Movies that were better than the books

I saw this on--it might have been The Guardian online. They asked readers to post comments with any movies that were better than the books they were based on. I didn't want to sign up to comment on their articles, so here's my answer.

I don't read many novels anymore.

But here are books I've read where the movie adaptations were better:

The Exorcist. I read the book on the Greyhound between New York and Chicago in the middle of the night. It was creepy at first until I got to the part where the demon was causing things to move by themselves and reading the priest's mind. But the priest wasn't sure there were signs of demonic possession. He thought it could be perfectly ordinary psychic phenomenon. That killed it for me.

The Long Goodbye. The book wasn't very good, considered a sign of Raymond Chandler's decline. The Robert Altman movie was a big improvement creating some connection between events. He stood the ending on its head which was a big improvement.

Planet of the Apes. I'm talking about the original movie. The novelist Pierre Boulle saw the book as one of his lesser works and I think he was right. Rod Serling adapted it freely.

I read a couple of James Bond books. Casino Royale stunk. James Bond's mission was to ruin a French labor union so to hell with him. He survives a couple of murder attempts entirely by chance, then he wins at a card game which requires no skill at all and is purely a game of chance. He's captured and tortured until someone comes and rescues him. I wouldn't want to, but I could do all that stuff.

Goldfinger just wasn't very good. I glanced at a copy of Live and Let Die in a bookstore. They apparently published the British edition. One chapter was entitled "N****r Heaven" without the asterisks. To hell with Ian Fleming.

Kurosawa's High & Low was infinitely better than the American novel King's Ransom it was based on. I started reading the book and was surprised at how closely Kurosawa stuck to some aspects of the plot. It starts with a business meeting at the home of a shoe company executive. In the book, his name was Gordon King---in the movie it was Kingo Gondo. But the book shows the kidnappers in the first or second chapter and they're not very interesting.

Dracula. I thought the novel got kind of dumb as it went on. It ends with the guys in it going to Transylvania to finish off the vampire. I'm all in favor of killing Dracula, but I would think that the guys would have a few doubts here and there as to whether vampires exist. And one of the guys was a little too happy about giving his life to kill Dracula.

And books that were better than the movie

This won't take long since, again, I don't read that many novels.

The Bridge Over the River Kwai (the book's title was slightly different from the movie's). The book had no dialog and gave some interesting details about Japanese vs British methods of bridge construction and knife fighting techniques of French commandos.

Compulsion, with an interesting but no doubt incorrect 1920's Freudian analysis of Leopold and Loeb.

Donovan's Brain. A doctor is being controlled by a brain he's kept alive. It's written in the first person and the doctor describes all the characters he encounters in medical terms.

The Maltese Falcon. For one thing, you know the scene where Elisha Cook tells Humphrey Bogart to "shove off", and Bogart says, "People lose teeth talking like that"? In the book, Elisha Cook's character didn't say "shove off". He said "Fuck you".

Midnight Cowboy. Details in the book are only be hinted at in the movie. We get the characters' deep background.

Features shot on Flip camcorder

What is This Film Called...Love?

I saw that one movie, a documentary of sorts, filmed in Mexico City by Mark Cousins. He was there waiting for a flight out and used a Flip camcorder to film himself walking around talking to a picture of Sergei Eisenstein.

Later, I looked at a bad, obscure Roku channel that had a horror movie on it alleged to have been filmed on a Flip camcorder. I didn't watch it. Probably wasn't any good, but at least it had a gimmick. I thought I could go back and watch it later but I couldn't find it again.

I found a list online somewhere of movies filmed with a Canon XL1, but I've looked and found nothing about movies filmed on a Flip camera. Might be a good reason for that. There could be hundreds that nobody ever heard of.

Anybody know of any?

Years ago a guy thought he could raise money from Nokia to shoot a movie on a cell phone. Nokia didn't go for it which was probably wise. 

Tell your children

Remember when Mitt Romney was running for president and a guy told how Romney attacked him in high school. Teenage Mitt had been outraged that his classmate had slightly longer than average hair.

Before he went to prison, Orthodox Zionist Jack Abramoff claimed that he couldn't remember the time in high school that he shoved a classmate down a flight of stairs.

And now Sean Spicer on a book signing tour was confronted by a Black former classmate who he had called a "n****r" as he tried picking a fight with him in high school.

Spicer's threatening to sue, but I wouldn't let that worry me.

And, you kids out there! Always be nice! People will remember if you do horrible things to them!
 

Andy Kindler's 2018 State of Industry Address

Okay. Here it is. Andy Kindler's 2018 State of the Industry Address at Montreal's Just For Laughs comedy festival.

So much has happened the last year. It seems so long ago that those #MeToo guys were shamed and shunned. But here it is. You can readily find his previous years' speeches on YouTube if nowhere else. Go on! Give it a listen!

https://soundcloud.com/user-517669847/andy-kindlers-2018-state-of-the-industry-address

The wonder of 16mm

Spike Lee with Krasnogorsk camera.

There were a couple of things I read long ago.

One was an article about the making of a 16mm made-for-TV movie. This was in the days of analog television. They filmed it using a 16mm camera obviously, but all the other equipment was stuff designed for 35mm. There was a photo of a little 16mm camera mounted on what seemed like an oversized dolly. They didn't exploit any of the advantages of the smaller film guage and treated it like it was 35mm and, I don't know if the audience could tell, but the director of photography thought it looked as good as anything shot on 35mm (at least when it was shown in a TV screen.)

