Category: Film

Film news from all over

Chicago wins George Lucas museum

Seth Anderson0 comment

Chicago at Night
Chicago Museum Campus at Night

In case you hadn’t heard…

“Star Wars” creator George Lucas has selected Chicago over Los Angeles and San Francisco as the future home of his collection of art and movie memorabilia, according to a spokeswoman for the museum.

The museum’s board Wednesday is expected to vote on a name change — from the Lucas Cultural Arts Museum to the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art — and destination.

Pending approval by the Chicago Plan Commission, Lucas’ institution would be built on what are now parking lots between Soldier Field and McCormick Place and would open in 2018. Architectural renderings will be presented to city officials in early fall, according to a statement from the museum.

(click here to continue reading Chicago wins George Lucas museum – chicagotribune.com.)

 The clouds in july are mostly in the plain

Soldier Field

Our first question about the proposal has already been answered, will there be lawsuits against this private museum being placed on the lakeshore? Yes:

Still, the museum has drawn opposition from open-space advocates, such as Friends of the Parks.

Among the 14 “basic policies” of the Lakefront Plan of Chicago, adopted by the city council in 1973, is that “in no instance will further private development be permitted east of Lake Shore Drive.” And the Lakefront Protection Ordinance says that the plan commission’s decisions “shall be made in conformity with” those policies.

“We will do what it takes and that very well may be a lawsuit,” Friends of the Parks President Cassandra Francis said. “We are in coalition-building mode, but we are very optimistic, based on discussions, that we will have a broad group of organizations joining us” in opposing the lakefront location for the museum.

Our second question: are there public funds being used for the George Lucas Megalomania Museum? Apparently, no, at least at first:

Under Emanuel’s plan, the two Chicago Park District-owned parking lots would be leased to the museum for $1, which is similar to arrangements other large cultural institutions have with the Park District.

But unlike other museums, the Lucas museum would not receive taxpayer subsidies to cover a portion of its operations, a top mayoral aide has said.

The parking lots would be moved underground at Lucas’ expense, the city has said.

That’s positive news, and different than how the Chicago Children’s Museum fiasco played out. 

I haven’t yet seen the plans, so I still wonder if the proposed museum will shrink the available green space along the lakeshore? If I’m reading the description correctly, the museum will take over 17 acres of asphalt parking, and put a 5 acre museum building and 12 acres of new green space. That sounds ok to me, but then I’m not a Chicago Bears tailgating maniac. Friends of the Park make a good point too: the land may be a parking lot now, but parking lots are easily converted to grassy knolls, much easier than removing a building once it is built.

Cassandra Francis, President of Friends of the Parks says:

Although the proposed site is now used as a parking lot, its future reversion to parkland is possible. Once a building is in place, it is forever precluded from being public open space.

9 great movies
Film History

For the record, I haven’t watched a Star Wars film in 25 years or more, but perhaps there will be other items of narrative film history of interest.

On Boycotting Woody Allen’s Films, Hate the Artist, Love the Art

Seth Anderson1 Comment

9 great movies
9 great movies

For many years I’ve heard many variations of the question answered here by the New York Times Ethicist columnist, Chuck Klosterman; whether moral failings or even alleged moral failings are reason enough to avoid the work of certain offending artists.

I was discussing with a friend whether it is permissible to boycott Woody Allen’s films in the wake of the sexual-abuse allegations. We both thought it would be wrong to further empower someone who may have sexually abused a child. But our legal system is built on the principle that the accused are innocent until proved guilty, and preserving that value is important whether or not you believe the allegations. Is it permissible in this case to boycott, or should we presume innocence? J.K., NEW YORK

When news of Dylan Farrow’s accusation against Allen resurfaced earlier this year, I received many emails that were all different versions of the same question: “Is it acceptable to continue watching (and re-watching) Allen’s films if any part of me believes he may have molested his adopted daughter?” Your query is both similar and different; you’re wondering if it’s O.K. to stop watching his movies, even if he has been convicted of absolutely nothing and insists that he’s innocent.

My answer to both questions is yes.

…

There are many who find themselves wondering if they can still love “Manhattan” or “Crimes and Misdemeanors” if the allegations against Allen are true. It’s highly unlikely, however, that those same people would wonder if they needed to move out of a house if they discovered the carpenter who built it had been accused of the same offense. This is because of art’s exceptionalism — we view artistic endeavors as different from other works. But it’s this same exceptionalism that allows a person to consume art by people they see (rightly or wrongly) as monstrous: What you know about an artist can inform the experience you have with whatever they create. A film is not just a product that has one utility; it’s a collection of ideas that can be weighed and considered in concert with one another.

Watching a movie is not a tacit endorsement of the person who made it.

(click here to continue reading On Boycotting Woody Allen’s Films – NYTimes.com.)

