David Vining's Blog, page 79

The Battle of Lake Erie – A Giveaway

So, I finally decided to try my hand at this: a Goodreads giveaway.

Starting with the book that has the most reviews, I give you a chance to own one of 100 free Kindle copies of The Battle of Lake Erie: One Young American’s Adventure in the War of 1812.

I hear it’s pretty good.

Sign up here! And tell your friends!

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Moby Dick

Ever wondered why I have that trailer of Moby Dick in my sidebar? It’s because when I first saw this film a few years ago, I looked up the original trailer, found it lackluster and uninteresting, and decided to try my hand at one. I think it came out pretty well, and I’ve never tried another one (though I have an idea for a better trailer of the 2011 production of Jane Eyre). Anyway…

Fitting in very well with the dominant thematic thread of John Huston’s directorial work, the idea of men ...

Beat the Devil

Funded in no small part by Humphrey Bogart himself, Beat the Devil is an intermittently amusing cross between a noir and a spoof that never quite settles into one or the other, grating up against itself without ever getting to the point where either half works fully and they don’t gel. Adapted from a novel by James Helvick who wrote the first draft that was, apparently, a more straightforward, noirish series of events, and provided a layer of wit and comedy from a second draft by Truman Capo...

Moulin Rouge

Not a single Elton John song? What is this?!

John Huston, the large, brash, active artist decided to make a film about a kindred spirit who could not follow in his footsteps in terms of the kind of life he led: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The physically stunted artist wanted the life that Huston led, and Huston seems to have had a real affinity for the painter’s inability to follow that life. Based on a novel by Pierre La Mure, Moulin Rouge takes a deeply sympathetic look at Lautrec, his i...

Writing Update – 8/29/23

So, I finished recreating my third draft of an old book I haven’t touched in about 4 years.

I could only find a typed out version of the second draft with the third draft corrections written in red on top. The process of reclaiming it involved using the camera on my phone, it’s integrated OCR software, and then correcting every line. It’s also 300 single spaced pages long.

I hated myself.

Anyway, it’s done. I’m going to release it as my next novel in a few months. I’ll probably start ...

The African Queen

The movie that John Huston bailed on the post-production for The Red Badge of Courage for, The African Queen is the kind of star-driven adventure that Louis B. Mayer would have probably loved to have funded, but Huston decided to fund it himself with his producing partner Sam Spiegel, go into the wilds of Africa with two movie stars, and came out a bit hungover, Anjelica Huston born in Los Angeles, and with one of his most beloved cinematic adventures in the can.

Brother and sister missio...

The Red Badge of Courage

Have you ever wondered why this film feels so cut up? Why the narration feels so out of place? Why there’s such self-importance to the titles that the film doesn’t share? Well, read Lillian Ross’ book Picture about the making of this film to find out! Essentially, Louis B. Mayer hated John Huston, Dore Schary believed in Huston but was unwilling to fight his battles for him (the tragic figure of the book is the film’s producer Gottfried Reinhardt who tries desperately to fight Huston’s battl...

William Wyler: A Retrospective

Film directors tend to get remembered themselves for a couple of different major reasons. The first are people like Alfred Hitchcock, those with extreme authorial stamps that especially extend to the visual aspects of their movies, making them easily identifiable simply by looking at them (there’s often a heavy influence from German Expressionism). The second are those who put such a unique thematic stamp, like a Sam Peckinpah, that mere descriptions of their work makes them easily identifia...

The Asphalt Jungle

So began one of the worst partnerships in John Huston’s career: his contract with MGM. Dore Schary believed in Huston, but Louis B. Mayer kind of hated him. It crated with Huston’s next film, The Red Badge of Courage, but Huston was allowed a free hand on his first feature for the famed movie studio. Mayer didn’t like the final product and ended up using the panicky reaction to test screenings on the next film to undermine Huston greatly. Huston’s partnership with MGM only lasted two movies,...

We Were Strangers

Well, this is an interesting little film that seems to have been lost to time. Trying to capture the revolutionary spirit of Cuba in 1933, John Huston casts in amber a time in Cuban politics that ends up so far removed from the reality a few decades later, made when Batista was merely a Cuban senator and before his coup, about the time Fidel Castro was little more than a gadfly on the edges of elite Cuban society, that it takes a small history lesson to figure out the specifics of what’s goi...