William Horberg

The Art of Choice

Remember the fate of Sixto Rodriguez in "Searching For Sugar Man"?

How he discovered a distant land, an alternate universe almost, where his work was understood and appreciated and celebrated as meaningful?

Such was the sublime fate of "Disconnect" recently, as I discovered to my amazement on a recent trip to the Camerimage Festival, a prestigious annual mecca for the world's best cinematographers, in Bydgoszcz, Poland.

"Disconnect" never even received a theatrical release as a film in Poland, but it was discovered by the programmers at Camerimage and recommended to two extraordinary policemen in Bydgoszcz as the perfect film for the third annual edition of a program that they invented and administer called The Art of Choice. 

What is life but a series of choices (unless you belong to that group of people who think the play has already been written and we are but actors in it)?

The Art of Choice picks a film whose theme is socially relevant to youth today, and through a series of seminars and workshops, encourages teenagers to make their own short films and tell their own stories around that same theme, in the case of Disconnect the socially disruptive power of technology and the internet, and how we communicate with each other today.

The film were judged in a competition and the winners presented at a Gala ceremony at the Multikino in association with the Camerimage Festival. I was grateful to be invited to attend and hand out the prizes to the winners, and blown away by the very idea that our film was the instrument and inspiration for this conversation and burst of creativity.

There was also a competition among student graphic artists for poster design. I have always been in love with the striking graphic art of classic and contemporary Polish film posters, so it shouldn't have been a surprise to me how deep and creative and subversive were the images that these artists drew for the assignment.

I loved their work and wish they had been around when we were struggling to find a campaign that would cut through the clutter and effectively market the film over here in the USA!

The whole trip was a slightly surreal and unforgettable experience.

And an inspiring idea, as the program seemed wildly successful in its multiple goals of getting teenagers to open up and engage in a conversation about things that matter to them, and in positioning the police not as a force of oppression and control but of listeners and facilitators of a conversation around the idea of making good choices.

Technology is neither good nor bad, it is a just a tool, as is the internet, with its amazing power to connect us and hide us, spy on us, amplify our voices and our anxieties, isolate us, reinvent us, expose us, inform us and on and on and on.

It's all a matter of choice as to how we use the tool. The Art of Choice.

Thanks to Alicja Szalska of the Tumult Foundation for inviting me, and to Lieutenant Colonel Maciej Wolczek of Voivodeship Police Headquarters for his hospitality and inspiring program!

Enjoy!

william

 

The Tivoli Banksy

Diego tried his hand at street art this morning, as part of the Street Painting Fair in Tivoli.

While not as anonymous and surreptitious as the more famous Banksy, he was rocking his hoodie and chalk and of course managed to create some memorable art.

What a great idea for a public art project! At least until the next rainy day!!

Enjoy!

william

Remember When...

It's November 1936.

The Depression got you depressed?

Perhaps a night out on the town is the antidote you've been looking for?

The Dance of the Forbidden Necklace sounds promising...although Tania clearly faced some stiff competition from Yvette and her Muff Dance!

I'd love to know what characters Shavo Sherman delineated in his act? But only those fortunate patrons of the Chateau Club in Cleveland almost 80 years ago would be able to tell us!

Ads courtesy of Billboard Magazine.

Enjoy!

william

The High Five

More fun characters hot off the pencil tip today from D (iego) C (omics)!!

This new super group is called The High Five.

Which one is your favorite?

I'm secretly hoping that Ska-doosh gets his own series (and maybe even a theme song, or a sidekick, or a henchman)!

These days anything seems possible!

Enjoy!

william

 

The Diego Universe

Move over, Stan Lee.

There is a new kid in town, with a vivid imagination and a seemingly endless supply of new superheroes and super villains to people his own cartoon universe.

Today's all-star team up is called The Nova Nine, and the members include:

A-Grow

Boost

The Ringtail

Sizeo

Man-Flame

High-Volt

The Anialatior

The Constrictor

Tony Jackstone

Diego is having a blast hand drawing these beautiful pictures and has become something of a factory for new characters daily.

