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“It Makes No Sense To Talk About The Internet As Separate From The Economy”

April 15, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Film, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The new freedoms of the Internet Age are great and in the aggregate we’re wealthier, but the dollars themselves are in far fewer hands than before we were wired. Astra Taylor, who’s made two excellent full-length documentaries (this one and this one), has a new book, The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age, which talks about the current wave of inequality fostered in part by the emergence of the web. Gawker’s Michelle Dean interviewed Taylor on the topic. The opening exchange:

“Question:

Can you boil down for me the main reason you think the internet isn’t the ‘democratizing’ force we were promised?

Astra Taylor:

Because of money. It makes no sense to talk about the internet as separate from the economy. In the mainstream pundit world, there are two camps. One would say the internet is ruining everything, or distracting, or addictive. The other camp would say the internet’s amazing, we’re all connected, and it’s going to bring about a new age of democratization of culture, and creativity.

It’s not [that I have] some revolutionary theory. But there was a disconnect between this chatter from a fundamental characteristic of our world, just sitting there, and I just felt like somebody had to address it. No one was talking about the role of finance and the way business imperatives shape the development of tech.

The web is not an even playing field. There are economic hierarchies, and there’s this rich-get-richer phenomenon. And it’s emergent of these massive digital corporations, you know, Google and Apple. They’re not the upstarts they position themselves as.”

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“Then You’re In The Darkness Of The Tunnel”

April 14, 2014 in Film, Science/Tech, Sports, Videos | Permalink

“The machine cannot lie,” said Leland Stanford, which may not be true much longer, but racer Jackie Stewart knew that humans certainly always could–especially to themselves–as he discusses his elaborate preparations for Monaco in 1972 with good friend Roman Polanski.

“Corporate Society Takes Care Of Everything”

April 11, 2014 in Film, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Global corporations that solve problems in an innovative and technocratic manner, but, oh, there’s a catch or two in return for the miracles and wonders. A featurette for Norman Jewison’s 1975 cautionary tale about the free market run amok, Rollerball.

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“All Our Robots Programmed For One Function–To Give Pleasure”

April 11, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech | Permalink

A “Making of…” featurette for 1973’s Westworld, in which writer-director Michael Crichton, then 30 years old, commented astutely on the Singularity. He wasn’t always so good at predicting the future.

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“I Want You To Know That Everyone At The Studio Did Not Want Me To Make It”

April 10, 2014 in Excerpts, Film | Permalink

Robert Evans, who’s made some great movies and some bad mistakes, did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

What was it like to be involved with such an iconic film, The Godfather?

Robert Evans:

It was the first mafia movie written, directed, and acted by Italians. Coppola’s hungry brilliance as its director, was cinematically operatic. But nobody wanted to make it. They only offered 6 million to make it and said it would never be a hit. I got the rights for $12,500 and they weren’t even impressed with that. Sometimes you have to go against the tide. Nothing is easy in the business. A lot of layers from distribution, down to set decoration, casting, music. Each one is a battle.

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Question:

I don’t really have any questions, I just wanted to tell you that Chinatown is my all-time favorite film, and I couldn’t be more grateful for everything you did to bring that film into existence. Everything about Chinatown is perfect.

Robert Evans:

Thank you very much. I want you to know that everyone at the studio did not want me to make it. It was my first independent movie as the head of production at Paramount, and everyone there thought i was crazy. Nobody understood the script. But i knew Robert [Towne] was a great screenwriter, i had Jack Nicholson as a lead, and Faye Dunaway, and Roman Polanski. I decided to bet on my artists, not my executives.

Question:

Do you and Roman [Polanski] still talk?

Robert Evans:

Yes we do often. He’s a very close friend of mine. We’ve been through thick and thin together.

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Question:

I’d like to ask what you think is different about the industry today compared to when you started? Specifically in regards to starting in the industry.

Robert Evans:

its much larger, more corporate. The American film has grown to be our countries number one export to the world. It flies the American flag higher all around the globe, more than any other product we manufacture. We should be very proud of it.

