The Celluloid Road Trip Blogathon is an event focusing on cities and towns in movies, presented by Hometowns to Hollywood. For a complete list of participating bloggers, visit the link at the host site.

Who’s Aftaid of Virginia Woolf?

In the summer of 1995, I worked as a counselor at a sleepaway camp in Massachusetts. To someone whose childhood summers were spent at day camps, this was a new experience. 

While I relished the opportunity, I probably would’ve suffered cabin fever without the occasional break from hikes in the forest, swimming and canoeing in the river, and daily recreation on the camp grounds. This was for the kids more than the adults, after all. 

Fortunately, there was a town to which I could retreat on my days off: a tiny college community called Northampton.

The Butlers & Maids Blogathon is an event that honors the domestic servants of film. Paddy and I thank you for taking part. You can find the roster of participating bloggers here and at her site.

The Innocents
YouTube viewing

I thought I had seen The Innocents before, when I worked in video retail, and maybe I did, but either it was on while I was helping customers and I couldn’t pay attention or I just forgot, because I would’ve remembered. This is one weird, freaky movie.

The only Henry James novel I’ve read was Washington Square and that was way back in high school, so I’ve never read The Turn of the Screw. It was published in 1898 as a 12-part serial in Colliers Weekly (with illustrations by one Eric Pape) and has enjoyed a long life, not only within academic circles, but in other media: it has been reincarnated as a ballet, an opera and a stage play. There have been film adaptations in multiple languages. Ingrid Bergman starred in a TV version directed by John Frankenheimer. A prequel was made called The Nightcomers. And references and homages to the story have popped up lots of places in different media. The Innocents, though, might be the best-known adaptation.

The 2019 Summer Reading Classic Film Book Challenge is an event in which the goal is to read and write about a variety of books related to classic film, hosted by Out of the Past. For a complete list of the rules, visit the website.

I used to work in video retail with a middle-aged man named Bill. He was instrumental in giving me a classic film education, so I think kindly of him, but I knew him as mostly irascible and gruff. He was also a gay man of a certain age, and as such, there were particular classic movies and movie actresses he placed upon a pedestal. Watching them could change his whole attitude in an instant.

Every year on his birthday, without fail, he’d put on All About Eve for one scene: At midnight, the phone operator wakes up Margo, Bette Davis’ character, for a west coast call to her fiancée Bill. At first she’s confused; she doesn’t realize the call was arranged secretly by Eve. Then Margo recognizes the occasion and smiles. “Bill!” says Margo. “It’s your birthday!” “My” Bill would hear that and melt.

But then, Bette Davis had that effect on people.

All About Eve is a fantastic movie that has dated little over the years. The theater isn’t as central to American pop culture as it once was, but the themes of ambition and careerism and middle age are as relevant now as they were in 1951, when it won the Oscar for Best Picture. The book All About ‘All About Eve’ by Sam Staggs chronicles the evolution of the tale of the aging theater diva and the mousy young groupie, and there’s much more to the route than most people realize.

Elisabeth Bergner, the inspiration for the character who would become Margo Channing

Did you know Eve was inspired by a true story? In the book we discover the middle-aged thespian from long ago, Elisabeth Bergner, who was the basis for the character of Margo Channing, and the young actress who wanted to be her. A third woman, only peripherally connected, was inspired to write a short story about the two. It was published. Writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz saw it, adapted it for the screen, and the rest is history.

Staggs writes about that initial author, Mary Orr, and how her story got her in trouble with the real-life “Eve,” plus Orr’s struggle for proper credit on what would become the Eve screenplay, and her reunion with “Eve” many years later. We learn about who else was considered for the role of Margo, the significance of the film in the lives of the cast, including an up-and-coming starlet named Marilyn Monroe, how hangers-on like George Sanders’ wife Zsa Zsa Gabor played a factor, the budding romance between Davis and co-star Gary Merrill, and of course, all the off-camera bickering. In addition, Staggs discusses the Broadway adaptation Applause, with Lauren Bacall, and the embrace of the film by the gay community.

