BRUCE CONNER -

BEAT ARTIST, EXPERIMENTAL FILMMAKER

DEAD AT 74

 
Bruce Conner's video for Devo's "Mongoloid"

From Boing Boing:

Bruce Conner, Filmmaker, Beat Artist (RIP)

Bruce Conner, a pioneering collage filmmaker and Beat-era assemblage artist, died yesterday. He was 74. Conner is best known for his experimental cut-up films made from found footage and TV advertisements. In the decades since his first gallery shows in the 1950s, Conner collaborated with the likes of DEVO, Terry Riley, Brian Eno, and David Byrne.

Conner’s first and possibly most famous film, entitled A Movie (1958), combined his thrift store hunting process and his use of still photography. It is referred to as the piece that brought Conner to notoriety. In skillfully editing stock footage, Conner created abstract metaphors of mankind's violence. He subsequently made nearly two dozen non-narrative experimental films.

Bruce Conner's Breakaway, featuring Toni Basil (1966)

While Conner was living in Massachusetts in 1963, John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Conner filmed the television coverage of the event (near Kennedy's birthplace) and edited and re-edited the footage with stock footage into another meditation on violence which he titled Report. The film was issued several times as it was re-edited.

According to Conner's friend and fellow film-maker Stan Brakhage in his book Film at Wit's End, Conner was signed into a New York gallery contract in the early 1960s, which stipulated stylistic and personal restraint beyond Conner's freewheeling nature. Conner reacted by attending openings, only to move among the crowd wordlessly pinning buttons that read "I am Bruce Conner" or "I am not Bruce Conner" to their clothes. Many send-ups of artistic authorship followed, including a five page piece Conner had published in a major art publication in which Conner's making of a peanut butter, banana, bacon, lettuce, and Swiss cheese sandwich was reported step-by-step in great detail, with numerous photographs, as though it were a work of art.

More Bruce Conner, from the San Francisco Chronicle:

Bruce Conner, a San Francisco artist renowned for working fluently across media, died at his home of natural causes on Monday. He was 74.

Mr. Conner was one of the last survivors of the Bay Area Beat era art scene that included Jay DeFeo (1929-1989), Wallace Berman (1926-1976), and Wally Hedrick (1928-2003).

"We were all anonymous artists here in the '50s," Mr. Conner told The Chronicle in 2000, shortly before the opening of his retrospective "2000: BC The Bruce Conner Story, Part II," at the de Young Museum.

Despite an enviably long record of gallery and museum exhibitions, Mr. Conner met with little recognition outside the worlds of contemporary art and independent film.

Bruce Conner's A Movie (1958)

Born in McPherson, Kan., in 1933, Mr. Conner arrived in San Francisco in 1957. Schooled in art at Wichita University, the University of Nebraska and Brooklyn Art School, Mr. Conner first got noticed for the short films he assembled from scavenged documentary and B-movie footage. Several of his films, including A Movie (1958), a sort of paean to human failure, and Crossroads (1977), are regarded as classics of independent filmmaking, even though Mr. Conner shot no original footage for them.

Crossroads replays, at ever slower speeds, official footage of a hydrogen bomb detonation on Bikini Atoll, until repetition - 27 times - and slow motion transfigure its colossal destructiveness into something hypnotically beautiful.

In the early 1960s, Mr. Conner made grotesque assemblages out of common household objects that ridicule consumer society's attachment to personal possession, including more precious sorts of artwork. They remain some of the most powerful inventions of their kind in American art.

He went on to make obsessively detailed abstract drawings, large-scale photograms (with the help of Edmund Shea) in which his figure appears made of light, and collages of old wood engravings in the manner of Surrealist Max Ernst.

Mr. Conner never stayed with one medium for long, resisting the art world's inclination to identify every artist with a style and a biographical myth.

Asked once by a critic to mention some artists who influenced him, Mr. Conner said, "I typed out about 250 names," and instructed the writer to add that "limited space prevents us from printing the remaining 50,003 names on Mr. Conner's list of influences."

Mr. Conner announced his own death erroneously on two occasions, once sending an obituary to a national art magazine, and later writing a self-description for the biographical encyclopedia Who Was Who in America.

Mr. Conner is survived by Jean Conner, his wife of more than 50 years, and a son, Robert.

No memorial event is planned as yet.

From IMDB:

The box-office popularity of Kung Fu Panda in China, where it has earned $20 million since its release in late June, has led to a debate in the country about why a film with many Chinese symbols and settings could not have been made in China itself, Britain's Guardian newspaper reported from Beijing today (Tuesday). The newspaper quoted from a blogger named Mu on the Sina.com website: "Although the 'theft' of the Chinese symbol of the panda gives us pain, at least it makes the Chinese movie industry consider why we are always one step behind in globalizations war of creation." The film was also the center of a debate by a parliamentary cultural-affairs committee, which concluded, according to the Xinhua News Agency, that there are too many government controls imposed on film production. "Although there is no secret ingredient to filmmaking success, the government ought to relax its oversight," the committee said.

