Although not the debut film of direc­tor Wes Ander­son, and cer­tain­ly not of star Bill Mur­ray, Rush­more intro­duced the world to the both of them. Ander­son­’s first fea­ture Bot­tle Rock­et (an expan­sion of the short film pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture) had­n’t found a par­tic­u­lar­ly large audi­ence upon its the­atri­cal release in 1996. But quite a few of the view­ers who had seen and appre­ci­at­ed it seemed to run in Mur­ray’s cir­cles, and in a 1999 Char­lie Rose inter­view the actor told of being sent copy after unwatched copy by friends and pro­fes­sion­al con­tacts alive.

But Mur­ray only need­ed to read a few pages of Ander­son­’s new script to under­stand that the young direc­tor knew what he was doing, and his abil­i­ties became even more evi­dent on set. “I said, ‘What’s this shot we got?’ He goes, ‘Oh, it’s one I saw in Bar­ry Lyn­don.’ ” But in Rush­more it depicts “the inter­mis­sion of the school play,” a full-fledged Kubrick­ian shot “com­ing past a lot of, you know, moth­ers and fathers going — jab­ber­ing, and all the way out past peo­ple buy­ing Cokes and drinks.” Yes, “the good ones copy, the great ones steal,” but to Mur­ray’s mind that say­ing “sort of sends a mis­di­rec­tion.”

Not to Ander­son, how­ev­er, whose rare com­bi­na­tion of cinephil­ia and direc­to­r­i­al skill have inspired him to make films both rich in cin­e­mat­ic homage and pos­sessed of their own dis­tinc­tive sen­si­bil­i­ty — a sen­si­bil­i­ty that let Mur­ray break out of the stan­dard goof­ball roles that had threat­ened to imprison him. In the video essay “Steal Like Wes Ander­son,” Thomas Fight exam­ines the now no-longer-young film­mak­er’s more recent repur­pos­ing of the work of auteurs who came before. In 2014’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, for exam­ple, Ander­son near­ly remakes an entire scene from Torn Cur­tain, Alfred Hitch­cock­’s Cold-War thriller with Paul New­man and Julie Andrews that also hap­pens to involve an east­ern Euro­pean hotel.

Ander­son does­n’t sim­ply lift Hitch­cock­’s shots but recom­pos­es them to “fit with­in his more plano­met­ric and sym­met­ri­cal style,” using the cin­e­mat­ic ref­er­ence “to add to the expe­ri­ence of the sto­ry” and play with audi­ence expec­ta­tions. If you’ve seen Torn Cur­tain, you know how New­man’s char­ac­ter shakes the man tail­ing him; if you’ve seen The Grand Budapest Hotel, you know it does­n’t work out quite so well for Jeff Gold­blum’s char­ac­ter. But only if you’ve seen both films can you appre­ci­ate Ander­son­’s sequence — and indeed, Hitch­cock­’s orig­i­nal — to the fullest. Even now, those of us excit­ed­ly antic­i­pat­ing the Octo­ber release of Ander­son­’s lat­est fea­ture The French Dis­patch are spec­u­lat­ing about not only which clas­sic films inspired it, but also which clas­sic films it will com­pel us to revis­it and enjoy afresh.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Glimpse Into How Wes Ander­son Cre­ative­ly Remixes/Recycles Scenes in His Dif­fer­ent Films

Wes Ander­son & Yasu­jiro Ozu: New Video Essay Reveals the Unex­pect­ed Par­al­lels Between Two Great Film­mak­ers

Wes Anderson’s Cin­e­mat­ic Debt to Stan­ley Kubrick Revealed in a Side-By-Side Com­par­i­son

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

If you weren’t in the indie cin­e­ma exhi­bi­tion indus­try in the 1980s, you prob­a­bly haven’t heard of Show­est. But this was *the* con­ven­tion back then, a chance to trav­el to Las Vegas, shmooze with film dis­trib­u­tors and Hol­ly­wood stu­dios, smoke cig­ars, drink sin­gle malt Scotch, run up your company’s tab and have a dim mem­o­ry in the morn­ing of vis­it­ing a strip club. You know: Busi­ness, Amer­i­can Style!

