Heroine Worship

Impossible Dream: Even when they’re bad-bad-bad, Disney’s animated females never take a breast-beating.

Disney, ‘Hercules,’ and the American chest

By David Templeton

David Templeton takes interesting people to interesting movies in his ongoing quest for the ultimate post-film conversation. This time out he takes his preteen daughters–experts on elementary school culture–to see Disney’s new animated film, Hercules.

HERE’S THE DEAL: It’s OK to like the new Disney movies,” explains my oldest daughter, “Eleven” (not her real name; just her age). “But you have to keep it secret if you like something like, say, Bambi, because then you’ll be made fun of.”

“Bambi?” I pause at a red light and turn to face my offspring. Both girls, about to enter the fifth and sixth grades, have agreed to discuss the new animated Disney film, Hercules, on the one condition that I not use their actual names. Having just departed from an advance screening of the movie–a dazzling, laugh-filled reworking of the famous Greek myth–we are now off to find some lunch.

But first, there’s this Bambi thing to clear up.

“Is it really uncool to like Bambi?” I ask, incredulous.

“Uh huh,” affirms “Almost Ten” from the back seat. “I have a friend who wore a Bambi shirt to school once. She had to say that her mother forced her to wear it.” She pauses, then leans forward. In a hushed whisper, she confides her own dark secret.

“I like Barney,” she confesses of the purple dinosaur, her face blossoming into a radiant blush. “Two of my friends do, too, but we pretend to hate him. If you like Barney, all the popular people will think you’re unpopular.

“You have to lie a lot at school,” she adds with a sigh.

“We’ll get back to that,” I inform her. First I want to know what they thought of the movie.

“I loved it. Weird but true,” says Eleven. “Judging from the TV commercials, I’d been thinking, ‘Oh no. One of those typical Disney movies.’ But it was great!” Asked to define the word typical, she says, “Oh, you know. I’m growing up. I was afraid it was just going to be, um, kind of ‘kid-ish.'”

“As in ‘Bambi-ish’?” I clarify.

“Right,” she nods, dramatically rolling her eyes. “But I think even seventh graders would like Hercules.”

“Especially the part where he cuts the hydra’s head off from inside of it,” Almost Ten glowingly affirms. “Boys will think that’s pretty nice.”

Lunch, it was earlier decided, will be at McDonald’s. (“To check out how cheesy the ‘Hercules’ happy meals are,” I was solemnly told.)

Somewhat to my surprise, their admiration for the film is real. The songs were “great,” the monsters were “cool,” Pegasus was “cute,” Hercules was “interesting,” the gods were “very cool,” Hades–the bad guy–was “funny,” and Megara–the movie’s tough-talking anti-heroine–was, well, she was . . .

“Here’s the deal with Meg,” Eleven says. “I liked her. But she was really skinny. All the Disney females are always really skinny, with really big . . . ,” she pauses. “Can I say the word breasts in the newspaper?”

“She looks like Anorexia,” Almost Ten chirps. When she sees my surprised face, she adds, “From that other movie.”

“You mean Anastasia,” laughs Eleven, referring to the heroine of an upcoming animated film from Ted Turner’s company. We saw the poster. “Anorexia is when you’re too skinny but you think you’re too fat.”

“Oh. Like Barbie,” Almost replies, apparently understanding the concept perfectly.

“You know, there are people who think that Disney movies are bad for girls, because it makes them think that they should look the way the female characters do,” I tell them. “With tiny, tiny waists and really big . . .”

“Breasts,” Almost helpfully offers.

“Sometimes I wonder what I’m going to look like when I start to, you know, to develop,” Eleven admits, modestly lowering her voice. “But I think I want small ones, so boys don’t stare at me all the time.”

“Boys do like you better when you have big ones,” Almost Ten says, knowingly. Instantly red again, she adds, “Don’t they?”

“Hmmmm,” I stall. “Some would say you just proved the point about Disney movies.”

“Girls don’t have to learn that from a movie,” she insists. “Girls just know that.” There is a long, thoughtful pause after which Eleven reaches out to take my hand.

“And Dad?” she says brightly. “If you do use our real names? We’ll break your fingers.”

From the July 2-9, 1997 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Death Knell?

Jerry Bauer

Brain Storm: Author Caryl Phillips sees no death in the life of the mind.

The rumored demise of thought

By David Templeton

Writer David Templeton takes interesting people to interesting movies. This time out, he accompanies award-winning author Caryl Phillips to see the pessimistic art film The Designated Mourner.

AN ESPRESSO, please, as large as you’ve got.” The waiter speeds away, clearly understanding the necessity of the situation. He returns quickly with the coffee, setting it before Caryl Phillips with the no-nonsense efficiency of a doctor administering an emergency shot of adrenaline.

“Well, that was an exercise in concentration, wasn’t it?” Phillips says wearily, sipping intensely at his drink. He is referring to The Designated Mourner, a new film by playwrights David Hare and Wallace Shawn in which three people sit at a table and mumble at the camera. Had he not been running on so little sleep (he is in the middle of a multicity book-signing tour, rising at 5 each morning in order to write), my guest might have struggled less with a film in which, arguably, nothing at all happens.

