The New "petit journal du cinema"

2009-04-10T18:49:00.000-07:00

From Cahiers du Cinema December 1963/January 1964, the the American Cinema special issue:
In a discussion of the growing tendency in Hollywood to make films based on best-sellers, Jean-Luc Godard says:

"Even the life of Christ is adapted based on a best-seller and not directly from the Bible: they paid some guy four million dollars to amle the life of Christ"

The Italian? style

2008-03-14T11:03:00.000-07:00

In early 1957, the journalist/novelist Michel Cournot spent the entire shoot of Henri-Georges Clouzot's film Les Espions on the set. From that experience, he was able to bring forth Le premier spectateur; histoire vraie. This work could be called a "nonfiction novel" (to borrow a term which Truman Capoté used to describe his masterpiece of the genre In Cold Blood). The following scene where Clouzot prepares to rehearse two of his actors - Gérard Séty and Curt Jurgens - is translated from that book. (page 20, my translation)

"Today, we are going to rehearse in the Italian-style"
"The Italian-style?" Séty said.
"Yes, sitting in easy chairs. Only the text. . ."
"The Italians are incapable of rehearsing in the Italian-style," said Jurgens, "they are too restless! Only the English can rehearse in the Italian-style."

Marin Karmitz on Alain Resnais

2008-03-13T19:26:00.000-07:00

This is quoted from the interview with producer Marin Karmitz on the DVD for Alain Resnais's film Mélo. It is spotted at about 3:40 into that interview.

I saw Alain arrive. He's very shy. How can I explain? He respects others, and his terrible shyness is due to his respect for others. It's very impressive and interesting because it's his respect for others that makes respectable himself. With him exchanges are intense due to his attitude of respect and trust.

Curtis Harrington anecdote concerning James Whale

2007-12-17T18:50:00.000-08:00

This anecdote is reported by Curtis Harrington in the documentary Universal Horror which is on Disc Two of the Frankenstein Anniversary 75th Edition concerning the film's preview in 1931.

"After the preview, he [Frankenstein's director James Whale] was sound asleep about 3 AM when suddenly the phone rang from the desk and they said, 'It's someone wants to speak to you, Mr. Whale'. And a voice came on and said, 'Are you the guy that directed that picture that they showed tonight'? And he said, 'Yes'. He said, 'Well I can't sleep and I'll be god-damned if I'm going to let you sleep'."

This anecdote occurs at about 49:37.

Noel Coward learns a lesson in privilege

2007-11-11T12:55:00.000-08:00

I do not have any documentation for this anecdote. It is one that I remember Noel Coward tell on Dick Cavett's late night talk show on ABC in the early 70s.

When Fiorello LaGuardia was mayor of New York City, Coward attended the opening night performance of a play involving a close friend of his. After the performance, he went to the telegraph office in Times Square to send the friend a mock congratulatory telegram. He signed the telegram "Fiorello LaGuardia". When the clerk for Western Union saw the signature, he told Coward that there was a company policy requiring that all telegrams be signed by the sender. So, Coward crossed out LaGuardia's name and wrote down "Noel Coward" in its place. The clerk then said to Coward that the problem was not that he had used LaGuardia's name but that he had not signed his own name. Coward told the clerk, "But I am Noel Coward". And the clerk said to him. "In that case, you can sign it Fiorello Laguardia"

The fleeting fame of James Cagney

2007-11-10T09:28:00.000-08:00

Frank "Pop" Mankiewicz, the father of director Joseph L Mankiewicz and screenwriter Herman Mankkiewicz was a high school teacher and later college professor in New York City. One of his students had the actor James Cagney. This anecdote is quoted from Pictures will talk : the life and films of Joseph L. Mankiewicz by Kenneth L. Geist.(page 107)

Joe loves to tell the story of how James Cagney, at the height of his thirties stardom, had stopped by their table at the Brown Derby one evening to pay his respects to his former Stuyvesant High School teacher. Pop's dedication to his academic pursuits had left him little time for seeing movies other than those made by his sons. In response to Cagney's query about whether the professor remembered him, Pop replied, "Yes, indeed, Mr. Cagney. Tell me, what are you doing now? "

