Please, Mr. Broderick
paperhaus October 29th, 2008
Say yes to the nice Twist & Shout people. Friday, the Village Halloween Parade, you and Cameron and that skinny girlfriend and a really beautiful car. Or really, just you.
Shake it up for Bueller.
Archive for the 'Film' Category
So do you have a cookbook there, Mrs. Muir?
paperhaus August 17th, 2008
Who knows why The Ghost and Mrs. Muir ended up on my Netflix list — I must have realized that I’d seen the TV version but never the film original. I thought it was kind of a gothic-ish, romance-ish film, which it was. But golly, it was also about a book!
Gene Tierney plays a young widow who rents a beachside house haunted by the ghost of a salty old sea captain. Yeah, really salty: salty language, sea-captain clothes, rough seaworthy beard. He tries to scare her away, and when she won’t run, well, you can guess what happens. What you might not remember is that when Tierney’s funding stream dries up, she and Rex Harrison — the sea captain — hatch a plan. He will write a book, she will publish it, buy the house and, when she dies, leave it as a retirement home for other men of the sea.
The book is bawdy in ways that code-era Hollywood could only allude to; it’s full of “blast” and “blasted,” too, an antique curseword that served as 1947’s “frak.”
The book finished, Tierny goes to a publisher’s office, determined to have it seen. George Sanders (one of my favorite charming film cads) sees her with the manuscript clutched to her chest. The last thing he suspects is that she’s carrying the racy memoirs of a dead sea captain.
Is it a cookbook? I hope not another “Life of Byron.” Or is it a book of dreams?
Dreams. Cookbooks. Byron. Those were the topics lady authors were expected to explore in the mid 1940s. “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir” was a popular 1945 book by R.A. Dick, so popular that the film rights went fast — the movie came out just two years after the book, in 1947.
But add a “U” and you get U.R.A. Dick, and I think that’s not a mistake; Dick was a pseudonym. The book was written by a woman, Josephine Aimee Campbell Leslie, who lived for 81 years and published just one other novel. My short, frustrating internet searches have turned up little else about her — on a message board, someone claims her father was a sea captain, and that’s about it. In its capsule review of the film, allmovie doesn’t even mention her, indicating that the woman never fully emerged from behind the pseudonym.
There is an obvious authorial frustration embedded in the film, which gets lost in the pretty Bernard Herrmann score and weepy love story. It’s funny — or is it sad? — that a woman is the front for a silenced male author in the novel/film, whose author, in turn, is a pseudonymous, androgynous front for a silenced, almost forgotten woman.
To Miriam Cooper
paperhaus June 16th, 2008
Today I read Dark Lady of the Silents, the autobiography of actress Miriam Cooper. She starred in two of D.W. Griffith’s biggest films, possibly two of the most important films in the evolution of cinema, but you don’t know her name. (I assume this because I care about this stuff, and I didn’t know her name). The trouble is that the films were Birth of a Nation and Intolerance.
Birth of a Nation, for all its cinematic breakthroughs — it played for nearly 3 hours when most films were far shorter, it had sophisticated editing and unusual closeups — ended with the Klan riding in to rescue a good white southern family from negros driven mad by post-civil war freedom. riiiiiiiight. It was wildly popular, playing for years and screening for the president at the White Housem, but its racism is just plain awful. When it was released in 1915, some audiences rioted in anger. Even the witty DJ Spooky remix ReBirth of a Nation is uncomfortably creepy.
Intolerance was meant, in part, to be a response to the northern audiences who “misunderstood” Birth of a Nation. It was a morality tale about, duh, tolerance. It was also monumentally expensive, massive in scope (four storylines set thousands of years apart) and narratively challenging (the four stories were parallel, but never intersected). It never caught on with audiences like Birth of a Nation did; instead, it put Griffith in serious financial trouble, and he couldn’t maintain his stable of filmmakers and performers.
Exactly what prevented Miriam Cooper from becoming as remembered/beloved as Lillian Gish, another early Griffith actress, is, in part, that she starred in films that didn’t have a shelf life. Intolerance was a joke, Birth of a Nation an embarrassment. But part of it is something else, and that something is hard to discern from her memoir. While she is candid — as early as 1920 she and her husband, director Raoul Walsh, like to have high colonics! — she doesn’t have much self-doubt. She says she wanted to be a wife and mother — but she seemed to choose these just as her career skidded into dust. She says she wanted to give her adopted sons a better life — but when, years after she divorced, one child chose to live with her ex-husband, she never spoke to the boy again (not ever, not for 40 years). She got jobs on her looks, which she admits, and she calls herself beautiful, but she never considers her own vanity. I loved the dish Miriam Cooper dished, but I am still mulling over her blind spots. She doesn’t think much about herself, not in this book at least, not beyond the (sometimes juicy) facts.
But with her will and what must have been, in the early days, a rambunctious spirit, she should be better remembered. Cheers to Miriam Cooper, who, between 1910 and 1924, appeared in more than 100 films.
Post-Apocaylptic Pittsburgh
paperhaus January 16th, 2008
The good news: Viggo is coming. The bad news: he’s coming to film The Road.
The producers filming Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer prizewinning The Road decided that Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania looked like the end of the world had the best variety of locations and filming incentives. “Filming will take place in suburban areas,” the Post-Gazette reports today, “along with coal mines, forests and an unused freeway a couple of hours away.”
Unused…freeway?
