MARY ELLEN MARK

November 15, 2024

Fellini, Francis Ford Coppola, Gary Oldman, Gisele Schmidt, Mary Ellen Mark, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Silkwood

Photographs by MARY ELLEN MARK
Words by GISELE SCHMIDT & GARY OLDMAN

Hollywood Authentic’s photography correspondents Gary Oldman and Gisele Schmidt look at the work of an award-winning documentary photographer with a personal connection to their meeting.

Gary and I are ever grateful to Greg for allowing us to grace his pages with our little stories and it gives us great joy when he asks, ‘Who’s next?,’ for us to blurt out a name that has impacted us so very deeply over the years. So when the question came around this time, we immediately responded; Mary Ellen Mark. And then, when we sat down to write, we were ultimately confronted by the blank page with the cursor mocking us as we realised where do we even begin? It’s Mary Ellen Mark, ffs! 

Mark is recognized as one of the most respected and influential documentary photographers EVER. She has published 30 books and countless photographic essays in world-renowned magazines and journals and has received so many awards and commendations that it could fill this magazine twice over. How can we even touch the surface of the indelible mark she left on the history of photography? We can’t.

Fellini, Francis Ford Coppola, Gary Oldman, Gisele Schmidt, Mary Ellen Mark, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Silkwood
Meryl Streep and Mike Nichols during the shooting of “Silkwood.” Texas, 1983, Mary Ellen Mark

And why are we focusing on a photographer who documented the psychiatric patients of the Oregon State Hospital, the street prostitutes of Bombay, the teenage runaways of Seattle, or Mother Teresa’s Mission of Charity work in Calcutta? Because Mary Ellen was also the stills photographer on over 100 films from the 1960s to 2000s… Fellini Satyricon (Frederico Fellini, 1969), Mississippi Mermaid (François Truffaut, 1969), Tristana (Luis Buñuel, 1969), The Day of the Locust (John Schlesinger, 1975), One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Milos Forman, 1975), Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979), Tootsie (Sydney Pollack, 1982), Silkwood (Mike Nichols, 1983), Agnes of God (Norman Jewison, 1984), American Heart (Martin Bell, 1993), Sleepy Hollow (Tim Burton, 1999), Babel (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2006), Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus (Steven Shainberg, 2006), Australia (Baz Luhrmann, 2008), to name just a few. 

Mary Ellen Mark brought the same exceptional sensitivity and humanity to her work on movie sets that she did to the subjects documented in her photo essays. With her photojournalist’s eye, Mark’s photographs provide insight to life on set and the personalities of some of the foremost directors and distinguished actors of our time. With the release of Mark’s publication, Seen Behind the Scene (Phaidon Press, 2008), the Fahey/Klein Gallery held an exhibition commemorating this body of work. I had met Mary Ellen a handful of times through the gallery, but during this particular show, we spoke about narrative. Each frame should stand on its own; like a character, but when looking at a roll, it should tell a story, like a film. This conversation was years prior to meeting Gary and consequently well before he encouraged me to pick up my camera, but it is something I consider whenever I click its shutter. 

We find that this idea is personified in Mark’s portrait of, Fellini on the Set of Satyricon, Rome 1969. Mary Ellen Mark recounted how Fellini was one of her favourite directors and that something amazing would happen every day with him while on set, ‘Fellini was wonderful in front of the camera. The picture of him with the megaphone was taken as he supervised a new set being built. Even though this picture is shot from behind, it is still very much a portrait of Fellini. You don’t have to be too literal when photographing people. Photography is not a factual, but a descriptive language. You must translate the scene visually and emotionally. This picture captures very much who Fellini was. He seems to be dancing gracefully, exactly like one of the characters in his films. This was just one moment, one frame, but it speaks to something larger, which is why it has become iconic. That’s what you’re really trying to do with a portrait, capture who the person is; get a glimpse at the essence of who they really are. Even if someone is on set or in a costume or standing on her head, you have to see beyond that to who they are.” (MEM, Seen Behind the Scene, Phaidon, 2008). 

Fellini, Francis Ford Coppola, Gary Oldman, Gisele Schmidt, Mary Ellen Mark, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Silkwood
Federico Fellini with a bullhorn during the shooting of “Fellini Satyricon.” Rome, 1969, Mary Ellen Mark

And with her photograph of The Cast of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Oregon State Hospital, Salem, Oregon, 1975, Mary Ellen captured the frenetic dynamism of tension and claustrophobic environment of the film in a single snapshot. ‘The cast was gathered together after a scene. They were shouting at each other and at something behind me; I don’t remember what. Jack Nicholson leads the picture and makes it work, but there’s so much going on, with people looking in different directions and reacting to each other. There’s a palpable group energy, and yet the image still uses the space well and has depth. It’s not perfect; there’s a guy hidden in there, but that shows it was a natural situation.’ 

