{"id":3150,"date":"2019-09-04T15:32:34","date_gmt":"2019-09-04T15:32:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/?p=3150"},"modified":"2019-09-06T14:09:19","modified_gmt":"2019-09-06T14:09:19","slug":"art-of-showbiz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/art-of-showbiz\/","title":{"rendered":"The Art of Showbiz"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the 1990s \u2014 when up-and-coming artists still considered selling out as something to be <em>avoided<\/em>, and the boundaries between sub- and superculture were porous as ever \u2014 a handful of New York City artists from what <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Pictures_Generation\">writer-curator Douglas Crimp termed the \u201cPictures Generation\u201d<\/a> would try their hand at Hollywood, or Hollywood-adjacent, filmmaking.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s a story as old as showbiz itself: a critically acclaimed <em>artiste<\/em> relocates to the sequoia\u2019d palms of Hollywood to direct their first big studio release, only to find their creative ambitions ground to a fine dust by bureaucratic infighting, clueless executives and the demands of working within a system biased against everything an individual artist stands for. This isn\u2019t to say that no blood was drawn from the Pictures Generation\u2019s opportunistic stab at the mainstream. Quite the opposite, in fact.<\/p>\n<h4>Backtrack (1990)<\/h4>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"500\" height=\"375\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/WMf2Y_9zYLY?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Aside from Kathryn Bigelow (who collaborated with artists like Richard Serra, Laurence Weiner and feminist auteur Lizzie Borden, before going on to make artillery-worshipping hits like <em><strong>Point Break<\/strong><\/em> and <strong><em>Zero Dark Thirty<\/em><\/strong>), the phantom haunting this informal survey is probably Dennis Hopper. While not a member of the Pictures Generation (too old, too West Coast), Hopper spent his storied career straddling the backlot and fine-art milieux as patron, performer, and mastermind.<\/p>\n<p>Following an Oscar nomination for 1986\u2019s <strong><em>Hoosiers<\/em><\/strong> and rave reviews for helming the LAPD drama <em><strong>Colors<\/strong><\/em>, Hopper rigged up a magnum opus called <em><strong>Backtrack<\/strong><\/em> with Vestron Pictures, starring himself as an assassin named Milo who becomes obsessed with a young \u201cCindy Sherman-type artist-entrepreneur\u201d named Anne Benton (Jodie Foster) after she witnesses one of his hits go down. The production spiraled out of control and the producers commissioned a borderline-incoherent cut called <em><strong>Catchfire<\/strong><\/em>, which Hopper took his name off of. The twist is that Anne is unabashedly based on the conceptual artist Jenny Holzer, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=4SrWsm2xFYI\">whose signature LED panels<\/a> \u2014 scrolling ominous phrases such as MURDER HAS ITS SEXUAL SIDE, EVEN YOUR FAMILY CAN BETRAY YOU and the iconic ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE \u2014 factor heavily into the film.<\/p>\n<p><em><strong>Backtrack<\/strong><\/em> is that rare <em>film maudit<\/em> that grows weirder and weirder the more research you put into it. The director\u2019s cut features Bob Dylan as a chainsaw-wielding artist standing in for either Frank Stella or Laddie Dill (depending who you ask), framed against a backdrop of work by the great wall-relief painter Charles Arnoldi. Given Anne\u2019s voluntary (!) decision to become Milo\u2019s love-slave, Hopper\u2019s real-life fixation on the Taos, New Mexico location where much of <em><strong>Backtrack<\/strong><\/em> was shot, and the brain-breaking list of cameos from his extended creative circle, it seems likely his motivations were classic ones: vanity, wish-fulfillment, and challenging Hollywood philistinism by siphoning money to his friends. (Joe Pesci, Fred Ward, John Turturro, Dean Stockwell, Charlie Sheen, Catherine Keener, Vincent Price, and Neil Young all appear in speaking parts of varying sizes.)<\/p>\n<h4>Super Mario Bros. (1993)<\/h4>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"500\" height=\"375\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/wtMZKYnLg5c?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>A few years later, Hopper would star as King Koopa in\u00a0<strong><em>Super Mario Bros.<\/em><\/strong> \u2014 widely regarded as one of the worst movies ever made, directed under intense studio pressure by British video artists Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton (co-creators of the original <em>Max Headroom<\/em>). While today\u2019s summer tentpoles are committee-arbited down to the last frame, <em>Super Mario Bros.<\/em>\u00a0represents a serious but compromised attempt \u2014 alternatively slap-happy and saccharine, yet filled with disgusting and surreal images \u2014 to give a dark reinterpretation to the most popular video game of all time.<\/p>\n<h4>Johnny Mnemonic (1996)<\/h4>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/Uwl5MBzTCRQ?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>A less telling, similarly doomed example is the would-be summer blockbuster <strong><em>Johnny Mnemonic<\/em><\/strong>, written by William Gibson and directed by NYC-based fine artist Robert Longo. As recounted by scholar Vera Dika in her excellent <em>The (Moving) Pictures Generation<\/em>, feature filmmaking was a pinnacle yearned after by Longo \u2014 already famous for the armies of assistants and technicians bringing his performances and paintings to life \u2014 since the beginning of his career.