About Andrew Hearst

I'm Andrew Hearst, a New York-based writer, editor, designer, musician, and gadabout. You can learn a bit more about me here.

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Best of Panopticist
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The Pound of Flesh
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my right thumb
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Grandaddy, Sumday

Röyksopp, Melody A.M.

Phoenix, Alphabetical

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Fountains of Wayne, Utopia Parkway

Freaks and Geeks
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Curb Your Enthusiasm


June 10, 2008
Eveready Harton in Buried Treasure, One of the First Pornographic Cartoons Ever Made

Created anonymously by a group of professional animators in about 1929, the silent short Eveready Harton in Buried Treasure is a gleeful exploration of the penetrative arts. The four-and-a-half-minute short follows the travails of the uncomfortably well-endowed title character as he wanders a barren landscape in search of satisfaction. Along the way, he encounters a self-pleasuring maiden, various sexually aroused animals, a surprised husband, and a donkey-humping farmer, whom Harton challenges to a duel. A penis duel.

Eveready Harton in Buried Treasure is one of the earliest examples of an animated porn film. According to its Wikipedia page, several famous animators supposedly made the short for a private party in honor of the pioneering animator Winsor McCay, whose work greatly influenced Walt Disney and is still held in high esteem by Maurice Sendak, Chris Ware, and other luminaries.

This totally isn’t safe for work, so be careful.

I’m pretty sure the intertitles in this copy are not the originals.

The Wikipedia page includes this backstory quote from Disney animator Ward Kimball: “The first porno-cartoon was made in New York. It was called ‘Eveready Harton’ and was made in the late 20’s, silent, of course—by three studios. Each one did a section of it without telling the other studios what they were doing. Studio A finished the first part and gave the last drawing to Studio B. … Involved were Max Fleischer, Paul Terry and the Mutt and Jeff studio. … A couple of guys who were there [at the party] tell me the laughter almost blew the top off the hotel where they were screening it.”

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categories: Film, TV and Video

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May 27, 2008
The Scandalous Origins of Martin Scorsese’s After Hours

After Hours

There’s no current hook for this post about a little-known Hollywood scandal. It’s just something I’ve been meaning to post about for a couple of years. The bare details have been mentioned online, but only in passing, and as far as I know the scandal has never been officially reported anywhere.

So here it is: Much of the plot setup and some of the dialogue in Martin Scorsese’s excellent 1985 film After Hours—a significant portion of the movie’s first 30 minutes, in fact—were brazenly lifted from “Lies,” a 1982 NPR Playhouse monologue by Joe Frank, the great L.A.-based radio artist who’s gotten a lot of love here on Panopticist. Joe Frank never received official credit for his contributions, and he appears to have been paid a generous amount of money to settle the plagiarism suit and keep everything quiet. It’s possible that this scandal was reported in the film-industry trade press around the time of the film’s release, but neither Nexis nor Google reveal evidence of any media coverage. I learned of the similarities in 2004 or 2005 through chatter on the unofficial Joe Frank mailing list. The closest thing I’ve found to a reference in a traditional media outlet is in this March 2000 Joe Frank profile in Salon, which mentions that Frank was “paid handsomely by producers of a Hollywood film (which he won’t name) that plagiarized his dialogue.”

The Wikipedia page for the screenwriter of After Hours, Joseph Minion, mentions that the film included some “minor details” borrowed from Joe Frank, and that Frank successfully sued over it. But the theft was far from minor. Many of the details in the film’s first half hour are similar, if not copied outright: the chance meeting of a man and a kooky but sexy woman; the woman’s offer to set the man up with some of her artist roommate’s plaster of paris bagel-and-cream-cheese paperweights; the man’s late-night phone call to the woman; his cab ride to meet her, at the end of which his only cash flies out the window; her wearing of a loosely tied bathrobe when she answers the door; her tale of having been raped by man who came down the fire escape; and so forth.

Here’s the entire monologue so you can judge for yourself. It’s 11 minutes long. If you’ve seen the film, much of this will sound very familiar indeed:

(If you don’t see the Flash audio player, here’s a direct link to the audio file.)

