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rankakiu · 5 years ago

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Thoughts of the Droid: Miraculous Ladybug Season 4 spoilers.

Hello, people of Tumblr! How have they fared in life? As always, I hope very well. People, a couple of days ago I learned about the existence of spoilers that reveal details of the fourth season of the Miraculous Ladybug series. Truth be told, these spoilers not only give me a bad feeling but also show in their entirety the creative problem that writers are going through, who, apparently, have run out of good ideas.

For example, we have that the characters of Kagami and Luka will be akumatized… AGAIN. What reasons will they have to be akumatized? And why precisely them, when basically there are other adolescents and even adult characters that we have not yet seen transformed into temporary villains? Not only that, but they also mention that it will finally be revealed which shipping will "win" in the future: whether Adrinette or Lukanette. Interesting detail, since at no time is Adrien and Kagami mentioned, giving you to understand that our favorite Japanese will end up losing. If you ask me, this “amazing” spoiler is everything, less amazing, for the simple reason that everyone in the fandom knew from the beginning that Marinette and Adrien are destined to be together.

But, most striking, for me, without a doubt is that they have announced a new character that will replace Chloé as Queen Bee. For those who have followed my blog and read some of my previous posts, it is no longer a secret that Chloé is one of my favorite characters in the series. So you can imagine my feeling when I hear this news. Basically, it felt like a good blow to the testicles (sorry for the expression).

It bothers me, yes, but more than anything I feel disappointed and ripped off with this change.

Why?

Well, I have the whole reasoning behind and this is where I will expand as much as I can.

First, the leaked video, even if they don't show an image, we have a lady (who I imagine is an animator or screenwriter ... or both) who describes the new Queen Bee as "She is sweet, she is not mean."

Who told you to say that line? Thomas Astruc!?

Returning to the topic, this is where I wonder: Is it really a mandatory requirement that the superheroes of this series are all sweet, kind and faultless people? (The latter is in doubt, seeing past chapters) Apparently yes, since people dislike superheroes who are dark vigilantes (Batman) or antiheroes who fight evil under their very dubious moral and ethical code, almost nonexistent (Venom, Spawn).

Oh, wait, those characters I just mentioned are popular, they have been since their beginnings and even though decades have passed, they are still very dear characters in popular culture.

With Chloé we had a bratty superheroine, pretentious and at all times she kept showing off and having a very high ego ... but still, she was a superheroine who was really able to risk her life for a common good. In addition, her personality made the dynamics of the team more interesting and entertaining. On the one hand, we had a Chloé who wanted to be a superheroine because of the emotion that it entailed. She sought to be a heroine for the attention and fame she obtained. Obviously, those two points are not commendable reasons to be a superhero, but these were eclipsed because more than anything Chloé sought to be a heroine to help Ladybug and feel useful, making a difference in the world for good. And now, with this new sweet girl, this dynamic will be forgotten.

Second, the spoilers mention that there will be more "secret siblings." That being the case, there is a possibility (remote but after all) that the new Queen Bee is a sister or cousin of Chloé. Here I will be honest and I differ with the majority of opinions I've seen about it: I would like the new Queen Bee to be Chloé's sister. It is one of the few ways I would accept, almost without questioning or protesting, this new heroine. The other way I would accept this new character is to not share any biological trait with Chloé, but to get to interact at a very personal level and, above all, to interact in a very good way, that is, despite their disparate personalities, get along very well and even be friends. Why not risk presenting this interesting scenario?

Right, the writers of the series do not like to take risks.

Third, the spoilers mention that Chloé will be akumatized… AGAIN. Which proves what I said above paragraphs: Writers are running out of ideas. If you ask me, it is already tiresome to see the same characters being akumatized over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. Of course, they change the reason why they are akumatized and the name and design change, but that does not help to make it more interesting, to the contrary, it creates the problem that the characters do not grow emotionally and with that, there is no real development of their characters.

Bitterness aside, I'm really intrigued to know the reason why Chloé will be akumatized again. And even more so if it will be a different fourth Akuma or one of its three previous forms will return. One part of me wants her fourth akumatization obeys the reason to be replaced by a new heroine. If you ask me, it would be a good reason.

Fourth and most important to me: Replacing Chloé with a new heroine will cause the little development she has had to be thrown away. Those who are fans like me of the character, will not let me lie and it has been frustrating and a disappointment after another to see a chapter where Chloé is shown more deeply, after another chapter to see how it is again an unpleasant brat.

I am going to tell you a little story and in the end, you will understand the reason for my disgust.

You see, I saw the Miraculous Ladybug series, back in 2017, about two years after its premiere in 2015. Don't believe it or not, the first season caught me the moment I saw that series. What I did was to see one chapter per day and when I finished watching it, it left me wanting more. To follow the story and its characters. As you may have guessed, Some of the chapters where they showed a little more of Chloé, made this character catch my attention and gradually become my favorite character. You cannot imagine my emotion when in those years they had confirmed that Chloé would have the Bee Miraculous and that she would be a superheroine named Queen Bee. Seeing the great results they had achieved with the first season, I assumed that in the second season I would see much more of Chloé and her training as a heroine. Which translated into more development.

Also by that time they had announced a special three chapters, "The Battle of the Queens" and whose chapters would be centered in Chloé. Imagine: more expectations were raised since it seemed to me that in three chapters they would develop Chloé better and that at the end of that special she would begin her arduous but satisfying journey to become a more dignified person and a trusted heroine. I am sincere, when I heard about this special, I did not want to see any other chapter, but only those three.

Finally, the day came when these special chapters were released.

You don't know a huge disappointment that I took away.

Wait about two years for a special that was disastrous from start to finish.

Do not misunderstand me, if there are extremely rescued scenes and moments, but they are very overshadowed by the mishandling they gave to those three episodes and something tells me that they did so on purpose to further sink the development of my favorite character.

The point is that, in my opinion, writers cannot or rather do not want to give the character an authentic redemption and development. And in fact, having this new Queen Bee has proved it that way. What bothers me most about this issue is that they are going to develop this new character, instead of giving it to Chloé. And this is where I wonder. And wouldn't it have been better to have the new character from the beginning be Queen Bee? Why did they give Chloé that opportunity, if, in the end, they weren't going to do anything significant with my favorite blonde? Why create those expectations if in the end all they do is destroy them in this outrageous way?

