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Apocalypse was confused, and it was hard to believe that Coppola himself had a clear or settled version of it.He seemed to have established a Northern Californian alternative, yet he nursed dreams of taking over a new Hollywood.So he moved to premises in Los Angeles to make One from the Heart, a deliberate throwback to the studio look of the 1940s.It is exquisite and well worth seeing, with color photography by Vittorio Storaro, gorgeous sets by Dean Tavoularis, a haunting score by Tom Waits, and the overall influence of Michael Powell, who was now director emeritus at Zoetrope.As a modest $2 million aside, it might have seemed a wonder of charm and pure cinema.But at $25 million and with more bad publicity over excess and mania, it was a disaster that plunged Coppola into debt.Few crazy indulgences or shattered budgets offend America as much as those in the arts.Soon after the film opened to scathing press, I saw Coppola at his Rutherford home in Napa.The driveway sported a childs warning signs, made by Sofia Coppola, who was then eight.They were intended to frighten the bailiffs who might be coming to take the family furniture or the house.Francis was down, black and blue and broke, until he started cooking a meal.Then his enthusiasm came back.The Rutherford house was next to the old Niebaum winery, and Coppola had an idea to make something of it.He would repay his debts eventually.He has carried on as a filmmaker.He has been able to see Sofia make films.We are agreed now, I fear, that American business is ready to go beyond the law and societys moral principles.No great American director has had a darker vision or won Best Picture with it.But it remains a devastating work, and it won Oscars for Best Picture and direction, as well as for Christopher Walken.I believe there to have been not one day or one moment in the turbulent history of Heavens Gate in which Michael Cimino intended anything other than to create a masterpiece, a work of lasting art.His certainty that he was doing so conditioned that history and much of the behavior of those around him.He did not set out to destroy or damage a company but believed he would enrich it, economically and aesthetically.This may have been too far from a cheap form of amusement. Bach and Cimino were defending different things, art and business, and somehow history had brought them into awkward overlap.By dint of his own chronic maneuvers and the companys helpless respect, Cimino was allowed to behave like Lucian Freud painting a portrait.It is next to impossible to abandon a movie, and very hard to press on, after the first few days, in the knowledge that it is not going to work out.Once that picture opens, however, anyone who can deserts the ruin.The audience was either speechless with awe or comatose with boredom.Their verdict was supported by an eventual gross of less than $4 million.Michael Cimino is alive still, and a man of mystery.His career has never regained the power of The Deer Hunter.That text is much clearer now, but by 1980 there had been a swing back toward nonthreatening movies and tranquil entertainment.No one wants to knock tranquil entertainment so long as it is as inspiring as Fred Astaire, Rin Tin Tin, Buster Keaton, Hawks on the trail, and Preston Sturges with Stanwyck and Fonda.Clint Eastwoods Dirty Harry series shifted from being an attack on the impossible position of the police to the glorification of a very macho loner.Above all, Spielberg and George Lucas joined forces on a grandiose new version of Saturday morning serials with Raiders of the Lost Ark, a booming franchise, and fun at first, but having so little to do with the real world.What have the movies got to do with life?Why, this isnt really life anymore.And why should it be?Not everything was depressing.Woody Allen was at his best in the years from Annie Hall to Radio Days.Martin Scorsese was a genius in turmoil in the years from Taxi Driver to Raging Bull.Were they going to the bathroom, in search of a smoke or candies?Were they bored by the picture?Perhaps, but the lobbies were increasingly stocked with games to play on screens.It was becoming an amusement arcade.One came off those games buzzing.The screen had found a new way of being.And today people sometimes play the latest version of those games in front of the movie, on their cell phone, offering their blue glowworm against the screens light.Ant was not a cynic, yet he may have discovered the need to pretend to be cynical, worldly, or amused, if he was going to survive making big pictures for such as the Weinstein brothers.After a few weekend retreats with the bosses you learn to talk their way, and sometimes you wonder if you are becoming more like them.Hawks, Capra, Lang, Ford, Vidor, Hitchcock, Lubitsch, Wilder, Wyler, Minnelli, Scorsese, and so on.What actors they had to be.In what we now call the golden age of Hollywood, directors did as they were told, swallowed the lies and the language, and fretted over their imprisonment in private.They hated their vulnerability under the system, and told horror stories about the arrogance of those who ran the studios, gave them their contracts, and then trampled on their vision as a matter of right and business habit.Their anger was being bought off, and in time that deal was sweetened by agreements to recognize residuals and profit participation.Just agreements, you understand.John Ford and Howard Hawks are such worldly heroes, and perhaps the smarts or resolve of some of their loner heroes was modeled on the directors own survival.They did good work over five decades.After that prolonged struggle, is it any wonder that many good American movies are metaphors for handling the system, the daily grind that faced ambitious directors?He had so many rows with studio executives he began to feel he was a misunderstood genius, so he branched out, went independent, and fell apart.The