Interview: Tom Berenger of “Lonesome Dove Church”

Posted on March 23, 2015 at 3:12 pm

Tom Berenger stars in Lonesome Dove Church, available March 24, 2015 on DVD. He spoke to me about the role and why Westerns have such enduring appeal. And I have a copy of the DVD to give away! Send me an email at moviemom@moviemom.com with Dove in the subject line and tell me your favorite Western star. Don’t forget your address! (US addresses only). I’ll pick a winner at random on April 3, 2015. Good luck!

How did a kid from Chicago learn how to act in cowboy movies?

I’ve been doing Western since 1978 (Butch and Sundance – The Early Days), and that was a big one and it was three months and it was just constantly on horseback, all kinds of terrain. It was in the mountains, it was in snow, it was on rocks, it was on ice, it was in rivers, it was full gallop, so just a little bit of everything. The first time I learned to ride a horse was bareback and it was fine, yes, it was okay, no reins so you just jerk the mane one way or the other. He always tried to rub me off on a tree but I didn’t let him, so I learned about controlling them. In this one, I drove a buckboard.

You play a preacher in this film. What is he like?

He is pretty much upbeat. He is a real upbeat character that does not allow himself to get down too much despite whatever the situation. And so he is not given much to moods or depression or anything like that. He’s not overbearingly joyous of course but he is pretty well grounded in his beliefs as well so he’s an anchor. He’s starting a new church in Missouri in the 1850s and so it’s right before the Civil War. And in the opening scene he talks a bit in his Sunday sermon about that, about his concern that the country could be torn asunder over slavery. And as far as people in the congregation I would say half maybe are for slavery and half against. So remember if it’s Missouri it’s a border state. He of course is anti-slavery and when you’re in Missouri you are also next to Kansas and the Civil War actually started out there. No we don’t see this yet but it was pretty, pretty bad out there, pretty vicious and it actually really sort of begun before war was declared.

Do you typically read a lot of the history before you work on a project or did you know all of this before?

I knew all of that beforehand and I remember talking to the prop guys about certain rifles and things like that, because they hadn’t developed repeating rifles as yet, and all that sort of thing.

The conflict in the film is also personal as your character has to be there for his son, who has made some bad mistakes and gotten in trouble.

Well, you know teenagers. I’m sure this was true in Roman times as well. Romeo and Juliet were teenagers. So you just sort of brace yourself for it and kind of remember what you were like as well. Certainly my character is pretty patient and understanding but frustrated about his son’s behavior, getting in trouble. He doesn’t want to see him get killed, he doesn’t want to see him go to prison. And he just wants him to get in touch with his religion and society. He loves him a lot as a parent.

Well I guess the West was something we had that nobody else did. In Europe all the borders were established forever. There were wars constantly but there was nowhere to go when it got too crowded or you ran out of farmland or it became so established that you never could improve yourself classwise. So here there was always a West where you could go and try it again. The whole country was like that to begin with. All these people get a chance to get away from their problems and start all over again with a clean slate.
And I’m not saying it was easy but like every wave of immigrants there was some hope that they could lift themselves up and be accepted and not be stuck in a class system. There are still many big open spaces if you drive through there. Endless opportunities. But not easy. You can see those old photographs of farmers out there and you can see how exhausted they were.You see them emaciated from hard work.

What’s the best advice you ever got about acting?

I worked with Richard Brooks. He started as a writer but he was a real character. He looked like a Marine with that haircut and the way he dressed. He looked like some guy on the cover of Field and Stream magazine or something. He smoked a pipe and drank black coffee and wouldn’t go out to lunch. I was the same way, I wouldn’t eat lunch and he and I would sit around and talk about stuff. He said, “Lunch is the worst American habit. Watch it, they will come back in and they will be slow, they are digesting their food, the are daydreaming, somebody will get hurt. And that happened, too, just as he predicted.

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Posted on March 23, 2015 at 12:16 pm

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Smile of the Week: Soul Pancake on the Power of Accepting Compliments

Posted on March 23, 2015 at 8:00 am

My very wise mother always says, “If someone pays you a compliment, don’t argue or deflect it. Just lower your eyes and say, ‘Thank you.'” This wonderful film from the great folks at Soul Pancake shows exactly how important that is.

