Wow, I was going to post the next paragraph as a comment to the blog entry I thought I made months ago and discovered it was still in my draft file. Must have buried it under newer entries, Now I am resolved to look it over again, correct typos and publish it with intended comment leading off.
Antonia Fraser and her husband, Harold Pinter, visited Ollie [aka Dr. Oliver Sacks] at his "little dark-red clapboard house" on City Island, a most un Bronx-like section of the Bronx. The only other details she provides about the house was that it had a porch and "was extremely close to the sea. She also mentions that Sacks told her and Pinter that he swam "in and out of the moored boats like a seal." Fraser, Antonia, Must You Go? My Life with Harold Pinter, p.141. A line from Awakenings was the seed of inspiration for Pinter's play A Kind of Alaska which premiered at the NT with Judi Dench as Deborah.
A friend of mine occasionally bikes on City Island so I've asked him to check this out and send me a photo if he identifies the place. Of course, many of the houses on the island are near water and piers -- several films have been shot on City Island as was much of the final episode of the U.S. version of Life on Mars if you want some idea of the area. In any case, if I get a photo of Oliver Sack's [old?] house, I'll share it here.
Like many people I first became aware of the work of Dr. Oliver Sacks from the 1990 film, Awakenings. Memorably portrayed by Robin Williams, the film's neurologist finds that a new drug, L-DOPA, "awakens" patients who survived the 1917-1928 epidemic of encephalitis lethargica but have spent the intervening 30-40 years in a catatonic state. The movie was a fictionalized version of the book of the in which Dr. Sacks chronicled of his efforts in the late 1960s to help patients at Beth Abraham Hospital, a Bronx, New York hospital, which was providing long-term care for a sizable group of individuals who had contacted this form of "sleeping sickness."
Oliver Sacks is a master storyteller and Vintage Sacks shows him to great advantage. For readers who must read Sacks' work as soon as it is published, this collection serves to highlight the best and possibly refresh the memory. For those like me who haven't done as good a job keeping it up, it was a re-introduction to a remarkable human being and scientist who could have had a full-time career as a writer, if the mysteries of the human neurological system hadn't led him along another path.
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Glamour Girls
Glamour Girls of Sixties Hollywood : Seventy-five Profiles by Tom Lisanti (2008) is a title from McFarland Publishing's extensive film and television performing arts category (http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/about.html). Sometimes it's hard to believe any more can be written about Hollywood in the 1960's but new angles on the motion pictures and television shows of the era keep popping up. In this book author Lisanti profiles 75 actresses of the era, most of whom briefly (some in close to the blink of an eye) passed across the big and little screens. Each actress gets at least one nice photograph from her heyday, a short description of career highlights, a longer section on "groovy" roles of the 60's, background on their pre-Hollywood years, and a section - lengths vary - on their post-1960's life and career(s). 13 of the women are interviewed as well and these interviews are the most interesting part of the book, imo.
For me, the most amazing thing about this book was a fleeting appearance by actor Steven Rogers (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0734779/). Mr. Rogers is shown getting close to one of the lovely ladies who are under a beach umbrella in one of those mid-60's beach movies. Rogers portrayed Doc on the first season of a hugely popular tv series, Combat! (the actual title includes a stylized bayonet, but an exclamation point is as close as my keyboard will get) and I had a huge crush on him. He disappeared from the show at the start of its second season (a sob from my pre-teen self), opting for the cushier life of beach and ski movies for a few years before departing from show business. A quick check of the yahoo group, combatfan, failed to provide much information beyond the imdb info.
All in all this is a fun read for fans of American films and television shows of the 1960's aimed at the teenaged audience that was dominating the tv set at home, if not the box office of the local movie theatre. Unfortunately, library books with excellent photos of movie actresses (or actors) are apt to have been vandalized at some point during their shelf life. This copy of Glamour Girls was no exception. Happily, the high quality of the book production work, another McFarland seliing point, has prevented the excisions from becoming too noticeable unless the reader goes through from cover to cover. In this case it was only a few pages into the Introduction before I realized 4 pages were missing and missing pages continued through to the end, generally in 4-page blocks. A less well-constructed book would have likely fallen apart before it had circulated very many times.
I meant to stick a note in when I returned it to the library the other morning but forgot; I'll try to remember to look up the catalog record and see which library owns the copy I read and call about the condition. Perhaps they'll take it out of circulation and obtain photocopies of the missing pages or replace it entirely before it goes out-of-print. Once someone has removed pages or otherwise damaged a book, subsequent users tend to be less careful than normal.
For me, the most amazing thing about this book was a fleeting appearance by actor Steven Rogers (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0734779/). Mr. Rogers is shown getting close to one of the lovely ladies who are under a beach umbrella in one of those mid-60's beach movies. Rogers portrayed Doc on the first season of a hugely popular tv series, Combat! (the actual title includes a stylized bayonet, but an exclamation point is as close as my keyboard will get) and I had a huge crush on him. He disappeared from the show at the start of its second season (a sob from my pre-teen self), opting for the cushier life of beach and ski movies for a few years before departing from show business. A quick check of the yahoo group, combatfan, failed to provide much information beyond the imdb info.
All in all this is a fun read for fans of American films and television shows of the 1960's aimed at the teenaged audience that was dominating the tv set at home, if not the box office of the local movie theatre. Unfortunately, library books with excellent photos of movie actresses (or actors) are apt to have been vandalized at some point during their shelf life. This copy of Glamour Girls was no exception. Happily, the high quality of the book production work, another McFarland seliing point, has prevented the excisions from becoming too noticeable unless the reader goes through from cover to cover. In this case it was only a few pages into the Introduction before I realized 4 pages were missing and missing pages continued through to the end, generally in 4-page blocks. A less well-constructed book would have likely fallen apart before it had circulated very many times.
I meant to stick a note in when I returned it to the library the other morning but forgot; I'll try to remember to look up the catalog record and see which library owns the copy I read and call about the condition. Perhaps they'll take it out of circulation and obtain photocopies of the missing pages or replace it entirely before it goes out-of-print. Once someone has removed pages or otherwise damaged a book, subsequent users tend to be less careful than normal.
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Stanley Kubrick : a biography (John Baxter)
John Baxter's Stanley Kubrick : a biography made for absorbing reading. The book covers his life, films and relationships with members of the filmmaking community -- stars, producers, other directors, technical crews and, with varying degrees of success, the authors and screenwriters whose work he transformed into images on the big screen. As a group these writers tend to be Mr. Baxter's most revealing sources.
There haven't been too many people to whom the dictum Less is More applies better than to Kubrick and not simply in terms of the number of films he made over the course of his career. By the end of his life as this biography tells it, S. K. comes across as a cross between Howard Hughes and Greta Garbo with a penchant for secrecy, obsession with security and the limited number of associates allowed through the gates. In shunning the celebrity culture of Hollywood for the relative isolation which he needed to remain creative, Kubrick may have created more fascination with his life and work than he would have if he'd chosen to reside in Malibu.
There haven't been too many people to whom the dictum Less is More applies better than to Kubrick and not simply in terms of the number of films he made over the course of his career. By the end of his life as this biography tells it, S. K. comes across as a cross between Howard Hughes and Greta Garbo with a penchant for secrecy, obsession with security and the limited number of associates allowed through the gates. In shunning the celebrity culture of Hollywood for the relative isolation which he needed to remain creative, Kubrick may have created more fascination with his life and work than he would have if he'd chosen to reside in Malibu.
Needless to say, Kubrick wasn't an active participant in the making of this biography and the people who were interviewed by John Baxter were former associates, not people working with him during the researching and writing of this biography.
Published in 1997 by Carroll & Graf Publishers and distributed by Publishers Group West, this 399-page work includes some terrific illustrations and a section of notes for each chapter. Alas the specific reference aren't noted by page or phrase so any reader (or future Kubrick biographer) wishing to fact-check using this book will have a job to untangle the background information.
On a personal note I was amazed to learn that one of the addresses for the Kubrick family during Stanley's high school years and also the address of his future wife, Toba Metz, was 1414 Shakespeare Avenue in the Highbridge section of the Bronx. In the 1940's my maternal and paternal grandparents lived a few blocks south of the Kubricks. My parents were only 2 and 4 years older than Stanley but both attended Catholic high schools in Manhattan, not William Howard Taft H.S., the "neighborhood" public h.s. for this area where Stanley and Toba went to school.
Researchers interested in delving into the Stanley Kubrick story more deeply should visit http://www.arts.ac.uk/kubrick.htm, the website of the archive of the acclaimed film maker's personal papers. The Archive contains more than 1000 boxes of material, including scripts, props, costumes, photography, correspondence, equipment and research.
Friday, October 23, 2009
The Films of John Garfield
It's not fair to blame Thomas Pynchon and Inherent Vice but ever since discovering how Pynchon's P.I. Doc imagined himself as John Garfield, I've been on a bit of nostalgic Garfield trip that's led me into the fascinating world of theatre in New York in the years between the world wars. A Garfield biography led me to Howard Clurman's The Fervent Years. From there I found Cheryl Crawford's memoir, and onto A Life on the Stage by Jacob Adler, and a few other books about the fascinating world of theatre in New York from the late 19th century up to the early 1950's. Some of these I've written about on this blog, others I've just recommended to friends and family but maybe I'll make a few notes eventually.
Back to the subject at hand -- Howard Gelman's The Films of John Garfield (Seacaucus, NJ : Citadel Press, c.1975) is worth tracking down just for the superlative photos of Garfield that it contains. It starts off with a 3-page introduction by Abraham Polonsky in which Polonsky explains how he met Garfield and his partner, Bob Roberts, at their independent film company, Enterprise Productions, and convinces them to produce Body and Soul, scripted by Polonsky. The resultant film, directed by Robert Rossen is considered one of Garfield's finest.
Don't be misled by the title. Yes, each film receives 1 or more pages of still photographs and production details, background information on the film, a 1970's assessment of its effectiveness, a plot synopsis and excerpts from period review(s) of the film focusing on Garfield's performance). In addition, though, there's a 27-page chapter of biographical information, a chapter on Garfield's major theatrical performances, and one on the HUAC investigation with excerpts from John Garfield's testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Back to Pynchon and Doc -- why would a youngish man of Italian (?) ancestry born in California identify so closely with John Garfield? How often does a person get to don a raincoat in sunny, Southern California? Is there something about being outsiders? Pynchon doesn't describe Doc's appearance so as I read the book, it was his attitude and p.o.v. that called to mind several people but none of these friends looked remotely like John Garfied.
