Who Created the Famous Shower Scene in Psycho? Alfred Hitchcock or the Legendary Designer Saul Bass?
Who killed Marion Crane? If you’ve watched Psycho, the best-known film by British master of cinematic suspense Alfred Hitchcock, you have the answer. And given that the picture came out in 1960, even if you haven’t seen it, you probably know the answer anyway. But today’s Hitchcock-loving cinéastes and enthusiasts of design have another important question to consider: who directed Marion Crane getting killed? We previously featured something of a master class in editing from Hitchcock himself in which he explains the mechanics of cutting together the “shower scene” of the unsuspecting secretary’s death. But that part of the process obviously began with all its components — Janet Leigh, the raised knife, the curtain pulled off of its rings, the chocolate syrup circling the drain — already captured on celluloid. To know the origins of this most famous sequence in Hitchcock’s oeuvre, and one of the most famous sequences in 20th century cinema, you have to begin with its storyboards, straight from the hand of graphic-design legend Saul Bass, who also put together the film’s title sequence.
“After Hitchcock’s death, Bass asserted that he had directed the scene at Hitchcock’s invitation — a claim definitively contradicted by both Janet Leigh and Assistant Director Hilton Green,” writes Catholic University of America English professor Glen Johnson on the companion page to his Hitchcock course. “Bass’s partisans have subsequently held that Hitchcock merely mechanically filmed shots already laid out by Bass. Comparing the storyboards to the filmed scene shows that to be untrue. On the other hand, the most crucial elements of the scene, such as the drain-eye matchcut and the tracking shot that follows it, are in the storyboards. That proves nothing about the author of the scene, however, since Bass drew the storyboards after extensive discussions with Hitchcock about the design of the scene.” Though it appears that no single creator “made” the shower scene — or made any given element of most motion pictures — its place in the enduring legacy of mid-20th-century culture goes undisputed. Below, you can watch this so often quoted, imitated, and parodied sequence play out in another form, combining storyboards, clips, and making-of dramatization, in last year’s feature film Hitchcock:
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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...Jack Kerouac Lists 9 Essentials for Writing Spontaneous Prose
Image by Tom Palumbo, via Wikimedia Commons
Jack Kerouac wants you to turn writing into “free deviation (association) of mind into limitless blow-on-subject seas of thought, swimming in sea of English with no discipline, other than rhythms of rhetorical exhalation and expostulated statement….” Think you can do that? Find out by following Kerouac’s “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose.” He published this document in Black Mountain Review in 1957 and wrote it in response to a request from Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs that he explain his method for writing The Subterraneans in three days time.
And for a theory of Kerouac’s not quite theory, visit the site of Marissa M. Juarez, professor of Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English at the University of Arizona. Juarez raises some salient points about why Kerouac’s “Essentials” bemuse the English teacher: His method “discourages revision… chastises grammatical correctness, and encourages writerly flexibility.” Read Kerouac’s full “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” here or below. [Note: If you see what looks like typos, they are not errors. They are part of Kerouac’s original, spontaneous text.]
SET-UP: The object is set before the mind, either in reality. as in sketching (before a landscape or teacup or old face) or is set in the memory wherein it becomes the sketching from memory of a definite image-object.
PROCEDURE: Time being of the essence in the purity of speech, sketching language is undisturbed flow from the mind of personal secret idea-words, blowing (as per jazz musician) on subject of image.
METHOD: No periods separating sentence-structures already arbitrarily riddled by false colons and timid usually needless commas-but the vigorous space dash separating rhetorical breathing (as jazz musician drawing breath between outblown phrases)– “measured pauses which are the essentials of
our speech”– “divisions of the sounds we hear”- “time and how to note it down.” (William Carlos Williams)
SCOPING: Not “selectivity” of expression but following free deviation (association) of mind into limitless blow-on-subject seas of thought,
swimming in sea of English with no discipline other than rhythms of rhetorical exhalation and expostulated statement, like a fist coming down on a table with each complete utterance, bang! (the space dash)- Blow as deep as you want-write as deeply, fish as far down as you want, satisfy yourself first, then reader cannot fail to receive telepathic shock and meaning-excitement by same laws operating in his own human mind.
LAG IN PROCEDURE: No pause to think of proper word but the infantile pileup of scatological buildup words till satisfaction is gained, which will turn out to be a great appending rhythm to a thought and be in accordance with Great Law of timing.