Mary Orr, who wrote the story that became All About Eve

Staggs writes All About in more of a fannish manner than a journalistic one, by his own admission. Davis and Merrill and Anne Baxter are Bette and Gary and Anne (with the occasional “Miss Davis” for period authenticity). His style is chatty in an Entertainment Tonight, Liz Smith kind of way: in interviews with living subjects, like Orr, he includes asides in the conversation like “You don’t really wanna know about this, do you?” and things like that.

You either like that kind of stuff or you don’t. I found it a bit distracting, and yes, I realize how that sounds coming from me, Mr. “I am not a film critic.” It makes me want to reevaluate my own writing, for this blog, but that’s another issue.

Staggs rambles on a bit too much at times. He’s extremely erudite, but I did think he loved the sound of his voice too much. I would say that’s the risk one takes when writing as a fan, but bloggers like Farran Smith Nehme, Kendra Bean, even Raquel and Aurora put the lie to that, so I dunno.

Bottom line, All About is very informative and illuminating. You might not be put off by Staggs’s writing style. If you love Eve the movie, check this out; just don’t expect it to read like Cahiers du Cinema.

Hard Boiled
YouTube viewing

The 90s were a great time to work in video retail — for me, anyway. Quentin Tarantino made being a video store clerk cool, and the store I worked in for much of the decade had a primo selection of independent and foreign cinema. Our clientele appreciated us for this.

This made me want to keep up with the current filmmakers building reputations outside the boundaries of Hollywood: Mike Leigh, Lars von Trier, Hal Hartley, Jim Jarmusch, Pedro Almodovar, just to name a few. One of the hottest directors during the decade, one championed by us film nerds, was a fella from Hong Kong named John Woo.


I admit, I jumped on the bandwagon for Woo late, after he made his American debut in 1996, with the film Broken Arrow. If you were a film nerd then, though, it was damn near impossible to avoid the buzz surrounding him.

This was partly due to the rising interest in Asian cinema in general, especially the chop-socky kind: Jackie Chan, Jet Li, and Michelle Yeoh were also crossing over to the Western market around this time (plus filmmakers like Ang Lee and Wong Kar-Wai, who appealed to the Film Forum/Angelika crowd).

You will always see a moment like this in a John Woo film.

Tarantino made it clear his films owed a big debt to Asian cinema, and lo, his disciples did go forth and spread the word, from their churches of VHS and Betamax, to their customers, and the word was Cool.

Woo made high-octane crime flicks, with levels of violence that would make Sam Peckinpah gasp. Woo's films were among the first where I understood the importance of letterbox.


In those primitive days before every television was formatted in widescreen proportions, I remember hearing my video store co-workers use phrases like "aspect ratio" and "pan and scan" and "two-three-five to one" and learning from them that how you watch a home video matters, especially if it's a tape of a film by a certain kind of filmmaker, like Kubrick, or Cameron, or Woo.

Many film nerds from my generation agree that one of Woo's best is Hard Boiled, starring Chow Yun-Fat, the Robert De Niro to Woo's Martin Scorsese, a star who also crossed over to Hollywood.


In Hard Boiled (story by Woo), he's a loose cannon cop who inadvertently crosses paths with an undercover cop while investigating a smuggling ring. It's a grand guignol of blood and bodies falling in slo-mo and bullets, bullets, bullets. It's not for the faint of heart, but man, is it fun to watch!

In searching for pics for this post, I discovered that Woo wants to remake another one of his classic HK films, The Killer, for American audiences. (Lupita Nyong'o? Talk about an out-of-the-box choice!)


My fear is that Woo's brand of ultraviolence won't have any traction today, in an era where PG-13 films reap wider audiences than R-rated ones. Then again, given how crazy PG-13 films can get with the violence themselves, maybe it's not an issue anymore. I guess we'll find out soon enough.

It's true, there was a time, not that long ago, when Blockbuster Video stores were as ubiquitous as Starbucks cafes. Hard to believe that time has passed, but how can you compete with online streaming? Still, I never thought the day would come when BB would generate not only nostalgia, but sympathy.

BB as the underdog, the analog lone wolf struggling to survive in a digital wilderness? Under other circumstances, I might be more  sympathetic. Fact is, though, my history within video retail gives me a different perspective, because for many years, BB was the enemy.

