Foreign Objects: A Miloš Forman Film Festival

A LO MILOŠ FORMAN FILM FESTIVAL A MI Š FORMAN FILM FE STIVAL

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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WELCOME

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ABOUT FORMAN

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FILMOGRAPHY

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THE INTERVIEW

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FILM SYNOPSIS

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CRITIC REVIEWS

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FESTIVAL SCHEDULE

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VENUE INFO

“First of all, to defend my work, I had to believe that I am doing a totally silly, stupid, innocent comedy.�

- Milos Forman

Welcome to FOREIGN OBJECTS: A Miloš Forman Film Festival. The fact that you’re here means you are a MiloŠ Forman fan and are ready to watch four of his greatest films.

Amadeus | Man On The Moon | The People vs. Larry Flynt | One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest FOREIGN OBJECTS: A Miloš Forman Film Festival is a celebration of the 40 year anniversary of when One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest was released (November 21, 1975). This film is what firmly established Forman’s reputation as a director in America, especially after it won all five major Academy Awards.

We also invite you to join us at the gallery showing of the history of Miloš Forman. It will be a showing of his life through photography and quotes/stories from Forman himself. It will give you a better understanding of the director, how he grew up and how it has affected his life and made him the great director he is today.

These films not only won multiple awards, but they have cemented a place in movie history and put Milos Forman on the map as a very talented director. If this is your first time watching any film by Forman, than you are in for a treat. He has a unique style of directing that appeals to a wide audience and you are definitely going to enjoy his films. He draws you in with unique main characters and their stories.

So, thank you for attending and have a fantastic time!

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ABOUT FORMAN

Jan Tomáš Forman known as MiloŠ Forman, is a Czech-American director, screenwriter, and professor, who until 1968 had lived and worked primarily in the former Czechoslovakia. Forman was born in Čáslav, Czechoslovakia (present-day Czech Republic), the son of Anna, who ran a summer hotel. When young, he believed his biological father to be Rudolf Forman, a professor. Rudolf was arrested for distributing banned books and died in Buchenwald in 1944. Forman’s mother died in Auschwitz in 1943. Forman has stated that he did not fully understand what had happened to them until he saw footage of the concentration camps when he was 16.

Forman lived with relatives during World War II. After the war, Forman attended the elite King George boarding school in the spa town Poděbrady, where his fellow students included Václav Havel, the Mašín brothers and future film-makers Ivan Passer and Jerzy Skolimowski. He later studied screen writing at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. During the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in summer 1968, he left Europe for the United States.

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Forman was one of the most important directors of the Czechoslovak New Wave. Since Forman left Czechoslovakia, two of his films, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus, have gained him an Academy Award for Best Director. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was the second film ever to win all five major Academy Awards (Best Picture, Actor in Lead Role, Actress in Lead Role, Director, and Screenplay) an accomplishment not repeated until 1991 by The Silence of the Lambs. He was also nominated for a Best Director Oscar for The People vs. Larry Flynt. He has also won Golden Globe, Cannes, Berlinale, BAFTA, Cesar, David di Donatello, European Film Academy, and Czech Lion awards.

FILMOGRAPHY I Miss Sonia Henie (Short) - 2009 A Walk Worthwhile - 2009 Semafor: Greatest Hits 2 - 2007 Goya’s Ghosts - 2006 Man on the Moon - 1999 The People vs. Larry Flynt - 1996 Valmont - 1989 Amadeus - 1984 Ragtime - 1981 Hair - 1979 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest - 1975 Visions of Eight (Documentary) -1973 Taking Off - 1971 The Firemen’s Ball - 1967 Worth While (TV Movie) - 1966 Loves of a Blonde - 1965 Black Peter - 1964 Audition (Documentary) - 1964 Why Do We Need All the Brass Bands? - 1964 Magic Lantern II - 1960

“Humor was not important only for me, IT was important for this nation for centuries, to survive, you know.�

- Milos Forman

THE INTERVIEW

Czechoslovakian director Milos Forman was an international success long before he came to America His earliest features, 1963’s Black Peter and 1965’s Loves Of A Blonde, made a significant splash on the festival circuit. But his 1967 farce The Firemen’s Ball enraged Czech censors, who understandably believed that its scathing depiction of a hapless, disorganized, disaster-prone fire brigade was a veiled criticism of the country’s government. The film was banned, and shortly thereafter, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia prompted Forman to emigrate to America.

