Hammers Down at Christie's South Ken

Last Wednesday saw the last auction at Christie's South Ken, London's premiere middle-market salesroom, a venue that stood for 42 years at the center of London's art and antiques scene.

Nic McElhatton, CSK's chairman, knocked down the last sales.  Buyers, sellers, and dealers kindly offered The Main Point their observations, and McElhatton made a moving farewell speech.

Why Filmmakers Love Morocco

Last month I wrote a travel story for The Spectator Life's summer issue about why filmmakers love Morocco, and where they like to stay when in Marrakech.  Also in that article I elaborate the spark that lit my interest in film-making:

Morocco shares many of the advantages that first drew filmmakers to California: year-round sunshine, diverse landscapes, great old architecture and abundant available extras. Just recently Morocco and Britain signed a treaty giving each other reciprocal tax subsidies for film and television production. And since the UK and Morocco are in the same time zone, they keep the same business hours.

My fascination with film was kindled in the New York editorial offices of a literary magazine, the Paris Review. My then boss, George Plimpton, recounted over lunch one day an adventure he had had long before — one of his stunts in participatory journalism — when he shipped off to Morocco to play a Bedouin extra on the set of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia.

He described Lean as a figure in the far distance, a speck at the end of a vast gorge, standing beside a camera and orchestrating the spectacle of a massive Bedouin army on horseback. ‘I’m on screen there somewhere,’ George insisted, ‘though I didn’t get a horse to ride on; mostly I stood around and ululated. Lucky that I was so far out of camera range because beneath those Bedouin robes I was wearing my own brown Bass Weejun loafers.’

The Spectator is the oldest continuously published magazine in the English language, and I was delighted to be included in that special issue.  Read the whole thing HERE.

Top image courtesy of La Mamounia Hotel.

The Courageous Choice of a Suit

Polite Notice to regular readers of TMP:

Some months back I wrote for Conde Nast's "M" Magazine a survey of the Future of Men's Fashion, interviewing sundry figures, including one novelist friend who discoursed on the utility of the right T-shirt.  In the end I learned what a courageous choice a suit can be:

You would think that after time away, the hardest part of visiting New York would be braving passport control, baggage reclaim, and then finding a taxi from JFK. Instead, I find it the dilemma of what to wear.

The director Whit Stillman once advised me, regarding an upcoming film-development meeting, “Wear a suit, a blue suit. In truth, it’s worked out terribly for my career, with people mistakenly thinking I might be on the business side rather than creative, but it does still create an impression!”

For writers, every day is casual Friday, and we rarely pay close attention to fashion trends. 

Read the whole thing HERE.

Video: How to Get to Mars

Earlier, here, I'd lamented the decline of American space exploration. Um, perhaps I spoke too quickly, because there is some interesting exploration of Mars going on right now.

Also, some very cool video simulations of those trips.  This clip is taken from the IMAX movie "Roving Mars."

The Spirit is a robotic rover on Mars, active from when it landed in 2004. The rover, after travelling 7.73 km (much beyond the planned 600m), became stuck in soft soil in late 2009, and its last communication with Earth was sent on March 22, 2010.

A formal farewell was planned at NASA headquarters after the Memorial Day holiday 2011, and was televised on NASA TV.

Thanks to IMAX, and to Norman Berke for tipping me off to this.

Billy Wilder on "The Lubitsch Touch"

... from my interview with Billy Wilder, in The Paris Review's Writers at Work Series:

INTERVIEWER
Coming to the American movie industry at a time when many distinguished German directors were working, did you feel part of a special group?

