And An Ascendant Star
(followed an article on Steven Speilberg titled Close Encounters With the Wunderkind...)
By Tony Rayns & Scott Meek
Like many other kids who fall in love with what the Chinese call ‘electric shadows’, John Carpenter misspent his youth where all true believers should: in the dark of movie theatres. “When I was four years old, my mother took me to see a movie called IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE, directed by Jack Arnold. It was in 3D. I sat in the front row, and this meteor came out of the screen and blew up right in my face. I got up and ran down the aisle, completely and utterly terrified. Bur by the time I reached the lobby, I knew that this was the greatest thing that had ever happened to me.” Carpenter was especially fond of s-f and horror movies (maybe the British film industry would have its own John Carpenters if the censor here didn’t lock such movies away behind X certificates), but he went to see anything and everything, indiscriminately. He began making papier-mache monsters epics on the family cine-camera when he was eight, and edited a magazine called Fantastic Films Illustrated in his teens. Finally, to legitimize these unhealthy interests, his parents agreed to send him to film school at the University of Southern California.
Like everyone else who’s ever been to one, Carpenter has mixed feelings about film school, but he’s quick to admit its benefits. “They actually require you to make a lot of films, and so you get to work out a lot of foolish excesses. Once you’ve masturbated with the camera, you’ve got it out of your system. Eventually, you learn what works and what doesn’t. You also get a solid grasp of technique: how the camera works, how sound works, and so on. Plus, being so close to Hollywood, USC would have directors visit and show retrospectives of their work. While I was there, I saw John Ford, Howard Hawks, Orson Welles, Luis Bunuel, and all their major films would be shown over a period of weeks. That part of it was an incredible education.”
He began making DARK STAR on 16mm as a school project in collaboration with fellow student Dan O’Bannon. That was in 1970. Nearly four years later, thanks to the intervention of a commercial backer, who boosted the budget from six to sixty thousand dollars, DARK STAR had become the 35mm feature that is currently playing to packed houses in London. Sixty thousand dollars is still an absurdly small sum for a feature, particularly for one with a lot of ambitious special effects. Nonetheless, the result bears witness to the sheer craftsmanship that Carpenter and O’Bannon picked up at USC; it looks like a much more expensive film. It also reveals a talent that one would have expected the idea-hungry Hollywood studios to snap up. No such thing happened. Carpenter stayed in Hollywood when the movie was completed, and began writing screenplays sometimes working freelance, sometimes on commission. When the chance to make ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 came up two years later, it was with money from another independent investor, not from an established producer or company. And ASSAULT, which is every bit as funny and dazzling as DARK STAR, hasn’t advanced Carpenter’s position in Hollywood so much as a fraction.
Why is that? Don’t examples like Spielberg and Lucas prove that it’s easier now for young directors to prove themselves than ever before? The questions ring hollowly in a context where real power is still in the hands on a few monopoly interests and where major studio bosses are forever looking for new ways to say “no”. The point is proved succinctly by the history of DARK STAR. Completed in 1974, it was sufficiently unlike anything else around to prevent any major distributor from buying it; quite simply, no one was willing to take the risk. It was first seen here at the 1974 Edinburgh Film Festival, and subsequently brought to London for a one-off screening by The Other Cinema. Result: delirious enthusiasm from every audience that saw it; apathy from every distributor. It was only after the BBC bought the film for a showing last year that David Grant of Oppidan Films stepped in to acquire the theatrical rights. In other words, the print spent a full three years on the shelf.
Compare and contrast the career of George Lucas. He too made a s-f short at film school in California, and later expanded/remade it into his first feature THX 1138. Like DARK STAR, this was a commercial flop, but Lucas had made it at the invitation of Francis Ford Coppola, and he remained a Coppola protégé. Coppola acquired new power when his GODFATHER became the highest-grossing film in history in 1972, and he promptly gave Lucas another chance to direct. The first result was AMERICAN GRAFFITI in 1973; the second was STAR WARS.
