When Charlie Chaplin Entered a Chaplin Look-Alike Contest & Came in 20th Place

in Film | February 4th, 2025

Char­lie Chap­lin start­ed appear­ing in his first films in 1914—40 films, to be precise—and, by 1915, the Unit­ed States had a major case of “Chap­lini­tis.” Chap­lin mus­tach­es were sud­den­ly pop­ping up every­where–as were Chap­lin imi­ta­tors and Chap­lin look-alike con­tests. A young Bob Hope appar­ent­ly won one such con­test in Cleve­land. Chap­lin Fever con­tin­ued burn­ing hot through 1921, the year when the Chap­lin look-alike con­test, shown above, was held out­side the Lib­er­ty The­atre in Belling­ham, Wash­ing­ton.

Accord­ing to leg­end, some­where between 1915 and 1921, Chap­lin decid­ed to enter a Chap­lin look-alike con­test, and lost, bad­ly.

A short arti­cle called “How Char­lie Chap­lin Failed,” appear­ing in The Straits Times of Sin­ga­pore in August of 1920, read like this:

Lord Des­bor­ough, pre­sid­ing at a din­ner of the Anglo-Sax­on club told a sto­ry which will have an endur­ing life. It comes from Miss Mary Pick­ford who told it to Lady Des­bor­ough, “Char­lie Chap­lin was one day at a fair in the Unit­ed States, where a prin­ci­pal attrac­tion was a com­pe­ti­tion as to who could best imi­tate the Char­lie Chap­lin walk. The real Char­lie Chap­lin thought there might be a chance for him so he entered for the per­for­mance, minus his cel­e­brat­ed mous­tache and his boots. He was a fright­ful fail­ure and came in twen­ti­eth.

A vari­a­tion on the same sto­ry appeared in a New Zealand news­pa­per, the Pover­ty Bay Her­ald, again in 1920. As did anoth­er sto­ry in the Aus­tralian news­pa­per, the Albany Adver­tis­er, in March, 1921.

A com­pe­ti­tion in Char­lie Chap­lin imper­son­ations was held in Cal­i­for­nia recent­ly. There was some­thing like 40 com­peti­tors, and Char­lie Chap­lin, as a joke, entered the con­test under an assumed name. He imper­son­at­ed his well known film self. But he did not win; he was 27th in the com­pe­ti­tion.

Did Chap­lin come in 20th place? 27th place? Did he enter a con­test at all? It’s fun to imag­ine that he did. But, a cen­tu­ry lat­er, many con­sid­er the sto­ry the stuff of urban leg­end. When one researcher asked the Asso­ci­a­tion Chap­lin to weigh in, they appar­ent­ly had this to say: “This anec­dote told by Lord Des­bor­ough, who­ev­er he may have been, was quite wide­ly report­ed in the British press at the time. There are no oth­er ref­er­ences to such a com­pe­ti­tion in any oth­er press clip­ping albums that I have seen so I can only assume that this is the source of that rumour, urban myth, what­ev­er it is. How­ev­er, it may be true.”

I’d like to believe it is.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in ear­ly 2016.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

6o+ Free Char­lie Chap­lin Films Online

What Would the World of Char­lie Chap­lin Look Like in Col­or?: Watch a Col­or­ful­ly Restored Ver­sion of A Night at the Show (1915)

The Char­lie Chap­lin Archive Opens, Putting Online 30,000 Pho­tos & Doc­u­ments from the Life of the Icon­ic Film Star

Char­lie Chap­lin Gets Strapped into a Dystopi­an “Rube Gold­berg Machine,” a Fright­ful Com­men­tary on Mod­ern Cap­i­tal­ism

Char­lie Chap­lin Films a Scene Inside a Lion’s Cage in 200 Takes

 

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Where Do You Put the Camera? Every Frame a Painting Presents Insights from Famous Directors

in Film | January 24th, 2025

Whether or not we believe in auteur­hood, we each have our own men­tal image of what a film direc­tor does. But if we’ve nev­er actu­al­ly seen one at work, we’re liable not to under­stand what the actu­al expe­ri­ence of direct­ing feels like: mak­ing deci­sion after deci­sion after deci­sion, dur­ing the shoot and at all oth­er times besides. (Wes Ander­son made light of that gaunt­let in an Amer­i­can Express com­mer­cial years ago.) Not all of these deci­sions are eas­i­ly made, and it can actu­al­ly be the sim­plest-sound­ing ones that cause the worst headaches. Where, for exam­ple, do you put the cam­era?

