Baseball nerds, you won’t want to miss Jonathan Hock’s documentary “Fastball.” And those who don’t follow baseball, it’s clear/insightful enough that you may come to understand why the game is such an obsession for the rest of us.
“Fastball” is playing at Tribeca, but I’m sure it will get a lot of play on ESPN and elsewhere. Look out for it.
I absolutely loved this film from Argentina, and it was such a pleasure and a surprise to run into – almost literally – the lead actress, Julieta Zylberberg at Ebertfest. I saw her name in the program and I was like, “Wait … I JUST saw her in something, like, two days ago.” She was attending Ebertfest as a special guest, with the film Wild Tales.
So it was this moment of sheer small-world coincidence. I had seen El Cinco at Tribeca the day before I flew out to Illinois – and then there she was in Champaign-Urbana, of all places, with another film! At one of the parties at Ebertfest I had a great conversation with her about El Cinco, which, of course, nobody else there had even seen yet since it hasn’t come out yet or screened anywhere yet. It was really awesome.
Anyway, who knows when/if El Cinco will get distribution in theaters. But definitely keep a watch out for it on Netflix or other online streaming modules. It’s really special.
The next film shown at Ebertfest was Celine Sciamma’s Girlhood (an extraordinary film about 4 black girls, teenagers, living in a housing project in a Parisian suburb – my review here). As with many of these films, I had seen Girlhood on a small screen at a press screening. To see it on that enormous screen at the palatial Virginia Theatre was amazing! You just cannot compare the two experiences!
After each screening, there’s an onstage QA of some kind and I was moderating the one for Girlhood. It was a great group, and the bunch of us had had lunch together beforehand, to talk about the film, which was a great dry run for our discussion. The panelists were Rebecca Theodore-Vachon, Eric Pierson (he had moderated the panel I participated in the day before), Matt Fagerholm, and one of the stars of Godard’s film Goodbye to Language, Héloïse Godet, who had flown in for the festival for the Godard film. There were a lot of interesting things to cover with Girlhood and since I was moderating I wanted to make sure we got it all in. There’s the racial element, which is fascinating, as well as Sciamma’s interest in another minority – girls – a subject she explores in extremely specific and beautiful ways in all of her films (Water Lilies, Tomboy, and now Girlhood. Eric Pierson went to the University in Urbana, and now teaches at the University of San Diego. Matt Fagerholm writes for Rogerebert.com and is so enthusiastic about Girlhood (it is his favorite film of the year so far) that he had printed out a couple of pages of quotes from the director, to bring up during the discussion. Rebecca Theodore-Vachon also writes for Rogerebert.com as well as other venues, and is interested in diversity of representation. There had been hopes that the lead actress, Karidja Touré, would join us via Skype, but – just like the character in the film – she had turned her phone off! She was in the middle of her mid-term exams, so I think that had something to do with it. She’s a wonderful actress and it’s hard to believe this is her first film. She carries it. She is in every scene. Our discussion onstage afterwards was fantastic and all of the panelists were wonderful. We talked about the paucity of stories about black girls, and how that situation affects our perceptions (especially the perceptions of black girls: if you only see yourself intermittently onscreen, and if you never see yourself as the center of the action … what does that do to your perception of how society views you? I mean, the question answers itself). It was great to have Héloïse onstage with us, giving us the French perspective about the Paris suburbs as well as the huge problem of racism in France. The questions from the audience were great, and I think people really enjoyed the film, and it launched a wonderful discussion that went on for the rest of Ebertfest. One of the points I made was that the common trope for “female friendship” (in film, anyway) is that girls tear each other down, girls are catty, girls get together and fight about men. NONE of that is present in Girlhood. OTHER things are present, and there are other issues and problems, but – in general – female friendship is a powerful thing, and means a LOT to women, and yet we so rarely SEE it. These girls have each others’ backs. These girls create a powerful and supportive second family. Sciamma is also smart enough to know that when a bunch of girls dress up to the nines, more often than not they are NOT dressing for male attention. They are dressing for each other. “Oh my God, you look so cute.” “You look amazing in that.” “I love that dress on you.” Rebecca and I talked about that a lot, how refreshing it was to see that reality expressed onscreen. It was a wonderful discussion.
