Ishmael Reed, The Haunting of Lin Manuel Miranda

 From CURRENT AFFAIRS, A Magazine of Politics & Culture, on a new play by Ishmael Reed attacking the Broadway musical Hamilton.

Read the article here. 

It would be a mistake to underestimate Reed, whose 10th and latest play, The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda, had its first reading at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe on the Lower East Side a few weekends ago. The Haunting rips apart Hamilton, Miranda’s homage to the first Secretary of the Treasury. Reed has been writing literature and non-fiction since the 1960s, and is widely regarded as one of the most important African American authors.
 ...

...Posts about The Haunting circulated all over Facebook and Twitter, touching a nerve among the sizable number of Hamilton-haters across the internet. Despite the lack of production and the sometimes-stilted acting, the crowd at the show I went to seemed enraptured by the performance, breaking out into peals of laughter at each joke and applauding furiously each time Reed, through the proxy of his actors, got in a particularly spicy jab in at Miranda.  

...

“How can someone have slaves and be considered an abolitionist?” Reed asks. The evidence points to the actual Hamilton owning slaves. At the very least, there is very strong evidence that Hamilton leased slaves who were owned by other people. And the family Hamilton married into—the much vaunted Schuylers—were celebrated slave owners. “Schuyler was harsh with his slaves,” says Reed. He is thinking about adding a new character to The Haunting. “There was a runaway from the Schuyler plantation named Diana. She was captured, and no one knows what happened to her after that. There’s a possibility she was murdered,” says Reed. (Reed draws on the scholarship of several women historians, citing Michelle Du Ross, Nancy Isenberg, and Lyra Monterio, for his deep understanding of the lesser-known histories of the Hamilton family.)

...

Reed recently came in for some harsh mockery from Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me!, the beloved (in some quarters) NPR comedy-news quiz show. The host, Peter Sagal, in addition to having no idea who “a writer named Ishmael Reed” was, characterized the plot of The Haunting as Miranda being “visited by ghosts of people from history telling him how wrong he is,” to raucous laughter from the audience. Sagal was incredulous that anyone could dislike “the most beloved musical of modern times,” with a panelist suggesting: “I wonder if his other play is, like, Puppies Suck.” Ghosts “telling Hamilton how wrong he is… that’s the play,” Sagal summarized. It’s disturbing that Reed, a giant in the world of arts and letters, who is making a serious and important critique, can be dismissed as a laughable crank by a white comedian on a show for purported liberals.

Reed had biting words for Sagal and that “NPR nerd show,” as he put it, in an email to me a few days ago. “I realized that not only are those kids at Covington ignorant of American history, but our highly educated [as well],” he wrote. “This is because good old boy historians like Ron Chernow view this history as a series of great god-like men and they have dominated the profession.”

Paul Schrader's attack on Brian De Palma

“Don’t get me started on Brian De Palma. I re-watched ‘Redacted’ last night because [I] thought that given total artistic freedom he could reach for the stars. And he did. But the stars were beyond his reach. The script is trite, it is weak. That’s because Brian is trite, Brian is artistically weak. Skate fast on thin ice. That’s his story. That’s his con.”

--Paul Schrader

Schrader reportedly posted this on Facebook, left it up for a time then took it down, not because he thought better of it, but because he wanted to start a "conversation" but not have it drag on forever.

Most of us are trite and artistically weak. There's not much we can do about it. If Brian De Palma has managed to cope with this handicap, a lot of people would benefit from hearing about it, but "Skate fast on thin ice" isn't all that helpful advice by itself.

I haven't seen Redacted. US troops rape a girl and murder her and her family in Iraq. It was based on an actual incident. I don't know what Schrader's problem was with the film, but pro-rape-and-murder "critics" like the Zionist Michael Medved were outraged and I don't think being more artistic would have helped.

Prom season

 

It dawned on me the other day that I completely missed prom season this year. I googled it and found that there were a couple of prom night murders and a few other fatalities. A 17-year-old girl was driving her father's car 112 miles per hour while her friends pleaded with her to stop. Cars are so safe now. They crashed at that speed and only one of them was killed.

But there were no prom dress controversies, no one got into the news for taking a cardboard cutout or other inanimate object as a date.

The cardboard cutout thing has run its course. If you want to get into the national news next year, hire an Elvis impersonator. Boys should think about taking a female impersonator. I don't know if performers would hire themselves out as escorts, but see if you can go to the prom with a man dressed as Carol Channing.

