Let's set the record straight with with gameshow hostesses; they may be
good looking but they're not as thick and dim as we make them out to be, are
they?
Let's spin the wheel and play a game of 'Spin to Win' to find out
if we have a winner or if we have bust our bank!
Starring:Morwenna Banks as the 'Spin to Win' game hostess and Gordon
Kennedy as the game show host.
This is a clip from the Channel 4 sketch show, Absolutely, written by and
starring Pete Baikie, Morwenna Banks, Jack Docherty, Moray Hunter,
Gordon Kennedy and John Sparkes
I leave you with a poem
Jim wrote. We use it in the episode, but I want to reprint it here. It
seems kind of perfect now that Jim’s finally slipped his chain.
BARKING
The moon comes up. The moon goes down. This is to inform you that I didn’t die young. Age swept past me but I caught up. Spring has begun here and each day brings new birds up from Mexico. Yesterday I got a call from the outside world but I said no in thunder. I was a dog on a short chain and now there’s no chain.
There were none like him while he lived. There will be none like him now
that he’s gone. He was a hero to me, an inspiration, a man I was
honored and grateful to have known and spent time with. And I am proud
that we were able to capture his voice, his words, for you.
09/09/89
BBC 'Film Club' introduction to Roeg's 1983 film with Nigel Andrews
giving the background to the film and its troubled release followed by
interviews with Director Roeg, Writer Paul Mayersberg, and Producer
Jeremy Thomas
● ● ●
me in Eureka
● ● ●
EUREKA TRAILER
● ● ●
Recorded Picture Company
Published on Jan 24, 2012
NICOLASROEG INTERVIEWED
by Harlan Kennedy
"Jack McCann is a
dinosaur,"says Jewish gangster Joe Pesci of Gene Hackman's aging
millionaire in Eureka.
"And
everyone knows what happened to dinosaurs."
They were wiped out by the Ice Age – all
except the few who went to Hollywood and became production chiefs. Nicolas Roeg has
been battling with them ever since, whether trying to woo his first film, Performance, off the Warner Bros. shelf
back in the late Sixties or
striving to make his good friend Dino
DeLaurentiis see Flash Gordon his
way in the mid-Seventies.
The shock of the new causes paroxysms on Sunset Boulevard and points East. Every Roeg movie, not just his latest, is rampant with
novelty and could justify the title Eureka. It
is thus no surprise that the latest
moguls at MGM/UA have responded to
its hard violence, sex, and complex
narrative with perplexity, not
immediately sure whether to cut it or tough it out. Instead, they've dumped it on UA Classics.
Up in the icy Yukon and down in the balmy Caribbean, Roeg and
screenwriter Paul Mayersberg (who
scripted Roeg's The Man Who Fell To Earth) dig for the tale of grizzled Jack McCann (Gene
Hackman), who gets rich quick in a 1925
gold strike and lives happily never
after. The enraptured rapture of his
great "Eureka" haunts him still when we rejoin him two decades later – a
giant leap for mankind, a swift flash-forward
for filmmakers – on his private island
sequestered from the din of World War II. And the lost rapture stays
to haunt him until his death, murdered in blood and
fire in a bizarre Walpurgisnachtin his
mansion Eureka.
Roeg thinks with his eyes: as befits a cinematographer turned
director. He was director of photography on Far From The Madding Crowd,
Fahrenheit 451, Petulia.
He then directed Performance, Walkabout, Don't Look Now, The Man Who Fell to
Earth, and Bad Timing.
Eureka is a
treasure-trail of optic clues, mythic
psychedelia and Treblinka rags of illusion and allusion, which leads
into one of the richest movie labyrinths
since Citizen Kane. It's a film about passion for gold, sex, or for the elemental in oneself and dying in the fulfillment. What can fuel life thereafter?
It's a film about sorcery – from alchemy to Tarot to telepathy. And murder, mystery and motive. Not so much "Who killed Jack McCann?" as "How and why did Jack McCann bring on his own death?"
