William Horberg

The Magical World of My Imagination

In the spirit of UPA, Natalie too has developed a special artistic vocabulary to express her ideas. Here is her "inverted world" with a super cold blue sun, rain falling upward, a tree with green roots and brown leaves, and a yellow tree that is glowing warm like the sun.

And here are some of the unique creatures that live on this imaginary world.

The Horse Girl. The Blue Owl. The Intelligent Ladybug.

When I asked her what she was drawing, she said: "The Magical World of My Imagination", so that is what you are looking at here!

william
 

UPA

People change, and tastes change too.

I must confess that growing up I looked down on the "limited animation" style that was the hallmark of UPA, the United Productions of America cartoon studio, that was founded during WW2 by a group of artists who had left Disney during an animators strike and hit the big time with Mister Magoo and Gerald McBoing Boing, until they stopped making theatrical cartoons in 1959, the year I was born.

 

As a kid I found Magoo kind of annoying, and it wasn't until years later that I revisited their output and came to appreciate the artistic vision behind their stripped down and more abstract conceptual and design choices. 

This 'minimalist' aesthetic was later co-opted for the budgetary restrictions of television, and got abused in the flood of cheap-o cartoons that came to dominate the airwaves on Saturday mornings, which may be one of the reasons that the legacy of UPA required a revisionist reassessment.

There is a new book out called "Inside UPA" that is a kind of home photo collection that captures the ambience and creative spirit of the place and the practitioners of this lost art form.

 

Here is UPA co-founder Stephen Busustow with "The Tell-Tale Heart" director Ted Parmelee looking at a background painting for that film drawn by Paul Julian, one of my favorite artists and the writer and illustrator of the magical children's book "Piccoli".

 

And here is animator Willis Pyle working on a drawing for a "Sad Sack" cartoon in the late 1940's.
 
For an even more comprehensive overview of this revolutionary period in design you can also check out "Cartoon Modern: Style and Design in 1950's Animation."

I like it. I really like it.

william
 

Nobody Knows

 

I'm trying to catch up on some of the films that I have missed over the years that recently ended up on many of the Best of The Decade lists that came out as we rolled into the 2010's.

"Nobody Knows" by Kore-Eda Hirokazu is one of those quiet gems that can easily float under the radar screen in this country, where the audience for subtitled foreign language films is even smaller than the crowd that still looks up movie showtimes in the newspaper.

A fairly reckless and selfish mother moves into a new apartment with her almost teenage son, but we quickly learn she has more children, who have been smuggled in past the unsuspecting landlord and his wife in their suitcases. At first she tries to keep up the pretense of a nominal family life, but she irresponsibly comes home late one night from a drunken evening of karaoke, and soon she doesn't come back at all, leaving the boy and his even younger sisters to fend for themselves.

Beautifully understated, this is one of those magic films featuring children incapable of a dishonest moment, like 400 Blows or Lord of the Flies, told from their point of view as they try to survive in an urban world ignorant of their plight. Apparently it was inspired by a true story! It has a heartbreaking ending that makes me wonder if that is also a development out of the real life events depicted in this film?

So after disparaging listmaking in an earlier post, I will contradict myself here and say that I am grateful to the list-compilers who called my attention to Kore-Eda's most memorable work and reminded me to finally check out one of the best movies of the last decade.

I hope you'll follow my example (see the movie, not "contradict yourself")!

:)

william

In My Life

I don't remember the year, but at some point in the late '60's my sister and I moved with my Mom to this big new high rise that was only a few doors down the block from the small brick house we grew up in. Though geographically close, it was emotionally miles away. 

I believe it was housing that was in some way subsidized for lower and lower-middle income families. We lived pretty high up, and it was one of the those places where the elevator broke down fairly often, and once there was a fire in the building and it was a big scare as the stairwell was filled with smoke and we had to shove towels under our front door and open up all of our windows and hang out to watch the Chicago Fire Department do their job below.

