Bob Rafelson
Bob Rafelson | |
---|---|
Born | Robert Rafelson February 21, 1933 New York City, U.S |
Died | July 23, 2022 Aspen, Colorado, U.S. | (aged 89)
Education | Dartmouth College |
Occupation(s) | Film director, producer, screenwriter |
Years active | 1959–2002 |
Spouses | Toby Carr
(m. 1955; div. 1977)Gabrielle Taurek (m. 1999) |
Children | 4 |
Robert Jay Rafelson (February 21, 1933 – July 23, 2022) was an American film director, writer and producer. He is regarded as one of the key figures in the founding of the New Hollywood movement of the 1970s. Among his best-known films as a director include those made as part of the company he co-founded, Raybert/BBS Productions, Five Easy Pieces (1970) and The King of Marvin Gardens (1972) as well as acclaimed later films, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981) and Mountains of the Moon (1990). Other films he produced as part of BBS include two of the most significant films of the era, Easy Rider (1969) and The Last Picture Show (1971). Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces and The Last Picture Show were all chosen for inclusion in the Library of Congress' National Film Registry. He was also one of the creators of the pop group and TV series The Monkees with BBS partner Bert Schneider. His first wife was the production designer Toby Carr Rafelson.
Early life
Robert Jay Rafelson was born in Manhattan on February 21, 1933[1] to a Jewish family,[2] the son of Marjorie (Blumenfeld) and Sydney Rafelson, a hat ribbon manufacturer.[3] His much-older first cousin, once removed, was screenwriter and playwright Samson Raphaelson, the author of The Jazz Singer, who wrote nine films for director Ernst Lubitsch.[4] "Samson took an interest in my work," Rafelson told critic David Thomson. "If he liked a picture, then I was his favorite nephew. But if he didn't like it, I was a distant cousin!"[5]
Rafelson attended the
Rafelson began dating Toby Carr in high school and they later married in the mid-1950s. The couple had two children: Peter Rafelson, born in 1960, and Julie Rafelson, born in 1962.
Early television career
Rafelson's first professional job was as a story editor on the TV series Play of the Week for producer David Susskind in 1959. The series produced televised stage plays from contemporary and classical authors. Rafelson's job required him to read hundreds of plays, select which were to be produced, and write some additional dialogue uncredited. Rafelson's first writing credits were for an episode of the TV series The Witness in 1960 and an episode of the series The Greatest Show on Earth in 1963.[7]
In June 1962, Rafelson and his family moved to Hollywood, where he began working as an associate producer on television shows and films at
In 1965, while working at Screen Gems, Rafelson met fellow producer Bert Schneider. They became fast friends and created the company Raybert Productions together that year. Raybert would later become BBS Productions and produce films as a subsidiary of Columbia Pictures.[7] Rafelson and Schneider's first project was a television series about a rock 'n' roll group.[12] Rafelson said that the idea for the show, which was inspired by his own misadventures while playing in a band in Mexico, predated A Hard Day's Night. Rafelson said, "I had conceived the show before The Beatles existed," and it was based on his time as an itinerant musician more "interested in having fun" than "in earning a living."[8] Raybert Productions sold the idea to Screen Gems and, when they were unable to get either the Dave Clark Five or the Lovin' Spoonful for the show, ran ads in Daily Variety and The Hollywood Reporter for musicians. The band that they created was The Monkees and the series ran from 1966 until 1968.[7]
Early film career
Collaborations with Jack Nicholson
Rafelson and Bert Schneider's newfound success allowed them to get more funding for Raybert Productions and to establish the record company Colgems. Their next project was Head, a feature film starring the Monkees. Co-written with friend Jack Nicholson, and featuring appearances by Nicholson, Victor Mature, Teri Garr, Carol Doda, Annette Funicello, Frank Zappa, Sonny Liston, Timothy Carey, Ray Nitschke, and Dennis Hopper, it was Rafelson's debut as a feature film director. Rafelson said, "Of course Head is an utterly and totally fragmented film. Among other reasons for making it was that I thought I would never get to make another movie, so I might as well make fifty to start out with and put them all in the same feature."[7]
Head represented the first of many Rafelson-Nicholson collaborations, later to include Five Easy Pieces, The King of Marvin Gardens and The Postman Always Rings Twice, among others. In a profile of Rafelson in Esquire magazine, Nicholson commented: "I may have thought I started his career, but I think he started my career."[14]
