Films And Theatre Quotes

The film [Stalker] needs to be slower and duller at the start so that the viewers who walked into the wrong theatre have time to leave before the main action starts.

people see so many movies that when they finally see one not so bad as the others, they think it's great. an Academy Award means that you don't stink quite as much as your cousin.

A film, a piece of theatre, a piece of music, or a book can make a difference. It can change the world.

Actors are agents of change. A film, a piece of theatre, a piece of music, or a book can make a difference. It can change the world.

Without writers, stories would not be written, Without actors, stories could not be brought to life.

For me, filmmaking combines everything. That’s the reason I’ve made cinema my life’s work. In films, painting and literature, theatre and music come together. But a film is still a film.

A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre; a good movie can make you feel alive again, in contact, not just lost in another city. Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again. If somewhere in the Hollywood-entertainment world someone has managed to break through with something that speaks to you, then it isn’t all corruption. The movie doesn’t have to be great; it can be stupid and empty and you can still have the joy of a good performance, or the joy in just a good line. An actor’s scowl, a small subversive gesture, a dirty remark that someone tosses off with a mock-innocent face, and the world makes a little bit of sense. Sitting there alone or painfully alone because those with you do not react as you do, you know there must be others perhaps in this very theatre or in this city, surely in other theatres in other cities, now, in the past or future, who react as you do. And because movies are the most total and encompassing art form we have, these reactions can seem the most personal and, maybe the most important, imaginable. The romance of movies is not just in those stories and those people on the screen but in the adolescent dream of meeting others who feel as you do about what you’ve seen. You do meet them, of course, and you know each other at once because you talk less about good movies than about what you love in bad movies.

Even the world’s greatest actor cannot fake an erection.

... and it occured to me then and forever afterwards, that films, theatre books and poems were just a fraud. It's only music that doesn't deceive, it doesn't pretend to be anything else except what it is. Music.

When the lights go off in a movie theatre, everyone becomes this one entity: the audience watching the film. And most films aim to get the same emotions out of people. The same reactions. To laugh or be scared or cry or be inspired. The audience goes in as individuals and comes out as people who’ve all experienced the same thing, are all feeling the same way.

In addition to conformity as a way to relieve the anxiety springing from separateness, another factor of contemporary life must be considered: the role of the work routine and the pleasure routine. Man becomes a 'nine to fiver', he is part of the labour force, or the bureaucratic force of clerks and managers. He has little initiative, his tasks are prescribed by the organisation of the work; there is even little difference between those high up on the ladder and those on the bottom. They all perform tasks prescribed by the whole structure of the organisation, at a prescribed speed, and in a prescribed manner. Even the feelings are prescribed: cheerfulness, tolerance, reliability, ambition, and an ability to get along with everybody without friction. Fun is routinised in similar, although not quite as drastic ways. Books are selected by the book clubs, movies by the film and theatre owners and the advertising slogans paid for by them; the rest is also uniform: the Sunday ride in the car, the television session, the card game, the social parties. From birth to death, from Monday to Monday, from morning to evening - all activities are routinised, and prefabricated. How should a man caught up in this net of routine not forget that he is a man, a unique individual, one who is given only this one chance of living, with hopes and disappointments, with sorrow and fear, with the longing for love and the dread of the nothing and separateness?

A film in cinema is what in theatre would be realism—and vice versa. In cinema—as in life—the text, the words, are refracted in everything apart from the words themselves. The words mean nothing— words are water.

You become a director by calling yourself a director and you then persuade other people that this is true.

When you feel like you’ve only got a bit part in your own life, write the script yourself

Kenji Mizoguchi is to the cinema what Bach is to music, Cervantes is to literature, Shakespeare is to theatre, Titian is to painting: the very greatest.

I had a fascination with 3D that goes back to the View-Master. I'd always dreamed of making a film in 3D. It's like a combination of theatre and film. There's something 3D gives to a movie that takes you to another land. Working with RealD creatively was a liberating experience. Thank you RealD for allowing us to make something like Hugo.

It is more frightening but it is not less productive to go your own way, to form your own theatre company, to write and stage your own plays, to make your own films. You have an enormously greater chance of eventually presenting yourself to, and eventually appealing to, an audience by striking out on your own, by making your own plays and films, than by submitting to the industrial model of the school and studio.

Et voilà. Maintenant le ressort est bandé. Cela n'a plus qu'à se dérouler tout seul. C'est cela qui est commode dans la tragédie. On donne le petit coup de pouce pour que cela démarre, rien, un regard pendant une seconde à une fille qui passe et lève les bras dans la rue, une envie d'honneur un beau matin, au réveil, comme de quelque chose qui se mange, une question de trop qu'on se pose un soir… C'est tout. Après, on n'a plus qu'à laisser faire. On est tranquille. Cela roule tout seul. C'est minutieux, bien huilé depuis toujours. La mort, la trahison, le désespoir sont là, tout prêts, et les éclats, et les orages, et les silences, tous les silences : le silence quand le bras du bourreau se lève à la fin, le silence au commencement quand les deux amants sont nus l'un en face de l'autre pour la première fois, sans oser bouger tout de suite, dans la chambre sombre, le silence quand les cris de la foule éclatent autour du vainqueur - et on dirait un film dont le son s'est enrayé, toutes ces bouches ouvertes dont il ne sort rien, toute cette clameur qui n'est qu'une image, et le vainqueur, déjà vaincu, seul au milieu de son silence…

Chaplin gave us a genuine reverse image of modern times: its image seen through a living man, through his sufferings, his tribulations, his victories. We are now entering the vast domain of the illusory reverse image. What we find is a false world: firstly because it is not a world, and because it presents itself as true, and because it mimics real life closely in order to replace the real by its opposite; by replacing real unhappiness by fictions of happiness, for example—by offering a fiction in response to the real need for happiness—and so on. This is the 'world' of most films, most of the press, the theatre, the music hall: of a large sector of leisure activities. (57)

Find a good teacher, don't betray yourself to succeed and be a better person before being a better actor.

A film that is a true work of art transcends theatre and heartwarmingly changes lives.

Characters do not speak unless they want something. Each speaking character has an agenda. Every line they say out loud advances that agenda.

Every time a character enters or exits, the relationships between the remaining characters changes. So should the dialogue.

Nature is a cinema. God, the cinematographer.

I won't be one of the hundreds telling you that being alive flows like a story you write consciously, deliberately, full of linear narrative, foreshadowing, repetition, motifs. The emotional beats come down where they should, last as long as they should, end where they should, and that should come from somewhere real and natural, not from the tyranny of the theatre, the utter hegemony of fiction.

We view films in the context of darkness. We sit in darkness and watch an illuminated world, the world of the screen. This situation is a metaphor for the nature of our own vision. In the very process of seeing, our own skull is like a dark theatre, and the world we see in front of us is in a sense a screen. We watch the world from the dark theatre of our skull. The darker the room, the more luminous the screen.

Keeping in touch with the things that help us feel alive – music, books, movies, even the theatre if, mysteriously, you are that way inclined – becomes a battle, and one that many of us lose, as we get older;

Yet in recent years I have witnessed a new phenomenon among filmgoers, especially those considered intelligent and perceptive. I have a name for this phenomenon: the Instant White-out. People are closeted in cozy darkness; they turn off their mobile phones and willingly give themselves, for ninety minutes or two hours, to a new film that got a fourstar rating in the newspaper. They follow the pictures and the plot, understand what is spoken either in the original tongue or via dubbing or subtitles, enjoy lush locations and clever scenes, and even if they find the story superficial or preposterous, it is not enough to pry them from their seats and make them leave the theatre in the middle of the show. But something strange happens. After a short while, a week or two, sometimes even less, the film is whitened out, erased, as if it never happened. They can’t remember its name, or who the actors were, or the plot. The movie fades into the darkness of the movie house, and what remains is at most a ticket stub left accidentally in one’s pocket.

