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TCM Schedule for Friday, October 7, 2022 -- What's On Tonight: Pakula's 70s Paranoia Trilogy
In the daylight hours today, TCM is bringing us Lovable Rogues. Then in prime time, TCM is featuring a trio of films directed by Alan J. Pakula. Give us the deets, Rob!ALAN J. PAKULA’S 70S PARANOIA TRILOGY
By Rob Nixon
September 26, 2022
3 Movies | October 7th
The 1970s, particularly the first half of the decade, were ripe for paranoia. The accumulated events and revelations of the preceding years brought a pervasive sense of dread and mistrust out of society’s fringes, those darker places where conspiracy theories thrive and into the mainstream. The Warren Commission report on the JFK assassination only stoked greater speculation and doubt about its lone gunman findings; Charles Manson and his murderous “family” put an evil grin on the communal love-and-peace face of the counterculture; the Pentagon Papers shed light on deceit and malfeasance in our highest halls of government during the Viet Nam war. And this was all before President Richard Nixon launched a criminal cover-up that led to his downfall.
Historian Richard Hofstadter published an essay in 1964 on “paranoid style” to describe “the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” in American politics (an environment discernable in the Goldwater era and even more magnified and mainstreamed in the 21st century). Although not noted in Hofstadter’s influential work, the term could also be applied to the cultural landscape of the time. In Thomas Pynchon’s groundbreaking novels “The Crying of Lot 49” (1966) and “Gravity’s Rainbow” (1973), we get a wild, comic picture of a world in which, according to William Burroughs, paranoia is simply having all the facts. Or as Joseph Heller, in his novel “Catch-22,” declared, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.”
The same creeping dread found its way into the films of the era, reaching its apex in such popular features as The Conversation (1974), Chinatown (1974) and Three Days of the Condor (1975). And, of course, in what has come to be known as Alan J. Pakula ‘s “Paranoia Trilogy,” a trio of films perfectly timed for “a decade defined by mistrust, cynicism, and crumbling faith in American institutions” (Tyler Aquilina, Entertainment Weekly, 2021).
Klute (1971) is a psychological thriller and a dark study of the unlikely relationship between a New York call girl (Jane Fonda, in her first Oscar-winning role) and a small-town detective (Donald Sutherland) investigating the disappearance of his friend. Pakula fills his frames with paranoid style, beginning with the very first shot of a tape recorder, a potent signifier of spying and invasion of privacy. Fonda’s Bree Daniels has been getting disturbing anonymous calls and “sick” letters from a former client, and her behavior from the beginning, even before she or the audience fully grasp the danger she’s in, betrays her fear and paranoia. She frequently checks her surroundings before she moves ahead, whether on the street or in the hallway leading to her apartment. She admits to being afraid of the dark, of thinking she hears or sees things, but as she tells Sutherland, “Okay, yeah, I get these feelings, but they’re just feelings. That’s just me.” Except they’re not just feelings: “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.”
The character is often glimpsed through windows and doorways, from neighboring rooftops. Even her potential protector, Sutherland’s Detective John Klute, is following her, watching, taping her phone calls and he in turn is also being followed and watched. Elements of the backgrounds and edges of the frame contribute to the paranoia: a funeral home sign, an image – more like a police sketch – of JFK on her apartment wall.
Then there is the distinctive lighting style of one of the period’s most influential and respected cinematographers, Gordon Willis, in his first of six collaborations with Pakula, including the other two films in the trilogy. Willis’s work on this picture proved to be game-changing, for him and for the art of cinematography. For the first time, he employed lighting from above to create evocative silhouettes and deep shadows on the actors’ faces. The result was a moody noir-like atmosphere with key elements of some shots partially obscured, earning him the nickname “The Prince of Darkness.” Willis’s technique was bold for its time but the look soon permeated many of the most significant movies of the 1970s and beyond.
The menace in this film goes beyond the stalker-killer trope and deep into the paranoia of a lone woman in a world dominated by predatory men. Even the “happy ending” leaves room for suspicion as she gives up her autonomy, however shaky, and leaves the threatening city for an unknown she dreads, confessing to her therapist that she is ill-suited for a new life that could very well make her go out of mind.
