Anthony Lane on Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe’s documentary, Lost in La Mancha: “For anyone who suffers from the wish to make movies, or who fears that this terrible condition may strike at any time, here is the cure.”
Category: making movies
Look At The Camera: Cyan Pictures Developing
Now that S(J03) is locked and getting ready for color correction and film transfer, I thought I’d catch up with the guys at Cyan Pictures, who I’d been in only intermittent email contact with for the last few weeks. They’re both walkin’ the walk and talkin’ the talk, in that order.
Putting the Director in Director of Photography
Sifting and digitizing footage for S(J03) until the batteries in my camera ran out, when I watched two DVD’s back to back, XXX and Don’t Look Now. At a stretch, I can say XXX is research for the Animated Musical. Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 thriller, though, is a concentrated course in editing in general and intercutting in particular.
When I cited the seduction scene in Out of Sight as inspiration for intercutting scenes 1 and 2 in Souvenir, a couple of readers suggested seeing the similar Donald Sutherland/Julie Chrystie love scene in Don’t Look Now, “one of the subtlest, most affecting erotic sequences in the history of cinema.” Similar? Apparently, in the Out of Sight DVD commentary,Soderbergh cops to copying this scene; frankly, I think he improved on it.
Roeg’s a cinematographer-turned-director, and it shows. Venice looks awesome in the dark (blown out sunlight at the end of a long alley) and the light (endless boats crossing shimmering canals). And Roeg never met a mirror or semi-transparent surface he didn’t like (or shoot); when the unsettling Scottish sisters confront Christie’s grieving mother in the ladies’ room, there are so many reflections you wonder where the camera was.
The love scene is unexpectedly intense (think twice before watching this one with the in-laws), and not just because I went into the movie thinking Julie Chrystie was the one in The Belle of Amherst. The intercutting is quite effective and interestingly different from Out of Sight. The differences between Roeg’s and Soderbergh’s scenes are both consistent and convenient. Don’t Look Now: impassioned married sex between people who know each other well is intercut with the aftermath, stolid scenes of getting dressed for dinner. The sex is guaranteed, just part of the fabric of life. Out of Sight: Self-conscious flirtation between pursuer and pursued is intercut with the payoff, uncertainty banished and anticipation building to a striptease and one hot night in the sack.
Roeg packs his film with foreboding cuts; pay attention, because everything seems intentional or freighted with meaning. Handheld camerawork (a church accident and late-night chase along a canal, in particular) crops up unexpectedly and with great emotional effect. Some of the love scene cuts are a bit obvious, though; a shot of Julie Chrystie rolling over cuts to a shot of her turning around and putting on lipstick, and there’s a silly pelvic thrust as Sutherland puts on his pants. Even if it feels a little heavy-handed or self-indulgent sometimes, Roeg’s is an expressive style of filmmaking that’s largely dropped from sight these days.
Except, of course, for the “exciting faux-documentary style of Bloody Sunday; the feverish intercutting in Adaptation, Chicago, The Hours, Solaris, even The Two Towers!” which Slate‘s David Edelstein points out…
Guess J. Lo Was Busy, or The Adaptation of About Schmidt
Louis Begley spoke before a screening of About Schmidt last night. An extremely genteel guy, he explained why he’s quite pleased with the film, even though it differs significantly from his novel. For Begley, “write what you know” means Schmidt (“known as Schmittie to one and all”) is an Upper East Side lawyer, recently retired to Bridgehampton, something, presumably, a vast majority of the screening audience knows well, too. Consistently for Alexander Payne, “film what you know” means a studied exploration of the middle of Middle America: Schmidt is an Omaha actuary whose retirement plans involve a Winnebago.
image: aboutschmidtmovie.com
The only disappointment Begley voiced was the elimination of his saucy Puerto Rican waitress character who (brace yourself) teaches Schmidt to love again. Or, more precisely, she “teaches Schmittie the transformative power of sex. [audience titters] You laugh. It’s true. Maybe you’re just too young to understand.” But then he gamely allowed that Payne may have been poking fun at this idea with Kathy Bates’ hand-painted clothing-shedding hot-tubber. Um, yeah.
While I’ve heard it described as a comedy, the laughs were all at things that are quite real outside the culture capitals; if you’ve been there, or are honest about being from there, your laughter is slightly embarassed and at yourself. (I’m not talking about my own proto-mullet here.) Begley sounded a little resigned when he said he couldn’t see the future holding anything good for Payne’s Schmidt. As I did in September, I have disagree and side with Payne. If taken at the most superficial level, you could argue that Schmidt’s transformative experience at the end is a pretty meager reward for all that preceded it. Why, it’s practically a, um, a money shot. What it may be is the difference between sex and love.