Arguably, John Garfield was one of the first "ethnic" types to achieve leading man status in Hollywood motion pictures as well as a forerunner of those famous rebellious youthful heroes of the 1950's and 60's -- from James Dean through that trio of easy riders. He was an ambitious, self-driven young man who removed himself from the poverty of the Bronx, plunged headlong into the theatre (after dreams of a professional boxing career faded) and landed in The Group (the brainchild of Clurman, Crawford and Lee Strasberg). Eventually he got himself out to Hollywood, reportedly because Clurman gave the lead in Clifford Odets' Golden Boy to Luther Adler, rather than Jules Garfield, for whom Odet had written the part.
Becoming John Garfield and starring in a series of gritty Warner Brothers' films designed to appeal to the Everyman (and woman), JG had a meteoric career. Eventually, frustration with Warners typecasting, less-than-reasonable loans to other studios and a number of suspensions led Garfield to go the independent route. Sadly, the blacklisting badly hurt his studio as well as his opportunities to get important roles and JG returned to NY, the theatre, the HUAC appearances and a life that had spiraled out of control. His May 1952 funeral in NYC was reportedly the biggest celebrity-funeral since that of Rudolf Valentino's in 1926 (http://themave.com/Garfield/artc/nytimes.htm).
Being a bit literal-minded and because I'd seen Garfield wearing lots of trench coats in noir-ish settings over my movie-watching years, I read Inherent Vice thinking John Garfield had played at least one P.I. for Doc to want to channel. Mr. Gelman's book provided a good way to determine if John Garfield ever portrayed a private investigator. So, for the record, here are the occupations of the characters portrayed by John Garfield in each of his films (minus a few appearances as himself):
Footlight Parade (1933) - sailor, U.S. Navy
Four Daughters (1938) - pianist and drifter
Made Me a Criminal (1939) - boxer and ranch hand
Blackwell's Island (1939) - investigative journalist
Juarez (1939) - general fighting to overthrow Mexico's foreign rule
Daughters Courageous (1939) - con man and vagabond
Dust Be My Destiny (1939) - fugitive from the law
Saturday's Children (1940) - an inventor
Castle on the Hudson (1940) - gangster
Flowing Gold (1940) - oil-field worker on the run from the law
East of the River (1940) - small-time hoodlum
The Sea Wolf (1941) - seaman on a fishing vessel
Out of the Fog (1941) - gangster
Dangerously They Live (1941) - intern at a NY hospital who runs afoul of Nazi spies
Tortilla Flat (1942) - workingman in a small fishing village in Mexico
Air Force (1943) - Army Air Corps sergeant aboard a fighter bomber
Destination Tokyo (1943) - sailor aboard U.S. Navy submarine attacking Tokyo
The Fallen Sparrow (1943) - Spanish Civil War veteran
Between Two Worlds (1944) - Newspaper reporter
Pride of the Marines (1945) - WW2 U.S. Marine Corps machine gunner blinded in action
The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) - drifter
Nobody Lives Forever (1946) -WW2 veteran and con man
Humoresque (1946) - violinist
Body and Soul (1947) - prizefighter
Gentleman's Agreement (1947) WW2 veteran experiencing anti-Semitism
Force of Evil (1948) - lawyer working for the mob
We Were Strangers (1949) - revolutionary and leader of a guerilla band in Cuba
Under My Skin (1950) -jockey barred from horse-racing
The Breaking Point (1950) -owner/captain of a sport-fishing boat
He Ran All the Way (1951) - small-time thief and murderer
Quite a range of occupations, quite a few films for such a short career, but nary a P.I. in the lot. But, thanks to The Films of John Garfield, I've a better handle on the film titles and characters so it's time to reread Inherent Vice.
Back to the subject at hand -- Howard Gelman's The Films of John Garfield (Seacaucus, NJ : Citadel Press, c.1975) is worth tracking down just for the superlative photos of Garfield that it contains. It starts off with a 3-page introduction by Abraham Polonsky in which Polonsky explains how he met Garfield and his partner, Bob Roberts, at their independent film company, Enterprise Productions, and convinces them to produce Body and Soul, scripted by Polonsky. The resultant film, directed by Robert Rossen is considered one of Garfield's finest.
Don't be misled by the title. Yes, each film receives 1 or more pages of still photographs and production details, background information on the film, a 1970's assessment of its effectiveness, a plot synopsis and excerpts from period review(s) of the film focusing on Garfield's performance). In addition, though, there's a 27-page chapter of biographical information, a chapter on Garfield's major theatrical performances, and one on the HUAC investigation with excerpts from John Garfield's testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Back to Pynchon and Doc -- why would a youngish man of Italian (?) ancestry born in California identify so closely with John Garfield? How often does a person get to don a raincoat in sunny, Southern California? Is there something about being outsiders? Pynchon doesn't describe Doc's appearance so as I read the book, it was his attitude and p.o.v. that called to mind several people but none of these friends looked remotely like John Garfied.
Arguably, John Garfield was one of the first "ethnic" types to achieve leading man status in Hollywood motion pictures as well as a forerunner of those famous rebellious youthful heroes of the 1950's and 60's -- from James Dean through that trio of easy riders. He was an ambitious, self-driven young man who removed himself from the poverty of the Bronx, plunged headlong into the theatre (after dreams of a professional boxing career faded) and landed in The Group (the brainchild of Clurman, Crawford and Lee Strasberg). Eventually he got himself out to Hollywood, reportedly because Clurman gave the lead in Clifford Odets' Golden Boy to Luther Adler, rather than Jules Garfield, for whom Odet had written the part.
Becoming John Garfield and starring in a series of gritty Warner Brothers' films designed to appeal to the Everyman (and woman), JG had a meteoric career. Eventually, frustration with Warners typecasting, less-than-reasonable loans to other studios and a number of suspensions led Garfield to go the independent route. Sadly, the blacklisting badly hurt his studio as well as his opportunities to get important roles and JG returned to NY, the theatre, the HUAC appearances and a life that had spiraled out of control. His May 1952 funeral in NYC was reportedly the biggest celebrity-funeral since that of Rudolf Valentino's in 1926 (http://themave.com/Garfield/artc/nytimes.htm).
Being a bit literal-minded and because I'd seen Garfield wearing lots of trench coats in noir-ish settings over my movie-watching years, I read Inherent Vice thinking John Garfield had played at least one P.I. for Doc to want to channel. Mr. Gelman's book provided a good way to determine if John Garfield ever portrayed a private investigator. So, for the record, here are the occupations of the characters portrayed by John Garfield in each of his films (minus a few appearances as himself):
Footlight Parade (1933) - sailor, U.S. Navy
Four Daughters (1938) - pianist and drifter
Made Me a Criminal (1939) - boxer and ranch hand
Blackwell's Island (1939) - investigative journalist
Juarez (1939) - general fighting to overthrow Mexico's foreign rule
Daughters Courageous (1939) - con man and vagabond
Dust Be My Destiny (1939) - fugitive from the law
Saturday's Children (1940) - an inventor
Castle on the Hudson (1940) - gangster
Flowing Gold (1940) - oil-field worker on the run from the law
East of the River (1940) - small-time hoodlum
The Sea Wolf (1941) - seaman on a fishing vessel
Out of the Fog (1941) - gangster
Dangerously They Live (1941) - intern at a NY hospital who runs afoul of Nazi spies
Tortilla Flat (1942) - workingman in a small fishing village in Mexico
Air Force (1943) - Army Air Corps sergeant aboard a fighter bomber
Destination Tokyo (1943) - sailor aboard U.S. Navy submarine attacking Tokyo
The Fallen Sparrow (1943) - Spanish Civil War veteran
Between Two Worlds (1944) - Newspaper reporter
Pride of the Marines (1945) - WW2 U.S. Marine Corps machine gunner blinded in action
The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) - drifter
Nobody Lives Forever (1946) -WW2 veteran and con man
Humoresque (1946) - violinist
Body and Soul (1947) - prizefighter
Gentleman's Agreement (1947) WW2 veteran experiencing anti-Semitism
Force of Evil (1948) - lawyer working for the mob
We Were Strangers (1949) - revolutionary and leader of a guerilla band in Cuba
Under My Skin (1950) -jockey barred from horse-racing
The Breaking Point (1950) -owner/captain of a sport-fishing boat
He Ran All the Way (1951) - small-time thief and murderer
Quite a range of occupations, quite a few films for such a short career, but nary a P.I. in the lot. But, thanks to The Films of John Garfield, I've a better handle on the film titles and characters so it's time to reread Inherent Vice.
Friday, October 2, 2009
Cheryl Crawford, "One naked individual"
In her 1977 autobiography, producer Cheryl Crawford (1902-1986) recounts her love of the theatre and overwhelming desire to become and stay part of this of world. Theatre represented an environment where she could express herself in ways that the Akron, Ohio of her childhood prohibited and the restrictive code of behavior imposed upon Smith College students. One Naked Individual : My Fifty Years in the Theatre traces Miss Crawford's triumphs, flops and failures (she defines the latter two conditions differently) as she assailed the barriers that existed against women as theatrical producers. Over the course of her career she moved back and forth between relative security of group work (but with limits imposed by others and frequent personality conflicts) and and the freedom enjoyed by the independent producer (along with sky-high financial risk.)
As Crawford explains, this autobiography is an exploration of her life by way of a mix of chronological and thematic strands. For readers who prefer a more chronological approach, the appendix comes in handy. Most readers, if they are familiar with Crawford's work, will recognize her from the musicals she produced. These are largely described in 2 chapters: "One Touch of Venus" and "Musical Adventures." The story of how of One Touch of Venus came to be such a smash hit is one of the most delightful in the book as she traces the production from its initial inception to its London premiere. A near siege aimed at getting Marlene Dietrich to play the goddess having failed, the stage is set for Crawford's initial meeting with Mary Martin, and an important lifelong friendship. From a disastrous opening in Boston Venus went on to win accolades, awards and audiences galore.
