The Scene That Reveals the Beauty of Classic Hollywood Cinema
1939 is widely considered the greatest year in Hollywood history. Back then, writes 1939: The Year in Movies author Tom Flannery, the so-called “Big Eight” major American studios “had a combined 590 actors, 114 directors and 340 writers under contract, each of whom worked an eight-hour shift every weekday,” plus half a day on Saturday. “It took an average of 22 days to shoot a movie, at an average cost of $300,000.” Annual grosses exceeding $700 million “made it easier to take a chance on ‘risky’ or commercially untested material.” From this industrial environment came forth one new feature for every single day of the year, including Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Stagecoach, and Young Mr. Lincoln.
There’s one problem with this framing: The Philadelphia Story didn’t come out until 1940. In his new video above, Evan Puschak, better known as the Nerdwriter, uses that celebrated picture — and in fact, just one of its scenes in particular — to reveal the commercial-artistic genius of old Hollywood.
This was not, we must note, an individual genius: “We’re used to thinking about movies as the vision of one person, an auteur director, but the studio system of Hollywood’s golden age didn’t really work like that.” Despite the talent of George Cukor, who went on to direct A Star Is Born and My Fair Lady, “there’s really no auteur here, but rather a collection of top-tier artists and craftsmen coming together to realize a great story and elevate great performances,” all of who make important contributions to the scene examined here.
The collaborators identified by Puschak include cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg, art director Cedric Gibbons (designer of the Oscar statuette), and costume designer Adrian Greenberg (known mononymously as Adrian). Nor can he ignore the work of the film’s three principal performers, a certain Cary Grant, James Stewart, and Katharine Hepburn. It may have been Stewart who won the Academy Award for Best Actor for The Philadelphia Story, but it was Hepburn who ultimately gained the most: having been saddled with a reputation as “box-office poison” in the thirties due to her famously cold screen presence, she seized the chance to portray a character who suffers for similar qualities of personality and is ultimately redeemed. She got her comeback — and we have a shimmering, witty monument to the most golden of Hollywood’s ages.
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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.
Read More...Famous Architects Dress as Their Famous New York City Buildings (1931)
On January 13, 1931, the Society of Beaux-Arts Architects held a ball at the Hotel Astor in New York City. According to an advertisement for the event, anyone who paid $15 per ticket (big money during the Depression) could see a “hilarious modern art exhibition” and things “modernistic, futuristic, cubistic, altruistic, mystic, architistic and feministic.” Attendees also got to witness more than 20 famous architects dressed as buildings they had designed—buildings that would become fixtures of the New York City skyline.
In the picture above, we have from left to right: A. Stewart Walker as the Fuller Building (1929), Leonard Schultze as the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel (1931), Ely Jacques Kahn as the Squibb Building (1930), William Van Alen as the Chrysler Building (1930), Ralph Walker as 1 Wall Street (1931), D.E. Ward as the Metropolitan Tower and Joseph H. Freedlander as the Museum of the City of New York (1930).
A 2006 article in The New York Times notes that the event, now considered “one of the most spectacular parties of the last century,” was covered by WABC radio. A few photographs remain, like the one above. As does a tantalizing short bit of video.
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via NYT
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What’s Entering the Public Domain in 2025: Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Early Hitchcock Films, Tintin and Popeye Cartoons & More
Each Public Domain Day seems to bring us a richer crop of copyright-liberated books, plays, films, musical compositions, sound recordings, works of art, and other pieces of intellectual property. This year happens to be an especially notable one for connoisseurs of Belgian culture. Among the characters entering the American public domain, we find a certain boy reporter named Tintin, who first appeared — along with his faithful pup Milou, or in English, Snowy — in the January 10th, 1929 issue of Le Petit Vingtième, the children’s supplement of the newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle.
