When two of these features—Beyond the Law and Weekend—screened at the New York Film Festival in 1968, we received a lot of attention for a party we gave at the event. We had rented a large nightclub, and Amos Vogel sent out the invitations. You couldn’t get inside unless you were on his list. Three very tough guys arrived and said, “We’re coming in.” Amos said no, and they came charging into the party. I was standing at the door, and the next thing I knew I was on the floor with my glasses rolling around. But somehow it had a comic aspect. I asked them what they were doing and they said, “Oh, you guys are all conservatives.” And I said, “Look at the walls!” I had hung Brecht posters all over the place. They looked around, apologized, and left. Mailer had a violent argument with his wife at the party, and Godard never showed up. Life magazine ran photos, and the New York Times noted that people like François Truffaut and Jeanne Moreau were left standing on the sidewalk because the party was so overcrowded, unlike the box offices for these films when they were released.
Earlier I mentioned Norman Mailer’s film Maidstone, which we did in the Hamptons. It had a very promising premise. Supposedly there are two teams of CIA people, one of which thinks it’s a good idea to assassinate the character Mailer plays, a would-be presidential aspirant, and another that wants him to get elected and not killed. The actors were each given a chip indicating which team they were on, information they could not share with anyone else. At some point the good ones were supposed to save Norman and the bad ones were supposed to try and kill him.
One of the actors was Hervé Villechaize, who became quite famous later when he appeared on the TV show Fantasy Island. One night, after the film crew had left my house, my mother-in-law stepped outside and came back screaming, “There’s a midget in the pool!” And there was Hervé floating on his back, unconscious. My wife Cristina and I fished him out, placed him on the side, and raced to Bridgehampton, where Norman was, and said, “Go get your midget!” And he did, and took Hervé to get his stomach pumped.
The next night Hervé, who was also a pianist, gave a concert during a party sequence that was part of the film. The actor who was supposed to play the lead in this scene was drunk, and Norman ordered him out of the huge room. I found myself next to him, outside on a stone terrace with his girlfriend; I was sitting next to them and overheard the actor say, “I’m going to kill Norman when he comes out.” When Norman appeared, the actor jumped on him from behind. Norman turned around, slugged him, knocked him into the bushes, and then ignored him. The guy slowly got up, tackled Norman, and started to hit his head against the stone terrace. At that point José Torres, a former world champion light-heavyweight boxer and a close friend of Norman’s, walked by, and Cristina said, “José, you’ve gotta save Norman!” José said he couldn’t do it because he’d get arrested, being a prizefighter. So I jumped on top of the actor and put my hands around his throat. I pulled him off Norman, and Cristina and I were still holding him, although by now he was standing, when some guys came over, Black Panthers, I think, one with a bottle of whiskey with which to hit the actor over the head. Cristina slipped around behind and took it from the guy’s hand. The actor ran off, fell off some large stones and wound up in the hospital. That was one night! I’d gotten all these people in East Hampton to lend Norman their houses as settings for the film. After that evening, I was persona non grata to them all.
The next day actor Rip Torn, who was supposed to have been the assistant director of the film but, with reason, felt thwarted, said to Michael McClure, “Come with me. We’re gonna kill Norman today out on Gardiners Island.” Michael decided he didn’t feel like going, and Cristina and I didn’t feel like going either. Rip took a little hammer to the island. In the film we saw him hit Norman with it but the wound looked a lot worse than it was. Nobody came to help. Norman’s wife started screaming, “He’s killing Norman!” Then Norman bit Torn so badly on the ear that Torn ended up in the hospital and Norman went home. This whole five minutes or so of film looks staged when viewed. However, it was real.46
Norman must have edited the film himself because he’s all that’s left in most of it. All those mad acts—throwing the midget into the pool and the attempted killing of the actor—aren’t in it.
