Film

You are currently browsing the archive for the Film category.

“Have I Done The Great Thing I Was Supposed To Do?”

February 3, 2014 in Excerpts, Film | Permalink

Tears poured from my eyes the second I heard about Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death yesterday. You? 

Three paragraphs about the things that drives us, sometimes down, when we’ve satisfied basic needs, when we realize that we crave something more even if we can’t exactly name it, from Alex Pappademas’ excellent Grantland postmortem of the great actor and his puzzling, painful collapse from within:

“Hoffman starred in two films that premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. In John Slattery’s grim, ’70s-set drama God’s Pocket, he didn’t look well. It’s strange to say that about an actor who was never afraid to let the camera look upon his pasty, freckled body as a catastrophe, but this was different. He had some weight on him, and appeared to be feeling every ounce of it. His voice was a low, heartsick rumble, the sound of a hangover made flesh. Hoffman conveyed this kind of suffering onscreen better than most working actors — it wasn’t the only thing he could do, but you could always count on him to do it. This didn’t seem like craft, though. He seemed like he was playing through pain.

I wrote a profile of Hoffman once, years ago, when he was promoting 2005’s Capote. We ate lunch in the West Village and smoked cigarettes on the street. I’ve lost the transcript and the story’s not online, which is probably for the best. But at one point I remember asking him some real JV-ball actor-interview question about what, if anything, he felt he had in common with Truman Capote. Hoffman thought about it for a second, and then talked about how Capote was 35 when he started reporting the story that became In Cold Blood, and how there comes a time in every man’s life, around your mid-thirties, when you start to ask yourself, Have I done the great thing I was supposed to do? Am I ever going to do it?

I was about 28 when I wrote that story. I’m 36 now, and I think about that conversation literally every day. I sit at my desk and I look at the dry-erase board above my desk, at the titles of as-yet-unwritten things in green ink, and I ask myself that question. And I think about Hoffman still struggling with it, despite everything he’d achieved by the time I met him. Capote was his first high-profile lead after a decade or so of lauded work in supporting roles, and people were predicting he’d win the Oscar for it, which he did. And he still felt that way, at least enough that it became his way into Truman Capote. Something about that is comforting to me. Or it was, anyway.”

Tags: ,

“The Absurd Hilarity Of The Situation Had Never Quite Stopped Haunting The Director”

February 2, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Film, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Excerpts from two articles about Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, which is one of the greatest films ever made, yet only my fourth or fifth favorite Stanley Kubrick movie, which shows you how highly I rank his work. It’s as perfect now as it was when released 50 years ago, as timeless as Patton or Duck Soup. In fact, it’s Patton *as* Duck Soup. It’s tremendously funny yet no laughing matter.

_________________________

From “Doctor’s Orders,” Bilge Elbiri’s 2009 Moving Image Source article explaining how a very serious novel became a Kubrick comedy:

After their initial drafts, Kubrick and his producing partner James B. Harris, with whom he had made The Killing, Paths of Glory, and Lolita, workshopped the script (then called The Delicate Balance of Terror) in New York. “They’d stay up late into the night cracking up over it, overcome by their impulse towards gallows humor,” says Mick Broderick, the author of Nuclear Movies and an extensive forthcoming study of Strangelove. Harris would soon leave to forge his own directorial career (his admirably tense 1965 directorial debut, The Bedford Incident, concerns a confrontation between an American destroyer and a Soviet submarine). But when Kubrick later called his former partner to tell him that he had decided to turn Delicate Balance into an actual comedy, Harris was skeptical, to say the least. “He thought, ‘The kid’s gonna destroy his career!’” says Broderick.

The absurd hilarity of the situation had never quite stopped haunting the director, as he and George continued to work on the film. It wasn’t so much the premise of the Red Alert story as everything Kubrick was learning about the thinking behind thermonuclear strategy. The director, even then notorious for thorough research, had become friendly with a number of scientists and thinkers on the subject, some with George’s help, including the notorious RAND strategist Herman Kahn, who would talk with a straight face about “megadeaths,” a word he had coined in the 1950s to describe one million deaths. As Kubrick told Joseph Heller:

Incongruity is certainly one of the sources of laughter—the incongruity of sitting in a room talking to somebody who has a big chart on the wall that says “tragic but distinguishable postwar environments’ and that says ‘one to ten million killed.” …There is something so absurd and unreal about what you’re talking about that it’s almost impossible to take it seriously.•

_________________________

From “Almost Everything in Dr. Strangelove Was True,” a New Yorker blog post about the scary reality that informed the nervous laughter, by Eric Schlosser, author of Command and Control:

This month marks the fiftieth anniversary of Stanley Kubrick’s black comedy about nuclear weapons, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Released on January 29, 1964, the film caused a good deal of controversy. Its plot suggested that a mentally deranged American general could order a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, without consulting the President. One reviewer described the film as “dangerous … an evil thing about an evil thing.” Another compared it to Soviet propaganda. Although Strangelove was clearly a farce, with the comedian Peter Sellers playing three roles, it was criticized for being implausible. An expert at the Institute for Strategic Studies called the events in the film “impossible on a dozen counts.” A former Deputy Secretary of Defense dismissed the idea that someone could authorize the use of a nuclear weapon without the President’s approval: “Nothing, in fact, could be further from the truth.” (See a compendium of clips from the film.) When Fail-Safe—a Hollywood thriller with a similar plot, directed by Sidney Lumet—opened, later that year, it was criticized in much the same way. “The incidents in Fail-Safe are deliberate lies!” General Curtis LeMay, the Air Force chief of staff, said. “Nothing like that could happen.” The first casualty of every war is the truth—and the Cold War was no exception to that dictum. Half a century after Kubrick’s mad general, Jack D. Ripper, launched a nuclear strike on the Soviets to defend the purity of “our precious bodily fluids” from Communist subversion, we now know that American officers did indeed have the ability to start a Third World War on their own. And despite the introduction of rigorous safeguards in the years since then, the risk of an accidental or unauthorized nuclear detonation hasn’t been completely eliminated.•