Back in the days when Man the Scientist had "simple" dreams – turning metal into gold – there were but four elements. Earth, air, fire and water. Roeg's layer-on-layer movie rests its animistic base on these, and the dazzling twenty-minute opening section set in the Yukon is a song for four elemental voices, with fire dominant. Fire plunges from
the sky, leaving a sizzling stone in the
snow that McCann guards ever after as
a sacred talisman, his "philosopher's stone." Gunfire blows away the head of a suicidal prospector. And fire frolics
tauntingly in the hearth of a croaky hooker-cum-sorceress,
Frieda (Helena Kallianiotes),
who laments the day McCann's
passion for gold overwhelmed and killed his passion for her.
If fire leaps forth as the
primal spirit of energy in Eureka – life-giving or life-destroying – gold is
its portable emblem. When, in the
Yukon prologue, Hackman hacks out a river of gold from the cavern under howling ice and snow (the other elements all in chaining coalition), Roeg intersects repeated pickaxed bangs with
the gasps, both orgasmic and dying,
of Frieda in her far-off bordello love nest. The
music from Das Rheingold's prelude,
simultaneously swelling on the
soundtrack, intimates mythic quest, Wagner-style. And sacrifice. For the consummation of Hackman's love for gold has been bought, like Alberta's, at the cost of human sexual love. And the gold itself gushes forth from the rock in a fiery-liquid river, an elemental orgasm.
When we leap forward into the Forties, the same mythic and elemental music is being played. The
aging mage McCann now presides over a household as knotted and intricate as the House of Atreus:
wife Helen (Jane Lapotaire), daughter Tracy (Theresa Russell), son-in-law
Claude (Rutger Hauer), plus a bevy of servants and a dubious business manager
(Ed Lauter).
If
McCann's tragedy is that he found
ecstasy too soon in his life – and
Alberich's curse lives with him in his sense of spiritual waste and passion spent – Roeg and Mayersbergalso now give him a tragic grandeur, a patriarchal fallen wisdom that becomes the apex of the main character triangle.
Tracy is his soul-heir. Her psychic link to her father is invoked both in telepathic cross-cuttings between the two and in the gifts of spirit he has bequeathed her, from a driving quest for ecstasy to the arithmetic wizardry they demonstrate one evening at dinner.
Claude is the third corner of the triangle: the interloper-dilettante (or "dabbler" as Roeg calls him) who wants Tracy as much for her being the receptacle of her father's soul as for herself. Rutger Hauer makes
Claude a vain, strutting, gold-quaffed, compelling demon; a wanderer; a flying Dutchman whose sole permanent possession is a yacht called Pandora.
Much like Pandora's Box, Eurekabecomes a movie that when thrown open explodes around one: outward from a three-cornered thematic core of desire (for
gold, for love, for other men's souls and secrets) and scattering sparks across a huge terrain of myth and
meaning. As in all his movies,
Roeg hurls heady visual juxtapositions at us – in a bid to storm the syntactical frontiers between shot and shot, scene and scene, metaphor
and reality, parable and paranormal.
Is it real or emblematic cause-and-effect when we cut from
McCann's hand being scorched by the
talisman, which stands on a
pedestal in the mansion's hall, to
Tracy crying in sexual pain or ecstasy
in her bedroom? Or when later in the
same scene a golden chain (child-parent link?) slips loudly from Tracy's dressing
table?
Mightiest brain-twister of all is the film's late and tenebrously cryptic courtroom scene. After McCann's murder, Claude is put on trial and led, by his own decision to conduct his defense, to a confrontation with Tracy herself. Each peels
off layer after layer of protective half-truth
as the lights dim around them save
for a pale and eerie spot on each.
Roeg and Mayersberg, gear-shifting into the surreal, depart furthest of all here from their true-life point of departure, the "real case" of Sir Harry
Oakes. Oakes, prototype for the movie's McCann, was murdered in Nassau in 1943. His son-in-law, a French Count, was tried for the killing and, like the film's Claude, acquitted. But there the resemblances end, almost. Eureka's stylized
courtroom becomes an arena not for weighing external facts but for peeling through to internal truths: the truth that Claude
is in Tracy's words, "guilty of innocence",
and that, far from having the
strength of mind and body to have taken
the life of McCann, he scarcely has
the strength or self-knowledge to keep his relationship with her alive.
