Veteran Hollywood director recuts 'Success', re-releases on Google Video
Until now, only about four copies of William Richert's dark 80s fairy tale, 'American Success Company', were known to exist (one owned by a television network, one by Steven Spielberg, and two VHS dubs, one owned by me). Richert has remastered the 1983 release of his picture, retitled 'Success', starring Jeff Bridges, Ned Beatty and Bianca Jagger. Not only is Richert selling DVDs of it directly, but has also put the entire movie on his website, in chunks hosted at Google Video. This movie was so obscure that it was never even released on VHS. Richert has also placed complete Google Video of his movies Aren't You Even Going To Kiss Me Goodbye, The Man in the Iron Mask and Winter Kills (also starring Jeff Bridges). Richert is currently involved with The Vindicator, a mobster drama that will be released on the internet. Dailies of The Vindicator after the jump. [GT]
Until now, only about four copies of William Richert's dark 80s fairy tale, 'American Success Company', were known to exist (one owned by a television network, one by Steven Spielberg, and two VHS dubs, one owned by me). Richert has remastered the 1983 release of his picture, retitled 'Success', starring Jeff Bridges, Ned Beatty and Bianca Jagger. Not only is Richert selling DVDs of it directly, but has also put the entire movie on his website, in chunks hosted at Google Video. This movie was so obscure that it was never even released on VHS. Richert has also placed complete Google Video of his movies Aren't You Even Going To Kiss Me Goodbye, The Man in the Iron Mask and Winter Kills (also starring Jeff Bridges). Richert is currently involved with The Vindicator, a mobster drama that will be released on the internet. Dailies of The Vindicator after the jump. [GT]
FRIDAY, JULY 9, 2010
SUCCESS (a.k.a. THE AMERICAN SUCCESS COMPANY)
(1980)
I learned a valuable lesson following my initial viewing of—and subsequent disappointment in—William Richert’s Success: make sure you watch the right movie. Watching the beyond-obscure VHS copy, I found the movie to be haphazard, cloying and, at the same time, insulting. A particularly shrill sequence in the film bordered on
misogynistic, as the film’s central conceit—pathological nice guy Harry Flowers, played by perennial nice guy Jeff Bridges, creates a bullying gangster persona named “Mack” in order to, as he says, “get his wife’s attention” and attain revenge on his rich and odious father-in-law (Ned Beatty)—came off like an adolescent boy’s math-class fantasy. Become the tough guy, shove people around, get what you want. Girls like nothing more than a man who puts them in their place. The ugly transfer didn’t help the movie’s ugly mood, despite its desire to play as a lighthearted comedy. But the movie I watched was not the movie that Richert and company made. Surprisingly, there are only very minor (and one major) differences between Richert’s version and the one I watched, but how much difference a few frames of film can make!
Beatty’s “Mr. Elliott” owns the Berlin-based “American Success Company”, or AMSUSCO, a stand-in for American Express, that extends ridiculous amounts of credit and then prosecutes the customers that can’t afford to pay back the interest, much less the principal. It’s as relevant a villain today as it was thirty years ago. Bridges’ Harry can’t stomach the corporate killer role he’s in so he does dumb things like trying to help out a tourist couple who become trapped in Germany after their card is cancelled in mid- vacation. This attracts the ire of his boss-in-law, who declares him a “loser” in the film’s opening scene (during a clever visual of Beatty stepping over a scale model of Berlin’s skyline) and the suspicion of Elliott’s sycophants Ernst and Herman (John Glover and Michael Durrell). Harry’s wife and Elliott’s daughter, Sarah (Belinda Bauer), is a spoiled little rich girl who spends all of her time in a childish regressive fantasy world, usually clad in a fairy ballerina costume dancing and staring at herself in omnipresent mirrors. Harry’s transformation into Mack is part of a bizarre plot to primarily break Sarah free of her narcissistic spell. The secondary motivation for the tough guy role is to relieve Elliott of Sarah’s inheritance, which is funding the morally-bankrupt AMSUSCO. Mack is Harry in a sharp suit and a prosthetic scar, but most-importantly a silver-topped walking stick, the key prop through which he channels his inner “Mackness”. For the preparation, Harry attends a Teutonic gym to exercise and retains the services of a high-class prostitute to point his newly assertive manhood in the right direction. After a while, he has his entire circle of associates convinced that Mack is not a new Harry, but a doppelganger who has
managed to replace Harry, not subvert him. Mack drops hints that the “real Harry” is physically somewhere else entirely.