Joseph Minion apparently created the script in his mid-twenties as part of his work at Columbia’s Graduate Film Program. It was later optioned by Griffin Dunne and Amy Robinson, who showed it to Scorsese. Minion’s IMDb credits are pretty thin after the early 1990s, so his career seems to have been really hurt by this, no surprise.

There’s also a weird twist: The cabbie who drives Griffin Dunne downtown is played by an actor named Larry Block, and he’s apparently the same Larry Block who appeared on many of Joe Frank’s shows for KCRW in the 1990s. Was the plagiarism discovered during the making of the film, and the role given to Frank’s friend Block as part of the lawsuit negotiations? Whatever the reason, it’s hard to believe Block’s casting was just a coincidence.

After Hours

If you have any insight into any of this, post away in the comments…

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categories: Best Of, Film, Music and Audio

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April 29, 2008
Best End-Credits Blooper Reel Ever

Here is Peter Sellers in the hilarious outtakes sequence at the end of Being There, the 1979 Hal Ashby film that was the second-to-last film Sellers made. When I was a kid I thought this was the funniest thing ever. Blooper reels were rare in major Hollywood films back then, so I’d never seen anything like it. I remember feeling amazed that I got to see secret scenes that weren’t in the movie. Quaint, I know.

According to the Wikipedia page for the film, Sellers supposedly didn’t want the outtakes to be included in the movie, “since, by all accounts, it was his attempt to show his skills as an actual actor as opposed to just a comedian. The inclusion of the blooper reel is sometimes blamed for Sellers’ failure to win that year’s Academy Award for Best Actor.” I find that last sentence hard to believe, but who knows.

[via Coudal Partners.]

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categories: Film, TV and Video

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March 17, 2008
Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Shot-for-Shot Remake

Here’s an excellent treat, and it’s something I’ve been wanting to find for years. Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation is a shot-for-shot remake that two Mississippi kids made over the course of eight years in the 1980s. A few weeks ago a complete copy was floating around on one of those secret BitTorrent sites. Here’s the first ten minutes. (The audio level is low throughout, so you may have to turn up the volume.) Enjoy.

Jim Windolf wrote about the remake in the 2004 Vanity Fair feature “Raiders of the Lost Backyard.” That same year, the producer Scott Rudin bought the rights to the boys’ story, and Daniel Clowes is apparently working on a script (or he was at one point, anyway).

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categories: Film, TV and Video

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February 20, 2008
Leonard Schrader’s Astonishing Movie-Poster Collection

From Vanity Fair’s website, an amazing slide show of lobby cards—“the gorgeous promotional posters that were a common sight in movie theaters from the early 20th century through the 1960s.” They’re from the collection of the late screenwriter Leonard Schrader, the brother of screenwriter-director Paul Schrader.

What! No Beer?

The Great Dictator

Love, Honor, and Oh, Baby!

The slide show itself is here; Peter Biskind’s introductory essay is here.

To read more about this incredible trove of Hollywood ephemera, visit the collection’s official site.

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categories: Art and Design, Film

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November 19, 2006
Brian Atene Returns—for Real

When I posted the video of Brian Atene’s Full Metal Jacket audition tape last month, I knew it was possible his performance was a joke, not a serious attempt to impress Stanley Kubrick. After watching the video a few more times, I became fairly convinced that Atene made the tape simply to amuse himself … and I got a sinking feeling that I had fallen for a prank. Whatever his motivations were, the tape is hilarious: If it was a joke, it’s a funny one; if it wasn’t a joke, the hubris and scenery-chewing are stunning to watch.

Well, Brian Atene himself has posted a video response to his 1984 tape, and he more or less admits that the video wasn’t a joke. This isn’t one of the lame fake Atene videos that popped up on YouTube in the wake of the original video—it really is Atene this time.

If you skip the first two (very weird) minutes, this new video is pretty entertaining. Atene seems off his rocker, but he’s also weirdly charismatic. Among other things, he says he didn’t actually send the famous tape to Kubrick; he made two tapes and ended up submitting the other one.

[via someone on Echo.]

