Theadora Van Runkle (1929-2011)

Take off those berets and fedoras and pay your respects. The great costume designer Theadora Van Runkle, a three time Oscar nominee, passed away this past Friday of lung cancer at 83 years of age [src]. For those who don't immediately connect her name to her movies, know that her work was seismic. 

Her most famous creations were actually those done on her very first feature Bonnie & Clyde (1967). She was able to do the picture only after Warren Beatty and the costume designers guild president screamed at each other for half an hour (she was not a guild member then) according to Mark Harris's invaluable tome Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and The Birth of New Hollywood.  She had never done a film and at one tense point admitted to Warren Beatty that she had no idea what she was doing. 

After Beatty vetoed her first period-specific ideas, she came up with the now legendary out of time ensembles that nodded to both the 1930s (when the story takes place) and contemporary 60s French New Wave that the project had always hoped to emulate (Beatty had originally wanted François Truffaut himself to direct).

You see people who are great beauties and never get anywhere. This was style."
-Theadora Van Runkle on Dunaway as Bonnie. 

Van Runkle even claims that she was the one who brought the unknown Faye Dunaway to Beatty & director Arthur Penn's attention. "There's the girl you should cast!" though there are competing legends as to how Dunaway first came up in the long search for the girl.

Because of the tight budget, many of the costumes worn by other characters weren't actually Van Runkle's designs but costuming the titular pair was enough to win her a permanent place in movie history and her first Oscar nomination. She was later nominated for both The Godfather Part Two (1974) and Peggy Sue Got Married (1986).

Those Oscar nominated movies were hardly the only memorable gigs. Other showy movies included the infamously delirious transgendered farce Myra Breckenridge (1970), the ill-fated Mame (1974), the post-war romantic drama New York New York (1977) and the bawdy gaudy musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982).

I'll always have a special place in my heart for her work on Peggy Sue Got Married. I love that too-shiny / too-tight gown that Peggy Sue is proud she can still fit into at her 25th reunion. Like Bonnie, Peggy Sue is straddling two eras, this time literally; a lovely mirage of the past clinging to a totally contemporary soul.

Good night and thank you, Theadora.

How Long Has It Been Since You've Seen "Close Encounters"?

Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind turns 34 this month. On a whim recently we put in the 30th anniversary edition Blu-Ray* and gave it a spin. I hadn't seen the movie since I was a kid and my memory of it was hilariously incomplete and childlike.

a production sketch shown on the special edition DVD

I remembered, for example, the oft repeated five musical notes that always made me nostalgic for that old light-up Hasbro game "Simon Says" and I remembered all the glowing lights and alien children at the end. My third most vivid memory was Richard Dreyfuss's mashed potato replica of Devil's Tower in Wyoming (a shape to which all the characters are drawn). Strangely I had zero recall of the far more narratively pronounced massive sculpture he builds inside of his house of the exact same structure. Funny the things you remember. The mashed potatoes must have stuck in my child brain because little kids play with their food but they're fully aware that adults aren't supposed to.

To my great astonishment, given decades of familiarity with Spielberg films, the movie is miraculously open ended. It's also open sided and open fronted which is to say that there are dozens of emotional entry points and next to nothing in the way of force-feeding or exposition. You can feel whatever you want to feel about it all the way through without the director telling you how you should be feeling (aside from free-form "wonder" which he expects and earns) or explaining any of those feelings away. In short, were his filmography a bookshelf, this would a lonely inkblot nestled between dozens of how-to instructional textbooks. 

Oscar History and 70s Nostalgia after the jump

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Oscar Horrors: Killer Bee Costumes!

Happy Halloween! This month Team Film Experience has been celebrating those rare Oscar nominations given to horror films. Here's a true oddity from Robert Gannon. This mini-series was his idea! Take it away, Robert.
 

Here lies...the original costume designs of The Swarm. Three time Oscar nominated costume designer Paul Zastupnevich earned his second nomination for the epic killer bee film from 1978. As silly as the film is, the costume design is no joke.

Zastupnevich designed very detailed costumes for the entire cast of the film. They fall into three broad categories. The first is military uniforms, including the imagined design for the killer bee response team in orange and white jumpsuits. The second is business attire, worn by a large cavalcade of performers and professionals woven throughout the running time of the film. The third is casual civillian wear, designed in an American-hued palette of various reds, whites, and blues. 

Taken separately, it may not seem that impressive. It's contemporary costuming in a horror/disaster film. But the true beauty of the costumes is seen in the second half of the film, where military personnel, business people, and casual civillians are all mixed together. It makes it quite clear that Zastupnevich had a great eye for categorizing character types. With such a large cast, it becomes essential to be able to pinpoint who everyone is. If nothing else, there is no confusion as to who is doing what during The Swarm.

This is the rare case of the Academy nominating the strongest element of an otherwise critically maligned film. It's rarer still that a horror film that was a commerical failure could gain any awards recognition. 

Previously on Oscar Horrors...
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane -Best Actress in a Leading Role
The Fly -Best Makeup
Death Becomes Her -Best Effects, Visual Effects
The Exorcist -Best Actress in a Supporting Role 
The Birds - Best Effects, Special Visual Effects

Rosemary's Baby - Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium
Beetlejuice - Best Makeup
Carrie - Best Actress in a Leading Role
Bram Stoker's Dracula - Best Costume Design
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - Best Actor in a Leading Role

King of the Zombies - Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic Picture
Poltergeist - Best Effects, Visual Effects
Hellboy II: The Golden Army -Achievement in Makeup
The Silence of the Lambs -Best Director
The Tell-Tale Heart -Best Short Subject, Cartoons

Oscar Horrors: In (Mild) Defense of Linda Blair

In Oscar Horrors, Team Film Experience explores Oscar nominated contributions to the horror genre. Here is new contributor Mayukh Sen.

