Babenco Tell Me when I Die

 

MILL VALLEY FILM FESTIVAL 43

 

    Mill Valley just north of San Francisco is a great place for a film festival. The journey there is across the Golden Gate Bridge, through redwood forests, and rolling hills. With a village atmosphere, walking around the small enclave encourages networking and meeting friends and filmmakers old and new. The Mill Valley Film Festival is now in its 43rd year which probably makes it the second oldest international film festival in the Bay area, after the venerable San Francisco International Film Festival.

 

    However like many film festivals this year, Mill Valley has had to contend with Covid 19 and replaced normal in-person activities with different strategies. A number of films were streamed online, while live screenings were conducted as drive-in events where everyone is protected within the confines of their cars.

 

    The range and variety of programming for Mill Valley is always worth the experience and I found this year some emphasis in documentaries about films, and music.

 

    The stand out film about film was BABENCO TELL ME WHEN I DIE about the life and career of filmmaker Hector Babenco.

 

    Babenco was from Argentina but lived and pursued his film career in Brazil. His debut film PIXOTE (1980) brought renewed attention to cinema in Latin America after the works of Glauber Rocha and Cinema Novo in the 1960s. He rose to international prominence with the Oscar-nominated feature KISS OF THE SPIDERWOMAN. 

 

    Babenco died in 2016 at the age of 70 and this documentary which won Best Documentary prize at the Venice Film Festival in 2020, was made by his widow, the actress Barbara Paz. 

 

    The film charts Babenco's trajectory - without much of the adulatory glossing over that often attends to legends - following the ups and downs of his career and his personality. And his is quite the personality - sometimes bombastic, sometimes stubborn, sometimes gentle. Beyond the figure of Babenco himself, the film emerges as a discourse on the creative mind, and the determination that both plagues and graces creative and talented filmmakers. 

    BABENCO TELL ME WHEN I DIE was one of several films included in the Valley of the Docs documentary film section of the Mill Valley Film Festival.

 

        It was just one such film about films. Another was SEARCHING FOR MR RUGOFF a documentary about the legendary New York film distributor, Donald Rugoff who died in 1989 at the age of 62. 

 

 

Searching for Mr Rugoff

   

     An old adage of filmmaking is that you should make films about things that you know about. SEARCHING FOR MR RUGOFF is a perfect illustration of that principle as it is the debut feature of another legendary distributor, Ira Deutchman who founded Fine Line Features (which was later acquired by Warner Bros) among other ventures. Over the course of his career and especially in the 1990s, Deutchman has worked on contemporary classics of our time such as HOOP DREAMS, THE PLAYER, MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO and many others. Today he remains one of the respected pioneers of art house cinema in the US, just like the man he worked for at the start of his career, Rugoff. 

    It's possible to see Rugoff as another bombastic, mercurial, aggravating but brilliant personality like Babenco. Stories from his staff (several of whom have gone on to become game changers in their own right) at his company Cinema 5 in the 1960s, describe a personality that was both fatherly and ruthless. Sending one woman to a meeting with a filmmaker at a hotel room, he says he will call her later just to make sure she is all right. For the publicity campaign of MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL he gets his staff to dress up in medieval garb and pound the pavements of Manhattan. In the end his strategies and manoeuvres generally paid off although he was increasingly preoccupied with legal wranglings over a hostile takeover bid. 

 

    Rugoff enjoyed relations with the legendary filmmakers of the time including French New Wave pioneers Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut whose films might seem to be odd bedfellows with Rugoff's big hit MONTY PYTHON comedy. 

Never too Late: the Doc Severinsen Story

     

    I am not a follower of late night talk shows but recognize their contribution to American and television culture. Undoubtedly the leader of this genre was Johnny Carson who had one of the most successful runs in TV history with The Tonight Show from 1962 to 1992. Carson had his sidekick Ed McMahon to bounce off jokes but his band leader was equally important. From 1967 to the end of the run, that band leader was Doc Severinsen. 

