Recent Prestige Releases

I watched The Apprentice the morning after the U.S. presidential election out of obligations to my podcast empire. We had already agreed to cover it a few days before, and were sort of assuming that Trump would lose. If I were not professionally obliged, I probably would have chosen anything else to do with my time. That doesn’t necessarily mean the movie wasn’t worth making, or isn’t well-executed. Trump is a two-term president now, so he’s more than proven himself a worthy subject of study. As it happens, I think The Apprentice is an okay movie that was made for no audience. If you love Trump, you’re not in the market for a hatchet job on him; if you hate Trump, you probably don’t want to hear more about him than you already have to.

Like a superhero origin story, it chronicles Trump’s awkward early years, with Sebastian Stan beginning the film as an empty vessel and slowly accumulating all the now-familiar tics and mannerisms, like Batman collecting his gadgets. It succeeds in providing some insight into Trump; I thought its thesis that he gained his code of ethics from Roy Cohn persuasive. The film invites comparison to Citizen Kane (a favourite movie of Trump’s, famously, and a movie directly referenced here), but there’s none of that film’s curdling of youthful vigour and idealism. When we first meet Trump, he’s evicting ill tenants from his father’s slums while trying to beat a lawsuit from the NAACP for discriminatory practices. And unlike The Wolf of Wall Street, there’s no push-pull sense of attraction/repulsion to Trump’s tacky, amoral empire. It tells the story of a bad man who becomes a worse one, which makes it a little bit unsatisfying.

The Year in Will Sloan – 2024

It’s time for another progress report here at Will Sloan Industries. We’ve tabulated the results and I’m happy to announce that 2024 was the company’s most productive year yet. As December draws to a close, I’d like to use this space to outline where Will Sloan Industries has been over the past 12 months, and anticipate directions for the company in the future. If you are not Will Sloan, then please don’t feel any obligation to read further. This is definitely much more for me than you, and is a more pleasurable year-end exercise for me than figuring out my taxes.

The Lost Frankie Avalon Interview

In the year 2013, the City of Toronto was awash with alt-weeklies, blogs, and VC-funded media startups that a 24-year-old aspiring journo such as myself could pitch to. And provided that one was content with earning anywhere from $15 to $25 for one’s work, one could write about virtually anything. As often as I could, I would look for opportunities to interview ageing celebrities. It was in this golden age that I was lucky enough to interview Frankie Avalon. The former teen idol and Beach Blanket Bingo star, then a hale and hearty 73 years of age, was set to perform at the Canadian National Exhibition. When I sent the article to my editor at Toronto Standard, I wrote: “This is the best Frankie Avalon profile you’ll run all year.” A day later, it appeared online under the title “The Best Frankie Avalon Profile We’ll Run All Year.”

Then and now, I stand in awe of Mr. Avalon as a showbiz lifer, and to this day I find it difficult to believe that I interacted with him. For the first time, here is the transcript of my interview from August 2013…

Will Sloan: You’ve been performing pretty much forever, I think it’s fair to say…

Frankie Avalon: That sounds pretty good, I like that.

WS: Or 50 years.

FA: More than that, but that’s alright, I’ll take 50.

WS: Yeah, we’ll round it down. In that time, aside from the obvious transition from teen idol to a more mature singer, how do you think you’ve evolved as a performer?

FA: I think my evolving has really been based upon… I think because I wanted to stay in this business as many years as I possibly could – and it’s been 55 – is I wanted to branch out and do other things. To be a teen idol was really exciting, it was great, it was fun, and it had its niche for me. Doing the teenybopper kinds of songs, the nice little innocent types of lyrics and melodies… and then when that starts to go away, you better find something else if you want to stay in the business.

So what I did is, I made sure that I went to the best mentors in this business to teach someone like myself – who was just, y’know, in front of ten thousand screaming kids – to go beyond that when they weren’t screaming.

So I learned my craft, and I think that’s bottom line. I worked with people like Nick Castle who had done films from Al Jolson on – taught me how to walk on stage, how to talk to an audience, how to perform, and how to sum it up. I think that was the most important thing to me, and I think that gave me my longevity.

Biden-Era Cinema

The imminent U.S. presidential election offers the clever cinephile opportunity to compose a first-draft analysis of Cinema in the Biden Era, and I’m ready to put my cleverness to work. Saint Gene Siskel often said that following the multiplex is like covering “the national dream beat,” so what has America been dreaming since Election Day 2020? Culture and politics are sometimes in such perfect synch that, for example, Rambo: First Blood Part II will always be remembered as a Reaganite movie, or Forest Gump as quintessentially Clintonian. What movies will we remember as embodying the spirit of Joseph Robinette Biden’s single term? I’m drawing this out for false suspense. I’m sure you can predict most of the movies I’m going to mention. America’s neuroses have been out in the open and the dreams have been a little on-the-nose.

