The 100 Best Movies You've Never Seen (28 page)

At the heart of
Treed Murray
is a very simple idea: An upper-class advertising executive is literally forced up a tree by a gang of disenfranchised youth. He bargains with them, plays head games with them, and in return they give as good as they get. Imagine
Twelve Angry Men
taking a bough, or an out-on-a-limb
Lifeboat
. “I pitched this movie to people as
Die Hard
in a tree,” laughs director William Phillips.

Murray (David Hewlett) is an upwardly mobile young ad executive taking a shortcut through a large city park on his way home from work. His path is blocked by a 14-year-old gangbanger named Carter (Kevin Duhaney), who demands money. The suit doesn't take the kid seriously, which only exacerbates the situation. When Carter becomes threatening Murray reacts by knocking him to the ground with his briefcase, dismissing him with a flick of his hand. Murray realizes the state of affairs has gotten out of control when the rest of Carter's gang, led by the charismatic Shark (Cle Bennett), emerges from the woods. It's everybody's worst urban nightmare — to be surrounded by a hostile gang bent on causing you pain and anguish — so he does what anyone would do. He runs like hell.

Lost, exhausted, and feeling trapped with the gang hot on his heels, Murray finds sanctuary in a beech tree. Unfortunately his briefcase at the base of the tree gives him away, and the kids discover his hiding spot. He tries to buy his way out of the dangerous circumstances by offering his wallet and watch, but the kids don't just want money, they want respect. They want the dignity that Murray took from Carter by pushing him to the ground. Shark demands an apology, but will only accept it face to face. Murray has to come down from the tree.

This is the point at which the movie becomes truly interesting. Screenwriter and director Phillips adds a massive dose of verbal pyro-technics between Murray and Shark. Murray refuses to come down from the tree, afraid of the consequences, and tries to talk his way out of trouble. The sky is beginning to darken as Murray tries to negotiate with his captors using every trick he has every learned at work — acquiescence, bargaining, manipulation. Nothing works. In Shark he has met his match, an equally clever salesman. Throughout the night their banter becomes a psychological war of words, revealing the true murky nature of the characters. As the night lifts and daylight begins to fill the sky it's clear that first impressions can be deceiving. Murray isn't necessarily the good guy; Shark and company aren't completely bad.

Treed Murray
should be a template for first-time, low-budget feature filmmaking. It's the kind of film that could be taught in film school to show how to make a riveting, ambitious movie that makes the most of its modest resources. Phillips takes a one-location scenario and relies on the script and carefully chosen actors to imbue the movie with life and vitality. Despite careful planning, however, there were problems during shooting.

“When you are trying to get your first feature off the ground one thing you have to do is get yourself a project with limited cast and limited locations and keep things really cheap,” says Phillips. “I thought that would be the case here. Of course, it's not easy. Putting a man up a tree turned out to be quite difficult.”

The tree was a 25-foot-tall American Beech tree in the heart of the Boyd Conservation area in Toronto. “It's a beautiful tree that went up and up and up, so high we couldn't even get the actors up that high without vertigo setting in or the insurance going through the roof,” says Phillips. “It was a huge tree. When the temperature and the moisture changed, a type of moss or algae would start to form, so the tree would go from flat matte grey to brilliant green. That was a problem because there was this artificial limb we put on it. We needed something strategically placed so David Hewlett had something to hold on to and work with. We put this limb on, and you can't damage the tree, so you couldn't hammer it in. So we had to create these straps, and the straps were covered with exactly the color of the bark. But we found that when the bark changed color the straps wouldn't. We constantly had to paint the straps.

“In the middle of the shoot the tree went to seed. The beechnuts became ripe on this tree and they started raining down. So we'd be doing these scenes, and beechnuts would be bouncing off the brims of the gang member's hats. Then the birds would come to eat the beechnuts. You'd have thousands of birds flying into the tree.”

“It sounds so bloody easy,” adds Hewlett who was positioned on a branch almost 20 feet above the ground for 16 of the 19 days of the shoot. “The ideal thing to do in the Canadian summer is to put sugar blood all over somebody's head and put them in a tree. Every wasp and stinging beastie landed in my hair. I spent the entire time waving off wasps.

“Also, you are so far from the Kraft service that by the time the coffee got up to me it was half spilled and cold,” he laughs. “It was hell.”

Location problems aside, Phillips makes the best of a limited scenario, keeping the dialogue crisp and the camera work fluid. Even though the action never strays from the one location, the film is at once simple, yet ideologically complex and exciting. Without judgment or manipulation, the well-written script shifts sympathy from character to character, forcing the viewer to change allegiances several times throughout the course of its 89 minutes. There is no black and white, right or wrong, just damaged people coming to grips with the idea that the great gap between them isn't so great after all.

The performances are believable, particularly those of David Hewlett and Cle Bennett as Shark. Hewlett is superb, running the gamut of emotions that Murray is forced to deal with when stuck in the tree, whilst Bennett is menacing but smart.

