JASON AND SHIRLEY: Stephen Winter's docu-drama of that famously unseen documentary

The name Jason Holliday may ring a bell with certain of us older folk -- movie-lovers who might have caught, during its brief theatrical run, Shirley Clarke's film, Portrait of Jason, during which, over a continuous half day and night, she filmed the man who went by the name of Jason Holliday and who was a drug-and-alcohol-addled black, gay hustler. Up until then (the film was shot in 1966 and released in '67), the "civilized" white world had seen nothing like this. either on film or most probably in real life.

Consequently the documentary, "scandalous" as it seemed at the time, was given a public (and sometimes critical) equivalent of a tar-and-feathering and promptly run out of town. Nowadays, of course, you can see this sort of narcissistic confessional on what seems like every other TV show -- from Dr. Phil and Ru Paul to the "housewives" of.. to you name it -- as our populace, desperate for fifteen minutes of fame, says and does its Can-you-top-this? routine in front of a camera so as to be properly "seen and appreciated."

All of which brings us to JASON AND SHIRLEY, the new docudrama from writer/director Stephen Winter (shown at left), that imagines what might have happened during and in between those twelve hours of shooting that went on in order to bring Portrait of Jason to fruition. In this new version, Jason is portrayed by Jack Waters (above, left) and Shirley by Sarah Schulman (above, right). TrustMovies saw the original film during its New York theatrical debut nearly fifty years ago and, as a 26-year old young, closeted, gay, white man, was properly appalled by what he saw. His horizons have expanded some since then, and he would love to see the film again today, with age, experience, and at least a bit more maturity on his side.

Interestingly enough, early last year the indispensable Milestone Films brought the restored movie back into a brief theatrical release and, toward the end of the year, onto Blu-ray and DVD. So comparisons can be easily made, for anyone interested. My initial response to this new film mirrors to some extent my original response a half century ago: embarrassment for the man at the center of it all who drinks himself into a stupor and generally makes an ass of himself, beginning to end. That Mr. Waters seems the utter embodiment of Mr. Holliday only adds to the very believable skeeviness of it all.

As I recall, Ms Clark was mostly left out of the original film, as documentarians so often were back in the day when their subjects were "all." Here, we see Shirley almost as much as we do Jason, and what we see is not very nice. Clark, as pictured in the new film, wants to get at Jason's core by any means necessary. Even if that core, as it turns out, seems as shallow and cliche-ridden as the fellow's exterior. And yet... Clark's films always probed the society in which her protagonists lived, and they showed us race and economics and especially power from the POV of those who possessed damn little of the latter. Her films are critiques of much more than their characters.

In any case, Clark was an artist, and as that charming, smart and woefully underseen movie Chic! informed us so beautifully, artists can get away with this shit because they have -- in addition to their huge ego and complete unconcern for anyone else,-- their art to back them up. So, while Clark may have been a crap human being in some respects, she delivers the goods in others.

Mr. Holliday, however, is something else. A failed just-about-everything, he doesn't seem to have possessed the talent, strength or determination to follow through on anything he supposedly wanted, although this new film tells us that he finally did do a single performance of his one-man show. Otherwise, he muses, reminisces about his life (which may be mostly fantasy), and Mr. Winter allows that fantasy or memory to take shape along the way, so that we flit in and out -- as Holliday grows drunker and more stoned -- of his life, his past, his needs and desires.

One one level Jason is the complete victim, on another he does possess a kind of strength -- as a gay, black hustler, he's tripled-whammied with nothing left to lose -- so it is possible to think of him, in the society of this mid-20th-century time, as something similar to concentration-camp Jews, whose only thing left is whatever self-respect they can muster in whatever manner it takes.  He's been marginalized -- granted, he's had a hand in his own marginalization -- to the point of obscurity, yet has bounced back by virtue of his ability to transgress and then revel in it.

The new film is nearly a half hour shorter than its predecessor, which is, as I recall, a kind of blessing. Yet, oddly enough, what the movie has made me want to do is revisit that original and see how it appears to me now. Overall Jason and Shirley is well-cast, -acted, -written (the two stars had a hand in this, it seems) and -directed, and it does build slowly a certain head of steam, culminating in the appearance of Jason's friend, the semi-famous actor Carl Lee (played with gravity and great appeal by Orran Farmer), whom Shirley puts to work in a craven manner designed to "break" our poor "hero." Fireworks (of a sort) ensue, but do they achieve the intended result? You will see.