His first American-made film, Taking Off (1971), followed the naturalistic style of his Czech films and ended up being an absolute failure, but he found mainstream success four years later with his incisive adaptation of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, which won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director.

Forman’s subsequent filmography is full of rich fictionalized portraits, both of eras (Hair, Ragtime, Valmont) and of real individuals (The People Vs. Larry Flynt, Man On The Moon).

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To date, his masterwork remains the brilliant Amadeus, a vividly textured, gorgeously realized reinterpretation of the life of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart that swept the Oscars in 1984. In the wake of recent DVD releases of Loves Of A Blonde and The Firemen’s Ball, and a new theatrical release of a remastered, extended version of Amadeus, The Onion A.V. Club spoke to Forman about ideological pressure versus commercial pressure, the problems with releasing a classical-musicthemed film in the 1980s, among other things.

The Onion: How did you originally get involved with the Amadeus film adaptation?

Milos Forman: That was sort of funny. I was in London just for three days, casting Ragtime. By sheer coincidence, my representative, Mr. Robert Lantz, was also in London. One day he called me, when I had a room full of people, and asked if I want to see a play with him that night. And, you know, the London stage is well-known for its

quality, so I didn’t even ask what, and I said, “Of course.”

Only in the taxi, I learned that it’s a new play about composers. [Laughs.] And I thought, “I am going to faint.” I was prepared for the most boring evening, because I was used to seeing the Russian and Czech films about composers, and they were the most boring films. Communists love to make films about composers, because composers compose music and don’t talk subversive things. But it was the very first public preview [of Amadeus] in London. Nobody saw it before. And I am sitting in the theater waiting to fall asleep, and suddenly I see this wonderful drama, which would be wonderful even if it was not Mozart and Salieri.

At the intermission, I told Mr. Lantz, “If this play will continue with this kind of force in the second half, it will be a wonderful movie.” And it did: I was glued to the seat to the very end. And right there after the show, I met for the first time [Amadeus playwright] Peter Shaffer, and I told him that if he would ever consider making a movie, I would be very interested.

The two of you worked together on the screenplay?

Of course, but I consider my work on the screenplay as half of directing. We were working for four or five months, five days a week, to reshape the play into the screenplay.

Are you typically that involved with your scripts?

I usually am, because I have to know about every

word, what it means and how it goes. There must be nothing against my sensibilities, my feelings of how the structure of a scene should go, so I usually get involved very much in the development of a screenplay. I consider it half of the directing.

Many of your American films center on unappreciated iconoclasts. Is that something you look for in a protagonist?

Well, individuals fighting or rebelling against the status quo, the establishment, is good for drama.

And also I feel admiration for rebels, because I lived twice in my life in totalitarian society, where most of the people feel like rebelling but don’t dare to.

And I am a coward, because I didn’t dare to rebel there and go to prison for that. That’s, I guess, why I admire the rebels and make films about them.

Most pieces written about you take note of your flight from Czechoslovakia—that, and your parents’ death in the Nazi concentration camps—and often, they explain your work strictly in terms of those events. That seems a bit simplistic.

I think these are the most visible things in my life that you can talk about. It’s not a lighthearted decision to change your language, your country, your citizenship, and come to a world where you don’t know anybody, to leave a place where you’ve had opportunities to build friendships from childhood. That’s quite a big decision to make. But I don’t like to analyze myself, how it affected me.

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THE INTERVIEW

On the DVD commentary to The Firemen’s Ball, you mentioned preferring the commercial pressure of the American film system to the ideological pressure you faced in Czechoslovakia.

Oh, yes, because I know that ideological pressure is much more crippling than commercial pressure.

Crippling to your own freedom of thinking and creating, crippling the final results. If you wanted to succeed during the really hard-line totalitarian regime, you have to make so many compromises

Oh, that’s about the freedom of speech. I think the hero of that film is the Supreme Court of the United States at that time. I lived long enough in a society where freedom of speech was nonexistent, and I know what kind of misery that creates— starting with the fact that life becomes very boring for people who just try to survive, and are quiet, and try not to buck the system. And, of course, it can be devastating for people who try to speak against it.

“Well, individuals fighting or rebelling against the status quo, the establishment, is good for drama.” to please the censors that you don’t recognize the original idea from the final result.

Which gets back to the theme of rebellion in your work. The People Vs. Larry Flynt, for instance. Were you interested in Larry Flynt personally because he dared to rebel, or was the film more about the general importance of freedom of speech?