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Question:

Has anyone been a bigger prick to you than Frank Sinatra?

Robert Evans:

Frank was great to me – i was a prick to him. And it wasn’t right. But it had to do with the casting of Mia Farrow, and Frank divorced Mia and our friendship over it. It was a friendship i really treasured because he gave me an opening in the business when he took the detective book i optioned as a young producer, and said “I want to make this film”. When it comes to a woman, all rules change. Especially an actress.

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Question:

How many pages does it take to get excited about a screenplay?

Robert Evans:

When its over. A screenplay is re-written, re-written, and re-written. Its a never-ending fight, and very subjective. I’ve made mistakes, and hit the ball out of the park…

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Question:

What do you look for in a script?

Robert Evans:

Lean dialogue. The more the dialogue, the more amateur the writer. A movie is called a moving picture. Its not a play. Theres a big difference to being a screenwriter. One can be a screenwriter and brilliant at it, yet not a book writer, or a stage writer. A triple threat writer is a very rare jewel. And overestimated by his agent.

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Question:

Why has it taken so long to do another Popeye movie and which modern day actor would make a good Popeye?

Robert Evans:

[no answer].•

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“I Was Studying The Apes To Develop A Choreography”

April 7, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech | Permalink

From film blogger Justin Bozung’s interview with mime Dan Richter, a passage about how he came to be cast as “Moon-Watcher” in 2001: A Space Odyssey and how he prepared for the role:

“Justin Bozung:

So for those that haven’t read the book, could you tell me how you came to work on the film with Stanley Kubrick?

Dan Richter: 

I had a friend at the time, a book publisher named Mike Wilson and he was working with Arthur C. Clarke on a series of books about diving. Arthur and Stanley had been discussing the ‘Dawn Of Man’ sequence because they had almost finished the live action shooting on 2001, but they still didn’t have an opening. They had tried a few different things but nothing seemed to worked right. They decided that maybe they should talk to a mime about some of their ideas. Arthur mentioned this to Mike Wilson, and because Mike and I had been friends, he said ‘I know a mime. His name is Dan Richter, and he’s great.’

So consequently, I was asked to go and meet with Stanley at Borehamwood Studios MGM outside of London. I figured he’d pick my brain, and I’d offer some suggestions. So I drove up to see him and we started to talk. Stanley started to explain to me some of the ideas they had had for the sequence that didn’t work. Thinking about it, I didn’t see his problems as having to do anything with acting, but rather as something to do with movement.

The ‘Dawn Of Man’ was for the opening of the film. The problem with the opening of a film or a play or a book is that you have to go and get your audience. You have a very short amount of time to get the audience involved, literally seconds of minutes. So it was important that we made the man-apes come to life.

Justin Bozung:

So you didn’t really go into the meeting thinking you were going in for a job interview with Kubrick?

Dan Richter: 

I truthfully thought I was just going in to talk to him. I thought Stanley was just going to pick my brain, and I thought I’d just offer up suggestions to him in regards to how a mime could be of assistance to him in terms of solving his problems for the sequence. I didn’t know I was auditioning for him. I went in there acting cocky. I wasn’t worried about saying anything wrong to Stanley, because I wasn’t looking for a job. I was busy with other work in London at the time. I just thought I was there to give Stanley some pointers or whatever. I thought I was meeting with Stanley to explain mime movement to him.

Stanley and I hit it right off, and I think he liked my approach. After I was done talking Stanley asked me to show him what I was talking about. He wanted to see how to move as I had explained it to him. Then he offered me the job. So I told Stanley I’d have to do all of the choreography. I told him I’d help develop all of the man-apes costumes. The costumes initially were completely unworkable. You couldn’t move in them. Then I told Stanley that I’d cast and then train the people myself. I didn’t think he’d actually agree to my terms, but he said ‘yes’ to everything. So suddenly, I found myself with a immense job, and it was a job creating something that had never been done before. I was given an office, a rehearsal studio, assistants, and my name on a door and I was just this cocky kid. I had to deliver.

