When I started The Main Point blog I described its purpose as a place for observations on culture and politics, news, very short stories, poems, photos, missives from friends.
On return to the blog I notice that balance has been out of whack and that my first post is entirely consumed with current events and conflict. As a former editor of a literary magazine and an arts journalist such had not been intention at the outset, but it is perhaps a reflection of the times we live in.
With the indulgence of my few followers, and since some of you are new to TMP, I'm going to take another look back now at a few earlier posts more in line with my original intentions and with, um, my actual areas of expertise. So herewith a kind of greatest hits for TMP:
The great Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa is best known for his samurai epics, but in the 1950s he was fascinated by hard-boiled crime stories and noir. In Hollywood there is now a cult fascination, led by Martin Scorcese, with Kurosawa's movie "High and Low." "The Bad Sleep Well" is worth similar reverence and has Shakespearean dimensions, but my favorite from that period is "Stray Dog," thoughts on which HERE.
Andres Velasco, until recently the Chilean economics minister, spoke with me in an interview for Monocle magazine, about the proper role of stimulus spending and his notion of counter-cyclical fiscal policies, HERE.
A short story? A very short story... Ernest Hemingway wrote the saddest, and it can be read HERE.
TMP received a missive from the eminent psychoanalyst and business consultant Michael Maccoby on his mentor Erich Fromm, HERE.
Extraordinary times? This month I'm reminded of 1848. Usually though I think back to 1958 and what that must have been like.
Tony Curtis died this winter. Years ago I interviewed Billy Wilder for The Paris Review and he recounted directing Curtis in "Some Like It Hot," as recounted HERE.
A collection of memories about my old boss George Plimpton HERE.
My favorite wine critic Jay McInerney remembered a then-recent bottle HERE.
A number of fascinating missives from novelist and military historian Caleb Carr HERE. Particularly of interest... Carr's speculation on Gunter Grass's life in the 10th SS Panzer division during WWII.
An archive of contributed poetry HERE, including work by Charles Wright, Pierre Martory, and the heroic Jeannie Vanasco.
Monday, February 21, 2011
Sunday, February 20, 2011
A Look Back at Hard Questions on Iraq and Afghanistan
I'm back, then. Returned after an extended hiatus to finish a film adaptation of a Raymond Chandler novel, and to support the release of "The Garden of Eden."
I'd like to start by taking a look back at some hard questions I rhetorically posed in July 2008, during the run-up to the presidential election, on my Standpoint magazine blog to then-Senator Obama. Time changes one's perspective. Iraq is now comparatively stable and may, with its scrappy educated population and its untapped oil wealth, have a promising economic future. Afghanistan continues to be a challenge in terms of conflict, politics and especially development. With both countries there should be no easy answers. Here are the hard questions I posed in July 2008:
1. Why does Senator Obama advocate a surge of troops in Afghanistan though he considers a surge of troops in Iraq to have been a mistake?
2. Why is a stable Afghanistan crucial to US interests while a stable Iraq is not?
3. How long does Senator Obama expect to keep troops in Afghanistan?
4. Why is an open-ended commitment in Afghanistan manageable while the same in Iraq is not?
5. How much does Senator Obama expect to spend rebuilding Afghanistan?
6. Why is rebuilding Afghanistan affordable while rebuilding Iraq is not?
7. Why does Senator Obama consider the ethno-sectarian issues in Iraq to be nearly intractable while in Afghanistan they are something we can overcome?
8. If leaving Iraq will make the Iraqi government behave more responsibly, how will an increased presence in Afghanistan affect the Afghan government?
9. Why does Senator Obama advocate a "surge in diplomacy" and multilateralism in Iraq while simultaneously advocating unilateral action in the Pakistani tribal areas?
10. How large of a "residual force" will be left in Iraq and for how long?
UPDATE: Some of these challenging questions are addressed in a new book I've just run across by Bing West entitled "The Wrong War: Strategy and Way Out of Afghanistan." A comprehensive review, admiring with caveats, is offered by Andrew Exum HERE.
