19 thoughts on “Hollywood Is No Respecter of Culture”

1. Re: Dance Marathons –

   http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi2130510105

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2. think Chicago—-the blues brothers

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3. Mark,

   “Vanity Fair” had a good piece last year on the making of that movie. It was by no means a sure thing. Belushi was notoriously hard to contain at that point. It ended up being the #10 box office of 1980. It’s one of those movies that if you run across it on cable you are compelled to watch it.

   http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2013/01/making-of-blues-brothers-budget-for-cocaine

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4. I may have said it before, but Unforgiven transcends the Western genre. Violence is real. It’s problematic, with a genuine moral component. And there are character studies, as the Clint Eastwood character tries to reform, a young gunslinger discovers it’s not all fun and games, and a big-talking wannabe gets his bluff called. This one isn’t a comic book. Sample dialogue:

   The Schofield Kid: “It don’t seem real… how he ain’t gonna never breathe again, ever… how he’s dead. And the other one too. All on account of pulling a trigger.”

   Bill Munny: “It’s a hell of a thing, killing a man. Take away all he’s got and all he’s ever gonna have.”

   The Schofield Kid: “Yeah, well, I guess they had it coming.”

   Bill Munny: “We all got it coming, kid.”

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5. If you upgrade to dogs, you might find a creature easier to herd.

   Then again I like a cat’s independence and sometimes a dog’s neediness is a bit much (although mine has been ignoring me all night and this is somewhat disconcerting. I think she misses the mrs.)

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6. Why doesn’t writing about the past make our regrets go away?

   “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. And then one fine morning— So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

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7. Tombstone is still the GOAT in my humble opinion….

   favorite scene

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8. Ken, it’s like CtC super-apostles vs. OL disciples. What’s it likes to be epistemologically and culturally awesomesauce? I tip my tin cup.

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9. The producer Saul Zaentz has died.

   http://literatecomments.com/2014/01/05/saul-zaentz-producer-of-oscar-winning-movies-dies-at-92/

   Among his films, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”, the most European-looking American film ever made.

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10. Frankie may have been able to sing, but he and the rest of Hollywood apparently can’t do Math. 3501 hours of dancing in 145 days (the stats are accurately quoted from both Mr Laine’s own website and IMDb) works out to a little more than 24 hours a day of dancing…

    Still, simply dancing for any length of time for 145 consecutive days is an impressive feat, and one unlikely to be matched by any reader of OL.

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11. If James Wolcott were Reformed rather than being a lapsed Catholic, he would definitely be an Old Lifer:

    http://literatecomments.com/2014/01/05/lucking-out-my-life-getting-down-dirty-in-seventies-new-york-by-james-wolcott-is-a-lot-of-fun/

    I recently wrapped up James Wolcott’s memoir, “Lucking Out – My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York.” It is flat out one of the funnest & funniest books I’ve ever read.

    Wolcott, a frequent-contributor to “Vanity Fair” magazine got his start as a writer with the “Village Voice” in New York City is the 70s on the strength of a recommendation from Norman Mailer. While a sophomore at Frostburg State in Western Maryland Wolcott had written a piece about Mailer’s appearance on “The Dick Cavett Show” for the school paper and decided to send the piece to Mailer. Mailer wrote back, “I think you have a career”. Wolcott decided to drop out and move to NYC. “It was so clear-cut, what he was saying, that I couldn’t from that moment imagine my future heading any other way.”

    The first (of five) parts of the book covers his time at the Voice, working his way up from the subscription department to (at least part-time) writer. Wolcott says of his time at the paper, “I don’t regret my days in gladiator school. Having your ego slapped around a bit helped the blood circulate and would prove a superb conditioning program for a future sub-career in blogging, where a tough hide would come in handy every time the Hellmouth opened. Every time I’m abused online with a battery of scurrilous remarks of a personal nature, I’m able to let them bounce off like rubber erasers, having been called an asshole by professionals, experts in the field.”

    Eventually Wolcott was fired by a boss who had not hired him. He landed on his feet however. “Released from duty, I drew unemployment and used my ejection time to write full out, placing pieces at not only the Voice but at rock magazines such as Circus, where I interviewed Todd Rundgren, then at the height of his musical wizardhood with attitude to match. From that point on I never worked a regular office job again, solely writing for a living, something that would have been impossible if New York hadn’t been a city of low rents and crappy expectations that didn’t require a trust fund or a six-figure income for the privilege of watching everything fall apart before your eyes.”

    At the end of the first part we get a hint of what is to come in the second. “One day I was puttering around the apartment, trying to unstick one of the drawers in my captain’s bed, washing a fork, who knows, when the phone rang. I picked it up and heard a voice that carried a ripple of laughter even as it said hello. “Hi, you’re a hard person to get ahold of. It’s Pauline Kael.”

