the dark, exotic crime film she’d made in 1952 for her The Outlaw producer Howard Hughes, and co-starring Robert Mitchum.  She had nothing but kind words for Mitchum, but the same couldn’t be said for the man who directed the film.  Macao was credited to director Josef von Sternberg, the legendary helmer  of such visually ravishing films as The Blue Angel, Shanghai Express and The Scarlet Empress among others. 

Macao was in fact von Sternberg’s last Hollywood film – he was replaced during production by Nicholas Ray (later of Rebel Without A Cause fame) – and Russell shared some fascinating and very personal insight as to why he was fired. 

“Mitch [Robert Mitchum] and I worked with Josef von Sterberg on that film,” she said over lunch.  “Everything was very stiff and posed, except for the stuff Nick Ray shot.  He was great fun to work with.  Von Sternberg was arrogant as could be.  He used to say things like ‘What are we going to do with this beautiful stupid broad in this scene, Mitch?’, and Mitch would just look at him without saying anything.”

It was obvious, listening to her tell the story, that von Sternberg’s comments still cut deep, even five decades later.   

“Finally it got so bad it couldn’t go on,” she continued.  “Mitch told his secretary to bring him a big picnic basket to the set one day.  He spread out a blanket and sat down, right in the middle of everything.  Pulls out a sandwich, opens a bottle of champagne and pours himself a glass, just like that.”

“Von Sternberg’s standing there and watching him with the rest of the crew.  His face is going red.  He’s literally shaking he’s so angry.  Finally he rushes over to Mitch and shouts ‘What are you doing?!  Who do you think you are sitting down and eating on my set??!  You can be replaced, you know!’”

“Mitch just looked at him and said, ‘No, you can be replaced.’  And that afternoon von Sternberg got a letter and he was gone.”

Russell said it was Mitchum’s own personal way of standing up for her, when she was suffering abuse from a co-worker and colleague.  It was a gesture she never forgot. 

Tokyo After Midnight: a B-movie Mystery

[The final chapter in the story of my mother LeAnn Bartok’s lost career in Japanese movies in 1959-1960 – and the search to find some trace of it over thirty years later.]

A few months after finally seeing the long-missing Kimi Wa Nerawareteiru, I e-mailed my friend Chris Marker, the legendary French director of La Jetee, Sans Soleil and The Last Bolshevik.  Chris has a long, rich association with Japan – there’s even a tiny bar in Tokyo called “La Jetee” that’s dedicated to him and his movies – so I thought he’d get a kick out of the saga of LeAnn and finding one of her Japanese B-movies. 

After I told him the whole story, he e-mailed back:

“My, my, if that ain’t the greatest story since the Man Who Would Be King … And what a script it could beget:  ‘The case of the lost movie’!  … If you could join to the package a copy of the tape [of ‘Kimi Wa Nerawareteiru’] that would make my day, my week, my year … And having a mother who’s able to carry a pistol hidden in her stockings surely helps to build one’s character.  (My Russian grandmother knew how to roll a cigarette on her boot single-handed, which isn’t bad, but you can’t compare.)”

I sent him a copy of the movie, and he sent back this wonderful little artwork incorporating an image of LeAnn from Kimi Wa Nerawareteiru and his beloved cat, Guillaume-en-egypte:

The image continued to bounce around in mysterious and unpredictable ways.  

Once the genie is out of the bottle it’s impossible to contain.

Jump cut to: 

I’m lying in bed, it’s 2008.  I’m watching Seijun Suzuki’s landmark 1963 crime movie Youth Of The Beast.  It’s close to midnight, my wife and son are both asleep.

It’s nearly half an hour into the movie … I’m starting to get drowsy too … Without warning, Jo Shishido – he of the huge, chipmunk cheeks – bursts into the office of a movie theater holding a rifle.

Suddenly I hear a voice, crying out … I’ve heard it somewhere before, this voice.

In fact I’ve heard it thousands of times.  It’s LeAnn’s voice, calling from half a lifetime away.

I bolt upright like I’ve been shot with electricity.  There on-screen, looming larger than life behind Shishido and the others, is the ghostly B&W image of my mother’s face.

It’s her once more, in a scene from Kimi Wa Nerawareteiru made three years earlier.

The same studio, Nikkatsu, had made both films.  They needed to show a movie projecting in the theater during the gun battle -- and for some reason, someone decided to pick this particular scene with LeAnn.

It’s a crazy world, isn’t it?  You go looking for something, and then you find it -- or it finds you.

And then it keeps finding you, over and over.

In late 2002, as Kinji and his son Kenta were preparing to begin shooting Battle Royale II, Toshiko e-mailed to tell me that Kinji was dying of cancer and didn’t know if he’d be able to finish production.

In fact Kinji was only able to complete a few days of shooting when he grew too weak to continue.

Kinji Fukasaku died on January 12, 2003.  Toshiko e-mailed the sad news:

“Kinji left us about an hour ago, shortly after 1 AM Sunday, Japan time.  He couldn’t pull a miracle for himself, Kenta and all of us.