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A common criticism of that film was that it portrayed Flynt too positively. You’ve run up against similar criticisms with your portrayals of other historical figures.

Well, I’m not making documentaries. People who make documentaries have to be faithful to the facts. But when you are making a drama, a fiction based on the life, all you have to be faithful to is the spirit of the facts, which I think I was in every

case. As long as you don’t violate their spirit, you can play with the facts.

we agreed that we had the same approach to the material, and that’s why it happened.

Then why begin with the lives of real people?

It doesn’t matter to me, really. But the fact is, I ran into more interesting stories based on real lives than I met in fiction.

Did either of them ever explain why they felt the book was so suited to your direction?

I think they both felt that the film shouldn’t be this crazy, schizophrenic vision of an Indian, that it should be a very real story where the Indian was very important, but just another patient on the floor. They liked the realism of my Czech films, and of my first American film, Taking Off. I was so happy to get the job that I didn’t ask them why they gave it to me.

How did you choose One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest as a potential project?

In 1966, Kirk Douglas came to Prague on a goodwill mission, with a small party. He saw some films, and he saw Loves Of A Blonde in a small party of American cultural attachés. He asked me if he could send me a book, if I would read it and tell him if I would be interested to make a movie. I said, “My god, of course.” I was a young filmmaker, and my head was turning miles an hour after he said that. And the book never came.

When I met Kirk 10 years later, I said, “You know, you turn a young filmmaker’s head around, and then you forget about it immediately when you leave the room.” And he said, “You son of a gun, I thought the same about you, because I sent you the book and you didn’t have the courtesy to tell me to shove it.” What had happened was, he really sent the book, but the censors at customs confiscated it, didn’t tell him, and didn’t tell me. Ten years later, I get the same book from Michael Douglas and Saul Zaentz, and Michael Douglas didn’t know that his father was talking to me about it. So it was like some kind of an omen that I was destined to make this movie. So I met with Saul and Michael, and FOREIGN OBJECTS: A MILOŠ FORMAN FILM FESTIVAL

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FILM SYNOPSIS

AMADEUS

Claiming to have murdered the composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the now elderly Antonio Salieri recounts to a priest his dealings with the brilliant composer. Salieri was court composer to Austrian Emperor Joseph II when Mozart and he first met. The Emperor, a major patron of the arts, immediately commissioned Mozart to write an opera in German, rather than the customary Italian. Mozart is childish, arrogant, annoying and brilliant all at once and Salieri is simultaneously in awe and green with envy at his genius. Salieri uses Mozart’s difficult relationship with his father and his guilt over being a bad son to drive him slightly mad and into a downward spiral of ill health, leading to his death.

McMurphy, a man with several assault convictions to his name, finds himself in jail once again. This time, the charge is statutory rape when it turns out that his girlfriend had lied about being eighteen, and was, in fact, fifteen (or, as McMurphy puts it, “fifteen going on thirty-five”). Rather than spend his time in jail, he convinces the guards that he’s crazy enough to need psychiatric care and is sent to a hospital. He fits in frighteningly well, and his different point of view actually begins to cause some of the patients to progress. Nurse Ratched becomes his personal cross to bear as his resistance to the hospital routine gets on her nerves.

ONE FLEW

OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST

THE PEOPLE VS. LARRY FLY

YNT

Strip club owner Larry Flynt and his wife, Althea, create a pornographic magazine that ignores society’s morals and taboos. Hustler magazine brings the Flynts not only millions in profit but also the wrath of “decent” people. Flynt and his overburdened attorney find themselves in courtrooms all over the nation defending Larry against criminal and civil charges. In the meantime, Flynt is beset by paralysis, the result of an assassination attempt, drug addiction, mental illness, and Althea’s failing health.

A biopic based on the life of Andy Kaufman, an eccentric comedian who went onto enjoy a career as lovable foreign car mechanic Latka Gravas on TV’s Taxi, and later gained infamy as an intergender wrestling champ. The film studies some of Kaufman’s comedy antics as well as his personal life and his relationship with his manager George Shapiro, his best friend/partner Bob Zmuda and his girlfriend Lynne Margulies.

MAN ON THE MOON

CRITIC REVIEWS

by Roger Ebert

ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a film so good in so many of its parts that there’s a temptation to forgive it when it goes wrong. But it does go wrong, insisting on making larger points than its story really should carry, so that at the end, the human qualities of the characters get lost in the significance of it all. And yet there are those moments of brilliance.

