FYI File: Fantasy, Nostalgia, and "The 2014 Project"

Now that this blog has been given its third and final (I swear!!) name, I thought I would shake things up a bit. Nothing so crazy as dropping the pink text color or updating the general appearance to a post-1997 look, of course. But there's a lot I've been wanting to say, so rather than post a succession of lengthy blog posts, I thought I'd post this variety pack of short ones. 

The Twentieth Anniversary of My Obsession With Anniversaries

The hits package that redefined my life. Like, seriously!

January '14 marked the 20th anniversary of my obsession with anniversaries. My first-time viewings of Starman, The Shining, Dawn of the Dead, and Working Girl on blistery and/or snowy Friday nights in January '94 mobilized in me a 1980s nostalgia that never went away. But it wasn't just the movies I watched that month, it was also buying THE album: Totally 80s, the 2-CD Razor & Tie compilation that was advertised on TV all the time before becoming the soundtrack to most of my life in the sixth grade. From 1994 on I was fetishizing every aspect of '80s pop culture while lambasting everything I could about the '90s. However, happy Friday nights ritualistically spent at the local multiplex limited my aptness for thrashing then-contemporary film. 

It is now a time capsule for what the world looked like in March '94,

but The Paper also remains grown-up Hollywood fare at its most brilliantly entertaining.

For the Class of 2000, 1994 was the year when the sixth grade ended and the seventh grade began. Thus the year closed with my being knee deep in adolescent angst, which only kept me going back into the past. I continually found myself disappointed by reality, so I was constantly choosing fantasies that were constructed in another era. My pre-pubescent childhood had been so happy, and the spirit of the '80s was so inextricably linked to my own soul, that I lamented the decade until it became an over-idealized Heaven that I dreamed of dying and going back to. I was not unaware of this being unhealthy, but that didn't make it any less painful to push forward, not when I discovered that being a teenager was to be a lot less pleasant than I had been imagining in the '80s. Instead of forging a new path that would make childhood dreams come true, I clung to the past as an escape while reality came crashing down in the present. And, for better or for worse, I've been inclined to do this ever since.

I related to Tess McGill when I was twelve. I still do now.

And I'll bet many of you reading this feel the exact same way.

A Sorta-Facade On The Verge of Sorta-Crumbling

There has been so much that I have wanted to communicate through this blog over the last fifteen months, but during said fifteen months my life has been in a major state of upheaval. Actually, it was in upheaval when I started this blog back in 2011. But way back then, things in my life were just starting to turn upside down, and the coinciding mini-phenomenon of “Vogue Boy” allowed me to escape reality like never before. For a moment in Summer '11, it felt like my dreams of being an artist and a star had been instantly realized when that video achieved its peak popularity in one weekend. It was during that delightfully manic moment that I quickly decided to become a blogger, and my early entries here are thus defined by an optimism, and even a sense of fulfillment, that apparently represents me at my purest.  

The-blog-formerly-known-as-RobWorld has been a tremendous outlet in the three years since since then, for it has allowed me to unlock and release parts of myself through the written word in a way that I could never do within the format of a screenplay. But for well over a year, I have not been inclined to do any unlocking or releasing, for I have discovered that my life experiences are a lot less vivid in my mind after I make them public here. And, as evidenced in past entries, my memories, and the role they play in shaping my creative output, are too precious to me to be sacrificed.

On some level, I've gotten more screenwriting done by not blogging. But on most levels it has denied me an outlet that I need: not only to write, but to be read. I might not have a huge readership on here, but the feedback I've received in personal messages has been too awesome to be ignored. There is no better feeling than knowing a handful of people were affected by work that they personally related to, or which made them look at a movie or a person or a similar life experience in a new light. I don’t know if I’ll start writing again more regularly, because I thought that that would be the case last November....and it wasn’t. But I think this has a lot to do with my wanting to make every post an event, in turn defeating the purpose that this blog serves, for me, in the first place. I am a hopeless neurotic, still in the middle of a challenging and annoyingly long life chapter, and I need a place to let all this shit out. Some people go to therapy. I go to the stage. And that’s exactly what this blog is to me.