The Parallax View (1974) amps up the paranoia considerably by expanding it from intimate psychological suspense to the broader scope of deadly events happening at the top levels of power and control. It begins with the very title, a phrase associated, quite appropriately here, with both guns and cameras, meaning a change in the apparent position of an object caused by a change in the observer's line of sight. In other words, you can’t quite trust what you see, what you’re looking at may not be where it actually is, there’s more than meets the eye.
In a story inspired by the spate of political assassinations in the 1960s, particularly the killing of Robert Kennedy, Warren Beatty plays a reporter driven by the fate of an ex-girlfriend to investigate the mysterious deaths of witnesses to the murder of a presidential candidate. As he gets further into his quest, he uncovers a corporation that recruits and trains assassins. The movie ends with a chilling facsimile of the Warren Commission concluding that the murder of another senator at a political rally was the work of a lone gunman acting out of paranoid fantasies and “a confused and distorted state of mind.”
Principal photography began before the script was even finalized. Various writers were brought in, including Beatty favorite Robert Towne (Bonnie and Clyde, 1967), and more and more layers of intrigue were added until the picture bore only glancing resemblance to Loren Singer’s 1970 novel, leading New York Times reviewer Vincent Canby to conclude that the central idea was treated “so soberly that they sabotage credulity.” Some critics had a hard time accepting the notion that “the world is changed more by rational planning, however evil, than it is by irrational individual actions” (Richard Schickel, Time). But others from the period saw the relevance of the subject matter, recognizing “what gives the movie its real force is the way its menace keeps absorbing material from contemporary life” (Joseph Kanon, The Atlantic). In recent years, the film has been more widely praised, with many reviews singling out one of Beatty’s career best performances.
The film was released just a couple months prior to Richard Nixon’s resignation and less than a year before the fall of Saigon. America was eager to move past the social unrest of the 60s, the war and Watergate and not ready to embrace a film that was not only about paranoia, but a deeply paranoid film, in the words of one reviewer. As a result, the film struggled at the year’s box office. Perhaps audiences were less inclined to accept a downbeat resolution that offered no light or hope or comfort, and perhaps it did strain some belief, as highly fictionalized and over the top as it may have been. Not so with the third film of the trilogy.
Things get real in All the President’s Men (1976). The paranoia isn’t merely a device or stylistic flourish; it arises from the real-life revelations around Watergate and the subsequent cover-up perpetrated by the Nixon administration that gripped the entire country early in the decade – and continues to resonate in the years since. Not only are the protagonists of this story surveilled and threatened as they work to uncover the conspiracy, but the entire American system hangs in the balance. And because the story is true, it can’t be dismissed as the product of a fevered and suspicious imagination, as “just me,” “just feelings.” Now that’s some paranoia.
William Goldman, who wrote the novel and screenplay for another 70s paranoiac thriller, Marathon Man (1976), adapted the book by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) about their dogged pursuit of the Watergate story. What could have been simply a great journalism tale (and it is considered one of the best) becomes on screen a nail-biting procedural, as full of twists and turns and tension as any crime drama or film noir. Pakula is once again aided by the singular approach of director of photography Gordon Willis, whose dark style is a dead-on fit for such scenes as the parking garage conversations with the mysterious and legendary informant Deep Throat.
The film received nearly universal critical acclaim and multiple nominations and awards, including Oscars for art direction-set decoration (for the exacting depiction of the newsroom), sound, Goldman’s adaptation and Best Supporting Actor (Jason Robards as Post editor Ben Bradlee). It was also a big box office success, grossing almost its entire budget in its first week in theaters.
So why were critics and audiences more willing to embrace this story far more than the director’s previous thriller? For one thing, the heroes do not die, they uncover the truth and, by the time the film was released, the “bad guys” had, in the public’s eye, been taken down. As Richard T. Jameson noted in a 1976 Film Comment article, the film “is committed to an infectious celebration of professional diligence and…righteous action.”
Pakula amplified this in an interview in the same issue: “I had just made a film, The Parallax View, which someone... said had destroyed the American hero myth. If that’s true, All the President’s Men resurrects it. One film says the individual will be destroyed, it’s Kafkaesque that way, Central European... The Woodward and Bernstein story is the antithesis of that. Film students have asked me how I could do one and then the other, and I say, it’s very simple: Parallax View represents my fear about what’s going on, and All the President’s Men represents my hope.”
