david
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May 12, 2008 19:31:41 GMT -5
Post by david on May 12, 2008 19:31:41 GMT -5
I agree with all that, except Bells Are Ringing wasn't any good. He was a very good actor when he tried, which wasn't often.
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May 13, 2008 1:47:27 GMT -5
Post by toom on May 13, 2008 1:47:27 GMT -5
Is the new Harold and Kumar any good?
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manho
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May 15, 2008 16:19:24 GMT -5
Post by manho on May 15, 2008 16:19:24 GMT -5
A walk through the city of ghosts
A paean to Liverpool, Terence Davies' new movie burns with anger and regret. Screenwriter and fellow scouser Frank Cottrell Boyce meets him in Merseyside Thursday May 15, 2008 Guardian
A couple of years ago, Terence Davies gave an interview to this paper in which he named and shamed the confederacy of film industry dunces who had refused to back his adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Sunset Song. It was a pretty exhilarating read - until I got to the end and found one of my own scripts (A Cock and Bull Story) on his list of dunce-funded disasters. So as I slog up Liverpool's Mount Pleasant to meet Davies, I feel like I've been summoned to the head's office to be lectured on the decline of British film and be told it's all my fault.
Half an hour into our meeting and it's much worse than I expected. Davies is asphyxiating with laughter as he struggles to recite his favourite Les Dawson-Roy Barraclough routine. He is going to die, and it's going to be my fault. I can see tomorrow's headlines: "Greatest living film director found dead in hotel - hack with grudge apprehended at scene." Davies laughs like a tickled toddler. The bitter, angry genius of that interview has been replaced by a generous, light-hearted genius. Who rearranged Davies' DNA? A small Liverpudlian production company called Hurricane Films, who managed to get him what he needed: a movie. A movie that is going to Cannes. A movie that is among his best.
Of Time and the City intertwines Davies' own story with the story of the redevelopment of his home town of Liverpool. It pivots around a sequence that shows utopian tower blocks being built and then falling into decay, to the tune of Peggy Lee singing The Folks That Live on the Hill. It's an elegant, angry sequence that tells a story recognisable to anyone who grew up in a city after the war. There must be millions of us with memories of an "old house" in the city that was abandoned for a new life in the suburbs or the estates.
Davies' film is made of old documentary footage, brilliantly illuminated by music and his commentary. I found myself scanning it for faces and places I knew. Sure enough, there's the block of flats where I spent my first years. There's even a little boy drawing on a doorstep that I am sure is me. Flushed with the feeling that our shared city is a common bond, I ask him what it's like to be home. "Well, it's not home," he says. "It's changed so much I feel like an alien." Changed for the better? "Well, it couldn't have been worse."
He tells a story about making his first film here. A group of men stopped and chatted to him about what he was doing. Davies recognised one as someone who had made his life hell at school. "But he didn't recognise me. He'd inflicted all that suffering. It was nothing to him." He almost flinches. It's obvious from watching his films that Davies is someone whose childhood memories are unusually vivid and raw. For him, coming back to Liverpool is like Dante just taking one more peep into the Inferno.
We talk about the business of leaving. For me, being moved out into suburbia made Liverpool a magical place - of childhood and forgotten ways. I couldn't wait to move back in. But you don't recapture the magic by moving back.
You lose it. The magical "old house" turns out to be just another house. The terrifying bully turns out to be smaller than you thought with problems of his own.
Davies, on the other hand, seems hypnotised by his memories. For Of Time and the City, he searched through miles of footage, looking for moments that resonate for him. There are shots of women carrying massive bundles home from the bag wash on their heads: "I thought, 'Yes, I remember that, and the way the house felt so empty on wash days because the curtains were down.'" The resulting movie is something both personal and universal. A crowd piles onto a New Brighton ferry in black and white, then spills off again in colour. Children run around some wasteland to the sound of Mahler, the familiar image aglow with loss. Stock footage of the Coronation crackles with energy as Davies - unexpectedly - lays into the monarchy.
I watched it with a friend who said it was like Dylan Thomas ("Christmas gobstoppers that lasted till August") meets the Sex Pistols, a comparison Davies would hate. Davies is the first person I've met in a long time who openly detests pop music. He's sure the world was a better place before 1963. I tell him I'm amazed by the size of the crowds in his film: the Kop, the ferries and the streets look like they're sinking under the weight of bodies. He immediately replies: "Yes, and they were all so proper."
