Interview: Ron Hogan, author of The Stewardess Is Flying The Plane!

Just in time for the holidays comes "The Stewardess Is Flying The Plane!," a beautiful hardcover guide to the films of the 1970s from Bulfinch Press. I sat down with author Ron Hogan (well, sat down as in he was sitting in a chair typing e-mails and so was I) and he explains why he chose that title, what Burt Reynolds could have done to change the path of his career, and why The Muppet Movie is one of his favorite films from the 70s.

The name of the book is "The Stewardess Is Flying The Plane," from Airport '75. How come you didn't name it "We're Going To Need A Bigger Boat" or "'Scuse Me While I Whip This Out"?

Actually, I was a bit partial to "The Power of Christ Compels You"  and "Quo Vadis, Baby?", but the Airport '75 line sums up a lot about what I love best about '70s movies: the goofiness, the upturning of all the old rules, the opportunity to put Karen Black on the cover...plus it tested really well around the Bulfinch offices. Though I've definitely got "We're Going to Need a Bigger Boat" in mind for the sequel, if I can find enough '70s films left to fill up another book.

I've always been curious about books like this. How exactly did you write your proposal, and what was the writing/editing process like, in a book with so many pictures and so many captions and the layout?

First, I came up with the basic idea for the structure, which was to start with the epic scope of science fiction and then essentially "zoom in" tighter and tighter until the final chapter is talking  about fairly small, intimate stories. Then I brought that outline to my editor with a few of the films listed and we worked our way through several rounds of martinis to flesh out the rest, shouting titles at each other and writing them down in the appropriate slots. Once we had that in place, we sent it to our photo editor; a month or so later, we met up with him in LA to spend three days looking at slides and production stills.

As for the actual writing, I had a master list of the photos we'd selected, and they all had ID numbers, so linking them with the captions was easy. I'd watch a couple films in the afternoon, take lots of notes, then type them up at night. In the morning, I'd polish that material, add stuff I'd found from additional research, make bridges between sections and so on. It wasn't until everything was completed that we handed the manuscript over to Roger Gorman, my designer, for him to layout.

The pictures are fantastic. You didn't just go out and find the same stock photos you seem in many film books. I can honestly say I haven't seen most of them before. You have a pic of a scene from one of my favorite films, Three Days of the Condor, and I don't even think that shot of him with his arms up is even in the film!

Manoah Bowman deserves a lot of credit for the stuff he was able to turn up. Most of what we used came from the photo archives of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, but for some of the smaller films, especially in the horror category, we were dealing with images that came from his own collection. And with all the photos, he had a great eye for which stuff had already been seen a gazillion times before.

There's one that didn't make it into the book, only because I wasn't able to track down the DVD in time to actually write about it. It's an amazing film called The Spook Who Stood By The Door; "blaxploitation" really doesn't do it justice. It's like Shaft meets The Amateur meets The Battle of Algiers. Remember all the hoopla about how The Warriors was going to cause massive gang violence? By all rights, *this* film should have started urban uprisings from coast to coast.

So what are your favorite movies of the 70s?

The answer's always different, depending on what comes to mind first, but right now I'm going to go with Space is the Place, this absolutely mindblowing film where celestial jazz visionary Sun Ra lands in Oakland and tries to take Black Power to the stars, and 
Juggernaut, a mid-decade disaster flick (bombs on an ocean liner) with a documentary-style approach from director Richard Lester. And The Muppet Movie, which is arguably an allegory for all those stories about the young filmmakers who took Hollywood by storm in the first half of the '70s. I wouldn't argue too hard for that interpretation-- I'm not crazy--but it sure as hell makes for great barroom philosophy. Plus it's got the instant recognition of some of the other classics from the period... Heck, I probably could've called the book "Bear Left? Right, Frog!"

Now here's the controversial question: are their any movies from the 70s that are critically-acclaimed or classics, but you just don't see what's so great about them?

