Okay, a little more about what's happening in US...
B.J. Novak's superb comedy "Vengeance" – released in 2022, but only caught by me on the plane back from Vancouver last August – charts an aspiring true-crime podcaster's attempts to document "the new American reality". And I mean charts. The film is a text. So this post isn't an in-depth review, just a recommendation. I'd originally meant to put it out as an immediate response to Trump's election victory back in November, because I thought: what rational reader wouldn't be thinking "Wait, what the hell's going on?" and I'd enjoyed the film as a search for some answers. Then I didn't post it, and now I've learnt the film's leaving Netflix on February 8th, so quick, HERE IT IS*
I'll return to "Vengeance" in a bit, and maybe it's too late now for post mortems, maybe no-one's in the mood for "What happened was...", but it's only going to get later, so here's another search for answers I meant to share – answers other than just "Everyone's Abandoned Democracy", which seems hopeless if true – and by the way, I'm so glad Jon Stewart's back...
"What happened was, the country felt like Government wasn't working for
them, and – the Democrats, in particular – were taking their hard-earned
money, and giving it to people who didn't deserve it as much as them. And
so the Democrats got shellacked."
Or, as Jennifer Pahlka puts it even more succinctly in this article:
"the reality is that
Republicans let their voters choose the candidate, and Democrats didn't - twice."
Maybe what resounded most, then, rewatching "Vengeance" after Trump's terrifying majority, were its final words, so here are SPOILERS... Our hero's initial understanding of events, before he even arrives in Texas, has proved completely correct: the girl he hooked up with in New York was just a hookup, and despite the conspiracy narratives spun by her family, she did die of an opiate overdose. But his understanding of everything else now – how to act, how to choose, how to love, how to remember... the big stuff – is scorched earth, and when he concludes to her mother, as we're all taught to conclude, "No regrets", the Texan muses back:
"I never understood that... No regrets... In my
life, everything starts with a regret... Ends with a regret... In between,
regrets... It's all regrets... You run as fast as you can from the last
regret... And of course you're just running straight into the next one... That's life... It's all regrets... That's what you should say... No other way
to be alive... It's all regrets... Make 'em count."
"So Six Flags, the theme park..."
"Exactly."
* UPDATE: For those who can, it's now up on All4 HERE.
Happy Hallow, as I guess today is! Above is not a picture of Hallowe'en. I have not been working here over Hallowe'en. God knows what's happened to the poor, brave souls who are. The work WhatsApp currently reads like the transcription of a black box. Lois has lost a finger, and I'm writing this on the train to York. I only hope they forgive my abandoning them.
“Why, to the North Po- to Whitechap- to London Bridge, of course! This is the Polar Exp- the Ten Bell- the Star Inn!”
When my job as a conductor on the Mid-Norfolk Polar Express ended in December, I knew I wanted the New Year to be, above all else, one in which I continued to play people who carry a hurricane lamp. No, I wanted to continue doing improvisation-friendly, site-specific shift work with a regular band of friends as I wrote last post, and the London Bridge Experience was my first themepunk gig of 2024. (I am committed to trying to make "themepunk" a thing. Sorry, it's my blog.)
London Bridge! History!
It was a return to Tooley Street, and to reading on the floor between shows, and writing your own script if you wanted to just as the London Dungeon had let you do when it was the rival across the road. It was also a return to painting myself a better jawline and cheekbones.
Look at this dashing rake! Who needs appetite supressants? Compare the portrait above taken when I started work at the LBE this February, to one below of me posing next to a stuffed tapir in Bedlam at the Dungeons in 2007, and you’ll see full rejuvenation was achieved. The dead don't age (although my phones seem to have got worse).
The LBE used some of the pumped odours too – and you know what that does to a pysche – and even some of the tunes: ducking out of Fleshmongers, past the giant spiders and through the labyrinth of killer clowns to check on my microwaved Shanghai rice in the green room, I’d hear the same plainsong which used to play on the steps to the boat ride a decade and a half ago…
There were differences too, of course: old Horror posters on the wall as you enter, which made me feel more at home than ever, real swords and a fake Viking longboat, chainsaws, Romans, a wall of broken dolls, and the fact this place is genuinely underground (I turned my flash on one day, and you don’t get gastropodinous limestone arteries like this in County Hall...)
