Category Archives: Film

I Like Words

02 Wednesday Apr 2014

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Words

Here’s the story: In 1934, a twenty-five-year-old named Robert Pirosh quit his well-paying but tedious job as a copywriter in New York and moved to Hollywood, hoping to kickstart his dream career as a screenwriter. Arriving in California, Pirosh compiled the names and addresses of as many top studio execs as he could, then proceeded to send each of them what is without doubt one of the most colorful, creative, and irresistible cover letters ever produced. This document secured him three interviews, one of which would land him a job as a junior writer at MGM. And as they say, the rest is history: Pirosh would go on to win the Oscar for best original screenplay for his 1949 war drama Battleground, but his other masterpiece — the one which first set him on his path to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre — is reproduced in full below:

Dear Sir:

I like words. I like fat buttery words, such as ooze, turpitude, glutinous, toady. I like solemn, angular, creaky words, such as straitlaced, cantankerous, pecunious, valedictory. I like spurious, black-is-white words, such as mortician, liquidate, tonsorial, demi-monde. I like suave “v” words, such as Svengali, svelte, bravura, verve. I like crunchy, brittle, crackly words, such as splinter, grapple, jostle, crusty. I like sullen, crabbed, scowling words, such as skulk, glower, scabby, churl. I like Oh-Heavens, my-gracious, land’s-sake words, such as tricksy, tucker, genteel, horrid. I like elegant, flowery words, such as estivate, peregrinate, elysium, halcyon. I like wormy, squirmy, mealy words, such as crawl, blubber, squeal, drip. I like sniggly, chuckling words, such as cowlick, gurgle, bubble and burp.

I like the word screenwriter better than copywriter, so I decided to quit my job in a New York advertising agency and try my luck in Hollywood, but before taking the plunge I went to Europe for a year of study, contemplation and horsing around.

I have just returned and I still like words. May I have a few with you?

Robert Pirosh

__________

The 1934 cover letter sent by Robert Pirosh to Hollywood executives.

I took the above picture a few minutes ago.

Read on:

  • Mark Twain’s hilarious, furious letter to a snake oil salesman
  • J.R.R. Tolkien’s smart, sharp letter replying to a Nazi publisher
  • Ernest Hemingway’s first letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald

Robert Pirosh

‘Addiction Is No Respecter of Persons’: Will Self on Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Demise

18 Tuesday Feb 2014

Posted by in Current Events, Film, Interview

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Will Self


Jeremy Paxman: Do you understand [Philip Seymour Hoffman’s] involvement with drugs?

Will Self: Well addiction’s no respecter of persons. You know there’s hardly anywhere you can point a finger, high or low in our society, and not hit somebody who’s got addiction issues. Heroin is a drug that we associate most strongly with addiction, but people can be addicted to all sorts of things. I think the fact that heroin was involved with his death is what people find very shocking, largely because of the image that heroin has in our culture…

The old sawhorse of whether the fact he was such an amazing actor was in some way connected to his drug use – or the pressures of his life led to his drug use – I dare say that’s in the mix, but you know, you can go to any poor or deprived part of our country, and throw a stick and you’ll hit somebody who’s got a heroin habit.

JP: It’s interesting, it’s often represented as a sort of loser’s drug, which is the environment that you are talking about there. By no stretch of the imagination was this man a loser.

WS: No, and as I say, you will find heroin addicts in every walk of life. But I think in America, in particular, there’s a very strange culture surrounding opiate drugs, which is the broader family of drugs of which heroin is one.

JP: What’s heroin like?

WS: You’re asking me personally?

I think that for people who don’t have a kind of need to be anesthetized, it probably is experienced as, yes, euphoric, but they wouldn’t necessarily feel a pull towards taking it again.

One of the strange things is that most of the people watching us now, at some time or other, will take medical diamorphine, which is heroin. And if they’re in pain, they’ll experience simply the removal of the pain.

JP: But it’s not instantly addictive though.

WS: No, it takes a fairly concerted effort to get addicted to opiate drugs, so you can say that people who do become addicted, maybe they’ve got a predisposition to it, but they have to make some decisions. They have to kind of decide to take it…

JP: But apparently he spent 20 years clean.

