#it was like they went out of their way to de-jewish the film

[wonderfulworldofmichaelford]

Is It Really That Bad?

It’s hard to believe nowadays, but there was a time where the Tim Burton/Johnny Depp duo was known for delivering nothing but certified bangers. Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, Sleepy Hollow… It was just hit after hit when these two joined forces. But in the mid 2000s, something shifted. It suddenly seemed like people were sick of Burton, sick of Depp, and most of all sick of them working together. Sure, Corpse Bride and Sweeney Todd were still well-liked, but once Alice in Wonderland hit theaters people weren’t shy about voicing their dislike of the director and especially the actor. Burton kind of skidded to a halt for a while, while Depp just kept making increasingly worse movies with Disney and generally not doing anything worthwhile after Rango, and while Alice was the breaking point, the cracks started to show in 2005 with a little film called Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

An attempt to redo Roald Dahl’s novel about a precocious child touring the candy factory of a wacky candymaker was being planned for a long time, with even Nicolas Cage in talks at one point to be Wonka, and at another point good ol’ Martin Scorcese was attached to direct. But things just kept falling through until Burton got dragged in, and from there he proceeded to get things done and talk the studio out of stupid decisions like killing off Charlie’s dad and making Wonka a parental figure. Ah, but speaking of Wonka, that crucial role needed filling, and it seemed a lot of famous actors were considered for the role by the studio—Robin Williams, Patrick Stewart, Michael Keaton, Steve Martin, Bill Murray, Christopher Walken, Brad Pitt, Leslie Nielsen, Robert De Niro, Will Smith, Mike Meyers, Ben Stiller, pretty much every living member of Monty Python left at the time, Adam Sandler, and Marilyn Manson among them according to TVTropes—and Burton had an interesting idea for his second pick to play the guy:

But instead he went for his first pick, someone who’s actually very similar to Marilyn Manson in a lot of ways! Good ol’ reliable JD himself! Surely this was gonna bring in the big bucks! And... it did! It's the highest-grossing adaptation of one of Dahl's works ever, and Burton's second highest-grossing film!

Critics seemed mostly fine with it, but audiences were a lot more divided. Some people liked that it was a new and different take on the story that stayed a lot more true to the book than the beloved 1971 Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (a movie that Dahl famously hated as much as he did Jewish people, so frankly who gives a shit about his opinion), while others clung to the nostalgia of the Gene Wilder Wonka and treated this new film like a war crime. How dare they remake their favorite movie, even though this isn't a remake, it's just a different adaptation of the same book!

So yes, this movie isn’t the most reviled film out there, but it definitely is incredibly divisive, and what’s more I distinctly recall even as a child being aware of the attitude towards Depp and Burton shifting towards the more negative when this film came out. So I figured it was a high time I see about revisiting it and find out if this second cinematic outing into Wonka’s factory was really that bad, or if it genuinely was a work of impure imagination.

THE GOOD

It may surprise you to hear that this film actually does a few things better than the 1971 film. This is especially evident in the four shitty children touring the factory with Charlie.

The ones from Willy Wonka were, to put it bluntly, dull and forgettable, and came off as far too sympathetic in regards to their fate because none of them aside from Veruca Salt showcased any terrible traits that would lead to them deserving their punishments. In this film, all these kids are assholes, so watching them fall prey to the karmic justice of Wonka's factory is all the more satisfying. We also get to see what happens to them after they get out, which is kind of funny. I’m not gonna pretend that they made them the deepest and most complex characters ever, but with how they updated them and with the young actors they got to portray them, they managed to inject a bit more life into them than you’d expect.

This movie also fixes Grandpa Joe, who is pretty infamous to fans of the '71 film as a total asshole who constantly encourages Charlie to steal and just in general seems like a massive burden to his family. Here, he actually is every bit the sweet old grandpa that you’d expect, and his motivations for wanting to go on the tour are a lot nicer and more sympathetic. He also never tries to push Charlie into a life of crime, which is nice.

Of course, the very best aspect of this movie is Deep motherfucking Roy. He’s the second best dwarf actor out there, only oovershadowed by Warwick “Leprechaun” Davis, and much like Davis was in Star Wars as the ultimate Glup Shitto—Droopy McCool.

And in this film he gets the incredible honor of being every single fucking Oompa-Loompa there is, and he is clearly having a blast and busting his ass. He had no prior dancing experience, but you could not tell with how he’s pulling off all these sick moves while spitting out diss tracks for children like he’s Blood on the Dance Floor. He really is the single best actor in the movie, and that’s not to slander anyone else—Roy is just that good. Like we have a scene-stealing minor role for Christopher Lee as Wonka’s dad, a crabby dentist who hates candy, and as amazing as he is Roy still is better. You better respect this man.

Speaking of men to respect: Danny Elfman. Taking lyrics straight from the book and weaving a unique style for each kid—Big Bollywood spectacle for Augustus (that was Roy’s idea), 70s funk for Violet, psychedelic rock for Veruca, and hard rock for Mike—the songs are all genuinely great and fun to listen to. I’d never go as far as to say they’re more iconic than the Oompa-Loompa tracks from the ‘71 film, but I think they function better as songs, and the fact each of them has their own distinct style to set them apart from each other was the right way to go. I do think Mike’s song is the weakest of the bunch, feeling a lot messier than the other three, but it’s not unbearably awful or anything.

THE BAD

The biggest issue with the film is that the two most important characters—Charlie and Wonka—fucking suck.

Let’s start with Charlie. Now, to be clear, I’m not putting any blame on Freddie Highmore—he was literally a child, and even then I think he’s doing his damndest to make Charlie cute and whimsical. The issue here is definitely on the writers, who saw fit to stuff him full of all the syrupy sweet Tiny Tim-esque kind-hearted poor child cliches but forgot to impart a personality to go with them. Charlie is, to put it bluntly, a boring and generic nice guy, and one who ends up feeling like a living plot device to further Wonka’s character development, something that feels especially egregious when his name is literally in the title.

And now let’s talk about Wonka. Boy, is there a lot to unpack with this guy.

Literally everything about this take on Wonka is incredibly awkward and off-putting. The most infamous aspect of him is definitely the look; with his pale skin and dorky haircut he looked a lot like Michael Jackson, who at the time the film came out was going through a very serious scandal where he was accused of doing awful things to children in his big rich guy mansion… which is essentially the plot of this film when you think about it.

But that’s just an unfortunate coincidence! It’s an ugly look, sure, but a good performance could make it palatable, and this was Johnny Depp during his big post-Jack Sparrow renaissance working together with the guy who helped put him on the map. Surely he wouldn’t deliver an incredibly awkward, cringey, and insufferable performance that dials up all his acting quirks to annoying levels, right?

Here’s the thing: On paper, Depp’s Wonka is honestly not that different than Wilder’s. They’re both weird, quirky, reclusive confectioners with a not-so-hidden disdain for the kids touring their factory and snarky, condescending attitudes. What it all comes down to is the presentation, and to show you what I mean I’m going to use the most batshit comparison you’ve ever seen:

Burton’s Wonka is very similar to Zack Snyder’s Ozymandias.

“Now hold on, Michael,” I hear you exclaiming in utter bewilderment, “how are these two comparable? I know that both are fine with the wonton murder of children if it helps achieve their goals and that a lot of people are weirdly horny for them, but how is this a good comparison?” Well luckily I’m not trying to compare a mass-murdering anti-villain to a quirky chocolatier in terms of character, but in how the adaptation drops the ball with how they’re presented by removing the more warm and positive aspects of them. In Alan Moore’s comic, Adrian Veidt is essentially a relentlessly charming gigachad, an affable and approachable fellow who seems beneath suspicion because he exudes a traditionally heroic warmth. In the movie, however, Snyder chose to portray Veidt as a cold, distant twink who doesn’t seem particularly approachable at all (another case of Daddy Zaddy tragically missing Moore’s point).

This same "missing the point" issue plagues Wonka. Yes, Wilder’s take is just as much a smug asshole reveling in the comeuppance the children are receiving, but he also has a genuine warmth to him which is codified perfectly with him singing “Pure Imagination.” Sure, he’s perfectly willing to traumatize everyone with a demented boat ride shortly after, but Wilder’s performance and the presentation of his Wonks help sell him as a quirky genius who is more likable than insufferable, and you really understand how despite being kind of a dick he is also a beloved figure.

Depp’s Wonka fails as the character in the same basic ways that the movie version of Veidt does: He's a condescending, cold, openly rude, guy who is just genuinely unpleasant to be around despite the movie really trying hard to make him likable and relatable, to the point where unlike Wilder's take it's hard to grasp why this guy gets any respect from anyone. He’s like the proto-Rick Sanchez, except he’s not even particularly funny to make up for it. Maybe this take is more accurate to the book, but if it is it’s really just proof that taking liberties when adapting really is for the best.

And this failure is only compounded by the movie piling on a tragic backstory for Wonka. Yes, Christopher Lee is great, but there is genuinely no need to pile on a traumatic childhood and weird daddy issues to Willy Wonka. The character works best as this weird, trickster mentor figure who dishes out karma to the naughty kids and ultimately rewards the good egg of the bunch. Trying to bring a guy with a magical factory full of dwarfs who do choreographed diss tracks every time a kid falls into the incinerator down to earth and make him relatable is just a mind-boggling decision.

These are really the only two issues with the film that stand out as excessively bad, but… you see the problem, right? The titular character and the owner of the titular chocolate factory are both bad. One’s a living prop, the other is just an obnoxious asshat who is given unneeded character development that ends up falling flat, and while this would be easy to ignore if they were side characters it’s impossible to let slide since they are the main fucking characters. The whole film revolves around the two very worst things in it, and no matter how good the other stuff in the movie is these elements alone drag it down a lot.

IS IT REALLY THAT BAD?

Look, I’m not going to pretend like this is a great film. If it really is closer to Dahl’s book, all it managed to do is convince me to never read it and solidified my belief that being pragmatic when adapting books to screen is the way to go. It’s also really easy to see how the Burton-Depp fatigue came about, as this is some of the weakest work in both of their filmographies.

But I still feel like there’s plenty to like here. The songs, the bratty kids, Deep motherfucking Roy, it’s all genuinely good shit! There was never a chance it was going to be iconic as the Wilder film, but it’s disingenuous to write it off entirely when it does a lot good things (and a few things better than the '71 version). A lot of people are nostalgic for this one these days, as it's the one this generation grew up with, and honestly? I can't really blame them entirely. It's a decent enough movie, and I honestly think that score it has up there is pretty fair. It's certainly a mixed bag but when it actually succeeds at being charming it does it in its own unique way rather than trying to ape the beloved classic that came before it, and I do respect it for that.

And hey, if Johnny Depp's worst and most annoying movie role is in a movie I'd still say is okay, that's a good thing right? He couldn't possibly ever take a role more cringeworthy and annoying than Wonka in a film that's genuinely shitty, right?

Right?

RIGHT?!

[profblahson]

On that Puss in Boots brainrot, so here’s a list nobody asked for that I can’t get out of my brain

Classical Music I think characters would appreciate for one reason or another, usually because of the story or impetus behind its writing or meaning, in an increasingly longer title

Disclosure: these are just my thoughts. Feel free to comment, reblog, add, discuss! I’m just some dude on the Internet talking about fictional characters, have fun with it!

Under a cut cuz it’s long and there’s a lot of video links

My goal was to explore the music a bit more, get into the reasoning behind its existence, and how that story might play into why I think these characters would appreciate to it. (Sometimes, though, it’s a bit more simple than that)

Gotta start with our favorite, fearless Hero

Puss

“Heroic” Polonaise in Ab, Frederic Chopin

You’ve probably heard this one before, as it’s one of Chopin’s most popular works. Some research, however, I found that Chopin apparently didn’t like attaching descriptive titles to his work - “Heroic” was added by the modern listeners and music historians. The piece was written during the revolutions of 1842, and Chopin’s love at the time, Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Francueil - known by her pen name George Sand - wrote that the piece had the energy and passion needed for the French Revolution. It seems their correspondence was a part of why it gained the name “Heroic” later in life.

While initially I chose this piece because “haha heroic for the hero,” I found I had a “wait a minute” moment reading about how the name was added later on. If having a title and being perceived a certain way doesn’t describe this cat (at least, for most of the film), then I watched the movie wrong. But the energy and vigor with which it clearly gets performed with, the emotional weight it can carry for so many people, during a time of political upheaval…I think Puss would resonate with that, being a Robin Hood himself.

Death

I have to talk about my boyfriend my boyfriend next, of course, being the reason for Puss’ journey in the first place.

Piano Trio No 2 in e, Dmitri Shostakovich

(This is likely the most difficult piece to listen to and talk about, tonally and emotionally. It’s incredibly dark. I’ve linked the fourth movement, because it beautifully synthesizes all the themes and ideas from the previous three, but if you have the time and spoons to spare I highly recommend listening to the entire composition start to finish.)

I’ve actually mentioned this piece specifically in this context on my blog before, but now I can elaborate a bit more. Shostakovich was heavily scrutinized by Stalin’s regime, and his works and performances were subject to the whims of the government for most of his life and beyond. He often had to write as carefully as he could so as to appear to be aligned with those in power, but often would write using themes and motifs counter to what the government would have liked.

The Piano Trio No 2 in e was part dedicated to Shostakovich’s friend and mentor, Ivan Sollertinsky - who passed away during the writing of the piece -, and part dedicated to the Jewish prisoners of war during WWII. Apparently, Shostakovich heard they were made to dig their own graves, and then dance on them. The fourth movement I linked makes the most clear use of a Yiddish-sounding theme in the violin, and the tormented nature of the composition is undeniable. As a character who clearly values life, I feel Death would appreciate the dedications and thought behind the piece, but also enjoy how beautifully macabre it sounds.

Kitty

Kitty was difficult for me, to be honest. Trying to find something that captures her arc is tricky, as I don’t personally know of much music that discusses trust, both in general, and the way she experiences it. But I do think she has a lot of pride in herself as a strong individual, and has pride in her work, which is why I went with

Danzon No 2, Arturo Marquez

The Danzon is a partner dance that developed from the Habanera, and is an active musical form in Mexico today. Marquez’s Danzon No 2 takes this to the next level, in a high energy and blistering work that will leave you humming it for hours. This piece is important as a modern work, as its popularity brought about not only greater respect for Mexican composers, but caused people (read: Western classical musicians) to explore and perform more Hispanic literature, especially Marquez’s. This is also the only piece on this list by a living composer, premiered in 1994.

Being of Hispanic descent, I felt Kitty would find pride in her nation’s music and dances becoming popular across the world due to the popularity of this piece. We also know this cat likes to dance, and it’s incredibly difficult to resist when listening to it.

Perrito

Nimrod, from Enigma Variations, Edward Elgar

The Enigma Variations are small vignettes written for Elgar’s friends. The most recognizable and known of the Variations, Nimrod is an absolutely gorgeous piece of music. The title “Nimrod” is a play on words - the friend in question’s name was Jaeger; Jaeger means “Hunter” in German; Nimrod was a biblical hunter of fame.

Jaeger was not only a friend, but Elgar’s publisher. He would offer advice and helped Elgar rework sections of music here and there. Jaeger’s presence as a confidant is shown in the slow moving lines, reflecting on years of support. If Perrito doesn’t embody dedicated friendship, support, and love in this way, then again - I must have watched the movie wrong. He learns to sit and listen through his time with Puss and Kitty, and this movement almost forces you to take a moment and really sit, listen, and appreciate what you’re hearing.

Goldi

Symphony No 1 in c, Johannes Brahms

I literally cannot think of a better “just right” story in music history than this piece. Brahms was known for destroying his manuscripts of works and sketches he didn’t approve of - he famously ached and pained over writing his first symphony, despite having already solidified himself as a successful composer. He was afraid of the looming shadow of Beethoven, who he had already been compared to by audiences and critics. Some records say it took 14 - others upwards of 21 - years for him to finish this first symphony, and even still he trialed it before publishing.

It seems things ended “just right” for this piece, after all. It was received positively, and spurred him on to compose his second symphony in about a year after the first. Music historians have pointed to this as a shift in the romantic symphonic style. While comparisons to Beethoven were still made (Brahms apparently being frustrated by this - not because of them, but because he felt it was obvious), Brahms had carved his own path of symphonic writing.

