William Horberg

Winter Break

It has been a gas blogging for all of you again this year.

I hope you've found something here that tickled your curiosity or your funny bone, introduced you to something new or reminded you of a past fancy, or in any other way stimulated you and encouraged you to think, act and discover.

I won't be sad to see 2010 in my rear view mirror.

Although when I think about it, sorely tested physically and economically and socially and politically this year as I was, nonetheless when I look back on '10 through the lens of time and distance, I guess what will survive in my memory most are the blessings:

the amazing progress of Diego; my daughter's beauty inside and out; my eldest son off to college; my brother-in-law Rene's strength and positive mental attitude in surviving his cancer; the various angels who helped me survive and recover from my accident, including my other brother-in-law Alex who had me laughing all the way home from Kuala Lumpur; Da Bears clinching the NFC North; my friend Maiz's father turning me on to the daily music videos I get from Jazz On The Tube; all the writers and filmmakers I got to collaborate with developing various projects for Wonderful Films; my journey to Egypt; my brother Ben coming to visit with his family and introducing us to his newest little girl Anahi; and of course my wife, nurse, muse, partner, and inspiration Elsita.

Time for this bird to take five. See you in the New Year.

Happy holidays to you and your friends and family and all you hold dear.

william

Free Jafar Panahi

An online petition calling for the immediate release of unjustly convicted Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi can be found and signed here.

Please take a minute and join your voice to the international community of filmmakers and artists and people of conscience calling for his freedom.

 

william

A Profound Injustice

I was sickened and angry this morning to wake up to this news report regarding the harsh sentence imposed by the Iranian courts on the brilliant Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi ("The White Balloon", "The Circle", "Crimson Gold", "Offside").

Having followed this story since his incarceration last Spring and his subsequent hunger strike and temporary release, it is nonetheless shocking to see how they've "thrown the book" at him with not only a lengthy jail sentence but a mandate to stop writing and directing films for 20 years!

Iran jails helmer Panahi for 6 years

Opposition filmmaker Rasulov also sentenced

By VARIETY STAFF

Panahi

TEHRAN, Iran -- -Iran has sentenced two prominent opposition filmmakers to six years in jail, each on vague charges of working against the ruling system, their lawyers said Monday.

One of the two, filmmaker and opposition supporter Jafar Panahi, has won awards at the Cannes and Berlin film festivals. Several of his films have been banned in Iran.

He has also been banned from shooting films or scriptwriting for 20 years, said his lawyer, Farideh Qeirat, who added that she will appeal the unusually heavy sentence.

"Panahi has been sentenced to six years in jail on charges of conspiring against the (ruling) system and is denied his professional rights including shooting films and scriptwriting," the semi-official ISNA news agency quoted Qeirat as saying.

"He has also been barred from leaving the country for 20 years and from doing any interviews with domestic or foreign media during this period," she added.

Berlin Film Festival director Dieter Kosslick had invited Panahi to join the 2011 competition jury in February.

He was among industryites including Robert Redford, Steven Spielberg, Michael Moore and Oliver Stone, who expressed outrage over Panahi's arrest on March 1.

In May the Cannes fest drew further attention to Panahi's plight, who was then on hunger strike in jail, by inviting him to sit on its jury. He was freed on bail later that month.

Mohammad Rasulov, another opposition filmmaker, received a six-year jail term, said his lawyer, Iman Mirzazadeh. Mirzazadeh said he will also appeal the sentence.

Both supported the opposition in Iran's disputed presidential election last June. Reformists say opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi was the rightful winner and that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won through vote fraud.

I met Panahi briefly in Tehran in 2009, prior to the disputed elections there. Even then he was aggrieved and rueful about his status - celebrated abroad and persecuted at home - a man who loved his country and didn't want to leave it but found himself in exile at home and wondering if he would ever be able to work again.

Please join your voice to the chorus worldwide that cannot stand silent in the face of this outrageous injustice. If there is a vehicle to coordinate this protest, please send us the link so we can promote it here.

william

The ART of Sibling Rivalry

Natalie was awarded a certificate as the Best Artist in her second grade class last week. It was no surprise to those of us who have been following her awesome creative output for some time. The apple doesn't fall too far from the tree, and Natalie definitely has taken her Mom's inspiring example as a point of departure for her own original way of seeing the world and expressing herself in a visual medium.

