William Horberg

We Are All Made of Stars

Last week's holiday break from school (budget-mandated furlough days have turned the Thanksgiving holiday into a full week off for Los Angeles Unified School District students) turned out to be the perfect opportunity for us to take our astronaut-in-training Diego on his first visit to one of our favorite places - the old Griffith Park Observatory.

Budget cuts have also mandated that this magical facility is now closed on Monday and Tuesday. Which just means that this popular destination is even more crowded on the remaining days when it is open.

We got there early, and the weather was glorious. The welcoming statue of Galileo, Kepler, Copernicus, Newton and other luminaries of astronomy was practically glowing.

The kids were fascinated by the domes that house the telescope and the planetarium. Diego had made a drawing at home in anticipation of the visit, and he clutched his paper sketch of the solar system with him wherever he went that day.

You didn't even need the deco-looking telescope to have a clear view of downtown!

In these days when the value of government, the public sector, the New Deal, and the middle class are all under vicious attack, it was a potent reminder of what we are capable of and can aspire to, to visit this wonderful public space built in the middle of the great Depression which has educated and entertained generations of visitors and been a source of pride and identification for the community.

 

Look at the many intricate details that went into its design and construction.

A copper plate on the front walk shows the relative distance of the planets' orbit around the sun. The orbit for Pluto is marked by a small plaque many meters away from this one. Unfortunately, Pluto has been downgraded to a dwarf planet in 2006, so this particular feature is now anachronistic.

Diego was really excited that his Grandmother was in town and could join him for this maiden voyage in Space! The planetarium show with its kicked-back reclining seats and magical star show overhead was just as cool as when Nick Ray filmed his version of it back in the 1950's with James Dean and Sal Mineo and the rest of the cast of "Rebel Without A Cause".

I was worried that the sensory overload of the swirling stars and shifting perspective on the Domed ceiling might be too much for our little rebel's autistic temperament, but he literally was in Heaven, amongst the constellations and the artist's imagined view of the underwater volcanoes of Jupiter's moon Europa in the sky show film about the search for Water and Life on other planets.

"No one can stop us now, 'cause we are all made of stars"

Enjoy!

william

 

Thankful !

Much to be thankful for this difficult year, starting with this subtle wordless reminder from the late, great William Steig that there is always someone out there whose troubles are worse than our own, including this turkey, confronting the tears of the teller of his fated future!

My list of gratitude this year comes in the form of an acrostic:

M is for my Mom, and Mora as in my wife Elsa, and Miro as in my son, and Marguerite as in my sister.

Y is for you - all my blog readers and well-wishers and interesting commentators.

L is for being lucky enough to land on my feet and not on my head.

E is for enjoying what we have been given and what we have to give and share.

F is for the funniest man in our life, the uniquely original and delightful Diego.

T is for my amazingly talented daughter Natalie, and my amazingly talented physical therapist helping me walk again, who happens to also be named Natalie.

F is also for my friends who have been there for me in good times and bad.

O is for optimism and open - as in one door closes and another one opens.

O is also for operation, and a big thanks to Dr. William Yong, my Malaysian surgeon. 

T is for this quote from the Talmud: “Life is so short we must move very slowly.”

Life in general, and my left foot specifically, forced me to slow down a bit this year.

But sometimes moving slower allows us to see more clearly that which is right in front of us. And to really take the time to be thankful for it.

Enjoy the holidays!

william

Man, Interrupted

i went back to my office on Friday for the first time since my accident.

There was a kind of post-Chernobyl quality to the frozen-in-time-and-abandoned tableau of those once familiar objects on my desk.

My week-at-a-glance calendar lay open where I had left off. It was covered in a fine layer of dust, and the August 2010 headline stared back at me auspiciously.

There was no entry for "Fall 20 Feet Down A Black Hole" penciled in for after lunch on Tuesday August 24th.

A new draft of a screenplay for one of my projects was dated August 18. That was the day we left for Malaysia.