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October 27, 2006
Good Day, Mr. Kubrick

Okay, I’ve been AWOL for a while, but I’m coming back atcha with something truly marvelous. It’s a screen test some talentless young actor sent in when Stanley Kubrick was casting Full Metal Jacket in 1984. The hubris on display here is magnificent and awe-inspiring.

[via Defamer.]

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August 20, 2006
Robby Benson’s Star Wars Audition

A couple of years before his late-’70s ascension to teen idolhood, Robby Benson auditioned for the Luke Skywalker role in Star Wars. He was as ill-suited for the role as you’d expect, given his subsequent success as a geeky but adorable moptop in such sports-themed movies as One on One and Ice Castles. In the clip below, 20-year-old Benson spends nine minutes reading turgid George Lucas dialogue with a mostly off-camera Harrison Ford.

[via YouTube member Ghyslain, with an indirect assist from All the Little Live Things. Ghyslain’s profile contains links to several other Star Wars audition tapes, including Mark Hamill’s.]

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Not So Fast, Claude Lelouch!

Claude Lelouch exposed!

Quel scandale! In response to my item last week about Claude Lelouch’s classic short film C’etait un rendezvous, my friend Peter Dizikes has provided the following smackdown of the widely reported claim that the car sustained a speed of 140 miles per hour for some or most of the film:

I decided to do a little research for you on the Claude Lelouch film, along with a back-of-the-envelope calculation. As you mentioned, it is said the driver of the car, whoever it was, hit speeds of up to 140 mph driving through Paris. Sounds pretty fast, right? I decided to test this claim. The distance from the point where you turn onto the Avenue Foch from the Bois de Boulogne, to the point where the Champs Elysees feeds into the Place de la Concorde, is right about 2.25 miles. Yes, I’m including the curve around the Arc de Triomphe. By my count, the car covers this distance in 1:50 in the film, from the 0:44 mark to the 2:34 mark. That averages out to about 74 miles per hour. So the car was going fast, but it’s just about impossible it could have been going 140 at any point. Moreover, this is the part of the route most conducive to driving at high speeds, so the car could not have been going faster later in the film, which is also obvious from watching it. A more likely high speed would thus be in the 80s — almost as fast as Princess Di’s driver supposedly was going when they crashed in the underpass at the Place d’ Alma in 1997, of course. Aren’t you glad I took the time to figure this out?

Others have apparently come to a similar conclusion. I just noticed that the C’etait un rendezvous page on Wikipedia contains the following passage:

Calculations made by several independent groups showed that the car never exceeded 140 km/h (85 mph), Lelouch himself cited that the top speed achieved was 200 km/h. Comments from Lelouch prove that the vehicle that carried the camera was his 6.9L Mercedes-Benz, with automatic transmission and a top speed of 230 km/h. The gear changes up into 5th and high-revving engine sounds indicate speeds of well over 200 km/h, yet the picture often does not match, as visual speed does not change as much as the sound does. This is due to the fact that the sound track was dubbed with the sound from a Ferrari 275GTB to give the impression of much higher speeds, as confirmed by Lelouch.

I’m not sure if this passage is accurate; at the very least, “comments from Lelouch” do not “prove” anything. But the Wikipedia page does include a link to this photo of Lelouch playing with a camera attached to the front of a Mercedes:

Claude Lelouch's Mercedes

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August 14, 2006
Lelouch’s Rendezvous With Google Maps

Early on a summer morning in 1978, the French filmmaker Claude Lelouch attached a gyro-stabilized camera to the front of a Ferrari 275GTB. He turned on the camera and handed the car keys to a professional racecar driver, who fired up the engine and then sped through the center of Paris at about 140 miles per hour. The resulting eight-minute film, C’etait un rendezvous, is a classic. Thanks to Google Video and YouTube, it’s gotten a lot of web attention in recent months. But here’s something new: A blogger named Brian Hendrix has created a Google Maps mashup that displays the car’s location on a map as the driver rockets himself through Paris:

Google Maps mashup with Claude Lelouch's 'C'etait un Rendezvous'

Lelouch has apparently claimed that it was he who was behind the wheel; he supposedly also said that the car was a Mercedes, not a Ferrari, and that the sounds of a Ferrari were overdubbed later. But I don’t have the energy to investigate whether (a) he actually claimed these things or (b) the claims are actually true.

