REVIEWS
'Something's Gonna Live' has critics raving.
If you care about the great days of Hollywood past — and how could you not — its hard to resist "Something's Gonna Live," a charming new documentary that plays for a week starting Friday at the Music Hall in Beverly Hills.
Daniel Raim's splendid, deeply moving documentary "Something's Gonna Live," 10 years in the making, takes its title from a remark from its central figure, the eminent production designer Robert Boyle. It is an expression of confidence that the films to which he and his colleagues contributed will live on and on.
Delightfully rambling and unexpectedly moving, Daniel Raim's fly-on-the-wall portrait of legendary production designer Robert Boyle and his illustrious friends stands as a bittersweet love letter to some of old Hollywood's least-heralded artisans.
Two new documentaries about Hollywood craftsmen opened in Los Angeles this week: Something’s Gonna Live and Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff (already on DVD in the UK). Both focus on likeable professionals and are brimming with movie clips, making them compulsive viewing, but I ultimately found the former much more compelling than the latter.
GO SOMETHING’S GONNA LIVE Warmly nostalgic, Something’s Gonna Live sheds light on film industry professionals most moviegoers disregard unless they’re filling out their Oscar pool sheet: production designers and cinematographers. Documentarian Daniel Raim previously paid homage to acclaimed production designer Robert F. Boyle (North by Northwest) with his Academy-nominated short The Man on Lincoln’s Nose.
The 2009 edition of AFI Fest, which opened last Friday in Hollywood with the North American premiere of Wes Anderson’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” reflects radical changes made in the past year to the basic DNA of the American Film Institute’s annual fall event.
This informative and lively documentary follows six artists in their senescence who have bonded throughout the years after working in Hollywood during the golden age of cinema. From storyboard artist Harold Michelson to art directors Robert Boyle, Henry Bumstead and Albert Nozaki to cinematographers Haskell Wexler and Conrad Hall, each one of them gets just the right amount of screen time so that you’re able to understand precisely how they started out in the film industry, how they contributed to it and what makes them so important within the scope of the world of film. Neither of them comes across as full of themselves or boring; they’re each wise, honest and charismatic.
Chances are you didn’t know who decided to make Jimmy Stewart a stamp collector in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, but it was the production designer, Henry “Bummy” Bumstead. You might also have forgotten who aged the wood in the bleak gallows from which the convicted killers in In Cold Blood are hanged, but that was another production designer, Robert Boyle.
Melancholy is the word that comes to mind. Whoever said change was exciting has never been old. I don’t mean old as in 25 years of age. I mean 100 years old, weak and feeble and frustratingly unable to do the things you once took for granted. People say it’s an ugly part of life, but you just don’t know until you’ve had the energy and physical capability swept right out from under you.
Bottom Line: A terrific look at a dying breed of art director and production designers in the old Hollywood studio system. Documentaries have been made about such below-the-line Hollywood talent as stunt performers and cinematographers so it's only fitting that one finally got made about production designers.
Documentary captures the wisdom of aging production designers Robert Boyle, Henry Bumstead and Albert Nozaki may not be household names, but the films designed by them are among the best known works in American cinema.
Director Daniel Raim has been nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary for The Man on Lincoln's Nose. This nominated film gives an inside look at the filmmaking process. Raim focuses on Robert Boyle's art directing and has footage of the men revisiting the locations from Hitchcock's The Birds.
