Tag Archives: Warren Beatty

Imaginary Lover

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For better or worse, the 1960s was a time when commercial and experimental cinema occasionally collided, producing innovative, financially successful films such as Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), but more often high profile failures such as Tony Richardson’s The Sailor from Gibraltar (1967), Otto Preminger’s Skidoo (1968) and the unfortunate 1969 screen adaptation of Lawrence Durrell’s Justine. In Search of Gregory (1969), which was designed as a star vehicle for Julie Christie by producer Joseph Janni and followed her critically acclaimed performance in Petulia (1968), falls into the latter category. 

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Remembering Hal Ashby

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Mark Harris’s best-seller Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood pointed to 1967 as the year that the studio system crumbled and a new order emerged while Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls profiled the subsequent rise of the young turk directors in the seventies who changed cinematic conventions with their idiosyncratic films. Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Peter Bogdanovich are usually singled out as the prime movers and shakers by film historians of that era while the once high profile Hal Ashby is often underrated and relegated to the sidelines. Hal, Amy Scott’s new documentary on the director, is a welcome homage that attempts to elevate and restore this influential figure to his rightful place in Hollywood history.  Continue reading →

Dining in the Buff

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The idea of a nude restaurant where the clientele and wait staff are composed of various members of Andy Warhol’s Factory crowd such as Taylor Mead and Viva wearing little more than skimpy black briefs may not sound like the most appetizing destination for dining. Yet, as a film, The Nude Restaurant (1967) is a lively, frequently hilarious and occasionally despairing communiqué from the underground for those who have always avoided or dismissed the experimental cinema of Andy Warhol as something boring and interminable based on seeing snippets of 1963’s Sleep (a 321 minute static camera study of John Giorno asleep in bed) or 1964’s Empire (a 485 minute single shot portrait of the Empire State Building from dusk until approximately 3 am) or just reading about them.  Continue reading →

Working Without a Safety Net

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Alexandra Stewart & Warren Beatty defy gravity in Arthur Penn’s existential noir, Mickey One (1965).

Every actor or director probably has at least one movie in their filmography unlike anything else they’ve ever done before or since and for Warren Beatty and Arthur Penn that film would be Mickey One (1965). Allegedly inspired by the French New Wave films of the early sixties, Penn’s film is an enigmatic and existential tale of a nightclub stand-up comic who goes on the lam from the mob because of a huge financial debt he can’t repay.  Continue reading →