The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (331 page)

Still, she had a terrific debut as the child in
The Professional
(94, Luc Besson), and made a lot out of the suicidal daughter in
Heat
(95, Michael Mann). She shone out of the crowd in
Beautiful Girls
(96, Ted Demme);
Everyone Says I Love You
(96, Woody Allen);
Mars Attacks!
(96, Tim Burton).
Anywhere but Here
(99, Wayne Wang) was a setback that suggested she was short on ideas of what to do while being photographed. That handicap was exposed—if not enshrined—in the three
Star Wars
pictures:
The Phantom Menace
(99),
Attack of the Clones
(02),
Revenge of the Sith
(05), all directed by George Lucas, in which she grew older but not wiser or more interesting.

However, she was extraordinary and the best thing in
Cold Mountain
(03, Anthony Minghella);
Garden State
(04, Zach Braff); a short,
True
(04, Tom Tykwer) and in maybe her best outing,
Closer
(04, Mike Nichols). She then did
Domino One
(05, Nick Louvel);
Free Zone
(05, Amos Gitai), made in Israel;
V for Vendetta
(05, James McTeigue); the “Faubourg Saint-Denis” episode in
Paris Je T’Aime
(06);
Goya’s Ghosts
(06, Milos Forman);
My Blueberry Nights
(07, Wong Kar Wai);
The Darjeeling Limited
(07, Wes Anderson), as well as the extra episode,
Hotel Darjeeling
, cut from the film but famous on the Internet; and as Ann Boleyn in
The Other Boleyn Girl
(08, Justin Chadwick).

Meanwhile she has written and directed and acted in an episode from
New York, I Love You
(09).

Dennis Potter
(1935–94), b. Berry Hill, England
Potter deserves to be viewed as a major figure in film history. And Potter is TV.

In the great age of film studies (early 1960s to 1980s), television was in fact the dominant cultural medium that nostalgists cherished the movies for having been.

All but a few movie fanatics have seen more moving imagery on a television screen than “at the movies.” It is likely that the regular, the reviewer who sees maybe six or seven movies a week, still submits to TV for several hours a day. It is on—like the light. The ordinary viewer, the average citizen, would delight the movie business if he or she saw one movie every six weeks. But he, she, we, the moblike broken family, goes back and forth, like leopards in our cage, while TV is “on,” six or seven hours a day. The world works by way of TV: that is where marketing occurs; that is how politicians play at running the country; and that is where news is defined and focused. It is lamentable, if you want to take that view. Though I suspect a greater damage to our culture and our ideas came earlier, in permitting photography. That was the first great drug, and it trained us for the others.

Television has shaped us—you can blame it for “abbreviated attention span” and a failure to believe in realities; or you can notice how it promotes a low-level passive surrealism in expectations, and an uncatalogued memory bank for our minds. We may be more like crazed movie editors trying to splice our lives together because of TV. There is a resistance it has bred, as well as a chaos: you can’t have one without the other. And in the end, there is no point in being gloomy or cheerful about it. It’s there, here, without moratorium or chance of reversal.

Intensive film study and film scholarship now work by way of the TV screen. It is seldom possible to review the great movies “at the movies.” Suppose I wanted to see
Sunrise, Duel in the Sun
, and
Ugetsu Monogatari
on big screens—where would I go? The difficulties I would face, of prints, screens, access, and so on, are only going to grow greater. Yet I might be able to summon them up on video, where I could see them as often as I liked, with “pause” to access the full beauty of the frame. Everyone is doing it, no matter that the color is forlorn (the United States has the worst TV color in the world), the image format is different, the sound is tinny … and the passion is not there. That passion is made by the dark, the brightness, the very large screen, the company of strangers, and the knowledge that you cannot stop the process, or even get out. That is being at the movies, and it is becoming a museum experience. How can one tell one’s students or one’s children what it was like seeing
Vertigo
(in empty theatres—for no one liked it once) or
The Red Shoes
from the dark. We watch television with the lights on! Out of some bizarre superstition that it protects our eyes. How so tender for one part of us, and so indifferent to the rest?

