Subject
Lo film-Blades-17Apr97
Date
Body
From: Alphonse Vinh
----------------------------------------------
THE TROUBLE WITH `LOLITA A NEW $40 MILLION MOVIE VERSION OF
NABOKOV'S NOVEL HAS BEEN SHUNNED BY DISTRIBUTORS. THE FILMMAKERS
APPARENTLY PICKED THE WRONG TIME FOR A FILM ABOUT PEDOPHILIA.
John Blades, Chicago Tribune
When the 1962 film of Vladimir Nabokov's scandalous novel
opened in theaters, the posters and newspaper ads teased: "How did
they ever make a movie of `Lolita'?"
Three decades later, the news that Nabokov's nymphet has
undergone a Hollywood makeover provoked another question: "Why
would they ever want to remake `Lolita'?"
That was the response of hard-nosed feminist Susan
Brownmiller, who promptly answered her own question: "Because
Hollywood does everything again and again. Look how many times
they've remade `Little Women.' They're creatively bankrupt"
Bankruptcy, creative or otherwise, was surely the last thing
that occurred to either producer Mario Kassar or director Adrian
Lyne when they spent nearly $40 million to revamp Nabokov's
subversive seriocomedy about a "little woman" -12-year-old
Lolita-who becomes the pubescent concubine of her wicked
stepfather, Humbert Humbert.
Because the first "Lolita" film had to be considerably
desexed and bowdlerized by director Stanley Kubrick in the
repressed and repressive '60s, Kassar and Lyne must have assumed it
was time for a more "faithful" version. Unlike Kubrick, they could
explicitly show the erotic couplings of Lo and Hum, even though
Nabokov himself left them to readers' imaginations.
But times have changed -- in ways that the filmmakers hadn't
anticipated. With the murder of 6-year-old Colorado beauty queen
JonBenet Ramsey and the media fixation on child molestation, they
may have chosen the wrong moment for a graphic remake of a novel
about pedophilia, even one as perversely funny and as sensuously
written as "Lolita." As Brownmiller, author of "Against Our Will,"
the landmark book about rape, put it: "A new `Lolita' is in very
poor taste."
Poor taste isn't the half of it. More likely, the prospect of
poor box office, or worse, may be responsible for the hazardous
fortunes of the latest "Lolita." Finished more than a year ago,
"Lolita" still hasn't been picked up by a distributor. And
according to the worst-case scenarios, "Lolita" is considered so
objectionable and/or uncommercial that it may never never be shown
in multiplexes, despite director Lyne's streak of blockbusters
("Flashdance," "Fatal Attraction" and "Indecent Proposal").
Alfred Appel Jr., perhaps the country's No. 1 Nabokovian and
editor of "The Annotated Lolita," speculated that the movie's
"salacious reputation" has frightened off distributors. "They (the
filmmakers) are saying that there's no difficulty, that the movie
is being recut, but that's nonsense. It's actually more dangerous
for the film to be released now than in 1962 because of new laws on
child exploitation and pornography."
A professor of English and American culture at Northwestern,
Appel has taught "Lolita" in his classrooms since the early '60s,
when pedophilia was fantasy to most of his students. "They didn't
believe there was such a thing. I used to have to remind them that
Humbert was a criminal. Until 10 or 12 years ago, pedophilia just
wasn't talked about. Now nobody will stop talking about it."
Not just talking about it -- on "Oprah" and "Jerry Springer,"
"Dateline" and "PrimeTime Live," "Entertainment Tonight" and the 10
o'clock news -- but writing about it as well, whether in newspaper
stories about predatory clerics or books about depraved fathers
(Jane Smiley's "A Thousand Acres" and Kathryn Harrison's "The
Kiss"). As Appel suggests, pedophilia has emerged from the media
closet and become a hot topic, along with voyeurism, incest, kiddie
porn and other erstwhile taboos.
