Films With Famous Quotes

Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires, athletes, or film-stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.

She was born under the sign of Gemini. And that stands for the good and evil twin. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde both hiding and residing inside her heart. Her good twin was not bad at all. But her evil twin was even better, and showed up to be way too fatal!

Their [girls] sexual energy, their evaluation of adolescent boys and other girls goes thwarted, deflected back upon the girls, unspoken, and their searching hungry gazed returned to their own bodies. The questions, Whom do I desire? Why? What will I do about it? are turned around: Would I desire myself? Why?...Why not? What can I do about it? The books and films they see survey from the young boy's point of view his first touch of a girl's thighs, his first glimpse of her breasts. The girls sit listening, absorbing, their familiar breasts estranged as if they were not part of their bodies, their thighs crossed self-consciously, learning how to leave their bodies and watch them from the outside. Since their bodies are seen from the point of view of strangeness and desire, it is no wonder that what should be familiar, felt to be whole, become estranged and divided into parts. What little girls learn is not the desire for the other, but the desire to be desired. Girls learn to watch their sex along with the boys; that takes up the space that should be devoted to finding out about what they are wanting, and reading and writing about it, seeking it and getting it. Sex is held hostage by beauty and its ransom terms are engraved in girls' minds early and deeply with instruments more beautiful that those which advertisers or pornographers know how to use: literature, poetry, painting, and film. This outside-in perspective on their own sexuality leads to the confusion that is at the heart of the myth. Women come to confuse sexual looking with being looked at sexually ("Clairol...it's the look you want"); many confuse sexually feeling with being sexually felt ("Gillete razors...the way a woman wants to feel"); many confuse desiring with being desirable. "My first sexual memory," a woman tells me, "was when I first shaved my legs, and when I ran my hand down the smooth skin I felt how it would feel to someone else's hand." Women say that when they lost weight they "feel sexier" but the nerve endings in the clitoris and nipples don't multiply with weight loss. Women tell me they're jealous of the men who get so much pleasure out of the female body that they imagine being inside the male body that is inside their own so that they can vicariously experience desire. Could it be then that women's famous slowness of arousal to men's, complex fantasy life, the lack of pleasure many experience in intercourse, is related to this cultural negation of sexual imagery that affirms the female point of view, the culture prohibition against seeing men's bodies as instruments of pleasure? Could it be related to the taboo against representing intercourse as an opportunity for a straight woman actively to pursue, grasp, savor, and consume the male body for her satisfaction, as much as she is pursued, grasped, savored, and consumed for his?

We consume indie music and films, and generate our own online content. We “think different” (even if we got the idea from Apple Computer’s famous ad campaign).

Adolescence is a marketing tool.

Monarchy can easily be "debunked", but watch the faces, mark well the accents of the debunkers. These are the men whose taproot in Eden has been cut -- whom no rumor of the polyphony, the dance, can reach – men to whom pebbles laid in a row are more beautiful than an arch. Yet even if they desire mere equality they cannot reach it. Where men are forbidden to honor a king they honor millionaires, athletes, or film-stars instead -- even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served -- deny it food and it will gobble poison. (Article "Equality")

Above them, one of the blackened television screens brightens, and there's an announcement about the in-flight movie. It's an animated film about a family of ducks, one that Hadley's actually see, and when Oliver groans, shes about to deny the whole thing. But then she twists around in her seat and eyes him critically. "There's nothing wrong with ducks," she tells him, and he rolls his eyes. "Talking ducks?" Hadley grins. "They sing, too." "Don't tell me," he says. "You've already seen it." She holds up two fingers. "Twice." "You do know it's meant for five-year-olds, right?" "Five- to eight-year-olds, thank you very much." "And how old are you again?" "Old enough to appreciate our web-footed friends." "You," he says, laughing in spite of himself, "are a mad as a hatter." "Wait a second," Hadley says in mock horror. "Is that a reference to a...cartoon?" No, genius. It's a reference to a famous work of literature by Lewis Carroll. But once again, I can see how well that American education is working for you.

Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires, athletes or film stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.

What’s there in Finland?” his boss asked. “Sibelius, Aki Kaurismäki films, Marimekko, Nokia, Moomin.” Tsukuru listed all the names of famous Finnish things that he could think of. His boss shook his head, obviously indifferent to all of them.

It was always surprising to me how ferociously the public mourned a beautiful stranger -- especially one from a famous family. Into that empty form they could unload the grief and regret of their own lives, be rid of it, feel lucky and light for a few days, comforted by the though, At least it wasn't me.

