Norman Mailer’s 1191-Page Harlot’s Ghost Outlined in One Handwritten Sheet

in Books, Literature | July 4th, 2014

Nor­man Mail­er wrote pro­lif­i­cal­ly, but that did­n’t mean crank­ing out insub­stan­tial vol­umes. The books whose names we all remem­ber always feel, when we take them down off the shelf, some­what weight­i­er than we remem­ber: Adver­tise­ments for Myself at 532 pages, The Naked and the Dead at 731, The Exe­cu­tion­er’s Song at 1072. But the ones with titles which don’t come to mind quite so read­i­ly can feel even more phys­i­cal­ly mon­u­men­tal, and delib­er­ate­ly craft­ed that way. “Mail­er liked to think of his books as his chil­dren,” wrote Louis Menand in the author’s 2007 New York­er obit­u­ary, “and, when asked which were his favorites, to name the least crit­i­cal­ly appre­ci­at­ed” — he answered, “Ancient Evenings and Harlot’s Ghost, great lit­er­ary pyra­mids that no one vis­its any longer.” Ancient Evenings takes place in Egypt, among the actu­al pyra­mids, but if you want to vis­it the much more labyrinthine land­mark of Har­lot’s Ghost, you’d best take a map. Con­ve­nient­ly, Mail­er drew one up him­self, in the form of the out­line above.

It would nev­er before have seemed pos­si­ble to me to reduce Mail­er’s 1191-page nov­el of the CIA in the 1960s — a tale of the Mafia, the Cold War, the Cuban Rev­o­lu­tion and Mis­sile Cri­sis, the JFK assas­si­na­tion, and all those events’ atten­dant com­pli­ca­tions both real and imag­ined — to a sin­gle sheet, but here we have it. You can click on the image at the top of the post to enlarge it, and then click on the sec­tion you’d like to read in detail. Read Har­lot’s Ghost with this out­line handy, and per­haps you’ll find your­self not on the side of those (Menand includ­ed) who dis­missed the book upon its pub­li­ca­tion in 1991, but of those who con­sid­er it Mail­er’s mas­ter­piece. Christo­pher Hitchens took the lat­ter posi­tion in his own obit­u­ary for Mail­er, call­ing the nov­el “a his­toric fic­tion­al­iz­ing of the nation­al-secu­ri­ty state that came very near to real­iz­ing the Balza­cian ambi­tion that he had con­ceived for it. What a shame that it was so dis­mal­ly received by the crit­ics and that he nev­er deliv­ered the sec­ond vol­ume of it that he had promised.” And imag­ine the size and com­plex­i­ty to which Mail­er would have grown that book.

via Fla­vor­wire

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Nor­man Mail­er & Mar­shall McLuhan Debate the Elec­tron­ic Age

Nor­man Mail­er & Gore Vidal Feud on Dick Cavett Show

Nor­man Mail­er: Strong Writer, Weak Actor, Bru­tal­ly Wres­tles Actor Rip Torn

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

5 Musical Guests Banned From Saturday Night Live: From Elvis Costello to Frank Zappa

in Music, Television | July 3rd, 2014

A defin­ing tele­vi­sion moment of my generation—Sinead O’Connor’s infa­mous rip­ping up of a pic­ture of Pope John Paul II on live tele­vi­sion after an a cap­pel­la per­for­mance of Bob Marley’s “War”—was as baf­fling to most as it was offen­sive to many. (O’Connor offered many elo­quent expla­na­tions for the act—most­ly ignored.) Not only did this strange form of protest effec­tive­ly send O’Connor into semi-obscu­ri­ty for the next twen­ty years, but it got her per­ma­nent­ly banned from Sat­ur­day Night Live by pro­duc­er Lorne Michaels. Michaels, it seems, didn’t so much object to her des­e­crat­ing the pope’s pic­ture. In fact, he has said he would have been fine with it… if only he’d known it was com­ing. He has called the moment both “a seri­ous expres­sion of belief” and “on a cer­tain lev­el, a betray­al.”