This is my third Ebertfest, and the second time a silent film has been shown, with the accompaniment of the awesome Alloy Orchestra (who write their own scores, and perform it live onstage as the movie plays). Last year was the phenomenal 1924 Lon Chaney vehicle He Who Gets Slapped (a masterpiece), and this year was the 1926 Rudolph Valentino film The Son of the Sheik (sequel to the massive hit The Sheik, which solidified Valentino’s position as a star – the first male sex symbol). Chicago Tribune critic Michael Phillips introduced the film, and he’s such a wonderful dry presence: “It’s only fitting that after Girlhood, we should watch The Son of the Sheik, filled with dubious sexual politics and racial stereotypes …” Ah, humor. Phillips gave some great background on the film and on Valentino. He talked about the love of all things Arab in the 20s. But the way Phillips put it was, “The 20s were lousy with sheiks.” I’m still laughing. In The Son of the Sheik, Valentino plays a dual role: the sheik from the first film as an older man now, and also the sheik’s son. Valentino apparently loved doing it, and there was some split-screen photography, with father and son in the same frame, that was quite well-done for the time. And Valentino was terrific as the older man: with whiskers, and a different posture, and a kinder demeanor. The Sheik is one long rape fantasy, but The Son of the Sheik has some other aspects to it: huge hilarious group fight scenes, horses galloping over dunes (they filmed in Arizona, I believe, and the conditions were atrocious and everyone got very ill, including Valentino, and the shoot probably contributed to his early death). The music played by the Alloy Orchestra was wonderful, a sort of constant drumming going on (afterwards, they said that was the main reason they wanted to take on scoring this movie, because it gave them a chance to utilize the hand-drums) – and God, there’s nothing like live music accompanying a movie! Valentino, as the “son of the sheik”, is relaxed and easy. He became a star before he really learned how to act, and he learned on the job. Here, he is to die for. There’s one totally erotic moment when he kisses Vilma Banky up her arm. It is positively carnal. His eyes are closed, and there’s a submissive quality to how he kisses her, a surrender, and her eyes literally rolled back up in her head. This is really powerful stuff. The women of the 1920s knew a good thing when they saw it. This was not “emoting”. This was a man who very calmly and openly expressed that private part of himself, his sexuality, and it feels like the real deal. No wonder his funeral rivaled the passing of a statesman. Seeing it on the big screen just drove home the fact that Yes, Rudolph Valentino was the first male sex symbol, and yes, he delivers.
Michael Phillips, the Alloy Orchestra: and you can see their instruments in the orchestra pit below
Michael Phillips led a great discussion afterwards with the Alloy Orchestra, and gave some great background on the film, as well as on Valentino. (I wrote a huge post about Valentino here.)
The movie that night was the 1993 film A Bronx Tale, Robert DeNiro’s first time in the director’s chair. He’s only directed one other movie. Too bad. A Bronx Tale is a great film. Here is Roger Ebert’s 4-star review. I saw it in the movie theatre on its first release and loved it to death then. It not only holds up but shivers/pulses with a kind of timeless energy that feels almost prophetic. The racial aspect of it for one thing … I had forgotten that element of it, and the danger and violence of it. It’s not as explosive as Do the Right Thing (both films, by the way, were produced by the same guy, John Killik, who was in attendance at Ebertfest this year!) but it treads the same ground. DeNiro’s style is intuitive: flashy when it needs to be flashy, quiet and observational when you don’t need anything else. He cast it beautifully. There’s an incredible sequence when the Italians jump in their car to go fuck up the black kids on the next block. The radio blares in the Italians’ car, and the jukebox blares at the bar where the blacks are hanging out – and at the moment of violent contact, both songs continue at the same time. The music is at war too. It’s brilliant. But there are so many brilliant small touches like that throughout. Chazz Palmenteri was in attendance as well and it was a thrilling QA that occurred afterwards. Hilarious and raucous.