A stack of unpaid bills called out for attention, and the batteries had died on my three-time-zone clock leaving the hour and minute hands quietly still.

As I looked around the room, I imagined a Babes In Toyland or Toy Story-like scenario of the animated life these inanimate objects must have enjoyed in my long absence.

Suddenly it felt quite suspicious that my iTunes was open to the "party song" playlist, my bookshelf of dvd's had clearly been riffled through like some drive-in movie theater, and what was that entry in my check book ledger made out to "office supplies"? Right!

It was clearly time for me to re-assert my dominion over this once-familiar territory, but with the new perspective that is afforded to one whose life has been interrupted. 

Enjoy!

william

Corgi !

Corgi Toys also produced die-cast metal cars and trucks and was started in 1956 as a direct competitor to Dinky. Their factory was in Wales and the company was named after the local breed of dog found in their logo.

Diego and I were excited to find that Corgi also branched out into producing toy rocket ships, as the beautiful drawings in this French sales catalogue for their 1969 toy line evidenced.

They even had a mobile radar system and truck-based launchers. Jeez. Feels like a toy set for a young Saddam Hussein!

To top off the coolness of the Corgi brand line of space vehicles, they even made their own Hovercraft! Be pretty sweet (and a pretty penny) to track down and own one of those today!

Like Dinky, Corgi was ultimately the victim of the changing taste in toys for kids and was bought out by Mattel. But unlike Dinky, the brand was later sold and sold again and now is back operating and selling die-cast metal toys under the Corgi name.

The race for space produced a whole generation of great toys and it is fun to share these old images with Captain Diego, and with you!

Enjoy!

william

Dinky !

Why is this boy smiling?

Once upon a time the Meccano company of Liverpool, England ruled the world market for toy die-cast metal cars. "Dinky" was the name of their line of miniature vehicles, and their colorful small replica models of real cars were the apple of every child's eye.

I found this mint condition French catalogue of Dinky Toy cars from 1969 and loved the graphics and colors and wanted to share it with you here.

Corgi Toy cars became a competitor to Dinky in the 1950's, and eventually both Corgi and Dinky were bought out and subsumed into the Mattel Toy Company whose "Hot Wheels" cars came to dominate the global market. The "Speedwheels" feature on these Dinky cars was introduced to try to compete with Hot Wheels more play-friendly spinning wheel action, but it was too little too late.

Rare Dinky models are valuable collector's items today. I love that boxy Renault, but Diego has the best taste and picked out that cool mid-60's French MATRA as his favorite! 

When it comes to wonderful Dinky toy cars, this boy is smiling and Diego is smiling too!

Enjoy!

william

Shocking Corridors

I found this image from the classic Sam Fuller nuthouse movie "Shock Corridor" and it reminds me of a story, one that Fuller himself might have appreciated.

One of the last films that I supervised as an executive at Paramount Pictures back in 1990 was "Jennifer 8" which starred Andy Garcia and Uma Thurman and was directed by the brilliant British writer/director Bruce Robinson ("Withnail and I").

The film was shot mostly in and around Vancouver. The principal location was an abandoned mental hospital that the Province was happy to rent to us for $1 and it became our base for filming there, including the production offices and many of the main sets for the shooting.

If you notice in the still picture above from Fuller's film, one of the inmates is scrawling disturbing images on the wall, and a few days into the production of "Jennifer 8" at that ominous location similar graffiti started to appear overnight in the rooms where we were filming. At first it was put down as an in-poor-taste prank by some disgruntled crew member, but when it happened again, it started to upset people.

As the filming continued, the warped drawings and often violent or pornographic slogans of the intruding artist intensified. It gradually became apparent that the "abandoned" mental hospital was not abandoned after all; that some wily patient had managed to stay behind when the staff and all of the others had left.

The film commissioner who had arranged for the rental was notified, and ultimately the police were brought in, but the hider was never found.

