Adventures in Movie Promotional Photos, part 112

In discovering yesterday’s image from the (not) “Twister” premiere, I naturally was led to images from the (L.A. Edition) “Twister” premiere (how many premieres did this movie have?), all helpfully catalogued at Go Fug Yourself. I never got past image 13. Cuz, damn. The 90s are back, even if they are not back for people my age, people who lived through the 90s, but while this image is from the 90s, this look is timeless, which is to say immortal, which is to say infinite. In this image, Wesley Snipes is, like space, beyond the observable universe, and so beyond observable fashion, something you, me, we cannot begin to comprehend. And so, I got to thinking.

You might have heard the recent news that Glen Powell is in talks to star in the (semi) long-awaited “Twister” sequel. And I get it. In a mostly movie star-less landscape, Powell is one of the Hollywood young guns who seems like he might have the juice. This blog loves Glen Powell and has said so! But seeing that image of Wesley Snipes at the (L.A. Edition) “Twister” premiere put me in mind of turning the “Twister” sequel into the long-awaited Wesley Snipes comeback. And though the “Twister” sequel is apparently going to be called...can you guess?...can you?...“Twisters,” like, hey man, despite its title, the first “Twister” had multiple twisters, both across the whole movie itself and in one sequence where the sky sprung two tornadoes at once. So, while I understand sequels are all about higher concepts, how exactly is “Twisters” a higher concept? We can do better, so much better, and I’ll tell you how. 

Mike Merriweather (Snipes) is a legendary storm chaser who has seen more tornadoes than anyone. “He’s done everything,” says one grizzled meteorologist, “short of ropin’ a twister.” But when Mike chases a conspicuously erratic tornado one May afternoon in northwest Oklahoma, he suspects it of being...alive? “It’s like that tornado knew me,” growls Mike. Naturally, this gets him laughed out of the storm chasing community, left to watch The Weather Channel in disgrace in fleabag highway motels. Until, that is, a madman scientist (Michael Shannon) is discovered to have implanted the Oklahoma sky with Artificial Intelligence. When an outbreak of robotic tornadoes threatens the entire state, the National Weather Service calls upon Mike once again for the biggest storm chase of his life, one that ends with him, yes, ropin’ a twister. 

Was that so hard?

Adventures in Movie Promotional Photos, part 111

A little while back, Chicago was besieged by inclement weather, severe thunderstorm warnings and tornado watches. So, as the local news breathlessly broke down the Doppler, I did what I often do in such situations and Googled “Twister.” Maybe it was streaming, I thought, and maybe I could watch a little before the tornado siren sounded and I fled to the cellar. But I never got that far. No, what I saw instead was an image captured lo those 27 years ago. This image:

At first, I assumed it must have been snapped at the “Twister” premiere. But the premiere took place in Oklahoma, where the movie is set, and astute readers will notice the baseball cap sported by Woody Harrelson (who is not in the movie) as belonging to the city of Atlanta’s baseball team. Indeed, just behind Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton (who are in the movie), with a hand on each of their shoulders, is Jane Fonda (who is not in the movie) who in 1996 would have been married to Ted Turner, owner of Atlanta’s Major League Baseball organization. Indeed, this, as it turned out, was the “Twister” premiere...with a twist. That is to say, it was the “Twister” premiere benefitting Jane Fonda’s G-CAPP (The Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Power & Potential), held at Atlanta’s Fox Theater one day after the “Twister” premiere in Oklahoma City. 

But what I am even talking about here? This is all setting the scene and, honestly, you don’t need the scene to be set. The scene sets itself. This photo exists independently of where it took place. It does because of Hunt, of course. And though you can find photos from this same scene snapped just before or after the above photo that show Hunt smiling and seemingly jovial and happy to be there, in the vacuum of this single image, that matters as little as the surrounding context. Because there, here, all on its own, in Hunt’s frown amid this sea of smiles is where the truth emerges.