wit, the insouciance, and the mercurial charm others loved, and which Sturges worked hard to maintain, turned into frustration and sorrow.The concept of home meant not just your own parking space on the lot and regular checks in the bank.It ensured a supply of material, stars, and craftsmen, and the greatest virtue of the factory system was that so many of those assignments were blessings.Louis is a testament to affection and trust enhancing beauty and film presence.Theres a legend that the studio abused and exploited Garland, though her own mother did worse.But there were also people at the studio who loved her and wanted to look after her.Minnelli is often called a stylist, or someone in search of beauty, but those tasks can be aided by an effective factory system.It follows that Minnelli was more or less willing to direct films that were about whatever the studio and the story department wanted them to be about.The public was as much a part of the team as an orchestrator or a focus puller, and for most of Minnellis working life, the audience came to the movies out of habit.So for those who regard Vincente Minnelli as a true artist, it must be said that many of his choices were made for him.And choices can kill you as easily as arrangements.Roy Helland, who did Meryl Streeps hair and makeup on everything from Sophies Choice to The Iron Lady.Scorsese went personally broke on Gangs of New York.Preparing a project can last a matter of years, with a concomitant fatigue, anger, and despair that can do damage to the fluency or playfulness of a venture.It requires a public persistence or stamina that is often at odds with the privacy of composition or meditation in much artwork.There is sometimes a force in artistic independence that simply refuses to be that ingratiating or compromising.Such intransigence characterized Orson Welles, John Cassavetes, Nicholas Ray, and Erich von Stroheim, to name just a few.But decades after the reported death of the film factory, it is hard and daunting for a real independent to make a movie.If you want to make art, dont give up your day job.You may not have seen them, or heard of them, but theyre worth talking about in the attempt to convey the life of a director, and Im sure they were both done in the glorious if vain hope of reaching the masses.She made her first feature, Down to the Bone, in 2004, and it won prizes at Sundance, and elsewhere, notably for the performance by Vera Farmiga as a young mother attempting to recover from cocaine addiction.It was well reviewed, but its tough subject and remorseless treatment had difficulty finding proper distribution in the United States.Like so many first films, it was made for very little, with dribs and drabs of money gathered over a long period.With a reported gross income of $20,000, it was just one of the worthwhile films that gain respect and admiration while bringing the filmmaker to bankruptcy.So that person has to ask herself, what do I really want to do?If he doesnt make that date, the family risks losing its house.This picture cost around $2 million, and again the funding was raised over a long period of time, with many setbacks along the way.But the picture got proper American distribution, from Roadside Attractions, which placed it in fewer than a hundred theaters.Still, it was noticed.In New York magazine, David Edelstein wrote, For all the horror, its the drive toward life, not the decay, that lingers in the mind.Edelstein is correct in his judgment, but by horror, he means the tough lives and the hardships people must battle with, and he is alluding to the physical harshness of life in the locations all found in rural Missouri.Ree has terrible problems to face, but this is not a horror film.Granik wanted to make a film that observed life honestly and was fair to the novel.The people behind Winters Bone were delighted with their success.Many who had worked on spec got a little money.Those nominations did not lead to a win, but they must have helped enlarge the audience for the movie.But its evident already that her commitment to difficult material and the honesty in dealing with it will not be easily shaken.Dunbar came from Bradford, in the north of England, and from a street fancifully named the Arbor.The layering takes getting used to, but its daring is to mingle Brechtian techniques with the raw emotion of the story that unfolds.For me it surpasses the defined but confined story of Winters Bone because its ambition is greater without any loss of emotion.Clio Barnard was raised in Yorkshire and attended art school in Newcastle and Dundee before doing an advanced project at Britains National Film School.Artangel is a foundation that helps many different forms of art, and its beneficiaries have included Atom Egoyan, director Steve McQueen, Douglas Gordon, and John Berger.The project took about four years, during which time Barnard taught film studies at the University of Kent and had a leave of absence.She wants to make other films, and is hopeful of getting money from the Film Fund.But the competition is intense.Its hard enough to know what you want to do.The most independent thing about any artistic venture is the wayward and lonely need that insists on doing it.Debra Granik and Clio Bernard may notice that they are a novelty in another way.In the age of Minnelli, from the 1940s through the 60s and into the silver 70s, it was so unusual to see a woman directing.They could edit, they could write scripts, they could be girl Fridays, and they could be beautiful.Mayer to do The Philadelphia Story.Ida Lupino made a run of intriguing B pictures in the 1950s.In 1970 the actress Barbara Loden, then married to Elia Kazan, managed to make Wanda, on 16 mm, a fragile picture about a forlorn woman who tags along with a male criminal enterprise.Barbara Loden died without making another film.Exceptional male careers have trailed away, too, when once the men might have been expected