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swanstep (2630)
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Hitchcock never made a self-conscious 'magnum opus' (thoughts on Megalopolis and the like)
Margo Epper (Mrs Bates in the window and with blackened face behind the shower curtain)
thirtysomething's Hitchcock Episode 'South by Southeast' is back on youtube
QT's 'The Movie Critic' cancelled/mothballed
Something Psycho-ish is going on in MaXXXine (2024)
Psycho and Blue Velvet
Johnny Crale's metal right hand
A small but irritating problem about dates
TCM remembers 2023, classy as ever
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<blockquote>In just the last year or two we've had Beau is Afraid and Babylon,
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Saw the latter only (Babylon)</blockquote>
Beau is Afraid is on Netflix these days (at least where I am) and I've tried to watch it again a few times but I've never been able to get past the first act, which is surreal, brutal and insane but is still sort of hipstery and fun and so much more focused than all the rest. The 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th acts are worth seeing *once* as a kind of endurance test of the self, but are almost impossible to force oneself to revisit. When I watched them the first time I had Billy Wilder's 'It's a dream within a dream? You just lost a million dollars.' in my head at every Act/Reel change as it got more and more far out, punishing, and unpleasant.
<blockquote>I gotta find this list. Forsythe HOSTED?</blockquote>
It's on wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Saturday_Night_Live_guests
with sub-pages for each alphabetical sub-group, e.g.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Saturday_Night_Live_guests_(E%E2%80%93H)
Unfortunately I now see that this page *doesn't* list Forsythe as hosting or even as a cameo player. I must have read that somewhere else, presumably less reliable than wiki, and been misled.
Clarification about Veronica Cartwright. She didn't play herself, rather she was a dying old lady in a sketch when OJ Simpson hosted back in 1978.And it was a minor enough appearance that it sin;t listed on Cartwright's IMDb page. That's working actor stuff not a 'cameo' in my books. Sorry that my info on all this is proving somewhat unreliable. *This* (of course) is a cameo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiJkANps0Qw
@Doc13. I checked out your post on Jeannie Epper and enjoyed the link to Lynda Carter's appreciation of her. Thanks.
Another tasty Obit in the NYTimes this weekend, Mary Wells Lawrence, one of the protoypes for
Mad Men's Peggy Olson. After recounting her glittering career in advertizing the obit says:
<blockquote>Ms. Wells Lawrence had homes in New York and the south of France, but spent most months in later years aboard her yacht in the Mediterranean.</blockquote>'Atta girl!
We await the truly enterprising youtuber who will put together a couple more generative-ai technologies and produce a (i) seamless QT talking head to go with the AI-QT audio, and (ii) have one of the better AI-oracles (in my brief experience with it, Claude 3.5 writes about as well as I do) write the underlying text. We could then have AI-QT visibly opining on the details of almost any movie you like.
I should add that while Claude 3.5 has some performance issues, so it's still not nearly as smart as I'd like, it's so eloquent that it does clarify some of the future of AI. AI won't have to fight us to take over, rather it's just going to out-competence us so we'll gladly hand over the reigns to it (i.e., rather than to another person). Claude 3.5 would already I think easily toast both Biden and Trump if it was allowed on stage with those guys at a debate - it would transparently be much more coherent, sensible, knowledgeable, thoughtful, etc.. Some future Claude *will* be voted in as President by humans, and 'getting humans out of most high public offices' *will* be a political and economic rallying-cry of, I dunno, the 2050s. The future is coming up fast.
Changing topic ever so slightly.... QT's thoughts on Dirty Harry (from his book Movie Speculations) are presented in full in the following video on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcGEUXyP6AE
QT's text is read not by QT himself but by an, in my view, impeccable, flabbergastingly accurate AI-simulation of QT. It really does sound *exactly* like QT doing an audio-book. I didn't notice any giveaways *at all* that this reading was a machine-product. Jesus. The tech has gotten so good now that, within six months at the outside (at least if there's no major new regulation), literally no human will ever physically record another audio book.
If you want to check this out, I'd recommend clicking the link above without delay. The legal issues around the tech used to make the vid as well as that tech's specific outputs are only just starting to be tested in court, but there is no guarantee that youtube/google won't take down stuff like this precautionarily. Maybe it'll stay up for a few days or even a week or two, but don't dilly-dally grasshopper!
Note that the same channel did the same thing only using actual QT reading audio about Point Blank and The Outfit about 4 months ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krQ3YfGX4AI
BTW, checking who's been a guest or in a cameo on SNL, at least Suzanne Pleshette and Veronica Cartwight get in as true Hitchcock film players.