Johnny Depp and some psychoactive mushrooms
Johnny Depp and some psychoactive mushrooms

Can you separate the artist as an individual from their work? I settled this question long ago, for myself, by agreeing to let myself read and enjoy poetry written by Ezra Pound. Ezra Pound seems like he was a virulent anti-semite, a Nazi-sympathizer, and so on, and yet his poetry is intriguing. Roman Polanski admitted having drugged and screwed a 13 year old girl, and yet “Chinatown” is still a great film, as is “Knife in the Water”. John Lennon might have hit Yoko Ono a few times, does that mean I can never listen to “Working Class Hero” again? What about David Bowie’s Third Reich fixation during the time of the recording of some of his best albums? The list goes on and on: artists who were assholes, thugs, sexual deviants, or even worse, Scientologists! Does it matter if Henry Ford was a Nazi-sympathizer? Would you still drive a Ford car? Like Mr. Klosterman says, would you boycott your house if you discovered one of the carpenters who worked on your kitchen did some vile thing ten years ago? Where does it stop? 

It’s a variant of the old cliché: Hate the Sin, Love the Sinner, in this case, Hate the Artist, Love the Art. Or not, it’s your own choice, and your choice alone to make.  

Quick, shallow review of The Untouchables

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Not only a quick, shallow review, but also will probably be disjointed since I watched this film on my iPad while on my treadmill, over a period of 3 days. Anyway, how did this film get such good press? Full of gangster clichés, Chicago tropes, and populated by Kevin Costner’s usual Bloomingdale’s store mannequin style of acting. There are an insane amount of continuity, factual and editing problems, enough to start me laughing eventually. Even the famous scene, so beloved by News America’s thuggish CEO, Paul Carlucci, doesn’t get explained – if you didn’t know before hand what was going on, you were not informed. Why does De Niro’s Al Capone suddenly start beating his own guy with a baseball bat? Doesn’t seem to be very emblematic of teamwork to me. Were there a couple pages of script that got cut out?

Untouchables

Somewhere in Chicago under the El

I watched the entire movie, so it wasn’t horrible, but it boggles my mind that The Untouchables allegedly propelled Kevin Costner to film star status.

My Netflix rating: two stars out of five.

Only Don't Tell Me You're Innocent
Only Don’t Tell Me You’re Innocent

As an aside, has Kevin Costner ever been in a good film, a movie where his acting was the essential ingredient? I can’t say I’ve seen one, but then I haven’t ever sat through either of his big films: The Bodygaurd, nor Waterworld. I did watch about 15 minutes of The Bodyguard once on television, but decided I needed to trim my toenails instead of wasting more time with that dreck. Waterworld might be more fun to watch, albeit not in the way Costner intended. Waterworld was famous for a minute for being an expensive flop, full of closeups of Costner’s face, but empty of plot.

Speaking of Waterworld, some fun gossip collected by IMDb…

  • It is rumored that director Kevin Reynolds and Kevin Costner had a huge squabble over the film, resulting in Reynolds walking off the project and left Costner to finish it. Reynolds was quoted as saying that “Kevin should only star in movies he directs. That way he can work with his favorite actor and favorite director”.
  • The script underwent 36 different drafts which involved six different writers.
  • Joss Whedon flew out to the set to do last minute rewrites on the script. He later described it as “seven weeks of hell”.
  • The 1,000 ton floating set did not have any restrooms, nor were there any on any of the 30 boats used by the cast and crew. The result was that filming had to halt so those in need could be ferried to a barge anchored near the shore which had several portable toilets on it.
  • Widely considered to be one of the biggest box-office bombs of all time. Although it grossed $255 million from a $175 million production budget, this does not factor in marketing and distribution costs, or the percentage of the gross that theaters keep (which is up to 45% of a film’s box office takings). The film came to be nicknamed “Kevin’s Gate” after Heaven’s Gate (1980) and “Fishtar”, after Ishtar (1987), two previous mega bombs.

Ten of Barbara Stanwyck’s Best – As Chosen By Margaret Talbot

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Barbara Stanwyck as Lily Powers in Baby Face

For your next holiday viewing party, a list of ten great films that Barbara Stanwyck shone in…

The qualities that made her great, that made her, as the film critic Nell Minow says, the most eternally modern of Golden Age actresses, were evident from the beginning. Stanwyck believed in being as natural on screen as the Hollywood glamour machine allowed, and it extended to her appearance: as Wilson makes clear, the actress was not vain. She described herself as just “average nice-looking”—no Greta Garbo or Carole Lombard or Hedy Lamar—and felt it was “a good thing” that she could “crack through with honesty.” She excelled at playing women with their own best interests in mind, tough women with hard shells, but she was also gifted at playing on the edge, where anger and defensiveness part to reveal a glinting vulnerability.

Stanwyck was one of Hollywood’s hard-working pros—a trouper who always knew her own lines, and often everybody else’s as well, was always on time, who learned the names of all the crew. She probably wouldn’t have appreciated a lot of psychologizing about her work, but it seems clear that she drew on her own rough upbringing to play many of her finest roles. Born Ruby Stevens in Brooklyn in 1907, she was four when her pregnant mother was killed by a drunk who pushed her off a streetcar. Her bricklayer father soon ran off to Panama, abandoning the family. Young Ruby was raised by a shifting cast of relatives, and supported herself from the age of fourteen as a switchboard operator, a pattern cutter, and a chorus girl. “I’ve known women who plodded through life,” Wilson quotes her saying, “but the women I knew did their plodding on the pavement, not the soil. I know very little about the simple life. I’m a product of crowded places and jammed-up emotions, where right and wrong weren’t always clearly defined and life wasn’t always sweet, but it was life.” That life, with all its ambiguity, is what you always see in a Stanwyck performance, flickering across her uncommonly intelligent face like light dancing on water.