What was the use of seeing a Chloé feeling deep sadness and disappointment to see that her childhood friend did not arrive at school? What was the use of seeing a furious Chloé and then in bitter tears when her idol, Ladybug, told her she was a liar? What was the use of seeing a sincere smile emanating from her when she made peace with her friend Sabrina? What was the use of seeing a Chloé with fear of losing Adrien's friendship? What was the use of seeing how butler Jean comforted and encouraged Chloé? What was the use of seeing a Chloé crying bitterly when she learned that Adrien was no longer going to school? What was the use of seeing a Chloé, on the verge of tears when her mother did not consider her exceptional or even her daughter? What was the use of seeing a Chloé open her heart and feelings to Ladybug? What was the use of seeing a Chloé, fighting beside Ladybug? What was the use of seeing her as Queen Bee?

Just to give me false hopes and that in the end, all that development so little, but so genuine will end everything in the trash.

Maybe I am being a bit rude. Perhaps this new Queen Bee is a hoax, as it was years ago the supposed existence of Amber. Maybe it's just to distract us. Maybe now if they give her the development that Chloé needs. Maybe so. I want to believe it. I really want to believe it ...

But I don't have many expectations after this spoilers.

Moreover, I do not make expectations so high and hopeful, for the simple fact that lately, the series has left much to be desired with this third season.

If basically the writers give Marinette a vexatious and humiliating treatment, to the sweet Marinette, to Marinette who is “our everyday Ladybug”, to Marinette who has always shown to possess a pure and kind heart, to Marinette, a character so laudable that we need this way in our real world, to the character that Astruc insists on that you must support and not Chloé….

So what's left for me as a fan of Chloé Bourgeois?

This is all I have to say about it. Of course, when all these chapters that have announced the fourth season comes out, rest assured that I will make the respective reviews. In spite of everything, I will continue to stay with the series for a while, especially for the good times that the fandom has provided me and will continue to do.

With this, I feel that I have finally relieved myself.

Thank you for reading.

Greetings

Rankakiu

#miraculous ladybug #miraculoustalesofladybugandcatnoir #tales of ladybug and cat noir #miraculous tales of ladybug and chat noir #ml ladybug #ml spoilers #ml leaks #ladybug spoilers #chloe bourgeois #chloé bourgeois #queen bee #ml queen bee #a little of ml salt post #opinions #thoughts #honestly though #seriously though #rankakiu

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chiseler · 5 years ago

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The Chiseler Interviews Tim Lucas

Born in 1956, film historian, novelist and screenwriter Tim Lucas is the author of several books, including the award-winning Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark, The Book of Renfield: A Gospel of Dracula, and Throat Sprockets. He launched Video Watchdog magazine in 1990, and his screenplay, The Man With Kaleidoscope Eyes, has been optioned by Joe Dante. He lives in Cincinnati with his wife Donna.

The following interview was conducted via email.

THE CHISELER: You're known for your longstanding love affair with horror films. Could you perhaps explain this allure they hold for you?

Tim Lucas: I suppose they’ve meant different things to me at different times of my life. When I was very young (and I started going to movies at my local theater alone, when I was about six), I was attracted to them as something fun but also as a means of overcoming my fears - I would sometimes go to see the same movie again until I could stop hiding my eyes, and I would often find out they showed me a good deal less than I saw behind my hands, so I learned that when I was hiding my eyes my own imagination took over. This encouraged me to look, but also to impose my own imagination on what I was seeing. Similarly, I remember flinching at pictures of various monsters in FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND magazine, then realizing that, as I became able to stop flinching, to look more deeply into the pictures, I began to feel compassion for Karloff’s Frankenstein Monster and admiration for Jack Pierce’s makeup. You could say that I learned some valuable life lessons from this: not to make snap judgements, not to hate or fear someone else because they looked different. I should also point out that beauty had the same intense effect on me as ugliness, in those early days at the movies. I was as frightened by the glowing light promising another appearance by the Blue Fairy in PINOCCHIO as I was by Stromboli or Monstro the Whale. I also covered my eyes when things, even colors, became too beautiful to bear.

As I got older, I found out that horror, science fiction, and fantasy films often told the unpleasant truths about our world, our government, our politics, and other people, before such things could be openly confronted in straightforward drama. So I’m not one of those people who are drawn to horror by gore or some other superficial incentive; I have always responded to them because they made me aware of unpopular truths, because they made me a more empathic person, and because they sometimes encompass a very unusual form of beauty that you can’t find in reality or in any other kind of film.

THE CHISELER: I'm fascinated by what you term "a very specific hybrid of beauty that you can’t find in reality or in any other kind of film.” Please develop that point.

Tim Lucas: For example, the aesthetic put forward by the films of David Lynch... or Tim Burton... or Mario Bava... or Roger Corman... or Val Lewton... or James Whale... or F.W. Murnau. It's incredibly varied, really; too varied to be summarized by a single name, but it's dark and baroque with a broader, deeper spectrum of color. I’ll give you an example: there is a Sax Rohmer novel called YELLOW SHADOWS - and only in a horror film can you see truly yellow shadows. Or green shadows. Or a fleck of red light on a vine somewhere out of doors. It’s a painterly version of reality, akin to what people see in film noir but even more psychological. It might be described as a visible confirmation of how the past survives in everything - we can see new artists quoting from a past master, making their essence their own.

THE CHISELER: Your definition of horror, to me, goes straight to the heart of cinema as an almost metaphysical phenomenon. My friend and frequent co-writer, Jennifer Matsui, once wrote: "Celluloid preserves the dead better than any embalming fluid. Like amber preserved holograms, they flit in and out of its parameters, reciting their own epitaphs in pantomime; revenant moths trapped in perpetual motion." Do Italian directors have what I guess you can call special epiphanies to offer? If so, does this help explain your Bava book?

Tim Lucas: The epiphanies of Italian horror all arise from the culture that was inculcated into those filmmakers as young people - the awareness of architecture, painting, writing, myth, legend, music, sculpture that they all grow up with. It's so much richer than any films that can be made by people with no foundation in the other art forms, people who makes movies just because they've seen a few - and maybe cannot even be bothered to watch any in black and white. I imagine many people go into the film business for reasons having to do with sex or power rather than having something deep down they need to express. The most stupid Italian and French directors have infinitely more in their artistic arsenals than directors from the USA, because they are brought up with an awareness of the importance of the Arts. No one gets this in America, where we slash arts and education budgets and many parents just sit their children in front of a television. Without supervision, without a sense of context, they will inevitably be drawn to whatever is loudest or most colorful or whatever has the most edits per minute. And those kids are now making blockbusters. They make money, so why screw with the formula? When I was a kid, it was still possible to find important, nurturing material on TV - fortunately!

Does it explain my Bava book? I don't know, but Bava's films somehow encouraged and sustained the passion that saw me through the researching and writing of that book, which took 32 years. When my book first came out, some people took me to task for its presumed excess - on the grounds that “our great directors” like John Ford and Orson Welles, for all their greatness, had never inspired a book of such size or magnitude. I could only answer that my love for my subject must be greater. But the thing about the Bava book, really, was that - at that time - the playing field was pretty much virgin territory in English, and Bava as a worker in the Italian film industry touched just about everything that industry had encompassed. All of those relationships needed charting. It would have been an insult to merely pigeonhole him as a horror director.