Everyone there works their arse off as well, like they grew up through Covid or something. Physically, verbally, chemically, no two actors share a superpower. I think it’s the only job on which I’ve lost my voice – bloody Vikings – which is another reason I've been taking it a bit easier. so, okay, the dead do age. But, readers... work with people who work their arse off. I don't mean losing a finger. I mean, say: okay, between bouts of bursting through a blood-drenched shower curtain, for example, Sam's at his laptop in the green room, putting together something like this beautifully simple, one-shot unnerver below. Enjoy! There’s Jess and Preston in the bushes too. God, I hope they're okay.
The summer evening I saw "Oppenheimer" I remember I raced hime to get to work on a version of this, inspired perhaps by Nolan's ruthless deployment of the formula: Man plus Hat times Cinema equals Importance. But I couldn't find an untreated soundtrack to the trailer I wanted to mix into it, and it wasn't really synching, and so I moved on. For the rest of the year however I continued to ponder just what that script had meant when targets other than Hiroshima were being dismissed by those men sat round the table as "too small". It was just a throwaway line, but how can a civilan target be "too small"? Noone ever explained that. This was well before thousands more non-combatants would be bombed to death with America's blessing in the Autumn. Anyway,
cut to the end of year and I had another look at the edit, and decided
it didn't really matter that it was shit; no less effort had gone into
it than the idea deserved.
Also for your consideration: "There are some things you can't film" Yoshishige Yoshida
And working on the mash-up further wouldn't stop anyone actually thinking that one film was a cinematic milestone and the other a risible vanity project, but I was still bugged I couldn't get an untreated soundtrack. Then, tonight, someone on F*c*b**k – already having gone into some length about how much they loathed the charmless Great Man narrative of "Maestro" – started watching "Oppenheimer" for the first time, so I decided to dust this off and join in, and here it is. Tone is tone, isn't it? Where did Michael Flatley go so wrong? Nowhere.
And: "When the horizon is at the top, it's interesting" David Lynch (as John Ford)
Just as Autumn was beginning, sitting in a festoon-lit beer garden on the South Bank, I got to thinking about Pinocchio, and about how much of my adulthood seemed to have been devoted to exactly the life choices he'd been told to avoid. To showbiz and hokum. I didn't know the original book very well though, so I then decided to text Gemma Brockis, who'd once made a touring adaptation with Silvia Mercuriali in a car, and ask her what she thought Pinocchio was originally, actually about?
Gemma answered that originally, actually the story had ended with Pinocchio getting hanged. Carlo Collodi only added the blue fairy and whale-based redemption arc after the success of his initial serial prompted its expansion into a whole book. She also said it was all tied into the Risorgimento. What was that? The unification of Italy. Collodi was apparently deeply concerned with the path his new country would take, and was convinced that education was the key to its prosperity. So, wait, was Pinocchio Italy? Totally, Gemma answered. I dimly remembered a live action television adaptation from my childhood, and decided when I got home to see if it was online. It was. Here's a taste.
Nightmarish. As most live action adaptations of Pinocchio seem to be. That fox at the top of this post is in it too. Want the whole thing? Both episodes?
Here!
"What a horrible thing, Simon, why would you share this?"
Well, I don''t know, look, sorry, but last night I saw Netflix's new "Pinocchio" – a film Guillermo Del Toro apparently says he has wanted to make for "as long as he can remember"
– and I think that might be even worse. At least the old BBC adaptation is nightmarishly bad. Despite its many nods to Frankenstein and the inclusion of Mussolini, the Del Toro version isn't even that. One of the problems might be that Del Toro said he "wanted to deviate from the original book’s themes of obeying
authority by making his Pinocchio virtuous for questioning the rules and
forging his own set of morals." But he doesn't, and when Pinocchio finds Gepetto in the stomach of a whale, it's not because he spent the last act of the story searching for him, but because he inexplicably and fortuitously was sent flying out of a fascist
military academy by a dropped bomb, which maybe makes the film sound more fun than it is. I promise it's not fun.