Michaels has banned many a per­former from the show, for many a rea­son. But most of all, it seems, Lorne Michaels hates sur­pris­es. As we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly not­ed, 23-year-old Elvis Costel­lo pissed Michaels off when he stopped his band dur­ing the intro to “Less Than Zero” and launched into “Radio, Radio” instead (above), a song he’d explic­it­ly been told not to play for its crit­i­cal take on mass media. Unlike O’Connor, Costel­lo would return to SNL when Michaels cooled down, 12 years lat­er, in 1989.

Leg­en­dar­i­ly bril­liant mess The Replace­ments hit the SNL stage in 1986 after the release of their first major-label album, Tim. They put on a respectably drunk­en, out-of-tune per­for­mance for their first song on the show, “Bas­tards of Young” (intro­duced by host Har­ry Dean Stan­ton).

So far, so clas­sic ‘Mats. But between this song and the next, “Kiss Me on the Bus” (above), it’s said they drank close to their weight in cham­pagne, and by the time they took the stage again—wearing each other’s clothes and stum­bling wildly—they were a com­plete­ly soused par­o­dy of them­selves. Fun­ny, right? Lorne Michaels was not amused. Singer Paul West­er­berg returned to the show as a solo artist, but the band nev­er received anoth­er invi­ta­tion.

Long before ston­er-rap­pers Cypress Hill got the SNL boot for smok­ing a joint onstage and trash­ing their equip­ment in 1993, abra­sive punk band Fear was said to have sparked a riot and caused $200,000 worth of dam­age to the set dur­ing their 1981 Hal­loween show appear­ance (above—introduced by host Don­ald Pleas­ance). Guests of John Belushi, who agreed to make a return cameo on the show on the con­di­tion that Fear come with him, their per­for­mances fea­tured typ­i­cal punk show antics, with row­dy audi­ence mem­bers smash­ing into each oth­er and storm­ing the stage. The N.Y. Post pub­lished an absurd­ly sen­sa­tion­al descrip­tion of the band’s appear­ance, cit­ing the $200,000 fig­ure and quot­ing an unnamed “NBC tech­ni­cian” as say­ing, “this was a life threat­en­ing sit­u­a­tion. They went crazy. It’s amaz­ing that no one was killed.” Bill­board lat­er set the record straight, how­ev­er. Appar­ent­ly, the extent of the offense con­sist­ed of “some­body… yelling obscen­i­ties close to an open mike.” Pro­duc­er Dick Eber­sol cut the per­for­mance short, and the show received “all of 12 com­plaints from view­ers.” As for all the sup­posed may­hem, Fear singer Lee Ving said, “all that hap­pened was that a plug got pulled out and a Hal­loween pump­kin was destroyed.” Nev­er­the­less, Fear would not be invit­ed back. Read more about that Fear appear­ance and Belushi’s love of punk rock here.

Belushi fig­ures in the per­for­mance of anoth­er musi­cian banned from the show—Frank Zappa—who served as both musi­cal guest and the show’s host. Zap­pa’s pompous atti­tude alien­at­ed most of the cast and crew in his first, and last, SNL appear­ance in 1978. Nerve names Zap­pa the sec­ond worst host in the show’s his­to­ry, cit­ing his “suf­fo­cat­ing air of smug­ness and uncon­cealed con­tempt for what he’d agreed to do.” Dur­ing the usu­al­ly chum­my clos­ing cred­its, “the cast mem­bers, oblig­ed to join him onstage, clus­tered near the edge as if fear­ing his per­son­al­i­ty might be con­ta­gious.” All but Belushi, who also joined Zap­pa and band onstage as Samu­rai Futa­ba dur­ing their third num­ber. As the clips above demon­strate, even SNL’s sec­ond worst host could still inject a good bit of wit and ener­gy into a show that’s often want­ed for both, not to men­tion the most well-rehearsed band in both avant-rock per­for­mance art and live tele­vised sketch com­e­dy.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Stunt That Got Elvis Costel­lo Banned From Sat­ur­day Night Live

William S. Bur­roughs on Sat­ur­day Night Live, 1981

Lorne Michaels Intro­duces Sat­ur­day Night Live and Its Bril­liant First Cast for the Very First Time (1975)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

The Lodger: Alfred Hitchcock’s First Truly ‘Hitchcockian’ Movie (1927)

in Film | July 3rd, 2014

Before Alfred Hitch­cock freaked out audi­ences every­where by killing off the pro­tag­o­nist halfway through Psy­cho, before he was praised as a great mas­ter of cin­e­ma by a bunch of French crit­ics who would them­selves go on to become cin­e­mat­ic mas­ters, before the adjec­tive “Hitch­cock­ian” entered the lan­guage, Hitch­cock was sim­ply a guy strug­gling to make a go of it as a direc­tor.

