At the Getty Center: Carleton Watkins and How the West Was Shot

Tonight was the fourth and final night of a Western film festival at the Getty Center of all places. The Getty is hands down one of my favorite museums ever. I know it well, but apparently not well enough. They're the last place I would've expected to see Westerns. It actually wasn't a stand-alone event, but a compliment to a photography exhibit called Dialogue Among Giants, which features the work of Carleton Watkins. I have to admit I'd never heard of Carleton before this exhibit, but you know, that's one of the reasons why I love the Getty, and museums in general. They're the perfect venue to discover the work of true artists who excelled at their craft and broke new ground. Indeed, Carleton is one of the giants referred to in the exhibition title, the others being his contemporaries, such as Charles L. Weed, Galen Clark, and Eadweard Muybridge.

Part of what makes this exhibition so interesting is that it shows three things happening at the same time. First, you've got the development and evolution of Carleton's talent. The earliest photos are from when he was barely legal drinking age. At the same time, we're seeing the evolution of photography, a nascent technology when Carleton first placed his eye to the view finder. And finally, these photos show us the development of the California landscape. In some cases this development is kind of sobering. Scenes of pristine nature become scenes of commercial or residential development with a scenic backdrop.

Carleton was born in the upstate New York town of Oneonta in November 1829. Mom and Dad ran a hotel and livery stable. As a youngster Carleton worked part time making deliveries for the family business. As soon as he was done with high school, he was done with Oneonta. He wanted to travel. It isn't really known if he was already into photography at this point, but his parents supported his ambitions, whatever they were. It's due to their bank account that he was able to get to South America in the first place. In San Jose, Chile he hooked up with a photographer named Robert H. Vance. This guy was basically Carleton's first mentor. He introduced our man to the picture technology of the day, called the daguerreotype.

Do you know what a daguerreotype is? I'd heard of it myself but never really got it. I mean I knew it was a way photographs used to be taken, but that's it. The exhibition explained that it was invented circa 1840. It basically involves a copper plate coated in silver that's made sensitive to light with iodine. You expose this plate to light, pointing the camera at whatever you want to photograph. Then you expose the plate to mercury vapor. Yes, mercury vapor. And that would develop the image. Sound weird? Hey man, this was cutting edge back in the day. And by the time Carleton came under the tutelage of Robert, it was still fairly new.

When he first arrived in California at the age of twenty, Carleton didn't stay. No one really knows why, although it's probably because he couldn't find steady work. Then as now, it was tough being an artist. Carleton went back to New York because he didn't have any money, but he could always count on Mom and Dad. Between 1850 and 1852, Carleton made several trips to California via Chile. When he finally settled in California in '52, it was only because he landed a steady gig with a childhood pal of his from New York. This friend was none other than Collis P. Huntington, co-founder of the Central Pacific Railroad. The railroad happened about ten years later. For now Collis had a trading business in Northern Cal. No stranger to transporting stuff, Carleton had no trouble with the work. Unfortunately, though, the business burned down by the time the year was out.

Carleton decided to give a more honest go to making money with his budding photography talents. So he freelanced. Thanks to his work with Collis, he was already familiar with the mother lode area, that part of the Sierra Nevada that had the largest concentration of gold mines. Don't forget that the whole gold rush thing started just a few years earlier. It was in January of 1848 at the sawmill of one John Sutter when an employee of John's named James Marshall stumbled upon some gold flakes that forever altered California's course through history. Sorry to sound dramatic, but it's hard to overstate the significance of what happened at Sutter's Mill.

So anyway, gold mines galore dotted the landscape of Northern California. Our man Carleton knew them like the back of his hand thanks to his work making deliveries for Collis. And this is the area where he got started as a freelancer. His mentor from Chile, Robert Vance, had set up a studio in the area and became one of Carleton's most frequent buyers. Carleton found other buyers too in and around San Francisco, Sacramento, and Marysville.

It was after about three years of freelancing that Carleton decided to switch from daguerreotypes to collodion-on-glass negatives with a mammoth-plate camera. No, it wasn't because daguerreotype is hard to spell. That remained a popular way to take photos for many more years. It's just that, with the glass plate negatives, you could reproduce them as much as you wanted, whereas it was impossible to make copies of daguerreotypes. They just weren't practical if your aim was to find as many buyers as possible. Of course, there is the small problem that you now have to carry around a friggin' mammoth-plate camera, and they're called mammoth for a reason. That's one of the cool things about the exhibition. Smack in the middle of the gallery they actually have a real mammoth-plate camera set up. I'm trying to think of what I can compare its size to. Maybe a tree house? Nah, it's not that big. Maybe a cross between a small tree house and a mansion-sized bird house. Whatever, it's huge. And those glass plates are huge too. Plus, ya know, they're glass, which made the issue of transporting them on a wagon over dirt roads kind of complicated.

None of this slowed down Carleton, of course. In the late 1850s, after a good five or six years toughing it out as a freelancer, he received his first-ever commission. Yeah! And guess who it was? None other than John C. Frémont. That name mean anything to you? Besides being a famous California explorer, he was also the first-ever Republican Presidential nominee. He ran in 1856 against eventual victor James Buchanan. It wasn't until 1860 that we got our first Republican candidate who won: Some guy named Abe Lincoln. But anyway, let's back up. Mr. Frémont hired Carleton to use that mammoth-plate bad boy to take photos of the Las Mariposas mining estate, which he controlled. Besides all that, Carleton also took some photos of the Frémont family that were part of the exhibition. I wish I could show them to you here. You had this one gorgeous photo of the Frémont kids chilling out in a grassy field. Amazing stuff, and so intimate, ya know? It's a good century and a half ago and yet you feel like you might know these people.

