Choking Charlie

My second Anatomy of a Gag on Chaplin, edited by Stephen Horne, produced by Liz Helfgott, is up at Criterion. This one is one I’m very chuffed with, as I hone in on a recurring motif in Chaplin that nobody else, so far as I know, has analysed.

Here.

The Battle of the Exes

Got my copy of THE AWFUL TRUTH from Criterion — excitingly, I have a video essay on this one, dealing with Cary Grant’s development from stage tumbler to great light comedian. I can’t entirely account for why we decided to call it Tell Me Lies About Cary Grant, but something about the phrase just seemed to click.

   

Stephen Horne did his usual magnificent job editing, and Danny Carr once more stepped in to create a title sequence (see also Ants in Your Plants of 1942 on SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS and On Transcendental Style and Flatulence on GOOD MORNING). I tentatively suggested replacing the words in AWFUL TRUTH’s main title with our own text, a task that proved to be more complex than expected — Danny basically animated everything you see here, the hand that turns the pages being the only moving element retained from the original shot.

Danny’s a genius, Kind of like Cary Grant in that way.

Vampire Nightclub

If Max Schreck is looking a bit unusual above, that’s because I photographed him off the screen at The Hidden Door Festival’s BLADE event. I shall attempt to explain.

Hidden Door put on surprising and unusual events in empty buildings around Edinburgh. A bit like squatters, only they invite an audience. Flashback a week —

I’d given up going to the Filmhouse Quiz (second Sunday of the month) because I found the new quizmaster a bit inept. I felt bad for him, but after all I don’t go out at the weekend looking to feel bad for someone. If I want to cringe, I can stay home and think about my adolescence.

But there’s a NEW new quizmaster and I’d heard she was great and I went along and she was — and my team won, which doesn’t always happen. My kind of film trivia doesn’t always turn up in a film trivia quiz.

AND there was a special question with a special prize — there was a line of dialogue which turned out to be from BLADE, and BLADE is a very special film for team member Kim — she met her future husband Eg through their shared love of BLADE. So of course she recognized the line, won the prize, and it was free tickets to the Hidden Door event…

On the night, Kim got in touch as there were still a couple of tickets going spare. The Leith Theatre, site of the event, is only five minutes from out house, but Fiona had just set off for a nap, so I popped along myself, curious about the venue and the “immersive cinema experience” promised.

Not quite curious enough to stay. The show started at 7.30 but the movie itself… when? NOSFERATU was on when I arrived.

The disco lighting created lots of odd effects unimagined by Murnau. The pumping music did not exactly sync with the movie — it wasn’t intended as accompaniment, really — but I’ve heard worse attempts at scoring. And they’d really put a lot of effort and imagination into creating a vampire nightclub, including people playing vampires who prowled up and down or danced on podiums by the screen. It was all fine. I hate night clubs, but I was happy to have a beer, walk about, watch NOSFERATU for a bit…

NOSFRATU ended… I prepared for BLADE… and NOSFERATU began again. Of course they weren’t going to sync the start of one film to the end of the other. NOSFERATU was just screen-filler. They would start BLADE whenever.

The thing is, I don’t actually like BLADE, so having enjoyed the venue and seen a bit of NOSFERATU under unique circumstances, I left. The thought of being in a night club, even a vampire one, for an indeterminate period, was intolerable to me. I enjoyed what I’d had — would strongly recommend Hidden Door (it’s still running) to those who enjoy nights out — but it wasn’t really for me. And the reward for staying in the club would have been BLADE…

I warmed to Stephen Norrington at the time his debut, DEATH MACHINE, came out, because he did an interview saying “We are the generation that hates LONDON KILLS ME.” He was foursquare against gritty British social realism, which was the only flavour on sale at the time apart from heritage Merchant-Ivory stuff. I was with him. We might also have been the generation that hates DEATH MACHINE, I’m not sure — I never saw it.

BLADE had an impressive opening sequence, but one that invalidate the rest of the film — once you’d seen Wesley Snipes effortlessly kill a hundred vampires, there didn’t seem much point sticking around. Then Norrington made the autobiographical tortured genius film THE LAST MINUTE, which I haven’t seen, then THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN, oh dear. I recently learned that Sean Connery had been set to do a film with Milos Forman until his experience with Norrington made him retire instead. Another reason to dislike this loud mess.

Norrington hasn’t made a film since, which is pretty remarkable. Normally, you do a film of that size, and SOMEBODY will hire you again. There’s a story there, but a lot of disagreement about what it is…

From one party I heard that everybody on LOXG hated Norrington. He famously didn’t attend the premiere. Another friend bumped into Norrington and heard his side of it. He’d been treated abominably. My friend was totally convinced by his account. But it doesn’t take too much finagling to find a theory that would square both versions: possibly Norrington was being mistreated by the producers, and this made him hard to work with, and Connery loathes disorganisation, and Norrington wound up universally unpopular but it wasn’t originally his fault. I don’t know. But I do find it hard to forgive him for using up Sean Connery right before he would have made the Milos Forman film. We are the generation that hates THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN.