Plastic surgery, John Wayne

There's a website. What's it's name? Awful Plastic Surgery. It turns out pretty much ALL the celebrities have had cosmetic surgery. Even the kids. Ali Lohan has breast implants, her lips have been plumped and she has veneers on her teeth.

They say Ashlee Simpson has had two nosejobs, breast implants and a bizarre chin implant.

Miley Cyrus got veneers and also, they think, something called a gingivectomy which makes your gums smaller. She was showing too much gum when she smiled.

Zac Efron had a nosejob and got his teeth fixed.

This has been going on since the '20s!

...although it is widely accepted that many of today’s celebrities have gone under the knife, it is an astonishing fact that in the past some of the biggest stars – men and women fêted for their supposed natural good looks in a seemingly more romantic age – were used as guinea pigs in the studios’ quest to manufacture the perfect celebrity.
According to a revelatory new BBC1 documentary, Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, John Wayne, Burt Lancaster and Rita Hayworth were just a few of the stars who secretly submitted themselves to the scalpel. Plastic surgery in Hollywood dates back as far as the Twenties. However, some of the earlier operations proved disastrous, leaving patients permanently disfigured. ‘My mother was made to have her ears pinned back and they wanted her to have a nose job,’ says Carrie Fisher. ‘But she refused the nose job because they were really butchering them then.’

Mary Pickford – the silent film star known as ‘America’s sweetheart’ and the wife of Douglas Fairbanks – was left looking almost mummified by an unsophisticated face-lift in the early Thirties. Her skin was stretched so tight across her face that she was left unable to smile, her mouth, according to one commentator, left looking like a ‘little stiff, red-lined orifice in the face of a mummy’. Similarly, Carmen Miranda was another victim of the macabre face-lift technique and was forced to endure a permanent expression of surprise. Funny girl Lucille Ball was so keen on this stretch-and-pull surgery that her eyebrows gradually floated up her forehead and nearly disappeared into her hairline.

‘The early experiments in cosmetic surgery were quite crude,’ says surgeon to the stars Dr. Richard Fleming, 57, who lives in Brentwood, California, with his wife Margaret. ‘Many women were left with a rather windblown look after having a face-lift, while for years surgeons could only do one kind of nose. It used to be the case where you could walk around Hollywood and identify the surgeon by the style of a star’s nose.’

Even John Wayne...

Few people realised that John Wayne...underwent a series of operations, including a procedure to correct his flabby neck, a face-lift and upper eyelid surgery in order to look better on camera. When he entered his 50s, studio bosses urged him to consider cosmetic surgery to boost his image as a Hollywood hero. After initially refusing – he loathed the toupee thrust upon him by the studio – he finally relented when he entered his 60s, with an operation to remove excess skin from his neck and upper eyelids. The procedure was performed by Dr Franklin Ashley, the surgeon who had operated on Rita Hayworth. ‘When John Wayne came in for his surgery, I got him ready and he was on the table,’ says Norma Gerber, Ashley’s former nurse. ‘I found his pulse was racing and I had to indicate to Dr Ashley without letting John Wayne know. He said, “Hold on a minute, Duke,” and went out and got him a little injection of Valium because he was so nervous, his hands were sweating. They’re all little children when it comes to surgery.’ In order to keep the operation a secret. on being released from hospital, John Wayne went to stay at the surgeon’s home, where he was spotted by the doctor’s son Frank Ashley. Seeing the star wrapped in bandages, the boy assumed John Wayne had gone blind, and told all his school friends about the star’s misfortune. ‘In those days – I’m talking about maybe 30 years ago – men just didn’t do that,’ says Pilar Wayne Upchurch, the former wife of John Wayne. ‘It wasn’t something that was freely discussed; you had to hide for a couple of weeks.’

This is from an article written ten years ago. You can find it here:

http://www.bevhills.com/news/2001/04/28/hollywood-knives/

Classical music

Here's the thing about classical music. You have Amy Chua, the abusive Chinese-American Yale law professor mother who gloats about having forced her daughters to practice for three hours a day. She forced them to play the violin and the piano. I don't know why Chua picked those two instruments. But I think I understand why she insisted on classical music.

It's because classical music requires zero creativity. You're playing the same music that has, in some cases, been played for centuries, and you're trying to play it the same way everyone else played it. If you're in an orchestra, you try to sound exactly like everyone around you.

And since there is a glut of thousands of other classical musicians all playing the same thing, and since it's all available on records and CD and has been for years, you're contributing absolutely nothing.

Maureen Corrigan reviewed Amy Chua's book on National Public Radio. The poor woman's been hanging around NPR too long. She concluded her review by noting that you couldn't argue with the results of Chua's sick abuse. Her daughters both played classical music! What a boon to mankind!

Some other fellows on NPR

There was the time the elderly MIT boys on Car Talk discussed school. The older one preferred math. He explained that you could get 100% on a math test and rest assured that you couldn't possibly have done any better. But even if you get the highest possible grade on an essay test in history or English, you could still have done better. No matter how good an essay is, it could always be improved somehow.

