Film

You are currently browsing the archive for the Film category.

From “Yokozuna in the Crease,” David Pincus’ offbeat Classical think piece which wonders whether a sumo wrestler, or even someone more morbidly obese, could make an unbeatable hockey goalie:

“A more fascinating experiment was conducted by Todd Gallagher, who wrote about the theory in his book Andy Roddick Beat Me With a Frying Pan. Gallagher hired George A. Romero of Night of the Living Dead fame to create a prosthetic fat suit roughly the size of Robert Earl Hughes, an American who was considered the fattest man in the world when he died in 1958. Hughes weighed just over 1,000 pounds. Gallagher convinced a few Washington Capitals players to attempt to score on someone in the fat suit. The guy in the fat suit, who wasn’t even able to lift the prosthetic arms, blocked most of their shots by default. But even he couldn’t cover all 24 feet of scoring space, and the Caps players were able to score on him in breakaways and up close.”

Tags: , ,

From “Red Obsessions,” a feature article by Lars Olav-Beier in Spiegel about Asia trying to supplant Hollywood as the global Dream Factory:

“Not just China, but also South Korea and Russia have become more important in the film business in recent years. The Russian market grew by almost 20 percent in 2012, with a film like Ice Age 4 earning $50 million there, or more than half of its budget.

‘We can no longer risk making an expensive film with a star who isn’t popular in Asia,’ says Hollywood producer Jerry Bruckheimer (Pirates of the Caribbean). While American films earned up to two-thirds of their revenues in North America in the 1980s, today it averages only about one third.

Hollywood has been beset by fears of a sellout, ever since Indian investment firm Reliance acquired the majority of the DreamWorks film studio and a Chinese company bought the second-largest movie theater chain in the United States. Finally, in mid-January the Chinese electronics company TLC bought the naming rights to Grauman’s Chinese Theater in the heart of Hollywood, one of the most famous movie theaters in the United States. It seems only a matter of time before the Chinese buy their first Hollywood studio.

It’s happened once before, now more than 20 years ago, that Asians, specifically Japanese companies like Sony, acquired a number of studios. ‘China wants something different from Hollywood than what Japan wanted at the time,’ says American industry expert Thomas Plate. ‘It isn’t as much about money as it is about know-how.’

Of course, money isn’t the only issue for Hollywood, either. America sees cinema as its very own art form, tailor-made for telling the world American stories and celebrating American values. ‘We’ll still be making movies about American football in the future,’ says Bruckheimer, ‘but with much smaller budgets. That’s because it’s almost exclusively American viewers who are interested in football.’ Bruckheimer exhorts his screenwriters to think internationally and write roles for Asian stars into films.”

Tags: , ,

Bill Gates grew up in Seattle near an early computer center and Steve Jobs in Silicon Valley. Would they have chosen different paths in life if they were raised in Idaho or Kansas? How much does the place where we’re raised have to do with who we become? How much of it is chance and how much of it is hardwired?

David Fincher spent his formative years in the shadow of Northern California filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas and believes that explains to a good extent why he’s a filmmaker. From a really good Financial Times piece about Fincher by Matthew Garrahan:

“Though Fincher’s childhood experience of Rear Window convinced him that he wanted to work in Hollywood, there was already plenty of film-making taking place around him in Marin County. He grew up in a middle-class family but their neighbors were some of Hollywood’s biggest names. ‘George Lucas was my neighbor, Francis Coppola was shooting The Godfather [nearby] in Shady Lane. There was a lot of film around.’

Lucas, who had not yet made Star Wars, was then embarking on his film career. ‘I was walking down the street one day with a friend of mine and saw a crew setting up lights for American Graffiti. We saw these old [Ford] Thunderbirds driving around. And then the movie came out. They found a part of a street in Petaluma that looked 10 years old and were able to transport an audience back in time with wardrobe, the hairstyles. To see that happen … was unbelievable.’ And fortunate, I say. Imagine if he had been raised in Idaho instead of Marin County. ‘I’d be a rancher. I’d be delivering calves now.’

When he was 14 his parents moved to Oregon but three years later the 17-year-old Fincher returned to California, where he stayed with a friend and his mother, and, unusually for a film director of his generation, did not attend film school. Within two years, however, he had found himself a job working for Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic, where he was part of the crew that made Return of the Jedi.”

Tags: , , ,

In 1974, David Frost interviewed football coach Brian Clough, who had just had a tempestuous 44-day reign in charge of Leeds United. The video is most notable because the great Michael Sheen has portrayed both subjects, the interviewer in Frost/Nixon and the interviewee in The Damned United.

