“Sideways”: Grapes, Nuts, and Flakes

Quaffed any good pinot noir lately? The grape got new respect in 2004 via Alexander Payne’s Sideways, a box office hit that was also a critical darling. (It was nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture, and won for the adaptation of Rex Pickett’s comic novel by Payne and co-author Jim Taylor.) I’ve long used it in my UCLA Extension advanced screenwriting courses as one way to approach various aspects of the screenwriter’s craft. Sideways provided a major boost to the acting careers of Paul Giamatti and his castmates, as well as a shot in the arm to tourism in California’s Santa Ynez Valley. It also upended the wine industry: after the advent of Sideways, merlot was considered by many to be a wine grape non grata.

 In 2024, Applause Books released Sideways Uncorked, described on its cover as “the perfect pairing of film and wine.” There’s no question that the authors know whereof they speak. Kirk Honeycutt was for twenty years a writer and then the chief film critic of The Hollywood Reporter. So he knows the film world inside and out. His in-depth understanding of independent films like Sideways was enhanced by his experience with low-budget maven Roger Corman on Final Judgement, a 1992 priest-and-stripper quickie for which Kirk wrote the original screenplay. (As Roger’s story editor I worked with Kirk on the project. I best recall a little moment in which the accused killer tries to get away from potential danger by climbing aboard a city bus. Roger refused to accept this quirky choice, reasoning that a badass required a motorcycle or something cooler than public transit. Thus my boss firmly rejected what I had found original and characteristic.) 

 In this book, it’s Kirk’s job to explain how Sideways came to be, how it was written, financed, cast, shot, and distributed.  Part of his focus is on the implications of Sideways being an indie film: by not allowing a studio with deep pockets to dictate key artistic choices (like the dream casting of George Clooney and Brad Pitt in the leading roles instead of the less glamorous Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church), Payne preserved his vision of this film as featuring two ordinary down-on-their-luck guys.

 Kirk’s insider stories about the making of Sideways, corroborated by the film’s cast and crew, are augmented by the contributions of his wife, Mira Advani Honeycutt. A longtime wine journalist, she puts her expertise to work in explaining the realities of the wine industry, especially as this applies to the Santa Ynez Valley. She begins by focusing in on the all-important physical properties of the area, what the French call “terroir.”  These are the environmental factors—relating to weather, soil quality, and the like—that determine which grapes can be most successfully planted in a given plot of land. Santa Barbara County’s Santa Ynez Valley offers vastly different climate conditions from Northern California’s famous grape-growing counties, and she traces the history of pinot noir cultivation in the region, showing in detail how this notoriously finicky grape (see Giamatti’s now-famous speech about the special needs of pinot) thrives in its soil. For wine lovers, she also advises on the best wineries for pinot noir in California, Oregon, and elsewhere. Nor does she neglect merlot, which is scorned by Giamatti’s character in the film, but certainly is worthy of having its own enthusiasts. It’s amusing to note that the book is dedicated “to Cinephiles, Pinotphiles, and Merlot Mavericks.”

 Want to know how the real-life owner of a Solvang restaurant made a fortune off the success of Sideways? This book’s for you. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Going “Psycho”

The other evening, in the line of duty, I went back in time and watched Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 masterwork, Psycho. Ironically, I never saw it in a theatre back in the day. (I was a young teenager at the time, and not especially keen on horror.) Needless to say, I’d heard all the brouhaha, and was aware that Janet Leigh’s character didn’t fare well during her overnight stay at the Bates Motel. But the intricacies of her killer’s identity were beyond me—until I took a long bus ride with a gaggle of other girls, and one filled me in on the entire plot.

 I’ve since seen the film, of course, though it’s been a while. But because I was asked to comment on a new biography about a Hollywood regular (Christopher McKittrick’s Vera Miles: The Hitchcock Blonde Who Got Away), it seemed appropriate to check out Miles’ appearances in films by legends like John Ford (The Searchers) and Alfred Hitchcock. Miles was, I learned, slated to become Hitchcock’s next leading lady, once Grace Kelly decamped for Monaco. After portraying Henry Fonda’s long-suffering wife in The Wrong Man, Miles was his original choice to play the fascinating female lead in Vertigo (1958), until scheduling problems got in the way. Still, she was featured by Hitchcock in the drama that kicked off his well-loved TV series. And for Psycho she played the important (though not especially interesting) role of Janet Leigh’s sister,  searching for the missing Marion Crane and letting out an impressive scream when she learns the truth about the spooky old lady in the big Victorian house.