THE CHISELER: I discovered your publication, Video Watchdog, back in 2000 when Kim's Video was something of an underground institution here in NYC. I mean, they openly hawked bootlegs. There was a real sense of finding the unexpected which gave the place a genuine mystique. Now that you've had some time to reflect on its heyday, what are your thoughts, generally, on VW?

Tim Lucas: It's hard to explain to someone who just caught on in 2000, when things were already very different and more incorporated. VIDEO WATCHDOG began in 1990 as a magazine, but before that it was a feature in other magazines of different sorts that began in 1986. At that time, I was reviewing VHS releases for a Chicago-based magazine called VIDEO MOVIES, which then had a title change to VIDEO TIMES. I pointed out to my editor that his writers were reviewing the films and not saying anything about their presentation on video, and urged him to make more of a mandate about discussing aspect ratios, missing scenes (or added scenes) and such. I proposed that I write a column that would start collecting such information and that column was called "The Video Watchdog.”

In 2000, VW's origins in Beta and VHS and LaserDisc had evolved to DVD and Blu-ray was on the point of being introduced, so by then most of the battles we identified and fought had already been won and assimilated into the way movies were being presented on video. But in our early days, my fellow writers and I - were making our readers aware of filmmakers like Bava, Argento, Avati, Franco, Rollin, Ptushko, Zuławski - and the conversation we started led to people seeking out these films through non-official channels, even forming those non-official channels, until the larger companies began to realize there was an exploitable market there. Our coverage was never limited to horror - horror was sort of the hub of our interest, which radiated out into the works of any filmmaker whose work seemed in some way paranormal - everyone from Powell and Pressburger to Ishiro Honda to Krzystof Kiesłowski.

Now that the magazine is behind me, I can see more easily that we were part of a process, perhaps an integral part, of identifying and disseminating some very arcane information and, by sharing our own processes of discovery, raising the general consciousness about innumerable marginal and maverick filmmakers. A lot of our readers went on to become filmmakers (some already were) and many also went on to form home video companies or work in the business.

I'm proud of what we were able to achieve, and that what were written as timely reports have endured as still useful, still relevant criticism. Magazines tend to be snapshots of the present, and our back issues have that aspect, but our readers still tell me that the work is holding up, it’s not getting old.

When I say "we," I mean numerous writers who shared my pretentious ethic and were able to push genre criticism beyond the dismissive critical writing about genre film that was standard in 1990. I mentioned this state of things in my first editorial, that the gore approach wasn’t encouraging anyone to take horror as a genre more seriously, and I do think horror became more respectable over the years we were publishing.

THE CHISELER: My own personal touchstone, Raymond Durgnat, drilled deep into genre — particularly horror films — while pushing back instinctively against the Auteur Theory. No critic will ever write with more infatuated precision about Barbara Steele, whose image graces the cover of your Bava tome. Do you have any personal favorites in that regard; any individual author or works that acted as a kind of Virgil for you?

Tim Lucas: I haven't read Durgnat extensively, but when I discovered him in the 1970s his books FRANJU and A MIRROR FOR ENGLAND were gospel to me. Tom Milne's genre reviews for MONTHLY FILM BULLETIN were always intelligent and well-informed. Ivan Butler’s HORROR IN THE CINEMA was the first real book I read on the subject, along with HITCHCOCK/TRUFFAUT - and I remember focusing on Butler’s chapter on REPULSION, an entire fascinating chapter on a single film, which I hadn’t actually seen. It showed me the film and also how to watch it, so that when it finally came to my local television station, I was ready to meet it head on. David Pirie’s books A HERITAGE OF HORROR and THE VAMPIRE CINEMA I read to pieces. But it was Joe Dante's sometimes uncredited writing in CASTLE OF FRANKENSTEIN magazine that first hooked my interest in this direction - followed by the earliest issues of CINEFANTASTIQUE, which I discovered with their third issue and for which I became a regular reviewer and correspondent in 1972. I continued to write for them for the next 11 years.

THE CHISELER: I was wondering how you responded to these periodic shifts in taste and sexual politics, especially as they address horror movies — or even something like feminist critiques of the promiscuity of rage against women evident all throughout Giallo; the fear of female agency and power which is never too far from the surface. Are sexism, and even homophobia, simply inherent to the genre?

Tim Lucas: None of that really matters very much to me. I've been around so long now, I can see these recurring waves of people trying to catch their own wave of time, to make an imprint on it in some way. For some reason, I find myself annoyed by newish labels like "folk horror" and "J-horror" because such films have been with us forever; they didn't need such identification before and they have only been invented to get us more quickly to a point, and sometimes these au courant labels simply rebrand work without bringing anything substantially new to the discussion. Every time I read an article about the giallo film, I have to suffer through another explanation of what it is - and this is a genre whose busiest time frame was half a century ago. Sexism and homophobia are things people generally only understand in terms of the now, and I don’t know how fair it is to apply such concepts to films made so long ago. Think of Maria’s torrid dance in METROPOLIS and all those ravenous young men in tuxedos eating her with their eyes. Sexist, yes - but that’s not the point Lang was making.

I don’t particularly see myself as normal, but I suppose I am centrist in most ways. I don’t bring an agenda to the films I write about, other than wanting them to be as complete and beautifully restored as possible. That said, I am interested in, say, feminist takes on giallo films or homosexual readings of Herman Cohen films because - after all - we all bring ourselves to the movies, and if there’s more to be learned about a film I admire, from outside my own experience, that can be precious information. I want to know it and see if I can agree with it, or even if it causes me to feel something new and unfamiliar about it.

My only real concern is that genre criticism tends to be either academic or conversational (even colloquial), and we’re now at a point where the points made by articles published 20 or more years ago are coming back presented as new information, without any idea (or concern) that these things have already been said. As magazines are going by the wayside, taking their place is talk on social media, which is not really disciplined or constructive, nor indeed easily retrievable for reference. There are also audio commentaries on DVD and Blu-ray discs. Fortunately, there are a number of good and serious people doing these, but even when you get very intelligent or intellectual commentators, they often work best with the movie image turned off, because it’s a distraction from what’s being said. Is that true commentary? I'm not an academic; I’m an autodidact, so I don't have the educational background to qualify as a true intellectual, and I feel left out by a lot of academic writing. I do read a good deal and have familiarity with a fair range of topics, so I tend to frame myself somewhere between the vox populist and academia. That's the area we pursued in VW.

