Francis Ford Coppola pays the bills with his day-job: making wine. Photo via Grazia Magazine

In a recent interview, auteur film director Francis Ford Coppola alludes to a future where the  intersection of art and commerce resembles our past more than it does the present.

Interviewer Ariston Anderson asked, “How does an aspiring artist bridge the gap between distribution and commerce?”

We have to be very clever about those things. You have to remember that it’s only a few hundred years, if that much, that artists are working with money. Artists never got money. Artists had a patron, either the leader of the state or the duke of Weimar or somewhere, or the church, the pope. Or they had another job. I have another job. I make films. No one tells me what to do. But I make the money in the wine industry. You work another job and get up at five in the morning and write your script.

This idea of Metallica or some rock n’ roll singer being rich, that’s not necessarily going to happen anymore. Because, as we enter into a new age, maybe art will be free. Maybe the students are right. They should be able to download music and movies. I’m going to be shot for saying this. But who said art has to cost money? And therefore, who says artists have to  make money?
- Francis Ford Coppola

“Is it important to veer away from the masters to develop one’s own style?”

I once found a little excerpt from Balzac. He speaks about a young writer who stole some of his prose. The thing that almost made me weep,  he said, “I was so happy when this young person took from me.” Because that’s what we want. We want you to take from us. We want you, at first, to steal from us, because you can’t steal. You will take what we give you and you will put it in your own voice and that’s how you will find your voice.

And that’s how you begin. And then one day someone will steal from you. And Balzac said that in his book: It makes me so happy because it makes me immortal because I know that 200 years from now there will be people doing things that somehow I am part of. So the answer to your question is: Don’t worry about whether it’s appropriate to borrow or to take or do something like someone you admire because that’s only the first step and you have to take the first step.

Fashion designer and director Tom Ford makes his model work.

As Tom Ford jumps from career to career, from fashion design to filmmaking, I find myself fascinated by his life story. Born in Austin to realtor parents, Ford’s family moved around Texas a bit before settling in Sante Fe (one of the cities on the hippie trail that leads up the West Coast). Ford left Santa Fe to attend New York University at age 17; then he dropped out of NYU after a year to focus on modeling and acting. Ford found time to study at prestigious art schools in New York during the Studio 54 days. Later, he provided the artistic vision that resurrected the Gucci fashion line as well as their overall brand. Ford would go on to start his own line, complete with a few boutiques spread around the world. And that is where my Ford appreciation burns hottest: the man knows how to design clothes…from head to toe, glasses to shoes.

And did I mention his clothes. I have no idea how much they cost, but I know their expensive, becauseno prices listed on his online store. Perhaps Ford will one day expand his brand to include the middle class…

…or maybe his brand will remain a fashion-forward lifestyle that we can aspire to.

Tom Ford’s directorial debut A SINGLE MAN is garnering rave reviews in limited release around the United States. Blackswansongs.com looks forward to viewing it.

Roman Polanski might just have to pay the piper.

Film auteur Roman Polanski was arrested while attempting to enter Switzerland for the Zurich Film Festival earlier today. He faces possible extradition to the United States where he has remained a fugitive since 1977 for having sex with a 13-year-old girl, authorities said Sunday.

This case is very, very complex. Polanski has already paid a settlement to his victim, Samantha Geimer after she sued him. Both Geimer and Polanski have asked a U.S. appeals court in California to overturn a judges’ refusal to throw out his case. Polanski’s attorneys claims misconduct by the now-deceased judge who had arranged a plea bargain and then reneged. Further, speculation remains that Switzerland may be trying to placate U.S. justice department officials who have been attempting to add transparency to Switzerland’s bank account system wherein rich individuals around the world are allowed to “hide” their money in the Swiss accounts without paying taxes in their home country. (If this changes, plot points involving Swiss bank accounts in James Bond films and other espionage movies will be forever altered.)

Polanski has had his fair share of hardships between escaping genocide during WWII and the Manson family killing his pregnant wife Sharon Tate. But I personally don’t think that should exempt him from paying his debt to society. Between O.J. Simpson, Robert Blake and countless others, we’ve all seen that if you have money, connections and celebrity in California, you can be above the law. I think the dismissal of Polanski’s case would just be further grist for that warped and smelly mill.

If California does decide to seek extradition for Polanski, I think they should mark the moment as a sea change wherein money and fame are no longer allowed to trump truth and justice in our judicial system. Polanski has created some amazing art in his lifetime…and he has been well compensated for it. But those things, accompanied with his hardships, do not make it OK to get a 13 year old drunk on champagne and then perform oral, anal and missionary sex on her. I know it was the heady 1970s and all – and he was under intoxicating environs house-sitting for Jack Nicholson – but that shouldn’t give you license to date rape a child.