The version of Success I watched slogged along without direction, scenes slamming clunkily another throughout the 78-minute or so running time. Harry was a milquetoast jerk and Mack was a bullying thug. It was difficult to root for either one. But neither of the Harrys were as odious as the irredeemable Mr. Elliott or the vapid Sarah. “All of our friends told us we looked good together,” Harry’s voice-over tells us, “so we got married.” Sarah is so childish that we wish Mack would start pushing her around sooner —until he does, dragging her by the arm into the kitchen “where she belongs”. It’s an ugly moment and it hits as hard as his cane meets the mirrors in her dancing studio, jarring us out of any semblance of “light comedy”.
As it stood, the only sympathetic and relatable character was the prostitute Corrine, played by Bianca Jagger. Openly mistrustful and world-weary, she gradually warms to Harry’s proto-Mack, which he never picks up on at all. Once fully Mack, Harry misses not only her glances, or her wistful gaze at the children playing outside her window, but even her plaintive crying after him as he leaves her for the final time. It’s too harsh and tragic for this early in the movie and it leaves us hating Mack—and Harry—even before his abuse of Sarah. When he finally achieves his end attack on the company, we can’t appreciate Harry’s unsuspected ingenuity. We can only marvel at what a bastard the “nice guy” is underneath the surface.
The credits ran and I was disgusted. And a word of wisdom from my colleague Phil Hall ran through my mind, “Sometimes, long-forgotten films are best left untouched in their well-deserved state of obscurity.”
But then my post-viewing ritual of research yielded new information: Success: The Director’s Cut existed on Richert’s personal website, available for both DVD purchase and online streaming. Re-edited by Brian Q. Kelley for a screening at the 2006 Munich Film Festival, this director’s cut restores some deleted footage, replacing some unnecessarily clumsy sequences, and benefits from a new and nuanced Bridges narration. In the version I viewed, Harry visits a magic shop, searching for a “new nose and chin”, and the elderly owner creates a life-mask of him with a new “Mack Face”. Wearing it to apartment hunt, the Mack Face in the mirror startles even Harry, and he discards it in favor of something more subtle. In the Director’s Cut, Harry sneaks into a costume shop late at night and plays with a new look, trying on wigs and hats, selecting a new suit and essentially creating the persona he wishes to adopt. It’s a man trying out a personality while finding his own. It’s played silently and subtly, the scene belonging solely to Bridges. It isn’t until the end of the scene that he discovers the extreme “Mack Face” in a display case. When caught by the store’s proprietor, Harry takes the money he’d left on the counter and hands it to the man, guiltily, but nonetheless excited.
Harry’s playing in the costume shop now echoes Sarah’s endless repetition of a Swan Lake rehearsal. He’s identifying with her fantasy life, hoping to find a portal into her imagination. Mack’s “attack” on Sarah now feels less like misogynistic brutality and more like a playmate changing her imaginary story. She weeps in the kitchen not because he abused her but because he broke the rules of her game. A pretty ballerina can’t play with a tough-guy gangster. It isn’t fair.
Mack’s existence in the Director’s Cut of Success is no less about revenge and more about forcing the world to face Harry on his own terms, as well as discovering who Harry really is. As he states near the end, “Harry was the real imposter.” And even though he isn’t Mack, he isn’t quite the original Harry, either. Success is an adult coming-of-age story inside a fairy tale structure.
Kelley’s re-edit lengthens the heads and tails of most of the scenes, in some cases by just a few nearly-imperceptible frames, reducing the jarring traffic-accident collision of cuts and giving the film a more natural pace. On VHS, Success seemed to be running full-tilt towards an ending to get itself over with. Kelley’s cut, from Richert’s supervision, allowed the movie to unfold. Again, it’s remarkable what a difference just a few frames can make. Likewise, the new narration by Bridges, predominantly the same as his original but with the newly-recorded nuance of an older version of the actor, paints a richer picture of Harry’s and Sarah’s worlds, not to mention strengthening Harry’s own motivation. The sequences with Corrine now come off less comedic and rushed, with her character receiving added pathos, not because of any new screen time, but because of the new context of the scenes around them. With less than six additional minutes of running time, Kelley and Richert managed to create a movie almost wholly unique from its former shell.