That’s the sub­ject of the new video essay above from Tay­lor Ramos and Tony Zhou’s YouTube chan­nel Every Frame a Paint­ing, which con­sid­ers how the deci­sion of cam­era place­ment has been approached by such famous direc­tors like Steven Soder­bergh, Gre­ta Ger­wig, Guiller­mo del Toro, and Mar­tin Scors­ese, as well as mas­ter cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Roger Deakins.

Tech­nol­o­gy may have mul­ti­plied the choic­es avail­able for any giv­en shot, but that cer­tain­ly has­n’t made the task any eas­i­er. Some film­mak­ers find their way by ask­ing one espe­cial­ly clar­i­fy­ing ques­tion: what is this scene about? The answer can sug­gest what the cam­era should be look­ing at, and even how it should be look­ing at it.

Hav­ing become film­mak­ers them­selves dur­ing Every Frame a Paint­ing’s hia­tus, Ramos and Zhou now under­stand all this as more than an intel­lec­tu­al inquiry. “Some­times, the thing in our way is equip­ment,” says Zhou. “Some­times it’s the weath­er. Some­times it’s a lack of resources. And some­times, the thing in our way is us.” Any direc­tor would do well to bear in mind the brac­ing advice once giv­en by John Ford to a young Steven Spiel­berg, as dra­ma­tized (with a tru­ly aston­ish­ing cast­ing choice) in the lat­ter’s auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal pic­ture The Fabel­mans: “When the hori­zon’s at the bot­tom, it’s inter­est­ing. When the hori­zon’s at the top, it’s inter­est­ing.” As for what it is when the hori­zon is in the mid­dle, well, you’ll have to watch the movie.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The His­to­ry of the Movie Cam­era in Four Min­utes: From the Lumiere Broth­ers to Google Glass

The Cin­e­matog­ra­phy That Changed Cin­e­ma: Explor­ing Aki­ra Kuro­sawa, Stan­ley Kubrick, Peter Green­away & Oth­er Auteurs

How Ger­man Expres­sion­ism Gave Rise to the “Dutch” Angle, the Cam­era Shot That Defined Clas­sic Films by Welles, Hitch­cock, Taran­ti­no & More

Every Acad­e­my Award Win­ner for Best Cin­e­matog­ra­phy in One Super­cut: From 1927’s Sun­rise to 2016’s La La Land

Sig­na­ture Shots from the Films of Stan­ley Kubrick: One-Point Per­spec­tive

Every Frame a Paint­ing Returns to YouTube & Explores Why the Sus­tained Two-Shot Van­ished from Movies

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Watch 950 Weather Reports Presented by David Lynch, Straight from His Los Angeles Home

in Film, YouTube | January 22nd, 2025

Los Ange­les is hard­ly a city known for its var­ied weath­er, but if one lives there long enough, one does become high­ly attuned to its many sub­tleties. (Grant­ed, some of the local phe­nom­e­na involved, like the noto­ri­ous San­ta Ana winds, can pro­duce far-from-sub­tle effects.) The late David Lynch, who spent much of his life in Los Ange­les, was more attuned to them than most. For a time, he even post­ed dai­ly YouTube videos in which he talked about noth­ing else. Or rather, he talked about almost noth­ing else: much of the appeal of his weath­er reports, 950 of which you can watch on this playlist, lies in his unpre­dictable asides.

In addi­tion to announc­ing the date (in a slight­ly eccen­tric form, e.g. “June one, two-thou­sand and twen­ty”), read­ing the tem­per­a­ture in both Fahren­heit and Cel­sius, and remark­ing on the pres­ence or absence of “blue skies and gold­en sun­shine,” Lynch would some­times men­tion what was on his mind that day. “Today I’m think­ing about tin cans,” he declared in his weath­er report for Octo­ber 11th, 2020. A cou­ple of months lat­er, he was remem­ber­ing Per­cy Faith’s theme from the San­dra Dee and Troy Don­ahue vehi­cle A Sum­mer Place, which to him encap­su­lat­ed the “roman­tic, won­drous feel­ing of the fifties” at that decade’s very end.