I mean, I had no ideas or plans to play ‘Moon-Watcher’ in the film. I thought I was there to just help with the research and the choreography of the actor’s movements. I never had any notions that Stanley would want me to play ‘Moon-Watcher’ in 2001.

Justin Bozung:

Then there was the enormous amount of research you did on apes.

Dan Richter:

I spent a great deal of time researching at the London Museum Of Natural History. I was granted access to their back stacks, and got to examine and study various skeletons and bones in their collection and all the early journals and research work the museum had acquired to that point.. I spent a lot of time talking to scientists with specialization in the Australopithecus era. Which of course, was the era that we were planning on setting the opening of the film in.

I also went to various zoo’s around England. With the zoo research I was studying the apes to develop a choreography. So I studied the apes at the zoo, so I could see how they interacted with each other in a tribe. How they moved, how their bodies reacted. So I began to study Gorillas, Chimpanzees, and Gibbons. Before my first trip Stanley had handed me a 8mm Bolex camera and told me to film everything. So I just went and filmed everything I observed. I was looking for the truth of it, I needed to know how they interacted with each other.

As we got closer to shooting, we were having a difficult time figuring out exactly how the man-apes should move. When I was at the zoo I filmed this Gibbon ape in slow motion coming down a tree and once he got down he began to just walk around. When I went back and watched the film I discovered this specific way in which the Gibbon walked. The Gibbon moves with their legs slightly bent with their knees pointing outward. Then, with the Chimps we decided it would be best to move our hands and arms in the same way that they moved theirs, which was at particular angle as well.”

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“POW! Two Unrelated Ideas, Adolescent Cruelty And Telekinesis, Came Together, And I Had An Idea …”

April 4, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Film | Permalink

In a Guardian piece, Stephen King recalls how two disparate thoughts crashed together in his head, allowing him to create his first novel, Carrie, 40 years ago. The opening:

“While he was going to college my brother Dave worked summers as a janitor at Brunswick High. For part of one summer I worked there, too. One day I was supposed to scrub the rust-stains off the walls in the girls’ shower. I noticed that the showers, unlike those in the boys’ locker room, had chrome U-rings with pink plastic curtains attached.

This memory came back to me one day while I was working in the laundry, and I started seeing the opening scene of a story: girls showering in a locker room where there were no U-rings, pink plastic curtains or privacy. And this one girl starts to have her period. Only she doesn’t know what it is, and the other girls – grossed out, horrified, amused – start pelting her with sanitary napkins … The girl begins to scream. All that blood!

I’d read an article in Life magazine some years before, suggesting that at least some reported poltergeist activity might actually be telekinetic phenomena – telekinesis being the ability to move objects just by thinking about them. There was some evidence to suggest that young people might have such powers, the article said, especially girls in early adolescence, right around the time of their first —

POW! Two unrelated ideas, adolescent cruelty and telekinesis, came together, and I had an idea …”

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“Let Me Ask You How You Originally Created HAL”

April 4, 2014 in Film, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Roger Ebert, as a part of “Cyberfest ’97,” interviewing Arthur C. Clarke via computer.

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“I Don’t Think Any Writer Is Content With What He’s Done”

April 3, 2014 in Books, Film, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Four years before his death, Anthony Burgess sat for this Face to Face interview in 1989. It amazes me that he was wounded by bad reviews.

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“You’ve All Of A Sudden Hit The Jackpot With A Thing Called Star Wars”

April 2, 2014 in Film, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

I find all the Star Wars films intolerable, but I will acknowledge some entertainment value in seeing Sir Alec Guinness speak about the original movie in a 1977 interview with Michael Parkinson. Neither one of them took George Lucas’ blockbuster too seriously.

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“What Is An Underground Movie?”

April 2, 2014 in Film, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Incredibly cool 1965 CBS Evening News report presented by Walter Cronkite about underground filmmaking in NYC. Features footage of “a musical group called the Velvet Underground” and interviews with Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage, Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick.