Head is a plotless, stream-of-consciousness film that, amongst other things, attempts to deconstruct the musical personas of the Monkees and satirize the consumer ideals of "image". In a song sung by the Monkees, they seem to confess by saying: Hey, hey, we are The Monkees/ You know we love to please/ A manufactured image/ With no philosophies. Other scenes utilize psychedelic or surrealistic theatrics such as the Monkees being sucked through a giant vacuum cleaner and turning into specks of dandruff in Victor Mature's head. The film ends with the Monkees being loaded into a truck and driven out of the Columbia Studio gates. The film was a financial failure and the popularity of the Monkees was already in decline,[7] but it has since emerged as a cult classic with a strong following.[citation needed]
Raybert's next project,
The New York Times critic Manohla Dargis has highlighted Rafelson and Schneider for founding "the groovy 1960s company Raybert (later known as BBS Productions) — and gave us Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, The Last Picture Show and Hearts and Minds, and lamenting the absence of such risk-taking companies today."[16]
Five Easy Pieces was written by Rafelson and Carole Eastman (under the alias Adrien Joyce) and starred Nicholson, Karen Black, and Susan Anspach. Nicholson plays Bobby Dupea, a gifted classical piano player who works on an oil rig in California and spends most of his time drinking beer and bowling with his put-upon girlfriend Rayette (Black). Bobby is constantly dissatisfied and a non-conformist, stating: "I move around a lot. Not because I'm looking for anything really, but to get away from things that go bad if I stay."[7] Bobby learns from his sister that his father has had a stroke and decides to travel back to his family home in the San Juan Islands in Washington state. He and Rayette go on a road trip to Washington, picking up two hippie hitch-hikers along the way and in the film's most notorious highlight, Bobby unsuccessfully battles with a waitress in a diner for an omelet with wheat toast. The scene ends with a violent sweeping of Bobby's arm clearing the table. "Do you see this sign!?" he blurts. True, it is derivative of Brando's close to precise action in A Streetcar named Desire but Bobby may have been channeling, as a trope, someone's behavior he'd seen in the movies. (To cool a possible dim view of Rafelson's suggested plagiarism, in 1996 in Blood and Wine a cinematic debriefing occurs where Nicholson accompanied by Michael Caine, in seeking a clear table for them both in a cafeteria, effects it by picking up a tray containing used utensils from one table and drops it to the floor in nonchalant simplicity.) Rafelson described Bobby as "a guy who is out of touch with his emotions."[7]
The film was a financial hit, earning $18 million at the box office, was widely admired by the critics, and was nominated for four
In his original 1970 review in the Chicago Sun-Times, film critic Roger Ebert called Five Easy Pieces "a masterpiece of heartbreaking intensity", adding, "The movie is joyously alive to the road life of its hero. . . . Robert Eroica Dupea is one of the most unforgettable characters in American movies." And, in his "Great Movies" essay on the film, Ebert reflected on seeing the impact of having seen it for the first time: "We'd had a revelation. This was the direction American movies should take: Into idiosyncratic characters, into dialogue with an ear for the vulgar and the literate, into a plot free to surprise us about the characters, into an existential ending not required to be happy." Ebert later included Five Easy Pieces in his "Great Movies" series.[17]
Rafelson's next film was The King of Marvin Gardens, released in 1972 through BBS. The film was written by Jacob Brackman, from a story by Rafelson and Brackman, and starred Jack Nicholson, Bruce Dern, Ellen Burstyn, Julia Anne Robinson, Scatman Crothers and Charles Lavine. The title refers to the original Atlantic City version of the Monopoly game board, where the misspelled and misplaced "Marvin Gardens" was one of the Yellow squares in the children's game of capitalistic success.[citation needed]
In the film, Nicholson plays David Staebler, a melancholy Philadelphia disk jockey who tells long, angst-ridden stories of his childhood over the radio and lives with his elderly Grandfather (Lavine). David receives a call from his extroverted con artist brother Jason (Dern) asking him to bail him out of jail in
The King of Marvin Gardens received mixed reviews and was not a financial success, although critics have since re-evaluated it. David Thomson wrote that it "may be an even better film" than Five Easy Pieces,[5] although it was the next-to-last film made by BBS. As Rafelson explained to Thomson, "I wanted to make my own pictures. And Bert was moving towards radical politics. He wanted to do Hearts and Minds [the 1974 documentary about the Vietnam war]."[5] Hearts and Minds (directed by Rafelson's friend of many decades, Peter Davis) won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature,[18] and was the last film to bear the BBS imprimatur[citation needed].