While the issues raised in
Treed Murray
are universal, there is one thing that makes it a story that could only have happened in Canada, where guns and gangs are not synonymous. When a revolver appears in the latter half of the film, everyone, including the gang members are unsure how to deal with it because guns aren't that commonplace. In the U.S. the entire story might well never have happened; Murray would likely have been shot long before he had the chance to hide in the tree.

Ancient philosopher and playwright Aristotle boiled down the perfect structure for a dramatic presentation to three acts — Act One: Put someone in a tree; Act Two: Throw rocks at them; Act Three: Get them out of the tree. William Phillips has entertainingly updated Aristotle's idea to fit cinema culture.

Early in his career Steve Buscemi twice played frustrated film directors. In 1992's
In the Soup
the former New York City fireman turned “King of the Indies” tries to finance a boring 500-page script, and inadvertently becomes the pawn in a crime spree. As Nick Reve in 1995's comedy
Living In Oblivion
he was at the helm of an independent film with a bungling crew. Perhaps as a result of impersonating one onscreen, in 1996 he decided to play the part in real life, and direct his own movie.

For his directorial debut he chose a script he had been working on since 1990. Centered on a seedy bar remembered from his youth,
Trees Lounge
is the story of Tommy Basilio (Buscemi), a 31-year-old loser who spends too much time at the bar. According to the screenplay Tommy is “pale, thin, unemployed but possesses a fair amount of humor and charm.” It's a character close to Buscemi's heart; he wrote it as an exercise in imagining how he might have turned out had he not left Valley Stream (a small town near Kennedy Airport and home of the real Trees Lounge) after high school. It's not a pretty portrait.

Tommy is an unemployed auto mechanic, fired for “borrowing” money from the till, whose pregnant girlfriend (Elizabeth Bracco) has just left him for his former boss (Anthony LaPaglia). He passes the time at Trees Lounge, a dive bar populated by hollow-eyed winos, drinking until he passes out or gets kicked out. His drinking is so out of control that when he pops in and announces he's only staying for one drink, the bartender bets him 10 bucks that he can't have just one. Tommy's fortunes seem to change following the death of his ice cream vendor uncle, when he is offered the opportunity to take over the neighborhood Good Humor route. The downward spiral, however, continues when a 17-year-old customer, Debbie (Chloe Sevigny) develops a crush. Never one to deny himself a drink or a woman, Tommy succumbs to her charms. Despite Tommy's assertion that nothing happened, that “we just made out like teenagers,” Debbie's father goes ballistic and destroys the ice cream truck with a baseball bat.

The role of Tommy is crucial to the success of
Trees Lounge
, as the movie is character-driven rather than plot-driven. Audiences must feel a certain empathy for Tommy or the whole thing would be a wasted exercise. Buscemi does a great job of defining Tommy's character. He's a beer-and-a-shot guy who sees salvation at the other end of the bar, if only he could stop drinking. “This character is the closest to myself that I've ever played,” Buscemi said at the time. “I guess it's my realistic dark side.” He's simultaneously pathetic and likeable, but Buscemi makes the character endearing enough that the viewer becomes frustrated with him as he throws his life away.

Unlike many other movies in the barfly canon,
Trees Lounge
isn't without hope. There is a sense that Tommy is at a crossroads in his life, and if he makes the right decisions he won't end up like Bill, a lounge regular who is an echo of what Tommy may become if he doesn't straighten up.

In 1997, after the release of the film, Buscemi rescued the neon sign from the real Trees Lounge from the scrapyard as realtors were converting the tavern into a sports bar. He paid $200 for it, storing it in his father's backyard in Valley Steam until the woman who ran the bar for 40 years asked if he would give it to her. He handed over the sign, and closed that chapter in his life.

The idea of dancing with the Prime Minister of Canada was not particularly appealing to me. While Pierre Trudeau, Joe Clark, and Brian Mulroney may have been able to cut a rug, they were hardly my dream dance partners. That all changed one Thursday night in 1992 when I went to a party celebrating the release of Ron Mann's documentary
Twist: An Instructional Dance Film
. The guest of honor was Canadian Conservative Prime Minister Kim Campbell. Ms Campbell, Canada's short-lived first female PM, was set to twist on the dance floor for a crowd of media types gathered for a photo op.

I knew she was scheduled to arrive shortly before nine, and I was determined to twist with the Prime Minister. What a great story to tell my grandchildren! I could envision sitting by my fireplace, toddlers crowded around me.

“Tell us about the time you danced with the Prime Minister,” they would coo.

“Well . . . it was really nothing,” I would say for the thousandth time, “we danced on a sultry summer night, and she looked longingly into my eyes. . . .”

Back to reality. It didn't happen. I stood on the sidelines with everyone else while Campbell and director Ron Mann shook their hips to Chubby Checker. Afterward I asked Mann how the PM was as a dance partner. “She dances conservatively,” he said.

