Your Wandering Boy Tonight

2010-08-08T11:03:00.000-07:00

Some of my favorite people have birthdays in early August. There are my friends Albert (who braved the Hammer Museum screening of Check and Double Check with me last year) and my friend John (who recently became a neighbor). Then there are the people I've never met, but who I wish I could have known, like Sylvia Sidney. Today is a day to celebrate her centennial.

Despite her decades of work in film and television, my first encounter with Sylvia Sidney came as it did for most of my generation, via Tim Burton, who cast her in Beetle Juice and Mars Attacks, the latter of which was her last role (if you don't count her stint on Fantasy Island). What a great one, too!

My first taste of classic Sylvia came in the form of Fritz Lang's thriller Fury, the American debut of German director Fritz Lang, in which she plays the fiancee of the victim of a lynch mod (Spencer Tracy). I caught this movie, a great one, on TV a couple of weeks ago, and was newly-mesmerized by Sidney, with her feline eyes and endearing screen presence.

Above: Sylvia watches as flames engulf her man in Fury. Below: Sylvia and John Loder compare appetizer preferences in Sabotage.

Lang cast Sylvia in his next film, You Only Live Once, in which she plays a thinly-veiled Bonnie Parker character to Henry Fonda's Clyde. Had things worked out a few years earlier, she might have also been directed by Sergei Eisenstein in An American Tragedy. Going back even further, she might have appeared in The Godless Girl, one of Cecil B. deMille's best movies.

Sylvia Sidney's career spanned more than one hundred feature films and television shows and lasted seven decades. Glancing over both her body of work and the information about her private life that's out there, one gets the sense that she lived very much the way she wanted. She could relax in her antique farmhouse in Connecticut, indulge in needlepoint, tell it like it is about the business (her comment about working with Alfred Hitchcock is golden) and make some refreshingly left-field acting choices every year or so (the Omen sequal, for instance).

Tortured divas like Crawford, Garbo and even Clara Bow get lots of coverage from celebrity biographers. Sylvia Sidney seems to have lived a life that was happy, creatively fulfilling and an inspiration to all of us who want to follow our bliss, do good work and spice up life with a little variety now and then.

Could this glamorous creature, with lilies down her back, imagine that, one day, she would save humanity from annihilation simply by listening to Indian Love Call?

As an aside, here's a photo of me from yesterday, waiting to see All About Eve (for the first time) at the Hollywood Forever cemetery. Taken by the above-mentioned Alberto. (Shout out to Michael, who insisted I come with.) I don't think I've ever posted a photo of my on here, so enjoy!

To indulge your Sylvia-love a little more, check out Dr. Macro's Annex (the source for the above photos), ShillPages and Starlet Showcase.

Flying Aces and Lost Girls

2010-07-24T13:51:00.000-07:00

I was really excited for day-two of the festival, perhaps more than any other day, because it would afford the rare opportunity for me to see The Flying Ace, a 1926 independent feature film with an all-black cast. I was initially intending only to see this film, but was able to persuade a friend to join me for another film. More on that later.

First thing first, I met up with a local friend and had lunch at Baghdad Cafe, which is always a good way to start the day. After catching up with him for about an hour, we went our separate ways and I got in line. The audience was almost entirely white; in fact, I can recall spotting only two African American audience members. It would be nice to see the film reach more members of the black community at some point, but the fact that this movie survives at all is miraculous enough on its own.

This screening was my first exposure a very-cool feature of the festival: beautifully curated slide shows themed after each film to break up the monotony of sponsor advertisements. In this case, we were treated to cards with facts about race films, and each one was followed by a poster or still from a particular film mentioned there. Titles included Within Our Gates, The Colored American Winning His Suit, The Love Bug, The Bull-Dogger and The Trooper of Troop K.

(Side Note: Every one of these slide shows had at least one typo. In this case, Trooper of Troop K was identified as Trooper of Company K. When I point this out, I don't mean any disrespect to the creator of the slide show, Meghan Pugh, who did a terrific job. I have made that exact same mistake . Blame it on that amateurish indie movie with a similar title)

As with all the other screenings, this one got started late. We were treated to a short by Georges Méliès with an English title that went something like Professor Crazybrain and His Flying Machines (if you want to try finding it on the IMDBs, get on there and pack a lunch). I never seek out Méliès movies necessarily, since they all rely on the same gimmicks (painted sets, double exposure, acrobats, roman candles - sounds like New York's hottest new club). Still, they can be fun and manage to be surprising, and this one was cute enough.

Before The Flying Ace could roll, it needed an introduction (of course). Starting things off, a fellow named Mike Mecham or Mechan (I can't read my hand-writing) took the stage to talk about the restoration of the film. It was preserved by the Library of Congress in 1980, but the print we would be watching was brand new, and completely re-timed. In fact, it had just been struck that Wednesday (this was a Saturday) after his colleague Ken Guban (again, guessing on the names) made more than 2000 timing changes. Everyone applauded.

Two women from the Norman Film Museum, Annw Byrd and Carolyn Williams, took the stage next to tell us about the film. First, Ms. Byrd (an adorable little old white lady) explained how Jacksonville had once almost become the film center of North America because of its year round sunshine and diversity of locations. Problem was, film companies kept doing annoying things to cut costs like, say, pulling fire alarms to draw free crowds or starting riots when they needed riot scenes. The results of the 1917 mayoral elections in Jacksonville, coupled with the still-prevalent notion that the movie business was less-than-respectable, ensured that most companies were run out of town. By then, Edendale and Universal City were film centers anyway, and had milder weather and even more locations like, say, mountains?

Allowed Ms. Byrd: "We're real sorry about that today."

Independent productions, including many black films, were still made in Florida, and Carolyn Williams spoke to us about that. In particular, we were told that the buildings where the film were shot still exist (as part of the Norman Film Museum) and that the character played by Kathryn Boyd was based on a real aviatrix, Bessie Coleman. She also advised us to pay attention to the 'colorism' in the film, with light-skinned heroes and dark-skinned villains and buffoons.

The lights were dimmed and the picture began. Right away, there were some glaringly amateurish features to it. Five main characters are introduced right after each other in the first scene, without much in the way of setting them up or making us care about them. There are lots of redundant dialogue titles. The intertitles make use of very mannered language, giving us dialogue such as "Just keep mum and no-one will molest me." True to Dr. Williams' , the darker-skinned actors play the villains; one of them plays a bumbling, corrupt police officer (film history's only black Keystone Cop?) who speaks in an... interesting form of slang. Let's just say that his intertitles use lots of apostrophes.

Here's the basic plot. A railroad paymaster comes to town and lets everybody know that he has the entire payroll in him. He is kidnapped, along with the money, and everyone thinks the cute little old station master, Mr. Sawtelle, is responsible. On a side note, the local man with mysterious income has his eye on Ruth, Sawtelle's beautiful and... young-looking daughter. The feeling is not mutual, even after a long scene where he shows her his plane and points out all the controls and steering mechanisms; by the end of this interlude, any of us in the audience could have operated that plane.

A local boy-turned-railroad detective-turned-World War I fighter pilot comes back into town at that moment, keeping his uniform on the entire time, lest we forget how noble he is. He's played by somebody named Laurence Criner. Picture, if you can, Francis X. Bushman from his Essannay days, and then turn him slightly black, and you hopefully will have some kind of mental picture of Laurence Criner. Needless to say, Ruth likes him A LOT more, and very soon he sorts out the plot by the local bootleggers (sorry, I'm spoiling it) to steal the money and frame Sawtelle. There is a climactic chase by air and a plane to plane transfer that was all filmed on the ground, but is still relatively effective.

The Flying Ace of a silent talkie, but it's still a solid piece of storytelling. The cast is a mixed group. Laurence Criner seems to come from the Milton Sills School of Acting, and Kathryn Boyd has a limited range of expression, but all the other serious parts are played in a restrained manner, and the comedic interludes between Peg and the cop are played well, and not intrusive to the larger story. The writer/filmmaker Bret Wood summed up the appeal of a film like The Flying Ace when he wrote about, and did a great DVD commentary for, the Dwain Esper masterpiece Maniac: Like a work of folk art, it has beauty and dignity in its rough simplicity, and to behold it, with all its flaws, can be much more rewarding than a glossy studio film of the same era.

Later that day, I met up with another friend and we saw Diary of a Lost Girl with Louise Brooks. That phenomenal experience deserves a blog post of its own. For now, in the words of Annette Hanshaw, That's All.

Images from The Flying Ace were found here.

"Amazing Tales" from Amazing People, in the Amazing Castro Theater

2010-07-16T20:08:00.000-07:00

This weekend, I am up in Northern California. Though the respite from the recent (and sudden) Los Angeles heatwave of 2010 is welcome, I have returned to the geopolitical region of my birth for something much more important: the 15th Annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival. It's my first time, and I'm constantly kicking myself that I didn't start coming to it years ago. I'll certainly be back again.

My first day at the festival, Friday, was pretty brief. (I didn't go to the opening film on Thursday night, John Ford's The Iron Horse, though it would have been fun.) After trying to plan an elaborate Caltrain/Muni route from my parents' house to the Castro District, I was relieved to get a ride from old mom and dad, who were going to be passing through there (they went out of town for the weekend). I'm not complain, but it feels really weird being dropped off in a gay ghetto by your parents.

I was there (at the Castro Theater) for a presentation called Amazing Tales from the Archives, in which several people spoke about preservation issues and showed clips from things that had been recently preserved. I started things off with a coffee from Cafe Flore and a stroll around the block after making sure I didn't need a ticket for the event (I didn't). I also texted a friend to say "i'm in sf bitch!"

The first feeling upon walking into the Castro Theater was that feeling I always get when I walk in there: pure elation that I'm standing in/sitting in/moving through such a stunningly beautiful space, crowded in with tons of other geeks just like me. The turnout for this event was much bigger than I expected. I took a seat in the middle-back of the auditorium, and (this always seems to happen) two heavy breathers settled into seats on either side of me. I don't want to judge them, but the gods of age and metabolism had not been kind to either of these cinephiles. A gaggle of attractive, well adjusted-looking guys sat in front of me, giving me hope for what I might look like in five or ten years (provide I grow five inches, drop fifteen pounds and achieve significant facial hair growth).

On screen flashed a slideshow of glass slide movie advertisements. Titles, which I now really want to see, included Padlocked (with positively fierce graphic design), Trent's Last Case, All of a Sudden Peggy, The Land of Jazz (with a cartoon halo of musical notes around Eileen Percy), Thirty Days, His Secretary and the short comedy One Spooky Night. In their hand-colored, low-fi, sometimes outright tacky way, glass slide movie ads are invariably gorgeous, and sometimes they are the only available visual record of a particular film. I had to call a friend to sort some schedule stuff out and, in a moment of total conceitedness, I sighed "You don't know what you're missing."

Among the other slides was this one, which I loved:

The show got started, and somebody who's name I don't remember (but should) spoke to us about the preservation efforts of the L. Jeffrey Selznik School of Film Preservation, which I'm embarrassed to say I need to look into now, and introduced a few of their scholarship students who were in the audience (to well-deserved applause). The 2010 scholar, who's name I will find and fill in later, will be restoring Mr. Fix-It this year, and their hope is that it will be on the screen at the Castro next year.

Kyle Westphal, the school's 2008 scholar, then took the stage and talked us through a project he worked on, two 1926 Kodachrome shorts, Parisian Creations in Colour with Hope Hampton, and Parisian Inspirations in Colour with Hope Hampton. He talked through them (there was musical accompaniment as well) and it was a little hard to focus on both, but his explanation of the films, the technology, and Ms. Hampton were all very interesting. Fun tidbits include:

1. These Fashion Newsreels were created by McCall's Magazine and distributed by some entity with a name like Educational Pictures Inc. They were not a very good distributor, so the films didn't get far. More people probably watched the film at that screening than had in 1926.
2. The Kodachrome stock and processing used in the film was an early version, very different from the Kodachrome stock for home movies that modern audiences are familiar with. Still in its infancy, it required lots of printing and reprinting in order to achieve the correct print exposure. Around this same time, Technicolor had already streamlined their process. Technicolor prints were cheaper, too ($0.08 a foot vs. $2.00 a foot for Kodachrome).
3. These films were just two of several similarly-titled shorts that were filmed by McCalls at the Long Island mansion of Hampton and her husband, Jules Brulatour. The list in the "Herself" portion of Hampton's IMDb page looks close to the titles Westphal rattled off. He asided that they do tend to run together.
4. Hope Hampton and Jules Brulatour didn't like the fashions that McCalls supplied for the film series. Fortunately for them, they had considerable funds of their own to go on what must have been a redonkulously expensive shopping spree.

For my part, I thought that A) it was cool to see footage of Hampton for the first time, and B) she looked a lot like Billie Burke. (The Photo of her above does not represent anything from the film I just described.) Also, C) the fashions were fantastic. Mr. Westphal kept apologizing for the length of the two movies ("It always goes on longer than I remember"). I for one could watch days of 1920's color fashion footage, so I wasn't complaining.

Once we finished with The Lady Hampton, we watched reel two from a King Baggot movie (I don't recall the name), in which he plays a dual role as a wealthy man and a double. All that survives of the film is this second of three reels; all the special effect footage, where Baggot faces off against himself, was in reel one (you're cruel jokes are not lost on us, Universe). There was a trailer reel for The Last Warning, On Trial and White Shadows in the South Seas, and, before I get too far ahead of myself, there was a snippet of A Chili Romance, which we were told was found rolled in with the King Baggot footage. (For a relatively generic slapstick comedy, it was very funny.)

Finally came the pièce de résistance: Paula Felix-Didier and Fernando Peña took the stage to talk about the restoration of the "new" version of Metropolis which was announced to exist in Argentina in 2008. The film screened to a packed house that night (I was not there, sorry) but it was interesting to hear them talk about the film's discovery, which wasn't nearly as instantaneous as it sounds in the press reports. Peña recalled how he had heard about the long-lost longer version of the film: Colleague Salvador Sammaritano described a film society screening during which the print was not running through the projector correctly. To correct it, Sammaritano had to run to the projection booth and hold his finger on the shutter to keep it from shaking. He held it there for two-and-a-half hours; when Peña said he had never heard of a version that ran so long, Sammaritano replied "Trust me, if it was your finger pressing on the gate for two-and-a-half hours, you would remember."

