: Joaquin Phoenix smolders in ‘Ladder 49.’ –>

Fireman and author Earl Emerson smokes ‘Ladder 49’

In its ongoing quest for the ultimate postfilm conversation, Talking Pictures takes interesting people to interesting movies.

“I just want to say a couple things right off,” begins Lt. Earl Emerson, the bestselling author (Into the Inferno, Vertical Burn) and longtime firefighter with the Seattle Fire Department. It is early Sunday morning, and Emerson is at home, gearing up to talk about Ladder 49, the new fire-fighting flick starring John Travolta and Joaquin Phoenix. Emerson saw the film Friday night, before reporting to his station for a 24-hour shift, which he only just completed. It was, he says, an eventful two-dozen hours.

After sitting through an oxygen-mask class, Emerson’s crew had fill-in duty, holding down the fort at another station while that crew went to mask class, a tricky situation, he explains, because every time there was an alarm, the visiting firefighters had to consult a map to see how to get to the fires, most of which turned out to be of the food-on-the-stove variety.

“Usually, you don’t get more than one food-on-the-stove call in a shift,” Emerson reports. “We had four in a row, so I don’t know what was going on in Seattle last night.”

The high point, in a personal sense, was when Emerson noticed a copy of his new book–the excellent kick-ass thriller Pyro (Ballantine; $24.95), about a pyromaniac who seems to hate firefighters–sitting on the bunk of a fireman whose station he was babysitting. As Emerson tells it, after debating the issue for a while, he finally grabbed the book and signed it, inscribing it with the manly message, “Thanks for saving my butt at that big fire last week. If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t be here. Earl Emerson.”

“I have no idea who the guy is,” Emerson laughs. “But, hey, weren’t we talking about the movie?”

Oh, yeah. The movie.

In Ladder 49, Phoenix plays a sensitive fireman trapped inside a burning building, tearfully flashbacking to all the most important moments of his life–first day on the job, first fire, first date, first kid, first work-related death–while his boss (Travolta) works the scene to find his fallen comrade and get him out of the flames.

“Let me just say,” Emerson comments with a slight bad-boy chuckle, “if that guy, Joaquin Phoenix, was in our station, I would not want to be his partner. Everywhere he went, somebody got killed or fell through a roof. It’s like, wow, this guy is bad news. We have people like that in the fire department–and I tend to avoid them.”

Was it Phoenix’s knack for getting into extreme-temperature trouble that alarmed Emerson, or the way the guy seemed always right on the verge of bursting into tears?

“Both,” Emerson laughs. “The other thing is, these guys never seem to have any normal alarms. Every time the bell hit, it’s like, ‘Oh my God! Somebody’s either going to die or get their faced burned off!’ In a real station, you’d have a lot more calls to go help someone with diabetes check their blood sugar. We didn’t see any of that.”

In spite of the glaring absence of blood-sugar scenes, Emerson admits to enjoying Ladder 49. “It didn’t have a plot and the actors weren’t so great, but you know, it held up remarkably well when you consider all the deficiencies,” he says. Recognizing that this isn’t exactly high praise, Emerson adds, “It was an enjoyable tearjerker, a real five-hanky movie, wasn’t it? Every time the bagpipes and the kilts came out, I started crying.”

So . . . firemen do cry?

“Yeah, but I only cry at fire movies and war movies,” he explains, “so it’s OK.”

Ladder 49 is destined to hold a special place in the hearts of firefighters, Emerson surmises, if only because it’s a better flick than Backdraft. That film, with Kurt Russell and Billy Baldwin, is still the focus of firefighter mockery, partly for its over-the-top fire scenes, but mainly, says Emerson, for the macho catch-phrases spouted by the fictional firemen.

“For years we were running around saying, ‘You go, I go!'” Emerson chortles. “We’d go out on some routine aid call–something like helping someone with diabetes–and before going in to take her blood sugar we’d say, ‘Hey man, you go . . . I go.'”

If being superior to Backdraft isn’t enough to encourage one to see Ladder 49, Emerson offers this additional endorsement.

