Author: greg

Scratch Frears From The ‘I’ll Never Make A Musical’ Club

Stephen Frears, the rather gritty naturalist British director, is finishing his first musical, Mrs. Henderson Presents, which tells the story of a London burlesque-like theatre during the Blitz.
I get cheered up when I hear stories of people who didn’t want to make a musical making a musical, and in the NY Times, James Ulmer’s October visit to the set reveals a bit of how Frears did it. One key was taking a page, literally, from Hollywood:

[Frears said] “Alan Parker once told me you can wing a movie, but you can’t wing a musical. So yes, I did feel trapped.”
Until, that is, he and his team discovered a book and saw a documentary on the world of Arthur Freed. From the 1940’s to the early 1970’s, Freed’s ability to lure top actors, directors, choreographers and composers to work cheek-by-jowl in his MGM production offices delivered such classic musicals as Singin’ in the Rain, Meet Me In St. Louis and Gigi. The Freed Unit created Hollywood’s first and greatest musical repertory company, and counted Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, Gene Kelly and Busby Berkeley in its fold. That model gave Mr. Frears the key he had been searching for.
“Freed had figured out that you must have all these creative people working together in the same room,” the director said. “You can’t do it right unless they’re all present and thinking the same way. So I got everybody into the same place – the writer, composer, musical director and choreographer – and worked it all out. Thank God we read that book.”

That book, I’m guessing, is Hugh Fordin’s expert M-G-M’s Greatest Musicals: The Arthur Freed Unit and the documentary is probably Musicals Great Musicals by David Thompson, a global public tv-style puff piece which is not as informative, but is still pretty and entertaining.
We just caught the end of Signin’ In The Rain on TCM, so my Freed awe factor is running kinda high right now. [Musicals Great Musicals is included in the Singin’ In The Rain 2-Disc DVD, by the way.]
A Pile of Rubble Topped by Nudes. Now That’s a Musical! [NYT]

Hell, It Would’ve Been An Honour To Be SEEN

Things don’t look good–and some things can’t be seen at all–in Jacob’s critical look at the BAFTA nominations. And the problem is the studios’ stupid MPAA-legacy DVD screener system.
Hero and Million Dollar Baby were left off top-10 lists and didn’t get a single nomination for anything, while House of Flying Daggers got nine. One possible reason? Studios didn’t send out DVD screeners at all.
The Life Aquatic didn’t get any nods, either, even though Buena Vista Pictures Marketing sent out screeners to all BAFTA members. The only problem: those DVD’s had “PROPERTY OF BVPM” and “DO NOT DUPLICATE” burned into every one of Anderson’s fanatically composed frames.

Occasionally, this is amusing–in the last of those images [on Yankeefog.com], you’ll notice that the back of Cate Blanchet’s shirt seems to be advertising her new biography, “I, Cate”–but most of the time, it’s even more incredibly distracting than you’d imagine from looking at the still images above. In every one of Wes Anderson’s carefully planned tracking shots, the most noticeable element becomes those big, unmoving letters at the top and bottom of the screen. Every one of his carefully composed static shots is thrown out of balance by their presence. It becomes difficult to notice Bill Murray’s wonderfully subtle performance, or Owen Wilson’s understated humor, because your eye keeps being drawn to the giant words hovering in front of them.

As if it could get worse the texts aren’t in Futura, Wes Anderson’s font of choice.
Looking Where The Light Is Good [Yankeefog.com, via kottke]
Related: Wes Anderson’s Favorite Font [greg.org pointing at kottke. kottke, kottke, kottke!]

Like Inviting A Hillbilly To Do Your Taxes

When Richard Hatch of Survivor fame [sic] got busted for failing to report his $1 million prize to the IRS, my mind raced back to some of the first tax advice I ever heard:

You.. can be a millionaire.. and never pay taxes! You can be a millionaire.. and never pay taxes! You say.. “Steve.. how can I be a millionaire.. and never pay taxes?” First.. get a million dollars. Now.. you say, “Steve.. what do I say to the tax man when he comes to my door and says, ‘You.. have never paid taxes’?” Two simple words. Two simple words in the English language: “I forgot!”

The title of this post pays homage to Mr. Hatch’s previous appearance on this website, which is hella funny.
Richard Hatch Hit With Tax Evasion Rap [thesmokinggun.com, via towleroad]
Steve Martin’s Monologe [snl transcripts]

On Smithson, Space & Time

Another cover from Life“the lunar surface photographed by the Apollo astronauts in 1969” yields a comparison to Smithson’s cover for Artforum published just a month later: a distribution of mirrors across a square of parched earth, one of a number of illustrations from his “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan.” Placing these images together, which speaks to an argument about travel as a form of cultural repetition that suspends an experience of the present, demands a great deal of archival legwork on Reynolds’s part.

