Ask The A.V. Club - February 22, 2008

Dry Welles

Can
you explain why Orson Welles is so ill-served on DVD? Apart from Citizen Kane, Touch Of Evil,
and F For
Fake, his back catalogue is a
mess, with poor transfers, little in the way of extras… or often just plain
unavailability. As one of the towering figures of 20th-century cinema, you'd
expect a comprehensive reissue program or a lavish box set. Lesser figures enjoy
this luxury, but not Welles. His career seems as badly treated in death as it
was in his life.

William
Dodds

Noel Murray raises Cain on your behalf,
William:

First off, let's not forget The Lady From
Shanghai,
which Columbia put out a few years back in a nice edition with a Peter
Bogdanovich commentary. And then there's The Stranger, which MGM cleaned up for
DVD last year (without providing any extras), and Criterion's 2006 set of Mr.
Arkadin,
which includes three different versions of the film, plus copious supplements.
Throw in Paramount's bare-bones It's All True, and that brings the
"official" Welles DVDs up to seven. (The rest, as you imply, are crappy
public-domain discs and grey-market bootlegs.) So why can't you sit in the
comfort of your own home and watch sparkling, features-packed editions of The
Magnificent Ambersons, Chimes At Midnight, Othello,
and The Immortal Story? Two words: Beatrice Welles. The daughter of the legendary
director is notoriously protective of her father's work, and even caused the
DVDs of Citizen Kane and Touch Of Evil to be held up in the past. Whenever Welles
scholars work to increase access to Welles' short films and unfinished works,
Beatrice Welles brings the big squash.

But lest you think that this is a cut-and-dried
case of some big meanie screwing over her father's fans, it's worth noting that
Beatrice Welles at least claims to have her father's legacy in mind. She rarely
makes statements to the press, but those who've worked with her—even
those who disagree with her clampdown—say that she's weighing the memory
of all the studio-imposed cuts and budgetary woes that compromised Orson
Welles' vision, and she doesn't want to see someone else seize the elements of
a choppy film like Chimes At Midnight and try to remake it the way they think Welles
would've intended. Something similar to that happened with the Touch Of Evil "director's cut," which
was marketed as being true to Welles' plans, because of some notes he made, not
because of any actual editing he did himself. Even Welles devotees like critic
Jonathan Rosenbaum have expressed worry that the average movie buff sometimes
takes these posthumously altered films as definitive, when they're merely
speculative.

Of course, Beatrice Welles' fear of outside
tampering didn't stop her from having Othello controversially re-dubbed
and re-scored when it had its theatrical re-release 15 years ago, so maybe she
really is just a control freak, and not a steward of a great man's art. Either
way, the best Welles fans can do is hope that she has a change of heart and
starts letting the enormous body of her father's work—finished and
partial—get out to the people who want to study it more closely.

Pick Up This Answer And Go Home

In the mid-to-late '90s, I remember seeing a
movie trailer that had a remake of Fleetwood Mac's "Gold Dust Woman" playing
for part of it. I don't care about the movie (although I think it was in the
femme-fatale vein) but I want to know who did the remake.

The only thing I can say for sure is that it
had a female singer and heavy industrial-ish grungy type guitars. Kind of a
Veruca Salt or Garbage type of sound. I know it's not much to go on. Thanks for
your time and for saving me from actually, you know, working.

Jon

Josh Modell wrote the bulk of "Live Through
This," but was uncredited:

I think this is an easy one, Jon. America's
sweetheart, Courtney Love (with her band Hole) recorded a cover of "Gold Dust
Woman" for the soundtrack to The Crow: City Of Angels. It's pretty bad, but if
you want to revisit it, you can procure a copy of the CD used from Amazon for
$.94 plus shipping. I would guess every used-CD store in the world has at least
one copy on hand, too. Other '90s acts that rated such a prestigious
soundtrack: Filter, Bush, Seven Mary Three, Korn, and NY Loose. (PJ Harvey is
on there, too, for a little indie cred.)

The Literal Cliffhanger

I need your help. I am a little fixated on this
scene I saw on TV when I was younger. It involves a man in the back of a truck
(perhaps an armored car). The back of the truck is hanging over a cliff, and
the gold(?) that he was trying to steal has slid to the back edge. The truck is
teetering, so he is faced with the possibility of either jumping out and
sacrificing the gold, or trying to get it, which could cause the truck to fall
with him inside it. I don't know anything else, and I especially want to know
how the scene ends. not knowing who the character is, I don't know if he would
be the type to go after the treasure to his own detriment, or give it up for
his own life (recalling the ending of Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade, of course).
Any ideas?

