Notes from Underdog.

Raymond Chandler's letter to Alfred Hitchcock

Great find on Letters of Note (hat tip to @T_FUTURIST on Twitter), of a parting letter writer Raymond Chandler sent to Hitchcock after their collaboration on Strangers on a Train didn't quite work out. 

December 6th, 1950

Dear Hitch,

In spite of your wide and generous disregard of my communications on the subject of the script of Strangers on a Train and your failure to make any comment on it, and in spite of not having heard a word from you since I began the writing of the actual screenplay—for all of which I might say I bear no malice, since this sort of procedure seems to be part of the standard Hollywood depravity—in spite of this and in spite of this extremely cumbersome sentence, I feel that I should, just for the record, pass you a few comments on what is termed the final script. I could understand your finding fault with my script in this or that way, thinking that such and such a scene was too long or such and such a mechanism was too awkward. I could understand you changing you mind about the things you specifically wanted, because some of such changes might have been imposed on you from without. What I cannot understand is your permitting a script which after all had some life and vitality to be reduced to such a flabby mass of clichés, a group of faceless characters, and the kind of dialogue every screen writer is taught not to write—the kind that says everything twice and leaves nothing to be implied by the actor or the camera.  ...

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Screenplay for THE ARTIST, an atypical script read.

[Thanks to Rope Of Silicon]

The script for THE ARTIST. Was really curious as to how a modern silent screenplay reads/looks, and naturally it violates the so-called rule to "avoid too much of that 'black stuff,'" i.e., too much description. It is all description, and often in long chunks, too. But he wrote it for himself to direct, and it's very effective at conveying the scenes, the feel, the mood, the actions, all at once. 

Reposting: A Beginner's Guide to 'Tintin': Everything You Need to Know About Steven Spielberg's Latest Big-Screen Hero

Reposting a piece I wrote for Movies.com giving some background on the boy reporter/hero and inspiration for the new Spielberg film. [I give the film a B+, for "Blistering barnacles," I really enjoyed it, to be precise. There are some really excellent Herge homages at the film's start, and then the spirit of the comics lives throughout. The writers may have tried to cram too much in (3 comics into one story) but changes otherwise seemed good, kept humor but added more.--cgp]

 

With the big-budget, CGI The Adventures of Tintin film hitting the world in a big way -- directed by one of the most famous of directors and produced by another no stranger to blockbusters -- it's hard to imagine a time back in my childhood when I innocently clutched faded reprints of Hergé's comic books and dreamed of a movie.

The year Raiders of the Lost Ark came out was when I first discovered this series, which shared many elements with Spielberg's crowd-pleasing adventure: A brave, young, globetrotting hero battles nefarious crime syndicates and villains over artifacts and heirlooms—though Tintin, a boy reporter instead of an archeologist, was younger and more innocent (and asexual, though this thought didn't occur to me as much as a lad) than Indiana Jones; and at times Tintin got into trouble more by sticking his nose into other people's business when things struck him suspicious, rather than venturing forth for his own gain. But these beautifully illustrated comic books captivated in much the same way as Raiders, and the stories took Tintin from England, the character’s home base, all over the globe: from South American jungles to Tibet, from fictional countries to, yes, the moon (before anyone really set foot on it).

 

Hergé

Belgian artist Hergé began Tintin as a serialized newspaper strip, before segueing to comic book form. Quite a few of the best stories were written before, during and right after WWII, so Hergé, an anti-fascist who tried to remain apolitical due to worries about Gestapo censorship—and worse—in his occupied country, certainly knew the territory. In that period Tintin was more an explorer like Indy, rather than a reporter (lest he sniff out something the real-life ruling fascists didn't care for). The earliest Tintins, in the 1930s, also had elements of discomfortingly dated racial portrayals, though now it seems clearer that Hergé's work tended to be a sign of the times without much maliciousness to the caricatures; as a judge recently ruled, Hergé's intent was not racist in Tintin in the Congo even if some of the drawings sure seemed that way. But you can trace his progression as an artist and observer reading through to his later work (the last, Tintin and the Picaros, was published in 1976).

In the 1970s and 80s, Tintin had more of a cult following in America than a widespread audience, even though he'd been popular around much of the rest of the planet for decades.

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[Reposting] Bringing A New Dimension to Movie History: Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo”

[Reposting my piece for Fandor]

Part of the Series The Silent Artists

 

A Dreamland of Magic: Asa Butterfield and Chloe Moretz in Martin Scorsese's "Hugo"

Hugo is clearly a departure for Martin Scorsese, as a 3D feature ostensibly about and for children, free of violence, and rarely very dark. Yet anyone familiar with the director’s work, especially in film preservation and scholarship (itself committed on film through documentaries like A Personal Journey Through American Movies) will know it is also entirely in his wheelhouse, as a valentine to the origins of cinema.

More simply, it is the story of Hugo Cabret, a smart but lonely orphan in a steampunk-ish 1930s Paris, who fends for himself in a railway station’s clock tower. Hugo (played by The Boy in the Striped Pajamas’ Asa Butterfield, who oddly looks like a small Maggie Gyllenhaal, with piercing green eyes, elfin nose and moppish hair) strikes an initially adversarial relationship with a toy shopkeeper (Ben Kingsley). He then befriends the man’s bookwormish but forward daughter Isabelle (the appealing Chloe Moretz, here with an English accent; it’s one of those films set in Continental Europe where a compromise is made to make all the characters act British). The two kids move from trying to solve one mystery–reconnecting with the boy’s dead father–to a question of more historical import: what happened to magician and early film pioneer Georges’ Méliès.

As the story unfolds, Hugo becomes more connected to cinema itself. Hugo recalls that his father once told him seeing a film is “like seeing his dreams in the middle of the day,” and sneaks Isabelle into her first movie screening, Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last (that film’s famous clock-hanging sequence is a bit of an on-the-nose set-up for a later scene, but one can forgive such things). They go to a library and discover a book about movie history, which reveals both the answer to a pressing riddle as well as the book’s author (a bearded Michael Stuhlbarg), who personally regales them with tales of the first movies in all their mystery and power, such as how the Lumiere brothers‘ Arrival of a Train sent audiences leaping from their seats, expecting the train to actually hit them.

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