John Cleese Plays the Devil, Makes a Special Appeal for Hell, 1966

in Comedy, Television | May 13th, 2012

Hell. We tend to take it for grant­ed. Have you ever stopped to think about the heat­ing bills, or the stu­pen­dous over­head?

John Cleese plays a cash-strapped Prince of Dark­ness in this clas­sic sketch from The Frost Report, the show that launched Cleese as a tele­vi­sion star in Britain. He was 26 years old at the time. The pro­gram was host­ed by David Frost, who is per­haps best known for his 1977 inter­views of Richard Nixon. There were four oth­er future Mon­ty Python come­di­ans on the writ­ing staff of The Frost Report–Gra­ham Chap­man, Ter­ry Jones, Michael Palin and Eric Idle–but only Cleese was a cast mem­ber. The show was broad­cast in 1966 and 1967, with each week­ly episode cen­tered around a par­tic­u­lar theme, like love, leisure, class and author­i­ty. The “Souls in Tor­ment Appeal” is from a March 24, 1966 pro­gram about sin. It’s a fun­ny sketch.

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Relat­ed Con­tent: 

John Cleese, Mon­ty Python Icon, on How to Be Cre­ative

Mon­ty Python’s Best Phi­los­o­phy Sketch­es

Mon­ty Python’s Away From it All: A Twist­ed Trav­el­ogue with John Cleese

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The Original Episode of Dark Shadows, the 1960s TV Series That Inspired Tim Burton’s New Film

in Film, Television | May 11th, 2012

For mil­lions of Amer­i­can kids grow­ing up in the late 1960s, it was a thrill to run home from school and flip on the TV in time to hear the creepy theremin music at the begin­ning of Dark Shad­ows. A soap opera with a vam­pire! There was some­thing strange­ly sub­ver­sive about it. As a head­line writer for The New York Times recent­ly put it, Barn­abas Collins (the undead star of the show) was “The Vam­pire Who Came Out in the After­noon.”

Tim Bur­ton was one of those kids who ran home to watch the show. “I should prob­a­bly have been doing home­work or play­ing sports after school instead of watch­ing ‘Dark Shad­ows,’ ” Bur­ton told Ter­rence Raf­fer­ty for the Times arti­cle. “But see­ing that show every after­noon, at home, in Bur­bank, it just does­n’t get much weird­er than that.”

It might get just a lit­tle weird­er tonight, with the Amer­i­can open­ing of Bur­ton’s campy new film adap­ta­tion of Dark Shad­ows, star­ring John­ny Depp as Barn­abas Collins. The movie has been get­ting pos­i­tive reviews. Manohla Dar­gis in The New York Times calls it “Mr. Bur­ton’s most plea­sur­able film in years.” To help get you in the spir­it, so to speak–and to add perspective–we’re tak­ing you back to the very first episode of the orig­i­nal series (above) from June, 1966. Alas, Barn­abas Collins did­n’t make his appear­ance until episode num­ber 211, a year lat­er. The actor who played Collins, Jonathan Frid, died last month at the age of 87. He makes a cameo appear­ance in Bur­ton’s movie. For a pre­view of the film, see below. You can pur­chase the com­plete Dark Shad­ows TV series on DVD here, which comes in a nice pack­age of 131 discs.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Vin­cent: Tim Burton’s Ear­ly Ani­mat­ed Film

Franken­wee­nie: Tim Bur­ton Turns Franken­stein Tale into Dis­ney Kids Film (1984)

Tim Burton’s The World of Stain­boy: Watch the Com­plete Ani­mat­ed Series

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The Making of “Tomorrow Never Knows,” The Beatles’ Song That Aired on an Historic Episode of Mad Men

in Music, Television | May 10th, 2012

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkirE9uH5SE

On Sun­day night, The Bea­t­les made his­to­ry again when Don Drap­er slipped a copy of Revolver onto his turntable and start­ed lis­ten­ing to “Tomor­row Nev­er Knows.” Accord­ing to Matthew Wein­er, the cre­ator of Mad Men, this marked the first time a Bea­t­les song appeared on a tele­vi­sion show (exclud­ing the band’s live TV per­for­mances dur­ing the 1960s). And the priv­i­lege of play­ing a Bea­t­les tune came at a cost — a report­ed $250,000.

