Tag: Robert Gordon

Categories
News News Blog

Report: Incentives Have Helped Tennessee Film Industry Grow

CREDIT: Photographs Courtesy of CMT

Photographs Courtesy of CMT

Kevin Fonteyne as Johnny Cash, Drake Milligan as Elvis Presley, and Christian Lees as Jerry Lee Lewis

State officials have given film companies $69.1 million in reimbursements or rebates for 68 production projects in Tennessee since 2007, according to a recent report, a move that has yielded $73.2 million in new tax revenues.

The Tennessee Entertainment Commission’s (TEC) February report said the “production industry continues to play a key role in the Tennessee economy.” Incentives have helped that sector grow, the report said, and the motion picture and video industry is set to grow in the state by 41 percent over the next five years.

The sector employs 6,016 in Tennessee, ranking the state sixth among all states in overall employment in the film-production sector. The film sector has added 2,400 new jobs in the state over the last five years. In that time, the sector as a whole grew by 135 percent.
[pullquote-1] Most of the state’s film jobs (4,441) are in Nashville, the report said. Memphis is not mentioned in the TEC report.

The productions generate spin-off revenue, too. Over the last nine years, the reports says production projects purchased $171.9 million in goods and services from about 10,400 Tennessee vendors.

The report estimates $419.5 million in new incomes were generated for Tennessee workers from those 68 incentivized projects. In total, incentivized film projects here yielded $655.6 million in total economic output for the state since 2007, according to the report. The report did not break down figures by regions or cities.
[pullquote-2] In January, MovieMaker magazine ranked Memphis (for the sixth year in a row) in the top 20 places to shoot in the country. Emmy and Grammy-winning writer and moviemaker Robert Gordon told the magazine that the 1990s-era John Grisham films laid down the tracks for the movie industry here.

Here’s Gordon’s description in the magazine of shooting in Memphis:

“Memphis is a great place to shoot,” Gordon said. “As a location, you can find streets to match most any era, and most any condition.

“Also, the crews are skilled, eager, and flexible. People I’ve worked with (on non-union shoots) are ready to do what’s needed, even if it means duties not normally assigned. They’re innovative and ready to try, and if you treat people right, they’ll go the extra mile, delivering you images you’d never have imagined.

“A friend of mine says, ‘Memphis is the town where nothing happens but the impossible always does.’”

Tennessee offers production companies a 25 percent cash refund on certain costs. Wages for in-state crew qualify for the rebate, for example, while wages for out-of-state workers don’t. But not all projects are approved and the approval process (run by the TEC) isn’t objective.

“Tennessee’s state production incentive program has limited funding and therefore is not ’first come, first served,’” according to the Memphis and Shelby County Film and Television Commission website. “Projects are approved based on merit and the ’best interests’ of the state.”

The commission offers film companies discounts on Memphis Police Department rates and hotel rates, according to the website.

Categories
Cover Feature News

Seventh Heaven

CREDIT: Christian Patterson

Now that Beale Street has been renovated, and neon warms its coldest nights, it’s hard to conjure up the feeling that must have greeted 37-year-old Calvin Newborn when he returned there after making his name in the jazz world.

“I came back to Memphis in 1970,” he told author Robert Gordon. “Beale Street was being torn down. I couldn’t find no place to play. … [I was] playing with Hank Crawford every six months in California. And when I came back to Memphis, I would stay inebriated. It broke my heart, you know, to come on Beale Street and it wasn’t there. So I just went to the liquor store. When they finally tore it completely down, I thought that was the end of Beale Street, you know. But they started to rebuilding, you know, slowly.”

Christian Patterson

Calvin Newborn

Newborn had dealt with heartbreak before, over the years, in many forms. Happily, he did eventually resume his rightful place as one of Beale’s star attractions. Now the heartbreak’s all ours, since he passed away on December 1st in his adopted home of Jacksonville, Florida. And for lovers of music history, his death marks the loss of more than one man and musician, great enough in his own right. Calvin was the last of the epoch-defining Phineas Newborn Family Showband.

Photo Courtesy of Jadene King

Herman Green

Family Ties

“When I hear stories about Elvis going and hearing [Calvin’s] dad’s band in the Flamingo Room, and borrowing Calvin’s guitar and sitting in with their family band, I think that Elvis probably got a lot of his feel from their family band. I can see how that was an influence on Elvis,” reflects musician and producer Scott Bomar, who worked with Calvin. “It was quite a band. I think Calvin and his family are that missing link between Sun Records and Stax. They were playing on Sun sessions, and you look at all the people that came through that band. William Bell, George Coleman, Honeymoon Garner, Fred Ford, Charles Lloyd, Booker Little. That whole Newborn Family Band was a cornerstone of Memphis music. It’s a chapter that I don’t think has gotten its due.”

Saxophone legend Charles Lloyd recently tried to give the Newborns their credit, when asked to recall his formative years in Memphis. “I was also blessed that Phineas Newborn discovered me early and took me to the great Irvin Reason for alto lessons. Phineas put me in his father — Phineas Senior’s — band. Together with Junior and his brother, Calvin, we played at the Plantation Inn which was in West Memphis. Phineas became an important mentor and planted the piano seed in me. To this day he still informs me.”

Photo Courtesy of Jadene King

Calvin with brass note on Beale honoring the Newborn family.

Of course, Phineas Newborn Jr., or just “Junior,” was Calvin’s older sibling, who some would later call “the greatest living jazz pianist.” Their parents, Phineas Sr., or “Finas,” and Mama Rose Newborn, raised them to love and play music, always hoping to carry on as a family band (with Finas on drums). And, for a time, they did. But, ultimately, Junior was too much of a genius on the ivories to be contained by such ambitions. Indeed, Calvin grew up in the shadow of Junior’s gift, something he apparently did not mind one bit. Though the brothers won their first talent show early on as a piano duo, that moment also brought home Junior’s genius to Calvin, who soon after began guitar lessons on an instrument that B.B. King helped him pick out.

Beale Street held a fascination for the whole family, who would initially make the long trek on foot from Orange Mound just to be there, until they moved closer. Finas turned down opportunities to tour with Lionel Hampton and Jimmie Lunceford just to be near his family and the promise of playing music with them. At that time, a flair for music was often a strong familial force. Dr. Herman Green, master of the saxophone and flute, went to Booker T. Washington High School with Calvin. “We grew up together. We been knowing each other since we were babies,” Green says. “The Newborn family, and the Green family, and then the Steinberg family. We had a lot of families together at that time that were musicians, you know? So we came up together, ’cause we had to go to the same school.”

Steve Roberts

Calvin Newborn, Chuck Sullivan, Richard Cushing, Robert Barnett (back). Dr. Herman Green & Willie Waldman (front) in FreeWorld. ca. 1990.

Though both brothers were soon proficient enough to tour with established acts (as when Calvin hit the road with Roy Milton’s band), by 1948, their father landed the family group a residency at the Plantation Inn in West Memphis. Green, too, joined the band, as did a young trombonist named Wanda Jones. For a time, Finas’ dream flourished. “Oh, we all was good, man!” recalls Green. “We was playing with his daddy. We had some good singers, like Ma Rainey.” Before long, they moved to the Flamingo Room in Downtown Memphis, and then collectively hit the road with Jackie Brenson, who was touring behind his hit record, “Rocket 88,” recorded (with Ike Turner’s band) by Sam Phillips.

If the family band was tight, Calvin and Wanda were getting even tighter. As Green remembers it, “Wanda, yeah — I’m the one that put ’em together. She was the vocalist with Willie Mitchell. I heard her, and I told Finas Sr. about her. And then we ended up using her for quite a while there. Now, Calvin was my right-hand buddy, man. Junior was in and out of there, you know, but me and Calvin were very close. He told me he was getting ready to get married to Wanda. I said, ‘Well, congratulations.’ He said, ‘Well, you ain’t heard the rest.’ I said, ‘Well, what is it?’ He said, ‘I want you to be my best man.’ And then we lived together in my daddy’s house, when he got married.”