Materialism and The Razor's Edge

2007-10-27T17:10:00.000-07:00

from The Secret Life of Tyrone Power by Hector Arce

The studio boasted that a record one hundred shooting days were spent on the production: its budget $4.000.000 including $250,000 for the screen rights to [Somerset] Maugham's book. It built eighty-nine sets costing $641,800 and gathered $800,000 worth of props to be used, including so much silver for a wedding scene that two Pinkerton men were hired to guard it during the filming. A single love scene between Ty [Power] and Gene Tierney cost $121,000, the studio proudly proclaimed. For the first time since the days of silent films, an orchestra was engaged to play on the set during rehearsals, to get the stars into the proper mood. The love scene was accompanied by Strauss waltzes; Clifton Webb died to funeral airs.
Overlooked was the contradiction in all this, the concerns for sumptuous settings in a film about irrelevance of materialism.

A Vincent Sherman anecdote

2007-10-17T08:52:00.000-07:00

from director Edward Dmytryk On Filmmaking (Boston : Focal Press, c1986) page 198-199.

Vincent Sherman once made a film with Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins, two of Hollywood's more headstrong actresses. I once aked him whether he had enjoyed directing them. "I didn't direct them," he said. "I referreed."

A History Lesson for Sacha Guitry

2007-09-26T19:09:00.000-07:00

from Sacha Guitry: the last boulevardier by James Harding (volume 2, page 239)

"Who, in your opinion, is the greatest historian?" Sacha [Guitry] once asked a man who was a very distinguished historian himself. "The archives", came the answer.

The Walt Disney

2007-08-19T19:37:00.000-07:00

This is an amusing anecdote from Walt Disney The Triumph of the American Imagination by Neal Gabler published in 2006 (page 282-283).

But as preoccupied as he [Walt Disney] was, when it came to Diane and Sharon [Walt Disney's daughters], he was a doting father who sheltered them from his own fame. He enjoyed telling how six-year-old Diane had asked him if he was Walt Disney. "You know I am," he answered. "The Walt Disney?" she questioned. When he chortled that he was, she asked for his autograph.

François Truffaut on Boby Lapointe

2007-08-12T19:35:00.000-07:00

This anecdote is from a memoir by François Truffaut of Boby Lapointe, the French pop singer who had appeared in Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player, whose Provençal accent was so thick that they had to put subtitles in French for the audience in France. Truffaut admits in the article that he made up the name "Rosembach" for the sake of his story. It was published in Truffaut’s Le Plaisir des yeux and is my translation. The actual film in question is a spaghetti-western title Chapaqua.

Later Boby [Lapointe] became an actor. I saw him in Les Choses de la vie. Then i met him one night at Orly Airport. He was waiting for a plane for Rome where he was going to act in a film. His Provençal accent was still preserved, contrasted by the anxiety in his regard. I asked him about the film he was to play in. "I don't know -- it's called Rosembach."
"Do you have a good role? Are you happy?"
"I don't know. I don't understand anything in the contract. Take a look."
I looked his contract over and I saw that Boby Lapointe was engaged to take the role of . . . Rosembach. He had the title role and he did not know it.

Mr Attal, meet Mr Mankiewicz

2007-06-14T10:05:00.000-07:00

Yvan Attal Joseph Mankiewiczat 1:16 of the interview of Yvan Attal on the DVD for Ils se marièrent et eurent beaucoup d'enfants (Happily Ever After).which he wrote and directed as well as starred in with his wife Charlotte Gainsburg.

When I started to write I wanted to make a film with just three men. Maybe just seen in restaurants, in bars, at work, talking about their lives, without woman. But suddenly, I wrote that scene in the restaurant when the three guys are together and I didn't know, I didn't have a plan, a structure, you know, I just went to write, just like that, a scene, a scene, another scene. and suddenly, I wrote this scene in the restaurant and the guy --- the three men are there and they run into a woman he sees at school. so they have a conversation, a funny conversation about how to fluff(?) with this woman (indecipherable) and he says, "What do you know about married woman?" And at the moment when I wrote that dialogue I wanted to cut to Charlotte’s character and I imagined the scene at the Virgin mega-store. after I wrote that scene I realized that she was the character that I wanted to follow now. I didn’t care about the men.

From Kenneth Geist's Pictures Will Talk a biography of the writer-director of All About Eve and A Letter to Three Wives, Joseph L. Mankiewicz. (page 168) Mankiewicz speaking at a conference in Tarrytown NY in November of 1972
All About Adam could be done as a short.