WS: Yes, that may well be true. Of course we don’t know whether he had other addictive behaviors that, so to speak, kept the addiction dormant.

I think that the way this story is being reported suggests this idea that addiction’s like a kind of ugly spirit that was cowed and pushed into the background, and then it reared up again in that way. I’m not sure that’s a very useful approach; it seems a rather medieval perception of it. But we don’t know what lead to him being in that situation. Again, very sadly, and this is only supposition, often with people who return to using heroin after a long period of abstinence, they can’t judge the dose. This happens quite frequently…

Philip Seymour Hoffman

__________

Will Self and Jeremy Paxman, talking last week on BBC Newsnight about the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman.

I recommend watching the remainder of this five minute interview for two primary reasons. First, Self is one of the more naturally expressive cultural commentators out there — and not only that, he’s a former heroin addict. Because of this, we must be extremely careful when weighing his words on this topic, especially those on the question of whether Hoffman’s creative genius was tied to his drug use, given that this riff could be a thinly veiled absolution of Self’s own related sins.

While I understand those who may take it this way — as a bit of self-justification designed to soften any critiques of his parallel personal history — I am inclined to take Self’s analysis as instructive, if also with a large grain of salt. His experience with the stuff colors his perception of it, sure, but it also means he knows more about it than I do. This is why the testimonies of sinners are always more powerful than those of saints: only they can say “I’ve been there” with a straight face.

I think it is also worth commending both Self and Paxman for the sobriety and gravity which they lend to this topic. So often, untimely celebrity deaths mark occasions for saccharine tributes and tabloid prying. So rarely do we recognize what we’ve lost and what we can learn. Yet notice how Paxman says “By no stretch of the imagination was this man a loser”; his voice registers the brilliance of Hoffman, the brutality of his demise, and how these two facts combine to cast a piteous shadow over the entire event. Hoffman’s death is devastating because he was a father, a son, and one of the most incandescently brilliant actors of our time. But it is also a moment for reflection because tragedies, unlike happy endings, are also the most dramatic lessons.

The Wisdom of Paul Newman

26 Sunday Jan 2014

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Paul Newman

“A man with no enemies is a man with no character.”

“You only grow when you are alone.”

“It’s more of a challenge.” (In response to being asked why he chose to identify with the Jewish side of his ethnicity)

“It’s like chasing a beautiful woman for 80 years. Finally, she relents and you say, ‘I’m terribly sorry. I’m tired.'” (After winning his first Oscar after so many losses)

“When you see the right thing to do, you’d better do it.”

“Men experience many passions in a lifetime. One passion drives away the one before it.”

“If you’re playing a poker game and you look around the table and and can’t tell who the sucker is, it’s you.”

“I had no natural gift to be anything — not an athlete, not an actor, not a writer, not a director, not a painter of garden porches — not anything. So I’ve worked really hard, because nothing ever came easily to me.”

“I’m a supporter of gay rights. And not a closet supporter either. From the time I was a kid, I have never been able to understand attacks upon the gay community. There are so many qualities that make up a human being… by the time I get through with all the things that I really admire about people, what they do with their private parts is probably so low on the list that it is irrelevant.”

“Who’s to say who’s an expert?”

“Acting isn’t really a creative profession. It’s an interpretative one.”

“Newman’s first law: It is useless to put on your brakes when you’re upside down.”

“Newman’s second law: Just when things look darkest, they go black.”

“We are such spendthrifts with our lives, the trick of living is to slip on and off the planet with the least fuss you can muster. I’m not running for sainthood. I just happen to think that in life we need to be a little like the farmer, who puts back into the soil what he takes out.”

“The problem with getting older is you still remember how things used to be.”

“I’ve repeatedly said that for people with as little in common as Joanne and myself, we have an uncommonly good marriage. We are actors. We make pictures and that’s about all we have in common. Maybe that’s enough. Wives shouldn’t feel obligated to accompany their husbands to a ball game; husbands do look a bit silly attending morning coffee breaks with the wives… Husbands and wives should have separate interests, cultivate different sets of friends and not impose on the other… You can’t spend a lifetime breathing down each other’s necks.”

