Paul Schrader, Revisiting Transcendental Style in Film, 2017

Paul Schrader discusses his 1972 book at the Toronto Film Festival.

An hour and twenty-eight minutes.

The Delivered (2019)

I've been watching these recent, extremely cheap westerns. I just wanted to know what they looked like, what you could get away with if you wanted to make a commercially viable three-day movie. No sex or nudity. They make up for the lack of drama, stunts or excitement with sheer brutality. In one, the villains kick and beat the sheriff, nail him in a coffin while he's alive, fire their guns into the coffin then douse it in kerosene and set it on fire while the man's son watches from a jail cell they locked him in.

So, for a change of pace, I watched this movie. It was an hour and fifty minutes, made in England, set in the 17th century. A puritan couple and their son come home from church and find a naked degenerate couple in their barn. Cromwellian law enforcement is on their trail. They seem like a nice couple. The man plays with the Puritan couple's poor son, so the kid's father canes him.

I won't go into it, but it becomes terribly violent toward the end.

It made me think a little of The Virgin Spring. Devoutly religious farmers are tough customers, not that it did this fellow much good.

Free on Tubi.

Art Carney, 'Twas Night Before Christmas (1954)

Since Art Carney came up on here a few days ago, here he is again. Something I posted before a year or two ago.

Last Days of Billy the Kid, Jesse James vs the Black Train

Watched two movies even I couldn't take: The Last Days of Billy the Kid and Jesse James vs the Black Train, apparently filmed back to back. Had many of the same people and same locations. Very cheap. They were just terrible.

The movies weren't like Plan 9 where every problem was blatantly obvious. My impression was that if you were there at the filming, you'd know they weren't Lawrence of Arabia, but you wouldn't realize how bad they were going to turn out.

It was hard for me to tell and this isn't a criticism, but I think a lot of the dialogue was filmed in a studio in front of a green screen. 

I'd feel guilty writing this if director Christopher Forbes hadn't made thirty-eight other movies. 

They had nice cover art.

There was a difference in the user comments on IMDb. There were no clever put-downs. They felt no need to explain or justify themselves. They were brief and to the point. A lot of them paid to see the movies and felt ripped off.

Free on Tubi.

Thought Spiral podcast: Jeff Garlin

Transcribed from the Thought Spiral podcast. Andy Kindler and J.Elvis Weinstein have no personal knowledge of and little insight into Jeff Garlin's problems on The Goldbergs. But that's okay. 

 Andy Kindler: "I don't know if we should talk about this and maybe we shouldn't, but--and I don't know what's happening with it, but Jeff Garlin seems to be in trouble from his behavior on the set or if he didn't have behavior on the set, and all--I'm not saying yea, I'm not saying nay."

J. Elvis Weinstein: "Yeah." 

AK: "I'm just saying, should I withdraw my apology?" 

JW: "I think you can just let it lie..."

AK: "Well right and initially when I had the falling out with Jeff Garlin and I felt like I needed to apologize because I felt I sandbagged him a little bit, you could not believe all---not millions of them, but, like, John Henson---you know John Henson?"

JW:  "Yeah."

AK: "He's nice. Very sweet guy."

JW: "I don't know him."

AK: "Yeah. But you know of him, right?"

JW: "I know mostly because he replaced Kinnear on Talk Soup."

AK: "Right. So he--so he contacted me and said that Garlin had screamed at him to do cleaner ma--he DOES clean material. I don't know if you've ever seen him. He's a clean act. Garlin was yelling at him to clean--I mean, I think he's had this kind of behavior for years and years, so I had lots of people come up and tell me about these horrible stories--"

JW: "Right."

AK: "--about him---I know he threw--I believe he threw something across the room at an assistant."

JW:  "Yeah."

AK: "Things like that."

JW: "Yeah. I don't know him at all so I can only go, Hmm, doesn't seem that inconsistent with the public image."

...

AK: "...People have disliked him for many many years, for many different reasons."

JW: "It doesn't seem like impulse control is really his forte."

AK: "You know what else is not his forte? Being that funny. And yet he has convinced people that he is hilarious, that this act of his is off-the-charts original. I think he's a good actor when he's on Curb and things like that, but I don't see him as a-----Why am I doing this, Josh?"

JW: "I don't know."

AK: "Why? Why? Josh, you must know why! You've known me long enough to know why I bring these things up."

JW: "Because every apology is a wound to you."

AK: "Yeah. So what's the point of apologizing? What was the point of it? Lou Schneider--I can say this. Lou Schneider--"

JW: "Who I like. I like Lou Schneider."

AK: "I love Lou Schneider. He works on that show--he works on The Goldbergs, so, and he's friends with Garlin, but everybody--but the thing is, he was telling me--he said, Why'd you apologize to him? Not a good idea. I think his point was that it would go to his head."

Mini-DV vs S-VHS

A few years ago, I bought an old Canon XL1 on eBay. Not a wise purchase, but I wanted one. I was like one of those guys who buys an old Camero because he wanted one just like it when was fourteen. I wanted one at one time. I also had the idea that it would impress people. It looks more like a movie camera than the dainty prosumer camcorders they have now. I got an early model so it's not widescreen. They're all standard definition. But I thought the unknowledgeable would be impressed. And they're still selling for a few hundred bucks on there. 

