A Blog of My Own

A nearly immutable law says that movies made from old TV sitcoms suck. So when Get Smart opened in summer 2008, I stayed away. It had cheap exploitation written all over it, and my good feelings about Steve Carell and Anne Hathaway weren’t enough to override my default setting. Even an amusing clip didn’t get me into the theater; I knew that the clip, which was clever and subtle, had to be unrepresentative.

But you know how when you flip randomly to a cable channel and through happenstance a movie is just about to begin, so you’ll be able to get in on the ground floor, and it’s a movie that has just enough going for it (despite your low expectations) that you’re willing to give it five minutes to prove you wrong? That happened.

One of the smartest choices the movie makes is to make Maxwell Smart smart. In the old sitcom, Don Adams was a buffoon, an idiotic jerk who foiled dastardly plots by bumbling into them. (There may have been an unacknowledged debt to Inspector Clouseau going on there.) But Steve Carell’s Maxwell Smart is a brilliant (if geeky) intelligence analyst who yearns to be an agent in the field, gets his chance, and comes through. This Maxwell Smart is a freshly and fully conceived comedic character, not a catchphrase-bot. He’s also not a retread of Carell’s Michael Scott from The Office, although I expected him to be.

Anne Hathaway’s performance as Agent 99 matches Carell’s. A very funny “dynamic” goes on between them, as their cover — they pretend to be a married couple — starts to feel so real to them that they fall into dysfunctional patterns with one another. Hathaway, by the way, is jaw-droppingly gorgeous in this film.

I believed, for some reason, that the movie got poor reviews when it opened. Maybe my expectation of mediocrity was so strong that I just assumed the general press confirmed it. But looking at the reviews now, I see that a number of them were quite positive and perceptive. Roger Ebert gave it three-and-a-half stars. The excellent J. Hoberman in The Village Voice liked the movie a lot. Salon’s Stephanie Zacharek called the film “a surprisingly smart comedy.”

You do have to give the movie about ten minutes to get fully up to comedic speed, but once it does, it maintains it. The good jokes come at you on all levels, subtle, broad, intellectual, physical, character-based, action-based, political, psychological. What all the jokes have in common is that none of them insults your intelligence. How the hell did that happen?

Not only is the movie a better one than I thought it was; it also did better. It grossed $230 million worldwide on an $80 million investment. And I see that a sequel, Get Smart 2, which will reunite Carell and Hathaway (and Alan Arkin, as The Chief), is in development for 2011. Yay.

The subject of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is death. Not killing, although there’s plenty of that. Death. There’s not a moment in the film’s two-and-a-half-hour length that you aren’t confronting the difference between life and death, and the way one can turn into the other, for any of us, in the blink of an eye. This is probably true of all of Tarantino’s movies; offhand I can’t think of another filmmaker whose body of work is so able to make us confront the horror of this cosmic reality. That he’s able to do this while giving us an ecstatically good time at the movies makes his genius even more awe-inspiring.

Set in Nazi-occupied France in World War II, the film makes an interesting contrast to another war film of this summer, Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, about an American bomb squad in Iraq. The Hurt Locker is an excellent film, but with a different subject: not death itself, but danger. Its characters face the possibility of dying every day, and we come to understand the traumatizing effect this has on them in a most powerful way; but the film doesn’t compel us to feel horror at the fragility of our own lives. It’s happening to them, not us.

Tarantino won’t let you off that easy. The only way we get through the day in our “real” lives is to live in constant denial of the truth that we’re going to die and be consigned to some other world, possibly hell, or to nothingness, which might even be worse. A Tarantino movie blends humor and violence (and by the way, while the violence that happens in this movie is gruesome, it occupies surprisingly little real estate, screentime-wise) to strip away that denial and make you know the truth you spend the rest of your life avoiding. It’s a funhouse ride that isn’t kidding around.