Okay I’m done here that’s as far as I got

If you made it down to here, congratulations! This idea came about because, uh, I thought it’d be fun! It gave me a chance to research a bit, and it was fun to try and think of music these characters that I can’t stop rotating in my head would appreciate.

Music is so universal, you could probably find a reason in any piece to give it to anyone, but that’s also what makes it so great. I am by no means an authority, and if you read all this way, feel free to let me know what you think!

Thanks for your time.

[punchingup101]

Brainwashing in Conflict: Palestine and Israel

By Isabel De Los Santos Ramirez

During the film screening of Israelism offered by Georgia Tech’s Muslim Student Association, a diverse set of emotions arose in me. Before coming into this, I was always up to date with news on social media and would say I was already well informed of the history and devastation that has been occurring from Jewish settlements in the land that Palestians call home. What I did not know, and honestly found extremely shocking, is the Israeli culture of raising Jewish children in a way that makes their entire personality about Israel. In a way that I would say even overshadows practicing Judaism. To the extreme that Jewish-American teenagers choose to go to a country they have most likely never been to in order to serve in the military as an attempt to express patriotism. 

Relating to the filming aspects of the documentary, I enjoyed the way the film progressed and how everything was introduced and expanded upon. For example, the main characters telling their story of how they were raised and how they experienced the real world for themselves which lead to them growing out of the “brainwashing” inflicted upon them by older zionist leaders in their communities. I appreciate the different perspectives on the Palestine-Israel situation. I had no idea some Jewish communities took such extremities in beliefs and nationalism. Just from this, I learned that we are not who we are raised to be. Anyone can change their way of thinking, their way of loving, their way of respecting, their way of having hope, their way of being a human being. It might take a tap on the shoulder or getting hit by a garbage truck, but it is possible. 

For example, Simone Zimmerman, one of the main characters in Israelism, went from being a conservative Zionist to an activists for Palestinian Liberation who founded IfNotNow,  which is a “movement of American Jews organizing community to end U.S. support for Israel's apartheid system and demand equality, justice, and a thriving future for all Palestinians and Israelis”. 

Since this watching experience, I have learned a lot more from class, the news on social media, books (Minor Detail), podcasts, and other short films. I can’t help but to feel anger and helplessness about not being able to do something that will have an immediate impact to make things better. I know liberation and peace take time and loss, but for what reason? I don’t think I will ever understand.

After the screening of Israelism I expanded my research by watching these videos:

[femmedplume]

Welp, just watched Red Sea Diving Resort. It was visually stunning, (Chris Evans, I’m looking at you,) but that was...the least Jewish movie about Jewish people helping other Jewish people I’ve ever seen. 

I mean, they didn’t have to play it up, but nobody did Israeli accents? They’re all supposed to be Israeli and NOBODY did the accents?? They changed the real Ari Levinson’s story so Chris Evans could sound like a bro and like...why, dude? Get a dialect coach, you can afford one! There was no shabbat, no brachas, nobody spoke Hebrew for even a second, they out here eatin’ lobster and talkin’ like they’re from the Midwest. 

And who was that chick?? Was that not the most Aryan looking woman they could’ve gotten to play Rachel? You’re telling me that there was not ONE Jewish actress who could’ve played her?  Not that there aren’t blond Jewish girls, but that was NOT what the actual Rachel Reiter looked like. She had cute mid-east curls! Dark hair! She was full on Ashkenazi-adorbs, and they couldn’t even find a brunette or dye the actress’ hair? Boo-urns! 

I literally could not tell that the story wasn’t about a bunch of Americans rather than Israelis, and that is reallllly fucking weird. 

Also, for a movie about refugees, it would’ve been nice to have the refugees get more face-time, more lines, more something. A scene or two that shows us what it means to be Jewish in Ethiopia. A Rabbi leading a group in prayer in the Sudanese camps, something. The whole impetus for saving these particular refugees was shared culture and religion, bringing a lost tribe home to Israel... and there wasn’t one scene of brotherhood in that sense in the film. There’s footage of the real rescues over the credits that shows the rescuers and the refugees dancing the hora together and like...yeah. That’s what I wanted in the actual movie. 

I just...I had such high hopes, man. Sigh. 

[qqueenofhades]

If/when they make a Joe/Nicky prequel movie, what are some of the Dos and Don’ts for them, with regards to historical accuracy. Like, what do you think they should include, and what do you think they should avoid?

Oof. This is a GREAT question, and also designed to give me a chance to ramble on in a deeply, deeply self-indulgent fashion. That is now what will proceed to happen. Consider yourself warned. So if they were miraculously to be like “well that qqueenofhades person on tumblr seems like she knows what she’s talking about, let’s hire her to consult on this production!”, here are some of the things I would tell them.

First off, a question I have in fact asked my students when teaching the crusades in class is whether you could actually show the sack of Jerusalem on screen. Like... if you’re making a film about the First Crusade, what kind of choices are you going to make? What narrative viewpoint are you going to uphold throughout the story? Are you actually going to show a slaughter of Muslim and Jewish inhabitants that some chroniclers described as causing enough blood to reach up to the knees of horses? (Whether it actually did this is beside the point; the point is that the sack went far beyond the accepted conventions of warfare and struck everybody involved in it as particularly horrific.) Because when you’re making a film about the crusades, you are also making it by nature for a modern audience that has particular understandings of Christian/Muslim conflict, religious warfare and/or tolerance, the War on Terror, the modern clash over ISIS, Trump’s Muslim ban, and so forth. The list goes on and on. So you’re never making a straight, unbiased historical adaptation, even if you’re going off the text of primary sources. You’re still constructing it and presenting it in a deliberate and curated fashion, and you can bet that whichever way you come down, your audience will pick up on that.

Let’s take the most recent example of a high-profile crusades film: Kingdom of Heaven from 2005. I’ve written a book chapter on how the narrative choices of KoH, aside from its extensive fictionalization of its subject matter to start with, make it crystal clear that it is a film made by a well-meaning Western liberal filmmaker (Ridley Scott) four years after 9/11 and two years after the invasion of Iraq, when the sympathy from 9/11 was wearing off and everyone saw America/Great Britain and the Bush/Blair coalition overreaching itself in yet another arrogant imperial adventure into the Middle East. Depending on how old you are, you may or may not remember the fact that Bush explicitly called the War on Terror a “crusade” at the start, and then was quickly forced to walk it back once it alarmed his European allies (yes, back then, as bad as America was, it still did have those) with its intellectual baggage. They KNEW exactly what images and tropes they were invoking. It is also partly why medieval crusade studies EXPLODED in popularity after 9/11. Everyone recognized that these two things had something to do with each other, or they made the connection somehow. So anyone watching KoH in 2005 wasn’t really watching a crusades film (it is set in the late 1180s and dramatizes the surrender of Jerusalem to Saladin) so much as a fictional film about the crusades made for an audience explicitly IN 2005. I have TONS to say on this subject (indeed, if you want a copy of my book chapter, DM me and I’ll be happy to send it.)

Ridley Scott basically sets it up as the Christian and Muslim secular leaders themselves aren’t evil, it’s all the religious fanatics (who are all made Templars, including Guy de Lusignan, going back to the “evil Templar” trope started by Sir Walter Scott and which we are all so very familiar with from Dan Brown and company). Orlando Bloom’s character shares a name (Balian de Ibelin) but very little else with the eponymous real-life crusader baron. One thing Scott did do very well was casting an actual and well-respected Syrian actor (Ghassan Massoud) to play Saladin and depicting him in essential fidelity to the historical figure’s reputed traits of justice, fairness, and mercy (there’s some article by a journalist who watched the film in Beirut with a Muslim audience and they LOVED the KoH Saladin). I do give him props for this, rather than making the Evil Muslim into the stock antagonist. However, Orlando Bloom’s Balian is redeemed from the religious extremist violence of the Templars (shorthand for all genuinely religious crusaders) by essentially being an atheistic/agnostic secular humanist who wants everyone to get along. As I said, this is a film about the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq made three years after 9/11 more than anything else, and you can really see that.

That said, enough about KoH, back to this presumable Joe/Nicky backstory. You would obviously run into the fact that it’s SUPER difficult to make a film about the crusades without offending SOMEBODY. The urge to paint in broad strokes and make it all about the evil Westerners invading is one route, but it would weaken the moral complexity of the story and would probably make it come off as pandering to guilty white liberal consciences. Are we gonna touch on the many decades of proto-crusading ventures in Iberia, Sicily, North Africa, and other places, and how the eleventh century, especially under Pope Gregory VII, made it even thinkable for a Christian to be a holy warrior in the first place? (It was NOT normal beforehand.) How are we going to avoid the “lololol all religion sucks and makes people do crazy things” axe to grind favoured by So Very Smart (tm) internet atheists? Yes, we have to demonstrate the ultimate horror of the crusade and the flawed premises it was based on, but we can’t do that by just showing the dirty, religiously zealot medieval people doing that because they don’t know any better and are being cynically manipulated in God’s Name. In other words (and the original TOG film did this very well) we can’t position ourselves to laugh at or mock the crusader characters or feel confident in looking down on them for being Dumb Zealots. They have to be relatable enough that we realize we could BE (and in fact already ARE) them, and THEN you slide into the horror and what compels them to do those kinds of things, and THAT’S when it hits. Because take a look at the news. This is happening around us right now.

Obviously, as I was doing in my First Crusade chapter in DVLA, a lot of this also has to spend time centering the Muslim point of view, the way they reacted to the crusade, the ways in which Yusuf as an Isma’ili Shia Muslim (Kaysani is the name of a branch of Isma’ili Shi’ites, he has a definite historical context and family lineage, and hence is almost surely, as I wrote him, a Fatimid from Egypt) is likewise not just A Stock Muslim. In this case, obviously: Get actual Muslims on the set to advise about the details. Don’t make stupid and/or obvious mistakes. Don’t necessarily make the Muslims less faithful or less virtuous than the Christians (even if this is supposed to praise them as being “less fanatic” than those bad religious Catholics). Don’t tokenize or trivialize their reaction to something as horrific as the sack of Jerusalem, and don’t just use dead brown bodies as graphic visual porn for cheap emotional points. Likewise, it goes without saying, and I don’t think they would anyway, but OH MY GOD DON’T MAKE THIS INTO GAME OF THRONES GRIMDARK!!!! OH MY GOD!!! THERE IS BEAUTY AND THERE IS LIGHT AND THERE IS POETRY AND THAT’S WHY IT HURTS SO MUCH WHEN IT’S DESTROYED! AND THE CHOICES THAT PEOPLE MAKE TO DESTROY THOSE THINGS HAVE TO BE TERRIFYINGLY PLAUSIBLE AND FAMILIAR, BECAUSE OH MY GOD!!

Next, re: Nicolo. Evidently he is a priest or a former priest or something of the sort in the graphic novel, which becomes a bit of a problem if we want him to actually FIGHT in the crusades for important and/or shallow and/or OTP purposes. (I don’t know if they address this somehow or Greg Rucka is not a medieval historian or whatever, but never mind.) It was a Major Thing that priests could not carry weapons, at least and especially bladed weapons. (In the Bayeux Tapestry, we have Odo, the bishop of Bayeux, fighting at the battle of Hastings with a truncheon because he’s a clergyman and can’t have a sword). They were super not supposed to shed blood, and a broadsword (such as the type that Nicky has and carries and is clearly very familiar with) is a knight’s weapon, not a clergyman’s. The thing about priests was that they were not supposed to get their hands dirty with physical warfare; they could (and often did) accompany crusade armies, bishops were secular overlords and important landholders, monks and hermits and other religious preachers were obviously part of a religious expedition, and yes, occasionally some priests would break the rules and fight in battle. But this was an exception FAR more than the rule. So if we’re going by accuracy, we have Nicky as a priest who doesn’t actively fight and doesn’t have a sword, we have him as a rule-breaking priest with a sword (which would have to be addressed, and the Templars, who were basically armed monks, weren’t founded until 1119 so he can’t be one of those yet if this is still 1099) or we just skip the priest part and have him as a crusader with a sword like any other soldier. If he was in fact a priest, he also wouldn’t be up to the same standard of sending into battle. Boys, especially younger sons of the nobility, often entered the church at relatively early ages (12 or 13), where it was treated as a career, and hence they stopped training in arms. So if Nicky is actually out there fighting and/or getting killed by Yusuf several times for Important Purposes, he’s... almost surely not a priest.

Iirc, they’ve already changed a few things from the graphic novel (I haven’t read it, but this is what I’ve heard) so they can also tweak things to make a new backstory or a hybrid-new backstory in film-verse. So once we’ve done all the above, we still have to decide how to handle the actual sack of Jerusalem and massacre of its inhabitants, the balance between violence comparable to the original TOG film and stopping short of being exploitative (which I think they would do well), and the aftermath of that and the founding of the new Latin Christian kingdom. It would have to, as again the original film does very well, avoid prioritizing the usual players and viewpoints in these events, and dig into presenting the experiences of the marginalized and way in which ordinary people are brought to the point of doing these things. It doesn’t (and frankly shouldn’t) preach at us that U.S. Invasions Of The Middle East Are Bad (especially since obviously none of the characters/people/places/events here are American at all). And as I said already but bears repeating: my god, don’t even THINK about making it GOT and marketing it as Gritty Dramatic Medieval History, You Know It’s Real Because They’re Dirty, Violent, and Bigoted!

Also, a couple tags I saw pop up were things like “Period-Typical Racism” and “Period-Typical Homophobia” and mmm okay obviously yes there are these elements, but what exactly is “period typical?” Does it mean “using these terms just because you figure everyone was less tolerant back then?” We know that I, with my endless pages of meta on medieval queer history, would definitely side-eye any attempts to paint these things as Worse Than Us, and the setting alone would convey a sense of the conflict without having to add on gratuitous microaggressions. I basically think the film needs to be made exactly like the original: centering the gay/queer perspectives of marginalized people and people of color, resisting the urge for crass jokes at the expense of the identity of its characters, and approaching it with an awareness of the deep complexity and personal meaning of these things to people in terms of the historical moment we’re in, while not making a film that ONLY prizes our response and our current crises. Because if we’re thinking about these historical genealogies, the least we can do (although we so often aren’t) is to be honest.

Thanks! I LOVED this question.

[chiseler]

The Mysterious Death of a Hollywood Director

This is the tale of a very famous Hollywood mogul and a not-so-famous movie director. In May of 1933 they embarked together on a hunting trip to Canada, but only one of them came back alive. It’s an unusual tale with an uncertain ending, and to the best of my knowledge it’s never been told before.

I. The Mogul

When we consider the factors that enabled the Hollywood studio system to work as well as it did during its peak years, circa 1920 to 1950, we begin with the moguls, those larger-than-life studio chieftains who were the true stars on their respective lots. They were tough, shrewd, vital, and hard working men. Most were Jewish, first- or second-generation immigrants from Europe or Russia; physically on the small side but nonetheless formidable and – no small thing – adaptable. Despite constant evolution in popular culture, technology, and political and economic conditions in their industry and the outside world, most of the moguls who made their way to the top during the silent era held onto their power and wielded it for decades. Their names are still familiar: Zukor, Goldwyn, Mayer, Jack Warner and his brothers, and a few more. And of course, Darryl F. Zanuck. In many ways Zanuck personified the common image of the Hollywood mogul. He was an energetic, cigar-chewing, polo mallet-swinging bantam of a man, largely self-educated, with a keen aptitude for screen storytelling and a well-honed sense of what the public wanted to see. Like Charlie Chaplin he was widely assumed to be Jewish, and also like Chaplin he was not, but in every other respect Zanuck was the very embodiment of the dynamic, supremely confident Hollywood showman.

In the mid-1920s he got a job as a screenwriter at Warner Brothers, at a time when that studio was still something of a podunk operation. The young man succeeded on a grand scale, and was head of production before he was 30 years old. Ironically, the classic Warners house style, i.e. clipped, topical, and earthy, often dark and sometimes grimly funny, as in such iconic films as The Public Enemy, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, and 42nd Street, was established not by Jack, Harry, Sam, or Albert Warner, but by Darryl Zanuck, who was the driving force behind those hits and many others from the crucial early talkie period. He played a key role in launching the gangster cycle and a new wave of sassy show biz musicals. At some point during 1932-33, however, Zanuck realized he would never rise above his status as Jack Warner’s right-hand man and run the studio, no matter how successful his projects proved to be, because of two insurmountable obstacles: 1) his name was not Warner, and 2) he was a Gentile. Therefore, in order to achieve complete autonomy, Zanuck concluded that he would have to start his own company.

