He had to flog himself to finish “Atlas Shrugged”
Here is the Mike Wallace interview Buckley mentions. It was her first TV interview.
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•Hank Sartin of Time Out Chicago, Guy Maddin and Chaz Ebert at Ebertfest 2009.
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•Guy Maddin’s films look like no others I have ever seen, so why do they remind me of something? Why do they feel like I’ve seen them before? How do they remind me of memories I don’t have?
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I find them addictive. Taught myself a little French after finding them in my daily paper at Cannes. The Europeans love him, but many Americans may not have ever seen one of Herge’s pages. I wonder if the Spielberg film will inspire sales of the English editions.
Here are all the book covers:
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And yet, all the same, there is much to be said for Simon’s words. I understand where he’s coming from. I’m not in sympathy with where he’s going.
The goal, I suspect, is to encompass the whole range of good movies, and despise the unworthy ones. The complete film critic must be large; he must contain multitudes.
I had completely forgotten this experience. I marked Gene Siskel’s birthday on Saturday by tweeting links all day, and that shook some new discoveries out of the branches.
Thanks for the link to Jerry Taylor.
July 5th, 1981
The 1st Annual Sundance Festival
By Roger Ebert
Robert Redford’s experiment: a struggle for independents
Sundance, Utah–Up here above Provo, in the resort he has carved out of a little mountain meadow, Robert Redford is conducting an experiment that Hollywood regards with a mixture of suspicion and curiosity. He has selected 10 low-budget films that are in the middle-to-late stages of preparation and invited their directors to spend the summer at Sundance working on their scripts in the company of established directors, writers and editors.
On the surface, this seems like an admirable and uncomplicated idea, a cinematic summer camp at which you bring home a screenplay instead of a woodcarving and an Indian belt. But the movie industry is not so sure. Rumors float around that Redford is starting his own studio, that his dream is to be a major producer of independent features, that just as Francis Ford Coppola wants his own major Hollywood studio, so does Redford want his own mini-¬studio here on the mountain he is developing.
The truth is apparently somewhere in be¬tween. Redford says he has no desire to produce personally any of the movies that are under construction at Sundance. But he might hope that eventually the Sundance Institute, a non¬profit foundation headquartered here, will be¬come a clearinghouse for independent film¬makers working outside the studio system. There are countless summer writers’ workshops nestled away in the wilds of Vermont and Iowa – why not a workshop for filmmakers?
There is one difference: The filmmakers at Sundance did not pay to attend. After their projects were selected from more than 100 entries, they were invited to settle down in residence here at the expense of Redford’s institute and several foundation grants. The facilities are spartan. The filmmakers are guests in several condo-cabins squirreled away in the hills above Sundance. Meals are served buffet¬-style in the small lodge building, and movies are scrutinized in a garage that has been converted into a screening room. There are videotape facilities at Sundance, and some of the film¬makers are conducting trial runs of their mate¬rial by taping some of their scenes.
None of the footage shot at Sundance will turn up in the finished films. It’s all preparation, rehearsal and deep thought up here, reflecting Redford’s personal belief that independent fea¬tures will not make greater inroads at the American box office until they are (hold your breath) of higher quality.
This is probably true. Most independent American films are made on very low budgets (from a rock bottom of $20,000 for “The Whole Shootin’ Match”, through a middle range, of $75,000 for “Return of the Secaucus Seven”, up to a high of $1.2 million for “Heartland”). Most of them lack well-known actors, although very occasionally a famous actor will lend himself to a project. Most of them have limitations on locations, special effects, costumes, period de¬tails and scenery – because film is the most expensive art form except for grand opera.
But most of all, Redford believes, most of them could benefit from more intensive pre¬production work – things like script revision, close analysis of the story, and an occasional pointed question about the worth of it all. Because independent filmmakers are often the only people who believe in their projects (or even care about them), they are sometimes inclined to treat a film as a crusade rather than as a work in progress.