By the time of the film’s release and in the decades that followed, the national mood – thanks in no small part to the events depicted – was increasingly one of cynicism, suspicion, insecurity and mistrust in even the most cherished foundations of American life. One wonders what Alan J. Pakula, who died tragically in 1998, would make of the state of paranoia in the 2020s.
By Rob Nixon
September 26, 2022
3 Movies | October 7th
The 1970s, particularly the first half of the decade, were ripe for paranoia. The accumulated events and revelations of the preceding years brought a pervasive sense of dread and mistrust out of society’s fringes, those darker places where conspiracy theories thrive and into the mainstream. The Warren Commission report on the JFK assassination only stoked greater speculation and doubt about its lone gunman findings; Charles Manson and his murderous “family” put an evil grin on the communal love-and-peace face of the counterculture; the Pentagon Papers shed light on deceit and malfeasance in our highest halls of government during the Viet Nam war. And this was all before President Richard Nixon launched a criminal cover-up that led to his downfall.
Historian Richard Hofstadter published an essay in 1964 on “paranoid style” to describe “the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” in American politics (an environment discernable in the Goldwater era and even more magnified and mainstreamed in the 21st century). Although not noted in Hofstadter’s influential work, the term could also be applied to the cultural landscape of the time. In Thomas Pynchon’s groundbreaking novels “The Crying of Lot 49” (1966) and “Gravity’s Rainbow” (1973), we get a wild, comic picture of a world in which, according to William Burroughs, paranoia is simply having all the facts. Or as Joseph Heller, in his novel “Catch-22,” declared, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.”
The same creeping dread found its way into the films of the era, reaching its apex in such popular features as The Conversation (1974), Chinatown (1974) and Three Days of the Condor (1975). And, of course, in what has come to be known as Alan J. Pakula ‘s “Paranoia Trilogy,” a trio of films perfectly timed for “a decade defined by mistrust, cynicism, and crumbling faith in American institutions” (Tyler Aquilina, Entertainment Weekly, 2021).
Klute (1971) is a psychological thriller and a dark study of the unlikely relationship between a New York call girl (Jane Fonda, in her first Oscar-winning role) and a small-town detective (Donald Sutherland) investigating the disappearance of his friend. Pakula fills his frames with paranoid style, beginning with the very first shot of a tape recorder, a potent signifier of spying and invasion of privacy. Fonda’s Bree Daniels has been getting disturbing anonymous calls and “sick” letters from a former client, and her behavior from the beginning, even before she or the audience fully grasp the danger she’s in, betrays her fear and paranoia. She frequently checks her surroundings before she moves ahead, whether on the street or in the hallway leading to her apartment. She admits to being afraid of the dark, of thinking she hears or sees things, but as she tells Sutherland, “Okay, yeah, I get these feelings, but they’re just feelings. That’s just me.” Except they’re not just feelings: “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.”
The character is often glimpsed through windows and doorways, from neighboring rooftops. Even her potential protector, Sutherland’s Detective John Klute, is following her, watching, taping her phone calls and he in turn is also being followed and watched. Elements of the backgrounds and edges of the frame contribute to the paranoia: a funeral home sign, an image – more like a police sketch – of JFK on her apartment wall.
Then there is the distinctive lighting style of one of the period’s most influential and respected cinematographers, Gordon Willis, in his first of six collaborations with Pakula, including the other two films in the trilogy. Willis’s work on this picture proved to be game-changing, for him and for the art of cinematography. For the first time, he employed lighting from above to create evocative silhouettes and deep shadows on the actors’ faces. The result was a moody noir-like atmosphere with key elements of some shots partially obscured, earning him the nickname “The Prince of Darkness.” Willis’s technique was bold for its time but the look soon permeated many of the most significant movies of the 1970s and beyond.
The menace in this film goes beyond the stalker-killer trope and deep into the paranoia of a lone woman in a world dominated by predatory men. Even the “happy ending” leaves room for suspicion as she gives up her autonomy, however shaky, and leaves the threatening city for an unknown she dreads, confessing to her therapist that she is ill-suited for a new life that could very well make her go out of mind.