I worked at three independent video stores from 1996-2003 (plus a six-month stretch at Tower Records in 1995, where I split time in the video and music departments), and one thing the customers at each indie had in common was their gratitude we weren't BB.

I'd hear it all the time. Maybe it was  because it was New York City, and we tend to get indie and foreign films before most places (and for a longer time), but I dealt with customers who demanded more than just mainstream Hollywood cinema — and BB didn't supply it as much or as often as we did.

That made a big difference in all three indie stores in which I worked, though in the end, BB won out through sheer strength in numbers. When I worked at the Third Avenue store, a BB opened on Second Avenue, on the same block as us, but I don't remember feeling seriously threatened. I believed we could compete with them, in large part, because so many of our customers hated BB and wanted nothing to do with them.

Oh, yeah, that's another thing: BB, like other national chain businesses, set up shop in locations where their (smaller) competition, like us, was already established, so that they could be top dog in time. They could afford to wait, too. Funny how none of the articles I've seen about the last BB standing mention little details like that.

And y'know, props to the Bend, Oregon BB for keeping their doors open this long and surviving in the age of Netflix, but as someone who actively worked against them for eight years, I can't forget the old days that easy. One day, sooner rather than later, the last Blockbuster Video will die, too... but the end will come far, far too late for me.

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Previously:
part 1
part 2
part 3

The At the Circus Blogathon is an event devoted to movies set at circuses, carnivals and freak shows, hosted by Critica Retro and Serendipitous Anachronisms. For a complete list of participating bloggers, visit the links at either site.

Roustabout
Netflix rental

Carnivals! Everyone loves them, right? I was no stranger to them as a kid. One came to the Shea Stadium parking lot every summer when the Mets were on a long road trip. I'd get my father to take me when I was little, and when I was older, I went by myself or with friends.

My favorite ride has many names, but it's basically a centrifuge: you get strapped into a great wheel that spins round and round. The pressure builds up and flattens you against the wall. I never had much of an interest in midway games unless they came with a joystick.

In New York, street fairs abound all over the five boroughs in the warm months. They tend to sell the same things no matter where you go: cheap jewelry and handbags, plus zeppoles and corn dogs to eat. I always look for used CDs and books.



Perhaps the most notable street fairs in New York are the San Genaro Festival in Manhattan and the Atlantic Antic in Brooklyn. The former is more like a real carnival, with midway-style games and the occasional ride or two, like a small ferris wheel or a motion simulator ride. Remind me to tell you one day about my San Genaro stories: one about my unfortunate encounter with two racist girls, the other about my attempt to win a pair of rollerblades.

In Columbus, I attended the State Fair. Being the city slicker I am, I had expected to see things like pie-eating contests and pig pageants (like in Charlotte's Web!). Truth was, it was much more like the carnivals I knew growing up, only much larger. I believe they offered helicopter rides! I was gobsmacked, however, at the array of things people are willing to fry, and sell, and eat. Fried Oreos? Fried Twinkies?! I'm here to tell you they exist.



It so happened that Melissa Etheridge was in town for a concert that night, and there was a contest for free tickets at a stage. I've been a fan since high school. Of course I had to enter. All I had to do was get up on the stage and, um, sing... for a minute or two. The audience judged the winner. I didn't decide just like that; I was alone and sober and didn't have anyone egging me on or talking me out of it, as it were. In the end, it came down to me wanting those tickets really bad.

I sang one of her songs; I forget which. I remember trying not to look at the audience too much. I basically closed my eyes and thought of England. I gave it everything I had, which wasn't much to begin with - my sister's the singer in the family, not me - and I lost. What the hell. YOLO, amirite?



Anyway. Wikipedia defines the word "roustabout" as "a traditional term used to describe a fairground or circus worker." These days, the word defines laborers on oil fields and rigs. The almighty Google oracle also tells me there's such a thing as a Roustabout Circus, in Alaska, but it doesn't look like it's a place for roustabouts to perform.

Further web exploration reveals within the context of a circus or carnival, a roustabout is usually a temp, unskilled or semi-skilled, that sets up and breaks down the tents and booths and rides, cleans, performs maintenance, stuff like that. It's not unlike being a roadie for a concert.