If that makes him sound smug or curmudgeonly, he's not. First of all because he's so civilised. He loves poetry, especially TS Eliot's Four Quartets, which he used to shape Distant Voices, Still Lives. I try to keep a straight face - but imagine pitching that to the Film Council today. "I can only do what I feel," says Davies. "Imagine if I tried to do an action movie: two cars moving towards each other very slowly and then fading away." He loves the detail in Betjeman and tries to recite Hunter Trials. I tell him, "Actually, Terence, that's my wife's party piece. I'll get her to do it for you later." "Will she do it with a lisp?" "Try and stop her."
It's like talking to the master of a forgotten craft. He glows when he describes his favourite shots, such as the amazing cross-fade to the city in FW Murnau's Sunrise. "It was done in the camera. Imagine that!" The terrifying image of Robert Mitchum silhouetted and singing on the horizon in Night of the Hunter. "They used a child on a donkey instead of Mitchum on a horse, to exaggerate the perspective." And he loves old studio movies, especially Singin' in the Rain.
It strikes me that the thing that makes his work extraordinary is that he has taken the techniques and production values of the back lot and the sound stage - and used them to tell stories about people who are normally shown as either comic relief or as social problems. He shoots his mother washing the windows of his terrace house with all the lavish attention of Rouben Mamoulian shooting Greta Garbo. He shoots working-class people as if they've got souls. There's a moment in Of Time and the City where an old lady lists all the hardships she's endured and then thanks God. It's like listening to a raw psalm.
As a child, Davies was a pious boy who lost his faith to the harshness of the pre-Vatican II era and his struggle with his own sexuality. But the glamour and precision of old Hollywood seems to have taken on the job that incense and candles used to do: the job of finding a door from the terraced house into the sublime. And his work is as dedicated and detailed as a monk illuminating a manuscript. I ask why he built a set for Distant Voices, instead of just shooting it in a street. "Well, there very few streets with two-storey houses on one side and three on the other, so obviously you had to build the set." I'm not sure how obvious that is, Terence. I think I might have made do with two storeys on both sides. As I might have made do with New Zealand birdsong in The House of Mirth (he famously had the incidental birdsong removed from the soundtrack so that he could dub on some more accurate twitters).
I suppose this makes him difficult to work with. He's not just trying to make a film, he's trying to make good his losses; to recreate what he lost. As a business plan, it's a non-starter. Maybe that's why people hesitate to back him. But it's also what makes him a great artist. And if the Film Council doesn't back Davies, then what is it for?
My wife turned up later and recited Hunter Trials for him. He sat there beaming, like a boy whose mother was reading him a bedtime story. Unless ye become as little children, I thought. And that's what Davies is. He's as foolhardy, clearsighted and uncompromising as a child. And that's why we should be looking after him a bit. And if we do, he'll tell us the truth. Just like children do.
Of Time and the City premieres at Cannes on Tuesday. It will be released in the UK in November guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
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david
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May 15, 2008 18:04:04 GMT -5
Post by david on May 15, 2008 18:04:04 GMT -5
Now that sounds like quite a film. I'm a big fan of Distant Voices/Still Lives and The Long Day Closes. If it's even half as good as either of those, it will be worth seeing.
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May 17, 2008 12:03:45 GMT -5
Post by cripes on May 17, 2008 12:03:45 GMT -5
Saw 'You're Gonna Miss Me' last night--it's the story of Roky Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators.
Great fucking documentary--I'm not really big on the Elevators, but this doc is the biz. Up there with 'Crumb' and 'Grey Gardens'.
Stick it on your Netflix queue!
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manho
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May 18, 2008 8:13:19 GMT -5
Post by manho on May 18, 2008 8:13:19 GMT -5
woody at the cannes festival yesterday: some guys get fatter, some guys get thinner, woody just looks more and more like woody every year.