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“I Had Few Intellectual Interests As A Child”

March 17, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech | Permalink

It’s not at all surprising that Stanley Kubrick was an early adopter of home audio recorders and had scads of them back during the 1960s. Last year, I posted two items from the New Yorker of that era (here and here) in which Jeremy Bernstein visited the director during the long gestation of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Via Open Culture, here’s a 1966 audio recording from those interview sessions that were made not by the journalist, who didn’t even work with a tape machine at that point, but by the auteur.

From Bernstein’s notes about how he came to know fellow chess enthusiast Kubrick:

“I met Kubrick soon after Dr. Strangelove opened in 1964. I had just started writing for the New Yorker when its editor William Shawn asked me if I would consider a piece about science fiction. I never much liked science fiction but said I would look into it. My friend and colleague Gerald Feinberg, a physics professor at Columbia and a great science fiction fan, recommended Arthur C. Clarke. Clarke was not very well known then, but I set about reading everything he had written and found that I liked it a great deal. I wrote an enthusiastic article, and soon after it appeared I got a note from Clarke saying he was coming to New York from Ceylon (as it then was), where he lived, and would like to have lunch. In the course of lunch I asked him what he was doing. He said he was working with Kubrick on a ‘son of Strangelove.‘ I had no idea what he was talking about, but he said he would introduce me to Kubrick. So we went to Kubrick’s large apartment on Central Park West. I had never met a film director and had no idea what to expect. When I first saw Kubrick and the apartment, I said to myself: ‘He is one of ours.’ What I meant was that he looked and acted like almost every eccentric physicist I had ever known. The apartment was in chaos. Children and dogs were running all over the place. Papers hid most of the furniture. He said that he and Clarke were doing a science fiction film, an odyssey, a space odyssey. It didn’t have a title.

When I looked at my watch and saw that I had to go, Kubrick asked me why. I explained that I had a date to play chess for money in Washington Square Park, with a Haitian chess hustler named Duval who called himself ‘the master.’ I was absolutely floored when Kubrick said: ‘Duval is a potzer.’ It showed a level of real familiarity with the Washington Square Park chess scene. He and I ought to play, he said, and indeed we did – during the entire filming of 2001: A Space Odyssey.”

 

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“I Think The Country’s Okay, And Hopefully It Will Survive”

March 14, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Politics | Permalink

In an interview conducted by Marlow Stern of the Daily Beast, Robert Duvall runs down Johnny Depp, True Detective, James Gray and one of my all-time favorite films, Network. Here’s an exchange about American history and politics:

“The Daily Beast:

Republicans in Hollywood seem to get a lot of flack and be a bit marginalized. Has it ever been tough, for you, to be a Republican in Hollywood?

Robert Duvall:

Let me say it this way: my wife’s from Argentina, she’s been here for a while, and she’s very smart. She calls herself a ‘tree-hugging Republican,’ but she might even vote Democrat next time because the Republican Party is a mess. I’ll probably vote Independent next time. I think it was Jack Kerouac who said something like, ‘Don’t run down my country. My people are immigrants, so I believe in this country with all its faults. To me, it’s a big country that’s made mistakes.’ Some of the bleeding-heart left-wing, extreme left-wing, are actually different from liberals. That movie The Butler? It’s very inaccurate. JFK had one of the worst Civil Rights voting records. And the Rockefellers were much more liberal with the blacks. All the atrocities in the South were committed by the Democratic Party, but now, everything’s been turned around in a strange way. Some of these very conservative Republicans… I don’t know, man. I believe in a woman’s choice. I believe in certain things. I hear they booed Rick Perry last night on the Jimmy Kimmel Show. But it’s a great country. We’ve done bad things. Slavery was terrible. One-third of all Freedmen in New Orleans fought for the South. I can’t figure that out. Those things aren’t told in the history books. There’ve been lots of contradictions and this and that. But I think the country’s okay, and hopefully it will survive.”

