Nell,
I wouldn’t want to agree with you too often, so I’ll say that I thinkthe West Side Story movie–and everything about the musical exceptBernstein’s sublime score–has dated embarrassingly. Apparently, there’s arevival somewhere in these 50 states that’s in no special hurry to arrive inNew York City, for fear of having critics reassess its quaint dissonances andmothballed sociology. This is, I admit, uncharitably revisionist, and I’d loveto have seen Robbins’s original production–to have been able to ogle those“joyously athletic” bodies in motion without the intrusion of all thatobnoxiously athletic editing.
Before I go any further, I want to apologize to readers for something in thelast dispatch. My wife, Rachel, points out that in the name of a cheap-jokesegue to the ongoing fat-soprano dispute in rec.music.opera, I did indeedappear to be making fun of Linda Tripp on the basis of her weight. This wasdeeply unfair to Ms. Tripp, whose unpalatability has nothing to do with herappearance. And anyway, her problem isn’t that she’s fat but that she’shatchet-faced.
Your admission that the local library might not offer any of “the fringematerial” that we discussed yesterday is so ludicrous an understatement thatI’m going to let it pass without further comment. Also, your declaration thatyou’re not going to “weep any tears for the dimming artistic vision of anyonewhose vision can be dimmed by a studio deal” misses the point. Nobody’s cryingfor the executives of, say, October Films, who were forced to unload ToddSolondz’s Happiness by Universal owner Edgar Bronfman: as you say, they choseto make that Faustian bargain. My tears are for filmmakers who have feweroutlets for the kind of chancy material that the indie movement ought to befostering. Will they soldier on, somehow finding a way to realize theirvisions as great artists do? What Van Gogh said above is certainly valid ifthe only things you need to make a work of art–aside from a roof over yourhead and food–are canvases and oils. But with very few exceptions, youcan’t make a movie these days that more than the teeniest sliver of theaudience is willing to see for less than a quarter of a million dollars. Theproblem is not that the vanguards of the market you celebrate are bottom-line-oriented; it’s that they’re more dimwitted than the mass audience they caterto. They don’t understand that, as the Lolita screenwriter Stephen Schiff toldthe Times, because you depict something doesn’t mean that you endorse it.
It doesn’t surprise me that Professor Turley is fearful of having his ownweapons turned against him. But I think that some of the other pundits,especially the ones who agree with me, are doing an outstanding job of layingout the issues surrounding Semengate. Toobin I extolled yesterday. Jeffrey Rosen and NinaTotenberg need no endorsement. Then there’s Lars-Erik Nelson, whose “Make MyDay” column in the Daily News (calling for Clinton to demand impeachment) wasa brilliant, if nutty, wake-up call to common sense. Nelson appeared today onBrian Lehrer’s terrific New York talk-radio show, On the Line, and pointed outthat “you can convict anyone of anything if you target an individual”–asStarr has relentlessly, and in violation of normal judicial restraints,targeted Clinton. In the August 13 issue of the New York Review of Books,Nelson has a haymaker of an article on books by Jim McDougal and Webb Hubbell.Beyond pointing out that every charge against the Clintons with regard toWhitewater, Vince Foster, the F.B.I. files, and the travel office, has beendiscredited or come to nothing despite years of fanatical digging (the LittleRock grand jury is out of business), Nelson identifies two principal culprits:McDougal, a “self-serving, self-pitying conniver who preyed on others and yet[saw] himself as a victim,” who went public about Whitewater because he wantedBill and Hillary Clinton to “feel [his] pain” (and who thought Bill was havingan affair with his wife–that again!); and the press, which even at its mostseemingly innocuous, will file a “work in progress that, just by its lengthand detail, implies that it is worth reading even though it actually provesnothing at all.” OK, maybe tomorrow I’ll listen to Rush and see that his pointof view is fairly represented in this space. And speaking of fat tenors…