I've also seen in more than one place recommendations that 35mm still photographers carefully compose their shots rather than taking dozens and dozens of shots and hope one comes out okay, as news photographers tend to do.

So, okay. I mention it here because I watched a lovely test roll someone shot on 16mm film using a Russian Krasnogorsk camera. Sure, it looked better than most digital videos I've seen, but was it because film just looks better, or because film is so expensive you treat it differently?

I read all the comments on the video. They all gushed about how good film looked. One brave soul did say that he had come to like digital video better, and maybe it's an arbitrary aesthetic. 

Perhaps forcing yourself to do all manual settings on a prosumer camcorder would simulate the experience of having to slow down and not waste film.

But I happened to look on eBay. 16mm cameras were built to last, and you can get them incredibly cheap now.

Les Moonves: Humanitarian???

Just four months ago, violent sex offender Les Moonves, the head of CBS, was given the 2018 "Humanitarian" Award by the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

Moonves is rich, he's powerful, he's Jewish, and of course he's a Zionist. Beyond that, they didn't even PRETEND that he was in any way a "humanitarian". There gave no explanation at all for the award.

Harvey Weinstein got the same award in 2015.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center has also given "Humanitarian" awards to, among others, Menahem Begin, Jerry Bruckheimer, George H.W. Bush, Tom Cruise, Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg, Ron Howard, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Senator George Mitchell, Rupert Murdoch, Ronald Reagan, Nicolas Sarkozy, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Natan Sharansky, Frank Sinatra, Will Smith and  Margaret Thatcher. In what way were any of these people "humanitarians"?

Makes me wonder what monstrous act Ronny Howard committed.

Scumrock, 2003

In the '60's or '70's, former child actor Paul Peterson sold what rights he had to The Donna Reed Show--any residuals he had coming--because it was black & white and NOBODY watched black & white TV anymore. Poor fool.

And now I'm sitting here watching a 2003 standard definition video movie called Scumrock, available on Fandor. Filmed on Hi8.

I don't know. It's not bad. In this age of wide screen high definition video, the 4 x 5 aspect ratio makes it more cinematic somehow. Having a different aspect ratio than the TV is the important thing.

The movie is something about punk rockers who call it "scumrock" instead of punk rock, and one of them is talking about making a movie on 16mm. They seem like terrible people. But who am I to judge.

Just as the Fisher Price PXL 2000 has a following among artists and hipsters, standard definition analog video has its place. This movie is an inspiration.

CBS's Les Moonves: Violent Sex Offender

Les Moonves' great uncle reads Israel's "declaration of independence".

It turns out that Les Moonves, the longtime CEO and president of CBS, has been sexually assaulting women for years. He attacks them and, if they aren't charmed an enchanted by this, he fires them.

Moonves is the great-nephew of the first Israeli prime minister, David Ben Gurion (real name Dave Grun).
 

Moonves' oddly proportioned great uncle can't sit in regular chair.

Deadline Hollywood reporting on Ronan Farrow's article in The New Yorker mentions one of several victims:

...aspiring screenwriter Janet Jones met Moonves in his office for a pitch meeting. She arrived to meet him at 20th Century Fox, briefcase in hand, wearing a pantsuit, ready to talk about her screenplay. He offered her a glass of wine and made unwanted sexual overtures.

“He came around the corner of the table and threw himself on top of me. It was very fast,” Jones told the New Yorker, saying Moonves began trying to kiss her. Jones said that she struggled, and shoved Moonves away hard, yelling, “What do you think you’re doing?” Moonves responded, “‘Well, I was hitting on you.'”

Jones recounted the experience to producer Mike Marvin, who said he confronted Moonves about his behavior. Not long afterwards, Jones said she received a threatening call from Moonves who told her, “I will ruin your career. You will never get a writing job. No one will hire you.”

Read Farrow's article here.

Bill Cosby, Fred MacMurray, Oedipus Rex

Tommy Kirk and Fred MacMurray

Now, a while back, I posted something about My Three Sons. There was an episode where Fred MacMurray was going to spank Ernie even though he was fourteen. Instead, he took him to a police station and forced him to confess to a crime he wasn't even a suspect in.

Still, MacMurray seemed like a better TV dad than convicted serial rapist Bill Cosby.

Maybe there's something wrong with them in general---with men who want to be known as father figures.

I was reading something about Disney star Tommy Kirk. You know who didn't like Tommy Kirk? Fred MacMurray. Kirk thought MacMurray could tell he was gay. He said:

"I really liked him very much but the feeling wasn't mutual. That hurt me a lot and for a long time I hated him. It's hard not to hate somebody who doesn't like you. I was sort of looking for a father figure and I pushed him too hard. He resented it and I guess I was pretty repellent to him, so we didn't get along. We had a couple of blow ups on set... He was a nice person, but I was just too demanding. I came on too strong because I desperately wanted to be his friend."

On My Three Sons, there really wasn't much chemistry between MacMurray and his sons.  Probably because he was never there. It was in his contract that he barely had to work. They would film all his scenes at one time. When we see the kids speaking to MacMurray, they were addressing a mop or a broom held up by a stagehand.