One feature film brought far more attention—and income—to the Grove film division than I ever could have hoped for. While attending the Frankfurt Book Fair in September 1968, I read a report in the Guardian about a Swedish film called I Am Curious (Yellow). I instinctively knew the film was perfect for us and contacted the head of Bonnier, the premier publishing company of Sweden. They put us in touch with the foundation that produced the film, and I sent two of our authors, Phyllis and Eberhard Kronhausen, to Sweden, to see it. They liked it and I went to Sweden to purchase the US rights for $100,000, a generous sum at the time. Directed by Vilgot Sjöman, a protégé of Ingmar Bergman’s, and produced by a nonprofit fund led by Göran Lindgren of the Sandrews Film and Theater Co., I Am Curious (Yellow) centers on Lena, a sincere young would-be female journalist on a journey of awakening. Incorporating documentary footage and street interviews, the film analyzes, through Lena’s eyes, class struggle and women’s rights in Sweden. It also contains some brief sex scenes, linking sexual liberation with political liberation.
Though hardly explicit sex by today’s standards, I Am Curious (Yellow) was a scandal the minute it hit this country; at the airport it was seized by US Customs officials on charges of obscenity. The parallel between this and the battles I had fought over censorship in print was immediately apparent. I declared at the time that Curious might win for the film industry the same freedom afforded literature in the Lady Chatterley’s Lover case. My prediction did come true, but it took more than a year’s worth of local and federal court cases. As we had done with the legal cases for the books, we brought in notable witnesses for our defense, including Norman Mailer and film critics Stanley Kauffmann, John Simon, and Hollis Alpert. The jury found the film obscene but, in an almost unprecedented move, the ruling was later reversed by the US Court of Appeals, which declared I Am Curious (Yellow) was not obscene under the Supreme Court’s definition of the term.
When Curious was finally able to open in New York on March 10, 1969, at our Evergreen Theater and the Cinema Rendezvous on Fifty-seventh Street, it was greeted with massive local and national attention. Virtually every critic felt obligated to weigh in on Curious, but many journalists and op-ed pieces claimed incorrectly that the film showed a great deal of “hardcore sex.” (In the New York Times, Vincent Canby noted that Curious didn’t show anything more explicit than many of Andy Warhol’s recent films, which played without any uproar. The difference was, however, that Warhol’s films did not have to get through US Customs.) We downplayed Curious’ sex appeal with text-heavy print ads and it quickly became a phenomenon, with lines wrapped around Cinema Rendezvous for many weeks.
One thing that helped enormously was an argument between Jacqueline and Aristotle Onassis that occurred when they went to see Curious. She hated it and insisted on leaving; he insisted on staying and kept his bodyguards with him. Jackie went out on the street to hail a cab, and a photographer followed her. She knocked the guy over and received a summons, and that was the start of the paparazzi thing in the US. The film was already winding down in New York, but this gave it new life—not only in the city but all around the country.
We were careful about booking the film outside New York; it was the first major national release we had attempted. In some places the film was booked on a standard percentage deal. In others, we rented the theaters ourselves. In Minneapolis we actually purchased a theater just to show the film and sold it when the run was over! Since state and city governments could still block screenings, our lawyer, Ed de Grazia, developed an innovative strategy of hiring well-known local civil rights lawyers in each market, paying them a percentage of the box-office receipts from the area in question. We won most of the dozens of cases that arose, while avoiding the enormous legal costs that
had almost crushed us during the Chatterley and Tropic of Cancer battles. I Am Curious (Yellow) went on to pull in $6 million as our share, coming only about a million and a half away from toppling La Dolce Vita as the highest grossing foreign release of its day.
Aided by the massive attention from Curious, film was now in full swing at Grove. By the end of 1969, our film division was handling more than 400 titles, mostly shorts. Evergreen Review had switched to a monthly format in 1968, and much of the increased content focused on cinema. Beginning in early 1969, Evergreen began running translations from France’s prestigious film magazine, Cahiers du Cinéma, including interviews with Ingmar Bergman, John Cassavetes, Jacques Demy, Roman Polanski, Glauber Rocha, and Miklós Janscó. Regular reports on film were filed by future Hollywood screenwriter L. M. Kit Carson, critic Nat Hentoff, and journalist Dotson Rader. In our book division, too, film became a new focus, as we published a series of photo-illustrated screenplays by Bergman, Antonioni, Beckett, Godard, Kurosawa, and Truffaut (which we marketed to the growing number of college film courses), as well as Parker Tyler’s Underground Film: A Critical History.