Felix-Didier and Peña had brought with them some clips of Argentine films, which they screened for the audience off of an ok-quality DVD. The first, a dramatic film called La cuena de la muerte (almost literally The Flute of Death), a story about a white man and a white woman who go on vacation in rural Cordova and have affairs with native people there. The quality was not exceptional, but the fact that such footage survives is miraculous. They also told us that this might have been the first "Gaucho" film, and the only silent Gaucho film, as most Argentine films made afterward were usually concerned with the middle class and were almost always shot in Buenos Aires.

There was also a documentary about the health hazards of flies (with microphotography that made me look away a few times). Finally, they presented ("cheating" as Sra. Felix-Didier confessed) the first sound film produced in Argentina. It consisted of four musical vignettes which would have been synchronized to a record. In both content and presentation they were similar to a Vitaphone short or even an Alice Guy-Blache song-film, but still I couldn't take my eyes (or ears) off the screen. The numbers consist of a singer in an unflattering gingham dress singing along with a three-piece band. Two mestizo Gauchos do some heel-stomp-dancing while . A musician plays something on . Finally, a different singer from the one before (and in a better outfit) does an entrancing rendition of a Tango song "Preciosa." This was the first Tango recorded on film, and thus puts the film under UNESCO's umbrella of World Heritage preservation (UNESCO has designated Tango to be an item of shared cultural significance, and with good reason).

The entire time, a sign-language interpreter worked tirelessly at the left of the stage. He was very expressive and, to my untrained eyes, an excellent interpreter. And handsome. He's probably not single.

And so concluded day one. I wasn't especially interested in A Spray of Plum Blossoms, which was up next, and I headed home, very sated indeed, and ready for the adventures to continue the following day.

See also:
Silent Film Festival's Blog Unlike me, they actually have photos from the event, along with insider information, show times, better writing, etc.

Another Dead Gay Guy, Part Two: Hollywood Murder Triangle

2010-04-30T23:18:00.000-07:00

Eighty years ago this past week, death stalked through Hollywood, taking three lives. It’s not a famous murder case, but one that captured my attention while I was researching the Mary McElroy case last weekend. Perhaps it’s best to start at the beginning:

Once upon a time, in 1927, a young man named Paul Vare was brought out to Hollywood from Billings, Montana, by evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. Some time after that, he was adopted by one Ada E. Wharton, a bedridden widow. By the mid-thirties, Paul Wharton’s talents were in demand from several prominent Los Angeles residents. Under the name Paul Ivar, he dressed famous clotheshorses like Jean Harlow, Aileen Pringle, Carmen Consedine (daughter of Alexander Pantages) and Constance Bennett (he designed the bridesmaid gowns for Bennett’s marriage to Henri de la Falaise, a Gloria Swanson ex).

Then, on the evening of April 25, 1935, Paul Ivar had a little dinner party with his chauffeur and secretary, thirty-five-year-old William Howard, and one (or possibly two) other men. He was still sharing a fashionable apartment with his foster mother. At some point in the evening, Paul brought Ada some dinner and then returned to his guests. Eventually, Ada heard somebody leave the main room outside, then three or four shots rang out, followed by the sound of her foster son groaning and slumping on the floor. Frantically, she crawled out of bed into the front hallway of the apartment, where she found Paul bleeding and clutching a telephone. As he expired in her arms, a man she had never seen before rushed in and stopped dead in his tracks. He was tall and blond, probably dressed in a gray suit and gray hat. Mrs. Wharton pleaded for help but the man disappeared into the kitchen and was never seen again. William Howard had also vanished.

Across town, a thirty-nine-year-old UCLA law professor named Henry E. Bolte was coming home from a dinner for his law class, noticed a stranger near the entrance to his apartment but paid no attention to him. Bolte walked to his apartment and practically had his key in the door when the stranger pulled a gun and shot at him three times, wounding him twice. Bolte’s wife, Virginia, opened the door to find her husband lying in a pool of his own blood, still alive but in critical condition. Investigators hurried from the sight of Paul Ivar’s death to Bolte’s apartment. William Howard was found nearby; he had shot himself in the head.

Two seemingly unconnected murders were now linked, and the connections that emerged over the next few days came out in the press in code words and suggestive phrasing. The news stories on April 26 described the tall blond “Mystery Man” sought by police for questioning.

Two men and two women, one reportedly dressed like a man, were questioned by the police. Meanwhile more facts about Paul Ivar emerged. He had struggled with an addiction to narcotics (but had been cured by Aimee Semple McPherson). At the time of his death, he was on probation for the theft of an $800 diamond ring belonging to a Mrs. Ray Wolfe of Bevely Hills. He and his crowd were described in coded terms by the newspapers: "pale," "strange," "exotic." Quothe Captain William Bright, head of the LA Sheriff's homicide division, in the Palm Beach Post: "They were strange men who led strange lives." Social politeness of the day meant that he and other law enforcement officials wouldn't comment on the possible motive, once financial disputes had been ruled out; readers who were "in the know" would have guessed in half a second that something lavender was afoot.

Actress and notorious clotheshorse Aileen Pringle, in an "exclusive" interview with the same publication, elaborated on her professional relationship with the designer: “He was exceptionally talented, and his designs were simply lovely. They were a little – well, a little bizarre. But good. Before he finished them, he told me he needed some new clothes for himself, and asked if he could use my charge account at a store. He said he could check off our bills to each other in that way. When my statement came back from the store, I found he had bought, not clothes, but several hundred dollars worth of perfumes, atomizers, cosmetics and similar things. I asked him about them, and he told me, ‘well, I use them.’”

Pringle went on to explain that “he had had a fight with Constance Bennett when she discovered he was Chinese.” I have not found any other information articles that suggest he was Chinese, and the one photo I did find didn’t hint that he was anything other than Caucasian. She allows one last revelation: “He occasionally appeared at my home… with curious, feminine-looking men.”

Aileen Pringle ought to have known something about 'bizarre - but good' fashions. Nine years earlier, she was being dressed by Erte. I'll leave the story there for now. Next month, the conclusion, more fun facts, and the identity of the big blond Mystery Man.

Another Dead Gay Guy, Part One: I Feel Like an Asshole

2010-04-19T22:01:00.000-07:00

I want to warn you in advance: This post is going to have a rather long set-up.

Whenever I have a big assignment or a midterm or, in the case of this past weekend, both looming ahead of me, I tend to do a LOT of procrastinating. Things get done one way or another, but not before lots of time has been spent checking email, checking social networking sights, footnoting articles on Wikipedia, and so on. This particular story actually starts with me reading IMDB trivia for the movie Kansas City. That in tern lead me to do a number of searches on Mary McElroy, the young woman on whos kidnapping the movie was based. (The kabillion-footnote Wikipedia article Mary McElroy (kidnapping victim) was written in the next few hours by yours truly.)

While reading scanned, highlight-sensitive newspaper articles from 1935, I found (I believe it was in the Miami Daily News) a somewhat scattered, confusing article about a Hollywood dress designer’s murder, one of three connected deaths. A bed-ridden spinster, a tall blond mystery man and Jean Harlow were all connected to the case.

Obviously, this was too good to be ignored. I went ahead and probably lost a good couple hours scanning for articles and coming up with a surprising amount of info that still seemed to have some missing pieces. What I found was tantalizing; I ate it up like the true crime vampire that I’ve always been. (I hope to follow up this post – hence the ‘Part One’ in the title – soon.) Then I checked facebook.

And I was stopped cold. Checking in on a few people from high school (they rarely come up in my news feed – something I don’t know how to change) I happened to search an acquaintance, not a close friend, but somebody from my past who I knew for a brief period and was friendly with. When I found him again on the site a year or so ago I was totally envious of him: he had a great job as a designer, lots of time and money to spend on trips to exotic places where Spanish is the primary language, a shockingly handsome boyfriend, a six pack you could bounce quarters on.

He was dead. His wall was covered with “we love you,” “RIP,” “we’ll miss you,” etc. I was shocked. It seemed so unreal. I’ve lost classmates before but this moment proved that each loss is just as sad and unnerving. There was no word as to the circumstances of his death on his page, so I did a quick google search: His death was everywhere. I don’t want to go into the details, and I only have what’s been printed and posted and forwarded and editorialized. I don’t really feel that I have the right to either. The absolutely appalling comments on NY Daily News’ site are bad enough.

It struck me, as I went from one page to the other, trying to get more details about Ale’s death that there must be somebody else out there doing the same thing, but not for the same reason. Just a few minutes before I had been devouring the details of a seventy-five year old murder case without feeling any sympathy for the victims in the case. There had to be another me out there, at the same moment, doing the same thing with this case. I felt like an asshole. Serves me right.

I want to close with my memories of Ale. He was two years ahead of me at Paly. He was closeted at the time, and I don’t begrudge him for that, knowing his circle. He still seemed to be himself, very intelligent and witty, with an appreciation for the finer things (Peter Greenaway comes to mind first). We knew each other briefly outside of high school, when he came to a couple of youth group support meetings. We had a mutual friend, my neighbor Katie, who had some classes with him and graduated the same year. I’m sure I still have his business card in a drawer somewhere. As much as he would have hated growing old, we clearly lost him too soon.

(12.3.1983 - 4.13.2010)

End of the Month Round-Up

2010-03-31T18:04:00.000-07:00

So, here are a couple of fun experiences I had this past (couple of months).

First of all, I actually got to meet somebody who has my dream job. I got to meet Andrea Kalas for thirty minutes at Paramount. She was very cordial and had a lot of helpful, encouraging advice. After all, one of her first major projects. I'm forever indebted to Tom, who spurred the Bessie Love post from last month, for putting me in touch with her.

Secondly, I've had a few production gigs, some of which actually paid, but all of them were good experiences. I've had some shitty, shitty PA jobs before, so I ought to know. There are some in the future, unpaid for the most part, but it makes school bearable.

Right now, I am on Spring Break, and last night I went to see Ran at the Stanford Theater with my dad and my brother. Now, I'm one of those people who needs to see a Kurosawa movie in the theater, and not only because that's the only way to see them. I'm have a bad case of that very modern disease, the ADD, and it makes watching anything on DVD a bit difficult. With nobody to watch you (and judge you), you find yourself folding laundry, checking your email or rushing back and forth from the kitchen to microwave a burrito while the movie plays. If the movie has subtitled, its even more of a problem; half the plot goes missing, characters become indistinguishable, you get the drift. So I always welcome to opportunity to see anything in the theater that I know isn't going to completely captivate me.

(That's not to say that Ran isn't a captivating, powerful film. It is. It's a strong story (you know, King Lear) and beautifully told. The lush greens and brilliant reds really make you appreciate the look of projected film. I'd never seen Ran before, and I'm glad that this was my introduction to it.)

The Stanford Theater and me go way back. I saw my first silent movie, Safety Last, there when I was seven (that's a story for another day). I saw many of my favorites there for the first time: Errol Flynn's Robin Hood, the silent Ben Hur, These Three, The Man Who Laughs. In high school I went all the time, sometimes with a friend but usually alone; I liked to do things by myself at the time anyway.

Flash forward five or six years to now, and I am very much a changed man. I strongly dislike going to movies alone. I haven't gone to see a conventional movie on my own since 2007 (Aranofsky's The Fountain - which I liked). This past month, however, I've had a bit of regression to my past life as a chubby, virginal, be-acned seventeen-year-old in the form of screenings at the Silent Theater down on Santa Monica and Melrose in Hollywood. I was most excited to find out that they were screening a Tod Browning silent from 1926, The Mystic with Aileen Pringle, because, as it just so happens, me and The Mystic go way back.

Flashback to 1996. I'm 11, I'm in sixth grade, and I'm going through a phase where I want to be a fashion designer. After haunting every fashion section of the local library for at least a week, I come away with an awareness of the artist Erte, and his amazing body of work that spanned over fifty years. I was enthralled by his extravagance, his use of detail, his willingness to show bare breasts and, most notably, his time spent in the mid-1920's as a couturier-in-residence at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. He designed sets and costumes for the likes of Marion Davies, Carmel Myers (his favorite), Norma Shearer and the exquisite above-mentioned Miss Pringle. Among the illustrations in the two books of his that the Palo Alto Library System holds are both costume sketches and tantalizing set stills from The Mystic. I remember staring at those photos and wondering if I would ever actually see the movie itself. It seems so long ago and so far away.

Well, I got my chance. I want to actually write a review, but that can be done another time. The issue at hand is regressing back to high school. I say this only because I went alone and wished that I hadn't. I made a sheepish attempt to invite a couple of people at the last minute. I didn't expect any sort of big crowd to show up, but when I got there, there was a line out the door. I was worried that I wouldn't get in. Nobody resembled the crowd I expected. Almost everyone in attendance was young, slim, clearly well adjusted and not at all crotchety. They all had dates.

At first I felt encroached-upon. All I wanted to do was slink into a quiet screening of some obscure movie, have my box of candy all to myself, and then slink back out. It was exactly the kind of experience I could have at the Stanford way back then, with the cavernous auditorium barely an eighth full. For some inexplicable reason I felt angry at everyone there. Then I caught myself; I was being stupid. I should have rejoyced, as I do now, that so many people had an interest in this movie. I should have been happy for The Mystic that I almost had to fight my in to see it.

Then there was the fact that I was alone. I felt so weird and naked there, being one of the few people with no date, no entourage. I look back on the situation and I realize that, generally, I don't often expect my friends to have any interest in these events. This is silly, of course. Case in point, I met up with some friends right after (a last minute thing) and they said "Oh, that sounds like so much fun. You should have told us." I don't doubt that I have cool friends, but I forget that we have as much in common as we do.

My resolution for April: Do a better job of inviting people to stuff.

Special Shout Out: To Bessie with Love

2010-02-23T23:54:00.000-08:00

This blog is sort of an eleventh-hour act on my part. I have been entrusted, by another silent film enthusiast, with the education of a mutual friend. What education, you ask? Well, those of us in the silent film geek ghost army (we have meetings and everything) love nothing more than to quiz each other on the vaguest and least relevant silent film-related topics we can think of. Then we silently judge that person when they get dates of birth wrong, when they forget that Colleen Moore’s real name was Kathleen Morrison, or when they can’t name the ugly Talmadge sister (it was Natalie, loosers!).

In this case, however, the topic is might be vague, but she is certainly not irrelevant. Even now, she has a following, though she is one of many who, it’s safe to say, are woefully neglected. I am speaking, of course, about the actress Miss Bessie Love. I’ll try to do justice to this talented beauty, because I’m a true friend. And friends don’t let friends go through life without teaching them, in blog post form, about Bessie Love. This one is for you, Kev.

