On the one hand, Robert Rauschenberg never seems to hurry when he’s home on Captiva Island–a densely populated winter hideaway for CEOs and celebrities off the southwest Florida coast. He smiles easily, speaks in a flannelly Texas drawl only partially blunted by his 40 years in the New York and international art worlds. He talks of looking forward to “the good old useless days.” On the other hand, Rauschenberg’s looks–thick wavy hair, slightly flattened features acknowledging his quarter-Cherokee heritage and clear hazel eyes–belie a man of 65. His spacious house and studio on 37 acres churn with enough artistic production to occupy a staff of six (artist-assistants, administrators and a janitor). And the office for ROCI (Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange, or “Rocky,” a kind of rolling-thunder tour of his art), at the University of South Florida in Tampa, employs a few more. If Rauschenberg is indeed the American Picasso, as some people think, he’s got at least another 20 years of gritty urban imagery still in him.
Like Picasso, Rauschenberg is an artist who, in the process of wandering all over the place, actually operates in compartmentalized periods of intense improvisation and invention. “If something is an idea before it’s a work, if I can avoid it, I do,” he says. “The piece that you’re working on–whether it’s sculpture, dance, anything–is the idea.” His painting-plus-found-object “Combines” of 1955-62 established him as an important artist and, in the bargain, managed to link the unlinkable: abstract expressionism and pop art. In 1958 he began flirting with (or inventing, depending on the source) “transfer drawing,” in which newspaper photographs are doused with solvent to loosen the ink, and then rubbed off in reverse onto paper. But the most fruitful–and perhaps the best–Rauschenberg period was 1962-64, when he produced the silk-screen paintings that are the subject of one of the better recent exhibitions at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art (through March 17).
In silk screen, the image is created by squeegeeing gelatinous ink through a piece of silk stretched tautly across a frame onto whatever material is underneath. Normally the purpose is a matched set of posters, prints or T shirts. Rauschenberg’s aim was to get his collage sensibility (the most compelling since dada’s Kurt Schmitters) directly onto canvas and into painting. The net effect in the 37 mostly large paintings in the Whitney show (roughly half the series) is an oddly benevolent roller-coaster ride through JFK-vintage America: astronauts, helicopters, skylines, Roger Maris and the late president himself. Although the iconography–pollinated with visual quotes from Rubens and Velazquez and allusions to Duchamp and Muybridge–will keep art-history doctoral candidates busy for generations, the real merit of the silk-screen paintings is simply that they’re so good looking. In fact, they’re such yummy examples of graphic design raised to fever pitch and heroic scale that it’s hard to imagine that there was ever a question of any reasonably sophisticated viewer not liking them. Which shows either how far we’ve come or–could it be?–how deceptively elegant Rauschenberg has always been.
He was born Milton Rauschenberg in 1925 in Port Arthur, Texas, the same cracking-plant metropolis that gave us Janis Joplin. At 18, the draft provided a way out. After the war (during which Rauschenberg worked in a Navy hospital), a friend convinced him he had drawing talent and directed him to Kansas City to study art. He paused in the K.C. bus terminal just long enough to decide on “Robert” as a new name for a new life and was soon gone to Paris. From Paris, Rauschenberg repaired to the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina where he became, as he puts it, the pet “intimidee” of the lab-coated, authoritarian, geometric abstractionist, Josef Albers. “I was sort of lucky,” he remembers, “because I was so totally unable to do what Albers expected of me.” Inevitably, Rauschenberg migrated north, to the hurly-burly art scene of New York.
There he hooked up with another young iconoclast, the painter Jasper Johns, and they in turn found mentors and senior soul mates in composer John Cage and dancer Merce Cunningham. While Johns has played it esthetically closer to the vest in the decades since (sticking mostly to paintings, prints and tabletop sculpture), Rauschenberg has, as they say, done it all: sound sculptures tuned to radio broadcasts, performance pieces with parachutes and turtles, a painting aiming to be a quarter-mile long and the world’s biggest, and collaborations with local artisans in Mexico, India, Russia and China.