[via someone on Echo.]

UPDATE: I posted a follow-up to this item a few days later.

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A Screaming Comes Across the Screen

In 1951, a sound designer on a Gary Cooper western called Distant Drums needed to overdub a scream onto a scene in which a man is killed by an alligator. He brought a contract actor into his studio and rolled tape as the man did six brief, anguished screams in one take. These screams were then added to the Warner Brothers sound library, and over the next couple of decades they found their way into dozens of Warner Brothers films.

In the mid-’70s, a young sound designer named Ben Burtt gave these sounds a name: “the Wilhelm scream,” after a character in one of the earliest films that utilized the sounds. A couple of years later, Burtt was hired to work on a film called Star Wars. As an homage, he overdubbed the scream onto a scene in that film. Then he overdubbed it onto a scene in The Empire Strikes Back. And Return of the Jedi. A fellow Lucasfilm sound designer began using the Wilhelm too, in Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, among other movies. And thus a film-geek in-joke was born. In the last 30 years the Wilhelm has been used winkingly in dozens of movies and TV shows, from Reservoir Dogs and The X-Files to Aladdin and Return of the King. More details are at Hollywood Lost and Found.

The video below is a compilation of dozens of Wilhelms from the last half-century.

[via an excellent blog called Cynical-C.]

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April 17, 2006
To Clarify Its Mission, Us Weekly Adds Four Letters to Its Name

In recent months, the celebrity weeklies have been all pregnancy, all the time. So on some level this makes sense:

Uterus Weekly. Va Va Womb! Jolie's Gigantic! Brad and Angelina's unborn daughter is already more famous, and more sexy, than you'll ever be. We know you're wondering: What's the fetus REALLY like? We went inside to find out. AN EXCLUSIVE U.W. REPORT

(Go to this page for more stuff like this.)

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categories: Art and Design, Film, Magazines, The Magazine Covers

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March 21, 2006
The 1962 Film That Inspired Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys

La Jetée, the experimental New Wave short by the French director Chris Marker, is probably best known today for having served as the inspiration for Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys. But Marker’s 26-minute masterpiece is by far the more important and original work, and not just because 12 Monkeys was almost ruined by Brad Pitt’s awful—but Oscar-nominated!—performance as a deranged animal-rights activist.

Except for one brief clip of a blinking eye, La Jetée (1962) is comprised entirely of black-and-white still images, voiceover narration, and unobtrusive minor-key music. The action, such as it is, takes place in the aftermath of World War III. Paris has been destroyed, along with much of the rest of the civilized world, and all survivors were long ago forced underground. A group of scientists is attempting to find food and energy by subjecting prisoners to rudimentary time-travel experiments. The film’s time-traveling protagonist, identified simply as “the man whose story we are telling,” is haunted by a childhood memory of an incident he witnessed on a pier (a jetée) at Orly Airport. He is sent again and again to prewar Paris, where he spends time with a beautiful young woman whose significance to him he can’t quite grasp.

La Jetée is about time, memory, and longing, among other things, and it’s incredibly complex and powerful. This seven-and-a-half-minute clip is from the first half of the film. (I taped it off of the Sundance Channel a few months ago.) The voiceover has been rerecorded in (French-accented) English.

The film seems to be hard to find on DVD, but Amazon can hook you up with used copies of a DVD compilation that includes it. And ooh, I just discovered that someone has uploaded the entire original French version to Google Video.

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September 29, 2005
All Work and No Play Makes Jack Torrance a Sweet, Sensitive Father Who Deeply Loves His Son

This is simply the best thing ever: a fake trailer for The Shining that’s edited to make the movie seem like a heartwarming family tearjerker. The soundtrack song is absolutely perfect.

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August 21, 2005
Hey, I’m in The Aristocrats! No Shit!

The AristocratsI got out of work at 3 on Friday and had no plans for the rest of the afternoon, so I wandered down to Union Square to catch a 4:40 showing of The Aristocrats, which I’d been meaning to see for weeks. It’s hilarious. If you like movies in which famous comedians tell stories about parents fisting their children and entire families wallowing naked in their own bodily fluids, this is the film for you.