The Phineas Newborn Family Showband was the toast of Memphis, with a plethora of future jazz and soul greats rotating through. And Calvin was distinguishing himself with a talent that his gifted brother did not have: showmanship. As Calvin told author Stanley Booth, “You’d have guitar players to come in and battle me, like Pee Wee Crayton and Gatemouth Brown, and I was battlin’ out there, tearin’ they behind up, ’cause I was dancin’, playin’, puttin’ on a show, slide’ across the flo’.” And flying, as captured in an iconic photo of Calvin in mid-air, his eyes fixed with fierce determination on his fretboard, his legs angled high in a mighty leap.

The Elvis Connection

As their reputation grew, the family band began to notice a young white kid at their shows, watching Calvin’s moves like a hawk. As Calvin recalled to Gordon, “I would see him everywhere, he used to come over to the Plantation Inn Club when we was over there.” That kid was Elvis Presley.

“Elvis used to be there, show up every Wednesday and Friday night to see me do Calvin’s Boogie and Junior’s Jive. I’ll be flyin’ and slidin’ across the dance floor [laughs] and I think that’s when he … started to flyin’, too.” Almost as a footnote, Calvin adds, “but he went on and made all that money, made millions of dollars, and I went to the jazz mountaintop and almost starved to death.”

But through it all, Presley remained close to the Newborns. It went far beyond studying their moves and their sounds at the club, as Calvin’s daughter, Jadene King, tells it. In describing her father’s prolific writings, she notes that he penned an as-yet unpublished volume with “a lot of the history between him and Elvis in it.” Titled Rock ‘n Roll: Triumph Over Chaos, “there’s an enormous amount of unspoken-of history of my dad and Elvis’ relationship. Actually, Elvis’ relationship with my entire family,” King says. “A lot of people think he was a prejudiced kind of human being, and from a very bigoted family, but that’s not true. He spent a lot of his life with my father and my uncle, at my grandmother’s home. They were very close. He ate many meals with my dad and my uncle, and my dad was the one that was responsible for a lot of his moves and a lot of his musical talent, as far as teaching him a lot of what he knew. They were very close.”

The Jazz Mountaintop

Family and Elvis aside, Calvin was more concerned with climbing to the jazz mountaintop, especially once the extent of Junior’s deep genius on the piano became widely known. After brief stints in college and the army, Junior was back in Memphis when Count Basie and the great talent scout John Hammond happened to visit, and heard him play. In that moment, the ring of opportunity became the death knell for Finas’ dream of a family band. By 1956, Junior and Calvin had moved to New York, playing in a quartet with two legends-to-be, Oscar Pettiford and Kenny Clarke, and recording for Atlantic and RCA.

Before long, Junior would go his own way, and deal with his own demons, leaving Calvin to deal with his. At first, the jazz mountaintop offered an escape from the South’s rampant racism. “I think that’s the main reason why I left Memphis, you know,” he told Gordon, “to play jazz. Because jazz seemed to have put it on an even keel, because a lot of white people respected jazz. And that was the bebop era, you know, and I admired Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker and Billie Holiday and all the jazz artists, so I was, that’s one reason I was so glad to get away from Memphis.”

But he also fell into the traps of bebop life, as did Wanda. As Booth writes, “Calvin began working with Lionel Hampton, then joined Earl Hines. His wife, who had become a narcotics addict, had convulsions and died in her sleep, and Calvin began using heroin himself.” And yet, he managed his addictions well enough to keep playing, building his reputation every step of the way. As the 1960s wore on, Calvin ended up working with Jimmy Forrest, Wild Bill Davis, Al Grey, Freddie Roach, Booker Little, George Coleman, Ray Charles, Count Basie, Hank Crawford, and David “Fathead” Newman.

Meanwhile, Junior’s eccentricities were turning into full-blown mental anguish, and he spent time here and there in mental institutions, recovering from his alcoholism in hospitals, or simply convalescing in the family home. Still, he would perform and record.

In 1965, Finas, now suffering from heart problems in spite of his then-clean living, ignored his doctor’s warnings against performing and joined his eldest son onstage in Los Angeles. It was the closest he’d come to recapturing the Newborn family band’s glory days. And he died of a heart attack as soon as he walked off stage. Still, Mama Rose kept her home in Memphis, and Junior stayed there more and more.

Thus was the state of his life and his family when Calvin returned to see Beale Street in ruins. He was once again based in Memphis, but toured often. As his daughter recalls: “The first thing I remember as a little girl was him being in the Bubbling Brown Sugar tour. That had him over in Europe for several years, and he lived in Holland, London, Paris.”

King, whose mother was an Italian immigrant whom Calvin met at Coney Island, but who grew up in Jacksonville, goes on: “That’s my first memory of daddy being gone for a long period of time. That was in the mid-1970s. And he did that for a while. He was constantly gigging and touring during most of my childhood, but he would always come to Jacksonville to see me, or I would go to Memphis and spend time with him at my grandmother’s house. Mama Rose’s.”

Staying at the family home or on his own, Calvin would help with Junior’s care and began playing more with his old classmate, Herman Green. The quartet recordings they made as the Green Machine still stand as some of the finest jazz that Memphis has produced. As the 1980s went on, Calvin joined Alcoholics Anonymous, cleaned up his act, made the occasional solo album, and began working with younger musicians. When Green fell in with the funk/rock/improv group FreeWorld, Calvin was not far behind. “Calvin was a member of FreeWorld for about two years, and his guitar virtuosity brought us all up several levels, musically speaking,” says FreeWorld founder Richard Cushing. “Herman and Calvin would occasionally start playing off each other in the middle of a song, pushing each other, cutting heads as only two old-school masters can do.”

Mike Brown

Working in the studio.

New Born

Memphis musician and producer Scott Bomar also treasures his time with Calvin, first as pupil and then as the producer of his phenomenal album, New Born. “I had to put a band together to back Roscoe Gordon, and I asked Calvin to play guitar. That was the beginning of our friendship and the beginning of us doing gigs together. Some of the most amazing musical settings that I’ve had the good fortune to be part of were with Calvin. At one Ponderosa Stomp show, the Sun Ra Arkestra actually played with Calvin and me. That’s one of the most intense audience reactions I’ve ever seen at a concert. And every time I’d talk to Calvin, he would still talk about it. The last time I spoke to Calvin, he was still talking about that performance. It was a tune of his called ‘Seventh Heaven,’ and that was a very, very special performance.”

Even as the next century approached, Calvin had a flair for showmanship. Bomar goes on: “When he got on stage, he had this energy that not many people I’ve ever played with have. He was electric. He could hit his guitar in a way that got people’s attention. His tone — I love his rawness. Of course, he had this deep musical knowledge and was very melodic, but he also had this kind of raw, rock-and- roll edge to his tone and his playing. His tone was always on the edge of distortion.”

By 2003, there was less to keep Calvin here in Memphis. Junior and his mother, Mama Rose, had left this mortal coil behind. And so he settled in with his daughter, adapting to the Sunshine State and a more contemplative life. “My dad had various levels of spirituality, and he studied every religion known to man. He studied Islam, he studied Jehovah’s Witnesses, he studied Judaism, he studied Hinduism. My father was just a brilliant individual. He’s read the Koran three or four times. He’s read the Bible many times. He was just a very well-versed man, and I would say the last 10 years of his life he completely went over to Christianity.”

