“A man who has nothing can whistle in a robber’s face.”—Juvenal, The Satires of Juvenal, translated by Hubert Creekmore
Is Your Senior Parent A “Screenager”?
3 hours ago
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Friday, June 19, 2009
Quote of the Day (Saul Bellow, on the Writer as Medium)
“I’ve always felt a writer is something of a medium, and when something is really working, he has a certain clairvoyant power; he has a sense of what’s going on. Whenever I’ve published a book that’s received wide attention, I’ve heard from thousands of people around the world who have been thinking the same thing—as though I’d anticipated things. I didn’t mean to, but I’ve learned one does.”—Saul Bellow, quoted by Michiko Kakutani, The Poet at the Piano: Portraits of Writers, Filmmakers, Playwrights, and Other Artists at Work (1988)
Thursday, June 18, 2009
This Day in Film History (Gance Meets Pius XII on Planned Life of Christ)
June 18, 1949—Abel Gance, creator of a film that took a potshot at a Renaissance Pope, was given a private audience with a more recent successor of St. Peter, Pius XII, in the Vatican, to discuss the French cinema pioneer’s dream project: La Divine Tragedie (The Divine Tragedy), a biopic of the life of Christ.
No problems appear to have been stirred by the meeting between dissenter and pontiff. All incessant energy, Gance was leaving no stone unturned in his effort to consult every religious figure who might help shed light on Jesus—and, in the process, help him make a film whose epic scope and importance would likely have exceeded that of his 1927 silent classic, Napoleon.
Unfortunately, for reasons having nothing to do with Pius’ attitude toward the film, Gance’s best-laid plans fell apart 14 months after the papal audience. The failure all had to do with the third man in that room, producer Georges de la Grandiere, who failed to provide the financial backing he had promised. Without the money, Gance was forced to cancel the project, though he continued to work on treatments for it, and hope against hope, well into his mid-80s.
The road to film glory is littered with all too many classics that died along the way, including by the likes of:
* Josef von Sternberg, whose 1937 adaptation of Robert Graves’ I, Claudius collapsed after a month of shooting, ostensibly because of an auto accident involving Merle Oberon, but more likely because producer Alexander Korda tired of the incessant bickering between the director and his star, Charles Laughton.
* David Lean, whose reexamination of the mutiny on the Bounty fell apart because of financing issues in the late ‘70s, and whose last project, an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, was abandoned when the director died in 1991, six weeks before principal photography was about to begin.
* Orson Welles, who deserves to have a whole wing for The Ones That Got Away, including a documentary taken out of his hands (It’s All True), as well as several other films that perished on the vine (Don Quixote, The Other Side of the Wind, The Cradle Will Rock, The Big Brass Ring).
But I find Gance’s failure to get his project launched a tragedy of its own. With his strength as a technical innovator (he pioneered Polyvision, a triptych or three-panel process, as well as stereo sound effects for Napoleon) and the nature of his own background, The Divine Tragedy might have overcome the difficulties that, in one way or another, ensnared others daring or foolhardy enough to tackle the life of Christ, including Cecil B. DeMille, Nicholas Ray, George Stevens, Martin Scorsese, and—of course!—Mel Gibson.
World War II—and especially the dropping of the atomic bomb—gave greater urgency to Gance’s quest to make this film. "Apart from the fact that La Divine Tragedie will be the crowning achievement of my life's work,” he noted, “my interest in making it derives from the conviction that showing such a film to the masses would release such a will for peace as would save humanity from impending cataclysm."
The project might also have attracted the maestro of what he called “the music of light” because of comparatively aesthetic reasons: his need to find a modern counterpart to the Biblical verse, “In the beginning was the Word….” His synopsis of the project featured a vividly cinematic restatement of this: “It is through the Christ and through his Passion that the image can achieve the Verb.”
In the postwar period, the director found himself longing for something distinctly old-fashioned: a miracle. He certainly needed something on that order to revive his former reputation as France’s answer to D.W. Griffith. For someone with such socialist and pacifist instincts embodied in his films, he also embraced, at one point or another, militaristic figures: from right to left, Mussolini, Franco, DeGaulle, and Mao Tse-Tung. The brilliant director was increasingly seen as a has-been, and even an opportunist.
In filming Lucrece Borgia (1935), Gance had committed two sins that would have been regarded as egregious by the Catholic Church. Bad enough that this tale of corruption in Renaissance Italy had resorted to full-frontal female nudity at a time when this ran against censorship codes of the time. But, as one of the plot’s villains, he had also used the Borgia Pope, Alexander VI.
