Little White Lies August - September 2016

Movie stardom is a fickle thing. You’re built up, you’re torn down, you’re papped, you’re slandered and you’re expected to accept it all. And if, sooner or later, you punch a photographer or jump on a couch or have a high profile fling, that’s all part of the deal too: the only bad publicity is no publicity. And yet: Denzel Washington. In between his movie roles and award podium appearances, where does he go? How has he achieved a 44 feature-strong career (a remake of The Magnificent Seven will be number 45), and maintained a nearunrivalled level of fame for decades, while remaining such an unknown quantity? There are some films in which he’s incandescent. He is still the only African-American to have won more than one acting Oscar (he…

Back in February 1998, Premiere magazine ran a cover story about commercial directors who had successfully moved into movies. A group shot of Michael Bay, David Fincher, Simon West, Dominic Sena and Antoine Fuqua was accompanied by the somewhat hyperbolic headline: ‘Do these men represent the future of Hollywood filmmaking – or the death of it?’ Linking them was the now defunct Propaganda Films, which produced, among other titles, Bay’s Armageddon, Fincher’s The Game, West’s Con Air, Sena’s Gone in Sixty Seconds and Fuqua’s The Replacement Killers. Some months later, Pauletta Washington remembered the magazine cover and showed it to her husband around the time he and screenwriter David Ayer were searching for someone to helm a project called Training Day. She had seen The Replacement Killers and recommended it…

Roaring guns! Darting horses! Sizzling action! A IS FOR AMERICA A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AS SEEN IN THE FILMS OF JOHN FORD. John Ford made Westerns – and much else besides. He made a great many period films, not a single work that speculated on the future, and a few pictures that were about as contemporary as you could get, shooting documentary footage under fire during the Battle of Midway and re-enacting then-recent fighting in the Philippines with freshly-decommissioned Navy Elco PT boats in Key West Florida, for 1945’s They Were Expendable. His period pictures, as well as his contemporary subjects, are prismatic objects, reflecting something of their maker, something of the era they represent, and something of the time in which they were made.…

BROWN’S HOLE WYOMING-COLORADOUTAH BORDER STILL SERVING: NO Featured in William Wiard’s Tom Horn (starring a haggard but soulful Steve McQueen), and also a onetime haven for outlaws such as Butch Cassidy, Brown’s Hole was one of the first social venues to be referred to as a “saloon” when it was established in 1822. It was renowned for its catering and became a stop-over spot for fur traders. It now takes the name of Brown’s Park, the location for a national wildlife refuge. LONG BRANCH SALOON DODGE CITY, KANSAS STILL SERVING: YES Including Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday among its regular patrons, it was known as Miss Kitty’s Long Branch Saloon Bar in the western television series Gunsmoke. Opened in the early 1870s, the original saloon was burnt down in a…

If you were to talk to the rough and tumble pioneers of Hollywood’s early westerns — Tom Mix, John Wayne and the like — they’d be sure to tell you that Yakima Canutt was one tough sonofabitch. Standing 6’3”, with a hillbilly drawl and a past as a rodeo champion, Canutt was a maverick stuntman and choreographer. He drove wagons off cliffs, threw himself from running horses, took rolls in army tanks, and developed the onscreen barroom brawl to balletic perfection. Canutt had been breaking in broncos since his teens, and took his expertise to the burgeoning silent film industry in 1919. There, he doubled for macho icons like Clark Gable and Errol Flynn. It’s fair to say that the 1910s were not an era known for their stringent health…

1. A MAN FROM THE BOULEVARD DES CAPUCINES (1987) BY ALLA SURIKOVA A gigantic hit when it was originally released in Russia, Alla Surikova’s quaint 1987 western satire, A Man from the Boulevard des Capucines, is a film which says that celluloid is the best weapon to get those trigger-happy varmints to holster their pieces. It follows a man named Mr Johnny who drops in to a generic town with a cinematograph under his fur-coated arm and transfixes the locals with an array of onereel silent comedies. Soon hard liquor is being replaced with glasses of milk. When it comes to westerns, women have more often directed one-hour TV serials – a feature-length run out is extremely rare. And so it seems rather fitting that, as the Cold War was…