I thought Last Tango In Paris was a bit boring, really, but I'm fully willing to acknowledge that may be due to the fact that it simply can't shock me the way it did its original audience. And some of the parts that weren't all about the sex could be interesting, like the scene where Maria Schneider's character visits her childhood home with her fiancé's camera crew tagging along.

Another one, which I'm much less apologetic for, is Don't Look Now, which strikes me as a perfect example of why art-film directors shouldn't make drive-in movies. All that hoopla over the dead kid and the psychic visions, and the payoff is (SPOILER ALERT) a psychotic  wrinkled dwarf wearing a bright red raincoat? WTF?

What movie or movies in the 70s changed movies forever? Jaws is always credited with being the real first blockbuster. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

You're not getting me anywhere near the Jaws question, Bob; better minds than me have been wrangling over that one for the last couple years now. But here's a couple films from the decade that I think did change everything that came after:

Dark Star totally destroys the myth of the squeaky-clean astronaut, paving the way for Dan O'Bannon to put even grittier working class stiffs into space in Alien. (And, yes, Silent Running predates Dark Star by two years, but the *first* version O'Bannon did with John Carpenter, the USC student film, was two years before that.)

Enter The Dragon didn't create the martial arts film craze, but it did establish that the genre was worth spending real money on, thus paving the way for the careers of people like Chuck Norris, Steven Seagal, and Jean-Claude Van Damme.

I wouldn't want to say this with 100% certainty, but I'm pretty sure the '80s high school wave, especially in its low-budget and/or debauch-themed varieties, can probably be traced back to Rock N' Roll High School.

If Smokey and the Bandit hadn't been the second biggest film of 1977, right behind Star Wars, Burt Reynolds probably would have made fewer car chase movies and more quirky films like Starting Over...which would mean that when the producers of Terms of Endearment asked him to be in the film, he wouldn't have had to say, "Sorry, I've got to shoot Stroker Ace." And if he'd been any good, which there's every reason to believe he would be, he probably would've beaten the other Oscar contenders that year.

OK, let's re-phrase it: how do you think the films of the 70s affected the movies of the 80s, and how do you view the 80s as a decade for film?

I feel like the real story of the influence of '70s Hollywood on the '80s might be the prominent negative examples: The cost overruns on Apocalypse Now, and then more famously on Heaven's Gate, scared off the studios and put the brakes on many of the freedoms filmmakers had enjoyed throughout the previous decade. The commercial failures of Bogdanovich's At Long Last Love and Scorsese's New York, New York didn't kill the musical off entirely--but can you think of any other great musical between Victor, Victoria (1982) and The Little Mermaid (1989)? (OK, if you want to stretch the definition of "musical," you can *maybe* get away with Pink Floyd: The Wall and Monty Python's The Meaning of Life...)

But even so, to coin a phrase, "I love the '80s," and I think there'll be a lot to say about those movies. I'm already testing catchphrases as titles. What do you think of "I Pity the Fool"?

Besides the book, you've been proprietor of beatrice.com for years now. How did that come about?

Well, there's two answers to that. The original site came about because it was 1995, I was working in a bookstore to make ends meet after grad school, and I knew as soon as I read about Mosaic (which is what they were calling Netscape back then) in Wired that I wanted  to make a website. When it dawned on me that authors were coming through on their book tours all the time, I started interviewing them and putting the Q&As up online.

I did that off and on for about eight years, until finally my paying workload got to the point where it was almost always "off." I needed to figure out how to keep the site going, so towards the end of 2003 I jumped on the blogwagon, figuring I could spend less than an hour writing every day. That was a bit of what our president would call a misunderestimate, but I eventually managed to get the scheduling under control. When it came time to devote the bulk of my energies to getting "Stewardess!" in on deadline, I was able to farm out a lot of Beatrice to guest writers. And I liked that so much I've kept adding them in larger doses over the last year, with even more coming in 2006.