BILLY WILDER
There were some excellent German directors, led by Mr. Lubitsch, but I simply met him and shook his hand; he had no interest in me when I arrived. In fact, he was very reluctant to give jobs to Germans; it was only four years later that he hired me. I had written some pictures in Germany, usually working alone. But when I came here I had to have a collaborator on account of my unsteady English and my knowledge of only about three hundred words. Later I found that if I had a good collaborator it was very pleasant to talk to somebody and not come into an empty office. The head of the writers’ department at Paramount had the good idea to pair me with Charles Brackett, a distinguished man from the East, who had gone to Harvard Law School and was about fifteen years older than I. I liked working with him. He was a very good man. He was a member of the Algonquin round table. He had been the movie critic or theater critic on The New Yorker in the beginning, the twenties.
   One day, Brackett and I were called in to see Lubitsch. He told us he was thinking vaguely about doing an adaptation of a French play about a millionaire—a very straightforward law-abiding guy, who would never have an affair with a woman unless he was married to her. So he married seven times!
   That would be Gary Cooper. Claudette Colbert was to be the woman who was in love with him, who’d insist “I’ll marry you, but only to be the final wife.” As the meeting was being adjourned, I said, I have a meet-cute for your story. (A “meet-cute” was a staple of romantic comedies back then, where boy meets girl in a particular way, and sparks fly.) Let’s say your millionaire is an American who is very stingy. He goes to a department store in Nice on the French Riviera where he wants to buy a pajama top, but just the top, because he never wears the pants. She has come to the same counter to buy pajamas for her father, who as it happens only wears the pants. That broke the ice, and we were put to work on that picture, which became Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife.
   Lubitsch, of course, would always find a way to make something better. He put another twist on that meeting. Brackett and I were at Lubitsch’s house working, when during a break he emerged from the bathroom and said, What if when Gary Cooper comes in to the store to buy the pajama top, the salesman gets the floor manager, and Cooper again explains he only wants to buy the top. The floor manager says, Absolutely not, but when he sees Cooper will not be stopped, the floor manager says, Maybe I could talk to the store manager. The store manager says, That’s unheard of! but ends up calling the department store’s owner, whom he disturbs in bed. We see the owner in a close shot go to get the phone. He says, It’s an outrage! And as the owner goes back to his bed you see that he doesn’t wear pajama pants either.

INTERVIEWER
When you first met Lubitsch over lunch, did you think of that meet-cute on the spot?

WILDER
No, I already had that. I had been hoping to use it for something, and when he told us the story of the picture I saw how it might fit. I had dozens of meet-cutes. Whenever I thought of one I’d put it in a little notebook. Back then they were de rigeur, a staple of screwball comedies. Every comedy writer was working on his meet-cutes; but of course we don’t do that anymore. Later, I did a version of the meet-cute for The Apartment, where Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine, who when they see each other every day have this little routine together. And in Sabrina, where she reappears and the younger Larrabee, William Holden, doesn’t recognize her—him not recognizing her becomes a kind of meet-cute. When Sydney Pollack was remaking that movie, I told him they should make the Larrabee family’s company a bankrupt company, and Sabrina’s competition for the younger Larrabee the daughter of a Japanese prospective-buyer.

INTERVIEWER
You have a gold-framed legend on the wall across from your desk. How Would Lubitsch do it?

WILDER
When I would write a romantic comedy along the Lubitschian line, if I got stopped in the middle of a scene, I’d think, How would Lubitsch do it?

INTERVIEWER
Well, how did he do it?

