Chicago Tribune from Chicago, Illinois • 83

riji'iiij'" ryy (fhicao (Tribune Wednesday, December 5, 1984 7Sr Bob Eddie Murphy's 'Cop' bad mix of mm comedy, violence Storyteller puts tradition to work i EATTLE The job description on Cathryn Wellner's business card is simple: Mrs. Wellner. 38. travels around telling By Gene Siskel Movie critic YOU HAVE been reading all of those point-'IJ less Christmas movie round-ups in which re-I II porters attempt to predict the hits and the ii flops you'll notice one consistent prediction: that ''Beverly Hills Cop," starring Eddie Murphy, is the runaway pick to lead all films in popularity this holiday season. This dubious piece of "information" is rendered even more meaningless after one has seen "Beverly Hills Cop," an often tedious, badly directed, one-joke affair that offers a few bright Eddie Murphy monologues amid some surprisingly brutal gunplay and absolutely no suspense.

The gunplay comes across as a rude surprise considering the comic nature of the film's premise. Murphy plays a rogue Detroit detective who always is doing things his own way and thereby annoying his bosses. When one of his dear friends is shot in the head by the henchman of a powerful drug dealer, Murphy takes off to Beverly Hills on his own to solve the murder. The main joke in the film is how a hip Murphy manuevers around the uptight, WASP-ish, by-the-book Beverly Hills Police Department. For example, when Murphy sees that a couple of Beverly Hills detectives are shadowing him from a car stories to groups of adults and children.

She tells stories approximately 20 times a month. The job is just what it sounds like she walks into a room full of strangers and tells the strangers a story. "The stories are on subjects as old as mankind," Mrs. Wellner said. "Stories of fidelity and love, of courage and faith, of fear and insecurity.

I try to make my listeners understand the stories at the level of their hearts." tradition of storytelling is a long and honored one. But in the 1980s, the very concept seems strange the idea of one person telling stories to a roomful of people she has never met. Television does that, and movies do that but one person telling stories? "IT IS VERY personal," Mrs. Wellner said. "You're meeting every eye.

Television doesn't speak to the individual; television speaks to a mass audience. "But when you're in a room telling stories to people, and it working well, there's almost a visible relaxation of the bodies that you see in the room. You watch their bodies relax, and you watch their eyes focus inward. The eyes aren't focusing on you, the storyteller, anymore; they're focusing on the story itself." Mrs. Wellner said the ideal size for a group listening to a story is between 30 and 50 people.

Much smaller than that and the people become self-conscious, and pay too much attention to each other; much larger than that and the sessions lose their intimacy. "People think they don't have time for something as simple as listening to a story," Mrs. Wellner said. "That's a complaint that you hear parked in front of his hotel, he has room ser "Beverly Hills Cop" Mini-review: One joke; much violence Directed by Martin Brest; screen-play by Daniel Petrle Jr. based on story by Danllo Bach and Daniel Petrle photographed by Bruce Surtees; edited by Billy Weber and Arthur Coburn; music by Harold Faltermeyer; produced by Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer; a Paramount re Wmmg- Jt Jtllllfl vice deliver a tray of food to the car, then he sneaks around it and sticks a banana in its tail pipe.

ANOTHER TIME, he crashes a snooty private club to confront the drug dealer by telling the manager that he has been sleeping with the mobster and that he wants to warn him that he may have given him herpes. The manager agrees to let Murphy break the bad news himself. These are cute bits, lasting about a minute Chlcaoo. Water lease at the and outlvlno theaters. tower naiea h.

THE CAST Alex Foley Eddie Murphy Del. Billy Rosewood Judge Reinhold Sgt. Toggsrt John Ashton Jenny Summers Lisa Ellbacher Lt. Bogomll Ronny Cox Victor Maltland Steven Berkofl Mlkey Tandlno James Russo Zack Jonathan Banks 'If you make time to listen to a story, it helps you to slow down, and that's good Cathryn Wellner wWffliftSWv sr mmmm iryxJSSSSAWS'X-. on screen, and we appreciate the comic energy Murphy develops in delivering them.

But that's more stand-up comedy than movie acting, because Murphy in these scenes is just playing himself which is where "Beverly Hills Cop" differs from the movie it was patterned after, Murphy's smash-hit film debut 48 in which he did play a genuine character. Now "48 HRS." also contained a mix of comedy and violence. Why does it work so much better than "Beverly Hills First of all, the mix is much different. In "48 director Walter Hill, a master of the action film, uses Murphy's comedy sequences as an occasional tension-breaker in a film that at its core is a powerful urban thriller. In "Beverly Hills Cop," director Martin Brest, much more comfortable with comedies "Going in can't seem to make up his mind as to what kind of picture he's making.

"Beverly Hills Cop" opens with a schizoid scene that starts out funny, lurches into a chase and a brutal gangland hit that shocks us with its violence, and then we're back to Murphy sassing his superiors. The result is that we never can take the story seriously; the violence always comes across as an interruption. THE CAUSE OF this confusion may not be entirely director Brest, who reportedly inherited a Continued on page 4 1TF7 Revelations about the dawn of a new age about much of society. People don't have time to talk to each other. You see relationships falling apart all the time because people are too busy to talk.

"We storytellers aren't out to change the world. All we're saying is, 'You do have If you make time to listen, to a story, it helps you to slow down, and that's good. "I'm not a psychologist, but I can tell you what I think that listening to stories can do for a person. I think it can have psychological benefits. As a listener, when I have heard a story and the storyteller has seemed to understand me, out in the audience, I feel more powerful when I leave.