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“Actors Rarely Carry The Franchise”

March 4, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech | Permalink

Video killed the radio star, and the technology of special effects (as well as the franchising of films, economic shifts and globalization) have seriously wounded the movie star. As Robert Downey Jr. heads for billionaire status, the next generation of leading men and women have become a part of a “starless” system. If Charlie Hunnam had stayed as lead of the big-budget Fifty Shades of Grey project, he was set to earn $125,000, which would have been close to nothing after agent and manager fees, taxes, etc. And it’s no better for action heroes. Chris Hemsworth, star of the Thor films which made more than a billion dollars globally, was paid just $500,000 for the sequel.

You don’t need to cry for such people since they’re still doing well relative to most people, but it’s telling that the diminution of the worker during our age of miracles and wonders has spread to even to such rarified air, even to the veritable lottery winners. From “The Last Disposable Action Hero,” by Alex French in the New York Times Magazine:

“Once upon a time, a movie poster needed to have only two words on it: the star’s last name and the title. Stallone: Rambo. Schwarzenegger: Terminator. In the new action-hero economy, though, actors rarely carry the franchise; more often, the franchise carries the actor. Chris Hemsworth was little known before Thor, and no one outside the industry was too familiar with Henry Cavill before Man of Steel. Lorenzo di Bonaventura, who produced Transformers and this winter’s Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, told me that studios were gambling on unproven actors for economic reasons. ‘These movies cost a lot to mount. Adding on the big movie star’s salary is the thing that makes you go, ‘Boy, I don’t know if I can afford it.’ Perhaps no movie typifies this model better than the 2006 mega-hit 300, an adaptation of Frank Miller’s popular comic-book series, which featured inexpensive and little-known actors like Gerard Butler and Michael Fassbender and then catapulted them to stardom. This week, the film’s producers are trying to replicate that success with a sequel, 300: Rise of an Empire, which is anchored by the unheralded Sullivan Stapleton and 299 other equally fit, anonymous men in leather skirts.”

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‘There’s A Pride In What I Do That Other People Share Because I’m Local”

February 24, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Videos | Permalink

On the heels of Sid Caesar dying, another comedy legend, Harold Ramis, has passed away. He died at the relatively young age of 69 from a rare autoimmune disease. The greatest comedy screenwriter of his era, Ramis was an SCTV alumnus who penned Animal House, Groundhog Day (which he also directed), Caddyshack (directed this one, too), Ghostbusters, Stripes, Analyze This and Meatballs, among others. Hollywood comedy from the late ’70s forward poured from his pen, although he always considered himself a Chicago guy and moved back to the Second City in his 60s.

My first thought when I head about Ramis’ passing was that I hope he and Bill Murray, his great collaborator from whom he was sadly estranged, had made amends. But that’s an unfair demand we put on famous people that we don’t put on ourselves. I think of people who were important to me at one point who I’m estranged from, and no one makes a big fuss about that. Changing and growing–and growing away, sometimes–is a natural part of life. Death makes us wish it wasn’t true, but it is.

The opening of Ramis’ obituary in his hometown newspaper, the Chicago Tribune:

“Harold Ramis was one of Hollywood’s most successful comedy filmmakers when he moved his family from Los Angeles back to the Chicago area in 1996. His career was still thriving, with Groundhog Day acquiring almost instant classic status upon its 1993 release and 1984’s Ghostbusters ranking among the highest-grossing comedies of all time, but the writer-director wanted to return to the city where he’d launched his career as a Second City performer.

‘There’s a pride in what I do that other people share because I’m local, which in L.A. is meaningless; no one’s local,’ Ramis said upon the launch of the first movie he directed after his move, the 1999 mobster-in-therapy comedy Analyze This, another hit. ‘It’s a good thing. I feel like I represent the city in a certain way.’

Ramis, a longtime North Shore resident, was surrounded by family when he died at 12:53 a.m. from complications of autoimmune inflammatory vasculitis, a rare disease that involves swelling of the blood vessels, his wife Erica Mann Ramis said.

He was 69. Ramis’ serious health struggles began in May 2010 with an infection that led to complications related to the autoimmune disease, his wife said. Ramis had to relearn to walk but suffered a relapse of the vasculitis in late 2011, said Laurel Ward, vice president of development at Ramis’ Ocean Pictures production company.”