“Show me a good loser and I will show you a loser.”

“Every time I get a script it’s a matter of trying to know what I could do with it. I see colors, imagery. It has to have a smell. It’s like falling in love. You can’t give a reason why.”

“I’d like to be remembered as a guy who tried – who tried to be part of his times, tried to help people communicate with one another, tried to find some decency in his own life, tried to extend himself as a human being. Someone who isn’t complacent, who doesn’t cop out.”

Paul Newman

__________

Paul Newman was born on this day in 1925. If I could live the life of anyone in the past century, I’d probably go with Newman’s.

If you want to know more, pick up a copy of Shawn Levy’s biography Paul Newman: A Life. If you want to see more, flip through Paul Newman: A Life in Pictures.

Despite his Oscar, Emmy, and six Golden Globes, Newman claimed that his greatest accomplishment was being number nineteen on Richard Nixon’s enemies list. He garnered this “accolade” due to his support for Eugene McCarthy, for whom he campaigned in 1968. Newman was also a vocal and highly visible opponent of the Vietnam War. In the short video below, you can hear him forcefully criticizing both the war and the American public’s insulation from its human toll.

Bullet Points

29 Tuesday Oct 2013

Posted by in Current Events, Film, Original

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GunI’m glad to announce that my short documentary “One Small Step to Reducing Gun Violence” has just won the 2012-2013 Georgetown University New Media Showcase, the prize given to the year’s best undergraduate or graduate media presentation. I made the short documentary for my Spring course on political communication, and the professor of that class, Dr. Mark Rom, nominated it for the competition.

Other than on the Bully Pulpit, I didn’t do much to promote my video in the voting. So thank you all for casting your ballots; the committee that handed me my award said I had as many votes as the next 3 projects combined.

You can view the project page here.

I’ve hosted the doc on my youtube channel. You can watch the video below. (I apologize for the shoddy sound quality. I can’t seem to get the voiceover right on youtube.)

Bullet Points

06 Friday Sep 2013

Posted by in Current Events, Film, Original

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GunMy short documentary “One Small Step to Reducing Gun Violence” has just been nominated by the Georgetown University faculty and library staff as one of the top media presentations of the past year.

It is now in a contest with nine other projects. Polls close Monday, so vote as soon as you can.

Help make me a winner — cast your vote here.

Watch the video below.

The Not-So-Great Gatsby

10 Friday May 2013

Posted by in Film, Original

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The Great Gatsby

I saw The Great Gatsby at midnight last night. Below is my short run-down as to why it sucks.

One must have a distorted sense of aesthetic and ego to read one of the great works of world literature and then think: you know what, this could really use a dash of CGI and some Jay-Z. But that’s what Baz Luhrmann has done in his new screen adaptation The Great Gatsby, a film so utterly devoid of depth and feeling that it functions more as an extended music video with a movie trailer tacked at the end. On the screen there is massive glitz overshadowing barely a glimmer of human personality and plot.

But the problem with this newest adaptation of Fitzgerald’s novel is not that it is as dizzyingly computerized as The Hobbit, or that the soundtrack would make F. Scott roll over in his grave (while covering his ears); it’s that the movie has no sense of pace or dramatic tension, and no fully rounded characters. It has a single scene of real dialogue (which is full of tension and intensity, and is the film’s crescendo) and two interesting shots (one is of the facade of an apartment building à la Rear Window, where we are given a glimpse into a dozen miniaturized lives. The other is of a clock, and is perhaps the only take in the movie which isn’t brushed over with a veneer of electric gloss).

In the film’s first twenty minutes, the camera makes many swoops into the canyons of Manhattan and across the bay between East and West Egg, but it barely settles on a single character for more than a minute. By the half-hour mark, you’ll be realizing that all this digitization is actually a distraction — this augmentation of reality is an artifice, and not true storytelling. By forty-minutes, you’ll be asking, Where the hell is Gatsby? (When he finally does appear, he is framed by blooming firecrackers and a big band version of ‘Rhapsody in Blue’. It’s an admittedly iconic shot. No one has done so much with fireworks and Gershwin since Woody Allen’s opening of Manhattan.)

