William Horberg

Happy Birthday Blog

A picture speaks a thousand words, so I think today I will let this one do all the talking for me - a group portrait of Elsa and the 3 Amigos, taken at Natalie's sixth birthday party.

And speaking of birthday's, it was a year ago that Elsa dragged me kicking and screaming into the notion of writing this blog. One year, hundreds of posts, and almost 50,000 readers later, I have to give props to my wife and say how much I've enjoyed writing and sharing stories and photos and ephemera with all of you here.

And most of all how much I've enjoyed your comments and the regular readers who have been following along and writing back and sharing stories and links of their own that have opened up whole new worlds of knowledge and information and entertainment for me.

So THANKS today! To my FAMILY! And to my BLOG FAMILY!

Happy Birthday, Blog!

Leave all of your birthday wishes for Blog here, and I will be sure to pass them on to him.

william

No "Picnic"

When asked "how do you make a movie?", one waggish filmmaker once retorted "inch by inch". As a statement of the unglamorous and painstaking process of collecting pictures and sound while a crew of hundreds gather somewhere on the planet and actors dress up and make faces, it pretty much fits the bill.

Our slow daily crawl of recording the precious camera set-ups that will eventually become the tiles in the mosaic that director Troy Nixey and editor Jill Bilcock will stitch together into a narrative (that will resemble the screenplay it is based on in the way that a house could be said to resemble the architect's blueprints for same) begins in the pre-dawn darkness at a place here called Mt. Macedon.

Never heard of it?

What if I told you that it was the location for one of the seminal Australian films of the 1970's - Peter Weir's "Picnic At Hanging Rock"? 

While the house we are shooting at here was not actually chosen because of any totemic value ascribed to its location, it is nice to feel that we are working in the shadow of that ancestor of poetic ambiguity.

There is nothing particularly poetic about the freezing temperatures each morning at our mud-covered base camp, nor is it ambiguous how many semi-trailers and generators and grip trucks and make-up wagons and miles of cable and gels it takes to bring the circus to town - our crack line producer Stephen Jones has every item covered as a line in his detailed budget.

And yet transcending the very prosaic reality of the shooting process to try to create "pieces of magic" is what every filmmaker must contend with, and what Weir and others have done so magnificently on occasion.

Once, here in the shadow of Mt. Macedon. 

Let's hope it rubs off!

william

Signs

Roadside signs can be a great source of graphic fun everywhere, and Australia is no exception.

Here is one of the most omnipresent and important signs for foreign drivers to ignore at their own peril!

I've been pretty good at getting around on my own here, but unconscious habits die hard, and thirty-five years of driving in the left seat and on the right side of the road American style are so ingrained they can be hard to shake. With no other cars out of the road to reference, the brain can easily go on auto-pilot as I found out on a lonely stretch of Oz highway early one morning. Luckily, once spotted, I had enough distance and time and adrenalin to jackrabbit back into my proper Australian lane. Sorry to whoever you were, Mr. Oncoming!

It is reassuring to know that fish and lobsters are also required to follow the same driving directions as mere mortals here in Southern Australia, as this sign near Lorne would indicate. I guess it used to be a real headache down here when their aquatic brethren didn't follow posted signs, but it seems from my tour that things are now pretty much straightened out!

I don't know where or when this next sign was posted. I only saw a newspaper copy of it on a restaurant wall here and took a photo to share with you. 

What a classic!

Enjoy!

william

The End of the Road

Lex de Vries is the friendly proprietor of Southern Views, a bed and breakfast situated on top of Laver's Hill, one of the highest peaks along the southern coast of Australia. This stretch of rough land has its own micro-climate, and in the winter the hawk really can fly there as the winds come uninterrupted from Antarctica across the southern seas.

Here is a dramatic shot I took at dawn through the glass-walled view of my small bedroom there. Since my camera battery was dead and my memory card was full after my shooting orgy at the 12 Apostles, I took this one with my cellphone. 

Not bad!

Lex and his wife Mary really take the "breakfast" part of "bed and breakfast" seriously and made some homemade bread and preserves served nice and warm to send me on the road home.

It turns out Lex has a connection to cinema too, and we wound up having a long chat about his former career as a projectionist in the family owned movie theatre in Geelong back in the '60's and '70's. It was his dream job and he waxed nostalgic about all the classic movies he got to watch back in the day, his pride in being part of presenting them to the public, and how movies meant so much back then to the average joe looking for a bit of escape and magic.

He turned me on to his current passion of researching restored movie palaces in Australia, and told me some places to check out in Melbourne, including the old Regent and Palace Theatres downtown which underwent a total renovation and were reopened to the public back in the mid-'90's.