Are there still companies hiring out celebrity look-alikes? Try to get a Smokey and the Bandit-era Burt Reynolds.

It would cost a lot and it would be pointless. It would get you in the news, but it's not like you'd get a record contract or a book deal out of it.

Elmer Gantry, 1960

Elmer Gantry was a long movie, nearly two and a half hours, and it only covered 100 pages of the novel by Sinclair Lewis, which makes me think the book was very fast moving. Starring Burt Lancaster as a salesman turned evangelist. He begins working with an Aimee Semple McPhereson-like revivalist played by Jean Simmons.

Elmer Gantry wasn't that horrible a person. He beat the crap out of Shirley Jones' pimp.

He did get annoying after a while. He needed to turn off the charm and take it easy now and then. I didn't like all the fake laughing.

The movie didn't conflate revivalism with mainline Christianity the way Leap of Faith did years later in 1992. I got dragged to that movie. It starred Steve Martin. I was anti-religious enough but I couldn't understand why they would think that all Christians believed in faith healing and would fall for blatantly phony miracles. I also didn't understand why they thought exposing Steve Martin's sad past as an orphan and delinquent discredited his religion. But Elmer Gantry and Sister Sharon Falconer (Jean Simmons) tried to hide their pasts, too.

Should I read the paper again?

I was a car wash attendant. Looked nothing like this.

I remember long ago. A young fellow was scoffing at my habit of reading the newspaper each morning. I told him I learned important things. Like in the news that morning, a member of the university wrestling team was going to fight the police so they threw him the ground and arrested him.

I quit reading the news after 9/11. I didn't know I was so sensitive. I've got to get back into it but now the local paper's be bought by a conglomerate. It's smaller and more right-wing than before.

I read a lot of news on line but it's not the same. I would have missed the wrestler story, for example.

The Fallen Idol

I watched The Fallen Idol last night, based on a story by Graham Greene, directed Carol Reed who also directed The Third Man and Our Man in Havana based on Greene's work.

It starred an Anglo-French child actor playing the son of the French ambassador. He has befriended the butler who unwisely shares certain secrets with him. He wants to dump his wife and marry his girlfriend. When his wife dies in an accident, the kid thinks he killed her. He lies to police trying to protect him but makes it worse. He later tries to tell the truth but police won't listen to him which is really just as well because, again, he would have only made things worse.

I guess the moral is, don't worry about destroying your credibility because you probably don't understand what's going on anyway.

I didn't notice the kid's French accent. He sounded English to me. I was impressed when he slipped effortlessly into French.

You know who should have watched this thing? Balloon Boy's parents. It would have taught them the perils of trying to get a child to keep your secrets.

Eddie Murphy, John Landis, Billie "Buckwheat" Thomas

I didn't watch Saturday Night Live during the Eddie Murphy years. I knew a dumb guy who loved Eddie Murphy and that turned me off to him. When Beverly Hills Cop came out, he said he just wanted to watch it to hear Eddie Murphy's laugh. That would be worth the price of admission! I told him he could hear that on the commercials. Why didn't he just watch the commercials?

But I did watch a couple of minutes of an episode of SNL during that period. Eddie Murphy was playing Buckwheat from The Little Rascals. He tells members of his entourage that HE'S the big star, not them, and he physically attacks one of them forcing him to the floor and lying on top of him.

Which is pretty much what Murphy described doing to John Landis. Read the last entry.

 Eddie Murphy was apparently playing himself.

I sided with Eddie Murphy against John Landis in their feud (which I heard about for the first time yesterday), but maybe they were BOTH right.

Max Landis, John Landis, Michael Jackson, Eddie Murphy

Well, that took about two seconds.

One article and that was it. He's such an obvious scumbag. No one doubts that he's guilty of everything. They were reluctant to say it without something in the mainstream press to back it up, but once the article was published, no one questioned it. There isn't the slightest doubt that it was all true. No questions about the motivations of the victims or why they waited to speak out or why they ever went near that subhuman to begin with. There were comments online from people who said they had been against the whole #MeToo movement who wanted Landis to pay for his crimes.

That doesn't sound like I'm defending Landis against the unquestioning mob, does it, because I'm not. They're right. He's the scum of the earth.

Michael Jackson did everything in his power to convince the world that he was a pedophile. He was practically bragging about it. But there are still people who defend him.

Not so with Max Landis who did the same thing---bragged about what he did to women.

The Landis Family and Michael Jackson

I had serious doubts about Michael Jackson's love for all the children of the world when he hired John Landis to direct one of his videos.