The relationship between the famous and the public who sustain them is governed by a striking paradox. Infinitely remote, the great stars of politics, film and entertainment move across an electric terrain of limousines, bodygurads and private helicopters. At the same time, the zoom lens and the interview camera bring them so near to us that we know their faces and their smallest gestures more intimately than those of our friends. Somewhere in this paradoxical space our imaginations are free to range, and we find ourselves experimenting like impresarios with all the possibilities that these magnified figures seem to offer us.

We like to believe that we live in a grand age of creative individualism. We look back at the midcentury era in which the Berkeley researchers conducted their creativity studies, and feel superior. Unlike the starched-shirted conformists of the 1950s, we hang posters of Einstein on our walls, his tongue stuck out iconoclastically. We consume indie music and films, and generate our own online content. We “think different” (even if we got the idea from Apple Computer’s famous ad campaign). But the way we organize many of our most important institutions—our schools and our workplaces—tells a very different story.

People played with fact and fancy. Waitresses wrote novels at night that would make them famous. Laborers fell in love with naked movie queens in rented cassette films. The rich wore paper jewelry, and the poor bought tiny diamonds. And princesses sallied forth onto the Champs Elysées in carefully faded rags.

The famous field altar came from the Jewish firm of Moritz Mahler in Vienna, which manufactured all kinds of accessories for mass as well as religious objects like rosaries and images of saints. The altar was made up of three parts, lberally provided with sham gilt like the whole glory of the Holy Church. It was not possible without considerable ingenuity to detect what the pictures painted on these three parts actually represented. What was certain was that it was an altar which could have been used equally well by heathens in Zambesi or by the Shamans of the Buriats and Mongols. Painted in screaming colors it appeared from a distance like a coloured chart intended for colour-blind railway workers. One figure stood out prominently - a naked man with a halo and a body which was turning green, like the parson's nose of a goose which has begun to rot and is already stinking. No one was doing anything to this saint. On the contrary, he had on both sides of him two winged creatures which were supposed to represent angels. But anyone looking at them had the impression that this holy naked man was shrieking with horror at the company around him, for the angels looked like fairy-tale monsters and were a cross between a winged wild cat and the beast of the apocalypse. Opposite this was a picture which was meant to represent the Holy Trinity. By and large the painter had been unable to ruin the dove. He had painted a kind of bird which could equally well have been a pigeon or a White Wyandotte. God the Father looked like a bandit from the Wild West served up to the public in an American film thriller. The Son of God on the other hand was a gay young man with a handsome stomach draped in something like bathing drawers. Altogether he looked a sporting type. The cross which he had in his hand he held as elegantly as if it had been a tennis racquet. Seen from afar however all these details ran into each other and gave the impression of a train going into a station.

What is more, the whole apparatus of life has become so complex and the processes of production, distribution, and consumption have become so specialized and subdivided, that the individual person loses confidence in his own unaided capacities: he is increasingly subject to commands he does not understand, at the mercy of forces over which he exercises no effective control, moving to a destination he has not chosen. Unlike the taboo-ridden savage, who is often childishly over-confident in the powers of his shaman or magician to control formidable natural forces, however inimical, the machine-conditioned individual feels lost and helpless as day by day he metaphorically punches his time-card, takes his place on the assembly line, and at the end draws a pay check that proves worthless for obtaining any of the genuine goods of life. This lack of close personal involvement in the daily routine brings a general loss of contact with reality: instead of continuous interplay between the inner and the outer world, with constant feedback or readjustment and with stimulus to fresh creativity, only the outer world-and mainly the collectively organized outer world of the power system-exercises authority: even private dreams must be channeled through television, film, and disc, in order to become acceptable. With this feeling of alienation goes the typical psychological problem of our time, characterized in classic terms by Erik Erikson as the 'Identity Crisis.' In a world of transitory family nurture, transitory human contacts, transitory jobs and places of residence, transitory sexual and family relations, the basic conditions for maintaining continuity and establishing personal equilibrium disappear. The individual suddenly awakens, as Tolstoi did in a famous crisis in his own life at Arzamas, to find himself in a strange, dark room, far from home, threatened by obscure hostile forces, unable to discover where he is or who he is, appalled by the prospect of a meaningless death at the end of a meaningless life.

Lange, who had been stricken by polio at the age of seven and walked with a painful limp, had become famous for the achingly sympathetic photographs she’d taken for the Farm Security Administration during the Depression. “Cripples know about each other,” she said of her ability to capture suffering on film.

Those who saw the famous film The Bridge on the River Kwai will remember the absurd zeal with which the English officer, prisoner of the Japanese, strives to build an audacious wooden bridge for them and is shocked when he realizes that the English sappers have mined it. So you see, love for a job well done is a deeply ambiguous virtue.

Ford3 Harrison (b.1942), American actor. He became internationally famous with his leading roles in the science-fiction film Star Wars (1977) and its two sequels.