WILDER
One example I can give you of Lubitsch’s thinking was in Ninotchka, a romantic comedy that Brackett and I wrote for him. Ninotchka was to be a really straight Leninist, a strong and immovable Russian commissar, and we were wondering how we could dramatize that she, without wanting to, was falling in love. How could we do it? Charles Brackett and I wrote twenty pages, thirty pages, forty pages! All very laboriously.
   Lubitsch didn’t like what we’d done, didn’t like it at all. So he called us in to have another conference at his house. We talked about it, but of course we were still, well . . . blocked. In any case, Lubitsch excused himself to go to the bathroom, and when he came back into the living room he announced, Boys, I’ve got it.
   It’s funny, but we noticed that whenever he came up with an idea, I mean a really great idea, it was after he came out of the can. I started to suspect that he had a little ghostwriter in the bowl of the toilet there.
   I’ve got the answer, he said. It’s the hat.
   The hat? No, what do you mean the hat?
   He explained that when Ninotchka arrives in Paris the porter is about to carry her things from the train. She asks, Why would you want to carry these? Aren’t you ashamed? He says, It depends on the tip. She says, You should be ashamed. It’s undignified for a man to carry someone else’s things. I’ll carry them myself.
   At the Ritz Hotel, where the three other commissars are staying, there’s a long corridor of windows showing various objects. Just windows, no store. She passes one window with three crazy hats. She stops in front of it and says, “That is ludicrous. How can a civilization of people that put things like that on their head survive?” Later she plans to see the sights of Paris—the Louvre, the Alexandre III Bridge, the Place de la Concorde. Instead she’ll visit the electricity works, the factories, gathering practical things they can put to use back in Moscow. On the way out of the hotel she passes that window again with the three crazy hats.
   Now the story starts to develop between Ninotchka, or Garbo, and Melvyn Douglas, all sorts of little things that add up, but we haven’t seen the change yet. She opens the window of her hotel room overlooking the Place Vendôme. It’s beautiful, and she smiles. The three commissars come to her room. They’re finally prepared to get down to work. But she says, “No, no, no, it’s too beautiful to work. We have the rules, but they have the weather. Why don’t you go to the races. It’s Sunday. It’s beautiful in Longchamps,” and she gives them money to gamble.
   As they leave for the track at Longchamps, she locks the door to the suite, then the door to the room. She goes back into the bedroom, opens a drawer, and out of the drawer she takes the craziest of the hats! She picks it up, puts it on, looks at herself in the mirror. That’s it. Not a word. Nothing. But she has fallen into the trap of capitalism, and we know where we’re going from there . . . all from a half page of description and one line of dialogue. “Beautiful weather. Why don’t you go have yourselves a wonderful day?”

INTERVIEWER
He returned from the bathroom with all this?

WILDER
Yes, and it was like that whenever we were stuck. I guess now I feel he didn’t go often enough.

INTERVIEWER
You’ve indicated where Lubitsch got his ideas. Where do you get yours?

Read Wilder's answer, and the rest of the interview HERE.

                                                                                       -- JSL

How About "Barry Lyndon" for Starters?

Julian Fellowes, the creator of Downton Abbey, has put his foot in it.

He has said that Hollywood stars just can't "do" period drama.  Presumably he means American actors, as opposed to the many British and Australian actors who have become stars via films made by American studios and independent companies.

At a recent seminar he argued: "Our actors have an understanding of period--for Europeans the past is very much in them as well as the present.  Americans find it harder."

I'm not so sure.  I'd say Los Angeles-born Ryan O'Neal, then a neophyte and heartthrob, had little trouble carrying the 1975 movie Barry Lyndon, based on the novel by Thackeray, and made by the Bronx-born filmmaker Stanley Kubrick.  That picture may well be the greatest period adaptation of English literature ever made.  It is worth studying alone for Kubrick's ingenious fitting of vintage super-fast 50 mm projector lenses on to his cameras, allowing him to shoot on film using only available light.  When you watch (below) the scene, set in the evening, of players at a card table lit by candlelight consider that that set was lit only by those candles, giving the whole scene a resemblance to a painting by, say, Gainsborough, one of the masters of the era of the novel from which the film was adapted.



Chinatown was, of course, a period film, and Nicholson and Dunaway were superb in those roles, seemed natural, and were Oscar nominees for their performances.  The Godfather films were, of course, in period.  Marlon Brando won an Oscar in 1973 for originating the role of Vito Corleone.  Two years later, Robert De Niro, playing the young Vito Corleone in Sicily at the dawn of the twentieth century, won the Oscar for best supporting performance.  Friends who speak Italian better than I do, and who understand the Sicilian dialect in which De Niro delivered his lines, say he did well.  Apropos, his performance in Bertolucci's 1900 was superb, and his Italian, the only language spoken in that film, was well handled.

