>2) Also on October 27th there will be a screening of a restored print of The Hustler (1961) at The Lighthouse at 111 East 59th Street at 7:30 p.m. To me The Hustler is the great anti-capitalist/marxist movie made in Hollywood with Bert Gordon/George C. Scott as the screen's ur-capitalist manipulator. Producer/writer/director Robert Rossen is interesting: joined the Communist Party when he went to Hollywood; wrote radical scripts for Warner Brothers (the only studio where he could have); blacklisted after winning Best Picture Oscar in 1949 for All the King's Men (he was one of the original 19 subpoenaed who eventually become the Hollywood 10); finally named names; then went on to make one of Hollywood's great subversive films that called into question and discredited the system that financed it. That he ever got it past the studio heads is a miracle. The Hustler also represents one of Hollywood's last radical/Brechtian-distance movies. The late '60's would usher in the !
> sentimental bathos of Penn, Scorcese, Coppola, Spielberg, Lucas et. al. Preminger and Mankiewicz would keep it up for a while, but they too were eventually crushed.
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For all of the ideology swamping the above, I'd like to give substantial
credit to Walter Tevis, the novelist who wrote _The Hustler_ and _The
Color of Money_, as well as _The Man who Fell to Earth_.
In the Beginning there was the Word, cineastes.