If Forman was preaching a parable, the audience seemed in total agreement with it, and I found that a little depressing: It’s a lot easier to make noble points about fighting the establishment, about refusing to surrender yourself to the system, than it is to closely observe the ways real people behave when they’re placed in an environment like a mental institution.

That sort of observation, when it’s allowed to happen, is what’s best about One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. We meet a classic outsider—R.P.

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McMurphy, a quintessentially sane convict sent to the institution as a punishment for troublemaking—whose charisma and gall allow him to break through to a group of patients who’ve mostly fallen into a drugged lethargy. Their passive existence is reinforced by the unsmiling, domineering Nurse Ratched, who lines them up for compulsory tranquilizers and then leads them through group therapy in a stupor.

McMurphy has no insights into the nature of mental illness, which is his blessing. He’s an extroverted, life-loving force of nature who sees his fellow patients as teammates, and defines the game as the systematic defiance of Nurse Ratched and the system she personifies. In many of the best scenes in the film, this defiance takes the shape of spontaneous and even innocent little rebellions: During exercise period, the patients mill around aimlessly on a basketball court until McMurphy hilariously tries to get a game going.

He also makes bets and outrageous dares, and does some rudimentary political organizing. He needs the votes of ten patients, out of a possible eighteen, to get the ward schedule changed so they can all watch the World Series—and his victory is in overcoming the indifference the others feel not only toward the Series but toward existence itself.

McMurphy is the life force, the will to prevail, set down in the midst of a community of the defeated.

And he’s personified and made totally credible

his characters and making them real, and then seeing how they changed as they bounced off one another —One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest might have been a great film. It’s a good one as it is, but we can see the machinery working.

Take, for example, the all-night orgy that finally hands McMurphy over to his doom. He’s smuggled booze and broads into the ward, and everyone gets drunk, and then the hapless Billy (Brad Dourif ) is

“McMurphy has no insights into the nature of mental illness, which is his blessing.”

by Jack Nicholson, in another of the remarkable performances that have made him the most interesting actor to emerge in the last two decades.

Nicholson, manically trying to teach basketball to an Indian (Will Sampson) who hasn’t even spoken in twelve years, sometimes succeeds in translating the meaning of the movie and Ken Kesey’s novel into a series of direct, physical demonstrations.

That’s when the movie works, and what it’s best at.

If Forman had stayed at that level -- introducing

cheerfully bundled into a bedroom with a willing girl. Billy stutters so badly he can hardly talk, but he’s engaging and intelligent, and we suspect his problems are not incurable. The next morning, as Nurse Ratched surveys the damage, Billy at first defies her (speaking without a stutter, which is too obvious) and then caves in when she threatens to tell his mother what he’s done. Nurse Ratched and Billy’s mother are old friends, you see (again, too obvious, pinning the rap on Freud and Mom).

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CRITIC REVIEWS

Billy commits suicide, and we’re invited to stand around his pitiful corpse and see the injustice of it all—when all we’ve really seen is the plot forcing an implausible development out of unwilling subject matter.

Even as I’m making these observations, though, I can’t get out of my mind the tumultuous response that Cuckoo’s Nest received from its original audiences. Even the most obvious, necessary, and sobering scenes—as when McMurphy tries to strangle Nurse Ratched to death—were received, FOREIGN OBJECTS: A MILOŠ FORMAN FILM FESTIVAL

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not seriously, but with sophomoric cheers and applause. Maybe that’s the way to get the most out of the movie—see it as a simple-minded antiestablishment parable—but I hope not. I think there are long stretches of a very good film to be found in the midst of Forman’s ultimate failure, and I hope they don’t get drowned in the applause for the bad stuff that plays to the galleries.

the people vs. larry flynt “This is it?” the Cincinnati printer asks dubiously, looking at the page proofs for the newsletter Larry Flynt wants him to print. “You’ve got to have text— like Playboy.” Flynt is unyielding. He is interested in gynecological detail, not redeeming social merit.

Soon his newsletter has blossomed into Hustler magazine, although not without difficulties (one editorial conference is devoted to a discussion of why the number of a magazine’s pages must be divisible by two).

If you believe that Hustler is pornographic and in bad taste, you will not get an argument from Flynt.