Oedipal conflict is a two-way street. In the play Oedipus Rex, Oedipus's biological father was clearly the aggressor. 

Look at "Charlie X", the first episode of the old Star Trek series. It seemed to be based loosely of Oedipus Rex. Captain Kirk takes Charlie to teach him Judo. Charlie is smaller than him and is being introduced to Judo for the very first time, but Captain Kirk inexplicably feels it necessary to humiliate him with his superior Judo skills.

And Oedipus's biological father was a rapist a la Bill Cosby.

Rear screen projection

Last night there was an episode of Perry Mason with a scene filmed Dragnet-style in front of a rear screen projection. Perry talks to a football coach with players practicing in the background. They dubbed in some background noise of the players. It was obvious but it looked good enough. With black and white lighting, you underexpose or overexpose the background to make the subjects of the shot stand out and they did that.

Anybody can do it now with a camcorder and a green screen. And why not? They used rear screen projection in film for years---it never fooled anybody but no one complained.

On Dragnet, they would film a master shot on location with no sound then film all the dialog in the studio with a rear screen projection and maybe a car parked there. It usually worked pretty well. I was disappointed when they recorded dialog on location. It didn't happen often, but when it did, it stood out like a sore thumb.

On the other hand, it was a really bad Perry Mason. I said this before. I watched old episodes of that show for years and it was great. But I had seen every episode.

Then they started showing it on this other channel. They show all these episodes I've never seen before and they were all terrible. It turns out they only had the best episodes in syndication all these years. Now they're showing the dregs.

Doubt, 2008

The movie Doubt was on TV in the next room. Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman shouted their lines at each other. Did yelling add anything?

Like this exchange:

"YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO ACT ON YOUR OWN! YOU HAVE TAKEN VOWS, OBEDIENCE BEING ONE! YOU ANSWER TO US! YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO STEP OUTSIDE THE CHURCH!"

"I WILL STEP OUTSIDE THE CHURCH IS THAT'S WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE, 'TIL THE DOOR SHOULD SHUT BEHIND ME! I WILL DO WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE, THOUGH I'M DAMNED TO HELL! YOU SHOULD UNDERSTAND THAT OR YOU WILL MISTAKE ME!"

They were talking in an office, during school hours I believe. Did they want everyone to hear? Couldn't it just as well have been:

"You have no right to act on your own. You have taken vows, obedience being one. You answer to us. You have no right to step outside the church."

"I will step outside the church if that's what needs to be done, 'til the door should shut behind me. I will do what needs to be done, though I'm damned to Hell. You should understand that, or you will mistake me."

It's all too easy now

They had a Budd Boetticher film festival.

When I was in high school, a teacher---the one who appeared in the movie Buffalo Rider---hipped the class to cheap movies we could see at the university. This was before home video took over. University groups showed movies on Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights. Some were related to the group's mission, some were just to raise money and some were to promote film as an artform.

So I started going over there every weekend. Depending on what was playing, I would see five to eight movies every weekend. I saw my first samurai movie (Sanjuro), my first king fu movie (Chinese Connection) and my first X-rated movie (Last Tango in Paris) there. Saw movies I would have never seen otherwise. French gangster movies, bad 1950s westerns. I saw an odd pseudo-French Hollywood movie from the '50's. I don't remember if the actors spoke in French accents, but the dialog sounded like subtitles.

Feminists protested The Story of O and a slasher movie with gay sado-masochistic undertones shown as part of a gay film festival. The Story of O didn't interest me and the gay student group decided not to show the slasher movie.

I saw an anti-porn documentary put on by a feminist student group. Later, when some friends dragged me off to see a porno film, I recognized one of the stars from the documentary. "That guy's an anti-porn activist now!"

Saw Teenage Caveman. A middle aged couple started talking to me. Asked if Roger Corman was anything like Ed Wood. I said, no, the French thought he was an auteur and he's well-regarded in Hollywood because he gave a lot of people their first jobs there. They responded by mocking the French.

Back then I never walked out of a movie even if it was terrible and didn't cost anything to get in. But now look at me. I sit here, I click on something on Roku, watch for five minutes and turn it off if it doesn't grab me. I have no idea what my own criteria are.

I don't know if I'm getting smarter or dumber. Is my attention span shot or am I just more discriminating? How much mental effort should I put into watching TV?

Not much I can do about it in any case.

Thai soccer kids get out of the hospital

The time I bought a bad camcorder

Years ago I bought a 3 chip Panasonic digital camcorder. I can't remember---they sold for four or five hundred dollars so when I saw one for under $250, I jumped at it and ordered one on-line.

They called me and told me that there was a slightly newer version with a different model number. Okay. Fine. The camcorder arrived and I discovered that the one change they made was removing the external mic jack.

Before it shipped, I had gotten a call from the store which I later learned was Hassidic owned and operated. The Hassid yelled at me that I needed extra batteries and hung up on me when I didn't instantly agree.

It turned out the reason it was so cheap is that high definition video had rendered it obsolete. I hadn't paid attention to new developments and made a stupid impulse purchase.

I later saw a character using the same camera in a zero-budget movie. Apparently the director owned one, so I felt a little better about it.

