William Horberg

Kindred Spirit

Years before the internet, before eBay, before Amazon and alibris and all the other sites for collectors, Larry McMurtry wrote a novel that captured the soul and spirit of the pack rat called Cadillac Jack.

You know who you are. The never-throw-anything-away crowd. The ones who see the value and bargains and hidden gems and nostalgic bric-a-brac and objets de art amidst the detritus of our culture and collect and preserve them.

Reader Janet Ergang is such a kindred spirit and was kind enough to contribute a piece of forgotten history to the blog as today's post.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the artist Virgil Patch and his cartoon character Big George and I shared a newspaper clipping of a Big George cartoon I had cut out and kept for decades after reading it one day.

Janet goes one better here, as she thinks it was around 1960 that this caught her attention in the Chicago Tribune. Big George first appeared in syndication in 1960 so this must have been one of his earlier appearances in print.

Enjoy!!

Thanks Janet.

william

Beautiful

I went to bed last night feeling kind of like the rotund fellow in the first panel drawing here after our Thanksgiving Feast yesterday, so I thought I'd share this cartoon strip from one of my all-time favorite gag artists, Ernie Bushmiller.

Have fun this weekend.

I'll be back on Monday and all next week with a fun series for you in anticipation of the holidays and catching up on the classics: my (current, it changes all the time) list of 500 of my favorite films of all-time.

william

Happy Thanksgiving

Found this wild illustration at a flea market and was looking for a chance to share it with you so I thought I'd slip it in here for turkey day.

Best wishes for a happy holiday for you and your family!!

william

Milk Men

Gus Van Sant's poetic, entertaining and important new movie "MIlk" opens today in selected cities. Let's get out and support it and make it one of the most successful per-screen openings of the year!! 

The marketplace for independent films, and for being able to tell stories like "Milk" is so fragile and under duress today, now more than ever. We get the cinema we deserve, and if we want to see and be moved by more movies like "Milk" we need to get "asses in seats" as they say in the distribution business.

Here are a few candid behind-the-scenes shots, courtesy of my great friend and legendary set photographer Phil "the Still" Bray.

               Yours truly with writer Lance Black and director Gus Van Sant.

And with Josh Brolin who plays Dan White in the movie.

Milk was produced by Academy-Award winning producers Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen, and was financed and Executive Produced by Michael London. Bruna Papandrea who works for London's company Groundswell Pictures was also an Executive Producer on the film, along with Barbara Hall who was in the trenches as the line producer and shares Executive Producer credit.

It takes a village to raise a child, and it takes a coalition of willing and talented and risk-taking people to make a movie like "Milk" possible. James Schamus and John Lyons of Focus Features don't get credit on screen, but are also responsible for making this movie happen and should get all the credit they deserve.

Go!  Tell your friends!

And if you don't believe me, check out the critical response at Rotten Tomatoes: as of this evening it is 100% fresh with Top Critics, 97% fresh with all critics. 

Or read Roger Ebert's 4 Star review here.

Or the New York Times' A.O. Scott's review here, who called MILK "the best live action mainstream American movie I have seen this year."

william

Hollywood

It's easy to beat up on Hollywood.

So much of what goes on here can be vulgar, or brutal, or risible, or soul-sucking, and easily parodied like on tv shows like Entourage, or in novels like Michael Tolkin's "The Player".

But it is not everyday that Hollywood takes its licking from a Nobel-Prize winning poet from Lithuania. 

My friend, producer Lawrence Inglee ("The Messenger") shared this poem with me, in a beautiful little paperback edition from Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, whose poetry blog you can see here.

Pretty harsh. 

I wonder if Milosz ever tried to work out here or turned his hand to screenwriting? A couple of rounds of studio notes from development hell could turn even the most beatific writer into a snarling, beastly thing. But 'justice" seems like perhaps a foolish thing to seek or expect from this grand enterprise. We can fantasize about a day of reckoning for bad movies or bad behavior, but there is no one sitting in judgement except the marketplace, and ourselves.

As Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley said: "You never meet anyone who thinks of himself as a bad person. What ever they do, it all makes sense in their own mind."

It's easy to complain, but I tend to feel that for all of its flaws, anyone who has been given the opportunity to work here and is engaged in the vast enterprise of visual storytelling should count themselves among the lucky and privileged. Not that we all should not try in our own way to critique the gross inequities of the place, and to contribute to make it and the stories we tell better.

And as Sydney Pollack once told me he heard from Milosz' Armenian neighbor, the old-time Hollywood director Rouben Mamoulian regarding the movies put out by the studios: "Orchids grown in horseshit." Every once in a while, however coarse or pure one's intentions, a film emerges that is a real gem, enriching our lives in a way no other medium rivals.

It's the orchids that keep us in the game, and that Milosz leaves out of his poem.

william

Pickles at 5 a.m.

In our house lately, there has been a happy chap who LOVES having pickles at the crack of dawn each day, and climbs into our bed to consume them.

I know what you're thinking. Yuck. What kind of a mad diet is that?

 

No. Nobody's pregnant. And we're not getting delivery's from Jerry's deli.

But in our home, we love pickles at 5 a.m.

Here is the young man who loves his pickles and wakes up early every morning eager for some new ones.

