Great Writer and Cineaste

Despite his role in Cimino's Heaven's Gate, Steven Bach appreciation and understanding of film extends far beyond what he is most associated with. Final Cut is not only one of the most intriguing books on the industry, it is also an exemplary memoir and piece of non-fiction writing.

Steven Bach, Producer, Biographer and Memoirist, Dies at 70 March 28, 2009

By WILLIAM GRIMES

Steven Bach, who as a studio executive at United Artists took the fall for the colossal failure of the western epic “Heaven’s Gate” but went on to write “Final Cut,” a gripping insider account of the debacle, died on Wednesday at his home in Arlington, Vt. He was 70 and also had a home in Munich.

The cause was cancer, said Robert Lescher, his agent.

At United Artists, where he became senior vice president in charge of worldwide production in 1978, Mr. Bach had the misfortune to be associated with one of the greatest cinematic disasters in Hollywood history, the 1980 film “Heaven’s Gate,” a sprawling historical drama about range wars in Wyoming in the 1890s. Under the direction of Michael Cimino, whose film “The Deer Hunter” had recently won five Academy Awards, the film grew to enormous length — the first version screened in New York ran three and a half hours — and ended up costing $36 million, five times the budget of an average studio film at the time.

The reviews were savage, even after the film had been drastically shortened.

“If the film was formless at four hours, it was insipid at 140 minutes,” Roger Ebert wrote. “At either length it is so incompetently photographed and edited that there are times when we are not even sure which character we are looking at.”

The box office was worse. “It is as if somebody called every household in the country and said, ‘There will be a curse on your family if you go see this picture,’ ” one United Artists executive said.

In the aftermath Mr. Bach was fired. He turned around and documented his experience in “Final Cut: Dreams and Disaster in the Making of ‘Heaven’s Gate’ ” (1985), regarded as a classic insider account of Hollywood.

“It is the best book ever written about the making of a movie,” the film critic David Thomson said. “It gives you an understanding of the battles, the egos, and how a film like that could come about. It’s all the more remarkable because he’s one of the stooges in the story: he let it happen, and he admits that.”

Mr. Bach was born in Pocatello, Idaho, and attended high school in Boise. After studying at the Sorbonne and earning a degree in French and English from Northwestern University in 1961, he taught American literature at New Trier High School in Winnetka, Ill.

In 1966 he moved to Los Angeles and, after working in public relations, earned a doctorate in film at the University of Southern California, writing a dissertation on the films of Josef von Sternberg.

For the next decade he worked as a story editor on theatrical and film projects with the producer Gabriel Katzka, and as executive story editor for Palomar Pictures International, which produced “Sleuth” and “The Heartbreak Kid.”

As a partner in Pantheon Pictures in the early 1970s, he helped produce the plays “The Comedians” and “Anna Christie,” with Liv Ullmann, on Broadway, and several films, including “The Parallax View,” “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three” and “Mr. Billion.”

As vice president and head of international production at United Artists, Mr. Bach did more than preside over the “Heaven’s Gate” affair. He helped bring to the screen critically or commercially successful films like “Raging Bull,” “The French Lieutenant’s Woman,” “Stardust Memories,” “Annie Hall,” “Eye of the Needle,” “Cutter and Bone” and “True Confessions.”

No matter. Close proximity to “Heaven’s Gate” sealed his fate and that of the studio, which was sold to MGM while “Heaven’s Gate” was being shown at the Cannes Film Festival.

Mr. Bach, regarded as perhaps too much of an intellectual and a gentleman to run a studio, turned his hand to writing and teaching. He wrote three well-received biographies: “Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend” (1992), “Dazzler: The Life and Times of Moss Hart” (2001) and “Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl” (2007).

In the late 1990s he taught in the film program at Columbia University and for the last decade he taught film and literature at Bennington College.

He is survived by his companion, Werner Röhr.

He lived long enough to see critical opinion begin to shift on “Heaven’s Gate.” “That’s the final irony,” Mr. Thomson said. “I think it’s a much more interesting picture than its legend would lead one to believe. It wouldn’t surprise me if one day it’s regarded as a great film.”

The Greatest

A Swedish Director’s Literary Lens

By MIKE HALE

March 5, 2009
The New York Times

At the age of 77 the Swedish director Jan Troell — after a four-decade career that includes a best picture prize at the Berlin Film Festival, a Golden Palm nomination at Cannes and a best picture Oscar nomination — is among the world’s most distinguished filmmakers. He is also practically invisible in the United States.