TIMING: Nothing is muddy that runs in time and to laws of time-Shakespearian stress of dramatic need to speak now in own unalterable way or forever hold tongue-no revisions (except obvious rational mistakes, such as names or calculated insertions in act of not writing but inserting).
CENTER OF INTEREST: Begin not from preconceived idea of what to say about image but from jewel center of interest in subject of image at moment of writing, and write outwards swimming in sea of language to peripheral release and exhaustion-Do not afterthink except for poetic or P. S. reasons. Never afterthink to “improve” or defray impressions, as, the best writing is always the most painful personal wrung-out tossed from cradle warm protective mind-tap from yourself the song of yourself, blow!-now!-your way is your only way- “good”-or “bad”-always honest (“ludi- crous”), spontaneous, “confessionals’ interesting, because not “crafted.” Craft is craft.
STRUCTURE OF WORK: Modern bizarre structures (science fiction, etc.) arise from language being dead, “different” themes give illusion of “new” life. Follow roughly outlines in outfanning movement over subject, as river rock, so mindflow over jewel-center need (run your mind over it, once) arriving at pivot, where what was dim-formed “beginning” becomes sharp-necessitating “ending” and language shortens in race to wire of time-race of work, following laws of Deep Form, to conclusion, last words, last trickle-Night is The End.
MENTAL STATE: If possible write “without consciousness” in semi-trance (as Yeats’ later “trance writing”) allowing subconscious to admit in own uninhibited interesting necessary and so “modern” language what conscious art would censor, and write excitedly, swiftly, with writing-or-typingcramps, in accordance (as from center to periphery) with laws of orgasm, Reich’s “beclouding of consciousness.” Come from within, out-to relaxed and said.
Oh, and for authenticity’s sake, you should try Kerouac’s “Essentials” on a typewriter. It’s all he had when he wrote The Subterraneans. No grammar robots to distract him.
via Al Filries
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Žižek Blames the US Government Shutdown on Ayn Rand’s Acolytes Who Caused the 2008 Collapse
Images via Wikimedia Commons
The government shutdown and the raising of the debt ceiling — such things are not usually grist for our cultural mill. But all of that changes when a cultural theorist pins the blame for Washington’s dysfunction on the acolytes of a pseudo-philosopher. Writing in The Guardian last Friday, in simple, straightforward prose, Slovenia’s favorite theorist Slavoj Žižek asks and answers a question in the title of his op-ed: “Who is responsible for the US shutdown? The same idiots responsible for the 2008 meltdown”. And who are those “idiots,” you might wonder? Let me spare you the suspense and jump you down to the last two paragraphs of his piece:
One of the weird consequences of the 2008 financial meltdown and the measures taken to counteract it (enormous sums of money to help banks) was the revival of the work of Ayn Rand, the closest one can get to an ideologist of the “greed is good” radical capitalism. The sales of her opus Atlas Shrugged exploded. According to some reports, there are already signs that the scenario described in Atlas Shrugged – the creative capitalists themselves going on strike – is coming to pass in the form of a populist right. However, this misreads the situation: what is effectively taking place today is almost the exact opposite. Most of the bailout money is going precisely to the Randian “titans”, the bankers who failed in their “creative” schemes and thereby brought about the financial meltdown. It is not the “creative geniuses” who are now helping ordinary people, it is the ordinary people who are helping the failed “creative geniuses”.
John Galt, the central character in Atlas Shrugged, is not named until near the end of the novel. Before his identity is revealed, the question is repeatedly asked, “Who is John Galt”. Now we know precisely who he is: John Galt is the idiot responsible for the 2008 financial meltdown, and for the ongoing federal government shutdown in the US.
We’re not saying it’s the most trenchant analysis, but we do like to take note of intellectual dustups. Speaking of, did you miss the Chomsky-Žižek spat from the summer? It went four rounds. Round 1. Round 2. Round 3. Round 4. And ended in a draw.
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Read More...The Fundamentals of Jazz & Rock Drumming Explained in Five Creative Minutes
Two weeks ago we posted CDZA’s “Journey of the Guitar Solo,” an entertaining tour of 50 years of rock and roll guitar playing. Now we’re back with the group’s follow-up, a fast and fun introduction to drums. New York-based drummer Allan Mednard takes us on a quick tour of the instrument, demonstrating the basic differences between jazz and rock drumming and showing how they have evolved over time. CDZA, short for Collective Cadenza, is an experimental music video project of a group of highly skilled musicians in New York. For more examples of their work, visit the CDZA Web site.