Calvin also continued to perform at the Jazzland Cafe and the World of Nations festival in Jacksonville, not to mention many area churches. And he remained as feverishly creative as ever. “He has several unpublished compositions that I have,” notes King. “I have several plays, several books, and tons of lyrics and scores for new music, new songs. He had just finished scoring a musical project that he wanted to take to New York and record.”

And then, in the spring of this year, romance came back into his life, in the form of one Marie Davis Brothers, who he had known for decades. “I’ve known her my whole life, for over 43 years,” says King. “Originally, they were together for 12 years, and they separated and were apart for 20 more years. In 2017, they started communicating again. They’d been talking over the phone for a little over a year, and then in April she moved here from Memphis. And in May they got married and they moved into their own apartment.”

Photo Courtesy of Jadene King

Calvin Newborn at the Memphis Music Hall of Fame induction of his brother Phineas.

The Final Chapter

No one expected Calvin Newborn to die this month. “He had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) from the years and years and years of smoking and drinking and just the jazz life, but he’d been sober and clean for over 35 years, and he was doing very very well,” says King. “Just in the beginning of November, his oxygen levels weren’t what they needed to be, but he just went from not having oxygen to wearing a little Inogen [portable oxygen] machine. And then toward the end of the month, that stopped giving him the levels that were needed, and here we are.”

Just before the end, he was still giving his daughter new writings to type up. “In my father’s last couple of months, he wrote a poem called ‘Seventh Heaven.’ It was based on a dream where he saw his great-granddaughter, who he called Bliss, looking out into what he called seventh heaven, and everyone was at peace. There was no more hatred, there was no more racial divide. There was no more poverty. Everything had been leveled out. It was a beautiful world. I guess if my father had an epitaph, it would be ‘Seventh Heaven: There’s no race, just the human race.'”

In Calvin Newborn’s heaven, there’s room enough for everyone to fly.

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Indie Memphis 2018 Friday: MIA, Diana Ross, and Negro Terror

After a gala opening at the Halloran Centre Thursday night, Indie Memphis moves to Overton Square on Friday. The schedule is packed with great stuff beyond what I could fit into this week’s cover story about the festival. 

Madeline’s Madeline (1:10 PM, Studio on the Square) is an acclaimed, visually inventive film by director Josephine Decker, who won the Craig Brewer Emerging Filmmaker Award at Indie Memphis 2014.

Indie Memphis 2018 Friday: MIA, Diana Ross, and Negro Terror

She began as a refugee from Sri Lanka, and ended up playing on the world’s biggest stages. Matangi/Maya/MIA (3:40, Studio On The Square) is a documentary about the fascinating life of political dance pop musician M.I.A.

Indie Memphis 2018 Friday: MIA, Diana Ross, and Negro Terror (2)

The festival’s first world premiere is Diego Llorente’s Entrialgo, a beautiful vérité documentary about life in rural Spain.

Entrialgo || trailer from diego llorente on Vimeo.

Indie Memphis 2018 Friday: MIA, Diana Ross, and Negro Terror (3)

The second world premiere of the day is Shoot The Moon Right Between The Eyes (6:30, Studio on the Square). It’s a musical by Austin, Texas director Graham L. Carter that sets the music of John Prine amidst a story of a pair of small-time grifters who meet their match in a strong willed widow. It’s inventive, heartfelt, and a little rough around the edges, which is totally appropriate for a film that takes inspiration from Prine’s lyrics.

Shoot The Moon Right Between The Eyes [Official Trailer] from Graham L. Carter on Vimeo.

Indie Memphis 2018 Friday: MIA, Diana Ross, and Negro Terror (4)

At 6:30 at Playhouse on the Square, the Hometowner Documentary Shorts bloc features films from Memphis artists, including Lauren Ready, Jason Allen Lee, and Klari Farzley. Best of Enemies director Robert Gordon and producer Kim Bledsoe Lloyd’s film “Ginning Cotton at the Dockery” tracks down the men and women who worked at the last functioning cotton plantation in Mississippi. Memphis musician Robbie Grant makes his directorial debut with “Ben Siler Gives Ben Siler Advice,” in which Memphis filmmaker and Flyer film contributor Ben Siler meets a younger Memphian named Ben Siler and tells him how the world works. It pretty much does what it says on the box, in two hilariously depressing minutes.

At 9:10, there’s a genuine only-at-Indie Memphis moment. Mahogany is a 1975 star vehicle for Diana Ross, directed by Motown impresario Berry Gordy (and a couple of ringers). Also featuring a smoking turn from Billy Dee Williams in his prime, and a smash hit number one song from Ross as a theme, it’s a 70s classic. To illustrate the depth of the Mahogany cult, the film will be proceeded by “Mahogany Too,, a short film shot on Super 8 by Nigerian filmmaker Akosua Adoma Owusu that is a lighting retelling of Ross’ film, featuring Nollywood star Esosa E.

Indie Memphis 2018 Friday: MIA, Diana Ross, and Negro Terror (5)

At 9:10 on the big stage at Playhouse On The Square, an experimental documentary about Memphis’ most radical band makes its world premiere. In Negro Terror, director John Rash maintains a light touch, focusing on the sights and sounds of the hardcore punk band’s legendary stage show, and the words of the band’s three very different members, led by Omar Higgins, an anarchist Hari Krishna devotee who is a longtime member of Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice (SHARP). In what is definitely a first for Indie Memphis and probably a first for just about anywhere, the band will provide a live soundtrack for the film about them as it premieres.

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 4: Football, Swans, and Punks

After a pause caused by the festival itself, here’s the next-to-last installment of Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits, where we count down the winners of the Best of Indie Memphis poll. You can get caught up with part one, part two, and part three.

Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory (2011)

Paradise Lost directors Joe Berlinger (left) and Bruce Sinofsky (right) pose with Jason Baldwin (center).

The West Memphis Three case is one of the most notorious miscarriages of justice in American history. But if it weren’t for a couple of struggling directors pitching a true crime documentary to HBO in the early 1990s, Damian Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelly would still be in jail for a crime they didn’t commit. Bruce Sinofsky and Joe Berlinger’s came to the Mid South asking, how could three normal teenagers commit such a gruesome crime? But once they got here, they quickly became convinced that the accused were innocent. Paradise Lost: The Child Murders At Robin Hood Hills would prove to be one of the most consequential documentaries ever, and has influenced a generation of works from Serial to True Detective. Berlinger and Sinofsky followed the case for 18 years, and when new DNA evidence came to light, their cameras were there. In 2011, Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory had its second public screening at Indie Memphis weeks after the West Memphis Three walked free. When Jason Baldwin walked onstage unannounced at the Q&A, it was one of the most electric moments in Indie Memphis history. Later that year, the film was nominated for Best Documentary at the Academy Awards.

Undefeated (2011)

The same film beat Paradise Lost 3 at both  the Oscars and Indie Memphis’ documentary category that year. Undefeated was directed by Daniel Lindsey and T.J. Martin told the story of the Manassas High School Tigers and their coach Bill Courtney as they attempt to turn around their school’s historic losing streak on the football field. Today, Undefeated remains a sports movie staple.

Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 4: Football, Swans, and Punks

Antenna (2012)

The Memphis punk scene started in January 1978, when the Sex Pistols played at the Taliesyn Ballroom—now the site of the Taco Bell on Union Avenue. A bunch of kids who thought they were the only ones listening to punk rock in Memphis found each other that night. Months later, some of them descended on The Well, a down-on-its-luck country western bar a few blocks from the Taliesyn, on Madison Avenue. In 1981, The Well became Antenna, the most radical music venue in the south. For the next fourteen years, Antenna was a haven for freaks and the home of new music in Memphis. National bands like R.E.M., Black Flag, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Green Day played at Antenna years before they were filling arenas. It was ground zero for Memphis’ alternative creative explosion that flew under the national radar while spawning groups like Panther Burns, Pezz, The Oblivians, The Grifters, and Jay Reatard—just to name a few.