I'd like to start by taking a look back at some hard questions I rhetorically posed in July 2008, during the run-up to the presidential election, on my Standpoint magazine blog to then-Senator Obama. Time changes one's perspective. Iraq is now comparatively stable and may, with its scrappy educated population and its untapped oil wealth, have a promising economic future. Afghanistan continues to be a challenge in terms of conflict, politics and especially development. With both countries there should be no easy answers. Here are the hard questions I posed in July 2008:
1. Why does Senator Obama advocate a surge of troops in Afghanistan though he considers a surge of troops in Iraq to have been a mistake?
2. Why is a stable Afghanistan crucial to US interests while a stable Iraq is not?
3. How long does Senator Obama expect to keep troops in Afghanistan?
4. Why is an open-ended commitment in Afghanistan manageable while the same in Iraq is not?
5. How much does Senator Obama expect to spend rebuilding Afghanistan?
6. Why is rebuilding Afghanistan affordable while rebuilding Iraq is not?
7. Why does Senator Obama consider the ethno-sectarian issues in Iraq to be nearly intractable while in Afghanistan they are something we can overcome?
8. If leaving Iraq will make the Iraqi government behave more responsibly, how will an increased presence in Afghanistan affect the Afghan government?
9. Why does Senator Obama advocate a "surge in diplomacy" and multilateralism in Iraq while simultaneously advocating unilateral action in the Pakistani tribal areas?
10. How large of a "residual force" will be left in Iraq and for how long?
UPDATE: Some of these challenging questions are addressed in a new book I've just run across by Bing West entitled "The Wrong War: Strategy and Way Out of Afghanistan." A comprehensive review, admiring with caveats, is offered by Andrew Exum HERE.
Saturday, December 4, 2010
"Hemingway's Garden of Eden"
A bit of news... December 10th will see the US release by Roadside Attractions of "Hemingway's The Garden of Eden."
"The Garden of Eden" has long been my favorite of Hemingway's novels. Like all his best work, it gives you the look and feel of places (in this case the Cote d'azur in the 1920s), but also the sensuous thrill of what the world offers, the excitement of complex relationships, and the tension of sexual intrigue. I only hope the film lives up to this great book. (I suppose I should mention that I'm biased since I wrote the screen adaptation.)
A glimpse here:
The trailer can be seen here, or here.
And more information here. Announcement here, here with commentary here... by ace blogger Liberty London Girl here.
And The Paris Review Daily reports on a New York screening at Tribeca Grand Hotel HERE... Vanity Fair interview HERE, and another by the wonderful Christine Spines on Random House's Word & Film site HERE.
Finally my account of a fit of overwhelming insecurity, film-related, in the FT HERE.
"The Garden of Eden" has long been my favorite of Hemingway's novels. Like all his best work, it gives you the look and feel of places (in this case the Cote d'azur in the 1920s), but also the sensuous thrill of what the world offers, the excitement of complex relationships, and the tension of sexual intrigue. I only hope the film lives up to this great book. (I suppose I should mention that I'm biased since I wrote the screen adaptation.)
A glimpse here:
The trailer can be seen here, or here.
And more information here. Announcement here, here with commentary here... by ace blogger Liberty London Girl here.
And The Paris Review Daily reports on a New York screening at Tribeca Grand Hotel HERE... Vanity Fair interview HERE, and another by the wonderful Christine Spines on Random House's Word & Film site HERE.
Finally my account of a fit of overwhelming insecurity, film-related, in the FT HERE.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Blogging will be light... though I remain before the fate machine
Blogging has been light recently as I've been at work on a feature film adaptation of a book by the fellow who also wrote this.
So, yes, I've been away, and yet still in front of this "fate machine."
Fate machine? "Typewriter keys represent the keys of life." It is all explained in this clip...
So, yes, I've been away, and yet still in front of this "fate machine."
Fate machine? "Typewriter keys represent the keys of life." It is all explained in this clip...