I know that's not much of a story. I'm thinking about it now because there are old standard definition three-chip prosumer camcorders for sale cheap. I know it's stupid, but I feel like buying one.

Perry Mason: The worst episode

I posted about this before. A local channel has started showing really bad episodes of Perry Mason and The Twilight Zone. I've seen those shows for years on TV and thought I had seen every episode. But it turns out that, all these years, they only had the good episodes in syndication. Now they're showing the dregs.

You know how Perry Mason would always get the real murderer to admit it in court? "That's right! It was me! They said I was too dumb! Well who's dumb now!" It turns out that in a lot of episodes he would entrap people outside the courtroom. He would bring up some piece of evidence and when the real killer returned to the scene to destroy it, Perry Mason and police would come walking out of the back room. "Ah ha!" Columbo did the same thing now and then.

Saw the worst episode the other night.

A wealthy eccentric was murdered. Perry is defending his elderly housekeeper who was accused of the crime. The man was killed by a gorilla he had caged in the basement of the mansion. Someone had let it out.

So, before the murder is discovered, Perry Mason enters the house. He walks upstairs. And there's a massive gorilla in the hallway. Seemed sort of terrifying in the context of a serious drama. Perry slips into a bedroom and locks the door, like that's going to help.

The gorilla breaks through the door.

The man is dead and the housekeeper is lying on the floor. She tells Mason not to look at the gorilla and give him his car keys to play with.

They kept showing close-ups of the gorilla. The gorilla mask was only lined up with one eye of the guy in the gorilla suit. I wondered if it was supposed to be a guy in a costume.

I don't think there ever was any golden age of television.

Slow cinema

From Film Socialisme, filmed on the Costa Concordia,

the cruise ship that later wrecked on the coast of Italy

in 2012. 

I guess I'm behind the times. Started getting into "slow cinema", art house movies made up of long takes in which not much happens. Now I find that Paul Schrader has already declared that tendency to have run its course. He says it was interesting ten years ago but it's a dead end.
 The movies are better-looking than most, have a greater feeling of realism because not much is happening and there's not a lot of dialog. Some are static camera, some, like Violet, have some lovely tracking shots---kids on BMX bicycles in that case.

I don't know how much plot is too much or too little in these things. Something has to happen. Watched Jean-Luc Godard's Film Socialisme which I enjoyed but I didn't really see any kind of storyline except for the kids being ignored by their parents in a couple of scenes.

People are always coming up with new styles in film. They all work for a time, then they become hack and filmmakers move on. One theory is as good as another.

I made "slow movies" without intending to. I was a tourist in a medieval village on a French mountaintop. I filmed a little French kid curled up on a stone wall playing a whistle. He wasn't going anywhere but I thought maybe he would do something so I kept filming for a couple of minutes. I think he knew I was filming. The place attracted so many tourists I figured he was used to strangers photographing him.

Another time I was filming a gallery opening. I filmed an old man gazing at a sculpture. Normally, I would have filmed for twenty seconds and moved on, but I filmed and filmed. "Come on, grandpa! DO something," I thought. Later, the artist told me that she found that long take "moving".

Remember when home video started? It wasn't until Video8 came along that camcorders starting using flying eraser heads. On the old VHS cameras, every time you started or stopped taping, there would be this big electronic glitch in the picture. Because of that and the fact that videotape was practically free, people would film in extremely long takes. They kept filming and filming.

I had a friend whose uncle visited his childhood home. He filmed several minutes of the river he used to walk past. Then he changed  position and filmed several more minutes of the same thing. Turns out he was an artist.

But I've gotten off the subject here.

Ball kids at Wimbledon

So, this Wimbledon thing is on TV. I looked up news about it online and read an article about the grueling training the ball kids go through--the kids who run out and pick up the balls rolling around in the grass during the games. I thought I heard on the radio that the kids no longer have to throw, but there was no mention of that. They're like Mousketeers. The training is grueling, it's fiercely competitive and they'll fire you at the drop of a hat.

To me, the firing would be a good thing. I'm assuming they get paid for the training. They get about $11 an hour. I would stay with it as long as I could then crap out, take my paycheck and go home before the tournament started. I could make some money while avoiding the stress of the actual job.

I don't have children but if I did, I would try to teach them the importance of getting out while you can.

Was that kid in junior high right?

I can't even remember what years I was in junior high school. But I remember the day this kid was pontificating about Michael Jackson. He claimed that Jackson's parents did something to delay the onset of puberty so his voice wouldn't change.

Now Jackson's doctor---the one who spent two years in prison for involuntary manslaughter in Jackson's death---claims that Joe Jackson had Michael chemically castrated when he was twelve.

"The fact that he [Michael] was chemically castrated to maintain his high-pitched voice is beyond words," Murray said in a video released by The Blast. Murray claimed Jackson was given hormone injections when he was 12 in a bid to cure his acne and stop his voice from deepening, an allegation the physician first outlined in his self-published book in 2016.
...
A French vascular surgeon made similar claims in 2011, even writing a book about it. Dr Alain Branchereau said Jackson was chemically castrated from the synthetic anti-male hormone drug Cyproterone. After researching the drug and observing photographs and specialists in the field, Branchereau found it prevents body hair and the larynx growing. It also affects the bones, which can lead to a slight frame and big chest.

https://www.rt.com/usa/432469-michael-jackson-chemically-castrated-doctor/?amp;utm_mediuamp;utm_campaign=RSS/

From a 2011 article about Alain Branchereau:

"An important part of my theory is this voice's exceptional character, which covers three octaves. But I haven't found any grown men's voices that cover three octaves."