Success’ evolution from failure to, well, success, is bizarre even by Hollywood standards. Richert, Bauer and Bridges were smack in the middle of shooting the political satire, Winter Kills, when hell broke loose. Over budget to the point that it was shut down three times due to bankruptcy, Winter Kills’ producers, Robert Sterling and Leonard Goldberg, wealthy drug dealers, scuttled not only the production but their own lives. Goldberg was
murdered, some speculate by the mafia for debt failure; Sterling was sentenced to forty years in prison for smuggling. Desperate to complete this film, Richert called in favors, took Bauer and Bridges to Germany and shoot what was then called The American Success Company for a European studio in exchange for Winter Kills finishing funds.
After its delivery, Success’ history gets fuzzy. Success was released to various markets around the world as Good as Gold, The Ringer, American Success and The American Success Company. Following a premiere at the Seattle International Film Festival in 1980 (?), the movie more or less vanished on American shores, never (or perhaps barely) released theatrically here, it played under the various titles and several different edits abroad. Columbia Pictures snuck it onto VHS under the Good as Gold title a few years into the mom ‘n pop video boom. An off label acquired an American Success print of it some years after. Both VHS versions seemed to vanish in the intervening years, eaten by VCRs or relegated to attics or garages. Even the ever-vigilant pirate sites are hard-pressed to yield-up copies, though it was popular on USENET for several minutes in the early ‘oughts.
But as bizarre as all of this sounds, it’s sadly not unusual for Richert. Winter Kills, while not “forgotten”, is certainly obscure today, and a well-regarded coming-of-age tale he made with the late River Phoenix (with whom he would later co-star himself in My Own Private Idaho) titled Aren’t You Even Going to Kiss Me Goodbye? suffered intense studio monkeying and the resulting cute-teen movie was sloppily tossed at theaters under the ragged banner A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon. Like Success, Richert has managed to regain the rights to this film and is making it available to audiences now at festivals and through his site.
On the Richert website, Success can be viewed in its entirety, albeit in a postage-stamped- sized stream broken up into twelve chapters. It’s a canny move, though, because as it exists now, Success is a pleasant, old fashioned romantic comedy that works even in its little streaming window and should be more than enough to entice the charmed into ordering the director’s approved cut on DVD.
If I haven’t made it overly apparent, you should head directly to: www.williamrichert.com
(As a post-script bit of trivia, look fast during the restaurant scenes for a cameo by Willy Wonka's "Mr. Slugworth", better known to German stage and screen as Gunter Meisner.)
POSTED BY MIKE AT 7:19 AM
LABELS: AMERICAN SUCCESS COMPANY, DIRECTOR'S CUTS, GOOD AS GOLD, JEFF BRIDGES, LOST FILMS, RE-EDITED VERSIONS, SUCCESS, WILLIAM RICHERT, WINTER KILLS
1 COMMENTS:
KaBluie said...
This played alot on HBO as "The American Success Company" I'd watch it everytime it was on.
AUGUST 2, 2010 1:03 AM
SUCCESS (a.k.a. THE AMERICAN SUCCESS COMPANY)
(1980)
I learned a valuable lesson following my initial viewing of—and subsequent disappointment in—William Richert’s Success: make sure you watch the right movie. Watching the beyond-obscure VHS copy, I found the movie to be haphazard, cloying and, at the same time, insulting. A particularly shrill sequence in the film bordered on
misogynistic, as the film’s central conceit—pathological nice guy Harry Flowers, played by perennial nice guy Jeff Bridges, creates a bullying gangster persona named “Mack” in order to, as he says, “get his wife’s attention” and attain revenge on his rich and odious father-in-law (Ned Beatty)—came off like an adolescent boy’s math-class fantasy. Become the tough guy, shove people around, get what you want. Girls like nothing more than a man who puts them in their place. The ugly transfer didn’t help the movie’s ugly mood, despite its desire to play as a lighthearted comedy. But the movie I watched was not the movie that Richert and company made. Surprisingly, there are only very minor (and one major) differences between Richert’s version and the one I watched, but how much difference a few frames of film can make!