But I want you to tell me what it is you think I do.” “Well,” Rick says, “the way it was explained to me is you put famous American talent in foreign films.” “Not bad,” Marvin says.

OCTOBER Wednesday My parents are always saying the world doesn’t revolve around me, but sometimes I wonder if it actually DOES. When I was a little kid, I saw this movie about a man whose whole life is secretly being filmed for a TV show. This guy is famous all over the world, and he doesn’t KNOW it. Well, ever since I saw that movie, I’ve kind of figured the same thing is probably happening to ME. HOPE YOU CREEPS ARE ENJOYING YOURSELVES!

To find his successor, Yeltsin’s entourage organized a public opinion poll about favorite heroes in popular entertainment. The winner was Max Stierlitz, the hero of a series of Soviet novels that were adapted into a number of films, most famously the television serial Seventeen Moments of Spring in 1973.

It was always surprising to me how ferociously the public mourned a beautiful stranger—especially one from a famous family. Into that empty form they could unload the grief and regret of their own lives, be rid of it, feel lucky and light for a few days, comforted by the thought, At least that wasn’t me.

Nowadays, the work of Alfred Hitchcock is admired all over the world. Young people who are just discovering his art through the current rerelease of Rear Window and Vertigo, or through North by Northwest, may assume his prestige has always been recognized, but this is far from being the case. In the fifties and sixties, Hitchcock was at the height of his creativity and popularity. He was, of course, famous due to the publicity masterminded by producer David O. Selznick during the six or seven years of their collaboration on such films as Rebecca, Notorious, Spellbound, and The Paradine Case. His fame had spread further throughout the world via the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents in the mid-fifties. But American and European critics made him pay for his commercial success by reviewing his work with condescension, and by belittling each new film. (...) In examining his films, it was obvious that he had given more thought to the potential of his art than any of his colleagues. It occurred to me that if he would, for the first time, agree to respond seriously to a systematic questionnaire, the resulting document might modify the American critics’ approach to Hitchcock. That is what this book is all about.

There is a famous scene at the beginning of a Star Wars film, where the main character cuts open an animal to climb inside of it to so that he would survive extremely cold weather. People were shocked by this, and they should be. Do they not consider that wearing fur or leather is the same thing? Shenita Etwaroo

Flash Gordon, though made famous in comics and in the film serials of Larry (Buster) Crabbe, had a limited run on radio. The weekly Hearst serial ended after 26 weeks with Flash and his companions crashing in the jungle and getting rescued by Jungle Jim. Thus Jungle Jim became the new Hearst serial; it continued for years.

Adding to her frustration was the much more frequent attention being given to her gender. Throughout the twenties, Frances was hailed as “one of the most famous scenario writers” or “highest paid scenarist” and now The Big House was promoted in the Los Angeles Examiner under the headline “Woman Writes Film Plot of Penitentiary.

Deep down, Story Easton knew what would happen if she attempted to off herself—she would fail It was a matter of probability. This was not a new thing, failure. She was, had always been, a failure of fairy-tale proportion. Quitting wasn’t Story’s problem. She had tried, really tried, lots of things during different stages of her life—Girl Scours, the viola, gardening, Tommy Andres from senior year American Lit—but zero cookie sales, four broken strings, two withered azalea bushes, and one uniquely humiliating breakup later, Story still had not tasted success, and with a shriveled-up writing career as her latest disappointment, she realized no magic slippers or fairy dust was going to rescue her from her Anti-Midas Touch. No Happily Ever After was coming. So she had learned to find a certain comfort in failure. In addition to her own screw-ups, others’ mistakes became cozy blankets to cuddle, and she snuggled up to famous failures like most people embrace triumph. The Battle of Little Bighorn—a thing of beauty. The Bay of Pigs—delicious debacle. The Y2K Bug—gorgeously disappointing fuck-up. Geraldo’s anti-climactic Al Capone exhumation—oops! Jaws III—heaven on film. Tattooed eyeliner—eyelids everywhere, revolting. Really revolting. Fat-free potato chips—good Lord, makes anyone feel successful.