After he somewhat scandalously won the grand prize for painting at the 1964 Venice Biennale, Rauschenberg phoned a friend in New York, asking him to destroy the screens so that he could avoid his professed worst nightmare, repeating himself (Rauschenberg was careful, however, to print a set of the images on paper, from which he made a few postscript pieces, such as “New York Bird Calls for Oyvind Fahlstrom,” in 1965.) But the silk-screen paintings remain at the core of Rauschenberg’s work. He’s never given up the medium entirely and, in the last several years, has resuscitated it on metal. The north and east walls of the single-room second floor of his Captiva house are covered with big works from the ghostly “Borealis” series, which hasn’t been shown yet. The exploited images are typical Rauschenberg favorites: oil cans, Charleston porch railings and rocket boosters, with the added exoticism of Eastern religious figures. The stunning, coppery pieces combine silkscreen and chemical dyeing; the result is eerie, oil-sticky colors that change in the light from rose to gold, from electric blue to gasoline sheen.
In 1961, Rauschenberg said, “There is no reason not to consider the world as one gigantic painting.” He certainly does, and for a long time he’s been pilfering bits of it to stick into his own paintings, which are (compared to the world, at least) really tiny little collages. These he puts back into the painting-that-is-the-world and starts all over again. His champions hail him for this as a founding father of mix ’n’ match postmodernism. And in small amounts, or in carefully cordoned-off sections as with the Whitney show, Rauschenberg is always refreshing, sometimes even breathtaking. But his great flaws as an artist lie right up against his virtues. He’s so facile and sensitive, especially in composition, that every collision of images looks deft and “right” in the same way. And he’s so passionately egalitarian about pictures that one particular combination of them doesn’t seem to mean something especially different from another. His working method is a little like salsa: pour enough of it over anything and you’ve got fill-in-the-blank ranchero.
But Rauschenberg is still the most jovially muscular American artist out there. Compared to him, the younger generation of “media artists” looks doctrinaire and prissy, and the latest brushy painters cramped and academic. Contrary to almost all of them, Rauschenberg still looks like he’s having a good time with art. And he’s not afraid, as one critic erroneously reported, of “being written off " because “I never wanted to be on.” Perhaps when ROCI takes its hard-earned rest and the “Borealis” series goes public, Rauschenberg will be revealed to be once again at the top of his form. In the meantime, the silk-screen paintings at the Whitney remind us of just how good that can be.
title: “Back To The Future” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-09” author: “Jaime Higginson”
Sometimes when I am working my clumsy way through the once inconceivable electronic, cordless present I think of my own long-departed parents, when they were young and (they no doubt thought) on the cutting edge of modernity. I interrupt their 1920s courtship–the poky car they considered a new-age marvel, the relatively novel telephone and telegram and radio and movie culture in which they were comfortable and their parents were not, the manner of self-presentation and dress their parents denounced as indecent, and the cockiness with which they considered themselves newly secure in their physical health on the basis of medical advances we now consider primitive. I try to tell them about space stations and the Internet and heart and liver transplants and cell phones and laptops. I say: look, I can sit up here in this airplane, which will get me to Europe in a very few hours, and type a story and file it to an office in Washington and exchange messages and phone calls with people around the world–all right here in my airplane seat. They are agog. But then they make the same mistake social analysts and prophets and visionaries always make. They think that life will have been transformed by these blessings in ways it has not been.
Yes, there is a sense–an important one–in which life has been transformed from the past in our age, just as it was transformed from an earlier time in theirs. Illness, ignorance and want have obviously not been eliminated. But millions upon millions of people living today, who not all that long ago would have been direly afflicted by all three, will never know them in anything like their once common form, if they know them at all. Better, faster and more are the defining terms of our culture and our condition. I don’t see how anyone could doubt that or fail to be awed by the way both physical and intellectual access have been expanded so you can go anywhere and/or learn anything with a speed that only a couple of decades ago, never mind a generation back, would have seemed merely fanciful, sci-fi stuff. And if we know anything, it is that this kind of progression is certain to continue.
