Frailty, Thy Name Is Director

This column inaugurates a regular feature of Sunday Calendar in which Times critics offer their perspectives on topical matters in their respective disciplines.

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Sometimes the greatest mysteries have the simplest solutions. In Edgar Allan Poe’s classic detective story “The Purloined Letter,” an incriminating note is discovered by the canny C. Auguste Dupin not in some obscure hiding place but in a self-evident location. Hidden, in effect, in plain sight.

To move from 19th century Paris to today’s movie world, one of the most perplexing mysteries is trying to discover why some celebrated directors have been making such weak and feeble films. And, as in the Poe story, the answer turns out to be both obvious and overlooked.

Examples of the high-powered-director, forgettable-film syndrome are currently thick on the land. In case you’ve blocked some of these out of your mind for self-protection, consider the following:

* Brian De Palma, the director of “Dressed to Kill” and “Casualties of War,” turns out “Mission to Mars.” It’s a piece of work as cold, lifeless and distant as the Red Planet itself, and its clunky and unconvincing dialogue is so bad you wish you could shut it off.

* John Schlesinger, almost a legend for 1960s films like “Billy Liar,” “Darling” and “Midnight Cowboy,” turns up with “The Next Best Thing,” a trite and tone-deaf examination of what happens when gay man Rupert Everett and his straight best friend Madonna end up having a child together. (Hint: It’s not pretty.)

* Mike Nichols, with “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” “The Graduate” and “Working Girl” behind him, now turns to “What Planet Are You From?,” a strenuously unfunny look at what happens when an alien lands on Earth intent on having sex with any of our women who will have him.

* Roman Polanski, the director of “Chinatown,” goes back to the supernatural territory he covered brilliantly in “Rosemary’s Baby” and can do no better than the phlegmatic “The Ninth Gate,” a kind of anti-thriller about books and the devil that is noticeably lacking in energy and drive.

These films were not only neglected by fussy critics, they were rejected by audiences as well. (Yes, the Disney organization fooled enough people to get a great opening for “Mars,” but any film that drops in the neighborhood of 50% in its second week and nearly as much in its third can’t be counted as a popular success).

Few are the prominent directors who have escaped this syndrome in recent years, witness Francis Ford Coppola’s “Jack” and Barry Sonnenfeld’s “Wild Wild West.” The question all these efforts raise breaks down into two parts: How do filmmakers who have had success get to the place where they turn out these kind of El Foldos, and, more mysteriously, what are they seeing that makes them susceptible to taking that path and what are they getting out of doing this that is not immediately obvious?

The answer, as any actor will tell you, is in the work.

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Because the movie business is blessed with a self-renewing wave of fiery young directors, willing to die or max out their credit cards (whichever comes first, which is usually the credit card) to put their visions on screen, it’s sometimes less apparent that other directors, as they age, may still love making films while harboring less and less interest in putting their lives on the line for a specific story they simply have to tell.

Part of this change is hardly the filmmakers’ fault. As the studios and even the independents become more and more a part of corporate America, unless you are a major star or attached to one it can get discouragingly difficult to get personal stories through a system that is increasingly indifferent to anything that does not guarantee a profit.

Also entering the picture is the fact that Hollywood is a factory town, which at the most basic level means that a system is in place that simply has to turn out product, good or bad, to fill quotas, keep employees busy and ensure that the pipelines are operational.

In England, director Neil Jordan said a few years back, the lack of a factory system meant that no film got made unless somebody was passionate about it. Here, because a simple passion for dollars is enough to get a proposal green-lit, there is a constant need for experienced foremen to oversee production. So veteran directors are often approached to take charge of films they care very little about, and get paid very well in the process.

Of course, money is a consideration in why directors say yes. A large paycheck has allowed many people to fool themselves into thinking that a project has more potential for quality than it does. Still, it would be a mistake to see greed as the main motivating factor. Hidden in plain sight--and described by Nichols himself in an in-depth New Yorker profile written by John Lahr just before the release of “What Planet Are You From?”--is the real rationale.

Nichols’ friends, Lahr relates, wish he would say no to questionable material more often. “He knows I don’t like a lot of the stuff he does,” Buck Henry tells the writer. “I think it’s beneath him.” But Nichols, Lahr continues, is unmoved.

“All movies are pure process,” the director is quoted as saying. “A commercial movie isn’t less process than an art movie. You can’t make your decisions about a film on the basis of ‘Is it important enough? Is it serious enough?’ ”

The truth, at last. For it’s become increasingly evident that while filmmakers may have lost their fervor for seeing a particular story up on the screen, they have not lost their passion for the satisfactions of the filmmaking process. The work itself, the day-to-day challenges of directing, are more than enough to fulfill the people in charge, so much so that whether the film completely absorbs them in terms of subject or story becomes very much of a secondary consideration.

While this may sound as unlikely as authors giving up on meaning to concentrate on the intricacies of the printing press, it’s actually quite different and very plausible. As anyone who’s been on a set knows, the making of film is a highly complex endeavor, a creation of alternate worlds, that completely enthralls those who do it.

Imagine being, as the director is, in complete charge of hundreds if not thousands of people, to have minions endlessly lining up to (a) ask for your make-or-break opinion and (b) fulfill every fancy you have for what you want to see on the set, no matter how arcane or difficult to procure. The resulting sense of power and control is something that Col. Kurtz in Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” would find familiar and satisfying.

The physical challenges that have to be surmounted, as the press notes for “Mission to Mars” (to give just one example) explain in some detail, can be quite complex and involving. An elaborate 3 1/2-story spinning wheel was constructed for that film to facilitate a dazzling shot that simulates a spaceship’s continual turning while astronauts go about their business. And 55 acres of the Fraser Sand Dunes outside Vancouver, Canada, were transformed into the surface of Mars with the use of thousands of square yards of “sprayable concrete” and a further spray-painted covering of “100 gallons of environmentally friendly Mars Red latex paint” applied every minute.

With such a variety of mind-bending enterprises to take up your time, who cares if no one has anything even the slightest bit involving to say? Under these circumstances, it’s easy to understand how directors conveniently forget that the end result of all their fascinating struggles is not, by any rational standard, worth the effort they put into it. Even as gifted a filmmaker as Martin Scorsese, who still does get passionate about his material, became so distracted by the technical side of “Bringing Out the Dead” that he lost sight of, or didn’t care, how dismally uninteresting the film’s protagonists were.

What has been lost in this process is the way Golden Age directors like Howard Hawks, William Wyler, George Cukor and others worked hard to graft their personal concerns into the standard studio material they were forced to take on. They did it because they had no choice.

Today, with the auteur theory encouraging directors to feel that everything they do is by definition personal, they can end up trying less hard for significance because they don’t think they have to. That lack of effort leaves everyone poorer, the audience most of all. *