Why Hollywood has its head up its ass

I’ve believed  this for quite a while now. Let me explain. Until smartphones took over, every time someone in a movie was on the phone and the other person hung up, the person would rattle the phone-cradle in a way that would do absolutely nothing except assure that the phone was dead.

This bizarre behaviour mysteriously migrated to the general population who routinely did the same thing when they lost a connection. Why? It was in the movies! Everyone did that! If the phone went dead, then, rattle-rattle-rattle, and it would come back! Never mind that it never happened that way in human history. People even did it with that brontosaurus of communication, the pay phone. (As a sideline, have you thought of this? With the phasing out of phone booths, we lose one more venue for steamed-up, hasty vertical sex.)

This technique might have worked during the era of Alexander Graham Bell and the crank-operated phone. The rattling was meant to connect you to the switchboard operator who sat at a giant panel with 100 other “girls” pulling out and pushing in little plugs and saying in a twangy nasal voice, “Num-ber, pleee-aaase.”  I don’t know exactly when this was phased out, but it was likely sometime after World War II.

There’s more. Until very recently, writers were always portrayed a certain way. They hid out in the attic with a manual typewriter and banged away, ripping the finished pages out, crumpling them up violently, and tossing them into the wastebasket in the far corner of the room. Hitting the basket meant it was a good writing day.

I remember this in Wonder Boys with Michael Douglas, in which he wrote a thousand-page novel without carbons (remember carbons? If you’re under 60, you won’t), so that by the end of the movie the one existing copy blew out to sea.

Update, Hollywood, update. Don’t show people slapping a hysterical person. Would YOU like to be slapped if you were hysterical? I’d be tempted to rip the person’s throat out. But hey, if it’s done in the movies, that’s what we need to do. It must work.

Woody Allen, now. (My fingers invariably stumble over his name and call him Woody Alien.) We all know he IS that writer who sits in a little nook in his palatial home banging away at a manual typewriter (and who must have his ribbons handmade for him in Thailand or somewhere). In his latest venture, Blue Jasmine, a tour de force vehicle for Cate Blanchett who plays a sort of latter-day Blanche DuBois, there are some clangers that are not only puzzling but downright offputting. One wonders if Allen has been living in a cave all these years.

Phones are the worst of it, though that’s not all: Jasmine’s low-rent sister Ginger has a wall phone with a cord which her badass boy friend predictably rips out of the wall and hurls, presumably in order to cut her off from all human contact. It’s the equivalent of taking an axe and cutting the phone line. Grrrrrrrr.

Though Jasmine spends a lot of time jittering around on her iPhone, she claims to have no technical experience whatsoever and decides to take a “computer course” so she can study fashion design online.  This is one of the most awkward, embarrassing things I’ve seen in a movie in quite a few years. The computer course is generic, its purpose unnamed, but it reminds me of the things senior citizens used to take in the early ‘90s to reduce their terror of technology.

The people taking this course aren’t seniors, but appear to be college-age students of a generation that grew up surrounded by technology, swimming in it like fish in the sea. My own kids, who are practically middle-aged by now, experienced computers as a fact of life and naturally became more proficient as the technology blossomed, then boomed. My son moved into a career as a techie without any sort of awkward transition and has thrived in it as naturally as a superbly-trained athlete in competition.

So why all these 25-year-old people taking this baffling “computer course”? Because no one dares tell Woody Allen that it’s a clanger of monstrous proportions. It really does get in the way. I’m not a particularly  tech-savvy person and for the most part stick to basics, but I doubt if navigating an online course would tax my abilities because it’s all pretty simple and straightforward.

Allen missed a chance for a splendid visual joke: he could have shown a roomful of seniors desperately trying to get the hang of this, while Jasmine looks around in chagrin. But his pride probably would not have allowed it.

When I saw these painful anachronistic jolts in a movie that is otherwise brilliant and extremely well-written, it pulled me so violently out of time that I sometimes wondered if the movie was supposed to take place in the early ‘90s. I am actually surprised that Blanchett didn’t try to rattle the nonexistent cradle on her iPhone or take a Pitman shorthand course at the local recreation centre.

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More Lloyd synchronicity: brought to you by your Uncle Marty!

(Facebook-surfing can either be very boring, or. . . very boring. But I found something tonight. Then lost it, then found it again. It's an interview from this past spring for Humanities magazine, featuring everyone's favorite Italian uncle, Martin Scorsese. Then I get to the end of it and find a Lloyd double-whammy. OK, so when do I get the third one?)

LEACH: How big was the transition from silent to talkies? How did it affect comedies?

