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| 1668046997
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| 1668046997
| 4.02
| 2,426
| Feb 13, 2024
| Feb 13, 2024
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really liked it
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Published in 2024, Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions is a terrific filmmaking memoir by writer/producer/director Ed Zwick, who climbed from a story edi
Published in 2024, Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions is a terrific filmmaking memoir by writer/producer/director Ed Zwick, who climbed from a story editor and writer on the TV series Family in the 1970s to co-creating, writing, and directing (with his creative partner Marshall Herskovitz) thirtysomething in the '80s to directing classic movies, including Glory, Legends of the Fall, and The Last Samurai. My knowledge of Zwick's work began with Special Bulletin, a 1983 TV movie about a reporter and cameraman taken hostage by eco-terrorists in the Port of Charleston who threaten to detonate what they claim is a nuclear device unless their disarmament demands are met. It's slicker and more terrifying than The Day After. It was informative to read about Zwick's arrival in LA (from Chicago) and inconspicuous start in show business, as well as his account of projects that were nearly made, like a 1994 version of Shakespeare In Love that would've starred Julia Roberts with Zwick directing (he stepped aside to produce and won an Academy Award for Best Picture). Zwick has great stories to tell and in a fashion that reminded me of his writing for television and film, for which the word "craftsmanlike" could apply, stays out of his way and gets to his stories, and to the characters in those stories. These include melting down at Woody Allen's New Year's Eve party after breaking up with the girlfriend we was in attendance with, Zwick's instruction by acting coach Nina Foch and mentorship by director Sydney Pollack. Zwick uses this book as an opportunity to mentor writers or directors coming after him. He admits to pining for relationships with the movie stars he's cultivated great working relationships with, only to never see or speak to them after the show wraps. Zwick praises first assistant directors and attempts to give a job few people can really define their due. He is candid about how difficult it was working with Matthew Broderick (and his mother) and Julia Roberts, litigating Harvey Weinstein into acceptable professional and human behavior, and how producing eighty hours of television gave him the tools to make movies. Between chapters, Zwick includes little lists of advice for writers and directors, or shares show business anecdotes in which the names have been removed. NINE LESSONS FROM NINA The oracle speaks 1. A HELPING HAND If an actor is nervous, tell him his power emanates from the ground, rising from the earth into the sky like lightning. If he's scared, insist "This is going to be fun." Appeal to the child in the actor, who then appeals to the child in himself. 2. BE HERE NOW Everything is happening for the first time. There's never time in real life to think. Throw in a curve ball before a take now and then. Create an unforeseen obstacle. Watch life happen. If something is easy, it's usually wrong. 3. THE DIALECTIC Every scene has two truths that collide and change each other. Pretty much every scene should go from dark to light, or light to dark. Try to identify the moment in a scene that a dark bird flies in and flies out. Everything else is just slight of hand. 4. THE GLASS IS HALF FULL When we say a performance is "generous" it means the actor is constantly giving the audience little gifts. Unexpected humor, sudden rage, mysterious secrets, unflagging intensity. That's the actor you want to cast. 5. THE LUCKY ONES The best actors can be reading items from a dinner menu and leave you breathless as you wait to hear the entrées. Some people simply appear to have more vivid inner lives than others even wen they don't. The life in their eyes never seems to dim, and the camera wants to know why. We call this Being Kissed by the Angel. 6. VINTAGE NINA, Part I As they grow older, actors tend to become less than men and actresses become more than women. She hastened to add, "They used to tell me I didn't have enough cleavage. Now I do but it's on my face." 7. VINTAGE NINA, Part II Cut scenes whenever you can. There are only two things that are too short: life and penises. Everything else is too long. 8. VINTAGE NINA, Part III One evening, after a cocktail or two, Nina whispered to me. "If you've ever listened to actors talk in private, you won't let them improvise." 9. DEFAULT MODE If the script and the staging and the set and the costumes are right, it should feel like cheating. The key to acting is to stop acting. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Apr 06, 2024
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Apr 07, 2024
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Mar 13, 2024
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Hardcover
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| 1250301831
| 9781250301833
| B07QSPPLQQ
| 4.10
| 3,589
| Feb 04, 2020
| Feb 04, 2020
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really liked it
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My introduction to the work of Sam Wasson is The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood. Published in 2020, the book covers the making
My introduction to the work of Sam Wasson is The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood. Published in 2020, the book covers the making of Chinatown, cited by many as the greatest screenplay ever written. Even more so than Peter Biskind's supreme account of 1970s Hollywood (Easy Riders, Raging Bulls), Wasson recreates entire conversations. I found that approach a little dubious, got accustomed to it and most enjoyed the chapters devoted to author Robert Towne's writing process and the genesis of his script, particularly the help he received from his friend Edward Taylor, girlfriend Julie Payne, dog Hira and director Roman Polanski, uncredited for his work on the script. -- "You had Paris in the 20s, Hollywood in the 60s," said record producer Kim Fowley. "And you wanted to get there because these places had hope. If you could get the bus ticket to get to paradise, even if you were a waiter, at least you were there." L.A.'s music scene, Fowley added, was so hungry for talent that "anybody who had charisma or a line of bullshit could walk into any record label and get a deal--maybe just one record, but that's how it worked." -- Towne had never read Raymond Chandler before--his old roommate, Edward Taylor, was the big mystery reader--it was the loss that got him. Chandler's detective novels preserved prewar L.A. in a hard-boiled poetry equal parts disgusted and in love, for while Chandler detested urban corruption, the dreaming half of his heart starved for goodness. Poised midway, the city held his uncertainty; Philip Marlowe, his detective, bore its losses. "I used to like this town," Marlowe confessed in The Little Sister in 1949. "A long time ago. There were trees along Wilshire Boulevard. Beverly Hills was a country town. Westwood was bare hill and lots offering at eleven hundred dollars and no takers. Hollywood was a bunch of frame houses on the interurban line. Los Angeles was just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style, but goodhearted and peaceful. It had the climate they just yap about now. People used to sleep out on porches. Little groups who thought they were intellectual used to call it the Athens of America. It wasn't that, but it wasn't a neon-lighted slum either." "In reading these words and looking at these pictures," Towne said, "I realized that I had in common with Chandler that I loved L.A. and missed the L.A. that I loved. It was gone, basically, but so much of it was left: the ruins of it, the residue, were left. They were so pervasive that you could still shoot them and create the L.A. that had been lost." -- Nicholson was playing tennis at Quincy Jones' when Towne first proposed the idea. "Look," Towne said. "We can't get The Last Detail going right now. What if I write a detective movie for you? It'll be L.A. in the thirties." "Sure. Sounds great. What's it about?" "I don't know." Then: "Water." Jack would be Towne's detective. That right there gave him a clue to the character. Nicholson, Towne knew, was a popinjay, a clothes horse. He loved his shoes, his vintage Hawaiian shirts, and leather jackets. Towne remembered Nicholson admiring himself in the mirror. "Look at my perfect teardrop nostrils," he would say, smiling. Towne's detective would have a little of that vanity. He would mind his hair, his fresh pressed suits, his Venetian blinds. He would be class conscious, maybe a little Hollywood, and if those qualities opposed traditional concepts of a movie detective--gruff, high-minded, ascetic--all the better. This detective would be different. Towne said, "[In] most detectives I have ever seen--[and] in Chandler and even Hammett--all the detectives are too gentlemanly to do divorce work. 'If you want someone for that go down the block.' But I knew in fact that that's mostly what they did." For his detective, Towne would go against genre; his detective would do divorce work. Unlike Chandler's Philip Marlowe, Towne's hero would do it for the money. That would give the character someplace to go, emotionally; it would give Towne the beginnings of a character arc. "I thought that taking someone like that," Towne said, "maybe venal and crude and used to petty crime and people cheating on each other, and then getting him to see the larger implications and then to draw the distinctions would be interesting." He decided, whenever possible, to counter movie myth with real life. "So I decided to do a movie about crimes as they really were," he said, "because the way they really were is the way they really are. I didn't want to do a movie about a black bird or anything. A real crime, with a real detective." [image] -- Under Towne's desk lay Hira, the giant Komondor, toying with the phone cord he took for a water snake. Man, he thought, I never saw such purity in a living thing. Every walk, the same fire hydrant, the same look of happiness. At the most fundamental level, he thought, that purity is what people fall in love with. Distraction--this was how it always started. "So much of writing," he said, "is trying to avoid facing it." -- For a while Towne would walk in circles. He couldn't know who the characters were until he knew who they needed to become, and he couldn't know who they needed to become until he knew who they were. He wouldn't start to write scenes until he had a full scene-by-scene outline, and he couldn't outline until he saw his people in detail, what they thought they wanted and what they really needed. But didn't he have to have a good story first? Mystery plotting was a snake eating its tail: does character move the story, or does the story move the character? Towne would have to discover them both simultaneously and proceed with caution, allowing one to inform the other, slow, one short inch at a time. -- By the fall of 1971, some six months after he had begun, Towne was still writing outlines. Some he discarded incomplete. Others ended unsatisfactorily. "'Chinatown' by Towne'" one began: "Only a few years back, when Gittes was working for the D.A.'s office, he got involved in the tong wars. He had been forewarned by his superior, Leon Whitaker, not to fool around with any of the goings on in Chinatown." If you had to go into Chinatown, Whitaker had told him, "do as little as possible." -- Towne was in agony. Writing Chinatown was like being in Chinatown. A novelist could write and write--and, indeed, Towne wrote like a novelist, turning out hundreds upon hundreds of pages of notes and outlines and dialogue snippets--but a movie is two hours; in script form, approximately a minute a page. What could he afford to lose? He needed to be uncompromisingly objective, but not so hard on his ideas that he ended up losing what may have been good in them--that is, if there was ever anything good about them to begin with. Was there? The question had to be asked. Was any of this good, and if so, would anyone care? A civics lesson on water rights and the incestuous rape of a child? From one vantage point, it was dull; from another, obscene. Who would ever make such a movie? -- "To say Edward Taylor was Robert's 'editor' was an understatement," said Mike Koepf, who knew Taylor well and shared credit with him on several screenplays. "They had a working relationship that although it was secret was significant. [Taylor] didn't take the lead a lot, but when he approached a scene, he was always correct. He would never argue, never criticize. He would say something smart and it was so goddamned smart you'd have to take it. He had a great read on human nature. If there was something wrong with the logic, or against human nature, he'd pick it out really quick. Robert was the strong one and Edward was the weak one, but Edward was the brilliant one. I mean the guy was smart. Character psychology and motivation were his forte. The guy deserves credit, a lot of credit indeed." [image] -- By 1972 Towne and Payne were nearly broke. "In those days," Payne said, "you could not pay Robert to write if he didn't want to write. He just wouldn't do it. He wrote only for love." Warren Beatty would call Payne: "How's it going?" "Slow. Robert won't put a word on the page until he thinks it's perfect." "If he ever asks you what you think, don't say anything, because he'll stop." And then, as it always had, the moment came. He handed her pages. "What do you think?" Julie glanced, but her answer was ready-made. "Shorter." She hocked her diamond earrings. -- Julie exiled him to Catalina Island to get it done once and for all. It was the cheapest place she could find. At sixty-four dollars, she could rent an entire seaplane--room enough for Robert, Eddie, Hira, two IBM Selectric IIs, and provisions--and a room at the Banning Lodge, a funky bed-and-breakfast between Cat Harbor and Isthmus Cove, wasn't much more. The trouble was the restaurant, the only place to eat in the area. It wasn't open on Sundays, so Julie would have to fly out on the seventh day, every week, with food for all purchased, in part, with money Jack Nicholson delivered to Payne while Towne was away. Money was that scarce. On Catalina: Towne sat in his bungalow, before his Selectric, before his window before the sea. -- "They wrote the script out there on Catalina Island," Koepf said, "and the script they came ashore with was like 340 pages." -- "It's a sucker's game," Towne said of his profession. "But sometimes you do get those moments when it all comes together. And that's exciting. Nothing can match that." "Sometimes"--a dreamer's word. -- Arguments persisted on all fronts for another two months. "Robert was absolutely resistant to changing anything," Julie Payne said. Polanski had to fight to subdue, it not eliminate entirely, the disquisitions into Los Angeles politics that were personally and politically crucial to Towne. He was demanding a universality from a story Towne had scrupulously grounded in specifics. "Initially," Towne said, "I was more specific about the story in Chinatown. I wanted what happened to [Gittes] to be ridiculous--a humiliation--and instead Roman wanted to emphasize the tragedy, but he didn't want to be specific about it." But the more detail Towne revealed Gittes' first tragedy in Chinatown, Polanski argued, the farther they would stray from metaphor and the harder it would be to emphasize the cyclical nature of Gittes' tragedy--and it had to be a tragedy, total tragedy. Polanski was still adamant about that. "My own feeling," Towne said, "is if a scene is relentlessly bleak ... it isn't as powerful as it can be if there's a little light there to underscore the bleakness. If you show something decent happening, it makes what's bad almost worse ... In a melodrama, where there are confrontations between good and evil--if the evil is too triumphant, it destroys your ability to identify with it rather than if its victory is only qualified." This was not the way the world worked, Polanski maintained. "You have to show violence the way it is," he said. "If you don't show it realistically, then that's immoral and harmful. If you don't upset people, then that's obscenity." Catastrophe happens, Roman would argue. That's life. Towne, a romantic, advocated somewhere, for hope. It did exist. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 10, 2023
