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swanstep (2616)
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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
OT: Killers of the Flower Moon [spoilers]
Best Youtube Vid. on Psycho's filming locations yet
New Book: 'Hitchcock's Blondes' by Laurence Leamer
Moviewise channel on Youtube
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Yes he did. The Guardian had an article that interviewed him about how he really was in the right place at the right time to get in on the ground floor of music video with M's 'Pop Muzik':
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2023/jun/05/m-how-we-made-pop-muzik-bowies
Yep, that's a famous one. That song was a big hit worldwide. There was, however, a much more expansive song and music video homage to Psycho around the same time (early '80s) that sadly wasn't much of a hit and was little seen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zthChjUe1II
I'm pretty sure that the 'creepy mansion' location used in the video both for interiors and exteriors is Ettington Park (which is now a hotel) which was the location used for exteriors in The Haunting (1963). That location won't have come cheap, reflecting that the band in question, Landscape, were given quite a bit of 'push' at the time. Their flashy video was directed by Brian Grant who was one of the top dudes at the time. He did stuff like the video for Olivia Newton-John's 'Physical' and he directed what is still one of the best music videos ever for Peter Gabriel's 'Shock the Monkey':
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnVf1ZoCJSo
<blockquote>Virginia Madsen</blockquote>I never thought much about Madsen back in the day - she was a beauty alright but (a) she never quite got a signature role (Lunch's Dune could have been it but that movie flopped etc., and Cabrini Green-horror, Candyman 1992 was pretty great as was The Hot Shot but I, like most people, didn't see them until much later), and (b) her basic willowy blonde, big hair look was close to Nancy Allen, Sharon Stone, Nancy Travis - in certain shots Madsen can look almost identical to each of them and I suspect that that was a problem for her. Madsen, interestingly, has really got a boost from the recent Dune and especially Dune Part 2. Florence Pugh now plays the Princess Irulan/Narrator character that Madsen played, and book fans aren't happy... Irulan in the books is an idealized tall blonde aristocratic beauty supposedly capable of turning male characters to jello whereas Pugh is short, gal-next-door-ish, and is left mostly invisible/hidden behind chain-mail veils. Paul's decision to marry her comes across as *pure* political convenience rather than a properly mixed decision - I'm marrying the hottest chick in the galaxy, not so bad!
I quite like the more-grunged up, more-pure-politics Dune series myself and Pugh fits well with that, but Madsen is the better book-casting for sure (shades of Reacher book fans never accepting Tom Cruise as Reacher).
<blockquote>A glance at Hopper's IMDb list of 70's movies -- as actor OR director -- after "The Last Movie" -- finds him struggling -- in my mind - until he finally came back on screen in "Apocalypse Now"</blockquote>Yep, that's what I noticed too - most of the '70s were a complete write-off for Dennis. I'm guessing that he had a big pile of Easy Rider money to live off during that time.
Hopper's first direction since The Last Movie was in 1980 with Out of the Blue, which gave Linda Manz her second big role after Days of Heaven. The opening scene of that movie has become a bit legendary:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qjq6PRjXQg
and has been sampled in, what in my view is some of the best music and music video of the '90s, e.g.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E86gWQs-ios
I've only seen OOTB once - it was a true bleakfest and hard watch, but was evidently well-shot and -directed - and I really need to see it again. OOTB has plenty of famous and non-famous fans these days and now frequently appears on lots of people's Best of the '80s lists. Probably more people have seen it since its blu-ray restoration appeared in the mid-2010s than saw it in the thirty years after its initial release.
It's funny, when I think about a Strangers on a Train remake I think of the story's Highsmith roots and that in turn makes me think of her Ripley tales and their recent semi-successful reinvention as Saltburn. I'd say that that case encourages the thought that Highsmith's stuff *can* be successfully updated. The whole project, however, strikes me as a bit beneath Fincher and you'd think he could find himself a better project than that.
Relatedly, the Robert Downey Jr Vertigo remake seems to have been greenlit by Paramount;
https://deadline.com/2023/03/vertigo-remake-robert-downey-jr-steven-knight-alfred-hitchcock-james-stewart-paramount-pictures-davis-entertainment-team-downey-1235308636/
It's an RDJ passion-project and he and his wife will be producing so I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Paramount regards this as a strategic move to lock in RDJ long-term for other, mostly more commercial projects. I'm sure that Paramount is well aware that remaking or even sequelizing venerable masterpieces (they made The Two Jakes) is normally a fool's errand and a pretty thankless task.
<blockquote>Well, Dennis Hopper got buried by...Michael Eisner?</blockquote>If so then he didn't stay buried for long. Blue Velvet (for which Hopper told Lynch,'I am Frank Booth') put Hopper back on the map big time and not just as a madman although that would be his strong suit throughout the '90s in stuff like Speed, Waterworld, True Romance, etc..
Blue Velvet was accompanied by acclaimed turns in River's Edge, Hoosiers (w. Hackman), etc.. and he quickly directed (for mid-major studio Orion) the topical and semi-successful but now largely forgotten Colors (1988) w/ Duvall and Sean Penn playing cops trying (and of course failing) to sort out warring gangs in LA.
In 1990, Hopper starred in Flashback, a very broad comedy about decadal change w/ Kiefer Sutherland as an FBI straight-man escorting Hopper's burned-out '60s radical. Hijinks ensue. Hopper hams it up a lot, e.g., 'It takes more than going down to your local video store and renting Easy Rider to become a rebel' and 'Once we get outta the 80's, the 90's are going to make the 60's look like the 50's.' Haw haw. Both lines were used in the trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CO8ivMSn_eY
Also in 1990, Dennis directed (again for Orion) The Hot Spot, a pretty good, mostly forgotten, erotic, twisty southern/sunny noir w/ Don Johnson, Jennifer Connolly, Virginia Madsen etc..
