Shel Silverstein Reads His Poem ‘Ickle Me, Pickle Me, Tickle Me Too’ in Animated Video

in Animation, Books, K-12 | May 1st, 2012

You know Shel Sil­ver­stein as the author of the beloved chil­dren’s book, The Giv­ing Tree, which he even­tu­al­ly turned into an ani­mat­ed film in 1973. Sil­ver­stein nar­rat­ed the film him­self and played the accom­pa­ny­ing har­mon­i­ca too. You can watch it online right here.

Now, almost four decades lat­er, comes anoth­er ani­mat­ed video. This time we have the voice of Sil­ver­stein (1930–1999) read­ing his poem, ‘Ick­le Me, Pick­le Me, Tick­le Me Too,’ which orig­i­nal­ly appeared in anoth­er famous col­lec­tion, Where the Side­walk Ends. The ani­ma­tion, you’ll notice right away, uses the same aes­thet­ic as the 1974 book. Hope you enjoy. And props go to Media Bistro for bring­ing it to light.

Christopher Walken, Iggy Pop, Debbie Harry & Other Celebs Read Tales by Edgar Allan Poe

in Audio Books, Literature, Music | May 1st, 2012

Back in 1997, Hal Will­ner record­ed, Closed On Account of Rabies, an audio com­pi­la­tion fea­tur­ing well-known artists read­ing macabre sto­ries by Edgar Allan Poe. 15 years lat­er, the album has gone out of cir­cu­la­tion. A hand­ful of “out-of-print” CDs can be bought on Ama­zon. But they’ll run you any­where from $30 for a used copy, to $250 for a mint copy in its orig­i­nal pack­ag­ing. That puts the audio col­lec­tion out of reach for most.

Once again Open Cul­ture comes in handy. Above, we’re fea­tur­ing a YouTube clip with Christo­pher Walken read­ing Poe’s clas­sic poem, “The Raven.” Below, we have assem­bled a few more high­lights from Closed On Account of Rabies — read­ings by Iggy Pop, Mar­i­anne Faith­full and Jeff Buck­ley.  And if you want to get resource­ful, you can always rum­mage through YouTube for more tracks list­ed out here. Mean­while, the major works of Edgar Allan Poe can be found in our col­lec­tions of Free Audio Books and Free eBooks.

Iggy Pop Reads “The Tell-Tale Heart”

Mar­i­anne Faith­full Reads “Annabel Lee” 

Jeff Buck­ley Reads “Ulalume”

The Higgs Boson, AKA the God Particle, Explained with Animation

in Animation, Physics | April 27th, 2012

Ever since the Large Hadron Col­lid­er (LHC) went online in 2008, physi­cists have been con­duct­ing exper­i­ments, hop­ing to final­ly prove or dis­prove the exis­tence of The God Par­ti­cle, oth­er­wise known as the Hig­gs Boson. CERN (which oper­ates the LHC) gives this basic intro­duc­tion to the the­o­rized par­ti­cle:

A major break­through in par­ti­cle physics came in the 1970s when physi­cists real­ized that there are very close ties between two of the four fun­da­men­tal forces – name­ly, the weak force and the elec­tro­mag­net­ic force. The two forces can be described with­in the same the­o­ry, which forms the basis of the Stan­dard Mod­el. This ‘uni­fi­ca­tion’ implies that elec­tric­i­ty, mag­net­ism, light and some types of radioac­tiv­i­ty are all man­i­fes­ta­tions of a sin­gle under­ly­ing force called, unsur­pris­ing­ly, the elec­troweak force. But in order for this uni­fi­ca­tion to work math­e­mat­i­cal­ly, it requires that the force-car­ry­ing par­ti­cles have no mass. We know from exper­i­ments that this is not true, so physi­cists Peter Hig­gs, Robert Brout and François Englert came up with a solu­tion to solve this conun­drum.

They sug­gest­ed that all par­ti­cles had no mass just after the Big Bang. As the Uni­verse cooled and the tem­per­a­ture fell below a crit­i­cal val­ue, an invis­i­ble force field called the ‘Hig­gs field’ was formed togeth­er with the asso­ci­at­ed ‘Hig­gs boson’. The field pre­vails through­out the cos­mos: any par­ti­cles that inter­act with it are giv­en a mass via the Hig­gs boson. The more they inter­act, the heav­ier they become, where­as par­ti­cles that nev­er inter­act are left with no mass at all.