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May 27, 2023
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Dec 12, 2022
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Kindle Edition
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| 0063112582
| 9780063112582
| 0063112582
| 4.05
| 12,958
| Oct 2022
| Oct 25, 2022
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it was amazing
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Cinema Speculation is everything I hoped it might be and more. Published in 2022, this book of film history and criticism is by two-time Academy Award
Cinema Speculation is everything I hoped it might be and more. Published in 2022, this book of film history and criticism is by two-time Academy Award winning screenwriter Quentin Tarantino, who's directed nine feature films from his screenplays--Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill among them--with no bad ones. The "worst" feature in Tarantino's filmography--my vote there is for Django Unchained--is better than the very best some other filmmakers can boast of theirs, and as this book demonstrates, his ideas for movies he could make but would prefer just to speculate about are more compelling than a lot of what gets produced. Tarantino bookends with a memoir, sketching for the reader what "Little Q" was up to in Los Angeles of the 1970s, not only what movies he was watching as a boy, but where he was watching them, who he was with, and how those adults impacted his development. The core of the book are enthusiastic essays on more than a dozen films he bought tickets for in this formative period, from 1972 to 1981, with many footnotes and asides along the way, as well as sourcing from directors he's talked to, like Peter Bogdanovich, Walter Hill and "Big" John Milius. -- Because I was allowed to see things the other kids weren't, I appeared sophisticated to my classmates. And because I was watching the most challenging movies of the greatest movie-making era in the history of Hollywood, they were right, I was. At some point, when I realized I was seeing movies other parents weren't letting their children see, I asked my mom about it. She said, "Quentin, I worry more about you watching the news. A movie's not going to hurt you." Right fucking on, Connie! After being exposed to all these images, did any of them disturb me? Of course, some did! But that didn't mean I didn't like the movie. When they removed the naked dead girl out of the hole in Dirty Harry, it was totally disturbing. But I understood it. Just making a list of the wild violent images I witnessed from 1970 to 1972 would appall most readers. But just listing grotesque moments--out of context of the movies they were in--isn't entirely fair to the films in question. And my mother's point of view--that she later explained to me--was always a question of context. In those films, I could handle the imagery, because I understood the story. -- Now, I knew of Super Fly because she already owned the smash hit soundtrack album, and it was played constantly in the apartment. The movie was also advertised heavily on Soul Train. And in our apartment, come Saturday, we never missed Soul Train. By this point I was living with my mother in a pretty hip apartment building that she shared with two cocktail waitresses that were her best friends at the time, Jackie (black) and Lillian (Mexican). All three were young, hip, good-looking women in the funky seventies, with a penchant for dating athletes. Three sexy women (at the time my mother looked like a cross between Cher and Barbara Steele), one white, one black, one Mexican, sharing an apartment with the white one's ten-year-old son: we were practically a sitcom. -- The importance of Neile McQueen to Steve's success as a movie star can't be overemphasized. It was Neile who read the scripts. It was Neile who narrowed down the material. It was Neile who was good at choosing material that would be best for Steve. Steve's agent, Stan Kamen, would read ten scripts that were being offered, then narrow that down to five and send those off to Neile. She'd read those five scripts, write a synopsis on the material, narrow it down to the two she liked best, and then tell Steve the stories and explain her reasons why she liked them for him. Which would usually end up in him reading the one Neile liked the most. Now of course the director was important, how much they were paying him, the location they were shooting the film at--all those things were important. But so was Neile weighing in. Naturally, directors who'd worked with Steve before--that he liked--got preferential treatment. But if Neile didn't like the script, it was an uphill battle. And it was thanks to Neile's good taste and her keen understanding of her husband's ability and his iconic persona that she steered her husband, starting with The Cincinnati Kid, into the biggest winning streak of the second half of the sixties (a Neile McQueen is what Elvis needed). -- I've always had an alternative reading of the Body Snatchers movies (Siegel's, Kaufman's, and Ferrara's). Each movie presents the Pod People in a sinister light. Yet really, almost nothing they do on screen bears out this sinister interpretation. If you're one who believes that your soul is what makes you you, then I suppose the Pod People are murdering the Earthlings they duplicate and replace. However, if you're more of the mind that it is your intellect and your consciousness that make you who you are, then the Pod People transformation is closer to a rebirth than a murder. You're reborn as straight intellect, with a complete possession of your past and your abilities, but unburdened by messy human emotions. You also possess a complete fidelity to your fellow beings and a total commitment to the survival of your species. Are you inhuman? Of course, they're vegetables. But the movies try to present their lack of humanity (they don't have a sense of humor, they're unmoved when a dog is hit by a car) as evidence of some deep-seated sinisterness. That's a rather species-specific point of view. As human beings it may be our emotions that make us human, but it's a stretch to say it's what makes us great. Along with those positive emotions--love, joy, happiness, amusement--come negative emotions--hate, selfishness, racism, depression, violence, and rage. -- I saw Alligator three times that year (one of those times was on a triple feature with Rolling Thunder and a Canadian trucker flick called High-Ballin' with Peter Fonda and Jerry Reed), and I agreed wholeheartedly with Kevin Thomas about the charm of Forster and Riker. So much so, when I did my top ten movies at the end of the year, and wrote my little awards (best actress, best actor, best director) it was Robert Forster who was my choice for best male performance of that year (Robert DeNiro for Raging Bull was number two). Fifteen years later, I was writing my adaptation of Elmore Leonard's Rum Punch (which I retitled Jackie Brown), and I had to consider who was to play the novel's likable lead male character, bail bondsman Max Cherry. I had a few choices. Gene Hackman was an obvious choice, as was Paul Newman. I also considered John Saxon. But there was something about Forster in Alligator that really stuck with me. I watched the movie again and felt that the character from Alligator could be Max Cherry, just fifteen years earlier. So I started writing the script as if he was, right down to the discussion with Jackie about his thinning hair. Would I have done that without Kevin Thomas highlighting Forster so positively in his review? No. In the end, what made Kevin Thomas so unique in the world of seventies and eighties film criticism, he seemed liked one of the only few practitioners who truly enjoyed their job, and consequently, their life. I loved reading him growing up and practically considered him a friend. In 1994 I won an award for Pulp Fiction from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. When I stepped up to the podium and looked out before the audience of L.A. critics, my first remarks to the room were: "Gee, thanks, now I finally know what Kevin Thomas looks like." -- I remember, before seeing Stallone's film, being at some neighborhood kid's house and the TV spot for Rocky came on. The kid wondered out loud, "What's that?" And his mother glanced at the TV screen and said dismissively, "Oh, just another movie about some guy and his problems." Today it's very easy to romanticize that cynical seventies era--especially since it's long gone--seemingly never to return. But from 1970 to at least 1977, every other movie that came out did seem like it was about "some guy and his problems." Part of the elation tied to the audience's response to the climactic fight in Rocky was after five years of seventies cinema, we didn't really expect things to work out for Balboa. And I don't even mean we didn't expect him to win the heavyweight championship of the world. He was never going to fucking win! We just hoped he didn't look like a fucking joke. That's why the ending was so surprisingly moving and cathartic. That's why when he knocked Apollo Creed flat on his back we hit the roof. Because from that point on, no matter whatever else happened, Rocky proved he wasn't a joke. But by the time you get to the last round--and Rocky has Apollo Creed on the ropes--hitting him with a left and a right and a left and a right and the crowd in the boxing arena was chanting: "Roc-ky ... Roc-ky ..." Oh my fucking god! There had simply never been anything like it. -- So who exactly was this Floyd character I was referring to earlier? His name was Floyd Ray Wilson and he was a black guy of about thirty-seven, who for about a year and a half in the late seventies lived in my house. He used to date my mom's best friend Jackie and he hung around in their circle. Years earlier, from time to time, he would visit the apartment my mom and I shared with her roommates Jackie and Lillian. And every time he came by it was exciting, because I thought Floyd was really cool and I could talk movies with him. And since he was a hip guy who saw a lot of shit, he could keep up (at least compared to the adults I knew). He especially knew all the action movies and Blaxploitation films. I remember when Jackie introduced us (I was ten), she said, "Quentin, Floyd's who you should talk to about movies. He knows as much as you." So I--a ten-year-old white boy--started testing this grown-ass black man on his knowledge of black movies. "Do you know who Brenda Sykes is?" I tested. "Of course I do," he said. I told him, "I think she's the prettiest black actress in movies." "You damn right she is," he answered. "What's your favorite Jim Kelly movie?" Again a test. If he answered Enter the Dragon, he's just like everybody else. "Three the Hard Way, obviously," he answered correctly. Lillian just stared at the two of us and said to the room, "I don't know who any of these people are." So from that moment on, whenever Floyd visited the apartment, it was practically like a holiday for me. Because finally, I was going to be able to talk to somebody about movies who knew what the fuck I was talking about. So when Floyd would come over I'd attach myself to him like a tick. But also during this time, I realized the hard way that Floyd was a flakey guy who couldn't be counted on. On at least two occasions when Floyd was visiting, he played the big man and told me he'd come over next Saturday to take me to the movies. In spite of its fantastic title, Tarantino devotes just one chapter to "cinema speculation,� imagining Brian DePalma—one of his favorite directors from this era or any other—directing Taxi Driver instead of Martin Scorsese. (Tarantino envisions a political thriller in DePalma's hands, with Jeff Bridges playing Travis Bickle instead of Robert DeNiro, Amy Irving or DePalma's future wife Nancy Allen playing Betsy with more screen time, and a bravura assassination attempt edited like the prom massacre in DePalma's Carrie). Diagnosing movies like The Getaway, Deliverance and Rolling Thunder, he does inevitably tease us with what a Tarantino remake of those guy classics might look like. It's the autobiographical sections of Cinema Speculation that struck a chord with me. By no means comprehensive--his biological parents are sketched more like older siblings than parents and with no explanation, Tarantino casually mentions his mother sending him to live with his "alcoholic hillbilly" grandparents in Tennessee--but I recognized the devotion to watching, cataloging, writing about and even making scrapbooks on movies as a child, as well as his education working at a video store (Tarantino refers to Video Archives the way college grads do their alma maters). Cinema Speculation also did something that's almost unheard of when I finish a book. When I was done, I sat down and wrote a film essay of my own, speculating how director John Carpenter's career might've turned out if The Thing, today regarded as a masterpiece, was a commercial or even critical success in 1982. While I wouldn't put Tarantino's book on the shelf right next to On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King (Tarantino doesn't instruct anyone how to write or direct a good movie, per se) they are related in that I came away with a profound appreciation for the craft and my own potential. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jan 15, 2023
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Jan 19, 2023
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Nov 26, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 1789090555
| 9781789090550
| 1789090555
| 4.74
| 221
| Jul 23, 2019
| Jul 23, 2019
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it was amazing
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Moving into an apartment and stocking a proper bookshelf, the first new book I purchased was The Making of Alien by Jonathan W. Rinzler. Published in