Dancing with the head of state is just one of Mann's many accomplishments. As Canada's leading pop cultural documentarian, his subjects have included jazz musicians (1981's
Imagine the Sound
), performance poets (1982's
Poetry In Motion
), comic books (1988's
Comic Book Confidential
), and marijuana (1999's
Grass
). “I'm interested in popularizing unpopular culture,” he says, “and making it accessible.”

At first glance the dance craze might seem like a thin idea for a feature-length documentary. Actually, the twist was one of the major turning points in our recent cultural history. The simple, even silly-looking dance was the catalyst that blew apart the conservative, uptight moral code of the 1950s, bridging the generation gap by introducing teenage culture to the establishment. Our parents did the twist. Even the first lady of Camelot Jacqueline Kennedy twisted at a nightclub in Palm Springs.

“What is interesting about the twist is that it became a metaphor for everything of that period,” says Mann. “It was a metaphor for society at the time. It became a metaphor for the appropriation of African-American culture. It became a worldwide phenomenon of people going nuts. It was liberating. It reflected the tone of the times.”

Reflected the tone, and perhaps created the tone of the times. Many pop culture historians have suggested that the twist was the beginning of the sexual revolution. “It was a dance that led to free style dancing, which sociologically led to the late '60s,” says Mann. “In terms of pop culture, it was a time when adults and kids were dancing together for that brief time. It symbolized the change out of the '50s and into the '60s. What I like to call squareness awareness.”

Mann cuts and pastes rare film clips to create
The Twist
, the result of three years of scouring film libraries and searching for vintage clips that weren't always easy to find. “People think that there is a warehouse somewhere where all these images are kept,” says Mann. “That simply isn't true. There are only six hours of pre-1962
American Bandstand
in existence. Most of the material, certainly from the early '60s, that was on television was on two-inch tape. They had executives with PhDs in economics who wiped out the tapes because they were $300 each. Much of the film that is still around from that period is deteriorating. People think it still exists, but it just fades away. As a cultural historian I am interested in recovering these images that are not represented in mainstream television and motion pictures.”

There are some real gems among the footage that Mann collected for this film. Any student of popular culture will be amused to see Marshall McLuhan discussing the twist on television. He admits that he has done the twist, but declares it unsexy, likening it to a “conversation without words.” Mann has also unearthed some great performance footage of Louis Prima doing “The Saints Go Twisting In.” The deft editing job was the result of studying reams of rare material. “We went through 350 hours of rock and roll footage of social popular dance. I have curated an archive to the point where even Michael Jackson's company calls us up to look at African-American dance.”

As a complement to the old clips, Mann has assembled new footage of interviews with a host of the creators and main practitioners of the twist. Mann shot three days' worth of original interviews at Lulu's Roadhouse in Kitchener, Ontario, with musicians Hank Ballard, Chubby Checker, Joey Dee, the first go-go dancer Janet Huffsmith, and ex-
American Bandstand
dancers Carole Spada and Joe Fusco. Mann also tracked down Betty (Romantini) Begg who was on the dance show the day Checker performed his hit song for the first time. “It was the first time we could move our hips on TV,” she says.

“It was a big twist love-in,” says Mann, “because some of these people hadn't seen one another in 30 years.”

I particularly found the interview with Hank Ballard fascinating. Ballard wrote and recorded “The Twist” as an r&b tune, but found little success with it. White radio stations wouldn't play the song because Ballard was well known for writing r&b songs with suggestive lyrics. Enter Chubby Checker. His voice was virtually indistinguishable from Ballard's, but he was a clean-cut kid who says in the film that he has “the talent to make anything seem clean.”

We know the rest. Chubby covers the song and becomes a pop culture phenomenon, while Ballard remains a relatively obscure figure. It surprised me that Ballard seems to harbor no ill will for Checker. In one of the more revealing interview clips, Ballard seems genuinely pleased by Checker's success. One would expect bitterness, but there doesn't appear to be any.

A film about the twist would not be complete without music. The doc's soundtrack includes dozens of twist songs culled from the huge catalog of dance music recorded in the early '60s. Everyone jumped on the twist bandwagon, and hundreds of twist songs were released in a very short time. Mann had a dream list of songs he wanted, but wasn't able to lay his hands on all of them. “As an independent filmmaker there is an economic censorship that exists,” says Mann. “You can't afford certain songs. ‘Twistin' the Night Away' by Sam Cooke is one of the top three twist songs. I couldn't use it because it wasn't available, or it was too expensive.”

He was able to secure the rights to many songs, although his favorite twist song got away from him — “Twistin' Off a Cliff” by Duane Eddy. It's only 40 seconds long, with a twangy guitar riff followed by the blood-curdling scream of someone falling off a cliff. “It even charted,” he says.

The Twist
garnered good reviews, even from the Prime Minister of Canada. She told me she thought it was a marvelous film. I told her I was disappointed that I didn't get the chance to dance with her. She promised me a twist the next time she goes out dancing. That was nine years ago. Never trust a politician.