As we did in 2021 and 2023, we're attempting to again increase book coverage in the community. This go round, we're talking to Stan about his review of film director Quentin Tarantino's "CINEMA SPECULATION" and to Rebecca about her review "carrie courogen's elaine may book" -- the book being MISS MAY DOES NOT EXIST. So both Tarantino and May are famous directors. Elaine, of course, is also a celebrated comic, writer and actress. Neither of you liked the books you reviewed. Stan?
Stan: Quentin Tarantino certainly is famous for directing. He's not that celebrated when you think about it. Elaine May's never been nominated for an Academy Award for directing. True. But she's a woman who directed her last film in 1987. With 2004's LOST IN TRANSLATION, Sofia Coppola became the first American woman nominated for a Best Director Academy Award. So 27 years of Elaine May stopped directing. Sexism. Quentin Tarantino is trash but he's a man. He's gotten four nominations for Best Director. But again, he's trash and he's uneducated trash and that's probably why he's never won an Academy Award for Best Director. With CINEMA SPECULATIONS, Tarantino's typed but let's not pretend that he's written a book. He can't handle a book. He really can't handle an essay. His film writing has gone tired and repetitive and that was the case by 1996. When he was stealing from Pauline Kael, for example for that TOP GUN riff he improved for SLEEP WITH ME, he could expand and add to but he wasn't capable of original thought. His entire career -- including this book -- lacks original thought.
Rebecca, your book. Poorly written as well?
Rebecca: Oh, yeah. But not in terms of sentences and word choice. It's a factual nightmare. She presents as a fan of Elaine May but she's just following what some men -- emphasis on men -- think about Elaine May. It's clear she's never had an original thought and can have fan girl fantasies but can't actually envision or comprehend or explore. She's a very bad writer. And I've got a long excerpt planned for this -- not from the book. But Elaine May needs and deserves a good book. This isn't even an okay book.
And why does Elaine May need a good book about her?
Rebecca: Because a high profile book in the year 2000 supposedly about women in the film industry was instead a non-stop, never-ending attack on Elaine May. We addressed that here at THIRD in a roundtable on April 12, 2009:
Ty: Okay, it doesn't look like Kat's going to be joining us, so
we'll move to the last e-mail. This came in at the end of January from
reader Nikkoli who just read Rachel Abramowtiz' Is That A Gun In Your
Pocket? and wants to know if you agree with her that Elaine May
prevented other women from directing films and that she set women back
many years?
C.I.: First, Rachel Abramowitz deserves
applause for writing a readable book that attempts to detail women's
achievements. So I will give her that. That's all I'll give her props
for. In terms of the question from Nikkoli, my response is "No" and I
will go into that in just a moment. But to establish my "no," I need to
note Rachel's problems. Rachel's problems include not knowing what the
hell she's writing about from one moment to the next. I haven't read the
book in years, I was amazed Random House published such a sloppy book.
At one point, she's referring to --
Ty: Jim's got a copy of the book. We knew you'd be pissed.
C.I.:
Okay, try page 144 for this Jim, at one point, Rachel's describing a
scene in Fast Times At Ridgemont High that she obviously never watched
because she gets it wrong.
Jim: Got it. This is the scene
between Jennifer Jason Leigh and Phoebe Cates' character and Abramowtiz
writes, "Linda, meanwhile, memorably demonstrates how to give a blow
job using a banana."
C.I.: What film did Rachel watch? It
wasn't Fast Times. Did she even watch the film she's writing about?
They use carrots. Rachel fudges the facts throughout, and many friends
who spoke to her -- often for inteviews for Premiere, not for a book
though they're included int he book -- feel she was highly selective
with her quotations. Rachel wrote the book with a dualistic mind set as
is obvious to anyone reading closely. There had to be an 'angel' who
would save us and there had to be a devil who banished women into hell.