Perhaps Mr. Fellowes meant American actors are not very good in British period roles, and that may very well be so; but the same might be said of many British actors (excepting Daniel Day Lewis!) taking American roles in period films... though Fellowes, being British, might not be in the position to know this.  Whatever Mr. Fellowes did mean, the collaboration of British and American filmmakers has produced many fine films.  I am, however, growing concerned that since pulling off a superb Olympics presentation, and since winning all those gold medals (3rd place overall), the Brits may start to lose the self-deprecating style we all so admire.

In any case, Ryan O'Neal is pretty good in Barry Lyndon.  Watch at the beginning of the scene below for a funny subtext, where Lyndon's employer speaking to him (O'Neal) says: "Pretend that you speak not a word of English."  Is this a mischievous Kubrick joke meant to send up attitudes akin to Fellowes's?  Perhaps.  A bit later in the scene watch O'Neal pull off dialogue spoken in passable German:



Regarding Fellowes, and his thoughts on the matter, more here.

UPDATE: In response to the above I received a call from filmmaker John Irvin (director of Hamburger Hill, A Month in the Country, The Garden of Eden).  Irvin knew Kubrick and said that Kubrick chose to make Barry Lyndon and indeed his many other films in Britain because of the high quality of the film craftsmen, the editors, sound technicians, set builders, costumers, wig-makers, etc...  Just before ringing off he said, "But Gone with the Wind... the civil war... a period picture... wasn't that made by Americans?  Performances very good."  Too right, as some Brits might say.

Roman Polanski's Short Film for Prada

Roman Polanski's latest entry for the Cannes Film Festival, billed as a "new work" and presented before the screening of a new print of his 1979 film Tess, is a short film entitled "A Therapy."  At less than four minutes, co-written with Ron Harwood, and starring Ben Kingsley and Helena Bonham-Carter (winners or nominees of Oscars and BAFTAs all of 'em), is this a short film, or is it instead a glorious advertisement?

Polanski's early short films, made in the 1950s and early 1960s when he was a film student in Poland, showed a precocious mastery of the form and are still watchable today.  This new film too is watchable, but not quite the revelation that those early films were.

Nonetheless, for your viewing pleasure...



Among Polanski's shorts, I especially recommend you see "Two Men and a Wardrobe" and "The Lamp," available along with others in this collection.

Here, below, is "Two Men and a Wardrobe."  Look for a young Polanski as the second assailant.

Haruki Murakami's NORWEGIAN WOOD... now a film

Below... the trailer for Anh Hung Tran’s adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s coming of age novel NORWEGIAN WOOD. Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, following on his eery work on THERE WILL BE BLOOD, has written the film’s score.

Can't wait for a US distributor to step up so I can see the whole thing in cinemas.



Hat tip Christine Spines.

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."

Ernest Hemingway's "The Garden of Eden"

... also forthcoming... news of, and a release for, the feature film adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's novel "The Garden of Eden." [For update info, see recent post.]

"Garden" 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.  (Disclosure: I wrote the film adaptation.)

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.

Video: Archie, the Parsons Terrier

In writing earlier about Soupy Sales, I commented that "these days with a laptop and a two hundred dollar Flip video camera, most everyone has better tools than he and his cohorts had."  Not that their videos are funnier.

I offer proof on both points in this video I've just shot and edited about the training of Archie, an aspirant to the role of Sherriff of Hampstead Heath.  He is a terror to squirrels and other small dogs.



There'll soon be other and better videos here and on my Youtube site, HERE.

Soupy Sales: Fang's Talent Agency

Since his death late last year I've been watching clips from the Soupy Sales Show.  The picture quality is not great, and the sets are homemade, but you could make a pretty funny video with a single stationary camera and a fellow in front of it who had a lot of personality.  In a way his are the forebears for Saturday Night Live's videos.