Nobody needs to be reminded that pedophilia is a punishable
offense these days. That point was most sensationally made with the
conviction of Mel Reynolds for criminal sexual abuse and child
pornography. "Did I win the Lotto?" the 43-year-old congressman
reportedly asked when negotiating a tryst with a 15-year-old
schoolgirl. After the Reynolds case, readers -- and viewers -- may
not look so tolerantly on Humbert Humbert's nymphet mania, his
aberrant peccadillos, nor be so easily dazzled and distracted by
Nabokov's opulent, alliterative prose, his mischievous humor and
his Joycean mastery of allusions, puns and pastiches. In their
eyes, "Lolita" is no longer a virtuoso "parody of incest," but a
repugnant and inhuman comedy.
Unexpected trouble
For those and other reasons, Hollywood gossips have
pronounced "Lolita" dead. But the obituaries are premature,
insisted Stephen Schiff, the New Yorker magazine journalist and
critic who wrote the screenplay, after drafts by Tom Stoppard,
Harold Pinter and David Mamet were scrapped. "We're in the middle
of big money negotiations. But I've been asked not to talk to the
press by my handlers. If I'm quoted I'll get into immediate
trouble."
Director Lyne had already run into unexpected trouble by
inviting reporters from Vanity Fair and Esquire to watch the
filming, a routine publicity ploy that may have sabotaged the movie
for mainstream distributors. Esquire featured nymphet Dominique
Swain on the cover, seductively licking her finger. Headlined
"Lolita Comes Again," the story recapped the more infamous cases of
child abuse during the last decade, then described how the sex
scenes between Swain and Jeremy Irons, playing Humbert, "simply
became the work at hand" during the shooting.
More damaging, perhaps, was the Vanity Fair article. It
opened with Lyne screening rough footage of Irons/Humbert making
love to Dominique/Lolita while she reads the funny papers. "Her
budding breasts, bare belly, and shoulders heave and glisten," the
Vanity Fair scribe wrote. "Lyne's voice, off camera, says,
`Brilliant. Move your --- more. . . . It's beautiful. Arch your
back a bit, darling.' "
Among the previewers was Vladimir Nabokov's son, Dimitri, who
had sold the remake rights to "Lolita" for $1 million and was
serving as unofficial consultant to assure "artistic integrity."
When the love scene ended and the lights went up, according to
Vanity Fair's reporter, Nabokov's "ashen face suggests he believes
his father is soon going to rise from the grave and come for him.
`Oh boy,' he says."
From all accounts, it wasn't just the stigma of pedophilia
that made the new and presumably unexpurgated "Lolita" too hot for
distributors to handle. Back in the '60s, Kubrick's chief obstacles
were the Production Code, the Catholic Legion of Decency and other
censorial organizations. But, as Vanity Fair noted, the new
"Lolita" could be vulnerable to prosecution under the Child
Pornography Prevention Act of 1996, which makes it a crime to
visually depict, or even appear to depict, "a minor engaging in
sexually explicit conduct."
When "Lolita" was shot, the 15-year-old Swain, who's making
her film debut, was already over the hill for a nymphet (a year
older than Kubrick's Lolita, Sue Lyon, whose voluptuous figure was
one of the earlier film's more visible compromises). Elaborating on
his passion for "girl-children," Nabokov's Humbert specifies that
the object of a "nympholept's" desire must be between the ages of 9
and 14 and endowed with "fey grace" and "elusive, shifty,
soul-shattering, insidious charm."
However delicately expressed, Humbert's cravings, which turn
him into a "hell furnace of localized lust for every passing
nymphet," are not just "degrading and dangerous" but criminal, as
he acknowledges in his confessional narrative. And it's a crime
that may be more liable to prosecution now than it was then,
whether committed in private or simulated for movie audiences.
Even if the sex is trimmed to a legal minimum, said Alfred
Appel, whose books include "Nabokov's Dark Cinema," the movie is
still likely to alienate connoisseurs of "Lolita" by violating the
artistry and inimitable spirit of the novel. "Nabokov almost gets
away with murder because there's hardly any explicit sex in the
book," he said. "That's why readers feel such extraordinary
sympathy for Humbert and Lolita."
Opponents are lining up
Judging by "Fatal Attraction" and "Indecent Proposal," Lyne's
movies are more notable for their flashy visuals than for
sympathetic, or even likable, characters, said Appel, a student and
later a friend of the novelist, who died in 1977. "Lyne's vulgarity
is really quite evident. . . . I groan and shiver at the thought of
seeing `Lolita' in pornographic soft focus."