The comparison demonstrates two things. One, luck helps—if you enjoy Coppola’s patronage, you have a head-start. Two, working within the monopoly system of production and distribution is the only way to achieve significant success—alone out on the fringes, you stand next to no chance of getting your film to the audience that would enjoy it.
Carpenter feels ambivalent about his prospects in Hollywood, although he’s concentrating his efforts on the challenge of establishing himself as a film-maker there. He isn’t too depressed at the abysmal quality of much that does get financed. “When we look back at the studio system of the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s, we see a number of great films and don’t remember how many hundreds of pieces of shit we put out alongside them. If we look back at the present studio system from then or 20 years hence, I think we’ll still pick out very good films, and forget all the garbage that’s around now.” He has one big reservation though. “The money has gone way up, and a lot fewer movies are getting made. And it’s because so much money is being gambled on individual films that so many hands get to finger each project. I wonder how many films that are personal to a director are going to be made in the years to come.”
At least he has full control of his own projects. “It’s the middle-range of directors, the ones who are working their way up through the studios, who are in the worst position because they have the least control of what they’re doing. The low-budget independents down here, and the really powerful directors up there are both better off.” Short of winning the “superstardom” of a director like Spielberg, Carpenter sees his present position, as an independent, as the best open to him.
But the limitations of independence, which Carpenter knows better than anyone after his experiences with DARK STAR and ASSAULT, are nonetheless driving him to work for a studio. “It’s very, very dangerous to make a film without any guarantee of distribution. You can’t protect the investment, and you can’t assure the investor that you can deliver the goods. And so I’m entering a period of several years in which I’ll be either writing or writing and directing films for studios—and fighting for control, trying to prove myself. It’s the most dangerous route of all: you can lose your identity, you can lose your spirit, you can become bitter. Especially in Los Angeles. But I think it’s the only way to achieve any real success.”
“If I become known as a good writer, the value of my scripts will increase and the moment will come when I can refuse to deliver a script unless the studio lets me direct it. Soon enough there will be a script that they want to do so badly that they’ll have to let me direct it. I’m well aware that I’ll be forcing myself into a situation that they don’t want, and I know that I’m going to suffer for it.”
When that crunch comes, it looks as if it might be Warner Brothers who are forced back into that corner. Carpenter is this year producing two films for the studio, both from his own scripts. Both are thrillers: PREY and HIGH RISE. He is also currently working on the development of a beach-party comedy for Warners, under the title ZUMA BEACH. Meanwhile, Columbia are at work on an old Carpenter project called EYES, which he originally wrote for Barbra Streisand; production is now going ahead with Faye Dunaway and Tommy Lee Jones. And John Wayne’s company Batjac is sitting on a script it bought from Carpenter called BLOOD RIVER. That’s the way it goes in Hollywood: for every script that actually becomes a film, there are many others that are optioned or bought but then shelved.
ASSULT ON PRECINCT 13 is a present-day urban western, which maintains a discreet distance from the Howard Hawks and John Ford movies that inspired it. As such, it works rather like a Sergio Leone film (say, ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST), playing on its audience’s familiarity with the genre’s traditions without becoming a spot-the-reference game for film buffs. It begins by introducing a number of distinct characters: a black cop on his first tour of solo duty, a divorced man en route to his prospective second wife’s house with his young daughter, a group of three condemned prisoners being transferred from one jail to another, and various members of a highly sinister, multi-racial gang called Street Thunder. Then an arbitrary murder sparks off a breath-taking escalation in pace and tension, as all threads converge in a massed gang assault on a derelict police station.
Going any further into the plot would spoil the enjoyment to be had from discovering it for yourself, but it’s not giving anything away to say that the movie has two prime qualities, both of them rare in contemporary American cinema. One is that it’s an audience film, in that it keeps a firm hold on its viewers’ emotional reactions through-out; it’s reminiscent of vintage Hitchcock in its expert juggling of points-of-view and identification figures. The other is that it sustains a positively amazing balance between humor and suspense; on one level, it’s played absolutely straight (and American audiences apparently usually take it as such), while on another, everything from the deadpan dialogue delivery to the mounting hopelessness of the situation in the besieged building is riotously funny. The icing on the cake is the outrageously compulsive synthesizer score, composed and performed by Carpenter himself.