When I was approached by Ross Johnson and John Floyd about making a documentary about Antenna and the music scene that thrived there, I knew it was something the Memphis community sorely needed. But I balked at the opportunity. I worried about the availability of archival footage. Antenna existed before the age when everyone had a cameraphone in their pockets. Would there be tape of bands like The Modifiers playing at Antenna? Turns out, I needn’t have worried. Antenna owner Steve McGehee knows everybody. By the time Antenna premiered at Indie Memphis in 2012, we had amassed more than 100 hours of vintage video, hundreds of still images, and 88 interviews, some of which were three hours long.

It’s difficult for me to talk about Antenna today. After winning the Audience Award and a Special Jury Prize at Indie Memphis 2012, we have tried in vain for years to find finishing funds to pay for the music licensing fees. I am extremely grateful that enough people remembered Antenna to vote it onto the list. Hopefully one day, everyone can see it. Until then, this is the only bit of untold Memphis music history I can share with you:

Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 4: Football, Swans, and Punks (2)

Very Extremely Dangerous (2012)

One of the highlights of Indie Memphis 2017 was Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell proclaiming Friday, November 3 Best of Enemies Day. Director Robert Gordon, who helped originate the project he co-directed with Morgan Neville, has had a long and distinguished career as a writer and director before winning an Emmy for Best of Enemies. In 2012, a film he produced with Irish director Paul Duane made waves at Indie Memphis. Very Extremely Dangerous opens with Gordon and Duane almost getting in a car wreck with their subject Jerry McGill, a 70 year old junkie, criminal, and Memphis musician. McGill had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and he brought along Duane and Gordon’s camera to record his final comeback performance/crime spree. To call Very Extremely Dangerous a harrowing watch is a dramatic understatement, but somehow, McGill comes out of it as a sympathetic character.

Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 4: Football, Swans, and Punks (3)

Keep The Lights On (2012)


Memphis-born Ira Sachs has long been one of the most intimate and truthful directors of the indie era. He got his start in the Bluff City before Indie Memphis got rolling with The Delta, an autobiographical coming-of-age story. In 2005, when Hustle & Flow won the audience award at Sundance, Sachs’ film Forty Shades of Blue won the Grand Jury Prize. Keep The Lights On is the story of an extremely dysfunctional relationship between Erik (Thure Lindhardt) and Paul (Zachary Booth), a filmmaker and lawyer living in Sach’s adopted home of New York who can’t help but bring out the worst in each other. Sachs keeps the audience’s expectations vacillating between “I hope these two kids can get it together in the end” and “They need to stay the hell away from each other.” It’s a story about the joys and limits of romantic love.

Keep The Lights On was the first film in a trilogy of sorts from Sachs about trying to stay human while living in New York. 2014’s Love Is Strange stars John Lithgow and Alfred Molina as a pair of longtime partners whose love is finally legal, but who are unexpectedly ripped apart after they finally tie the knot. 2016’s Little Men is a story Sach says was inspired by his Memphis childhood about friendship between kids from different social classes who find their lives disrupted by the creeping gentrification of Brooklyn. Sachs’ work is humane, beautiful to a fault, and absolutely required viewing for Memphis film fans.

Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 4: Football, Swans, and Punks (4)

What I Love About Concrete (2013)

Remember when you were in high school and thought, “We should make a movie about our crazy lives!” Well, Alanna Stewart and Katherine Dohan actually did it, and their film is probably much better than yours would have been. The two White Station High Schoolers, with the help of Brett Hanover, created a home grown, magical realist masterpiece—imagine if Pretty In Pink had been written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Morgan Rose Stewart (sister of the director) stars as Molly, a woman who finds herself growing very-not-metaphorical wings in her senior year, just as she is preparing for college and the big essay contest. The practical special effects and handmade animation sequences carry considerable visual punch, but it’s the unmannered acting and wild expanse of it all that elevates What I Love About Concrete to the level of the sublime. The film won at Indie Memphis, and has the distinction of being Commercial Appeal movie writer John Beifuss’ only acting credit.

Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 4: Football, Swans, and Punks (5)

“I Wanted To Make A Movie About A Beautiful and Tragic Memphis” (2013)

“I sometimes find it easier to reveal intimate details about myself through art. This is prime example” says Laura Jean Hocking. After spending years locked in a small dark room with me editing Antenna, Hocking wanted to do something completely different. She wrote, produced, and directed this Midtown memoir completely by herself. It is at once a celebration of place, a confession, and a series of visual experiments. Hocking collaborated transatlantically with Memphis expat musician Jimi Enck, who scored the film while living in London.

At the 2017 Indie Memphis festival, Hocking and her co-director Melissa Anderson Sweazy won Best Hometowner Feature and the Audience Award for their documentary Good Grief about kids who have experienced tragedy and the counsellors who help them at the Kemmons Wilson Family Center for Good Grief in Collierville.

I WANTED TO MAKE A MOVIE ABOUT A BEAUTIFUL AND TRAGIC MEMPHIS from oddly buoyant productions on Vimeo.

Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 4: Football, Swans, and Punks (6)

Short Term 12 (2013)

By 2013, Indie Memphis’ profile had risen high enough to land the biggest films on the festival circuit. Destin Daniel Cretton’s film Short Term 12, loosely inspired by his time as a counsellor in a group home for troubled teens, swept the Independent Spirit Awards and launched the career of Brie Larson. As one of the biggest vote-getters in the poll, it remains a favorite of Indie Memphis audiences.

It Felt Like Love (2013)

Here’s a little story that tells you what film festival life is like. In 2013, I was on the screening committee for Indie Memphis. We were tasked with finding the eight best features out of the hundreds of applicants that flood into Indie Memphis every year. Late in the season, we had whittled the list down to about a dozen when we noticed that no female directors were represented on the short list. Since it was pretty inconceivable that, in 2013, no women had made and submitted a decent movie, we dug back into the pile of DVDs. At the bottom was It Felt Like Love by Eliza Hitman, and when we popped it into the player, we were absolutely riveted. It was clear that this coming of age film was by far the best thing we had seen that year, and we almost lost it in the shuffle. Later, at the festival, the judges (who are not members of the screening committee) agreed, and It Felt Like Love won 2013’s Best Narrative Feature award.

Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 4: Football, Swans, and Punks (7)

Categories
Music Music Blog

The Memphis Country Blues Festival rises again

Reverend John Wilkins

These days, it seems that music festivals are blossoming like algae around the Greater Memphis Area. But it ‘s worth remembering a time when such celebrations were few and far between, and made a much greater political statement. The original Memphis Country Blues Festival of 1966 was the local counter-culture’s shot across the bow at the prevailing status quo. Held at the Overton Park Shell only a week after the Ku Klux Klan held a rally in the park, it promoted a vision of radical possibilities.

For all the details, (re)read your copy of Robert Gordon’s It Came From Memphis, which vividly evokes a rag-tag cohort of artists, musicians, and other blues fans whose utopian vision was rooted in a careful salvaging of the past – in this case, the genius of blues players like Furry Lewis or Bukka White, who had fallen into obscurity. These were heroes to many in the nascent hippie culture. They ended up throwing a party on a grand scale that included both living legends and cutting edge rock and funk.

Today, we again face the question of who to memorialize from the past and who to scorn. It’s a perfect time to revive that spirit of communal action, and it’s about to happen in two days’ time when the Levitt Shell hosts rebirth of the Memphis Country Blues Festival.

