More Tales from the Crypt (or, more accurately, the vaults)

When last heard from, Beverly in Movieland had just toured the storage vaults at Hollywood’s  Pickford Center for Motion Picture Study. It was a fascinating experience, but there was much more to come. After we enjoyed the musical pleasures of the American Fotoplayer (complete with auto horn and whoopee whistle interjections), we were ushered into the spacious Linwood Dunn Theater for a demonstration of what the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences does best.

               

The Academy has preserved films of many nations, everything from Rashomon to Bambi Meets Godzilla. But one of its proudest achievements has been restoring the work of the great Bengali director, Satyajit Ray. Ray’s Apu Trilogy consists of three films (beginning with 1955’s Pather Panchali) that capture life in rural India in glowing black-and-white. The films, which had been hailed by cinephiles the world over, suffered a devastating blow when the British facility in which the original negatives were stored caught fire. An Academy-produced documentary, Saving the Apu Trilogy, showed us just how badly the films were damaged: their sprockets were gone, and many sections were warped or fused together. Whole reels looked like they’d been barbecued to a crisp. The Academy poured its resources into the problem, and – with the help of a special lab in Bologna, Italy – managed to save the bulk of Ray’s masterwork.

An unexpected part of the Academy archive is its collection of home movies, which show Hollywood’s legendary movers and shakers at work and at play. We saw Gary Cooper and famous art director Cedric Gibbons on the tennis court, Marlene Dietrich socializing with friends, and Marilyn Monroe cozying up to a fluffy pup on the set of The Misfits. Early images of a sleepy Hollywood Blvd. were priceless. And the son of the great Fayard Nicholas (one of two tap-dancing Nicholas brothers) came up to the podium to introduce footage of his father hanging out with his uncle Harold, and Harold’s beautiful bride, Dorothy Dandridge.

Because the Academy is also interested in cinematic innovation, we watched a 1956 short called “The Miracle of Todd-AO,” designed to promote a new wide-screen 70mm format. Inevitably, we were taken along on a queasy-making roller-coaster ride, watched skiers swoosh down the slopes of Sun Valley, and joined in a motorcycle chase through the hills of San Francisco, more than a decade before Bullitt. The whole thing ended in an unexpected commercial for an upcoming Todd-AO release, the screen version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!

I also delighted in two short films from the Academy collection, both of them featuring cats. One, made by Gus Van Sant, was a live-action short capturing a pet feline trying to chase down a patch of sunlight. The other, done in spectacularly fluid animation by Sara Petty back in 1978, shows two Siamese cats cavorting in a delightfully sinister way. It’s called “Furies,” and I could see why. Petty apparently made many animated shorts in the course of her career, but a break-in at her storage locker tragically robbed the world of much of her talent. Just one more reason that we need film archives as repositories for great works of cinematic art.

The big news for film lovers is that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is finally taking steps to share its priceless collections with the public. For years Angelenos have bemoaned the lack of a serious movie museum in the town that movies built. Now construction is actually underway on L.A.’s Miracle Mile. We‘re promised an “immersive environment” that will help visitors explore the dream factory.

Bulletins as they break!  

From Sara Petty's "Furies"

The Academy’s Pickford Center, Where Movies Get the Red Carpet Treatment

Of course we all know that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences annually stages the Oscar ceremony. But the organization, founded in 1927, does far more than roll out the red carpet for celebrities in fancy dress. Last night I was invited for a tour of the Pickford Center for Motion Picture Study, which since 1991 has been the Academy’s headquarters for  preserving and protecting motion picture history.

The Pickford Center, named after cinema pioneer Mary Pickford, is located on Vine Street in Hollywood. Back in 1948 this building was a television studio. Today it is a temple dedicated to the cinematic arts. Its walls are lined with rare photographs, some of them historic and others quite new. The Pickford Center has just received -- and now proudly displays – a series of candid shots snapped by Jeff Bridges, who has chronicled his career by way of behind-the-scenes images of fellow actors, crew members, and stunt performers. They’re well worth a gander.

