lzcutter
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Posts posted by lzcutter
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> He wrote quite a few biographies (Higham) and books on film. Is he still around?
He died a few months ago.
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> Why is Kevin McCarthy in the movie? (as a character) I dont remember him factoring in Liz' life........
He was a friend of Taylor's. He was at the dinner party the night that Monty Clift had his accident and arrived on the scene seconds after Taylor did.
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Barb,
Even in the winter you would probably still need your Bain de Soleil. I can't believe I spelled that right on the first try! My memory isn't so cheesy after all!
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> Pardon my cynicism as I speculate that Wayne, who was a career-driven workaholic kind of man, had that career primarily in mind a lot of the time in his "friendship" with Ford. Am I doing John Wayne an injustice?
From various accounts, including Scott Eyman's wonderful bio on Ford, Print the Legend, Wayne looked up on Ford as a father figure. In that position, one is likely to put up a great deal of ridicule and pain because it is equated with love.
Wayne was not the only one who often found himself "in the barrel" while working on film with the cantankerous director. Ward Bond, Harry Carey, Jr, Ben Johnson and others were all targets of Ford's.
Despite the treatment, Wayne never wavered in his support of or his friendship with the director.
When Ford was dying, Wayne was a constant visitor and was one of the last visitors Ford had before he died.
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> No one still has provided a plausible explanantion for the shelving of The Damned (1959),
In the past when this has happened with other film titles, it is usually because:
1) The distributor was unable to provide a digital print of the film.
2) It was discovered that the broadcast rights to air the film need further clarification. Perhaps the distributor did not have the U.S. broadcast rights they thought they did.
3) The distributor sent the wrong film.
Hope that helps.
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> With all the books, the knowledge, the documentaries... if movie fans blindly idolize their favorite stars, without seeing that they are only human and far from perfect, then they're always going to be let down.
It's not only about movie fans idolizing their favorite stars that this book does a disservice to, it's the film historians and biographers that will spend the next years having to deal with the unprovable "facts" in this book.
Like Kenneth Anger's *Hollywood Babylon* books, this is a salacious read that has truth mixed in with unproveable "facts". People who read Anger's books and will read this one, won't distinguish between the two and many of Bowers' tales, real and fictional will pass into Hollywood lore just the ones from Anger's books did.
Film historians, biographers and family members of those in Bowers book will be dealing with the "lore" for years to come just as those who followed in the wake of the Anger books.
There are books and websites dedicated to the debunking of stories told in the *Babylon* books but what people still trout out is the "lore" of the books.
And no one in this thread has stopped to consider the impact on the families of the stars that Bowers is writing about.
I was friends with Clara Bow and Rex Bells' son, Rex, Jr. and thirty years after Anger's book brought the myth of Clara Bow and the USC football team back into the forefront, her family was still trying to set the record straight on the matter. And it angered Rex that what people remembered of Bow wasn't her screen personality or even her as a person, it was the pieces of "lore" from Anger's book that they remembered when they asked him about her.
David Stein wrote the wonderful *Running Wild* bio of Bow partly in response to the many myths about Bow that since *Babylon's* publication had taken root in people's minds.
This book will likely have a similar effect and people will talking about Laughton, Powers and Tracy and sharing the more salacious parts of the book with others with little regard to the believability factor.
It's one thing to write a book about the "servicing" side of Hollywood and quite another to write a book that trots out stories that can't be proven to only provide salacious thrills for the readers.
And the Laughton, Powers and Tracy sections of this book certainly fall into that category.
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> I think Wayne became "iconic" in the 1960s by promoting (or presenting) his persona every chance he could get. The same applies to Jimmy Stewart.
Chief,
That's an excellent point about Jimmy Stewart. Jimmy Stewart was a frequent guest on the *Tonight Show* back then. Carson would sit there and listen and Jimmy would do his "Aw shucks" routine that, inevitably, included rather risque double entendres (are there any other kind?) and the look on Johnny's face was always priceless.
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> Why has John Wayne's name endured so much stronger with the passage of time than has Gary Cooper's?
Tom,
I think this is a great question!
From my perspective, Wayne was much more in the public eye than Coop. Wayne's image was one that made him seem accessible to fans while Coop, rightly or wrongly, always seemed more distant and aloof.
Also, Coop passed away just as American pop culture exploded. One of the greatest contributions of *The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson* is it brought those classic era film stars into people's living rooms (and bedrooms) five nights a week.
While I didn't agree with Wayne's politics, I love his movies. He was like the uncle at family dinners, as long as you stayed away from politics, you could just listen to his stories and he was a good story-teller.