That quick state­ment sets the stage for watch­ing the video above. Here we have Daniel White­son, a physics pro­fes­sor at UC Irvine, giv­ing us a fuller expla­na­tion of the Hig­gs Boson, mer­ci­ful­ly using ani­ma­tion to demys­ti­fy the the­o­ry and the LHC exper­i­ments that may con­firm it soon­er or lat­er. H/T Metafil­ter

Look­ing to bone up on physics? Find 31 Free Physics Cours­es in our Col­lec­tion of 450 Free Cours­es Online. They’re all from top uni­ver­si­ties — MIT, Stan­ford, Yale and the rest.

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.

Orson Welles Explains Why Ignorance Was His Major “Gift” to Citizen Kane

in Film | April 26th, 2012

In 1998, Roger Ebert had this to say about Orson Welles’ 1941 clas­sic, Cit­i­zen Kane:

It is one of the mir­a­cles of cin­e­ma that in 1941 a first-time direc­tor; a cyn­i­cal, hard-drink­ing writer; an inno­v­a­tive cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er, and a group of New York stage and radio actors were giv­en the keys to a stu­dio and total con­trol, and made a mas­ter­piece. “Cit­i­zen Kane’‘ is more than a great movie; it is a gath­er­ing of all the lessons of the emerg­ing era of sound, just as “Birth of a Nation” assem­bled every­thing learned at the sum­mit of the silent era, and “2001’’ point­ed the way beyond nar­ra­tive. These peaks stand above all the oth­ers.

Cit­i­zen Kane blazed many new trails. The cin­e­matog­ra­phy, the sto­ry telling, the spe­cial effects, the sound­track — they were all inno­v­a­tive. And they were all woven into an artis­tic whole by a 26 year old direc­tor mak­ing his first film. Years lat­er, Welles explained the alche­my of Kane. Igno­rance, he said, was per­haps the genius of the film. “I did­n’t know what you could­n’t do. I did­n’t delib­er­ate­ly set out to invent any­thing. It just seemed to me, why not? And there is a great gift that igno­rance has to bring to any­thing. That was the gift I brought to Kane, igno­rance.”

Of course, Welles is also quick to rec­og­nize that Gregg Toland — “the great­est cam­era­man who ever lived” — con­tributed to the great­ness of Cit­i­zen Kane too, pro­vid­ing the right spir­it and cin­e­mato­graph­ic touch. If you’re unfa­mil­iar with Toland’s work, we’ve pro­vid­ed a short mini doc­u­men­tary on the leg­endary cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er below.

Sev­er­al films direct­ed by and star­ring Orson Welles can be found in our col­lec­tion of Free Movies Online.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent

Orson Welles’ Last Inter­view and Final Moments Cap­tured on Film

Orson Welles Nar­rates Plato’s Cave Alle­go­ry, Kafka’s Para­ble, and Free­dom Riv­er

Werner Herzog Reads From Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses

in Books, Film, Radio | April 25th, 2012

Rough­ly since the 2005 release of his wide­ly seen doc­u­men­tary Griz­zly Man, Wern­er Her­zog has come into great demand. He does so not just as a film­mak­er (though he has dozens and dozens of movies of many kinds to his name), or as a writer (though sev­er­al vol­umes of his diaries and one long-form inter­view have appeared as books). Many of Her­zog’s newest fans, lured into the fold by the dis­tinc­tive voiceover nar­ra­tion he records for his doc­u­men­taries, sim­ply want to hear him talk. Hav­ing grown up in Bavaria, honed his craft in Ger­man-lan­guage projects through the sev­en­ties, and more recent­ly put down roots in Los Ange­les, Her­zog com­mu­ni­cates in a man­ner some­how more basic and more intel­lec­tu­al, more and less artic­u­late, than any oth­er pub­lic per­son­al­i­ty alive. In one char­ac­ter­is­tic line from Griz­zly Man, he com­pares his view of nature to his hap­less sub­ject, the late bear enthu­si­ast Tim­o­thy Tread­well: “What haunts me is that, in all the faces of all the bears that Tread­well ever filmed, I dis­cov­er no kin­ship, no under­stand­ing, no mer­cy. I see only the over­whelm­ing indif­fer­ence of nature. To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears. And this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored inter­est in food.”

