#polly platt

[deadpanwalking]

“Orson and Oja had, of course, met Cybill with Peter and knew all about my shattered marriage,” Platt recalled. “Orson roared in the telephone line, ‘Come and work for me.’ I was more than grateful.” Welles sent her shopping for ground beef, tapioca pudding, brandy and coffee before preparing a dinner of steak tartare. It was followed by brandy and watching the Arizona sunset before working on the script for the shoot. “I was recovering from heartache and Orson was infinitely helpful about that,” Platt recalled. “He said, ‘You’re not unhappy. You would only be unhappy if Peter had left you for a woman as intelligent as you are. Don’t you know that Peter would rather be unhappy with Cybill than happy with you?’ Then he would laugh uproariously. It was infectious and I would laugh too.” Welles, 56, was married to Paola Mori as he conducted his own an extramarital relationship with Kodar “willfully blind,” Platt says, that Kodar, 30, was having a passionate affair with a riding instructor during the filming of The Other Side of the Wind. After a day of shooting, Platt recalled how the crew would listen as Kodar read from a novel she was writing about a woman living in Arizona with her older lover, while having an affair with a Russian horse riding instructor. “Brilliant, [Welles] would assert – clapping when she read her scenes to us. I didn’t find them brilliant at all and wondered why he pandered to her,” Platt said. “What Orson didn’t know, but I did, was that Oja was, in fact, having an affair with the Russian man who was teaching her how to ride.” Kodar went riding with the instructor daily and “make mad love on the horse blankets… sometimes I would go out riding with Oja and I had to ride around alone in the desert until they were done,” Platt stated.Platt recalled how Kodar would tell her how she and her riding instructor had sex in a cave, and the next day or so the lovemaking in the cave would turn up in her novel.

[omercifulheaves]

Targets (1967) "What's that, Roger? You say Karloff owes you two days of shooting? And you want to recycle some footage from The Terror? Okay, sure, then Polly and me are gonna use that to make one of the most harrowing, horrifying movies ever made!"

[gimmyruinslives]

(via Tornado Tatum Action shot 1.5 (Modified lighting) by me (Gimmyruinslives) on DeviantArt)

[redlipstickdujour]

POLLY PLATT!!! It will serve anyone anywhere well to at least listen to this podcast series about her, or just read her bio-she was a force, a tale, a piece of history that history forgot—

I am glad I’ve gotten the chance to meet her though (I think you will appreciate it too)

[didim-dol]

“I don’t want to be a directors wife and live this alcoholic life”

- Polly Platt

[erstwhile-punk-guerito]

[streamondemand]

'Targets' – Peter Bogdanovich begins on Criterion Channel and free on Hoopla

Old-school horror meets the new face of the real American terror in Targets (1968). The debut feature from director Peter Bogdanovich fictionalizes the true story of Charles Whitman, the sniper who killed 17 people on a shooting rampage in in Texas in 1966, and winds it through the story of an aging horror actor (Boris Karloff playing “Byron Orlok”) who wants to retire because his brand of…

[twittercomfrnklin2001-blog]

Targets

Made before director-co-writer Peter Bogdanovich knew what he couldn’t do, TARGETS (1968, Criterion) is one of the screen’s most audacious directorial debuts.  As good as some of his work is, I’m tempted to call it Bogdanovich’s best film. And it certainly gave Boris Karloff one of the best roles of his career, essentially playing a variation on himself.

The film opens with the finale (almost) of one of Roger Corman’s most delirious films, THE TERROR (1963), which starred Karloff and the largely unknown Jack Nicholson. It then cuts to a screening room, where Karloff’s Byron Orloff has been unhappily watching the last of three low-budget horror films he’s just made. He informs his ambitious young director-writer (Bogdanovich) that he’s retiring without having read the young man’s new script, which you may suspect is the script for this film. The argument moves to the street, and suddenly we cut to Karloff seen through the sights of a sniper rifle. That moves us into the parallel story of Bobby Thompson (Tim O’Kelly), who’s stockpiling weapons for a killing spree. Bogdanovich switches between these stories almost effortlessly with the help of editor Verna Fields. The idea of the classic horror star who feels he’s no longer relevant in a world of real-life horrors like those perpetrated by O’Kelly may be a little too pat, and the inevitable merging of the two plots a little too convenient, but the ideas behind all this trump any objections.

Karloff is magnificent, giving a performance even more impressive when you know that between scenes he had to return to a wheelchair and breathe through an oxygen mask. He’s a master of subtlety. He never wastes a gesture, and he doesn’t just speak his lines; he makes love to them. O’Kelly is also strong, projecting a lot through long silent stretches. Bogdanovich wisely never explains the specifics that led him to mass murder (there’s a sense that he has father issues), but you get the impression that he and O’Kelly know exactly what’s going on in the character’s mind. Laszlo Kovacs did the pristine cinematography, with subtle camera moves to disguise the cutting and build tension. Bogdanovich’s then wife, Polly Platt, co-wrote the original story (there were uncredited writing assists from Sam Fuller) and did a terrific job designing the sets. Thompson lives with the family, and their home is a fascinating combination of story book setting and sterility. It’s the middle-class dream moldering around the edges.