Since 1936 Crawford and Kurt Weill had nourished a hope of collaborating on a second work. Their first resulted in Johnny Johnson, a production that had been beset by difficulties raising money (a near constant strand in the book) and personality conflicts galore. Amidst these problems and distractions Crawford and Weill found themselves in agreement about the role and prospects for musical theatre, an interest that was secondary to her fellow Group Theatre directors. Crawford along with was a member of the triumvirate that ran the Group Theater. Impressed by the work of Stanislavsky and Mayerhoff and the theater scene in the Soviet Union, Crawford, Howard Clurman and Lee Strasberg led a strong company of actors wishing to expand their acting skills by presenting plays by young and little-known American dramatists. Thematically, the Group Theater wanted to put on plays that were relevant to to situation of American audiences during the Great Depression, a striking contrast to most of the Broadway productions, not to mention Hollywood films, of this period.
Miss Crawford writes that she had the "good fortune to be identified with many of the major theatrical enterprises of my time." In addition to the The Maplewood Theater, a stock company she ran for 3 seasons until WW2 gas restrictions impeded attendance, the list is a veritable What's What of New York Theatre: the Theatre Guild, the Group Theatre (aka The Group), the American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA), the American Repertory Theatre (ART), and the Actors Studio
Famous individuals fly across these pages with actresses figuring larger than actors. (In Body and Soul: The Story of John Garfield biographer Larry Swindell describes J.G.'s prolonged siege of Cheryl Crawford; here the effort gets a sentence.) Besides Mary Martin, Judith Anderson and Marilyn Monroe stand out from the crowd of names. But it's the playwrights who get the most attention with three dominating the later chapters of the book: "Gadg" as Elia Kazan was known (his college nickname of Gadget being shortened), Clifford Odets (whom Crawford first hired as an actor and sent out with road companies) and most movingly, Tennessee Williams or "Tenn" (whose photographic portrait suggests he was far and away the handsomest of the group.)
Speaking of photographs, there are 34 black-and-white ones reproduced with varying degrees of success on 16 glossy pages. Alas there were not more but these were carefully chosen and cover the time-frame of the autobiography from beginning to end. There's also a poem by Walt Whitman that begins "I know I am solid and sound...' quoted; Crawford describes this as her bulwark against uncertainty and attacks of the "blues."
Wistfully she explains "I had no private life to speak of, just occasional evenings with colleagues. A social life, not to mention a love life, takes time, and I had none to spare. It was a high price to pay." (p.112). Published in 1977 by Bobbs-Merrill, this 275-page autobiography is a fascinating page-turner. Chances are you'll have to look for copies at the library or o.p. dealers. I gather from a tag on a library book annotation site, Crawford is known in the lgbt community but there's no hint of serious personal attachments to anybody in One Naked Individual : My Fifty Years in the Theatre.
For researchers interested in looking at Cheryl Crawford's papers, the Billy Rose Theatre Collection of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts has the following inventory online: http://www.nypl.org/research/manuscripts/the/thecrawford.xml
As Crawford explains, this autobiography is an exploration of her life by way of a mix of chronological and thematic strands. For readers who prefer a more chronological approach, the appendix comes in handy. Most readers, if they are familiar with Crawford's work, will recognize her from the musicals she produced. These are largely described in 2 chapters: "One Touch of Venus" and "Musical Adventures." The story of how of One Touch of Venus came to be such a smash hit is one of the most delightful in the book as she traces the production from its initial inception to its London premiere. A near siege aimed at getting Marlene Dietrich to play the goddess having failed, the stage is set for Crawford's initial meeting with Mary Martin, and an important lifelong friendship. From a disastrous opening in Boston Venus went on to win accolades, awards and audiences galore.
Since 1936 Crawford and Kurt Weill had nourished a hope of collaborating on a second work. Their first resulted in Johnny Johnson, a production that had been beset by difficulties raising money (a near constant strand in the book) and personality conflicts galore. Amidst these problems and distractions Crawford and Weill found themselves in agreement about the role and prospects for musical theatre, an interest that was secondary to her fellow Group Theatre directors. Crawford along with was a member of the triumvirate that ran the Group Theater. Impressed by the work of Stanislavsky and Mayerhoff and the theater scene in the Soviet Union, Crawford, Howard Clurman and Lee Strasberg led a strong company of actors wishing to expand their acting skills by presenting plays by young and little-known American dramatists. Thematically, the Group Theater wanted to put on plays that were relevant to to situation of American audiences during the Great Depression, a striking contrast to most of the Broadway productions, not to mention Hollywood films, of this period.
Miss Crawford writes that she had the "good fortune to be identified with many of the major theatrical enterprises of my time." In addition to the The Maplewood Theater, a stock company she ran for 3 seasons until WW2 gas restrictions impeded attendance, the list is a veritable What's What of New York Theatre: the Theatre Guild, the Group Theatre (aka The Group), the American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA), the American Repertory Theatre (ART), and the Actors Studio
Famous individuals fly across these pages with actresses figuring larger than actors. (In Body and Soul: The Story of John Garfield biographer Larry Swindell describes J.G.'s prolonged siege of Cheryl Crawford; here the effort gets a sentence.) Besides Mary Martin, Judith Anderson and Marilyn Monroe stand out from the crowd of names. But it's the playwrights who get the most attention with three dominating the later chapters of the book: "Gadg" as Elia Kazan was known (his college nickname of Gadget being shortened), Clifford Odets (whom Crawford first hired as an actor and sent out with road companies) and most movingly, Tennessee Williams or "Tenn" (whose photographic portrait suggests he was far and away the handsomest of the group.)
Speaking of photographs, there are 34 black-and-white ones reproduced with varying degrees of success on 16 glossy pages. Alas there were not more but these were carefully chosen and cover the time-frame of the autobiography from beginning to end. There's also a poem by Walt Whitman that begins "I know I am solid and sound...' quoted; Crawford describes this as her bulwark against uncertainty and attacks of the "blues."
Wistfully she explains "I had no private life to speak of, just occasional evenings with colleagues. A social life, not to mention a love life, takes time, and I had none to spare. It was a high price to pay." (p.112). Published in 1977 by Bobbs-Merrill, this 275-page autobiography is a fascinating page-turner. Chances are you'll have to look for copies at the library or o.p. dealers. I gather from a tag on a library book annotation site, Crawford is known in the lgbt community but there's no hint of serious personal attachments to anybody in One Naked Individual : My Fifty Years in the Theatre.
For researchers interested in looking at Cheryl Crawford's papers, the Billy Rose Theatre Collection of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts has the following inventory online: http://www.nypl.org/research/manuscripts/the/thecrawford.xml
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Acting with Adler by Joanna Rotté
Joanna Rotté, a writer, actor and director, studied with Stella Adler for three years in the 1970's. A member of Actors Equity, she has a doctorate in theatre from the CUNY Graduate Center and is a professor of graduate-level theatre at Villanova University in addition to teaching at the Stella Adler Conservatory in New York City.
Ellen Adler, Stella's daughter from her first marriage to Horace Eliascheff, has contributed an unusual foreward that eschews tracing her mother's life or career. Ms. Adler devotes a few sentences to her mother and her three husband and devotes the bulk of the foreward to describing the Adler family burial plot in Mount Carmel Cemetery in Queens, N.Y. This is the final resting place of two major stars of the late 19th/early 20th century Yiddish theatre, Jacob and Sara Adler (Ellen's grandparents), their sons Jay, Abe, and Luther (he of the piercing stare) and daughters Frances (with her daughters, Pearl and Lulla) and Stella (along with her second husband, Harold Clurman. )
Acting with Adler is of interest to the casual reader for its insight into one method of teaching acting (sometimes referred to as "The Method"). Readers with an interest in the life and career of Stella Adler can glean some nuggets of information but this distillation of Miss Adler's ideas only makes me wish someone would write a proper biography. In the meantime Harold Clurman's The Fervent Years is the best substitute that I've found.
Ellen Adler, Stella's daughter from her first marriage to Horace Eliascheff, has contributed an unusual foreward that eschews tracing her mother's life or career. Ms. Adler devotes a few sentences to her mother and her three husband and devotes the bulk of the foreward to describing the Adler family burial plot in Mount Carmel Cemetery in Queens, N.Y. This is the final resting place of two major stars of the late 19th/early 20th century Yiddish theatre, Jacob and Sara Adler (Ellen's grandparents), their sons Jay, Abe, and Luther (he of the piercing stare) and daughters Frances (with her daughters, Pearl and Lulla) and Stella (along with her second husband, Harold Clurman. )
Acting with Adler is of interest to the casual reader for its insight into one method of teaching acting (sometimes referred to as "The Method"). Readers with an interest in the life and career of Stella Adler can glean some nuggets of information but this distillation of Miss Adler's ideas only makes me wish someone would write a proper biography. In the meantime Harold Clurman's The Fervent Years is the best substitute that I've found.
Paul Robeson by Martin Bauml Duberman
Paul Robeson by Martin Bauml Duberman. New York : Knopf, 1988. 1st ed. xiii, 804 p., [48] p. of plates .
Good thing I double-checked as I wrote a new FB that I'd blogged about this book when, in fact, this entry has been in draft form since September 2009.
This may be first book where I spent as much time reading the "Notes" as the text. 198 pages of notes printed in a small typeface and arranged in a double column make for a considerable amount of reading. Many of these notes provide highly detailed clarifications or contradictory evidence; readers ignore the notes at their own peril.
As Professor Duberman explains in the "Note on Sources", this level of information was necessary because so much of his research was based on the Robeson Family Archives (RA), a 50,000-item collection made by Paul Robeson's wife, Eslanda (Essie), and later organized by their son, Paul Robeson, Jr. Writing in 1988 Duberman hopes that the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University will open the RA to general use shortly. He has attempted to assist future scholars by citing gaps or contradictions in the record and also pointing to valuable seconday sources. In addition to the documentary material in the RA, Duberman consulted the holdings of an additional 29 repositories and 30 privately-held collections of manuscript materials. He interviewed over 100 acquaintances and colleagues of Robeson, going back to high school and college classmates.