Whether the characters whose lives are at stake in Basterds are Nazis, Jews, collaborator French, resistance French, or innocent bystanders, there’s no distancing yourself from them. Some critics have understood how great this film is, but others have complained that it rambles or even grows tedious over its length. I don’t know what the hell (no pun intended) is wrong with them. From the first scene of this epic film (in which an SS officer interviews, in suave and sophisticated fashion, a French dairy farmer he suspects of hiding Jews) all the way to its Grand Guignol climax and quiet denouement, I was gripped by it. Proper attention has been paid elsewhere to the superior acting in this film, but the main source of the film’s power is Tarantino’s writing. The man knows structure, and the man knows how to write dialogue that won’t let you go. Best of all, he knows how to make a movie that has its way with you and leaves you limp as more movies used to, but very very few do now.

The movie Julie and Julia — in which a young writer feels connected to, and inspired by, an older one — brought back memories of the afternoon I spent with the movie critic Pauline Kael in her apartment.

There were some key differences. In the movie [spoiler alert], Julie is told by a reporter that her inspiration, master French chef Julia Child, hates Julie’s blog. (We never get confirmation that this is so, but Julie presumes it to be true, and is devastated.) And Julie never meets Julia. [End spoiler alert].

I, on the other hand, had the heady experience of learning from Pauline Kael that she liked my work (I was the main movie reviewer for my college newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian, and had sent her some clippings) and was open to meeting with me. As the DP’s “Cinema Editor,” I had sent her a letter requesting an interview for an article to appear in the paper. How did I get her address? Simple. I went to the University of Pennsylvania library and looked her up in the Manhattan phone book! (She was actually listed.)

I thought that by enclosing some reviews I’d written, I might get Kael, the preeminent American film critic from the 1960s through the 1980s, to say yes in the event she liked them. That’s what happened. I sent her three or four of my reviews. The only one I remember now is the one I wrote about the Carrie Snodgress & Richard Benjamin movie Diary of a Mad Housewife, regarding which I held a jaundiced view. She must have liked my sensibility, or my ability to express my sensibility, or perhaps she simply agreed with my viewpoints in the pieces I sent her, but in any case I received within the week a letter from her proposing I come up to interview her in her apartment on a date in the near future. I called her and arranged to do so.

On that day, I took the train up to New York from Philadelphia. I brought a cassette recorder with me, and we sat down in the large living room of Pauline’s Central Park West apartment. (A manual typewriter on a desk by one wall testified that this room was also where she wrote her movie criticism.) Was I scared? You bet. The fact that at the time I had the moxie to have contacted her for the interview and gone through with it should not be mistaken for an excess of self-confidence.

To say I idolized her would be no exaggeration. Ever since as a high schooler I discovered her first two books, I Lost It at The Movies and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, my way of looking at movies, and my way of understanding the potency of passionate persuasion possible with the written word, were transformed.

I Lost It at the Movies First Edition Book Cover

I had written out a bunch of questions for Kael, then in her early fifties, and went through my list, trying my best to listen to her answers for possible questions that might occur to me impromptu. She spoke in a gentle voice, and even though I (inwardly) feared that she would reduce me to a puddle by regarding one of my questions as stupid, she didn’t. I had the feeling that she thought it was important to talk to me and give me all the time I needed. That time turned out to be three hours, and at no time did she show impatience.

At one point she interrupted the interview in order to take her small dog around the block for a walk. Some other luminary might have used the occasion as a convenient moment to end an interview with a student reporter. Instead, she invited me to stay in her apartment, by myself, until her return! Why did she not ask me to accompany her on her walk? I don’t know, but it might be because she thought I would welcome the opportunity to get a feel for her place in her absence. It certainly showed a tremendous amount of trust. Why didn’t I volunteer to accompany her on her walk? Because I couldn’t refuse the chance to get a feel for Pauline Kael’s apartment in her absence!