One of the key organizers of the original festival, and a performer there with Insect Trust, was musician and author Robert Palmer. His daughter Augusta Palmer, a documentary film maker, is currently working on a documentary about the original festivals that ran from 1966-69.

The Blues Society – Kickstarter Trailer from Cultural Animal on Vimeo.

The Memphis Country Blues Festival rises again

“Last year there was a commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the first blues festival,” she recalls. “And Robert Gordon and I curated a panel of people who came and talked. So Marcia Hare/Misty Blue Lavender, and James Alexander, and Jimmy Crosthwait, and Chris Wimmer, who were all part of the original events, came up. We showed a little bit of the New York Channel 13 footage that was shot of the 1969 concert. And then had all the people to talk on stage and answer questions. Yeah, it was a great conversation. Ric was there and that’s where we met, actually.”

Reviving the festival was the brainchild of promoters Ric and Stephen Whitney, cousins from Memphis who learned of the original festivals just as they were looking for fresh ideas for community events. Says Ric, “The fact that there was something that happened so long ago, and it was very innovative in terms of bringing together constituencies who didn’t necessarily spend a lot of time together, but the common denominator was music. And that was one of the things that we often talked about in terms of things we wanted to do in the city ourselves: to produce music-based shows that brought people together.” Augusta Palmer

Original poster for the Memphis Country Blues Festival

Soon after that, Ric Whitney met with Liz Levitt Hirsch, president of the Levitt Foundation in Los Angeles. “There was a salon she had at her home, actually, and we had a chance to chat about the idea in general. And then we ended up being introduced to the Levitt Shell folks in Memphis. And it sort of blossomed from there. Our biggest goal was to produce a free concert. And it worked well because the Shell produces their concert series each year, and the majority are free shows. We didn’t see this as something that we were looking at making tons of money on. We really saw it as an opportunity, really, kinda looking at what’s happening in the US today – there’s a lot of strife, a lot of miscommunication. So we wanted to come up with an opportunity for people to use music, and particularly the blues genre, as an way to bring people together.”

Palmer, naturally, will be there to document the proceedings, and may screen a trailer for her newest work. It’s a powerful moment for both her and the city, “that these two African American Memphis natives are taking on the mantle of the Blues Festival. I think my dad would have been really happy.”

It’s especially fitting that the headliner for the show was a performer at the original event: Rev. John Wilkins. Kevin Cubbins, who plays in the band, reflects, “What a lot of people don’t know is that this is a return trip for Rev. Wilkins. It’s not his first time at the Shell. And that’s not even counting the time he played with his father, delta blues and gospel icon Rev. Robert Wilkins, at one of the first Memphis Country Blues Fests in 1968. See, up until 2006, the year he retired from the City of Memphis Park Services, Rev. Wilkins was the groundskeeper and maintenance supervisor at the Shell. He was responsible for everything from keeping the grass cut to keeping the place secured and cleaned up.”

Once again, honoring the past is lighting the way forward. “It’s kind of epic,” adds Cubbins. “He was there in the golden days of the late 60’s, he was they guy holding the place together during its years of neglect, and now he’s taking the stage in it’s rebirth. Kinda cool.”


The Memphis Country Blues Festival, Levitt Shell, Saturday, September 16, 7:00 – 10:00 pm, free admission. Lineup: Reverend John Wilkins (son of Robert Wilkins); Blue Mother Tupelo (southern soul and blues, Husband & Wife duo); Cam Kimbrough (grandson of Blues legend, Junior Kimbrough).

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Best of Enemies Premieres on WKNO Tonight

Best Of Enemies, the acclaimed political documentary with Memphis connections, makes its free TV premiere on WKNO tonight at 8 PM. 

William F. Buckley and Gore VIdal in Best of Enemies

The documentary, which premiered at Sundance 2015, had a successful theatrical run last year and garnered rave reviews from critics worldwide. It tells the story of the series of televised debates between conservative William F. Buckley and liberal Gore Vidal that aired on ABC during the 1968 Democratic and Republican national conventions. The film was co-directed by Memphis filmmaker Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville, who won an Academy Award in 2013 for 20 Feet From Stardom.

The timely documentary airs on WKNO as part of PBS’ Independent Lens series at 8 PM.  You can read much more about the film in this Memphis Flyer cover story from last August. 

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

The Year in Film 2015

It’s fashionable to complain about how bad Hollywood movies have become. But from the perspective of a critic who has to watch it all go down, it’s simply not the case. At any given time in 2015, there was at least one good film in theaters in Memphis—it just may not have been the most heavily promoted one. So here’s my list of awards for a crowded, eventful year.

Worst Picture: Pixels

I watched a lot of crap this year, like the incoherent Terminator Genysis, the sociopathic San Andreas, the vomitous fanwank Furious 7, and the misbegotten Secret in Their Eyes. But those movies were just bad. Pixels not only sucked, it was mean-spirited, toxic, and ugly. Adam Sandler, it’s been a good run, but it’s time to retire.

Actually, I take that back. It hasn’t been a good run.

Most Divisive: Inherent Vice

Technically a 2014 release, Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s ode to the lost world of California hippiedom didn’t play in Memphis until January. Its long takes and dense dialogue spun a powerful spell. But it wasn’t for everyone. Many people responded with either a “WTF?” or a visceral hatred. Such strongly split opinions are usually a sign of artistic success; you either loved it or hated it, but you won’t forget it.

Best Performances: Brie Larson and Jacob Tremblay, Room

Room is an inventive, harrowing, and beautiful work on every level, but the film’s most extraordinary element is the chemistry between Brie Larson and 9-year-old Jacob Tremblay, who play a mother and son held hostage by a sexual abuser. Larson’s been good in Short Term 12 and Trainwreck, but this is her real breakthrough performance. As for Tremblay, here’s hoping we’ve just gotten a taste of things to come.

Chewbacca

Best Performance By A Nonhuman: Chewbacca

Star Wars: The Force Awakens returned the Mother of All Franchises to cultural prominence after years in the prequel wilderness. Newcomers like Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver joined the returned cast of the Orig Trig Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher in turning in good performances. Lawrence Kasdan’s script gave Chewbacca a lot more to do, and Peter Mayhew rose to the occasion with a surprisingly expressive performance. Let the Wookiee win.

Best Memphis Movie: The Keepers

Joann Self Selvidge and Sara Kaye Larson’s film about the people who keep the Memphis Zoo running ran away with Indie Memphis this year, selling out multiple shows and winning Best Hometowner Feature. Four years in the making, it’s a rarity in 21st century film: a patient verité portrait whose only agenda is compassion and wonder.

Best Conversation Starter: But for the Grace

In 2001, Memphis welcomed Sudanese refugee Emmanuel A. Amido. This year, he rewarded our hospitality with But for the Grace. The thoughtful film is a frank examination of race relations in America seen through the lens of religion. The Indie Memphis Audience Award winner sparked an intense Q&A session after its premiere screening that followed the filmmaker out into the lobby. It’s a timely reminder of the power of film to illuminate social change.

Best Comedy: What We Do in the Shadows

What happens when a group of vampire roommates stop being polite and start getting real? Flight of the Conchords‘ Jemaine Clement and Eagle vs Shark‘s Taika Waititi codirected this deadpan masterpiece that applied the This Is Spinal Tap formula to the Twilight set. Their stellar cast’s enthusiasm and commitment to the gags made for the most biting comedy of the year.

Best Animation: Inside Out

The strongest Pixar film since Wall-E had heavy competition in the form of the Irish lullaby Song of the Sea, but ultimately, Inside Out was the year’s emotional favorite. It wasn’t just the combination of voice talent Amy Poehler, Bill Hader, Lewis Black, Mindy Kaling, and Phyllis Smith with the outstanding character design of Joy, Fear, Anger, Disgust, and Sadness that made director Pete Docter’s film crackle, it was the way the entire carefully crafted package came together to deliver a message of acceptance and understanding for kids and adults who are wrestling with their feelings in a hard and changing world.