Okay... I've put it off long enough. Time to talk about Roustabout the movie. As a thespian, Elvis doesn't embarrass himself here, but the script doesn't exactly challenge him, either. He basically cashes in on his bad boy image once again which, by 1964, was beginning to grow a bit stale (he was 29 when he made this one). Still, the movie soundtrack went to number one in the year of Beatlemania, so 50 million Elvis fans... you know the rest.

He doesn't do much actual roustabout work (though we do see him help assemble a ferris wheel); he's too busy macking on the ladies, riding his motorcycle in an outfit he stole from Marlon Brando, and of course, singing songs. I am pleased to report he gets slapped no less than three times in the film. But enough about him...



...let's talk about the real reason I chose to watch this movie: BARBARA STANWYCK! Missy made this a year before The Big Valley debuted on TV. They originally wanted Mae West, if you can believe it, but allegedly, she wanted to be one of Elvis' love interests. That might not have been a bad idea... if she wasn't close to seventy years old at the time. (Then again, this is Mae West...!) The filmmakers said no.

No one watching Roustabout will forget Double Indemnity or The Lady Eve or Stella Dallas. Stany probably did this to pay the bills. That's okay. We love her anyway. Elvis holds his own in his scenes with her, though again, it's not a challenging role. It's more than a little surreal to watch the two of them share a screen. It's like, say, Helen Mirren acting a scene with Kanye West. Sadly, there's not a whole lot of Stany in this flick, either... but hey, the songs are decent. (Also, Richard "Jaws" Kiel as a strongman at the very end.)

John, Sue and I watched this on Netflix and we all got a kick out of it. There's one song with the lyric "popcorn, peanuts" and John thought Elvis said "penis" instead. He kept goofing on that for the rest of the movie.

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Related:
5 movies set at World's Fairs

Other circus, carnival or freakshow movies:
Freaks
Nightmare Alley
He Who Gets Slapped
Laugh Clown Laugh

These Three
seen on TV @ TCM

So Paddy and I were talking about These Three the other day. The inevitable comparisons to The Children's Hour came up, of course. Paddy said that the former holds up as well as the latter, even if it is a censored version of the latter. I had said that in my mind, Three can't hold a candle to Hour, since Hour, after all, is the original version.

It's important to note that Lillian Hellman, creator of the original stage play that led to both film versions, wrote the screenplay for Three with the full knowledge that the original couldn't be presented on screen, at least not in 1936. William Wyler directed both versions, 25 years apart..

I saw Three first, back in my video store days. My old manager Bill, a gay man, had put it on. I learned a great deal about Old Hollywood from him. I don't recall what he said about Three as he put it on, though I'm sure he mentioned the fact that it was censored. It was a middle-of-the-day movie, when the in-store traffic was light, so I could follow the story better than I could if it were put on in the evening, though I couldn't give it my complete attention. 



I thought at the time it was okay. By that point, I was used to splitting my attention between serving customers and watching movies, and most of the time, it wasn't too difficult. Three has a relatively simple plot, so if I lost a plot thread while ringing up a customer or answering the phone, I could pick it up again. Not the most ideal way to watch a movie, but what can you do?

For those who've never seen either version: these two chicks open a private girls' school. One of them falls in love with this dude, a local doctor who helps them out. There's one girl who's a total brat. She resents the teachers and loves playing the innocent, all the while bullying the other girls. Now, in Hour, the original, Bratty Girl spreads a rumor that Martha (blonde teacher) is secretly in love with Karen (brunette teacher) based on circumstantial evidence. In Three, the rumor is that Martha is in love with Joe, the doctor who's already committed to Karen. Either way, the result is the same: the parents suspect there's some kind of hanky panky going on and bad things result.



I've talked about Hellman here before, and I've given her her due as an exceptional American playwright, ahead of her time in a number of ways. Looking at Three again, without any distractions, I have to say that she did the best job she possibly could in altering her material. The lesbian themes are completely excised, and if you never knew they were there to begin with you'd never notice the difference. I doubt anyone else could've done a better job with the material.