And so what we have here is a pro­mo­tion­al film for an up-and-com­ing 1984 movie called Ghost­busters. Not the trail­er, you see, that’s for the gen­er­al pub­lic. Instead, this is two of the film’s lead actors, Dan Aykroyd and Bill Mur­ray, direct­ly address­ing atten­dees, implor­ing them to check out what could be the sci-fi com­e­dy of the sum­mer. “It’s gonna make E.T. look like Raiders of the Lost Ark,” Mur­ray quips.

There’s a few things appar­ent from this pro­mo film: Ack­royd and Mur­ray are com­plete­ly wing­ing it, and this prob­a­bly took as long to shoot as it takes time to watch. Also, per­haps: they’ve been “cel­e­brat­ing” if you know what I mean. Maybe. Alleged­ly. Either way, you can tell these guys are goof­ing about and mak­ing each oth­er laugh. And it also ends with a Ghost­busters theme that isn’t the Ray Park­er, Jr. clas­sic. It’s…well, it’s this, if you need to hear the whole thing.

And final­ly: there’s a few jokes that, if not total­ly “rapey” per se, do assume a woman-as-sex­u­al-favor vibe. To that I would posit: Ack­royd and Mur­ray knew their audi­ence (unfor­tu­nate­ly). (It was the Rea­gan era, and don’t for­get, the main vil­lain of Ghost­busters is the Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency!)

But let’s not end on a down note. Instead, let’s just quick­ly add that as of this writ­ing, the *oth­er* Ghost­busters star, Rick Mora­nis, has just appeared after years in seclu­sion to appear with Ryan Reynolds in a cell­phone com­mer­cial. Yes, it’s also advance pro­mo for a Hon­ey I Shrunk the Kids reboot, but I’ll take what we can get these days.

P.S. If you’re won­der­ing what hap­pened to Show­est, the con­ven­tion arm of the Nation­al Asso­ci­a­tion of The­ater Own­ers (NATO, for short, go fig­ure), you can read all about it here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Zen of Bill Mur­ray: I Want to Be “Real­ly Here, Real­ly in It, Real­ly Alive in the Moment”

Bill Mur­ray Explains How He Was Saved by John Prine

John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd Get Bri­an Wil­son Out of Bed and Force Him to Go Surf­ing, 1976

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

The dozens of film­mak­ers in the dia­gram above belong to a vari­ety of cul­tures and eras, but what do they have in com­mon? Some of the names that jump out at even the casu­al film­go­er — Andrei Tarkovsky, Jim Jar­musch, Pier Pao­lo Pasoli­ni, Ter­rence Mal­ick — may sug­gest a straight­for­ward con­nec­tion: cinephiles love them. Of course, not every cinephile loves every one of these direc­tors, and indeed, bit­ter cinephile argu­ments rage about their rel­a­tive mer­its even as we speak. But in one way or anoth­er, all of them are tak­en seri­ous­ly as auteurs by those who take film seri­ous­ly as an art form — and not least by Paul Schrad­er, one of the most seri­ous auteur-cinephiles alive.

Schrad­er first made his name as a film crit­ic, with his 1972 book Tran­scen­den­tal Style in Film: Ozu, Bres­son, Drey­er. In it he argues that the work of Yasu­jirō Ozu, Robert Bres­son, and Carl Theodor Drey­er have in com­mon a qual­i­ty that quite lit­er­al­ly “tran­scends” their dif­fer­ences in ori­gin.