The weath­er-report­ing Lynch showed an aware­ness of his audi­ence as well, occa­sion­al­ly pre­sent­ing them with a hand-drawn Valen­tine’s Day card or expres­sion of thanks for view­ing: “What a great bunch you all are, those of you who come each day to check out the weath­er.” But as Ali Raz writes in the Believ­er, one views Lynch’s weath­er reports “not to learn about the weath­er but to watch Lynch per­form — even though, pre­cise­ly because, he doesn’t per­form in any actor­ly way. Instead, he per­forms him­self.” And he’d been doing it in that form longer than many real­ized, hav­ing begun his reports as a call-in seg­ment on Los Ange­les radio sta­tion Indie 103.1 FM in 2005, then post­ing them as videos to his own web site.

Lynch returned to weath­er reportage on YouTube dur­ing the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, which made the at-home set­ting fash­ion­able. His videos inspired some of their view­ers, who pre­sum­ably had more time on their hands than usu­al, to do the hard work of exe­ge­sis. One user of the David Lynch sub­red­dit found the weath­er reports key to under­stand­ing Lynch’s work, specif­i­cal­ly through “the idea of aware­ness. What does it mean to look at the world around us?” In his films, “this is accom­plished by sur­re­al­ism, vio­lence, and a gen­er­al sense of the unset­tling or men­ac­ing. But those are vehi­cles for the idea of aware­ness, not its essence.” His Weath­er Reports show that “aware­ness does­n’t have to come through an extreme men­tal state, but could be part of our dai­ly life,” in times of blue skies and gold­en sun­shine or oth­er­wise.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Wide-Rang­ing Cre­ative Genius of David Lynch (RIP): Dis­cov­er His Films, Music Videos, Car­toons, Com­mer­cials, Paint­ings, Pho­tog­ra­phy & More

David Lynch Explains Why Depres­sion Is the Ene­my of Cre­ativ­i­ty — and Why Med­i­ta­tion Is the Solu­tion

David Lynch Tries to Make a List of the Good Things Hap­pen­ing in the World… and Comes Up Blank

How David Lynch Got Cre­ative Inspi­ra­tion? By Drink­ing a Milk­shake at Bob’s Big Boy, Every Sin­gle Day, for Sev­en Straight Years

Hear the Best of Ange­lo Badala­men­ti (RIP) from 1986–2017: Fea­tures Music from David Lynch’s Blue Vel­vet, Twin Peaks & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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The Story of How Quentin Tarantino Became a Filmmaker and Created Pulp Fiction, as Told by Quentin Tarantino

in Film | January 21st, 2025

For a film, explained a young Quentin Taran­ti­no in one inter­view, “the real test of time isn’t the Fri­day that it opens. It’s how the film is thought of thir­ty years from now.” It just so hap­pens that Pulp Fic­tion, which made Taran­ti­no the most cel­e­brat­ed direc­tor in Amer­i­ca prac­ti­cal­ly on its open­ing day, came out thir­ty years ago last fall. That pro­vid­ed the occa­sion for the video essay from YouTu­ber Dod­ford above, which tells the sto­ry of how Taran­ti­no became a film­mak­er, assem­bled for the most part out of Taran­ti­no’s own words — and in the not-quite-lin­ear chronol­o­gy with which peo­ple still asso­ciate him.

As Taran­ti­no’s body of work has grown, it’s come to seem less defined by such sliced-and-diced time­lines, or even by the obses­sions with pop cul­ture or graph­ic vio­lence the media tend­ed to exag­ger­ate when first he rose to fame. “They thought it was far more vio­lent than it was,” he says of the pub­lic reac­tion to his first fea­ture Reser­voir Dogs in a Char­lie Rose inter­view from which this video draws. He could take that as a tes­ta­ment to his under­stand­ing of cin­e­ma, a form that draws its pow­er just as often from what it does­n’t show as what it does.