In mid-April of 1933 he picked a public fight with Jack Warner over a staff salary issue, then abruptly resigned. Next, he turned his attention to setting up a company in partnership with veteran producer Joseph Schenck, who was able to raise sufficient funds to launch the new concern. And then, Zanuck invited several associates from Warner Brothers to accompany him on an extended hunting trip in Canada.

Going into the wilderness and killing wild game, a pastime many Americans still regard as a routine, unremarkable form of recreation, is also of course a conspicuous show of machismo. But in this realm, as with his legendary libido, Zanuck was in a class by himself. He had been an enthusiastic hunter most of his life, dating back to his boyhood in Nebraska. Once he became a big wheel at Warners in the late ’20s he took to organizing high-style duck-hunting expeditions: the young executive and his fellow sportsmen would travel to the appointed location in private railroad cars, staffed by uniformed servants. Heavy drinking on these occasions was not uncommon. (Inevitably, film buffs will recall The Ale & Quail Club from Preston Sturges’ classic comedy The Palm Beach Story, but DFZ and his pals were not cute old character actors, and their bullets were quite real.) Members of Zanuck’s studio entourage were given to understand that participation in these outings was de rigueur if they valued their positions, and expected desirable assignments in the future. Director Michael Curtiz, who had no fondness for hunting, remembered the trips with distaste, and recalled that on one occasion he was nearly shot by a casting director who had no idea how to properly handle a gun.

But ducks were just the beginning. In 1927 Zanuck took his wife Virginia on an African safari. In Kenya Darryl bagged a rhinoceros and posed for a photo with his wife, crouched beside the rhino’s carcass. Virginia, an erstwhile Mack Sennett bathing beauty and former leading lady to Buster Keaton, appears shaken. Her husband looks exhilarated. During this safari Zanuck also killed an elephant. He kept the animal’s four feet in his office on the Warners lot, and used them as ashtrays. If any animal lover dared to express dismay, the Hollywood sportsman would retort: “It was him or me, wasn’t it?” Zanuck made several forays to Canada with his coterie in this period, gunning for grizzly bears. Director William “Wild Bill” Wellman, who was more of an outdoorsman than Curtiz, once went along, but soon became irritated with Zanuck’s bullying. The two men got into a drunken fistfight the night before the hunting had even begun. In the course of the ensuing trip the hunting party was snowbound for three days; Zanuck sprained his ankle while trailing a grizzly; the horse carrying medical supplies vanished; and Wellman got food poisoning. “It was the damnedest trip I’ve ever seen,” the director said later, “but Zanuck loved it.”

Now that Zanuck had severed his ties with the Warner clan and was on the verge of a new professional adventure, a trip to Canada with a few trusted associates would be just the ticket. This time the destination would be a hunting ground on the banks of the Canoe River, a tributary of the Columbia River, 102 miles north of Revelstoke, British Columbia, a city about 400 miles east of Vancouver. There, in a remote scenic area far from any paved roads, telephones, or other niceties of modern life, the men could discuss Zanuck’s new production company and, presumably, their own potential roles in it. Present on the expedition were screenwriter Sam Engel, director Ray Enright, 42nd Street director Lloyd Bacon, producer (and former silent film comedian) Raymond Griffith, and director John G. Adolfi, best known at the time for his work with English actor George Arliss. Adolfi, who was around 50 years old and seemingly in good health, would not return.

II. The Director

Even dedicated film buffs may draw a blank when the name John Adolfi is mentioned. Although he directed more than eighty films over a twenty-year period beginning in 1913, most of those films are now lost. He worked in every genre, with top stars, and made a successful transition from silent cinema to talkies. He seems to have been a well-respected but self-effacing man, seldom profiled in the press. 

According to his tombstone Adolfi was born in New York City in 1881, but the exact date of his birth is one of several mysteries about his life. His father, Gustav Adolfi, was a popular stage comedian and singer who emigrated to the U.S. from Germany in 1879. Gustav performed primarily in New York and Philadelphia, and was known for such roles as Frosch the Jailer in Strauss’ Die Fledermaus. But he was a troubled man, said to be a compulsive gambler, and after his wife Jennie died (possibly of scarlet fever) it appears his life fell apart. Gustav’s singing voice gave out, and then he died suddenly in Philadelphia in October 1890, leaving John and his siblings orphaned. (An obituary in the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent reported that Gustav suffered a stroke, but family legend suggests he may have committed suicide.) After a difficult period John followed in his father’s footsteps and launched a stage career, and was soon working opposite such luminaries of the day as Ethel Barrymore and Dustin Farnum. Early in the new century the young actor wed Pennsylvania native Florence Crawford; the marriage would last until his death.

When the cinema was still in its infancy stage performers tended to regard movie work as slumming, but for whatever reason John Adolfi took the plunge. He made his debut before the cameras around 1907, probably at the Vitagraph Studio in Brooklyn. There he appeared as Tybalt in J. Stuart Blackton’s 1908 Romeo and Juliet , with Paul Panzer and Florence Lawrence in the title roles. He worked at the Edison Studio for director Edwin S. Porter, and at Biograph in a 1908 short called The Kentuckian which also featured two other stage veterans, D.W. Griffith and Mack Sennett. Most of Adolfi’s work as a screen actor was for the Éclair Studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey, the first film capital. The bulk of this company’s output was destroyed in a vault fire, but a 1912 adaptation of Robin Hood in which Adolfi appeared survives. That same year he also appeared in a famous docu-drama, as we would call it, Saved from the Titanic. This ten-minute short premiered less than a month after the Titanic disaster, and featured actress Dorothy Gibson, who actually survived the voyage, re-enacting her experience while wearing the same clothes she wore in the lifeboat. (This film, unfortunately, is among the missing.) After appearing in dozens of movies Adolfi moved behind the camera.

Much of his early work as a director was for a Los Angeles-based studio called Majestic, where he made crime dramas, Westerns, and comedies, films with titles like Texas Bill’s Last Ride and The Stolen Radium. In 1914 the company had a new supervisor: D. W. Griffith, now the top director in the business, who had just departed Biograph. Adolfi was one of the few Majestic staff directors who kept his job under the new regime. A profile in the February 1915 issue of Photoplay describes him as “a tallish, good-looking man, well-knit and vigorous, dark-haired and determined; his mouth and chin suggest that their owner expects (and intends) to have his own way unless he is convinced that the other fellow’s is better.” It was also reported that Adolfi had developed something of a following as an actor, but that he dropped out of the public eye when he became a director. Presumably, that’s what he wanted.

Adolfi left Majestic after three years, worked at Fox Films for a time as a staff director, then freelanced. During the remainder of the silent era he guided some of the screen’s legendary leading ladies: Annette Kellerman (Queen of the Sea, 1918), Marion Davies (The Burden of Proof, 1918), Mae Marsh (The Little ‘Fraid Lady, 1920), Betty Blythe (The Darling of the Rich, 1922), and Clara Bow (The Scarlet West, 1925). Not one of these films survives. A profile published in the New York World-Telegram during his stint at Fox reported that Adolfi was well-liked by his employees. He was “reticent when the conversation turned toward himself, but frank and outspoken when it concerned his work. Mr. Adolfi is not only a director who is skilled in the technique of his craft; he is also a deep student of human nature.” Asked how he felt about the cinema’s potential, he replied, with unconscious irony, “it is bound to live forever.”

III. The Talkies

In spring of 1927 Adolfi was offered a job at Warner Brothers. His debut feature for the studio What Happened to Father? (now lost) was a success, or enough of one anyway to secure him a professional foothold, and he worked primarily at WB thereafter. Thus he was fortuitously well-positioned for the talkie revolution, for although talking pictures were not invented at the studio it was Sam Warner and his brothers, more than anyone else, who sold an initially skeptical public on the new medium. After Adolfi had proven himself with three talkie features Darryl Zanuck handed him an expensive, prestige assignment, a lavish all-star revue entitled The Show of Shows which featured every Warners star from John Barrymore to Rin-Tin-Tin.

Other important assignments followed. In March of 1930 a crime melodrama called Penny Arcade opened on Broadway. It was not a success, but when Al Jolson saw it he sensed that the story had screen potential. He purchased the film rights at a bargain rate and then re-sold the property to his home studio, Warner Brothers. Adolfi was chosen to direct, but was doubtless surprised to learn that Jolson had insisted that two of the actors from the Broadway production repeat their performances before the cameras. One of the pair, Joan Blondell, had already appeared in three Vitaphone shorts to good effect, but the other, James Cagney, had never acted in a movie. Any doubts about Jolson’s instincts were quickly dispelled. Rushes of the first scenes featuring the newcomers so impressed studio brass that both were signed to five-year contracts. While Adolfi can’t be credited with discovering the duo, the film itself, re-christened Sinners’ Holiday,remains his strongest surviving claim to fame: he guided Jimmy Cagney’s screen debut.

At this point the director formed a professional relationship that would shape the rest of his career. George Arliss was a veteran stage actor who went into the movies and unexpectedly became a top box office draw. He was, frankly, an unlikely candidate for screen stardom. Already past sixty when talkies arrived, Arliss was a short, dignified man who resembled a benevolent gargoyle. But he was also a journeyman actor, a seasoned professional who knew how to command attention with a sudden sharp word or a raised eyebrow. Like Helen Hayes he was valued in Hollywood as a performer of unblemished reputation who lent the raffish film industry a touch of Class, in every sense of the word.

In 1929 Arliss appeared in a talkie version of Disraeli, a role he had played many times on stage, and became the first Englishman to take home an Academy Award for Best Actor. Thereafter he was known for stately portrayals of History’s Great Men, such as Voltaire and Alexander Hamilton, as well as fictional kings, cardinals, and other official personages. The old gentleman formed a close alliance with Darryl Zanuck, whom he admired, and was in turn granted privileges highly unusual for any actor at the time. Arliss had final approval of his scripts and authority over casting. He was also granted the right to rehearse his selected actors for two weeks before filming began. All that was left for the film’s director to do, it would seem, would be to faithfully record what his star wanted. Not many directors would accept this arrangement, but John Adolfi, who according to Photoplay “was determined to have his own way unless he is convinced that the other fellow’s is better,” clearly had no problem with it. His first film with Arliss was The Millionaire, released in May 1931; and in the two years that followed Adolfi directed eight more features, six of which were Arliss vehicles. He had found his niche in Hollywood.

One of Adolfi’s last jobs sans Arliss was a B-picture called Central Park, which reunited the director with Joan Blondell. It’s a snappy, topical, crazy quilt of a movie that packs a lot of incident into a 58-minute running time. Central Park was something of a sleeper that earned its director positive critical notices, and must have afforded him a lively holiday from those polite period pieces for the exacting Mr. Arliss.

In spring of 1933, after completing work on the Arliss vehicle Voltaire, Adolfi accompanied Darryl Zanuck and his entourage to British Columbia to hunt bears. Arliss intended to follow Zanuck to his new company, while Adolfi in turn surely expected to follow the star and continue their collaboration. Things didn’t work out that way.

IV. The Hunting Trip

It’s unclear how long the men were hunting before tragedy struck. On Sunday, May 14th, newspapers reported that film director John G. Adolfi had died the previous week – either on Wednesday or Thursday, depending on which paper one consults – at a hunting camp near the Canoe River. All accounts give the cause of death as a cerebral hemorrhage. According to the New York Herald-Tribune the news was conveyed in a long-distance phone call from Darryl Zanuck to screenwriter Lucien Hubbard in Los Angeles. Hubbard subsequently informed the press. The N.Y. Times reported that the entire hunting party (Zanuck, Engel, Enright, Bacon, and Griffith) accompanied Adolfi’s remains in a motorboat down the Columbia River to Revelstoke. From there the body was sent to Vancouver, B.C., where it was cremated. Write-ups of Adolfi’s career were brief, and tended to emphasize his work with George Arliss, though his recent success Central Park was widely noted. John’s widow Florence was mentioned in the Philadelphia City News obituary but otherwise seems to have been ignored; the couple had no children. 

V. The Aftermath

Darryl F. Zanuck went on to found Twentieth Century Pictures, a name suggested by his hunting companion Sam Engel. One of the company’s biggest hits in its first year of operation was The House of Rothschild, starring George Arliss and directed by Alfred Werker. The venerable actor returned to England not long afterwards and retired from filmmaking in 1937. In his second book of memoirs, published three years later, Arliss devotes several pages of warm praise to Zanuck, but refers only fleetingly to the man who directed seven of his films, John Adolfi, and misspells his name.

In 1935 Zanuck merged his Twentieth Century Pictures with Fox Films, and created one of the most successful companies in Hollywood history. He would go on to produce many award-winning classics, including The Grapes of Wrath, Laura, and All About Eve. Zanuck’s trusted associates at Twentieth-Century Fox in the company’s best years included Sam Engel, Raymond Griffith, and Lloyd Bacon, all survivors of the Revelstoke trip. Personal difficulties and vast changes in the film industry began to affect Zanuck’s career in the 1950s. He left the U.S. for Europe but continued to make films, and sporadically managed to exercise control over the company he founded. He died in 1979.

In 1984 a onetime screenwriter and film critic named Leonard Mosley, who had known Zanuck slightly, published a biography entitled Zanuck: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood’s Last Tycoon. Aside from his movie reviews most of Mosley’s published work concerned military matters, specifically pertaining to the Second War World. His Zanuck bio reveals a grasp of film history that is shaky at times, for the book has a number of obvious errors. Nevertheless, it was written with the cooperation of Darryl’s son Richard, his widow Virginia, and many of the mogul’s close associates, so whatever its errors in chronology or studio data the anecdotes concerning Zanuck’s personal and professional activities are unquestionably well-sourced. 

When Mosley’s narrative reaches May 1933, the point when Zanuck is on the verge of founding his new company, we’re told that he and several associates decided to go on a hunting trip to Alaska. The location is not correct, but chronologically – and in one other, unmistakable respect – there can be no doubt that this refers to the Revelstoke trip. From Mosley’s book:

“There is a mystery about this trip, and no perusal of Zanuck’s papers or those of his former associates seems to elucidate it,” he writes. “Something happened that changed his whole attitude towards hunting. All that can be gathered from the thin stories that are still gossiped around was that the hunting party went on the track of a polar bear somewhere in the Alaskan wilderness [sic], and when the vital moment came it was Zanuck who stepped out to shoot down the charging, furious animal. His bullet, it is said, found its mark all right, but it did not kill. The polar bear came on, and Zanuck stood his ground, pumping away with his rifle. Only this time it was not ‘him or me,’ but ‘him’ and someone else. The wounded and enraged bear, still alive and still charging, swerved around Zanuck and swiped with his great paw at one of the men standing behind him – and only after it had killed this other man did it fall at last into the snow, and die itself. That’s the story, and no one seems to be able to confirm it nor remember the name of the man who died. The only certain thing is that when Zanuck came back, he announced to Virginia that he had given up hunting. And he never went out and shot a wild animal again, not even a jackrabbit for his supper.”

VI. The Coda

Was John Adolfi killed by a bear? It certainly seems possible, but if so, why didn’t the men in the hunting party simply report the truth? Even if their boss was indirectly responsible, having fired the shots that caused the bear to charge, he couldn’t be blamed for the actions of a dying animal. But it’s also possible the event unfolded like a recent tragedy on the Montana-Idaho border. There, in September 2011, two men named Ty Bell and Steve Stevenson were on a hunting trip. Bell shot what he believed was a black bear. When the bear, a grizzly, attacked Stevenson, Bell fired again – and killed both the bear and his friend.

That seems to be the more likely scenario. If Zanuck fired at the wounded bear, in an attempt to save Adolfi, and killed both bear and man instead, it would perhaps explain a hastily contrived false story. It would most definitely explain the prompt cremation of Adolfi’s body in Vancouver. Back in Hollywood Joe Schenck was busy raising money, and lots of it, to launch Zanuck’s new company. Any unpleasant information about the new company’s chief – certainly anything suggestive of manslaughter – could jeopardize the deal. A man hit with a cerebral hemorrhage in the prime of life is a tragedy of natural causes, but a man sprayed with bullets in a shooting, accidental or not, is something else again. That goes double if alcohol was involved, as it reportedly was on Zanuck’s earlier hunting trips.