Branchereau admitted that he had not contacted Jackson's family or friends for his book, "Michael Jackson, the secret of a voice," due out on March 9.

"We will never have proof," the doctor said. "Unless his entourage says something."

 I don't know. It's hard for me to believe that kid in junior high was right about anything.

Tab Hunter RIP

Tab Hunter with Anthony Perkins.

I didn't hear this until now. Tab Hunter died Sunday at age 86. A secretly gay screen heartthrob. He was discovered while working as a stable boy. I looked through his acting credits in imdb.com. I've seen only four that I'm aware of and I have no memory of him in two of them. I saw The Loved One, Won Ton Ton the Dog That Saved Hollywood, Polyester and Lust in the Dust. I may have seen him in some TV appearances. He was in an episode of Cannon and Hawaii Five-O among others. Was in one spaghetti western, Vengeance is my Forgiveness.

In the early 'fifties, Hunter had the same agent as Rock Hudson and Rory Calhoun. When Confidential magazine was about to publish some scandalous story about Hudson, their agent got them to squash the article in exchange to two stories about Tab Hunter and Rory Calhoun---that Calhoun had been sentenced to Federal prison when he was seventeen for driving a car he stole across state lines and that Tab Hunter had been arrested for disorderly conduct when a gay party he attended at age fifteen was raided by the cops. Hunter had lied about his age and joined the Coast Guard at fifteen and one of his Coast Guard buddies had invited him to the party.

Oddly, his career took off after the story was published.

With Roddy McDowall.

Soviet political cartoon

Cartoon from Pravda, USSR, 1952

Cannon

I've always found fictional cops and private eyes with names like "Bullitt" and "Magnum" ridiculous.

I've watched a few episodes of Cannon, the old private eye show. A guy named Cannon isn't quite the same as one named Bullitt, Magnum or Gunn. Frank Cannon was played by William Conrad who was terribly overweight. I saw episodes of the show now and then when I was a kid, but I didn't realize it was an action show. Cannon fights, uses Jiu-Jitsu, shoots people. He runs.
I thought he should have had a bigger gun. He uses, like they all did back then, a nondescript snub-nosed .38. They should have given him a gun with a longer barrel. He couldn't be expected to run after people, so he needed to be able to shoot them from a distance as they ran away.

He drives around in an enormous 1970's Lincoln Continental. They're impossible to park and it would take about two minutes to turn around in one which would be a serious impediment if you were trying to follow somebody. The landau top wasn't doing him any favors creating terrible blind spots.

And then there were the '70's clothes. Clothes were tighter back then, and when a guy's already overweight, he just looks really, really uncomfortable. Wearing natural fibers wouldn't have hurt anything.

Be open to action stars who aren't big muscle guys.

Let's see how Merkel likes it

You know what would make a good Twilight Zone thing? If Angela Merkel tells Trump, "I haff vitnessed Germany under der Soviet control," then she goes outside and when she steps through the door she finds herself a Soviet citizen in World War Two under German occupation.

"Mein gott! Dis ist so much vorse!"

It's been almost 30 years. Germany is the most advanced capitalist country in Europe and therefore the world, and the majority of East Germans STILL say they prefer Communism. They didn't vote for reunification.

Motion Picture Academy invites Polanski's wife to join

Polanski's getting shorter. His wife is 5' 8" but she may be wearing heels.

The Motion Picture Academy needs to pay attention to what they're doing. They invited Roman Polanski's wife, French actress Emmanuelle Seigner, to join.

“How can I ignore the fact that a few weeks go, the Academy expelled my husband, Roman Polanski, in an attempt to appease the zeitgeist – the very same Academy which in 2002 awarded him an Oscar for The Pianist! A curious case of amnesia!” she says.

I think she's giving them too much credit. They probably didn't know Polanski was married. 

I don't know when this was taken, but assuming that's Polanski's real hair, he seems surprisingly boyish for a guy in his 80's.

What was George Clooney doing on a motor scooter?

Steve McQueen once roared up to a movie set on a motorcycle. The director went berserk yelling at him to get off that thing. The slightest mishap could halt filming on the movie and cost them millions.

So why was George Clooney driving 60 miles per hour on a motor scooter in Sardinia? They're filming a Catch 22 TV miniseries. He crashed into a car that suddenly turned into his lane and flew several yards into the air. He landed on another car and broke the windshield with his head. If he hadn't been wearing a helmet, he'd be a dead man.

I live near a university. Every few years, when the economy gets especially bad, students start riding scooters. They're easy to park and insurance is dirt cheap. Then people start getting injured and they decide it's not such a good idea after all.

I had a friend who rode one until a girl down the street from him was riding along, minding her own business when an on-coming car turned left in front of her. She survived but spent weeks in the hospital.

But why is a fifty-seven-year-old millionaire riding one?

Soccer team and their coach rescued

All twelve boys and their coach are safely out of the cave in Thailand, thank God. Before it began, there was doubt they could do it without fatalities. A diver died earlier.