“It’s a great date movie for firefighters,” he assures. “If you’re a fireman and you want to get laid, take her to see Ladder 49. It’s a sure-fire winner.”

From the October 6-12, 2004 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

FEMME FATALE: 14-year-old actress Celeste Marie Davis also wrote ‘Purgatory House,’ in which she stars.

–>FOREVER YOUNG: Kate Winslet and Johnny Depp co-star in the Barrie bio ‘Finding Neverland.’

–>Sex Scene

The 2004 Mill Valley Film Festival reveals a few naked truths–and a whole lot more

Film festivals can tell us a lot about the state of the cinematic art, and possibly the reigning social attitude, merely by an examination of how each new festival hangs together. Except for those festivals organized around a very specific theme–science fiction/ horror movies, gay and lesbian movies, movies made for under $1,000 by recovering alcoholics from Fresno–the average film festival strives to be a vast salad bar of eclectic thematic subjects, origins and cinematic styles. That said, one cannot help but notice while skimming the program listing of the average film festival that certain mini themes frequently appear and a large number of films do seem to fall together into topical groups.

Consider last year’s Mill Valley Film Festival (MVFF), which included The Barbarian Invasions, Japanese Story, Sylvia, A Family Undertaking, My Life without Me, Pieces of April, Mystic River, The Station Agent and Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself, all of them about people dealing with death. The mortality theme was pronounced enough that many attendees began affectionately referring to the event as “the Mill Valley Death Festival.”

For the 2004 MVFF, running Oct. 7-17, the organizing Film Institute of Northern California has put together a first-rate lineup of over 100 films, shorts and special screenings, only a handful of which deal overtly with death and dying: Johnny Depp’s whimsical Finding Neverland, William Hurt’s Blue Butterfly, the satirical football and capital-punishment comedy Death and Texas and the buzz-inducing Purgatory House, in which a group of teen suicides are sentenced to eternity in a hellish halfway house.

A perusal of this year’s films reveals other small filmic groupings of similar subject matter. There are music films (Blues Divas, The Grateful Dead Movie, The Nomi Song, Timbuktoubab and the closing night blues documentary Lightning in a Bottle); films that were either made in the Bay Area or made by local filmmakers (notably the youth-directed compilation of shorts titled Barbie, Frankenstein and Friends featuring the hilarious antibiography Michael Patten’s Life by Novato high school junior Michael Patten); and animated films (the piratical French adventure Black Mór’s Island, Bill Plympton’s ghoulish Hair High and The Dark Side of the ‘Toon).

Oddly, the festival also features not one but two films dealing in part with . . . college admissions officers: Melissa Painter’s Admissions (starring Six Feet Under‘s Lauren Ambrose) and P.S., in which admissions officer Laura Linney discovers that an incoming freshman (Topher Grace) is the reincarnation of her long-dead high school sweetheart (which actually qualifies this film for the death-and-dying subset).

What does this mean? We have no idea. But whether it means anything or not, one can’t deny that films, like celebrity deaths and election season lies, do tend to come along in breathtaking clusters.

“It’s interesting how that happens,” agrees film producer Gail Mutrux, whose producing credits include Quiz Show, Nurse Betty and Donnie Brasco. “I remember a few years ago, the year of In the Bedroom and Monster’s Ball and a few others. That was the year we all got to see movies about families dealing with the death of a child. There was just something in the air.”

So what’s in the air now?

“Well, coming out of the Toronto Film Festival,” she replies, “it looks like we’re about to see a lot of films that deal in some way with sex.”

Bingo.

A glance at this year’s MVFF lineup–one or two offerings of which were also unveiled earlier in Toronto–reveals that sex and sexual politics is the new death and dying. For 10 stimulating days, the MVFF will be treating us to a whole range of films that take a look at issues of sex, sexuality, gender identity, male-female, male-male and female-female relationships. One notable entry is the film that Mutrux will be bringing to the festival. The sure-to-be-controversial Kinsey, starring Liam Neeson and Laura Linney (hey, here’s another trend) tells the story of sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, who set out in the late 1940s to scientifically categorize adult sexual behavior with the same clinical inquiry afforded plants and animals. Directed by Bill Condon (Gods and Monsters), the film is magnificently done, and though a little bit over-earnest at times, ranks as one of the most provocative and daring films of the year. It’s already raising the hackles of certain Kinsey-unfriendly media watchers.