Of course, it’s also possible that Adolfi did indeed suffer a cerebral hemorrhage. Like his father.

John G. Adolfi is a Hollywood ghost. Most of his works are lost, and his name is forgotten. (Even George Arliss couldn’t be bothered to spell it correctly.) Every now and then TCM will program one of the Arliss vehicles, or Sinners’ Holiday. Not long ago they showed Adolfi’s fascinating B-picture Central Park, that slam-bang souvenir of the early Depression years in which several plot strands are deftly inter-twined. One of the subplots involves a mentally ill man, a former zoo-keeper who escapes from an asylum and returns to the place where he used to work, the Central Park Zoo. He has a score to settle with an old nemesis, an ex-colleague who tends the big cats. As the story approaches its climax, the escaped lunatic deliberately drags his enemy into the cage of a dangerous lion and leaves him there. In the subsequent, harrowing scene, difficult to watch, the lion attacks and practically kills the poor bastard.

by William Charles Morrow

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

My sources for this article, in addition to the Mosley biography cited in the text, include Stephen M. Silverman’s The Fox That Got Away: The Last Days of the Zanuck Dynasty at Twentieth-Century Fox (1988), and Marlys J. Harris’s The Zanucks of Hollywood: The Dark Legacy of an American Dynasty (1989). For material on John Adolfi I made extensive use of the files of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Special thanks to James Bigwood for his prodigious research on the Adolfi family genealogy, and to Mary Maler, John Adolfi’s great-niece, for information she provided on her family.

[introvertguide]

The Life of Roman Polanski

The director of our current movie under review, Roman Polanski, is a man that has been surrounded by sadness and controversy. I think that he is a great director and an amazing creator of the visual arts, but he has a major flaw that makes me very glad he is nowhere near me. I think a statement like that deserves some explanation, but know that a lot of my take is based on opinion. I was not alive when a lot of his issues occurred so I base my opinion on news and official record statements. I will try and rely on recorded facts as much as possible and make a point to mention if something is not proven. I also encourage anyone who is interested to find out more because it is a fascinating story.

Polanski started off the in a pretty bad way as he was born in 1933 in Paris during the height of Nazi reign in Europe. He was moved to Krakow in 1937 right before the German invasion and his parents were taken in raids. He was kept alive in foster homes under an assumed identity and was lucky to survive. His mother died in Auschwitz, but he was reunited with his father after the war in 1946. Roman had quite the artistic eye and used it for both photography and filming. He attended the National Film School in Lodz, Poland and started directing short films that gained recognition. One film in particular was called Bicycle. It was a true story of a thief that tricked Polanski out of his money when purchasing a bicycle and instead beat Polanski around the head with the butt of a gun. The thief was found and eventually executed for past crimes including 3 murders. 

After graduating in 1959, Polanski went to France and continued to make short films. He reported that there was a problem with xenophobia at the time since so many Polish people had dispersed around Europe after the war. He went to England and made three movies between 1965 and 1968 that gained recognition in America: Repulsion, Cul-de-sac, and Dance of the Vampires. A young woman named Sharon Tate played a role in Dance of the Vampires and Polanski fell in love. He married her in 1968 in England, and they moved to the U.S. so he could make movies in Hollywood. His first film in the states was a horror film entitled Rosemary’s Baby, one of the highest rated horror films of all time. Polanski had a beautiful young wife, a son on the way, a hit movie with more work coming, and great prospects for life in the United States.

As horrific as his formative years were, I am surprised to find myself writing that this is when Polanski’s life really went out of control. On August 9th, 1969, cult members who followed a man named Charles Manson broke into the Polanski home in Los Angeles and murdered the 8 month pregnant Sharon Tate and four friends that were at the home. Polanski had been working in London on a new film and wasn’t there that night. He says to this day that it is by far the greatest regret of his life. Remember this. It seems that some wires got crossed as far as Roman’s thinking process because his behavior really took a turn.

His films had been dark and violent in the past, but they started to have sexual undertones with more graphic nudity. His first movie back after the loss of his wife was Macbeth, a movie that was rated X at the time for graphic nudity and violence. Polanski later said that he was in a dark place, but the media would find things in his movies always looking for a story. He hated the media after the sensationalism and lack of privacy involved with the loss of his wife and son. Next came an extremely odd road trip sex comedy that was appropriately called What?. And then came his last work filmed in the United States and the film he was probably best known for, Chinatown. I don’t want to go over the film too much since it is the film currently under review for the group, but it is very dark and has an extremely down beat ending. 

And then another crime was committed in Polanski’s life that would haunt while simultaneously erasing any good will the American public had for him. He was charged for drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl who modeled for him during a Vogue photoshoot. It was recorded as occurring at the Bel Air estate of Jack Nicholson. There is no question about this encounter as Polanski was arrested and confessed to the charges. He thought he was going to receive probation and timed served for a guilty plea, but the judge was reported to have changed his mind and was planning to reject the plea and give Polanski prison time for all charges. This would result in up to 50 years in jail and what amounted to life in prison. Polanski would not serve this sentence so he fled the country to France where he would not be extradited. 

The charges are still pending and there is no statute of limitations on rape in the United States, so Polanski is on a list of people that if found outside of certain countries will be immediately sent back to the U.S. to face charges. He has dual citizenship in France and Poland; both countries do not extradite citizens. He went on to make one of his best works, a film called Tess, while in Europe. It was a great success and Polanski was nominated for Best Director. The film ended up winning three Academy Awards (none for Polanski). So it seemed that this acclaimed director would live in France and hope that things would blow over. He settled a civil suit in court with the girl and she went on to marry and says she forgives Polanski. But it didn’t end...

Because the woman was in the U.S. and Polanski was not, she was harassed by the press to speak out and tell her story. She reported that the media did much more harm to her and her family than Polanski did. That is a very strong statement considering the charges. Things finally cooled down somewhat when Polanski married an actress from one of his films, Emmanuelle Seignor in 1989. The couple have two kids together and things were apparently going fine in France. 

Things remained well through the 90s although nothing Polanski did got much attention. It seemed he would simply live out his life quietly in France. Then in 1999, he came out with a film called The Ninth Gate that garnered attention since it starred the very popular Johnny Depp. Polanski was back on his game and he directed and produced a film called The Pianist. It stars Adrian Brody and told the story of a Polish-Jewish composer who survived the concentration camps because of goodwill received from German officers that appreciated his work. It is a masterpiece and earned Polanski the award for Best Director. He could not accept the award in person because he would be arrested, so Harrison Ford accepted it on his behalf and took it to him in France. A strange little detail about this is that The Pianist was also up for best picture, but stirrings about Polanski’s past were brought up by a competing producer to throw the award. There is no real proof of this, but the man said to have done this was quite powerful in Hollywood at the time. Ironically, that man who was said to remind people of old rape charges was none other than Harvey Weinstein. I don’t have proof of this, but it is an interesting story. One of those “I heard it is said that” kind of things from TMZ. 

Anyway, these reminders had people trying to interview Polanski and his wife about the past and he basically said that people needed to move past it. This does not tend to go over very well with the American public or the legal system and Polanski was arrested while in Switzerland and held in Zurich. Public sentiment in America, France, and Poland leaned towards Polanski being sent to America to face trial. The Swiss judge denied extradition and Polanski was sent back to France. There were requests in 2014 by US courts that Poland send Polanski to stand trial since there was question concerning the conduct of the original judge in Polanski’s case. It was believed that Polanski would be given some form of probation, but it also meant he could travel. Polish courts ruled that Polanski had served his punishment and should not have to face U.S. courts again. In 2016, it was presented by Polish officials that no amount of time could account for the crime of rape, but the decision of the lower court was held. 

In 2018, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences removed Polanski as a member. Strangely, that same year, they offered a membership to his wife (who loudly said no).

So the final say about how to feel about Polanski and his works lies firmly on the individual. Here is all the information about the trial that can keep it nice and ambiguous for you. The judge, the lead prosecutor, and the LA County Deputy DA at the time all admitted bias against Polanski. He would not have gotten a fair trial and would likely have ended up in prison for life. The prosecutor said later in an interview for a documentary that he was not surprised at all that Polanski left and it would have been a media circus. Polanski paid the victim almost a million dollars in civil settlement money and she said she doesn’t want to see any further prosecution. Okay. In 2017, a website run by Matan Uziel was sued by Polanski for libel when it was posted that 5 other women had come forward and accused Polanski of sexual assault. Polanski did not show up in court so Uziel was dismissed of charges. Uziel requested specifically that the cases not be dropped so that Polanski could not try and sue him at a future date. It is true that, in 2010, an English actress accused Polanski of “forcing himself” on her during filming of the movie Pirates. In 2017, a Swiss woman accused Polanski of raping her in the 70s when she was only 15. The same month, another woman accused him of assaulting her in 1975 when she was only 10. Finally, in 2019, a former actress model from France said that Polanski violently raped her at a Swiss chalet in 1975.

So what can you say about the man? His early life was tragedy and misery. The loss of his wife and child was horrific. He seemed like he was in a very bad place in the 70s. I don’t want to give credence to accusation without proof, but it can be sure that he committed at least one sexual assault of an under aged girl. He ran from his trial because he knew it would not be fair, but he was still never held accountable in a court of law for what he did. He has been forced to stay in Poland and France, but he is wealthy with a wife and kids, never seeing the jail time for what he did. And if it is true that he has committed other crimes like this, then he needs to be in jail. But could he ever get a fair day in court at this point? The man is 87 and will likely die soon, likely before any sentencing could occur. Also, how reliable is testimony from any parties about things that happened between 40-50 years ago? Everything he is accused of seems to have happened after the death of Sharon Tate and before his marriage to his current wife, so it seems like his behavior was linked to his state of mind and he is no longer in that state. That may explain things but it does not forgive them.

I don’t know. This is probably why I chose psychology instead of law enforcement or criminal justice. Trying to decide if someone has adequately paid for crimes they have committed is not my specialty. It will be a moot point soon enough because he will be dead. So what do we do with the guy? He has encountered both great suffering and great joy in his life. He as also caused great suffering and great joy. I guess it is more about how he will be remembered at this point. I would be curious to hear what others think. 

[aion-rsa]

Once Upon a Time in America Is Every Bit as Great a Gangster Movie as The Godfather

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This article contains Once Upon a Time in America spoilers.

The Godfather is a great movie, possibly the best ever made. Its sequel, The Godfather, Part II, often follows it in the pantheon of classic cinema, some critics even believe it is the better film. Robert Evans, head of production at Paramount in the early 1970s, wanted The Godfather to be directed by an Italian American. Francis Ford Coppola was very much a last resort. The studio’s first choice was Sergio Leone, but he was getting ready to make his own gangster epic, Once Upon a Time in America. Though less known, it is equally magnificent. 

Robert De Niro, as David “Noodles” Aaronson, and James Woods, as Maximillian “Max” Bercovicz, make up a dream gangster film pairing in Once Upon a Time in America, on par with late 1930s audiences seeing Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney team for The Roaring Twenties or Angels with Dirty Faces. Noodles and Max are partners and competitors, one is ambitious, the other gets a yen for the beach. One went to jail, the other wants to rob the Federal Reserve Bank. 

Throw Joe Pesci into the mix, in a small part as crime boss Frankie Monaldi, and Burt Young as his brother Joe Monaldi, and life gets “funnier than shit,” and funnier than their more famous crime films, Goodfellas and Chinatown, respectively. Future mob entertainment mainstays are all over Once Upon a Time in America too, and they are in distinguished company. This is future Oscar winner Jennifer Connelly’s first movie. She plays young Deborah, the young girl who becomes the woman between Noodles and Max, and she even has something of a catch-phrase, “Go on Noodles your mother is calling.” Elizabeth McGovern delivers the line as adult Deborah. 

When Once Upon a Time in America first ran in theaters, there were reports that people in the audience laughed when Deborah is reintroduced after a 35-year gap in the action. She hadn’t aged at all. But Deborah is representational to Leone, beyond the character.

“Age can wither me, Noodles,” she says. But neither the character nor the director will allow the audience to see it beyond the cold cream. Deborah is the character Leone is answering to. She also embodies the fluid chronology of the storytelling. She is its only constant.

The rest of the film can feel like a free fall though. Whereas The Godfather moved in a linear fashion, Once Upon a Time in America has time for flashbacks, and flashbacks within flashbacks, and detours that careen between the violent and the quiet. It’s a visceral experience about landing where we, and this genre, began.

Growing up Gangster

Both The Godfather and Once Upon a Time in America span decades; it’s the history of immigrant crime in 20th century America. But they differ on chronological placement. Once Upon a Time is set in three time-frames. The earliest is 1918 in the Jewish ghettos of New York City’s Lower East Side. 

Young Noodles (Scott Tiler), Patrick “Patsy” Goldberg (Brian Bloom), Philip “Cockeye” Stein (Adrian Curran) and Dominic (Noah Moazezi), are a bush league street gang doing petty crimes for a minor neighborhood mug, Bugsy (James Russo). New on the block, Max (Rusty Jacobs) interrupts the gang as they’re about to roll a drunk, and Max makes off with the guy’s watch for himself. He soon joins the gang, and they progress to bigger crimes.

The bulk of the film takes place, however, from when De Niro’s Noodles gets out of prison in 1930, following Bugsy’s murder, and lasts until the end of Prohibition in 1933. Max, now played by Woods, has become a successful bootlegger with a mortuary business on the side. With William Forsythe playing the grown-up Cockeye and James Hayden as Patsy, the mobsters go from bootlegging through contract killing, and ultimately to backing the biggest trucking union in the country as enforcers. They enjoy most of their downtime in their childhood friend Fat Moe’s (Larry Rapp) speakeasy. Noodles is in love with Fat Moe’s sister, Deborah, who is on her way to becoming a Hollywood star. The gang’s rise ends with the liquor delivery massacre.

The final part of the film comes in 1968. After 35 years in hiding, Noodles is uncovered and paid to do a private contract for the U.S. Secretary of Commerce Christopher Bailey…  Max by a different name who 35 years on has been able to feign respectability and make Deborah his mistress. An entire life has become a façade.

Recreating a Seedier Side of New York’s Immigrant Past

While The Godfather is an adaptation of Mario Puzo’s fictional bestseller, Once Upon a Time in America is based on the autobiographical crime novel, The Hoods. It was written by Herschel “Noodles” Goldberg, under the pen name of Harry Grey while he was serving time in Sing-Sing Prison. 

Coppola’s vision in The Godfather is aesthetically comparable to Leone’s projection. From the opium pipes at the Chinese puppet theater to the take-out Lo Mein during execution planning, the multicultural world of old New York crowds the frames and the players in both films. Most of Once Upon a Time in America was shot at Rome’s Cinecittà Studios. The 1918 Jewish neighborhood in Manhattan was a street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which was made to look exactly as it had 60 years earlier.

Leone skillfully, yet playfully, captures the poverty of immigrant life in New York. The first crime we see the four-member gang commit could have been done by the Dead End kids. They torch a newspaper stand because the owner doesn’t kick up protection money to the local mug. And like the Dead End kids, they needle their mark, and joke with each other. At the end of the crime, Cockey is playing the pan pipe, and the very young Dominic is dancing. They are proud of their work and enjoy it. It’s fun to break things for money. And even better when they get a choice between taking payment in cash or rolling it over into the sure bet of rolling a drunk.

Violence without the Cannoli

Gangster films, like Howard Hawks’ Scarface and William A. Wellman’s The Public Enemy, were always at the forefront of the backlash to the Motion Picture Production Code. Which might be why gangster pictures were one of the first genres to benefit from the censors’ fall. A direct line can be drawn from the machine gun death which ends Bonnie and Clyde (1967) to the toll-booth execution of Sonny Corleone (James Caan)  in The Godfather. Another from when Moe Greene (Alex Rocco) gets one through the glasses and Joe Monaldi gets it in the eye in Once Upon a Time in America.

The Godfather has some brutal scenes. We get a litany of dead Barzinis and Tattaglias, horse heads and spilled oranges. Once Upon a Time in America ups the ante though. The shootings and stabbings are neat jobs compared with the beatings, which allow far more artistic renderings of gore, and pass extreme scrutiny. The one time the effects team balks at a payoff is when it’s not as gruesome as the setup.