As I said up top, the reason the Getty called the exhibition Dialogue Among Giants is that Carleton was photographing a lot of the same areas as his contemporaries, who themselves were pioneers in photography. They were giants of their field and, as the brochure nicely puts it, they "engaged in a visual dialogue" with each other. What areas do I speak of? Well, Carleton sure loved Yosemite. A healthy share of this exhibition's photos are of sites in Yosemite Valley as well as stuff along the Mariposa Trail that leads to and from the valley. But he ventured elsewhere too, such as Oregon's Columbia River. What's interesting is that he'd return to the same sites after many years. I'm not exactly sure why, but it's kind of fascinating and humbling to see how little nature changes over a period of, say, a decade or so. If anything's different, it's the slightly different position of the sun. Generally, though, Carleton's signatures were to place his camera diagonal to his subject and with the sun low to the horizon because that was when light bounced off surfaces in neat ways. You take that Oregon example I cited above. This exhibition featured one photo of this settlement called Celilo on the Columbia River in Oregon from 1867. It's got this rock monolith on the right, a railroad track dead ahead, and the river on the left. Then he goes back to that same site in 1883 for another photo op. This time, though, he sets up the camera further to the left. The monolith still clearly dominates the right side of the frame, only not quite as much. And the railroad's much further to the right. Nah, what dominates the second photo is the river itself, with the sun's rays reflecting off it.

Of course, before all of that nature stuff, Carleton had to get his adolescence out of his system. Remember how I said his folks ran a hotel and livery stable? And how his first steady work in Californ-I-A was delivering stuff to mines? Well, sure enough, a lot of those early daguerreotypes are of stuff like mines and hotels. The whole first chunk of this exhibition features almost exclusively stuff like that, as well as shots of town streets, advertising signage, groups of miners, and so on.

Carleton worked steadily into the 1890s, when he was in his sixties, before he finally edged his way toward retirement. He was successful, but like Mozart, he sucked with money. When he was in his thirties, his Yosemite photos earned him a ton of coin. He had fans as far away as Europe. But by his mid forties he'd spent it all. His success couldn't keep up with the money slipping through his fingers. The real heartbreaker is that he lost all of his negatives in the 1906 San Francisco quake. One of the photos they had here, taken by I'm not sure who, showed a seventysomething Carleton being helped out of his studio during the quake by two assistants while he was holding a white mask over his face to protect against the dust.

Still, a lot of his work has obviously survived, to the tune of almost thirteen hundred mammoth-plate pictures, almost five thousand stereographic photos, and a good bit of other works. Oh, and speaking of those stereographic photos, another cool thing about this exhibition is that scattered around the gallery they have these little stereographs set up where you can sit and take a look-see like someone would've done in the beforetimes. It's really neat because the photos look three dimensional. Essentially you're looking at two photos of the same thing.

Ultimately, and again like Mozart, Carleton left the planet a pauper. Like Mozart, he'd advanced his chosen field by light years. He was a true groundbreaker in the field of photography, having laid the fertilizer for the likes of Ansel Adams. But when he passed away at Napa State Hospital at the age of eighty-six, he didn't have a penny to his name.

As you can no doubt tell, this is easily one of the best photography exhibits I've ever seen, on par with the August Sandler exhibit I saw at the Getty last June and about which I wrote on this very blog. Mind you, I don't exactly go to photography exhibits every week, or even every month. But when I see one worth sharing, I can't help blogging about it. Dialogue Among Giants is simply too special not to write about.

But wait! It's even more special than that. As I said at the top, the Getty put on a Western film festival as a companion piece to the exhibition. Entitled How the West Was Shot: Six Westerns, Six Decades, it was, well, a festival of six Westerns, each from a different decade. They started with a silent from the 1920s and concluded with the 1970s. For the most part they went in order, although they did show the 1960s entry before the 1950s one for a reason that will become clear down yonder. As for when they were shown, the first one was last Friday, followed by the second and third on Saturday, the fourth one last night, and the final two tonight.

The Iron Horse (1924)

None other than John Ford directed this epic silent bad boy when he was still in his twenties. And he was already a grizzled vet with something like fifty films to his name. Seriously! If you see The Iron Horse and think it overdoses on archetypes, that's because when viewed almost a century after it was made, it sure does. What you have to understand, though, is that saying so would be a compliment. At the time, the characters were anything but archetypes, and it speaks volumes about the success of John's narrative that it's been emulated innumerable times since. You've got this guy named Davey Brandon. When he was a kid, he saw his dad get murdered by this three-fingered white guy pretending to be a Native American, chap called Deroux. Then years later, as a twentysomething youngster working for Union Pacific, he helps finish the work his dad started: The construction of the first transcontinental railroad. Of course there's a love interest. We meet Miriam at the beginning, when she's a little girl and Davey's a little boy and they're neighbors. As adults, there's obviously a rival for her affection. So Davey's got to deal with that and the fact that Deroux's still around trying to make things complicated. But Davey's got his sidekicks, one of them a drunk and hot-tempered Irishman. I'm sure you can guess how it all ends. What was fascinating about this was the sheer scale of it. That John Ford, man, he didn't spare any expense. What's more, back then cameras were humongous and clunky. I can't imagine all the crew he needed to haul the stuff around, as quite a bit of it was filmed on location in Arizona and Nevada.