Tags: , , ,

“Out Here Among The Stars Lies The Destiny Of Mankind”

January 29, 2014 in Film, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Well, this is fun. Introduced by Vernon Myers, the publisher of Look, the 1966 short film, “A Look Behind the Future,” focuses on the magazine’s former photographer Stanley Kubrick, who was in the process of making 2001: A Space Odyssey at London’s MGM studios. It’s a nice companion piece to Jeremy Bernstein’s two great New Yorker articles about the movie during its long gestation (here and here).

Mentioned or seen in this video: Mobile phones, laptop computers, Wernher Von Braun, memory helmets, a 38-ton centrifuge, Arthur C. Clarke at the Long Island warehouse where the NASA L.E.M. (Lunar Excursion Module) was being constructed, Keir Dullea meeting the press, etc. 

Tags: , , ,

“I Chose To Go With The Eavesdropper”

January 29, 2014 in Film, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Here’s a wonderful featurette about Francis Ford Coppola making The Conversation, the 1974 psychological thriller, which moved the disquiet of Antonioni’s Blow-Up into the Watergate era, asked questions about a world where everyone is a spy and spied upon. The surprise 40 years later: Few seem upset about the new order of the techno-society. We haven’t been trapped after all; we’ve logged on and signed up for it. My short essay about the film follows the video.

A product of the Watergate decade, an era when spying and snooping at least gave us pause, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation was made before ubiquitous public security cameras were watching us, phones were tracking us and seemingly everyone was living in public. A lack of privacy has never been as well-regarded as it is today nor have the perils of such actions, which are investigated in this film, been so invisible.

Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) is a jazz loving San Franciscan who earns his living as a surveillance expert, stealthily recording private conversations with an elaborate array of mikes of his own making. Caul is top dog in the trade, and he’s paid handsomely to find answers for his bosses and not ask them any questions. A devout Catholic, the wire tapper has moral issues with his work, especially since information he culled in a past case led to murder. But it’s hard for Caul to stop doing what he’s doing because he’s so damn good at it, something of an artist.

While he may be an artist, Caul is definitely a hypocrite. He keeps everything about himself strictly private, even from his girlfriend (Teri Garr) and point man (John Cazale). He rationalizes he’s doing it for safety reasons, but it’s also in his nature. This delicate balance is thrown off-kilter when Caul believes his latest assignment, in which a wealthy man is paying for info about his young wife, may also lead to murder. Caul can’t head down that road again and a crisis of conscience makes him go rogue. Soon he himself is the target of surveillance, a probing that he can’t withstand.

In the era that saw the downfall of an American President who listened to the tapes of others and erased his own, The Conversation was amazingly relevant, but in some ways it may be even more meaningful in this exhibitionist age, in which we gleefully hand over our privacy to satisfy our egos. As Caul and Nixon learned, and as we may yet, those who press PLAY don’t always get to choose when to press STOP.•

Tags: ,

“In America, A Thriller, Or A Mystery Story As We Call Them, Is Slightly Below The Salt”

January 25, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Film | Permalink

Woe the American genre writers of days of yore, forced to be contented with handsome paychecks that were uncoupled from the respect afforded their “serious” counterparts, often their lessers. In our time, perhaps things have swung too far in the other direction, with comic-book heroes, zombies and the such more highly valued than ever. It sure feels like a bubble. Maybe those in the future will strike the right balance.

The opening of a 1958 BBC conversation between two masters of genre, Ian Fleming, birther of Bond, and Raymond Chandler, dark poet of Los Angeles:

“Ian Fleming:

Well, the first thing, really, is to define what we’re supposed to be talking about. I think the title of what we’re supposed to be talking about is English and American thrillers. What is a thriller? To my mind of course, you don’t write thrillers and I do.

Raymond Chandler:

I do too.

Ian Fleming:

I don’t call yours thrillers. Yours are novels.

Raymond Chandler:

A lot of people call them thrillers.

Ian Fleming:

I know. I think it’s wrong.

Raymond Chandler:

Oh, well I . . .

Ian Fleming:

I mean, you write novels of suspense like Simenon does and like Eric Ambler does perhaps, but in which violence is the background, just as love might be in the background of the ordinary or the straight kind of novel . . .

Raymond Chandler:

Well, in America, a thriller, or a mystery story as we call them, is slightly below the salt.

Ian Fleming:

Yes, thriller writing is very below the salt really . . .

Raymond Chandler:

You can write a long, very lousy historical novel full of sex and it can be a bestseller and be treated respectfully. But a very good thriller writer, who writes far, far better, just gets a little paragraph of course.