“Steel-True” has inspired several Stanwyck retrospectives, including one at Film Forum, in New York, playing through December 31st. It inspired me to make a list of my favorite Stanwyck performances, all of them available on DVD. Here they are, in chronological order:

(click here to continue reading Barbara Stanwyck’s Best : The New Yorker.)

Click through the link to read thumbnails about each of the ten.

I’ve seen: Baby Face; Stella Dallas; The Lady Eve; Ball of Fire; Double Indemnity; Meet John Doe; and There’s Always Tomorrow

and have yet to see: The Miracle Women; Ladies They Talk About; and All I Desire.

Of the films I’ve seen, Double Indemnity is my favorite, I’ve seen it multiple times, but all are worth watching methinks. The links go to Netflix, if available. I was unable to find There’s Always Tomorrow, except at Amazon as part of a collection including All I Desire, and contrary to Ms. Talbot’s assertion that all of these are available on DVD, I could not find several films. Perhaps there are other sources.


Baby Face – Directed by Alfred E. Green

Repo Man: A Lattice of Coincidence

Seth Anderson0 comment

Sam McPheeters writes a paean to a favorite film of mine, Repo Man. Repo Man has been out of print recently, but now The Criterion Collection has rescued it, and restored it as well. I’m really tempted to get a copy. For many years, the phrase “Let’s get sushi… and not pay!” has been an oft repeated phrase in my monologues.1 Also, “I don’t want no Commies in my car!… No Christians, either!” in my best Harry Dean Stanton Old West voice…

Repo Man, released in early 1984, was the first feature film by a twenty- nine-year-old British UCLA film school graduate named Alex Cox. Even now, the film’s existence seems implausible. It is an apocalypse tale with no doomsday, a punk movie with no concert, a science fiction story with less than ten seconds of aliens. Most of its now classic music was on the far, far edge of American society in 1984. It mines a world of drugs, crime, and capitalist peril for absurdist yuks (when Cox showed the film to his contacts in the real world of Los Angeles auto repossession, they found it to be a diluted version of their much more terrifying jobs). The project, originally envisioned at one-tenth of its final budget, was picked up by Universal Studios. That backing launched the green director into the unfamiliar universe of teamsters and lawyers and the watchful eyes of a studio that could smoosh the project with one phone call.

Criterion Repo Man

Criterion Collection – Repo Man

How a major studio allowed such a vehemently odd movie to exist really is a mystery. Its outlandishness isn’t forced; it’s forceful. This is a film that expands a singular style of humor into an entire worldview, a physics as vast as the Force in Star Wars. But part of the mystery is also that Cox could gather so much talent in one place. Granted full autonomy in his casting, he somehow assembled a flawless ensemble. Emilio Estevez’s Otto is a pitch-perfect mix of blank ambition and obliviousness. Matching this is the world-weary exhaustion—dubbed “the Old West/cadaver look” by a friend of Cox’s—of Harry Dean Stanton’s Bud. Otto is a baby-faced punker initiated into a secretive trade by Bud, who listens to obsolete music, dresses square, and dreams small. Their worldviews collide in the new terrain of early eighties America, an era of subtle but rapid change from the Me Decade to the Greed Decade.

(click here to continue reading Repo Man: A Lattice of Coincidence – From the Current – The Criterion Collection.)

I know I saw the Repo Man film in the theatre, but I don’t know if it was during the first run, or after the soundtrack made a splash. In those old dusty days, before the internet, before cable television, before DVDs and streaming video services, I saw a lot of movies on opening weekend. I do remember it being a mostly empty theatre, but laughing hysterically at the cans of generic food…

Repo Man thrived largely because of its music. The soundtrack not only resurrected the theatrical run, it also stoked interest in the video release. The film had the wonderful serendipity to enter the VHS market during the golden age of video stores. In the mideighties, “cult film” was both an aesthetic and a status facilitated by scarcity. Video connoisseurs of the pre-Internet world foraged through shelves and bins, propelled by word of mouth and employee picks. Even if you managed to catch the infamously edited television version of Repo Man (with “flip you” and “melon farmer” dubbed over saltier insults), you would have had to own a VCR to share the experience with friends. The film bloomed as a phenomenon not just because it had to be sought out but because it delivered on expectations when finally found.

Musically as well, it’s hard to think of another nondocumentary film with the preposterously marvelous timing of Repo Man—Cox had the most vibrant and diverse punk scene in America to work with. And certainly no other film used such good fortune to such novel effect. Consider the cameo by the Circle Jerks. That scene shows one of the mightiest lineups in the first wave of American hardcore—Keith Morris, Greg Hetson, Earl Liberty of Saccharine Trust, and the celebrated drummer Chuck Biscuits—in that incarnation of the band’s only recorded performance, as a drum-machine-backed lounge act.