The Big Trail (1930)

Raoul Walsh directed this epic about the Oregon Trail. And he also intended to play the main character, Breck Coleman. When he lost an eye shooting Old Arizona, that plan was out, and he wanted to cast Gary Cooper in his place. By this time, Gary came with a high price tag, and what with the Depression and all, Fox didn't feel like paying that much. Well guess what? None other than John Ford persuaded Raoul to cast this unknown struggling actor to play Breck: Some dude named...(wait for it)...John Wayne! The Duke wasn't even twenty-five when he made this sucker. I'd never seen this before, so it was weird seeing him so thin, not to speak of baby faced. You can't help but recognize the voice, though. So anyway, he plays this expert tracker and scout named Breck, and he's persuaded to help all these folks, hundreds of them, travel from the Mississippi to Oregon. Again, like The Iron Horse, the sheer scale of this production makes your jaw drop. It was filmed in several places, among them Yuma, Arizona, Sacramento, Sequoia National Park, and Montana. One interesting piece of trivia has to do with the scene where they're lowering all of the wagons, oxen, and people down the Spread Creek Mills. At one point one of the wagons slips through the ropes and plummets hundreds of feet to the cliff base. Well, Raoul didn't exactly plan that. Years later he admitted that it was an accident and that he'd been counting his blessings ever since that no one got hurt. Also like The Iron Horse, you've got a great villain here: Red Flack. Great bad guy name, huh? He's played by Tyrone Power Sr., who passed away a year after this came out. Red's actually part of the group heading out west, so the tension's sort of constant. Breck knows Red's game but is calmly waiting for the latter to make the first move. Great stuff. In every way this film set a standard for epics of any genre, not just Westerns. I like the way the program describes this flick: "With 20,000 extras, the filming of the epic was perhaps more strenuous than the historic event itself."

Red River (1948)

More John Wayne! This time he's almost twenty years older, but is he wiser? Well... Here he plays this guy named Dunson (awesome main character name). At first he seems sympathetic. It starts with him on this wagon train with the woman he's been with a while and who wants to marry him and settle down. Oops. Here come some Native Americans to mess things up. They kill everyone. Dunson and his pal Groot (Walter Brennan) are the only two who escape. They make it into Texas and start their own ranch there. Then this little kid named Matt shows up. He's lost and has nowhere to go. He'd been part of that same wagon train and is still sort of in shock from all the pillaging and killing. Dunson adopts him on the spot. Okay now fast forward a bunch of years. The Civil War's just ended. Matt, now played by Montgomery Clift, comes home. He's barely off his horse when his dad announces he's broke thanks to the above-mentioned war and that he has no choice but to take all his cattle to Missouri. The cattle drive is anything but a walk in the park. Soon they're all miserable and wonder if it's worth it. Except Dunson, that is. He becomes a real dictator until Matt leads a mutiny and says he's taking the cattle somewhere closer. Dunson swears he'll find Matt someday and kill him. I won't tell you how it ends, but I will say it got a lot of flak for the anticlimactic climax. Personally I had nothing against it at all. Like the first two films, what you've got here is a movie of such scale you can't help but be impressed. Director Howard Hawks actually got nine thousand head of cattle for the drive and a good five hundred extras. And that stampede was a real stampede. Awesome stuff. What's more impressive is that Howard, while he'd dabbled in most genres at this point, had never done a Western. He filmed this near Elgin, Arizona as well as Mexico.

Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)

They did this one before the 1950s selection because it's close to three hours and would've been too much to show as part of today's double bill. No matter. Once Upon a Time in the West is hands down one of my favorite films ever. After last night, I've now seen it four times, and all four times on the big screen. Honestly I can't imagine watching it on TV. It was directed by Sergio Leone, an Italian guy most noted for his spaghetti Westerns and for giving Clint Eastwood something to do when the poor guy couldn't get arrested in Hollywood. Most of this was filmed in Italy, as well as Spain. But he did come to the States for two scenes as an homage to John Ford. When we first meet Claudia Cardinale's character Jill McBain in the beginning, she's getting off the train and needs a ride to her husband's place. Well, Sergio filmed that carriage ride sequence in Monument Valley, Utah. You can't miss it. The vistas defy words. Sergio also used Monument Valley as a backdrop for that key flashback that comes together piecemeal over the course of the film to explain why Harmonica (Charles Bronson) is hell bent on finding Frank (Henry Fonda). Speaking of Mr. Fonda, his casting here may be one of the best instances of casting against type I've ever seen. Seriously, if you're familiar with his work, he's the last guy you'd think of for such a character. Yet he, like the film itself, is perfect. The story is simple really, belying it's two hours and forty-five minutes. You've got Charles Bronson as this guy with a harmonica trying to find Frank. That's it. He wants to find Frank and have a draw. But everything is only set in motion when Claudia Cardinale arrives from New Orleans. Indeed, everything in this film happens only because she is there. Check it out. Let me move on before I gush. I can't gush enough about this masterpiece.

Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)

Now here's a film with a simple plot and the running time to prove it. At a mere eighty minutes, Bad Day at Black Rock was adapted from a short story called "Bad Day at Hondo." What sets this apart from the other films in this series is that it takes place around the time it was made. Well, ten years earlier to be precise. It's set right after World War II. You've got this guy from L.A. named Macgreedy (Spencer Tracey). He was an officer in the war. The film starts with him showing up by train at this teeny tiny little town called Black Rock, "played" by the town of Lone Pine in Death Valley National Park. Spencer Tracey's awesome. I've seen 'im in a lot of things, but this might be one of the best characters he ever played. Check it out. To add to the mystery of why he's in Black Rock looking for a Japanese farmer called Kamako, he keeps one of his hands in his pocket during the entire film. Yes, the entire film. So he's essentially one-armed. Is that other arm a prosthetic? What's wrong with it? We never know. And why is everyone in Black Rock so mean to him? Some even want to see him dead. Among the nasties are Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, and Robert Ryan. Not a bad cast, eh? Not everyone hates him, though, and that would include the town doctor, Doc Velie, played by our pal Walter Brennan (Groot from Red River). Obviously I can't tell you why Macgreedy's looking for Kamako, nor why the townsfolk are determined he do no such thing. I can say that you can look forward to seeing Spence beat up Ernest Borgnine with one hand. That's pretty cool. According to the program, through this film director John Sturges became the first filmmaker to address the shame of our government interning Japanese Americans. And apparently this film was also supposed to be an allegorical wagging of the finger at Senator Joseph McCarthy for his Hollywood blacklist.