Anyway, about 15 or 20 minutes in, there’s a short scene in which five or six Onion writers sit around a conference room and analyze the dirty joke that is the subject of the film. As the scene begins, the camera is focused on a pile of stuff on the conference table. One of the most prominent things on the pile is the front page of an issue of The Onion. As I watched the slow pan up the table, it took me a second or two to realize that the Onion issue onscreen was the very issue whose cover story—“Non-Controversial Christ Painting Under Fire From Art Community”—I posed for several years ago. I’m right there onscreen for a good three or four seconds before the camera pans up from the table. Here’s the picture that accompanied the story; that’s me in front, wearing an ill-fitting jacket that makes me look twice as big—okay, maybe one and a half times as big—as I actually am.

Non-Controversial Christ Painting Under Fire From Art Community

And so I take my rightful place alongside comedy geniuses like Jon Stewart, Eric Idle, Sarah Silverman, and Taylor Negron.

Here is a video file of the South Park version of the Aristocrats joke as it appears in the film. Completely and utterly not safe for work, so take any appropriate precautions.

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March 16, 2005
More on 5-25-77

A few belated follow-ups to last week’s post about 5-25-77, the upcoming low-budget movie starring John Francis Daley (late of Freaks and Geeks) as a fanatical Star Wars fan in 1977:

First, my pal Rob was quick to inform me that it isn’t Martin Starr in the pre-production teaser—it’s Chris Owen, who’s best known for playing the Shermanator in American Pie. Owen really does look a lot like Martin Starr in that teaser, I have to say.

Second, I got a couple of nice emails from 5-25-77’s writer/director, Patrick Read Johnson. Based mainly on what I saw in the teaser, I wrote in my post that the movie is “apparently a Scary Movie-style spoof of ’70s culture.” Johnson made some clarifications:

The film, now in post-production, is actually NOT a spoof… We don’t focus on Smiley Face t-shirts or Earth Shoes. It’s not in the LEAST self-conscious in that sense (the teaser IS—) And though much of it is pretty damn funny (or so people are telling us) it’s not really even a comedy. It’s more like… American Graffiti in the months leading up to the release of the original Star Wars. Yet it’s not really ABOUT Star Wars… or Star Wars fandom, either, for that matter.

He also told me that among the many cameos in the film is one by Mark Borchardt, the subject of one of the best documentaries ever—no, one of the best FILMS ever: American Movie. Borchardt apparently has a small role as the manager of a movie theater.

Third, I discovered an extended interview with Johnson that makes it clear that 5-25-77 is at least partly autobiographical. When he was a movie-obsessed teenager growing up in Illinois, Johnson visited Los Angeles and got to hang out with Steven Spielberg on the set of Close Encounters, among other adventures.

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March 8, 2005
The (John Francis) Daley Show

Those of you who’ve listened to some of the commentary tracks on the Freaks and Geeks DVD set know that John Francis Daley, who played Sam Weir on that brilliant show, is no longer a squeaky-voiced adolescent. Daley’s voice has dropped at least an octave since 2000, when NBC cancelled Freaks and Geeks after a single near-perfect 18-episode season. I hadn’t seen a recent picture of Daley until I discovered this:

John Francis Daley

It’s a still from an upcoming movie, a low-budget comedy called 5-25-77. The title is a reference to the original release date of Star Wars. The plot description on the movie’s IMDb page simply says this: “Pat Johnson has things get in the way of him seeing Star Wars.” Daley stars as Pat Johnson, and Christopher Lloyd plays a character called Herb Lightman. The movie’s official site doesn’t have much more than stills, behind-the-scenes photos, and a list of the cast and crew, so it’s hard to tell exactly what the deal is with this movie. But it’s apparently a Scary Movie-style spoof of ’70s culture. Weirdly enough, one of the producers of 5-25-77 is Gary Kurtz—the actual producer of Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back. The movie’s original music is being composed by Alan Parsons, which is just totally hilarious and perfect.