In that twenty minute or so interval, I poked around with my eyes, not touching anything. I noticed that her record collection tilted predominantly (almost exclusively) to two genres, opera and R&B; she had many complete opera recordings, along with a pronounced appreciation for Aretha Franklin. And I noticed that her book collection contained first editions of all the Frank L. Baum Oz books. These books were a childhood passion that predated the film, since she was twenty when the movie of The Wizard of Oz came out.

She returned with her dog (come to think of it, a little dog very much like Toto!) and we resumed the interview. By the time it was through, I had three cassette tapes filled on both sides. As we parted at her door, we clasped hands, and she said, warmly, to be sure to send her the interview when it was written, and to be sure to keep in touch. I said I would do both.

I did neither.

I will never understand why, although I’ve spent many hours of therapy trying.

I would be graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in only two or three more weeks. While I had imagined there would be time for me to write up the interview and get it into the paper, now there didn’t seem to be time.

Only a couple of weeks elapsed between graduation and when I began a master’s program in journalism at Northwestern, outside of Chicago. I brought the Pauline tapes with me, thinking I would transcribe them and turn them into a piece I could get published somewhere. It certainly didn’t seem far-fetched to imagine a newspaper or magazine would want it. She didn’t give out many interviews of any length, let alone as extensive an interview as the one she granted me.

I did, in fact, transcribe the tapes, on the typewriter in my graduate student apartment, during that hot and humid summer of 1971. But I never went further with it.

Nevertheless, I still had those tapes, and I had the typewritten transcript. It always seemed possible to me that I would do something with them. But I never did; and then, one day years later, when looking for the tapes and the transcript, finally possessed of the resolve to write up the piece now, I could not find them. They were lost.

Why did I not keep my promise to Pauline Kael, the one I made to her at her apartment doorway as we parted company that afternoon?

There are many answers to that, all of them true.

1. I was at the time, and remain to this day, a person with a rock-bottom sense of self-doubt. While sometimes I am able to propel myself into action and assertiveness in defiance of this self-doubt, at other times I cannot. Concerning my Pauline Kael interview, decades elapsed in a paralysis of self-doubt. At the same time a part of my brain knew that the material would be of interest to a publisher, another part of me kept saying, “Oh, who’s going to want your interview with Pauline Kael anyway?” The energy required to turn the transcripts into a publishable piece was just never there, because hope is the fuel that turns dreams into energy, and when it comes to that fuel, I have always run on empty.
2. While Blanche Dubois said, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers,” my watchword has always been, “I have always feared the retribution of everyone.” I go around thinking that people think ill of me, and wish harm to come to me, for ways in which I imagine I have failed them. A part of me was afraid to publish the piece, because I was afraid Pauline wouldn’t like it. (The feeling was similar to my fear that she’d pounce on me for a dumb question during the interview, and even though she didn’t do that, the possibility that she would be displeased with my article effectively paralyzed me.) There was no reason, in truth, to suppose that she would have been anything but delighted. That’s easy for me to see now, now that writing the piece is impossible.
3. This one is the most difficult to admit. Entirely for reasons having to do with my own sexual inexperience and hangups at the time, and having nothing to do with Pauline Kael, I started to entertain the fantasy that she had “designs” on me—designs that I would have no idea how to deal with. In today’s slang, I started to think of her as a cougar. I had in my makeup a fear — easily triggered regardless that circumstances might not warrant it — of sexual predation. I am so ashamed of having felt this that the words are difficult to type. But I thought, “Why is she having me up to her apartment? Why is she spending so much time with me here? Why is she letting me feel so at home, even to the point of leaving me alone in her apartment? Why, upon our parting, is she shaking my hand so warmly, and holding out the implicit promise of a keen interest in my future if only I will keep in touch? It can only be because she wants to turn me into her personal plaything! In return for what she can do for me, what will be the price to be paid?” I didn’t examine these delusions at the time (a blend of narcissism and terror), but I did entertain them — and the result was to make me keep my distance from her  (including not writing the piece and never contacting her again), when my professional goals and hopes and dreams would have been better served by the opposite course. Was it possible that she just plain liked me and had affection for my ideas and my talent? I was able to entertain that thought, too — but not for very long.
4. My self-loathing made me feel unworthy of her attention, even if she disagreed with that assessment. It seemed to me a fairy tale had come true the afternoon I spent with her, but it was just a fairy tale. She’d return to her exalted life, and I’d return to the rock I crawled out from under. I didn’t belong in the same world as her.
5. The more time passed without my keeping my promises to her to send her the finished piece and to keep in touch, the worse I felt about the betrayal. And the worse I felt, the more paralyzed I became. At some point it seemed ridiculous even to think about the matter much anymore, because surely it was now “too late” to do anything about it.