 Psycho may be today one of Hitchcock’s best remembered films, but it’s far from typical of his oeuvre. Yes, it features a pretty blonde woman in dangerous circumstances, but Janet Leigh’s role in Psycho is far removed from those played by such Hitchcock blondes as Madeleine Carroll, Eva Marie Saint, Grace Kelly and Tippi Hedren. Whereas the usual Hitchcock heroine is elegantly attired, Leigh’s Marion Crane is most familiarly depicted wearing a bra and slip. She’s attractive, but she’s no mysterious glamour girl caught up in international intrigue. The criminal act of which she’s guilty is the sordid little matter of stealing a wad of cash from her employer so that perhaps she can finance a marriage to her not-so-willing boyfriend (John Gavin, a future US ambassador to Mexico).  

 Hitchcock’s decision to cast Janet Leigh, a rising star with a well-publicized Hollywood marriage (to Tony Curtis) as Marion Crane meant that the bulk of his budget went toward her salary. The result was that other aspects of Psycho were necessarily simplified. It was shot, mostly by Hitchcock’s TV crew, in austere black & white, in contrast to such glossy full-color Hitchcock productions as 1958’s Vertigo and 1959’s North by Northwest. But in fact this austerity seems to suit the simple but macabre story.

 One thing I never realized until I read the Vera Miles bio is that Hollywood, in its wisdom, eventually decided to sequelize Psycho. Hitchcock was dead and gone in 1983 when Universal Pictures paid Richard Franklin to direct Psycho II, set 22 years after the original story. Marion Crane played no part, of course, but Anthony Perkins signed on to again play Norman Bates, newly released from a mental institution. And Vera Miles signed on too, to portray the still-grieving sister who thirsts for revenge. Naturally there are mysterious and macabre doings galore . . . and three years later, Perkins himself directed Psycho III, described as a psychological slasher film. Happily, I missed these cinematic gems.  

 

 

Peru Comes to the Vatican . . . and Hollywood

Understandably, there’s been much press coverage of Leo XIV, the newly anointed first American-born pope. Though a native of Chicago, Leo (born Robert Francis Prevost) has close link with the nation of Peru, where—after years of missionary work—he took on Peruvian citizenship. His strong emotional ties to that picturesque South American nation reminded me of Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian Nobel laureate who died this past April at age 89.   

 Vargas Llosa was a man of letters who in 1990 nearly became Peru’s president. (He was defeated in a landslide by Alberto Fujimori, who quickly claimed dictatorial powers and was run out of the country 10 years later.) A prolific writer of both fiction and non-fiction, Vargas Llosa began his literary career circa 1960. Though I’ve read his charming early work, known in English as Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, I by no means pretend to be an expert on his entire oeuvre. Still, for a time I worked closely with his younger cousin, Luis Llosa Urquidi, familiarly known as Lucho.

 When I was Roger Corman’s story editor at Concorde-New Horizons in the late 1980s, we shot many low-budget features in Argentina, taking advantage of the exotic locales and cheap labor costs that the current U.S. regime is striving to combat with tariff threats. At one point Roger was flying to Buenos Aires to check on a troubled production, but bad weather forced the plane to land in Lima, Peru. Screenwriter Fred Bailey told me what happened next: Roger “got off the plane, took a taxi into town, opened up the yellow pages, and got somebody to find motion picture production listings. Made a few calls asking who was the best filmmaker in Lima . . . they all said, ‘Luis Llosa.’ Called him up, made a deal, and was back on the airplane to Argentina within a couple of hours.”

 Through Lucho, Roger discovered a wealth of Peruvian locations: crumbling colonial cities, towering mountain ranges, a long seacoast, lots of jungle. There we shot everything from ecological thrillers (Fire on the Amazon) to a submarine drama (Full Fathom Five) to a rather fascinating Bonnie-and-Clyde-in-the Future project (Crime Zone). More than once we used the jungles of Peru to stand in for Vietnam in would-be war epics. What made shooting in Peru particularly exciting was the fact that this was the era of the Shining Path, an armed guerrilla group aiming to launch a People’s War against established government entities. One Corman production was actually briefly put on hold when the Shining Path took over a location. I’m certainly not complaining about the fact that I, as story editor, remained safe in my office in Brentwood, California.