John Landis is Max Landis's father and is best known for having murdered three people including two small children on the set of the The Twilight Zone movie. He was charged with manslaughter but, as celebrities tend to do, got away with it.

There's an interesting article here about a bit of a feud between Eddie Murphy and John Landis.

Landis's career suffered a slight setback after he murdered the two first graders. Murphy took pity on him and hired him to direct Coming to America.

The article quotes an interview Murphy gave to Playboy magazine. I took these quotes from the article linked above, so you might want to just read that:

MURPHY: I wanted to help out [the director, John] Landis. I figured I’d give this guy a shot because his career was fucked. But he wound up fucking me.

PLAYBOY: What happened?

MURPHY: As it turned out, John always resented that I hadn’t gone to his Twilight Zone trial. I never knew that; I though we were cool. But he’d been harboring it for a year. Every now and then, he would make little remarks, like, “You didn’t help me out; you don’t realize how close I was to going to jail.” I never paid any mind.

PLAYBOY: Did you think he was guilty?

MURPHY: I don’t want to say who was guilty or who was innocent. [Pauses] But if you’re directing a movie and two kids get their heads chopped off at fucking twelve o’clock at night when there ain’t supposed to be kids working, and you said, “Action!” then you have some sort of responsibility. So my principles wouldn’t let me go down there and sit in court. That’s just the way I am. If somebody in my family was guilty of something, I wouldn’t sit there for them in a courtroom and say, “You’ve got my support.” Fuck that. The most it would be is, “Hey, you go work that out. I still love ya; I’m still your friend.”

...

PLAYBOY: Was he grateful?

MURPHY: He came in demanding lots of money. Paramount was saying, “Hey, come on, Eddie, we’re getting fucked here,” but I made them pay his money. They bent over backward. But after he got the job, he brought along an attitude. He came in with this “I’m a director” shit. I was thinking, Wait a second, I fucking hired you, and now you’re running around, going, “You have to remember: I’m the boss, I’m the director.”

One of his favorite things was to tell me, “When I worked with Michael Jackson, everyone was afraid of Michael, but I’m the only one who would tell Michael, ‘Fuck you.’ And I’m not afraid to tell you, ‘Fuck you.’” And sure enough, he was always telling me, “Fuck you, Eddie. Everybody at Paramount is afraid on you.”

...

PLAYBOY: Did you confront him?

MURPHY: I kind of ignored it. But every day, it was a new “I told Michael, ‘Fuck you’” story.

Then, one day, I had these two writers who did the screenplay for Coming to America with me. They were writing a TV show called What’s Alan Watching? that my company was producing. They were at our location in New York, and Landis was asking them, “Why are you guys here?” They said, “We’re working on something for Eddie.” And he said [strongly], “The production’s not picking that up.” And they said, “No, we’re working through Eddie’s company. Right now, we’re waiting for the deal to go through.” And Landis said, “So you’re not being paid yet? That company should be paying you! Don’t come to New York unless you’re being paid.”

The whole crew was standing around—extras and actors—and Landis started screaming. “Don’t be afraid to ask Eddie Murphy for his money. You go up and ask for your fucking money!” I walked in and he said, “Eddie! Your company is fucking these guys out of their money! Guys, don’t be afraid to go up to Eddie and say, ‘Fuck you!’” He’s screaming about my deal making in front of the cast.

PLAYBOY: What did you do?

MURPHY: I playfully grabbed him around the throat, put my arm around him and I said to Fruity, one of my guys, “What happens when people put my business in the street?” And Fruity said, “they get fucked up.” I was kind of half joking. Landis reached down to grab my balls, like he also thought it was a joke—and I cut his wind off. He fell down, his face turned red, his eyes watered up like a bitch and he ran off the set. Fuckin’ punk.

PLAYBOY: Did you go after him?

MURPHY: Nah. He came to my trailer later and made this big speech. His voice was trembling. And it all came out: that he didn’t think I was talented, that the only reason he did Coming to America was for money, that he didn’t respect me since I hadn’t gone to his trial and all this bullshit. All this fucked-up shit. Called me ignorant, an asshole.

PLAYBOY: How did you take it?