If you’re not famil­iar with “Tomor­row Nev­er Knows” (lis­ten below), we’ll tell you a few sim­ple things about it. Accord­ing to Steve Turn­er, author of A Hard Day’s Write, this was John Lennon’s “attempt to cre­ate in words and sounds a suit­able track for the LSD expe­ri­ence” (John dis­cuss­es his first encounter with the drug here), and it was also the “weird­est and most exper­i­men­tal piece of music to appear under the Bea­t­les’ name at the time.” With­out a doubt, this psy­che­del­ic tune would have fit hand-in-glove with Mad Men’s fifth episode of the sea­son, when Roger and Jane drop acid at a psy­chi­a­trist’s din­ner par­ty. But it sits com­fort­ably too in Episode 8. Just as the song marked a tun­ing point in the band’s sound, so too does it presage a turn­ing point in Mad Men’s nar­ra­tive. We begin to see indi­vid­ual char­ac­ters mov­ing in new per­son­al direc­tions and the show itself enter­ing the lat­er rad­i­cal 60s.

Above, we’ve includ­ed a clip where Paul McCart­ney, George Har­ri­son and George Mar­tin talk about the mak­ing of “Tomor­row Nev­er Knows.” Wikipedia actu­al­ly offers some more good details on the song’s struc­ture and record­ing. Below you’ll also find the orig­i­nal track.

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Jim Henson’s Commercials for Wilkins Coffee: 15 Twisted Minutes of Muppet Coffee Ads (1957–1961)

in Comedy, Television | May 3rd, 2012

Drink our cof­fee. Or else. That’s the mes­sage of these curi­ous­ly sadis­tic TV com­mer­cials pro­duced by Jim Hen­son between 1957 and 1961.

Hen­son made 179 ten-sec­ond spots for Wilkins Cof­fee, a region­al com­pa­ny with dis­tri­b­u­tion in the Bal­ti­more-Wash­ing­ton D.C. mar­ket, accord­ing to the Mup­pets Wiki: “The local sta­tions only had ten sec­onds for sta­tion iden­ti­fi­ca­tion, so the Mup­pet com­mer­cials had to be lightning-fast–essentially, eight sec­onds for the com­mer­cial pitch and a two-sec­ond shot of the prod­uct.”

With­in those eight sec­onds, a cof­fee enthu­si­ast named Wilkins (who bears a resem­blance to Ker­mit the frog) man­ages to shoot, stab, blud­geon or oth­er­wise do grave bod­i­ly harm to a cof­fee hold­out named Won­tkins. Hen­son pro­vid­ed the voic­es of both char­ac­ters.

Up until that time, TV adver­tis­ers typ­i­cal­ly made a direct sales pitch. “We took a dif­fer­ent approach,” said Hen­son in Christo­pher Finch’s Of Mup­pets and Men: The Mak­ing of the Mup­pet Show. “We tried to sell things by mak­ing peo­ple laugh.”

The cam­paign for Wilkins Cof­fee was a hit. “In terms of pop­u­lar­i­ty of com­mer­cials in the Wash­ing­ton area,” said Hen­son in a 1982 inter­view with Judy Har­ris, “we were the num­ber one, the most pop­u­lar com­mer­cial.” Hen­son’s ad agency began mar­ket­ing the idea to oth­er region­al cof­fee com­pa­nies around the coun­try. Hen­son re-shot the same spots with dif­fer­ent brand names. “I bought my con­tract from that agency,” said Hen­son, “and then I was pro­duc­ing them–the same things around the coun­try. And so we had up to about a dozen or so clients going at the same time. At the point, I was mak­ing a lot of mon­ey.”