Flaunting the magazine’s raunchiness, he became a millionaire while printing cartoons such as the one in which “Dorothy has a foursome with the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion and the Scarecrow—oh, and Toto.” Emboldened by his success, Flynt grew more outrageous, until finally one of his parody ads inspired a $40 million lawsuit from the Rev. Jerry Falwell.

Was Falwell right to be offended? He certainly was; the parody of a Smirnoff ad was in outrageously bad taste. Did Flynt have a right to print the parody? The Supreme Court eventually decided that he did. No one in their right mind could believe that what the ad said was true (as Falwell himself admitted from the witness stand), and the right of free speech includes the right to offend.

The Supreme Court’s ruling in the Hustler case came under attack at the time, but consider this: If Falwell had won his suit against Flynt, this newspaper would be fundamentally different.

The editorial cartoons could not make fun of public officials. The op-ed columns could not risk offending. The lawyers might have questioned a recent review in which I said a film should be cut up into ukulele picks; after all, that might have hurt the director’s feelings. And Falwell himself might not have been able to broadcast his sermons, because they might have offended atheists.

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CRITIC REVIEWS

“If they’ll protect a scumbag like me, then they’ll protect all of you,” Flynt said after his 1987 court victory. Inelegant, but true. Milos Forman’s The People vs. Larry Flynt argues that the freedom of speech must apply to unpopular speech, or it is meaningless. Beginning with this belief, Forman constructs a fascinating biopic about a man who went from rags to riches by never overestimating the taste of his readers.

If you question the dimensions of Hustler’s success, reflect that a modern skyscraper towers in Los Angeles, proclaiming FLYNT PUBLICATIONS from its rooftop. Even if he’s only leasing, that’s

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a lot of rent. When Flynt started Hustler in 1972, Playboy was already 20 years old and Penthouse was a success. He aimed below them—at the vulgar underbelly of the market—and offered pictorial details that Playboy, at least, has never been interested in printing.

For Flynt, played by Woody Harrelson, Hustler was like winning the lottery. He was a Kentucky moonshiner’s son who ran away from home and eventually ran strip clubs in Cincinnati. There he found the love of his life: Althea Leasure (Courtney Love), a bisexual stripper who bluntly told him, “You are not the only person who has slept with

“If they’ll protect a scumbag like me, then they’ll protect all of you.”

every woman in this club.” Hustler’s first publicity breakthrough came when Flynt printed nude photos of Jacqueline Onassis, a coup so sensational it forced the media (and the public) to notice the magazine. The People vs. Larry Flynt shows Flynt running a loose editorial ship in which his brother Jimmy (Brett Harrelson), hangers-on and assorted strippers and hookers seem to publish the magazine by committee.

The movie shows Larry and Althea as a couple deeply into promiscuity; proposing marriage to him in a hot tub, Althea is shocked when Larry thinks she means monogamy. Their marriage survives many tests, not least the one when Flynt is temporarily converted to religion by Ruth Carter Stapleton, sister of the president. (The movie never really makes it clear how sincere Flynt was in his born-again period.)

Very early, he meets a man destined to be a lifelong companion: his lawyer, Alan Isaacman (Edward Norton), who wins his spurs defending him in one action after another. An early antagonist is Charles Keating, then head of Citizens for Decent Literature, more recently an S&L crook. “I’m your dream client,” Flynt tells Isaacman. “I’m fun, I’m rich and I’m always in trouble.”

As the magazine grows, Flynt keeps it on the low road, eventually developing enemies. In 1978, during a trial in Georgia, both he and Isaacman are shot by an unknown gunman, and Flynt is paralyzed from the waist down. That leads to a long dark period, until 1983, when he and Althea hole up in a Los Angeles mansion, using pain-killers and whatever other drugs come to hand. The magazine 40

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seems to run itself while they cower behind the steel door of their bedroom.

Flynt eventually has an operation that stops his pain, and he kicks drugs. Leasure, not as lucky, sickens and dies of AIDS. Then comes the suit

by Falwell, and a journey that ends with Flynt pumping his wheelchair into the Supreme Court.

Larry Flynt is never likely to find his face on a postage stamp, but he has played a role in our era.

A negative one, in contributing to the general decay of taste and decorum, and a positive one, in being the point man for a crucial defense of American liberties. As an individual, he seems to have been clueless some of the time and morose much of the time (he plays a camera role in the film as a judge, and looks unhappy).