And then of course, one day it was too late. The tape and transcripts were gone. And Pauline died in 2001, with impeccable timing eight days before the horror of 9/11.

Was I really this crazy, dysfunctional way with everyone? No. I’ve always been blessed with friends and loved ones whose affection and love I am able to take at face value, and return. But these undercurrents ran through me then, and they surface again from time to time.

I remember leaving her apartment that day with a feeling of excitement and belief in myself and my future. Pauline Kael liked me! Pauline Kael wanted me to keep in touch! Pauline Kael is going to be my mentor, recommending me for the movie critic job at a prestigious newspaper or journal! (There were other writers, who would become known as “Paulettes,” whom she championed and helped.) But I couldn’t hold on to that feeling. Soon it was sunk underneath the depression that had been my more or less constant companion since childhood. The feeling was as lost to me, metaphorically, as the tapes and transcripts later became in reality.

Ever since, I’ve had self-recriminations about my stupidity and the road not taken.

And also, about my not having kept my end of the bargain with Pauline. She spent a lot of time with me that day. She didn’t do it for her health. She did it because she expected to see a piece come out of it that would reach a young audience. She had every right to expect that. And she did it, perhaps, out of wanting to make contact with someone who might, possibly, continue her level of thoughtful movie criticism into the next generation. She was generous with her time and got nothing for it in return. I’m ashamed of that.

What would have happened if I had written the piece, sent it to her, kept in contact? Perhaps not a whole lot. But I can’t know that.

I do remember one thing vividly from the interview, and since it is the one moment from our exchange I can give you verbatim without the benefit of the transcripts, I will. Since so much of her early reputation had been gained by publicly bashing the views of less astute (but more famous) critics, I asked her if there were any critics now that she followed with any regularity. She replied, “No, not really. I mean, in any generation, there’s only one film critic worth reading, isn’t there? In the thirties it was Otis Ferguson, in the forties it was James Agee, and now, it’s me.” I loved that answer, because it contained no braggadocio whatever. It was the truth.

Of the many striking things about Howard Hawks’ 1938 screwball classic Bringing Up Baby, one is how Katharine Hepburn relates with such comfortable familiarity to a leopard. You scratch your head and wonder how it could be. Many leopard scenes in the film are “cheated” one way or another (the production-savvy eye can detect those scenes when the leopard only seems to be with Hepburn or Cary Grant, through the magic of rear-projection or split-screen), but in some parts of the movie, it’s absolutely clear there really is a leopard walking free around Katharine Hepburn! And she really is making contact with it, and appears utterly relaxed! (There are no such fakery-free scenes involving the leopard and Cary Grant, who obviously had a healthy fear of the beast.)

Just off-camera was Olga Celeste, Swedish-born (1887) leopard trainer who had a career in vaudeville, and then performing daily at the Luna Park Zoo in Los Angeles from 1925-1931. She specialized in leopards, leaving other big cats to others. When the movies needed a leopard, she was the go-to gal. After Bringing Up Baby, she did the chores on Tarzan and the Leopard Woman (1946) with Johnny Weissmuller.

Baby actually has two entirely separate leopard “characters” in it, one gentle and one mean. (And of course an attendant mistaken identity in the plot.) I suspect they are the same leopard, with Celeste coaxing cuddliness or ferociousness out of the beast as needed for the part, but I can’t confirm this.

