Do actors do this?

Gene Wilder

Actors say what seem like terribly unkind things to each other. Cloris Leachman told Corey Haim that his half smile was cute but he did it too much and said he should practice keeping his mouth closed---he always thought it was cute to always go around with his mouth open. Mia Farrow's mother told her she would be equally convincing as a Good Girl or a slut. And a local actress interviewed on Community Access TV said she was terribly hurt when she told her acting professor she was going to Hollywood and he suggested she look at Hollywood actresses because she looked nothing like them. There was a high school acting teacher who told a girl she walked funny so she worked for years to change the way she walked.

Charles Grodin wrote in one of his books that he was given the task of telling a young Gene Wilder that he was never going to make it as an actor and it was time to give it up.

Paul Peterson, when the Donna Reed Show went off the air, said he tried to continue working as an actor but Mickey Rooney finally come over to tell him it was a lost cause.

I was just driving home from the grocery store with NPR on listening to a woman tell how her closed-minded parents thought she should get a good job and live a normal life instead of pursuing her dream, whatever that was. But even if you're successful in some creative endeavor, it probably won't last long. Acting careers, for example, peter out. A lot of actors did very well for a time and wound up as realtors. Victor Mature had a TV repair shop. Tommy Kirk went into carpet cleaning.

You have some poor devils like Dustin Diamond who won't let go. He's 42, his life is going nowhere, but he doesn't have much alternative, especially now that he's an ex-convict.

Bob Denver, TV's Gilligan, starred on stage in Play It Again, Sam, taking over Woody Allen's role. Horshack is big on Broadway. There's nothing like that for Diamond. Maybe he could have done local TV commercials if hadn't been for the sex tape.

Poor devil looks terrible. He's grown a beard which is probably all he can do about it. He should try to maintain a neutral expression at all times, maybe try different wigs or hats. He needs to lose weight. Or maybe gain lots and lots of weight. I'm really not the one to give advice.

I had this idea...

Here is an idea I had long ago. I couldn't see how to make any money by making a zero-budget movie. It just seemed impossible.

BUT...there was a spate of books at the time telling people how to make movies with almost no money. I figured the how-to books were where the real money was. Think of it as merchandising.

So just rush your movie into production. Back then, I would say film on Super8 and release the movie on VHS. Film without sound and dub. Then write your book. Or write the book first, either way.

And, once the book is published, you could even parlay that into a teaching job---an adult education course or, if you can manage it, a professorship.

Fortunately, mediocrity in academia is self-perpetuating. Professors who are already on the job have a say in hiring, and they don't want to hire some big shot who'll overshadow them. Some guy who made one terrible movie and wrote a book about it would be the ideal candidate.

Of course, those days are long gone. There are no more books on how to make a zero-budget movie because it's OBVIOUS how to make a zero budget movie. You buy a camcorder, then you make the movie.

I need a new idea. Some new scheme.

The Swimmer, 1968

My school district had a print of an short, 16mm version of The Swimmer with Burt Lancaster. I had seen this in at least two classes, and both teachers thought he was supposed to be like a salmon on his last legs swimming upstream to spawn. I later saw the movie on TV and was surprised it was a feature film. Before that, I was surprised that Burt Lancaster was in a school movie.

Years earlier, in the fifth grade, they showed us a movie of Sidney Poitier reading a children's book. The story wasn't very interesting, he had an odd reading style and we were too old to have that sort of thing read to us. We didn't react well to it, so the teachers berated us. One of them said that Sidney Poitier was a big star and it cost them a lot of money to get him to read that book.

I'm sure Mr Poitier did it for free, but if he was paid a lot, it seems like all the more reason to laugh at him.

If the teachers knew he did it for free, they could have told us that Sidney Poitier was a big star and he did us a favor reading that book.

It might have been better with Rod Steiger. He could have worked himself up and started crying by the end.

I don't know how I reacted to The Swimmer. I might have been a bit uneasy about Burt Lancaster in a bathing suit.

The Swimmer was about a middle aged rich guy who's somewhere in a bathing suit. There are a lot of backyard swimming pools around there, and he thinks it would be fun to swim home by going from swimming pool to swimming pool. In doing this, he meets people he's known and confronts his past. I think. I was in high school and probably didn't understand it.

With Joan Rivers.

Russian Roulette (UK, Canada, 1975)

Not as anti-Soviet as I thought it would be.

George Segal plays a corporal in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. He's been suspended for assaulting his commander but he's told he can get back on the force if he'll abduct a Lithuanian living in Canada who the Soviets think will try to murder Deputy Premier Kosygin when he lands in Vancouver.

I remember seeing just the end of this when it was on HBO in the 1970s.

It seems terribly dangerous for George Segal to be firing a high powered rifle at a helicopter as it flies over the city. He was a bit cavalier about a couple of deaths in it. You'd think a Mountie would call the police when he finds a murdered man.

The movie reminded me what Roger Corman told a young director. The first reel has to make sense because the audience needs to know what the movie is about. The last reel has to make sense because people want to know how it ends. The middle part doesn't matter so much.

George Segal drives around in a lovely Jensen Healey Interceptor after they tow away his Dodge.

Canada comes across as a neutral country.

As Kosygin arrives, there are protesters demanding free emigration for Soviet Jews. Now Israel has imprisoned the population of Gaza, not letting anyone out for any reason, and the Jews of the world don't see any problem.

Free on Amazon Prime.