It Follows

Best Horror: It Follows

The best horror films are the ones that do a lot with a little, and It Follows is a sterling example of the breed. Director David Robert Mitchell’s second feature is a model of economy that sets up its simple premise with a single opening shot that tracks a desperate young woman running from an invisible tormentor. But there’s no escaping from the past here, only delaying the inevitable by spreading the curse of sex and death.

Teenage Dreams: Dope and The Diary of a Teenage Girl

2015 saw a pair of excellent coming-of-age films. Dope, written and directed by Rick Famuyiwa, introduced actor Shameik Moore as Malcolm, a hapless nerd who learns to stand up for himself in the rough-and-tumble neighborhood of Inglewood, California. Somewhere between Risky Business and Do the Right Thing, it brought the teen comedy into the multicultural moment.

Similarly, Marielle Heller’s graphic novel adaptation The Diary of a Teenage Girl introduced British actress Bel Powley to American audiences, and took a completely different course than Dope. It’s a frank, sometimes painful exploration of teenage sexual awakening that cuts the harrowing plot with moments of magical realist reverie provided by a beautiful mix of animation and live action.

Immortal Music: Straight Outta Compton and Love & Mercy

The two best musical biopics of the year couldn’t have been more different. Straight Outta Compton was director F. Gary Gray’s straightforward story of N.W.A., depending on the performances of Jason Mitchell as Eazy-E, Corey Hawkins as Dr. Dre, and O’Shea Jackson Jr. playing his own father, Ice Cube, for its explosive impact. That it was a huge hit with audiences proved that this was the epic hip-hop movie the nation has been waiting for.

Director Bill Pohlad’s dreamlike Love & Mercy, on the other hand, used innovative structure and intricate sound design to tell the story of Brian Wilson’s rise to greatness and subsequent fall into insanity. In a better world, Paul Dano and John Cusack would share a Best Actor nomination for their tag-team portrayal of the Beach Boys resident genius.

Sicario

Best Cinematography: Sicario

From Benicio del Toro’s chilling stare to the twisty, timely screenplay, everything about director Denis Villeneuve’s drug-war epic crackles with life. But it’s Roger Deakins’ transcendent cinematography that cements its greatness. Deakins paints the bleak landscapes of the Southwest with subtle variations of color, and films an entire sequence in infrared with more beauty than most shooters can manage in visible light. If you want to see a master at the top of his game, look no further.

He’s Still Got It: Bridge of Spies

While marvelling about Bridge of Spies‘ performances, composition, and general artistic unity, I said “Why can’t all films be this well put together?”

To which the Flyer‘s Chris Davis replied, “Are you really asking why all directors can’t be as good as Steven Spielberg?”

Well, yeah, I am.

Hot Topic: Journalism

Journalism was the subject of four films this year, two good and two not so much. True Story saw Jonah Hill and James Franco get serious, but it was a dud. Truth told the story of Dan Rather and Mary Mapes’ fall from the top-of-the-TV-news tower, but its commitment to truth was questionable. The End of the Tour was a compelling portrait of the late author David Foster Wallace through the eyes of a scribe assigned to profile him. But the best of the bunch was Spotlight, the story of how the Boston Catholic pedophile priest scandal was uncovered, starring Michael Keaton and Mark Ruffalo. There’s a good chance you’ll be seeing Spotlight all over the Oscars this year.

Had To Be There: The Walk

Robert Zemeckis’ film starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Philippe Petit, the Frenchman who tightrope-walked between the twin towers of the World Trade Center, was a hot mess. But the extended sequence of the feat itself was among the best uses of 3-D I’ve ever seen. The film flopped, and its real power simply won’t translate to home video, no matter how big your screen is, but on the big screen at the Paradiso, it was a stunning experience.

MVP: Samuel L. Jackson

First, he came back from the grave as Nick Fury to anchor Joss Whedon’s underrated Avengers: Age of Ultron. Then he channeled Rufus Thomas to provide a one-man Greek chorus for Spike Lee’s wild musical polemic Chi-Raq. He rounds out the year with a powerhouse performance in Quentin Tarantino’s widescreen western The Hateful Eight. Is it too late for him to run for president?

Best Documentary: Best of Enemies

Memphis writer/director Robert Gordon teamed up with Twenty Feet From Stardom director Morgan Neville to create this intellectual epic. With masterful editing of copious archival footage, they make a compelling case that the 1968 televised debate between William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal laid out the political battleground for the next 40 years and changed television news forever. In a year full of good documentaries, none were more well-executed or important than this historic tour de force.

Best Picture: Mad Max: Fury Road

From the time the first trailers hit, it was obvious that 2015 would belong to one film. I’m not talking about The Force Awakens. I’m talking about Mad Max: Fury Road. Rarely has a single film rocked the body while engaging the mind like George Miller’s supreme symphony of crashing cars and heavy metal guitars. Charlize Theron’s performance as Imperator Furiosa will go down in history next to Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven and Sigourney Weaver in Alien as one of the greatest action turns of all time. The scene where she meets Max, played by Tom Hardy, may be the single best fight scene in cinema history. Miller worked on this film for 17 years, and it shows in every lovingly detailed frame. Destined to be studied for decades, Fury Road rides immortal, shiny, and chrome.

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Indie Memphis 2015, Day 2: Memphis Shorts Shine

Here’s a universal truth about film festivals: If you’re looking at a big schedule of films, but you’re uncertain as to what you want to see, you should choose a block of short films.

Memphis music legend Jimmy Crosswaith in ‘Time Will Tell’

The reason why is simple. If you choose a feature film, and it turns out you don’t like, you’re stuck with it for the duration. But if you choose a shorts block, and you don’t like one of the films, just wait a few minutes and you’ll get something else that you do like. 

The second night of Indie Memphis features a killer line up of short films from Memphians. The 6:00 PM Hometowner Narrative Shorts Block includes films from both accomplished Memphis directors and newcomers. 

“The Department of Signs and Magical Interventions” by Melissa Anderson Sweazy is a mini epic of one man’s journey through the veil of life and death, and the deadpan humor of finding that the afterworld is just as bureaucratic as the moral coil. “Alphabet” is the latest editing tour de force from Memphis filmmaker and occasional Flyer contributor Ben Siler. You can read more about those two films in Eileen Townsend’s column in this week’s issue. 

Also in the block is “Time Will Tell” directed by Mud Boy and the Neutrons percussionist Jimmy Crosswaith along with Theo Patt. Prolific Memphis actor Drew Smith branches out into directing with two short films, “Missed Connection” and “Snow Day”. “Glitching” directors Emily Herene and Lara Johnson led an all-female cast and crew in what they describe as a cross between “Broad City” and “The Twilight Zone.” 

Part of the all female cast and crew of ‘Glitching’

The second show at the Halloran Centre features two very different Memphis-centric documentaries. The contemplative documentary Barge by director Ben Powell has won awards at both the Dallas International and Crossroads Film Festival in Jackson. It depicts modern working life on the Mississippi river 150 years after Mark Twain first examined the subject. It is proceeded by “All Day, All Night”, the first film by acclaimed Memphis director Robert Gordon. The film about Beale Street features such remarkable scenes as a meeting of the minds between Rufus Thomas, Evelyn Young, Sunbeam Mitchell, and Earnestine of Ernestine and Hazel’s fame. Gordon, who will speak at a panel on documentary filmmaking at 6 PM, is the co-director of Best Of Enemies, which was a documentary hit this year and is currently gathering buzz for an Academy Award nomination. (As a side note, Memphis musician Jonathan Kirkscey just won an award from the International Documentary Association for the soundtrack of Best Of Enemies.) You can read more about Robert Gordon in this Flyer cover feature from August. 