He start­ed his career in film when he was bare­ly out of his teens in 1919. Hitch­cock soon found him­self work­ing in the largest and most influ­en­tial stu­dio in Europe, Germany’s Uni­ver­sum Film AG (UFA). There he not only watched Fritz Lang and F. W. Mur­nau direct, but he also worked as a writer, art direc­tor, assis­tant direc­tor on a num­ber of silent films includ­ing The White Shad­ow (1924) and The Black­guard (1925). Though Hitch­cock got his first director’s cred­it with the 1926 movie The Plea­sure Gar­den, the first movie to tru­ly feel Hitch­cock­ian was The Lodger: A Sto­ry of Lon­don Fog (1927). You can watch it above.

Based on a nov­el by Marie Bel­loc Lown­des, The Lodger opens with a blonde woman scream­ing in ter­ror. She is the vic­tim of a shad­owy Jack the Rip­per-like ser­i­al killer who leaves a call­ing card announc­ing him­self as ‘The Avenger.’ Cut to Daisy, a blonde mod­el whose par­ents are jubi­lant over final­ly find­ing a board­er for their spare room. The guy is hand­some, mys­te­ri­ous and has a weird thing for blondes. You think he might have some­thing to do with the mur­ders?

For a film that came out decades before Ver­ti­go and Rear Win­dow, The Lodger has just about all of Hitchcock’s cin­e­mat­ic ticks. A fetishis­tic obses­sion with blondes? Check. An unset­tling min­gling of sex and death? Check. A man wrong­ly accused? Check. The only thing it real­ly lacks is a nation­al land­mark as the back­drop of a showy action set piece.

On the oth­er hand, The Lodger feels decid­ed­ly Ger­man. The claus­tro­pho­bic light­ing, the grotesque shad­ows and the gen­er­al­ly mor­bid sto­ry­line all would be per­fect­ly at home at Uni­ver­sum Film AG. In fact, The Lodger, in terms of sto­ry, tone and looks, feels like a cin­e­mat­ic cousin to Fritz Lang’s 1931 ear­ly sound mas­ter­piece M.

Of course, Hitch­cock was just a young direc­tor in 1927. And like many young film­mak­ers, he had a hard time with his pro­duc­ers. While the book leaves it ambigu­ous whether or not the lodger is the killer, the han­dlers of the movie’s star Ivor Nov­el­lo couldn’t pos­si­bly have the actor play a vil­lain and demand­ed a change to the end­ing. When Hitch turned in the final movie, Michael Bal­con, the movie’s main pro­duc­er, was unim­pressed and almost shelved the flick, and, with it, Hitchcock’s career. But after a lit­tle bit of tin­ker­ing, the movie was final­ly released. And when The Lodger became a huge box office hit, Hitchcock’s career was assured.

You can find The Lodger on our list of 23 Free Hitch­cock Movies Online, as well as in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch The White Shad­ow, the Recent­ly-Dis­cov­ered and Ear­li­est-Sur­viv­ing Hitch­cock Film

23 Free Hitch­cock Movies Online

The 39 Steps: Hitchcock’s 1935 Clas­sic Online

37 Hitch­cock Cameo Appear­ances Over 50 Years: All in One Video

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow.