    In part two Wolcott describes his time hanging out with Kael, the prominent film critic for The New Yorker Magazine. Of Kael he says, “The liberal arts are what she liberally pursued. She was an opera fan, a jazz enthusiast, and a pop music appreciator (she grasped immediately what made the Talking Heads compelling, whereas John Simon walked out fifteen minutes into the screening of Stop Making Sense, Jonathan Demme’s concert film of the Heads).”

    Kael had read and enjoyed a few of Wolcott’s Voice pieces and they appeared to have hit it off immediately. They attended screenings together. “Pauline was still riding the crest of the crescendo that was Deeper Into Movies (1973), the collection of reviews that stamped her name as the most important and embattled film critic in America, her championing of The Godfather, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Cabaret, Steven Spielberg’s Sugarland Express (when most critics preferred Terrence Malick’s Badlands) helping augur the seventies resurgence of American cinema that left us such beautiful scars and drizzly haze. It was a feudal age of film criticism too, when criticism retained the ability to make readers mad in both senses of the word, angry-mad and crazy-mad, with popular opinionists such as Judith Crist and Rex Reed, and deep-dish ponderers such as Vernon Young (the Hudson Review), William S. Pechter (Commentary), and Charles Thomas Samuels (an academic freelancer whose mentor was John Simon, then at the unpopular height of his Dracula impersonation) making every major studio release or prestige European import a debatable proposition, the basic terminology setting a dividing line.”

    Of Kael, Wolcott says, “Like Norman Mailer, Pauline was more exasperated by leechy, well-intentioned liberals trying to set everything in proper order than by outright antagonists.”

    They didn’t always see eye-to-eye. At a showing of Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900, “a pseudo-Marxist epic of oppression, decadence, and revolt that also revealed to the world Robert De Niro’s penis in its raw, shy state of nature. Gerard Depardieu’s too, though that may have been previously exposed”, Wolcott walked out between parts one and two while Kael stayed. “As Part One neared its climactic end, one of the inbred decadents in the film – played by Donald Sutherland with all the dementia at his disposal, which was a lot – tied a wriggling kitten to the wall, and I said to Pauline, ‘If anything happens to that cat, I’m outta here.’ After a beat to build up a sense of apprehension, Sutherland bashed the kitten with his head, killing it. I’m sure the killing was faked, but that was enough for me, I’d had it, and I didn’t return for Part Two.”

    Part Two of the book is long, informative, and frequently funny. Of George C. Scott’s The Savage is Loose, “a Robinson Crusoe tale of primitive survival with an incest angle” Wolcott reports, “Lubitsch humor had no place in the Darwinian allegory that was like Gilligan’s Island goes Lord of the Flies. ” Predictably, the movie bombed.

    In Part Three, “Punk”, Wolcott writes about covering the rock music beat in seventies NYC – especially the music being played at his primary hangout, Hilly Kristal’s CBGB’s. Patti Smith, Television (fronted by Tom Verlaine), the Ramones, the Runaways, Talking Heads (one of my favorite groups going back to the early 1980s), the B-52s.

    Wolcott also includes some interesting memories of the rock critic Lester Bangs.

    And, of course, the humor continues:

    “When the Late Show and Channel 13/PBS co-produced an arts program called Edge, though public television being public television, whatever “edge” there was was soon filed away by the genteel overseers of caution under the Emasculation Proclamation that seemed to be PBS’s primary directive.”

    and,

    “Same for the Beats – they were a self-aware, self-promoting lore syndicate whose exploits still inspire hipster doofuses today, at least those who forswear irony. Lore is publicity that lasts long after there’s nothing left to publicize.”

    on a return visit CBGB’s years later, Wolcott recalls:

    “I descended to the bathrooms downstairs, and they were just as Dantesque as ever, the stall-less toilet resting like a debauched throne, like the only thing left after a lightning bolt had blackened everything else to cinders and char. I experienced the tender awe amid this necropolitan splendor that had managed to be left alone, raising itself with minor supervision, as punk itself had.”

    In Part Four – “Bodily Contact” – Wolcott turns his attention to the seemingly incongruous subjects of seventies porn and his unexpected romance with – wait for it – ballet.

    He begins the chapter with the story of a female friend who knew her marriage was over when she came home and found her husband watching a porn movie with his brother:

    “I shared my friend’s revulsion – I hadn’t met her husband but had always assumed he was a snake, based on credible hearsay coming mostly from her (she is now happily remarried) – but for me the real mind-boggler of the story was that this skink had been watching a porn move with his brother. I have three brothers of my own, and I couldn’t imagine settling in with a snack tray and watching a wankeroo with any one or any combination of them – how tarantula-crawling, the very idea. What if mom found out? The very prospect made one crinkle inside. No, I maintained a more traditional attitude. As far as I was concerned, porn was to be enjoyed solely within the privacy of your own shame and guilt, or among strangers, unable to identify you from police suspect photos.

