45: The Hoop Montage
The montage in The Hudsucker Proxy in which the Hula Hoop is developed is the greatest montage of the Coen brothers’ filmography. The great irony of this is that this montage was not directed by the Coen brothers.
The Hudsucker Proxy was the first big budget feature for the Coens, and pressure was put on them to be able to play ball in the big leagues. This did not just mean their ability to deliver a film that would be compelling enough to a broad enough audience to make back its budget, but also to work within the politics and scheduling of the bigger budget players and all their attendant moving parts. For Joel & Ethan Coen, who had taken five years to create their first two films, an important part of proving themselves as viable filmmakers in this system was being able to hit tight deadlines, which in turn meant relinquishing control of some aspects of filmmaking that had previously been completely under their control. One way this control was relinquished was the hiring of a second unit director for the first time, a post which had the most profoundly obvious fit: Sam Raimi.
Sam Raimi of course is a co writer of The Hudsucker Proxy. He is in fact the only person who collaborated in the writing process of any Coens-directed film except for 2003’s Intolerable Cruelty. He also has a deep link to the careers of the Coens in that he gave Joel Coen his first gig in the movie industry as an assistant editor on his own feature film debut, 1982’s The Evil Dead. Even more than that, after having finished their own directorial feature debut, Blood Simple, Raimi let the brothers (with Joel’s then-girlfriend Frances McDormand) crash in his one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles for months as they sought distribution for their film (during which the first pass of Hudsucker was written). He evidently felt some kinship with his fellow Jewish indie filmmakers from a midwestern state full of snow. It is not an exaggeration to say that without Raimi, there would be no Coens. The sad reality though was in the early 1990s Raimi was not the celebrated auteur the Coens were. While both Raimi and the Coens had highly promising debuts, their followups were not equally regarded. By 1991, the Coens had won so many awards at the Cannes film festival that a rule was created to keep one filmmaker from sweeping the awards ceremony again in the same way, while Raimi had created a pair of cult camp horror classics (his debut The Evil Dead and its 1987 sequel) amidst a series of flops such as Crimewave (a different script written by Raimi & the Coens) and the failed early comic book adaptation Darkman. Raimi had not yet gotten his shot at the majors in the way the Coens were getting theirs, and so what better way to spend some of the $25 million of Joel Silver’s money than by hiring their buddy and collaborator to direct a couple of scenes they couldn’t be bothered to*?
Raimi as a director has a distinct visual style. He loves to have the camera move and zoom and pan, often quickly and with quick cuts, the polar opposite to the Coens’ more sedate shot layouts. The Coens have a distinct visual style to be sure, but their style is much more about what is being shot, while Raimi’s is about how it’s being shot. One of Raimi’s most famous uses of this visual language comes from his film Evil Dead 2 where the hero Ash —fresh after cutting his own possessed hand off with a chainsaw— goes to a shed and builds a rig to connect the chainsaw to where his hand used to be. Constructing such a rig in reality would be a dull workmanlike affair of selecting the correct kind of bracket and getting it to properly interface with the chainsaw and the user’s arm, but Raimi —by framing the scene as a series of quick cuts and closeups of various items in the shed— makes the creation of the rig exciting. With each cut he builds tension of what on earth Ash could be doing, until that tension is finally released with a shot of Ash successfully using his new chainsaw arm to saw the barrels off his shotgun. His reaction to his own work is a cooly understated version of how we as the audience feel about his new gizmo. “Groovy”
Montages in general are not a standard Coens feature. The montage as a cinematic device was developed by the Soviet filmmaker Sergey Eisenstein as a means of depicting a scene with a collective of people as its subject rather than a single protagonist. It has since been adapted as a means of showing time passing in addition to showing the collective action of a group. Outside of The Hudsucker Proxy the Coens have three montages across their 17 films: One of Barton Fink writing an entire screenplay in a single frenzy in Barton Fink, one the three escaped convicts traveling across Mississippi in O Brother Where Art Thou? and one of a bowling alley full of bowlers bowling over the opening credits of The Big Lebowski. While each of these montages competently convey what they’re meant to as far as story, character, and setting goes, none of them are remarkable in themselves in the way that, say, Charlie Meadows teaching Barton how to wrestle is in Barton Fink, or the three jailbirds encountering the sirens in O Brother Where Art Thou? or the “Gutterballs” hallucination sequence in The Big Lebowski. The second scene that Sam Raimi directed in The Hudsucker Proxy however, the montage in which the Hula Hoop is created, is possibly its greatest scene.
As written the hoop montage consists of the following beats: the hoop project is approved by top brass, the accounting department figures out a cost for the hoop, quality control tests it, and the creative department names it. The hoop is manufactured and distributed, where it languishes on shelves until a fed up shopkeeper tosses some into the street, where a child picks it up and starts playing with it, causing it to be an instant hit. In reality, the wheels of commerce run slowly. Meetings are convened, committees are formed, and lots of work happens virtually motionlessly at desks. It is even less exciting than building a piece of DIY hardware in a shed, yet Raimi makes it seem fascinating and exciting.
