Audio transcription

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Old Boyfriends introduction by Brittany Gravely. Friday 23 August 2019.

Brittany Gravely  0:00

[INAUDIBLE] …review of the film in this week's Weekly Dig, which I think is only in print, not online yet, but he has a lot of great insights into it and goes over the history, which I will also go over briefly here.

After working as a stage director, choreographer and dancer Joan Tewkesbury’s first job in the movie industry was a script girl on McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Then she went on to co-write Thieves Like Us, and her most famous writing gig was Nashville. So, she was kind of on the up and up and meanwhile, hot off of Taxi Driver, Rolling Thunder and Blue Collar, screenwriter Paul Schrader wrote a script called Old Girlfriends with his brother Leonard. Apparently, he wanted to take advantage of the popularity of women's movies at a time so he switched it around and changed it from a man to a woman and offered the script to Tewkesbury to direct. She made further rewrites to the script with the assistance actually of Talia Shire who stars in the film. This would be the only theatrical feature she would ever direct. Like many female directors at the time, though she preferred film, she could only really find work in TV movies and shows. So that comprises most of her career. So that's an unfortunate statistic, but if there were one film she was going to direct, it's appropriate that it's this one. So I would advise against taking the film at face value because I think that it's still entertaining, but it's much less interesting. As I mentioned in my note in the calendar, it goes beyond any obvious feminist statement, instead placing you in this kind of experiment of the woman as a mirror for the men in the film, who all lie somewhere on the spectrum of broken figures as well. It's a smart deceptive film in this way and also makes her journey that she goes through much more radical than it appears on the surface. So once you lift the women's movie veil, the film opens up to a whole other reality of women's placement in cinema and in society at large. And, the rules given are not given to them. I don't want to give anything away or guide you too much in my reading of the film. There's a lot of cues, but I just wanted to put that out there, especially if it's your first time watching the movie.

As Jake mentioned in his article, the film's revival came about recently after a book was published called Liberating Hollywood: Women Directors and the Feminist Reform of the 1970s American Cinema by Maya Montañez Smukler. The book inspired UCLA to have a program based around the films mentioned in the book and that's when they screened a print of Old Boyfriends that turned out it was super faded, and all the prints were really faded. And so they found the original negative and just very recently struck brand new prints, one of which you're going to watch tonight, so it's having a really limited run in only a few theaters around the country. And if you find the film as fascinating as I do, you have three more opportunities to rewatch it this weekend. It will be playing all weekend in addition to some Howard Hawks. So anyway, enjoy the film and please turn off any electronic devices that make noise or shed light, and keep them off the whole time. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

©Harvard Film Archive

Perhaps most famous for writing Robert Altman’s multi-storied Nashville, Joan Tewkesbury directed her first feature film from a script originally written by Paul Schrader and his brother Leonard. Talia Shire stars as Dianne, a woman on a journey to find herself through revisiting her former loves—with unpredictable and complicated results. Despite initial indications of romantic comedy, the brightness transforms completely during Dianne’s complex, disturbing reunion with an old high school sweetheart—played by John Belushi with an intense mix of pathos, sleaze and rage. While the darker aspects of her own intentions also begin to emerge, neither her voiceover nor an old boyfriend’s private investigations fully explain her mission or behavior. As a feminist film or a “woman’s movie,” Old Boyfriends even breaks those genres’ attempts at stereotype-shattering with its enigmatic, faulty heroine/anti-heroine who, instead of defiantly blazing a new trail, seems to travel in reckless retrograde; rather than bare her soul, she mirrors the actions and desires of her male counterparts. The “little game of transference” she is eventually accused of playing exposes the emptiness in the men’s lives, her own existence as a broken reflection, and ultimately, cinema’s tendency to cast women in identity-less roles only meant to support their male co-stars—leaving everyone with a void to fill. The illusion destroyed, she and any other survivors—onscreen or in the theater—can put the new parts and new narratives back together in a different way, should they choose to do so.