Paul Schrader, Transcendent Style in Film

Paul Schrader

I had never heard the term but I'd already seen a few movies that qualified as "Slow Cinema". Some of them, like Ida, a Polish movie, just seemed kind of dull. I liked Kelly Reichhardt's movies, noticed they were a little slow but not boring. Then I saw a Taiwanese movie, Stray Dogs, which I liked but it was definitely very different, almost plotless. Very long takes where not much was happening.

So I bought the new edition of Paul Schrader's book, Transcendental Style in Film with a new introduction discussing Slow Cinema which, he thought, has gone overboard, a lot of the movies now being museum pieces or never being seen outside film festivals.

I'd read somewhere else that the term "art house film" isn't controversial---(almost) everyone knows what it is, agrees it exists and agrees on what which movies qualify, but no one can quite define what makes a film and art house film. I've tried to put my finger on it and failed, so this book is helping.

I just watched Schrader's First Reformed which combines elements discussed in Transcendent Style, his first book, with his first screenplay, Taxi Driver.

As I understand it, Schrader is working on much lower budgets (this was made for $3.5 million, about the cost of an hour TV episode) and he's made a movie a year the last few years.

And I feel stupid bringing this up, but he's making a monkey out of Woody Allen. Allen's known for low budgets and making a movie a year, but his budgets have never been THAT low---they're pretty high considering what he's doing---and he's never made anything this good.

Just to get away from the constant yammering, Allen should try his hand at Slow Cinema. Just as an exercise, make a movie where everyone isn't constantly talking.

Now that he's washed up, Allen should watch This is Not a Film a few times and make a movie of himself in his townhouse.

SCUM Manifesto, global warming

You ever see I Shot Andy Warhol? Valerie Solanas is the one who shot him. She wrote the SCUM Manifesto which calls for the elimination of the male sex.

At the end of the movie, we see Solanas in a mental hospital. Someone off camera had apparently confronted her with the fact that getting rid of all males would be the end of humanity. She didn't see how that mattered because it would happen after everyone was dead. Why should anyone care what happens after they're dead?

People took the SCUM Manifesto as parody, but Solanas insisted she was dead serious and her saying that showed how seriously deranged she was.

But that's pretty much how it is. The world is run by people trying to maximize profits who care nothing if global warming wipes out millions a few decades from now. Actually, billions.

Repeating myself on Woody Allen

Woody at home.

I had thought the scene in Manhattan, the one where Woody Allen's character was out with his friends and they see Woody's ex-wife's book for sale and they buy a copy and start reading about him, and one of the things they read is that he had a three-way with his wife and her Lesbian lover---I thought that was taking it too far. No normal person would do that. It was beyond the bounds of credibility and wasn't funny.

I was wrong about that.

In case you missed it, a 58-year-old former model came out with the story that she had started dating Woody Allen in the 1970's when she was sixteen. Age of consent in New York was 17. They saw each other for eight years and, starting when she was 20, had three-way sex with Mia Farrow.

Ronan and Dylan Farrow haven't commented on it. Their attacks on Woody Allen haven't done their mother much good. She's been exposed as a child abuser and they were threatening to take away her UNICEF "ambassadorship". People keep bringing up her brother who's in prison for child molestation, her support for Roman Polanski and the fact that she's a homewrecker who broke up Dory Previn's marriage to Andre Previn. And more people are aware that the conclusion of the investigation into the molestation accusation against Woody Allen was that Mia Farrow had coaxed Dylan Farrow into making a false accusation.

The optics aren't good when a white brother and sister attack their adopted Asian siblings for reporting that they were abused by their mother.

Ronan Farrow has lost some of his #metoo sheen as a result of his obsessive attacks on his father. He justifies attacking Allen by saying there was really no evidence against Harvey Weinstein, either. He made the same argument when MSNBC questioned a weak accusation he reported against Brett Kavanaugh.

And now Mia Farrow has been exposed as a bigger degenerate than anyone dared imagine.


But now Woody Allen is like Bill Cosby in prison. Before Cosby was sentenced, I didn't know what to think. Should they put an old blind guy in his 80's in prison for years? How could he survive? What would be fair in a case like this? But now that he's IN prison, it's fine with me. I've lost all interest.

Woody Allen? I wanted him to keep making movies. More and more of them, year after year. But now that he's stopped, I'm strangely indifferent.

If he wants to make movies, he's rich enough to pay his own way. You can make movies with a tiny crew---just bring a few actors over to that big house he bought with his Midnight in Paris money. His using big stars in his movies always bothered me anyway.

He should do the Roger Corman thing----go through lists of Screen Actors Guild members and look for names he recognizes who haven't worked in a while. He could resurrect careers and give new actors their starts. He'd be a saint. Hire people who need the money rather than underpaying a lot of callous millionaires who'll probably turn on him anyway.

Remember when Alfred Hitchcock couldn't get Michael Caine to be in Frenzy, so he got a different actor who looked just like him? Allen should do that now that Caine has taken to attacking him.

[Correction: Michael Caine said a few months about that he WOULD be willing to appear in another movie directed by Allen noting that he was never charged with any crime.]

Woody Allen's townhouse

Does he own any art that didn't come from a furniture store?

Moses is a photographer. He could put up a couple of his photos. He wouldn't want pictures of Ronan or Dylan, but he has Moses and two daughters he and Soon-yi adopted. What kind of old person doesn't have pictures of the children?

Look at the place. There's nothing personal there. Is there even one thing that didn't come straight from the furniture store when they moved in?

It doesn't look like he's an avid reader.