Raimi’s take on the development and sales of the hoop relies heavily on his three major components of his distinct style: Closeups of action, quick cuts, and motion of the frame. The hoop’s approval could have been signified by a man sitting at a desk and signing a document, but that is not how Raimi operates. The hoop’s approval is signified by a man in a suit tearing a ream of paper from an electric typewriter and sprinting to the Hudsucker mailroom, where the paper is rolled into a canister that is whooshed through a pneumatic tube where a hand is shown unrolling the paper, displaying the design and name of project Extruded Plastic Dingus. The camera then zooms to one corner where a hand with a stamp appears with a rubber stamp bearing the mark “Approved”.
Raimi does not then wholesale move on to the next beat. The approval process goes through the first half of the montage, as every part of the beginnings of Hula Hoop production are built up so that they are interspersed with each other. After we’ve had a bit of the hoop being accounted for, tested for quality, and creatively brainstormed before we go back to shots of piles of technical drawings, each stamped “approved” by dozens of disembodied hands. The beats of the creative bullpen coming up with the name of the hoop (the only dialogue in the scene**) come interspersed among all its other pieces. This allows for the great visual gag of their secretary reading two thousand pages of Tolstoy, but it also shows us as the audience that this isn’t a linear progression of one department doing one thing and handing it off, it’s the entire thousands-strong apparatus of Hudsucker Industries pushing towards a grand unified goal all at once: an extruded plastic dingus. The excitement and movement of the company as a whole is underlined with each distinct aspect of the hoop’s development being separated by a shot of the pneumatic tubes presumedly running through Hudsucker HQ with a whooshing sound effect.
The pacing and visuals turn what would be men quietly sitting at desks crunching numbers into the most exciting thing imaginable. Even the accounting department gets a glorious moment of action. As a senior accountant disapproves of the proposed retail price of $ .79, we get an action closeup of the accounting ledger and the junior accountant putting a single line down to turn it to $1.79.
Raimi’s zooms and closeups and fast pans make industry and capital into an action sequence. The exaggerated excitement of corporate development Raimi depicts makes it almost believable that part of that development is seeing what happens to the product if the user explodes as part of the quality control program.
Insufferable film nerds*** like to obsess over perfect shots, single placements of camera, actor and props in a setting that is not merely deeply visually satisfying but also somehow is broadly representative of the film. The Dude looking at his reflection in a mirror evoking Time magazine’s “Man of the Year” issue with a banner asking “Are you a Lebowski achiever?” at the bottom in The Big Lebowski is such a shot.
Marge Gunderson holding a gun on Gaear Grimsrud and pointing at the badge on her hat in Fargo is such a shot.
Anton Chigurh strangling a Texas deputy with his handcuffs as he stares determinedly into the middle distance in No Country For Old Men is such a shot.
A perfect shot from The Hudsucker Proxy sits right near the end of the hoop montage, as the first child to use the hula hoop ponders its existence. The hoop, after having rolled improbably down an alley and down a sidewalk across a crosswalk finally finds itself to this child, first circling him before collapsing on the pavement just in front of him. As Carter Burwell’s Khachaturian inspired score builds to a crescendo, the camera shoots the child from above as he ponders the hoop and steps into it.
In that moment we as the audience know that the affable hick Norville Barnes from Muncie, Indiana will succeed. His wild idea for kids will be a hit. The corrupt Hudsucker board will fail. The moment when the child sees the hoop on the ground marks a dividing point in the film. Before he steps inside it, Norville Barnes was a jerk, a schmoe, a lamebrain, a dipstick, someone to be pushed around. After he steps inside it, Norville Barnes becomes The Einstein of Enterprise, The Edison of Industry****, The Billion-Dollar Cranium, The Idea Man. So much emotion and meaning of the film’s plot sits in that one shot of a child stepping inside a circle. It’s the perfect shot of the Coens’ fifth motion picture, and it wasn’t even directed by the Coens. Bravo to Sam Raimi.
* You may be feeling sorry for Sam Raimi right now. This is a natural reaction. Don’t worry though. While making Hudsucker he’s a few years away from inventing the modern superhero movie with his take on Spider-Man starring Toby Macguire, an achievement for which he will be compensated with a barge’s worth of money.
** Dialogue which is performed by Raimi himself along with 1st Assistant Director James Cameron, in what is the only instance I have found of a director’s cameo by a 2nd unit director or an assistant director.
*** Like me, and probably you if you’re reading an essay series on a 26 year old film with your spare time.
*** While I get the sentiment behind it, this is such a strange epithet, as Thomas Edison wasn’t researching and improving upon inventions for funsies, he was doing so to manufacture and sell them. Thomas Edison is the Edison of Industry. It’s like calling a musician “The Bob Dylan of Songwriting”