Another photograph that we feel encapsulates this notion is her photograph of ‘Mike Nichols with Meryl Streep, Silkwood, Texas, 1983’. Streep plays Karen Silkwood, the plutonium-processing plant employee who was killed in a suspect car crash as she drove to talk about safety violations with a New York Times reporter. The double portrait has Streep and Nichols seated at a booth in a diner. Streep is in profile looking past Nichols who sits facing us, the viewer. Streep, lost in thought, appears weighted down – possibly by the physical and mental strain of such a demanding role – almost exemplifies how Karen Silkwood must have been wrought by her decisions to come forward about radiation leaks and other hazardous practices within the nuclear plant workplace. And then we have Nichols, confidently glaring at us beyond the picture frame, representing the establishment and authority which challenges us to question and consider the story of Karen Silkwood and the beautifully crafted and nuanced performance by Streep.

Gary has a particular fondness for Francis Ford Coppola from his role as Dracula; however, what ignited a desire to work with him was Coppola’s masterpiece, Apocalypse Now. More extraordinary than the film itself, is the behind-the-scenes footage which was recorded by Francis’ wife, Eleanor and featured in her documentary Hearts of Darkness – A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse. The documentary chronicles how bad weather, health issues and increasing costs almost derailed the production of the film and could have possibly destroyed the career of Francis Ford Coppola. Mary Ellen Mark’s photograph, Francis Ford Coppola, Apocalypse Now, Pagsanjan, Philippines, 1976 depicts him sheltering from the unrelenting rain that contributed to the troubles of an already beleaguered shoot. The photograph exemplifies the conditions the director and actors faced but illuminates the exhaustion, frustration, and anguish as to whether the film and his career would be washed away by the rain.

Lastly, we wanted to discuss the portrait of Dana & Christopher Reeve, New York City, 1999 [See page 72]. There is not a more beautiful portrayal of the power of love. Dana had devoted her life to caring for Christopher after his near-fatal horse accident that left him paralyzed in 1995. Their bond was so strong that the doctors credited her for Christopher’s years of ‘borrowed time’ after the accident. As if she was his ‘medication’. Reeve may have been Superman, but Dana’s resolve, care, patience, love, support, and optimism was superhuman. 

Mark was obsessed with photography, the process, the cameras, but most importantly, the subject and how to convey its story. We relate to that on a fundamental level. I have spent years studying photography and only recently begun to express myself with it, and Gary has observed and interpreted the characteristics of individuals through countless roles and a passion for all things cinematic before or behind the lens whether film and photography. It’s why Mary Ellen’s photographs captivate us so wholeheartedly.

Coincidentally, Mary Ellen is as responsible as Richard Miller for our fateful introduction. As Gary puttered around his home in Los Feliz wondering who took the photograph of Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean that early Saturday afternoon, he looked up at the first photograph he had ever acquired, Mark’s, ‘Fellini on the Set of Satyricon’. As he had acquired the print from Fahey/Klein, it’s what led him to return to the gallery to seek out an answer. He just never expected to find the answer, acquire the photograph and eventually get so much more!

Fellini, Francis Ford Coppola, Gary Oldman, Gisele Schmidt, Mary Ellen Mark, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Silkwood
Francis Ford Coppola sheltering from the rain during the shooting of Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now.” Pagsanjan, Philippines, 1976, Mary Ellen Mark

Photographs by MARY ELLEN MARK
©️Mary Ellen Mark, courtesy of The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation/Howard Greenberg Gallery
Words by GISELE SCHMIDT & GARY OLDMAN

THE CONVERSATION

November 15, 2024

Francis Ford Coppola, Gene Hackman, Paramount Pictures, The Conversation

Words by KRYSTY WILSON-CAIRNS

The Academy Award-nominated screenwriter of 1917, Last Night in Soho and The Good Nurse, Krysty Wilson-Cairns, salutes a series of mishaps that honed Francis Ford Coppola’s unfinished espionage film into a perfect classic.

The foundational years that formed my sense of myself as a writer took place mostly in isolation. Initially in a bedroom, then in a series of bedrooms. Sometimes perhaps punctuated by sessions in the real world, cocooned from it in a pair of noise-cancelling headphones. This useful isolation from the world became, more than anything, a badge of validation. ‘Look! How she squints in the daylight. Gaze upon her ghostly pallor.’ I was serious. I was a writer.