Ian Fleming:

Yes, I know. That’s very true.

Raymond Chandler:

Mostly. There’s no attempt to judge him as a writer.”•

______________

The audio version:

Tags: ,

“Some Of Herzog’s Team Were Wounded With Arrows”

January 23, 2014 in Film, Videos | Permalink

A great 1982 South Bank Show portrait of Werner Herzog broadcast as Fitzcarraldo, a film I think Eisenstein would have been proud to call his own, was nearing its screening at Cannes. When I interviewed the director a decade or so ago, he insisted to me that he was “clinically sane” but appreciated the journalists (“stooges,” he called them) who portrayed him as mad because he felt protected by the scary reputation. 

Tags:

“Cornfield Was Planted Only For The Purpose Of This Movie”

January 23, 2014 in Film, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

A 1968 filming-location video from Lake Powell, Arizona, for Planet of the Apes.

“He Is Full Of Creative Angst”

January 22, 2014 in Film, Videos | Permalink

John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, in 1981, months before the former’s death, interviewed by Gene Shalit on the Today Show. They were there to promote Neighbors, but part of the conversation focuses on Belushi’s discomfort with fame. He just wanted to be anonymous in record stores and bars when he wasn’t acting, which obviously wasn’t possible.

Tags: , ,

“Paramount Pictures Has Become The First Major Studio To Stop Releasing Movies On Film In The United States”

January 22, 2014 in Film, Science/Tech | Permalink

As “film” ceases to be an actual thing and becomes just an idea, what will be different? We’ve always worried about film degrading, but should we worry now that it won’t? Digital has its own flaws, but they’re very different flaws.

While experiencing the imperfections of music on vinyl or movies on film holds an attraction for those of us who enjoy a lo-fi aesthetic, I doubt that these flaws have any inherent value. They just trigger memories and it’s those memories that contain the real value. People who never know such decaying media likely won’t miss anything. Their memories will have their own triggers. From Richard Verrier in the Los Angeles Times:

“In a historic step for Hollywood, Paramount Pictures has become the first major studio to stop releasing movies on film in the United States.

Paramount recently notified theater owners that the Will Ferrell comedy Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues, which opened in December, would be the last movie that would it would release on 35-millimeter film.

The studio’s Oscar-nominated film The Wolf of Wall Street from director Martin Scorsese is the first major studio film that was released all digitally, according to theater industry executives who were briefed on the plans but not authorized to speak about them.

The decision is significant because it is likely to encourage other studios to follow suit, accelerating the complete phase-out of film, possibly by the end of the year. That would mark the end of an era: film has been the medium for the motion picture industry for more than a century.”

“I Realize That Computers Are In Their Infancy, But They’re Pretty Pathetic”

January 20, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

In 1987, when Omni asked Bill Gates and Timothy Leary to predict the future of tech and Robert Heilbroner to speculate on the next phase of economics, David Byrne was asked to prognosticate about the arts two decades hence. It depends on how you parse certain words, but Byrne got a lot right–more channels, narrowcasting, etc. One thing I think he erred on is just how democratized it all would become. “I don’t think we’ll see the participatory art that so many people predict, Some people will use new equipment to make art, but they will be the same people who would have been making art anyway.” Kim and Snooki and cats at piano would not have been making art anyway. Certainly you can argue that reality television, home-made Youtube videos and fan fiction aren’t art in the traditional sense, but I would disagree. Reality TV and the such holds no interest for me on the granular level, but the decentralization of media, the unloosing of the cord, is as fascinating to me as anything right now. It’s art writ large, a paradigm shift we have never known before. It’s democracy. The excerpt:

“David Byrne, Lead Singer, Talking Heads:

The line between so-called serious and popular art will blur even more than it already has because people’s altitudes are changing. When organized religion began to lose touch with new ideas and discoveries, it started failing to accomplish its purpose in people’s lives. More and more people will turn to the arts tor the kind of support and inspiration religion used to of- fer them. The large pop-art audience remains receptive to the serious content they’re not getting from religion. Eventually some new kind of formula — an equivalent of religion — will emerge and encompass art, physics, psychiatry, and genetic engineering without denying evolution or any of the possible cosmologies.

I think that people have exaggerated greatly the effects new technology has on the arts and on the number of people who will make art in the future. I realize that computers are in their infancy, but they’re pretty pathetic, and I’m not the only one who’s said that. Computers won’t take into account nuances or vagueness or presumptions or anything like intuition.

I don’t think computers will have any important effect on the arts in 2007. When it comes to the arts they’re just big or small adding machines. And if they can’t ‘think,’ that’s all they’ll ever be. They may help creative people with their bookkeeping, but they won’t help in the creative process.

The video revolution, however, will have some real impact on the arts in the next 20 years. It already has. Because people’s attention spans are getting shorter, more fiction and drama will be done on television, a perfect medium for them. But I don’t think anything will be wiped out; books will always be there; everything will find its place.

Outlets for art, in the marketplace and on television, will multiply and spread. Even the three big TV networks will feature looser, more specialized programming to appeal to special-interest groups. The networks will be freed from the need to try to please everybody, which they do now and inevitably end up with a show so stupid nobody likes it. Obviously this multiplication of outlets will benefit the arts.

I don’t think we’ll see the participatory art that so many people predict. Some people will use new equipment to make art, but they will be the same people who would have been making art anyway. Still, I definitely think that the general public will be interested in art that was once considered avant-garde.