Stay tuned, fans! Look for the "made up by Diego Horberg" credit as the sign for quality comic entertainment!

DC is the new name for Diego Comics. 

Enjoy!

william

Filming The Quiet American

From the archive, here are a few stills I found in an old Kodak box in the garage taken on location in 2001 in Vietnam during the filming of The Quiet American.

This one is from the river in Da Nang, with Brendan Fraser playing dead as his character Pyle is murdered in Graham Greene's political thriller.

Our brilliant art department built the French watchtower twice, once in the rice fields in Vietnam, and again on Doug and Dave's dirt firm in Australia to double for the fires and coverage we needed of the attack.

Working with Michael Caine was one of the best experiences of my career. Here he is as the British reporter Thomas Fowler, on a set in Ninh Binh near Hanoi.

Photos are all by the great unit photographer Phil Bray.

Enjoy!

william

R.I.P. PSH

Near Brasov, Romania 2002

The Farmer's Market

I first visited LA's famous Farmer's Market on Fairfax and 3rd Street in the mid-70's and it had already been going strong for almost 40 years at that point. It remains one of our favorite places in town and although diminished in footprint from what it once was before it was tucked into a corner of The Grove, it's still a small oasis of preservation of the past amidst the ocean of physical change and transformation that defines SoCal culture.

I found this vintage book of colorful illustrations and photos in a thrift store all the way in Woodstock, N.Y. of all places. Wonder how it got there?

According to the book, the market was the brainchild of one Roger Dahljelm back in the midst of the Great Depression, who took the notion to a friend named Fred Beck, an ad man, and Beck sold the concept to Earl Gilmore who owned a big farm including the tract of land that the current market sits on. The market will be 80 years old this summer, so I guess it was a pretty solid idea after all.

David Hollander wrote a wonderful play once called The Sun Diaries about a group of regulars, free lance script readers and analysts for the studios and independent producers, who meet at the market and kibbitz and trade horror stories about their low level wanna-be creative jobs. The conceit of the play is that, as expected and desired by the system, one reader has read and covered close to a thousand screenplays without ever recommending a single one. But to his dismay, he is reading a script that he loves, knowing that his recommendation could force his boss to actually have to read the thing, and perhaps cost him his job. It was a wonderfully droll piece of humor and so familiar and true to those of us who started in the business as readers and used the farmer's market as our office!

I have some great old color photos from the book to scan and share with you next.

Enjoy!

william

60's Pop Quiz

The holidays were a fun escape for many reasons, but one of the pleasures of the season was the discovery of the 60's channel on the XM radio in our rental car.

At Elsa and Natalie's insistence, we stayed tuned to 60's on 6, and put the pedal to the metal cruisin' the Hudson River Valley to the sounds of famous and one-hit-wonder tunes from my childhood. 

While the songs were almost all familiar, many of the names of these groups were lost to the fog of time in my memory, so it was also fun to look them up and reconnect to these lesser known performers of the era.

Check out the chart below:

The Spiral Starecase? The Blues Magoos?

Can you connect the group to the song they made famous, and name that tune?

Enjoy!

william

 

 

Vintage Travel

 

I found this old travel brochure of a State Park near Ithaca, N.Y. at a vintage store in Woodstock.

I loved the black and white photographs of nature inside.

It reminded me of my own childhood exploration of the Starved Rock State Park on the Illinois River outside of Peru, Illinois.

Every state park seems to have places named after the Devil, and this is a picture of Lucifer Falls in Enfield. 

I vaguely recall that Starved Rock had a Devil's Playground, or something like that. It always felt very Nathaniel Hawthorne to me in regards to this view of the satanic nature of the nature surrounding us (and within us)! 

This is a place called The Old Mill, like the famous Disney short cartoon of the same name.

 

 

 

Here is a bridge over "The Narrows". Beautiful.

I hope we get to visit there one day and compare then to now. Hopefully not much has changed. In the meantime we can enjoy the place vicariously through these vernacular images.

william