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The Slide Area No. 9/winter 2007-2008
How much is an “old” film book worth? Far more than one
might imagine. The Fine & Rare Books auction at PBA Galleries in
San Francisco on June 14, 2007, had for sale a copy of The
American Motion Picture Directory: A Cyclopedic Dictionary of the
Motion Picture Industry, 1914-1915, published in 1915 by the
American Motion Picture Directory Co. of Chicago. The auction house
valued the book in the $10,000.00-$15,000.00 price range. The value
seemed positively laughable, and I anticipated a sale of the book for
a couple of hundred dollars. Was I wrong! It sold for $6,900.00 –
far less than the suggested value but far, far more than anyone might
have believed.
And writing of expensive tomes, Heritage Book Shop in West Hollywood,
one of the most affluent of antiquarian booksellers, has announced
its closure. While not known for selling film books – despite
the above sale, they are too cheap for consideration – Heritage
Book Shop did count a lot of Hollywood celebrities among its clients,
including Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp and Michael Ovitz. Unlike most
bookstores which close because they cannot afford to continue in
business, the owners of Heritage, the brothers Ben and Lou Weinstein,
are ceasing business because they are selling the property for a
reported ten million dollars and because the stock is to be sold to a
U.K.-based auction house for a guaranteed minimum of eight million
dollars.
Obviously, there is money to be made out of books, but,
unfortunately, as far as I can tell not by most authors.
Very few individuals were aware of the death on February 6, 2003, of
Milt Luboviski, the founder of Larry Edmunds Bookshop and its
principal proprietor until 1980. Milt died at his home in the South
of France, to where he had retired after divorcing his wife Git. Even
fewer individuals will know that Milt’s brother, Phil, who had
been the dominant force behind the bookstore since Milt’s
retirement, died in Los Angeles on April 18, 2007. (Phil was born on
September 9, 1923.)
Larry Edmunds Bookshop is a legendary institution, the most famous
film bookstore in the world, and one that should be considered a
major part of Hollywood’s cultural heritage. It is right there
on Hollywood Boulevard (its third location since its founding) in the
center of an area that is supposedly being revitalized. Yet its
future remains in doubt. The bookstore is on a month-to-month lease,
and, in large part because of the Internet, sales have steadily
decreased.
There is a new Visual Culture catalog out from British publisher,
I.B. Tauris, and it features an impressive number of new film
titles, although the emphasis is obviously on the academic market.
New and available in both hardcover and paperback are Roman Polanski:
The Cinema of a Cultural Traveller by Ewa Mazierska, Federico
Fellini: His Life and Work by Tullio Kezich, Brazil on Screen: Cinema
Novo, New Cinema Utopia by Lúcia Nagib, Live Flesh: The Male
Body in Contemporary Spanish Cinema by Santiago Fouz-Hernandez and
Alfredo Martinez-Exposito, The Queer Cinema of Derek Jarman: Critical
and Cultural Readings by Niall Richardson, Filming the Modern Middle
East: Politics in the Cinemas of Hollywood and the Arab World by Lina
Khatib, Makhmalbaf at Large: The Making of a Rebel Filmmaker by Hamid
Dabashi, Iranian Cinema: A Political History by Hamid Reza Sadr,
Religion and Film: An Introduction by Melanie J. Wright, Chasing
Dragons: An Introduction to the Martial Arts Film by David West,
Hollywood Heroines: Women in Film Noir and Female Gothic Film by
Helen Hanson, Elia Kazan: The Cinema of an American Outsider by Brian
Neve, Teen Dreams: Reading Teen Film and Television from Heathers to
Veronica Mars by Roz Kaveney, Stagecoach to Tombstone: The Filmgoers’
Guide to the Great Westerns by Howard Hughes, a new edition of
Britain Can Take It: British Cinema in the Second World War by Tony
Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards (paperback only), a new edition of
License to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films by
James Chapman (paperback only), A New Heritage of Horror: The English
Gothic Cinema by David Pirie, X-Films: True Confessions of a Radical
Filmmaker by Alex Cox (hardcover only), Dziga Vertov: Defining
Documentary Film by Jeremy Hicks, and Storm over Asia: The Film
Companion II by Amy Sargeant. For more information, go to
www.ibtauris.com.