In Hollywood, or in the movie community, television has been disdained. Nothing may be so telling a secret sign of the stars’ horror of the public; and nothing so surely accounts for the decline of movies as
the
American entertainment. This superiority should come to terms not just with the public and its viewing habits. It should face the potency of careers like those of Lucille Ball, Johnny Carson, and Michael Mann, as well as the difficulty of dealing with so many problematic realities on the big screen. For movie fantasy has moved away from us, like a rogue moon, drawn off by some greater source of gravity. Once, movie dreams were dangerously and tormentingly close to our lives: it made the medium irresistible. But now, television has us in its grip. Week after week, TV deals with the experience of such things as AIDS, drugs, hopeless ordinary existence, undramatic madness, in a way that shames movies. One reason why television is watched is the plain state of recognition.

Even so, television in America is ruthlessly controlled by commercial structures. It is a horror of American life that no one has ever made the full case for public broadcasting. And it is too late now, for Britain is surely killing off its own BBC. So there will be no chance left of an example. But for close to twenty years in Britain, amid expanses of gentility, banality, and severe boredom such as no American could tolerate, television stirred the nation. From the early sixties on, there was an accepted forum for strong talk, subversive comedy, and risky drama. This was the time and the studio that gave careers to Stephen Frears, John Cleese, Alan Bennett, and Dennis Potter.

Potter evidently told all questioners that he was born in the Forest of Dean. Britain is not an extensive country, and the Forest is a small part of it. Still, he must have been born somewhere in the forest, and I don’t know where. So he emerges as some kind of sprite or devil, from out of the woods, and I suspect this suggestion was intended, for Potter is intent on getting us back into his woods. (Did Stephen Sondheim ever know the Forest of Dean?) He was the son of a coal miner. The family was large and poor. But when he was twelve (this would be in the terrible winter of 1947, a cold occasion in British folklore), the Potters went to live in London. The father was unhappy and he took the others home again, but Dennis stayed on with relatives. He went to St. Clement Dane’s grammar school and that led to a scholarship to Oxford. There he was president of the Labour Club and editor of
Isis
. The country sprite became an angry young man.

A career in journalism (writing for the
Daily Herald
, one of the few Labour papers) led him toward writing plays for television. These “plays” were usually made as films, but they were advertised as plays of the week, or whatever, and they were meant to have a sense of rational immediacy. Or rather, if that was not meant, Potter and several others helped supply it.

Potter began as a realist with two plays about a young man coming alive in the sixties and attempting a career in politics (Potter, too, ran as a Labour candidate in 1964):
Stand Up, Nigel Barton
(65, Gareth Davies) and
Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton
(65, Davies).

Once established, Potter moved irrevocably toward novel forms, often tinged by autobiography, but imaginatively daring and fueled with the power of fantasy. He was as much affected by popular songs and silly old movies as by his own childhood and the Britain of the war, the welfare state, Suez, Macmillan, and Swinging London. In all that followed, he was the writer who came to exert a moral force (not to say bullying) on directors and actors so that they were grateful for the chance to serve him. Authority is natural, and authorship follows it. I have not space to list every work, but here are highlights:
Alice
(65, Davies) concerns a boy being told Carroll-like stories. In
Where the Buffalo Roam
(66, Davies), a youth in drab Swansea believed he was Shane.
A Beast With Two Backs
(68, Lionel Harris) is a Forest of Dean legend about the guilt of the people and a relieving ritual: it was an early sign of Potter’s entirely agnostic sense of moral retribution.
Moonlight on the Highway
(69, James MacTaggart) had Ian Holm as a man devoted to the 1930s English singer Al Bowlly.
Son of Man
(69, Davies) was a source of controversy: it offered a Jesus for the working class, played by Colin Blakely. (Notice how Potter drew on superb players.)
Lay Down Your Arms
(70, Christopher Morahan) concerned a bored clerk who imagines he is a great goalkeeper.
Traitor
(71, Alan Bridges) had John Le Mesurier, a fine character actor, as a Philby-like figure in Moscow.
Casanova
(71, John Glenister, Mark Cullingham) was a series, over six hours in all, with Frank Finlay as the great lover. The period detail was exact, yet this Casanova was an intellectual lecher—sensuality for Potter has always been a play on the mind.