Taran­ti­no began cul­ti­vat­ing that under­stand­ing ear­ly, through­out his movie-sat­u­rat­ed child­hood and his stint as a video-store clerk in Man­hat­tan Beach. Con­trary to pop­u­lar belief, how­ev­er, Video Archives did­n’t make him a movie expert: “I was already a movie expert; that’s how I got hired.” It was dur­ing that peri­od that he com­menced work on My Best Friend’s Birth­day, which he meant to be his first film. Though he nev­er com­plet­ed it even after three years of work, he did notice the artis­tic devel­op­ment evi­dent in a com­par­i­son between its ama­teur­ish ear­ly scenes and its more effec­tive lat­er ones.

That failed project turned out to be “the best film school a per­son could pos­si­bly have,” and it pre­pared him to seize the oppor­tu­ni­ties that would come lat­er. After writ­ing and sell­ing the script for True Romance, he was in a posi­tion to work on Reser­voir Dogs, which even­tu­al­ly made it to pro­duc­tion thanks to the inter­est of Har­vey Kei­t­el, who would play Mr. White. When that pic­ture got atten­tion at Sun­dance and became an indie hit, Taran­ti­no went off on a Euro­pean sojourn, osten­si­bly in order to work on his next script — and to fig­ure out how to beat “the dread­ed sopho­more curse,” some­thing with which he’d had much sec­ond-hand expe­ri­ence as a dis­ap­point­ed movie­go­er.

The fruit of those labors, a crime-sto­ry anthol­o­gy called Pulp Fic­tion, first seemed, incred­i­bly, to promise lit­tle box-office poten­tial. But one sens­es that Taran­ti­no knew exact­ly what he had, because he knew his audi­ence. It’s not that he’d com­mis­sioned inten­sive mar­ket research, but that, as he once put it, “It’s me; I’m the audi­ence.” And so he’s remained over the past three decades, draw­ing ever clos­er to com­plet­ing what, as he’s often said, will ulti­mate­ly con­sti­tute a ten-pic­ture fil­mog­ra­phy. Actu­al­ly stop­ping there would, of course, risk the dis­ap­point­ment of his many fans, who only want more. But when a film­mak­er keeps at it too long, as the cinephile in Taran­ti­no well under­stands, he runs the far more dire risk of dis­ap­point­ing him­self.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Quentin Taran­ti­no Explains How to Write & Direct Movies

My Best Friend’s Birth­day, Quentin Tarantino’s 1987 Debut Film

An Analy­sis of Quentin Tarantino’s Films Nar­rat­ed (Most­ly) by Quentin Taran­ti­no

Quentin Taran­ti­no Gives a Tour of Video Archives, the Store Where He Worked Before Becom­ing a Film­mak­er

Quentin Taran­ti­no & Roger Avary Rewatch Cult-Clas­sic Movies on Their New Video Archives Pod­cast

Why Quentin Taran­ti­no Will Only Make 10 Movies

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

 

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Why David Lynch’s Dune Went Wrong: A Comparison with Denis Villeneuve’s Hit Adaptation

in Film, Sci Fi | January 20th, 2025

Denis Vil­leneu­ve’s recent film adap­ta­tion of Dune is gen­er­al­ly con­sid­ered to be supe­ri­or to the late David Lynch’s, from 1984 — though even accord­ing to many of Lynch’s fans, it could hard­ly have been worse. In a 1996 piece for Pre­miere mag­a­zine, David Fos­ter Wal­lace described Dune as “unques­tion­ably the worst movie of Lynch’s career,” not least due to the mis­cast­ing of the direc­tor him­self: “Eraser­head had been one of those sell-your-own-plas­ma-to-buy-the-film-stock mas­ter­pieces, with a tiny and large­ly unpaid cast and crew. Dune, on the oth­er hand, had one of the biggest bud­gets in Hol­ly­wood his­to­ry,” mar­shaled by super-pro­duc­er Dino De Lau­ren­ti­is. But could even a mas­ter block­buster crafts­man have made cin­e­mat­ic sense of Frank Her­bert’s orig­i­nal sto­ry, “which even in the nov­el is con­vo­lut­ed to the point of pain”?