In the novel, Fitzgerald captures the ethereal sophistication and savoir faire of Gatsby’s parties, observing, “… men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.” But in the film, Gatsby’s smooth blue gardens are replaced by raunchy dance floors and a raucous pool scene; and those men and girls are hardly the flittering presences of the book — they are bouncers and ravers. They’re like a crowd at a party at the Playboy mansion, only they look more plastic.

The overarching theme of the Gatsby story is that of romance — or rather romanticization. And there is nothing less romantic than ‘H to the Izzo’ (yes, it’s in the movie). Luhrmann has taken a story that should sway with the seduction of Sinatra and made it convulse under the synthetic distortions of Will.I.Am. The soundtrack is the weakest part of this movie, and is one of the worst — or perhaps worst suited — scores that I’ve ever seen in a film. Even if one could cram Jay-Z into the Jazz Age, why would you want to?

And that question generalizes to all the lights, costumes, songs — all the flash, fringe, and flapping that make up this whole mess-of-a-movie. Even if you could, why would you? Sure, there’s a lot going on, but this sumptuous buffet of color and sound is crammed down the audience’s throats; and instead of being a subtle pâté de foie gras, it is corn mash. And we in the audience are the ones being force-fed.

There is one point in the film (pictured in the screenshot above) where Jay Gatsby has brought in a sea of crystal vases filled with flowers to decorate Nick Carraway’s humble cottage, where he anxiously awaits the arrival of his love, Daisy. He wonders aloud, “Do you think it’s too much?” and holds his cafeful gaze on Nick, who then shrugs, politely, “I think it’s what you want.”

In the case of Luhrmann’s movie, it is too much. And it’s not what we want.

__________

I saw The Great Gatsby at midnight last night. A mistake: wait for the video release.

It’s worth noting that in the 88 years since it was published, no one has been able to adapt Fitzgerald’s classic into a movie. Jack Clayton’s 1974 version with Robert Redford is just as bad, although in very different ways, from the Luhrmann-DiCaprio edition.

The Great Gatsby

The Tree of Life

20 Wednesday Feb 2013

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Tree of Life Shot

“Terrence Malick’s [The Tree of Life] is a form of prayer. It created within me a spiritual awareness, and made me more alert to the awe of existence. I believe it stands free from conventional theologies, although at its end it has images that will evoke them for some people. It functions to pull us back from the distractions of the moment, and focus us on mystery and gratitude…

Many films diminish us. They cheapen us, masturbate our senses, hammer us with shabby thrills, diminish the value of life. Some few films evoke the wonderment of life’s experience, and those I consider a form of prayer. Not prayer ‘to’ anyone or anything, but prayer ‘about’ everyone and everything. I believe prayer that makes requests is pointless. What will be, will be. But I value the kind of prayer when you stand at the edge of the sea, or beneath a tree, or smell a flower, or love someone, or do a good thing. Those prayers validate existence and snatch it away from meaningless routine.

Tree of LifeFoot

We all occupy our own box of space and time. We have our memories and no one else’s. We live one life, accumulating it in our minds as we go along. Terrence Malick was born in Waco, Texas, and has filmed much of The Tree of Life in small Texas towns; the house of the O’Brien family is in Smithville. I felt like I knew this house and this town. Malick and I were born within a year of one another, and grew up in small towns in the midlands. Someone else, without my memories to be stirred, might be less affected by its scenes of the O’Briens raising their three boys.

I know unpaved alleys with grass growing down the center, I know big lawns with a swing hanging from a tree. I know windows that stand open all day in the summer. I know houses that are never locked. I know front porches, and front porch swings, and aluminum drinking glasses covered with beads of sweat from the ice tea and lemonade inside. I know picnic tables. I know the cars of the early 1950’s, and the kitchens, and the limitless energy of kids running around the neighborhood.

