If you’re going to be a film director—if you’re going to work anywhere in the entertainment industry, really—It’s important to have a thick skin, because critics are absolutely everywhere. Some directors will insist that the critics are wrong; that they’re out of touch with audience tastes. Other directors will own their failures. For example, Roland Emmerich admitted that Independence Day: Resurgence didn’t really work and that he probably shouldn’t have been the director.
And some directors respond by making another movie that takes the criticism head-on.
That’s what we’re talking about today. We open with Intolerance (1916), directed by D.W. Griffith. It’s a three-and-a-half hour movie intercutting four different-but-parallel storylines, and it’s specifically a response to criticism that he’d glorified the Ku Klux Klan in Birth of a Nation. Griffith specifically framed this as a response to the critics and not an apology.
From there we move to Part 2 and Barry Levinson’s Liberty Heights (1999). This was the fourth time that he went to the well of his life in Baltimore, and the second that we’ve looked at (we still need to get to Tin Men and Avalon).
Liberty Heights is not a response to any criticism of his Baltimore films, but was instead a response to someone’s comments about his portrayal of Dustin Hoffman’s character in the film Sphere, which got Levinson thinking about his youth and led to the story seen here.
COMING ATTRACTIONS:
In our next episode we’ll be looking at some men who are searching for God in their own way. We start with A Serious Man (2009) directed by the Coen Brothers, and move on to The Tree of Life (2011), directed by Michael McCracken. Join us, won’t you?
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