The timely relevance of Michael Mann’s ‘The Insider,’ plus the week’s best movies in L.A.
Hello! I’m Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.
This is the time of year when it seems that any night of the week, there’s a full-fledged film festival happening all over Los Angeles. Movies looking to launch themselves further into awards season are screening at venues all over town, often with starry casts and prestigious creative teams in tow for Q&As.
Josh Rottenberg wrote a really sharp story about the ecosystem of screening rooms and venues around the city that are needed to make that happen. Studios start putting down reservations for the following year’s awards race even before the Oscars for any given year are done.
“Sometimes people think it’s no big deal, like it’s an easy thing to do, but it really involves so many moving parts,” says agency awards consultant Michael Aaron Lawson. “There’s a lot that goes into it. It’s pretty stressful, I will say.”
Michael Mann’s ‘The Insider’ and ‘Heat’
The Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. will launch a new series in collaboration with the Egyptian Theatre on Wednesday with a double feature of Michael Mann’s 1999 “The Insider” followed by 1995’s “Heat.” Mann will be present for a Q&A between the films with LAFCA member and former Times critic Justin Chang. (Full disclosure, I’m a LAFCA member too.)
“The Insider” will screen in 35mm, while “Heat” will play in the 4K restoration, per Mann’s personal preference.
While “Heat” has become Mann’s signature work, “The Insider” is now often overlooked, which is partly why its pride-of-place at this event is so exciting. Based on the true story of tobacco industry whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe) and the efforts of “60 Minutes” producer Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino) to get his story to air, the film is a riveting thriller about ethics, the media, the workplace and what kind of world we want to live in.
In his original review of the film, Kenneth Turan wrote,
“As much as anything else, ‘The Insider’ is a paradigmatic slice of 20th-century America, a look at who we are and at what drives us as individuals and a society. It’s a scathing attack on the power of serious money and the chilling effect corporate might can have on the ability to disseminate the truth. … It shows how difficult and torturous it can be to do the right thing on an individual level and, most important, what bravery actually means and how little the faces and personalities of heroes fit our often simplistic preconceptions.”
A December 1999 story in The Times by Paul Lieberman and Myron Levin attempted to unravel fact from fiction in the movie amid challenges to its accuracy from Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., “60 Minutes’” star Mike Wallace and executive producer Don Hewitt.
That story earned a letter of rebuke from the real-life Lowell Bergman and another from Mann and screenwriter Eric Roth.
Bergman wrote, “The filmmakers who created ‘The Insider’ are clear. It is not a documentary. Unfortunately, your article pretends to be nonfiction but does not in my opinion live up to the standards of basic reporting.”
In their letter, Mann and Roth wrote, “Regarding the central issue of reportage versus dramatization, when real events are approached from the level of human experience, they come alive in ways that they cannot as news or factual report. That’s what drama does. To protest that ‘The Insider’ is a dramatization, as if drama is automatically tantamount to falseness, is ridiculous. ‘The Insider’s’ dramatization is faithful to the truth.”
And I probably don’t need to say much more about “Heat” except that big and loud in the Egyptian, it is going to fully rip, especially playing to an excited audience directly after an appearance by Mann himself.
In an interview at the time of the film’s release, Mann spoke about how he wanted the film to seem alive to the city of Los Angeles. “I wasn’t that hip to it at first . . . but when we began exploring L.A., we found a very vibrant culturally and economically diverse city. … When you’re on top of a tall building in L.A. at 11 o’clock or midnight in January or February and you’re not moved a little bit by what you’re seeing — the blinking lights and the 16 or 17 airplanes on approach to LAX — there’s some emotional deficit going on there.”
John Waters’ ‘Female Trouble’
We are all always looking for new holiday movies. Which is why Vidiots’ screening on Monday of John Waters’ 1974 “Female Trouble” is particularly exciting. The story of the anarchic delinquent Dawn Davenport (the irrepressible Divine), the film is a prime example of Waters’ early style and features a signature scene in which Dawn demolishes her family Christmas because she did not get the cha-cha heels she wanted.
