“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

So said Charles Dickens, to describe the changing worlds of staid England and turbulent France, of the two cities London and Paris, during French revolutionary times — in his great melodramatic novel A Tale of Two Cities, an all-time bestseller and once the source of a terrific David O. Selznick movie.

So we might also say of the world of movies these days: a vast half-dotty realm of seemingly boundless technological promise and artistic possibility, where no visual wonder seems out of reach, no technological feat far beyond the tech guys’ abilities, no blockbuster financing (at least in some extreme situations) deeper than the bankers’ pockets — but in which the results are often artistically pathetic, aesthetically puny, and morally, spiritually and intellectually vacant.

Sex and the City 2? Prince of Persia? Give me a break.

So too I often felt (I felt like the dickens, in fact), while wandering the streets and freeways of Los Angeles in the last couple of months, emptying out the storeroom of the last sad possessions of Marji Sirkin, an old sweetheart who died long ago, once again haunting the screenings in the Angeleno screening rooms (as I did when I wrote nine years for the Los Angeles Times), and — the one really great part of it all — attending some wonderful film festivals and movie series, movie confabs and feasts devoted to those treasures of the movie past that many current studio execs and green-lighters seem hell-bent on ignoring or disgracing.

So, since I got totally tied up in storeroom clearing and closing, in last-minute flight booking and re-booking, and also in somehow getting back in time for a Wednesday class on the Coen Brothers that I had to start teaching in Chicago, I’m delayed on seeing the new crop this week. I’ve been temporarily shut out of the perhaps rich and manifold pleasures of The A-Team, The Karate Kid and Marmaduke — all movies that don’t exactly fill me with joyous anticipation. (There are some, like Winter’s Bone, that might).

I’ll catch up with a few of them this Friday and let you know what I think. Right now, at least, I have a sad task finished, and a hard ride taken between my two cities, Chicago and Los Angeles. But I still have a rosy glow from L.A.-derived memories of the festival I came to town to see — the TCM Classic Film Festival in late April, which was the thing brought me to L.A. and which, by my lights, made a huge, rousing, smashing success.

Hosted by the affable one time Hollywood Reporter columnist Robert Osborne (who was treated like a rock star), the fest showed pearly prints at Grauman’s Chinese and Egyptian theatres of John Huston‘s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, of the Judy Garland-James Mason-George Cukor A Star is Born, Bogie’s and Curtiz‘s Casablanca, Godard’s Breathless, the restored Fritz Lang Metropolis, Orson Welles‘s The Magnificent Ambersons, Billy Wilder‘s Sunset Boulevard, and Some Like It Hot, Nic Ray’s In a Lonely Place, Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful, Mackendrick’s, Odets’ and Lehman’s Sweet Smell of Success, Mel Brooks‘ The Producers, Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors, Jacques Tati’s Playtime (the way it should be seen), Clint E. and Leone‘s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Stanley K‘s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kazan’s Wild River and Hitch‘s North by Northwest — as well as bringing in terrific people to talk about the shows with Osborne: Eli Wallach, Brooks, Anjelica and Danny Huston, Tony Curtis, Esther Williams, Peter Bogdanovich, Norman Lloyd, Eva Marie Saint (a wow), Martin Landau, and — flying in at the age of 100 to talk about her Oscar winning lead performance in 1937“s The Good Earth — the bewitching Luise Rainer.

In all my life — and I’m counting ten Cannes Film Festivals — I never spent four better days at the movies.

Also available to any self-respective L. A.-based movie-lover during late April, May and June in Los Angeles were the various film series around town (including a Kurosawa retrospective run by the American Cinematheque at the Egyptian Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, a block from where I used to live), a luscious black-and-white schedule at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art honoring the primo ‘40s-‘50s film noir cinematographer Nick Musuraca, with shows like Out of the Past, Stranger on the Third Floor, Cat People and Clash by Night, and more noir at the Motion Picture Academy‘s theatre, a pristine 35 millimeter print of Billy Wilder’s supreme dark masterpiece, with Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck as crime-crossed lovers, from James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity.

