It's the most wonderful time of the year

In one week, I leave for the glorious, thin-air nirvana of Telluride, Colo., where the best film festival in the world blooms as prettily as mountain delphinium every Labor Day weekend. This will be my third time there (second as a volunteer), and each year is an adrenaline shot to the heart. My first time at Telluride (in 2004 as part of its student symposium), I lunched privately with Joan Allen, Todd Solondz, Ken Burns and Tom Shadyac; I spilled my goddamn guts to Roger Ebert on the 10-minute walk from Main Street to his lodgings; I sat in the front row of a 100-seat opera house for the world premiere of Yes and watched Being Julia al fresco as shooting stars streaked across the velvet-black sky. Last year, I saw 15 movies, including Volver and The Last King of Scotland, before there was any buzz for either (I also served popcorn to both movies' stars, long before they were being touted for the Oscar noms they'd eventually get). Both years I got to see movies that would never make it to theaters -- brilliant student prints, movies that would only show in Los Angeles, obscure foreign dramas that had no chance of finding distribution.

In short, Telluride is a dream. It's the only marquee festival that's just for cinephiles. There are no junkets, no press conferences, no awards, no wheelings and dealings. The film list isn't announced until the day the festival starts, so attendees have to rely on the discriminating tastes of the selection committee (although I have confirmation of at least one movie on the docket: Barbet Schroeder's doc Terror's Advocate). The tiny town is located in a tiny enclave in the southwest corner of Colorado, so you need to be wealthy enough to buy transportation, lodging and a festival pass, or savvy and passionate enough to worm your way into the volunteering ranks. If you do, you'll mingle on Main Street with Meryl, Pedro and Werner. You'll gorge yourself on up to six movies a day -- most are North American premieres, some are restored retrospectives, some are accompanied live by the wonderful Alloy Orchestra. Okay, that's it, I'm getting aroused.

Telluride is a busy time for a volunteer, but I will blog when I can (as I did last year). It'll start a week from today. So stay tuned. In between, the Triple Crowners series will continue, as will the usual grabass.

Breaking news! Plus, Blanchett will win two Oscars in February

A psychology professor at UC-Davis has done statistical research that proves:

1. Movies based on prize-winning material and made by filmmakers of great pedigree are usually critical successes, and are likely to be nominated for Oscars.
2. Big-budget blockbusters with lots of special effects are usually critical failures, and are less likely to be nominated for Oscars.

"I had this hope that there was a difference between blockbusters and really great art films—films that can be considered great cinematic creations," said Dean Simonton, who presented his findings Friday at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association in San Francisco. "It was gratifying to find out they're very, very different and you can find out what's different about them."

Wow. I...nevermind.

Also, Harvey Weinstein says of I'm Not There: “I may be jumping the gun, but if Cate Blanchett doesn’t get nominated, I’ll shoot myself.”

It's going to be a tricky awards year for Cate, who will no doubt blow our minds in both I'm Not There and Elizabeth: The Golden Age. It should be a stunning two-fer. In the first, she plays Bob Dylan. In the second, she plays history's most famous monarch, returning to the role for which she should've won the Oscar in 1998. So maybe 2008 is the year the same person wins both the leading actress and the supporting actress Oscar. How rad would that be? YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST.

Re: violence in movies

1. I guess we're finally cutting to the chase, title-wise.
2. I think Clive regrets not taking Bond.
3. Paul Giamatti + big gun = interesting idea? Either way, it's been a string of wild choices post-Sideways. Work while you can, I guess.

2. Helen Hayes, first lady of the American theatre

HELEN HAYES, 1900-1993. Triple crown achieved at age 52 in 1953 with an Emmy for best actress for a variety of TV appearances, including "Schlitz Playhouse of Stars," "Pulitzer Prize Playhouse" and "Robert Montgomery Presents." Preceding it were a best leading actress Oscar for The Sin of Madelon Claudet (1931) and a best actress (dramatic) Tony for "Happy Birthday" (1947). Following it were a best actress (dramatic) Tony for "Time Remembered" and a supporting actress Oscar for Airport.