Tags: , ,

Bruce Nussbaum’s essay about Apple takes inspiration from Walter Benjamin’s 1936 writing “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Here’s a piece from it, which talks about the difference in acting on stage and on film, which I mostly don’t agree with except for its most basic premise:

“For the film, what matters primarily is that the actor represents himself to the public before the camera, rather than representing someone else. One of the first to sense the actor’s metamorphosis by this form of testing was Pirandello. Though his remarks on the subject in his novel Si Gira were limited to the negative aspects of the question and to the silent film only, this hardly impairs their validity. For in this respect, the sound film did not change anything essential. What matters is that the part is acted not for an audience but for a mechanical contrivance – in the case of the sound film, for two of them. ‘The film actor,’ wrote Pirandello, ‘feels as if in exile – exiled not only from the stage but also from himself. With a vague sense of discomfort he feels inexplicable emptiness: his body loses its corporeality, it evaporates, it is deprived of reality, life, voice, and the noises caused by his moving about, in order to be changed into a mute image, flickering an instant on the screen, then vanishing into silence …. The projector will play with his shadow before the public, and he himself must be content to play before the camera.’ This situation might also be characterized as follows: for the first time – and this is the effect of the film – man has to operate with his whole living person, yet forgoing its aura. For aura is tied to his presence; there can be no replica of it. The aura which, on the stage, emanates from Macbeth, cannot be separated for the spectators from that of the actor. However, the singularity of the shot in the studio is that the camera is substituted for the public. Consequently, the aura that envelops the actor vanishes, and with it the aura of the figure he portrays.

It is not surprising that it should be a dramatist such as Pirandello who, in characterizing the film, inadvertently touches on the very crisis in which we see the theater. Any thorough study proves that there is indeed no greater contrast than that of the stage play to a work of art that is completely subject to or, like the film, founded in, mechanical reproduction. Experts have long recognized that in the film ‘the greatest effects are almost always obtained by ‘acting’ as little as possible … ‘ In 1932 Rudolf Arnheim saw ‘the latest trend … in treating the actor as a stage prop chosen for its characteristics and… inserted at the proper place.’ With this idea something else is closely connected. The stage actor identifies himself with the character of his role. The film actor very often is denied this opportunity. His creation is by no means all of a piece; it is composed of many separate performances. Besides certain fortuitous considerations, such as cost of studio, availability of fellow players, décor, etc., there are elementary necessities of equipment that split the actor’s work into a series of mountable episodes. In particular, lighting and its installation require the presentation of an event that, on the screen, unfolds as a rapid and unified scene, in a sequence of separate shootings which may take hours at the studio; not to mention more obvious montage. Thus a jump from the window can be shot in the studio as a jump from a scaffold, and the ensuing flight, if need be, can be shot weeks later when outdoor scenes are taken. Far more paradoxical cases can easily be construed. Let us assume that an actor is supposed to be startled by a knock at the door. If his reaction is not satisfactory, the director can resort to an expedient: when the actor happens to be at the studio again he has a shot fired behind him without his being forewarned of it. The frightened reaction can be shot now and be cut into the screen version. Nothing more strikingly shows that art has left the realm of the ‘beautiful semblance’ which, so far, had been taken to be the only sphere where art could thrive.”

Tags:

I’ve posted before about Eadweard Muybridge, genius of nascent cinema who wound up on trial for murder. There’s a new book about him, The Inventor and the Tycoon, which receives a beautifully written review this week in the New York Times by Candice Millard. The opening:

“Genius, it seems, is almost always accompanied by eccentricity, if not madness. Those rare instances of genuine brilliance that we find scattered throughout history — in the music of Ludwig van Beethoven, the paintings of Vincent van Gogh, the mathematical equations of John Nash — often appear to have come at great cost to the minds that produced them. The work of Eadweard Muybridge is no exception.

While Muybridge’s photographs are widely known, his personal life has been largely neglected, which seems incredible now that, in Edward Ball’s engrossing book, The Inventor and the Tycoon, we have the whole fascinating story, full of strange and surprising details. At the height of his genius, Muybridge, a British immigrant whose stunning advancements in photography in the mid-to-late 1800s astonished the world and gave rise to the motion picture industry, looked and generally lived like a vagabond. He dressed in clothing so tattered that his uncombed, usually unwashed, hair poked out of holes in his hat, and his pants threatened to fall off in pieces as he walked. He ate cheese flies, tiny insects that hover around the tops of old cheese and that he used to gather up into packages and snack on as he brooded over his photographs. Then there was the small matter of the murder.

