raphael.longbournprods.com

The other night I watched Nightmare Alley, the 1947 noirish thriller starring Tyrone Power and Joan Blondell. It’s set around a travelling carnival, and really does emphasize the seamiest and dirtiest side of the noir genre.

So I’m watching this movie and I start seeing the word “geek” written on the sides of a lot of the caravans, and I’m thinking “geez, I thought geeks were social outcasts now, but this is nothing on the Forties, when they were obviously such outcasts that they were literally treated as circus freaks!”

I didn’t know the half of it. To my shock and amazement, when the “geek” himself finally showed up on screen, he was this lumbering sub-human person who feasted on live chickens right before the audience (great piece of entertainment, you know — I always love that humanity has historically found entertainment value in witnessing the slaughter of animals for sport or spectacle). Just why the hell, I wondered, is this freak of nature who feasts on raw chicken being called a “geek”? Was this the grim punishment for being an adult comic book fan in the Forties, perhaps?

Wikipedia sums it up thusly:

A geek is an individual who is fascinated by knowledge and imagination, usually electronic or virtual in nature. Geek may not always have the same meaning as the term nerd. The Merriam-Webster definitions are “1: a carnival performer often billed as a wild man whose act usually includes biting the head off a live chicken or snake 2: a person often of an intellectual bent who is disliked 3: an enthusiast or expert especially in a technological field or activity,” though these are only three of many definitions.

This really gave me pause when I read the Merriam-Webster definitions, because there written boldly was the whole issue that had given me pause. Just how the hell does a word go from meaning “a circus freak who bites the heads off live chickens” to “an obsessive enthusiast” (which is the Oxford definition)? The only explanations I can come up with are hardly flattering to geeks — that so-called “obsessive enthusiasts” were so reviled by the general community that only a word whose meaning was as vile as “geek” could be sufficient to level at them.

Oh, dear. Oh, dear oh dear oh dear. Anthropologists and etymologists could have a field day with this whole issue, and you know what? I think I’ll leave it to them. Suffice to say that it was quite an eye-opening experience to watch a geek — one of us, man, or so I thought — turn out to be nothing more than a circus freak who consumes live chickens for the delectation and amusement of some frankly astonishingly crude and barbaric Middle-American citizens. Hadn’t this sort of behavior gone out of fashion with the fall of the Roman Empire?

I’ll tell you, I’m going to have trouble dealing with the term in the same way ever again.

But I’ll tell you something else, that on second thought, is eating a live chicken really so bad? Maybe, maybe it just tastes good… Say, I’m feeling a little peckish. I’m a geek. Maybe I should go and try eating something really fresh for a change…

Technorati tags: geek, Nightmare Alley.

Man, I had forgotten how much I despise pan-and-scan videos.

Starman, the science-fiction film directed by John Carpenter and starring Jeff Bridges and Karen Allen, arrived on my doorstep at the end of last week, courtesy of Netflix (to my surprise, too, which I suppose is part of the fun of setting up a queue and then forgetting about it).

Equally surprising was the realization that, unlike what is stated at the Netflix site, the disc I received had no widescreen version of the film, enhanced for 16×9 displays; in fact, it had no widescreen version at all.

Instead, I was forced to endure watching a film that had been shot in anamorphic Panavision crammed into a nearly square box, which said box is occasionally and quite abritrarily slid from side to side within the original film’s 2.35:1 format.

Now, a letterboxed movie which is not anamorphic widescreen is bad enough. But a pan-and-scan “full frame” edition? Almost unendurable. I’d managed to steer clear of full frame DVDs pretty much entirely over the last few years, but one finally managed to rear up and take me by surprise. It would have to take me by surprise — I certainly wouldn’t rent a pan-and-scan movie intentionally.

What’s worse is that this Sony release is copyrighted 2005 on the disc, the same disc which says absolutely nothing about “full frame” anywhere upon its printed surface. And the menu — I saw better menus in the very first crop of Warners DVDs way back in 1997. I think it must be the worst DVD menu I have ever beheld. Bad enough in 1997; intolerable in 2005.

The worst insult a “full frame” movie can offer is actually not that it’s chopped off about half the picture. No. What makes it so horrific is the pan-and-scan feature. Because when the picture effectively trucks left or right, there is this horrendous smearing effect on the screen that completely and unceremoniously drops you out of the cinematic cocoon in which the movie has wrapped you. It’s like a wake-up call to remind you that the director and DP of the movie are no longer in control, and some technician with dodgy equipment will now be re-shooting the movie in a very small box with a bad dolly track.