On Friday evening Martin and Mona went to the United Artists Theatre to see a film already being mentioned for the Academy award. It had three stars, ran a hundred and ten minutes, and bored them both to petrifaction. (In brief, the award was in the bag.) The Case of the Seven of Calvary

Stahl trailed him upstairs, across a mezzanine, and out into the darkness of the sloping balcony. Tom gave the aisle his torch so his guest could see. On the screen below a woman's head was wavering, two or three times larger than life. A metallic voice clanged out, echoing sepulchrally all over the house, like a modern Delphic Oracle. 'Go back, go back!' she said. 'This is no place for you!' Her big luminous eyes seemed to be looking right at Lew Stahl as she spoke. Her finger came out and pointed, and it seemed to aim straight at him and him alone. It was weird; he almost stopped in his tracks, then went on again. He hadn't eaten all day; he figured he must be woozy, to think things like that. ("Dusk To Dawn")

When I’m given a role, the first thing I do is read the play over and over again. I scour the script and write down everything the character says about himself and everything that everyone else says about him. I immerse myself in my character and imagine what it might be like to be that person. When I played Cassio in Othello I imagined what it would be like to be a lieutenant in the Venetian navy in 1604. I sat down with Ewan McGregor and Chiwetel Ejiofor and together we decided that Othello, Iago and Cassio had soldiery in their bones. I took from the script that Cassio was talented and ambitious, with no emotional or physical guard - and that’s how I played the part. For me, acting is about recreating the circumstances that would make me feel how my character is feeling. In the dressing room, I practise recreating those circumstances in my head and I try to not get in the way of myself. For example, in act two of Othello, when Cassio is manipulated to fight Roderigo and loses his rank, some nights I would burst into tears; other nights I wouldn’t but I would still feel the same emotion, night after night. Just as in life, the way we respond to catastrophe or death will be different every time because the process is unconscious. By comparison, in Chekhov’s Ivanov I played the young doctor, Lvov. Lvov was described as “a prig and a bigot … uprightness in boots … tiresome … completely sincere”. His emotions were locked away. I worked around the key phrase: “Forgive me, I’m going to tell you plainly.” I practised speaking gravely and sincerely without emotion and I actually noticed how that carried over into my personal life: when I played the open-hearted Cassio, I felt really free; when I played the pent-up Lvov, I felt a real need to release myself from the shackles of that character. It’s exhilarating to act out the emotions of a character - it’s a bit like being a child again. You flex the same muscles that you did when you pretended to be a cowboy or a policeman: acting is a grown-up version of that with more subtlety and detail. You’re responding with real emotions to imaginary situations. When I’m in a production I never have a day when I haven’t laughed, cried or screamed. There are times when I wake up stiff from emotional exhaustion. Film is a much more intimate and thoughtful medium than theatre because of the proximity of the camera. The camera can read your thoughts. On stage, if you have a moment of vulnerability you can hide it from the other actors; on film, the camera will see you feel that emotion and try to suppress it. Similarly, if you’re pretending to feel something that isn’t there, it won’t be believable.

And suddenly I knew, as I touched the damp, grainy surface of the seawall, that I would always remember this night, that in years to come I would remember sitting here, swept with confused longing as I listened to the water lapping the giant boulders beneath the promenade and watched the children head toward the shore in a winding, lambent procession. I wanted to come back tomorrow night, and the night after, and the one after that as well, sensing that what made leaving so fiercely painful was the knowledge that there would never be another night like this, that I would never eat soggy cakes along the coast road in the evening, not this year or any other year, nor feel the baffling, sudden beauty of that moment when, if only for an instant, I had caught myself longing for a city I never knew I loved. Exactly a year from now, I vowed, I would sit outside at night wherever I was, somewhere in Europe, or in America, and turn my face to Egypt, as Moslems do when they pray and face Mecca, and remember this very night, and how I had thought these things and made this vow. You're beginning to sound like Elsa and her silly seders, I said to myself, mimicking my father's humour. On my way home I thought of what the others were doing. I wanted to walk in, find the smaller living room still lit, the Beethoven still playing, with Abdou still cleaning the dining room, and, on closing the front door, suddenly hear someone say, "We were just waiting for you, we're thinking of going to the Royal." "But we've already seen that film," I would say. "What difference does it make. We'll see it again." And before we had time to argue, we would all rush downstairs, where my father would be waiting in a car that was no longer really ours, and, feeling the slight chill of a late April night, would huddle together with the windows shut, bicker as usual about who got to sit where, rub our hands, turn the radio to a French broadcast, and then speed to the Corniche, thinking that all this was as it always was, that nothing ever really changed, that the people enjoying their first stroll on the Corniche after fasting, or the woman selling tickets at the Royal, or the man who would watch our car in the side alley outside the theatre, or our neighbours across the hall, or the drizzle that was sure to greet us after the movie at midnight would never, ever know, nor even guess, that this was our last night in Alexandria.

We do so many things together. We go to theatres, exhibitions, bookstores, we spend hours and hours discussing politics, books, films, friends. And you think I do these things for the same reason you do, because I enjoy them. But you're wrong. I do them all for it, for the tapeworm. That's how it seems to me: that my whole life is no longer for my sake but for the sake of what I carry inside me, of which I am now no more than a servant.

[Luchino] Visconti came from the Milanese branch of one of Europe’s oldest families, whose roots can be traced back to the early 13th century. He might have appeared as a character in one of his own films about the aristocracy, such as Senso or The Leopard – that’s the life he was born into. But at a certain point in the 1930s, his passion for theatre, opera and the cinema set him on a radically different path. (...) He has often been referred to as a great political artist, but that’s too limiting and frozen a description. His sense of European history was vast and he knew the lives of the rich and powerful first hand – but at a certain point he became drawn to understand the other side of life, that of the poor and powerless. He had a strong sense of the particular manner in which absolutely everyone, from the Sicilian fishermen in his neorealist classic La Terra Trema to the Venetian aristocrats in Senso, was affected by the grand movements of history.

On a movie set, the cry is 'Back to one!' to alert the cast and extras to reset to their original positions before the camera is rolled for the next take. Whenever I arrived at a place where the film business felt uncomfortable or downright unsafe for me, the place I often returned to was the theater. Onstage, we trust the material works, we assume all the actors are genuinely talented, and the work itself is the focus, unencumbered by the bullshit that often interferes with moviemaking. Back to one indeed.

When money is the cornerstone of everything, it is the end of genuine art! You have given me this rose and, of course, it is beautiful. But you are mistaken when you say that it is alive! It died as soon as you condemned it to this golden captivity! It was transformed into the mummified corpse of a flower! It is the same with your cinematograph. The theatre is life! And like all life, it is instantaneous and unrepeatable. There will never be another moment exactly the same, it cannot be halted, and that is why it is beautiful. You Fausts, who dream of halting a beautiful moment, fail to grasp that beauty cannot be recorded, it will die immediately. That is what the play we acted today is about! You must understand, Andrei Gordeevich, that eternity and immortality are the enemies of art, I am afraid of them! A play may be good or bad, but it is alive. A film is a fly in amber. Exactly as if it were alive, only it is dead. I shall never, do you hear, never act in front of that box of yours with its big glass eye!’ God, how lovely she was at that moment

what else would you do with your life? Finish your book? Or, like most people, be content being babysat, left to watch and generally obsess about sports and entertainment stars? It’s all fluff. People waste their lives on fluff.” Nelson opened a view into his INU. “But you’re one of the bright ones, aren’t you? You follow politics and the news. Well, I have some news for you. It’s theatre. Sports heroes, film celebrities, rock stars, politicians, controversies of all sorts on the news, they’re all just different channels of the same show. Distract and keep happy.” “What

Nevertheless, he was caught in its magic and he understood, what he had not known before, that much of the magic of a great theatrical moment is created by the audience itself, a magic impalpable but vividly present, and that what begins as trickery of lights and paint is enlarged and made fine by the response of the beholders. There are no great performances without great audiences, and this is the barrier that film and television, by their utmost efforts, cannot cross, for there can be no interaction between what is done, and those to whom it is done. Great theatre, great music-drama is created again and again on both sides of the footlights.

