Jennifer Jones: Like A Virgin

Two casting directors I knew in New York City totally agree with what Steven Spielberg told the American Film Institute in an interview -- it's essential for today's young actors and future filmmakers to watch and learn from classic films.  Films made well before the 1980s.  Films that are in black and white.  Some may be silent, some may be foreign and subtitled.  I agree with Spielberg and those casting directors.  I've told young actor acquaintances of mine that, if they cannot afford acting classes, they should watch classic films with actors at their best.  Learn from them.  Study their performances.  One performance I wish young women would watch and appreciate is the one that brought Jennifer Jones the Oscar for Best Actress of 1943.  The film is The Song of Bernadette, directed by Henry King.  When I was a kid in Catholic school, this was required viewing.  It's the story of Bernadette Soubirous, the French peasant girl who saw visions of the Virgin Mary in Lourdes in 1858.  After her death, she was canonized as St. Bernadette.

 A little background on Jennifer Jones.  In her day, she was a top movie actress.  She got five Oscar nominations from the 1940s through the 1950s.  When she first hit Hollywood, she was married to Robert Walker, one of the most appealing, charismatic and talented new actors of the 1940s.  He had boyish good looks and major acting skills.  They were quite a team.  They played sweethearts in the World War II drama, Since You Went Away.  Jones got an Oscar nomination for that film.

Unfortunately, their marriage was collapsing as they played that romantic pair.  David O. Selznick, legendary film producer and notorious control freak, had become obsessed with her.  He produced Gone With The Wind and Rebecca.  Both films brought him Best Picture Academy Awards.  Selznick also produced Since You Went Away.  He guided Jones to a new height in her film career.  She divorced Walker and became Mrs. David O. Selznick.

After Selznick died, Jones fell apart briefly and then recovered.  She married multi-millionaire industrialist and philanthropist, Norton Simon.  If you watch the annual Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena on television, you always see the floats and marching bands pass by the Norton Simon Museum.  That's the guy.

When he died, Jennifer Jones did many good deeds with his money and carried on his philanthropic spirit.  Her last film role was in a blockbuster hit, The Towering Inferno.  That disaster film with an all-star cast was tops at the box in 1974.  She wanted to play Aurora Greenway in Terms of Endearment but the role went to Shirley MacLaine.  Jones died at age 90 in 2009.  In her career, with her ephemeral quality, no Hollywood actress could switch so quickly and effectively from virgin to vixen like Jennifer Jones.  Besides playing St. Bernadette, she was the innocent time-traveling beauty in Portrait of Jennie....

...and she was the wholesome, lovely amnesia victim in Love Letters.

Then she turned it out as the sexy half-breed who can handle a man and a gun in the lusty western, Duel in the Sun.

She was equally non-virginal and loaded for bear as Ruby Gentry.

Her performance in The Song of Bernadette is a rarely-mentioned Best Actress Academy Award winner that deserves another look.  It's a very difficult role.  She earned that Oscar.  The role demands high concentration and specific interior work.  Bernadette is a sweet young girl of little education.  She's of a Catholic peasant family in a small town.  She gets her scholastic and religious education from the church.  It's very institutionalized and rigid.  Do as the nuns and priests tell you to do.  Memorize and, like a parrot, repeat back what you've been taught.  Don't question authority.  Believe all the Bible stories.  It's all very corporate and confining.  But there's a priest she likes and she loves the holy cards.  Especially one with a picture of the Virgin Mary.  She feels more spiritual freedom, more communion with Heaven, when she's out in the woods with her friends and family.  That's when her spirit sings.  There's also Antoine, the handsome young village hunk who's in love with Bernadette.  Then, one day in the woods with her friends, something seems to call to Bernadette's soul.  It's not something the others can hear.  Only she can.  She sees a beautiful lady in the grotto.  It's a radiant vision.  Bernadette sees the Virgin Mary.  Her soul is illuminated by this vision.  This vision occurs on land that is near a city dump.

