Podcast: Interview with Tom Laughlin (1985)

Tom Laughlin and Delores Taylor in the 1971 cult hit Billy Jack. (Photo: Handout/NY Daily News)

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts, at CJRT-FM (today Jazz 91.1) in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to writers and artists from all fields. In 1985, I sat down with actor, director and screenwriter Tom Laughlin.

At the time of the interview, Tom Laughlin was in Toronto filming The Return of Billy Jack, a planned follow-up to his Billy Jack films of the previous decade, in which he bucked the trend of 1970s film antiheroes by portraying a genuinely positive heroic figure who protected animals and children against racist thugs. The Return of Billy Jack would unfortunately never be released.

– Kevin Courrier

Here is the full interview with Tom Laughlin as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1985.

Refugees: Leave No Trace

Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie and Ben Foster in Leave No Trace. (Photo: IMDB)

Intimate, graceful and sorrowful, Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace is the best movie I’ve seen so far this year. And it’s a total surprise, because I found Granik’s last picture, Winter’s Bone, phony pretty much from start to finish. A study of an adolescent girl (Jennifer Lawrence) growing up in abject poverty in the Ozarks, it was relentlessly gray and cheerless, the characters reduced to editorial signposts proclaiming the director’s vision. The whole movie reminded me of the scene at the end of Brokeback Mountain where Heath Ledger visits his clandestine lover Jake Gyllenhaal’s parents after Gyllenhaal’s death: Ang Lee wanted to make the point that these people were dirt poor, so the walls were bare. But it’s an elemental human impulse to try to import some comfort to even the grimmest surroundings – a hospital room, a jail cell. The only scene in Winter’s Bone that felt lived-in was one where a group of people gather to make music. By contrast, there isn’t a single moment in Leave No Trace – the coming-of-age story of a teenage girl, Tom (Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie), who lives, homeless and itinerant, with her father, Will (Ben Foster), in the woods of the Pacific Northwest – that seems inauthentic. It has a varied and rich emotional palette. Perhaps the magnificent visual palette of the landscape (shot by Michael McDonough) helped keep Granik honest.

Through an Architect's Eyes: A Conversation About Columbus

John Cho and Haley Lu Richardson in Kogonada's Columbus. (Photo: IMDB)

Columbus, the indie debut feature by renowned video essayist Kogonada, is widely considered one of the best films of 2017 and garnered a rapturous response at this year’s Ebertfest. Set among the world-famous modernist buildings of Columbus, Indiana, it tells the story of two people stuck in an in-between phase of their lives: Casey (Haley Lu Richardson), a nineteen-year-old architecture fan and daughter of a divorced former opioid addict (Michelle Forbes), and Jin (John Cho), the estranged son of a celebrated Korean architecture professor who suddenly collapses. They meet by chance and spend their days together talking about architecture. Both Richardson and Cho give superb performances, Complemented by the assured direction and the formalist cinematography of Elisha Christian, shooting on location in the eponymous town. Columbus stands out for its many gorgeous and moving shots of well-known modernist buildings, including the Miller House, the Columbus Regional Hospital Mental Health Center, the Cleo Rogers Memorial Library, and the Irwin Union Bank building. In her review for RogerEbert.com, Sheila O’Malley writes of the film, “What is remarkable is how intense it is, given the stillness and quiet of Kogonada’s style, and the focus with which he films the buildings.” And Nathan Knapp’s heartfelt analysis of Columbus for the online magazine Bright Wall/Dark Room is one of the best pieces of film criticism I’ve yet encountered.

As architecture is such a prominent part of the film, I was interested in how someone with formal architectural training might see it. Humphrey Yang is a high-school classmate of mine who received his degree in architecture not too long ago and is now pursuing graduate studies in computational design at Carnegie Mellon. Our discussion below, which has been edited and condensed, covers the art and engineering aspects of architecture, how to shoot an architectural film, why Columbus isn’t one, and how it might have turned out in a non-Western context.

Portugal/Brazil: Melancholy Redux – The Shared Literary Ethos of Assis, Pessoa, and Lispector

Machado de Assis's Collected Stories, Fernando Pessoa's Book of Disquiet, and Clarice Lispector's Collected Stories. (Photo: Getty Images)

This is an appreciation of three new translations of seminal works by perhaps the greatest writers in a shared language in the late 19th and early to mid 20th century. But these three remarkable writers, all of whom specialized in creating scintillating short stories of extreme structural brevity and emotional precision, had much more in common than only writing in Portuguese. They also shared a deep subterranean conduit of melancholy realism and occasionally a surreal current of open-hearted embrace for the uncanny aspects of everyday life. They each documented waking dreams: everyday life under a magnifying glass.

