Category: Movie

The Rick James documentary Bitchin’: The Sound and Fury of Rick James, briefly touches on James’ stint in a band with Neil Young called The Mynah Birds — one of those rock collaborations that sounds too weird to be true.

Anyone with a basic knowledge of popular music probably thinks of James as the funk-driven, volatile mastermind of tracks like “Super Freak” and “Mary Jane,” and Neil Young as the earnest architect of ballads like “Heart of Gold” and protest anthems like “Rockin’ in the Free World.”

But their musical tastes melded beautifully in 1966 Toronto, where James went to avoid being drafted into the Vietnam War, and immediately fell into a thriving Canadian music scene that spawned Young, Joni Mitchell, and Gordon Lightfoot, among others.

James recounted his Toronto years in his magnificent 2014 memoir, Glow, which was completed after the singer’s 2004 death by author David Ritz, who appears throughout Bitchin’, which was directed by Sacha Jenkins and debuts Friday on Showtime.

James was born James Ambrose Johnson, Jr., and grew up in Buffalo, New York, just 100 miles from Toronto, across the U.S.-Canadian border. As he explains in Glow, he lied about his age to enlist in the Navy at the age of 16, but soon decided it was a mistake. After reporting to Rochester to be shipped over to Vietnam, he decided to instead buy a one-way ticket to Toronto — and went AWOL.

Also Read: Yes, Rick James Avoided the Manson Murders Because of a Hangover

He set out for Yorkville, which he had been told was “the Greenwich Village of Toronto,” according to Glow. He loved the coffeehouses, clubs and strips bars, but was soon confronted by three drunk Americans who accused him of being a draft dodger and called him a racial slur.

Fortunately, a group of Canadian musicians came immediately to his aid. They would later become famous as members of The Band. (Martin Scorsese chronicled what was billed as their last performance in his 1978 documentary The Last Waltz.)

They brought James into the Toronto music scene, where he went by the name Little Ricky, in part to evade arrest for escaping Vietnam. He soon met a budding manager named Colin Kerr, who was impressed with his musical talents and invited him to his cafe, The Mynah Bird.

This led to the creation of the band The Mynah Birds, featuring “Little Ricky” on lead vocals. Inspired by The Beatles, Kerr promoted the group heavily, and they gained local buzz.

At first, they were basically an R&B band, and James says in Glow that he stood out “as an authentic R&B singer living in a city where white musicians were striving to play authentic R&B. That added to my status.”

But James wanted to change the group’s sound. As James tells it, his friend Joni Mitchell and his Mynah Birds bandmate, Bruce Palmer, both recommended adding then-unknown Toronto native Neil Young to the Mynah Birds, because he could help the group attain a “blues-based folk rock” sound.

“Like most of the other white musicians in Toronto, he was into Black music,” James says of Young in Glow. “His singing was a little strange, but his facility on the guitar was crazy. He got all over those strings and showed me some shit I’d never seen before. Neil helped reshape the Mynah Birds into the band I’d been hearing inside my head.”

Neil Young was equally complimentary of Rick James — who went by Ricky James Matthews in the Mynah Birds — in his 2012 memoir, Waging Heavy Peace.

“Ricky James Matthews, as he was called then, was our lead singer, and he was known as the Black Mick Jagger. He sang his ass off.”

They moved in together, and played a lot of Rolling Stones covers. But Waging Heavy Peace also includes some grim foreshadowing of James’ fate:

“Living with Rick in a basement  apartment… I became introduced to other drugs,” Young writes. “I was trying amphetamines and smoking a little hash. Looking back, I could have done a lot deeper. Luckily I didn’t get too far into the stronger drugs.”

Here’s the Mynah Birds song “It’s My Time,” featuring Rick James and Neil Young (story continues after):

The Mynah Birds soon parted ways with Colin Kerr and joined up with a new manager, Morley Shelman, and financial backer John Craig Eaton. James describes in Glow as “two rich kids in love with music.”

