THE IMMORTALS
Gus Van Sant.
Is there anyone alive or a green-lighter the knows how damn much he added to the art of filmmaking? If they remember what he meant… do they care to pass that on… the those hungry for a drop of what an emerging, independent film maker can deliver? Do they want to expend the energy to share anything that preserves the Integrity of re-defining Indie films or the vision it took to create this enormous and enormously important film artist-as-visionary world? Because that world was for him and others like Luc Besson a world they influenced.
Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho, Milk, Finding Forrester, Good Will Hunting, To Die For. Besson: Lucy, The Fifth Element, La Femme Nikita, The Professional.
To carry the torch of the person that can write screenplays so obviously powerful they attract A-List talent and get the theatrical release they deserve requires knowing why Gus Van Sant, Sam Rami, Robert Shaye, Bukowski, and Sidney Lumet created something out of nothing with nothing to spend and altered the trajectory of the Vector of filmmaking. Bukowski wrote the unfinished Pulp Fiction for crissakes.
Gus Van Sant’s movies that carried the weight for Indie film production at film festivals. Movies that began showing the limits, love, and emotions of unique characters told so poetically. And being so damn good at the art he could force financing to believe in his films even if they did not understand them. He was the playground for the Indie arms of studios that fed Focus Features, Fine Line.
Drugstore Cowboy uplifting not just the genre but making immortal roles for Matt Dillon, Heather Graham, and Kelly Lynch – but also had the brilliance to cast William S. Burrows a great counter-culture author of books like Bukowski’s (the voice of countercultural truth, the soul and confessor of our sins.)
In one word they wrestled “dirty realism” but poetically for cinema they created something out of nothing with nothing but artistic talent willing to trust these immortals.
This is why A.I. can never take over filmmaking or replace the true filmmaker. Sure, it can duplicate actors and write scripts that devolve to pieces of crap to watch. But A.I. cannot “be” Gus Van Sant – the man to risk making “My Own Private Idaho” with River Phoenix in a time when banking an international release on hints of homosexuality could end a career. His trust in channeling “the divine” makes “Brokeback Mountain” a half-measure.
When you hire someone to write a screenplay you can go with the dozens that know how to fit a template for approval by Producers – or you can hire someone that went to the film festivals when they had power… when Sundance spun off Slamdance and
“Once Were Warriors, “ “South Park,” “Blood Simple,” “El Mariachi,” “Hoop Dreams,” “Run, Lola, Run,” “Momento,” “sex, lies, and videotapes, “Swingers” and “The Brothers McMullen” took the festival by storm. The momentum that forced bidding wars was that legacy Hollywood recognized lightning in a bottle – something veteran Producers and Studio heads couldn’t come up with on their own.
It isn’t enough to study these in film schools. The electricity in the air – the electricity of discovery – infused main street. Buzz was everything. Who remembers the outrageous interview with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in the house after they started their Indie film finance company and someone didn’t turn off the mic on their shirt? Too insane to tell that full story but it was Maxwell’s Demon at work redirecting all the energy.
Hollywood is confused… it’s broken… it’s fielding empty threats from A.I… but those that remember Besson and Van Sant feel in their bones Hollywood and the Power of Story cannot be created in data alone. These men opened visions held within the collective consciousness of humanity committed to the screen in a new way even if the story has been told a million times. A.I. will create just one of the million times again as it derives more and more of its examples from screenplays written by A.I.
Data is what happens at minute 43 in a screenplay that is perfectly paced. But a two-shot that works. It’s in the moment the Director waited for in ten takes before moving on after the 11th take. It’s in the chemistry between Leon and a new starlet named Matilda that no A.I. could imagine. It is in that smile Nicole Kidman has on her face when she thinks a film crew is just around the corner waiting to make her a superstar. It’s in the limit of 90 seconds of Super 8 in the hands of Rodriguez and how to infuse emotion in how short that life is… short in a way A.I. won’t create in an original film.
The few of us old enough to hear the side-stories of the great filmmakers that are still making movies that are in some cases groundbreaking will be either forgotten, or immortalized if they begin anew this next era of filmmaking.