 Of course Lucho, despite his thriving cinematic career in Peru, aspired to make American movies with prospects beyond those of the low-budget Corman world. His biggest success was a 1997 creature-feature called Anaconda, shot in South America with a big-name cast that included Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube, Jon Voigt, and Owen Wilson. This snake-infested horror movie grossed $136.8 million worldwide and quickly became a popular franchise. It earned money but not respect, ending up nominated for six Razzie Awards (including Worst Picture, Worst Director, Worst Actor, and Worst Screenplay), all of which it lost to Kevin Costner’s The Postman. Still, today it’s considered a cult classic.   

Another successful member of the Llosa clan is writer/director Claudia Llosa Bueno, niece of both Mario and Lucho.  Her second feature, The Milk of Sorrow, explores the folk beliefs of indigenous Peruvians. In 2010 it was nominated for the Best Foreign Film Oscar.

 

 

Water, Water, Everywhere: Life of Pi

Life of Pi is many things to many people. It can mean Yann Martel’s deeply philosophical novel, which after numerous rejections came out in 2001, immediately attracting readers and winning major prizes. It can mean the 2012 film version, which nabbed eleven Oscar nominations and won four statuettes, one of them for Ang Lee’s inspired direction. It can mean the stage adaptation I saw recently in Los Angeles, following residences in London and New York.

 The stage and film versions of course have to meet the challenge of depicting a boy on a small boat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. And, oh yes, his companion throughout this watery journey is a large and very hungry-looking Bengal tiger. The production I saw at L.A.’s Ahmanson Theatre was heavily reliant on what we might call stage magic. The show effectively used both light and sound to suggest the briny deep. And that tiger? Here the production team turned to an artform that has earned respect on western stages only in the last fifty years or so: puppetry. When we think of puppets, it’s easy to focus on child’s play: on Punch and Judy or on their rather more sophisticated cousins, the Muppets. Other cultures, though, have made deeply serious and deeply adult use of puppets in their theatres and even in their religious rituals. (See the shadow puppets of Indonesia who act out sacred myths on behalf of the whole community.) I’m personally a big fan of Japan’s bunraku, in which large doll-like puppets perform traditional romantic stories that can be poignant, even genuinely tragic.

 I credit Julie Taymor with discovering that puppets belong on the Broadway stage when in 1997 she took on the challenge of directing The Lion King, a live-action version of the beloved Disney film. Ten years later, a best-selling novel called War Horse was dramatized in London, featuring life-size horse puppets manipulated by several well-coordinated actors. In Life of Pi, two highly-trained human performers slip under the skin of that tiger, and others in the cast make a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan, and a large turtle come to life before our eyes. 

 The movie version of Life of Pi poses different challenges. Movies by their nature need to look real; there’s not the willing suspension of disbelief that distinguishes an audience response to a theatrical performance. Filming on water is hardly easy. That fact was acknowledged by my former boss, Roger Corman  when he turned down a chance to make an early version of Water World. (Kevin Costner’s 1995 take on this futuristic story, in which rising sea levels have made dry land mostly disappeared, was seriously weighed down by a huge production budget.) Still, these days it’s not impossible for a well-trained movie crew to make a large tank on a studio lot look like an entire ocean.

 But the challenge of the cinematic Life of Pi was less the ocean than the animals. Here’s where modern CGI came into its own: the film’s central critters are almost entirely computer-generated, and the young Indian actor playing Pi was never in contact with a dangerous wild beast. (Needless to say, Suraj Sharma’s role was not an easy one: he had to react to the moods and moves of creatures who were simply not there.) 

 The Oscars won by Life of Pi are a testament to the film’s technical brilliance. In addition to Ang Lee’s directorial triumph, the film was honored for its remarkable cinematography and visual effects. To be honest, though, it’s not as riveting a movie as the eventual Best Picture winner, Argo.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Losing the Invaluable Frances Doel

 It saddens me to report that Frances Doel is no longer with us. Frances, the right-hand woman of Roger Corman for many a decade, passed away last week at age 83. Late in life she had moved from Hollywood to Lexington, Kentucky to be tended by family members who loved her dearly. Honestly, she was dearly loved by everyone who knew her.