 Near the entrance to the Pickford Center stands a priceless artifact, an American Fotoplayer from 1907. The Fotoplayer was designed to provide accompaniment for silent films in smaller theatres that couldn’t afford a live orchestra. Imagine a sort of extreme player-piano, with attached wings that supply a full set of percussion instruments, along with such extras as an auto horn, a whoopee whistle, a siren, and a baby’s cry. Only twelve of these beauties are left in the world, and the Academy’s is the only one not in private hands. We were lucky to be given an impromptu concert, with the Fotoplayer (nimbly manipulated by a member of the Academy staff)  adding music and sound effects to a 1904 Georges Méliès short, “Tchin-Chao The Chinese Conjuror.” I’m  not sure what was most fascinating: the conjuror’s hokey magic tricks, the casual racism of the “Chinese” performers, or the way Méliès used the film medium to enhance the magician’s stage trickery. But listening to the Fotoplayer was, in any case, delightful.

Because the Pickford Center is a film archive, we were also ushered through the high-ceiling vaults in which movies from all over the world are stored. The first vault, in which the temperature is set at 60 degrees Fahrenheit, contains unprocessed films that will wait years (or sometimes decades) to be sorted by the center’s archivists. A second vault, ten degrees cooler, holds stacks of processed films. (I spotted reels from such diverse flicks as Shaft, Patton, and Anna and the King.) We were not escorted through the chilliest vault (45 degrees Fahrenheit), the one holding camera negatives. But we learned that the scent of vinegar in the air is a telltale sign of a film beginning to deteriorate. In all, the Pickford vaults contain 2000 items, or over 500 tons of film materials. Another tidbit: in case of fire (heaven forbid!), the Pickford has a special gas-based fire suppression system. Conventional sprinklers are avoided, because water can destroy film stock as quickly as fire can.

The Pickford is not just about film storage. The center collects artifacts, like a full array of Harpo Marx’s comic props (a rubber chicken among them), donated by his son. And a separate department contributes to the science of filmmaking by, among other things, working to create new standards for digitally-shot movies. We all gasped at the results of the new ACES imaging system that greatly increases the dynamic range of today’s color photography. Then there’s the Pickford’s much-admired restoration work, which enables even classics from Cuba to get the red carpet treatment.

But you ain’t read nothing yet. More to come!

Georges Melies as Tchin-Chao, the Chinese Conjuror

My Roger Corman Life: A 90th Birthday Tribute

Roger Corman changed my life. Today, remarkably, the famous supplier of B-movies to the world’s youth market turns 90 (and I’m not feeling so young myself). My relationship with Roger has been complicated, and I’m sure the same holds true for most of his employees, past and present. As one of them told me, “Just when you think he’s the shit of the world, he turns around and does something of extraordinary niceness.” True -- yet his magnanimity can’t always be trusted.

I met Roger Corman in 1973, when he interviewed me for a job at New World Pictures. He had gotten my name through the Phi Beta Kappa chapter of UCLA, where I was finishing up a doctorate in English. It was typical of Roger to seek out someone with lofty academic credentials: he loved to shore up his credibility by hiring underlings with fancy degrees and titles.

On that first morning, I was impressed (as everyone always was) by Corman’s handsome face, deep voice, and good-humored manner. We had a serious talk about motion picture aesthetics, and he told me I’d need to promise to read and discuss with him Siegfried Kracauer’s Theory of Film (1960). Of course I complied, wondering how this ponderous tome would shed light on the making of monster movies and biker flicks. I’m still wondering. He never mentioned Kracauer again.