Because at the end of the process I would inevitably emerge back into society with something to show. I would emerge with a screenplay. And without a screenplay, what would the directing students direct, what would the acting students act? As a screenwriting student, I knew the truth. No matter how much the auteur theory was hammered into the directing students and the art of improvisation fed to the actors, the screenplay was key. I understood my work to be something immutable. Sent out in the world complete. Like a painting or a photograph.

Francis Ford Coppola, Gene Hackman, Paramount Pictures, The Conversation
The Conversation poster, 1974. Alamy

At that time, my favoured texts were the ones that worked hard to get the win. The sharp, twisty thrillers that showed a masterful corralling of the audience’s attention from beginning to end. Those films that took you one way before pulling the rug out from under you. Most of all, I loved the paranoid thrillers that came out of the USA in the ’70s. Three Days of the Condor, The Parallax View, Klute… films that spun the audience a web of lies and confusion before pulling out the rug from under them and saying, ‘No, this is how it really is.’ Paranoid, anxious, tightly wound. (In no way a reflection of my mind at the time…)

Above them all stood The Conversation. A sparse, taut, tense thriller starring Gene Hackman alongside the late, great John Cazale (can any actor have given so much in such a tragically short career?). With cameos from Frederic Forrest, Robert Duvall, Harrison Ford, Teri Garr and Cindy Willams, The Conversation was at the apex of the talent that defined the New Hollywood of that decade.

Written and directed by the great Francis Ford Coppola, if any film was evidence of the primacy of the screenplay it was The Conversation – 112 minutes of terse, tight character action. Hackman (never better) plays Harry Caul, a reclusive, emotionally closed private investigator who is hired by a mysterious client to record a seemingly mundane conversation. Inevitably the job is not as simple as sold and Harry is left contemplating the morality of his work, along with his role in the world. What feels like very low stakes to begin with soon becomes a matter of life or death.

But that’s not why I loved it. I loved it for the exactitude of the writing. The entire plot hinging on a glorious pay-off at the end that relies on, of all things, intonation of key dialogue. ‘He’d kill us if he got the chance’ is the line you’ll remember from this film. It’s what everything leads towards and, despite its intonation being somewhat lost in the multiple languages in subtitles on the screen during its premiere at Cannes, it still won the Palme D’Or that year – and rightly so. Could anything be more writerly? More illustrative of the primacy of the script, of the screenwriter’s intentionality? That Coppola, the writer, pulls us through his world for almost two whole hours before pulling it all out from under us with something so simple as the emphasis of a pronoun! Except, of course, he didn’t… well not exactly.

Imagine my surprise when at a BFI screening and Q&A, Walter Murch, the film’s sound designer and editor, suggested an alternative. In Murch’s retelling, an entirely different version of Coppola’s film was originally planned: one that stuck closely to a bloated 157-page screenplay. As fate would have it, Coppola was called early to start shooting his next studio tentpole, The Godfather Part II, leaving the much smaller, more experimental The Conversation with 78 scenes yet to be shot. Seventy-eight!
And so, Coppola flew off, leaving the existing footage in the very capable, but rather green, hands of the young Walter Murch. Coppola just told Murch: ‘Do what you can.’

Francis Ford Coppola, Gene Hackman, Paramount Pictures, The Conversation
The Coversation, 1974. Paramount Pictures/Alamy

None of the scenes in which Harry tracks down the girl, gets all the answers and discovers the real story had been shot. So, the film’s narrative, as it existed in celluloid, in stacked 35mm reels in the editing room, currently had no denouement. Faced with a film missing over a fifth of its screenplay, with little chance of additional shooting days from the studio, and with his director on the other side of the country, Murch did the only thing he could. He tore up the screenplay and worked with what he had.

In one ingenious move, Murch completely redesigned the film’s story and structure. The film’s pivotal scene takes place in the aftermath of a drunken party. The woman Harry has slept with steals the vital recordings, forcing Harry into action and the film towards its conclusion. Only, the way the scene was written (and filmed) was originally much more throwaway – the woman’s role in the film was to validate Harry’s distrust, not further the plot (she originally only steals plans for a recording device for Harry’s competitor).

By thrusting a minor character into the thick of the plot, Murch consolidated the two storylines, and all it took was a single additional shot – a cutaway of Harry’s arms revealing the stolen tape reels. Using Hackman’s brother as a stand-in, Murch recreated the set in a corner of a stage being used by another film that was shooting at the time – Chinatown. They didn’t even have to pay for the camera hire. In that one move, an unwieldy, twisty, 240-minute thriller becomes a tight, sparse, sinewy sub-two-hour masterpiece.