 Roger Corman met Frances at Oxford, where she was completing a degree in literature. Always a shrewd judge of character, he concluded she was smart enough and agreeable enough to make a good assistant. And so she was—learning from scratch pretty much every job involving a movie set or a production office. Her obituary notes that she ghost-wrote the first draft of many a Corman classic, and named among her official writing credits 1974’s Big Bad Mama, starring Angie Dickinson, William Shatner, and Tom Skerritt.  I was there, and I’m happy to share how this first Frances Doel screen credit came to be.

 Starting work as Roger’s new assistant in 1973, I immediately gravitated toward the New World Pictures story department, which was Frances. Roger wanted a seriocomic rural crime thriller à la Bonnie and Clyde. Back then, he was obligated to use WGA writers, and it was a lot cheaper to hire a union writer for a re-write than for an original script. That’s why he gave Frances an entire weekend to crank out a workable first draft. Of course she came through with flying colors, devising a story about a poor but feisty mother and her two nubile daughters who take up robbery in Depression-era Texas. She slapped a fake name on the draft, and we hired a veteran screenwriter to take over.

 William Norton, a very nice guy, seemed to enjoy story meetings with Frances and me. As we worked our way through characterizations and plot points, Bill started wondering aloud about the author of  the original draft. He went so far as to ask if this “man” could come in and discuss some story questions he had. At which point, Frances and I began to giggle. Eventually we couldn’t hide the fact that Frances herself was the screenwriter in question. A true gentleman, Bill insisted that she share script credit with him. It was the start of her string of Corman writing credits, which ultimately included such low-budget classics as Crazy Mama and Sharktopus.

 Did Frances get paid extra for her weekend labors? She couldn’t recall exactly, but suspected that Big Bad Mama earned her about $100. Over the years, her earnings increased, netting her $5000 each for quickie creature-features like Dinocroc. But she never entirely earned Roger’s full respect. As she told me in 2011, soon after her retirement, “Roger got very fed up with me,” because he didn’t feel she was writing fast enough. Ten script pages a day seemed to him a reasonable amount, even though she was putting in this work solely on evenings and weekends.

 Frances stayed with Roger in various capacities for decades, earning the genuine praise of such celebrated Corman alumni as John Sayles and Ron Howard. But the time came when she got a better offer, moving on to Disney, and then ultimately joining with Corman alum Jon Davison to produce hits like Starship Troopers. Eventually she hit on hard times, and Roger—in a burst of generosity—gave her my job as Concorde-New Horizons story editor. It hurt, but I couldn’t blame Frances. She was too gracious and too special for that.   

 And I could never have written my Roger Corman bio without her.   

Bruce Logan: On the Beach and On the Moon

I first met Bruce Logan when he was getting married. Well, sort of. Back in 1974 I was serving as production secretary on the Roger Corman gangster romp, Big Bad Mama, which starred the odd triangle of Angie Dickinson, William Shatner, and Tom Skerritt. (Yes, there were some wild and crazy sex scenes.) Part of my job was to keep track of cast and crew. So I knew it was a very big deal that Bruce Logan was our director of photography. After all, he had been a young visual effects whiz, working directly with Stanley Kubrick and SFX master Douglas Trumbull on 2001: A Space Odyssey. A self-taught animator, he began work on 2001 in 1965, at age 19,  and stayed with the project through the film’s release in 1968. That same year, he left his native England, coming to California to collaborate with Trumbull on Antonioni’s apocalyptic Zabriskie Point (1970).

 Given his classy resumé, we were all impressed that Bruce Logan was willing to work on low-budget Roger Corman fare. But there he was, fitting in nicely with our misfit crew. The last day of our three-week Big Bad Mama shoot, we threw ourselves a wrap party on the site of our final location, Malibu’s Paradise Cove. To add to the fun, we staged on the sand a mock wedding for Bruce and his girlfriend, who were apparently planning to get hitched for real in the near future. A veteran actor, Royal Dano, had played a scoundrel of a minister in the film: he was persuaded to put on his clerical robes and conduct the ceremony with great theatrical flourish. If memory serves, most of the ad hoc wedding party ended up splashing in the waves. And a good time was had by all.