Moving into an apartment and stocking a proper bookshelf, the first new book I purchased was The Making of Alien by Jonathan W. Rinzler. Published in 2019, this large book (337 pages of text supported by color photographs and artwork) was commissioned by Twentieth Century Fox. They chose Rinzler, author of many similar books on the making of the Star Wars series. Alien is my favorite movie. I've seen it in theaters eight or nine times. I thought I knew everything about the making of it, but this comprehensively packaged book features terrific stories and stunning visual aids I'd never seen before. -- "I was aware of Planet of the Vampires," O'Bannon said. "I had seen clips from it and it struck me as evocative. It had the curious mixture that you get in those Italian films of spectacularly good production design with an aggressively low budget mentality." Decades later, O'Bannon would admit: "I stole the giant skeleton from Planet of the Vampires," but would add that he'd been primarily influenced by Clifford D. Simak's "Junkyard," published in a 1953 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction; space explorers alight on a blighted asteroid where they discover a graveyard with a wrecked alien spacecraft; they also come upon a stone tower into which one astronaut lowers himself through a hole in the top. "I don't steal from anybody," O'Bannon said. "I steal from everybody." [image] -- "Before we could sign the contract with Roger Corman," Shusett would recall, "Dan and I were walking down the street, and we saw a guy from film school named Mark Haggard. Dan said, 'I want to ditch this guy. He's always telling me he can find money to make movies, but he never has yet.' We ran across an alley but Mark called, 'Dan, Dan! I hear you got a great script! Can I read it?' We said, 'Sure, everybody else is reading it.' We were too stupid to think anyone would rip it off because we didn't think it was good enough." Haggard drove over to Goldwyn Studios, where Brandywine had a ground-floor office. On the vast acreage of the studio, with its winding streets and standing exterior facades that were always being altered for period shoots, Haggard became disoriented. He couldn't find the right building. Instead, he stumbled up an alley that went by Brandywine's exterior wall. It was a hot July day, so Walter Hill and David Giler, two of the production company's three founders, had their windows wide open. Hill had finished his script for The Driver on May 23, and was working on a revision. "Everybody hears about scripts that came through the window," Giler said, "but in this case it literally did come through the window." -- It's possible things began to break Brandywine's way when Ladd heard good things about Star Wars from Steven Spielberg. The director saw an early cut, and telephoned Ladd to assure him that Lucas's film was going to be a smash hit. It may also be that Ladd saw Hill as similar to Lucas. They could both be seen as iconoclastic writer-directors, each with one film under their belt, doing something different in the science fiction genre. Lucas was making a space fantasy. Hill wanted to do science fiction/ horror. "I think the only person at Twentieth who really believed in this from the beginning was Alan Ladd," O'Bannon said. "The rest of the folks were split down the middle." Giler and Hill transformed the crew into what they called "truckers in space," as they would be referred to going forward. Among the truckers, they created class divisions based on job descriptions, and made engineers Parker and Brett moan about not receiving as much money as the others. Hill would say that the most significant difference between their rewrite and the original O'Bannon script was "the mood, the environment ... We added a rough contemporary quality that broke it out of the usual genre mold--the 'kiss my rosy red ass' and 'kill the motherfucker' kind of dialogue that historically you didn't find in science fiction movies." [image] -- Back in the UK, Lieberson had given the matter some thought and come up with Ridley Scott. He'd known the director for many years. He even had furniture designed by Scott in his apartment. They also had a mutual friend in David Puttnam, who had produced movies for Lieberson's company, Goodtimes Enterprises. "I called Ladd," Lieberson recalled, "and said, 'Listen, there is a director here. Ridley Scott, he's done one film. It looked fantastic; I've got an instinct about this guy.'" -- In the 40 to 90 minutes it took Scott to read Alien (accounts vary), he found a lot to admire. "It was unpretentious--and unbelievably violent--yet a lot of character painting came through. Characterization was in the attitudes, in the very Spartan choice of language, and what they talked about. An interesting social subtext emphasizing the class differences between the command officers and the guys sweating it out on the engineering decks. Hill writes a screenplay in a very communicative way. The image just comes bang at you, and you understand completely what is going on. It was minimal, but I got a great sense of the drive, the power of the script. And that's unusual. Hill and Giler were tough editors and the material was very well paced. Both great writers. Giler was probably one of the best writers in Hollywood at that point. Also, to me it was more than a horror film, it was a film about terror. The thriller aspects of it just leapt off the page. I found it very pure." -- By the time Scott was engaged in that series of crucial meetings, O'Bannon had received the hand-bound Necronomicon that Giger had sent him (although the American would remember the text being in German, not French). "I was really flattered," O'Bannon said. "He'd sent it to me because he wanted me to use it on the producers. He didn't think they were sufficiently impressed with his work. The book was brilliant--the man has a real knack for coming up with disturbing imagery." O'Bannon told Scott he wanted to show him something. "He produced The Necronomicon almost out of nowhere, like it was a dirty magazine or a dirty postcard," Scott recalled, "and asked, 'What do you think?' Dan wasn't actually quite sure about it. Didn't know what people would think when he showed it to me. It was a covert operation." With Carroll looking on, probably horrified, Scott opened The Necronomicon and leafed through its pages. "I looked down and saw this stunning picture, this remarkable half-page painting," he said. "I nearly fell over. It was the most frightening thing I'd ever seen. I have never been so sure of something in all my life. I thought we'd be arguing for months about what the beast was going to be. But I thought, If we can build that, that's it. I was stunned, really. I flipped. Literally flipped. I've never really been so shook up about anything. O'Bannon lit up like a light bulb, shining like a quartz iodine. It was then that I realized I was dealing with a real sci-fi freak, which I'd never come across before. I thought, My God! I have an egghead here. [image] -- To further illustrate his intentions, Scott locked himself in his RSA office part of each day to draw storyboards specifically for Alien. "At that time the budget was something like $4.5 million," he said. "And I was very well aware that we couldn't do it for that. There was a preliminary period of about six weeks, during which we had to work up a new budget. It was fairly apparent that a higher budget was inevitable. So when I came back to London to start casting, I also began work on a storyboard presentation to show Fox where the additional money would be spent." Although he wouldn't board out the entire film, Scott wanted to show Ladd and Fox how certain scenes would play and what they might look like. Fox agreed to wait and see before finalizing the budget. In this endeavor O'Bannon had also been invaluable, for he had also pressed for a visual representation so everyone was on the same page and understood what they were up against, as well as what they were going for. "The boards work for me," Scott said. "It's a way of expressing awareness of the medium. I was an art director before and to draw a sequence helps me think. Once the pictures are right, everything else starts to occur from them. I literally put down every thought I had in my head about how I wanted it to be." [image] -- At Shepperton, Weaver was taken through a display of Giger artwork by Scott. "They showed me the design and I was like, 'Woooo!'" Weaver said in 1979. "It was a wonderful exploitation of everybody's darkest fears. I thought, It's going to be beautiful and frightening at the same time." Later she'd say that she thought of the phase III alien: "This is a giant penis!" She was then toured around the stages, which left her "impressed by the people," the production crew of Alien. That night, "I sat down," Weaver said. "I thought, Well, Sigourney, you'd really better make up your mind if you want to do this or not. They've already flown you out here. If you don't, you better think about ending it. I thought about Ripley a long time before deciding I really wanted to play her ... "I liked that they had broken the rule and written two of the parts, originally designed for men, for women to play," she continued. "I remember thinking, Women aren't allowed to play these warriors and I've been handed this opportunity to play this woman who becomes a warrior and goes from someone rational to someone who's completely instinctive. There was a no-nonsenseness to Ripley. I think she grew up believing there was a certain order to things that could not be broken or changed. And her beliefs are exploded when she suddenly has to work on instinct and emotion. She has to make decisions she hopes are right, but she never will know for sure. I loved that uncertainty because that's something that could be quite frightening to me, to be responsible for a group of people. "I finally decided I really liked the character of Ripley, as well as the designs and Ridley Scott. Besides, I didn't want anyone else to do it. It wasn't until the day before I did the screen test that I thought, Yes, I would really like to do this, it's going to be interesting." [image] -- One eyewitness recalled Weaver screaming, Stanton being sick and Skerritt throwing himself back against a wall, "both hands covering his mouth, his eyes wide in terror"--but it was Cartwright who stole the moment. "One of the blood hoses happened to be angled right straight at Veronica's face," said O'Bannon, "so this jet of blood, about 3 ft. long, caught her smack in the kisser. The amount of blood was unparalleled. It knocked her right off her feet. She was screaming--it was pretty convincing. I was delighted!" "Veronica looked white and was shaking and she was crying as more blood kept flying around," Christian concluded. "Poor John Hurt was soaked in it, but kept on acting until Ridley softly whispered 'Cut.' Then they all stood around in shock, covered in splattered blood while the crew applauds. Two technicians rush over to help Veronica. They lead her off the set like some pitiful accident victim, visibly shaking. "Derek Vanlint rushes to the bathroom, clutching his mouth. O'Bannon walks up to Veronica, beaming: 'That was fantastic. What you did was incredible.' Veronica glares at him. 'Thanks, Dan.' She quavers, wiping blood from her mouth. 'But I really was sort of freaked out.' "Derek complimented me later," Cartwright said, "by saying none of it bothered him until he saw my face, then he ran off to throw up." [image] -- Although the Jones "family" cats were trained, when Weaver had to retrieve one on the bridge and put it in the box designed by Cobb, things bogged down. "They shot that scene time after time," said Cobb. "Here is the entire crew of this huge spaceship set, the lights, the camera, the dolly, the director, the assistant director, and the makeup people, and the assorted little cat cages that they had full of cats for different takes. We're all sitting around, very tense, waiting. Everybody is being very quiet while someone is trying to get this cat to go to sleep on this control seat. Finally, the assistant director, with this very loud megaphone, says: "Stand by! The cat's lying down, the cat's lying down. Stand by!' Everybody's getting ready,. and finally he says, 'What? It's asleep! It's asleep!!' "But then the cat wouldn't be there when the camera panned down. Or the cat would jump on Sigourney as soon as she walked in. Or the seat would catapult forward and the cat would disappear into the rafters above the set for good. Then they'd have to get another cat until someone could find the first one. Then they have to be calm and wait for this cat to go to sleep. You couldn't get the same cat back into that seat after it had been frightened out of its wits. No way. For one entire afternoon, there were cats flying all over the place." [image] -- Because Fox executives had experienced a preview gone wrong a year before, executives in Dallas started to worry. (A scene in a film about Vietnam vets, Rolling Thunder, had actor Willian Devane put his hand down a waste disposal unit and grind it to the bone, which caused the audience to react viscercally and nearly attack Ladd; one account had his shirt ripped off.) Scott removed his dark blue jacket because he thought it made him look like an executive and a potential target. Because of the emotional responses, he then found himself in a debate about the sound level with Ladd in the foyer. "Laddie had come to argue with me," Scott said. "Laddie said, 'I'm getting a bit worried--we're overdoing things--this is too strong.' So I said, 'Nonsense. We're all right, we're in good shape,' but I noticed he was looking away and there was this incredible crash as an usher came through the door and collapsed. He collapsed! There was this huge thud and he landed face down on the tiles! The manager rushed in and said, 'Christ, this is too much, man!' and carried the usher outside to give him fresh air and pat his face. I went out and said, 'You must have eaten something. Do you feel all right?' And he said, 'No, no, I'm all right. That scene with the robot--he got his head knocked off! Who thinks of this stuff?'" "At that point, there was panic among the Fox ranks," Powell said. "'Are we going to get lynched?!'" Ladd had had enough. He grabbed his wife and ran for their car. Back in the theater, onscreen, Ripley was frantically running through the corridors looking for Jones. "Leave the fucking cat!" someone screamed. But the audience behaved themselves and the film came to a peaceful end. [image] Who needs film school when there are books like this? The Making of Alien features production art, storyboards, set photos and photocopies of documents, but I enjoyed the behind-the-scenes Polaroids most. Rather than look like it was made in the '70s, Alien is shot and edited in a way that looks like it was made today, and the Polaroids maintain that intimacy. I appreciated how thoroughly Rinzler tracks how much money was spent day to day; accounting is pretty boring and rarely mentioned, as if all you need in Hollywood is a good pitch and cash will just appear magically. This book reinforces how every minute of filmmaking is fueled by available money and fights over money. [image] ...more |
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Apr 28, 2022
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May 06, 2022
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Apr 26, 2022
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| 1510751769
| 9781510751767
| B07TH9N3X2
| 3.81
| 331
| unknown
| Feb 18, 2020
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did not like it
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The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--continues with The Science of Women In Horror: The Special Effects, Stun
