From the corner booth at the historic Musso and Frank Grill in Hollywood, we talk the biggest night in Hollywood with critics, writers and more!
Commentary: Did bad marketing keep 'Chi-Raq' out of the Oscars?
is MTV's Chief Film Critic and a regular contributor to KPCC's FilmWeek. She argues that Spike Lee's "Chi-Raq" was not only the best film of the year, but it was also robbed of an Academy Award because of problems in diversity and marketing.
Here's the Oscar-worthy movie I haven't stopped talking about for three months: it's called "Chi-Raq," and its director, Spike Lee, won an Oscar this November.
Wait, November?
Yes, in November the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences presented Spike Lee with an Honorary Oscar, the award usually given to people in their 80s and 90s, when they've pretty much retired from filmmaking. Last year, "Miracle on 34th Street" star Maureen O'Hara won her Honorary Oscar at 95.
But Spike Lee is 58. It's strange that he would win a consolation Oscar this young — he can keep trying to earn a real Academy Award for decades. And the extra irony is that he won a consolation Oscar the same year that he made his best movie since "Do the Right Thing."
"Chi-Raq" is a bold, hot-blooded, hot-tempered musical comedy that updates the sex-strike premise of Aristophanes' "Lysistrata" to modern day Chicago. Here, Lysistrata is a young feminist — think Gloria Steinem meets Pam Grier — who convinces every babe in town to stay celibate until their gangster boyfriends put down their guns.
"Chi-Raq" was my No. 1 movie of 2015. In the year of Black Lives Matter, this is the feisty, funny and furious film that deserves a gold statue. The script, which is all written in hip-hop rhyme, is terrific. The direction has passion and energy. And the acting couldn't be better.
"Chi-Raq" has award-worthy supporting performances by Samuel L. Jackson, Angela Bassett, Jennifer Hudson, Wesley Snipes and Dave Chappelle, and an award-winning star turn from newcomer Teyonah Parris, who was just voted Best Actress by the African-American Film Critics Association.
But Spike Lee won't be at the Oscars. "Chi-Raq" didn't get a single Academy Award nomination. In solidarity with the #OscarsSoWhite campaign, Spike Lee is boycotting the Oscars just three months after he won one. You might have heard people complain that "Creed" and "Straight Outta Compton" were snubbed. But no one is mentioning "Chi-Raq." Why not?
The answer is simple: nobody saw it.
The problem isn't only diversity — it's technology. The movie business is changing faster than Oscar campaigns can keep up with. "Chi-Raq" was the first feature film released by Amazon. Unlike veteran Oscar masterminds like Harvey Weinstein, Amazon had no idea how to reach voters. Neither did Netflix, whose African civil war drama "Beasts of No Nation" also went ignored by the Academy.
This is a big deal, because Amazon and Netflix are becoming powerhouse indie film distributors. Last month at Sundance, they bought 10 movies — an unheard of amount of cash in the festival world.
Now, these new kings of cinema have to prove they can do more for this year's Oscar contenders than they did for Spike Lee. If not, they'll keep embarrassing themselves like Netflix did in Park City when it tried to buy Sundance's grand jury prize winner "Birth of a Nation" for a record-breaking $20 million — and got turned down.
Instead, the biopic of slave rebellion leader Nat Turner accepted a smaller offer from Fox Searchlight. "Birth of a Nation" decided it was worth losing millions of dollars to work with a studio that had more experience winning Academy Awards.
If their gamble works, maybe next year "Birth of a Nation" will change the #OscarsSoWhite conversation. Or maybe next year's Best Picture winner will be the Sundance hit critics preferred: Kenneth Lonergan's "Manchester By the Sea" — purchased by Amazon.
So the bitter joke about Spike Lee's old-person honorary Oscar is that he's actually the first director to leap into the future. I'm still upset we won't see "Chi-Raq" at the Academy Awards. But the silver lining is you can see "Chi-Raq" right now at home — it's free on Amazon Prime.
Patt Morrison on the history and magic of Musso & Frank Grill, one of Hollywood's oldest restaurants
First, do not think of Musso & Frank as some historical monument, as if it were a kind of museum with menus.
Think of it as what it has been for most of its nine decades: a living part of the ecosystem of Hollywood in the 1920s, the 30s, the 40s, into the 50s.
This was when the bookstores in Hollywood were open almost as late as the bars … and there were almost as many of them.
And Musso’s was the neighborhood Starbucks of its age — with booze, without laptops.