Amos Vogel, long allied with us because of the Cinema 16 acquisition, joined the company in 1969 as a very special “film consultant” and film editor of Evergreen Review, where he was in charge of the expanded film section. In our press release, Amos stated what he planned to do in his new job:
I have joined Grove because I believe it has the potential to become a major force for modern cinema in America. This movement—encompassing Godard as well as Brakhage, the avant-garde, and the independents, the young political filmmakers as well as the explorers of a new aesthetic—requires new patterns of distribution, exhibition, production, and publicity, a willingness to utilize new technological tools and an openness to the “subversion” of established, already ossified norms and techniques. Grove’s resources and well-known predilection for modernity, unorthodoxy, and artistic freedom provide this possibility. I should like to help realize it.47
We sent Amos to international festivals to scout new films, bankrolling the acquisitions with the money we made from Curious. In Czechoslovakia, Amos and Grove editor Fred Jordan were tracked by both the FBI and the Czech secret police. In spite of this, Amos managed to acquire films by young Eastern European directors, such as Jaromil Jireš.
The overwhelming response to Curious allowed a speculative plan that was years ahead of its time—a home video version of Evergreen Review. Companies like Motorola, Sony, and CBS were then busy developing separate home video systems for the consumer market. I saw a new opportunity and compiled a 16mm prototype of “Evergreen Cinema,” which I screened on college campuses. In a front-page article in Variety, “Evergreen Vidmag for Cassettes Piloted, With All the No-Nos for TV,” the magazine saw the idea as revolutionary:
Nielsenless, sponsorless, networkless, stationless and blipless programming for the home bijou is in the works. Such massive unburdening of the tube portends limitless horizons. Adult TV. Polemic TV. Obscene TV. Unpatriotic TV … try to imagine CBS News’ 60 Minutes or NBC News’ First Tuesday [with] the radical lib of Godard instead of the double-think of Stan Stunning on the nightly news.48
Unfortunately, nothing concrete resulted from all this, again because of financial constraints.
Another major project for us was the Grove Press International Film Festival, which screened twelve Grove-distributed features at three New York venues in March 1970, accompanied with a program guide that took the form of an issue of Evergreen. The event included Ousmane Sembène’s Mandabi, Nagisa Oshima’s Boy, Glauber Rocha’s Antonio Das Mortes, and Marguerite Duras’s Destroy, She Said. The festival kicked off an innovative distribution plan: all titles would be available simultaneously for theatrical release at art houses as well as nontheatrical distribution to universities and secondary schools. (Mandabi, for example, was distributed to New York public high schools as a classroom tool for teaching students about modern Africa.) The event garnered a great deal of attention. In the March 29, 1970 New York Times Vincent Canby wrote:
Conceivably, if New Line, Grove (with its current Grove Press International Film Festival of 12 films), Janus and other distributors can succeed in finding a public for films that would probably collapse in regular theaters, it will provide further impetus for the production of the kind of films that the major producers simply are not geared to handle.49
Though this festival was considered a critical success, its subsequent booking strategy achieved mixed results. We did not, however, shy away from our vision of socially leftist films. Only days after a women’s liberation group occupied our offices in 1970, Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin arrived at Grove. As the “Dziga-Vertov Group,” the two had made Pravda and See You at Mao, two experimental features that we were distributing. With money we provided, Godard and Gorin were working on two other Dziga-Vertov films. Along with Grove staffer Kent Carroll, the two filmmakers embarked on a US college tour. Unsurprisingly, their highly theoretical works failed to attract favorable reactions or large audiences.