Hayes was and is the pride of Washington, D.C., where she was born to a poultry salesman and an actress, where she made her professional debut at age 9, and where she is immortalized as the namesake of the region's theatre awards. This five-foot, 100-lb dynamo worked in every decade of the 20th century and was to the stage as Katharine Hepburn or Meryl Streep is to the cinema: deeply and broadly talented, capable of striking any tone, with a virtually unassailable legacy.

Alas, I wasn't around to catch her on stage, though there was ample opportunity. Hayes was on Broadway 60 times before making her talkie debut in The Sin of Madelon Claudet, and followed that role with 40 more appearances. One hundred performances on the Great White Way. Impressive. It's not surprising that she won her first Tony the year they were created -- for the comedy "Happy Birthday," which Anita Loos wrote specifically for her when Hayes complained she was sick of playing noble queens.

In addition to a regional theatre award, Hayes also has a Broadway house named after her. When it was dedicated in 1982, The New York Times reported that Hayes made a point of showing disdain for the use of microphones in the theatre by standing to the side of the lectern and speaking without amplification.

"Even though I couldn't be on the stage, I took comfort that I was still represented on Broadway,'' she said. ''The theater has been my whole life. It has given me every great thing I ever had. I hope this theater will have many long runs and outlive me."

When she had her first starring stage role as a flapper in 1920 in "Bab," the reviews weren't so glowing. Heywood Broun dismissed her as "cute," which a term that tailed her for years. "On opening night, I gave one of those shrill, tense performances that became a hazard in my career whenever I was not in top form," she admitted later. So she worked to get better. She improved her voice and delivery and concentrated hard on seeming taller. "My posture became military," she said. "I became the tallest five-foot woman in the world."

She followed her writer husband Charles MacArthur to Hollywood and was polished enough by 1931 to win an Oscar for The Sin of Madelon Claudet, in which she aged 30-some years in 76 minutes. Hayes plays Madelon, a woman who is abandoned by her husband and left alone to care for their infant son. Madelon sends her son to be raised by friends in the country, marries a rich man in order to provide for the son, gets caught up in the second husband's malfeasance, goes to jail for 10 years, is released, seeks out her son but tells him his mother is dead, tries to find a job to surreptitiously pay for his schooling and ends up becoming a whore to finance her son's dream to become a doctor. Keep in mind the son has no idea she's alive, even though they've met face to face.

"Let's face it," said producer Irving Thalberg. "We win Academy Awards with crap like Madelon Claudet."

And Hayes did. The movie is rather silly, but Hayes is fun to watch. With her wide-set eyes, apple-pie voice and spritely manner, her appearance and acting feel surprisingly contemporary and unaffected for a 1931 movie. She's an unconventional beauty in a bullseye of an Oscar role: Madelon is pretty, then ugly. Young, then old. A chaste mother, then a whore with a heart of gold. She gets to flit around in a lacy dress early in the movie, and then skulk around in old-lady makeup at the end. It set the Oscar mold for all the future pretty ladies who would uglify themselves for a decent part. Hayes won the Oscar over two competitors, Marie Dressler and Lynn Fontanne (also a first lady of the theatre). Despite the senseless plot of the movie, Hayes deserved the honor. Her performance exists on its own plane and somehow remains free of the movie's contrived logic. Why? Because she's so damn charismatic and likeable.

Adequately prepared by Madelon Claudet, Hayes played over 80 years of Queen Victoria's life in the 1935 Broadway production of "Victoria Regina," which was considered her greatest stage triumph (no Tony, though -- they had not been created yet). "Tremulously magnificent," wrote critic Brooks Atkinson in The New York Times. "Since the Queen is dead, God rest her soul. Let the cheers go to her actress, who deserves all the homage the town contains."