Claude ends up, in this Strindbergian ghost-trial, being arraigned not for a capital crime of murder but for the spiritual crime of an egoism that camouflages weakness, dilettantism, and moral myopia.
Nothing in Eureka is what it seems. Even
the movie's "subplot" is no subplot,
in the sense of an obediently subordinate layer of narrative. It's a major
navigating force in the action, as businessman
Joe Pesci and his assistant Mickey Rourkebid to build a casino on LunaBay, a proposed development on McCann's land. But McCann won't play. "I don't believe in chance," he says, summing up his Homeric certainty that man holds the reins to his own destiny and had visible, communicable gods of desire and conscience with whom to battle over it.
Nights later, duly pricked to action, Pesci's men converge on Hackman's mansion, Claude trailing ghost-like after in the shadows. And McCann, strewing blood-red flower petals over the stair-rail as if in invitation, is done to death.
●
Trying to summarize the theme and story of a Nicolas Roeg movie is like trying to distill and bottle Niagara Falls. Even
the director, whom I met and talked
with at London's Natural History Museum
under the towering shadow of a
long-dead dinosaur, tackled like with like. Roeg thinks and speaks as he
films, in a high-volt
helter-skelter of images and
allusions, delivered in an intense and
husky British brogue that sometimes
sounds like Herbert Marshall attacked
by oneiric delirium. It's impossible
to transcribe his speech without plentiful
italics, which mark the points where Roeg jumps on a word like a trapper on a quarrelsome grizzly and wrestles it to
the ground.
"I wanted to make a film
about ecstasy," he says, "the many forms of ecstasy. Ecstasy in individual people, and ecstasy as the mystic sense of life. How our actions are connected to everything and
everyone around us. It's not a mystery
film, it's not a thriller. And I hope you can't put it into a slot. There isn't a slot to put it
in. To do so would make it a thing
it isn't."
Nonetheless, critics have been
trying to coax Roeg into slots for years
now. He's a "movie
mystic," he's a director of "existential thrillers," he's a
"Borgesian." Eurekahas already started
sending cries of critical bafflement into the heavens. "A-ha!" cry hopeful scrutineers, Roeg has made a murder thriller. But then the film swirls and interpenetrates on into a climactic trial scene that has nothing to do with criminal justice and a denouement that doesn't even tell us whodunit.
"Professional critics reflect the time they live in," says Roeg. "And today
it's a very reactionary time, socially, politically, and artistically. Especially in the movies. If the
grammar of cinema is at all changed or dented, it's resented far more
than in other mediums.
Fellini once said,
'They call me self-indulgent now. They used to call it style.'
In
literature and poetry, fine:
changes and changing attitudes to the form are quite acceptable. But
the diagrammatic form of cinema has very
little root in literature, and nothing
to do with the theater. And it's
become full of rigid preconceptions."
"I remember an audience coming out of a screening of Marienbad, among them some very eminent critics who said,
'The man doesn't know anything about form at all. Look at the ridiculous shot of Sacha Pitoeff
coming downstairs in a dinner jacket and
then going upstairs in a blazer,
then downstairs in a dinner
jacket... That guy Resnais doesn't understand!'
And yet today, every
television commercial, the wife puts a
pie in the oven and the next shot is the family sitting down to feast on it. That has its direct root in the changes in the grammar of film. Commercials like that are the direct result of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Alain Resnais."
"The trial scene in Eureka,"
Roeg continues, "is not – obviously it's not – a 'real' trial. The lights don't go down in a real courtroom, as they do in ours; you don't have spotlights. It's a dramatic setting for a confrontation between two characters.
It's formalized. It's an arena. And
when you see Claude cross-examining Tracy, it's he who's being exposed. 'I taught you everything you know,' he says. And he still doesn't understand that he's talking to someone
who has McCann's soul when he's
talking to her, that they're the strong ones, she and McCann,
the ones who understand, the ones
with a capacity for life, knowledge, not
him. She saves Claude's neck, but in doing
so all things have to be said between
them. And very few relationships can
survive that amount of truth."