I can’t stand the cult of personality in pop music. I don’t know if that will disappear in the next 20 years, but I hope we see a healthier balance between that phenomenon and the knowledge that being part of a community has its rewards as well.

I don’t think that global video and satellites will produce any global concept of community in the next 20 years, but people will have a greater awareness of their immediate communities. We will begin to notice the great artistic work going on out- side of the major cities — outside of New York, L.A., Paris, and London.”•

____________________________________

“Music and performance does not make any sense”:

Tags:

“Yes, I Am A Brain Surgeon”

January 19, 2014 in Film, Videos | Permalink

Well, this is insane. Gene Wilder and Cloris Leachman, on the set of Young Frankenstein in 1974, being interviewed really badly for Spanish TV.

Tags: ,

“Albert Einstein Was A Pretty Cool Guy”

January 19, 2014 in Excerpts, Film | Permalink

In order to promote The Monuments Men, which has received a coveted February release date, Bill Murray, a complicated man, just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

__________________________

Question:

If you could go back in time and have a conversation with one person, who would it be and why?

Bill Murray:

That’s a grand question, golly.

I kind of like scientists, in a funny way. Albert Einstein was a pretty cool guy. The thing about Einstein was that he was a theoretical physicist, so they were all theories. He was just a smart guy. I’m kind of interested in genetics though. I think I would have liked to have met Gregor Mendel.

Because he was a monk who just sort of figured this stuff out on his own. That’s a higher mind, that’s a mind that’s connected. They have a vision, and they just sort of see it because they are so connected intellectually and mechanically and spiritually, they can access a higher mind. Mendel was a guy so long ago that I don’t necessarily know very much about him, but I know that Einstein did his work in the mountains in Switzerland. I think the altitude had an effect on the way they spoke and thought.

But I would like to know about Mendel, because i remember going to the Philippines and thinking ‘this is like Mendel’s garden’ because it had been invaded by so many different countries over the years, and you could see the children shared the genetic traits of all their invaders over the years, and it made for this beautiful varietal garden.”

__________________________

Question:

Do you still talk to your deaf/mute assistant? If so, does he pretend like he can understand what you’re saying?

Bill Murray:

Well, we didn’t part well. I don’t communicate with her, she was a she. I was sort of ambitious thinking that I could hire someone that had the intelligence to do a job but didn’t have necessarily speech or couldn’t quite hear or spoke in sign language. She was a bright person and witty but she had never been away from her home before and even though I tried to accommodate more than I understood when I first hired her, she was very young in her emotional self and the emotional component of being away from her home was lacking. I tried my best, but I was working all day. She was lovely and very smart, but there’s a lot of frustration when you meet people who can’t speak well. Being completely disabled in that area causes a great amount of frustration, and this was going back 30 years or so before ether were the educational components that there are today. It didn’t go particularly well for me, but for a few weeks she really was a light and had a real spirit to her. She was like one of your own kids that never had a job, and then they get a job and realize that certain things are expected, and you can’t react to everything you don’t like or care about. So the first time you have a job and someone says ‘you have to do this’ – it was more complicated than she imagined. We were both optimistic, but it was harder than either of us expected to make it work.

__________________________

Bill Murray:

Someone asked “what movie was the most fun to act in” and deleted their comment, so here goes:

Well, I did a film with Jim Jarmusch called Broken Flowers, but I really enjoyed that movie. I enjoyed the script that he wrote. He asked me if I could do a movie, and I said ‘I gotta stay home, but if you make a movie that i could shoot within one hour of my house, I’ll do it.’

So he found those locations. And I did the movie.

And when it was done, I thought “this movie is so good, I thought I should stop.” I didn’t think I could do any better than Broken Flowers, it’s a film that is completely realized, and beautiful, and I thought I had done all I could do to it as an actor. And then 6-7 months later someone asked me to work again, so I worked again, but for a few months I thought I couldn’t do any better than that.

__________________________

Question:

What do you think of the current SNL cast?

Bill Murray:

They’re good. I don’t know them as well as I knew the previous one. But i really feel like the previous cast, that was the best group since the original group. They were my favorite group. Some really talented people that were all comedians of some kind or another. You think about Dana Carvey, Will, Hartman, all these wonderful funny guys. But the last group with Kristen Wiig and those characters, they were a bunch of actors and their stuff was just different. It’s all about the writing, the writing is such a challenge and you are trying to write backwards to fit 90 minutes between dress rehearsal and the airing. And sometimes the writers don’t get the whole thing figured out, it’s not like a play where you can rehearse it several times. So good actors – and those were really good actors, and there are some great actors in this current group as well I might add – they seem to be able to solve writing problems, improvisational actors, can solve them on their feet. They can solve it during the performance, and make a scene work. It’s not like we were improvising when we made the shows, but you could feel ways to make things better. And when you get into the third dimension, as opposed to the printed page, you can see ways to solve things and write things live that other sorts of professionals don’t necessarily have. And that’s why I like that previous group. So this group, there are definitely some actors in this group, I see them working in the same way and making scenes go. They really roll very nicely, they have great momentum, and it seems like they are calm in the moment.

__________________________

Question:

How do you feel about recreational marijuana?