She made a fifth as many movies as she did pieces of theatre, but struck Oscar gold again 40 years after Madelon Claudet in the ridiculous, shameless disaster movie Airport. Hayes, then 70 years old, plays Ada Quonsett, a serial swindler who sneaks onto airplanes without paying. She shows up 23 minutes into the film to hop a flight to Europe. She's wearing a brown hat with a brown pompom and a tweed coat with a black velvet collar. She is white-haired and cute as a button, but is nevertheless caught by security and sent to the office of the airport general manager (played by Burt Lancaster).

She charms him, saying that she was taking the trip her husband had always wanted to take. "He always said, 'See Rome, and die,'" she simpers. "But he died while we were packing."

Jean Seberg, who plays another airport official, sees right through the act and encourages security to be on the lookout for a "sweet-looking innocent old lady" after Quonsett sneaks out of Lancaster's office. What if she gets onto the plane after all? "She deserves it," Lancaster says. "She's fabulous."

She is fabulous, isn't she? Hayes is the welcome comic relief in a too-serious movie, the cheery antidote to Maureen Stapleton's potent grandstanding. Quonsett does get on the plane and is conveniently seated next to a would-be bomber (ah, there's the plot!).

Eventually she is enlisted by the flight crew to act as an abused passenger to distract the bomber. As part of this ruse, we get one of cinema's great moments: Jacqueline Bisset (playing the stewardess) slaps the first lady of the American theatre.

Hayes is in command of a decent role in a shoddy movie (like she was in Madelon Claudet). She plays a geriatric con artist, so she gets to perform within a performance. Look at her fake-weep in the above clip, and that awful face she makes when she wails "You hurt me!" Delightful. Selfless. Somewhere along the line, the bomb goes off and we last see Quonsett huddling under a fur coat with a nun, taking pulls on a bottle of airport brandy. So it's funny. It's kitchsy. But an Oscar? Sure, the competition wasn't extreme (Hayes faced Stapleton, Lee Grant, Karen Black and Sally Kellerman), but still...

Hayes became the first person to have both a leading and supporting Academy Award on her mantle. She wasn't at the ceremony. Rosalind Russell accepted on her behalf (it was the closest Roz got to an Oscar).

The next year, Hayes guest-starred on "Here's Lucy" in an episode called "Lucy and the Little Old Lady." You guessed it: Hayes plays the Little Old Lady, who looks and acts an awful lot like Ada Quonsett, and who also happens to be a con artist. The episode is a yawn -- you can tell Lucille Ball's time had passed -- but Hayes is a gas. Her entrance is met with canned applause. Even the fake audience is aware of her stature. But Hayes isn't afraid of getting goofy. The seance scene -- in which Hayes tries to summon the spirit of Napoleon Bonaparte -- is pretty great. Even though she won her Emmy nearly 20 years before, I'm mentioning this television appearance because it's the only one I could find on DVD. So sue me.

Helen Hayes, Helen Hayes. If we look at Madelon Claudet, Airport and "Here's Lucy," what are we to make of her? A young lady who could play old, and an old lady who could play goofy. I wish I could've seen her on stage, which obviously filled in most of her greatness. The theatre side of her triple crown weighs heaviest.

Hayes's view of her eminence was modest. "Without the compensation of glamour, I am hard put to explain the durability of my career and the loyalty of the audience," she wrote in a 1968 memoir titled "On Reflection." "Perhaps it is just identification. I was once the typical daughter, then the easily recognizable wife, and then the quintessential mother. I seem always to have reminded people of someone in their family. Perhaps I am just the triumph of Plain Jane."

The is part two of The Triple Crowners, an 18-part series celebrating the actors who have won an Oscar, an Emmy and a Tony. Check back soon for part three, featuring the second most beautiful woman in the movies. The collage at the top of this post is from http://www.stevemoore.addr.com/, and is used without permission. Forgive me.

I'll believe it when I see it (which will be never)

A curious thing happens when you type in http://www.romanceandcigarettes.com/. Go ahead, click it.

This is indicative of the small infamies that have befallen Romance and Cigarettes, the jukebox musical that premiered at the Venice and Toronto films festivals in 2005, went straight to DVD in Britain and has yet to see the light of day stateside. It got "lost in the shuffle" during the Cruise-Wagner acquisition of MGM. But lo! Its director, John Turturro, will distribute the film himself on Sept. 7. Hold off on your hallelujahs, though. It premiers in New York at the Film Forum. Will it make its way to D.C. or anywhere else? Probably not. The news releases don't say (assholes). And it might never reach Region 1 of the DVD world.

Please refer to previous posts for my screed. How could a jukebox musical with this cast and this trailer not be a winner? If you live in New York, please e-mail immediately at forgetitjake@gmail.com when you see it. Tix go on sale Aug. 31. Here are some clips (yes it looks like it could be a mess, but still):

Broads bilk the script at the '68 Oscars

While trolling through YouTube doing research for my Triple Crowners series, I came across this clip. Watch and be stunned:

This is Natalie Wood, Ingrid Bergman, Jane Fonda, Diahann Carroll and Rosalind Russell at the 1968 Academy Awards (which was the first year the ceremony was broadcast globally). They presented the best director Oscar, but not before admonishing the nominated directors for doing their best "to make female stars obsolete." Bergman starts off the patter with, "We are assembled here somewhat reluctantly..." and the quintet proceeds to mock the directors -- except Anthony Harvey, who had a female lead in Katharine Hepburn in The Lion in Winter -- for stacking their casts with men exclusively. (Bergman herself disqualifies Olivia Hussey, who played Juliet in nominee Franco Zeffirelli's Shakespeare adaptation, by brushing her off as "a teenaged newcomer" in a tone that is mischievous at best, contemptuous at worst.) Fonda and Russell in particular appear to be reveling in their own rebellion.

I've devoured my share of Oscar-related books, and I've never heard of this bit of unscripted subterfuge. After finding this clip, I tried to Google my way to answers: Whose idea was it? It must've been planned and rehearsed -- how else could it have been executed so flawlessly? What was the general reaction at the time, besides a surprised smattering of laughter in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion? How come the winner, Carol Reed, didn't respond during his acceptance speech? I found no answers online. The quintet of women aren't even listed as presenting the 1968 best director Oscar in the "Self" section of their IMDb filmographies. I scoured my Oscar books and found no mention of the incident. And yet here these women are, plain as day on YouTube, sticking it to the men and then politely giving the Oscar to one of them.

Has anyone heard of this before? Is this old news? And do you think these women's stunt was purposeful or tactless? Either way, it's one of the few Oscar clips that the Academy has not pulled selfishly and unreasonably from YouTube. Watch it while you can, if only to hear Russell dismiss HAL 9000 as "girlish."

Gary Gary quite contrary

"Greatness is the orphan of urgency, Laine. Greatness only emerges when we need it most -- in time of war or calamity. I can't ask somebody to be a Kennedy or a Lincoln. They were men created by their times. What I -- what I can ask for -- is the promise of greatness. And that, madam senator, you don't have."

The comments attached to Nathaniel's excellent post on Oscar-nominationless actors brought Gary Oldman into my headspace once again. I love his magnificent performance in the 2000 masterpiece, The Contender, and surely would've nominated him for the supporting award and given it to him. Oldman is one of the top three working film actors (Geoffrey Rush and Oldman's Contender co-star Jeff Bridges are the other two) and I was reminded again during the latest Harry Potter of his limitless capacity for invention. Watch him deliver the scariest pep talk ever in The Contender, or mug with Matt LeBlanc on "Friends," or spin apart in Sid & Nancy or opine on the symbiotic relationship between life and destruction in The Fifth Element. The man can play anyone. A limitless range, but with a charisma that sustains.

In Death, Their Similar Paths Crossed

A good friend (ahem) wrote a little piece about Bergman and Antonioni's coordinated deathdate.

1. Thomas Mitchell, the character actor's character actor

THOMAS MITCHELL, 1892-1962. Triple crown achieved at age 60 in 1953 with a Tony for best actor in a musical for "Hazel Flagg." Preceding it were a best supporting actor Oscar for Stagecoach (1939) and a best actor Emmy (1953) for his work on several programs, including "Robert Montgomery Presents," "Tales of Tomorrow," "Lights Out," and "Studio One."

Nineteen hundred thirty-nine was a banner year for film and a banner year for Mitchell. In that one year, he was featured in Gone with the Wind, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (above right), Only Angels Have Wings, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Stagecoach (above left), for which he won the Oscar over his Mr. Smith castmates Harry Carey and Claude Rains. It was a nice convergence: Mitchell deserved it for Stagecoach and deserved it for his cumulative work that year.

There's something very familiar and modern about Mitchell in Stagecoach. He plays the drunkard-physician Doc Boone, an affectionate man who provides the heart, soul and comic relief for this otherwise melodramatic -- I'm looking at you, Claire Trevor -- wagon picture. Mitchell was 46 while filming Stagecoach. Philip Seymour Hoffman, who shares Mitchell's gift for balancing comedy and gravity on a scale of frumpiness, just turned 40. When Hoffman hits 50, the resemblance will be even stronger. These men do not fit the mold of the matinee idol, but they are still leading men and fine actors. It's a function of charisma and commitment. One's appearance is molded to fit the part.

In Stagecoach, Mitchell is whiskered and phlegmy, always taking pulls from a bottle of whiskey. A top hat, bushy eyebrows and coattails are part of the ensemble. He enters the picture as comic relief, stumbling and bumbling in a drunken stupor. "I'm not only a philsopher, sir, I'm a fatalist," Boone says at one point. "Somewhere sometime there may be the right bullet or the wrong bottle waiting for Josiah Boone. Why worry when or where."

His role deepens as the plot advances. Notice the kind bedside manner he affects after delivering Mrs. Mallory's baby, and his grandfatherly tone as he advises Trevor how to proceed romantically with the Ringo Kid (played by John Wayne). It's the prototypical supporting Oscar performance: a funny sideshowman has the chance to shine dramatically.

Mitchell won his Emmy like he won his Oscar: by dint of his ubiquity. Mitchell was a featured player or guest star on no less than half a dozen programs leading up to the 1953 Emmys, and I was able to get my hands on a DVD of "Tales of Tomorrow," a forerunner to "The Twilight Zone." In an episode called "The Crystal Egg," Mitchell plays a professor who is able to see the Martian landscape in, well, a crystal egg. It's based on a silly H.G. Wells story. What matters, again, is Mitchell's commitment to the material. He's not coasting on his looks (he can't), and he's not phoning it in, even though it's a silly TV show. He plays this crazy professor for all he's worth, but stops short of caricature. It's really quite striking -- the restraint and the energy.

The Tony came shortly after. Mitchell played one of the leads in the Jule Styne musical "Hazel Flagg," which was based on the Carole Lombard movie Nothing Sacred and opened in the Mark Hellinger Theater (now the Times Square Church) six days after he won his Emmy. His onscreen persona seems like it would translate gloriously to the stage, though I do wonder about his singing voice...

The is part one of The Triple Crowners, an 18-part series celebrating the actors who have won an Oscar, an Emmy and a Tony. Check back soon for part two, featuring one of the first ladies of American theatre.

Excuses

Things have been busy. I planned to start The Triple Crowners series today, and I will. By 11:59 p.m. probably. So hold on a bit. (In the meantime, can anyone guess who the first actor is?) Also, I know I said I'd have thoughts on Antonioni, and I will. They'll come on Sunday, but in a different, un-bloggy format. How was your day today? I'm hungry.