B. B. King in ‘All Day, All Night’

Categories
Cover Feature News

Best Of Enemies

CREDIT: Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures

It was 1968. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, giving the civil rights era a tragic coda. In June, Bobby Kennedy, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, fell to an assassin’s bullet. The Republican and Democratic conventions were to be held in August, and the three television networks were planning the same gavel-to-gavel coverage they had been doing since 1948.

But ABC had a problem. As the perpetual third-place network, they couldn’t afford to send a horde of reporters scurrying over the convention floor. So they settled on a cheaper alternative: They would invite two intellectuals, one conservative and one liberal, to a no-holds-barred political debate live on the air. The choice to represent the conservative side was easy: William F. Buckley Jr., founding editor of the political magazine National Review. His writings had formed the foundation of what we now call the conservative movement, and two years earlier he had started his own political television program called Firing Line.

Buckley immediately accepted the invitation. Who would you like to debate, ABC asked? Anyone but Gore Vidal, he replied. The unabashedly liberal, sexually ambiguous author of Myra Breckinridge was the antithesis of everything Buckley stood for. He hated that guy.

Naturally, ABC called Gore Vidal.

Fundamental Issues

Memphis director Robert Gordon’s new documentary, Best of Enemies, tells a story that has been lost amid the greater drama of a country tearing itself apart. The televised debates between Vidal and Buckley reverberate across the years, setting the stage for the political and media landscape where we find ourselves as we gird for another political battle for the future of the nation. “It — 1968 — was such a volatile year,” Gordon says. “It was when the frame that held America together came undone.”

Gordon co-directed Best of Enemies with Morgan Neville, whose Twenty Feet from Stardom won Best Documentary at last year’s Academy Awards. The pair have previously collaborated on films about Johnny Cash, Muddy Waters, and Cowboy Jack Clement. Since their work (as well as Gordon’s other books and films, such as the Stax Records history Respect Yourself) has dealt primarily with musical subjects, a political documentary seems like a big departure. But Gordon says it wasn’t a stretch. “Morgan and I both liked using the subject of the film to explore deeper, wider territory. So the documentary on Stax is a lot about the civil rights movement in America. Johnny Cash’s America is about the fundamental issues of democracy in America.”

Prize Fighters

The 1968 Republican convention in Miami was a well-oiled political machine, with Buckley acolytes Ronald Reagan and Nelson Rockefeller lining up behind nominee Richard Nixon. The ABC coverage of the convention was a comedy of errors. The only thing that went right was the 15 minutes every night when the cameras were trained on Buckley and Vidal. The pair circled each other like prize fighters, unleashing flurry after flurry of verbal attacks, with neither seeming to lay a glove on the other. It was riveting television.

“You just don’t ever get to see fully completed thoughts on TV any more,” Best of Enemies editor Eileen Meyer says. “You don’t get to see people like Buckley. His sentences were two or three minutes long. You can barely comprehend what he’s talking about. I had to watch the debates over and over and over again before I fully comprehended everything that was in there, and I still don’t get maybe a third of it. They were just so far above anyone’s intellect, and yet they were entertaining and fun to watch.”

Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures

Gore Vidal in Best of Enemies.

A Long Memory

Best of Enemies took five years to make, but its roots go back to the early 1970s when writer and publisher Tom Graves was a Memphis State student interested in politics. “I knew of Vidal as a novelist and Buckley as a conservative spokesman who was on TV,” Graves recalls.

His interest was piqued when he came across their dueling articles in Esquire that were published in the aftermath of the 1968 debates. “I was absolutely amazed by what I had read. These two guys going head to head was better than Muhammad Ali’s ‘Thrilla in Manila.’ This is incredible word-slinging. What a mass of rhetoric! It was verbal fencing,” he says.

Graves wanted to see the debates for himself, but in the pre-VCR era, it proved impossible. “I never lost interest in this, ever,” he says.

He wasn’t the only one. Years later, Graves discovered Vidal had copies of eight of the debates, but in an obsolete video format. Graves arranged with the writer’s camp to have the tapes professionally transferred to DVD. “I thought maybe I could turn this into some kind of Frost/Nixon kind of play. But I’m not a playwright.”

In 2010, he arranged a screening of the debates at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. He didn’t expect much interest, but “it was not only sold out, they had to turn quite a few people away.”

Among those in the audience was Gordon. He saw the potential in the footage and contacted Graves, who recalls him saying, “My partner’s Morgan Neville, and if I were to do this as a solo project, he would never forgive me.”

Blood in the Streets

Three weeks after the Republican convention, the Democratic Party gathered in Chicago. The death of Kennedy had thrown the Democratic race into chaos, and the convention devolved into a fiasco of historic proportions. The floor fight between Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern was soon overshadowed by the events outside the hall, where Mayor Richard Daley’s heavy-handed police force helped escalate anti-war demonstrations into all-out riots.

On the air, Buckley and Vidal went at it again. Word had spread of the verbal fisticuffs, and the nation tuned in. They were not disappointed. Buckley was smug, confident he could exploit Democratic divisions. Vidal, the radical, was incandescent, railing against Buckley’s brand of conservatism and the Democratic pro-Vietnam war faction, led by President Lyndon Johnson, whose back-room dealings secured the nomination of Vice President Hubert Humphrey.

By the penultimate night of the convention, with blood flowing in the Chicago streets, the gloves had come off in the ABC studios. Vidal baited Buckley relentlessly, and when he equated Buckley’s conservatism with outright fascism, Buckley’s carefully constructed patrician demeanor slipped. He called Vidal a “goddamn queer,” and the debate was on the verge of physical violence when moderator Howard K. Smith stepped in. Backstage, Buckley flew into a rage while Vidal declared victory and partied with Paul Newman.

But the real winner was ABC, which, over the course of August, went from last to first in the ratings.

Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures

Gore Vidal and Paul Newman in Best of Enemies.

Digging Into the Past

“ABC was supportive from the beginning,” Gordon says. “They didn’t understand immediately, but I won their trust. Then I called Morgan and told him I had this great idea, and could I send him a DVD?”

Unexpectedly, Neville had a connection with the material. “His first job out of college was fact-checker at The Nation, and he was Vidal’s fact-checker,” Gordon says. “It was the worst job he ever had. Gore did not like being told he made mistakes. Morgan saw the same thing I did — that these debates represented the culture wars in America today and that they were articulating both sides so well, yet it was 45 years old. We both saw this as a very contemporary project.”

Gordon, Neville, and Graves set up interviews with political and media figures, including talk-show host Dick Cavett, columnist Frank Rich, and Vanity Fair editor James Wolcott. “They saw what we saw, that they could talk about all kinds of contemporary issues by talking about the enmity between these two guys,” Gordon says. “When we finished the first interview with Wolcott, I knew we had a great movie.”

They managed to secure one of the last interviews with the late writer Christopher Hitchens. “I was so nervous going in there,” Gordon says. “It was two weeks before he was diagnosed with cancer. He wasn’t ill yet. It was a delightful evening of cocktails and talk.”

“We had so much fun. I hope it comes across,” Graves says.

Hollow Victory

In August 1968, the consensus was that Vidal had won the debates. But it was a hollow victory. With the Democratic Party in disarray, Nixon handily defeated Humphrey. “In the immediate days and weeks after the convention, Buckley’s ideas won out,” Gordon says. “They reached their epitome with Reagan, who is still the icon of the Republican Party. Though people no longer know who Buckley is, they know Buckley’s ideas, because they know Reagan. But it’s been interesting to see, in the past half-dozen years or so, the turn to where Vidal’s ideas are having their moment: Gay rights, marijuana legalization, these ideas that seemed so far out back then are finding their way into the American mainstream.”