Bill Murray:

Well that’s a large question, isn’t it? Because you’re talking about recreation, which everyone is in favor of. You are also talking about something that has been illegal for so many years, and marijuana is responsible for such a large part of the prison population, for the crime of self-medication. And it takes millions and billions of dollars by incarcerating people for this crime against oneself as best can be determined. People are realizing that the war on drugs is a failure, that the amount of money spent, you could have bought all the drugs with that much money rather than create this army of people and incarcerated people. I think the terror of marijuana was probably overstated. I don’t think people are really concerned about it the way they once were. Now that we have crack and crystal and whatnot, people don’t even think about marijuana anymore, it’s like someone watching too many videogames in comparison. The fact that states are passing laws allowing it means that its threat has been over-exaggerated. Psychologists recommend smoking marijuana rather than drinking if you are in a stressful situation. These are ancient remedies, alcohol and smoking, and they only started passing laws against them 100 years ago.

__________________________

Question:

What was the oddest experience you had in Japan?

Bill Murray:

The oddest… well, I was eating at a sushi bar. I would go to sushi bars with a book I had called “Making out in Japanese.” it was a small paperback book, with questions like “can we get into the back seal?” “do your parents know about me?” “do you have a curfew?”

And I would say to the sushi chef ‘Do you have a curfew? Do your parents know about us? And can we get into the back seat?’

And I would always have a lot of fun with that, but that one particular day, he said “would you like some fresh eel?” and I said “yes I would.” so he came back with a fresh eel, a live eel, and then he walked back behind a screen and came back in 10 seconds with a no-longer-alive eel. It was the freshest thing I had ever eaten in my life. It was such a funny moment to see something that was alive that no longer was alive, that was my food, in 30 seconds.•

Tags: , ,

“The Gold Deposits At The Site He And Jibila Were Discussing May Be Worth Billions Of Dollars”

January 17, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

For the past six years or so, Jeffrey Wright, one of the best actors on the planet, has been trying to extract precious minerals from the earth in Sierra Leone, hoping to aid the impoverished region. It’s an uncommon, perhaps quixotic, quest. It’s real life and it’s a movie. The opening of “Jeffrey Wright’s Gold Mine,” an article in the New York Times Magazine by Daniel Bergner:

“‘This is a relationship that could bring us all the things we desire,’ Jeffrey Wright said. He was sitting with Samuel Jibila under an awning rigged from rusty metal sheets in front of Jibila’s decrepit house in Sierra Leone. Jibila is the traditional ruler — the paramount chief — of Penguia, a little domain of jungly hills and dusty villages 250 miles from the capital. Wright is an actor who lives in Brooklyn. He has won a Tony, an Emmy and a Golden Globe and most recently appeared as Beetee in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. And for the last decade, he has been traveling to this isolated area near the Guinea border to run his small gold-exploration company, Taia Lion Resources. He wanted to maintain Jibila’s faith in his company, in his plans, but Jibila, who was surrounded by lesser chiefs in glossy robes, wasn’t feeling faithful.

Since 2003, Wright has brought in geologists to sample Penguia’s soil and streams. He leases the exploration rights here from the national government. The gold deposits at the site he and Jibila were discussing may be worth billions of dollars. He says that mining will be a boon to everyone; that the operation will put many hundreds of people to work, not counting the small shops and other businesses that will bloom; that company employees will have a real chance to rise; that paved roads will replace cratered tracks. Transformation will come to a territory so undeveloped that when the rare vehicle needs to cross a river not far from Jibila’s home, the driver pulls onto a raft and ferrymen tug the vessel across with a rope.

But despite this vision and these promises, no metamorphosis has come to Penguia.”

 

Tags: , ,

“It’s The First Feature Film To Be Shot On Videotape”

January 12, 2014 in Film, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Frank Zappa as a mystery guest in 1971 on What’s My Line?, in conjunction with the release of his film 200 Motels, which was technologically innovative though I still find it unwatchable.

I’ll be coy and say that one person from this video smoked a lot of dope and attended orgies in the Dominican Republic, and it wasn’t Zappa.

Trailer for 200 Motels:

Tags:

“You’ve Changed. Analysis Is Working Or What?”

January 8, 2014 in Film, Videos | Permalink

Before all the eeeew! in his personal life, Woody Allen used to do quite a bit of press for his films. In 1977, he spoke with a Miami reporter about Annie Hall. Similar to Allen’s Merv Griffin appearances, the interview ends with an awkward kiss.

Tags: ,

“Personalization Is Not As Exciting As Many Once Believed”

January 8, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech | Permalink

Personalization, not a great thing for a democracy, was always for me one of the least-interesting aspects of Web 1.0. I don’t want to learn what I already know but what’s unfamiliar. 

Netflix abandoned its drive to improve personalization for a couple of reasons: 1) Streaming made it less of a priority since a customer could easily switch from unpleasing programming, and 2) Perhaps some others agree with me about desiring novelty instead of familiarity. From Ben Kunz at ThoughtGadgets:

“The deeper issue is that personalization is not as exciting as many once believed. In the 1990s, Don Peppers built a consulting business on the concept of “1to1 marketing,” where new computer systems would learn individual preferences and businesses would respond with customized offers. Don’s concept was that personalization would create an unbreakable competitive advantage — because once a consumer trained a company to anticipate her needs, she would be reluctant to go through the same process with a competitor. Don was observant enough to note that such customization wouldn’t be a fit for every business model — but companies that had customers with a wide range of needs (such as Netflix movie watchers) or a wide range in value (say, financial advisors courting investors) would benefit by deploying 1to1 personalization.