to work far longer.Brian De Palma, someone valued highly by Pauline Kael, has not in years matched the savage progression or cruel humor of Scarface.Bob Rafelson, Peter Bogdanovich, and William Friedkin, for various reasons, went into decline or withdrawal.Bob Fosse, Sam Peckinpah, and Hal Ashby died too young.Monte Hellman, Walter Hill, and Phil Kaufman made too few films.Michael Cimino was never the same again after Heavens Gate, and is now a recluse who gathers more rumors than projects.Coppola has not been his old self for decades, and George Lucass comeback felt drained of creative need.Or perhaps that constituency had just faded with the years.They may have silly plots, and theres not much of a story, but they are about a technology.The same old whimsical anhedonia inspires his comedies, though sometimes inspires is a generous word.We should be grateful for a comic turn of mind in an age that has made its comedies increasingly coarse and juvenile.Yet Im not sure Allen exactly believes in comedy as a response to life, rather than a wisecracking routine for holding attention and deflecting greater depth.Actors seem to like working for him, but he gives them little direction or challenge.Then he made Interiors, a doomed imitation of Ingmar Bergman.And then the list goes on, as if Allen has been growing older but hardly changing.Those two seem to be broken but brave souls facing the abyss.He has never let us, or possibly himself, into his own heart, and when a man works so hard, that omission becomes disconcerting.No one could charge Clint Eastwood with not changing, and he is another filmmaker compelled to work as if Hollywood still existed and were waiting patiently to enact his wishes.It is an extraordinary journey, worthy of Dreiser, and possibly more interesting than Eastwoods films.Eastwood was born in San Francisco in 1930 and grew up middling poor, rather wild as the son of an itinerant father, but enjoying the good old movies.He did a spell of military service as a lifeguard, and it was his physique and his looks that got him into the Universal talent school.He has received the Irving Thalberg Award and the American Film Institute Life Achievement Award, and he is a member of the Légion dHonneur.There is no crime in that, but the campaign for respect helps us understand the nature and determination of the man, and seldom fits with the outsider roles he played before the age of fifty.So what is to be said about Eastwood the filmmaker?He is somewhere between a modest and a reluctant actor who understood Gary Coopers treasured economy, though he has rivaled it very seldom and never had access to Coopers inner anguish.As a director, he is at best efficient, economical, and quick.Eastwood has played heroic too many times, and entered into that aura so completely, that he lacks an edge of intelligent doubt that marks so many of the best directors.The distance between Play Misty for Me and Mystic River is large enough to remind us how hard Eastwood studies.Edgar Hoover under an increasing cloak of respectability.He has worked independently a great deal.Even when he helped sustain Warner Bros.He has enabled several documentaries on jazz and popular music, and he has shown private generosity to people close to him.He might have had a chance of running an old studio, or being president of the United States.It is not sensible to rate him as an artist, but his is exactly the type of career that old Hollywood wanted.There will never be anyone like him again.Im sure theyd be polite if they met, but they do not have a lot in common.Yet Barnards one film has a depth of intelligence and emotion that I doubt Eastwood has considered.That doesnt mean shes a genius while he is just a classic entertainer, or that one label is harder to earn than the other.They are both of them dedicated to their attempts to communicate.I suspect there have been moments when Clint sought artistic prestige while Clio longed for a limo.Let me suggest someone who has a case for being the most effective director of his time.He was born in 1959 and his name is Tim Van Patten.There is a fair chance you have not heard of him, a reminder that, with television, you are not always watching, even if the set is on and your gaze is more or less given to the screen.Van Patten has never made a theatrical movie, but he has directed some of the best material of our time, twenty episodes of The Sopranos, more than anyone else.If there was an arresting or unusual episode, it usually came from a concept in the writing.John Coulter made twelve.But by the time he came to The Sopranos, he was called its creator, a term that is generally too sweeping for the film industry.Still, nothing is certain at the start.Chase was worried about their commitment and looking to get some extra funding to turn that pilot into a movie for theaters.Only then did the channel decide to move ahead.You cant be a creator for six series without a symbiotic exchange between you and your chief character.You could miss a run of episodes without losing touch.And yet a key to the show was that millions of people tried to watch every episode, and this was before we had easy access to storing television shows and watching them on demand at our convenience.Just as Hollywood was giving up the ghost on narrative, David Chase had created a serial, and found an audience eager for it.It had participant suspense, that old asset of the movies.I daresay Chase had fluctuating ideas about how to end his story, or whether any ending would satisfy his wish to deal with an ordinary man.So many television series get crazier as they dig deeper into themselves but respond to the pressure to be different.My goal was never to create a show.I wanted to be a filmmaker.I wanted to make movies.The money got into my head, and I kept snorting that money for a long time.I went from term deal to development deal to development deal.I didnt want to be that.I never