To start of, Bessie was not her real name; she was born Juanita Horton in 1896, the daughter of a rancher in Midland, Texas. A daughter of the west, she started working as an actress in 1916 out of necessity. She appeared in several movies at the Fine Arts studio in Los Angeles, including the 1916 epic Intolerance: Love's Struggle Through the Ages (the movie with the elephant pillars). D.W. Griffith, the director of Intolerance, is usually thought of as the person who came up with Bessie's stage name.

Breakthrough roles came very quickly; she was cast opposite William S. Hart and Douglas Fairbanks in 1916 films. One year later, she was playing lead roles in feature films for Vitagraph and Pathé. In 1922, the Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers selected Bessie and twelve other young actresses as the WAMPAS Baby Stars. She was still a major player all through the twenties, playing a bootlegger’s girlfriend in Those Who Dance (1924) and Broadway diva in The Matinee Idol (1928, an early Frank Capra endeavor).

The coming of sound derailed a lot of careers, but it earned Bessie Love an Oscar nomination in 1929. The movie was The Broadway Melody, which is still widely thought of as the first true movie musical. She worked steadily in sound films from 1929 to 1932-ish. (at left: Bessie and Anita Page in The Broadway Melody)

Perhaps because of marriage, her career dropped off after the early 1930’s, but for the next several decades of her life, Bessie continued to take the occasional role in film or on television, mostly in England, where she lived for most of her 'post-Hollywood' life. Her notable roles at the end of her career were in Warren Beatty’s epic Reds (1981), as well as Ragtime (also 1981) and the sexy vampire movie The Hunger (1983). She died in London in April of 1986.

Bessie was a Virgo. She was once married to Howard Hawkes’ brother William, which also made her a cousin in law of Carole Lombard. had terrific face, with big expressive eyes and a long nose. Standing approximately five feet, she was petit and doll-like even into her later years.

One more fun fact about Bessie: She wrote a play in 1958 called The Homecoming.

Below is a clip from Hollywood Revue of 1929. To say she's the best part of the movie is an understatement, as you can probably tell. I like this clip because I feel like it shows off her personality and her abundant talent. Thank you dudfilmscorporation for the clip.

Three Great Ladies, One Great Movie

2010-01-17T17:51:00.000-08:00

One of the best recent broadcasts on TCM the other night was a gem called Comet Over Broadway, a drama about a woman who's dream of being an actress breaks her life, then catapults her to success, then holds her to some hasty words from years before that she knows she can't go back on. The reason for the broadcast has to do with its leading lady, Kay Francis, who is no longer with us but who turned 105 this past Wednesday.

Watching this movie, I was moved by its story, which was involving and well told. Perhaps the biggest treat in a viewing of the film is the discovery (for me) of three wonderful, woefully-neglected actresses: Francis, Minna Gombell and Sybil Jason. It's also a great showcase for the talents of a man best known for his dance arrangements: Busby Berkeley. Even some die-hard 42nd Street fans don't remember that Berkeley directed several non-musicals between 1933 and 1951. Few of his non-musical ventures were A Pictures. This one clearly falls into the "programmer" category. Yet it's so much better than that. Spoilers ahead.

Kay plays a small-town shopkeeper named Even, married and with a baby, who has vague dreams about acting and a side gig in community theater. When a famous Broadway actor (Ian Keith) comes to town, Eve attracts his attention and she goes to meet him at his hotel room for 'acting lessons.' Her husband (John Litel, nobody famous, but a great actor) gets wind of this and, in the brawl that ensues from confronting the illicit pair, the actor is knocked down a slope and into a ravine (spoiler coming), and fatally hits his head. Eve's husband is brought to trial for the accident and charged with manslaughter. Eve is racked with guilt, particularly when her lawyer explains to her that it was her own foolish ambition that brought this tragedy upon her. As her husband goes into the big house, she pledges to do everything she can to get him out, and once he is out, she'll be there waiting for him.

Snagging a burlesque gig, Eve goes on the road with her baby daughter, Jackie. On the train, the troupe's leading lady Tim (Gombell) takes Kay and the child under her wing. Eve gets pressured by various men to leave the kid with somebody else and focus on her career, and after holding out for a long time, she decides it would be best to leave Jackie under Tim's care. Tim, who had years ago lost her only child to what sounds like SIDS, is elated; she's become very attached to the child herself. Eve travels to country and makes it to New York city, where she meets a handsome British producer, Bert (Ian Hunter), who casts her right away in a production. She is driven away, however, by the show's jealous leading lady (Leona Miracle). Despondent, Eve sales to England on a whim.

Several years pass, and Eve has become the most talked about stage actress in Britain. She sends for Tim and Jackie, now 8 or 9 and being played by the fantastic, utterly adorable Jason. Initially happy to see them, Eve is crestfallen when she realizes that Jackie has grown up under the impression that Tim is her mother, a misunderstanding Tim failed to correct. Reluctantly, Eve goes along with it.

When they return to New York, Eve reconnects with Bert; there is still the same sexual chemistry between them and, now that Eve is a big name, he can be the one to mount her American debut. At the same time, she finds out that her husband's case can be overturned, but only for several thousand dollars that she doesn't have. She agrees to work with Bert if he can loan her the money, which he does.

The play is a huge success, and Eve is forced to accept the fact that she is in love with Bert. In a long and tearful conversation, she tells him the whole story, and why they can never be together. Bert is reluctant to accept this; surely, her husband will understand that, after all this time... Eve agrees. She goes to meet her husband at the prison. He is so happy to see her, she can't bring herself to tell him that she loves someone else. In the final scene, we see Eve walking with Jackie back to the prison, to her fate, with nonetheless a bright and prosperous future ahead, and with her dreams of success achieved. It is then that Jackie calls her "Mommy." The circle of Eve's trials is complete.

Like its three stunning leading ladies, Comet Over Broadway is long overdue for rediscovery.

More Letty Fashion Madness

2010-01-16T19:29:00.000-08:00

Here is a still from Letty Lynton, that obscure, celestial beauty that is the highly suppressed Joan Crawford multi-national-extramarital-affair-a-thon from 1932.

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this get up, but it looks like Miss Le Sueur wasn't having much fun. When you consider how hot those sets could get under all those Kleig light (not to mention how heavy fur coats are), it's no wonder. Still, it's the kind of bold statement a 1930's would make (or die from heat exhaustion trying). (Need to retrace my steps and find the link. Will post when I locate it.)

Here's another picture of Joan in the same outfit. This time she isn't being Little Miss Mopey Face.

And just for kicks, here's another Adrian creation Joan wore in this film. If the beatnik vultures from The Jungle Book needed to be sexy, they could probably use this picture as a reference.

I feel greatly remiss for not having discovered this sooner, but there is a fantastic Joan Crawford website where you can find out just about everything you could want to know about even her most obscure movies. There's a great Letty Lynton page too.

The Toy Wife

2010-01-14T13:16:00.000-08:00

Last Tuesday, Austrian-born actress Luise Rainer turned 100. To celebrate, TCM spent that day airing a selection of her films, and I recorded most of them. I still need to watch The Great Zeigfeld and The Good Earth, but last night, I snuggled under the covers and took a gander at a film about which I knew nothing. The title alone intrigued me: The Toy Wife.

Luise, with her Austrian accent, plays the daughter of a Louisiana plantation owner; the fact that she has spent all of her cognisant life in a French boarding school excuses the difference between her accent and the polished Hollywood accents of her father, her older sister and all the other white people in the movie. At the opening of the story, the Brigard family returns to New Orleans, still under French rule, and settle back into their gorgeous plantation house, slaves and all (more on that in a minute). We learn quickly that Luise is not only the baby in the family, she's the most annoying and least likable. The character's name is technically Gilberte, already a bad sign, but everyone calls her by her nickname, 'Frou Frou.'

The naive Luise falls for a handsome lawyer named Georges, and they marry. Since Georges is played by Melvyn Douglas, the attraction is understandable. Georges still carries a bit of a torch for the older Brigard sister, Louise (Barbara O'Neil) and Frou Frou still feels some attraction for a younger bad-boy, Andre (Robert Young). Louise movies in with Georges and Frou Frou to help her sister become a better wife and mother, but finds herself doing all the work. Georges finds that his attraction to the other adult in the house more easily justified, and even more so when his flighty wife elopes with Andre. And so follows all the backstabbing and fighting over children that one would expect from a movie like this.

Between the gleaming foyers and glittering gowns you'd expect characters named Alexis or Krystle to show up randomly and pull on each others' hair pieces, but the real shocking element that sets The Toy Wife apart from other films, even Gone with the Wind, is the treatment of the slave characters. This HAS to be the reason that so few people have seen this film, the reason it's not on DVD. This movie has more speaking parts for black actors than any other film of 1938 as far as I can tell (except maybe for Gods Step Children). Most of them have names and at least basic differentiated personality traits, but they still have bad grammar and names like Brutus and Pompey.

The character played by Theresa Harris presents the most brain-exploding example. She smilingly introduces herself as 'Pick;' because she has no given name, everyone just calls her an abbreviated version of the pejorative 'Pickaninny.' This occurs when Frou Frou is getting acquainted will all the female slaves in the house, and Harris goes down on her knee to say "I wishes I could be your own pa'ticular darkie."

"You do, do you?" answers the benevolent Frou Frou. "Well then you shall be. But if you're going to belong to me you'll have to wear shoes and stockings."

Theresa Harris is an actress that I truly love. I've probably seen her in a dozen movies, and she always plays a maid, but she never lets the absurd dialog get the better of her. Every 'you is' gets treated with perfect diction, and it highlights just how beneath her such characters were. It's as if she's winking to the African American members of the audience, assuring them "It's ok, I know this sucks, but we'll get through it."

Allegedly, this was one of several projects given to Rainer as punishment for her difficult behavior. A reviewer on the IMDb calls it a B-Movie. With its amazing costumes (by the incomparable Orry-Kelly) and detailed set decoration, this period piece doesn't look at all like a B-movie. The direction by Richard Thorpe is too mannered for an already slow screenplay, which has neither economic passage of time or witty dialogue. A long movie, with an irritating lead character, equals a disappointment in my book. Rainer comes off as a capable actress who's doing the best she can with a problematic role. By all accounts she hated this movie.

One consolation remains: One can live through racism, hoop-skirts and winning two consecutive Oscars, and still live to be 100. Happy belated birthday, Luise Rainer. I'm sure I'll like you better as Anna Held.

Southern Family Stuff

2009-09-26T09:10:00.000-07:00

Right now, I'm in Charlotte, going to that wedding I mentioned in my last story. I am excited, particularly after the very fun rehearsal dinner last night, a huge BBQ-style deal that was at somebody's very gorgeous house out on the Charlotte 'burbs. The houses in the area reminded me of the mansion at the end of the second Harold and Kumar movie. The particular house we were at had a Colonial-style church on the lot behind it, which was brightly illuminated and provided a nice view. Even nicer was (have been) everyone I've encountered since I stepped off the plane. I know I live in one of the least friendly cities in the world, but even after factoring that in, I am struck by how familial and relaxed people are here. Not only is it refreshing, it's infectious. On principal, I try to avoid being rude to customer service people, but here I can't help being extra nice. It feels good to really smile and mean it when you say "Thank you so much."

One thing I got to do (and there are pictures of it) is hold my cousin Amy's new baby daughter. Now, I generally don't like kids. They're loud and dirty and irrational. They don't know how to blow their noses or edit what they say. They carry germs and terrible television is produced every day in their name. However, babies who don't cry for twenty-four hours straight, are adorable, and Little Natalia is no exception. Once she was handed to me I was reluctant to give her up. Amy is also a great parent. After only a few months, she's devoted to her baby but doesn't hover or antagonize other grownups. She also trusts her relatives. When we got there and Amy came up to give us all hugs, we asked where Natalia was and she said "Oh, she's being held by somebody over there." When I grow up, I want to be a mommy like Amy.

Today is the second wedding in the space of about two months that I'll be going to. I'm not going to draw any unfair comparisons between the two (except for the DJ; Jessie and Satish had the best wedding DJ ever). The wedding also won't go all night, so there might still be time to check out the bars and sample the locals. And will Lucy ever relinquish the bathroom? Only time will tell.

My Night with Hollywood Canteen

2009-09-18T00:14:00.000-07:00

I'm staying up late to watch Hollywood Canteen on TCM, a 1944 musical comedy written and directed by Delmer Daves, and starring everyone and their mother who was under contract at Warner Brothers at that time.

Robert Hutton plays a GI named 'Slim' who shows up in Hollywood with a buddy. His Bronx-born buddy goes off to drink and Slim wanders around in a montage sequence that features every miracle mile intersection possible. Its the kind of montage that you would only get if you've ever actually spent a fair amount of time in Hollywood, so I have a feeling signs for Sunset and Cahuenga went over Middle America's heads. After doing that, Slim is hungry and goes to a full lunch counter where the customers are all rude to him and the counter man sasses him, a sequence that seems less 1944 and more 1969. All they need is for an extra at the end of the bar to yell "Baby killer!" and this movie would be ageless.

So Slim finds his way to the Hollywood Canteen, and nelly-ass Joe E. Brown is holding court at the entrance, surrounded by sailors who are totally in heat for his autograph. I swear Brown does not actually make a single joke, and he has probably three facial expressions, but the laughs from the extras around him seem to come naturally. I hope they all got SAG vouchers for that one.

Jane Wyman (looking very tan and dark-haired) shows Slim to the counter, where there is A) no line and B) Barbara Stanwyck doling out slop. She and Slimster flirt back and forth in what is the first really magical moment of the movie. Getting the moves put on you by Barbara Stanwyck must have been a uniquely intimidating and exciting experience, and this is the closest I will ever get. Thanks Hollywood Canteen!

One of the busboys is drop-dead handsome John Garfield. He and Slim start chatting and it's homoeroticism at first sight. Garfield vows to find golden woman Joan Leslie to sacrifice to the Slim.

Slim keeps wandering around asking other famous people where Joan Leslie is. Not creepy at all, right? And even though the place is jam packed, they have plenty of time to help him. When Joan Leslie shows up to work dressed in a shimmering cape (what else you gonna wear to night shift?), Bette Davis grabs her and gets her to say yes to meeting him.

Some other musical numbers.

Slim finally meets Joan Leslie. And naturally it's love at first sight. Joan is stunning and the scene between them is beautiful and understated, one of those scenes that makes you wish that all of one's life could be a 1940's movie. Also three words concerning Bette Davis that I can take home from this whole interlude: Best. Wingman. Ever.

John Garfield is being a voyeur i mean gazing longingly at Slim I mean love's young dream happening over in the corner. One stern look from Bette Davis snaps him right out of it.

