Preminger Centennial (But Not Centennial Summer)

I should have highlighted this on the day, but December 5 of this year was the centenary of the birth of Otto Preminger. In his honor, the Academy of Arts and Sciences held a tribute to him last month.

Preminger's a guy who had erratic taste in scripts -- he seemed to pick projects based on how much publicity the title or subject-matter would generate, and publicizing the project sometimes seemed to matter more to him than getting the writer to come up with a good script. But for most of his career, his movies are a pleasure to look at for his preference for long, expansive takes and his use of every inch of the frame. Look at this scene from Advise and Consent, where he has Peter Lawford in the distance at the very edge of the Panavision frame while George Grizzard (as the evil Senator Fred Van Ackerman) is speaking; finally Lawford says something, but Preminger doesn't cut to him, just leaves him there at the edge and expects our eyes to go to him. That's why this is one of those movies that makes absolutely no sense on TV. And you may recognize the person making a cameo as the tart-tongued Senator from Kansas:



And then, of course, there's the bad Preminger. And there's nothing badder than his 1968 attempt to stay relevant and controversial, Skidoo. To be fair, though, the clips posted online make the movie look even worse than it is, because they're in pan-and-scan.

Oh, and this remake of Preminger's last good movie, Bunny Lake is Missing, starring Reese Witherspoon? I guess Witherspoon's a better actress than Carol Lynley, but I greatly fear the new version will force the whole thing to make sense, and there would be no point to it that way.

Update: One other thing about Preminger is that for most of his career, his movies were distinguished by unusually good musical scores. Many prominent directors either didn't seem to care who composed the music, or struck up semi-permanent partnerships with certain composers whether or not they were any good (like Robert Aldrich's incessant use of easy-listening schlockmeister Frank DeVol). But Preminger used the great David Raksin for most of his films at Fox, and when he went independent, he used a succession of different and often very distinguished composers. He also would sometimes make unusual and good choices for the composer; on Advise and Consent he gave Jerry Fielding his first assignment for a big budget movie.

More Evil Than The Shark

Just a follow-up to my post below: if you want to see how far Happy Days fell, and how fast, you need look no further than Fonzie's first confrontation with Mork From Ork. The one thing that always interests me about these Paramount shows of the late '70s is that even though the studio had given up on one-camera filming, in favor of loud, obnoxious studio audiences, they were still resistant to the prevailing '70s method of shooting comedy shows. That is, most comedies by that point were shot and staged like little plays. Paramount was still putting in the mood music and cheesy optical effects familiar from their one-camera shows like The Brady Bunch.




And, for those of you who weren't traumatized enough by the above, there's always the Saturday morning cartoon The Mork and Mindy Laverne and Shirley Fonz Hour. Thanks again, Fred Silverman.

Pre-Shark

Wow, never count out a series when it comes to DVD releases. After two years of waiting, Season 2 of Happy Days will be released in April 2007.

Those who remember my posts from way back in 2004, when the first season was released, will remember that I'm a big fan of the early Happy Days, when it was filmed with no studio audience and Richie was the lead character. The second season was the last one filmed that way. There's actually one episode where they experimented with the live-audience, three-camera format ("Fonzie's Getting Married"). It was one of the weakest episodes of that season, so naturally they switched full-time to that format starting with the third season, and Happy Days became more successful, more popular, and much, much less good.

Good Morning, Mr. Briggs

What I find ingenious about Mission: Impossible (the first season finally came out on DVD today) is that creator Bruce Geller figured out how to provide a TV equivalent for a genre that normally doesn't adapt well to TV: the caper story.

Caper movies were all the rage in the '60s, but as we've seen this past season (with the almost instantly-canceled Smith), capers don't usually work in a television series format, because audiences don't usually come back to root for the criminals week in and week out. A movie like Rififi or Topkapi or even The Lavender Hill Mob only expects us to follow the criminals until this one job is done. But you can't ask people to cheer for the crooks week after week, not until The Sopranos anyway.