This is where Jones' acting craft shines.  Her internal work is so specific and on point.  When this peasant girl sees that vision of radiant beauty and peace, she's not going to be wide-eye like Dorothy Gale seeing the dead legs of the Wicked Witch of the East under her house in The Wizard of Oz.  This is an intense spiritual transformation and a heavenly song shared between two women -- the Virgin Mary and that simple peasant girl.  We have to see that Bernadette is in an altered state, a heavenly state on earth, and having a vivid conversation that is telepathic.  Her soul is speaking.  Heaven is speaking to it.  This new female bond is so special that even Bernadette is unaware of how special it -- and she -- are.  She does not know what Immaculate Conception means.  Such a great, eloquent love story this is between two female figures.  Bernadette devotes herself to the Beautiful Lady.  Until the day she dies,  Bernadette will be in conflict with the Catholic Church.  The very institution that taught her to believe in miracles and to believe in Jesus Christ, a Savior born in poverty, will constantly put on her on trial.  The Church's stance is that miracles do not happen.  Saints do not appear to the poor.  But the faithful flock to Lourdes when miracles do happen.  They believe.  As they flock, religion proves to be good business for greedy local merchants and local officials.

If, for one minute, Jennifer Jones seems like she's acting in a fantasy film versus a spiritual love story, this whole film falls apart.  We must believe in her innocence.  We must believe in her visions.  We must feel her supreme love for The Lady of the Rosary.  We must know that Bernadette's grotto in the woods is more a more sacred and free place of worship than the convent where her spirit is humiliated and abused in the name of Christ.  Her spirit cannot sing within the thick cold walls of organized religion.

There are several hearts in this movie.  Anne Revere as Bernadette's durable and loving mother is memorable.  She knows that life goes fast, particularly life for a peasant girl in a bleak town.  Then there is the moment when the mother is an awe of the child.  She's humbled when she realizes that Bernadette was born for greatness.  The mother knows her child will become legend.  She will not be just another poor girl in that dreary French village who becomes old before her time..  She has been blessed with a great gift.

Director Henry King shows us how legend is born.  After a miracle happens with the help of Bernadette, the news passes from villager to villager.  Townspeople, mostly the women, gather and follow her.  This doesn't change Bernadette.  She remains devoted to the Heavenly Mother.  She does not seek fame or glory or special treatment.  While she contends with the men out to discredit her accounts, she enters a convent.  Here we have a gorgeously shot and acted love scene.  Bernadette leaves her village for a new life as a nun.  The love she has for the Heavenly Mother is more sublime than any romantic love she could have for a man on earth.  She will think fondly of Antoine.

She has committed herself to the Virgin Mary.  During her ride, Antoine stops her coach, gives her flowers and bids her adieu and good wishes.  He understands what she must do.  Yet he loves her so that he commits to her.  He shall never marry.  Again, Bernadette's soul is illuminated as she tenderly hands him a flower in return.  Her journey continues.  Bernadette can help miracles happen for others but not herself.  In the convent is her strict former teacher.  This nun is filled with jealousy because of Bernadette's fame and gift.  She will have to undergo a spiritual transformation herself.

Gladys Cooper played the jealous sister a year after playing the mean mother in Now, Voyager.  Even as Bernadette lay dying of bone cancer, the men of the Church try to get her to say that she lied.  That she never saw the Immaculate Conception.  "I did see her," she says with a weak voice.  Then she has one more vision and, almost orgasmically, proclaims her love Our Lady of the Rosary.  With her dying breath, she overcomes organized religion, archaic rules and Catholic male suppression.  Bernadette calls out to the Beautiful Lady in the room, "I love you!  I love you!  I love you!"  Yes, this is an outstanding performance you need to see.  Besides the Best Actress Academy Award victory, The Song of Bernadette also received nominations for Best Picture and Best Director.  Spend some time with Jennifer Jones in Lourdes.  And try the water.  You'll feel better.

DVD Double Feature

If you're up for a DVD double feature this holiday weekend, I've got a rental tip for you.  Michelle Williams, currently in the Best Actress Academy Award race right now for her performance as Marilyn Monroe in My Week With Marilyn, inspired my movie picks.  First, see Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as investigative newspaper journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in All The President's Men.  Alan J. Pakula directed this tense, true drama about the two reporters for The Washington Post.

Their righteously maverick coverage of the Watergate scandal for the newspaper eventually lead to President Nixon's resignation while in office.  I remember watching Nixon resign live on network television.  His broadcast was quite a few minutes shorter than pro golfer Tiger Woods' "I cheated on my wife" mea culpa that, for some reason, also warranted live special broadcast network coverage decades later.