<\/p>\n<p>Longo\u2019s most famous work is arguably <em>Men in the Cities<\/em>, a series of dazzling charcoal and graphite drawings of contorting bodies isolated in space, redrawn from photographs he shot on the roof of his downtown loft between 1977 and 1983. Featuring the flailing limbs of Cindy Sherman, stand-up monologist Eric Bogosian and other downtown personalities (some of whom would feature in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=NNs2Eofqudw\">Longo\u2019s 1987 anthology-short film <strong><em>Arena Brains<\/em><\/strong><\/a>) the shots harken back to the hard edges of modern dance, and the ubiquitous film noirs and cop procedurals that were a TV mainstay of many Boomer childhoods: its subjects appear frozen at the moment of impact, a smoking gun perhaps just off-frame.<\/p>\n<p>(In a sly comment on the Reagan-era symbiosis between high art and higher finance, Mary Harron\u2019s film adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis&#8217;s\u00a0<strong><em>American Psycho<\/em><\/strong> saw\u00a0<em>Men in the Cities<\/em>\u00a0hanging on the walls of Patrick Bateman\u2019s penthouse apartment. The drawings later served as de facto inspiration for Apple\u2019s first iTunes ad campaign before completing their circuit in a mini-remake by Longo at the behest of Bottega Veneta \u2014 bringing back the original silhouettes, plus luxury brand handbags.)<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_3157\" style=\"width: 1034px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-3157\" class=\"wp-image-3157 size-large\" src=\"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/american-psycho_longo-1-1024x432.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1024\" height=\"432\" srcset=\"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/american-psycho_longo-1-1024x432.jpg 1024w, http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/american-psycho_longo-1-200x84.jpg 200w, http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/american-psycho_longo-1-300x127.jpg 300w, http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/american-psycho_longo-1-768x324.jpg 768w, http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/american-psycho_longo-1-1240x523.jpg 1240w, http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/american-psycho_longo-1-860x363.jpg 860w, http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/american-psycho_longo-1-680x287.jpg 680w, http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/american-psycho_longo-1-400x169.jpg 400w, http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/american-psycho_longo-1-50x21.jpg 50w, http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/american-psycho_longo-1.jpg 1280w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><\/p>\n<p id=\"caption-attachment-3157\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">One of the many appearances by <i>Men in the Cities<\/i> in Marry Harron&#8217;s <i>American Psycho<\/i> (2000, Lion&#8217;s GateFilms).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><em>Johnny Mnemonic<\/em>\u2019s most zealous defenders cite it as an act of subterfuge, a punk refusal to play by the rules of the system, and a tantalizing glimpse at the possibilities of digital technology in a pre-<strong><em>Matrix<\/em><\/strong> landscape. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wired.com\/1995\/06\/gibson-4\/\">In an interview with <em>Wired<\/em> before the film\u2019s release<\/a>, Longo and Gibson bemoaned the co-opting of the grunge movement out of Seattle, and the director alluded to his difficulties with Columbia TriStar brass as follows: \u201cWe did a good job! They gave us $30 million and we gave them a movie they don\u2019t understand!\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The film does feature many inspired touches: Nilo Rodis-Jamero\u2019s production design is staggering, Dolph Lundgren plays a Jesus freak remake of Roy Batty from <em><strong>Blade Runner<\/strong><\/em>, Japanese auteur Takeshi \u201cBeat\u201d Kitano is the main villain, and the climax involves a clairvoyant, cybernetic dolphin. If Longo and Gibson were angling to subvert the Hollywood tentpole, there\u2019s little evidence that they succeeded: the movie walks an uncomfortable line between knowingly deadpan and painfully anemic. It\u2019s often hard to tell what is a sincere prediction versus an aggressive stylistic choice, but this tension is one of the most thrilling things about the movie.<\/p>\n<h4>Search and Destroy (1995)<\/h4>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"500\" height=\"375\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/mxUppySYjHY?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>On the Indiewood side, revered neo-Expressionist painter David Salle took to filmmaking with <em><strong>Search and Destroy<\/strong><\/em>, starring Griffin Dunne as Martin Mirkheim, a would-be con man who turns to filmmaking during a midlife crisis, setting his sights on adapting a mythical self-help book written by a bogus motivational speaker named Dr. Waxling (played, of course, by Dennis Hopper.)<\/p>\n<p>Adapted by filmmaker Michael Almeredeya (<em><strong>Nadja<\/strong><\/em>) from a play by Howard Korder (<strong><em>This Boy\u2019s Life<\/em><\/strong>), and produced by none other than Martin Scorsese (who has a delicious cameo as Martin\u2019s bookkeeper), the film is a queasily self-reflexive anti-comedy who\u2019s-who of downtown NYC cool, just a few years past prime. Martin turns to selling drugs with the help of a magnate played by Christopher Walken, who describes himself as doing \u201cmarket analysis for Pacific Rim groups &#8211; robot systems, medical equipment and information retrieval, sexy stuff like that\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>Costing $1 million, the film foregrounds work by muralist Thomas Hart Benton and painter Alex Katz, a contemporary of Salle and Longo; Walken does a Brechtian number in a Japanese nightclub, and John Turturro plays an hysterical agent; characters dress in shoulder-padded Armani suits at all times. <em>Search and Destroy<\/em> isn\u2019t a fiasco, but watching it means straining to understand Salle\u2019s choices, less in a judgmental sense than an aesthetic one.