Paul Robeson was not a diarist nor was he a prolific correspondent; the years before he met and married Essie Goode are sparsely documented. For the later chapters of Paul Robeson's life, much of the documentation is provided by files from the FBI which Paul Robeson, Jr. was able to obtain under the Freedom of Information Act. Feeling there was additional FBI material that Mr. Robeson had not received and recognizing that access under FOIA had become more restricted, Duberman eventually filed a lawsuit against the FBI for materials relating to Robeson's physical and mental collapse. Sadly, the files received were inconclusive, leaving another avenue for future scholars to probe. Since this work was researched and published prior to the end of the Soviet Union, one can only hope that the opening of Soviet-era archives in Russia and Eastern Europe will provide access to additional unpublished material from these counties.
112 black-and-white photographs from family, friends and a wide range of other sources
Martin Bauml Duberman is Distinguished Preofessor of History at Leman College, The City University of New York and the author of ten previous books and a play.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
The Blue Flower: A Novel
In The Blue Flower: A Novel Penelope Fitzgerald, winner of the Booker Prize for her novel Offshore, presents a richly detailed imagining of a brief period in the life of Friedrich (Fritz) von Hardenberg (1772-1801) better known by his pen name, Novalis. Drawing on literary and historical writings - correspondence, diaries and other documents - Fitzgerald depicts Hardenberg's family life and friendships during his university years and the start of his planned career, The position of mining inspector in the Harz Mountains has been chosen for him by his family as it will allow him to continue in his father's footsteps and keep the family landholdings together.
This period encompasses Fritz's "love at first sight" meeting with Sophie von Kuhn, the 12-year old step-daughter of a business associate of Hardenberg's mentor and teacher, Coelestin Just. Fitzgerald throws her readers into an unsettled historical period and an unsettling period for Fritz, given his tumultuous relationship with his father Sophie's age is less of an issue than modern readers are apt to expect, particularly once Friedrich agrees to wait until Sophie reaches an age specified by her family to formally announce their engagement. The bigger issue for the von Hardenberg family is Sophie's lower social status. Her father was a minor noble but following his death, her mother remarried ; her new husband is a one-time military officer who retired to the provinces with no particular distinction other than an outsize, booming personality.
Reading The Blue Flower, I was puzzled by Fitzgerald's use of "the" preceding certain names. Both Fritz's younger brother August Wilhem Bernhard ("the Bernhard") and Sophie's married older sister "the Mandelsloh" (the wife of an army lieutenant of that name and Sophie's companion and nurse) get this treatment. These two individuals were very important to Fritz and Sophie, respectively, so perhaps that's the reason for the emphasis.
According to the Afterword, Fritz informed his friends he would write under the name Novalis in Feb. 1798. Novalis was an old family name which translated as "clearer of new land." Three years later he was dead of the same disease which claimed his beloved and several of his brothers and sisters, pulmonary tuberculosis.
The Blue Flower is a delight to read, at turns tragic and comic, filled with unforgettable characters, set in a region torn by war, in 227 pages (including an illustration of the engagement ring), this novel also delineates the state of medicine in the late 18th century when it is beginning to emerge as a profession based on experimental science from its earlier wellsprings of observation, analogy and speculation.
Throughout Fitzgerald contrasts the protagonist's artistic aspirations with the practical demands of career and preparation for eventual inheritance and elevated social position in such a way that the plot is propelled forward at a gallop.
Published by Houghton Mifflin, Boston, c1995.
This period encompasses Fritz's "love at first sight" meeting with Sophie von Kuhn, the 12-year old step-daughter of a business associate of Hardenberg's mentor and teacher, Coelestin Just. Fitzgerald throws her readers into an unsettled historical period and an unsettling period for Fritz, given his tumultuous relationship with his father Sophie's age is less of an issue than modern readers are apt to expect, particularly once Friedrich agrees to wait until Sophie reaches an age specified by her family to formally announce their engagement. The bigger issue for the von Hardenberg family is Sophie's lower social status. Her father was a minor noble but following his death, her mother remarried ; her new husband is a one-time military officer who retired to the provinces with no particular distinction other than an outsize, booming personality.
Reading The Blue Flower, I was puzzled by Fitzgerald's use of "the" preceding certain names. Both Fritz's younger brother August Wilhem Bernhard ("the Bernhard") and Sophie's married older sister "the Mandelsloh" (the wife of an army lieutenant of that name and Sophie's companion and nurse) get this treatment. These two individuals were very important to Fritz and Sophie, respectively, so perhaps that's the reason for the emphasis.
According to the Afterword, Fritz informed his friends he would write under the name Novalis in Feb. 1798. Novalis was an old family name which translated as "clearer of new land." Three years later he was dead of the same disease which claimed his beloved and several of his brothers and sisters, pulmonary tuberculosis.
The Blue Flower is a delight to read, at turns tragic and comic, filled with unforgettable characters, set in a region torn by war, in 227 pages (including an illustration of the engagement ring), this novel also delineates the state of medicine in the late 18th century when it is beginning to emerge as a profession based on experimental science from its earlier wellsprings of observation, analogy and speculation.
Throughout Fitzgerald contrasts the protagonist's artistic aspirations with the practical demands of career and preparation for eventual inheritance and elevated social position in such a way that the plot is propelled forward at a gallop.
Published by Houghton Mifflin, Boston, c1995.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Swept away with T. C. Boyle
Water Music by T. Coraghessan Boyle ; introduction by James R. Kincaid. New York : Penguin Books, [2006]. Originally published by Little, Brown and Company, 1981. 25th Anniversary Edition with a new introduction. (Kincaid is Aerol Professor of English at the University of Southern California.) "Map to illustrate Mungo Park's missions into West Africa (on 2 facing pages preceding the t.p.)
The citation for this novelized version of the life of Mungo Park in Richard Holmes' The Age of Wonder (more on this later) reminded me of my resolution to read more of T. Coraghessan Boyle's work. Several years ago I read Riven Rock and Road to Wellville but wandered off to read other authors. From his wikipedia entry I realize he's written a dozen novels so I've more than a few books to I have to read in order to catch up. OK, one of these days.
Back to Mungo Park and his fascinating life (the unusual first name stuck in my memory but prior to reading Mr. Holmes' book I lacked a context in which to place the famed English explorer.) Here in a most unconventional fictionalized biography, Boyle reimagines Park's life in parallel with the experiences with those of an orphan who grows up in the slums of 18th century. This fictional alter ego, Ned Rise, is a young man in a hurry to succeed who pretty much turns everything he touches into a mess (not all that dissimilar from Boyle's view of Park.) Along with real characters like Ailie Anderson Park, Mungo's wife who gives new meaning to the term long-suffering, and Joseph Bank, one-time explorer but now stay-at home president of the Royal Society, Boyle creates a batch of fictional characters including Johnson (Mungo's guide to the mysteries of the River Niger), Gleg (a Scottish physician who stays home and tries to stand by Ailie) and various friends and enemies of Ned Rise.
If you're a fan of T.C. Boyle's but missed this uproarious first novel, please read it; if his reputation as a modern great or the ponderous pace of the film version of Road to Wellville has turned you off , give Water Music a try. I think you'll be in for a treat.
The citation for this novelized version of the life of Mungo Park in Richard Holmes' The Age of Wonder (more on this later) reminded me of my resolution to read more of T. Coraghessan Boyle's work. Several years ago I read Riven Rock and Road to Wellville but wandered off to read other authors. From his wikipedia entry I realize he's written a dozen novels so I've more than a few books to I have to read in order to catch up. OK, one of these days.
Back to Mungo Park and his fascinating life (the unusual first name stuck in my memory but prior to reading Mr. Holmes' book I lacked a context in which to place the famed English explorer.) Here in a most unconventional fictionalized biography, Boyle reimagines Park's life in parallel with the experiences with those of an orphan who grows up in the slums of 18th century. This fictional alter ego, Ned Rise, is a young man in a hurry to succeed who pretty much turns everything he touches into a mess (not all that dissimilar from Boyle's view of Park.) Along with real characters like Ailie Anderson Park, Mungo's wife who gives new meaning to the term long-suffering, and Joseph Bank, one-time explorer but now stay-at home president of the Royal Society, Boyle creates a batch of fictional characters including Johnson (Mungo's guide to the mysteries of the River Niger), Gleg (a Scottish physician who stays home and tries to stand by Ailie) and various friends and enemies of Ned Rise.
If you're a fan of T.C. Boyle's but missed this uproarious first novel, please read it; if his reputation as a modern great or the ponderous pace of the film version of Road to Wellville has turned you off , give Water Music a try. I think you'll be in for a treat.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Mean Streets and Urban Fantasy
Continuing my quest to keep up with Jim Butcher's Dresden Files, I discovered Mean Streets in the library a couple of months ago. This collection introduced me to 3 other authors writing in the genre called variously "urban fantasy" or paranormal or occult fiction. Mean Streets was a fun but failed as an introduction to the genre because it lacked any text other than the 4 novellas themselves and the briefest of author bios. If publishers are going to issue collections like this, I wish they'd use the model of Steampunk (http://alms-jact.blogspot.com/2009/06/steampunk-sub-genre-i-didnt-know-had.html) . I want an explanation of the history of the genre, its literary antecedents, and some explanation of why these particular authors were included. As it is Mean Streets comes across as book produced because the publisher happened to have 4 items, too long to include in a short story compilation but not long enough to publish as standalones.
The book contains "The warrior" by Jim Butcher, "The difference a day makes" by Simon R. Green, "The third death of the little clay dog" by Kat Richardson and "Noah's orphans" by Thomas E. Sniegoski. I enjoyed the first 3 immensely but was left cold by "Noah's orphans." Twelve years of Catholic schooling gave me some grasp of the concept of angels so when they became hot some years back, I got turned off -- too anthropomorphical, rather silly and frilly-looking.
Since finishing Mean Streets, I've read 2 more novels by Green and continue to find Nightside a wonderful invention and the protagonist, John Taylor, a near-perfect noir P.I. I'd love to see this series used as the basis for a television program. Since Mr. Green lives in England, I figure there's always the possibility that the BBC or Granada or another British television producer will try to bring it to the screen. Kat Richardson's Greywalker series makes a solid contribution to the female P.I. tradition and I enjoyed the second novel in the series as well as her contribution to Mean Streets. Sadly the library doesn't have the first; perhaps one of these days I'll stumble across a copy at a bookstore. I did read the first book in the angel as P.I. series by Mr. Sniegoski, a prolific y.a. and fantasy writer, but it didn't convince me to change my mind about angels, even if it was set in Boston, a city I'm familiar with from visits growing up and time spent with friends attending college there.