In 1874, just a year after one of his most important breakthroughs, when he was well into the work that would make him famous, Muybridge killed a man.”

Tags:

I’m sure I’ve posted clips from Andrei Tarkovsky: A Poet in the Cinema before, but here’s the whole 1983 documentary.

Tags:

Three years before she was killed in one of the most shocking mass murders in American history–one that essentially ended an attempt at a new openness, a new sense of community–Sharon Tate was her bright, beautiful self while being interviewed by Merv Griffin on location in London.

Tags: ,

The very first of Michael Caine’s 18,000,000 appearances on American talk shows, with Merv Griffin in 1965.

Tags: ,

Merv Griffin leaves the studio to interview Richard Burton in 1974. I was frightened of Burton when I was a child. He just seemed so out of control. But the one that really terrified me was George C. Scott. Oh my god, that man! All that rage.

From Burton’s scary personal diary, which cataloged his demons and destruction, a passage from right around the time of the Merv interview:

“Tuesday 21st: Drank enormously and cheated when E wasn’t looking. Don’t remember much except falling a lot and suggesting divorce. Can’t control my hands, so cannot write any more. Very silly. Booze!

Wednesday 22nd: Having been so drunk yesterday, felt terrible in morning and was desperately ill. Went quietly at 9.30 to find a double brandy. Bar closed until 10. Asked for Fritz (manager). Reluctantly, he opened bar for me and suggested vodka as it wouldn’t be so smelly when E had morning kiss.

Drank it with very shaking hands. Have become a ‘falling-down’ [drunk]. My hand-writing indicative of the shakes. Painful knee, bottom, right elbow, back of head, right ear.

E an angel, and looked like one. How does she do it? Look so well, I mean, for she had a lot to drink, too.

Thursday 23rd: Two weeks married. Still faintly dizzy if I make any sudden movement. Had to have helping hand to walk first few steps in any direction. Very disappointed in myself, but periodically, no doubt, will fall into the trap.

Friday 24th: Made superb love to E in the afternoon. Gets better all the time, if that’s possible. Thought about death too much.

Monday 27th: Drank a lot. Don’t remember anything, if at all.

Tuesday 28th: Drank some more.

Wednesday 29th: Ditto. Must stop!”

Tags: ,

Before world culture was saturated with American comic books via film, it was a niche market and considered by most to be shameful and lowbrow. By the late 1970s, when Marlon Brando was getting millions for doing a few minutes of screen time as Superman’s dad, people thought that the form had reached its zenith. But we hadn’t seen nothing yet. As Hollywood special effects prowess grew and a post-Cold War age opened global markets yearning for entertainments not bogged down by a specific language, comics became king.

I miss how movies used to be vehicles of adult expression and would rather rewatch The Passenger any day than see the latest superhero vehicle, though I acknowledge the greatness of this art form in panels even if it’s not my particular thing. In 1977, Mike Douglas, co-host Jamie Farr and, um, a flamboyant panel, welcomed members of the pre-Comic-Con culture. Collector Phil Seuling shows off an original Superman, which was then valued at $1,500. The audience gasped at the price, but today a pristine copy goes for more than $2 million. That’s as good an indicator as any of the value of this source material in our age.

Tags: , ,

Orson Welles’ first film, a 1934 avant garde silent short, “Hearts of Age,” which was made with a school chum named William Vance. More or less, it’s about the visitation of a dandyish Grim Reaper (played hauntingly by Welles) upon the lives of a couple of grotesque Colonial American characters. Seemingly influenced by German Expressionism, D.W. Griffith, Dali and Buñuel.

Tags:

Orson Welles discussing fortune tellers’ secrets during a 1970 appearance on David Frost’s chat show. He opined on the same topic three years in a Playboy Interview.

Tags: ,

Excellent 1984 interview with Roman Polanski conducted by Clive James.

Tags: ,

Michelangelo Antonioni was still three years from the U.S. release of his “hippie film,” Zabriskie Point, when he sat for a Playboy Interview in 1967. But unsurprisingly, discussion got around to American hippies, a subject that always fascinated him. He suggested that young people were trying to slip out from under old masks, using new ways of communicating, hoping to become more honest. But more than four decades later, we seem to be covering up as much as ever in our information-rich, interconnected world, in what’s supposed to be a time of great transparency. We may be hiding behind an icon rather than a mask, but the artifice remains. We never really lose the blueprint to reconstruct that wall. An excerpt:

Playboy:

Some people over 30 seem to feel that today’s youth is a lost generation, withdrawn not only from commitment but, in the case of the hippies, from reality. Do you disagree?