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973)

When I was in high school, I was a Billy the Kid nut. I wanted to know everything about him. For my sixteenth birthday, my father and I flew out to Lincoln County, New Mexico, where the Kid did his stuff. We visited the town of Lincoln and saw the places where he'd made his mark (literally in the case of the jail and that bullet hole in the wall from when he killed Deputy J.W. Bell). I guess I was cynical going into this film because I felt I'd gotten the Kid out of my system. Shame on me for doubting Sam Peckinpah. Sure, he was a raging drunk while he filmed this, but that didn't stop his unique vision. Filming the whole thing in Durango, Mexico, Sam was smart in that instead of trying to tell the Kid's entire life story, he focused only on the last year or so, starting around the time Garrett was made sheriff of Lincoln County by the Santa Fe Ring. Here you've got a story where the players could each be called a hero and a villain. At one time Billy Bonney (Kris Kristofferson) was an honest ranch hand, and Pat Garrett (James Coburn) was the shady guy. Then Billy fights in the Lincoln County War, kicks some ass, and is made an outlaw. And Pat's the guy they make legit to deal with it all. There's this one hilarious scene where Pat deputizes a guy on the spot, some dude called Alamosa Bill (Jack Elam, who had a cameo at the start of Once Upon a Time in the West). Even though we don't get to know Alamosa Bill too well, you can tell he's hardly deputy material, which Pat doesn't seem to care too much about since he's drinking during that scene. See what I mean? It's a moral quagmire. Kris Kristofferson made for a terrific Kid, better than Emilio Estevez or Val Kilmer. The only thing I didn't agree with here was casting Bob Dylan as this fictional character named Alias. I didn't see the point of that at all. His music for the film was great, though. Was his casting a symptom of Sam's drunkenness? Anyway, I liked this far better than I thought I would. We've come a long way from those early Westerns that celebrated progress and adventure, a long way from The Iron Horse in terms of going from innocence to cynicism. My favorite line from this film is when Pat Garrett says: "This country's getting old, and I'm getting old with it."

At the Movies with Governor Tom: Frozen River

I caught a screening of Frozen River tonight at the ArcLight Hollywood. I saw this when it originally came out last August. Tonight it was screened as part of an AFI series with this year's Oscar nominees. As I'm sure I've said in past posts, the ArcLight doubles as the home base for the American Film Institute in addition to being a first-run theater. As for the Oscar nominees from Frozen River, you've got Best Actress for Melissa Leo and Best Original Screenplay for Courtney Hunt, who also directed. Besides the fact that this is a very well-made film, if a bit on the bleak side, the appeal for seeing it again was that Melissa Leo was there in person following the film for a Q&A. Joining her was Misty Upham, who plays Lila, the main supporting character.

Do you know who Melissa Leo is? She first appeared on my radar back in 2003 as the wife of Benicio del Toro in 21 Grams. It was a small role, but she definitely held her own. Since then I've caught her now and again in roles just as small if not smaller, including all of one scene in last year's Righteous Kill. If you haven't seen that, that's perfectly all right. Now if you're a fan of those police procedurals on TV, then it's possible you've known of Melissa for a good long while. She was a regular on Homicide: Life on the Street for four years or so back in the nineties. I read an article in the L.A. Times last August when Frozen River came out, and the subject of her leaving the show came up at one point. Apparently her departure was neither her choice nor the producers'. The network wasn't crazy about her because she wasn't big on wearing makeup. From what I understand, her character was a gritty Baltimore cop and, well, why in heck would you want such a person to look too dolled up? She said in the article she still gets people who stop her and tell her they're sorry she was sacked from the show. From the movies I've seen her in and now that I've seen her in person, I'm surprised she doesn't get more cop roles. Melissa is definitely one tough no-nonsense gal.

As for Frozen River, it takes place in a town called Massena during the days leading up to Christmas. Massena is way up in northern New York State, literally a stone's throw from Canada. Melissa plays Ray Eddy. When the film starts, her gambling addict hubby has just left her and the two boys to go feed his addiction in Atlantic City. At first she deludes herself into thinking he'll come back, but reality sets in soon enough. She has to tough it out on her own. What's more, how is she going to pay for the new trailer home she ordered? She did have the money, but her man took it with him. If she doesn't have the down payment soon, the deal's off. It's kind of tough to see how she's going to do that with her cashier gig at Yankee Dollar.

Soon into the flick she comes across her hubby's car parked at the trailer of another single mom named Lila. A Mohawk who lives on the Akwesasne Reservation, Lila's got her own predicament. She has a baby, but her mother- and sister-in-law have stolen it. When she found Ray's hubby's car abandoned in a parking lot, she took it for herself. As for her own husband, he drowned while trying to drive across the frozen St. Lawrence River separating Massena from Quebec. Now why would he have been doing such a thing, you ask? Well, lots of people apparently do it. They go across to Canada, pack some illegal immigrants in the trunk, and drive back. To lessen their chances of being caught, they do all the smuggling on the Akwesasne Reservation. See, this reservation basically straddles the border. There's a bit of it on the U.S. side and a bit on the Canada side. In other words, it's a hole in the border.

The tense dynamic between the white woman and the Mohawk woman slackens soon enough when they realize they're both living in the same boat, so to speak. But that doesn't mean the tension in the movie slackens. Lila offers to share some of the proceeds with Ray if she helps her smuggle illegals. At first Ray flat out refuses, but as with her hubby going to Atlantic City, soon she faces reality. There is simply no way she can support her two boys and get a bigger trailer with what she makes at Yankee Dollar. Ray and Lila form a sort of smuggling partnership. Ray's no-bullshit attitude serves her well in dealing with others in this shady trade. She finds that she's a pretty good smuggler. And her granite personality is a nice counterpoint to Lila, who's far too meek for her own good. She never should've allowed her in-laws to snatch her infant boy from her.

