Here’s a fascinating little window into the working habits of one our most brilliant and prolific artists. It’s from Robert B. Weide’s 2011 PBS film Woody Allen: A Documentary. In the scene above, Allen shows us the machine he has used for sixty years, the only typewriter he has ever owned: an early fifties manual Olympia SM‑3. “I bought this when I was sixteen,” Allen says. “It still works like a tank.”
Every comedy sketch, every screenplay, every essay ever written by Allen was composed on the one typewriter. When Weide asks Allen how he manages without the “cut-and-paste” functions of a word processor, he pulls out a pair of scissors and an old Swingline stapler. “It’s very primitive, I know,” says Allen, “but it works very well for me.”
“Allen’s persistence in using the one and only typewriter of his life, and in practicing cut-and-staple editing are certainly curious, quaint, idiosyncratic, even endearing,” writes Richard Brody in the Front Row blog at The New Yorker; “but they’re also proof on the wing of two of Allen’s lifelong qualities–untimeliness and hermeticism–as well as of the enduring struggle in his films between writing and experience.”
Nobody could ever accuse Tim Burton of underproductivity. The past decade has seen him not only direct seven feature films but step into the music video game as well. Most directors inclined to do music videos begin there in order to transition to full-fledged movies, but Burton has, to put it mildly, never hewn to tradition. At the top of this post, you can watch his very first music video, produced in 2006 for the song “Bones” by post-punk revivalists The Killers. Featuring model Devon Aoki and 90210 star Michael Steger, the video shows off Burton’s sensibilities both by plundering the history of ickily thrilling and slyly transgressive cinema — pieces of Lolita, Creature from the Black Lagoon, and Jason and the Argonauts appear — and by making much thematic and aesthetic use of the human skeleton. Most of its action takes place in an early-sixties desert drive-in theater gone to seed, which seems to me the ideal venue in which to screen Burton’s features.
The imaginative auteur’s second and most recent music video came out just this past September. Working again in the service of The Killers, Burton dreamed up another piece of haunted whimsy for their song “Here With Me”. In it, a black-clad, serious-eyed adolescent boy — a Burtonian archetype if ever there was one — steals and makes a companion of a wax mannequin modeled after his favorite B‑movie actress. Fans can thrill to the fact that, to fill the role of this B‑movie actress, in comes Winona Ryder, star of the beloved Burton collaborations Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands. Ryder has led a career filled with its share of both B- and A‑movies, but to which of those levels do Burton’s rise? Neither, it would seem, or perhaps both at once, or, even more likely, to the liminal state in between — a hard-to-define psychological space, both Burton’s boosters and detractors would agree, of his very own.
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Cultureand writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Before you close out the week, you’ll want to spend some time with Ned Zeman’s piece in Vanity Fair, “Soul Men: The Making of The Blues Brothers.” It brings us back to the 1970s, when John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd labored to bring their characters, Jake and Elwood Blues, onto the national stage. Despite being the stars of Saturday Night Live, Belushi and Aykroyd had to cajole the show’s producer Lorne Michaels into letting them perform as The Blues Brothers on late night TV. First, Michaels let them warm up SNL audiences before shows. Then, in 1976, Michaels let the Blues Brothers make their first live appearance. But there was a rub. They had to dress as Killer Bees and not as “John Lee Hooker gone Hasidic.” Only in April, 1978, did Jake and Elwood make their true SNL debut as a musical act (see below).
Zeman’s piece focuses mostly on the next chapter in the history of The Blues Brothers — the making of the now legendary film. That had its own set of difficulties. Big budgets, big ambitions and big coke addictions, all threatening to derail the project. Down to the very last moment, the film looked like a guaranteed financial bust, to the tune of $27 million. But, of course, that’s not how things turned out.
Above, you can watch The Making of The Blues Brothers, a 2005 documentary that came out with the 25th anniversary re-release of the comic masterpiece. Below, watch their SNL debut.
The idea of smoking in a movie theater, or anywhere one might go to have a good time, seems outlandish in 21st-century America, far more fantastical than most of what you’d actually see projected onscreen. I don’t smoke, but it certainly wouldn’t occur to me to start while moviegoing, a pursuit that, here in Los Angeles, takes up a considerable chunk of my free time. Though I attend screenings at the Nuart Theatre on Santa Monica Boulevard with some frequency, I’ve sadly missed the heyday of the public service announcement above. Bad-taste-is-good-taste filmmaker John Waters shot the PSA for the Nuart Theatre decades ago in appreciation for their long-running showings of his breakthrough feature Pink Flamingos. “I’m supposed to announce that there’s no smoking in this theater,” Waters says to the camera, after taking a drag on his cigarette, “which is just one of the most ridiculous things I’ve heard of in my life.”
