“The movies are now old enough — we’ve had a century of movies — that you can actually look at a long period of time during which there has been interaction between the forms [of film and the novel]. And it has been both ways, and we tend to think of it only going one way, because there isn’t the specific act of adapting a film into a book. But there is, all the time, the more general act of writers being strongly influenced by things they’ve seen in movies, and wanting to do something like that in a book.”
Salman Rushdie discusses the the adaptation of novels into films, why free adaptations are better than strict adaptations (”infidelity is better,” he says, and after getting a laugh cites There Will Be Blood), the influence of film on his writing (including how his viewing of 8 1/2 influenced his writing of Midnight’s Children), why novelizations of films tend to be so wretched, and so forth.
One of the videos is here and the rest can be found in the related videos; there doesn’t seem to be any playlist as yet.
The David Lynch Foundation wrote us the other day to mention a delightful film they’re screening on the DLF.TV website until December 9th: Path Lights.
It’s a 22-minute short, based on a 2005 story by Tom Drury, about a voice actor who almost gets hit by a flying bottle one day — and then sets out to track down the culprit, much like the private eye in the cheesy detective novels he performs for an audiobook company. All in all a charming twist on the LA noir, written, directed, and produced by one Zachary Sluser, who appears to be getting off to a good start in the movies.
“His prose may often rest on a banality (“we like to feel superior to others. But our problem is that we’re not superior”) but his inner turmoil over such bland ideas, expressed with a post-adolescent intensity, is disarming.”
Ron Slate reviews the new book from actor, playwright and filmmaker Wallace Shawn, Essays. (Several months ago, we wrote about one of these essays, “Writing About Sex”.)
Total Film has published an installment of their regular feature “Movie by Movie,” about each one of Terry Gilliam’s films: “The Trials, the Tribulations, The Triumphs.” From Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Jabberwocky on to Time Bandits – about which there is an amazing story:
Gilliam was having a big argument with the studio about the ending, where the parents are blown up. The studio didn’t want exploding parents at the end of a movie. So he agreed to have a test screening in Fresno, with parents. But there was something wrong with the print, the sound was garbled, and it died altogether about a third of the way through. The test audience left, writing on their feedback cards that the one thing they liked most, was the ending — that is, they were relieved it was over! But the studio never found out the screening got botched, and so Gilliam got to keep his exploding parents.
Similar stories are given for Brazil, Baron von Munchausen, the Fisher King, Twelve Monkeys, Fear and Loathing, the Brothers Grimm, Tideland, and Doctor Parnassus.
Ed Ruscha, photographer of twenty-six affectless Standard gas stations in LA, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, and painter of words floating in space, with or without a setting, is the subject of a retrospective at London’s Hayward gallery, and the Times of London decided to ask David Lynch what he thinks of it. (Who better to ask, really?) Bottom line: “I like to think the California sun has burnt out all unnecessary elements in his work.” (more…)
Synth Britannia is a documentary about the emergence of British synth pop (trailer here), from the “sinister” 1971 Moog score for A Clockwork Orange to Depeche Mode, and the Telegraph has published an interesting review of the film.
First key quote: ” ‘We thought we were avant-garde,’ says Andy McCluskey of OMD, ‘but we were the future of pop.’ ”
Second key quote: “Today, electronic sounds dominate the charts. But we’ve domesticated the electricity that once sounded so exciting and packed it into little white computers. As Human League founder Martyn Ware says, the element of risk has gone and watching even the pioneering Kraftwerk on their last tour ‘was like watching four old guys checking their email’.”
For the next three days you can watch it over on the BBC4 website.
The Rumpus just published my review of Abel Ferrara’s documentary about the Hotel Chelsea in decline, Chelsea on the Rocks:
The Hotel Chelsea is legendary, with its century and more of history as New York City’s shelter for artists, actors, musicians, writers, filmmakers, dancers, and other eccentrics who have trouble paying their bills on time. More than legendary — the Chelsea is mythic. So much so, it’s almost hard to believe the place is not some novelist’s invention, some kind of exemplary fable about living the artist’s life in America: residents arrive too late and leave too soon (or the other way around), they fail, or maybe succeed, and they drink too much, and have sex with all the wrong people, and get addicted to drugs, and romances start and fizzle out and hearts are broken, and death, murder, and suicide haunt the corridors; but every day, they work on their art, whatever it be, and though most are destined for obscurity, the list of famous residents is long and awe-inspiring.
Recently I bought a copy of Farber on Film, and I’ve been flipping through it, sporadically reading here and there; last week I happened across his famous piece on Sunset Boulevard (1950). These lines and observations are fairly well-known, but they still hold up to re-reading. Check it out: (more…)
The Believer just published an interview by Sheila Heti with Agnès Varda, whose first film, La Pointe Courte (1954), is sometimes thought of as the first breaker in the nouvelle vague. Criterion just released a box set collecting 4 of Varda’s most influential films.
Contrary to what Heti writes, neither Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (aka the Gleaners and I) nor Deux ans après are included in that set. But they’re a wonderful pair of documentaries about scavengers and scavenging that I recommend you see. They were released in 2002 as a single DVD.
Early on in the first section, Varda talks about her motivations in 1954 for trying to make a strikingly different kind of film from what had gone before: (more…)
There’s an interview with Rudy Wurlitzer over at Chuck Palahniuk’s site; we recently reviewed his first novel, Nog. Although the introduction features some questionable vocab (Wurlitzer is said to be “imminently” readable, which I guess means he’s always about to be readable), the interview itself is interesting and worth checking out.
At one point Wurlitzer dismisses decades of reviews that peg Nog as a record of a drug trip — based upon no evidence whatsoever, I might add, apart from sales copy — and he describes his artistic aims really well. I recommend that bit of the interview.
But that’s not the part I want to quote. The part I’m going to present you is his story of introducing Bob Dylan to Sam Peckinpah. It involves semi-nudity, gunfire, and tequila. (Like many good stories in life.) Check it after the jump.
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JEREMYHATCH.COMConsisting of four blogs, wherein I write about the three arts in San Francisco that interest me most: film, words, and images. The fourth blog contains my public notes on other stuff.
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