I bought it, tried it out a few times but did nothing with it. It's been sitting on a modestly priced fluid-head tripod in the living room all this time. And it sort of had the desired effect. My sister-in-law wants me to drive a couple of hours the day after Xmas to film her and her band. I tried to talk her out of it. I told her all that stuff about it. But she said she had the same idea I did. Just have it there for looks and it would impress the rubes in the band. 

I'll drive up there. I'll keep my mask on.

I've done that before, filmed bands, filmed, lone singers and an organist doing a pre-Halloween performance. I guess I did okay. My sister-in-law said she'd have other people there filming with cell phones. Maybe my footage can be edited in, maybe it can't. We'll find out.

I gave her plenty of warning.

I also have an old SVHS camcorder. Have some SVHS tapes which haven't been made in years. Maybe I can bring that for back-up.

Years ago, I was filming with it somewhere. A homeless guy started talking talking to the camera. I told him more than once that I wasn't from the media but he wanted me to record his message to the governor.

Can't remember what I paid for it. It was obsolete at the time. Got it from a guy on Craigs List who used it to record services at his church.

Man---they're still selling those things on eBay. They're cheap, too. I should probably buy another one just so my blank tapes don't go to waste.

I read that a guy in Portland filmed a documentary about heroin addiction. He just knew those poor addicts would steal his equipment so he filmed it with two almost worthless VHS camcorders. It turned out the low quality analog video perfectly suited the subject matter.

Barnaby Jones

 

Lately, I've been lying there awake at four in the morning with Barnaby Jones on TV. I'm okay with an action show about an elderly person, but I think Buddy Ebsen should have worn glasses, had a younger person drive him everywhere and turned down his hearing aid before shooting people.

Look at Art Carney in The Late Show. He did those things and more.

Buddy Ebsen should have been crabby instead of folksy.

Ebsen wasn't THAT old, but Art Carney was only 59. 

The lesson here for young aspiring filmmakers is that ANYBODY can be an action star.

Flip video camera

I finally found my old Flip video camera. I had forgotten or maybe I somehow never knew that it used AA batteries. It's been years since I used the thing. Standard definition. I don't remember the rolling shutter being a problem but I heard that it was on early models.

I saw Marc Cousins' documentary that he shot on one. And there was a horror movie on an obscure streaming channel which, according the description, was shot on a Flip camcorder. I thought I'd go back and look at it later but I couldn't find it again.

Wikipedia has a list of movies filmed on the old prosumer Canon XL1. Found no such list for Flip cameras although I did find a movie romance filmed on one in 2011 shortly after the camera itself was discontinued.

Roger Ebert's review:

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/a-love-affair-of-sorts-2011

I don't know. There was a movie filmed on a Fisher-Price PXL2000 which was sort of interesting. Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel made their own short films on Fisher Price cameras for their show. But a Flip camera---it's not very good but it's not bad enough to be interesting. 

You know what I thought would be a good gimmick? To make a really cheap movie and say you did it with your COVID-19 stimulus check. At least one person tried that.

Why YOU should be a comedian!

Being a comedian means never having to say you're sorry.

Jeff Garlin has been fired from The Goldbergs after a long HR investigation into complaints from crew members.

Looking at the comments from some of the articles about it online, there are people claiming to have worked on the show who said he was far worse that what's being reported.

But most of the comments defend him. And the defense is always the same. He's a COMEDIAN. People just failed to appreciate that.

When Joan Rivers revealed herself as a snarling violent racist rejoicing at the deaths of thousands of Palestinian men, women and children, some thoughtful person leapt to her defense. "That's what comedians do!" he wrote. 

Contrast that with what Andy Kindler said in a different context. "If you're a comedian and you're not funny, you're just a racist."

These people think comedians are beyond human judgement. They can literally do no wrong.

I thought comedians were traditionally viewed as bitter, screwed up neurotics using humor to cope with their awful childhoods. 

Look at Jerry Lewis, a terrible, terrible person. One of those guys who would brag in interviews about abusing his children because he thought it showed what a good father he was. Ironically, he was in a feud with Bing Crosby.

Steven Spielberg hoplessly out of touch

Spielberg's West Side Story is bombing at the box office. 

I remember many years ago. They did the play on a tiny stage in my old junior high school. I was in high school at the time, but I knew a horrified university music major who was a student teacher there. They bought a case of novelty switchblade combs they made to look like knives. Why do they do this to children? 

Yearbooks from the school are online. I thought I could find a picture from the play to illustrate this post, but it was such an intensely uncomfortable memory that the yearbook didn't mention it.

I don't know if former young people who did the play in school would enjoy seeing it on the big screen or if it would give them flashbacks to the horror they went through. I've long thought that the real purpose of school music programs was to keep kids from ever wanting to become musicians. School plays may serve the same purpose, to keep them from running away to Hollywood.

It's been suggested that the only people West Side Story would appeal to are older and have the good sense to stay away from theaters full of possibly COVID-infected movie-goers. What's the point of having a huge, high definition TV if you're just going to go to the movies anyway? I have a smaller high def TV, but I sit closer to it.

Burying Leni Riefenstahl

Article on Nina Gladitz' lifelong crusade to expose the crimes of Leni Riefenstahl:

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/dec/09/burying-leni-riefenstahl-nina-gladitz-lifelong-crusade-hitler-film-maker

 

Buckskin (2021)

In fairness, it was set in an odd time period---1820. How many movies are set back then?