When he was in college, a famous poet made a useful distinction for him. He had drunk enough in the poet's company to be compelled to describe to him a poem he was thinking of. It would be a monologue of sorts, the self-contemplation of a student on a summer afternoon who is reading Euphues. The poem itself would be a subtle series of euphuisms, translating the heat, the day, the student's concerns, into symmetrical posies; translating even his contempt and boredom with that famously foolish book into a euphuism. The poet nodded his big head in a sympathetic, rhythmic way as this was explained to him, then told him that there are two kinds of poems. There is the kind you write; there is the kind you talk about in bars. Both kinds have value and both are poems; but it's fatal to confuse them. In the Seventh Saint, many years later, it had struck him that the difference between himself and Shakespeare wasn't talent - not especially - but nerve. The capacity not to be frightened by his largest and most potent conceptions, to simply (simply!) sit down and execute them. The dreadful lassitude he felt when something really large and multifarious came suddenly clear to him, something Lear-sized yet sonnet-precise. If only they didn't rush on him whole, all at once, massive and perfect, leaving him frightened and nerveless at the prospect of articulating them word by scene by page. He would try to believe they were of the kind told in bars, not the kind to be written, though there was no way to be sure of this except to attempt the writing; he would raise a finger (the novelist in the bar mirror raising the obverse finger) and push forward his change. Wailing like a neglected ghost, the vast notion would beat its wings into the void. Sometimes it would pursue him for days and years as he fled desperately. Sometimes he would turn to face it, and do battle. Once, twice, he had been victorious, objectively at least. Out of an immense concatenation of feeling, thought, word, transcendent meaning had come his first novel, a slim, pageant of a book, tombstone for his slain conception. A publisher had taken it, gingerly; had slipped it quietly into the deep pool of spring releases, where it sank without a ripple, and where he supposes it lies still, its calm Bodoni gone long since green. A second, just as slim but more lurid, nightmarish even, about imaginary murders in an imaginary exotic locale, had been sold for a movie, though the movie had never been made. He felt guilt for the producer's failure (which perhaps the producer didn't feel), having known the book could not be filmed; he had made a large sum, enough to finance years of this kind of thing, on a book whose first printing was largely returned.

Steamboat Willie put Walt Disney on the map as an animator. Business success was another story. Disney’s first studio went bankrupt. His films were monstrously expensive to produce, and financed at outrageous terms. By the mid-1930s Disney had produced more than 400 cartoons. Most of them were short, most of them were beloved by viewers, and most of them lost a fortune. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs changed everything. The $8 million it earned in the first six months of 1938 was an order of magnitude higher than anything the company earned previously. It transformed Disney Studios. All company debts were paid off. Key employees got retention bonuses. The company purchased a new state-of-the-art studio in Burbank, where it remains today. An Oscar turned Walt from famous to full-blown celebrity. By 1938 he had produced several hundred hours of film. But in business terms, the 83 minutes of Snow White were all that mattered.

When President Nixon was reelected in a landslide in 1972, film critic Pauline Kael famously said in disbelief, “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.”14 Her statement has come to symbolize the insulation of the liberal elite, living in a bubble and hearing only the opinions of fellow liberals. It has become known as “Pauline Kael Syndrome” and its most virulent strain has been discovered in late 2016, complete with paranoid delusions of Russian hacking. Liberals

Choreographer Twyla Tharp, who directed the opera and dance scenes for the film Amadeus, has this to say about the film’s portrait of Mozart: There are no ‘natural’ geniuses… No-one worked harder than Mozart. By the time he was twenty-eight years old, his hands were deformed because of all the hours he had spent practicing, performing, and gripping a quill pen to compose… As Mozart himself wrote to a friend, “People err who think my art comes easily to me. I assure you, dear friend, nobody has devoted so much time and thought to composition as I. There is not a famous master whose music I have not industriously studied through many times.

Cinematographer.” Such an ornate term, yet still so vague. I often wonder if that’s to blame for how overlooked we are as a profession. Or even worse, that dry title, “Director of Photography.” But we are the true artists. A director may quite literally call the shots, but it is the cinematographer that makes them. We choose the angles, the lighting, pretty much everything that you see on the screen. The camera is a brush, and we are the hand, the arm, the eye. The director’s basically just the mouth, making pointless noise while the hand does the actual work. Almost every famous director that you know who has a distinctive visual style has simply managed to lock down a talented DoP.

Too many film schools, as well as any number of screenwriting gurus and an obscene number of how-to-write tomes, have made a business of catering to fledgling screenwriters and filmmakers by exploiting their belief that the only thing standing between them and an Oscar is the right kind of knowledge. If only one knew enough, one could easily become rich and famous. Unfortunately, almost all are susceptible to that eternal malady – “that last great infirmity of the soul” – which is FAME. And whilst I don’t deny the value of technical knowledge, such knowledge matters very little if the story one is trying to tell doesn’t matter, either because it’s incoherent or simply because it fails to make us care.