 I didn’t think much about Bruce over the years, until filmmaker friends invited me to a gathering at which he was being given a lifetime achievement award. This was around 2009, and his filmography had swelled to include providing visual and optical effects for the first Star Wars film (1977) and cinematography for the ambitious sci-fi epic, Tron (1982), in which a computer hacker is abducted into a digital world. I was then working on a book that took readers back to the film year 1967, and I had a hunch that Bruce would have some opinions about that era in which both he and I were youthful film enthusiasts.  He graciously invited me to his Pacific Palisades home for what turned out to be a long, fascinating chat. He was an imposing figure: tall, with white hair and beard. His clothing was conservative, except for a beaded necklace and that heavy silver skull bracelet on his left wrist. Underneath it all, I suspect, Bruce Logan would forever be a bit of a hippie, though he no longer had the long flowing locks of his 2001 days.

 Our conversation was wide-ranging. Of course we discussed Kubrick’s prescience in making 2001, which features convincing-looking computer screens and read-outs decades before desktop computers actually existed. With the advent of the U.S. space program, new data was coming in about the lunar surface, at the very same time that Kubrick and company were deciding what their moon’s back side should look like. They thought of altering their concept to match the science, then decided that, frankly speaking, “the moon looks kind of boring.” Ultimately, they stuck by their own artistic vision, one that would prove inspiring to countless Baby Boomers.

 Bruce Logan died on April 10, 2025. I wish we could have had another long, fruitful chat.

 

 

Shooting Day for Night

Day for Night, in common movie parlance, is the process of shooting film during daylight hours but using filters to convince the audience that the scene takes place after nightfall.  Day for Night is also the English-language title of a 1973 film that was a labor of love for French cinéaste François Truffaut, who directed, co-wrote, and played a central role as, bien sûr!, a director. (The film’s original title is the term that is the French equivalent of “day for night”:  La Nuit américaine. How apt that this wholly artificial but often cost-effective process is linked to American savvy.)  

 In this film about the making of a romantic melodrama called Je vous présente Paméla (or Meet Pamela), Truffaut takes a loving look at the very essence of cinema. Films may seem to reflect life as it is lived, but in fact they are wholly dependent upon artifice. So it follows that those who make movies accept—and thrive on—unreality.  Like the fact that the pretty girl in the speeding car is—temporarily—a stuntman wearing a dress and a wig.  That’s why movie sets are (believe me, I know!) little worlds unto themselves, with emotions running wild. Offscreen romantic partnerships can change from day to day, and few in the cast and crew are on their best behavior.

 Day for Night begins with what seems like an everyday street scene somewhere in the south of France. Passersby stroll along a leafy avenue, a deliveryman makes his rounds, a woman walks her dog.  Then, cut! It all has to be done again . . .  and again. As the director and his loyal assistant try to keep things under control, the film’s stars are creating their own brand of havoc. Jean-Pierre Aumont, as the veteran actor Alexandre, keeps making mysterious trips to the local airport, little knowing that one of these jaunts will have disastrous consequences.  Fellini veteran Valentina Cortese plays Séverine, an ageing actress so worried about her fading looks and diminishing skills that she imbibes heavily, leading to an hilarious scene in which she can’t quite manage to say her lines and open the proper door. (She was ultimately Oscar-nominated for this role, and singled out by winner Ingrid Bergman as the more deserving nominee.)  

 While cast and crew await the arrival from America of leading lady Julie (Jacqueline Bisset), her film spouse Alphonse (Jean-Pierre Léaud) is struggling with an on-again off-again romance with the novice script girl. (Léaud’s presence will spark a frisson of recognition from film buffs who well remember him as the fourteen-year-old Antoine Doinel at the center of Truffaut’s cinematic breakthrough, 1959’s The Four Hundred Blows.) When the oh-so-passionate Alphonse discovers his inamorata has decamped with the hunky stuntman, his agony knows no bounds. He’s determined to quit the production on the spot; in placating him, Julie inevitably puts her own new marriage at risk.

 My favorite among the minor characters may be Joëlle, the assistant director. She’s always at the director’s right hand, making smart suggestions when asked, generally taking care of business.  This doesn’t stop her, though, when out in the countryside cleaning up someone else’s mess, from stripping off her clothes and announcing to a surprised crew member that she’d enjoy a quickie.  Later, after the script girl’s sudden departure, Joëlle makes her own feelings clear. She can’t imagine leaving a production to pursue a romance. But would she quit a romance for the sake of a production? Bien sûr!  As Irving Berlin once put it, “There’s no people like show people . . . .”