Bringing Up Baby is worth a look on DVD for another reason: the commentary track by Peter Bogdanovich. The younger director was in awe of Hawks, and during the course of the film shares many illuminating conversations he had with him about it, relaying Hawks’ words in an amusing approximation of the master director’s voice. For a good, and pretty thorough, essay on the film, check out this entry at moviediva.com.

For all those frustrated by the dumbass way the Oscars showed this year’s “In Memoriam” film — making us watch a multitude of small screens on the Kodak Theatre stage, rather than showing us the film full-frame on the home screen — here is a nice present from someone inside the Academy. It’s the same piece they ran that night, so it doesn’t redress the problem of all the people who should have made it into the film who didn’t, and we’re still stuck with Queen Latifah’s weirdly re-structured version of “I’ll Be Seeing You”; but at least this shows us the tribute the way the film editors wanted us to see it, and without distracting applause-o-meter sounds from the audience to signal us who their darlings are.

For those interested in some well-deserved bitching about who should have been in the film and wasn’t, read here.

The seven-screen indie theater in my neighborhood has had two of its screens claimed by one or another movie starring the flavor-of-the-year actress for months on end now.

The older you get, the more movies you’ve seen, the harder it is to get carried away by one. (Inevitably you begin to put every movie you see in the context of some other movie you’ve seen. You become impossible to surprise. You wise up to the ways movie work, and with wisdom comes, sadly, emotional distance. If, let’s say, everyone views 100,000 movies in a lifetime, when you’re twenty you’ve seen only 5,000 of them and still have 95,000 to go. Every movie is new to you. When you’re older, and you’ve seen 95,000, no way movies can mean to you what they once did. There are only so many stories, and so many ways to tell them.) But there are exceptions. Like Slumdog Millionaire.

I thought I was past the time when a movie could grip me with suspense from beginning to end, make me feel a character’s fate was my own, put me in a whole new world, make me feel the terror of that world completely. Well, not yet, I’m not. That’s the happy lesson I learned from Slumdog Millionaire.

This is not a special opinion, since at least eight different friends told me I needed to see it, but now that I have, let me add my voice to the chorus.

Some flawed films transcend their problems to be wonderful moviegoing experiences after all. So it is with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

Through the first half of the movie, Brad Pitt, as the reverse-aging Button, is a cipher. Things happen to him, but as to who he is, there’s not much there there. Aging backwards could really do a number on you, I get that, but wouldn’t you have some personality, rather than none?

And at points along the way the storytellers haven’t worked out their timeline rigorously. OK, it’s World War Two now, so he’d have reverse-aged how many years? And his normally-aging girlfriend Daisy would be how old now? Then how come he doesn’t look that age, and how come she’s the dancing ingenue in the original cast of Carousel? And how come Daisy’s daughter (whom we see in the present-day framing device, as she attends her now-dying mother) looks like she’s thirty-two to her mother’s ninety?

Other aspects of the tale feel less than fully thought out. As Benjamin regresses into childhood, he seems to develop Alzheimer’s. But Alzheimer’s is a disease brains get when they get old. If Benjamin’s body is growing younger, and his brain is a part of his body, a disease of brain decrepitude makes no sense.

But while such questions nag, their nagging becomes less insistent, and the film takes on power, about halfway through, as we begin to recognize the emotional toll on Benjamin and those who love him as their ages cross each other and diverge. In the first half, Benjamin and those around him have the happy experience of seeing their ages converge from their opposite poles; but once that halfway meeting point is crossed and passed, we know the characters are in for a world of pain.

Button makes you believe in its story, makes you think about how you’d feel if it happened to you. And so it is different from the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story on which it’s based. Fitzgerald’s story is coldly comical in tone, and its main business is social satire. We aren’t meant to identify with the figure at its center for a second. But we do identify with the Button of Brad Pitt, director David Fincher and scenarist Eric Roth.

