Cannes '96, Expert Witness #3: Noah Tsika

Following my wide-ranging survey of Cannes '96 with Hélène Zylberait and my Lone Star-focused exchange with John Alba Cutler, my third Expert Witness conversation is with Noah Tsika, an Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at Queens College, CUNY, where he specializes in historical, political, economic, and representational aspects of West African film and video.  You can (and should!) get your fullest exposure to this dimension of Noah's work in his book Nollywood Stars: Media and Migration in West Africa and the Diaspora, which debuted just over a year ago from Indiana University Press.  The book is a great, accessible, multi-sided assessment of celebrity, performance, narrative, circulation, and distribution in relation to a huge, Nigeria-based film culture with a mind-boggling and under-reported global reach.

Still, to say Noah "specializes" in any one thing feels like a misnomer, given his eclectic pursuits as a media scholar and his seeming awareness of every movie ever made.  You might know his work from the short study of Gods and Monsters he published in Arsenal's Queer Film Classic series a while back, or from his contributions to anthologies about African sci-fi and genre fiction, or Brokeback Mountain, or 21st-century film criticism. I am desperately anticipating his next book, Pink 2.0, due out this October, about digital queer cinema. (Feel free to pre-order it!)  Soon, we will feature together in a collection of feminist essays on each of Todd Haynes's movies, where Noah's attentions will focus on my beloved Dottie Gets Spanked. Noah's Twitter feed is the best place to enjoy his diverse and funny reflections on new releases as they bow, on the wide-ranging classes he teaches, on the latest exploits and milestones of African films and their headliners, and on important political causes, including those that directly affect his institution and its students.

I was most eager to engage Noah about Flora Gomes's Tree of Blood, a joint production of Portugal and Guinea-Bissau and a rare West African feature to grace the Main Competition at Cannes. Gomes's name and work were new to me through this #Cannes96 exercise (and perfect evidence of why I undertake these projects) but Noah, as ever, has been tracking this filmmaker for a while.  Some of our exchange centered around this title, but in perfect tribute to my discussion partner, the talk spreads to race and racism on film, environmentalism, Robert Altman, misogynist archetypes, festival politics, places to see all-but-buried African features, and other topics far and wide...

ND: By the first week of Cannes '96, the three big stories were already Secrets & Lies, Fargo, and Breaking the Waves, and they maintained that status for the remainder.  So first, I'm polling everybody: had you been on the jury, which of those three would you have championed for the Palme? What do you most love or admire about it?

NT: In 1996, Secrets & Lies was the one for me—and I suspect that it still is. I like to think of it as a film about passing, and I've taught it alongside such works as Basil Dearden's Sapphire (1959) and Imitation of Life (both the 1934 and the 1959 versions, directed by John M. Stahl and Douglas Sirk, respectively). Secrets & Lies upends the conventions of this particular subgenre, if you can even call it that. The film is about poor white people who struggle with their proximity to Blackness—who, in various ways, have attempted to pass as isolated, even hermetic, in their whiteness—and an affluent, tremendously accomplished Black woman who is utterly unperturbed by her own "difference." The performances are gorgeous. Brenda Blethyn is, despite what detractors might say, thoroughly in character with her histrionics. It's a dazzling turn: the Cannes jury got Best Actress exactly right, and Blethyn should have won the Oscar, too. Marianne Jean-Baptiste is wonderful, as is Timothy Spall, but young Claire Rushbrook is simply astonishing. Her displays of anger and resentment always terrify me. Secrets & Lies has a truly great ending, with Blethyn's character offering a lovely little benediction. The film is hardly "cinematic" in the conventional sense, but I love its dingy, downright televisual style. It looks like a home movie, which is apt, I think.

Are you a fan of the other two in that group, or was this a pretty easy decision for you?

My parents took me to see Fargo the day it opened in Maine. I remember thrilling to its opening text; the words "true story" and "respect for the dead" so impressed me that I immediately stiffened my back, steeling myself for a Very Important Film. The austerity of the images, starting with a car approaching the screen amid all that snow, along with the urgency of Carter Burwell's remarkable score, made me believe that this would be a life-changing experience. (My mother must have had a similar response; she leaned toward me and whispered, "You'll probably want to write about this one.") But something about the film—its comic tone, its stylized acting, its repetitive linguistic play—disappointed me tremendously. It was only later, watching the film on television, that I began to enjoy it. The constant parodies must have made it less strange. In just a few months, Marge had become a pervasive object of impersonation, and I suddenly felt profoundly comfortable with Fargo. It had been transformed, for me, into a kind of collectively produced folk art.