The Parallax View (1974) amps up the paranoia considerably by expanding it from intimate psychological suspense to the broader scope of deadly events happening at the top levels of power and control. It begins with the very title, a phrase associated, quite appropriately here, with both guns and cameras, meaning a change in the apparent position of an object caused by a change in the observer's line of sight. In other words, you can’t quite trust what you see, what you’re looking at may not be where it actually is, there’s more than meets the eye.
In a story inspired by the spate of political assassinations in the 1960s, particularly the killing of Robert Kennedy, Warren Beatty plays a reporter driven by the fate of an ex-girlfriend to investigate the mysterious deaths of witnesses to the murder of a presidential candidate. As he gets further into his quest, he uncovers a corporation that recruits and trains assassins. The movie ends with a chilling facsimile of the Warren Commission concluding that the murder of another senator at a political rally was the work of a lone gunman acting out of paranoid fantasies and “a confused and distorted state of mind.”
Principal photography began before the script was even finalized. Various writers were brought in, including Beatty favorite Robert Towne (Bonnie and Clyde, 1967), and more and more layers of intrigue were added until the picture bore only glancing resemblance to Loren Singer’s 1970 novel, leading New York Times reviewer Vincent Canby to conclude that the central idea was treated “so soberly that they sabotage credulity.” Some critics had a hard time accepting the notion that “the world is changed more by rational planning, however evil, than it is by irrational individual actions” (Richard Schickel, Time). But others from the period saw the relevance of the subject matter, recognizing “what gives the movie its real force is the way its menace keeps absorbing material from contemporary life” (Joseph Kanon, The Atlantic). In recent years, the film has been more widely praised, with many reviews singling out one of Beatty’s career best performances.
The film was released just a couple months prior to Richard Nixon’s resignation and less than a year before the fall of Saigon. America was eager to move past the social unrest of the 60s, the war and Watergate and not ready to embrace a film that was not only about paranoia, but a deeply paranoid film, in the words of one reviewer. As a result, the film struggled at the year’s box office. Perhaps audiences were less inclined to accept a downbeat resolution that offered no light or hope or comfort, and perhaps it did strain some belief, as highly fictionalized and over the top as it may have been. Not so with the third film of the trilogy.
Things get real in All the President’s Men (1976). The paranoia isn’t merely a device or stylistic flourish; it arises from the real-life revelations around Watergate and the subsequent cover-up perpetrated by the Nixon administration that gripped the entire country early in the decade – and continues to resonate in the years since. Not only are the protagonists of this story surveilled and threatened as they work to uncover the conspiracy, but the entire American system hangs in the balance. And because the story is true, it can’t be dismissed as the product of a fevered and suspicious imagination, as “just me,” “just feelings.” Now that’s some paranoia.
William Goldman, who wrote the novel and screenplay for another 70s paranoiac thriller, Marathon Man (1976), adapted the book by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) about their dogged pursuit of the Watergate story. What could have been simply a great journalism tale (and it is considered one of the best) becomes on screen a nail-biting procedural, as full of twists and turns and tension as any crime drama or film noir. Pakula is once again aided by the singular approach of director of photography Gordon Willis, whose dark style is a dead-on fit for such scenes as the parking garage conversations with the mysterious and legendary informant Deep Throat.
The film received nearly universal critical acclaim and multiple nominations and awards, including Oscars for art direction-set decoration (for the exacting depiction of the newsroom), sound, Goldman’s adaptation and Best Supporting Actor (Jason Robards as Post editor Ben Bradlee). It was also a big box office success, grossing almost its entire budget in its first week in theaters.
So why were critics and audiences more willing to embrace this story far more than the director’s previous thriller? For one thing, the heroes do not die, they uncover the truth and, by the time the film was released, the “bad guys” had, in the public’s eye, been taken down. As Richard T. Jameson noted in a 1976 Film Comment article, the film “is committed to an infectious celebration of professional diligence and…righteous action.”
Pakula amplified this in an interview in the same issue: “I had just made a film, The Parallax View, which someone... said had destroyed the American hero myth. If that’s true, All the President’s Men resurrects it. One film says the individual will be destroyed, it’s Kafkaesque that way, Central European... The Woodward and Bernstein story is the antithesis of that. Film students have asked me how I could do one and then the other, and I say, it’s very simple: Parallax View represents my fear about what’s going on, and All the President’s Men represents my hope.”