[12/12 update: Alexander Payne will be on Studio 360 this weekend. AND he will be given the Work In Progress award by the MoMA Department of Film and Media next February. Stay tuned.]
Hey! They shot that scene in the church on my corner
The Opposite of Sex and The City, by FTrain’s Paul Ford.
Director’s Cut? That, My Friend, is TMI
On the set of Starship Troopers: DP Jost Vocano,
director Paul Verhoeven, star Casper Van Dien, writer Ed Neumeier
Yesterday’s NY Times Magazine is a veritable toolbox (and I use that word deliberately) for film, all you want to know, and more. First, what you want to know: There’s the Cinderella-story of indie director Joe Carnahan’s tremendous success on the Bel-Air Circuit, where Narc, his ignored-at-Sundance cop flick became the favorite film of (among others) Tom Cruise and Harrison Ford.
And the more: The “How to…” section provides expert opinion on potentially tricky subjects, all in a neat little package. Here’s a quote from Paul Verhoeven’s How to Shoot a Nude Scene:
When I did Starship Troopers, the cast was balking about going through with a group shower scene. So I took off all my clothes. And my director of photography did also. It worked, because everybody started laughing, and then they got naked. And we didn’t hear anymore complaints.
You can read reviews of Verhoeven’s piece at CNdb, the Celebrity Nudity Database.
Some Quotes and Links
“Asbury’s book is a tribute to the magical power of naming: long stretches of ‘Gangs [of New York]’ are taken up by lists of gangs and villains and even fire engines, and, like the lists of ships in the Iliad, they are essential to the effect…We read of Daybreak Boys, Buckoos, Hookers, Swamp Angels, Slaughter Housers, Short Tails, Patsy Conroys, and the Border Gang, of Chichesters, Roach Guards, Plug Uglies, and Shirt Tails, and we melt.”
— Adam Gopnik discussing Herbert Asbury’s cult-fave 1928 book in the New Yorker
“What you really are afraid of is that you’re competing against somebody who is rich and irrational. I mean, it used to be a given, a saying in the industry: Don’t ever bid against Rupert Murdoch for anything Rupert wants, because if you win you lose. You will have paid way too much.”
— media mogul John Malone, in an interview with Ken Auletta at NewYorker.com
“Just as Italians don’t translate Johnny Cash as ‘Giovanni Soldi,’ and we don’t take Federico Fellini and rename him ‘Freddy Cats,’ so the term Arte Povera has to stand unchanged and unexplained.”
— Blake Gopnik, brother, writing (entertainingly but incorrectly) about the Hirshhorn Gallery’s latest show in the Washington Post
“Then sometimes you’re given the chance to make a memory for someone, give them a pleasant moment to remember, which is the greatest thing you can ever do. Keep the Oscar and all that.”
— Rod Steiger, Oscar winner, on Jon Favreau’s Dinner for Five on IFC
“We’re a little tired of the thin-skinned whining, which is much of what we get from north of the border…
— Pat Buchanan, defending his comment about “Soviet Canuckistan” on the CBC’s As It Happens [Pat’s about 12:00 into the stream.]
On Seeing Jackass: The Movie; Souvenir (November 2001) Press Updates
Whatever else it may be, Jackass is possibly the purest cinema experience ever. It is undiluted, unadulterated and unambiguous. It will make you run. You certainly don’t need me to tell you, though, if you should run toward or away from the theater; whatever your pre-existing inclination, you will do well to follow it. Jackass will not mislead you.
Hustled out to Queens to get press screening tapes of Souvenir (November 2001) to MoMA’s Film Department. Falling a little behind on delivering the printed press kits; it’s going to be a working weekend.
Real Men, Rank Bulls, Raw Sport (and Glidecam)
So I’m watching the PBR Bud Light Cup World Finals, and there’s a camera guy in the ring, all decked out like he’s, well, like he’s going to the biggest bullriding rodeo event of the year, thank you very much, and he’s got a Glidecam, just like we used in France.
‘Well, you have to be a nut, kid.’
image of Isabella Blow in Yoshiki Hishinuma, by bill cunningham, via nyt 2002
“To be contemporaine de tout le monde–that is the keenest and most secret satisfaction that fashion can offer a woman.”