And here are the "pickles" he loves:

I know that for me, and I assume for most of us, the iTunes "Visualizer" program was kind of a gimmick, a fun toy to turn on and play with when it first came out, bringing the old '60's Ken Kesey/Fillmore West/Grateful Dead lightshow aesthetic to a new, digitally savvy generation.

But for Diego, it is a real genuine Magic Lantern act, and he can't wait to see the swirling lights, which he calls "pickles", moving to the computer-generated rhythms and patterns in synchronicity to the music. For some reason, he seems to really dig Coldplay's "Clocks" as the early morning music of choice.

"A Rush of Blood to the Head", indeed!!

Sleep? 

Who needs sleep, when you could be hugging your son, listening to Coldplay, and watching pickles through your half-open eyelids as the dawn's early light gradually filters into your consciousness and you get ready for the great day ahead!

william

Reader's Write In

Thanks to Margaret Oomen from our neighbor up north for yesterday's comment and biographical information on Canadian-born cartoonist Richard Taylor. 

And here is a picture of the actual Fort William where cartoonist Richard Taylor was born in 1902.

What a different world that must have been? Who would think that from those distant northern walls would spring the sophisticated wit and wide-eyed wonder of this mid-20th century Manhattan marvel.

And thanks to Peter Hannan who wrote in to remind us of this other side of Richard Taylor, back when booze-filled humor was a staple of mainstream culture.

Here is a self-portrait of the artist in his hair-of-the-dog state:

In "By The Dawn's Ugly Light" he writes: "I receive my greatest inspiration after a hearty repast of hot buttered crumpets, shrimps, and root beer, topped by a cheap cigar."

But this fellow looks like he had a bit more than root beer to partake of:

This little bit of extra biographical information also really intrigued me: "Taylor began his art studies at the age of twelve. (JUST LIKE MY WIFE ELSITA!!). At fourteen he was imitating Rubens. At sixteen, due to reverses in the family fortunes, he was painting garish posters in the basement of a movie theatre in the Mexican quarter of Los Angeles."

Was this true, or just another piece of Taylor drollery? What dire circumstances lead him from Ontario, Canada to East Los Angeles in 1918? Was he alone or with his family? Wouldn't you love to see one of those garish Mexican movie posters painted by Richard Taylor today?

My favorite thing about the blog is when readers write in and expand our circle of knowledge. Thanks to all of you who have been posting your comments here.

william

Silent Storyteller

Richard Taylor in his studio

Charles Addams is much more well known today, courtesy of the 60's television series "The Addams Family" so familiar to baby boomers, and for the two films directed by Barry Sonnenfeld in the 90's, mostly memorable today for the great and talented Raul Julia, who died so young and is sorely missed.

But Richard Taylor was one of his contemporaries in the famous stable of New Yorker magazine cartoonists, and his distinctive style is also familiar to any one of us who used to "read" Playboy Magazine, (only for the articles and cartoons, of course!) :)

He was born in Ontario, Canada in 1902, and died in New York in 1970. I couldn't find much more biographical information about him out there.

Here are a few of his elegant, visual gags.

Taylor wrote a beautiful and definitive book called an Introduction to Cartooning, and you can see it in page detail here.

They'll never make a Richard Taylor movie, but his wordless cartoon panels are a delight of silent storytelling.

william

Branded Entertainment

Reading in Variety last week about Ridley Scott coming on board to develop and make a film based on the classic board game "Monopoly", made me think again about how Hollywood has moved so far away from making movies and into the business of what is known as "branded entertainment".

I remember a friend of mine a while back telling me about the struggle he was having with various writers and the studio trying to craft a workable scenario for a movie they were attempting to develop from the "Hot Wheels" toy car line.

It lead me to a fun speculation of the future, and what the farthermost of this line of thinking might ultimately be:

How about ingenue KIMBERLEY CLARK starring in KLEENEX: The Movie:

I guess if anyone can make a compelling movie out of a board game, the great Sir Ridley Scott can, but it sure feels like a long, long way from The Duellists, or Alien, or BladeRunner. I hope he takes special care with the low rent citizens of Baltic Avenue, which was always my perversely favorite property to own!

I'm sure you can come up with your own and better brands that you'd like to see coming soon to a theatre near you. 

Feel free to share them with us here!

william

The Duke

"Real royal blood comes in real small amounts. We've got three royal cats: the Duke, the Earl and the Count." - Jon Hendricks

After so many years of listening to, collecting and playing jazz, it is nice to discover something new. As famous as it is, I had never heard The Great Paris Concert of Duke Ellington until I bought the CD recently.

Live at Newport '56 had always been the gold standard of Ellington recordings for me, with the soaring and legendary performance of tenor sax man Paul Gonsalves on "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue" as an all-time high water mark.

I'm not sure that the Paris concert actually tops this, but it is a two-disc set of music of the Duke and the band at the absolute height of their powers in front of an appreciative live audience at the Olympia Theatre in Paris recorded in February of 1963.

All the great soloists are here, including Gonsalves, "Cat" Anderson, Cootie Williams and Johnny Hodges, Ray Nance and Russell Procope and Jimmy Hamilton on clarinet.

There is even an instrumental version of this song:

If you're looking for a stocking stuffer this holiday season, you could do a lot worse than filling your ears with these great sounds!!

Enjoy!

william