<\/p>\n<p>While Martin claims that what he really wants is to make &#8220;capital-A&#8221; art, his hustle goes unproduced; meanwhile, he has a fling with Waxling\u2019s assistant (the great Illeana Douglas) that proves her ticket to the big time, making a gross-out horror thriller called <em>Dead World<\/em>. (What we see of that film in <em>Search and Destroy<\/em> is taken from Glenn Takajian and Ted Bohus\u2019 underrated <em><strong>Metamorphosis: The Alien Factor<\/strong><\/em>.) Salle told <em>New York Magazine<\/em> that he pitched the film to Scorsese as a \u201cflat Sixties pop art movie\u201d; running afoul of perhaps-inevitable Tarantino comparisons, he frustratedly cited Bu\u00f1uel and Dali as his inspirations instead.<\/p>\n<h4>Basquiat (1996)<\/h4>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/GsWZyvtX5tU?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Beyond the backgrounds of the filmmakers, what really binds these movies is the search for discernible traces of auteurism across mediums. Sometimes it&#8217;s possible to come across as too much of an auteur\u00a0\u2014 which brings us to Julian Schnabel\u2019s <em><strong>Basquiat<\/strong><\/em> ($5 million), starring Jeffrey Wright alongside both Walken and Hopper, as well as sundry other NYC scene fixtures. While the film has many moments of breathtaking, lumpen poetry (in no small part due to Wright\u2019s underrated performance), Schnabel couldn\u2019t stop himself from featuring Gary Oldman as \u201cAlbert Milo\u201d, an obvious stand-in for the filmmaker by which he embellishes his friendship with the tortured young artist.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1996\/08\/04\/movies\/portraits-of-the-artists-on-the-big-screen.html\">In her <em>New York Times<\/em> review<\/a>, Roberta Smith \u2014 who once groan-inducingly rebranded Longo as \u201cRobert Long-Ago\u201d \u2014 knocked Schnabel for omitting many of Basquiat\u2019s contemporaries, including Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, George Condo, and Francesco Clemente, and for pointlessly inserting a thinly silkscreened version of himself as a young man into the action. (Smith was more generous toward <em>Search and Destroy<\/em>, which she claimed had \u201cthe brittle self-consciousness and sophistication of Salle\u2019s paintings\u201d.)<\/p>\n<h4>Office Killer (1997)<\/h4>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"500\" height=\"375\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/36hhU0OuhHc?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>The final film in this dream-retrospective is Cindy Sherman\u2019s <em><strong>Office Killer<\/strong><\/em>, a macabre comedy starring Carol Kane as Dorine, a mousy copyeditor forced to work from home due to budget cuts at her magazine. Her coworkers are uniformly selfish, hateful people; Dorine declines to call 911 after one of them electrocutes himself trying to fix a PC (the decline of print and onset of digital work culture being one of the animating anxieties of Sherman\u2019s film). What results is a slow-burn killing spree connected to Dorine\u2019s long-suppressed trauma from childhood, a series of flashbacks skillfully rendered by Sherman in the hues of William Eggleston\u2019s 1970s photography and her own famous self-portraiture.<\/p>\n<p><em>Office Killer<\/em> was too obscure to catch on with any kind of general public, yet too incisive and crass to win acclaim from professional snobs (the more familiar you are with Sherman\u2019s more famous work, the more satisfying it will be). This exposes another paradox: any film costing more than a few thousand dollars will require extensive proofing-of-concept to get green-lit and distributed, so the industry defaults to punishing outside-the-box concepts.<\/p>\n<h4>What price glory?<\/h4>\n<p>In that same <em>New York Magazine<\/em> feature story quoting Salle, Longo mused, ahead of <em>Johnny Mnemonic<\/em>\u2019s release, that he had been \u201caccused of being too pop for the art world and too smart for the real world\u201d. If the end product failed in all applicable directions, there\u2019s still something admirable in that any of these experiments were finished and released at all.<\/p>\n<p>Hollywood has always run on recycled ideas, but in the current moment, imagining an artist of Longo\u2019s stature being entrusted with any of today\u2019s massive genre properties isn\u2019t just a stretch; it\u2019s insanity. Salle, Longo and Sherman\u2019s contemporaries who stayed at the other end of the filmmaking food chain \u2014 toiling in an endlessly corporatized New York City to make zero-budget, obscurantist no-wave video and glitch-art \u2014 may not have found success in the conventional sense, but their work will influence future generations, who will inevitably cannibalize it for their breakout festival-land shorts and corporate-commissioned sponsored content in due time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From subculture to superculture with Dennis Hopper, Johnny Mnemonic, and the Pictures Generation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":3159,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[17],"tags":[179,175,177,176,172,178,174,173],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3150"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3150"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3150\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3182,"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3150\/revisions\/3182"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3159"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}