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Cannes '96, Expert Witness #2: John Alba Cutler

Some of the friends I've interviewed about films that showed in Cannes 1996, like yesterday's guest Hélène Zylberait, have a pretty broad exposure to festival-circuit auteurs and their long bodies of work. Others are eager and regular moviegoers, but I was especially motivated to approach them because of contexts they could bring to a particular title.  Among this second group is my good pal John Alba Cutler, an award-winning scholar and teacher of U.S. Latino/a literature and contemporary U.S. poetry who works with me in Northwestern's English Department.  John's book Ends of Assimilation is among the best academic studies I've read in several years, in part because you don't have to be a scholar, much less one who is previously versed in the traditions of U.S. Latino/a fiction or poetry, to follow and appreciate it.  In an extremely accessible, wide-ranging, and often politically pointed way, John unfolds a substantial archive of novels, poems, journals, and other writings by Latino/a authors and uses that material, in part, to pose a complex and timely challenge to the languages and values attached to "assimilation" in U.S. public culture.  Not only does he question the pressures, internal and external, that Latinos face to assimilate (or not to assimilate) into what is perceived as "mainstream" anglophone U.S. culture but he voices considerable skepticism about what "assimilation" even means, and showcases the many ways in which novelists and poets have productively complicated these ideas.  If you don't believe me about how artistically illuminating, politically nuanced, and generally amazing this book is, maybe you'll trust this absolutely glowing review from the Los Angeles Review of Books. You can also read more about John's work here, starting on p.22.

I knew that John's scholarly interests and teaching areas made John Sayles's Lone Star a favorite of his, but we'd never had a full, proper conversation about this enduring yet somewhat under-heralded American classic (also the subject of this recent and interesting essay on Fandor).  In what follows, John is typically thoughtful and provocative about Lone Star but also extremely helpful in sketching out a whole literary tradition of Latino/a, Chicano/a, and border-related narratives that Lone Star fans should explore.  This is especially valuable given the continued failures of U.S. publishers as well as U.S. university English departments to make Latino/a cultural production central and visible in their catalogs and courses.  Lastly, having taken in several wide-ranging movies in theaters with John over the years, from the sublime to the ridiculous, I was also curious for his thoughts about a few other films that played the Croisette twenty years ago.

ND: I know you teach Lone Star sometimes, but in which classes, and with what curricular or intellectual goals?

JAC: I’ve taught Lone Star in several different classes, including classes on border literature, interracial dynamics in American culture, and a course on the long cultural history of Manifest Destiny. I generally want students to come away understanding that Mexican Americans have a long history within the United States (i.e., that we’re not just recent immigrants), that Mexican American communities are not monolithic, and that the history of the US-Mexico border demonstrates how inextricable Mexican and American culture are from one another.

Are there particular subplots that seem to resonate most for your students? Or any that tend to confound them? (Spoilers ahead here, including That One.)

Among the pleasures of teaching Lone Star are students’ reactions to the revelation that Sam and Pilar are half-siblings. Reactions generally range from nervous tittering to outright revulsion, but what the narrative so deftly points out is the thin line between animosity and desire subtending racial politics. Also, Elizabeth Peña is luminous, QDEP. I find that being shaken out of neutral helps students begin to interrogate difficult ideas, and Lone Star does nothing if not shake.

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Cannes 1986: First Quarter

Of the first six Palme contenders to screen at Cannes in 1986, two of them have proved resolutely unavailable (Poor Butterfly, The Last Image). The other four I have now re-screened, in the case of Mona Lisa, or screened for the first time, in the cases of Love Me Forever or Never, Altman's better-than-expected Fool for Love, and Scorsese's disappointing After Hours. All four of those links will take you to my new reviews of those films. (If you're wondering why I'm even talking about these movies and this 25-year-old festival, check this out.)

If I'd really been on that long-ago Croisette and possessed of a crystal ball, I'd have known that, among these early titles, I had already seen winners for Best Director, Best Actress, and Best Actor, even though the last two prizes resulted in ties. I frankly think I would have been dismayed to know this, especially since the Actress winner was Fernanda Torres and not Kim Basinger. Even the stronger movies are totally sturdy, steadily insinuating films but not quite the "wow" moments you hope for from a genuine Palme competitor.

To that end, next on my itinerary is a return trip to Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice, which famously lost the Palme but still feels like the Movie of the Festival anyway, the same way All About My Mother did in 1999 or Dogville in 2003, despite not coming out on top. I know I'm looking forward to it, as much as you can to a long, slow, stately rehearsal of the apocalypse.

P.S.: Oops. Scheduling data had been ambiguous about Bertrand Blier's Ménage, aka Tenue de soirée, because it was already playing commercially in France by the time it premiered in competition at Cannes. Turns out that was on the first day of regular programming, following the Opening Night showing of Polanki's Pirates. So before posting a Sacrifice review, I'll have to play the shame-faced journo who missed Ménage at its official screening and had to catch it at the 'plex. (Michel Blanc eventually shared Best Actor with Bob Hoskins, so this front-loading of prizewinners is totally out of control.)

Two Weeks in Another Town: 1986

It has become increasingly obvious that I won't be enjoying any big trips this summer, but there are always new methods for taking matters into your own hands. Needing a break from all of the high-intensity academic writing of the last year, and a different kind of break from the big Oscar projects, and inspired by all the fascinating coverage that came out of this year's Cannes Film Festival, I decided to take unusual advantage of working at a major research university and reassemble a Cannes Film Festival from the past for my own enjoyment. Some people like to restage Civil War battles or the Lewis & Clark Expedition, and I really can't speak to that, but if you want to resuscitate two weeks on the Croisette, here's what you do:

• Visit the official page for the year you have picked at the Cannes Film Festival website, remembering to click the "All Selections" tab since, as we re-learn every year, the main competition film are often rivaled in quality by the sidebar selections and other out-of-competition titles. This will also entail visiting the relevant sites for the Directors' Fortnight and the Critics' Week pages, since these programs aren't archived on the Cannes page. Polish up your own page devoted to the Cannes festival you are revisiting, making sure to expand the archive past the Palme competitors. Draw up your ranked preferences of which films you are most intent on seeing, as though preparing to buy tickets at any other festival. As happens in real life, you occasionally will have already seen some of the titles before this new festival begins, so it's fair to record what you think about those films already, even if you saw them eons ago and plan on re-screening them.

• Retrieve as many of the programmed films as you can get your hands on, through a combination of the public library system, the Interlibrary Loan office, MUBI, Odd Obsession, and Facets—since you still think other rental agencies besides Netflix deserve to have loyal (and local!) customers, and since a lot of what you're looking for may only be available on long out-of-print VHS tapes. Used media shops like Chicago's splendid, three-location Reckless Records may also come in handy here.

• Do your best to ascertain the order in which the Competition films debuted, because it's fun to simulate the particular sequence, contexts, and suggestive associations among different films that a Cannes journalist might have experienced at the time. This can be tricky, but some reading ability in French will help, since Le Monde is usually pretty diligent about reviewing these titles the day after each one premieres, and you can search their archive to find out when these columns appeared in print. If you pick a year before 1987, as I did, a lunch hour at the Microfiche station is the way to crack the case. Occasionally, you will find an article that actually lists the calendar for the whole upcoming festival, but you cannot count on this. You can cheat a little on the Out of Competition titles, since records here are blurrier, and they typically play more often and get reviewed in a less systematic fashion. Besides, you have to draw a line somewhere.

• For added historical context, read a little of the initial Cannes coverage in Le Monde, Figaro, the Guardian, the Telegraph, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and especially Film Comment to learn what was in the air, culturally and politically and cinematically, at the time your festival fired up. This always yields fascinating tidbits, and if you wind up getting a little advance sense of which films flew and which ones bombed, that's fine, because usually when you show up to a festival, you already have some sense of the buzz around certain titles, including the ones about which everyone stays oddly silent. Just take it as a bad sign if, without variation, you always wind up agreeing.

• Buy a small piccolo of champagne and a lot of coffee, wake up early in the mornings since you still have work to accomplish later in the day, and start your itinerary!

I decided to return to the 1986 Cannes Film Festival in honor of its 25th anniversary, which also happens to be the 25th anniversary of my beginning to see movies on my own and attending grown-up dramas with my parents. I hadn't seen a lot of the Competition selection before, although the actual Palme winner, Roland Joffé's The Mission, is maybe my least favorite recipient of this prestigious prize. Turns out this was both a popularly applauded and a viciously contested win, with rampant rumors of jury manipulation even before the festival opened. The scuttlebut: Gilles Jacob really wanted to premiere the movie, which Joffé and his ambitious producer David Putnam weren't finished editing; wags maintained that Jacob told Putnam, if you bring us the film, we'll tell the jury to feel very, very, very grateful for the opportunity.

In general, the Palme was seen as a two-way race between the picturesque pop of The Mission and the austere, differently picturesque, semi-penetrable spiritual agonies of Andrei Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice, which I've also seen though I don't remember it all that well. Both movies grabbed multiple prizes from different bodies beyond just the main jury, controversially chaired by the devoutly mainstream Sydney Pollack. The Ecumenical Jury and the FIPRESCI International critics gave their annual citations to Tarkovsky, while the Technical Grand Prize council, who often cited films by director rather than singling out individual craftsmen, bestowed their plaque on Joffé. Pollack's crew did what they could to distribute the wealth of prizes in other ways, partly by divvying up Best Actress and Best Actor to two performances apiece from different films—the only time that has happened in Cannes history. Still, 1986 is remembered as one of those two-racehorse years on the Croisette, sort of like the 1994 Oscars and, possibly, the 2010 Oscars. Note which side always comes out on top in these situations.

Aside from these two films plus Andrei Konchalovsky's Runaway Train and Neil Jordan's Mona Lisa—Oscar nominees and Golden Globe winners for Best Actor in 1985 and 1986, respectively—the main competition will all be new to me. This includes off-center work from Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese, Nagisa Ôshima, and Bruce Beresford; divisive outings from name directors to whom I've had at least some exposure, including André Téchiné, Margarethe von Trotta, Jim Jarmusch, and Franco Zeffirelli; and little-seen work by important figures whose movies I've never seen, including India's Mrinal Sen, Brazil's Arnaldo Jabor, France's Bertrand Blier, and Russia's Sergei Bondarchuk. The sidebar programs include Spike Lee's debut, the punk classic Sid and Nancy, the completion of a trilogy by Axel Corti and the beginning of one by Denys Arcand, a sexually provocative Tennessee Williams adaptation, rarely screened titles from Chantal Akerman and Amos Gitaï, a Carlos Saura dance film, and an Australian movie I've never heard of where Isabelle Huppert has a starring role as a blind woman. Plus, encore screenings of Hollywood favorites that hadn't yet opened in Europe (Hannah and Her Sisters, The Color Purple) and the big, four-film coming out party for a tremendously exciting Down Under talent named Jane Campion.

Campion won the Short Film competition for her peerless student film Peel, making her the first woman to win a Palme at any level of Cannes, seven years before she also became the first woman to win the Palme for feature films. Led by Mona Lisa, The Mission, and Sid and Nancy, I have read that the UK had more official selections in and out of the main derby than they ever had before. (Sid, the best reviewed of the lot, was relegated to Un Certain Regard.) Meanwhile, a single, Israeli-owned production company called Cannon Films, previously the industrial plant for such exquisite art works as Hot T-Shirts, Schizoid, and Exterminator 2, spent millions of bribes dollars becoming the first outfit to place three different and notably disparate titles in the Palme line-up: Runaway Train, Altman's Sam Shepard adaptation Fool for Love, and Zeffirelli's attempt to bring Verdi's all-singing Otello to the screen.

The biggest story at Cannes that year, proving that some things never change, is that the U.S. had recently commenced a major bombing campaign in Libya, which had already claimed the life of one of Muammar Qaddafi's children (although this report was later exposed to be false). Security was at maximum intensity at Cannes, which gleams just across the Mediterranean from Tripoli, and virtually all the American talent that had previously planned to support their films in person wound up canceling their visits: Scorsese, Spielberg, Shepard, Whoopi Goldberg, Rosanna Arquette, Walter Matthau, Jon Voight. The casually fearless Robert Altman, the more bullishly fearless Eric Roberts of Runaway Train, and Griffin Dunne, the heavily invested star and producer of Scorsese's After Hours, were the only Yanks to hit the Croisette. By all accounts, the paparazzi were pissed, though the jury wasn't impressed enough by the intrepidity of Altman, Roberts, or Dunne to give a prize to any of them (though Scorsese did win Best Director). Military ships patrolled the shoreline at all hours, as did a giant replicated galleon commissioned to advertise the Opening Night film, Roman Polanski's comic farrago Pirates, which I'm not ashamed to say I'll be skipping.

Among the 20 Palme entrants, I've been able to scrounge up all of them except for Raúl de la Torre's Argentinean political allegory Poor Butterfly; Marco Ferreri's I Love You, a story about a man who literally falls in love with a talking keychain, which was all but booed out of town; and Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina's French-Algerian production The Last Image. The latter I am sorely disappointed to miss, since Lakhdar-Hamina's Chronicle of the Smoldering Years is one of my favorite Palme victors of the past, and certainly the least well-known of the really great ones. The only available DVD of Bondarchuk's Boris Godounov doesn't seem to have English subtitles, but it's also not clear how much dialogue it's got, so we'll see whether or not I can hang in there with it. It's a festival tradition to get punked by translations or the absence of needful translations, as it is also a festival translation to bail out when the going gets too tough.

Otherwise, stay tuned for some reviews soon. I plan on enjoying my two-week "trip" tremendously, and I hope you'll be along for the ride!

Mr. Altman & the Women

One more shout-out to the steps we're skipping. The actual daisy-chain after yesterday's paean to Positively True Adventures would lead you through an anti-corporate documentary; a queer Latin American prison drama; a spunky French sketchbook about all things Maggie Cheung; Holly Hunter visiting her parents for Thanksgiving; a South Central 'hood tragedy; a florid update on the Dracula legend; and one singularly ass-kicking flight attendant. And that's when you'd be ready to climb into this portal, right into a brilliant if somewhat erratic artist's imagination. It's better than Malkovich. It's Altman...

"He's always askin' me out and everything, but I'm not gonna go out with him till he gets over that cold..."

Still Remembering Robert Altman

Stop Smiling Magazine continues to be unaccountably generous to me, this time by inviting me to contribute a short piece in memoriam of Robert Altman. The invitation was perfectly suited to the man we mourn: rather than review a whole movie or anatomize a major set-piece, the editors asked me to reflect on a stray moment or detail in one of Altman's movies that made a lasting impression on me. I couldn't help but talk about Shelley Duvall's skirts in 3 Women, which keep snagging in her car door when she drives. Another respondent writes about 3 Women's peculiar genesis in a dream of Altman's, and two other writers celebrate McCabe & Mrs. Miller (as well one might!) and A Wedding (which I've never seen). If this isn't enough Altman for you, and it shouldn't be, click back to the full-length interview with Altman that Stop Smiling published five issues back. And then go watch one of his movies. And then watch another one. And then go talk over someone while they're still finishing their sentence. (And then remind yourself that the glorious praises of Ronee Blakley and Lily Tomlin will doubtless be sung by all of the mockingbirds gathered together at next month's Supporting Actress Sunday roundtable for 1975. It's never the wrong time to venture back into Nashville.)

(Image © 1977 Lions Gate Films/20th Century Fox Film Corp., and reproduced from DVDBeaver's review of the sensational DVD)

A Killer Read

I had a Season-One-of-Project Runway experience with Christine Vachon's new memoir A Killer Life: How an Independent Film Producer Survives Deals and Disasters in Hollywood and Beyond. That is to say, I sat down with the book on the evening I bought it and read every page until I was finished, at around 3:30am. Granted, A Killer Life is hardly A Suitable Boy, and nor is Christine Vachon aiming to be Marcel Proust, so gobbling this book in one go is hardly a feat of readerly stamina. Rather, it's a testament to the absorbing way in which Vachon—the co-founder, leading shepherd, and most public face of Killer Films—conveys two decades' worth of professional experience as well as her own forthright, principled, occasionally abrasive, utterly unprecious view of what matters in a movie, and of how the American independent film scene should and does operate (which, predictably enough, amount to two very different things).

