Status Updates From Roger Ebert's Book of Film:...

As a souvenir, John Waters took home a palm fraud from the Spahn Ranch, which perhaps once shaded Charles Manson, Shorty Shea or both (778).

Water says that Venice Beach is the only place that reminds him of the East Coast (777).

I like John Waters irreverence: “Think of the lucky schoolchildren who get let out of class for smog alerts instead of blizzards” (771). I was never one of those children, but I can imagine how they feel, having survived Youth Corp and a disastrous football tryout at CSUN.

What a curious excerpt from Robert Stone’s Children of Light: a son gets even with his father by attacking the older man’s beloved scenes.

Julia Phillips memoir about winning Best Picture is so coked and sad. Nowhere to go but down.

For laughs, I reread Groucho Marx letters to Warner Brothers re: the studio’s objection to the proposed “Night in Casablanca.” What a lovely work of writ & lit.

How strange that Oscar Levant’s prose has little continuity between paragraphs. Ebert praises Levant’s one liners, and I did smile, but some paragraphs were sans smile. What beyond syntax makes words cohere in a sentence? How can theme be divided & distributed across paragraphs? Ignore counterpoint at peril of the self.

“[The] dump grew continually…there wasn’t a dream afloat …which wouldn’t sooner or later turn up on it, having first been made photographic by plaster, canvas, plaster lath and paint. Many boats sink and never reached the Sargasso, but no dream ever entirely disappears…. it troubles, some unfortunate person, and someday, when that person has been sufficiently troubled, it will be reproduced on the lot.”

The Hollywood section is the most cynical as it tells again & again how the movies lie & how we know it & how we justify it. The Budd Schulberg excerpt appears beside the Howard Koch excerpt. What a plot.

“(Caroline) had learned from hurst the truth was only one criterion by which a story could be judged….” (720) Cinema is at best a fragment of a fact.

“”Caroline… was attracted to the idea of film, not as an art, or as light, or as whatever everyone wanted to call so collective and vulgar a storytelling form, but as a means of preserving time, netting the ephemeral, and the fugitive – there it is! now, it’s past, gone forever.” as Hearst’s sister-in-law, Caroline’s being tied to the tracks seems symbolic.

Timothy X. Farrell “ had worked as a carpenter and general handyman for Thomas Ince. Now he was a successful director, noted for his use of light (717). Vidal fires a shot across the bow.

Reading Gore Vidal’s excerpt about William Randolph Hearst producing (which is described as directing) a melodrama, the theme becomes clear: live by the movie, die by the movie.

Robert Bloch’s “The Movie People,” could be good without the magic. I’m thinking of the stuntmen and mugs in The Cauliflower Alley Club that met on Tuesdays at The Old Spaghetti Factory. What about the actual recipients of the Motion Picture Fund?

The “Building It Up” bit by screenwriter Joel Coles focuses on adding complications—divorce, alcoholism, cancer, abuse, a stint in The French Foreign Legion—to a plot to make it interesting. Of course, life builds itself up.

In a beautiful paragraph Fitzgerald captures the distinct tones of between Hollywood on a Sunday and any working day (677).

On one hand, telling the actor what to DO in the script and then PHOTOGRAPHING that action is basic directing, but his notion that movies have gone downhill since sound came in is hyperbole. That adverbs are as meaningful as backstory seems dumb.

Although I’ve read Kurosawa’s “Something Like an Autobiography” before, I couldn’t tell you where he thinks “the essence… of cinematic beauty” lies. He has opinions on counterpointing music, editing rushes to inspire the crew and varying 3-camera coverage to two. In other words, he is nearly for everything at its best story moment. The ethereal smoke of inspiration.

Janet Leigh, has nothing but praise for “Mr. Hitchcock,” says, “He had started to manipulate the audience before the film was even in the theater“ (659).

Joe Bonomo writes about a stunt gone wrong in the early days (before ‘33). A contemporary account could also be interesting, one about stunts that work (not the “Rust” debacle https://www.nytimes.com/article/alec-...)

Almendros says Marlene Dietrich‘s femme fatale look was the result of her, hiding her nose and accentuating her cheekbones by looking at her love interest (The Lunk) sideways (644).

The section on technique is right down my nerd alley. Almendros: “When taking close-ups in a color picture, there is too much visual information in the background, which tends to draw attention away from the face. That is why the faces of the actresses in old black-and-white pictures are so vividly remembered…. Filmed in black and white, those figures looked as if they were lit from within“ (642).

As much as I agree with Crisp on certain points, overall, I find movies make me remember rather than “forget“ (637). If I’d read no other essay in this book, the contrast between his aesthetic from this essay and my experience—especially with documentaries and psychological thrillers—was worth reading the whole anthology.

A bit of divergence with Crisp: “we must take to each cinema two pairs of spectacles. While we plunge into each picture as though it were happening to us, we must also watch it from a distance, judging it as a work of art” (636-7). Authorial distance varies, depending on the movie makers control of the elements of cinema.

Quentin Crisp: “ television, diminishes the scale of our fantasies, but it does worse than that; it domesticates them. It does not compel us to give it our whole attention…. we see television on our own mundane turf. It is as injuries to the soul as fast food is to the body” (635).

British condescension: “We have a tv, but, of course, we don’t watch it.”

Sarris’ sense of humor about academia is balanced by his personal view of “films that helped mold [his] consciousness” (627).