I remembered my own days as a movie theatre operator back in Chicago, and the complicated love/hate relationship we often had with the various projectionists who worked for us then. It was a really powerful union, some say backed by the mob, and although we had a few projectionists who really cared about movies and quality, we also had some lifers who used to watch tv and cook meals on their hot plates up in the booth during the screenings, missing the changeovers.

Nonetheless, it was all a bit more human than the malls and giant computer programmed platter systems that are the standard projection systems today, and talking with Lex brought back for me the human face of the people behind the scenes who were part of what it meant to go to the movies way back in the ancient history of the 20th Century!

william

The 12 Apostles

Okay, so I know it looks a little bit "Yanni at the Acropolis"-ish, but here is yours truly pulling out his Verne Q. Powell flute with the gold Brannen-Cooper headjoint to get ready to serenade the sunset at one of the most amazing sites in Southern Australia - the sentinels of limestone rock stationed along a remote stretch of highway on The Great Ocean Road known as The !2 Apostles.

The problem is that nature has not cooperated with the folks who named the site and who carved that bronze plaque at the visitor's center, as the natural process of waves and erosion mean that there are now only like 8 apostles. Sorry, Jesus! 

In fact one of the Apostle structures known as London Bridge is looking for a new moniker, as the arch-like structure that connected the two towers recently collapsed. I guess that means a net gain of one apostle, so one tourist's loss is another one's gain!

Anyway, here is a series of shots of the sun setting over the 7, 8 or 9 apostles or however many there still are - it doesn't really matter as the spectacular view and the quasi-mystical vibe to the place made me feel like I was photographing the book cover of some old 1970's Dell paperback science-fiction novel by Samuel Delaney or Lin Carter or James Blish!

Can't you just feel Charlton Heston from the end of Planet of the Apes pounding his fist in the sand and screaming ""God Damn you all to hell" when you look at this landscape?

After dark I realized just how desolate a place I was in when I looked for a place to grab a meal. I drove down the starry night road a few more kilometers to the small town of Port Campbell, where I found a nice curry and rice and a glass of Shiraz. Luckily the local gas station was open until 8 p.m. 

It would have been a bit too Mad Max to get stranded out there alone with my rental car on fumes!

william

The Great Ocean Road

Last Sunday was the first day off from production since I've been in Australia, so I used the opportunity to jump in the car (seated in the right hand driver's seat and driving on the left side of the road, of course!) and take a trip down to the southern coast of Victoria state and transverse part of what is known locally as The Great Ocean Road.

It is the middle of winter here, but I was graced with one of the most glorious days ever for my journey. The road south travels through (or around, with the new bypass road) the city of Geelong (pronounced Ja-long) and down to Torquay on the coast.

The series of beaches on the southern coast are some of the most famous surfing beaches in the world, and sure enough, there were some hardy boarders in wet suits braving the cold winter waters in their search for the perfect wave.

Here are some snaps from the road to share with you:

Belle's Beach just below these cliffs, is the site of the World Surfing Championship.

Down the road a bit is the small beach town of Anglesea - "where bush meets sea" as the sign says. Some puerile minds might find a tasteless joke in this, but not me, and not the town fathers of Anglesea! They care more about keeping the streets free of those pesky skateboarders!

Here is a view from along The Great Ocean Road. The clear waters, the rocky reefs, the azure skies and cotton candy clouds - Heaven!

With modern GPS navigation, the old lighthouse system around the world is mainly in disuse. This grand old tower at Split Point is still functional, but many along the coast are not. The southern coast of Australia was the home to innumerable shipwrecks over the course of most of the 19th century and into the 20th Century. Hundreds of boats and crews and passengers and cargo were lost at sea during the perilous voyage. Here is a photo of passengers who were the lucky ones - their boat got stranded in shallow waters off the coastal town of Lorne in 1908, but they survived and made it to shore.

I stopped and had lunch at a great little seafood restaurant right at the end of the pier at Lorne. My final photo here is a view of the pier. You can just make out the three kids playing on the rocks as if it was the middle of summer.

On this grand day, on this great road, it was!

william

This Must Be The Place

If you were to look up "jazz club" in the encyclopedia, the picture you found there just might look like "Bennett's Lane" in Melbourne, Victoria. 

Miramax executive Mike Falbo and I were wandering lost, trying to decipher our google map, when we finally stumbled into a dead end alley just off Little Lonsdale Street, saw a hint of neon and heard, or felt really, the tiniest vibrations of an upright bass walking the beat. 

The club at the end of the alley was tiny, intimate as the best jazz clubs should be - a room, a bar, some tables, fewer chairs, and a piano, bass and drums crammed onto a stage that would be hard-pressed to hold an octet, let alone a big band.

