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jay440's Replies
I looked up The Last of Sheila based on your description and found that it was written by Stephen Sondheim and....Anthony Perkins! Perkins isn't in the cast, but James Mason is. I wonder why Perkins isn't in it, since he was in Murder on the Orient Express.
It's a self-parodic comic whodunit with an interesting premise: "A year after Sheila is killed in a hit-and-run, her multi-millionaire (movie producer) husband invites a group of friends to spend a week on his yacht playing a scavenger hunt-style mystery game. The game turns out to be all too real and all too deadly."
The friends are all Hollywood insiders (many based on actual Hollywood insiders of the time), including a washed-up director (James Mason), a Sue Mengers-based superagent (Dyan Cannon, who took the role after Mengers herself turned it down and recommended her client, Dyan Cannon), a movie star (Raquel Welch), and a struggling screenwriter (Richard Benjamin).
From the Wiki page: "The six guests are each assigned an index card containing a secret (in Clinton's words, "a pretend piece of gossip") that must be kept hidden from the others. The object of the game is to discover everyone else's secret while protecting one's own....suspicion begins that each guest's card does not contain "pretend" gossip but in fact an actual, embarrassing secret about each guest....the second card was revealed to be "YOU are a HOMOSEXUAL..."
Sondheim and Perkins, both homosexuals, based the script on an actual parlour game that Sondheim would play with his friends.
Also from the Wiki page: "James Mason told a newspaper at the time that Welch was 'the most selfish, ill-mannered, inconsiderate actress that I've ever had the displeasure of working with.'
She really got under your skin, didn't she?
I've got to be on the lookout for this now oddly relevant film.
Hollywood insiders, a luxury yacht cruise, and murder.
[url]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZCGUs2CrKo[/url]
I can't believe this actually exists. Thanks!
Caesar's Garlic Wars!
Soderbergh seems to have lost interest in message movies.
From a NY Times article: Mr. Soderbergh, an Academy Award winner for his crisscrossing drug-trade narrative “Traffic,” is deadly serious when he says he is never going back to making the films he used to.
“I’ve really lost my interest as a director — not as a producer or viewer — in anything that smells important,” he said. “It just doesn’t appeal to me at all anymore. I left that in the jungle somewhere.”
After a career of independent breakthroughs (“sex, lies and videotape”), mainstream hits (“Erin Brockovich”) and occasional oddities (“Full Frontal”), Mr. Soderbergh said he was changed for the worse by “Che,” his biographical film about Che Guevara, which was released in two parts in 2008.
That film was a scramble to finance...and a slog to shoot; Mr. Soderbergh spent about two and a half months on it and still found himself wishing he’d had more time. “Che” ended up a critical success but a commercial dud, and it soured Mr. Soderbergh on so-called prestige films. “‘Che’ beat that out of me,” he said.
The quote is from a NY Times article about his WWII film The Good German. Soderbergh's production method on this film is inspired by Golden Age Hollywood directors:
If there is a single word that sums up the difference between filmmaking at the middle of the 20th century and the filmmaking of today, it is “coverage.” Derived from television, it refers to the increasingly common practice of using multiple cameras for a scene (just as television would cover a football game) and having the actors run through a complete sequence in a few different registers. The lighting tends to be bright and diffused, without shadows, which makes it easier for the different cameras to capture matching images.
The advantage for directors is that they no longer need to make hard and fast decisions about where the camera will go for a particular scene or how the performances will be pitched. The idea is to pump as much coverage as possible into the editing room, where the final decisions about what goes where will be made....the sheer amount of exposed film makes it possible for executives to step in (after the director has completed his union-mandated first cut) and rearrange the material to follow the latest market-research reports.
During the studio era it was more typical for directors to arrive on the set, block out their shots and light them with the use of stand-ins; the actors were then summoned from their dressing rooms and, after a brief rehearsal, they would film the lines needed in the individual shot. The crew would then break down the camera and move it to the next setup, as determined by the director.
“That kind of staging is a lost art,” Mr. Soderbergh said, “which is too bad. The reason they no longer work that way is because it means making choices, real choices, and sticking to them. It means shooting things in a way that basically only cut together in one order. That’s not what people do now. They want all the options they can get in the editing room.”