I like "Fang's Talent Agency," a still from which below, but there loads of others.

These days with a laptop and a two hundred dollar Flip video camera, most everyone has better tools than he and his cohorts had.

Watch Soupy and Fang HERE.

Maud Yeddou - Another Excellent Thing About French Cinema

She's got a great look, and wears it with attitude.

Found by New York Magazine's "Look Book," Yeddou was evidently visiting the city to perform in an experimental video by Anton Perich.

Her interview in NYM HERE.

Anton Perich's Youtube video channel HERE.

Another excellent thing about French cinema HERE.

Akira Kurosawa's STRAY DOG, Hemingway's Shortest Story

I've been blogging over at STANDPOINT magazine recently, and I've just posted on Akira Kurosawa's great film noir police procedural, as well as Hemingway's shortest story. As I write there:

Many of the finest filmmakers did their finest work in what some, incorrectly, call the lesser genres. Billy Wilder's film noir "Double Indemnity," an adaptation of the James M. Caine novel, compares well to his original "Sunset Boulevard," and in some ways paved the way for that later work. In an upcoming post, I'll offer Wilder's account of working on that adaptation with Raymond Chandler, from a conversation I had with the director shortly before he died. (It was a contentious relationship and in the end Wilder was legally enjoined by the studio from brandishing his riding crop during working hours. A limit was also placed on the number of calls he was allowed to accept from young ladies.)

This week I've been re-watching Akira Kurosawa's film noir "Stray Dog" (1949). That film had its genesis as an unpublished police procedural novel that the great Japanese filmmaker himself wrote over a feverish two month period.

Read the whole thing HERE.

"Her Jolieness," Angelina Jolie

Last eve TMP enjoyed an eyeful of Angelina Jolie in an advance screening of WANTED by Kazhak-Russian director Timur Bekmambetov.

Alongside "Her Jolieness" (see above) are James McEvoy, Morgan Freeman, and Thomas Kretschmann. If you have an inner geekboy, this kinetic comic-book-derived flick will be the thing.

As for the story, it's as if there were a KGB within the KGB who've begun to have second thoughts... but of course it's set in a futuristic Chicago.

Thanks to Lucy P for this opportunity to popcorn blog.

Charles Burnett's "The Killer of Sheep"

This week to the British Film Institute's Southbank Theater comes the legendarily unavailable film "The Killer of Sheep" by Charles Burnett.

What a wonderful movie. Not much in the way of story, but the film has a gaze that's penetrating yet generous to its characters. One thing I especially loved was the constant stream of oblique glimpses into their lives. Example... filmmakers are always taught to get into a scene quickly without entrances and exits, to begin "in medias res." Burnett, instead, begins one scene with kids in a little handstand competition on their front porch. Clearly they're bored out of their skulls. After a good while of this, the father, coming home from work and in a "mood,' enters the frame, distractedly brushes their hovering feet away from his face, dumping the kids over, and lumbers in the front door. Somehow hilarious, and an entrance invested with so much psychological material. Genius rarely comes so offhand.

See it! Meanwhile, a good broad assessment of the film HERE, excerpted below:

The legendary South Central film “Killer of Sheep,” will be released for the first time in theaters on its 30th anniversary. The film, now in a beautifully restored 35mm print, will be commercially distributed for the first time.

Directed by Charles Burnett, “Killer of Sheep” examines the black Los Angeles ghetto of Watts in the mid-1970s through the eyes of Stan, a sensitive dreamer who is growing detached and numb from the psychic toll of working at a slaughterhouse. Frustrated by money problems, he finds respite in moments of simple beauty: the warmth of a teacup against his cheek, slow dancing with his wife to the radio, holding his daughter. The film offers no solutions; it merely presents life -- sometimes hauntingly bleak, sometimes filled with transcendent joy and gentle humor.