He allowed himself to be mocked on *Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In* and countless Bob Hope specials. We felt we knew him even though we never met him.
When he announced he had cancer and then had beat it the first time around, America sighed in relief.
At a time when the country was tearing itself apart, he symbolized (whether you agreed with it or not) that which was good about America. The American people turned to him and turned him into an icon that they needed as chaos and assassinations reigned around us. He reminded them of a simpler time, of a time when the country banded together to fight common enemies (the Depression, WW II) and real life got more and more out of control, many Americans yearned for that simpler time.
We wrote on his image those truths we hold deeply about this country and about who we are as a people.
There was no way he could have lived up to all those expectations. But, because he seemed so accessible, so humorous, so willing to make fun of himself, we came to revere the man he was.
One of the reasons he likely won the Oscar for *True Grit* in 1969 was a reaction to the times. Older Academy voters saw a familiarity (and a life-long talent) in Rooster Cogburn that by 1969 many were openly yearning for.
When he announced that his cancer had returned, we all believed he would win the fight again.
When he stepped out on that stage at the Academy Awards in 1979, the country took a collective deep breath. We knew he was sick and we knew there would be no happy ending.
He soldiered on, putting on that smile and assuring us that he would be around for years to come.
It wasn't to be.
He had been part of pop culture and was part of the zeitgeist by the time he died that July, just a few months after taking the stage at the Oscars.
Edited by: lzcutter to add a couple of things I missed in proofing the first time around.
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So, it sounds like you basically, you feel TCM should only program for you and the rest of its vast audience who enjoys *Underground* or *Essentials, Jr* or the guest hosts or any of its other programming should be ignored because yours is the only opinion that matters.
Luckily for the rest of us, TCM takes a broader view.
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> It would have been nice if TCM told us the problem, like in NOW PLAYING, instead of dropping the series without any notice.
*Cartoon Alley* has been off of TCM for about three or so years now. There's posts in the message board archives from a couple of the TCM staff regarding that issue. They posted in response to questions back then about why *Cartoon Alley* was discontinued.
If I recall correctly, the rental/lease agreement for the cartoon package had expired and another network (Cartoon Network) outbid TCM for the rights to air the cartoons.
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"Purple eyes in the canyon
That's where I long to be
With my sweet, good companion
Just my rifle, pony and me"
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> That's ok with me, but why do you think the film is restricted?
TCM and Fathom Events is presenting the film in theaters nationwide on July 12th. As part of the presentation, TCM will run parts of the interview that Robert O did with Debbie Reynolds after the film screened at this year's Film Festival.
That may be why the film was not available for the festival.
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> I know this is off topic, but didn't Truman Capote also write a similar book? Other Voices, Other Rooms . I have not read it, but I understand he attended all the big parties (in NYC, I think?) and got people to confide in him, only to turn around and write this book.
I think you may be thinking of Capote's book, Answered Prayers. Capote sold four chapters to Esquire while he was finishing the fictional book. Many characters in the book were based on real-life people that Capote knew and socialized with. The issue of Esquire became the talk of the town and various newspapers, magazines and talk shows as the roman a clef was scrutinized by those who were portrayed in the book and those who enjoyed trying to put characters and well-known public figures together.
The uproar from his society friends was huge. Bill and Babe Paley never talked to him again as did many others.
Capote was said to be shocked by their reaction. He was, after all, a well-known writer and to his way of thinking, they should have known they were fodder for his writing.
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> So I imagine he will blaze this trail to control the marketing of the content of his networks. He will be a significant player in this new dissemination. He may have conflicts as he was one of the big players in the early days of cable.
Ted Turner no longer owns his media empire. When he merged with Time Warner back in the mid-to-late 1990s, his media empire was part of that deal.
Those channels are now owned by Time-Warner. Time-Warner and Ted parted company shortly after the merger.
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Roy,
Cary Grant would have been just as good as Norman though I don't know how well the audience would have bought his Norman being on the downside of his career as Grant's certainly wasn't at that time. But Grant had the chops to be as believable and as good (if not better) than Mason.
Sinatra would have come with a different set of problems, one being that his non-traditional handsome face would have been problematic for a role that required him to be a former matinee idol. Frankie was many things but rarely described as a matinee idol. Judy and Frank got along very well (she was part of the original Rat Pack with him around Bogie) but I don't know how well their friendship would have fared working together, especially since Frank liked to only do one take and move on.
As for Ty Power, hewould have made the film about Norman Maine and not about Esther. He had been a matinee idol, but was losing those boyish good looks that had made so many hearts swoon. But the movie is front and center about Esther, not Norman.