Its American distributor, the University of California Press,
announces the latest group of BFI publications. New in the “BFI
Film Classics” series are The Big Lebowski (this is a film
classic?) by J.M.Tyree and Ben Walters, Lawrence of Arabia by Kevin
Jackson, City Lights by Charles Maland (a good writer and scholar),
Night Mail by Scott Anthony, and The Apu Trilogy by Philip Kemp. Also
new are 100 Shakespeare Films by Daniel Rosenthal, 100 Road Movies by
Jason Wood and 100 British Documentaries by Patrick Russell. As the
last group of titles sadly illustrates, the British Film Institute is
emulating the American Film Institute with its silly notion of 100
greatest or best thing and 100 greatest of best that. What does the
BFI plan next? Perhaps the 100 Greatest Quota Quickies or even the
100 Greatest Maurice Elvey Films.
Actually, maybe the BFI doesn’t have anything planned for the
future, as word has it that the publishing division is to be siphoned
off and run as a commercial venture. If this is indeed true, all the
second-rate British academics that have found an easy publishing home
for their worthless projects are out of luck. Of course, I suppose
there is still I.B. Tauris.
A British publisher that is to be highly recommended is Persephone
Books Ltd., a small house specializing in quality, uniform paperback
reprints of little-known fictional works, primarily by women. One
book worthy of attention by film enthusiasts is Farewell Leicester
Square by Betty Miller (Jonathan’s mother), which is about a
Jewish filmmaker in England and “the discreet discrimination of
the bourgeoisie.” Another reprint from Persephone is Elisabeth
Sanxay Holding’s The Blank Wall, a 1947 thriller that was
filmed as The Reckless Moment in 1949 and as The Deep End in 2001.
Finally, Persephone also has available Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s
1924 novel of a house-husband, The Home-Maker, which became a superb
1925 film directed by King Baggot and starring Alice Joyce and Clive
Brook.
For more information on Persephone Books and a complete listing of
its titles, check out www.persephonebooks.com.co.uk,
or write to the company at 59 Lamb’s Conduit Street, London
WC1N 3NB.
A legendary name in film literature has died. Rudolf Arnheim,
who published the classic text, Film as Art, in 1957, died on June 9,
2007, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, at the age of 102. Born in Berlin on
July 15, 1904, Arnheim left Germany in 1933 with the Nazis rise to
power. Eventually, he came to the U.S.A., and published his first
major English-language work, Art and Visual Perception, in 1954. He
taught at the New School for Social Research in New York, Sarah
Lawrence College, Harvard University, and the University of Michigan.
As Adam Bernstein reminds us in a first-rate obituary in the
Washington Post, Arnheim admired the “artistic purity of
expression” of the silent film, arguing that words
“significantly limit the expression of the image.”
And now for some book reviews…
There are two new titles in the “Contemporary Film Directors”
series. The first is Kathleen McHugh’s Jane Campion
(University of Illinois Press, $50.00/$19.95). I would not
describe the text as “witty,” as does one of the
academics quoted on the back cover, but it is adequate, and the
interviews, filmography and lengthy bibliography are particularly
acceptable. The text is a mix of straightforward biographical
narrative and pseudo-academic discussions of the films themselves.
Jane Campion deserves better and more detailed examination than this,
but until that “something better” comes along, Kathleen
McHugh’s text will suffice.
Juan A Suárez is a professor at the University of Murcia in
Spain, and also the author of Jim Jarmusch (University of Illinois
Press, $50.00/$19.95). While I would welcome the book as the
first major English-language study of the director whose last film
was Broken Flowers in 2005, I must note that the text is somewhat
stilted, although it is heavy with facts. There is only one interview
with the director here, but it is a long one, albeit reprinted from
the relatively easily available Projections 11 (published by Faber &
Faber).
Also new in the series are Manoel de Oliveira by Randal Johnson
and Roman Polanski by James Morrison (both priced at
$50.00 in hardcover and $19.95 in paperback). Of course, Polanski is
the better known of the two, and the study of his work does make a
convenient pocket size reference text. The Portuguese de Oliveira is,
in all honesty, little known, but it is quite amazing, as the author
points out, that his career as a feature film director dates back to
1942, and that his first involvement in film was in 1928, making him
one of the oldest, active filmmakers in the world.