Why, with this background, would the Holy Father have even given Gance the time of day? Yes, Pius might have been impressed by the director’s assurances of good faith. As a leader whose silence on the Nazis had called into question whose good intentions during the war, he might have felt sympathy for another suffering from ostracism.
But I think another factor might have lent Gance credibility in the eyes of the Pope: the director’s backing by the Office Familiale de Documentation Artistique, an anti-communist Catholic organization. (Pius was a fierce anti-communist.)
Anti-Semitism has sometimes been lodged against films about Christ (see, of course, Mel Gibson). Gance, however, might have been able to sidestep this. In addition to checking in with the pope, he had also consulted with the newly established l’Amitie Judeo-Chretienne de France about the script. Moreover, his own secret family history (he was the illegitimate son of a Jewish physician) would have rendered him more sympathetic to Jewish sensibilities.
As the producer of Monsieur Vincent, a treatment of the life of St. Vincent de Paul that won a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, Georges de la Grandiere might have seemed an excellent choice to help get Gance’s project made. But, after extensive scouting of locations, vetting of actors (American actress Irene Dunne, a devout Roman Catholic, agreed to play Mary), and six scripts that reduced the film's running time from 6 1/2 to 2 1/2 hours, it all came apart in August 1950.
No problems appear to have been stirred by the meeting between dissenter and pontiff. All incessant energy, Gance was leaving no stone unturned in his effort to consult every religious figure who might help shed light on Jesus—and, in the process, help him make a film whose epic scope and importance would likely have exceeded that of his 1927 silent classic, Napoleon.
Unfortunately, for reasons having nothing to do with Pius’ attitude toward the film, Gance’s best-laid plans fell apart 14 months after the papal audience. The failure all had to do with the third man in that room, producer Georges de la Grandiere, who failed to provide the financial backing he had promised. Without the money, Gance was forced to cancel the project, though he continued to work on treatments for it, and hope against hope, well into his mid-80s.
The road to film glory is littered with all too many classics that died along the way, including by the likes of:
* Josef von Sternberg, whose 1937 adaptation of Robert Graves’ I, Claudius collapsed after a month of shooting, ostensibly because of an auto accident involving Merle Oberon, but more likely because producer Alexander Korda tired of the incessant bickering between the director and his star, Charles Laughton.
* David Lean, whose reexamination of the mutiny on the Bounty fell apart because of financing issues in the late ‘70s, and whose last project, an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, was abandoned when the director died in 1991, six weeks before principal photography was about to begin.
* Orson Welles, who deserves to have a whole wing for The Ones That Got Away, including a documentary taken out of his hands (It’s All True), as well as several other films that perished on the vine (Don Quixote, The Other Side of the Wind, The Cradle Will Rock, The Big Brass Ring).
But I find Gance’s failure to get his project launched a tragedy of its own. With his strength as a technical innovator (he pioneered Polyvision, a triptych or three-panel process, as well as stereo sound effects for Napoleon) and the nature of his own background, The Divine Tragedy might have overcome the difficulties that, in one way or another, ensnared others daring or foolhardy enough to tackle the life of Christ, including Cecil B. DeMille, Nicholas Ray, George Stevens, Martin Scorsese, and—of course!—Mel Gibson.
World War II—and especially the dropping of the atomic bomb—gave greater urgency to Gance’s quest to make this film. "Apart from the fact that La Divine Tragedie will be the crowning achievement of my life's work,” he noted, “my interest in making it derives from the conviction that showing such a film to the masses would release such a will for peace as would save humanity from impending cataclysm."
The project might also have attracted the maestro of what he called “the music of light” because of comparatively aesthetic reasons: his need to find a modern counterpart to the Biblical verse, “In the beginning was the Word….” His synopsis of the project featured a vividly cinematic restatement of this: “It is through the Christ and through his Passion that the image can achieve the Verb.”
In the postwar period, the director found himself longing for something distinctly old-fashioned: a miracle. He certainly needed something on that order to revive his former reputation as France’s answer to D.W. Griffith. For someone with such socialist and pacifist instincts embodied in his films, he also embraced, at one point or another, militaristic figures: from right to left, Mussolini, Franco, DeGaulle, and Mao Tse-Tung. The brilliant director was increasingly seen as a has-been, and even an opportunist.