– The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin
Apparent egalitarianism is the great appeal of the Street Fashion concept, especially in New York, and especially in the street photos of Bill Cunningham in the NYTimes. If you just be yourself –and that self is someone who’s got a bit of the trend radar that puts you in cargo pants about six weeks before it shows up in Cunningham’s Sunday street collages– your embroidered jeans-wearing booty may just surprise you by turning up in the paper. Bill never put your name under your photo, not even if yours is recognizable; credit goes to the man with the camera, and your just appearing is reward enough.
But when someone like Isabella Blow –who’s got “Muse” printed on her carte de visite –walks down the street, it’s the street fashion equivalent of George Bush making a speech in a national park: the setting says “See, I < heart > nature,” but be surprised if the clearcutters wait till FoxNews cuts back to the studio before revving up their chainsaws. Blow’s not on just anyone on any street any time. She’s a Muse. In Paris. During The Shows. Walking (or wafting, in this case) amidst photographers, designers, editors, stylists, and groupies. Fashion industry types. Just like her.
One of the designers Blow muses for is Jean-Paul Gaultier, who I once sat next to on the Concorde [that was totally uncalled for, I know]. Nice guy. And a brilliant miner of both the street-as-walkway and the street-as-runway. The Mixture, a new culture site with an old-school appreciation of editing, is streaming Gaultier’s latest show in its entirety. It’s worth watching.
Benjamin called the flaneur “a spy for the capitalists, on assignment in the realm of consumers.” If so, in the lead of France’s fashion industry (an “occult science of industrial fluctuations” if ever there was one. The Arcades Project is like a can of Pringles: once it’s open, you can’t stop at just one.) is just where Gaultier belongs.
France’s fashion week definitely has an industrial air, with trade associations, official this and that, and weighty government sanction. It’s like the Expositions Universelles that made Paris the center of the 19th century world, where innovations were unveiled: things like “electricity” (“The City of Lights”) and “Photography,” which debuted there in 1855. Benjamin again, on the group that re-defined the term, avant-garde:
The Saint Simonians, who envision the industrialization of the earth, take up the idea of world exhibitions…[They] anticipated the development of the global economy, but not the class struggle…World exhibitions glorify the exchange value of the commodity.
Nice work, if you can get it. Nobody knows better than Benjamin that the image and (the street) reality have a very complicated (business) relationship. When Bill Cunningham takes Isabella Blow’s picture on the street in Paris, we have to know that the image is manufactured, constructed in a myriad of ways, some obvious and some not, by all parties involved. (Isabella, even the panhandling woman in my neighborhood changes into her garbage bag before starting work.)
And I found the same issues face the filmmaker, even/especially the documentary filmmaker. To what extent do you just “let something happen” and you “happen” to film it? To what extent to you “make something happen,” or stage it? Can’t stage it? Wouldn’t be prudent? Wouldn’t have street cred? Well, how about if you just go to the spots where you know what you want to shoot is gonna happen? Then, you can just “happen” to film it. It all involves choices; editing before, during, and after the fact; having an eye (and a camera), and deciding what to do with it. All things being equal, then, some things just look better. And that can make all the difference.
The Age of Street Fashion [nyt]
1979 Star Trek, or The Thin Line Between (Punch-Drunk) Love and Hate
I’m watching Star Trek: The Motion Picture right now, and it’s blowing me away. It’s the first movie, the one with the original crew, the bald chick, and V’Ger, a cloud-like alien vessel with the Voyager space probe at its core. Anyway, wide swaths of the movie are a nearly psychedelic trance, which I never remembered. There’s an incredible 10+ minute abstract FX sequence of the Enterprise entering the vessel. It’s similar to Jeremy Blake’s digital work and the passages he did for Punch-Drunk Love. Or, it’s as abstract, at least. A very unexpected place for such a confluence.
[The visual effects on STTMP were originally led by Richard Taylor, then Douglas Trumbull took over after overruns in the chaotic production’s budget. So far, I think the V’Ger sequence was John Dykstra‘s and Trumbull’s realization of Syd Mead‘s concepts. An interview with Taylor survives for now in Google’s cache: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 & 6. Charles Barbee wrote about lighting and shooting the V’Ger Flyover, including accounts of 10-pass in-camera composited shots and finding just the right “glare angle.” Syd Mead discusses creating V’Ger.]
While I mentioned before that elements of the Star Trek IV story inspired the latest script for the AYUAM, it turns out that several ideas from this Star Trek worked in as well. I’m not unaware that these are considered two of the lamest Star Trek films made (“The V’Ger flyby was interminable.”). Combine this with the fact that I don’t like musicals, and I find myself deeply engaged in something I should be hating, but instead, I’m loving it. Can someone explain this to me?