It might be tempting to ask, who are they looking at? Because clearly, they are looking at someone. (Ted Turner? Speculation!) But whoever is outside of the frame does not affect what is inside the frame, which is perfect all on its own, one moment in time that feels eternal, a split-second in which Helen Hunt, consciously or not, embodies the overcrowded agony of the movie premiere, where rather than standing on a red carpet, you wish to god you were sprawled at home on your couch. 

Some Drivel On...the Twister Soundtrack

The “Twister” soundtrack was released on May 7, 1996, a Tuesday as was customary in those days, three days ahead of the movie itself. The movie finished second at the box office that year, though the soundtrack was a little less sucessful, peaking at #28 on the June 1, 1996 Billboard chart, right behind 2Pac’s “All Eyez On Me” and two spots ahead of No Doubt’s “Tragic Kingdom”, which really does feel of its time, or my time, at least, since I probably listened to those two albums more than any others in 1996. (Alan Jackson’s Greatest Hits was wedged in at #29, probably an album played against my will at the pizza place where I worked.) But the “Twister” record also felt of its era in a larger sense. The 90s were a boom time for movie soundtracks. Not the standard-issue ones with the musical score, no, but collections of pop songs, even if they were not featured in the movie, in which case they were deemed as being “inspired by” the movie. If this soundtrack phenomenon sometimes felt spot-on, like the “Singles” soundtrack capturing the grunge era, or even the heavy metal “Judgement Night” soundtrack epitomizing its hapless middle class suburbanites going hardcore, more often these albums were merely sonic marketing ploys, a secondary revenue stream for any would-be blockbuster, throw some songs together and make a few extra bucks.

Both “Batman Forever” and “Batman & Robin” went this route, enlisting the likes of U2 and The Smashing Pumpkins, respectively. “City of Angels” is probably less remembered for the movie than its soundtrack while both the apex and nadir of the genre might have been “Godzilla”, with then-Puff Daddy being featured alongside The Wallflowers, Ben Folds Five, The Foo Fighters, Rage Against the Machine, Silverchair, even Jamiroquai, a weird, right mélange of 90s sounds. “Twister” was in this vein. “Like the force of nature it’s named after,” Lisa Schwarzbaum wrote for Entertainment Weekly, “the soundtrack for Twister careers across the land, never settling anywhere.”

It’s strange, in a way, that it failed to get settled because “Twister” itself is more music-centric than you might remember. An early scene of the storm chasers making preparations in an Oklahoma field cuts from Jo (Helen Hunt) fiddling with the doppler above her truck to Dusty (Philip Seymour Hoffman) fiddling with the speakers he has installed above his van. Indeed, he is introduced singing along with Eric Clapton’s video for “Motherless Child” and later, when the team heads out in search of its first tornado, he cranks Deep Purple’s “Child in Time”, broadcasting it over those same speakers we seem fiddling with to the ostensible benefit of every other car in their storm chasing line. (Neither of these songs was part of the official soundtrack.) Not that everyone wants to hear Deep Purple. The camera tracks to the stationwagon in front of Dusty, piloted by Preacher Rowe (Scott Thomson), who is listening to the William Tell Overture, while ahead of him, Beltzer (Todd Field) and Haynes (Wendle Josepher) belt out “Oklahoma” from the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical.  

It’s a missed opportunity, really, to go through everyone in this scene and reveal their musical choices. I imagine Sanders (Sean Whalen) being into early R.E.M. (not on the soundtrack); Brian Laurence (Jeremy Davies) probably dug Minutemen (not on the soundtrack); Joey (Joey Slotnick) might have been into Rusted Root, which makes their presence on the soundtrack feel more allowable than the Red Hot Chili Peppers or Soul Asylum. No one here is listening to them. Mark Knopfler? Eh, maybe Rabbit (Alan Ruck), though I have to confess, when I really stop and think about it, I picture him saying the immortal words of my seemingly square high school pre-algebra teacher (and this is an exact quote): “There hasn’t been a good band since Alice Cooper.” (Alice Cooper is not on the soundtrack.)