“A lot of politically conservative people still blame Kinsey for the sexual revolution, and, of course they don’t like that the sexual revolution even occurred,” says Mutrux. “These are the same people who believe there shouldn’t be sex education in schools, which came about, one could argue, because Alfred Kinsey showed that there was a need for sexual education. Anyway, that’s just the political side of it. The movie’s also very entertaining.”

No argument there. Then again, what’s not entertaining about a middle-aged, bisexual entomologist with a statistically larger than average penis who surrounds himself with handsome researchers (occasionally offering full frontal nudity) and sets out to take thousands of sexual histories from a wide cross-section of Americans? The cast is great (especially Linney, who plays Kinsey’s remarkably durable wife), and the story is told with an astonishing amount of period detail, much of which sets up the exact flavor of sexual repression, along with all the misinformation and sexual superstition that existed before Kinsey’s Report. What surprised Mutrux about the film, which she spent eight years trying to bring to the screen, was the reaction it received from the ratings board.

“The MPAA gave us an R rating,” she proudly states, “and they did it very quickly. We really were expecting to get an NC-17, and we were preparing to have to go in and argue with them, but they didn’t give it an NC-17. In fact, they told us they actually learned a lot from the movie. Can you believe that?”

Along with Kinsey, the festival includes Vera Drake, the latest work of art from Mike Leigh (director of Naked, Topsy-Turvy, Secrets and Lies, and the subject of his own MVFF tribute event on Oct. 12). The film, which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, follows a saintly English abortionist (the luminous, Oscar-destined Imelda Staunton) in the 1950s.

Director Richard Eyre’s Stage Beauty is set in the early 17th century, when women were still forbidden to perform on the stage. Billy Crudup stars as an actor famous for his portrayals of women, whose life is upended when the king abolishes the prohibition against women actors. With women free to play female roles, there is no longer a need for his specialty, and his entire professional and sexual identity are challenged as he has to learn how to play a man as convincingly as he once played a woman.

A few more sexual politic highlights include Antares, an entertaining, sexually explicit Austrian drama exposing the messy lives of three couples in a Viennese housing community. Paul Cox’s Human Touch follows the sexual reawakening of a young music teacher, whose chilly life starts to melt when she begins posing nude for a famous photographer, and Nicole Kassal’s astonishing drama The Woodsman prompts Kevin Bacon into giving the best performance of his life as a convicted pedophile attempting to rebuild his own life after 12 years in prison.

Also of note is Allison Berg’s Witches in Exile, a mesmerizing documentary about the Kukuo Witch Camp in Northern Ghana, which examines the gender discrimination that has sentenced thousands of women to refugee camps as accused witches, and the surprising culture they create together.

Like we said–there’s something to appeal to everybody’s tastes.

Surely, Dr. Kinsey would approve.

As with all film festivals, scheduling is hectic at the MVFF. The best way to follow screenings is on its website (www.mvff.com). Note: due to remodeling of the CinéArts Seqouia Theater, all films scheduled for that venue will be held at San Rafael’s Century Regency 6 (280 Smith Ranch Road). 925.866.9559.

‘Baby’ Face: Josh Kornbluth’s new cinematic monologue, ‘Red Diaper Baby,’ chronicles his upbringing, replete with a father determined that he head the American communist party.

–>Ego Strip

Josh Kornbluth’s ‘Baby’ premieres at MVFF

Josh Kornbluth is excited.

