ISSUE #59
BEAM FROM THE BOOTH | GRAND RAPIDS FILM SOCIETY
[EDITED BY: GRIFFIN SHERIDAN & SPENCER EVERHART]
Hello and welcome back to an all-new installment of BEAM FROM THE BOOTH brought to you by GRAND RAPIDS FILM SOCIETY!
We’re now less than a week away from the kickoff of our exciting June programming! Starting us off NEXT MONDAY NIGHT (6/3) is the GRAND RAPIDS PREMIERE of the buzz-worthy indie comedy HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS.
Our own Caleb Francis Jenkins has seen the film and has some thoughts to share to get you all excited for the screening.
Plus, Kyle Maccoimei takes us on a journey through the career of cinematic madman George Miller in celebration of Furiousa: A Mad Max Saga’s release.
Check it all out below!
DAM.
A FOREWORD TO HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS
[BY: CALEB FRANCIS JENKINS]
Hundreds of Beavers...
This film . . .
Words cannot describe. (I will try.)
Chirp-chirp...grrrrrr...woof.
Those are sounds. Let’s try again.
Bizarre...spectacular...whimsical.
“Live action Looney Tunes,” yes. NOT Back in Action but MORE action.
Extremely epic. A whole new level of artistic nostalgia, brilliant creativity, and genuine genius that I personally munched right up.
The comedy is there; on-the-nose jokes and clever wit similar to Mel Brooks humor. Wile E. Coyote-Roadrunner and Moe-Larry-Curly setups and antics. The quirkiness and charm of a Chaplin or Keaton picture, plus style and movement that Wes Anderson would approve of, combined with music and sounds you’d hear in a Malle or Tati film. I need more movies like this!
So do the rabbits,
the fish,
the wolves,
the beavers (those left),
YOU!
I didn’t know much about this production team so I did some hunting for info. This was made by a Wisconsin-based director, Mike Cheslik, plus his friends and frequent collaborators. Everything they do is local and independent. Their budgets are shoestring, and Beavers was no exception. The film was shot during the pandemic and cost 150K to make; less than 10K went toward costuming which consisted mainly of several mascot uniforms purchased on the internet. Some of the score was written by the lead actor’s father. The creators radiate geeky-coolness and passion, and I am stoked to check out their last film, Lake Michigan Monster (2018).
I hope you’ll join me on 6/3 for the Grand Rapids Premiere of this fantastic flick at WT.
Lastly, my map. This might make more sense after seeing the movie.
THE MAD DOCTOR: GEORGE MILLER’S ROAD TO FURIOUSA
[BY: KYLE MACCIOMEI]
George Miller, renowned for his groundbreaking Mad Max film franchise, returned to the big screen with Furiosa on May 24th. Furiosa marks the fifth film in Miller’s post-apocalyptic series and a true landmark in the blending of both a visionary director and highly lucrative intellectual property. The fact that all five Mad Max features are co-written and directed by a leading creative voice is an impressive feat in the modern Hollywood landscape, especially when we consider that this universe has been 45 years in the making.
As always when I write for this publication, the topic I’m most interested in is context; what led to the point of this film’s release? What history do the filmmakers have with the story and what are the expectations coming from both audience and industry? How has George Miller managed to build the unlikeliest of cinematic empires over the course of nearly five decades, and what more is in store from this Aussie auteur?
THE AUSTRALIAN NEW WAVE AND A STRUGGLING EMT
Miller began his professional career in medicine, not film. He was twenty-six years old, and in his final year of medical school he decided to attend a film workshop at Melbourne University. There he met Byron Kennedy, his soon-to-be best friend and longtime producing partner. The two then spent the next four years trying to independently finance their passion project: a violent dystopian thriller called “Mad Max.”
Their production was about to benefit from a range of financial subsidies provided by the Australian government. In the 1970s, Australia was attempting to revitalize their domestic film industry, and so the governing administrations created the Australian Film, Television and Radio School to train up-and-coming creative talents. This is the start of the Australian New Wave of cinema, which Miller was able to ride on the back of. They still needed roughly $350,000 to make the film happen, though, so Miller and Kennedy teamed up to drive together in an ambulance performing roadside surgery to raise funds for their budget. In witnessing the violent intensity of car crash victims, the grisly tone and style of Mad Max was born.