I'd also suggest that if you don't like the story of Pinocchio – whatever that is – don't adapt it. I don't care that Mark Kermode gave this film five stars. Well, that's a lie, obviously I care. If anything I care more about this film's reception than the film itself. It actually made me want to watch the Zemeckis version to see how that could possibly be worse, although as summarised
by the excellent Ryan George below, that also seems to share quite a few of the Netflix version's narrative malfunctions. Don't watch
the Del Toro adaptation, is really all I've come on here to say, quite spitefully, I don't know, you might love it. But if you really want to watch a terrible Pinocchio adaptation this holiday, dim the lights, press "play" above, and let the screaming start.
And how successful was the act? Because, if it was successful, why have I never
seen any contemporary imitations? Why would we not see this level of
articulation in a puppet again until "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles"? If Vaudeville could come up with something this impressive in 1907, why would a Master of Cinema like Fritz Lang, the creator of Metropolis, have such difficulty building a convincing dragon nearly twenty years later? If I was Lang I'd have gone "Get me the dancing pig people, STAT!" Or
maybe he did. Maybe they built this dragon too, but it wasn't as good. Who
built this pig!
(Okay, now I've looked it out, it's better than I remember, but it's still no dancing pig.)
I have a question too about the technology used to clean this clip up – less about the wherewithal, and more about its effect. I assume it's some kind of rougher, off-the-peg version of whatever Ai Peter Jackson used to clean up the Beatles footage in "Get Back". A few other youtube clips suggested by my algorithm use the same tech. Here's the first I saw...
My old workplace, the Trocadero, and the next time I was there I took a photograph, to compare the two...
Because, when I watch these clips I feel – as I felt watching "Get Back" –
that I'm somehow being transported in time, and then I have to check why,
because documentaries aren't new, and film has been around for long
enough for me not to be surprised by it. That's my question.
So I've decided, it's not that the retouching makes footage look more realistic, but that it makes it less immeditaely familiar as "footage", and so the brain reads it more literally. One can – rightly – condemn the artificiality of this, if what's intended is the creation of a more accurate record. But what this technology reminds me is that, from its inception, film has never been just a record, it is also a genuine marvel.
Here's a Saturday treat! No need to wait now for "The Dial of Destiny" to get your additional Indy content. Have eight minutes of the very first iteration of Old Indy, dashing through the snow in a wraparound for a "Young Indiana Jones Chronicles "spinoff movie I'd never heard of called – terribly – "The Mystery of the Blues!" I prefer my title, even if it is a bit of a spoiler for the ending.
Doesn't he look great with the beard? I guess it was for "The Fugitive", so this was actually filmed only a couple of years after "The Last Crusade" but it's a great Old Indy look regardless. I think he should have kept the beard. I also think he should also have kept that stuntman they used for the shot of Indy just getting out of the car, then he wouldn't have hit his head on the Millenium Falcon in "Force Awakens". Enjoy!
I have been doing a little research into the studio that made Citizen Kane. Also featured in Episode One of The RKO Story: Katharine Hepburn... King Kong... Murray Spivak's giant wind machines... a hundred dancing women strapped to aeroplanes... Ginger Rogers... and Fred Astaire, who also appears in Love Goddess - the Rudy Vallee Rita Hayworth Musical, tickets HERE!
Having skirted its making in my "research" for Love Goddess, today I decided to actually rewatch Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, which happily appears to be available on iplayer forever. The film seems timely now in a way it probably hadn't since it first came out. I initally wrote "frighteningly timely" but, if I'm honest, also quite pleasingly timely...
Timely not just in its depiction of one of the richest men in the world
maniacally throwing money away in an attempt to buy the love of "The People" and call it Democracy, but also in its depiction of the attempt to use money, and the media that money buys, to remake reality itself, and of the suicide-attempt-inducing nightmare of having to live inside that lie – the fate of Kane's second wife.
