Monaco P. A History of American Movies: A Film-by-Film Look at the Art, Craft, and Business of Cinema
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Much like Driving Miss Daisy, Dances with Wolves, the Best Picture Oscar
winner for 1990, revealed that the conventional wisdom of the Hollywood
bosses had gone wrong. Both of these movies were considered by some in
the motion picture industry to be “difficult” and “uncommercial,” yet they
succeeded quite well. Hollywood studio executives were concerned that
Dances with Wolves was too long, would be inaccessible to many audiences
because Kevin Costner wanted much of the dialogue to be in a native Da-
kota tongue with subtitles, and also was a pessimistic “downer” movie. So
Costner had to turn elsewhere for financing, primarily to a relatively success-
ful newcomer to the Hollywood scene, Orion Pictures, but also eventually
to a relative outsider to Hollywood, Canadian financier Jake Eberts. Eberts
had backed a total of nineteen different movies in the 1980s, nearly all of
which constituted sleeper successes at the box office, including two Acad-
emy Award–winning best pictures: Gandhi and Chariots of Fire. Dances with
Wolves, however, had already earned a $75 million box office gross when
it garnered its Academy Awards (including Best Screenplay, Actress, and
Makeup, in addition to Best Picture).
Set in the 1860s, Lt. John J. Dunbar (Costner) finds himself between two
worlds as the sole inhabitant of Fort Sedgwick, where he was assigned as a
reward after the Civil War. His contacts with the Sioux soon form bonds of
mutual respect and trust. Robert Pastorelli (from network television’s Murphy
Brown) took the role of Timmons, Dunbar’s rowdy sidekick. Other stars in-
clude Graham Greene as Kicking Bird, Mary McDonnell as Stands with a Fist
(an emotionally traumatized young White woman adopted by the Sioux), and
Rodney A. Grant as Wind in His Hair.
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Directed by Costner, who also coproduced it with Jim Wilson (the ex-
ecutive producer was Eberts), Dances with Wolves was filmed with a screenplay
written by Michael Blake that was based on his own novel; the music was
composed and conducted by John Barry. Although the novel had never been
a best-seller, Costner and Wilson regarded the material as rich with visual po-
tential. “Americans are kind of rootless in a way,” commented Costner. “The
people who truly know how to use this land, how to control it, are not here
anymore. . . . At the cost to the people who already lived here, we—the white
man—had to have this.”
Costner’s desire to offer the reality of a West that hadn’t been seen on the
screen before was to be achieved in part by using the Dakota language in dia-
logue. Nonetheless, Dances with Wolves is neither a history lesson nor an attempt
to set the record straight. The Los Angeles Times reported, just after the film com-
pleted principal photography, that movie industry pundits were calling it either
“Kevin’s Gate” or “Costner’s Last Stand,” because filming was two weeks over-
due and the production already was $7 million above budget. Filmed entirely in
South Dakota, during the summer and fall of 1989, Variety commented:
In his directorial debut, Kevin Costner brings a great deal of grace and feel-
ing to this elegiac tale of a hero’s adventure of discovery among the Sioux
Indians on the pristine Dakota plains of the 1860s. Despite its three hour
length . . . [it] stands a good chance of being a word-of-mouth hit and one
of the season’s most widely popular pix.
“The story of one man’s awakening, and, by extension, all of ours,” the Hol-
lywood Reporter called it.
Orion Pictures put up a substantial portion of the movie’s $18 mil-
lion budget. Costner had come a long way from The Big Chill, in which his
character’s suicide was the grounds for the reunion of a group of old college
chums, but whose actual time on-screen was cut entirely from the release
version of the film. Dances with Wolves’s Lieutenant Dunbar learns the Dakota
language and keeps a journal, with entries such as, “They have a gentle humor
I enjoy. . . . I’ve never known a people so eager to laugh and so dedicated to
family”—lines that struck New York Times reviewer Vincent Canby as worthy
for a popular magazine sold at the checkout counter. Sheila Benson in the
Los Angeles Times was more focused in her praise for the frontier epic rich in
character, action, and spectacle.
Dances with Wolves was an abrupt commercial and critical success that,
as the industry says, “went through the roof.” Through its first 140 days, it
grossed just about a million dollars a day, making it Orion’s most profitable
movie ever.