About a big fur trapping operation in Texas. I didn't know any animals in Texas were prized for their fur. Indians have wiped out a bunch of trappers including the son of the guy running this fur trapping business, but the man's teenage grandson has fled into what Texans consider a "forest".  A trapper turned cook goes walking out there alone to look for the young fellow. Everyone walks very slowly in this. Even when some bad men capture the former trapper, tie his hands and force him walk behind their horses they're barely moving. 

Like most low budget movies, there was more dialogue than anything else, but the dialogue is odd and stilted. They don't speak naturally. It's like they were supposed to be speaking a foreign language but didn't want to use subtitles.

The boy hasn't been out there very long, but he's gone feral and doesn't want to leave the forest to which he attributes supernatural powers. He wears a big fur hat even though they're in Texas. Others dressed like regular cowboys. I don't think that guy's musket was going to be of much help if they were attacked by more than one Indian.

At one point, the former trapper and experienced frontiersman eats some poisonous berries. Like an idiot.

It could have been a half hour shorter. Terribly violent ending you might like.

The sets and props were good.  Directed by Brett Bentman.

Go ahead and watch it. Available free on Tubi.

Memento (2000)

 

I wasn't interested in seeing this, but I exchanged some emails with my cousin. He recommended it and he said he'd watch some crap I suggested so I owed him. Everyone else seemed to like it. I remember when it came out but didn't realize how long it had been.

Sitting through the first half, I wondered what people were so excited about. Got more interesting toward the end. The story was told in reverse to simulate the memory loss, I guess, but I don't know how much it helped.

A man with no short term memory has to take Polaroid photos and constantly write notes to himself as he hunts the man who murdered his wife and gave him his debilitating brain injury.

Lina Wertmeuller, 1928 - 2021

Lina Wertmueller died today at age 93. 

My family had HBO in the '70's and I watched a couple of her movies then. I was in junior high and watched The Seven Beauties and Swept Away.  

There was a scene in Swept Away where the bourgeois woman complains that the spaghetti was overcooked. I've been self-conscious about my spaghetti ever since. And that was 45 years ago. 

I just started watching the movie again. I was thirteen when I saw it and didn't realize it was a comedy.

Llamageddon (2015)

My cousin hipped me to this, Llamageddon, about a llama from space who kills people. Pleasant and amusing, like a toned down, less offensive Troma movie. Had some intentionally bad special effects, like the close-ups of people being battered by llama hooves and blood inexplicably sprayed from a vast distance when people were killed.

In one scene, the camera slowly pans over a cemetery. There are no people, but we know there's a funeral because we hear bagpipes playing Amazing Grace.

A brother and sister, college students, stay at their grandparents' house after the funeral. The grandparents died in what was thought to be a horrible accident. The sister invites friends over for a party which is then terrorized by the llama.

Apparently a local production from Ohio. 

University students in the neighborhood here were having a party while I watched the movie. Had to listen to their crap for two or three hours. I was rooting for the llama.

69 minutes.

Free on Tubi and Amazon Prime.

Herman Melville quote

 “Depravity in the oppressed is no apology for the oppressor; but rather an additional stigma to him, as being, in a large degree, the effect, and not the cause and justification of oppression.”

– Herman Melville, White-Jacket

Michael Wolff on Ronan Farrow

From Michael Wolff on Ronan Farrow in his new book, Too Famous:

For NBC, this—Farrow as crusading investigator—was a confusing development on a number of fronts. First, NBC had fired him. And yet here he was proposing a major investigative effort—an odd bit of not getting the we-don’t-really-think-much-of-you message. And, at best, he was a mere rookie reporter, with scant journalism background and little support in the organization—and he wants to do what?

And then there’s the Allen thing. Certainly, in conventional reporting terms, you’d naturally question the appearance of bias here. This person whose life story was bound up in one of the most controversial charges of sex abuse of all time was now asking—demanding—to represent the network in a dicey sex abuse exposé. (In Catch and Kill he dismisses even the suggestion that there might be legitimate concerns about bias as preposterous.) And there was yet another, sotto voce, aspect of this. Many in the news division didn’t believe the Farrow family’s Allen story. This had become something of a generational divide. Younger people seemed to blindly accept the Farrow version, while older people—and these were older media people running NBC News—were skeptical. Some, in fact, believed the story to be flatly false and that it only achieved younger generation credibility in a Trumpian way, with the baldness and magnitude and repetition of the Farrow family claims.

 ...

What if none of the accusations against Woody Allen are true? Allen, after nearly thirty years, continues to deny every meaningful detail of the claims, with no one else coming forward to support them, and with the Farrow children divided over their veracity. But not only that, what if Ronan Farrow has pursued the vendetta against his father knowing it was a likely fake? The account by Ronan’s brother Moses (starkly refuting almost every one of his mother’s central claims about the alleged molestation), who was fourteen at the time of his mother’s accusations against Allen and present at the time of the alleged incident—Ronan was five— certainly suggests you would need to be willfully blind not to have major doubts.

Read more here:

https://www.lamag.com/culturefiles/michael-wolff-roasts-ronan-farrow-and-defends-woody-allen-in-new-book-too-famous/

The American President (1995) Rob Reiner

Imagine the reaction in the bourgeois press if a movie like this had been made in any Communist country, or even a modestly progressive country. Or even a somewhat conservative neo-liberal country the U.S. decided to hate. If it had been about a Russian president who starts dating again after losing his wife.