I am tempted to shout ‘Baka!’ (which means “idiot!”)  He didn’t have to die now if he were more prudent, but who is to say how one should live one’s life also.”

[Fond farewells -- our last dinner with Kinji Fukasaku in the Ginza district.  

Top photo, left to right:  Kenta Fukasaku, Susan Gold, Kinji.

Bottom photo:  Isao Tsujimoto (far left), Toshiko Adilman (far right)]

Toshiko’s husband, Sid Adilman, one of the best-loved film journalists in Canada, died several years later after a long illness … My last memory of Sid is sitting in his bedroom as we watched Kinji’s Virus, the movie that brought Toshiko and Kinji together for the first time, and Sid laughing his ass off at how silly it all was.

Flash forward again, or maybe sideways … Linear time has little meaning now:

I’m standing on the chilly rooftop of Toei Studios in Tokyo, as a Shinto priest conducts a blessing ceremony for the movie I’m there to produce, a segment of the film Trapped Ashes – inspired, in fact, by the haunting memories of the hanged man my wife and I had discovered in Nanzenji Temple in Kyoto.

It’s nearly 47 years since LeAnn came to Tokyo and wound up making movies.  And here I am, following her footsteps.

Our last day of shooting wrapped up at nearly 5:00 AM – ironically at the same soundstages where Kinji had made the very first Battles Without Honor & Humanity, and where his son Kenta was currently prepping his new movie.

The wheel turns, and turns.

I went back to the hotel and collapsed, exhausted.  Two hours later I shook myself out of my stupor, showered, and climbed on a train.  It took me an hour outside Tokyo, where I was met in the cold morning rain by my buddy Yoshiki.

I was there to see an old family friend.  One I’d never met before.

Yoshiki got on the phone and made a call.

A few minutes later we walked to a nearby coffee shop.  A slight, elderly man with glasses came up to us carrying an umbrella, and smiled broadly.

“I’m Motomu Ida,” he said.  “I directed Kimi Wa Nerawareteiru.”

   

An enormous thank you for all their tremendous help and encouragement over the years to:  Toshiko Adilman; Kinji Fukasaku; Motomu Ida; Isao Tsujimoto; Tadao Sato; Susan Gold; Shari Bartok; Jayce Bartok; Yoshiki Hayashi; Tiffany Bartok; Chris D.; Chris Marker; Stuart Galbraith; Marc Walkow; Christian Storms; Tom Abrams.

Tokyo After Midnight: a B-movie Mystery

[Part 6 in the story of my mother LeAnn Bartok’s lost career in Japanese movies in 1959-1960 – and the search to find some trace of it over thirty years later.]

A few months later in November, 2002, I got a message from my friend Yoshiki in Tokyo:  the long-lost Kimi Wa Nerawareteiru had just screened on Japanese television and he’d taped it for me.

I was dumbfounded … it didn’t seem quite possible.  Nearly 10 years of actively searching for the movie and here it just happened to serendipitously turn up on Japanese TV. 

Thank God for coincidence, I thought.

A few days after that Toshiko Adilman forwarded a letter to me from Mr. Ida:

“Dear Mr. Dennis:

It’s been five years since I last wrote to you, but I am Ida who directed ‘Kimi Wa Nerawareteiru.’

How is your mother?  I really would like to have a chance to see her, but it’s difficult, wouldn’t you think, given we are so far apart from each other.  Today, I have good news.

The film produced 40 years ago was broadcast this month by the Tokyo CS Channel.  It’s ‘Kimi Wa Nerawareteiru.’

In the film your mother’s performance is strong and she looks smashing.  I would like you to see it as soon as possible.”

I started crying when I read his letter.  Sometimes life is very good.

It was also very sad to read his message to LeAnn.  He didn’t know she’d passed away a year and half earlier.

Ida, too, had videotaped the film and was sending me a copy.  (As it turns out I received copies from several other friends in Japan afterwards … I guess I’d talked to a lot of people about it.)

I wrote back to him, sharing his joy at the film finally turning up again, and telling him the news of LeAnn’s death.  I told him more about her own career as a painter and filmmaker, and how she treasured her time in Japan, how she carried it with her her whole life.  I promised to send him a copy of one of LeAnn’s last Mt. Fuji paintings (I’d earlier given one to Kinji Fukasaku as a gift for all his friendship and support.)

Soon after, VHS tapes of Kimi Wa Nerawareteiru started showing up at the American Cinematheque office – first from Ida, then Yoshiki and others.

It took me a few days to actually sit down and watch the movie.  To be honest, I was a bit scared of seeing it after all this time. 

[Above:  Years of searching -- and it comes down to this.]

