Talking Taos
A small gem of a film fest
What sounds more enticing than a long weekend film festival, April 16 through
19, in Taos, New Mexico? But no one imagined for the Taos Talking Picture
Festival an unseasonal blizzard that for two grim days transformed the
sun-soaked adobe village into igloo town. In fact, Taos looked depressingly
like the snowed-in northern New Hampshire visible in Paul Schrader's adept
rendition of the 1989 Russell Banks novel Affliction. The Nick
Nolte-starring film, which will be released this October, was probably the
biggest coup for the Taos festival, just in its fourth year.
"This is a very faithful adaptation of the novel," said screenwriter-director
Schrader as he introduced the showing. Long ago, he'd thumbed through
Affliction in a bookstore and was awestruck by the opening line: "This
is the story of my older brother's strange criminal behavior and of his
disappearance." That's the voiceover beginning of the film.
Nolte, who is wonderful, had signed on from the outset to play Wade, the
cursed-by-life schnook protagonist. But Affliction got made only when
Nolte finally agreed to come way down on his Hollywood acting price for the
chancy project, and when shooting was switched to rural Quebec because of the
low Canadian dollar.
"What advice would you give a young screenwriter?" someone asked Schrader.
"Spend the first five years of your career networking," answered the screenplay
author of Taxi Driver. "If that's too humiliating, quit and become a
real writer."
Schrader, the dark-and-difficult cinéaste of Blue Collar,
Comfort of Strangers, Patty Hearst, and Hardcore, was also
lured to Taos to receive the 1998 Howard Hawks Storytelling Award, which is
named for the filmmaker of Bringing Up Baby and The Big
Sleep. I was honored to write the program note for the award; I said in
part about Schrader, "No other significant American filmmaker has never sold
out. Not once. Schrader's simply incapable of Pollyannaism, of consorting with
John Grisham, of going soft with Robin Williams, of making one for the studio,
one for himself. They're all for himself."
What's unique about the Taos fest is its avowed multiculturalism, especially
its commitment to forwarding Native American cinema. There was a tribute to a
Vancouver-based Native filmmaker, Loretta Todd, who unveiled Today Is a Good
Day, a bio of the late Cree actor Chief Dan George, star of Little Big
Man. The most popular showing at Taos was Chris Eyre's Smoke
Signals, an enormously moving road movie about two young Coeur
d'Alène Natives, Victor and Thomas, who leave their Idaho reservation
for Arizona to recover the dead body of Victor's father.
Taos was good enough for D.H. Lawrence, for nearby flying-saucer landings, and
for Dennis Hopper to shoot some of, and edit, Easy Rider. Now it's good
enough for mighty Miramax. In another fest coup, Smoke Signals'
distributor was leaned on by the Native cast and crew to allow Taos a
two-showing sneak of its precious June release. The fest responded by choosing
Eyre to receive its coveted Land Grant Award, a nonpareil annual prize of five
acres of prime desert land on Taos Mesa, near the spectacular Rio Grande
gorge.
"Chris has a pressing engagement out on the Mesa," Smoke Signals
actor Gary Farmer explained of the missing filmmaker at a screening. "He'll be
your new neighbor in Taos." Farmer joked, "We Natives are trying to convince
him to turn it into a reservation, where we all can live."
The friendly, accessible Taos fest occurs just long enough after Sundance that
it can be a discovery ground for a new batch of American independents,
including those mistaken Sundance rejects. Journalists and distributors take
note! I was especially struck by Vermonter Jay Craven's A Stranger in the
Kingdom, a dense, complicated, ambitiously acted regional drama about
racism in rural New England, and by Juliane Glantz's black-comedy debut
feature, Wilbur Falls.
Glantz, a native of Western Massachusetts, wrote Wilbur Falls at
20 and directed it at 21, as she graduated from film school at USC. She's now
23, with a husband and a baby, and she's that precocious young talent whom
producers should rush to. Wilbur Falls, frothing with energy, ideas, and
directorial imagination, is a genuine calling-card movie. She's ready!
Wilbur Falls was inspired by Glantz's informing Californians about life
back home in Becket, population 1500. She told me, "I lived up the street from
an ax murderer, the pizza parlor was in someone's basement, you bought milk
from the local policeman." Last year she took her script to the Sundance
Festival and stopped everyone there with her pitch: "It's a dark comedy set in
Massachusetts, where I'm from, about a girl in high school who seeks revenge on
this jock and accidentally kills him."
She sneaked into a Sundance foot-massage party (!) and met a producer there
who said yes, then turned out shaky. Wilbur Falls was taken over by Las
Vegas investor David Delman, who bankrolled it himself. Glantz shot it in, and
around, Becket. A Massachusetts miracle.
Her next project? A film based on the love letters of Nathaniel Hawthorne and
Herman Melville!