Talk and Slash

For the first time I’m in the esteemed Bright Lights Film Journal, with a piece co-authored by genius Daniel Riccuito. Subject: giallii!

Daniel is, believe it or not, the easiest and most agreeable of collaborators — typically he just gets in touch and says “I need a paragraph to get me from here to here.” I don’t usually read the bits I’m supposed to join up. This time, I seem to have wound up doing at least half the piece, but Daniel had to do a lot of hammering to get it coherent. The result — a lucid critical analysis of the form animated by the same fervid enthusiasm as the films themselves, and cutting deeper, I believe, than most accounts of the psychological impulses at play.

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Happy Actorday!

It’s Brando’s birthday! In celebration, Criterion are boosting an extract from my ONE-EYED JACKS video essay here.

Meanwhile, Daniel Riccuito, over at The Notebook, sings the praises of a MUCH more significant thespian — Dead End Kid Frankie Darro. I have contributed a few words, and as usual, readers are invited to see if they can separate my wheat from Danny’s other wheat.

The Face on the Cutting Room Floor

There’s a new article at The Notebook by Daniel Riccuito and me.

Here.

We’ve evolved a strange method of collaboration. Daniel pesters me on Facebook, asking for paragraphs, or thoughts or examples of cinematic phenomena he’s exploring. I’ll churn out a hundred words or so on the topic at hand, and he’ll simply drop the passages into his works in progress, occasionally, I presume, massaging the surrounding text to make it seamless, or seamless-seeming. Not easy, I suspect, for anyone to identify who wrote what.

Illustration: Allen Jenkins by Tony Millionaire