Vachon, working with a co-writer named Austin Bunn, shows the same helpful and lucid grasp of her book's audience that she has demonstrated in her stewardship and remarkably successful marketing of 32 feature films since 1991; she presumes the film literacy of her readers without pandering, but also without any alienating veils of insider posturing or untranslated industryspeak. As proud as she obviously is of her work, she doesn't expect the titles of her films to speak for themselves, even though several of them do: if the Killer Films imprimatur doesn't mean much to you, consider the phenomenal track-record contained within Vachon's 15-year portfolio, including not just some of the most seminal films of contemporary queer cinema (Go Fish, I Shot Andy Warhol, Boys Don't Cry, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and all of Todd Haynes' films) but also some white-hot provocations (Larry Clark's Kids, Todd Solondz's Happiness), one midsized commercial breakthrough (Mark Romanek's One Hour Photo), and one late-career effort by a canonized auteur (Robert Altman's The Company).

These films don't get equal airtime in Vachon's account, and in a few cases, such as Hedwig and The Company, I was eager to hear a little more about the mechanics and vicissitudes of working with a floridly ambitious tyro like John Cameron Mitchell or a notoriously free-form marionette like Altman, whose films hardly radiate the queer angles and empathies that mark so many of Vachon's projects. Still, notwithstanding the inevitable omissions, Vachon is a frank and generous raconteur, and though the book is clearly being marketed as a "tell-all," she isn't being coy in asserting that her overriding interest is in clarifying the tough, frugal, extremely heterogeneous, but artistically rewarding tasks of being an artist-friendly independent film producer. She knows that even many film aficionados have a shakier grasp on a producer's duties than they do on other behind-the-scenes work, and this is for a reason:

"With every other credit in a film, you know exactly what it means; the production designer on Camp did exactly the same job as the production designer on Cold Mountain. But 'producer' is a catchall. In the morning, I could be talking to David Schwimmer about potential parts in our movies, because he got into the business to be De Niro, not 'Ross' from Friends. By the afternoon, I might be negotiating with a big composer's agent to do the score for One Hour Photo (and when he laughs at what we can afford to pay, we spin the Rolodex and go elsewhere). By the afternoon, I could be on a plane up to Toronto to support Glenn Close on set, who is having a hard time with her character and is nervous about working with a whip-smart but slightly overwhelmed director."

That last allusion is surely to Rose Troche's interesting but oddly stifled movie The Safety of Objects, which apparently tested through the roof but gained zero traction on the critical or commercial markets. Though Vachon tends to be terse about these sorts of misfires, probably because it's impossible to say for certain why The Grey Zone or Storytelling passed with nary a blip, she doesn't skew the book too grossly toward her roundest successes. You leave with a candid sense of why Kids was a horrendous shoot, despite yielding a satisfying product; of where and how A Home at the End of the World got unlatched from newbie director Michael Mayer's vision for the project, though Vachon seems as surprised as anyone that she wavered in this case on her usual policy of staunch director advocacy; of how a promising script with generous development momentum like The Shaggs, a story about folk-singing sisters that was intended as Kirsten Dunst's next project just as Spider-Man hit, suddenly gets scuttled despite every good intention; of how the unnamed but transparently designated Crime + Punishment in Suburbia unraveled into Killer's largest lapse in collective judgment.

To a naïve outsider like me, who has logged zero hours on a film-set or in a production office, one of the most valuable lessons built into A Killer Life is just how fine the line can be between triumph and fiasco; even the most unified artistic visions have often survived the kind of peril and disagreement that one tends to imagine as the exclusive property of flops and vanity projects. Vachon spends a good deal of time, for example, illuminating the disastrous corporate takeover of Far from Heaven, which was briefly indentured to its bond company. Vachon, who would later accept her first Independent Spirit Award for Best Feature for this movie, couldn't even access its bank account for several days and was routinely shamed by bookkeepers and insurance types for failing to regulate the budget. The Boys Don't Cry set was riven by several fractious confrontations between Ivy League director Kimberly Peirce and linchpin star Hilary Swank over their very different reads on Brandon Teena, and though Killer managed to trump a competing project at 20th-Cenutry Fox (which ultimately quashed its own movie and distributed Boys Don't Cry through its Fox Searchlight speciality division), karma is now biting back fiercely as Vachon's Infamous is trotting into limited release as the "other" Truman Capote movie:

