Filed under: architecture, arts, culture, history, hollywood, preservation | Tags: architectural heritage, Bringing Back Broadway, conservation, Downtown Los Angeles, preservation
The crusaders of Bringing Back Broadway show no signs of letting up in the midst of a stormy economic upheaval. Their noble, damn-fine mission is bravely forging these uncertain waters and they are keeping enthusiasm and interest in the project alive with a slew of terrific free events. Artwalks, Happy Hours, Tours and more—they are tireless in their determination to make the dream of a revitalized Broadway a reality. This Saturday, for example, they have partnered with the Los Angeles Historic Theatre Foundation for a fabulous free event at the Palace Theatre on Broadway in downtown Los Angeles. Doors open at 10:00AM for an ‘insider’s tour’ and historical overview/lecture about this history of this historic gem:
“This FREE event is part of an ongoing series by LAHTF to provide the public with education and info about the architecture and history of the wonderful historic theatres that many people never have an opportunity to see. This has been a wonderful series on the Broadway theatres, so much great info and a fun experience for everyone who participates — you won’t want to miss it!”
For more information visit the LAHTF website and, of course, if you haven’t already signed up for the Bringing Back Broadway email list—do it now!
Filed under: arts, cinema, classic movies, film, hollywood, movies | Tags: comedy; chick flicks; women's issues; females in film; rosalind russell; katharine hepburn;
Below is a terrific article from today’s Guardian where Anne Billson asks the heavy question: Where are the meaty comedy roles for women? She addresses the very obvious lack of smart, sexy comedic roles that dominated 40s film. Instead of the sharp, clever roles embodied by Rosalind Russell and Kate Hepburn, we have instead an endless slew of what Billson calls “Jimmy Choo-ing” and “Vera Wang-ing.”
Article below:
Where Are the Meaty Comedy Roles for Women?
They don't make them like they used to ... Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday. Photograph: Cine Text/Allstar
Men, I share your pain. Chick-flicks really suck. Especially in this post-Sex and the City period, when their focus seems to have shrunk down to shopping and weddings, as if those are the only subjects women could possibly be interested in. I gaze, bemused and, yes, fascinated, at curious anthropological artifacts such as Bride Wars or He’s Just Not That Into You or Confessions of a Shopaholic, in which Kate Hudson or Ginnifer Goodwin or Isla Fisher play characters who might almost belong to a third gender, a bubble-headed one that emits ear-splitting shrieks, teeters constantly on the verge of hysteria and acts as an indiscriminate mouthpiece for the placement of overpriced tat.
Perhaps the recession will finally put the kibosh on all this vulgar Jimmy Choo-ing and Vera Wang-ing. Perhaps designer name-dropping is fated to go the way of the dinosaur, to be replaced (please God) by comic situations that don’t involve tulle-clad brides tussling in the aisle or catfights over Gucci boots, or maybe even (dare one dream) by a smidgeon of emotional truth and some witty, clever dialogue. In fact, I’d settle for slapstick and cheap sarcasm, just so long as it’s not wedding related.
It’s not as though there’s a shortage of female talent capable of delivering a well-timed quip. Even the most Friends-phobic curmudgeon has to admit that 10 years’ toil on a popular sitcom will have honed Jennifer Aniston’s comic chops. So where are they now? Nowhere to be seen or heard in He’s Just Not That Into You, that’s for sure, where all she wants is … to get married. Isla Fisher carries Confessions of a Shopaholic on her adorable shoulders, but it’s clear she’s punching below her weight. For God’s sake, someone give these girls something they can sink their teeth into.
But it doesn’t have to be like this! Think back to His Girl Friday, in which Rosalind Russell juggles fiance, ex-husband, speed-of-light dialogue and the ethics of journalism, wears extravagant hats and performs an impressive rugby tackle. Maybe the secret is that the role was originally written for a man, which lends it a breadth missing from the usual female stereotypes.