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Ramis with David Letterman in 1983:

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“A Prominent Futurologist Has Claimed That AI Girlfriends (And Presumably Boyfriends)…Could Become A Reality By 2029”

February 20, 2014 in Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Computer dating, with the help of IBM’s ENIAC, stretches back at least to the 1960s (listen here to a 50-year-old radio report about it). But when futurist Ray Kurzweil talks about computer dating, he doesn’t think of the machine as a middleman but as a ladies’ man (or lady or some other variation on the theme). It’s disquieting to a lot of us, but is it just around the bend? The opening of Ben Child’s Guardian article about Kurzweil’s recent review of Spike Jonze’s Her:

“It might just be music to the ears of lovelorn geeks prepared to wait another 15 years to meet the love of their lives: a prominent futurologist has claimed that AI girlfriends (and presumably boyfriends) like the one played by Scarlett Johansson in the Oscar-nominated film Her could become a reality by 2029.

Ray Kurzweil, an inventor and Google’s director of engineering makes the claim in a review of Spike Jonze’s much-praised sci-fi romance. In a post on his website, Kurzweil delivered a generally positive verdict on the film, which stars Joaquin Phoenix as a man called Theodore who falls in love with his operating system, Samantha, before moving on to its technological implications.”

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“Is It Necessary To Make Intelligent Systems Human-Like?”

February 20, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It’s clear by now that our natural tendency is to accept machines that can feign humanness, even when there’s no logical reason to do so. That makes it easier for us to transition to a digital world but often confuses the question of what is genuine AI, what is simulacra and what is somewhere in between. In a Wired piece, Vlad Sejnoha uses Spike Jonze’s Her to take a look at the future of computerized assistants. An excerpt:

“One of the most compelling aspects of Samantha is that she behaves in an utterly human-like manner, with a true sense of what is humorous and sad. This is yet a higher level of reasoning, and huge challenges remain to truly understand — and program — social relationships, emotional ties, and humor, which are all parts of everyday knowledge. It is more conceivable that we will be able to make a system understand why a person feels sad or happy (in the most primitive terms, perhaps because of realization of goal failure or goal success), than actually simulating or replicating visceral feelings in machines.

Is it necessary to make intelligent systems human-like?

Much of human behavior is motivated by emotions and not by black-and-white logical arguments (search through any popular online news blog for evidence!). The machine thus needs to understand to some degree why a human is doing something or wants something done, just as much as we demand an explanation from them about their own behavior. There is also a very practical reason to want this: in order to interact effectively we need a model of the ‘other,’ whether it’s an app or a person. At a high level of sophistication it will be faster and more efficient to allow us to start from such models we have of humans, as opposed to slowly discovering the parameters of a wholly alien and new ‘AI tool.’

There is also that astonishing voice… Samantha had us at that first playful and breathy ‘Hi.’

The amazing emotional range and subtle modulation of Samantha’s voice is beyond what today’s speech synthesis can produce, but this technology is on a trajectory to cross the ‘uncanny valley’ (the awkward zone of ‘close but not quite human’ performance) in the next few years. New speech generation models, driven in part by machine learning as well as by explicit knowledge of the meaning of the text, will be able to produce artificial voices with impressively natural characteristics and absence of artifacts.”

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“It Bears Little Relationship To Respectable Journalism And Undermines The Reputation Of The New York Times”

February 17, 2014 in Film, Videos | Permalink

Dick Cavett, angrily defending Woody Allen from charges of child molestation, in an all-out offensive against Mia Farrow as well as one of his current places of employment, the New York Times, and his co-worker Nicholas Kristof. Articulate as always, he likely skirts litigious language, if barely. Should have mentioned he’s had relationships with Allen and Bob Weide, whose Daily Beast article he references. You can make the argument that his friendship with the former is well-known, but not the latter. Fireworks begin here at the 2:35 mark.