Meanwhile, Jason and Shirley, begins a week's theatrical run at MoMA in New York City, today, Monday, October 19. Down the line, I imagine it will eventually reach a much wider audience via DVD and digital streaming.

ORNETTE: Made in America--Shirley Clarke's experimental look at an experimental jazz musician

To watch Shirley Clarke's ORNETTE: Made in America today, some 27 years after its debut at the 1985 TIFF, is to realize just how experimental a filmmaker Clarke really was. Much of what we see on screen is what many new documentaries are now doing -- over a quarter of a century later. Using no narration as such (the press material tells us that the filmmaker used Coleman's symphony Skies of America as her underlying script, but this does not really compute: narrative can be verbal, even visual, but symphonic is a bit of a stretch), Clarke simply drops us into things and we begin to learn about this musician, his life and his music -- on the fly, as it were.

Ms Clarke, shown at left, was quite a woman, and this is now the second of her films, after The Connection, to be restored and released via Milestone Films and the ongoing Project Shirley. Its subject, the American jazz great Ornette Coleman, is still with us, even though Clarke died, a victim of Alzheimer's, in 1997. Her movie melds, among other things, present and past, dream and reality, fathers and sons, full orchestra and jazz band into a portrait that turns out to be not really one of the man or of his music but a kind of kaleidoscope vision of creativity and life as it emanates from the very odd personage of Coleman himself.

I wish we could have heard, really heard, more of Ornette's music here. Even though we're given quite a bit of it during the film, Clark's visuals, in several scenes, at least -- insistent, preening, all over the place -- prevent us from concentrating on the music in any serious way. The filmmaker was probably trying to find a visual equivalent to Coleman's work, but if anything some of these visuals obfuscate more than they render clear.

As for Coleman himself, you certainly don't come away from the movie saying, "Whoa -- now I really know this guy (or his music)!" But rather, "What a strange and interesting fellow he seems to be, what a life he probably led, and how I'd like to hear more of his music." In its way, it's kind of an appropriate, if weird, introduction to the musician because it allows you to experience how very strange he and his music are. (Other jazz musicians are said to have simply walked off the stage whenever Coleman would appear on it.) Simply listening to the fellow's little riff on castration/circumcision and man/male will probably rattle your brain bizarrely for some time to come.

Clarke concentrates on the movie's singular "event": a performance of Coleman's symphony to open the new cultural center in Fort Worth (the musician's home town), Caravan of Dreams. Clarke uses the orchestral part of the score more heavily, I think, that she does the Jazz Band's contribution, and she uses this as underscoring for the tale she tells. (The orchestra and the band, at least as shown here, though sharing the same stage seem oddly un-integrated both in terms of the music we hear and what we see: the band is black, the orchestra white.) All this makes for interesting, non-linear storytelling that, back when the film was first released, might have proven a little difficult for audiences to follow. Today, after all the changes we've seen to the documentary form, her film looks surpri-singly contemporary but perhaps now not so hard to keep up with.

Some of the famous people who enter the film and Coleman's life include William Burroughs (above, center), Buckminster Fuller, and George Russell, a composer and professor at the New England Conservatory of Music. The last has this to say a propos Coleman's work: "The West has always thought of music as entertainment. It doesn't understand how it also can contribute ideas & philosophy."

What proves most difficult about the movie are some of Clarke's would-be snazzy visuals and editing techniques (occurring particularly heavily in the Buckminster Fuller section). These are jumpy, repetitive and tiresome and do nothing for one's enjoyment or understanding. They don't even properly reflect Coleman's music, syncopated as it is. They simply call attention to themselves, so we wait until the filmmaker has gotten this out of her system. Fortunately, it doesn't take too long.

What the movie might do is send viewers out to look for and listen to this musician's work. Unlike most of the Clarke oeuvre, this documentary is also more modern in that it lasts only 78 minutes, just about a half-hour shorter than much of her full-length work. Given the style in which she has chosen to present the film, this shorter running time seems appropriate. Ornette: Made in America opens tomorrow, Friday August 31, here in New York City at the IFC Center.