Now, here in le vingt-et-unième-siècle, that first version of Tintin can be reinvented in any manner one can imagine — at least in the United States. In the European Union, as the Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain directors Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle note in their Public Domain Day blog post for this year, that Tintin remains under copyright until 2054, a date based on his creator Hergé having died in 1983. The thoroughly American comic-strip hero Popeye also made his debut in 1929, but as Jenkins and Boyle hasten to add, while that “Popeye 1.0 had superhuman capabilities, he did not derive them from eating spinach until 1931.” Even so, “it appears that the copyright in this 1931 comic strip was not renewed — if this is true, Popeye’s spinach-fueled strength is already in the public domain.”
This year also brings a development in a similar matter of detail related to no less a cartoon icon than Mickey Mouse: last year freed the first version of Mickey Mouse, his river-navigating, farm-animal-bashing Steamboat Willie incarnation. “In 2025 we welcome a dozen new Mickey Mouse films from 1929,” write Jenkins and Boyle, “Mickey speaks his first words – ‘Hot dogs! Hot dogs!’ – and debuts his familiar white gloves. That version of Mickey is now officially in the public domain.”
This Public Domain Day also brings us literary works like Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (as well as detective novels from Agatha Christie and the pseudonymous Ellery Queen, once the biggest mystery writer in America); the first sound films by Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, and the Marx Brothers; musical compositions like “Singin’ in the Rain,” Gershwin’s An American in Paris, and Ravel’s Boléro; actual recordings of Rhapsody in Blue and “It Had To Be You”; and Surrealist works of art by Salvador Dalí and — pending further investigation into their copyright status — perhaps even René Magritte, whose L’empire des lumières just sold for a record $121 million. Who knows? 2025 could be the year we all look to Belgium for inspiration.
For more on what’s entering the public domain today, visit this Duke University website.
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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.
Read More...The Complete History of the Music Video: From the 1890s to Today
If you want to understand the history of music videos, you must consider a lot of things that are not obviously music videos. The Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star,” the first selection of MTV’s inaugural broadcast, must surely count as a music video — but then, it was produced a couple years earlier for the much different context of the British chart program Top of the Pops, much like Queen’s proto music video for “Bohemian Rhapsody” from 1975. But is Bob Dylan’s much-parodied card-dropping “performance” of “Subterranean Homesick Blues” from a decade earlier, shot for D. A. Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back, a music video? What about A Hard Day’s Night, the Beatles’ exuberantly narrative-light film from the year before?
All of these come up in the new history of the music video from YouTube channel Polyphonic above, which compiles into an over three-hour-long viewing experience all the episodes of its series on the subject. In its long historical view, the music video didn’t begin with the Fab Four, and not even with their epoch-making appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show.
One can trace it farther back, past Scopitone film jukeboxes (included in “the canon of Camp” by Susan Sontag in her famous essay); past Disney’s Fantasia (essentially eight animated classical music videos strung together); past even The Jazz Singer, the first feature-length musical “talkie,” which in 1927 put a definitive end to the era of silent film.
Perhaps the earliest identifiable predecessor of the music video is “The Little Lost Child,” which in 1894 was exhibited as an “illustrated song.” Its delivery of a narrative through projected still images accompanied by live piano was like nothing its audiences had experienced before, with an emotional power greater than the sum of its visual and musical parts. This was a brand new technology, and indeed, like any cultural history, that of the music video is also a technological history, one advanced by film, broadcast television, cable television, and in our time, internet streaming, which stayed the form’s looming prospect of pop-cultural irrelevance. Now, in the twenty-twenties, we must ask ourselves this: when TikTok users post themselves dancing, zooming in on pancakes, or skateboarding while drinking Ocean Spray, is it a music video?
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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.
Read More...The Longest Construction Projects in History: Why Sagrada Família, the Milan Duomo, Greek Temples & Other Famous Structures Took Generations to Complete
Public-transit projects are the religious building endeavors of twenty-first century America, less because they’re motivated by the belief in any particular deity than by how much time and money they now require to complete. Take New York’s Second Avenue subway, whose less than two-mile-long first phase opened in 2017: its construction had cost $4.45 billion, and the line itself had first been proposed 97 years earlier. That’s nothing by ancient standards: the Temple of Apollo at Didyma took six centuries; the Temple of Olympian Zeus at Athens lagged a full 650 years behind schedule; and the Heraion of Samos ended up passing the 800-year mark.