Jacob Bronowski on Johnny von Neumann

2007-05-19T18:41:00.000-07:00

from the companion book to the BBC series from the early 1970s, The Ascent of Man, by Jacob Bronowki concerning the mathematician Johnny von Neumann.

"There was endearing and personal about Johnny von Neumann. He was the cleverest man I ever knew. And he was a genius, in the sense that a genius is man who has two great ideas. When he died in 1957 it was a great tragedy to us all. And that was not because he was a modest man. When I worked with him during the war, we once faced a problem together, and he said to me at once, "Oh no, no, you are not seeing it. Your kind of visualising mind is not right for seeing this. Think of it abstractly. What is happening on this photograph of an explosion is that the first differential coefficient vanishes identically, and that is why what becomes visible is the trace of the second differential coefficient."
As he said this is not the way I think. However, I let him go to London. I went off to my laboratory in the country. I worked late into the night. Round about midnight I had the answer. Well. Johnny von Neumann always slept very late, so I was kind and I did not wake him until well after ten in the morning. When I called his hotel in London, he answered the phone in bed, and I said, "Johnny, you're quite right." And he said to me, "You wake me up early in the morning to tell me that I'm right? Please wait until I'm wrong."
If it sounds very vain, it was not. It was a real statement of how he lived his life. And yet it has something in it that reminds me that he wasted the last years of his life. He never finished the great work that has been very difficult to carry on since his death. And he did not really, because he gave up asking himself how other people see things. He became more and more engaged in work for private firms, for industry, for government. They were enterprises which brought him to the centre of power, but which did not advance either his knowledge or his intimacy with people - who to this day have not yet got the message of what he was trying to do about the human mathematics of life and mind." (Page 433-435)

some ideas from Robert Altman

2007-05-15T19:00:00.000-07:00

some thoughts from Robert Altman on the documentary "Robert Altman : Art and Soul" which is on the "Fool for Love" DVD.

at 13:40
"I don't know of anything that I've done that has really been original I mean that just came out of ether, it's always been, there's been a stimulus from something else that I've seen."

at 14:45
"I purposely don't go into a project that I know how to do. . .I'm afraid I'd be late for work."

at 18:35
"If an actor comes up to me and says, 'Oh, how should I play this part.' I will do anything except answer that question."

A tale from Jesse Lasky Jr.

2007-05-08T17:31:00.000-07:00

In 1927, producer Jesse Lasky who was making a film about Teddy Roosevelt's "Rough Riders" outfit of the Spanish-American War conducted a nation-wide search for a TR look-alike to take on the role of the hero of San Juan Hill. Lasky's net trawled up a man named Frank Hopper. But when production of the film started, it became too apparent that the mild-mannered Hopper was not up to re-enacting the "bully" Roosevelt. Well, there was no turning back after all the publicity surrounding the casting of Hopper. So, what to do? In his book "Whatever Happened to Hollywood?", Lasky's son, screenwriter and novelist, Jesse Lasky Jr. tells the story:

"At that moment the door was opened by a slender graying man of distinguished bearing: Will Hays, former postmaster general in President Harding's cabinet, now embarking in the 100,000 a year post of custodian of motion picture morals (to improve the national image after a few too many scandals had begun to hurt business).
"Can I come in, Jesse?"
"Glad to see you general. We have a large problem."
Hays listened, a spark showing through his glinting eyes. He looked like Uncle Sam minus the beard. When the dilemma had been aired, he spoke.
"This may been out of the far end of the diamond, Jess, but there's a simple fundamental that might apply. so basic people forget it. A man reacts the way the world treats him. Other people are his mirror, he becomes what he sees in the way they look at him. Try it out on him. Get Hopper in here, now! Instead of letting him see how worried you are, introduce him to me with the greatest respect. I'll act as though I'm meeting Roosevelt himself."
. . .
When Hopper arrived, Hays proved at once he knew how to play the required scene. He had learned how with real presidents in his Washington days. when the would-be Roosevelt came cowering into the office, eyes darting nervously around, my father began with near reverence, "General, I have the honor of presenting Theodore Roosevelt."
"proud to make your acquaintance, sir." hays responded with a formal bow. "May, I say. sir. the resemblance is perfect? But more than merely physical. I can see you have the same fearless nature, the same character and patriotism. You are the kind of man who would meet the challenge of the war with the words, 'Let us pray with our bodies for our souls' desire.'" Then he turned to my father. "Mr. Lasky, as former postmaster general of the United States, I count this as a proud moment, and I thank you for the honor of meeting this man."
Astonished at first, the new treatment hit Hopper like a bolt form the blue. Red, white and blue. As he left the office and everyone rose, it could be noted that his posture had undergone a subtle
change. His head was more erect, his step had acquired the slightest suggestion of a strut.
Orders were relayed throughout every department of the studio: The movie Roosevelt was to be treated as though he were the real T. R. As told in my father's biography, by Don Weldon, I Blow My Own Horn, this was one of the rare occasions where grips, juicers, cameramen, assistant directors - everyone, in fact, but the star - was performing to the hilt.
Unfortunately, the wormed turned too far. Under this ego-massage, the simple smalltown storekeeper became almost unmanageable. The man was submerged by the megalomaniac monster demanding total attention, obsequious respect, demanding that every scene should receive his signature of approval before he would film it.