So what Geller did in Mission: Impossible was to take all the familiar devices of the crime caper -- the elaborate plan, the team members with different specialties, the suspenseful twist when it looks like the plan has gone wrong -- and create a format where the devious team was, if not on the side of the law, at least on the side of goodness and decency. But there was still that element of outlaw-ishness, because these characters weren't officially sanctioned; the American government hired them secretly, promising to disavow any knowledge of their actions, and they violated international law just about every week. So although the members of the Impossible Mission Force were more sympathetic than the purely selfish characters in most caper films, they weren't squeaky-clean either; unlike, say, the guys in The Guns of Navarone, their plans had an air of rebelliousness about them because they weren't playing by normal rules or working for anyone recognizable as an authority figure (except that mysterious voice on the self-destructing messages).

Here's the opening scene from the pilot (where Wally Cox was the guest star as a safe-cracker; remember that many of the episodes, especially early ones, would have an additional member who wasn't part of the regular team). You'll notice that this was one of the few prime-time filmed shows of its time that made occasional use of a hand-held camera; in this case we see a hand-held shot when the team is introduced playing cards.

A TV Cinematographer

This is why I love the web: where else would people like me have access to an interview with George Spiro Dibie, a veteran director of photography for television? and not just any interview, but a long, long, long interview with lots of technical stuff about shooting a series. If you like to know about why Barney Miller looked different from other videotaped shows, or what kind of film was used for Buffalo Bill, then you'll enjoy this interview as much as I did.

Dibie also seems to share my shameful affection for Growing Pains:

Like you said, there isn’t a lot of recognition from the industry, so you find satisfaction in your own feelings about your work. You have a different script to shoot every week with no time to rehearse, maybe a couple of days to prepare each episode, almost always with a different director. There are also times when writer-producers seek you out, and actresses and actors insist that you shoot their shows. One of my most memorable sitcoms was the Halloween episode of Growing Pains. It was a one-hour episode, and we had four days to shoot it. We had to create moods and looks that touched on all of the emotions in that one show. The camerawork was an important part of the story-telling. We had an important interior scene mainly motivated by a fireplace with some night light coming through a window. There was a black and white sequence and one where colors were very important. We had interior and exterior scenes, and one where a Steadicam was important. If someone said to me, Dibie give me an hour that represents your best work, I’d probably pick that show.

Grudge Matches I'd Like To See: Batman vs. The A-Team

The A-Team is hiding out in Gotham City, and Colonel Decker asks Batman to track them down and capture them. Batman, with his sour view of human nature, doesn't believe that the A-Team is innocent, and assumes that they're just another group of quirky criminals that he needs to hunt down.

Can Batman capture the A-Team? Or will he fail to handle the combined power of Hannibal's planning, B.A.'s helluva-toughness, Murdock's craziness, and... uh... whatever the heck it is that Face does?

"It's Not the Coffee, It's the Bunk"

From Preston Sturges' Christmas in July, Dick Powell comes up with what is either the worst or the greatest advertising slogan of all time.

It's Frankie (Tashlin)!

The Looney Tunes Golden Collections include a lot of Frank Tashlin (a documentary on vol. 3, and a full disc of his cartoons on vol. 4), but they aren't able to include many clips from his live-action movies, since his best live-action movies are owned by Paramount or Fox. So as a Tashlin maniac, I thought I'd randomly link to one of the great Tashlin scenes: Julie London's cameo appearance singing "Cry Me a River" in The Girl Can't Help It.

The set-up of the scene is that the talent agent played by Tom Ewell used to be in love with Ms. London; he lost her when she became successful, and now he's haunted by her every time he listens to her big hit. The odd thing about the scene is that Tashlin plays it both funny and straight: it's an over-the-top parody of a certain kind of movie melodrama (it takes a standard device -- having a character's lost love appear as a ghostly memory -- and keeps it going so long that it becomes absurd), but Ewell is being directed to play the character's pain and sadness as quite real, and you do sort of feel for him by the end of the scene.