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david
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Jun 5, 2008 13:05:49 GMT -5
Post by david on Jun 5, 2008 13:05:49 GMT -5
VERTIGO Steyn on Stage and Screen Thursday, 22 May 2008 This week we've been marking the centenary of James Stewart's birth, beginning with Monday's Song of the Week and young Jimmy in one of his earliest turns in the spotlight, serenading Eleanor Powell in Born To Dance. For this week's trip to the movie vault, I thought we ought to check in on the mature Stewart, and his partnership in the Fifties with Alfred Hitchcock. There are two stand-out movies. Rear Window looks better and better in hindsight (appropriately enough), no matter how familiar grows its story of a domestic quarrel in an apartment house observed across the courtyard by Stewart's wheelchair-bound voyeur. As a film about the act of watching, it's a kind of post-modern reflection on the film-maker's art, even though most of the crutches of film-making are eschewed: 35 per cent of the film is silent, there are hardly any close-ups and none when you expect them, not even when Grace Kelly tells Jimmy Stewart she loves him. It's technically adventurous, formally experimental, and psychologically insightful - and yet it plays entirely naturally because smack dab in the middle is the quintessential American everyman. That was Stewart's great contribution to the Hitchcock oeuvre - he normalized the master's wilder turns, and never more so than in Vertigo:
Gorgeously restored and digitally remastered, Vertigo these days looks better than it did on its release exactly 50 years ago - especially all those wacky signature effects: the spiral motif, symbolising the psychological vortex of the film; the vertigo effect itself, created by zooming forward and tracking back simultaneously on a miniature set, so that the stairwell itself seems to uncoil and then compress; and, of course, Hitchcock's camera gliding in and out, slowly, slowly, slowly - memorably spoofed, like everything else in Vertigo, in Mel Brooks's High Anxiety, where the camera tracks in too far and bumps into the window.
Vertigo opens on the rooftops of San Francisco, where Scottie, played by James Stewart, is in hot pursuit of a villain. A police colleague comes to his aid, but Scottie can only hang helpless from the building's edge as his fellow officer plunges to his death. Diagnosed with vertigo, Scottie quits the force and reluctantly takes a job trailing an old school pal's wife, whom the husband insists has been possessed by a suicidal ancestor. When Madeleine does, indeed, kill herself, by diving from a bell tower he's too scared to climb, Scottie is consumed by guilt and suffers a nervous breakdown. At which point, he runs into a remarkably similar-looking woman and gets obsessed all over again, determined to discover the link, as the film's original trailer put it, `between the golden girl in the dark tower and the tawdry redhead he tried to remake in her image'.
Actually, the link isn't that tricky. At their first meeting, Judy, the tawdry redhead, has a flashback, and we learn the truth about what happened in the dark tower. The whodunnit is a side-show, which is why Hitchcock throws it away halfway through; for this film, he's motoring on pure psychology. As in so much of his work - not least Psycho - Vertigo is about obsession and the loss of identity. But Vertigo is Hitchcock's Hitchcock - literally: an autobiographical exploration of his own particular obsession. As Scottie, Stewart gives an unusually intense, overwrought performance, and, as if to compensate, almost everything else in the picture is cooled down. Watch that first scene between Stewart and his gal pal Barbara Bel Geddes (Miss Ellie from Dallas). The dialogue's very even, very modulated, like two old friends hanging around on a lazy afternoon: it's so good you hardly notice it, but rarely in movies do you get such a good strong sense of two people who know each other that well. They have a brief conversation about brassieres, and, in those three or four lines, you learn everything about their relationship. Conversely, after Scottie has fished the suicidal Madeleine out of San Francisco Bay, taken her home and put her to bed, you're aware - and she's aware, and he's aware - that he's seen her naked. That fact cuts through everything else in the scene. The fact that it's Jimmy Stewart who's seen her naked makes it even more palpable.
Vertigo fulfills that boast which so many films aim for but so few exemplify: it really does go beyond words. For large chunks of the picture there seems to be no dialogue at all - instead, Scottie and Madeleine wander around as if their strange trancelike relationship has already passed beyond words: the emotions are articulated by Bernard Herrmann's omnipresent score. When Madeleine dies and Scottie meets the tawdry redhead, we're suddenly back to dialogue, for this is a more prosaic, earthbound relationship: 'Judy, you don't understand...' 'Oh, I understand alright. I've been understanding since I was seventeen.'
