CineSage_jr
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Posts posted by CineSage_jr
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> {quote:title=HollywoodGolightly wrote:}{quote}
> > {quote:title=Ascotrudgeracer wrote:}{quote}
> > Some have said that the husband "ghosted" her work, but I can't imagine all those credits on all those films being all a lie.
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> No, they aren't a lie - from what I've read, her presence on the set was a contractual demand, if the studio wanted to use the Technicolor process.
Natalie Kalmus's lifetime position as the Technicolor company's "color consultant" was a provision of her divorce settlement with Dr Herbert Kalmus, nothing more. She was widely reviled by directors and cinematographers as little more than a parasite who did nothing to aid their work, and whose dictates (she rarely suggested) were typically ignored.
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> {quote:title=filmlover wrote:}{quote}
> So, last night I got to attend the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Centennial Tribute to Joseph L. Mankiewicz, hosted by TCM's own Ben Mankiewicz, J.L.'s grand nephew.
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> In attendance were many of the Mankiewicz clan. So many of the seats were reserved with their name on them that I thought there would be nothing left for anyone else. (Joke. The Academy's Samuel Goldwyn Theater is quite large.)
I was there, too, and was, to be frank, rather disappointed. Besides Ben's flippancy (if he'd turned on his TV and had found CLEOPATRA playing, instead of THE BAREFOOT CONTESSA, would he have married a woman called Cleopatra just so he'd have a convenient story to tell on nights like this?), and the choice of one of J.L. Mankiewicz's weakest films in SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER (give most of the credit for its over-the-top sturm und drang to the flamboyant Tennessee Williams), the utter and total lack of any mention of Mankiewicz's 1950 clash with Cecil B. DeMille over the latter's attempt to force a mandatory anti-Communist loyalty oath on the membership of the Directors Guild (Mankiewicz was the Guild's president at the time -- elected after first being proposed for the post by...Cecil B. DeMille) was shameful, nothing less. Frankly, what Mankieiwcz did in opposing DeMille and his cadre of cronies could have destroyed his career, and came perilously close to doing just that. It outweighed everything he did in that career, and was a display of personal courage that tells more about the man than all the films he made, put together.
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> {quote:title=JakeHolman wrote:}{quote}
> >hamradio wrote:
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> Change is inevitable but I have no crystal ball...
The Wicked Witch of the West had a crystal ball -- a big Technicolor one -- but even she couldn't see change coming, in the form of a bucket of cold water...
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> {quote:title=ajgrad05 wrote:}{quote}
> Well, considering I've never seen his name spelled prior to these writings it is an (e)xcuseable error on my part.
> ajgrad05
Advice to anyone who would seek a career in a public venue: make sure you have a surname that has only one spelling. Unfortunately for Bob, his name has at least four. It's most commonly misspelled hereabouts as "Osbourne," so yours is somewhat refreshing.
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> {quote:title=theladyeve wrote:}{quote}
> I'm also a fan of *Black Narcissus* (have always wondered why David Farrar didn't have a bigger career) and though the two films are different in many ways, you won't be disappointed in *I Know Where I'm Going!*. Thanks for the link, by the way...
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> Message was edited by: theladyeve
Farrar had a perfectly fine career -- until he came to Hollywood, where studio executives and producers could only see him as a saturnine villain. It's a story repeated with many excellent British actors, whom U.S. studios only wanted to use as narrowly-cast character actors to back up their American stars. Fortunately for him, and all of us, the great James Mason escaped this kind of short-sighted pigeon-holing, becoming a leading man versatile as heroes, villains and, most importantly, complex, subtly-shaded characters embodying the characteristics of both.
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> {quote:title=ajgrad05 wrote:}{quote}
> Gee, shucks, only 6 Oscars!! Thanks to you both for the information. As you said cinesage about the Thalberg Award being bestowed on Wilder in '87, true, it does not count as an Oscar. My query was in response to Robert Osborn's statement that Wilder had received 7 Oscars. I still wish to know where is this elusive, and to a large degree unlucky, #7 Oscar to which Osborn has referred.
Oscar number 7 is probably being stored with the missing "e" in Osborne's name.