Also, while I linked to this a few months ago, I figured I should put it up again for those who missed it the last time around: the ultimate Tashlin scene -- combining music, fetishism, parody and old-movie references (to Lubitsch's "Beyond the Blue Horizon" number in Monte Carlo) -- "A Day in the Country" from Hollywood or Bust.

A number in which, as Jenny Lerew once remarked, the women all look like "Elvgren pinups come to life."

Update: I forgot to mention, with regard to the scene from The Girl Can't Help It, that this is a perfect example of Tashlin importing animated cartoon gags into his live-action filmmaking. The overriding joke here is a very standard cartoon joke: no matter where one character goes, the other character is always there. It's like a cartoon except that the role of Daffy Duck is played by Julie London.

Shirley Walker, RIP

The composer and conductor Shirley Walker died Wednesday. She was 61.

Walker (1945-2006) was probably best known as supervising composer for Batman: The Animated Series. She'd previously been a prolific orchestrator and conductor for various movies, and came to the attention of the Batman producers because she'd orchestrated and conducted Danny Elfman's score for the 1989 Batman movie, as well as composing the music for the short-lived live-action series The Flash. For the Batman series, Walker arranged Elfman's main title theme (based on, but superior to, the version of that theme in the movie), composed the music for dozens of episodes, and supervised the work of the other composers to make them fit in with the style she'd set for the show.

She could also depart from that basic style, quite brilliantly, when needed; for the episode "The Laughing Fish" she did a spooky, Bartókian, modernistic score, and in the tribute to Dick Sprang's Batman comics in "Legends of the Dark Knight," she went to great lengths to make the score (and the recording of it) sound like a parody of canned music in early '60s TV cartoons.

Here's a website devoted to Walker's work, which includes a full list of her many credits.

I wrote a bit about Walker in an earlier post, which included a link to this article on Walker and the other Batman/Superman composers. There was also a recent two-part interview with her in Film Score Monthly.

Walker can also be heard on two audio commentary tracks on volume 3 of the Batman series.

Ah, Good

Somebody finally uploaded the (short) title sequence of Peter Gunn:



That's one show that could have used a minute-long title sequence, but shows in those days didn't spend a lot of time on the titles (what was important was to get as quickly as possible to the name of the sponsor).

Speaking of shows with iconic theme music, DVD Beaver has a review and screenshots of season 1 of Mission: Impossible.

Evening, Morning and Afternoon At the Improv

Ken Levine wonders whether improvisation is really all it's cracked up to be.

Even the same TV critics who hail this new form admit in their reviews that the shows are quiet, amusing in spots, the tone is more naturalistic, the actors are likeable, but there are very few big laughs. And that’s understandable because unless your cast includes Robin Williams, Sasha Cohen, Elaine May, Will Ferrell, or the Christopher Guest road company you are putting too much comedy burden on the actors. It’s not their job. It’s not their gift.

I think that's a terrific observation. There are a lot of great things about improvisation, but very few of them have to do with getting the big laughs. Think back to the comedy troupes that helped establish the importance of improv in comedy, like Second City. The point of improv in the Second City stuff was not, primarily, to make the sketches funnier; it's not like conventional sketch comedy was so short on big laughs or funny jokes that the younger performers thought they could do better by making stuff up on the spot. What improv lent to sketch comedy was a sense of depth and characterization; by acting more naturally, by forcing performers to really watch each other (because neither knows exactly what the other is going to do next), by incorporating awkward pauses and stammering and backtracking just like in real life, characters in sketches became more like real people than joke machines.