This is the film's central performance. Hitchcock was famously fond of cool blondes - Grace Kelly, Eva Marie Saint - but Vertigo is the only film where he deconstructs his obsession: Stewart's Scottie is a Hitchcockian male, a Professor Higgins determined to rebuild Judy, his soiled little shopgirl, into the austere, icy blonde Madeleine of his dreams. What makes the double-role work brilliantly is Kim Novak. She wasn't too experienced an actress back then, and she brings an artlessness to the performance that is just right. In the first half of the picture, when she's ambling around in a flat-voiced trance, you can't quite put your finger on what's wrong; but, of course, it's that her acting isn't that good - which is entirely appropriate when we subsequently meet her as the tawdry redhead. It also helps that Miss Novak was kind of big and lumpy (not now; she looks fantastic these days), so she seems, even as she's all dolled up as one of San Francisco's finest ladies, as if she's not quite at ease.
Hitchcock was acknowledging the futility of his fantasies: a 'woman of mystery' enigmatic, few words - is a woman who's fine for a mystery but can't keep it up forever; the moment you get to know her, the spell is broken. He believed that every beautiful woman is a deception, and it prompted in him a sort of sensual equivalent to his vertigo effect - simultaneously drawn in and repelled. 'Why are you doing this?' asks Novak, as Stewart demands she assume the dead woman's hair and clothes. 'What good will it do?' 'I don't know,' he says. 'No good, I guess. I don't know . . .' He reaches to caress her face but then pulls away. It's a superb moment from James Stewart and, in that one gesture, he distills brilliantly Hitchcock's entire approach to his leading ladies.
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Jun 5, 2008 15:51:50 GMT -5
Post by cripes on Jun 5, 2008 15:51:50 GMT -5
I love the look of Vertigo. I'm partial to San Francisco in the fifties. Still, Vertigo tugs too hard on my suspension of disbelief muscle.
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Jun 6, 2008 1:23:29 GMT -5
Post by toom on Jun 6, 2008 1:23:29 GMT -5
Saw 'You're Gonna Miss Me' last night--it's the story of Roky Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators. Great fucking documentary--I'm not really big on the Elevators, but this doc is the biz. Up there with 'Crumb' and 'Grey Gardens'. Stick it on your Netflix queue! Grey Gardens, my wife deleted that from my dvr, never saw it, but I'll make a 2nd effort based on the name-check. Boo-vi-yay!
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Jun 15, 2008 20:31:05 GMT -5
Post by Cat Stevens on Jun 15, 2008 20:31:05 GMT -5
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david
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Jun 17, 2008 13:13:49 GMT -5
Post by david on Jun 17, 2008 13:13:49 GMT -5
Anybody seen this one? It sounds promising . . .
The Incredible Hulk Peter Bradshaw Friday June 13, 2008 The Guardian
'Critic exit cinema miffed' ... The Incredible Hulk
"Hulk. Smash!" Yes. Hulk. Smash. Yes. Smash. Big Hulk smash. Smash cars. Buildings. Army tanks. Hulk not just smash. Hulk also go rarrr! Then smash again. Smash important, obviously. Smash Hulk's USP. What Hulk smash most? Hulk smash all hope of interesting time in cinema. Hulk take all effort of cinema, effort getting babysitter, effort finding parking, and Hulk put great green fist right through it. Hulk crush all hopes of entertainment. Hulk in boring film. Film co-written by star. Edward Norton. Norton in it. Norton write it. Norton not need gamma-radiation poisoning to get big head. Thing is: Hulk head weirdly small. Compared with rest of big green body.
Hulk not scary. Hulk look like Shrek. Wait. Critic have ... second thought. Hulk look like Shrek when Shrek turn handsome, in Shrek 2. Like Gordon Brown. Hulk rubbish. Hulk not look powerful. Especially when Hulk do jumpy bouncy floaty thing. Over New York buildings. Then Hulk look wussy. Big. Yet wussy. Not good combination. Stan Lee have big cameo. Stan Lee keen on self. Previously Stan Lee just glimpsed. Now Stan in it for 30 seconds. Or more. Stan clearly on roll. Stan even give Robert Downey Jr cameo. As Iron Man. This very irritating. Audience supposed to be excited. Audience nod off. Long ago.