45 Massive Open Online Courses Getting Started in July: Enroll in a MOOC Today

in Uncategorized | July 3rd, 2014

MOOCs on the beach? Why not. New MOOCs are get­ting start­ed, even dur­ing the dog days of sum­mer. You can find 45 cours­es get­ting going this month. They’re all cap­tured on our com­plete and fre­quent­ly-updat­ed list of Mas­sive Open Online Cours­es. As for me, I think I will be final­ly check­ing out this Uni­ver­si­ty of Rochester course on The Music of the Bea­t­les. It starts on July 6 and runs 6 weeks.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Audio: The Bea­t­les Play Their Final Con­cert at Can­dle­stick Park, 1966

Gui­tarist Randy Bach­man Demys­ti­fies the Open­ing Chord of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’

MOOCs from Great Uni­ver­si­ties (Many With Cer­tifi­cates)

Take Free Online Cours­es at Hog­warts: Charms, Potions, Defense Against the Dark Arts & More

The Art of Mapping Music: Mike Hamad’s 200 Schematics of Songs by Phish, Pink Floyd & The Dead

in Art, Maps, Music | July 2nd, 2014

Mike Hamad, a music writer for The Hart­ford Courant, has a deep and abid­ing love for Phish. He also has a tal­ent for draw­ing “schemat­ics” or maps that turn the expe­ri­ence of lis­ten­ing to music into some­thing visu­al. Over at his tum­blr SetlistSchemat­ics, you can find near­ly 200 schemat­ics of songs (usu­al­ly per­formed live) by The Grate­ful Dead, The Dave Matthews Band, Pink Floyd, and most­ly Phish. Accord­ing to a short pro­file in The New York Times, Hamad “has a master’s degree in music the­o­ry and a Ph.D. in musi­col­o­gy” — his dis­ser­ta­tion focused on the tonal rela­tion­ships in Franz Liszt’s songs — and, some­where along the way, he devel­oped a ten­den­cy to trans­late music into schemat­ics, a flur­ry of “arrows, descrip­tive notes, roman numer­als and wavy lines.”

If you’re inter­est­ed in giv­ing Hamad’s method a try, we sug­gest lin­ing up some col­or­ful pens and  big sheets of paper, and then tun­ing into these clas­sic Phish con­certs found in our archive: Phish Plays the Entire­ty of the Talk­ing Heads’ Remain in Light (1996) or Phish Plays All of The Rolling Stones’ Clas­sic Album, Exile on Main Street, Live in Con­cert.

via @NYTimes and h/t Eric

Wim Wenders Reveals His Rules of Cinema Perfection

in Film | July 2nd, 2014

Does Wim Wen­ders, one of my favorite direc­tors, make per­fect films? Hard­ly — and there­in, at least for me, lies the appeal. Per­fec­tion strikes me as a sin­gu­lar­ly unin­ter­est­ing goal for art, and Wen­ders has made some of the most inter­est­ing pieces of motion pic­ture art going for the past thir­ty years: Wings of Desire; Paris, Texas; Note­book on Cities and Clothes; Tokyo-Ga. Per­haps, it occurs to me, he has achieved his own kind of very spe­cif­ic, inim­itable per­fec­tion. But if you seek to imi­tate it nev­er­the­less, have a look at “Wim Wen­ders’ Rules of Cin­e­ma Per­fec­tion” above. In this video (actu­al­ly a kind of spot for Stel­la Artois, a brand with which the auteur has worked before), we see humor­ous­ly revealed sev­er­al of Wen­ders’ best film­mak­ing prac­tices: “You need a good title from the begin­ning,” “Con­ti­nu­ity is clear­ly over­rat­ed,” “Try to wel­come and incor­po­rate” the unex­pect­ed, and “If you like foot­ball, don’t shoot dur­ing the world cham­pi­onship.”

If you’ve done your read­ing on Wen­ders, you can prob­a­bly tell that the clip draws from a pub­lished list of the direc­tor’s “50 Gold­en Rules of Film­mak­ing.” Oth­er help­ful rec­om­men­da­tions include “Before you say ‘cut,’ wait five more sec­onds,” “A ‘beau­ti­ful image’ can very well be the worst thing that can hap­pen to a scene,” and “There are no rules.” Will fol­low­ing these if-n0t-rules-then-guide­lines turn you into the next Wim Wen­ders? Unlike­ly. Will drink­ing Stel­la Artois do it? Cer­tain­ly not. But it could hurt none of us, what­ev­er our cre­ative endeav­or of choice, to emu­late his will­ing­ness on dis­play here to learn from his mis­takes (based on his list, I’d say he’s tak­en his share of hard knocks hir­ing cou­ples, adapt­ing nov­els, and work­ing with ani­mals); to share his wis­dom; and (maybe most impor­tant­ly of all) to learn not to take our­selves too seri­ous­ly. Sure, his detrac­tors tend to accuse him of pre­ten­tious­ness, but we true fans (who pay close atten­tion even to his com­mer­cial act­ing gigs) know the truth.