The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--continues with The Science of Women In Horror: The Special Effects, Stunts and True Stories Behind Your Favorite Fright Films by Meg Hafdahl. & Kelly Florence. I snapped this up on Kindle by virtue of the magnificent title and the fact that I am the demographic for this book. I never skip an opportunity to learn something about women in the horror genre, but I abandoned this book at the 15% mark. The writing is abnormally poor, hurling facts at the reader that are readily available on Wikipedia (like the Webster's definition of post-traumatic stress syndrome). The authors explore no film at any depth, skirting through plot and sprinkling in some quotes from the filmmaker, which anyone could read online. Those hoping for a book that documents the making of films like Carrie (not included), The Howling (not included), The Craft (not included), Jennifer's Body (not included) or Midsommar (not included) will be disappointed. Please do not buy this book sight unseen like I did. Read the first chapters before parting with your mad money. This subject matter deserves far more thought and effort than the writers gave it. Hafdahl & Florence have "written" two other books, one on Stephen King and one on monsters, all with "The Science of" in the title. This book certainly has the feeling of something that was cranked out to bring in a revenue stream. As a genre fan I was highly disappointed. Moving on, I'll share a few thoughts on the film that's not only my favorite Women In Horror but my favorite film of all time: Alien (1979). I've seen Alien in theaters every five years or so since the age of 14. I've studied the 177-minute behind-the-scenes documentary, The Beast Within, which you can watch on YouTube. YouTube also features Millennials or Gen Z recording their reaction to movies they're watching for the first time and Alien is a top selection for most of them. Men and women alike remain on edge for the entire film. And this is a so-called old movie from the '70s. It looks like it could've been made a few years ago. [image] Alien was so far ahead of its time that it's still out in front of how movies are written today. This can be best expressed by Helen Mirren, who in her MasterClass isn't discussing horror films or any film in particular but how actors can transcend traditional casting choices when she brings up Alien. She gives writing credit to the film's director Ridley Scott instead of the original screenwriters Dan O'Bannon & Ronald Shusett, but her observations are on point: The first time I understood what was possible was I was privileged enough to read the script of Alien. I was up for a role in it, which I didn’t get, sadly. But I was privileged to read the original script, Ridley Scott’s script of Alien. And it was brilliant, because the way it was written, all the characters had names like Ripley, or, I don’t know, Tonn, they had these weird names that could be male or female. There was not a single direction in the script that said whether this was a man or a woman. It didn’t say, "Ripley is a tall, athletic woman with a fierce determination in her eyes," that sort of stage direction which you often get. So annoying. There were no stage directions at all for any of the characters, so any of the characters could have been played by a man or a woman. And that was such a liberating idea for me. I had never thought of that before. Thought that was possible. And there it was, laid out for me in this wonderful script of Alien. And from that moment on, it really transformed my thinking about who could play what and why. And Alien was quite a long time ago and it’s taken us all--and especially the world of producers and writers and directors--to catch up, and indeed the audience, to catch up. [image] Previous reviews in the Year of Women: -- Come Closer, Sara Gran -- Veronica, Mary Gaitskill -- Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, Viv Albertine -- Pizza Girl, Jean Kyoung Frazier -- My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh -- Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Fannie Flagg -- The Memoirs of Cleopatra, Margaret George -- Miss Pinkerton, Mary Roberts Rinehart -- Beast in View, Margaret Millar -- Lying In Wait, Liz Nugent -- And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie -- Desperate Characters, Paula Fox -- You, Caroline Kepnes -- Deep Water, Patricia Highsmith -- Don't Look Now and Other Stories, Daphne du Maurier -- You May See a Stranger: Stories, Paula Whyman -- The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, Deesha Philyaw -- White Teeth, Zadie Smith -- Eva Luna, Isabel Allende -- Slouching Toward Bethlehem: Essays, Joan Didion -- Eve's Hollywood, Eve Babitz -- You're on an Airplane: A Self-Mythologizing Memoir, Parker Posey -- The Beauty of Living Twice, Sharon Stone -- Fade Into You, Nikki Darling -- The Last Stargazers: The Enduring Story of Astronomy's Vanishing Explorers, Emily Levesque -- The Smallest Lights in the Universe: A Memoir, Sara Seager ...more |
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Oct 11, 2021
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Oct 13, 2021
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May 07, 2021
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Kindle Edition
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| 0525656766
| 9780525656760
| 0525656766
| 3.70
| 6,967
| Mar 30, 2021
| Mar 30, 2021
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really liked it
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The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--continues with Sharon Stone and The Beauty of Living Twice. Published th
The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--continues with Sharon Stone and The Beauty of Living Twice. Published this year, Stone charts the peaks and depressions of her extraordinary life so far, beginning her story at the ER bleeding in her brain and nearing death in 2001. Her childhood in Pennsylvania, modeling and acting career, tempestuous family, ten years of superstardom, sexual abuse by her maternal grandparents, philanthropic work and rehab from her stroke are explored. It's a harrowing trip. -- By not being put in a typical gender role-playing position at home, I was able to learn a lot of traditionally male-oriented skills, such as how to make and pour concrete, and how to lay a stone wall so it didn't fall over. All of us learned how to build a house, and since we grew up in Amish country, we learned it the Amish way, building the frame and the sides and then raising them with ropes. I mowed the lawn, shoveled snow, climbed trees, and played golf. I beat up my brothers, so I didn't get beaten up. Which is not to say there wasn't an absolute rule with Dad about not hitting girls; it was just that the boys didn't think it applied to sisters until we kicked their asses. [image] -- As a model, I was often called in to do the "difficult" jobs. I guess they thought I was the smarter, tougher one. Those jobs where they thought the guy might be tough, or the client hard to deal with. I worked with the Buf-Puf client who put me in a light box: a small box the size of my body lined entirely with lights, with a dish of water in front of me; I was meant to take the sponge out of it and show it to the camera near my face. She just kept telling me a thousand ways to say "Buf-Puf": accent on the "Buf" or on the "Puf," whatever--she kept drilling me as if I were an object in the box. And for her I was. A million-degree box, with an assistant putting cold towels on my back so I didn't pass out. I did jobs famous men who arrived drunk, and with famous men who arrived sober and were terrific and with whom I am friends today, like Bruce Willis, who was spectacular and funny and kind. -- After I was told that I got the part in Basic Instinct, I was asked to come in to meet with Paul Verhoeven, as well as some other people from the production company. I was so nervous and excited I could hardly hear. I met with Paul in the company's offices in Hollywood, then said hello to a few other people on the way down to fill out some paperwork and meet the line producer, an older, kind of dodgy man, in his messy office. He closed the door and sat down and said, "You were not our first choice, Karen. No, you were not even the second or the third. You were the thirteenth choice for this film." He continued to call me Karen all through the making and postproduction of the movie. I left that meeting so messed up that I got into my car in the parking lot, put on my rap music super-loud, and back into a semi three feet behind me. [image] -- Also, for the ten years of the on-fire piece of my career this caused me to skip all medical needs. Dislocated shoulder: suck it up. Root canal in my trailer with no novocaine at lunchtime: that was not a great one, I can say; I had that redone twice--and then had total jaw surgery to repair the damage from this absolutely stupid behavior. Bursting ovarian cyst: get some super-strong meds, and change it from a standing scene to a sitting scene. Broken foot from an overzealous stuntman: get a bigger boot for that foot, finish the show, and then get it rebroken and repaired after the show wraps. In other words, shut up and deal. There isn't room for babies in this biz, especially if I, as a woman, want to prove my mettle. -- Now that I look back on it, the hideousness of all of it, the unbearable pain of recovery, how I could be sitting on the couch and it would feel like someone had punched me in the face; my head would swivel, I would make a sound as if hit, and my face, only on that side, would suddenly turn bright red. Or I would get brutal pains on the top of my head and these inch-high lumps would come up, scattered over my scalp. Or my leg would feel like it was bleeding or wet, or burning. My fuse box was so messed up it was sending all kinds of weird signals all over the place. I was about to find out that I wouldn't be able to read for another two years or remember where I'd put down my teacup. But I was up and I was alive and I had a one-and-a-half-year-old baby boy who needed a mother. I didn't know how I would do it, but I knew I would. Stone's #metoo moments are like practice drills compared to her serious tests: growing up in a lower-middle class family of six in Pennsylvania, three miscarriages, losing custody of her adopted son and the removal of two benign tumors in her breasts, which led to her laying on one side, which led to blood pooling on that side of her brain which nearly killed her. A difficult rehabilitation and a search for inner peace was waiting for her next. Material rewards had been fleeting. Basic Instinct, her most popular film, is cited most often and her account of its opening weekend is one of the more amazing descriptions of the actor's life I've come across: -- When I played a serial killer in Basic Instinct I tapped into that rage. It was terrifying to look into the shadow self and to release it onto film for the world to see. To allow people to believe that I was "like that." Even more, to let myself know that I have or had that darkness within. I can say that it was and is the most freeing thing I have ever done. To engage my full self so very deeply and to free that dark angel. To know that I was angry--to know that I was so angry that I would have loved to stab Clarence to death--was incredibly freeing. Ultimately, it also let me know that I wasn't really the stabbing type. Letting myself process that rage was magnificent, and I think letting others feel that release was a bit therapeutic for the audience. I know it's not just me. The day Basic Instinct came out in theaters I hired a limo. Mimi and I started in Harlem and went to movie theaters all over NYC, from one side of town to the other, into the wee hours of the morning. We had bought two bowler derbies and wore our hair up inside and both of us wore our glasses. We watched about twenty minutes at each theater. Harlem was my favorite. People were yelling and screaming at the screen. Cheering my character on. We were having a ball, seeing the reactions all over town. We stopped in the Upper East and West Sides, Hell's Kitchen, all the way into the Bowery. We were running in and out of theaters at various points during the film and fleeing like thieves into the day and night. And the audiences went wild, they loved this movie! It was one of the best times. The next morning while we had a glorious, celebratory breakfast, the horrible reviews came out. [image] I found The Beauty of Living Twice compelling not by virtue of its writing, its study of the acting craft or even its potential for backstage intrigue. Stone admits that actresses have a reputation for "faking it"--which made her diagnosis nearly fatal and far more difficult than it should've been--but even taking that into account, I was moved by the strength this woman has summoned to complete the many trials of her life. She should not be alive. We shouldn't even know her name. Sharon Stone was born in 1958 in Meadville, Pennsylvania. Her father was a tool-and-die manufacturer. Her mother was a homemaker and briefly an accountant. Considered academically gifted as a child, Stone was awarded a creative writing scholarship to Edinboro University of Pennsylvania at the age of 15. Crowned Miss Crawford County in 1975, Stone was drawn to the film industry and dropped out of college. Initially interested in directing, she moved to New York to pursue a modeling and acting career. She was plucked as an extra on Woody Allen's Stardust Memories for a larger, memorable but non-speaking role in the 1980 film. Stone spent a year in Zimbabwe and South Africa for her first film leading role in King Solomon's Mines and Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold. Supporting roles in two more action films led to a break playing a treacherous spy in the blockbuster Total Recall for director Paul Verhoeven. When as many as twelve leading ladies passed on the role of Catherine Trammell in Verhoeven's next film Basic Instinct, Stone fought for a screen test and won the part. Superstardom ensued. The prestige of her Academy Award nomination for Best Actress opposite Robert DeNiro and Joe Pesci led to Stone producing and starring in The Quick and the Dead, for which she plucked Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio out of obscurity to co-star with her. Stone has served as Global Campaign Chair for amfAR for twenty years, heightening awareness for AIDS research. In 2013, she was honored by the Nobel Peace Laureates with the Peace Summit Award for her work. Stone lives in San Francisco. [image] Previous reviews in the Year of Women: -- Come Closer, Sara Gran -- Veronica, Mary Gaitskill -- Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, Viv Albertine -- Pizza Girl, Jean Kyoung Frazier -- My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh -- Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Fannie Flagg -- The Memoirs of Cleopatra, Margaret George -- Miss Pinkerton, Mary Roberts Rinehart -- Beast in View, Margaret Millar -- Lying In Wait, Liz Nugent -- And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie -- Desperate Characters, Paula Fox -- You, Caroline Kepnes -- Deep Water, Patricia Highsmith -- Don't Look Now and Other Stories, Daphne du Maurier -- You May See a Stranger: Stories, Paula Whyman -- The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, Deesha Philyaw -- White Teeth, Zadie Smith -- Eva Luna, Isabel Allende -- Slouching Toward Bethlehem: Essays, Joan Didion -- Eve's Hollywood, Eve Babitz -- You're on an Airplane: A Self-Mythologizing Memoir, Parker Posey ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jun 23, 2021
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Jun 28, 2021
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Mar 30, 2021
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Hardcover
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| 0062908502
| 9780062908506
| 0062908502
| 4.40
| 2,798
| Nov 17, 2020
| Nov 17, 2020
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it was amazing
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"Life imitating art" is a phrase I hear but don't immediately cotton to. Then Alright, Alright, Alright: The Oral History of Richard Linklater's Dazed