I reach out and squeeze her hand, and remember everything we’ve lived through together. The normal things we endured as we grew from girls to women. The days in school where boys would line us up in order of our fuckability. The parties where it was normal to lie on top of a semi-conscious girl, do things to her, then call her a slut afterwards. A Christmas number-one song about a pregnant woman being stuffed into the boot of a car and driven off a bridge. Laughing when your male friends made rape jokes. Opening a newspaper and seeing the breasts of a girl who had only just turned legal, dressed in school uniform to make her look underage. Of the childhood films we grew up on, and loved, and knew all the words to, where, at the end, a girl would always get chosen for looking the prettiest compared to all the others. Reading magazines that told you to mirror men’s body language, and hum on their dick when you went down on them, that turned into books about how to get them to commit by not being yourself. Of size zero, and Atkins, and Five-Two, and cabbage soup, and juice cleanses and eat clean. Of pole-dancing lessons as a great way to get fit, and actually, if you want to be really cool, come to the actual strip club too. Of being sexually assaulted when you kissed someone on a dance floor and not thinking about it properly until you are twenty-seven and read a book about how maybe it was wrong. Of being jealous of your friend who got assaulted on the dance floor because why didn’t he pick you to assault? Boys not wanting to be with you unless you fuck them quickly. Boys not wanting to be with you because you fucked them too quickly. Being terrified to walk anywhere in the dark in case the worst thing happens to you, and so your male friend walks you home to keep you safe, and then comes into your bedroom and does the worst thing to you, and now, when you look him up online, he’s engaged to a woman who wears a feminist T-shirt and isn’t going to change her name when they get married. Of learning to have no pubic hair, and how liberating it is to pay thirty-five pounds a month to rip this from your body and lurch up in agony. Rings around famous women’s bodies saying ‘look at this cellulite’, oh, by the way, here is a twenty-quid cream so you don’t get

This Is Not an Elegy At sixteen, I was illegal and brilliant, my fingernails chewed to half-moons. I took off my clothes in a late March field. I had secret car wrecks, secret hysteria. I opened my mouth to swallow stars. In backseats I learned the alchemy of guilt, lust, and distance. I was unformed and total. I swore like a sailor. But slowly the cops stopped coming around. The heat lifted its palms. The radio lost some teeth. Now I see the landscape behind me as through a Claude glass— tinted deeper, framed just so, bits of gilt edging the best parts. I see my unlined face, a thousand film stars behind the eyes. I was every murderess, every whip- thin alcoholic, every heroine with the silver tongue. Always young Paul Newman’s best girl. Always a lightning sky behind each kiss. Some days I watch myself in the third person, speak to her in the second. I say: I will meet you in sleep. I will know you by your stillness and your shaking. By your second-hand gown. By your bruises left by mouths since forgotten. This is not an elegy because I cannot bear for it to be. It is only a tree branch against the window. It is only a cherry tomato slowly reddening in the garden. I will put it in my mouth. It will be sweet, and you will swallow.

If this is true—if solitude is an important key to creativity—then we might all want to develop a taste for it. We’d want to teach our kids to work independently. We’d want to give employees plenty of privacy and autonomy. Yet increasingly we do just the opposite. We like to believe that we live in a grand age of creative individualism. We look back at the midcentury era in which the Berkeley researchers conducted their creativity studies, and feel superior. Unlike the starched-shirted conformists of the 1950s, we hang posters of Einstein on our walls, his tongue stuck out iconoclastically. We consume indie music and films, and generate our own online content. We “think different” (even if we got the idea from Apple Computer’s famous ad campaign). But the way we organize many of our most important institutions—our schools and our workplaces—tells a very different story. It’s the story of a contemporary phenomenon that I call the New Groupthink—a phenomenon that has the potential to stifle productivity at work and to deprive schoolchildren of the skills they’ll need to achieve excellence in an increasingly competitive world. The New Groupthink elevates teamwork above all else. It insists that creativity and intellectual achievement come from a gregarious place. It has many powerful advocates. “Innovation—the heart of the knowledge economy—is fundamentally social,” writes the prominent journalist Malcolm Gladwell. “None of us is as smart as all of us,” declares the organizational consultant Warren Bennis,

In one of the most famous experiments in the history of psychology, Walter Mischel and his students exposed four-year-old children to a cruel dilemma. They were given a choice between a small reward (one Oreo), which they could have at any time, or a larger reward (two cookies) for which they had to wait 15 minutes under difficult conditions. They were to remain alone in a room, facing a desk with two objects: a single cookie and a bell that the child could ring at any time to call in the experimenter and receive the one cookie. As the experiment was described: “There were no toys, books, pictures, or other potentially distracting items in the room. The experimenter left the room and did not return until 15 min had passed or the child had rung the bell, eaten the rewards, stood up, or shown any signs of distress.” The children were watched through a one-way mirror, and the film that shows their behavior during the waiting time always has the audience roaring in laughter. About half the children managed the feat of waiting for 15 minutes, mainly by keeping their attention away from the tempting reward. Ten or fifteen years later, a large gap had opened between those who had resisted temptation and those who had not. The resisters had higher measures of executive control in cognitive tasks, and especially the ability to reallocate their attention effectively. As young adults, they were less likely to take drugs. A significant difference in intellectual aptitude emerged: the children who had shown more self-control as four-year-olds had substantially higher scores on tests of intelligence.