All The President's Men was a big hit and one of the best big Hollywood studio releases of the 1970s.  So much of the reporters' work was quite mundane.  Checking files at a library, making countless phone calls, taking notes, sitting through staff meetings.  But director Alan J. Pakula made it thrilling with a cast of fine actors doing solid work.  Not just the two stars, but supporting players like Jason Robards (who won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for this film), Jane Alexander, Hal Holbrook, Ned Beatty and Jack Warden.  There's a bit player named F. Murray Abraham as Arresting Officer #1.  He'd go on to win the Best Actor Oscar for his work in Amadeus, the Best Picture Academy Award winner for 1984.  The power of the press and the need for freedom of the press were at the heart of All The President's Men, an Oscar nominee for Best Picture of 1976.

The sizes of journalism classes in colleges increased with the popularity of this movie.  Then, and now, I felt that many of the students -- and I knew some -- really didn't want to be the dedicated investigative journalists doing the commonplace, tedious requirements of the craft.  They wanted to be Hoffman and Redford as Bernstein and Woodward.  I think this film was influential in the new wave of journalists as celebrities.  Like Geraldo Rivera.  There are young reporters on television today who, I bet, really don't fully know why the syllable "gate" is attached to a end of a word used in a new scandal story.  Especially a political scandal.  It comes from the Watergate break-in story.  Additionally, those young reporters probably don't know how news was gathered in the pre-internet and pre-cell phone days.  Bernstein and Woodward went to a library.  They didn't log onto Wikipedia for facts.  Look at what those two hardworking reporters did with typewriters, steno pads, ink pens and rotary telephones.  They brought down a President of the United States who overrode our Constitution.


Michelle Williams is an Oscar nominee for playing the Hollywood legend who famously sang a sexy rendition of "Happy Birthday" to President John F. Kennedy -- Marilyn Monroe.

It's her third Oscar nomination.  One for playing a tragic Hollywood movie queen and two for playing young women in troubled working class marriages.  After you've seen All The President's Men, see Michelle Williams give a bright comedy performance as the bespectacled high schooler, Arlene Lorenzo, in Dick.  For a truly funny political satire, you can't beat Dick.  Michelle Williams and Kirsten Dunst star as two clueless high school girls on a field trip who wander off during a White House tour and meet Richard M. Nixon. 

They bumble their way into becoming the official White House dog walkers.  Not only that, they're chosen as special White House youth advisors to President Nixon during his Watergate crisis.  The girls feel that they're doing their patriotic duty.  As Michelle's Arlene character says, "We're human beings and we're American citizens.  And four score and seven years ago, our forefathers......did something."

Dan Hedaya is an absolute hoot as Richard Nixon.  Harry Shearer is G. Gordon Liddy.  Ana Gasteyer (now a neighbor on the ABC sitcom, Suburgatory) plays Rose Mary Woods.  As did Robert Redford in All The President's Men, Will Ferrell plays investigative journalist Bob Woodward.  A smart, well-written comedy and Williams is quite winning as a sweet dimwit.  This 1999 release didn't get much national box office attention but it's very clever, very entertaining and a fun reminder that Michelle Williams can get laughs. Follow All The President's Men with Dick and you can't go wrong.  That's my DVD Double Feature tip for your holiday weekend.  Happy Presidents' Day.

My Mom in Hollywood

When I was a youngster growing up in South Central Los Angeles, this cowboy made it possible for my mother to buy me some new shoes for Catholic school.

This was back in the 1960s.  My parents had divorced and Mom needed extra income.  Dad was a postal clerk for the Terminal Annex in downtown L.A.  Mom was a registered nurse, a veteran of much hospital duty.  If you see old TV shows and movies in which nurses wear white uniforms with starched caps, matching white regulation shoes and white stockings that made their legs look like drumsticks ready to be deep fried, that's just how our mother dressed for years going to and coming home from work.  Mom loved being an R.N. (Registered Nurse).  She loved being in the nurse's union.  It was my mother who taught me "Mind your manners," "Don't talk to strangers" and "Never cross a picket line."  By the time Mom and Dad had separated, she was working as a public health nurse.  The hours were more stable than hospital hours.  No night shifts.  She could be home for dinner.  And she didn't have to wear a white nurse's uniform at the clinics.  Working in the community, Mom met some women who did domestic work in Hollywood.  Two of them dropped by our house.  I remember Mom chatting with them one sunny Saturday afternoon on our front lawn about working for celebrities.  I wasn't even in high school at that time but I was already fascinated with the movies and the folks who made them.  These two black women with Mom were in shop-talk mode.  In sharing their occupational experiences, the two ladies mentioned that "the people you really want to work for are Peter Lorre...