I decided to go and see another film, just to take my mind off Star Wars, and noticed that a film called The Matrix was playing in the same theatre. Two hours later, I re-emerged into the street full of the excitement and satisfaction that The Phantom Menace had failed to inspire. The Matrix seemed fresh and cool and visually breathtaking; making wonderful, intelligent use of CGI to augment the on-screen action, striking a perfect balance of the real and the hyperreal. It was possibly the coolest film I had ever seen. Ironically, fraternal directing team the Wachowskis faltered quickly with their sequels, killing their baby in just three years. Credit to George Lucas, it took him twenty-five to murder his.

Once a month, The Metropolitan hosts Films Under the Stars. The rooftop is converted to a luxury movie theatre. They show both new releases and classics and there’s a large staff serving traditional movie snacks, meals from the restaurant downstairs, and drinks from one of the two bars. There’s regular seating, oversized bean bags, and private seating in one of five cabanas. Each cabana has a couch, cooler, and two large, side by side, plush lounge chairs. The cooler has complimentary waters and wine. During the summer months, misting fans are included and during colder months, small heaters. We have two small heaters. The best part is the heavy curtains that surround the cabana; they give us extra privacy.

Our inner lives must be lent a structure and our best thoughts reinforced to counter the continuous pull of distraction and disintegration. Religions have been wise enough to establish elaborate calendars and schedules. How free secular society leaves us by contrast. Secular life is not, of course, unacquainted with calendars and schedules. We know them well in relation to work, and accept the virtues of reminders of lunch meetings, cash-flow projections and tax deadlines. But it expects that we will spontaneously find our way to the ideas that matter to us and gives us weekends off for consumption and recreation. It privileges discovery, presenting us with an incessant stream of new information – and therefore it prompts us to forget everything. We are enticed to go to the cinema to see a newly released film, which ends up moving us to an exquisite pitch of sensitivity, sorrow and excitement. We leave the theatre vowing to reconsider our entire existence in light of the values shown on screen, and to purge ourselves of our decadence and haste. And yet by the following evening, after a day of meetings and aggravations, our cinematic experience is well on its way towards obliteration. We honour the power of culture but rarely admit with what scandalous ease we forget its individual monuments. We somehow feel, however, that it would be a violation of our spontaneity to be presented with rotas for rereading Walt Whitman.

What Silly Values their readers have, if they can’t grapple with it! I think the editors are silly, and the readers would like it. It’s the same silly attitude that film and theatre managers have, that you must ‘write down’ to the public. For once, I think Winifred is wrong in telling you to get on quickly with another book. You don’t want to be the kind of writer who just writes anything to show she is writing. It will give you angst, to do so! All right if you were a journalist, and had to get out an article once a week, that is a matter of training. But for a sensitive (crumb!) writer like yourself to feel bound to turn out something is morally wrong. You have got to feel it well up in you, like K.M. and her stories!

What then is the difference between film and theatre? Or should one not rather ask: what are the differences? Let us be content wi th the reply that the screen has two dimensions and the stage three, that the screen presents photographs and the stage living actors. All the subtler differences stem from these. The camera can show us all sorts of things--from close-ups of insects to panoramas of prairies--which the stage cannot even suggest, and it can move from one to another with much more dexterity than any conceivable stage. The stage, on the other hand, can be revealed in the unsurpassable beauty of three-dimensional shapes, and the stage actor establishes between himself and his audience a contact real as electricity.

Pan, The House of Bernarda Alba, Transform Caithness: Hunter, Be Near Me, Nobody Will Ever Forgive Us, The Bacchae (also Lincoln Center), Elizabeth Gordon Quinn, Home: Glasgow, and Black Watch, which toured internationally and for which he won Olivier and Critics’ Circle awards. He was Associate Director of the Traverse Theatre from 1996 to 2001, Paines Plough from 2001 to 2005, the National Theatre of Scotland from 2005 to 2012, and was a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University in the 2010–2011 academic year. JACK THORNE writes for theater, film, television, and radio. His theater credits include Hope and Let the Right One In, both directed by John Tiffany, Junkyard, a Headlong, Rose Theatre Kingston, Bristol Old Vic & Theatr Clwyd co-production, The Solid Life of Sugar Water for the Graeae Theatre Company and the National Theatre,

In literature, the reader standing at the threshold of the end of a book harbors no illusion that the end has not come—he or she can see where it finishes, the abyss the other side of the last chunk of text. Which means that the writer is never in danger of ending too soon—or if he does the reader has been so forewarned. This is the advantage a book has over a film—it is the brain that marshals forward the text and controls the precise moment of conclusion of the book, as the density of the pages thins. A film can end without you if you’ve fallen asleep or, because you can’t wait any longer to use the bathroom, slipped out of the darkness of the theatre salon, and missed it. There will never be a form more perfect than the book, which always moves at your pace, that sits waiting for you exactly where you’ve left it and never goes on without you.

If talking pictures could be said to have a father, it was Lee De Forest, a brilliant but erratic inventor of electrical devices of all types. (He had 216 patents.) In 1907, while searching for ways to boost telephone signals, De Forest invented something called the thermionic triode detector. De Forest’s patent described it as “a System for Amplifying Feeble Electric Currents” and it would play a pivotal role in the development of broadcast radio and much else involving the delivery of sound, but the real developments would come from others. De Forest, unfortunately, was forever distracted by business problems. Several companies he founded went bankrupt, twice he was swindled by his backers, and constantly he was in court fighting over money or patents. For these reasons, he didn’t follow through on his invention. Meanwhile, other hopeful inventors demonstrated various sound-and-image systems—Cinematophone, Cameraphone, Synchroscope—but in every case the only really original thing about them was their name. All produced sounds that were faint or muddy, or required impossibly perfect timing on the part of the projectionist. Getting a projector and sound system to run in perfect tandem was basically impossible. Moving pictures were filmed with hand-cranked cameras, which introduced a slight variability in speed that no sound system could adjust to. Projectionists also commonly repaired damaged film by cutting out a few frames and resplicing what remained, which clearly would throw out any recording. Even perfect film sometimes skipped or momentarily stuttered in the projector. All these things confounded synchronization. De Forest came up with the idea of imprinting the sound directly onto the film. That meant that no matter what happened with the film, sound and image would always be perfectly aligned. Failing to find backers in America, he moved to Berlin in the early 1920s and there developed a system that he called Phonofilm. De Forest made his first Phonofilm movie in 1921 and by 1923 he was back in America giving public demonstrations. He filmed Calvin Coolidge making a speech, Eddie Cantor singing, George Bernard Shaw pontificating, and DeWolf Hopper reciting “Casey at the Bat.” By any measure, these were the first talking pictures. However, no Hollywood studio would invest in them. The sound quality still wasn’t ideal, and the recording system couldn’t quite cope with multiple voices and movement of a type necessary for any meaningful dramatic presentation. One invention De Forest couldn’t make use of was his own triode detector tube, because the patents now resided with Western Electric, a subsidiary of AT&T. Western Electric had been using the triode to develop public address systems for conveying speeches to large crowds or announcements to fans at baseball stadiums and the like. But in the 1920s it occurred to some forgotten engineer at the company that the triode detector could be used to project sound in theaters as well. The upshot was that in 1925 Warner Bros. bought the system from Western Electric and dubbed it Vitaphone. By the time of The Jazz Singer, it had already featured in theatrical presentations several times. Indeed, the Roxy on its opening night in March 1927 played a Vitaphone feature of songs from Carmen sung by Giovanni Martinelli. “His voice burst from the screen with splendid synchronization with the movements of his lips,” marveled the critic Mordaunt Hall in the Times. “It rang through the great theatre as if he had himself been on the stage.

