Always the Director: Martin Scorsese Spoofs Himself in Two Commercials

in Comedy, Film, Television | September 17th, 2012

Over the years, Mar­tin Scors­ese has earned a rep­u­ta­tion as a con­sum­mate film­mak­er, an obses­sive per­fec­tion­ist who lives and breathes cin­e­ma. In these two com­mer­cials the famed direc­tor moves to the front of the cam­era to make fun of his own man­ic per­fec­tion­ism.

In 2003 Scors­ese was asked to play him­self in a com­mer­cial for Amer­i­can Express (see above), which was one of the spon­sors of the Tribeca Film Fes­ti­val. In keep­ing with his rep­u­ta­tion for fas­tid­i­ous­ness, Scors­ese demand­ed to see a resume and show reel from vet­er­an com­mer­cial direc­tor Jim Jenk­ins before agree­ing to the shoot. “It’s like Kobe Bryant ask­ing for your bas­ket­ball cre­den­tials,” Jenk­ins told Ste­fano Hat­field at Adver­tis­ing Age. “What are you gonna say? I once direct­ed Tonya Hard­ing in a Fox Sports com­mer­cial?”

Scors­ese appar­ent­ly liked what he saw, because Jenk­ins was hired. The shoot took place in a Los Ange­les drug­store dur­ing a sin­gle day. “The main chal­lenge,” wrote Hat­field in his arti­cle, “was to get Mr. Scors­ese to speak as quick­ly as we all think he does. He actu­al­ly had to be coaxed into that machine-gun deliv­ery we have all come to expect of him. While it is entire­ly cred­i­ble that this per­fec­tion­ist would have his nephew stage a par­ty all over again for a bet­ter shoot, Mr. Scors­ese admit­ted that he had­n’t actu­al­ly col­lect­ed a roll of film from a drug­store for 15 years.”

Jenk­ins and Scors­ese teamed up again for a 2008 AT&T com­mer­cial that was shown in the­aters to encour­age movie-goers to silence their phones. It shows Scors­ese barg­ing into the home of a moth­er and her young son and pro­ceed­ing to direct a pri­vate phone call.  The mes­sage: “We won’t inter­rupt your phone calls. Please don’t inter­rupt our movies.” Scors­ese was orig­i­nal­ly expect­ed to direct the com­mer­cial, accord­ing to Jenk­ins, but decid­ed just to act in it. “Obvi­ous­ly he’s a nat­ur­al actor,” Jenk­ins said of Scors­ese in an inter­view with Cre­ativ­i­ty-online. “But he was ner­vous. He just want­ed it to be fun­ny. He said, ‘I can’t know if it’s fun­ny. Just make it fun­ny.’ ”

You can watch the com­mer­cial below to decide for your­self whether it’s fun­ny. And be sure to come back tomor­row, when we fea­ture an imag­i­na­tive com­mer­cial direct­ed by Scors­ese him­self.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Mar­tin Scors­ese’s Very First Films: Three Imag­i­na­tive Short Works

Mar­tin Scors­ese Appears in New Apple Ad, Plays on His Chill­ing Cameo in Taxi Dri­ver

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Yeah, Baby! Deep Purple Gets Shagadelic on Playboy After Dark

in Music, Television | September 14th, 2012

This is so bad it’s good. Or maybe, as the char­ac­ter played by Tho­ra Birch dead­pans in a mem­o­rable scene in Ter­ry Zwigof­f’s film Ghost World, “This is so bad it’s gone past good and back to bad again.”

In any case once it gets going you may find it hard to resist watch­ing this clip from the Sep­tem­ber 23, 1968 episode of Hugh Hefn­er’s syn­di­cat­ed TV pro­gram Play­boy After Dark. It looks like it came straight out of an Austin Pow­ers movie. The show was chore­o­graphed to rep­re­sent the hippest, groovi­est cock­tail par­ty ever.

The musi­cal guests that night were the British rock group Deep Pur­ple, who had formed only nine months ear­li­er and were still in their orig­i­nal line­up, which fea­tured Rod Evans on vocals and Nick Sim­per on bass (both of whom left the band less than a year lat­er) along with Jon Lord on organ, Richie Black­more on gui­tar and Ian Paice on drums.

Look­ing debonair in his black tie and jack­et, Hefn­er fakes inter­est in a brief gui­tar les­son from Black­more before chat­ting awk­ward­ly with Lord (who died last month) and ask­ing the group to play their first hit, “Hush” (writ­ten and orig­i­nal­ly record­ed by Joe South, who also died recent­ly), which had just made it to the top five in the Amer­i­can pop charts around the time of the broad­cast. Says Hef: “I think it would real­ly groove the kids if you’d do that.”