Mad Max was released in 1979, and the critical response was mixed. Press outlets called it “ugly, incoherent,” “blatantly exploitative,” and “fit only for sadists and child murderers.” Audiences disagreed, however, and Miller’s first film went on to make over $100 million worldwide, breaking the record as the most profitable film ever made until The Blair Witch Project’s release twenty years later. While he initially thought that his debut feature was a massive failure, Miller wanted to push on to see if he could go bigger, louder, and bolder with his sequel The Road Warrior (1981).
With more than ten times the budget, and after having read Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Miller decided that his next Mad Max entry would be grander, more operatic, fantasy-laced, and mythological in scope. This is where the fantastical post-apocalyptic wasteland was born in the Mad Max world, and the film has become the definitive aesthetic for post-nuclear imagery in pop culture. While the film was a massive success, it was the last film Miller and Kennedy would work on together. Kennedy, at the age of 33, died in a helicopter crash just two years later, and Miller was heartbroken.
To cope with the stress of having lost his creative partner, Miller decided to bring on a second director for his third Mad Max film, Beyond Thunderdome. George Ogilvie was meant to direct character-based dialogue scenes while Miller preferred to just direct the action sequences. This left Beyond Thunderdome with a strange sense of pacing that permeated through to the audience as it is considered by most to be the weakest in the Mad Max series. Miller’s aversion to directing actors is a theme that will bleed through his entire filmography, preferring to work with barnyard animals, animated creatures, and characters who speak minimal dialogue as he progresses as a filmmaker.
NO MORE ACTION AND OFF TO HOLLYWOOD
Miller, like many New Wave Australian talents, was being courted by American studios to come and work with them. After countless attempts, Warner Bros. was able to convince Miller to work on their adaptation of a John Updike novel, The Witches of Eastwick (1987), starring Cher, Michelle Pfeiffer, Susan Sarandon, and Jack Nicholson. The film is a supernatural comedy that tells the story of three women who are unknowingly witches, and after a night of drinking they accidentally summon the “perfect man,” a devilishly romantic Nicholson.
The production was a massive source of frustration for Miller, who had never before battled the studio system to such a degree. It didn’t help that he was working alongside a new producer, Jon Peters (famous for trying to include a giant robot spider in the climax of Kevin Smith’s failed Superman Lives film), who stifled and fought with Miller constantly. Peters would show up to set some days with an actor in a fully-constructed alien costume and demand that Miller rewrite the script to include an extra-terrestrial subplot in the narrative. The film was a decent success and received positive-to-mixed reviews, but Miller was left scarred by the experience and vowed to never work under those conditions ever again.
While the film is mostly a departure from Miller’s other work, it does hold true to a constant theme that we find throughout his filmography: the oppressive nature of conservative religious culture. The Witches of Eastwick is about the personal and sexual liberations of the three main characters, who are not treated well in their small-town Christian community. The repressive nature of religion will come back soon enough in Miller’s mind as he continues his craft, appearing again in both Happy Feet (2006) and Fury Road (2015).
Five years later, Miller released Lorenzo’s Oil (1992), a human drama inspired by the real-life American boy Lorenzo, who is diagnosed at a young age with a neurodegenerative disease very similar to ALS. The film is about his parents who struggle for years as they attempt to uncover a treatment for their son’s genetic disease in the unlikeliest of places: olive oil. The film is a perfect return for George Miller the medical doctor as he’s able to spend large stretches of the film performing creative exposition sequences so the audience can better understand myelin sheaths, long chain fatty acids, and competitively inhibiting enzymes. While this film is the closest Miller has come to directing ‘Oscar bait,’ Lorezno’s Oil is not without a wild sense of direction and intensity at times, creating the sense that America’s medical system is just as dystopic and horrifying as Max’s gasoline-fueled wasteland.
Next, Warner signed Miller to direct Contact, an adaptation of Carl Sagan’s science fiction novel. Miller and the studio never saw eye-to-eye on the project, and after two years of pre-production they replaced him with Robert Zemeckis. This prompted Miller to sue Warner Bros. for breach of contract, and in the settlement it was confirmed to Miller that he would retain full ownership and rights to the Mad Max universe. This is not the last time Miller would get in a lawsuit with his parent studio, and it shows a regularly combative nature that this director has with the overbearing and often overreaching American studio system.