    That’s how the seventies raised me, one of the enduring values they endured.”

    Why porn? Wolcott explains:

    “As with punk, my formal indoctrination into the porn funnel had begun with a Village Voice assignment. I was doing an essay on the eroticization and exploitation of young girls that puddle-jumped from Lewis Carroll’s photographs to Lolita to Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver to Brooke Shields in Pretty Baby to wherever the last station stop in the piece ended up being. I needed to check out rumors that illegal underage porn was being openly sold in Times Square adult video stores and started scouting the aisles. It didn’t take much scouting.”

    The work on the article appears to have led to at least a mild form of porn addiction for Wolcott:

    “I filed the piece, a responsible-toned cultural-reporting essay that avoided tabloid sensationalism and easy moralizing (it was not a subject suited for flippancies, that I knew going in). But after the article was printed I continued dropping into Times Square (and by ‘dropping in’ I mean just happening to be in the slummy vicinity after making a trip expressly for that very purpose), making the irregular rounds of the theaters enough to be as up on the latest trends in smut as a racetrack tipster.”

    He goes on:

    “I intermittently haunted Times Square and it haunted me, the place exerting a pull even as it deadened the nerves, nerve deadening being part of the pull. Porn has all the attributes of junk, wrote Norman Mailer, and I interpreted his use of ‘junk’ not simply as a synonym for trash but as a slang term for heroin and any other hook-sinking hijacker of body and soul.”

    Wolcott makes the point, humorously, of course, that porn addiction may be even less socially acceptable than substance addiction:

    “I was once at an AA meeting in which one of the regulars received a customary round of applause for saying how long he’d been nicotine free, yet another for having giving up caffeine, but when he topped it off by announcing it had been three months since he had masturbated to porn or images in his head, I was the only one who began to clap, stopping my hands in midair.”

    Eventually Part Four shifts from porn to ballet and Wolcott tells us how he became a somewhat unlikely devotee, given his background:

    “Perhaps ballet personified all of the nice things denied me up to then (by no one in particular, by the luck of the draw), things I thought I didn’t feel I deserved, and in certain moods still don’t. Without realizing it until the fug was washed off my windshield, I had grown up Beauty-deprived, a word I’m capitalizing to differentiate it from the beauty of a flower or the beauty of a sunset or the beauty of a smiling face or any of those other Kodak moments to paste in our memory books and tell ourselves are enough; and they’re not. They’re not genius-blessed. They’re not Bach, they’re not Balanchine, they’re not Geoffrey Beene.”

    Of seeing Baryshnikov for the first time he says:

    “It was there that I saw Baryshnikov’s first rabidly awaited performances and received a tutorial in star power as paradigm shifter.”

    At the conclusion of the chapter Wolcott reveals:

    “I go to the ballet now. I’m married to a dance critic, something that just had to be, and in the corridors and lobby and on the balcony overlooking the Lincoln Center square and geysering fountain, there are different girl dancers shadow-boxing now, marking what they’ve just seen, and yet they’re the same girls, replenished. I love being able to look at them with unwanting eyes and careful not to look too long, looks so being easily mislaid.”

    In The fifth and final part of the book, “What Are You Doing Here?”, Wolcott wraps up his memoir by looking at the year 1979, using Woody Allen’s follow-up to Annie Hall, 1979′s Manhattan, to get the ball rolling:

    “For those of us who lived in New York in the seventies and felt as if this is where our real lives began despite wherever it was we were marking time before, the opening montage of Woody Allen’s Manhattan – the city photographed by Gordon Willis in a black-and-white panorama of enshrining shadows and blinking signs; the elevated subway inching like a Lionel model train past Yankee Stadium, whose lights glow like birthday-cake candles; the mute mosaic of skyscrapers, silhouetted bridges, billowy steam clouds, snow-laden streets, thronged sidewalks, and traffic honks silenced as George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue builds to a fireworks climax – is more than a beautiful overture, a midnight valentine. It carries ambiguous undernotes, emotional motes that never quite settle.”

    Wolcott compares the two films (Annie Hall was released in 1977) to illustrate how the City was changing:

    “Visually, the movie joins the social and the spatial dimensions of the city together in tense embrace. For real estate was about to become everyone’s demanding mistress. Compared with the tiny, rattletrap apartments of Annie Hall, the interiors of Manhattan look like shadow boxes, shipping containers for larger ambitions.”