If you’ve nev­er seen the movie, imag­ine those sen­tences spo­ken with a Teu­ton­i­cal­ly inflect­ed delib­er­ate­ness and the non-native Eng­lish speak­er’s slight hes­i­tan­cy about word choice. Then imag­ine it ulti­mate­ly arriv­ing at the kind of grasp of and rev­er­ence for the mean­ing of those words you tend to have to spend a lot of time star­ing into the abyss to achieve. Giv­en his inter­est in the affect­less sav­agery of the world around us, it comes as no sur­prise that Her­zog counts him­self as a fan of the nov­el­ist Cor­mac McCarthy. Pulled from an episode of NPR’s Sci­ence Fri­day, the above clip fea­tures Her­zog read­ing, and thrilling to, a pas­sage from McCarthy’s 1992 nov­el, All the Pret­ty Hors­es. “It can­not get any bet­ter,” he adds, “and for decades we have not had this lan­guage in Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture.” Crim­i­nal­ly, he did­n’t direct the adap­ta­tion of All the Pret­ty Hors­es, nor has he direct­ed any oth­er. But until the inevitable day that he does, per­haps he could just record McCarthy’s audio­books?

Relat­ed con­tent:

Wern­er Her­zog Reads “Go the F**k to Sleep” in NYC (NSFW)

An Evening With Wern­er Her­zog

Con­tem­po­rary Amer­i­can Lit­er­a­ture: An Open Yale Course

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

Clive Owen & Nicole Kidman Star in HBO’s Hemingway & Gellhorn: Two Writers, A Marriage and a Civil War

in Books, Film, History | April 20th, 2012

On the 28th of next month, HBO will air Hem­ing­way & Gell­horn, a fea­ture-length dra­ma based on the tit­u­lar writ­ers’ five-year mar­riage. Direct­ed by well-known adapter of lit­er­a­ture and his­to­ry Philip Kauf­man — he of The Right Stuff, Hen­ry & June, and Quills — the film roots itself in the peri­od of 1936 to 1945, begin­ning with the cou­ple’s first encounter in Flori­da and fol­low­ing them into the Span­ish Civ­il War, which pro­vid­ed both of them with vivid mate­r­i­al indeed. Amer­i­cans and Euro­peans — and no doubt much of the rest of the read­ing world — need no intro­duc­tion to Ernest Hem­ing­way, author of such oft-assigned nov­els as The Old Man and the Sea, The Sun Also Ris­es, and For Whom the Bell Tolls. As the quin­tes­sen­tial high-liv­ing, sav­age­ly artis­tic, and aca­d­e­m­i­cal­ly respect­ed fig­ure movies love, he’s under­gone a great many cin­e­mat­ic res­ur­rec­tions this last decade and a half: Albert Finney played him in Hem­ing­way, The Hunter of Death; Vin­cent Walsh played him in Hem­ingway: That Sum­mer in Paris; Corey Stoll played him most vis­i­bly in Woody Allen’s Mid­night in Paris; and Antho­ny Hop­kins will play him in next year’s Hem­ing­way and Fuentes. Movie-star buffs must have all kinds of expec­ta­tions for “Papa” as embod­ied in the ever-ris­ing Clive Owen, but some­thing tells me they’ll have even more to say about Nicole Kid­man’s turn as Martha Gell­horn.

If you can’t imme­di­ate­ly place the name of Martha Gell­horn in the life of Ernest Hem­ing­way, it’s per­haps because she, her­self, helped ensure that. After she divorced him in 1945, Gell­horn specif­i­cal­ly request­ed that her inter­view­ers nev­er so much as bring up Hem­ing­way’s name. Though it counts as no fail­ure to fall under Hem­ing­way’s shad­ow in the pub­lic lit­er­ary imag­i­na­tion — most writ­ers do, after all — Gell­horn carved out her own siz­able place in the his­to­ry of for­eign cor­re­spon­dence, report­ing on war not only from Spain but from Eng­land, Hong Kong, Viet­nam, Fin­land, Sin­ga­pore, Ger­many, Czecho­slo­va­kia, Bur­ma, Cen­tral Amer­i­ca, and the Mid­dle East. Hem­ing­way & Gell­horn, whose trail­er you can watch above, seems like­ly to fill in plen­ty of bio­graph­i­cal details that many of Hem­ing­way’s read­ers, and even many of Gell­horn’s, don’t know. But you can’t yet watch it on the inter­net, or on DVD — or in any form at all, for that mat­ter — until after May 28th. Then, pre­sum­ably, you can see exact­ly how Martha Gell­horn inspired For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Remem­ber­ing Ernest Hem­ing­way, Fifty Years After His Death

Ernest Hem­ing­way Reads “In Harry’s Bar in Venice”

Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea Ani­mat­ed Not Once, But Twice

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

Alfred Hitchcock Adapts Joseph Conrad’s Novel of Terrorism in Sabotage (1936)

in Books, Film | April 19th, 2012

Just like most of you Open Cul­ture read­ers, I’m a suck­er for cul­tur­al inter­sec­tions, the places where music meets paint­ing, poet­ry meets com­put­ing, lan­guage meets archi­tec­ture, and so on. I feel an even greater thrill when two respect­ed cre­ators team up to accom­plish this; the more unlike­ly and inad­ver­tent the com­bi­na­tion, the bet­ter. The film above, which you can watch free on YouTube, rep­re­sents not just the inter­sec­tion of cin­e­ma and lit­er­a­ture, but the inter­sec­tion of Alfred Hitch­cock and Joseph Con­rad, titans of their respec­tive forms whose lives only briefly over­lapped. In 1907, Con­rad pub­lished The Secret Agent, a polit­i­cal nov­el of late nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry Lon­don. (Find it in our Free eBooks col­lec­tion) In 1936, Hitch­cock turned it into the pic­ture Sab­o­tage, also known as The Woman Alone (but not, I should note, Secret Agent, an entire­ly dif­fer­ent Hitch­cock-direct­ed film of that year). Con­rad’s book, a tale of ide­ol­o­gy and ter­ror­ism, saw very fre­quent cita­tion in the after­math of Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001. Lat­er that decade, Quentin Taran­ti­no cit­ed Hitch­cock­’s film to illus­trate a vital plot point in his own Inglou­ri­ous Bas­ter­ds. Both works, it seems, have retained a cer­tain rel­e­vance.

While Hitch­cock and com­pa­ny tai­lored Con­rad’s source mate­r­i­al to fit their sen­si­bil­i­ty, their times, and their medi­um, both the movie and the nov­el cen­ter on a busi­ness­man named Ver­loc. (Spoil­er alert, we talk about the plot here.) Caught in the unen­vi­able posi­tion of belong­ing to a bomb-chuck­ing anar­chist soci­ety and work­ing as an agent provo­ca­teur for a coun­try some­where in shad­owy East­ern Europe, Ver­loc uses his unsus­pect­ing young broth­er-in-law Ste­vie to car­ry out an attack meant to osten­si­bly fur­ther the anar­chist agen­da but to secret­ly strike a blow for the nation that employs him. When the bomb­ing goes awry and takes Ste­vie with it — a death that Hitch­cock report­ed­ly regret­ted includ­ing, though the inevitabil­i­ty with which his plot deliv­ers it strikes me as entire­ly Hitch­cock­ian — Ver­loc finds him­self not at the mer­cy of the anar­chists, nor of the spies, nor of Scot­land Yard, but of his own enraged wife. Even after hav­ing under­gone cin­e­mat­ic sim­pli­fi­ca­tion, Con­rad’s tale eludes almost any posi­tions or mes­sages read­ers would ascribe to it. “Con­rad dis­trust­ed gov­ern­ments as much as he scorned those who sought as a mat­ter of abstract prin­ci­ple to over­throw them,” writes Judith Shule­vitz in a Slate piece on the nov­el­’s post‑9/11 pop­u­lar­i­ty. “He nei­ther advo­cat­ed one kind of state over anoth­er nor proph­e­sied the ongo­ing war against ter­ror­ism, except inso­far as he saw indus­tri­al­ized soci­ety as for­ev­er at odds with the anar­chic human heart.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

21 Free Hitch­cock Movies Online

We Were Wan­der­ers on a Pre­his­toric Earth: A Short Film Inspired by Joseph Con­rad

Truffaut’s Big Inter­view with Hitch­cock (MP3s)

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

The Art of the Book Cover Explained at TED

in Art, Books, TED Talks | April 19th, 2012

Give this one a minute to get going, to get beyond the schtick. And then you’ll enter the world of Chip Kidd, asso­ciate art direc­tor at Knopf, who has designed cov­ers for many famous books. As he will tell you, his job comes down to ask­ing: What do sto­ries look like, and how can he give them a face, if not write a short visu­al haiku for them? In the remain­ing min­utes of his TED Talk, Kidd takes you through his work, reveal­ing the aes­thet­ic choic­es that went into design­ing cov­ers for books by Michael Crich­ton, John Updike, David Sedaris, Haru­ki Muraka­mi, and oth­ers.