Is there any wonder a lot of the new stuff shrivels by comparison? I don’t mean to be a grouch, but it’s hard not to be dyspeptic seeing the intellectual-artistic gap between treasure troves like those and a season which, the last few weeks gave us, as its top-of-the-line headliners, Splice, Get Him to the Greek, Sex and the City 2, and Prince of Persia, and that tempts us this week with the glorious possibilities of The A-Team, and of Owen Wilson and George Lopez playing dogs in Marmaduke.

Movies these days seem to be often picked, and directed, and even written by, people who don’t seem to love books and reading and literature, as many of the Hollywood Golden Age movie-makers did, but instead to have spent all their youths glazed and starry-eyed, in front of a TV.

What about a remake of The Andy Griffith Show with Tom Hanks as Andy, Steve Buscemi as Barney, and Ashton Kutcher as Gomer Pyle? Or a movie of Kojak, with Vin Diesel sucking lollipops for Telly Savalas? Or a new animated doozy with Sarah Jessica Parker and her gal-pals playing pussycats in the animatronic delight The Perils of Prunella? I bet you could get all those obvious disasters green lighted today before anyone approved an A-budget for something like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Or, for that matter, Casablanca. (Yes I know the story of how the Koch/Epstein Brothers script, recycled and re-titled, was turned down by every exec in town.) Or, for that matter, A Tale of Two Cities.

I’m aware of something else — something that might make me resemble exactly the cranky oldster hip dudes like the “Ain’t it Cool” crowd complain of, when they carp that we relics don’t just get it, just don’t understand the grammar of, say, Michael Bay. I hate to say it, but they have a point. A small one.

Because, back in the heyday of most of the great movies listed above, those very same classics we now revere today were often held up as poor, thinner, decadent stuff, by then-critics and reviewers who kept comparing the new movies unfavorably to the classics of yesteryear.

And I’m not talking about halfwits, dunderheads and ass-kissers. I’m talking about the great James Agee, the angel of the Nation and Time, the finest writer ever to pick up a movie reviewer’s pen, but also the man who – in the very period now regarded as the zenith of the old Hollywood studio system — not only damned John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath as overrated, but slammed Welles for Citizen Kane, and kept ranting and railing so frequently against Casablanca, it sometimes seemed he had a vendetta, maybe against Claude Rains.

How wrong can a top writer be? Well, you must remember this: Agee loved The Treasure of the Sierra Madre passionately, but he had one reservation: Humphrey Bogart’s performance.

So, I suppose it’s possible that we’re low-rating movies like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, and that years from now, greybeards and ladies with blue hair will be stumbling into Cop Out and The Back-Up Plan and The Haunting of Connecticut, and crying “Now, there was a movie!”

But I doubt it. Golden Ages (like the ‘40s and ‘70s) and tin ages (like the ‘80s) only slide into perspective with the passing of Time (Agee’s old boss). The movie lovers of the future will have sifted though everything by then, and they’ll have found the classics and the people who made them. And many of those certified gems will be movies that were relatively ignored by audiences or even critics, or had lower budgets and better scripts and only a fraction of the advertising budget of the mega-million grossers of today.

They’ll love the old movies, and some of the new, just as we do now. But they won’t be making fun of older movies, or of older people, just because, temporarily and luckily, they’re young — and because the execs are spending fortunes trying to lure them into multiplexes.

That’s the kind of stuff I was thinking about, as I emptied Marji Sirkin‘s storeroom, which we’d filled back in the ‘80s, and packed floor to ceiling with boxes and books and curios and even with the old mattress on which we’d slept — and on and around which frolicked her pets: Ringga the mixed Samoyed dog, Harry and Binky the cats, Ralph the canary, chirping from his cage, and Mickey the little purebred doggie. (I forget the breed, but it was impressive. He looked like a midget collie.) They were all strays from the Humane Society, except for Ralph, who was caught on the fly in the Ralph’s store where she bought groceries, and for Mickey, whom I bought for her, after a dog show in which he quickly won three prizes, halfway on his way to champion status (which he never got).

Marji was a beautiful red-headed lady with a terrific sense of humor, who tried very hard to become a film editor. She was so pretty that one of her friends for years was Gene Shacove, the hair guy who inspired Warren Beatty’s character in Shampoo. (Gene always cut her hair, for free.) She took photographs at rock concerts, and she worked as a seat-filler every year at the Academy Awards, where she was one of the stunners. I met her after a screening of the pretty lousy surfer movie North Shore at an L. A. movie screening.