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Leonard Cohen’s 1983 Musical for Canadian Television: I Am a Hotel

in Music, Television | September 10th, 2012

One of the more curi­ous pieces in Leonard Cohen’s illus­tri­ous cat­a­logue is his roman­tic half-hour musi­cal, I Am a Hotel, made for Cana­di­an tele­vi­sion in 1983. The film is essen­tial­ly a long-form music video. It was inspired by his song “The Guests,” which begins:

One by one, the guests arrive
The guests are com­ing through
The open-heart­ed many
The bro­ken-heart­ed few

The film tells the sto­ry, through music and dance, of the roman­tic yearn­ings of the hotel’s staff and guests, with Cohen appear­ing through­out the film as the detached but sym­pa­thet­ic sto­ry­teller. “It’s light enter­tain­ment,” Cohen told the Tole­do Blade in 1985. “It uses songs from my first record up through recent songs.” Those songs are:

  1. “The Guests” from the 1979 album Recent Songs.
  2. “Mem­o­ries” from the 1977 album Death of a Ladies’ Man.
  3. “The Gyp­sy’s Wife” from Recent Songs.
  4. “Chelsea Hotel #2” from the 1974 album New Skin for the Old Cer­e­mo­ny.
  5. “Suzanne” from his 1967 debut album Songs of Leonard Cohen.

I Am a Hotel was filmed at the King Edward Hotel in Toron­to over a six-day peri­od in April of 1983. It was direct­ed by Allan F. Nicholls and writ­ten by Cohen and Mark Shek­ter. The cast includ­ed ice skat­ing cham­pi­on Toller Cranston as “The Man­ag­er,” dancer and chore­o­g­ra­ph­er Anne Ditch­burn as “The Gyp­sy Wife,” and Celia Fran­ca, founder of the Nation­al Bal­let of Cana­da, as “The Diva.” The film was first broad­cast in Cana­da on May 7, 1984, and although it went on to win a Gold­en Rose at the Mon­treux Inter­na­tion­al Tele­vi­sion Fes­ti­val, it has rarely been shown since. The ver­sion above is from Dutch tele­vi­sion.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Leonard Cohen Reads “The Future”

The 2005 Doc­u­men­tary, Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man

The 1965 Doc­u­men­tary, Ladies and Gentlemen…Mr. Leonard Cohen

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The Wire Re-Imagined as a Classic Video Role-Playing Game

in Television | September 10th, 2012

If some­one has insis­tent­ly rec­om­mend­ed that you watch the whole of The Wire, David Simon’s tele­vi­sion series of Bal­ti­more­an insti­tu­tion­al dys­func­tion, that per­son has — let’s face it — prob­a­bly been a thir­ty­ish white guy. But we thir­ty­ish white guys do have our iso­lat­ed moments of cul­tur­al astute­ness, of which, accord­ing to all the legit­i­mate crit­ics, enthus­ing over The Wire counts as one. But we also go into volup­tuous Prous­t­ian rap­tures at the sight of our favorite old video games, so you’d do well to take us with a grain of salt. The above video from Col­lege­Hu­mor, a site that knows its audi­ence, trans­pos­es the social­ly crit­i­cal, bor­der­line-nihilis­tic action of The Wire into the pix­el-inten­sive, usu­al­ly moral­ly sim­plis­tic form of a con­sole role-play­ing game from the late eight­ies or ear­ly nineties. This will make a cer­tain over­lap in the cul­tur­al Venn dia­gram quite excit­ed indeed, and no doubt pro­vide a source of strange fas­ci­na­tion to the rest.

The play­er takes the role, for the most part, of trou­bled Bal­ti­more Police Depart­ment Detec­tive Jim­my McNul­ty, whose equip­pable items include “gun,” “badge,” “whiskey,” and “hair gel.” When he elects to “fight the sys­tem,” a turn-based bat­tle launch­es, pit­ting McNul­ty against the sys­tem’s lit­er­al embod­i­ment, a pha­lanx of invin­ci­ble bureau­crats. The game ren­ders a drug deal as the kind of store you’d vis­it in The Leg­end of Zel­da. Items avail­able: “crack,” “hero­in,” and “mana potion.” One stage even turns into some­thing of a graph­ic adven­ture, where the play­er, in search of evi­dence, clicks com­mands like “inspect,” “take,” and “hit,” although every pos­si­ble action seems to result in noth­ing more than curs­ing from either McNul­ty or his part­ner Bunk More­land. Clear­ly, this video con­tains a wealth of laughs for the Wire (or vin­tage role-play­ing game) diehard. If you’ve put off get­ting into the show, per­haps the prospect of get­ting these inside jokes will con­vince you to take the plunge. And putting in a few hours with the ear­ly Final Fan­ta­sy titles won’t hurt.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Wire Breaks Down The Great Gats­by, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Clas­sic Crit­i­cism of Amer­i­ca (NSFW)