From 4029 TV.com:

FORT SMITH, Ark. -- Crowds in Arkansas came for the lure of cage fighting and $1 beer, but police said two shows in June only wanted to film an audience enraged by men ripping each others' clothes off and kissing.

The June shows were hosted in Texarkana and Fort Smith. They were the sets for a new movie featuring Sacha Baron Cohen of "Borat" fame.

Texarkana police Captain Mark Lewis said a red flag went up before the June 5 show at the Four States Fair Grounds. Lewis said promoters asked for 10 plainclothes officers. Four officers ended up heading over to the event, but were asked to sign release and liability waivers. Lewis said the officers learned that they were to be plants in the audience who would try to rile the crowd.

Fair grounds president and CEO Dwight Duncan said the Texarkana show, entitled "Red, White and Blood Cage Fighting," closed down early. He said officials had no inkling of the fight night's true intention, as the fair grounds held another fight put on by the same promoter that went fine.

In Fort Smith, police Sgt. Adam Holland said 18 off-duty officers provided security. Holland said two men in the show went right up to the line of the city's morality laws. The crowd booed and threw beers according to Holland. Police said it took about 45 minutes to clear the arena.

Matt Labov, a Los Angeles-based publicist for Baron Cohen, said he had no comment Monday about the faked fights.

Two Coreys Meltdown on the Set of Lost Boys 2:

From News of the World: 

Mini-Me Verne Troyer & Ranae Shrider: At last, proof that size really DOESN'T matter. By Georgina Dickinson.

SEX with 2ft8ins Austin Powers Mini-Me star Verne Troyer was always going to be a tall order for 5ft6ins lover Ranae Shrider. But as the explicit leaked video of the pair's passionate romps proved to the world...they wouldn't let a little thing like that come between them.

And after a judge pulled the explosive footage off the internet, actress Ranae, 22, revealed to the News of the World her own red-hot tale of the tape—and just how 39-year-old Hollywood dwarf Verne measures up in bed.

Brunette Ranae admitted: "I never imagined one day I'd date a man who barely came up to my kneecaps.

"But as soon as I met Verne I was so captivated by his personality, his size didn't seem to matter.

"I liked him so much I even gave up wearing high heels for six months.

"But sex was very different from anything I'd experienced before, and I'd be lying if I didn't say it was tricky making everything work.

"I had to kneel down just to give him a hug. And anything but the traditional missionary position was just impossible. So I'd lie on the bed and Verne would crawl up my legs to have sex with me. And as he did it his feet would be tickling my knees!

"It wasn't quite as passionate as sex with a normal-sized man but he did his best. He didn't wear a condom. There was no point, they're all too big.

"On the whole though, he wasn't short of sexy skills and tried his hardest to make up in technique what he lacked in size."

Now Ranae has given us the low-down on their extraordinary six-month fling and revealed how pint-sized Verne:

WOWED her with his Austin staying Powers, making love THREE TIMES in 20 minutes.

ALMOST DROWNED as she tried to seduce him in the bath!

STACKED phone books on chairs so he could eat with her at the table.

LOATHED her miniature pet dog—because it was taller than him.

It was New Year's Eve when Ranae first met Verne at Playboy boss Hugh Hefner's party in his Beverly Hills mansion. Ranae says the chemistry was instant. She told us: "He asked for my phone number. I didn't have anything else to do so I thought why not?"

Her first date with Verne—famous for playing midget clone versions of baddie Dr Evil in the smash Austin Powers movies—was a romantic dinner at seafood restaurant The Lobster overlooking the Pacific in Santa Monica.

Ranae recalled: "Verne told me not to reach down and hold his hand when we walked in as he didn't want it to look like a child out with his mum.

"When we got to the table he'd fixed for the restaurant to pile three thick phone books on the seat so he could be on the same level as me. Once he'd sat down it was just like having dinner with a normal-sized man.

"We laughed all night and I noticed what amazing eyes Verne had. By the end of the meal I was smitten.

"But Verne played the perfect gent and didn't lay a finger on me. He just dropped me home and I bent down so he could give me a peck on the cheek.

"It was two weeks before we finally had sex, at his place. I was so nervous I wanted it over and done with—in case there was no chemistry or it just didn't work because of his size.

"It was a normal-sized bed and once Verne had clambered up, I undressed and laid down next to him.

"For a small guy he's quite well endowed. I had no complaints.

