One legal thriller gets knocked off its US chart-topping perch and is replaced by another legal thriller. Which prompts the question: is this all because of an influx of Ivy League law-school grads from back east, who flooded into Hollywood from the late 1980s onwards?
These people were once content to stay in Manhattan and pollute Wall Street but, at some point, they realised that all the heavy cash was out here in California, lying in the streets, growing on trees and falling from the blue, blue skies. All you needed was a law degree. And so they came …
Old-timers in Hollywood didn’t go to law school. Raoul Walsh served his apprenticeship by getting caught up in the Mexican revolution, losing an eye, and playing John Wilkes Booth in Birth of a Nation. Nicholas Ray was a junkie, a musical researcher in the south (he was friends with Leadbelly), and a committed political activist before his move west. Roman Polanski spent half his childhood running from the Nazis. The German exiles – Lang, Wilder, Ulmer, et al – arrived in LA with nothing, having fled the very real possibility of dying in concentration camps.
Even the old-time studio heads had to overcome formidable obstacles such as poverty and profound anti-semitism before they could build empires and start acting like bastards themselves. And did they have law degrees? Did they bollocks.
I’m not saying that the absence of legal qualifications among the participants is the reason they all made great movies, but I bet it helped. After all, given the choice, would you prefer to see White Heat, In a Lonely Place, Rosemary’s Baby and Sunset Boulevard – or The Client, The Rainmaker, The Firm, The Chamber, A Few Good Men, My Cousin Vinnie and The Devil’s Advocate? (If you prefer the latter group, why are you bothering to read this?)
The first list comes from a time when artistic impulses and life experience enriched the movies, the second is a testament to the fact that most quasi-artistic impulses are now directed toward deal-making and marketing campaigns, not toward the movies themselves. And the now horribly familiar lawyer-hero seems to have become a projection of the producer’s ideal self.
Actually, having made all these insane generalisations, I have to admit that both Erin Brockovich and Rules of Engagement, its replacement at the top of the US chart, are a cut above the garden-variety Grisham-isms of the aforementioned titles.
Rules of Engagement (opening in SA this week) has ageing enfant terrible and former movie-brat William Friedkin – no lawyer he – at the helm, and the ever dependable Tommy Lee Jones and Samuel L Jackson on the marquee. Jackson is the bemedalled war hero who finds himself accused of 83 counts of murder after opening fire on a hostile Arab crowd during the evacuation of the US Embassy in Yemen, and Jones is the ex-drunk combat pal he hires to defend him at his court martial.
Friedkin leavens the legalese with two excellent, horrifying action sequences, the first a flashback to Vietnam in 1968, the second the disastrous embassy massacre. Neither they, nor the rock-solid performances by the leads (and by the ferrety Guy Pearce), are enough to make Rules of Engagement a really good movie (like Erin Brockovich) but the time passes swiftly enough.
I got to meet Friedkin last summer on the Rules set at Paramount Studios. To be honest, I wasn’t that anxious to do so because, although I’ve seen French Connection so often I can lip-synch the whole thing (including the car-chase) and think his To Live and Die in LA is one of the best movies ever made about this town, I’d also just read Peter Biskind’s scabrous account of Hollywood in the 1970s, Easy Riders and Raging Bulls.
Biskind depicts Friedkin as far and away the brattiest of the movie brats, all Vesuvian tantrums and Himalayan ego, insanely demanding, hard on the help and harder still on his womenfolk. But the man I huddled with between takes could have been a totally different person. The rail-thin peacock of the Seventies was a little plumper, but the expensive haircut and tailoring still conveyed the impression of sleekness, and there was none of the vehement, cocksure tone that characterised his utterances back when he was Whelp No 1.
He wasn’t prepared to discuss Biskind – he blanched a little when I mentioned it – but otherwise he was a dream host. He walked me over to the sound stage where Welles made Citizen Kane – a holy of holies for both of us – and later introduced me to Jackson, a magnificent modern-day Hannibal in his Marine corps uniform, and to Jones, who just looked psychopathic.
Friedkin beamed like a schoolgirl when I told him how much I admired To Live and Die in LA. With its counterfeiting, lawless lawmen and super-saturation of greed and vice, and given Friedkin’s experiences in this city (he could use the same title for his autobiography), it’s always seemed like a personal manifesto. “My own internal landscape certainly matches the one in the movie very closely,” he said a little dourly, “perhaps because I think that life in general, not just my movies, is a moral wasteland.”
His next project is Night Train, a biopic of hard-luck heavyweight champ Sonny Liston. There was a whiff of Friedkin’s own life in his summary of Liston’s. “He was desperate to be the best and, against all the odds, he pulled it off for a while, but he was never accepted by the public. And that’s not something you can train for.”