Phone Booth

How the Script Saves the Day & A Director Reinvents Himself

(From Hollywood Vs. Dogville, © by Jake Horsley)

 

 

“I feel that only the literary mind can help the movies out of that cul-de-sac into which they have been driven by mere technicians and artificers. . . . In my opinion the writer should have the first and last word in filmmaking, the only better alternative being the writer-director, but with the stress on the first word.”

—Orson Welles

 

A film like Phone Booth—written by independent cult horror guru, Larry Cohen and directed by one of the premier Hollywood hacks, Joel Schumacher—is proof that, if the script is strong enough—the ideas behind it fresh and topical enough—a movie will find its proper form. There are ample cases of technically adequate, less-than-visionary film directors rising to the occasion provided by a solid script who then sink to the lower depths of tastelessness when stuck with a stinker. Adrian Lyne, for example, gave the world Flashdance, 9½ Weeks, and Indecent Proposal—one of the worst movies ever to ooze its way into the public consciousness. Yet Lyne also directed the creepy, paranoid classic Jacob’s Ladder (from a script by Bruce Joel Rubin), and the lyrical, haunting Lolita (written by Stephen Schiff), arguably an improvement over Kubrick’s cool and detached treatment of 1962. In both of these cases the script carried the day, bringing Lyne’s talents (talents we might otherwise have assumed not to exist at all) to the fore.

There are many cases of filmmakers whose passion and focus—and therefore talent—comes and goes according to the script they’re working with and just how much it inspires them. It’s understandable that Lyne, when working with dross like Flashdance or Indecent Proposal, would do a sloppy, lackluster job of it. When blessed with a Jacob’s Ladder, on the other hand, he knuckles down and puts all he’s got into it so as to do justice to the material. Perhaps more common is when a basically schlocky but capable director—Taylor Hackford, for example—gets a decent script and, without ever really doing justice to it, makes a superior piece of entertainment by not screwing it up too badly. Devil’s Advocate is easily Hackford’s best film, but it is still visibly the work of the man who made Against All Odds.[1]

With such modern classics as The Lost Boys, Flatliners, Falling Down, Batman Forever and Batman and Robin, Joel Schumacher has often been seen as the living embodiment of soulless Hollywood hack churning out soulless Hollywood trash. In the last few years, however—starting with the gritty bit of psycho-camp 8mm in 1999—he has embarked on a process of creative regeneration almost unique in the annals of hack filmmakers. In fact, as a director, Schumacher has reinvented himself as few filmmakers—not Scorsese, not Coppola, not Altman—ever do, making him a kind of reverse burn-out. Schumacher started out as a shop window dresser whose specialty was ladies’ lingerie, became a costume designer for Woody Allen (Sleeper and Interiors), and slowly evolved into a Hollywood director of vague promise (The Incredible Shrinking Woman in 1981, St. Elmo’s Fire in 1986) before sinking to the depths with The Lost Boys and Flatliners. At this point (and with subsequent works Falling Down and two Batman stinkers), Schumacher appeared to settle into the groove as one more empty studio hack with no visible talent. Then, as if by sheer will power (once he’d sunk about as low as he could go with Batman and Robin), he gradually mutated into a gifted filmmaker and—dare we say it?—an artist. Did anyone notice this amazing transformation? Apparently not; apparently, once a shop window dresser, always a shop window dresser. Schumacher can reinvent himself all he wants, few critics seemed willing to give him credit.

After 8mm, Schumacher made Tigerland (2000), a Vietnam movie that never set foot in Vietnam and a powerful, inspired piece of filmmaking, with Colin Farrell’s affecting performance (as the rebel-soldier Bozz) marking the arrival of a major new talent. Schumacher’s handheld camera and his assured work with actors—his respect for the material and his obvious confidence as a director—gave the film a bracing, documentary-style authenticity. Schumacher’s work her exhibited the kind of “searing urgency” that directors like Ridley Scott and Spielberg were busy winning awards for, and as a complete work, Tigerland wiped the floor with Saving Private Ryan. Yet despite a largely favorable critical response, the film never found an audience.