SCORSESE: It all became verbal. The comedy stars in the thirties were Laurel and Hardy, thankfully, and W. C. Fields, and the Marx Brothers. Then after the war or during the war, Abbott and Costello, which was really language, old vaudeville routines. And then postwar it’s Martin and Lewis, which was a kind of manic craziness and kind of reflection of the freedom after the war.

LEACH: Two foils.

SCORSESE: Yeah, exactly. But in the silent era, it’s all physical and visual comedy: Chaplin, Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and Charley Chase, all these people we’re restoring. There’s a lot of them that are being restored. It’s quite remarkable seeing these on a big screen.

Young people, when I show it to them, they ’ll ask, Do they talk in this movie? I say, they don’t talk in this one, but you might find it interesting. And they do.

LEACH: I’ll bet.

SCORSESE: The great silent dramatic films really worked extraordinarily well. I mean, they still do if you’ve seen them restored, meaning at the right speed, the right tint and color, because everything was in color, but toned and tinted. In any event, they did have their own international language. Murnau wanted to use title cards in Esperanto. He said, this is the universal language, cinema. And then when sound came in, it changed again completely.

LEACH: The movie industry is America’s greatest presentation to the world in terms of public diplomacy. For instance, Charlie Chaplin was truly universal. You didn’t have to translate it into any language.

SCORSESE: Norman Lloyd, who was a great actor and producer, he worked with everybody: Hitchcock and Welles and Chaplin. He’s in his nineties now. He was just talking on television the other night on TCM, and he was saying that Chaplin is universal, probably the greatest, because he kind of told the story of the immigrant. And anywhere around the world people could identify with it.

LEACH: Well, we thank you.

SCORSESE: Thank you.

(Post-blog revelation. Don't ask me how I find these things. The above shot of the demented old man in the Shriners fez really is Harold Lloyd hanging off the Space Needle in Seattle when he was something like 76 years old. I would've doubted my eyes except, when I looked closely at his right hand, I could see that it was missing thumb and forefinger. How and why he'd do this is anyone's guess, but maybe he was thinking in terms of going out with a big splash.)

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The gospel according to Woody Allen

(A big p. s. The above quote has also been attributed to George Carlin and Andy Rooney. Pick one. To be honest, my bet's on Carlin.)

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BUSTED!: the Imaginary Architect

This a.m. I got the following Facebook message which left me reeling with I-don't-know-what: distaste, revulsion, even a tinge of fear?

Hello pretty, My name is (xxx), 57years old single man, l am living here in Toronto Ontario, I work as an Architect and i have been in this profession for over 32 years. I have traveled to so many countries and to every major cities of the United States and Canada, including some part of Asia. I live alone since i lost my wife about 6year, and i have a 19 years daughter in nurse school. I like music, sunset and rise, walk at the beach, hiking, swimming, camping etc. I would like to meet a gentle soul that wants a gentleman as a best friend and love. I came across your wonderful profile and it caught my attention and I viewed your charming, lovely and beautiful picture i became astonished that is why i decide to write to you,i like your hair style and out looks. I will like to meet a very nice lady like you,maybe we can have a date and get to know each other, I have a lot to say but i will wait till i hear from you, are you single and ready to start relationship that will lead to marriage. Please feel free to tell me little about you. 

I felt a little queasy about being a target for some creep looking for a "nice lady" to get married to. But what really amazed me is that my friend Matt Paust got exactly the same message!

We all know Matt's a hunk, that goes without saying, but "pretty" does not seem to do him justice. "Gentle soul", well - sometimes - maybe he meant "Gentile". The "charming, lovely and beautiful picture" that made him so "astonished" is only part of the deal: he also likes his hair style (which is, admittedly, pretty cool) and "out looks". Sounds like something that might work in a pride parade.

So what's this all about? If it's just some robot, why can't they get a robot that can spell? Is this a way of getting vulnerable women in their 50s (maybe widowed) to part with their money by praising their pictures in the most awkward and  ridiculous manner possible?

Maybe I should answer this guy, string him along for a while. Tell him I'm well-endowed in the chest department and throbbing with anticipation. Might be fun. I'll arrange a meeting with him in some trendy bar, wearing a wire of course.  As his hand furtively sneaks thighward and his dog breath melts the ice in my Monkey's Dick cocktail, a coiled figure will suddenly pop out from under my chair and proclaim: "I'm Chris Hansen from Dateline NBC. You are SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO busted!" 

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The Glass Character: Make up the clowns!

This is an excerpt from my third novel, The Glass Character, which features the legendary silent film comedian Harold Lloyd and his complex, decades-long relationship with an actress/writer named Muriel Ashford. In this scene, Harold is making his first venture into talkies in what he calls the "circus picture" and is experimenting with clown makeup, with surprising consequences for Muriel.

