British, directed by former stage magician Walter Booth. IMDB

From the Public Domain Review via Karen L. Myers.

Jameson Irish Whiskey has a Jameson First Shot Program giving three filmmakers a chance to make a short film produced by Kevin Spacey starring Uma Thurman. In this one, poor Uma (no longer Aphrodite, alas!) plays Hera, wife of Zeus, who is consulting a therapist.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Enter the Ringo Kid.

Scott Eyman, in his new biography, John Wayne, The Life the Legend, describes the historic source of the iconic gesture in the opening scene of John Ford‘s “Stagecoach” (1939), which ignited Wayne’s career and made him a major star.

The scene had a problem, and the problem was the gun.

Dudley Nichol’s script was specific. “There is the sharp report of a rifle and Curly jerks up his gun as Buck saws wildly at the ribbons.

“The stagecoach comes to a lurching stop before a young man who stands in the road beside his unsaddled horse. He has a saddle over one arm and a rifle carelessly swung in the other hand… It is Ringo…

“RINGO? You might need me and this Winchester, I saw a couple ranches burnin’ last night.’

“CURLY? I guess you don’t understand, kid. You’re under arrest.

“RINGO?(with charm) I ain’t arguing about that, Curly. I just hate to part with a gun like this.

“Holding it by the lever, he gives it a jerk and it cocks with a click…”

John Ford loved the dialogue, which was in and of itself unusual, but the introduction of the Ringo Kid needed to be emphasized. Ford decided that the shot would begin with the actor doing something with the gun, then the camera would rapidly track in from a full-length shot to an extreme close-up — an unusually emphatic camera movement for Ford, who had grown to prefer a stable camera.

Since the actor was already coping with two large props, Ford decided to lose the horse. He told his young star what he was planning to do: “work out something with the rifle,” Ford sais. “Or maybe just a pistol.” He wasn’t sure.

And just like that the problem was dropped in the lap of his star, a young — but not all that young — actor named John Wayne., better known to Ford and everyone else as Duke.

Wayne ran through the possibilities. every actor in in westerns could twirl a pistol, so that was out. Besides, the script specified a rifle cocked quickly with one hand, but later in the scene than what Ford was planning. In addition, Ford wanted him to do something flashy, but it couldn’t happen too quickly for the audience to take it in. All the possibilities seemed to cancel each other out.

And then Yakima Canutt, Wayne’s friend and the stunt coordinator on the film offered an idea. When Canutt was a boy he had seen Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. As the overland stage raced around the arena, a messenger trailing behind the stagecoach had carried a rifle with a large ring loop which allowed him to spin the rifle in the air, cocking it with one hand. The crowd went wild. Canutt said that it had been done thirty years ago and he still remembered the moment. More to the point, he had never seen anybody else do it.

Wayne sparked to the idea, as did Ford, so they had to make it work. Ford instructed the prop department to manufacture a ring loop and install it on a standard issue 1892 Winchester carbine. After the rifle was modified, Wayne began experimenting with the twirl move as Canutt remembered it, but there was a problem — the barrel of the rifle was too long — it wouldn’t pass cleanly beneath Wayne’s arm.

The Winchester went back to the prop department, where they sawed an inch or so off the end, then soldered the sight back on the shortened barrel.

With that minor adjustment, the move was suddenly effortless. Wayne began rehearsing the twirling movement that would mark his appearance in the movie he had been waiting more than ten years to make — a film for John Ford, his friend, his mentor, his idol, the man he called “Coach” or, alternately — and more tellingly — “Pappy.”

With any luck at all, he’d never have to go back to B westerns as long as he lived.

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Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World.

(sample)

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Hat tip to Emmy Chang.

Cracked.com

Hat tip to Randy Barnett.

The great Run Run Shaw, Hong Kong producer of countless examples of martial arts cinema, who brought Chinese culture and flying Kung Fu masters to the world, passed away, allegedly at the admirable age of 106. Quentin Tarantino is basically his disciple, and Tarantino acknowledges the debt by routinely prefacing his own films with the Shaw Brothers logo.

Variety:

Shaw’s birthday and his exact age have long been clouded in mystery — his widow Mona Shaw (aka Mona Fong) has often refused to clarify the issue — and other sources put his age at 107. He died at 6.55am local time in Hong Kong on Jan 7, 2014.