That's largely the point of the improvisation on a show like Curb Your Enthusiasm. That is actually a heavily scripted show; Larry David writes out what's going to happen in every scene, all the plot points, the subject of each conversation, all the big gags. The only thing that he doesn't write out are the actual words that the characters say, but those aren't the source of the biggest laughs, at least not directly. The improvisation helps give the show a naturalistic feel and it's also necessary to the theme of the show, because the show is about awkwardness and embarrassment. You can't write out and rehearse awkwardness and embarrassment; that, as Irving Berlin said, comes nat'rally. But when it comes to comedy, the actual choice of words is almost the least important part; the success of a show with improvised dialogue is perhaps a rebuke to joke writers who spend hours crafting the sound of each line (add more "K" sounds, quick!"), but it doesn't change the fact that good comedy needs a good writer. It just means that good comedy writing is about more than just funny dialogue.

If you go back even farther than that, some of my favorite movie directors of the Good Old Days (which I still call GOD for short) used improvisation that way: they'd plan out the scene and they'd write out the big jokes, but let the actors improvise the peripheral things. Leo McCarey did it that way; he didn't like to use a finished written script, but that didn't mean he relied on the actors to come up with the jokes. The biggest laughs in a movie like The Awful Truth come from things that were clearly planned and rehearsed in advance, like Cary Grant leaning back and falling off his chair. What the improv does is to give the performances a sense of naturalism that more tightly-scripted movies don't have, but it's still the responsibility of the writer and director to come up with the actual jokes.

Same with Gregory La Cava, whose film Stage Door is heavily improvised but still filled with great scripted punchlines ("Could you possibly see an older woman in the part?"). Improvisation is great in these movies, but they're not funny because of the improvisation; the best jokes are scripted, and the improv provides the depth and context for those jokes.

This post has gotten a little rambling and repetitive, but my point is this: I love improvisation in TV and film comedy. But what's good about it has very little to do with what makes those TV shows and movies funny. The funniest stuff tends to be planned out, which is why you need writers like Larry David or directors like Leo McCarey. But a good comedy needs more than laughs; it needs a sense that these are actual people, with lives and feelings and responsiveness to one another. And that's the element that improv can add.

Best Movie Theme Ever?

Random question to encourage reader participation: what's your favorite instrumental/orchestral theme from a movie (that is, non-vocal music)? Some movie scores don't have one big tune that's recognizable as the "theme," but it's fair to say that many if not most movie composers try to include one big melody that will define the picture. The themes for Star Wars or Kings Row or Superman (wait, they're all basically the same theme) stand for those movies in our heads; they are much more important to the image of the movies than, say, poster logos, which can change many times and be forgotten rather quickly.

I think I would pick David Raksin's theme from The Bad and the Beautiful. A long melody (it really just keeps going and going without a clear resolution, like musical perpetual motion) that's hauntingly beautiful but has that slightly unsettling edge that all Raksin's music has, it's the stand-in for the character of Jonathan Shields and the movie's attitude to Hollywood: tough but ultimately rewarding. Here is the final statement of the theme, from the closing scene -- as usual with Vincente Minnelli, all in one take -- and the closing credits (note that John Houseman, the producer, who'd worked on Citizen Kane, does something similar to Kane by showing clips of all the main actors at the end).

Don't Touch That Dial!

Somebody's uploaded a bunch of segments from the cult flop show that helped revive funny cartoons: The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse. Produced by Ralph Bakshi and involving the talents of John Kricfalusi, Eddie Fitzgerald, and many other now-familiar names, it revolutionized what a Saturday morning kids' cartoon could do in terms of experiments with design, adult-oriented humor, cartoony animation, and all the other stuff you hardly ever saw in the '80s. The show didn't succeed, but its influence is all over Ren and Stimpy and Tiny Toons and any other early-'90s comedy cartoon you can name.

This is one of the best cartoons from the show, "Don't Touch That Dial." It was written by Tom Minton, who went on to write a number of similar cartoons for Warner Brothers (like the great "Toby Danger" segment from Freakazoid); it's a rather vicious parody of television animation, taking shots at not only the obvious targets of Saturday Morning TV (Scooby-Doo) but also more respected shows like Rocky and Bullwinkle. It also mocks the kids in the audience, and even The Adventures of Mighty Mouse itself.

