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CINEMUSINGS INTERVIEWS AUTHOR
JOSEPH DOUGHERTY
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So, who's Joseph Dougherty (Who I pronounced as John Dougherty for some reason, Sorry, sir)? Well, if you've been visiting the site, we reviewed his excellent Hollywood satire/semi-biographical novel "Comfort and Joi" a look at Hollywood and Ms. Joi Lansing's career which is earning some well deserved critical acclaim, including from Christopher Guest, but if you've kept up he's also worked in the film and television medium for many years working as a screenwriter for critically acclaimed shows as "Thirtysomething", and "Once and Again", and the remake "Attack of the 50 ft. Woman" with none other than Spinal Tap alum Christopher Guest. He's also the kind man who was nice enough to grant us an interview.
I marveled at Mr. Dougherty's insightful
and mind-blowing views on pop-culture from his novel, and we
requested an interview with the author to which he was kind enough
to oblige and he further emphasizes his gripes with the current pop
culture craze and muses on many things from remakes, ipods,
television, and his favorite directors. If you were looking for
insight on pop culture, here is the place to read it. Mr. Dougherty
went all out and we were more than happy to post it for all of you
to read with our further coverage of Mr. Dougherty's novel "Comfort
and Joi" which I urge you to buy. |
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FV: Other than exposing the world to Joi Lansing, what other ideas motivated you to write this book? JD: One motivation was to see if I could do it. I’ve spent my career up until now as a dramatist and I wanted to explore the possibilities of a substantial piece of prose, something totally my own. I was also looking for a way to talk about movies and culture in a form less restrictive than straight-forward, non-fiction. I really did turn around one day and realized this minor actress was taking up a disproportionate place in my memory, which led to a two-part decision; to let the structure of the book be dictated by the course of Joi’s career, and to graft myself onto a fictional narrator and send him off alone to see what would happen. FV: The main character is never named, but it's pointed out in the summary that the book is not told from your own point of view with some liberties taken. Was the nameless character intentional? And for what reason did he become a separate entity? JD: If I went away for a weekend to write a book about Joi Lansing it wouldn’t be the same as the one the narrator of Comfort and Joi creates. I share a great deal with him, certainly when he talks about the movies, but we also part company along the way. He’s an alternative version of me; a different set of reactions I wanted to play with. I suppose he represents who I might have become if I’d gotten stuck at a certain point in life. As for never naming him, it would have been easy to slip his name in there somewhere, but for reasons I can’t explain I feel it’s a more intimate experience for the reader if they can’t put a name between themselves and the narrator. Initially he doesn’t tell you his name because he’s trying to write in a safe, non-fiction voice, but he can’t maintain it and the book becomes more and more a diary. I really wanted to give the reader the sense that they’d come upon an unfinished manuscript, something left behind. FV: You express many distastes (In your book) for modern pop culture from the televisions that once resembled furniture but now stand out from the room, the lack of true human communication in America due to technology, and the deterioration of the classic movie theater. What other progressions in culture and technology have left you generally alienated or discontent? JD: Well, I’m pretty well fed up with those damn horseless carriages filling the streets. It’s not that I’m against technology. I’m not saying we should or even can arrest the rush of progress. But I think we have to remember that we are in danger of surrendering important parts of ourselves in exchange for, arguably, very little in the way of convenience. In the book, when the narrator talks about the difference between the console “entertainment centers” he remembers compared to the big screen t.v. in the house where he’s staying, it’s less important that one television is technologically better than the other and more important that you have two very different relationships with the two different machines. The bigger and better our televisions get (while claiming to offer a “movie theater” experience) the more they dominate the room they’re in. You can’t really live in a living room with a five-foot plasma screen. That is a room for watching. All of a sudden, this appliance is dictating what you can do with the room. As for the movie theater, beyond the aesthetics of a beautiful auditorium, the important thing to remember is that movies were designed to be communal experiences. We were supposed to give ourselves over to them in the dark, surrounded by strangers. Watching them in private is an entirely different experience. Frankly, I think it’s a diminished experience. I suppose you could have a whole bunch of strangers come over to your home theater, but I think that opens you up to all sorts of other problems. FV: As a follow up, have you found many or some of the modern technological progressions beneficial? Have you taken a shine to particular modern technology or crazes? JD: I think the iPod is the greatest thing to come along since sliced bread, but I wouldn’t want to watch Dr. Zhivago on one. I