That's the appeal of classical music. It's music for people devoid of any creative impulse. You judge a performance according to how much it's sounds like everybody else. There's an objective measure. You don't say, "Well, it could always be better," you say, "It sounds exactly like the CD you can buy for eight dollars!"

Bourgeois Chinese mother Amy Chua

Abusive nutjob

So there's a new book out by someone called Amy Chua, a Chinese-American Yale law professor married to a Jewish Yale law professor. They agreed that their children would be Jewish for some reason, and they also agreed that they would be raised in what they thought was a Chinese manner. Their two daughters had to be "#1" in every subject but P.E., she considered an "A-" to be a "bad grade", she didn't allow them to do anything unless they could win an award for it, and they had to spend hours a day practicing a musical instrument, which had to be either a violin or a piano. She bragged about how she constantly insulted them, denouncing them for being fat or "lazy". She called one of them "garbage" because she had trouble playing some classical piece. She gloated about the time she took her 7-year-old daughter's doll house to her car and said she would get rid of it unless the 1st grader learned to play a song perfectly on her violin in one day.

Maybe this was some expression of Chinese culture, although it doesn't explain the girls' Jewish father. No doubt a Zionist.

I looked at a message board for teachers. One teacher in Canada had a large number of Chinese-Canadian students. She said that their mothers would demand to know how their children ranked in the class. The teacher tells them they don't give out that information---they don't discuss the grades other children receive. So then they will offer to help grade papers thinking they'll get the information that way, and the teachers refuse.

There are well over a billion Chinese in the world, and that's just in China. Hard to believe they're all that way. In any case, Chua and her Jewish husband actually sat down and agreed to this. It wasn't that she couldn't help herself or that she thought this was normal. She actually sat down and decided to act this way.

The daughters should get as far away from their mother as possible. Because if anything ever happens to her---if she's ever run over by a hit-and-run driver, if her brakes ever fail, if she ever falls down the stairs and breaks her neck---the girls are going to be prime suspects.

The real problem

What bothers me is the classical music. We probably ought to explain to Chinese coming to the West that you don't make a child play the violin so that they'll become classical musicians. You make them play the violin to be sure they never become musicians at all.

I have never seen an adult play the violin unless they were getting paid for it. It's something only children do and only because they can be forced to.

You force them to play classical music because nobody likes it. The kids don't like it. Their parents don't like it. While that one girl was playing her violin in Carnegie Hall, her classmates were forming punk rock bands, playing gigs, getting paid for it and actually enjoying themselves.

It makes Joe Jackson seem like a very reasonable person. The Jackson family is rich now. Some family members have extremely serious problems, obviously, but living in poverty in Gary, Indiana, was no picnic either.

Andre Agassi revealed a while back that he hated tennis but was forced to practice for years by his father. And Agassi did pretty well for himself.

But Amy Chua?

According to Maureen Corrigan who reviewed Chua's book on NPR, both of her daughters are "gifted" musicians (some gift). As I mentioned, one of them won a competition that allowed her to perform in Carnegie Hall.

First Chua forces her daughters to play music that nobody likes, and then she makes sure that no one will ever be able to listen to them without thinking about what a bitch their mother was. When she asked her daughter for input on the book, the daughter said, "I'm sure it's all about you anyway."

Elderly directors

I recently read that Kenneth Anger made his first film, "Fireworks", when he was 22 and in college, not when he was 17 and in high school as he claimed.

I always wondered about that. Seemed strange that a high school kid would make an art movie. When I was in high school, I made kung fu movies.

Anger claimed that he was in high school, his parents were out of town so he and his friends stole a backdrop from a movie studio then coaxed some sailors into coming to his house to make a homoerotic art film.

There are other directors who've lied about their age. Steven Bach, in his book about the making of Heaven's Gate and the undoing of United Artists, noted that Michael Cimino kept trimming years off his age. Even Woody Allen falsely claimed to be in his 30s when he directed Sleeper.

There have been a few young directors. Robert Rodriguez was, what, 24 he made El Mariachi? Harmony Korine was the same age when he directed Gummo.

Years ago, some cable station hired a six-year-old to direct a series of short videos. A thirteen-year-old directed a movie called Lex The Wonderdog in Holland, but that was his only movie.

In India, there's a 12-year-old director named Kishan Shrikanth who directed a movie at age 9.

But look at the old people!

Alfred Hitchcock was in his 70s when he made Frenzy and was pushing 80 when he made Family Plot.

John Huston was 79 when he directed Prizzi's Honor and 81 when he directed The Dead.

Sydney Lumet was 82 when he directed Before the Devil Knows You're Dead.

Movies made by the really old seem to be much more interesting than those made by the very young.

Of course, it may just be that no one wants to trust a 20-year-old with the millions of dollars it takes to make a movie.