With its two parts hav­ing been released in the twen­ty-twen­ties, Vil­leneu­ve’s Dune prac­ti­cal­ly cries out for Youtube video essays com­par­ing it to Lynch’s ver­sion. The one above from Archer Green first high­lights their dif­fer­ences through one scene that was mem­o­rable in the nov­el and both films: when, being put to the test by the Rev­erend Moth­er Gaius Helen Mohi­am, the young hero Paul Atrei­des, played in the old Dune by Kyle MacLach­lan and the new one by Tim­o­th­ée Cha­la­met, inserts his hand into a box that inflicts extreme pain. Super­fi­cial­ly sim­i­lar though they may appear, the two sequences reveal defin­ing qual­i­ties of each pic­ture’s look and feel — Vil­leneu­ve’s is shad­owy and full of ancient-look­ing details, while Lynch’s looks like a piece of retro-futur­is­tic Jacobean the­ater — as well as the con­trast between how they dra­ma­tize the source mate­r­i­al.

The new Dune is “a very mod­ern-look­ing film that goes for a real­is­tic and ground­ed aes­thet­ic, and it feels more like a seri­ous pres­tige sci-fi movie,” says Archer Green, “where­as old Dune is more sur­re­al­ist: it’s elab­o­rate, grungy, and ulti­mate­ly quite over the top.” Their hav­ing been made in dif­fer­ent eras explains some of this, but so does their hav­ing been made at dif­fer­ent scales of time. Viewed back-to-back, Vil­leneu­ve’s Dune movies run just over five and a half hours. Lynch open­ly admit­ted that he’d “sold out” his right to the final cut in exchange for a major Hol­ly­wood project, but he also sel­dom failed to men­tion that the stu­dio demand­ed that the film be “squeezed” to two hours and 17 min­utes in order to guar­an­tee a cer­tain min­i­mum num­ber of dai­ly screen­ings.

This pres­sure to get the run­time down must have moti­vat­ed some of what even in the nine­teen-eight­ies felt old-fash­ioned about Lynch’s Dune, like its extend­ed “expo­si­tion dumps” and its “hav­ing char­ac­ters’ thoughts audi­bi­lized on the sound­track while the cam­era zooms in on the char­ac­ter mak­ing a think­ing face,” as Wal­lace put it. The film’s fail­ure “could eas­i­ly have turned Lynch into an embit­tered hack, doing effects-inten­sive gorefests for com­mer­cial stu­dios” or “sent him scur­ry­ing to the safe­ty of acad­eme, mak­ing obscure, plot­less 16mm’s for the pipe-and-beret crowd.” Instead, he took the pal­try deal sub­se­quent­ly offered him by De Lau­ren­ti­is and made Blue Vel­vet, whose suc­cess he rode to become a major cul­tur­al fig­ure. In a way, Lynch’s Dune fias­co gave Cha­la­met the even­tu­al oppor­tu­ni­ty to become the defin­i­tive Paul Atrei­des — and MacLach­lan, to become Spe­cial Agent Dale Coop­er.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Side-by-Side, Shot-by-Shot Com­par­i­son of Denis Villeneuve’s 2020 Dune and David Lynch’s 1984 Dune

Hear Bri­an Eno’s Con­tri­bu­tion to the Sound­track of David Lynch’s Dune (1984)

The Dune Col­or­ing & Activ­i­ty Books: When David Lynch’s 1984 Film Cre­at­ed Count­less Hours of Pecu­liar Fun for Kids

The Glos­sary Uni­ver­sal Stu­dios Gave Out to the First Audi­ences of David Lynch’s Dune (1984)

The 14-Hour Epic Film, Dune, That Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky, Pink Floyd, Sal­vador Dalí, Moe­bius, Orson Welles & Mick Jag­ger Nev­er Made

The Wide-Rang­ing Cre­ative Genius of David Lynch (RIP): Dis­cov­er His Films, Music Videos, Car­toons, Com­mer­cials, Paint­ings, Pho­tog­ra­phy & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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The Wide-Ranging Creative Genius of David Lynch (RIP): Discover His Films, Music Videos, Cartoons, Commercials, Paintings, Photography & More

in Art, Film | January 16th, 2025

Image by Sasha Kar­galt­sev via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

