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Black-Leather Director in a Business World
- University Press of Mississippi
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20 Black-Leather Director in a Business World Clarke Taylor / 1988 From the Los Angeles Times Calendar, October 9, 1988, 28. Reprinted by permission of the Los Angeles Times Syndicate. Bang! Bang! Bang! Shots rang out along the dim paths into Central Park, reminding intrepid strollers and joggers of the danger that lay deep within the huge, cavernous park. And then, a reassuring shout from within the park: “Cut! Print!” Kathryn Bigelow, sinewy and dark-haired, stood in long shadows that streaked the floodlighted clearing, directing her third film. It’s Blue Steel, an action thriller about a rookie police detective who becomes embroiled in the hunt for a serial killer. Jamie Lee Curtis is the detective in pursuit of psychotic murderer Ron Silver. The camera operators, grips, and other technical personnel were easily identified as the crew. The bookish producer Ed Pressman—whose quirky range includes Badlands, Plenty, True Stories, Conan the Barbarian , and Wall Street—appeared strong and authoritative. The executives sent in from Los Angeles by Vestron Pictures, the film’s distributor, looked and sounded like the Hollywood executive types they were (they wouldn’t breathe a digit of the film’s budget). But Bigelow, in black pants and sweater and a black leather jacket, seemed more like one of the rockers or punkers who nest in downtown Manhattan and rarely venture into the park. Then again, Bigelow, thirty-five, is not in the mold of many other working directors. • • • clarke taylor / 1988 21 Bigelow appeared on the independent film scene several years ago with The Loveless, a biker movie set in the fifties and starring Willem Dafoe, which she co-directed with Monty Montgomery. Talk of Bigelow and her highly stylized approach began to circulate within the independent film community, but not much beyond, until last year’s release of Near Dark. A vampire Western about handsome, homoerotic , blood-drinking villains that seemed to blend the fated romanticism of Nicholas Ray, the poetic violence of Sam Peckinpah and the explosiveness of contemporary filmmaker James Cameron, Near Dark vanished quickly into videocassette stores. However, the film, which she co-wrote with her Blue Steel co-writer, Eric Red (The Hitcher), also caught the attention of younger film buffs, cineastes—and producer Pressman. “I thought her style was cinematically dynamic and her sensibility original,” said Pressman, who compared his discovery of Bigelow to that of the young Brian De Palma (Sisters) and Terrence Malick (Badlands), whose early films Pressman produced. “Like them, I felt that she was trying to push the (film) form as far as she could. And my confidence in her has been reinforced on this location. She’s bright, with a strong visual sense; she’s totally in command; and the picture looks wonderful.” Pressman said he is committed to producing the next film slated for Bigelow. A futuristic film set in Japan, New Rose Hotel is based on a story by author William Gibson (Necromancer), who, as the “cyber-punk” king of science fiction, flourishes in the cult circle of fans who already surround Bigelow. Bigelow was quick to acknowledge her influences and “the input” into her work from within this circle, as well as those who have gone on to commercial success such as Walter Hill and her friend Oliver Stone (who is co-producing Blue Steel with Pressman). “There may be a certain relationship to other filmmakers, but she also paints a very different landscape, with color, light and dark, all to establish an atmosphere that deals with the darker side of America,” said Larry Kardish, a film department curator at the Museum of Modern Art, where Bigelow’s work, including her first twenty-minute short, Set-Up, is being added to the collection. “We think she’s a significant talent.” Bigelow started out in the art world, first as a painting student at the San Francisco Art Institute and then, from 1972 to 1983, in New York, where she eventually showed her work at the Whitney Museum of American Art and edited a magazine devoted to art criticism. During this period [44.200.39.110] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 00:07 GMT) 22 kathryn bigelow: inter views she shot film backgrounds for a performance art piece, “fell in love” with the filmmaking process and enrolled in Columbia’s graduate film school, headed by director Milos Forman. A woman of few words who immediately comes across as bright and artistically motivated with an academic bent, Bigelow resisted analysis of her work...