There have been quite a few books on pioneering African-American
director Oscar Micheaux, and, in a way, it is surprising that he
should be the subject of a biography by a white guy from Milwaukee.
However, Patrick McGilligan’s The Great and Only
Oscar Micheaux: The Life of America’s First Black Filmmaker
(HarperCollins, $29.95) is as good as any of his previous
works on such eminent Caucasian directors as George Cukor and Alfred
Hitchcock. As one would expect from McGilligan, the biography is
highly readable and both honestly and intuitively captures the
spirited life and career of Oscar Micheaux. The research is
phenomenal, making extensive use of coverage in the black press, such
as the Chicago Defender, and the photographs are, I suspect, rare.
As one quoted scholar notes, there has been “a mad dash to
honor Oscar Micheaux,” and it does bother me somewhat that
writers (both academic and popular) tend to pay scant attention to
the quality of his films. Yes, Oscar Micheaux was a pioneering
director, but he was no D.W. Griffith, and we must avoid taking his
films out of context and judging them based only on the color of the
filmmaker’s skin rather than his artistic and technical
virtuosity. After all, while Oscar Micheaux may have given Paul
Robeson his first screen role with Body and Soul in 1925, did it
really (honestly and truthfully) do anything for the actor’s
career? Surely far more important was the stage production of The
Emperor Jones that followed or Show Boat (both stage and screen) or
the magnificent, and seldom seen, production of Proud Valley in
Britain in the late 1930s.
An original approach to comedy, an over-written about subject, is
always welcome, and Alex Clayton’s The Body in Hollywood
Slapstick (McFarland, $35.00) is certainly
original. It discusses the interaction of the body between the mind,
the setting, the voices (where the comedy is a talkie) and the
machine in the films of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd,
Laurel and Hardy, and – oh dear! – Jerry Lewis. The text
is certainly readable, despite a large amount of citations of
academic works. Ultimately, the book is somewhat disappointing, in
large part, perhaps, because there is not a lot here that is new
despite a new approach to the subject.
Wild Bill Elliott: A Complete Filmography by Gene Blottner
(McFarland, $55.00) is the ultimate encyclopedia of the Western
star, popular from 1940 through 1954. The book opens with a detailed
study of Elliott’s life, which is followed by listings of his
various film appearances, split into categories such as starring
roles, short subjects, etc. (Later, the author provides alphabetical
and chronological listings of the films in each category.) There is
also a listing of various comic books featuring the star, a record of
his Las Vegas television programs in the mid 1960s, and documentation
on his rating in various Western polls from the 1940s and 1950s.
There is even a bibliography, which, surprisingly, does not include
the American Film Institute Catalog, which should have been
the primary source for credit information. Of course, there are lots
of photographs, and, I must admit, a rather nice, nostalgic,
full-color cover based on a 1952 Wild Bill Elliott comic book cover.
After this publication, let us have no more books on Wild Bill
Elliott.
I must admit that an academic text on The Lord of the Rings filled me
with fear and loathing, and I must state up front that I could not
bring myself to read Kristin Thompson’s The Frodo Franchise:
The Lord of the Rings and Modern Hollywood (University of California
Press, $29.95) in its entirety. I must also confess that I am
incredibly at fault to dismiss this book without due consideration
and without intelligent examination. It is incredibly good. It may be
academic, and the author goes to great lengths in her preface and
acknowledgments to explain that it is not part of The Lord of the
Rings franchise and she has made no licensing arrangements with New
Line Cinema. (Of course, if she and/or her publisher had paid
licensing fees to use the illustrations, it is doubtful that either
could have afforded to publish the volume.) All in all, Kristin
Thompson has produced an amazing, detailed, sympathetic and, above
all, readable study of The Lord of the Rings.