Despite the noble dream of giving customers more utility and companies more brand loyalty, personalization never took off. Amazon was really the best case study … but it struggles still to offer truly relevant personal recommendations on its website (the core challenges being it cannot easily recognize multiple users on the same Amazon account, or differentiate between your modality as you shop for your spouse one day and yourself the next). Twitter has a personalization engine behind its “Discovery” tab to push news or links to you based on your observed Twitter profile. That site section has so little utility, most Twitter users don’t use it. And Facebook, which arguably has the greatest trove of data on human personal interests, is really at the mercy of the advertisers who wish to target you; this is why you, guys, get ads for men’s underwear whether you really want them or not.

Why is personalization so difficult? Why is it so hard to anticipate what people want, and use that for business advantage? The challenge is personalization is at odds with a core driver of consumer purchase behavior — novelty. Consumers are constantly hungry for something new, something improved, something that will stimulate their endorphins in a manner unseen before.”

Tags:

“And Say Goodnight To A Bad Film”

January 7, 2014 in Film, Videos | Permalink

In 1983, a local Miami newscaster pans Scarface and interviews the first local moviegoers to see Al Pacino’s now-iconic and “understated” performance.

Tags:

“It Could Be Said That Historical Fiction, Like Science Fiction, Is Really Always About The Present”

December 31, 2013 in Excerpts, Film | Permalink

I’ve never understood why Luc Sante isn’t a staff writer at the New Yorker. What could make more sense? It seems an oversight. Here’s a poignant segment from his New York Review of Books piece about the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis:

“Then again, it could be said that historical fiction, like science fiction, is really always about the present. Llewyn Davis is a creature of the here and now, not of 1961. He has none of the communitarian goodwill, the erudite passion, or the optimistic idealism that marked the period. He is a confused, irascible striver who isn’t sure what he is striving for, apparently seeking a career when folk music was about the last place you’d look for one. It is suggested that he has been flopping on friends’ floors for months, when, at the time, people generally only did that when they first hit town, since it wasn’t hard to scratch up the twenty or thirty bucks a month it took to rent a tenement flat fifty years ago.

But if you excise the period details, he makes sense. Whereas in a better time he would spend five or ten years woodshedding and developing a soul, he has no choice but to enter some kind of race right away or die on the vine. He is consistently crass because he feels threatened by people and ideas he can’t dominate—and he can’t dominate very much because he feels threatened. (How else to explain his heckling an Appalachian singer, complete with autoharp and authentically awkward?) Somehow he has made a connection to something that is genuine and profound—the haunting music—but circumstances force him to treat it as a card to play rather than as a path to explore. The implacable dictates of a society in which the value of everything is determined solely by its sale price will sooner or later shuttle him into some low-level desk job. He’ll take his guitar out on weekends for a while, but then the regret will become too strong and he’ll bury it in the back of his closet. And when he sees this movie, he’ll feel a pang—and then he’ll laugh about the vanity of youth.”

Tags: , ,

“I Think There Is Little Doubt That We’re Probably On The Threshold Of A Whole New Revolution”

December 30, 2013 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I wish I had more of a feel for pop culture than I do, but most of it leaves me cold, from comic-book film adaptations to reality TV to pop music. I just don’t care. I don’t think I’m better than it–just separate from it. 

For instance: I’ve never had any interest in Star Trek, the TV series or films. I actually feel physical pain if I have to sit through it. But creator Gene Roddenberry was obviously a special guy and not only for his progressive outlook on race and gender. In a 1976 Penthouse interview conducted by Linda Merinoff, Roddenberry laid out the next 40 years of our society, from the Internet to email to swarms and crowdsourcing to the decline of the traditional postal service to online learning to the telecommunications revolution. Three excerpts follow.

_________________________

Penthouse:

What is happening to television as a piece of mechanical equipment?

Gene Roddenberry:

I think there is little doubt that we’re probably on the threshold of a whole new revolution in telecommunications. We are now experimenting with mating television sets with print-out devices, think of TV mated with a Xerox-type machine in which probably our newspapers will ultimately be delivered. It’s a much more efficient system. The minute you put the newspaper to bed electronically, you can then push a button and any house that subscribes to the service can have the thing rolled right out of the TV set. We’re also experimenting, in some cities already, with mating television with simple computers and the home will be run by a home-computing feature. You’ll do your billing on it, your banking, probably a great part of your shopping. I think it is inescapable that we mate TV with reproducing devices, that it will become our postal system of the future, almost certainly our telephone or videophone. So I see television going in either of two directions. One is that it can become that opiate we fear. Or, used properly, it can be a way for all people, everywhere, to have access to all the recorded knowledge of all humanity.

_________________________

Penthouse:

Where do you think mankind is heading?