Women watching Power as Norman continue to drink his way to death would have ended up disliking Esther. Why? Because those women would be convinced that "they" could save that Norman from himself.
When, the sad truth is, no one can save an addict from himself.
So, with either of them as Norman, the confrontation with Danny and the finale with Esther saying "This is Mrs. Norman Maine" would have been washed over in the tears still being spilled for poor Ty or Cary as Norman.
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I had just graduated high school in the summer of 1975 when I saw *Jaws* (opening weekend).
I lived in Las Vegas, a land-locked community if ever there was one (especially in the summer) and that summer I refused to swim in pools, swim in Lake Mead (a man-made lake nowhere near the ocean) or take a bath (I did take showers) because I had a phobia of sharks.
Luckily, the phobia went away about a year later.
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Brent,
TCM ran a number of Roy's films last summer when they put the spotlight on Singing Cowboys.
Plus, Roy's daughter, Cheryl, introduced a number of his films last year at the 2012 TCM Film Festival.
He did a number of films for Republic Films. Unfortunately, the Republic film library has been sold and resold over the years so I don't think it has stayed intact nor is it now owned by any one company.
You might try contacting the researchers at the Margaret Herrick Library at the Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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It's also possible that Olive Films may have a similar deal like Warner Archives and the film may not be available for broadcast for certain amount of time after the DVD is released.
If a film is newly released via the Warner Archive, there is a year-long moratorium on the film being shown on TCM. Warners wants to cut down on the number of bootlegs, presumably.
Olive Films may have a similar deal. Might be worth contacting Olive Films to find out?
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CBL,
You should check out Mongo's *Candids 2* thread in Films and Filmmakers. For more years than I can remember, he has been posting images every day of those celebrating birthdays.
A snag with a board upgrade (the old photo code stopped working) rendered his old *Happy Birthday* and his original *Candids* threads threads in General Discussions unviewable.
Thus, he combined the idea of the two threads and started *Candids 2* in the F&F forum because the photo cord worked there.
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> Iz, I doubt one could actually contribute the majority of the reason why some people come and go as regulars to any website because to "arguments and flame wars"
The thing to keep in mind is that this used to be an unmoderated board. One of the reasons we have had board moderation for the last three years or so is because of how ugly and vicious the arguments and flaming was.
It's all there in the board archives and to be truthful, in some instances it was inane and in too many cases (especially beginning in the summer of 2006 and into early 2007) it got really ugly.
And there were posters who didn't want to deal with the trouble makers and the arguing and said so before they left.
As I said, it's all there in the archives just waiting for you to read.
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> They promote the Classic Film Union, the DVD shop and the book store, and a whole bunch of downloadable apps, but I never hear of the message boards getting a mention.
Up until recently (like the last couple of years), they were promoting the website and the message boards but as technology changes and with the explosion of Facebook, social media and technology (tablets, apps, etc), there are now many different ways to interact with TCM and I think the channel's Facebook page and the apps popularity plays into that.
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> I, too, am puzzled by the small number of people on this message board (compared to those who watch the channel) Possibly because viewers tend to be older and less inclined to check out the website? I dont know....
TCM has a much larger following on Facebook and fans of the channel tend to post there and spend more time there than here.
The community here used to be much, much larger but arguments and flame wars over the years have taken their toll.
Add to that the general wonkiness of the board software that made it very difficult to post here sometimes for weeks on end. TCMWeb has managed to work a number of the kinks out but before that, upgrades and fixes often led to more problems and some posters probably just gave up.
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Chief,
That's a great point about Norman (as James Mason portrays him) being a "functioning drunk".
Norman loves Esther very much but back in the day, they didn't treat alcohol as an addiction but as a disease that could be overcome with the right medicine.
Before the film begins (and is made known to us through the backstory), Norman Maine was the idol of millions, the actor of his generation and he soared to incredible heights. But as all who soar so high learn, the altitude cannot be sustained forever.
The spiral started slowly, he probably never noticed the prop he now needed to help relieve the emotional pain. But as the ground got closer, the spiral increased and he needed a crutch. The bottle becomes that crutch. It helps to make it through the days where he is no longer the top of the pyramid.
Esther comes into this world just as he is nearing rock bottom. He has gone from prestigious A- list studio films and would be further down the studio food chain of b -minus and c-type filler movies were it not for his talent which still shines through and Oliver Niles having his back.
