When I go over to my good friend Doug Welch’s house, I’m always astounded that his entire DVD library (and it is quite massive) is organized by his flickchart rankings. He also has the most complete icheckmovies account I’ve ever seen (look at the listing on this thing!) In addition to all this, the college just passed his proposal for a film analysis class.

So, of course, I was super-excited to get a chance to chat with him about film, symbolism, and the Literating way to watch a movie. I walked past the old mahogany bookshelves, past his little tv in his office (much like Dustin Hoffman in Stranger than Fiction). I clicked on the recorder and started firing questions:

Lance Schaubert: What was the first film you ever saw?

Doug Welch: In the theatre, it was Star Wars.

LS: A New Hope?

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DW: 1977. Yup. I was three years old. I don’t remember much of that. The first movie I remember seeing in the theatre was Superman.

LS: The Christopher Reeves one?

DW: Christopher Reeves original.

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LS: I’ve actually never seen that. Back before he was…

DW: Yeah, but I think for my first movie I would have been three or four.

LS: Do you remember anything blowing up? The proton torpedoes?

DW: Yeeeah, I don’t. I mean, obviously I’ve seen it so many times since. It’s hard to specifically remember one scene for the first time when I was four.

LS: Do you think the medium has actually matured? What, it’s only been around a hundred years? Do you think it’s matured enough to be a sufficient form of storytelling, or do you think it’s still got some things to learn? I mean the novel’s already well-established.

DW: Sure. Yeah, well I think so. I think you have legitimate works of art that are being expressed cinematically.

LS: That you could say like paintings that hang in galleries?

DW: Right, that would hold up against… just like we would ask if there’s been an American master in novel-form since Hemmingway? You know, since…

LS: Steinbeck.

DW: Maybe Steinbeck would be better.

LS: McCarthy maybe?

DW: Maybe… You know someone like Updike. Or Norman Mailer or someone like that. But there’s some [films] that I would… well we’d need to get further away from them. We’d need to get several years, two hundred years away to see-

LS: What lasted.

DW: Yeah. As per the renaissance artists Michelangelo, Da Vinci. Should we put Malick against some of those? You put Warhol on one side, someone who’s doing pop-art. You put someone like, not Hitchcock, but like…

LS: Like a Wes Anderson?

DW: Well maybe, but I watched a movie called The Descreet Charm of the Borgeoise where Buñuel, who is like Warhol. Or like Dali or something. In fact I think he collaborated with Dali in one thing.

LS: Salvador Dali?

DW: Yeah. He’s quite expressively making fun of his audience and he even had a great little essay on that. He’s deliberately playing with your expectations of the medium. The joke of the film is, there are these six people, three couples, that keep trying to have dinner. They keep failing. They keep being interrupted by life, history, whatever. Some of them are in dreamscape. So they walk into this house.

LS: Like Tron or like Beetlejuice?

DW: No. It’s depicted much more realistically.  It’s not hightened at all. It’s shot straightforward. There’s one recurring motif of them walking down this country road, but even that’s not shot stylistically. It’s shot very simply. Six people walking up and down this road. They come into this house and some servant comes and drops these two cornish hens on the ground –

LS: [laughs]

DW: -and someone picks them up and realizes that they’re fake. Someone picks up a drink and says, “This tastes like Cola.” Then the back wall is a curtain and it opens and there’s an audience. They’re on stage. There’s someone in the box who’s the prompter. He’s giving them their lines.

LS: [laughs]

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DW: Most of them just leave. One person starts repeating their lines, and says, “I forgot my lines.” And then he wakes up. And it’s this dream sequence. And, you know, [Buñuel’s] dileberately doing that. He’s deliberately saying to you: “What’s dream? What’s reality? What’s actual? What’s history? What is pretense?” That’s point one: pretense, with the Burgeoise. All of that, and none of it matters. He’s deconstructing all of those kind of things in film form. So yes. That’s that’s a piece of art.

LS: Yeah.

DW: Probably what’s happened because of the mass media of film, because of the money, it’s not taken seriously. But I would say that’s the case for any burgeoning art form that’s coming on the scene. You have the pop-artists. Then you have those who are trying to do something different, and who are trying to express themselves in a way that’s interesting and that’s saying something. Not that those two are always incompatible, but something that’s quite interesting can be said and have quite a lot of people see it.

LS: Like Tolkien?

DW: Sure. Sure.