“How can anyone sit through the length of a film,” he continues, “especially a European film, and not have a cigarette?” Indeed, the Nuart today remains a reliable source for interesting pictures, often of European origin. So, I’ve heard, was Berkeley’s UC Theater, another frequent screener of Waters’ “no-smoking” PSA, before it closed its doors in 2001. When Landmark Theatres owner Gary Meyer purchased both the Nuart and the UC in 1974, they became the first in that now-formidable chain of popular-art house crossover venues. Revival cinema has seen something of a resurgence in recent years, giving Landmark more competition than it once faced, and though some theaters have brought gourmet food and alcohol into the experience, cigarettes seem unlikely to make a return. What the moviegoing world needs now is a clip from Waters denouncing cellphone usage — but he’s got to do it seriously. Or as seriously as he can.
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Cultureand writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Young women trapped in gilded cages: that’s the theme that comes to mind when thinking about the films of Sofia Coppola, so readily that her Wikipedia page uses the phrase almost verbatim. The Virgin Suicidesstarred five suburban sisters under ever-tightening parental lockdown. Lost in Translation found a rock photographer’s wife free yet adrift in a swank Tokyo hotel. Marie Antoinette made a subject of, well, Marie Antoinette, and Somewhere left its eleven-year-old daughter of a disaffected movie star with no choice but turn up on on her dad’s Chateau Marmont doorstep. Even now, the filmmaker completes work on The Bling Ring, whose titular clutch of teenagers find themselves driven to burgle the homes of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and other such luminaries, surely out of sheer ennui. But the most vicious expression of the signature Sofia Coppola setup came in her very first film, the 1998 short Lick the Star.
Set amid the aristocratic court-level intrigue of a middle-class junior high school, the story traces the breakdown of a conspiracy by the girls, led by seventh-grade queen bee Chloe, to gradually poison the boys with doses of arsenic. In what we by now will have come to think of as a Coppolan turn, Chloe gets the idea from V.C. Andrews’ Flowers in the Attic, copies of which she passes around to the underlings she pressures into helping her execute the plan. Alas, what goes for the best-laid plans of mice and men goes also for those of spiteful thirteen-year-old girls. Shot on black-and-white 16-millimeter film, Lick the Star would at first seem to fit right in, aesthetically, with the other quick-and-dirty debuts of the 1990s’ American indie boom, but a series of striking stylistic touches soon set it apart. More evidence for Coppola’s defenders, who argue against the detractors who accuse her of having gotten by on nepotism. Then again, without the right connections, could she have cast Peter Bogdanovich as the principal?
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Cultureand writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
In 1980, the revered Japanese director Akira Kurosawa shot Kagemusha, otherwise known asThe Shadow Warrior. Francis Ford Coppola was the producer. Somewhere during the production, the two filmmakers lent their star power to a series of commercials for Suntory Whisky. If you’re a regular reader, you know that many cultural icons have pitched Japanese products in times past — take for example Woody Allen, James Brown, Nicolas Cage, Paul Newman and good ole Dennis Hopper. And, if you’re even a casual moviegoer, you know that Sofia Coppola (daughter of Francis) put an American movie star drinking whisky at the center of her Oscar-nominated film, Lost in Translation (2003). And it wasn’t just any whisky that Bill Murray was sipping. It was Suntory Whisky.
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Few filmmakers have been so often, or so unambiguously, called masters of the medium as Andrei Tarkovsky. In acclaimed pictures like The Mirror, Stalker, and Nostalghia (find free online versions of his films here), he realized his visions without compromise. If you can engage with these visions, watching a Tarkovsky film makes for a cinematic experience without compare. Geoff Dyer, for example, one of the director’s particularly high-profile fans, recently published Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room, a volume on nothing but watching Stalker. If you can’t engage with these visions, you may find watching a Tarkovsky film rough going indeed. (Admittedly, Nostalghia’s nine minutes of candle-carrying requires a certain frame of mind.) But if you make films, you’d do well to consider Tarkovsky’s methods either way. The clip above from the documentary Voyage in Timeoffers some insight into how the man thought about his work.
First and foremost, he didn’t think about it as “work,” separate from other pursuits. “It’s not hard to learn how to glue the film, how to work a camera,” Tarkovsky says. “But the advice I can give to beginners is not to separate their work, their movie, their film, from the life they live. Not to make a difference between the movie and their own life.” These words don’t come as a surprise from a director well known for crafting deeply personal films, but one suspects that creators of any kind all too rarely find it in themselves to heed them. But Tarkovsky, always described as a thoroughly rigorous man, could have lived no other way. “Cinema is a very difficult and serious art,” he continues. “It requires sacrificing of yourself. You should belong to it, it shouldn’t belong to you. Cinema uses your life, not vice versa.” A great demand indeed, but we’d surely have a more interesting cinema if young directors accepted it. The artistic world could use more Tarkovskys.