“Killer of Sheep” played at a handful of colleges around the United States and in some small European festivals before receiving the Critics' Award at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1981. In 1990, the Library of Congress declared it a national treasure and placed it among the first 50 films entered in the National Film Registry for its historical significance. In 2002, the National Society of Film Critics also selected the film as one of the 100 Essential Films of all time.

“Killer of Sheep” was shot on location in Watts in a series of weekends on a budget of less than $10,000, most of which was grant money. Finished in 1977 and shown sporadically, its reputation grew and grew until it won a prize at the 1981 Berlin International Film Festival.

Hitchcock Blonde Popcorn-Blogs David Lean

The best theater-... pardon me... theatre-blogger in Britain, aka Hitchcock Blonde, turns her attention to cinema, and the kick off of the David Lean retrospective at the British Film Institute theater at the South Bank.

The H-Blonde writes:

"The best literary and filmic realism stems from meticulously constructed fakery. The English, masters of precise practical craftsmanship and emotional detachment, do it particularly well: we frigid orgasm-feigning voyeurs are brilliant at building sincere pieces of insincerity that hit the heart by tricking the mind. From Thackeray and Hardy to Eliot and Dickens, our great realist novels are composed of the very symptoms of sham: cliche, stereotyping, coincidence and highly selective symbolism abound."

Read the whole thing HERE.

The H-Blonde is a legend in the making. She deserves her own star on the walk of fame (see above). Oh, and she can stop traffic too.

Billy Wilder: On Raymond Chandler

From "Billy Wilder, The Art of Screenwriting," originally published in The Paris Review

JAMES LINVILLE
I understand your collaboration with Raymond Chandler was more difficult?

BILLY WILDER
Yes. Chandler had never been inside a studio. He was writing for one of the hard-boiled serial magazines, The Black Mask, the original pulp fiction, and he'd been stringing tennis raquets to make ends meet. Just before then, James M. Cain had written The Postman Always Rings Twice, and then a similar story, Double Indemnity, which was serialized in four or five parts in the Black Mask.
They don't have those serial magazines anymore, but in Germany they were very popular. At the end of that week's excerpt you're left with a great feeling of suspense. I understand that thousands of people would wait near the docks for the arrival of the boat coming from England with the new chapters of a Dickens novel.
Paramount bought Double Indemnity, and I was eager to work out with Cain, but he was tied up working on a picture at Fox, called Western Union. A producer-friend brought me some Chandler stories from The Black Mask. You could see the man had a wonderful eye. I remember two lines from those stories especially: "Nothing is emptier than an empty swimming pool." The other is when Marlowe goes to Pasadena in the middle of the summer and drops in on a very old man who is sitting in a greenhouse covered in three blankets. He says, "Out of his ears grew hair long enough to catch a moth." A great eye. . . but then you don't know if that will work in pictures because the details in writing have to be photographable.
I said to Sistrom let's give him a try. Chandler came into the studio and we gave him the Cain story, Double Indemnity, to read. He came back the next day--"I read that story. It's absolute shit!" He hated Cain because of Cain's big success with The Postman Always Rings Twice.
He said, "Well, I'll do it anyway. Give me a screenplay so I can familiarize myself with the format. This is Friday. Do you want it a week from Monday?"
"Holy shit," we said. We usually took five to six months on a script.
"Don't worry," he said. He had no idea that I was not only the director but was supposed to write it with him.
He came back in ten days with eighty pages of absolute bullshit. He had some good phrases of dialogue, but they must have given him a script written by someone who wanted to be a director. He'd put in directions for fade-ins, dissolves, all kinds of camera moves to show he'd grasped the technique.
I sat him down and explained we'd have to work together. We always met at nine o'clock, and would quit at about four-thirty. I had to explain a lot to him as we went along, but he was very helpful to me. What we were doing together had real electricity. He was a very, very good writer, but not of scripts.
One morning, I'm sitting there in the office, ten o'clock and no Chandler. Eleven o'clock. At eleven thirty, I called Joe Sistrom, the producer of Double Indemnity, and ask, "What happened to Chandler?"
"I was going to call you. I just got a letter from him in which he resigns."
Apparently he had resigned, because while we were sitting in the office with the sun shining through I had asked him to close the curtains and I had not said "please." He accused me of having as many as three martinis at lunch. Furthermore, he wrote that furthermore he found it "very disconcerting that Mr. Wilder gets two, three, sometimes even four calls from obviously young girls."
Naturally. I would take a phone call, three or four minutes, to say, "Let's meet at that restaurant there" or "Let's go for a drink here." He was about twenty years older than I was, and his wife was older than him, elderly. And I was on the phone with girls! Sex was rampant then, but I was just looking out for myself.