The book contains "The warrior" by Jim Butcher, "The difference a day makes" by Simon R. Green, "The third death of the little clay dog" by Kat Richardson and "Noah's orphans" by Thomas E. Sniegoski. I enjoyed the first 3 immensely but was left cold by "Noah's orphans." Twelve years of Catholic schooling gave me some grasp of the concept of angels so when they became hot some years back, I got turned off -- too anthropomorphical, rather silly and frilly-looking.
Since finishing Mean Streets, I've read 2 more novels by Green and continue to find Nightside a wonderful invention and the protagonist, John Taylor, a near-perfect noir P.I. I'd love to see this series used as the basis for a television program. Since Mr. Green lives in England, I figure there's always the possibility that the BBC or Granada or another British television producer will try to bring it to the screen. Kat Richardson's Greywalker series makes a solid contribution to the female P.I. tradition and I enjoyed the second novel in the series as well as her contribution to Mean Streets. Sadly the library doesn't have the first; perhaps one of these days I'll stumble across a copy at a bookstore. I did read the first book in the angel as P.I. series by Mr. Sniegoski, a prolific y.a. and fantasy writer, but it didn't convince me to change my mind about angels, even if it was set in Boston, a city I'm familiar with from visits growing up and time spent with friends attending college there.
Saturday, August 29, 2009
IT'S BEEN NEARLY A MONTH
Trying to blog in summertime, especially with weather that entices a person outdoors, is difficult. Winters around here are long and cold. Huddling by the computer, appreciating the warm air its fan exhausts on my feet, works much better for me. Today, it's windy and cloudy and damp from all the rain of the past few days so indoors at the computer works for me. As a matter of fact, it's a very Irish sort of a day.
In the meantime, though, I haven't quit reading, nor watching tv or dvd's. As a matter of fact MCFLS came through with the 2nd season of Torchwood and the 4th of Doctor Who. Just before that I watched the 3 seasons of a marvelous Canadian series called Slings and Arrows which starred Paul Gross. Seeing an older, but still gorgeous, Paul Gross reminded me of one the funniest and most charming (sounds like an oxymoron, but if you haven't seen it, please do) police procedurals ever made - Due South. MCFLS has the complete televised series so I borrowed the set of Season One. Alas, it contained way more episodes than I could watch in a week, so back it wait and I'm on the waiting list to borrow it again.
I'm finally seeing Lord of the Rings in the Special Extended DVD Edition. I resisted seeing the movie in the theaters -- 90 minutes is about my limit to sit in a seat in a large roomful of strangers. It's nice watching it at home where pause and scan back are options when I miss something on the first viewing. My spouse and son, both of whom saw the trilogy in the initial theatrical releases, are very knowledgeable about the Tolkien universe, not to mention the Peter Jackson version of that universe, so I can ask questions.
One of my friends in high school introduced our little group of friends to The Hobbit freshman year. Our homeroom was in the Physics Lab and we sat in the last row, behind taller classmates. Back there we passed books, notes and low-voiced comments along our row of seats (actually they were more like bar stools.) I waited my turn to read The Hobbit and, as soon as I was finished, I gathered together my baby-sitting money and allowance for doing chores at home and headed off to the nearest bookstore on one of the cross-streets off Broad St. and bought the trilogy. Wish I could remember the name of the bookstore but I do remember it was cozy, had a big picture window, and a small rental library of bestsellers, in addition to books on shelves from floor to ceiling. Next to the Eisner Memorial Library and the big record store on Broad, it was my favorite hangout during h.s. years.
In the meantime, though, I haven't quit reading, nor watching tv or dvd's. As a matter of fact MCFLS came through with the 2nd season of Torchwood and the 4th of Doctor Who. Just before that I watched the 3 seasons of a marvelous Canadian series called Slings and Arrows which starred Paul Gross. Seeing an older, but still gorgeous, Paul Gross reminded me of one the funniest and most charming (sounds like an oxymoron, but if you haven't seen it, please do) police procedurals ever made - Due South. MCFLS has the complete televised series so I borrowed the set of Season One. Alas, it contained way more episodes than I could watch in a week, so back it wait and I'm on the waiting list to borrow it again.
I'm finally seeing Lord of the Rings in the Special Extended DVD Edition. I resisted seeing the movie in the theaters -- 90 minutes is about my limit to sit in a seat in a large roomful of strangers. It's nice watching it at home where pause and scan back are options when I miss something on the first viewing. My spouse and son, both of whom saw the trilogy in the initial theatrical releases, are very knowledgeable about the Tolkien universe, not to mention the Peter Jackson version of that universe, so I can ask questions.
One of my friends in high school introduced our little group of friends to The Hobbit freshman year. Our homeroom was in the Physics Lab and we sat in the last row, behind taller classmates. Back there we passed books, notes and low-voiced comments along our row of seats (actually they were more like bar stools.) I waited my turn to read The Hobbit and, as soon as I was finished, I gathered together my baby-sitting money and allowance for doing chores at home and headed off to the nearest bookstore on one of the cross-streets off Broad St. and bought the trilogy. Wish I could remember the name of the bookstore but I do remember it was cozy, had a big picture window, and a small rental library of bestsellers, in addition to books on shelves from floor to ceiling. Next to the Eisner Memorial Library and the big record store on Broad, it was my favorite hangout during h.s. years.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
John Garfield - Bits and Pieces
Earlier tonight I read a book review of Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice and learned that Pynchon's hero-protagonist, PI Larry "Doc" Sportello, is "obsessed with" John Garfield. This reminded me I'd better hurry up and finish this blog entry. I haven't read Vice yet but I've been reading about it courtesy of Dave Monroe's forwards from Pynchon-L for some time now and I added my name to the library's hold list about a week ago.
What prompted this entry which I began about 6 weeks ago was a bit of info I learned in the course of some reading I've been doing. John Garfield lost the lead in Golden Boy to Luther Adler. I've been a fan of Garfield's for decades but lately have been seeing more of Adler in the film noir classic, D.O.A., and in several appearances on the tv series, Naked City. The idea of the first Method actor to become a Hollywood star (and perhaps Hollywood's first real reel rebel) and the scion of the First Family of Yiddish Theater competing for the same part back in the 1930's strikes me as more than a little odd.
According to wikipedia, John Garfield was born Jacob Julius Garfinkle. The son of immigrant parents, David and Hannah Garfinkle, he lived in the Sea Gate section of Brooklyn until his mother's death. Deeply troubled by this loss, young Julie (his lifelong name to family and friends) Garfinkle was sent to P.S. 45 in the Bronx where he came to the attention of the school's principal, noted educator Angelo Patri. Garfield credits Patri with introducing him to theater and the possibility of an acting career.
Although it was taken about a decade later, chances are the school's appearance would not have changed too much so check out http://bronxboard.com/pgal.php?p=20 for a thumbnail image of (a photo of the White Castle hamburger place on Fordham Road at Lorillard Place in 1938 with) a portion of P.S. 45 visible on the right contributed by Charles A. Warren. Click on it for a larger image. Also, in an entry on the Bronx Board site, http://bronxboard.com/diary/diary.php?f=Streams%20of%20Neighborhood%20Memories, Gene Ret describes P.S. 45, Paul Hoffman Junior High School and the Belmont neighborhood. Hopefully some of Mr. Ret's good memories of the neighborhood were shared by John Garfield.
After high school and a brief flirtation with professional theater, John Garfield spent a year and some as a hobo, hitching rides by car and freight train across the country, an experience he shared with writer Dale Wasserman and countless other Americans during the early years of the Great Depression. Garfield's stories of life on the road eventually became part of the inspiration for Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels.
Eventually, Garfield returned to New York and found a home with the Theater Group until that part written for him - Joe Bonaparte in Clifford Odets' Golden Boy - went to Luther Adler instead. Discouraged, Garfield accepted an offer he'd received from the Warner Bros. Studio and moved to Hollywood. Broadway's loss was America's gain as millions got a chance to see Garfield on the silver screen and people like me got to see him on tv a couple of decades later, not to mention on video tapes, dvd's and youtube a few more decades late. In 1960 or thereabout I told my mother all about this great actor I'd just seen in a 1943 movie shown on tv - Destination Tokyo. She laughed and told me she never missed a John Garfield movie when they were released back when she was in school or working in Manhattan. My daughter's a John Garfield fan, too.
Fact-checking some of the info above, I found a website with a detailed biography, filmography, family photos and other nice features: http://www.themave.com/Garfield/index.htm
What prompted this entry which I began about 6 weeks ago was a bit of info I learned in the course of some reading I've been doing. John Garfield lost the lead in Golden Boy to Luther Adler. I've been a fan of Garfield's for decades but lately have been seeing more of Adler in the film noir classic, D.O.A., and in several appearances on the tv series, Naked City. The idea of the first Method actor to become a Hollywood star (and perhaps Hollywood's first real reel rebel) and the scion of the First Family of Yiddish Theater competing for the same part back in the 1930's strikes me as more than a little odd.
According to wikipedia, John Garfield was born Jacob Julius Garfinkle. The son of immigrant parents, David and Hannah Garfinkle, he lived in the Sea Gate section of Brooklyn until his mother's death. Deeply troubled by this loss, young Julie (his lifelong name to family and friends) Garfinkle was sent to P.S. 45 in the Bronx where he came to the attention of the school's principal, noted educator Angelo Patri. Garfield credits Patri with introducing him to theater and the possibility of an acting career.
Although it was taken about a decade later, chances are the school's appearance would not have changed too much so check out http://bronxboard.com/pgal.php?p=20 for a thumbnail image of (a photo of the White Castle hamburger place on Fordham Road at Lorillard Place in 1938 with) a portion of P.S. 45 visible on the right contributed by Charles A. Warren. Click on it for a larger image. Also, in an entry on the Bronx Board site, http://bronxboard.com/diary/diary.php?f=Streams%20of%20Neighborhood%20Memories, Gene Ret describes P.S. 45, Paul Hoffman Junior High School and the Belmont neighborhood. Hopefully some of Mr. Ret's good memories of the neighborhood were shared by John Garfield.