    Wolcott, was hired as a columnist at Esquire, “The Don Draper of sixties magazines”, and wrote his first piece for The New York Review of Books in 1979, but still managed to take a step back in quality-of-life when he couldn’t afford the down payment on his apartment when the building went co-op. He managed to take over a rent-stabilized apartment that a former girlfriend was vacating:

    “Making the hazardous journey from West Village to East, I saw the apartment as a stopgap, a stepping-stone to the next chapter of my ruthless climb to the top of the middle, but I would stay there for ten years, as if serving out a sentence handed down from an unknown court. True, it was a rent-stabilized apartment, something so coveted in New York real estate that tenants would hold on to one until their toenails had turned yellow, their bodies had gone scarecrow, and they had become shut-in hoarders, until the inevitable day fell when neighbors would notice ‘a funny smell’ wafting from the apartment, and out came the carcass, buried under a rotting pyramid of pet-food cans.”

    The place was no gem, as we learn in the best pet-related story of the book:

    “With my studio located on the floor conveniently above the garbage room, mice didn’t have far to come to visit. I once dispatched a mouse with a broom after it dropped in around three o’clock at night, swinging at it like Dustin Hoffman in Straw Dogs while my cat, Gully, sedately sat by and monitored the situation, interested in seeing how this would turn out. Once the mouse was suitably flattened (not something I enjoyed doing, but glue traps seemed more sadistic and the snap of mousetraps too guillotine), I, sweat drenched on this summer night by the sudden exercise, gave Gully a silent look of reproach for falling down on the job as a mouser. I may have actually voiced something like this aloud, since a person who lives alone with a pet is prone to carrying on one-sided conversations. As I prepared to sweep the dead mouse into a dustpan, Gully trotted over to the radiator, reached behind it with her paw, and scooped out a decomposed mouse body that had been there so long it looked mummified, it too unable to give up a rent-stabilized apartment. Rather than tote the dead mouse in her mouth, she scooted it over with her paw and left it next to the fresh body, as if to say, Since you’re disposing of that one, how ’bout getting rid of this one while you’re at it? Cats really do have their nerve.”

    At one point Wolcott was burglarized, and he took security measures thereafter:

    “My saltine box of an apartment was now fortressed with the bolts and bars of a security cell at Rikers, but that was part of the package deal of living in the East Village, the trade-off for being at the nexus of everything it had to heave at you before it eventually turned into a simulation of itself, a watering hole for hipster doofuses on safari.”

    Wolcott was quite productive in 1979, writing prolifically on books, movies, television, and theater for a number of different publications. He occasionally left the City:

    “I spent a sunstroke week in New Mexico on the set of Sam Peckinpah’s delay-plagued Convoy , where he called me a pussy in front of the crew, which I was told to not take personally, I was but the latest in an infinite line.”

    Wolcott wraps the book up by coming back to his friend Pauline Kael, including a short “Coda” on Renata Adler’s devastating take-down of Kael, “The Perils of Pauline” (New York Magazine’s Philip Noble called it a “crucifixion”). The final paragraph finds Wolcott and Kael sharing a cab ride home after a disappointing screening of The Competition . The cab driver tells them that John Lennon has just been shot:

    “The Christmas Lights in Midtown looked incongruous, an irony we could have done without. The driver had lowered the radio volume again, as if respecting our quiet, or sensing that we had heard enough, and beside me Pauline said, ‘I wish the movie had been better. It had so much going for it.’ ‘I guess this just wasn’t our night,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t anyone’s night,’ Pauline said, and it got quiet again as the Christmas lights continued to go by.”

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12. “3501 hours of dancing in 145 days (the stats are accurately quoted from both Mr Laine’s own website and IMDb) works out to a little more than 24 hours a day of dancing…”

    Old Life has been old school for too long. We’ve been going by hunches and gut instinct, and that’s why Grady Little left Pedro in too long. Let’s get on board with sabermetrics and start to quantify what it means to be Old School. Get this iain guy into the front office and listen to him. Might want to find out who he is first.

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13. Iain, Frankie was well connected to the mob and the church. You do the math.

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14. New season of “Downton Abbey” starts tonight. Two hour show.

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15. “How could any baby boomer living in the suburbs relate to one-sheriff towns with one saloon and perhaps a brothel, populated by ranchers?”

    Reminded me of the first half of “Dead Man,” which I guess was a divisive film. I liked it, though Ebert’s negative review is also true in a detached way, like reviewing church for how the music sounded and communion tasted. It at least aged more gracefully than most 90s movies.

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16. Hey DGH, a little birdie tells me you’ll be swinging through my neighborhood some time this month. I’m looking forward to a chance to get together IRL and clink some physical glass bottles…

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17. Got all i needed to know about the Wild West from Grateful Dead tunes written by Robert Hunter.

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18. Rube, The birdie flew out of the mid-west before the storm hit, I guess. I am snowed in and trying to keep the pipes from freezing.

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19. Recommended on Netflix:

    “Public Speaking” – Martin Scorsese’s portrait of Fran Lebowitz

    http://www.hbo.com/documentaries/public-speaking

    Disc only, no streaming at this point.

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