-Pamela M. Lee writing about new books about Robert Smithson in “The Cowboy in the Library,” published in the Dec/Jan 2005 Bookforum. She’s referring to Ann Reynold’s 2003 book, Robert Smithson: Learning from New Jersey and Elsewhere, which draws intensively and creatively on Smithson’s archives at…the Smithsonian.
The image above is Moonworks, artist Craig Kalpakjian’s 2003 proposal for creating earthworks on the moon. Read about it in Issue Magazine. Craig’s got a show up through Saturday at Galerie Edward Mitterand in Geneva.
Lee continues:

In one of the most striking passages of art history I’ve read in a while, Roberts connects a Mannerist altarpiece Smithson studied at length with the abstract sculpture he began making in the mid-’60s, by bridging a discussion of Jacopo Pontormo’s Descent from the Cross, 1525-�28, a deposition image composed around the rotational forms of its sacral actors, to the spiraling forms and crystalline structures of works such as Gyrostasis, 1968. What connects them in Smithson’s oeuvre, Roberts argues, is their attitude toward the deposition of time: Pontormo’s languorous Christ now exhibits a “depositional temporality,” whereas the growth process of a crystal is itself called a “deposition.” It says something about Roberts’ gifts as a polemicist that she can make this leap wholly convincing for the reader. More art history should be written with the kind of imagination and verve displayed here.

Roberts is Jennifer Roberts, who wrote Mirror-Travels: Robert Smithson and History. Smithson’s sculpture Gyrostasis was recently on view at the Hirshhorn.

On Math & Art In France

sugimoto_math.jpg

Although Gustav Eiffel didn’t explicitly use one himself, an American engineering professor has come up with a mathematical expression for the shape of the Eiffel Tower, based on its creator’s own studies of wind resistance, torquing, and load transfer.
Which reminds me of the photos by Hiroshi Sugimoto at the Fondation Cartier, Mathematical Forms. They are monumental images of beautiful, little plaster stereometric models, which were created in 19th and early 20th c. Germany to illustrate complex trigonometric formulas. Several were published in the NY Times Magazine last month.
Elegant shape of Eiffel Tower solved mathematically [PhysOrg.com, via archinect]
Etant Donne: Le Grande Verre by Hiroshi Sugimoto through Feb. 27 at the Fondation Cartier
Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Mathematical Forms [NYT Mag]

Robert Polidori: ‘Habitats, Not Architecture’

Check out Michael Bierut’s appreciation of the bracing architecture environment photographs of Robert Polidori. Polidori’s are not photos for architects, who want their buildings to look their renderings–pristine and perfect, unsullied by unpredictable humanity and the less-pedigreed landscape surrounding them. No, Polidori makes photos that seem real; when you go to Bilbao, it’d actually look–and feel–like his picture, not the postcard. His work appears often in The New Yorker, Architecture Week, and in his books (actually, it appears all the time in his books).

Robert Polidori’s Peripheral Vision [designobserver.com]
Book Review: Polidori’s Metropolis [metropolismag.com]
Buy Robert Polidori’s Metropolis for 65 undiscounted bucks at Amazon.

Section 8: We Make Movies, Not Money

There’s a long profile in the NYT of Section Eight, Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney’s Warner Bros-based production company, whose deal is set to run out in a couple of years. I’m not quite sure what the takeaway is:

  • George and Stephen were so focused on creating an environment where filmmakers could work free of studio meddling, that Soderbergh buddy and first-time director Ted Griffin got sacked during the first week of shooting from Untitled Ted Griffin Project and was replaced by Warner chief’s old pal, Rob “Meathead” Reiner. Fittingly, the project’s now called Rumor Has It.
  • Section 8 works well as a farm team. Seriously, do you think Chris Nolan could’ve gotten the Batman gig without making Insomnia. I mean, tell me what he had EVER done before that?
  • Even in a discussion of disappointing performance, literally, no one wants to talk about K Street.
  • The duo set out to make movies, not money, and they’ve succeeded spectacularly.
    Trying to Combine Art and Box Office in Hollywood [NYT]
    Previously: Speaking of Losers, We Found A Bag Of Mail [greg.org]
    No one except me: greg.org posts regarding K Street