After sixteen lively months as Corman’s all-purpose assistant, I left New World in 1975 to return to academia. Years later, I was persuaded by Roger to become the story editor at his re-vamped company, Concorde-New Horizons. Signing on in 1986, I once again plunged into the madcap world of low-budget filmmaking. My duties included overseeing writers, consulting with young directors, and earning the occasional script credit on horror films and thrillers that needed emergency fixes. Yes, I played a few bit parts too, in all of which I kept my clothes on. But one April afternoon in 1994, Corman called me into his office, where we had another pivotal conversation.

Roger told me his fears for his company’s financial health. (This was nothing new; he had these concerns every week or two.) Then he brought up the plight of a close friend of mine. She had been an early Corman employee and had taught me a great deal when I first arrived at New World. Later, she’d moved into more lucrative positions with more prestigious companies. But she’d hit on hard times, and was now desperate for work. It was a nice gesture on Roger’s part to make a place for her on his staff. It was not so nice, however, to give her my job.

So after eight years of loyal service, I was rewarded with two weeks’ notice. All the while Roger insisted that I had been an exemplary employee. He told me to write myself a glowing recommendation (“Don’t be modest,” he said), promised to sign it, and did. I later discovered that in typically shrewd Corman fashion, he’d hired my old friend on a cut-rate basis. Which meant that while lending a hand to someone in need, he was actually saving the difference between her salary and my own. So his altruism (though undoubtedly genuine) was also to his material benefit. Such is Roger Corman: the buck stops with him, in more ways than one.

No, I don’t hold a grudge. My memories from my Corman years are priceless. And writing Roger Corman: Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesh-Eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers has given me a career I never anticipated. So I’d say it’s been a fair trade.

Happy birthday, Roger!

Becoming Patty Duke; Becoming Anna

When I was in high school, Patty Duke was not a universal favorite. We serious drama kids of course looked down our noses at her amiable “twin-cousins” sitcom, The Patty Duke Show. True, there was also her gripping portrayal of the blind and deaf young Helen Keller in 1962’s film version of  William Gibson’s The Miracle Worker. The role had made her (at age 16) the then-youngest competitive winner in Oscar history, but we were reluctant to give her too much praise. After all, two of our classmates had just resoundingly won first prize at the Los Angeles County drama festival by performing a dramatic scene from The Miracle Worker. Our teacher plainly preferred the work of his student -- a teacher’s pet type -- to that of the young actress he disparagingly nicknamed “Debbie Fink.” (He’d borrowed this name from an obnoxious child-star character in Al Capp’s “Li’l Abner” comic strip.) If our dramatic mentor hadn’t much use for Patty Duke’s s triumph, who were we to argue?

Now that Duke has passed on, at the shockingly young age of sixty-nine, it’s time for me to rethink her career accomplishments. Unlike Helen Keller she was neither deaf nor blind. Still, she had some serious physical and emotional obstacles to overcome. And, much like Keller herself, she surmounted them magnificently.

 Duke’s path to Hollywood was via Broadway, where (at age 13) she created the Helen Keller role on stage. To get the part, she’d been carefully coached by her talent managers, who’d assembled a stable of child actors. They’d come into the life of Anna Marie Duke when she was eight, essentially taking over from her alcoholic father and clinically depressed mother. Hoping to remake her in the mold of another child star, Patty McCormack (the evil little girl in The Bad Seed), they changed Anna’s name to Patty Duke, abruptly announcing that “Anna Marie is dead; you're Patty now.”

A 1987 autobiography, Call Me Anna, that she wrote with drama critic Kenneth Turan details years of mistreatment at the hands of her unscrupulous managers, who financially exploited her, while also introducing her early on to alcohol and prescription medications. After the cancellation of The Patty Duke Show, she made a surprising jump (at 21) to the over-the-top role of Neely, an actress prone to booze, drugs, and cat fights in Valley of the Dolls. (Here’s an unforgettable sample of her campy tough-gal dialogue, as she discusses her latest flame: “Ted Casablanca is NOT a fag . . . and I'm the dame who can prove it.”) The role of Neely is loosely based on the life of Judy Garland, but an ample share of Patty Duke’s own misery seeps into her performance  as well.