When you’re done, we rec­om­mend check­ing out these relat­ed items:

Vladimir Nabokov Mar­vels Over Dif­fer­ent “Loli­ta” Book Cov­ers

Spike Jonze Presents a Stop Motion Film for Book Lovers

Books Come to Life in Clas­sic Car­toons from 1930s and 1940s

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

in Film | April 12th, 2012

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Last week we fea­tured the first three films of Stan­ley Kubrick. Today we focus on the first three by Mar­tin Scors­ese. Although the two men were about the same age when they ven­tured into film­mak­ing, and faced sim­i­lar con­straints, their ear­li­est films are strik­ing­ly dif­fer­ent.

Kubrick and Scors­ese had both grown up in New York City and gone to high school in the Bronx, but their cir­cum­stances were worlds apart. Kubrick failed to get into col­lege after high school because of bad grades but, as he put it, “backed into a fan­tas­ti­cal­ly good job at the age of sev­en­teen” work­ing as a staff pho­tog­ra­ph­er for Look mag­a­zine. Scors­ese went to col­lege and stud­ied the his­to­ry and aes­thet­ics of cin­e­ma. When Kubrick decid­ed to try his hand at motion pic­tures he was dri­ven by a sense of eco­nom­ic urgency. His strat­e­gy was to get a foothold in the mar­ket­place by beat­ing the news­reel indus­try at its own game. Scors­ese, on the oth­er hand, was shel­tered from eco­nom­ic wor­ries. He was moved instead by the vivac­i­ty and inven­tive­ness of French New Wave cin­e­ma, among oth­er influ­ences, and want­ed to assert him­self as the next great auteur.

As a severe­ly asth­mat­ic child, Scors­ese went to the movies often. When high school grad­u­a­tion was approach­ing he thought about becom­ing a priest, and briefly con­sid­ered study­ing lit­er­a­ture. But then some­thing caught his eye: a cat­a­log for the New York Uni­ver­si­ty film school. He went to an NYU ori­en­ta­tion ses­sion, where the var­i­ous depart­ment heads took turns describ­ing their pro­grams to a room filled with prospec­tive stu­dents. When the head of the Depart­ment of Tele­vi­sion, Motion Pic­tures and Radio stood up–a man named Haig Manoogian–the young Scors­ese was instant­ly impressed. “He had such ener­gy, such pas­sion,” Scors­ese tells Richard Schick­el in Con­ver­sa­tions with Scors­ese. “I said to myself, That’s where I want to be, with this per­son.”

Manoogian took the art of film very seri­ous­ly. When Scors­ese was a fresh­man in 1960 he attend­ed Manoogian’s once-a-week class on the his­to­ry of film. Each ses­sion includ­ed a lec­ture and the screen­ing of a film. In Con­ver­sa­tions with Scors­ese the film­mak­er remem­bers Manoogian’s ruth­less­ness in deal­ing with stu­dents who attend­ed only to watch movies. “He’d say, okay, you don’t come back, you don’t come back,” says Scors­ese, “ ‘because some of you must think because we’re show­ing movies, it’s fun. Get out.’ ”

As Scors­ese moved through the pro­gram, he grad­u­al­ly began learn­ing a few basic skills in the mechan­ics of mak­ing a movie. By junior year, each stu­dent was expect­ed to col­lab­o­rate in the mak­ing of a short film. So in 1963 Scors­ese took Manoogian’s sum­mer work­shop, where he found that not every stu­dent got to direct. “He’d say, Okay, you’re direc­tor, you’re grip, you’re cam­era, what­ev­er,” Scors­ese tells Schick­el. “So there were a lot of peo­ple who were very unhap­py.” He quick­ly fig­ured out that Manoogian was assign­ing the role of direc­tor to stu­dents who had their own screen­play. “What I did was write a script and get it to him as soon as pos­si­ble, and he okayed it, so I was giv­en a crew, and they all knew that they had to do what I want­ed.”

Scors­ese and his crew took one of the school’s old 16mm Bell & How­ell Fil­mo cam­eras and shot a one-reel com­e­dy in a week. He would lat­er describe the film as “nine min­utes of visu­al non­sense.”  What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This?, as it is called, (see above) adopts the sur­re­al com­ic sen­si­bil­i­ty Scors­ese admired in the work of Mel Brooks and Ernie Kovaks, along with nar­ra­tive tech­nique he picked up watch­ing French New Wave films, par­tic­u­lar­ly those of François Truf­faut. As he tells Schick­el:

My lit­tle film had all the tricks and fun of just putting pic­tures togeth­er in slow motion and fast motion and stills, and inter­cut­ting with mattes the way Truf­faut would do in Jules and Jim. It had no depth at all, but it was a lot of fun. And it won me a schol­ar­ship, so my father was able to use it for the tuition for the next year. And then that led me to doing anoth­er short film in my junior year, the sec­ond semes­ter, and that became It’s Not Just You, Mur­ray!