Because the Mynah Birds were a little bit folk rock (like The Byrds), a little bit bluesy (like the Stones), and a little bit Motown, Eaton and Shelman set up a meeting with the Mynah Birds and Motown Records, across the border in Detroit.

The band played “It’s My Time,” which James describes in the memoir as “the Four Tops meets the Lovin’ Spoonful, a combination of soul and folk rock.” (It’s great — listen above. James says in his memoir that he wrote it, and Young says in his memoir that they wrote it together.)

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Motown signed the group to a six-year contract and began grooming the band to be Motown’s next big thing. James and Young first met Motown luminaries like Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson and The Temptations.

“Smokey Robinson dropped in and was helping us, and some of the Four Tops would come in and back up our vocals, standing behind us as we sang,” Young writes in Waging Heavy Peace. “They made us sound cool. Everything was going great! It was just a big family feeling around Motown.”

Not necessarily says James: He recalls Marvin Gaye telling him that Motown was “survival of the fittest” and “a throat-cutting contest.”

Either way, at the start of 1967, The Mynah Birds were poised for success. But after a dispute over money, James says in Glow, Shelman, the group’s manager, “ratted me out” to the U.S. government — and the Motown contract disappeared.

“Neil Young and Bruce Wagner, both great guys, stayed loyal,” James says in Glow. “They didn’t kick me out of the band.”

Here’s The Mynah Birds song “I’ll Wait Forever,” featuring Rick James and Neil Young (story continues after):

 

But James, taking advice from his mother, turned himself in.

Two days after James was busted, Young writes, Shelman “OD’d on some heroin he had bought with our advance money. The cash was gone, and so was our manager. We went back to Toronto and the band broke up.”

Curiously, James remembers Shelman’s fate differently: He says in Glow that Shelman was “killed in a fiery motorcycle accident.”

After much more draft-related drama — including breaking out of the brig in the Brooklyn Navy Yard — James was able to resolve his issues with the U.S. government.

Neil Young and Bruce Palmer moved to Los Angeles, and joined Buffalo Springfield, best known for the iconic ’60s anthem “For What It’s Worth.” Young later joined Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, which also included his Buffalo Springfield bandmate, Stephen Stills. Soon after, Young became known as one of the greatest rock songwriters as a solo artist, backed by his group Crazy Horse. He remains one of the most revered rock artists of all.

Rick James also moved to Los Angeles, but struggled for years. Still, Neil Young had his back. He recalled a reunion near the end of the ’60s when Young welcome him to his “log cabin in the hills,” wearing “full Indian regalia.”

“We hugged like long-lost brothers and shot the shit for hours. … Neil and I had great rapport — two wild artists who understood each other on the deepest level,” James says in Glow.

The Mynah Birds also had a direct connection to James’ eventually success. In the mid-70s, after he recorded demos of the album that would become his breakthrough success, Come Get It, in Buffalo, he went back to Los Angeles to shop it around to record labels. He was determined, he says in Glow, to sign with anyone but Motown.

But then he had a chance elevator run-in with a Motown producer, who greeted him with, “I’m Jeffrey Bowen. I met you during the Mynah Birds days in Detroit.”

After some haggling, James agreed to sign again with Motown, after more than a decade of trying to break into music. Come Get It was a hit, and James’ had a strong run that peaked with the massive success of his 1981 album Street Sounds, which included the hits “Super Freak” (featuring The Temptations) and “Give It To Me.”

“You smoke a joint and write a song and next thing you know you’ve got a check in the mail,” he told People Magazine in 1982.

But he had relentless drug problems. In 1990, he received an unexpected windfall when MC Hammer sampled “Super Freak” for his hit “U Can’t Touch This.” But just a year later, his reputation hit its nadir when he was accused of holding a woman hostage, forcing her to perform sex acts, and burning her repeatedly with a crack pipe. While out on parole, he was accused of kidnapping and beating a second woman, also while on cocaine.

He was found guilty of one assault and pleaded guilty to another in 1994, according to the Buffalo News, and served more than two years of a five-years-and-four-months prison sentence.