Here's an actual line from the movie:

"Sydney, the man is the leader of the free world! He's brilliant, funny, handsome!"

I was surprised to learn that not everyone thought this abomination was a morbid romantic fantasy about Bill Clinton getting over Hillary's death.

On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969)

I didn't like George Lazenby's frilly see-though tuxedo shirt. He was the least experienced actor to play James Bond, but he was the one who had to show he had feelings. I didn't think he was that bad. He gets married at the end but things don't go well. All the movies in this series were disappointments.

With Diana Rigg and Telly Savalas. 

Free on Pluto.

I checked. Telly Savalas had earlobes in real life.

Bad News Bears Breaking Training (1977)

Why did I watch this?

Child actor Alfred Lutter III's last movie after a short but distinguished career working with Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese. 

The Bad News Bears was about a terrible boys' baseball team with an alcoholic coach. In the 1977 sequel,  they're so good that they're going to the Astrodome to play. 

The overweight kid from the original movie lost weight, and good for him, but they replaced him in the sequel. The others all seemed to be there except Tatum O'Neal and they added Jimmy Baio.

William Devane as Jackie Earle Haley's estranged father who pretends to be their coach.

The original movie was about how kids shouldn't be abused and pressured to compete. This one had nothing to say, although the racist kid seemed more racist than before.

 

Nothing much

Listened to a little news about the upheaval in the movie industry caused by COVID-19. Everything is being delayed. It was okay with me. I don't want to see a James Bond movie or anything based on a comic book. I don't know if this will be a boon to cinema, but it couldn't make it much worse.

When Woody Allen's Rainy Day in New York became the top grossing movie in the world, he quipped that all it took was a deadly global pandemic to put him on top.

I watched a little of a low budget western. Soldiers go out somewhere and are surrounded by Indians.

I watched only the first several minutes. It looked very well-made with what they said were authentic uniforms. It was filmed on a western set like the one where they were filming Rust. But I looked it up on IMDb, read the user comments, and there was nothing but seething hatred against it. Not because they made Indians the villains, but because it wasn't up to Steven Spielberg standards.

One person was outraged that there were any positive reviews at all and seriously suggested that IMDb remove them because they were obviously wrong. 

I might have felt the same way if I had watched another twenty minutes. One person said that people made the movie just to make a movie. Which could have been true, but even if it were, there have been perfectly good movies made just for the sake of making a movie. How many movies did Roger Corman make because he had a few days before he had to tear down a set? Didn't Pudovkin make Storm Over Asia because he happened to be in Mongolia or someplace that looked like Mongolia?

I bring this up because I started this post with nothing to say. I just haven't posted anything in a few days and thought I'd better write something. I posted for the sake of posting.

I haven't watched anything I want to admit to. On Amazon, they had these really cheap DVDs of sadly unerotic 1950's "pornography". I'm always amused at the extreme low end of commercial cinema, so I ordered one. They're from a company that puts out old public domain B movies.

A series of short films. I thought they might have sort of a storyline, that the "filmmakers" might have seen them as a stepping stone to slightly more lavish productions,  but I was disappointed. 

It was six bucks with free shipping. If I saw it in a store I would have bought it on impulse, although, there, you could pay cash and wouldn't have the purchase etched indelibly onto your permanent record.

 

Now that I think about it, in those days, wasn't pornography all produced by the Mafia? There was some nonsense that it was all being produced by Communists--- some congressman claimed that photographers, film crews and naked ladies converged on a town in Poland to produce all the dirty pictures and movies that were destroying the West. But if the Soviets produced it, it would have been so much better. The movies would have been well-lit and had a little story.

No, this was the work of the Mafia. The dirty, stinking Mafia.

Anyone could make a dirty movie, obviously, but the Mafia would simply steal it. This continued until someone in the FBI realized that enforcing copyright would be an easy way to go after organized crime.

Gentleman's Agreement (1947)

The opening scenes are of Gregory Peck with ten- or eleven-year-old Dean Stockwell as his son. They filmed the master shots on the streets of New York and the dialogue in the studio in front of rear screen projections. It worked very well. It was reportedly less apparent that they did it this way before high definition video.

Gregory Peck as a journalist assigned the task of writing a series on anti-Semitism. It will be called "I was a Jew for Six Months". They couldn't just have a Jewish guy write it? 

"I've been having my nose rubbed in it and I don't like the smell."

In an early scene, Peck has to explain to Dean Stockwell what anti-Semitism is. He says that some people hate Catholics, some hate Jews.

"And nobody hates us because we're American," his son observes.

"Uh, well, no."

Peck is thrown out of an expensive hotel, his son is harassed by Jew-hating children, he learns from his secretly Jewish secretary that the liberal magazine he works for doesn't hire Jews, and his girlfriend, Dorothy McGuire, tolerates anti-Semitism among her callous, bourgeois friends.

I first saw this when I was in high school. A couple of years later, when I saw Caddyshack, I got it when Rodney Dangerfield told his Asian friend, "I hear this place is restricted, Wang, so don't tell them you're Jewish."

With John Garfield. Sam Jaffe as a Professor Lieberman. They mention Palestine and Zionism in passing without noting any irony. Dean Stockwell was amazing as a child actor.

Free on The Criterion Channel.

 

Dean Stockwell, RIP

Dean Stockwell has died at 85.