A soldier hits on Eddie Cantor. Eddie discovers that he's not that funny, and that the young people don't know who he is any more. He and Nora Martin do a song. Then Eddie invites a sailor up and gives him a kiss and makes a gay joke at his expense.

S.Z. Sakall's face gets molested (and roughly) by three different soldiers who he calls 'gheneral.' I cover my lap. What is this movie doing to me?

The Sons of the Pioneers appear and sing something. Roy Rogers rides in on Trigger and the extras part like the Red Sea, which would TOTALLY happen in real life (as SO sanitary ). He makes trigger 'bow.' That is SSOOOOO Tom Mix in 1925. He asks Trigger for a kiss. I never ever again want to hear a human say of a horse "He sure kisses juicy!" Roy sings Don't Fence Me In. Then he jumps back on Trigger and makes Trigger "dance" which is cute at first, but the extras standing look less enchanted and more nervous.

Slim FINALLY has an "I will never wash this hand" moment.

Ida Lupino invites a GI to sit down and pretends to be nice to him and show him "the ropes." He tries to give her a French lesson. She humors him so bad it's cruel. Then a French sailor comes up and asks for her autograph. Is this the Hollywood Canteen or the Mustang Ranch.

For a time when Hollywood was ruled by soft-focus and Max Factor, Ida Lupino is a shining beacon of natural beauty.

There's that French sailor again! Chatting up faux blond Irene Manning.

Patty Andrews looks like a man.

Peter Lorre is Sydney Greenstreet's mini-me, peering out from under the crook of Greenstreet's arm. They also talk to each other like pedophile wingmen scoping out a playground, only with less of an understanding of "personal space." Yes, I know Delmer Daves is doing all this on purpose, but it feels so dirty to watch.

Patty Andrews encourages drinking your tallboy with a straw.

Paul Henreid gets hit on by the GI who thinks he knows French. But Paul is more interested in Irish battle axe Mary Gordon. At least that's what Mary thinks until she leaves them alone and they start talking about rubbing noses and animal instinct.

French GI corners Alexis Smith. She's not having any of that nose-rubbin' talk.

Dennis Morgan: "Excuse me fellas but I gotta be a douche bag and go out and do a patriotic song." (By the way, I'm paraphrasing) Also, the term "a spade's a spade" is still racist.

Every patriotic song needs a chorus of people from the kitchen.

Morgan can't carry the number on his own, so Joe E. Brown comes out again and does his thing. He actually manages to look LESS gay when he's sauntering around to different tables with GIs and singing. Oh, and he finds the Asians in the audience.

The French Guido has a homo moment with a HAWT blond sailor who he thinks is Alexis Smith.

"I like these novelty bands that play music the way it's written!" What?!?

I know this is a little bit gay, but LOVES ME the Joan Crawford. If she walked up to me and asked me to dance, I would faint too.

The boys are back at the camp, having a bunkside chat. Gayer! They're talking about democracy. Gayer!

OMG, Farmer's Market! Been there! Oh, and Joan Leslie shops there! Dressed like Heidi!

Aw, Slim and Joan Leslie, sittin' in a tree. The Frenchman can't take it.

The guys aparently were jonesing for the HC so they're back again the third night in a row. And they think they're going to have their millionth man walk through the doors that night. So now we have some exposition about how the different studio departments all contributed, yaddiyaddayadda...

Finally there is a line of people at the entrance. Tension must be built, you see. Slim is the millonth man (surprise!) and he gets kissed by every junior hostess in the house (surprise!). "You didn't know you were somebody special, did you, corporal?"

Bette Davis has the right to pimp out any actress to the millionth man for the weekend. He chooses... Joan Leslie. And of course Slim doesn't forget his best friend. He gets to dance with Dolores Moran, who apparently has really good "give." Oh, and Joan Leslie shows us she can sing. And then they get rice thrown on them as a joke.

Slim is so taken he can't drive straight. Cute.

A 'rice' rumor starts to circulate. Joan Leslie still lives with her folks, who next door to the Shaggy Dog. She apparently is also in the habit of taking men to her home at night before she's married them. Slim just wants to talk though, cuz you know, he's not much of a romantic. And stuff... That's exactly what they end up doing. It's a pretty adorable scene.

Sexy room service girls tell Slim he's married to Joan Leslie. They go to the studio, and Slim can't bare to watch Joan Leslie kiss her scene partner Zachary Scott. It turns out, she really is into him, and wants him to come to dinner with her parents. I feel like I don't need to watch any more of this movie.

Millionth man's friend gets shown around the studio and they stealth-boom him up on a camera crane after he wanders into a 'Ballet Girls Dressing Room.' Then there's a ballet number that is very 'Wedding of the Painted Doll' only slightly less embarrassingly antiquated, and with ballet sailors and a lot of upskirt.

We meet Joan Leslie's family. Her sister is played by her real sister, who looks like the chick from Gambling with Souls. Her parents are played by impostors.

Joseph Szigeti plays 'Flight of the Bumblebee' which, if you believe this movie and Radio Days, was the most popular song in all of World War II. Bette Davis seems really unsure of her announcements. She introduces a second act, and the principals spend most of it arguing about who is a better performer. Sorry, too boring, I'm fast-forwarding.

There's some cute samba music. Dolores Moran and Frenchy sneak off to to go bang up at Hollywoodland. There's a Spanish dance number I also wasn't interested in. Slim has a monologue, and proves he can't pronounce Czechloslovakia. We are treated to a rousing Rainbow Nation montage of everyone sitting at the Hollywood Canteen. Kitty Carlisle asks for a request from Slim as he leaves, and ends up doing a reprise of the song Joan Leslie sang the night before.

Slim waits a little longer, but Joan Leslie isn't anywhere to be found. Somebody tells him he's just being used, but he writes her a note saying he doesn't care either way. Meanwhile, she's stuck at what appears to be the same gas station from Assassin of Youth.

OMG! Union Station! I've been there! And Joan Leslie makes it to say goodbye. They promise to keep on dreaming about each other. Another adorably smaltzy movie that I totally loved.

Wedding Dresses, History and Me

2009-09-13T23:03:00.000-07:00

I am currently working my way through a backlog of entries from the podcast Stuff Mom Never Told You, hosted by the always lovely and congenial Cristen Conger and Molly Edmonds, and this past week I heard an excellent episode that not only appealed to my girly side, but mirrored current events (both past and approaching) in my life. It also just got me thinking generally about the topic: Why do brides wear white? At least that was the heading that showed up once iTunes was finished downloading the file; the topic could just have easily been Where to wedding dresses come from? Other than 'shut up, that's why' and 'hopefully somewhere reasonable,' I have a few reactions to the podcast. There are my thoughts.

Just to recap, I had a very dear old friend, well two dear friends, get married recently (they aren't all that old ... late twenties). I also have a cousin who is getting married later this month, and that trip will take me to Charlotte, North Carolina, which I am trying to tell myself will be fun, a chance to see relatives and sample at least one local (and blog about it, using lobby cards from A Woman in Grey as illustrations).

Anyhow, back to weddings. Cristen and Molly stated, at one point, that wedding dresses tend to follow contemporary fashion trends, which is totally true. However, Molly posited that, for example, in a 1970's wedding, "...you'd wear, like, you know, a mini, just like you would wear to go... shopping? Wherever you wear your mini's?" Actually, not as far as I can tell. While I wasn't technically around in the seventies, I can attest to seeing the many wedding photos of not just my parents, but of many friends' parents, all of whom were married in the seventies. All I remember from those photos were long, lace-up-the-front hippy-flavored gypsy dresses. These get-ups were as ubiquitous in these photos as our dads' John Lennon hair cuts. Mini-dresses, however, not so much.

World War II also came up in the discussion. Both sets of grandparents were married during that era, though neither (as far as I can tell) were married in a dress made out of parachute silk. Grandma Kitty and Grandpa Oji-San (Mr. and Mrs. Don Lynch) managed to swing a marriage in Italy in 1944, at the height of the conflict. They were married in a baroque chapel and honeymooned in Sorrento. Sounds romantic, right? Well, for the most part it sounds like it was, but fifty years later, Grandma was a little resentful of the fact that she had to get married in her uniform. Once, when we were watching TV together, a commercial for allergy medication or something started up, and the woman on the screen professed to be so excited about getting married in her mother's wedding gown. Kitty snorted "Nobody would ever want to have been married in my wedding dress!"

My dad's parents, as I said, were also married around that time, and their wedding photo stands in marked contrast. A traditional studio portrait, it shows John Sr. in a three-piece suit and cravate, and Regina in a long, elegant dress and corresponding veil. Again, I can't say whether the dress was made of parachute silk, but I will say that it is gorgeous, understated, and encapsulates the era. Grandma Reggie has never had any pretense about being stylish (she just is) but her wedding gown looks like the equivalent of something Worth or Dior were turning out at the time.

According to Cristen and Molly, the first recorded wedding white wedding dress was that of Queen Victoria I of England. This does actually sound like something I've hear somewhere before, so therefore it must be true. Apparently, Old Vic was the the first bride to have bridesmaids carry her train. My friend Jessie, who just got married, did not have an expansive train as part of her gorgeous gown, but she did work for a company three years ago that was bonding The Young Victoria, an Emily Blunt-starring hoop-skirt-straviganza that needs to come out already (seriously, it's been like three years). So, Jessie's wedding and former job are my connections to the late British monarch and the work of Sandy Powell.

The above photograph was found at a new discovery, the blog Jane Austen's World, which has a lovely illustrated article about weddings from November of last year, titled "Regency Wedding Dresses and Later Developments in Bridal Fashions."

http://janeaustensworld.wordpress.com

Happy Birthday to Me (and Myra Breckenridge)

2009-09-05T18:50:00.000-07:00

So today is my birthday. I share this birthday with a few celebrities that people know about (Raquel Welch, Rose McGowan, Michael Keaton) as well as a few who I actually admire and care about (Werner Herzog, Paddy Considine, Arline Pretty - see below left).

Virgos are alluring, but have doughy faces, as Ms. Pretty demonstrates here. I am likewise a bit doughy in the face. As for the alluring part, I don't know so much.

I'm about to go out to celebrate, and I just wanted to post a cute clip of what I was watching right before I left. Here's an unrecognizable Ginger Rogers singing two songs in A Night in a Dormitory (1929), from that period where musicals were so bad they almost died. Just goes to show you that everyone needs a little time to grow into their own. I feel like 23 sounds a lot older than 22 but people keep saying I still have time to grow into myself. I'll take it.

I'm Not Your 2001 Monkey

2009-09-01T23:24:00.000-07:00

It's only the second day of the fall semester, and already I have a fun anecdote. I was sitting right behind a deaf guy in my History 1 class, and of course he had a sign language interpreter on hand, who signed everything the crazy professor had to say, even his weird asides that make me wonder if it's possible to have a GTS attack and also be snarky. Interpreter girl must have been tired by the end of the class. I was just watching her.

In the last quarter part of the time we had in class, the professor showed us the first 15-20 minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, one of those movies that I know and admire, but have only really seen all the way through once, because if I never saw it, I could never be a real boy as so on. Unlike some other movies (Battleship Potemkin, Casablanca - I know, sacrilege) I think 2001 is a great movie, one of those "even it's flaws are interesting" kind of movies. It was nice to see even just a portion of it after at least eight years (I saw it in middle school).

So back to the hot deaf action that was going on in front of me. All three of us - me, deaf guy, sighner girl - all knew that she was under some sort of obligation to "sign" the movie, even though there really isn't any dialog in the parts we were watching (all the stuff with the monkeys, and the ship reaching the space station). If there is any dialog that occurs before Floyd gets off the rotating elevator, it’s not the coherent spoken English kind that might need interpreting. Still, Miss Lady Sign Languagesson still had plenty to say with her hands before the clip was over.

This then begs the question: “What does ‘More monkey noises’ look like in American Sign Language?” Sadly, I cannot describe it. I’d like to think that statement was in her jestures somewhere, but it could just as easily have been “It’s that annoying classical music again.” If this guy stays in the class, maybe someday I’ll learn the difference. Until then, I have a mountain of Math Homework to get through.

PS: The above is not a scene from the film, rather an accurate depiction of life in the bureaucratic labyrinth of despair that my school. Those pendulous clouds are from the fire that is slowly engulfing Los Angeles County. Happy September, y'all.

An American Wedding

2009-08-25T11:32:00.000-07:00

This past weekend, two of my oldest friends in Los Angeles got married. The ceremony was great, with lots of drinking, great music and carousing with old and new friends. More on that in a moment.

The story of Satish and Jessie, the wonderful couple in question, is long and filled with drama (in a good way). Not to sound like a douche bag, but I was there at the beginning. They had one particular class together, one of those classes that are so complicated that it destroys friendships, and were part of the same group. I came along for a meeting early in the semester at Jessie's house and watched her argue with Satish. Even though they clearly disagreed about several things, they were clearly on a certain wavelength. Since Jessie was the only one with a car at the time, she drove everybody home. She dropped Satish off at his place, and as we watched him make his way up to the front door, she said something along the lines of "I think I want to make out with him."

My reaction: "Go for it!"

Flash-forward to this past weekend. The wedding ceremony was held at a Buddhist college in Aliso Viejo, and among the guests were Jessie's big Filipino family, Satish's big Italian family, and both of their friends, who are one of the most eclectic and international groups of people you could hope to find anywhere. It was classic and elegant, with the poofy dress, the tuxedos, the centerpieces, but it was loose and free in a way that all weddings ought to be.

In episodes of Six Feet Under where primary characters died their funerals would be packed with extras you had never seen before. That struck me as weird, even though I could look to other funerals I've been to, such as my grandmother's in 2006, when old neighbors and my mother's high school friends were showing up. Similarly, in the weddings I've been to in the last few years (and there have been several) there were always those people who you didn't know, the guests you never spoke to, the guests who were just extras and who you'd totally have forgotten about if they weren't walking through the background of your snapshots. All I ever saw on Six Feet Under were the lead characters, and their relationships with other lead characters. This weekend I feel like I had something of an epiphany. Those scenes from the HBO show finally made sense when I looked around and saw all these people who I had never met, but who were there, just like me, to show Satish and Jessie their love and support. I am finding that, from my very selfish perspective, I see my interactions with people as being the only events that really take place. Why would they know anybody I've never met? Why would I not know any other people that they know? Because, I know now, we are humans. Those people I have never met are all humans. I grant that this revelation probably doesn't make sense to anyone else in the world, but for me it's a bit profound. No wonder people are still dismissing me by saying "Oh, you're young."