Mason Astley

Tasha Robinson goes for the gold:

I have an idea, Mason, but I don't know how
satisfying you're likely to find it. You're thinking of the very end [spoilers
ahead, obviously] of the original 1969 version of The Italian Job, starring Michael Caine.
Much of the film is taken up with the planning and execution of a heist that
leaves Caine and his team, at the end of the film, with a huge heap of gold
bullion being transported along a winding Italian country road in the back of a
tour bus. Then the driver misses a turn, and the bus winds up handing off the
edge of a cliff, with the heist crew huddled at one end of the bus, and the
gold hanging off empty space at the other. It's pretty obvious that they can
all make it to safety if they try, but only if they're willing to lose the
gold. And that's where the film ends, with Michael Caine saying "Hang on a
minute, lads, I've got a great idea. Uh…"

Find that hard to believe? Here's the end of the
film:

Reportedly, producer Michael Deeley didn't like
any of the proposed endings for the film, so he suggested the cliffhanger cut,
which was designed to lead into a sequel where the Mafia descends from
helicopters on Caine and his cronies and seizes the gold, and they have to
spend the rest of the movie getting it back. But the film, a British-American
co-production, did poorly in America—Caine blames the botched
marketing—and funding for a sequel was never forthcoming. So we never
find out which Caine's character valued more: the gold, or his life. But given
the rest of the film, I think he would have opted for self-preservation. He's a
talented guy; he can always steal more gold.

Order In The Court

So here's something that's been
making me scratch my head for a long time. I've noticed that when the principle
cast from a film is featured on a movie poster or a DVD cover the names of the
actors are almost always over the wrong actor. It'd be one thing if I saw this
now and again. But, it seems like 99 percent of the time the wrong name is over
an actor's head. It doesn't seem like it's alphabetical, or arranged by star
status or anything. It's like whoever's making these poster/box covers is going
out of their way to put the wrong name over of the wrong actor. Why the hell
would they do this?

Alex

Tasha Robinson again:

Wow, Alex, someone's finally letting me show off
my fancy college-type education. Thanks. This was actually covered when I was
taking film courses as an undergrad, many years ago, and it seemed just as
silly then as it does now. Essentially, English-speaking people read left to
right, top to bottom. So the topmost, leftmost name on any given poster is the
one they'll read first, and that's the position considered "top billing." Who
gets that slot isn't necessarily determined by who's the biggest
star—it's determined by who has contractual rights for top billing in the
film. (That would also be the first name you'd see onscreen, either before or
after the film, when the actors' names start popping up.) So the order of the
names on the poster—if it's one of those posters with a bunch of names
running across the top or middle—is determined by contracts.

But studies say that while people read left to
right, they look at images differently—they see the center of the image
first, then glance left and right to take in the sides. So often, "top billing"
in the images of a poster is considered the middle, and your top-billed star
will be in the center of the poster, flanked by co-stars to the left and right.
Just as often, though, design will suggest putting something eye-catching in
the middle, like a woman showing some skin. Hence, for instance, this poster:

Match the names to the figures below them, and it
looks like this poster is saying that Bruce Willis and Melanie Griffith have
both had sex changes. But from a design standpoint, the names of the three
stars across the top are in contractual order—first, second, and third
billed—while the photo design puts all the color (and all the boobs and
exposed skin) front and center, where people will look first. The order of the
names tells you who the contracts say is most important. The order of the
figures on the poster tells you what the marketers think you most want to see,
and what will draw you in fastest.

STUMPED!

Once again, it's time for you to help us answer
baffling questions from your fellow ATAVC readers. If you can identify any of
the memories below, let us know in comments, or e-mail us at the address below.
Specifics, proof, and video links always highly encouraged.

Okay,
Maybe you can help me. I've been trying to find out what this book is for
decades. Scholastic Book Club, I would say. Got it in the early '80s. And it
had the most bizarre, downbeat plot. It was set in the future after ecological
disaster. Food was rationed. It was about a family that had a secret stash of
chickens and other animals that they raised under their house and ate. They get
busted, I think—the middle is a muddle. But the end has the family admitted to an
"escape ship" meant to leave the ecologically destroyed earth behind. Only
here's the twist, the ship was actually a suspended-animation chamber, and the
people were going to wait tens of thousands of years until humanity had killed
itself off and the earth was cleansed. As I said, rather a downbeat book for a
6th grader to read. Any ideas?