As a child, he was Gregory Peck's son in Gentleman's Agreement, and was later in The Boy With the Green Hair, an anti-war movie that helped get the director blacklisted.

The main thing I remember him from is Compulsion which I saw on TV several times as a kid. Learned about the Leopold & Loeb case and it taught me that seemingly pitiful young men still might rape or murder you.

Three-day movies

I heard that there were companies that specialize in three-day movies. But what companies? What movies did they make? I heard they weren't very good, but in what ways? What do people want from a three day movie and how much can you get away with?

Finally found one. A guy named Clay Moffatt has an interview on YouTube. He discusses his movies which are generally shot in three or four days. He's a restaurant manager by trade so I didn't take it seriously until I looked him up and found he has several movies on Tubi and Amazon Prime. 

I watched a couple of them. They tended to have fewer than ten actors and were mostly filmed on one location. Mostly horror movies although he did a couple of teen spy movies with larger casts that he may have spent more time on.

One of his tips was to not shoot unnecessary retakes. 

I didn't like the naturalistic dialogue in part because I disliked the characters.

The sound wasn't great in one and the handheld camera shook a little too much in another. Jump cuts helped move things along which was fine with me. Movies ALL look pretty good now. It's not like the old days.

Jory (1973) Robby Benson.

Jory's father is a lawyer who plays classical music on a saloon's out-of-tune piano. He gets himself killed by continuing to antagonize a much larger man even after he pulls a knife on him.

Jory (Robby Benson), watches the murder through the window.

Now an orphan, Jory unwisely confronts the killer.

"Why did you kill my father?"

It seems like a skinny teen killing a big violent drunk with a rock would be an obvious case of self defense, but Jory flees the area by joining men driving a herd of horses to Texas. 

This happens in the first ten minutes so I'm not giving anything away.

Coming of age stories always have a Young Adult feel to them. That was the case here even though the boy kills people.  Later, he sees a naked girl swimming.

A cowboy introduces Jory to shooting which turns out to be a natural ability rather than an acquired skill.

Robby Benson must have been sixteen or seventeen playing a 15-year-old. His first major role. He spoke very softly and he must have cried a few times, but it was the most ruggedly masculine role any young boy could ever hope to play.

Available on YouTube.

I never heard the name "Jory" before. I googled it and looked at a website for baby names. It's unisex and means "farmer". And, in 1973, when this movie was released, it had a spike in popularity.

This is the last Dracula thing

I listened to the novel Dracula on tape one time. The main thing I remember is the men going off to kill Dracula. I thought it was strange that they never had any self-doubt. None of them thought that maybe they got caught up in the moment and that vampires obviously don't exist and they could get into a lot of trouble for what they were planning to do.

The end of the Francis Ford Coppola version was more true to the book. I don't think this is a spoiler, but a cowboy kills Dracula with a Bowie knife.

Are vampires a Christian thing or a natural phenomenon? Why does Dracula recoil at the sight of a crucifix? Why wouldn't a vampire have a reflection in a mirror? There's no religious or scientific explanation for that.

Spanish langauge Dracula (1931) etc

I don't know how long it's been. I went to the doctor. They tried to hand me a diagnostic questionnaire but I'd already gotten it off the internet and filled it out. My answers, according to the thing I read, meant I likely had ADHD. It would explain a lot. But the doctor pooh-poohed it and wouldn't give me Adderall in any case, which wasn't necessarily what I wanted, although why does everybody get Adderall but me?  Woody Allen mentioned Adderall in his memoir, it turns out my brother-in-law takes it and he has a family history of heart disease, too. All the college students take it. It's a crime, but they openly sell it to each other. 

Well, I looked into it and realized I wasn't getting nearly as much caffeine in my diet as I thought. It's the poor man's Adderall. Rather than struggle to ingest enough semi-naturally, never knowing how much I was actually getting, I bought a jar of caffeine pills. But now I keep forgetting to take them. And when I remember, I think, okay, I'll take some caffeine. Then, after a little while I think, Did I just take one? I can't remember.

You don't think that's a sign of ADHD? If I can't take generic caffeine pills responsibly, I probably shouldn't be trusted with a Schedule 2 controlled substance.

In spite of my dwindling attention span, I managed to sit through the Spanish-language version of Dracula (1931) filmed at the same time as the Bela Lugosi version on the same sets. I've heard it was considered better than the English version but it's been so long since I've seen it, I couldn't compare. It was better than I thought it would be. 

By the way, was Werner Herzog's Nosferatu really that great? He's German and did terrible things to the rats in the movie. 

These movies people watch for Halloween are really grim. People dying horrible deaths. They're not as fun as people seem to think.

Halloween, 2021

I went to the store on Halloween looking for Halloween candy. They had other decorations, but no candy. I didn't see pumpkins either. I bought fun size Almond Joys and some Christmas candy. Thought about buying candy canes, but I assumed I'd have to eat them myself and I never liked those things.

I thought the lack of candy meant there would be no trick or treaters.

In the parking lot, there was a boy dressed as Elvis and a girl wearing a costume version of an old Girl Scout uniform, so I should have known there'd be trick or treating.

A large group came to the door.

"Take all you want!" I said. And one girl grabbed a huge handful. I didn't think they'd go for Almond Joys. Maybe she didn't know what they were. 

That one group cleaned out most of the candy. I opened the second bags.

Another group, all siblings I would imagine, took a large amount. One girl took a huge handful. Dropped one on the ground and instead of putting it in her bag returned it to the bowl.