The thought was just as chilling to Florence Rush, who
dissected "Lolita" in her book about child abuse, "The Best Kept
Secret." Rush picketed the Edward Albee adaptation of "Lolita,"
during its brief and disastrous 1982 Broadway production, and
participated in the feminist protest against "The People vs. Larry
Flynt." She's ready to take on the new film of "Lolita" if it
portrays the pubescent heroine as "a naughty little girl," rather
than a victim of Humbert's depravity. "The only reason they might
want to make another movie of `Lolita,' " said Rush, "is because
sex sells. Even child-adult sex."
But fears that Lyne has turned "Lolita" into kiddie porn may
be unwarranted, judging by the testimony of an executive for a
major studio, who saw it at a screening for distributors. Though he
passed on the movie, the executive (who asked not to be identified)
called it "brilliant in many respects. The performances are
wonderful, particularly Jeremy Irons', and the nudity and sex are
handled beautifully.
"But it's very hard to deal with the downbeat ending and the
graphic sexuality of the characters. When the book came out in the
late '50s, and the first movie in 1962, you didn't know where it
was going. But in the years since, we've all been exposed to the
horrible reality so often that we're uncomfortable right from the
start. It's a very disturbing film. Because of the quality
treatment, you can defend its right to be seen. But the subject
matter is indefensible."
The studio executive had little doubt that "Lolita" would
eventually be picked up by a distributor. "But it's not an
inexpensive movie, and it's going to be tough to find one that's
willing to take a major financial risk and go against a feeling of
social responsibility."
No matter how skillfully or faithfully it's made, Appel
questioned the wisdom of making "Lolita" in the first place. Along
with "Ulysses" and "The Great Gatsby," he asserted, " `Lolita' is a
perfect example of a book that shouldn't be filmed. Any book with a
great verbal texture or written in the first person just defies a
cinematic equivalent."
Kubrick's version of "Lolita" came close to finding one,
Appel added, but only in the improvised opening scene, when Humbert
(James Mason) plays Ping-Pong with the dissolute playwright, Clare
Quilty (Peter Sellers), then shoots him to death for running off
with Lolita. "If you don't know the book," said Appel, "it's not a
bad movie at all."
Considering the difficulty Nabokov had in getting the book
published, as well as the subsequent notoriety, Kubrick must have
been expecting trouble, if not slyly inviting it. "Lolita" was
rejected by four American publishers (with Simon & Schuster's
editors labeling it "sheer pornography") before it was brought out
in 1955 by the Olympia Press, which was headquartered in Paris and
had a well-deserved reputation for pornography, sheer and
otherwise. Three years later, Putnam published "Lolita" in America,
to great controversy and everlasting acclaim.
Film's creators express doubts
If "Lolita" were a new kid on the publishing block, how would
it be greeted by publishers today? With wide-open arms, said Jason
Epstein, executive editor of Random House, who serialized Nabokov's
novel in the Anchor Review, which he edited in the '50s. "Somebody
might try to get some publicity by making a scene. But I don't
think so. There was really no problem back then. It was just that
some publishers panicked."
But the movie "Lolita" is different story, said Epstein,
who's as skeptical as Appel about converting Nabokov's book onto
film. "You lose a whole dimension and you're left with the plot,
which is really a pretext for the language. How do you make a movie
out of that? You can't."
Up to a point, director Lyne and screenwriter Schiff seem to
concur. "It's such a bloody marvelous book that, no matter what you
do . . . you're doomed to failure," the British-born director told
Vanity Fair. "So why not have a go?"
In an interview published on-line before he was silenced by
his "handlers," Schiff also admitted defeat in trying to capture
the "ornate curlicues" of Nabokov's prose, which "simply don't work
in a movie. . ."
"I would never claim that we are filming Vladimir Nabokov's
`Lolita,' " he added. "I would say only that we are attempting to
translate into a kind of exciting sign language--the language of
film--what one of the century's greatest masters of prose rendered
so incomparably on the page."
If Schiff and Lyne had read Nabokov's book a little more
carefully, they might have clearly understood the potential folly
of their enterprise and scrubbed it. As Humbert says on the first
page: "Look at this tangle of thorns."