As every cinephile has by now heard, and lament­ed, we’ve just lost a great Amer­i­can film­mak­er. From Eraser­head to Blue Vel­vet to Mul­hol­land Dri­ve to Inland Empire, David Lynch’s fea­tures will sure­ly con­tin­ue to bewil­der and inspire gen­er­a­tion after gen­er­a­tion of aspir­ing young auteurs. (There seems even to be a re-eval­u­a­tion under­way of his adap­ta­tion of Dune, the box-office cat­a­stro­phe that turned him away from the Hol­ly­wood machine.) But Lynch was nev­er exact­ly an aspir­ing young auteur him­self. He actu­al­ly began his career as a painter, just one of the many facets of his artis­tic exis­tence that we’ve fea­tured over the years here at Open Cul­ture.

Lynch stud­ied paint­ing at the Penn­syl­va­nia Acad­e­my of Fine Arts in the mid-nine­teen-six­ties, and the urban decay of Philadel­phia at the time did a great deal to inspire the aes­thet­ic of Eraser­head, which made his name on the mid­night-movie cir­cuit a decade lat­er. When the MTV era fired up in just a few years, he found his sig­na­ture blend of grotes­querie and hyper-nor­mal­i­ty — what would soon be termed “Lynchi­an” — in demand from cer­tain like-mind­ed record­ing artists. It was around that same time that he launched a side career as a com­ic artist, or in any case a com­ic writer, con­tribut­ing a thor­ough­ly sta­t­ic yet com­pelling­ly var­ied strip called The Angri­est Dog in the World to the LA Read­er from the ear­ly eight­ies through the ear­ly nineties.

In 1987, the year after the art-house block­buster that was Blue Vel­vet set off what Guy Maddin lat­er called “the last real earth­quake in Amer­i­can cin­e­ma,” Lynch host­ed a BBC tele­vi­sion series on the his­to­ry of sur­re­al­ist film. That ultra-mass medi­um would turn out to be a sur­pris­ing­ly recep­tive venue for his high­ly idio­syn­crat­ic art: first he made com­mer­cials, then he co-cre­at­ed with Mark Frost the ABC mys­tery series Twin Peaks, which prac­ti­cal­ly over­took Amer­i­can pop­u­lar cul­ture when it debuted in 1990. (See also these video essays on the mak­ing and mean­ing of the show.) Not that the phe­nom­e­non was lim­it­ed to the U.S., as evi­denced by Lynch’s going on to direct a mini-sea­son of Twin Peaks in the form of canned-cof­fee com­mer­cials for the Japan­ese mar­ket.

Even Mul­hol­land Dri­ve, the pic­ture many con­sid­er to be Lynch’s mas­ter­piece, was con­ceived as a pilot for a TV show. Not long after its release, he put out more work in ser­i­al form, includ­ing the sav­age car­toon Dum­b­land and the har­row­ing sit­com homage Rab­bits (lat­er incor­po­rat­ed into Inland Empire, his final film). In the late two-thou­sands, he pre­sent­ed Inter­view Project, a doc­u­men­tary web series co-cre­at­ed by his son; in the ear­ly twen­ty-tens, he put out his first (but not last) solo music album, Crazy Clown Time. That same decade, his pho­tographs of old fac­to­ries went on dis­play, his line of organ­ic cof­fee came onto the mar­ket, his auto­bi­og­ra­phy was pub­lished, and his Mas­ter­Class went online.

Lynch remained pro­lif­ic through the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic of the twen­ty-twen­ties, in part by post­ing Los Ange­les weath­er reports from his home to his YouTube chan­nel. In recent years, he announced that he would nev­er retire, despite liv­ing with a case of emphy­se­ma so severe that he could no longer direct in any con­ven­tion­al man­ner. Such are the wages, as he acknowl­edged, of hav­ing smoked since age sev­en, though he also seemed to believe that every habit and choice in life con­tributed to his work. Per­haps the smok­ing did its part to inspire him, like his long prac­tice of Tran­scen­den­tal Med­i­ta­tion or his dai­ly milk­shake at Bob’s Big Boy, about all of which he spoke open­ly in life. But if there’s any par­tic­u­lar secret of his for­mi­da­ble cre­ativ­i­ty, it feels as if he’s tak­en it with him.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Twin Peaks Actu­al­ly Explained: A 4‑Hour Video Essay Demys­ti­fies It All

