Authorship and Post-Classical Hollywood" (2015)
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Old Dominion University ODU Digital Commons Communication & Theatre Arts Faculty Communication & Theatre Arts Publications 2015 Understanding Tony Scott: Authorship and Post- Classical Hollywood Robert Arnett Old Dominion University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/communication_fac_pubs Part of the Film Production Commons Repository Citation Arnett, Robert, "Understanding Tony Scott: Authorship and Post-Classical Hollywood" (2015). Communication & Theatre Arts Faculty Publications. 20. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/communication_fac_pubs/20 Original Publication Citation Arnett, R. (2015). Understanding Tony Scott: Authorship and Post-Classical Hollywood. Film Criticism, 39(3), 48-67. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Communication & Theatre Arts at ODU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Communication & Theatre Arts Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of ODU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Understanding Tony Scott: Authorship and Post-Classical Hollywood Robert Arnett Few directors represent post-classical Hollywood cinema better than Tony Scott. His Hollywood career arcs from the 1980s and the iconic Top Gun (1984) to 2010, with the underrated Unstoppable. Scott’s films innovated the fragmentation and excessiveness of the post-classical Hollywood films, including the ability to overwhelm to an extent that negates for many critics and academics the possibility of any substance. Of Tony Scott, David Thomson, in his massive The New Biographical Dictionary o f Film (2003), managed about 100— dismissive—words, issuing, in effect, a challenge: those that see something in Tony Scott have “the advantage over me” (794).1 What Thomson and others fail to see in Tony Scott’s all-too-short career is a Hollywood director with a distinct authorship in the post-classical context. Scott negotiated David Bordwell’s notion of “belatedness” in post-classical Hollywood and eventually established authorial identity. The key to Tony Scott’s authorial identity is the relationship with his older brother, Ridley Scott, who acted as mentor to Tony. The mentor-student becomes the dominant metaphor of Tony Scott’s authorship, along with a technology-as-film metaphor that provides the conflict in the relationship (e.g., the older and younger engineers 48 on the train in Unstoppable). Unlike his brother, who joined a group of directors who re-assemble B-movies into prestige A-movies, Tony Scott recreated the B-movie and the B-movie experience in the post- classical Hollywood context. In understanding Tony Scott, we find a director smuggling a personal expression, identifying with the heroes in many of his films, who, like his audience, wander a fragmented and difficult to comprehend physical and digital world looking for purpose. Post-Post and New-New Post-classical Hollywood filmmaking, especially as practiced by Tony Scott, would not be possible if the European Art Cinema and New Hollywood had not preceded it. Critics (e.g., Jenkins, 1995; Elsaesser, 1998; Smith, 1998; Kramer, 2000; Langford, 2010) acknowledge an emerging “New Hollywood” profoundly influenced by the directors of the European Art cinema as the classical studio system drew to an end in the 1970s. Whereas an oligopoly of studios enacted variations on a mode of production that characterized the classical, in the post-classical too many producers enact too many variations for too many audiences. In the language of the poststructuralists, changing modes of production destabilized Hollywood cinema. Much of the writing on post-classical Hollywood cinema attempts to stabilize the destabilized. Elsaesser, for example, corralled the post-classical Hollywood into “elements,” one being “New Media Ownership and Management Styles” (191). Langford’s The Post-Classical Cinema lays out the industrial/business history, pre- and post-1970s, in great detail, and Dixon (2001) surveys some of the same developments, but focuses on the 1990s and technology development with a title that suggests a common attitude: “Twenty-five Reasons Why It’s All Over.” Covering much of the same ownership/industry ground, David Denby asks in the title of his book, Do the Movies Have a Future? (2012). Academic industry watchers fret over direction and try to discern a grand meaning (e.g., “it” apparently is all over), but only a few, such Thomas Elsaesser’s essay on Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Kramer’s post-classical chapter in American Cinema and Hollywood, push beyond the industry ruptures to find meaning in the films, either in genre, authorship, or cultural concerns. Similarly, little has been written of Tony Scott—no books and only three significant academic essays (Huber and Paranson, 2007; Anderson, 2008; and Knapp, 2008), and one dissertation from Australia (Taylor, 2006). 