The Wire as Great Vic­to­ri­an Nov­el

Bill Moy­ers with The Wire’s David Simon

The Wire: Four Sea­sons in Four Min­utes

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Jimi Hendrix Wreaks Havoc on the Lulu Show, Gets Banned From the BBC (1969)

in Music, Television | September 6th, 2012

Can you imag­ine Jimi Hen­drix singing a duet with Lulu? Well, nei­ther could Hen­drix. So when the icon­o­clas­tic gui­tar play­er showed up with his band at the BBC stu­dios in Lon­don on Jan­u­ary 4, 1969 to appear on Hap­pen­ing for Lulu, he was hor­ri­fied to learn that the show’s pro­duc­er want­ed him to sing with the win­some star of To Sir, With Love. The plan called for The Jimi Hen­drix Expe­ri­ence to open their set with “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” and then play their ear­ly hit “Hey Joe,” with Lulu join­ing Hen­drix onstage at the end to sing the final bars with him before segue­ing into her reg­u­lar show-clos­ing num­ber. “We cringed,” writes bassist Noel Red­ding in his mem­oir, Are You Expe­ri­enced? The Inside Sto­ry of The Jimi Hen­drix Expe­ri­ence.

Red­ding describes the scene that he, Hen­drix, and drum­mer Mitch Mitchell walked into that day as being “so straight it was only nat­ur­al that we would try to com­bat that atmos­phere by hav­ing a smoke in our dress­ing room.” He con­tin­ues:

In our haste, the lump of hash got away and slipped down the sink drain­pipe. Pan­ic! We just could­n’t do this show straight–Lulu did­n’t approve of smok­ing! She was then mar­ried to Mau­rice Gibb of the Bee Gees, whom I’d vis­it­ed and shared a smoke with. I could always tell Lulu was due home when Mau­rice start­ed throw­ing open all the win­dows. Any­way, I found a main­te­nance man and begged tools from him with the sto­ry of a lost ring. He was too help­ful, offer­ing to dis­man­tle the drain for us. It took ages to dis­suade him, but we suc­ceed­ed in our task and had a great smoke.

When it was time for The Jimi Hen­drix Expe­ri­ence to go on cam­era, they were feel­ing fair­ly loose. They tore through “Voodoo Child” and then the pro­gram cut to Lulu, who was squeezed awk­ward­ly into a chair next to an audi­ence mem­ber in the front row. “That was real­ly hot,” she said. “Yeah. Well ladies and gen­tle­men, in case you did­n’t know, Jimi and the boys won in a big Amer­i­can mag­a­zine called Bill­board the group of the year.” As Lulu spoke a loud shriek of feed­back threw her off bal­ance. Was it an acci­dent? Hen­drix, of course, was a pio­neer in the inten­tion­al use of feed­back. A bit flus­tered, she con­tin­ued: “And they’re gonna sing for you now the song that absolute­ly made them in this coun­try, and I’d love to hear them sing it: ‘Hey Joe.’ ”

The band launched into the song, but mid­way through–before Lulu had a chance to join them onstage–Hendrix sig­naled to the oth­ers to quit play­ing. “We’d like to stop play­ing this rub­bish,” he said, “and ded­i­cate a song to the Cream, regard­less of what kind of group they may be in. We ded­i­cate this to Eric Clap­ton, Gin­ger Bak­er and Jack Bruce.” With that the band veered off into an instru­men­tal ver­sion of “Sun­shine of Your Love” by the recent­ly dis­band­ed Cream. Noel Red­ding con­tin­ues the sto­ry:

This was fun for us, but pro­duc­er Stan­ley Dorf­man did­n’t take it at all well as the min­utes ticked by on his live show. Short of run­ning onto the set to stop us or pulling the plug, there was noth­ing he could do. We played past the point where Lulu might have joined us, played through the time for talk­ing at the end, played through Stan­ley tear­ing his hair, point­ing to his watch and silent­ly scream­ing at us. We played out the show. After­wards, Dorf­man refused to speak to us but the result is one of the most wide­ly used bits of film we ever did. Cer­tain­ly, it’s the most relaxed.