Of course, that’s the whole problem with the “Twister” soundtrack, it too often makes no sense, in terms of character or in terms of the movie. It’s why even if most of these songs do seem to appear in the movie itself, they are often brought way down in the mix so you can barely hear them. Even when they aren’t, they don’t always fit. If I believe Jo might listen to Alison Krauss, the Krauss track here doesn’t quite fit the eerie moment when a tornado tears through a drive-in showing “The Shining.” On the other hand, it’s totally believable that the roadside service station and coffee shop where the whole gang briefly stops would have Shania Twain playing. Would Jami Gertz’s un-immortal Dr. Melissa Reeves have been into Tori Amos? k.d. lang? Belly? C’mon. She would have listened to Celine Dion and even then, only because the Adult Contemporary station in Oklahoma City told her to.

The big song here, of course, was Van Halen’s “Humans Being”, which did ascend to the top of the Mainstream Rock charts for a couple weeks. I can hear the so-called Extreme version of Bill Paxton’s Bill Harding listening to Van Halen, and probably Dusty too, though probably early 80s Van Halen, not Van Hagar, especially not mid-90s Van Hagar. And though in imagining the song’s conception, Chuck Klosterman pictured “somebody from Universal Pictures (being) like ‘We need a song that feels like a tornado’, and some guy taking the meeting for Warner Brothers (being) like, ‘I think I know who to ask’”, I’m not sure I agree. What do people always say when asked what a tornado sounded like? That it sounded like a train. Wouldn’t Johnny Cash sound more like a tornado than Van Halen?

“Twisted”, which was written and performed by Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, did not get the attention of “Humans Being.” The former is heard in the movie, though at such a low level you have to strain to hear it, which Nicks herself knew all too well, telling Uncut in 2014 that “When songs go into movies you might as well dump them out the window as you’re driving by because they never get heard.” I’m inclined to agree with Stevie’s lingering notes of bitterness. I mean, it’s a movie about a squabbling couple chasing freaking tornadoes. If you’re not making the song by Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, pivotal figures on the greatest breakup album of all time, your anthem, you’re not doing your job. 

Forgotten Great Moments in Movie History

Loyal frustrated readers know well the fondness this blog retains in its heart for Jan de Bont’s “Twister.” That softness stems not from the CGI tornadoes nor the ostensible thrill of those chasing all those twisters, but from the peripheral Midwestern atmospherics. You see these in the movie’s opening, which we have written about before, as well as in the truly remarkable shot where Bill Paxton stands beneath a stormy Midwestern sky and runs some dirt through his fingers, like so many idiot men in the central Iowa neighborhood where I grew up who would defiantly go outside whenever a tornado siren wailed on some glorious June evening to gaze at the threatening sky. The film’s atmospherics, however, were not simply limited to the outdoors; they were also felt indoors.

Midway through the movie, after a close call with death and an impressive brushing off of this glimpse of the pearly gates, the whole storm chasing gaggle, captained by Jo (Helen Hunt) and Bill Paxton’s Bill, retires to the nearby home of Jo’s Aunt Meg, played by the legend Lois Smith. “Red meat!” declares Dusty played by pre-immortal Philip Seymour Hoffman in a performance that packs as much glorious wind as any of those fake tornadoes. “We crave sustenance!” That they do, and once at Meg’s, steaks fry in the pan, right alongside eggs, and eventually wind up on ginormous plates alongside glorious mounds of mashed potatoes (with Hoffman getting his pronunciation of potatoes just right, saying “po-ta-TUHS” not, “po-TAH-oes”) slathered in gravy, images that suggest Cézanne Still Life by way of a truck stop diner.