[larkandkatydid]

I listened to the You Must Remember This season about Polly Platt last month and just watched Asteroid City on the plane, but I’m not crazy in thinking that it’s at least partially about Polly Platt, right?

[sleepythug]

reading cinema speculation finally and in the first chapter quentin explains that steve mcqueen was the best of the late ‘60s movie stars because he picked the best projects however he wasn’t a big reader (relatable), he only read car magazines, so his wife neile adams would be the go-between reading the ten or so scripts his agent would sift through. neile would narrow it down to five, write a short premise for each of them, and present them to mcqueen -- so mcqueen owes some of his success to her, for reaching the heights he did, and her nudging him to do certain roles he was initially apprehensive. found this tidbit interesting because it fits into this grander picture of the better halves of hollywood players, being unsung, uncredited string pullers that really boosted their male partners from succumbing to mediocrity early on in their careers.

[lesbiancolumbo]

What's your take on Peter Bogdanovich's work overall? I've only seen Last Picture Show, which I enjoyed but wasn't exactly blown away. I want to see his collabs with Ben Gazzara, but wasn't sure if it's worth going through the rest of his CV.

his collaborations with the true genius in his first marriage, polly platt, are fantastic. these are the first four films of his career, which she worked on as production designer and in the case of targets, helped write AND effectively produced the entire damn thing uncredited. polly made peter a better filmmaker and no one likes to admit that, least of all peter, but i don't care. i like these films a lot.

i don't care for his first film with ben, saint jack, if we're being fully honest, but his second collaboration with ben, they all laughed, is probably the non-polly collab of peter's that i like the most. it's a beautiful film and the beginning and sad end of dorothy stratten's career. even if it's just to see her budding talents as a comedienne, you should watch they all laughed.

i have a lot of thoughts about peter as a person that is divorced from his work, and i won't get into That here (it's mostly very negative - i fucking hate that guy) but his early period is honestly the best he ever was (he knew it too, i think) and then he went through a lot of ups and downs, career-wise. a lot of people love to give his more maligned works credit in retrospect, and i respect that for them but i'm really just not interested in watching anything that isn't they all laughed or paper moon or last picture show.

[brokehorrorfan]

Targets will be released on Blu-ray and DVD on May 16 via The Criterion Collection. Sister Hyde designed the cover art for the 1968 crime thriller.

Peter Bogdanovich (The Last Picture Show, Paper Moon) writes and directs. Boris Karloff, Tim O'Kelly, Nancy Hsueh, James Brown, and Sandy Baron star. Roger Corman produces.

Targets has been newly restored in 2K, supervised by Bogdanovich, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack. Special features are listed below.

Special features:

Audio commentary by writer-director Peter Bogdanovich (2003)

Introduction by writer-director Peter Bogdanovich (2003)

Interview with filmmaker Richard Linklater (new)

Excerpts from an interview with production designer Polly Platt (1983)

Booklet with an essay by critic Adam Nayman and excerpts from an interview with Peter Bogdanovich from Eric Sherman and Martin Rubin’s 1969 book The Director’s Event

Old Hollywood collides with New Hollywood, and screen horror with real-life horror, in the startling debut feature from Peter Bogdanovich. Produced by Roger Corman, this chillingly prescient vision of American-made carnage casts Boris Karloff as a version of himself: an aging horror-movie icon whose fate intersects with that of a seemingly ordinary young man (Tim O’Kelly) on a psychotic shooting spree around Los Angeles. Charged with provocative ideas about the relationship between mass media and mass violence, Targets is a model of maximally effective filmmaking on a minimal budget and a potent first statement from one of the defining voices of the American New Wave.

Pre-order Targets.

[itsjackgilbert]

He was—as they call everyone who has killed themselves preparing in every conceivable way for what may be their one and only shot at the only job they imagine—a natural.

by James L. Brooks

[byneddiedingo]

Barbra Streisand and Ryan O'Neal in What's Up, Doc? (Peter Bogdanovich, 1972)

Cast: Barbra Streisand, Ryan O’Neal, Madeline Kahn, Kenneth Mars, Austin Pendleton, Michael Murphy. Screenplay: Buck Henry, David Newman, Robert Benton, Peter Bogdanovich. Cinematography: László Kovács. Production design: Polly Platt. Film editing: Verna Fields. Music: Artie Butler.