You can watch many of the Wilkins Cof­fee com­mer­cials above. If you’re a glut­ton for pun­ish­ment, there are more on YouTube. And a word of advice: If some­one ever asks you if you drink Wilkins Cof­fee, just say yes.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jim Henson’s Orig­i­nal, Spunky Pitch for The Mup­pet Show

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

Jim Hen­son Pilots The Mup­pet Show with Adult Episode, “Sex and Vio­lence” (1975)

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The Art of Film and TV Title Design

in Art, Film, Television | April 26th, 2012

PBS’ web series Off Book talks to artists work­ing hard, whether they’re doing so in the street, in tat­too par­lors, on Etsy, or on film and tele­vi­sion title sequences. In the lat­est install­ment above, Karin Fong and Peter Frank­furt dis­cuss their now-icon­ic Mad Men title sequence, as well as their ear­li­er and more trou­bling open­ing cred­its for David Fincher’s Se7en. Ben Con­rad explains how his title work inte­grat­ed into the phys­i­cal world of Ruben Fleis­cher’s Zom­bieland, allow­ing zom­bies to ram­page right through float­ing let­ters announc­ing things like “Colum­bia Pic­tures” and “Pro­duced by Gavin Polone,” and spelling out the num­bered rules of post-apoc­a­lyp­tic sur­vival even as the pro­tag­o­nists observed, bent, and broke them. Jim Hel­ton tells the sto­ry of his back-and-forth with direc­tor Derek Cian­france in design­ing the titles for Blue Valen­tine, which take explod­ing-fire­work imagery and aes­thet­i­cal­ly uni­fy it with the scat­tered mem­o­ries that make up the movie. All of them face the chal­lenge of simul­ta­ne­ous­ly invit­ing audi­ences into a sto­ry, reflect­ing its sen­si­bil­i­ty, and on top of that, mak­ing an orig­i­nal con­tri­bu­tion to the pro­duc­tion as a whole.

Though the meet­ing of design, film, and tele­vi­sion has nev­er been more enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly exam­ined than in this era of inter­net video, this line of work has a rich his­to­ry. After this episode of Off Book’s end cred­its, the inter­vie­wees all give props to title design­er Saul Bass — “Saint Saul,” Frank­furt calls him — who, if you believe them, ele­vat­ed title sequences, cor­po­rate logos, and oth­er pre­vi­ous­ly plain and straight­for­ward means of visu­al com­mu­ni­ca­tion into art forms unto them­selves. Watch Bass’ cre­ations in North By North­west, The Man With the Gold­en Arm, and West Side Sto­ry, some of the ear­li­est title sequences to show­case the for­m’s capac­i­ty for impli­ca­tion and abstrac­tion, and you’ll under­stand his impor­tance to these mod­ern-day design­ers. Per­haps this brief visu­al intro­duc­tion to Bass’ designs, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured on Open Cul­ture, will inspire you to get into the busi­ness your­self.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed con­tent:

For­get the Films, Watch the Titles

Cin­e­ma His­to­ry by Titles & Num­bers

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

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Alain de Botton’s Quest for The Perfect Home and Architectural Happiness

in Architecture, Television | April 24th, 2012

In the first episode of The Per­fect Home, embed­ded above, philo­soph­i­cal jour­nal­ist and broad­cast­er Alain de Bot­ton con­tends that we don’t live in the mod­ern world. Rather, we do live in the mod­ern world in that we exist in it, but we don’t live in the mod­ern world in that few of us choose to make our homes there. As de Bot­ton sees it, the res­i­dents of the devel­oped world have, despite keep­ing up with the lat­est cars, clothes, and gad­getry, cho­sen to hole up in shells of aes­thet­ic nos­tal­gia: our mock Tudors, our restored cot­tages, our Greek Revivals. Hav­ing writ­ten books and pre­sent­ed tele­vi­sion shows on philo­soph­i­cal sub­jects — you may remem­ber Phi­los­o­phy: A Guide to Hap­pi­ness — he even brings in Niet­zsche to diag­nose this archi­tec­tur­al dis­or­der as an abject denial of real­i­ty. Accord­ing to old Friedrich, he who builds him­self into a fake real­i­ty ulti­mate­ly pays a much greater price than what endur­ing real real­i­ty would have cost. With that omi­nous bit of wis­dom in mind, de Bot­ton trav­els the world in search of build­ings designed with mod­ern sen­si­bil­i­ties and mod­ern tech­nol­o­gy that nev­er­the­less make us hap­py with­out enabling self-delu­sion.