"Life imitating art" is a phrase I hear but don't immediately cotton to. Then Alright, Alright, Alright: The Oral History of Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused illustrates all too well what life imitating art means. Published in 2020, Melissa Maerz chronicles filmmaker Richard Linklater, a huge cast of then unknowns and crew members from L.A. and Austin as they dramatized the last day of the 1976 school year for a movie. In doing so, Maerz chronicles what high school is: friendships, rivalries, tests, confrontations with authority, drugs, alcohol, romances, breakups, music, clothes, classmates who graduate to enviable success, classmates who disappear, life, death and the passage of time. This book was poignant for me because Richard Linklater split his childhood with his mom in Huntsville, Texas and father in Houston in the 1970s and I grew up in Houston in the 1980s. When Dazed and Confused was being shot in Austin in the summer of 1992, I'd just finished my freshman year of college at the University of Texas at Austin. I sometimes wonder what it'd be like to magically visit the set of a classic movie as it was being created but here was a seminal film that literally shot around the corner from me at a time where I might've actually been hired to work on it. Part of me thinks I'm way too introverted to run cable and made better use of my time reading and writing, while another part of me wishes for a do-over. This book was that do-over. -- Gary Price: Austin was so cheap. Everybody I knew at the time was living in a house where it was like $300, total--to rent the entire house! That's why Austin had so many musicians and artists. It has the University of Texas, which elevates the intellectual pursuits, but it's still a lazy place, because you don't have to make money to live there. People said Stevie Ray Vaughan could play like that because he only had to pay $60 a month in rent. How could he not come up with great songs when he could just play guitar all day and not work? [image] -- Richard Linklater: I had the indie film success to some degree. And one night, Gus Van Sant was in town, showing My Own Private Idaho, and one of his producers told me, "You're going to say a lot about yourself in your next film. You're going to tell everybody where you see yourself. Are you the weird indie guy, doing weird films? Or do you belong in the studio system?" And I took that to heart. If I was ever going to do that, now might be the right time. -- Marisa Ribisi: In film, it's always like, "What's your big moment? What's the catalyst? What's it about?" And I think Rick was like, "It's not about anything. It's about people existing." If you look at Dazed and Confused, there was the A-story, which is, "Is Pink gonna take the pledge with the football team?" But really, they're just hanging out. How do you pitch that film? "It's the 1970s, it's the bicentennial, the music is gonna be great"? "Here, let me give you millions of dollars!" -- Sasha Jenson: For me, talking about that summer feels the same as if you were the schoolyard with your friends many years ago and you just were playing around with a bunch of people, and you never really paid attention to the moment, because it didn't feel special at the time. And then many years later, people were like, "Remember when you were on the swing set? That was so awesome!" And you're just like, "Huh?" It didn't feel like we were making a movie, you know? It just felt like we were all playing together, and there happened to be cameras there. That's the thing that's so unique about this movie. I go back to other high school movies and the relationships feel contrived. But Rick was trying to build real life chemistry with these kids. And I think he got it. [image] - Parker Posey: Rick wanted to create an authentic high school experience in 1976, and we were fully committed. High school can be catty. Does that sound sexist? Weren't the '70s sexist? Aren't we still in this patriarchal thinking? Obviously. The pitting against. It's constant and it's catty. Do I think men like to see that? Yes. When will this dialogue get so boring to the point of getting back to interesting and human? -- Matthew McConaughey: I mean, if we're going to sit here and do any kind of psychoanalysis or objective judgment, if you're gonna try to break Wooderson down, you're already in a different narrative than he is. The everyday world, the manners and social graces, and the way life is supposed to go on and men are supposed to evolve--yeah, he doesn't fit in that. He's on his own frequency. He is living in ignorance. Wooderson is not the kind of guy who's gonna get conscious of, "Oh, this is creepy." He's just the kind of guy that goes, "I'm sorry you see it that way. Whatever's going on in your life, I hope you get through it." I love characters and people in life with great convictions that are outside of the mainstream. At least you see where they stand. -- Adam Goldberg: It seemed unknown whether it was going to be a Fast Times-type mainstream success. But from the moment I saw the trailer, which looked like it was actually made in 1976, I was like, Oh, this is an independent movie. [image] -- Richard Linklater: Before Dazed came out, I thought, maybe I'm one of those directors whose personal films are actually commercial, too. I think that's what the disappointment was. I thought my little whimsical, quirky ideas were totally in sync with the broader public, and then Dazed kind of proved they weren't. This set a template that I've gotten so used to, it hardly bothers me anymore. I learned right then and there not to consider how a film did financially as the barometer of much of anything. It's really not something you can control--it's out of your hands. The deal I made with the film gods was simply to be able to make films. The definition of success wasn't spelled out. -- Jason London: I did a movie with Susan Sarandon, and she said, "I saw your movie two nights ago, but we didn't realize you needed to smoke a joint first, so we're going to get blazed and go see it again tomorrow." That's when I started to realize, this could be big. -- Mark Duplass: There's this theory amongst a lot of storytellers right now that if you're creating a television show or a movie, you should set it before the year 2000, because people really want to live in worlds where social media doesn't exist. It's the biggest wish fulfillment you can offer audiences right now. And I think that might relate to the legs on Dazed and Confused, particularly now. [image] Melissa Maerz was a founding editor of Vulture (the website of New York Magazine) and has served stints as an editor at Spin and Rolling Stone. One of the things I loved about how she compiled this book was letting subjects respond to someone else's versions of events, which don't always correlate when people with egos who enjoyed having a good time try to recall things that happened 25 years ago. An entire chapter is devoted to the legend surrounding the discovery of Matthew McConaughey (at a bar atop the Hyatt Regency in Austin.) See Dazed and Confused if you haven't already. Buy this book if you have. [image] ...more |
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Dec 13, 2020
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Dec 16, 2020
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Dec 08, 2020
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| 1845763432
| 9781845763435
| 1845763432
| 4.50
| 911
| Nov 21, 2005
| Oct 11, 2006
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it was amazing
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Film school in a box. There's no better way for me to describe Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th, which regardless of wha
Film school in a box. There's no better way for me to describe Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th, which regardless of what your opinion of slasher movies or this long-running series is--11 films and a television series are covered--stands as one of the best books I've read about the creative process. Published in 2006, it's an oral history, which I always appreciate, and author Peter Bracke exhausts every aspect of the making of low budget, non-union movies--financing, script development, casting, production, special effects, post-production, distribution, marketing, etc.--which is literally grab a camera and your friends and make a movie. -- Sean Cunningham, Producer & Director: I discovered Bruno Bettleheim and his book Uses of Enchantment back in the mid-1970s when I had tried to develop an update of Hansel & Gretel. He says one of the values of these grim, ugly fairy tales is that young people have unnamed fears: fears of abandonment, fears of death, fears involving sexual repression. Scary stuff. Parents read these stories and get spooked, but the kids love it, because at a young age we don't have words or names to go around these things, we just know they are out there lurking. What fairy tales can do, and by extension certain kinds of horror movies can do, is take the fear, dress it up in a costume, look at it in the safety of a story and then put it away. We had a tough bullet to bite--there is no discount for the patron at the box office to see a low budget movie. On any particular night, people are either going to see your film or someone else's. They are all first-run movies. Even at that time, the whole idea of a second feature, the B-movie that plays at drive-ins and exploitation houses, didn't exist anymore as a viable alternative to conventional distribution. That was the reality. When Victor and I were conceiving Friday the 13th, we were very aware that we needed to create something that had an element of circus to it. -- Victor Miller, Screenwriter: Everything happened really fast. This was in the middle of 1979. My first week's work was coming up with about 50 different venues. Anywhere that kids would be. Like high schools, playgrounds, forests, whatever. I would go over and pitch my ideas to Sean and we would say, "Nah, nah, nah." Then I remembered that going away to summer camp was just too scary for me. My older brother went to camp and I did not like the stories he came back with--the whole idea living in these big rooms with people and sleeping in double bunk beds sounded pretty awful. So I finally went over to Sean's and said, "I think I got it. It's a summer camp before it opens." And we both said, "Yippie!" I went off to my little office, typing my life away. And after I started writing I came up with the highly unfavorable title of "Long Night at Camp Blood." That was its working title until about the third or fourth draft, when Sean came and said, "I've got the name of the movie." -- Barry Moss, Casting Director: The first thing you do when you cast is, you read the script and write down your ideas for the role. Then you send a breakdown out to all the agents and ask for their submissions, and they send you headshots and resumes. From there you audition--usually the casting director interviews everybody first, and then you bring back your top choices to read for the director. On Friday the 13th, we usually brought in three or four actors for each part, and sometimes you just get lucky right on the first day. Like when you bring in Kevin Bacon, and he's the answer--you don't even have to bring in anyone else. -- Kevin Bacon, "Jack": When I first started out, I had the idea there were two sides to acting--"out of work" and "star." That was a misconception that was blown apart when I realized that there was this whole middle range of actors who were making a living in the theatre, playing a wide variety of roles, tuning and tightening and mastering their craft. So I took whatever acting work I could get at the time. I worked as an extra, and tried unsuccessfully to land commercials. I did soap operas. That being said, I think I was still really careful not to make work decisions based on money. Friday the 13th, honestly...it was material that, for whatever reason, I didn't necessarily feel connected to. But I tried to take the size of the budget and the size of the part and the size of the paycheck out of the equation. And then a huge variety of things open up to you, because there is something about a truly collaborative effort that really feels right. Movies are an isolated medium. You're taught or learn to look out for number one--yourself. Rarely do you encounter something that's really my concept of what an ensemble is. -- Betsy Palmer, "Mrs. Voorhees": I was in some city once, doing a radio show and the kids were calling in to talk to "Mrs. Voorhees." And I asked one of the girls, "Why do you kids love this woman so much?" And she said, "Because we know why you did it." That is the reason why I think the character has stayed alive as long as she has. I didn't think I was a bad lady. I thought I just got the short shrift in life. If her little boy hadn't drowned she never would have killed all those counselors. I just tried to save those other children every summer when they tried to reopen the camp. Doesn't the movie talk about how I had set fires and poisoned the water, and it eventually closes the camp down? Doesn't it make sense? -- Tom Savini, Special Makeup Effects: It's a very primitive thing, but it's all about a mindset. It's the same mindset that I teach the students here at my school: "What do I need to make me believe what I'm seeing is really happening?" Then you create the pieces. And in the case of a movie, the pieces are the shots. I need a shot of the actor clean. Then, a shot of the threat of the knife or the threat of the ax. Show that first, because then the audience knows there's going to be a meeting of that weapon and the actor. And finally a shot of the impact, of that meeting. That's what the audience can't wait for. It's almost like an exhibit from your favorite artist. That's really what Friday the 13th was about, not just gore--magic tricks that are fooling you into believing that what you're seeing is really happening. -- Bill Freda, Editor: I remember the Paramount screening distinctly, because I was working the soundboard in the back. All the studio execs at the distribution level were there, too, including Frank Mancusco. And when Sean and I had been editing, we used scratch music. And there was this one piece of music that we used at the end, with a big "Bang!" in it, for when Jason pops out of the water at the end. And at that screening, I remember I took the volume band and just went crazy with it. I mean, everything would shake at that volume. And boy, when I bounced that thing up all the execs just jumped. I think that's the thing that sold it. I think these guys sat there and said, "Even if we buy this movie for the ending, it'll be worth it." -- Steve Miner, Associate Producer: The enjoyment with this kind of film is audience participation. The audience didn't even mind the dumb stuff, because they could talk back to it. They really stayed with the story. What does happen with a lot of these movies is that they have terrific ad campaigns but then don't deliver. I don't think that was the case with Friday the 13th, because business continued strong for weeks and weeks. Practically all of the advertising money was spent during its first week of release, which means that its continued success was based on good word of mouth. I think a film like Friday the 13th is pure entertainment, like a rollercoaster ride is pure entertainment. These excerpts cover the making of the original Friday the 13th (1980) and take the reader to the 13% mark. If I were a film professor, I think I'd want a class to prepare students for what low budget, non-union, by hook or crook filmmaking was all about and I'd use Crystal Lake Memories as my textbook. Each week, Professor Valdez would look at a different aspect of filmmaking, talk about what these guys did and whether it was successful or not. Even if you hate the Friday the 13th movies, and I have criticisms of all of them, I felt like this book was inspiration to go out and produce something better. Bracke's fantastic book served as the basis for a 400 minute documentary of the same name in which most of those he interviewed give on-camera interviews, with footage from all the movies. If I had to choose my favorite, I'd say that the two directed by Steve Miner--Friday the 13th Part 2 and Friday the 13th Part III--stand out. Part 2 has the best Final Girl in Amy Steel, whose character "Ginny" actually uses her college degree to survive Jason, while Part III, shot for and released in 3-D the following year, is the best rollercoaster ride. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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Nov 12, 2020
