good evening welcome to another edition of a fistful of posturing here princeton t v in downtown princeton i'm the moderator tonight my name is janet stern and i'm delighted to be joined by our three other regular panelists carol wel marilyn campbell and bob brown and tonight we're going to be discussing two films both are about jazz trumpeter miles davis is one of the featured ally don't want to the film that tells a story a story from the life of ted baker both of these films interesting enough to choose as their starting point little point in the subject's lives rather than th r triumphal parts and this film starts at a time when chet baker has had a very successful career as a trumpeter and singer but he's had has heroin addiction and  he's in jail and he's really down and out and someone bails him out of jail and tough and he's he's doing a comeback and the comeback is really the story of the film he meets a young woman  and they fall in love and she is going to clean him up and reform him and turn him into a good citizen and he tries but ultimately i don't think this is much center story the frame stories you might say is when miles davis is i guess it's about three quarters away through his career has become a recluse and his upper west side apartment in new york he's refusing to cooperate with columbia records and he is just sort of making his own demo tape and not paying attention to his trumpet playing at all and there's a bit of the same kind of  as to some people trying to steal his tape and the record company threatening him and then there are flashbacks to his earlier life and his relationship with one of his wives francis and as in born to be blue she's a woman who's going to reform him but he's not quite reform of all show we say so we see different aspects of his career because as a musician he's had  very development it's clear he's almost the picasso of jazz because he transforms jazz in revolutionary ways throughout his career so you see a little snippet of each one of those stages in kind jerky flashbacks that are a little hard to understand first on both of these films i neglected to say are still playing in our area which is it's great because these are definitely independent productions and i don't know if it's just ray and walk the line about johnny cash in the one but they don't seem to fall into that pattern why do you think they were made i think that the vet both of them were attempting to make a movie that's a little bit like jazz that is fragments and bits and pieces and flashbacks and fantasy there's even fantasy sections in i think probably some with some of m rolling stone reporter is completely made up that's right but it's sort of a composite of reporters who were trying to get into his head right but i think that that vic that semi consciously first i think that people feel that the traditional biopic of the start at the beginning of the career show the triumph show the difficulties show that eventual trials are are dull and that they want one to fall with the chronology a little bit and  in fact in both of these start at a bad point in both of these these music greats career rather than a good place and and i i think it was the way influenced by the idea that  and actually he did a little crowdsourcing he actually raised some money through the internet and tried and on that web site where he is right trying to raise money he says and he wanted something that miles would like something that was hit in cool and maybe a little bit ahead he didn't want a traditional format and of the two movies the miles ahead is even less traditional and then born to be blue i mean it's pretty wild chase scene and there's lots of it what i don't want to cause some of those shootings and that's that was the interesting thing he convinced the family he had first his ideas and family didn't like and then he came upon the idea of let's make miles a gangsta so you have that whole chase scene on the shooting and yeah holding people up to get his tape back that's the fictional part the well  shot well the the one here was shot why did they do that why did they do was put in that fictional that really fantastical fictional element y to make it more so exciting fictional so well i think that that whenever you put a reporter in in a movie who is investigating the life of a person like citizen kane where it starts out a newsreel reporter is going to investigate the life of  interviews different people and that's another sort of fragmented you see came from different angles and this i think was there's this reporter from rolling stone trying to get a story he's trying to extract the story from someone  not want to story told who in fact tells all kinds of lies tells makes makes this guy do all kinds of crazy things drags him around makes him his chauffeur around directed it he wrote it in part it became his baby and he went online and tried to raise money for it so it was but i think what's happened is that everybody has decided that the buyer to pick format is just she's the central yes ok now do you do you all feel that there was a more substantive fall for anything in this i think more the nice thing about francis is that is that she has a career at the time when they meet she's a dancer she's she has she has in fact seen very serious dancer sort of sort of  mean with him yeah and one of the points of their disagreement is that she wants to continue to have a career and he wants someone who will stay home and minister him to him and that's one of the major causes of their of their their break up i think that is definitely progressive in bio pics about famous men most of which the wife is content to stand by and weep into her you know we've been to her handkerchief when he's unfit for the point when you realise yes i needed her all yeah yeah where and it's also true it's also true in the baker film although she is not she is a beginning actress a struggling actor said at the beginning of the of their relationship she definitely has a commitment to working i think that that that is sympathetic to the fact that they wanted to have their own identities in their own careers and that was a point of friction and both men tell their women you've got to stop doing what you've got is not i want  they said at one point this is the sort of woman you marry yes and but she has a career she's an artist in her own right and you can see where that makes him her more interesting to him but of course