It made for quite an unsettling shoot (that I always believed contributed to some of the creepy atmospherics of the movie) and the crew was happy and relieved when we finally wrapped out of that massive pile of old brick buildings.

I wonder if they ever found that penultimate inmate?

Robinson did not direct another film for twenty years after "Jennifer 8" (his version of Hunter S. Thompson's "The Rum Diary" comes out next year), but as a very independent filmmaker I think that he was more horrified by the treatment he received at the hands of the "studio system" than he was put off by his near encounter with patient #1.

Nonetheless, as usual Fuller got it right when he composed the haunting tableau above and others in "Shock Corridor".

william

 

A Few Of My Favorite Things

They are among my most prized possessions, collected one by one over the years at swap meets, book fairs and in the nooks and crannies of that now almost-extinct brick and mortar establishment, the used book store.

Somewhat ominously, a man in the white robe and turban of a Sikh sold me my first copy at a flea market almost 25 years ago, a non-descript hard cover with the name "Vertigo" on the spine but little else to herald the wonders inside. A year or so later I stumbled upon this limited edition copy of "God's Man", and I understood this was part of a larger body of work by a truly remarkable artist, and I was hooked.

It was only a matter of time before work this prodigious and beautiful was bound to be rediscovered, and now for the first time Lynd Ward: Six Novels in Woodcut have been collected and published in a fancy new two-volume edition with a foreward by Art Spiegelman.

Before the term "graphic novel" was part of our pop culture lexicon, Ward's wordless storytelling skills and his remarkable stark graphic style combined to create these epic stories whose titles are as portentous as the tales they tell: God's Man, Madman's Drum, Wild Pilgrimage, Prelude to a Million Years, Song Without Words and Vertigo.

Adrift in a tempest-tossed sea.

Almost overcome by the forces of nature that sometimes seem to be pitted against us.

Seeking the dawn of a new day.

Those are my descriptions of the first three pages of part one of "God's Man", which is poetically titled "I, the Brush".

But you might have your own descriptions, as such is the limitless pleasure of these books and this medium of wordless narrative that our imaginations are fully engaged as we each seek and bring our own meaning to the images Ward has created for us.

It took me 25 years to search and find and discover these so-called Woodcut Novels, and now you can get them all in a click of a button. Hmmm.

But once you dive in I imagine you'll spend the next twenty-five years revisiting them for time to time, as Ward's themes of Man and Nature and God and Modernism and Capitalism and Corruption and Beauty are timeless and profound.

Enjoy!

william

Floating Lives

Living on a boat connotes a life untethered.

From Mark Twain's "Huck Finn" to Jean Vigo's "L'Atlante" to the new film from Vietnamese director Nguyen Quang Binh "Floating Lives", artists have used the confined space and rootless nature of characters who peripatetically travel by water to reflect on both the exterior journey of landscape and the interior journey of the soul.

Binh's beautifully shot and sadly devastating film is based on an acclaimed Vietnamese short story by young author Nguyen Thi Ngoc Tu, who captured the pain of a broken family and broken hearts in the lives of itinerant duck farmers in Vietnam's southern Mekong Delta, and was shown this weekend as part of the New Voices from Vietnam film series that the UCLA Film and Television Archives sponsored with the Academy of Motion Pictures.

Like a Vietnamese version of a Son House blues song, the timeless beauty of life on the Delta is punctuated by the modern intrusion of abandoned children, adulterous wives, hard-hearted men, and a ruined woman in the form of a battered prostitute who becomes the one loving mother figure the kids on the river boat have ever known.

Lurking in the eddies of the swirling muddy rivers are the Quarantine police, who are supervising the capture, vaccination and slaughter of the local duck population in a vain attempt to ward off the avian flu epidemic that swept through Vietnam several years ago, an act of war that can't help but remind us of all the other cinematic and photographic images we carry in our collective consciousness of another war that took place in that country a generation ago.