From Sixteen To Thirty-Two: "The 2014 Project"

Like the film itself, I'll NEVER forget the first time I saw this trailer!

When I was sixteen, I realized that Wes Craven's Scream was released exactly eighteen years after John Carpenter's Halloween, which itself had been released exactly eighteen years after Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. Years later, I would realize that Val Lewton and Jacque Tourneur's Cat People’s limited release in December 1942 meant it was the movie that launched this every-eighteen-years cycle. Since then, I’ve been anticipating "The 2014 Project", a film that would, like the aforementioned four films, inject the horror-viewing experience with enough wit and suspense to change the cinematic landscape and redefine the genre for another two decades.

The most bewitching of Hollywood films and

possibly the most influential horror movie ever made.

Since the late '90s, I have secretly hoped that the Universe would see fit to choose me to write this 2014 horror film, and much of my creative life has been spent preparing myself to be worthy of such an opportunity. Alas, I've proven far more adept at writing screenplays than actually getting them made into movies. And without ever seeing your work on some screen, one can hardly feel like a real screenwriter. So last year I attempted to put work of which I remain as proud as ever temporarily behind me, and to instead take a stab at crafting "The 2014 Project". I spent the entirety of 2013 working on eight different scripts, each of which I had hoped could potentially reinvent "the American horror film", but none of which ever made it to their respective finish lines. By New Year’s Eve, I was forced to admit defeat. I was proud of the work I had done, and confident that one day the characters and story elements from this arsenal of partial completion would find their way into my future projects. But by no means did I come close to striking the gold that I was digging for.

If every attempt at crafting a pure suspense picture was even half

as effective as Halloween, the world would be a much better place.

It was not until the very end of 2013 and the very beginning of 2014 that a burst of renewed inspiration and ambition (my favorite cocktail) launched me on a new path. My dream, in this easy-to-shoot-but-hard-to-distribute world of modern indie filmmaking, was that the work flowing out of me would find its way into the right hands, and a quickly-realized project (Cat People, Psycho, Halloween, and Scream were themselves low-cost/high-speed shoots) could theoretically find its way onto a VOD platform or into an early 2015 film festival. But nearly a third of the way into 2014, I'm inclined to believe that that dream will not come true....and I'm okay with that. It’s very likely that a great horror film will come along and make the impact I was hoping to make while I'm still pining away, and if that happens, I can finally say I was right all along. And hopefully, if that happens, 'my little horror film', whenever it makes its way to the screen, will still earn itself a place in the hearts of like-minded movie lovers. But for now, I think I'll put my faith in "The 2032 Project": I have good reason to believe I might be capable of writing something worthy of comparison to the aforementioned films when I'm fifty. In the meantime, I intend to enjoy the writing process instead of mourning my failure to be where I thought I would be when I was half the age that I am right now. 

No movie-going experience has come close to the first two times I saw Scream on the big screen. And I'm 99.44% sure that this will always be the case.

Furthermore, assuming that the every-eighteen-years cycle really does extend into this century, I'll be keeping my eyes peeled for the film that will ultimately redefine our collective concept of modern horror movies. There are already a few potential contenders in the pipeline, and 2014 has only just begun...

Twenty of Bette: Portraits Of Miss Davis In Love

After Halloween, Valentine’s Day is my favorite major holiday. A lot of people hate Valentine’s Day because they see it as a cheap commercialization of the romantic experience. I myself see it as a celebration of eating chocolate, watching romantic movies, and the color pink: three of my great passions in life. I don’t feel particularly inclined to blog about my love of pretty colors, but I would be remiss not to acknowledge the first Valentine’s Day since I started blogging with a celebration of a woman who could portray romance on the big screen like no other screen actor before her or since: Miss Bette Davis.