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“We Will Change The World”

February 16, 2014 in Film, Videos | Permalink

This looks great. A trailer for Frank Pavich’s documentary about a mid-1970s sci-fi epic that was never made yet was influential: A pre-Lynchian adaptation of Dune by Alejandro Jodorowsky, master of hallucinogenic midnight movies and maddest hatter of them all. The film was to star David Carradine and Mick Jagger and Orson Welles and Gloria Swanson and Salvador Dali, and it was to change the hearts and minds of the young people–to start a revolution.

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“Murray Acts As A Kind Of Father Figure To The Saturday Night Live Alumni”

February 13, 2014 in Excerpts, Film | Permalink

Bill Murray’s interview with Charlie Rose a couple days ago was a nice complement to his recent Ask Me Anything. I thought the most interesting part was when he explained to the host how he caught “Oscar fever” at the time of Lost in Translation. Murray, of all people, being disappointed in not winning an Oscar was a disappointment in itself, so it’s great he has more perspective now.

The opening of “The Rumpled Anarchy of Bill Murray,” a 1988 New York Times Magazine article by Timothy White, which misunderstood the comic’s cerebral nature for a Zen-like one, and opens with the first-ever reunion of SNL alumni:

“AS HOLLYWOOD parties go, the one in full swing this past spring in a handsome, Georgian Revival home off Sunset Boulevard was an anomaly.

No agents circulated, no studio executives haunted the hallways. The food was lasagna and fried chicken; the beverages, Mexican beer and bottled seltzer – with the seltzer proving the more popular. Instead of dizzying references to ‘gross points,’ ‘back-end deals,’ scripts ‘in turnaround’ and multimillion-dollar movie deals, the talk concerned the fortunes of Chicago sports teams and New York rock bands, and the only ‘creative products’ under scrutiny were baby pictures.

If any aspect of ‘the industry’ was being bantered about, it was the return to the employment ranks of the party’s co-host, Bill Murray, who had, earlier that day, finished filming for Scrooged – an outlandish adaptation of the Dickens Christmas classic that will be released on Wednesday. Coincidentally, three other film comedies featuring other former Saturday Night Live regulars were then nearing completion: Coming to America, starring Eddie Murphy; Caddyshack II, starring Chevy Chase, and My Stepmother Is an Alien, starring Dan Aykroyd. To celebrate this serendipitous event, Murray and Peter Aykroyd, an actor-composer who is Dan’s younger brother, had decided on this first-time-ever gathering of Saturday Night Live alumni.

A picture of genial abandon in rumpled khakis, football jersey and sneakers, Murray was urging Dan Aykroyd, Laraine Newman and Chevy Chase to drop their ‘reserves of cool’ on the dance floor and ‘get down!’ Murray’s warmth is disarming. Chase, for instance, once considered Murray a rival, and the feeling was mutual. Murray was hired at Saturday Night Live in January 1977, just five weeks after Chase left for a movie career. The pressure Murray felt in trying to supplant his predecessor flared into backstage fisticuffs when Chase returned as a guest host for the third season of Saturday Night Live. Now, the two are thoroughly at ease with each other. Even Eddie Murphy, a Saturday Night Live latecomer whose box-office magnetism eclipses that of most of his associates, is meek in Murray’s presence.

Bill Murray is considered by his colleagues to be a man who has made peace with any private demons he might have had, someone who has brought his personal life and his career into enviable concord. Slightly disheveled and projecting what Richard Donner, the director of Scrooged, calls ‘a woolly Zen wisdom,’ Murray acts as a kind of father figure to the Saturday Night Live alumni.”

 

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“A Software Program (An AI) Can — Will — Be Believably Human And Lovable”

February 12, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech | Permalink

The opening of Ray Kurzweil’s compelling review of the Oscar-nominated Her, a near-future film he sees as nearer than most do:

“Her, written, directed and produced by Spike Jonze, presents a nuanced love story between a man and his operating system.

Although there are caveats I could (and will) mention about the details of the OS and how the lovers interact, the movie compellingly presents the core idea that a software program (an AI) can — will — be believably human and lovable.

This is a breakthrough concept in cinematic futurism in the way that The Matrix presented a realistic vision that virtual reality will ultimately be as real as, well, real reality.