But what I mostly remember was that the walls were paper thin, as were the doors, and that once upon a time when my older sister and I were fighting over the kind of stuff that mattered desperately then but has faded into oblivion now (probably who got to watch what program on tv at the time), I threw a punch at her and my small fist went and popped a gaping hole right through her flimsy bedroom door. In the tit for tat that usually defined these exchanges of sibling rivalry, she went and got a hammer, and she tried to hammer a matching hole in my door, but surprisingly, perhaps by some law of physics that governs poorly constructed domiciles, the hammer just kept glancing off the door, scratching it pretty badly, but leaving it frustratingly intact.

Luckily she didn't turn that hammer on my skull or I wouldn't be here writing this!

Sorry, sis! I probably never got to say that.

 

Moving on up, when my Mom got remarried in the early 1970's we moved into this older but more elegant building. My room was right off of the kitchen, and I remember I was somehow allowed to paint it an eye-jarringly shade of dark blue. It looked pretty cool with my black light on, as did some of the day-glo posters I had up on the walls. There was a kind of service window connecting my room to the kitchen, so what I lacked in privacy, I could sometimes make up for by having a warm piece of Sara Lee Butter Streusel Coffee Cake and a glass of milk shoved through the slot by my obliging Mother!

 

Many years later I found myself in this modest apartment building, a mile of so west, near the "L" train tracks. My apartment was on the 3rd floor, and one of the more memorable things that happened to me here was when there was a knock on my door one day, and I opened it to two plainclothes police officers. I still haven't figured out how they got up there without ringing the doorbell.

They were there to question me as I had been a witness to an act of police brutality that occurred in the train station at 35th Street, while I was on my way to a White Sox game at the old Comiskey Park. I was with my sister's boyfriend, and we were alone in the station when we came across a circle of uniformed policemen and a black man on the station floor who was beaten and bleeding, handcuffed, and subdued but still struggling.

We hustled on out of there with our eyes averted, but were caught on the surveillance camera in the station, and when we later heard on the news that the suspect had died in the police car on his way from the station, we knew that we were going to be involved. We each had gone downtown and given a statement of what we saw.

My midday visit by the flatfeet (how did they know I was home?) came a few months later. It had a veneer of matter-of-fact-ness to it, but underneath the simple questioning of the details of my statement around the kitchen table of my small one bedroom apartment that day, I remember how intimidated I felt by the big guy in the police windbreaker who never spoke, but stood there looking at me. And I remember the speech that the speaking-guy gave me, about how it is a jungle out there, and how tough it is to work the mean streets as a cop, etc. It was a good speech. It had the ring of truth. I wish I had written it down. 

But what place did it have in my home, and under these circumstances?

The accused cops turned out to have a history of abusive behavior that came out in the press during their long legal ordeal. I believe they were kicked off the force. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, but I was never called to testify in court. 

Just another one of those strange things that happened back then in Chicago, as I was reminded on my recent visit home.

william

 
 

 

6' 2" Above Sea Level

This is a post about numbers.

18 years ago today, on 2.18.92, this young man was born at 12:30 pm in the afternoon, after about 40 hours of labor.

He grew up to be this handsome, sweet, funny guy who a few years ago easily shot up past his Dad and now breathes the air about 6' 2" above sea level.

His high school basketball team was 19 - 3 this year and are on their way to the playoffs.

He's my #1 son Miro, and he will always be number one in my heart, and in the hearts of his brother and sister, the rest of his extended family, and those who are lucky enough to know him.

Happy 18th Birthday, Miro.

Go, Wolves!

Love, Dad

 

There Are Places I Remember

I'm not really sure if going back to visit the place(s) where you lived as a child gives you a sense of how much you've grown and how far you've gone in life, or how little, that is the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree? 

How easy it is to slip back into the sights and sounds and experiences that are contained in the brick and mortar of any still-standing building that defined so much of your world once upon a time. 

The house on the left of screen is the house that I spent most of my childhood living in with my Mother and Father and older sister, before my parents got divorced. 

 

The alley between the two matching buildings and the t-shape formed in the back by the garage for the cars of the residents was my universe, after school, on weekends, in broiling summers and frigid winters. That back door was my hiding place from schoolyard bullies or peering neighbors or trying-to-end-my-fun parents or babysitters. That concrete patch was the site of some world-class hopscotch or jump rope for my sister and her friends. And for running bases and baseball and football games for mine. Many a skinned knee and pint of blood stained that hallowed ground. When we grew old enough, kisses were stolen and "feels" were copped, and later on an intense feud broke out one year between my friends and I and a girl who lived next door, who we went to war with only because we were secretly so attracted to her that any interaction, even a negative one, was better than indifference.