----------------------------------------------
THE TROUBLE WITH `LOLITA A NEW $40 MILLION MOVIE VERSION OF
NABOKOV'S NOVEL HAS BEEN SHUNNED BY DISTRIBUTORS. THE FILMMAKERS
APPARENTLY PICKED THE WRONG TIME FOR A FILM ABOUT PEDOPHILIA.
John Blades, Chicago Tribune
When the 1962 film of Vladimir Nabokov's scandalous novel
opened in theaters, the posters and newspaper ads teased: "How did
they ever make a movie of `Lolita'?"
Three decades later, the news that Nabokov's nymphet has
undergone a Hollywood makeover provoked another question: "Why
would they ever want to remake `Lolita'?"
That was the response of hard-nosed feminist Susan
Brownmiller, who promptly answered her own question: "Because
Hollywood does everything again and again. Look how many times
they've remade `Little Women.' They're creatively bankrupt"
Bankruptcy, creative or otherwise, was surely the last thing
that occurred to either producer Mario Kassar or director Adrian
Lyne when they spent nearly $40 million to revamp Nabokov's
subversive seriocomedy about a "little woman" -12-year-old
Lolita-who becomes the pubescent concubine of her wicked
stepfather, Humbert Humbert.
Because the first "Lolita" film had to be considerably
desexed and bowdlerized by director Stanley Kubrick in the
repressed and repressive '60s, Kassar and Lyne must have assumed it
was time for a more "faithful" version. Unlike Kubrick, they could
explicitly show the erotic couplings of Lo and Hum, even though
Nabokov himself left them to readers' imaginations.
But times have changed -- in ways that the filmmakers hadn't
anticipated. With the murder of 6-year-old Colorado beauty queen
JonBenet Ramsey and the media fixation on child molestation, they
may have chosen the wrong moment for a graphic remake of a novel
about pedophilia, even one as perversely funny and as sensuously
written as "Lolita." As Brownmiller, author of "Against Our Will,"
the landmark book about rape, put it: "A new `Lolita' is in very
poor taste."
Poor taste isn't the half of it. More likely, the prospect of
poor box office, or worse, may be responsible for the hazardous
fortunes of the latest "Lolita." Finished more than a year ago,
"Lolita" still hasn't been picked up by a distributor. And
according to the worst-case scenarios, "Lolita" is considered so
objectionable and/or uncommercial that it may never never be shown
in multiplexes, despite director Lyne's streak of blockbusters
("Flashdance," "Fatal Attraction" and "Indecent Proposal").
Alfred Appel Jr., perhaps the country's No. 1 Nabokovian and
editor of "The Annotated Lolita," speculated that the movie's
"salacious reputation" has frightened off distributors. "They (the
filmmakers) are saying that there's no difficulty, that the movie
is being recut, but that's nonsense. It's actually more dangerous
for the film to be released now than in 1962 because of new laws on
child exploitation and pornography."
A professor of English and American culture at Northwestern,
Appel has taught "Lolita" in his classrooms since the early '60s,
when pedophilia was fantasy to most of his students. "They didn't
believe there was such a thing. I used to have to remind them that
Humbert was a criminal. Until 10 or 12 years ago, pedophilia just
wasn't talked about. Now nobody will stop talking about it."
Not just talking about it -- on "Oprah" and "Jerry Springer,"
"Dateline" and "PrimeTime Live," "Entertainment Tonight" and the 10
o'clock news -- but writing about it as well, whether in newspaper
stories about predatory clerics or books about depraved fathers
(Jane Smiley's "A Thousand Acres" and Kathryn Harrison's "The
Kiss"). As Appel suggests, pedophilia has emerged from the media
closet and become a hot topic, along with voyeurism, incest, kiddie
porn and other erstwhile taboos.
Nobody needs to be reminded that pedophilia is a punishable
offense these days. That point was most sensationally made with the
conviction of Mel Reynolds for criminal sexual abuse and child
pornography. "Did I win the Lotto?" the 43-year-old congressman
reportedly asked when negotiating a tryst with a 15-year-old
schoolgirl. After the Reynolds case, readers -- and viewers -- may
not look so tolerantly on Humbert Humbert's nymphet mania, his
aberrant peccadillos, nor be so easily dazzled and distracted by
Nabokov's opulent, alliterative prose, his mischievous humor and
his Joycean mastery of allusions, puns and pastiches. In their
eyes, "Lolita" is no longer a virtuoso "parody of incest," but a
repugnant and inhuman comedy.