Idea is. Dr Bruce Banner - on run. Keep anger under control. Banner hope not turn into Hulk. Banner live .... in Brazilian slum. Work in factory. Total babe there fancy Banner. Banner quite fancy babe. But Banner not make move. Babe in film to keep guys interested. Until Banner's girlfriend Liv Tyler come into action later. Tyler not mind Hulk thing. Hulk remind her of dad. Steven Tyler. Possibly. Much location work. Overhead shots. Of slums. City of God vibe intended. But this rubbish. Like everything else.
Tim Roth come on. As evil soldier. Fighting Hulk personal for him. Roth typical evil Brit. Roth supposedly working for US army. Yet Roth Brit. Critic annoyed by stereotyping. Roth get injected with serum. Become Hulky supervillain. Smash cars. Tanks. Only with no trousers. Roth groin area ambiguous. Groin area look lumpy. Bumpy. Perhaps odd penis. Perhaps odd trousers. Critic ... not sure.
Same old story. Superhero movie give superhero mirror-image antagonist. Like in Spider-Man 3. Idea rubbish in Spider-Man 3. Idea rubbish here. Hulk versus humanity important thing. Cancelled out here. Basic problem ... critic not believe Hulk angry. Hulk just roar. It not look convincing. Not truly seem angry. Critic think about this. Critic decide why. It because Hulk not swear. Hulk just say: "Hulk. Smash" etc. If Hulk shout C-word ... different matter. Then Hulk look angry. Sound angry. Not here. Hulk genteel.
Critic remember Ang Lee version. Ang Lee version slagged off. Yet rubbish new Hulk film make that look like Citizen Kane. Critic exit cinema miffed. Film take away two hours of critic's life. Critic not get time back. Ever. Rarrrrr.
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Jun 18, 2008 2:29:59 GMT -5
Post by dino on Jun 18, 2008 2:29:59 GMT -5
Who's the whet-type interviewer? one of the most famous italian journos, gianni minà, he did an interview with dylan in 1978 and a legendary hours long one with fidel castro in the 70s - also cassius clay still on the ring of the MSG in the 60s quite an asshole anyway
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Jun 18, 2008 9:11:42 GMT -5
Post by Cat Stevens on Jun 18, 2008 9:11:42 GMT -5
thanx for the info.
congrats on yesterday's win.
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david
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Jun 28, 2008 12:59:10 GMT -5
Post by david on Jun 28, 2008 12:59:10 GMT -5
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Jul 10, 2008 23:04:48 GMT -5
Post by Cat Stevens on Jul 10, 2008 23:04:48 GMT -5
seen anything interesting so far?
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david
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Jul 14, 2008 13:22:50 GMT -5
Post by david on Jul 14, 2008 13:22:50 GMT -5
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manho
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Jul 14, 2008 14:58:36 GMT -5
Post by manho on Jul 14, 2008 14:58:36 GMT -5
"an off the wall Argentinian tribute to silent films"
is that one available on dvd?
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david
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Jul 15, 2008 7:13:08 GMT -5
Post by david on Jul 15, 2008 7:13:08 GMT -5
If it isn't out on dvd, it will be at some point. Along with everything else. Here's the trailer for it: www.youtube.com/watch?v=2E0RoL68t4oAnd I caught two more terrific films last night. One was yet another cool Japanese gangster flick from the 60s, Gangster VIP. The other was a documentary called Spine Tingler: The William Castle Story. I don't know if William Castle was much known outside of North America, but he was a major pop culture figure in the 60s and 70s. If any of you saw a film from the early 90s called Matinee, the John Goodman character was based on Castle. What he was famous for was making schlocky horror movies like 13 Ghosts, The House On Haunted Hill, The Tingler and a bunch of others. Actually, he wasn't really famous for the films, he was famous for the way he promoted them. He'd have nurses outside the cinema handing out insurance policies, guaranteeing $1000 to the families of any audience members who died of fright during the movie. He offered a money back guarantee to any audience member who left during the last fifteen minutes of the film (a clock helpfully appeared on screen to count down the last 60 seconds), but to get the money back you had to stand in a "Cowards' Corner" of the cinema lobby until the film ended and all the people who stayed could see who the cowards were. Most famously, he wired up cinema seats to buzz the sudience at a critical point during The Tingler. In short, he was a character, a big guy who all the photos show with an enormous grin and smoking a huge cigar. There are loads of great William Castle stories, most of which are in the film, which is lots of fun.