Bette Davis was an incredibly romantic person, onscreen and off. In her autobiographies, Bette wrote about her great love affairs with the same fondness that she spoke of her finest roles in film. Hedda Hopper once famously said that she gave her best performances when she was in love, and that’s evident in several of the films here: she was in love with two co-stars and at least one director featured on this list. The films are All About Eve, Dark Victory, and Jezebel, and the respective romances attached were with final husband Gary Merrill, beloved co-star George Brent, and the legendary William Wyler. Miss Davis often cited William Wyler as the great love of her life, but I’ll bet I’m not the only fan who suspects brilliant New Englander Gary Merrill was her true soul mate.

This list is a celebration of Bette Davis’s gift as an actress; specifically, her ability to represent an unparalleled range of romantic emotions. This is not to say the films here all fall under the category of “Romance”. My twenty favorite Bette Davis love stories span five decades and many genres, from literary adaptations to gangster movies to film noir to showbiz melodrama to Southern gothic horror. These films thrill me as a viewer, inspire me as a writer, and have truly shaped my heart.

The list begins with her first great film, John Cromwell’s Of Human Bondage, and ends on her last great film, George Schaefer’s Right of Way. But these are not my votes for her twenty finest films, perhaps not even for her twenty greatest romances—these are just the ones that mean the most to me. Some of them parallel my own relationships, while others offer an insight into my greatest fantasies or darkest fears—or both. All of them are, like love songs, linked to moments and memories in my life that can never be erased, and the massive impact they’ve all had is largely attributable to that divine leading lady. Not that the directors, writers, composers, cinematographers, and fellow actors are not vitally essential to what makes every one of these films superb. But there’s just no denying it: Bette Davis’s interpretation of human emotions, and of the infinite ways in which love will manifest in life, is what most captivates me and the millions of people who adore these films and have made them among the most rewatched of all time.

Some of these are funny, some are depressing, and a few are downright shocking. While they take place in a world separate from our own, their revelations of the infinite nuances of romance make them utterly relatable. That’s thanks to the one consistent element to be found in every single one of them: Miss Bette Davis herself. She fought for realism in her films with the same might with which she also fought for sentimentality. She achieved that delicate balance when she brought true love to life on the silver screen in these twenty films. And that’s what makes every one of them beautiful.  

1. Bette Davis gave her first great performance as the seemingly cold-hearted Mildred, the object of Leslie Howard's unrequited love in John Cromwell's classic adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage (1934)....

2. ...while Paul Muni was the object of Bette's unrequited love when she gave her second great performance as the deeply disturbed Marie in Archie Mayo's gritty classic Bordertown (1935). 

3. Leslie Howard finally found love with Bette Davis in in Archie Mayo's utterly brilliant adaptation of Robert E. Sherwood's hit Broadway play The Petrified Forest (1936). The movie introduced the world to Humphrey Bogart and still serves as a timeless standard bearer for intelligent Hollywood filmmaking. 

4. Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart play a prostitute and a district attorney fighting unspoken romance in Lloyd Bacon's classic crime melodrama, Marked Woman (1937). It was Bette Davis's first role after her legal battle with Warner Bros, and marked the beginning of her most glorious decade as an actress.

5. Gangster Edward G. Robinson is in love with moll Bette Davis, but she's  in love with idealistic prizefighter Wayne Morris in Mike Curtiz's Kid Galahd (1937). The Elvis Presley remake is more well-known but the original is 1930s Warner Bros. filmmaking at its best and boasts an unforgettable ending. 

6. Bette Davis and Leslie Howard teamed up for the third time as self-indulgent stage stars in Archie L. Mayo's romantic screwball comedy It's Love I'm After (1937). It was, sadly, their last film together before Howard's death in WWII. It also marks Davis's last collaboration with Archie Mayo and first collaboration with her greatest screenwriter, Casey Robinson, and one of her most treasured friends and co-stars, Olivia de Havilland. 

7. Bette Davis had her first onscreen pairing with Henry Fonda while under the direction for the first time of Edmund Goulding in That Certain Woman (1937). Bette gives a timelessly brilliant performance that foreshadows the roles that would soon define her career, beginning with William Wyler's Jezebel. 