Eric

I have some very vague
recollections of an anime (or at least an animated film) from probably the late
'80s to early '90s. The flick starts with a strange bipedal, frog-like creature
with a strange toy. I think it was basically composed of three vertically
connected boxes, and when the door on the front of each box was opened, a
different figure popped out. The scene continues with this creature talking to
a cloaked man who is standing on a ledge overlooking a city. From here, I draw
a complete blank in the story. I remember that the protagonist is introduced
(it's a young kid) as well as his/her companion (a small furry creature with a
tuft of hair at the end of its tail like a poodle).

Another complete blackout of
storyline, and we skip to what I believe is the end. It gets really interesting
at this point. The protagonist winds up in some sort of building, almost like a
castle. I remember the building being composed of block shapes, almost like
Tetris shapes. Eventually, the protagonist is chased by a large, robotic T-Rex
on wheels. That's all I've got. I really hope you can find this for me. It's
had me stumped for years!

Kirk

Okay, so I've got a plotline from a random
short story floating around in my head and was hoping someone has heard of it.
I remember reading it back in middle school, so probably the mid-'90s. It
centered on a town where a new company comes in selling what I think was this
incredibly delicious ice cream or something similar that everyone basically got
addicted to. Once they started getting really fat, another company came in with
a machine that would instantly take off five pounds every time—the only
catch was that a person had to get a little blue dot tattooed on their wrist
every time they used it. I remember the protagonist was a girl who didn't like
ice cream or something, and didn't use the machine. There was a description of
one of her friends who had so many blue dots, it looked like a bracelet. And
the kicker at the end was that it was actually aliens, and they took you away
once you had too many blue dots. Reading back over the summary, this sounds
kind of silly, but it's stuck with me all these years somehow, and I'd like to
know what it is, even if it's a terrible story. Thanks for your help!

Nicole

As
a teenager, I spent a lot of nights channel-surfing at home, often lingering on
the movie channels in hopes of stumbling upon nudity or sex. But just as often,
I would find blood and gore, and one image in particular has lingered in my
mind for years: A small group of trendily dressed teens or twentysomethings is
standing in the woods. Each person appears in a medium shot, looking at the ground
with a serious, possibly slightly freaked-out expression. Each one of them is
covered in blood. A cut to a wide shot of the whole group reveals they are
looking at a hollow log that has been cut into slices, along with a now-dead
bald man inside of it. A look of horror is frozen on the dead man's face. At
this point, either the scene ends or I switched channels.

This
would have been during the early or mid '90s, and I remember the film looking
pretty new and high-budget. I'm curious to find out what movie this was and
what the context was for this scene. I've entered every descriptive phrase I
can think of into Google without any luck.

Ken

Hi! I'm trying to track down the best
worst-movie I've ever seen. It begins like an educational film: A father answers
his son's questions about various animals and natural phenomena during a
leisurely hike. The footage of animals appears to be lifted from other, actual
nature documentaries: The son points to a bird taking flight, and the animal
appears in a completely different setting from that of our couple. The movie
then abruptly turns into a mystery-thriller in which, it seems, somebody or
something is trying to murder the father, who is nearly crushed by a falling,
booby-trapped tree. It turns out that an alien is the culprit: The son steps
into some sort of hole in the universe, which transmits him to the realm of an
elderly alien who wants to live on a mountain free from meddlesome hikers. Did
I mention that the alien also has a nifty remote control which can change
reality at whim? While justifiably weary of the alien at first, the son forgets
his dear old pa when the alien makes it snow; the two make amends over a
snowball fight while the father searches for the boy. The ending, which I've
forgotten, is obviously inconsequential, as, needless to say, none of the loose
ends are tied up. I've been having trouble finding it, because although it is
ostensibly set somewhere in the U.S. wilderness, I saw it only on BBC (one
Sunday morning in the spring of 2005). Please help me identify this sublime
example of unintentional comedy!

Nate

Next week: The ghost of Pauline Kael
has a question, and more. Send your questions to [email protected].