This first summer at Sundance is highly tentative. Redford and his associates say they are uncertain about exactly what they hope for from the experiment. “We started this with no rigid expectations,” Redford said over lunch in his small office at Sundance. “They say I’m starting my own studio, I’m challenging the studios… Actually, I have no idea what this will turn out to be. I know that it’s getting increasingly hard to get a movie well distributed in this country unless it has the potential to make millions of dollars. I think these projects here have a lot of promise, and I guess the idea is that they’ll turn out better if the filmmakers have the opportunity to work on them with some experienced professionals.”
Independent filmmakers got a boost here in Utah three years ago with the founding of the U.S. Film and Video Festival, which is held every January in another ski resort, Park City, and specializes in independently produced fea¬tures. Now maybe Sundance will help generate independent films to be shown at Park City.
The problem, however, is not getting a new low-budget movie shown in Park City. The problem is getting it shown anywhere else. Two weeks ago, as part of his summer-long institute, Redford held a weekend conference of most of the major exhibitors and distributors of “specialized” films – a category that includes independent U.S. features, foreign films, “art films,” cult films, revivals and almost anything else that isn’t a big-budget, first-run standard Hollywood production.
Most of the independent exhibitors and dis¬tributors accepted Redford’s invitation, and it was astonishing, seeing them all together in the same place, to realize how few of them there were. The big studios and the big movies dominate play dates on most of the nation’s movie screens, and there are only a handful of houses in most cities that will even consider booking a “specialized” film. Some 45 theater owners, bookers and distributors sat in the bright sunlight in the meadow at Sundance and agreed, almost without discussion, that:
-There are only seven or eight cities in North America in which a “specialized film” can get a decent booking and have any chance of a good run. They are New York, Boston, Washington, Chicago, Toronto, Los Angeles, San Francisco and, surprisingly, Seattle, which is the best city in the country to open a movie that’s out of the ordinary.
-College campuses used to supply large audi¬ences for foreign, art and underground movies, but these days the kids go for action blockbust¬ers like “The Empire Strikes Back”, just like everybody else.
-Big chains are completely uninterested in booking offbeat films. Like supermarkets, they’re concerned only with the turnstile. Chains with four- or six-screen multiplex the¬aters don’t even consider booking one of the screens with specialized films.
-Unless it’s a rare breakthrough like “La Cage Aux Folies”, foreign films are up against a wall at the American box office. There are only about 100 theaters in America that will book a serious, subtitled film, even if it’s by Ingmar Bergman or Federico Fellini.
-There is still a market for specialized films among local and campus film societies, but the backbone of that market, rental of movies in 16-mm. prints, is being under-minded by the widespread and illegal practice of videotaping movies and then showing them on video cas¬settes instead of renting them again. (Almost every campus in the country rips off films that way, it was agreed; even, though they’re break¬ing the law.)
-Exhibitors talked about the “strong want¬-to-see” factor that fuels blockbuster hits like “Superman II”, contrasting it with the curious “desire not to see” that handicaps specialized films. The average moviegoer is under 25. Ten or fifteen years ago, young moviegoers were more enthusiastic about offbeat, anti-establishment independent and foreign films. Now they are much more conformist. More sophisticated big-¬city teen-agers who once attended films by Jean-Luc Godard have now regressed to the level of “Friday the 13th, Part II”. Today’s young filmgoers have a herd instinct and are reluctant to take a chance. In a sense, they “wear” movies like they wear clothes, attend¬ing a movie that their fashion-sense suggests will look good on them.
The outlook, everyone agreed, was gloomy. Various alternatives looked just as, gloomy. Public television stations like New York’s WNET have attracted large audiences for prime-time telecasts of quite esoteric indepen¬dent films, but TV exposure, an exhibitor complained, removes the aura of a “special event” that a movie must have for a theatrical booking.