This tran­scen­den­tal style in film “seeks to max­i­mize the mys­tery of exis­tence; it eschews all con­ven­tion­al inter­pre­ta­tions of real­i­ty: real­ism, nat­u­ral­ism, psy­chol­o­gism, roman­ti­cism, expres­sion­ism, impres­sion­ism, and, final­ly, ratio­nal­ism.” It “styl­izes real­i­ty by elim­i­nat­ing (or near­ly elim­i­nat­ing) those ele­ments which are pri­mar­i­ly expres­sive of human expe­ri­ence, there­by rob­bing the con­ven­tion­al inter­pre­ta­tions of real­i­ty of their rel­e­vance and pow­er.”

45 years on, Schrad­er revis­its this con­cept in the Toron­to Inter­na­tion­al Film Fes­ti­val inter­view clip above. “Most movies lean toward you. They lean toward you aggres­sive­ly with their hands around your throat, try­ing to grab every sec­ond of your atten­tion.” But tran­scen­den­tal films “lean away from you, and they use time — and as oth­er peo­ple would call it, bore­dom — as a tech­nique.” They linger on the every­day, the unevent­ful, the repet­i­tive. Used adept­ly, this “with­hold­ing device” is a way of “acti­vat­ing” view­ers and their atten­tion. Then comes the “deci­sive action,” the moment in which the film does “some­thing unex­pect­ed”: the “big blast of Mozart” at the end of Bres­son’s Pick­pock­et, the “big blast of emo­tion” at the end of an oth­er­wise reserved Ozu pic­ture. “What are you going to do with it, now that he has total­ly con­di­tioned you not to expect it?”

In the new edi­tion of Tran­scen­den­tal Style in Film pub­lished in 2018, Schrad­er includes the dia­gram at the top of the post. It illus­trates the three major direc­tions in which film­mak­ers have depart­ed from tra­di­tion­al nar­ra­tive, rep­re­sent­ed by the N at the cen­ter. Ozu, Bres­son, and Drey­er all go off toward the med­i­ta­tive “man­dala.” Abbas Kiarosta­mi, Gus Van Sant, and the Ital­ian neo­re­al­ists start on path that leads to the “sur­veil­lance cam,” with its unblink­ing eye on an unchang­ing patch of real­i­ty. The likes of Ken­ji Mizoguchi, Michelan­ge­lo Anto­nioni, and David Lynch point the way to the audio­vi­su­al abstrac­tion of the “art gallery.” Float­ing around these aes­thet­ic end points are the names of film­mak­ers known for the “dif­fi­cul­ty” of their work: Stan Brakhage, Wang Bing, James Ben­ning.

Their work resides well past what Schrad­er calls the “Tarkovsky Ring,” named for the auteur of Mir­ror, Stalk­er, and Nos­tal­ghia. When an artist pass­es through the Tarkovsky Ring, as Schrad­er put it to Indiewire, “that’s the point where he is no longer mak­ing cin­e­ma for a pay­ing audi­ence. He’s mak­ing it for insti­tu­tions, for muse­ums, and so forth.” With­in the Tarkovsky Ring appear a fair few adven­tur­ous direc­tors still work­ing today, like Hirokazu Kore-eda, Kel­ly Reichardt, Alexan­der Sokurov, and Hou Hsiao-hsien. Schrad­er has neglect­ed to include his own name on the dia­gram, per­haps leav­ing his exact place­ment as an exer­cise for the read­er. He cer­tain­ly belongs on there some­where: after all, some crit­ics have called his last fea­ture First Reformed his most tran­scen­dent yet.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Exhil­a­rat­ing Film­mak­ing of Robert Bres­son Explored in Eight Video Essays

How One Sim­ple Cut Reveals the Cin­e­mat­ic Genius of Yasu­jirō Ozu

Four Video Essays Explain the Mas­tery of Film­mak­er Abbas Kiarosta­mi (RIP)

Andrei Tarkovsky Reveals His Favorite Film­mak­ers: Bres­son, Anto­nioni, Felli­ni, and Oth­ers

Watch Online The Pas­sion of Joan of Arc by Carl Theodor Drey­er (1928)

The 5 Essen­tial Rules of Film Noir

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.