So I’d like to see a little more role reversal, please. I’m fed up with charmless slackers like Seth Rogen getting off with hotties, so how about a rom-com about a girl geek who gets knocked up by an overachieving Mr McDreamy? How about Sarah Silverman as a 40-year-old spinster who sets out to lose her virginity? Or some edgy comic business relating to abortion, or menstruation? (No? Probably too much to ask, I know.) More to the point, where is the female Judd Apatow, playing godmother to a new wave of funny ladies in femme-oriented comedies that allow their characters to live lives beyond Prada? Five years ago, with Mean Girls, Tina Fey looked as though she might be shaping up to fill that role, and of course last year she scored a double-whammy with Sarah Palin and 30 Rock. Yet her last movie was the brain-dead Baby Mama. Though I guess babies make a change from shopping and weddings.
But why can’t someone write a female equivalent of, say, the mock-biopic Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, so Anna Faris could expand on her scene-stealing Britney Spears impersonation from Just Good Friends with a potted send-up of half a century of girly music, instead of being stuck in cutesy fluff like The House Bunny?
Or how about a female stoner comedy? Actually, there already is one of these – Gregg Araki’s Smiley Face, in which Faris eats all of her flatmate’s hash-cupcakes, leading to a masterclass in 101 dope-addled expressions as her day devolves into a paranoid nightmare of botched auditions, sausage factories and a first edition of the Communist Manifesto. Now that’s funny. But for some reason the film was never given a proper release in this country (though you should be able to find it on DVD). British distributors evidently concluded there wasn’t enough shopping in it.
Filed under: 1920s, arts, film, music | Tags: annette henshaw; sita sings the blues; nina paley; 1920s music; PBS; animation
Back in January, we featured a post on the status of Nina Paley’s animated musical Sita Sing the Blues which was facing serious copyright issues over its unlicensed use of Annette Henshaw music from the 1920s. Apparently the Gods have looked kindly upon Miss Paley, and Sita will air March 7th on PBS (WNET) in New York. Congrats Nina–and thanks to BoingBoing for the heads up!
Filed under: arts, classic movies, entertainment, film, history, hollywood, movies, preservation | Tags: academy of motion picture arts and sciences; academy museum of motion pictures; museum; cinema; oscars;
Ripley's Believe it or Not Odditorium: One of Hollywood's ... um ... cultural offerings
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has been long overdue in providing its hometown with a museum that both it and the film community can be proud of. ‘Tacky’ is a word all too often (and deservedly so, I hasten add) used to describe Hollywood’s cultural offerings. Consider the slew of shamefully shabby tourist trap ‘museums’ that clutter Hollywood Blvd. Ripley’s Believe it or Not. The Hollywood Wax Museum. The Hollywood History Museum has much potential, but feels more like an antique flea market than anything else. And so film lovers here in LA breathed a sigh of relief when the Academy recently announced its plan to unveil a world-class film museum rivaling the Walt Disney Concert Hall in transformative power. (Just look at the good Frank Gehry’s experimental edifice has done for downtown.) Even the proposed site, around the corner from the Cinerama Dome, seemed inspired: the museum would be christened in the very part of town where the whole Industry began a hundred years ago. (yeah, I know, Biograph was in Downtown L.A.—but I’m talking generalities, people.) The hope of the Academy was that such a museum would put there ‘there’ in Hollywood: a place commonly thought of as having ‘no there there.’
Artists rendering of proposed Academy Museum.
This wouldn’t be an ‘Oscar’ museum by any means. It would be something much more important: a place to ‘celebrate and explore how film has reflected and shaped world culture, and to help us all better understand what the movies have meant – and continue to mean – in our lives.’ And when LA Magazine featured an in depth article on the project a few months back, I was swooped into eager anticipation.
And so it is particularly bittersweet that today’s Hollywood Reporter features a report on the status of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures project, which appears to be approaching indefinite hiatus thanks to our stalled economy. With programs being hacked countrywide, Alex Ben Block’s report was inevitable: “… Despite a multiyear battle to purchase the land—bought, as it turns out, at the top of the market—and despite an investment of about 35 million, there is no indication that the museum will go ahead any time soon. For insiders, the whole ting is beginning to seem eerily reminiscent of the last time the Academy explored creating a movie museum, back in the early 1960s, when it bought land near the Hollywood Bowl, hired a famed architect to design it, but saw the project founder because of one sole property owner who wouldn’t budge. This time the Academy has all the land. It just doesn’t have all the money. If completed, images of such stars as Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin and directors like D.W. Griffith will be returned to the very site where they once gave birth to movies. But without the funds in place, and with no clear indication of where they will come from, that’s a big if.
