In "STAR," the biography of Warren Beatty, biographer Peter Biskind explains how Beatty had just been involved in assisting Senator McGovern's campaign to become the Democratic Party candidate against then President Richard Nixon, who w.as re-elected in 1972 on a landslide.
According to Biskind, Beatty was at that point in his life an incurably self-centered and self-absorbed philanderer and tight-fisted would-be politician who realized that acting and producing was far easier, but who learned enough from the 1971/2 election campaigns to see that a movie could profitably be made out of all those hysterical and dramatic times, set against the backdrop of the war in Vietnam. Perhaps PARALLAX's greatest triumph is that it came out at about the same time as the Watergate case loomed large in the news, which certainly bolstered its box office performance.
Yet, according to Biskind, PARALLAX only went ahead because Beatty was in a "play-or-play" position and, true to his character, he did not want to pay. So production began without a script and in the midst of a writers' strike in Hollywood, but Pakula liked chaos and cunningly judged it an opportunity, in light of ongoing political developments in the US.
As a film, PARALLAX has an interesting premise, with reporters who watched an assassination being steadily assassinated themselves, leaving only Frady (Beatty) on the run, and he just survives the whole nefarious and sinister affair but the film ends on an unconnected compilation of stills which are meant to be significant but which just highlight the gargantuan ambitiousness of a film that simply does not have the script, the direction or the actors, to make a cogent statement.
At his own imposition, Beatty was always shot in a manner that enhanced his good looks, from angles that he would personally endorse, regardless of Pakula's vision, and that caused some friction between the two men . but nothing that Beatty couldn't bend to his gain.
In "STAR," Biskind recalls that "in one scene, Beatty does nothing more complicated than sit at a table stirring soup. He did take after take to just get the right amount of steam coming off the soup." The working team labelled that take "Warren Stirs Soup - Take 98."
Photography is probably the least bad thing about PARALLAX, which I have now watched twice, and have found jarring, annoying, and - to me, the capital sin in any bad movie - pretentious. Three stars for the stirring small part played by Paula Prentiss, the photography and the attempt to reflect the paranoia of the day.
According to Biskind, Beatty was at that point in his life an incurably self-centered and self-absorbed philanderer and tight-fisted would-be politician who realized that acting and producing was far easier, but who learned enough from the 1971/2 election campaigns to see that a movie could profitably be made out of all those hysterical and dramatic times, set against the backdrop of the war in Vietnam. Perhaps PARALLAX's greatest triumph is that it came out at about the same time as the Watergate case loomed large in the news, which certainly bolstered its box office performance.
Yet, according to Biskind, PARALLAX only went ahead because Beatty was in a "play-or-play" position and, true to his character, he did not want to pay. So production began without a script and in the midst of a writers' strike in Hollywood, but Pakula liked chaos and cunningly judged it an opportunity, in light of ongoing political developments in the US.
As a film, PARALLAX has an interesting premise, with reporters who watched an assassination being steadily assassinated themselves, leaving only Frady (Beatty) on the run, and he just survives the whole nefarious and sinister affair but the film ends on an unconnected compilation of stills which are meant to be significant but which just highlight the gargantuan ambitiousness of a film that simply does not have the script, the direction or the actors, to make a cogent statement.
At his own imposition, Beatty was always shot in a manner that enhanced his good looks, from angles that he would personally endorse, regardless of Pakula's vision, and that caused some friction between the two men . but nothing that Beatty couldn't bend to his gain.
In "STAR," Biskind recalls that "in one scene, Beatty does nothing more complicated than sit at a table stirring soup. He did take after take to just get the right amount of steam coming off the soup." The working team labelled that take "Warren Stirs Soup - Take 98."
Photography is probably the least bad thing about PARALLAX, which I have now watched twice, and have found jarring, annoying, and - to me, the capital sin in any bad movie - pretentious. Three stars for the stirring small part played by Paula Prentiss, the photography and the attempt to reflect the paranoia of the day.