THE CHISELER: David Cairns and I once published a critical appreciation of Giallo, using fundamentally Roman Catholic misogyny — and, to a lesser extent, fear of gay men — as an intriguing lens. For example, lesbians are invariably sinister figures in these movies, while straight women ultimately function as nothing more than cinematographic objects: very fetishized, very well-lit corpses, you might say.

Tim Lucas: See, I admire a lot of giallo films but it would never occur to me to see them through a lens. I do, of course, because personal experience is a lens, but my lens is who I am and I’ve never had to fight for or defend my right to be who I am. I have no particular flag to wave in these matters; I approach everything from the stance of a film historian or as a humanist.

There is a lot of crossdressing and such in giallo, but these are tropes going back to French fin de siècle thrillers of the early 1900s, they don't really have anything to do with homophobia as we perceive it in our time. In the Fantomas novels, Souvestre and Allain (the authors) used to continually deceive their readers by having their characters - the good and the evil ones - change disguises, and sometimes apparently change sexes.

I remember Dario Argento saying that he used homosexual characters in his films because he was interested in their problems. He seldom actually explored their problems, and their portrayal in his earliest films is… quaint, to be kind about it… but it was a positive change as time played out. I think the fact that Argento’s flamboyant style attracted gay fans brought them more into his orbit and the vaguely sinister gay characters of his early films become more three dimensional and sympathetic later on, so in that regard his attention to such characters charts his own gradual embracing of them. So in a sense they chart his own widening embrace of the world, which is surprising considering what a misanthropic view of the world he presents.

THE CHISELER: But Giallo is roughly contemporaneous to the rise of Second Wave Feminism. Like the Michael & Roberta Findlay 'roughies', this is not a fossilized species of extinct male anger we're talking about here. Women's bodies are the energy of pictorial composition; splayed specifically for the delectation of some very confused and pissed off men in the audience. I know of no exceptions. To me it makes perfect sense to recognize the ritualized stabbings, stranglings, the BDSM hijinks in Giallo as rather obvious symptoms of somebody's not-so-latent fear and hatred.

Tim Lucas: I think that’s a modernist attitude that was not all that present at the time. Once the MPAA ratings system was introduced in late 1968, all genres of films got stronger in terms of graphic violence and language, and suspense thrillers were no exception. At the time, women and gay people were feeling freer, freer to be themselves, and were not looking for new ways to be taken out of films, however they might be represented. Neither base really had that power anyway at that time, but at any rate it wasn’t a time for them to appear more conservative. That would come at a later period when they felt more assured and confident in their equality. Throughout the 1960s, even in 1969 films like THE WRECKING CREW and BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS, you can see that women are still playthings of a sort in films; there are starting to be more honest portrayals of women in films like HUD, but the prevailing emphasis of them is still decorative, so it makes sense that they would be no different in a thriller setting. There’s no arguing, I don’t think, that the murder scenes become more thrilling when the victim is a beautiful, voluptuous woman. It’s nothing to do with misogyny but rather about wanting to induce excitement from the viewer. If you look back to Janet Leigh’s character arc in PSYCHO, the exact same thing happens to her, but because she’s a well-developed character and time is given to explore that character and her goals and motivations, there is no question that it is a role women would want to play, even now. However, the same simply isn’t true of most giallo victims, which should not be seen as one of their rules but as one of their faults. In BLOOD AND BLACK LACE, I think Mario Bava shows us just enough of the women characters for us to have some investment in their fates - but when the giallo films are in the hands of sausage makers, you’re going to feel a sense of misogyny. It may be real but it may also be misanthropy or a more commercial mandate to pack more into a film and to sex it up. I should add that, because I’m not a woman or gay, I don’t bring personal sensitivities to these things, so I see them as something that just comes with the territory, like shoot-outs in Westerns. If you were to expunge anything that was objectionable from a giallo film, wouldn’t it be just another cop show or Agatha Christie episode? You watch a giallo film because, on some level, you want to see something with the hope of some emotional or aesthetic involvement, or with the hope of being outraged and offended. There is no end of mystery entertainment without giallo tropes, so it’s there if you demand that. Giallo films aren’t really about who done it, only figuratively; they are lessons in how to stage murder scenes and probably would not exist without the master painting of PSYCHO’s shower scene, which they all seek to emulate.

THE CHISELER: You mentioned Val Lewton earlier. Personally, I've never encountered anything like the overall tone of his films. There's always something startling to see and hear. Would you shed a little light on his importance?

Tim Lucas: He's an almost unique figure in film in that he was a producer yet he projected an auteur-like imprint on all his works. The horror films for which he's best known are not quite like any other films of their kind; I remember Telotte's book DREAMS OF DARKNESS using the word "vesperal" to describe the Lewton films' specific atmosphere - a word pertaining to the mood of evening prayer services, which isn't a bad way of putting it. I've always loved them for their delicacy, their poetical sense, their literary quality, and their indirectness - which sometimes co-exists with sources of florid garishness, like the woman with the maracas in THE LEOPARD MAN. In THE SEVENTH VICTIM, one shy character characterizes the heroine's visit to his apartment as her "advent into his world," and when I first saw it, I was struck by the almost spiritual tenderness and vulnerability of that description. Lewton was remarkable because he seems to have worked in horror because it was below the general studio radar, which allowed him to make extremely personal films. As long as they checked the necessary boxes, he could make the films he wanted - and I think Mario Bava learned that exact lesson from him.

THE CHISELER: I've always been fascinated by a question which is probably unanswerable: Why do you think it is that movies based on Edgar Allan Poe stories — even those films that only just pretend to sink roots in Poe, offering glib riffs on his prose at best — invariably bear fruit?

Tim Lucas: Poe's writings predate the study of human psychology and, to an extent, chart it - so he can be credited with founding a wing of science much like Jules Verne's writings were the foundation of science fiction and, later, science fact. Also, from the little we know of Poe's personal life, his writing was extremely personal and autobiographical, which makes it all the more compelling and resonant. It's also remarkably flexible in the way it lends itself to adaptation - there is straight Poe, comic Poe, arty Poe, even Poeless Poe. It helps too that a lot of people familiar with him haven't read him extensively, at least not since school, or think they have read him because they've seen so many Poe movies. The sheer range of approaches taken to his adaptation makes him that much more universal.

It also occurs to me that people are probably much more alike internally than they are externally, so the identification with an internal or first person narrator may be more immediate. But it's true that his work has inspired a fascinating variety of interpretation. You can see this at work in a single film: SPIRITS OF THE DEAD (1968), which I’ve written an entire book about. It’s three stories done by Roger Vadim, Louis Malle, and Federico Fellini - all vastly different, all terribly personal expressions of the men who made them.