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But like many another man he was fortunate to find the love of a loyal woman, and Althea, as played by Love, is a quirky free spirit. The product of a tragic childhood (she identified the bodies after her father murdered her family, then she was sent to an orphanage, where she was abused), she is made by Love into a kind of life force, misdirected but uncompromised. It is quite a performance; Love proves she is not a rock star pretending to act, but a true actress, and Harrelson matches her with his portrait of a man who has one thing on his mind, and never changes it.

man on the moon Our inner child embraces Andy Kaufman. We’ve been just like that. Who cannot remember boring our friends for hour after hour after hour with the same dumb comic idea, endlessly insisted on?

Who hasn’t refused to admit being wrong? “I won’t give up on this,’’ we’re saying, “until you give up first. Until you laugh, or agree, or cry ‘uncle.’ I can keep this up all night if necessary.’’ That was Andy Kaufman’s approach to the world. The difference was, he tried to make a living out of it, as a standup comedian. Audiences have a way of demanding to be entertained. Kaufman’s act was essentially a meditation on the idea of entertainment. He would entertain you, but you had to cave in first. You had to laugh at something really dumb, or let him get away with something boring or outrageous. If you passed the test, he was like a little kid, delighted to be allowed into the living room at last. He’d entertain, all right.

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He was not the most successful comedian of his time. The last years of his life, his biographer Bill Zehme tells me, were spent in mostly unemployed show-biz free fall. But Kaufman enjoyed that, too: He was fascinated by the relationship between entertainer and audience, which is never more sincere than when the entertainer is hated. It is poetic justice that Andy Kaufman now has his own biopic, directed by Milos Forman and starring Jim Carrey. He wins. Uncle.

What is most wonderful about Man on the Moon, a very good film, is that it remains true to Kaufman’s stubborn vision. Oh, it brightens things up a little (the cookie and milk evening at Carnegie Hall wasn’t his farewell concert, because by then he was far too unemployable for a Carnegie booking).

But essentially it stays true to his persona: A guy who would test you, fool you, lie to you, deceive you and stage elaborate deceptions, put-ons and hoaxes. The movie doesn’t turn him into a

sweet, misunderstood guy. And it doesn’t pander for laughs. When something is not working in Kaufman’s act, it’s not working in the movie, either, and it’s not funny, it’s painful.

The film has a heroic performance from Jim Carrey, who successfully disappears inside the character of Andy Kaufman. Carrey is as big a star as Hollywood has right now, and yet fairly early in Man on the Moon, we forget who is playing Kaufman and get

troublesome kid in his room, refusing to go out and play, preferring to host his own TV variety program for the cameras he believed were hidden in his bedroom walls. His material was inspired by shabby nightclub and lounge acts. He understood that a live performance is rarely more fascinating than when it is going wrong.

I myself, for example, have seldom been more involved than I was one night at a 36-seat theater in London during a performance of a one-man

“Kaufman’s act was essentially a meditation on the idea of entertainment.” involved in what is happening to him. Carrey is himself a compulsive entertainer who will do anything to get a laugh, who wants to please, whose public image is wacky and ingratiating. That he can evoke the complexities of Kaufman’s comic agonies is a little astonishing. That he can suppress his own desire to please takes a kind of courage.

Not only is he working without his own net—he’s playing a guy who didn’t use a net.

The film, and written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, begins with Kaufman as a

show called “Is It Magic—Or Is It Manilow?’’ The star was a bad magician who did a bad imitation of Barry Manilow, alternating the two elements of his act. There were 12 people in the audience, and we were desperately important to him. The program notes said he had once been voted most popular entertainer on a cruise ship out of Goa. Andy Kaufman would have been in ecstasy.

The movie follows Kaufman into the L.A. standup circuit, where a talent manager (Danny DeVito) sees something in his act and signs him. Kaufman 46

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is soon a sitcom star, a regular on Taxi (we see cast veterans like Marilu Henner, Carol Kane, Christopher Lloyd and Judd Hirsch playing themselves—DeVito of course is otherwise engaged). He insists on “guest bookings’’ for his “protege,’’ an obnoxious lounge act named Tony Clifton, who is played behind impenetrable makeup

by Kaufman and sometimes by his accomplice Bob Zmuda. Kaufman steadfastly refuses to admit he “is’’ Clifton, and in a way, he isn’t.