page 60-61 of Whatever Happened to Hollywood? by Jesse Lasky Jr.

Norman Jewison on multiple screen editing

2007-05-03T18:53:00.000-07:00

from Norman Jewison's commentary for his 1968 film "The Thomas Crown Affair".
at 06:22 into the film.

"We were trying to tell five stories at the same time. And so we all went up to the Montreal World's Festival just before we started the film and that's where we were exposed to [Christopher] Chapman's multiple-screen technique which was shown there for the first time in Habitat. And Haskell [Wexler] and myself and Hal Ashby we got so excited because in Chapman's film "A Place to Stand" there was something like 40 minutes of film and it was shown in 17 minutes because of the multiple screens and we realized that the eye is the only selective organ in the body. And therefore you could take in more than one image at the same time as long as there wasn't a lot of sound."

Andre Kertesz quotes

2007-04-30T19:14:00.001-07:00

transcribed from "Masters of Photography. André Kertész" [videorecording] West Long Branch, NJ : Kultur, 2006.

The narrator says quoting Kertesz (at 15:33 into the film) "In my own work I am an amateur", he once told a reporter. "And I intend to remain one. I avoid virtuosity. When I have found the subject which interests me, I leave for the lens the responsibility for recording the image, faithfully."

Kertesz himself speaking (at 24:43) "I never know what I am doing. I am going out without thinking photographing. I am going around. . .see something that will give me the idea. I do."

Alain Renoir on his father,(Jean) Renoir

2007-04-19T16:03:00.000-07:00

Alain Renoir was the son of the film director Jean Renoir. In the late 1930s while still a teenager Alain Renoir worked as an assistant cameraman for his father on The Rules of the Game and The Human Beast. He left for the United States during World War II and he became a professor of English at the University of California -- Berkeley. These are transcription from an interview he gave in 2003 for the Criterion DVD of The Rules of the Game.

from 11:00 to 13:35 in the interview.

"When the first World War broke out, my father was a career non-commissioned officer in the military, the French Calvary - the Dragoons. and some of the effect that he cavalry had upon him can be seen in his films. For instance, he repeated to me over and over again that in the cavalry their was no such thing as a white horse or a black horse -- it did not exist -- in the cavalry a white horse was a light gray horse and a black horse was a dark gray horse....Well, if you think for a second you can see that that applies to everything he did. You have nothing that is just straightforward and cut-and dried. People are always a little bit of this and a little bit of that."
"My father had a knack for getting people to do exactly what he wanted. Pretending for them and for himself that it was not the case. For instance, he would say to the actor, "This is wonderful, this is absolutely wonderful. But you know it may be fun to try something else. Never saying it was lousy. And eventually I knew damned well where it was going. It would be the same thing with his cameraman. He would say, "Oh this shot is wonderful. You know it might be interesting to try it in a slightly [inaudible]way". But he never told them that is what I want done."
"I will tell you an anecdote that for obvious reasons I will not give you the name. On one particular occasion, I had heard a certain actor spouting the movie and it was obviously totally wrong. Well that night I went back home and my father and I met at the door of the apartment and I said, "Oh dad, this guy I'll call him X said that-and-that. He completely doesn't understand the movie. I think you should tell him" And my father turned to me and said, "Don't you say a word to him. When an actor understands his part in a play or a movie, he can no longer play it."

Acting with Marlon Brando

2007-04-17T07:40:00.000-07:00

from Richard Shickel's biography of Elia Kazan. His fellow performers on acting with Marlon Brando in "A Streetcar Named Desire".