THE CHISELER: Speaking of Poe adaptations, I've long thought it's time to confront Roger Corman's legacy; as an artist, a producer, an industrial muse, everything. Sometimes I think he's the single most important figure in cinema history. And if that's a wild overstatement, I could stand my ground somewhat and point out that no one person ever supported independent filmmakers with such profound results. It's as though he used his position at a mainstream Hollywood studio to open a kind of Underground Railroad for two generations of film artists. He gave so many artists a leg up in a business where those kinds of opportunities were never exactly abundant that it's hard to keep track. Entering the subject from any angle you like, what are your thoughts on Corman's overall contribution to cinema?

Tim Lucas: I can think of more important filmmakers than Corman, but there has never been a more important producer or mogul or facilitator of films. I said this while introducing him on the first of our two-night interview at the St. Louis Film Festival’s Vincentennial in 2011. He was largely responsible for every trend in American cinema during its most decisive quarter century - 1955 through 1980, and to some extent a further decade still, which bore an enormous influx of talent he discovered and nurtured. People talk about Irving Thalberg, Darryl F. Zanuck, Steven Spielberg, etc. - but their productions don’t begin to show the sheer diversity of interests that you get from Corman’s output. He has no real counterpart. I’ve spent a lot of the past 20 years musing on him, first as the protagonist of a comedy script I wrote with Charlie Largent called THE MAN WITH KALEIDOSCOPE EYES, which Joe Dante has optioned. A few years ago, I decided to turn the script into a novel, which is with my agent now. It’s about the time period before, during, and after the making of THE TRIP (1966). It's a comedy but one with a serious, even philosophical side.

You know, Mario Bava once described himself to someone as “the Italian Roger Corman.” It’s incredible to me that Bava would have said that, not because it’s wrong or even because he was a total filmmaker before Corman made his first picture, but because Bava has been dead for so long! He’s been gone now almost 40 years and Roger is still making movies. And he’s been making movies for the DTV market longer than anybody, so he sort of predicted the current exodus of new movies away from theaters to streaming formats.

THE CHISELER: Are there any other producers/distributors you'd care to acknowledge, anyone that you think has followed in what you might call Corman’s Tradition of Generosity?

Tim Lucas: No, I really think he is incomparable in that respect. I do think it’s important to note, however, that I doubt Roger was ever purely motivated by generosity of spirit. I don’t think he would put money or his trust in anyone merely as a favor. He’s a businessman to his core and his gambles have always been based on projects that are likely to improve on his investment, even if moderately. I have a feeling that the first dollar he ever made is still in circulation, floating around out there bringing something new into being. I also don’t think he would give anyone their big break unless they had earned that break already in some respect. And when he does extend that opportunity, he’s got to know that, when these people graduate from his company, he’ll be sacrificing their talent, their camaraderie, maybe even in some cases their gratitude. So yes, there is some generosity in that aspect - but he also knows from experience that there are always new top students looking to extend their educations on the job. I wish more people in the film business had his selflessness, his ability to recognize and encourage talent. It may be his greatest legacy.

THE CHISELER: You introduced me, many years ago, to Mill of the Stone Women — I'll end on a personal note by thanking you and asking: Would you share an insight or two about this remarkable gem, particularly for readers who may not have seen it?

Tim Lucas: MILL OF THE STONE WOMEN was probably my first exposure to Italian horror; I saw it as a child, more than once, on local television and there were things about it that haunted and disturbed me, though I didn't understand it. Perhaps that's why it haunted and disturbed me, but the image of Helfy's hands clutching the red velvet curtains stayed with me for decades (a black and white memory) until I got to see it on VHS - I paid $59.95 for the privilege because my video store told me they would not be stocking it. It's a very peculiar film because Giorgio Ferroni wasn't a director who favored horror; the "Flemish Tales" that it's supposedly based on is non-existent, a Lovecraftian meta-invention, and it's the only Italian horror filmed in that particular region in the Netherlands. It looks more Germanic than Italian. I’m tempted to believe Bava may have had a hand in doing the special effects shot, which look like his work, but they might also have been done by his father Eugenio, as he was also a wax figure sculptor so would have been good to have on hand. He seldom took screen credit. So it's a film that has stayed with me because it's elusive; it's hard to find the slot where it belongs. It's like an adult fairy tale, or something out of E.T.A. Hoffmann. I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve wasted, trying to find another movie with the unique spell cast by that one.

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theadmiringbog · 5 years ago

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*wakes up and looks at phone* ah let’s see what fresh horrors await me on the fresh horrors device

–@MISSOKISTIC IN A TWEET ON NOVEMBER 10, 2016

A more recent project that acts in a similar spirit is Scott Polach’s Applause Encouraged, which happened at Cabrillo National Monument in San Diego in 2015. On a cliff overlooking the sea, forty-five minutes before the sunset, a greeter checked guests in to an area of foldout seats formally cordoned off with red rope. They were ushered to their seats and reminded not to take photos. They watched the sunset, and when it finished, they applauded. Refreshments were served afterward.

—

Bird-watching is the opposite of looking something up online.

They write: If you can have your time and work and live and be a person, then the question you’re faced with every day isn’t, Do I really have to go to work today? but, How do I contribute to this thing called life? What can I do today to benefit my family, my company, myself?

To me, “company” doesn’t belong in that sentence. Even if you love your job! Unless there’s something specifically about you or your job that requires it, there is nothing to be admired about being constantly connected, constantly potentially productive the second you open your eyes in the morning—and in my opinion, no one should accept this, not now, not ever.

Audre Lorde meant it in the 1980s, when she said that “[c]aring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

As Gabrielle Moss, author of Glop: Nontoxic, Expensive Ideas That Will Make You Look Ridiculous and Feel Pretentious (a book parodying goop, Gwyneth Paltrow’s high-priced wellness empire), put it: self-care “is poised to be wrenched away from activists and turned into an excuse to buy an expensive bath oil.”

Thinking about sensitivity reminds me of a monthlong artist residency I once attended with two other artists in an extremely remote location in the Sierra Nevada. There wasn’t much to do at night, so one of the artists and I would sometimes sit on the roof and watch the sunset. She was Catholic and from the Midwest; I’m sort of the quintessential California atheist. I have really fond memories of the languid, meandering conversations we had up there about science and religion. And what strikes me is that neither of us ever convinced the other—that wasn’t the point—but we listened to each other, and we did each come away different, with a more nuanced understanding of the other person’s position.

The life force is concerned with cyclicality, care, and regeneration; the death force sounds to me a lot like “disrupt.” Obviously, some amount of both is necessary, but one is routinely valorized, not to mention masculinized, while the other goes unrecognized because it has no part in “progress.”

