Word: emperor
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Eventually, the absurdity of "no tax" pledges, like the Emperor's nudity, will be recognized. Unfortunately, we have thus far ostracized the naively honest candidates who tried to force the realization upon us. We can only hope that something less than a genuine economic catastrophe will arouse us from our eight-year-long daydream...
...burghers of Hollywood, however, were not initially impressed. Producer Jeremy Thomas had to raise his $23.8 million budget independently, while Bertolucci secured precedent-setting rights to film in the Forbidden City. Only after shooting did David Puttnam, head of Columbia Pictures, agree to distribute Emperor in America. Before the film was released, Puttnam resigned under fire, and the new administration has treated its gift horse like a Trojan horse. Even now the film is playing in only 882 North American theaters...
...Hollywood standards, The Last Emperor is a supremely daring film. Instead of following the normal emotional trajectory of movie epics -- struggle, triumph, despair, reconciliation -- Bertolucci's film runs a slalom course of disillusionment. In worldly or heroic terms, Pu Yi attains nothing. He loses his power, then his title, then his freedom. Nor is Pu Yi personally attractive; he can be both toady and bully. "He's not a sympathetic character," says Screenwriter Mark Peploe, who is Bertolucci's brother-in- law. "I resisted even trying to understand him when I wrote the script." But any alert viewer can understand...
...Italian town called Tara; his most ambitious work, 1900 (1976), is a folk epic spanning 70 years of Italian history -- a Gone With the Wind gone red. Red ink too: the film, cut from 5 1/2 to 4 hours, sank quickly. It took The Last Emperor to reconcile Bertolucci's art and his craftiness, his mandarin aesthetics and his hunger for popular success...
...Bernardo was always in love with Hollywood," notes Production Designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti, who worked on Last Tango and Last Emperor. "But before, it was a love-hate relationship. Now it's a love-love thing." And now it's time for Hollywood's last moguls to love Bertolucci right back. Columbia might begin with a wider American release for the film and follow up the gesture by financing the director's dream project, an adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's novel Red Harvest. Surely Bertolucci, among all recent Oscar winners, deserves to see that goldplate turned into box-office gold...