Friday, October 1, 2010
Billy Wilder on Writing "Some Like It Hot," and Directing Tony Curtis
Tony Curtis died yesterday. His career included roles in The Sweet Smell of Success, Spartacus, The Defiant Ones, and many others, but he’ll be best remembered as Joe (and Josephine) in Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot.
Some years ago, when I was an editor at The Paris Review and was visiting Los Angeles, I learned that Billy Wilder went to the same office every day from ten to twelve in the morning. For two year I’d been trying to get the filmmaker to agree to an interview for the Writers at Work Series, and he’d steadfastly refused. I finally decided simply to show up and introduce myself, to “door-step him,” as he had done, years before, as a young journalist in Vienna.
The office was a simple suite on the second floor of a low-rise office building. Mr. Wilder, a restless man, even at ninety then, taller than expected, blinked behind large black-framed glasses, and was not quite as surprised to see me as I’d expected. With wonderful Old World manners, he ushered me in, nodding as I gave my name. The mail had just arrived and with the air of a benevolent, even exuberant, dictator, he instructed me to pick it up and carry it over to his desk. He motioned to a leather chair beside it.
On the wall across from his desk, in gilt letters eight inches high was the question "HOW WOULD LUBITSCH DO IT?" A day bed, like an analyst's couch, was set against one wall. The opposite wall was decorated with personal photos, including a number of him with some of cinema's other great writer-directors--John Huston, Akira Kurosawa, and Federico Fellini.
When firmly settled in a large chair behind his desk, we chatted for a half hour while he sorted his mail. Finally, the mail sorted and opened, he peered over his glasses and said, "You wanted to ask me a question."
Thus began a series of four meetings over ten days, after which we composed and, with my boss George Plimpton, edited a text that became “The Art of Screenwriting.” The edited interview can read in Paris Review Interviews, Volume I, published by Picador. I include below one of the many out-takes from the published piece that were removed due to their concern with the craft of directing, and so outside purview of the magazine’s interviews series, the craft of writing. For Wilder, of course, those two were one and the same, or rather one melded into the other. (Plimpton would have none of this argument unfortunately, and so out these anecdotes went, removed from publication, until now.)
Sometime into our second meeting I asked Mr. Wilder what happens between the script and the filming of a script.
BILLY WILDER: You have to work with the actors to make sure the dialogue meshes, that there are no pauses. Or, if there is going to be a laugh you need to make a pause there for the audience response, some bit of action maybe.
When the Marx Brothers were about to shoot A Night at the Opera, Irving Thalberg of MGM did something very intelligent. He had some of the brothers take routines from the movie and play them between vaudeville acts to an audience. Somebody from the studio would be there to analyze the laughter and time everything: "This is good for seven seconds." "This is only good for four." "This falls flat. That we cut."
So, for instance, when we had the scene in Some Like it Hot where Tony Curtis after a night with Marilyn Monroe, using that Cary Grant accent on her, climbs into the window of his hotel room, where he finds lying in bed Mr. Lemmon, who had just danced the night away, the tango, everything, with Joe E. Brown.
Curtis says, "What's new?"
Lemmon says, "I'm engaged."
"What do you mean you're engaged, for Christ's sake. Who's going to marry you?" In fact, this millionaire guy, Joe E. Brown, wants to marry Jack Lemmon.
I knew it was a very funny scene and people were going to laugh at all this. There was a group of tourists on the set while we shooting who didn't know the script. As soon as they saw Curtis dressed as a Shell Oil heir-kind of yacht captain, and Lemmon in the dress with the hairdo, there was constant laughter from the sidelines. People were having to leave the stage so as not to disrupt shots. We figured that we had written in about twenty laugh lines, and I knew I would need to slow down, to retard the dialogue to give people time to recoup.
On the stage, someone will say a straight line to set up a whallop of a joke. Right? Then you need to wait for the laughter to subside before you start in with the next straight line to feed the next joke.
