I imagine that interviewing Clint Eastwood is no easy task, for although the respected actor and director may appear open and charming, relaxed and good-natured, with a disarming modesty and a facility to talk, Eastwood rarely, if ever, reveals anything about himself.

Norman Mailer discovered this when he interviewed Eastwood on the set of Sudden Impact. The paucity of quotable material saw Mailer cleverly pad out his article with an imaginary conversation between himself and a dinner guest discussing the actor’s merits.

I watched this documentary The Man With No Name when it first aired on the BBC back in 1977. I enjoyed it. I was an Eastwood fan, and had seen most of his movies and read all the film-tie-in books for Dirty Harry, Magnum Force, the Spaghetti Westerns, and so on. But a part of me was slightly disappointed that I had learned no more about Clint Eastwood than what I had already gleaned from the characters he played on the screen—those solitary men united by a belief that one individual can make a difference, even against the most preposterous of odds. It’s an American ideal, and certainly appealed to this young Scot, who had been raised on a culture of collective responsibility and shared endeavor.

Yet, there was something about Eastwood’s tales of filming and homespun wisdom I found unsatisfying.

“Just keep grinding, until the talent, the hard work, the effort to learn, and the good luck all come together at one time. And when they do, well, then you’re alright.”

Even then I’d seen enough people who had worked hard, had been more than willing, had put in the effort, and had never had the luck. Their fortune was poverty, violence and despair. Of course that had nothing to do with Eastwood. But still, I naively wanted him to be more open and give a little thought to some of the myths he was selling.

That said, The Man With No Name is an excellent documentary, with presenter, the writer and broadcaster Iain Johnstone getting great value from directors Sergio Leone and Don Seigel, actor Richard Burton and the critic Dilys Powell. 
 

 
Bonus featurette on the making Clint’s ‘The Gauntlet,’ after the jump…

 
Is there any song more synonymous with “classic rock” than “Stairway to Heaven”? Damn few. The eight-minute acoustic-to-electric meditation on bustles and hedgerows, among other things, has become the 800-pound gorilla of the classic rock song repertoire. More than any other, it’s the one song that evokes the phrase “album-oriented radio,” and it’s the one song that, at least according to Wayne’s World, guitar store owners have banned because every would-be Jimmy Page just has to have a crack at it. It’s the great rock-and-roll albatross, the song nobody can stand and yet frequently tops the surveys of the greatest rock song ever recorded.

In the 1976 concert movie The Song Remains the Same, recorded over three gigs at Madison Square Garden, after the line “and the forests will echo with laughter….” Plant exuberantly engages in a bit of unrehearsed crowd work, crying, “Does anybody remember laughter??”

For anyone who’s seen the movie, the phrase can function as an automatic killer laugh line when the conversation hits an unexpected lull or needs that extra bit of non-sequitur levity—it communicates that you know your rock and roll history but also that you can deflate a bit of rock and roll grandiosity. Even when the listener doesn’t get the exact reference, somehow Robert Plant or someone like him is evoked, in all of his 1970s bombasity and idealism and excess.

Apparently Plant himself cringes every time he hears it.

In Mick Wall’s When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin, the following story is told:
 

Planning was meticulous, with all the remixing of the new DVD and CD of The Song Remains the Same and track sequencing and artwork for Mothership completed by May [2007]. Unlike the DVD and How the West Was Won package of 2003, where Page was in charge of every aspect of production, this time Plant took the helm. Kevin Shirley, the talented young South African producer who had worked with Jimmy on DVD and How the West Was Won and now found himself working with Robert on the re-jigged The Song Remains the Same, recalls how “Jimmy wasn’t that bothered this time around it seemed but Robert was really insistent on being there with me. When we came to that bit on ‘Stairway to Heaven’ when he ad-libs, ‘Does anyone remember laughter?’ he winced and asked if we could delete it. I said, ‘No, you can’t erase that, it’s what people remember, part of history!’ So he very reluctantly allowed me to keep it in. There were a couple of other smaller ad-libs that I did take out for him here and there—a few of the baby, baby, babys—just to keep him happy.”

Thus we see the high price of being a rock and roll icon—people will love and fondly remember even the stupid things you say…...
 

 
This is probably the last TV interview the director, artist and writer Derek Jarman gave to the BBC. It was recorded in August 1993 for the series Edinburgh Nights, a magazine program that reviewed theatrical productions, movies and exhibitions from across the Festival. I’d worked on the show twice before, but this time I was back to direct only one item: an interview with Jarman.