“Inflammatory words from a union boss,” corporate thug Chicken Joe asks as he is about to light Jimmy “Clean Hands” Conway O’Donnell on fire. The mobster has such a nice smile, and the union delegate, played by Treat Williams, looks so pathetic while dripping gasoline that it feels like it might even be a mercy killing. It is a wonderful set piece, perfectly executed and timed. When Max and Noodles, and the gang defuse the situation, rather than ignite it, it is a lesson in the dangerous balance of suspense.

Like many specific scenes in Once Upon a Time in America, Conway’s incendiary introduction would’ve worked in any era. This is the turning point for the gang. The end of Prohibition is coming and all those trucks they’re using to haul liquor can be repurposed for a more lucrative future. 

“You Dancing?”

Music is paramount in both Leone’s and Coppola’s films. The Godfather is much like an opera, the third installment even closes the curtain at one. Once Upon a Time in America is a frontier film. The score was composed by Ennio Morricone, who wrote the music behind Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars, For A Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

The film opens and closes with Kate Smith’s version of “God Bless America.” Though the scene occurs during the 1968 timeframe, the song comes out of the radio of a car seemingly from another point in time.

Morricone’s accompaniment to Once Upon a Time in America is as representational as Nino Rota’s soundtrack in The Godfather. Characters, settings, situations, and relationships all have themes, which become as recognizable as the Prohibition-era songs which flavor the period piece’s ambience. Fat Moe conducts the speakeasy orchestra through José María Lacalle García’s “Amapola” while grinning dreamily to Deborah who is chatting with Noodles. He’s a romantic.

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The music becomes part of the action in Once Upon a Time in America. Individual couples cut their own rugs, doing the Charleston between tables as waiters and cigarette girls glide by. Cockeye, who has been playing the pan pipe since the beginning of the film, wants to sit in with the band. 

Forsythe almost steals Once Upon a Time in America. He cries what look like real tears at the mock funeral for Prohibition and drinks formula from a baby bottle during the maternity ward scene. The blackmail scheme, which involves swapping infants, plays like an outtake from a Three Stooges movie, something Coppola would never dare for The Godfather. The ruse is choreographed to the tune of Gioachino Rossini’s “The Thieving Magpie,” which elicits the youthful thuggery celebrated in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. 

Devils with Clean Faces

One ironic difference between the two films is whimsy. The Godfather, which glorifies crime as corporate misadventure, is a serious movie with no time for funny business. Once Upon a Time in America, which is an indictment of criminal life, has moments of innocence as syrupy as in any family film (of the non-crime variety) and can be completely kosher. It’s sweeter than the cannoli Clemenza (Richard Castellano) took from the car, or the cake Nazorine (Vito Scotti) made for the wedding of Don Vito’s daughter. 

The scene where young Patsy brings a Charlotte Russe to Peggy in exchange for sex is a masterwork of emotive storytelling. He chooses a treat over sex. On one level, yes, this is a socioeconomic reality. That pastry was expensive and something he could never afford to get for himself. But as Patsy sneaks each tiny bit of the cream from the packaging, he is also just a child, a kid who wants some cake. He learns he can’t have it and eat it. It is so plainly laid out, and so beautifully rendered.

The Corleone family never gets those moments, not even in the flashbacks to Sicily or as children on the stoop listening to street singers play guitars. We know little of Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) or Sonny as youngsters, much less teenagers, and are robbed of their happier moments of bonding. We know they are close, they are family. But Michael has his own brother killed while Noodles balks at the very idea. Twice, as it turns out.

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“Today they ask us to get rid of Joe. Tomorrow they ask me to get rid of you. Is that okay with you? Cos it’s not okay with me,” Noodles tells Max after the gang delivers on a particularly costly contract, double-crossing their partners in a major diamond heist. They are not blood family, but from the moment Max calls Noodles his “uncle” to fool a beat cop, they are all related. 

Noodles then does what young men in coming-of-age movies have done since Cooley High: Something really stupid. An indulgence the Corleones could never enjoy. He speeds the car into the bay. The guys can’t believe it. It adds to his legend. The scene could have been in Diner, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, or even Thelma & Louise. It is hard to dislike the gangsters in these moments. We know them too well, even as they do such horrible things.

How Women are Really Treated by an Underworld

The Godfather is told from the vantage point of one of the heads of the five established crime families; organized crime is as insular as the Corleone mall on Long Beach. That motion picture reinvigorated the “gangster film,” long considered a ghetto genre, but its perspective is insulated. By contrast, no matter how far they climb, Leone’s characters never really get off the block. They are street savages, even in tuxedos. Once Upon a Time in America whacked the gangster film, and tossed its living corpse into the compactor of a passing garbage truck.

The Godfather doesn’t judge its gangsters. The Corleones are family men who keep to a code of ethics and omerta. They dip their beaks in “harmless” vices like gambling, liquor, and prostitution. While there are scenes of extreme domestic violence, and a general dismissal of women, the film stops short of challenging the image of honorable men who do dishonorable things. Leone offers no such restraint. His history lesson is unabridged.

Long before Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman stripped gangster lore to a tale of toxic masculinity, Once Upon a Time in America robbed it of all glamor. There is a very nonchalant attitude toward violence and other demeaning acts against women in Leone’s film, from the very opening scene where a thug fondles a woman’s breast with his gun in order to humiliate her civilian date.

This is deliberate. The director, best known for Spaghetti Westerns, wants to obliterate any goodwill the gangsters have accumulated through their magnetic antiheroism. One scene between Max and his girlfriend Carol (Tuesday Weld) is so hard to sit through, even the other members of the gang squirm in their chairs.

Noodles sexually assaults two women over the course of the film. While there is some motivational ambiguity in the scene during the jewel heist attack, the rape of Deborah is devastatingly direct. It kills any vestige of romance the gangster archetype has in film. The camera does not look away, and the scene lingers with terrifying ferocity and traumatic intimacy. There is a visible victim, and Noodles’ wealth and pretensions of honor are worthless.

The Ultimate Gangster Epic

Once Upon a Time in America brings one other element to the genre which The Godfather avoids, a lingering mystery. Coppola delivers short riddles, like the fate of Luca Brasi, which are revealed as the story warrants. But the 35-year gap between the slaughter of Noodles’ crew and the introduction of Secretary Bailey is almost unfathomable. How did Max go from long-dead to a man with legitimate power?

What happens to Noodles in those years is fairly easy to guess, without any specifics. He got by. The gang’s shared secret bankroll was empty when he tried to retrieve it as the last surviving member. He put his gun away and eked out a quiet life. But even as the details spill out on the true fate of Max, it is unexpectedly surprising, as much for the audience as Noodles.

“I took away your whole life from you,” Max/Bailey says. “I’ve been living in your place. I took everything. I took your money. I took your girl. All I left for you was 35 years of grief over having killed me. Now why don’t you shoot?” This final betrayal, and Noodles’ inert revenge, take Once Upon a Time In America into almost unexplored cinematic depths. 

Max has gone as low as he could go. The joke is on Noodles, everyone’s in on it, including “Clean Hands,” who is tied in to “the Bailey scandal.” The cops are in on it, and so is the mob. Max admits even the liquor dropoff was a syndicate set-up. He’d planned this all along. Just like Michael Corleone had a long term strategy to make his family legitimate. 

This is an ambitious story. Beyond genre, this bends American celluloid into European cinema. By sheer virtue of being outside of Hollywood, Leone transcends traditional boundaries. He has a far more limitless pallet to draw from. He can aim a camera at De Niro’s spoon in a coffee cup for three minutes and never lose the audience’s rapt attention. Leone can pull the rug out from everything with a last minute reveal. Coppola bent American filmmaking for The Godfather, but stayed within proscribed parameters. He never gets as sweet as a Charlotte Russe nor as repulsive as the back seat of a limo. 

Once Upon a Time in America ripped the genre’s insides out and displayed them with unflinching veracity and theatrical beauty. It is a perfect film, gorgeously shot, masterfully timed, and slightly ajar.

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[ourimpavidheroine]

Okay, @peoniequeen, here are your stories.

How many people do you know moved across the world for love? 

Well, you all know about this one. I met my late wife online in late 1998 on an X-Files message board, we emailed and then called, etc. until she came to the U.S. from Finland in September of 1999 to live with me for a year. After the year was up we relocated to Finland, in part because she could not legally immigrate to the U.S. during that time as a same-sex partner (Finland was a huge fucking pain in the ass about it but eventually they let me immigrate there based on our relationship status) and in part because we thought Finland would be a better place to raise kids due to healthcare, schools, etc. When I arrived in Finland it was the first time I had even been to Europe, never mind the country I was going to live in and the airline accidently left my two dogs in Amsterdam instead of putting them on the plane to Helsinki and I spent my first moments in my new home sobbing about my dogs until the very nice airline lady called for my late wife over the loudspeaker and let her come back and take me in hand (much the way Mako takes Wu in hand, if you must know). (Don’t worry, the airline put us up in a hotel next to the airport and the dogs came on the next flight and came to us there in a taxi the airline made arrangements for. They were completely fine and in fact weren’t sure what the fuss was about.) It was kind of a big culture shock. The end.

Or worked as a college radio DJ? 

I did! I had a show on Tuesday mornings from 4-6 am that nobody listened to but about 10 loyal people. (Kind of like my blog here, come to think about it.) I played a lot of old blues and jazz stuff that I’d grown up listening to. My Dad worked part time as a DJ at a local radio station so I knew how to work all the equipment and such thanks to him. (I also had a two hour slot on Wednesday nights there in high school where I played stuff teenagers wanted to listen to and not the never ending country western that the station owner and manager wanted played 24x7.) Yes, this was in the late 80′s-early 90′s when I was at university so it was all vinyl. I still have a collection of albums that have the gold stamp on them saying they are not for sale, that they are for radio station play only! (Some of them the aforementioned station manager gave me since they were not country and he was basically going to toss them into the trash and some of them were albums that I might have gotten through less altruistic means.)

Or was a makeup assistant to Drag Queens? 

I took a stage makeup course while I was majoring in theater at University and did so well with it that the guy who gave the class asked me to come and assist him at the San Francisco opera while they were essentially painting all of the singers brown in a classic racist move that was pretty well accepted in the 90′s but, thankfully, would be extremely frowned upon now. As I was doing it I struck up a friendship with one of the chorus tenors; it turned out he was a drag queen who sometimes did performances when he wasn’t doing opera. He was a Madonna impersonator (not a very good one, sorry to say) and he wanted me to help him design his makeup for it. So I went to the club he performed at a few times to get a better feel for how drag queens worked and then hung around backstage and ended up doing some designs for some of the other queens. The pay was basically me getting to see their performances for free and getting fed afterwards at whatever was open at 4 am but God it was fun. Also, now I am the most Judgy McJudgerson of ever when it comes to drag makeup on RuPaul’s Drag Race. The end.

Or wrote a letter to their Archbishop when they were twelve and got a personal answer in return? 

I was very put out by the fact that boys could be altar boys but girls got shit (I was Catholic, in case you haven’t guessed) and I was talking about it to my Grandma one time and she told me I should write a letter to the Archbishop and ask him why. Now see, my maternal Grandmother was married to a labor union president (my grandfather was still the president when he died of a heart attack when I was 8) and she was a good old fashioned liberal rabble rouser. Like, she got arrested with nuns protesting nuclear power plants in her muumuus and Birkenstocks, okay? She wrote letters to EVERYONE. So I sat down and very carefully wrote the letter and my Grandma made a few calls and got me the address and we sent the letter. I don’t think my Grandma actually thought I’d get a letter back (it was more of a teaching moment, if that makes sense) but he did send me a letter back! He was very kind, although his answer was the usual Catholic BS. I still have the letter but it is packed away in storage so I very sadly will not be producing it at this juncture in time.

Or drove from Los Angeles to Philadelphia in a 20 year old Volvo? 

My friend from university was going to Grad School at Temple University and her parents didn’t want her to drive the entire way by herself. So I drove with her in an orange 1971 Volvo sedan. (In fact, I drove about 90% of the trip because she didn’t like driving.) The air conditioning fan died as we were driving through the Mojave Desert on the way to Vegas and I realized that if I floored it the cool air would actually move itself and so I floored it all the way through the desert and we are lucky that fucking ancient hulk of Swedish steel did not die and leave us stranded to be baked to death. We stopped in Vegas (which was not as impressive in 1992 as it is today, trust me) and found a guy who could actually fix the fan and spent the night in one of the casino hotels before continuing on. We did stop in Chicago to stay with her grandparents for two weeks (where so many elderly Jews kept responding to my last name with confusion as they assumed I was Jewish that I eventually started to do genealogy and found out that I am, indeed, Jewish on my father’s side) and also we saw the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer film in Des Moines and went to a cowboy bar in Cheyenne (I learned how to line dance and my friend got completely trashed and I had to practically carry her back to the hotel) and many other adventures until we finally arrived in Philly and her parents flew me back to California. It was a great road trip and short of the reeeaaaally sketchy and filthy motel room in Salt Lake City that had both a half-empty Chinese takeout box and a soiled condom under the bed we had a grand time.

Or was part of a thruple? 

I have been part of two thruples. Well. Sort of. One thruple and one wanna be thruple. The first one, with my first husband and my girlfriend was a huge mistake from the get-go. (Oh god, she was so hot and the sex was so fucking good but she was really an awful person and my ex kept trying to control the entire thing and basically forced her into living with us instead of being just my girlfriend with benefits and the entire thing blew up and while it wasn’t the reason why I divorced him it didn’t help either.) The second one was with my late wife and our mutual boyfriend and it worked very well but he had a little boy from a former relationship and his son got very ill and died and he didn’t handle it at all and he disappeared out of our lives. It’s been 20 years, give or take, since I’ve talked to him. He asked us to no longer contact him and I’ve always respected that. And before you ask, he knows where I live and my email address is the same as it was all those years ago. If he wanted to find me it would be very easy for him to do so. He clearly doesn’t and I respect that. I wish him love and peace, wherever he is. I miss him still.

Or beat up the drunk lady in the hallway to get back a little girl’s keys?

Ah, I’ll tell this one tomorrow.

[dweemeister]

Movie Odyssey Retrospective

Bambi (1942)

In the early 1920s, Austrian Felix Salten began working on his best-known novel. Salten, a prominent Jewish author, was an avid outdoorsman who closely observed the habits of wildlife in the Viennese countryside. His experiences led him to write Bambi, a Life in the Woods, which became a bestseller in Europe. It was a bestseller in the United States, too, but Salten’s work had somehow been recategorized as a children’s book when exported across the Atlantic. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) producer Sidney Franklin (1942’s Mrs. Miniver, 1942’s Random Harvest) purchased the film rights, but he experimented and failed to find a satisfactory way to adapt Salten’s novel. Frustrated, Franklin handed the reins to Walt Disney. While Disney took on this new project, the Nazi Party banned Salten’s novel – claiming it to be, “a political allegory of the treatment of Jews in Germany.”

Salten, who soon fled for neutral Switzerland (never to return home to annexed Austria), may have inserted some such allegories, but that is not his novel’s primary intention. In one of the novel’s most memorable passages not present in the Disney adaptation, Bambi’s father shows his son a poacher’s corpse – another human has shot this poacher. In realizing humanity’s fragility and its sameness to the animals of the forest, a frightened Bambi, while examining the poacher’s body, declares, “‘There is Another who is over us all, over us and over Him.’” Salten’s novel and the 1942 Disney adaptation directed by David Hand are about the inevitability and universality of death – subject matter not exclusive to children.

Bambi was slated to be the second animated feature by Walt Disney Productions (now Walt Disney Animation Studios). Due to production delays, narrative confusion, aesthetic difficulties, and especially the Disney animators’ strike of 1941, it is the fifth and last entry of the studio’s Golden Age. Whether because of or despite these delays, Bambi seems an outlier in the Disney animated canon. It bears scant artistic resemblance to any of its predecessors or successors. To the bewilderment of viewers who believe that a great movie requires plot, Bambi dispenses of such notions. If conflict appears, it is resolved immediately – with one continuous exception. As Walt Disney insisted on the animation being as realistic as possible while retaining anthropomorphic qualities, the True-Life Adventures series (1948-1960; fourteen innovative nature documentaries that continue to influence the subgenre’s narrative and visual grammar) remains Bambi’s closest cousin in the studio’s filmography. Bambi – wildly innovative, underappreciated upon release and today – completes a consecutive run of five animated features for a Golden Age. Rarely matched today are the standards set by those five films.

