Subject: REVIEW: POWDER

From: [email-masked] (J. Neil Schulman)
Date: Mon, 30 Oct 1995 19:01:54 GMT

POWDER
                       A film review by J. Neil Schulman
                        Copyright 1995 J. Neil Schulman

                      KEEP YOUR POWDER DRY
 
                       by J. Neil Schulman

     Boy, am I gonna get it this time.  
 
     It's not bad enough that I tick off the liberals by 
believing in God, the U.S. Constitution, and the Right to Keep 
and Bear Arms.  
 
     It's not bad enough that I tick off everyone who's short on 
melanin in their skin by proclaiming my belief in O.J. Simpson's 
innocence and defend the jury that acquitted him.  
 
     It's not bad enough that I tick off everyone in Hollywood 
who I haven't already ticked off with my pro-gun stuff by 
proclaiming that I think SHOWGIRLS is an unsung masterpiece.  
 
     Uh-uh.  That's not good enough for me.  I haven't done 
enough damage yet.  I'm not far enough out on a limb.  I haven't 
yet managed to convince everyone that I should be in a padded 
room somewhere.  
 
     Now I have to go and declare that a convicted homosexual 
child molester has written and directed a truly great movie about 
love and transcendence ... and if that's not bad enough, the damn 
film even does its best to be anti-gun.
 
     Okay, Neil.  Take a deep breath and calm down.  This is a 
fair and just country, and they *always* allow the condemned man 
to have a few last words before they string him up.  Hell, if you
can't convince them that you're not out of your friggin' mind,
then you'd probably be a good sport and chip in for the rope.
 
     So you've got a few minutes to save your life, Neil.  See
if you can tell as good a tale as Sheherazade did.
 
     Today, I handed an inscribed copy of my new book SELF 
CONTROL NOT GUN CONTROL to Nathan Winters, now twenty years old, 
who at age eleven was enticed into oral sex by POWDER's writer-
director Victor Salva.  Winters was in front of the Galaxy Theater
on Hollywood Boulevard doing a protest of the movie opening, as 
well as doing some live radio with syndicated talk-show host Tom 
Leykis.  My inscription read, "No more victims!" which is
certainly a sentiment it's hard to disagree with, unless you
happen to need them for your work.
 
     I'd been listening to Tom Leykis for a couple of days, 
interviewing Winters, his mother, and experts on child
molestation, milking this story for all its worth.  And, why not?  
It has all the elements we've come to love so much now that the 
O.J. Simpson trial is over and we're all looking for a way to 
fill up those empty daytime hours.  Ricki Lake gives us every 
variation on "someone backstage is secretly in love with you." 
Sally Jessy Raphael, Charles Perez, Gordon Elliot, Rolonda, 
Jenny Jones, and Maury Povich each try to outcompete the others 
with every variation on young women who are cheating on their own 
husbands with their sisters' spouse.  So why shouldn't a radio
talk show get some of the action?
 
     Nathan Winters, despite his protests that he's forgiven 
Victor Salva, has an understandable beef against him.  The young 
director Salva drew the much younger Winters, a child actor, 
into a homosexual relationship.  Like Nixon, Salva made the 
mistake of allowing his sins to get onto tape, and it was his 
undoing: the videotapes Salva made proving his sexual 
relationship with the eleven-year-old Winters got Salva charged 
with eleven counts of sexual crimes, plea-bargained down to
five offenses and fifteen months served in a California prison
before a couple more years of parole.  Time having tolled, 
Salva is a free man, and aside from having to tell the police 
where he's living, Salva can pretty much work where he pleases so 
long as he can convince someone to pay him for it.
 
     Francis Ford Coppola, a Salva mentor, a producer on the 
Salva movie which Winters was starring in at the time of his 
molestation, and a consummate Hollywood insider, seems to have
taken the side of Salva the director over Winters the child star.  
According to Winters' account on Leykis, Coppola's company not
only offered Winters no aid and comfort when Salva was exposed, 
but circled the wagons and sued Winters and his mother for breach 
of contract when Winters' mom found out about the molestation and 
pulled little Nathan off the shooting set.  
 
     This treatment shouldn't be surprising to anyone familiar 
with how things work in Hollywood.  Read INDECENT EXPOSURE by 
David McClintock (Dell, 1982), which tells how, when actor Cliff 
Robertson blew the whistle on Columbia Pictures chief David 
Begelman for forging Robertson's signature on checks, Begelman 
was embezzling, it was Cliff Robertson who was shut out of show 
business; Begelman was just given another deal elsewhere.  If 
Hollywood has held anything sacred since the McCarthy era, it's 
that you don't tattle on someone "in the industry"--no matter 
what.  The Mafia or the LAPD has no more sacred code of silence.
 
     So when Nathan Winters learned that Caravan/Hollywood 
Pictures/Buena Vista Distributing--that is, Disney--had
financed and was now releasing POWDER, a fantasy film written 
and directed by none other than Victor Salva, Winters decided 
that he had a job to do.  
 
     Winters didn't like the idea that director Salva would be in 
charge of movie sets where children might secretly be under his 
control again.  He didn't like the idea that Disney, a company 
which is supposed to be a safe haven for children, had taken the 
man who had molested him to its corporate breast, and was going 
to make money with him and for him, as well as giving Salva a 
canvas on which to paint his homo-erotic impulses.  And, when 
you get right down to it, Winters probably wasn't thrilled that
the man who had molested him and ended his budding acting 
career was now making more movies instead of more license plates.
 