Such predictions have always been a pretty safe bet. There were Greeks, there were Renaissance figures (of whom Leonardo was but one) and there were 19th-century figures, such as even the poet Tennyson, whose imaginations enabled them to see well beyond the scientific confines of their times. And so of course can we. What is harder to see is a day when human nature and human life on earth will have been commensurately transformed. What I am saying is that the humanists’ insights will probably always be more to the point than the imagery of technological marvels yet to be. What Shakespeare uniquely knew about the human mind and heart and the timeless human predicament will be just as apt a millennium or two from now as it is today and was 400 years ago. The uses to which actual, famously fallible people put the newfangled marvels will still be the issue.
I think of this when the lawyer-commentators are taking us through the latest permutations of the O.J. case. All the knowledge about DNA, all the supersensitive means of analyzing microscopic traces of blood and hair and all, do not get you past an ancient kind of drama and an equally familiar set of responses to it by accuser and accused. I think of the dear old Newt mess, entangled as it now is in interception technology, unencrypted cell-phone messages, arguments about which kind of cable connector to which kind of recording device from which kind of scanner went into the notoriously taped phone call.
And, above all, I think of the tremendous conflicts in this country over the uses to which the new technologies will be put. These are conflicts riding on moral choices, and the mathematical principle has not been thought of that can resolve them. We fight about who gets the good of the lifesaving device and technique. This can be a fight among equally needy individuals for a scarce resource or a fight between generations about how much one person must pay to extend another’s longevity. We fight about where we should put our pooled resources to get the good of the burgeoning knowledge–in space? in bombs? in basic research? We fight about who owns the new knowledge and its fruits, who has proprietary rights, who is entitled to privacy, who should be able to hook up with whom. We fight about what to do when a new scientific blessing, as is so often the case, comes accompanied by a curse–the pesticide or vehicle or energy source that saves and also, simultaneously, sickens or kills. Decked out in our ever newer skills and abilities and seemingly magical potential, facing the glowing screens of our new life, soaring above the earth, bouncing back from a long dreaded and once mortal disease, guess what? It’s the same old us.
I think it is awfully important to remember this as the rhetoric ascends toward the millennial moment, starting this week and gaining verbal altitude as the turn of the century nears. There are not and never can be any scientific rules whereby we can perfect ourselves the way we can perfect certain objects and processes in the physical world. And in this limitation will always reside our potential glory and our potential shame. It will always be easier to do the scientifically impossible thing (as we contemporaneously think of it) than to do the personally possible but difficult thing –the right thing by ourselves and by others and by the technologically amazing world we have concocted to live in. I believe, in other words, that my seemingly quaint, flapper-age parents, once they got the hang of the gadgetry, would be as at home in this world as we all would be in the super-duper one about to come. So far as its human inhabitants are concerned, we would have seen it all before.
title: “Back To The Future” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-18” author: “Joe Marino”
title: “Back To The Future” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-06” author: “Justin Smith”
Late last week, exactly two weeks after the crime, somebody dumped Kukura near his home in broad daylight. The oil tycoon was so disoriented sources suggest somebody may have pumped him full of heroin as well. LUKOil denies that any ransom was paid for his release. As yet, authorities seem to have no clue who grabbed him. The case promises to end as mysteriously as it began.
Episodes like this might not have been as shocking in the old gangster days of Boris Yeltsin’s newly post-Soviet Russia. But this is 2002, and Kukura is among the highest-ranking businessmen in the country. The president is supposed to be overseeing a sober, authoritarian and decriminalized New Russia, as some call it. But suddenly it’s back to the bad old days of the “Wild East.” Kukura’s case is just one of a slew of recent incidents that seem to herald another open season on leading businessmen and politicians. The day after Kukura was kidnapped, an airport customs chief was fatally shot near his office. Duma parliamentarian Vladimir Golovlyov was assassinated on Aug. 21 while walking his dog in the woods near his home. Just the day before, the deputy head of the Moscow Railways had been gunned down in his neighborhood. Outside Moscow, the vice governor of the Smolensk region was shot seven times on Aug. 7, and elsewhere the deputy mayor of Novosibirsk (the second deputy mayor from the city to be killed in 11 months) was gunned down while leaving his parents’ dacha on Aug. 26. And that’s just to name a few.