"But the whole thing was over in three minutes.

"It was strange having sex with someone who couldn't reach to kiss me at the same time, except for my tummy that is! I was so relieved it was over.

"But minutes later Verne was ready to go again. That night we made love three times in 20 minutes, which most bigger men only dream about doing."

The pair's next romp came four weeks later when Verne took Ranae for a romantic Easter break to the luxury L'Ermitage Hotel in Beverly Hills.

It was here they made the infamous sex tape, which last week was sensationally leaked onto the internet after allegedly being stolen from the home the couple still share.

And it was here Verne almost DROWNED in a bubble bath as Ranae tried to spice up their love-making.

"I thought it would be fun to do it in the tub," she said. "Sadly I almost killed him. While Verne was watching TV I ran the bath, emptied a bottle of bubbles in it and called him in.

"But the bubbles were so thick and high that once he climbed in he got lost under the water and I couldn't see him.

"Verne's voice is just like it is in the films and as he disappeared under the water, I heard this tiny yelp for help. I could just hear him crying, ‘Ranae, I can't see! Get me out, I'm drowning!'

"I was frantic and started to scoop the bubbles out so I could find him. The bath was only about 3ft deep but for someone of Verne's size it was like he'd fallen into the deep end of a swimming pool—and he CAN'T swim. I put my hand under and eventually felt his bald head and hauled him out. I couldn't believe I'd tried to do something sexy and ended up almost killing him. He looked like a drowned rat.

"Then when I asked, ‘Shall we have sex now?' he was so out of breath he just stomped off with foam on his shiny head and said, ‘I don't feel like it now.' It was dreadful."

So the next night, when Verne asked her to star in his DIY sex video, guilty Ranae felt duty-bound to agree.

She said: "Without a doubt there's nothing Verne enjoys more than seeing himself on screen. Watching his own films is his favourite hobby. So it was no surprise when he asked if he could film us having sex. He said we could use it to get ourselves turned on."

Verne then turned director...telling Ranae where he wanted furniture because he was too small to move it himself. She said: "Verne ordered champagne and strawberries to get us in the mood. Then we got down to it.

"First the tape shows Verne pleasuring me for 15 minutes which was amazing. The next 45 minutes is us having sex. And we really enjoyed ourselves."
Pizza

Within weeks the pair were so in love they rented an apartment in Hollywood together. But that's when their little-and-large romance began to unravel. Ranae said: "The fact is, because of his size, Verne can't do a lot of stuff. So I ended up feeling more like a carer than his girlfriend. We only had sex one more time after that.

"And at home Verne couldn't be bothered with phone books on the chair so we ate at the coffee table, him on a stool and me on the floor.

"Luckily I didn't have to cook much—because after two biscuits Verne is full. One slice of Hawaiian pizza and he's happy for the rest of the day!"

And Ranae discovered there were times when Verne's shortcomings did make him miserable. "Obviously part of him wishes he could be as big as a regular man," she said. "Verne absolutely hated looking in the mirror.

"And he detested my little Maltese dog Lacey because when she stood on her back legs she was bigger than him."

Booze was a problem, too. Last year Verne confessed he was battling to beat the booze after the collapse of his two-month marriage to 6ft2ins yoga instructor Genevieve Gallen.

Ranae said: "Verne regularly drinks five beers at a time, which for a man his size is lethal. I'd tell him he'd had enough but his pals just told him to ignore me. In the end Verne put his friends before me and now it's over.

"We live in the same apartment but have separate rooms. I still care for Verne—but sadly Verne cares more about himself."

And that's the long and short of it.

From CNN:

Could Heath Ledger Win an Oscar?

LOS ANGELES, California (AP)  -- Jack Nicholson's Joker was a blast. Heath Ledger's Joker is as dark and anarchic a figure as Randle McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, the role that brought Nicholson his first Academy Award.

People who have seen Heath Ledger's Dark Knight performance compare him to the great screen villains.

Ledger's performance in the Batman tale The Dark Knight is so remarkable that next January 22, the one-year anniversary of his death, he could become just the seventh actor in Oscar history to earn a posthumous nomination.

"I do think that Heath has created an iconic villain that will stand for the ages, and of course, I would love to see him get an award," said Christian Bale, who reprises his Batman Begins role as the tormented crime fighter. "But you know, to me, you can witness his talent, celebrate his talent within this movie. Anything else is gravy."

Superhero flicks usually are not the stuff Oscar dreams are made of. Yet Ledger delivered so far beyond anyone's expectations that he could end up as the second performer to win Hollywood's top honor after his death.

"He may be the first actor since Peter Finch. He may even win the damn thing," said Gary Oldman, who co-stars as noble cop Jim Gordon in The Dark Knight, which hits theaters July 18.

