SFIFF Dispatch. 1.

Fog City Mavericks was both a film and an event, and an event film, which makes it fairly well critic-proof. For SFIFF, the Castro was the perfect place to premiere a film celebrating innovative Bay Area filmmakers; there will never be a more perfect audience for it and they ate it up. And for all my eyerolling over the event as, superficially at least, a giant group hug for Bay Area film, it was hard not to get caught up in it all despite myself. A friend of mine wanted me to ask George Lucas the question most of us want an answer to, some sort of explanation for the last three Star Wars films, but seeing him up there on stage, I felt my inner 7-year-old gurgling to the surface and temporarily lost the nerve.

Updated through 5/2.

But on to the film itself: Fog City Mavericks wasn't made for the SFIFF's 50th anniversary - that was just a happy accident, says director Gary Leva (it will be aired on Starz network this year). Peter Coyote, ubiquitous to San Francisco film narration and doc narration in general - he certainly has the perfect, strong but soothing voice for it - reads the occasionally overplayed narration of a story that begins in the 19th century but jumps ahead to focus mostly on the decade of the greatest innovation - the 1970s. The opening glance at Eadeward Muybridge, the photographer who developed a scheme for instantaneous motion picture capture and the first Bay Area film maverick (I highly recommend reading Rebecca Solnit's fantastic book on him for more), is interesting but too quick before film shifts to Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola. A look at Chaplin's Essanay Studios, situated in the East Bay, is also featured, but it serves more as an example of inspiration for Coppola's American Zoetrope dreams, the story of which serves as the film's core - if it has one. It's hard not to get inspired by the stories of Coppola and Lucas's beginnings. Their first turning points both centered around childhood near-tragedies, Coppola's bout with polio, Lucas's near-deadly car crash as a teen - just as Muybridge changed his life's ambition after a wagon accident. ("But everything changed..." Coyote's narrator tells us over at least two of these incidents.)

The film does serve as a good reminder to those who may have forgotten what an innovative director George Lucas once was. Both the startling THX-1138 and the engaging American Graffiti are perfectly realized visions. The latter film, while much more commercial than the first, still had the studio suits nervous, even after a hugely successful test screening at San Francisco's North Point theater. Out of sheer stubborn stupidity, they demanded Lucas make their series of cuts, despite what should have been obvious, that they had a crowd-pleasing hit on their hands. At this point, Lucas knew he couldn't work with studios the same way again. Coppola, meanwhile, took on a job he needed in order to earn some money to pay off Zoetrope's debts and keep them all going, a little studio gangster pic called The Godfather. That story is much more well-known, but Mavericks does a fine job of briskly capturing how Coppola found the heart of the picture by making it the story of a family, of a king and his three sons, a story he could latch on to more than the novel's gangster tale.

We then turn to a couple of films later you may have heard of - Star Wars and Apocalypse Now - both of which are such well-covered territory that Mavericks wisely doesn't dwell on them too long. One of the more interesting points of the film is the influence Bay Area experimental filmmaker Jordan Belson had on these future filmmakers, particularly Lucas, and Philip Kaufman, who said he used Conner's work for several aspects of The Right Stuff. [The film also acknowledges a debt to Bruce Conner, though more than a snippet would have been nice.]

The film also features the producer Saul Zaentz, one of the few who are hands-on in a good way, as he's ushered in many labors of love that no one else believed in - usually adaptations - to go on to win a slew of awards. The One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest story is particularly inspiring, as studios unilaterally said, "No one wants to see a film about a bunch of crazy people." (Perhaps it hit too close to home.) Milos Forman, who directed Cuckoo and later Amadeus for Zaentz, here calls him "the only producer who never irritated me."

Mavericks then jumps around in time, and from person to person, often jarringly. The film's editing feels rushed in spots. Poor Chris Columbus, who proves himself a most affable, humble presence in the film and afterwards for the onstage Q&A, seems like the answer to the "Which One of These Is Not Like the Other One" contest. While he's in the film more to tell of how these other directors influenced him, it's hard to watch scenes from Mrs Doubtfire and Home Alone (crowd-pleasing hits to be sure) succeeding scenes from The Conversation and THX-1138, and followed by Clint Eastwood, and wondering where the innovation or artistry is. (Later, at the Q&A, Columbus spoke to how he's constantly hard on himself, seeing things he wished he'd done better, still wanting to do something great, and it's hard not to root for him a little - at least until you remember Bicentennial Man.)

And so we get brief, short attention span looks at Eastwood's jazz-soaked films, each more finely crafted than the last; Carroll Ballard's beautifully photographed man-and-nature films (The Black Stallion being the first, and the first film I remember crying in the theater for as a young 'un); my personal favorite of all these directors, Kaufman, who has made relatively few films but all of them pretty remarkable; brilliant editor Walter Murch (himself the subject of a better documentary showing at this year's fest); John Lasseter and the Pixar story, which is certainly an example of innovation; and on to the newest (and second) generation of filmmakers, represented first by Sofia Coppola - the first American woman to receive a Best Director Oscar nomination.

She stands out as the only woman in the bunch, which later inspired a question from the audience during the Q&A: Why aren't there more women depicted here, and for that matter, persons of color? Gary Leva answered that his focus was more personal; he wanted to narrow it to the directors he thought most important and influential, though a much longer version (this cut already feels too long) once existed that included many more filmmakers. While the director's response sidestepped the question a bit, this issue is certainly larger and outside his control; that is, why weren't, and aren't, there more women directing features, and have these men (other than papa Coppola, of course) ever thought to address it? The lack of people of color wasn't really examined in the film, either, though Wayne Wang is at least given some mention. This speaks, too, to Leva's intention to be more celebratory than exploratory. At any rate, given the region's diversity and progressive politics, is this the Bay Area's lacking? It's a question worth pondering, and the film does not. Mavericks also speeds through the subject of documentaries, though Les Blank is acknowledged appropriately; odd, considering the documentary is arguably the cinematic form in which the Bay Area stands tallest and proudest.

There's no denying that there is "something in the water," to have so many innovators, to have so much magic made here over the years. And while it's hard to imagine non-San Francisco audiences embracing the film quite as wholly as the one at the Castro, Fog City Mavericks is still a watchable treat for film students and cinephiles looking for inspiration and a reminder of these now established filmmakers' former struggles. And as an impetus to go seek out their earlier work, made when they were still hungry. To his credit, the charming Coppola says in the film that he felt the need to start over, to reinvent himself, to be a student of film all over again.

Update, 5/2: Cinematical's James Rocchi snapped pix.

Posted by dwhudson at May 1, 2007 4:59 AM