And yet some studios still release DVDs in both widescreen and full frame versions (the Star Wars Trilogy comes to mind). The idea of actually consciously choosing to spend money to get a full frame edition seems to me equivalent to buying the airline edit of a movie because you prefer it to the original theatrical edition. It’s simply a decision for mad people who ought to be shipped off to Manhattan with the mutants and not get rescued by Snake Plissken.

To return to Starman, every time I began to sink into the movie and forget that half of it had been sheared off, along would come a pan-and-scan move, and pop, suspension of disbelief bursts. The truck move, complete with smearing of the picture, is so obvious and heavy-handed, it’s impossible not to be ripped from the narrative, because it’s so bloody incongruous. Pan-and-scan moves look absolutely nothing like a film move, they don’t look like a camera on a dolly, and the unpleasant sensation of scrolling along a two-dimensional plane (in other words, the movie screen itself), is so disorienting that it makes me sick. If a real camera really filming a scene were to make a truck to the left or right, on real dolly tracks, the perspective would shift as the camera moved. As viewers, we expect this shift in perspective for the movement to feel naturally a part of three-dimensional space. A Pan-and-Scan truck does not shift perspective, because the actual shot in the movie itself is usually not moving. Instead, the equipment trucks across the two-dimensional plane of the flat movie projector screen, while the perspective in the shot remains the same. That’s disorienting enough, but when you add this grotesque smearing effect to the affair, it just totally throws it beyond endurance for me.

I suppose I’ve been somewhat spoiled by having this great 16X9 HDTV set, and having so many anamorphic widescreen movies which fill my widescreen set and offer films in the aspect ratio intended by the filmmakers. It may seem like griping over something fairly trivial to some, but to me, especially after avoiding Pan-and-Scan videos for so long, it’s shocking to realize how poorly-treated filmmakers’ work has traditionally been, just because a few people are too stupid to understand what those damned black bars at the top and bottom of the screen are supposed to be.

Selfish I may be, but I hope to God I don’t have to endure another Pan-and-Scan full frame DVD any time in the near future. I swear, the experience may kill me.

Now if I can just find an edition of Starman out there with a widescreen transfer so that I can actually give the movie the attention it deserves.

Tags: DVD, widescreen, Starman.

Last night, or rather early this morning, I watched the utterly awesome American Zoetrope documentary on the bonus disc of the THX-1138 release.

Now, the whole early years of the film brat pack holds great mystique for me. Be a rebel, strike out on your own, form a powerful network of like-minded friends (who are all geniuses), buck the system, and then eventually make millions and millions by following your dream and being yourself.

For those unfamiliar with the term, the film “brat pack” refers to the first generation of filmmakers to emerge from the film schools in the 60s, who seized the film system then in flux and decline, and remolded it to their will by releasing a string of classic moneymakers throughout the 70s. Some of the names include: Steven Spielberg, Francis Coppola, George Lucas, Walter Murch, Bob Zemeckis and Bob Gale, Martin Scorsese, Brian dePalma. Some of their products include American Graffitti, The Godfather, The Conversation, Carrie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Mean Streets.

There’s a strain of idealism and artistic ambition that runs throughout their individual and group stories which has always captured my imagination and piqued my interest. I’ve read lots of individual biographies of some of the participants, and I’ve read other biographical type books which at least in part cross paths with this loose-knit group at one point or another, to one level of detail or another.

The American Zoetrope story, which forms, if you will, the first chapter in the saga of the brat pack, was a San Francisco-based film production company / studio founded by Francis Coppola in 1969, with the ambition to make films outside the Hollywood system, and outside the traditional confines of the Hollywood production mentality. Coppola envisioned a studio where friends and collaborators would congregate, lending support to one anothers’ individual projects while they worked on banks of the most state-of-the-art equipment that money could buy. Coppola envisioned an entirely new production process, with movies made much like student films, stripped-down, lean, documentary-style, with lightweight cameras and mostly natural lighting, and virtually no studio work. Perhaps most important of all, each filmmaker was free to make exactly the film he or she desired, with no veto or forceful involvement coming down from Coppola in his role as executive producer.
It was a revolutionary dream, and those involved in it were transformed with excitement, led by Coppola’s tireless energy and boundless charisma.

Regrettably, the dream was not to be. In late 1971, when distributor/financer Warner Bros./Seven Arts saw Zoetrope’s first product, THX-1138, they were appalled. They demanded the return of the money they’d invested and cancelled all other projects in production. Coppola went into serious debt and, for all intents and purposes, American Zoetrope ceased to exist, its members scattering to the four film corners in search of new work.

Having recently read Droidmaker, which touched on these heady years early in the book, I was thirsty for more. And when I discovered that there was a well-regarded documentary on disc two of the THX-1138 DVD release, serious Netflix queueage ensued.