So that's the plot in a nutshell without spoiling anything for you. It's a very indie movie, made on a shoestring. In other words, expect lots of handheld camera work, grainy images, and natural lighting, all of which only add to the gritty realism of this thing. Indeed, there really is a border town in New York called Massena, and a reservation straddling the border called Akwesasne, and people do smuggle illegals there. Writer-director Courtney Hunt was inspired to make this pup by a smuggler she knows. More on that below.

When Melissa Leo and Misty Upham came out after the show, the first thing they talked about was the short film Courtney Hunt made back in 2004 and which served as the basis for Frozen River. Courtney didn't want to do a short film. The way Melissa told it, Courtney was bound and determined from the beginning to get Melissa to play Ray Eddy. Like me, Courtney first took notice of Melissa in 21 Grams. Indeed, it was right after 21 Grams that Courtney approached Melissa about the role. Melissa said absolutely, but the producers said absolutely not. They wanted Courtney to get someone better known. It's too bad Courtney wasn't here tonight, but she sounds just as tough and outspoken as Melissa. She simply wouldn't back down, to the tune of financing her own little short and then showing the producers that Melissa really was the only person who could play Ray. Misty Upham piped in at one point and said that one especially callous producer said something like, "Who wants to see a movie with Melissa Leo and some Indian chick?" As for the short film, Melissa said the plot revolved around the baby in the duffel bag. If you see Frozen River, you'll know what I mean.

Part of why Courtney was so determined to do the film her way was due to the seven or so years of research she put into it. That leads me to the personal connection she has to this story that I hinted at above. Courtney's husband is a member of the Blackfoot Mohawk tribe in upstate New York. He personally knows people who smuggle illegals across the river. Indeed, according to Melissa, it's to him that she owes a debt of gratitude for getting this part. Originally, after seeing 21 Grams, Courtney wanted to get Melissa for another project. But then Courtney's hubby said that she'd actually be perfect as Ray Eddy. He was tickled by how real the film turned out. There's a scene early on when Ray's trying to tow her hubby's abandoned car from Lila's trailer back to her own. She ties a rope to it or something. And then when she gets into her car and tries to drive, the rope immediately snaps because it's frozen. He liked the film because of little touches like that.

Obviously the short film fulfilled its purpose and then some, what with the Oscar attention and all. In fact, Frozen River started getting raves right after its first screening at Sundance a year ago January. It's amazing what you can do with a tiny budget. The preproduction was all of nine days, which is infinitesimal by feature film standards. Many features get a good several months, sometimes a year, for preproduction. Did I mention this was low budget? The shoot itself lasted twenty-four days. Again, that's very quick for a ninety-minute film. Instead of Massena, they shot the whole thing in Plattsburgh, about ninety minutes from Massena in the northeastern part of the state, on the other side of Lake Champlain from Vermont. Lake Champlain "played" the St. Lawrence. The only thing they couldn't fake was the cold. They really did shoot it in the dead of winter. Melissa said it would routinely dip below zero. One day it bottomed out at minus thirty or something, which is unfathomable for me. And for them too. Melissa said the production shut down that day. Between takes the poor things would get in a car and blast the heater. The crew? Not so lucky. Melissa couldn't stop gushing about what warriors they were. Well sure. It sounds like they didn't have a choice.

When the moderator asked them what it was like to work with a director who'd also written the film, Melissa said she wasn't crazy about it. She talked about meeting Tennessee Williams many years ago. After that encounter, she was convinced that writers are a very specific kind of people who talk to everyone more or less the same way. Directors, for their part, are another specific kind of people who, if they're good, figure out that you can't talk to everyone the same way because not everyone's the same. I have to say I disagree with her opinion of writers. I'm a writer. I don't talk to everyone the same. Writers, like directors, have to know that people come in all shapes and sizes, right? How else can you create a cast of characters, whether for a novel or a film or a play? If the characters are all the same, shit, forget about it. Misty Upham would agree with me, but for more practical reasons. She was glad to have the writer and director as the same person. That made it much easier to work out issues with the shoot that Courtney hadn't anticipated while writing it. Misty liked how Courtney would literally have these arguments with herself until issues were resolved.

Speaking of Misty, someone in the audience asked her how much longer she'd be working at the Laundromat. Huh? I had no idea what that meant, but apparently this person was being literal. She was an older woman who looked like she knew Misty. In fact, now that I think about it, it could've been Misty's mom. Sure enough, Misty hasn't established enough of a foothold with her acting career to give up her day job doing laundry for people. Courtney made her gain a lot of weight for this film so she'd look like someone who just had a child last year. Misty has lost some of it, but she did confess that she's still struggling to get back down to her pre-Frozen River weight. Interesting thing about Misty, she really is of Mohawk descent and does live in upstate New York, about a half-hour from Canada. Like Courtney's husband, she knows people who smuggle illegals, but she's taken the smuggling for granted her whole life. It wasn't until doing this film that she realized what a big deal it is. For her part, Melissa says Courtney's timing couldn't have been better. With the economy in the state that it's in, more people than ever are turning to immigrant smuggling to keep the bread on the table.

Melissa and Misty also talked about the two kids who played Melissa's sons. The older one is T.J., played by Charlie McDermott. This is hardly his first film. In fact, he's compiled quite the resume for someone just out of high school. He's originally from the northeast and was still living there while acting so he could finish school. But now, according to Melissa, he's a working actor in L.A. As for little Ricky, he was played by this kid named James Reilly, who hasn't done anything besides this. Indeed, he wasn't even supposed to be in Frozen River. Courtney auditioned tons of kids but just couldn't find her Ricky. That's when Charlie said he had a younger cousin named James who might be good for the part. So they brought in James and Courtney fell for him on the spot. But wait, it gets better. According to Melissa and Misty, sweet little James never caught on to the fact that they were making a movie. They had to say stuff to him to prompt him and get him to look at a certain person or thing and react in a certain way. And then Courtney would insert snippets of that footage into the film to make it all look seamless. This is a perfect example of the power of editing. It's amazing what you can do.