Buck and The Preacher one-sheet

Friday night, the eve before my birthday, I stayed in my tiny downtown Austin apartment and enjoyed a Sidney Poitier film retrospective on one of my favorite television channels, Turner Classic Movies (TCM). I just happened upon the fest, but it was exactly what I was looking for and I happened upon it at exactly the right time.

After watching A RAISIN IN THE SUN and his academy award winning turn in the sublime LILIES OF THE FIELD, I watched a film of his I’d never heard of…BUCK AND THE PREACHER. After an informative introduction from TCM host Robert Osborne, I got comfortable on the couch and strapped in for two (more) hours, but this time instead of Poitier’s brooding antihero or his amiable Christ-like everyman, he wowed me with an original action tale amid 19th century black activism.

Poitier deftly directs himself in the lead as Buck. And it must be noted that this was his debut turn as director, Osborne said that he took over as director only a few weeks before shooting began in the middle of Mexico…without the studio’s official consent when Poitier and co-producer, co-star Harry Belafonte realized that the man they’d chose to direct wasn’t the right fit.

Released in 1972, Poitier takes the “exploitation” right out of Blaxploitation. The story revolves around Buck, a “wagon master” that attempts to lead freed slaves from Louisiana westward so that they might receive their 40 acres and a mule. The freed slaves encounter genocidal night raiders (masquerading as plantation labor recruiters) as they try to make their way to Colorado. Amazingly the clan also encounters a con-man preacher (Belafonte) who they must also escape until he changes his ways and decides to help Buck and the freed slaves.

The pace is brisk and accelerated with a clever sub-plot involving native Americans, accurately portrayed (as opposed to the mumbo-jumbo spouting caricatures that Hollywood was well-accustomed to depicting).

I’d always dug Belafonte, but now I have a new appreciation for his acting prowess. Belafonte obviously relishes his role as the smooth-talking, rotten-teethed grifter who has a change of heart at exactly the correct time. Belafonte  is the court jester to Poitier’s kingly, Christ-like Buck. He is the Flavor Flav to Poitier’s Chuck D. And he is so much more…Belafonte character arc has a much larger pitch than any other character in the film. Poitier might have had the meatier, harder role with its subtle degrees of dramatic modulations, but Belafonte’s scene-stealing role should have been an Academy Award winning performance. Sadly the Academy’s blindness to great performances by people of color was still institutionalized despite Poitier’s undeniable winning performance in LILIES OF THE FIELD.

Action, adventure, comedy, drama, tragedy, pathos all rolled up into the story of freed slaves trying to make it to the promise land. It’s a thing of glory and much better than the trailer lets on.

Make sure to set your TIVO, iCal, Google Calendar or DVR for September 18, 2009 at 10:00 p.m. and/or October 03, 2009 at 2:00 p.m. as it will show again on Turner Classic Movies.

TCM’s timing for Friday night’s Poitier retrospective couldn’t have been more prescient: on Thursday President Barack Obama awarded Poitier with the highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

If you are digging the new STAR TREK film, or if you are a fan of Lost and its co-creator J.J. Abrams, check out his TED lecture wherein he explains how mystery is one of the most important motivating mechanisms in his storytelling.

Abrams falls into fast-talking director mode as he postulates on the inner-workings of LOST being one gi-normous mystery (What is the island? What is the smoke monster? What is Jacob?).  The inciting incident of STAR WARS…wherein R2D2 begins to play the hologram to Luke…sets up a mystery. JAWS and ALIEN – since the audience never gets a good look at the monster – propel their stories based on mystery.

All writers and members of the creative culturatti will want to view this short lecture.

Thanks to my buddy Eric Melin for pointing me (and now you) in the direction of this lecture.

Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor ponder future innocence lost.

Early Sunday evening, I was preparing to run to the store for some groceries and I turned the television to one of my favorite channels, TCM (Turner Classic Movies). I quickly learned that the 1951 classic A PLACE IN THE SUN was about 15 minutes in to its first act. I’d never viewed it before, and after realizing it featured Montgomery Clift and Liz Taylor at the height of their adolescent powers, I was hooked in until the end.

Clift’s natural acting style adds such complexity to his character. You want to root for him. He’s a terribly sympathetic tragic hero, done in by his own moral shortcomings. His character George Eastman could have found a way to make it work, or at least that is my 21st century take on his situation (notice I’m trying not drop any spoilers).

And Elizabeth Taylor. She was fully invested in the role: smart, sexy, believable, real, emotional. You fall in love with her on the screen just as Clift’s character does.

George Stevens’ direction ratchets up the suspense like a Hitchcock film. And Shelly Winters is a revelation too. Knowing her adult career – and how annoying she was as a stock character in her older age, seeing her play the same type role in her youth allows you to get the joke if you hadn’t before. Winters knows how to be utterly unlikable, loud and obnoxious. Her character in A PLACE IN THE SUN also possessed a naive hopefulness. And this yielded some pathos-filled facial expressions in her key monologue on the lake. Brilliantly done, Ms. Winters.