UCLA Medical Center is the epicenter of the Los Angeles basin or something. Robert Wise died there this week at 91.
In between editing Citizen Kane and flacking for Scorsese’s Gangs of New York [Scorsese was a big fan, so I’m sure it’s fine], Wise also directed The Sound of Music, West Side Story, The Day The Earth Stood Still, Star Trek: The Motion Picture…
Not a super-auteur-y guy, but in a good way. The Hindenburg,he directed The Hindenburg….
NYT Obit / imdb / previous greg.org fawning
Ooh, What A Little Klieglight Can Do
[images: reuters/larry downing via yahoo; whitehouse.gov]
Scott Sforza: I’m gonna put these giant spotlights here in New Orleans, just like I did with the Statue of Liberty on 9/11/02, and if you think the next three years won’t be a half-trillion dollar sinkhole of devastatingly corrupt cronyism, too, it’s your own fault.
[update via TPM: In other lighting news, Brian Williams reports the lights came on for the first time last night in the Warehouse District –from about 30 minutes before the Bush motorcade passed by until about an hour after it left.]
[update, Wonkette has Elizabeth Bumiller’s tour of the set for the pool report:
“Bobby DeServi and Scott Sforza were on hand as we drove up about 8 p.m. or so EDT handling last-minute details of the stagecraft,” Bumiller wrote. DeServi is the White House’s chief lighting designer; Sforza is in charge of visuals.
“Bush will be lit with warm tungsten lighting, but the statue [of Andrew Jackson] and cathedral will be illuminated with much brighter, brighter lights . . . like the candlepower that DeServi and Sforza used on Sept. 11, 2002, to light up the Statue of Liberty for Bush’s speech in New York Harbor,” she wrote.
“Here’s a quote from DeServi on the lit-up cathedral: ‘Oh, it’s heated up. It’s going to print loud.’ “]
So You Want To Read “Brokeback Mountain”
I shouldn’t be surprised that I’m getting this question a lot these days. Here’s what Ang Lee told the NYT’s Karen Durbin:
“When I first read the story, it gripped me. It’s a great American love story, told in a way that felt as if it had never been done before. I had tears in my eyes at the end. You remember? You see the shirts put away in the closet side by side.”
Who could forget? When Annie Proulx’s short story about two cowboys in love appeared in The New Yorker nearly eight years ago, it was so startling and powerful that for many people, the experience of reading it remains a vivid, almost physical memory.
The movie just won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and had its North American debut at the Toronto Festival last week. The theatrical release is expected in December, which gives you enough time to track down a copy of Brokeback Mountain yourself.
Here’s where it is:
Here’s where it isn’t:
A slightly bowdlerized version of the text was posted last summer on a message board at heathbaby.com, but has since been taken down. If you try Googling a distinctive phrase [like, say, “They shook hands in the choky little trailer office,”] you might find it, though. [unbelievable-but-true update via towleroad: Amazon published the complete story as an excerpt for an out-of-print audio version of Close Range.]
And just like that, his dream of amassing a mountain of quarters from Amazon commissions burns off like morning dew on the alfalfa field.
Ang Lee: Master of Social Mores [nyt via iht]
Official filmsite: Brokebackmountain.com
Tote That Barge
Randy Kennedy has an article on the making of Robert Smithson’s Floating Island, a tree-filled barge which will chug around lower Manhattan for a week or so:
Smithson’s project is just as intimately connected to Central Park, which he regarded, in all its artificial pastorality, as a conceptual artwork of its own. (He revered Frederick Law Olmsted and said that he found him more interesting than Duchamp.) While not nearly as monumental as Smithson’s most famous work, “Spiral Jetty,” a 1,500-foot-long curlicue of basalt jutting into the Great Salt Lake in Utah, the island – which resembles a rectangular chunk of Central Park, neatly cookie-cuttered out – is a further twist on Smithson’s career-long fascination with displacement. This generally meant taking art outdoors and bringing pieces of the land back indoors, into galleries. In the case of “Floating Island,” the displacement is all outdoors, an exploration of land and water, urban and rural, real and recreated, center and periphery. As a paean to Central Park, it can be seen as a kind of artificial model of an artificial model of nature.