That said, knowing Hour exists, and having seen it multiple times (and owning it on VHS), I still can't help but be drawn to it as the better movie. The hubbub over what may or may not have been an affair between Martha and Joe seems lightweight. I can imagine a controversy brewing, I can imagine parents getting upset, but I couldn't quite buy the level of moral outrage, the paranoia, that would cause parents to pull their girls out of the school. Fear of gay teachers, on the other hand, has been a real thing for a long time. Plus, I honestly think Shirley MacLaine's Martha is better than Miriam Hopkins' Martha, though Hopkins is very good here (and of course, she appears in Hour as Martha's stage diva aunt).



One edge which I'll concede to Three is Bonita Granville as Mary, the Bratty Girl. Karen Balkin in Hour is very good in the role, but Granville is damn near frightening. She was Oscar nominated for her work, in fact. She gets a lot of screen time in the film, which surprised me a bit, but clearly Wyler and Hellman knew what they had in her.

So Three is better than I had remembered, but for me, it's difficult for it to escape the shadow of Hour, which is, after all, the original, uncensored version.

For a long time, I underestimated Joel McCrea. I never disliked him, but I never saw him as anyone particularly special, at least not compared to more dynamic actors like Jack Lemmon or William Holden or Burt Lancaster. McCrea always struck me as kinda vanilla by comparison.

At first, there were his films with writer-director Preston Sturges, Sullivan's Travels and The Palm Beach Story. At the time I watched them, I remember knowing more about Sturges than McCrea, so it's possible that I was more caught up with the dialogue than with the actors in those movies. 

This would've been during my early video store days, when I was still learning about major directors and actors. Someone like McCrea would've gone under my radar, except I distinctly remember one day when Bill, my manager, put on These Three. McCrea's name is under the title, after the names of the stars Miriam Hopkins and Merle Oberon, and when I saw that, I thought perhaps his name was pronounced mac-CREE, so that it would rhyme with "three." 

When I started film blogging, I'd see other bloggers write about him in more appreciative tones. but while I saw some more of his movies, I never went out of my way to pay attention to him. To me, he remained an actor who was good, serviceable, sturdy, but not someone I could get excited about.

I wouldn't call Ride the High Country an epiphany of any kind, but that was a movie where McCrea surpassed being merely "good" for me. As an older man, especially in a Western setting that was a little bit edgier than earlier Old Hollywood westerns, he had a more authoritative, distinguished air that suited him well, I think. Of course, by the time I saw that, my tastes had evolved to where I could appreciate different kinds of actors. 

Would I put McCrea in my all-time top ten for leading men? No - so why am I writing about him? Because I realize now that he is better than I used to give him credit for. Also, I'm just enough interested in him to want to know a little more about him - and what I've learned is quite interesting indeed.

For instance, did you know McCrea owned a ranch? He wasn't just a movie cowboy, he was one in real life, too! It was built on what eventually became 3000 acres of land in Santa Rosa Valley, California, back in the 30s at the suggestion of none other than Will Rogers, whom McCrea befriended early in his career, as a fallback in case Hollywood didn't work out. He lived there with his longtime wife (57 years!) Frances Dee, and raised their children there. From the photos, it looks beautiful, like something out of one of his many westerns.


McCrea had a TV show - a Western, natch, called Wichita Town (not to be confused with a movie he made called Wichita), which he starred in with his real life son Jody. It was a post-Civil War series about a US Marshall in a growing town. It only lasted one season on NBC. Jody alternated much more between film and television. Perhaps you saw him in such films as Beach Blanket Bingo, How to Stuff a Wild Bikini and The Glory Stompers?

So I think what we've learned here is that sometimes - not always, but sometimes -there's more to an actor than meets the eye.

Next: Thelma Ritter

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Films with Joel McCrea:
Banjo On My Knee
Sullivan's Travels
Ride the High Country

Previously:
Jack Lemmon   Jean Arthur
Edward G. Robinson   Rita Moreno
Frank Capra   Bernard Herrmann
Joan Blondell   James Dean
Ethel Waters   William Powell
Tod Browning   Edith Head

The 1947 Blogathon is exactly what it says on the tin, hosted by Speakeasy and Shadows & Satin. For a complete list of participating bloggers, visit the link at S&S.