If it were me, if I walked into a cave, I would have stayed close to the front. I tend to do that in non-caves, too. I like to stay close to the door.

I'm happy they're out. I'm sad one man died. And let this be a lesson to all of us. Don't follow a soccer coach into a cave.

The kids in Thailand

Panumat Sangdee, 13, one of the trapped kids.

They've rescued four more kids from the cave in Thailand. At this pint, there are four more kids and the coach waiting to be rescued. One diver has already died. Some of the kids don't know how to swim and none of them have used diving equipment. It takes hours to get them out.

A few years ago, there were two Florida middle schoolers who disappeared in the ocean where they went alone in a 19 foot boat to go fishing. There was a spate of younger and younger children who wanted to break the work record by being the youngest to sail around the world. It's not just the kids. There are people think they can casually climb Mt Everest. You can phone your family from there if you have a satellite phone which creates the illusion that it's sort of safe.

We need to teach children a deathly fear of nature. There was Werner Herzog's documentary, Grizzly Man, about failed actor Timothy Treadwell who went hiking alone into the Alaska wilderness. Bears do this thing where they'll charge at you. Sometimes they keep coming, sometimes they stop before they reach you and are just trying to chase you away. But Treadwell didn't know that. When a bear charged at him and stopped, he thought it was because he showed no fear and figured that so long as kept showing no fear he could freely cavort with the bears. And he managed to do this until one killed and ate him.

But Treadwell was engaged in "educational" activities, visiting schools and telling children that gigantic prehistoric predators are nothing to be afraid of.

Treadwell had nothing to do with this, but some pre-teens in Brooklyn broke into the zoo so they could go swimming with the polar bears. Only one went through with it and he was killed partially eaten. Journalist Alexander Cockburn thought this was because of the anthropomorphized bears they keep putting in children's books.

I've told this before. I had a great uncle who was half American Indian born in the 1880's. He had an amazing ability to find his way through the woods even in total darkness. He did things that amazed his white in-laws. BUT HE WAS AFRAID TO GO INTO THE WOODS ALONE. He'd take his (white) nephew with him on jobs that took him into the woods which is how word of this got around the family. They were out in the forest, it got dark. They couldn't see a thing. Can you stay behind me? he said. His nephew said, I guess so, and they walked through the woods at full speed straight to their parked car.

This came to mind when a hiker out there alone amputated his own arm after having it stuck in some rocks for several days.

I have a brother, a musician by trade, who was offered a job on a cruise ship. He didn't want to do it. They're terrible gigs. Then he found out it was part of a round-the-world cruise and that people paid over a hundred thousand dollars just for the leg of the cruise he would be on, so he took the job. They stopped in Kenya. He went on an excursion to see the wild animals. The tourists were excited to see the elephants out there in their natural habitat while the Kenyan guides seemed extremely nervous and wanted to get out of there.

It was reported in the local paper that a young woman saved her money and took a trip to Kenya. Out there at night, she was so happy to be there that she walked into the veldt until some armed men in a Land Rover roared up and arrested her. It's illegal to walk around out there at night because you get killed doing that. She was taken before a judge. She was alarmed because she didn't have money to pay the fine. But the judge had mercy on her because she was "a stupid white person".

The case of Christopher McCandless immortalized in the movie Into the Wild. The poor guy burned his money then walked into the woods in Alaska. He got stuck out there, living in an abandoned school bus. He dug up roots to eat but hunting for them burned more calories than he got from them and he died of starvation.

Now fans of the movie who want to see the same spot in which McCandless found himself trapped keep finding themselves trapped and have to be rescued.

And something along these lines that didn't involve hiking anywhere: I heard a call from a listener on a NPR. They were talking about mushrooms. This guy had been at a family reunion. A young semi-hippie relation had brought some mushrooms she picked to the potluck. The caller knew he shouldn't but he ate one and had to be rushed to the hospital where they barely managed to keep him alive. The guest on the show said that at least half the mushrooms growing wild in his region of the countries were potentially deadly.

Stay away from nature. It's just awful. People who live out there are terrified of it. We have cities for a reason.

Poil de Carotte (1932)

The title translates directly to Hair of Carrot, or Carrot Top in English. About a redheaded kid (it's a black and white movie and they explain at one point that his hair is more blond than red) whose family cares nothing about him. He goes home for a two month vacation from boarding school and he's driven to the brink.

The kid in it had an odd acting style that made me think of Shia Labeouf in what I've seen of him on his old Disney sit-com, like a kid trying to be funny. But it was a sad movie set in the French countryside.

A couple of scenes made me think of Bunuel's Los Olvidados aka The Young and the Damned. The kid dreams he's in a conversation with himself about ways to commit suicide. In another, he runs down a road his own voice telling him "You'll always be alone. Always."

Julien Duvivier directed. He directed a silent version a few years earlier and there were two remakes since then in the 1970's and 2000's.

Why was it so much better than Hollywood movies from that period?

The kid in it was 12-year-old Robert Lynen who went on to appear in several more movies. At 20, he joined the French Resistance and carried out numerous missions before being arrested by the Nazis in 1943. He was tortured and deported to Germany. He was 23 when the Germans executed him in 1944.

Available on Filmstruck.

