Saturday, August 2, 2008
I Was Under the Influence on Mondays in July
Another highlight of summer television was the series of four interviews Elvis Mitchell had in a short season of a new series called Under the Influence.
The first show was with Sidney Pollock in his last interview. Those conditions could not help but to create a bittersweet. It also was hard at first to see understand the intent of the interview until it became clear that the focus of these interviews were not going to be on the artist and their works but --duh-- as the series title says, their influences. So Pollock talked about how Gene Kelly was his idol as a moviegoer in Indiana, even down to buying the black loafers like Kelly wore in An American in Paris.
The next show with Bill Murray turned out to be my favorite. He focused in on comediennes he admired. He was most effusive about Margaret Sullavan, particularly with Henry Fonda in a film called The Moon's Our Home My favorite section of the discussion with Murray came at the end when he reminisced about living in Paris and having exposure to French screenings of the whole of cinematic history and how that was influential for himand he talked about how hard it is to make films, even bad ones.
I have mixed feelings about the third installment with Laurence Fishburne. It was intriguing to hear him talk about his admiration for Clark Gable. And I appreciate his almost ebullient response for the likes of Tony Curtis in Sweet Smell of Success among others as well as his list of actors and roles that are examples of when an actor is really "swinging." But Fishburne's ego and sense of self-worth also made me shake my head and not want to listen closely at times. Still, good acting is going to be a lot about self-consciousness, so as with James Lipton's Inside the Actor Studio, one should expet that these sorts of interviews are going to move into that kind of territory.
The last program with Quentin Tarrentino didn't make a great impression with me. It was typical hyperactive Q. But where are you going to see a half hour interview that covers both The Last House on the Left and the screwball comedies of Preston Sturges?
The show isn't coming back until November. Web sources state those guests will be Joan Allen, Edward Norton, John Leguizamo and Richard Gere. But in the mean time, time with Under the Influence lead me to the discovery that there are 12 years of similar Mitchell interviews for streaming or in recent years, podcast downloads, from the radio show that the TCM program emulates, The Treatment. What an archive to explore!
posted by well-executed buffet at 7:15 PM
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