If you look at depictions of weddings in popular American culture, they are usually pretty staid, sober affairs. Not only have they been manufactured by award-winning production designers with the backing of a major studio, but there is a formal going-through-the-motions quality that seems to be present only when you're dealing with a white, WASPy family. The only loose weddings seem to be the 'ethnic' ones, and that's usually because they are some sort of homogeneous gathering for a particular minority. I look back on Jessie and Satish's wedding, and I am struck by what a microcosm of America the whole thing is. Especially when the newlyweds (Indian and Pinay respectively) and their Bridesmaids (Indian, Middle Eastern, African American) and Groomsmen (Indian, Pakistani, Mexican) jumped on the dancefloor for a surprise rendition of Michael Jackson's Thriller dance (led by a white girl). Meanwhile, Satish's adoptive Italian family, Jessie's Filipino family and everyone else in the room clapped along and hooted and cheered.

Saying that a particular wedding is more American than another doesn't qualify it as better or worse, but this one, with it's white minority and melting pot pastiche of guests, was the most fun I've ever had.

Bonnie and Clyde

2009-08-19T00:18:00.001-07:00

I am getting toward the end of the book Go Down Together by Jeff Guinn, a recent (and excellent) biography of Bonnie and Clyde. A real page turner, it reflects a lot of new research that re-examines, and in many cases debunks, numerous popular myths and misconceptions about the famous Depression-era outlaws. Of course, this put me in the mood to do something I had wanted to do since middle school: Start writing my Bonnie and Clyde screenplay. The book has so many interesting stories and pieces of information that I was thinking that a John Adams-style mini-series might (at least sort of) do it justice, but I was dismayed to learn that a movie about the very same subject has been filming since April.

The movie The Story of Bonnie and Clyde, which is due out next year, has garnered a lot of criticism due to the fact that Hilary Duff will be playing Bonnie Parker. Everybody on the webs are up in arms. I have to admit I was too at first. As an ex-Disney pawn (is she still a Disney pawn?), Duff doesn't seem like the type of actress that you want to entrust with a serious role. Her movies so far have all been majorly fluffy, and her Lizzie Maguire TV persona isn't help much. She's too young, too perfect, to modern to accurately play the Bonnie Parker who lived a rough life, aged quickly and died violently beside her sociopathic boyfriend.

I'm gonna say it: Maybe she can do it. Why not? She hasn't really been presented with the opportunity to tackle a challenging role. With a woman at the helm of the production, Duff might be privy to some directorial insight into the character that Faye Dunaway didn't quite get from Arthur Penn. I'll hold out hope that Tonya S. Holly is more Kathryn Bigelow than Catherine Hardwicke.

Am I wary of the choice of Duff to play this hallowed, complicated character? Yes, absolutely. We also have to remember that many of the common notions about Bonnie are false or unproven: Bonnie probably never shot anybody, she never smoked cigars, she most likely never slept around with other members of Clyde's gang. While she's nowhere near my first choice (Mireille Enos), or second (Anna Paquin), or third (Jennifer Jason Leigh), Duff must have done something right in the audition process. The problem of casting her in this role is, partly, the problem of casting any current age-appropriate actress: People look younger, seem younger, and more youth-oriented personas now than they used to. Duff is going to be 22 this year, about the same age as Clyde and Bonnie when they first met.

The only other thing I'm really worried about is the movie's actual overall quality. Since the subject is pretty close to my heart, I want it to look nice and be presented accurately. I want it to be shot in the right locations (it is), on film (fingers crossed), with a large enough budget to allow for accurate costumes and props (one can only hope). I doubt that it's budget is anything close to that of Public Enemies. I'm hopeful that they'll be able to make it work.

Most of the uproar around this movie seems to come from everyone's impression that this is a 'remake' of the 1967 movie Bonnie and Clyde that starred Dunaway and Warren Beatty at the title characters. I can't agree about this being any particular sort of "tragedy," since I don't like and never liked that film, but calling this movie a 'remake' is about as accurate as Sarah Palin's recent use of the term "Death Panel." This movie is a retelling of historical events, not the rehashing of an older film. If you still want to look at it that way, then just remember that your precious 1967 movie would then, by that definition, also be a remake, since it was preceded by the terrific Gun Crazy and, before that, the proto-noir You Only Live Once.

I'm annoyed that a Bonnie and Clyde movie is being made at the moment, but I'm annoyed for very selfish, unrealistic reasons. I want it to either be good and be well received, or for it to be so terrible that it gets buried by the distributor, with no release whatsoever. The real tragedy will be if it picks up where Public Enemies left off turning the subject of 1930's gangsters into 21st Century box office poison.

Good Ideas: Ozsploitation

2009-08-03T21:02:00.000-07:00

I've gotten really interested, lately, in vintage foreign action movie genres, namely the Nikkatsu yakuza thrillers of the 1960's, and the Roger Corman-produced, Pam Grier-starring quazi-Blaxploitation women-in-prison action movies from the 1970's, movies like The Big Doll House and Black Mama, White Mama (they count as foreign because they were shot in the Philippines). I have to admit I'm even curious about those awful Golan & Globus action movies that were shot in Israel or Apartheid-era South Africa in the late 1980's. Maybe this was a phase I should have gone through when I was younger, but right now I'm rethinking my old attitudes about "guy" movies, movies that are gritty and cheep and know it.

I can now add another sub-genre to that list, thanks to today's episode of The Business on KCRW (I listen to the podcast version every week). Ozsploitation is the subject of a documentary called Not Quite Hollywood, which documents the rash of sleezy, ultraviolent and bra-ripping early days of 1970's Australian filmmaking. According to the director, Australia had developed a very strong film industry in the 1940's and 1950's, but the foreign powers bought up all the cinemas in the 1960's and pushed the homegrown industry out. The country's return to domestic film output co-incided with the dismantling of censorship laws, and as a result, the outback cinema became one of blood and boobs, and more than a handful of near-death car stunts. Among the best known of the genre were Mad Max and The Cars That Ate Paris, but there were dozens of other films that were far dirtier, far more explicitly violent and sexual, far more shocking. The genre also gave start to a lot of careers, including Barry Humphries/Dame Edna Everage, who you'll remember from another blog entry.

I had no idea there was a piece of history like this lurking in the shadows, but it does fit with what information I did already have about Aussie films. If I had to name any Austrailian movie older than Mad Max, I couldn't get much farther than The Story of the Kelly Gang. and that's only because it's been acknowleged as the first feature film ever made that wasn't a boxing documentary. It's really qite a sad story, that of Australia's film industry, that it produced the worlds feature film (in the tender year of 1906) and had a thriving industry that was so destroyed by America in about fifteen years time that these films are the output of an industry that was starting over from scratch.

That's not to diminish the value of the movies that are profiled in Not Quite Hollywood. They look fun and exciting. Given the context in which they were made, I feel like now is the best time for me to see them. The really ironic thing is that the only other movies being made in Australia at the time were languid hits and misses like Walkabout (hit) and Picnic at Hanging Rock (not a hit).

Somehow I bet Night of Fear or Alvin Purple Rides Again are a lot more watchable that the beautifully shot but not very rewarding Careful, He Might Hear You, which I just sent back to Netflix yesterday.)We'll see how I feel once I've seen a few Ozsploitation movies all the way through, but first, Seijin Suzuki's Youth of the Beast.

Now I Wanna Be Your Dog

2009-07-24T18:47:00.000-07:00

Every now that then you see something that makes you angry, not because it offends you, but because you wish you came up with it. Back in February I saw Diablo Cody speak at Cinequest in San Jose and she said that The Wrestler had made her angry for that very reason.

Well, here's the item for this week that I wish I had come up with: A beautifully designed and smashingly edited rendition of the classic Stooges song. Why couldn't I have come up with this? It's not like I've been busy updating my blog or anything.

Oh well. I'm sure I'll be feeling the same thing tonight; I'm going to see the long-awaited (500) Days of Summer.

Good Ideas: WPA Murals, Hawaii

2009-07-23T18:24:00.000-07:00

There are a few things bothering me lately, but only slightly since I haven't been keeping up on politics a whole lot in the past few weeks. From what I can tell, crazy white people are still having affairs and snubbing government money that would help their states' schools, and then spreading rumors that Barack Obama might not have been born in the US, and about how brown women are racist. Oh yeah, and they're still practically going out of their way to mispronouce non-WASP surnames. I guess I haven't been missing very much.

President Obama is a native of Hawaii, that beautiful state where white people can go and get treated like massa's. Hawaii was inducted into the union in March 1959, a year and five months before his was born, so the question of birth on American soil isn't an issue. However I was talking with a friend the other day and the hypothetical "What if he had been born before 1959" came up. It's a reasonable scenario. Fortunately, Albert is smart and knew right away that, since 1900, Hawaii had been a US territory, which qualities it as American soil, and therefore Obama wouldn't have had any trouble. Can you imagine what Mrs Ann Coulter would have done with that, though? I'm going to write Albert in on the ballot for 2012.

The only things that are really bugging me about Obama are already things we knew before we voted for him: He's a little more moderate than I would like, and he doesn't support marriage equality. I've said that before, not on here, and I'll say it again, on here. And, yes, it's the perfect time to take down Don't Ask, Don't Tell. These Human Rights Campaign spam emails really to stop. People are also totally freaked out about the free communist healthcare, big surprise. I just want to know if American can expect free WPA Murals with their healthcare. That's a change I could believe in.

By the way, this is the WPA mural from the late, great Essex Mountain Sanatorium in Verona, New Jersey. Check out the link below to see more fabulous pictures.

http://www.mountainsanatorium.net/

Thanks for Birth Control, Auntie Em!

2009-07-11T14:43:00.001-07:00

For a research paper I am crunching today, I was looking up the 1957 interview Mike Wallace did with Margaret Sanger, the famous and controversial birth control advocate. Once you get past Wallace's lengthy, prattling plug for the Phillip Morris cigarettes (he might as well be smudging a lit smoke in your ear, it's that obvious) the actual interview is extremely interesting and Sanger comes off as very sincere and articulate, as much an advocate for personal responsibility as for . (She also had recanted her past views on eugenics at this point, and that doesn't excuse them, but it shows she wasn't above changing her mind when broader life experience proved her wrong.)

The entire time I was watching the interview, I was struck by how much Sanger resembled that actress everyone doesn't know they know, Clara Blandick. A classic character actress, Blandick is better known as Auntie Em to Judy Garland's Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz (1939). I kept picturing that scene where Elmira Gulch (Margaret Hamilton) gets told off by Auntie Em, but with different dialogue.

Ms Gulch: What do you say to opponents that birth control violates, not only a Catholic law, but a 'higher law.' What would you say to that?
Auntie Em: Well, you'd have to ask a Catholic. I can't speak for them.

Watch the interview here:
http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/multimedia/video/2008/wallace/sanger_margaret.html

Vanity Fair

2009-07-09T16:24:00.000-07:00

I have to give this month's Vanity Fair major props for its 'Ain't We Got Style?' photo spread by Michael Roberts, Norma Jean Roy and Mark Seliger, especially for the fantastic portrait of Mila Kunis as Letty Lynton, the Joan Crawford role/character that has been hard to find for the past seventy-something years since it was court-ordered back into the MGM archives on copyright violations. My next thought, after taking it in, was 'Of all movies, Letty Lynton? Do people actually know about that movie?'

Apparently people know about the dress. "(T)he Letty Lynton dress, with billowing, diaphanous sleeves, became an overnight sensation" says the small text in the upper right corner. Previously, my only visual reference was a small still in the great book Sin in Soft Focus by Mark A. Vieira, which shows Crawford buried in silver fox, leaning against Nils Ascher. Indeed a google image search did turn up some terrific glamour shots of Miss le Seur in the white dress with big sleeves.

A YouTube search turned up something even more exciting: The entire movie, which I don't think has ever been on VHS (and certainly never been on DVD). Until it gets taken down, do seek it out. It's been divided into about ten increments.

I watched the first three or so last night, and I can't say I'm not completely impressed. The overall image quality is better than nothing, but still very dismal and washed out, particularly disappointing when you consider how gorgeous movies from that era at MGM usually looked. (The cinematographer Oliver Marsh, was also responsible for Dancing Lady, San Francisco, The Women and a few of the Thin Man movies.) The sets, by Cedric Gibbons, are disappointingly plain. As to the acting, let's just say nobody won any Oscars. Joanie is good, not great. Her wardrobe is more interesting. Robert Montgomery is charming, and more interesting to watch than Joan's wardrobe. Nils Ascher is good, but not the complicated General Yen you'd like to see. Character problems aside, the actors don't bring a whole lot.

Granted, I'm saying this after watching the equivalent of the first three reels. Maybe Letty Lynton will redeem itself in its second act. By the time I'm finished with my essays for English class, hopefully this faded apparent bootleg will not have been removed from the webitudes. In the meantime, I'm just glad it's available, glad that it didn't suffer the same fate as Convention City. Then again, Convention City was exciting enough to watch than it actually threatened the status quo. Letty Lynton scandalously (allegedly) plagerized an outside source material, but so far that's about the only aspect of it that's still scandalous today.

One more reason to visit Israel

2009-07-01T16:39:00.000-07:00

I always joke about how I don't want to go to Israel because I don't want to be killed. I know it's wrong, but my Israeli friends don't take it personally. The truth is that the only thing I'm afraid in Israel of is the excess of sunshine. If I could be guaranteed a moderate, overcast weekend and an umbrella barer to follow me around anytime I went outside, I would be strolling down those Bauhaus boulevards in Tel-Aviv, and floating through the pudding water of youth that is the Dead Sea.

Doing some research on tourism in Israel, for a paper for school, I came across this offering that reminded me of what I've already learned from the films of Eytan Fox, and best spoken by Sal on Mad Men: "These Jews aren't like our Jews. You don't see that down in the diamond district!"

I leave you with that racist comment. Now back to work.

Fuck Assimilation

2009-06-30T17:43:00.000-07:00

I wanted to finish up June with a little story from a few weeks ago.

I was waiting at the bus stop on LaBrea and Pico with my friend Jessie (she can back me on this) that evening. That particular bus bench had one of those spiffy ads for the movie District 9, which I have been waiting to see with mounting anticipation. The ads, which are part of a very clever marketing campaign, look like this:

Before I say anything else (and you'll see why this is important) I should warn you, never ever attempt to take the bus that runs along LaBrea. You'll wait about an hour, only to eventually climb aboard an overcrowded, rickety vehicle with an actively rude and beligerant driver. It goes through a mostly-latino neighborhood, making it very difficult for the locals to get very far out of the area, which is not a particulaly nice one. It also makes it logistically harder, more time consuming and less desirable, to go up LaBrea to the relatively nicer, more commercially thriving neighborhood, or up to the Hollywood area, where tourists might see them.