She had a tough time, despite her looks. Many of her boyfriends were mean. She earned a little money as a display demonstrator, and got a little cash from her mom Esther — and some fancy pretty clothes from her dad, Joe, who ran a clothing store in Wilmington, Delaware called “Suburban Fashions.“ But Joe wouldn’t help finance any college course as trivial (to him) as movie-making. Marji had to mostly take care of herself, including taking on extra expenses, like twice nursing her champ runner and beauty Ringga back from serious sickness, once with (she swore) chicken soup.

Mostly on her own, she went to the UCLA extension sequential film courses, acting as an aide for her professors to help get through. Finally, she was accepted into UCLA Film School, where she always brought Mickey to campus. (Mickey was named for Mick Jagger, as Ringga and Harry were named for Ringo Starr and George Harrison). And there she earned a 3.96 G. P. A. and a prize for one of her short films, about the dangers of smoking.

But Marji also fell ill while at UCLA. She got Hodgkins’ Disease. She had to go to UCLA hospital, and her hair fell out (we got her a red-headed wig), and her mother came and eventually Joe got her an apartment near UCLA, where she could stay with her mother and her animals. Marji and Esther moved there, but Marji got sick again on her very first night out, and had to return to the hospital. There, one night I brought her something I thought would cheer her up: a program signed for her personally by many of the winners and guests at that year’s Los Angeles Film Critics Association awards luncheon, including Jack Lemmon, Terry Gilliam, Julie Andrews, and Blake Edwards. And (what a great guy) by Chuck Jones, who took a whole page to draw her an original cartoon of Bugs Bunny, inscribed and signed by both Chuck and Bugs, both of whom wished her well.

She died a few days later. The last thing I said to her, sang to her, was the lyrics for a Beatles song. Hey Jude, I think.

What was left to me were a closet full of movie press packs, which got lost, and Marji‘s grey compact car, Simone de Celeca, which got stolen and trashed by the street gang in my neighborhood (a block from the Egyptian), and the storeroom full of stuff we‘d locked up years ago, when I first met her. I would have liked to keep happy little Mickey, but he went instead to a relative, whose husband didn’t appreciate him and thought he was a faggot dog. I wanted Esther to go over all the stuff with me and keep what she wanted, but I left for Chicago, and the years passed. The last time I talked to Esther, she‘d taken a fall and didn’t remember me. And worse, she didn’t remember Marji, the person she had loved most in all the world.

All those years, almost 25, I kept paying for the storeroom. Now, as I emptied it, I kept thinking, remembering — recalling the best times and the worst.

When she was alive, I never got to take Marji to the Oscars. I took my mother Edna once, and once I took another friend, but, when it was Marji‘s turn, the passes suddenly dried up. Bob Epstein, one of my editors at the L. A. Times, decided not to hand out that particular perk to me any more, but instead to pass the tickets on to Times upper execs, perhaps to curry favor. I wished I could have taken her, just once, and let her see it from her own seat. I think the cameras would have loved her, as I did.

Anyway, I found one of Marji’s Oscar show seat-filler’s passes as I went though all the boxes, which were mostly taken up with a large library she’d accumulated from used book stores over the years. She was a real reader. She’d carefully inscribed each volume with her name, Marjorie A. Sirkin. I found lots of other things too, some of which made me happy, some sad — but nothing happier than a story I found again that she’d written and illustrated called The Phantage of Desiree Moonlily. At least that didn’t get lost or trashed.
So, I finally emptied the storeroom. I kept and transferred as much as I could, cleaned off the floor, closed the door. (Stupidly, I locked it, so now I have to mail the key back to Public Storage.) And I left in a rush, to fly back to Chicago just in time for my Coen Brothers class. She liked the Coens.

Goodbye, Marji — the girl who loved movies, and books, and animals, and who wanted to be a film editor. And who never made it.

The TCM Classic festival would have been just the party for my sweet friend, as it was for anyone with a real crush on movies and books, and on the people behind them. As Dooley Wilson would say: The fundamental things apply, as time goes by.

– Michael Wilmington
June 3, 2010

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