The brightest ray of hope at Sundance came from Seattle, where there are 13 theaters successfully showing specialized films. (By contrast. Chicago has only two first-run houses, the Biograph and the Sandburg, two showcase operations in Facets and the Film Center, occasional specialized bookings at the Three Penny, and several reper¬tory theaters.) Seattle used to be a lousy town to open an art film – everyone agreed – and the secret to its success was creative exhibition. Audiences were lovingly nurtured, leafleted, mailing-listed and cajoled. Lacking effective coming-attractions trailers, some exhibitors sim¬ply got up with a microphone and told their audiences what was coming next week, and what they thought about it.
No firm conclusions were reached at Sun¬dance. Various visionary schemes were suggest¬ed to establish a national support network for independent features – but without a steady supply of good movies in the pipeline, it would have trouble supporting itself. Success stories were recited about the few breakthrough films like “Secaucus Seven”, “A Woman Under the Influence”, “Penitentiary”, “Gal Young Un” and a handful of foreign hits. Everyone agreed that if there were more good films, there would be larger audiences. But statements like that tend¬ed to lead into winsome silences.
Meanwhile, up in the hills in their cabins, Sundance’s filmmakers-in-residence were work¬ing on their scripts. They were consulting every day with experienced professionals such as director Sidney Pollack (“They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?”), screenwriter Waldo Salt (“Midnight Cowboy”), cinematographer Caleb Des¬chanel (“The Black Stallion”) and actress Amy Robinson (“Mean Streets”). Would 10 really fine independent films come from their labors? Maybe. Maybe five. At least it is a noble experimentt
¶
I was there before the Beginning, in January 1981, for the third annual Park City Film and Video Festval. I wrote Sundance before it was Sundance .
Spike Jones – I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy by perruche
My Great Movie review of Yankee Doodle Dandy, which won James Cagney an Oscar.
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When Harry Met Sally 2 with Billy Crystal & Helen Mirren from Billy Crystal
Surely one of the web’s funniest sites is Funny or Die. .
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Internet Scout: Larry J. Kolb
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Laserdiscs were new. Pan-and-scan was popular. The idea of watching a movie at home was catching on. Siskel & Ebert had an important influence in some areas, and we led the charge against pan-and-scan and colorization, and praised the idea of letterboxing, which has become standard. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen! Thank you very much!
Some 200 of my TwitterPages are linked at the right.
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Edited by Marie Haws, Club SecretaryFrom Roger Ebert: Club members receive the complete weekly Newsletter. These are abridged and made public on the site three weeks later. To receive the new editions when they’re published, annual dues are $5. Join here.From The Grand Poobah: Reader Steinbolt1 writes in: “Mark Mayerson has been putting together mosaics of all the scenes from specific Disney
animated films, and is currently working through Dumbo. Each scene has
the specific animator(s) who worked on the film listed above it. This is
my favorite post on Dumbo, so far:
Mayerson on Animation: Dumbo Part 5
“The only humans we’ve seen previously are in sequence 3. They are all white and wearing uniforms that clearly mark them as circus employees. When we get to this sequence, the only humans we see are black. As they are disembarking from a railroad car, we know that they are also employees, but they don’t get uniforms. The roustabouts are the ones who do the heavy lifting, regardless of the weather. Why aren’t the rest of the employees helping? I guess the work is beneath them. Let’s not forget that the circus wintered in Florida, at the time a Jim Crow state.” – Mark Mayerson; animator, writer, producer, director, Canadian.
The Wrap’s full coverage of the 2013 Sundance winners.
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I met her so very long ago, in 1967
“You get all kinds, Liza Minnelli said. “A couple of days ago I was interviewed by a guy from the Los Angeles underground press. He didn’t exactly ask me what I ate for breakfast. He came in with this tape recorder, and the funny thing was, he kept stopping the machine every time he’d ask a question and then start it for my answer. So it must have sounded like a long speech by me, babbling away about the universe.”
What about the universe?
“A large topic,” Liza grinned. “No, what he did ask was, how could I justify appearing on the Hollywood Palace since I was a member of the Movement.”
The Movement?
“The Movement,” Liza said. “I guess my last album gave the Movement the idea I was a recruit. So he asked, in which direction is the Movement moving? So I said it’s moving toward Truth. He started his tape recorder and looked happy.