As a character, Aunt Meg mostly exists to be placed in peril, which is why we have to be introduced to her in some sort of friendly scene to ensure we want to see her saved. As such, the steak and eggs and potatoes might merely have been edible background noise. And, in a way, they are, though also, like the movie’s best parts, the food sort of thrusts itself to the forefront anyway, like an oversized Midwestern plate of food should, Whatever else de Bont wants you to be paying attention to, it’s nigh impossible not to have your eyes drawn back to the food.

Food has an illustrious history at the movies for appearing as metaphors when it comes to love, from Luca Guadagnino’s atply titled “I Am Love” to “Like Water For Chocolate.” And one might be tempted to extract metaphorical sustenance from the steak and eggs and mashed potatoes of “Twister.” That is because Dr. Melissa Reeves (Jami Gertz), the fiancé of Bill, does not seem all that eager to eat the steak and eggs and mashed potatoes when placed in front of her. Her character, of course, might be engaged to Bill but she is nevertheless still The Other Woman because Bill and Jo, once married, now about to officially get divorced, have, as they must, re-kindled their affection. And Dr. Melissa Reeves’s refusal to eat this food might well have worked to indicate that she does not have the, uh, shall we say, necessary emblematic appetite.

But then, we already knew that. And for a movie that is all on the surface, so, thankfully, is the steaks and the eggs and the potatoes. As any hearty Midwesterner will tell you, food is food.

Shout-Out to the Extra: Twister Version

Shout-Out to the Extra is a sporadic series in which Cinema Romantico shouts out the extras, the background actors, the bit part players, the almost out of your sight line performers who expertly round out our movies with epic blink & you’ll miss it care.

You would think – you would THINK – that having tornadoes, those terrifying twirling funnel clouds would be antagonistic enough in a movie in which daring meteorologists chase them to and fro across the Oklahoma prairie. But this, friends, is Hollywood where conflict and stakes rule all. Can’t never have enough of conflict and stakes, don’t you know, and so “Twister”, with titular rotating clouds of mayhem coming out its proverbial ears, still decided to insert a gaggle of Bad Weathermen in all black vans trying to chase the same tornadoes as the Good Weathermen. The Bad Weathermen are lorded over by Jonah Miller, played by Cary Elwes with an omnipresent sneer who fuses a modern storm chaser with sub-optimal Lionel Barrymore. And throughout the movie Dr. Miller, as he must be, is trailed by a bastion of flunkies, all of whom apparently did not know that meteorology school would one day entail mimicking the members of Biff Tannen’s gang.

Indeed, kind of like how you now recognize Billy Zane in Biff’s gang, you probably recognize particular faces in Jonah’s gang. There’s Jake Busey and Zach Greiner and Patrick Fischler. But, there is also Eric LaRay Harvey. Per IMDb he plays Eric, which is something of a letdown compared to Busey’s “Mobile Lab Technician” and Fischler’s “The Communicator” and even Greiner’s “Eddie” which is the perfect name for Dr. Miller’s #2. Not that it matters. Eric outdoes ‘em all. He never gets a line, mind you, because he’s just the Token Black Guy In The Background. But he doesn’t need a line; he just needs to laugh.

Film scholars generally agree that “Twister’s” most memorable moment is the gas station parking lot confrontation between Good Weathermen and Bad Weathermen when the Good Weathermen’s chief emeritus, Bill (Bill Paxton), realizes that his brilliant idea for placing a patented doo-hickey in a tornado’s path to scientifically gauge its innards has been pilfered by Dr. Miller. “You damn thief,” Bill declares as he knocks the baseball cap off Dr. Miller’s head. There is a little pushing and shoving and it is quickly broken up and the two men exchange a few words and appear set to go on their un-merry ways until Dr. Miller decides to get off one more zinger. Knowing that Bill has hung up his storm chasing credentials to become a TV weatherman instead, Dr. Miller scoffs: “By the way, I really enjoy your weather reports.” All on its own, this historically horrendous insult would be comedy enough, but Eric LaRay Harvey, bless his soul, decides to take this moment into the unintentional comedy stratosphere. At the conclusion of the affront, LaRay Harvey unleashes a mammoth cackle. (You can watch the scene here. Skip to 1:50 for the cackle.)