Unexpected trouble
For those and other reasons, Hollywood gossips have
pronounced "Lolita" dead. But the obituaries are premature,
insisted Stephen Schiff, the New Yorker magazine journalist and
critic who wrote the screenplay, after drafts by Tom Stoppard,
Harold Pinter and David Mamet were scrapped. "We're in the middle
of big money negotiations. But I've been asked not to talk to the
press by my handlers. If I'm quoted I'll get into immediate
trouble."
Director Lyne had already run into unexpected trouble by
inviting reporters from Vanity Fair and Esquire to watch the
filming, a routine publicity ploy that may have sabotaged the movie
for mainstream distributors. Esquire featured nymphet Dominique
Swain on the cover, seductively licking her finger. Headlined
"Lolita Comes Again," the story recapped the more infamous cases of
child abuse during the last decade, then described how the sex
scenes between Swain and Jeremy Irons, playing Humbert, "simply
became the work at hand" during the shooting.
More damaging, perhaps, was the Vanity Fair article. It
opened with Lyne screening rough footage of Irons/Humbert making
love to Dominique/Lolita while she reads the funny papers. "Her
budding breasts, bare belly, and shoulders heave and glisten," the
Vanity Fair scribe wrote. "Lyne's voice, off camera, says,
`Brilliant. Move your --- more. . . . It's beautiful. Arch your
back a bit, darling.' "
Among the previewers was Vladimir Nabokov's son, Dimitri, who
had sold the remake rights to "Lolita" for $1 million and was
serving as unofficial consultant to assure "artistic integrity."
When the love scene ended and the lights went up, according to
Vanity Fair's reporter, Nabokov's "ashen face suggests he believes
his father is soon going to rise from the grave and come for him.
`Oh boy,' he says."
From all accounts, it wasn't just the stigma of pedophilia
that made the new and presumably unexpurgated "Lolita" too hot for
distributors to handle. Back in the '60s, Kubrick's chief obstacles
were the Production Code, the Catholic Legion of Decency and other
censorial organizations. But, as Vanity Fair noted, the new
"Lolita" could be vulnerable to prosecution under the Child
Pornography Prevention Act of 1996, which makes it a crime to
visually depict, or even appear to depict, "a minor engaging in
sexually explicit conduct."
When "Lolita" was shot, the 15-year-old Swain, who's making
her film debut, was already over the hill for a nymphet (a year
older than Kubrick's Lolita, Sue Lyon, whose voluptuous figure was
one of the earlier film's more visible compromises). Elaborating on
his passion for "girl-children," Nabokov's Humbert specifies that
the object of a "nympholept's" desire must be between the ages of 9
and 14 and endowed with "fey grace" and "elusive, shifty,
soul-shattering, insidious charm."
However delicately expressed, Humbert's cravings, which turn
him into a "hell furnace of localized lust for every passing
nymphet," are not just "degrading and dangerous" but criminal, as
he acknowledges in his confessional narrative. And it's a crime
that may be more liable to prosecution now than it was then,
whether committed in private or simulated for movie audiences.
Even if the sex is trimmed to a legal minimum, said Alfred
Appel, whose books include "Nabokov's Dark Cinema," the movie is
still likely to alienate connoisseurs of "Lolita" by violating the
artistry and inimitable spirit of the novel. "Nabokov almost gets
away with murder because there's hardly any explicit sex in the
book," he said. "That's why readers feel such extraordinary
sympathy for Humbert and Lolita."
Opponents are lining up
Judging by "Fatal Attraction" and "Indecent Proposal," Lyne's
movies are more notable for their flashy visuals than for
sympathetic, or even likable, characters, said Appel, a student and
later a friend of the novelist, who died in 1977. "Lyne's vulgarity
is really quite evident. . . . I groan and shiver at the thought of
seeing `Lolita' in pornographic soft focus."