Chinese cars

Just some Chinese cars.

I post recently about North Korea, "The North Korean auto industry exports cars, mostly to Vietnam, but it doesn't sound like they produce anything interesting or retro."

Here are the sort of thing I had in mind. Produced in Red China up until the '70's or '80's.Wish I had one.

Harlan Ellison RIP

The irascible Harlan Ellison died last week at 84: “I hate when a director says to me ‘Here’s how I envision this scene’, excuse me? It’s right here in the script – I ‘envisioned’ it FOR you. Do what I wrote. If you want to ‘envision’, you should become a writer. Where the fuck were you when the page was blank?”

From counterpunch.com

Harlan Ellison wrote the Emmy-winning episode of Star Trek, "City on the Edge of Forever". As I understand it, in his original script, recreational drug use had become a thing on the Enterprise but this was taken out.

It was kind of ahistorical. Dr McCoy went berserk and leapt through a time portal to go back to 20th century Earth where he disrupts history by saving the life of a pacifist street preacher who will be elected to Congress and delay US entry into World War Two.

I'm not sure that would be possible. The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and Hitler inexplicably declared war on the United States and started torpedoing ships off the US coast. I guess the Nazis might not have done that if the woman had somehow stopped Lend Lease, but they declared war on us, we didn't declare war on them.

It's like Southerners who think the North started the Civil War. Gettysburg is in Pennsylvania. The Confederates invaded the North first, and they rounded up every Black man woman and child to ship back south as slaves.

In any case, the US barely put a dent in the Third Reich. The Soviets won the war.

Why I leave people alone

I stumbled upon some of my old junior high school yearbooks online. Looked at them. Became depressed. The kids look so young to me now and the horrible things than happened to some of them seem far worse. At least two died of overdoses, one suicide that I know of, there was the kid whose mother died after a long illness whose father then committed suicide. It went on and on.

There was a kid whose first year of junior high was my last. He was small for his age and seemed funny and outgoing. His father was a hippie. A lot of people knew who the kid was but they all seemed to dislike him. I never spoke to him. Now, more than forty years later, I thought maybe I should have been a nice guy, like I should have befriended him. Poor tiny kid.

You know, Art Garfunkel befriended Paul Simon because he felt sorry for him for being so short.

I googled the kid's name. I hoped he hadn't come to some terrible end.

No, he's doing great. I read an interview with him in a magazine. He makes custom pool cues and is very well known in the custom pool cue community and apparently makes a pretty good living. Those things are expensive.

It turns out that he took woodshop in high school, worked some in construction and worked some as a carpenter and did other wood work. Then he really got into playing pool.

All these things converged to put him in the business he's in today. If even one element had been left out, who knows what he would be doing now.

And if I had been friends with him I would have tried to talk him out of every one of those things, or at least I wouldn't have shown any enthusiasm. If I had had the slightest influence over him, I would have ruined his life.

He's really tall now, by the way.

Michael Moore on Roseanne Barr

Michael Moore has---well, he hasn't exactly defended Roseanne Barr, but he pointed out that she suffered a serious head injury in a car accident as a child and that's part of her problem. She's always seemed to have a couple of screws loose.

“Roseanne seems to be suffering from some sort of madness. It’s more than just saying she’s a racist,” Moore writes. “She operates in the same sewer of lies, conspiracy theories and bigotry that’s been rising in America for years and that has now succeeded in electing our current president. Totally nuts.” 

“But she is also a damaged soul. Most people don’t know that she has suffered her entire life from a massive head injury she received during a serious car accident when she was a child. Her brain injuries were immense and she spent months in the hospital struggling to recover,” he continues.

I don't know if that's really necessary to explain her political transformation. Look at David Mamet or Ron Silver. Both were liberal Jewish Zionists who became ridiculously right-wing when they found out leftists criticize Israel. That's what neo-conservatism is all about.

Mainstream Zionism is a "sewer of lies, conspiracy theories and bigotry". The mainstream view among pro-Israeli Jews is that Palestinians want their children to die to make Israel look bad, that the Armenian genocide was a hoax, that the Nazi genocide of Gypsies never happened, that Palestinian refugees fled their homes as part of a conspiracy against the Jews; when the Israelis massacred Jenin Refugee camp, Zionists claimed that Palestinians were digging up cemeteries so they could strew dead bodies around to make Israel look bad. They think the New York Times is anti-Israel. They believe that Oxfam, Save the Children, UNICEF, the Red Cross, and Doctors Without Borders are all anti-Semitic. They believe that Franklin Roosevelt secretly wanted Hitler to wipe out the Jews.

Zionists are morons. They're more like Trump supporters than anything else. Roseanne Barr is just bringing it home.

Filmmaking doesn't have to be that hard

That's Tester talking to a kid in the audience.

You know Desmond Tester? He played the kid brother in Alfred Hitchcock's Sabotage. He seemed to be a playing a child but he was 17 at the time. I've seen him referred to as a "boy actor" rather than a "child actor" and that may be why.

Tester went to Australia after World War Two and began working in Australian TV.