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Read More...The Hunger Strikes at Guantánamo Bay Prison Revealed in Poignant Animated Video
In late September, the US military declared the hunger strikes at Guantánamo Bay over. “At its peak,” writes Charlie Savage in The New York Times, “106 of the 166 prisoners … were listed as participants” in the strike. That number has now dropped to 19, they say, and they’re all being given “the appropriate level of care.” What exactly does that mean? You can get an idea from this animated video created by The Guardian. In 6 minutes, you’ll get introduced to the world of people who have spent years in prison. They’ve never been charged with a crime nor given access to the legal system. Despite being cleared for release, many remain stuck in limbo year after year. When they lose hope and go on hunger strike, they have tubes and food crammed down their noses. Poignant as it may be, the colorful animation may dull your reaction to what’s actually happening in Guantánamo. Perhaps it’s better to look at these color photos to fully appreciate the Kafkaesque system the government has put in place.
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Read More...David Lynch Presents the History of Surrealist Film (1987)
What living director has drawn the descriptor “surreal” more often than David Lynch? If you’ve seen, or rather experienced, a few of his films — particularly Eraserhead, Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr., or Inland Empire, or even the first half of his television series Twin Peaks — you know he’s earned it. Like any surrealist worth his salt, Lynch creates his own version of reality, with its own set of often unfathomable and inexplicably but emotionally and psychologically resonant qualities. In 1987, the year after his breakthrough Blue Velvet opened in theaters, the BBC apparently thought him enough of an authority on the matter of cinematic surrealism to enlist him to present an episode of Arena on the subject.
And so we’ve highlighted, just above in two parts, the fruit of their collaboration, with apologies for the straight-from-the-VHS quality of the video. (I just think of the slight muddledness as adding another welcome layer of unreality to the proceedings.)
Lynch’s duties on the broadcast include providing facts about the films and filmmakers excerpted throughout to tell the history of surrealist film. (He also provides several choice opinions, as when he calls Philadelphia “one of the sickest, most corrupt, decadent, fear-ridden cities that exists.”) We see bits and pieces of pictures like Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s 1929 Un Chien Andalou (above), Jean Cocteau’s 1932 Blood of a Poet, Fernand Léger’s 1947 The Girl with the Prefabricated Heart, and Chris Marker’s 1962 La Jetée. Not only does Lynch contextualize them, he discusses their influence on his own work. Casual filmgoers who’ve caught a Lynch movie or two and taken them as the imaginings of an entertaining weirdo will, after watching this episode, come to understand how long a tradition they fit into — and they’ll no doubt want to see not just more of Lynch’s work, but his sources of inspiration as well. (They may, however, after hearing all he has to say here, still regard him as a weirdo.)
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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...Watch Antoni Gaudí’s Unfinished Masterpiece, the Sagrada Família, Get Finally Completed in 60 Seconds
In 1883, Antoni Gaudí, the great Catalan architect, began working on his magnum opus, the Sagrada Família, the church that has become one of the most popular tourist attractions in Barcelona. Before his death in 1925, Gaudí managed to complete the crypt, apse and part of the Nativity facade. Work on the basilica slowed during the 1930s and 40s, especially during the Spanish Civil War, but picked up again in the 1950s. A series of architects carried on Gaudí’s work, completing new towers and facades. In 2000, the central nave vaulting was completed, and, since then, modern technology has put architects on track to complete the church decades ahead of schedule. The new target date is 2026 — the centenary of Gaudí’s death. Thanks to a computer-generated video released by the Sagrada Familia Foundation, you can see what the basilica, almost 150 years in the making, will look like when it’s all done. You can also take a virtual tour of the interior of the UNESCO landmark here.
via Slate
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Read More...Joseph Stalin, a Lifelong Editor, Wielded a Big, Blue, Dangerous Pencil
It seems only natural that Joseph Stalin, who presided over perhaps the most staggeringly vast erasure of human beings, their property, their documents and histories, should have also been a meticulous editor. Whether we know it or not, the invisible hand of an editor intrudes between us and nearly everything we read (even if it’s the writer as editor), making esoteric decisions, creating alternate outcomes and deleting the past. In Stalin’s day, and still in many editorial departments today, the editor wielded a colored pencil instead of a keyboard, and hovered over manuscripts, noting addenda, correcting minutia, slashing through sentences, and scribbling indecipherable comments in the margins. Stalin’s pencil was blue, a color that was not visible when photographed.