In filming Lucrece Borgia (1935), Gance had committed two sins that would have been regarded as egregious by the Catholic Church. Bad enough that this tale of corruption in Renaissance Italy had resorted to full-frontal female nudity at a time when this ran against censorship codes of the time. But, as one of the plot’s villains, he had also used the Borgia Pope, Alexander VI.
Why, with this background, would the Holy Father have even given Gance the time of day? Yes, Pius might have been impressed by the director’s assurances of good faith. As a leader whose silence on the Nazis had called into question whose good intentions during the war, he might have felt sympathy for another suffering from ostracism.
But I think another factor might have lent Gance credibility in the eyes of the Pope: the director’s backing by the Office Familiale de Documentation Artistique, an anti-communist Catholic organization. (Pius was a fierce anti-communist.)
Anti-Semitism has sometimes been lodged against films about Christ (see, of course, Mel Gibson). Gance, however, might have been able to sidestep this. In addition to checking in with the pope, he had also consulted with the newly established l’Amitie Judeo-Chretienne de France about the script. Moreover, his own secret family history (he was the illegitimate son of a Jewish physician) would have rendered him more sympathetic to Jewish sensibilities.
As the producer of Monsieur Vincent, a treatment of the life of St. Vincent de Paul that won a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, Georges de la Grandiere might have seemed an excellent choice to help get Gance’s project made. But, after extensive scouting of locations, vetting of actors (American actress Irene Dunne, a devout Roman Catholic, agreed to play Mary), and six scripts that reduced the film's running time from 6 1/2 to 2 1/2 hours, it all came apart in August 1950.
Gance did not give up entirely on his dream movie, but his efforts on the project, extending into the 1970s, became increasingly more feeble with age. He was lucky to revive his career at all after a 10-year hiatus from the screen.
Quote of the Day (Tennessee Williams, on Memory)
“Life is all memory except for the one present moment that goes by so quick you can hardly catch it going.”—Tennessee Williams, The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore (1963)
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
This Day in Presidential History (“New Yorker” Story Turns JFK Into War Hero)
June 17, 1944—“Survival,” a nonfiction narrative by John Hersey that appeared in The New Yorker, did more than just begin the 30-year-old writer’s association with the famous magazine. In telling how the crew of PT-109 was given up for lost, then lived through five harrowing days after being rammed in a nighttime action by a Japanese destroyer, it helped turn the American boat’s skipper, Lt. John F. Kennedy, into a national hero—and relaunched the political brand of his family.
Neither Hersey nor his New Yorker editors mentioned that the writer had a personal connection to the 27-year-old lieutenant. Hersey’s wife at the time, the former Frances Anne Cannon, had been a serious flame of the sailor until she became engaged to Hersey. It took a while for Kennedy to get over her loss—or as long as you’d expect, anyway, from someone with a famously wandering eye.
(Ironically, in the 1960 Presidential primaries, Hersey backed Adlai Stevenson, who was sitting on the sidelines but hoping for a convention deadlock. Nevertheless, he was in the audience nearly a year later on that cold January day when JFK delivered his memorable inaugural address.)
JFK was having drinks at New York’s Stork Club with the Herseys and other friends when he told the group about his near-death experience in the South Pacific in early August the prior year. Hersey was especially intrigued by the “dreamlike quality” of Kennedy’s description of the current bringing him back to the point where he had started to float after his ship had been split in two.
To his credit, Kennedy suggested that Hersey talk to three crewmates before interviewing him. Once he saw the initial draft he strongly urged the writer to devote more space to executive officer Lennie Thom.
Not that Kennedy was entirely naïve about what all of this meant to him personally. Before agreeing to sit down with Hersey, JFK called his father for advice. Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. was delighted not so much by the story itself, but by Hersey’s intended target—Life Magazine, a mass-market periodical then at the height of its influence.
For the last few years, the former Ambassador to Great Britain had remained publicly silent in the face of furious attacks on his isolationism and defeatism as war broke out in Europe. He’d been galled by the thought that his own chance to become the first Irish-Catholic President was over, but he intended to boost the political careers of his two oldest sons.
(It had long been assumed that the family patriarch had switched his attention to Jack only after Joe Jr. had been killed in the war. But an FBI wiretap that only came to light years later revealed that Joe Sr. had wanted to maintain the potential political viability of Joe and Jack as early as 1942.)
His hopes for elective or appointive office might be forever shot, but that did not mean that Joseph Kennedy Sr. had lost his ability to cajole, jawbone, manipulate, or use his money to get what he wanted. Now he swung into action on behalf of Jack.