The cinema today: end or impossibility of ending? Most current films, through the bloody drift of their content, the weakness of their plots and their technological trumpery – useless high-tech – reveal an extraordinary contempt on the part of film-makers for the tools of their own trade, for their own profession: a supreme contempt for the image itself, which is prostituted to any special effect whatsoever; and, consequently, contempt for the viewer, who is called upon to figure as impotent voyeur of this prostitution of images, of this promiscuity of all forms beneath the alibi of violence. There is in fact no real violence in this, nothing of a theatre of cruelty, but merely a second-level irony, the knowing wink of quotation, which no longer has anything to do with cinematic culture, but derives from the resentment that culture feels towards itself, that culture which precisely cannot manage to come to an end and is becoming infinitely debased - a debasement being raised to the power of an aesthetic and spiritual commodity, bitter and obsolescent, which we consume as a 'work of art' with the same complicity with which we savour the debasement of the political class. The sabotaging of the image by the image professionals is akin to the sabotaging of the political by the politicians themselves.

We took perhaps the greatest step in the inner order. Everything else in innumerable areas is now connected to it. And here I’d like to return to the starting point of my remarks, namely, to the concept of “worldview”. I said that worldview is nothing more than the consideration of the entire world in its phenomena from a uniform standpoint of the latest scientific discoveries, serious discoveries. And I went after all other problems in the same way. We solved our economic questions, gentlemen, when all the so-called experts claimed they couldn’t be solved. We solved our cultural problems. What didn’t they say earlier! They said, “What? You want to eliminate the Jews? Ha ha! Then you won’t have any more money, you won’t have any more gold”. As if the Jews were a gold-producing element! Gold only has any meaning when it represents value. Values are not created by Jews, but rather, by people who have invented valuable things, or produced them. The Jew simply inserts himself between the inventor or producer and the consumer. He is a valve that restricts the flow. I built a valve which can cut off the flow when needed or let it flow again, at will. When I was young I often went to the German Museum in Munich. That was the first great technical museum at that time. I had a tremendous interest in it – almost the entire inventiveness of the human race is represented there. What was ever invented by Jews? The Jews, who rule everything, the whole economic system, our industrial life, they rule everything! – What did they ever invent? Where are the Jewish inventors? There’s not a single one there! Not one! You can raise the same question in cultural life. People have said to me, “So when you kick out the Jews, you can say goodbye to the theatre! But who really founded our culture? Was it the Jews? Who were our Jewish composers? Who were our great poets? Were our great thinkers [illegible] Jews, perhaps? How do the Jews suddenly succeed in inserting themselves into the production of the same goods that were created by the greatest Germans, or the discoveries that originated with the greatest Germans? Experiment showed that I was right. I removed the Jews; German theatres are full as never before. German film is flowering as never before. German literature, the German press, is being read as never before, better than ever before. Much better! We swept away vulgarities in innumerable fields, without ever falling victim to a prudery of the past. Since here we know a principle, namely, the maintenance of our race, our species. Everything that serves this principle is correct. Everything that detracts from it is wrong. The Führer's talk to Generals and Officers on May 26, 1944 at the Platterhof in Obersaltzberg

It is a painful irony that silent movies were driven out of existence just as they were reaching a kind of glorious summit of creativity and imagination, so that some of the best silent movies were also some of the last ones. Of no film was that more true than Wings, which opened on August 12 at the Criterion Theatre in New York, with a dedication to Charles Lindbergh. The film was the conception of John Monk Saunders, a bright young man from Minnesota who was also a Rhodes scholar, a gifted writer, a handsome philanderer, and a drinker, not necessarily in that order. In the early 1920s, Saunders met and became friends with the film producer Jesse Lasky and Lasky’s wife, Bessie. Saunders was an uncommonly charming fellow, and he persuaded Lasky to buy a half-finished novel he had written about aerial combat in the First World War. Fired with excitement, Lasky gave Saunders a record $39,000 for the idea and put him to work on a script. Had Lasky known that Saunders was sleeping with his wife, he might not have been quite so generous. Lasky’s choice for director was unexpected but inspired. William Wellman was thirty years old and had no experience of making big movies—and at $2 million Wings was the biggest movie Paramount had ever undertaken. At a time when top-rank directors like Ernst Lubitsch were paid $175,000 a picture, Wellman was given a salary of $250 a week. But he had one advantage over every other director in Hollywood: he was a World War I flying ace and intimately understood the beauty and enchantment of flight as well as the fearful mayhem of aerial combat. No other filmmaker has ever used technical proficiency to better advantage. Wellman had had a busy life already. Born into a well-to-do family in Brookline, Massachusetts, he had been a high school dropout, a professional ice hockey player, a volunteer in the French Foreign Legion, and a member of the celebrated Lafayette Escadrille flying squad. Both France and the United States had decorated him for gallantry. After the war he became friends with Douglas Fairbanks, who got him a job at the Goldwyn studios as an actor. Wellman hated acting and switched to directing. He became what was known as a contract director, churning out low-budget westerns and other B movies. Always temperamental, he was frequently fired from jobs, once for slapping an actress. He was a startling choice to be put in charge of such a challenging epic. To the astonishment of everyone, he now made one of the most intelligent, moving, and thrilling pictures ever made. Nothing was faked. Whatever the pilot saw in real life the audiences saw on the screen. When clouds or exploding dirigibles were seen outside airplane windows they were real objects filmed in real time. Wellman mounted cameras inside the cockpits looking out, so that the audiences had the sensation of sitting at the pilots’ shoulders, and outside the cockpit looking in, allowing close-up views of the pilots’ reactions. Richard Arlen and Buddy Rogers, the two male stars of the picture, had to be their own cameramen, activating cameras with a remote-control button.

You’ve written a surprising large number of screenplays – – Have I? … but they’ve all been adaptations. Yes. Why are there no original Stoppard screenplays? I’ve never felt like that about film. I wanted to start… I wanted to be a writer, I wanted to start writing for the stage at a time when the stage was particularly interesting in the British theatre… I’ve had as many ideas for a play as I’ve written, you know, I don’t have a bottom drawer of half-baked ideas and half-finished plays. I’ve just used everything. I just wanted to work in the theatre and that’s what I did. I’m trying to sort of… understand something in myself, it’s as though I don’t want to waste my idea on a movie. I think there’s an element of that. Because there’s no question about it, unless you are… I can’t, I can’t imagine a circumstance in which a writer is properly in control of his script in the world of movies. Well, I can imagine one way - you pay for the film and that’s that. But as long as there’s a paymaster… You never… You never, you never quite… You don’t quite have the final vote, the decisive vote on things. There are situations, there have been situations where… I mean Shakespeare In Love, for example was, you know… yeah, pretty much, I mean I wrote it on the back of an earlier script called Shakespeare In Love and in the final stages of that movie I was arguing, you know, with the producer about… well, just a phrase or two. And this happened with television too with BBC/ HBO, I did a thing called Parade’s End. I end up arguing trying to persuade them to keep something which, which is generally felt by other people to be difficult to understand. And I’m saying ‘No, it’s not difficult to understand, honestly.’ And they’re saying: ‘Well, it is for our audience –’ or whatever. That kind of thing wont happen, I don’t think that kind of thing would ever happen, at least in the theatre that I work in, the London theatre, the British theatre.