Freaks and Geeks

The movie’s IMDb page links to a pre-production teaser, and this is where things get especially weird. The teaser was made before John Francis Daley was cast in the film, so he’s nowhere to be seen. But another Freaks and Geeks alum is in the teaser: Martin Starr, who played Sam Weir’s eccentric friend Bill Haverchuck. Starr, however, isn’t listed in the credits on IMDb or the movie’s official site; he apparently doesn’t have a role in the actual film. (At one point during the teaser, Starr and another character talk about the fact that Gary Kurtz was the producer of Star Wars, and one of them holds up a picture of Kurtz. Very, uh, Being John Malkovich.) Also in the teaser, for literally a second or so, is none other than Carrie Fisher herself. She’s listed in the teaser’s closing credits but not in the credits on IMDb or the official site. I have no idea if she does a cameo in the actual film. Also in the teaser’s closing credits, but nowhere else, is Joe Pantoliano. The teaser is packed with snippets of ’70s culture, including brief clips from Logan’s Run, Jaws, and The Six-Million-Dollar Man. (There are also a few ’60s and ’80s references in there, too.)

Chatter in the movie’s IMDb message boards indicates that the filmmakers are hoping to release 5-25-77 in time to capitalize on the publicity surrounding Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith, which opens in May. The director of 5-25-77, Patrick Read Johnson, has occasionally been popping up in the IMBd boards to answer questions or clarify facts.

In other Freaks and Geeks-related news, Newmarket Press recently published the show’s complete scripts in two volumes. My pal Emily Nussbaum wrote about the show in the Arts & Leisure section of The New York Times a year or so ago, when the DVD set was released, and the back cover of volume one of the scripts features this blurb from her piece: “Even among good series that died young, Freaks and Geeks stands out. A brilliantly funny and poignant high school comedy-drama … The show attracted a fan base that identified strongly with its obsessive, loyal, pop-culture-loving characters.”

SPECIAL FREE OFFER! I still have all 18 episodes of Freaks and Geeks on videotape; I recorded them when they were rerun on Fox Family some months after NBC cancelled the show. Now that the DVD set is out, I don’t need these tapes anymore. I’ll mail them free via USPS to the first person who sends me a friendly note and an address within the lower 48 states. If you’ve never seen this show, you really gotta.

UPDATE: I did a follow-up post about 5-25-77 a week later.

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March 6, 2005
Walter Murch on the Sound of Apocalypse

Walter Murch

This is fantastic: On transom.org, a site devoted to “channeling new work and voices to public radio through the Internet,” the film editor and sound editor Walter Murch is spending several weeks as a sort of philosopher-in-residence. I learned of Murch’s transom.org appearance through a guest post by the former New Yorker writer Lawrence Weschler on one of my favorite sites, Design Observer.

Murch has won Oscars for both film editing (The English Patient) and sound editing (The English Patient and Apocalypse Now)—a remarkable achievement, given some of the very different skills those two jobs require. Murch is responsible for at least one of my all-time favorite film sequences: the scene in The Conversation where the surveillance expert Harry Caul (played by Gene Hackman) assembles a listenable mixdown from several shoddy recordings of a single conversation. The sound editing in that scene is a perfect example of Murch’s genius.

In several essays and a discussion thread in his special transom.org section, Murch relates a number of details about the ways the human brain processes sound. He then explores how these details inform the arsenal of techniques a sound editor must use to impart complex, multilayered audio information without smothering the listener in a gelatinous blob of noise. The extraordinary centerpiece of Murch’s transom.org residency is his detailed breakdown of the various threads of sound that run through the monumental “Ride of the Valkyries” helicopter sequence in Apocalypse Now. Murch demonstrates his concepts with a series of videos of the scene, each one isolating a separate component of the audio track. As Murch explains, he originally set up the sequence’s audio as six separate layers of sound. But he eventually realized that six layers was one too many: “[A]t any one moment (for practical purposes, let’s say that a ‘moment’ is any five-second section of film), five layers is the maximum that can be tolerated by an audience if you also want them to maintain a clear sense of the individual elements that are contributing to the mix.” In the case of the helicopter sequence, he writes,