They've never been able to ignore you, Ma'am." "I made damn sure they couldn't. I never let them or anyone tell me what to do, except where Peter was concerned." She sighed, her weak chest rising and falling beneath the teal hospital down. "I'd trade my diamonds for a cigarette." Vera reached into her purse and pulled out a package of Gigantes she'd purchased at a tobacconist shop on the way to the hospital. She removed the cellophane wrapper and handed it to the Princess, the ability to anticipate Her Royal Highness's needs never having left her, even after all these years. The Princess didn't thank her, but the delight in her blue eyes when she put one in the good side of her mouth and allowed Vera to light it was thanks enough. The Princess struggled to close her lips around the base, revealing the depths of her weakness but also her strength. She refused to be denied her pleasure, even if it took some time to bring her lips together enough to inhale. Pure bliss came over her when she did before she exhaled. "I don't suppose you brought anything to drink?" "As a matter of fact, I did." Vera took the small bottle of whiskey she'd been given on the plane and held it up. "It isn't Famous Grouse, I'm afraid." "I don't care what it is." She snatched the plastic cup off the bedside table and held it up. "Pour." Vera twisted off the cap and drained the small bottle into the cup. The Princess held it up, whiskey in one hand, the cigarette in the other, and nodded to Vera. "Cheers." She drank with a rapture equal to the one she'd shown with the cigarette, sinking back into the pillows to enjoy the forbidden luxuries. "It reminds me of when we used to get drinks at the 400 Club after a Royal Command Film Performance or some other dry event. Nothing ever tasted so good as that first whiskey after all the hot air of those stuffy officials." "We could work up quite a thirst, couldn't we, Ma'am?" "We sure could." She enjoyed the cigarette, letting out the smoke slowly to savour it before offering Vera a lopsided smile. "We had fun back then, didn't we, Mrs. Lavish?

can be horribly fallible, and is over-rated in courts of law. Psychological experiments have given us some stunning demonstrations, which should worry any jurist inclined to give superior weight to ‘eye-witness’ evidence. A famous example was prepared by Professor Daniel J. Simons at the University of Illinois. Half a dozen young people standing in a circle were filmed for 25 seconds tossing a pair of basketballs to each other, and we, the experimental subjects, watch the film. The players weave in and out of the circle and change places as they pass and bounce the balls, so the scene is quite actively complicated. Before being shown the film, we are told that we have a task to perform, to test our powers of observation. We have to count the total number of times balls are passed from person to person. At the end of the test, the counts are duly written down, but – little does the audience know – this is not the real test! After showing the film and collecting the counts, the experimenter drops his bombshell. ‘And how many of you saw the gorilla?’ The majority of the audience looks baffled: blank. The experimenter then replays the film, but this time tells the audience to watch in a relaxed fashion without trying to count anything. Amazingly, nine seconds into the film, a man in a gorilla suit strolls nonchalantly to the centre of the circle of players, pauses to face the camera, thumps his chest as if in belligerent contempt for eye-witness evidence, and then strolls off with the same insouciance as before (see colour page 8). He is there in full view for nine whole seconds – more than one-third of the film – and yet the majority of the witnesses never see him. They would swear an oath in a court of law that no man in a gorilla suit was present, and they would swear that they had been watching with more than usually acute concentration for the whole 25 seconds, precisely because they were counting ball-passes. Many experiments along these lines have been performed, with similar results, and with similar reactions of stupefied disbelief when the audience is finally shown the truth. Eye-witness testimony, ‘actual observation’, ‘a datum of experience’ – all are, or at least can be, hopelessly unreliable. It is, of course, exactly this unreliability among observers that stage conjurors exploit with their techniques of deliberate distraction.