Here is the best thing about Benjamin Button: It made me grateful that my wife and I, and all my other friends and loved ones, are aging in the same direction. We usually think getting old and dying sucks. Well, maybe it does — but getting young and dying (when all about you are going the other way) sucks worse. It is a blessing we journey in the same direction as each other, even though that journey end in death. I’m going to try not to forget that.

Roth, by the way, just lost all his money to Bernie Madoff. He’s off on his own picaresque life adventure now.

Finding film history worth reading is like finding an economist with an accurate prediction — good luck with that. The trade seems to invite charlatans, writers who rely on secondary research, and writers who coast on a little research and a lot of received opinion and impressionistic “b.s.” Greeting card paper stock should be made of 100% recycled content; film history books shouldn’t be.

The books of Rudy Behlmer aren’t.

Behlmer’s books are content-rich, and written in a self-effacing style. But self-effacing style is not absence of style, and just because Behlmer gets out of the way of his subject matter doesn’t mean his writing lacks character. On the contrary, the clarity and grace of his style inspire confidence that what you are reading is true; and so his style is essential to the pleasure his books bring. You sense as you read him that you are in the presence of a writer who would be ashamed to tell you something he couldn’t substantiate, and equally ashamed to pad a paragraph with gossamer speculation.

Responsibility to that thing we call “the movies” is another value that emerges from a Behlmer book. The reader can hear him saying, “The only reason to write this book at all is to add, reliably, to film history; hell, the only reason for me to write the next word is to add reliably to film history.” He loves the movies too much to do anything else, just as he loves the movies too much to write less than well about them.

Behlmer — who had a career directing live television in the fifties, and then as a producer for the Leo Burnett advertising agency in the sixties through eighties — first made a broad national impact, book-wise, with Memo from David O. Selznick (1972). (Previously he had written several pieces, starting in 1961, for the magazine Films in Review and then co-authored, with Tony Thomas and Clifford McCarty, The Films of Errol Flynn. An article he wrote about Selznick for FIR, for which he interviewed Selznick, led indirectly to Memo after Selznick’s death.) Granted access by Selznick’s son to the legendary producer’s missives to those who worked for him, Behlmer pulled off an organizational tour de force, selecting and structuring so as to do what might have seemed impossible — create a compelling read from the contents of two thousand file boxes! We’re by Selznick’s side, taking his dictation, at the creation of 66 films, including such classics as Gone With the Wind, Rebecca and Spellbound. From the book’s nearly 500 pages of business directives, an engrossing narrative emerges, as well as a coherent sense of the man’s character. That is Behlmer’s work.

As if shaping these memos into a page-turner weren’t contribution enough to film scholarship, Behlmer’s “Editor’s Foreword” is an essential essay on Selznick and his working methods. Regarding the book as a whole, the Newsweek reviewer had this to say at the time: “I can’t imagine how a book on the American movie business could be more illuminating, more riveting or more fun to read than this collection of David Selznick’s memos.”

For Behlmer in his own words from start to finish, read America’s Favorite Movies: Behind the Scenes, a series of chapter-length essays on the creation of classic films like Gunga Din, Casablanca, and the 1938 Errol Flynn The Adventures of Robin Hood. The title could as easily have been Rudy’s Favorite Movies, because a number of them are; when he was a lad, Behlmer saw the three-strip Technicolor Robin Hood, and hasn’t been the same since.

Behlmer returned to the memo-well with two other books, Memo from Darryl F. Zanuck: The Golden Years at Twentieth Century Fox and Inside Warner Bros. (1935-1951): The Battles, The Brainstorms, and the Bickering from the Files of Hollywood’s Greatest Studio. Both are must-reads, made so by Behlmer’s editorial notes and structuring as much as by the invaluable nature of the primary source materials themselves.