"With Boys Don't Cry, I never spent a second thinking about what Fox Searchlight and [star/producer] Drew Barrymore were feeling when we scooped them, rendering their project irrelevant. We had the upper hand. Now I know what they were feeling: That sense that your passion and dedication isn't always enough. That the world is chaotic and you can't control everything. It's a lesson I have to keep relearning."

A Killer Life brims with enough production anecdotes that fans of Vachon's movies are assured of a good time. The book doesn't really promise an intimate glimpse of Vachon herself, though her persona emerges in ways that are both intended and not. It's refreshing to read a movieland memoir by someone as intellectually inclined as Vachon, who name-drops Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" essay and speaks with fondness about her training in semioitics at Brown, but is just as transparently mad about movies. At the same time, she can be a tad uncouth and susceptible to hubris: it's a little dismaying to hear her cop to some gladhanding praise of Agnieszka Holland in a business meeting, expressing love for Holland's Washington Square even though she hasn't actually seen it, which she says "doesn't matter"—probably true from a brokerage and etiquette standpoint, but discordant, surely, with the proud cinephilia Vachon elsewhere professes. This blend of bracing honesty and curt impolitesse crops up in a few more personal anecdotes, too, as in Vachon's memory of the endless funerals for victims of AIDS that she attended in the 1980s. One of these was the burial of her friend and temporary mentor Bill Sherwood (Parting Glances):

"I can't really recall Bill Sherwood's funeral because I attended so many around the same time. It reminds me of an observation in John Weir's book The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket, set in the mid to late 1980s, about how all the memorial services became indistinct because all these gay men were kind of the same: they all liked show tunes, they all liked going to brunch, they all liked to talk on the phone. Since few of them were from New York, you'd attend a memorial service in the Village someplace—where the family didn't show—and you'd be like, Is this Larry's, or is this Robert's? Or Bill's?"

Is it sentimental of me to want a heroic artist like Vachon, a paragon in her field and a tremendous burr in the straight-boy oligopoly of most Hollywood production, to sound a little less tetchy or unmoved on a subject like this? It's immaterial, really, to the provenance of her book, and maybe it's why this kind of autobiographical element becomes increasingly scarce as the book proceeds: Vachon really walks the walk in asking to be judged on her work. In the same spirit, she doesn't exactly hold back from characterizing colleagues and Hollywoodland acquaintances in whatever better or worse countenance they have presented to her—Cate Blanchett, Steven Soderbergh, and, surprisingly, Jerry Bruckheimer will be proud of their depictions, Jeff Bridges and Sandy Powell rather less so, and Julianne Moore is something of a split decision—but all of them appear for the value and nature of their involvements with Killer Films, not to gussy up the book with gratuitous star cameos and salacious whispers. Even the requisite anecdote about Julia Roberts is evocative and germane (she expressed interest in the Harper Lee role in Infamous before pregnancy ruled her ineligible).

The best-showcased supporting roles in A Killer Life are filled not by celebrities but by executives, agents, directors, and producing partners, who interpolate their own memories of working with Killer and helming their own projects as satisfying aperitifs between Vachon's chapters. (Killer co-partner Pam Koffler writes an especially tasty one about screening Mrs. Harris for the real Jean Harris and The Notorious Bettie Page for Bettie herself.) Anyone who thinks they will enjoy A Killer Life almost certainly will. Anyone who is skeptical about learning anything practical from this book should be nicely surprised, though Vachon's earlier volume, Shooting to Kill, is probably a more helpful nitty-gritty primer for aspiring producers who are just getting started. A Killer Life offers generous and earnest points of entry for film students, cineastes, starfuckers, and anyone interested in the complex sociologies of an industry as obviously personal and political as independent film production. Vachon is proud of the fact that her brave, thorny, and unlikely movies tend to split their viewers into devotés and detractors, but A Killer Life may wind up doing something very un-Killer: that is, making all of its readers feel equally invited and equally well rewarded.