In fact, Natalie's talents are so precocious that at times it has been intimidating for Diego, whose challenges with autism included a delayed ability to grasp a pencil and write or draw. For years he didn't express much interest in Art, ceding that territory entirely to his older sister, and when he did engage it was often only to demand of her to be a gun-for-hire executing his ideas for drawings (rows of tools and lists of numbers being his favorites). Natalie happily obliged, and the status quo side-stepped any typical sibling competition or rivalry.

But all that has changed as Diego has made such amazing progress this last year, really coming into his own and finding it easier and more comfortable to express his own unique independent ideas and to communicate with others, including his interest in picking up pencil and paper and drawing his own artwork.

This explosion has been exciting to watch, and has mushroomed as Elsa and I decided to enroll both Diego and Natalie in separate weekend art classes at a wonderful local studio this Fall. Natalie's Panda painting and Diego's pencil character sketch are just the tip of the iceberg of their prodigious output which is rapidly filling up our home.

It's funny how the onset of their sibling rivalry, which can be intense and competitive and at times conflict-filled and is usually a headache for parents, has been such a pleasure for Elsa and I to witness. At least for now we just can't complain or be annoyed by the kids' typical power struggles, as it is the very fact that they ARE typical, and the huge change that represents, that we celebrate.

The kids get mad at us as sometimes we can't help but laugh when they turn up the heat on their artistic rivalry like some pint-sized Van Gogh and Gauguin, and of course we should be taking their feelings seriously.

Yet the real artistry of these two is how they have figured out a way to get along so well in spite of all of the challenges and obstacles that come along with having a child with special needs as a brother and a child with special talents as an older sister. I wish we could take more credit for it, but these two usually show us the way when it comes to the Art of having a loving family.

Thanks, guys!

william

 

House Party

You've never seen a movie like Nobuhiko Obayashi's "House".

A whirling dervish of experimental and avant-garde techniques applied to a story that combines the sweet, naive comic sensibility of a '70's Saturday morning cartoon, a Japanese ghost story, the stylized graphic violence of the Italian giallo cinema of Dario Argento or Mario Bava, and the syrupy good girl innocence of "Hello, Kitty" or "My Rainbow Pony", this first feature film by the successful Tokyo commercial director Obayashi was completely unique, fully formed, and insanely entertaining.

The main characters are a sextet of adolescent girls named Kung Fu, Melody, Sweetie, Fantasy, Mac and the Prof who accompany the lead girl Gorgeous on a visit to her Aunt Angel's way-too-haunted house in the countryside.

The aunt, in an acid green dress, sunglasses and a wheelchair sometimes and other times not (completely unexplained of course), is a ghost, but one who practices cannibalism and uses her house and it's many eccentric features to systematically and literally devour these tender morsels.

The girls maintain a cheerful camaraderie and good mood through much of the psychedelic and gruesome proceedings, to the pop tunes of then-contemporary Japanese rock group Godiego.

The scene of Melody playing her insistent and haunting melody on Aunt Angels' baby grand piano which anthropomorphizes into some finger, hand and then piano-student devouring contraption as envisioned and animated by the unholy union of Terry Gilliam and Stan Brakhage is one of the most insane set-pieces I've ever seen.

Hard to imagine this film came out the same year as Saturday NIght Fever. 

Man, the seventies sure were a strange time.

A big hit in Japan when it came out, this cult classic never hit my radar screen until I came across the new dvd release from Criterion and picked it up on a whim as the screaming red cat on the cover (actually a fluffy white kitty in the movie who plays a pivotal role in the mayhem) seemed to arrest and then hypnotize me into buying it and checking it out.

I have to come down from this acid trip and watch it again, or maybe I don't since I'll be having flashbacks of it for the rest of my life. But it is one of the most creative pieces of Pure Pop that I've ever seen; one of those first movies where you feel the filmmaker spent years dreaming up and storing up all the imagery and tropes and tricks he would unleash on an unsuspecting public one day if he ever got the chance.

Thankfully, he did, and thankfully it has been rescued from the disco-era wrecking ball and served up to you in this new edition.

Enjoy!

william

Ich Bein Ein Berliner

I'm back from my trip to snowy, icy Berlin.

If you think walking on crutches with one bum foot is hard, try doing it on an ice skating rink!

But despite the cold and the hazardous conditions, it was great to hit the road again and push myself to get out of my comfort zone a bit and introduce my foot back into some real world conditions. Life is not all flat floors and Southern California weather.

Berlin's Alexanderplatz, along with much of the city, has changed tremendously since Rainer Werner Fassbender made his 18 hour film of the same name here many years ago. 