...or Elizabeth Taylor.  You work for them and you can't tell if you're the domestic help or a houseguest. They treat you that well."

One added, "You have your work cut out for you when you work for Elizabeth Taylor.  Being a movie star, she's not used to picking up after herself but she will treat you right."  The other woman, who had worked for Peter Lorre, commented "He made me lunch!  We sat there and ate lunch together at his table."  Different from any dialogue you heard in The Help, isn't it?  They hooked my sophisticated, college-educated mother up with an agency to contact so she could make some extra cash money on Saturdays working for a Hollywood wife.  One day, Mom came home and told me that she'd gotten an extra job.  The woman who hired her, she calmly revealed, "...is married to Stoney Burke."

Wow! I could not wait to get to school and brag to my classmates that my mom would be working for TV star, Jack Lord.  She would be in the home of the man who played rodeo cowboy Stoney Burke on ABC!  Mom gave me that "hold your horses" look and told me this was news to keep within the family.  I do remember Mom calling me on a Saturday after finishing her part time work.  She told me to be ready.  She'd drive home, get me and take me to Thom McAn's to buy me new shoes for school.  My mother is now in her 80s and recovering in a good facility from a fall in her house.  She had leg problems and another health issue.  I visited her last weekend.  Odd to see the nurse convalescing in bed and in need of a nurse's care.  Mom and I talked for hours.  It was a wonderful visit.  She was healing and in great humor.  She brought up her brief time being employed by Marie Lord, Jack Lord's wife.  Mom liked her and appreciated her very much.  She said that Jack Lord "...was very particular about how he wanted his shirts ironed.  Starch in the collar."                                                                   

Like my mother, I'm older now too.  I had to crash through some of the same color barriers that my mom -- and dad -- did as a black person in America.  I have so much more respect for my mother taking that job with no trace of ego or vanity.  In fact, in order to make that extra household money doing someone else's laundry, she tried to play down her educational background and skills.  My mother had assisted doctors in surgery.  To get the job, which paid cash, she tried to seem less educated than she was.  Apparently, Mrs. Lord caught on when -- during casual talk about movies -- Mom gushed about how much she loved Simone Signoret in Stanley Kramer's Ship of Fools.  Not only that, Mom thought it was one of her best performances since Room at the Top, the British film that brought the French star the Oscar for Best Actress of 1959.  Mrs. Lord knew immediately that there was more to this woman who was ironing her clothes.  This black employee was, in a way, playing a part.  She was acting the role of a minor character in a Hollywood home.  Mom said that they then "just talked like a couple o' women" and she explained to Mrs. Lord that she was a newly-divorced working mother of three.  Without alimony.  And two of her three kids were in Catholic school.  Mrs. Lord offered my mother a different job.  More upscale, with more money.  Mom said, "She wanted me to be her social secretary but I felt I just couldn't do it with three kids to raise."  Life was changing for our mother.  Life would soon change for Mrs. Lord and Mr. Lord.  "We're moving to Hawaii," she told Mom one Saturday.  The job of ironing Jack Lord's shirts came to a comfortable end because he had to move.  Jack Lord had booked a new acting job.  He was relocating to start a new TV series for CBS:  Hawaii Five-O.

The rest is TV history.  The star of series is part of our Rivers Family history.  I loved that tropical cop show.  I'd watch Jack Lord as Detective Steve McGarrett. Every time he said "Book 'em, Danno," I'd think "Wow, my mom used to iron his shirts.  His wife was really kind to my mom."  And my mother was really kind to do that extra work for us kids.  She tried to make herself seem less than she was so she could do more for her children.

