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Blue Glow Pacino vs. DeNiro on new "Deathmatch"; Woody and Frasier, together again
Eat this song It's heeeeeeeeere T E L E V I S I O N Movin' on down Chasing TV Married... with hit men TV 1998 Fu fighter |
A decade in 2 days NBC'S PAINFULLY MEDIOCRE MINISERIES "THE '60S" MAY BE JUST WHAT THAT GENERATION DESERVES. BY CHARLES KAISER | "The '60s" executive producer Lynda Obst has come up with a simple formula: Take an hour of actual file footage, break it up into tiny sound bites of every station of the '60s Cross, from Martin Luther King's speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial to Bobby Kennedy's funeral, add 11 stick figures (eight whites, three blacks), mix in the standard songs from the Beatles, Bob Dylan and Marvin Gaye, and presto -- you have a brand new miniseries just in time for sweeps this Sunday and Monday evening on NBC. Done well, these four hours might have been the perfect antidote for the endless show trial the '60s have endured all year in Washington, where every ex-hall monitor in the Republican Party seems determined to wreak his revenge on the era of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll by persecuting our poor draft-evading, noninhaling, sex-crazed president. Sadly, those same Republicans are probably the only people who will find much to cheer in this sappy epic, which features plenty of dopey drug addicts mouthing ludicrous philosophies at the height of the Summer of Love. It's too bad, since to everyone like Obst who lived through them, the '60s remain the Holy Grail of film backdrops. With civil rights, the Vietnam War, political assassinations and the best popular music of modern times, it remains a golden opportunity for someone. Maybe. But like the '60s themselves, when it comes to actually mining all that promise, it's a whole lot harder than it looks. Part of the problem is that even talented filmmakers are hard pressed to make pre-Lee Harvey Oswald 1963 look like anything other than incredibly naive -- "a time of innocence, a time of confidences," as "The '60s" soundtrack inevitably reminds us. Unfortunately, here we are in the hands of something even more lethal -- mediocre TV people who've never seen a cliché that can't be transformed into a major character. "The '60s" has them all: the blue-collar barber in Chicago who dreams of sending his son to Notre Dame and yells at his daughter for dancing the twist in a "lewd and inappropriate manner"; the jock son who decides to enlist in the Marines after meeting a real Marine who refuses to buy him beer ("Damn! That uniform looked good, didn't it?"). Then, of course, he gets shipped out to Vietnam while his brother campaigns for Gene McCarthy, before switching to Bobby Kennedy and falling in love with an Ali McGraw look-alike, who is temporarily swept away by the more radical Kenny Klein, who heads Students for a Democratic Society at Columbia. And then there's their sister, who gets knocked up by a rock 'n' roll star and flees to the Haight to avoid the wrath of their father. The blacks are less numerous but equally predictable: the Mississippi minister who organizes lunch-counter sit-ins (set anachronistically to Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get It On," which someone forgot is from 1973, instead of 1963) before moving to Los Angeles with his son Emmet, where the son gets his father killed after Dad grabs a pistol out of his son's belt, just before the police arrive to shoot the newly armed father. Then Emmet is radicalized and becomes Black Panther Fred Hampton's bodyguard before returning to L.A. to organize a breakfast program for black children. Someday, somewhere, someone may manage a feature-length film that authentically re-creates all of the promise and pathos of this amazing era. But so far the only director who has come close is Oliver Stone, who did the best job of conveying how it really felt to be there in the first 20 minutes of "The Doors." (After that the movie fell apart, through little fault of its own, by sticking too close to the real events of Jim Morrison's relentlessly depressing life.) The only other successes in this department have been the documentaries that limit themselves to footage of the actual events. In "The '60s" the stock footage is supposed to provide all of that verisimilitude, but in the end, it only makes matters worse, by heightening the contrast between the power of these real events and the vapidness of the invented characters. Then, as now, the only truly reliable thing about this saga is the soundtrack (already available on a new CD in a store near you) featuring the Jefferson Airplane, the Beach Boys, the Band, the Animals and Marvin Gaye, as well as a newly recorded version of "Chimes of Freedom" with Bob Dylan and Joan Osborne, which didn't make it onto the rough cut of the series NBC provided to reviewers last week. On the other hand, when the love-struck couple starts quoting lyrics from Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man" to each other, you long for the Ryan O'Neal and Ali McGraw characters of "Love Story," who are two of the great, gritty creations of the cinema in comparison. In the end, the crassness of this effort may make it exactly the miniseries the boomers deserve, since no other generation has fallen further down the cliff from its original promise. After a brief moment of fighting for civil rights, working to end the war -- and, believe it or not, opposing materialism, nearly everyone who had been pushing peace and love switched most of their energy to the pursuit of the almighty dollar. The ones who moved to Hollywood represent only a handful of the most egregious examples of this syndrome. All of which leaves us with just one source of suspense when these four hours are actually broadcast: Will Mercedes Benz sponsor it with its most appropriate commercial -- the one with the Janis Joplin soundtrack?
Charles Kaiser is the author of "1968 in America" and "The Gay Metropolis." |