In 2004, he came back into the public’s consciousness thanks to a Chappelle’s Show sketch featuring a Rick James story from Charlie Murphy. (James had worked with his brother, Eddie Murphy, on a 1985 album that spawned the hit single “Party All the Time.”) It included Chappelle delivering the catch phrase, “I’m Rick James, bitch!” that inspired the title of Bitchin’.

James was found dead at his Los Angeles home in 2004. The cause of death was a heart attack, and he was found to have had nine different drugs in his system, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Since you’re going to go looking for it anyway, here’s Rick James’ “Super Freak,” recorded about 15 years after Rick James and Neil Young collaborated on The Mynah Birds…

… and “Rockin’ in the Free World” by Neil Young, released about 23 years after his Mynah Birds collaboration with Rick James.

Bitchin’: The Sound and Fury of Rick James, is now available on Showtime.

Main image: Rick James in Bitchin‘ and Neil Young on the cover of Waging Heavy Peace.

This story was originally published on Sept. 2 and has been updated with more details about Morley Shelman and Rick James signing with Motown in the 1970s.

The post Rick James and Neil Young’s Band: The Sad Story of the Mynah Birds (Video) appeared first on MovieMaker Magazine.

Impeachment: American Crime Story premieres Tuesday on FX. The third installment of Ryan Murphy’s anthology series centers on President Bill Clinton’s famous affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky — and the precipitating events that lead Lewinsky’s friend and coworker Linda Tripp to expose their secret to the world.

Longtime Murphy collaborator Sarah Paulson (American Horror Story, Ratched) plays Tripp in Impeachment. But the real-life Linda Tripp passed away before she could see Paulson’s portrayal of her on cable television — or meet Sarah Burgess, the screenwriter who spent countless hours pouring over books, documents, interviews, and audiotapes to understand Tripp’s reasons for recording her phone conversations with Lewinsky in which the young woman revealed intimate details about her sexual relationship with the president.

Tripp died on April 7, 2020, according to her obituary in the New York Times, though her former lawyer, Joseph Murtha, did not provide a cause of death. According to NPR, Tripp had at one point battled pancreatic cancer, though it’s unclear whether she died from the illness.

Burgess sorely wishes she could have met Tripp before her death. She said that she “felt connected” to Tripp when she was writing Impeachment, and put emphasis on painting a fair, nuanced picture of her rather than casting her as a one-sided villain, as she has often been portrayed in the media.

“I would have loved to talk to her. It was very hard for me when she passed away last year that I’d never got the chance,” Burgess told MovieMaker. “I don’t believe characters have to be quote-unquote ‘likable,’ especially female characters. That can be sort of a trend that we fall into. Women are sometimes expected to behave differently from men and female characters have to have this more explicit warmth or vulnerability sometimes. Linda’s a messy and complicated character and someone who I… had great affection for as I was writing.”

Also Read:  Monica Lewinsky Hopes Impeachment: American Crime Story Is the Last Time She Has to Talk About This

Burgess isn’t sure whether Tripp was ever aware of the FX series’ existence while she was alive. It was still in production when she died, and Tripp says the show’s general policy is not to reach out to its subjects for their input — Bill and Hillary Clinton were not contacted, either, though they are played by Clive Owen and Edie Falco, respectively. Lewinsky’s role as a producer on the series is an exception to this rule, allowing her some control over how she — played by Beanie Feldstein — was portrayed during the most vulnerable moments of her life.

Burgess says she was always confident that the way she wrote Tripp was fair, but that after learning of Tripp’s death, she did reconsider one part of the script.

“I didn’t feel that I had to change course because I already felt that I was writing so much from her point of view. I think it did briefly — her death made me reconsider how I would end her character. I will say that. I don’t want to give away too much,” she said. “Her final moments in the show, I think I reconsidered after her death.”