Jones, along with the US military attaché in Indonesia, took Subandrio’s advice. He emphasized to Washington that the United States should support the Indonesian military as a more effective, long-term anticommunist strategy. The country of Indonesia couldn’t be simply broken into pieces to slow down the advance of global socialism, so this was a way that the US could work within existing conditions. This strategic shift would begin soon, and would prove very fruitful. But behind the scenes, the CIA boys dreamed up wild schemes. On the softer side, a CIA front called the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which funded literary magazines and fine arts around the world, published and distributed books in Indonesia, such as George Orwell’s Animal Farm and the famous anticommunist collection The God That Failed.33 And the CIA discussed simply murdering Sukarno. The Agency went so far as to identify the “asset” who would kill him, according to Richard M. Bissell, Wisner’s successor as deputy director for plans.34 Instead, the CIA hired pornographic actors, including a very rough Sukarno look-alike, and produced an adult film in a bizarre attempt to destroy his reputation. The Agency boys knew that Sukarno routinely engaged in extramarital affairs. But everyone in Indonesia also knew it. Indonesian elites didn’t shy away from Sukarno’s activities the way the Washington press corps protected philanderers like JFK. Some of Sukarno’s supporters viewed his promiscuity as a sign of his power and masculinity. Others, like Sumiyati and members of the Gerwani Women’s Movement, viewed it as an embarrassing defect. But the CIA thought this was their big chance to expose him. So they got a Hollywood film crew together.35 They wanted to spread the rumor that Sukarno had slept with a beautiful blond flight attendant who worked for the KGB, and was therefore both immoral and compromised. To play the president, the filmmakers (that is, Bing Crosby and his brother Larry) hired a “Hispanic-looking” actor, and put him in heavy makeup to make him look a little more Indonesian. They also wanted him bald, since exposing Sukarno—who always wore a hat—as such might further embarrass him. The idea was to destroy the genuine affection that young Sakono, and Francisca, and millions of other Indonesians, felt for the Founding Father of their country. The thing was never released—not because this was immoral or a bad idea, but because the team couldn’t put together a convincing enough film.36

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.

ONCE YOU’VE HOOKED readers, your next task is to put your early chapters to work introducing your characters, settings, and stakes. The first 20-25% of the book comprises your setup. At first glance, this can seem like a tremendous chunk of story to devote to introductions. But if you expect readers to stick with you throughout the story, you first have to give them a reason to care. This important stretch is where you accomplish just that. Mere curiosity can only carry readers so far. Once you’ve hooked that sense of curiosity, you then have to deepen the pull by creating an emotional connection between them and your characters. These “introductions” include far more than just the actual moment of introducing the characters and settings or explaining the stakes. In themselves, the presentations of the characters probably won’t take more than a few scenes. After the introduction is when your task of deepening the characters and establishing the stakes really begins. The first quarter of the book is the place to compile all the necessary components of your story. Anton Chekhov’s famous advice that “if in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired” is just as important in reverse: if you’re going to have a character fire a gun later in the book, that gun should be introduced in the First Act. The story you create in the following acts can only be assembled from the parts you’ve shown readers in this First Act. That’s your first duty in this section. Your second duty is to allow readers the opportunity to learn about your characters. Who are these people? What is the essence of their personalities? What are their core beliefs (even more particularly, what are the beliefs that will be challenged or strengthened throughout the book)? If you can introduce a character in a “characteristic moment,” as we talked about earlier, you’ll be able to immediately show readers who this person is. From there, the plot builds as you deepen the stakes and set up the conflict that will eventually explode in the Inciting and Key Events. Authors sometimes feel pressured to dive right into the action of their stories, at the expense of important character development. Because none of us wants to write a boring story, we can overreact by piling on the explosions, fight sequences, and high-speed car chases to the point we’re unable to spend important time developing our characters. Character development is especially important in this first part of the story, since readers need to understand and sympathize with the characters before they’re hit with the major plot revelations at the quarter mark, halfway mark, and three-quarters mark. Summer blockbusters are often guilty of neglecting character development, but one enduring exception worth considering is Stephen Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. No one would claim the film is a leisurely character study, but it rises far above the monster movie genre through its expert use of pacing and its loving attention to character, especially in its First Act. It may surprise some viewers to realize the action in this movie doesn’t heat up until a quarter of the way into the film—and even then we have no scream-worthy moments, no adrenaline, and no extended action scenes until halfway through the Second Act. Spielberg used the First Act to build suspense and encourage viewer loyalty to the characters. By the time the main characters arrive at the park, we care about them, and our fear for their safety is beginning to manifest thanks to a magnificent use of foreshadowing. We understand that what is at stake for these characters is their very lives. Spielberg knew if he could hook viewers with his characters, he could take his time building his story to an artful Climax.