The Academy now owns the 8 acre stretch of land near sunset and vine--with the $27 million mortgage to prove it.
“The city estimated that the new museum would create 160 full-time jobs. Because of this, the Academy wasn’t alone in its enthusiasm. Local politicos were thrilled about what it could mean for the ongoing development of Hollywood. ‘This is the museum that the neighborhood always wanted but never had,’ L.A. Councilman Eric Garcetti explains, ‘a world class museum of the highest caliber.’ And it would have been, if not for the financial meltdown. Now everything is frozen. After nearly eight years of development, the whole project has been put on hold. [Academy President] Ganis says it makes no sense in the midst of an economic downturn to launch a $300 million capital campaign. That means there is no firm timetable when, or even if, fundraising will proceed. “
Adding insult to injury? “The Academy must now wait out the financilal crisis while making payments on $27.8 million mortgage.” Ganis insists that the museum will open by 2014. “This is a multiyear project we are well into … I’m very confident it will happen. It has been a dream for too many of us for too long and we won’t let it fail.”
Here’s hoping, Mr. Ganis.
Filed under: cinema, classic movies, entertainment, film, history, hollywood, nostalgia | Tags: Oscar night; Oscar history; Academy Awards;
Confession. I’m a sucker for the Oscars.
Living in Hollywood and working around Industry folk, I would love nothing more to than to be able to say that I don’t give two beans about this outrageously overinflated night of excess and ego … but the simple fact is that I love Oscar night. I guess it’s all due to childhood memories of mom baking yummies and dad settling into his favorite chair and all of us spending three whole hours together: laughing at Billy Crystal or groaning at Chevy Chase, cheering at the surprises, jeering at the upsets, cringing at freakish fashion faux-pas, tearing at the perennial ‘in memoriam’ retrospectives, and on the whole just loving the experience. Being a fan of Hollywood history helps, I admit, because to me it’s not about the media circus and high fashion couture: it’s carrying on the tradition set forth by Fairbanks and Pickford, DeMille and Lasky and Thalberg and Mayer. It’s not about Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie, it’s about Hattie McDaniel and Janet Gaynor, Chaplin and Murnau, Bette Davis and Katie Hepburn and Fritz Lang and the Barrymores and Bop Hope.
I had the pleasure of meeting the Academy’s amiable president Sid Ganis two years ago at the opening day of an Academy exhibition called ‘Meet the Oscars’ and it was a terrific treat to realize that he was just as much a fan as everyone else in that room. He said to me, which one of us growing up didn’t stand in front of a mirror and say the words ‘I’d like to thank the Academy.’ Stepping back and not taking the whole damn escapade so damn seriously makes it possible to sit back and enjoy things like Oscar night. And so, jaded as I am with most of modern Hollywood, I still hold a fond affection for Oscar night and you can bet that come this Sunday night I will have my Oscar ballot at the ready, rice crispy treats sitting on the counter top and some champagne in the ice box … rooting for Slumdog.
The Academy’s website has a terrific section on planning the perfect Oscar night, including recipes and printable ballots.
They also have a terrific, informative history section that I highly reccmomend reading.
Filed under: entertainment, film, hollywood, movies | Tags: industry; studio system; economy;
Below is an interesting article in today’s Hollywood Reporter by guest commentator Schuyler Moore that suggests a variety of methods for stabilizing the Industry, not the least of which is a return to the studio system of yesteryear. I normally don’t care much for Industry politics, but Schuyler Moore’s particular two-cents were well worth the read. Whenever anyone makes a statement like “we need to revert to the studio system that ended in the 1950s, where lead actors were signed to long-term contracts”—you have my attention!