The Biggest Property Rental In Amsterdam Amsterdam has been ranked as the 13th best town to live in the globe according to Mercer contacting annual Good quality of Living Review, a place it's occupied given that 2006. Which means that the city involving Amsterdam is among the most livable spots you can be centered. Amsterdam apartments are equally quite highly sought after and it can regularly be advisable to enable a housing agency use their internet connections with the amsterdam parkinghousing network to help you look for a suitable apartment for rent Amsterdam. Amsterdam features rated larger in the past, yet continuing plan of disruptive and wide spread construction projects - like the problematic North-South town you live line- has intended a small scores decline. Amsterdam after rated inside the top 10 Carolien Gehrels (Tradition) told Dutch news company ANP that the metropolis is happy together with the thirteenth place. "Of course you want is actually the first place position, however shows that Amsterdam is a fairly place to live. Well-known places to rent in Amsterdam Your Jordaan. An old employees quarter popularised amang other things with the sentimental tunes of a quantity of local vocalists. These music painted an attractive image of the location. Local cafes continue to attribute live vocalists like Arthur Jordaan and Tante Leeni. The Jordaan is a network of alleyways and narrow canals. The section was proven in the Seventeenth century, while Amsterdam desperately needed to expand. The region was created along the design of the routes and ditches which already existed. The Jordaan is known for the weekly biological Nordermaarkt on Saturdays. Amsterdam is famous for that open air market segments. In Oud-zuid there is a ranging Jordan Cuypmarkt open year long. This part of town is a very popular spot for expats to find Expat Amsterdam flats due in part to vicinity of the Vondelpark. Among the largest community areas A hundred and twenty acres) inside Amsterdam, Netherlands. It can be located in the stadsdeel Amsterdam Oud-Zuid, western side from the Leidseplein as well as the Museumplein. The playground was exposed in 1865 as well as originally named the "Nieuwe Park", but later re-named to "Vondelpark", after the 17th one hundred year author Joost lorrie den Vondel. Every year, the recreation area has around 10 million guests. In the park can be a film art gallery, an open air flow theatre, any playground, and different cafe's and restaurants.

Marriage is the authentic measure to see the reality and truth in love. Truth always goes with one's last breath. The rest of it is as the actors acting in the theatre or film.

Instead of playing little league baseball on weekends, I usually was sitting in my neighborhood movie theatre, munching on popcorn.

A 15 per cent wage cut imposed on civil servants by Ottawa and imitated by most provinces and other major employers left living standards undamaged. The prosperous few could enjoy themselves with an obliviousness to wider suffering that wealth seems to confer. Newspapers and radio helped. Media in the 1930s accepted a solemn duty to trivialize or ignore the misery of millions. Lush Hollywood musicals and adventure films filled neighbourhood movie theatres. Air races, professional sports, and the exotic junketing of reporters such as the Toronto Star’s Gordon Sinclair allowed the public to escape.

Politics is like theatre. An actor has confidence when he knows he is perfectly constumed, made-up and lit for the boards or film.

If the monologue is an image , the dialogue is a film - I am just an empty chair in the theatre

What is now Tanzania was once Tanganyika and before that part of British East Africa and prior to that a colony of Germany. During World War I the fighting actually came to the Continent of Africa. Known as the East African Campaign, many of the battles almost went unreported and are little known, however the romance of this war is portrayed by many novels and the well-known movie “African Queen,” starring Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn. The film is a stretch, but strictly speaking it is based on a true story, however even saying this, neither the original novel nor the movie bears more than a passing resemblance to reality. The four years of warfare mostly fought in Europe, cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and affected many millions more. The campaigns, skirmishes and battles in Africa, although relatively small, cost the lives of 14 German soldiers with 34 being wounded whereas the British had a total of about 150 casualties. “In actual fact the four years of warfare from 1914 to 1918, cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and affected many millions more. The campaigns, skirmishes and battles although relatively small, cost the lives of 14 German troops with 34 being wounded whereas the British had a total of about 150 casualties. An example of the type of battles fought in Africa was the Battle of Bukoba. Here the British objective was the destruction of the Bukoba wireless station on the shore of Lake Victoria, it was decided that the raid should take the form of an amphibious assault by the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment and the 25th Frontier Royal Fusiliers who served in the African Theatre of war around Lake Tanganyika, British East African and German East African territory. Upon reaching the objective at Bukoba, the attackers were mistakenly landed in a large swamp and were pinned down by fierce rifle

Earlier, Susanne’s husband had detected a certain ticking in her, a bomb. He’d packed their children into the car and set out for a night of pizza and a double feature at the second-run movie theatre, leaving her alone to explode, splattering the house with a combination of things she’d ingested as a teen-ager, certain films and punk-rock records that confirmed what she’d guessed: one dies alone. Best to have her family out of the way. Best to have them hidden in a dark cinema when the desire to chop her hair roughly and live on cigarettes surged. These bursts of freedom, while infrequent, were dangerous. Their self-indulgence could tear holes in evenings, marriages, families. She’d been lost in the roar of the vacuum—a device that had the power to put her under a spell, into a trancelike state from which she could most easily contemplate the nature of the universe, the purpose of love, the purpose of death, and a fantasy she sometimes had of being bound nude to a parking meter in the city.

There’s nothing that makes me cry harder than fiction. There’s nothing that makes me weep, nothing that holds my breath and brings tears stinging to my eyes more than fiction. And all those sad realities which filter through my days. They leave no lasting impression. All they serve is small reminders of my busy life. Small purposes: remember the pain of the world. Okay, alright. I remember it all. Then I go watch a movie. I listen to the classical music station in my car at five-thirty pm where they always play that same song. I watch a play, watch the performance. Watch the smoke descend upon the stage. This fiction. It’s the only thing that affects me. Funny, isn’t it?

He did have some small advantage, though. He knew the truth about surveillance. Ever since the dawn of GWOT the nations of the West – apart from the United States, where civil libertarians tended to carry rifles and use them on closed-circuit cameras as an expression of their freedoms – had put their faith in creating a paranoid state, one where every move of every citizen was recorded and logged and filmed and fuck you, if you’ve got nothing to hide you’ve got nothing to worry about. Whether this had had any great influence in the course of GWOT was a moot point, but there was one thing not generally appreciated about the paranoid state. It was incredibly labour-intensive. There were simply not enough people to monitor all the cameras. Every shop had one, every bus and train and theatre and public convenience, every street and road and alleyway. Computers with facial recognition and gait recognition and body language recognition could do some of the job, but they were relatively simple to fool, expensive, and times had been hard for decades. It was cheaper to get people to watch the screens. But no nation on Earth had a security service large enough, a police force big enough, to keep an eye on all those live feeds. So it was contracted out. To private security firms all trying to undercut each other. The big stores had their own security men, but they were only interested in people going in and out of the store, not someone just passing by. So instead of a single all-seeing eye London’s seemingly-impregnable surveillance map was actually a patchwork of little territories and jurisdictions, and while they all had, by law, to make their footage available to the forces of law and order, many of the control rooms were actually manned by bored, underpaid, undertrained and badly-motivated immigrants.