Betty Comden

Betty Comden, of Comden and Green, died a few days ago. Here's the New York Times obituary.

Time,
I'm just taking my time,
I'm just strolling along
While the world's on the run.
I
Once went hurrying by,
Never hearing a song,
Never seeing the sun.
What a surprise,
When I opened my eyes,
There was sunlight and skies,
And beginning that day
I discovered a world,
Such a wonderful world,
Every day is Thanksgiving
Now that I'm living
My way.
-- Betty Comden and Adolph Green, Subways Are For Sleeping (1962)

Paul Harrison's Prescience

Here's something else I posted on a message board earlier but am only getting around to reproducing here. I searched Newspaperarchive.com to see if there was any press coverage of the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies while they were still in production; as expected, there wasn't much. But I did find one entertainment journalist who was singing the praises of these cartoons before anyone else. This would be Paul Harrison, whose syndicated entertainment column (for "XEA Service Inc.") appeared in some of the smaller newspapers. I know nothing else about the guy; I don't know how well-known he was or if he was considered particlarly good. All I know is that in 1937, before Daffy Duck was known to anyone, before Bugs Bunny, he was writing an article about how good the Leon Schlesinger/Warner Brothers cartoons were. The article, dated July 3, 1937, also goes into various details about how animated cartoons are made. Plus it features Schlesinger predicting doom for Walt Disney's crazy idea of making an animated feature -- a common view at the time.

An animated cartoon factory is a much quieter place, and more efficient, than an ordinary movie studio. Without bellowing assistant directors and bleating players, life is pleasanter, if more purposeful.

It didn't take long for the animators to introduce machine-like efficiency into their realm of pure fantasy. I used to think that all such films were turned out painstakingly, picture by picture, by a lot of busy little gnomes named Disney, sitting cross-legged in a grotto somewhere.

Instead of that, the pen-and-ink and water-color epics represent just about the highest development of the unit system of production in Hollywood.

There are budgets and shooting schedules and production charts. There are producers and directors and art directors and story departments. From inception to preview, each picture has its own full staff of executives and technicians.

The man who makes the most animated pictures is Leon Schlesinger, a veteran showman who has been in practically all branches of the stage and movie business, but who can't draw a straight line.

In 1930, when he had a prosperous little studio turning out titles and trailer ads and such, Jack Warner suggested making cartoon films.

So Schlesinger started "Merry Melodies [sic]" with a staff of 36 people. Now he has two studios, a staff of 170 workers, and a payroll of nearly a third of a million dollars a year.

This year he will make 20 Merry Melodies in color and 16 Looney Tunes in black and white. That's twice the number of cartoon shorts issued annually by Disney.

Schlesinger is a pleasant, solid man who reminds you a little of Hal Roach. He likes his work and gets a kick out of his own pictures, although with a modesty that is particularly non-Hollywood he says he's just a businessman, and acclaims the artistry of Disney.

As a businessman, though, he doubts that full-length cartoon features ever will make money. Disney has 575 employees and will spend nearly $1,000,000 producing "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs."

Schlesinger's current pride is Porky, a pig that stutters.

"I discovered Porky two years ago," he said. "We had a picture about a schoolroom, and the pupils were a cat, a turtle, an owl, and all sorts of animals, including a pig. Well, the minute we saw that pig we knew we had something. It was just like spotting a promising personality among the extras or bit players in a regular movie. So we got busy and gave Porky screen tests and changed him a little in developing his character. And now he stars in 16 pictures a year, the 'Looney Tunes.'

A stuttering character actor does the Porky dialog for a recording; then the record is speeded up so that the voice is about an octave higher when it reaches the film. Before they attained acting prominence, Rochelle Hudson and Jane Withers worked for Schlesinger, dubbing in their voices for those of cartoon characters.