The character of Claude is the "wild card" in the movie: an elusive, mercurial presence
flitting around the stronger flames of
McCann and Tracy. "He's a dabbler," says Roeg. "When we first started on the character of Claude, I remembered
a man I once saw on Brighton beach before the war, when I was a child. He was, supposedly, a French Count.
The local people despised him and used to
call him the 'Count of no account.' And he had a beautiful girl with him who wore one of the first bikini-type bathing suits, shocking the locals. I thought of this man as a dabbler. The kind of man who came to fruition later in occult things and dope
and smoking grass, etc. The first hippie really, though I've nothing against hippies. I'm probably one myself – though a rather old hippie!
"But Claude hadn't 'gone the route' like McCann, in a single quest for gold – for
his gold, for the gold's really a symbol
of anyone's gold. Claude had never
thought any purpose through, and he's not bright like McCann. He dabbles, for instance, in the Cabala. At the dinner early
in the film, Claude is wearing this shirt
with cabalistic signs on it, flaunting
this rather cleverer-than-thou image. And at one point, after they've talked about the five points of wisdom in the Cabala, McCann says 'And the sixth is
Bullshit.' And he goes on, 'There's only
one Golden Rule. Do unto others as
you would have them do unto you. The
rest is conversation.'
"Well, people have come up to me and said 'Oh anti-Semitic!' and this, that, and the other. Well, when Jack says that he's actually
quoting straight from the
center of the Talmud: 'There's only one Golden Rule' the Talmud says: 'Do unto
others,' and then it ends, 'The rest is
commentary.' So the people who come up and say 'Anti-Jewish, anti-Yid'
are only scratching surfaces. I believe – and it's part of what Jack McCann represents – that once you start scratching a surface you must go on until you reach as far as you dare go. Or maybe go right
to the bottom, whatever the
dangers.
"And this strength that
Jack has," Roeg continues, "is what Claude envies, what he covets.
When the three of them have their fight
later in the film – Tracy,
Claude and McCann, when Jack breaks into
the couple's house – McCann says to Claude: 'I see what you want. You
want my soul.' Claude wants it through Tracy.
She, like McCann, has this strength, this
quest for ecstasy, and understands
the danger of finding
your ecstasy too soon."
Roeg sets a flame to another
cigarette and looks up at the dinosaur's
head, hollow-eyed and
bleach-boned.
"One reason the film isn't
a murder thriller," he says, "is
that McCann doesn't die. That's to
say, what he is, what he represents is absolutely continued in Tracy. There are children – I've seen it in
friends of mine and their families – who
are quite literally soul-clones
of their parent, their father
or mother. In surface things they
can be quite different, but the essence is passed on.
"And that's what I wanted to illustrate, as simply as possible, when the mathematics puzzle is solved by Tracyin her head at the dinner. She and Jack share this gift. And how often can you know
what is going on in someone else's head?
It's a classic lover's question, isn't it? 'What are you thinking, darling?' Pause. 'Oh, thinking about you,
darling!' But you never know. Unless you have a gift in
common. And that scene was a simple, direct way of showing that Jack and Tracy are linked."
Roeg and I get up and walk
through the room, among the bustle of visitors busy cricking their necks at the beast beetling above them, a giant jigsaw of white bones.
"I wanted the characters in the movie to be big people," says Roeg. "Not big 'symbolically,' because
that's the death knell. But Grecian almost.
The Father. The Mother.
"When you have this elemental feel to the people, there
are links you can make between the
characters. For instance, all the
women – Frieda, Helen, Tracy – have dark hair, and they're given this
kinship with the world of sorcery, of
mysticism. And even the gangsters have this extra stature, they're small in a 'big' way. They're brutal, petty,
mean, violent, uncaring men. Grand Guignol characters almost. They don't realize how much it takes to kill a man
like Jack McCann. He has to be beaten down and consumed.