Then came Phone Booth, the first Hollywood classic of the digital age. Shot in ten days and in “real time” (its 80-minute length covers 80 minutes of action), Phone Booth bordered on Dogme in its simplicity and ruthlessness (and as it happens, Schumacher is an admirer of Lars von Trier and the Dogme movement). With its admirably limited and exact goals, the film attained every one of them with unerring accuracy, precision, and economy. Phone Booth was an almost perfect genre piece that transcended its self-imposed limits and entered smoothly and inconspicuously  into the realm of art. Too inconspicuously, as it happened. A tiny masterpiece of suspense and psychological drama, impeccably directed, acted (that feral Farrell again), shot, edited, scripted, it was the purest piece of suspense entertainment Hollywood has produced in years; it was almost totally ignored by the critics.[2]

One reason the film never got the attention it merited was the timidity of the studio, who held back the film’s release date when news of a real-life sniper (killing at random in the US) put the nation in a state of fear and paranoia (or so the media would have it). The studio was no doubt afraid that, having weirdly overlapped with reality, Phone Booth would seem in bad taste for making entertainment out of real-life “tragedy.” Had the studio possessed the courage and cunning to back their movie—the wit to realize that so unlikely a “coincidence” gave it extra credibility and topicality—and released it as planned, the film would have probably stirred up some controversy and received the attention it deserved. As it was, it pretty much passed audiences and critics by, a fact doubly regrettable considering what a lousy year it was for movies.

It’s ironic (to say the least) that, with auteur after auteur being dumbed down and swallowed up by franchise-happy Hollywood, a rare and revealing case such as Schumacher’s has gone almost entirely unremarked upon. But what Tigerland and Phone Booth briefly showed was a filmmaker evolving out of franchise jobs and into accomplished, occasionally brilliant personal work. For a brief time, Schumacher became one of the most exemplary filmmakers working in Hollywood, because if the man behind Batman and Robin could successfully transform himself into an artist, there was hope for hack filmmakers everywhere.[3]

 

 

 

 

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[1] The same might be said for Tony Scott—the man who made Top Gun—who, when given a Tarantino script to sink his teeth into (True Romance), proved to be an exhilarating filmmaker. His choice of material is generally pedestrian, however, and though Scott gives above-average genre entertainment with action flicks like Enemy of the People, Spy Games, and Man on Fire, he is not likely to ever be mistaken for an artist. Scott’s older brother, Ridley, though overall the more gifted of the two, has proved equally dependent on his material (and an even less reliable a judge of it), alternating the formulaic mediocrity of Someone to Watch Over Me, Black Rain, GI Jane, and Hannibal, with borderline works of art such as Alien and, more recently, the superb Matchstick Men. His in-between stuff, Thelma and Louise, Gladiator, Black Hawk Down, though dubious, is at least slickly made and entertaining.

[2] What was especially impressive about the movie was that the “villain”(the sniper played by Keifer Sutherland, though we only see him briefly at the end), was not merely sympathetic but also quite admirable, in his way. The movie didn’t indulge in the kind of perverted admiration that made Silence of the Lambs such a crock, but it treated its villain with respect. It was smart and open-minded enough to let the audience judge for itself.

[3] More recently and less encouragingly, Schumacher’s Veronica Guerin (2003, produced by Jerry Bruckheimer), was a so-so thriller (based on the murder of the Irish journalist who took on the Dublin drug world in the 1990s, with Cate Blanchett miscast in the title role); Schumacher’s work was slick but unimaginative, and the film was serviceable at best.  Considerably worse was The Phantom of the Opera (2004), a showy, bloated spectacle with little to recommend it. Possibly his work with Colin Farrell was only a momentary blip of brilliance in an otherwise consistently mediocre career, or possibly, Schumacher is aspiring to two careers simultaneously: one as a Hollywood hired hand, the other (his real vocation?) as a rough-and-ready, guerilla-style filmmaker. If so, we can only hope his latest work—an adaptation of The Crowded Room, based on a multiple-personality serial killer—falls into the latter category.