In CASABLANCA: Dooley Noted

I've been looking through my mother's high school yearbook.  In New Jersey, she was in Montclair High School's Class of 1942.  What strikes me about Mom's yearbook is the racial diversity of her class.  Not at all like the depiction of high school classes you saw in MGM, Paramount or other major Hollywood studio movies of the 1940s.  Think of the Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland musicals like Strike Up The Band and Babes in Arms.  Those groups of musical teens eager to put on a show in New York City were all white.  They weren't racially mixed like the Montclair High School boys' soccer and track teams, the girls' basketball and field hockey teams, the Latin club and the glee clubs.  Just imagine if those old Hollywood movie studios had embraced racial diversity.  My mother and her high school classmates in 1942 would've liked that.  One of the things that irked glamorous Lena Horne the most when the singer was under contract to MGM, the Tiffany shop for movie musicals, was that she never got to interact with the studio's white musical stars on camera.  She did featured numbers in A-list MGM productions but her songs were separate from the film's action.  Horne had broken through a barrier in how we blacks were shown in Hollywood films, especially black women, but she was still within margins in a pre-Civil Rights era.  The Hollywood roles for black actors in the 1930s and 40s were mostly under-educated maids or manservants.  This is why I see Casablanca as revolutionary in a sophisticated, subtle way.  Sam, the nightclub headliner played by Dooley Wilson, is a Hollywood breakthrough character.

Sam is not a servant, a train porter or a dining car waiter.  He's a top act at a swanky, popular nightclub.  He's also the hero's friend and confidante.  The hero, as famously played by Humphrey Bogart, is Rick Blaine.  He's the tough American who "came to Casablanca for the waters."  It became Hollywood folklore that Lena Horne's elegant MGM musical numbers were shot separate from the movies' main action so that they could be cut out when the movies played down South.  In his fascinating, revealing and under-appreciated Lena Horne biography, Stormy Weather: The Life of Lena Horne, author James Gavin disputes that folklore with evidence while addressing Hollywood racial discrimination of the time.  But Horne absolutely did not get to do scenes and have dialogue with her Caucasian MGM studio co-workers who were the stars of big musicals in which she performed -- stars such as Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney,  Gene Kelly, Kathryn Grayson, Esther Williams, Van Johnson, Janet Leigh and Tom Drake.  She was woven into the action solely in films with all-black casts such as Vincente Minnelli's sophisticated 1943 adaptation of the Broadway musical fantasy, Cabin in the Sky.  She starred in the less sophisticated and oddly-titled 20th Century Fox all-black musical comedy, Stormy Weather.  If Dooley Wilson had not been allowed to do scenes with the Caucasian stars of Casablanca, the 1943 Best Picture Oscar winner, or if key scenes with them had been cut out down South to appeal to bigoted minds, the film would've fallen apart.  As Sam, Wilson's musical numbers are not just featured scenes like Horne's in MGM musicals like Words and Music and Thousands Cheer.  Sam's numbers are the musical backstory.  He acts opposite each star in a key scene that advances the story.  He has history with Rick and with Rick's great love, Ilsa, famously played by Ingrid Bergman.  We sense this history when she, with a wistful smile says, "You used to be a much better liar, Sam."  Try to imagine this movie without Ingrid Bergman saying to Dooley Wilson "Play it, Sam.  Play 'As Time Goes By.'"  What a great scene.

That sets up the heart of this film.  Not only is it a classic Hollywood movie scene, it's a scene critical to that movie classic.  So is another scene with Sam.  He's alone with the movie's hero, Rick.  The nightclub owner, drunk and bitter, makes Sam play it again as he emotionally reels from having been reunited unexpectedly with the woman who broke his heart: "Of all the gin joints, in all the places, in all the world, she walks into mine."

This takes us into the important montage in the Julius and Philip Epstein screenplay.  It shows us Rick and Ilsa's love story and how it was severely, darkly interrupted by the Nazi regime.  Sam was with them in Paris.  The lovers were separated by war.  Ilsa comes back into Rick's life.  She's married.  Sam knows the love story, the secrets and the music that goes with it all.  Here was Sam, a best friend and classy nightclub entertainer.  How many times in an old Hollywood film did you see a black character share a bottle of champagne with -- not just one -- but two Caucasian lead characters?

THAT was major.  Whenever there's a TV channel doing a salute to Black History Month with presentations of and looks at classic films, Casablanca is never included.  It should be.  A Broadway actor, Dooley Wilson originated the role of Joe in Cabin in the Sky done in the film version by Eddie "Rochester" Anderson.  Ethel Waters, with that glorious voice of hers, recreated her stage role as Joe's wife for Vincente Minnelli's directorial debut.  A new song was written for her to introduce in the film.  Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg's "Happiness Is Just A Thing Called Joe" was an Oscar nominee for Best Song.

