What a bunch of liars.
Well, they all have their reasons.
Ha ha. Lots of famous writers, including one who died last week, Martin Amis, have been *utterly obsessed* with the dark sides of ambition and success in fields that often pose as being very un-business-like or even as fundamentally uncompetitive and high-minded. Gore Vidal's famous dictum that for writers, 'It's not enough to succeed. Others must fail.' is the starting point for Amis and others. Anyhow, *not everyone* in Hollywood succumbs to the temptations of pettiness and spite and feathering ones own nest and subtle undermining of others that's part of the on-going brute competition for attention, collaborators, money, fame, posterity, and all the rest of it, but a hell of a lot do.
Wilder and Hitch probably understood each other's tricks better than most. Both spent crucial time in wild, sexually diverse and free 1920s Berlin (e.g.,
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/billy-wilder-in-weimar-berlin ), and both were ready to make bank in Hayes Code America from hinting at the presence of all the sophisticated/sordid stuff that was officially repressed there, i.e., that had only broken out into the open back in Weimar Berlin. And 1920s Berlin was, of course, full of hotshot film-makers and painters and dramatists that young 'uns like Wilder and Hitch (and Siodmak, Ulmer, Zinnemann, and many others), of course, could soak up enormous amount from and would use to their advantages throughout their American and English Language careers.
Somewhat relatedly: I saw a photo from the Cannes film Festival prize-giving over the weekend: QT was handing out the Palme D'Or top award, which was bizarre given that he wasn't on any of the Juries. Cannes strikes me as the ultimate insider house of cards built out of back-scratching and back-biting and personal vendettas!
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roger1 (2734)
a year ago
What a bunch of liars.
Well, they all have their reasons.
Ha ha. Lots of famous writers, including one who died last week, Martin Amis, have been *utterly obsessed* with the dark sides of ambition and success in fields that often pose as being very un-business-like or even as fundamentally uncompetitive and high-minded. Gore Vidal's famous dictum that for writers, 'It's not enough to succeed. Others must fail.'
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A famous and grim line, that one. And I guess SOME in Hollywood live by it. That Easy Riders, Raging Bulls book is full of such bile. Director Robert Altman and studio guy/producer Don Simpson hated each other; their quotes in that book are awful but Altman had the last laugh when Simpson died of drugs on the toilet: "I'm glad he's gone. I only wished he suffered more." Man, life's too short, guys! (As Don Simpson found out.)
To the contra: we had what looked like some pretty good fellowship among the "movie brats" of the 70s: Spielberg and Lucas and Scorsese and Coppola worked on each other's movies, gave each other points, used the same actors, etc. DePalma was part of that crowd but needed some years to get the same kind of respect(because of his Hitchcock copycatting.) Still: they DID seem to help each other.
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Anyhow, *not everyone* in Hollywood succumbs to the temptations of pettiness and spite and feathering ones own nest and subtle undermining of others that's part of the on-going brute competition for attention, collaborators, money, fame, posterity, and all the rest of it, but a hell of a lot do.
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Perhaps as they grew older, fearful bitternesses arose. Wilder saying about the dead Hitchcock: "I'm glad I don't have him to compete against anymore." Elsewhere, when Some Like It Hot and The Apartment hit back to back and the latter won Oscars, Wilder noted that he FINALLY had a bankable name. Prior to then, Wilder noted, "Only DeMille and Hitchcock had name clout at the box office."
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roger1 (2734)
a year ago
Sidebar:
Netflix is running Billy Wilder's "late movie"(in the dire Tarantino tradition), The Front Page of 1974 right now. It was released at Christmas 1974 by Universal in an attempt to tie into the nostalgia of "The Sting" in the Christmas of 1973. Wilder brought along the insurance of Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau as stars -- but only Matthau was really bankable, and just coming off a trio of thrillers -- Charley Varrick, The Laughing Policeman, and The Taking of Pelham 123 -- that made his Billy Wilder vehicle(from an old 20's play) look that much more dated. The Front Page is OK enough -- the play was solid foundation, Lemmon and especially Matthau were fun. The support cast(including Charles Durning from The Sting, and young Susan Sarandan) was great. The real flaw to the movie was WILDER, who burdened the classic play with his dated re-written lines -- an attempt to be modern with un-hip cussing and clumsy sex jokes and anti-gay humor... WILDER was the problem with his own movie.
And Universal honcho Lew Wasserman figured that out. Wilder's new contract with Universal was summarily ended and he was sent out into the wilderness. Meanwhile, Wasserman kept his old pal Hitchcock on contract and supported for one last film(Family Plot.) I'm sure some of this was Wasserman's loyalty to Hitch as a friend, but also: Universal's ownership of Psycho and the Hitchcock TV series were lucrative and Wasserman KNEW that Universal stood to own the Paramount movies like Rear Window and Vertigo some day. So : Hitchcock IN, Wilder OUT at Universal.
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roger1 (2734)
a year ago
Wilder and Hitch probably understood each other's tricks better than most. Both spent crucial time in wild, sexually diverse and free 1920s Berlin (e.g., https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/billy-wilder-in-weimar-berlin ), and both were ready to make bank in Hayes Code America from hinting at the presence of all the sophisticated/sordid stuff that was officially repressed there, i.e., that had only broken out into the open back in Weimar Berlin. And 1920s Berlin was, of course, full of hotshot film-makers and painters and dramatists that young 'uns like Wilder and Hitch (and Siodmak, Ulmer, Zinnemann, and many others), of course, could soak up enormous amount from and would use to their advantages throughout their American and English Language careers.