This film is a coming-of-age tale; more specifically, it is about a male fawn’s experiences and observations on the natural life cycle. It begins with Bambi’s birth and concludes as Bambi inherits his father’s role as Great Prince of the Forest. This animated Bambi is less pedantic than Salten’s book, which focuses on Bambi’s survival lessons from the other woodland creatures. Instead, story director Perce Pearce (1940’s Fantasia, 1943’s Victory Through Air Power) and screenwriter Larry Morey (primarily a lyricist; 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs) adopt a free-flowing episodic structure where Bambi lives life innocently, with violence puncturing through the idyll rather than being omnipresent. We see him befriend the rabbit Thumper and skunk Flower, learn to observe his surroundings before grazing in the open meadow, and play in the snow and on the ice come his first winter. There are comic misunderstandings and warnings about men, neither of which dominate the film.

Bambi also takes time, for a minute or a few, to avert its concentration from its protagonist to other animals. In a less disciplined film, these decisions might undermine the film’s goals – in this case, to portray nature as faithfully as possible within the bounds of a loose narrative. But each of these scenes focused away from Bambi either strengthen Bambi’s characterization, the liveliness of the forest, or the film’s messaging.

A handful of scenes including the elderly Friend Owl introduce us to Bambi and his mother as well as those adolescent, animalistic romantic tinglings he calls “twitterpation”. Friend Owl moves the film forward in ways that abided by the censors at the time, as well as introducing concepts to Bambi and friends in just enough time that is necessary. The most graphic moment during the first scene featuring the hunters (who are never depicted, aurally or visually) does not concern Bambi and his mother, but a few nameless pheasants. Covered in shadow by the long grasses, one of these pheasants speaks of the impending danger, and the audience hears the terror in her tremulous voice. Flying out of the underbrush in a desperate attempt to flee, she is shot by the hunters, and drops to the ground. The frame shows the pheasant’s corpse, but does not linger. This is the only depiction of a dead animal in the film – contrary to the recollections of many viewers. For younger and older viewers alike, this scene emphatically communicates the dangers that Bambi’s mother has warned about, priming the audience for what is to come, and doing so without sensation.

It leads directly to a scene that has become a sort of childhood rite of passage. The death of Bambi’s mother in a later scene has traumatized multiple generations of viewers – intrepid, timeless cinema. As Bambi and his mother are grazing on early Spring grass in the meadow, the latter senses movement and pokes her head up, turning her head realistically as if on a swivel. Her eyes are wide, unnerving. She looks straight at the audience; this would be the stuff of fourth wall-breaking comedy in any other context, but here it is almost inquisitive. Bambi is one of the few Disney canonical films in which what is happening off-screen is equally (if not more) important than what the audience is seeing – something most evident here. The film stubbornly fixes its perspective on the deer and the snow-blanketed backgrounds that emphasize how exposed they are. They flee. There is no cover as the editing becomes more frantic, closing in on the deer’s terrified faces as they rush back to the thicket. A shot rings out. The film’s score – a constant presence throughout Bambi until now – decrescendos from broadening string lines to a chorus vocalizing pianissimo (mimicking the wind-blown snow drifts), and disappears completely when the Great Prince of the Forest appears.

The Great Prince is obscured by the falling snow.

“Your mother can’t be with you anymore.”

Silence. Stillness.

Bambi sheds but a single tear. He walks away with his father and, mirroring his deceased mother, looks towards the audience – this time, not in accusation or inquiry, but faint hope. Cynical viewers label this scene as anticlimactic due to Bambi’s lack of expression. But the filmmaking preceding it – a combination of the editing by Thomas Scott (1939’s Beau Geste, 1948’s So Dear to My Heart); the compositional decisions by composers Frank Churchill (Snow White, 1941’s Dumbo) and Edward H. Plumb (1944’s The Three Caballeros); the attentive character animation by artists too numerous to single out here; and the moody lighting and brushstroke textures to the backgrounds set by Tyrus Wong (1956’s Giant, 1969’s The Wild Bunch) – helps justify Bambi’s reaction. Some of the most important, at times traumatic, moments in life are silent and still. There is just enough pathos here without being anticlimactic or maudlin, or to be patronizing towards young viewers.

And yet the next scene shows Bambi grown up, in the middle of Spring, at play. There is no allusion to the tragedy on-screen a few minutes prior. The filmmakers are not minimizing Bambi’s trauma or nature’s violence, but saying that life nevertheless continues. There is growth, the acceptance of grown-up responsibilities, romance, love, child-rearing. Stags – like Bambi and the Great Prince – mate with does, but do not participate in the lives of their fawns. Unlike other Disney films where animals assume greater anthropomorphized qualities (1967’s The Jungle Book, 2016’s Zootopia), Bambi’s naturalistic approach contradicts any application of human norms and values onto its animals.

For years, this meant struggling to animate wildlife – especially deer. Rendering deer in appealing ways is difficult, due to the shape of their face and the positioning of their eyes on either side of the face. In the end, the animators went with character designer Marc Davis’ (Davis also led the character design of Thumper, Flower, and Cruella de Vil from 1961’s One Hundred and One Dalmatians) outlines: maintaining realistic deer anatomy, but exaggerating the face with a shorter snout and larger eyes. The Great Prince’s antlers proved most infuriating due to the intricate perspectives in animating them. When the animators resolved that they could not animate antlers from scratch, a plaster mold of deer antlers were made and was Rotoscoped (projecting live-action film onto an image for an animator to trace it) the film’s animation cels.

But the most remarkable contribution to Bambi comes from Tyrus Wong. Wong, a Chinese-born American artist, established the look of Bambi’s painterly backgrounds. Based on landscape paintings from the Song dynasty (960-1279; a Chinese historical period when landscape painting was in vogue), Wong’s concept art caught the eye of colleague Maurice “Jake” Day. Day, a photographer, illustrator, and naturalist, spent weeks in Vermont and Maine, sketching and photographing deer and the woods surrounding them. His sketches, however, were deemed too “busy”. By comparison, Wong’s concept art – using pastels and watercolors – is impressionistic, deeply atmospheric. Disney, impressed by Wong’s work, appointed him to be lead production illustrator, and instructed the other background animators to take inspiration from Wong’s concept art. Wong’s lush backgrounds have graceful dimension (a hallmark of Song dynasty landscapes), seemingly extending the forest beyond the frame. A brushstroke implies dimensions to the forest unseen. Wong’s sense of lighting – whether soaking in sun-bathed greens or foreboding black-and-white, blues, or reds – helps Bambi smoothen otherwise abrupt tonal shifts.

Nevertheless, history downplayed Wong’s enormous contribution to one of the greatest animated films ever made. The studio fired Wong shortly after Bambi’s completion as collateral damage from the aftermath of the Disney animators’ strike – by the terms of the agreement with the strikers, Disney recognized the animators’ union but would lay off a union-approved equal ratio of strikers and non-strikers. Wong later found work as a Hallmark greeting card designer and a production illustrator for Warner Bros. Retiring in 1968, Wong was contacted by Disney to serve as a sketch artist for Mulan (1998) – Wong declined, stating that animated films were no longer a part of his life. Only within the last decade has Wong, who passed away in December 2016 at 106 years old, received due recognition for his contributions that his on-screen credit does not reveal.

Perhaps inspired by his meetings and collaboration with conductor Leopold Stokowski and music critic Deems Taylor for Fantasia, Walt insisted on a film score to be present across Bambi’s runtime. Composers Frank Churchill and Ed Plumb take inspiration from the Silly Symphony shorts made prior to Snow White – Bambi’s score and soundtrack occasionally blends with the sound mix and it liberally uses “Mickey Mousing” (the synchronization of music with actions, most notably footsteps, on-screen). With the writing team periodically revising Bambi, Churchill and Plumb waited until the final structure of the story was set before composing the music. Transcripts from the Disney Archives also reveal an emboldened Walt – again, perhaps inspired by his experiences from Fantasia – to insert his own preferences in how the music should sound. Walt, a man who once professed that he, “[didn’t] know beans about music,” was more musically articulate than he had been before Fantasia, and was unusually influential in the film’s orchestration. In the end, the Churchill and Plumb score is largely framed by the opening credits number, “Love is a Song”.

Love is a song that never ends. Life may be swift and fleeting. Hope may die, yet love's beautiful music Comes each day like the dawn.

In a few short stanzas, the composers begin a score that falls silent only two times: when Bambi’s mother mentions “man was in the forest and when the Great Prince of the Forest appears shrouded in snow. If one did not already associate it with the actions of the film’s characters, Bambi’s fully-orchestrated score sounds like a lengthy, motif-filled tone poem that can be heard in a concert hall. Listen to the string harmonies supporting the “Love is a Song”-vocalizing chorus during “Sleep Morning in the Woods/The Young Prince/Learning to Walk” beginning from 4:19-5:20. That sort of harmonic density would not be out of place in a late Romantic-era concert hall. Occasionally, that tone poem of a score gives way for the limited musical soundtrack like “Little April Shower” – the film’s best song, and one where instruments and vocalizing humans serve to simulate the sound of rain and wind. Bambi contains some of the tenderest music, reflecting the film’s thematic content, in the Disney canon.

Upon release, many critics and audiences found Bambi a step backward for Disney, caring not that the studio’s namesake and its animators agonized over its realism. Disney had upended the moviegoing world’s expectations with Snow White and spawned competing studios looking to replicate that alchemy. But in doing so, the studio also coded audience and critic expectations that animated film should only be fantastical. To strive for realistic animation to reflect nature was, “boring” and “entirely unpleasant” – for these critics (who say nothing about how animation can guide emotion), animated fantasy was innovative because it bent reality in ways live-action cannot portray. Echoing the most vehement criticisms hurled towards Fantasia, Bambi’s then-contemporary naysayers implied that even attempting to animate nature realistically and ignoring fantasy would be a pretentious exercise. In columns and tabloids, the American media also devolved into a mud-slinging debate over whether Bambi – because of its off-screen portrayal of humanity – defamed hunters.

By similarly contradictory logic, animated film in 1942 was mostly perceived as children’s entertainment – an attitude that has been dominant ever since, and one that yours truly tries to discredit with exasperating frequency. With no other rival animation studios attempting anything as ambitious as a Fantasia or Bambi, gag-heavy short films from Disney and its competitors contributed to these widely-held views. With World War II underway, the dissonance of expectations would only escalate. American moviegoers, though wishing to escape from the terrible headlines emerging from Europe, North Africa, and Asia, believed animated films too juvenile for their attention. Bambi – a dramatic film intended for children and adults – faltered under the burden of these wartime contradictions. It would not make back its production costs during its initial run.

This commercial failure, on the heels of the animators’ strike, cast a shadow over Disney’s Burbank studio and on Walt himself. Walt would never publicly admit this, but he believed he had been too focused on animated features. So much of his creative soul and experimental mind had been dedicated to the Golden Age films, but at what cost? The critical and commercial triumphs of Snow White and Dumbo were offset by Pinocchio’s (1940) budgetary overruns and the headline-grabbing negativity (by music and film critics) that financially drowned Fantasia and Bambi. Internal divisions that led to the animators’ strike nearly destroyed the studio; heavy borrowing from Bank of America resulted in runaway debt. Walt – spiritually and physically – would not be present for the rounds of layoffs (mandated by the agreement with the striking animators) that almost halved the studio’s staff after Bambi’s release. He accepted a long-standing offer from the Office for Inter-American Affairs to embark on a goodwill tour of South America to help improve relations with Latin American nations (as well as collect ideas for future animated films).

Bambi remains a sterling example of Walt Disney Animation Studios’ artistic daring. The film pushes realistic animation as far as the technology of its time can. It does so not only for the sake of visual realism, but to reinforce the profound emotions it has evoked for decades. The film’s tragic dimensions are legendary, oft-parodied; yet this does not (and should not) define it. Almost eighty years since its debut, Bambi’s reputation continues to be mired in the contradictions that first greeted its release. There are some who still believe that animated cinema, by its nature, is specifically for children. And by an extension of that thought, some believe tragedy has no place in animated cinema. What a limited view of art that is, an underestimation of humanity’s capacity for understanding.

Bambi concludes the Golden Age of Walt Disney Animation Studios. Since its departure from theaters, moviegoers have rarely been treated to animated cinema of equal or greater maturity – let alone from Disney itself. The artistic cavalcade of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Pinocchio (1940), Fantasia (1940), Dumbo (1941), and Bambi (1942) resulted in five consecutive films resembling nothing like the other, but all united in ferocious innovation. The central figure of this Golden Age, Walt Disney, was personally involved in each of these works; the end of this so-called Golden Age comes as he stops dedicating himself so completely to the studio’s animated features. In their own ways, each film helped define what animated cinema can be and who it is for. That debate remains fluid, one where the principal interlocutors learn from or disregard the lessons of this Golden Age.

My rating: 10/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. Half-points are always rounded down. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found in the “Ratings system” page on my blog (as of July 1, 2020, tumblr is not permitting certain posts with links to appear on tag pages, so I cannot provide the URL).

For more of my reviews tagged “My Movie Odyssey”, check out the tag of the same name on my blog.

This is the seventeenth Movie Odyssey Retrospective. Movie Odyssey Retrospectives are reviews on films I had seen in their entirety before this blog’s creation or films I failed to give a full-length write-up to following the blog’s creation. Previous Retrospectives include The Wizard of Oz (1939), Mary Poppins (1964), and Oliver! (1968).

[rabbitcruiser]

International Holocaust Remembrance Day 

International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust, commonly known as International Holocaust Remembrance Day, commemorates those who lost their lives during the Holocaust, the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis and their collaborators during World War II which killed 6 million Jews—about one-third of their total number—as well as 11 million others. This solemn remembrance was designated with United Nations General Assembly resolution 60/7, on November 1, 2005, during the 42nd plenary session. The resolution and the day were initiated by Israel.

Earlier in the year, on January 24, a special session had been held to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps and the end of the Holocaust. The largest Nazi concentration camp and death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, was liberated by the Russians on January 27, 1945. January 27 became the date of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which was first held in 2006. There is a twofold rationale behind the day: It remembers those who lost their lives in the Holocaust on account of the Nazi regime, and it promotes the education of future generations throughout the world about the horrors of the Holocaust.

In addition to these two goals, the resolution that designated the day did a few other things. It rejected denial of the Holocaust and condemned all religious intolerance, incitement, harassment, or violence against persons or communities based on ethnic or religious belief; it called for the active preservation of Holocaust sites that were locations of Nazi death camps, concentration camps, forced labor camps, and prisons; and it called for the establishment of a United Nations program that would do outreach and mobilization of society for the remembrance of and education about the Holocaust.

Before International Holocaust Remembrance Day was created, there had been other holidays marking the Holocaust. In the United Kingdom, there has been a Holocaust memorial day on the same date since 2001. In Germany, Tag des Gedenkens an die Opfer des Nationalsozialismus (The Day of Remembrance for the victims of National Socialism) was established in 1996. Other countries also have established their own remembrance days, often connected to dates related to the Holocaust. For example, Israel marks Yom HaShoah on the 27th day of Nisan. International Holocaust Remembrance Day is a national event in various countries, and 39 countries participated in commemoration ceremonies for the holiday in 2015. Official commemorations are held at the Headquarters of the United Nations in New York City, as well as at UN offices around the world, in state UN offices, at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and at Yad Vashem. Since 2010, the UN has designated specific themes for the annual celebrations.

The Nazis, who thought they were a superior race, came to power in Germany in 1933. Believing Jews were an inferior race and also a threat, they soon began a systematic persecution of them, keeping them out of social, economic, and cultural life, and putting pressure on them to leave the country. The Jewish population of Europe at the time was over 9 million. Eventually, during World War II, the Nazis attempted their "Final Solution"—the murdering of all Jews in Europe. The carrying out of this appallingly evil plan was known as the Holocaust; the word "holocaust" comes from a Greek word which means "sacrifice by fire."