Jonze started his feature-motion-picture career directing Being John Malkovich, which also presents a realistic vision of a future technology — one that is now close at hand: being able to experience reality through the eyes and ears of someone else.

With emerging eye-mounted displays that project images onto the wearer’s retinas and also look out at the world, we will indeed soon be able to do exactly that. When we send nanobots into the brain — a circa-2030s scenario by my timeline — we will be able to do this with all of the senses, and even intercept other people’s emotional responses.”

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“We Both Liked The Movie And The Critics Fucking Killed It”

February 11, 2014 in Film, Sports | Permalink

Bill Simmons has a really good podcast at Grantland with legendary screenwriter William Goldman. They, of course, discuss the sadness that is the loss of Philip Seymour Hoffman but also cover other less-depressing aspects of Hollywood, including handicapping the upcoming Oscars. Goldman doesn’t tell the story about how Dustin Hoffman fucked up the climax of Marathon Man, but he does recall how Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was lambasted by critics and was expected to be a bomb. That anecdote demonstrates how unsophisticated movie tracking was at that point. There had been research about the marketability of stars for decades already, but tracking didn’t materialize until studios began trying to make tentpole movies. After Jaws, essentially. Advanced ticket sales online have made it much easier as well. Listen here.

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“All Men Have Weaknesses”

February 10, 2014 in Film, Sports, Videos | Permalink

Mohammed Ali

Muhammad Ali and Clint Eastwood hitting the speed bag for David Frost in 1970. Ali, who was in the midst of his Vietnam Era walkabout, was correct in saying that athletes from earlier periods weren’t as good as the ones of his generation, which wasn’t likely the conventional wisdom at the time.

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“Kesey Runs Laughing After The Tractor”

February 7, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Film | Permalink

In 1976, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest opened to tremendous critical acclaim, but author Ken Kesey, who adapted his own novel for the film version, felt ripped off financially and planned on suing the film’s producers Michael Douglas and Saul Zaentz. Kesey was simultaneously having a feud with Whole Earth Catalog legend Stewart Brand. From John Riley’s People profile from that year about the litigious writer who was at the time running his own cattle farm in Oregon:

In 1959, at a VA hospital in California, Kesey volunteered as a subject for early unpublicized experiments on the effects of LSD. That experience, plus a subsequent job there as night attendant in a psychiatric ward, enabled him to write convincingly about the fictional Randle McMurphy and the other cuckoos nesting in the pages of his first novel.

A more celebrated brush with bedlam was Kesey’s life with the Merry Pranksters—the name given a group of young drug-takers he teamed up with in the mid-’60s. In the Pranksters’ short-circuited philosophy of life, a person was “either on the bus or off the bus”—a doper or a drag. No one was more emphatically “on the bus” than Kesey himself, who owned the actual 1939 International Harvester vehicle in which the Pranksters tripped across the U.S.A. (Tom Wolfe described the bizarre journey of these psychedelic sharpshooters in his 1968 book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.)

But things change. These days Kesey, now 40, has turned from raising Cain to raising cattle and is a member of the PTA in Pleasant Hill, a small farming community five miles from Eugene.

A recent visitor finds Kesey, in greasy coveralls, heaving bales of hay to his 30 head of beef. One, a crazy Angus steer named Sonofabitch, has broken through a casually constructed fence to reach the lush grass near some blueberry bushes. Soon the animal returns, bawling, and farmer Kesey watches the bucolic scene with apparent contentment. He signals his 9-year-old daughter, Sunshine, to drive the Ford tractor back toward the converted red barn that is their home. He chases down a calf named Frivol. Then, cradling the long-legged creature in his powerful arms, Kesey runs laughing after the tractor.•

 

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“A Lot Of Fuzzy Animals Were Crushed To Death By A Big Rock”

February 3, 2014 in Film, Videos | Permalink

Michael “Mr. Mike” O’Donoghue, the darkest and cruelest writer of the original Saturday Night Live, a Marquis de Sade for the National Lampoon set, is afforded a bizarre TV-magazine profile the morning after a Halloween party. How apt.

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