MURPHY: I’m sitting there shattered; I’m thinking, This fucking guy. I bent over fucking backward to get this guy a job. He probably won’t even acknowledge what happened. He didn’t realize that his fucking career was washed up. So I told him, “The next time you fuck around with me, I’m gonna whip your ass.” His Hollywood shit came out then: “What do you mean, ‘whip my ass’? That’s not in our deal.” So I said, “You’re gonna have to give me either some fear or some respect. I want one of them, because this is my shit and you’re working here. If the only way you can fear me is knowing that the next time you fuck up, you’re gonna get your ass whipped, fine.” But Landis was fucked up: “Is that a net or a true-gross ass whipping I’m gonna get? What kind of ass whipping is it?”

PLAYBOY: Would you have whipped his ass?

MURPHY: If he had fucked up again, I would have beat the shit out of him.

You have to admire that in a way.

Max Landis is a rapist

By his own account, Max Landis is a horrible, horrible person.

"...He was always vicious, but everyone would say, oh, that’s just how Max is. He’s a jerk. He knows it. He calls himself out on it. There was this conflation of self-awareness with meaningful change. In my opinion, some of the worst people in the world are those who openly admit they’re terrible, using that proclamation as a get-out-of-jail-free card. They think, well, you were warned.”

That's from an article in the Daily Beast, "Eight Women Accuse Hollywood Filmmaker Max Landis of Emotional and Sexual Abuse: 'We're Not People To Him'". Read it here:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/max-landis-8-women-accuse-hollywood-filmmaker-of-emotional-and-sexual-abuse-were-not-people-to-him?ref=scroll

Women quoted in the article accuse him of rape, strangulation and psychological abuse. 

This had come up before, but no one would speak on the record at the height of the #MeToo movement. I wrote about it on this blog, but after a few months I had to admit that nothing had come of it.

I hope this will be the end of him.

Why politicians keep talking about getting along

I was driving around on vacation years ago when I heard this on NPR. 

About twelve percent of voters are oblivious to the fact that there are political differences. They don't know that different people have different interests or different political views. They think everyone believes exactly the same things they do and they think that political debates or disagreements are "bickering".

"Why don't they stop bickering and just do what everybody wants!" they say. 

The percentage who think this was the same percentage who voted for Ross Perot. 

I thought maybe these idiots would wise up what with Trump in power, but I just saw one of them on the news last night. He said he voted for Trump because there's too much arguing and he just wants someone who'll get things done. He doesn't care WHAT he "gets done" because he assumes everyone wants the same thing.

Politicians can rake in twelve percent of the vote by refusing to debate.

Remember the debate between Joseph Lieberman and Dick Cheney? People were deeply moved at how polite they were. It was almost as if they didn't disagree on anything at all. Four years later, Lieberman campaigned for Bush's re-election. They got along so well in the debate because they were horrible, horrible people who had no actual differences.

Now we have Biden who brags about how well he got along with even the most vile racists in the Senate, and progressives are trying to point out that there's a reason for this.

Jeffrey St Clair wrote in Counterpunch:

Can anyone cite one issue where Biden is more progressive than Hillary Clinton? What kind of institutional laughing gas have the Democrats been inhaling to convince themselves that another center-right candidate with even less rhetorical skills than HRC could defeat Trump?

Judgement at Nuremburg, Mrs Olson

When I watched Judgement at Nuremberg as a kid, I think I quickly accepted Werner Klemperer (TV's Colenol Klink) playing a Nazi in a grimly serious role. William Shatner's appearance was brief enough that he didn't throw things off. I wouldn't have recognized Judy Garland as an adult and I think I knew who Montgomery Clift was but didn't think much about it. I somehow knew who Maximilian Schell was.

But Mrs Olson---Virginia Christine who, for two decades, starred in Folgers coffee commercials---was the one I couldn't get past.

I assumed that her Swedish accent was authentic since she used it both in the movie and the commercials, but it she was born in Iowa. She grew up in a Scandinavian community so that may be why she was so good at it. She appeared with Spencer Tracy again in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and she did a lot of TV. I didn't recognize her in anything else which makes me think that she must not have been using the accent in those things. She was in High Noon and episodes of The Rifleman. Having a Swedish woman in the westerns would have been kind of nice touch.

In Judgement at Nuremberg: "How were we supposed to know?"

Willard (1971)

Willard was big in its day. At least we thought so at my grade school. I remember kids talking about it. I read the Mad magazine version and eventually saw the thing on broadcast TV.

Willard (Bruce Davidson) is a pitiful office worker in his late 20's. He lives with his mother (Elsa Lancaster) in an old mansion. His boss (Ernest Borgnine) somehow stole the business from Willard's father and is mean to him. 

