Last week, when news broke that the Los Angeles County Museum of Art was shutting down its film program temporarily to “rethink” how to make it more profitable, some of the more interesting responses suggested that we should be skeptical that the program will come back in any significant form at all. “Don’t believe for a moment that this hiatus is designed to refresh and strengthen film at LACMA,” wrote Richard Schickel in an LA Times piece, in which he also came this close to accusing LACMA director Michael Govan of not having heard of the French New Wave. Also at the LAT, in a piece widely praised for its vitriol, critic Kenneth Turan railed against the “half-baked hiatus”: “You’ll excuse me, but the logic of needing to stop the program in order to rethink it sounds suspiciously like the apocryphal Vietnam War rationale that ‘we had to burn the village to save it.’ That the museum seems to lack the ability to consider the situation’s pros and cons while things are up and running doesn’t give me a lot of confidence in its ultimate decision.”
That decision seems to lie with Govan, and Schickel’s not the only one calling into question his credentials as an arbiter of film curation. In an interview with Govan and demoted film programmer Ian Birnie for LA Weekly, Tom Christie subtly implied that, with his suit and tie and talk of Jeff Koons, Govan’s agenda is hopelessly corporate art — not exactly the kind of worldview that befits a world class museum film program, according to Anne Thompson. “I loved the programming, but it was arcane and eclectic, as a museum’s should be, not designed to ‘build an audience.’”
What’s interesting is that, even in the wake of all this criticism, LACMA is actually encouraging further feedback. They’ve set up a forum where concerned parties can ask questions and/or rant about the rumored changes, and Govan will allegedly read and respond. So far, I couldn’t see any sign of him, although LACMA communications director Allison Agsten seems to be very active. So: is this an honest attempt at dialogue on LACMA’s part, or are they just paying lipservice to a community too small to have a real impact on the institution’s bottom line? That remains to be seen.
This may qualify as hyperbole, but Richard Schickel’s You Must Remember This––which premiered at Cannes in May, screened here at Telluride as part of a tribute to Schickel and will debut on PBS in slightly different form this fall––is maybe the most appropriately titled made-for-TV Classical Hollywood documentary directed by a working film critic I’ve seen this year.
“You must remember this,” is, of course, a lyric from “As Time Goes By,” the signature song from Warner Brothers’ Casablanca. From the opening montage of a tour through the WB backlot, set to a soundtrack of memorable lines from maybe a dozen and a half classic productions from that studio, Schickel’s film is devoted to anecdotal recall of Warner Brothers’ various signatures, from experts and witnesses who are dishy and not uncritical, but still often as sentimemtal as the song that Rick commands Sam to play again. From silent doggie star Rin Tin Tin (who, snarked writer and eventual head of production Daryl Zanuck, had the biggest brain on the lot) to the Busby Berkeley musicals that not so subtly told the viewer that “Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler are gonna get laid, and we’re all part of it,” to the social issue films of the 30s which carried “a vision of the world that was darker, more cynical, and more problematic than any other studio’s,” Schickel finds a surprisingly rich balance between behind-the-scenes trivia and multi-layered criticism. Access to talking heads including Molly Haskell, Neal Gabler, Jeaninne Basinger and former WB contract player Ronald Reagan certainly helps with the gravitas.
Also surprising was the slightly salty candor that ran through Schickel’s Special Medallion acceptance chat, which both the honoree and the audience seemed to find too brief. Still, Schickel managed to get out som zingers involving Manny Farber, Pauline Kael, the youth of America and John McCain. Some highlights after the jump.
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