After high school and a brief flirtation with professional theater, John Garfield spent a year and some as a hobo, hitching rides by car and freight train across the country, an experience he shared with writer Dale Wasserman and countless other Americans during the early years of the Great Depression. Garfield's stories of life on the road eventually became part of the inspiration for Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels.
Eventually, Garfield returned to New York and found a home with the Theater Group until that part written for him - Joe Bonaparte in Clifford Odets' Golden Boy - went to Luther Adler instead. Discouraged, Garfield accepted an offer he'd received from the Warner Bros. Studio and moved to Hollywood. Broadway's loss was America's gain as millions got a chance to see Garfield on the silver screen and people like me got to see him on tv a couple of decades later, not to mention on video tapes, dvd's and youtube a few more decades late. In 1960 or thereabout I told my mother all about this great actor I'd just seen in a 1943 movie shown on tv - Destination Tokyo. She laughed and told me she never missed a John Garfield movie when they were released back when she was in school or working in Manhattan. My daughter's a John Garfield fan, too.
Fact-checking some of the info above, I found a website with a detailed biography, filmography, family photos and other nice features: http://www.themave.com/Garfield/index.htm
But who is the actress doing the improv?
Occasionally the reason a person reads a certain book can make for an interesting story and Lessons in Becoming Myself is one of those books for me. I tracked it down at the library hoping it might confirm a possible uncredited appearance by Ellen Burstyn in the Naked City episode "The Fault in Our Stars" which originally aired on Mar. 22, 1961.
There's a young actress who briefly appears doing an improvisation which she describes as "repeated words spoken by a man in a dying delirium." The scene takes place in a Greenwich Village club called Bizarre, in the audience are 3 guest stars - Roddy McDowall (Donnie Benton), Patricia Bosworth (Betty Harkness) and Alvin Epstein (Elliot Kesbeck.) Like many of the bit parts in Naked City, this young woman doing an improv that elicits great approval (by way of snapping one's finger, not clapping) is not identified.
Alas, Ellen Burstyn never mentions appearing in Naked City in her autobiography. It can't be because she's embarassed about the appearance; nor do I think she would have forgotten it. She is very candid about her life and career, telling readers more than some people might want to know about her experiences, aspirations, fears, and achievements.
Coincidentally, she mentions that Patricia Bosworth was among those auditioning for the role in Fair Game which went to Ms. Burtyn, marking her 1957 Broadway debut under the stage name Ellen McRae. By chance I happened to watch a 1961 episode of 77 Sunset Strip titled "The Navy Caper" in which Ellen McRae guest starred as Betty Benson, the Admiral's daughter. At first I thought I was watching Ms. Bosworth, the two young women looked so similar, down to hairstyles and clothing (classic, sleek American sportswear of the early 1960's) their characters wore. Somewhere I read that fans sometimes confuse Louise Fletcher and Ellen Burstyn but in the late 50's/early 60's, the confusion must have been between Patricia Bosworth and Ellen McRae.
There's a young actress who briefly appears doing an improvisation which she describes as "repeated words spoken by a man in a dying delirium." The scene takes place in a Greenwich Village club called Bizarre, in the audience are 3 guest stars - Roddy McDowall (Donnie Benton), Patricia Bosworth (Betty Harkness) and Alvin Epstein (Elliot Kesbeck.) Like many of the bit parts in Naked City, this young woman doing an improv that elicits great approval (by way of snapping one's finger, not clapping) is not identified.
Alas, Ellen Burstyn never mentions appearing in Naked City in her autobiography. It can't be because she's embarassed about the appearance; nor do I think she would have forgotten it. She is very candid about her life and career, telling readers more than some people might want to know about her experiences, aspirations, fears, and achievements.
Coincidentally, she mentions that Patricia Bosworth was among those auditioning for the role in Fair Game which went to Ms. Burtyn, marking her 1957 Broadway debut under the stage name Ellen McRae. By chance I happened to watch a 1961 episode of 77 Sunset Strip titled "The Navy Caper" in which Ellen McRae guest starred as Betty Benson, the Admiral's daughter. At first I thought I was watching Ms. Bosworth, the two young women looked so similar, down to hairstyles and clothing (classic, sleek American sportswear of the early 1960's) their characters wore. Somewhere I read that fans sometimes confuse Louise Fletcher and Ellen Burstyn but in the late 50's/early 60's, the confusion must have been between Patricia Bosworth and Ellen McRae.
Back to Lessons in Becoming Myself - the memoir is closer to "no-holds barred" expose than most. It's a must read if you're interested in learning about the metamorphosis of Edna Rae Gillooly of Detroit, Michigan into Ellen McRae, aspiring stage and tv actress, into major film star, Ellen Burstyn. It also describes a lifelong quest for self-knowledge that begins with the Roman Catholicism of her youth, continues through psychotherapy and early"New Age" healing practices and on to Sufiism.
For me, the mystery of the actress doing the improv continues -- maybe one day I'll have a chance to travel to New York or Boston to consult Patricia Bosworth's papers at NYPL or BU. Alternately, I coud go west and look at Stirling Silliphant's papers at UCLA, or to Madison to look at Howard Rodman's papers at WHS.
Steampunk - a (sub) genre I didn't know had a name
Wow -- this one's been gathering dust in my draft file for so long it's becoming a fading memory but for years I've been reading books by Moorcock, Chabon and Stephenson and very much enjoying the blend of Victoriana and sf . Then I ran across this book searching the library catalog, read it and found a name for these books:
Steampunk / Ann & Jeff VanderMeer, editors ; [Neal Stephenson ... [et al.]].
Publisher San Francisco, CA : Tachyon Publications, 2008.
Michael Chabon / Neal Stephenson / James P. Blaylock / Joe R. Lansdale / Mary Gentle / Ted Chiang / Michael Moorcock / Jay Lake / Molly Brown / Stepan Chapman / Ian R. MacLeod / Rachel Pollack / Paul Di Filippo / Rick Klaw / Jess Nevins / Bill Baker
http://www.tachyonpublications.com/book/Steampunk.html?Session_ID=new
Now I've been introduced to a batch of new authors and gained new insights into Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day which I really ought to reread. Of course, I don't have enough time to read new authors and books on subjects that interest me as it is so that's a wish that'll have to be deferred.
Kudos to the editors Ann and Jeff VanderMeer for the fine selection and the history of steampunk, especially its 19th and early 20th century origins in adventure stories published in pulp magazines -- stories featuring steam-powered horses and giant mechanical men taking travellers out to the hinterlands to do great deeds.
Steampunk / Ann & Jeff VanderMeer, editors ; [Neal Stephenson ... [et al.]].
Publisher San Francisco, CA : Tachyon Publications, 2008.
Michael Chabon / Neal Stephenson / James P. Blaylock / Joe R. Lansdale / Mary Gentle / Ted Chiang / Michael Moorcock / Jay Lake / Molly Brown / Stepan Chapman / Ian R. MacLeod / Rachel Pollack / Paul Di Filippo / Rick Klaw / Jess Nevins / Bill Baker
http://www.tachyonpublications.com/book/Steampunk.html?Session_ID=new
Now I've been introduced to a batch of new authors and gained new insights into Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day which I really ought to reread. Of course, I don't have enough time to read new authors and books on subjects that interest me as it is so that's a wish that'll have to be deferred.
Kudos to the editors Ann and Jeff VanderMeer for the fine selection and the history of steampunk, especially its 19th and early 20th century origins in adventure stories published in pulp magazines -- stories featuring steam-powered horses and giant mechanical men taking travellers out to the hinterlands to do great deeds.
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
An Intriguing Read "Un-American" Hollywood
Took a bit of effot but I finally finished reading "Un-American" Hollywood : Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era. The reason for the unusual effort was that I borrowed the book from the library along with an armload of other items and neglected to renew it before another borrower put a hold on it so I had to return. It was nearly a month before I got to pick up where I left off.
In case readers are interested (or I need a memory assist), the following are the essays and authors contained in the book:
Are you now or have you ever been a Christian? the strange history of The robe as political allegory (Jeff Smith)
Un-American : Dmytryk, Rossellini, and Christ in concrete (Erica Sheen)
"A living part of the class struggle" : Diego Rivera's The flower carrier and the Hollywood left (Frank Krutnik)
A monarch for the millions : Jewish filmmakers, social commentary, and the postwar cycle of boxing films (Peter Stanfield)
The violent poetry of the times : the politics of history in Daniel Mainwaring and Joseph Losey's The lawless (Doug Dibbern)
Dark passages : jazz and civil liberty in the postwar crime film (Sean McCann)
Documentary realism and the postwar left (Will Straw)
Cloaked in compromise : Jules Dassin's "naked" city (Rebecca Prime)
The progressive producer in the studio system : Adrian Scott at RKO, 1943-1947 (Jennifer Langdon-Teclaw)
The house I live in : Albert Maltz and the fight against anti-Semitism (Art Simon)
Red Hollywood in transition : the case of Robert Rossen (Brian Neve )
Swashbuckling, sapphire, and salt : un-American contributions to TV costume adventure series in the 1950s (Steve Neale)
Hollywood, the new left, and FTA (Mark Shiel)
Red Hollywood (Thom Anderson)
Afterword (Thom Anderson)
If I had to recommend a single essay it would be Red Hollywood both for Thom Anderson's elegant writing and the sheer scope of the piece. A rather different article I enjoyed was Frank Krutnik's "A living part of the class struggle : Diego Rivera's The flower carrier and the Hollywood Left ". Who would have thought that an item of set decoration - a print of a famous painting - would link a group of films. Quite by coincidence, I saw one of these films on tv not too long ago and when I saw the first photo of The Flower Carrier on p. 57 I realized I'd seen it and In a Lonely Place is one of the films discussed.
There's a lot of information in this book as well as analysis and criticism. Steve Neale's research into the authorship of episodes of 4 British tv series which were either shown on US networks or syndicated here is amazing. One can only marvel at the amount of time he must have spent in the archives to compile the lists of credited names and the likely real authors.