If you haven’t seen the film in a while, or ever, give it a spin…

Repo Man Poster

Repo Man Poster

Footnotes:
  1. conversations, dialogues, whatever [↩]

What Woodward’s John Belushi book can tell us about the sequester scandal

Seth Anderson0 comment

John Belushi
John Belushi – source unknown

In the course of writing a new biography of John Belushi, Tanner Colby went page by page through Bob Woodward’s book Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi to check facts, and, and found reality much different than what Woodward had written. A fascinating subject, in fact. Woodward’s reputation continues to swirl downward…

What started as a fun project turned out to be a rather fascinating and unique experiment. Over the course of a year, page by page, source by source, I re-reported and rewrote one of Bob Woodward’s books.…

Wired is an infuriating piece of work. There’s a reason Woodward’s critics consistently come off as hysterical ninnies: He doesn’t make Jonah Lehrer–level mistakes. There’s never a smoking gun like an outright falsehood or a brazen ethical breach. And yet, in the final product, a lot of what Woodward writes comes off as being not quite right—some of it to the point where it can feel quite wrong. There’s no question that he frequently ferrets out information that other reporters don’t. But getting the scoop is only part of the equation. Once you have the facts, you have to present those facts in context and in proportion to other facts in order to accurately reflect reality. It’s here that Woodward fails.

Over and over during the course of my reporting I’d hear a story that conflicted with Woodward’s account in Wired. I’d say, “Aha! I’ve got him!” I’d run back to Woodward’s index, look up the offending passage, and realize that, well, no, he’d put down the mechanics of the story more or less as they’d happened. But he’d so mangled the meaning and the context that his version had nothing to do with what I concluded had actually transpired. Take the filming of the famous cafeteria scene from Animal House, which Belushi totally improvised on set with no rehearsal. What you see in the film is the first and last time he ever performed that scene.

Here’s the story as recounted by Belushi’s co-star James Widdoes:

One of the things that was so spectacular to watch during the filming was the incredible connection that [Belushi] and Landis had. During the scene on the cafeteria line, Landis was talking to Belushi all the way through it, and Belushi was just taking it one step further. What started out as Landis saying, “Okay, now grab the sandwich,” became, in John’s hands, taking the sandwich, squeezing and bending it until it popped out of the cellophane, sucking it into his mouth, and then putting half the sandwich back. He would just go a little further each time.

Co-star Tim Matheson remembered that John “did the entire cafeteria line scene in one take. I just stood by the camera, mesmerized.” Other witnesses agree. Every person who recounted that incident to me used it as an example of Belushi’s virtuoso talent and his great relationship with his director. Landis could whisper suggestions to Belushi on the fly, and he’d spin it into comedy gold.

Now here it is as Woodward presents it:

Landis quickly discovered that John could be lazy and undisciplined. They were rehearsing a cafeteria scene, a perfect vehicle to set up Bluto’s insatiable cravings. Landis wanted John to walk down the cafeteria line and load his tray until it was a physical burden. As the camera started, Landis stood to one side shouting: “Take that! Put that in your pocket! Pile that on the tray! Eat that now, right there!” John followed each order, loading his pockets and tray, stuffing his mouth with a plate of Jello in one motion.

First off, Woodward wrongly calls the cafeteria scene a rehearsal, when half the point of the story is that Belushi pulled it off without ever rehearsing it once. Also, there’s actually nothing in the anecdote to indicate laziness or lack of discipline on Belushi’s part, yet Woodward chooses to establish the scene using those words. The implication is that Belushi was so unfocused and unprepared that he couldn’t make it through the scene without the director beside him telling him what to do, which is not what took place. When I interviewed him, Landis disputed that he ever referred to Belushi as lazy or undisciplined. “The greatest crime of that book,” Landis says of Wired, “is that if you read it and you’d just assume that John was a pig and an asshole, and he was anything but. He could be abrupt and unpleasant, but most of the time he was totally charming and people adored him.”

(click here to continue reading Bob Woodward and Gene Sperling: What Woodward’s John Belushi book can tell us about the sequester scandal. – Slate Magazine.)

You should read the rest…

Ok, one more excerpt:

John Belushi was a recreational drug user for roughly one-third of his 33 years, and he was a hard-core addict for the last five or six, from which you can subtract one solid year of sobriety. Yet in Wired, which has 403 pages of narrative text, the total number of pages that make some reference to drugs is something like 295, or nearly 75 percent. Belushi’s drug use is surely a key part of his life—drugs are what ended it, after all—but shouldn’t a writer also be interested in what led his subject to this substance abuse in the first place? If you want to know why someone was a cocaine addict for the last six years of his life, the answer is probably hiding somewhere in the first 27 years. But Woodward chooses to largely ignore that period, and in doing so he again misses the point. In terms of illuminating its subject, Wired is about as useful as a biography of Buddy Holly that only covers time he spent on airplanes.

