William Horberg

Dancing 3D Santas

Christmas was literally spectacular this year as we joined thousands of other tourists and native New Yorkers for the holiday ritual known as the Christmas Spectacular at the Radio City Music Hall.

While we were prepared for dancing Rockettes, who have been plying their trademark long legged kick for the past 85 years, we were enthralled by dancing reindeer...

...and dancing bears...

The show has a newfangled attraction to engage 21st century young ones weened on video games - part of the show is a 3D interactive video game whose visual effects showered out from the huge stage into the gasping audience. Of course Diego preferred to wear his 3D glasses (and his sound-muffling headphones) for the entire performance, so his trippy view of those dozens of dancing Santa Claus must have looked something like this...

Thanks for the memories, Radio City!

Enjoy!

william

Portrait of a Fellow Pupil

Natalie and Diego have been attending an "art camp" this summer.

Their daily immersion in creativity has been a joy to behold. Each day they come home with new handmade treasures. Natalie is already an accomplished artist, but for Diego this daily dose of independence in a structured environment has lead to an explosion of his fertile imagination. 

We all know children can create amazing works of art, all the more special for their unique way of seeing the world. On a recent trip to London, the small book that really caught my eye at the used book store on Charing Cross Road was "Children As Artists" by R. R. Tomlinson.

Published in 1947, the author used the work of young children from various Junior Girls' Schools and High Schools as the basis for his essay on these tiny Titans or Titians as the case may be!

These amazing paintings are all from that small volume.

With the near elimination of the long held idea of the arts being an essential component of a child's development and education in our No Child Left Behind era, Tomlinson's words of 65 years ago echo loudly today:

"This innate urge in a child to draw and create is a precious inheritance, the value of which has not yet been fully realised by education authorities; neither has the beneficial effect of its encouragement upon other forms of expression and growth been apprehended by them sufficiently."

Expression and growth have been running wild around here lately, with a tip of the hat to old R.R.

Enjoy!

william 

Serb Noir

Here is a wonderful piece of Serbiana - a vintage paperback edition of Raymond Chandler's "The High Window" found on the sidewalks of Belgrade.

The publisher Dzepna Knjiga was based in Sarajevo and this edition came out in 1964.

Even in the former Yugoslavia, "R Cendler" was entertaining readers with his tales of fallen angels, crooked cops and errant knights.

Enjoy!

william

This Serbian Life

And finally, here is the cover of my comic memoir of my days in Serbia filming "Therese Raquin".

Logically, I would have posted this first but it was the drawing that I finished last, after I got home, so here you have it in reverse order.

With a grateful acknowledgement of assistance from Elsita for the wonderful water coloring of the ink drawing.

Gundulicev venac was the wonderful name of the street I was living on with my roommate, the world class stills photographer Phil Bray. With his ear for language he picked up a smattering of passable Serb much better than I, but neither of us could ever remember or pronounce the name of our street!

Enjoy!

william

Serbia (pt. 5)

Happy Independence Day!

Here is the last page of my comic memoir of the last few months in Serbia:

Pancevo is the town about 45 minutes outside of Belgrade where we filmed several different sets in one building that was an old museum.

Ivanovo was a frozen wasteland when we first scouted there in January, but became the lush green river banks of both the Raquin family's country home in Vernon and the lake outside Paris where the lovers murder their victim.

Kalemegdan is the old fortress park right in the city center of Belgrade where we built a metal gazebo to house a bear in our version of a proto-zoo.

And Simanovci is hardly a tourist destination, but a sign on the highway giving the name of the town closest to the acres of land in the countryside where the PFI soundstages were built.

From such disparate and incongruous elements were built the illusion of 19th Century Paris for our play.

Enjoy!

william

Serbian Pulp Fiction

In any new place I travel, I enjoy seeking out not only the differences that make it cuturally unique and authentic, but also the things that we have in common as children of the 20th century.

Often I will track down the local flea market, and rummage around in the detritus of the pop culture of a place; I especially enjoy finding old comic books and paperbacks and pulp magazines.

Here are a few choice samples culled from the street vendors of Belgrade:

My handy translator Nadezda decoded this one as Final For Two Revolvers, but said in meaning it could also be called "The Last Gunfight" or "The Final Shoot Out."

Dej Kin seems like a pretty cool name for a crime fiction writer. I couldn't find out anything about him or his work on line, but I will investigate further.

The building in the cover painting looks a bit like Marina City towers in Chicago, which is perhaps why I was attracted to it.

The publisher Duga (rainbow) apparantly put out different editions and this one is the Green Edition (zeleni dodatak).

"The Girls of the Wharf # 13" is quite a handsome cover painting of quite a handsome trio of girls. Wharves were always such great settings for crime fiction stories.

I love the title of this one: The Stars Have Gone Dark.

Spijunski roman means "spy novel". Pretty apocalyptic. I wish I could read it.

Enjoy!

william

Pulp Collection

Original paintings made for the covers of pulp magazines from the 1930's were treated as disposable commercial art-for-hire in their time, and therefore are quite rare today.