On Michael Palin’s Diaries

Thoughts on There and Back: Diaries 1999-2009 and other volumes

The first book collection of Michael Palin’s diaries, covering 1969-1979 and subtitled “The Python Years,” was released in 2006 when I was in my last year of high school. Subsequent volumes, which brought his life up to the millennium, were released in 2008 and 2014, by which time I was a few years out of grad school. Now, a decade later, a fourth volume called There and Back: Diaries 1999-2009 greets me in my mid-‘30s, and reading it has been a surprisingly emotional experience. Palin has been a presence in my life since I found Monty Python’s Flying Circus on TV when I was in third grade. During my adolescent Python superfandom I explored the nooks and crannies of his career, and I’ve spent my entire adult life with Palin’s pleasant, highly readable diaries as reliable bedside companions. At this point, Palin feels a little bit like family to me, and I read his latest volume with that mix of affection and frustration that family inspires. I like him a lot (who doesn’t?), and have also been unable to shake his old colleague Eric Idle’s venomous appraisal of the first diary collection: “Is this the Oxford way like Alan Bennet constantly backing shyly into the limelight with another enormous volume about themselves?”

Late Styles

I had mixed feelings when I heard that another “last” Jean-Luc Godard movie, this one called Scénarios, was playing at the Toronto International Film Festival. Of course, I’m always happy to have a new dispatch from one of cinema’s greatest and most consequential artists, and going to see a new Godard at TIFF has been a treasured ritual for most of my adult life that I’ll be sorry to see end. That said, even though Godard’s films tend to age in good and interesting ways, I do worry that something might be lost from releasing them further and further away from the moment of their production, given how interactive he always was with the moment (he died September 13, 2022, or two TIFFs ago). I was also starting to feel conspiratorial about exactly how involved Godard was in these final works, knowing that his body was failing him and that collaborators Fabrice Aragno, Jean-Paul Battaggia, and Nicole Brenez were doing much of the hands-on work.

On this last point, I got some answers from Exposé du film annonce du film “Scénario”, a 36-minute piece that has accompanied Scénarios at festival screenings. Filmed in October 2021, it consists of a single sequence of the 91-year-old Godard instructing Aragno and Battaggia on how to assemble a film called Scénario – which, to be clear, does not appear to be the same film as Scénarios, or at least is a very different version of it. Hunched at a table, speaking in a croaking, papery voice, Godard holds a stack of index cards, which look like the collage paintings we saw in his previous “last” film, Trailer of the Film That Will Never Exist: “Phony Wars”. Godard points at his drawings, saying that this part of the screen should be animated, that part should have a clip from a movie, find an actress for this part – no, not that actress, one with big hair – no not that kind of big hair… Cinematic and literary references fly fast and furious (memorably, he cites Russ Meyer). Topical signifiers like “Fake News” and “Macron” are sprinkled in; how surreal to hear the director of Breathless say these words. I can’t say I got much out of Godard’s monologuing, but I did gain some insight into how how the production of his late films worked: he gave his collaborators confusing instructions, which they followed as directly as possible.

On Changing One’s Mind About a Movie

I was flipping through Philip Lopate’s new essay collection My Affair with Art House Cinema, saw that one of the essays was titled “On Changing One’s Mind About a Movie,” and felt compelled to immediately shut the book and start writing this blog post. I’ve left a long trail of opinions about movies across my life, many of them in public forums, and a great deal of them no longer hold up, so I wanted to ruminate on this. I trust that Philip Lopate doesn’t care if I steal his title.

Pauline Kael claimed that she never watched a movie more than once, and never revised an opinion. Kael was anything but humble, and no doubt felt that saying this made her judgments seem more authoritative – but if she was telling the truth, I think that’s sad. I’ve found that revisiting art and revising opinions is one of the major pleasures of growing older, and it would be a shame if Kael deprived herself of that. Incidentally, I know for a fact that her claim wasn’t entirely true. There’s an anecdote in the anthology Talking About Pauline Kael that in her dotage, Kael watched Enter the Dragon repeatedly with her kung-fu-loving grandson, and estimated that she had seen it more times than any other movie. She gave it a guardedly positive review in the ‘70s, but I’ll bet her appreciation for it deepened in that context.

The Art of the Deal

R.I.P. Roger Corman

The death of Roger Corman on May 9 has been occupying a lot of my thoughts lately. Maybe it’s not a tragedy when a 98-year-old man passes after a long, prolific, and singular career, but still, I’m sad to lose him. Certain people are living history, and I’m sad to lose someone who could be plausibly described as the single most important figure in American film after the Second World War.

