The Fabelmans and the lions in winter

It’s central to this movie’s appeal that it could have been titled: Young Steven Spielberg.

The Fabelmans tells the story of a young boy who is taken to a John Ford movie — The Greatest Show on Earth — and becomes obsessed with it and then transfers that obsession into a love of making movies.

As the movie continues, the boy’s father, played by Paul Dano, and mother (Michelle Williams), grow apart and eventually divorce. The father is an engineer and the mother should have been a concert pianist.

Their differences are on display in nearly every conversation they have with the boy. The father explains in painstaking detail how a projector works, and the mother talks of art and love.

The boy’s childhood is spent making movies with his sisters, then his boy scout friends, and eventually his entire high school class. The boy is his mother’s son and pursues art at every turn. But his father is in him too. At one point he figures out how to make the fake guns in his western look like they are really firing.

The father’s engineering and computing career takes off and he moves the family twice. In response, his mother buys a monkey.

That these people stayed married long enough for the boy to be in high school is a damn miracle.

Meanwhile, he faces a series of personal issues that threaten his commitment to what should be his career. At one point the boy, (Gabriel LaBelle) has something intensely personal to tell his mother. He’s found it in the movies he was shooting.

But he can’t say it out loud. And that leads to a long bit of tension between the two until it eventually erupts. Finally, he still can’t say it, so he pulls out the reel of film and plays it for her.

And I thought, “yeah kid, you’re either going to be a director one day or dead at an early age.”

You needn’t worry, Young Steven Spielberg did quite well for himself.

One by one, our old friends are gone. Death, natural or not, prison, deported.

The Godfather: Part II

When I left the theater I found myself thinking of the men of Spielberg’s generation and where they are now. I was born in 1978 and so the raging bulls — Spielberg, George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, and Martin Scorcese — loomed over most of my film-going life. There are more names that deserve to be on that list but when I think of one of them I almost always think of these four guys together.

George of course is the easiest to peg. He sold Star Wars and Indiana to the Mouse and retired. As the years have gone by the prequels have grown in stature and his achievements have been reassessed but it seems clear that he never really recovered after the fans reacted so negatively to the new trilogy.

The thing I remember the most about him is that he kept saying that he wanted to make more small movies, more things like THX 1138, but Star Wars consumed his life. The franchise that is Star Wars has had ups and downs but it seems in good hands now.

Much of the movies we watched, or the books we read, even the things that consumed the entire world for a season will fade away. Quick, what was the biggest box office hit of 2019? Of 2003? Of 1983? Of 1963?

These things leave us. But Star Wars will most likely stand forever. He never made those small movies, he’ll have to settle for changing the world.

Francis is off chasing one more crazy dream. It took him 40 years to be willing to pursue another one after the hell he went through on Apocalypse Now.

“My film is not a movie. My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam. It’s what it was really like. It was crazy. And the way we made it was very much like the way the Americans were in Vietnam. We were in the jungle. There were too many of us. We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little, we went insane.”

Francis Ford Coppola at a 1979 news conference.

His new movie, apparently filming now, is called Megalopolis. In an interview, he’s comparing it favorably to Apocalypse Now. I think he’s also financed or nearly financed it with $100 million of his own money.

“Now with “Megalopolis” I would like to make a Roman epic with the story of an architect who wants to rebuild a utopian New York City after a devastating disaster,” Coppola told GQ.

This is either going to be a world conquerer or a flop. God Bless him, but Francis has decided he will not go quietly into the night.

And Marty, who was once going to be a priest, and is now the Pope of cinema. To hear some tell it Marty presides over the Council of Bishops and they cast their favors over what is and what is not real cinema.

He really got under their skin by telling people what he thought and why. It reminded me of the time Roger Ebert said, “Video games can never be art.”

Ebert said it, he believed it, and he caught a lot of online scorn and hatred about it. And now, I suspect, most of the world has completely forgotten about it. Tomorrow we shall be angry at someone else we disagree with.

Marty should say whatever he wants about anything he likes or dislikes. He’s earned it. He’s one of the world’s great directors. I think the real issue though, is not what is being made, it’s that Marty remembers what it used to be like when he and George, and Francis, and Steven were young.

Back then, the people with the money might take a chance on a weird science fiction romp that blends World War II fighter pilots with Arthurian legend. They might do a divorce movie with aliens with the boy from the back lot who gave them Jaws. They’d let a sickly kid from the city explore the Mean Streets and come back with a story about a psychopath who is obsessed with street crime and women.

How was he to know that the end of Casino would be an elegy for the Hollywood he loved too?

The town will never be the same. After the Tangiers, the big corporations took it all over. Today it looks like Disneyland. And while the kids play cardboard pirates, Mommy and Daddy drop the house payments and Junior’s college money on the poker slots. In the old days, dealers knew your name, what you drank, what you played. Today, it’s like checkin’ into an airport. And if you order room service, you’re lucky if you get it by Thursday. Today, it’s all gone.

Casino

But Marty’s still out there making movies and tilting at the windmills. He and Spielberg will probably die on the same day. Like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, each of them, I suspect, hunched over in an editing bay.

And this year, Steven has retreated into his boyhood. They say he cried every day on set because he was, truly, bringing these painful times back to life. Sitting Shiva not just for his mother and his father but his own youth, and the dreams you have when you’re young and you don’t yet know the cost.

There comes a point in your life when you realize how temporary all of this really is. That everyone you love, and nearly everything you love will just one day be gone. And you’ll be gone too. Even the memories of you will fade as the world moves on.

But if anything has a chance at it, if anything is immortal at all, it’s the great movies.