"sophies-choice"

Ah, that eternal question: which is better, the book or the movie? Though such comparisons are natural, even inevitable, they’re also kind of pointless, since the conventions of each medium differ so markedly. Books explore the dense inner lives of characters in a way movies can’t, while films use sight, sound and motion to create an immediacy books can’t.

There’s an extra frisson of excitement to be found in what I call “launch pad” movies. This is not necessarily a movie star’s first film, but rather the one that propels him or her to that exalted status. In these special outings, you can feel a certain electricity coming off the screen; it's as if the performer is announcing in a subliminal stage whisper: “I’ve arrived!”  Here are twenty key launch pad vehicles for some of my favorite stars, spanning eighty years of movie history.   

Watching Matthew Miele’s “Alan J. Pakula: Going For Truth” (2019), more a heartfelt memorial tribute than a standard doc, waves of nostalgia swept over me, not just for Alan J. Pakula’s best films from half a century ago, but for the bygone days when artists like him could thrive; when good, meaty scripts were still prized and Hollywood invested in them.

Looking back half a century (can it really be half a century?), I’m reminded that 1971 was a very good year for movies.

I can vividly recall the first moment I saw Meryl Streep on-screen. The film was “The Deer Hunter” (1978). Her part was relatively small — she played the stateside love interest of two men shipped off to Vietnam — but I was immediately struck by her presence. 

Ever wonder why so many films are set in New York City? In addition to its size, and reputation for being the cultural and financial center of America (if not the world), there are the not-insignificant tax breaks our local government offers to attract penny-pinching studios, City Hall’s willingness to accommodate film crews (completely shutting down entire neighborhoods for location shoots), and a nice bonus in that 99% of stars and directors have home-away-from-penthouse spreads in the Big Apple. But there’s so much more to New York than the touristy scrum of Times Square, the hip Chelsea scene, the tony Upper East Side, or the high rise canyons of the Financial District. There are five boroughs that make up New York City, after all, and among them, Brooklyn. Part of Brooklyn’s glory is that it stubbornly defies stereotypes. Even with the current crop of twenty-something “trustafarians” overrunning the borough, the place is too big, too old, and too rich in history to erase the centuries of cultural roots hiding in plain sight.