Waters (at the far left of the of photo with Eddie Anderson and Lena Horne) was the second black person to be nominated for an Academy Award, thanks to her supporting performance in the 1949 Elia Kazan race drama, Pinky.  The maid role Ethel Waters played in Pinky was the second film role the recording and Broadway musical star got after 1943's Cabin in the Sky.  The first black person to be an Oscar nominee was Hattie McDaniel.  She was the first nominee and the first winner, awarded Best Supporting Actress for her work as the sturdy, all-knowing, no-nonsense Mammy to iron-willed Scarlett O'Hara in 1939's classic Civil War drama, Gone With The Wind.

After the Oscar victory, McDaniel would spend pretty much the rest of her film career playing maids.  She'd frequently have a skimpy role as a maid even though she'd be the only member of the cast who'd won an Oscar.  Look at the satirical comedy, The Male Animal.  In that 1942 feature,  Hattie's a stereotypical black maid in a scene with Olivia de Havilland, Henry Fonda, Jack Carson and Joan Leslie.  She's the only actor in the scene who'd won an Oscar and made major Academy Awards history.  But she has the bit part with lines like "Yes'm.  I'll get it."  Hollywood largely under-utilized the skills of this talented, charismatic actress after her Oscar victory.

Hattie McDaniel acted in another project that made Academy Awards racial history.  She had a brief role as a singing mammy cook in Disney's Song of the South (1946).

James Baskett played her friend on the plantation grounds, storyteller Uncle Remus.  For his work, Mr. Baskett became the first black man to get an Academy Award.  He was given an honorary Oscar for his work in the live action/animated Disney musical.

Actress Ingrid Bergman handed Mr. Baskett his honorary Oscar.  With them onstage was Hollywood humanitarian, Jean Hersholt.  Neither Hattie McDaniel nor James Baskett could attend the Atlanta premieres of the films that brought them Academy Awards because of racial segregation.

Sam in Casablanca was sort of a Bobby Short many years before the dapper entertainer became the darling of New York City's ritziest nightspots.  Think of Bobby Short singing "I'm In Love Again" in Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters (1986).

One final note about Dooley Wilson's piano man character that thrills me:  When Rick sells his nightclub to Sydney Greenstreet's hefty character in the last act, he proves to be a great boss and a true friend.  He sells only if his longtime employees are kept on in their jobs.  That includes Sam.  For Sam, Rick negotiates a very nice pay raise.

Sam did better financially with Rick in Casablanca in 1943 than I did with the guy who became my ex-broadcast agent in New York City in 1999.  And there you have it.  

The Grammys

I hope you like my number Sunday night on the Grammys.  As you know, I'm in the singing group of aging male babyboomers called 'N Debt.  Live on the Grammys telecast, we'll debut our new single, "My 401(k) Went...Bye Bye Bye."  It's a cut off our new CD that drops next week -- LakTose 'N Tolerant.

TiVo our number on the Grammy Awards.  If you can figure out how to do that.  Put your glasses on.  Or, better yet, just ask one of the kids to do it for you.

Cameron Crowe Got Wilder

One of my favorite films of 2000 which became one of my favorite films of the previous decade is Almost Famous, written and directed by Cameron Crowe.  That warm, witty, sophisticated comedy is a valentine to the more innocent, less corporate-influenced rock music scene of the 1970s.

Inside this valentine were Patrick Fugit and Billy Crudup as two guys involved with the same girl.  Kate Hudson was golden as the girl, Penny Lane.

With that relationship at the heart of Almost Famous, it's like a classic film that won the Best Picture of 1960 Academy Award.  It's a movie dear to Cameron Crowe's heart -- Billy Wilder's The Apartment starring Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine and Fred MacMurray.

In The Apartment, one of the two guys involved with the same girl is an ambitious young male, one must learn to become a mensch (look it up).  The girl will need to have her stomach pumped.

In Almost Famous, one of the two guys involved with the same girl is an ambitious young male, one must learn to become a mensch.  The girl will need to have her stomach pumped.  It's Christmastime in The Apartment and in Almost Famous.

In both films there's deceit and "love disguised as sex, and sex disguised as love" as wise Lester Bangs (played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman) says in Crowe's Almost Famous.  A personal highlight for me in 2000 was the opportunity to be Crowe's interviewer for a one hour live national broadcast in New York City.  The audience was packed with New York University students who'd just seen the film in a special preview before it opened.  Just as Steven Spielberg did to the American Film Institute in a video interview on YouTube, Crowe told the audience full of future screenwriters and directors that they must study the film classics, especially the black and white ones made before the 1980s.  In our interview, the students learned that Crowe's paramount inspiration when writing Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Say Anything, Jerry Maguire and Almost Famous was Hollywood's master writer and director, Billy Wilder.  Crowe was lucky enough to spend time with the man who invited us up to The Apartment, parked us on Sunset Blvd., taught us about the Double Indemnity clause, showed us an Ace in the Hole, proved that Some Like It Hot and gave us a taste of The Fortune Cookie.  He got to know Billy Wilder.