Most Russians refuse to describe these killings were “political,” even when the victims held elective office. Most believe the deaths (like Kukura’s kidnapping) are linked to the same factors that drove the Wild East of old: the creation and frantic redistribution of wealth in the Putin era and, on a lesser scale, the settling of old feuds. Kukura, for instance, knows all about the financial dealings of LUKOil–a company that handles more than 20 percent of all of Russia’s oil exports. And, with war looming in Iraq, there’s no business that stands to yield more profit in Russia nowadays than oil. After Kukura’s kidnapping, LUKOil issued a statement saying some of the information Kukura was privy to could be classified as “state secrets.” The list of those with a possible interest in such information is long, from mafia gangs to business competitors to rogue security agents and feuding groups within LUKOil.
In other words, Russia hasn’t changed as much in the past decade as many would have hoped, says Yuri Shchekochikhin, vice chairman of the Duma’s Committee on Security. Pointing to the Audis and Mercedeses in the Parliament’s parking lot, not to mention the lawmakers in tailored suits walking around with bodyguards, he notes the monthly salary of the typical deputy: about $300. “This Parliament is filled with ‘businessmen’,” he says. “Politics is just their krisha,” or roof–Russian slang for mafia-style protection. “It wasn’t like this a few years ago,” he adds, suggesting a reason for the regression. As Shchekochikhin sees it, Russia is spiraling into the same cause-and-effect scenario it experienced in the bloody early ’90s. Now that the leadership has changed hands, new sectors of the economy are up for grabs, especially in the red-hot energy sector, and no one is wasting any time in fighting for them. LUKOil, for one, is pushing for new oil fields in Siberia; other oligarch groups are expanding into the auto and chemical industries, or into Russia’s newly privatized agricultural land. At the same time, the Putin administration is likely to break up monopolies that were created from the great post-Soviet feeding frenzy over state property: railroads and banks, pension funds and utilities. Many of these assets are in the hands of Soviet-style Moscow bureaucrats and regional administrative bosses–and they’re not likely to let them go peacefully. “There will be a lot of emotion,” warns Lilia Shevtsova, Moscow analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center. “And murder.”
Dabbling in business means that politicians, too, have become targets. Eight legislators have been murdered since 1991–including Golovlyov, who had already survived one assassination attempt earlier this year. Golovlyov’s allies insist his killing was political. The 45-year-old parliamentarian was known as a liberal lawmaker, a democrat who did not hesitate to criticize the Kremlin on everything from the war in Chechnya to the meltdown of free political discourse in the Putin era. But few outside his party are buying it. Golovlyov was also the focus of a corruption probe that involved the embezzling of tens of millions of dollars from the Urals region, where he supervised the privatization of state property in the early ’90s. Right before his assassination, he was threatening to name names.
If all this feels like deja vu, there’s at least one unsettling difference. These days, says Shchekochikhin, it’s not the old mafia that’s calling the shots in crime. That role, he says, “has been usurped by the government.” Gangs might be able to take over a small business, but only if their local militia gives the green light. Corrupt government officials also see the new climate as a second chance at missed opportunities from the past. Because Russia’s legal system is both arbitrary and abused, it is not hard to re-examine past privatization deals and find fault with them, especially when judges can and have been paid off.
One thing is clear. Politicians and businessmen are now fair game–and their murderers are not likely to be caught. It’s also said that the best mafia-style “protection” a person can get nowadays is from the Interior Ministry, the Federal Security Service (FSB) or the tax police. Those groups can make or break you in Putin’s Russia. “Everyone now knows that the Prosecutor’s Office or the FSB is the best ‘roof’ you could ever have,” says Sergey Yushenkov, coleader of the Liberal Russia Party. How ironic, at a time when old-style mafia roughnecks are happy to give up their former life. “Most have enough money. They’ve given up their red suits and their Jeep Pajeros, and their children are long since enrolled in Swiss schools,” says analyst Shevtsova. “They want to be respected and are rejecting their old and dirty tricks.” But that just means someone else–a force not classified as a criminal group–is adopting those same dirty tricks. Kukura’s abduction and Golovlyov’s killing prove that old habits die hard, especially when the stakes–once again–are high.