Only two of his films, the well-regarded 1996 “Hamsun,” about the Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun, and “Hurricane,” a misfire from his brief sojourn in Hollywood in the late 1970s, are available here on DVD. His masterpieces — “The Emigrants,” “The New Land,” “The Flight of the Eagle” — have not been in print since the days of the laser disc.

It’s a state of affairs that can drive his American fans to distraction but that does not appear to hold any particular interest for Mr. Troell.

“I haven’t really thought about that,” Mr. Troell (pronounced tro-el) said by phone from his home near Malmo recently before politely moving the discussion to more relevant topics, like the opening in New York and Los Angeles on Friday of his latest movie, “Everlasting Moments,” a 2009 Golden Globe nominee for best foreign-language film. It will be the first Troell movie released in the United States in 12 years, but who’s counting?

Mr. Troell’s relative obscurity here might seem surprising given the splash he made in America with his third film, “The Emigrants,” in 1972. The story of 19th-century farmers making an epic journey from southern Sweden to the forests of Minnesota earned four Oscar nominations that year: for best adapted screenplay, director, actress (Liv Ullmann) and picture. It is still one of only eight foreign-language films to get a best-picture nod.

But possible reasons for his low profile, beyond the natural reserve evident in conversation, come to mind easily. There’s the Ingmar Bergman factor, for one thing. Perhaps there has been room in the American consciousness for only one 20th-century Swedish cinematic genius. Mr. Troell, of course, was quick to dismiss the notion that he had worked in his countryman’s shadow.

“I would prefer to say I’ve been in the sun of Bergman,” he said. “His films have always inspired me.”

And Mr. Troell has not been prolific, making 12 features in 43 years. He said that with documentaries and television films he had worked more or less steadily but acknowledged that his pace was deliberate.

“It has taken a very long time for several of the films to be financed,” he said, “mainly because I have not been what film companies usually are looking for. And I’ve been quite expensive sometimes too.”

That comes with the territory when you have a fondness for making long, meticulously designed period dramas like “The Emigrants” and its sequel, “The New Land,” both three hours plus, or the two-and-a-half-hour polar exploration story “The Flight of the Eagle,” set in 1897 and requiring the re-creation of a balloon flight over the Arctic ice cap. There are no car chases or costumed superheroes here, though Mr. Troell’s avoidance of mass-market material is paired with an extraordinarily accessible, straightforward narrative style.

“Everlasting Moments” is a period film too, set around World War I, though at 131 minutes it is practically a short by Troell standards. It differs from his earlier American releases in being primarily a domestic drama, tracking the life of a poor Malmo family.

But the themes of heroism and fearless exploration that run through Mr. Troell’s work are present in the character of the struggling wife and mother Maria Larsson, played by the Finnish actress Maria Heiskanen. Like the emigrant Karl-Oskar, the balloonist S. A. Andree and the aviatrix Elsa Andersson (in the 2001 “As White as in Snow,” never released in America), Maria is an adventurer, even if she travels nowhere. Her vehicle is the bulky camera she wins in a raffle.

For Mr. Troell the story of how photography changes Maria’s life was doubly appealing: the character was based on his wife’s great-aunt, and her journey mirrored his own.

“I started when I was 14,” he said. “I was given a used camera almost the same as the one she uses, 9-by-12-centimeter glass plate. For me it was a similar adventure as it must have been for Maria, the miracle, the mystery of the images coming in the red light” of the darkroom.

Mr. Troell worked as a still photographer and a schoolteacher before breaking into movies, and it’s tempting to see the mark of those professions in his filmmaking style: humanist, literary, cerebral yet fast moving, with a constant emphasis on clear storytelling.

It’s an aesthetic, and an ethos, summed up by the photography studio owner played by Jesper Christensen in “Everlasting Moments”: “What do you see as you look through the camera, Maria? You see a world, there to be explored — to preserve, to describe. Those who’ve seen it — they cannot merely close their eyes. You can’t turn back."

There are more explorations in Mr. Troell’s future, despite some issues with hearing and memory. (Asked what movies he’d liked recently, he said the titles rarely stayed in his head, but then quickly summoned up “Lars and the Real Girl” — “Really unusual” — and “Frozen River.”)