Of all the people I interviewed, SNL writer and current Sen. Al Franken, referencing his late comedy partner Tom Davis, offered the most apt description of Woodward’s one-sided approach to the drug use in Belushi’s story:

“Tom Davis said the best thing about Wired,” Franken told me. “He said it’s as if someone wrote a book about your college years and called it Puked. And all it was about was who puked, when they puked, what they ate before they puked and what they puked up. No one read Dostoevsky, no one studied math, no one fell in love, and nothing happened but people puking.”

In Conversation: Steven Soderbergh

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Passing Strangers
Passing Strangers

Mary Kaye Schilling of New York Magazine has a quite interesting interview with Steven Soderbergh, who is about to quit making films to paint. I’ve long been an admirer of Soderbergh, probably since his first film came out when I was taking film classes at UT1 I don’t love every film Soderbergh has made, but he often does interesting stuff.

A few excerpts, in case you are too lazy to click the link. For instance:

MKS: You’ve talked in the past about obsessively viewing films for inspiration—like The Battle of Algiers and Z for Traffic. What did you watch for Magic Mike?

SS: Saturday Night Fever was our model. It’s one of those movies people remember differently than what was actually true. Going back, we were startled by how dark it gets. This girl is being raped in the back seat of the car, and Travolta doesn’t really do anything, he just drives around. He does things that you probably wouldn’t want your protagonist doing today.

and 

MKS: But you’ve shown an incredible ability for getting films made, particularly the mid-level, character-driven, superhero-and-­vampire-free films that conventional wisdom says don’t get made anymore—from the esoteric sci-fi film Solaris to, yes, even a somber, black-and-white movie about post–World War II Germany. How do you account for that?

SS: On the few occasions where I’ve talked to film students, one of the things I stress, in addition to learning your craft, is how you behave as a person. For the most part, our lives are about telling stories. So I ask them, “What are the stories you want people to tell about you?” Because at a certain point, your ability to get a job could turn on the stories people tell about you. The reason [then–Universal Pictures chief] Casey Silver put me up for [1998’s] Out of Sight after I’d had five flops in a row was because he liked me personally. He also knew I was a responsible filmmaker, and if I got that job, the next time he’d see me was when we screened the movie. If I’m an asshole, then I don’t get that job. Character counts. That’s a long way of saying, “If you can be known as someone who can attract talent, that’s a big plus.”

 and

SS: Music has become another of the most abused aspects of filmmaking. I’m mystified by the direction scores have taken in the last ten years. It’s wall-to-wall—it’s the movie equivalent of the vuvuzelas from the last World Cup! I don’t understand it at all. For me, it’s ideal when you can get the music to do something that everything else isn’t doing.

MKS: I’ve always appreciated how you don’t use the soundtrack to telegraph emotions; your scores are remarkably subtle. The Informant! was one of the few times you used music conspicuously, but it really worked for that film.

SS: A lot of people had mixed feelings about that score.  Look, it was a very specific choice in the sense that—what I said to [composer] Marvin Hamlisch was, this music is not for the audience. This music is for him [Matt Damon’s character], it’s his soundtrack. For the movie, it worked. But that’s not typically what you’re doing with a score. I think that’s why people reacted ambivalently.

I was saddened to hear that the Confederacy of Dunces script is dead, again:

MKS: Are there many films you wanted to make that didn’t happen?

SS: Less than a handful. There are tons of excuses you can make for something not happening. It’s a very imperfect process, getting a movie made. And I’m one of those people who just ignores that stuff. The film doesn’t have to be perfect. The deal doesn’t have to be perfect. I’ll reverse engineer into whatever box we have so that we can do it and do do it—less money, less time, whatever. I’m looking for reasons to say yes. But, sometimes, nothing works.

MKS: Like Confederacy of Dunces. Whatever happened to that?

SS: I ended up walking away. We had this lawsuit over the rights [against Scott Rudin and Paramount pictures in 1998], and we got the project back, and at that point—it was a good lesson to learn, actually, because I realized once we got it back that my enthusiasm had been beaten out of me. Now it was an obligation, as opposed to something that I wanted to do. I don’t know what’s happening with it. I think it’s cursed. I’m not prone to superstition, but that project has got bad mojo on it.

Ok, one last bit relevant to this blog’s interests:

MKS: That’s a 180-degree turn from fifteen years ago, when you called the film business the silliest in the world.

SS: After making a lot more films, I realized that the movie and TV business is, for all its inefficiencies, one of the best-run big businesses we have. It’s very transparent, financially, and the only business I know of that successfully employs trickle-down economics: When movies and shows make money, the profits go right back into making more movies and shows, because the stock price is all about market share. And these people excel at problem-solving—that’s 99 percent of the job. I look at Hurricane Katrina, and I think if four days before landfall you gave a movie studio autonomy and a 100th of the billions the government spent on that disaster, and told them, “Lock this place down and get everyone taken care of,” we wouldn’t be using that disaster as an example of what not to do. A big movie involves clothing, feeding, and moving thousands of people around the world on a tight schedule. Problems are solved creatively and efficiently within a budget, or your ass is out of work. So when I look at what’s going on in the government, the gridlock, I think, Wow, that’s a really inefficient way to run a railroad. The government can’t solve problems because the two parties are so wedded to their opposing ideas that they can’t move. The very idea that someone from Congress can’t take something from the other side because they’ll be punished by their own party? That’s stupid. If I were running for office, I would be poaching ideas from everywhere. That’s how art works. You steal from everything. I must remember to tweet that I’m in fact not running for office.