Richard Roeper and Leonard Maltin asked the questions. The story of how A Bronx Tale came to be is well-known, and Chazz Palmenteri is really the one to tell it, but here’s a bullet-point version. It’s the true story of his childhood. He grew up on a street in the Bronx ruled over by a Mob guy (in the movie he’s called Sonny, although that was not his real name). It was kind of a benevolent dictatorship and all the little kids idolized this guy. He was like a movie star. Then one day, when Palmenteri was 9, 10 years old, he was sitting on his front stoop, and there was some altercation that went down, and Sonny shot a man in the head, right in front of Chazz. He saw the whole thing. Chaz’s father, Lorenzo, was a bus driver (just like he is in the movie), and was determined that his son would grow up with values, and not “waste his talents” (the saddest thing in the world, according to Lorenzo). The entire film is true. It’s autobiographical, even down to the black girl he dated from the next block. And his racist friends. Etc. Chazz P. moved out to LA and very quickly started working regularly in television. He got some good recurring roles. But he had a sense that if he wanted his career to go to the next level, he would have to write something for himself. He was taking an acting class at the time, and so he started writing out this story – of his witnessing a murder, and this guy named Sonny, and all these memories. And he started working on it bit by bit in his acting class. He did all the parts. He played himself, he played Sonny, he played his father. This, of course, then became a one-man show, that eventually played very successfully in Los Angeles, before moving to off-Broadway where it became a smash hit. It became a hot hot property. Palmenteri was offered money by every studio in town for the script. He wanted to be in it. Nobody wanted him to be in it because he wasn’t a name. He kept saying No. And the prices offered kept rising. The prices rose as high as $1 million. This man was offered literally a million dollars and he turned it down. Then one day Robert DeNiro came to see Chazz Palmenteri in the play. They met backstage. De Niro told him he had been looking for a project to direct, and he wanted to direct A Bronx Tale. He didn’t want to change the script. Chazz P. said, “But I have to be in it” and De Niro said, “Of course. You’ll be Sonny, I’ll be Lorenzo, I don’t want to change a word of it.” De Niro was good to his word.
It was a dream experience. And it is one of those experiences that is an example of what can happen if you never give up. It’s like Sylvester Stallone, broke, writing the script of Rocky over a four-day period living in a room where he literally could touch both walls if he reached out his arms. And he didn’t want to sell it if he couldn’t be in it. And it all worked out. These are inspirational stories, for sure. And sometimes, yeah, life happens that way.
Chazz Palmenteri was fabulous in person. The audience was rolling in the aisles at some of the anecdotes about filming. The questions were fantastic, from all over the audience.
Some choice gems:
— On whether or not he hesitated before letting De Niro, a first-timer, direct his script: “He did all these movies with Scorsese. He had to have learned something, I thought.”
— There’s a great scene where all the big Mob guys on the block shoot craps in a crowded basement. Those were not actors. Those were the actual guys who had lived on Palmenteri’s block. Palmenteri said, “For the craps game, Bob insisted we use real money. At the start, we had $1200. At the end, we were $400 short.” So Chazz went around to everyone saying, “Come on guys, give it back.” Palmenteri said, “They couldn’t help themselves! They’re thieves, some of these guys!”
— Both De Niro and Chazz were pressured to hire a light-skinned actress for the role of Jane Williams, the girl that Calogero “C” at 17 dates. But they stayed firm. They wanted a dark-skinned girl, and they ended up getting their way, hiring the wonderful and beautiful Taral Hicks. Chazz said, “To be honest with you, that was really important to us. The girl I dated had dark skin, she was my first great love, and it was 1968, you know, it was rough, but we loved each other. It was important that she be that.” I appreciated that honesty, and I appreciated her performance so much. When she leans over to unlock his side of the car door, the audience erupted into cheers. What a payoff!
— De Niro involved Chazz in all aspects of filming. He was even in the editing room. He didn’t feel ever that De Niro was threatened by Chazz, or that De Niro wanted to “take over.” Chazz mentioned it to him once, and De Niro replied, “It takes as much talent to recognize a good idea as it does to come up with a good idea.” That attitude meant that De Niro didn’t care where good ideas came from. He was in the position to recognize them. There was one scene in the bar that De Niro couldn’t figure out how to handle. There was a lot of conversation amongst De Niro, Chazz P., John Killik, the cameraman, etc. No resolution. Finally, a guy who worked in the bar, flipping burgers in the kitchen, who had been overhearing the whole thing, called out, “Hey, I think I have an idea …” and he said his idea, and that was how they ended up doing it. Beautiful.