Tripp worked in the White House for multiple years before being transferred to the Pentagon to work in the Department of Defense, where she met and befriended Lewinsky. Tripp ultimately became famous for turning over tapes of their sensitive conversations to Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr and then later wearing a wire for the FBI to record another conversation with Lewinsky. But Burgess does not believe that Tripp ever intended for her actions to hurt Lewinsky as much as they did.

“I don’t believe this person is a complete monster,” Burgess said. “I have studied Linda Tripp so carefully over the past three years, I’ve developed I think what I would describe as an obsession with Linda Tripp… I personally wrote the story believing that she was acting on instinct and did not totally understand the forces that she was unleashing,” she added. “I wrote the story believing that some part of Linda Tripp is aware of the problems with what she did, and I think felt the need to articulate different ideas in the press because she felt under attack. And there’s a tragic loneliness to that to me.”

Impeachment: American Crime Story premieres Tuesday, Sept. 7 at 10 p.m. on FX. Main Image: Sarah Paulson as Linda Tripp. Credit: Kurt Iswarienko/FX.

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Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence play scientists trying to warn people that the end is near in the new Netflix comedy Don’t Look Up, from Anchorman director Adam McKay.

In the just-released trailer, the president of the United States, played by Meryl Streep, asks the incredulous pair: “Do you know how many ‘the world is ending’ meeting we’ve had over the last two years?”

“Drought, famine, hole in the ozone,” adds an aide, played by Jonah Hill. “It’s so boring.”

The film marks McKay’s return to comedy after the (mostly) dramatic Dick Cheney biopic Vice and the financial-collapse drama The Big Short. Those were dramas with a great feel for absurdity. Don’t Look Up is a satire of our modern age, where lots of people suffer science fatigue and a seemingly endless barrage of grim predictions for our world.

McKay said in a recent interview with MovieMaker that the film is partly a response to the frustrations of trying to navigate a flood of news, misinformation and social media white noise.

“In fairness to people, we’re dealing with an explosion of media — social media interconnectedness — that I don’t think any of us ever could have imagined. It’s creating new types of communities. It’s creating new types of exchanges that have never existed in the history of Homo sapiens ever. So we we definitely are confused. We’re definitely angry. This happens to coincide in the U.S. with a time where your average citizen has never had less power than right now. So it makes sense that the little bit of power we do have, which is to yell our opinions on social media, to get angry and outraged, would go down like that. So I understand why people fall into it,” McKay said on the podcast, which you can check out on Google, Apple or Spotify or here:

Don’t Look Up, coming to Netflix on Dec. 24, includes a huge A-list cast that includes Jennifer Hudson, Cate Blanchett, Timothee Chalomet and Ariana Grande, among others.

This is a busy time for McKay: He’s also an executive producer of Successsion, returning to HBO next month, and is working on a series about the Showtime-era Los Angeles Lakers.

Main image: Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence in Don’t Look Up.

 

The post Don’t Look Up: DiCaprio, Lawrence Warn of Humanity’s Doom in Adam McKay Comedy (Video) appeared first on MovieMaker Magazine.

Too Soon: Comedy After 9/11 is a documentary about how the comedy world tried to bring laughter back after the horror of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Airing on VICE TV, it includes interviews with David Cross, Janeane Garofalo, Marc Maron, Matthew Broderick, Aasif Mandvi, Rob Riggle, Nathan Lane, Gilbert Gottfried, Cedric the Entertainer, Chris Kattan, Lewis Black, Doug Stanhope, Jimmy Carr, Russell Peters and many more. In this piece, Emmy-nominated filmmaker Nick Fituri Scown explains how he and award-winning comedy journalist Julie Seabaugh took inspiration from Werner Herzog to make the film.

The only thing I love more than Werner Herzog the filmmaker is Werner Herzog the motivational speaker. Back when I was an undergrad in college, he visited our directing class and gave one of the most inspiring lectures I’ve ever heard. The one idea that really struck a chord with me was about the power of telling someone that you’re making a movie. Not, “I’ve got this idea I’m thinking about” but, “I’m making this project. It’s happening one way or the other. You want in?” 