His new project, a script he is composing with the Danish screenwriter Klaus Rifbjerg, does not sound destined to raise his profile in the United States. It’s another period drama, set in Sweden during World War II, and its protagonist, the real-life anti-Nazi activist Torgny Segerstedt, is the most anachronistic of heroes: a crusading newspaper editor.

As if that’s not enough, Mr. Troell threw in a last notion: “I’m thinking of making this one in black and white.”

February 19 – 22, 2009

Zoe and Paul — Production Stills

Improv

I Never Knew!

I notice all these headlines about how Laserdisc is officially dead and all I can think is "Again? What's going on?" This whole time Pioneer has been producing players in spite of no new films on laserdisc for 8 years! What a shock to realize that this format was actually still alive, only to then learn that it is now dead again. Here are some of the articles:

Pioneer Discontinues Laserdisc Players

January 15, 2009 — Announcing the death of a format can be tricky business. After all, a lot of them live on in our hearts, minds, racks, and libraries—and at least one "dead" format, the LP, never really died. But if the manufacture of hardware is a major criterion, then the laserdisc format has died. Pioneer has discontinued its last three laserdisc player models, according to a brief announcement in Akihabara News.

Originally known as DiscoVision and LaserVision, the 12-inch optical videodisc format was developed by MCA and Philips. The first consumer player wore the Magnavox logo, though Pioneer eventually became the format's champion, giving it the proprietary name LaserDisc, which became the generic format name laserdisc.

Laserdisc output an analog NTSC signal, and is therefore as obsolete as the doomed analog broadcast standard. It was never a high-def format. There were two subformats, the higher-quality CAV, which held 30 minutes per side, and the more capacious and prevalent CLV, which held an hour per side. Two-hour, two-sided discs in CLV became the norm. Most discs were released with audio in a pretty decent two-channel FM-carrier format, which carried matrixed Dolby Surround, and was eventually upgraded to PCM digital. This allowed LD/CD combi players to be marketed. In the format's waning years, Dolby Digital and DTS were added.

The laserdisc won a three-way format war with two other major disc formats, both of which, incredibly, were stylus-read like an LP. CED was invented and promoted by RCA, then an independent company, and the loss of the format war—along with tens of millions of dollars—was a major factor in turning RCA from an independent company to a TV brand that got passed around like a shopping bag. There was also a VHD format from JVC, which also went nowhere, but did so less expensively. Laserdisc won because consumers perceived greater performance and value in an optical-disc format.

There was a time when having a laserdisc player and library was synonymous with being a videophile. Considering the alternatives, it was the best choice. Its more than 400 lines of horizontal resolution were better than either VHS or Beta, at 250 each, and also beat the 300 lines of broadcast TV. There was a Super VHS format boasting more than 400 lines, but it recorded only the brightness signal at that resolution, and the color signal at lower resolution, so it looked smeary compared to laserdisc.

Laserdisc was doomed when DVD made its debut. The smaller disc was—well, smaller, and it offered better resolution (even though standard-def) and accommodated Dolby Digital and DTS from day one. Even now, the DVD shows signs of holding on in the face of competition from the genuinely superior Blu-ray, which supports HD, lossless surround, and other good stuff. But no one knows how long it will take for DVD to go the way of laserdisc.

Anyway, goodbye, laserdisc. I'll always associate you with evenings spent with passionate movie-loving friends. Thanks for the memories.

Pioneer bids Adieu to the Late Great Laserdisc Player
Wednesday, January 14, 2009

It never came close to dethroning VHS, but LaserDisc survived—nay, thrived—as a proud niche format, and it paved the way for all those DVD special features that we take for granted.Frankly, I'm less surprised that Pioneer is halting LaserDisc player production than by the fact that it's still churning them out. As this Register Hardware story reports, there hasn't been a new LaserDisc title in the U.S. in eight years—seven years in Japan—and I'd assumed that manufacturers had stopped building LaserDisc decks some time ago.

But as it turns out, Pioneer still makes them—and will, indeed, crank out another 3,000 players before shutting down production lines for good, according to Register Hardware.

I have to say, I still carry a torch for LaserDisc, a 30+-year-old format that was the premier choice for videophiles (not to mention Karaoke fanatics) until the DVD format arrived in 1997.