— Casting the little boy was a huge deal. He had to be right. They saw hundreds, probably thousands, of little boys. Chazz was in on all of the casting sessions, reading opposite the little kids. When 9 year old Francis Capra walked into the casting room, he started off by saying, casually, “Hi, Bob. Hi, Chazz.” Bob. Chazz. He was 9 years old. He basically swaggered into the room. De Niro and Palmenteri looked at each other like, “Does this kid have a set of balls on him or what?” De Niro gave Francis some pages to read, and right before he started the scene, Francis turned to De Niro and said, “Bob, do you want me to cry or not cry?” I am still laughing. Bob. Of course he got the job.
— De Niro as director: Just one example, again with that crowded craps game in the cellar. Of course no one thought they would actually film in that cellar. They’d have to build a little set. It was too cramped, too hot, too gross. But De Niro looked around and was like, “Nope. We’ll film it right here.” He got a lot of pushback on that: the ceiling, the walls, the heat, etc. But he liked working within that confined space, saying at one point, “Let your obstacles be your guide.”
— De Niro was obsessed with every single detail on the film. The shirt collars brought on endless discussions. The cars. The colors. The music. When they were picking music for the film, De Niro showed up at the sound mixing joint one day with a box set called “40 Years of Tony Bennett.” (You’d have to hear Chazz tell this story. It’s probably not as funny when I do it.) Chazz was like, “FORTY YEARS??” And they listened to every single song. “If we did the movie now, Bob would have had us listening to SIXTY years of Tony Bennett.”
I could have listened to Chazz Palmenteri talk for two more hours. I think we all felt that way.
It’s good to be back in Champaign-Urbana for Ebertfest. This is my third year going and it’s wonderful to meet up with the same people, volunteers, staff, other guests in attendance. It has a very homey atmosphere, a family atmosphere. Mum and I have been having a great time, going to films, talking about films, and then crashing in our hotel room at night. We are in love with our room and the two of us basically never want to leave. We may never come home.
Seen thus far:
Goodbye to Language, (2014, d. Jean-luc Godard). I had already seen it, but that was in a press screening that had kind of a reverent silent atmosphere. Seeing this film in a gigantic PACKED theatre was an entirely different experience. It felt like a whole other film. It is funny, playful, profound, provocative, and uses the 3D in really interesting ways (unlike anything else I’ve seen in 3D). What was also surprising to me watching it in that environment was how clear, ultimately, it really is. The structure is broken-up and fragmented, scenes are cut off, the sound is uneven (on purpose), every image is futzed with in some way … but there really is a story there, and it’s really a quite simple one. A couple trying to work things out. I would imagine that seeing it in 2D would really lessen the experience (unlike a lot of other 3D films where they really only use the 3D to make explosions “come at you” and things “lunge” at you). But here? The 3D is woven into the storytelling, it’s another tool of the trade – like music and color and editing – and it’s integral to how the whole thing works. I loved it. Mum loved it too. Actress Héloïse Godet was in attendance as a guest. Some special moments: While up on the stage, she took a photograph of all of us in that massive theatre to send to Jean-luc Godard. Adorable. She told some great stories, about Godard’s playfulness, his inventiveness with 3D, his sense of experimentation and openness.
A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (2014, d. Roy Andersson). I had never seen a Roy Andersson film. I will rectify that now. You wouldn’t think that a film with such a title would be an uproarious experience. Or maybe you would. The first 20 minutes had the audience (Mum and I included) rolling in the aisles. I was CRYING. (Nothing like the sound of 1400 people bursting into laughter at the same moment.) There is a radical tone-shift in the final 15 minutes, but on the whole, the thing – made up of self-contained vignettes that build on one another, talk to one another, and feature recurring cast members in different situations – was a fascinating experience. Producer Johan Carlsson had come all the way from Sweden to be with us. I had met him at breakfast that morning and he, as Andersson’s regular partner and collaborator, had a lot to say about Andersson’s process, how they work (I was amazed to learn that every single thing we saw was a set, built in their own studios. My God!) What a bizarre movie. It’s rare to say “You’ve never seen anything like it” and mean it. In the case of Pigeon it applies.
Moving Midway (d. Godfrey Cheshire). The hit of the festival, thus far. Directed by Godfrey Cheshire, a film critic for Rogerebert.com (with a long career behind him at the New York Press and other venues), made a movie about the tumultuous process of moving his family’s ancestral home, Midway Plantation, to a new location. It involved running huge steel beams beneath the old house (built in 1848), and lifting it up. There was a Fitzcarraldo element to all of it. The image of this huge house being pulled along on the edge of a massive rock quarry is totally surreal. The process of moving the house is documented in full, but the film is really an examination of race, life in the South (told by Southerners, not an “outside” perspective, which often gets it wrong), and the “plantation myth” and its importance to American culture, black and white. It’s an extraordinary film. SEE IT, if you haven’t already.