    • 2005-01-24, This Week In The New Yorker

    In the magazine header, image: newyorker.com
    Issue of 2005-01-24
    Posted 2005-01-17
    NOTE: This week the Magazine published all its major pieces online for, I believe, the first time.
    THE TALK OF THE TOWN
    COMMENT/ UNSOCIAL INSECURITY/ Hendrik Hertzberg on the Bush Administration’s plans for retirement.
    IN THE AIR/ DO-GOODER/ Dan Baum meets a Red Cross volunteer with a bag full of cash.
    DEPT. OF EDUCATION/ SAFE JOURNEY/ Ben McGrath on sending a school hall monitor off to war.
    POSTCARD FROM THAILAND/ SEA GYPSIES/ Eliza Griswold on the plight of the diminutive, indigenous Moken.
    THE FINANCIAL PAGE/ DON’T DO THE MATH/ James Surowiecki on weighing costs and benefits in medicine and business.
    ANNALS OF NATIONAL SECURITY/ Seymour M. Hersh/ The Coming Wars/ The Pentagon has new powers.
    SHOUTS & MURMURS/ Andy Borowitz/ Real-Estate Note
    NEW YORK JOURNAL/ Rebecca Mead/ Funny Boys/ How to get rich off dumb jokes.
    PROFILES/ Jon Lee Anderson/ A Man of the Shadows/ Iyad Allawi’s past and Iraq’s future.
    LETTER FROM EUROPE/ Jane Kramer/ Blood Sport/ What’s really at issue in the foxhunt debate?
    FICTION/ Thomas McGuane/ “Ice”
    THE CRITICS
    BOOKS/ Jim Holt/ Measure for Measure/ The strange science of Francis Galton.
    BOOKS/ John Updike/ Subconscious Tunnels/ Haruki Murakami’s dreamlike new novel.
    THE THEATRE/ Hilton Als/ Mad Women/ “K.I. from ‘Crime'” and “Belize.”
    THE ART WORLD/ Peter Schjeldahl/ That Eighties Show/ Revisiting the East Village.
    THE CURRENT CINEMA/ David Denby/ The Contender/ Ben Stiller onscreen.
    FROM THE ARCHIVE
    LETTER FROM TEHRAN/ SHADOW LAND/ JOE KLEIN/ Who’s winning the fight for Iran’s future?/ Issue of 2002-02-18 & 25
    Q&A/ All That Nature Cares About/ Author Thomas McGuane discusses his work and the world of fiction writing today with the magazine’s fiction editor, Deborah Treisman./ Issue of 2003-01-13
    PROFILES/ Kenneth Tynan/ Fifteen Years of the Salto Mortale/ A profile of Johnny Carson which was not, despite what the page says, “Posted 2005-01-24″/ Issue of 1978-02-20

    From Anne Truitt’s Journal, ‘Prospect’

    I just read this Friday night on the train. Seemed apt:

    Brenda Richardson, deputy director of the Baltimore Museum, installed the exhibition there. We had agreed that she would install alone so when I walked into the rooms filled with work dating from First, 1961 to 1991, I had the delight of seeing it from an entirely fresh point of view. One of the trepidations I feel when my sculptures are exhibited is that they may be harmed: people like to touch their surfaces, they mar them without intending to. Brenda forfended this possibility by isolating groups of sculptures inside a designated pathway: they stood aloof from touch save by imagination. I had the happy feeling that the work was safe. [p. 146]
    …
    Some time ago a friend who had flown from his home in Boston down to Richmond wrote me a postcard to say that he had seen in a bank there a sculpture he instantly recognized as mine. Recently a little girl saw that same sculpture, Signal. It is a small column, 59 inches tall x 5 1/2 inches x 4 inches, painted in clear yellow, white and blue horizontal planes. It must have looked like a Maypole to this enthusiastic child: she ran to it, hugged it, swung around it–and scuffed it. I do so like her reaction, which mitigated the automatic spasm of anger I always feel when one of my pieces is damaged. The bank has sent me the sculpture for restoration. I am working on Signal now, with the good feeling that I can return it in pristine condition to a place where it apparently encounters appreciation.
    Not all damage is that minor. A columnar structure running on a line of gravity from earth to sky is as intrinsically precarious as a human body; no matter how carefully weighted and how strongly constructed, it can be struck down. Knot, a column 81 inches x 8 inches x 8 inches, was recently so toppled. This sculpture had survived the Persian Gulf War in the basement of the American embassy in Tel Aviv, but last month a photographer backed into it and knocked it over. A representative of the U.S. State Department Art in Embassies program, under whose aegis Knot had been placed in Israel, was present the other day in the studio when I uncrated it. As I raised it to its full height over our heads, we heard loud cracks. The material wedged into a solid cradle at its base, ballast to prevent its tipping, must have been shattered by the force of its fall. To judge from the scars denting its pure yellow, white and black encircling colors, it probably dropped at so tipped an angle that it hit the floor twice. The Art in Embassies representative remarked that the Tel Aviv embassy has a marble floor. In any case, the internal damage is, for a variety of structural reasons, irreparable.
    I have never been able to detach myself sufficiently to prevent a feeling of having been hurt myself when my work is damaged. I use the money I receive for restoration to make new work, but I never stop rather anxiously holding all my own work intact in my mind, hoping for its safety. In Knot‘s case, this attachment was augmented by the fact that it had traveled in a foam-lined bed inside a wooden crate beautifully made by an old friend. He had for many years packed my work. Last December, he was killed, senselessly gunned down in the street, instantly bereft of both dignity and life in yet another of the wanton murders that now characterize our urban area. His crate was perfect; it stands in my studio reminding me of him, and of Knot as it will never be again. [pp. 159-60]

    Excerpts from Prospect: The Journey of An Artist, by Anne Truitt, whose sculpture, Catawba, was recently damaged at MoMA.