This color becomes a metaphor for Stalin’s invisibility in a fascinating article on Stalin as editor by Holly Case, associate professor of history at Cornell University. Before Stalin was Stalin, he was Joseph Djugashvili, revolutionary bolshevik and seminary dropout, “a ruthless person, and a serious editor.” Stalin rejected 47 of Lenin’s articles to Pravda (and suppressed Lenin’s warnings about his protégée after the former’s death). And once he assumed power as head of the Soviet state in the mid-twenties, Stalin continued in this capacity, heavily rewriting documents and manuscripts, and scrawling notes and revisions over hundreds of official party documents. “For Stalin,” Case writes, “editing was a passion that extended well beyond the realm of published texts.” She comments on the paradox of the dictator’s inescapable public presence and his intrusive, yet invisible, editorial tendencies:
Stalin always seemed to have a blue pencil on hand, and many of the ways he used it stand in direct contrast to common assumptions about his person and thoughts. He edited ideology out or played it down, cut references to himself and his achievements, and even exhibited flexibility of mind, reversing some of his own prior edits.
So while Stalin’s voice rang in every ear, his portrait hung in every office and factory, and bobbed in every choreographed parade, the Stalin behind the blue pencil remained invisible. What’s more, he allowed very few details of his private life to become public knowledge, leading the Stalin biographer Robert Service to comment on the remarkable “austerity” of the “Stalin cult.”
We should not mistake Stalin’s “self-effacement,” Case writes, for modesty. She quotes the enigmatic street artist Banksy to make the point: “invisibility is a superpower.” Stalin applied the power of his pencil to thousands of official documents and pieces of propaganda, even completely rewriting the 1938 Soviet bible, The Short Course on the History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks). Commissioned for a team of authors in 12 chapters, Stalin found it necessary to “fundamentally revise 11 of them” (see the first edition title page above).
Stalin’s blue pencil also intervened in more direct, and chilling ways. The document at left shows a list of people held by the NKVD, forerunners to the KGB. The blue handwriting scrawled over the list is Stalin’s. It reads “Execute everyone.”
We have another execution order below, this time in the form of a 1940 letter written by Stalin’s secret police chief Beria and recommending “execution by shooting” for around 20,000 prisoners, most of them Polish officers, at a camp in Katyn, a massacre the Soviets blamed on the Nazis. Beria’s letter (below) bears the signatures, in blue pencil, of Stalin and several Politburo members.
In addition to heavily editing propaganda and signing mass death warrants, Stalin used his pencil to deface drawings by 19th century Russian painters, scrawling “crude and ominous captions” beneath them in red or blue. He left his mark on 19 pictures, all of them nudes, most of them male. He slashed through their torsos and other body parts with the pencil (below) and wrote on one of the drawings, “Radek, you ginger bastard, if you hadn’t pissed into the wind, if you hadn’t been so bad, you’d still be alive.” Karl Radeck was a revolutionary activist in the 20s that historians believe Stalin had killed in 1939. Historian Nikita Petrov—who believes Stalin defaced the drawings between 1939 and 1946—says of them: “These captions show Stalin wasn’t just malicious and primitive, but that he was also very dangerous.” It is indeed deeply unsettling for an editor to see Stalin’s ruthless hand move freely from the violence of his slash-and-burn textual changes to that of his mass execution orders and crude, “loutish” debasement of human forms.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Rocky’s Famous Trip up the Art Museum Steps Spoofed by the Pranksters of Improv Everywhere
I believe some movies are so classic, they should be considered untouchable, an opinion I wish more Broadway producers shared.
Brace yourself. Rocky, Sylvester Stallone’s heartwarming tale about a small-potatoes boxer in 1970s Philadelphia, has been turned into a musical.
No! Why!? Adrian!!!
It’s likely not as bad as I fear. Stallone himself is co-producing, young director Alex Timbers is deservedly hot, and lyricist Lynn Ahrens is responsible, in large degree, for Schoolhouse Rock.