In addition to these books (and others), Behlmer has written the liner notes for what must be dozens of essential film music releases (he has a particular interest in the work of Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Miklos Rozsa, and can hum on demand the themes from any number of notable film scores of the Golden Age). Today, he is on call with the major film studios to provide commentary tracks for their classic DVD releases; you can hear him accompanying Gone With the Wind, among many other films. His commentary tracks consistently receive appreciative mention on the various DVD-review websites, since they are as content-rich, and as interesting, as his books. You’ll also see him occasionally turn up in a behind-the-scenes documentary on a DVD or on Turner Classic Movies, and in July he programmed a month’s worth of “big bands in the movies” for the channel (the swing bands of his youth being another of his interests).

Since the 1980s he has been married to the lovely Stacey Behlmer, née Endres, a partner of Rudy’s in film scholarship since she is a staff member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science’s Margaret Herrick Library.

I first knew Rudy in the late seventies, when he was assigned to produce a commercial I’d written at Leo Burnett. It is hard for me to remember another person with whom I hit it off so instantly. I knew who he was before this, having read (and loved) the Selznick book when it came out a few years before. In my late twenties at the time, I was quite excited to be collaborating on a commercial with the author of that book. I think Rudy enjoyed meeting and working with someone of the “hippie generation” who, first of all, knew who he was; and second of all, while not knowing a tenth of what he knew, at least knew what he was on about. (And someone who could hum some great Korngold and Rozsa themes back at him, in our own version of “Stump the Band.”) We have remained friends through visits and phone calls all the years since, and my wife and I are now looking forward eagerly to our next visit with Rudy and Stacey in Los Angeles, in January.

Rudy, you are more than (in the words of a director we both worked with, about someone else) “a legend in your own lunchtime.” You are an example of continued productivity that is a model for us all. I suspect it has been your hope that your work would be a resource for film scholars in all generations to come. I also suspect that, since you’ve always had a pretty clear-eyed view of things, you figured it would. Well, you’re right.

The documentary Toots—about the legendary NY restaurateur/barkeep Toots Shor, who owned the place with his name on it at 51 W. 51st St.—had its “U.S. Theatrical Premiere” at Facets Multimedia in Chicago on Friday. I’m not sure exactly what that means, since the film was reviewed in the New York Times on September 14, 2007, with an endline that says “opens today in New York,” but no matter. It is a fun film; a great character study; a vivid portrait of New York in the fifties and sixties; a look at journalism, sports, the mafia, show business and alcohol when there was a point on the map you could locate the nexus of all five; and when it’s done, all you want to do is go to Toots Shor’s.

It’s impossible, of course—one might as well wish to visit Brigadoon, the Scottish village of musical-theater lore which becomes visible to outsiders only once every hundred years. But Toots makes the watering hole Toots Shor’s visible, if not visitable, on demand. More than that, it makes it come alive.

Although the movie is the work of one of Shor’s granddaughters, Kristi Jacobson, Toots is not a vanity project. Jacobson is a documentarian whose films have run on HBO, A&E, ABC, and PBS, and at festivals nationally. The film is well-paced, drawing you into its world from the first sip. A real movie-making intelligence drives it. “Intoxicated” might not be too strong a word to describe the state it puts you in, as the film builds its case for the specialness of a lost world.

Over a period of ten years, Jacobson got revealing on-camera interviews with Mike Wallace, Walter Cronkite, Gay Talese, Sidney Zion, Pete Hamill, Frank Gifford, Whitey Ford, Joe Garagiola, and others who were there. These she has integrated artfully with clips, stills, and other archival materials. Frank Sinatra is seen reminiscing about Shor, in a clip which I believe is taken from Sinatra’s 1985 lecture at Yale, the one organized by Zion. The movie gives us tales about Marilyn, DiMaggio, Mantle, Gleason, Hemingway. Damn. Just writing this, I want to go to Toots Shor’s all over again.

The movie plays at Facets through this Thursday. See if it you can, or if it comes to your city. Failing that, get the DVD, which comes out on December 31.