The search takes de Bot­ton all over the world, from Vic­to­ri­an theme-park­ish Eng­lish sub­ur­ban devel­op­ments to a Japan­ese Dutch vil­lage to Egypt­ian and Scan­di­na­vian embassies in Berlin to a heli­copter soar­ing above Lon­don with the archi­tect Nor­man Fos­ter to the con­crete-mod­ernist Zurich apart­ment of his own child­hood. Just as Phi­los­o­phy: A Guide to Hap­pi­ness grew from the same intel­lec­tu­al soil as de Bot­ton’s book The Con­so­la­tions of Phi­los­o­phy, so grows The Per­fect Home from The Archi­tec­ture of Hap­pi­ness. That book’s explo­rations pro­ceed­ed from the idea that we desire in our archi­tec­ture what­ev­er we feel we lack in our char­ac­ter: the undis­ci­plined grav­i­tate toward stark­ness and sim­plic­i­ty, per­haps, while the straight-laced build with more whim­sy. What does this say about the lady vis­it­ed in this first episode who devotes her every domes­tic impulse to con­struct­ing a “cozy” set­ting, burst­ing in every direc­tion with ted­dy bears? Though de Bot­ton demures from that ques­tion, he oth­er­wise goes to great lengths to find an escape from tire­some “pas­tiche” archi­tec­ture and a way our build­ings can embrace our times — a way, that is, we can final­ly live in the present.

 

Relat­ed con­tent:

Socrates on TV, Cour­tesy of Alain de Bot­ton (2000)

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling­wa­terAni­mat­ed
Gehry’s Vision For Archi­tec­ture

Ice Cube & Charles Eames Rev­el in L.A. Archi­tec­ture

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

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Art Critic Robert Hughes Demystifies Modern Art in The Shock of the New

in Art, Television | April 17th, 2012

With the aid of YouTube, you can watch an episode of Robert Hugh­es’ doc­u­men­tary series The Shock of the New each week, just as it first aired on the BBC and PBS in 1980. But I defy you to watch “The Mechan­i­cal Par­adise,” the first of its eight install­ments, and not plow through the rest in a day. Hugh­es, a pro­lif­ic art crit­ic who has writ­ten books on every­thing from Fran­cis­co Goya to America’s cul­ture of com­plaint to the city of Barcelona to the his­to­ry of his native Aus­tralia, has also host­ed tele­vi­sion pro­grams about every­thing from Car­avag­gio to Utopi­an archi­tec­ture to the Mona Lisa. The Shock of the New, a project which found expres­sion as a book as well as these broad­casts, takes on the ambi­tious task of trac­ing the progress of mod­ernism through visu­al art. But the roots of the move­ment run deep­er into his­to­ry, and so this first episode begins at the base of the Eif­fel Tow­er, a mon­u­ment to the accel­er­at­ing sci­en­tif­ic and tech­no­log­i­cal progress of the late nine­teenth cen­tu­ry that would so dis­rupt the aes­thet­ics of the twen­ti­eth.

As a read­er of art crit­i­cism, I’ve long trust­ed Hugh­es’ writ­ing on these sub­jects more than I do any­one else’s. Clear, bold, con­crete, and always, in a blunt­ly stealthy way, more nuanced than it seems, Hugh­es’ tex­tu­al per­sona stands against what, in his auto­bi­og­ra­phy, he calls the “airy-fairy, metaphor-rid­den kind of pseu­do-poet­ry” that he sees as hav­ing flood­ed the field. As a guide through the his­to­ry of artis­tic mod­ernism, he proves as no-non­sense yet dry­ly enter­tain­ing on film as he is on the page. Whether turn­ing our atten­tion toward spe­cial details of Braque and Picasso’s can­vass­es or zip­ping around in a 1900s road­ster, Hugh­es presents with the assur­ance of author­i­ty but not its intel­lec­tu­al over­reach, pulling you along to Fer­nand Léger, the Futur­ists, and Mar­cel Duchamp. And as a view­er of tele­vi­sion doc­u­men­taries, I’ve long trust­ed the late sev­en­ties and ear­ly eight­ies as the form’s gold­en age. In this episode and beyond, The Shock of the New show­cas­es what the pro­duc­tions of that era did best: a moody elec­tron­ic score, archival clips cre­ative­ly used, and extend­ed sequences that give us time to real­ly look. (Voiceover work by Judi Dench and Mar­tin Jarvis doesn’t lose this chap­ter any points, either.)

