Melting Pot Melting? Spring 1997

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Six O'Clock News, directed by Ross McElwee (WGBH, 1997), 90 mins.

InSix OTiock News, his latest documentary-as-autobiography, filmmaker Ross McElwee records a would-be Hollywood deal in the making. The scene is bittersweet, because McElwee is a visionary who deserves a wider following, and this project could be a breakthrough. Sitting in a Los Angeles diner, Josh Kornbluth (star of the one-man show Red Diaper Baby) and producer Michael Peyser court McElwee to direct a film starring Kornbluth. McElwee is ambivalent. He's never shot fiction and is uneasy about a film that mixes documentary and fiction. Robert Altman's movie The Player lampooned such encounters—the schmoozing, the flattery, the lingering feeling that Great Art is at stake—but McElwee captures the real thing in all its awkwardness.

Kornbluth, nervous and talkative, expresses his discomfort with McElwee's camera, saying it makes the meeting feel like something between "fakeness" and reality. Peyser stares at the table for a brief and awkward moment, then changes the subject. If that scene occurred on an episode of Frasier, the title card might say "How Not to Persuade Ross McElwee to Go Hollywood."

The closest McElwee came to box-office success was his 1987 film, Sherman's March: A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation. What begins as a documentary about General William Tecumseh Sherman's destructive Civil War march through the South instead becomes an often funny chronicle of McElwee's search for true love.

McElwee found that true love with Marilyn Levine, another filmmaker. His film Time Indefinite (1993) captures their wedding and the crises that soon struck. Within a matter of months, ...

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