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

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Vegetable Magnetism

By Daniel Riccuito with David Cairns

Art by Tony Millionaire

Vengeance is a tool for the powerless.

And what better revenge could a 1930s movie-going public muster than the absurdist act of turning stars into nourishment?  Take that vision of hate and spittle, Ned Sparks, pulling faces never before seen on the front of a human head. Sparks was the Great Depression’s favorite specialty item: a purple carrot.

Arguably a sweet onion, Frank McHugh had bone-weary audiences drooling in the aisles.

John Litel made a fine rutabaga.

Hand-carved parsnip, Edward Everett Horton, gave our pre-Code vegetable garden nuance.  But mainly we craved cartoon food — entertainment that mixed problem-solving and problem-salving for a seventy-five to eighty-minute span. We liked excitable, doughy screen personas as stand-ins that brought our truth to new lows.

Coming Soon!

Pat O’Brien as Spud.

Mug Shots

Art by man-myth Tony Millionaire graces a new article at MUBI, co-authored by Daniel Riccuito (of The Chiseler) and I. Subject: the pre-code avatars of, respectively, slopeyness and pointyness, Allen Jenkins and Ned Sparks. Here.