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Taylor Hackford Film Society Award for Lifetime Achievement in Directing This award is given each year to one of the masters of world cinema.
Perpetual Motion Pictures by John Anderson It may be an apocryphal story, but sometime in the mid-1930s, the legendary producer Irving Thalberg is said to have had a heart-to-heart talk with his frustrated screenwriter, F. Scott Fitzgerald. The novelist’s movie scenes, which were meeting resistance at the MGM studio, were full of beautiful people engaged in long, lyrical, delicately sculpted conversations, while sitting, for instance, in a parked car. “Scotty,” Thalberg said to Fitzgerald, “there’s a reason they’re called moving pictures.” Thalberg would never have had to admonish Taylor Hackford—like Fitzgerald, a writer; like Thalberg, a producer, and a director whose films have always been motion pictures. Kinetic energy, in fact, is both the trademark and power of a Taylor Hackford film. From the more obvious—the dancing of Mikhail Baryshnikov and Gregory Hines, for example, in Hackford’s 1985 White Nights—to the far more subtle—the telltale body language of Jennifer Jason Leigh and Kathy Bates in Hackford’s sinfully underrated Dolores Claiborne—the case is made on screen: Hackford, unlike so many who practice his craft, knows that modern cinema is a synthesis of conflicts both verbal and visual. His movies virtually percolate—and not just with action, but ideas. There are other examples, all of which are about the organic marriage between storyline and the visual: The contrast that exists between the often brutal exchanges of Louis Gossett Jr. and Richard Gere in an An Officer and a Gentleman and the unspoken romance subtly developing in that same film between Gere and Debra Winger. Similarly, the chaos and mayhem of Central America that surrounds Russell Crowe and Meg Ryan in Proof of Life, and the unspoken yearning that creates such delirious, hungry tensions between them. And is there a better example of all this than Ray? In Hackford’s much-honored 2004 bio of singer Ray Charles, the images left branded on one’s brain-pan range from the ecstatic to the elegiac: There is, on the one hand, Jamie Foxx’s title character bringing a roomful of dancers to a frenzy in the movie’s centerpiece musical number, the spontaneous creation of “What’d I Say?” Or that same Ray Charles, shot from behind, moving down a lonely street in a blind man’s shuffle, his confidence and sightlessness enmeshed in a manner that bespeaks both dignity and pain. The joyous rock ’n’ roll energy that bubbles out of Ray should come as no surprise to anyone who knows Hackford’s background: He began his show business career at the Los Angeles public TV affiliate KCET, where he pioneered the presentation of unedited rock performances on American television. It was a formative, fertile time, with Hackford immersing himself in the pop music that would surface later in his filmmaking—in addition to Ray, he has directed The Idolmaker (1980) about seminal rock promoter Bob Marucci, discoverer of Frankie Avalon and Fabian; he directed the performance doc Chuck Berry Hail! Hail! Rock and Roll in 1987 and that same year produced Luis Valdez’s La Bamba, the vibrant story of doomed Latino rocker Richie Valens. For KCET’s cultural department, Hackford also created several award-winning documentaries—a genre he’s never abandoned, as evidenced by the Chuck Berry film, and most notably by his producing the Academy Award-winning When We Were Kings. In that account of the fabled “Rumble in the Jungle,” Muhammad Ali’s warrior poetry was made to seem even more euphoric and supple by a movie that was smart, fluid and indispensable. There is also, in the totality of Taylor Hackford’s filmography, a clear affinity for the story of the society’s dispossessed, disenfranchised and betrayed. Ali, of course, had been persecuted by the U.S. government for his beliefs about the Vietnam War; Richie Valens not only played “devil music” but was Hispanic besides. The Long Walk Home, which Hackford executive produced in 1990, was a revelatory story about the 1955–56 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, which happened to feature standout performances by Whoopi Goldberg and Sissy Spacek. And then, again, there’s Ray, the story of a man both blind and Black, who overcomes what in his time were dual handicaps to become one of the world’s most important and beloved forces in popular music. The work for which Taylor Hackford is being honored by the San Francisco International Film Festival is not just about social conscience, or craft, or musical taste. It’s for a combination of all of the above, and for a career that seems to have been in its own state of perpetual motion. Some might look at the state of the movie world (or the world at large) and say Hackford is a Renaissance man operating in a new Dark Age. But with his kind around, there will always be light.
Copyright
© 2005 San Francisco Film Society
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