Back in November of 1992, my friend Betsy and I got our first script assignment. We co-wrote an episode of Roseanne. After Betsy and I split the fee, and taxes and agent fees were taken out, I netted around $11,500. It was the biggest check I had ever received in my life, and it’s still a lot of money, if you ask me.
So, when a person gets a windfall like this, they should naturally look at various savings or investment options. Which I did. I researched a whole bunch of them: individual stocks, no-load mutual funds, money market accounts, a variety of IRA options, and some certificates of deposits with high interest rates. I finally settled on what I would do with the money.
I bought a piano.
It was a Yamaha grand piano. It was 6’2” long in ebony, with that glorious bell-like tone and responsive action. Best investment I ever made. I played it all the time. My kids took piano lessons and they played it all the time. I especially liked playing it while dinner was being made and everyone else was watching TV or reading. In 2007, with our family drowning in financial woes, I ended up selling the piano. One of the worst days of my life was watching that piano getting loaded up and driven away.
Oh, well, I decided, someday I’ll have money again, and I’ll get another grand piano.
That hasn’t happened yet, but that hasn’t stopped me from going into piano stores, playing a bit, and imagining it in my house, with dinner being made in the other room. Thank you, random piano store, for my little mental vacation. It was just the therapeutic break I needed.
Whether you play the piano at home, in random piano stores, or not at all, you can certainly enjoy movies about pianos and piano players. Here are my favorites.
This movie from director and screenwriter Jane Campion is a hard one to really assess. A period drama set in Victorian New Zealand, it was released to massive acclaim. Campion became just the second woman to be nominated for the Best Director Academy Award for her work on this film. She won the Oscar for Best Screenplay and also won the Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, the highest honor at that event. The second time I watched this movie, however, my reaction was, ‘Wait, what?!’
This story of a mute Scottish woman (Holly Hunter) sold into marriage with her young daughter (Anna Paquin) to a lonely frontiersman (Sam Neill) in 19th century New Zealand, who communicates through her beloved piano, just seems weird the second time through. Third time’s a charm. The love story that develops between Hunter’s character and the man to whom she gives piano lessons (Harvey Keitel) comes across as passionate and loving. Hunter won Best Actress and Paquin won a Best Supporting Actress at the Academy Awards in 1994 for their performances, and they were both well-deserved wins.
If you haven’t seen this movie in a while—especially if you were annoyed by it the last time—give it another viewing. I think you’ll change your mind. I did.
Pulp Fiction (1994) wasn’t just the name of the exhilarating, violent Quentin Tarantino movie. It was also a style of writing and publishing that emerged in the first half of the 20th century in the U.S. It consisted mainly of violent, salacious crime stories that were cranked out quickly by writers and printed on cheap paper called pulp paper. Pulp fiction also included science fiction, westerns, and fantasy writing. A sub-genre of pulp fiction was the potboiler—snappy, vaguely smutty novels with covers that featured scantily clad women in perilous situations. Lots of writers wrote pulp fiction or potboilers on the side to help pay the rent. William Faulkner, for instance, wrote one called Sanctuary. It didn’t win him any literary prizes, but it kept the lights on and the pot boiling, so to speak. One of the masters of pulp fiction was David Goodis. By day, Goodis was a New York advertising copywriter, and by night he wrote pulp fiction, often cranking out as many as 10,000 words a night. French New Wave director François Truffaut loved American pulp fiction, and this movie is based on Goodis’ potboiler Down There.
The story concerns a former concert pianist whose life falls apart after his wife’s suicide. He decides to live a different life under an assumed name and becomes a piano player in a dive bar. His brothers and their gangster lives disrupt that plan. This is a great movie. Charles Aznavour plays the piano player. Aznavour was one of the most beloved singers in France. He sold more than 180 million records, and is often referred to as “the French Frank Sinatra.” Take a listen sometime to his recording in English of In the Old Fashioned Way. You’ll be humming it the rest of the day. You might even find yourself playing it at night and dancing with your partner. To be clear, his song isn’t in the movie. It just is my suggestion for you for a date night. A nice romantic dinner, Shoot the Piano Player, and then dancing in your kitchen to In The Old Fashioned Way as sung by Charles Aznavour. And then to bed.
