The Writer Who Directed, The Director Who Wrote: Every Frame a Painting Explores the Genius of Billy Wilder

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When the acclaimed cin­e­ma video-essay chan­nel Every Frame a Paint­ing made its come­back this past sum­mer, its cre­ators Tony Zhou and Tay­lor Ramos took a close look at the “sus­tained two-shot,” which cap­tures a stretch of dia­logue between two char­ac­ters with­out the inter­fer­ence of a cut. Though it’s become some­thing of a rar­i­ty under today’s shoot-every­thing-and-fig­ure-it-out-in-edit­ing ethos, it was used often in clas­sic Hol­ly­wood pic­tures. Take, for exam­ple, the work of Pol­ish-born writer-direc­tor Bil­ly Wilder, who began his film career in pre­war Ger­many, then went to Hol­ly­wood and “embarked on a series of osten­si­bly dar­ing, dis­en­chant­ed movies, against the grain of Amer­i­can cheer­ful­ness.”

So writes David Thom­son in The New Bio­graph­i­cal Dic­tio­nary of Film. “Dou­ble Indem­ni­ty was a thriller based on the prin­ci­ple that crime springs from human greed and deprav­i­ty; The Lost Week­end was the cinema’s most graph­ic account of alco­holism; A For­eign Affair has shots of a ruined Berlin accom­pa­nied by the tune ‘Isn’t It Roman­tic?’; Sun­set Boule­vard mocks the mad­den­ing glam­our with­in Hol­ly­wood; Ace in the Hole expos­es the unscrupu­lous­ness of the sen­sa­tion­al press; Sta­lag 17 […]

The Complete Howard Stern Interview with Kamala Harris

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It’s hard to know where to start. This elec­tion comes down to whether we want to reward some­one who tried to sub­vert our democ­ra­cy four years ago. Whether we want to pre­serve the alliances that have kept the peace since World War II. Whether women want to resist los­ing rights they long thought secure. (It’s…

The Story of Francis Ford Coppola’s Four-Decade-Struggle to Make Megalopolis

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This past sum­mer, out came a trail­er for Mega­lopo­lis, the movie Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la has spent half of his life try­ing to make. It took the bold approach of open­ing with quotes from reviews of his pre­vi­ous pic­tures, and not pos­i­tive ones: when it was first released, Rex Reed called Apoc­a­lypse Now “an epic piece…

The Doctor Who Theme Reimagined as a Jacques Brel-esque Jazz Tune

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Writ­ten by Ron Grain­er, and then famous­ly arranged and record­ed by Delia Der­byshire in 1963, the Doc­tor Who theme song has been adapt­ed and cov­ered many times, and even ref­er­enced by Pink Floyd. In the hands of come­di­an Bill Bai­ley, the song comes out a lit­tle differently–a lit­tle like a Bel­gian Jacques…

Kurt Vonnegut’s Lost Board Game Is Finally for Sale

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Kurt Von­negut’s life was not with­out its ironies. Fight­ing in World War II, that descen­dant of a long line of Ger­man immi­grants in the Unit­ed States found him­self impris­oned in Dres­den just when it was dev­as­tat­ed by Allied fire­bomb­ing. To under­stand the rel­e­vance of this expe­ri­ence to his lit­er­ary work, one need…