She makes both characters women. Elaine's the devil and Jodie Foster's
the angel. Jodie Foster has her own career problems and never saved
women -- nor was that her obligation. But, for those who haven't read
the book, Rachel was convinced that Jodie was the new woman and that she
could be sexy and smart and, sorry, Rachel Abramowitz, most movie goers
have never found Jodie Foster sexy. Likeable? Yes. Sexy? No. But Rachel
has to pile on the praise to create Jodie as the one who will save us
all. Jodie never asked for that role and never said she was taking that
role. Jodie's focused on career choices she found interesting as is her
right. She's a very talented actress but she hasn't changed acting and
she hasn't changed the way women are seen in films. That's reality,
Rachel. Actually, Rachel doesn't make Jodie the angel so much as she
makes her a Snow White or Cinderella. The evil queen is supposed to be
Elaine May. And this is where the book really falls apart because to rip
Elaine May apart, it's necessary for Rachel to invest in two
questionable sources. Variety's bitchy and catty Todd McCarthy and a set
designer. On Todd, he's a former assistant to Elaine May. There's not a
woman working in the industry that doesn't grasp what little pricks
most men who are assistants actually are. For example, Kathyrn Bigelow,
an immensely talented director. A wonderful person. And someone who has
been trashed like crazy, in the worst terms, by a former assistant. His
last name is a Biblical one and he worked for her in the nineties and he
will have no career in the entertainment industry because a number of
us -- don't include Kathryn in that, I'm not even sure she knows the
things he's said about her -- have made a point to get the word out on
him. If Rachel Abramowitz had spoken to him, he would have given her
some wonderful fantasies she could have printed as truth. Reality, his
tiny ego couldn't accept the fact that as a recent college student with
no real experience, he was damn lucky to be hired to fetch Kathryn's
coffee. He wanted to be a director himself but had nothing to show for
it, not even a short student film. So he trashed her and when a number
of us found out, we made a real point to get the word out on him. I know
I never mentioned it to Kathryn Bigelow, someone else may have, or she
may learn it from someone asking her about this. If she doesn't already
know, she will know who I mean. He's a little s**t who can't stand the
fact that he's not a director and that Kathyrn is and that she was his
boss. The things he has whispered about her on job interviews were
horrible. So the idea that any of us give a damn what little Todd
McCarthy, whose life amounted to nothing, thinks about Elaine May?
Rachel's living in a dream world. As for the set designer, has he ever
not had a problem with women? We can forget his violent problems with
women in his personal life and just, for example, note all the vile and
crap he's publicly spewed at Barbra Streisand. Funny, whenever he works
with a woman director, he has a problem and goes running to the press.
He had a problem with Elaine May, he had a problem with Barbra
Streisand. He's been punched in the face on sets with male directors but
he's never gone running to the press about that, now has he? But he
gets real bitchy when he works for a woman and just having to work under
a woman so enrages him that he has to go running to the press and
making up these fantastic stories. I know for a fact what Barbra was
asking for and I know for a fact he didn't deliver it which is why she
had to improvise with the camera work and everything else. Barbra was
not the problem. He was the problem. And his tales about Elaine May are
so similar to his tales about Barbra. And if Rachel was a journalist of
any real talent, she would have bothered to research what that set
designer had to say about other directors and she would have noticed how
his trashing of Elaine was so similar to his trashing of Barbra. Who
the hell cares if a set designer thinks a montage belongs in a film? Who
cares? He is not the director. Barbra was the director. His little
catty, bitchy act has gotten real damn old and most of the time he carps
about actresses but whenever he works with a female director, he
trashes her. He's never been that talented. A woman who went on to
produce who was part of that family, briefly, by marriage was and is
much more talented than any male of that family. Elaine May directed A
New Leaf, The Heartbreak Kid, and Mikey and Nicky during the 1970s. She
was the first woman to direct a studio film since Ida Lupino did The
Trouble With Angels. In Rachel's nonsense view -- she sides with Todd
McCarthy -- Elaine May is the reason women didn't get to direct. That's
bulls**t. Elaine May isn't the reason women didn't get to direct more.
And if Elaine May hadn't directed those three films no woman would have
directed a studio film in the US during the seventies. That's reality.