He meets Esther and falls in love. He wants to make her dreams come true even though he knows how dangerous her dream to be a top movie star can be. He wants her to reach the heights he touched, confident that she will be able to sustain the altitude better than he.
He tries. He tries hard to put his problems on the back burner and concentrate on Esther. But along the way, before he met Esther, Norman had found a love with a hell of a grip. Not the starlet who accompanies him to premieres and benefits at the top of the movie, but the bottle.
That love can blot out all his feelings of despair about his spiraling career, that love can make him believe that he can still be the dashing handsome playboy of yore, that the audience will still love him as a leading man and want him back.
Esther can't compete with that lover. At first she blames Norman for not being stronger, for not fighting harder but because he has shielded her from the reasons and causes of his demons, she doesn't understand why he can't overcome them. She only sees the bottle as the problem not the mangled self-esteem and insecurities that make Norman reach for that bottle.
And in a perverse sense, she see's herself as the reason that Norman drinks. If only she loved him more, if only she had more time to spend with him, if only she was stronger.
Because alcoholism back then was treated more like a mental illness that could be overcome with just drying out and didn't focus on the reasons for Norman's drinking, Norman isn't able to get a grip on his problem.
He falls off the wagon not because he loves Esther any less, not because Esther doesn't love him enough, but because he refuses to admit to himself and deal with the reason he drinks.
Oliver Niles offers to put Norman back to work if it will help Esther. But Norman isn't ready to give up the idea that he can once again be the heart throb of millions of women, he can't admit to himself that it's time to transition to character parts.
He's Norman Maine, after all. The actor that a generation admired and loved. But he cannot come to grips with the fact that the generation moved on and found new idols.
When he finally does realize that the pain cuts him to the bone as does the realization of the pain he has caused Esther.
He knows himself by then. He knows the only way he can escape the pain of being the former leading man of an era is to drown himself in alcohol.
His insecurities are too much to be overcome by love, his addiction too strong.
So, he does the only thing he thinks will keep him from further hurting and disappointing Esther. She won't leave him. She loves him too much. He loves her. Divorce is not really an option because they really do love one another. She is willing to give up her career. And if he were stronger, more able to deal with his problems, she wouldn't have to, they could grow old together.
But he's not. So, with one more look, Norman decides that Esther is better off without him and goes for a swim knowing that Esther will recover from the loss and continue to be able to pursue her dreams.
"This is Mrs. Norman Maine."
Here's a link to the scene with Esther (Judy Garland) and Oliver Niles (Charles Bickford):
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Barb,
My condolences on your Aunt Elaine.
Glad to hear that BronxMom is doing well.
Andrew Sarris has died
in Films and Filmmakers
Posted
I debated whether to post this in one of the more frequently traveled forums like "General Discussions" or "Hot Topics" but thought it might be more fitting (and he might feel more at home) to post the news here.
Film critic and author Andrew Sarris died unexpectedly this morning. The long-time critic, perhaps best known for his auteur theory, was married to fellow critic and film historian, Molly Haskell.
While you may or may not agree with Sarris, he had a passion for movies that too few modern critics seem to have.
From the News Observer:
Andrew Sarris, a leading movie critic during a golden age for reviewers who popularized the French reverence for directors and inspired debate about countless films and filmmakers, died Wednesday. He was 83.
Sarris died at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan after complications developed from a stomach virus, according to his wife, film critic Molly Haskell.
Sarris was best known for his work with the Village Voice, his opinions especially vital during the 1960s and 1970s, when movies became films, or even cinema, and critics and fans argued about them the way they once might have contended over paintings or novels.
No longer was the big screen just entertainment. Thanks to film studies courses and revival houses, movies were analyzed in classrooms and in cafes. Audiences discovered such foreign directors as Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman, rediscovered older works by Howard Hawks, John Ford and others from Hollywood, and welcomed new favorites such as Robert Altman and Martin Scorsese.
Filmmakers were heroes and critics were sages, including Sarris, Pauline Kael, Stanley Kauffmann and Manny Farber.
"Andrew Sarris was a vital figure in teaching America to respond to foreign films as well as American movies," fellow critic David Thomson said Wednesday. "As writer, teacher, friend and husband he was an essential. History has gone."
Sarris started with the Voice in 1960 and established himself as a major reviewer in 1962 with the essay "Notes on the Auteur Theory." Acknowledging the influence of French critics and even previous American writers, Sarris argued for the primacy of directors and called the "ultimate glory" of movies "the tension between a director's personality and his material."