On a quiet Sunday morning, in a small hotel situated at the end of a long Georgian terrace, we sat in a cramped front room with a view onto cobbled streets and lush green gardens hemmed in by a black iron fence. The room was cluttered, not an ideal location, but we were on quick-turn-around: shoot it, edit it, get it out.

I hadn’t seen Derek in four years. The last time was during a summer in Glasgow where he had been exhibiting at the Third Eye Center. He seemed happy, dressed in a blue boiler suit and we wandered around a park where we filmed an interview with Derek talking to Richard Jobson about The Pet Shops Boys, films, AIDs and sexual politics. Now it was heart-breaking to see him again, this beautiful, brilliant man dressed in orange and pink and yellow, in vibrant contrast to the ravaging effects of his illness.

Jarman was in Edinburgh to screen his latest film, Blue, a single-shot movie of saturated color (Yves Klein blue), over which actors read extracts from his diary detailing the weeks Derek had spent in hospital, blind as a result of an eye infection caused by HIV. The diary formed the backbone to Blue, from which stories branched out—a film he described as “a sort of Schererazade.” Though it was an intimate portrait of his illness, there was no self-pity for as usual, Jarman was only thinking of others:

”I wanted to convey some of what I’d seen, and the disaster of which I’ve been living through of the last few years. I mean for instance, last Thursday, I was in the hospital, and there was a mom with a two-year-old child who’s got the same infection in the eyes as I have, I couldn’t… I sat and watched as I waited, it was just quite terrible, honestly, you know, I was thinking of this child, you know, that’s all happening and people don’t see it, and they don’t think about it very often, and I hope the film sort of makes people think about that just for a moment.”

Blue was Derek Jarman’s twelfth and final feature film, for which he won the Michael Powell Award at that year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival. It was a much deserved (if late) reward, but as I left to rush back to an edit, I still felt that we had all failed to truly appreciate the man’s genius.
 

 
A massive lot of Hollywood memorabilia is going up for auction next week at Bonham’s, including, among many, many wonders, Dustin Hoffman and Steve McQueen‘s prison uniforms from Papillon, a revised final draft of the Citizen Kane screenplay, and an astonishing and lovely nude painting of Clara Bow (once owned by Bela Lugosi).

The big draw seems to be the actual Maltese Falcon, the eponymous prop from the classic Bogart film, probably the single most famous Macguffin in the history of cinema, and I would argue that in the entire history of narrative fiction, this item ranks with the Golden Fleece.
 

 

The auction will star the legendary lead statuette of the Maltese Falcon, from the classic 1941 film noir of the same name. A pivotal character in its own right, the statuette is arguably the most important movie prop ever, and is central to the history of cinema. The statuette has the archival Warner Bros. inventory number and an impressive exhibition history, including appearances at the Pompidou Center in Paris, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and The Warner Bros. Studio Museum in Los Angeles. Bonhams will present Sam Spade’s burgundy leather chair from the same remarkable film, among other Maltese Falcon highlights (est. $150,000-200,000).

The auction is curated by TCM, and bidding begins on Monday. Good luck.
 

 
My childhood Saturdays were spent at the cinema enchanted by the fluttering beauty of the images on the screen. It wasn’t just the story, or the acting, but the sets, the costumes, the props, the number of scales scored on the back of a Harryhausen dinosaur, the special effects that made Dracula vanish into dust, the superimposition, the incredible backdrops and painted mattes.

One Christmas, I received Denis Gifford’s classic book A Pictorial History of Horror Movies, which I read and studied more assiduously than my schoolbooks, and learnt almost by heart. Indeed, there was once a time when I could recount with ease all of the casts and crews of Universal and Hammer horror films—what strange portfolios we invest in our childhood knowledge. One of the names I noted was Bob Cuff, a matte painter, and model maker, whose name appeared on several of my then-favorite films: The Day of the Triffids, The First Men on the Moon, The Masque of Red Death, and One Million Years BC.

As you no doubt know, a matte painter creates painted representations of a landscape, set, or distant location, which allows the filmmaker to create wonderful illusions of real or fantasy environments that are usually far too expensive to build. It’s a technique that’s been used since Norman Dawn painted crumbling mansions on glass for Missions of California in 1907, and has been used extensively in cinema ever since.