There was no interest in hiring women to direct. Barbra had been trying
to direct Yentl for the last half of the seventies, and finally set it
up only to see Heaven's Gate destroy her and many other filmmakers
dreams. But the refusal of so many to greenlight Barbra as a director
had nothing to do with Elaine May, it had to do with the sexism
ingrained in the entertainment world. Since Barbra pretty much directed A
Star Is Born and The Main Event, I'm surprised Rachel didn't try to pin
it on Barbra. But it sure is amazing that Rachel wants to pimp the
notion that the only woman the studios saw fit to allow to direct is
also the reason other women couldn't direct. What a load of hogwash.
Elaine got her opportunity because she was talented in another field and
because of greed. Her talent opened the door. The hope that she, like
her former partner, might make money for the studios was the greed
factor. She and Mike Nichols stood on stage and did amazing, hilarious
comedic sketches. Mike had gone on to become a director who delivered
box office in the sixties, though by the time Elaine was doing her first
two films, he was suffering some set backs. But if Mike could do it
then his partner might be able to as well! For that reason, and because
Elaine didn't give them what they wanted, they were interested in her as
a director. She had to fight to get that interest but she did. She
leveraged everything she had and became a director. She basically moved
mountains and it's catty and bitchy and just wrong to blame her for the
fact that other women weren't given opportunities. Richard Pryor, to
offer an example of another minority, was hugely successful in films in
the seventies, as an actor granted, but that didn't mean the studios
suddenly wanted to create all these roles for African-American actors.
Rachel lives in an ahistorical world. If Elaine were successful or a
failure, it wasn't going to impact other women during that decade. And
it didn't impact other women. Elaine's first two films were money
makers. And that's something Rachel can't grasp either because she lives
in a post-Jaws world and is trying to write about a pre-Jaws one.
Meaning, A New Leaft was a hit by the box office standards of its day.
The Heartbreak Kid even more so.
Jim: Okay, jumping in to play devil's advocate, Rachel writes that Elaine went overbudget.
C.I.:
Yes, she did. And yes, many of the films released in 1971 went over
budget. Some, like A New Leaf, were hits, some were flops. She did not
go over budget in a way that threatened the film and the proof there is
that she was never fired. If she'd been viewed as a threat to the film,
she would have been fired during filming and someone else would've been
brought in. Howard Koch told Paramount to fire her, as Rachel herself
admits, but Paramount decided not to. That's not because the ones in
charge were kindly. If you buy into that fairy tale, ask Robert Evans
and he will tell you how blood thirsty the money men in New York really
were. Paramount liked what they saw. They knew she was overbudget when
they removed Koch. They liked what they saw and knew that they could go
over budget without risking the profit -- in part because she wasn't
that over budget and also because they had grossly underbudgeted the
film.
Jim: Okay, one question. Page 63, Abramowitz writes
to infer that Elaine May's original conception was that Walter Matthau
kills the wife, played by May, in the film: ". . . so instead of a story
about a man who gets away with murder it became the watered-down,
ostensibly more audience-friendly story of a man who merely contemplates
the act."
C.I.: Whether Rachel intended that to be what
the readers thought or not, it is what they will think because, in the
film, Walter is thinking about killing Elaine's character. He doesn't.
As filmed, Walter kills two men in the cast. Those two murders are cut
from the film before it's released. So, as Jim points out, if you've
seen the film and read Rachel's book, you will leap to that conclusion,
that the original had Elaine's character killed by Walter. It's an
important point because by not informing readers of who died, Rachel
further undercuts Elaine's gifts by implying she's so stupid she was
killing off the most likeable character in the film.
Jim: So Elaine May is not the reason women were not directing?