It’s Not Just You, Mur­ray! part one:

It’s Not Just You, Mur­ray! part two:

It’s Not Just You, Mur­ray! (above), com­plet­ed in 1964, is a much more ambi­tious film. It tells the sto­ry of a pair of Ital­ian-Amer­i­can gansters. “The two char­ac­ters, Mur­ray and Joe,” Scors­ese tells Michael Hen­ry Wil­son in Scors­ese on Scors­ese, “are close friends, but the sort who are con­stant­ly steal­ing from each oth­er, pinch­ing their whisky and their girls. They live the way I myself was liv­ing with my buddies–relationships that con­tain as much hate as love.”

Scors­ese chose not to present Mur­ray as a gang­ster at the begin­ning of the film, because he want­ed to make a wider state­ment about Amer­i­can life. “I grew up in Lit­tle Italy,” he tells Wil­son, “I’ve seen cor­rup­tion up close, I’ve seen it oper­at­ing every day. After that you can’t take the Estab­lish­ment seri­ous­ly. It’s all a fraud.” The two-reel film is like a pre­lim­i­nary sketch for some of Scors­ese’s most famous lat­er films. When Schick­el tells Scors­ese he had nev­er seen It’s Not Just You, Mur­ray!, he is sur­prised by the film­mak­er’s descrip­tion. “It was basi­cal­ly Good­fel­las,” Scors­ese says. “Huh,” says Schick­el?

It’s Good­fel­las. I did it in 1964. Mur­ray was a big epic, as much as I could man­age, of two guys who were friends in the under­world, from my old neigh­bor­hood. but I did it with very New Wave tech­niques. It was also a cross with The Roar­ing Twen­ties, an attempt at that sort of scale which led even­tu­al­ly to Mean Streets, which led ulti­mate­ly to Good­fel­las, and to Casi­no and Gangs of New York–the scale of it, the exces­sive nature of it. I mean, in Mur­ray there’s just a hint of it. We did­n’t have the mon­ey.

The Big Shave:

After Scors­ese received his bach­e­lor’s degree from NYU in 1964, he began work on his first fea­ture film, Who’s That Knock­ing at My Door? It took him over two years to make, and in 1967 he still had­n’t found a dis­trib­u­tor. At that time he received a grant from the Ciné­math­èque de Bel­gique to make a short film. The result was the third film by Scors­ese to be released, and his first in col­or: The Big Shave (above). “In a bath­room that may rep­re­sent the Amer­i­can Psy­che haunt­ed by the Viet­nam war,” writes Wil­son in a syn­op­sis of the film, “the dai­ly rit­u­al of shav­ing turns into a scene of hor­ror.”

As Scors­ese tells Mary Pat Kel­ly in Mar­tin Scors­ese: The First Decade, “It grew out of my feel­ings about Viet­nam. But in real­i­ty some­thing else was going on inside of me, I think, which real­ly had noth­ing to do with the war.” Scors­ese was expe­ri­enc­ing a num­ber of pro­fes­sion­al and per­son­al set­backs, and was deeply depressed at the time. “After sep­a­rat­ing from my wife,” he tells Wil­son, “I was camp­ing out in emp­ty, creepy apart­ments.” He con­tin­ues:

When I wrote the script, I was very seri­ous, but while we were shoot­ing it we nev­er stopped laugh­ing. Watch­ing the rush­es, we were dou­bled up. It was only after­wards that I tried to ratio­nal­ize what I had done. I almost con­vinced myself that it was a film against the Viet­nam war, that this guy who shaves so metic­u­lous­ly and ends up cut­ting his throat rep­re­sent­ed the aver­age Amer­i­can of his day. It was because of these polit­i­cal impli­ca­tions that I used Bun­ny Beri­g­an’s orig­i­nal 1939 ver­sion of “I Can’t Get Start­ed” for the sound­track. I even want­ed to end with archival images of Viet­nam, but I did­n’t need them. The Big Shave was real­ly a fan­ta­sy, a strict­ly per­son­al vision of death.

You can find the Scors­ese films men­tioned above in our col­lec­tion of Free Movies Online.