title: “Back To The Future” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-14” author: “Joan Leonard”
There were compensations. Yugoslavia’s last president, Vojislav Kostunica, the popular hero who led the democratic uprising that ousted Slobodan Milosevic, found himself without a job. He’s unlikely to be missed, considering that fewer than a third of his countrymen support him. Apathy runs so deep, in fact, that last December’s Serbian presidential elections had to be annulled (for the second time) because a required majority of the electorate didn’t turn out to vote. Not that it much mattered, since the post had become almost purely ceremonial anyway. Kostunica’s exit was similarly lackluster. He didn’t even use the occasion to deliver one of the long-winded lectures that state television once felt compelled to broadcast. Taking Yugoslavia’s place is the new union of Serbia and Montenegro. Aptly, it has already given rise to a sardonic joke. The republic is dead.Long live S&M.
In fact, the end of Yugoslavia is no laughing matter. The new union is a shotgun wedding, with the European Union as father of the bride. Europe’s foreign-policy czar, Javier Solana, brokered the deal to keep Montenegro from seeking independence, which in turn would have made it harder to deny Kosovo the independence its Albanian majority wants. It’s also likely to be a short marriage. Almost all Serbs and Montenegrins expect to split after three years or so, when the charter binding them allows a referendum on independence. Meantime, the pair don’t even share an anthem, flag or currency. Serbia keeps its dinar, Montenegro the euro, which last year replaced the Deutsche mark. Both Kostunica and Montenegro’s prime minister, Milo Djukanovic, boycotted the spartan festivities halfheartedly marking the new nationhood.
Where now? Possibly back to the future. Once again, Serbian nationalism is intruding on politics. Running a frighteningly close second to Kostunica in those aborted presidential elections was Vojislav Seselj, the Chetnik warlord and ultranationalist named as a conspirator with Milosevic in war crimes. Kostunica himself has proved deeply nationalistic and anti-Western, losing much of the liberal support he enjoyed during the October 2000 revolution. His inability to muster the 50 percent turnout needed to get re-elected has left Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic, leader of the Democratic Opposition of Serbia, as the man who calls the shots.
Djindjic is the politician who has everything, except popular support. He’s never won a national election and owes his rule to a coalition among wildly divergent small parties. Many Serbs will never forgive him for turning Milosevic over to The Hague. Milosevic’s trial, now in its second year, has actually boosted the ex-strongman’s standing at home. His fevered rants of an international plot against the Serbs gets better audience ratings than popular soap operas. Partly to bulk up his popular support, Djindjic has lately been playing some dangerous cards. Trolling for right-wing nationalist votes, he spoke late last year of redrawing Serbia’s borders in a sort of Dayton Round 2. The implication: that the former Serb Republic of Bosnia would go to Serbia–notwithstanding that it’s part of another country. More recently, he called for international talks to resolve the Kosovo problem–an excuse, some suspected, to bang the drum for a sacred “Serbian motherland.” To detractors, all this recalled Djindjic’s dubious wartime visit to Pale, the Bosnian Serb capital, to attend an ox roast hosted by the besiegers of Sarajevo–a personal legitimization of the Serbs’ assault on multiethnic Yugoslavia.
Even Djindjic’s critics concede such talk is just “pragmatic politics” in a right-wing Serbia. “They are calculated to enable him to retain more power than he could ever win in the elections,” says Miroslav Prokopijevic, a former top official in Djindjic’s party. Trouble is, that’s what brought Yugoslavia down in the first place. At the very least, it’s “destabilizing,” as Prokopijevic puts it. Remember that other “pragmatic” political operator who bid for power by playing a cynically nationalist hand? He’s the one sitting in The Hague.
title: “Back To The Future” ShowToc: true date: “2023-02-01” author: “Jose Smiechowski”
Bad weather, a national depression and the deep-seated scorn of Easterners for the meat-packing Windy City nearly doomed the fair’s chances. About all Chicago had going for it was the energy and seductive charm of its leading architect, Daniel Burnham. Burnham wooed the cream of American architects to help design the fair. He persuaded Frederick Law Olmsted, the father of Central Park, to design the grounds. And lest anyone felt like complaining about the results (almost no one did), there was engineer George Ferris’s amazing new wheel revolving out there on the midway.