He is excited that actress Laura Linney will be at the Mill Valley Film Festival. “I’ve been in love with her ever since that movie she made with Mark Ruffalo,” he says of You Can Count on Me, “the one with the title no one can ever remember.” He is excited at the possibility of hanging out with Dustin Hoffman, about whom he reveals, “He kinda likes my work, and he evidently used to read a transcript of Red Diaper Baby to his family at dinnertime.” And he’s excited to meet director Mike Leigh who, he shrugs, “is probably not that excited about the idea of meeting me.”

So it’s not, you know, a sexual excitement, though Kornbluth isn’t ruling that out as a near-future possibility. What’s stirred the conspicuous enthusiasm of the famous Berkeley-based monologist (Love and Taxes) and filmmaker (Haiku Tunnel) is the sudden realization that the world premiere of his new film–Red Diaper Baby, a live “concert” version of Kornbluth’s very first show–will be playing alongside a whole passel of high-profile films, many of them dealing with the subjects of gender, sex and sexuality.

“Oh, it’s an honor to be connected with sex in any way,” he says, “at my age especially. So that’s really cool. But then, Red Diaper Baby is a perfect fit for this year’s festival because it does have a very explicit 20-minute sex scene in it. Now, the fact that I’m the person standing there alone onstage in front of a filmed audience describing this sexual encounter, I realize, makes it somewhat less titillating to contemplate, but Red Diaper Baby is a coming-of-age story, so of course, that means sex. So my movie will fit in. Really well.”

Red Diaper Baby couples the story of Kornbluth’s slapstick sexual awakening with memories from his unorthodox upbringing among a community of passionate New York communists. His late father, who raised him to become the leader of the American communist revolution (“That didn’t work out, did it?” Kornbluth winks), is a central figure in Red Diaper Baby and is part of the reason why this show, more than all the others, is the one he felt most protective of as it went through various stages of adaptation for the big screen.

Kornbluth, citing a desire for “real control” over any filmed versions of his autobiographical material, explains that he’s divided his one-man shows into two categories: those in which he was more or less the same age he is now, or close enough to get away with portraying himself accurately in a narrative film, as he did in the Sundance hit Haiku Tunnel; and those monologues that recall an adolescent or otherwise far-too-youthful Kornbluth, a vision of himself that he’d rather take to film as a monologue, describing the time rather than bringing in an actor to attempt some sort of impersonation.

“These monologues, these memories, are the essential DNA of my life story,” Kornbluth says, “so I think I want those stories to be preserved and presented as, you know, what they began as: solo pieces. I’m very pleased with Red Diaper Baby, the movie. Actually, I’m kind of over-the-moon about it. It turned out just like I dreamed it would.” The film will be granted a limited theatrical release (it opens at the Smith Rafael Film Center a week after the festival) and then will run on the Sundance Channel before being released on DVD and video. If nothing else, Kornbluth sees the film as an important personal artifact.

“I feel like, you know, if my arms and legs should start to fall off now,” he says, “there will be this permanent record of what I was like in performance, a record of me performing, with my arms and legs, before I became, you know, the rolling-ball monologist. But my arms and legs feel fine, so don’t worry.”

Glad to hear that. But let’s get back to talking about sex.

“‘Little Fucker’ was my father’s nickname for me when I was little,” Kornbluth points out, a fact that is brought hilariously to life in the movie. “And I always felt that, in order to lead the revolution, as he told me I must, I needed to somehow become a Big Fucker. Maybe that’s part of what helped the movie get into the Mill Valley Film Festival.

“Usually,” he laughs, “sex doesn’t help me much in the movie industry, but maybe this is one occasion where it did.”

Red Diaper Baby, with in-person appearances by Josh Kornbluth, director Doug Pray and producer Brian Benson, screens on Friday, Oct. 15, at 6:45pm at the Smith Rafael Film Center, 1118 Fourth St., San Rafael. 925.866.9559.

–D.T.

From the September 29-October 5, 2004 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

FUTURE SHOCK: Daniella and Veasna discuss their plans.