It’s Not Easy Making Art That Floats [nyt]
Even cooler, though, at nytimes.com/robertsmithson, Times makes a raft of its Smithson coverage, dating back to 1982, available (for who knows how long). [greg.org coverage of Smithson, alas, only goes back a couple of years.]
From The Anals Of Stupid Trademark Lawyering
Garrison Keillor is going after Rex for his “A Prairie Ho Companion” t-shirts. As if Keillor wasn’t unfunny and annoying enough already.
A Prairie Homeboy Companion [mnspeak, via fimoculous: “oh yeah, I got cease and desisted.”]
Let Free Some Rain!
George Bush asks Condi Rice for permission to pee, plus zoomed back version and on flickr [reuters/yahoo via waxy]
Technically, It Has Been Worse
My daughter became very sad this morning as she tried to coax her day-old balloon up off the floor.
It was heartbreaking to watch, and we tried to console her, but then I realized that on some September 11th to come, I’ll have to try to explain far worse things to her about this date.
As Ronald Reagan Once Said,
Are you better of than you were four years ago?
Indeed, what’s most shocking is not any particular mistake that was made but how often federal officials were left to brainstorm or hash out on-the-fly just what the federal government’s responsibilities were, how to coordinate federal, state and local relief efforts, or even simply who was in charge.
Reading those passages of the article, there’s one conclusion I think any fair-minded person would have to come to. And that is that in the four years to the day since 9/11, the administration appears to have done little if any effective planning for how to mobilize a national response to a catastrophic event on American soil.
And given all the history that has passed before us over these last four years, that verdict is devastating.
Josh Marshall on the NYT’s report of the government responses to Katrina.
Donald Sutherland Naked On A Cold Day
I’m not the only one with a thing for the editing. Donald Sutherland tells the Guardian about what made that sex scene in Don’t Look Now so, well, sexy. Hint: it wasn’t Julie Christie. OK, it wasn’t JUST Julia Christie:
“About Don’t Look Now, we shot that love scene in a room in the Bauer Grunwald early one morning with Nick Roeg and Tony Richmond operating two un-blimped Arriflex cameras and a bunch of wires going to the technicians on the other side of the closed door. An un-blimped Arri makes a noise like a huge sewing machine. Two of them operating together are deafening. Julie and I lay side by side on the bed, Nick yelled instructions. ‘ZZZZZZZ Donald, kiss Julie’s breast, ZZZZZZZZZZZ Julie, tilt your head back ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ Julie, come ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ. That’s how it was for about three hours. What made the scene wonderful to people was the editing.
He goes on to tell why, and he’s right. But now I wonder when the sound editor gets his due.
Total Recall [guardian.co.uk, all the way down]
Editing, Art or Science? Movie or Website.
I find that I remake a movie at least three times: when I write it, when I shoot it, and again when I edit it. The one I didn’t realize–and that still seems wildly underappreciated to me–is editing.
Well, here’s hoping that EdgeCodes.com has a long, successful run at Two Boots Theater and beyond. From A.O. Scott’s review, this documentary about the history, theory, practice, art, and science of film editing sounds awesome.
Inside the Editing Room, Where Movies Are Built [nyt]
EdgeCodes.com [the name is the url!]
related: start with anything about Murch or Schoonmaker
Q: One Sheets To Get A Documentary Rolling
Turning from the descent of our country into unaccountable, repressive totalitarianism for a moment…
A reader emailed a question that I thought would be interesting to open up to other readers, too. He’s preparing to make a documentary on a band:
So now as I approach this project, which I intend to direct and shoot primarily myself, I am having trouble organizing my thoughts into the right style treatment for something of this nature. I am aiming for a “one sheet” that gets the point across and will be easy for the band/record company to read and comprehend. Do you have an example of something like this or know where I could go to find one? I would just love to get some ideas on how to format this thing.