One of the masters of the medium was Norman Saunders, so it was quite a treat to stumble upon a small exhibit of the original vintage paintings of some of his now famous work at an out-of-the-way gallery run by Syracuse University on a recent trip to New York.

One of Saunders many employers was Hugo Gernsback, the editor of Amazing Stories, Wonder Stories, Science-Wonder Stories and many of the other seminal pulp fiction publications that introduced writers like Jules Verne and H.G. Wells to the world. In fact, he is often known as the Father of Science Fiction, and the annual award for the best in science fiction writing, The Hugo, is named after him. I had never seen a picture of him at work, but they had a cool one in the exhibit.

Although not painted by Saunders, I liked this poster from one of the most successful pulp characters, spawning radio shows, comics, movies, and books for generations:

Norman Saunders knew what evil lurked in the hearts of men, and women, and he painted them luridly, and beautifully.

Enjoy!

william

Ten Best Films

"Tis the season for retrospective analysis of the year that was and the resulting onslaught of lists, or lisztomania to paraphrase the film of British director Ken Russell, one of the many 20th Century film icons who died this year.

My TEN BEST list this year is retro - ten films that I had wanted to see for years and finally caught up with, or some fresh suggestions of classics from film friends that really inspired me.

All highly recommended. In no particular order.

1. KES

            

Ken Loach's second film after his start in British television and the one that brought him international acclaim is a masterpiece of realism featuring an unforgettable performance by young David Bradley and his kestrel, whose soaring flights over the soot-scarred landscape of his troubled youth are pure poetry.

2. THE WORLD

           

Thanks to Dave Kehr for turning me on to this Chinese film from director Jia Zhangke, with its fascinating modern blend of realism, theatricality and animation. Set in a loopy Beijing theme park with Vegas-style recreations of scaled down versions of famous world landmarks that might have been designed by the villian Gru from "Despicable Me", the opening shot alone is worth the price of admission.

3. GET OUT YOUR HANDKERCHIEFS

           

How did I miss this one? An iconic French comedy by Bertrand Blier from the '70's that helped catapult its star Gerard Depardieu to worldwide fame, the somewhat far-fetched and very French premise of a young husband enlisting a lover to cheer up his depressed and tres beautiful wife, wonderfully played by Carole Laure, has three or four unforgettable scenes including the tour-de-force opening ten or twelve minute sequence in which the premise is set-up so convincingly - a triumph of writing, acting and direction.

4. HOUSE

          

I blogged about this late '70's film from Japanese producer/director Nobuhiko Obayashi previously but it merits another mention here as a celebration of extreme no-limits-to-the-imagination filmmaking. Pure pop!

5. SHADOWS

           

It was great fun this year in preparing for the filming of "Disconnect" to revisit the early independent work of writer/director/actor/producer John Cassavettes and rewatch Husbands and Faces, and to finally get a chance to watch his very first and perhaps best film "Shadows". The closest film equivalent to a great improvised jazz solo, this black and white portrait of a group of interracial relationships in Beat era New York City stars Leila Goldoni and a memorable turn from Tony Ray, whose father Nick Ray was also one of the most interesting filmmakers of the era.

6. BLOODY SUNDAY

           

This film caused a stir among agents and executives in Hollywood when it first came around in 2002 and catapulted its director Paul Greengrass to big studio level filmmaking, but I was out of the country and missed it, and it has been surprisingly hard to get on DVD since then for some reason - it certainly deserves to be more widely seen; perhaps a Criterion treatment should be in the offing. In the vein of The Battle of Algiers, it is a documentary-style portrait of one man caught in the maelstrom of a devastating act of political violence, with an incredible performance by James Nesbitt that must be seen.

7. DAVID HOLZMAN'S DIARY

           

From people of the generation that preceded mine I had always heard that this cult film holds a place of reverence, and seen today it is a pioneering analog work that anticipates so much of what has become the lingua franca of the digital age - DIY, confessional self-reflection, unreliable narrative, meta-fiction. "Exit To The Gift Shop" certainly owes a debt of gratitude to this film. Having known the director Jim McBride for decades I am embarrassed to admit that I only caught up with it on its video re-release this year; but I'm happy to include it on this list of rediscovered gems.

8. THIS SPORTING LIFE

          

I was happy to find this still frame from the movie online, as apart from the more famous iconic image of the bloodied and muddied working class rugby player played by Richard Harris in this amazing, harrowing film by Lindsay Andersen; this was one of the scenes that really broke my heart - the tender interlude he has with the children of widower Rachel Roberts.  A sharp contrast to the film's brutal depiction of life and love as violent sport and a bucolic memory to cling to amidst the many hard truths of David Storey's novel and screenplay. Sometimes the emperor has no clothes, and sometimes a masterpiece is a masterpiece for a reason - glad I waited as long as I did to encounter this one.