wanted to be somebody who had more than one show.I dont know how people do that.I never wanted to have a series.The answer hardly mattered if enough people had decided with David Remnick that it had vindicated and transformed television.I would say that Tony never became as commanding or as disturbing as Michael Corleone.But you dont know the kind of person the creator was, and more or less he left the game for us to play with.By the end of the show, Chase was reportedly on a salary of $15 million a season.One of the most intriguing directorial debuts for a premier cable channel was the pilot episode of Boardwalk Empire, shown in September 2010 and directed by Martin Scorsese, who is also an executive producer on the series.Was this a busy year, or one in which the maestro might have assigned some projects to associates?A Letter to Elia was codirected with Kent Jones, but Scorseses appetite for film is not much drawn to delegation.Its about the very essence of Christianity.Its about who Jesus really is, in a sense.Its based on a true story.Some priests went there in his name and tried to bring ‘salvation to the Japanese.Its the imprint of a versatility or split personality that prevails in the American movie world two decades after Steven Spielberg did Jurassic Park and Schindlers List at nearly the same time.There was widespread relief among directors when Scorsese at last got an Oscar for directing and the Best Picture award for The Departed.He deserved so much more, even if The Departed was not his best work.The tumult or torment in Scorsese may be too interesting to settle for words like genius or creator. It is the striving and the endless tension in Marty that are most impressive, and that drive the violence in his work.He is haunted by the life and death of gangsters, and endlessly drawn to filming killings.But this is not just shooting spectacular deaths, or needing them in his stories.Pesci and De Niro are one of the most frightening warped love stories in modern film.The Age of Innocence tried to deal with women and society, but it is not as true to Edith Wharton as Terence Daviess English film The House of Mirth, which has an exceptional, fatalistic performance from Gillian Anderson as Lily Bart.Taxi Driver and Raging Bull are landmarks.When I first saw Casino, I thought it was just Marty doing gangsters again.It is that, but theres more.The ultimate riddle in Vegas is that while many people go there for a few days because it promises an adventure with hell, the characters in Casino have a helpless sense of heaven there.Las Vegas is a biblical city, and no other film has delivered that so fully.Scorsese looks at clothes, décor, and male gesture like a cobra scrutinizing a charmer.No one is more alive in the moment, or such a defender of history.He has fought to preserve films, to celebrate their past, and to revive neglected triumphs.He was a saint of generosity and admiration to Michael Powell, and he surely learned from the repressed extremism in many Powell films.Aged two, in a family that split up before he was born, he moved to Torrance, California, and never went beyond high school.It was like a teenager who had been programmed by the history of film noir and then had a shot of adrenaline in his heart.Weve most of us met video store clerks who play games with titles, talk in dialogue, and seem to have been up all night watching three screens.Tarantinos first plan was to film Reservoir Dogs on 16 mm for as little as he could manage.By contrast, Reservoir Dogs gives the impression of knowing and caring about nothing from life.When youre dealing with a store like this, theyre insured up the ass.Theyre not supposed to give you any resistance whatsoever.If you get a customer, or an employee, who thinks hes Charles Bronson, take the butt of your gun and smash their nose in.Now if its a manager, thats a different story.If you wanna know something and he wont tell you, cut off one of his fingers.Then tell him his thumbs next.After that hell tell you if he wears ladies underwear.In fact, the film played better in England, where interest in cruelty and video technology seemed ahead of American standards.At that point, sensing a dynamic new talent as well as a practitioner whose taste for guns, language, and music played to a young audience, Miramax said they would finance Tarantinos next film.For just over $8 million they got Pulp Fiction, which won the Palme dOr at Cannes and grossed close to $300 million across the world.It helped excite a new younger generation about movies, rather as Easy Rider had done.Its unceasing reliance on classic movie situations, with so many scenes of violence and foul language, was a sneer of rejection for older audiences.But its intricate formal structure as a narrative encouraged the idea that a film was just a set of scenes that had no relationship with closure or meaning.It made a shape, like a snake eating its tail.The film hoped to imitate its title, but it was shot to resemble old Technicolor, still wet from the processing baths.The music was chosen lovingly, the cast was worthy of a poster, but the characters had no backstory or dramatic provenance.That helps account for the energy and freshness of the film, and indicates how many American films at the turn of the century were formally stagnant, and short on excitement.You could not resist Tarantinos own thrill, and it drew attention to the crazy verbosity of his lowlifes.Harvey Keitels Winston Wolfe is not just a master fixer but a drug called spiel.It is a film that might have gone on forever, just as its convoluted structure is available for further loops and intersections.If you ever wonder why your own kids think its fatuous for a film to seek their emotional involvement, or for its story to be sincere or dramatic, Pulp Fiction had the cheerful thrust of getting those archaic hopes to walk the plank.

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