Peter Bodganovich's What's Up, Doc? is a tribute to the masters of screwball comedy,  Howard Hawks and Preston Sturges especially, but also the ones who made worthy contributions like Gregory La Cava, George Stevens, Mitchell Leisen, and Frank Capra. Bogdanovich followed a few of the rules of the genre: One, get stars who usually played it straight to make fools of themselves. Two, make use of as many comic character actors as you can stuff into the film. Three, never pretend that the world the film is taking place in is the "real world." Four, never, ever let the pace slacken -- if your characters have to kiss or confess, make it snappy. On the first point, Bogdanovich found the closest equivalents to Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn (or Clark Gable, Joel McCrea, James Stewart on the one hand, Rosalind Russell, Claudette Colbert, Jean Arthur on the other) that he could among the stars of his day. Ryan O'Neal was coming off the huge success of the weepy Love Story (Arthur Hiller, 1970) and a five-year run on TV's Peyton Place, and Barbra Streisand had won an Oscar for Funny Girl (William Wyler, 1968). O'Neal is no Cary Grant: His timing is a little off and he overdoes a single exasperated look, but he makes a suitable patsy. But has Streisand ever been more likable in the movies? She plays the dizzy troublemaker with relish, capturing the essence of Bugs Bunny -- the other inspiration for the movie -- to the point that you almost expect her to turn to the camera and say, "Ain't I a stinker?" As to the second point, we no longer have character actors of the caliber of Eugene Pallette, Franklin Pangborn, or William Demarest, but Bogdanovich recruited some of the best of his day: Kenneth Mars, Austin Pendleton, Michael Murphy, and others, and introduced moviegoers to the sublime Madeline Kahn. And he set it all in the ever-picturesque San Francisco, while making sure no one would confuse the movie version with the real thing, including a chase sequence up and down its hills that follows no possible real-world path. And he kept the pace up with gags involving bit players: the pizza maker so distracted by Streisand that he spins his dough up to the ceiling, the banner-hanger and the guys moving a sheet of glass, the waiter who enters a room with a tray of drinks but takes one look at the chaos there and turns right around, the guy laying a cement sidewalk that's run over so many times by the car chase that he flings down his trowel and jumps up and down on his mutilated handiwork. This is comic gold of a sort we don't often see -- and, sadly, never saw again from Bogdanovich, whose career collapsed disastrously with a string of flops in the mid-1970s.  

[heavencasteel420]

Speaking of an OC who's Nancy's lousy husband, I do have an AU idea (fairly low down the list of things I will actually write, although I have a paragraph or two written somewhere) where it's set during S1, but all the older teen characters are in their mid-to-late-twenties instead. This was inspired by a joke post pointing out how all the older teens look/act like they're well into their twenties by the time you get to S4, but I decided to make it drama:

Nancy is a recently divorced single mother; her ex-husband Bradley (whom she started dating in high school and went to IU with) was good on paper and not malicious, but he was ultimately unsupportive of her career ambitions and disinterested after the birth of their daughter despite being the one who wanted kids. (In this universe, Holly is Nancy's daughter with her ex and Mike is the late-in-the-game baby of Karen and Ted.) She works at the Hawkins Post for now and gets tons of shit for being a single mom.

Jonathan also works at the paper (a victory after years of menial jobs and night school) and is a single parent (of twelve-year-old Will, thanks to a series of harrowing events when he was in his teens). He and Nancy are work friends who become real friends who become...?

Steve works at his father's insurance company and is considered one of the biggest catches in Hawkins, but people are starting to talk because he hasn't settled down, and he's not really happy in his work. He didn't date Nancy in high school--they ran in different circles--but now he's smitten with her.

Barb is Nancy's BFF, as in canon. She's a nurse now and she lives in the same duplex as Nancy. She's also a lesbian and quietly dating another aged-up older-teen girl, but I'm not sure who yet. I'm leaning towards Robin (quirky music teacher whom everyone thinks is dating Steve, for a more light-hearted romance), Heather (prickly, troubled daughter of the Editor-in-Chief, for the moderate drama), or Chrissy (unhappily married to Jason, for the angst and high drama).

Tommy and Carol are married, quite happily, and refrain from bullying because they're adults. However, they do have a Company thing going with Steve ("Stevie...you know...no one wants you happy more than we do...no one...but isn't she a little bit, well...you know...?").

Generally everybody behaves a little better, because they're not literal teenagers.

I'm not sure where I'd go with it: no Upside Down, or there's just a 1980s-Polly-Platt-ghost-directed romantic dramedy that turns into a horror movie? That's one of the difficulties. Another is that it would change the Byers family dynamic considerably.

[motherofthousands]

the timing is good on the project im working on because it has been delayed but that allowed me to be moved by some productive design spirits and take in more information to make choices that are guided by the theme rather than just the stray bolts and sand that are rattling around in my brain.

even the casting debacle we went through gave me important information to follow. im zoning in. so i just wanna make some notes

actor 1's enormous and empty room with a water dispenser and plastic cups, devoid of personality

the HGTVification of housing in America (grey)

real interiors have curves (meaning this one doesnt)

polly platt saying nothing belongs in the shot that doesnt aid the story. take things out that dont belong. nothing superfluous or because i think it's cool (note to self)

Polly Platt saying she filled the shooter's home with items that would drive one to kill in 'Targets'

Influencer. Sociopath.