Certain people would like to use technology to live longer, or forever. Ironically, this desire perfectly illustrates the death drive at play in the “Manifesto of Maintenance Art” (“separation, individuality, Avant-Garde par excellence; to follow one’s own path—do your own thing; dynamic change”)30. To such people I humbly propose a far more parsimonious way to live forever: to exit the trajectory of productive time, so that a single moment might open almost to infinity. As John Muir once said, “Longest is the life that contains the largest amount of time-effacing enjoyment.”

Poswolsky writes of their initial discovery: “I think we also found the answer to the universe, which was, quite simply: just spend more time with your friends.”

... he said, with an epiphany he had while accompanying a fellow clergyman on a trip to Louisville:

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness.

My most-liked Facebook post of all time was an anti-Trump screed. In my opinion, this kind of hyper-accelerated expression on social media is not exactly helpful (not to mention the huge amount of value it produces for Facebook). It’s not a form of communication driven by reflection and reason, but rather a reaction driven by fear and anger.

Obviously these feelings are warranted, but their expression on social media so often feels like firecrackers setting off other firecrackers in a very small room that soon gets filled with smoke.

Our aimless and desperate expressions on these platforms don’t do much for us, but they are hugely lucrative for advertisers and social media companies, since what drives the machine is not the content of information but the rate of engagement. Meanwhile, media companies continue churning out deliberately incendiary takes, and we’re so quickly outraged by their headlines that we can’t even consider the option of not reading and sharing them.

To stand apart is to take the view of the outsider without leaving, always oriented toward what it is you would have left. It means not fleeing your enemy, but knowing your enemy, which turns out not to be the world—contemptus mundi—but the channels through which you encounter it day to day. It also means giving yourself the critical break that media cycles and narratives will not, allowing yourself to believe in another world while living in this one.

Standing apart represents the moment in which the desperate desire to leave (forever!) matures into a commitment to live in permanent refusal, where one already is, and to meet others in the common space of that refusal. This kind of resistance still manifests as participating, but participating in the “wrong way”: a way that undermines the authority of the hegemonic game and creates possibilities outside of it.

A crowded sidewalk is a good example: everyone is expected to continue moving forward. Tom Green poked at this convention when he performed “the Dead Guy,” on his Canadian public access TV show in the 1990s. Slowing his walk to a halt, he carefully lowered himself to the ground and lay facedown and stick-straight for an uncomfortable period of time. After quite a crowd had amassed, he got up, looked around, and nonchalantly walked away.

So to a question like “Will you or will you not participate as asked?” Diogenes would have answered something else entirely: “I will participate, but not as asked,” or, “I will stay, but I will be your gadfly.” This answer (or non-answer) is something I think of as producing what I’ll call a “third space”—an almost magical exit to another frame of reference. For someone who cannot otherwise live with the terms of her society, the third space can provide an important if unexpected harbor.

Herman Melville’s short story, “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” Bartleby, the clerk famous for repeating the phrase, “I would prefer not to,” uses a linguistic strategy to invalidate the requests of his boss. Not only does he not comply; he refuses the terms of the question itself.

Facebook abstention, like telling someone you grew up in a house with no TV, can all too easily appear to be taste or class related.

We need to be able to think across different time scales when the mediascape would have us think in twenty-four-hour (or shorter) cycles, to pause for consideration when clickbait would have us click, to risk unpopularity by searching for context when our Facebook feed is an outpouring of unchecked outrage and scapegoating, to closely study the ways that media and advertising play upon our emotions, to understand the algorithmic versions of ourselves that such forces have learned to manipulate, and to know when we are being guilted, threatened, and gaslighted into reactions that come not from will and reflection but from fear and anxiety.

“In short, when the inattention stimulus falls outside the area to which attention is paid, it is much less likely to capture attention and be seen,” the researchers write. That’s intuitive enough, but it gets more complicated. If the briefly flashing stimulus was outside the area of visual attention, but was something distinct like a smiley face or the person’s name, the subject would notice it after all.

As an artist interested in using art to influence and widen attention, I couldn’t help extrapolating the implications from visual attention to attention at large.

In a post about ad blockers on the University of Oxford’s “Practical Ethics” blog, the technology ethicist James Williams (of Time Well Spent) lays out the stakes: We experience the externalities of the attention economy in little drips, so we tend to describe them with words of mild bemusement like “annoying” or “distracting.” But this is a grave misreading of their nature. In the short term, distractions can keep us from doing the things we want to do. In the longer term, however, they can accumulate and keep us from living the lives we want to live, or, even worse, undermine our capacities for reflection and self-regulation, making it harder, in the words of Harry Frankfurt, to “want what we want to want.” Thus there are deep ethical implications lurking here for freedom, wellbeing, and even the integrity of the self.

In an effort to make the user aware of persuasive design, Nudget used overlays to call out and describe several of the persuasive design elements in the Facebook interface as the user encountered them. But the thesis is also useful simply as a catalog of the many forms of persuasive design—the kinds that behavioral scientists have been studying in advertising since the mid-twentieth century.

Vivrekar lists the strategies identified by researchers Marwell and Schmitt in 1967: “reward, punishment, positive expertise, negative expertise, liking/ingratiation, gifting/pre-giving, debt, aversive stimulation, moral appeal, positive self-feeling, negative self-feeling, positive altercasting, negative altercasting, positive esteem of others, and negative esteem of others.”

Vivrekar herself has study participants identify instances of persuasive design on the LinkedIn site and compiles a staggering list of 171 persuasive design techniques.

“knowing your enemy” when it comes to the attention economy. For example, one could draw parallels between the Nudget system, which teaches users to see the ways in which they are being persuaded, and the Prejudice Lab, which shows participants how bias guides their behavior.

Or that the woman in front of you in line who just screamed at you is maybe not usually like this; maybe she’s going through a rough time. Whether this is actually true isn’t the point. Just considering the possibility makes room for the lived realities of other people, whose depths are the same as your own. This is a marked departure from the self-centered “default setting,”

Last week, after a meeting, I took the F streetcar from Civic Center to the Ferry Building in San Francisco. It’s a notoriously slow, crowded, and halting route, especially in the middle of the day. This pace, added to my window seat, gave me a chance to look at the many faces of the people on Market Street with the same alienation as the slow scroll of Hockney’s Yorkshire Landscapes. Once I accepted the fact that each face I looked at (and I tried to look at each of them) was associated with an entire life—of birth, of childhood, of dreams and disappointments, of a universe of anxieties, hopes, grudges, and regrets totally distinct from mine—this slow scene became almost impossibly absorbing. As Hockney said: “There’s a lot to look at.” Even though I’ve lived in a city most of my adult life, in that moment I was floored by the density of life experience folded into a single city street.

When the language of advertising and personal branding enjoins you to “be yourself,” what it really means is “be more yourself,” where “yourself” is a consistent and recognizable pattern of habits, desires, and drives that can be more easily advertised to and appropriated, like units of capital.