What would the last 70 years of American culture look like without Roger Corman? Maybe Martin Scorsese would have still made Mean Streets even if he hadn’t made the Corman-produced Boxcar Bertha (1972), and maybe he would have even developed the skills of efficiency and frugality that would make The Last Temptation of Christ possible – but maybe not. Maybe The Godfather would have been made, but Francis Ford Coppola probably wouldn’t have directed it, which means it wouldn’t have been The Godfather. Certainly if Corman had never produced and directed a pair of counterculture blockbusters called The Wild Angels (1966) and The Trip (1967), three of his collaborators – Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson – would not have had the runway to make Easy Rider. And if Corman had never tossed off The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) in two days and a night, then Alan Menken and Howard Ashman, the men who turned it into an enduring Off-Broadway musical, would never have become the architects of the ‘80s/‘90s Disney Renaissance beginning with their music for The Little Mermaid. And if Corman had never started New World Pictures, would the environment have existed for a young gearhead from Canada named James Cameron to ascend from production assistant to model maker to production assistant to…

Okay, and if a butterfly flaps its wings on one side of the globe, the chain reaction eventually reaches us, fair enough. Getting back down to earth, I’d say that Corman is important because no one more perfectly embodies the central dilemmas of cinema, which is that it is both an art and a business. But it’s a bad realm for business because one can never really predict the zeitgeist, and an unpromising realm for art because it’s so expensive and collaborative by nature. Still, Orson Welles was right to call it the most expensive electric train set a boy ever had. Corman personinified all of these tensions.

To the extent that Corman was an artist in his early career, I think his satisfaction came from what another American entrepreneur later called “the art of the deal.” He was a Standford engineering student and left-brain thinker who liked movies more than engineering. He emerged in the early 1950s as an independent producer for the burgeoning drive-in market, mastering the skill of spending a certain number of pennies and selling for a few more pennies to earn a couple of pennies profit. He became a director because it seemed easy enough and allowed him more control, and for the rest of the decade he enjoyed riding the market and getting the most out of a dollar. One of the stories he liked to tell was that the day he read about the launch of Sputnik in the newspaper, he booked a meeting with Allied Artists and promised he could deliver a cash-in movie in just three months if they gave him $70,000. Three months later, he delivered the answer print of War of the Satellites (1958). (Checking the dates, I discover that that movie’s May 1958 release was a little over seven months after the October 1957 satellite launch, but I would never question a good story).

War of the Satellites is not very good, and humans are built to want more. Obituaries cited his gangster movie Machine Gun Kelly (1958) as a creative milestone – it was when the French critics first started taking an interest, and Corman himself described it as “a major turning-point in my career.” Next year he tried a provocative mix of horror, satire, and what was then called “sick humor” with A Bucket of Blood (1959), my favourite of his films, the basic structure of which was quickly adapted into The Little Shop of Horrors. These films, both shot in under a week, have the infectious energy of friends mucking around, knowing they can do whatever they want because the films are too cheap to not be profitable.

The Year in Will Sloan

2023 was an active and productive year here at Will Sloan Enterprises. Perhaps the most active and productive yet! Here, in one convenient place, is a rundown of most of my professional activities over the past 12 months. In addition to stroking my ego and calling your attention to various things that I’m proud of, I’d like to put the last year’s activities into some kind of shape and perspective so that I can assess where I am and where I should be going in the future. Possibly some of this will be of interest to you, and very possibly not, but I’m not going to bullshit you: this exercise is mostly for me.

Exhausted

On Juliet Bashore’s Kamikaze Hearts (1987)

(This article was first published in Cinema Scope magazine #93)

Early in Juliet Bashore’s Kamikaze Hearts (1987), the porn performer Sharon Mitchell tells the audience at her striptease show that cameras and microphones are filming the event for her next movie. After reassuring the audience that they won’t be seen, she explains, “It’s sort of a surrealistic look at myself and my girlfriend and how we look at the X-rated film business and our relationship with each other.” A voice asks: “Is it more truth or more fiction?” Mitchell replies, “I don’t know because I don’t know whether I’m more truth or more fiction.”

Pornography lends itself to this kind of chin-stroking about the line between truth and fiction. It’s a genre built on the tension between the documentary appeal of seeing private acts performed “for real,” and how stylized and artificial the acts look before the camera. It’s also a genre built on the promise of showing its stars crossing that one inviolable line that “real” movie stars aren’t supposed to cross. If your job is to reveal everything you’re supposed to keep hidden, what do you keep for yourself? Mitchell, who wears nudity like a suit of armor, here calls attention to the artificiality of her persona, and invites us to start wondering what she’s really thinking.