C.I.:
No. Sexism prevented all women from directing. Elaine May was ideally
suited, in ways similar to Richard Pryor, to work the system and get a
shot at doing what they weren't letting other women and African-American
males do. The same institutional racism that prevented others from
following in Pryor's footsteps in the seventies also prevented women
from following in Elaine's. It takes a real idiot to pin systematic and
institutionalized sexism on Elaine May. It takes a real idiot to blame
the victim for the system that victimizes. It takes a real idiot to run
to some of the most sexist men in the industry, with long histories of
public sexism, and use them to call out Elaine May. In 1971 and 1972,
Elaine had two films she directed released and both were well received
and hits for their day. To blame Elaine May for other women not being
able to direct is to not understand history. If sexism wasn't the cause,
then those two hits would have resulted in studios screaming, "Get me
our Elaine May! Find us a woman to direct for us! Women are box office
gold!" That didn't happen. Now Elaine stumbles at the box office with
the amazing Mikey and Nicky. That's 1976. Now someone could argue that
the film's box office hurt other women . . . if other women had been
directing studio films between 1971 and 1977 -- I say through '77 due to
release patterns. They weren't. Elaine didn't help women in the
seventies and she didn't hurt them. She helped other women in the
longterm by proving that a woman could direct. But the system was such
that no other woman was going to benefit from it in the seventies.
Again, Barbra Streisand, the biggest box office for that decade as an
actress -- in the top ten when few other women were -- Goldie Hawn and
Jane Fonda were two other women who made the top ten box office -- she
has problems setting up a musical that she will sing in and that she
will act in because she's also directing. A Star Is Born is the
immediate musical for the studios to judge by, its box office, and it
was a huge hit. Even so, the directing aspect made studios leery. Barbra
was not turned down because of Elaine May. Barbra was turned down
because of sexism. Now women were directing non-feature films and it's
telling that Rachel wants to pooh-pah women taking film courses during
this period but doesn't want to even mention Antonia: A Portrait of the
Women, a 1974 documentary which was directed by Judy Collins -- yes, of
music fame -- and Jill Godmilow and was nominated in 1975 as a Best
Documentary Feature for the Academy Awards. 1975 would see the release
of The Other Half of the Sky: A China Memoir, a documentary directed by
Claudia Weill and Shirley MacLaine. It would be nominated the following
year for Best Documentary. That's 1976. 1976 would see two women
nominated as directors. Barbara Kopple would be nominated for Best
Documentary and win. Also in 1976 Lynne Littman would be nominated for
Best Short Documentary, Numer Our Days, and she would win. I'm not done
yet, Dyan Cannon won for Best Live Action Short film. The film was
Number One. She wrote, she directed, she co-produced. None of those
women's accomplishments make it into Rachel's book; however, she does
find time, I believe page 55, to note that Dyan Cannon, Cicely Tyson and
other women take part in AFI's directors workshop and to repeat the
false criticism that they are part of an "elitist" program. It's amazing
that the incredible Cicely Tyson gets only one mention in a book on
women in film that's over 400 pages long and it's to infer that Cicely
is "elitist." It's also amazing that Dyan's Oscar win, after taking part
in the workshops, isn't noted by Rachel. But it doesn't fit her motif
of what failures women of the sixties and seventies were. To push that
narrative, she has to introduce Jane Fonda as a film producer in 1980
with 9 to 5 when, point of fact, Jane's already produced Coming Home and
The China Syndrome. But apparently Jodie Foster made Rachel's vagina
moist and she had to write a book about it wherein a child actor,
courted by male directors because she was a tomboy, is the savior of
womenhood. Jodie's own box office didn't prove that before the book came
out and hasn't since the book came out. Jodie has a special audience
and has to be paired with very select material or the mystique flops at
the box office. Only an idiot would have suggested that Jodie was the
way forward for women and blazing a trail. I'm not trying to insult
Jodie, she's a wonderful person and a supremely talented actress.
Jim:
You really found the book offensive. And don't edit yourself in
replying, this is the portion of the roundtable that readers are going
to write in about.