By the time of the film’s release and in the decades that followed, the national mood – thanks in no small part to the events depicted – was increasingly one of cynicism, suspicion, insecurity and mistrust in even the most cherished foundations of American life. One wonders what Alan J. Pakula, who died tragically in 1998, would make of the state of paranoia in the 2020s.
Enjoy!
7:00 AM -- Beau Bandit (1930)
1h 8m | Western | TV-G
A tenderfoot hires an outlaw to do his killing for him.
Director: Lambert Hillyer
Cast: Rod La Rocque, Mitchell Lewis, Doris Kenyon
This film is preserved in The Library of Congress collection.
8:30 AM -- The Bad Man (1941)
1h 10m | Western | TV-PG
A Mexican outlaw reforms to help an old friend and a pair of young lovers .
Director: Richard Thorpe
Cast: Wallace Beery, Lionel Barrymore, Laraine Day
This was Ronald Reagan's first movie for MGM.
9:45 AM -- The Bad Man of Brimstone (1937)
1h 30m | Western | TV-G
An old bandit reforms when he meets his long-lost son.
Director: J. Walter Ruben
Cast: Wallace Beery, Virginia Bruce, Dennis O'Keefe
A cloudburst swept away an entire filming location just thirty minutes after the company, who had been working on a river bottom all morning, had left for the day.
11:30 AM -- Barbary Coast Gent (1944)
1h 27m | Western | TV-G
A bandit is run out of San Francisco's Barbary Coast and heads for the gold fields of Nevada.
Director: Roy Del Ruth
Cast: Wallace Beery, Binnie Barnes, John Carradine
Based on a story by William R. Lipman and Grant Garett.
1:00 PM -- The Law and Jake Wade (1958)
1h 26m | Western | TV-PG
An outlaw forces his reformed buddy to lead him to buried loot.
Director: John Sturges
Cast: Robert Taylor, Richard Widmark, Patricia Owens
It looks like Richard Widmark is riding Pie, James Stewart's favorite horse.
2:30 PM -- The Three Musketeers (1973)
1h 45m | Adventure | TV-PG
A country boy joins the famed musketeers and fights to protect the queen's name.
Director: Richard Lester
Cast: Richard Chamberlain, Oliver Reed, Raquel Welch
The cast stayed at a plush hotel in Madrid. As a practical joke, Oliver Reed removed the goldfish from the ornamental pond in the dining room late at night, keeping them in his bath, and replaced them with fish-shaped carrots. The next morning at breakfast, he dove into the pool and began devouring the fake fish. The manager called the police and Reed was hauled off the premises bellowing, "You can't touch me! I'm one of the Musketeers!"
4:30 PM -- The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)
1h 42m | Adventure | TV-G
The bandit king of Sherwood Forest leads his Merry Men in a battle against the corrupt Prince John.
Director: Michael Curtiz
Cast: Errol Flynn, Olivia De Havilland, Basil Rathbone
Winner of Oscars for Best Art Direction -- Carl Jules Weyl, Best Film Editing -- Ralph Dawson, and Best Music, Original Score -- Erich Wolfgang Korngold
Nominee for an Oscar for Best Picture
Swordmaster Fred Cavens, who staged the duels in Captain Blood (1935), was assigned to make the fight scenes exciting. Cavens believed the duels should be magnified and exaggerated for effect. His approach was to create a routine that was choreographed like a dance, with counts and phrases. Basil Rathbone was already an impressive fencer, so Errol Flynn trained with Cavens, though many sources say Flynn was less than dedicated to the task and relied more on his innate athletic ability. In this area, liberties were also taken with history. Although broadswords that would have been typical for the era were used (but designed as lighter and more manageable replicas), the fight scenes incorporated fencing techniques that would not be developed until decades later. Medieval swordplay involved a lot more hacking than finessed lunges and parries.
6:15 PM -- The Kissing Bandit (1949)
1h 42m | Musical | TV-G
A timid young man is forced to follow in his father's footsteps as a notorious masked bandit.
Director: Laslo Benedek
Cast: Frank Sinatra, Kathryn Grayson, J. Carrol Naish
Frank Sinatra did not want to make this movie, feeling that he was not right for the part. The studio, anxious to build him up as a leading man, forced him to be in it. He stated later that he never watched the film since he was embarrassed by the whole thing. Kathryn Grayson likewise disliked the film saying that it was her least favorite of all her films. In later years, Don Rickles would often zing Sinatra about it; e.g., "Frank, I saw 'The Kissing Bandit.' It's over."