The stunt report­ed­ly got Hen­drix banned from the BBC–but it made rock and roll his­to­ry. Years lat­er, Elvis Costel­lo paid homage to Hen­drix’s antics when he per­formed on Sat­ur­day Night Live. You can watch The Stunt That Got Elvis Costel­lo Banned From SNL here.

Relat­ed con­tent:

‘Elec­tric Church’: The Jimi Hen­drix Expe­ri­ence Live in Stock­holm, 1969

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Face to Face with Bertrand Russell: ‘Love is Wise, Hatred is Foolish’

in Philosophy, Television | August 31st, 2012

In April of 1959 the British philoso­pher and math­e­mati­cian Bertrand Rus­sell sat down with John Free­man of the BBC pro­gram Face to Face for a brief but wide-rang­ing and can­did inter­view. Rus­sell rem­i­nisced about his ear­ly attrac­tion to math­e­mat­ics. “I got the sort of sat­is­fac­tion that Pla­to says you can get out of math­e­mat­ics,” he said. “It was an eter­nal world. It was a time­less world. It was a world where there was a pos­si­bil­i­ty of a cer­tain kind of per­fec­tion.”

Rus­sell, of course, dis­tin­guished him­self in that rar­i­fied world as one of the founders of ana­lyt­ic phi­los­o­phy and a co-author of Prin­cip­ia Math­e­mat­i­ca, a land­mark work that sought to derive all of math­e­mat­ics from a set of log­i­cal axioms. Although the Prin­cip­ia fell short of its goal, it made an enor­mous mark on the course of 20th cen­tu­ry thought. When World War I came along, though, Rus­sell felt it was time to come down from the ivory tow­er of abstract think­ing. “This world is too bad,” Rus­sell told Free­man. “We must notice it.”

The half-hour con­ver­sa­tion, shown above in its entire­ty, is of a qual­i­ty rarely seen on tele­vi­sion today. The inter­view­er Free­man was at that time a for­mer Mem­ber of Par­lia­ment and a future Ambas­sador to the Unit­ed States. Rus­sell talks with him about his child­hood, his views on reli­gion, his polit­i­cal and social activism, even his amus­ing con­vic­tion that smok­ing extend­ed his life. But per­haps the most famous moment comes at the end, when Free­man asks the old philoso­pher what mes­sage he would offer to peo­ple liv­ing a thou­sand years hence. In answer­ing the ques­tion, Rus­sell bal­ances the two great spheres that occu­pied his life:

I should like to say two things, one intel­lec­tu­al and one moral:

The intel­lec­tu­al thing I should want to say to them is this: When you are study­ing any mat­ter or con­sid­er­ing any phi­los­o­phy, ask your­self only what are the facts and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Nev­er let your­self be divert­ed either by what you wish to believe or by what you think would have benef­i­cent social effects if it were believed, but look only and sole­ly at what are the facts. That is the intel­lec­tu­al thing that I should wish to say.

The moral thing I should wish to say to them is very sim­ple. I should say: Love is wise, hatred is fool­ish. In this world, which is get­ting more and more close­ly inter­con­nect­ed, we have to learn to tol­er­ate each oth­er. We have to learn to put up with the fact that some peo­ple say things that we don’t like. We can only live togeth­er in that way, and if we are to live togeth­er and not die togeth­er we must learn a kind of char­i­ty and a kind of tol­er­ance which is absolute­ly vital to the con­tin­u­a­tion of human life on this plan­et.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Bertrand Rus­sell on the Exis­tence of God and the After­life

Three Pas­sions of Bertrand Rus­sell (and a Col­lec­tion of Free Texts)

Face to Face with Carl Jung: ‘Man Can­not Stand a Mean­ing­less Life’

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Truman Capote (In Cold Blood) Talks Death Penalty with William F. Buckley (1968)

in Law, Television | August 31st, 2012


“Tru­man Capote did­n’t study to become expert in cap­i­tal crime and its pun­ish­ment,” says William F. Buck­ley on the Fir­ing Line broad­cast of Sep­tem­ber 3, 1968, “but his five and one half year engage­ment of the slaugh­ter of the Clut­ter fam­i­ly, which went into the writ­ing of In Cold Blood, left him with high­ly set­tled impres­sions in the mat­ter.” You can hear Buck­ley elic­it and Capote con­cise­ly lay out the posi­tion to which these impres­sions brought him in the clip above. Though remem­bered for his own con­ser­v­a­tive views, Buck­ley seemed ever eager to invite onto his show, fre­quent­ly and with­out hes­i­ta­tion, pub­lic fig­ures who strong­ly dis­agreed with him. This sense of con­tro­ver­sy gen­er­at­ed a stream of clas­si­cal­ly com­pelling tele­vi­su­al moments over Fir­ing Line’s 33-year run, but for my mon­ey, all the direct con­flicts have less to offer than the times a guest — or even the host — broke from stan­dard ide­o­log­i­cal posi­tions, as Capote does here.