From his early work doing odd jobs around theaters and cinemas controlled by his older brothers, Shaw went on to establish and run the leading production studios in Asia by the 1950s. Along the way he ushered in significant technical progress into Chinese film.

Shaw is best known for the Shaw Brothers’ martial arts output of the 1960s, but he should rightly also be given credit for pioneering a form of Asian musical film and for putting Hong Kong on the global cinema map.

The Shaw Brothers company was in its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s and was influential in both the Asian and Western film industries. He personally has credits on some 360 films, ranging from martial arts classics to Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner.”

Smithsonian magazine explains how popcorn conquered the movie theater industry.

in 1885, the first steam-powered popcorn maker hit the streets, invented by Charles Cretor. The mobile nature of the machine made it the perfect production machine for serving patrons attending outdoor sporting events, or circuses and fairs. Not only was popcorn mobile, but it could be mass-produced without a kitchen, an advantage that another crunchy snack–the potato chip–lacked (the earliest potato chips were made in small batches in kitchens, not ideal for mass snack appeal). Another reason for its dominance over other snacks was its appealing aroma when popped, something that street vendors used to their advantage when selling popcorn. Still, movie theaters wouldn’t allow the popular street snack into their auditoriums.

“Movie theaters wanted nothing to do with popcorn,” Smith says, “because they were trying to duplicate what was done in real theaters. They had beautiful carpets and rugs and didn’t want popcorn being ground into it.” Movie theaters were trying to appeal to a highbrow clientele, and didn’t want to deal with the distracting trash of concessions–or the distracting noise that snacking during a film would create.

When films added sound in 1927, the movie theater industry opened itself up to a much wider clientele, since literacy was no longer required to attend films (the titles used early silent films restricted their audience). By 1930, attendance to movie theaters had reached 90 million per week. Such a huge patronage created larger possibilities for profits–especially since the sound pictures now muffled snacks–but movie theater owners were still hesitant to bring snacks inside of their theaters.

The Great Depression presented an excellent opportunity for both movies and popcorn. Looking for a cheap diversion, audiences flocked to the movies. And at 5 to 10 cents a bag, popcorn was a luxury that most people were able to afford. Popcorn kernels themselves were a cheap investment for purveyors, and a $10 bag could last for years. If those inside the theaters couldn’t see the financial lure of popcorn, enterprising street vendors didn’t miss a beat: they bought their own popping machines and sold popcorn outside the theaters to moviegoers before they entered the theater. As Smith explains, early movie theaters literally had signs hung outside their coatrooms, requesting that patrons check their popcorn with their coats. Popcorn, it seems, was the original clandestine movie snack.

Beyond wanting to maintain appearances, early movie theaters weren’t built to accommodate the first popcorn machines; the theaters lacked proper ventilation. But as more and more customers came to the theater with popcorn in hand, owners couldn’t ignore the financial appeal of selling the snack. So they leased “lobby privileges” to vendors, allowing them to sell their popcorn in the lobby of their theater (or more likely on a bit of street in front of the theater) for a daily fee.

Eventually, movie theater owners realized that if they cut out the middleman, their profits would skyrocket. For many theaters, the transition to selling snacks helped save them from the crippling Depression. In the mid-1930s, the movie theater business started to go under. “But those that began serving popcorn and other snacks,” Smith explains, “survived.” Take, for example, a Dallas movie theater chain that installed popcorn machines in 80 theaters, but refused to install machines in their five best theaters, which they considered too high class to sell popcorn. In two years, the theaters with popcorn saw their profits soar; the five theaters without popcorn watched their profits go into the red. Eventually, movie theater owners came to understand that concessions were their ticket to higher profits, and installed concession stands in their theaters.

World War II further solidified the marriage between popcorn and the movie theaters. Competing snacks like candy and soda suffered from sugar shortages and in turn, rationing, as traditional sugar exporters like the Philippines were cut off from the United States.

By 1945, popcorn and the movies were inextricably bound: over half of the popcorn consumed in America was eaten at the movie theaters.

Read the whole thing.

Via the Dish.

Seriously over-the-top parody trailer with loads of major stars making cameos.

Hat tip to Vanderleun.

Link

Josephine Livingstone certainly chose a hard boiled title for her review of Bran Nicol’s new book The Private Eye: Detectives in the Movies.