Finch is the only person to win posthumously, earning the best-actor prize for 1976's Network two months after he died.

News of Ledger's death at age 28 from an accidental drug overdose broke just hours after the Oscar nominations were announced last January, darkening what normally is one of Hollywood's happiest days. The nominations next year fall on the same date because they were moved back two days from their traditional Tuesday announcement to avoid conflicting with the presidential inauguration.

With nothing remotely like the maniacal Joker among his credits beforehand, Ledger had been a surprising choice to fans, some feeling he was too young, others sensing he would not live up to the campy but earnest performance Nicholson gave in 1989's Batman. (The role earned Nicholson a Golden Globe nomination, though he did not make the Oscar cut.)

As filming progressed last year, word began leaking from the set about the feverishly psychotic persona Ledger was creating.

With a marketing campaign heavily focused on the Joker, the movie trailers that followed presented a Joker with sloppy, ominous clown makeup that looked as though it had been applied in a windstorm. The brief footage revealed a character whose cackling humor cannot conceal the malevolent soul beneath.

"Whatever Heath channeled into, he's found something quite extraordinary," Oldman said. "It's arguably one of the greatest screen villains I think I've ever seen."

Fans were hooked, but some were skeptical when Oscar buzz for the performance started circulating after Ledger's death. Comic-book tales and other big action flicks rarely are taken seriously by awards voters, who are willing to honor them for technical achievements but generally not for acting.

Skepticism dissolved once Warner Bros. began screenings for The Dark Knight. iReport.com: Will you see Dark Knight because of Ledger?

"Heath Ledger didn't so much give a performance as he disappeared completely into the role," filmmaker and lifelong comics fan Kevin Smith said on his MySpace blog after seeing The Dark Knight. "I know I'm not the first to suggest this, but he'll likely get at least an Oscar nod (if not the win) for best supporting actor."

Ledger's performance is surpassing even the sky-high expectations hardcore fans have going in.

"He was better than I thought he was going to be," said Bill Ramey, founder of the fan Web site Batman-on-Film.com, who caught an advance press screening. "I think he legitimately would deserve an Oscar nomination, not just out of sympathy to his passing, but because he was just fantastic in the movie. ... It's right up there with Hannibal Lecter," which earned Anthony Hopkins an Oscar for The Silence of the Lambs.

Along with Finch, past posthumous Oscar contenders include James Dean, who was nominated for best actor twice after his death, with 1955's East of Eden and 1956's Giant.

The other actors nominated after their deaths were Spencer Tracy (1967's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner); Ralph Richardson (1984's Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes); Massimo Troisi (1995's The Postman); and Jeanne Eagels (1929's The Letter).

The aura surrounding Ledger since his death is a sign that, like Dean, he could endure as a mythic figure of talent silenced before his time. Ledger had a best-actor nomination for 2005's Brokeback Mountain and was considered a gifted performer just coming into his own.

That will not necessarily improve his Oscar chances. Dean had two shots after his death and lost both.

"The fact that only one actor has ever won an Oscar from the grave tells us that in general at the Oscars, the feeling is when you're dead, you're dead," said Tom O'Neil, a columnist for TheEnvelope.com, an awards Web site. "Maybe the point is that the Oscars are all about hugs. Nobody wants to hug a dead guy."

Oscar voters tend to hand out the trophies for heroic or sympathetic roles, so Ledger's supremely evil characterization could prove a drawback along with the action-genre stigma.

Yet there are notable instances when actors playing villains made such an impression that academy members could not resist voting for them.

Besides Hopkins as cannibalistic killer Lecter, bad guys who won include Fredric March in the title role of 1932's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; F. Murray Abraham as Mozart's mortal enemy in 1984's Amadeus; Kathy Bates as a novelist's demented fan in 1990's Misery; Denzel Washington as a corrupt cop in 2001's Training Day; and Charlize Theron as a serial killer in 2003's Monster.

The last two years have brought Oscar wins by Forest Whitaker as brutal dictator Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland, Tilda Swinton as a murderously ruthless attorney in Michael Clayton, Daniel Day-Lewis as a savage oilman in There Will Be Blood and Javier Bardem as a psychopathic killer in No Country for Old Men.

"When a performance as a villain is that memorable, it can be held up as being that much more special," said Chuck Walton, managing editor of online movie-ticket site Fandango.com. "Oscar voters have a lot of respect for actors willing to really let themselves go and inhabit darker roles."

Warner Bros. and the filmmakers are profuse in their praise of Ledger but have been diplomatic about the Oscar talk. Awards publicity generally pads a movie's box-office and DVD receipts, and the studio has cautiously avoided any appearance of profiting from the added attention Ledger's death has brought to the film.

The Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan sidestepped the Oscar question, saying that he was simply happy that early viewers were responding to the performance the way Ledger would have liked.

From CNN:

Other Bozo Dead, 83

LOS ANGELES, California (AP)  -- Larry Harmon, who turned the character Bozo the Clown into a show business staple that delighted children for more than a half-century, died Thursday of congestive heart failure. He was 83.

Although not the original Bozo, Larry Harmon portrayed the popular frizzy-haired clown in countless appearances.

His publicist, Jerry Digney, told The Associated Press he died at his home.

Although not the original Bozo, Harmon portrayed the popular clown in countless appearances and, as an entrepreneur, he licensed the character to others, particularly dozens of television stations around the country. The stations in turn hired actors to be their local Bozos.

"You might say, in a way, I was cloning BTC (Bozo the Clown) before anybody else out there got around to cloning DNA," Harmon told the AP in a 1996 interview.

"Bozo is a combination of the wonderful wisdom of the adult and the childlike ways in all of us," Harmon said.

Pinto Colvig, who also provided the voice for Walt Disney's Goofy, originated Bozo the Clown when Capitol Records introduced a series of children's records in 1946. Harmon would later meet his alter ego while answering a casting call to make personal appearances as a clown to promote the records.

He got that job and eventually bought the rights to Bozo. Along the way, he embellished Bozo's distinctive look: the orange-tufted hair, the bulbous nose, the outlandish red, white and blue costume.

"I felt if I could plant my size 83AAA shoes on this planet, (people) would never be able to forget those footprints," he said.

Susan Harmon, his wife of 29 years, indicated Harmon was the perfect fit for Bozo.

"He was the most optimistic man I ever met. He always saw a bright side; he always had something good to say about everybody. He was the love of my life," she said Thursday.

The business -- combining animation, licensing of the character, and personal appearances -- made millions, as Harmon trained more than 200 Bozos over the years to represent him in local markets. iReport.com: Share your 'Bozo' memories

"I'm looking for that sparkle in the eyes, that emotion, feeling, directness, warmth. That is so important," he said of his criteria for becoming a Bozo.

The Chicago version of Bozo ran on WGN-TV in Chicago for 40 years and was seen in many other cities after cable television transformed WGN into a superstation.

Bozo -- portrayed in Chicago for many years by Bob Bell -- was so popular that the waiting list for tickets to a TV show eventually stretched to a decade, prompting the station to stop taking reservations for 10 years. On the day in 1990 when WGN started taking reservations again, it took just five hours to book the show for five more years. The phone company reported more than 27 million phone call attempts had been made.

By the time the show bowed out in Chicago, in 2001, it was the last locally produced version. Harmon said at the time that he hoped to develop a new cable or network show, as well as a Bozo feature film.

He became caught up in a minor controversy in 2004 when the International Clown Hall of Fame in Milwaukee took down a plaque honoring him as Bozo and formally endorsed Colvig for creating the role. Harmon denied ever misrepresenting Bozo's history.

He said he was claiming credit only for what he added to the character -- "What I sound like, what I look like, what I walk like" -- and what he did to popularize Bozo.

"Isn't it a shame the credit that was given to me for the work I have done, they arbitrarily take it down, like I didn't do anything for the last 52 years," he told the AP at the time.

Harmon protected Bozo's reputation with a vengeance, while embracing those who poked good-natured fun at the clown.

As Bozo's influence spread through popular culture, his very name became a synonym for clownish behavior.

"It takes a lot of effort and energy to keep a character that old fresh so kids today still know about him and want to buy the products," Karen Raugust, executive editor of The Licensing Letter, a New York-based trade publication, said in 1996.

A normal character runs its course in three to five years, Raugust said. "Harmon's is a classic character. It's been around 50 years."

On New Year's Day 1996, Harmon dressed up as Bozo for the first time in 10 years, appearing in the Rose Parade in Pasadena.

The crowd reaction, he recalled, "was deafening."

"They kept yelling, `Bozo, Bozo, love you, love you.' I shed more crocodile tears for five miles in four hours than I realized I had," he said. "I still get goose bumps."

Born in Toledo, Ohio, Harmon became interested in theater while studying at the University of Southern California.

"Bozo is a star, an entertainer, bigger than life," Harmon once said. "People see him as Mr. Bozo, somebody you can relate to, touch and laugh with."

Besides his wife, Harmon is survived by his son, Jeff Harmon, and daughters Lori Harmon, Marci Breth-Carabet and Leslie Breth.