I have the 75th Anniversary Oscars book Bob edited for the Academy, and there are mistakes in it (the only one that comes immediately to mind is that it lists the 1953 Joseph L. Mankiewicz-John Houseman JULIUS CAESAR, with Brando, et al, as a 20th Century-Fox film. It was MGM). Sad to say, but a lot of what Bob's given to say (and given, it almost certainly is; I doubt that he writes much of that stuff himself) is questionable, at best, and flat-out wrong at worst.
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> {quote:title=HollywoodGolightly wrote:}{quote}
> Isn't the Irving Thalberg award the same as the honorary Oscar? I think he got the Thalberg award in 1988.
No, it's not, though it's also not a competitive award. The Thalberg is, for all intents and purposes, a lifetime achievement award, bestowed on producers (or directors who typically produce their own films) for "consistently high standards of production," and only thirty-six have been given out in the 81-year history of the Academy Awards (the first went to Fox Studios chief Darryl F. Zanuck in 1938).
Wilder won six competitive Oscars in his career; the Thalberg (which was bestowed in 1987, not '88) doesn't count even though some less-than-precise sources will credit a film with an extra Oscar when its producer happens to be given the Thalberg in the same year his film was eligible (such as GONE WITH THE WIND. For the record, GWTW won eight competitive Oscars, not the ten some sources report).
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Message was edited by: TCMWebAdmin
Off Topic
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Warner's is the copyright holder (though under European Union laws, that copyright may have expired, even if it hasn't in the U.S.), and could exert its rights to have access to the print.
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> {quote:title=HollywoodGolightly wrote:}{quote}
> > {quote:title=kingrat wrote:}{quote}
> > In an interview collected in the book Film Crazy, Raoul Walsh characterizes Wyler as good for women's pictures. True enough, since he directed some of the best Bette Davis films, but the general public probably knows him best for Ben-Hur and the chariot race. From Mrs. Miniver to The Best Years of Our Lives you can see Wyler transitioning toward the more male-oriented films like The Big Country and Ben-Hur. He directed a number of different kinds of films remarkably well.
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> A good analysis. I think he certainly tried to adapt to the times, and when Biblical epics became the rage, starting in the 50s, he just went along with the flow, and showed he could direct them just as well as any other director.
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> > Does it drive anyone else crazy that the phrase "an actors' director" is actually used to belittle directors like Wyler?
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> I don't think I've ever regarded it as something used to "belittle" directors.
Wyler did not have the reputatation as a "women's director" in the sense that George Cukor did (of course, Cukor's well-known homosexuality led some who felt threatened by that aspect of his life to derisively call him a "woman director"), and I'd hardly call any number of Wyler films, such as HELL'S HEROES, THE WESTERNER and DODSWORTH "women's pictures." As I wrote earlier, there wasn't a lot of distinctive thematic unity to his pictures; if a story attracted Wyler's interest, it didn't much matter whether the protagonist was a man or a woman, so long as it was compelling.
It may also be instructive to consider for a moment three films Wyler had originaly agreed to direct, and for which he did substantial pre-production planning but, for one reason or another, didn't direct:
HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY
THE SOUND OF MUSIC
and
PATTON.
Interestingly, each went on to win both the Best Picture Oscar, and Oscars for the men who did direct them, John Ford, Robert Wise and Franklin Schaffner. And as good as each film is, I think they might very well have been a tad better had Wyler been at the helm.
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Message was edited by: TCMWebAdmin
Harassment
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Buy Pepsi, or else!!!
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Amazing that, for the last sixty-five years, no one ever noticed. At the very least, you'd think that that "LIttle Man" in the pit of Barton Keyes's stomach would've told him that something strange was going on...
From Britain's Guardian newspaper:
Chandler's double identity
Adrian Wootton on a writer's secret cameo
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the death of legendary American crime scribe Raymond Chandler, whose seven completed novels, including The Big Sleep, Farewell My Lovely and The Long Goodbye profoundly changed crime fiction and crime movies. The success of his novels - The Big Sleep was first to be published in 1939 - led Chandler to try his hand at screenwriting, notably with his debut screenplay, adapting James M Cain's sultry pulp thriller Double Indemnity with Billy Wilder, who also directed. Their collaboration was fertile and productive but also fractious. Chandler learned a lot from Wilder and Wilder managed to draw the very best out of Chandler. But they never worked together again and neither ever spoke fondly of the experience.
