Sierra Prasada

I don’t think I’ve ever come across a person more incandescently delighted with his own life than fashion photographer Bill Cunningham, the charmingly eccentric figure profiled in Richard Press’s 2010 documentary.

Cunningham has worked for The New York Times since the late ’70s – and he appears to have ushered in a new era for the Gray Lady of taking photographs of celebrities without their permission – but he refused to take money from Details magazine on the argument that he was more free without it. Today’s voluntarily unpaid and underpaid workers may share his sentiment. From his own lips:

You see if you can’t take money, they can’t tell you what to do, kid. That’s the key to the whole thing. Don’t touch money. It’s the worst thing you can do.

When it comes to money, there’re really only two choices: Earn more or need less.

Image courtesy of Zeitgeist Films

Like most of my generation, I’ve grown up listening to the Beatles but not spent much time looking at them, perhaps because their images are about as omnipresent, and therefore as invisible, as wallpaper.

Martin Scorsese’s collage-like documentary undertakes an unstructured if roughly chronological walkabout through the life and music of the “quiet Beatle” George Harrison, Living in the Material World, but it’s so full of images of George, John, Paul and Ringo as to serve as a revelation for younger eyes.

The Beatles’ most fervent fans are said to have screamed so loudly that their voices drowned out the music, but since then, especially in the digital era, the opposite has happened – it is the spirit of the band as conveyed by words, melody and rhythm that has effectively broken loose from that material world. George would surely approve.

The New Yorker has a wonderful profile (abstract) of Pixar writer and director Andrew Stanton who’s making the leap from animation to live action with John Carter due out in spring of 2012. He makes some clip-worthy comments on writing and art.

Stanton on the triumph of the old studio system at Pixar:

[S]ome of the Pixarness we’re trying to spread at Disney is ‘It’s O.K. to not know, to be wrong, to screw up and rely on each other.’ Art is messy, art is chaos – so you need a system.

His ‘notes to self’:

Pinned to the crosspieces of his bookshelves are index-card reminders: ‘Inevitable but not predictable,’ ‘Conflict + contradiction,’ ‘How they choose is who they are,’ and in a different vein, ‘I don’t want success to follow me home.’

On the virtues of doing it fast, wrong and wholeheartedly:

Stanton’s precepts are often invoked at the studio [Pixar], particularly ‘Be wrong fast’ or ‘Fail early.’ He explains, “It’s like every movie is a kid, and no kid avoids puberty. Just dive through it – get that outline that should take three months done in one, so you get the inevitable bad stuff out of the way and have more time to plus the good stuff.’ Another Stantonism is ‘Do the opposite’: if a woman is going to spurn a marriage proposal, Stanton will open up the possibilities wondering, ‘What is he said yes?’ He urges writers proposing a fix for a balky scene to ‘finish the sentence’ – to follow their change’s consequences to the end of the movie, to insure that it works throughout. His byword, though, is not tactical but emotional. Pete Doctor, whose first directing job was ‘Monster’s, Inc.,’ says, ‘I thought the film was about clever ideas and bits, and Andrew kept saying, ‘What makes me care?”

And storytelling as detective work:

I’ve always felt you unearth story, like you’re on an archaeological dig. Stories tell you what they are – you don’t have a say in what bones you’re going to get, and when. You just have to have the intestinal fortitude to acknowledge, Oh, my stegosaurus, is actually a T. rex. The demon I’m chasing is, ‘Can I figure out what my story is before I run out of time?’

In the years leading up to 1914, Rudyard Kipling may have spoken out and waved the flag for what he believed to be a necessary and inevitable war (“What stands if freedom fall? / Who dies if England live?”), but he paid dearly for his own integrity. His own 18-year-old son, John, went off to war and died on his second day in France, after his father pulled strings so that he might “do his bit” as they both so clearly wanted him to. His eldest daughter Josephine had previously died of illness at age six. In the words of John’s mother, Carrie:

One can’t let one’s friends’ and neighbours’ sons be killed in order to save us and our son. There is no chance John will survive unless he is so maimed from a wound as to be unfit to fight. We know it and he does. We all know it, but we all must give and do what we can and live on the shadow of a hope that our boy will be the one to escape.