Although considered a progressive movie by its makers, and one that
offered correctives to the history of the American West, Dances with Wolves
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nonetheless attracted union problems that arose after the film garnered seven
Oscars. The leaders of an International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees
local complained that union members who had worked on the film did so un-
der an improper contract. Moreover, activist Native American leaders pointed
out the irony that Costner had an $18 million budget for his movie, while at
the same time most of the tribes that Dances with Wolves romanticized were still
using outhouses. David Denby noted that it was a movie story that once upon
a time in cinema history could easily have been told in a hundred minutes or
less “before actors started to become directors and producers.”
AN ENDEARING MOB TALE
Ray Liotta spoke the opening lines in GoodFellas: “As far back as I can re-
member, I wanted to be a gangster. To me, being a gangster was like being a
President of the United States.” A relative newcomer, Liotta, who played the
midlevel criminal Henry Hill, had the biggest role in the movie, but there is
little doubt that the film’s popularity had much to do with the pairing—for
the sixth time—of director Martin Scorsese with the acting talent of Robert
De Niro (Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, New York, New York, Raging Bull, and The
King of Comedy).
GoodFellas was a Scorsese collaboration with Irwin Winkler, the risk-
taking producer who had gambled on Raging Bull a decade earlier. As it turned
out, Scorsese and Winkler were both drawn to the same written source for
the film, Nicholas Pileggi’s nonfiction best-seller, Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Fam-
ily. Pileggi and Scorsese collaborated on the screenplay for the movie, which
recounts the dangerous, delinquent, and sometime uproarious misadventures
of Henry Hill, a Queens Mafioso, and the gang of more brutal wiseguys with
whom he works.
As David Ansen wrote in Newsweek, “Normal, law-abiding society barely
makes an appearance in the movie.” Ansen was trying to advance a broader
sociological explanation as to why he believed that audiences at the beginning
of the 1990s were finding gangsters irresistible.
He may terrify us but he also acts out our primal lust for power: individu-
alism doesn’t get any more unbridled. Crime and punishment is not the
issue anymore: at the end of the real-life Mafia chronicle GoodFellas, the
gangster is unrepentantly ensconced in a witness protection program. Life,
and crime, goes on.
“Is it a great?” asked Pauline Kael in her New Yorker review. “I don’t think
so. But it’s a triumphant piece of filmmaking—journalism presented with the
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brio of drama. . . . But Scorsese leaves the themes, and even the story, lying
there inert.” David Denby, writing in New York magazine, commented:
GoodFellas is the greatest film ever made about the sensual and monetary
lure of crime, and the whole perversely brilliant movie—an ambiguous
celebration of murderous freedom—comes into focus in a single, stagger-
ing shot: Arriving at the “Copacabana,” Henry leaves his car across the
street with an attendant and, as the camera follows, walks with Karen [his
girlfriend, played by Lorraine Bracco] past the crowd waiting to get in and
enters the club through a side door, going along red damask walls, round
corners, into the kitchen past waiters and busboys as well as chefs, around
more corners, and then out onto the floor of the club itself, where a smiling
headwaiter greets Henry and Karen, and offers them a bottle of champagne
as a gift from some smiling wiseguys at a neighboring table.
This screen sequence cited by Denby is so powerful because it constitutes a
seamless, fluid, four-minute descent to the depth of the underworld life but si-
multaneously portrays the feeling of its heights. This critic also praises Michael
Ballhaus, the director of photography on GoodFellas, who works a smoothly
galvanized camera that is essential to telling the movie entirely from Henry’s
point of view as a record of immoderate pleasures.
Still, some critics complained the movie is more loosely and inconclu-
sively plotted than most Scorsese films. The Variety review said the movie
was “simultaneously fascinating and repellant, colorful, but dramatically
unsatisfying.”
Scorsese had had a great critical success with Raging Bull (1980), which
was selected by several polls of movie critics as the best film of the 1980s, a
picture in which he presented his central character as an icon of brutishness.
This time, he wanted the central characters to be realistically shallow, and
he succeeded. What plays off their shallowness aesthetically is the rapid-fire
switch from visceral violence to giddy comedy throughout the movie as edited
by Thelma Schoonmaker. Paulie Cicero (Paul Sorvino) and Jimmy Conway
(De Niro) are, in the end, the close friends that Henry betrays and loses forever
when he testifies at trial against his Mafia colleagues. Like so many Scorsese
films, at the end of the day, GoodFellas is best appreciated as a buddy picture.