“With biz at a crossroads, sharp turns from the current path are imperative”
By Schuyler Moore
February 18, 2009
Our industry is in economic trouble, and it isn’t ending soon. The studios already know that bad times are a-comin’, which is why they are letting so many people go. But firing staff doesn’t solve the problem. So I offer here some tough medicine — economic triage — to get us through these tough times. And while some might not like this bitter pill, better to take it than have our industry bleed to death until bankruptcy. Because that is where it is going as we get destroyed by piracy, a free fall in ad revenue and a reduction in state tax credits. A previously mediocre business is now a loss leader.
Back to the future
The first and most important step is that we need to revert to the studio system that ended in the 1950s, where lead actors were signed to long-term contracts (up to seven years, the maximum generally permitted by law) with reasonable — and fixed — compensation. Imagine the benefits to Fox if it had put Leonardo DiCaprio under a seven-year contract before “Titanic” or Warners had locked in Tom Cruise before “Risky Business.” The studios “make” stars by putting them in successful films, and they take the financial risk, so it is nuts to let the actors reap the reward by charging studios more than $20 million plus a massive share of gross on later films. If the studios implemented this approach and focused on grooming and creating their own stars, they could hold down their production costs and, more importantly, avoid the massive giveaway of gross they now incur. Before agents start sending me death threats, let me note that there are benefits for actors as well: guaranteed compensation for up to seven years, rather than the risk of homelessness with a work drought. And it would allow a reallocation of the excessive profits now paid to a few stars across a broader range of actors, as opposed to the lopsided current system of the few “haves” and a vast majority of “have nots.” Indeed, this proposal already is standard in the television industry, where actors are put under option for multiple seasons. But alas, even there it exists only in theory, which brings me to the next proposal.
Take the gloves off
The current lack of respect for long-term contracts is a joke. Often once a TV series has become successful, the actors all get “sick” or find some other excuse to breach their contracts, and everyone caves in to the extortion and ups their compensation. It is time to hold actors to their contracts — including the longer-term agreements I advocate — and sue them when they breach. Yes, it will be ugly and expensive in the beginning, and one or more series might even require cancellation because of lower ratings. But after a few actors lose cases for millions of dollars and get enjoined from working elsewhere, they just might start honoring their contracts, and the industry can get back to business and bring costs down.
Dump residuals
When residuals first snuck their nose under the tent, they were applied only to the then-tiny amount of TV revenue on theatrical films, since talent was paid their base compensation for the primary medium: theatrical. Remember that “residual” comes from the word “residue” and refers to the grime at the bottom of the pan. Residuals then were applied in the 1970s to another ancillary medium called video, which through an unexpected fluke grew into the main event and now swamps theatrical revenue by a margin of 2-1. The guilds conveniently have forgotten history and now think that residuals on the primary media are a God-given entitlement. And the worst part is that residuals are paid based on gross receipts, even if the studio is losing its shirt. It is time to dump residuals if this industry is going to survive. There is not a single other industry where union employees are entitled to a share of the employer’s gross receipts. Please tell me why a Teamster driver should get a share of the “Batman” gross. And if SAG decides to commit suicide by going on strike, now is the time to fight this battle.
Cross-platform release
It is astonishing that the industry — after watching the music industry be Napsterized 10 years ago — is passively allowing itself to be pirated into oblivion. Kids around the world are watching films at home for free through peer-to-peer networks on the same day they are first released in theaters, if not before. Gee, I wonder why the increase in piracy matches the decrease in DVD sales? The only solution to piracy is to offer a reasonably priced alternative, which means that VOD and DVD must be made available day-and-date with the theatrical release. We must break the hammerlock of the theaters at all cost, or we will go the way of the music industry. The one approach that won’t work is business as usual: Running at a loss is not an option.
Filed under: arts, culture, journalism, literature | Tags: los angeles; book; book review; los angeles times; douglas fairbanks; Frank Lloyd Wright;
Who says that no one in LA reads? At least the fine folks at Jacket Copy do, the LA Times most excellent book blog. They recently posted a great review of Jeffery Vance’s Douglas Fairbanks biography , a delicious excerpt from T.C. Boyle’s The Women (Frank Lloyd Wright and the women who loved him) and are they ever abreast of the latest developments in all things literati—even including a sale at the Library of America.
Regardless of your particular abode of dwelling, Jacket Copy is a great way keep a reading list that is, not only current but also relevant.