I highly recommend adding Cameron Crowe's book, Conversations with Wilder, to your classic film library.  This would be a sweet Valentine's Day gift for a classic film lover.

In a way, Almost Famous is also a valentine to Billy Wilder's The Apartment.  Before we took to the stage for the interview, Crowe and I met and chatted briefly outside the theatre.  I had seen the film twice.  I loved it that much.  I paid to see it again when it opened.  I commented to him, knowing of his Wilder appreciation, "Penny Lane had a quality that reminded me of Fran Kubelik."  Man, did he break a smile at that one!  My reference to Shirley MacLaine in The Apartment delighted him.

Not only was he delighted, he was complimented.  He response to my expressed feeling about Kate Hudson's character in Almost Famous was "That just what I was going for."

In the interview, I asked Cameron Crowe questions and I took some from the students in the audience.  More than once, he was asked for advice on screenwriting.  His immediate answer was always, "Watch the films of Billy Wilder."  I'm blogging this to, once again, remind young aspiring filmmakers and actors that watching those old Hollywood classics is part of your homework.  If you wanted to be a Broadway musical star, you couldn't just pay attention to musicals starting with and coming after A Chorus Line.  You'd have to know Rodgers & Hammerstein classics, Cole Porter shows, Pal Joey, Porgy and Bess and Showboat.  And not just you future actors, directors and writers.  That goes for you entertainment reporters too.  Director Sydney Pollack remade the sophisticated comedy, Sabrina. There was a New York City press junket for the 1995 release that starred Harrison Ford, Julia Ormond and Greg Kinnear.

A buddy of mine who worked on the press junket production crew told me she was shocked at how many of the TV entertainment reporters had not done their homework before taping the interviews.  They hadn't even read the movie's press kit.  She said that many of them didn't know that Pollack's film was a remake of a 1954 Billy Wilder hit.

A hit starring Humphrey Bogart, Audrey Hepburn and William Holden.  In fact, Billy Wilder guided Hepburn to another Best Actress Academy Award nomination for her performance as Sabrina.  Trust me on this -- professionals in the entertainment industry can always tell who's done some homework.  There's nothing wrong with being young and cute on camera when you sit opposite a star to conduct an interview.  But you need something else to back it up.  Cuteness will carry you only so far.  Do your homework. About Almost Famous...I have a great affection for that film.  It felt so real to me.  I had my first professional broadcast job at a rock radio station in the 1970s.  I was the new "uncool" guy, like the dedicated young Rolling Stone magazine journalist on the road with a rock band in Crowe's movie.  I also lost my heart to a girl as radiant to me as Penny Lane was to the the journalist and to Russell, the very cool guitarist ("I am a golden god!"). I related to William, the Rolling Stone writer.  I also related to Ed, the quiet drummer usually seated alone on the bus.  Kate Hudson was rightfully Oscar-nominated for the performance.  It's still her best work.  Frances McDormand was also a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nominee for her fabulous, funny work as the outspoken widowed high school teacher mom of the traveling journalist ("Rock stars have kidnapped my son."). I had a teacher just like that in high school.  McDormand wore the same kind of floral print earthy clothing that Mrs. Ogren did in history class.  McDormand had the same strong presence and attitude.  Even the same hairdo. Wow.  That really took me back.

There was an actor who stood out to me in a hotel lobby scene.  His character was the harried front desk clerk and the actor had less than five lines:  "You have a message from Elaine, your mother.  She's a handful."  But the actor made his bit part shine.  Ten years later, I watched the premiere of a new ABC sitcom because I recognized his face in the commercials.  The actor playing the hotel clerk -- Eric Stonestreet, now the award-winning star of Modern Family.

Almost Famous brought Crowe an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.  I still feel the movie should've been up for Best Picture.  About Billy Wilder's The Apartment...if you've never seen it...rent it.  That classic is very dear to my heart too.  Billy Wilder got to see Almost Famous.  Cameron Crowe told me about the legendary director's reaction to it.

If you've never seen Almost Famous...you should rent that too.