It was my pleasure to present the film and host a discussion after the screening with the filmmakers including actress Do Thi Hai Yen who was our leading lady "Phuong" opposite Michael Caine in Phillip Noyce's film version of "The Quiet American" and here plays the complex and challenging role of "Suong", the prostitute on the run who takes refuge among the floating lives of these tragic characters until life and her own past catch up to her.

Vietnamese cinema has made a remarkable great leap forward in the last several years as a new generation of entrepreneurial filmmakers benefit from new sources of financing and infrastructure and training and the somewhat more relaxed if still present standards of government censorship and control.

I am happy that Binh's new work, along with the other filmmakers taking part in the New Voices series, is being seen here in Los Angeles and I hope you get the chance to check it out, too.

Enjoy!

william

Vic_ory

In lieu of a post today I thought this old polaroid I found of a washed-up broken down democratically-decorated business storefront called "Victory", which used to be on Milwaukee Avenue near Grand Avenue in Chicago before that whole neighborhood was gentrified and turned into "River West", was the perfect picture-worth-a-thousand-words for this post-election morning-after hangover.

:(

 

william

A Letter of Note

I think the first time I ever heard of electronic mail, or email as it is now ubiquitously called, was when Francis Ford Coppola mentioned that he was using it back in 1989, during the early days of his development of the script of The Godfather: Part III at Paramount.

Before then, what we now call "snail mail" was the preferred method of written communication, with all of the attendant accoutrements of stamps, envelopes, stationary, ink pens or typewriters, and more than anything else...patience.

There is a website called "Letters of Note" that is bringing back the art of the letter and features vintage correspondence from the famous to the not-so-famous to the "famous-to-their-mother-in-their-own-house-at-lunchtime", as my wife likes to say.

In an homage to both Letters of Note and to one of my personal heroes, I dug out of the file to share with you this letter I received back in 1984 from the legendary hard-boiled crime fiction writer (he disdained the label novelist) Mickey Spillane.

Dig that logo design for his production company! Classic!

Here is the text in case it is hard to read:

March 24, 1984

Dear Bill:

Sitting a death watch over my friend Dave is a rough deal. How he manages to hold on, eaten up by cancer the way he is, seems incredible. This, coming on top of the fribullation that hospitalized me, has left me shaky enough to curtail a lot of activities.

Frankly, I don't see any way I can get involved with any more projects at this point. Any active segments of my agenda are being decelerated and I am going to have to take it easy from now on. Luckily, I'm old enough not to be bothered by having to slow down.

I'm sorry to have to cancel out of the arrangement we discussed, but those things happen. I'll notify Con Murphy and Jack McKenna and they can get your check back.

Meanwhile, best regards and stay a tiger on the courts.

Sincerely, 

Mickey Spillane

The Dave in the letter is Dave Gerrity, a drinking buddy of Spillane's and the author of "Cry Me A Killer" "Kiss Off The Dead" and other noir books in the Spillane idiom, who passed away not too long after this letter was sent. Despite the retiring tone of the letter, it is interesting to note that Spillane lived for another 22 years after "decelerating the active segments of his agenda", passing away in 2006 at the age of 88.

I had met Gerrity and Spillane and his then 92 year old agent Jack McKenna down in Naples, Florida one weekend back in 1983 to discuss a proposal to make a film based on two of Spillane's novellas "Me, Hood" and "Killer Mine".

I played a lot of tennis in high school and was even captain of my tennis team one year. But I was no match for the amazingly spry and seemingly bionic McKenna, who was 92 going on 16 and ran me ragged around the court while Spillane and Gerrity drank and laughed at my expense.

So the last line of the letter is really quite an endearing joke on me, "the tiger" who got whipped on the courts, from the old literary lion himself.

Spillane knew that "people buy a lot more salted peanuts than they do caviar" and always fancied himself a guy who typed books for the masses. Having this typed letter from him makes me remember and appreciate those more epistolary days, and the letters of note we exchanged with one another.

Enjoy!

william