After the start of the war, after Germany gained occupation of Poland, they placed the Jewish people into ghettos there, deporting them from all the areas they controlled. Hundreds of thousands died in the ghettos. In June 1941, the Soviet Union was invaded. Following this, the Einsatzgruppen and Waffen-SS, with support from the Wehrmacht, went behind enemy lines. They conducted mass shootings and used gas vans to kill Jews, Roma, and Soviet and Communist Party officials. The mass shooting of Jews continued throughout the war, many times being done by the German Order Police. It is believed that 1.5 million Jews were killed this way.

The use of stationary gas chambers began in late 1941. Almost 3 million Jews were deported to Nazi-occupied Poland between 1941 and 1944. Transported by train, most of them were sent to extermination camps such as Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Poison gas was used to kill most of them. Some were sent to do forced labor in ghettos or camps or to concentration camps in Nazi-controlled areas in Poland or the Soviet Union, where most died from starvation, disease, or from being shot after becoming too weak to work. Starting in 1942, Jews were mainly being sent to death camps, although they would be told they were being sent to labor camps, and the Nazi's euphemistically called what they were doing "resettlement to the east."

Other groups besides Jews were persecuted—and died—on account of perceptions that they were racially or biologically inferior, including the Roma, who were often called "Gypsies," some Slavic people like Poles and Russians, Soviet prisoners of war, blacks, and people with disabilities. Over 250,000 Roma were killed, as were over 250,000 mentally or physically disabled people, who mainly were Germans living in institutions. As many as 2 or 3 million Soviet prisoners of war died, many being outright murdered, and even more Soviet citizens died. People were also targeted because of their political, ideological, or behavioral backgrounds, including Communists, Socialists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and homosexuals. In total, about 11 million from these groups lost their lives.

By 1945, the Final Solution was almost two-thirds complete. As the Allies approached and the end of the war neared, Nazi SS guards moved prisoners by rail or by marches—known as death marches—so that they wouldn't be liberated. The Allies were able to liberate concentration camps and save Jewish prisoners who were on the march between one camp and another. The marches stopped on May 7, 1945, the day that Germany surrendered to the Allies. The next day is known as V-E Day. Following the Holocaust and the war, over 250,000 Jews found refuge in displaced persons camps. Between 1948 and 1951, about 136,000 displaced Jews moved to Israel. Others resettled in the United States and elsewhere, and the last camp for Jewish displaced persons closed in 1957.

Today we remember those who lost their lives on account of the Nazis, and we work to promote education around the world about the horrors of the Holocaust, to ensure that something so horrific never happens again. We stand for human rights around the world and stand up against any form of oppression or injustice that may still be found.

How to Observe International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust

The day should be spent remembering those who lost their lives in the Holocaust, and by promoting education about the Holocaust in order to prevent something like it from ever happening again. The following are some ways that the day could be observed:  

Attend an official commemoration. Some locations where commemorations take place include the Headquarters of the United Nations and other UN offices, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Yad Vashem, and at Heldenplatz in Vienna.

Visit a Holocaust site.

Explore the Holocaust and United Nations Outreach Programme.

Watch a documentary about the Holocaust such as Shoah or Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State.

Watch a feature film that deals with the Holocaust, such as Schindler's List, The Pianist, or Life is Beautiful.

Read a book on the subject of the Holocaust, such as The Diary of a Young Girl, Night, or Survival in Auschwitz.

Source

[hannahhill-photography]

Lecture 6 - Gideon Koppel

Prior to the lecture we were asked to watch two of his films Broth and sleep furiously. Broth is about an hour long and sleep furiously a little longer about an hour and a half I loved both but I have to admit I connected more with sleep furiously the landscape in which he filmed felt familiar to me and very much reminded me of home. I really like the use of dialog in the film I feel like I got a really good idea of what it was to live in Bangor the people and how they spend their time and how community based it is. My personal favourite part was the dialog between the library bus driver and the locals the way their accents came out and the use of the welsh language occasionally. Its not something I commonly hear and therefore feels foreign and interesting. Bangor feels like the sort of place where everyone knows everyone and that is very typical of a rural village and is something I am very aware of growing up in a landscape which isn't too dissimilar to Bangor. 

Broth reminded me of holidays as a child in rundown seaside towns, I found it really hard to actually place the location of the beach until seeing welsh flags on  the pub which is shown near the end of the film. I really love the constancy of the video and the way the sounds inform the images rather than the image being the main focus of the film. The sound describes each house and I think thats a really interesting way to look at the buildings rather than just looking at the structure and the actual physical building. 

Notes from lecture:

Gideon begun his education at the London college of printing and then went to Slade.

Stuart brisley, Paula Rego

Found he mainly painted rather than creating film.

Early into his career emersed himself in making commissioned work working for comme de garçons and the BBC.

The senses and feelings are themes that run through his work and this is very obvious particularly in the film Broth the use of sound is very important.

His parents were refugees and he comes from a jewish German background they moved to a rural part of Wales. You would have thought it would be an unwelcoming area but it wasn't the experience of his parents. Therefore decided to dedicate his film Broth to the town he was incredibly inspired by the community and in particular the yellow library van which connects all disparate spaces in the area. He also like the library man he is a genuine and nice person and this radiates in the film Gideon also likes the idea that this is a man who travels with stories.

Looking and listening is an important part of every living thing other animals apart from humans don't need a purpose in life they simply just see and they need to do this in order to survive. 

Siri Hustvedt - Mystery of the rectangle

Part of making art is being a magpie 

Sometimes you need to look at something for a long enough time that you feel comfortable with it.

Philip Larkin - “nothing like something happens anywhere”

Turn the unremarkable into remarkable 

Sleep furiously was shot on 16mm just before rainfall. It was filmed on a track which moved along the beach filming the sea front houses. Behind the camera a black background was used this is to prevent reflections in the windows of the houses as the camera went past. He was going to originally film both the sea and the houses and have both screens showing at the same time showing both sides but then decided not to. I think this was a wise decision I like that you can only hear the sea you still get a sense of location due to the sound. Gideon used layers to make the sound -sea, the sound of the houses these were recorded in the interior and exterior of the houses the two are combined and each scene has a different sound.  

[ambitionsource]

wait i actually have more weirdly specific questions (if ur up to it) - how do the kids feel about poetry? do they follow any sports? what childhood tv shows were their favs? do they have celebrity crushes? fav coming of age movie? how are they doing in quarantine? what time in history were they obsessed w as a kid? have they ever been to summer camp? what type of candles do they like? what song do they cry to? how do they drink their coffee/tea sorry if u’ve answered already/too many questions

wooooo thank you for your patience iz!! we’re gonna go point by point

poetry?

charlie loves it genuinely and will read it for fun. riley likes it enough but doesn’t go out of her way to read it. farkle loves coming up with insane explanations for the metaphors and is smug about interpreting it in class. zay doesn’t care for it, neither does lucas. asher appreciates it but finds it boring; dylan likes it for the same reason farkle does, only not to look smart but to come up with something completely crackheaded to combat farkle’s interpretation (which he can’t then say isn’t correct, bc its poetry, so all interpretations are valid!). isa doesn’t like it because she doesn’t get the metaphors on paper the same way she can pick them up in film. maya hates it even though multiple people have pointed out that song lyrics are basically poetry -- she will tune you out.

sports?

sports aren’t Big at aaa (aside from dance), but there are remnants here and there. riley follows basketball of course -- even tho as demonstrated in 110, she cannot play it to save herself -- and she tried out for cheer in 9th grade at her old school but was rejected from the squad (another bad mark on a terrible year). farkle prefers wii sports over any actual sport, but will sometimes watch golf with stuart because it’s quality time with his very busy father. charlie did soccer when he was younger before it got phased out by dance and semi keeps up with it. dylan also “played” soccer, but this meant the other little league teammates getting pissed at him bc he never paid attention to the game and was just like “hey! hey, dennis, look at this!” and did like 3 cartwheels across the field. it was a smart move when randall pulled him from the team bc those intense soccer moms were gonna like beat them up fDJSKG. so now dylan is just an unofficial gymnast instead.

isa doesn’t like sports but played them a lot with foster siblings, and even though she sucks she gets very competitive. lucas liked baseball and was good at track in middle school, but he never thought about doing a sport for real because he knew he was going to quincy eventually where his dad is a coach... yeah. no. but he’s great at running fast from the police!

maya hates sports (aside from the art of dance). waste of time, waste of energy. asher has never done a sport nor ever contemplated a sport. the most Sport he’s endured is going with jade to support dave at his swim meets (where nigel also does swim) and suffice to say, asher wasn’t there to look at the swimming.

childhood tv?

dylan to this day is a spongebob squarepants STAN. legend, icon, scholar, best television show ever made, in his opinion. he also was well-versed in pokemon, adventure time, gravity falls, and phineas and ferb. asher and lucas both didn’t watch lots of tv growing up (if at all), so dylan considers it his job to give asher a thorough education in the quality tv he missed as a kid.

maya was all over hannah montana (miley is still a role model to this day for her), and she, zay, and charlie all remember the fever dream that was shake it up. zay especially loved it bc he was (is) obsessed with zendaya. zay and maya both also watched victorious. charlie was sharing a tv with four siblings so he just ended up watching whatever the dominant sister that day wanted to watch. riley was a disney channel girl, and farkle was a pbs scholar (arthur, cyber chase, fetch! with ruff ruff man... classics).

 celebrity crushes?

zay = zendaya (as previously mentioned). charlie = harry styles to a major degree, although his Cover Story would be zendaya if you asked (ironically). maya = britney spears (but in a I Want To Be Her way, major idolization rather than attraction) and technically the same for valerie de la cruz but like... rip to that lmao. isa = loki, yes we know, but sometimes it be that way (altho that does extend a little bit towards tom hiddleston in general). asher = logan lerman, aka the main valid white boy who dresses nice, is polite and soft-spoken, and minds his own business (not to mention he is the Same Type as dylan). dylan = had crushes more on like... personalities so like ash ketchum and percy jackson, and now its irrelevant bc he met asher and became obsessed and its like every other potential crush just flew out the window of his brain. it’s full asher territory in there nowadays.

riley doesn’t have a specific one, she thinks lots of people are Pretty but no one particularly strongly. farkle doesn’t have one because he’s insane and doesn’t have the mental capacity. lucas doesn’t have one because he’s demi and also hates most celebrities as people.

coming-of-age movie?

maya’s is mean girls. farkle’s is ladybird. zay’s is easy a. riley’s is bend it like beckham. isadora’s is eighth grade. charlie’s is dead poet’s society. asher’s is perks of being a wallflower. dylan’s is spiderman: into the spiderverse. lucas doesn’t know movies.

quarantine?

we’ve somewhat discussed this before, but ultimately es and i elected to let aaa remain in a nice, calm universe where they don’t have to endure covid. lucky them. blow a kiss to the ether for us, buds,

fave time in history?

riley is huge on ancient greece and greek mythology. maya loves the theatricality and Drama of the roaring 20s (a baby flapper at heart). zay vibes hard with the 80s. charlie likes the fashion and romanticism and music and art of the 70s (that sort of flowery positivity clashing with the rebelliousness of the movements of the 60s... yeah. that hits something in him). farkle’s is the great depression not only bc he’s an emo but also all the raw and desperate art that came out of it. isadora was a egyptian mythology kid. i know lucas sounds lame (he is), but i don’t think he cares about history -- but if pushed he’d probably say the 90s bc he dresses like he’s straight out of there, everyone was angry rocking, and he wasn’t born. asher likes the victorian era bc of the sheer elegance and Aesthetic to everything. dylan doesn’t have a favorite time period because due to being the subconscious multiverse conduit (i.e. the being that is somewhat connected to every other version of himself) sometimes he wakes up and for a minute he doesn’t even know what year it is 🤪anyway...

summer camp?

charlie has been to many a christian youth summer camp. zay went to the kossal program, but that was basically it. lucas no although he probably wished he could be anywhere else during the summer sometimes including a camp he would hate. riley went for a few years in elementary school. isa has gone to a couple of “foster kid” summer camp bonding things that she despised. farkle went to jewish summer camp One time and was like that was HORRIBLE, never make me spend a whole summer outside AGAIN. asher was more of a Enrichment courses at the rec center during the summer kid than a camper. dylan no because the orlandos couldn’t afford something like that. same for maya.

candles?

riley has a small variety of scented ones that are like... warm scents, like cinnamon and stuff. asher a couple that smell like clean linen but his fear of accidental fires keeps him from ever lighting them. maya has one and it smells like “star power,” a gift from her mom one christmas. isadora can’t have any because many of her foster homes don’t allow them. lucas legally shouldn’t be allowed anything that catches on fire. dylan doesn’t have one but similarly should not be given one. the minki have a whole collection for different things so farkle can just pluck one at any time if he needs one like for a super fancy bath or whatever the fuck rich people do.

mental breakdown song?

charlie’s are “falling” and “from the dining table” by harry styles.

riley’s is “manhattan” by sara bareilles and “rainbow” by kacey musgraves.

zay’s are “imagine” by ariana and “dear life” from the step up soundtrack (post zc breakup).

farkle’s are “vienna” by billy joel and “get it right” from glee.

asher’s is “don’t cry” by ruel.

isa’s is “you are my sunshine” because valerie used to sing it to her a lot when she was really little, so it will always make her a little emotional.

dylan’s (although rare) are “soon you’ll get better” by ts and “make you feel my love” by adele. the second one is because his mom loved adele when she was just starting out bc 19 was released the same year that she passed away so there’s a lot of like subconscious association there even if he doesn’t realize it.

maya doesn’t have one, and lucas also doesn’t have one because in the rare moments he does cry its in his closet in the dark silence alone bc he literally can’t stand the sentience of knowing he’s crying so. sensory blackout.

coffee / tea?

riley will add at least 3 sugars to anything, but she’s ultimately an iced tea gal. lucas drinks it black but only because it never occurred to him to add anything to it and so it’s a big wake up call when he realizes you can drink it and have it NOT be bitter and horrible and demoralizing ( “i thought we were all just suffering for the caffeine fix??” ). isa is a tea girl mostly, although she wishes she could drink black coffee for the aesthetic (and hates that lucas can... it’s like... he didn’t even Earn that aestheticism, smh). asher doesn’t drink caffeine bc it makes him Jittery (and he’s already jittery) so he’s like... the lemonade bitch at coffee shops which kin, and then dylan definitely drinks caffeine but not thru coffee, he’s more likely to get like a hot chocolate.

farkle lives on coffee but he can only drink it from home because they’re rich and can have like fresh ground good imported whatever the heck etc etc so he’s like spoiled about coffee. zay will hit up a starbucks now and then and will order coffee at a diner, but he’s not too attached either way. maya is a fun n free starbucks gal with her frappes and lattes and lots of cream (whipped or otherwise). charlie doesn’t drink coffee or tea bc hes hyper aware of his body and health (he doesn’t really have soda either) and it was frowned upon in his house.

[scripttorture]

I’m an Anastasia fanfic and I wanted it to be more realistic. In terms of Russian revolution and being held captive and (almost) killed, would what Anastasia went through have qualified as torture since the people doing it were now in power? My thinking is the torturers (abusers?) have a lot of anger that is motivated by politics and personal ambition and hate for the family. They are incompetent enough that Anastasia escapes, but how can I portray incompetence as a result of torture and not

(Anastasia 2) not simply them being ‘new’ and inexperienced considering the revolutionists haven’t been in power for years like the Romanovs. I was also considering memory problems as a symptom to echo the amnesia she had in the film. I am also considering anxiety, insomnia, an aversion to touch, and perhaps one more traditional symptom from the masterpost. If you have a suggestion for it, or any other aspect of the story, that would be appreciated.

-

I’m not familiar with this fandom but I’m assuming it’s not some kind of niche history fandom? I had to ask round the Fam to get an explanation for this, so I think we can safely say I’m unfamiliar with the canon.

 For the sake of stating my biases I find the idea of a children’s movie centred on Anastasia Romanov a little… macabre. But hey I watched sausage smugglers growing up and played games centred around police brutality, so who am I to judge? I might ot ‘get’ the story but think I can help. :)

 I’m going into this with a little bit of background knowledge about this historical incident (ie the death of the last members of the Romanov line) but I don’t know much Russian history to put it into context.

 I’ll start with the first question: yes I think legally speaking you could make an argument that any abuse the Romanovs suffered was torture. Whether the people who held them were technically in power or not they were an armed group powerful enough to control territory. It doesn’t matter whether they were recognised rulers, they were in de-facto control of a significant area and number of people. They were organised. They had a command structure.