Another interesting bit I learned -- one of my favorite actors from the mid 1960's, Robert Vaughn, earned a Ph.D. in communications from the University of Southern California, in 1970. His dissertation was published as a book Only Victims: A Study of Show Business Blacklisting in 1972. From 1964 to 1968 hVaughn starred as "Napoleon Solo" in the television series The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (United Network Command for Law and Enforcement), with British co-star David McCallum playing his fellow agent Illya Kuryakin. I continue to enjoy seeing both actors on tv.
Makes a person realize that the Blacklist Era wasn't all that long ago.
In case readers are interested (or I need a memory assist), the following are the essays and authors contained in the book:
Are you now or have you ever been a Christian? the strange history of The robe as political allegory (Jeff Smith)
Un-American : Dmytryk, Rossellini, and Christ in concrete (Erica Sheen)
"A living part of the class struggle" : Diego Rivera's The flower carrier and the Hollywood left (Frank Krutnik)
A monarch for the millions : Jewish filmmakers, social commentary, and the postwar cycle of boxing films (Peter Stanfield)
The violent poetry of the times : the politics of history in Daniel Mainwaring and Joseph Losey's The lawless (Doug Dibbern)
Dark passages : jazz and civil liberty in the postwar crime film (Sean McCann)
Documentary realism and the postwar left (Will Straw)
Cloaked in compromise : Jules Dassin's "naked" city (Rebecca Prime)
The progressive producer in the studio system : Adrian Scott at RKO, 1943-1947 (Jennifer Langdon-Teclaw)
The house I live in : Albert Maltz and the fight against anti-Semitism (Art Simon)
Red Hollywood in transition : the case of Robert Rossen (Brian Neve )
Swashbuckling, sapphire, and salt : un-American contributions to TV costume adventure series in the 1950s (Steve Neale)
Hollywood, the new left, and FTA (Mark Shiel)
Red Hollywood (Thom Anderson)
Afterword (Thom Anderson)
If I had to recommend a single essay it would be Red Hollywood both for Thom Anderson's elegant writing and the sheer scope of the piece. A rather different article I enjoyed was Frank Krutnik's "A living part of the class struggle : Diego Rivera's The flower carrier and the Hollywood Left ". Who would have thought that an item of set decoration - a print of a famous painting - would link a group of films. Quite by coincidence, I saw one of these films on tv not too long ago and when I saw the first photo of The Flower Carrier on p. 57 I realized I'd seen it and In a Lonely Place is one of the films discussed.
There's a lot of information in this book as well as analysis and criticism. Steve Neale's research into the authorship of episodes of 4 British tv series which were either shown on US networks or syndicated here is amazing. One can only marvel at the amount of time he must have spent in the archives to compile the lists of credited names and the likely real authors.
Another interesting bit I learned -- one of my favorite actors from the mid 1960's, Robert Vaughn, earned a Ph.D. in communications from the University of Southern California, in 1970. His dissertation was published as a book Only Victims: A Study of Show Business Blacklisting in 1972. From 1964 to 1968 hVaughn starred as "Napoleon Solo" in the television series The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (United Network Command for Law and Enforcement), with British co-star David McCallum playing his fellow agent Illya Kuryakin. I continue to enjoy seeing both actors on tv.
Makes a person realize that the Blacklist Era wasn't all that long ago.
Sunday, June 14, 2009
What Do You Call Them?
For the last few days publib subscribers have been tossing around the always interesting question about what to call people who register for library cards, or frequent the facility to use the collections and databases. Are they clients, customers, patrons, users, or even as a recent study suggests, MEMBERS??? I was going to post this as a reply there but time got away from me, and my comments got overly lengthy for a listserv reply. So here goes:
Clients hire (sometimes after a negotiation) a professional or professional services firm to carry out a specific task for an agreed upon sum of money; the choices of whom to hire are generally limited. Customers purchase goods or services offered to all for a given price at a point in time; if people do not care for the selection that being offered or find a better price elsewhere, they go there . I cannot see how either term describes the relationship between a library and its public. Users isn't a bad term but it went out the window with the rise in the number of people abusing various substances. Library cardholders or registrants both seem awkward and a lot to keep typing out.
I, for one, have never used the expression joined a library nor do I recall ever hearing anyone else say it. Most people seem say "I have a library card" much as they say "I have an overnight parking permit." Perhaps becoming a member is a regional expression but having lived in New York City, suburban NJ, Denver, CO and in and around the city of Milwaukee I've experienced a pretty good geographic span. Somewhere I should have run across becoming a member of my local library but I haven't before the discussion on publib.
Libraries ask people to become members of their friends group but a membership in the library itself strikes me as competiting with your own friends group since getting a public library card or using library services is free of charge since you are directly or indirectly supporting the library through tax $$$. This doesn't strike me as a good idea.
I used to work for a museum that went from being County department to an NPO managed by a private Board of Directors in 1992. Immediately the nearly 50-year old Friends of the Museum group that had supported the publicly funded museum was dissolved. In place of FOMPM membership everyone became members of the museum. The FOMPM staff were given new titles - Director of Development and Member Services Coordinator (among others) . Perfectly sensible -- a separate Friends group in a private or quasi public institution is redundant, unless that's an additional category of membership.
Of course, more than a decade later, long-time members still refer to themselves as Friends of the Museum; maybe they hadn't adjusted, maybe friends was just a less pretentious word. After all member carries a connotation of a special relationship, often one that is open only to an elite few.
Considering museum members had problems getting around the newly named relationship, I doubt taxpayers and/or community residents generally perceive themselves as members of their libraries. A pair of clever publib subscribers came up with the term custpatronomers and maybe that'll will win the day, cheering all but the spelling challenged. Meantime, I'll stick with users and patrons, depending on the circumstances or context. After all libraries flourish through the patronage of their communities and they demonstrate their value to the community through use.
So I'm trying to figure out how the study came up with members. Were the respondents escapees from a professional association meeting who got confused? Did the researcher time-travel back to the 1st half of the 19th century to conduct the study? Or visit another English-speaking country that lacks our splendid public library heritage? Or mix up coefficients in the statistical analysis of the responses?
Clients hire (sometimes after a negotiation) a professional or professional services firm to carry out a specific task for an agreed upon sum of money; the choices of whom to hire are generally limited. Customers purchase goods or services offered to all for a given price at a point in time; if people do not care for the selection that being offered or find a better price elsewhere, they go there . I cannot see how either term describes the relationship between a library and its public. Users isn't a bad term but it went out the window with the rise in the number of people abusing various substances. Library cardholders or registrants both seem awkward and a lot to keep typing out.
I, for one, have never used the expression joined a library nor do I recall ever hearing anyone else say it. Most people seem say "I have a library card" much as they say "I have an overnight parking permit." Perhaps becoming a member is a regional expression but having lived in New York City, suburban NJ, Denver, CO and in and around the city of Milwaukee I've experienced a pretty good geographic span. Somewhere I should have run across becoming a member of my local library but I haven't before the discussion on publib.
Libraries ask people to become members of their friends group but a membership in the library itself strikes me as competiting with your own friends group since getting a public library card or using library services is free of charge since you are directly or indirectly supporting the library through tax $$$. This doesn't strike me as a good idea.
I used to work for a museum that went from being County department to an NPO managed by a private Board of Directors in 1992. Immediately the nearly 50-year old Friends of the Museum group that had supported the publicly funded museum was dissolved. In place of FOMPM membership everyone became members of the museum. The FOMPM staff were given new titles - Director of Development and Member Services Coordinator (among others) . Perfectly sensible -- a separate Friends group in a private or quasi public institution is redundant, unless that's an additional category of membership.
Of course, more than a decade later, long-time members still refer to themselves as Friends of the Museum; maybe they hadn't adjusted, maybe friends was just a less pretentious word. After all member carries a connotation of a special relationship, often one that is open only to an elite few.
Considering museum members had problems getting around the newly named relationship, I doubt taxpayers and/or community residents generally perceive themselves as members of their libraries. A pair of clever publib subscribers came up with the term custpatronomers and maybe that'll will win the day, cheering all but the spelling challenged. Meantime, I'll stick with users and patrons, depending on the circumstances or context. After all libraries flourish through the patronage of their communities and they demonstrate their value to the community through use.
So I'm trying to figure out how the study came up with members. Were the respondents escapees from a professional association meeting who got confused? Did the researcher time-travel back to the 1st half of the 19th century to conduct the study? Or visit another English-speaking country that lacks our splendid public library heritage? Or mix up coefficients in the statistical analysis of the responses?
Saturday, June 13, 2009
SomeThoughts about the Grand Concourse
The NY Times of Friday, June 5, 2009 has an article about an intriguing new museum - a Museum of Trees - planned for the Bronx's famed Grand Concourse.
Here's a link to the article which includes a multimedia presentation:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/nyregion/07about.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Grand%20Concourse%20Museum%20of%20Trees&st=cseA Museum of Trees That Speak of History
Jim Dwyer's opening paragraph reads:
The notion that the Grand Concourse could be turned into a long boulevard of talking trees — a tree museum, with trees connecting to oral guides of Bronx history — came to Katie Holten one day when she was traipsing along the boulevard near the Cross Bronx Expressway.
I hope people read the entire article but for those pressed for time, the Times has included a pdf of the brochure/prospectus:
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/nyregion/TreeMuseumInfo.pdf
I've been fascinated by the Concourse for as long as I can remember. My college roommate and I bonded in part because her Russian immigrant grandparents and my Irish immigrant grandparents lived not far from each other on either side of the Concourse; hers to east, mine to the west. Years before college, I'd walked along the Concourse with my parents or my grandparents to shop or visit friends and relatives who lived there. During Easter Week vacations in the City, my grandfather and I regularly visited Catholic churches along the Concourse to see how they'd decorated their altars for Easter (I think there was some religious point to this but I forget what it was. For me the appeal was each spectacular display of flowers and altar finery.) I don't think there were too many neighborhoods in the NYC where Pop (a motorman for the IRT and IND lines) couldn't find a favorite saloon or luncheonette, so the church and flower tours included sampling Cokes with maraschino cherries and ham sandwiches along the way.