It was not a waste of time. There are actually two documentaries on the bonus features disc of THX, both produced by the same crew from the same interviews. The first is entirely about the life of American Zoetrope, and the second a shorter, almost addendum-like, documentary on the making of THX itself. Since the tales of the two are inextricably linked, both documentaries are best viewed back to back, which is what I found myself doing at one o’clock early this morning.

I do love me a good film history documentary, and this one doesn’t disappoint. As a film itself, it’s very well-done, edited with panache and directly informative. Unlike so many of those trashy A&E Biography type documentaries, there’s little in the way of hype or saccharine goodiness. Occasionally the swelling soundtrack is a bit — Hollywoody? — but, you know, whatever. A documentary is only as good as its subjects, and there is virtually every participant of the Zoetrope story on-camera here, totally ready to be forthcoming, as well as bystanders heavily influenced by this Coppola-Lucas journey, like Spielberg and Scorsese.

Perhaps most surprising is John Calley himself, who was head of Warners/Seven Arts from 1969-1975, effectively the antagonist of the Zoetrope project. For him to make an appearance, freely discussing the fact that, yes, his administration hated THX and, yes, it was they who severed relations with Zoetrope — it gives the documentary an impressive sense of completeness. Especially in light of the painful realization that, as someone states in the docu, if Calley had maintained his support of Zoetrope through their early growing pains, the fruits they would ultimately bear — like Apocalypse Now, American Graffitti — would very likely have gone to Warners.

I could go on and on and on — it’s one of my favorite blab topics — but I think I’ll just leave it at that and say, well, well worth a watch. It doesn’t matter if you’re a fan of THX or not. The opportunity to watch a documentary of this quality chronicling such an important and unique chapter in the history of filmmaking is one nobody should pass up.

And it’s narrated by Richard Dreyfuss, too, in his recognizable croaky voice. I’d take him any day over that buffoon who narrates those Biography things.

Yesterday I updated my little “current reading” list on my pathetic and in-desperate-need-of-improvement sidebar. Here’s a micro-blurb on each of those three and why they’re there:

“Hero in the Shadows” — I did a post a couple of weeks back about how David Gemmell rescued the fantasy genre for me. At the time, I’d just begun reading this particular entry in the non-series of Drenai tales, and having finished it quite quickly, I can wholeheartedly recommend it. As ever. Waylander the Slayer, a supernaturally gifted assassin, who found his way at least partway back to the path of good after years as a killer, makes his third appearance in this one. While all Gemmell books are designed to be read independently, “Hero” is the third in a series of books about Waylander. Reading the other two (”Waylander” and “In the Realm of the Wolf”, the latter published in the UK as “Waylander II”) will increase your enjoyment of this novel immeasurably, though it’s not a requirement. In all of Gemmell’s books, good people often do bad things, sometimes for good reasons; and bad people wind up doing good things, for reasons they sometimes cannot fathom. Gemmell writes in gray areas, exploring heroism and the costs of fighting evil in thought-provoking and sometimes disturbing ways.

There is a character in “Hero” — a ditchdigger whose sole ambition in life is to have enough coin to gorge on food, liquor, and whores — who finds himself a “chosen one”, destined to lead a band of ancient warriors against a foe, and in the process become a hero, while a disciplined, deeply religious warrior monk, who has spent his entire life in training to combat this very evil, finds himself marginalized, as a simple ditchdigger fulfills a role he himself spent his entire life training to face. Gemmell uses these kinds of surprise upsets and turns of role as a way to explore the complexity and confusion of good versus evil, and the roles individuals find themselves playing in the conflict.

“Droidmaker” — having just bought this yesterday, I am already completely engrossed. This book, by a former employee and member of Lucasfilm’s crack team of computer engineers, deftly segues from a biography of Seventies film rebels George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola (and friends) into a chronicle of the thinktank of computer pioneers who would develop revolutionary technologies such as Non-Linear Editing systems, and initiate the spark that would eventually become Pixar, THX, even Adobe. “Droidmaker” in a sense represents the ideal book to me, the ideal subject matter, and the ideal biographical approach, meshing personal biography with technical history, and company lore.

It also represents a period in film and computer history which is of huge interest to me. For whatever reason (don’t laugh), the sagas of film and computers in the late Seventies and early Eighties hold a great deal of romanticism for me. I could watch the documentaries on the Tron Special Edition DVD over and over, re-read Alan Arnold’s journal of the making of Empire Strikes Back over and over; the early years of Atari are hugely fascinating. One of my very favorite books ever is “Industrial Light and Magic: the Art of Special Effects”, which chronicles the first ten years of ILM. “Droidmaker” fits perfectly into this space, filling in dots and fleshing out shadowy areas, and it covers so much territory so seamlessly that the mind boggles.

