The end of the reel
The world of cinema is greatly weakened by the passing of screenwriter William Goldman and directors Nicolas Roeg and Bernardo Bertolucci. All were complicated, flawed men, but gifted practitioners of the seventh art. All dead within a week
BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI
March 16 1941 – November 26 2018
For many cinephiles, Marlon Brando’s finest performance was not the one for which he won his first Oscar in On the
Waterfront. Nor was it his second Oscar-winning turn in The Godfather. No, the most brutally honest and literally naked cinematic performance by the man who made method acting a household name occurs in a 1972 film called Last Tango in Paris, directed by a 31-year-old Italian cinematic genius named Bernardo Bertolucci.
Coming two years after Bertolucci’s groundbreaking fourth feature, The Conformist — described by Francis Ford Coppola as “the first classic of the decade” and signalling a seismic shift in the history of cinema for the way it melded politics, psychology and strikingly stylish visual invention — Last Tango in Paris was a revelation for its treatment of eroticism and sensuality on film. Critic Pauline Kael hailed it as “the most powerfully erotic film ever made, and it may turn out to be the most liberating movie ever made”.
Bertolucci, the self-consciously artistic and embarrassingly bourgeois son of a poet and a literature professor, had begun his career in his 20s working for postwar European cinema’s most avowedly controversial and anticapitalist director, Pier Paulo Pasolini.
Quickly developing his own politically socialist and dazzlingly formalist aesthetic style, Bertolucci carved a niche for himself in the turbulent uncertainty and hope of the late 1960s as the successor to his mentor. He was Italy’s most visually imaginative and politically conscious director, a young master artist with the talent and freedom to be given a blank slate for the realisation of his cinematic imagination. It was a creative licence that would offer both untold freedom and the opportunity to make hubristic mistakes worthy of a character straight out of Greek tragedy.
Infamous scene
Back to 1972 and Last Tango — we have Bertolucci, Brando and his beautiful 19-yearold co-star, French actress Maria Schneider. There is an infamous scene in the film involving anal sex using butter as a lubricant. In 2007, Schneider revealed that the idea had been developed by Bertolucci and Brando without her knowledge and that, although the sex was simulated, she felt, in a way, raped by both men. “After the scene, Marlon didn’t console me or apologise. Thankfully, there was just one take.”
Bertolucci later claimed that he had done this to get Schneider’s reaction “as a girl, not as an actress”, but this has not satisfied critics in the era of #MeToo and the director’s plea for forgiveness two years after Schneider’s death in 2011 has done little to appease them.
However, Bertolucci is no Roman Polanski and, though his actions are not necessarily forgivable, they are but one dark spot on a career in which he went on to create some of cinema’s most memorable portrayals of the tensions between politics, philosophy and psychology.
They include the under-appreciated but inspired five-hour epic of Italian history
Novecento (1976); his nine-Oscar-winning The
Last Emperor (1988); and his brief reminder of genius The Dreamers (2003), which followed a long period of lacklustre, by-the-numbers projects. While he may have overstepped the boundaries of propriety in getting what he wanted for Last Tango, Bertolucci’s body of work still stands as a testament to the ability of cinema to be more than the mere amalgamation of pretty pictures, but rather an art form that raises socially, politically and psychologically important questions.
WILLIAM GOLDMAN
August 12 1931 – November 16 2018
In 1965, while teaching creative writing at the University of Princeton, novelist William Goldman had a Eureka moment that changed the course of his life and the notion of the screenwriter as a necessary but irritating, underpaid cog in the movie machine forever. Using the historical story of a pair of Old West bank robbers, Goldman reinvented them as a pair of lovable, doomed, basically-in-love-with-eachother rogues called Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and kick-started a genre of buddy, bromance films that continue to be multimillion-dollar safety bets for the dream machine.
He sold the script for a record-breaking $400,000 to 20th Century Fox in 1967. The resulting film, directed by George Roy Hill and starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford, went on to be a box-office smash and won four Oscars, including one for Goldman’s screenplay.