The parabolas of Kaufman’s career intersect as Taxi goes off the air. He has never been more famous, or had bleaker prospects. He’s crying wolf more than the public is crying uncle. He starts wrestling women in his nightclub act, not a popular decision, and gets involved in a feud with Memphis wrestling star Jerry Lawler. They fight on FOREIGN OBJECTS: A MILOŠ FORMAN FILM FESTIVAL

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the Letterman show. It looks real. The movie says it was staged (Lawler plays himself ). OK, so it was staged—but Lawler’s blow to Kaufman’s head was real enough to tumble him out of his chair. And no doubt Kaufman made Lawler vow to hit him that hard. He always wanted to leave you in doubt.

What was it with Kaufman? The movie leaves us with a mystery, and it should. In traditional Hollywood biopics, there would be Freudian shorthand to explain everything. Nothing explains Andy Kaufman. If he had been explicable, no one would have wanted to make a movie about him.

AMAdeus Milos Forman’s Amadeus is one of the riskiest gambles a filmmaker has taken in a long time — a lavish movie about Mozart that dares to be anarchic and saucy, and yet still earns the importance of tragedy. This movie is nothing like the dreary educational portraits we’re used to seeing about the Great Composers, who come across as cobwebbed profundities weighed down with the burden of genius. This is Mozart as an eighteenth-century Bruce Springsteen, and yet (here is the genius of the movie) there is nothing cheap or unworthy about the approach.

Amadeus is not only about as much fun as you’re likely to have with a movie, it also is disturbingly true. The truth enters in the character of Salieri, who tells the story. He is not a great composer, but he is a good enough composer to know greatness when he hears it, and that is why the music of Mozart breaks his heart. He knows how good it is, he sees how easily Mozart seems to compose it,

and he knows that his own work looks pale and silly beside it.

The movie begins with the suggestion that Salieri might have murdered Mozart. The movie examines the ways in which this possibility might be true, and by the end of the film we feel a certain kinship with the weak and jealous Salieri — for few of us can identify with divine genius, but many of us probably have had dark moments of urgent selfcontempt in the face of those whose effortless existence illustrates our own inadequacies. Salieri, played with burning intensity by F. Murray Abraham, sits hunched in a madhouse confessing to a priest. The movie flashes back to his memories of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the child genius who composed melodies of startling originality and who grew up to become a prolific, driven artist.

One of the movie’s wisest decisions is to cast Mozart not as a charismatic demigod, not as a tortured

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CRITIC REVIEWS

“One of the movie’s wisest decisions is to cast Mozart... as a goofy, immature, likable kid with a ridiculous laugh.”

superman, but as a goofy, immature, likable kid with a ridiculous laugh. The character is played

by Tom Hulce, and if you saw National Lampoon’s Animal House, you may remember him as the fraternity brother who tried to seduce the mayor’s daughter, while an angel and a devil whispered in his ears. Hulce would seem all wrong for Mozart, but he is absolutely right, as an unaffected young man filled with delight at his own gifts, unaware of how easily he wounds Salieri and others, tortured only by the guilt of having offended his religious and domineering father.

The film is constructed in wonderfully well-written and acted scenes — scenes so carefully constructed, unfolding with such delight, that they play as perfect compositions of words. Most of them will be unfamiliar to those who have seen Peter Shaffer’s brooding play, on which this film is based; Shaffer and Forman have brought light, life, and laughter to the material, and it plays with grace and ease.

It’s more human than the play; the characters are people, not throbbing packages of meaning. It centers on the relationships in Mozart’s life: with his father, his wife, and Salieri. The father never can be pleased, and that creates an undercurrent affecting all of Mozart’s success. The wife, played by delightful, buxom Elizabeth Berridge, contains in one person the qualities of a jolly wench and a loving partner: She likes to loll in bed all day, but also gives Mozart good, sound advice and is a forceful person in her own right. The patrons, especially Joseph II, the Austro-Hungarian emperor, are connoisseurs and dilettantes, slow to take to Mozart’s new music but enchanted by the audacity with which he defends it. And then there is Salieri (F. Murray Abraham), the gaunt court composer whose special torture is to understand better than anybody else how inadequate he is, and how great Mozart is.

The movie was shot on location in Forman’s native Czechoslovakia, and it looks exactly right; it fits its 52

CRITIC REVIEWS

period comfortably, perhaps because Prague still contains so many streets, quares and buildings that could be directly from the Vienna of Mozart’s day.

illustrate. There are times when Mozart speaks the words of a child, but then the music says the same things in the language of the gods, and all is clear.