Gene Roddenberry:

There’s a theory I have that i’ve been making notes on for a couple of years now and intend to write a book on it sometime in the future. You often hear the question, “I wonder what the next dominant species will be?” I think that completely unnoticed by practically all people is the fact that the next dominant species on earth has already arrived and has been with us for some time. And this is a species that I call socio-organism. It first began to make its appearance when men started to gather together in tribal groups, and then city-states, and more lately in nations, giant corporations, and so on. The socio-organism is a living organism that is made up of individual cells–which are human beings. In other words the United States of America is a socio-organism. It is made up of 200 million cells, many of them become increasingly specialized just as the cells in our body do. Furnish food, take away waste products, or the nerves–the sight, the thinking, the planning. Your local PTA is also a small socio-organism. General Motors and ITT are socio-organisms. The interesting thing about this new creature is that unlike all the past life forms, one cell in a socio-organism can be a member of several of these socio-organisms. Also, they do not have to live in physical proximity with each other as in our bodies. It sounds a rather foolish sci-fi thing to say that General Motors is a living organism. But if you take a few steps back and view it from this point of view, you begin to discover that the evolution of this socio-organism almost exactly parallels everything we know about Darwinian evolution.

Briefly, Darwinian evolution is fairly generally accepted, that the first life forms on earth were individual cells floating on the warm soup seas of the time. Finally, through chance and other factors, groups of these cells discovered that by being gathered together they could get their food more efficiently, protect themselves, and become dominant over the single-cell amoebas. With humans, exactly the same thing happened. More and more individual units began to get more and more specialized. As it became more complex, with more and more highly specialized units, the creature became more and more powerful, was capable of protecting itself, taking care of its individual cells. This is a process of accumulating interdependence. The frightening thing about viewing humankind now, this way, is that the socio-organisms are really becoming more dominant than the individual. In Red China they are teaching the very lessons that our bodies have, over the centuries, taught to its cells–that we can no longer exist for ourselves. We must exist for the whole. But you can see the same thing in the United States. People now live the corporate morality. If I join a corperation, my duty is to the corperation. If the corperation says lie, cheat, steal, move here, do that, I must do it because my duty is to the whole. So if indeed civilization is following the laws of Darwinian evolution, you can predict ahead a few centuries or a few dozen or hundred centuries, until a time in which the independent individual will have totally vanished and this planet will be inhabited by totally specialized cells who function as part of these giant, living things. The great battle and great decision we humans face is whether to let this continue until we become faceless, totally interdependent organisms. Whether this is goood or bad I don’t know. You might, if it were possible, talk to a cell of my heart and say, “Look cell, are you happy?” It seems to have adapted well. Maybe this is the way it suppose to be. Maybe there is some form of mass mind, mass consciousness, when a socio-organism reaches its final form, and we will be part of it and perfectly happy to be part of it. There may be contentments and happiness in this that we presently can’t visualize. I fear it because I can’t visualize it being better than remaining a free individual. I also fear the fact that is I remain, and insist on remaining totally independent and free, that the way things are going I am to be treated as a cancer cell by the socio-organisms around me, which will find it necessary to eradicate me because I endanger the organism.

Penthouse:

What is one’s purpose in this socio-organism? Just to survive?

Gene Roddenberry:

No. My purpose… that’s a hard question. I’ll try to answer it. My purpose is to live out whatever my function may be as a part of the whole that is God. I am a piece of Him. I believe that all intelligence is a part of the whole and it may be a great cyclical thing in which we have to go on, evolving, perfecting, until we reach the point where we are God, so that we can create ourselves so that we know we existed in the first place.

_________________________

Penthouse:

You’ve said that you felt that Star Trek was a very optimistic show. Are you still that optimistic in the 70’s about the future of mankind? 

Gene Roddenberry:

Yes, but I think that if we have an earth of the Star Trek century, it will not be ab unbroken, steady rise to that kind of civilization. We’re in some very tough times. Our twentieth-century technological civilization has no guarantees that it is going to stay around for a long time. But I think man is really an incredible creature. We’ve had civilizations fall before and we build a somewhat better one on the ashes every time. And I’d never consider the society we depicted in Star Trek necessarily a direct, uninterrupted out-growth of our present civilization, with its heavy emphasis on materialism. I think But my optimism is not for our society. It’s for our essential ingredient in humankind. And I think we humans will rebuild and, if necessary, we’ll lose another civilization and rebuild again on top of that until slowly, bit by bit, we’ll get there.•

Tags: ,

“You Got A Shot At Going All The Way”

December 29, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Film | Permalink

Robert Evans’ second memoir, The Fat Lady Sang, featuring his customary blend of hard-boiled talk and Hollywoodisms, is excerpted in the Telegraph. The passage has to do with his relationship with Frank Sinatra, which went to pot over Mia Farrow’s decision to star in Rosemary’s Baby. The opening:

“‘Kid, you remind me of me. Been watching you close. They tell me you’re comin’ off great. Been around long enough to have a nose who’s going to make it and who ain’t. You got a shot at going all the way. Take some advice from a guy who’s never learnt. When it comes to those hangers-on, though, take my advice: have your radar on high.’ The words were coming straight from the mouth of the King, Frank Sinatra by name, having a mano-a-mano powwow at Chasen’s, his favourite restaurant in town.

It was spring of ’59. He was a megastar playing the lead role in the filmization of the Broadway musical Can-Can.

Me? A punk starlet, playing my first starring role in The Hell-Bent Kid, a western remake of Kiss of Death. Screen-tested and plucked it away from many. Can-Can and The Kid − hell-bent, that is − were shooting on adjoining soundstages at 20th Century Fox.

The laugh being that it was he who sought me out, and with purpose, not by mistake.