The trio was mid-song when we entered, and even though it was a modern interpretation, I recognized the old ragtime melody poking through - Louis Armstrong's "Struttin' with Some Barbeque". The reedy gray-haired man on the drums, Allan Browne, turned out to be a bit of a local legend. He was joined by pianist Marc Hannaford and bassist Sam Anning, in what turns out to be the regular Monday night house band at the Lane.

The band was smoking, the club was well-attended but not packed, and the friendly bartender worked out a two-for-one deal with me, not on drinks as Falbo and I were resolutely sober on this work night, but on cd's, as I bought one of the Allen Browne trio, and she gave me one for free of another local - pianist Jex Saarelaht - which was recorded live at Bennett's!

I found out more about Browne when I went into the studio for work the next day. In one of the small world coincidences I love, it turns out that his son and daughter are working as assistant editors on our movie! 

I asked his son Billy about the dire, nihilistic Russian poetry that Browne read aloud between songs during the set, and he said it was a common thread in the life of this bohemian artist. Browne had retired from the scene a few years back for health reasons, but has made a comeback, and was in fine form, especially when he dropped the sticks and brushes and played the tom toms with his soft supple fingers for one of their groovy ballads.

No, Natalie wasn't there with all the other local hepcats, but if she was, I'm sure she would have looked something like THIS!

william

Hello, Dali

The National Gallery of Victoria here in Melbourne has a stunning exhibition of work by Salvador Dali called Liquid Desire. Although some of his most famous paintings such as The Persistence of Memory are not in the show, it is the breadth of his work over seven decades in so many mediums including painting, drawing, watercolour, etchings, sculpture, fashion, jewelry, cinema, photography, as well as book illustrations, that make this show so spectacular. 

I was familiar with his famous film collaborations with Luis Bunuel as well as Alfred Hitchcock (the dream sequence in Spellbound) and Walt Disney - the amazing cartoon Destino that was shelved back in the day, but recovered and restored a few years ago.

Equally cool and less known to me were the illustrations that Dali did for The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, a book that many years ago John Patrick Shanley told me was one of the most amazing stories he had ever read.

I was also unfamiliar with the Dream of Venus pavilion that Dali created for the 1939 World's Fair, pictured below.

           

According to the museum's literature, although it was torn down after the fair, the surviving photographs of Dali's creation mean that is now recognized as one of the earliest full-scale installation pieces. Lured by a siren's recorded chant (sung by B-movie legend Ruth Ford) visitors purchased twenty-five cent tickets from a fish-headed booth, and then passed through an entrance flanked by two towering legs clad in stockings and high-heels. Inside the building, visitors entered a lavish grotto, the centerpiece of which was a nude sleeping Venus, who reclined in a 36 foot-long bed covered in white and red satin, flowers, and leaves. Her dream was staged underwater in the adjacent aquarium, where women wearing revealing costumes adorned with fins and spikes milked a mummified cow, tapped on giant typewriter keys, and answered oversized submerged telephones. 

I also learned about Dali's friendship with Harpo Marx, who he sought out as "the most surrealist figure in Hollywood" and saw as a kindred spirit. He even gifted him a surrealist harp with barbed wire strings and teaspoons and forks for tuning knobs.

With his restless searching intellect, later in life Dali became fascinated by the work of Dennis Gabor, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1971 for his invention of the hologram.

From the website of the Centre for Dalinian Studies we learn that:

In 1965 his interest in holography and three-dimensional art began to be awakened. Over the course of the decade he continued to study the latter aspect and the work of Gerard Dou, in whose canvases he discovered dual images, that is, stereoscopic images. From that time, 1970, he began to work with a Fresnel lens in order to put together these images. In 1971, when Denis Gabor was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work on lasers, Salvador Dalí interested himself in holography and in 1972 staged his first hologram exhibition at the prestigious Knoedler Gallery in New York, where the hologram Holos! Holos! Velázquez! Gabor! was presented.

With little time off from shooting, we took the whirlwind tour of the exhibit.

I hope to get back soon to take a more leisurely stroll and savor the kaleidoscope of imagery on display. If you make it down to this neck of the Southern Hemisphere, don't miss it!

william

Mel Bourne

Mel Bourne was the name of the Chicago-born and New York-based art director and production designer who worked on "Annie Hall" and went on to design 'Manhattan" and "Broadway Danny Rose" and "Zelig" and many other classic movies for Woody Allen. We crossed paths once, on the Paramount production of the Adrian Lyne romantic comedy "Indecent Proposal".