Check out this excerpt from the dust jacket flap to see what I mean:

Droidmaker is an insider’s chronicle of Lucas’ uneasy role between business, technology and entertainment—with parts played by Francis Ford Coppola, Walt Disney, The Grateful Dead, Akira Kurosawa, Steven Spielberg, Michael Crichton, Stanley Kubrick, Ross Perot, Robert Moog, Steve Jobs, The Doors, Steven Soderbergh and many others. Their stories woven into a tapestry of backdrops: USC, Atari, Sun Microsystems, CBS, America Online, Amadeus, the Univeristy of Utah, Tron, Xerox, Twilight Zone, Pixar, Jurassic Park, and, of course, Skywalker Ranch.

If this sounds hopelessly overambitious, fuzzy in its direction, be assured that it is very focused and clear. But the involvement of individuals in Lucasfilm’s computer research, and then the scope of influence this computer research then brought to bear on the entertainment industry, is extraordinarily broad.

Magnificent stuff.

“The Britons” — I confess to being something of a history fan, especially of medieval and ancient European history. I slogged through the 1200 pages of “Europe: A History” without complaint. “Britons”, part of a series about European peoples, is about that fuzziest and elusive of all ethnic groups, the Briton, who may or may not be Celtic, may or may not be transplanted European, did not have a written language as such … in other words, mysterious and tantalizing. Loosely, Britons are the people who were living in England, Wales, and parts of Scotland when the Romans arrived. Sort of. Kinda. They were a network of tribes who shared a common language and customs. We think. Sorta. Modern Welsh is one the modern descendants of their language. Anyway, we know very little about them, and this slim and very direct book looks at the most contemporary archaeological and historical evidence to shed as much light on them as possible. And it does a damn good job of it. It then goes on to discuss what survived throughout subsequent millennia of these ethnic “Britons”, when the Isles were repeatedly conquered by Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Normans. It also discusses the historical/mythological figure of Arthur, most famous Briton of all.

And it begins with the following quote:

“I am Arthur, King of the Britons.”
“King of the who?”

Any book which begins with a quote from Monty Python and the Holy Grail has got to be good.

So. Three current/recent books. Good stuff to be had by all.

Pasadena is no stranger to film crews. I like to call it Hollywood’s Back-Backlot. Rather bizarrely, they like to use Pasadena to double for Anywhere USA, as if driving fifteen miles east of the lots in Burbank gets you to “regular USA”. Pasadena has been used in fifteen trillion films (officially) and thirty-one bazillion commercials (officially). It can be seen in Halloween, Father of the Bride, The Wonders Years tv series, Pleasantville, even (briefly) Star Trek: Generations.

But for me, its shining moment has got to be Back to the Future, where it features prominently. (Technically, some of the streets used in filming were in South Pasadena, a different city bordering Pasadena to, um, the South. Whatever.) And most prominently of these prominently featured prominences is, of course, the Gamble House, which exterior doubles for Doc Brown’s home in the 1955 segments (before he squandered the family fortune and sold the land to developers and Burger King).

When I moved to Pasadena in 2001 one of the very firstest things I drove past was the Gamble House, not because it’s very impressive — it is — but because the Doc lived there.

I thought everyone knew about the Gamble House and its role in cinema history. Thus my surprise when the following scene occurred at my local Blockbuster:

I’m standing in an aisle browsing movies while two bored employees I know slightly exchange chit-chat at the registers.

Employee One: … and I saw the house in Halloween, and I saw the house in Nightmare on Elm Street, and I saw [etc.]. I’m still looking for that house in Back to the Future.

I wander over, my curiosity piqued.

Me: Which house in Back to the Future?

Employee One: Doc Brown’s house.

Me: That’s the Gamble House.

Employee One: Is that what they call it?

Me: It’s a museum, it’s on the National Register of Historic Places. You can visit it.

Employee One: Um.

Me: You just drive down Orange Grove Boulevard and … well you just drive down Orange Grove and then there it is. It’s just across that bridge thing, where Orange Grove twists south.

Employee One: Yeah?

Me: Yeah. Remember the garage in the movie? It’s a book shop now. But only the exterior was shot at the Gamble House. The interior was shot at a private home. So the interior’s different from the movie.

Employee One (turning to Employee Two): Hey, ever seen the house in Nightmare on Elm Street?

[]

The point is that I thought everyone knew about the Gamble House and its role in cinema history. But I was wrong. Two guys at Blockbuster didn’t, and they live in the same goddamned town.