I bought my first LaserDisc player back in 1995 or '96—I'm pretty sure it was this one, the Pioneer CLD-S104—and compared to VHS, it was a revelation. My first two LaserDiscs were the letterboxed editions of "The Empire Strikes Back" (the original, thanks very much) and "Pulp Fiction," and my collection gradually grew from there.

In addition to the improved picture quality, I found something else new on my LaserDisc movies. They were called "extras," or "supplements": Deleted scenes, trailers, documentaries, and even "commentary tracks" with the directors, writers, and actors. The first commentary track I ever heard: "The Usual Suspects," probably circa 1996, and I thought it was a brilliant idea.

And then there was (and still is) the Criterion Collection, a home video label that churned out gorgeous—and expensive—special edition versions of classic movies, old and new. (My five-disc, CAV edition of "Seven" from Criterion cost a cool $99, and I was more than happy to pay up.)

Of course, one of the biggest problems with the 12-inch LaserDisc platters was that you could only fit about 60 minutes of video per side (or only about 30 minutes for "standard" CAV LaserDiscs, which offered features like freeze frame and "variable" fast-forward/reverse), meaning you had to flip the disc at least once (or even load additional discs) for feature films.

Still, I was wary of the burgeoning DVD format, especially after seeing the muddy resolution and static backgrounds on the earliest, poorly mastered discs. I hedged my bets with Pioneer's LD/DVD combo deck, the DVL-909, which cost me a whopping $800 (or even $900??) back in 1998.

But it wasn't long before the sharper resolution (and convenience) of DVD won me over, any when I finally moved from San Francisco to New York in 2002, I left my DVL-909—and all my LaserDiscs (including my beloved Criterion editions of "Seven" and "Dead Ringers", plus two sets of "Star Wars" discs) behind. (Note to the good buddy I left my LD collection with: You've still got all those discs safely in storage, right?)

Anyway … what were we talking about? Right: LaserDisc, dead, but lived a long, fruitful life as a niche product. Who knows—maybe we'll be saying the same thing about Blu-ray one day (and hey, that's not a bad thing).

Best Films of 2008

2008 was not the year to be watching films. Not because it wasn't a particularly strong year for films (it was an okay year), but because there was so many other eventful things. The spectacle of the Olympics, the Presidential Debates and Election, the economy, the protests. A historic, pivotal year. As much as I love films, I'd rather have a year like this. So, I have to admit that this is one of the times the films I still need to see out number the films I have seen.

The first five listed films are stunning pieces of work. They amazed and challenged me, unconsciously reshaped my perspective on film. The following five amused and touched me and are excellent, beautiful films. The rest . . . . I don't think about them that often. They were okay, Interesting and . . . . that's about it.

1. (tie) The Dark Knight (dir. Christopher Nolan) and Paranoid Park (dir. Gus Van Sant)

3. Everlasting Moments (dir. Jan Troell)

4. Still Life (dir. Jia Zhang Ke)

5. The Wrestler (dir. Darren Aronofsky)

6. Revolutionary Road (dir. Sam Mendes)

7. I've Loved You So Long (dir. Philipe Claudel)

8. Tulpan (dir. Sergei Dvortsevoy)

9.Wall-E (dir. Andrew Stanton)

10. The Flight of the Red Balloon (dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien)

11. Standard Operating Procedures (dir. Errol Morris)

12. The Class (dir. Laurnt Cantet)

13. Milk (dir. Gus Van Sant)

14. Che (dir. Stephen Soderbergh)

15. Gomorrah (dir. Matteo Garrone)

16. Synodeche, New York (dir. Charlie Kaufman)

Films I haven not seen in no particular order:

Ashes of Time Redux
You, The Living
Frozen River
My Winnepeg
Revanche
Hunger
Racheal's Getting Married
Happy Go-Lucky
Snow Angels
Vicky Christina Barcelona
Mad Detective
Mongol
A Christmas Tale
The Headless Woman
24 City
Shine a Light
Let the Right One In
Man on a Wire
Frost/Nixon
The Reader
Changling
Doubt
Gran Torino
Stranded
Australia

I thought The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttons was awful; ranking amongst the worst films I've ever seen. What's shocking is that people are shooting each other over this film. Ballast is good, but completely overrated and I may never understand what is so great about Slumdog Millionaire.

The Screening of America

The Way We Live Now

By A. O. SCOTT

A short time ago, in honor of the impending holiday season and the looming depression, I settled in for a viewing of “It’s a Wonderful Life.” I watched it on the same laptop on which I’m writing these words, with headphones plugged in to filter out distraction, though from time to time I did shrink the image so I could check my e-mail or my favorite blogs.