His mother wants him to kill the rats in the backyard, and, at first, Willard takes a sadistic glee in his preparations to drown them. Then he takes pity on them and begins to train them. More and more of them appear.

The movie's slower than I remember and I thought he murdered more than one person. He really wasn't very nice to the rats considering how helpful they were to him. They were like the henchmen in a James Bond movie, mindlessly sacrificing themselves to achieve the supervillain's goals no matter how stupid. It got a GP rating back then, which may have been slightly different than a PG rating.

It was perhaps an Ayn Randian tragedy with Ernest Borgnine as the one true Randian Ubermensch; Willard, altruistically caring for his elderly mother and expecting help from her and his father's old friends, brings about his own destruction. The rats represent the masses who Rand despised.

They should have taken a straight Communist line. The rats were pretty much pawns in a battle between two cruel, parasitic capitalists who only pretended to care anything about them.

I notice it didn't say in the credits that no animals were harmed in the making of this motion picture. I was more afraid FOR the rats than of them.

Free with Amazon Prime.

Two TV shows

My God. I turned on The Beverly Hillbillies for about three seconds. Granny was berating an actor dressed as Ulysses S. Grant. She thought it was really him. She threatens to have him sent as a prisoner of war to Andersonville. Andersonville was home to the Confederacy's ghastly Nazi-like prison camp. 13,000 Union prisoners died there, up to 100 a day at times. How can they make that a joke on a sit-com? It was only a hundred years earlier. There were probably elderly children of Andersonville survivors watching.

Although, come to think of it, I saw a celebrity on a game show in the '70's who thought it was hilarious that her mother always talked about the "starving Armenians". That was only fifty years after the Armenian genocide.



I watched an old episode of Perry Mason last night. It wasn't very good--one of the bad episodes that hadn't been in syndication for years. I found it distracting that the victim's name was Kirk Cameron.

"That can't be!" I thought. "Maybe it's Kurt Cameron."

Then they showed his name his door. It was Kirk Cameron all right.

I started contemplating how dumb Kirk Cameron is. I googled him and watched a video of him smiling as he talked about a hurricane that was about to strike Florida and one that killed seventy people in Texas two weeks earlier.

"One thing we know about hurricanes and all weather is that this is not Mother Nature in a bad mood," Cameron said. "This is a spectacular display of God's immense power. When He puts his power on display, it's never without reason. There's a purpose. And we may not always understand what that purpose is, but we know it's not random and we know that weather is sent to cause us to respond to God in humility, awe and repentance."

"Hey Kirk Cameron," responded a Twitterer, "your hopes and prayers sound less than sincere when you call destruction of life a display of God's power."

But it's so easy to attack Kirk Cameron. It's completely pointless.

There was a guy I was very slightly acquainted with many years ago. He was either religious already or he was just turning religious, but he was in his mid-30's and kept hanging around a youth minister and his teenage congregants. I knew his roommate. The guy kept bringing home religious tracts intended for high school kids, telling them to obey their parents and not to date anyone they weren't going to marry.

This is what I imagine Kirk Cameron is like. He turned religious as a teenager and never upgraded to a grown-up version of Christianity. People probably thought he would mature and become less obnoxious about it, but he never did. He's pushing fifty and is as bad as ever.

Polanski, Allen, Venice Film Festival

Polanski pictured here with horrible "mothers" Mia Farrow and Joan Crawford.

It usually annoys me when people lump Woody Allen and Roman Polanski together. They both have a connection to Mia Farrow I guess. Investigators cleared Woody Allen of any crime while Polanski pleaded guilty to a charge of "unlawful sexual intercourse" after he raped a middle school girl.

But it's being reported that Allen and Polanski will likely have their films shown at the Venice Film Festival in August, Allen's Rainy Day in New York and Polanski's An Officer and a Spy. Read about it here.

On the one hand, Polanski freely admitted his guilt while Allen was obviously innocent. On the other, Polanski is an infinitely better director so it may not be all that terrible to have your name associated with his.

I shouldn't be so timid

This little fellow was twelve when he accidentally killed the sheriff in the 1930's.

The senior center doesn't discriminate by age. I like to think that's why I'm allowed to attend the writing group. Although I have received senior discounts in restaurants without asking so I might look older than I think.

This week, I wrote a very short story, less than 500 words. A western again.

It begins with two boys in the sheriff's office. They're there to report a crime. The sheriff doesn't believe them. He tells them the story of the Boy Who Cried Wolf.