So we're sitting on this bench and I look at it, about to say something about how I love this particular marketing campaign and I'm looking forward to the movie, and South African accents are hot, when I notice some interference with the lettering of the ad. Stepping back and squinting (it was kinda dark) we made out a new, shocking message.

I apologize for the poor quality of the pictures. I will summarize the damage: the word 'Human' in the first line had been abbreviated to just the letters 'US.' Then the 'Report Non-Humans' had been changed to 'Deport Non-United S' with 'tates Citizens' trailing after it. Strong, hateful words to put out in a community that is already horribly marginalized.

I was surprised that I couldn't find anything about our bench online. There was, however, a similar picture of a different bench on Bunny Blog. It looks like this:

I'm the victim of my own racism sometimes, and I beat myself up about it. When you live around any particular ethnic group for a long enough period of time, you start to notice things that annoy you. I lived around white people for eighteen years, and that got old really fast. But people in this town really hate the latino population for what they see as refusal to assimilate. I'm aware of my own prejudices, and in my time in LA I've had the misfortune to meet many people who aren't aware of theirs, but that doesn't mean sights like this are any less upsetting.

I've seen discrimination on both sides of the line, and heard racial hatred spew from mouths of all colors and creeds, and what can you expect from a city where everyone comes to get away from their closed-minded upbringings in small towns in flyover states. All it does is feed the mindset inherent to the city itself. LA was designed to keep it's population segregated, which is obvious if you know the town's history or looked at the city plan (yes, LA was actually planned), and its residents are doing their best to make sure it stays that way.

On another, lighter note, I offer this photo, courtesy of faithful YWBT operative Brian, who recorded this piece of fagtastic defiance in a port-a-potty at San Francisco Pride this past weekend. This is exactly what's missing from LA's gay community, this spirit of "You know what, we have baseball bats too!" That's exactly what we need, an antidote to something like the Happy Hour 'Demonstration' hosted by Fiesta Cantina, a good safe distance away from anyone not already part of the choir, on May 26, 2009. Where are the fags setting buildings on fire? That's what I want to know!

Oh well, I'm not bitter. This rant should have ended several paragraphs ago. Happy last day of June, everybody!

Completely Inconsequential Film History Brought to You by Pixar

2009-06-29T20:04:00.000-07:00

I had the pleasure of taking in the new Pixar film Up today, and it exceeded all of my expectations, which were pretty high to begin with. I don't recall the last movie that had me in tears the first fifteen minutes, then had me laughing like a little girl just a few frames after. Yet another masterpiece from the best animation studio in the world.

I was particularly hooked by the 1930's newsreel that opens Up, how accurately it captured the material from that period (see the very first ever post on this blog for my thoughts on the Hearst Metrotone collection at UCLA). In the newsreel, we see the diminutive protagonist Carl as a little boy, watching the exploits of ficticious explorer Charles Muntz, who travels the globe in search of exotic creatures by way of a giant diridgible. This, combined with my recent failed attempt to locate my school's copy of Kevin Brownlow's The War, the West and the Wilderness ... segue... made me think of all those filmmaking explorers who went out to the Pacific, the Arctic, and Near East and nearly everywhere in between to capture places never before photographed. I particular, I thought of a husband and wife couple, Martin and Osa Johnson.

Active between 1914 and 1937, Martin E. Johnson and Osa Leighty Johnson made several documentaries on location in Africa and the South Seas, including Congorilla (1932), which they touted as "the one and only picture shot entirely in Africa." Their collaboration ended in 1937, when Martin was lost in a plane crash.

Martin and Osa were a cute couple, but they were hardly the most inventive, or ethical, documentary wunderkinden. They did the Robert Flaherty trick of playing records for the "natives," or of giving a chimpanzee a beer and filming the results. Basically, they look down on the natives and say "Aren't you glad you're not them, America?" They even filmed and touted (there's that word again) their own capture of a gorilla family, having the mother killed and the babies isolated by hired locals. For this work, they received sold-out premieres on Broadway.

Here are a few shots of the Johnson's at work. Not glamorous, but then even a PA gig on Entourage probably isn't as sexy as you might think.

This still reveals that the Johnson's offered equal opportunity employment, at least once they got to the location. In those unequal days of the 1930's, even Oscar Micheaux was stuck with white camera operators.

I do wonder what Martin and Osa would think of the currently thriving American film presence on the Dark Continent.

For more information, check these out:

The Osa Johnson Safari Museum, located in her hometown of Chanute, Kansas. Finally, there's a place in Kansas I actually want to go to. Can you say your local library has a safari museum and used to be a train station? Do you suppose there is such a place, Toto? Probably not, unless you're lucky enough to live in Chanute.
http://kansastravel.org/safarimuseum.htm

The blog where most of these images came from, and which also has a lot more information about them:
http://theselvedgeyard.wordpress.com/2009/02/04/martin-osa-johnson-safari-film-legends/

Another article/photo source:
http://www.a2oxford.info/pages/reno_2006/pages/osa_arc.html

Oh, and GO SEE UP.

Out of Despair comes... Blog Posts

2009-06-27T11:55:00.000-07:00

I was doing a little research online for an English research paper, the due date for which is thankfully not for a couple more weeks. In hopes of finding inspiration for a topic, I did a search on propaganda and came across some fantastic World War One posters. Scrolling through and enlarging them one by one, I thought 'This would be terrific fodder for at least one blog post.' And that is why I am selecting a few and offering commentary on them below.

We live in an age of overly-colorful print ads. I wish we could go back to the simpler times, when all you needed was an artist who could draw women well and color them in even better.

Very little has changed since the War to End All Wars. We still teach our white kids to shit all over those who are less fortunate.

The origins of the corn subsidizing in America.

...and look good doing it!

Talk to Chuck.

"I got your liberty bonds right here..."

Even in war time, child nudity is wrong.

Theater people are shameless name droppers.

You can find more information on this title by here - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0289290/

aka Der Angfall die 50 Meter Stahlzehestefel.

"No, because you're family's poor!" she continued.

It might hurt a little at first, but once you get used to it...

Just when you thought the Boy Scouts couldn't get any gayer.

I'm always a fan of nurses in furs.

Back when the homos actually cared about politics.
When the uniform isn't sexy enough, try smoking.

Link to poster page on the sidebar.

'Angels' Devilishly Fresh, Fun

2009-06-22T19:02:00.000-07:00

Last Thursday, I went out to Casito del Campo, a Mexican restaurant tucked away in the hills of Silverlake. I've eaten there before, and recommend it, but this time I was there to see a show in the basement.

That's right. A show. In the basement. "Some thing with latin drag queens being " was the jist of it. I took a deep breath, squeezed into a tiny seat between my date and the Asian mother of one of the secondary performers' friends, and got ready to be thoroughly bored and insulted.

In fact, the exact opposite happened. Why? I was witnessing a performance of Chico's Angels, a long-running but woefully neglected take on the 1970's television show Charlie's Angels, only with latin drag queens Kay Sedia, Freida Laye and Chita Parole. One of four episodes (or so I think I heard), this particular show sent them on the Love Boat, where they attempt to apprehend the culprit behind several attempts on the life of Coochie Coochie mistress Charo (jes, that Charo). Along the way, there are probably 25 musical numbers (with terrific choreography), several simulated slow-motion 'NNNNOOOOOOOO!' moments, and some surprising, delightful sight gags.

Love Boat Chicas (that's the name of the show) is. like most drag comedy, a collection raunchy double entendres, ethnic stereotypes (i.e. Latino men preening in dresses) and 1970's pop culture references. It just does it all so freakin' well that the past 25 years or so of bad drag queens and self-loving attempts at camp humor are forgiven. I haven't laughed so hard at something I normaly can't stand since the last Brian DePalma movie. This time, I was laughing with them.

El cho, Love Boat Chicas, runs through July 19, with a possible extention, but more importantly, is so worth getting over the hill to see. Oh, and buy their T-shirts and stuff. They need money, ok?

http://www.chicosangels.com/

Quick and Enigmatic

2009-06-17T22:45:00.000-07:00

I wanted to do one quick post today, one of my favorite finds from the 50-cent bin at Fairfax/Melrose. I won't say too much about it. It speaks for itself.

I can't read most of the writing on the back. Maybe one of you can help me?

It's the Little Things

2009-06-15T23:15:00.000-07:00

My neighborhood was invaded by homosexuals last weekend for the annual Gay Pride dog and pony show here in LA. I did my best NOT to get caught up in the fanfare, but I did manage to make it down the street (I live in the gay-berhood) to spend the afternoon in the closest, least busy anti-circuit bar, catching up with people I hadn't seen in a while, dishing the dirt with people I had, and occasionally maybe letting other peoples hands drift to over to unmentionable areas.

Yesterday (Sunday) was all one big Up reference. It came to be that somebody would say 'Squirrel!' and turn their head every time something (some body) they liked walked by. I haven't seen this movie yet; I must be the last gay man on earth who hasn't seen it. That'll go on my list of gay things I don't have, right below 'Gym Membership' and 'iPhone.'

LA Pride (some call it WeHo Pride) is epic. It's Intolerance without the sets. It's Gone with the Wind, with slightly fewer hoop skirts. It's like King Kong, and everybody gotta be Fay Wray. Where else can we go with this? It's like the prologue for Ten Commandments, and everybody gotta be Estelle Taylor. Anyways, I thought it would be nice to share a small but hardly insigificant detail from that epic journey, brought to you by my sexy shutterbug friend Chris.

We found this in the driveway of LA Buns & Co. left by someone with my sense of humor. For their work, I give ten whore diamonds. Happy Gay Pride, possums.

Dame Edna Lives! In the Past.

2009-06-11T15:18:00.000-07:00

I just had the pleasure of seeing the first of what I hope will be at least one other live Dame Edna Everage shows, this one being last night's premiere at the Ahmandson Theater in Downtown Los Angeles. I took the train with my friend Kevin from Highland to Civic Center (also known as my daily commute to a temp job this time last year - *sigh*) and got in the cheap way, in the stand-by line. It's a good thing that neither of us were singled out by Dame Edna, or else our zero-dollar admission fee would have come out and we would have been reamed over the coals by herself and the audience.

With extremely minimal prior exposure to all things Dame Edna, I had only a rough idea of what to expect, so I certainly can't say I was disappointed on any level by the show. Dame Edna, aka Barry Humphries, is incredibly talented, so sharp-witted in his interactions with the audience and so wholly that character that you forget it's a man under that purple bouffant and the pair of winged glasses. The character of Dame Edna goes deeper than drag, deeper than camp, to a place we all know and, I'll say it, identify with. We each know a Dame Edna one way or another, and we each want to be her a little.

One highlight I would like to preserve for forever, occurred early on in the show. Edna had singled out a woman in the audience, and was trying to torture some audience participation out of her, when another (much younger) woman in the exact same seating area got up and tried to sneak out of the audience to use the restroom. Edna stopped and everyone in the audience laughed until the the girl realized she was on the spot and tried to reason her way out without getting heckled by the Dame. After the girl left, Edna suggested that everyone in the audience ask the girl in unison once she got back if she was "Feeling Better?" They did.

Dame Edna's performance was, as I said, a premiere, in this case for a tour called 'My First Last Tour.' I'm hopeful that I'll have more opportunities to see him him on further last tours. Maybe I'll finally get a Gladdy thrown directly at me in such a way that I can actually catch it, not wince as it whistles through the air towards me like the Confederate standard in O Brother Where Art Thou.

This entry is a two parter, Possums. For a while, there is a particular snapshot in my collection that I've been meaning to upload and share with all (both) of you who actually might be reading this. A mixture of (to a much greater extent) laziness and (to a lesser extent) waiting for the right moment-ness has brought us to the unveiling of this fantastic little chestnut from Melrose/Fairfax discard bins.

Voila! Dame Edna's sullen twin.

The back of this photo reads "Aug. 2, 1924" in black fountain pen cursive. Then just below that in scratchy blue ink is written "Mary Sandefer; My Grandmother; Take In N.M." This would normally be a 'bad idea' post but I've really grown fond of this glum woman with her rumpled, complicated and very stylish outfit. She's also making a bit of a Dame Edna face. Mary Sandefer, I'm glad that chance and posterity have brought us together.

My Childhood Doppelgänger Has Been Found!

2009-06-07T12:20:00.000-07:00

I was just checking the Library of Congress photostream on Flickr (like you do), and I came across this lovely photograph from the Bain New Service.

Apparently, these are the children of somebody named H.P. Whitney. Aside from looking like a behind-the-scenes photo from a certain Hailey Mills movie from the sixties that I saw a few too many times as a child, there was one detail that caught my eye:

This kid.

Now, I can't say I'm either particularly straight-acting or swishy in adulthood but, as a kid, I was very girly. Sensitive, you might say. I was fortunate to be able to hang on to it long enough before various oppressive influences (Jordan Middle School, Jane Lathrob Standford Middle School, Boy Scouts) made me change my ways pretty significantly. This little boy is me from that era, right down to the limp eye-lids and high black socks with light colored shorts!

Thank you again, Library Congress. Who knew an institution of the American Government could make life so worth living?

Your Las Vegas

2009-06-07T11:26:00.000-07:00

Friday night I was persuaded by my friend Grace to go see The Hangover, that new film set in Las Vegas about four guys who have a bachelor party so wild that they wake up the next morning with no memory of it. While I thought the movie itself was funny, I have a feeling my enjoyment of it was a little hampered by the lack of distance between the Friday night screening and the previous weekend's foray into the actual Las Vegas.

The Hangover is set in the 'nicer' part of Vegas, over in the Bellagio/Cesar's Palace neighborhood. We, on the other hand, were staying at the Golden Nugget, right on Glitter Gulch. Old town Vegas isn't like most old town centers with pedestrian thoroughfares. Those places usually have attractive historical facades, trees, places to sit and good-looking tourists.

Glitter Gulch, as it's name might suggest, was a place full of tragedy. Not the sudden, unexpected tragety, but the long-living, chain-smoking, crack-addled kind of tragedy that is really so much more depressing. This was a place shouded in nicotine and despair.

There were a few moments I have to preserve:

1. We are at the check-in counter. The girl behind the desk informs us that the pool has been closed. The following exchange takes place between her and my mother: "Is there another pool in the area? Do you have some kind of agreement with another hotel?" "No." "Well, I guess I might as well give my children cigarettes." We are mortified.