So when my co-director, Julie Seabaugh, and I first started discussing Too Soon, and she asked how we, two first-time documentary filmmakers, could even start a project like this, I told her about wise ole Werner’s theory, and how I thought we should test it. We wouldn’t tell folks that we were thinking of doing a documentary about comedy after 9/11: We would announce to the world that we were making it.

Story continues after the trailer for Too Soon: Comedy After 9/11, by Nick Fituri Scown and  Julie Seabaugh:

Of course it’s very hard to make a documentary without any camera equipment… or audio gear… or an editing system… or footage. But we were not going to let such trivial things stand in our way. So we did the one thing we could at that moment — research. We scoured the internet for any archival interviews or clips that we could use to make a sample reel of what we wanted to examine in the film, the idea of Tragedy + Time = Comedy.

Thanks to Julie’s background and connections from being a comedy journalist, we were able to get a pitch meeting with a cable channel specializing in comedy. The people there liked the idea and reel, but they weren’t ready to hop on board.

That left us with a choice. We could take our reel around town, polish our pitch and wait to see if anyone else would help us — or we could just continue making the documentary. The entire movie. Just the two of us.

Also Read: Werner Herzog on Parenting and How to Rent a Dad in Japan (Podcast)

Which to be honest, was pretty terrifying, but hell, Werner Herzog said he stole a camera to make one of his first films, so…

We borrowed equipment, and didn’t steal anything… though I may have perhaps lied a little to get press credentials to the Just For Laughs Comedy Festival in Montreal, where we went to begin filming our documentary. Julie showed the reel to some of the folks she knew in the comedy world, and that was enough to get Todd Barry and some other comics to commit to interviews. We not only got some great footage on tape, but could now see how this was going to be more than just a good idea — it would be a good movie.

Inspired by what we’d got on our first shoot, we started shooting interviews with comics in L.A. on our lunch and dinner breaks from work. I would secretly cut our footage when the AVIDs at my job weren’t otherwise in use. After trading in our miles and hotel points to go film in New York, we had enough material to update and improve our reel. That got us more pitch meetings (not buyers, unfortunately) — but more importantly, it got us more interviews, as other comics could see who else was in the film and what the tone of it was. This wasn’t going to be just a series of tasteless jokes, but a respectful examination of that harrowing time, told from the POV of entertainers who weren’t sure what their place in the world was going to be after such a tragedy.

Over the course of the next year-and-a-half we compiled enough interviews to flesh out some of the major story points, particularly The Onion’s 9/11 issue and the rise of the Arab comics who formed The Axis of Evil Comedy Tour. Now people could see the narrative arc of our film play out with their own eyes; the world before 9/11, the terror of witnessing the attacks, and the feeling that the world had changed. No one knew what comedy’s place would be, but eventually entertainers realized that they needed to talk about the trauma we had all experienced. By doing so they helped us all mend.

Through making the film we’d discovered that the true equation we were examining wasn’t Tragedy + Time = Comedy, but T+T+C = Healing. 

Werner’s theory was proving true. The more we made the film, the more momentum we gained. The more interviews we filmed, the more other entertainers were interested in sitting down with us. The more we edited the film, the more people could see what the film would be, which led to Julie winning a grant from Women Making A Scene that we used to finally get our own editing system, which let us start editing a rough cut of the film.

Over the course of four years, Julie and I had now built enough momentum on our own that people were ready to hop on board. The first to join the Too Soon train was Dan Baglio of Pulse Films. He had worked with Sean Hayes and Todd Millner’s production company, Hazy Mills, in making The History of Comedy for CNN. Since Julie and I already had a rough cut of the film, it was very easy for us to cut a new reel and build a pitch deck.

Since we had spent so much time making the film, Julie and I were confident we could talk anyone through the story and answer any questions they had. Which we did for a lot of great distributors, but there was one in particular that stuck out to us. When we met with VICE, the people there were the first ones who didn’t want to waste time with us pitching them the story of the film. They just wanted to know how they could help us make it. These were our kind of people.