“There was a town,” the sheriff said, “and they had a flock of sheep. And they gave a boy the job of guarding the sheep. He got bored watching them, so he yelled, Wolf! Wolf! And the people in town grabbed their guns and came running. But when they got there, there was no wolf and the boy was laughing at them like it was all a big joke. So they shot him.”

"We ain't laughin'," the kid says. "We're tellin' the truth."

The story doesn't go into detail, but the two children murder the sheriff and deputies try to beat confessions out of them. The violence was all off-screen so to speak, but it bothered me that it involved children so I decided not to read it to the group. When in doubt, do nothing has long been my motto. It has saved me a lot of embarrassment over the years.

I have to go to the group even if I have nothing to read because I have to take my mother there. So I sat at the big table listening to the others.

One guy, about ninety, read a story he wrote based on Norse mythology. It began with Odin carrying two elf girls into the bushes and raping them.

Another guy (one of my old teachers from junior high) who keeps writing Jewish stuff read something based on the story of Lilith, Adam's first wife who now flies around the world killing babies for some reason.

Old people aren't as sensitive as I thought.

I should note here that the ex-teacher said he had told the story to an audience at some event. He prefaced it by explaining that it was rather sexist---Lilith was Adam's BAD wife who  refused to serve him before she started killing babies---but he was surprised that women in the audience found the story offensive.

That's what worries me about what I write. Other people may not find ironic sexism and backward, violent people as amusing as I do.

The Other Side of Hope (Finland, 2017)

A traveling salesman leaves his wife, sells his stock and uses the money to get into a high stakes poker game. He buys what turns out to be a failing restaurant. I don't know why he didn't just earn a living as a gambler. But he befriends a Syrian refugee fleeing deportation. He finds him outside the restaurant so he takes him inside and feeds him.

Directed by Aki Kaurismaki. The acting is deadpan which is nice, really. As with his other movies, the film is nicely lit which gives it kind of an old fashioned look. He'd made another movie, Le Havre, in France, with a similar subject. Without a thought, people help a refugee, a young African teenager in that movie.

Several scenes of bands playing what might be popular dance music in Finland. The salesman drives around in a Checker Marathon which was the passenger car version of the old Checker taxicab built in Detroit from 1961 to 1982.

There's a band of neo-Nazis walking around attacking refugees. In one scene, homeless Finns come to the refugee's aid.

The movie may have been more instructive than realistic, telling us how to conduct ourselves in situations like this. If you see a Nazi attacking someone, hit him over the head with a wine bottle. The salesman/gambler/restauranteur wasn't really a nice a guy, but he did what he could to help a war refugee.

I watched it on the Criterion Channel.

Foreign interference in UK elections

Trump and Theresa May.

Remember when Obama threatened British voters? They'd better not vote for Brexit, he told them. The United States just wouldn't have time to negotiate trade deals with Britain if they did. Support for Brexit increased by several percentage points as a result.

Now US Secretary of State Pompeo has been caught on tape promising a Jewish group in the UK that the United States will prevent Corbyn from becoming prime minister even if the Labor party wins the election.

I don't know if the Tories are colluding with the US election interference, but they haven't said a word against the US undermining what passes for their democracy.

Hopefully, this will get Corbyn elected.

Murder and divorce: a double and triple feature suggestion

Dustin Hoffman acting Italian.

I'm sitting here listening to the Thought Spiral podcast with Andy Kindler and J Elvis Weinstein. They're discussing the movie Adam's Rib (1949). Katharine Hepburn plays a lawyer defending a woman who opened fire on her husband when she caught him in bed with another woman. I haven't seen that movie since I was in grade school, but my memory was that, in those days, a man would doing the same thing would likely have been deemed temporarily insane and gotten away with it. Hepburn's character argues in court that the woman in this case should be found not guilty by reason of insanity, too.

Weinstein didn't believe it. He didn't believe there was ever a time when a man could get away with shooting his wife.

I heard of a case in the '70's where a Southern sheriff got away with murdering his wife this way, so I think the movie was probably accurate for the most part.

And I was aware that this was apparently the case in Italy. I base this on what I saw of the movie Divorce Italian Style (1961). Divorce was illegal in Italy until 1970. The premise of the movie is that a husband (Marcello Mastrianni) wants to end his marriage. Divorce is illegal, but in Italy, if a husband finds his wife with another man, he can murder them both and plead temporary insanity. So the husband tries to manipulate his wife into sleeping with another man so he can murder them and marry his girlfriend.