Porn (‘n Chicken) on the Internet? What’ll they think of next?
James “Sweet Jimmy the Benevolent Pimp” Ponsoldt was a co-founder of Porn ‘n Chicken, a Yale timekiller-cum-media spoof-cum-Comedy Central movie. (If that sentence doesn’t get this weblog banned by your corporate firewall, it’ll at least get you a reprimand at your performance review.) Tad Friend’s New Yorker piece contains Jimmy’s description of his latest project:
“It’s ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night’ set in rural Appalachia,” he said, “with themes of rifts between generations, loneliness, becoming a man, and OxyContin addiction.”
Sound familiar? It took me a second, but it’s Cyan Pictures’ Coming Down the Mountain. Despite what the title may lead you to believe, it has nothing to do with Porn or Chicken. [For fun, try and match the other porny aliases in the article with the crew at Cyan!}
Great Minds, etc etc
Arnolfo di Cambio et al, Basilica di Santa Croce, 1294-1442 [img via]
As the Artforum.com discussion of Nico Israel’s Spiral Jetty travelogue turned from my smug fact-checking to the romanticisation of contemporary art, E.M. Forster’s A Room With a View popped into my head. Just as Forster’s English followed Baedekers around Italy–from this altarpiece to that fresco, from Firenze to Rome to Venice to Ravenna–a Contemporary Art Grand Tour has taken shape where Artforum pilgrims can demonstrate their faith.
In addition to Spiral Jetty, the CAGT includes: The Rothko Chapel; Walter deMaria’s Lightning Field; Michael Heizer’s Double Negative; Donald Judd’s Chinati Foundation; James Turrell’s work-in-progress Roden Crater; the Guggenheim Bilbao; and my own heretical favorite, Richard Serra’s Afangar.
With Merchant/Ivory’s version of ARWAV firmly entrenched in my own movie worldview, I saw a vision of a hipster artist roadtrip remake. Sort of Basquiat meets Thelma & Louise, with Reese Witherspoon as Helena Bonham-Carter, Josh Hartnett as Julian Sands and Daniel Day-Lewis as, well, himself.
ANYWAY, it turns out the fashion world’s own Forster, English Vogue-er (and faux twin) Plum Sykes, may beat me to the intersection of Art & Film. Hintmag.com leaked the outline of Sykes’ book, Bergdorf Blondes (which just got picked up by Talk/Miramax Books for $625,000, not including movie rights).
The hot narratrix (calls herself “Moi”) dates, gets engaged to, and breaks up with the hot it-boy painter “Dan” (“Our heroine consoles herself that there is one thing worse than being disengaged to a person in a GAP ad, and that’s being married to someone in a GAP ad.”) [NB: Sykes dated, etc. painter/Gap ad star Dam(ian) Loeb.]; receives confidence-boosting advice as she pines for the hot LA filmmaker (“You are not superficial, you just look like you are because you wear a lot of Gucci.”) ; and hightails it home to En-ge-land, perchance to marry the Earl-next-door (“after bonking at the SoHo Grand”). Sounds pretty much like my movie idea.
Should I go ahead and develop it? Or would it be like when there were those two Dalai Lama movies out at the same time?
keep the curvoisier, pass the maker’s mark
Congratulations to the guys at Cyan Pictures for getting their rough cut fedexed to Sundance just in time. [Technically, they could’ve eked out a whole other day by flying the tape to the festival office in person, so they had a huge time cushion, but hey, that’s enough dramatic tension.]
Their short film, Coming Down the Mountain, is set and was shot in/around Hazard, Kentucky, which is near Troublesome Creek. Last night, on plasticbag.org, I read about the Fugate family, aka The Blue People of Troublesome Creek. John Stacy married into the clan and said of his father-in-law:
[Levy Fugate was] part of the family that showed blue. All them old fellers way back then was blue. One of em – I remember seeing him when I was just a boy – Blue Anze, they called him. Most of them old people we [called] by that name – the blue Fugates. It run in that generation who lived up and down Ball Creek.
What you really want to do is direct??
Dateline, Malibu: Directin’ ain’t easy, even for Stephen Gaghan, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Traffic, a man who has Steven Soderbergh on his Buddy List (and IM’s him for advice on “Super-35 blown up to anamorphic” or not). He writes about his unblinking-but-not-too-pity-inducing directorial debut in the NYTimes. Gaghan also tells a good story (ahem, surprised? He’s an O-winning screenwriter.) on the Criterion DVD for Traffic.