    Conclusion: Greg Allen Is A Dramatic Genius

    The shows are almost entirely presented as direct addresses, and the actors will often talk to one another between plays, using one another’s real names. Every performance of “Too Much Light” begins like a political stump speech: someone stands up, looks at the audience and says, “We’re not going to lie to you.”
    Rob Neill, the managing director of the New York branch, said: “There’s not a lot of pretense in what we do. We’re not playing characters. We’re relating things we feel and stories from our lives.”
    Since cast members build shows around their own break-ups, feelings of depression or idiosyncratic theories about life, the show can occasionally feel like a clever and deeply felt blog performed onstage.

    “Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind,” the long-running production by the Neo-Futurists of Chicago (whose founder, Greg Allen, ‘wrote’ the original) has returned to New York City. The show plays at the Belt Theater,336 West 37th Street.
    Don’t Blink: You May Miss The Show [NYT]

    Someone Hasn’t Heard of ‘Napoleon Dynamite’.,.

    In this week’s Arts & Leisure section, Adam Leipzig entertainingly/depressingly lays out the beyond-improbable odds of 1) having a successful independent film, and 2) getting your script made into a big studio hit.
    Not that I would EVER question the brilliance of the editors who this week afforded me the opportunity to speak with Pamela Anderson, but I worry that if Leipzig’s arguments go unchallenged, too many doctors, dentists, and uncles will be dissuaded from investing in surefire hit films, and then where would our culture be? We’d only have 2,000 features trying to get into Sundance.
    That said, while I could dig up data on indie films and indie scripts and indie budgets and indie returns on investment, I’m kinda wiped out right now. Leipzig’s numbers are empirically correct, but don’t reflect even the basic risk-mitigating, probability-enhancing factors that should accompany a deserving film.
    What are the odds for films that were developed in the Sundance Institute writer’s workshop? How about for movies featuring a recognizable actor? Or the distribution pickup rate of films shown at IFC Market? Or of films by former IFC volunteers, even? How many $5 million films make back their investment? How many $100,000 films? How many films were self-distributed, and at what budget level does self-distribution start (or stop) looking viable?
    The Sundance Odds Get Even Longer [NYT]

    Puppet Masterpiece Theatre

    Umm, I thought the British were supposed to be smarter than Americans. How else would they get all that work narrating documentaries? Yet the Guardian’s film critic Peter Bradshaw gives Team America World Police an ecstatic review. And his Observer colleague Philip French calls it “better sustained than [Parker and Stone’s] feature-length animated comedy, South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut. Fundamentally, it’s an extended parody of Thunderbirds and centres on a group of super-patriots dedicated to–
    No, fundamentally, Mr Belevedere, it’s a sloppy, thin pool of disappointing puke, with a few chunks of humor floating in it.
    Maybe things look different from the other side of the pond. Maybe the movie’s obtuse, pig-headed politics look more prescient after the 2004 election than it did last summer. [ummm, indeed.] Whatever. Which country, exactly, is to blame for Benny Hill, AbFab, AND Bean? That’s what I thought.
    America, &^*(W$&^ Yeah.
    ‘hilarious movie’ [Observer]
    ‘Why can’t non-puppet films be as good as this?’ [Guardian]
    Previously on greg.org: Smaller, Shorter, and Most Definitely Cut

    Sforza vs. Toyota on “The Youth Movement”

    Don’t quite know what to make of this:

  • For a town-hall-style pitch for phasing out Social Security, G. W. Bush’s hand-selected audience included Josh Wright, a representative of “the youth movement,” who is also a Utah dairy farmer (and son of a Republican state senator.) When Wright started talking, Bush said, “Wait a minute, you don’t need to talk about private conversations. OK, you’re a dairy farmer? Good. Milking those cows.”
  • For the introduction of its new Tacoma pickup at the Detroit Auto Show, Toyota hired Mike Reid, a 20-year old pizza waiter, ” to skateboard around the truck for three of the show preview days in order to ‘associate the vehicle with youth culture.'” On the other side of the truck was a magician “dressed like an ice fisherman.”

    With Utah dairy farmer, Bush talks Social Security     [SL Trib]
    Reporters Notebook from the 2005 Detroit Auto Show [NYT, Sunday Jan. 9 5:27 entry, fyi]