But, yes, also to our original list of Hitchcock SNL Hosts we have to add John Forsythe. I was a little surprised to see that his Trouble With Harry co-star Shirley MacLaine has *never* appeared on SNL. I was pretty sure she'd done some cameos at least, e.g., on the molly shannon/cheri oteri playing Ann
Miller and Debbie Reynolds recurring sketch 'Leg Up', but I can't find any record of them now. Harrumph.
<blockquote>This is on topic about Anthony Perkins and Psycho, but a little bit OFF topic about Bruce Dern, Karen Black and Family Plot. Hitchcock players all and -- I believe -- the only three Hitchcock performers to host Saturday Night Live.</blockquote>Whether his small part in Psycho (cop at the end) really makes him a Hitchcock player is perhaps doubtful, but Ted Knight (hot off the MTM show) hosted SNL.
Of course, if you include people who were on AH's tv shows then a whole bunch have hosted: Ed Asner, Angie Dickinson, James Coburn, Burt Reynolds, William Shatner, Harry Dean Stanton, and probably a few more I've missed.
BTW, I think it sounds like a good monologue gag for Dern to have him effectively chastise the audience for not going to see his good, serious films where he's often a good guy. It's funny to think of films as well-thought-of now as Silent Running and Kings of Marvin Garden not being seen by many people on release.
<blockquote>I think, yet again, that QT seems to have "locked in" on a handful of American directors who sort of ran out of gas in the 60s and 70s</blockquote>I suspect that that's what happened too, and, to be fair to QT, if you're a big fan of some director (or other artist) to see them suddenly producing genuinely inferior work is shocking, galling, gutting, traumatizing, a betrayal, pick your epithet. My biggest experience of this kind (and from the same period that seems to have burned QT) was with Stanley Donen. As a budding film buff I worshipped Donen but then I got to see my first hot-off-the presses Donen film: Saturn 3 (an ugly, plodding, embarassment). I vividly remember the feeling of a kind of hour-long, full-body-cringe in the cinema. You don't forget that sort of experience. As a result, I couldn't bring myself to pay money for Donen's final film a few years later, 'Blame it on Rio', notwithstanding that it had one of my fave actors, Michael Caine as lead. I did catch BIOR on vhs a few years later, however, and, my God it was awful. While BIOR was more enjoyable and certainly more technically competent than Saturn 3 it was evidently trying to be a kind of late-addition to the wave of middle-aged guy sex-comedies that began with '10' only with a downshift of lust to high-school age/daughters. There's some undeniably luscious teen nudity but it all leaves you feeling pretty icky (and it makes the genuine teen sex-comedies that were around at the time seem pretty innocent by comparison). And if you're there for Donen and Caine you can't help thinking something along the lines of 'What are we doing here?' and 'Thank god I didn't pay real money for this'.
Donen lived for another 30+ years after these twin debacles (most of that happily cohabiting with my ideal woman, Elaine May). It's sad in a way that he didn't direct again except a little TV, but I'm pretty sure that most of Donen's biggest fans were glad that there were no more S3s or BIORs.
<blockquote>I despise QT's idea that all artists are subject to "diminishing returns."</blockquote>That's been my basic line about QT's views on this topic too. Ultimately there's age-ism involved here: QT has definitely got in his head the idea that directing movies after you're about 60 (the age when Hitch made Psycho and Wilder made The Fortune Cookie) is a bad idea and he's often used the phrase 'limp dick' to characterize his point. Allow some slippage for better health care etc. and perhaps the moral QT wants to draw is that once you are 60 you should be looking to wrap up your directing career with a final film within the next few years. QT is currently 61.
As personal policy there's nothing wrong with that. For example, it seems to have worked out well for Ingmar Bergman. His final film was Fanny and Alexander (1982), a masterpiece, when he was 64, and he busied himself for the next 25 years with writing scripts for a bunch of people including his son to direct, as well as directing lots of theater and TV (some of which even got theatrical releases around the world, most notably Saraband (2003)).
But taken as a general prescription QT's policy seems spectacularly stupid, and you don't have to 'go foreign' to see this. Altman was 60 in 1985. His big 'comeback' film, The Player (1992), didn't drop until he was 67, and his post-75 output included Gosford Park, The Company, and Prairie Home Companion, all very good to excellent. Sure, Altman made some pretty bad movies all though his career, including a final down period after Short Cuts and before Gosford Park, but, *my* policy, who cares about those (bad stuff just gets forgotten about)? I *need* (the world needs) the eggs of his good ones right up to the end.
But maybe this doesn't matter. QT may be making a mistake to try to tie off his directing career the way Bergman did, but like Bergman he plans to stay creatively active so any diamonds he later turns up will make it into the world somehow.
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