Around this time one of the ongoing Curious cases went to the Supreme Court. In a case against Maryland (the only state which then still had its own censorship board), the Supreme Court issued a deadlocked 4–4 verdict in the spring of 1971, thereby upholding the lower court’s ban due to Justice William O. Douglas’ abstention from voting because, he said, his publisher had sold an excerpt from his book, Points of Rebellion, to Evergreen Review. (The excerpt had appeared in issue No. 77, April 1970). Despite the Supreme Court’s non-ruling, the many legal actions around Curious seriously eroded the reach of film censorship. Our legal counsel, Ed de Grazia, later wrote that the film’s case “was widely considered to have broken the grip of governmental interference with the depiction of sexual lovemaking on the screen.”50
By this time, the early 1970s, Grove was falling into financial decline, partially as a result of our fight against censorship and despite the great success of I Am Curious (Yellow). Because we had made a substantial amount of money, I bought a lot of foreign films—which were no longer really viable because many of the art theaters had closed down, overnight, in 1970. They had started showing X-rated porno films instead. There had been a big market for foreign films in this country, and suddenly it was gone. We had helped kill our own market.
Despite waning financial prospects, our film division had by then gained a reputation as one of the most important collections of cinema in existence. In 1972, the Kennedy Center’s American Film Institute in Washington, DC, honored Grove by presenting a retrospective of our films from January 19 through the end of the month. In 1973, the newly formed Pacific Film Archive at Berkeley ran an even more comprehensive retrospective, citing our achievements “in the most challenging areas of independent filmmaking—the American underground, the political cinema of Europe and the Third World, and the cinema of personal expression in Eastern Europe.”
One of the films on view at the PFA’s retrospective was a “collaboration” with Godard that to my knowledge has not been screened since. In 1971, Godard and Gorin delivered one of their Dziga-Vertov features, Vladimir and Rosa, into which Grove had invested some $25,000. Godard had told us the film would be a political fantasy about Lenin meeting Rosa Luxemburg during the 1968 Paris student rebellions. It turned out to be a fictionalized rendering of the Chicago Seven trial, with French actors playing characters based on Bobby Seale, William Kunstler, Jerry Rubin, and Abbie Hoffman. The film was a travesty. When I invited Rubin and Hoffman to watch Vladimir and Rosa at our offices they ranted and insulted it from the first frame on. As it happened, my old friend Haskell Wexler stopped by. He had an amateur crew shoot footage of Rubin, Hoffman, and me mocking the film, and later we spliced excerpts into the print of the original film. We called this new film Vladimir and Rosa and Jerry and Abbie and screened it in New York. No reaction from Godard. Then the print disappeared.
By 1971, with our theatrical booking basically dead,
we became almost exclusively an educational distributor, creating extensive catalogs with film/book packages for college courses. A number of unique political films had become part of our catalog by this time, including rare shorts from the People’s Republic of China and The Funeral of Jan Palach, a bit of footage depicting a Czech student’s self-immolation as protest against the Russian invasion of Prague. It arrived anonymously and gratis. The FBI raided the apartment of a Grove employee because of this film, although it was hardly pro-Communist. We had also amassed a large number of African American films, including William Klein’s Muhammad Ali documentary, Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee; Agnès Varda’s Black Panthers; Thomas Reichman’s Mingus; and Lionel Rogosin’s anti-apartheid feature, Come Back, Africa, which was set in South Africa’s Sophiatown and launched the career of Miriam Makeba.
Evergreen Review ceased publication in 1973 (although a single further issue was produced in 1984). That last issue of 1973, No. 97, was devoted exclusively to Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris. Although the film had not yet been released in this country, it was already causing a ruckus for its reportedly explicit sexual content. I asked Grove editor Kent Carroll to put together a special issue on the film that featured essays by contributors such as Norman Mailer, Alberto Moravia, and John Simon. When Last Tango’s distributor, United Artists, refused to issue press photos prior to the film’s release, Kent asked a projectionist he knew in Paris to clip frames from a print of the film still playing there. Then Kent’s girlfriend at the time, an airline stewardess, smuggled the stolen images back to us, where they were used in this special Last Tango issue. Published in a newspaper format, it is one of the more elusive of all Evergreen Reviews today.
Rosset: My Life in Publishing and How I Fought Censorship Page 18