Jack swallowed hard but remained a good sport when he learned that Life had turned down Hersey’s article but that The New Yorker had accepted it. With his father, it was an entirely different story.
Neither Hersey nor his New Yorker editors mentioned that the writer had a personal connection to the 27-year-old lieutenant. Hersey’s wife at the time, the former Frances Anne Cannon, had been a serious flame of the sailor until she became engaged to Hersey. It took a while for Kennedy to get over her loss—or as long as you’d expect, anyway, from someone with a famously wandering eye.
(Ironically, in the 1960 Presidential primaries, Hersey backed Adlai Stevenson, who was sitting on the sidelines but hoping for a convention deadlock. Nevertheless, he was in the audience nearly a year later on that cold January day when JFK delivered his memorable inaugural address.)
JFK was having drinks at New York’s Stork Club with the Herseys and other friends when he told the group about his near-death experience in the South Pacific in early August the prior year. Hersey was especially intrigued by the “dreamlike quality” of Kennedy’s description of the current bringing him back to the point where he had started to float after his ship had been split in two.
To his credit, Kennedy suggested that Hersey talk to three crewmates before interviewing him. Once he saw the initial draft he strongly urged the writer to devote more space to executive officer Lennie Thom.
Not that Kennedy was entirely naïve about what all of this meant to him personally. Before agreeing to sit down with Hersey, JFK called his father for advice. Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. was delighted not so much by the story itself, but by Hersey’s intended target—Life Magazine, a mass-market periodical then at the height of its influence.
For the last few years, the former Ambassador to Great Britain had remained publicly silent in the face of furious attacks on his isolationism and defeatism as war broke out in Europe. He’d been galled by the thought that his own chance to become the first Irish-Catholic President was over, but he intended to boost the political careers of his two oldest sons.
(It had long been assumed that the family patriarch had switched his attention to Jack only after Joe Jr. had been killed in the war. But an FBI wiretap that only came to light years later revealed that Joe Sr. had wanted to maintain the potential political viability of Joe and Jack as early as 1942.)
His hopes for elective or appointive office might be forever shot, but that did not mean that Joseph Kennedy Sr. had lost his ability to cajole, jawbone, manipulate, or use his money to get what he wanted. Now he swung into action on behalf of Jack.
Jack swallowed hard but remained a good sport when he learned that Life had turned down Hersey’s article but that The New Yorker had accepted it. With his father, it was an entirely different story.
Highbrows might be okay on occasion, such as imparting a patina of class for his sons at Harvard, but the circulation of The New Yorker simply did compare to others. So, if he could not get the piece on his son in Life, he would aim for Reader’s Digest, maybe an even bigger prize.
The stumbling block was Reader’s Digest’s policy on condensation and rights. New Yorker editor Harold Ross loathed abridging material, believing that his magazine had already edited everything that needed to be cut from any piece. Moreover, the Digest’s policy of purchasing rights in perpetuity, the better for constant reselling, was one he abominated.
In the end, Ross yielded in the face of two negotiating ploys by Joe Kennedy. First, Reader’s Digest would make an exception to its reprint policy, forsaking perpetuity in favor of a one-time-only exception. Second, the Digest agreed to contribute to a philanthropy involving the widows and orphans of naval personnel.
The Digest version, appearing in the August issue of the magazine, would be the one that the Kennedys would use at critical points in the rise of JFK: during his initial successful campaigns for Congress and the Senate, when hundreds of thousands of reprints would be used throughout Massachusetts.
The journalist Robert J. Donovan would pick up on the story and expand it into a bestselling book in 1961. Two years later, a film based on that, starring Cliff Robertson in the JFK role, appeared. (Warren Beatty had been JFK’s personal choice to play him.)
It wasn’t until more than 30 years after the event, and a decade after Kennedy had been shot, that journalists and historians probed deeper into the PT-109 incident. Nobody doubted his role in saving the life of at least one injured sailor, whom he had towed by the life jacket strap with his teeth.
But The Search for J.F.K., by Joan and Clay Blair Jr., questioned what had happened on the night when the boat had been cut in two—more specifically, if Kennedy had his men properly alert (nobody saw the destroyer bearing down on them until the last seconds).
The stumbling block was Reader’s Digest’s policy on condensation and rights. New Yorker editor Harold Ross loathed abridging material, believing that his magazine had already edited everything that needed to be cut from any piece. Moreover, the Digest’s policy of purchasing rights in perpetuity, the better for constant reselling, was one he abominated.