8. As Julie Marsden, one of the greatest roles in film history, Bette Davis was in love with Henry Fonda onscreen and in love with director William Wyler offscreen. The career-defining Jezebel was a blockbuster in 1938, and in 1939 it won Bette her second Oscar and cemented her status as a legend.

9. Bette Davis had a famous romance with co-star George Brent onscreen and off when she gave what she considered her greatest performance in what she also considered her finest film: Edmund Goulding's Dark Victory. It was one of the signature blockbusters of 1939, the year considered by film fans to be the peak of Old Hollywood greatness, and remains perhaps the most powerfully affecting film ever made about meeting death with dignity.

10. Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins are both in love with George Brent, even decades after his character's death, in one of the biggest and most beloved films of 1939: Edmund Goulding's The Old Maid. 

11. Bette Davis's first time playing Queen Elizabeth and last time working opposite Errol Flynn remains one of the greatest films ever made about a powerful older woman in love with an ambitious young man: Mike Curtiz's The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939). 

12. Bette Davis gives one of her subtlest, finest performances and shares one of the screen's greatest quiet romances with Charles Boyer in their only film together: Anatole Litvak's epic adaptation of Rachel Field's All This...And Heaven, Too (1940). Bette was nominated for an Oscar for The Letter that year, or else this film, a Best Picture nominee, would have no doubt earned her a fourth Best Actress nomination.

13. Do you think the universe has kept count of how many billions of times the final cigarette exchange in Now, Voyager has been rewatched?  The onscreen romance between offscreen friends Bette Davis and Paul Henreid in Irving Rapper's adaptation of Olive Higgins Prouty's Now, Voyager (1942) is one of the most beloved love stories in the history of film. In my book, it is also the greatest American movie ever made.

14. Bette Davis played one of her most atypical characters and gave one of her best performances opposite her favorite actor, Claude Raines, as the titular character in Vincent Sherman's Mr. Skeffington. One of the biggest hits of 1944, it earned Bette her seventh Best Actress Oscar nomination and, like so many Davis classics, has an ending that is powerful enough to transform a viewer's life...as it did mine.

15. The first of two movies in which Bette Davis played good and bad twins, Curtis Bernhardt's A Stolen Life was a box office smash and a film noir classic. It's also a touching love story opposite rising star Glenn Ford, set against an effective soundstage recreation of Bette's beloved Cape Cod. 

16. Bette Davis said that Bretaigne Windust's Winter Meeting (1948) could have been great if it had not been butchered by the censorship of its era. She was absolutely right. In spite of this, the connection between Bette Davis as a repressed New Yorker and Jim Davis as an aspiring priest also serves as an unintentional but devastatingly relatable parallel to unrequited love between a straight woman and a gay man.

17. What more can possibly be said about Joseph L. Mankiewicz's All About Eve? It is a perfect work of art in addition to being one of the great screen entertainments of all. It is also a beautiful love story between older actress Margo Channing and younger director Bill Sampson. Bette Davis and Gary Merrill's passionate offscreen romance in those respective roles no doubt adds to the film's pulsating energy and timelessness.

18. Sterling Hayden is in love with Bette Davis for the woman she is, not the Hollywood star she used to be. Stuart Heisler's The Star (1952) is as relevant today as sixty years ago, and its timeless love story is deeply affecting for anyone who has ever fought for a career while dreaming of a soul mate. 

19. Bette Davis's portrayal of a deranged Southern recluse in Robert Aldrich's Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964) is a staple of 60s horror. But it is her obsession with her great love (Bruce Dern) whose life ended violently decades earlier that makes her performance, and the film, endlessly fascinating to watch. This rendition of the theme song, sung in character on "I've Got A Secret", speaks to the tragic romance at the heart of a suspense classic.