Then some poor devil, may have been about eleven, came to the door in what looked like Batman pajamas. He was alone. I gave him his candy. Told him to take more.

In the past, I've had older or older-looking kids come to the door. The teenagers seem kind of embarrassed and will only take one. You have to encourage them. They are guests at your door and you should be polite.

I had a friend who trick-or-treated at sixteen because he needed the food. He was malnourished. He was arrested one night when he was thirteen while searching for food in a dumpster. He thought they would feed him in juvenile detention but it was too late. Dinner was over. He thought he'd get to eat in the morning, but his otherwise negligent mother rushed down before breakfast to get him out.

Also, he was a potentially dangerous juvenile delinquent. When he said "trick or treat" he may have really meant it. Just give teenagers their candy and don't try to shame them.

It could have been so cheap, easy and safe

By the way, there's one other situation where filmmakers always use fake prop guns. When they have a convicted felon in the movie who can't be in possession of a firearm, they make these real-looking props.

It's been reported that cops found real ammunition on the set of Rust and that crew members had been going out and "plinking" with the gun that killed Halyna Hutchins. They had been doing it that morning and apparently left a live round in the gun. 

But with these things, once people start testifying under oath, the facts often turn out to be different than what was reported in the press. 

It seems crazy when you're making a low budget movie---when much of the crew walks off because they hadn't been paid in weeks and because they had to drive to Albuquerque every night because hotels there were slightly cheaper---that you'd go the more expensive route for your prop guns. They shouldn't have been using real guns. And the stunts should have been done through editing so no one could possibly get hurt.  

There was the Soviet western, White Sun of the Desert, set in Kazakhstan in the 1920's. The public loved it but it got little respect from the Soviet movie industry because there were only one or two actual stunts in it. In one, a guy jumped out of second floor window and landed in some sand. I don't remember what the other one was. But the rest of it was done with montage. 

We see a guy climbing a ladder. We see someone shoot at him. Then a close-up him hanging by one hand. He lets go. Then a shot of him after he landed. I think that's how one thing went.

They do that anyway now. They won't do an action scene in one shot. They were bragging about Matt Damon learning karate for a movie, but then the fight scenes were pieced together from very short takes. Like the fight scene Chris Elliott put together as a joke on David Letterman.

Why do people make things difficult?

Right-wingers mouth off

One of these handsome fellows is Trump, Jr.

Donald Trump, Jr, has started marketing a T-shirt that says, "Guns don't kill people. Alec Baldwin kills people." 

Junior didn't take some anti-gun statement by Baldwin and throw it back in his face. It's just an old anti-gun control slogan proven false by the accident. The gun killed Helyna Hutchins. No one is seriously blaming Baldwin.

Someone named Candace Owens said the shooting was "poetic justice". Pretty indirect if it was.

 

Prop gun was used for target practice off set

Dummy rounds available on Amazon

I wondered how this could have happened. 

TMZ is reporting that the prop gun which killed DP Helyna Hutchins and wounded director Joel Souza had been used by members of the crew for target practice away from the set. 

And they found live ammunition stored alongside blank ammunition on the set.

If you're rushed and a bit sloppy in your work, can you mistake live rounds for dummy rounds? Did they use dummy rounds? Was the gun supposed to be loaded with dummy rounds? 

I keep thinking back to that jackass film prof who was incensed that college students would use anything but real guns in a student film.

Alec Baldwin has left New Mexico

Alec Baldwin left New Mexico and has presumably returned to New York. He spoke at the private memorial service for Halyna Hutchins. Director Joel Souza, and the first AD Dave Halls attended; Hannah Gutierrez, the gun handler, wasn't there.

It's been reported that other armorers were offered the job and passed on it because they had doubts about the film's budget and the large number of guns involved. So they gave the job to a beginner.

It was a Tier 1 movie which means it was budgeted at less than $6 million but more than $1.5 million. Below that amount would be considered an "Ultra Low budget" film if I'm reading this chart right:

https://chicagofilmmakersproducing.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/feature-film-budget-ranges.pdf

The movie's kaput, which isn't surprising. I doubt it's a great loss to cinema, but that's okay. 

I don't know what I think about the westerns they make now. They're low-budget and often extremely violent which I guess is the name of the game with that genre. It seems like they must be labors of love, but they're so generic.

Daily Beast reports on accident

The Daily Beast has an article blaming the weapons handler on the movie.

Read the whole thing HERE.

The article tells about concerns raised from the previous movies Hannah Gutierrez-Reed worked on.

“She was a bit careless with the guns, waving it around every now and again,” said a source, who worked alongside armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed on the upcoming Nicolas Cage film, The Old Way. “There were a couple times she was loading the blanks and doing it in a fashion that we thought was unsafe.”

 

On her last movie, she loaded a gun with blanks and handed it to an 11-year-old actress.

 

Concerned crew members intervened, demanding filming be stopped until Gutierrez-Reed had properly checked the firearm, the two sources said.

 

 “She was reloading the gun on the ground, where there were pebbles and stuff. We didn’t see her check it, we didn’t know if something got in the barrel or not,” one source said, explaining the crew waited until she double checked the gun for barrel obstruction.