C.I.: I found it very offensive. I
found it offensive that a woman would write a book about women in an
industry and take the word of sexist men when she wanted to slam a woman
and never even raise the issue of the hostility of those men. Never
even acknowledge it. I found it offensive that she needed to bury and
belittle the accomplishments of women in the sixties and seventies in
order to elevate an actress who, no offense to Jodie, has to select
every part with great care because her range is not that of Meg Ryan's
or Michelle Pfieffer's or any number of women. She's completely
unbelieveable in a love scene as both Somersby and Anna and the King
have now demonstrated. I'm thrilled for Rachel Abramowitz that she has a
secret crush on Jodie Foster but that has nothing to do with the topic
of her book and her crush drags the book down considerably. In terms of
the women who participated in the AFI directing workshops, she made no
effort to speak to them. But she includes that crap about how it was
"elitist." The women were chosen because they had some success in some
field. And, this goes back to Elaine May. None of those women were given
feature films to direct in the seventies by studios. And they were
successful women. But, like Barbra, that wasn't enough. The only woman
who knew how to play the system in the seventies was Elaine May and good
for her for doing that and good for her for leaving three amazing
seventies films.
Jim: I have two questions and I know
you're looking impatient but this is what's going to make the roundtable
for a lot of people, this discussion. In fact, I'm considering pulling
this section out and making it a stand alone. But I have two more
questions. The first is Ishtar which you are speaking around. I know it
doesn't apply to the points being made because it comes in the
mid-eighties. But just wondering about that?
C.I.: Ishtar
fails because of the leading lady. That's what destroys the film. The
NYC scenes are funny and move quickly. Dustin and Warren both have
enough of a giddy high going into the desert scenes to carry that
forward. But the actress is all wrong, hired for the wrong reasons and
she tanks the film. You need someone light, someone to be a good sport,
like Dorothy Lamour was in the Bob Hope and Bing Crosby road pictures,
or someone who is actually funny. You do not need a French actress of
questionable looks pouting through scene after scene. No one needs it,
no one wants it and she weighs down every scene she's in. Like Jodie
Foster, that actress can play drama. Ishtar was not a dramatic film.
Charles Grodin is also very good in the film and Carol Kane is just
magic, so much so you wish she'd been given the lead female role. Dustin
and Warren were switching out the onscreen personas they were known for
and for audiences to have accepted it, the film needed to be laughout
loud funny. For large sections, the film is just that. It fails every
time the actress with the granite and unmoving face comes onscreen.
Jim:
Okay, second point. Rachel Abramowitz doesn't just present an argument
that Elaine May destroyed directing chances for other women, she also
argues Elaine May is a lousy director. Your thoughts?
C.I.:
Little sheltered women from Yale should learn to study what they're
writing about. There is no indication that she ever actually saw any of
Elaine May's films. Rachel presents the theory that Elaine is a lousy
director because she thinks Elaine has no sense of the visual. First of
all, there's more to directing than just the visual and I wonder what
Rachel would assume a DP is responsible for. But Elaine came onto the
set of her first film attempting to build scenes as one would in the
theater. She's not the first director to ever approach it that way. She
was going for a rhythm and that rhythm included, pay attention Rachel,
the visual rhythm because theater is also a visual medium. Elaine
learned quickly about the camera on her first film and there are some
amazing shots in A New Leaf. There are some amazing shots in The
Heartbreak Kid. Elaine's an amazing director with a unique visual sense.
It also bears noting that she has an amazing skill. No one else ever
got such a complex performance out of Walter Matthau. The Heartbreak Kid
resulted in two supporting acting nominations [Academy Award
nominations]. She is very good at assisting actors in finding their
characters. She's an amazing writer as well and I didn't focus on that
because her writing was ignored by Rachel but her directing was attacked
-- as was her legacy. Elaine May has a place in film history and she
didn't deserve Rachel's uninformed, smutty little gossip passed off as
history. Also if I could, on the subject of women directors, The Hurt
Locker is Kathryn Bigelow's latest film, it opens this spring and, it's
really something.
Rebecca: Sorry for the long excerpt but that's why Elaine needs a good book.