Kim Hunter
"It is," she admitted, "a tremendous experience to play in relationship to him; he yanks you inot his own sense of reality." Her example was the trunk scene, with Brando going through Blanche's clothes while Stella tries to protect them from his furious routings. "He had a different sort of attitude toward each of his belongings every night; sometimes he would lead me inot quite a fight with him, and other times I'd be seeing him as a silly boy. I got worn out after many months in the play, but I never got bored. . ." (page 180)

Jessica Tandy
"I can say I enjoyed acting with him sometimes and other times, God knows, I could have wrung his little neck." (page 179)

Karl Malden
"I learned to protect myself. I played off him. I let him do whatever he wanted to do and I'd go from there." (page 179)

Fellini, on fumetti

2007-04-11T15:08:00.000-07:00

In November of 1965, Cahiers du Cinema published a short interview with Federico Fellini on the subject of comic strips -- fumetti in Italian. Fellini had worked in comic strips before he began his film career. One revelation of the interview was that Fellini was a fan of "Charley Brown" and "B C". Among other things, Fellini had this to say,

The fumetti which borrow too freely from cinematic technique are for me the least beautiful, the least artistic.I remain sentimentally attached to the very simple, linear fumetti which are nearly always humorous. It was cinema which borrowed from them. Some settings of Chaplin, some characters, frame in a medium long shot, are truly borrowed from George McManus and his "Bringing up Father" and from the adventures of the "Katzenjammer Kids". The fumetti which merit popularity are those which inspired the cinema and not those which borrowed too skillfully from it

Cahiers du Cinema (Page 15 November 65)

Albert Dieudonne and Napoleon's ghost.

2007-03-19T16:17:00.000-07:00

Transcribed from the subtitles on Cinema Europe : the other Hollywood (Photoplay Productions ; directed and produced by David Gill & Kevin Brownlow ; written by Michael Winterbottom, Dan Carter) Albert Dieudonné who played Napoleon in Abel Gance's classic silent film about that legendary emperor, tells this story of going to Fountainebleau castle and a visit that he paid in costume to on of its night-watchmen who was forever claiming to be visited by the ghost of Napoleon.

"I flung open the door. I was in uniform and I said, "Asleep on duty, Matat?" The poor fellow woke up completely bewildered, rubbed his eyes and stared at me. Then I went. Next day, he told the curator D'Esparbes about it. He confessed that in the past he'd been joking a little but this time he'd really seen Napoleon. Unfortunately, the poor soul died eight days later and I may have been one of the causes."

Franz Kline anecdote Elaine de Kooning

2007-02-01T17:42:00.000-08:00

On the TV broadcast Franz Kline Remembered, Elaine de Kooning tells the story of how in Greenwich Village in the late 1930s artists such as Kline would live primarily on heavily sugared coffee. Kline was taking care of the German Shepherd of a friend of his who had left New York for a time. One day, Kline came home and found the dog dead on the floor with a half eaten bar of soap next to its body. Elaine de Kooning says that Kline's reaction was, "It just shows you that a bohemian can survive where an animal can not."

A little Seinfeld wisdom

2007-01-31T18:57:00.000-08:00

From the Seinfeld episode The Understudy. A distraught Elaine Benes shambling around on a rainy night jostles a man with an umbrella. He is J Peterman. They have this exchange.

Elaine: Oh, God! I'm so sorry. I don't even know where I'm going.

J Peterman Well that's the best way to get some place you've never been

.

The thought just passed through my head but:

2007-01-28T05:54:00.000-08:00

Has a reading of Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead" ever inspired anyone to become an architect?
.
.

Richard Matheson on the (incredible) Shrinking Man

2007-01-17T07:30:00.000-08:00

This short exchange is lifted from an interview with the novelist- screenwriter Richard Matheson (IMDb page) which appears on a site hosted by the Rod Serling Memorial Foundation.

RM: Yes, because I waited until they wanted my novel! There are other ways to do it now, but back then I think that was the best way. My book was not called the Incredible Shrinking Man (as it if is often referred to), it was just called The Shrinking Man. The phrase Incredible Shrinking has became part of the American language. I just saw it in Weekly Variety yesterday.

WS: In other words the producer added it to the title.

RM: Yes. My feeling is, it’s already pretty incredible that a guy is shrinking! Why add the adjective?