Examples, not advice, necessarily, although I’m sure good advice/experiences would not be unhelpful. Send them in or point to them, and I’ll post the results here.
I’ve heard from TV show-pitching friends that people now want to see pilots and trailers more than treatments, little DV sketches of what a show’d actually look like. It reminds me of the pitch for Team America World Police, which consisted of a Thunderbirds episode overdubbed by Matt Parker and Trey Stone; it got the point across and conveyed the essence of what the film would be [or, in this case, should’ve been].
Still, it’ll be easier to get a record exec to skim a one-page treatment than to pop in a dvd, so so far, my advice is netting zero.
Sforza Shooting Katrina On A Closed Set
As with any big feature production, studio publicists are compelled by a primal instinct for the preservation of their own power to attempt to control any and all information coming from the set
At first the evidence was scattered and anecdotal. But now it’s pretty clear that a key aim of the Bush administration’s takeover of the NOLA situation is to cut off press access to report the story.
– Talking Points Memo
On the other hand, they do put out carefully crafted selections of promotional stills to keep the protests down. Looks like Gregory Crewdson has a fan at FEMA. [fema.gov, via robotwisdom]
Maybe Scott Sforza Should Be Running FEMA
GWB: ‘Only you Republicans get to see
these here 6-day-old maps.’
Wes Anderson did it with Bottle Rocket, and it’s since become a classic indie scenario: you shoot the short in order to get funding for the feature. Turns out White House producer Scott Sforza’s latest short was Friday’s George W. Bush Does Too Like Black People, See?. German television crews reported that Potemkin food & aid distribution centers Bush visited were dismantled and abandoned soon after the mediapack following Bush moved on. And LA Senator Landrieu reported that Friday’s hive of emergency repair activity at the 17th St. levee was gone the next day.
But it tested well, and with the studio in desperate need of a hit, Sforza got the greenlight to make the feature–it’s more accurate to call it a mini-series, since it goes on all week, beginning yesterday. The cast includes all the usual suspects [sic], plus the biggest, blackest Republican they could find, Condoleeza Rice, who replaces little known HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson, who originated the role in the short [above]. Karl Rove and Dan Bartlett are writing the script.
White House Enacts a Plan to Ease Political Damage [nyt]
As White House Anxiety Grows, Bush Tries to Quell Political Crisis
See the production blog [whitehouse.gov]
WH Heathers Give LA Gov The Katrina Treatment
Bush went to Louisiana again today to shoot some more footage of grateful evacuees. Governor Kathleen Blanco traveled with him, although she had only first heard about the trip from reporters. Seems no one from Washington bothered to coordinate the trip with her, or even let her know it was happening until this morning.
I’m sure it’s not politicizing anything. And I’m sure it’s not an infantile, petty, personal snub by the administration meant to punish an outspoken critic who they’re trying to deflect blame for their own failures onto.
No, it’s just that no one could have anticipated the need to maintain an open channel of communication between federal and state leaders in this kind of situation. To the White House’s credit, they apparently did try Blanco’s secretary’s office voicemail last night. Seriously.
“Bush spokesman Scott McClellan said the White House reached out to Blanco’s office Sunday, but didn’t hear back…” [via CNN]
As If You Didn’t Have Enough Reasons To Evacuate New Orleans
“Not an hour goes by that we do not spend a lot of time thinking about the people who are actively suffering.”
– Michael Chertoff, DHS Secretary, in the aptly names White House Rose Garden. [As NYT: White House Anxiety Grows, Bush Tries to Quell Political Crisis]
“We’re making progress.”
-GWB, a million times on The Daily Show [blogcritics.org, anyone have the video?]
“I think about Iraq every day. Every. Single. Day.”
– GWB, a US-EU press conference. [transcript, whitehouse.gov]
“I want them to know that there’s a flow of progress. We’re making progress.”
–GWB yesterday at NO airport [whitehouse.gov]