Hollywood at Harvard

Virtually everybody around here these days knows about Counterpoint, the Harvard feature film where Professor John Finley '25 falls dead in a mock-tragic assassination scene. Information about it has been disseminated very, very successfully. Counterpoint has been doing the Harvard "circuit" lately--in a tentative way--and it's been playing to nearly sell-out crowds at a dollar a head so far. Even though the titles are still in the lab and the film is running without them. Even though there's no synchronised sound (prohibitively expensive) and parts of the picture are fuzzy and overexposed. Even though the plot of this thriller is completely incoherent, impossible to follow. Miscellaneous events: a shooting and a heroin deal, a chase and a knifing, a mammoth aquarium tank rupturing and some springtime kissy-kissy, a final plunge from the Lowell House Bell Tower into oblivion.

There are celebrities--besides Finley, there's Ted Kennedy '54, George Plimpton '48, B.F. Skinner, Walter Jackson Bate '39, Leonard Bernstein '39, Derek Bok, Daniel Steiner '54, Burris Young '55, Alan Heimert, and Alfred Hitchcock (who is rear-projected--he's not really there). And the locations--inside the Library of Congress, the Fogg Museum, Grand Central Station, Harvard courtyards, Quebec City, the Plaza Hotel in New York, the New England Aquarium....

Sounds like someone's got an eye for the main chance. If the Harvard population were the American public, then W. Donald Brown '74 of Eliot House would be Sam Goldwyn. Brown wrote, directed, shot, edited, appeared in, even ran the projector for Counterpoint at a showing the other night. But mostly he produced it. Brown got an original loan of $400 from the Eliot House entertainment fund. Then he sold shares in the film to 42 students--sending a prospectus to friends in Cambridge, in Eliot House, in the Hasty Pudding Club--to pay his creditors back. Brown even arranged with his lab to pay for special effects on the installment plan. A public relations article has appeared in The Boston Globe, two have run in the Herald-American, another in the Harvard Independent. Now there are more publicity plans in the work, including the "Counterpoint Frappe" which Brown hopes to push in the House grills. Counterpoint will be shown for the public twice a night tomorrow, Saturday and next weekend at the Science Center; rumors fly about future showings outside Harvard.

Donald Brown doesn't really cut the image of the Harvard filmmaker. A black Minnesotan from a small community, he decided in the ninth grade to make a movie based on Edgar Allen Poe's elegaic prose poem Ligeia. Since then he's made a number of films, including a feature called Negatives when he was a freshman here. But it's strange. He's no cinema pedant--far from it, and he doesn't major in Visual Studies. He likes Hitchcock, Mike Nichols, Woody Allen, Blow-up, nothing fancy. Nothing experimental or avant-garde for him. He makes full-length feature films on commercial subjects and with big-name stars. One purpose of Counterpoint was to supplement applications to the film schools at USC and UCLA, the two major feeders for TV and Hollywood, and partly for this reason the picture is flashy--over 400 special lab effects were used. "I tried to run the gamut," says Brown. Right now he's halfway through a tongue-in-cheek version of Robin Hood, based on the Errol Flynn movie and filmed in color with Robert Kennedy Jr. '76 in the leading role. Maid Marion was originally designed for a sophomore named Nicole Bourgois. It's inspired--an adventure story with Harvard's glamor stars. One can almost see it on the marquee.

Just like in real movieland, it's the arrangements rather than the filmmaking itself that seem to be getting all the attention. Brown says he is often most intrigued with the business aspects of filmmaking and, judging from all the fuss, this is what he does best. He says he had "fun" going through red tape to gain access to the Library of Congress and the Plaza Hotel, and lining up a cavalcade of actors for the show. Of Brown's $1200 budget only $350 went to the basic costs of filming: a sizeable portion of the rest paid for travelling expenses for shooting on location in Washington and Canada and New York. He uses the word "fun" to describe the making of the film a lot, and his audiences have fun too, laughing when, for example, B.F. Skinner briefly enters the picture for no reason but to raise his eyebrows at a couple embracing in his laboratory. Skinner is supposed to be reclusive, but somehow Brown convinced him to appear. Brown spent a great deal of energy making this film full of fun scenes like these--and they are perfect selling points in a hokey sort of Harvard way.

Since Counterpoint is by genre a simple old-fashioned thriller, a professional touch could have created a breezy kind of Hollywood entertainment. Professionalism extends beyond the question of equipment--Brown's elaborate use of models and rear-projection, his advertising and the cameo stars, all are conceived in a professional way. But the appeal of a Hollywood picture depends on more than this: it has to make sense.

Donald Brown describes Counterpoint as a film of "hidden meanings." "An imposed, artificial order on the surface" (this is supposed to be symbolized visually by recurring shots of clocks, rows, columns, etc.) hides a world of "chaos underneath" (symbolized by smoke). This is "counterpoint." There is also a set of "misconceptions" and "red herrings" in the plot line which parallel this visual theme.

Unfortunately, though, the "chaos underneath" only gives away a general anarchy in the conception of the film itself. This general chaos surfaces in the first few minutes of Counterpoint and rules with an iron hand for the duration of the film. Both of Brown's worlds--the order and the chaos--are presented with the same frenzied, confused montage which wreaks havoc on the plot. Even the masters of quick-cutting, whom Brown openly imitates, structure their films around sequential thought, building their tricks atop a plot that conveys at least a remote sense of plot or development. Tenuous visual connections alone aren't enough to grab an audience.

Counterpoint does demonstrate an active editing imagination in a number of short scenes. Several times Brown skillfully imitates Hitchcock's murder-in-the-shower sequence from Psycho, and there's an interesting scene at the headphones in Hilles Library. But they do this at Carpenter Center all the time.

Most undergraduate filmmakers limit themselves to making short, non-narrative films--and with good reason. Working on tight budgets with no assistants, using only the relatively primitive equipment Harvard has to offer, the student filmmaker faces so many production problems even in a short that he barely has time to consider his film as a whole. In a full-length film the burden of technical impositions becomes enormous. Novice directors tend to be gimmicky and hard-to-follow even in short films.

For a project like the hour-and-a-half-long Counterpoint to work as a movie, it needs to channel its energy better. Less time spent planning cameos, more on the unity that a thriller demands; less concern with gimmickry, more with acting; less spectacle, more drama--whatever the problems, Counterpoint has plenty of them and it didn't have to. It tries--wastefully--to get by on Harvard in-jokes and a flashy facade.

Maybe, with so much talk about so little movie--further perpetuated here--and with the commercial forms (if not the actual money) so blatant, the implication is that W. Donald Brown's Counterpoint is a con movie, that he's ripping somebody off. Maybe so. But in career games like filmmaking, it's seldom talent that pulls a first-time artist out of the hat and into the public view. Usually you need to do it with mirrors.