Often responding to Philip or Sam, the private investigator (PI) may be identified by his coat and hat. His natural habitat: the wet street corner or, unauthorised, another person’s home. He is commonly accused of committing the very crime under his investigation. You will find him lit starkly, from the side. He is good at getting women into bed, but they often turn out to be malevolent villainesses. He is American.

The PI’s bloodlines flow deeply into the tradition of masculine heroes. His characteristics loom so large over Western popular culture that it can be hard to make him out. This is the problem facing any book on the film noir detective: being a chap, in a movie, trying to solve a problem, he is as inscrutably general a cultural trope as the femme fatale. What makes a PI a PI, and not just some other kind of leading man? You can’t even really chalk him up to an era, since he has existed since the early days of film. …
[The] famous five film noir traits—oneiric, strange, erotic, ambivalent, and cruel—were neither clear cut nor all strictly necessary in order for a film to be noir. This genre is yoked together by a general ambience—an aura of darkness—rather than any true collective character. If the film noir is about one particular thing, I’d say it was about bad people. It is therefore about crime, and the investigators of those crimes. Enter the PI.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Orson Welles with Henry Jaglom.

Orson Welles was renowned for his keen wit, sharp tongue, and profound sense of personal grievance. Consequently, Welles’ lunch-time collected commentary, compiled in the recently published My Lunches with Orson, will inevitably be a treasure trove of good lines.

Peter Apsden, in the Financial Times, gives us a few good excerpts:

Orson Welles was stymied at virtually every stage of his career by those whom he believed to be inferior and, in consequence, terminally unsympathetic to him. Welles wrote the template for the way in which arrogance and insecurity fuel each other to produce breakdown. There was the stellar ambition of Citizen Kane (1941), and then immediate and lengthy decline. His physique swelled, his patience shortened, his friends, or “friends”, scarpered. He ended his days at his regular hang-out, Hollywood’s Ma Maison restaurant, draping himself, as Gore Vidal once described, in ‘bifurcated tents to which, rather idly, lapels, pocket flaps, buttons were attached in order to suggest a conventional suit’.

Which is where we find him in My Lunches With Orson, Peter Biskind’s sensitively edited account of Welles’s conversations with Henry Jaglom. The British-born actor and director became Welles’s regular lunch partner and confidante, and taped their dialogues over a couple of years before Welles’s death in 1985. This is Welles riffing uninhibitedly on his life and times, lurching from mischief to melancholy, and it is riveting. I defy anyone not to feel moved by its narrative arc of greatness laid low by its own luminosity.

The book is already attracting attention for its waspish indiscretions. Here is Welles on Woody Allen: ‘I can hardly bear to talk to him. He has the Chaplin disease. That particular combination of arrogance and timidity sets my teeth on edge.’ On Laurence Olivier: ‘Larry is very – I mean, seriously – stupid.’ On the pianist Arthur Rubinstein: ‘The greatest cocksman … [he] walked through life as though it was one big party.’ On Rear Window (1954): ‘Everything is stupid about it. Complete insensitivity to what a story about voyeurism could be … Vertigo. That’s worse.’

But beyond those headlines, there are fascinating pointers to how Welles viewed himself, and his work. What, asks Jaglom, did they think of Kane in England? ‘It was not gigantically big in England. Auden didn’t like it,’ replies Welles, obviously preferring to stew on the verdict of a single poet rather than the bathetic business of box office returns. ‘I always knew that Borges … hadn’t liked it,’ he continues. ‘He said that it was pedantic, which is a very strange thing to say about it, and that it was a labyrinth. And that the worst thing about a labyrinth is when there’s no way out. And this is a labyrinth of a movie with no way out.’ And then we can imagine that famously booming voice turn warm with the sudden discovery of a good joke.
‘Borges is half-blind. Never forget that.’

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One more interesting paragraph from John Powers, at NPR:

If you love old movies, My Lunches with Orson is like being handed a big tin of macadamia nuts — you just keep devouring it. Welles talks about everything from the secret side of Katharine Hepburn — she talked dirty and was hot to trot — to how The Godfather is ‘the glorification of a bunch of bums who never existed.’ He knows this because he used to bed the same showgirls real gangsters did. Although a lifelong man of the left, Welles says the right-wingers in Hollywood were much nicer people — especially John Wayne, who was a prince.

“Teenage Devil Dolls” aka “One Way Ticket to Hell” (1955).

From Ratak Monodosico.