As it was, there was far more drama in the seat beside me–where Phillips fought valiantly to stay awake–than there was onscreen as director Mike Nichols and actors Miranda Richardson and David de Keyser orated cleverly about the death of intellectualism and the extinction of people who read John Donne.

Phillips–who divides his time between homes in London, the West Indies, and Massachusetts, where he is professor of English and writer-in-residence at Amherst College–is the author of numerous books, including the Booker Prize­nominated Crossing the River. His remarkable new novel, The Nature of Blood (Knopf; $23), is an interlocking series of first-person narratives, with voices from across the globe and throughout time (a young Holocaust survivor, an Ethiopian woman settling in Palestine, a 16th-century Jew imprisoned in a Venetian ghetto after the murder of a girl, and Othello, tentatively exploring his new home of Venice) that are masterfully spun into ever-tightening patterns to heartbreaking effect.

As the author of complex, poetic, heartily non-mainstream books, Caryl Phillips must surely agree with the film’s premise that intellectualism and literacy are hovering on the verge of extinction.

“No. No. I don’t believe that’s true,” he insists. “Though that is certainly what the film posited. Look at the film version of Romeo and Juliet that just came out–that was incredibly popular. Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V a few years ago was nominated for an Academy Award. Millions of people have seen it. I think we’re in a state of robust health, actually.”

“But given the choice, wouldn’t the vast majority rather see a film about dinosaurs eating people than a film based on Shakespeare?” I ask.

“Well, of course,” Phillips nods. “I don’t see that as a problem. During Shakespeare’s time, there were a lot of people watching the equivalent of dinosaurs eating people; crappy romantic stories of the servant girl getting pregnant by the gentleman master, the equivalent of the Harlequin romance. Charles Dickens was popular, but not to the degree that the serialized novels were, and they weren’t far removed from dinosaurs eating people.

“There has always been a popular culture that has a bigger audience than we’d like,” he continues. “And there will always be other people who want more serious forms, who want to engage with the form of the art, whatever form it happens to be.

“That’s never going to be a large number of people,” he adds. “It’s never going to be the majority. But those people will still exist.”

As the caffeine begins to have the desired effect, Phillips turns his face to the window, leaning slightly forward into a wide beam of afternoon light as he ponders all of this.

“I can’t help feeling,” he murmurs slyly, “that at the end of the film we’re supposed to feel that we’ve sneaked a glimpse at a world that we’ve got to protect ourselves from, the world of the intellectual abyss, that world where John Donne is hurtled toward Hell and nobody reads him or understands him.

“But I didn’t come out the cinema thinking, ‘Shit! We’re about to become major consumers of the Oprah show, only!’ Or ‘Geraldo is about to become the new David Brinkley!’ I’m rather more optimistic than that.”

“So,” I reply, in my best “summarizing” voice, “you’d say that intellectual thought and the love of poetry is safe for the time being?”

He gasps aloud.

“Oh God, I don’t want to be quoted as tempting fate!” he laughs brightly. Eyes widened, he imagines his remarks in print. “‘Phillips says intellectuals safe for forseeable future!’ That’s rather frightening, isn’t it? But we’re not in danger of the death of the intellectual. That seems to be too apocalyptic a drum to be beating.

“I know that the New York Times bestseller list 20 years ago had people like [novelists Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, and William Styron] and now it has ‘How to Love Your Puppy’ and ‘How to Die at the Age 120 in Three Easy Steps.’ It’s a less intellectually robust bestseller list. And I’m sure the same is true of the movies. We have–to a certain extent–debased and diluted the intellectual content of our commercially successful material. That’s true. We’ve become a much more commercially oriented and much crasser society. I understand all of that.

“But within that argument,” he continues, “to say that the idea of poetry as a worthwhile pursuit is in danger, to say that the novel is in danger or that serious intellectual thought is in danger . . .

“I don’t know,” he smiles, now fully awake, “perhaps I’m a gibbering idiot, but I simply refuse to believe that.”

From the June 26-July 2, 1997 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Ocean Bound

Michael Amsler

Remote: Filmmaker Andrew Golland in his Santa Rosa home. Adventurer Peter Bird’s visage is frozen on the screen.

Filmmaker spotlights sailor Peter Bird

By gg****@*****ro.com“>Gretchen Giles

PETER BIRD DIED ALONE. He was probably knocked unconscious when a wave bearing a log fatally thwacked his one-man rowboat and swept him into the cold arms of the sea. Let’s hope he was out, unable to feel the deadly chill of the waters off the Japanese coast soaking his windbreaker and shorts on June 2, 1996.

Bird, 49, had been at sea for a month, confined to the 35 short feet of his specially equipped rowboat. Single-minded and some say obsessed, Bird was attempting to make a solo row from Vladivostok to San Francisco. And he was trying it for the fifth time.