#scienceoflove

Be sure to check out the earlier film I posted from Soul Pancake about the science of gratitude.

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Shorts Smile of the Week

How Do Movies Change to Convey Modern Technology?

Posted on March 22, 2015 at 3:54 pm

I love this exploration of how cinematic storytelling has evolved to reflect the role that technology plays in our lives, especially in the way we absorb and convey information, especially the discussion of the elegant use of text in the “Sherlock” series.

Interview: Robert Kenner of “Merchants of Doubt”

Posted on March 22, 2015 at 7:03 am

Robert Kenner’s Merchants of Doubt is a deeply unsettling documentary about the way corporations divert money they should be spending on making better products more effectively to spend it instead on undermining science and scientists. By creating fake “public interest” groups with generic names to argue that scientific findings are not sufficient to take action they use the tactics perfected by the tobacco companies to delay government action for decades while people suffer the consequences. These days, that primarily means “selling” the idea that there is not a scientific consensus on the reality and the causes of climate change, but it applies to many other scientific findings as well. The scientific method is rigorous, checked and counter-checked, and ruthlessly truthful, with no other agenda but the facts. This is the method that produces all advances in technology and medicine. These efforts to devalue and undermine science by selling doubt the way corporations sell products obstruct efforts at the most fundamental level to establish policies based on the latest and most documented understandings of how the world works.

Writer/director Robert Kenner (“Food, Inc.”) said that while much of the film focuses on the fossil fuel companies’ efforts to discredit the science of climate change, “It is not about any specific industry. It’s about a group of very talented individuals who honed their craft in tobacco and were able to take the most difficult subject, a product that they knew was cancer causing, and for 50 years maintain doubt about it. They couldn’t say it doesn’t cause cancer because it’s a lie. They could say, ‘We don’t have enough science. We need to do more study.’ It’s the ‘doubt and delay’ tactic. So, they would switch the subject and say, “You’re taking our freedom away. We should be allowed to smoke on airplanes.” We had people picketing at Washington’s National Airport saying, ‘We demand the right to smoke on airplanes. You’re taking our freedom.’ So what’s interesting is on one hand we think of tobacco slightly as an old hat subject but what’s interesting is that playbook that was created lives on exactly the same way today. What’s so interesting is not only is it a lot of the same people but it’s the same very specific tactics.” He says it is a kind of “anti-Enlightenment.”

The industry-sponsored consultants who fabricate “interest groups” with uncredentialed “experts” are the primary culprits in the film, but one of its most significant and disturbing revelations is the complicit nature of the media, whose reflexive commitment to “showing all sides” means that they will bring on any contrarian without checking the legitimacy of the source, training, expertise, or conflicts of interest. “The real battle here is I don’t think newspapers should be putting people who play scientists on television, quoting them as equals. I think the media is playing a role in encouraging false debate. There’s always going to be one guy out there arguing that the earth is flat but that does not mean the question is not settled.”

So it is especially gratifying to see an exception in the film’s portrayal of two Chicago Tribune investigative reporters who spent two years on a brilliant expose of fraud, misrepresentation, and fake science funded by the tobacco and chemical industries that led to fire retardant regulations that (1) didn’t work and (2) exposed infants to toxic chemicals.

But Kenner points out that there are “fewer and fewer and fewer” news organizations able to devote those kinds of resources to exposing these corporate scams. “There are now 4.5 PR representatives for every journalist. When I started out there were far more journalists than PR Reps. So as people get fired from their newspapers they get hired by the very companies that they might have investigated.”

This should not be a political issue, he says. “I talked to George Schultz and he said the greatest thing he and Ronald Reagan did was the international ozone treaty. He said, ‘We didn’t know 100% but we were in the high 90’s and it was the right thing to do. We had to take action. It was a great insurance policy.’ And Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency, and George Bush with acid rain — so there is a tradition of conservative environmental protection. We might all hate the EPA for being such nags, but the air and water are cleaner and so we are lucky they are there.”

He also insists that it is not an anti-corporate film. “It’s really important to say that corporations are in the best position to be the solution.”

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