via No Film School

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Wim Wen­ders Cre­ates Ads to Sell Beer (Stel­la Artois), Pas­ta (Bar­il­la), and More Beer (Car­ling)

Wim Wen­ders and Cel­e­brat­ed Direc­tors Talk About the Future of Cin­e­ma (1982)

Wim Wen­ders Vis­its, Mar­vels at a Japan­ese Fake Food Work­shop

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Coudal’s Kubrick Collection: An Online Treasure Trove of Kubrick Ephemera

in Film | July 2nd, 2014

Last year, the Los Ange­les Coun­ty Muse­um of Art wrapped up a bril­liant, exhaus­tive exhi­bi­tion about Stan­ley Kubrick. It was a ver­i­ta­ble cor­nu­copia of Kubrick mem­o­ra­bil­ia, rang­ing from grainy black and white pho­tographs he took for Look mag­a­zine as a youth, to a creepy plas­tic Star Child from 2001: A Space Odyssey, to the blood soaked dress­es of those hol­low-eyed twins in The Shin­ing. The exhib­it was a mas­sive suc­cess. It’s hard to imag­ine any oth­er direc­tor, with the pos­si­ble excep­tion of Alfred Hitch­cock, who would not only get an exhib­it in a major art muse­um but also be able to pack the hall week after week.

Part of his allure, no doubt, is Kubrick’s care­ful­ly-honed pub­lic per­sona – a reclu­sive genius who con­trolled every ele­ment of his movies, from the font on the open­ing titles to the design of the poster. His movies, espe­cial­ly his lat­er ones, are dense, deeply-lay­ered works of such com­plex­i­ty that they con­tin­ue to unpack them­selves after mul­ti­ple view­ings. Heck, there’s an entire doc­u­men­tary, Room 237, that presents nine stark­ly dif­fer­ent inter­pre­ta­tions of The Shin­ing.

Kubrick’s movies seem designed to appeal to a cer­tain breed of obses­sive film geek. So if you count your­self a mem­ber of this tribe (as I do) and you didn’t hap­pen to catch LACMA’s exhib­it, you’re in luck. The Chica­go design firm Coudal Part­ners has cre­at­ed a whole online trea­sure trove of Kubrick ephemera. We’ve culled a few cool things from their site.

Above is a cheesy, behind-the-scenes movie for 2001. The 20-minute pro­mo sets up the movie as if it were an episode of The Out­er Lim­its. “It is the year 2001, you’re on your way to a space sta­tion for busi­ness,” intones the nar­ra­tor. “This is but one exam­ple of what life would be like in 2001.” What fol­lows is a series of inter­views with the sci­en­tists, experts, and crafts­men involved in cre­at­ing Kubrick’s vision of the future with only fleet­ing footage of the film­mak­er him­self at around the 18-minute mark­er. Though it does give you a lot more infor­ma­tion on the nuts and bolts of the astro­nauts’ space­suits, the short movie, one can’t help but think, is set­ting up the audi­ence for dis­ap­point­ment. It does lit­tle to help view­ers under­stand that the first half of 2001 is about the strug­gles of ape men on the plains of Africa and does even less to address the psy­che­del­ic freak­out of the movie’s last reel.

Also found in Coudal’s col­lec­tion is a site that has com­piled all the fonts that Kubrick, a not­ed typog­ra­phy enthu­si­ast, used in his movies. We’ve post­ed a cou­ple. He liked Futu­ra and Goth­ic a lot, appar­ent­ly. The title card for The Shin­ing was designed by Saul Bass.

And on this site, some genius has cre­at­ed sweaters, ski masks, and door­mats from that odd, geo­met­ric car­pet pat­tern from The Shin­ing. Pre-orders have sad­ly closed, but hope­ful­ly they’ll start sell­ing them again. I want the cardi­gan.

