Roll Credits

lester credits from David Cairns on Vimeo.

The last of the deleted scenes from PICTUREWISE 3, my Richard Lester piece. Ending with an unmade film seemed too similar to the first installment (available on the Blu-ray of A HARD DAY’S NIGHT).

Images are from Bob Willoughby’s The Platinum Years, which Lester recommended highly as about the best set of movie stills he’d seen. I picked the book up in Toronto and scanned the relevant pages on PETULIA.

I somehow got the impression from Lester’s impassioned description of Joseph Conrad’s VICTORY — which lays emphasis on aspects that are lightly brushed over in the screenplay he commissioned from Pinter — that the book has a real personal significance for him. Without speculating on what that is (the dollarbook Freud approach), I thought illustrating it with images of Lester would be a suitably oblique approach, having rejected the idea of using lots of stills of book jackets, illustrations etc…

UK: A Hard Day’s Night: 50th Anniversary Restoration [Blu-ray]

US: A Hard Day’s Night (Criterion Collection) (Blu-ray + DVD)

PICTUREWISE III

Mister Beewees

When Timo Langer, boy editor, and I completed the first cut of PICTUREWISE 3 (here), the sequel to the two-part video essay on A HARD DAY’S NIGHT, it was about fifteen minutes long. Criterion suggested that ten minutes would be a better length for online content (maybe the standards were set by YouTube’s original upload limits; at any rate, people prefer shorter clips), so we made some trims. But I preserved the deleted scenes so I could empty my trim-bin all over Shadowplay.

The first bit we deemed snippable is an amusing story from the production of THE THREE MUSKETEERS, which besides its humorous content shows how money gets wasted on films. Lester, being a socially responsible chap, was always tormented by this. “You think — I’m wasting hospitals here!”

lester beewees from David Cairns on Vimeo.

The Three Musketeers/The Four Musketeers (Two-Movie Collection)

Something I didn’t realize: my Lester video essay is also on the UK Blu-ray of A HARD DAY’S NIGHT from Second Sight — A Hard Day’s Night: 50th Anniversary Restoration [Blu-ray]

Picturewise 3

Using bits of my Richard Lester interview I couldn’t incorporate into PICTUREWISE, the two-part piece I made for Criterion’s A HARD DAY’S NIGHT disc, editor Timo Langer and I have made a sequel, PICTUREWISE III. Since the first part concentrated on A HARD DAY’S NIGHT and what led up to it (The Goon Show, the Buster Keaton influence, IT’S TRAD DAD) and the second part mainly portrayed the sixties films, this piece looks at the seventies and eighties work, which REALLY needs re-assessed and appreciated.

Parts one and two are narrated by Rita Tushingham (wow!) but for this third part you have to settle for me.

You can see it here.

Parts 1 and 2 are on the DVD: A Hard Day’s Night (Criterion Collection) (Blu-ray + DVD)