Soderbergh *feels* to me more like a modern version of one of those very solid golden-age studio directors like Cukor or Mervyn LeRoy or Gregory Le Cava.
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That seems to be how he would like to see himself, too. This quote is from an interview:
“I often think I would have been so happy to be Michael Curtiz,” Mr. Soderbergh said. Mr. Curtiz, the contract director, made more than 100 films for Warner Brothers, including “Casablanca” and “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” between his arrival in Hollywood from Hungary in 1926 and his death in 1962. “That would have been right up my alley,” Mr. Soderbergh said, “making a couple of movies a year of all different kinds, working with the best technicians. I would have been in heaven, just going in to work every day.”
From Richard Castellano's IMDB page:
[on why he was not in The Godfather: Part II (1974)] "I saw Clemenza as a teacher. He teaches how to make spaghetti, how to use the gun. [Coppola] can't tell me that Clemenza, after years of loyalty to the old man, would go in and testify against organized crime. Not unless you proved to me... that he had become a fearful man, that he had become a betrayer. The demands on me were impossible. I had settled on a price and everybody else's was settled upon mine. [Coppola] had me losing weight to play Clemenza as a young man. I was down to 194 pounds. When I received the script five minutes later, it had me rolling in at 300 pounds... The next thing, I saw Coppola quoted as saying that I asked for more money than anyone else, that I asked to rewrite the script. Once the lie gets out, the lie is told, and it takes."
And still relevant to filmmakers today. Christopher Nolan on his latest hit, Dunkirk:
“You save a lot of money on paper,” he jokes about his 76-page script, which is roughly half the length of his typical screenplays. “Dunkirk” relies on visual imagery, not conversation, to propel the story, which can be a gamble. The characters are blank slates who offer no details about the lovers they left back home, their senses of humor or their previous heroic deeds.
“My idea was that, instead of trying to explain through dialogue why we should care about them, we use the language of suspense — we use the language of the Hitchcock thriller — to create immediate empathy with the people on-screen by virtue of their physical situations,” he says.
In prepping Dunkirk, Nolan told the Los Angeles Times that he screened Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, then concluded, “OK, we don’t want to do anything like that.” Thus there are no blood and guts in his war movie and no soldiers kissing sweethearts goodbye. Instead, Nolan re-ran Hitchcock and opted for other devices to touch his filmgoers.
“No examination of cinematic suspense and visual storytelling would be complete without Hitchcock, and his technical virtuosity in ‘Foreign Correspondent’s portrayal of the downing of a plane at sea provided inspiration for much of what we attempted in ‘Dunkirk,'” Nolan said.
Hitchcock's influence is obvious on directors like Scorcese, Spielberg, and the Coens, and Nolan continues this tradition.
Whatever one thinks of Nolan's films, and they can be polarizing, Hitchcock still remains a huge influence on today's filmmakers, and likely will for a long time to come.
Brian DePalma said it best: "Dealing with Hitchcock is like dealing with Bach - he wrote every tune that was ever done. Hitchcock thought up practically every cinematic idea that has been used and probably will be used in this form."
Happy B'day Hitch!
Thanks for the link. I just saw this episode and didn't make the connection with Norman, but yes, the scene with Nacho trying to switch Don Hector's medication unnoticed in order to kill him is, as pointed out in that segment of the podcast, like Norman at the swamp watching the car with Marion's corpse momentarily stop sinking. We root for Norman to "hide the body" of someone we loved just minutes earlier, just as we root for Nacho to make the "pill switch". And Nacho is, like Norman, acting as a "dutiful son" (in Nacho's case he's trying to protect his father from a dangerous drug lord).
An interesting point made in the podcast was that the idea that "likability" is deemed by "the business" to be essential for a character is "terribly misguided." I would agree, but this doesn't apply to Norman; Nacho is a thug and criminal (also young, like Norman, but scary looking), and he's trying to eliminate an even more vicious criminal, while Norman is charming and likable (at first, anyway), and his victim was innocent and harmless, which complicates our feelings even more.