She is obviously highly familiar with the original novels, and her
discussion of their writing and publication is quite fascinating. She
explains the rights process in detail, the production, the use of
digital special effects, and the franchising of the movies that has
helped to generate billions of dollars in revenue to a few lucky
people. This is a history of modern filmmaking at its best,
unquestionably the definitive study of The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
I can’t quite put my finger on it, but there is something
lacking in the biography Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel
Merman by Caryl Flinn (University of California Press, $34.95).
The author has done all the research necessary, but, somehow, the
text is lackluster and, quite frankly, rather dull. One opens the
book expecting to hear Ethel Merman’s voice belting out from
the pages, but instead one hears only silence. Perhaps there was
simply nothing very exciting about Ethel Merman’s life. A
handful of marriages, a lot of hit shows on stage and a disappointing
Hollywood career. As an actress, she was never as good as when she
was presenting a song in her own inimitable style. Her marriage to
Ernest Borgnine deserves our attention, but fascinating and weird as
it must appear, the author provides nothing new on the subject –
and there is no indication that she tried to approach Ernest Borgnine
(whom I must admit has always come across to me as a very nice guy).
The best comment in the book comes not from the author but from
legendary critic Wolcott Gibbs (unidentified in the text): “I
know Ethel gets terribly cozy with the audience…but you can’t
help feeling that she’s never been introduced to the cast.”
The most scandalous revelation in the book is that Ethel Merman’s
scrapbooks, which she donated to the Museum of the City of New York
“are now ravaged by age, and many book signatures are illegible
from mold and deteriorating paper. A few portions have had to be
tossed and are lost to posterity.” How shameful that the Museum
of the City of New York has failed in its obligation to safeguard and
preserve the artifacts that it holds.
For the record, there is a second biography of Ethel Merman,
published contemporaneously with the above volume. It is Brian
Kellow’s Ethel Merman: A Life (Viking, $25.95). It
is a cheaper and shorter work, which I have not read. The Hollywood
Reporter (December 5, 2007) notes that “Brian Kellow displays a
keen sense of how and why Ethel Merman worked…and his profile
of her personal life is an aching refrain worthy of the musical
‘Follies.’”
There is much that is interesting, if not totally original, in Robert
Spadoni’s Uncanny Bodies: The Coming of Sound Film and the
Origins of the Horror Genre (University of California Press, $24.95),
but there is to many quotes from other academic sources (including
Kristin Thompson). I wish the author had gone forward on his own,
without academic reservations. Very obviously, Robert Spadoni knows
film history and has done his research, but no sooner does one read
an interesting paragraph or page, with interesting contemporary
commentary, than one becomes bogged down in some modernistic, and
dreary quotes, from the likes of Russian Yuri Tsivian (don’t
ask me who he is – I don’t care).
The “body” on screen is obviously the latest fad with
film academics. Another recent text is Jonathan Auerbach’s
Body Shots: Early Cinema’s Incarnations (University of
California Press, $60.00/$24.95). The original concept here is
not without interest: the manner in which early cinema in the 1890s
and early 1900s used the body as the center of the action or the
frame, as in the body running, posing, kissing, or being shot
(President William McKinley). There are nineteen subheadings under
the entry in the index for “body.” The text is not too
academic, but there are times when one finds the reading of it to be
heavy-going. And the illustrations are generally of a poor quality,
with bodies clearly visible but faces barely discernible.
There is a new, the 2008 edition of Leonard Maltin’s Movie
Guide (A Signet Book, $9.99). The front cover promises, and I am
sure the book delivers, more than 17,000 entries, including 400 plus
new ones, more than 8,000 DVD and 13,000 video listings. There is
really nothing new that can be said or written about Leonard’s
work. It is the best of its type available – and the biggest
bargain around. I can only wonder what happens to the many thousands
of the previous year’s edition that are sure to be discarded,
and I can only hope that the owners recycle them properly.
The historical significance of home movies is “explored”
in Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories,
edited by Karen L. Ishizuka and Patricia R. Zimmermann (University of
California Press, $60.00/$24.95). Obviously, such footage
provides a certain view of history, albeit often stilted and boring.
Despite what academics might like us to believe, home movies are of
primary interest only to those featured on screen. The same is true
not only of John and Jane Doe’s home movies, but also those
shot by movie celebrities. Viewing the home movies of, say, Preston
Sturges, preserved at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, was in
struck by how little the fame director knows of how actually to shoot
a film.