So if you’re a fan of Back to the Future and are ever in Pasadena, stop by the Gamble House and check it out. Just remember that the interior was shot at a private house elsewhere in Pasadena. It’s probably not recommended you visit that one — the owners might become cross — and even if you did, it wouldn’t look the same, since the house changed owners after the first movie was shot, and they gutted the interior. Hmm.

In fact, I know of people who come to Los Angeles to take the “Back to the Future Tour” (as distinct from Back to the Future: the Ride at Universal). You start in Burbank on Victory Boulevard (the Burger King in the beginning of the movie), then the Hollywood United Methodist Church on Franklin (interior scenes of the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance), then hop down to lovely Arleta to see Marty’s stunning 1985 home (complete with high-tension power lines behind the residence), then over to Whittier High School for, naturally, the high school scenes, then up to the even more gorgeous Puente Hills Mall in City of Industry (alas very different today), then finally to Pasadena where you can drive up Bushnell Avenue (host to most of the 1955 town street scenes) and then come to a stop at the Gamble House. My but isn’t that fun.

If I said I’d actually done this tour would you laugh at me?

Home is where the film crew is.

As any of you who bother to watch movies through the end credits will know, in the last thirty years there has been a huge increase in the amount of contributors to a film who get credit.

In the Golden Age, you had a couple of screens worth of primary contributors before the story got going, most of these being the above-the-line people (actors, director, writers, etc).

Nowadays, virtually everyone is contractually entitled to be credited in the film’s end credits, from the production runners through the personal assistants, drivers, caterers, accountants … enough personnel that bigger movies need ten minutes or more to scroll all the names past. Even the managerial staff of the visual effects companies get credit. They’re all covered, right? Right?

Wrong.

There’s one major group of professionals who virtually never receive credit at the end of a motion picture. They are, so far as I can tell, the last group of professionals to regularly contribute to films who are not contractually entitled to appear in the credits. I’m talking, of course, of the motion picture score musicians.

Play a few of your favorite flicks, and skim through the end credits. Found one that listed all the violinists, oboists, cellists, percussionists, French hornists, and so on whose performance appears in the score? Didn’t think so. You may, perhaps, see a featured soloist or two, but probably only if that soloist is a famous name in his or her own right (like, say, Yo Yo Ma).

Now, go back to one of those favorite flicks, and find the section in the end credits which lists sound and score personnel. If it’s a movie with a big score (like the Lord of the Rings trilogy), you’ll see credits for people like score producers, orchestrators, orchestra contractors, score preparation people, music programmers, and of course music editors. They all get credit, and I believe they’re all contractually entitled to it.

So why aren’t the musicians themselves?

If you forward ahead, to the songs credits, even the most incidental of songs, like a snippet from Handel’s Concerto Grosso Opus 6 No. 6 that lasts for five seconds, or Tom Cruise croaking out a lullaby to Dakota Fanning, will get complete mention, including composer, performer, and publisher (where applicable). Handel has been dead for two-hundred and fifty years, and his music is in the public domain. But they dutifully list his or any other composer’s contribution in the credits, no matter how incidentally it appears during the movie.

So why not the musicians?

It’s been a question that’s really puzzled me big-time, for a long time. Is it because somehow the individual musicians are not perceived of as being contributors, but the orchestra itself? If so, why are orchestras themselves not often mentioned, unless they’re a “name” orchestra, like the London Symphony? Is it because the musicians’ contribution is not considered material enough to warrant inclusion? I’ll argue with anyone who thinks the value of those musicians’ contributions is somehow less than the petty cash accountant, or the Teamster driver.

Or perhaps it’s because the guild(s) to which these musicians belong doesn’t have the clout and sway of the Teamsters Union, or the SAG union, or the WGA. Perhaps there is no unified voice standing up and saying, “put us in the credits, or we walk”.

Occasionally, if the composer is feeling nice, or someone thinks to do it, you’ll see the list of musicians in the compact disc release of the soundtrack. But not always. I’m a big soundtrack collector; many of my discs have no listing of musicians.

I think that sucks. I think it sucks that the musicians appear to be the last professionals in the industry excluded from the end credits, and I think it sucks that the composers, like Hans Zimmer and John Williams and Danny Elfman, don’t push the producers to put those musicians’ names in the credits, whether they’re contractually obligated to appear or not.

Just take a second to imagine Star Wars without the orchestra. John Williams conducting to a room full of empty seats.

People filled those seats, people with names. And their contributions really mattered. So put their fucking names in the credits.

Technorati Tags: music, movies, soundtracks, motion picture scores, film music