The fact is, you don’t have to squint too hard to see Pittsburgh as post-apocalyptic. Deserted streets, unoccupied row houses, boarded-up churches, cavernous empty warehouses. And nearby: abandoned mines, steep hills. All under an ever-gray sky with a dusting of snow and, in the film, ash.
The filmed will star Viggo Mortenson as the father and a young Australian as the boy. Charlize Theron will be the wife (please, don’t make the flashbacks too important) and Guy Pearce will “factor into scenes near the end of the movie.” Which means he’s one of the people the father meets on the road — or more than one? Is he a good survivor or an evil survivor?
Shortly after I moved to Pittsburgh I was an extra in the filming of Mysteries of Pittsburgh (it’s showing at Sundance). At first I thought no way I’d do that for The Road — who wants to lie in a filthy basement with a bloody stump or two for $60 a day? But if Viggo will be in the scene, I might just have to reconsider.
The Road is scheduled to film for 8 weeks starting in late Feburary “to take advantage of the cold and snow.” Oh, poor Viggo.
Screens and snow
paperhaus November 16th, 2007
That’s the view from my office this morning. Snow. Just a flurry, but snow nonetheless.
If you have concerns about the film adaptation of Love in the Time of Cholera, they are not unfounded. Nor are your trepidations about Beowulf.
Just when I get my panties in a bunch about David Denby’s remarks about silent film (“movies became more realistic, more ‘psychological’” in the sound period) in the New Yorker, the magazine goes and publishes a smart little DVD notes bit on silents by Richard Brody. It begins, “The psychological subtlety of the silent cinema owes much to a complex visual grammar that DW Griffith employed to tell surprisingly old-fashioned stories.” That’s more like it.
No Country for Old Men still not playing in Pittsburgh.
Oscar winners for whom I’ve made coffee
paperhaus February 25th, 2007
Forest Whitaker, Best Actor, The Last King of Scotland
Tim Robbins, Best Supporting Actor, Mystic River
MFA meets Hollywood
paperhaus December 6th, 2006
I don’t know Stephanie Lord, but she’s an MFA student here at Pitt. This fall she won a Don and Gee Nicholls Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. She got to go to a dinner at the Academy a couple weeks ago, and she also got $30,000 bucks. I got the zeroes right — that’s thirtythousanddollars. Sweet. Anyway, tonight she’ll be talking to a class of grad students and I’m sneaking in to get the story. Grad school can be cool!
That’s the way to white trash it, baby
paperhaus August 18th, 2006
The brilliant Jason Toney puts up "officially the whitest thing I’ve ever posted" on his blog, Negro Please, and it is so excellent I’m teary-eyed. Kelly Clarkson clambers on stage with her boyfriend to sing along with hairmetal cover band Metal Skool and it’s boozy and while definitely well shot and edited, feels unscripted. MetaFilter loves it, I love it. How do you do white trash right? Swig from the Chivas bottle and sing "Sweet Child O’ Mine."
In more Friday-is-the-Day-to-Watch-Videos-on-the-Interwebs news, I caught this funny short Everything I Know About Drugs I Learned From Hollywood on LAist — it’s an excellently compiled drugtaking collage from movies and TV. Defamer thinks it’s funny, which is good for the budding LA filmmaking collective pixelpushers in general and director/editor Elina Shatkin in particular (go, Elina!) Frank Sinatra writhing in withdrawl from The Man With The Golden Arm? You know it’s in there. As is Punky Brewster asking the local ponytailed pusher about "Nose candy." Trust me. The first time you watch is free.
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Cinespia on NPR!
paperhaus August 18th, 2006
In LA, people watch old movies at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, the final resting place of Rudolph Valentino and more. It’s been happening for 5 years under the banner of Cinespia. And today, as I’m sitting at my laptop in Pittsburgh, NPR visits, talks to picnic-ers, and watches Psycho on the wall of the mausoleum with everyone else.
One of the things they don’t mention is that LA has very few public parks; in fact, it’s got one of the lowest greenspace-to-people ratios in the country. Pocket parks are rare, and there’s no easy-access LA version of NY’s Bryant Park. So Cinsepia is particularly cool in that the owners of the cemetery had to think public film screenings would be a good idea. And boy, are the owners cool — the photogenic, second-generation cemetery businessmen Brent & Tyler Cassity are practically the TV series 6 Feet Under come to life.
While I didn’t get to go before I moved away this summer, I take one part of the report as a word of warning. "We have to come earlier every year," said one picnicking attendee. Getting to the cemetery early isn’t so bad, tho. You can wander around and gaze at the graves of Hattie McDaniel, John Houston and Mel Blanc (it really does say, "That’s All, Folks").
Mysteries of the Mysteries of Pittsburgh
paperhaus August 16th, 2006
As noted by Bookslut and Largehearted Boy, Friday there’s an open casting call for the movie version of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. Here, in, of all places, Pittsburgh, where they will be shooting the film.
So I promptly read the book, because I plan to show up at the open call. We’re supposed to dress early/mid 1980s. Which is a little funny, because while the book was written then, it isn’t really set then, except perhaps for its cavalier, pre-AIDS sexual mores. So I’ve been thinking about 1980s style. And, well, Adam Ant.
While Adam Ant does make an appearance in the book (via lyrics), I admit I watched more than one of his old videos, entranced by the true original Jack Sparrow. Actually, I meant to be getting to some questions about the movie-i-zation of TMOP. Those questions — including spoiler elements — after the jump.