Believe it or not, our landlord's name was Schreck, and like the movie, he assumed an ogre-like dimension in my childish imagination. He owned an Army Surplus Store, and there was a kind of "Honeymooners"-like quality to the arguments we would sometimes hear coming through the walls of their apartment.

Of course at some point they could probably listen to the arguments coming through our walls too as my own parents' eleven year marriage came to an end. It was the winter of The Big Snow, and the city was blanketed under two feet of powder, and my sister and I made tunnels in the front yard and threw snowballs at each other and passing pedestrians and pretty much anyone else that dared to venture within range. 

We were too young to be sad, or we were sad but our youth and the snow were just too much fun to think about any old adult stuff for very long.

Coming back in 2010, I didn't have the time or the courage to ring the bell and see who was living there now. I already felt when I was taking these photos that I was trespassing, but the family I was trespassing on was probably my own, and if someone had answered the bell, who's to say it wouldn't have been ol' Schreck, looking for the rent money!

Have you gone back to see the place you grew up lately?

william

 

 

The Neighborhood Playhouses

They are old and shuttered now. Relics of a bygone era. The neighborhood movie palaces of my youth. You probably have one or two where you live. Sometimes they get refurbished and are given a new lease on life as either a retro movie showcase or a multi-purpose entertainment venue. But more often than not they are victims of what made them special - their size, their age, their local-ness.

 

These two theaters are almost across the street from one another in the Uptown area of Chicago, on Broadway near Lawrence Avenue. How large they once loomed when the bulbs burned bright on their marquees and their gold stanchions controlled the flow of the crowds onto their red carpets, and garish outsized lobby cards and window cards trumpeted the newest release. Even when they became more or less Grindhouses catering to the "B" or "Z" movie crowd, they retained a certain degraded charm. 

But no more.

How I remember the ear-splitting rumble of the Sensurround bass speakers when the Japanese fighters attacked Pearl Harbor in the road show screening of "Tora Tora Tora" or the sensation of the buildings crumbling around my seat in "Earthquake" at the Uptown. Or when I lied to my parents, and my under-age friends and I snuck into "2001: A Space Odyssey" and left dazzled but with no clue as to what we had just seen and experienced. Or when I took the bus Uptown to meet a friend for a double-feature of creep fests like "The Abdominable Mr. Phibes" and "The Dunwich Horror". 

Or even further back when my best friend from summer camp that year was a kid with a funny accent who turned out to be from Boston, and we went together to see Phil Silvers singing as Baloo The Bear in Disney's "The Jungle Book". That must have been in the summer of 1967.

All of those movies and all of those memories must be rattling around inside those empty buildings like so many ghosts of cinema past. If you snuck inside past the rusted lock on the alley door and closed your eyes, you could probably hear echoes of the popcorn popping and the Milk Duds sticking to your shoes and the 35mm film chattering through the gates of the old carbon-arc projectors.

There is a Friends of the Uptown Theatre hoping to find economic support for reviving this one time palace.

I certainly consider that the Uptown and the Riviera and the Century and the Lake Shore and the Parkway and the 3 Penny and the Biograph cinemas were all old friends to me as part of my education in the art of the moving image.

william

 

Old School

Driving around my old neighborhood on a recent trip back to chilly Chicago, one building loomed largest in my imagination: the Louis P. Nettlehorst school on Broadway and Melrose, my destination for eight years from kindergarten in 1964 until my 8th grade graduation in 1972.

This venerable institution, built in 1898, is now more than 100 years old.

If those walls could talk, think of the generations of stories they would tell and the lives of the teachers and children who passed through there?

If memory doesn't fail me completely, those two windows with air conditioning units that are jutting out over the doorway on the Broadway side were bathrooms, and at one time that bathroom was the site of a dangerous school prank that gave rise to a moral lesson for the whole class.

When I was in 6th grade, a few of my friends and classmates (was I one of the perpetrators?) used the occasion of recess to sneak into the bathroom and fill up a couple of balloons in the faucet there, creating a few colorful, heavy-to-hold water balloons with the mischievous intent to drop them on the heads of passers-by our local public school.