This is an intensely sad and affecting movie. Jack Nicholson is a classical pianist and the son in a family of famous musicians. He lives with his sweet but not too bright girlfriend (Karen Black) and works on oil rigs in Bakersfield, CA. He returns home one weekend, reluctantly bringing along his girlfriend, and has a series of unpleasant confrontations with his family. He disappears, leaving his girlfriend in the lurch. This movie is best known for the famous wheat toast scene in a diner and Nicholson turns in one of his best performances.
But for me, this Bob Rafelson movie has two truly great elements. First is Black’s Oscar-nominated performance as Rayette DiPesto, the girlfriend. She just breaks your heart and turns in such an honest performance you just want to scream at Nicholson’s character and wring his neck. The other is the Oscar-nominated script by Carole Eastman (writing under the pen name Adrien Joyce). The cast also includes Susan Anspach and Lois Smith, both of whom turn in outstanding performances, as well as Helena Kalliianiotes in an unforgettable cameo as an angry lesbian hitchhiker.
Well, here’s another movie in which a piano teacher and her student get involved in some monkey business. I suppose it’s a natural setting for sparks of sexual electricity. You and your teacher are both sitting next to each other, usually in a studio or a quiet part of her apartment. It’s an intimate experience. And yet, I have had three piano teachers as an adult and there were no sparks there. All three were middle-aged women, and I can say with a great deal of confidence that the feeling of sizzling sexuality between me and any of them was mutually non-existent. Now granted, none of my teachers were Isabelle Huppert, and I certainly was not, nor ever will be, a hot young piano-playing Viennese hockey player with perfect hair, either.
So, is this a realistic portrayal of the piano teacher-piano student relationship? Uh, no. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t watch this movie. First of all, it has Huppert, who is one of the greatest actresses in the world over the past fifty years. Plus, Huppert and her student (Benoît Magimel) are just so after each other that at one point they’re mauling each other in a public restroom. And it’s quite an appealing moment at that, I must say. The film was directed by the noted Austrian director Michael Haneke from his own adaptation of Elfriede Jelinek’s novel of the same name. Jelinek won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004, so the source material is quite impressive.
You have not seen a movie about piano players or musicians quite like this before. This German film is about an elderly piano teacher, Traude, who is working in a women’s prison, and reluctantly takes on a rough young prisoner, Jenny. Jenny has major anger issues and reacts violently to setbacks. As a child prodigy, Jenny had been pressured by her adoptive father to excel on the piano. She rebelled. One thing led to another and voila! She’s in a women’s prison. Under Traude’s firm tutelage in prison, however, Jenny makes it to the finals of an Under 21 piano competition, only to have more violence erupt in her life. The police are after her as she enters the stage to perform her four-minute piece, a showy number by Schumann. And, well, I’m not going to tell you what happens. You’ll just have to rent this movie and find out.
It’s an exceptionally well-made drama from the German director and screenwriter Chris Kraus. Outstanding performances from Monica Bleibtrau (Traude) and Hannah Herzsprung (Jenny). Bleibtrau was one of the most beloved actresses of her time in the German-speaking world. She was made up to look like an 80-year-old woman in this film, when she was only in her early 60s. (Check her out as the cranky grandmother in the very amusing 2009 German comedy Soul Kitchen. It was one of her final films, unfortunately.) Enjoy Four Minutes, it’s is an incredible film.
David Raether is a veteran TV writer and essayist. He worked for 12 years as a television sitcom writer/producer, including a 111-episode run on the ground-breaking ABC comedy “Roseanne.” His essays have been published by Salon.com, The Times of London, and Longforms.org, and have been lauded by The Atlantic Magazine and the BBC World Service. His memoir, Homeless: A Picaresque Memoir from Our Times, is awaiting publication.