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Cultureand writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Another year gone by. Another 1200+ cultural blog posts in the books. Which ones did you like best? We let the data decide. Below, you’ll find the 17 that struck a chord with you. Free Art Books from The Guggenheim and The Met: Way back in January, the Guggenheim made 65 art catalogues available online, all free of charge. The catalogues offer an intellectual and visual introduction to the work of Calder, Munch, Bacon, and Kandinsky, among others. Then, months later, The Met followed suit and launched MetPublications, a portal that now makes available 370 out-of-print art titles, including works on Vermeer, da Vinci, Degas and more.
The Best Animated Films of All Time, According to Terry Gilliam: Terry Gilliam knows something about animation. For years, he produced wonderful animations for Monty Python (watch his cutout animation primer here), creating the opening credits and distinctive buffers that linked together the offbeat comedy sketches. Given these bona fides, you don’t want to miss Gilliam’s list, The 10 Best Animated Films of All Time.
Here Comes The Sun: The Lost Guitar Solo by George Harrison: Here’s another great discovery — the long lost guitar solo by George Harrison from my favorite Beatles’ song, “Here Comes the Sun.” In this clip, George Martin (Beatles’ producer) and Dhani Harrison (the guitarist’s son) bring the forgotten solo back to life. When you’re done taking this sentimental journey, also see another favorite of mine: guitarist Randy Bachman demystifying the opening chord of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’.
Ray Bradbury Offers 12 Essential Writing Tips and Explains Why Literature Saves Civilization: In June, we lost Ray Bradbury, who now joins Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, and Philip K. Dick in the pantheon of science fiction. In this post, we revisit two moments when Bradbury offered his personal thoughts on the art and purpose of writing — something he contemplated during the 74 years that separated his first story from the last.
Free Science Fiction Classics on the Web: Speaking of science fiction, we brought you a roundup of some of the great Science Fiction, Fantasy and Dystopian classics available on the web in audio, video and text formats. They include Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World, Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia,many stories by Philip K. Dick and Neil Gaiman, and much more. Find more great works in our collections of Free Audio Books and Free eBooks.
This is Your Brain in Love: Scenes from the Stanford Love Competition: Can one person experience love more deeply than another? That’s what Stanford researchers and filmmaker Brent Hoff set out to understand when they hosted the 1st Annual Love Competition. Seven contestants, ranging from 10 to 75 years of age, took part. And they each spent five minutes in an fMRI machine. It’s to hard watch this short film and not shed a happy tear.
Rare 1959 Audio: Flannery O’Connor Reads ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’: In April of 1959–five years before her death at the age of 39 from lupus–Flannery O’Connor ventured away from her secluded family farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, to give a reading at Vanderbilt University. She read one of her most famous and unsettling stories, “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” The audio is one of two known recordings of the author reading that story.
33 Free Oscar Winning Films Available on the Web: On the eve of the 2012 Academy Awards, we scouted around the web and found 33 Oscar-winning (or nominated) films from previous years. The list includes many short films, but also some long ones, like Sergei Bondarchuk’s epic version of War & Peace. Sit back, enjoy, and don’t forget our collection of 500 Free Movies Online, where you’ll find many great noir films, westerns, classics, documentaries and more.
The Story Of Menstruation: Walt Disney’s Sex Ed Film from 1946: Staying with movies for a second, we also showed you a very different mid-1940s Disney production – The Story of Menstruation. Made in the 1940s, an estimated 105 million students watched the film in sex ed classes across the US.
30 Free Essays & Stories by David Foster Wallace on the Web: We spent some time tracking down 23 free stories and essays published by David Foster Wallace between 1989 and 2011, mostly in major U.S. publications like The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, and The Paris Review. Enjoy, and don’t miss our other collections of free writings by Philip K. Dick and Neil Gaiman.
Everything I Know: 42 Hours of Buckminster Fuller’s Visionary Lectures Free Online (1975): In January 1975, Buckminster Fuller sat down to deliver the twelve lectures that make up Everything I Know, all captured on video and enhanced with the most exciting bluescreen technology of the day. The lecture series is now online and free to enjoy, so please do so.
Kurt Vonnegut’s Eight Tips on How to Write a Good Short Story: When it came to giving advice to writers, Kurt Vonnegut was never dull. He once tried to warn people away from using semicolons by characterizing them as “transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing.” In this brief video, Vonnegut offers eight tips on how to write a short story.
Free Online Certificate Courses & MOOCs from Great Universities: A Complete List: We gathered a list of 200 free massive open online courses (MOOCs) offered by leading universities. Most of these free courses offer “certificates” or “statements of completion.” Many new courses start in January 2013. So be sure to check it out. Also don’t miss our other new resource collection: 200 Free Kids Educational Resources: Video Lessons, Apps, Books, Websites & Beyond.
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