The late 1970s
Rafelson then spent more than a year researching a film that would never be made about the slave trade in Africa. He traveled over five thousand miles in West Africa and has said that he "lived the life of many of the characters that I'd read about." Rafelson then "wanted to turn to something more cheerful, to project a more exhilarating aspect of myself."
Bridges stars as Craig Blake, a millionaire in Alabama who has recently inherited his parents' fortune after their tragic deaths in a plane crash. He lives a lonely life in his mansion with only his butler (Crothers) to keep him company as he idles away his days. When he becomes involved in a shady investment firm, he visits the Olympic Spa gym, where bodybuilders are training for the upcoming Mr. Universe contest. He befriends bodybuilder Joe Santo (Schwarzenegger), who teaches him that "You can't grow without burning. I don't like to be too comfortable. Once you get used to it it's hard to give up. I like to stay hungry."[citation needed] He also begins dating the gym's receptionist Mary Tate (Field), but his upper-class friends do not approve of his new lower-class friends. In the end Blake chooses his new friends and buys the gym with Santo.[7] The film earned Rafelson and Gaines a nomination for Best Comedy Adapted from Another Medium from the Writers Guild of America,[citation needed] while Schwarzenegger received a Golden Globe for Best Acting Debut in a Motion Picture.[citation needed]
In 1978, Rafelson began production on the film
Later film career
Rafelson again teamed up with Jack Nicholson in 1981, directing him in their fourth collaboration, The Postman Always Rings Twice, based on the novel by James M. Cain which had been adapted as a film in 1946 with John Garfield and Lana Turner. The remake was written by David Mamet — the first screenplay by the playwright — and co-starred Jessica Lange. Nicholson plays a Depression-era drifter who happens upon a rural diner and becomes involved with the owner's wife in a plot to kill her husband. Rafelson has said of the film's reception, "The critics in America—at least when it first came out, now they have switched – didn't like it very much, but in France and in Germany and in Russia and in places that I have traveled since the making of this movie, this seems to have emerged as one of the movies that they like most of mine because of its unlikely romantic nature."[8] In France, in particular, he is considered an auteur.[22]
In 1987, Rafelson directed
Rafelson and Nicholson
Rafelson has been honored at numerous international film festivals, including in Argentina, Brazil, England, France, Greece, Japan, Serbia and Turkey, and has given many masterclasses.[citation needed] He contributed commentaries or interviews to the DVD or Blu-ray releases of Head, Five Easy Pieces, The King of Marvin Gardens, Stay Hungry, The Postman Always Rings Twice, and Blood and Wine. Rafelson has also contributed essays to the Los Angeles Times Magazine and John Brockman's collection The Greatest Inventions of the Past 2,000 Years.[citation needed]
Personal life
Bob Rafelson married Toby Carr in 1955. They lived near Aspen, Colorado, in a house "built in the '50s by a climber and his 11-year-old son" that Rafelson bought in 1970. "We live here and nowhere else," he said.
