Episode 093: Round Midnight

Today’s show takes a look at the classic 1986 French drama about jazz, Bertrand Tavernier’s Round Midnight.

Whether or not you are a fan of jazz, 1986’s Round Midnight is a beautifully made film about music and friendship. Martin Scorsese loved the idea of the movie so much, he agreed to act in a small role in the film.

I really want to hear what you think, both positive and negative. Please leave your notes below. If you really like the show, please consider rating and reviewing the show on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Amazon Music, or the podcatcher of your preference.

Thank you again.

Edward

You can also listen to The 80s Movie Podcast on most other major podcatchers.

TRANSCRIPTION

Hello, and welcome to The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today.

On this episode, I want to visit one of my favorite movies of the decade, one that really brought the passion of jazz into my life that not even my father’s Blue Note Records collection could bring me in my youth, for I was not yet ready for jazz as a kid.

I’m talking about Bertrand Tavernier’s 1986 masterpiece Round Midnight.

By the time our story starts in the early 1980s, Bertrand Tavernier had been working in the film industry for a good quarter century, although he wouldn’t direct his first movie, The Clockmaker, until 1974. With films like 1975’s Let Joy Reign Supreme, 1976’s The Judge and the Assassin and 1981’s Coup de Torchon, Tavernier became one of the most successful and awarded directors in French cinema. And with that success, Tavernier would finally start to work on the one movie he really wanted to make.

Tavernier had become a jazz aficionado in his teens years, and he was regularly bothered by how filmmakers, especially in Hollywood, would document jazz music and jazz musicians on film. 

Although jazz primarily originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans in the late 19th century, with roots in the blues and ragtime, most jazz movies focused on a white main protagonist, like the 1941 Bing Crosby film Birth of the Blues, while the true jazz artists like Louie Armstrong or Billie Holiday would be cast in secondary roles supporting the actors playing jazz musicians, such as 1947’s New Orleans. Tavernier wanted to capture the improvisational aspects of jazz on film, which is nigh impossible to do with actors playing a jazz musician.

One day in the late 1970s, Tavernier would see a photo of the great jazz saxophonist Lester Young during the last months of his life in early 1959. Young’s style of playing had influenced a generation of tenor saxophonists but Young had died at just the age of 49, on a flight from Paris to New York, from internal bleeding related directly to his alcoholism. Young looked decades older than his true age, and Tavernier knew he had his hook for his story. 

While making the 1980 science fiction movie Death Watch, his first film at partially in English, Tavernier would engage David Rayfiel, the co-screenwriter of the movie, in discussions about jazz and movies and this idea Tavernier had about a jazz movie. Over the course of five years, the two men would work on and off on the story, which would feature the friendship between two jazz musicians in Paris in the 1950s, one an African-American jazz legend and one a white French up and comer.

But the two characters keeping ending up too comparable to each other, so they would look for other inspiration. They’d attempt a storyline that would feature a blacklisted African-American musician who would befriend Django Reinhardt, based on a story by James Jones, but that script would end up becoming extremely political. Every studio in France and America would reject it. By chance, Tavernier would meet a French graphic designer, Francis Paudras, who not only had extensive personal knowledge about American jazz expatriates in France during the 1950s but was one of jazz pianist Bud Powell’s best friends. During one conversation, Paudras had mentioned he would stand outside clubs in Paris to listen to Powell play when he couldn’t afford an admission ticket to the club, even if it was pouring rain outside.

The next morning, Tavernier would phone Rayfiel, back home in New York, with a whole new storyline.

In New York, the film community can be very close knit. On one of his visits to the city in early 1985, Tavernier would get to meet with Martin Scorsese, an admirer of Tavernier’s, and the two directors would speak about Tavernier’s jazz project. Scorsese would be so moved by the story, he, Scorsese, would call up Irwin Winkler, his producer on New York, New York and Raging Bull, and told the producer in no uncertain terms that Winkler had to get this film made.

Within a month, Winkler and Tavernier had the $3m film funded through Winkler’s first look deal at Warner Brothers, although Tavernier and Rayfiel only had half the script written.

While Rayfiel continued writing, Tavernier went on the hunt for a seasoned jazz musician to play the leading role of Dale Turner, who by this time was a composite of Bud Power and Lester Young. While watching some old film of jazz musicians in Paris in the 1950s and 1960s, Tavernier would become engrossed with footage featuring Dexter Gordon, an American tenor saxophonist who was influenced by Lester Young, and who influenced John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins. Gordon was exactly what Tavernier had been looking for, but Gordon hadn’t performed live in a couple years, and no one was really sure if he was even alive. Tavernier was despondent, as not only was Gordon the right man for the role, Gordon had actually appeared in a couple movies in the 1950s and 1960s, and had recorded with Bud Powell in Paris in 1963. He believed Gordon would be able to use his personal experiences to feed his performance.