Now, however, more than 60 years after its release, a French cinema historian and two US crime-writers almost simultaneously happened on the same bizarre discovery - that Raymond Chandler, uncredited and previously unnoticed, has a tiny cameo in Double Indemnity. On 14 January, the American mystery writer Mark Coggins, tipped off by another writer, John Billheimer, posted the news on his website, Riordan's desk (tinyurl.com/raymondchandler), while the French journalist Olivier Eyquem, wrote about on his blog (tinyurl.com/chandlerfrench) on March 30.
Cameos, more often than not, are the preserve of famous actors or are in-jokes by the film directors themselves (most famous of the cameo-making directors is Alfred Hitchcock, with whom Chandler would also worked acrimoniously and unsatisfactorily on Strangers on a Train in 1950.) Of course, writers Graham Greene, Stephen King, Kurt Vonnegut and Hunter Thompson have also popped up on the big screen. But their appearances were all recognised at the time. That is not the case with Chandler and Double Indemnity, one of the earliest appearances in a Hollywood classic of a notable novelist.
Chandler himself was a reclusive sort. He gave very few interviews of any description (apart from, famously, a radio chat with fellow novelist Ian Fleming, in London for the BBC in 1958). There is no television footage or film of him at all, apart from a snippet from a home movie. His preferred form of communication was the letter, although there is no apparent reference in any of his epistles to his appearance in front of the camera during the making of Double Indemnity. Wilder never mentioned it either in any of his many interviews about the film.
Despite all of this, there he is, 16 minutes into the movie, sitting outside an office as Fred MacMurray walks past. Chandler glances up at MacMurray from a paperback he is reading, in hindsight a rather obvious clue about the true identity of this extra. Sadly, it is impossible to determine what the book is as the film briskly moves on and Chandler vanishes.
Who knows whose idea this magical little appearance was? Maybe Billy and Ray, in one of their more amicable moments, thought it would be a nice joke. The reasons are for the cameo are unlikely ever to be known. But, somehow, it is enough that we have this little magic moment, with Chandler secretly inscribed into the film. And how fitting that this piece of knowledge should be uncovered in the 50th year since Chandler's death.
? Adrian Wootton is appearing on 17 June at Cardiff Chapter, on 19 June at BFI South Bank and on 1 July at Broadway Media Centre, Nottingham to give illustrated talks on Raymond Chandler's life and career
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> {quote:title=FredCDobbs wrote:}{quote}
> > {quote:title=CineSage_jr wrote:}{quote}
> > You're forgetting a couple of very important factors that have a great deal to do with when TCM schedules new movies, versus old ones: the channel is paying a much higher fee to telecast a film like SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, making it essential that they air it during hours that will attract the largest audience.
>
> And what does that tell you? It tells you that if you run a Classic Film channel, that people are paying extra for, you DONT waste your money renting modern movies that have already shown dozens of times on other channels during the past 12 years.
That might be a valid argument if TCM had exclusive deals with the studios and copyright holders from whom they lease the films they show, but they don't. A lot of the films shown on TCM play in syndication and on cable channels such as Encore.
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How much for the strait-jacket, itself?
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You're forgetting a couple of very important factors that have a great deal to do with when TCM schedules new movies, versus old ones: the channel is paying a much higher fee to telecast a film like SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, making it essential that they air it during hours that will attract the largest audience. Older films like THESE THREE are part of multi-film packages that permit multiple or unlimited showings during the term of the deal with the copyright owner, whereas a PRIVATE RYAN may be contracted for on a film-by-film, and showing-by-showing, basis for which the channel must pay each time.
PS: "Saving Private Ryan" is simply too recent of a movie to show on TCM." I honestly don't understand why americans keep dropping the superfluous word "of" into sentences of this construction. It should read "...too recent a movie to show on TCM."
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You're off by nearly a year: the date was 3/26/45, not 3/15/46. And the rather unconvincing "mysterious wrong-way driver" story is what MGM's publicists told the newspapers, but there's no evidence that Gable veered off the road and crashed due to anything other than his own massive drunkenness.