David Lynch Teach­es You to Cook His Quinoa Recipe in a Strange, Sur­re­al­ist Video

David Lynch Being a Mad­man for a Relent­less 8 Min­utes and 30 Sec­onds

David Lynch Explains Why Depres­sion Is the Ene­my of Cre­ativ­i­ty — and Why Med­i­ta­tion Is the Solu­tion

David Lynch Mus­es About the Mag­ic of Cin­e­ma & Med­i­ta­tion in a New Abstract Short Film

David Lynch Tries to Make a List of the Good Things Hap­pen­ing in the World … and Comes Up Blank

Ange­lo Badala­men­ti Reveals How He and David Lynch Com­posed the Twin Peaks’ “Love Theme”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

 

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Watch Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo and Gertie the Dinosaur, and Witness the Birth of Modern Animation (1911–1914)

in Animation, Film, History | January 14th, 2025

“Con­sid­er­ing that, in a car­toon, any­thing can hap­pen that the mind can imag­ine, the comics have gen­er­al­ly depict­ed pret­ty mun­dane worlds,” writes Calvin and Hobbes cre­ator Bill Wat­ter­son. “Sure, there have been talk­ing ani­mals, a few space­ships and what­not, but the comics have rarely shown us any­thing tru­ly bizarre. Lit­tle Nemo’s dream imagery, how­ev­er, is as mind-bend­ing today as ever, and Win­sor McCay remains one of the great­est inno­va­tors and manip­u­la­tors of the com­ic strip medi­um.” And Lit­tle Nemo, which sprawled across entire news­pa­per pages in the ear­ly decades of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, pushed artis­tic bound­aries not just as a com­ic, but also as a film.

When first seen in 1911, the twelve-minute short Lit­tle Nemo was titled Win­sor McCay, the Famous Car­toon­ist of the N.Y. Her­ald and His Mov­ing Comics. A mix­ture of live action and ani­ma­tion, it dra­ma­tizes McCay mak­ing a gen­tle­man’s wager with his col­leagues that he can draw fig­ures that move — an idea that might have come with a cer­tain plau­si­bil­i­ty, giv­en that speed-draw­ing was already a suc­cess­ful part of his vaude­ville act. Meet­ing this chal­lenge entails draw­ing 4,000 pic­tures, a task as demand­ing for McCay the char­ac­ter as it was for McCay the real artist. This labor adds up to the four min­utes that end the film, which con­tains moments of still-impres­sive flu­id­i­ty, tech­nique, and humor.

Clear­ly pos­sessed of a sense of ani­ma­tion’s poten­tial as an art form, McCay went on to make nine more films, and ulti­mate­ly con­sid­ered them his proud­est work. Like the Lit­tle Nemo movie, he used his sec­ond such effort, Ger­tie the Dinosaur, in his vaude­ville act, per­form­ing along­side the pro­jec­tion to cre­ate the effect of his giv­ing the tit­u­lar pre­his­toric crea­ture com­mands. “In some ways, McCay was the fore­run­ner of Walt Dis­ney in terms of Amer­i­can ani­ma­tion,” writes Lucas O. Seastrom at The Walt Dis­ney Fam­i­ly Muse­um. “In order to cre­ate a lov­able dinosaur and accom­plish these seem­ing­ly mag­i­cal feats, McCay used math­e­mat­i­cal pre­ci­sion and ground­break­ing tech­niques, such as the process of inbe­tween­ing, which lat­er became a Dis­ney stan­dard.”

More than once, McCay the ani­ma­tor drew inspi­ra­tion from the work of McCay the news­pa­per artist: in 1921, he made a cou­ple of motion pic­tures out of his pre-Lit­tle Nemo sleep-themed com­ic strip Dream of the Rarebit Fiend. But for his most ambi­tious ani­mat­ed work, he turned toward his­to­ry — and, at the time, rather recent his­to­ry — to re-cre­ate the sink­ing of the RMS Lusi­ta­nia, an event that his employ­er, the news­pa­per mag­nate William Ran­dolph Hearst, had insist­ed on down­play­ing at the time due to his stance against the U.S.’ join­ing the Great War. Decades there­after, Looney Tunes ani­ma­tor Chuck Jones said that “the two most impor­tant peo­ple in ani­ma­tion are Win­sor McCay and Walt Dis­ney, and I’m not sure which should go first.” Watch these and McCay’s oth­er sur­viv­ing films on this Youtube playlist, and you can decide for your­self.