     So Nathan Winters called a press conference, called Tom 
Leykis, and flew to Hollywood to try to stop the release of
POWDER--to get the movie pulled from distribution.  
Supporters are urging a boycott both of POWDER and of all
Disney products.  The calls coming in to the Leykis show, if
Leykis's call screeners are being at all even-handed, are
coming in strongly supportive of Winters and against Disney.
 
     The film industry has battened down the hatches and is being
as quiet as they can be.  They see witch hunts from the witch's
point of view.  With Bob Dole, Janet Reno, and William Bennett
breathing down their necks, no wonder.  They remember the Hayes
Board, and rules which prevented divorce from being portrayed in
movies, or married couples sharing the same bed, for that
matter.  Of course, perhaps things have just gone too far ever
to go back and they have nothing to worry about.  On October 22, 
1995, CBS's 60 MINUTES--in the holy Sunday seven o'clock 
family prime-time hour--showed America Julie Andrews' bare tits 
in a clip from the movie S.O.B.  What other barrier is there
to cross unless Barbara Walters is planning on interviewing Linda
Lovelace after an uncensored clip from DEEP THROAT?
 
     So we find ourselves in an arena which we in America are 
becoming quite used to.  We have decadent, liberal, Godless, and 
gay Hollywood in one corner, and decent, conservative, God-fearing,
and puritan middle-America in the other corner.
 
     And, tossed into the ring for us to fight over, like Eris's
golden apple thrown "to the most beautiful of you," is a new
movie, titled POWDER, which I saw tonight.
 
     Sorry, my friends.  I had to see it.  I'm a fantasy writer.  I'm a
screenwriter.  I'm a journalist and opinion writer.  And even if I
wasn't, there's something ornery and contrary about me that says that
the minute someone doesn't want me to see something....

     Powder is better than you or me.  He feels your pain--literally.
He can read your memory so he knows what bad things were done to you.
He can also make *you* feel another's pain.  He makes a hunter feel,
from the inside, the death throes of the deer he just shot, and
understandably, the hunter not only doesn't want to hunt anymore, he
can't even touch a gun after that.  (Cynically, this might be Salva's
sour grapes; as a felon he can't own a gun, either.  But I'll give
Salva the benefit of the doubt, that he really does dislike guns.)

     Like all those angels, enlightened masters, E.T.'s, or other
Saviors who have come to teach us how depraved we are, Powder is only
with us a short while.  He is here to be better than us, different from
us, and to be despised for being both.  We are to revile him for
telling us truths about ourselves that we'd rather not hear.

     And, you know, in telling us about Powder, Victor Salva is telling
us about himself.  What Powder does physically by connecting the hunter
to the dying deer, Salva does with his ability as a storyteller to
connect us to his own pain.  He wants us to understand the beauty he
sees in young men --and presumably young boys, although that's not
shown in the film.  He wants us to understand the tragedy of not being
touched lovingly, and what a caress from an older man to a younger man
can mean.

     I get that.  We heterosexual men, both in the movie and in the
audience, must believe that Powder is a faggot because he sees the
beauty in the male as well as female forms.  But God is the creator of
both male and female and if you ask me, you'd have to be blind not to
admire the Lord's handiwork.  Mr. Salva, I can admire a beautiful male
body without wanting to have sex with it.

     None of this is religiously unorthodox, even to Christians.
Ironically, the sex offender Victor Salva has put no message in this
movie that should be at all discomfiting to the family values of Middle
America.  True, Victor Salva has managed to infuse Powder with those
angelic traits which are most acceptable to those Hollywood New Age
acolytes who never could get along with fire-and-brimstone
Christianity--but then, the Presbyterian and United Methodist
Churches--which favor gun control and teach us that even child
molesters are our brothers in Christ--probably wouldn't care much for
the sorts of militarized angels that Jesus told Peter He could call
down at a moment's notice.

     Victor Salva's eschatology leads us to an afterworld of love with
understanding of all and with conflict between none.  It is hardly the
heaven of Saint John the Divine's Revelation, a battlefield in our
race's future where both humans and angels fight a battle between gom
the ashes of Auschwitz or the cinders of Sarajevo?

     POWDER may, in fact, be Victor Salva's attempt at paying for his
crime against Nathan Winters.  It may be his apology.  It may be his
explanation of why he did what he did.  It may well be Victor Salva's
penance.

     Nathan Winters has already done his job.  I doubt any movie
insurance company will be willing to take the risk of allowing Victor
Salva anywhere near children on his shooting set.  And if Nathan
Winters convinces enough people to stay away from POWDER, then no
matter how good the film is, if it loses money, Victor Salva won't be
given many more chances to direct.

     But I doubt that Victor Salva will have permanent problems finding
work in the film industry again.  I mean, he's just a convicted child
molester.  It's not like he's done anything *really* scandalous ...
like joining the NRA.

--
J. Neil Schulman
P.O. Box 94, Long Beach, CA 90801-0094
Voice Mail & Fax: (500) 44-JNEIL
http://www.pinsight.com/~zeus/jneil/

This article is under submission.  Reproduction
in computer file and data bases is permitted for informational
purposes only.  Copyright (c) 1995 by J. Neil Schulman. 
All other rights reserved.