Portrait of a Soundscapist: An Interview with Peter Strickland
“I had to allow time to let experience ferment inside me, and by then you forget whether what you went through was useful or not!”
Category: Artists
When Luck Runs Out: Preston Sturges’ Gallic Swan Song
“I have always contended that in addition to talent, success depends on a little bit of luck, and my luck seemed to have run out, professionally at least.” –Preston Sturges, on the making of The French, They Are a Funny Race1
Memoir · SF & Fantasy · Writers & Critics
Wild Love: Spike Jonze Meets Maurice Sendak in Where the Wild Things Are
“I’ll eat you up. I love you so.”
Cary Grant: Prince of Denmark
“If we take Grant seriously, we must contend with an extreme difficulty: what appears to be fake, an actor portraying a character, might be real; what we normally think of as real, a person gesturing in the everyday world, might well be artificial.”
Actors & Personalities · Comedy
Forgotten Charleys I: Charley Bowers: Silent Comedy’s Wizard of the Bizarre
“He is Aladdin and the camera is his lamp.” — James R. Quirk
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Silents
Forgotten Charleys II: Charley Chase: Mr. Normal Unleashes His Comic Demon
“He could be suave or awkward, likable or pesky, average or eccentric, a winner or a loser, a fussy nerd or the life of the party, all the while remaining Charley Chase.”
Fifty plus Fifty: The Fifty Year Decline and Fall of Hollywood Reconsidered: The Sorrows of Ezra, as Told by Himself
He worked for Time; that can do things to a man
Actors & Personalities · Silents
Florence Lawrence: “The First Movie Star”
“Lawrence had become a movie star for many reasons — gentleness, grace, that silky hair, and what Laemmle assessed as ‘sensational bubbies.'”
Essays · Historical & Epic · Music & Musicals · Writers & Critics
Boris Godunov in America: Notes on a Meyerhold Production Resurrected*
“My God! — cried out a querulous voice within me — is it possible that we, artists of the stage, are doomed by the materiality of our bodies to eternal servitude and the representation of crude reality?” — Stanislavsky, questioning his Realistic method after a failed 1904 production of symbolist one-act plays by Maeterlink2 “The stage is art . . . There’s a genre painting by Kramskoy in which the faces are portrayed superbly. What would happen if you cut the nose out of one of the paintings and substituted a real one? The nose would be “realistic” but the picture would be ruined.” — Chekhov, explaining to an actor why offstage sounds of croaking frogs and buzzing dragonflies would not render a 1898 production of The Seagull more “realistic”3
The Pervert’s Guide to The Birds: Of Hitchcock, Žižek, the Maternal Superego, and Critical Confusion
“It is the search for explanation itself and the experience of the alien, disturbing, and frightening that thrills audiences.” In The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, directed and produced by Sophie Fiennes,[…]
Actors & Personalities · Directors · Interviews · Visual Artists
“Myself as Queen”: A Profile and Interview with Anna Biller
“My interest in creating visual worlds is what led me to both painting and film.”
Writing (and Filming) the Memories: An Interview with Guillermo Arriaga on The Burning Plain
“Arriaga’s use of eroticism and semi-incest between respective children of the two illicit lovers is more than a pastiche; it’s an organic outgrowth from an idea.”
Counterculture · Directors · Documentaries · Interviews
Drawing from Life: Talking with Director George Hickenlooper
On Art, Identity, Families, Fragmentation, Medication . . . and Fulfillment
Actors & Personalities · Interviews
Confessions of a Hollywood Tough Guy: An Interview with Rod Steiger
“The only thing that is absolutely important for me is quality.”
Lists · Movies · Writers & Critics
Rating Movies: Or, Seeing Stars
“I want my favorites to get the high ratings — my judgments are being challenged by anonymous forces whom I cannot confront.”
Hollywood’s Nightmare, Not Ours: On The Mist, Story (1980) and Film (2007)
Director Frank Barabont hijacks — and sinks — Stephen King’s powerful allegory of political oppression
Jean Renoir’s Toni: Unreal and True
And staying forever young
Actors & Personalities · Silents
Rudolph Valentino: Dream Lover
“Valentino said there’s nothing like tile for a tango!” — Norma Desmond to Joe Gillis in Sunset Boulevard (1950)
The Homing Eye: Comparing James Wolcott and Judith Williamson
“Where Williamson is highly critical of films that encourage us to consume lifestyles, Wolcott’s writing appears to be an appreciation of surfaces — in fact, his whole style can be read as an analysis of ’50s textures and design elements.”
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