THE CONNECTION: Shirley Clarke's grubby classic returns to sport spiffy, silvery sheen

Milestone has done it again. The company that keeps turning out major restorations, with the help of the UCLA Film & Television Archive, of major (or minor, depending on how you view them) works of cinema -- from Araya to Rogosin, The Exiles to The Edge of the World -- has a new one opening tomorrow in New York City, fifty years from the time it first appeared, only to be shut down by the New York City Police Department. At the time of its debut in October of 1962, THE CONNECTION, directed by Shirley Clarke, from the stage play by Jack Gelber, was already a cause célèbre. Back in those days, the play itself was considered raw and real -- too raw and real for the more popular, affordable and accessible entertainment offered by the movies. (This was prior to the creation of our current and ever-ridiculous ratings board.)

At the time of the film's initial release TrustMovies was a very young man who had arrived in New York the month previous to begin drama school. He missed opening day and didn't see the film until it was once again allowed to be shown, at which point, that "raw and real" subject mater -- a group of junkies, including some fine jazz musicians, sitting around a dilapidated cold-water flat waiting for a fix from their connection who, unlike Godot, really does show up to service the guys -- did indeed seem shocking and much more frank than anything he had seen up until then. That's about all he remembers of the film -- except that the print did not seem particularly good. Certainly nothing like the gorgeous one we saw at the press screening of The Connection at the IFC Center, where the film opens this Friday, May 4th. (Is that even possible? That today's restoration might look better than the film projected at the time of the initial release?) The dismal apartment that is the set of the film still looks like shit, but the film itself -- all silvery sheen and so many lustrous shades of grey that you want to lick them off the screen -- is a jewel.

Are we now so carelessly used to watching DVDs at home and digital projection in theaters that we can be so easily shocked into renewed appreciation by something this beautiful? (This restoration is up there with the best of them -- like Rogosin's On The Bowery.) Past the film beauty on display, however, The Connection, as is true of a number of these restored films, has not been treated kindly by the passing of time. Gelber's play and Clarke's film of it is a kind of play-within-a-play/movie-within-a-movie that posits a filmmaker/journalist (William Redfield, above) and his crew making a documentary about these guys and their "habits."

What may have seemed like stark realism in the 1960s comes off now as not a little pompous and "arty." And Gelber's writing, which again, seemed so honest and pointed at the time can sound awfully "theatrical" now, with some of the more "dramatic" moments resounding as the least real. The apartment's owner, Leach (played by a terrific William Finnerty, above) is afflicted with a boil on his neck that pains him no end. It's a very theatrical boil, however, and the actor is often referencing it to huge dramatic effect. Just when we're thinking, "Will somebody please pop the damn thing so we and this poor actor can move on!", somebody does, and we do.

Fortunately, four of the junkies are musicians, so we get a nice dose of jazz (a form of music I appreciate much more now than when I first saw the film). Nearly half the cast is black, and though civil rights had barely begun to make its mark in our country by 1962, you can feel the shimmering beginnings in this film. Gelber, Clarke and the cast show us how things were, with just a hint of what's to come. The strongest character in the play/film is Cowboy (played by Carl Lee, below), the titular connection who provides a little bit of heaven -- drug-wise -- along with philosophy, strength and cynicism for his crew.

Clarke put together a grand crew of her own to man the film, with some movie greats doing great work. Arthur J. Ornitz (Serpico) was cinematographer, Albert Brenner (The Pawnbroker, The Hustler) did the art direction, and Richard Sylbert (with dozens of classic films to his credit) handled the production design. The still below gives you a sense of what was achieved by these three.

For her part Clarke has Ornitz's camera constantly prowling the apartment; she's seldom still, and her movement keeps us enrapt. At 103 minutes, the film still feels a tad too long for what it has to say. Yet, in its way, it is so visually stunning, I don't think you'll mind sitting, listening and looking. Then, too, there's all that jazz.

As I noted above, The Connection, from Milestone Films, opens Friday, May 4, at the IFC Center in New York City (and elsewhere, I hope?) -- with a promise of the institutional DVD and home DVD release available this coming winter, 2013.