The End of the Tour (2015, d. James Ponsoldt) Ponsoldt, a Georgia native, is a regular guest at Ebertfest. Two years ago, his wonderful film Spectacular Now, starring Miles Teller and Shailene Woodley, screened here. You should also try and see his first film, Smashed. The End of the Tour, based on the book by David Lipsky, is about Lipsky’s weekend-experience interviewing David Foster Wallace at the end of Wallace’s book tour for Infinite Jest. Wallace was 34, Lipsky (also a novelist) was 30. I have not read Lipsky’s book, but the film takes place over the course of a couple of days as Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg) travels to Bloomington, Illinois to interview Wallace, who had just exploded on the literary scene with his 1,079-page novel Infinite Jest, wiping out the competition in one fell swoop. Lipsky was enamored of Wallace, and also intimidated and envious. All of that comes across in the film which is basically a two-hander (most of Ponsoldt’s films amount to two-handers.) Jason Segel plays David Foster Wallace and Jesse Eisenberg plays Lipsky. Both Jason Segel and director James Ponsoldt were in attendance for the screening. The movie hasn’t even opened yet! Keep your eyes peeled for it.
Ebertfest director Nate Kohn, Jason Segel, James Ponsoldt, Ebert.com managing editor Brian Tallerico, onstage after the screening of “The End of the Tour”
Two more interesting documentaries playing at Tribeca:
Gored, about Antonio Barrera, who has the distinction (?) of being the “most gored” matador in history – and Among the Believers, a complex and intricate documentary about the controversial (to put it mildly) Red Mosque in Pakistan. The directors got incredible access, interviews with students at the mosque, and the leader of the mosque (who has since been placed under house arrest).
Pioneering documentary film-maker Albert Maysles (Grey Gardens, Gimme Shelter, and the list goes on from that stunning standpoint) died just last month. He has two films coming out posthumously, one being Iris, about Iris Apfel, the style maven with the enormous glasses, and In Transit (in which he worked with four other directors), about travel on the passenger train line The Empire Builder (a busy train route that goes across the American plains and into the Pacific Northwest.)
It’s playing at the Tribeca Film Festival, and it’s one of my favorite things I’ve seen thus far.
The two festivals overlap every year, but thankfully Tribeca runs for a couple of weeks, and Ebertfest is just four jam-packed days. I’ve “covered” both before and it made me feel like I was breaking the spacetime continuum. I was literally in two places at once. Anyway, the same will be true this year as well! I’ll be reviewing stuff for Rogerebert.com. The Tribeca Film Festival starts officially tomorrow and runs until the end of April. I have been going to pre-festival screenings for two weeks, and there is still much more to see in the press & industry screenings that happen during the festival.
I went downtown to the Tribeca offices today to pick up my press badge. I had some serious writing I had to do this morning, in a short amount of time, and it had to be done before I left town for Ebertfest. I needed to concentrate and limit my distractions, so I went and found a bench on the Hudson River waterfront, it was a cool grey morning, and sat there with a cup of Dunkin Donuts, and wrote like a maniac for two hours straight – long-hand!, got done what I needed to get done, and then was first in line when the Press Lounge opened its doors.
As I walked across the overpass to get to the Tribeca offices, I happened to catch the moment in the photo above. It was just too perfect. Thank goodness I love movies because I think I’ve seen 40 in the last two weeks alone. And the month is only half over.
My hair is huge, my hair is ablaze, and I am ready for Ebertfest 2015.
The lineup of films and guests is awesome. I’ll be participating in one of the panels (“Challenging Stigma Through the Arts”), as well as presenting/participating in the QAs onstage for two of the films being shown: Girlhood, directed by Céline Sciamma (so excellent, my review here), as well as a sad beautiful film called The Motel Life (starring Stephen Dorff and Emile Hirsch) – my review here. Stephen Dorff and co-director Alan Polsky will be in attendance as guests. Very exciting! Lineup of Ebertfest guests here The list of critics attending Ebertfest is extensive. It’s going to be a great time. My mother and I fly out to Illinois tomorrow.