don’t know if it’s the inevitable flip-side of the diminishment of communal experiences, but I think the communities that have developed on the internet are both vibrant and embracing. I think we’re just at the beginning of Podcasting, which is perhaps the single most astonishing concepts for personal expression to show up in a very long time. Imagine having access to the world through your laptop…access that takes the form of that long abandoned medium: Radio. Marshall McLuhan would be laughing himself sick if he knew about this. FV: You display much discontent for modern movie-going mainly in the nuance or lack thereof provided for the audience whom may never be aware of the novelty of the movie-going experience. The latest popular common complaint is lack of consideration in movie theaters, and deteriorating of well mannered movie goers. Are there any complaints you have toward that? Any gripes or thoughts? JD: If all you’ve ever done is watch movies in your living room, how are you supposed to know there’s another standard for behavior in a theater? That’s giving the idiot with the cellphone behind you a lot of slack. Maybe the rudeness in movie theaters is the same rudeness we’re surrounded by everywhere else, it just stands out in starker relieve when you’re trying to watch a movie. But there’s hope. Sort of. I live in Los Angeles and we have a theater complex here called The Arclight which was built as an annex to the fully restored Cinerama Dome on Hollywood Boulevard (which was built in 1963 for the premiere of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World). The Arclight has state of the art projection and sound, but it has something else. It offers what we might as well start calling the “Connoisseur” movie going experience. All seats at the Arclight are reserved seats and you can buy your tickets online. They show no commercials before the feature and a maximum of four trailers. Before every show the audience is greeted by the usher in charge of the auditorium who welcomes them and lets them know they’ll be checking on the sound and image throughout the show. Any problems or questions, don’t hesitate to ask. It costs a couple of bucks more to see a movie at The Arclight than it does at a regular movie house, but people pay the price. They pay because they know there’s something special about the theatrical experience, something they’re unwilling to give up. Maybe conventional movie theaters will go the way of the Drive-In and there’ll be nothing left but high-end venues such as The Arclight. Maybe, but at least when you go to them you know you won’t hear somebody’s cell phone ringing…and being answered! FV: I've passed your book on to my uncle who is a hardcore film buff, and he's passing it on to his friend who is also a hardcore film buff and movie critic, and after reading they've expressed the same question, what was the significance of the main character's next door neighbor and his observance of her going in and out of her house? JD: I don’t want to get to specific about the neighbor because she’s open to a lot of interpretations I didn’t intend, but could be completely valid. I’m not being coy, but she gave me a lot of trouble when I was writing the book. Let me see if I can talk about this without screwing things up for people who haven’t read the book. For a period when I was writing, I fully expected the relationship between the narrator and the neighbor to develop in a much more “conventional” way. But every time I tried to nudge the book in that direction, it swerved off onto the shoulder. Then I realized that the thing had to play out the way it does, because of what the narrator eventually discovers (or thinks he discovers) about living on the edge of life. Not the edge, the fringe. Not quite in the light. FV: Do you feel film as a medium has evolved or de-evolved in terms of quality and or originality in the modern era? JD: Absolutely yes. The awful pictures are much more awful than they ever were and they do a tremendous amount of damage to the audience’s attention span while refusing to challenge them on any level. But sit in a theater watching a dazzlingly beautiful digital presentation of a Pixar Film such as The Incredibles and you can appreciate how it’s part of a hundred year plus evolution of technique and art and passion all in the service of our human hunger for stories; our genetic need to respond emotionally to something that isn’t really happening. FV: How do you feel about the gradually growing sentiment being placed in the public consciousness (by Madison Ave.) that anything and everything older than twenty years is basically obsolete from black and white classic films, to music from the sixties and fifties which have been stripped from public radio, to books that are being deemed as irrelevant? JD: I think it represents human sloth in its worst possible form. We could go to the political agenda here in that a people without an awareness of their own history is very easy to manipulate, but let’s stay in the cultural column. There’s a cold spine of laziness running through the dismissal of a past that required skill and apprenticeship, not to mention genuine talent, as prerequisites to creativity. Today performers will sample a song they could never compose and reproduce it with the electronic versions of instruments they don’t know how to play, then call the result their creation, call themselves artists. That’s like going down to Ikea, buying a chest of drawers, putting it together with a Philips head screwdriver, and calling yourself a cabinet maker. The grammar and vocabulary of film has been evolving for more