49 Elsaesser also suggests the element of “A New Generation of Directors.” By that, he returns to the oft-covered New Hollywood of the 1970s. And while Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg were new in the 1970s, such is no longer the case. Beginning in the late 1970s, many waves of New directors flowed into and out of Hollywood. Tony Scott belongs to a second wave of British directors. Second, that is, to the directors of the British New Wave of the 1960s (e.g., Tony Richardson, Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz), who experienced some success in Hollywood but faded during the 1970s. The mega producers of the late 1970s and early 1980s, such as Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson and Joel Silver, had little interest in auteur-oriented American directors of the New Hollywood, because by the late 1970s, New Hollywood had produced an array of expensive flops: Scorsese’s New York, New York (1977), William Friedkin’s Sorcerer (1977) and The Brink’s Job (1978), Spielberg’s 1941 (1979), Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980), and Francis Ford Coppola’s One From the Heart (1982). Young directors from England, who came to prominence by directing television commercial, and who had recently completed a first feature film, filled the bill. The core of the British Second Wave consists of Hugh Hudson, Ridley Scott, Adrian Lyne, Tony Scott, and Alan Parker.2 Their education during the 1960s included art and film training, and all landed jobs in advertising that lead to directing commercials. The Second Wave grew up with an awareness of Classical Hollywood in transition. As students in the 1960s, the Second Wave directors developed passions for the art cinema of the late 1950s and 1960s. Tony Scott attended the Sunderland Art School, where “[I] ran the Film Society there—I was the projectionist, . Roman Polanski was my man. I suppose the darkness of Polanski attracted me” (Figgis 128). Later Scott claimed, “My first movie, The Hunger, was a direct knock-off of [Nicolas Roeg’s] movie Performance” (Morgan). Like their American counterparts, the Second Wave came to their careers in feature films with a keen awareness of their position in film history. Ridley Scott developed a prominent advertising company (RSA or Ridley Scott Associates). After directing Alien (1979) and Blade Runner (1982), Ridley Scott directed the famous Apple Macintosh commercial that first aired during the 1984 Super Bowl and is widely considered one of the all-time best commercials (Parrill 23). Ridley Scott offered Tony the opportunity to direct commercials once Tony had completed film school. According to Tony Scott: 50 I shot commercials for ten years . 1 cornered the market in fashion commercials. It was the best training I could have gotten, you know. I’d shoot a hundred days a year. I turned more film than most feature directors turn in a year, you know. It was fun, and very lucrative. I won lots of awards, but, most of all, I got to understand my craft. I got to understand how to communicate with a crew and how to get non-actors to perform for you. (Emery, Four 22-23) Directing commercials became, in effect, an education that included not only learning the technical matters of the craft, but also learning to sell with images.3 The first film from each director did little box office, yet achieved an important goal in helping land a second feature with a powerful Hollywood producer. Alan Parker led off with Bugsy Malone (1976), which begat the more commercially and critically successful Midnight Express (1978), produced by Peter Guber, and Alan Marshall, David Putnam. Ridley Scott followed The Duellists (1977) with Alien, produced by David Giler, Walter Hill, and Gordon Carroll. For Adrian Lyne, first Foxes (1980) then Flashdance (1983), Bruckheimer and Simpson, producers. For Tony Scott, The Hunger (1983) preceded Top Gun, also produced by Bruckheimer and Simpson. Producers like Bruckheimer and Simpson saw the combination of a feature film and the advertising experience as the necessary training for their directors. Not surprisingly, Jerry Bruckheimer started in advertising (Pollack 2006). He and Simpson became mega-producers not only in the amount of money their films made, but also in establishing more authorial control for the producer (most of their films reaffirm the ideology of Ronald Reagan’s conservative America of the 1980s). In Peter Biskind’s words, “The megaproducers didn’t want to use New Hollywood veterans like Friedkin because these directors were too powerful, independent, and costly. Simpson and Joel Silver preferred novices they could hire for a song and push around, like Adrian Lyne or Tony Scott” (414). What Biskind reads as “pushed around” may have been experienced professionals delivering a product for a major client. The British Second Wave, then, is one of many “generation of directors” fragments to spin out from the 1980s. They followed the New Hollywood directors of the 1970s and paralleled the 2.0 phase of 51 the surviving New Hollywood directors, like Spielberg, Scorsese, and De Palma. They also ran parallel to a wave of Australian directors in Hollywood (e.g., Peter Weir, both George Millers, Bruce Beresford) and preceded the Indie Directors emerging in the late 1980s and 1990s (e.g., Sam Raimi, the Coen Brothers, Quentin Tarantino, Atom Egoyan, Steven Soderbergh).