The writers who first congregated there were often fugitives from New York and other places vaguely East. Men for whom Musso’s, with its comforting dark wood and dark walls, was a frontier Algonquin, a refuge from the relentless sunlight of Los Angeles and the relentless pressures of the Hollywood studios they worked for with a combination of shame and disdain that only the solace of big paychecks and deep martinis made tolerable.
Genius met here, ate here, got drunk here — F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Saroyan, Dashiel Hammett, Nathanael West, John O’Hara. Writers began with hair-of-the-dog lunches that turned into convivial dinners.
Sometimes they strolled or staggered out the back door and down a few yards to Stanley Rose’s book shop for some spirited singing, a look at the new editions, and then back to Musso’s for a nightcap or two.
William Faulkner got so exasperated one day that he went behind the bar himself to show the barkeep how to make a genuine Mississippi mint julep.
That was after Prohibition ended. Before, Greta Garbo was spotted by a gossip columnist gulping near-beer and attacking a plate of spaghetti.
This was an era when the stars weren’t embedded in the sidewalks outside Musso’s, but ensconced at the tables inside — rather like the studio system: the stars out front, the writers out of sight in the back. But the back room was the writers’ private club, guarded by a maître d’ every bit as bumptious as the clipboard guy outside today’s nightclubs.
In time, another generation of writers found its way there: Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood; Lillian Hellman and Budd Schulberg; and giants fleeing Hitler’s Germany, Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann.
Musso’s lost the lease on the back room in 1954, just about the time television began making mincemeat of the studio system that had paid the writers’ bar tab.
Oh, writers still came, searching for the same fellow-feeling that earlier writers had found there. John Fante, the novelist and screenwriter who loved L.A., said that to walk into Musso’s was “ a glorious beginning to the new day, a rekindling of the will to survive, a renewal of one’s faith in mankind.”
Science fiction writer Harlan Ellison was sitting at the bar one day, working on some galleys, and he looked up to see poets: Richard Brautigan on his left and Rod McKuen on his right.
I had a couple of lunches with James Ellroy there, and I’d have sworn the ghosts wreathed the room like the cigarette smoke the writers once exhaled with their 80-proof breath.
Or maybe it was just the martini doing its magic.
Why 'Trumbo' is actually a thriller: Screenwriter John McNamara on his Oscar-nominated film and Hollywood history
Of all the movies nominated for an Oscar this year, the one that best fits our show at Musso & Frank for lunch with martinis and vichyssoise is "Trumbo," starring Bryan Cranston as the blacklisted screenwriter. He’s been nominated for an Oscar for best actor; his words are by John McNamara, who also produced the film.
McNamara has also been a writer and producer on TV shows including "Aquarius," "The Fugitive" and "Lois and Clark" — as well as "Revenge of the Nerd" on the CBS Afternoon Playhouse in 1983.
On Dalton Trumbo's history at Musso & Frank
I think there's credible documentation that he did [dine here]. He lived not that far away — several times in his career he was within shouting or cabbing distance. And he was a raconteur, a bon vivant, a boulevardier, so he liked all the places. He liked Ciro's, and he liked Perino's. He was known to like to have a cocktail or two.
On sharing a corner booth in a place where Trumbo once worked
I started coming here, I think, the very first week I moved to Los Angeles, which was 1984. And I remember just enjoying the ambiance then — you can just sort of feel in the walls, the booths and the waiters. In fact, a friend of mine later said, "the nice thing about Musso and Frank is the waiters who are rude to you were rude to F. Scott Fitzgerald."
On whether "Trumbo" is a biopic
I don't think it really is, because it really begins and ends with this battle. I think a biopic sort of starts with a crying baby in a hospital and it has a kind of a "David Copperfield" sort of sweep of childhood to teen years. It'll take you through the whole of someone's life who may have done one or two interesting things.
I mean, I sort of structured it more like a thriller, even though it may not have ultimately ended up that way on screen. The structuring and laying out of the plot at the early stages of writing it, I thought, "I can't really begin the story until the antagonist appears," and of course the antagonist is HUAC (the House Un-American Activities Committee). So they appear very early in the movie, and by the time they're disassembled more or less, the movie is over.
On researching the script and the value of talking with Dalton Trumbo's surviving relatives
All the detail of his moods, his language, his behavior, his habits — like the fact that he wrote in the bathtub later in his career because he had a bad back. I never knew why he wrote in the bathtub, and it was because of this terrible pain he was having from years of writing. Which I could very much understand, having developed a sort of bad back myself.