Tree of Life

And I know the imperfect family life Malick evokes. I know how even good parents sometimes lose their tempers. How children resent what seems to be the unforgivable cruelty of one parent, and the refuge seemingly offered by the other. I know what it is to see your parents having a argument, while you stand invisible on the lawn at dusk and half-hear the words drifting through the open windows. I know the feeling of dread, because when your parents fight, the foundation of your world shakes. I had no siblings, but I know how play can get out of hand and turn into hurt, and how hatred can flare up between two kids, and as quickly evaporate. I know above all how time moves slowly in a time before TV and computers and video games, a time when what you did was go outside every morning and play and dare each other, and mess around with firecrackers or throw bricks at the windows of an empty building, and run away giggling with guilt.

TOL

Those days and years create the fundament. Then time shifts and passes more quickly, and in some sense will never seem as real again. In the movie, we rejoin one of the O’Brien boys (now played by Sean Penn) when he grows to about the age his father was. We see him in a wilderness of skyscrapers, looking out high windows at a world of glass and steel. Here are not the scenes of the lawn through the dining room windows. These windows never open. He will never again run outside and play.”

__________

Read the rest of Ebert’s blog post about The Tree of Life, or his original review of the movie.

TreeofLife

As a minor aside, I cringe when I read Ebert trying to equate the movie to a form of prayer. That’s really not le mot juste in this case, and Terence Malick would be the first person to laugh off such a description. It’s not that I believe prayer must always be made in the form of a request — and I, like Ebert, am someone who basically spurns the temptation to make self-serving, material petitions to an omniscient being — but he just foolishly conflates artistic expression, and philosophical reflection, with devotional prayer. Which is very stupid.

Check out Ebert’s top ten movies of all time. Yes, The Tree of Life makes the cut.

Watch The Tree of Life trailer here:

Watch the trailer for Malick’s newest movie, To the Wonder, which will be released later this year:

“Repression” by C. K. Williams

17 Thursday Jan 2013

Posted by in Film, Poetry

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Roman FaceMore and more lately, as, not even minding the slippages yet, the aches and sad softenings,
I settle into my other years, I notice how many of what I once thought were evidences of repression,
sexual or otherwise, now seem, in other people anyway, to be varieties of dignity, withholding, tact,
and sometimes even in myself, certain patiences I would have once called lassitude indifference,
now seem possibly to be if not the rewards then at least the unsuspected, undreamed-of conclusions
to many of the even-then-preposterous self-evolved disciplines, rigors, almost mortifications
I inflicted on myself in my starting-out days, improvement days, days when the idea alone of psychic peace,
of intellectual, of emotional quiet, the merest hint, would have meant inconceivable capitulation.

__________

“Repression” by C. K. Williams, which can be found in his Collected Poems.

The first time I read “Repression,” I didn’t know what it meant, but I knew I liked it. Once I had ran my eyes over it several more times, I was struck with a pang of recognition, more serene than ecstatic: here is a work of immense and immediate power.

I don’t want to spoil that gradual epiphany for anyone patient enough to read over “Repression” several times, so I’m not going to post any additional commentary on the poem. The only slight direction I will give is to keep the title “Repression” in mind, and to keenly trace the poem’s line of thought, knowing that it is a single sentence.

As a side note: in the famous mirror scene of Spike Lee’s 25th Hour, the character Jacob Elinsky, an introverted, tightly restrained professor, is heard reading “Repression” to his class. This is certainly no accidental detail of David Benioff’s script, and it should give you some clues about the poem as well as Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character in the film. The powerful (and profanity-laden) scene is below.

It’s Like You Go To the Beach

01 Thursday Nov 2012

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Kildare Beach

“It’s like you go to the beach. You go down to the water. It’s a little cold. You’re not sure you want to go in. There’s a pretty girl standing next to you. She doesn’t want to go in either. She sees you, and you know that if you just asked her her name, you would leave with her. Forget your life, whoever you came with, and leave the beach with her. And after that day, you remember. Not every day, every week… she comes back to you. It’s the memory of another life you could have had. Today is that girl.”

__________

From an underrated and unfairly ignored movie, Roger Michell’s Changing Lanes.