In fact, I don’t know what a personal brand is other than a reliable, unchanging pattern of snap judgments: “I like this” and “I don’t like this,” with little room for ambiguity or contradiction.

The fact that commenting on the weather is a cliché of small talk is actually a profound reminder of this, since the weather is one of the only things we each know any other person must pay attention to.

(“bland enough to offend no one”)

The professional social media star, a person reverse-engineered from a formula of what is most palatable to everyone all the time.

Everybody says that there is no censorship on the internet, or at least only in part. But that is not true. Online censorship is applied through the excess of banal content that distracts people from serious or collective issues.

Our interactions become data collected by a company, and engagement goals are driven by advertising.

Mastodon... They allow more granular control of one’s intended audience; when you post to Mastodon, you can have the content’s visibility restricted to a single person, your followers, or your instance—or it can be public.

... forming any idea requires a combination of privacy and sharing. But this restraint is difficult when it comes to commercial social media, whose persuasive design collapses context within our very thought processes themselves by assuming we should share our thoughts right now—indeed, that we have an obligation to form our thoughts in public!

A counterexample would be the sparse UX of Patchwork, a social networking platform that runs on Scuttlebutt. Scuttlebutt is a sort of global mesh network that can go without servers, ISPs, or even Internet connection (if you have a USB stick handy). It can do that because it relies on individual users’ computers as the servers, similar to local mesh networks, and because your “account” on a Scuttlebutt-powered social media platform is simply an encrypted block of data that you keep on your computer.

In #NeverAgain, David Hogg writes that “[a]nger will get you started but it won’t keep you going.”

Before long, the conference would be over, and I would have missed most of it. A lot of things would have happened there that are important and useful. For my part, I wouldn’t have much to show for my “time well spent”—no pithy lines to tweet, no new connections, no new followers. I might only tell one or two other people about my observations and the things I learned. Otherwise, I’d simply store them away, like seeds that might grow some other day if I’m lucky.

Seen from the point of view of forward-pressing, productive time, this behavior would appear delinquent. I’d look like a dropout. But from the point of view of the place, I’d look like someone who was finally paying it attention. And from the point of view of myself, the person actually experiencing my life, and to whom I will ultimately answer when I die—I would know that I spent that day on Earth.

“I would prefer not to.”

#How to Do Nothing #books

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mrmichaelchadler · 7 years ago

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Your Roger Stories: The Meetings

As we celebrate empathy this week on the fifth anniversary of Roger Ebert's passing, we'll be sharing some of your Roger stories submitted over the last week. In this installment, we've gathered memories of those who met and talked to him over the years. We previously published a collection of memories from fellow film critics, and tomorrow we'll be sharing some memories sent in by his readers.

LUKAS BRASHERFONS

I met Roger on April 1, 2006. The occasion was the Wisconsin Film Festival (in the glory days of Meg Hamel's curation), and Roger was hosting a Q&A in correspondence with the festival, on the isthmus downtown in what he called "the people's republic of Madison." Roger opened his dialogue with the audience by asking "who here has seen a good movie lately?" At the time I was 14, and fancied myself a cinematic expeditionary, and when my turn to share came I mentioned I had been recently struck by Bergman's “The Seventh Seal.” While my choice was no doubt show-offish, Roger proceeded to cogently and seriously discuss the film with me, as well as the philosophical underpinnings of the chess match in cinema. He was excited that this (pretentious) young person was taking an interest in classic art-house films and gave me his Wisconsin Film Fest pin as a medal for "being curious about great movies."

Only a few months later he would undergo surgery that would leave him without his physical voice. I remain incredibly grateful to have met him and spoken with him, however briefly, and still cherish the pin to this day.

ROB CACY

I saw Roger at Sundance, 2000. Siskel had just died, so unexpectedly, the previous year. I was a senior at film school, I grew up on their reviews, and I missed Gene greatly already. It was so delightful to see that Roger was in the audience with me at “The Eyes of Tammy Faye.”

After the film, crowds gathered around Tammy Faye. She was tiny, but still larger than life. Roger was furiously snapping (film) photos of her. A fan interrupted him to ask for a photo with them. Roger snapped back angrily, “I’m working here!”

I laughed and laughed. I’m sure the fan was upset, but to me, it was classic Ebert. We waited around for 15-20 minutes more, and Roger graciously, if expediently, posed for a picture with us (after he’d had the chance to talk to Tammy Faye).

I have pictures of the whole encounter, including him taking pictures of her, and both her and him taking pictures with us, which I cherish. I know he softened over the years and had a decent, humanist heart, but I loved prickly Ebert.

JAY DIAMOND

I met Roger Ebert on a book tour for Your Movie Sucks. I waited patiently in line for a signing, as I’d been a fan for many years. Upon meeting him, I thanked him for mentioning that a movie I’d wanted to see forever (Errol Morris' “Gates of Heaven”) was finally released on DVD. I was a fan of the director (in part because of Roger’s reviews over the years) and had tried to find it without success.

He signed my book and looked off in the distance. I assumed that he was done with me, like so many authors signing a million books, with a million more to sign.

As I started to walk away, he began to speak. At first I thought he was addressing the next person, but it was for me. “There’s this woman in that movie—Florence Rasmussen, who gives the most moving speech.” He then spent about two minutes spontaneously dissecting one scene of a movie, why it was moving, and why it was remarkable storytelling.

To my surprise, Roger hadn’t dismissed me, but rather was deep in thought about a craft that he loved and wanted to share that with a random stranger who’d expressed interested. The moment that he spent to pass on his passion has never left me.

IAN MANTGANI

Years back, which is to say during the mid-to-late-1990s, I was pen-pals with Roger, who was an early adopter of the Internet through Compuserve. I was also writing reviews online, which of course is not nearly as common a practice as it is now. As an admirer of his work, it was a great thrill to finally meet him at Telluride Film Festival in 2002. We went for an iced tea (which he picked up the tab for), and as we left the place, a young girl asked him for his autograph. He signed it, then pointed to me, and said, “You should get his autograph too—he’s one of the best-known critics online.” It was a bit of an embellishment for him to say that, but I never forgot what a classy move it was and how it made me feel special and like I could accomplish something worthy of the gesture. Not a lot of people would have the presence of mind to make a move like that.

BETH MILLER

I had the privilege of getting to know this brilliant and kind man through my dear friendship with his wife Chaz who I met nearly 20 years ago.