These facts come from the new Told in Stone video above on “the longest construction project in history.” Some of the structures covered will be familiar to Open Culture readers: for instance, Notre-Dame de Paris, which took nearly 200 years to build (and which reopened just this month after five years of fire-damage repair and restoration), or Sagrada Família, which broke ground in 1882 and is scheduled for completion in 2026 — if you don’t count decorating its exterior, which could go on until 2034. Ornamentation is important in architecture of this kind: it’s why the Duomo di Milano, whose construction began in 1386, wasn’t truly complete until 1965.
The decoration process was also prolonged in the case of the Basilica Papale di San Pietro in Città di Vaticano, or Saint Peter’s Basilica, which took 120 years to build, spanning the early sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As the timeline goes for such an ambitious project in that era, it could have been worse; that particular High Renaissance church owes its notoriety to its sheer cost, which works out to “tens of billions” of dollars today. This video, being Microsoft-sponsored, leads up to that software giant’s 3D, AI-assisted replica of Saint Peter’s Basilica, which we featured here on Open Culture when it was released this past fall. Perhaps beholding its glory will give New Yorkers a little more faith that the Second Avenue Subway will reach 125th Street in their lifetimes.
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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.
Read More...Hunter S. Thompson Remembers Jimmy Carter’s Captivating Bob Dylan Speech (1974)
51 years ago, Hunter S. Thompson wrote Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, which “is still considered a kind of bible of political reporting,” noted Matt Taibbi in a 40th anniversary edition of the book. Fear and Loathing ’72 entered the canon of American political writing for many reasons. But if you’re looking for one bottom-line explanation, it probably comes down to this: Says Taibbi, “Thompson stared right into the flaming-hot sun of shameless lies and cynical horseshit that is our politics, and he described exactly what he saw—probably at serious cost to his own mental health, but the benefit to us was [his legendary book].”
Thompson may have reached some journalistic apogee with his coverage of the ’72 Nixon-McGovern campaign. But his political writing hardly stopped there. The Gonzo journalist covered the ’76 election for Rolling Stone magazine. And inevitably he crossed paths with Jimmy Carter (RIP), the eventual winner of the election. Above, Thompson recalls the day when Carter first made an impression upon him.
It happened at the University of Georgia School of Law on May 4, 1974. Speaking before a gathering of alumni lawyers, Carter upset their celebratory occasion when he dismantled the criminal justice system they were so proud of. And Carter particularly caught Thompson’s attention when he traced his sense of social justice back to a song written by Bob Dylan:
The other source of my understanding about what’s right and wrong in this society is from a friend of mine, a poet named Bob Dylan. After listening to his records about “The Ballad of Hattie Carol” and “Like a Rolling Stone” and “The Times, They Are a‑Changing,” I’ve learned to appreciate the dynamism of change in a modern society.
I grew up as a landowner’s son. But I don’t think I ever realized the proper interrelationship between the landowner and those who worked on a farm until I heard Dylan’s record, “I Ain’t Gonna Work on Maggie’s Farm No More.” So I come here speaking to you today about your subject with a base for my information founded on Reinhold Niebuhr and Bob Dylan.
You can read the full text of Carter’s speech here. It’s also worth watching a related clip below, where Thompson elaborates on Carter, his famous speech and his alleged mean streak that put him on the same plane as Muhammad Ali and Sonny Barger (the godfather of The Hells Angels).
Note: An earlier version of this post first appeared on our site in 2012. With the passing of President Carter, it seemed like a good time to bring it back.
