Projections

For those of you missing the big screen experience, particularly the celluloid or celluloid-derived kind, I can wholeheartedly recommend lying on your back outdoors when it’s snowing. The white sky becomes a great screen, animated by manic granular white-on-white activity. A bit like the whites in Jim Jarmusch’s STRANGER THAN PARADISE, blown up from 16mm so the grains are like golfballs.

If you turn your face into the wind so the flakes are bombing right at you, it’s a 3D movie.

Of course, I wouldn’t recommend doing it for the full ninety minute feature length. It’s strictly a one-reel experience.

Another form of projection became familiar to all of us in the Trump era: the way he would accuse his enemies of doing exactly what he was doing, so that you could pretty reliably deduce his undiscovered crimes from the things he said about opponents.

Now on my second documentary feature (finishing tomorrow) and it increasingly seems to me that whenever we talk about other people, we’re talking about ourselves. Nearly all my interviewees offered concise self-portraits when asked to talk about the subject of the film. The implications are slightly alarming, not least for me, since I spend most of my time on here talking about other filmmakers, including bad ones…

Above: just about the only frame of the new film I can safely reveal.

The Cleveland Blues

I’m in Billy Wilder Land, for professional reasons (but also for pleasure).

In the case of THE FORTUNE COOKIE, that takes me to Cleveland.

Remarkable how this blackish comedy can looking so much like a bleak European art movie. Partly it’s the b&w coupled with widescreen which pushes thing further away/puts more space around them. But partly I think it’s Cleveland.I’ve never been there, but the place has kind of grey associations for me, based solely on Harvey Pekar’s comic strips, and partly from the scene in Jim Jarmusch’s STRANGER THAN PARADISE where the protags decamp to Ohio and find the city to be an ICY, HOWLING WHITE VOID. If I recall aright, the credits actually claim the film was shot partly on location there, but they might as well have overexposed a shot in a studio against an infinity curve while holding the mic next to a hair dryer.

So those are my mental images for Cleveland: Robert Crumb cross-hatching and howling white voids.I doubt if the place is that bad. I’d be happy to live in one of these houses, if there were a bus route nearby.As for football stadia… well, I know intellectually that people like sport, though I can’t quite see why, but does anyone consider the stadium an attractive thing in its own right? Wilder adds greatly to his film’s melancholy by staging the resolution on a deserted football field (or “green,” as I believe it’s called). With the cleaners looking on.é

Some critics at the time took the film as a sign that Wilder was getting soft…

I like the music — maybe Andrew Preview Andre Previn’s best film score? Walter Matthau’s theme sounds a bit like the later ODD COUPLE, but as if his character of Whiplash Willie Gingrich had sort of sidled up to that score and corrupted it by mere proximity.

Warren William Looks At Cleveland

Sorry, Cleveland.

(From GOODBYE AGAIN, directed by Michael Curtiz)

I have no idea what Cleveland is actually like. I was kind of introduced to the concept of Cleveland by Jim Jarmusch’s STRANGER THAN PARADISE, in which the municipality is seen as a wintry white void, in which the only perceptible detail is the 16mm film grain. Then I read some Harvey Pekar comics. Most of the artists weren’t too great, but when Robert Crumb drew Cleveland you got the sense of a fairly dingy burg. I think something about cross-hatched pen-and-ink makes cities looks kind of depressing. Victorian prints of London are depressing, although also beautiful and dramatic.

Warren William, meanwhile, with his starving lion’s face, having fallen into neglect (the actor and the face), is back in the Jungian unconscious thanks to regular TCM screenings of his spicy pre-code work. How could something this good slip out of film history?