Did this compromise my experience of the movie? Maybe, but then again, compared to what? Hadn’t there always been commercial breaks and scenes interrupted by a trip to the bathroom or the refrigerator? As I watched Jimmy Stewart discover Zuzu’s petals in his pocket for at least the 20th time, I realized that “It’s a Wonderful Life” — like “Casablanca” and “Ben-Hur” and most of Ingmar Bergman and James Bond, among countless others — was a film I had never seen as a film. I’d never seen it projected through a dark room full of strangers onto a big screen.

How much does that matter? There is a school of thought according to which it matters a great deal, on both aesthetic and communal grounds. The whir of the sprockets, the cone of light passing through frames of celluloid to produce an illusion of continuous movement, the reverent hush, the smell of popcorn — all of this tends to be evoked, by critics of a certain age and temperament, in nostalgic or even elegiac tones. What will happen, in the age of iPod, DVR, VOD, YouTube and BitTorrent, to the experience of moviegoing, to say nothing of the art of cinema?

The answer does not seem to be that people will stop going to the movies. Nothing has stopped us before — certainly not the rise of television in the late 1940s or the spread of home video in the early ’80s. While both of those developments appeared to threaten the uniqueness of film, they also extended the power and pervasiveness of the movies, which never surrendered their position as the highest common denominator of the popular culture, the standard of visual storytelling to which all the others aspired. An unusually successful television show could be praised as “cinematic,” while the sign that a movie had failed was that it went straight to video.

When television came along, Hollywood responded by expanding the scale and size of its spectacles and by making the big screen even bigger. The studios came up with wide-screen formats — with proprietary names like CinemaScope and VistaVision — that promised a level of sensory immersion no home console could ever hope to match.

Home systems eventually caught up, through a dialectical process that is only accelerating. It took a while, but Hollywood discovered that movies could, of all things, actually be shown on television. The older ones were especially adaptable, since their nearly square dimensions (the 1:33:1 aspect ratio known as the Academy standard) were close to those of the average television set. The newer, wider pictures, however, needed to be cropped or squeezed. In the VHS era, movies were routinely packaged in truncated, distorted versions, their camera movements and compositions destroyed by inelegant panning and scanning. So while you could watch a movie on TV or video, it really wasn’t the same.

Now it might actually be better. The size and shape of the television screen has changed, making it more compatible with the shape of the movie screen. The newest DVDs, especially but not only in the high-definition Blu-ray format, offer images of a clarity and fidelity far beyond what could be found in the old revival houses, where the prints might be scratched or faded and the equipment old and run-down. The digital age may well turn out to be a golden age of cinephilia, with a wider variety of movies available for viewing in better conditions than ever.

But the ubiquity of screens — and also of cameras — may also mean the death, or at least the transfiguration, of cinema as we know it. Already, the pre-eminence of the feature film as a delivery system for complex narratives has been eroded by television, both cable and broadcast. The latent novelistic potential of the dramatic series has been realized by shows like “The Wire,” “Mad Men” and “Lost,” which have also dominated conversation to an extent that few recent movies have been able to match.

At the same time, smaller-scale visual narratives have been flourishing on the Internet, delivering topical satire, political commentary and slices of real-life absurdity with a nimbleness and speed that makes both conventional film and traditional television seem unwieldy. Movies, meanwhile, are once again responding by growing louder, brighter and more sensational. Imax and variously improved 3-D formats are becoming more popular with the movie studios, even as the widespread use of digital effects gives their products less and less resemblance to traditional cinema.

Which nonetheless survives, even if it isn’t what it used to be. As we head toward a way of life organized around the diversity of screens — I’m looking over my laptop at the television, while my iPod charges on the desk until I take it with me to my next screening, where I’ll be sure to shut off my cellphone — there will be at least an equal diversity of art forms and ways of appreciating them, alone or in groups. And they will continue to cross-pollinate. Amateur filmmakers with digital cameras will learn the mechanics of classical decoupage with the preinstalled video-editing software on their computers, while professionals will continue to mimic the grainy, jerky texture of video captured by handheld camcorders and cellphone irises.

Maybe cinema is dead, but it’s a wonderful afterlife.

A. O. Scott is a film critic at The Times.