Of all the Eastern Bloc countries that gained independence after the spectacular fall of the Soviet Union, only in Romania were the former Communist leaders yanked down off the throne and killed. All the other leaders slunk away, unharmed. But in Romania, Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife Elena were arrested, interrogated, and executed via firing squad. It is indicative of the level of brutality of the Ceaușescu regime, and his old-fashioned brand of Stalinism. Romania was one of the most repressive regimes in the entire Soviet imperium. The personality cult of Ceaușescu reached North Korea levels. Even Stalin didn’t go that far. Ceaușescu’s secret police were among the most ferocious, the most feared. Romania was a poor country and Ceaușescu was a peasant who rose through the ranks of the Communist party, and became General Secretary upon the death of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej in 1965. He ruled until 1989, when he (and his wife, equally monstrous – maybe even more so) were arrested and shot.
The Romanian New Wave of cinema is one of the most exciting cinematic communities in the world. One of the common themes is a nation and its people dealing with the wreckage of the Ceaușescu regime, even so many years later. A country doesn’t recover from a dictator like that overnight. For other nations, like Czechoslovakia, for example, it was an easier transition. Their revolution was, famously, referred to as “velvet”, for its nonviolence. Vaclav Havel became President, a dissident playwright, one of the people. But Czechoslovakia had always been more open than Romania, more rebellious. Interestingly enough, when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968 to put down the rebellion, Ceaușescu rallied his country around the Czechs. It was appalling that a member of the Warsaw Treaty would invade a country under that same treaty. Ceaușescu often displeased the Kremlin with his independent stance. I wonder, too, if even they – with their KGB and strong state apparatus, saw the celebrations in Ceaușescu’s honor (overwhelmingly sycophantish) and thought, “Now, now, Ceaușescu, you’re going too far.”
Andrei Ujică’s documentary, The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu, is a fascinating examination of this hated and feared individual, told only in extant footage (newsreels, home movies), with no voiceover. Many of the clips have no sound, so you watch the behavior unfold in silence. The footage is only his many public appearances: speeches at the various Congresses (with his unimpressive hammering-it-home delivery, and his flailing arm), trips to inspect factories and state-run grocery stores (all the workers standing at attention as he passes), state dinners, trips abroad (to China, to North Korea, to England, to Hollywood, even), a vast life organized around his public role as beloved father of Romania.
The documentary is three hours long. The overall effect of three hours of public appearances is both deadening and fascinating. Consider the title of the film. It is the “autobiography” of this man. We get no personal revelations, we rarely see him speaking off the cuff, we get a lot of footage of him and his wife (always at his side), shaking hands with workers, clapping as some over-the-top parade in praise of him goes by … To a public man like Ceaușescu, the accumulation of public appearances through almost 30 years of his life as a leader, IS his autobiography.
The documentary starts with the state funeral of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, and ends with grainy video footage of a freaked-out Ceaușescu and his wife, being interrogated by an angry off-camera voice in December of 1989.
Ceaușescu cannot understand the reality of what has occurred, having lived in a bubble of his own personality cult for so long. He refuses to answer questions. When his wife tries to speak (she seems angrier and more contemptuous than he does), he quiets her. They are trapped. No one mourned Ceaușescu. In the early days, the 60s, and 70s, the parades and events created to honor him were well-organized and frenzied. Crowds of people cheering and roaring “spontaneously”. By the 1980s, the public appearances you see in the film are more ragged around the edges. You can clock people in the crowds clapping unenthusiastically, going through the motions. And Ceaușescu himself seems increasingly unhappy (although he never really seemed happy). But the vast theatre of Love he had created for himself, the pageantry and parades and ovations … it’s empty. He knows it. People will never clap for him enough to satisfy him. And if they clap for him and don’t mean it, then what the hell has his life meant? All of that is evident on his face.
There is a fascinating clip from one of the Congresses, where a colleague gets up in that giant hall, and makes a speech criticizing Ceaușescu for somehow doctoring the voting system so that he will stay General Secretary, overriding other possible candidates. The man is heckled and booed, and when Ceaușescu takes over the meeting again, the ovation is so uproarious that nobody can speak for five minutes. There are stories of the ovations that Stalin used to receive: huge crowds in smoky halls, clapping for 10, 15 minutes, clapping so hard their palms bled. They clapped not because they loved him so much and wanted to clap for that long, but because each individual in that hall was terrified of being the first one to stop clapping. That’s what you sense in those ovations in The Autobiography too.