y because i am not an artist in any way and to to watch someone so get a kid to say all he wants to do is play this trumpet and he will take heroin for the rest of his life because it makes him happy because as he describes in the film it makes me wider it makes time wider as well as longer if i can billion every no i mean you really get a sense yeah maybe you should keep taking that the me but i don't know that kind of person that's that's an excuse but there are plenty of people in the jazz world who are just like that bill evans who played for miles davis exactly the saying that's not true well you there's a line in the film in the miles davis film where they say oh hey but you were actually playing better when you were off drugs in the case we see him actually davis was addicted to heroin earlier on i don't see that in this film ok we see him during the coke phase i mean he was so he was addicted to heroin early in his life and he went back home to detox on his own he went cold turkey locked in self and his parents  n his bedroom and his parents home and came out of it on his own but then he went back into lighter drugs shall we say well later on you're married to  owners were offering it to him and the recording the recording executives were offering it to you it was just part of the scene but i think the movie chet baker movie also suggested an alternate reason why he might be taking it doesn't involve using your mouth in a very very demanding way that basically basically you're sort of spit into that well you have your lips are i played the trumpet for years and it does create in some cases i mean you look at louis armstrong's lips and there's a permanent circle on his lips that miles davis complained later in his life when people asked him to play some of his earlier stuff he said i just don't my lips don't do that anymore well so yeah whether he was telling the truth but if you hear is later stuff he's not so flowing and you know it's was partly it's his attitude about i think  question of whether i think i'm i'm understanding what you're thinking but did the artists themselves really believe that it made their music better i think i think they did in the sense that it's jazz and you're you have to be much looser and sort of open to a kind of something that's beyond what's on the page now the difference between chet baker as a jazz musician and miles davis was miles davis actually in a classical music training he was a truly art for at least a part of his time and he dropped out because he didn't want to be too influenced by dead white male musician and composers but chet baker was much more intuitive it seems to me and so it was very important to him to be kind of much more open and he felt that once he was on drugs those avenues were open to him in some way i was you and you see much more in the davis in the miles davis movie davis sitting down with serious set musicians in a studio going over the composition in a very calculated way in a very technical in a technical way that strode he knew what music theory was and how structure worked right because that was davis usually worked with some aviator trio or other musicians and chick baker was much more he didn't have a of their trumpet players their respective trumpet players or or what well i thought particularly miles ahead was was not judge mental i mean it doesn't even go through the standard you know the and yeah yeah yeah that's in the fly and yes and he keeps flashing back and saying i should not have wept that when they don't you know that was like right the best relationship in his in his personal life but it in the present it seems like he has now just doesn't expect there to be a special person in this life he just expects to have a series of groupies on them and that's ok with that he does have into a serious something that made me realize just now a lot of the drama in this kind of a film apparently this is not the case in my head because there was no we coverage but for the audience a drama is is he going to go back movie about music per se whereas i think the miles davis movie gives you the sense that whatever horrible person miles davis was he was a real pioneer o and in his youth and ahead head and shoulders didn't do that in the chip bigger events right now it was somebody else playing chip and i was convinced listening and it's funny because the miles davis film was not heavy on him performing on stage in other words having was trying to bring in a copy that i have of that recording there is nobody who can emulate chet baker we had when he was a very few were straight ahead tenor just heartbreaking the way he is saying yeah very slow are good segue bob because what i'd like to ask you to do to sum up instead of something up well you could tell a tale but tell me what you thought of the performances of these very well known actors  is is that kind of an interpretation i didn't really feel he was the chet baker that i know from recordings and i've heard a lot of chet baker recordings and he didn't look like chet baker didn't really sing like him but it was an father in the film played chet baker in the documentary that the same as that the same director did about chet baker's death so that was apparently what chet baker i saw him isn't harvey yeah yeah quickly though  thought that the performances were very good but i was more more intrigued with the way the films were put together than i was necessarily i know both of these have talked about is perhaps oscar worthy performances and certainly someone who is the center character of really carries the film in both cases you have to say well it carried the film so it has to be a pretty great performance but i was actually more interested in just the way the stories were being told and how inventive they were the directors were trying to be oh did i forget well i only saw one of them but i have to say i know that the beggars legacy was a lot of what we remember is this sort of little beautiful little boy lost quality that the women in the show and i think that people like did that very well although i knowledge that he was not nearly as good a community and that manner to me no know i think he did have a really tremendous job ok well i think i thank you all for those comments are really interesting especially as i didn't see one of them and now i really want to grab to see it and i hope our audience feels the same way so please join us again another edition of this full