(click here to continue reading In Conversation: Steven Soderbergh — Vulture.)

Footnotes:
  1. yes, as we all know by now, I joke I am a film school drop-out, but it is true as well [↩]

Tom Waits – Hell Broke Luce

Seth Anderson0 comment


 A surreal yet intriguing music video of the Tom Waits song, Hell Broke Luce, from his 2011 album, Bad as Me.1

Directed and photographed by Matt Mahurin, and only recently released, as far as I can tell…  ((as of right now, only 307 views, despite being linked from TomWaits.com ))

Footnotes:
  1. Wikipedia [↩]

Francis Ford Coppola: Artists Might Not Get Paid In the Future

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DaVinci Wine (or Whine, depending)
DaVinci Wine

Francis Ford Coppola is simply repeating what he has said before, Francis Ford Coppola Sees the Future For Artists, and Francis Ford Coppola Finances His Movie With Wine because it seems like the truth. Mick Jagger and David Bryne concur, btw: Mick Jagger and Internet Piracy and Death of the Music Industry, Rolling Stones Edition

How does an aspiring artist bridge the gap between distribution and commerce? We have to be very clever about those things. You have to remember that it’s only a few hundred years, if that much, that artists are working with money. Artists never got money. Artists had a patron, either the leader of the state or the duke of Weimar or somewhere, or the church, the pope. Or they had another job. I have another job. I make films. No one tells me what to do. But I make the money in the wine industry. You work another job and get up at five in the morning and write your script.

This idea of Metallica or some rock n’ roll singer being rich, that’s not necessarily going to happen anymore. Because, as we enter into a new age, maybe art will be free. Maybe the students are right. They should be able to download music and movies. I’m going to be shot for saying this. But who said art has to cost money? And therefore, who says artists have to make money?

In the old days, 200 years ago, if you were a composer, the only way you could make money was to travel with the orchestra and be the conductor, because then you’d be paid as a musician. There was no recording. There were no record royalties. So I would say, “Try to disconnect the idea of cinema with the idea of making a living and money.” Because there are ways around it.

(click here to continue reading Francis Ford Coppola: On Risk, Money, Craft & Collaboration :: Articles :: The 99 Percent.)

 

The story behind The Wizard of Oz

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Not Ray Bolger
Not Ray Bolger

The head of MGM, Louis B. Mayer, famously had great doubts about The Wizard of Oz.

“Be smart but never show it,” is one of Mayer’s more famous sayings, but the man who built MGM into a powerhouse occasionally found himself tripping over bad instincts (not to mention a lacerating tongue; displeased with the posture of a then 16-year-old Judy Garland, he took to calling her “my little hunchback”). And he was adamant —adamant — about his distaste for “Over the Rainbow.” Here’s Troy’s breakdown of the dispute: “Mayer thought it slowed the movie down. That it was too serious a song — too long a song.”

You can see Mayer’s point. Who starts a movie with a momentum-killing ballad? … Nevertheless, Mayer wanted the ballad gone, and here’s what Troy unearthed during his research: “They kept taking it out and putting it back in, and after the third time they cut it from a test screening (producer) Arthur Freed finally said, ‘What exactly is your problem with this?’ So he listens to all the reasons, and then his response is: ‘”Rainbow” stays, or I go.'”

Bold words. But at the time, Freed was producing yet another Garland musical for Mayer (“Babes in Arms” with Mickey Rooney) that was midway through filming. “Freed realized he had some leverage, and if not for ‘”Rainbow” stays, or I go,’ that song would never have been in the movie.”

“The Wizard of Oz” would go on to win two Academy Awards, including best song for “Over the Rainbow” (Mayer really ate crow on that one, didn’t he?), and yet everything about the film’s gestation suggested disaster. As many as 14 writers were assigned to work on the script, with just as many drafts floating around. (The final version was cobbled together by the film’s lyricist E.Y. “Yip” Harburg, who essentially cut-and-pasted bits from each draft.)

Five directors were assigned to the film, although only three actually directed scenes. Richard Thorpe was on the film for barely two weeks before producers, unhappy with his work, switched him out in favor of Victor Fleming, who is the credited director on the picture and was responsible for all the scenes that take place in Oz.

But then Fleming, too, was reassigned to another movie. “He would have finished the picture,” said Troy, “except that Clark Gable, who was a good buddy of Victor Fleming’s, had just started on ‘Gone with the Wind’ and was very uncomfortable being directed by George Cukor, who was known as a women’s director.” Apparently afraid he would contract a case of cooties, “Gable demanded that Fleming be brought in to direct ‘Gone with the Wind,’ so suddenly Victor Fleming was yanked off ‘The Wizard of Oz’ with just a few weeks left to go, which left a vacuum with the Kansas scenes.” The producers brought in King Vidor, who made his name in silent films, to shoot the black-and-white portions that bracket the film.