Without spoiling the ending for you, Melissa said the appearance of that reservation cop was Courtney's way of saying not all men are shit, which is a message you could easily take away from this thing. Men are pretty much nonentities here. But nah. If we could see what happens after the film ends, that cop could easily become a surrogate dad to T.J. He obviously wants to straighten the kid out.

Melissa talked about being criticized by a certain network for not wearing enough makeup. It's been a decade since Homicide sacked her, but she still carries it. She couldn't get over how they used that as a reason. That's probably why she couldn't stop gushing about Courtney, who encouraged her to show the lines on her face. Melissa's all about the indie scene because that's where all the untapped talent lies. While of course it means low pay, she loves doing short films and shoestring-budget features for newbies.

Opera League: Preview of The Ring Cycle

Today I attended a very special Opera League event at the Millennium Biltmore Grand in downtown L.A. The Opera League and members of the opera company set up shop in the hotel's Crystal Ballroom to put on a two-hour seminar about their upcoming production of the Ring Cycle. Before I get into that, can I just mention that the Crystal Ballroom is where they filmed that one scene in Ghostbusters where they catch the little green slimy ghost? Sorry, I know that already takes you a million miles from opera, but I grew up on that movie and had never been in this room before. Being there just for that alone would've been awesome enough. As it was, I got to attend this terrific event.

Okay so back to the seminar. Have you ever heard of the Ring Cycle? Let me provide some background for the non-operaphiles out there. Officially known as The Ring of the Nibelung, the Ring Cycle is a series of four operas by German composer Richard Wagner (1813-1883). Each one tells a story that could fill up a book, but I'll be brief. The operas are called Das Rheingold (The Rhine Gold), Die Walküre (The Valkyrie), Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods). Collectively they're about this ring, right? Not surprising, I know, but it's important to point that out. It's a powerful magic ring that was forged by this dwarf who made it with gold from the Rhine River, which is like the Mississippi of Germany, okay? Anywho, the thing about this ring is that because it's so powerful, everyone and their cousin vies for it, even Wotan. You know who he is? Wotan is to Nordic mythology what Zeus is to Greek mythology. He's the chief god. The god of the gods. Another person who wants the ring is this human guy named Siegfried (the third opera's namesake). He eventually wins the ring, and that's a good thing as far as Wotan is concerned. But Siegfried is eventually killed. Not good. Especially if you're Wotan. And it's Wotan's daughter Brünnhilde, whom we meet in part two (she's one of the Valkyrie) who eventually takes the ring back to the Rhine River. So there you have it. A full-circle journey for that little ring. Unfortunately for Brünnhilde's dad, and all the other gods, the ring's deposit into the river kills them all. See how part four is called, in English, Twilight of the Gods? Twilight doesn't mean end of the day in this instance. It means end of their divine lives. Poor devils.

So that's it in a nutshell. It feels weird summing up sixteen hours of opera in one paragraph. It took Herr Wagner something like a quarter century to write the thing. No, seriously. Dude was in his late thirties when he started it, and by the time he wrapped up Götterdämmerung, he was in his early sixties.

While it isn't absolutely necessary to watch all four operas in sequence, they do tell an epic story. And I do mean epic. Each opera is....wait for it....four hours long. Yes, you read that right. You see what I mean by not having to see them all at the same time? Or even in the same year? Besides, each opera does stand on its own as a complete work with a beginning, middle, and end. Many opera companies will include one of them in any given season, and that's just fine.

Los Angeles Opera, however, has never produced any of them in their twenty-three-year history. You can't exactly blame them. Wagner never did anything small. Whether it's one of the Ring operas or any of his other ones, you can be sure it will be a massive production. L.A. Opera has done some of his other stuff. Just last year, in fact, they put on Tristan und Isolde. In 2001 they put on Lohengrin which, despite its four hours, is one of my favorite operas. The first time I saw that was in Vienna during the summer of '99. I didn't have the benefit of supertitles then, but that didn't stop me from falling in love with the music. Wagner can be double-edged, though. L.A. Opera staged Parsifal back in 2005 or thereabouts. Easily one of the worst operas I've ever seen. Ugh. Five hours. Ugh! At least I think it was five hours. Like most Wagner operas, it was at least four. Maybe I'm thinking five 'cause that's how it felt. Oh what difference does it make? Once you get past four, and you're still awake, your ass is already numb.

Well now L.A. Opera has decided to tackle the Ring once and for all. And, although the details of the production are being kept under wraps, the company's making no secret of how they're sparing no expense, recession be damned. They're staging the first two this spring, then the second pair next season. And right after next season, during the summer of 2010, they're mounting all four in the same month. They always take the summers off, so this is quite a deal, not to speak of the fact that they're mounting the entire Ring several times the same month. I suppose props have to go mainly to Placido Domingo, the legendary tenor who still performs on opera stages across the globe while serving as the general director of both L.A. Opera and D.C.'s resident company, National Opera. He's always been involved in L.A. Opera in some capacity or other. I think at first, when the company was first born in '86, he was a creative consultant or something. But since he took the reins in 2000, he's done a yeoman's job putting this nascent company on the map. And yes, L.A. Opera is still considered very young. By comparison, the Met in New York has been around since the 1880s. Many of the opera companies in Europe go back even further. So it speaks volumes that in such a short time L.A. Opera is attracting the crème de la crème of opera talent from all over the world, and now they're staging the Ring in its entirety, a true mark of a sincere opera company.

