I don’t know what magazines are about anymore. In a typical Borders one can go to the traditional section, which has familiar newsy publications such as The New Yorker, Time, The Atlantic Monthly, and so forth, but if you stray to the left there are scores of thick but unfulfilling lads’ magazines with wetted-down movie actresses on the covers, or wander to the right, where one is confronted with tens of magazines with odd titles such as B East, Good, Plazm, Flaunt, Clear, Anthem, Fader, Dazed and Confused, Bomb, Bikini, Dont, or Giant Robot. There doesn’t seem to be a name for this new breed of publication, but they mix music, movies, fashion, skateboarding, and toys, at least for starters. One caught my eye the other day because it had Jack Nicholson from Chinatown on the cover. It turned out to be a special movie issue (themed “Hollywood Lost and Found”) of Stop Smiling , the “magazine for high-minded lowlifes.” Like most of the issues of this kind of newspaper that I’ve sampled, it proved to be thin, just like the mainstream magazines I assume it is supposed to counter.

On the cover the issue pretends that a package of interviews with screenwriter Robert Towne and producer Robert Evans provides “Lessons of Chinatown.” But in the actual reading they prove to be just another pair of chats with two already over-interviewed subjects. Towne seems especially put off by his interlocutor, coming across as desultory in his replies. When the interviewer asks him, “Was there any one moment in San Pedro that made you want to become a writer,” Towne says yes, then proceeds not to finish the answer, instead turning his response into a complaint that people in real life don’t wear hats as much as they do in movies. The excerpt from Towne’s intro to the published Chinatown script is way livelier. The Evans review is a rehash of material we’ve seen before in his autobiography and in the documentary made from it. In short, no “lessons” from Chinatown. On the other hand, the paper has a few new essays, one by Jonathan Rosenbaum on Lubitsch and Wilder, J. Hoberman on Samuel Fuller, and Paul Cullum on Preston Sturges, that are worth reading. The rest of the issue is all nightclubs, lost movie palaces, and the Hollywood sign.

The problem with this kind of magazine is that it doesn’t serve the reader, it serves the publicists who granted them access to stars, or the publishers who gave them free books. There is no reason on earth to profile dull human presences such as Bruce Dern or Harry Dean Stanton except that they happen to be in current projects that need publicity. A shortcut to evaluating an issue such as this one is to turn to the books pages. Here, there is a short list of 12 “key” books on Hollywood, and a passel of reviews of contemporary books. The Hollywood 12 is, quite simply, a list of bad or out-of-date books, few of which anyone should read. Even as a 12-year-old when I first started collecting movie books I knew these titles were moth-eaten: The Fifty Year Decline of Hollywood, The Rise of the American Film, Hollywood: The Dream Factory, and A Million and One Nights. The only books from the list worth having are The Parade’s Gone By, a readable if woefully out-of-date book on silent film, Picture, Lillian Ross’s subtly hilarious New Yorker account of a prestige Hollywood film’s production, and Additional Dialogue, the collected letters of blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo.

But again, this is all old stuff. New book reviews, such as they are, happen to be worse, however, by being untrustworthy about high priced items. I refer specifically to the glowing account of the Taschen movie series. Taschen is a German publisher of mostly art and what they call “sexy” books, many of which are good. In recent years, Taschen has strayed into movie-book publishing with mixed results. Two huge books on Wilder’s Some Like it Hot, and the career of Stanley Kubrick, are expensive but essential. But a series of director profiles has proved to be unbelievably dull. Covering directors such as Hitchcock, Kubrick, Antonioni, Polanski, and Michael Mann, they are flatly written, plodding career bios with little writing flair and few insights, and with, as usual, poorly selected cover art (a Taschen Achilles heel). In the interest of full disclosure I should say that I auditioned to write a book in this series back when the project was just getting started, but didn’t pass muster, and was certainly unaware of the direction the series was going to go. Here, the books are reviewed as “expansive meditations,” which is a disservice to the interested reader.

Another annoyance is designed-based. Almost all the articles are continued at the back of the book, but the remainder of the article is a mere sliver. Couldn’t the designer have eliminated at least some of the copious white space that graces the pages so that the articles were self-contained? But then, magazines such as Stop Smiling don’t seem to aspire to be read, but rather flipped through briefly before being displayed on coffee tables.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 21st, 2007 at 1:19 pm and is filed under Reel Politique - Film columnist DK Holm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.