I had many wonderful times with Roger including his Star Ceremony in Hollywood, the green room before his segment on the Tonight show and many Telluride Film Festivals. However none of these bigger moments compare to a visit to their home in Chicago after Roger had lost the ability to speak. He showed me with pride all of his mementos and awards and then we sat down in their living room. He wrote on a pad of paper if I would read to him one of his favorites, Yeats. So there we were, just he and I, one of the most prolific writers and speakers in the world asking me to read to him so he could absorb these beautiful words. He smiled and it was in that moment that I knew that we had shared one of life’s remarkable experiences. A lesson in empathy for never taking “my voice” for granted and how the smallest gesture can be the most impactful.

I love and miss you, Roger.

CHRIS OSTERNDORF

While my interactions with Roger probably amount more to anecdotes than stories, I still feel compelled to share them because they meant a lot to me.

Both occasions I was lucky enough to meet Roger were in the screening room in Chicago, where I would go to review movies for my college newspaper, The DePaulia. I hadn’t been doing it very long when one day, I was running late to a screening of "Exit Through the Gift Shop." I had heard Roger Ebert came to the screening room pretty often, but again, I was still new to this whole world and I didn’t quite believe I would ever see him. Well, I believed it on that day, when I arrived to the film at least five minutes late, desperately trying to find a seat, and ended up having to take the one right in front of Mr. Ebert himself.

I watched the rest of the movie (which is quite good) overly distracted, acutely aware of the giant I was sitting in front of. When the film was done, I felt that I had to say something, for fear I would always curse myself if I never got another chance. I tried to approach him as casually as I could. Roger and Chaz were both very nice to me, though I must’ve come off as a blubbering amateur. I asked Roger what he thought of the movie, and learned the hard way that he didn’t discuss films before his review was published. Nevertheless, I walked away feeling happy that I got to tell a man who’s work meant so much to me exactly that.

On the next occasion I ran into him, I'd made sure to bring my copy of The Great Movies with me for him to sign. He not only did this graciously, despite what was probably an unprofessional request on my part, he also dated it and inscribed that we had met in the screening room. He gave me his email too, so I could reach out about doing an interview with him for The DePaulia. This never happened, but I still cherish the little interaction we had that day and the time before.

I continued to see him at the screening room until I left Chicago a few years later (my favorite of these occasions was probably when somehow we were both tasked with reviewing "Hatchet 2,") but I don’t think I approached him again, probably for fear of bothering him. It was clear that his health was not good by that point.

Years later, I walked into a movie theater in Los Angeles to see "Life Itself." One of the movies Ebert was reviewing in the film was "Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III," a forgettable Charlie Sheen vehicle from Roman Coppola. It occurred to me this was the last movie I saw at this very theater, the last time I was in Los Angeles, the year earlier. I wept when the movie was over, not so much because a man I loved was gone, but because I felt overwhelmed by life’s happy little coincidences, which several times in college afforded me the chance to actually talk to this man.

They say you should never meet your heroes, but I met Roger Ebert twice, and wouldn’t trade either interaction for anything.

JEFF STILL

I was a big fan of the Siskel & Ebert television shows (in all their incarnations), since the 1970s and so it was certainly one of the big moments in my life when I actually met Roger Ebert.

My name is Jeff Still, I'm an actor, and in the winter of 2000 I was working at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago in a play by Austin Pendleton called Orson's Shadow; I played Orson Welles in this piece, and of course in doing so I did quite a bit of research including reading all about Citizen Kane. I was aware that Roger Ebert was quite an expert on this particular subject, and had also enjoyed greatly his book of interviews entitled "A Kiss is Still a Kiss." I knew very well that Roger Ebert was, among other things, an expert on "Citizen Kane." At the end of the play there is a section where the characters, chiefly Orson Welles, Laurence Olivier, and Joan Plowright, are standing on stage as Plowright informs them what happened to their lives after the life of the play, which took place in 1960, ended. I had chosen to stand during this section in a stance copied from a stance that Orson Welles took in one of the Citizen Kane posters. This was something I just did for myself, there is no reason any audience member would know what I was doing.

One night after the performance Roger Ebert came around to meet with the actors. We were all awed and delighted that he did so, and it was a thrill to hear him thank us and congratulate us on our work. I wore a fat suit to play Orson Welles and, as I struggled with the zipper to get out of it Roger quipped, "That's how I get out of mine, too." It was wonderful to meet him and talk with him, this man whom I had admired for so long, and as we talked about the play, and also about "Citizen Kane," Roger said "You know, I know a little about this." I thought, "no kidding."

Then he said, "You know, that stance you took at the end of the play - that looked just like Welles did on the poster" and I was, as the British would say, gobsmacked. No one else but Roger Ebert would have known that. Afterwards we all went across the street to O'Rourke's and, while I did not get the chance to talk to him there, it was still an honor knowing he was in the room (Roger was not drinking any alcoholic beverages by this point, by the way—I would find out later he had stopped drinking). I treated myself to a cab that night, thinking in the back seat as we sped north towards Andersonville how elated I was that I had not only just met Roger Ebert, but that this great man had validated my work.

Many years later, as Roger was assembling "At the Movies with Roger Ebert," he wanted to do an intro to the show that was an homage to a trailer Orson Welles had done for Citizen Kane, introducing the people on his program as Welles had once introduced the Mercury Theatre players. Roger had remembered my performance of Welles that was, at this point, some 11 or 12 years prior, and inquired as to whether I would do the introduction. After a brief Skype interview/audition with Chaz I was offered the part and did the introduction, and so had yet another connection with Roger Ebert.

Roger Ebert was a giant in his field, a Pulitzer Prize winning writer, and one of the nicest "celebrities" (I'm sure he would scoff at that word to describe him) I have ever met, and by now I've met quite a few. I miss him every time a movie comes out that I want to see and I wish he were here to tell me what he thought about it. Rest well, Mr. Ebert—you've earned that permanent seat on the aisle.

RON SUSSMAN

I was living in Chicago in the early '90s and ran into Roger in a Laserdisc store one afternoon. He had a huge stack of discs under his arm. I said hi, told him I was an editor and asked what he was buying. He put down his stack and went through each title, telling me why he was buying it and what was so special about each film, even if it was just a fun title with no real cinematic worthiness.

LIZ WEIR

Back in April 2006 on the last night of the Conference on World Affairs I received a call in Boulder Colorado to tell me my 92-year-old mother had suffered a stroke back in Ireland. I fell into panic mode and got the first available flight back to Dublin via Chicago next morning.

Roger shared the ride to the airport next morning with us and was really sympathetic to the emotions I was going through. He offered to take my daughter and I into the first class lounge to wait for our flight. He was really kind to us and I will never forget it.

Mummy died that same night, 12 years ago now and then Roger left us. I will never forget him.

He used to call me “the Irish storyteller” and once asked me to voice some his jokes at a gathering in Colorado. I smile at the memory and acknowledge the empathy he showed me.

from All Content https://ift.tt/2q0cKdQ

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