All the same, prank collective Improv Everywhere’s take on one of Rocky’s most iconic scenes falls more squarely within my comfort zone. The first installment in the group’s weekly Movies in Real Life series, this Rocky features lookalike comedian Dan Black running through the streets of Philly, a crowd of kids tailing him on the final leg. (“So, uh, you have parents?” he gasps, atop the art museum steps.)
As with the annual No-Pants Subway Ride and many other Improv Everywhere stunts, a great deal of fun comes from the reactions of unsuspecting passersby. Some of my favorites are viewable in the prank’s Mission Report, a follow up with less need to stick to the script. Still in character, Black demands royalty checks from street vendors selling Rocky t‑shirts and screws with tourists posing in front of the famed Rocky statue. Small wonder Improv Everywhere’s motto is “we cause scenes.”
For those in need of refreshment, here is the original:
The most recent Movies in Real Life features a boulder chasing Indiana Jones through Central Park to the Museum of Natural History. Tune in to the collective’s Youtube channel every Tuesday this fall for another fresh but faithful take on a familiar film.
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Ayun Halliday’s most recent book is the graphic novel, Peanut . Follow her@AyunHalliday
Read More...Lorne Michaels Introduces Saturday Night Live and Its Brilliant First Cast for the Very First Time (1975)
Saturday Night Live, now in its 39th season, has become more notable lately for its takes on such unintentionally (and too often painfully) funny political figures as Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, rather than for its actual sketches. The show’s had some rough years, and though I can’t count myself among its current fans, for perhaps an eight-year period, from the late 80s to the mid 90s, I tried to catch every episode. Occasionally, I would have to endure what every fan of the long-running show must bear: a long nostalgic rant from my parents’ generation about how terrible the show had become and how it would never be as funny as it was in their day. But they may have just been right, since they watched it live in its infancy in the mid-seventies, when the show featured such comedic giants as Dan Aykroyd, Steve Martin, John Belushi, Bill Murray, and Gilda Radner. Although the topical humor of those early episodes is badly dated, the raw energy radiating from people who would go on to create such enduring classics as Animal House, The Blues Brothers, The Jerk, and Caddyshack sets the bar very high for everyone who followed.
Debuting on October 11, 1975, the brainchild of Lorne Michaels and Dick Ebersol was originally just called the show Saturday Night to differentiate it from an ABC show called Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell. But from its inception, the hallmark elements were in place: the opening sketch ending in “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!” (originally uttered each time by Chevy Chase); the live studio audience; the celebrity guest host (pioneered by George Carlin in the first episode); and the live musical guests (the first were Billy Preston and Janis Ian). The original cast consisted of Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, Jane Curtin, Garrett Morris, Gilda Radner, John Belushi, and Laraine Newman. In the video at the top you can see a very young Lorne Michaels introduce the eight original cast members before the first show aired in an interview on The Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder. Asked by Snyder about the format of the show, Michaels jokingly replies, “we’ve got eight, and we’re hoping for two to really work. Not all of these people will become stars.” The cast laughs nervously. There’s no way any of them could have known how much the show would function as a star-making machine, but that is exactly what it became, even in its first season.
We are lucky to have screen tests from two of the first cast’s biggest stars-to-be, John Belushi (above) and Dan Aykroyd (below). In his audition, Belushi waggles his famous eyebrows, does a couple of brilliant Brando impressions, and generally hams it up. Aykroyd plays it straight, engaging in the smart satire of current events and pop culture that he did so well and pulling off a very credible Louisiana accent.
While some of the most famous comedians of season one, including Belushi and Aykroyd, are well known even to the raw youth of today, Lorne Michael’s first hire, the fabulous Gilda Radner, has sadly faded from pop culture memory, and there are precious few clips of her SNL work online. But Radner was a singular artist whose stand-up routines and Broadway shows are absolutely phenomenal, and still hold up today. You can see her below from her 1979 show “Gilda Live” doing a character called Candy Slice, her take on Patti Smith (who was never so wasted, I think). Notice a young Paul Schaeffer on the drums and SNL’s G.E. Smith, Radner’s first husband, on guitar. Radner’s tragic death from ovarian cancer in 1989 cast her late life in somber tones, but seeing her below, before her illness, offers but a glimpse of the tremendous physical energy and commitment she brought to her every memorable character on the show.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
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