There is extraordinary footage (not included in the film for some reason) of Ceaușescu’s final speech, given from the balcony of one of the government buildings in Bucharest. It was December 21, 1989, and violence had broken out in Timisoara. The troops had been called in to crush it. Revolution was sweeping through the country. Despite the control of the press, Romanians were hearing what was happening in their fellow Communist countries over the radio. Protests started breaking out. Unlike Czechoslovakia, there was no real history of open dissent in Romania (a measure of how repressive the regime really was). In December of 1989 it exploded, and in the middle of all of that, Ceaușescu walked out onto that balcony with his wife and made a speech. It is a terrible speech. (It’s on Youtube in its entirety.) At a certain point, the crowd in the square below (all holding flags and banners and signs proclaiming their love for him) gets too rowdy for him to control. He is actually heckled and booed. You can feel his confusion and panic. He is completely out of touch. He tries to Shush the crowd, over and over again, haranguing them to be quiet. They refuse. Elena gets in on the act, yelling into the microphone for everyone to be quiet. You can hear Ceaușescu say to her at one point, “Shut up!” Incredible footage. In a desperate moment, he yells out to the crowd that just that morning “they” (meaning the Guys in Power) have decided to raise the minimum wage a little bit. They also will raise the amount for pensions. (It’s queasily ironic that in a Communist country, a worker’s paradise, allegedly, his last-ditch effort to get the crowd on his side is to throw money at them. Sounds pretty darn capitalist there, Nic.) There are some cheers of approval in the crowd, but the scene is so chaotic that the sense of unity is completely absent. The whole point in having a crowd (in Ceaușescu’s view) was to have them all move as one, marching past his balcony, the individual obliterated. That crowd in the square below in December of 1989 had become a huge fractured group of angry individuals. He and Elena basically slink off the balcony, terrified and confused. They were airlifted out of there by helicopter. The writing was on the wall. They had only a couple of days left to live.
The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu does not provide any new information to those who remember these events. What it does do is reveal the self-perception of one of the world’s most repressive absurd dictators. And it does so through showing, in intimate detail (the footage is absolutely extraordinary), his public appearances, his speeches, shaking hands, kissing children, sitting with Mao Tse-tung, watching the changing of the guard with Queen Elizabeth, shaking hands with Reagan, shaking hands with Gorbachev (Ceaușescu’s behavior is eloquent: he looks at Gorbachev with a mixture of contempt and fear), strolling through grocery stores and squeezing the roles of bread on display, commenting to his aide, “The bread is better in the capital,” making a speech to a Writer’s Union saying that “abstract” art is fine, but writers needed to be writing socialist revolutionary poetry as well (he was completely uneducated, and it shows) … It’s boring, it’s maddening, it’s a completely empty life filled with bureaucracy and pageantry. With pictures of him hanging everywhere. Just like he liked it.
If you have three hours free, The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu is a hell of an experience.
James Burton, of course, is known for being Elvis’ guitarist throughout the 1970s, but he played with everyone, most notably Ricky Nelson. Listen to some of that old Ricky Nelson stuff. Listen to Burton’s guitar solos. Astonishing stuff. Completely contemporary, thrilling stuff. James Burton is still alive. Me and Charley went to go see him in 2013, and it was such a memorable awesome night. Burton played with legends. Burton is a legend. I went on a bit of a Ricky Nelson/James Burton tear yesterday and found a couple of clips.
The first one is from 1958, from Ozzie and Harriet. Ricky and James sit down and play acoustic guitars together, an extended duet. Wonderful!
The second clip is from when James Burton played with The Nelson Brothers (Matthew and Gunnar Nelson), sons of Ricky Nelson. They play a really fun Ricky Nelson song, “It’s Late,” (listen to how strong the 1950s are in the lyrics! The couple stayed out too late, and they will be in big trouble!).
Ricky Nelson’s original is a lot of fun.
The contemporary version, with Nelson’s sons and James Burton, is awesome as well.
Zoom in on what James Burton is doing on that guitar in that last clip. Goosebumps.