Not powerful in the egotistical sense, or the managerial sense. But powerful in the sense of being a little stronger because I understand more about the world in which I'm living." ONE OF THE things that storytelling can do, Mrs. Wellner said, is to help people who are lonely. "Loneliness, I think, is not having anyone who understands who you are," she said. "A good storyteller makes you feel that someone understands the things that are going on inside of you.

There is no cure to loneliness in a story. But it can help temporarily. When there is a real person in that room telling a story, there is a feeling of warmth. And at least for that period of time, the loneliness seems to go away." Mrs. Wellner said that going to a storytelling session is different than going to a lecture on, say, how to cash in on the real estate market.

"What a person gets out of a 'lecture' is removed from himself," she said. "A lecture is somebody else's view of the world. People want to be thinner and more beautiful and richer. Lecturers promise to tell you how to achieve those things. storyteller a storyteller is offering something a little warmer.

A storyteller doesn't give you a simplistic answer about how to change one area of your life and thus make you a superficially happier person. But a good storyteller can enrich your life just by being in the room and talking to you so personally." WHILE SHE IS telling a story, Mrs. Wellner said, her mind is not on the techniques of her performance. "I do the same thing the audience does," she said. "I start to live with the characters in the story.

What's going on in my mind is the story itself. I watch that audience enjoy the story: I watch them relax and let the world go away, and watch them enter into the story." Most of Americat of course, gets its stories from a glass picture tube. And people who appear on that tube can sit down on a talk show and reach 10 million viewers at the same time. So why does Mrs. Wellner content herself with talking to audiences of 30 people, of 50 people? "If there are 30 people in the room, I can be sure that I am making a real connection with every single one of them, and I can be aware of it at the moment it's happening," she said.

"With 10 million people I don't know, I just don't think I'd have that feeling. "Sometimes I think about it, but only in this sense I'll be telling my stories to a roomful of people, and I'll think to myself: This is going so well, but there's not enough time in my life to possibly talk to enough groups and reach enough people. But then I'll see the people reacting in the audience, and it will be all right. Do I ever think it's a waste of time? I've never even thought to ask myself that question." was dropped. He had been listening to a Tokyo frequency when he heard a report of radiation injuries and illness among many of the survivors at Hiroshima.

The reports, he would tell author Peter Wyden almost 40 years later, "upset and puzzled" him. They came as "quite a surprise." These problems had not been expected. This wasn't supposed to be happening. Ramsey and the other eminent scientists who built the bomb had known, of course, that radiation was 'They didn't know about radiation. They literally didn't know the radiation gun was loaded Peter Wyden, By Paul Galloway DT IS 3:49 A.M.

on Aug. 9, 1945, and Norman F. Ramsey is standing in the darkness at the end of a runway on an island in the South Pacific, 1,400 miles from Japan, watching the overloaded B-29 that carries the second nuclear bomb to be used against human beings, as it lumbers toward take-off and its target, Nagasaki. Ramsey, a noted physicist, is a member of the inner circle at the atomic laboratory in Los Alamos, N.M., and the head of the ultra-secret Delivery Group. J.

Robert Oppenheimer, the top scientist of the atomic project, has sent him to the Tinian Air Base in the Mariana Islands to supervise the care and arming of the new superweapons. Oppie, the brilliant, charismatic leader, tells Ramsey that he will be there for six months, for it may be necessary to drop 50 bombs before the Japanese capitulate, The first bomb has been dropped three days earlier, on Hiroshima, and Ramsey, writes Peter Wyden in "Day One" Simon Schuster, $19.95, is preoccupied. It seems to him "inevitable" that a crash and subsequent disaster will eventually occur at Tinian if 50 bombing runs are to be made because the added fuel the planes must carry to complete their mission makes take-off extremely dangerous. There have already been a number of crashes by planes heading for Japan with conventional bombs. HE IS ALSO concerned about the broadcast he has heard on a shortwave radio just after the first bomb scientists at Los Alamos to more Japanese broadcasts about radiation aftereffects.

He wires them that in his opinion the charges are either "hoax orpropaganda." Three months later. Groves would make an appearance before the newly formed U.S. Senate Special Committee on Atomic Energy, where he would be congratulated for his "splendid management job" and would give an account of how this great wartime task was achieved. During a questioning period, one of the questions would be about radiation. What happens, a senator would ask, to a casualty of -radiation? "He can have enough so he will be killed instantly," Groves would testify.

"He can have a smaller amount which will cause him to die rather soon, as I understand it from the doctors, without undue suffering. In fact, they say it is a very pleasant way to die. AT HIROSHIMA 130,000 persons would be killed, many dying in dreadful agony from radiation. Thousands more would be affected in later years, from maladies resulting from radiation, from birth defects, from psychological scars and ostracism. Even today, a 170-bed hospital cares for survivors.

Wyden ends the first chapter with this sentence: "The men who made the Bomb did not know what it was." Wyden's revelations about the lack of awareness of the continuing lethal horror of radiation and the intentions to drop 50 bombs are new. In an interview with The Tribune, Wyden was asked about criticism his Continued on page 3 if. UP iff1! It part of the package, but the consensus was that its effects would be incidental to the explosion and the firestorm that followed, that it would be contained within and overwhelmed by the destructive radius of the detonation. It would be the big bang that would cause the deaths and the injuries, not any lingering radiation. In the United States, Wyden writes, there is skepticism as well as surprise.

On Aug. 24 from Washington, Army Maj. Gen. Leslie R. Groves, the director of the atomic project, responds to mounting concern from Eddie Murphy, Judge Reinhold and John Ashton in "Beverly Hills Schizoid.

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