When he turned around, I felt a literal thrill run through me: he had painted on a new face, a clown mask both classic and modern, designed along the lines of his own features but with a tinge of exaggeration that brought out a slightly wicked quality I had never seen in him before.

This was the Harold that wouldn’t, couldn’t be bested, the Harold who had to win. The curve of the mouth was almost sensual, the eyes a little fierce. But it was a clown face nevertheless: and how could we ever be afraid of such jollity, such crazy eagerness to take a pratfall? This was yet another incarnation of the Glass Character, Harold at the Big Top, pushed down again and again, discouraged, despairing, until that magic moment when his never-say-die courage makes him leap to his feet and win the day.

I was absorbing all this (and by his expression, he was obviously pleased) when he did a suprising thing.

“So, Muriel. It’s your turn now.”

“My turn?”

“Of course. Can I paint your face? It’s such a lovely face, I’m sure you’ll make a very pretty clown.”

In his long history of strange behaviour, this was the strangest thing yet. Here was this slightly menacing Pierrot with a paintbrush, asking to turn me into a different person. His artistry was obvious, but I was a little uneasy about the results.

But I succumbed, sitting in the makeup chair which he turned away from the mirror. I began blushing almost instantly as he pulled my hair back and tied it, then laid down a base coat of cold cream. First came the clown white, which he spread on with deft fingers (using both his left and his right hand, which he had learned to use with surprising dexterity). Then he began to work on me: his concentrated expression was fascinating to watch, as this was an area of mastery for him, a talent that even predated his movie career.

As he drew lines and smudged them, touched my lips with carmine, created false lashes and brows, I could not help but respond to the sensuality of being painted. I wanted to believe it was an act of love, but I knew I was fooling myself: this was just another area in which Harold shone, in which he was the best because he had to be. Nor had he ever had any instruction: as with everything else in his life, he had figured it out for himself.

He carefully applied a beauty mark, looked me over one last time, smiled. “Ready, Muriel?”

“I suppose so.”

“Behold!” He turned me around so rapidly my head spun.

Shock! Harold had found me out – had looked inside my cringeing, vulnerable, childish soul, found all my mooning romanticism and false courage, my hopeless ambition and desperate loneliness – and somehow, he had painted it all over my face.

My eyes looked huge in the dead-white skin, full of fear and a strange kind of awe. They were pretty eyes, almost doe-like, yet not timid. Somehow they had the glassy, faceted look of a dolly with blinking eyelids. He restrained himself from painting on a single tear, but the effect was the same. And yet, there was also a heartbreaking hope in them, a willingness to go back for yet another round of pain and rejection.

Ye gods, Muriel: and you thought Harold didn’t understand you? The problem is, he understands you all too well!

“Look at us. Are we a pair?” he asked with an antic grin.

“I suppose so. But I look pretty serious for a clown.”

“Sad clowns remind us how precious happiness is.”

“And happy clowns?”

He looked a bit confused. “You’re a touch beyond me, as usual, Muriel. I’m a simple soul, just offer what I have and go home. I leave the analysis to others.”

The strange thing was, it was largely true. Harold was a roll-up-your-sleeves type, and not easily daunted. He didn’t sit up at night agonizing about his art. He wanted to make people laugh because that was his job, and he was very good at it. Just lately he had been faltering, and it terrified him, though he was not about to admit it. There was nothing for it but to try again. There had to be a way – another way – it was just that hadn’t found it yet.

For your copy of The Glass Character, click on the link below!

The Glass Character: Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

Separated at. . . oh, you know

Yes, I know I've been through this 

(and through this) before. 

But bear with me.

When an actor plays someone famous, 

such as - uh, er, Ashton Kutcher playing 

Steve Jobs - we expect a startling physical 

resemblance and not much else. The 

"oh, doesn't he look like" phenomenon

 lasts for about 15 minutes.

But after a while you need some acting chops to carry it through. 

And it is VERY important not to aim for caricature, or you could ruin the whole thing.

When you look at these two, it gives you the sense of some kind of blood kin, however distant. 

I just find it interesting, is all. 

I do. 

Not that the two of them really have anything to do with each other. Or with me.

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Just the most beautiful picture I've ever seen

I turn up new Lloyd treasures every day, just when I'm sure I'm at the bottom of the chest. Here he is looking upon a very young Rich Correll (now a Hollywood polymath and living Lloyd encyclopedia) with a kind of proud fatherly tenderness. What a face the man had as he got older, the kind eyes. And he just kept on being good-looking, like he was always good-looking, but not vain about it. What it must have been like to live in those times! Bittersweet, for Harold's own son had serious problems that were not easy to mend.. Life splashes blue on so many things, it would seem,  but can our tears somehow wash it all away?