The article mentions the Assistant Director's role:

The second production source told The Daily Beast that the first assistant director should be personally verifying whether a weapon is “hot” or “cold.” (A “cold gun” indicates there are no cartridges—including blanks—inside the firearm. A “hot gun” indicates the weapon is loaded with cartridges, either live ammunition or blank rounds.) “This check alone should’ve prevented this incident,” the person said.

In a heartbreaking 911 call, script supervisor Mamie Mitchell also seemed to reference Halls as she urgently asked a dispatcher to send an ambulance to the set at Bonanza Creek Ranch, on the outskirts of Santa Fe.

Mitchell can be overheard telling someone nearby, “this fucking AD that yelled at me at lunch asking about revisions, this motherfucker. Did you see him lean over my desk and yell at me? He’s supposed to check the guns. He’s responsible for what happened.”

The weapons handler on the movie

From Showbiz 411 :

EXCLUSIVE Hannah Gutierrez has been identified as the armorer or weapons handler on the movie, “Rust.” According to reports, she laid out three guns on the Santa Fe set. One of them wound up killing Halyna Hutchins and wounding director Joel Souza, fired by an unwitting Alec Baldwin.

Gutierrez’s LinkedIn page includes a resume note from this past spring and summer working at Yellowstone Film Ranch in Montana from March through June. She described her job there: “Loading firearms with appropriately sized blanks. Ensuring gun safety on set along with instructing actors on how to use their guns.”

She is young and pretty, and according to LinkedIn a student at Northern Arizona University from 2017 to 2020 in “creative media and film.”

It’s unclear if Gutierrez was union approved or licensed, or still a student. But she comes from a family of “armorers.” Her father is the famous armorer and movie gun consultant Thell Reed, who she said trained her in an affidavit.

 

The Rookie switching to airsoft

In response to the accident on the set of Rust, ABC's cop show, The Rookie, will start using airsoft guns as props on their show and add muzzle flashes digitally. 

I assumed there was some good reason why they didn't do this years ago, and maybe there was, but they're changing.

It seems insane to keep on with the blanks when they're that big a hazard. Even if you do everything safely, it's a lot of work.

In the '50's, the studio where they filmed The Untouchables was robbed. Burglars made off with several (real, fully functional) submachine guns. 

 

A little more about the accident on the set of RUST

Six union camera crew members walked off the set of Rust over safety concerns just hours before the accidental shooting which killed the DP and nailed the director in the collar bone. There had already been a couple of accidental discharges of prop weapons. 

According to the L.A. Times:

Safety protocols standard in the industry, including gun inspections, were not strictly followed on the “Rust” set near Santa Fe, the sources said. They said at least one of the camera operators complained last weekend to production managers about gun safety on the set.

Three crew members who were present at the Bonanza Creek Ranch set that day said they were particularly concerned about two accidental prop gun discharges on Saturday.

Baldwin’s stunt-double accidentally fired two rounds Saturday after being told that the gun was “cold” — lingo for a weapon that doesn’t have any ammunition, including blanks, one of crew members who witnessed the episode told the Los Angeles Times.

“There should have been an investigation into what happened,” said the crew member. “There were no safety meetings. There was no assurance that it wouldn’t happen again. All they wanted to do was rush, rush, rush.”

A colleague was so alarmed by the prop gun misfires he sent a text message to the unit production manager. “We’ve now had 3 accidental discharges. This is super unsafe,” according to a copy of the message reviewed by the Times.

According to Showbiz 411, Rust is a "Tier 1" movie, meaning it's being made for under $6 million. I don't know how much under.

It's like they're blaming Alec Baldwin

The headlines about the death of DP Halyna Hutchins now seem intent on blaming Alec Baldwin, like it was his fault whatever happened. It's misleading to say that he accidentally shot and killed someone, like it wouldn't have happened if he had been more careful.

I listened to a couple of "serious" filmmakers on the internet a few years ago. They were so serious that they were infuriated that anyone would use anything but real guns in a movie. El Mariachi used toy guns, and I saw a long, long action sequence made to showcase a director's ability that was done with airsoft and BB guns. There are Non Guns used in movies and TV shows, although they don't have anything that would work in a western.

Blanks are dangerous, loud and expensive and, every so often, they kill someone.

There are a couple of teens in the cast of Rust. I hope they didn't witness this horror.

Still, I hope they let the kids kill a few people in the movie (if they continue, and it's hard to imagine they will). I've mentioned before that, with the thousands and thousands of westerns that have been cranked out over the last 125 years, it's only been recently that women and children have been allowed to shoot anyone. I know Grace Kelly killed a guy in High Noon. The exception proves the rule. 

But I wouldn't let a child actor use real guns loaded with blanks. Maybe there was a very good reason they were never allowed to shoot anyone.

Propgun misfire kills director of photography, injures director

Director of photography Halyna Hutchins was killed and director Joel Souza was wounded on the set of the movie Rust being filmed in New Mexico in an accident involving a gun loaded with blanks fired by Alec Baldwin. 

Are blanks still necessary? Bruce Willis suffered hearing loss from firing blanks in a closed space in a Die Hard movie; they killed Brandon Lee and Jon-Erik Hexum.

I don't remember who the director was---maybe Al Adamson---who loaded a rifle with a blank cartridge and handed it to an actor who immediately aimed it at him. The director dived for cover. The actor was disappointed. "I wanted to shoot you!" He didn't know that, at that distance, the blank would have killed him.

I know people have complained about digitally added blood spatter in movies, but are muzzle flashes no good, either? No one has been killed in a blood spatter accident.