T-Men
YouTube viewing

T-Men continues my foray into the film career of director Anthony Mann. You may remember my post earlier this year on Raw Deal and, much earlier, Bend of the River. I think what I like about Mann's movies is the direct approach he took with his stories. He didn't fool around with too much in the way of subplots or characterization, but that may have been a by-product of the genres he worked in - crime and westerns.

This one's a "true crime" story about undercover treasury agents busting up a counterfeiting ring. Watching this, I was reminded a little bit of the old crime comics from the same period of time, such as Crime Does Not Pay and the EC Comics such as Crime SuspenStories and Crime Patrol. These and other genre titles were the medium's equivalent of pre-code films; they were known for pushing the boundaries of what was considered acceptable in comics before the moral watchdogs of society stepped in and forced the industry to adopt their own version of the Hays Code. 



T-Men, like many of those true crime comics, particularly Crime Does Not Pay, takes an authoritative approach to its story. It begins with an introduction by an actual former Treasury Department bigwig who explains the real life case this film is based on, drawing comparisons to the Al Capone case, and then a Naked City-type narrator takes over for the rest of the film. Dennis O'Keefe, who was the bad guy in Raw Deal, is the good guy here. His tough guy persona kinda reminds me a bit of Sterling Hayden or even William Holden - a very no-nonsense type who never descends into camp.



T-Men is quite dark visually. Even the interiors in places like hotel rooms and fancy apartments are shrouded in menacing shadow at times. The cinematographer was named John Alton, who worked with Mann on Raw Deal (I noted some of the clever compositions in that film) and other movies of his, and would go on to share an Oscar win for his work on An American in Paris. He also worked on Father of the Bride, The Brothers Karamazov, Elmer Gantry and The Birdman of Alcatraz, among many others.



I don't know how big a problem counterfeiting is today, but I remember it was something I was taught to be cognizant of, at the least, when I worked in retail. We'd have one of those special pens that you had to use to mark the big bills to test the paper, and we'd have to hold the big bills up to the light to look for a certain strip woven into the paper, things like that. And of course, there'd always be one dumbass customer who'd say "Oh, yeah, it's real, I made it myself!" or something like that.

Anyway, this is another cool movie from Anthony Mann. Now I gotta get back into his westerns...

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Other films from 1947:
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
Miracle on 34th Street
Lady in the Lake
Dark Passage
Nightmare Alley

Interview With the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles
last seen on TV @ BBC America
10.31.14

My Anne Rice story is much less exciting than I sometimes make it out to be. For awhile, whenever I would tell it, I'd embellish it, try to make it a bit more epic-sounding, but the subsequent years - not to mention the change in the way I think about Rice - have altered my perspective on it. Anyway, here it is; you can judge its epic-ness or lack thereof for yourself.

It goes without saying, perhaps, that for many years I was a huge Anne Rice fan. I think I first became one in college. I don't recall exactly when I first read Interview With the Vampire, but obviously, I liked it enough to continue reading not just the other vampire books, but her other stuff as well, including the Mayfair Witch books, which I think are better than the vampire books (still hoping someone, someday, will make a film out of The Witching Hour), her other supernatural books like The Mummy and Servant of the Bones, and even her non-supernatural books like The Feast of All Saints and Cry to Heaven. (I drew the line at the S&M books, though.) 



This was back when Rice was HUGE. I have a distinct memory of reading The Vampire Lestat on the subway and seeing this dude on a subway platform give me the thumbs up outside the window. He held up three fingers and pointed to himself, which I guess was supposed to mean that he'd read the first three vampire books in the series. He was pretty psyched about it! 

I also remember leaving my copy of Interview on a Greyhound bus by accident and buying another copy, but it was a later printing than my initial copy, which was from the same print run as Lestat and Queen of the Damned, so now the books don't match up anymore. That kinda bugs me a little, still, after all this time. Wish it didn't.



I have another memory of reading The Witching Hour around the time I met a girl in college who claimed to be a Wiccan (as was her mom too!), although she was more on the New Age, rocks-and-crystals end of the spectrum. Still, it was my first experience with such things, and though I liked her a lot, I was still... trepidatious about the whole thing at first, as a result of reading Rice's book at the same time.