In pictures, it's almost impossible to stop the laughter, to slow things down. The next joke will come while people are still laughing. So I came up with the idea of Lemmon playing with some Cuban maracas.
So Curtis: "Why would you want to marry a guy?"
Lemmon: "Security!" Rum, bum, bum, bah, with the maracas.
I spread the lines out with the maracas.
It wasn't so easy when we first showed the guys in disguise. First you see the heels, walking, very high heels, then the legs.
Slowly I disclose that these two are carrying instruments, and then you figure out it's our two musicians on the run, Lemmon and Curtis. On the MGM lot number three where they had the train, they only had a locomotive and three cars. We wanted to spread the walking out, so we used three takes four times--a train's a train, you can't even tell.
The audience now has enough time to recover, we're back to a medium shot, the feet and the bottom of a dress. The feet stop walking, and Lemmon says, "It's so drafty!"
[During another meeting I asked Mr. Wilder if when he wrote something whether he could tell when he had it right. – JSL]
BILLY WILDER: Izzy Diamond and I were writing the final scene of Some Like it Hot the week before we shot it. We'd come to the situation where Jack Lemmon tries to convince Joe E. Brown that he cannot marry him.
"Why?" Brown says.
"Because I smoke!"
"That's all right as far as I'm concerned..."
Finally Lemmon rips his wig off and yells at him, "I'm a boy! Because I'm a boy!"
Diamond and I were in our room working together waiting for the next line--Joe E. Brown's response, the final line, the curtain line of the film--to come to us.
Then I heard Diamond say, "Nobody's perfect."
I thought about it, and I said, "Well, let's put in 'nobody's perfect' for now. But only for the time being. We have a whole weeks to think about it." We thought about it all week. Neither of us could come up with anything better, so we shot that line, still not entirely satisfied.
When we screened the movie, that line got one of the biggest laughs I've ever heard in the theater. But we just hadn't trusted it when we wrote it; we just didn't see it. "Nobody's perfect." The line had come too easily, just popped out.
Now if I go to Europe or if I am in New York sometimes somebody will suddenly stare at me, and without saying my name, maybe not even knowing who I am but just that I had something to do with that movie, they'll say, "Nobody's perfect."
Some years ago, when I was an editor at The Paris Review and was visiting Los Angeles, I learned that Billy Wilder went to the same office every day from ten to twelve in the morning. For two year I’d been trying to get the filmmaker to agree to an interview for the Writers at Work Series, and he’d steadfastly refused. I finally decided simply to show up and introduce myself, to “door-step him,” as he had done, years before, as a young journalist in Vienna.
The office was a simple suite on the second floor of a low-rise office building. Mr. Wilder, a restless man, even at ninety then, taller than expected, blinked behind large black-framed glasses, and was not quite as surprised to see me as I’d expected. With wonderful Old World manners, he ushered me in, nodding as I gave my name. The mail had just arrived and with the air of a benevolent, even exuberant, dictator, he instructed me to pick it up and carry it over to his desk. He motioned to a leather chair beside it.
On the wall across from his desk, in gilt letters eight inches high was the question "HOW WOULD LUBITSCH DO IT?" A day bed, like an analyst's couch, was set against one wall. The opposite wall was decorated with personal photos, including a number of him with some of cinema's other great writer-directors--John Huston, Akira Kurosawa, and Federico Fellini.
When firmly settled in a large chair behind his desk, we chatted for a half hour while he sorted his mail. Finally, the mail sorted and opened, he peered over his glasses and said, "You wanted to ask me a question."
Thus began a series of four meetings over ten days, after which we composed and, with my boss George Plimpton, edited a text that became “The Art of Screenwriting.” The edited interview can read in Paris Review Interviews, Volume I, published by Picador. I include below one of the many out-takes from the published piece that were removed due to their concern with the craft of directing, and so outside purview of the magazine’s interviews series, the craft of writing. For Wilder, of course, those two were one and the same, or rather one melded into the other. (Plimpton would have none of this argument unfortunately, and so out these anecdotes went, removed from publication, until now.)