The picture was taken on a stretch of roadside beach in County Kildare, Ireland.

You Can Never Tell the Good Thing from the Bad

21 Sunday Oct 2012

Posted by in Film, Interview, Journalism

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Mike Nichols

From the conclusion of Abigail Pogrebin’s interview with acclaimed filmmaker Mike Nichols:

“I find myself looking at this famous director, who dines regularly with Spielberg and ‘Harrison’ [Ford], who has a staff at home, and a pool outside, and an equally accomplished wife upstairs on a conference call, and I find myself asking the old chestnut: Does he ever think about how far he’s come from that seven-year-old on a boat from Berlin? Nichols pauses. “I do think about that. What I think mainly is that I’m ridiculously lucky. I mean, indescribably lucky. Frighteningly lucky. Sometimes I think, ‘Oh please, don’t let some spiritual bill be piling up somewhere.’ And I’m relieved to remember that the first part of my life (as a German Jew escaping the Nazi regime) was not wonderful by any stretch of the imagination. Maybe, maybe, maybe I’ve paid my dues in that tough, painful first part, which was, after all, very long. We’ll see. If not, then I’ll be sorry. Of course the gag is that the luck was there to begin with. As I’m always telling my children and they’re now always telling it back to me: ‘You can never tell the good thing from the bad thing. Sometimes not for years, and sometimes never, because they become each other.’

__________

From Abigail Pogrebin’s Stars of David: Prominent Jews Talk About Being Jewish.

This quote comes at the end of Pogrebin’s profile of Nichols, the comedian and director of The Graduate, Angels in America, and several other cinematic masterpieces. I read this for the first time in eighth grade, and it was my introduction to an idea that I still consider perhaps the deepest bit of philosophy I’ve yet read; namely, the notion that life is inherently tragic because we have to go about experiencing it in one direction while understanding it in the other.

Two great thinkers recognized and wrote about this idea before Nichols could have known. They are, first, Clive Staples Lewis, who, in reflecting on the tragic and abrupt passage of his wife, said, “The pain now is part of the happiness then. That’s the deal.” In other words, if it weren’t for the sublime moments in the presence of his former wife, the time in her absence wouldn’t be so painful.

We all understand this intuitively. The horrendous moment sometimes becomes the happy joke with the help of time, and the golden, shining instance often turns into a point of particular melancholy, and longing, and loneliness once it becomes a mere memory. You cannot tell the good from the bad: they become each other. Lewis spent several books — Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life, The Problem of Pain — trying manfully to work this out.

Yet the original and best distillation of this idea was made by Søren Kierkegaard in his journals. He recognized the tragic and unavoidable truth that life can only be understood retrospectively. So you don’t know the mistake until you’ve made it, and you cannot truly know the beautiful moment until it has already passed you by. Kierkegaard wrote:

“It is quite true what philosophy says; that life must be understood backwards. But then one forgets the other principle: that it must be lived forwards. Which principle, the more one thinks it through, ends exactly with the thought that temporal life can never properly be understood precisely because I can at no instant find complete rest in which to adopt a position: backwards.”

Now reflect back on Nichols’s words.

Ernest Hemingway in Paris

20 Thursday Sep 2012

Posted by in Film, Humor, Speeches

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“The assignment was to take the hill. There were four of us, five if you counted Vicente, but he had lost his hand when a grenade went off and couldn’t fight as could when I first met him. And he was young and brave, and the hill was soggy from days of rain. And it sloped down toward a road and there were many German soldiers on the road. And the idea was to aim for the first group, and if our aim was true we could delay them.

Have you ever made love to a truly great woman?…And when you make love to her you feel true and beautiful passion, and you for at least that moment lose your fear of death… I believe that love that is true and real creates a respite from death. All cowardice comes from not loving, or not loving well, which is the same thing. And when the man who is brave and true looks death squarely in the face like some rhino hunters I know, or Belmonte, who’s truly brave, it is because they love with sufficient passion to push death out of their minds. Until the return that it does to all men. And then you must make really good love again. Think about it.”

__________

From Woody Allen’s movie Midnight in Paris.