Unfortunately, one errant balloon flew over its intended target and hit the window of a passing Chicago Transit Authority bus. Man, when that ballon hit that bus, the s*** also hit the fan, and the culprits were quickly detected, run down and busted and sent to the principal's office.

Suspension and even expulsion were on the table, but our Sixth Grade teacher Miss Lindermann, saw opportunity where others only saw punishment. She somehow convinced the administration to turn the event into a trial, of the students, and conducted by the students, as a kind of grand civics lesson. Regular classes were suspended, and students were chosen to play the roles of prosecutor, defense, judge and jurors.

While the details of the court proceedings that took place in the old classroom are a bit dim some 40 years later, one thing that comes back to me vividly is the booming voice of Miss Lindermann as she rose to give a summation speech before the mock court, dripping with sarcasm that would shame us all into better behavior.

"Kick a fellow in the nuts. Fun, fun, fun. Pull a knife in the schoolyard. Fun, fun, fun. Grab a girl by the breast. Fun, fun, fun. Toss a balloon out the window of school property and almost kill the passengers on the bus. Fun, fun, fun."

I'll bet I'm not the only kid in that classroom then who can remember that lecture; not that we didn't ever mess up again, but we were "scared straight" by her moral righteousness, and we could feel her looking over our shoulder disapprovingly if and when we ever did occasionally stray from the path again.

Talk about Old School, Nettlehorst and Miss Lindermann were a potent force for the unsentimental education of my generation!

Who was that teacher in your life?

william

The Moral Responsibility Of Artists

Although he'd probably hate me saying it this way, Frank Pierson is a living legend among screenwriters, and hearing him interviewed by fellow screenwriter Larry Karaszewski the other night after a screening of the seminal film "Dog Day Afternoon" for which Frank won an Oscar for Best Screenplay, was just one more affirmation of his stature, and why we're so grateful he is still around, and still giving so much back to the industry.

Of the many tales he told the other night, the one that really stayed with me was a story about the fate of one of his real-life characters, and how it made him reflect on the question of the moral responsibility of the artist.

Tackling true stories can be devilishly tricky business, especially if the people involved are still alive, and if the events depicted are controversial or involve criminal proceedings. 

I remember a few years ago when Sidney Kimmel financed a movie called Alpha Dog based on a true crime story, and the leading character was a fugitive from justice living outside the United States. When he was apprehended and brought here to stand trial on kidnapping and murder charges, suddenly the movie itself became entangled in the legal proceedings against him, and almost could not be released.

In Frank's case, his leading character "Sonny" Wortzik was based on the real life John Wojtowicz, the bisexual man who was arrested and convicted and imprisoned for the bank robbery gone awry to finance his lover's sex change operation, as depicted in the movie. A more complex, original and unconventional movie protagonist would be hard to find, and Frank as a dramatist was faced with the age-old problem of figuring out what made this guy tick, and how to get that essential truth across to an audience.

While hewing closely to the facts of what happened that day and talking to as many people involved as he could, he did find the need to invent one crucial scene in the film for dramatic purpose, an invention that itself had dramatic repercussions later on outside of the film.

The scene is a conversation between the erstwhile bank robber "Sonny" as played by Al Pacino, and the FBI agent Sheldon, as played by James Broderick, who is working alongside Det. Sgt. Eugene Moretti, as played by Charles Durning. The cops appear to be acting on a strategy to sow division and doubt between Sonny and his more lethal accomplice Sal, played so unforgettably by the great John Cazale. 

Here is the scene as Frank wrote it in the screenplay:

EXT. BANK - NIGHT

as they (Sheldon and Sonny) exit and stand in the doorway
out of earshot of the others. Sheldon is matter-of-fact,
but insinuating and conspiratorial.

					SHELDON
			Sonny, you handled yourself real
			well. A lot of men would have
			choked, and we'd have a lot of
			chaos and panic and maybe a death
			or a multiple death on our hands,
			but you handled it. I respect that.
			Don't you try to take Sal. We'll
			handle him. You just sit tight and
			you won't get hurt.

He starts to go. Sonny grabs him.

					SONNY
			Wait a minute! What the fuck you
			tryin' to tell me?