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Jul 15, 2008 9:45:31 GMT -5
Post by Cat Stevens on Jul 15, 2008 9:45:31 GMT -5
wow
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manho
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Jul 17, 2008 7:12:50 GMT -5
Post by manho on Jul 17, 2008 7:12:50 GMT -5
Charles Joffe
Movie producer and a key player in the career of Woody Allen Ronald Bergan Thursday July 17, 2008 Guardian
If Woody Allen has anyone to thank for his achievements in the cinema, then the producer Charles Joffe, who has died aged 78, must lay the greatest claim to his gratitude. It was Joffe and his partner Jack Rollins, when they were managers of a talent agency, who persuaded Allen, then a writer on TV comedy shows, to try stand-up comedy. It was Joffe who got Allen his first film contract as writer and actor in What's New Pussycat? (1965) and enabled him to direct his first movie, Take the Money and Run (1969), and it was Joffe and Rollins, as producers, who stuck with the comedian-writer-director through thick and thin, from the highs of Annie Hall, Manhattan, Crimes and Misdemeanors and Hannah and Her Sisters, to the lows of Hollywood Ending, The Curse of the Jade Scorpion and Scoop.
Most significant of all, Joffe was able to guarantee Allen complete artistic control over his films, including casting and script approval, final cut, advertising and promotion - a very rare deal indeed in Hollywood. As an agent of a stable of comedians such as Billy Crystal, Steve Martin and Mike Nichols and Elaine May, the fast-talking, cigar-chomping Joffe was known as a tough negotiator, causing Robin Williams, one of his clients, to dub him the Beast. In 1985, Joffe got Crystal $25,000 for each appearance on Saturday Night Live.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of a pharmacist, Joffe studied journalism at Syracuse University, New York State, while at the same time getting bookings for dance bands at local nightclubs. He then became a junior agent at MCA, where he worked for Rollins, who was trying to promote a struggling folk singer called Harry Belafonte. In 1953, the pair formed their own agency, working from an office in Manhattan.
In 1958, Allen, then a writer on the Sid Cesar Show, entered into a gentleman's agreement with Joffe and Rollins. When, two years later, Allen was fired from his $1,700-a week job on the Gary Moore Show, they signed him up, getting him to perform his own material.
In 1965 Joffe and Rollins won a $35,000 contract for Allen to lick a well-worn script into shape for producer Charles K Feldman at United Artists. Allen, following Feldman's instruction to "write something where we can all go to Paris and chase girls", produced what was finally called What's New Pussycat? However, although Allen got the sole screenplay credit, the final cut was different from the one he wrote. From then on, Joffe and Rollins were determined to defend their client's artistic integrity.
It all began in 1969, when Joffe rejected United Artists' original offer of $750,000 for Allen's screenplay of Take the Money and Run, and made it known that anyone who took on the script would have to accept Allen as director. It was the first of 40 films produced by Joffe and Rollins, culminating this year with Allen's latest, Vicky Cristina Barcelona.
During this long period, there was barely a hiccup in their relationship. However, when Allen made Stardust Memories (1980), his rather sour attack on fans, sycophants and bores, and on producers' constant demands for comedy, Joffe said: "I found myself questioning everything. I wondered if I had contributed over the past 20 years to this man's unhappiness." Allen assured him that the reference was not to him and Rollins.
Of the producing partnership, the more extrovert Joffe was the more hands-on. During the early years of Allen's film efforts, Joffe would, figuratively speaking, hold the director's hand on set. "As time went on," Joffe told Allen biographer Julian Fox, "Woody grew more confident and assured. I found I needed to go less and less on the studio floor. But I was always there if needed."
In 1978, Joffe picked up the Oscar from Jack Nicholson for Annie Hall as best picture, but also for best director because Allen chose to be 3,000 miles away, playing dixieland jazz on his clarinet in Michael's Bar in New York. On accepting the award, Joffe said: "United Artists said to Woody, 'Woody, do your thing'. They have allowed him to mature into a fine filmmaker."
Joffe's 50-year working relationships with Rollins (now 93) and Allen is proof that he was an easy man to get along with. He is survived by his wife, a son and two stepdaughters.
· Charles H Joffe, film producer; born July 16 1929; died July 9 2008 guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
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