WHAT'S ON TONIGHT: PRIMETIME THEME -- ALAN J. PAKULA'S 1970S PARANOIA TRILOGY
8:00 PM -- All The President's Men (1976)
2h 18m | Drama | TV-MA
Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward's investigation of a seemingly mundane break-in.
Director: Alan J. Pakula
Cast: Dustin Hoffman, Robert Redford, Jason Robards Jr.
Winner of Oscars for Best Actor in a Supporting Role -- Jason Robards, Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium -- William Goldman, Best Art Direction-Set Decoration -- George Jenkins and George Gaines, and Best Sound -- Arthur Piantadosi, Les Fresholtz, Rick Alexander (as Dick Alexander) and James E. Webb
Nominee for Oscars for Best Actress in a Supporting Role -- Jane Alexander, Best Director -- Alan J. Pakula, Best Film Editing -- Robert L. Wolfe, and Best Picture
Hal Holbrook was the first (and only) choice to play the shadowy informant Deep Throat. During pre-production of the casting process, Bob Woodward -- while looking at various actors' head shots and resumes, but not revealing Deep Throat's true identity (being the former Deputy Director of the FBI, Mark Felt) -- insisted to director Alan J. Pakula that Holbrook was the best choice to play Deep Throat. (Holbrook, in fact, bears a strong resemblance to Mark Felt.) Holbrook originally turned the role down, thinking it would not be a significant part. However, Robert Redford came to Holbrook's house and convinced him to take the role, saying that Deep Throat would be the character that the audience would remember more than any other in the film.
10:30 PM -- The Parallax View (1974)
1h 42m | Suspense/Mystery | TV-MA
A reporter uncovers the deadly conspiracy behind a political assassination.
Director: Alan J. Pakula
Cast: Warren Beatty, Paula Prentiss, William Daniels
The film's director Alan J. Pakula described the picture as "sort of an American myth based on some things that have happened, some fantasies we may have had of what might have happened, and a lot of fears a lot of us have had . . . The Parallax View was a whole other kind of filmmaking for me".
12:30 AM -- Klute (1971)
1h 54m | Suspense/Mystery | TV-MA
A small-town detective searches for a missing man linked to a high-priced prostitute.
Director: Alan J. Pakula
Cast: Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland, Charles Cioffi
Winner of an Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role -- Jane Fonda
Nominee for an Oscar for Best Writing, Story and Screenplay Based on Factual Material or Material Not Previously Published or Produced -- Andy Lewis and David E. Lewis
The scene with the psychiatrist was mostly ad-libbed. Pakula used just one camera and later said he should have used two, as Vivian Nathan's reactions were much more interesting in the takes where the camera focused on Jane Fonda.
2:30 AM -- The Velvet Vampire (1971)
1h 19m | Horror | TV-MA
A young couple accept the invitation to visit the desert estate of the mysterious Diane, unaware that she is a vampire.
Director: Stephanie Rothman
Cast: Michael Blodgett, Sherry Miles, Celeste Yarnall
Michael Blodgett covered his private parts with masking tape for his nude love scene in the living room with Celeste Yarnall. Ouch!
4:00 AM -- The Hunger (1983)
1h 39m | Horror/Science-Fiction | TV-MA
A centuries-old female vampire falls for a beautiful young research doctor.
Director: Tony Scott
Cast: David Bowie, Susan Sarandon, Catherine Deneuve
One day during filming, costume designer Milena Canonero, who is famously dedicated to her craft, disappeared and was nowhere to be found. It was discovered eventually that she had flown to Rome to purchase fabric for a handkerchief David Bowie is supposed to wear. Unable to find fabric she liked in London, Canonero had flown to Rome at her own expense to find the fabric she needed instead.
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= new reply since forum marked as read
Last edited Wed Oct 5, 2022, 08:26 AM - Edit history (1)
In my view. Pakula filmed it in ways that made the cinematography just as alienating for the viewer as the script, such as long shots from nearby buildings looking through glass walls of the building the characters were conversing in. I first saw it in a theater and then decided to watch it one night at home while doing 'shrooms. Not a good idea. 