I've only been an Opera League member for about a year now. You can find a few other posts on this blog about seminar events. For the most part they're lectures. And that's fine. The Opera League is entirely member-supported, so you can't really expect special effects extravaganzas. Besides, as you can see in those other posts, I always learn a ton. Today's event went a bit further. You had lectures, some costumes, and a bit of singing to cap it off.

My attendance got off to an inauspicious start when I first walked into the Crystal Ballroom. I pulled out my cell to snap a few photos that I had planned to include with this post. I had literally taken all of one when this old codger jumped in front of me, sloshing his glass of water in an effort to block the front of my phone. Hadn't I seen the sign at the ballroom entrance prohibiting photographs? Uh, no. And stupid me because when I looked back, the sign wasn't exactly hidden. I guess I had my head too far into Ghostbusters to notice. Anyway, this guy insisted he watch me delete my photo. I don't think he could see that well because when I did delete it, he didn't really make an effort to watch. He just stared at nothing in particular and insisted several more times that I not take any photos. I couldn't help smiling. "No big deal, man," I said. Eventually he smiled too and walked back to his fellow septuagenarians by the water table. He'd been so serious about it. Maybe he expected I'd resist the edict, but I took it perfectly in stride, which I think helped him chill out.

Most of the seats in the front and middle of the ballroom were taken, but being toward the back didn't prevent my eyes from being drawn to the stage up front. Arrayed around the stage were what could only be costumes. There weren't that many, but you couldn't possibly miss what I can only describe as a giant-headed dwarf piece. It was pretty complete and looked remarkably alive for a costume that didn't have anyone in it. You also had what looked like a ballerina figure with a puffed up black skirt and a black headdress.

Opera League President Dorothy Wait, elegant and smiling and articulate as always, came out to introduce things and thank us all for being there at four in the afternoon on a Tuesday. And not just any Tuesday. Inauguration Day! And then another high-up from the League, Warner Henry, stepped up to the mic to plug Mozart's The Magic Flute, the opera they're putting on right now. As far as I was concerned, he was preaching to the converted. I just saw it last Saturday. And I didn't need anyone to convince me. I saw it when L.A. Opera put it on a few years ago. It's always been one of my faves. But I like the way Warner did it. The first thing he said, which is something I never thought about, was that advertising in the Los Angeles Times is so expensive that usually they have to sell out an opera just to get that money back. That's kind of amazing, really, since I've seen their ads in the Sunday Calendar section and never thought much of them. I usually hear about operas from stuff they send in the mail. Their newspaper ads are pretty small. Anyway, he said that to make up for the fact that they're cutting back on print ads, those of us who've already seen The Magic Flute should e-mail our friends and family about how much we liked it. Apparently he did this and ended up selling a hundred tickets. That's what he said anyway. But what I really liked about his pitch was when he talked about the reactions of children who've seen it, including his own grandkids and the grandkids of friends. He seemed like a sincere guy so I'm pretty sure he wasn't making it up. And besides, if there's one opera that's kid friendly, it would be The Magic Flute. Relating operas to kids is also a way to balance out the demographics that operas traditionally cater to. I have to say that whenever I go to these Opera League events, I'm in the minority in terms of age. The vast majority of these people are middle aged and above. Although when I actually go see operas, it isn't like that at all. I always see plenty of twenty- and thirtysomethings and, yes, even kids.

Warner then introduced the first featured speaker of the afternoon: James Conlon. A diminutive graying-haired guy with a boyish face and voice, James got a lot of well deserved applause. He's only been music director for a couple years, but he's already garnered an enormous amount of respect. Part of that comes from his accessibility. His predecessor, Kent Nagano, never really spoke much to the audience. James, in stark contrast, quite often partakes in those pre-performance lectures up in the second-level lobby of the opera house. He's got a terrific sense of humor. And as someone who's been immersed in classical music since he was a teenager, his breadth of knowledge is incredibly vast.

Speaking of his youth, he did reminisce for a bit about growing up in New York in the sixties. He remembers when the new version of the Met opened for the 1966-67 season, when he was in high school. Dude actually skipped school and blew off his homework to go see operas. Can you say devotion? I've never known any teenager so in love with classical music that they would do that. Indeed, I'm not sure I've ever met a teen who likes classical at all, although I know they exist because I was one of them. Since he was in high school and didn't have a job, he could never afford more than the buck twenty-five standing room area. When times were really tight, he'd pay the seventy-five cents for the highest-level standing room.

Prior to joining L.A. Opera, James had been making the rounds in Europe. While this is hardly the first time he's conducted the Ring, it is the first time he's ever done it in the U.S. The rehearsal space they're using is over near the intersection of Pico and La Brea, in the Mid-Wilshire area of L.A. It's not far at all from the opera house, but he was tickled by how unassuming it looks from the outside when compared with the massive multi-zillion-dollar project they're concocting inside. Speaking of big, another thing that tickled him was how the city of Los Angeles is putting on a city-wide Ring festival during the summer of 2010 to coincide with the L.A. Opera's staging of all four operas at once. He said if there was one composer whose ego was big enough to think it makes sense for a city to bring everything to halt to honor him, it would be Wagner. That's why he prefaced his speech by saying there wasn't anything new he could say about Wagner because so much has already been written about him. And no one wrote more about Wagner than Wagner himself.

It's kind of ironic that it's taken him this long to do an American production of the Ring, as this guy, per his own admission, is the biggest Wagner fan you'll ever see. Part of the reason he was so frustrated as a journeyman conductor was not only because he couldn't find a place to be a resident conductor, but also because he couldn't find enough opportunities to do Wagner. The first time he was offered a music directorship, in Cologne, he said he would only take it if they'd let him conduct all ten of Wagner's major works. They agreed. And then when he was eventually offered the directorship in Paris, he made the same proviso. He got to perform five of them before moving on. And finally, when Placido Domingo offered him the L.A. gig, James once again insisted he be allowed to Wagnerize the joint. Placido had no problem with that. Remember, Placido's a tenor, and some of the best tenor roles come from Wagner. Wotan, anybody? How can you beat playing the god of gods? Although that role actually requires a bass, but you know what I mean. James sure is getting his wish now, isn't he? He couldn't stop gushing about how Placido's given him the budget to build Bayreuth. Not literally, of course. But as I stated above, they're not sparing any expense. Do you know Bayreuth? It's a town in southern Germany most famous for its annual Wagner festival. In fact, Wagner himself founded the festival as a way to show off the Ring Cycle.

James also had nothing but nice things to say about working in L.A. in general. The big turnoff about the European houses was all the rivalry and back biting. More than once today he expressed his amazement at the lack of behind-the-scenes drama. Indeed, they all get along so famously that it's now a tradition for the cast and crew and musicians to have post-opera get-togethers at Kendall's, the restaurant and bar located next to the opera house on Grand Ave. Not only do they eat and drink and be merry, but James himself, ever the conductor, steps behind the bar and serves the drinks.

While he didn't really spill any details of the production, he did say that the orchestra pit would be covered. Now that right there makes me look forward to it, as I've never in my life seen an opera where you couldn't see the hard-working musicians down there. Besides that, all he told us about the Ring was that, like any Wagner piece, it's all-consuming. No other composer does that to him, he said. Whenever he does Wagner, nothing else in his life exists.

James spoke the longest by far, but the program wasn't over yet. After him you had a couple of gals from the costume department. Hallie Dufresne is what they call senior craft person. And Heather Bair is a cutter and draper. And she's also a Temple University alum! Apparently she got her MFA in theater there, which is part of the same school where I got my bachelor's in film. It's too bad I didn't get a chance to chat with her afterward. I don't meet many Owls outside alumni events.

Hallie and Heather basically talked about all the costumes that had been displayed on the stage since I sat down, including that one with the giant head. Apparently that is just one of several dwarves. Hallie tried on the black ballerina dress. Her face appeared at the bottom of the long neck. On stage, the person wearing that will have their face covered in a black mask so that it blends in with the rest of the neck, while the character's actual black and blank face is a couple feet higher. One of the main points they made was that they have to be practical first and foremost. You always have to think about how heavy or light the costumes are while, of course, trying to fulfill the director's vision. It's always a fine line. This got Hallie talking about the thermal plastic they used for a lot of the costumes.

The stage director, by the way, is this seventysomething German guy named Achim Freyer. I have to admit I've never heard of him, but reading his bio on the L.A. Opera site, dude's obviously a living legend in the theater world, especially European theater. Hallie and Heather said that Achim's vision for the Ring is so vast that he required two solid years of preproduction, which is downright unprecedented whether you're talking about theater, film, whatever. Two years! I've got to think that Achim's on the demanding side. Hallie and Heather sort of hinted as much, but they were very diplomatic about it. "He's just got this complete vision," they said more than once, always giggling after they said it.

Achim actually has a history with L.A. Opera. Back in '02 he did an abstract staging of Bach's B-minor Mass, which I didn't see, but I worked with someone at the time who did. She hated it. And apparently she wasn't alone. L.A. Opera got a truckload of scathing letters about it. In '03 Achim bounced back with Hector Berlioz's Damnation of Faust. Now that I did see and enjoyed quite a bit. I wasn't alone. It did quite well. Achim is first and foremost, however, a painter. That's always been his first love. After Damnation of Faust, he wanted to retire from theater altogether so he could do nothing but paint. Then he got a fatefull call in 2004 from L.A. Opera's then-COO Edgar Baitzel. At first it was about doing Bertolt Brecht's The Threepenny Opera. That was the first suggestion because Achim's a longtime student of Brecht's work, what they call in German a Meisterschüler (master student). Achim also did plays for the Berliner Ensemble, a theater company in Berlin founded by Brecht. But during that same phone call, Edgar said something like, "But ya know, Achim, it'd be more awesome if you could do the Ring Cycle for us instead." The rest, as they say...

On a sad note, Edgar passed away last year from cancer. His widow Christina, however, is still very much involved in L.A. Opera. Officially she's special assistant to Placido Domingo. Unofficially, during the Ring productions, she shadows Achim as his translator, since his English is as narrow as his Ring production is grand.

And finally, to cap off this special event, which I have to admit I felt kind of lucky to be at, they had three different singers come up one at a time to sing excerpts. Playing the piano accompaniment was this big fella named Mark Robson, a voice coach from Cal Arts. First up was a young African-American mezzo by the name of Ronnita Miller. She'd been sitting up front the whole time actually. She stepped up to the stage and sang a piece from scene four of Das Rheingold called "Weiche, Wotan! Weiche!" Apparently it's when the goddess Fricka summons Wotan. Ronnita, by the way, is a recent winner of the Domingo-Thornton Young Artist Award, a pretty competitive competition co-founded by Placido himself. After her you had a Dutch tenor named Arnold Bezuyen, who sang an excerpt from scene two. Dorothy Wait said he'd been in L.A. a good ten days already and was digging the summer-like weather. He still lives in Holland which, it's not hard to imagine, has some pretty harsh winters. And finally there was Jeannine Altmeyer, a blonde soprano from California. She sang by far the longest piece, from act three, scene three of Götterdämmerung. She just turned sixty last year, although you wouldn't know it. Officially she retired from opera back in '03, having led quite the Wagnerian career.

When it was all over, they put on a reception in the adjacent Tiffany Ballroom, which unfortunately I didn't have time to attend. As I was filing out through the crowd, I found myself exiting the ballroom behind Jeannine. Next to her was this guy who I think was her assistant or something. She was telling him that she could have done her piece so much better. Wow, you could've fooled me. I'm no opera expert, but I thought she was terrific. As did everyone else judging by the thundering applause she received.