Word: forman
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Cuckoo's Nest). Hippies raise their voices, and a little hell, against the Viet Nam War (Hair, 1979). A black man is driven by righteousness to lead an armed revolt against white America (Ragtime, 1981). A great but graceless composer battles the musical establishment of Old Vienna (Amadeus). In Forman's American films an irascible individualist is forever butting his head against the walls of official power and getting bashed for his pains. These parables of dreams defeated hold echoes of tales from Forman's compatriots in dark absurdity, Franz Kafka, Milan Kundera and Tom Stoppard. They are hardly...
...much about Forman and his films mirrors the spirit of America. Like any true Hollywood director, he works on the grand scale, in broad, confident strokes. Energy, not nuance, informs every frame. And like any true immigrant with a success story, Forman is grateful to his adoptive country. "For me," he says, "there was only one place to go if I couldn't live in my own country: America. It is a country of immigrants. There is such a tolerance for the foreign and the unfamiliar. America continues to amaze...
Born 53 years ago, in Caslav, Czechoslovakia, Forman was already a significant cinema voice before his arrival in the U.S. He had helped unleash the Czech new wave of the 1960s with a trio of wry social comedies: Black Peter, Loves of a Blonde and The Fireman's Ball. But in 1968 the Prague Spring ended abruptly to the rumble of Soviet tanks, and shortly thereafter Forman went to New York City to shoot his first American film, the gentle, generation-gap comedy Taking Off. "I've never been political," he insists, "not in Czechoslovakia, not in this country...
Fortunately, Forman had studied his new subject, America and its movies, like a scholar lover. "I knew America by way of the films I'd seen growing up," he recalls. "I had a kind of mythical vision of the country, a movie vision, larger than life. But then, so many things about America are larger than life that it was a more accurate vision about things than you might think." Forman's early years in New York City gave him glimpses of New World generosity ("The manager at the Chelsea Hotel was very relaxed about the rent") and mendacity...
...Forman, who became an American citizen in 1977, lives on a 39-acre farm in Connecticut. After 16 years of courting and being courted by Hollywood, the filmmaker is still a fan. "I admire the vitality and variety of American films," he says. "Where else do you get a Star Wars, a Places in the Heart and a Stranger Than Paradise?" Though still married to an actress who remained in Czechoslovakia with their two sons, Forman is now an American moviemaker with few regrets. "I certainly don't think my art has suffered from my being in Hollywood," he declares...