June 19, 2010

I was watching a terrific documentary about the making of Steven Spielberg’s "Jaws" on the Bio channel the other night; it’s well worth a viewing if you’re a fan of that famously crisis-plagued production. Anyway, when it was time to discuss the horrifying “USS Indianapolis” speech that crazy ol’ Quint delivers to his shuddering shipmates moments before the shark starts gettin’ all territorial on their asses, the documentary cut to a close-up of writer John Milius grinning like a possum, just as I expected.

Milius wrote the better part of that legendary monologue about the shark-infested hell the men of the Indianapolis experienced when their ship was sunk by an enemy sub near the end of World War II. It’s probably the single best thing in a movie that’s wall to wall with beautifully crafted scenes and revealing character moments, and he deserves all the credit he gets for it. It’s classic stuff.

But, great speech or not, the chief reason for that cut to Milius is that every documentary ever made concerning a movie Milius participated in features him delivering amusing little anecdotes about the folly of pretending you know what you’re doing when you direct a major motion picture. Then he chuckles at some deeply absurd aspect of the commercial filmmaking process, which is usually illuminated through a story that involves people like Spielberg, Francis Coppola, Martin Scorsese, or Brian DePalma, who are Milius’ personal buddies. Then he puffs on his cigar, and chuckles again.

He may not be as widely celebrated as they are, but you just know Milius doesn’t take any crap from his more conventionally successful friends. He knows they’re just as screwed as everybody else is by their love of celluloid, even if their mansions are piled high with money and awards.

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Milius has helmed several partially good movies himself, and a few obviously lousy ones, with his biggest hit being, God help us, “Conan the Barbarian.” He’s far more renowned for his (often un-credited) script work, due mainly to an innate ability to spin nutty, violence-related lines of dialogue that quickly, or sometimes eventually, become catch phrases.

Milius, for instance, wrote “Charlie don’t surf!” and “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” for “Apocalypse Now,” and “Do you feel lucky?” and “Go ahead, punk, make my day” for Clint Eastwood. That gun-waving alpha male stuff is just what he does. If you have to have a money-making métier in Hollywood, I suppose it could be much worse.

The thing about Milius, though, is he’s really smart and more than a little bit shit-crazy, sort of a genial blow-hard, but with an occasional salient point. Regardless of his hippie decade credentials, he’s a gun and war nut (and a member of the board of directors for the NRA) who undoubtedly wants to see some Ernest Hemingway staring back at him when he looks in the mirror. So he plays up his droll blood-and-guts side for his and everyone else’s amusement.

Milius wrote the original “Apocalypse Now” screenplay for Coppola’s American Zoetrope film collective in the late ‘60s, although his version of the script (I’ve read it) is heavily populated with insane comic book characters like Robert Duvall’s Col. Kilgore; it actually makes the acid armaments Coppola ended up with seem subdued, if you can imagine that. Plus, and I think this is pretty brilliant, Milius wanted the picture to be filmed documentary style, right there in Vietnam during the Tet Offensive!

But his collaborators - including the shy, asthmatic director who was supposed to film the script, George Lucas - backed out because they didn’t want to, you know, die while making a movie. Milius, it’s important to note, didn’t attempt to film the picture on his own after everybody bailed. But he sure likes to talk about what he might have done, which is part of his charm.

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I actually started thinking about Milius several days before he popped up in that “Jaws" documentary because I had tried unsuccessfully to watch the whole of Michael Mann’s recent John Dillinger picture, “Public Enemy,” which, like so many of Mann’s movies, is gorgeously photographed and presented in the groundbreaking Snooze-a-Rama process.

The utter lifelessness of Mann’s movie reminded me that Milius once made a better Dillinger picture with about one one-hundredth of Mann’s budget, and only one or two decent actors. In fact, if there’s a Milius-directed movie I would suggest you watch, it has to be 1973’s “Dillinger,” starring the late, great, and vastly underrated Warren Oates.

Look a that poster! A more glowing description of Dillinger’s exploits would be hard to find— even if this is meant to be an homage to gangster pictures from the 1930s, it’s hard not to feel that Milius really is a major fan of a cold-blooded murderer. That’s a little harsh, though. It’s probably more accurate to say he’s a major fan of the idea of being a famous cold-blooded murderer. So he made a movie loaded with cold-blooded murders, several of which, I’m sorry to say, are extremely entertaining.

“Dillinger” has its problems, not the least of which being that Milius can’t seem to decide if he wants to ape James Cagney’s down-and-dirty Warner Bros. barn-burners or John Ford’s elegiac sense of Americana. But the shootouts, pardon my French, are fucking fantastic!

One bank robbery gone wrong is too full of orgiastic gunfire, spewing blood, and squealing victims to post on Wall of Paul, not because I think it’s no good - it’s amazingly well done, and contains a couple of remarkable POV shots - but because it can make you gag if you’re not prepared for it, and I try not to make my readers gag. So I’ll opt instead for a brief little clip that features one of my all-time favorite cinematic gangster killings, one that rivals anything in the much more highfalutin’ “Godfather” pictures.

Understand that Milius, who often finds himself adapting and-or filming reality-based material, has virtually no respect for reality. For instance, his Oscar-nominated 1975 feature, “The Wind and the Lion,” purports to be based on an historic event concerning Teddy Roosevelt, but is largely made up out of thin air. “The Wind and the Lion,” in other words, is a pack of lies containing Teddy Roosevelt.

So it’s not especially surprising that Milius’ take on Melvin Purvis, the FBI agent who tracked down and killed Dillinger and several other public enemies, tends to come unmoored from actual events roughly 45 seconds after “Dillinger”’s opening credits.

The bulk of “Dillinger”’s story, outside of the title-gangster's legendary robberies and jail escapes, consists of Purvis, played with rock-jawed machismo by Ford veteran Ben Johnson, resolving to blast as many guys as he can from the FBI’s most wanted list to kingdom come, then smoke a fresh cigar over each of their dead bodies. And that’s exactly what he does, one after another. And Milius films it so we can watch.

Here, then, is the most "John Milius" scene ever filmed, one that, through a mere handful of well-selected shots, reduces the entire gangster genre to a haiku.

Well, you can’t say he didn’t warn him.

Paul Tatara