THE GRISLY RISE OF HANNIBAL LECTER
In the early 1990s, in the competition for the Academy’s Best Picture Oscar,
Orion Pictures was on a roll. The company had purchased the rights to the
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Thomas Harris novel The Silence of the Lambs, initially with the assumption
that Gene Hackman would make his directing debut with the feature and star
in it. These planned elements of the production package, however, changed
quickly, and Anthony Hopkins was given the male lead as Hannibal Lecter
and Jonathan Demme was chosen to direct. Earlier films by Demme, such
as Howard and Melvin and Stop Making Sense, had done well with the critics,
but were not big moneymakers. After Demme came on board, his company,
Strong Heart Productions, worked out a budget for The Silence of the Lambs
of about $19 million. Then, Demme quickly assembled the same production
team that he had used on Married to the Mob, led by his director of photogra-
phy, Tak Fujimoto. The Silence of the Lambs was filmed on location in Pitts-
burgh and Washington, D.C.
The story centers on Clarice Starling, a gutsy FBI trainee played by Jodie
Foster, who is hunting a serial killer who murders women to make a suit
from their skins. With a poster campaign featuring Foster’s face with a but-
terfly with a death skull on its back covering her lips, the movie was released
on Valentine’s Day, 1991. The poster’s single, enigmatic image played off the
film’s tension and morbidity, while simultaneously evoking the female lead’s
innocent demeanor.
Even before its release, the movie was the subject of objections and
protests because of claims that the movie portrayed the degradation of
women and perpetuated negative gay stereotypes. Village Voice critic Mi-
chael Musto called the film an exercise in disgust: “Mutilation, cannibalism,
Roger Corman in a supporting role—not what you’d expect from Jonathan
Demme. . . . Jodie Foster’s character makes one fleeting disclaimer, assuring
us that the psychotic girl-mutilator she’s tracking down is not your typical
transsexual. No shit, Sherlock.” However, many reviewers ignored such
complaints. Boxoffice assessed Silence of the Lambs to be the unusual combina-
tion of a “crackling commercial formula film” and “an undeniably brilliant
example of the moviemaker’s art.”
The duel of wits between Hannibal the Cannibal—a brilliant, though
perverse, psychiatrist and professor—and Clarice, an orphan child from Ap-
palachia, produces the kind of easily accessible conflict that appeals repeatedly
to moviegoers. As he gives her clues to the killer Buffalo Bill’s mind and
identity, Hannibal simultaneously probes into the recesses of her background.
As Newsweek’s reviewer David Ansen observed of their talks, in them Hanni-
bal becomes a kind of “intellectual suitor,” shot in the manner of exaggerated
close-ups that have a “horrific, weirdly erotic intimacy.”
Critic David Denby argued in New York that the film gives viewers the
kick of uncontrollable perversions and the thrill of broken taboos: “This is a
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creepy thriller, and one with strong audience appeal overseas.” Variety’s re-
view called it
a mesmerizing thriller that will grip audiences from the first scene to the last
. . . [since it] intelligently wallows in the fascination for aberrant psychology
and perverse evil, delivering the goods in a way that should electrify both
critics and mainstream audiences and generate solid box office.
True to that forecast, the film performed well both in the United States and
abroad. Variety reported that The Silence of the Lambs set a record for a three-day
box office take in the United Kingdom with its opening in London in June.
Despite the protests, the movie drew ten Oscar nominations, including
Best Picture, and won a Golden Globe for Best Picture awarded by the Hol-
lywood foreign press. By the time the run-up to Oscar season began, Orion
Pictures was in bankruptcy court. Orion still owed Kevin Costner’s produc-
tion company $3 million for Dances with Wolves and was at least $360,000 in
debt to Demme, the director of its smash hit, which had grossed $137 million
in just domestic rental revenues. In its “dances with debt,” wrote Time, Orion
was struggling to keep the wolves from the door. (Puns flew about Silence as
well, such as, “This movie has bite.”)
When the Best Picture Oscar triumph came for The Silence of the Lambs
in April 1992, Orion already was going out of business as a motion picture
distributor. Hence, the movie’s commercial value at the time was hardly in-
creased at all by its Oscar win. Still, it was the only film ever to win a Best
Picture Academy Award that can be described by genre as a horror movie.