20. The equally legendary Bette Davis and Jimmy Stewart finally got to work together in one and only film: George Schaefer's Right of Way (1983). As a married elderly couple who have decided to end their lives together, two of America's most talented and beloved actors bring a vital, relatable warmth to a telefilm so controversial that it was rejected by the major networks and aired on HBO to great acclaim. Having explored countless facets of human emotion in her body of work, Bette Davis and Jimmy Stewart's lone collaboration is a truly beautiful insight into the depth of a love that has only grown over decades. Sadly, her second film with Schaefer and only film with Stewart unexpectedly capped off the "Silver Age" of Bette's career, during which time high quality telefilms provided some of the best roles she had played since Warner Bros. Right of Way was the last film Bette made before a devastating stroke impacted the rest of her acting career, and as such, it is almost unbearably sad to cite it as "her last great film". Yet, in many ways, it is the perfect book end to Dark Victory, her proudest accomplishment, and thus makes for an undeniably appropriate final chapter in what might be the richest body of work of any screen actor. 

VIVA LA BETTE! Miss Davis in France

How did I go my whole, Bette Davis-loving life without having seen this clip?! 

It’s Bette Davis at the 1963 Cannes Film Festival, sans co-star Joan Crawford, for the festival screening of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?. It’s worth putting into context: it was at the Cannes Film Festival where her eldest daughter B.D. met future husband Jeremy Hyman, whose influence over B.D. was cited by Bette as a reason for her daughter’s eventual betrayal. But don’t let that spoil anything, for this is Miss Davis at her absolute best: flamboyant yet humble, intelligent yet unpretentious, regal yet professional. She’s bursting with her trademark New England energy, but still manages to take us all to Old Hollywood with two of her most dramatic cigarette lightings EVER! 

Bette Davis was of French and English/Welsh descent, and she seemed to credit her (maternal) French ancestry with her passionate, romantic side in her trio of autobiographies. No doubt she gave much credit to her French side for her great appreciation of the arts, and in 1986 she was awarded by the French Minister of Culture for her contribution to the art of cinema. On May 22^nd of that year, she brought her medal to The Tonight Show for her first sit-down with Johnny Carson since a catastrophic string of ailments coincided with her 75^th birthday: a double mastectomy, a stroke, a broken hip, and, most devastating of all, the publication of a vicious tell-all-lies book by her beloved (and evil?) daughter, B.D. Hyman. Although she never let go of the pain of what her (yes, evil) daughter did to her, she wrote in her bestselling 1987 memoir This ‘N That that she was “having a ball” with Johnny Carson on this night. And boy do we have a ball watching her! (The interview is divided over several clips, but at 1:58 you'll see the award—and how honored she was to receive it!)

This was the era when I first fell in love with Bette Davis. She had a grand resurgence in the 1980s due to her films, her book, her talk show appearances, and, most especially, the famous indomitability on display in the wake of public heartbreak. I loved Bette Davis before I loved Madonna, and I’m not gonna lie—Madonna is a VERY close second, but this slice of TV heaven speaks to why Miss Davis will always get my vote for THE greatest star of all.

Bette Davis at the 1963 Cannes Film Festival (via Google Images)

Bette Davis’s powerful relationship with France came to a profoundly sad yet beautiful end when she died in an American hospital in France on October 6^th, 1989. She ultimately succumbed to the reemergence of breast cancer, which had also been the cause of death of her mother and sister. No one knew when eighty year old Bette was in the final days of her life except for she and her doctors. This is pretty shocking in theory, yet easily believed when one watches this 1988 clip, supposedly the last TV interview that Miss Davis ever gave for French television. Despite the dubbing, her distinctly recognizable voice is as strong and commanding as ever while she promotes the French paperback edition of This ‘N That. Despite her ongoing battle, and even after her massive stroke, Miss Davis remained as witty and intelligent as ever. But I think that the REAL shocker in this interview is that Bette, one of Hollywood’s most ardent lifelong Democrats, cast her last ballot for George H.W. Bush! We’ll never get to know what she thought of his lone term, but my respect for “Bush 1” went up when I learned he had been good enough for my beloved Bette.