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Candidates for the National Film Registry: Choose Me

Introduction by Pat Padua

A man walks into a bar: there's a pretty face in front of him and another pretty face down the counter. What does he do? What if another pretty face comes along later? One answer is supplied by Choose Me: try them all. Not as an ode to promiscuity, but to a life lived of trying to see how it fits, then trying again - and again. All this is tempered by the messiness that comes from making choices that might be intertwined and related - and sometimes married. This is a quintessential Alan Rudolph plot.

A weaker cast might have reduced this to sitcom shenanigans, but a group of expressive faces make these unlikely characters come alive. Genevieve Bujold is Doctor Love, the sexy, goofy host of a radio loveline. Keith Carradine is Mickey, an escaped mental patient and admitted pathological liar. Lesley-Anne Warren is Eve, who works and owns Eve's bar. These and other characters seem to hide behind images and false fronts: photography, talk radio, calling up talk radio, bad poetry. Fluid camerawork by Jan Kiesser and a soul and jazz soundtrack help the film capture the elusive emotions and connections that people look for behind the mask.

Alan Rudolph started working in film when he was nine years old. His first job was in front of the camera, making a brief appearance in The Rocket Man (1954), directed by his father Oscar Rudolph and co-scripted by Lenny Bruce. He moved on to work as Assistant Director on television programs, including The Brady Bunch and Love American Style - the latter of which Rudolph fondly remembers as a chance to work with a fresh set of actors each time out. He directed two low-budget horror pictures before he got his big break with Robert Altman. He served as assistant director on three Altman films, and did uncredited work on the screenplay for Nashville. Even after he began to direct his own movies, Rudolph was still seen as "Altman's protege," but Altman told American Film that he sees "more of Alan reflected in me than I in him...a lot of Nashville is his movie."

Everyone has to eat. To keep working, Alan Rudolph has taken on studio projects, like Endangered Species (1987), Made in Heaven (1987) and Mortal Thoughts (1991), that tend to be less personal than projects he initiated himself. It is when working independently that he makes his best films. Choose Me, the 1984 film that was his third independent feature, is his very best. In 1993, Artforum asked Rudolph how the script came to him:

About two months before shooting took place, I'm driving in Los Angeles and I turned on the baseball station. Normally, I never listen to AM radio, but this day the Dodgers were rained out, and I found myself listening to a Doctor Tony Somebody-or-other. I hear people pouring their guts out to this woman between commercials: "Yes? You can't cope with life? OK, we'll get right back to you after this message from..." So that's where the Dr. Nancy Love idea came from [...] other than that, I only knew I had to use the song by Teddy Pendergrass. (Artforum, January 1993)

Like all of Rudolph's independent projects, music is essential to the unique mood of Choose Me. Teddy Pendergrass' seductive, yearning ballads voice the inner longings of lovelorn souls; tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp and pianist Horace Parlan set the flirtatious, smoky character of Eve's bar. Songs were culled from several soul, jazz, and reggae albums, but while in today's market a CD tie in would be expected, a soundtrack album was never released.

Rudolph's work since Choose Me has been erratic. Films like Trouble in Mind (1986), The Moderns (1988), and Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994) are entertaining but sometimes forced. His distinctive quirkiness occasionally feels like the work of someone who's trying too hard to impress. The release of Afterglow in 1997 marked a return to form, and a return to the romantic entanglements of Choose Me. If you haven't seen an Alan Rudolph film before, I hope you enjoy this example of the director at his natural best.

Pat Padua works in the Library's Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division, helping save and preserve America's film heritage.