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.

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.

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”.)

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.

Ruscha has always insisted: “My pictures are not that interesting, nor is the subject matter. They are simply a collection of facts.”

“I think that’s baloney,” Lynch says with a laugh. Well, Spam, perhaps. Before Ruscha, such objects — words, gasoline stations, street frontages — were not seen as interesting. Now, because of him, we can see even gasoline stations as having “angles, colours and shapes, like trees”, as the artist has put it, capable, in his hands, of epic re-presentation.

The article is mostly a quick summary of Ruscha’s career, but Lynch’s reflections are pretty interesting too. Link.

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 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.

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The story … amounts to a morbid liaison between the “talkie” and silent film world, with Swanson doing a lot of ear-bending with a voice like a hollow stone wall, while Holden does an unemphatic version of the best silent-film pantomime. The tragedy inherent in his gigolo setup with the ex-star is largely muffed because the Brackett-Wilder combination — vague about the sunset period of an actress’s life — entwines Holden with a cliche of the frustrated middle-aged artiste and drenches them both in gimmicks and weird atmosphere.

And another fantastic passage:

The cold, mean Sunset Boulevard — a beautiful title, though I suspect it was shot on another boulevard — is further proof of the resurgence of art in the Hollywood of super-craftsmen with insuperable taste. American film makers have suddenly learned how to make movies work as plastically as Mondrian paintings, using bizarre means and gaucherie, with an eye always on the abstract vitality produced by changing pace, working a choppy sentence against a serene image, extravagant acting against quiet. In this gimmick-ridden Sunset a corpse talks. The improbability bothers me less than the fact that he over-talks, explaining action … that explains itself with a morbid realism about American scene.

Possibly my favorite lines:

The movie is stultified by spectacle, novelistic development, and a slow dismemberment of the human beings that are strictly from Von Stroheim’s day. It is hard to find any logic or life in Swanson’s grotesque because the director is too busy building baroque furniture for both her and her ménage. The illogicality of her mausoleum-like mansion, moldering outside while one butler keeps the inside jungle of rococo spotless, is less stultifying than the eclectic worship of forebodingly cluttered shots and dated insights about contaminated life.

After reading all this, of course I had to pick up Sunset Boulevard at the library. I guess I’ll watch it again mid-week.

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:

When I saw what painting had done in the last thirty years, what literature had done — people like Joyce and Virginia Woolf, Faulkner and Hemingway — in France we have Nathalie Sarraute — and paintings became so strongly contemporary while cinema was just following the path of theater. Theater! I mean, psychology and drama and dialogue and making sense! At that time, when I started, in the ’50s, cinema was very classical in its aims, and I thought, I have to do something which relates with my time, and in my time, we make things differently.

And of The Gleaners, she says:

I wanted to catch the problem of consumption, waste, poor people eating what we throw away, which is a big subject. But I didn’t want to become a sociologue, an ethnographe, a serious thinker. I thought I should be free, even in a documentary which has a very serious subject. It made me feel very good that I could investigate a certain way of doing documentaries in which I’m present — I’m myself — knowing I’m doing a documentary and speaking with the people, telling them I have a bed, that I can eat every day, but I would like to speak to you.

And on the subject of why be a filmmaker — why write, if you will — she says she wants to:

share a lot of ideas — not ideas — emotions, a way of looking at people, a way of looking at life. If it can be shared, it means there is a common denominator. I think, in emotion, we have that. So even though I’m different or my experiences are different, they cross some middle knot. It’s interesting work for me to tell my life, as a possibility for other people to relate it to themselves — not so much to learn about me. There’s nothing special.

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.

After Two-Lane Blacktop I was hired to write Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid for Sam Peckinpah. As I was finishing the script, Bob Dylan came over to my apartment on the Lower East Side and asked if maybe he could be involved as he had always felt connected to Billy the Kid, implying that maybe he was a reincarnation of the famous outlaw. I called the producer who was thrilled at the thought of a Bob Dylan score and suggested that I write Dylan a part and then fly to Mexico to meet Sam who was busy with pre-production. We arrived in Durango late one evening and immediately went out to see Sam, who was living outside of town. As we approached the house there was a gunshot from inside, followed by a terrified maid running out the front door. Hesitating, we stepped inside as another shot rang out from upstairs. I called out for Sam, but there was no sound, no answer. Fearing the worst, we crept upstairs. At the end of the hall we found Sam in his bedroom standing half-naked in front of a smashed full length mirror staring at his shattered image, a pistol in one hand and a bottle of tequila in the other. “Hi, Sam,” I finally managed to mumble. “This is Bob Dylan. He wants to be in the film. I’ve taken the liberty of writing a part for him.” After a long pause, Sam turned, slowly looking Dylan over before he replied, “I’m a big Roger Miller fan myself.” After another long silence, Dylan and I left and I was sure that was the end of it. But amazingly Dylan was thrilled by this meeting with the old outlaw film director, and from then on became an important part of the film, writing one of the all time great scores as well as playing the part of Alias, a mysterious member of Billy the Kid’s gang.