To say that Sidney Lumet helped shape the American film scene would be a bold understatement. But I can really only speak to how he impacted my love of film, particularly the 70's era, and how his style and unabashed quality has influenced my own efforts in this lazy, crazy town.
When I was in boarding school, in the 80's, I was terribly out of touch with culture & pop culture all those elements that help shape your life in the upcoming, post adolescent years. I think all of us, in that tiny school on a tiny mountain in tiny Vermont, could say the same thing. We were sort of stuck in the low heat dryer cycle of The Grateful Dead, Led Zeppelin and a late 60's ideology. No complaints but when it came to what was happening in the world outside our oasis, we were lost.
Watching movies meant finding a teacher that had a VCR and somehow finding a movie to put in it. There was a copy of Ferris Beuller's Day Off that someone had taped off the television. I brought a copy of Stand By Me. And then, when I was in 11th grade and they installed a TV and VCR in the school-wide common area, I discovered Apocalypse Now. Well, to say I discovered it sort of an overstatement. It was the only tape around. Except Josh Somebody's skateboarding movies. I think every Saturday night for a year we would gather there and watch as Martin Sheen struggled with his demons and confronted Marlon Brando's. Needless to say, this was before you could call up every known fact about the making of a film and discuss until you passed out. All we really knew was that it was loosely based on the book "Heart of Darkness", which most of us had recently read. I also knew that the director was a producer (though I didn't know what that meant) of "The Black Stallion", without a doubt my most favorite film up to that point.
So, as I gently opened my eyes to the power and influence of film I became thirsty for more of it that strayed from the beaten path. I just couldn't find those films in that part of the world. I had to move a mountain to get some teaching intern to take me to see the latest River Phoenix movie at a theatre almost an hour away. And I had no idea how that effort would change my life.
The film was Sidney Lumet's "Running on Empty". I knew nothing about it, save for it starring the lovely, doe-eyed River. That was enough for me. But I knew I was in for something totally different when the opening credits came on (one long shot of the yellow lines down the center of a country road at night) and the music seemed a little more mournful than typical Hollywood fare. What followed was, as everyone surely knows by now, a fantastic exploration of a family trying to live a normal life when their ideals have cost them the ability to exist in a "normal" sphere. I was struck by the notion of family, sacrifice and a love so strong that you can let someone go. Not to mention River Phoenix!
The following weekend there was an article about Mr. Lumet in the New York Times, which I stumbled across at the local general store. Not having any cash, I stole the Arts section and scurried back to campus. I kept that article for years. It helped define my adoration of film. I was hotly desperate to get my hands on these movies. I begged the general store to order Dog Day Afternoon and Network, to no avail. So I waited for Spring Break when I could raid the local video store.
(That video store and it's influence on me could be it's own post. Not to mention that one of it's employees asked me out on my first date, thinking I was in college and then promptly took me home when he learned I was only 16.)
Sidney Lumet introduced me to the quality and terrific subversiveness of movies made during, what I consider the greatest decade of filmmaking, the 1970's. Even when I went to graduate school a few years ago, the thrill of one of my professors having been the screenwriter of Dog Day Afternoon was weirdly child-like. I actually got nervous around him.
So today is a sad day for the film community, but it's a joyous moment to remember someone without whom the cinematic landscape, in it's ideal iteration, would be as evolved as it is.