Hollywood has scores of people capable of imitating voices, and the producer never has any trouble finding talent for impersonating, in sound, the Crosbys, Stepin Fetchits, Garbos and other celebrities whom he frequently satirizes in "Merry Melodies."

If you saw "Coocoonut Grove" you'll recall that Katharine Hepburn was caricatured as a horse. Schlesinger has heard that she was delighted with the impudence and went to see the picture three times.

In cartoon shorts, he explained, the animators are the real actors. They're the artists who sketch the action and the expressions of the characters, and they work from complicated scripts, or charts, plotted by the directors.

On these charts the notion of each scene is minutely described and a certain number of "frames," or individual pictures, is allotted for each bit of action. On the screen you see 24 of these frames a second.

Also on the animator's chart is written the dialog, divided into syllables and each syllable indicated for a certain group of pictures so that the characters' lip movements will synchronize perfectly, as though they're actually speaking.

In fact, the animators actually try to reproduce the true lip movements; they use themselves as models, looking into mirrors to see how certain sounds are formed.

After writing that column, Harrison didn't stop plugging the Schlesinger cartoons; two years later he wrote a short item on Schlesinger's attempt at a serious patriotic cartoon, "Old Glory," and in 1940 he raved about the Schlesinger studio's mix of live-action and animation in "You Ought to Be in Pictures."

With Walt Disney devoting his talents to features and allowing his short subjects to sag under artistic emphasis which neglects story values, I'm becoming still more of a fan for the Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies of Leon Schlesinger. The producer is one who believes that cartoons should be made just for laughs.

I've just previewed a Porky Pig and Daffy Duck vehicle called "You Ought to Be in Pictures" which is the first film in more than 20 years, as far as I know, to combine cartoon characters with real people. Of course the effects are many times better and different than away back in the days of the "Out of the Inkwell" series.

This isn't a series, anyway. Schlesinger never does a stunt more than once. It deals with the ambitions of Porky, who decides he'll quit cartoons for higher dramatic art -- maybe as Bette Davis's leading man.

He trots into Schlesinger's office, gets a release from his contract, drives to Warner's studio, eludes the gateman, crashes a busy sound stage, is tossed out on his ear and after some further disillusionments finds himself back at his old job and glad to be there.

All these things happen with the hand-drawn characters of Porky and Daffy mingling with normally photographed people and backgrounds. The process is too tricky for description.

Notice that bit at the beginning where Harrison says that he prefers WB's short subjects to Disney's. This is a normal enough sentiment nowadays, but it was close to blasphemy in 1940 to say that Schlesinger's factory was making better animated cartoons than Disney. It's often said that Manny Farber of The New Republic was the first "mainstream" journalist to make such claims for the WB shorts, but Harrison beat him to it by at least two years. Of course he attributes the cartoons to the producer, Schlesinger, rather than the directors; this was inevitable, because Schlesinger's name was more prominent on the cartoons than anyone. Still, Paul Harrison, whoever he was and whatever else he did, seems to have been ahead of the curve when it came to cartoons.

Flip Your Wings And Fly To Daddy

Because I'm just in another one of those Bob Fosse kinda moods:

Grudge Matches I'd Like To See: Apollo Creed vs. Clubber Lang

In honor of the upcoming Rocky Balboa, here's another Grudge Match I'd Like To See:

APOLLO CREED (Carl Weathers) vs. CLUBBER LANG (Mr. T). Rocky's most formidable opponents. Both of them beat Rocky once and got beaten by him once. (This is Apollo in his prime, not the wimpy Apollo who got killed by that Russian dude.) Who wins this battle of the Rocky also-rans?

Note On Comments

Haloscan for some reason stopped working with my blog, so I've switched back to regular Blogger comments. Note, however, that you don't have to sign in to a blogger account to comment; anonymous/pseudonymous commenting is fine and encouraged (I've done it, you've done it, go nuts).