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SHAT HAPPENS: Rock it, man!

"And I'm gonna be. . . . h--i--i--i--i--i--i--g--h--h--h--h--h . . ."

Yes, this must be Rocket Man,  William Shatner's immortal version, which he performed at some Syfy-type awards show, post-Trek but pre-T. J. Hooker. The audience, confused, didn't laugh but gave him some kind of standing ovation at the end. No one thought it was funny or satiric or over-the top. They just thought it was William Shatner. Between gigs.

No one knows if this thing humiliated Shatner or not, but probably not. It sure beat doing Loblaws commercials, and this way he got to wear a nice ruffled shirt.  Unlike Leonard Nimoy who bawled like a sacrificial goat singing The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins, Shatner did not even try to sing.
                                       

                                 Actors. Just one "sieg heil" and they disappear on you.

                                There is very little that can be said about this shot, where Shatner's inner party animal breaks loose and begins to shimmy around like some drunken middle-aged housewife. I particularly like the way the image on the right hangs there like a transparency with a bite out of it. Very high-tech for its time.

"Sam!. . . Ass!. . .Sam!. . . Ass!"

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Back alive again: the resurrection of Peter

It wasn’t much of a day. She wasn’t even sure it was a day at all, since they had really cancelled days quite a long time ago and made everything One. Or was it that they had cancelled Night?

 Which means, you walk around in a half-state, sometimes jokingly known as Twilight. Twilight was the stuff of owls and demons and things that didn’t even really exist any more. But, she thought to herself, do any of us really exist any more?

 They all made it seem as if it were “just her”, and that everyone else was normal. This was all part of the scheme, the huge heartwrenching scheme to take her life away. It was illustrated nearly every day now when she ran into the people she knew.

 They looked dissimilar, but all the same, with a strange hazy quality. Yet they laughed and were jolly in a way they never seemed to be before, as if they had discovered an amazing new Secret.

  

“Emma. Hi, Emma! Haven’t seen you in a long time!” Gretel was wearing the strangest outfit, bright paisley like she’d never worn, a sort of muumuu, with a straw tote bag.

“Hi, Gretel. I think.”

“Oh, it’s me all right. This is just my New Look.”

It’s hardly a look at all, thought Emma, wondering whatever happened to the Old Look, and what made her change it.

“You look the same,” Gretel said in a flat tone. Looking the same wasn’t quite “it”, she supposed.

“Haven’t gotten my instructions in the mail yet,” Emma said, trying to be ironic.

“Oh, that’s so funny! You’re such a funny person! Well, goodbye then!”

“Wait, Gretel. I need to ask you something.”

 “What is it now?” She was getting testy already.

“You know, Peter. . . “

“Yes, Peter.” They had both known Peter. His sudden death had been a wrench, for both of them she thought, but now she wasn’t so sure.

 “What about Peter?”

“Ever since he passed, you know. . . “

“Passed?” She began to titter. “Was he in school or something?”

“No! Don’t you remember? When he. . .”

 “What, when he went on vacation?”

The ultimate vacation, Emma thought.

“Look, I mean when he died.”

“Died?”

“Died.”

“Died?”

“For God’s sake, Gretel! You know what I’m talking about.”

“Oh, that.” She fumbled around in her straw bag for a minute. “I thought you’d heard about it.”

“Heard what?”

“He’s back alive again.”

Stunned silence. A sick feeling gathered in her stomach.

“Back alive again?”

“Of course. Haven’t you seen him? He’s walking around.”

“How, by remote control?” Her sarcasm seemed to be flying over Greta’s pointed little head.

“Sort of, but it’s better than that. He can go under his own steam by now.”

“But he’s dead!”

“Sort of. But not really. You can get renewed now, sort of like a library book. You must know that by now."

She stood there stunned, things whirling around, as Gretel just walked away without even saying goodbye.

She started to comprehend then why everything was different, why she was sort of seeing through some people, mostly really old people, but some of them children. They had a strange sort of translucent quality, but they were still walking around.

And they always seemed happy. Emma thought about Bible study a million years ago, before the Bible was universally banned, and how Jesus had raised Lazarus from the dead. She had always wondered if Lazarus really wanted to be raised, his body half-rotted. Would he have a new body, somehow, or walk around  like that forever?

 

But then that meant she could find Peter!

Peter wasn’t her lover, never had been, but he had been there during the blackest, the most despairing time in her life. He would just show up at Starbucks with his baseball cap and his smile, cheerful as Bugs Bunny. He was in worse shape than she was, but they joked about it, guffawed about how awful life was.