"Which is why we made the murder scene quite violent. People have come up to me and said, 'Oh it's very gruesome and brutal!' But I
think it's important. In Performance
only two shots were fired. But when
you shoot someone, you reduce a
physically healthy young man to
probably terminal illness. It's an important thing.
"I feel bad about violence when I think of films, good as they might be, like Friday the 13th, and people say 'Jolly good film, lot of blood, and people are strangled and stabbed!' I believe in the sanctity of life and I've tried to show these gangsters as
only foolish people and criminal, not glorified at all. Sadistic violence
offered for gain, or to express machismo, is awful."
Eureka
is in a different dimension from that catchpenny breed of fairground
shocker: not only in its content but in its style and vision. Part of the
movie's spell lies in Roeg's ability, as in all his films, to bend and
transform images in a way that takes us far beyond naturalism. Even that old
slam-bang favorite, the zoom shot, is transfigured here into a technique
supple, responsive, and varied – from limpid, spectacular lunges forward
across snowy landscapes or into the moon's face to tiny darts of attention
into an object or a human face.
"I'm not comfortable just
standing still," says Roeg. "It's probably some psychological
thing! I like to be at different distances from things. They seem to expand
more then. And the zoom creates this effect. I can't bear, for instance,
those interview programs on TV where two faces just sit across from each
other and the camera doesn't move. I want to get up and walk around myself.
I'm probably from the PeripateticSchool
of philosophy!"
Peripatetic conversation has
now walked us all the way from the NaturalHistoryMuseum
to Nicolas Roeg's house. I ask him how the title Eureka
had finally been chosen for the film, after the title had gone through
several previous variants, including most recently Murder Mystery.
"It was the cry of
Archimedes, of course," says Roeg, "when he stepped into the bath
and discovered the principle of specific gravity. He was wearing the golden
crown of Herion, the ruler of Syracuse,
who had asked him to find out how much base metal there was in it. So
Archimedes put it on and stepped in, the water ran over the side, and he
dashed off down the street yelling 'Eureka!'
Amusing chap.
"But actually the direct
idea for our title came from Edgar Allan Poe's essay 'Eureka.'
Which I think is marvelous, the best thing he ever wrote – it s speculation
about the stars and the heavens, the cosmos. He said, 'After I've done "Eureka"
I can do no more.' And that was the last he ever wrote. He went on a great
binge and died two weeks later.
"Of course, what's
fascinating about following leads in building a movie," continues Roeg,
questing busily among his bookshelves, "is that some things, some
references feel instantly right. And you don't have to follow the roots right
through. You find echoes of what you're trying to say in all kinds of places.
"When we were preparing
the film and we were talking about ecstasy, Paul Mayersberg and I, we were
saying that the truly ecstatic moment should arrive at the point of
ecstasy-is-death. And I came across this."
Roeg opens a book.
"According to the Muslims, there are seven Heavens', and they're listed
and described, one by one. And when we come to the Sixth Heaven, listen to
this: 'The Sixth Heaven is composed of ruby and garnet and is presided over
by Moses. Here dwells the guardian angel of Heaven and Earth, half snow and
half fire.' And Jack is the snow and the flame! That's the Sixth. 'The
Seventh Heaven is formed of divine light beyond the power of tongue to
describe and is ruled by Abram. Each inhabitant is bigger than the whole
Earth and with 70,000 heads, each head 70,000 miles, each mouth 70,000
tongues, and each tongue speaks 70,000 languages, all forever employed in
chanting to the glory of the most high. To be in the Seventh Heaven is to be
supremely happy, to be in paradise, to be in ecstasy.' "
Roeg chortles with delight,
closes the book, and throws a beaming look at me across the room.
"It's rather shattering,
isn't it? That really is the story of Jack McCann!
Snow and fire.And the
quest for the Seventh Heaven. Ecstasy."
● ● ●
COURTESY T.P.
MOVIE NEWS.
THIS ARTICLE APPEARED IN THE APRIL 1983 ISSUE OF FILM COMMENT.