Sometime into our second meeting I asked Mr. Wilder what happens between the script and the filming of a script.
BILLY WILDER: You have to work with the actors to make sure the dialogue meshes, that there are no pauses. Or, if there is going to be a laugh you need to make a pause there for the audience response, some bit of action maybe.
When the Marx Brothers were about to shoot A Night at the Opera, Irving Thalberg of MGM did something very intelligent. He had some of the brothers take routines from the movie and play them between vaudeville acts to an audience. Somebody from the studio would be there to analyze the laughter and time everything: "This is good for seven seconds." "This is only good for four." "This falls flat. That we cut."
So, for instance, when we had the scene in Some Like it Hot where Tony Curtis after a night with Marilyn Monroe, using that Cary Grant accent on her, climbs into the window of his hotel room, where he finds lying in bed Mr. Lemmon, who had just danced the night away, the tango, everything, with Joe E. Brown.
Curtis says, "What's new?"
Lemmon says, "I'm engaged."
"What do you mean you're engaged, for Christ's sake. Who's going to marry you?" In fact, this millionaire guy, Joe E. Brown, wants to marry Jack Lemmon.
I knew it was a very funny scene and people were going to laugh at all this. There was a group of tourists on the set while we shooting who didn't know the script. As soon as they saw Curtis dressed as a Shell Oil heir-kind of yacht captain, and Lemmon in the dress with the hairdo, there was constant laughter from the sidelines. People were having to leave the stage so as not to disrupt shots. We figured that we had written in about twenty laugh lines, and I knew I would need to slow down, to retard the dialogue to give people time to recoup.
On the stage, someone will say a straight line to set up a whallop of a joke. Right? Then you need to wait for the laughter to subside before you start in with the next straight line to feed the next joke.
In pictures, it's almost impossible to stop the laughter, to slow things down. The next joke will come while people are still laughing. So I came up with the idea of Lemmon playing with some Cuban maracas.
So Curtis: "Why would you want to marry a guy?"
Lemmon: "Security!" Rum, bum, bum, bah, with the maracas.
I spread the lines out with the maracas.
It wasn't so easy when we first showed the guys in disguise. First you see the heels, walking, very high heels, then the legs.
Slowly I disclose that these two are carrying instruments, and then you figure out it's our two musicians on the run, Lemmon and Curtis. On the MGM lot number three where they had the train, they only had a locomotive and three cars. We wanted to spread the walking out, so we used three takes four times--a train's a train, you can't even tell.
The audience now has enough time to recover, we're back to a medium shot, the feet and the bottom of a dress. The feet stop walking, and Lemmon says, "It's so drafty!"
[During another meeting I asked Mr. Wilder if when he wrote something whether he could tell when he had it right. – JSL]
BILLY WILDER: Izzy Diamond and I were writing the final scene of Some Like it Hot the week before we shot it. We'd come to the situation where Jack Lemmon tries to convince Joe E. Brown that he cannot marry him.
"Why?" Brown says.
"Because I smoke!"
"That's all right as far as I'm concerned..."
Finally Lemmon rips his wig off and yells at him, "I'm a boy! Because I'm a boy!"
Diamond and I were in our room working together waiting for the next line--Joe E. Brown's response, the final line, the curtain line of the film--to come to us.
Then I heard Diamond say, "Nobody's perfect."
I thought about it, and I said, "Well, let's put in 'nobody's perfect' for now. But only for the time being. We have a whole weeks to think about it." We thought about it all week. Neither of us could come up with anything better, so we shot that line, still not entirely satisfied.
When we screened the movie, that line got one of the biggest laughs I've ever heard in the theater. But we just hadn't trusted it when we wrote it; we just didn't see it. "Nobody's perfect." The line had come too easily, just popped out.
Now if I go to Europe or if I am in New York sometimes somebody will suddenly stare at me, and without saying my name, maybe not even knowing who I am but just that I had something to do with that movie, they'll say, "Nobody's perfect."
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