Buck­ley opens by ask­ing whether “sys­tem­at­ic exe­cu­tion of killers over the pre­ced­ing gen­er­a­tion might have stayed the hand of the mur­der­ers of the Cut­ter fam­i­ly.” Capote replies that “cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment — which I’m opposed to, but for quite dif­fer­ent rea­sons than are usu­al­ly advanced — would in itself be a sin­gu­lar­ly effec­tive deter­rent, if it were, in fact, sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly applied. But because pub­lic sen­ti­ment is very much opposed to it and the courts have allowed this end­less pol­i­cy of appeal — to such a degree that a per­son can be eleven, twelve, thir­teen, four­teen years under a sen­tence of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment — it becomes, in effect, an extreme, unusu­al, and cru­el pun­ish­ment. If peo­ple real­ly were sen­tenced to be exe­cut­ed and were with­in a rea­son­able peri­od of time, the pro­fes­sion­al mur­der­er knew the absolute, pos­i­tive end of their actions would be their own death, I think it would cer­tain­ly give them sec­ond thoughts.” This per­haps lends itself poor­ly to a sound bite, but Fir­ing Line at its best nev­er dealt in those.

Relat­ed con­tent:

William F. Buck­ley Meets (Pos­si­bly Drunk) Jack Ker­ouac, Tries to Make Sense of Hip­pies, 1968

James Bald­win Bests William F. Buck­ley in 1965 Debate at Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty

Allen Gins­berg Reads a Poem He Wrote on LSD to William F. Buck­ley

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Jim Henson’s Animated Film, Limbo, the Organized Mind, Presented by Johnny Carson (1974)

in Animation, Film, Television | August 24th, 2012

Not hav­ing grown up dur­ing the Mup­pets’ first and high­est wave of pop­u­lar­i­ty, I’ve always won­dered how some­thing like The Mup­pet Show could pos­si­bly have attained such main­stream cul­tur­al pri­ma­cy. A friend of mine who did spend his child­hood watch­ing pup­peteer Jim Hen­son’s array of crea­tures do their thing on nation­al tele­vi­sion offers a sim­ple expla­na­tion: “It was the sev­en­ties.” Though Hen­son began his pup­petry career twen­ty years before The Mup­pet Show’s 1974 pilot episode, his dis­tinc­tive­ly earnest yet pre­scient­ly post-psy­che­del­ic vision seemed made for that decade. Amer­i­ca respond­ed by ele­vat­ing his work into the zeit­geist, and not just the stuff prop­er­ly involv­ing Mup­pets. Above, you can watch a 1974 clip from The Tonight Show fea­tur­ing a short per­for­mance from Hen­son and fel­low Mup­peteer Dave Goelz called Lim­bo, the Orga­nized Mind.

Hen­son and Goelz treat John­ny Car­son and the Tonight Show audi­ence to a jour­ney through the brain, as an abstract­ed, hand-oper­at­ed face nar­rates the pas­sage through organ­ic struc­tures like his medul­la oblon­ga­ta, and cere­brum, and the seats of things less defin­able, like thoughts of his fam­i­ly, thoughts of his ene­mies, his “extra-spe­cial sec­tion of good thoughts,” his evil thoughts, and his fears. The score comes from elec­tron­ic com­po­si­tion pio­neer Ray­mond Scott, whose 1964 album Sooth­ing Sounds for Baby has won great respect among enthu­si­asts of ambi­ent music. Watch­ing Lim­bo, the Orga­nized Mind in 2012 brings one obvi­ous lament to mind: why don’t they make such delight­ful­ly eccen­tric and artis­tic tele­vi­sion any­more? But of course they do make it, in stranger and less pre­dictable ways than even Hen­son did, but main­ly in the count­less frag­ment­ed, com­par­a­tive­ly mar­gin­al venues of mod­ern media. Lim­bo aired on a show that half the peo­ple you knew would have seen. It was the sev­en­ties.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Jim Henson’s Vio­lent Wilkins Cof­fee Com­mer­cials (1957–1961)

Jim Henson’s Zany 1963 Robot Film Uncov­ered by AT&T: Watch Online

Jim Hen­son’s Short, Oscar-Nom­i­nat­ed Film (1965)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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