KIDS MOVIES AND OSCARS GALORE
Now, in 1995, with the Mad Max rights restored fully to him, Miller began work on the story for Fury Road as it was birthed in his mind. A warrior woman who frees six slaves from a brutal warlord, a disheveled Max stumbling upon the women as they clean themselves, and an armada of cars chasing after a single gasoline truck. Miller would spend the next twenty years of his professional career developing the world, backstory, and design of the Fury Road universe (including the near-completed Furiosa screenplay) as he struggled to get his ambitious vision off the ground. With a number of delays that included a war in the Middle East, his lead star being outed as an anti-semite, and numerous failures to secure proper funding, Miller was always leaving Fury Road in the backseat while he focused on what made money for his production company: children’s movies.
While he was busy with Contact, Miller was also producing a story he had written about a young pig named “Babe.” Officially directed by Chris Noonan, behind-the-scenes reporting indicates that Miller had an outsized influence on the production of the film. Babe (1995) would go on to be a smash hit at the box office, being nominated for seven Academy Awards that included Best Picture. Miller decided he wanted to step in the directing chair for Babe 2: Pig in the City (1998). If you’re curious as to which city Babe finds himself in for this sequel, the answer is simply all of them. George Miller, creative world designer he is, decided that he wanted Babe 2 to be set in a fantastical amalgamation of all the world’s greatest urban areas. Part New York, part Venice, part Tokyo, part Paris, Babe finds himself in a strange underground world of a violently roving gang of dogs, circus apes who work for a delirious Mickey Rooney, and a wheelchair-bound Jack Russell Terrier who briefly witnesses the afterlife before Babe pulls him back to the harsh reality of the real world. The film is gonzo to the tenth degree, and displays a fully-unleashed George Miller at his frenetic best.
This sequel, unfortunately for Miller, was also a box office bomb. But there was a glimmer of hope for Miller as the wheels started turning to get Mad Max: Fury Road off the ground in the first few years of the 21st century. With his lead actor Mel Gibson secured, most of the vehicles built, and just a month away from filming, the US invasion of Iraq threw an insurmountable wrench into their plans. With rising shipping and insurance costs adding onto an already-inflated budget, the studio pulled the plug on the project. All of the artwork had to be set aflame as the studio wouldn’t pay for its storage, and the dream of seeing the Fury Road itself was put on delay again. Luckily, Miller had a backup project to turn towards in Happy Feet.
Warner Bros. offered Miller the first draft of Happy Feet wondering if he would be interested in returning to stories aimed primarily at children, but Miller wasn’t interested solely in the original pitch of a dancing penguin fighting for self-expression. He decided to add two more adult themes to the narrative, that of religious oppression and environmental protection. The penguin hero of the film, Mumble, is born into a penguin colony of religious tradition and ritual. It is through Mumble’s individuality and free-spirited dancing that he is not only able to break down the conservative barriers of his society but also lead them to salvation as he uncovers the harms of human pollution on their food sources. The film ends with Mumble showing off his dancing to the human race, leading to a human-led populist revolution across the world to save the penguins.
Setting a film in the Antarctic had been a dream of Miller’s since filming Mad Max 2, where one of his camera operators spoke to Miller about the majesty of the frozen wasteland and how it was not too dissimilar from the Australian deserts they were capturing. The film was a massive success, becoming Miller’s highest grossing film of his career (still true to this day), and winning the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. The studio was so excited by the end product that they asked Miller to make a sequel. Miller was interested, but only on the condition that after Happy Feet was complete, Warner Bros would help finance his Fury Road passion project. The studio agreed, and Miller got to work on Happy Feet Two (2011).
While the first Happy Feet is about breaking from tradition and finding success in individuality and free expression, the second film serves as a contrasting counterpoint to the themes of its original. Now in a freer society that is no longer constrained by an organized church, there is a lost sense of community that pervades Happy Feet 2’s storyline. With religion no longer the binding force amongst the penguin colony, Mumble and his friends must find a new way to rebuild the connections between each other to form a strong and unified community. An extended subplot reinforces these themes, as two Krill (performed by Matt Damon and Brad Pitt) go on an expedition to leave their swarm of Krill in the hopes of finding adventure and individuality. At the film’s conclusion, the Krill subplot wraps up with recognizing the fact that the Krill are interconnected with one another and rely deeply on each other for protection, love, and support. Similar to how Babe 2 breaks heavily from its predecessor, Happy Feet Two proves that George Miller is never content to take the easy path in furthering his story — something we will see again in both Fury Road and Furiosa.