By chance, a pianist friend of the director’s who knew about his search for Gordon would come across the jazzman about a month later, playing without billing in a small club in New York City. Gordon, upon hearing about the French filmmaker who wanted to cast him in a leading role in a movie about jazz in Paris in the late 1950s, would get in contact with the director.

Tavernier would be correct in his assessment about Gordon, and not just as an actor. Tavernier would welcome Gordon into the writing sessions, where he was able to help better inform the writers on how things were in the Paris jazz world of the late 1950s, when the movie takes place. Gordon would also suggest little ticks for his character, and moments of dialogue that would make it into the final film.

As François, the recently-divorced French graphic designer who befriends Dale Turner and attempts to help the jazz man escape his alcoholism, Tavernier would turn to twenty-nine year old actor François Cluzet, who in just five years of professional acting had already worked with several of the top French filmmakers including Claude Chabrol and Diane Kurys. Tavernier would assemble a who’s who of modern jazz greats to play members of Turner’s band, including Herbie Hancock, whose 1962 album Takin’ Off featured Dexter Gordon on tenor sax and would also be composing the score for the film, Bobby Hutcherson, John McLaughlin and Wayne Shorter. It was Tavernier’s expectations to let the musicians just play whatever they wanted, live on set, to capture the magic of jazz as it happens, and work the footage into the final film as needed.

While Martin Scorsese would not be a producer on the film, he would agree to come aboard as an actor, playing a scumbag New York club owner.

The movie would begin production in Paris on July 1st, 1985, at the Studios d’Épinay, where the sets for both Paris’s Blue Note Club and New York City’s Birdland Club would be recreated as faithfully as possible. After two and a half months of shooting, first in the City of Light and then a few days in Tavernier’s home town of Lyon, the production was supposed to move to New York City for one week of location shooting, but would have to be put on hold when Gordon needed to be hospitalized for abdominal pain. Shooting would resume in late September, once Gordon was out of the hospital. Ironically, Scorsese’s scenes as a New York City nightclub owner were not shot in New York City that week but on one of the sets in Paris a few weeks earlier.

As Tavernier worked on his cut of the film, Round Midnight would find another benefactor on the Warner Brothers lot, the jazz enthusiast Clint Eastwood, who had been looking to make a movie about jazz legend Charlie Parker for nearly a decade. A successful release for Round Midnight would be extra incentive to get the studio to finally commit to his movie.

Warner would plan a platform release for the film beginning in New York City on October 3rd, after its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 12th, and two shows at the New York Film Festival on September 30th and October 1st.

Opening at the Plaza Theatre in New York City, the film would mesmerize film critics and audiences alike. Janet Maslin of the New York Times would call the film “a masterly tribute” to jazz, while many critics would single out Dexter Gordon as giving not just one of, but THE best performance of the year. In its first three days of release at the 510 seat Plaza Theatre, five shows a day with a late show on Friday and Saturday, the film would gross $39k. At $6 a ticket, they’d sell an average of 382 seats at every single show, whether it was 12 noon or 12:15 in the morning. In its second week of release, the film would actually increase its weekend gross total to $40k.

In week three, Warners would open the film at the 414 seat Regent Theatre in Westwood, where it would sell $26k worth of ticket, on top of the $22k worth of tickets sold at the Plaza in its third week. And it would continue like that, opening on one screen in a major city to strong numbers, but never really given a chance to become a true breakthrough film. Even at its widest point of release, Round Midnight only played in fifty theatres. The movie would pretty much disappear from theatres after the first of the year, although Warners would continue to play it on one screen in Los Angeles and New York, in the hopes that the film might secure an Oscar nomination or two.

And although Santa Cruz was, and still is, home to one of the better jazz clubs in America, the Kuumbwa Jazz Center, Round Midnight would not make it to town until Christmas Day, nearly three months after its initial New York engagement. I had to work on Christmas afternoon and evening at my theatre, so I wouldn’t have the chance to see the film until the following day. My mom got me a Sony Discman for Christmas, and since my go-to record store in Santa Cruz, Cymbeline Records, was closed that day, I would hit the record in the morning and buy a few CDs to listen to on my new Discman, before I hit the Nickelodeon for the 1:35 show.

Throughout the entire film, I sat there in the theatre, mesmerized. This was jazz as I had never experienced it before. I knew of John Coltrane and Miles Davis and Theolonious Monk, thanks to my dad and his what I finally realized was his amazing collection of jazz records, but this was a thunderbolt that awakened my soul. The movie was beautiful, but the music was life-affirming and life-changing. Right after the movie, I headed back to Cymbeline and bought the Round Midnight soundtrack. And over the next thirty-six years of my life, I would immerse myself into the music of Cannonball Adderly and Eric Dolphy and the two men who inspired the movie, Bud Powell and Lester Young. 