Against this story of visionary success, Larson counter-poses the dark tale of Dr. H. H. Holmes, a serial killer who preyed on young women drawn to Chicago by the fair. Once in custody, Holmes claimed to have murdered 27 people. While Burnham was constructing his White City by the lake, Holmes was building a hotel with a gas chamber and a cremating kiln in the basement. To Larson, Holmes was Burnham’s dark twin, but the author doesn’t over-work the conceit. He doesn’t have to. “Each embodied an element,” Larson says, “of the great dynamic that characterized the rush of America toward the 20th century.” You know the rest.
Lamentably, Larson the entertainer almost sells out Larson the historian. Only in the notes at the back of the book does he admit that the chapters describing Holmes’s murders are merely conjecture built on a handful of facts. In his eagerness to beguile us with a good story, he squanders our trust. But not even this grave misstep can’t doom his book, because the story of the fair and its effect on American life is simply too enchanting.
The Columbian Exposition cemented Americans’ love affair with technology. In the summer that the fair glittered dreamlike on the lake (arsonists burned most of the buildings shortly after it closed), millions saw, among other marvels, the comparative safety of electricity and the assurance of clean water–no small things to people who had seen their city razed by fire in 1871 and watched as 10 percent of the population died of cholera in 1885. The fair showed what a city could be, and whether we know it or not, we still live with its legacy.
title: “Back To The Future” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-06” author: “Kimberly Mckenzie”
Commentators have noted the signs of a symbolic Soviet renaissance across Russia. President Vladimir Putin has already reinstated the Soviet anthem, with new words. The Defense Ministry has suggest-ed restoring the Soviet red star on military flags. Muscovites have considered returning Felix Dzherzhinsky, the dread founder of the secret police, to his pedestal in the square opposite the former KGB headquarters. But Stalin, the dictator who slaughtered tens of millions of Russians?
The controversial proposal to change the name of their city back to Stalingrad is spear-headed by a dwindling group of Volgograd veterans who helped turn back an attacking Nazi Army 60 years ago next month. More than 1 million Soviet soldiers and hundreds of thousands of German soldiers died in the six-month battle. “We were hungry and cold, the city was on fire,” recalls 81-year-old veteran Zoya Kabanova. “There were a lot of tears and so many deaths. But we defended this city. That is why Stalingrad is dear to us.” The city was renamed after Stalin’s death in 1953, once the crimes of his regime were finally exposed.
The rehabilitation of Stalin says much about how the chaos of post-Soviet reforms has inspired nostalgia for the orderly ways of the Soviet Union. According to opinion polls in recent years, a majority of Russians either admire Stalin or are indifferent to his actions. “A lot of time has passed,” says regional Gov. Nikolai Maksyta, who has, along with the local Parliament, petitioned Putin to consider a name change. “There is no reason to be afraid of the name Stalin or our history. The threat these days is terrorism, not Stalin.”
That is still not a majority view in Volgograd. “These people should ask a victim of Stalin’s repression how they would feel,” says local businessman Yuri Krasnyanski, noting that no one has proposed a “Hitlergrad” in Germany. Volgograd’s younger generation especially dislikes the idea. “We’ll be stuck with this name for the rest of our lives,” complains 18-year-old Albina Magomedeminova.