Now, after five years, we’re happy to say that we are no longer making Too Soon, because it’s been made. It’s done. It’s being released by ViceTV for all the world to see.

So, if there’s a movie you’ve been dreaming about for a long time, something you believe the world needs to see, that will help entertain, educate, or enlighten people. Then listen to Werner: Stop thinking about it and start making it.

Too Soon: Comedy After 9/11 is now airing on VICE TV. It will also screen at the Dances With Films Festival on Saturday, Sept. 11, at Hollywood’s TCL Chinese Theater.

Main image: Too Soon: Comedy After 9/11 moviemakers Nick Fituri Scown and Julie Seabaugh, courtesy of Too Soon Productions.

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The Voyeurs writer-director Michael Mohan understands the term “erotic thriller” reads as dated. And while he holds a lot of love for the genre which peaked in the ’90s, his latest thriller is not some stale homage to a forgotten era.

“Every movie is a product of its time,” Mohan tells MovieMaker. “Even though in my mind, I’m bringing this genre back and there is something of a throwback, just the fact that I’m saying the word ‘erotic thriller,’ there’s something dated about saying that. But I didn’t want the movie to feel dated.”

To Mohan, it’s important to distinguish between the different subgenres that make up this category of film.

“You’ve got movies like Body Heat and Wild Things that are these sweaty neo-noirs,” Mohan says. “And then you have ‘[blank] from Hell’ movies, like ‘the Nanny from Hell’ in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle.”

But there is another subgenre, which Mohan calls “steamy moral dilemmas,” which include Adrian Lyne films like Unfaithful and Indecent Proposal, that Mohan hopes The Voyeurs will join.

“What I love about those movies is that you’re going to have an opinion on whether or not the character made the right decision. And the person next to you is going to have a completely different opinion, but will be just as passionate. And you get to have these fun arguments after the movie is over,” he says.

In The Voyeurs, Sydney Sweeney and Justice Smith’s characters, Pippa and Thomas, spy on their neighbors (played by Ben Hardy and Natasha Liu Bordizzo) — a couple who don’t seem to understand how blinds work. Mohan worked with cinematographer Elisha Christian (his roommate from film school) to subtly visualize the closing spaces between the two couples.

“What we wanted to achieve is that these apartments that are far apart felt like they were getting closer and closer together as the movie went on, but it was all motivated by story,” Mohan says.

“When they’re first looking over there, they’re just looking with their naked eye. So it has to be wide. It can’t go close, because she can’t see. The next night, when they look, we went just a teeny bit tighter on the lens. And then when they get the binoculars, that’s when we’re on that longer POV lens, and we stuck with it. And then as the movie went on, we would tighten up our lens further and further from there.”

Pippa and Thomas not only watch, but also listen in on their two neighbors, with the aid of a nifty laser pointer trick. Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation is a big inspiration on The Voyeurs, and these audio elements play into that reference.

Mohan worked with sound designer Nathan Ruyle to subtly transition a bustling city soundscape into a more intimate drama as the story wears on.

“When the couple first moves in together, you’re hearing all the traffic, you’re hearing ambulances, you’re hearing construction all around them,” Mohan says. “But then as the movie goes on, and they’re focused more and more in on this couple across the way, the sound of the city melts away until that one fateful night where Pippa crosses the line — you can almost hear a pin drop.”

That moment is marked by one of those character decisions sure to get audiences debating. Without spoiling anything, the plot boils over in its final act with a number of twisty turns.

“The thing I love about about erotic thrillers is that the best ones go far off the rails in the third act. I knew I needed to go there here,” Mohan says. “I was OK with it pushing the boundaries of believability, because it was going to serve the allegory of the movie.”

The Voyeurs, written and directed by Michael Mohan, is now available to stream on Amazon Prime Video. Main image (above): Sydney Sweeney and Justice Smith in The Voyeurs, from writer-director Michael Mohan. 

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