The thought was just as chilling to Florence Rush, who
dissected "Lolita" in her book about child abuse, "The Best Kept
Secret." Rush picketed the Edward Albee adaptation of "Lolita,"
during its brief and disastrous 1982 Broadway production, and
participated in the feminist protest against "The People vs. Larry
Flynt." She's ready to take on the new film of "Lolita" if it
portrays the pubescent heroine as "a naughty little girl," rather
than a victim of Humbert's depravity. "The only reason they might
want to make another movie of `Lolita,' " said Rush, "is because
sex sells. Even child-adult sex."
But fears that Lyne has turned "Lolita" into kiddie porn may
be unwarranted, judging by the testimony of an executive for a
major studio, who saw it at a screening for distributors. Though he
passed on the movie, the executive (who asked not to be identified)
called it "brilliant in many respects. The performances are
wonderful, particularly Jeremy Irons', and the nudity and sex are
handled beautifully.
"But it's very hard to deal with the downbeat ending and the
graphic sexuality of the characters. When the book came out in the
late '50s, and the first movie in 1962, you didn't know where it
was going. But in the years since, we've all been exposed to the
horrible reality so often that we're uncomfortable right from the
start. It's a very disturbing film. Because of the quality
treatment, you can defend its right to be seen. But the subject
matter is indefensible."
The studio executive had little doubt that "Lolita" would
eventually be picked up by a distributor. "But it's not an
inexpensive movie, and it's going to be tough to find one that's
willing to take a major financial risk and go against a feeling of
social responsibility."
No matter how skillfully or faithfully it's made, Appel
questioned the wisdom of making "Lolita" in the first place. Along
with "Ulysses" and "The Great Gatsby," he asserted, " `Lolita' is a
perfect example of a book that shouldn't be filmed. Any book with a
great verbal texture or written in the first person just defies a
cinematic equivalent."
Kubrick's version of "Lolita" came close to finding one,
Appel added, but only in the improvised opening scene, when Humbert
(James Mason) plays Ping-Pong with the dissolute playwright, Clare
Quilty (Peter Sellers), then shoots him to death for running off
with Lolita. "If you don't know the book," said Appel, "it's not a
bad movie at all."
Considering the difficulty Nabokov had in getting the book
published, as well as the subsequent notoriety, Kubrick must have
been expecting trouble, if not slyly inviting it. "Lolita" was
rejected by four American publishers (with Simon & Schuster's
editors labeling it "sheer pornography") before it was brought out
in 1955 by the Olympia Press, which was headquartered in Paris and
had a well-deserved reputation for pornography, sheer and
otherwise. Three years later, Putnam published "Lolita" in America,
to great controversy and everlasting acclaim.
Film's creators express doubts
If "Lolita" were a new kid on the publishing block, how would
it be greeted by publishers today? With wide-open arms, said Jason
Epstein, executive editor of Random House, who serialized Nabokov's
novel in the Anchor Review, which he edited in the '50s. "Somebody
might try to get some publicity by making a scene. But I don't
think so. There was really no problem back then. It was just that
some publishers panicked."
But the movie "Lolita" is different story, said Epstein,
who's as skeptical as Appel about converting Nabokov's book onto
film. "You lose a whole dimension and you're left with the plot,
which is really a pretext for the language. How do you make a movie
out of that? You can't."
Up to a point, director Lyne and screenwriter Schiff seem to
concur. "It's such a bloody marvelous book that, no matter what you
do . . . you're doomed to failure," the British-born director told
Vanity Fair. "So why not have a go?"
In an interview published on-line before he was silenced by
his "handlers," Schiff also admitted defeat in trying to capture
the "ornate curlicues" of Nabokov's prose, which "simply don't work
in a movie. . ."
"I would never claim that we are filming Vladimir Nabokov's
`Lolita,' " he added. "I would say only that we are attempting to
translate into a kind of exciting sign language--the language of
film--what one of the century's greatest masters of prose rendered
so incomparably on the page."
If Schiff and Lyne had read Nabokov's book a little more
carefully, they might have clearly understood the potential folly
of their enterprise and scrubbed it. As Humbert says on the first
page: "Look at this tangle of thorns."