LS: Well that’s intersting, because Chesterton says in Utopia of Users that art stops becoming art when we do it for advertisement. You know, the guy who makes this bar of soap looks so good, but he’s just doing it because he’s getting paid to make a picture of soap. Like some graphic designers. We talk about trailers, do you think that kind of…

DW: Like intent.

LS: Yeah.

DW: Verses…

LS: Motive and intent.

DW: Well, most filmmakers have little-to-no say in what goes into a trailer. Those are studio efforts. So “Here’s shot footage. We’re in process with the film, we’re still editing, we’re still adding.”

“Well, what sequences are finished?”

“Well we’ve got a moment or two of them flying through the air, crashing into a building to show what this is gonna be about.”

LS: Which might explain why a lot of them give stuff away.

DW: Well, yeah, because they don’t care. In the end it’s all building buzz. Again, those are created by advertisers, rather than created by artists. You’ve got the director saying, “this is not the flavor of the film at all. That was taken completely out of context.” Even putting things off-sequence.

LS: Or like the three funny scenes of the movie are all on the trailer

DW: Right.

LS: So it’s conveyed as a comedy, but it wasn’t and then it’s not funny and no one likes it.

DW: Right. Or the worse thing, it is a comedy and –

LS: [laughs. laughs.]

DW: — those are really the only three funny scenes in the whole movie.

LS: It’s just that terrible.

DW: Yeah, and they’re like, “Well what do we have?”

“Well, we have this turd of a movie with three funny lines.”

LS: [laughs hard.]

DW: “We have a trailer.”

LS: [laughs.]

DW: “Maybe we can make sixty-five-million dollars opening weekend –“

LS: [laughs.]

DW: “—before word-of-mouth kills this movie.” Which is what happens to a lot of films.

LS: Yeah. Yeah. They make their money back in opening weekend.

DW: They make their money in opening weekend. Even Harry Potter made almost half of what it totalled in its opening weekend. I was very interested in that. It made somewhere around $340 million.

LS: That put it on the list?

DW: Of all time? Probably somewhere. It’s certainly number one for the year. But it made $170 or slightly less its opening weekend. About half of what it made. That’s what they’re going for. That’s why the stars appear on Leno and Letterman leading up to those days. Saturday Night Live. That’s a studio decision.

LS: Thus part two.

DW: That was the beginning of the independent movement, to get away from that. Because the studio’s only interested in this:

People were disinclined toward that. So the independent film took off. Well, it’s always been around, but as a movement… And certianly the technology’s benefitting them.

LS: Especially with Canon’s new thing, I dunno if you’ve seen this.

DW: Yeah, with the red camera. Digital technology. What do you need now to make a movie? Even some of the film movements have gone that direction just for logistical purposes, some in a direct effort to steer away from the Michael Bay-explosion-3D-overuse-hightened-stylized-AA through what we call a neo-neo-realistic movement. People like Rahmin Bahrani who did Man Push Cart

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Goodbye Solo

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What’s the other film? Oh… [snaps fingers twice] Chop shop! Those are great films.

LS: Well even the Batmans were influenced by that mentality.

DW: Sure. Sure.

LS: The newer ones.

DW: I think so. I mean, you still got the action set pieces that are… well the joke is now that every sequel needs to be darker and grittier.

LS: [laughs.]

DW: So it’s like. Superman Returns tanked, so what are we gonna do? Well we need a Superman that’s darker and grittier.

LS: [laughs.] Spiderman?

DW: What are we gonna do with Spiderman? Well we need a Spiderman that’s darker and grittier. That’s the effect of Batman. Now it’s like Batman is darker and grittier. That’s a return away from the heightened ridiculousness of Joel Shoemaker—

LS: Arnold Schwartzenegger

DW: –via Tim Burton of the Gothic sense of Batman in that series of five movies, away from the campiness of the ‘60s T.V. show. That was a return to some of those real… you know… but Superman? There’s nothing dark about Superman at all. Superman is a boyscout. That’s who he is!

LS: He’s an alien.

DW: Yeah. Superman doesn’t have internal turmoil.

LS: [laughs.] His angst is that he’s on the wrong planet.

DW: Exactly, he’s homesick. He’s the little kid at summer camp.

LS: He just really wants his daddy.

DW: He can reverse time by spinning around the planet real fast. That’s all he is. That’s why he’s kinda boring.

(this interview continued in next week’s Ask the Experts)