Average acting is like jerking without an orgasm.

On the day Roja released, Rahman’s younger sister Fathima was sitting in a theatre in Chennai with her friends, all set to watch the movie. The opening credits rolled, the film began and the first song—‘Chinna Chinna Aasai’ as you might guess—played with the movie’s heroine singing the song, scaling Chalakudy’s waterfall and playing in the verdant fields of the South Indian countryside. The song was already a hit and by the intermission, Fathima heard a very drunk man sitting in a seat behind her say, ‘Evano semayaa paattu pottu vachchurukaan da.’ (Whoever did the music for this has done a great job.) ‘That’s when I knew,’ she says with a laugh. ‘That’s when I knew my brother had got it right. I was so proud.

Mani Kaul, the most strikingly non-narrative of the Indian arthouse filmmakers of the sixties and seventies, was also a student and exponent of the dhrupad. I don’t know if it was his exposure to the raga that made his films (according to many) notoriously slow, and Kaul (this is known to relatively few) a ferocious critic of the Renaissance. The Renaissance painting, like proscenium theatre, or, indeed, the realist story, gives centre-stage to a protagonist – that is, the human being. Renaissance art’s development of perspective helps consolidate the rules of realism: a foreground or central theme, and a background occupied by what’s necessary to complete the portrait of the protagonist. Kaul’s cinema wished to be unfettered by hero or theme; he wanted the camera to devote itself equally to recording things ordinarily consigned to ‘background’.

What was it about the I'll kill the bitch guy that cracked our audience up so much? Simple, everyone in the theatre had seen that guy before. I had seen that guy. And when we stepped outside the theatre into the Scottsdale shopping center where the Carson Twin Cinema was located, we might see that guy again. But what really cracked us up was we had never seen that guy in a Hollywood movie.

You follow politics and the news. Well, I have some news for you. It’s theatre. Sports heroes, film celebrities, rock stars, politicians, controversies of all sorts on the news, they’re all just different channels of the same show. Distract and keep happy.

The story was okay, but the acting bothered Andrei. Sometimes he would watch a scene and then it would go to the next; Andrei would blink, bewildered at the time that had passed. The film just went by. Scenes would jump to the next but his mind was the same. Why? He noticed that the lead actress in her later years was extremely gorgeous, except some sharp concentration in him blocked out her beauty. This seated heart screamed for the movie to shatter him. And it drew upon him that this was another film that the world was not bothered by of its acting. In fact, they did not even see it. In its short scenes, audiences were hypnotized for an average of five to eight seconds by an actor’s beauty and if the editor timed it right, and with enough spectacle, movies could get away with doing nothing. Gorgeousness stimulated the mind. “Wow, they are so beautiful,” the audience was forced to think—and then by jumping to the next beautiful part fast enough there was something called a movie. And the movie seemed to use the actors’ appearances to drive most of the scenes. And many actors in different scenes sort of just stood there, handsome, and whispering. That was their strategy—mumbling murmurs of breath and rasp. Their indecisive bodies were unnaturally still, as though they had close-ups when the shot was wide. All of the actors’ voices were dumbly lowered to a safe natural cadence while in an unnatural situation and yet seeming real, no actual thought needed to be shown. 'Beauty is good,' says the industry. 'Sell that. Sell beauty! Make it beautiful. Ugly stories about beautiful people. It naturally turns a crap film into a decent one. The people are left with a good impression, as though having watched something fascinating. Make sure to let the camera sit on those beautiful people and their faces will give the audience something impossible to understand and give us runtime while they gaze. But having ugly people in it, people that look like people, actors that look like their audience—er, that’s not so profound,' says the industry. It was why the scenes moved without Andrei knowing: nothing was done by its actors.

At Landmark Theatres, we focus on enhancing your escape through the diversity of our curated content: Films, Music, Sports, Gaming, Live Events, etc. We are known for historic theatres and those with neighborhood charm and contemporary locations. We are offering the regular movie concession fare you expect, as well as drinks at many locations. We are also focused on bringing you a state-of-the-art presentation and a safe environment for you to experience it.

What the Swots had studied deeply was the art of forbidding things, and in a very short time they had forbidden painting, sculpture, music, theatre, film, journalism, hashish, voting, elections, individualism, disagreement, pleasure, happiness, pool tables, clean-shaven chins (on men), women’s faces, women’s bodies, women’s education, women’s sports, women’s rights. They would have liked to have forbidden women altogether but even they could see that that was not entirely feasible, so they contented themselves with making women’s lives as unpleasant as possible.

The Incredible String Band were the most multi-faceted group in British popular music, and this book attempts to mirror this. Yes, there is stuff about dates and albums and personnel changes, but you’ll also find articles about their experiments with dance, film, theatre and lifestyles. Their music was always intertwined with the places they lived in, from Sixties Edinburgh to West Wales to the Scottish Borders, and these are all featured here. Their songs ranged from early folk-club whimsy to the material on, say, 5000 Spirits or Wee Tam And The Big Huge which, as Rowan Williams says, demanded an intimidating literacy to pick up all the allusions. The range of their musical palette was striking, too.

This is what cinema is all about. Images, sound, whatever, are what we use to construct a way which is cinema, which is supposed to produce effects, not only in our eyes and ears, but in our ‘mental’ movie theatre in which image and sound already are there. There is a kind of on-going movie all the time, in which the movie that we see comes in and mixes, and the perception of all these images and sound proposed to us in a typical film narration piles up in our memory with other images, other associations of images, other films, but other mental images that we have, they pre-exist. So a new image in a film titillates or excites another mental image already there or emotions that we have, so when you propose something to watch and hear, it goes, it works. It's like we have sleeping emotions in us all the time, half-sleeping, so one specific image or the combination of one image and sound, or the way of putting things together, like two images one after another, what we call montage, editing - these things ring a bell. These half-asleep feelings just wake up because of that - that is what it is about.

The influence of the mid-to-late-Sixties English counterculture is clearer in The Beatles’ music than in that of any of their rivals. This arose from a conflux of links, beginning with their introduction by Brian Epstein to the film director Richard Lester, continuing with McCartney’s friendships with Miles and John Dunbar, and culminating in the meeting of Lennon and Yoko Ono. Through Lester and his associates - who included The Beatles’ comedy heroes Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers - the group’s consciousness around the time of Sgt. Pepper was permeated by the anarchic English fringe theatre, with its penchant for Empire burlesque (e.g., The Alberts, Ivor Cutler, Milligan and Antrobus’s The Bed Sitting Room). This atmosphere mingled with contemporary strains from English Pop Art and Beat poetry; the ‘happenings’ and experimental drama of The People Show, Peter Brook’s company, and Julian Beck’s Living Theatre; the improvised performances of AMM and what later became the Scratch Orchestra; the avant-garde Euro-cinema of Fellini and Antonioni; and the satire at Peter Cook’s Establishment club and in his TV show with Dudley Moore, Not Only . . . But Also (in which Lennon twice appeared). From the cultural watershed of 1965-6 onwards, The Beatles’ American heroes of the rock-and-roll Fifties gave way to a kaleidoscopic mélange of local influences from the English fringe arts and the Anglo-European counterculture as well as from English folk music and music-hall.