Although it was not obvious at the time, the Buckley-Vidal debates marked the beginning of the modern age of political punditry. By the time the 1972 conventions rolled around, all three networks had teams of ideologically opposed commentators debating the issues of the day. Gavel-to-gavel convention coverage was a thing of the past.

Greenlit

“It was one of those stories that we had to find it as we went along,” Neville says. “And it was one of these rare experiences on a film where every stone we turned yielded some nugget that just made it richer and richer. Oftentimes, in a documentary, you’re searching for the characters or for dramatic tension. This film had all that in spades.”

Work on Best of Enemies was on and off. The team struggled to secure funding, get interviews, and uncover new archival footage. “Morgan probably made five documentaries in the interim, and he was piggybacking shoots for this onto those.”

Memphian David Leonard shot many of the interviews, and Meyer edited scenes and trailers together, which were used to try to secure funding from investors and grants from Independent Television Service (ITVS).

“When Robert came to me to talk about the project five years ago, I said, ‘Who?,’ and he said ‘Cool!'” Meyer says. “I hadn’t really thought about the fact that people under 40 don’t know who these guys are. In making the film, it was a fun exercise to try and make it accessible to people who were alive during the events and who knew everything about these guys, and then also to introduce a whole new generation to these two amazing characters and this event.”

Finally, after three years, a grant from ITVS greenlit the project. The final budget was approximately $750,000. “It’s a 90-minute film, and 80 minutes of screen time is archival [footage],” Gordon says. “Hundreds of thousands of dollars went into licensing.”

The money opened up new sources of material. “Everything changed when we got into the ABC archive. They had so much we didn’t know they had, like convention coverage. These films hadn’t been seen in decades. Every time we would hit a splice, it would turn to dust,” Gordon says.

For Neville, the biggest discovery was that the debates were a Hail Mary by ABC. “The real character that emerged while we were making the film was ABC. As the film became more and more the story of ABC, everybody got a little nervous about how they would react. But I have to say, at the end of the day, when we finished the film and showed it to their business affairs, they wrote back and said, ‘It’s a film of quality. We’re a news organization. We don’t believe in censorship. You can use anything you want.’ That’s the kind of thing you want to believe a news organization would say, but I guarantee not every news organization would say that.”

Two Things You Should Never Turn Down

After 1968, Buckley and Vidal both went on to greater successes. For the next three decades, Buckley would take on all comers on Firing Line. National Review became the blueprint for the conservative movement that swept America. Vidal found himself in demand, famously quipping that there were two things one should never turn down: sex and appearing on television. His career as a writer flourished with a series of historical novels, such as Lincoln, Burr, and The Golden Age, earning him the sobriquet “America’s biographer.”

As political TV shouters proliferated, the Buckley-Vidal debates were largely forgotten. But the combatants didn’t forget. Their deepening hatred for each other is echoed in the widening divide between the two forces in American politics, the right and the left. Buckley died in 2008. His son, Christopher, refused to be interviewed. “This was a festering wound in the Buckley family. I understood why he didn’t want to talk,” Gordon says.

Vidal died in 2012, while the film was in production. “We interviewed Vidal, which we did not use in the film,” Graves says. “He was real cranky, and he didn’t give us any sound bites we could use. But without Bill in the film, it just seemed off-balance.”

Uncivil Discourse

Gordon and Neville’s masterful storytelling help the lessons of Best of Enemies go down easy. “I think the role of the documentary filmmaker is to be a filmmaker,” Neville says. “Remember that movies, whether scripted or unscripted, are about character and story.”

Scenes from the debates alternate with biographical details and contemporary interviews. “We came up with that idea pretty early in the process,” Neville says. “As much as it’s about political debate, it’s also about a championship fight. We knew we had 10 rounds, with a knockdown in the ninth. We wanted that to be the structure of the film.”

But Best of Enemies is about more than a spectacular clash of ideologies and egos. “We wanted to step back and talk about how we argue,” Neville says. “We’re not choosing sides, and not being objective for the sake of being objective. We’re not choosing sides, because we want to make the bigger point.”

That point is simple. “When did civil discourse become uncivil?” Gordon says. “Where are the adults?”

The contrast between Buckley’s and Vidal’s carefully constructed arguments and today’s button-pushing political discourse couldn’t be clearer. “You see a dumb person on television, and you say, ‘They’re dumb like me! That’s cool!'” Meyer says. “I wish people would say, ‘Wow, that dude is so smart. I want to sit and listen to him all day long.'”

Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures

Morgan Neville

Neville agrees. “The dumbing down of our media has led to the dumbing down of our politics. That’s something that’s mutually beneficial to the companies who make money off of news and the companies that make money off of politicians.”

The message has resonated with critics and audiences. The film was snapped up by Magnolia Pictures the night of its premiere. “When we sold the film at Sundance, the night we were negotiating with our distributor, Robert said, ‘As long as you open the film in Memphis. That’s a term of selling it to you.’ And they said okay!”

On Friday, August 14th, Best of Enemies goes into wide distribution after earning rave reviews from critics and early Oscar buzz in limited release.

Indie Memphis will host the Memphis premiere on Friday at 7:15 p.m. It will feature a Q&A with Gordon and the sale of Buckley vs. Vidal (The Devault-Graves Agency) by Graves, a transcript of the debates with an introduction by Gordon. There will be another Q&A with Gordon after Saturday’s 7:15 p.m. screening.

Gordon says making the film helped him appreciate how increasing political polarization threatens the very fabric of civil society. “We don’t listen to each other, because we don’t have to. But at some point, we’re going to have to.”

Editor’s note: Our thanks to Malco Theatres for allowing us to use the lobby and projection room of the Ridgeway Cinema Grill for Justin Fox Burks’ photographs.

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Robert Gordon Strikes Gold At Sundance

Memphis writer/director/producer Robert Gordon’s new project Best Of Enemies was sold to Magnolia Pictures and Participant Media today for a “high six-figure sum”. The documentary film, which was co-directed with Morgan Neville, whose last film 20 Feet From Stardom, won last year’s Academy Award for Best Documentary, premiered last Friday at the Sundance Film Festival. 

William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal square off in this still image from Best Of Enemies.

Best Of Enemies chronicles the series of debates between Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley staged by ABC during the 1968 Republican and Democratic conventions, which the film credits as kicking off the contemporary cable news shoutfest style of political programming. 

Reviews for the film by the cadre of industry professionals who descend on Park City, Utah every January have been nothing short of rapturous. The Hollywood Reporter‘s Todd McCarthy wrote “For American viewers of an intellectual/historical persuasion, there could scarcely be any documentary more enticing, scintillating and downright fascinating than Best of Enemies.” Writing for Variety, Joe Leydon says “Best of Enemies never gets heavy-handed while attempting to illustrate the true historical importance of what might still be viewed by many as nothing more than an obscure and eccentric bit of prime-time misadventure.” The Guardian‘s four-star review, written by Jordan Hoffman, says  “Directors Morgan Neville (20 Feet from Stardom) and Robert Gordon (Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story) have unearthed outstanding footage and interviewed many of today’s best thinkers for a juicy and thrilling documentary about two intellectual titans who truly loathed one another.” 

In addition to Gordon, who directed and produced, the film’s strong Memphis roots include editor Eileen Meyer, composer Jonathan Kirkscey, director of photography David Leonard, consulting producer Tom Graves, and production assistant Andrew Paisley. 

Magnolia Pictures and Participant Media will reportedly give Best Of Enemies a theatrical release sometime this year, with home video, television, and streaming deals to follow. You can watch a short interview with directors Gordon and Neville at CraveOnline.