(click here to continue reading The story behind The Wizard of Oz – chicagotribune.com.)

Dorothy and Toto2
Dorothy and Toto

Coincidentally, we recently watched the film for the first time in years and years, and of course were captivated. The edition of The Wizard of Oz I have has a second disc full of documentary pieces which were mostly fascinating, including a bit of the jitterbugging footage mentioned by Nina Metz.

A Sad Look at Crowd-Sourced Film Sites

Seth Anderson0 comment

9 great movies
9 great movies

Wikipedia isn’t the only crowd-sourced site with problems – IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes have inherent problems too, as discussed by Christopher Campbell…

The issue first came to my attention via Michael Parfit, one of the directors of The Whale, a terrific yet under-seen 2011 documentary that I had expected to appeal to a wider audience (albeit for some of the wrong reasons), especially since it was produced by Scarlett Johansson and Ryan Reynolds, who also narrates. “IMDb is a very important site for us,” Parfit tells me via email, “perhaps more than for a major studio film. We often work with people in the industry who are only vaguely aware of our film. The first place they go is to IMDb to get more info. But when you go on IMDb or IMDbPro and look up The Whale, the information you get is, to say the least, misleading.”

Some of his complaints have to do with seemingly nit-picky data that most of us don’t think much about but which is actually a big concern for those on the inside. For example, one of The Whale’s distributors is listed as a production company, which would seem like an easy fix. But often such errors aren’t even noticed immediately, and when they are caught they’re still not quickly amended (the film’s “company credits” info remains incorrect).

“Repairs and additions have always taken so long that they’re almost useless when they are finally done,” Parfit says. “When the news of Ryan Reynolds’ involvement in the film came out, and was widely covered, we tried to get his name in the database as the film’s narrator for months — months! — before it appeared. At the time we were seeking investors. What must they have thought when they looked on IMDb and did not see the celebrity name we had told them was part of the film? They would not have thought that the highly-trusted IMDb was wrong.”

(click here to continue reading Are IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes Still Our Best Reference Tools? A Sad Look at Crowd-Sourced Film Sites | Movie News | Movies.com.)

 

Netflix Hates Its Own DVD business

Seth Anderson2 Comments

Netflix Has Lost Its Way

I don’t understand this corporate logic:

Netflix has given up all hope that there’s a future in DVDs.

…On an earnings conference call with analysts Wednesday, Hastings said Netflix now has no plans to spend any marketing dollars on its DVD-by-mail service, which lost 2.76 million subscribers during the last three months of 2011.

“We expect DVD subscribers to decline each quarter forever,” he said.

(click here to continue reading Netflix sees DVD business withering, gives up on video games – latimes.com.)

especially when the DVD rental is the bulk of Netflix’s business, and generates most of its profits:

While the streaming business is growing (adding 220 subscribers domestically in the quarter), and the DVD business sis shrinking (it lost 2.76 million subscribers domestically), it’s margins are much worse than the legacy DVD business. The streaming business has an 11 percent profit margin, compared to a very healthy 52 percent margin for the DVD business.

Out of Netflix’s total $847 million in revenues last quarter, $476 million came from streaming and $370 million came from DVD rentals (the remainder came from international). The streaming business also twice as many subscribers: 21.7 million versus 11.2 million. But the DVD business contributed the vast majority of Netflix’s profit: $194 million versus $52 million.

If you break that down, each streaming subscriber is worth only $2.40 in profit each quarter to Netflix, compared to $17.32 for each DVD subscriber. The old business was very lucrative. The new business kind of sucks. The economics are very different. The DVD business had fixed costs, while Netflix is forced to negotiate streaming licenses on a case by case basis with each media company.

(click here to continue reading Netflix Streaming Margins Are 11 Percent, DVD Margins Are 52 Percent | TechCrunch.)

Maybe Netflix can sell its DVD business to someone who cares about it still. From my perspective as a long time Netflix subscriber (since September, 2001, actually), the streaming option is occasionally useful, but most films I want to watch are not available as a streaming option, nor are their “extras” included. Often my streamed film is fuzzy, pixelated, the sound doesn’t sync, subtitles are unreliable, or unavailable, and so on. Unfortunately, there is no other solution, or I would have dumped Netflix over the summer.

Netflix Throttling

There is also the issue with the DVD throttling practice. I returned two films at the same time; one was received by Netflix the next day, the second took an extra three days, presumedly because it was supposed to go to Bloomington, IL first. If Netflix despises its DVD rental business so much, perhaps they ought not to care enough to throttle anymore. There is no limit to the amount of streamed video one can view, why the rental restriction?

Talking Heads Chronology

swanksalot0 comment
Talking Heads ChronologyTalking Heads Chronology, originally uploaded by swanksalot.

Excited to watch this.