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Nov 19, 2020
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Nov 19, 2020
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Hardcover
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| 0544648943
| 9780544648944
| 0544648943
| 3.89
| 1,599
| Aug 08, 2017
| Aug 08, 2017
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it was amazing
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As research for a novel I'm writing, I'm not only reading detective fiction but branching out to read memoirs by women or Black, Hispanic and Asian wr
As research for a novel I'm writing, I'm not only reading detective fiction but branching out to read memoirs by women or Black, Hispanic and Asian writers for looks at how they see, or don't see, themselves reflected in popular culture. While I'd never followed the reviews of Carina Chocano during her tenure at the Los Angeles Times from 2003-2008, like Manohla Dargis--whose departure to the New York Times slid Chocano over from TV to film--Chocano was a trustworthy voice from my generation, thoughtful, analytical and enjoyable to read. Chocano's memoir You Play the Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks & Other Mixed Messages mixes stories of her childhood (she was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil in 1968 and moved to New Jersey at the age of 5 when her father, a marketing executive for a pharmaceutical company, was transferred to New York), school days, marriage and motherhood (she gave birth to a daughter the year she was laid off from the Times) with criticism of how women are portrayed in a dozen or so pop culture institutions. Nearly every print publication be it ink or electronic has someone like Chocano reviewing film and TV daily. What makes her book special is how much I realized I had in common with her beyond her impressions of Ghostbusters 2016 (good but not great summer movie). Like me, Chocano grew up in the suburbs in the '70s and '80s, went to school, dated and all the while absorbed many of the same magazines, books and movies that I did. Her book is sharp, creative, passionate and candid. She lays it all out there. She taught me a great deal about how women are misrepresented in film. Even better, she's often very funny. On discovering Katharine Hepburn when she was 12 years old: Before watching The Philadelphia Story, it had never occurred to me that femininity and femaleness were not one and the same thing. I'd dutifully absorbed the lessons embedded in movies, TV shows, ads, magazines, commercials, and cartoons. The frillier, flightier, wilier, sweeter, gentler, kinder, bitchier, more nurturing, scarier, more insecure, more insincere a character was, the more of a "girl" she was. I'd learned to rank female characters by prettiness. Little girls like to claim their heroines' beauty as their own. It's like picking a team, though it's unclear what's being won. The Philadelphia Story marked the first time I remember encountering the idea that this ephemeral but familiar thing I'd recognized all my life as the feminine ideal might be not just distinct from but also possibly oppressive to women. It came as a shock. Here was Tracy, a heroine--a bride, no less--and she was different. She was experienced. She had learned from her youthful mistakes and was making deliberate choices. She had agency. She had a horse. (Not that this was germane, but I really loved horses.) She was comfortable in her own skin, secure, and she believed in herself. She radiated confidence of a kind I'd never seen before in a movie heroine. It wasn't the kind of confidence you usually saw in movie stars. It wasn't just that she was secure in her sexiness. On the contrary, she didn't seem to think about her sexiness at all. What made her attractive was that she acted like a person, not a girl. I did think it was strange to be encountering this in 1980, given that The Philadelphia Story was released in 1940. [image] On revisiting a movie she was obsessed with at 15: Only now, decades later, do I see Flashdance for what it was: a fantasy of self-creation ungrounded in political, material, or economic reality. It was a feature length music video hawking the individualist, bootstrapping Reagan-era fantasy. It said you can do anything (in your imagination). All it takes to lift yourself off the lowest social rung and be borne aloft on wings of stardom and true love is a big dream, a flashy style, a psychotic belief in yourself, and a willingness to sleep with your boss. You just have to want it. You can do it! Girl power! Dream on, sister! And hey, if it doesn't work out, remember you have only yourself to blame. Maybe you weren't good enough, did you ever consider that? Here are some tips for self-improvement. Flashdance taught us that stripping was cool and a great way to put yourself through school. It taught us that the window to success is open for a very short time. Without Nick, Alex would have curdled into something monstrous in no time. [image] I must pause to give Chocano credit for some awesome chapter titles: A Modest Proposal for More Backstabbing in Preschool The Kick-Ass The Bronze Statue of the Virgin Slut Ice Queen Bitch Goddess You Play the Girl was already good but when Chocano turned her lens on the Seth Rogen-Katherine Heigl comedy Knocked Up, which she saw while trying to have a baby, her memoir really took off for me. The problem with Knocked Up wasn't that it was full of moments that made it more than a little bit sexist, even though it was. The problem was that it presented an adolescent boy's perspective of what it means to be an adult woman in a world that has not yet come to terms with the idea of women as autonomous subjects. The problem was that it reveled in its hero's unearned advantage in this world while at the same time refusing to acknowledge what it's like on the other side. The movie refused to so much as utter the word abortion. (It makes somebody say "smashmorshun" instead.) Knocked Up wasn't interested in Alison's life or in her experience or in her options; it was the life stages of a woman as they are seen in fairy tales: child, maiden (hot chick), mother, and crone. Alison was an incubator, not only for her baby but for Ben's maturity. The trouble wasn't only Knocked Up, of course. This take on gender relations circa 2007 was the only perspective anyone got. It was the most suffocating dude-bro imperialism; patriarchy rebranded as "fratiarchy." Watching it, I felt the way I imagine Khrushchev must have felt as Nixon tried to undermine his self-esteem with a tour of the modern American kitchen. Khrushchev was, like, we have kitchens in Russia, too, you know ... But nobody listened. I'm listening and I'd like to hope that content creators either have a jewel like Chocano reading their work before it's shipped worldwide, or has her terrific book on their shelf. [image] ...more |
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Jul 23, 2020
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Jul 30, 2020
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Jul 16, 2020
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Paperback
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| 006289059X
| 9780062890597
| 006289059X
| 4.30
| 857
| Jun 30, 2020
| Jun 30, 2020
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really liked it
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As research for a novel I'm writing, I'm not only reading detective fiction but branching out to read women or Black, Hispanic and Asian writers for l
As research for a novel I'm writing, I'm not only reading detective fiction but branching out to read women or Black, Hispanic and Asian writers for looks at how they see, or don't see, themselves reflected in culture. Next up is my introduction to Shayla Lawson. This Is Major: Notes on Diana Ross, Dark Girls, and Being Dope caught my eye on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ. I curate a good title almost as much as I do a book cover. Reading this book I felt like I was dating someone who's eighteen years younger than me. That might not be everyone's ideal and certainly isn't my preference. I was often lost here but also learned a lot and enjoyed my time with a talented writer. My favorite essays were easily those in which Lawson recounts or dramatizes her experiences as the only black employee at the advertising agency, or the only black person on her Tinder date. These are great stories with antagonists, obstacles and perhaps lessons learned, certainly for me as a reader. My least favorite essays were dedicated to celebrities, playwright Ntozake Shange and musical artist SZA in particular. Having never heard of either and unable to see their play or listen to their music in the essay, I was as lost as I would be if someone from Gen Z were trying to describe a DJ or an app that came out two minutes ago to me. When I was able to relate to what Lawson was interested in exploring, her writing took off for me. -- From Tammy From HR: Becky has not had the time to come up with any ideas. She has been too busy. You say you understand this, this project being a less-important part of her workflow (it's not) than the obviously rigorous schedule she's been maintaining (she hasn't). She grunts, knowing you have seen her empty Google Calendar. She blurts a half-assed idea off the top of her head. You think, that's a stupid idea, and agree it's a great idea, directing her toward the list of reasonably executable advertising campaigns you spent most of the night working up, looking for the thought most similar to hers. She says if you'd been in creative longer, you would know why your idea wouldn't work. That may be so. You ask her if the two of you can keep cracking at hers. You tighten up your smile face and pull out a new piece of blank paper, diving in to her piece of an idea with a preschool teacher's enthusiasm. You know you sound pedantic, but past Beckys have made it clear to you that Beckys like to be spoken to this way. It reminds them of The Help. You have spoken to Beckys other ways in offices and it was always resulted in You made Becky feel like she knows less than you do with her associate's degree and your graduate school education and her previous service customer service job at Macy's and your more senior position in this company and so you bob up and down on the pink carousel horse of Becky's preferred communication style, holding close to its spiral pole. -- From No, My First Name Ain't Whoopi: I've spent enough time living around European and Americans to know that white people, especially white men, tend to think that by pointing out black women in public, they're doing us a favor. Aside from Whoopi, I have been called Florence Griffith Joyner, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, and Macy Gray. I have been called Janelle Monáe, Erykah Badu, Serena Williams, Kelly Rowland, and Gabrielle Union. I have been called "that black woman from Mr. Robot." I have been called a number of black women who look nothing like me or each other. And yet, a few weeks after my Realtor "Whoopi Goldberg" encounter, I was at the Red Bull Crashed Ice Valkenburg games and could identify my husband in a crowd of tall, twenty-something white men, from the back. How do I do it? With a little effort and self awareness, it is quite easy to recognize anybody. The reason why so many white men misidentify me is because they consider black women generic. One dark blob of a face. -- From "Black Lives Matter" Yard Signs Matter: Despite my having grown up in the south, Portland is the most racist place I have ever lived. This is because being anti-racist isn't about using politically correct buzzwords and giving lip-service to sensitive conservation topics. Being anti-racist is about constructing a landscape that is safe for dark people to inhabit. It is not about white people trying to prove they are "woke" by putting up yard signs. That is not even what "woke" means. "Woke" is a territory of open-eyed, unsuperficial, cultural awareness white people are nowhere close to occupying; they are not even in the neighborhood. But being anti-racist in this dangerous era is something they can do, by going out of their way to make non-white people feel safe. -- From Diana Ross Is Major: But casting a thirty-three-year-old in the role of Dorothy was not a foregone conclusion. At fifteen, Stephanie Mills was receiving stellar reviews in the Broadway musical and a lot of people couldn't see how a thirty-something like Ms. Ross could compete with the young ingenue for the role. One of those skeptics was Berry Gordy Jr., the head of Motown, whom Diana Ross had worked with ever since she was a teenager, the man who helped make her a star. Up until then, Gordy had been one of Ms. Ross' biggest advocates; Diana Ross, Gordy's muse. A few years before The Wiz, the two had had huge success on the big screen with her Oscar-nominated film debut as Billie Holiday in the 1972 biopic Lady Sings the Blues. But Gordy did not see Diana Ross as Dorothy, he thought she was too old. What Gordy didn't understand is that Diana Ross is from the future. Diana Ross couldn't have predicted this, but her portrayal of Dorothy as a single adult who can't seem to move out of her family's house is a pretty accurate forecast of black girl millennials. We've grown up in an era where the space between 18-35 has looked less like adulthood and much more like an extended adolescence. Many of us, like Diana/Dorothy, have had to move back home into our childhood bedrooms, as we take inventory of our college degrees, career goals, and the constantly rising cost of living, while we try to figure stuff out. When I watch The Wiz now, I see a twenty-something school teacher living with her aunt and uncle and understand this Dorothy so much better. She is much more relevant to use than any other Dorothy could be. Lawson seems to emphasize her own evolution and observations she's made about being a black woman along the way, both from self-analysis and her analysis of art that impacted her. I couldn't readily follow her references or share her interest in a topic like Black Twitter, but the writing took me out of my suburban white television culture raised background and made me see how it would feel to be made invisible by that culture. ...more |
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Aug 02, 2020
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Aug 06, 2020
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Jun 27, 2020
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Paperback
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| 1335937803
| 9781335937803
| 1335937803
| 3.96
| 6,399
| Mar 05, 2019
| Mar 05, 2019
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liked it
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Beware! The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Legacy of Milicent Patrick is a five-star subject given two-star writing treatment.