The Shock of the New con­sists of the fol­low­ing episodes: “The Mechan­i­cal Par­adise,” “The Pow­ers That Be,” “The Land­scape of Plea­sure,” “Trou­ble in Utopia,” “The Thresh­old of Lib­er­ty,” “The View From the Edge,” “Cul­ture as Nature,” “The Future That Was”

You can watch them on YouTube.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Guggen­heim Puts 65 Mod­ern Art Books Online

Pow­er of Art: Renais­sance to Mod­ern

John Waters: The Point of Con­tem­po­rary Art

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

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Alan Watts On Why Our Minds And Technology Can’t Grasp Reality

in Philosophy, Religion, Technology, Television | April 13th, 2012

“The world is a mar­velous sys­tem of wig­gles,” says Alan Watts in a series of lec­tures I keep on my iPod at all times. He means that the world, as it real­ly exists, does not com­prise all the lines, angles, and hard edges that our var­i­ous sys­tems of words, sym­bols, and num­bers do. Were I to dis­till a sin­gle over­ar­ch­ing argu­ment from all I’ve read and heard of the body of work Watts pro­duced on Zen Bud­dhist thought, I would do so as fol­lows: human­i­ty has made astound­ing progress by cre­at­ing and read­ing “maps” of real­i­ty out of lan­guage, num­bers, and images, but we run an ever more dan­ger­ous risk of mis­tak­ing these maps for the land. In this 1971 Nation­al Edu­ca­tion­al Tele­vi­sion pro­gram, A Con­ver­sa­tion With Myself, Watts claims that our com­par­a­tive­ly sim­ple minds and the sim­ple tech­nolo­gies they’ve pro­duced have proven des­per­ate­ly inad­e­quate to han­dle real­i­ty’s actu­al com­plex­i­ty. But what to do about it?

Using an aes­thet­ic now rarely seen on tele­vi­sion, A Con­ver­sa­tion With Myself cap­tures, in only two unbro­ken shots, an infor­mal “lec­ture” deliv­ered by Watts straight to the view­er. Speak­ing first amid the abun­dant green­ery sur­round­ing his Mount Tamal­pais cab­in and then over a cup of cer­e­mo­ni­al Japan­ese green tea (“good on a cold day”), he explains why he thinks we have thus far failed to com­pre­hend the world and our inter­fer­ence with it. In part, we’ve failed because our “one-track” minds oper­at­ing in this “mul­ti-track” world insist on call­ing it inter­fer­ence at all, not real­iz­ing that the bound­aries between us, one anoth­er, our tech­nol­o­gy, and nature don’t actu­al­ly exist. They’re only arti­facts of the meth­ods we’ve used to look at the world, just like the dis­tor­tions you get when dig­i­tiz­ing a piece of ana­log sight or sound. Like ear­ly dig­i­ti­za­tion sys­tems, the crude tools we’ve been think­ing with have, in Watts’ view, forced all of real­i­ty’s “wig­gles” into unhelp­ful “lines and rows.” He sums up the prob­lem with a mem­o­rable dash of Bud­dha-by-way-of-Britain wit: “You’re try­ing to straight­en out a wig­gly world, and now you’re real­ly in trou­ble.”

(If you’d like a side of irony, pon­der for a moment the impli­ca­tions of absorb­ing all this not only through human lan­guage, but through tech­nol­o­gy like iPods and Google Video!)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Alan Watts Intro­duces Amer­i­ca to Med­i­ta­tion & East­ern Phi­los­o­phy (1960)

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

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