But it would take me a while to discover there was a second album related to the movie, released as The Other Side of Round Midnight, that featured several songs either from the movie that didn’t make the official soundtrack, or were recorded during the making of the movie but not used in the final film.

Round Midnight would be awarded a number of accolades at the end of the year. The National Board of Review would name it one of the ten best films of the year. The New York Film Critics Circle would name it the third best foreign language film of the year behind Denys Arcand’s The Decline of the American Empire and Doris Dorrie’s Men, which is kind of strange since at least half of the movie is in English. Dexter Gordon would be nominated for Best Actor by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and the NAACP Image Awards, and would be the runner up for the Best Actor prize from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, behind Bob Hoskins’ brilliant performance in Neil Jordan’s Mona Lisa.

And the film would get two Academy Award nominations, one for Dexter Gordon for Best Actor, and one for Herbie Hancock for Best Original Score. Gordon would lose his category to Paul Newman, who finally won his first and only competitive Oscar after seven previous losses and a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1985. Herbie Hancock would win for Best Original Score, which would set off a firestorm of controversy.

Many musicians, including James Horner, Jerry Goldsmith and Ennis Morricone, who were also nominated for their work that year in Aliens, Hoosiers and The Mission, respectively, voiced opinions that Hancock’s score was only new recordings of jazz standards like Body and Soul, Fair Weather and the movie’s title song. And the main soundtrack for the film only features three of those new songs from the score. However, if you really listen to the score as you’re watching the movie, you’ll hear there really is a real score for the film outside of the live performances of those standards filmed on the Blue Note and Birdland sets.

After its Oscar win, Warners didn’t do much with the film, letting it get the late stragglers in Los Angeles and New York City who would only go to see a movie like this if it was an award winner, and Round Midnight would finish its American box office run with $3.27m in ticket sales. However, the film would be a huge hit in France, where it would sell nearly $7m worth of tickets, in a country that less than a quarter of the population of the United States. The film would also do reasonably well in jazz-loving countries like Denmark, the Netherlands and Switzerland. It would be profitable enough for Warners to give Clint Eastwood the go-ahead to make Bird, his biography about Charlie Parker, which would win Forest Whitaker the Best Actor prize from the Cannes Film Festival in 1988, and win Eastwood the Golden Globe as Best Director, the first time in his nearly twenty year directing career he would get any recognition for his work behind the camera.

But Bird was perhaps too long, at two hours and forty-one minutes, and too downbeat for audiences, and the film would barely gross $2m in America, despite near universal critical acclaim, although, like with Round Midnight, it would perform better in France.

Dexter Gordon would enjoy a career resurgence thanks to the movie, including winning a Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Soloist at the 1987 ceremony for his work on the Other Side of Round Midnight album. He would tour the world, this time as the headliner, and he would play on Tony Bennett’s 1987 album Berlin. But this renewal of his career would also end up being his downfall. A lifelong smoker, Gordon’s schedule would cause his emphysema to flare up. After filming a small role in Penny Marshall’s film Awakenings, Gordon would be admitted to Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia on March 18th, 1990, for treatment of cancer of the larynx. He would pass away five weeks later, on April 25th, due to kidney failure. He would never be able to see his final acting performance.

One of the things I learned about Dexter Gordon while researching this episode was that while living in Copenhagen in the 1960s and 1970s, Gordon would become good friends with Danish tennis player Torben Ulrich and his family, and would become the godfather to Torben’s son, Lars, who would grow up to become the drummer for the heavy metal group Metallica.

The young Lars could often be found with his family watching Dexter Gordon play in one of Copenhagen’s jazz clubs, but by the time Lars could have had a closer relationship with the jazz legend in the late 60s and early 70s, Gordon had already moved back to the United States, but Lars would never forget him. Years later, when Metallica was on tour, Lars would happen to meet up with the legendary Lionel Hampton after a show, who was also playing in the same town as Metallica the same night. Lars would mention to Hampton that Dexter Gordon was his godfather, and the two men would bond over the course of the evening, talking about music until the early morning.

As of the writing of this episode in November 2022, Round Midnight is not available for streaming on any service. However, the Criterion Collection did release a Blu-Ray and DVD of the film in March 2022 that features a remastered 5.1 surround soundtrack and a number of other special features, although, sadly, no commentary from Herbie Hancock or Bertrand Tavernier, the latter of whom passed away in March 2021 at his home in Sainte-Maxime in the South of France, about an hour southwest of Cannes.

Thank you for joining us. We’ll talk again next week, when Episode 94 is released.

Remember to visit this episode’s page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about the movie Round Midnight, Bertrand Tavernier, Dexter Gordon and others we covered this episode.

The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.

Thank you again.

Good night.