Beatty’s “Mr. Elliott” owns the Berlin-based “American Success Company”, or AMSUSCO, a stand-in for American Express, that extends ridiculous amounts of credit and then prosecutes the customers that can’t afford to pay back the interest, much less the principal. It’s as relevant a villain today as it was thirty years ago. Bridges’ Harry can’t stomach the corporate killer role he’s in so he does dumb things like trying to help out a tourist couple who become trapped in Germany after their card is cancelled in mid- vacation. This attracts the ire of his boss-in-law, who declares him a “loser” in the film’s opening scene (during a clever visual of Beatty stepping over a scale model of Berlin’s skyline) and the suspicion of Elliott’s sycophants Ernst and Herman (John Glover and Michael Durrell). Harry’s wife and Elliott’s daughter, Sarah (Belinda Bauer), is a spoiled little rich girl who spends all of her time in a childish regressive fantasy world, usually clad in a fairy ballerina costume dancing and staring at herself in omnipresent mirrors. Harry’s transformation into Mack is part of a bizarre plot to primarily break Sarah free of her narcissistic spell. The secondary motivation for the tough guy role is to relieve Elliott of Sarah’s inheritance, which is funding the morally-bankrupt AMSUSCO. Mack is Harry in a sharp suit and a prosthetic scar, but most-importantly a silver-topped walking stick, the key prop through which he channels his inner “Mackness”. For the preparation, Harry attends a Teutonic gym to exercise and retains the services of a high-class prostitute to point his newly assertive manhood in the right direction. After a while, he has his entire circle of associates convinced that Mack is not a new Harry, but a doppelganger who has
managed to replace Harry, not subvert him. Mack drops hints that the “real Harry” is physically somewhere else entirely.
The version of Success I watched slogged along without direction, scenes slamming clunkily another throughout the 78-minute or so running time. Harry was a milquetoast jerk and Mack was a bullying thug. It was difficult to root for either one. But neither of the Harrys were as odious as the irredeemable Mr. Elliott or the vapid Sarah. “All of our friends told us we looked good together,” Harry’s voice-over tells us, “so we got married.” Sarah is so childish that we wish Mack would start pushing her around sooner —until he does, dragging her by the arm into the kitchen “where she belongs”. It’s an ugly moment and it hits as hard as his cane meets the mirrors in her dancing studio, jarring us out of any semblance of “light comedy”.
As it stood, the only sympathetic and relatable character was the prostitute Corrine, played by Bianca Jagger. Openly mistrustful and world-weary, she gradually warms to Harry’s proto-Mack, which he never picks up on at all. Once fully Mack, Harry misses not only her glances, or her wistful gaze at the children playing outside her window, but even her plaintive crying after him as he leaves her for the final time. It’s too harsh and tragic for this early in the movie and it leaves us hating Mack—and Harry—even before his abuse of Sarah. When he finally achieves his end attack on the company, we can’t appreciate Harry’s unsuspected ingenuity. We can only marvel at what a bastard the “nice guy” is underneath the surface.
The credits ran and I was disgusted. And a word of wisdom from my colleague Phil Hall ran through my mind, “Sometimes, long-forgotten films are best left untouched in their well-deserved state of obscurity.”
But then my post-viewing ritual of research yielded new information: Success: The Director’s Cut existed on Richert’s personal website, available for both DVD purchase and online streaming. Re-edited by Brian Q. Kelley for a screening at the 2006 Munich Film Festival, this director’s cut restores some deleted footage, replacing some unnecessarily clumsy sequences, and benefits from a new and nuanced Bridges narration. In the version I viewed, Harry visits a magic shop, searching for a “new nose and chin”, and the elderly owner creates a life-mask of him with a new “Mack Face”. Wearing it to apartment hunt, the Mack Face in the mirror startles even Harry, and he discards it in favor of something more subtle. In the Director’s Cut, Harry sneaks into a costume shop late at night and plays with a new look, trying on wigs and hats, selecting a new suit and essentially creating the persona he wishes to adopt. It’s a man trying out a personality while finding his own. It’s played silently and subtly, the scene belonging solely to Bridges. It isn’t until the end of the scene that he discovers the extreme “Mack Face” in a display case. When caught by the store’s proprietor, Harry takes the money he’d left on the counter and hands it to the man, guiltily, but nonetheless excited.
Harry’s playing in the costume shop now echoes Sarah’s endless repetition of a Swan Lake rehearsal. He’s identifying with her fantasy life, hoping to find a portal into her imagination. Mack’s “attack” on Sarah now feels less like misogynistic brutality and more like a playmate changing her imaginary story. She weeps in the kitchen not because he abused her but because he broke the rules of her game. A pretty ballerina can’t play with a tough-guy gangster. It isn’t fair.