You might ask, as a writer, what of the excised material would I be interested in seeing restored? The answer: none of it. From my current perspective, as one who has emerged from the cave, and who has been on set during the filming and in the edit of all the films I’ve written, I’ve been able to experience first-hand how much the story evolves and needs to evolve during the filmmaking process. I now know all too well that the primacy of the screenplay (much like the auteur theory) is a fallacy. An illusion, to justify those weeks spent in the dark. Typing. Alone. Who am I to assume that whatever motivation I conjured while sitting in my pyjamas will ring true after an actor has brought life to it in front of a camera years later.

If it’s not in the film, it doesn’t exist. The casting, the designing, the actual shooting takes that immutable thing – the screenplay – and whittles it, hones it and sometimes just negates it for something else truer, which is what we see on screen. And that line that I loved, ‘He’d kill us if he got the chance’ – that intonation that expertly shifts emphasis, turning a repeated, innocuous plea into a wilful declaration of violence? A happy accident. A mistake by the actor, marked on the day as a bad take, destined for the cutting-room floor, but that ultimately replaced the work of 78 unshot scenes of slow realisation with the time it takes to say eight words. I like to be efficient when I write, but this is a next level of genius, and a perfect example of the screenwriter’s mantra – show it, don’t tell it. Famous for going back and re-editing his own films, The Conversation was the one film that Coppola had always thought was ‘perfect, just the way it is’. Because of course, it is. It’s perfect. It may have come about through a series of mishaps and the incredible talent of Murch’s editing, but it couldn’t be any other way. 

Francis Ford Coppola, Gene Hackman, Paramount Pictures, The Conversation
The Conversation, 1974. American Zoetrope/Alamy 

Words by KRYSTY WILSON-CAIRNS
The Conversation (1974), Paramount Pictures, written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, starring Gene Hackman. Available on Apple TV

MEGALOPOLIS

May 17, 2024

megalopolis, adam driver, francis ford coppola, cannes, hollywood authentic

Words by JANE CROWTHER

Megalon is a futurist building material developed by an architectural planning czar, Cesar (Adam Driver), in New Rome – New York with toga-esque clothes and a bacchanalian social scene – where a fight for power and ideology kicks off as Cesar defies the laws of physics and stops time, drops his ambitious gold-digging mistress, Wow (Audrey Plaza), for Mayor Cicero’s ‘wild’ daughter (Nathalie Emmanuel) and clashes with a political father/son opponents Crassus (Jon Voight) and Clodio (Shia LaBeouf). Throw into the mix psychedelic visuals, lush costumes, musical numbers, a theatrical tone and philosophical musings on Marcus Aurelius tracts, string theory and whether art freezes time… and Francis Ford Coppola’s self-funded passion project is certainly a big cinematic swing. In the Cannes screening, an actor walked in front of the stage mid–film to interact directly with Driver onscreen in a moment of multi-media bravado that begs the question of if it will be repeated at showings globally. For anyone complaining of algorithm-defined and IP-reliant entertainment, this is a major creative flex by one of cinema’s defining auteurs – refusing to bend to market positioning or easy interpretation. 

By the same token, Megalopolis has the potential to bemuse and confound. The narrative is labyrinthine, the dialogue rich and the tone straddling a line of high camp (LaBeouf, Plaza and Voight having got that memo) and earnest pomp that prompted titters. Cesar’s trajectory could be a trippy study of Robert Moses’ controversial planning of New York or a nod to Caligula, a fever dream, a comment on our cyclical mistakes as a human society, a deeply personal reflection on the creator’s own relationship with art – or indeed, all of these. Coppola offers no easy answers. What he does offer is LaBeouf with resplendent mullet and crackling energy, Plaza in fabulous vamp mode and some CGI dream-like visuals that pop on an IMAX screen. This is certainly not a The Godfather retread.

Expensive folly or artistic shot across the bows of cookie cutter, factory movies? An experience to be loved or loathed (there’s certainly no middle ground)? Whatever it is, Megalopolis shows a storied director at the height of his powers operating without a safety net.

Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis starring Adam Driver, Nathalie Emmanel, Shia LaBeouf, Aubrey Plaza and Jon Voight is out in cinemas now

hollywood-authentic-mono-logo-white
Instagram Youtube
Subscribe

All photographs by Greg Williams

2023 © hollywoodauthentic.com