 

    Band leaders on late night talk shows get some attention but not too much. They mustn't distract from the show's star so they rarely get to show off their talents in a sustained way. Doc Severinsen managed both - he's definitely a personality but more importantly, a true musical talent. He had a career as a trumpet player and band leader before and after the Tonight Show - he continues to perform and tour. Some of his most interesting work - as this insightful documentary (directed by Kevin S. Bright and Jeff Consiglio) shows - was with the San Miguel 5 (comprising himself and mainly Mexican guitarist Gil Gutierrez, and violinist Pedro Cartas). They met in San Miguel, Mexico, by chance soon after Severinsen moved there. 

 

    As the film shows, at the age of 92, Severinsen is as energetic and creative as ever. How does he manage it? We learn from the film that he has been married three times, and is now with a partner who could easily be his daughter (and in fact looks younger than his real daughter). The real answer perhaps lies in his love affair with the trumpet which continues unabated. 

Frank Marshall : director How Can You Mend a Broken Heart

     

    Frank Marshall is better known as the producer of mega-film franchises like the INDIANA JONES, BACK TO THE FUTURE, and JASON BOURNE among many others. He is a major player in Hollywood so, on the basis that once again you should film what you know about, he has, as director, turned in a compelling and very watchable documentary HOW CAN YOU MEND A BROKEN HEART on supergroup and major players in the world of pop music the Bee Gees.  

    The broad strokes of the Bee Gees story are well known - three brothers (Barry, Maurice, Robin) born in England, grow up and cut their first album in Australia. Taking a chance on the booming pop scene in England in the 1960s they were picked up by NEMS, the company run by Beatles' manager Brian Epstein and placed under Australian staffer, Robert Stigwood. 

 

    Stardom by the late 1960s with attendant ego battles and fueled by drugs blew up the brothers' relationships. Songs like MASSACHUSETTS and I STARTED A JOKE could have ended up as just memorable debris in the history of pop music in the 1960s but Stigwood, who left NEMS to form his own company after Epstein's death, had unshakeable faith in the group, and put them on the comeback trail. Saying goodbye to a grey England, the group found new life in Florida where Stigwood's other falling star, Eric Clapton had recently recorded 461 OCEAN BOULEVARD, the album that brought him back from three years of heroin addiction. It was Clapton who had the insight that the Bee Gees were at heart a R'n'B group which also influenced the way in which Stigwood recorded them. And it was at the Criteria Studios that they developed the falsetto sound (first heard in "Nights on Broadway") that became their trademark.

    The music that the Bee Gees made in Florida (later characterized as the "Miami Sound") took them on the road that led to one of the best selling albums of all time SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER (1977). Among other fascinating details we learn that the record's innovative producer Albhy Galuten invented the drum loop out of necessity when the group's regular drummer had to attend to his dying mother. 

 

    But the group fell off the top of the pop mountain once again due not to drugs, but to an anti-disco movement in the late 1970s that reviled the Bee Gees and their music. Marshall shows Steve Dahl's Disco Demolition Night fracas in Chicago in 1979 and sides with today's perspectives on that incident to show that the anti-disco movement was fueled by racist and homophobic sentiment (disco having evolved from underground gay clubs often frequented by Latinos and Blacks). No mention however is made of punk rock which was  ascendant at the time, and which was also anti-disco and had its fascist fringe. 

 

    It took the best part of the 1980s for the Bee Gees to recover, saved this time by Barbra Streisand. She asked Barry Gibb to write a song for her (he came up with "Guilty" and duetted with her on it) which was so successful that the Gibb brothers then spent the rest of the decade writing a number of hits for other stars (including Diana Ross, Aretha Franklin, Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton). 

 

    Marshall skilfully shows the influences on the Bee Gees (Black music in particular) and their influence on younger generations such as Coldplay. One key to their sound is their uncanny ability for deep and moving harmonies that the film explains is only possible between family members.

    The Bee Gees were the chameleons of pop music. They were adaptable, almost it seems to the music forms that prevailed around them. As pop masters, they were well attuned to the public's tastes and trends. To that end they were quintessential survivors, and that in the end may be their enduring genius. 

 

    The dynamics of pop music with its ups and downs, personality clashes and inspired commercialism, is not far from Marshall's world of blockbuster film production. And with the rash of pop biopics recently (Queen, Elton John et al), we should anticipate a Bee Gees movie in the near future. Marshall's documentary is like a live action script for that film. "Stayin' Alive" - indeed!

[HOW CAN YOU MEND A BROKEN HEART has been picked up by HBO for broadcast later this year.]