ANOTHER EASTWOOD SUCCESS
Since the 1950s, a number of actors had become movie directors, some had
become movie producers, and some had opened their own motion picture
production companies. Clint Eastwood was one of the most successful Holly-
wood figures to do all three. In 1992, Eastwood starred in and directed one of
the finest westerns ever made, Unforgiven (with the same title as a 1960 western
directed by John Huston that starred Burt Lancaster and Audrey Hepburn).
Unforgiven was a dark tale, starring Eastwood and Gene Hackman.
A Warner Bros. release of a Malpaso (Eastwood’s production company)
film, Unforgiven was financed in part by the studio even though westerns
weren’t “in” and Eastwood and Hackman were not exactly teenage idols.
It was an unapologetically mature and contemplative movie. During devel-
opment, the film was known alternatively by the titles The William Munny
New Hollywood Enters the Digital Age 279
Killings and The Cut Whore Killings. The screenwriter, David Webb Peoples,
nurtured the script along and was eventually given credit as a producer on the
movie, as well.
Unforgiven was perceived throughout the movie industry as bucking the
popular wisdom that the western was dead. With a strong supporting cast that
included Morgan Freeman, playing Ned Logan, Bill Munny’s (Eastwood) only
friend, and Richard Harris as a killer-for-hire called English Bob, the movie
defied the industry’s conventional template, playing well in both urban and
rural areas, as well as drawing audiences across age and gender lines. Surely it
was a movie to which movie professionals are favorably drawn. It’s the kind of
film that crosses the predictable tastes of the moment and that pays homage to
originality. The Academy chose Unforgiven as its Best Picture for 1992.
At a time when the motion picture industry and the national press were
both beginning to pay attention to the earnings a movie made on the first
weekend of its release, Unforgiven opened with the best August weekend up
until that time at $14.6 million. The Hollywood Reporter was quick to praise
the promotional campaign for the movie as a triumph for the Warner Bros.’s
distribution team led by Barry Reardon.
The subject matter was hardly predictable as a big box office draw, the
movie being a saga of guilt and redemption set in a grim Wyoming town
called Big Whiskey. When a prostitute (Anna Thomson) is slashed to death
by a drunken cowboy who cannot perform sexually, another prostitute played
by Frances Fisher (Eastwood’s real-life romantic partner at the time) years later
focuses her anger sufficiently to mobilize support to create a reward and revive
the search to apprehend and punish the culprit. However, the local sheriff,
Bill Daggett (Hackman), has taken the position that this is much ado about a
matter of scant consequence and that the slashing is best left alone. Moreover,
it’s a matter now seemingly well in the past and behind the town; the accused
old gunslinger is now a pig farmer and a widower raising two kids. For those
moviegoers looking for lessons, Unforgiven does remind its viewers that rem-
edies are illusory and often carry an unexpected price.
The review in USA Today remarked that it was Eastwood’s best movie
as a director and the best western directed by anybody in twenty years. Across
the nation, local reviewers and critics were consistent in their praise. In Time,
Richard Corliss wrote that he saw Unforgiven as questioning the rules of a
macho genre, with Eastwood summing up macho attitudes in this movie, but
at the same time atoning for the flinty violence in his previous films that had
made him rich and famous.
Eastwood’s mentors were the directors Don Siegel and Sergio Leone,
to whom this movie was dedicated. Design was by Hollywood veteran
Henry Bumstead. The movie’s director of photography, Jack N. Green,
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provided a look that was dark and ominous and entirely appropriate to the
subject matter.
Among the critics, there are always doubters, of course. Seasoned critic
Stanley Kauffmann of the New Republic was unkind, bemoaning Peoples’s
screenplay and calling Eastwood’s direction “lively but unoriginal.” Marilyn
Beck, writing in the Los Angeles Press Telegram, offered: “Odds are he’ll walk
out of the Music Center laden with Oscars. Not because Unforgiven necessar-
ily deserves them, but because this seems to be Clint’s year among many in
the industry.”