He was wondering, how does a punk kid not yet hitting the quarter-century mark end up in the biblical sense with the two great loves of his life?

Adding insult to injury, the Chairman’s spies told him I’d been seeing both of them at the same time. Their names? Ava Gardner and Lana Turner.”

Tags: , ,

“Found A Cameraman, Started Making A Film”

December 20, 2013 in Film, Videos | Permalink

Here’s Allan Havey, a guest this week of Marc Maron, interviewing Robert Downey Sr. in 1991. There’s really nothing like Putney Swope, is there?

Tags: ,

“The Average Level Of Celebrity Behavior Must Have Been Much Worse 50 Years Ago”

December 19, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Film, Urban Studies | Permalink

One more thing from the recent email exchange between Bill Simmons and Malcolm Gladwell. (I posted here about my agreement with Gladwell’s remarks about PEDs.) The host and guest discuss celebrity early in the conversation and make some good points. There is one thing, however, I disagree with. In discussing an anecdote from Johnny Carson, the new book by Henry “Bombastic” Bushkin, the late talk show host’s longtime lawyer, Gladwell asserts that celebrity behavior must have been far worse 50 years ago because there wasn’t so much press attention. This is conventional, but I think incorrect, wisdom. 

Celebrity behavior was horrible decades ago, and it was covered up. That’s true. Every now and then something would explode into public view, like the cases with Errol Flynn and Fatty Arbuckle. But I believe the same thing happens now, even with the tabloid culture. Paparazzi aren’t muckrakers duty-bound to serve the public good but entrepreneurs who sell salacious details, even uncovered information about criminality, to the highest bidder. Plenty gets covered up. It’s a marketplace in which silence is bought with money or favors. Let’s assume that tween performers don’r grow up to be so dysfunctional without cause and that action stars don’t always behave well while filming abroad. Every now and then something will explode into the public view, like the cases of O.J. Simpson and Michael Jackson. But despite the surfeit of information everywhere, most misbehavior is still kept quiet.

From Simmons and Gladwell:

“Bill Simmons:

It’s weird to think of Johnny Carson involved in a conspiracy, though.

Malcolm Gladwell:

And it just not plausible today, is it? There are 4 million Americans with top secret security clearances. How can you make a legitimate cultural argument for the presence of some shadowy secret government when 4 million people are in on the shadowy secret government? But in 1970, the Mafia throws the biggest star on television down the stairs and then puts a contract on him, causing him to lock himself in his apartment for three days and for millions of Americans to be forced to watch live coverage of the Italian American unity rally, and none of that became public. This is tabloid malpractice.

Bill Simmons:

Wait, it seems like you were inordinately mesmerized by this Carson book. Was it because you didn’t realize that he was such a flawed human being? Or were you blown away by how different celebrity culture was in the 1960s and 1970s compared to now?

Malcolm Gladwell:

Well, it made me think that the average level of celebrity behavior must have been much worse 50 years ago than today.”

Tags: , ,

“Jaws Was The First Film To Challenge This Conventional Thinking”

December 16, 2013 in Film, Urban Studies | Permalink

January is the graveyard for movies that turned out to be turkeys, a month for studios to clear the slate. But it wasn’t always that way. Summer used to be the season to forget. That changed because a beach-themed film wanted to attract beachgoers. After that film (Jaws, of course) proved it was a winning time of year, the warm months gradually became the big stage for blockbusters. From Priceonomics:

“Why didn’t Hollywood think to distribute their biggest pictures during the summer? Executives thought that people had better things to do with their time than sit in a dark room watching movies all summer. As the Financial Times writes:

Back then June, July and August were the movie industry’s low season. By day, everyone was on the beach; by night, eating, drinking, dancing and carrying on. Who wanted to go rectangle-eyed in the dark, watching movies? That was a winter thing.

Jaws was the first film to challenge this conventional thinking. One reason for the then unorthodox timing? The Times also notes that the producer stated, ‘The release of the film was deliberately delayed till people were in the water off the summer beach resorts.’ Director Steven Spielberg wanted the fear to be as real as possible, and that apparently included making sure that as many viewers as possible came from the beach to the film.”

Tags:

“I Do Apologize To The Audience For Being So Intensely Nervous”

December 15, 2013 in Film, Videos | Permalink

I remember from when I was a kid that there were few people as famous or revered as the actor Richard Burton was during his life, but does it feel like his star is falling piece by piece to the Earth as those who watched him act live die off? The fame and infamy mean little now, the marriages and the drinking and the off-stage drama, and his performances, as least those on stage, are known directly by fewer an fewer. His famous name is recalled but without full knowledge of his talent. Here he sits down for a long-form interview with Michael Parkinson in 1974, having just completed a stint in rehab for his titanic problem with alcohol.

Tags: ,

“Even After Many Years, It Is Still A Very Upsetting Story”

December 3, 2013 in Film, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Here’s an oddity: In 1991, Doris Tate, mother of actress Sharon Tate who was among those murdered by the Manson Family, appeared on To Tell the Truth hosted by Alex Trebek. The elder Tate became a campaigner for the rights of crime victims. This short-lived iteration of the venerable game show, which had a harder, more provocative edge than such fare usually has, provided a platform for Tate’s work. She passed away the following year as a result of a brain tumor. Begins at the 8:18 mark.

Tags: , ,

« Older entries § Newer entries »