Did Superman star George Reeves commit suicide or was he murdered? Although the police long ago classified the gunshot that killed Reeves as self-inflicted, questions still remain surrounding the circumstances of his death. Those lingering doubts over the cause of Reeves' demise are fodder for the critically acclaimed dramatic movie, Hollywoodland, directed by Allen Coulter and starring Ben Affleck as Reeves.
A hit at the Venice Film Festival, Hollywoodland is an engaging, entertaining film loaded with terrific performances by Affleck, Diane Lane, and Adrien Brody. And in support of the film's release on DVD, director Allen Coulter graciously found the time to answer a few questions on the film and on his involvement in the Hollywoodland DVD.
I found it really interesting to listen to your commentary on the set design and how you wanted everything to be perfect, yet you stressed how much you didn’t want to focus on the background. You just wanted everything to blend in. So many directors would have chosen to focus on a car passing by or the architecture or other ‘period’ piece just to show they’d gotten it right. At what point in the process did you decide that wasn’t going to be your approach?
“Right away. You know when I was thinking about this, I was thinking, ‘What is it I don’t like about period films?’ There’s a lot of traps that surround doing this period in particular. Any period in film, but especially this period. And part of it is that when people say the ‘50s, they become nostalgic for an era that they probably didn’t live in. Most films about that era, in my opinion, are about a kind of imaginary era that has nothing to do with reality. That’s mostly about not only the kind of fake nostalgia, really, but also sort of a shallow depiction of something that really takes you out of real life of the era.
Right away I was very interested in trying to make a movie that was truthful about the way that life was at that time. When I looked at movies from that era that were shot on the streets, like Kiss Me Deadly or whatever, you realized that they’re not – even The Apartment, the great Billy Wilder film – they’re not trying to show you the era. They might be saying, ‘Hey The Music Man was a popular play at the time,’ because that’s where Jack Lemmon has his date with Shirley MacLaine. But they’re not trying to say, ‘And look at the great architecture.’ They’re not. They’re just shooting on the street. The French Connection wasn’t trying to show you what the ‘70s looked like in New York, they just shot it on the street. You don’t shoot any film in its contemporary period and say… We wouldn’t shoot now and say, ‘Be sure and get that 2007 car.’ You know? You’d just shoot it. So we took the attitude that if we were to shoot this film in the ‘50s, what would we do? So that’s what we did.
We tried to reproduce as accurately as we could all of the architecture which, among other things I realized, was always a combination of many different periods that were being photographed at the zenith of whatever the era is. May 1st, June 17 1959 – all right, what existed at that time? Well, buildings built in the 1800s, 1900s… Well, in Hollywood probably in the 1930s and 40s and 50s, and the same with cars, and the same with clothing. We realized that men in those days did not buy new suits every year. They bought a suit in 1940-something and they’re still wearing it 10 years later. Every period has within it all of the previous periods still embedded. What we said was, ‘Well all these periods are still there.’ They’re not neatly cordoned off like something like you would get in Grease where everything was made in 1955. All eras contained previous eras within in them, so that was our idea. ‘All right, we’ve got all these eras going on and now let’s just ignore it because it’s not a big f**king deal,’ is basically our attitude. ‘Let’s get it right.’ Even the jackets of the guys driving the cars in the background out of focus half a mile away were correct because you just never know. And also because we just said let’s just do it right and whatever you see, you see. And I think we felt the greatest success when people who lived in Hollywood in that era said, ‘You’ve got it right.’ That was the highest compliment we got.”
You also mention a book of photos you used in order to get the era right. How instrumental was that book?
“That book was really about the look of the thing. It was called Americans in Kodachrome. It’s a book of amateur snapshots from the ‘40s and ‘50s. I don’t think it goes past the ‘50s. It’s a wonderful book but what it told Jonathan Freeman and myself – he was the cinematographer – it gave us the clue as to how we wanted the film to look. All of the Louis Simo stuff was designed to look like those photos. As our colorist said, ‘You want it to look like a box of photographs left in the garage through the summer,’ because we didn’t want to give it a polished, slick, Hollywood look. Because we felt, first of all, that glamorized it in a way that we didn’t want to glamorize the world.
We wanted to say that the world of Louis Simo is the beginning of the modern era. And my perception of the modern era is, in comparison to George Reeves’ world, an era where things were simply literally hotter. There are fewer trees. There’s more cars, more people. The sun seems, in those pictures, to always be glaring and hot. It was also a way of saying that the world is just tougher. It’s not as glamorous as it used to be. It’s just not as pleasant. We made the soundtrack noisier. It was filled with a cacophony of distant sounds. It was also filled with something that was beginning to be unique, which was television. The ubiquitous sound of a TV in another room, and we also added the sound of a radio and cars and so on to say the world is becoming a noisier place. The world that George Reeves aspired to was literally the quieter and lusher, more green place that was more romantic and it was why George was so enamored of it. It was a world that was beginning to fade away as movies faded and the glamorous world of Hollywood faded and was replaced by what we live in now, which is this world of noise and chaos and hotter days.”