He won a second Oscar in 1972 for his adaptation of
All the President’s Men and, over the course of his career, which continued into the 21st century, eight of his films would gross over $100-million in the US. They included Marathon Man, The Princess Bride, Misery, The Stepford Wives, Chaplin and A Bridge Too Far.
Goldman had found his calling and would write more than 20 novels and 20 screenplays over the course of his life, but what he really changed about the movie business was the role of the screenwriter. Goldman became a brand, a star in his own right whose attachment to a project was seen as an asset that would guarantee returns.
In 1983, he wrote the book Adventures in the Screen
Trade, a biting and hilarious put-down of the very system that had made his fortune. He showed that screenwriting was not an art form but a question of “skill; it’s carpentry; it’s structure. I don’t mean to knock it — it ain’t easy. But if it’s all you do, if you only write screenplays, it is ultimately denigrating to the soul. You may get lucky and get rich, but you sure won’t get happy.” As for Hollywood, Goldman famously and to the chagrin of many executives declared: “Nobody knows anything … Not one person in the entire motionpicture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work.” An ironic insight, perhaps, from a man who sold himself as a guarantee of success, but one that still holds true and is far too often ignored.
Without Goldman, not only would we never have had Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or All the
President’s Men, but the hugely profitable screenwriting-teaching industry that his memoir spurned, pioneered by the likes of Syd Field and Robert McKee, would not exist.
William Goldman made sure that films were better written, better made and ultimately better loved, and for that he’ll be sorely missed by millions of movie lovers.
NICOLAS ROEG
August 15 1928 – November 23 2018
In 1995, Time Out magazine conducted a poll to select the 100 best films of cinema’s first 100 years. Three of those films — Performance, Don’t Look Now and The Man
Who Fell to Earth — were directed by Nicolas
Roeg.
The much-celebrated cinematographer had come late to directing when, in 1970, he codirected (with Donald Cammell) what is now held to be the greatest cinematic expression of the whirlwind, psychedelic-experimenting, sexually permissive heyday of swinging ’60s London —
Performance. Starring Mick Jagger and James Fox, the film still pulsates with a visceral, erotic, dangerous and mad energy that is a lingeringly effective portrayal of a particular cultural and spiritual moment in 20th-century history.
Roeg followed that film with his solo directorial debut, Walkabout, the following year. Set in the Australian outback, the film tells the haunting tale of two children abandoned in the middle of nowhere, who befriend a young aboriginal man who helps them find their way home. It’s not on the top 100 list but it’s a beautiful, dark and complicated coming-of-age film that showcases Roeg’s fascination with questions of sex and danger and his mastery of form as a vehicle for the elevation of storytelling. These skills were used to full effect in 1973’s
Don’t Look Now, still regarded by many as the scariest film ever made and featuring one of the most memorable and genuine sex scenes in cinema history. Adapted from a story by Daphne du Maurier, the film stars Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie as a couple trying to come to terms with the death of their daughter while on a trip to Venice. Venice has never been the same again for anyone who has seen the film’s terrifying finale.
The infamous sex scene, shot on a handheld camera in a hotel room and intercut in a particularly Roegian temporal flourish with scenes of the couple getting dressed afterwards, was controversial for its time because of its intimacy and immediacy. Until as late as 2015, Sutherland had to deny rumours that he and Christie had engaged in actual sex in front of the camera.
In 1976, Roeg collaborated with another rock god, David Bowie, for probably his most divisive and brilliant film — The Man Who Fell to Earth. It is an unclassifiable and disturbing dissection of consumerism, which remains one of cinema’s most visually innovative and challenging experiences — right up there with Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Roeg would go on to make several brilliant and unique films, including Bad Timing, Eureka,
Track 29 and The Witches.
While these are all excellent achievements in their own right, the three films on the centenary list are deserved recognition for one of the medium’s true visionaries, a tribute to his belief that “finding reality is much more exciting than trying to invent it”.
What he really changed about the movie business was the role of the screenwriter. Goldman became a brand, a star in his own right