Today, it’s all cold clunky digital, which for me lacks the beauty and craft of the matte paintings by artists like Bob Cuff. I was, therefore, delighted to discover a site dedicated to Cuff’s long career in film with examples of his work from Dr.Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Monty Python’s Life of Brian, The Princess Bride, right up to his last film before retirement,Terry Jones’ Erik the Viking.

Cuff’s work is beautiful, painterly and seamlessly adds an incredible richness to all of the films he worked on. Alas, Cuff died in 2010, but at least his wonderful artwork lives on.

Check here to view a gallery of Bob Cuff’s work.
 

‘Richard III’ (1955) Director: Laurence Olivier, Matte painting: Bob Cuff.
 

‘Alexander the Great’ (1956) Director: Robert Rossen, Matte painting: Bob Cuff.
 

‘I’m Alright Jack’ (1959) Director: Roy Boulting, Matte painting: Bob Cuff.
 

‘First Men on the Moon’ (1964) Director: Nathan Juran, Matte painting: Les Bowie Co. with Ray Caple and Bob Cuff.
 

‘Monty Python’s The Life of Brian’ (1979) Director: Terry Jones, Matte painting: Bob Cuff.

 
In Eraserhead Stories, a feature length doc on the six-year making of the cult classic, all-American surrealist David Lynch talks directly to the camera, smoking cigarettes and telling charming tales of how his unlikely film came to be. Like Eraserhead itself, the film is B&W and there’s a continuous ominous hum on the soundtrack.

Not quite a monologue, Lynch also calls Eraserhead‘s assistant director Catherine Coulson (she later played the “Log Lady” on Twin Peaks) for her take on things. There was a sort of “family” assembled around the film and without this, Eraserhead would never have been birthed into the world (see what I did there?). At one point Lynch calls the viewers’ attention to a year and a half gap between two edits. He also reveals that he himself lived in the windowless set of Henry’s room for two years while the film was being made.

Amusingly, the film’s lead actor, Jack Nance, never knew, nor did he care, what Eraserhead was all about. He’s quoted as saying “You guys get way too deep over this business. I don’t take it all that seriously. It’s only a movie.”

In 2004, Eraserhead was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the United States Library of Congress.
 

 
Fearing typecasting, Tim Curry notoriously shied away from discussing the role he’s most famous for—“Dr. Frank N. Furter” in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. He never did the fan conventions. Even at the late date of 2010, when fellow cast members Barry Bostwick and Meatloaf guest-starred on “The Rocky Horror Glee Show” episode of Glee, Curry still wanted no part of it, which is what makes this B&W interview shot in 1975, the week the film was released in Britain, so fascinating

This is probably the sole extended interview on video that Curry has ever given on the subject of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. He tells interviewer Mark Caldwell of the role’s physical demands, of reprising Rocky onstage in Los Angeles at The Roxy and how he tried to make the character more “evil” for the film version. When asked near the end if there would be a Rocky Horror sequel, Curry firmly deadpans “Not with me in it.”

In recent years, Curry, who had a major stroke in 2012, has been more open to talking about Rocky Horror.
 

 
Chronology is the damndest thing. Everybody knows the fantastic scene in This is Spinal Tap in which the band commissions a Stonehenge set but mistakenly asks for a model of 18 inches instead of 18 feet, which tiny replica then finds its way into a real Tap concert—even though nobody has informed the band’s members of the mixup beforehand.

That gag was first presented to the public on March 2, 1984, when the movie was released. A year earlier, in August 1983, Black Sabbath (one of the primary sources for Spinal Tap) released Born Again (October 1983 in the U.S.), one of their most poorly reviewed efforts. The second track on the album is a brief instrumental called “Stonehenge”—and on their 1983 Born Again tour, Black Sabbath hilariously had to shelve a Stonehenge stage concept because the scenery was much too big to use—someone had misinterpreted the requested foot measurements as meters, making all of the pieces roughly nine times too large (remember your volume calculations in high school geometry?).

It’s tempting to conclude that Spinal Tap nicked the gag off of this real-life precursor. But there are problems with this theory. For one thing, Black Sabbath’s North American tour didn’t start until mid-October 1983, and the incident with the Stonehenge set didn’t occur until around October 21, when they hit Montreal. It seems unlikely that they hadn’t finished principal photography on This is Spinal Tap by then (the project had already been kicking around for a while), and nothing about the Stonehenge gag suggests a rush job—a full song was composed, a live rendition was recorded, and so forth.