But the more things change, the more some things stay the same, like love and marriage and family. My good friend, the German filmmaker Tom Tykwer and his lovely bride Marie celebrated their wedding last weekend, and held a rocking all-night party in a beautiful old hall in the former East Berlin so friends and family could join in making whoopee to honor the occasion.

Tom and I met over ten years ago when Harvey Weinstein sent Anthony Minghella and I to Berlin to sit down with the young star director of "Run, Lola, Run" and talk about his new project, a film based on a screenplay by the late Polish director Krystof Kieslowski called "Heaven".

Tom's wedding was also a nice chance for me to reconnect with some of the talented German crew who worked with me on "Heaven" in Italy all those years ago.

As one might expect in a union of artists, the assembled guests put on a veritable variety show of talent in the cabaret-like setting.

One of Marie's childhood friends sang arias from Puccini a capella; one of the actors from Tom's new movie "3" or "Drei" in German, picked up an acoustic guitar and led the crowd of international baby boomers in a rousing version of "Hey Jude". One colorfully dressed actor led an interactive comedy routine which unfortunately was completely lost in translation to me, but had the crowd in stitches.

Crutches or not, when the spirit moves you, you have to Bust A Move, and even the camera couldn't capture my blazing moves on the dance floor!

:)

But while the party for the director of "3" was definitely a "10", by far the best part of the trip for me was meeting and hanging out with young Toto Tykwer for the first time. 

The dude is a charmer, and seems to share Diego's preference for eating bread a whole loaf at a time!

None of that "half a loaf is better than none" philosophy for this new generation apparently!

Please join me in wishing Viel Glück! to the new Tykwer family.

Enjoy!

william

The Trouble With Redheads

For my final post on the Art of Graphic Novels as practiced by the publishers of the Graphic Mystery Books series of hard-boiled crime fiction, let's turn the book around and take a look at the back cover art.

Strike a pose!

I love the composition of these images, so charged with dramatic action, obviously cropped and designed to carry all of the copy and quotes to sell the book, but much more interesting to look at on their own in isolation.

I'd love to know more about the publisher and art director behind Graphic Mystery Books, but one thing is obvious: the guy either had a thing for redheads, had a redheaded girlfriend that was willing to model for him on the cheap, or some serious market research must have told them that Redheads Sell when it comes to marketing noir fiction.

Enjoy!

william

 

 

More GRAPHIC novels

Here are some more striking cover designs from Graphic Mystery Books. Including a rare non-hard-boiled crime title, a wonderful collection of short stories by the Bard of Broadway, Damon Runyon!

His famous story "Blonde Mink" was almost too easy an inspiration for whoever designed that cover painting of a blonde in a mink being visited by a spirit from beyond the grave.

I love the desperate expressions on the faces here.

"Three Must Die" (but one of them is not going to be me!).

Is it just me, or does it look like the same model must have posed for the artist or artists who painted these various covers, maybe in a few different wigs? What an art studio that must have been!

Helen McCloy, whose flaming red "Unfinished Crime" cover leaves little to the imagination, was actually married to the author Davis Dresser, who wrote the famous MIKE SHAYNE mystery novels under the pseudonym Brett Halliday. Imagine their bedtime chatter?

So many of these Graphic mystery writers had pseudonyms.

Davis Dresser was even a bit of a "cross-dresser" when it came to names, as he also wrote under the pseudonym of Kathryn Culver!

Believe it or not, my Mom goes by a pseudonym. After her second divorce she didn't want to go back to her maiden last name, so she made one up!

Maybe it's time for me to adopt one too. Hmmm. Suggestions?

Enjoy!

william

GRAPHIC novels

Before the term "graphic novel" became a kind of catch-all to describe the trend towards a more literary, non-superhero form of comic book storytelling, there was another kind of Graphic Novel, the amazing series of mystery books put out for 25¢ by Graphic Books in the 1940's and '50's.

Robert O. Saber was actually the pseudonym for author Milton Ozaki, one of the first hard-boiled crime writers of Japanese descent. He was from Kenosha, Wisconsin, and set most of his crime stories in a fictional small midwest town.

Hal Braham mostly published under the pseudonyms Mel Colton and Merrill Trask, but this 1957 Graphic novel was written under his own name.

Their roster didn't feature the most renowned hard-boiled writers (no Thompson nor Goodis nor Cain nor Spillane to be found) and their cover artists are not the most collectible or remembered today (no Avati or Belarski or McGinnis), but there was something so consistently compelling, so stripped down and essential, in their packaging and design - the title, the girl, the gun, the crime - that they are among my favorite, and I wanted to share them with you here.

Enjoy!

william