–>Journey’s End

‘Aging Out’ examines what it means to be all alone and 18

By Gretchen Giles

Daniella’s got a baby on her hip and a glint in her eye. A 20-year-old foster “child” who has opted to stay in the system until she turns 21, Daniella is now anxious to “age out.” Her baby’s father, Veasna, is also in foster care; a Cambodian orphan, he’s acquired a hip-hop accent during his time in the system and is loath to leave his comfortable group home.

Meanwhile, Risa has just turned 18 and is the first in her family of 12 siblings to graduate from high school. She’s won a scholarship to UC Santa Barbara and is only the second client her social worker has ever had who has attained a savings account, checking account, job and college placement. She’s ready to leave her 10th foster facility and go it alone. Almost. And David’s been in the system since he was abandoned by his mother at age six weeks. Mentally fragile, uneducated and angry, David is also on the cusp of release from foster care. Freedom to David means little more than the chance to burgle, drink and score crystal meth.

What sets each of these young people apart is a life spent as wards of the state. What makes them exactly like any other young person about to step alone into the world are the fierce unknowns awaiting them. But what again sets them apart is that no one is there to help them. Daniella has no relative to watch the baby or knit a blanket. Risa sets up her side of the dorm room alone while her roommate’s family sets up hers together. David can take a bus to the Alaskan fisheries and no one will know where he is; worse, almost no one will care.

Followed in documentary filmmaker Roger Weisberg’s award-winning Aging Out–showing Thursday, Sept. 30, at Rialto Lakeside Cinemas–Daniella, Risa and David’s stories serve as shorthand sketches for the 20,000 or so young people who turn 18 and are released each year from the U.S. foster care system. According to a February 2003 report from California’s Little Hoover Commission, about 40,000 children enter foster care in this state alone each year. Upon aging out, about one-third haven’t finished high school, a quarter will be homeless for some time, half remain unemployed and another quarter are destined to be arrested.

Screening as a benefit, Aging Out shows here to help raise funds for the United Way’s new transitional housing facility, a 26-bed oasis on Santa Rosa’s Yulupa Avenue that will allow new adults the break they need to get jobs, save money and establish themselves cautiously in the world. Clients will be expected to pay roughly 30 percent of their income in rent for the privilege–estimated to be between $225 to $375 a month–and will learn such basics as bill-paying, how to secure a lease, the steps necessary in job application and other adult essentials.

While growing up always comes with its adjacent pains, that delicate time of late-adolescence/early adulthood can be particularly treacherous to navigate. Young people with two supportive parents, a solid education and a beckoning college often have trouble making the transition and moving forward. Those not blessed with families, education–fine or otherwise–or college opportunities find it that much harder to be 18.

Daniella goes to college at night; Veasna sleeps in the student lounge with the baby on his chest, waiting for her classes to end. They don’t live together–the system can’t provide for that. They want to make their own family. “I feel guilty,” Daniella says, looking at an old photograph of her birth family, including the father who beat her so badly that she finally called the police on him herself, “because I keep wanting to be part of that family.”

While Risa has everything to be congratulated about, the strain begins to show. She begins to experiment with “every drug except heroin,” hears voices and has a psychotic episode that leaves her in the hospital for three weeks, voids her UC scholarship and lands her back with her final foster mother, a kind woman who takes her back even though the state won’t fund it.

Given several chances and even the unlikely friendship of a sympathetic cab driver, David can’t help but steal and drink and smoke dope. He bounces around from one bad experience to another, finally landing back on the doorstep of the only people he knows as family, the first foster parents who took him in as a baby and regretfully let him go as a five-year-old when he became too violent to keep. Vowing in the end that he’s had enough of dope-smokers and druggies, David shoulders a backpack and boards a Greyhound bus for Alaska.

“The only thing I’m proud of is my defiance,” he says sadly. “But that gets old, man.”

‘Aging Out’ screens on Thursday, Sept. 30,
at 7:15pm in benefit for the Social Advocates for Youth’s new transitional housing facility. Rialto Cinemas Lakeside, 551 Summerfield Road, Santa Rosa. $20. 707.544.3299, ext. 231.

From the September 29-October 5, 2004 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.