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Hawks has long been a darling of the cineastes, whereas Wyler and Wise have never been, largely because there were recurring themes to which Hawks would come back again and again, while the other men tended to take subject matter and genres as they found them, without bending them to any particular outlook. Then, too, Hawks's visual style was more dynamic than either Wyler's or Wise's but, in the end, Wyler always managed to put the camera in exactly the right place.
Nobody was more versatile than Hawks, I'll grant you, but his films never had quite the depth of Wyler's, and the value of that that can't be underestimated.
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> {quote:title=scsu1975 wrote:}{quote}
>Perhaps somebody thought Anita Ekberg resembled Marlon Brando.
Somebody should've put her in a torn t-shirt just so we could make sure they were two separate and distinct individuals.
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> {quote:title=Kubrickbuff wrote:}{quote}
> Of course Saving Private Ryan belongs on TCM because it's a great film.
You ought to become a member of the Motion Picture Academy. I can't count the times the voters have been conned into believing a pretentious and illogical film deserved an Oscar merely because it wore its "noble" intentions on its sleeve. Crikey.
> {quote:title=araner1973 wrote:}{quote}
> Also, the MGM documentary "When the Lion Roars" was made for TV (TNT, to be exact) as well, and I don't think there's been much complaints about that airing on TCM before, no?
"M-G-M: When the Lion Roared" was a multi-part documentary about the movie business during its Golden Age; as such, one cannot imagine anything more appropriate for TCM to show. It makes no difference for whom it was produced, as long as it's accurate.
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> {quote:title=FredCDobbs wrote:}{quote}
> No, thats not what Im talking about. That is due to the camera being hand-held.
>
> What Im talking about is the high shutter speed of the film camera, caused by a narrow-wedge opening in the disc shutter. This causes each frame of the hand-held scenes to have no blur. This is abnormal for film and abnormal for the human eye.
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> Normally, film cameras have shutter speeds from about 1/40 to maybe 1/100 of a second. Battle cameras had shutter speeds of as much as 1/200 of a second. But Private Ryan looked like it had a shutter speed of 1/1000 or more. That eliminated all blur on individual frames, and that is visually abnormal.
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0WBZab8SWE&
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> That technique was a fad back in the 1990s, but it is generally no longer used in films.
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> Here is military/news film of D-Day. Notice the blurs of the running soldiers in each frame.
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>
> The weird color of Private Ryan was due to it having been shot on Eastman EXR 200T 5293, which is no longer manufactured today.
I knew exactly what you were talking about; I simply didn't address it, but what I did write still applied: that it was all done to simulate the look of WWII-era combat photography. But the hish shutter speed was only used for the Omaha Beach sequence, and for various other points during the film, not for the whole thing. Whether one thinks it was an appropriate creative decision by Spielberg is, of course, a matter of personal taste.
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How apprpriate that Gable's personal car should impersonate the one that runs down Fitzgerald's Myrtle Wilson, since the story goes that Gable actually killed someone in a traffic accident that MGM then hushed-up by offering some minor studio employee a generous lifetime income if he'd take the rap for Gable.
I wonder if they guy's family is still collecting payments, or whether the money dried up after Kirk Kerkorian gutted and destroyed Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in the 1970s.
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> {quote:title=Terrence1 wrote:}{quote}
> Actually, Alfred Newman used certain themes in more than one movie. The one instance that comes to mind is the finale from "The Robe." This beautiful piece of music he had used previously in "The Song of Bernadette" and "Hunchback of Notre Dame." I always felt that he loved this particular music so much that he tended to use it over and over again.
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> Terrence.
Newman didn't even write that piece. That particular "Hallelujah" chorus was by Ernst Toch, and I doubt that his re-use of it had anything to do with his love for it, only that it was well suited to what he wanted to do in the various scores, and that it was available. The only real "Hallelujah" chorus Newman ever wrote was for THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD, and it was removed by director George Stevens in favor of the chorus from H?ndel's "Messiah" (Newman's choruses are is available on the CD sets issued by Ryko and Var?se Sarabande).
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Run, Eliza, run (I've seen THE KING AND I once too often)!
Preston Sturges
in Hot Topics
Posted
I have, for the past twenty-three years, kept an official (well, in my mind, anyway) Preston Sturges "whoopee" whistle in my car for precisely those madcap moments in life that demand underlining, but for which words are inadequate (the car has changed a few times over the years, but the whistle remains eternal).