In a back over “blurb,” B. Ruby Rich notes that home
movies are “essential tools of historiography,” and that
the visionary essays in the book provide “a way to reclaim
devalued work and turn the tables of the cataloguers.” It is a
curious, and specious, argument in that the majority of the pieces in
the book are written by archivists at various institutions with major
holdings of home movies – in other words, the very cataloguers
upon whom this work turns the tables.
Canyon Cinema: The Life and Times of an Independent Film
Distributor by Scott MacDonald (University of California Press,
$65.00/$29.95) contains more than 450 pages, revealing far more
than one would ever want to know about the San Francisco-based
distributor of independent and avant-garde film, founded in 1960 and,
apparently, still in operation. Scott MacDonald writes that “One
can only hope that Canyon is able to weather the challenge posed by
DVD releases of 16mm films,” a hope that, quite frankly, is
incredibly naïve. As anyone who has tried to find a lab in the
United States able to handle 16mm knows only too well, 16mm is dead.
Certainly, one cannot and should not criticize this book for its size
and minutiae. All aspects of film history should be documented in
such detail. However, I am sure many will agree that Canyon Cinema
simply does not deserve such coverage – about as many people
will purchase this volume as have viewed the films in the Canyon
Cinema library. That having been said, I have to confess that the
book is worth its cost simply for the hilarious recounting of the
antics of the legend in his own mind, Gregory Markpoulos. If you
don’t know who he is, you are in the majority. Suffice it to
say, he is the ego-clown of avant-garde cinema, who once sent copies
of his self-published books to the Margaret Herrick Library of the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and asked – no
demanded – that they be subject indexed under a unique category
of something along the lines of original film art, with heavy
emphasis on the art.
Steve Ricci’s Cinema & Fascism: Italian Film and
Society, 1922-1943 (University of California Press, $24.95) examines
Italian filmmaking between World War One and World War Two and
discusses to what extent the productions from that period may be
considered “fascist.” Just as many Nazi films contain
nothing that appears offensive, so, apparently, do many Italian films
from the Mussolini era contain nothing propagandistic or “fascist.”
Relatively short (a little over 200 pages) are presumably intended
for use as a textbook, Cinema & Fascism is an OK introduction to
the subject but occasionally heavy-going in terms of the academic
approach.
I have to confess (I am doing a lot of confessing) that I have little
interest in the Marilyn Monroe phenomenon. The never-ending stream of
books on the subject leaves me cold, and when I do force myself to
read, or at least skim through, one of them, I find little that is
new. And so, I am delighted to report on A Marilyn Mosaic by Mark
Bellinghaus and Ernest W. Cunningham. A self-published, signed
and limited edition in spiral-bound format, the book contains a
curious mix of items, including poetry and a four-inch x five-inch,
unpublished black-and-white photograph. Best of all, and fascinating
to me, it considers all the fraudulent characters involved in the
exploitation of her life and career. There is a section titled “The
10 Big Lies about Marilyn Monroe” and, of course a somewhat
nasty (although I suppose deserved) look at Robert L. Slatzer, “the
main villain in the Marilyn Monroe story,” who claimed to have
once been married to her. (Slatzer actually still owes me money for
some research I did for him years ago, I think for a book on John
Wayne, and so I am more than happy to endorse the attack here –
particularly as that now he is dead, I am never going to get paid!)
For more information as to price and availability, check in at
ewcformm@pacbell.net.
Another internet connection to check out is bearmanormedia.com at
which may be found information on my own, latest book, Incorrect
Entertainment, or, Trash from the Past: A History of Political
Incorrectness and Bad Taste in 20th Century
American Pop Culture. How is that for a title? Included in the
book are chapters on camp, nudity, alcohol, drugs, fascism in
Hollywood, popular songs, topical jokes Helen Keller and Eleanor
Roosevelt, Hedda Hopper, the Porky’s trilogy, and much more. I
guarantee that the book contains something to offend everyone –
and at only $19.95 it is a real bargain. Telephone orders at
800-566-1251.
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