Beware! The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Legacy of Milicent Patrick is a five-star subject given two-star writing treatment. Published in 2019, this is a debut book from Mallory O'Meara, who effectively translates her passion for late animator, actor and special effects makeup designer Milicent Patrick--creator of the iconic Gill Man from The Creature From the Black Lagoon--into a noble cause. I just wish I'd been able to fall in love with the writing as much as the subject. Patrick was the daughter of Camile Rossi, a chief construction engineer of Hearst Castle in San Simeon. Milicent was a scribbler, always doodling. She studied at the Chouniard Institute for three years, focusing on illustration and drawing. A frequent visitor of the L.A. art school was Walt Disney, who was looking to build an animation studio staffed by artists who understood how to draw for action. Patrick went to work for Disney in 1939 in the Ink and Paint Department, staffed entirely by women doing meticulous and delicate work of cel inking, regarded by men then and now as women's work, not real animation. Patrick worked on Fantasia, animating one of Disney's greatest monsters, the Chernabog. Layoffs led her into modeling and acting, but Patrick was forever sketching portraits and her artistic skill caught the eye of Bud Westmore, head of the makeup department at Universal Pictures. Patrick's designs brought the beasts of such classic films as It Came From Outer Space, This Island Earth and most notably The Creature From the Black Lagoon to life. Universal even sent Patrick on a national promotional tour to help hype the Gill Man, but Westmore's jealously prompted him to fire Patrick and take credit for her work. [image] Patrick never worked in makeup design again and never complained about being run out of the industry by Westmore either. She passed away in 1998 just as the Internet and in particular the Internet Movie Database were beginning to offer "corrected credits" for many films whose contributors never received their due, either because of arcane union rules, blacklisting or simply the way the film industry regarded crew members until very recently. Now, Westmore's very short Wikipedia page states that he stole credit for designing Gill Man from Milicent Patrick. I hope he's rolling over in his grave. It is a credit to The Lady from the Black Lagoon and Mallory O'Meara that I now know any of this. It's impossible to ignore how poorly her book is written, though. She admits that she encountered skepticism that Patrick's work warranted enough material for a book and those warnings were right. O'Meara gets around her lack of material by commenting about her career, her experiences in the film industry, her tattoo of Milicent Patrick. She pads the book with chatty, pedestrian, flat, blog-style writing that often does everything it can not to focus on Milicent Patrick. The 1940s were turbulent years for the world, for the country and for Milicent. World War II was raging and the anxiety of technological progress loomed over America. The war cast a dark shadow over everything, even Hollywood and sunny California. Fear and uncertainty were ubiquitous. While the world was swirling in turmoil, Milicent stepped out into it for the first time. Besides illustration, one of Milicent's great talents was looking beautiful and poised in front of a still or video camera. Believe me, this is a talent. It is not an easy thing to charm a lens. Being aware of every part of your face and body, keeping every muscle poised, tightened and angled just so is a sort of creative magic that leaves me in awe. [image] I mean, call your area Poison Control hotline and ask for Mr. Yuk, right? Ugh. I'm thrilled that O'Meara wrote The Lady from the Black Lagoon--Milicent Patrick was ready for her long deserved closeup on public radio and television as a pioneering woman in the field of special effects makeup design--but would caution film geeks beware how substandard and padded the writing is. Googling two or three articles about Patrick from professional journalists to learn about her life and contributions would be my recommendation, but it's debatable any of those articles would exist without O'Meara's research and her book, so, I do give her props. [image] Word count: 101,130 words ...more |
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May 17, 2020
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May 19, 2020
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Jul 24, 2019
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Hardcover
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| 1632862123
| 9781632862129
| 1632862123
| 4.11
| 458
| unknown
| Feb 12, 2019
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really liked it
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Well-compiled and educational study of the making of The Wild Bunch (1969), which ranks as one of the greatest westerns ever made and like so many fil
Well-compiled and educational study of the making of The Wild Bunch (1969), which ranks as one of the greatest westerns ever made and like so many films of its era unburdened by the Hays code, hit audiences like nothing they'd seen before. W.K. Stratton doesn't have the ability that Peter Biskind does to put the reader right there as key decisions involving the greatest movies of all time are made, but he's at a disadvantage in that most of those involved in The Wild Bunch have long since passed away. Anyone who loved Once Upon A Time In Hollywood ... might enjoy this book, as it takes place in 1969 and traffics heavily into the men who Quentin Tarantino based Rick Dalton and Cliff Booth on. The genesis of the film was Roy Sickner, one of the greatest stuntmen of all time, who had an sketchy idea for a movie set in 19th century Mexico revolving around action sequences he'd devised. The book peels back how screenwriter Walon Green and screenwriter-director Sam Peckinpah came to be so enamored with Mexico and reflect its culture and history on screen in ways that Hollywood films had never done before. -- Roughly the same age as Buddy Holly and Roy Orbison, Walon Green grew up as a member of the first rock 'n' roll generation: too young for World War II or Korea, too old to be drafted for duty in Vietnam. Though born in Baltimore, Green grew up in L.A., where his stepfather was pop composer James V. Monaco. Through Monaco, Green was exposed to movie-industry people throughout his childhood. He attended public schools in Beverly Hills and was of the right age and in the right place to have been an angst-ridden 1950s teenager of the sort portrayed in Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without A Cause. But Green held a wider, less self-obsessed view of life than many youths of his time. And he had cojones. When he was barely into his teen years, he talked his way into a group from the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History that traveled to Baja California to collect birds and small mammals. One night the group camped unknowingly on a tidal marsh. Green and the others were awakened by a foot of seawater that rolled in with high tide. No one was hurt, but their car sank to its axles in the wet sand. The group set out walking to find help. It took nearly six hours, but they finally found a bunkhouse on a ranch that was miles away from their stranded vehicle. One of the ranch workers spoke a little English, and once he understood the plight of the group, he mobilized a crew of other vaqueros to help the gringos. They traveled to the stuck car, and, with the aid of a World War II-vintage half-track, the vaqueros freed the car. Then the ranch hands invited the yanquis to return to the ranch with them, where they fed Green and his companions and put them up in the bunkhouse. Green was moved by the kindness. "I thought, 'Jesus, these are really special people,'" Green said. "You're stuck in the mud, and they haul you out, but they want nothing for it. To them, it was just the right thing to do. That started my love affair with Mexico." After that, Green returned to Mexico whenever he could and eventually went to college there. Lee Marvin plays a prominent role in the book as the star long attached to play Pike Bishop (he ultimately dropped out to collect the then-unheard of sum of $1 million to star in the ill-fated musical Paint Your Wagon with Clint Eastwood). I can never read too many anecdotes about Lee Marvin and stuntmen developing a movie project between rounds of tequila. I did start skimming the book, with its many sections that read a little too much like Wikipedia posts. I didn't feel I needed to know this much about the wardrobe supervisor. In giving me even greater appreciation for The Wild Bunch, Stratton does his job. ...more |
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Dec 2019
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Dec 02, 2019
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Feb 15, 2019
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Hardcover
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| 0735218218
| 9780735218215
| B01N11RHPM
| 3.16
| 4,030
| Jul 24, 2018
| Jul 24, 2018
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really liked it
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The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--continues with Parker Posey and You're on an Airplane: A Self-Mythologiz
The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--continues with Parker Posey and You're on an Airplane: A Self-Mythologizing Memoir. Published in 2018, this book is predominantly for those familiar with the actor's scene stealing romps in films like Dazed and Confused or Best In Show, or her four-episode arc in Season 3 of Louie playing a bookstore clerk who succumbs to cancer. Words on a page simply can't do her unique performances across three decades justice, but fans should savor this dryly manic peek into the life of one of the most prolific actors of her generation. -- So, my name: When mom was eleven, she was a Girl Scout, and her friend's older sister had a daughter named Parker. Back then my mom thought to herself, "If I ever have a little girl I will give her a strong name like Parker." Her own name was Lynda, spelled with a "Y," and she always hated it. "The obligatory Y," my mom called it. Why, Y, why? So when the doctor asked for a name, my mom said Parker for my first name and Christian for my middle name, because they wanted the help of Jesus and of the Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Posey was from my father, obviously. My mother says she thought the name Posey was silly, and it really is. I know, my name sounds made up. -- Anyway, the focus and energy to shoot in film, which is costly material and not disposable, made the work happen differently. Everyone whirled around like dervishes. Actors hit their marks, made their cues, and knew their lines--there wasn't time to spare. No dillydallying by the crew but horses at the gate, reflexes on, moving large equipment like C-stands and ladders and sandbags to blast off the shot as quickly as possible. "Time is money!" was shouted all day long. Sometimes, I'd sing back, "GE, we bring good things to life." "GE" is short for the grips and electrical department--the ones doing the heavy lifting and loading of the lighting and electrical equipment. -- I was skeptical about Blade: Trinity but when I got my fangs, I got more into it. I put them on and ordered a sandwich at the deli and walked the sidewalks in the East Village, doing errands and acting natural--just another reason to love New York. I got on the phone with the wardrobe designer and shared all these ideas about what a thousand-year-old vampire would wear: talismans of various skulls of the people and animals she'd sucked the life out of, multinational monk garb, crucifixes, grunge Elizabethan, a monkey's head on some monk beads that she'd swing around like Bette Davis. I wanted to be a dirty and chic cavewoman with hair extensions that varied in length and texture--for my vampire to be moody and nihilistic, yet romantic and emotional. I went to set only to have all this nixed, and I ended up as a corporate vampire. I wore designer clothes and dyed my eyebrows blond, wore blue contacts, and sported mainly a tight all-business ponytail. It was actually enough of a change to get me going. -- As I stood there in Mountain Pose, more memories and repressed feelings came up. The biggest thing, probably, was that I recognized myself--or my life. I stood there in prayer, with hands at my heart center, and just felt my life up to that point. I saw the speed of my life and all this running. How I'd grab on to parts and my work as if it were real, as if it were something I could hold on to. I just wanted to be distracted and absorbed at the same time and have it be about something or someone else. I was reaching outside myself, mostly. It's so weird because really I want to disappear and acting allows for that, but at the same time you can see me on the screen of this airplane. Anyway, I started to realize stuff. -- Best In Show is a movie everyone loves. No one's ever said they didn't like it, and if they did I would run away from that person. I'm always shocked when I hear, "The person you played is my sister!" or "She's just like my wife!" I mean, that's nuts! The woman I played screamed at her husband at airports, was maniacally entitled and demanding, and threw fits and yelled at hotel managers and pet store owners. I guess we all get to that point sometimes, though? I have, obviously. Probably the best compliment I ever received was in the parking lot of a Lowe's hardware store in upstate New York. This man had his five-year-old son with him, and he said, pointing at me, "This is the crazy dog lady from Best In Show, and the little kid started laughing. I mean, done. Nothing makes me happier than a five-year-old boy laughing at a grown woman acting like a five-year-old. It's an honor to be a part of this group and to have made so many people laugh. Parker Posey has never married or had biological children (many illustrated photos of her 14-year-old bichon frise/ poodle/ Maltese dog Gracie are included), so You're on an Airplane is devoted entirely to Posey's larger than life childhood, her idiosyncratic career and the spaces that fall in between when she's just her own person, for better or for worse. She recounts being "famous" and having to admit to her director Nora Ephron that she had $1.75 in her checking account. She admits that she's been wrong for roles she's wanted but been rejected for (the female lead in Speed that made Sandra Bullock a star is cited). I was encouraged to read how Posey grew up without connections to show business in rural Louisiana and Mississippi, so discouraged in her hometowns that she didn't want to go outside. She doesn't offer much acting or career advice, but in writing about her journey, does illustrate why she's been so successful. It says something about her uniqueness that so many directors from Richard Linklater to Christopher Guest to Nora Ephron to Woody Allen cast her over and over again. Her whole energy and style reminds me of a character on her way to visit Pee-wee's Playhouse and her book is a lot of fun in that spirit. Parker Posey was born in 1968 in Baltimore but grew up in Monroe, Louisiana and Laurel, Mississippi. Her father was drafted into the U.S. Army and served as a captain liaison officer in Vietnam. Coming home, he ultimately opened a Chevy dealership. Her mother became a junior high school teacher. After studying ballet as a teenager, Posey attended State University of New York at Purchase to study drama, where she spent three years on academic probation due to her tendency to skip rehearsals. Her senior year, an agent landed her a recurring role on the soap opera As the World Turns playing a troublesome teenager. Posey's film work led to the thankless honorary "Queen of the Indies" during the 1990s in low budget movies like Dazed and Confused, Party Girl, The House of Yes, The Daytrippers and Clockwatchers. She was chosen to join Christopher Guest's repertory company with roles in all of his mockumentaries, including Best In Show. She also appeared in You've Got Mail, Josie and the Pussycats, Scream 3, Blade: Trinity and Superman Returns. She recently played Dr. Smith in Netflix's reboot of Lost In Space. Posey currently lives in New York City, where she's resided most of her life. [image] Previous reviews in the Year of Women: -- Come Closer, Sara Gran -- Veronica, Mary Gaitskill -- Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, Viv Albertine -- Pizza Girl, Jean Kyoung Frazier -- My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh -- Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Fannie Flagg -- The Memoirs of Cleopatra, Margaret George -- Miss Pinkerton, Mary Roberts Rinehart -- Beast in View, Margaret Millar -- Lying In Wait, Liz Nugent -- And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie -- Desperate Characters, Paula Fox -- You, Caroline Kepnes -- Deep Water, Patricia Highsmith -- Don't Look Now and Other Stories, Daphne du Maurier -- You May See a Stranger: Stories, Paula Whyman -- The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, Deesha Philyaw -- White Teeth, Zadie Smith -- Eva Luna, Isabel Allende -- Slouching Toward Bethlehem: Essays, Joan Didion  -- Eve's Hollywood, Eve Babitz ...more |
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Jun 16, 2021
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Jun 21, 2021
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Jul 24, 2018
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Kindle Edition
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| 0747544212
| 9780747544210
| 0747544212
| 4.14
| 9,132
| Sep 27, 1998
| Jan 01, 1999
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it was amazing