I also watched Alfredo, Alfredo (Italy, 1972), starring Dustin Hoffman. I saw it about thirty years ago on VHS. I must not understand method acting. He was in this thing speaking English while everyone else spoke Italian. His lines were dubbed in Italian in a voice that sounded nothing like his. He plays a fellow named Alfredo who rushes into marriage. It doesn't work out well. Legally he can leave his wife, but he can be arrested if he's caught sleeping with another woman. His wife, on the other hand, can do what she want since he left her.

So. If you want to know about Italian laws against divorce, watch those two movies if they're available.

And you want to feel less smug about how backward the Italians were, make it a triple feature and watch Adam's Rib.

Map to the Stars, David Cronenberg

I watched this 2014 movie called Map to the Stars. I was impressed by the kid actor in it, Evan Bird, playing a sadly but incredibly obnoxious 13-year-old child star/teen idol. And Bird is a Canadian, from Vancouver, BC. I've been there twice and both times I felt like a monster because everyone there was so nice. I tried to be nice back but I'd been driving for hours. I didn't make reservations and the only motel room I could find was over a biker bar. I crouched in my room with the lights out watching them in the parking lot, and they were all very nice Canadian bikers.

It would have made me nervous filming the scene where the kid plays with the gun. Actors have been killed doing that. 

A strangely grim movie about a family in Hollywood clinging to fame. On Netflix. Directed by David Cronenberg.

Outtakes from Mr Arkadin

Sort of interesting I guess. You can watch them on the Criterion Channel. At least the outdoor scenes were dubbed but they recorded live sound to aid in the dubbing. So they didn't care that you could hear the camera running in one take. In another it sounded like a plane was going by but they didn't let that bother them.

Remember when Christian Bale went berserk because a guy was walking around while he was doing a scene? At one point Orson Welles says cut and points at a guy off camera who wasn't standing still. They cut it short, so maybe Welles ranted at him for several minutes, who knows.

They were more careful with the sound in an interior scene. They film all of Welles' lines at once. He had the script in front of him and we hear him turning the pages as he reads each line. In the other scenes we hear the other actor off camera reading his lines.

He directs other actors while filming scenes, being quite specific about what he wants. They repeat a brief bit of dialog several times without stopping.

"Chin higher, don't look as far to your right," Welles tells the Paola Mori.

I don't know if it annoys actors when directors do this. When Welles appeared in Catch 22, he reportedly never memorized his lines. To conceal how unprepared he was, he told Mike Nichols to just tell him each line the way he wanted him to say it---it would be so much quicker and easier and he'd get what he wanted that way.

And I saw one interview where Welles talked about a director he worked with. They would shoot retake after retake but the director never told them what he wanted. He would just shake his head after each take and say, "Noooo, noooooo."

I always liked Mr Arkadin. But it was seen as a failed attempt to translate Citizen Kane into a European setting.

Writing group at the senior center

This looks nothing like the writing group I go to.

I can't imagine anyone being interested in this, but, in the writing group I go to, I finally stopped writing about movies. I've written fiction the last two times. Westerns. I've managed to do it with all the violence off-screen so to speak. They're pretty much all-dialog.

I probably shouldn't write it all in Western dialect. In real Westerns, characters talk like normal people. Ignorance, sexism and distorted 19th century morals probably aren't as amusing as I think. I wanted to have a teenager as a continuing character but it's not that easy to wedge a 14-year-old into a story. But I think I've done pretty well keeping an even mix of male and female characters. I worry that expressions of sexism will be considered sexist rather than reflecting the different time. And I've avoided it, but I'm afraid I'll sound like a gun enthusiast if I talk about guns or show any knowledge of them.

The thing is that I've always disliked Westerns. Even when I was four or five, when Westerns were big on TV, when kids played freely with toy guns, I didn't like them. The ugly clothes, the ugly towns, every man a moron with a gun. Why would anyone want to ride a horse or live in the desert? I could see what they were doing to the horses. I could tell whether they were using trip wires or if they were trained to fall. 

Having no respect for the genre gives you a feeling of freedom while writing.

Here's what attracts me to it: There are scenes and other elements I want to steal from foreign films, but the only way to put them in an American setting is to make them into westerns. I never thought Samurai movies made into Westerns worked very well, but there was a movie I just saw set in present day rural China that I'd like to steal from. I haven't done it. No one would notice, but I don't want to blatantly steal it.