“But I really wasn’t in his bag. I’m afraid of LSD, for example – scared to death of it. I don’t particularly care what other people do, although these 14-year-old kids saying they’ve found essential reality is, well, a little frightening. I don’t want to live in a world of high. And then, suppose you took LSD and found out horrible things about yourself? Some people should keep those doors closed . . . “
Liza is a small, bright, pleasant girl with astonishingly appealing eyes. The eyes remind you of her mother, Judy Garland, and some of her singing style comes from that quarter as well. But not too much. She has nurtured her own talent since, at age 15, she played Anne Frank in a company touring Israel. She had an off-Broadway debut at, 17, won a Tony at 19, was an established concert star at the same age, and now at 22 is receiving warm reviews for her role in Albert Finney’s new movie, “Charlie Bubbles.”
She will give a concert next Saturday night in the Auditorium Theater, but that was not the reason for this Chicago visit.
She came for a long weekend with her husband, Peter Allen. He and brother Chris, arriving from Australia like two jolly swagmen a few years ago, are having a considerable success at Mister Kelly’s. So she watched their act (“Listen to this key change,” she whispered during “We’re Off to See the Wizard”) and then jumped in a cab with Peter to dance at Maxim’s between shows. “We think it’s important to be together as much as possible,” Liza said.
All the same, she confessed, there will probably never be an act featuring Peter, Chris and Liza, “We’ve tried singing together a couple of times, but our voices aren’t compatible,” she said. “We sound like the Sons of the Pioneers.”
The chance to appear in “Charlie Bubbles” was a surprise. She was singing in London a year ago and met director Karel (“Morgan”) Reisz. He recommended her to Finney who picked her for the movie “and now supposedly I’m a dramatic actor,” she said. “Isn’t that crazy? When I wanted a dramatic role, everybody kept coming up with musicals. So new I’ve finally played a dramatic part, and I want to do a musical, and everybody has more straight roles.”
What kind of a musical?
“I have an idea. Just an idea. You could do ‘The Fantasticks,’ only do it outside, out in the fields in Italy or Spain, maybe. Do it strangely, the way it’s written. Maybe steal from the style of Fellini’s ‘La Strada.'”
That makes it sound like a different breed from the MGM musicals her mother made famous: “The Wizard of Oz,” “Till the Clouds Roll By,” “Easter Parade” and all the others.
“Yes, I guess so,” Liza said, “But mother doesn’t give me any advice, all the same. She doesn’t believe in it. She says she trusts me. That’s a good feeling.”
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Marie Haws found this cartoon for the latest issue of the Ebert Club Newsletter. She writes: “It’s by the British cartoonist/animator behind the Daily Express’ cartoon strip “Bewley.” Ant Blades has designed a series of clever shorts for BBC Comedy and various commercial clients under the signature “Sketchy” as produced by Bird Box Studio, an indie animation house in London, England.” Marie is herself an artist and animator.
Go here to join the 6,000 subscribers to The Ebert Club Newsletter. Your subscription directly supports the Far-Flung Correspondents and the Demanders (critics of On Demand videos) on my site.
Go here for the New Yorker’s article about Apollo Robbins.
Here’s my Great Movies review of Robert Bresson’s “Pickpocket.”
Here’s my review of the 1993 James Coburn movie “Harry in Your Pocket.
Dead Wife And Kids Replaced By Miniature Horses
Two segments for an unaired pilot taped by Welles in 1979
Thanks for the links to Pablo Villaça, my Far-Flung Correspondent from Brazil.
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Walt Kelly remains in my mind the greatest of all creators of daily comic strips. Yes, greater than Charles Schultz, because Pogo’s Okefenokee Swamp was considerably larger than the Peanuts landscape, his characters were sometimes wicked animal versions of politicians, and his drawing was so delightful.
Pogo has become immortal for a single line:
And here’s an example of one of the many theoretical and philosophical conversations that went on in Pogo’s neighborhood. [ Click to enlarge ]
Comments are open.
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