Something for film schoolers to think about. Most of them want to be directors. If you ever hit it big, you'll probably be fifty. How are you going to pay your student loans in the meantime?

Birdemic

It was made for less than $10,000. Good. It was on a "ten worst" list for movies of 2010. It actually got a theatrical release. Didn't go straight to video.

Pretty amazing.

Here are action scenes:




Well, yes. The movie has some shortcomings. But if it had been any better, the director would probably be sharing a cell with Julian Assange right now.

Note that the people are being attacked by eagles and vultures, representing U.S. imperialism and corporate capitalism. The movie is presented as an anti-global warming movie. In fact, it's pro-Iraq, pro-Afghan and anti-imperialist.

I'll give away the ending here, but I don't think it'll ruin it for anyone.

It ends with the people watching the birds fly away over the ocean. Where were they going? They weren't seabirds. Why would they do that unless they symbolized U.S. imperialism defeated and driven out of by indigenous people?

Real exorcisms are nothing like in the movies

I've seen video of "real" exorcisms. They weren't very interesting. You had a girl speaking in a funny voice. She throws up in a bag. People stand around yelling religious stuff at her. A nondenominational minister pressed a crucifix into her at one point and she breaks character.

"That hurts!" she says in a normal voice.

"Oh. Sorry."

Then they start in again.

In fact, there was a long article on a skeptic website about the case that the book (and movie) The Exorcist was based on. In the late 1940s, a 14-year-old boy in Maryland was supposedly possessed. There was a wildly inaccurate documentary on the Discovery channel about it. The author of the article actually found the kid, now an old timer who wanted to be left alone. He also interviewed the last surviving priest who was involved and a couple of the kid's friends.

According to the boy's friends, he wasn't possessed; he was a jerk. He had a mean dog. His idea of a joke was to invite his friends over and then sic the dog on them when they came to the door.

The priest's account of it was that the priests were completely credulous. They took everything at face value. There were scratches on the kid's stomach which they assumed were the work of the devil. Did they watch the kid to make sure he wasn't doing it himself? No. Did they look for skin under his fingernails? No.

The priest said that the kid spoke Latin, a language he didn't know, but that he was just mimicking the priests to annoy them.

It was the mother and the grandmother in the family who were getting him exorcised. The kid's father came home from work and read the paper and wanted no part of it. And by all accounts, the priests weren't frightened by anything that happened. One of them was laughing about it during the exorcism.

But everything was in there. The kid's bed did shake, but his friends explained that beds back then were light frames on wheels with thin mattresses and it was very difficult to keep them from moving a couple of feet every time you turned over. The scratches appeared on his stomach, he spoke Latin, as I said. He was able to spit very accurately, but his friends explained that they practiced a lot.

I bring this up now because I saw that a movie called The Last Exorcism is on a list of the ten worst movies of 2010.

Here's the list:

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/post/135164-the-10-worst-films-of-2010/

I don't know. Splice sounds sort of interesting.

Personal film-making

There was a book at the university library, published in the early '70s, called Personal Filmmaking. It was written, if I remember correctly, by a community college instructor. He taught a class on the subject.

His students would get their hands on an 8mm movie camera, easy enough to do back then. You had to ask around if you didn't own one. I don't know if they showed up as often in the Goodwill stores as they did a few years later. All it cost was a few bucks for a roll of film.

Basically, they'd make little movies. Some did art films. One example was something where a guy had his friends act out a funeral. Another was about two hunters. As they drive into the countryside, they hear a report on the radio that a killer had escaped from the state hospital and was on the loose.

Say what you will, they sound more interesting than most student films.

I don't know if home video has ruined this sort of thing. The movies they did had the advantage of being silent or with unsynchronized sound.

I wish people would do stuff like that with their Flip cameras.

But then, I used to buy home movies whenever I came across them in junk stores. I had one wedding movie (4 minutes, regular 8), a Super 8 movie of a homely baby's first birthday. They set up the camera, put an ornate birthday cake in front of the baby and encouraged her to dig her hands into it and tear it up. I had some 16mm films of a family drinking and riding around on minibikes with guns. A teen, aware that he's being filmed, tries not to react to a groin injury while on his minibike.

There was an odd movie where a couple carried their tiny baby into the middle of a lake. Then they stand there with it. They walk back. In another scene, they put the baby in a wading pool, holding its head up and splashing water on it.

I only came across a couple of examples of people trying anything artistic. One was a a roll of black leader that had some stuff scratched into it.

Even back then, few people tried to create anything narrative.

One of the more interesting things I bought was a large set of slides. They were pictures of two elderly couples on vacation in Hawaii in the early 'seventies. We see some typical tourist stuff. We see the building where Steve McGarrett's office was in Hawaii Five-O. Then it all changes. After a certain point, all the pictures were of massive storm damage. Trees blown down. Lamp posts blown down. Cars smashed. Buildings damaged. They had an interesting trip.