In his original review of the film from 1975, Kevin Thomas cheerfully called the film “another outrageous exercise in poor taste” before noting, “it’s necessary up front to make it perfectly clear that this film is strictly for the very, very open-minded, those who’ve already taken Andy Warhol and Robert Downey in stride.”
Thomas added, “Performances of course are extravagantly burlesqued (or blissfully amateurish), yet Divine’s Dawn, in her staggering lack of self-awareness and infinite capacity for self-deception achieves a kind of loony pathos.”
Points of interest
Robert Altman’s ‘Ready to Wear’
The Academy Museum will bring its series celebrating Italian actor Sophia Loren to a close on Saturday with a 35mm screening of Robert Altman’s 1994 “Ready to Wear” with a print from the Harvard Film Archive.
Set amid Paris Fashion Week, the film is comparable to Altman’s films such as “MASH,” “Nashville,” “The Player” and “The Company” for the way it examines a specific institution or system. Besides Loren, the overstuffed cast includes Marcello Mastroianni, Anouk Aimée, Julia Roberts, Lauren Bacall, Teri Garr, Forest Whitaker, Richard E. Grant, Kim Basinger, Tracey Ullman, Lili Taylor and many more along with cameos from fashion world figures Issey Miyake, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Thierry Mugler and Sonia Rykiel.
The movie features a scene between Loren and Mastroianni that deliberately recalls a notorious striptease with the two from 1963’s “Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.” As Loren recalled to Chris Willman in a 1994 interview with The Times, “I think that in principle it was Bob’s idea to have me and Marcello together in the film and to re-propose something that we had done before. But he didn’t know what we would come up with.”
Loren said she found the record of the same music from their earlier film at her house and had the idea to restage the scene. “So I think: Should I bring it back to Bob and make him listen to it and talk about the striptease that I did with Marcello such a long time ago? Because I was a little bit reluctant. It’s a kind of prudeness, a kind of timidity; we don’t know how the public will accept it. But we wouldn’t have done anything vulgar or too pushy or wrong, I don’t think. So, just in the name of what we had done before, I said, ‘I’ll ask Marcello, we’ll propose it and see what happens.’ He jumped on the ceiling and bonked his head when he heard about it.”
‘The Spoilers’
The New Beverly will be showing Edwin Carewe’s 1930 “The Spoilers” for two shows each on Monday and Tuesday. Starring Gary Cooper, Kay Johnson, Betty Compson and William ‘Stage’ Boyd,” the film is the story of a battle over control of an Alaska gold mine that includes an epic fistfight scene between Cooper and Boyd.
The film will be playing from an extremely rare 35mm print preserved by the Library of Congress. In a statement on the New Beverly’s calendar, Quentin Tarantino said, “This is a movie few people alive have ever seen. For me, watching it will be the film event of the last two years.”
Curiously, The Times did not formally review the film when it was initially released, though the paper did publish three separate stories from July to September 1930 involving visits to the set while the movie was in production. One of which, by William A. Johnston, used “The Spoilers” as a jumping-off point to consider the then-recent decline in box office revenues for movies “as suddenly and unexpectedly as the stock market decline last fall.” Among Johnston’s prescriptions to get audiences back into theaters: “Action and realism! These are the flour and water of picture fare. You cannot make a good batch of entertainment bread without them.”
In other news
Mohammad Rasoulof and ‘The Seed of the Sacred Fig’
Having already served time in prison in his native Iran, banned filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof was facing another term when he fled the country on foot. His new film, “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” shot in secret before he left the country, is a bracing thriller that uses one family to examine the larger system of patriarchal oppression, as a father attempts to control his wife and two teenage daughters.
In a recent interview in Los Angeles with Carlos Aguilar, Rasoulof spoke of what it was like to make films under such extreme conditions.
“Being able to deflect censorship has its own value,” Rasoulof said. “I had two choices: either not to make films, because I had no interest in making them under the dictates of censors, or make films this way.”