For my purposes, and for the purposes of this brief study of their work (which is not a review of all three new translations at once but rather is a celebration of their radical stylistic spirit) there is a kind of metaphysical conveyor belt running directly from Machado through Pessoa and leading powerfully into the lap of the almost unbearably glamorous Lispector. (A lap-dance for intellectuals, perhaps.) That conveyor belt also operates in the gloomy nocturnal geographical navigations traveling from Portugal to Brazil and back again, fueled by the quirky and deceptive simplicity of their native language (to which I, alas, have no access apart from the seemingly brilliant handiwork of three gifted translation artisans) as it mysteriously runs uphill into a passionate yet tautly restrained English.

All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Florida Project (2017)

Brooklynn Prince and Valeria Cotto in The Florida Project. (Photo: IMDB)

Mothers are infallible. They’re the safety net, the locus of belonging that makes everything else okay. This is the secret of childhood. The secret of growing up is learning that this isn’t true. The Florida Project (2017) is about a little girl named Moonee (Brooklynn Prince) who learns this at way too young an age.

In many ways, the entire film is built around the idea of waiting for the other shoe to drop. Moonee lives with her very young single mom, Halley (Bria Vinaite), at the Magic Castle Motel right outside Disney World. The motel, and similar ones nearby, serves as home and community for families rendered homeless by the Great Recession, including Moonee’s friends Scooty (Christopher Rivera) and, from the Futureland Motel next door, Jancey (Valeria Cotto). The film follows these kids in their world as they while away the early days of summer vacation by getting up to shenanigans, running around screaming, begging for change for ice cream, exploring the nearby (and surprisingly beautiful) empty fields, and basically just doing what kids throughout pre-internet history have always done.

The Member of the Wedding: How Not to Stage an American Classic

Roslyn Ruff and Tavi Gevinson in The Member of the Wedding. (Photo: Daniel Rader)

There isn’t an iota of poetry in the Williamstown Theatre Festival production of The Member of the Wedding. Carson McCullers’s adaptation of her own 1946 coming-of-age novel was produced on Broadway in 1950 and filmed – unforgettably – by Fred Zinnemann two years later with the original stars: the great actress and jazz singer Ethel Waters, the child actor Brandon de Wilde, and in the role of the protagonist, twelve-year-old Frankie Addams, the phenomenal twenty-six-year-old Julie Harris. Except for A Streetcar Named Desire, this is, I believe, the most lyrical play ever written by an American. Frankie, lonesome, motherless, desperate for connection, latches onto the idea of going off with her brother and his fiancée after their imminent wedding because she has no group to belong to and decides that “they are the ‘we’ of me.” The speech in which she conveys this notion – to her little cousin and next-door neighbor John Henry, who, of course, has no idea what she’s talking about – is the first-act curtain, and it’s utterly remarkable. The language shimmers; the revelation it frames, fantastic as it is, is pellucid and profound. At several points in the play Frankie – though she is trembling on the razor’s edge of adolescence, pulled as much backwards as forwards – offers perceptions that are both touchingly and terrifyingly mature for a girl of twelve and that, more astonishingly, she articulates with the clarity of a poet. She’s like the little girl in Elizabeth Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room” who stumbles into an adult vision of the improbable co-existence of disparate segments of humanity. She’s also a portrait of the writer as a young woman.

Lessons for the Home Baker

A loaf of sourdough bread. (Photo: Liliana Fuchs)

In New England, everybody knows King Arthur Flour. It’s on the shelves in most grocery stores and it’s generally on the more expensive side. Their all-purpose flour is higher in protein than most brands – within the range of traditional bread flours – and that makes for a good, elastic dough and a delicious loaf. The King Arthur Flour Baking Center is situated among the green hills of Vermont, immediately across the Connecticut River from Dartmouth College. While the company that eventually became King Arthur has been in operation for over 200 years, the Baking Center only opened in 2012. It includes a bakery, a café, a baking supply store and a small school that offers classes for both professionals and amateurs. The question is, with so many recipes and Youtube videos available on the internet for free, why would you sign up for a class to learn how to make something like sourdough bread or croissants? Because yeast is a living creature; and because many home bakers find croissant recipes daunting just to read. Baking, in other words, can be tricky business, and some skills are most easily learned with the help of experts.