He not only helped write the rules, but filled in the names. He was a pioneer of the annual "Top 10" film lists that remain fixtures in the media. In 1968, he published "The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968," what Sarris described as "a collection of facts, a reminder of movies to be resurrected, of genres to be redeemed, of directors to be rediscovered." Among his favorites: Ford, Hawks, Orson Welles and Fritz Lang. Categorized as "Less Than Meets the Eye": John Huston, David Lean, Elia Kazan and Fred Zinnemann.
The critic himself would be criticized, especially by his enduring rival, Kael, a West Coast-based reviewer who in 1967 was hired by The New Yorker. In the 1963 essay "Circles and Squares," Kael mocked Sarris' ideas as vague and derivative, trivial and immature. She later wrote off the auteur theory as "an attempt by adult males to justify staying inside the small range of experience of their boyhood and adolescence."
Athough Kael herself went on to celebrate such directors as Altman and Brian De Palma, the two never reconciled and friends divided into "Sarristes" and "Paulettes." When Kael died, in 2001, Sarris acknowledged that they "never much liked each other" and added that he found her passing less upsetting than the demise days earlier of actress Jane Greer.
"The terms of the battles he fought for the films he loved have receded into the past - the rivalry with Pauline Kael that we saw as epic at the time, the campaigns on behalf of the auteur theory," Wall Street Journal critic Joe Morgenstern said Wednesday. "Yet Andrew's passion for films - and for his beloved Molly - remained undiminished, despite declining health. Indeed, in recent years his film love seemed to intensify as it grew ever more inclusive."
Kael aside, Sarris was greatly admired by his peers and even some directors. "Citizen Sarris," a collection of essays about the critic published in 2001, included contributions from critics Roger Ebert and Thomson, and from filmmakers Scorsese, John Sayles and Budd Boetticher. Scorsese, with whom Sarris briefly shared an office at New York University, praised him as "a fundamental teacher" and credited him for helping Scorsese "see the genius in American movies." A former student, "Superbad" director Greg Mottola, tweeted Wednesday that Sarris was an "inspirational film writer and teacher."
Sarris was a heavyset and sad-eyed man, a deeply knowledgeable, elegiac critic with a notable willingness to admit error. He dismissed Billy Wilder in 1968 as being "too cynical to believe even his own cynicism," then years later (with a nudge from Francois Truffaut) said he was wrong. After initially panning Stanley Kubrick's "2001: Space Odyssey," he gave the 1968 film another try - under different circumstances - in 1970.
"I must report that I recently paid another visit to Stanley Kubrick's '2001' while under the influence of a smoked substance that I was assured by my contact was somewhat stronger and more authentic than oregano on a King Sano (cigarette) base," he confided.
"Anyway, I prepared to watch '2001' under what I have always been assured were optimum conditions, and surprisingly (for me) I find myself reversing my original opinion. '2001' is indeed a major work by a major artist."
Sarris was born in Brooklyn in 1928, the son of a real estate investor who lost much of his fortune during the Great Depression. (Always broke, but never poor, was how Sarris remembered his childhood.)
According to a family story, young Andrew was being pushed in a standing stroller when he dashed into a nearby movie house and had to be dragged out, screaming. "Womblike," was how Sarris later described his bond to the screen. As an undergraduate at Columbia University, he found himself edging away from campus and "ever deeper into the darkness of movie houses, not so much in search of a vocation as in flight from the laborious realities of careerism."
He called himself a "middle-class cultural guerrilla," an arsenal of ideas and emotions. "Novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poems slithered off my typewriter in haphazard spasms of abortive creation," he later wrote.
By the mid-1950s, he was absorbing the writings of the influential French journal Cahiers du Cinema, where contributors included such future directors as Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Eric Rohmer. In 1960, he became the Village Voice's film critic, starting with a review of Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho," which he praised for "making previous horror films look like variations of 'Pollyanna.'"
Sarris left the Voice in 1989 to write for the New York Observer, where he remained until he was laid off in 2009. In 2000, Sarris was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for criticism and in 2012 received a $10,000 prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for "progressive, original, and experimental" criticism. He was also a founding member of the National Society of Film Critics, wrote screenplays for the films "A Promise at Dawn" and "Justine" and worked as a story consultant for 20th Century Fox from 1955-65.
He was a longtime professor of film at Columbia University, and also taught at New York University and Yale University. His other books included "Politics and Cinema" and "The Primal Screen."
In 1969, Sarris married Haskell, a union Kael predicted wouldn't last. Haskell said Wednesday that "he had a wonderful life" and that it was fitting.
RIP, Andrew (and have Ford, Hawks and Walsh buy you a drink at that bar in heaven).