Susan Alexander's story probably stands up best as a metaphor; in reality, billionaires' wives seem to be managing okay. Still, as the opening of the film makes clear, Citizen Kane doesn't take place in reality. I was wildly wrong before when I said it began with a news reel. Of course, it begins with this:
In the ruins of the fairy tale that Kane retreated into, to the sound of the same sleepily growling horns composer Bernard Herrmann would later use to accompany Jason and the Argonauts disturbing Talos' gigantic jewellery box: lost monkeys, abandoned gondolas, an absurdly convex golf course, and the suggestion – confirmed in the film's closing shots – that this is just a taste of Xanadu... that you'll never be able to see the whole thing. Immediately, I was reminded of scrolling through my photos after a night walk, deciding what images to use, and how many, and what order to put them in on this blog. So actually, this opening does remind me of the real world. Or whatever you want to call what we're living in until the lights go out. That's what makes it the greatest.
"... and on this." Different Play, Act III Scene 4
After the surprising delights of Peter Brook's seventy-three-minute-long 1953 King Learyesterday, I decided to revisit Gerolamo Lo Savio's extravagantly-hatted, fourteen-minute-long silent 1910 version from the BFI collection Silent Shakespeare, posted at the top.
In looking that up I discovered an even earlier, thirteen-minute-long, German-subtitled version from 1909 credited to the Vitagraph Company of America, so I thought I'd post that too.
Comparisons are invidious, but what else are we going to do?
The most surprising thing both versions share is an absolutely stand-out Oswald. Goneril's servant, it's a small but satisfying role, whose job both literally and narratively is to just turn up and be a dick. Above is the Vitagraph version, fully understanding the assignment as he bounds out and tells everyone to eff off. Below is Lo Savio's. I remembered the 1910 version having excellent facial hair and helmets, and I was right. Just look at him there on the left. This Oswald may not have received the promotion to chief antagonist Brook gave him in 1953,
despite this 1910 version also cutting the subplot, but he definitely gets the outfit hardest to ignore, against stiff competition too.
That's Kent in the middle, gobsmacked by his cheek. Required by the plot to disguise himself as a servant by simply shaving, Kent looks very underdressed in this company. The shorter 1909 version not only keeps the suplot, involving Edmund and Edgar – YAY! – but also devotes a whole scene to Kent shaving. He gets to keep the moustache too. In the following scene, having picked another fight with Oswald, Kent is sentenced to the stocks. That's Oswald behind him leaping for joy. What a dick.
Compare this scene to the 1910 version. Again, excellent helmets. But...
These guys really do not know how to put someone in the stocks.
In general, as gorgeous as this later, hand-tinted version looks, it does come across as a bit of a shambles compared to Vitagraph's effort: Like many blockbusters, a lot more time and care seems to have been spent on it in post than during the actual shoot. Here's the 1910 version's storm scene...
... minus the storm, because we're filming outside on a clear day because it's 1910. Feigning madness without a script is also quite a big ask, especially when you're missing the rain and thunder that's meant to push you over the edge, so after quite a lot of faff with a cloak, Ermete Novelli's Lear tries to fix this narative lapse by punching a rock and going Ow.
Again though, it was 1910. Cut the film some slack.
Let's compare this to Vitagraph's earlier 1909 version...
Oh okay! Sure! If you want to go the traditional route, I suppose you could always bring out a backdrop, run a shower in front of the camera and scratch lighning flashes directly onto the film, but...
Okay no, this is clearly much better. But aren't you just rushing everything if you have to include the subplot? Only providing a series of tableaux vivants? What about later, when Lear is discovered lost to his madness but drifiting in and out of a state of revelation? (Sorry, SPOILERS... that's a joke of sorts, but actually if you don't know King Lear, there will be spoilers coming.) Here's the Vitagraph:
Having kept the subplot, this Lear also keeps its full complement of witnesses: Lear flanked by the banished and debased Edgar, and Gloucester, the father who banished and debased him, blinded now by allies of the son he promoted. Here's the 1910 version:
Having lost both the subplot and the blinding of Gloucester, and of course the storm – but having definitely hurt his hand, let's not forget that – Ermete Novelli now improvises some "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" business with a broomstick, abandoning the narrative pretty much entirely before shuffling off stage right with a cry of whatever the Italian is for "Wheee I'm a witch, byeeee!"