What miffed Brennan about working with Ford was the director’s lack of respect for fellow professionals. Unlike Howard Hawks, Ford was not much of a collaborator. He never gave Brennan the feeling that they were in a project together. Hawks, on the other hand, treated Brennan as a crucial part of a film’s success. In Red River (September 17, 1948), Brennan gets nearly as much screen time as John Wayne and co-star Montgomery Clift, in the epic story of a cattle drive from Texas to Missouri that is diverted to Abilene during the lawless days following the Civil War. In one version of the film, Brennan actually narrates the story, making it his own by trading on what was now a character that transcended individual films and seemed, in effect, the voice of the West. In another less powerful version of the film, narration is delivered through the rather clumsy device of turning pages in a book. For the Lux Radio Theatre one-hour adaptation (March 7, 1949), not only was Brennan restored as narrator, he also becomes a dominant voice mediating between Dunson and the other characters.

ideal actor is an ideal person. You are the representative of humanity. All walks of life look up to you. They all want to be you. Despite the fact that government money for the arts is not there in abundance, all of society admires you, is entertained by you, would not be able to function without theatre, film, TV, webcasts, videos, and musical performances. Life would be a dull place indeed without you. You have a responsibility toward yourself, your fellow actors, and all of mankind.

Films take you captive, they feed you everything on a plate, the legerdemain they create transports you into a state where you may as well be dreaming, but theatre takes you into a world where your imagination is stimulated, your judgement is unimpaired, and thus your enjoyment heightened.

Some great actors have had substantial training and some have not. I am biased toward the well-trained theatre actor because I am passionate about theatre and the special devotion it takes to pursue that love. Oddly, there doesn’t seem to be a correlation between success as a working actor and training. Mark Duplass (“The League,” Your Sister’s Sister) has never had a formal acting class in his life. As long as you’re a good, compelling actor, you will book jobs. Actors who graduate from Julliard (Jessica Chastain) book jobs and actors who have never had an acting class in their life work regularly in both TV and film.

The streets of the poor quarter of great cities are, above all, a theatre and a battle ground. There unaware and unnoticed every human being is a poet, a marker, a warrior, a dancer and in his innocent artistry he projects against the turmoil of the street, an image of human existence. (from an introduction to the film In the Street (1945–46) by James Agee, Helen Levitt, Janice Loeb in the streets of Harlem, New York)

The number of theatres that regularly played art films (defined as foreign language films and English language films produced abroad without American financing) increased from around one hundred in 1950 to close to 700 by the 1960s. Foreign film distribution in the United States was originally handled by dozens of small independent outfits, but when Brigitte Bardot's And God Created...Woman broke box-office records in 1956, Hollywood took over. In search of foreign pictures with commercial ingredients, the majors absorbed the most talented foreign film-makers with offers of total financing and promises of distribution in the lucrative US market.

[Cinema]… obeys the laws of the mind rather than those of the outer world.

The intellectual actor For many of those who aspire to be actors or to become better actors, the biggest challenge is to stop thinking and start feeling. Our education system trains young people in thinking and the prizes are given out for analytical skills. But fundamentally this is a cerebral engagement, impassive and rational. And this kind of education – especially at degree level – is often in direct opposition to what actors need to cultivate in themselves. For much of our lives, we are served well by the ability to think logically about what’s happening and make considered, rational decisions about what to do. Indeed, for most professions it’s essential. I’m guessing we would all rather be operated on, or have our taxes done, by someone with the rigour of thinking to be able to analyse a situation and come up with a reliably intelligent plan of attack. But the foremost job of an actor is to commit to the fictional world of a drama and this is not a cerebral activity. The qualities that will really make a performance – spontaneity, impulsiveness, emotional availability, unguarded vulnerability – are neither logical nor intellectual. And these are things we can deliberately cultivate in ourselves. Nicolas Cage: ‘I invite the entire spectrum, shall we call it, of feeling. Because that is my greatest resource as a film actor. I need to be able to feel everything, which is why I refuse to go on any kind of medication. Not that I need to! But my point is, I wouldn’t even explore that, because it would get in the way of my instrument. Which is my emotional facility to be able to perform.

In the Bible, the word hypocrite shows up 33 times. Interestingly, hypocrite was a common Greek term for an actor who worked behind a mask. Stage players in antiquity wore masks to hide their true identity as they played the part of their characters. We live in a society today where people are paid millions of dollars to be hypocrites. A friend of mine, before he passed away, built movie sets for a living. Many movies are filmed on studio lots, but these designed sets are not the reality you might think they are when watching a movie. Actors and actresses play the part of someone they really are not. The better they are at pretending or lying, the more convincing they will be as an actor, and typically, the more money they make. I rarely darken the door of a movie theatre because I don’t want to give those liars my money, and I don’t want to support the totally ungodly world of Hollywood. This is also why I don’t own a television. I don’t want my cable or satellite fees funding that wicked industry. In the time of the Greeks, it was easy to figure out the real identity of the actors. You could walk up to them, take off their masks, and see their faces. Jesus is doing the same here. He is unmasking the Pharisees. He is showing us their real character. He is revealing their true colors. Don’t live a lie. Don’t be a hypocrite. It is not a healthy way to go through life, and you will have regrets when the time of unmasking comes.

Victor Frankenstein has become the prototype for pretty much all subsequent depictions of mad or evil scientists. Many people have their impressions of Victor formed from film or theatre adaptations of Mary’s novel, or the interpretations of the Frankenstein scientist type that followed from them. However, the idea you may have in your head of an hysterical, obsessive scientist with evil ambitions is very different from the character Mary Shelley created in 1816. The figure she depicted was certainly focused, perhaps even obsessive, about his scientific endeavours, but she did not portray Victor Frankenstein as mad. Victor’s work may have been misguided, and lacking foresight, but Mary never showed his intentions to be evil. Nor is Frankenstein a very good example of science gone wrong. Victor’s experiment in bringing life to an inanimate corpse was a complete success. It was his inability to foresee the potential consequences of his actions that brought about his downfall.

Because of the picture's constant theatrical circulation all during the forties, two presentations on the Lux Radio Theatre, and finally as a staple of early television, the tale was familiar to almost two generations of moviegoers. Hart's task was to preserve the potent appeal of this Hollywood myth while making it viable for a modern-day audience. The problem was complicated by the necessity of rewriting the part of Esther/Vicki to suit Judy Garland. The original film had walked a delicate dramatic path in interweaving the lives and careers of Vicki and Norman Maine. In emphasizing the "star power" of Lester/Garland, more screen time would have to be devoted to her, thus altering the careful balance of the original. Hart later recalled: "It was a difficult story to do because the original was so famous and when you tamper with the original, you're inviting all sorts of unfavorable criticism. It had to be changed because I had to say new things about Hollywood-which is quite a feat in itself as the subject has been worn pretty thin. The attitude of the original was more naive because it was made in the days when there was a more wide-eyed feeling about the movies ... (and) the emphasis had to be shifted to the woman, rather than the original emphasis on the Fredric March character. Add to that the necessity of making this a musical drama, and you'll understand the immediate problems." To make sure that his retelling accurately reflected the Garland persona, Hart had a series of informal conversations with her and Luft regarding experiences of hers that he might be able to incorporate into the script. Luft recalls: "We were having dinner with Moss and Kitty [Carlisle], and Judy was throwing ideas at Moss, cautiously, and so was I. I remember Judy telling the story of when she was a kid, she was on tour with a band and they were in Kansas City at the Mulebach Hotel-all the singers and performers stayed there. And I think her mother ran into a big producer who was traveling through and she invited him to come and see the act, and supposedly afterward he was very interested in Judy's career. Nothing happened, though. Judy thought it would be a kind of a cute idea to lay onto Moss-that maybe it might be something he could use in his writing.

Books, theatre, film — all media takes us away for a while into fantasy worlds if we immerse ourselves in it.