PEDAL TO THE METAL ON THE FURY ROAD
After Happy Feet Two, Miller’s twenty year journey towards Fury Road was finally full steam ahead, and its success is now a commonplace fact amongst film communities around the world. Frequently named as one of (if not THE) greatest action film ever made, Miller was similarly crowned one of the greatest directors of action cinema. Fury Road went on to redefine blockbuster action filmmaking and sweep the technical categories at the 88th Academy Awards, winning six trophies for his strange cohort of Australian craftspeople. With that, you would expect that he was ready to go with his Furiosa prequel epic that he had written almost fifteen years before...
That was not the case, though, because he had one more project he wanted to immerse himself in before tackling Furiosa. Whether that was due to another lawsuit with Warner Bros. over Fury Road bonuses, or just because Miller wanted to work with a smaller scale project before returning to the wasteland, I do know that 3,000 Years of Longing (2022) is an excellent appetizer for the mythmaking and grand storytelling that we see in Furiosa.
3,000 Year of Longing, based on a 1994 short story, tells the tale of an academic narratologist, someone who studies storytelling, who comes across a recently freed genie who is ready to grant her three wishes. While most might find this an incredible opportunity, our professor is uniquely suited to think skeptically about how this could backfire on her. So the two engage in ways that they know best: telling stories to one another. These stories serve as grand tales by themselves, but they also expose their true characters and vulnerabilities to one another, strengthening their bond. It makes sense that the film Furiosa, an epic saga told over fifteen years of Furiosa’s life, would emulate this style of operatic storytelling. It feels as though Miller is practicing, once again, a form of mythmaking before he tackled his greatest heroic myth to date in Furiosa.
Furiosa is out now in theaters, and I highly recommend you head over to either the Dolby screen at the Phoenix Theater or the IMAX screen at Celebration cinema North. It’s large, it’s loud, it’s sick, and it’s a grand fairytale that serves as a beautiful compliment to the high-paced action energy of Fury Road. This prequel enhances and deepens the world of the wasteland that Fury Road briefly inhabits and is a now-necessary companion piece to the original. I’m so very excited to see both Furiosa and Fury Road again as I think that watching them both together is a true delight of auteur-driven cinema.
*
I’m particularly excited, and delighted, because Griffin Sheridan and I have decided to rent out the Wealthy Theater’s Koning Microcinema for a FREE PRIVATE SCREENING of MAD MAX: FURY ROAD on SATURDAY, JUNE 8th, starting at 3:00pm. What better time to see Fury Road again on the big screen than when Furiosa is pumping through our veins? Seating is limited, but there are a few spots left so if you would like to join us on the Fury Road please fill out this form here.
Special Thanks to Kirsten Fedorowicz for editing assistance.
UPCOMING EVENTS
HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS (Cheslik, 2024)
WHAT: GRAND RAPIDS PREMIERE! A drunken applejack salesman must go from zero to hero and become North America's greatest fur trapper by defeating hundreds of beavers.
WHEN: Monday, June 3rd, 8:00pm
WHERE: Wealthy Theatre
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE (Wright, 2004)
WHAT: In this adaptation of Jane Austen's beloved novel, the outspoken Elizabeth Bennet is introduced to the handsome and upper-class Mr. Darcy. Although there is obvious chemistry between the two, Darcy's overly reserved nature threatens the fledgling relationship. In partnership with Books & Mortar and Hyssop Floral. *COSTUMES ENCOURAGED*
WHEN: Sunday, June 9th, 2:00pm
WHERE: Wealthy Theatre
SHE IS CONANN (Mandico, 2024)
WHAT: MICHIGAN PREMIERE! Hellhound Rainer roams the abyss, following Conann in each phase of her life, from childhood as a slave to Sanja through to her accession as queen.
WHEN: Monday, June 17th, 8:00pm
WHERE: Wealthy Theatre
And so we’ve arrived at the end of another BEAM FROM THE BOOTH! We appreciate you taking the time to read it and truly hope you’ll continue to do so. Be sure to SUBSCRIBE to get each issue in your inbox every MONDAY (usually), and stay up-to-date on all things GRFS.
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Until then, friends...