Michelangelo Antonioni:

I don’t think they’re lost at all. I’m not a sociologist nor a psychologist, but it seems to me they are seeking a new way to be happy. They are committed, but in a different way–and the right way, I think. The American hippies, for example, are against the war in Vietnam and against Johnson–but they combat the warmongers with love and peace. They demonstrate against police by embracing them and throwing flowers. How can you club a girl who comes to give you a kiss? That, too, is a form of protest. In California’s ‘loving parties,’ there is an atmosphere of absolute calm, tranquility. That, too, is a form of protest, a way of being committed. It shows that violence is not the only means of persuasion. It’s a complicated subject–more so than it seems–and I can’t handle it, because I don’t know the hippies well enough.

Playboy:

Sometimes that tranquility you spoke of is induced by hallucinogenic drugs. Does the use of such drugs alarm you?

Michelangelo Antonioni:

No, some people have negative reactions or can’t stand hallucinations, but others stand them extremely well. One of the problems of the future world will be the use of leisure time. How will it be filled up? Maybe drugs will distributed free of charge by the government.

Playboy:

You’ve always emphasized both the importance and the difficulty of communication between people in your films. But doesn’t the psychedelic experience tend to make people withdraw into an inner-directed mysticism, even drop out of society altogether? And doesn’t this tend to destroy communication?

Michelangelo Antonioni:

There are many ways of communicating. Some hold the theory that new forms of communication between people can be obtained through hallucinogenic drugs.

Playboy:

Would you want to try some yourself?

Michelangelo Antonioni:

You can’t go to an LSD or pot party unless you take it yourself. If I want to go. I must take drugs myself.

Playboy:

Have you?

Michelangelo Antonioni:

That’s my business. But to show you the new mentality: I visited St Mark’s in Venice with a young woman who smokes pot, as do most young people in her environment. When we were above the gilded mosaics–St. Mark’s is small and intimate–she exclaimed, ‘How I’d like to smoke here!’ You see how new that reaction is? We don’t even suspect it. There was nothing profane in her desire to smoke; she merely wanted to make her aesthetic emotions more intense. She wanted to make her pleasure giant-size before the beauty of St. Mark’s.

Playboy:

Does this mean that you believe that the old means of communicating have become masks, as you seem to suggest in your films, that obscure communication?

Michelangelo Antonioni:

I think they become masks yes.”

Tags:

Societies are prone to rampant, unreported abuse of their most vulnerable whenever they’re so repressed and authoritarian that you’re not allowed to say the truth aloud, when any person or group is considered sacred. Anyone in 1960 or so who had known about the Catholic Church’s child-sex ring would have been torn to shreds by media and institution alike if they had dared to blow the whistle. Protecting the accepted order of things was given preference over protecting children.

Families are no different. Their “rulers” can also be savage if there are no checks and balances. A gigantic movie star like Joan Crawford could do as she pleased in a buttoned-down America as long as she gave the public the face it wanted. And the result was terrible child abuse. Christina Crawford, who shocked the nation with her book Mommie Dearest in 1978, was attacked even then for presenting the facts. Some people still wanted the lie. Here she is interviewed by Phil Donahue that same year.

Tags: , ,

What has been gained in access to information and communication during the Digital Age more than makes up for anything lost. But there have been losses. Process helps determine outcome, and the speed of digital removes significant time from effort. And precision means there are fewer errors and accidents, those things that birth genius. If method is faster, is the result naturally speeded up as well? From Richard Brody’s 2000 New Yorker profile of Jean-Luc Godard:

I began by asking him about his most recently released feature film, For Ever Mozart, from 1996, a bitter fantasy about art and mourning. In it, three young French people with lofty ideas but idle hands take off for Sarajevo to put on a play and are killed in Bosnia by paramilitary thugs. One of the victims is the daughter of an old French director who has been stalled in his work; in his grief, he finds the will to create.

Typically, Godard was not satisfied with the film. ‘It wasn’t very good,’ he said. ‘The actors aren’t good enough, and things remained too theoretical.’ Godard’s complaint about his movie led to a complaint about young actors today: that even unknowns, inundated with media hype, comport themselves like stars and are ‘less available’ to direction: ‘They think they know what to do, by the fact that they’ve been chosen. They have no doubt. Doubt no longer exists today. With digital, doubt no longer exists.’

