Movie Freak by Owen Gleiberman

Author:Owen Gleiberman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography / Entertainment & Performing Arts
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2016-02-23T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

MAKING THE GRADE AT ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

By 1991, the American independent film movement was like an exotic hipster houseplant that was growing one quietly flowering bud at a time. Few, including me, had any notion that it was about to turn the movie world upside down. It would be a year before Quentin Tarantino unveiled his debut feature, the cunningly booby-trapped torture-porn heist thriller Reservoir Dogs. It would be three years before the release of Kevin Smith’s naughty-boy talkfest Clerks and five years before Todd Solondz’s squirmy suburban nerdfest Welcome to the Dollhouse. The debut features of Paul Thomas Anderson, Darren Aronofsky, Spike Jonze, Mary Harron, Wes Anderson, Alexander Payne, Doug Liman, David O. Russell, Sofia Coppola, and Christopher Nolan were all years away—at that point, barely a gleam in their creators’ eyes. Independent film was still standing on the sidelines. But I got to write about a great deal of it for Entertainment Weekly, carving out space to review films like the startling drag-queen documentary Paris Is Burning, which I called “a tale of dispossessed youth taking refuge in their own narcissism” (“They want to be beautiful and they want to be rich, and the way they see it, the two states have become virtually inseparable”) or Sean Penn’s The Indian Runner (“Penn is trying to get at gritty American ‘truths’ about love, brutality, and blood ties. Somehow, though, it’s all a bit pat. By now, even these stark themes have the ring of movie conventions”).

One week, I grabbed the chance to nudge a movie on the extreme margins into the spotlight. It was the first time I realized that my critic’s perch might just be a bully pulpit. Todd Haynes, the creator of Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (which had stuck in my head ever since I saw it on VHS the night of my 30th birthday party), had made his first movie that was actually going to play in theaters, a cutting-edge queer triptych called Poison. I was eager to see it but didn’t care much for it; it felt like a calculated act of subversion—a kinky academic’s “outlaw” thesis film. I knew the movie was just going to be a dry drop in the ocean, but I wondered: Was there a way I could use it to draw attention to Superstar? And it occurred to me that there was.

Superstar was literally an underground film, since Haynes had made it without securing the rights to the Carpenters’ hits, almost all of which were featured in the movie. Legally, this 43-minute Barbie-doll masterpiece couldn’t be shown. The rights were held by Richard Carpenter, and he wasn’t about to give permission to Todd Haynes any more than he would have sanctioned the vandalization of his home. As a sidebar to my review of Poison, I got the idea to write an open letter to Carpenter in the pages of EW, asking him to give Haynes permission. It was just a stunt, but it was my way to sneak in a review of Superstar.

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