In the end, Ross yielded in the face of two negotiating ploys by Joe Kennedy. First, Reader’s Digest would make an exception to its reprint policy, forsaking perpetuity in favor of a one-time-only exception. Second, the Digest agreed to contribute to a philanthropy involving the widows and orphans of naval personnel.
The Digest version, appearing in the August issue of the magazine, would be the one that the Kennedys would use at critical points in the rise of JFK: during his initial successful campaigns for Congress and the Senate, when hundreds of thousands of reprints would be used throughout Massachusetts.
The journalist Robert J. Donovan would pick up on the story and expand it into a bestselling book in 1961. Two years later, a film based on that, starring Cliff Robertson in the JFK role, appeared. (Warren Beatty had been JFK’s personal choice to play him.)
It wasn’t until more than 30 years after the event, and a decade after Kennedy had been shot, that journalists and historians probed deeper into the PT-109 incident. Nobody doubted his role in saving the life of at least one injured sailor, whom he had towed by the life jacket strap with his teeth.
But The Search for J.F.K., by Joan and Clay Blair Jr., questioned what had happened on the night when the boat had been cut in two—more specifically, if Kennedy had his men properly alert (nobody saw the destroyer bearing down on them until the last seconds).
Other, more recent JFK biographers, including Nigel Hamilton and Robert Dallek, contended that JFK behaved, in Hamilton’s words, “with commendable courage and intelligence given the chaos, cowardice and confusion” elsewhere on that night.
Nobody could gainsay the crew’s powerful devotion to Kennedy. They had already bonded with him even before the incident, and his performance under dire conditions (several were not aware that JFK towed the sailor despite the fact that the destruction of the boat had aggravated JFK's old back injury) only cemented their loyalty.
One sentence in the article brought me up short: Kennedy’s thought upon being hit by the destroyer Amagiri: “This is how it feels to be killed.” The question inescapably comes to mind whether the same thought flashed through his mind on November 22, 1963.
The story of the creation of the PT-109 legend, then, owes to two factors: JFK’s ability to fascinate and lead men and his father’s still-prodigious ability, even while in disgrace, to manage news and manipulate events. The same combination would eventually produce Kennedy’s victory in the 1960 Presidential campaign.
Nobody could gainsay the crew’s powerful devotion to Kennedy. They had already bonded with him even before the incident, and his performance under dire conditions (several were not aware that JFK towed the sailor despite the fact that the destruction of the boat had aggravated JFK's old back injury) only cemented their loyalty.
One sentence in the article brought me up short: Kennedy’s thought upon being hit by the destroyer Amagiri: “This is how it feels to be killed.” The question inescapably comes to mind whether the same thought flashed through his mind on November 22, 1963.
The story of the creation of the PT-109 legend, then, owes to two factors: JFK’s ability to fascinate and lead men and his father’s still-prodigious ability, even while in disgrace, to manage news and manipulate events. The same combination would eventually produce Kennedy’s victory in the 1960 Presidential campaign.
Quote of the Day (H.L. Mencken, on “Professionally Dishonorable” Politicians)
“A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.”—H.L. Mencken quoted by Roger Butterfield, “Mr. Mencken Sounds Off” (interview), Life Magazine, August 5, 1946
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore
Many a time over the past week, the Sixties classic by the Walker Brothers rang through my mind. Even in the middle of the night, the steady drumbeat of rain against my window woke me up. It disturbed my sweet, peaceful rest, in much the same way that an insistent telephone interrupted Dorothy Parker’s train of thought, leading her to ask, “What fresh hell is this?”I’m not sure which of the following occasions left me the most peeved:
1) Deciding on Friday night to take a long drive to the Shakespeare Festival in New Jersey in Madison, based partly on the prediction that the weekend would be largely clear of rain—only to discover the next day, as I drove back and forth from the production, that I’d have to battle precipitation the whole way.
2) Getting two blocks from work yesterday, then being forced to seek shelter under a canopy and unable to move without getting soaked.
3) Listening to the radio weatherman this morning, saying that we should get no rain—and then the dreaded words—“for the most part.”
In a brief respite from all of this on Sunday, I took some pictures in Overpeck Park in Bergen County, NJ, only a mile or so from where I live. I thought I’d try out a close-up of what I see an awful lot there: puddles. Accompanying this blog is one such image.
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