In sum, Hopper had his mojo back by the second half of the '80s and my sense is that he worked pretty much exactly as much as he wanted ever after from there, albeit it's most fairly disposable, paycheck stuff after the '90s. I believe that for his artistic kicks Hopper concentrated on his rather successful painting career for his last decade or so. I'd bet that he was principally just very thankful that he didn't kill himself or anyone else in his wild years:
https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/iggy-pop-david-bowie-dennis-hopper-cocaine/
Hopper and Bowie would later appear together in Basquiat (1996) as an art impresario and Warhol respectively
https://noideasbutinthings.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/basquiat2.jpg
and, hey, it's currently on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFfcqK_S36o
Both Bowie and Hopper were deeply into their painting and art-collecting at this time so this was fortuitous casting to say the least.
<blockquote>Meanwhile, "Easy Rider" looks like a late 60's movie often DID look: gritty, realistic "semi-documentary" in style and very loose in plot and structure. Not terribly well acted by amateurs in certain scenes, either.</blockquote>I first saw Easy Rider on VHS around 1987. I gap-filled a lot of '70 and '60s movies around then (on VHS). So, for example, I remember seeing The Graduate and Chinatown and ER all for the first time within a week or two. I remember ER seeming *very* amateurish compared to those other films, especially acting-wise. Everyone who watched with me was thrilled when Jack Nicholson showed up but bummed, and felt the film went downhill, when he left the story. Roughly I remember losing interest in the film after Jack's departure then suddenly being shocked awake by the out-of-nowhere downer ending (none of us knew that *that* was coming whereas I guess that that ending would have quickly become common knowledge during its original run). I remember Hippy Jokes and jibes in the discussion after the movie.
QT has had a lot to say about ER, e.g. here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qt0W8HS9wVY
opining, for example, that ER is strangely sensitive to the time in which it's viewed so that it looked dated in the 1980s, not dated at all in the '90s and so on. I watched ER again about a decade ago and it definitely seemed better than I'd remembered it being. E.g.. the amateurish acting aside from Nicholson no longer bugged me much at all. So my own personal evolution on ER fits QT's model.
Voice as an aspect of stardom probably isn't considered nearly enough, so bravo to the effort in this thread. I have a very minor contribution to make with a small Psycho connection.
In the year of Psycho, 1960, the biggest selling pop-hit in the US (#1 for a then record 9 weeks) was Percy Faith’s “Theme From A Summer Place“. You all know it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSsiS-v6_6M
This is *still* the biggest instrumental hit that there has ever been on the US charts and it's in the top 25 biggest US hits ever. It's impossible, from a Psycho perspective, to not hear Herrmann's strings as directly attacking the signature string-piece of its time.
Well, I finally got around to watching the hit film Faith's tune came from, A Summer Place (1959) dir. by Delmer Daves (Broken Arrow, 3-10 to Yuma). The biggest name in the film is arguably Grease-punchline Sandra Dee followed by her object of lust Troy Donahue, but it's the two fathers of the teens who really jump out. Richard Egan playing Dee's character's liberal father is a somewhat generic big handsome dad-dude for the time but he's also got a great sonorous voice that makes the pretty corny dialogue almost poetic. Donahue's dissolute dad is played by Arthur Kennedy who most of us know as the reporter-figure in Lawrence of Arabia (1962) - again he's got a *great* voice that makes average dialogue sing (and he's a good physical actor too, really taking over many of his scenes).
A Summer Place (1959) is a solid film with a famous theme and two great voices (which we'd kill for today) to get us though its more eye-roll-inducing scenes. Worth a look, in part because it's good to listen to. (One slight problem with ASP, typical for the time, see also NbNW, is that its supposedly east coast scenes are all filmed in California as the coastal mountains in the backgrounds give away.)
<blockquote>Andie MacDowell, who got one of the "lucky" careers in Hollywood for a time, to me. No real personality, not a very good actress, an ex-model(natch) but not a sexy one -- and yet, she ends up in "Groundhog's Day" and "Four Weddings and a Funeral" and other major films.</blockquote>MacDowell had an incredible run of good-to-excellent movies from 1989-1994 - Sex Lies and Videotape, Green Card, then one after the other: Groundhog Day, Short Cuts, Four Weddings. But no one ever gave her much of the credit for those successes and then her hot streak cooled off after 1994 which seemed to confirm the sceptics' suspicions. Lots of people seemed to really enjoy snarking at her. For example, her line about 'not noticing it raining' at the end of Four Weddings appeared on lots of 'worst lines ever' lists notwithstanding that an almost identical slightly silly line from Gene Kelley in Singin' In the Rain is beloved.
John Carpenter's The Fog (1980) used Point Reyes; East of Eden (1955) used Mendocino (which is up near Fort Bragg) to great effect both its rich bits and its down and out bits. But I've never seen Morro Beach or Crescent City or Point Arena in a film...
Hell, back in the day when I was trying very half-heartedly to do a bit of screenwriting I thought the easiest thing to do was channel NbNW and 'connect the dots' between a bunch of nifty locations. Obviously underfilmed locations seemed to be all around me. It seemed crazy to me that no thriller had used the Crazy Horse Monument or The Grand Coulee Dam or The Columbia River Gorge or The strange German village, Leavenworth, up in the Cascade mountains near Seattle, and so on. Unfortunately Ernest Lehman's talent eluded me.
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