HERE LIES...Linda Blair’s reasonably complex turn in The Exorcist, slain by the prodigious work of fellow pubescent Tatum O’Neal (Paper Moon). 

Brian de Palma apparently hated The Exorcist, and it’s not difficult to see why.  I generally fall on the unimpressed side with the film, because none of the psychological trauma undergone by the characters finds aesthetic articulation.  Everything is so clearly, obviously constructed on a Hollywood set that it borders on the parodistic. What is superlative about a director like de Palma is that he understands the trappings of genre conventions and mocks the notion of film as a classically escapist, populist medium, managing to extract a modicum of truth out of such a framework.  Friedkin doesn’t understand this.  Interpreting what should be perfunctory entertainment as a parable of human suffering – that’s dreary city.         

I won’t waste a second pretending Linda Blair’s performance is any great shakes.  Her nomination was largely the product of inertia – The Exorcist (1973) was just a cultural phenomenon that the Academy couldn’t ignore, Dan.  Yet reading Glenn’s wonderful piece on Sissy Spacek’s performance in Carrie made me realize the extent to which Blair’s performance has become underrated.  Spacek’s performance is a masterpiece because of her fearless, but still graceful, physical expressivity.  She is a performer who understands body language.  The way she continually destructs, contorts, and fractures her body often acts as a reflection of the character’s emotional distress. 

Somewhere along the line, it became fashionable to oversimplify Blair’s performance as a lot of “sitting there” caked with makeup.  Those in defense of her performance often point to the luminosity of her earlier pre-possession scenes, rightly claiming that she is replete with youthful charm.  I agree.  She’s wonderful there, and she sets up a foundation for the supposed tragedy that occurs later in the film. 

Beyond Mercedes McCambridge’s voice, plastic turning heads, body double controversies and other stunts that may not have much to do with acting talent, though, Blair’s work is solid.  She demonstrates remarkable control over her facial expressions and body language, subtly communicating the “devil’s” continual torment, lack of patience, and frustration.

How does one externalize the psychological state of demonic possession?  I’m not quite sure, but we can say that Linda Blair succeeded, to a degree. Her work is highly gestural but still controlled, and this degree of expressivity works wonders. I’ve noticed a tendency of certain critics to dismiss horror film performances as merely “acting scared” and “being terrified”.  Though Blair’s performance is ultimately a cheap narrative trope, it shouldn’t be evaluated so lazily.  I’m not a fan of praising performances because of the sheer amount of work put into them (see Meryl Streep’s string of performances in the 80s), but, in this case, the physical work is brutally effective.  There is increasingly little appreciation for what actors communicate through physical gestures, and this might be part of why Linda Blair’s nomination is something of an afterthought these days.

Previously on Oscar Horrors

Oscar Horrors: Carrie White Burns In Hell

In the daily Oscar Horrors series we're looking at those rare Oscar nominations for horror movies. Happy Halloween from Team Film Experience.

Here lies… Sissy Spacek’s Oscar for Best Actress in Carrie (1976). Carrie White may burn in hell (along with her ill-fated off-Broadway musical), but Sissy Spacek’s nomination remains a shining beacon of hope that genre fare from little-known actors don’t have to be relegated to, ahem, the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films Awards.

Can you conceive of it today? A 26-year-old actress, in one of her first major roles, portraying an introverted teenage high schooler with supernatural powers who kills the students at her senior prom. Sounds like fairly standard genre stuff, especially when coming from the minds of an up-and-coming writer (Stephen King was paid $2,500 for the book rights) and director (Brian De Palma). Yet somehow, it became one of the few horror titles to earn prestigious acting nominations at the Academy Awards. Can you picture this happening today?

Didn’t think so.

Spacek’s performance as the titular Carrie White was only her fourth major film role after Prime Cut (1972), Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973), and Ginger in the Morning (1974). Spacek would go on to win the statue just four years later for a musical biopic about Loretta “the Coal Miner’s Daughter” Lynn, which makes this breakthrough Oscar nomination all the crazier. Did the Academy see something in her that broke through the conventions of the genre, or was this merely one of those rare moments when they were able to look past all the barriers and recognise the defining, film-changing performance within? Her only other nomination and win of that awards season came from the National Society of Film Critics. High praise, sure, but tell that to Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Yolande Moreau, Sally Hawkins, Naomi Watts, Reese Witherspoon, Ally Sheedy… well, the list goes on (presumably...the strike rate was so high going back just 10 years that I figure there must be plenty more without spending the time to research.)

Somewhere behind the smooth as honey tracking shots, blood-splattered prom dresses and John Travolta (“in his first motion picture role!”) smashing a pig on the head with a mallet (I couldn’t quite stomach Carrie as a younger man due to this very scene), Spacek emerged. It probably helped that the young actress had the gloriously villainous Piper Laurie in her back pocket to help shine a light on her. Laurie, a previous nominee in 1962 for The Hustler, received a Best Supporting Actress nomination for being a mother that would make even Mary Jones shake in her boots. As mother/daughter combos go, the Whites are a doozy of a pair.

A quick look at the original trailer and you’d be hard-pressed to believe this was the sort of thing that would be to the Academy’s taste and yet Spacek’s repertoire of jutting sideward glances, shy upwards looks from behind flattened hair and high-pitched whelps of demonic terror makes for one of the greatest horror movie performances of all time. At a glance Carrie looks like little more a schlocky teen horror title; would Academy members even watch a film like that today? That Spacek lost the Oscar to Faye Dunaway in Network is hard to quibble with, but the miracle of the nomination is enough to keep me happy. 

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