In one scene, a man is talking to his doctor. The doctor comments that he hasn't been sick in years and wonders why he got sick now. The man says that the only people who don't get sick are the dead. The doctor thinks it's a ridiculous statement because how would anybody get sick if they were dead?

In another scene, a kid is alone in a house. His uncle comes to the door. The kid lets him in. "Why was the door locked?" The kid says that his father went somewhere and told him there was a Wild Man loose in the area. "He just said that to scare you so you wouldn't leave," the uncle said. The kid doesn't want to eat the food in the house so the uncle takes him out to get something.

There was the Russian movie, Okraina (The Outskirts),  the Italian movie, Night of the Shooting Stars, scenes from Japanese juvenile delinquency films, Luis Bunuel movies. There were some scenes from a Ukrainian movie I liked even though the movie itself was pro-fascist. 

I think the real trick with a Western would be to create a situation where killing people is the only possible solution to the problem.

Woody Allen: What do feminists want?

So. What are the feminists' demands, Woody Allen-wise? I was just reading an attack on him and the comments on a feminist website.

Do they want Soon-yi to divorce Woody or Woody to divorce Soon-yi, or can they stay married? Should Woody put his minor daughter up for adoption? Should he disown and have no further contact with them because the feminists have declared him to be "creepy"? Calling someone "creepy" is pretty much an admission that you have nothing on them. You don't need to know anything. All you need is a vague feeling.

Again, they knew nothing. They thought he and Mia Farrow were married, that Soon-yi was either his stepdaughter, his adopted daughter or both, or they thought she and Dylan Farrow were the same person.

Some attacked him because his movies usually don't do very well. Does feminism demand only high-profit movies now?

I know that's not much of a point.

I'm no stranger to seething hatred. I hate lots of people. If it's for ideological reasons, I try to have a coherent reason.

In the case of Woody Allen, I tend to be unhappy with him because his movies are all-white and when he does put non-white characters in them, like the prostitute in Deconstructing Harry, it's usually racist or otherwise objectionable. When asked about it, he stupidly said that he would never cast an actor based on race and that's why he only uses white actors unless the script he wrote calls for it.

His wife, his son/brother-in-law and one of his daughters are East Asian, for crying out loud. And you look at Fading Gigolo, the movie he acted in but didn't write or direct---it was so refreshing to see him among Black people, sitting in his living room with his African-American wife and stepchildren.

I hate John Landis because he murdered three people. Not much can be done about that now. I hated Dustin Diamond because he was so obnoxious. Jerry Lewis never said anything funny and was one of those guys who abused his children and bragged about it because he thought it showed what a good father he was. I hated Joan Rivers because she was an extremely violent racist rasping in her ugly voice about murdering Palestinians. Woody Allen is no picnic in that regard. He can't understand why Palestinians don't like being tortured, murdered and ethnically cleansed. Don't they know Jews are God's Chosen People?

There are a number of people I should hate and don't. I watched Our Man in Havana last night and liked Burl Ives okay in spite of his cooperation with the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. To hell with that guy.

There was Arthur Miller, that piece of crap who thought he was too good to be married to Marilyn Monroe. He thought he was a genius because, in HIS play, the Salem Witch Trials were BAD.

Woody Allen's next movie

Woody Allen's next movie will start filming this July in Spain under the working title Wasp 2019, will star Christoph Waltz, Luis Garrel, Sergi Lopez, Elena Anaya, Wallace Shawn and Gina Gershon.

According to Deadline.com, "The film tells the story of a married American couple who go to the San Sebastian Film Festival. According to the production, they get caught up in the magic of the festival, the beauty and charm of Spain and the fantasy of movies. She has an affair with a brilliant French movie director, and he falls in love with a beautiful Spanish woman who lives there. 'It is a comedy-romance that resolves itself in a funny but romantic way,' Mediapro confirmed in a release."

After all the attacks on him, all the people who thought he was finished, Woody Allen's doing okay for himself. I wonder how Dylan and Ronan are taking it.

I think Allen's been in decline for some years working on smaller budgets. If his audience shrinks, he'll work on even smaller budgets. He's got a ways to go. Look at Call Me By Your Name made for two or three million dollars. Allen's never worked that cheap. I assume he gets a percentage of the gross, so it makes a difference to him, but it's fine with me if his movies go to streaming video or DVD.

I looked at comments on this story on various sites. The people attacking him still can't get the story straight. They've started mistaking Soon-yi for Dylan which is a new thing. I don't know what their excuse is for hating Moses. Next they'll start confusing Mia Farrow with Diane Keaton.