Indeed, the initiative looks destined to fail. Polls by the opposition SPS Party in Volgograd show that 80 percent of the populace is against the switch. The Kremlin has suggested the city hold a referendum. But “Stalingrad” proponents, true to form, prefer to settle the matter with a decision from above. “If I were Putin I would just decree the name change while visiting during the anniversary of the battle,” says Deputy Gov. Yuri Sezov. That seems unlikely. Asked about the proposal during a recent call-in show, Putin–his soft spot for Soviet symbolism notwithstanding–responded that a name shift “would generate some sort of suspicions that we are returning to the times of Stalinism. I am not convinced that this would be useful to all of us.” When it comes to Stalingrad, at least, it’s heartening that these latest winds of change are not yet blowing from the Kremlin.
title: “Back To The Future” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-05” author: “Jose Pederson”
Lately in Hollywood, it’s the story that everyone wants to tell. So-called origin stories–how fill-in-the-blank became fill-in-the-blank–are all the rage. “Once upon a time, Frankenstein was [in a movie] battling Abbott and Costello. When it gets to that point, you’ve gotta start over,” says horror auteur Rob Zombie, who’s working on a reboot of the “Halloween” franchise. “These are iconic characters we’re revisiting, and classic material stays classic.” The “Star Wars” prequels and last summer’s “Batman Begins” both struck gold tracing the rise of their A-list characters. In theaters now, you can find out everything you wanted to know about Leatherface (“The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning”) but were afraid to ask. Next year, Michael Myers (“Halloween”) and Jason Voorhees (“Friday the 13th”) will also get the childhood treatment, as will Hannibal Lecter in February’s “Hannibal Rising,” which will explain why the infamous killer’s taste for cannibalism might date back 60 years to the day when a Nazi soldier ate his little sister. Possibly with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.
As long as risk reduction is the name of the game in Hollywood, studios see no point in giving up on brands that still hold currency with filmgoers. “When you have a title people recognize,” says DreamWorks marketing chief Terry Press, “part of your battle is already won.” Ironically, playing it safe financially also provides studios with the cover to take creative risks. The director of “Hannibal Rising” is Peter Webber, whose only other feature, “Girl With a Pearl Earring,” was an Oscar-nominated period piece about the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer. Webber chose Gaspard Ulliel, a French actor, to play the Anthony Hopkins role. “It’s easy to look down on sequels and prequels and think you’re getting into ‘Police Academy 47’,” says Webber. “But if this film did that, I wouldn’t have gotten involved.” “Hannibal Rising” will conveniently leave off well before the starting point of the previous Lecter films–so if it works, expect sequels to the prequel.
From a narrative perspective, origin stories are tricky because the audience comes in already knowing how they end. The drama must arise from the character’s arc: discovering how this ordinary person transforms into someone extraordinary. “There can be tension in the telling,” says Webber. “I can drive a car from New York to Los Angeles, but you don’t know how I’m getting there–am I going through New Orleans or Chicago?” The usual strat-egy is to take iconography associated with the character and attach stories to it. In “Casino Royale,” we discover that Bond won his beloved Aston Martin at a card table. Such details satisfy fans and help reel in new viewers who know little about these characters beyond their legend.
Of all the reboots on the horizon, “Casino Royale” is the riskiest because, unlike the others, the Bond franchise was still quite frisky. “Die Another Day” was the highest-grossing film of the entire series. “I’ll tell ya, it’s not something your partners at the studio relish–when you’re coming off the biggest one ever and you tell them you’re gonna break the mold,” Wilson says. “But creatively, it’s the right way to go. Who knows if it’ll make as much money?” In “Casino Royale,” the filmmakers take a character known for his suave nonchalance and make him, Wilson says, into “a grittier, tougher, darker kind of guy.” The Bond of the film is the Bond of Ian Fleming’s 1954 book: he smokes 70 cigarettes a day, drinks too much and, frankly, isn’t all that jazzed about shooting people. It could work like a dream, or it could be a view to a buzzkill.
It’s predictable for a franchise to reboot and go gritty. It’s the logical corrective for a property that’s gotten too bloated and silly. “They always say that,” Press argues, “but look, I’m sure there will be plenty of explosions and cool cars and pretty women in the new Bond.” There certainly will be, but the filmmakers were dead set on establishing that “Casino Royale” isn’t the same old James Bond. “To set the tone, we wanted to start with something visceral and dynamic, and it ended up being a foot chase over the tops of buildings,” says Robert Wade, a screenwriter on the film. “It shows him as raw and explosive, rather than a smooth operator.” So no invisible cars this time? “And no space stations with lasers on them,” says Neal Purvis, Wade’s writing partner. “At least not for a few years.”