And then there’s this behind-the-scenes shot of the direc­tor and Sue Lyon on the set of Loli­ta accom­pa­nied by a quote from Kubrick about the actress.

“From the first, she was inter­est­ing to watch—even in the way she walked in for her inter­view, casu­al­ly sat down, walked out. She was cool and non-gig­gly. She was enig­mat­ic with­out being dull. She could keep peo­ple guess­ing about how much Loli­ta knew about life.”

And speak­ing of pho­tos, here’s a few pic­tures Kubrick took of the New York sub­way sys­tem back in 1946 for Look mag­a­zine. Com­pare these pho­tos to his ear­li­est movies like Fear and Desire and Killer’s Kiss. Both his ear­ly flicks and these pic­tures have the same grit­ty imme­di­a­cy.

There is much, much more there at the Coudal Part­ners to keep any film nerd and Kubrick maven occu­pied. Check it out.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Fear and Desire: Stan­ley Kubrick’s First and Least-Seen Fea­ture Film (1953)

Stan­ley Kubrick’s Daugh­ter Shares Pho­tos of Her­self Grow­ing Up on Her Father’s Film Sets

Stan­ley Kubrick’s List of Top 10 Films (The First and Only List He Ever Cre­at­ed)

4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow.

E.O. Wilson’s Life on Earth Released as a Free eBook and Free Course on iTunes

in Biology, Books, e-books, Online Courses | July 1st, 2014

Yes­ter­day, E.O. Wilson’s Life on Earth was released as a free iBook on iTunes. It fea­tures “state-of-the-art dig­i­tal media ani­ma­tions, video, and inter­ac­tive mod­ules in a com­pre­hen­sive 41-chap­ter text cov­er­ing stan­dards-based biol­o­gy cur­ricu­lum.” Cre­at­ed under the direc­tion of Pulitzer Prize-win­ning author and Har­vard nat­u­ral­ist Edward O.Wilson, Life on Earth can be down­loaded in 7 units on iTunes. The free book also comes with a free iTune­sU course. In addi­tion to read­ing assign­ments, the course “incor­po­rates activ­i­ties such as field obser­va­tions, writ­ing assign­ments, project-based learn­ing exer­cis­es,” using apps and oth­er mate­ri­als. Com­bin­ing infor­ma­tion from the Smith­son­ian Nation­al Muse­um of Nat­ur­al His­to­ry, Nation­al Geo­graph­ic, and the Ency­clo­pe­dia of Life, the course cov­ers a vari­ety of impor­tant themes — cit­i­zen sci­ence, evo­lu­tion, cli­mate change, and pro­tect­ing bio­di­ver­si­ty. The first nine chap­ters of the iTune­sU course are avail­able now, and the remain­ing mate­ri­als for the 41-chap­ter course will be released through­out 2014.

The book can be found in our col­lec­tion, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices. And the course will be added to our list of Free Online Biol­o­gy Cours­es, part of our larg­er col­lec­tion: 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

h/t @RandyDeutsch

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Enter E.O. Wilson’s Ency­clo­pe­dia of Life: Free Access to All The World’s Knowl­edge About Life

Watch the First Animations of Peanuts: Commercials for the Ford Motor Company (1959–1961)

in Animation, Business, Television | July 1st, 2014

Bill Wat­ter­son, cre­ator of arguably the last great com­ic strip, Calvin and Hobbes, wrote the fol­low­ing about per­haps the great­est com­ic strip ever. “Peanuts pret­ty much defines the mod­ern com­ic strip, so even now it’s hard to see it with fresh eyes. The clean, min­i­mal­ist draw­ings, the sar­cas­tic humor, the unflinch­ing emo­tion­al hon­esty….” Charles Schulz, the artis­tic force behind Peanuts, fun­neled a life­time of lone­li­ness and emo­tion­al pain into these spare lit­tle draw­ings, cre­at­ing a strip that was bleak­ly fun­ny, philo­soph­i­cal and real. Char­ac­ters like the social­ly inept Char­lie Brown or the bossy though odd­ly trag­ic Lucy con­nect­ed with audi­ences in a way that few ever did.

