BEFORE: OK, now THIS film represents the end of the Doc Block - for now, anyway. Whoever's in charge of taking my cast list submissions at the IMDB can take a break this weekend.
I may have to work a few docs in here and there if I'm going to clear them and make some progress on that part of the list. I can go back to fiction films tomorrow, which is a relief, and set myself up for Mother's Day. I learned a lot about athlete activists, and music industry activists, prison inmate activists, and, umm, plane hijackers, I suppose. We covered tennis, basketball, boxing, baseball, blues music, jazz, Broadway, TV producers, authors, lawyers and time-share salesmen. That last category can just go burn in hell, of course, they're garbage humans.
But I started with a documentary about an actor, Val Kilmer, and I'm ending with one about an actress, Natalie Wood. So it wasn't a true doc circle, like last year, but it was somewhat circular in nature. And the same people kept popping up, as I expected. Richard Nixon is now WAY out in front, with 10 appearances, he's going to be hard to beat for the year. It turns out if you're a U.S. President or a talk-show host, you never really die, you just live on forever in archive footage that gets used in documentaries.
George Hamilton and Dyan Cannon carry over from "8 Heads in a Duffel Bag".
THE PLOT: Exploring Natalie Wood's life and career through the unique perspective of her daughter, Natasha Gregson Wagner, and others who knew her best.
AFTER: Well, as they say, that's Hollywood - celebrities are just like us, only more so. I didn't know that Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner met early on in their movie careers, got married, got divorced, got together with other partners and then years later came back together and formed this great big family of nepo babies and step-children who almost all had two celebrity parents, it's just that none of them had a matching set. Umm, I think - it's a bit hard to keep track of. I remember that Carrie Fisher monologue where she used a big chalkboard to describe the comings and goings, marriages and divorces of Debbie Reynolds, Eddie Fisher, Liz Taylor and more, because if they didn't do that, somebody might end up dating their own half-sibling, and then where would we be?
Natasha Gregson Wagner was a producer on this film, and also an interview subject, and she called her step-father "Daddy Wagner" to distinguish him from her biological father, "Daddy Gregson", and so I guess whatever works and keeps all the relationships squared away in your mind is probably helpful. There's a bit of an organizational problem, though, as the film details Natalie Wood's career, moves forward to her drowning accident and then skips back to her childhood for some reason. Why they couldn't start at the beginning and end at the ending is a bit beyond me - if you ask me the childhood stuff is all a bit sadder because you're already aware that if life's a party, the party's over at some point. Regarding the accident, it's a bit clear that there's an agenda here, to clear Robert Wagner of any wrongdoing - the doc was released two years after he was named as a "person of interest" in the investigation of her death, which for some reason is still ongoing. I've been notified that legally I'm not allowed to throw out any theories here regarding the night in question, so I will refrain from doing that.
I get why we have to take the walk back though her career, though - what an amazing run of notable hit movies she had, starting as a child in "Miracle on 34th St." in 1947, and the HUGE film "Rebel Without a Cause" in 1955, "Splendor in the Grass" and "West Side Story" in 1961, "Gypsy" a year later, "Sex and the Single Girl", "Inside Daisy Clover", and "This Property is Condemned". Not to mention the defining film of the sexual revolution, "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice", and a cameo in "The Candidate" in 1972 before basically retiring to raise her daughters. It's a bit weird that her intended comeback films were sci-fi films, "Meteor" in 1979 and "Brainstorm", but we'll never know where her career was headed after that because she died while on a break from filming "Brainstorm".
Everything in the film post-drowning, and after the career retrospective, basically amounts to a form of therapy for Natalie Wood's children and step-children as they all work out how they've been affected by her death, and what it all means. I'm not sure all of this needed to be included, they could have all just had these conversations with their analysts instead of the movie-viewing audience. I mean, nobody's ever going to have anything constructive to say about the night in question, certainly not anybody watching at home. Why not just spend the majority of the movie celebrating her life, rather than wallowing in misery over her death?
Also starring Elizabeth Applegate, Richard Benjamin (last seen in "Catch-22"), Michael Childers, Tonya Crowe, Mart Crowley, Joshua Donen, Mia Farrow (last seen in "The Kid Stays in the Picture"), Elliott Gould (last seen in "The Automat"), Julia Gregson, Richard Gregson, Sarah Gregson, Peter Hyams, John Irvin, Delphine Mann, Alan Nierob, David Niven Jr., Alice Emmy Price, Robert Redford (last seen in "Mr. Saturday Night"), Julie Salamon, George Segal (last seen in "Becoming Mike Nichols"), Jill St. John (last seen in "Diamonds Are Forever"), Douglas Trumbull, Courtney Wagner, Katie Wagner, Natasha Gregson Wagner (last seen in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"), Robert Wagner (last seen in "Space Jam: A New Legacy")
with archive footage of Natalie Wood (last seen in "Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It"), David Niven (ditto), Fred Astaire (last seen in "Lucy and Desi"), Warren Beatty (also last seen in "Mr. Saturday Night"), Roy Scheider (ditto), Bill Boggs (last seen in "Where's My Roy Cohn?"), Tom Snyder (ditto), Michael Caine (last seen in "An Accidental Studio"), Sean Connery (last seen in "Dionne Warwick: Don't Make Me Over"), Robert Culp (last seen in "Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project"), Tony Curtis (last seen in "Blonde"), James Dean (also last seen in "The Automat"), Jane Fonda (last seen in "Monster-in-Law"), Merv Griffin (last seen in "What Happened, Miss Simone?"), Edmund Gwenn (last seen in "Them!"), Florence Henderson (last seen in "Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street"), Orson Welles (ditto), Henry Jaglom, Howard Jeffrey, Elia Kazan, Jack Lemmon (also last seen in "The Kid Stays in the Picture"), Barbra Streisand (ditto), Dr. Phil McGraw, Liza Minnelli (last seen in "Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind"), Scott Pelley (last seen in "Everything Is Copy"), Irving Pichel, Stefanie Powers (last seen in "The Magnificent Seven Ride!"), Nicholas Ray, Cliff Robertson (last seen in "Midway" (1976)), Rosalind Russell (last seen in "His Girl Friday"), Jessica Savitch, Dick Shawn (last seen in "Mel Brooks: Unwrapped"), Dinah Shore (last seen in "Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You"), Frank Sinatra (ditto), Maria Shriver (last seen in "Scandalous: The Untold Story of the National Enquirer"), Christopher Walken (last seen in "Domino"), Jack L. Warner, Lana Wood (also last seen in "Diamonds Are Forever").
RATING: 5 out of 10 magazine covers
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