Kipling memorialized his son directly in the poem My Boy Jack and, indirectly if no less devastatingly, in another poem, The Children. The events surrounding John’s death also inspired writer-actor David Haig to write a play that has since been turned into a television film (now available on DVD). Despite one surviving daughter, Kipling would have no grandchildren, so his children’s stories would be read by other people’s children to their children.

The 2011 British remake of Wuthering Heights sets itself apart with casting that may be more faithful than creative, writes Steve Rose in the Guardian

Meanwhile, across the channel, the Museum of the Great War opens in Meaux, France, and focuses “less on the battles than on evoking the atmosphere of the war and its time”

Author Touré, writing in The New York Times dismisses the idea of a “post-racial America” as “a term for a concept that does not exist. There’s no there there.”

In The Master, Colm Tóibín images the particular discomfort a young Henry James might have felt on being forced to share a bed with another young man.

If that book became a movie, the filmed scene would almost certainly be exactly nothing like the above, even if the two would undoubtedly share (with a nod to James’ francophilia) a certain je ne sais quoi.

If you think of Houdini as a man of art, you also have to think of him as a man of science. As most artists in the past, he is always working at the edge of technological development…That’s why I think when you see interesting magic today, you have to think about films, imagination. That’s the continuation of Houdini’s legacy.
                                                                                                    -Vik Muniz, Artist

The San Francisco Contemporary Jewish Museum‘s exhibit on Houdini: Art and Magic finished last week, but you can still view highlights.

During his abbreviated lifetime, Harry Houdini (born Erik Weisz) gained international renown as a magician, performer and author, aided, no doubt, by his own considerable skill as a self-promoter and a time period that offered few alternatives to live performance.

Biographer Christopher Sandford writes that Houdini befriended author Arthur Conan Doyle during a brief period when they shared an enthusiasm for spiritualism; Houdini initially believed he might be able to speak with his deceased mother but his own gift for subterfuge made him naturally skeptical of séances.

He clashed with Conan Doyle and devoted himself to debunking spiritualism, most prominently with his 1924 book, A Magician Among the Spirits, and 1926 testimony before Congress.

Leave it to the magic of Hollywood to resurrect any friendship; media, after all, is just the plural of medium.

There’s no enticement quite like an artfully made movie trailer, and it doesn’t spoil the fun to get a better idea of how the pieces come together – and increasingly fly apart.

Film Historian Wheeler Winston Dixon helps NPR’s Monkey See put some of the classiest recent trailers in context:

“The shots are shorter and shorter and shorter, and more fragmented,” Dixon says. “There have been a number of studies that demonstrate that the average length of a shot in a film have been shrinking every single year, because audiences absorb information faster — and there’s also a sense that you don’t want to bore them.”

Click through to “The Art of Modern Movie Trailers” to view some trailers in a new light and learn some of the lingo. (The article doesn’t reference the above trailer for Midnight in Paris, but it’s a good mash-up of some of the techniques discussed.)

If you missed it: This New York Times Magazine slideshow makes it clear just how much thought went into a mere four minutes of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Full disclosure: Haven’t seen the movie but I sure do admire the original trailer.

Streep delivered this thoughtful, moving commencement address at Barnard in 2010, and she spoke with Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross this week.

Here’s an excerpt from Monday’s interview in which Streep discusses her experience filming The Iron Lady and the need for minimal yet transformative makeup:

It’s not about the audience. It’s all about fooling the other actors into believing that you are who you say you are. Because that’s hard, when you walk on set and it’s a big makeup job. And it makes it hard for them. And I take my entire performance from them, so if they don’t look at me and hate me appropriately or love me the way they’re supposed to or find, you know, an old face but see the young one underneath which is Jim Broadbent’s task as Dennis Thatcher, then I’m lost, I don’t have anything to go on because I can read that immediately in their eyes, you know?

Listen to the rest