Kimi Wa Nerawareteiru literally translates as “You Are Being Aimed At,” or probably better, “You Are The Target.”  LeAnn always referred to it “The Man They Tried To Kill” since that was the translation on her script.  It turned out to be a tough, taut little crime movie, barely 55 minutes in length, with more than a passing resemblance to Hitchcock’s North By Northwest.  Motomu Ida later told me the resemblance was no accident:  the head of the studio had apparently seen Hitchcock’s movie, then called Ida into his office and said:  “I want you to make me a North By Northwest.”

Shot in beautiful B&W Cinemascope, the movie opens with shots of Tokyo:  an elevated train track, people bustling in the streets.  The Tokyo LeAnn would’ve known in 1959.  It’s the story of a reporter, played by Yuji Odaka, who gets mistaken for an undercover policeman named “Henry Yamanaka” who’s been trying to infiltrate a Japanese crime syndicate.

Here, finally, was the elusive “Henry Yamanaka” I’d heard about so many times as a kid.

And here as well, playing one of the mob enforcers, was LeAnn’s mysterious agent:  the Turkish/Russian actor and sometime pimp, Osman “Johnny” Yusuf.  The man who claimed he was in love with her.

Watching the film, I feel like I’m looking at a lost member of the family … I only wish I could’ve met the guy.

The movie clips along at a brisk pace with the reporter getting into and out of scrapes with the mob enforcers, helping to rescue an innocent girl (Kyoko Hori) and locking horns with an enigmatic, dark-haired beauty (Hisako Tsukuba) who works for the drug bosses.

The similarities to Hitchcock’s film are apparent in a number of scenes.  Here, the reporter played by Yuji Odaka brings the police back to the house where he was drugged – just as Cary Grant does – only to be met by caretakers who claim the place is empty:

And here, mimicking the famous scene at the United Nations, Odaka is trapped in an elevator with a man who’s just been knifed – a crime he’ll be mistakenly blamed for:

For all its influences, Kimi Wa Nerawareteiru stands on its own.  Ida’s eye for composition is especially strong, framing his characters in simple, unobtrusive Widescreen shots that increasingly throw a noose around Odaka’s trapped reporter.

The only problem was, it was nearly 35 minutes into the movie … and I still hadn’t seen a sign of my mother.  I started scanning every scene for her profile – was it possible that after all these years, we’d gotten it all wrong?  That LeAnn didn’t appear in the movie after all -- or she was just some walk-on part, visible so briefly even I didn’t recognize her?

Finally in Act III, there’s a big meeting of all the syndicate underbosses at a resort in Hakone.  They all gather in one room, but the seat at the head of the table is empty, reserved for the mysterious Boss of Bosses.

The door opens, they all turn around … and my mother walks in.  Wearing a white sequined gown, with bleached blonde hair and dark eyebrows, looking like a cross between Veronica Lake and Frida Kahlo. 

Then she starts to talk – in English! – and she’s the cocktail waitress from hell, swearing and cursing and just beating the hell out of the poor underbosses for their failure to capture “Henry Yamanaka.”

Big plot twist:  Henry Yamanaka turns out to be a woman, the dark-haired beauty played by Hisako Tsukuba.  Exactly like North By Northwest where the double agent is Eva Marie Saint.

LeAnn chews scenery right and left, she shoves people around, she whips a little pistol out of the top of her stocking … She’s loud and abrasive and menacing as all get out.

In the end there’s a big shoot-out and the police burst in.  She’s hauled off to jail, still wearing her white fur wrap and string of pearls.  Still Mr. Big.

I can’t say she’s a good actress in the film – she’s way over the top in fact, screeching like some harpy from a roadside diner in an Edgar Ulmer poverty row movie.  But in her way, she’s utterly fantastic. 

If you watch Kimi Wa Nerawareteiru, the thing you’re most likely to remember is that outrageous, beautiful, ballsy blonde that everyone’s afraid of.

That’s my mother, LeAnn.

A few weeks later, my friend Isao Tsujimoto from the Japan Foundation e-mailed to ask if I’d seen the movie.  When I said yes, he replied – wonderful, wonderful, our friend Tadao Sato will be so happy … he’s the one who arranged to have the film shown on Japanese TV for you.

I was dumbfounded – what was he talking about??  Of course I remembered meeting with Sato in Tokyo a few months earlier.  I’d given him some pages from the script and he’d promised to look into it – I never heard anything else and thought he’d forgotten about it.  It was just pure coincidence the movie ran on TV.

Not at all, said Isao.  Sato had called an old friend of his at Nikkatsu who researched the film and confirmed that yes, there was an original negative in storage.  When Sato explained it was for the family of an American woman who co-starred in it, his friend said I’m sorry, but the film has never come out on DVD and I could lose my job if I made you a copy.  

But what I can do, he added, is to arrange to have it shown on our own TV network, so you can tape it and send a copy to your friend in Los Angeles.

So through this incredible, roundabout way, Kimi Wa Nerawareteiru was broadcast on national television in Japan so it could be taped and sent to me.

Somewhere, LeAnn was laughing her ass off.

(Next chapter:  A lost movie that won’t stay lost)