than a century. To understand why you react to a film the way you do, you have to understand the forces that have shaped acting, writing, editing, lighting and a dozen other disciplines over the decades. Two minutes ago I was talking about Podcasting and the easy technology that gives individuals almost instant access to the world, but the Podcasts that will survive the inevitable shake out are the ones created by people who understand writing in general and storytelling in particular. The others will get bored and move on to the next thing. The things that will last in that form, the things that will have an impact on people, are the ones that understand all the great stuff that happened before any of us were born and still have the power to move us. FV: Are there any past traditions or practices in the form of film or television you particularly miss? JD: I miss hard ticket road-show movies. Those event movies that opened in a handful of theaters that gave two shows a day, with an overture and an intermission. I think if more people had an experience with a well-presented 70MM print in dye-transfer Technicolor, they’d go home and curse their so-called wide screen t.v. sets. A plug for a site I have nothing to do with: The American Wide Screen Museum. As for television. When I wrote my first hour of television in 1987 an episode was forty-nine minutes long (down from fifty-one in the sixties). Today, an hour episode is forty-two minutes. I’d love to have those seven minutes back to help me tell a story. FV: Do you feel modern technology and the many filmmaking facets given to the common consumer devalues the struggle, torture, and utter creative experience it takes to make a film these days? JD: I’m afraid so. There is a very real difference between seeing Will Smith appear to do a stunt in front of a green screen with a bunch of CG robots and Jackie Chan standing on the roof of a real building doing a similar stunt. When the difference gets blurred or somebody tells you it doesn’t matter, then something important and human is in danger of being lost. FV: Are there any modern or contemporary filmmakers that you are especially fond of? JD: I’m all over the map these days. I really like what Terry Zwigoff is doing, Ghost World, Bad Santa. I think the Japanese animator Satoshi Kon has made some breathtakingly original films, Tokyo Godfathers and Millennium Actress. And there’s Hayao Miyazaki with Spirited Away and Castle in the Sky. FV: What do you think about the current trend in Hollywood of remaking any and every film? And are there any remakes that particularly angered or irritated you? JD: They’re all so useless. Now they’ve started to remake movies there was no real reason to make in the first place. Yours, Mine and Ours? Fun With Dick and Jane? What exactly was the decision making process behind those greenlights? But I’ll say this, the one movie that should be remade every fifteen or twenty years is Invasion of the Body Snatchers; each version we’ve had so far has been a solid movie and a fascinating variation on the themes. And every time you make it, you’re making it in the middle of a different socio-political soup. FV: The feedback from readers about the book have all shared the similar thought (including me) that your descriptions of the B Movies Ms. Lansing was in often resembled the comedic spoofing from "Mystery Science Theater 3000", how do you feel about that? JD: I’m a long-standing fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and I admit some of their deconstructionist ways of looking at movies creep into the book. But it’s so damn infectious. Also, I think much of what goes on in MST3K comes from a real affection for film as an experience. After all, wisecracks aside, it’s a series about having to go into a theater to watch a movie. FV: What is your favorite film of all time? And, why? JD: There’s no way you’re going to narrow me down to one film, I have to give you a couple. And you said favorite, not best. At the top of the list…if it were a list…would be Preston Sturges’ Unfaithfully Yours, which pretty much ended his career but is really the summit of the mountain he was climbing throughout the forties. Then Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, it’s pretty near perfect any way you want to slice it. Also close to perfect is Robert Benton’s Late Show. Jacques Tati’s Playtime, a Buster Keaton feature to be named later (it’s between Seven Chances, Our Hospitality, and The Navigator), and I’m one of those people who pick Day at the Races over Night at the Opera. FV: The cliffhanger in the climax really does open the book up to possibilities of a sequel. Are there plans for one, or was that just intended to keep the reader guessing? JD: You’re assuming the poor guy can ever get it together to move on from the point we leave him at on the last page and I’m not so sure he does. But then, I’ve found out more information about Joi Lansing since I finished the book. I’ve got copies of her death certificate and last will now. That’s doesn’t make me weird. Does it? FV: Do you have any plans for a new novel any time soon? JD: I have plans for two novels, both about aspects of the movie business and each structured very differently from Comfort and Joi. FV: What projects are you currently working on at the moment, if not, what are your plans for future work? JD: I’m focusing on television right now, but I’m also getting ready to produce some original plays for Pod casting and working on a revised version of the book for a musical I wrote a couple of years ago which might go on tour.
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