From Slate Magazine:

Mirandize This!
Was Dirty Harry a right-wing fantasy of swift justice—or a cautionary tale about vigilantism?
By Mark Harris

In 1971, when a script called Dead Right landed in Clint Eastwood's hands, it was one step from the Hollywood graveyard. Steve McQueen had turned it down, as had Paul Newman. Frank Sinatra, well past his cinematic prime, stepped in then dropped out. Burt Lancaster passed, and so did Robert Mitchum, who later explained that he wasn't "a complete whore. … There are movies I won't do for any amount. … Movies that piss on the world."

Nobody but Eastwood wanted to play Harry Callahan, a San Francisco police inspector with an aversion to certain tedious elements of the Bill of Rights and a taste for vigilantism administered via his .44 Magnum. And nobody but Dirty Harry's creators was particularly happy when the movie caught on. Roger Ebert was one of many critics to call it "fascist." Pauline Kael—like Eastwood, a San Francisco native—was furious to see her hometown, already known as "the red center of bleeding-heart liberalism," exploited to focus the "unifying hatred of reactionaries." (Some things never change.) Kael called the movie a "deeply immoral … right-wing fantasy."

Warner's new seven-disc edition of the Dirty Harry series offers all five of the movies that, between 1971 and 1988, intermittently gripped the public, coined half a dozen catchphrases, and launched a long-running debate about their quaintly repugnant, strangely adaptable politics. The extras include five commentary tracks (though none by Eastwood) and six hours of documentaries. But the most fascinating artifacts here are the films themselves, particularly the first three, which offer a tour down a scuzzy side street of mainstream '70s cinema. With their helicopter shots, plasterboard sets, no-second-take performances, and light-jazz soundtracks, they're the kind of movies that, for critics at the time, seemed to define the decade as a low point in Hollywood filmmaking, no matter what they might have been seeing from Robert Altman or Francis Coppola.

Dirty Harry based its plotline on the same late-'60s murders that inspired David Fincher's Zodiac (in which Harry is unflatteringly referenced). The Zodiac killings went unsolved, but Dirty Harry reimagines them as the work of Scorpio, a shaggy-haired sniper who blends easily with the city's post-hippie community. In one shot that especially outraged the film's detractors, he's shown wearing a peace-sign belt buckle. The implication wasn't that the anti-war movement was sheltering murderers but, rather, that liberal peaceniks would never notice one more lunatic in their midst.

The movie's most inflammatory sequence is not Harry's famous, twice-delivered "Do you feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?" monologue. It's the scene in which Harry traps Scorpio and then tortures him to learn the whereabouts of his latest victim (who, unbeknownst to Harry, is already dead). "Rights. … I have rights," Scorpio shrieks, sniveling as Harry's foot presses down on his bleeding leg. Because of Harry's literal overstepping, the killer eventually goes free; he then hires a large black thug to beat him up so that he can work the easily duped court system by filing a false police-brutality claim. While the city's brass wants to bargain with Scorpio, Harry knows the only solution is to hunt him down and kill him. Which he (spoiler alert) does.

In other words: Of course this is a right-wing fantasy. Ideologically, Dirty Harry was a well-calculated sop to the group of Americans that Richard Nixon identified in 1969 as the "Silent Majority" (though neither word was entirely accurate), those for whom everything about the period, from burning ghettos to women's lib to anti-war marches represented steps toward barbarism.

Over the years, though, some critics have given the film a bit of a revisionist free pass for its particular brand of malarkey. That's due in large part to its director, who claimed to be as appalled by Harry as many of the movie's fiercest critics. Dirty Harry was made by Don Siegel, a self-professed liberal whose Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Riot in Cell Block 11 had won him a kind of cult status among cinephiles who saw a through line in his work, which more than once depicted prickly, amoral, or even criminal outsiders in opposition to a corrupt or dimwitted establishment. Siegel shrewdly began spinning even before Harry's release: Calling the original script "terrible," Siegel proffered his take, which was that Harry was just as bad as Scorpio "in his way." He added, "We show that within the force there are 'pigs' like this."

Reinforced by the ads ("a movie about a couple of killers … the one with the badge is Harry"), some auteurists saw Harry not as a right-winger fighting wimpy liberals, but as a cowboy protecting a frontier that had succumbed to lawlessness. It's almost a legitimate reading—that is, if you ignore the actual screenplay, which was overhauled by hard-core conservative and noted munitions enthusiast John Milius. Harry, says Milius on the discs, was a response to "the liberal bureaucratic morass that we all live in." There's not much political ambivalence there, or in Eastwood's remark that in 1971, "everyone was so sick of worrying about [rights of] the accused … [the movie] was in resistance to out-and-out stupidity."

Out-and-out stupidity soon became a series hallmark. Siegel wasn't a great director (and he certainly wasn't the actor's director that Eastwood needed back then), but he had a craftsmanly sense of visual storytelling; his impenetrably inky night scenes and his use of the lurching verticality of San Francisco as a sniper's dream terrain are still effective. Siegel was also economical: "If you shake a movie," he once said, "ten minutes will fall out."