9. BORN TO WIN

          

One of the pleasures of having a streaming Netflix subscription and an iPad. I stumbled on this great Ivan Passer film accidentally one night on location and couldn't stop watching it - not because of the small supporting role played by Robert DeNiro who is shamefully featured on the DVD cover - but because it was such a captivating portrait of a time and place (the mean streets of Manhattan circa 1970) with such winning performances (George Segal, Karen Black, Paula Prentiss) and an unforgettable turn by Jay Fletcher as Segal's drug-hustling buddy Billy Dynamite. It has a mixed reputation, but I think it is one of those films that has gotten better with age.

10. MURDERBALL

           

I liked this film so much that I hired its co-director Henry-Alex Rubin to direct "Disconnect". A documentary with a real grasp of narrative storytelling and just the right tone in a story that could have been too sentimental or full of bathos. The "star" of "Murderball", Mark Zupan, pictured here, even came out and graced us with a cameo in our movie. Watch for him!

What cinematic discoveries or rediscoveries did you make this year?

Enjoy!

william

Cinema of the Mind

You know when you crack open a book and in one sentence are caught up in the spell of an author's voice and grip and eagerly relax as you know you are going to gladly be transported to wherever the storyteller confidently chooses to take you?

"Dr. Rankin was a lage and rawboned man on whom the newest suit at once appeared outdated, like a suit in a photograph of twenty years ago. This was due to the squareness and flatness of his torso, which might have been put together by a manufacturer of packing cases. His face also had a wooden and a roughly constructed look; his hair was wiglike and resentful of the comb. He had those huge and clumsy hands which can be an asset to a doctor in a small upstate town where people still retain a rural relish for paradox, thinking that the more apelike the paw, the more precise it can be in the delicate business of a tonsillectomy."

                                        - De Mortuis

"A rural relish for paradox" - wonderful!

Thanks to Peter Lang for introducing me to the delightful worlds and imagination of John Collier. As a fan of the fantastic and a wanderer amongst the wonderful, I have no idea how this writer and his work stayed off of my radar screen for lo these many years. What were those English teachers at the Latin School of Chicago and Wesleyan University thinking to not include a writer like Collier in their cirriculum?

Thanks to the New York Review of Books publishing imprint for collecting these fanciful stories and bringing them back in print for the 21st century - with a fan's appreciation of an introduction by Ray Bradbury no less!

Apparantly one of Collier's epic but never realized achievements was his screenplay adaptation of Milton's "Paradise Lost" - which he dubbed Cinema of the Mind. It would take more than a "rural relish for paradox" to think that we are currently living in an Age of "cinema of the mind" (many other body parts would more quickly spring to mind), but imagine if some brave filmmaker and adventurous studio would boldly take up Collier's mantle today!

Who would your choice be to play Adam? Eve? Moloch? Satan? Beelzebub?

Enjoy!

william

The Location Scout

No matter where you are in the world, every film location scout has a certain rhythm and shape and tropes familiar to anyone in the business. The beautiful island of Guadeloupe was no exception.

Here is a little photoblog of some iconic moments from our preliminary look-see for your enjoyment.

The driver is usually one of the most important local members of the team, and often the coolest dude. We were blessed with a father and son team, Max and Patrice, whom we dubbed Mad Max and Danica Patrick for their mad skills behind the wheel. You never knew which one was going to show up each day. 

On any scout you will almost invariably find someone pointing a finger. Usually it is the director, but it can also be the location manager, or in this case the local guide to the city.

More often than not, when you see the most beautiful location and fall in love with it, you will be told that it has poor access, no place for a base camp, is too steep, or otherwise massively unfriendly to production.

This can lead to another trope - the look of consternation exchanged between bottom-line oriented producer and artistic-minded filmmaker.

It can be an amazing and wonderful thing when people generously open their homes and share their interior worlds and lives with you. Taking the time to hear their stories invariably enriches your own understanding of the world, and seeps into the DNA of your film project. This woman was a cook, and one of the greatest organizers to maximize the use of a small space that I have ever witnessed.

This woman had come to Guadeloupe from Algeria, and lived in an old 1930's wooden beach house that was as weathered and experienced at survival as she was; only when her daughter arrived did we discover it was also her birthday!

Snack food is an inevitable part of driving around in a car all day. There has been a movement over the years away from loading up on donuts and other junk and towards providing the team with some healthier options.

This cassava or manioc had a thick texture with some kind of brown sweet syrup inside made from local sugar cane. Not bad.

Why is it that Directors always feel that they have to have some kind of special chair to sit in?

The Film Gods are always prone to laughing at our futile efforts to impose our organizational will on nature, so it is not a bad idea to light a candle and say a prayer wherever you go. As they say, the quickest way to end a drought is to take out your film camera and set up for a shot!

If you see a location you like during the day, it is usually a good idea to go back and take a look at night, too. Or if you visit a place in the winter and it has a great view, try to imagine what it will look like when you come back to shoot six months later, when it has been completely blocked by foliage, or even worse, torn down and paved over by new construction.

Finally, make sure to ask your local guide to suggest the best place for dinner, and take your team out for a delicious last supper!

At the Kote Sud, the house special ravioli stuffed with conch was delicious.

But the local aged Rhum Vieux was to die for!

Enjoy!

william