Mack’s existence in the Director’s Cut of Success is no less about revenge and more about forcing the world to face Harry on his own terms, as well as discovering who Harry really is. As he states near the end, “Harry was the real imposter.” And even though he isn’t Mack, he isn’t quite the original Harry, either. Success is an adult coming-of-age story inside a fairy tale structure.
Kelley’s re-edit lengthens the heads and tails of most of the scenes, in some cases by just a few nearly-imperceptible frames, reducing the jarring traffic-accident collision of cuts and giving the film a more natural pace. On VHS, Success seemed to be running full-tilt towards an ending to get itself over with. Kelley’s cut, from Richert’s supervision, allowed the movie to unfold. Again, it’s remarkable what a difference just a few frames can make. Likewise, the new narration by Bridges, predominantly the same as his original but with the newly-recorded nuance of an older version of the actor, paints a richer picture of Harry’s and Sarah’s worlds, not to mention strengthening Harry’s own motivation. The sequences with Corrine now come off less comedic and rushed, with her character receiving added pathos, not because of any new screen time, but because of the new context of the scenes around them. With less than six additional minutes of running time, Kelley and Richert managed to create a movie almost wholly unique from its former shell.
Success’ evolution from failure to, well, success, is bizarre even by Hollywood standards. Richert, Bauer and Bridges were smack in the middle of shooting the political satire, Winter Kills, when hell broke loose. Over budget to the point that it was shut down three times due to bankruptcy, Winter Kills’ producers, Robert Sterling and Leonard Goldberg, wealthy drug dealers, scuttled not only the production but their own lives. Goldberg was
murdered, some speculate by the mafia for debt failure; Sterling was sentenced to forty years in prison for smuggling. Desperate to complete this film, Richert called in favors, took Bauer and Bridges to Germany and shoot what was then called The American Success Company for a European studio in exchange for Winter Kills finishing funds.
After its delivery, Success’ history gets fuzzy. Success was released to various markets around the world as Good as Gold, The Ringer, American Success and The American Success Company. Following a premiere at the Seattle International Film Festival in 1980 (?), the movie more or less vanished on American shores, never (or perhaps barely) released theatrically here, it played under the various titles and several different edits abroad. Columbia Pictures snuck it onto VHS under the Good as Gold title a few years into the mom ‘n pop video boom. An off label acquired an American Success print of it some years after. Both VHS versions seemed to vanish in the intervening years, eaten by VCRs or relegated to attics or garages. Even the ever-vigilant pirate sites are hard-pressed to yield-up copies, though it was popular on USENET for several minutes in the early ‘oughts.
But as bizarre as all of this sounds, it’s sadly not unusual for Richert. Winter Kills, while not “forgotten”, is certainly obscure today, and a well-regarded coming-of-age tale he made with the late River Phoenix (with whom he would later co-star himself in My Own Private Idaho) titled Aren’t You Even Going to Kiss Me Goodbye? suffered intense studio monkeying and the resulting cute-teen movie was sloppily tossed at theaters under the ragged banner A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon. Like Success, Richert has managed to regain the rights to this film and is making it available to audiences now at festivals and through his site.
On the Richert website, Success can be viewed in its entirety, albeit in a postage-stamped- sized stream broken up into twelve chapters. It’s a canny move, though, because as it exists now, Success is a pleasant, old fashioned romantic comedy that works even in its little streaming window and should be more than enough to entice the charmed into ordering the director’s approved cut on DVD.
If I haven’t made it overly apparent, you should head directly to: www.williamrichert.com
(As a post-script bit of trivia, look fast during the restaurant scenes for a cameo by Willy Wonka's "Mr. Slugworth", better known to German stage and screen as Gunter Meisner.)
POSTED BY MIKE AT 7:19 AM
LABELS: AMERICAN SUCCESS COMPANY, DIRECTOR'S CUTS, GOOD AS GOLD, JEFF BRIDGES, LOST FILMS, RE-EDITED VERSIONS, SUCCESS, WILLIAM RICHERT, WINTER KILLS
1 COMMENTS:
KaBluie said...
This played alot on HBO as "The American Success Company" I'd watch it everytime it was on.
AUGUST 2, 2010 1:03 AM