This abrupt switch from the sociological to the technological is typical of Godard’s conversation: his sentences, like his films, are always soaring into abstractions, or breaking off, pivoting on an instant of silence to change direction. ‘With digital, there is no past,’ he continued. ‘I’m reluctant to edit on these new so-called ‘virtual’ machines, these digital things, because, as far as I’m concerned, there’s no past. In other words, if you want to see the previous shot, O.K., you do this’—he tapped the table like a button—’and you see it at once. It doesn’t take any time to get there, the time to unspool in reverse, the time to go backward. You’re there right away. So there’s an entire time that no longer exists, that has been suppressed. And that’s why films are much more mediocre, because time no longer exists.'”

Tags: ,

Jack Paar once used this line by young gag writer Dick Cavett to introduce a legendary sex symbol: “Here they are…Jayne Mansfield.” That was a reference to her knockers, which were larger than the knockers of the average woman of the era. Merv Griffin went down the same road (sans the wit) when Mansfield visited him in 1966, the year before the horrific car accident that claimed her life. Along with her famous rack, Mansfield brought along her three children by bodybuilder Mickey Hargitay, including 2-year-old Mariska. Due likely to the presence of the kids, fellow guest Henny Youngman managed to restrain himself from copping a feel.

Tags: , ,

In 1972, five years after her career took off like a shot with Bonnie and Clyde and two years before Chinatown wowed, Faye Dunaway was visited by Merv Griffin on the set of Oklahoma Crude.

Tags: ,

It doesn’t seem there’s any solitude now. We’re all interconnected, we’re tracked and commodified by gadgets in our pockets 24/7. We’re consumers more than citizens, more icon than flesh. And how can we develop, ask ourselves the important questions without the quiet?

Yet people are still surprising when you get to know them. They’ve kept something in reserve. Maybe solitude has transformed. Maybe we’ve split ourselves, created our own doppelgangers. Not just because of ego, but also for self-preservation. Perhaps there’s still an inner self that we keep in a separate, uncluttered place. Via Biblioklept, a message to young people from Andrei Tarkovsky.

Tags:

Merv Griffin interviews horror icon and Renaissance man Vincent Price in 1979.

I always thought the 1964 Price film, The Last Man on Earth, a low-budget Italian production of Richard Matheson’s novel I  Am Legend, was the most haunting screen realization of the author’s vision, despite far glitzier versions with A-listers Charlton Heston and Will Smith. Matheson did not feel the same and asked for his name to be removed from the credits.

Tags: , ,

In 1979, Merv Griffin interviews the big-name cast of The China Syndrome, a drama about a cover-up of security hazards at a nuclear power plant. The talk is largely a Hollywood ass-kissing session. Within a couple of weeks of the film’s release, a real-life version of the horrifying scenario played out as Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island plant melted down. Now that’s a tie-in.

Tags: , , ,

Reddit has a new Ask Me Anything with Stanley Kubrick’s daughter Katharina and grandson Joe. If you read the blog regularly, you probably know I’m a little obsessed with Kubrick, whom I rate above all other filmmakers, even Wilder, Buñuel and Godard. A few exchanges with Katharina follow.

________________________

Question:

Katharina, I don’t know how old you are, so I’m not sure if this is relevant or not. But what was your father like during filming as opposed in between films? Did he seem more stressed, or did he ever complain about so and so not being able to nail a take? Or was he pretty much always the same at home?

Also, any cool stories of you being on set with him or anything like that?

Katharina:

I’m nearly 59. Between films he did a lot of reading, caught up with viewing the videos of American football games that his sister used to send him. He was always working on improving print qualities, hiring directors to shoot the voice overs for films that had to be dubbed and checking on how his films were doing in other parts of the world. He never stopped tending his babies even once they were out in the world.

________________________

Question:

What were Stanley’s favorite movies? (Aside from his own) 

Katharina:

He loved films. He admired the work of Bergman, Tarkovsky, Bunuel, Spike Lee, Speilberg, the list is long and varied.

Question:

I love the idea of Stanley Kubrick watching Do the Right Thing or She’s Gotta Have It. 

Katharina:

He liked White Men Can’t Jump. It was on TV and I asked him if I should watch it, and he said, “yeah that’s a good movie, you’ll enjoy it.”

________________________

Question: 

What are your favorite memories of Stanley? What was he like around the house?

Katharina:

He was just a Dad who liked making tuna sandwiches and watching sport on TV. He was always working, and we learned a lot being around him.

••••••••••

Two recent Kubrick posts:

Tags:

Merv Griffin interviews John le Carré in 1965, during the frost of the Cold War.

Tags: ,

Unedited footage of a 1981 audience Q&A session with Orson Welles, who discussed The Trial. His Kafka adaption has amazing set design and cinematography, but it still feels sort of hollow to me.

Tags:

« Older entries § Newer entries »