Like Father, Like Son

If I’m not mistaken, the trailer for Roman Coppola’s follow-up to 2001’s quirky sci-fi romance CQ, A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III, dropped just yesterday. The film, scheduled to be released on my sister’s birthday in February, stars Charlie Sheen—in a bad wig, it has to be said—as a heartbroken man who goes on crazy adventures with friends and strangers (is Bill Murray playing John Wayne or Rooster Cogburn?). Anyway, according to the Internet Movie Database, Swan’s a graphic designer, but he looks like a 70s porn king to me, which is a role I can more easily see Sheen playing. He did, after all, come close with Rated X.

As with most of my astute—and by that I mean “trivial”—observations, the one I am going to tell you about now occurred to me with water running in the background. While washing my cereal bowl and spoon just a few moments ago (yes, I let it go unwashed from 6 am until now and thereby let the residue from my quick, cold breakfast meal calcify along the walls of the bowl over the course of a day), I realized that perhaps it’s not so strange that Charlie Sheen, now a caustic hack/rabble-rouser of an actor, should appear in a (R.) Coppola film. For there’s a family connection: Roman’s papa Francis memorably directed Charlie’s dad, Martin Sheen, in Apocalypse Now. Perhaps the famous offspring have known each other for years; they may have even grown up together. Perhaps the new film was shot before Sheen went crazy in public… for the sixteenth time. Regardless, it remains an open question whether or not his unstable persona will promote or damage the film upon its release.

If we further draw out the family connection, then we must remember that Charlie played a version of himself in Being John Malkovich, which was directed by Roman’s then-brother-in-law Spike Jonze. Small world? I think not. So there you have it. I think I figured out the reason why Sheen is in this “quirky” (W.) Anderson-lite picture.

The Director as Film Subject

My sister called me from the car while on her way to a movie theater showing Hitchcock. You know, the one with Anthony Hopkins under piles of piss-poor prosthetic makeup. Ostensibly a behind-the-scenes look at the making of 1960’s Psycho, from the reviews and features I’ve read, the film sounds more like a portrait of Alma Hitchcock (played by Helen Mirren), the legendary director’s long-time wife and partner-in-crime.

Anyway, while we were discussing the movie, I made an observation, surely oft-repeated in the entertainment news outlets all over: 2012 has shaped up to be the year of Abraham Lincoln and Alfred Hitchcock, as both icons have each starred in two movies. Not only that, Honest Abe and the Master of Suspense have each received a fanciful—or at least playful—treatment on-screen: the former in Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and the latter in the aforementioned Hitchcock. The more serious—one might even say didactic (in the case of the first)—film stories are Spielberg’s/Kushner’s/Day-Lewis’s Lincoln and The Girl, which is about Hitch’s (Toby Jones) maniacal obsession with the actress Tippi Hedren (Sienna Miller), glamour puss of The Birds.

It might seem odd that Lincoln has been granted two (wildly different) big-screen starring roles this year. But he has been a popular cinematic subject for a hundred years or so. Most notably, Henry Fonda played him in Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), and Lincoln‘s co-star Hal Holbrook portrayed the 16th U.S. president in 1974’s TV miniseries also called Lincoln. If you look up the character “Abraham Lincoln” on the Internet Movie Database (also known as The Bible), you will see he has appeared in over 300 film, TV, and video game titles—that’s not even counting the use of archival footage (meaning, still photographs) shot of the man. The point is, he’s often represented in our moving image culture(s) because, well, he is credited with the abolition of slavery and ending the American Civil War. His figure looms large in our society, 147 years after his assassination.

So we understand why Lincoln’s (still) making waves. But what about Hitchcock? Being arguably the greatest filmmaker who ever lived isn’t as grand a legacy as Lincoln’s. (For the record, I don’t think of Hitchcock in such absolutist terms.) Since he’s only been dead 32 years, he hasn’t had the time to rack up as many on-screen credits (as a character performed by other actors; I am not referring to his cameos in his own films). Why are we suddenly comfortable to look at Hitchcock’s personal and/or professional lives? What forces are at work that have prepared us for this?

As my sister can tell you, this question got me thinking about other real-life film directors being the subject of later motion pictures. At first thought, there aren’t that many. Last year’s Hugo, Martin Scorsese’s pedantic celebration of the early cinema pioneer Georges Méliès, comes to mind. And for that matter, so does Scorsese’s docu-diary through Italian cinema, My Voyage to Italy, in which he casts himself, famous filmmaker that he is, as the subject. My favorite Tim Burton movie is a black-and-white biopic of Ed Wood and features one of Johnny Depp’s finest performances as the B-movie director who’s known for making the worst films ever (I don’t believe that, either). Once you look farther afield, though, the pool of film directors as movie subjects begins to get shallower and shallower. Me and Orson Welles doesn’t count because Richard Linklater’s coming-of-age tale charts the backstage antics taking place during Welles’s anti-fascist production of Julius Caesar—that is, before he ever made Citizen Kane, his cinematic debut. And no, Luis Buñuel’s cameo in Midnight in Paris doesn’t count, either. It’s a cameo, and therefore the film’s not about him.

So this got me thinking even more: why are film directors rarely the subject of cinematic dramatizations, whereas famous authors and musicians have featured in plenty of biopics? Are their lives, as if by comparative default, uninteresting? Is it because we assume they either learned their craft early, using super 8 camcorders while on happy family vacations, or in film school or in some combination of the two? What about people like Quentin Tarantino, who famously didn’t go to film school and learned his trade through fanatical movie-watching?

I think the dearth of such movies probably has to do with the public’s confusion about what the director’s position on a picture truly entails. We understand he or she is responsible for how all of the various parts of the film production come together. But that process seems overly complicated, as if beyond our comprehension. Those on-screen representations of directing, wherein the director sits in a folding chair and shouts “Action!” from behind the monitor, is both quaint and the way, more than 100 years after the advent of a cinematographic camera/projector, we like to think of them on the big screen. We understand film to be its own art form now, but we don’t want to know how real-life artists have made their works? It seems downright bizarre to me.

Having said all this, I can’t wait to see Steven Spielberg’s biopic. But wait, I believe J.J. Abrams already made it back in 2011: Super 8.