So. Late 90s, me working at the video store on Third Avenue. Rice just came out with a new vampire book and she was doing a signing at a tiny little bookstore in the West Village - which, in itself, is noteworthy. An author of her caliber could've easily gone the B&N/Borders route, but she chose to support this independent book shop instead. That means a lot, especially these days. The signing was at five PM and I was working until ten that night. What to do, what to do?



I decided to take my lunch hour at five and scramble down to the Village. I told my co-worker to cover for me in case I make it back late, which was a distinct possibility. I grabbed my copies of Interview, Lestat and Hour and hopped on a downtown bus. I arrived about a half hour or so later. I'd never been to this particular bookstore before; it was a little out of the way from where I was and I had to search for it.

When I got there... the line was out the door, down the block and around the corner. So much for getting back to work on time! But I just said the hell with it: there were enough people at the video store that they didn't need me that badly, and besides, I was desperate to meet Rice. So I joined the queue and waited. And waited. Finally, I was inside the small bookstore but still on line, and I could just barely make Rice out from behind a table and a crowd of people.



But then the other shoe dropped. I found out that she was only signing copies of her new book which one had to buy in the store! I dragged all my other books with me for nothing! (For the record, the book was Pandora, a shorter tale of one of the minor vampire characters. Not terribly memorable at all.) And while I had enough money to buy the book, it would clean me out for the rest of the night. So what could I do? I bought it. As I recall, this was the store's policy, not Rice's, and looking back on it now, I can't say I blame them for insisting on this, especially since they were an indy book shop, but at the time, I was just pissed.

Rice has lost weight since. At the time, she was... somewhat large. I knew this, having seen her face in magazine interviews. Her Louise Brooks hair was still black, although strands of gray were showing. And of course, she was dressed in her signature black Gothic attire. I wish I had thought of something clever to say to her. I ended up not saying much other than the standard "Big fan, thanks a lot" spiel. So after all the trouble I went through to meet my favorite author, all I have to show for it is her signature (not even personalized!) in a book of hers I don't even read anymore, and this story.Told you not to expect much!



So time went by and my tastes changed, and one day I broke out Interview again and discovered that the bloom was off the rose. I didn't like it as much anymore. For one thing - and this is also true of the movie, of which Rice wrote her own screenplay - it's REALLY talky. The action, such as it is, is sporadic and abbreviated, and while it plays out slightly better on the screen, in the book it kinda bores me now. 

It's not like all the talk is indulgent. A lot of it deals with Louis trying to find the answers to not just the origins of vampires, but the Big Questions in life as well, and one would think that this sort of thing would appeal to me - and it does. But Lestat kinda has a point; after awhile, Louis does come across as sounding whiny! Maybe I started losing interest in Rice's books because of this.



Still, it must be said that Rice's vampires are far, far, far more interesting, with more depth and complexity, than the ones that have captured the imagination of the current generation, and I think you and I both know which ones in particular I'm referring to here. I dunno, it seems like vamps never quite go out of style. All the attempts to re-create them for modern audiences seems to speak to the power the mythos continues to hold on us. I'm not saying that Rice got it "right," but I think her combination of existential angst, Gothic imagery, violence and sex has a certain raw, primal power that people have, and continue to, respond to.

As for the movie itself, well, I remember the controversy over Tom Cruise being cast as Lestat and how Rice got turned around on him after seeing him in the role, though honestly, it's nothing more than Cruise being Cruise, and only for a fraction of the film. It's Brad Pitt's movie, and he carries it well. For the longest time, I considered Claudia to be Kirsten Dunst's best role, even after she grew up. I haven't seen Melancholia, so I don't know if that's still true, but she deserves so much credit for taking on such a difficult role for a child actress - essentially being an adult in a child's body - and making it work. 



I think the movie as a whole still holds up, talkiness and all, though I suspect if it were made today - and it looks like it will be pretty soon - it would look very different, given everything that's come afterwards, from Buffy to Blade to Underworld to True Blood and yes, to Twilight. I guess we'll find out in a matter of years, won't we?

And for the millionth time... it's "Interview With THE Vampire," people, not "A Vampire." Why do so many people get that wrong? Pisses me off!