If only someone had shaken the 124-minute Magnum Force (1973) two or three times. Milius, who co-wrote the script with Michael Cimino, says the movie was intended as an "answer" to the charge that Harry was fascist; here, his enemies would be real fascists, a jackbooted gang of motorcycle policemen that moonlights as a death squad, killing criminals who they say would be behind bars "if the courts worked properly." When Harry first encounters these guys on the firing range, he's downright giddy at their marksmanship. "When I get back on homicide, I hope you boys'll come see me," he says, as flirtatious as Mae West. (When another cop comments that the close-knit pack seems almost "queer for each other," Harry replies, "If the rest of you could shoot like them I wouldn't care if the whole damn department was queer.")

But when Harry finds out what they're up to, he's … concerned. "When police start becoming their own executioners, where's it gonna end?" he muses, expressing some fear that police might kill people for minor offenses. Apparently, it's not the principle that's flawed—only its potential misapplication. The evil cop's response: "Either you're for us or you're against us." (Congratulations to George W. Bush for being the only politician ever to lift the villain's line from a Dirty Harry movie. Perhaps Harry's oft-repeated mantra from this film—"A man's got to know his limitations"—wasn't as appealing.)

As early as 1972, Eastwood and Co. already knew that Harry's image needed cleaning up; the sequel offers no reprise of the original's not-quite-serious statement that "Harry hates everybody—limeys, micks, hebes, fat dagos, niggers, honkies, chinks." Thus, Magnum Force teams Harry with a black officer—temporarily, of course, since Harry's partners tend to meet their makers in the line of duty before the closing credits. In The Enforcer (1976), he's forced to pair with a woman—"Lady fuzz!" a bad guy calls her—played by a pre-Cagney & Lacey Tyne Daly with every shred of dignity she can muster while performing chase scenes in knee-length suede boots and carrying a huge purse. The Enforcer draws its boogeyman inspiration everywhere, from the Manson family to the SLA, inventing the "People's Revolutionary Strike Force" and, better still, a black-power group called "Uhuru" run by one "Big Ed Mustapha." There's little ideology on display, however, just a silly climax involving an exotic new weapon called a "taser gun" which seems to have been fashioned by Warner's props department out of a shoe box and a can of silver paint. By now, Harry is almost a teddy bear; he approvingly tells Daly, "Whoever draws you as a partner could do a hell of a lot worse," just before she takes a slug to save his life and, possibly, her future acting career.

Historically, Harry has come out to play only for Republican presidents; he went into mothballs during the Carter administration, and probably should have stayed there. The last two Dirty Harry movies feel like studio horse-trades that bought Eastwood freedom to pursue the more ambitious, nuanced path he was already clearing for himself as an actor and director. He stepped behind the camera for 1983's bloody, brutish Sudden Impact, in which Harry acquired a farting bulldog as a sidekick while pursuing, not unsympathetically, a woman who is picking off the men who raped her. But it's memorable chiefly for handing Ronald Reagan a re-election-campaign present with "Go ahead—make my day" (a line that actually originated in the exploitation movie Vice Squad a year earlier).

As for The Dead Pool (1988), in which Harry investigates a series of murders surrounding the production of a horror movie, the "before they were stars" casting is a happy accident; the supporting players include Liam Neeson, Patricia Clarkson, and "James" Carrey as a heroin-addicted pre-Goth rock star who lip-syncs "Welcome to the Jungle." But the script is little more than an especially gory episode of "Murder, She Wrote." The streak of political taglines also ended with this tin-eared enterprise—unless John McCain decides to deploy "You forgot your fortune cookie—it says you're shit outta luck" during a debate.

Eastwood recently scotched rumors that he'd be blowing the dust off Harry for one final escapade, saying the character would simply be too old to remain remotely credible as a police officer. (Now he worries about credibility?) More to the point, though, the man who incarnated him is, at this point, simply too smart to try to rehabilitate a cop who was a relic the day he was conceived. "It was fun for a while," says Eastwood in a typically laconic 2001 interview on the DVD. But, he adds, "[S]ometimes it's best to leave a good thing alone." Perhaps wisely, he doesn't elaborate on exactly what the good part was.

From Slate Magazine:

HBO's Roman Polanski Problem
A crucial scene of a celebrated documentary turns out to be wrong. By Kim Masters.

Tonight, HBO airs Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, a documentary that, according to the HBO press materials, raises "lasting questions about … the U.S. legal system." Without being exactly sympathetic to Polanski, the message of the film is clear: The courts did to him what he did to a 13-year-old girl in 1977.