Astaire had been told by the studio brass that he could have all the time he needed, so he planned for six weeks of rehearsal on the more difficult numbers (“Night and Day” and “The Table Dance”) that he imported from the stage production. Even though Astaire had played the role of Guy Holden, the man mistaken for Mimi’s (Ginger Rogers) divorce correspondent, on Broadway and in London, he was too much of a perfectionist to assume that he could reprise the dances on film without sufficient rehearsal. In addition, the Cole Porter score that he had sung in the theatre was, with the exception of “Night and Day,” completely scrapped and replaced with songs by Mack Gordon and Harry Revel, and Con Conrad and Herb Magidson (after Porter refused producer Pandro Berman’s request to write new ones). Astaire wanted, and was given, the time to master the new material.

(In the annals of Parisian cultural history, the episode is still known as “the scandal of L’Age d’or.”) A week later, Police Chief Chiappe closed the theatre; the film was censored, and remained so for fifty years.

LETTERS FROM REGIONAL THEATER OWNERS “Stay away from this. A nightmare. Will drive ’em out of your theater. It may be a classic to you, but it’s plumb nuts to your public. Some swell acting and production wasted. Way too extreme.” J. K. BURGESS, Iris Theatre, Velva, North Dakota, Motion Picture Herald, January 3, 1942 “Don’t try to tell me Orson Welles isn’t a genius. Herein he has produced a mighty fine picture. Herewith he has established for me the lowest gross I have ever experienced. I hurt all over.” DANIEL KORMAN, Palace Theatre, Ontario, Canada, Motion Picture Herald, February 28, 1942

The biggest excuse for film is that it is a film. It’s a game, an art for a bunch of people who sit in a dark theatre. The light hits them and then they go home, and it’s more or less over. But a good film, or a cautionary one . . . A darkened theater is a safe place to say things that mean something.

The biggest excuse for film is that it is a film. It’s a game, an art for a bunch of people who sit in a dark theatre. The light hits them and then they go home, and it’s more or less over. But a good film, or a cautionary one . . . A darkened theater is a safe place to say things that mean something.

I spite of his scientific attitude he is a romantic, and indeed much more whole-heartedly so than the other less radical naturalists of his day. His one-sided, undialectical rationalization and schematization of reality is already boldly and ruthlesslyromantic. And the symbols to which he reduces motley, many-sided, contradictory life— the city, the machine, alcohol, prostitution, the department store, the markethall, the stock exchange, the theatre, etc.—are all the more the visions of a romantic systematizer, who sees allegories instead of concrete individual phenomena everywhere.

The film version of Chicago is a milestone in the still-being-written history of film musicals. It resurrected the genre, winning the Oscar for Best Picture, but its long-term impact remains unclear. Rob Marshall, who achieved such success as the co-director of the 1998 stage revival of Cabaret, began his career as a choreographer, and hence was well suited to direct as well as choreograph the dance-focused Chicago film. The screen version is indeed filled with dancing (in a style reminiscent of original choreographer Bob Fosse, with plenty of modern touches) and retains much of the music and the book of the stage version. But Marshall made several bold moves. First, he cast three movie stars – Catherine Zeta-Jones (former vaudeville star turned murderess Velma Kelly), Renée Zellweger (fame-hungry Roxie Hart), and Richard Gere (celebrity lawyer Billy Flynn) – rather than Broadway veterans. Of these, only Zeta-Jones had training as a singer and dancer. Zellweger’s character did not need to be an expert singer or dancer, she simply needed to want to be, and Zellweger’s own Hollywood persona of vulnerability and stardom blended in many critics’ minds with that of Roxie.8 Since the show is about celebrity, casting three Hollywood icons seemed appropriate, even if the show’s cynical tone and violent plotlines do not shed the best light on how stars achieve fame. Marshall’s boldest move, though, was in his conception of the film itself. Virtually every song in the film – with the exception of Amos’s ‘Mr Cellophane’ and a few on-stage numbers like Velma’s ‘All That Jazz’ – takes place inside Roxie’s mind. The heroine escapes from her grim reality by envisioning entire production numbers in her head. Some film critics and theatre scholars found this to be a cheap trick, a cop-out by a director afraid to let his characters burst into song during the course of their normal lives, but other critics – and movie-goers – embraced this technique as one that made the musical palatable for modern audiences not accustomed to musicals. Marshall also chose a rapid-cut editing style, filled with close-ups that never allow the viewer to see a group of dancers from a distance, nor often even an entire dancer’s body. Arms curve, legs extend, but only a few numbers such as ‘Razzle Dazzle’ and ‘Cell Block Tango’ are treated like fully staged group numbers that one can take in as a whole.

Relief came in the form of a “tab” show—an hour long (see Warner Bros. Footlight Parade for examples) musical review that played in the movie theatres with the film. It was a traveling show and Pan, whose job it was to create the dances as well as perform them, got good experience in the fine art of “doubling in brass.

Hollywood Boulevard at night was a dream in neon. Mickey cruised along the strip, colorful lights blurring by like hallucinations. On his right, the El Capitan Theatre lured customers in like a Vegas casino, while the Walk of Fame preserved stardom on his left. Tourists bustled beneath the blinking signs like extras in the giant story of this land of stories, hoping for a real-life glimpse of that other world just behind the veneer of this place. In the ’50s, Hollywood Boulevard had looked different—less buildings, less vehicles, less pedestrians—but the aura of the strip, the energy, hadn’t changed at all.

An “awesome” plot does not necessarily mean unique or original. For our purposes, “awesome” merely means strong. Well-defined. Clear. Our first and only real rule about writing of any kind is this; Clarity Is God. Strive for clarity in all aspects of your writing, from the plot and theme to the dialogue and narrative.

Dialogue can be tough because it has so many requirements to be truly wonderful. It must sound authentic but not overly realistic (think of all of our hiccups and pauses and repetitions and filler words). It must move the story forward while revealing character. It must entertain and provide information. It must have “Voice” with a capital V, and not sound derivative of other writers who went before you. And if you’re working in first-person, then you have to do all of this within the narrative too.

Every novel has a point of view, and the world should be seen through that point of view. That point of view needs to be consistent, but also contextualized.

Where your scene is set—where the characters are physically located in the storyworld—changes their dialogue.

Where the character is coming from before he enters into a scene should influence his dialogue.

In its initial character, the gangster film is simply one example of the movies' constant tendency to create fixed dramatic patterns that can be repeated indefinitely with a reasonable expectation of profit.

This attitude finds a late but still abundantly clear expression in the conventions of the classical court theatre, in which the actor, quite regardless of the demands of stage deception, addresses the audience directly, apostrophizes it, as it were, with every word and gesture, and not only avoids ‘turning his back’ on the audience but emphasizes by every possible means that the whole proceeding is a pure fiction, an entertainment conducted in accordance with previously agreed rules. The naturalistic theatre forms the transition to the absolute opposite of this ‘frontal’ art, namely the film, which, with its mobilization of the audience, leading them to the events instead of leading and presenting the events to them, and attempting to represent the action in such a way as to suggest that the actors have been caught red-handed, by chance and by surprise, reduces the fictions and conventions of the theatre to a minimum. With its robust illusionism, its forthright and indiscreet directness, its violent attack on the audience, it expresses a democratic conception of art, held by liberal, anti-authoritarian societies, just as clearly as the whole of the courtly and aristocratic art—by its mere emphasis of the stage, the footlights, the frame and the socle—is the unmistakable expression of a highly artificial, specially commissioned occasion, from which it is obvious that the patron is an initiated connoisseur who does not need to be deceived.

It isn’t real, none of it is, but it’s bearable. Isn’t it pathetic the only way some can tolerate existence is by faking one? The effort to entertain is a happy one. It’s the need to do it that’s so damn sad.