When he later comes to on a cheetah skin we're back in the play, but the hand-tinters seem to have called it a day...
For both 1909 and 1910 Lears, the reconciliation scene with his banished daughter Cordelia is played as eccentrically as the madness scenes, meaning Vitagraph's William V. Ranous gets to keep his dignity, while Novelli, for whom that ship had long sailed, still gets to go noodly noodly, but in a happier vein than before. The Vitagraph version also provides a harpist for Ranous. I don't know if that made any difference to the accompaniment. Nice helmet bottom right too.
Here, of course, is where the story should end, and where, even with their tiny truncated running times, both versions show the strength of the play's final act. Vitagraph also manages to cram in a final fight between Edmund and Edgar, before somehow managing to rig a slowly setting sun over the final image of Lear grieving for his hanged daughter through disintegrating filmstock.
And I even stopped laughing at Novelli (put that on your poster!) There is nothing comic in him bringing on Cordelia's body, and while the 1910 version doesn't give us a sunset, it does manage an impressive number of distant extras to the left of the frame and a possibly fake bridge.
Unfortunately 1910 Lear's grief turns loopy almost immediately, and the film cuts just as it looks like he was about to get better.
Still, I'm very glad there was a record of whatever it was Ermete Novelli thought he was up to.
Today we had two performances of Love Goddess, I didn't trip up once, and that requires a bit of upper body strength, so
I'm afraid I'm now a little too tired to do anything more than just
fob you dear unatendees off with some more Orson Welles content. Here are a couple of stills from Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles, directed by Chuck Workman (do you think he's American?) I saw it last night and I'd like to think that, for all the ways I don't look like him, Welles would have killed for a big old nose like mine.
One of the joys of Magician, for me at least, is the number of clips I now recognise from my own youtube research, as previously posted on this blog, and the wealth of guests Workman presents to provide commentary on this material is also breathtaking: not only Simon Callow and Peter Bogdanovich, not only Richard Linklater, Julie Taymor, Spielberg, Lucas and Scorsese, not only Welles' last "companion" Oja Kodar spilling tea gloriously from the Vila Welles on the Dalmation Coast – although I'm pretty sure that, in a rare slip-up from Workman, this...
... is actually a picture of Vincent D'Onofrio – but even one of Orson's own former classmates (not a fan) and perhaps most surprisingly of all, again at least to me, Peter Brook, who also appears at the end of this trailer. I spent some of my time off today researching Brook's
collaboration with Welles further, but I'll probably present that tomorrow. And I thought it more sporting to embed the trailer than the whole documentary, but you can watch that here.
It's just after Frank Capra who directed "It's A Wonderful Life" talks about Hobart Bosworth losing his upper jaw to a pill of dry ice he kept in his mouth to produce convincing breath for a movie set in the South Pole, that conversation turns to the subject of Harry Cohn: "At least that era is over," Dick Cavett suggests, as we now know completely mistakenly. But Capra, like Welles, was a fan: "If he could bully you, he didn't want you around, if you could stand up to him, he wanted you."
It's also possible Capra got on Cohn's good side just by being immensely successful, and Cohn got on Capra's good side by letting him know it. Also interviewed is Mel Brooks, who describes his own introduction to Cohn beautifully, watching him wheeled around on his back from messenger to messenger "like a piece of field artillery." Robert Altman and Peter Bogdanovich are there too, it's quite a line-up, although I've never seen Dick Cavett so watery and ineffectual, but Mel Brooks has some fun with that.
Cohn seems to have been as keen to be hated as Orson Welles was to be loved, I'm having a ball playing both without the aid of a cigar, and I cannot overstate how easy everyone is making it for me. Love Goddess, the Rita Hayworth Musical returned to the Cockpit tonight. I'm a huge fan of this show. Come and join me. Tickets here!