Melbourne is also the name of the second city of Australia where I have taken up residence this summer for the production of the Miramax film "don't Be Afraid of the Dark", which is being directed by talented newcomer Troy Nixey, and produced by my friends Mark Johnson and Guillermo del Toro. This poetic horror film is a remake of a cult classic telefilm from the early 1970's, which viewers of a certain age still recall as one of their scariest memories. It stars nine year old Bailee Madison as the daughter of architect Guy Pearce, who has come to live in a crumbling old mansion called Fallen Mill which is being restored by Guy and his new girlfriend, a designer played by Katie Holmes. 

The "dark" which of course they should be Very afraid of is the ash pit in the basement, wherein reside a set of malevolent creatures known as homunculi, which have been fiendishly and deliciously designed by Troy and Guillermo and the special effects team they have assembled.

Some people compare Melbourne to San Francisco as a city on the bay, but to me it has a real Chicago feel to it, a bit architecturally, but more in the vibe of the place, the many cultural activities found here, the competitive attitude towards their bigger neighbor Sydney to the north, and the hard-working spirit of the people.

I look forward to blogging for you from here and sharing some of the sights and sounds of this big city, somehow, sometime, in between my all-consuming Executive Producer duties on this cool new film project.

I may not be as regular a writer as I have been for this past year, but stay tuned: there will be lots of nifty stuff to come out of this experience, I'm sure.

william

A Look Back at Harvey Kurtzman

Harvey and his daughter attending a ComiCon in the early 1970's.

I have been blogging about MAD magazine founder and comic book genius Harvey Kurtzman for this last week, and today I stumbled across an appreciation of Harvey by someone much more qualified than I to write about him.

Terry Gilliam came to New York in the early 60's and worked for Kurtzman at his then current magazine venture, Help! Here is his first hand account of that first encounter which had such a formative influence on his own creative journey as artist and filmmaker and Python member. Turns out Gilliam even met John Clesse through his work producing what he calls fumetti for Help! - little comic photo strips - which inspired Gilliam to take the eventual leap into making movies.

From The Guardian:

Then Harvey started Help! magazine. I just discovered it one day, and said, hello, what’s this? For me, the best thing about Help! were the fumetti, the funny photo-stories that Harvey was doing. I’d never seen anything like that before. So we started doing those. That was the next step for me towards film-making: suddenly we were going out and doing photo-shoots, dressing people up and finding locations and telling stories. I started sending the magazines to Harvey, because I just wanted him to see who was out there copying him, the monster he’d helped create. He sent back a really nice letter which was the beginning of the end, or the beginning of the beginning.

When I graduated from university I really didn’t know what I was going to do. But I wrote to Harvey and said, ‘I’m gonna come to New York. I’d love to come and meet you.’ And he wrote me back saying, ‘Don’t bother, kid. There’s no job here, there’s nothing, it’s a hard place.’ But nevertheless, I went.

So we agreed to meet, at the Algonquin Hotel. Now, I was a great fan of the Algonquin, because that was where the Round Table was in the Twenties, where Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley and George Kaufman used to hang out and be witty and write for the New Yorker.

I got there and I remember going up the stairs, this callow youth from California, and I knock on the door and the door opens and inside this suite were gathered together all of my god hero cartoonists. And then Harvey turns up. He was much smaller than I expected; most of my heroes are. But it was wonderful. Harvey was really sweet and enthusiastic. And standing next to him was a guy named Charles Alverson, the assistant editor of Help!, who had just decided to quit. And they were looking for somebody to replace him. So I got the job just like that.

At Help! I had to do everything. I had to deal with whatever went on with the magazine, so I’d be on the phone talking to people in a solemn voice: ‘Ah, yes, this is Mr Gilliam, the assistant editor of Help! magazine, I’ll have that package over to you in about, oh, 15 minutes, I’ll tell the boy to bring it in.’ But that boy was me. And I was making two dollars less than I would’ve made on the dole every week. It was wonderful.

What I really loved was doing the fumetti, because I had to be, in a sense, the producer. So I would get the actors together, the props together, the costumes, find locations. Some of this was done with Harvey, sometimes it was me out there on my own. Henry Jaglom, the film director, was in one of our fumetti; so was John Cleese, which is how we met. Once we were doing this fumetto about gangsters; we needed a Mr Big and one of our ‘gun molls’ happened to be dating Woody Allen. He was perfect, although Harvey was wonderfully bemused about who this guy was.

Kurtzman's later work, especially his drawing the Little Annie Fanny cartoon for Hefner's Playboy Magazine felt like a fall from grace for those who missed the razor sharp wit of his Mad, Trump, Humbug and Help! days. But his legacy and influence clearly live on, as Gilliam's eloquent appreciation amply demonstrates.

Enjoy!

William