“I heard about a woman who committed suicide. But before she committed suicide she got out the vacuum cleaner and cleaned her whole house top to bottom so it was absolutely spotless. Then she hung herself.” They had both howled with laughter.

Then they just lost touch. Like a sick cat, he had crawled under the house somewhere. She had known he was deteriorating; one conversation they had wasn’t a conversation at all, but a monologue on her part. He’d start to say something, then dry up after a couple of words and look at her in bafflement.

What bothered her was the fact that it didn’t bother him.

She kept sending him emails long after she suspected he had passed (and NOT “in school”!). She couldn’t help it. She’d think she saw him in a crowd. But it wasn’t him. Because the emails didn’t bounce back to her, she assumed they were hitting the target and he was just too busy to reply (knowing full well he had kicked the bucket long ago).

Back alive again. Strange things had been happening lately. She had mentioned her grandfather to a friend of hers, how difficult it had been for him to let go.

“Is he still dead?” the friend asked.

 h, maybe they meant in her mind, in her memory! But somehow she didn’t think so. Death was the only thing more sure than birth. Wasn’t it?

Would she see Peter again? A wild stab of hope made her heart beat faster.

She became aware of how the light went right through people, and began to count them. It was an awful lot. She wondered just what had happened to everyone. Back alive again? Is he still dead? Did you will this, wish it, or did someone impose it on you like poor Lazarus wrapped in his rotten gravecloths?

It was too much to hope for, but in her next turn of mind, when she did not pass Go but began in the middle again, she saw him. She saw a ball cap bouncing up and down the street first, then a smile.

Then they were sitting in Starbucks, but she noticed he was sitting two inches above the chair. He didn’t seem to really drink the coffee, but the eyes were the same.

 They could always be blunt and honest with each other, so Emma waded right into it.

“So, Peter. I hear you’re back alive again.”

“It would seem to be so.”

“How does that happen?”

“I don’t know that, any more than cells know how to multiply or the earth knows how to turn.”

“But is it. . . beyond your will or something?”

"This is a place beyond will."

"Her head was whirling. She hated the idea of not being able to die. Death was one of the things she looked forward to the most.

“Peter, I’m sorry, but it sounds as if you’re a fucking zombie or something. The Undead.”

“Hey, I like that! Undead, but not really alive.”

“Look, Peter, there are only TWO states: dead and alive! Which one are you?”

“No. There is the dream state. There is the hypnotic state. There is the hypnogogic state. There is the catatonic state. There is the trance state. There is the transcendent state. There is the resurrected state. I could go on and on.”

“But those are only in your mind, Peter.”

“Tell me this.” He leaned forward and looked at her with his old intensity, and for one moment she really believed this was Peter. “If I were just a body, I mean lying over there with my heart beating but no consciousness, would that be ‘me’?”

“I don’t. . . “

“So what is it that makes me me?”

“I don’t know, your brain?”

“The brain is just half a pound of juice with some wires running through it. Dissect it, and you see some curls and buds and bulges like normal internal organs. There’s nothing there.”

“So where. . . “

“Ah. You’re about to ask me where Consciousness resides.”

“I guess so. Peter, why aren’t you drinking your coffee?”

"I've evolved beyond coffee, I guess." He chuckled to himself.

“You’re not alive. Get away from me! You’re not really Peter. Are you a ghost?”


"Beyond ghost. We've been refined. We don't have to go around haunting old buildings and Civil War battle sites any more."

“But who DOES this? It has to come from somewhere!”

“Haven’t you noticed you don’t have any privacy any more?”

“Oh, Jesus, Peter.”

 “Haven’t you noticed all the electronic jims and jams that everyone seems to carry now?”

“Oh, so you’re saying your Smart Phone turned you into a ghost.”

“Everything is changed, changed utterly.”

“So what if it all just shuts down, the power grid and that?”

“Yes! Smart girl. THAT is what it is all about.”

“What?” 

"Bodies that need no sustenance when the Time comes. That time when the whole ecosystem collapses, gives way in a great Biblical flood and rips apart the rest of the world with an all-consuming fire."

“You’re scaring me.”

 “Haven’t you ever worried about it?"

“Of course. But I never knew that. . . “

“Now we can live under any conditions.”

“BUT YOU AREN’T REALLY ALIVE! You died of AIDS two years ago!”

 “But I’m not really dead.” He grinned, looking as cheerful as when he told me the suicide joke.

“You must be dead, Peter. You MUST be.”

 “No, my good friend.” He lifted his mug and pretended to drink from it. “I’m back alive again.”

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