Follow the Yellow Brick Road
(72, Alan Bridges) had a bad actor who would sooner make TV commercials than fierce Potter-like plays—for Potter has always been suspicious over the “failure” of escapism and the “importance” of serious work. He trusts any imagination and the way it twists, for only there are we free from lies.
Schmoedipus
(74, Barry Davis) is the story that would grow into
Track 29
(88, Nicolas Roeg).
Where Adam Stood
(76, Brian Gibson) is about a child whose fundamentalist father is trying to deny the meaning of evolution. (The child is frequently vital in Potter stories—even if it is the child remembered, the child absent, or just the hope in adults to regain childishness.)
Brimstone and Treacle
(76, Davis) caused another scandal with its unsentimental vision of ordinariness invaded, exploited, and invalid innocence raped. The original
Pennies from Heaven
(78, Piers Haggard) was another series, four and a half hours, with Bob Hoskins as the wretched sheet-music salesman. The novelty of songs interacting with the drama was something Potter had been advancing on for years.
Blue Remembered Hills
(79, Gibson) is a masterpiece, a play about childhood in a forest tangled in games, passions, friendships, and war, and all played by adults.

Then for London Weekend Television, he did a trio of films—
Blade on the Feather
(80, Richard Loncraine),
Rain on the Roof
(80, Bridges), and
Cream in My Coffee
(80, Gavin Millar), which played in successive weeks—the output has been prodigious, for I should add that Potter also did TV dramatizations of
The Mayor of Casterbridge
and
Tender Is the Night
.

The movies claimed him after
Pennies from Heaven
. He did the screenplay for Hollywood’s grotesquely overblown remake (81, Herbert Ross), which only shows how misguided some admiration can be. He did
Brimstone and Treacle
(82, Loncraine) for theatres—the BBC had banned it from the small screen. He did the scripts for
Gorky Park
(83, Michael Apted) and
Dreamchild
(85, Millar)—the first pedestrian and the second inventive, but a minor work by Potter’s standards. A few years later,
Track 29
proved a travesty of
Schmoedipus
.

It was in 1986 that Potter wrote the six-part
The Singing Detective
(Jon Amiel), his greatest work, and the amalgamation of all his themes and loves—not least that of chronic illness. Potter was the victim of psoriasis and arthritis, and of their attending drugs. The topic is too large to be explained here. Suffice it to say that Potter called illness both his friend and his enemy. It seems to me to have sharpened his life and his work: it defined his authority with others; it condensed his anger; and it enraged his passion. For Potter found difficulty and turmoil in his own flesh.

He did another TV series in 1993,
Lipstick On My Collar
(Renny Rye), set in the fifties. It had Potterian elements: song, the glamour of murder, the clash of classes, and a special lyrical pathology. But by the standards of
Singing Detective, Lipstick
was a minor work.

Along the way, with wife and children, Potter had taken on much other work. He did a stage play in 1983,
Sufficient Carbohydrate
. He had written novels—
Ticket to Ride
and
Blackeyes;
and he had directed pictures of
Blackeyes
(1989) and
Secret Friends
(1991), which is based on
Ticket to Ride
. The latter is the only example of his work that I have found less than riveting.

He died in June 1994 after the sudden onset of cancer. He had done a valiant farewell interview—and finished two last plays for TV:
Karaoke
(96, Rye) and
Cold Lazarus
(96, Rye). He was always on a deadline.

Dick Powell
(1904–63), b. Mountain View, Arkansas
Powell had his origins in the heyday of abandon—Warner Brothers musicals of the 1930s—from where he hauled himself home to citizen respectability. By the time he died, he was known internationally as the host of TV’s
Dick Powell Show
, an agreeable, pipe-smoking dullard who talked to the audience with Nixonian solemnity. He had come through to be one of the pioneers of TV drama; he acted rarely and, in the 1950s, indulged himself as a director five times. But the most lasting image of Powell is still the wide-eyed hoofer, face alight with lewdness tunneling through the splayed legs of Busby Berkeley’s chorines in
42nd Street
(33, Lloyd Bacon) and boasting that he was “Young and Healthy.”