I worked at the Avenue A Kim's Video for the final year of its existence, from 2003-04. I'm pretty sure I answered a classified ad in the Village Voice to get the job. Previously, I had put in five and a half years at a video store on Third Avenue in Manhattan, so I had earned my cinematic education by the time I arrived at Avenue A. Unlike my first day at Third, I felt like I fit in at Kim's instead of being low man on the totem pole.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
seen @ Movieworld, Douglaston, NY
7.15.14

So you wanna be a leader, do you?

Understandable. When you're a leader, you're the star of the show. You're the one who gets to sit in the captain's chair. Everything that happens revolves around you. What you say goes and everyone has to listen to you because they all know you're the smartest, the bravest, the strongest. And they'll follow you into hell if you say so because they believe in you.

You better make sure you read the fine print, though, because being a leader also means making the kind of decisions no one wants to make. Maybe you have to work with someone untrustworthy. Maybe you have to put your people through a stressful situation. Maybe you even have to make a choice that'll mean someone's death.

That center seat doesn't feel quite so cozy anymore, does it?

Independence Day (1996)
first seen in South Hadley, MA
summer 1996

South Hadley, Massachusetts is an itty-bitty town with a population of 17,514, first settled in 1725. Now, I got that from the town's webpage and from Wikipedia. I wish I could tell you stuff about the town that you wouldn't find online, but I can't, because when I went to South Hadley, I wasn't terribly interested in the rest of the place at the time. All I saw of it was a strip mall that looked like it was in the middle of nowhere... but that mall was important because it had a multiplex.

This was during the summer I spent as a counselor at a sleepaway camp in an even tinier Massachusetts town called Cummington. Actually, I spent two summers there; this was the second. It was high in the Berkshire mountain territory along Route 9 - a pleasant place, though in the summer it can get awful cold at night if you're not careful. 

A Hard Day's Night
seen on TV @ TCM
6.2.14

I was a schoolboy when I heard my first Beatles song; "Love Me Do," I think it was. From there it wouldn't take long... Oh wait, lemme start over...

Actually, I'm not quite sure which Beatles song I heard first, but I do remember at what time in my life their music began to have an impact on me - high school. It was my buddy Eric who introduced me to classic rock in general, and the Beatles in particular. I clearly remember afternoons after school rummaging through Tower Records, comparing albums - and I do mean albums, the big black discs, though by this time I was more into cassettes for my newly-bought Walkman and wondering about the future of these strange new golden platters called compact discs.

Fast forward a bit to 1995. I spent that summer working as a sleepaway camp counselor, and there was a ton of Beatles hype in the air, in anticipation of the Beatles Anthology. Campers as young as seven and eight knew the songs, and I remember being shocked that they were not only as familiar with them as they were, but that the music spoke to them like they spoke to me almost a decade ago.


There have been numerous essays describing what the Fab Four meant to America, England, and the world at large, and chances are you've read a fair amount of them. What do they mean to me? I imagine my story's not too different from yours. The unpretentiousness of the music. The phenomenal creative output over such a shockingly short period of time that made them far more than a trendy boy band. The hair. 


A Hard Day's Night captures the Beatles during the early days of their successful arrival in America, and while it may have been a cash grab designed to capitalize on their immediate success, the Beatles themselves don't come across as fabricated. You can tell that they're amazed at being at the center of such a phenomenon and that they still don't quite believe it's real.


Fame these days comes so cheaply. We take for granted how relatively easy it is to get noticed, and not just through the traditional media of music or television or movies, but new media like the Internet. Someone makes a video (or gets captured on video) and it's put on YouTube and a million people watch it and boom! That person is famous for a minute or two. But it's hollow, and it's fleeting, and ultimately unsustainable for 99.9% of those involved. How many of us could cope with real fame, like the kind the Beatles enjoyed for so long? This movie, fictionalized as it is, provides a clue, and while we know now that the four of them weren't always as buddy-buddy as they seem here, we still accept the legend.

Music has always been a big business in America, and it's a completely different one today than it was fifty years ago, but the music of the Beatles have remained a constant, whether it's used to sell sneakers, mashed up with modern rock bands or rappers, heard on a scratchy LP or an MP3. I think that in one way or another, they'll always be a part of us.

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Lovely Lily