But that’s not all. When This is Spinal Tap was much closer to the pitch stage, Rob Reiner and his three principals, Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer (who did the bulk of the writing), put together Spinal Tap: The Final Tour, a 20-minute rough cut of the movie that they could show to financiers as an example of what the end result would look like. This footage dates from 1981 or 1982—well before Black Sabbath released Born Again—and the Stonehenge bit is there pretty much in its entirety.

So it’s all a complete coincidence—one of those uncanny examples of art anticipating life.
 

 
While we’re on the subject, let’s see what the members of Black Sabbath had to say about the Stonehenge incident. By the time of Born Again, Ozzy Osbourne was long gone, and Ronnie James Dio had quit the band after the previous album, Mob Rules. Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler were still in the band, and they actually wanted to release the material under a different name, but label considerations forced them to stick with the name Black Sabbath. They recruited Deep Purple singer Ian Gillan to do the vocals, but he quit the band after the tour. Original drummer Bill Ward, now newly sober, had sat out Mob Rules but returned for Born Again; it was the last Sabbath studio album Ward would play on.

According to a 1995 interview with Geezer Butler, this was what happened with the Stonehenge stage set:
 

Jeb Wright:  There is also a part of the movie Spinal Tap that concerns Geezer Butler – or so I have been told.  The idea of Stonehenge being too small actually came from Black Sabbath’s idea to make a Stonehenge stage set for the Born Again tour that was too large.  My source gave you the credit for the whole mistake.

Geezer Butler: It had nothing to do with me.  In fact, I was the one who thought it was really corny.  We had Sharon Osbourne’s dad, Don Arden, managing us.  He came up with the idea of having the stage set be Stonehenge.  He wrote the dimensions down and gave it to our tour manager.  He wrote it down in meters but he meant to write it down in feet.  The people who made it saw fifteen meters instead of fifteen feet.  It was 45 feet high and it wouldn’t fit on any stage anywhere so we just had to leave it the storage area.  It cost a fortune to make but there was not a building on earth that you could fit it into.

JW:  Where is Stonehenge now?

GB:  I last saw it on the docks in New York on the same tour.

JW:  So somewhere these things are around.

GB:  They were probably thrown into the Atlantic Ocean.

JW:  One day a futuristic society will find them.

GB:  They will think it is Atlantis.

 
So wait—Sharon Osbourne’s dad was probably responsible for the mixup, which must mean that the part of Jeanine Pettibone in This is Spinal Tap is basically Sharon Osbourne, right? I don’t think I had put that together before.

In an interview in Mojo magazine in December 1994, Gillan largely confirms the story but says that the whole Stonehenge idea was Butler’s, which Butler obviously denies (see above):
 

We were up at a company called LSD (Light and Sound Design) in Birmingham, and the lighting engineer asked if anyone had any ideas for a stage set. Geezer Butler suggested Stonehenge. “How do you envisage it, Geezer?” asked the engineer. “Life size, of course,” replied Geezer. So they built a life-size Stonehenge. We hired the Birmingham NEC [National Exhibition Centre] to rehearse in and they couldn’t get these bloody things in there. We opened in Montreal and Don Arden had hired Maple Leaf ice hockey stadium for a week, so they shipped the set over there and could still only get a few of those damn stones up, one each side of the stage, one behind the drums and two cross-pieces.

 
According to Gillan, there were further misadventures involving dry ice and (as in the movie) a dwarf:
 

Then we hear this horrendous screaming sound—they’ve recorded a baby’s scream and flanged it—and suddenly; we see this dwarf crawling across the top of Stonehenge, then he stands up as the baby’s scream fades away and falls backwards off this 30 foot fibreglass replica of Stonehenge onto a big pile of mattresses. Then dong, dong—bells start toiling and all the roadies come across the front of the stage in monk’s cowls, at which point War Pigs starts up. By now we can see the kids are either in stitches or wincing in horror.

After spending 40 grand a day to achieve all this, someone had economised by not actually trying out the dry ice in the afternoon run through. So as I stride confidently towards my prompt book, not even knowing the first word of the song, I’m suddenly shocked to see a chest-high cloud of dry ice is berating me to the front of the stage. So there I am after this big opening, kneeling down, swatting the air and trying to read me line, popping my head above this cloud every now and then. Someone shouted “It’s Ronnie Dio!”

 
Butler thinks the original Stonehenge plinths are in the Atlantic Ocean, but I found a reference online to the effect that “the design company LSD (Light and Sound Design) ... still have the model in their possession. At one point, it was going to be donated as an auction prize for a children’s charity, but since it was touring around rock museums all over the world as part of an exhibition, this never happened.”