Marina Zenovich's documentary was well-received at Sundance and at Cannes. But the film to be broadcast tonight differs in one key respect from the version that those audiences saw. The ending has been changed—apparently because it was wrong.

The final shot of the film that was seen at the festivals and reviewed by critics asserts that Polanski, who fled the United States in 1978, considered returning in 1998 but declined because the court seemed poised to screw him again. That shot was altered after the Los Angeles Superior Court took the step of contacting HBO's lawyers.

No one seems to take issue with the film's premise that the judge who originally presided over Polanski's case, Laurence Rittenband, was obsessed with the media and far less obsessed with honoring his word. Both prosecutor Roger Gunson and defense attorney Douglas Dalton say on the record that Rittenband reneged on agreements that could have resolved the case. Rittenband died in 1994, so he's certainly in no position to take issue with that portrayal.

But Zenovich concludes her film on an ironic note: In 1997, those two attorneys appeared before a sitting Los Angeles Superior Court judge—not named in the film—and reached an agreement that if Polanski returned to the United States, he would not be taken into custody. At the very end, the film states in white letters dramatically typed on a black background, the judge imposed one condition: The proceedings would have to be televised. The obvious implication: Here we go again, another Los Angeles judge poised to turn Polanski into media chum. Polanski, the film reports, turned the deal down.

But it doesn't seem to have happened that way.

There was a 1998 meeting with the judge, who was Larry Paul Fidler. He presided over the recent Phil Spector murder trial, and in that case, he allowed the cameras to roll. Spector's case was the first criminal trial televised in its entirety in a Los Angeles Superior Court since the O.J. Simpson case in 1995. That may be why Fidler was sensitive to the film's implication that he was another media-obsessed jurist.

But Los Angeles Superior Court spokesman Allan Parachini says Judge Fidler unequivocally denies that he imposed any such condition. "Judge Fidler made it very clear to counsel that any ultimate resolution of the Polanski matter could only occur in open court, on the record. There was no discussion about television coverage," Parachini says.

Parachini's office got in touch with HBO (as did we), and on Friday, HBO said that it was altering the documentary to reflect "new information" provided by the court. That must have been quite a scramble for something that airs tonight, especially since the allegation in question is kind of the film's punch line. HBO—which also will have to fix prints that are headed to theaters in July—did not say exactly how the revised ending will go. But presumably Fidler can relax.

Except that, inevitably, the film's premise is already well-established, since many outlets have already reported on it. A New York Times review from critic Manohla Dargis calls the film "sharply argued" before concluding: "Mr. Polanski survived the Holocaust and the murder of his wife, Sharon Tate, in 1969 by followers of Charles Manson. It was the American legal system that almost did him in."

In its coverage, the British Telegraph said "the legal shenanigans surrounding the case have continued in California," citing the supposed requirement that the trial be televised. And the paper argued that Polanski, meanwhile, has "lived a blameless, hard-working life in exile in France." Meanwhile, Polanki has expressed the view that he is innocent, that Americans are "prudish," and that he has "suffered enough."

***********************

Following up our report this week about the new Roman Polanski documentary, we take note of a weird statement released Wednesday under the signatures of the prosecutor and the defense attorney in the case.

Recall that both are featured in an HBO documentary, Roman Polanksi: Wanted and Desired, in which they bemoan the shabby treatment that alleged child rapist Polanski suffered at the hands of the Los Angeles Superior Court in 1977.

As we reported, the documentary originally ended with the assertion that an unnamed judge in 1998 was going to permit Polanski to return to the United States without risking jail time, but only if he appeared at a court proceeding that would be televised.

Last week, the Los Angeles Superior Court identified that judge as Larry Paul Fidler and vehemently denied that he had ever imposed such a condition. After a pause, HBO said Friday that it would change the end of the film to say that Polanski feared the proceeding would be televised, which is quite different from having a judge insist that it had to be.

The altered documentary aired Monday. Yesterday, the film's publicists released a statement signed by the prosecutor in the case, Roger Gunson, as well as defense attorney Douglas Dalton. It contends that at the 1998 hearing, Dalton pressed "for a resolution of the case that would allow for minimal news media." The statement says Dalton "recalled that Judge Fidler would require television coverage," and then adds: "Mr. Gunson recalls television coverage discussed at the meeting."

Talk about lawyer words. There's no further elaboration as to what, if anything, Gunson remembers about that discussion. Presumably, it could have gone like this:

    Gunson: "So, your honor, what about television coverage?"

    Fidler: "Hate it."

The statement, based on this rather threadbare set of assertions, concludes that both lawyers denounce the court's "false and reprehensible statement" disputing the notion that Fidler demanded television coverage.

No word from HBO on whether the film will be changed again.