					SHELDON
				(quiet)
			What I said. You just sit quiet
			and we'll handle Sal.

And he turns and starts to walk away, leaving Sonny staring
after him.

INT. BARBER SHOP - NIGHT

as Sheldon steps into the door. The place is jammed,
Moretti stands inside the door where Sonny could not have
possibly seen him. Sheldon quietly turns and stands beside
him, both men looking back across the street.

					MORETTI
			The little bastard miss me?

Sheldon smiles the supercilious Ehrlichman smile of his.

INT. BANK - NIGHT

as Sonny re-enters. He's restless, hyperactive, constantly
moving during this scene; a man with a potentially guilty
conscience. Sal moves toward him and both men walk to area
in front of the Tellers' cages.

					SAL
			What'd he say?

					SONNY
			He was talkin' about arrangements
			... we were talkin' about the TV.

					SAL
			Why couldn't he talk about that here?

					SONNY
			He was showin' me how the airport
			bus is comin' in, like that, Sal.
				(notices Mulvaney
				start to faint)
			What's wrong with him?

It's a great scene in a great movie. It shows the first time that Sonny lies in the film. It sets up the ending, in which Sonny survives but Sal is killed by the police as they foil their getaway with the hostages at the airport. 

But it never happened.

Cut to a few years later and Frank runs into somebody who has been to see the real John Wojtowicz, then serving a 20 year sentence at the Federal Penitentiary in Lewisberg. Wojtowicz related the problems he had in prison as a result of that one scene, which implied that he knew what was going to happen to Sal, and had somehow betrayed his partner. And we all know from the movies what happens to rats in prison.

Despite the fact that he was a convicted felon that Pierson never knew, Frank was deeply troubled by how with a stroke of his pen or the keys of his typewriter, he had inadvertently almost gotten this man killed. 

It lead him to speak about our contemporary culture of truthiness, in which the lines between fact and fiction have been blurred if not totally erased, and how he was troubled by the skillful manipulation of the film medium by practitioners like Oliver Stone in his making of "JFK", and how generally absent from the discussion today seemed to be any conversation about the moral responsibility of the artist to the truth.

Of course it's been often said that "fiction is a lie that tells the truth". It was fascinating to watch Frank struggle with this paradox even today, some 35 years later.

If there was a moral to his story, it might have been in the delicious coda to the making of "Dog Day Afternoon". Even though Sonny/John's actual ill-conceived bank heist failed miserably in its intent to grab some quick funds to pay for his lover's sex-change operation, Warner Bros. succeeded where he had not. 

The money that the studio paid him for his life rights fittingly went to turn Mr. Ernest Aron into Ms. Elizabeth Eden.

Now how's that for "moral responsibility"?!?!

william

Exiles on Main Street

Kent Mackenzie's The Exiles is one of the most compelling films I have seen in quite some time. 

The black and white photography of downtown Los Angeles in the early 1960's evokes a kinship to Orson Welles' famous treatment of the Venice Beach area in "Touch of Evil" made just a few years earlier. 

But Welles' fluid crane shots and stylized approach to his noir story give way here to a more documentary vernacular and quotidian narrative; the group of unforgettable characters that comprise this subculture of displaced American Indians living as a minority underclass in the shadow of Angel's Flight and old Bunker Hill are treated to an intimate, relaxed, slacker portrait that might have influenced Jim Jarmusch.

 

The film has a beautifully simple story line, following a small group of men and women over one single night of drinking and partying, with some of the characters winding up at a drunken, ritualistic gathering of cars and booze and girls and drums and tribal chants on what they refer to as "Hill X", overlooking the old downtown skyline dominated by the outline of City Hall made famous in Jack Webb's "Dragnet".

 

The final image of the male revelers and their pick-up dates at dawn walking noisily down the alley between decrepit buildings in this soon-to-be-extinct neighborhood, while left-behind Mary bears witness as she waits alone in her small bedroom is heartbreaking, as are many other moments in this authentic film crafted over several years and based on extensive interviews with the real people playing themselves on screen.

The independent film never got a theatrical release despite critical praise and festival attention back in 1961 (boy, does that sound very familiar these days), but you can see it now on DVD.

Once you do, you will never forget it.

william