It was not until 1982, when she was in her thirties, that Duke was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, for which she was successfully treated. From that time onward, she became a strong public advocate for mental health issues. She also served three years as president of the Screen Actors Guild, while continuing to earn respect for a wide variety of acting roles. Her domestic life was often rocky, but apparently her last years were peaceful ones. Following her death, son Sean Astin paid tribute to “our beloved wife, mother, grandmother, matriarch and the exquisite artist, humanitarian, and champion for mental health.”

The Miracle Worker was the rare popular film built around the relationship of two females. Anne Bancroft, five years before The Graduate, won her Oscar for playing Helen Keller’s devoted teacher, Annie Sullivan. So sad that we have now lost both these great actresses. 

Is Hollywood Ready for “Ready Player One”?

Original artwork by Ian Yandman Hook

When I read that Steven Spielberg is about to start shooting a screen adaptation of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, I felt obliged to check out the 2011 source novel. Normally I don’t spend much time reading science fiction, nor do I indulge in video-gaming. But the subject matter of my son’s big new theatre piece has convinced me to become slightly more knowledgeable about avatars and virtual-reality quests. And since I consider Spielberg one of our most masterful filmmakers, the projects he chooses are always of interest.

Despite the availability these days of sophisticated CGI effects, Ready Player One is not going to be easy to adapt for the screen. It’s a huge story, one that for quite a while didn’t entirely hold my interest because so much explanation was needed to set it in motion. Cline posits an era in the not-too-distant future when the daily lives of average citizens are so grim that they are only too happy to send most of their waking hours online. The first-person narrator, Wade Watts, is (of course) a computer genius, but one who lives in squalor in a miserable place called “the Stacks.” That’s why he camps out in a secret hiding place, from whence he is able to log into Oasis, an all-purpose on-line universe that provides him with schooling, entertainment, and much more.

 In the course of the novel Wade’s trusty avatar, Parzival, will embark on a fantastic quest into virtual outer-space to locate the mysterious keys that unlock the shadowy gates that will lead one lucky winner to claim the fabulous fortune of Oasis’s deceased founder, James Halliday. Along the way, Parzival will find allies, rivals, and a group of sophisticated thugs who are quite ready to create mayhem, either in the virtual world or the real one. There’s the usual disconnect between the avatars playing the game and the honest-to-goodness human beings who control them, which leads me to wonder how Spielberg plans to differentiate between two separate realities with interlocking sets of characters. (James Cameron did a brilliant job of achieving this with Avatar; I wonder if Spielberg has something similar in mind, or has devised his own solution.)

 Though, frankly, some of the solemnity of Parzival’s quest seems a bit silly to me, there’s another aspect to the book that has me tickled. We’re to understand that all of Oasis is a figment of James Halliday’s fertile imagination. And Halliday, it turns out, was obsessive about the Eighties, when he was young, frisky, and a binge consumer of popular culture. So some of Parzival’s quest-time is spent having to re-enact Eighties flicks like WarGames, or dodging monsters, the likes of Mechagodzilla, who lurch straight out of Japanese cinema. One planet in the Oasis virtual universe is build along the lines of the iconic Tyrell Building from Blade Runner, and Wade briefly takes a breather by flying to Planet Zemeckis and surmounting a small challenge that earns him a Flying DeLorean.

I enjoyed the outrageousness of all that, and can see how Spielberg would be intrigued and amused by the opportunity to dodge in and out of other people’s movies (legalities permitting). But, as a screenwriting instructor I can’t help wondering how he plans to manage the tone of a story that’s sometimes serious to the point of tragedy and sometimes totally goofy.

The book also introduced me to a Japanese term: hikiko mori. I find myself worrying about those poor souls who shun reality to withdraw into the fantasy world of their computers. In Ernest Cline’s dark future, I guess it can’t be helped.