The movie is a western called Rust starring Alec Baldwin, with teen actor Brady Noon.

The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976)

You'll be glad to know that Jodie Foster's 20-year-old sister acted as body double for her nude scene. On the other hand, a co-star really slapped the poor girl in the face. It's hard to fake in a movie, so Jodie told the actress to just go ahead and hit her. Her character had given the woman a mouthful of sass over her pedophile son (Martin Sheen) who tried to molest her.

Reportedly one of Foster's least favorite movies.

She plays a girl whose dying father arranged for her to conceal his death. So she lives alone in a rented house. She's home schooled which means she's supposed to educate herself. She's stalked by Martin Sheen and befriends neighbor Scott Jacoby but is otherwise isolated.

And she kills a couple people, but you can hardly blame her for that.

Based on a novel. Reportedly conceived as a stage play. Most of the film takes place in one location with no more than three people per scene.

Available on Amazon Prime.

Cat Women of the Moon (1952)

"You're too smart for me, baby. I like 'em stupid."
--One of the men

Objectionable, but it wasn't that bad. I never understood what people had against Sonny Tufts. The Cat Women talk about "genocide" just eight years after the term was coined.

Originally in 3-D. There's been at least one remake.

 

"Strange. I should care what happens to them. Yet I don't."
--Man-hating lady astronaut

The Monster of Piedras Blancas (1959)

 

The main thing I remember was the 10-year-old boy with a leg brace. He was the director's son. He finds a dime on the ground, goes into the store to spend it and finds the shop owner dead. He runs--hopping two steps in his good leg for ever one with his bad one--to his mother at the graveside service for the monster's last victim. 

"He didn't have any head!"

It was painful seeing a child suffering from the effects of polio. It gave his character a backstory. The little fellow had been through enough without finding a headless body. He appeared in another movie his father made and went on to direct a few himself. 

A creature-from-the-black-lagoon-like fish man terrorizes a coastal community. The lighthouse keeper had been feeding it. I don't know if that was a mistake on his part.

With Les Tremayne and Don Sullivan. 

I watched it on Pub-D-Hub which means it's public domain and must be available on a lot of other streaming channels.

Wayne Wang's Chan is Missing (1982) on the Criterion Channel

I don't remember what it cost, but it was the first really low budget movie I remember hearing about. The black & white 16mm really looked nice after all these years of digital video.

A couple of Chinese-American cab drivers in California want to operate their own taxi. They gave Chan several thousand dollars to help them get a license through another cab company but now he has disappeared. There was a conflict between those siding with Taiwan with supporters of mainland China which led to a murder and other issues that may have led to Chan's disappearance.

Made before home video took over. Getting a movie shown in theaters was your only hope. Look at Feature Filmmaking at Used Car Prices by Wang's former collaborator, Rick Schmidt. The book focused on the possibility of getting your movie released theatrically.

Available with other Wayne Wang movies on The Criterion Channel.

Russia beats Tom Cruise

Russian actress Yulia Perisild.

A two person Russian film crew is leaving the International Space Station where they filmed the first movie in space. They return to Earth on Sunday.

According to RT: 

The film plot centers around a female cardiac doctor who is called to go into orbit and perform heart surgery on a cosmonaut who got stranded there due to a condition. Further details of the plot remain undisclosed. 

90-year-old William Shatner just went into space, so it shouldn't be too great a strain for elderly California millionaire Tom Cruise. Cruise was reportedly going to film a scene on the space station. I don't what his movie will be about, but now it won't be the first. 

NASA thinks that seeing 59-year-old Tom Cruise in space will get kids interested in science.

Russia has wisely declared two Scientology-linked organizations "undesirable" and will likely ban them. So there's another blow they've struck against Cruise.

 

THE DESPERATE HOURS, William Wyler, 1955

The first time I heard about this movie was in junior high school. I was in a "citizenship" class. The movie was based on a real incident. A family named Hill had been taken hostage by escaped criminals in 1952. There was an article about it in Life magazine at the time. You'll be happy to know that the criminals treated the Hill family courteously, so the Hills felt they were misrepresented by the magazine's claims that their nine-year-old was roughed up and that their adult daughter bit one of the men. The family sued. They won, but the Supreme Court turned on them and deprived them of their winnings. They ruled that the cost of a free press is crooked, money-grubbing "journalists" making up phony stories about you.

The movie is rather tense as you might imagine. The father (Fredric March) is trying to keep his wife and kids from provoking the escapees; Humphrey Bogart, meanwhile, is trying to keep a giant violent moron (Robert Middleton) he's escaped with from murdering them. Gig Young as the daughter's boyfriend who won't go away no matter how many times she tells him that it's not a good time and he can't come in.

With Martha Scott and Mary Murphy.

Also with Ray Collins, Arthur Kennedy, and Alan Reed (the voice of Fred Flintstone).

Joe Flynn from McHale's Navy as an additional hostage.

Dewey Martin played Bogart's younger brother. He died in 2018. The two kids, Richard Eyer who played the son and Louis Lettieri who played his friend, may be the only two left. 

Several years ago, someone noted that Robert Blake was one of the few actors left who worked with Humphrey Bogart, but Richard Eyer was in a lot more scenes with him. He even attacked Bogart at one point. Blake had a small role in Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

Filmed in VistaVision even though most of it took place in a house.

Available on The Criterion Channel or on Pluto.