Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Arts & Entertainment

Real art is murder
Valerie Solanas, the woman who shot Andy Warhol, died forgotten a decade ago. Now her never-produced play has been dusted off to combat NEA "censorship."
By Michael Scott Moore
[02/23/00]

Column
Airheads
Beneath all the retro stereotypes and bogus "you go, girl!" feminism, Oxygen's core message to American women is: Keep shopping!
By Joyce Millman
[02/22/00]

Movie Review
"Pitch Black"
Something wicked this way comes in David Twohy's stylish space-crash survival tale
By Andrew O'Hehir
[02/18/00]

Movie Review
"The Whole Nine Yards"
Attention airline passengers: Don't even bother staying awake for this Bruce Willis gangster farce.
By Andrew O'Hehir
[02/18/00]

Movie Review
"Boiler Room"
Giovanni Ribisi tops a dynamite cast in writer-director Ben Younger's crisply told tale of young Wall Street bottom feeders on the make.
By Stephanie Zacharek
[02/18/00]

Complete archives for Arts & Entertainment

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

The making of "Racing With the Moon" turned out to be a first-class film school for the screenwriter. When Kloves first saw it he was shocked. Now, he says, "I realize how lucky I was." Benjamin ("a wonderful guy to be around day after day -- he's hysterical and dry") had directed a softer but funnier film than Kloves had envisioned. Kloves recognizes that what shaded his reaction to the movie was his own impulse to direct. "Once you see a work brought to the screen, even when it is done with real passion and respect, you see things that you would like to see done differently. The painting looks different than what you had in your head, so you'd like to see if you could handle the brush."

In particular, Kloves was drawn to working more directly with actors. "I always felt that writers and actors share an obsession with the truth of their characters. The first day of shooting on 'Racing With the Moon,' Richard was staging the scene, and I walked over and made a suggestion -- maybe someone could cross this way -- and he gently took me aside and said, 'You sit here.' He did it so sweetly. I realized he was right, but I also realized that I wanted to be over there playing in the sandbox.

Michael Sragow Michael Sragow's column appears every Thursday in Arts & Entertainment + Archives

"Once you are a director, you realize you are still outside the sandbox. You're responsible for so much; it's not play. And of course, it's not just that for the actors, either. But I tried so hard to shape characters in the script, through the rhythm of the dialogue and through the expression of simple gestures in the script, that I didn't want to stop there. I wanted to take it onto the floor and continue that dialogue with the actors about characters I spent a year or two creating. I don't think it's any accident that the two movies I directed were originals."

In 1985, Kloves completed a draft of "The Fabulous Baker Boys," a movie about a dual-piano brother act and its sardonic bombshell of a singer, a former escort girl named Susie Diamond. "I spent three years trying to get it made. No one in town wanted to make that movie. Actors always loved it and always thought it was funny. I always thought it was a comedy on some level. But the studios thought it was too dark, too depressing. And who wants to see a movie about two guys in tuxedos playing piano in a Holiday Inn?

"Halfway through shooting, I woke up and thought that too. What made me think that an updated version of Ferrante and Teicher [the dual-piano team who had a string of easy-listening hits] was a compelling idea for a movie? It had absolutely come out of me seeing Ferrante and Teicher on 'The Ed Sullivan Show' and thinking what a weird act this is, and what if you had a low-rent version of that working the Holiday Inns? Here I was spending $10 million on it and it felt insane. But I got over that and was sure in my mission, and enough people have seen it over the years that I feel justified."

Rueful and electric laughs emerged from the writing of the brothers' roles and the casting of Jeff and Beau Bridges and Michelle Pfeiffer. So did potent romance in the chemistry of Jeff Bridges and Pfeiffer and the moody feel of the movie. "What's always been important to me as a writer and as a director," says Kloves, "is atmosphere. And I think that comes from the films I grew up on. 'The Last Picture Show' drips with the atmosphere of that small Texas town; it's as much a character in the piece as the actors themselves. The whole thing of the Baker boys is the way their act creates a romantic aspect for people in these bars."

One of Kloves' favorite quotes is from the late British screenwriter Dennis Potter, who decried the mistake of snobs "assuming that because people like cheap art, their feelings are cheap, too." To Potter, when a couple speak of having their own song, "what they're saying is, 'That song reminds us of that tremendous feeling we had when we met.'" This was Kloves' touchstone for how the Baker boys and Susie should interact with one another and with their audiences.

"The truth is, I intended for Susie Diamond to come in at Page 40 and exit at Page 70 or 80. But I couldn't get her out of the script. Once Michelle was playing it, no way she was going away. Michael Ballhaus, the cinematographer, and I had always talked about the colors of the movie. And I said, 'I'm sure you've heard this before, but I see this as [an Edward] Hopper painting.' Jeff Bridges' character is a walking Hopper painting. I have always had a fascination with hard-edged romance. It's what I always try to do: edgy, character-driven movies that have a romantic cast about them. 'Baker Boys' is probably the truest expression of my sensibility."

"The Fabulous Baker Boys" had a healthy post-theatrical life on cable and home video. "Flesh and Bone" never developed a following. It's the story of a Texas boy who stands by as his dad (James Caan) slaughters an entire rural family except for a baby -- a crime that haunts the boy as an adult (Dennis Quaid) and casts a pall on his relationship with a woman who's fleeing a bad marriage (Meg Ryan). Kloves' roots in Texas and Louisiana drew him to the setting, and he's "proud of a lot if it, especially some of the performances," such as Quaid as the hero and Paltrow as a young scam artist who throws in with Quaid's murderous father.

"Paltrow was superb in it. I wish I'd had 120 pages with her," Kloves says. "She was a dream to work with -- a remarkable 19-year-old girl. I think she's strongest when she's dangerous: Her sexiness comes from danger and intelligence -- and her sense of humor. The failure of that movie is mine. I lost my nerve. The script was highly metaphoric, but in the shooting it became more real. I should have gone more aggressively toward the allegorical. It probably would have been just as despised, but it would have made me happier if I had been truer to my vision of the script."

Next page | Three years off without writing a word