Week that Was

Life was Sweet

When Life is Sweet, an unexpected comedy about a middle-class family of misfits, won the National Society of Film Critics Best Film Award on January 6, 1992, it was a triumph not only for director Mike Leigh but also for an upstart American distributor named October Films. Leigh's film was the first release from the new company formed by Jeff Lipsky and Bingham Ray, and it was a hit – or, at $1.5 million box office, at least enough of one to establish October and enable it to go on to release films like Breaking the Waves, High Art, and The Apostle. And for Leigh, whose previous film, High Hopes, was distributed by Lipsky at Skouras Pictures and was a more modest success, the Life is Sweet accolades allowed him to develop an American audience that has come back again and again for films like the Oscar-nominated Secrets and Lies (also distributed by October) and Topsy Turvy. And what of October? The company, whose story is recounted in Peter Biskind's Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film, was sold and renamed USA Films, which, in turn, was combined with the New York production and sales company Good Machine in 2002 to become Focus Features.

One Small Sneeze For Mankind

It lasted only five seconds, but it was a piece of history: one hundred and thirteen years ago this week, Thomas Edison and his inspirational partner W.K.L. Dickson assembled to record a series of images to accompany an article in Harper's Weekly. They were trying to capture on film the process of sneezing in all its minutiae, and so gave their lab assistant Fred Ott some snuff. The pictures were then viewed on the Edison Kinetoscope (an invention, in fact, of Dickson's), allowing one to view the event unfolding all over again. "As seen in this wonderful mechanical device," the Harper's article read, "the figure actually sneezes, and the phonograph as an accompanist sounds the precise "as–shew". The illusion is so perfect that you involuntarily say, "Bless you!"" Shot at 16 frames per second, the now-famous Fred Ott's Sneeze was immediately copyrighted by Edison, but is now public domain.

The First "Documentary"

On January 7, 1925, Paramount released Moana, Robert J. Flaherty's exploration of life of South Sea natives. More than a decade before, Flaherty, an explorer, guide and sometime photographer, traveled the Arctic region, chronicling the life of the Eskimo tribes who flourished in such excruciatingly inhospitable conditions. By 1920 he persuaded Canadian furriers to finance a film about the people he had met. And the resulting work, Nanook of the North, which was released in 1922, became a surprise commercial and critical success (as well as a later fashion inspiration for Isaac Mizrahi). Not to be left out in the cold, Jesse Lasky of Paramount in 1923 promised to pay for Flaherty's next non-fiction exploration, hopefully in a warmer clime where the natives might show a bit more skin. Flaherty chose the village of Safune on the Samoan island of Savi'I, an area quickly being modernized under British rule. Using a new panchromatic film stock, which rendered the images in a dreamy silvery tone, Flaherty spent over a year chronicling native life. While Moana proved less a commercial blockbuster than Nanook, it did earn the first appellation "documentary," applied by the then New York Sun critic John Grierson.

The Last One Out

This week in 1995, there was no dispute over the fact that Linda Fiorentino had given one of the performances of the previous year in John Dahl's brilliant neo-noir The Last Seduction, however a judge nevertheless ruled that Fiorentino would be ineligible for an Academy Award. Fiorentino had taken the Best Actress from the New York and London critics as well as at the Independent Spirit Awards, but would be denied an Oscar chance on the basis that The Last Seduction had aired on HBO prior to its cinematic release and thus broke Academy rules for a theatrical film. A legal ruling at Los Angeles' Superior Court on January 10 failed to overturn a previous ineligibility verdict; a few months later, Fiorentino could only watch Jessica Lange win Best Actress for the little-seen Blue Sky and wonder what might have been. The case was sufficiently high-profile to act as a wake-up call for producers of Oscar-caliber films which had early TV premieres: last year, for example, Brian De Palma's Iraq drama, Redacted, had an under-the-radar theatrical run in Norwalk, CT before "premiering" on the HDNet cable channel.

The French Way

For those who wonder why France has produced so many great but often decidedly non-commercial auteurs, part of the answer was provided on January 11, 1983, when France's Minister of Culture, Jack Lang, was celebrated for expanding the country's commitment to supporting cinema. A percentage of box-office receipts going towards the production of new arthouse cinema, government aid for distributors and exhibitors, and various other subsidies comprise what's known as "the French system," which Lang strengthened during his tenure, ensuring that "cinema d'auteur" flourished in the years ahead.

No Business Like "Chaud" Business

French director Francois Truffaut was in England at Pinewood Studios to begin production on his first and only English-language film Fahrenheit 451 on Wednesday January 12, 1966. The film was adapted from Ray Bradbury's celebrated dystopic novel about a future in which books are banned and "firemen" burn them. Published in 1953, in the midst of the McCarthy hearings, the book was read by many as an attack on the fear-mongering of the times — although Bradbury always denied that. Truffaut, flush from the success of films like Jules et Jim and The 400 Blows, wanted to bring Bradbury's book to the screen, but couldn't raise the necessary capital in France. (Except for Chris Marker's 1962 experimental La Jetée, sci-fi was not a very French genre at the time.) The film was blessed with an excellent cast and crew — Nicolas Roeg shot the film; Bernard Herrmann scored it — but the production nevertheless found itself in trouble from the first. One big problem was the script. Truffaut, holding dear to the auteur theory of filmmaking, insisted on writing the screenplay with his collaborator Jean-Louis Richard — even though neither man was fluent in English. To make matters worse the production was conducted in French, a language only a smattering of cast and crew knew. And although the film survives today as a cult classic, the bad reviews of the time were quick to hint at the irony that a film about the precious power of language should be undone by it.