Perhaps his confidence in his locations gave Forman the freedom to make Mozart slightly out of period.

Forman directed the film version of Hair, and Mozart in this movie seems to share a spirit with some of the characters from Hair. Mozart’s wigs do not look like everybody else’s. They have just the slightest suggestion of punk, just the smallest shading of pink. Mozart seems more a child of the 1960s than of any other age, and this interpretation of his personality — he was an irreverent protohippie who trusted, if you will, his own vibes — sounds risky, but works.

Amadeus is a magnificent film, full and tender and funny and charming -- and, at the end, sad and angry, too, because in the character of Salieri it has given us a way to understand not only greatness, but our own lack of it. This movie’s fundamental question, is whether we can learn to be grateful for the happiness of others, and that, of course, is a test for sainthood. How many movies ask such questions and succeed in being fun, as well?

I have not mentioned the music. There’s probably no need to. The music provides the understructure of the film, strong, confident, above all, clear in a way that Salieri’s simple muddles only serve to FOREIGN OBJECTS: A MILOŠ FORMAN FILM FESTIVAL

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FESTIVAL SCHEDULE

GALLERY SHOWING To celebrate Forman as a director, not only do we want to show his films, but we also will have a photography gallery showing of his life. You will learn about his childhood and how he became the man he is today.

Open Fri, Sat and Sun Noon - 10:00pm

AMADEUS

Friday, Nov 20, 2015 7:00pm

ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST

Saturday, Nov 21, 2015 7:00pm

MAN ON THE MOON

Sunday, Nov 22, 2015 2:00pm

THE PEOPLE VS. LARRY FLYNT

Sunday, Nov 22, 2015 6:00pm

"I think I just glorify this rebel because I am myself a coward, and I would like to be a hero but I, you know, I don’t have courage to do that."

- Milos Forman

VENUE INFO

We have decided to host this event at the Walter Reade Theater because of it’s roots in film and history of film festivals they have hosted there. And the fact that Milos Forman has made his home in New York and has made it known that is his city and he never wants to leave has made us know that keeping his film festival in New York would be the proper thing to do.

The Film Society of Lincoln Center was founded in 1969 to celebrate American and international cinema, to recognize and support new filmmakers, and to enhance awareness, accessibility and understanding of the art among a broad and diverse film going audience.

The Film Society is best known for two world-class international festivals – the New York Film Festival (the most famous and prestigious in the country), and New Directors/New Films (celebrating new cinematic artists). It runs two state-of-the-art year round cinemas, the Walter Reade Theater (268 seats) and the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center FOREIGN OBJECTS: A MILOŠ FORMAN FILM FESTIVAL

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(90 seats, 150 seats and the 75-seat Amphitheater), and publishes the country’s most respected cinematic journal, Film Comment. Each year the organization presents its annual Gala Tribute honoring legendary stars and industry leaders of our generation at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall. At various times of the year the Film Society partners with Hollywood studios to present premieres and special live appearances.

The Film Society of Lincoln Center Walter Reade Theater 165 West 65th Street Between Broadway and Amsterdam

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VENUE INFO

Our theaters are convenient to the 66th Street stop of the 1 train, as well as being five blocks from a major transportation hub, Columbus Circle. Bus Lines M104, M5, and M7 all stop in front of Lincoln Center.

Walk west on 65th Street, look to the left to find the Film Center and to find the Walter Reade, look to the right for the FILM banner on 65th Street. For access to the upper level use: the new public staircase on the north side of 65th FOREIGN OBJECTS: A MILOĹ FORMAN FILM FESTIVAL

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St near the mid-block crossing, the elevator in the Juilliard School, the elevator or the escalator directly beneath the theater.

To speak to Lincoln Center customer service staff, call (212) 875-5456, Monday through Friday from 9am - 8pm. www.filmlinc.com

FOREIGN OBJECTS: A Miloš Forman Film Festival Catalog designed and compiled by Nicole Johnson Student ID 02533561 nikkijohnson1122@gmail.com Copyright © 2013 The original source for this book was created in InDesign and output as a PDF. Photographs were enhanced using Photoshop and the text was formatted in InDesign.

The typefaces used in this book are Avenir, Adobe Garamond Pro and Heavy Equipment.

This book was printed on 100# Premium Matte.

It was printed and bound by Blurb.

GR 612 - Integrated Communications Instructor Marc English Fall 2013 at the Academy of Art University San Francisco, CA All Rights Reserved