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Benedict Cumberbatch Reads Kurt Vonnegut’s Letter of Advice to People Living in the Year 2088
There was a time when a company like Volkswagen could commission various luminaries to write letters to the future, then publish them in Time magazine as part of an ad campaign. In fact, that time wasn’t so very long ago: it was the year 1988, to be precise, when no less an optimistic (or optimistically bleak?) novelist than Kurt Vonnegut was still active. At some point between writing Bluebeard and Hocus Pocus, he composed a missive directed toward humanity a century hence (in 2088), which you can read even in this relatively early year of 2024 here.
Vonnegut begins with quotations from Shakespeare and St. John the Divine, explaining that “our century hasn’t been as free with words of wisdom as some others, I think, because we were the first to get reliable information about the human situation.” In his time, we knew full well “how many of us there were, how much food we could raise or gather, how fast we were reproducing, what made us sick, what made us die, how much damage we were doing to the air and water and topsoil on which most life forms depended, how violent and heartless nature can be, and on and on. Who could wax wise with so much bad news pouring in?”
Of special import to him was the revelation that “Nature was no conservationist. It needed no help from us in taking the planet apart and putting it back together some different way, not necessarily improving it from the viewpoint of living things.” Earth may have given rise to humanity, but it has not the capacity to care whether we or any other particular life form survives on it. And so we must take it upon ourselves to ensure our own well-being, which requires living in accordance with what Vonnegut calls “Nature’s stern but reasonable surrender terms”:
- Reduce and stabilize your population.
- Stop poisoning the air, the water, and the topsoil.
- Stop preparing for war and start dealing with your real problems.
- Teach your kids, and yourselves, too, while you’re at it, how to inhabit a small planet without helping to kill it.
- Stop thinking science can fix anything if you give it a trillion dollars.
- Stop thinking your grandchildren will be OK no matter how wasteful or destructive you may be, since they can go to a nice new planet on a spaceship. That is really mean, and stupid.
- And so on. Or else.
You can easily imagine these words uttered by Vonnegut himself, but how about by Benedict Cumberbatch? There’s no need to imagine: you can simply watch the new video above, taken from a recent Letters Live event. Cumberbatch is one of the series’ star readers, having previously interpreted letters by Nick Cave, Albert Camus, Alan Turing, and others onstage. This advice to the “ladies and gentlemen of AD 2088” has proven to be one of his hits; you can hear another, earlier reading here. Perhaps Vonnegut’s words bear repeating, but then, he always showed a sharp awareness that humanity has few qualities as persistent as the inability to listen.
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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.
Read More...The New York Times Presents the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, Selected by 503 Novelists, Poets & Critics
For longtime readers of American book journalism, scrolling through the New York Times Book Review’s just-published list of the 100 best books of the twenty-first century will summon dim memories of many a once-unignorable critical fuss. At one time or another over the past 25 years, some of us felt as if we could hardly consider ourselves literate unless we’d read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, say, or A Visit from the Goon Squad, or The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, or seemingly anything by George Saunders — all of which have placed on the Book Review’s list, the product of surveying “hundreds of literary luminaries,” some of whose ballots have been made available for public viewing.
As a reminder of how deep we are into this century, more than a few of the authors of these noted books — Denis Johnson, Joan Didion, Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, Hilary Mantel — have already shuffled off this mortal coil. Roberto Bolaño, whose The Savage Detectives and 2666 placed at numbers 38 and 6, respectively, was already dead when both of those novels first appeared in English translation.
Some selections may cause despair over the health of literature itself: Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, for instance, whose rapturous reception critic James Wood once memorably described as “further proof of the infantilization of our literary culture: a world in which adults go around reading Harry Potter.”
But then, everyone will have their objections, which is the point behind these lists as much as behind literary prizes like the Nobel, works by whose laureates from Toni Morrison to Han Kang have placed among the top 100. I note the omission of Saul Bellow and J. M. Coetzee, whose Ravelstein and Elizabeth Costello would’ve easily made my ballot were I luminary enough to vote. In any case, these standings are hardly likely to look much the same in a few decades’ time. Imagine a list of the best books of the twentieth century composed in 1924, when even The Great Gatsby hadn’t come out — or indeed, a list of the best books of the nineteenth century from 1824, thirteen years before the publication of the first novel by a certain promising young scribbler named Dickens.