 This is a sufficient level of control, power and organisation that, yes, I think you could class them as torturers. It’s certainly not the action of a lone individual doing something horrible on a whim. Abuse in these circumstances would be either ordered or tacitly condoned.

 That makes it torture.

 I think your characterisation of the torturers’ motivations seems sound. This is something that can happen.

 I would add a note of caution here that perhaps applies more to history then the canon you’re working from. A lot of people had a lot of legitimate grievances with the Romanovs. Russia had just come out of a disastrous war, flu had killed a lot of people and I think there was also a major problem with food supplies throughout the country.

 Tsar Nicholas was at best incompetent in a way that lead to the deaths of millions of his subjects. He presided over disastrous wars, economic collapse and widespread attacks on Jewish people. He is widely reported to have refused to take advice or change his mind with changing circumstances.

 Russian losses in Nicholas’s war with Japan are estimated at between 43,000-120,000 people. The organised attacks on Jews during his reign claimed an estimated 4,500 lives. The ‘Bloody Sunday’ of 1905 led to an estimated 1,000 dead or wounded. And then there was the First World War, to which Russia lost an estimated 2 million soldiers and almost half a million civilians. For context the high estimates say Russia lost 2% of their population.

 There were a lot of poor, sick, starving people who had lost loved ones over issues that seemed trivial and far away. While the royal family was incredibly rich and not doing much to help their people.

 This by no means justifies their abuse and murder. But be careful about trivialising the anger these people felt. They had cause. And while the Grand Duchesses didn’t have much real power the Tsar and Tsarina certainly did.

 By directing their anger at the monarchs they were targetting someone who had caused many of their problems. Having lived in an absolute monarchy, I can understand their frustration and the urge to lash out at an easy target rather then settle down to the harder work of solving the problems absolute monarchs cause.

 I don’t know what this cartoon shows of the Romanov’s treatment and deaths.

 My impression from what I’ve read is that the rumours surrounding the survival of one of the younger daughters came from the lack of bodies. There was also a report that the girls (this was apparently true of some of servants too) had sewed jewels into their corsets, in order to hide them from the guards and that bullets had ricochetted off the diamonds, acting like armour.

 Several of the girls were stabbed to death after the shooting stopped. An account claims one of them survived this and was clubbed to death at the mass grave.

 Survival in the sort of scenario the Romanovs actually went through is unlikely because it isn’t the torture that killed them. This was an execution. Of a large number of people yes, but the executors wanted to ensure every single one of them was dead. So after the bullets stopped and the smoke cleared they stabbed the bodies, they cut throats.

 This is not unusual in these circumstances. It is pretty rare for someone to survive these kinds of mass shootings of prisoners in a confined space.

 Honestly the closest I can think of to a survivors account is this. The victim is a child describing one of the worst attacks on a school in the modern era.

 My instinct is that for someone to survive the kind of attack that the Romanovs and their servants were subjected to, she’d have had to be both very lucky and very obviously wounded in a way many people would assume was fatal.

 I’d suggest using that. Have medical professionals comment on how unlikely, or lucky, the story is. Have the executioners notice this one is alive and then shrug and say well she won’t be for much longer go ahead and throw her in the pit.

 My instinct is that this is separate to torture.

 The Romanovs changed hands several times over the course of their imprisonment. As I understand it conditions for them gradually worsened but were not originally torturous.

 Later prisons cut their contact with the outside world completely, discouraged talking amongst themselves and banned talking to the guards. Some of them had no natural light and there are accounts of both the children and the Tsarina being threatened with guns or shot at for being too close to windows or trying to look outside.

 I’m finding it difficult to definitively say what they went through because the accounts I’m finding don’t seem to understand clean torture. So I’m seeing a lot of possible abusive actions here, but I’m unsure how to label them all because they’re being described inconsistently.

 They weren’t in solitary confinement, but there are definite attempts at isolation here. There are accounts of the daughters being sexually harassed (no accounts I could find of assault, this was all verbal or crude graffiti). I am unsure if the rations constituted a starvation diet or not. The son was deprived of medical care. The prison conditions certainly seem torturous towards the end, but I feel like I’m missing a lot of details that would let me describe precise physical effects.

 I don’t think you need to go into detail about any of this if you don’t want to but you could use this period of imprisonment to establish the incompetence of the guards.

 I would do it by writing two distinct groups of guards. One group that threatens and harasses and potentially tortures the family, and a second group who don’t do these things, concentrating on guard work instead.

 Having established the two groups I’d show that while the first group is on duty the family or their servants can actually get away with more things. So- if the first group is harassing older sister Olga, they may not notice that the Tsarina was too close to the window again.

 If the idea is that Anastasia escapes before the family is executed then I’d show that happening while the first group of guards in on duty. If she’s there when the family are executed then I’d have members of the first group displaying the ‘well she’s mostly dead’ attitude that allows her to survive.

 Essentially it’s about showing that if a guard is concentrating on making their prisoner feel bad, they are not concentrating on where all the prisoners are and what they’re doing. If a guard treats making the prisoner feel bad as their primary task then that guards has stopped doing their job.

 If you’re using an escape then a way to do this would be to have one member of the family ‘provoke’ the torturers, creating the opportunity for some of the children to escape.

 Amnesia, in the way it’s traditionally used in fiction, is not how memory problems due to trauma typically work. I get the impression you’re aware of that.

 I prefer using accurate memory problems but I understand that the canon has probably left you in a difficult position here.

 Typically torture/trauma survivors don’t forget their identity or older, childhood memories. They also don’t typically forget the abuse they suffered. In fact it’s more common for them to remember it in awful (but not necessarily accurate) detail.

 There is an exception: young children, under the age of about 7, can sometimes forget large chunks of their identity after trauma if they are then raised by people who can’t/don’t reinforce that identity.

 The real Anastasia was 17 when she died. That’s too old to forget who she was.

 So how do we square this?

 My instinct that mixing several memory problems rather than relying on memory loss alone is the better bet.

 Anastasia is the name of a saint who was apparently very popular in European Orthodox churches. A lot of girls Anastasia Romanov’s age probably shared that name. And a lot of them probably changed it to something less associated with the church when the Bolsheviks took power. Making something old and essential like her name a decision rather than a result of trauma would help.

 But I think the main piece of advice I have would be use inaccurate memories rather then memory loss alone, as the major memory problem.

 Because if this child is aware that most of her normal day-to-day memories are inaccurate, then she could remember vast chunks of her childhood and dismiss them as false.

 At the height of their power the Romanovs had a lot of servants. Anastasia could remember the palaces, the royal family, the wealth she was surrounded by, and assume she saw this as a servant rather than as a member of the family.

 If her memory is patchy anyway then that seems like a reasonable conclusion. She could also remember being arrested and imprisoned, being harassed by guards, being cold and hungry. And this would fit with her earlier conclusion because many of the Romanov’s servants were treated badly by the new regime (some of them died with the family).

 Insomnia would feed into this and make it worse.

 Partly because insomnia in and of itself causes memory problems (it interferes with our ability to form longer term memories) and partly because of some of the other effects serious insomnia can have: microsleeps and hallucinations. Microsleeps are short periods of unconsciousness that occur when someone is very very tired. People can dream vividly during these short periods of sleep. And the result can be a blurring of reality and dream as they sleep in short bursts and then wake again, unaware that they slept at all.

 Combined with the occasional hallucination and inaccurate memories this sort of scenario could very easily make a child doubt her own memories. It could result in a situation where she does remember big chunks of her life and childhood but convinces herself they were not real or interprets them differently.

 She might end up remembering her father and The Tsar as two separate people. She might convince herself she was a servant in the palace because that seems the more likely explanation. She might mix up memories of servants she knew from infancy with memories of family members.

 Combined with anxiety and avoidance of these memories (or anything that brings them up-) I think you could quite plausibly build up a character who hasn’t so much forgotten her past but is really confused about it. When memories are this muddled and painful it’s often easier for a character to just claim they don’t remember. Especially if there’s a lot of discrimination against mentally ill people in the setting. Because- well explaining that your memory is a mess and you hallucinate tends to convince people you’re ‘crazy’, whereas telling people you ‘don’t remember’ and you were badly injured often leads to a more sympathetic response.

 I’ll finish this up with the question of any additional symptoms.

 I think that if you’re using two types of memory problems (memory loss and inaccurate memories) with anxiety and insomnia then you’ve already got a reasonable number of symptoms.

 If you wanted to include more I think panic attacks and social isolation could both fit very well with the symptom set you have and the setting/character. Social isolation does seem like a particularly likely outcome for a child who was imprisoned for part of her development, lost her family and is suffering from severe mental health problems.

 There aren’t really bad picks, it’s more a case of thinking about what fits with the character you want to establish and the story you want to tell. If you want a story that’s got a more optimistic bent then suicidal feelings and addiction in a teenager may not be good picks.

 Personality change might be a good pick but I think that depends on how much of your story deals with Anastasia before her family are killed. For personality change to work well in a story I think you need to be able to establish the character’s personality before and after the traumatic event. That might not work with the plot you have planned.

 I have a post on sleep deprivation here that you might find helpful.

 Beyond that, I think you’ve got a good starting point here and a reasonable, realistic concept.

 I hope that helps. :)

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[videoassocdallas]

Bart Chat 2/23/19 Greetings all,   We are very excited about DOCUFEST coming up October 3rd-6th at the Angelika Film Center in Dallas, but before we get to that, we have a program coming up this Saturday at The Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth.  As you may or may not know, they have a great Gordon Parks photo exhibit going on there. Most People know Gordon Parks from Shaft fame but he was also a great photographer and seeing the show is worth the trip.  We are teaming about with Amon Carter to show his earlier documentaries, Diary of a Harlem Family (1968, 20 minutes) and The World of Piri Thomas (1968, 60 minutes). Parks tells the story of the Fontenelle family. He was inspired to make this film after photographing the Fontenelles for a Life magazine photo essay on race and poverty in an attempt to show that, regardless of race and class, families across America all work to provide for their children. This a rare opportunity to see these films so please check them out. The World of Piri Thomas gives an unflinching view of the “mean streets” of Spanish Harlem as told by one of its most noted inhabitants. In this film, Thomas, who was a painter, poet, author, ex-con, and ex-junkie, shares his experiences and reads from his book, Down These Mean Streets.   Now back to DocuFest.  We live in, shall we say, unique times when questions about what is real and what is fake constantly permeate decision making. Should I click on that? Can you believe what he said? Can that be true? In these titles, DocuFest presents fresh oasis of media that ascribes to presenting reality and framing reality in a way to make us better citizens, to create awareness, and make us whole in a time when the news makes us feel empty, angry, less connected to the world and in the end, less human. Come to the Angelika Film Center Dallas and spend four days with us and you can rediscover joy, brilliance, tragedy and be moved by it all. This fest is more than just a series of movies, it is a way to reconnect with your sanity. (Did I oversell this?)    The first two nights, we have two theaters. Opening night, we start with a preview of Flannery, a new feature film about the great southern writer Flannery O’Connor.  This is a really great doc by a good friend, Elizabeth Coffman, whose work we have shown before, but this is her best film to date. If you ever read O’Connor’s work, this film tells her fascinating story in a style that works with her style.  At the same time, in another world in the next screening room, we have Now or Never: A Tony Romo Story.  We have seen him play, we have seen him talk, now see how he attained success with interviews of family and friends who knew him back in the day. Then our late shows on Thursday have A Woman’s Work, by Yu Gu, a documentary about NFL cheerleaders who are fighting for their rights.  It follows class action lawsuits and the women who have the courage to stand up to the NFL for their rights. Then we have a classic: When DA Pennebaker passed away, we wanted to show one of his films to honor his memory and what he meant to documentary film. We thought of The War Room (directed by Chris Hegedus) because we have an election coming soon and we thought about Don’t Look Back, which is the obvious choice and we don’t do that, so we went with Ziggy Stardust to remember both Pennebaker and Bowie.    Pretty cool for opening night.   On Friday night, we start with a new documentary about legendary choreographer Merce Cunningham, in 3D!!!!!!!  It’s hard to imagine modern dance without the influence of Cunningham and his lifelong collaborator and partner John Cage. In his film, the filmmaker assembles dancers from the Merce Cunningham dance company to perform the classic works, in a new way. Often 3D can be a trick or a gadget but here with an artist working with moving in space, 3D brings it alive. At the same time (sorry, on Thursday and Friday night you will have to make tough choices) we are proud to show Midnight Traveler, the story of filmmaker Hassan Fazili’, who had a bounty on his head from the Taliban and had to leave with his wife and their two daughters. In this film, shot with a mobile device, he documents the everyday moments of family life interspersed with the peril of this dangerous journey. This film helps put a voice to the people who are having to leave their countries, seeing, knowing and understanding their struggles.   The late-night Friday program is just as special. Varda by Agnes is a film that was on many best-of lists from Toronto. Agnes Varda has had a long and fascinating career as a filmmaker, and she gets to tell her story in this doc. (We have been happy to show her work for years, including the great Beaches of Agnes.)  In this film, we see her in many different audiences talking about her work. It is a great way to hear her talk about and view her work. It’s a must-see.   And finally, the last program is controversial (Can you believe we would do that?) It is American Dharma, Errol Morris’ film about Steve Bannon.  This played a few festivals last year and Errol got blasted for giving Bannon some oxygen.  Indeed, I was not keen on the idea of the film and then I saw it. Bannon does get to put this burn it all down point of view in the film, while Morris does call him on things, it is not as much as most audiences would like. However, as we get into this next election cycle, it is good to see what made Trump’s campaign successful, at least from one person's point of view. Also, I think it’s better to get into the heads of an opponent than to think you know them.   And the actual film is fascinating. Bannon is very much influenced by films, and he has made films of his own.  He talks about 12:00 High, a classic film about the Air Force, heroism and WW2. Morris recreates the main set of 12:00 High and the interview takes place in the set. It brings a strange unsettling context to their discussion, and I think it works. That’s just the first two nights and there is so much more, which I will detail in the next newsletter.    Speaking of immigrants, last night I got to see a special screening of Detras de Realidad which will show in Frame of Mind October 10th at 10:00 PM. This program is made by women about their own journey to Texas and what their life is like here. Frank, honest and in their own voices. I really liked what they did, but I was so happy to meet the makers who learned how to control the image and use the medium to tell everyone their stories. Thanks so much to Amber Bemak who taught then and Ignite Dallas at SMU for making it happen.   Speaking of Frame of Mind we have a great new show on Thursday night at 10 PM. Each year on the series, we feature a retrospective of a Texas filmmaker and usually, they are old folk. This year, we took a different approach.  Explordinary is Sarah Reyes and Daniel Driensky. They are great at straddling the world of digital and analog media, as well as film as art and commerce. They have traveled the globe documenting, in their unique way, artists, skaters, film labs and many other things. They put together their own retro and it rocks. 10:00 PM Thursday, Sept 26th.   What else is happening around town?   On Thursday, there is a special screening of the Princess Bride as a benefit for Hope Kids of North Texas.  Next weekend, there is the North Texas Film Festival in Plano.  There is the Alice Cooper film that played at DIFF and things like Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Poltergeist, and Reanimator, so if you are into these and many are, not so much me, go for it. My favorite film they are showing is Mack Wrestles, a short I saw at SXSW about the Mack Beggs, a local athlete who goes through a sex change and still wants to wrestle. This is a must-see.   As for The Texas Theater, on Wednesday, they are showing a film that has been getting lots of buzz (I have not seen it, yet) called Anthropocene the Human Epoch. It is one of those national we are all showing the same film tonight, programs.  On Thursday, they are showing not one but two Les Blank films (I love Les Blank films) called Chulas Fronteras and Del Mero Corazón. These are newly restored, so they should look great. They are some of the first films that showcase Texican border music, including Flaco Jimenez and they sound great. Then they are showing the Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool film that was on PBS, made by the great Stanley Nelson. We have an interview with him about this film and the rest of his work on the podcast The Fog of Truth. Then Friday night, Theater Cine Wilde presents a film that is actually wild, Todd Haynes' Poison. A really great film that showcased his voice is his Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story.   On Tuesday night, The Magnolia Theater is showing Yentl, Barbara Streisand’s film about gender inequality in the Jewish religious community. Bart Weiss Artistic Director Dallas VideoFest