Monday, January 21, 2008

JGD: Solid Wisdom on Hollywood and Film


Finally feeling like reading books again. And I picked out a gem: Regard: The Selected Nonfiction of John Gregory Dunne. I just finished the first section that contains several some excellent Hollywood insider tales from the front. What impresses me is that he and wife Joan Didion played the screenwriting game to keep insurance, enjoy occasional perks and luxury, o be engaged by the challenges and problems of the work which they would solve and worked on together as a team. Its evident too by his essays that they were entertained by some of the capitalist intrigue and excesses that reeks in about every level of the motion picture business. And because they understood the game and the business so well, they didn't seem to get a lot of that limburger on them very often or for very long. They worked in screenwriting, but they always knew there was more to life and work than what the movies could offer them

Here is a quick excerpt from a 1974 Atlantic article called Tinsel that basically looks like Dunne shuffled his index card notes and typed them up. But to great impact and effect. They are indeed little postcards from the front.

"Technique is easily learned. I sat through three consecutive showings of Seven Days in May at a second-run drive-in in Long Beach to count the number of sequences that made up a well-crafted movie. (As I remember, there were forty.) But most instructive of all is seeing the bad movies of good directors. Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451, Antonioni's Red Desert, Peckinpah's Major Dundee, Penn's The Chase--in each there is a moment or sequence that stands out in such bold relief from the surrounding debris as to make the reasons for its effectiveness clear."

Anyone who watches and loves movies knows exactly what he is talking about. Bazin's Cahiers youngbloods who changed cinema filled their criticism finding these kinds of moments and being very expansive about them and there is a culture of film goers and enthusiasts who spend a lot of time in that park.

In another passage Dunne talks about he dreads the annual Spring coming Academy awards and notes that the film critics of the likes of Andrew Sarris and Vincent Canby have an annual smirking ritual regarding the Oscars where they always speak of the "tacky" ceremony and the "moribund" choices. He explains:

"The Academy is essentially a trade union of some 3.000 members, a mixture of below-the-line sound men and lighting men, special-effects men an PR people, film editors an set dressers as well as above-the-line actors, directors, producers and writers, The awards are the awards of any union in any company town, a vote for jobs, and hits provide jobs, and flops don't. If the New York film critics, most of whom work for union-organized publications, opened their membership to several thousand typesetters from the Typographical Union and projectionists from ISATE and secretaries from the Newspaper Guild, I suspect that the Academy's choices would seem a lot less moribund. "

I find this an intriguing and timely observation with the industry reeling of the possibility of Oscarus Interuptus due to the writer's strike.
posted by well-executed buffet at 7:51 PM
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