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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.
Read More...How A Charlie Brown Christmas, and Its Beloved Soundtrack Album, Almost Never Happened
A Charlie Brown Christmas uses a cast of amateur child voice actors, deals with the theme of seasonal depression, and culminates in the recitation of a Bible verse, all to a jazz score. It was not, safe to say, the special that CBS had expected, to say nothing of its sponsor, the Coca-Cola Company. In all likelihood, it would have been canceled, but seeing as it had already been announced and promoted (and in any case, was completed only a few days before it was scheduled to air), the show went on. In the event, not only did it please the viewers of America, it went on to become one of the most beloved pieces of Christmas animation — and that jazz score went on to become one of the most beloved Christmas albums.
In the new Digging the Greats video above, bassist Brandon Shaw breaks down some of the distinguishing characteristics of Vince Guaraldi’s score, with help from drummer Ryan Shaw (not just Brandon’s brother, but also a musician with his own direct connection to Peanuts productions) and pianist Jonté Moore.
“There’s beauty, because of the major 9 sounding, but there’s, like, this tension,” Moore explains while playing the immediately recognizable chords of “Christmastime Is Here.” “Something’s maybe missing: it could be people who have lost a loved one, or are maybe just tired of the holiday season, so they have this weight that they carry.” We’re a long way indeed from the insipid cheer of many a holiday production.
“Christmastime Is Here” may be the single most influential piece of A Charlie Brown Christmas’ musical legacy. But it’s best heard in the context of the whole soundtrack, where it sounds of a piece with the “jazz arrangements of Christmas classics,” as Shaw puts it, as well as with “Linus and Lucy,” the Peanuts theme song Guaraldi had previously composed. This coherent aesthetic and sensibility — the composer’s, of course, but also that of the world Charles Schulz created — goes a long way toward making the project not just a collection of Christmas songs, but an enduring Christmas album: one that, over the next couple of days, even those of us without enthusiasm for Christmas music in general will be spinning as many times as we can get away with.
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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.
Read More...How Leonardo da Vinci Painted The Last Supper: A Deep Dive Into a Masterpiece
When Leonardo da Vinci was 42 years old, he hadn’t yet completed any major publicly viewable work. Not that he’d been idle: in that same era, while working for the Duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza, he “developed, organized, and directed productions for festival pageants, triumphal processions, masks, jousting tournaments, and plays, for which he choreographed performances, engineered and decorated stage sets and props, and even designed costumes.” So explains gallerist and YouTuber James Payne in the new Great Art Explained video above, by way of establishing the context in which Leonardo would go on to paint The Last Supper.
For the definitive Renaissance man, “theatre was a natural arena to blend art, mechanics and design.” He understood “not only how perspective worked on a three-dimensional stage, but how it worked from different vantage points,” and this knowledge led to “what would be the greatest theatrical staging of his life”: his painting of Jesus Christ telling the Twelve Apostles that one of them will betray him.
This view of The Last Supper makes more sense if you see it not as a decontextualized image — the way most of us do — but as the mural Leonardo actually painted on one wall of Milan’s Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie, whose space it extends (and where it makes more sense for everyone to be seated on one side of the table).
Payne goes in-depth on not just the visual techniques Leonardo used to make The Last Supper’s composition so powerful, but also the untested painting techniques that ended up hastening its deterioration. If you do go to Santa Maria delle Grazie, bear in mind that at best a quarter of the mural’s paint was applied by Leonardo himself. The rest is the result of a long restoration process, made possible by the existence of several copies made after the work’s completion. And indeed, it’s only thanks to one of those copies, whose maker included labels, that we know which Apostle is which. Unlike many of the creators of religious art before him, Leonardo didn’t make anything too obvious; rather, he expressed his formidable skill through the kind of subtlety accessible only to those who take their time.
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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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