It’s just incredible to hear. It’s the kind of cackle I imagine Dennis Rodman would have unleashed circa 1996 when he was Michael Jordan’s primary enforcer and #23 had just talked some trash to, say, Detlef Schrempf. I mean, LaRay Harvey has “Eric” act like “I really enjoy your weather reports” is the sickest burn since Bill the Butcher advised in no uncertain terms that “I don’t give a tuppeny fuck about your moral conundrum, you meat-headed shit sack.” LaRay Harvey’s cackle is not just an exclamation point; it feels like a rush of insight, a glimpse behind the curtain at an entire world we don’t know existed, where scientists and TV weathermen are like the Sharks and the Jets, pitted against one another in a never-ending Battle Royale, where the manner in which you choose to employ your knowledge says more than your knowledge. You know, there was talk way back when of a “Twister” sequel but it just sort of quietly abated, maybe because they had already served up all the tornadoes that CGI could bear. But maybe it was never meant to be set in the field. Maybe it was meant to be set out of the field, at the news station, behind the desk and near the doppler. Somewhere, Hollywood, Eric LaRay Harvey waits for your call.

Pour one out for the extra.

Twister's Opening Scene

Jan de Bont’s “Twister” finished second in the considerable 1996 box office sweepstakes, and congratulations to it, for being a weather-driven rollercoaster ride. Any references to the fatal mayhem that twisters can wreak is merely in the service of “stakes”, not much else, as most of the characters’ orations on the value of accurate meteorology ring hollow, intending to drum up tension that doesn’t exist anyway between two factions of tornado chasers. No, our principal heroes, briskly named Jo (Helen Hunt) and Bill (Bill Paxton), come across more desperate to see the inside of a funnel for the thrill of it than for the data they might collect, which might have been an interesting angle to play but isn’t going to happen when a $92 million budget is in play. And whatever; I don’t mean to give “Twister” a bad review to commemorate its incredibly unimportant 20th anniversary.

No, I come bearing praise. People might term “Twister” an atmospheric film because, like, you know, funnel clouds form when the atmosphere is unstable. But I think of “Twister” as a kind of unintentional atmospheric film, one that in its best moments, when there are no special effects and no calculated rushes of adrenaline and no Jami Gertz talking on a mid-90’s cellphone, is intrinsically Midwestern, whether it’s a shot of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman spooning lumps of decadent mashed potatoes onto a plate next to steak and eggs or the mesmerizing frame in which Bill Paxton stands beneath a gloriously darkened sky.

For all its lame attempts at generating a love triangle, and for all its asinine comic release valves like cows flying through the air, this fast-moving movie is often at its best when it just settles down, reveling in its second unit photography or tendering tiny mood-building moments. There is just such a moment at the beginning. Not, mind you, the full prologue of the film’s Helen Hunt played heroine watching her dad scarily fly away the night the F-5 tornado hit her hometown; no, I’m talking about the five successive shots that immediately open the movie. They are wonderful; they are perfect; they are where I’m from.

This shot immediately follows the opening title card, setting the stage, any evening in Midwestern May when the sky is all simple, scenic innocence.

In the next shot, however, the clouds have assumed an ominous gray, the kind that causes the men down at the co-op who have seen a storm or two in their time to remark “something’s brewing.”

In the third shot, the sky is getting black, and it is this point when you feel the thrilling, terrifying tingle in your spine.

By the fourth shot, the prelude to the tempest is in full swing; this is Tornado Watch weather.

And because it is Tornado Watch weather, you settle in to keep apprised of the situation by watching the local weatherman, sipping coffee to keep awake because you never know when it might go wrong even if you are continually hoping that it does not go wrong.