The one way that Wat­ter­son and Schulz dif­fered, and dif­fered great­ly, was in the area of mer­chan­dis­ing. While Wat­ter­son famous­ly refused to license any of his char­ac­ters (those praying/peeing Calvin car decals, it might sur­prise you to learn, are not offi­cial­ly sanc­tioned), Schulz licensed his cre­ations far and wide. For those who grew up in the ‘70s, a Snoopy plush toy was sim­ply de rigueur. The Peanuts char­ac­ters hawked Dol­ly Madi­son snack cakes, MetLife insur­ance, and Wendy’s kids meals. And those spon­sor­ship deals paid spec­tac­u­lar­ly well. By the time that Schulz died in Feb­ru­ary 2000 — the night before the final Peanuts strip was to go to print — he had report­ed­ly earned over the course of his life $1.1 bil­lion dol­lars.

The first instance of Char­lie, Snoopy and the gang being cor­po­rate spokeschar­ac­ters hap­pened to be also the first time they were ani­mat­ed. The Ford Motor Com­pa­ny licensed them in 1959 to do TV com­mer­cials along with intros to the Ten­nessee Ernie Ford Show. You can watch them above. Prob­a­bly the most strik­ing thing about the com­mer­cials is that the adults are intel­li­gi­ble, not the incom­pre­hen­si­ble mut­ed trum­pet bleats of the Peanuts movies.

The spots proved to be such a suc­cess that Schulz and ani­ma­tor Bill Melén­dez were soon pro­duc­ing half-hour long TV spe­cials, includ­ing the Emmy-win­ning A Char­lie Brown Christ­mas in 1965. In a 1984 inter­view, Melén­dez talked about work­ing with Schulz, who went by the nick­name of “Sparky,” for those first Ford spots.

Well, I was doing Ford com­mer­cials at J. Wal­ter Thomp­son when it was decid­ed that Char­lie Brown would be the spokesman for the Ford Fal­con. I was told Charles Schulz was very shy and ret­i­cent about com­mer­cial­iz­ing his strip. So I went to San Fran­cis­co and met Sparky and we hit it off. I told him what we did, and he nod­ded and said, “All right, we’ll try it.” He was very leery of get­ting involved with “Hol­ly­wood types” as he used to call us.

Of course he under­stands that his draw­ings are flat, two-dimen­sion­al designs, and that, for exam­ple, the front view is very dif­fer­ent from the side view. They are not three-dimen­sion­al char­ac­ters. You can’t turn them around the way we used to turn the Walt Dis­ney char­ac­ters, who were designed to be round and three-dimen­sion­al. To ani­mate Peanuts char­ac­ters we have to be more inven­tive, because we tend not to be real­is­tic. We don’t try to ape real live action as we did in ani­mat­ing Don­ald Duck and Mick­ey Mouse.

I imag­ine Sparky must have been curi­ous about how we were going to do it, but he nev­er gave us any kind of a hint or any­thing at all about what he want­ed. So we showed him how we thought it should move, how we thought they should turn, how we thought they should walk and he accept­ed every­thing. From then on we hit it off pret­ty well.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ger­tie the Dinosaur: The Moth­er of all Car­toon Char­ac­ters

Vis­it the World of Lit­tle Nemo Artist Win­sor McCay: Three Clas­sic Ani­ma­tions and a Google Doo­dle

How Walt Dis­ney Car­toons are Made

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow.

Free Download: They Might Be Giants Play Their Entire First Album Live

in Media | June 30th, 2014

They Might Be Giants released their epony­mous debut album in Novem­ber, 1986 and it imme­di­ate­ly attract­ed the atten­tion of Vil­lage Voice music crit­ic, Robert Christ­gau, who, in giv­ing the album an “A,” said “the hits just keep on com­ing in an exu­ber­ant­ly annoy­ing show of cre­ative super­abun­dance”. Almost thir­ty years lat­er, the band per­formed the sem­i­nal first album live in its entire­ty dur­ing its 2013 world tour. And now, as a spe­cial gift to fans old and new, they’re mak­ing avail­able a record­ing of those per­for­mances for free. It runs 47 min­utes. To get the record­ing, click the “Free Album Down­load” but­ton below, and fol­low the instruc­tions. Or click here.

via Laugh­ing Squid/Boing­Bo­ing