Is this true? Did anyone reading this ever see a tour at a “rock museum” that included the original Black Sabbath model of Stonehenge?
 
“Spinal Tap: The Final Tour,” part 1:

 
More after the jump…

Fire Walk With Me - Dress

Suckers Apparel has a Twin Peaks-themed clothing line. A wee bit expensive for my tastes, but kind of fun nonetheless. There’s also “Who Killed Laura,” “8Bit Lodge,” and “Log Lady” leggings available for purchase.
 

Laura - Dress
 

Welcome To Twin Peaks - Dress
 

Smoking In The Girls Room - Cape
 

 
From 1941 until 1949, Orson Welles, director of Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, was a serious object of surveillance by the FBI. This is not new information; you can read about it in biographies about Welles. You can read the actual FBI file on Orson Welles on the FBI website section called “The Vault” (PDF file). It’s 194 pages long, contains a great many documents from different places and times. Once you get used to the bureaucratic throat-clearing, it makes for very diverting reading.

It’s not stated in so many words, but Welles seems to have become a subject of FBI interest after Citizen Kane was made. William Randolph Hearst, thinly disguised subject of the movie, was friendly with J. Edgar Hoover. As is well known, Hearst mobilized his vast network of newspapers against Welles after the movie was released. To judge by the nomadic second half of Welles’ career, which he spent mostly in Europe and in which he made many literary adaptations on a low budget, it’s reasonable to posit that Hearst’s campaign against Welles had some success.

Little of that is in the file, however. To read the file is to be transported back into the pages of a James Ellroy novel, perhaps The Big Nowhere (that one’s my favorite) in which powerful wealthy white men deploy scandal and innuendo in order to defend their increasingly unhinged vision of American empire.

Most of the material pertains to two periods, 1941/42 and 1945. Welles’ association with various left-wing organizations is described in portentous terms. It is reasonably clear that Welles was left-leaning and lent his name to a great many organizations deemed subversive by the federal authorities, but that he was not a particularly organized political thinker and probably never joined the Communist Party.

What is so fascinating in retrospect is that many of the actions held against him do not appear to be very objectionable in the clear light of day. Two examples of this.

On page 48 his membership in the Negro Cultural Committee is discussed. The group is ominously described as a pro-Communist organization, but one of the charges leveled against it is: “The Negro Cultural Committee was reportedly a group organized by the Communist Party for the purpose of agitating in favor of anti-lynching bills.” That’s right—if you are the member of a race that is the systematic target of violent terrorist activity and you try to organize against it, then you are suspicious in the eyes of the FBI.

A page later we read the following: “An article appearing in the New York Times for January 17, 1939, stated that Welles was among the signers of a petition protesting the dismissal of 1500 employees of the WPA Federal Arts Project.” Again—if you belong to an interest group affected adversely by a decision made by the federal government, and you sign a petition protesting this, then you might be labeled a subversive. Eighty years later, it’s difficult to see why either of these two activities should be considered especially noteworthy.

In 1945 you can see the hysteria of the Red Scare cranking into gear. Welles’ support of the UN is held against him, and several times it is mentioned as a point of some interest that Welles undertook some travel for, or otherwise was working at the behest of Franklin Roosevelt, who, let’s remember, was the president of the United States at the time. Similarly, wartime activities in support of the USSR—at the time an ally of the United States in the global conflict known as “World War II” against Nazi Germany—that’s also used as evidence that Welles is probably a subversive.

There’s a bit of business involving Hedda Hopper and Welles’ increasingly estranged wife Rita Hayworth—there’s a good deal of talk of informants revealing this or that, a group that apparently includes Hayworth. On page 90 there is mention of of “extra-marital activities with [REDACTED] former Main Street burlesque strip tease artist.” Those of a salacious cast of mind are recommended to go to this series of pages first.

On page 119 (1949) a memo glumly admits that “In view of the fact that WELLES has never been placed as a member of the Communist Party by confidential informants of this office,” it is time to seriously consider “cancellation of his Security Index Card,” which I think means that they’re going to stop treating Welles as an active subject.  A few pages later this recommendation is approved.

Sigh. After the PATRIOT Act was passed into law, there were ample stories that it was being used against, among other people, harmless left-wing activists in New England. Given the fates of Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Aaron Swartz as well as the spate of shocking recent stories about the breadth of NSA surveillance, it seems safe to conclude that the age of federal agency files of this type is far from overwith.
 

 

 
via Cinephilia and Beyond