Stan: I forgot about that roundtable. And that is true, by the way. IS THAT A GUN IN YOUR POCKET? was all about ripping apart Elaine May and treating Jodie Foster as a goddess. The reality, Jodie's not much of a director. And she had studios falling at her feet throughout the 90s and the 00s. But nothing she directed has any real lasting value or is unique in any way. Elaine made films. Real films. And Rachel Abromowitz wrote that book with a soggy crotch. It was obvious she had a crush on Jodie Foster and that's fine but don't let it override your brain. Jodie was given the title of director and yelled action and cut but she never produced a film. They don't even qualify as bad TV movies -- I'm talking about the films she's made.
Rebecca: She has no vision of any kind. Elaine May? She's running through all the films she directs and she's creating something that makes an impression on you. And Jodie's a good actress, I don't mean to pick on her. It's not as though she elevated herself into a battle with Elaine May. But that's what that awful Rachel did. For her book, Jodie was the one who was going to save us all and Elaine was the one who harmed us all. It's nonsense. And it's nonsense to compare Jodie and Elaine as directors because there's no comparison. Elaine is a film director and has a body of work that backs that up. Jodie's attempts at directing films is worthless. Maybe if, back when she was pretending to date Russell Crowe, she'd made that carnival movie starring him she might have created an actual film. But that didn't happen. And never will now. Marcia and my summer book read was covered in "Boze Hadleigh's Hollywood Lesbians: from Garbo to Foster" and "'hollywood lesbians: from garbo to foster' by boze hadleigh" and as that makes clear, Jodie doesn't like Russell anymore because when they didn't make the film and he was asked about their 'romance,' he clarified that there was no romance because "she doesn't play for my team." And Jodie's people got furious and tried to spin it by insisting that "the other team" wasn't about Jodie being a lesbian. She was still in the closet then and pretending she was straight. That gets forgotten a lot today. People think, "Oh, well, she just didn't discuss her personal life." No, Jodie actively worked to mislead the public. I think it was when she was promoting NELL that her people started planting gossip items about how she was about to get married to a man -- a man who was gay but the publicists pretended otherwise. Anyway, Elaine May is a great talent and she deserves a book that does her justice. Maybe some day.
Stan?
Stan: Tarantino's never going to write a book worth reading. He's too stupid. What the book makes clear is that the uneducated idiot still has the mind of a five-year-old -- the five-year-old who loved it when his step-father yelled "fa**ot!" at the screen in a theater. His homophobia started early on and to this day he's proud of it. He's also a racist and that comes through in the book. Black people are only capable of B-movies and can't be movie stars. You get that if you pay attention to one of his films. But it's there in the book. Paul Newman and Robert Redford and all these White men are movie stars. He doesn't treat Richard Roundtree and other Black males like that. There's a sense -- on the page like in his films -- that he expect African-Americans to be grateful that he acknowledges them with his low opinions of them. He's just a racist and there's no getting around it. Every critique Spike Lee has ever made about him is true. He's also a sexist pig. You can prove that with his index if you don't want to trudge through the boring book. It's there that you will find things like not one mention of Jane Fonda in the book -- he does insult KLUTE in a single sentence but doesn't mention Jane in that -- but multiple pages on Peter Fonda. I'm sorry, Tarantino, only trash would mistake Peter Fonda for the better actor. Jane's got six Academy Award nominations for Best Actress and one for Best Supporting Actress and she's been nominated twice for a Tony. Peter has one Academy Award acting nominations. Jane won two Academy Awards for Best Actress.
Okay, thank you both for this book discussion.
---------------------
Previous book discussions:
"Book Talk (Trina, Ava and C.I.)"
"Books (Ruth, Jim, Ava and C.I.)"
"Book Talk (Stan, Ava and C.I.)"
"Book Talk (Dona, Ava and C.I.)"
"Book Talk (Ty, Ava and C.I.)"
"Book Talk (Mike, Ava and C.I.)"
"Book Talk (Stan, Rebecca, Ava and C.I.)"
"Book Talk (Mike, Ava and C.I.)"
"Book Talk (Ann, Marcia, Trina, Ava and C.I.)"
"Book Talk (Elaine, Ava and C.I.)"
"Books (Marcia, Rebecca, Ava and C.I.)"
"Book Talk (Kat, Ava and C.I.)"