JAMES LINVILLE
Wasn't there something about shaking a riding crop?

BILLY WILDER
Well, when I work it's true I can sometimes have a temper, but that was just ridiculous. Later, in a biography he said all sorts of nasty things about me--that I was a Nazi, that I was uncooperative and rude, and God knows what.
I told them forget about all that shit, let's just go on with the script. I agreed not to use the crop anymore.
I would say, "Would you please move your legs so I can walk past to the toilet?" Always, please, please, please.
Maybe the antagonism even helped. He was a peculiar guy, but I was very glad to have worked with him.
In any case, he must have learned something, because he went on to write two pictures at Paramount without me.
When Double Indemnity premiered in Westwood, Chandler didn't show, had disappeared, but Mr. Cain had come to see it. Afterwards, he was crying, he was delighted with what we'd done.

copyright: James Linville, 1996. Read the whole thing in The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1

Five Best Books about Hollywood - Whit Stillman

Whit Stillman's choice for the five best books about Hollywood. Interesting that the selections of this writer-director are not auteur-theory-driven. I especially likes his comment about this film editor:

3. When the Shooting Stops . . . the Cutting Begins
By Ralph Rosenblum and Robert Karen
Viking, 1979

The dourest of men, Ralph Rosenblum was the editorial genius behind many of the great modern film comedies, including the first films of Woody Allen, Herb Gardiner and Mel Brooks. Rosenblum's account of the editing-room transformation of "The Producers," "Take the Money and Run" and "Annie Hall" is a film education in itself and a counterweight to the usual debate over the primacy of either script or direction. Rosenblum's bête noire is the cult of the film director. In his memoir only three directors -- Allen, Gardiner and Sidney Lumet (the first two also writers and so more tolerably "auteurs") -- come off well. "The myth that the director is the sole creator of his film is a burden on almost everyone in the movie business, including the director," he and co-author Robert Karen write. Particularly revealing is Rosenblum's description of how the beautiful ending to "Annie Hall" -- when Allen, as Alvy Singer, muses on the absurdity and necessity of romantic love -- was concocted in a taxi and recorded in a sound booth barely an hour before a key audience screening.

Read the whole thing HERE.

Reading, Watching II

These days I'm diving into David Fromkin's classic A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East... a book twenty years old now and more relevant every day. Also the superb debut issue of Standpoint, the UK journal of opinion that defends and celebrates Western civilization. Also Monocle magazine's Aviation Survey, in their June issue, Tim Lott's piece in Granta 101, Christopher Tilghman's In a Father's Place. Looking forward to Rowan Somerville's novel The End of Sleep, and Anuradha Roy's An Atlas of Impossible Longing. Am following changover at the Abumuqawama counter-terrorist theory blog.

Watching Hitchcock's Secret Agent. And will soon watch American Beauty, as I'm re-reading Alan Ball's screenplay... a perfect script... and recalling Mena Suvari's wonderful performance.

Am daydreaming of islands along the southern Dalmatian coast and of American beaches, which I miss.