2. One look at the lobby, and I understand why Las Vegas is so popular with expatriates from the Emerates. They also would know not to go somewhere called Glitter Gulch.

3. We kept seeing members of the Griswald Family Reunion wandering around. We know they are part of the Griswald Family Reunion because they have "Griswald Family Reunion" T-shirts with their names (Chet, Bud, etc.) emblazoned on the back. I kept seeing members of the Griswald party and thinking about the prospective benefits of eugenic councelling. Yes, I know, that makes me a terrible person.

4. My sister, brother and myself were all waiting in the gift shop for mom and dad to join us. I get a text from Shaun that says 'It's 7:30. Are you being a slut yet?' I text him back: 'I'm with my brother and sister in the gift shop wating for our parents to come down. What do you think?'

5. My sister doesn't have her ID. There goes our plans to see the Chippendales dancers.

6. We do actually see some Chippendales dancers posing for pictures. I am still a little mortified that I retold Margaret Cho's joke about the Chippendales dancers to my dad and my brother. ("It doesn't work for women.")

7. My sister and I did end up having some fun time bonding and comparing guys as we wondered around. I think she wishes I were more adventurous. I know she's eighteen, but I still refuse to buy her cigarettes.

I think my parents do no research ever before they go on trips. It reminds me of the time my dad wanted to take us to Seattle for Christmas, not because we know anybody there but because it seemed "like a cool place." A month after settling on those plans, he realized that Seattle in winter was a bad idea for everyone (though I probably would have been fine, sicne I live cold weather).

With Vegas, mom and dad came away from the trip grossed out and depressed. I wanted to scream at them "What did you expect? It's called Glitter Fucking Gulch!" I have managed not to yet. I think if I ever do vocalize my thoughts on the subject I'll include something along the lines of: "The only reason any sane person would go to Glitter Gulch is for some sick kind of anthropology study."

I know both of my parents are smart people, and it makes it that much more frustrating to see their questionable judgement in action. If I learned one thing from this trip, it's the same I learn from all the others: This is my last family vacation. At least for a while. Till then, I will revisit The Hangover and probably enjoy it a lot more once the taste of real-live flesh-and-blood Las Vegas is finally washed all the way out.

Today, Utah. Tomorrow, the World. Actually Vegas.

2009-05-29T19:34:00.000-07:00

The Utah part of our trip is coming to an end. We will be saying goodbye to Big Love state and spending a night in, yes, Las Vegas. My first trip ever to Las Vegas, and I am spending it the same way I spent my first trip to UK and all my trips to Florida - with my family. It's getting harder, but I'm still not complaining.

I find it a little embarassing that I've lived in California all my life, lived in Los Angeles for five years, and know people who hop the state line all the time to see friends and family, and still I have not been to Las Vegas. My ex-boyfriend went once while we were dating and texted me saying 'We need to do a dirty weekend there one time.' A couple I know got married there, and I still hold a (petty, I know) grudge that I wasn't invited by them or any of our mutual friends. I know about the whole Lucky Luciano/Virginia Hill/Flamingo Hotel debacle from 1947. I've seen Sister Act, Austin Powers, Showgirls and that episode from season one of Six Feet Under where David gets gonorrhea from a male prostitute. I plan to see The Hangover on DVD at the latest. That's the closest I've come to the city where everything stays... in that city.

This is the trip where I bust my Vegas hymen. I don't know why, but it feels like a big deal. I'll say it: I feel lame. I feel like I should be hitting the strip with my man friends, getting really drunk and touching gogo dancers in their private areas. I want to meet a handsome stranger, or two, and go back to their hotel room. I want to not worry about editing myself in front of the people who bore me and are helping my pay for college. Vegas is the kind of place where you're never supposed to even think about that.

If I'm lucky, I'll either see a show or hit some 18-and-over club with my sister. I'm not saying it can't work, I'm just saying I'm not holding my breath. Maybe I could argue that this trip doesn't count. We'll have to see how it goes.

There is a silver lining to this Vegas trip. There's a great line at the end of the movie Hamlet 2 where Steve Coogan is imparting some words of wisdom to a Tuscon-born student: "You know, Chuy, you're going to have an amazing life. Because wherever you go, it'll always be better than Tuscon." I kind of feel like this trip will be a really great one, because whatever we do, we won't be doing it in Utah.

*Sassy*

Touch-Down in the Big Love State

2009-05-28T22:03:00.000-07:00

Today was the first day of a three-quarters of a week trip into the middle of those United States. It's a long story as to why I'm here, and just explaining the itirerary looses people, but suffice to say that I am, at the moment of this writing, in Cedar City, Utah, and twelve hours ago, I was in Burbank, waiting for a flight to Las Vegas.

Oh, and I'm with my family. And I've had a soar throat and dry, stuffy nose since Tuesday. I found myself saying "It hurts to swallow" to friends when they ask me how I am. They open their mouths to say something tacky about that. "Don't!" I say preemptively.

I'm not complaining. Really. This is what not complaining looks like.

One thing I'm definitely not complaining about is the scenery. We drove the 15 from Las Vegas through Mesquite and across the boarder to our current location, and the mountain ranges we passed through were truly stunning. My brother was trying to get me to watch the Robin Hood TV series (on MY laptop) but the only time I could take my eyes off of the a view outside the back passenger window for any extended length of time was the shirtless male bondage interlude in episode two.

I couldn't focus on the terrible dialogue and slightly better costumes. I was too busy planning my post-apocalyptic remake of 'Hidden Fortress,' to be shot in those amazing red and pink and beige hills. Plenty of shirtless male bondage oportunities there.

Cedar City closes up early, as I suspect most towns do in this part of the world. We stopped in a convenience store that closes at 10 PM. Before that, we were at a Mexican restaurant that closed at 9. The whole place seems to be devided into quadrants of track homes, each with a church in the center. Each church is red or brown with a white colonial spire. As far as I can tell, you can't really walk anywhere.

Watching Comedy Central in the hotel room, I have one question: Why are the Girls Gone Wild adds so loud and so freakin' long? Those aren't TV spots, those are . It's reassuring that, deep in the heart of Utah, you can still see them deviding up segments of The Colbert Report, South Park and The Daily Show. Wherever you go in America, you can still find Comedy Central. When the world ends, there will be cockroaches, Comedy Central and Starbucks.

The hotel has Comedy Central and Adult Swim. And a fitness center that's open twenty-four hours. I will get over this cold. I'm not complaining.

Studio Glamor

2009-05-20T15:51:00.000-07:00

I recently bought a hard-cover edition of the brand new Bonnie and Clyde biography Go Down Together by Jeff Gunn. Since I am (slowly) reading about five different books right now, I haven't gotten very far; I've covered Clyde's harrowingly destitute childhood, but that's about it. I can, however, already recommend it very highly as an engaging and well-written piece of historical literature.

Go Down Together gets extra brownie points for its nice collection of illustrations, mostly rare photographs that relate to the principals' early lives. One of my favorite pictures is a 1925 (or thereabouts) studio portrait of a teenage Bonnie Parker, an item the low-born girl would have had to really save up for. It's a gorgeous picture, and worth contrasting with the famous snapshots of her clowning around with a shotgun. Those pictures were taken about twelve years later, and you can see the effects of a stressful and difficult life on twenty-something Bonnie. The woman in those pictures had aged quickly and no longer had any illusions about life.

The photographic gem below was purchased the same day as the Hawaiian vacation group shot, and from the same vendor. I don't have any information on the woman, but the picture struck me with its simple beauty and wonderful little details (look at those sleeves!) as well as its clarity.

Matching Hats

2009-05-20T10:52:00.000-07:00

This was another pick from Sunday. Not quite worthy of submission to Awkward Family Photos, but close. The dour expression on the little girl is priceless.

Bad Ideas: 40's Teeth

2009-05-19T17:34:00.000-07:00

Here was a terrific find from Sunday's foray into snapshot hunting.

One thing I learned from this photo: Women with tragic grills tend to favor leopard collars (?!?) dramatic scream queen eyebrows (a given).

Also, I question the armchair upholstery. I know we can't see the whole thing with the Lois and Stewie in the way, but it just looks bunchy and unprofessional. That dashes to the rocks all my assumptions about the superiority of pre-1970 furniture.

The baby is adorable. How much you wanna bet those eyebrows turned him into a homosexual during his adolescence? There's a screenplay in there somewhere.

Flea Market Finds

2009-05-19T17:02:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday (the 17th) I went out in the morning and spent money on two things that, in my current financial state, I shouldn't be spending money on. Those things were a) brunch at Canter's and b) some old snapshots at the flea market over on Melrose and Fairfax.

I bought some other photographs along time ago (see the on other post from this month so far) from the same guy. He's an older guy, and always been their ever since I can remember. His relatively haphazard enterprise consists of a few tables of wide, shallow cardboard boxes filled with photographs. All kinds of photographs. Snapshots, slides, negatives, old ones and recent ones. For the most part, they are two for a dollar. Depending on how many you buy, you can go back and pick out a few more (I bought $9.00 worth, which entitled me to four additional freebees).

Everyone who was looking through the (college-age hipsters, a thin diminionative matron, a pair of well-to-do-looking Mexican guys) all had the same question about the merchandise: 'Why would anyone buy this stuff?' It's a reasonable question, especially since most of the pictures are recent, and bad. There's a reason they weren't wanted. If you aren't looking for something specific, and then even if you are, it can tend to blend together after a few minutes. I was trying to keep an open mind and, even though I'm happy with what I found, the process was like digging through several glossy color haystacks to find some decent black-and-white, aesthetically interesting needles.

I have no idea where this guy gets these pictures. I need to ask him next time, but I don't know if he'll tell. Something tells me that word would have gotten out and it would be part of Fairfax lore if he was open about it. You have to wonder where they come from though since most of them are clearly very recent. Like, literally from the 90's and 2000's. And they are terrible. They are unflattering. 80's hair and 90's makeup abound. Subjects are caught at embarassing angles or with their eyes forced closed by an unexpected flash. There are lots of pictures of peoples kids, which is creepy. The fact that these pictures are of people who are still alive is creepy. And I do wonder who buys them. I sudder to think what purposes they fill.

The question 'Why woudl anyone buy this stuff?' implies one of two questions, the real question that's on the asker's mind. The first of these would be the 'What do you do with them?' That's what diminutive matron asked me. I had to admit I didn't do much. I just like having them. Being the archivist I am, I could never think of incorporating them into a collage or cutting them up. And, with plenty of my own family photos back home in Palo Alto, I'm not in need of a new family history. I guess the other thing I could have said was 'I post them on my blog.' That would be true, but I don't want her to think I'm too pretentious. I care what total strangers think of me.

The one other question that people are really asking is 'What do you see in them?' What do you see in these old, faded, rejected pieces of ephemera, usually completely cut off from any context (I have found that it's rare to even find a year or a name written on the back). Apart from interesting clothes and hair, I find their appeal hard to pinpoint. I guess if anything I feel like I'm rescuing memories. Wanky, I know, but again it's the archivist in me. These pictures have been thrown out once. The disposal stops with me. I am happy to have them.

From My Collection

2009-05-12T19:55:00.000-07:00

I've been equal parts busy, uninspired and neglectful when it came to keeping up this blog over the past month. With my extended work trip up to the bay area and constantly shifting schedule back here (with a fair number of social engagements to provide distraction), posting snarky comments about hundred year old photos hasn't been anywhere near on my mind.

I promised I would post something from my own small collection of vintage snapshots, and I think I chose the right one. No real back story on this one. I got it on my last trip to the flea market on Fairfax. I have no idea who these people are. I wish I knew the story or even the year (my guess is c. 1915). Can anyone identify that steel bridge-structure behind them?

So there you have it: the first update in almost a month. (I feel so ashamed!) I thought this post would double nicely as a tribute to some friends (and they shall remain nameless by request) who will be visiting Hawaii. After all, those things around the woman in the center are unmistakably wearing lei's. Come to think of it, it can do triple duty by also paying tribute to some new friends (themselves Hawaii transplants) I acquired while staying in San Francisco about a month ago. Everyone wins!

There will be more posts like this in the future. However, I think I will try to diversify, and write about things other than old movies, old photos and old fashion.

When I Get Back

2009-04-22T18:58:00.000-07:00

I am really hoping to upload some photos from my own collection soon. This business of posting things that are already out in the internets is hardly optimal if I want anyone to read this blog. The other thing I would like to do is increase my web savviness by a smidgen. If anybody out there has some tips on where to find a good tutorial that will, say, show you how to make a word in a paragraph a highlighted link that also changes color once you've clicked on it (is that what you call it?) please let me know! All this, of course, will be much more easily done once I return from my brief exile from LA.

Award Deux

2009-04-21T20:06:00.000-07:00

I have nothing to write at the moment that is particularly insightful or provocative, so that means we're due for round two of Awards for Random Things. Once again, the fur collars have it!

Thank you google image search! When I make my epic movie about set in the late 1920's or early 30's, the one on the left will be a star, based solely on pelt count.

Well, time to go get sauced at a local bar on a week night with two of my favorite twenty-first century women.

Haha, Blackface.

2009-04-14T16:22:00.000-07:00

Today, I'm again playing that constant game of catch-up. It's been over a week since I blogged. Here now are, as promised, my thoughts on Check and Double Check, the Hammer/UCLA blackface offering from over a week ago.

Check and Double Check is an Amos n Andy movie, the only one, starring the radio performers who created the duo, Charles Correll and Freeman Gosdon. (the picture above is from the TV show) It's up to you to look it up since I don't want to waste space laying out the plot. In attendance was Correll's son, Richard, who unbeknownst to me (I'm ashamed) is a successful TV director and writer in his own right. Ever hear about this thing called Hannah Montana? He invented it. Seriously. Anyway, he got up and talked about his father, his father's partner in crime for thirty years and about the film.

Refreshingly, Correll made no apologies for the film. He shouldn't, but he's also a rare brave soul not to take the audience's hand in his and talk to them like a ten year old. An audience of adults at the Hammer Museum in Westwood, California, doesn't need to be reminded that the movie we are about to see contains subject matter that some people might find offensive. We are there because we know that already and just want to see the damn movie. Kudos to you, Mr. Correll.

Richard Correll's parting words were something like, "I'll probably be the only one laughing for most of this, but enjoy." The audience's reaction, however, was extremely positive, and the movie holds up really well, thanks in no small part to it having been made well and to surviving in its original form. The jokes are also way less dated than, say, a Marx Brothers movie where they make jokes about Abie's Irish Rose.