Then, it does go wrong. “Tornado Warning.” The two most terrifying words in the Midwest. There is more to come, of course, but in a way, this is more than enough. 

5 Places In The Movies I Can Smell

A few weeks back I put up a post chronicling five make-believe (kinda) movie locations I would most like to visit and #3 was The Hit Pit of “Million Dollar Baby” fame. I referenced its “disgusting aroma of sweat, gym socks, fresh blood and cheap bleach”, and Alex of And So It Begins concurred in the comments saying (italics his) “You could smell that place.” This, as it must, got me to thinking.

They say, after all, that smell is our most powerful sense. And although film is predominantly a visual medium and does not (as of yet) have a 3D scratch & sniff option, any true blue moviegoer knows there are indisputably times when despite the barrier of the movie screen you can still smell what is happening up there. Yes, you can.

So, what places/images/moments in the movies do I most remember smelling?

5 Places In The Movies I Can Smell

Gone Baby Gone. I remain more partial to Ben Affleck’s directorial debut than his recent Oscar winning “Argo”, and one reason is the immaculate set design (holla, Sharon Seymour & Kyra Friedman Curcio!). And when I say immaculate, what I mean is it immaculately designs dumpy, lived-in, ultra-realistic sets. And there is no set I love more than Helene McCready’s house. Look at that crappy carpet! Just look at it and you can SMELL the crumbs of half-eaten Sno Balls and spilled Miller High Life and un-vacuumed dirt and grime and cigarette smoke all embedded in its fibers. Its distinct aroma in a word? Nasty. Just like Helene.

Twister. Yes, I understand Jan de Bont’s hollow spectacle is not necessarily a film of emotionally affecting visuals. It is mostly CGI tornadoes and CGI cows and a CGI Cary Elwes (I’m fairly certain he was CGI’d in that anyway). But…there is a scene and a shot of which I have admittedly written before that captures – with all due respect and thoughts and prayers to everyone affected by the tragedies in Oklahoma (where the movie is set) – the electricity of a stormy Midwestern afternoon. Bill Paxton stands outside a roadside BBQ joint, gazing at the ominous storm clouds in the distance. And, dear reader, to see those clouds is to smell that rain.

Planes, Trains and Automobiles. Finicky Neal Page has just taken a shower in the low-rent motel bathroom where he has been forced to spend the night with loutish Del Griffith. Del has already been in the bathroom. Towels, sopped with water, lay everywhere. Water is pooled on the floor. The sink is “like a demilitarized zone.” And though, of course, you can’t see it, the odor of Del Griffith permeates every inch of that room. We all know that smell, don’t we? We have all, terribly, unwillingly, encountered it at one time or another, haven’t we? It’s a damp pungency that makes you shiver just to think about.

Platoon. Privates Taylor, King and Crawford are, unfortunately, relegated to latrine duty. So there they are, in the midst of the Vietnam War, which is pretty much bad enough all on its own, hauling cans of soldier piss away from outhouses and then burning it into oblivion. Ugh. Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore loved the smell of napalm in the morning, to be sure, but napalm isn’t the aroma I recall when thinking of war movies – it’s the militaristic urine being carted away by the grunts in “Platoon.”

Once Upon A Time In The West. Put simply, I have never smelled a scene more than the scene near the end of Sergio Leone’s epic masterpiece when Cheyenne (Jason Robards) shows up one final time at the frontier home of Jill McBain (Claudia Cardinale) and asks if she made coffee. Which, of course, “this time (she) did.” She pours a bowl of hot water so he can shave. She pours the coffee. The sweat glistens on their faces in the un-air-conditioned Old West. Hot water. Coffee. Sweat. Dust. Fragrantly, it all wafts through the air, mixing together, fashioning an odor so palpable you can literally (which is to say, figuratively) see it ooze from the pores of your TV.

---Now, let's keep it rolling. What places in the movies have you smelled?