Entry 14:

Dear Phillip,

Truth to tell, the Oscar ceremonies of the past seem to leave little trace in my memory. Each seems to melt into some generic meta-ceremony that includes musical numbers of staggering clunkiness, montages in which hundreds of images from the past are each allotted their fraction of a second, and acceptance speeches by special effects designers or directors of short subjects who go on just a little too long and are (these days) rudely cut off by the orchestra striking up to drown them out. And the jokes, desperate or otherwise: Offhand, the biggest laugh I can recall was Billy Crystal (in the wake of Clinton's recently delivered pronouncement about his marijuana experiences) interjecting a propos of nothing at all to fill a dead moment: "Didn't inhale." (Long pause worthy of Jack Benny while laughter builds.) I remember that once upon a time, Bob Hope owned the Oscars and that when I was kid I thought he was really funny. Part of growing up was not laughing on cue at his monologues anymore (maybe because I finally got them).

I'll bet they do know who Mike Ovitz is in all those far-flung places. He might even seem more interesting when contemplated from a remote perspective, in the same way that early Hollywood moguls take on more stature the further they recede in time. (Not to mention more ancient figures ... Try to imagine a dinner party with the real Antony and Cleopatra, unmediated by Plutarch or Shakespeare or Joe Mankiewicz. Could be a rough night out.)

It's true that the only real surprise the Oscars can ever offer is an unscripted response, forced out of otherwise well-rehearsed people by the shock of winning. (We don't usually get to see the results of the shock of losing for more than a split second.) Weird how the joy of winning is endlessly amplified by awards ceremonies, the aftermath of sports victories, political victories, the triumphant finales of game shows, and then further amplified in all those movies about winning, Rocky and company. (Not to mention Independence Day, where saving Earth from alien devastation was reduced to the level of winning the World Series.) Vicarious triumph seems to be the opiate of choice, while the glum notion of noble defeat, which used to have a certain cultural stature, has definitely been shelved. We've come a long way from noble Romans falling on their swords or opening their veins in the bath. Today the watchword to Seneca is: Don't get mad; get even.

By the way, I don't think of fantasy and documentary as mutually exclusive. Every artifact finally becomes a document, and every document becomes material for fantasy. Human behavior itself is so frequently fantastic that even the most literal documentary can become pure show biz. Likewise many an early '30s Hollywood movie has now acquired a gritty aura of authenticity from its material trappings--the clothes, the body language, the way the actors spit the lines out, the glimpses of streets and buildings, even if the movie itself is the purest pulp. I love movies that manage to suggest both extremes, sometimes in the same shot. I'm thinking of Luis Bunuel's The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, one of my favorite films and one that sadly seems to be unavailable these days, at least on video. It's a Saturday matinee children's movie, perfect as such, that's also an unrelenting, disturbing, sometimes hallucinatory contemplation of solitude. I'm very fond of historical movies that try to bridge the gap between past and present with a nearly documentary approach, like Rivette's Joan of Arc movie that I thought was one of the best of the last decade. Or those Rossellini movies about Socrates, Pascal, Louis XIV, and others. Put it another way: Some of my favorite documentaries are those filmed in other centuries.

Best,
Geoffrey