“Most of us don’t actually get quite that opportunity to do exactly what we want to do,” says Santa Rosa resident Andrew Golland, a close friend of Bird’s and a filmmaker who is preparing to shoot the story of Bird’s life.

“Peter had that opportunity, and he chose to take it, despite perhaps that fact that he was an extremely gregarious person, one who had a lot of close friends and relatives–and a family.”

A London-based photographer whose rocky career included stints providing transport for film and fashion shoots, Bird had gained fame when he and a friend rowed together from Britain to the West Indies in 1980. Youthful and handsome, Bird made great copy for the newspapers and an even better image for the TV. And he had found something real to do.

“Everyone in life must have something to aim for,” he said simply in a television interview. Once bitten, Bird began planning the next adventure. In 1983, he set out to row solo from San Francisco to Australia–anywhere in Australia–his only real obstacles being his own psyche, the sea herself, and the Great Barrier Reef. Bird handily overcame the first two.

At sea for 10 months, Bird endured the extraordinary loneliness of such self-imposed solitary confinement, videotaping himself for company, weathering six cyclones, and traveling some 9,000 miles on the strength of his own two arms. With 33 miles left to go before he touched land on the Australian coast, he swamped on the reef.

“His take on it was that it was a failure, getting pulled out [of the water],” says Golland. Pointing to a TV image of photos taken at Bird’s rescue by an Australian coast guard cutter, Golland says, “You’re not really sure whether he was waving for them to go away or for them to come. They said, ‘If we don’t pick you up now, we might never pick you up.’ That was the starting point.”

The starting point, as Golland sees it, for Bird’s search to surmount the sea.

This is also the starting point for the film Golland is making about his friend, producing it with his own Clear Sky film company. This British native has written a script and plans to direct Last Row, a fictionalized account of Bird’s life and passion. Taking Bird’s stranding at the reef as a central metaphor for the determination he showed for the rest of his life, Golland begins filming at Tomales Bay this fall, with a general casting call going out in August. British actor and James Bond portrayer Pierce Brosnan has tentatively expressed interest in playing Bird.

When the two met through mutual friends in London in 1987, Golland didn’t know that his new acquaintance was Peter Bird the adventurer, and Bird didn’t play it up. It was months before the truth came out. By then, Bird had a new plan: rowing alone from Russia to California. Between 1992 and 1996, he made five attempts, building at least one of the boats in Sonoma. The second attempt, in 1993, found him at sea again for 10 months, traveling a torturous two miles a day against unfavorable winds, unknowingly rowing for weeks in circles, out of food, and exhausted.

Even had he been endowed with superhuman strength, at that rate, the 6,000-mile trip would have taken him five years. He was picked up at sea.

But it was the last trip in 1996, a lone launch far different from the fanfare of the others, that killed him. He left behind his companion, Polly Wickham, and their 5-year-old son Louis , a child who had grown mostly while his father was away. Although Wickham maintained a stalwart acceptance of her lover’s conquests, she is reported to have turned to his brother upon hearing the news of Bird’s death and to calmly say, “I could kill him for what he’s done to us.”

But Golland defends his friend. “Our story is that there was a lot of conflict,” he says, sitting amongst the moving boxes of his recently acquired home. “There was a lot of fun behind the scenes, of course, and a lot of excitement, but principally it tells of his single-mindedness. He was going to do it, and a lot of people at the end probably didn’t agree with that.

“There was something that set him apart, a depth that none of us could quite latch on to,” says Golland. “There are things that we’re able to do with a [film] that color certain features. Obviously, we have a story that’s reflective of what happened. I have a belief that there are reasons why he did certain things.

“I think some of the reasons are those things about men,” he continues. “Do we ever grow up? The big thing about settling down is that there are commitments to be made, and perhaps sometimes that was the big difficulty [for Bird]. The real big difficulty was not going out there again. There was a lot of razzmatazz associated with all of this. There were always people interested, and women interested; he had this very warm and magnetic personality.”

Bird floundered in the business world; rowed with a friend to the West Indies, landing there not as a prearranged destination but as the result of conflict that arose between the two men; and spent the rest of his life trying to achieve a possibly impossible goal while absenting himself from his child during the boy’s most formative years. Why does Golland consider him a hero? Why, in fact, was he not a failure?

“Because he tried something as often as is humanly possible,” Golland replies firmly. “There’s a grit factor involved. His story is truly a no-limits story, and he actually did pursue it to the end.

“He drove himself on to continue this, and I think that it’s that conflict between what you’d like to do and what you actually end up with or are saddled with in life. A lot of people say, ‘If I don’t go out now and climb that mountain, I’ll never do it.’ Well, with Peter, it just all went on a lot longer.

“I always sort of thought that it was like banging your head against a brick wall,” Golland laughs. “It’s wonderful when you stop.”

Clear Sky is casting local actors for Last Row. Those interested should send résumés and head shots to Karyn Williams, Warden McKinley Agency, 1275 Fourth St., Suite 247, Santa Rosa, CA 95404.

From the June 26-July 2, 1997 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.