H/T Izzy

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Evo­lu­tion of Ani­ma­tion, 1833–2017: From the Phenakistis­cope to Pixar

Vis­it the World of Lit­tle Nemo Artist Win­sor McCay: Three Clas­sic Ani­ma­tions

Watch Fan­tas­magorie, the World’s First Ani­mat­ed Car­toon (1908)

Win­sor McCay Ani­mates the Sink­ing of the Lusi­ta­nia in the Ear­li­est Ani­mat­ed Pro­pa­gan­da Film (1918)

The Beau­ti­ful Anar­chy of the Ear­li­est Ani­mat­ed Car­toons: Explore an Archive with 200+ Ear­ly Ani­ma­tions

The Ori­gins of Ani­me: Watch Ear­ly Japan­ese Ani­ma­tions (1917 to 1931)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Compare the “It Ain’t Me Babe” Scene from A Complete Unknown to the Real Bob Dylan & Joan Baez Performance at the Newport Folk Festival

in Film, History, Music | January 8th, 2025

A Com­plete Unknown, the new movie about Bob Dylan’s rise in the folk-music scene of the ear­ly nine­teen-six­ties and sub­se­quent elec­tri­fied break with it, has been praised for not tak­ing exces­sive lib­er­ties, at least by the stan­dards of pop­u­lar music biopics. Its con­ver­sion of a real chap­ter of cul­tur­al his­to­ry has entailed var­i­ous con­fla­tions, com­pres­sions, and rearrange­ments, but you’d expect that from a Hol­ly­wood direc­tor like James Man­gold. What many view­ers’ judg­ment will come down to is less his­tor­i­cal verac­i­ty than whether they believe Tim­o­th­ée Cha­la­met as the young Bob Dylan — or rather, as the young Bob Dylan they’ve always imag­ined.

Still, much depends on the rest of the cast, who por­tray a host of major folk- and folk-adja­cent fig­ures includ­ing Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, John­ny Cash, Alan Lomax, and the late Peter Yarrow. No per­for­mance apart from Cha­la­met’s has received as much atten­tion as Mon­i­ca Bar­baro’s Joan Baez. In those char­ac­ters’ key scene togeth­er they take the stage at the 1964 New­port Folk Fes­ti­val and sing “It Ain’t Me Babe,” a Dylan song that Baez also record­ed. Their ren­di­tion con­veys the depth of their roman­tic and artis­tic con­nec­tion not just to the audi­ence, but also to Dylan’s girl­friend, played by Elle Fan­ning, watch­ing just off­stage.


“That idea of the secret is real­ly what I need­ed to dri­ve the scene,” says Man­gold, using the lan­guage of his trade, in the Vari­ety video at the top of the post. “Ulti­mate­ly, I’ve got to get it to where Elle is dri­ven away by what­ev­er she’s seen on stage. But it would­n’t have worked as well if Cha­la­met and Bar­baro had­n’t nailed the per­for­mance, just one of many in the film shot 100 per­cent live. If you’d like to com­pare them to the real thing, have a look at the footage of Dylan and Baez singing “It Ain’t Me Babe” at the actu­al 1964 New­port Folk Fes­ti­val just above. After that, you may want to go back to the pre­vi­ous year’s fes­ti­val and watch their per­for­mance of “With God on Our Side” — and, while you’re at it, lis­ten to Dylan’s entire cat­a­log all over again.

Relat­ed con­tent

Joan Baez Live in 1965: Full Con­cert

Bob Dylan’s His­toric New­port Folk Fes­ti­val Per­for­mances, 1963–1965

Watch Joan Baez Endear­ing­ly Imi­tate Bob Dylan (1972)

The Moment When Bob Dylan Went Elec­tric: Watch Him Play “Maggie’s Farm” at the New­port Folk Fes­ti­val in 1965

A Mas­sive 55-Hour Chrono­log­i­cal Playlist of Bob Dylan Songs: Stream 763 Tracks

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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