The fact that you think he chain smoked this much, but he really chain smoked more than you could possibly imagine.
He was such a lover of freedom, of dissent and of debate and discord, but not in his home. He did not like the idea that his oldest daughter, who is the most like him, stood up to him. And it was her memories that really formed the core of that relationship with Elle Fanning and Bryan Cranston in that movie.
On whether Academy members knew Trumbo was the real author behind his Oscar-winning screenplays
I think it was a kind of process of whispers. I think that they had no idea that Ian Hunter wrote "Roman Holiday," and he was the first Oscar winner to use his name only. But by the time you get to Robert Rich, a huge portion of the voting Academy knew and were sending a message — that this is ridiculous. I think it's a very good movie, and it was deserving of the award, but I think there was also a political message behind it by the left.
White ‘Straight Oughta Compton’ writers talk #OscarsSoWhite
Among the films nominated for best original screenplay this year, only one tells an unmistakably Los Angeles story: "Straight Outta Compton," the story of the rise (and decline) of the pioneering rap group N.WA.
To make the story both compelling and accurate took dozens of rewrites, years of research, hours of interviews and four writers. Jonathan Herman and Andrea Berloff co-wrote the screenplay and joined John Rabe in the corner booth at Musso and Frank to talk about the film.
Andrea Berloff on researching the story:
I was hired in 2010 by New Line in Warner Brothers to put together a movie about N.W.A. I started off interviewing Ice Cube. He was really the driving force behind the project in the early days. I mean, we spent countless hours and countless days together where I was just sort of extracting his tales from him, and then he introduced me to the world around him, so the rest of the guys in the group and DJ’s from that era. I spoke to a professor down at USC, Todd Boyd; he is a professor of hip hop. I talked to them over the course of ten months.
Berloff on the challenges found in putting recent history into a screenplay:
That’s part of the task of the job, is that you have to be able to work with the people who are still alive and still very able to tell their story and make them comfortable. I’ve done a lot of these where you work with people who are alive, and I always say I’m like a doctor — it’s first do no harm. You know, if someone is still alive, I’m not trying to make their life any harder than it already is. So you have to work with them and collaborate with them and figure out how you can both be authentic and true to the story but also present a version that they are comfortable with.
Co-writer Jonathan Herman on being nominated and the #OscarsSoWhite campaign:
I mean, that morning when the Oscars were announced at the crack of dawn, and obviously the first reaction is total joy — but then we started talking to our publicist. Because then all the calls started rolling in and it was pretty apparent almost immediately that that was the first question that people were asking. What do you think about the fact that all the actors are white and that they are saying that "Oscars so white" is being repeated? And it was sort of tough because in that moment to sort of have to recalibrate your thoughts, and how do we respond to this, like "Wait, we want to say the right thing. We want to be able to continue this conversation in a positive way and not make it worse."
Berloff:
I don't think that at any point we have said "this is not a valid conversation to be having." I think we believe, really strongly, in the conversation and the fact that Hollywood needs to take a strong look at itself. And this is a big issue we're facing as an industry. #OscarsSoWhite is a symptom of the fact that not enough people are getting hired, and not enough diverse stories are getting told, and the studios aren't making those movies. It's a whole ecosystem of issues.
We really are happy to have that conversation and have the movie serve as a conduit for that, for us to all be talking about it. Beyond Hollywood.
Herman:
And also, it was weird for us individually. Andrea is a screenwriter who writes in a world where most movies being written are made about men, and are boy movies. And I'm gay, and there certainly aren't a lot of gay movies, so I find myself writing for straight guys, these strong, male tough characters. We're still participating in it, we want to work in this system.
Berloff on what didn't make it into the movie:
I loved the world of the Compton swap meet, which is this great place where people go and sell anything that you can humanly think of. That was really the place where Eric ["Eazy-E" Wright] discovered [Dr.] Dre’s music. They had known each other as kids in school, but later on Eric wanted to get out of the drug racket and had some cash in his pocket and was sort of wandering around the swap meet and wandered past this music booth, this booth that was selling mixtapes. He saw how people were going crazy over Dre’s mixtapes. And to me, that moment of hearing the music and how amazing and fresh and interesting it was, seeing the crowd’s reaction to that but also how much money was changing hands, and they kept talking about money, money, money. And him realizing that there is commerce around this incredible music and this incredible sound. I loved that world and I loved that moment.