HISTORICAL, BLACK-AND-WHITE, TRIUMPHAL
The success of Unforgiven surprised movie industry experts, but the success of
Schindler’s List was even more astonishing. How do you sell audiences on a
three-hour black-and-white movie, with no major American stars, about the
Holocaust? At the time, these questions were being posed by many in the mo-
tion picture industry with regard to the project that went on to win the Best
Picture Oscar for 1993.
As early as 1963, a development deal for a film about Oskar Schindler, a
German factory owner who had apparently saved thousands of Jews from Nazi
extermination, had gone into the works with MGM, but had never panned
out. In the early 1990s, one answer to the motion picture industry’s questions
about the viability of such a movie was that Amblin Entertainment and Uni-
versal Pictures would be working with Steven Spielberg. By now, Spielberg
was a Hollywood giant and an acclaimed director known worldwide. Still, his
record was mixed. As a director, Spielberg had succeeded with commercial
fantasy-adventure films, such as the record-grossing E.T. and the more recent
Jurassic Park, but had received decidedly mixed reviews and audience responses
for his more adult-themed efforts, such as The Color Purple, Empire of the Sun,
and Always. Being a name director for nearly two decades was no guarantee
for success with your next picture in this high-risk business. Schindler’s List
had become a pet project for Spielberg, but even for the vaunted Hollywood
super-player, it took more than ten years to bring the project through devel-
opment and into production.
The screenplay for the movie was based on Thomas Keneally’s 1982
best-seller, adapted for the screen by Steven Zaillian, after Universal purchased
the rights for $500,000. Spielberg served as a producer of the film, along with
Gerald R. Molen and Branko Lustig. Polish cinematographer Janusz Kamin-
ski was chosen as the movie’s director of photography. Spielberg originally
planned to film at the Auschwitz concentration camp, but encountered resis-
New Hollywood Enters the Digital Age 281
tance from the Jewish community. After negotiations with representatives of
the World Jewish Congress, the production company eventually built a replica
of the camp for its set, supervised by production designer Allan Starski.
Even the screen talent appeared to finally find just the right level and
tone for their performances. The complex SS commandant Amon Goeth is
played convincingly by British stage actor Ralph Fiennes. Ben Kingsley de-
livers the role of Itzhak Stern, the Jewish accountant who Schindler chooses
to run his factory, with a delicious combination of gratitude, disdain, sub-
servience, and pride. Spielberg credited Universal, the studio with which he
had been working since he broke into Hollywood in the early 1970s, with
pursuing a $22 million project for which there appeared to be “little com-
mercial upside.” Ostensibly, MCA president Sid Sheinberg urged Spielberg
to stay with the project, telling him: “It will be remembered when Jurassic
Park is long forgotten.” The movie played out as complex and provoca-
tive to many viewers because the title character remains such an enigma.
Schindler’s motives are puzzling, because he was driven by no clear political,
religious, or social principle.
As New York Times movie critic Janet Maslin observed, Spielberg directed
Schindler’s List with a fury and immediacy that most critics like her found to be
profoundly surprising. She praised Michael Kahn’s nimble editing. Similarly,
Julie Salamon, writing in the Wall Street Journal, said that she believed that
Spielberg’s passion for the subject liberated him enough so that he could make
a film that is almost entirely free of artifice. In Screen International, reviewer Ana
Maria Bahiana called it Spielberg’s most passionate, yet simultaneously most
restrained, film; John Williams’s score showed Bahiana a similar restraint, and,
she continued, Kaminski’s camerawork had the depth of feeling and hypnotic
beauty of Italian neorealist films made right after World War II. Kenneth
Turan also praised the director’s restraint, which he found surprising coming
from a director whom he considered to be the “Master of Razzamatazz.”
Critic David Denby observed that the film caused Spielberg to work with his
usual kinetic dynamism, but now with a furious purpose as well.
The photography is in black-and-white, and Spielberg actually operated
a camera himself for many of the sequences, but the thematic complexity of
the movie is constantly reinvestigating good and evil. David Thompson in
Britain’s Independent called it one of the cinema’s finest achievements: “With
its grave documentary thoroughness and moral complexity, it rewrites film
history.” In the New Republic, Leon Wieseltier argued that Hollywood had
owed the American public this film after decades of stupefying the public,
stuffing it with illusion, and blurring the distinction of fiction and fact. Shortly
after its premiere in 1993, the Hollywood Reporter began touting Schindler’s List
as an Oscar-worthy picture.