Lately, I've been watching a classic television show - Naked City - and it's hard to miss how often scenes were filmed along the Concourse and near the Bronx County Courthouse. The show's fictional 65th precinct was located in the theatre district of Midtown Manhattan but the Naked City production headquarters were at the Biograph Studios, (aka Gold Medal Studios) located about a mile east of the Grand Concourse at 807 E. 175th St. It was convenient to shoot in the area and the wide boulevard and tall (but not skyscraper-tall) buildings provided a very attractive cityscape that filmed well in all sorts of weather and at different times of the day.
Wikipedia has a succinct history of the studio, at one time the largest production facility outside the Los Angeles area:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biograph_Studios
For more on the history of the Grand Concourse and pictures of its wonderful architecture, take a look at these two articles from Forgotten New York:
http://www.forgotten-ny.com/STREET%20SCENES/Grand%20Concourse/concourse.html
http://www.forgotten-ny.com/STREET%20SCENES/concourse2/concourse.html
Here's a link to the article which includes a multimedia presentation:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/nyregion/07about.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Grand%20Concourse%20Museum%20of%20Trees&st=cseA Museum of Trees That Speak of History
Jim Dwyer's opening paragraph reads:
The notion that the Grand Concourse could be turned into a long boulevard of talking trees — a tree museum, with trees connecting to oral guides of Bronx history — came to Katie Holten one day when she was traipsing along the boulevard near the Cross Bronx Expressway.
I hope people read the entire article but for those pressed for time, the Times has included a pdf of the brochure/prospectus:
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/nyregion/TreeMuseumInfo.pdf
I've been fascinated by the Concourse for as long as I can remember. My college roommate and I bonded in part because her Russian immigrant grandparents and my Irish immigrant grandparents lived not far from each other on either side of the Concourse; hers to east, mine to the west. Years before college, I'd walked along the Concourse with my parents or my grandparents to shop or visit friends and relatives who lived there. During Easter Week vacations in the City, my grandfather and I regularly visited Catholic churches along the Concourse to see how they'd decorated their altars for Easter (I think there was some religious point to this but I forget what it was. For me the appeal was each spectacular display of flowers and altar finery.) I don't think there were too many neighborhoods in the NYC where Pop (a motorman for the IRT and IND lines) couldn't find a favorite saloon or luncheonette, so the church and flower tours included sampling Cokes with maraschino cherries and ham sandwiches along the way.
Lately, I've been watching a classic television show - Naked City - and it's hard to miss how often scenes were filmed along the Concourse and near the Bronx County Courthouse. The show's fictional 65th precinct was located in the theatre district of Midtown Manhattan but the Naked City production headquarters were at the Biograph Studios, (aka Gold Medal Studios) located about a mile east of the Grand Concourse at 807 E. 175th St. It was convenient to shoot in the area and the wide boulevard and tall (but not skyscraper-tall) buildings provided a very attractive cityscape that filmed well in all sorts of weather and at different times of the day.
Wikipedia has a succinct history of the studio, at one time the largest production facility outside the Los Angeles area:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biograph_Studios
For more on the history of the Grand Concourse and pictures of its wonderful architecture, take a look at these two articles from Forgotten New York:
http://www.forgotten-ny.com/STREET%20SCENES/Grand%20Concourse/concourse.html
http://www.forgotten-ny.com/STREET%20SCENES/concourse2/concourse.html
Friday, June 12, 2009
Musings on the Dresden Files in print and on tv
Turn Coat is the latest full-length novel in Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series. I just finished reading it a couple of days ago and, once again, I'm impressed. When I started reading the series back in January, it took a bit of effort to read the first few books. I kept going because of an email message on A&A List pointing out that a later novel included an unusual archives (we like to keep track of fictional archives and archivists on the list.)
At that point, I needed the lure of this archives to keep me going while waiting for the arrival of the library dvd of the SciFi Network's Dresden Files. And, I'd found out about the program only because NBC cancelled Lipstick Jungle and I wanted to see more work by Paul Blackthorne, the actor who played Shane Healy , ne'er-do-well husband of movie mogul Wendy Healy (Brooke Shields).
To make a long story short, I'd managed to read most of the books by the time the library finally reached my name. By then I had pictures in my head of what Harry Dresden looked liked, not to mention Murphy, Mister and Mouse, Bob, Harry's office, his apartment, and his favorite bar. I've the added advantage of having visited many of the actual Chicago locations Jim Butcher works into his books so I know what they look like. Needless to say, the tv series disappointed. Paul Blackthorne's a good actor but he was a different Harry. Toronto is a lovely city but it is definitely not Chicago; the lamp posts and street signs are different to begin with. Was a single adversary faced down in a major cultural attraction? And why do a show about a wizard who fights with (or cooperates with) pixies, fairies, vampires, werewolves, etc. without a special effects budget to show the same?
Back to the books, though -- as a longtime reader of mystery and science fiction book series, I know it's very tough to keep developing the characters and inventing fresh plots while still working within the constraints of the series. To borrow a line - -the entries in the Dresden Files just keep getting better all the time. So, thanks to Christine for telling me about Ivy the Archives and thanks to NBC for cancelling another tv program, but most of all, thanks to Jim Butcher for inventing and sharing Harry Dresden and his world.
At that point, I needed the lure of this archives to keep me going while waiting for the arrival of the library dvd of the SciFi Network's Dresden Files. And, I'd found out about the program only because NBC cancelled Lipstick Jungle and I wanted to see more work by Paul Blackthorne, the actor who played Shane Healy , ne'er-do-well husband of movie mogul Wendy Healy (Brooke Shields).
To make a long story short, I'd managed to read most of the books by the time the library finally reached my name. By then I had pictures in my head of what Harry Dresden looked liked, not to mention Murphy, Mister and Mouse, Bob, Harry's office, his apartment, and his favorite bar. I've the added advantage of having visited many of the actual Chicago locations Jim Butcher works into his books so I know what they look like. Needless to say, the tv series disappointed. Paul Blackthorne's a good actor but he was a different Harry. Toronto is a lovely city but it is definitely not Chicago; the lamp posts and street signs are different to begin with. Was a single adversary faced down in a major cultural attraction? And why do a show about a wizard who fights with (or cooperates with) pixies, fairies, vampires, werewolves, etc. without a special effects budget to show the same?
Back to the books, though -- as a longtime reader of mystery and science fiction book series, I know it's very tough to keep developing the characters and inventing fresh plots while still working within the constraints of the series. To borrow a line - -the entries in the Dresden Files just keep getting better all the time. So, thanks to Christine for telling me about Ivy the Archives and thanks to NBC for cancelling another tv program, but most of all, thanks to Jim Butcher for inventing and sharing Harry Dresden and his world.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
The Impossible Musical by Dale Wasserman
This afternoon I caught an episode of Gunsmoke called "Stark" with Richard Kiley as guest star. Seeing Mr. Kiley reminded me that I'd started to write something about a book that discusses his most famous role . Thinking about it, I should have been reminded about the by the Tony Awards this past Sunday but somehow it took seeing Kiley in a most un-Cervantes role to link the synapses.
The Impossible Musical is first and foremost, the biography of a play, Man of La Mancha. It performs double-duty as the Rhinelander, Wisconsin-born Dale Wasserman's memoir of his long and storied career as a playwright and screenwriter.
On
I saw Man of La Mancha when I was in college. It would have been at the Martin Beck Theatre, the Eden Theatre or the Mark Hellinger Theatre depending on the year. All I'm sure of is that it was not the ANTA Washington Square Theatre, the original home of the production. Since I’ve always been a fan of Northern Exposure, I was delighted to learn from reading the book that the marvelous John Cullum (Holling Vincoeur) was a member of the original cast and filled in on occasion for Richard Kiley in the title role.
Wasserman regales his readers with plenty of Broadway lore, theater stories, Hollywood stories, and the trials and tribulations of a copyright holder dealing with foreign productions of his work. As outspoken in print as he apparently was in person, he settles a few old scores,and takes pains to explain the distinction between Broadway and Off-Broadway play. It is not the theater’s physical location but the type of contract involved. Lavishly illustrated with personal photographs and photos from various productions of Man of La Mancha, The Impossible Musical includes the teleplay I, Don Quixote.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
More on Seals
This is a followup of sorts to a comment I made in a post on Archives & Archivists List a few days ago. This afternoon I put the tv on while I was eating lunch and caught part of a Season 1 (1951) episode of I Love Lucy -- the episode where Lucy thinks Ricky is trying to murder her. The following is fron a phone conversation between Ricky and his agent, Jerry, who is trying to find a new variety act to include in Ricky's nightclub show.
Jerry: Gotta get over to Jersey to see a talking seal.
Ricky: Does the seal act?
Jerry: Nah, he's the agent, but he's got some great acts.
Darn, if I'd seen this sooner, I'd have called us talking seals, instead of performing seals!
Jerry: Gotta get over to Jersey to see a talking seal.
Ricky: Does the seal act?
Jerry: Nah, he's the agent, but he's got some great acts.
Darn, if I'd seen this sooner, I'd have called us talking seals, instead of performing seals!
The Natural Order of Things
Love the title, love the book. Sadly, I don't remember who pointed me in the direction of the author, Antonio Lobo Antunes, but thank you. If it were New Year's Day, my resolution would be to read everything the author has written that's been translated into English. Sadly I can't read Portuguese, I'm not even sure how to pronounce the place names or character names so I fall back on my high school Spanish and Latin. Kudos to translator Richard Zenith for his graceful rendering because this book reads as though the author wrote it in English. I think there's an award for translations of novels -- if so I'd nominate this book.
Antonio Lobo Antunes is a lifelong native of Lisbon; he's a psychiatrist which possibly explains The Natural Order of Things' exploration of memory, points of view and mental illness. The River Tagus, the Atlantic Ocean, the weather, the topography of the city, the residents - be they from families that have lived in Lisbon for generations or newcomers from the countryside or North Africa - and, the changes time has wrought in the city and its environs shape this book.
Determining who is speaking and to whom the speaker addresses his or her comments is part of the enjoyment of the book. My favorite books describe their locales - whether real or imaginary - in a sensate fashion; if you also enjoy envisioning cityscapes and landscapes, hearing the sounds and smelling they smells, The Natural Order of Things is well worth the time you'll want to spend reading it.
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