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However much is true, however much really happened that way, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How The Sex 'N' Drugs 'N' Rock 'N' Generation Saved Hollywood
However much is true, however much really happened that way, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How The Sex 'N' Drugs 'N' Rock 'N' Generation Saved Hollywood by Peter Biskind remains one of my favorite non-fiction reads. For those who hear "film history" and think Titanic, in 1967, the major American film studios were in such disarray and the counterculture seemed to be overturning conventions with such speed that a new generation of filmmakers, by and large under the age of 30, (and universally white males), briefly seized the controls. This director-driven era of American film lasted ten years and generated such groundbreaking pictures as: Easy Rider, M*A*S*H, The Last Picture Show, The Godfather, American Graffiti, The Exorcist, Mean Streets, Chinatown, Jaws, Shampoo, Taxi Driver, Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Apocalypse Now and Raging Bull. Biskind, the former executive editor of Premiere magazine goes behind the scenes of each film and others to explore the creative hubris that resulted in these ever being made and the personal hubris that destroyed the careers of many involved, as well as ultimately turning control from the artisans back over to the financiers. Some choice excerpts: -- [Peter] Fonda's call couldn't have come at a better moment for [Dennis] Hopper. He had hit rock bottom. A wild and disheveled sometime actor, talented photographer, and pioneering collector of Pop Art, a former pal and acolyte of James Dean, whom he had met on the set of Rebel Without a Cause, Hopper had been blackballed for crossing swords with director Henry Hathaway. He was in the habit of buttonholing studio types at parties and hectoring them about the industry--it was rotting from within, it was dead--the Ancient Mariner on acid. He kept saying, "Heads are going to roll, the old order is going to fall, all you dinosaurs are going to die." He argued that Hollywood had to be run on socialist principles, that what was needed was an infusion of money channeled to young people like himself. He recalled, "I was desperate. I'd nail a producer in a corner and demand to know, 'Why am I not directing? Why am I not acting?' Who wants to deal with a maniac like that?" They smirked, moved away. -- Now that The Last Picture Show was happening, Bogdanovich finally got around to reading the book. Peter was in a funk. He was a New York boy, what did he know from small town Texas? Polly [Platt] liked the book because it spoke to her experience growing up in the Midwest. "There were all these movies about this, but they were all fake," she says, "Everything that's in that book, the taking off of the bra, hanging it on the car mirror, the hands that were cold and the girl who would only let him touch her tits, just barely getting your hand up this girl's leg, were experiences I'd had as a young woman. There were parts of the woman's body that were completely off limits in America. These were things that it was just impossible to show in Hollywood films, whereas in European films, like Blow-Up, you saw pubic hair." -- Most films used professional extras; the same faces would turn up again and again, looking like cookie cutouts. Francis didn't want to use professionals, because he didn't want The Godfather to look like other movies. He wanted the faces to look authentic, so he spent a lot of time casting the extras. Says [Gray] Frederickson, "That was not the way Hollywood had ever done things before, and it freaked them out. Extras were extras. To the studio, it was just time wasted." The day they shot Clemenza with the cannoli, Jack Ballard, Paramount's head of physical production, told Francis, "If you don't finish on time today, you're not gonna come to work tomorrow." Rumors flew that, indeed, Coppola was going to be fired. -- Usually, when studio executives screen a picture, they exit without comment. After Ashley, Calley, and Wells saw The Exorcist for the first time, they just sat there, dumbfounded. Calley asked, rhetorically, "What in the fuck did we just see?" They loved it, but did not know what they had, and decided to release it in no more than thirty theaters, where it was to play exclusively for six months, a terrible release pattern for a potential blockbuster, as The Godfather had shown. Nor did Warners preview the picture. They were afraid to. Says [William] Friedkin, "If The Exorcist had previewed it would have never come out. 'Cause people would have written on the cards, 'This is terrible, you have a little girl masturbating with a crucifix, you dirty Jew bastard.' Those were the kind of notes we got anyway, afterward. But if we'd gotten them before, they would have died." -- Meanwhile, [Paul] Schrader continued to write furiously. He desperately wanted to direct. "Somewhere in between how Obsession and Yakuza turned out I realized that if you were a critic or a novelist, you lived by your words," he says. "When you're a screenwriter, that didn't happen. You're half an artist. If you wanted to be in control of your own life, you had to be a filmmaker." He rewrote the Taxi Driver script, wanted it to be an American Notes from the Underground, an American Pickpocket. He read the diary of Arthur Bremer, the man who shot George Wallace. One night, in a New York hotel, he picked up a girl in a bar. When he got her to his room, he realized that she was "1. a hooker, 2. underage, and 3. a junkie. At the end of the night, I sent Marty [Scorsese] a note saying, 'Iris is in my room. We're having breakfast at nine. Will you please join us?' A lot of the character of Iris was rewritten from this girl who had the concentration span of about twenty seconds." -- Lucas felt he was ready to screen Star Wars. The special effects weren't finished, and George had cut in black and white dogfights from old World War II films, but you got the general idea. DePalma, Spielberg, Huyck and Katz, Cocks, and Scorsese met at the Burbank airport. It was foggy, and the flight to San Francisco was delayed. When it finally took off, Scorsese wasn't on board. He was as nervous about Star Wars as Lucas was about New York, New York. He hated flying, but Huyck and Katz thought, Well, he's really competitive, he really didn't want to see it, didn't want to know about the film. As Scorsese puts it, "You'd have the anxiety--if it's better than yours, or even if it isn't better than yours, you think it is. And your friends will tell you it is. And you believe it. For years." -- Simply put, the success of Star Wars, coupled with the failure of New York, New York, meant that the kinds of movies Scorsese made were replaced by kinds of movies that Lucas (and Spielberg) made. As [John] Milius put it, "When I was at USC, people were flocking to Blow-Up, not going to the theaters to the jolted by a cheap amusement park ride. But [Lucas and Spielberg] showed there was twice as much money out there, and the studios couldn't resist that. No one had any idea you could get as rich as this, like ancient Rome. You can clearly blame them." And Friedkin, "Star Wars swept all the chips off the table. What happened with Star Wars was when like McDonald's got a foothold, the taste for good food just disappeared. Now we're in a period of devolution. Everything has gone backward toward a big sucking hole." Easy Riders, Raging Bulls has my highest recommendation for students and others discovering the key films of the era and are looking for more information about this gilded age in Hollywood. Biskind really does his work, getting superstars like Warren Beatty and Steven Spielberg on the record as well as those who worked behind the scenes--like film editors Marcia Lucas and Paul Hirsch--who never became famous. There's gossip (the author has contributed to Vanity Fair) and probably a bit of exaggeration or even misrepresentation on a few fronts, but Biskind covers multiple sides of any event pretty well. None better than the test screening of Star Wars in San Francisco. With the effects and sound finally finished, Lucas screened it again at the Northpoint, just like Graffiti. Marcia had taken a week off from New York, New York to help George. "Previews always mean recutting," Lucas said gloomily, anticipating the worst. The suits were there, Ladd and his executives. Marcia had always said, "If the audience doesn't cheer when Han Solo comes in at the last second in the Millennium Falcon to help Luke when he's being chased by Darth Vader, the picture doesn't work." From the opening shot of the majestic Imperial Starship drifting over the heads of the audience across the black vastness of space studded with stars blinking like diamonds, the place was electric. "They made the jump to hyperspace, and you could see bodies flying around the room in excitement," recalls Hirsch. "When they get to that shot where the Millennium Falcon appears at the last minute, not only did they cheer, they stood up in their seats and raised their arms like a home run in the ninth inning of the seventh game of the World Series. I looked over at Marcia and she gave me a look like, I guess it works, ya know? So we came out, I said to George, 'So whaddya think?' He said, 'I guess we won't recut it after all.'" ...more |
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Sep 16, 2017
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Sep 17, 2017
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Sep 16, 2017
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Paperback
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| 0316295043
| 9780316295048
| 0316295043
| 4.08
| 19,586
| Oct 07, 2002
| Sep 09, 2014
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it was amazing
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Journalist James Andrew Miller and television critic Tom Shales compiled the definitive oral history of Saturday Night Live in 2002, a book that was n
Journalist James Andrew Miller and television critic Tom Shales compiled the definitive oral history of Saturday Night Live in 2002, a book that was nothing short of a master's program in comedy, writing and stagecraft, as well as the business of TV. Friends with interests in those areas, or who were simply fans of SNL, were lobbied hard by me to read it. Subsequently, and not surprisingly, my copy vanished. In 2014, in time for the 40th anniversary of the longest running variety series in television, Miller & Shales have published this expanded edition, which includes the last twelve seasons of the show with one-hundred new pages. I'll now commence lobbying efforts on behalf of this must-read book across social media and place my hardcover copy under lock and key. Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live is straight out the best memoir I've ever read. This is an oral history, which means that except for some chapter setting exposition, Miller & Shales get out of the way and let the history of Saturday Night Live unfold through the memories of the cast members, writers, producers, musicians, hosts, guests and network executives who were there. As you'd expect from the immense reservoir of talent involved in SNL through the years, the insights are priceless. Paul Shaffer, Musician: I met Lorne up in his 17th floor office. For some reason I have this recollection of him looking at two pots of coffee brewing and saying, "Which of these coffees is fresher?" And I'll always remember that. I thought, "This is a guy who speaks in comedic pentameter." I remember that and the fact that his skin was all broken out, because he was nervous. He was putting this show together from scratch, and he hadn't hired anybody yet. Lorne Michaels, Executive Producer: When people come up to me at a party at the end of their first year and say, "I can't tell you how much I appreciate this, and I'm so grateful for this opportunity," I always go, "Well, let's talk about this in year six, because that's when it will actually matter. Because now all the power is on my side and you have no power." The test of character is how people behave when they're successful and they have more power. Some people handle it really well. Chris Rock, Cast Member: How can anyone hate the guy? A lot of people have problems with Lorne. A lot of people I've met from the show come from these great backgrounds, and they're not used to working for people. And you know he hired you to work for him, there's no working with. You're only working with if you count the money at the end of the night. Otherwise you're working for. And when you're working for somebody, you're going to have to do shit you don't want to do. Al Franken, Writer: People used to ask me about this and I'd always say, "No, there was no coke. It's impossible to do the kind of show we were doing and do drugs." And so that was just a funny lie I liked to tell. Kind of the opposite was true, unfortunately--for some people, it was impossible to do the show without the drugs. John Landis, Film Director: I went up to the SNL offices. John was giving me a tour, when a very sexy girl walks by. Tight jeans and a T-shirt, no bra, curly hair. "Oh my God, who is that?" And John says, "That's Rosie Shuster. That's Lorne's wife and Danny's girlfriend." Which is true. It was wild. Rosie's the one who coined the best line about Aykroyd. Danny had studied in a seminary to be a Jesuit priest the same time he was doing second story jobs in and around Ontario. Rosie's the one who said, "Danny's epiphany would be to commit a crime and arrest himself." Buck Henry, Host: There were people outside the cast that I look at and say, "They could have been cast members"--Tom Hanks, Alec Baldwin, John Goodman and Steve Martin. Those four people were essentially cast members, because they really fit into the format and they understood their work, and they were really great guest hosts. Tim Kazurinsky, Cast Member: One little test I used to do was on a Monday morning when we'd meet the host, I would ask the host if he would be interested in doing a sketch called "The William Holden Drinking Helmet". I would always gauge their reaction, because poor Bill Holden had fallen and cracked his head open and bled to death. So I always thought, if they laughed at that at least, I knew it would be a good week. And if they went, "What?! Aw, no, that's sick," then I thought, "Aw-oh, we're dicked." That was my little running gag to see if they had a sense of humor or if they were going to be a dickhead like Robert Blake. Ana Gasteyer, Cast Member: I speak to college groups and stuff about being a woman. This era has been clearly less scathed--if that's a word--and if anything, I think we were exalted, for reasons that weren't always clear to me early on, Molly Shannon and Cheri Oteri and I. We got press for it. We got press for being this trifecta of women that turned the show around. I mean, that's what they talked about. I don't think there's such a thing as actual exaltation every day in this place, because there's just too many creative people that need exaltation at any given time. But, you know, we were written up and we were photographed together. That sort of signifies that you've changed a tune, and certainly we heard it anecdotally all the time--that the women are the best thing on the show. James Downey, Writer: The 2008 election had that really interesting thing going on between Obama and Hillary in the front half, and in the back half you had Tina Fey doing Sarah Palin. I never thought the writing for the Sarah Palin character was particularly great until the last one, the vice presidential debate. But her performance was so incredibly great. It's one of the all-time great political impressions. You just got that "Thank you, God!" kind of break where you had Sarah Palin and Tina Fey on the planet at the same time. You can't count of getting those kinds of things. I became a fan of SNL at the age of 9 when Eddie Murphy, only ten years older and maybe ten pounds heavier than I was, joined the cast and shot to superstardom. Many viewers discovered the show with Murphy and haven't watched it since he left. I stayed glued for a decade, through Dana Carvey's tenure as Bush, Perot, the Church Lady and later, Garth to Mike Myers' Wayne. I seemed to move on around the time Will Ferrell and others replaced them in 1995. I'd watched The Best of John Belushi and The Best of Dan Aykroyd on VHS tape, but as for the new casts, relied on my mom to recite the latest sketches for me. One of the reasons that Live From New York makes for such a compelling read -- even for those who'd maintain, "Well, sorry, not a fan of that show" -- is the bigger picture of how what was happening in Studio 8H at 30 Rock Plaza was a microcosm of what was going on in the United States. SNL doesn't invent culture; the show mirrors what's happening in culture and to read this book is to travel across forty years of it: the rise and fall of '60s counter-culture; the struggle by women, minorities and homosexuals for equality in the workplace; shifting attitudes toward sex, drugs and even health. At 745 pages (not including the indexes), Live From New York would make a wonderful gift for anyone you know with even a passing interest in comedy, writing, performing or social studies. You just can't borrow my copy; I'm keeping this on my shelf for quick reference whenever I need a shot of creativity. My only regret is that Amy Poehler & Tina Fey can't travel back in time to try to mesh with the show in the wild and crazy '70s and stop John Belushi from overdosing. Even comedy heroes of mine have limitations to their powers. ...more |
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Oct 06, 2014
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Oct 10, 2014
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Sep 24, 2014
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