Sonny, Sonny, Sonny, Sonny

Ah, that's more like it: Bosom Buddies, the complete first season, on DVD.

I have said my say about why I love Bosom Buddies in an earlier post. Shorter version:

a) Chris Thompson, the creator, was one of the most original and interesting sitcom writers to come out of the Paramount factory in that period; he came up with very strange and funny stories and off-kilter lines. He's never had a successful show -- his most recent creation was the memorably nasty cult series Action -- but his stuff is always worth seeing.

b) Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari were brilliant, improvising and ad-libbing like crazy and playing off each other impeccably; you don't often see great comedy teams on sitcoms -- usually everybody just kind of does their own thing -- but they were a true team.

c) The late Wendie Jo Sperber, as I wrote earlier, was successful in "turning what could have been a degrading, stereotypical role (the young overweight woman with an unrequited crush on the Peter Scolari character) into a very human and attractive character."

d) Holland Taylor is never less than great.

I actually think the second season was better than the first, because the dressing in women's clothes was de-emphasized. The original idea may have been to do a sitcom version of Some Like It Hot, but it quickly became apparent that Hanks and Scolari were funnier just doing their own thing in regular clothes; the drag gimmick actually detracted from what made them funny. But there's a lot of good stuff in the first season too.

One other thing about the show is that the pilot was shot on film, like all the other Paramount sitcoms of the era, but the series was shot on videotape. I don't know if they were trying to save money or if they decided that tape suited the series better -- but it did, in fact, suit the series better; tape made the show look looser, rougher and less cute than the other sitcoms from the Miller/Milkis/Boyett factory, making it a little more apparent that this wasn't Laverne and Shirley with guys.

No word on whether the DVD will use the original theme song, a cover version of "My Life" by Billy Joel, or the alternate theme song (with lyrics by Thompson) that was used in some syndication versions. Here's the original song, with the season 2 title sequence.



Update: I might as well re-post some of the Bosom Buddies quotes that someone else assembled on a message board. Few shows have had so many lines that make no sense out of context but are completely hilarious when you're watching:

"I was quite the bohemian at Vassar."

"It was a perfectly normal day at the Susan B. Anthony Hotel, except everyone had become the undead."

A bird with a hat - a very powerful aphrodisiac."

"I'll cherish this gift for...as long as it lasts. Does anyone have 15 'D' batteries?"

"But we were gonna live on Cheetos and develop respiratory infections!"

"What do you think of this piece here?...mm-hmm...uh-huh...It's the flag of Japan!!!"

"I ate my albino snake."

"Sven, you crazy Viking!"

"Mint donut?"

Altman

You've probably heard that Robert Altman died.

In his honor, the memorial service will feature three eulogists, all delivering their eulogies simultaneously.

One thing I admire about Altman is that even though he was an acclaimed auteur, he was an auteur who actually liked to work. A lot of directors, once they get famous, start getting so picky about projects that they let several years go between films, and wind up taking years to create a disappointing movie. Altman made a movie (sometimes two) every year; some of them were great, some of them were OK, some of them were terrible, but the upshot of it was that he wound up making more great/good movies than the directors who treat every project as the challenge of a lifetime. Moviemakers make movies; Altman didn't develop projects or shepherd properties through the production process -- he made movies. Lots of 'em.

Another thing I like about Altman is that, compared to the other directors who became famous in the '70s, he didn't seem to have the same kind of extravagance, either with budget (M*A*S*H isn't a favorite movie of mine, but it's impressive that it looks as good as it does as a low-budget movie shot entirely on the Fox backlot) or technique. He'd worked in episodic TV for years before he broke into features, and he sort of retained the lessons of episodic TV filmmaking: don't over-think things, don't take too long. When he does go for a really extravagant shot, it's sort of a joke, like the opening shot of The Player -- a parody of the way Hollywood movies will spend immense amounts of time and money on over-elaborate shots that nobody will notice, while neglecting the importance of a good story.