The film naturally proposes a number of interesting questions, but none more intriguing than the idea of the Street Thunder gang with its blood oaths, its impossible racial mixture and its apparently random violence. Does the gang represent Carpenter’s idea of the urban guerrilla of the future? “I specifically wanted to avoid giving the film any political or social overtones in that respect: that just wasn’t the kind of film I wanted to make. And so I didn’t want to make it an all-black gang, or an all-Chicano gang. Any knowledgeable American audience knows that in reality the gangs don’t mix, and so I hoped that the inter-racial mixture in the film would give the gang a strange, almost supernatural quality. I prepared for the film by doing some research on the gangs in Los Angeles, and I found that the senseless violence that actually exists is much worse than anything I could imagine. Some horrible things have happened. One incident suggested the killing of the little girl in the movie: some gang-members were standing around a bus-stop when a bus pulled up and one of them took out a 357 Magnum and said aloud that he was going to shoot the fourth person who got off the bus. Three people got off, then the fourth was a little girl. He shot her, and walked away. Now, I don’t believe that this has anything to do with politics, or with socio-economic problems—this is sheer psychotic violence.”
What were the problems of working on a very low budget again? “It may or may not be evident, but we got stung in a couple of places with the actors. Two factors governed the casting: the cast had to look right for the movie, but they also had to work for very little money, which meant that generally they came from the lowest rung of Hollywood actors. The guy who plays Napoleon Wilson was a friend of mine, and so he was in from the beginning. But there was one actor who could barely get his lines out. Every time he finished a speech, he would let out an audible sigh of relief. He has a minimal command of English, and can barely remember his lines, but he tries to play them like Othello. His performance and one other only just squeak by. I cut the film myself, and I tried to edit out all the bad stuff.”
The short-shooting schedule apparently didn’t cause Carpenter any problems, since, like Hitchcock, he storyboards (sketches out in advance, shot by shot) his key sequences. “Directing, to me, has very much to do with a director’s point-of-view. If you’re going to involve an audience in a complicated visual sequence, which may not depend at all on dialogue or exposition, you have to be very careful to plan in your mind and on paper what you want them to see and when. This doesn’t rule out subsequent changes in the editing room, but I did draw out all the action sequences beforehand, as well as other scenes in which I was concerned with building suspense or tempo.”
His use of music is more intuitive. “The reason that I scored both films myself is that I was the cheapest and best person I could get for the money. I would have loved to hire someone else. I used the synthesizer because I can’t write or arrange music, but I can hear, and so I would over-dub myself time and again until it was right. My father teaches music, and I rebelled against his insistence that I learn piano and violin when I was a kid. But I did pick up an ear for music: I sometimes play in a rock band and write my own songs.”
One reason that a film like ASSAULT is so successful is that it’s made in a way that few films are these days, with careful attention to characterization and plot structure. There are no sequences in which a song starts up on the sound track and the visuals simply stop bothering to do anything until it’s over. Is Carpenter conscious that his approach is almost old-fashioned in this respect? Sure he is. “What has influenced Hollywood is not only the European films that began to be shown in the ‘50s, but also TV commercials. Their influence has completely changed the pace and timing of films. Audiences have grown so used to taking in information rapidly from TV that they now get bored with slow films. A lot of successful directors’ shorthand their films: they don’t take time, they don’t explore, they never go off on sidetracks. The films definitely suffer for it. I deliberately didn’t make ASSAULT like that. It’s basically a fairly straightforward story, but I was careful not to just bang it through for the audience, just to keep them going, like a drug or something.
The British audiences who have so far seen ASSAULT have received it rapturously. But in America, where the distributor chose to aim the film at a lowest-common-denominator audience, it hasn’t done particularly well. Carpenter, about to begin his own assault on the studio system, isn’t too discouraged. “I wasn’t surprised. I didn’t expect ASSAULT to be a big hit, because in intent, style and content it’s completely unlike any other films being made in America.” Check out for yourself what America doesn’t know it’s missing.