I'm going to go out on a limb here: This movie is not offensive! Its central characters are uneducated black men played by white men in blackface, but their relationship is complex and plays out with admirable subtlety and humanity. There's an especially moving scene where Amos learns that his own employer, who was like a father to him and Andy, has passed away. His reaction, even in the minstrel-y dialect, is heartfelt and moving.

I will also point out a scene where they have to spend a night in a haunted house. As fearful as they are of houses' alleged ghost, they are still able to work strategize and keep their cool. When somebody's coat tail gets caught in a door, they don't behave any differently than Edgar Kennedy or Laurel and Hardy would. For a 1930's comedy made by white people about black people, that's about as unoffensive as you can get.

One more thing to consider: Charles Correll and Freeman Gosdon were both known to be supportive of equality both in the recording studio and in the real world. A number of black performers, including Hattie McDaniel, go their start on the Amos n' Andy radio show. They were even lauded by the NAACP.

This movie was the first half of a double feature program. At the end of the second feature, a guy sitting near me and my cohorts asked us about Check and Double Check, which he had skipped because he didn't want to see a racist movie. We did our best to assure him, in a polite and round-about way, that he missed a well-made and interesting movie that had a lot more than that to offer than some politically incorrect makeup choices. We did our best to paraphrase what Richard Correll had said, but it didn't seem to change his mind.

As much as I want him to understand us, I can see where he's coming from. We all have our red flags that we can't see past. It's like opening a window for a bird stuck in a house, and all they could do was keep hitting their head on the wall space next to it. Certain accents make me wary of people. Certain word choices make me judge them. And yet I feel like, in America, blackface is one of those things that refuse, at this point, to get past. By its very nature, it has become territory that nobody dare cross into. In the previous night's show He Fell In Love with His Wife, Lydia Yeamans Titus played a brutish, rabble rousing Irish housekeeper, but nobody at that screening seemed to bat an eye. There is something so outrageous, so unnatural and invasive about blackface, that its very appearance cancels out its context. It made me sad that, outside from academic-filled screenings like this one, this sort of film was unlikely to see much appreciation, or at least be given the chance it deserves.

More Hammer and Comics

2009-04-06T16:47:00.001-07:00

I got a new job. Don't get excited, it's a one-day thing sorting my friend Kevin's comic book collection. Too bad it won't be a regular thing since it actually pays better than my last temp assignment.

Like most comic book people, my friend's backlog of comics is sprawling. He left me alone in his house for a few hours while he ran errands (was this wise? he will never know) but it did manage to plow through three long boxes, which were completely out of order, and sort everything into stacks. I kind of wish I had taken a picture.

The night before, I dragged the same friend to the Hammer to see something called He Fell In Love with His Wife, a VERY primitive movie from 1915. Those of you who are up with your 'who's who' in silent Hollywood annals will recognize the name of the director, William Desmond Taylor. Very few of his movies survive, and this particular one, which has been preserved, strikes me as not the best example of his work, although it has some nice moments. It suffers from many classic silent film problems: unbelievable plot (woman suffers amnesia after finding out her husband is a bigamist - well, I didn't buy it), really stiff acting and mugging at the camera, funny romantic scenes, precious few closeups. The lead actress, Florence Rockwell (below center), is kind of a butterface. It was, however, short (59 minutes), light on the reading, and Kevin described it as 'delightful.' As much as I enjoyed seeing it, too, it was the first time in a while that I've worried about whether or not my date was bored.

Tonight, the man's indulging me further and we're hitting a double feature: the Amos n' Andy comedy Check and Double Check (which promises to be a total cringe-fest), and another movie with a title that my friends have said is very me: Pointed Heels. Oh, how alluring. I wonder if the color sequence from that one (yes, THE color sequence) has been uploaded to youtube by the same magical wizard person who has access to scenes from 1931's illusive Dixiana. If so, I could steal it and make it part of my post tomorrow.

Clara Bow Endorses Nazis, Bland Millinery

2009-04-04T12:09:00.000-07:00

The things you learn about people you love just by putting them into google search! Seriously, I have no idea what got into this girl, but you can tell she knows it's a bad idea by the way she's slouching and only half-smiling. The execution of this outfit is so shoddy. The swastikas look so slapped on. It's like that time in The Simpsons when they had to give Malibu Stacy a makeover and all they come up with was that cheap hat. Sorry Clara. Your attempts to usurp Pola Negri and Lina Basquette have failed.

Bad Ideas: Swimwear

2009-04-02T16:16:00.000-07:00

Note the scalloped collar with matching cuffs (?!?), standing far left. Also, the feathered (?!?) bathing cap of the seated center girl. Also, intuition tells me that sausage curls don't hold up very well under moisture. Stay out of the surf, little miss Spanish shawl.

Mack Sennett Bathing Beauties, c. 1920. I don't know who's who but most of them look familiar. I really like the bowl cut, standing second from left.

Another bad idea: picking up strange women who wear triangular hats. You never know who they're bringing with them:

More Sennett girls. No date, circa 1918.

Jean Harlow Award for Excellence

2009-04-02T14:59:00.000-07:00

I wasn't sure of what to write about today. I need to post something, otherwise I will have failed in my mission as a blogger. There's a lot going on but I feel extremely disinclined to write about it. After all, if I tried to work my issues out here, what would I talk to my therapist about? Jean Harlow?

I needed an excuse for posting pictures on here. A blog does not survive on written words alone. Therefore, I am creating the award for excellence in a particular field. Like being photographed wearing something I like. I will post new winners at my discretion. I am pleased to announce that today's winner is...

Jean Harlow, for her Chewbacca costume! Actually, this outfit is fantastic, don't you think? I don't know which movie this is from but I'm assuming based on the hair, that it's one of her earlier films. This is quintessential Harlow right here. You can almost see where her face ends and her hair begins. Lord only knows how many sables were harmed in the making of this fantastic example of fur coat cubism.

Also, I'm including in this post a gag photo that is most definitely associated with Red-Headed Woman. I'm reluctant to pick a favorite Harlow movie, but this one is up there. The woman holding the bottle is Gentlemen Prefer Blonds author Anita Loos, who wrote RHW's fantastic screenplay. It's a good thing we're having a power outage. It forces me to go somewhere public and do constructive things, like look for a job and stuff. Otherwise, I might be compelled to pop in that 'Forbidden Hollywood' DVD and spend an hour shouting 'Can you see through this? I'm afraid you can miss. I'll wear it!' at my computer.

Hearst Metrotone Highlights

2009-03-30T13:34:00.000-07:00

Last night I attended a UCLA Film and Television Archive screening, part of their fourteenth annual lineup of recently preserved materials from their collection. The set of films they have this year is especially appetizing, and I urge you to try to check it out if you're in LA through April 26th. (A link will be posted below.) All screenings are presented at the Hammer Museum's terrific Billy Wilder Theater, with its immaculate acoustics and Pepto-Bismal-hued seats. You might also see famous people (I happened to be seated in the same row as Leonard Maltin).

For those of you who don't know, I kinda have a 'thing' for archive footage. Ok, it's more of an obsessive fetish. Last night's program title alone, SILENT AND EARLY SOUND FILMS FROM THE HEARST METROTONE NEWS COLLECTION (1919-30), was making me twitch. We were going to be seeing a group of news stories that had not been seen in 80 to 90-some years. Heaven! I apologized to my date, Shaun, in advance: "If I start spontaneously orgasming in the middle of this thing, it's ok to pretend you don't know me." He assured me he would.

The show was hosted by Jeffrey Bickel, Newsreel Preservationist for UCLA (and my new god), who had great notes for the each segment. The new stories were presented chronologically. The first batch of clips were silent and spanned 1919 through the mid 1920's, and had live piano accompaniment (sorry, pianist, I can't remember your name, but you did a great job!). The sound segments picked up in 1929 and a majority of them were from the following year (January to September). I can't remember all of them (there were over a hundred minutes of them) but below are a few highlights:

A never released obituary for Theodore Roosevelt, including shots of his wintry funeral procession and burial in Long Island. Right from the beginning, the footage was fascinating and the visual quality was extremely reassuring.
Several shots made in France following the armistice, including a victory parade. The crowd shots were incredible. There is also some extremely beautiful footage of US General Pershing leaving port in southern France (in one interesting, very human moment, somebody is helping him get something out of his eye with a handkerchief), and Victory parades in New York and Washington, DC, that deserve to be in every World War I documentary ever from now on. (Why can't I remember that guy's name? He was a big deal!)
"Women Besiege Capitol To Urge Suffrage Bills" which I recognized from documentaries like Prohibition: Thirteen Years that Changed America (which is worth seeing). The hats and furs are terrific in this one, though the title is overly sensational. I wouldn't say the well-dressed, slow moving caterpillar of lady protesters are 'besieging' the steps of Albany's capitol building. They are simply making their case. You go, ladies!
A ship that has run aground near Devon, England, gets pried out of its chasm prison. Many of the reels, both silent and sound, were tinted different colors. This one was tinted bright yellow.
The Wall Street crash of 1929, and a proclamation by Charles M. Schwab (not the Charles Schwab you're thinking of) set the sound era of Heart Metrotone off with a bang. Schwab talks about how everything is going to be fine, and there is no need to worry about the economy. I love the speeches and interviews from this period. The speakers never seem comfortable, they usually shout their speech at the camera, and it usually ends with them pausing awkwardly and asking the off-camera technicians if they are done. So human! So different from the ass puppets you see on the news today!
The interior of a black (!) Southern (!) schoolhouse during a 'war on illiteracy,' showing African American adults learning to read. This was one of my favorite pieces, mostly because it's so unexpected; real black people are rare enough in the movies around this time. Here they are in their natural habitat (that sounds bad). Plus there are great closeups on fashion (people really took pride in their appearance back then!) and they sing a gospel song at the end. Yeah, maybe somebody could argue that it's a little racist to include that. But you know what? It's also a valuable document of American cultural heritage. Plus I couldn't stop recalling the instructor on the car-ride home: "M...A...N! Again!"
A children's parade in central park where a little boy is named champion of a 'freckle' contest (cute), and a dower little girl dressed in bridal wear declares "I am the blushing bride" as if she's undergoing some sort of punishment (in my opinion, she definitely was).
The 'plainest girl' in DC (or was it New York?), twenty-something Dolly Gray, is made over by a set of 'beauty scientists' while an on-camera male commentator makes shockingly sexist remarks. The end result: Dolly models her new look awkwardly. She's cute enough with the marcel wave and all, but Shaun and me like her better with long, unprocessed hair, natural eyebrows and light smattering of freckles.
A demonstration of self-defense techniques by people with British accents. Cute.
Also in Britain, a prince opens a hospital for children with polio. During his speech, I kept thinking of Eddie Izzard talking about EastEnders ("We must go with our strange accents...").
Navy football players training and tackling each other. Just goes to show that football has always been America's great latent-homoerotic pastime, even without steroids.
A group of Japanese-American teenage girls do a song and dance number. Just goes to show that Asian girls have always been and always will be TOTALLY ADORABLE!
A guy jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge (for the second time, apparently). He says something to the newsreel camera and then gets a kiss from his stylish girlfriend, be-cloched and be-furred. Fun thirties fashion turn up so often when you least expect it!
Tennis champion Betty Nuthall defeating Virginia Wade. My first thought was "Finally, women's tennis without the porno noises," and I was not disappointed. Miss Nuthall accepted her trophy with class and humility. Another posh accent.
The beginning of an all-female airplane race in Long Beach, with no word on who won. And no cute flapper outfits either. Suddenly I want my money back.
The latest fashions from Paris, and all of them have some sort of fur piece, of course. Ok, I feel better now. The narration for the episode is by some woman with a French accent that is both heavy and fake-sounding. Unlike today's models, the mannequins in this segment look like they eat healthy meals. Like today's models, they all look a bit angry.
A women's fire brigade. For all the probably good intentions of the newsreel crew, the women seem a little foolish, fighting fires in 4-inch heels and cloche rain caps. Also, when you're going to fight a barn fire by spraying water through the front entrance, it's probably best to open both doors, rather than just one. That way, you won't spend most of the time spraying the door you left shut, and you won't get soaked by the back-splash. Just a thought.
Finally, I get to hear what Thomas Edison and Henry Ford sounded like, and all in one story! They are addressing a group of scholarship winners. Edison can barely stand or open his eyes, and mumbles as if he doesn't know what's happening to him. To be fair, he was 82 by then. Ford, however, is the complete opposite, on the other hand. One smooth oak spouting asinine stuff like 'There's no such thing as a lost opportunity,' I thought of Gary Cooper. An old Gary Cooper with big ears and an undying hatred for Jews.
Hiram Johnson yells at the camera about stuff. The benefits of isolationism, I think. He moves his around a little too much, and shouting even more than usual. 1930 seems early to be yelling about war anyway. Freckle boy and his contemporaries wouldn't get caught in the draft for another twelve years.
This wasn't the last piece, but it has to have been the most priceless: Two lion tamers get married in a cage, with their prized lions standing in as witnesses. As if this wasn't already a tacky idea, a handler at the beginning lets the trap door fall on the tiger's head as it steps into the cage. I don't know how audiences in 1930 would have processed that, but in this post-PETA zeitgeist, all of us in the Billy Wilder Theater let out a gasp, followed by a rumble of righteous indignation. The bride and groom (both really good-looking) are about as nervous and distracted as could be expected, but for at least as long as the camera and sound men were rolling, nobody's face was torn off.

How miraculous that all of this survives, when you consider how much has been lost or is missing. What a shame It's about as cliché a notion as can be had, but you realize just how true it is when you're walking through the Hammer's lobby, your butt just beginning to regain feeling after 100 minutes sitting on Barbie-pink leather, and images and sounds of another age playing themselves over and over in your head. A few people looked exhausted after the show, but Shaun and I were both jonesing for more.

Where does that leave us? Well, what we all have to do is throw some money at the National Film Preservation Foundation and wait for Treasures from American Film Archive Volume 87 to come out. If the films I see tonight get released on DVD, I can see myself doing what I always do whenever I procrastinate: Adding new titles to the Internet Movie Database. Wouldn't it be nice to search for titles like Good News for Homely Girls or Edison Welcomes ‘Brightest' Boys and not come up empty-handed? John James Brookhart has a filmography thanks to NFPF's efforts. Why not grant the same opportunity to the plainest girl of 1930, Dolly Gray?

A list of showtimes and program notes for UCLA Film and Television Archive's 14th Annual Festival of Preservation can be viewed here:
http://www.cinema.ucla.edu/