Rafelson married Gabrielle Taurek in 1999 and the couple had two sons, E.O. and Harper. He died from lung cancer at his home in Aspen on July 23, 2022, at the age of 89.[1][30][31]
Filmography
Films
Year | Title | Director | Writer | Producer | Notes |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
1968 | Head | Yes | Yes | Yes | Co-written with Jack Nicholson |
1970 | Five Easy Pieces | Yes | Story | Yes | Story co-written with Adrien Joyce |
1972 | The King of Marvin Gardens | Yes | Story | Yes | Story co-written with Jacob Brackman |
1976 | Stay Hungry | Yes | Yes | Yes | Co-written with Charles Gaines |
1981 | The Postman Always Rings Twice | Yes | No | Yes | |
Modesty | Yes | Yes | No | Short film[32] | |
1987 | Black Widow | Yes | No | No | |
1990 | Mountains of the Moon | Yes | Yes | No | Co-written with William Harrison |
1992 | Man Trouble | Yes | No | No | |
1994 | "Wet" | Yes | Yes | No | Short film later released in Tales of Erotica[33] |
1996 | Blood and Wine | Yes | Story | No | Story co-written with Nick Villiers |
2002 | No Good Deed | Yes | No | No | |
Porn.com | Yes | Yes | No | Short film[34] |
As uncredited producer[31]
Television
Year | Title | Notes |
---|---|---|
1995 | Picture Windows | Episode: "Armed Response" (E6) |
1998 | Poodle Springs | Made-for-television film |
References
- ^ a b Smith, Harrison (July 25, 2022). "Bob Rafelson, a New Hollywood renegade, dies at 89". Washington Post. Retrieved July 26, 2022.
- ISBN 9780307270528.
- ^ "Obituary for Donald Rafelson – Oregon Obituaries".[permanent dead link]
- ^ Bob Rafelson Biography (1933–)
- ^ a b c "BFI". Archived from the original on June 21, 2017. Retrieved April 5, 2014.
- ^ a b Biskind. p. 54.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o Wakeman, John. World Film Directors, Volume 2. The H. W. Wilson Company. 1988. pp. 821–826.
- ^ a b c d e f Filmjournal.com
- ^ Biskind. pp. 53–54.
- IMDb
- ^ Biskind, pp. 54–55
- ISBN 0-86719-378-6.
- ^ "Primetime Emmy Award Database".
- ^ "Bob Rafelson death: Monkees co-creator and New Hollywood era director dies, aged 89". July 25, 2022.
- ^ BFI
- Scott, A.O. (May 2, 2014). "Memos to Hollywood". The New York Times.
- ^ Ebert, Roger (March 16, 2003). "Five Easy Pieces movie review (1970)". www.rogerebert.com/. Retrieved December 5, 2021.
- ^ "NY Times: Hearts and Minds". Movies & TV Dept. The New York Times. 2009. Archived from the original on February 25, 2009. Retrieved July 25, 2022.
- ^ Canby, Vincent (April 26, 1976). "Stay Hungry (1976) Screen: 'Stay Hungry':Rafelson Film Is About 'New' South". The New York Times.
- ISBN 978-0571215485.
- ^ "Bob Rafelson Sues Fox Re 'Brubaker'". Variety. May 23, 1979. p. 7.
- ^ The Taming of a Hollywood Rebel, Chicago Tribune, Jeff Silverman, February 22, 1987. Retrieved June 11, 2020.
- ^ The Washington Post
- ^ Rogerebert.com
- ^ Jack Kroll, "In the heart of darkness", Newsweek, February 26, 1990
- ^ "24th Moscow International Film Festival (2002)". MIFF. Archived from the original on March 28, 2013. Retrieved March 30, 2013.
- ^ Michael Cleverly, "Director's Cut," Aspen Sojourner, Summer 2010
- ^ Biskind. p. 187.
- ^ "Peter Rafelson".
- ^ Koseluk, Chris (July 24, 2022). "Bob Rafelson, Director of 'Five Easy Pieces' and Co-Creator of 'The Monkees,' Dies at 89". The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved July 24, 2022.
- ^ a b Lim, Dennis (July 24, 2022). "Bob Rafelson, Director of 'Five Easy Pieces,' Dies at 89". The New York Times. Archived from the original on July 25, 2022. Retrieved July 24, 2022.
- ISBN 1-903364-52-3.
- ^ German Film & Literature. D. Holloway. 2000.
- ^ "Bob Rafelson". British Film Institute. Archived from the original on July 25, 2022. Retrieved July 25, 2022.
External links
- Bob Rafelson at IMDb
- Bob Rafelson discography at Discogs
- "Bob Rafelson and His Odd American Places" interview and essay by Peter Tonguette
- "The Monologist and the Fighter: An Interview with Bob Rafelson" by Rainer Knepperges and Franz Müller, Senses of Cinema.
- Sight and Sound magazine interview