F.x. Feeney

Dennis Hopper

Dennis Hopper, 1936-2010

F.x. Feeney
Dennis Hopper and I only briefly shared a table one morning at a film festival four years ago, but we hadn't talked more than five minutes before he alluded to the death of James Dean. Hopper's brief friendship with his co-star and mentor on the sets of Rebel Without a......
J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye

A Paranoid in Reverse: Revisiting J.D. Salinger

F.x. Feeney
If originality is, as Vladimir Nabokov suggests, the true measure of greatness in an artist, then the argument can be made that J.D. Salinger towers over most American writers of the past half-century. Few writers anywhere have ever been more widely or more passionately read. Fewer still have so fiercely......

“Milestones”: In Memoriam

F.x. Feeney
Michelangelo Antonioni once famously remarked that, as a filmmaker, he was completely innocent of theory or preconception. “I never think of how I want to shoot something,” he said. “I simply shoot it. My technique, which differs from film to film, is wholly instinctive and never based on prior considerations.”......
Man with a movie camera: Graver (right) with Welles (Courtesy of Jillian Kesner Graver)

The Soul of Generosity

F.x. Feeney
In 1970, when he called Orson Welles out of the blue and offered his services, Gary Graver was a young cinematographer who’d trained the hard way, filming the war in Vietnam for the U.S. Army. Welles politely brushed him off, at first. Luckily — for Welles and the rest of......
Brando in The Night of the Following Day or tomorrow night

Beyond the Imaginary Line

F.x. Feeney
Death came so quietly for my friend Hubert Cornfield on June 18 that it astonished even the nurse who was bringing him his breakfast. Such a departure was completely in character. If you knew the films he’d directed — including such marvels of film noir as Plunder Road (1957), The......
Farrell and Kilcher: Same great taste

The New New World

F.x. Feeney
Speaking as one who feels Terrence Malick’s latest was not just the best film of last year, but one of the greatest I have ever seen, I didn’t want him to cut so much as a frame from the version that opened in limited release over Christmas. Happily — if......

In Glorious Technicolor

F.x. Feeney
Ever since pictures started to move, filmmakers have attempted to realize them in color. “Two strip” Technicolor existed as early as World War I, but it was an uncertain science, yielding lunar-pale skin tones and reds indistinguishable from browns. By 1932, this technique was amplified to include three strips, or......

Million Dollar Boomer

F.x. Feeney
One restless 2 a.m. in November 2001, writer-filmmaker Paul Haggis lay awake, wrestling with whether to get out of bed and write down what, in his half-sleep, looked like a white-hot idea. “I hate waking up with an idea in the middle of the night,” he laughs, “because whenever you......

True Lies

F.x. Feeney
Photo by Kimberly French —What are we doing? —I don’t know. —Should we stop this? —Stop what? Such words have been spoken by a billion adulterers, back to Lilith and Adam, Adam and Eve, Eve and Lucifer. The beauty is that when we speak them (and adult life condemns us......

Last Tango at LACMA

F.x. Feeney
“You are your mother’s masterpiece,” the desperate man (Marlon Brando) tells his dead wife as she lies before him in a coffin. We’re midway through Last Tango in Paris as he tears these words out of his heart. This moment arguably constitutes the moral nucleus not only of Bernardo Bertolucci’s......