I found I could build a “sandwich” with five layers to it. If I wanted to add something new, I had to take something else away. For instance, when the boy in the helicopter says “I’m not going, I’m not going!” I chose to remove all the music. On a certain logical level, that is not reasonable, because he is actually in the helicopter that is producing the music, so it should be louder there than anywhere else. But for story reasons we needed to hear his dialogue, of course, and I also wanted to emphasize the chaos outside—the AK47’s and mortar fire that he was resisting going into—and the helicopter sound that represented “safety,” as well as the voices of the other members of his unit. … Under the circumstances, music was the sacrificial victim. The miraculous thing is that you do not hear it go away—you believe that it is still playing even though, as I mentioned earlier, it should be louder here than anywhere else. And, in fact, as soon as this line of dialogue was over, we brought the music back in and sacrified something else. Every moment in this section is similarly fluid, a kind of shell game where layers are disappearing and reappearing according to the dramatic focus of the moment. It is necessitated by the “five-layer” law, but it is also one of the things that makes the soundtrack exciting to listen to.

In 2002, Knopf published The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film, a collection of transcribed dialogues between Murch and Michael Ondaatje, the author of The English Patient.

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categories: Best Of, Film, Music and Audio

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February 10, 2005
The Only Interesting Thing About Paris Hilton

Escape to Witch Mountain

Nothing interesting can be said of Paris Hilton, the mantis-like creature who represents celebrified Homo sapiens in its purest form. Except this: One of her aunts is Kim Richards, the ’70s child star who appeared in such fine cultural offerings as No Deposit, No Return, James at 15, and, most significant, Escape to Witch Mountain, the classic 1975 Disney flick about two badass kids with magic powers. Richards’s character, Tia, was the Buffy of the 1970s preadolescent set. Also noteworthy is the fact that Escape’s villains were played by Ray Milland and Donald Pleasence, which is just awesome. (The villains in the 1978 sequel, Return From Witch Mountain, were played by Bette Davis and Christopher Lee, which is also just awesome.)

And what of Ike Eisenmann, the young boy who played Tony, Tia’s brother? In 2002, he directed and co-wrote a short movie called The Blair Witch Mountain Project, a Blair Witch parody and nostalgia exercise that features appearances by several actors who had roles in Escape to Witch Mountain:

In the 13-minute-long production, filmmaker Blair Billingsly (played by actress Hope Levy) seeks out members of the Witch Mountain casts and visits various locations where the movies were shot in a quest to uncover why, more than 20 years after their initial release, the pictures remain so popular. As she encounters many of the actors, she becomes increasingly obsessed with finding Tony and Tia, the two “alien” children who starred in the features. At one point, she even interviews famed celebrity biographer J. Randy Taraborrelli (author of Michael Jackson: The Magic and the Madness and Sinatra: Behind the Legend, among other books).

You can watch The Blair Witch Mountain Project here. It’s cute but, um, not so good.

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categories: Best Of, Film

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February 2, 2005
Don DeLillo, Screenwriter

Game 6

The first film to be made from a Don DeLillo script, Game 6, had its premiere at Sundance a couple of weeks ago. It’s about a playwright and Red Sox fan (played by Michael Keaton) who skips the opening night of his new play to watch the fateful sixth game of the 1986 World Series. Game 6 was shot on a tiny budget by the director Michael Hoffman, and it also stars Robert Downey Jr. and Griffin Dunne. After the film’s Sundance premiere, The Hollywood Reporter had this to say about it:

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categories: Books, Film

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Join Rolf Harris Singing The Court of King Caractacus and Other Fun Songs
Boards of Canada, The Campfire Headphase
Fountains of Wayne, Utopia Parkway
The Postal Service, Give Up
Royksopp, The Understanding
Van Halen I
Don DeLillo, White Noise
Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb
Robert Caro, The Power Broker
The Portable Nietzsche, edited by Walter Kaufmann
Sidney Cohen, The Beyond Within
Tibor Kalman, Perverse Optimist
Vanity Fair
Book Magazine
Lingua Franca
Civilization magazine
Columbia Journalism Review
American Gentrifier