I stumbled upon this article. It starts as a letter to Desmond from a director who had worked with him in the '50's.

https://stefansargent.com/2010/11/21/production-diary-letter-to-desmond-from-stefan-with-love/

From the article:

TCN CHANNEL 9, SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA 

I’m working as a junior TV director at J. Walter Thompson. By chance I make a commercial that is so good it knocks the one made by the agency’s head of television off the air. He hates me. I’m moved to a small office and given no work. Time to go… 

I contact the station manager at Channel 9. He finds some space in a garage built as a prop for Aussie gas company, Ampol. 

I move in and discover I’m sharing space with Desmond and Miss Penny, that’s the entire Ch. 9 children’s department. 

Desmond, the local host of The Mickey Mouse Club, asks me to shoot a weekly, three-minute show, The Kaper Kops. 

YOU CAN’T BE SERIOUS 

We have just one roll of 16mm film to shoot each episode. 

“That’s only three minutes.” 

“Right, we have no editing.” 

“Desmond, I’ve got all the kit, why not do it properly? I’ll shoot 400 ft. and cut it down to three.” 

“No, we shoot in sequence with no editing.” 

Shoot in sequence — no editing? “What happens if there’s a mistake?” 

“No retakes. Wait and see. Once you know everything is take one, mistakes don’t happen. It’s like live television, only on film.” 

Now I know he’s nuts. 

WIND-UP CAMERA 

I shoot at 8 frames a second on a Bolex clockwork 16mm camera. TV in Australia is 25 frames a second, so everything is speeded up by three on playback. Nine seconds of real-time live action is condensed into three. 

A 100 ft. daylight loading spool is really 110 ft. I set the counter at minus five feet, thread up the camera in broad daylight, close the camera side door, and run on to zero to get rid of the exposed bit.  

We shoot live action to 100 ft. on the counter. 

There’s really have another five feet inside there, but it’s going to get fogged on the way out. I keep running until — clickerty, clack — the film runs out. Open up the camera, lift out the now full take up spool. 

SHOOTING BY NUMBERS 

Desmond is the sneaky crook, Slippery Sam. 

I need a 3 sec. shot of him checking out the jewelry shop. I shoot 9 secs. @ 8 fps. Great, that’s our opening. The next shot is — our next shot. Reverse angle as Desmond puts on his mask and runs into the shop. He robs the jeweler. Shot of him running out. Jeweler phones the Kops. 

“Twenty feet, exactly, Desmond.” 

Now we shoot 20 ft. of the Kops getting the news, driving and spotting the crook. 

“We’re on 40!” Time for the chase. Desmond steals a bike. He can go places that the Kop Kar can’t go. I take alternate shoots of the Kops giving chase and Desmond escaping them. 

At 60 ft., Desmond aka Slippery Sam, arrives at the Rose Bay flying boat airport. We have a title card. FLY TO LORD HOWE ISLAND. I do a takeoff shot from inside the plane. 

The Kops are on board too, looking for Sam. At 80 ft. we land in the lagoon. 

Finally, a 20 ft. chase around the island. He’s caught! Now at 100ft. Got it. Shoot the extra 5 ft., the film runs out!

Tester in the striped shirt. There's the Bolex they filmed with.

Those days are over.

But there was Lenny Lipton's book Independent Filmmaking. Stan Brackage wrote the foreword. He noted the incredible about of technical information in the book, but said that Lipton's weak spot was editing. It was something Lipton apparently didn't enjoy doing so he gave bad advice, encouraging the use of tape splices. 

Brackage suggested that if you dislike editing that much, avoid it altogether by shooting in sequence and editing in camera. I've seen this suggested in other books. I've done it and it worked okay on short films.

In the days of analog video. Hi8 and Super VHS were prosumer formats, but editing was their Achilles heel. The only way to edit it without a noticeable loss of quality was to transfer it to one inch tape and pay a fortune to rent an editing suite. The only affordable alternative was to film your movie in sequence and edit in camera. You could rewind and record over outtakes.
 

I knew some guys who did that. They were doing a video for their church in a small town in Alabama. It was going to be shown on local TV. They did all the editing in camera because they didn't know how else to do it. The guys at the TV station were amazed at how well it worked.

Let old people live

Ethel Barrymore looks pretty healthy here. She was only 67.

I believe that sick, elderly characters in movies should survive at the end of the movie, even if they've gone through something physically grueling that might be expected to cause their deaths. I'm tired of old people dying in every single movie. They're like Chekov's gun. You see an old person in act one, you're going to see a dead old person by the end of act two.

Wasn't there a Disney movie about a boy and his dog, and the dog almost dies but recovers? If they can start letting animals survive, why not old people?

And now that I think about it, why does the gun you see hanging on the wall in act one have to be fired by the end of act two? Have a character with a house full of guns and have the guns do him absolutely no good at all when there's a home invasion of some sort. Make the gun nut as helpless as the rest us.

As it happens, I just watched The Spiral Staircase (1946). It takes place before World War One. A serial killer is on the loose. (Spoilers) A woman suffering hysterical mutism has locked the man she believes to be the killer in a closet but can't use the telephone to call for help. Then it turns out a DIFFERENT guy is the killer and he's about to murder her, too, but the man's own elderly invalid stepmother (Ethel Barrymore) staggers out of her room and empties a revolver into him. And then she dies.

She didn't even exert herself that much just pulling a trigger a few times. Killing him could just as well have given her a new lease on life. She could decide that she no longer feels helpless.