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Great historical stuff in there, swanstep. Funny, given how quickly Germany plunged into horror by the 30s, that it could have been such a hot and humid breeding ground for great filmmakers, Expressionistic style, and sinful content in the 20s. (I always felt this came back a little when the Beatles kept jumping over to Germany to play clubs and bed strippers in the 60s.)
I guess we can add Fritz Lang there?
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roger1 (2734)
a year ago
Somewhat relatedly: I saw a photo from the Cannes film Festival prize-giving over the weekend: QT was handing out the Palme D'Or top award, which was bizarre given that he wasn't on any of the Juries.
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Yeah, but he's really the kind of "star director writer (sometimes actor)" that Old Hollywood was built on.
I sometimes feel a lot of people are missing that about QT. His movies have sick scenes in them, ultra violence and -- more fatally -- large doses of overlong self-indulgence in scene length and dialogue. But the man and his movies "caught a wave" in 1992 that has crested for 30 years and has left him afloat as one of our true superstar directors, "just for the fun of it." (And as with Billy Wilder and Woody Allen, he WRITES his own stuff, all alone, which Wilder did not do.) And I will note: I find those sick scenes and overlong scenes to be flaws in the films but I love ALL the films. He knows what he is doing. He's an entertainer who works with big stars. Kind of like Hitchcock --whom it turns out, QT pretty much doesn't respect at all.
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Cannes strikes me as the ultimate insider house of cards built out of back-scratching and back-biting and personal vendettas!
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Yes, well THIS year -- Johnny Depp showed up and THAT started something. He has his supporters, but a contingent of women came on stage wearing shirts bearing Amber Heard's image. (Hey, why give EITHER of them much attention, eh?)
I have found this to be the funniest aspect of Cannes in recent years:
Internet press agents dutifully report that various debut movies and their casts and directors got "a ten minute standing ovation" or "a nine minute standing ovatation" as if this is BIG NEWS when actually it is just the weird star-poking nature of the crowd.
But this backfired: the new Indy Jones movie ONLY got a "five minute standing ovation" -- so it must be terrible. However, STAR Harrison Ford got a "ten minute standing ovation" BEFORE the movie came on.
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roger1 (2734)
a year ago
So now, the LENGTH of your standing ovation can matter...and can kill you.
Flashback: Hitchcock came to Cannes in 1972 to show Frenzy out of competition . He was accompanied into the event by Princess Grace(after all , it was HER country). There are photos, the former Grace Kelly has trendy long 1972 hair -- you can see the older star she WOULD have been on screen. I wonder what SHE thought of Frenzy?
Anyway, Frenzy got a ten minute standing ovation or something like that, and I always found that to be part of the great "Hitchcock comeback of 1972." But now I'm not so sure. Of the comeback...yes. Of Cannes applause meaning anything...no.
On the other hand: Scorsese and his "Killers of the Flower Moon" got a ten minute ovation this year. And QT and "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" got a ten minute ovation in 2019.
Or something like that...
And: Brian DePalma made a 2002 thriller called "Femme Fatale" which has an opening set piece jewelry robbery AT the Cannes event, it was for me the only real "look inside" at the event, with great big Panavision images of the red carpet and the applauding theater crowd. Worth a watch for the Cannes elements alone.
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roger1 (2734)
a year ago
But its worse: Hitchcock gave that answer to Truffaut in 1962, evidently never dreaming that, sometime in the 70's, Bass would show that he drew ANOTHER storyboard for Psycho: the shower murder. And THAT storyboard was published in a film magazine and can now be found lots of places (like on the internet).
Oops, Hitch.
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I return with some more thoughts about this.
Some years ago in some book, really good storyboards were printed of the crop duster chase in North by Northwest. The storyboards were perhaps too good: it was clearly Cary Grant's face in them.
Well, I've since read that THOSE storyboards were FAKE, drawn up "after the fact" to promote the movie in some magazine.
And yet: way back in 1973, in a book on Hitchcock called Focus on Hitchcock(which I own), there were some REAL storyboards from the crop duster scene -- just this side of stick figure sketches without Grant being recognizable -- and those were the real deal. Oops: no, they weren't. I just checked. The storyboards were done for an article about the crop duster scene for the book!
Several books on Hitchcock -- notably "Hitchocck at Work," have what seem to be quite legitimate storyboards from Shadow of a Doubt(illustrated as if in an artist's painting) and Lifeboat. So evidently, Hitchcock storyboarded SOME scenes, in SOME movies.
But the issue becomes: how many scenes did Alfred Hitchcock REALLY have storyboarded for his movies? "All the way through the story, start to finish" (as some have contended.) Nah, I don't think so. KEY scenes? (The murders in Psycho.) Yes, I think so.
The Birds got plenty of storyboards for action scenes. I've seen them. And I've seen storyboards for the Family Plot runaway car scene and the cemetary criss-cross(evidently drawn up also for a proposed book on the movie that was never published.)
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roger1 (2734)
a year ago
Back to Psycho:
These are probably long gone, long torn away, long thrown away, but wouldn't it be cool to see:
ONE: Saul Bass's storyboards for the Arbogast murder? (Would he have matched Hitchcock's great close up of the slashed face of the victim?)
TWO: SOMEBODY's storyboards -- or rather production sketches -- for the Psycho house. I'm willing to bet that Hitchcock ordered five, ten, TWENTY different sketches to give him ideas for the Gothic structure. And finally, he matched those sketches to a set on the Universal backlot -- and made changes.
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