Shot with my Hipstamatic for iPhone
Lens: Watts
Flash: Off
Film: DreamCanvas

www.davidbyrne.com/film/TH_Chronology/index.php
Chronology pulls together live performances from across Talking Heads’ career. It starts with their earliest days at CBGB and The Kitchen in New York City in the mid-seventies, through their breakthrough years in the late seventies and on to global success in the eighties. They completed their last tour in 1983 although they would continue to make very successful albums throughout the eighties before officially breaking up in 1991. The DVD concludes with their “reunion” performance of “Life During Wartime” on their induction into the Rock `n’ Roll Hall Of Fame in 2002.This deluxe version is packaged in a hardback cover with a 48 page book containing photographs and an unexpurgated Lester Bangs essay written as a review of the “Fear Of Music” album for The Village Voice in 1979 but only ever published in a heavily edited version.

Still one of my favorite bands…

Sold A Photo for a Yo-Yo Ma Documentary

Seth Anderson0 comment

Biking to work
Biking to work

Film makers at the Kennedy Center are nearly done with a documentary about cellist and raconteur Yo-Yo Ma to be shown this December at the Kennedy Center Honors, and simultaneously broadcasted on CBS. They contacted me last week to purchase the above photo of a musician biking on Wacker Drive  1 with a cello on his back  to be shown in the film for a second or two…

Part of my payment is to receive a copy of the finished DVD, and a small honorarium. As a non-profit, they couldn’t pay my normal asking price, but we came to an agreement for One Time Use North America Standard TV Broadcast, after I wrote:

Your logic is a bit askew: the big guys like Corvis and Getty have thousands of license requests a week so can afford to have lower costs. I am self-employed, have to pay for health insurance and living expenses. $xxx is the lowest I would consider.

I am truly honored to be involved in a project like this – hope they do use the photo they paid for.  Tell me if you see it!  2

Kennedy center honors
Kennedy center honors

More about the show:

The 34th annual Kennedy Center Honors have announced this year’s honorees and as always, arts A-listers will share the evening with pop culture icons. The Dec. 4 ceremony at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts will celebrate singer Barbara Cook, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, saxophonist and composer Sonny Rollins, singer and songwriter Neil Diamond and actress Meryl Streep.

President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama will be seated with the honorees during the televised ceremony, traditionally a star-laden evening of colorful speeches and performances.

“This year, the Kennedy Center celebrates its 40th anniversary by selecting five extraordinary individuals whose collective artistry has contributed significantly to the cultural life of our nation and the world,” said Kennedy Center Chairman David M. Rubenstein.

…”Yo-Yo Ma’s sterling musicianship makes him one of the most versatile and popular classical music performers in the world and his Silk Road Project has inspired students across the world to love and honor music. Saxophonist Sonny Rollins’ masterful improvisation and powerful presence have infused the truly American art form of jazz with passion and energy. The sheer brilliance and breadth of Meryl Streep’s performances count as one of the most exhilarating cultural spectacles of our time.”

 

(click here to continue reading Yo-Yo Ma, Barbara Cook tapped for Kennedy Center Honors – latimes.com.)

Footnotes:
  1. maybe heading towards the Civic Opera House? [↩]
  2. I uploaded the image, but you never know with films, it could be deleted at the last moment [↩]

Cuba’s International Brand Havana Club Rum Co-Produces Film

Seth Anderson0 comment

Papa Dobles
Papa Dobles

One of these days, I’d like to visit Cuba.

As one of Cuba’s very, very few international brands, Pernod Ricard-owned Havana Club rum uses Cuba itself as a marketing tool. Capitalizing on Havana’s lively, sultry cultural scene, the company is co-financing a feature film called “Seven Days in Havana”1 to be screened in cinemas around the world next summer.

The film, created with M&C Saatchi, Paris, is a contemporary portrait of Cuba’s capital city, with a different director for each of the seven days. One director, for instance, is Oscar-winning actor Benicio del Toro.

There is contractually no product placement in “Seven Days in Havana,” although because the film was shot in Cuba, and Havana Club is one of the few alcoholic drinks brands in the country, the rum features in the finished product.

Daniel Fohr, founder and creative director at M&C Saatchi, Paris, said, “Everyone who goes to Havana is in contact with Havana Club. It is everywhere in Havana — people drink it in every bar and carry it on every street.”

…

The 100-minute film continues Havana Club’s focus on Cuban culture and creativity. Havana Club, produced at a distillery in San Jose, Cuba, has been promoted since 2006 with an ad campaign using the slogan “El Culto a la Vida” and regularly updates a website featuring contemporary Cuban artists and musicians at havana-cultura.com.

“Seven Days in Havana” is currently in post-production. Although it was filmed by seven different directors, the whole script was written by Cuban crime writer Leonardo Padura.

Wild Bunch International has secured distribution in more than 20 markets, including Japan, France, Italy, Germany and Canada. Havana Club is planning a program of marketing activities around the launch of the film in every country, except the U.S.

(click here to continue reading Cuba’s International Brand Havana Club Rum Co-Produces Film | Global News – Advertising Age.)

 

Footnotes:
  1. 7 días en La Habana [↩]