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In Focus |
Thursday, June 4, 2009Milius, The Last Apostle by Michael
“It’s the graveyard of the civilization that’s shot from under us…the world of outmoded ideas…they’re all so many dead stumps in the desert. That’s where I belong. So do you, Duke. You’re last great apostle of rugged individualism.” - Alan Squier (Leslie Howard), The Petrified Forest, 1936. “Sometimes that shark he looks right into ya. Right into your eyes. And, you know, the thing about a shark...he's got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll's eyes. When he comes at ya, doesn't seem to be living...until he bites ya, and those black eyes roll over white and then...ah then you hear that terrible high-pitched screamin'. The ocean turns red, and despite all the poundin' and the hollerin', they all come in and they...rip you to pieces.” - Quint (Robert Shaw), Jaws, 1975 “I know what you're thinking. ‘Did he fire six shots or only five?’ Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk? “ - Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood), Dirty Harry, 1971
The Writer It is one of the great ironies that two of the famous exchanges written by John Milius went uncredited. One, the USS Indianapolis speech in Jaws. Two, the entire screenplay of Dirty Harry. In the case of the former, Milius was doing a favor for his friend Steven Spielberg. In the case of the latter, Milius didn’t challenge arbitration, and, hence, got screwed. “I love the smell of napalm in the morning”. The majority of filmgoers have gone through life, some unknowingly, quoting the man. In Oliver Stone’s 1991 film The Doors, on the sunlit Venice Beach, the shadow of Jim Morrison passes over future Doors organist Ray Manzarek, and the germ of an idea for a band is born. The two men walk across the sand, drunk with creativity. At one point, in this state of revelry, Ray says to Jim, “Vietnam's right out there. Sides are being chosen. People wanna fight or fuck, love or kill, everything's gonna flame. The planet's screaming for change, Morrison. Make the myths, man!!” And, in the style of noted inspiration Robert Bolt’s screenplay for Lawrence of Arabia, that’s exactly what Milius does, what he’s all about. Re-writing the myths! Characters expressing themselves in a manner that is larger than life. And to paraphrase, Peter O’ Toole’s T.E. Lawrence, “taking no prisoners!” That is why Milius is not just a screenwriting master, but a novelist in his own right. Like Coppola’s images of air strikes turning night into day pushing the frame hard, like a Samuel Fuller POV angle, or Kubrick’s Starchild staring at you, its eyes beckoning you, like Captain Ahab at the dawn of death, the words of Milius paint a picture bright enough to remain permanently housed in your memory. The Director Milius, the director, ever the outsider, remained stylistically divergent from his peers of the American film movement of the 1970s. Eschewing the New Wave influences popular at the time, or the TV-oriented “closeup-cut-cut shaky cam aesthetic” now currently in vogue, Milius bridged the gap between the Easy Rider generation and Classic Hollywood. Without question, the biggest Milius influence is John Ford. Like Ford, Milius often favors medium or long static shots, and shots of wide vistas, whether the foamy brine, Mount Doom from Conan the Barbarian, or the jungles of Borneo in Farewell to the King. Also, his films are peppered with knowing homages to Ford’s work. In Big Wednesday, a wise man/mentor/former surfer builds boards for the protagonists in his home at the end of a California beach pier. This character, Bear (Sam Melville) at one point attends a party held by the leads. He stands from an open doorway, beer in hand, and looks back at the youthful surfers and their girlfriends, reminding him of what he once was. He smiles, turns and walks out the front door of the house. And like John Wayne in the famous final shot of The Searchers, an unseen hand shuts the door behind him. In the same picture, there is a scene of exaggerated comic fisticuffs (surfers versus rich kids), where surfers cheerfully knock their smug opponents through windows, and no one is seriously hurt. In Flight of the Intruder, bomber pilots and fighter pilots engage in a similar brawl in a Vietnamese bar, to similar effect. The style of the two scenes is a nod to The Quiet Man (the Duke versus Victor McLaglen), John Wayne and Lee Marvin’s wall-to-wall brawling in Donovan’s Reef. And like Ford’s The Searchers (Jeffrey Hunter wailing on a romantic rival), Milius uses these strategically-placed fight scenes to offer a respite from the weight of the film’s themes. Whether this is appropriate(as in the case of The Searchers), is up for the viewer to decide. And if that were not obvious enough a tip of the hat, Hank Worden appears in a supporting role in Big Wednesday, sounding a lot like his character Mose from The Searchers. “Jornada del Muerto is pure Milius, with its action, sense of code, camaraderie and heart. If the film gets made I will score it. “ -Basil Poledouris, interview with BSOSpirit “The very close collaboration with a director who was also the writer. John's unflinching desire that it should play like an opera contributed to the constancy of the score. - Basil Poledouris, speaking about his Conan score, Milius, the director, has, in the past, relied on few of the same creative principles, the exceptions being surfer/actor Gerry Lopez (Big Wednesday, Conan the Barbarian, Farewell to the King), and, most significantly, Basil Poledouris. The composer’s mighty themes have complimented Milius’ taste for exoticism and mythic grandeur, their strongest effort arguably being the Conan the Barbarian score. Inspired in equal parts by Prokofiev and Orff, pieces such as the rousing “Anvil of Crom” drive home the film’s macho narrative with heavy brass and 5/4 time. String arpeggios underline the swordplay, and massive haunting choirs spell out the haunting threat of the murderous cult of Thulsa Doom (James Earl Jones). In Big Wednesday, mournful woodwinds and muted horns spell out the protagonists’ coming of age. The martial brass and snare drums employed in Poledouris’ score for Flight of the Intruder provide a patriot uplift, which provides a contrast to the Vietnam bomber pilots’ growing dillusionment with the running of the war. In Farewell to the King, low flutes, chimes and gongs perfectly complement the lush jungle foliage of Borneo. And in Red Dawn, ’80s synths are added to traditional orchestral arrangements to embody the foreign menace of Soviet invaders. Without a doubt, the bold strokes of Basil Poledouris have proven invaluable to Milius’ most iconic efforts. Sadly, Poledouris passed away in 2006, and while Jornada del Muerto (Journey of Death), a modern day western with a motorcycle gang, has pressed forward into production, something will definitely be missing. The sound of a master. The Man
As a young man, he surfed the beaches of Malibu. He graduated from USC film school in 1967. He was a peer of Spielberg, George Lucas, and Francis Ford Coppola. Yet, despite all that, it is John Milius’ politics people tend to focus on. But, politically, Milius is rather hard to pin down. The cold war paranoia of Red Dawn and his membership on the Board of the Directors of the NRA, would suggest to some far-right leanings. That, and the fact that he was the basis for the John Goodman character in The Big Lebowski. On the other hand, Milius has often described himself as a “zen anarchist”. In an October 2006 Richard Stayton “Written by” magazine article, Milius reveals himself in a high school classroom to be decidedly pro-union, saying, “I love, at this late age, to be taking up the red flag, but you've all got to be revolutionaries.” He also, in the same piece, reveals himself to be not only “pro-choice”, but a critic of the late Bush administration. He was most recently quoted by Thom Patterson on CNN.com, as saying that he would have Rush Limbaugh “drawn and quartered” for defending Wall Street traders responsible for the current financial crisis. As I said, the man is hard to pin down, though the extremity of the latter remark seems to stem from an ingrained desire to shock those with more delicate sensibilities. You know, people who think the height of racial awareness is watching the movie Crash. Still, if Milius was the raging ideologue others claim him to be, would the film Red Dawn, with its high school guerillas repelling a Soviet invasion scenario, contain such satirical moments, as the invaders screening Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky at the local theater. Or take the instance of the Soviet soldier who removes a firearm from the bloody corpse of a man lying beneath his truck’s “From my cold dead fingers” bumper sticker. Such jests would cause Walter Rostow to have a conniption. Irony is never far from Milius’ grasp. “Conan! What is best in life?” - Mongol General(Akio Mitamura) “To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women. “ “It's not possible to make an anti-war movie, because all war movies, with their energy and sense of adventure, end up making combat look like fun." - Francois Truffaut “I think they're supposed to appall the average viewer, and generally they do-but for the young man who's about to go fight, it's like, a woman's naked body, it's, it's sexy, it's war, it's the thing that you might soon enter, and it's sexy, and exciting, and thrilling. And not anti-war at all” - - Jarhead author Anthony Swofford, In the end, while it easy to see, for example, who, out of the authors of 1941 (Spielberg, Bob Gale, Robert Zemeckis, Milius) felt the need to have Warren Oates’ mad Colonel bellow “Let me hear yer guns!” in reference to the plane another character(Tim Matheson) has stolen, it would be fair to say that Milius is far from the only war-fixated individual out there. His own generation gorged themselves on John Wayne in The Sands of Iwo Jima and Audie Murphy in To Hell and Back. Be that as it may, it is true that, in turn, Apocalypse Now and films of its ilk have filled a hole for some Generation Xers feeling powerless and stranded in a society of apathy or consumerism or any of the half-baked adolescent poetry that make up the ideas presented in Fight Club, both the movie and the book. Minus that film’s wit, style and killer soundtrack. The Vietnam fixation, though, cannot be placed on Milius’ shoulders. After all, soldiers in Vietnam (according to Michael Herr and Tim O’Brien) did indeed smoke grass, sleep with exotic women, and fire automatic weapons. This trifecta still appeals to many men(and some women) today. This fantasy Nam obsession is well examined in the Alex Garland book The Beach. The Danny Boyle film? Not so much. But the appeal of violent machismo did not start with Milius. It dates all the way back to when Homer picked up a tablet, and got his war on. It is Milius’ thing. Do we fault Scorsese for his Catholic guilt? Schrader for his Calvinist repression? Or Coppola for making Jack? Well, yes, in the last case, but what we can’t forgive we can forget. Has Milius been marginalized because of his beliefs, as he often has insisted? I don’t think so. I believe it is due largely, in part, to his rejection of glossy product and easy formulas, which is the polite way of describing a lack of recent success at the box office. Yet, to this day, Milius remains a fierce, idiosyncratic voice, sticking to his guns in the vast creative wasteland. Before I end this piece, though, I must talk about Big Wednesday. Big Wednesday - 1978 The story of three friends(Matt Johnson, Jack Barlow and Leroy “The Masochist“) on the beaches of Malibu, Big Wednesday follows them through the Big Swells from 1962 to the biggest of them of all in 1974. We watch as times change, the local greasy spoon is replaced by a hippie eatery, Matt (Jan Michael Vincent) becomes a family man and watches with regret as new young surfers rise to take his place, Jack (William Katt) goes to Vietnam, and Leroy (Gary Busey) becomes something of a journeyman surfer, disappearing somewhere out in the islands. The story is a celebration of youth, and how we try to capture it for one bright, shining moment before it all fades away. Apocalypse Now may be my favorite film, but of all of Milius’ pictures, Big Wednesday is the one that moves me the most, and for a damn good reason. In May of 2004 and January of 2005, I lost two of my closest friends, brothers, really, and felt alone and out in the cold. You see, like so many before us, we were going to be gods in our youth and conquer the world in our own small way. We would grow up to see each other’s families, wives, children. And, like the song goes, we would all go down together, out of this life, and into the next. But it didn’t happen like that. But, now, through the clearness of memory, I look and back and think maybe we all lose the glory of youth so that we have something to carry ourselves through the rest of our lives, to remind us of that one moment when we laughed at fate and lit up the darkest night. And whether you were a surfer or just some kid from a small town with big dreams and a couple of friends to get your back, Milius allows you to remember what it was, and honor it. Through the cannons of war, through the greatest swell, through the flares of our youth, he allows you to remember. And that’s what, in the end, makes him great. John Milius. Nostalgist. Warrior. Writer. Legend.
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