SPECIAL REPORT: INDEPENDENTS
In the past few years the independent film scene has come alive, found its voice, flexed its muscles. Austin Lamont provides the compleat handbook for the would-be independent—how to finance your film, select a distributor, win a festival slot, grab the main chance—with sound advice from independents (like Sandra Schulberg and John Hanson) who learned it the hard way.
EUROPEAN SKIN GAMES
Someching odd happened to European movies in the Sixties. While the New Wave was reinventing film language, other directors began exploring the indistinct boundaries between politics and sexuality, passion and pain, normal and abnormal. Raymond Durgnat catalogues and criticizes skin-game movies from such directors as Losey, Resnais, Bercolucci and Taviani, beneath and beyond.
TERRY GILLIAM: BANDIT
He trashed the Middle Ages in Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Jabberwokcky. He messed up the Messiah in Life of Brian. Now, in Time Bandits, Terry Gilliam and his corps of sawed-off misanthropes have all of time to scamper through. It is another unique adventure from this American expatriate and, with Anne Thompson, he talks about his art, his life, and his serene silliness.
CLASSIC FRENCH FILM
Il etait une fois French movies were suffused with a spirit of glamorous fatalism. The Museum of Modern Art’s new exhibition highlights French films from 1930 to 1960. We do, too, with Marc Mancini’s essay on poet-screenwriter Jacques Prévert; Dan Yakir’s tribute to Georges Clouzot; and Stephen Harvey’s gallery of femmes fatales.
JOURNALS
Mitch Tuchman visits the grund-glik (set) of Quest for Fire. David Overbey finds a French film he likes. Tom Allen finds Chinatown in New York.
BROADWAY TO HOLLYWOOD
Some talented young playwrights are now doing movies. Why? Good money, no regrets. Lawrence O'Toole talks with Michael Weller, David Mamet, David Rabe, Wallace Shawn, and Ed Clinton. From London, Harlan Kennedy reports on Steve Tesich.
GDANSK MACABRE
Diane Kaiser Koszarski sees fireworks on the screen and in the streets of Poland’s headline-grabbing city. She found much excitement, new films, and a grand old lion, Andrzej Wajda.
NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL
Autumn in New York means the big bash at Lincoln Center (nineteenth year). Elliott Stein (seventh year) tackles the new films and praises the retrospectives. James McCourt (sixth year) casts an acute eye on the Festival's Movies for Cynics, a potpourri of old films and new.
LETTERS
Albert Maltz and Lester Cole, two of the Hollywood Ten, strike back at Richard Schickel’s recent article.
BOOKS
Jonathan Rosenbaum finds much to praise in his review of David Bordwell’s important new study of the films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer.
BULLETIN BOARD
Notices, contributors, photo credits.