The most famous child survivor of the Holocaust in the 1950s was not Anne Frank—after all, she didn’t survive—but a young woman named Hannah Bloch Kohner. NBC television’s This Is Your Life was one of television’s first reality shows, in which host Ralph Edwards surprised a guest, often a celebrity, by reuniting him or her with friends and family members the guest hadn’t heard from in years. The program didn’t shy away from either political controversy or questionable sentimentality, as when guest Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto, who had survived the atomic bombing of Hirsohima in 1945, was introduced to the copilot of the Enola Gay. On May 27, 1953, This Is Your Life ambushed a beautiful young woman in the audience, escorted her to the stage, and proceeded, in a matter of minutes, to package, sanitize, and trivialize the Holocaust for a national television audience. Hannah Bloch Kohner’s claim to fame was that she had survived Auschwitz before emigrating, marrying, and settling in Los Angeles. She was the first Holocaust survivor to appear on a national television entertainment program. “Looking at you, it’s hard to believe that during seven short years of a still short life, you lived a lifetime of fear, terror, and tragedy,” host Edwards said to Kohner in his singsong baritone. “You look like a young American girl just out of college, not at all like a survivor of Hitler’s cruel purge of German Jews.” He then reunited a stunned Kohner with Eva, a girl with whom she’d spent eight months in Auschwitz, intoning, “You were each given a cake of soap and a towel, weren’t you, Hannah? You were sent to the so-called showers, and even this was a doubtful procedure, because some of the showers had regular water and some had liquid gas, and you never knew which one you were being sent to. You and Eva were fortunate. Others were not so fortunate, including your father and mother, your husband Carl Benjamin. They all lost their lives in Auschwitz.” It was an extraordinary lapse of sympathy, good taste, and historical accuracy—history that, if not common knowledge, had at least been documented on film. It would be hard to explain how Kohner ever made it on This Is Your Life to be the Holocaust’s beautiful poster girl if you didn’t happen to know that her husband—a childhood sweetheart who had emigrated to the United States in 1938—was host Ralph Edwards’s agent. Hannah Bloch’s appearance was a small, if crass, oasis of public recognition for Holocaust survivors—and child survivors especially—in a vast desert of indifference. It would be decades before the media showed them this much interest again.

another true Death Valley Days story is presented for your entertainment by the Pacific Coast Borax Company, producers of that famous family of products—20 Mule Team Borax, 20 Mule Team Borax Soap Chips, and Boraxo. Well, Old Ranger, what’s your story about tonight?” Through many changes of format, it remained a hardy perennial, eventually becoming a filmed TV series with Ronald Reagan as host.

Alone, we can listen, not to those who tell us we must see the famous this or that, or to the voice in our head that says a place must be as it seems in a film or on a website - but to what's really there. We can hear the muezzin, the bookseller, the rug hawker, the echoes of an ancient cistern and the mysteries buried within. Alone, we don't have to speak. We can feel the vibration of a city as it is in that moment in time and will never be again: the sound of the crowd, the waves crashing into the harbor, the cries of seagulls swooping over the Bosporus. Here, and then gone.

No trip to Hana is complete without at least noticing the famous HASEGAWA STORE. Somewhat a legend (even immortalized in song), this aloha-filled delightfully overflowing country store (begin 1910) is designed to carry everything you need plus incidentals to interest the visitor. If you need film, 2 x 4's, beer or diapers. Harry the friendly proprietor, is bound to stock it.

John List was the inspiration for the elusive, enigmatic character of Keyser Soze in the 1995 film “The Usual Suspects,” starring Kevin Spacey.

Harry Tugend had abandoned radio to write films; Allen’s writers were now Arnold Auerbach and Herman Wouk (later famous as the author of The Caine Mutiny and other bestselling novels). Wouk and Auerbach may have been the most rewritten team in radio, for Allen continued to do the script’s final drafts.

He took the trophy and the mic and said, ‘Uhm,’ and then laughed, almost as if he were at a loss for words. When the presenters insisted though, he looked to the audience and thanked his crew again, Danny Boyle especially, the people of Mumbai and the optimism that he believed was the essence of the film. ‘All my life,’ he said, finally looking like he was starting to choke up, ‘I had a choice of hate and love. I chose love. And I’m here. God bless.’ Truer words he could not have spoken. At every point in his life he had faced this crucial choice. When his father died. When he had to start working before he was even a teenager. When he had to drop out of school. When he had to grow up faster than any child could have reasonably been expected to; when he had to become the man of the house at eleven, had to take care of his family. When he felt creatively stifled during his days as a sessions player and wondered if this was all his life was going to be about. When he felt his music wasn’t being appreciated widely or truly enough before Roja. When it seemed he was all alone, with no one to turn to. When he became famous. He could have chosen to be bitter, prideful or sad at every stage. But he didn’t. If not for his music, then simply for his capacity to choose light over dark, A.R. Rahman deserves every bit of adulation he got that day and ever since. His speech done, AR lowered his mic, as if not trusting himself to keep his composure for much longer, and walked off the stage.

It is very strange to realise that when you see those old films on television of the toothbrush moustache dictator ranting and the mass rallies, and the stiff-armed salutes and all the marching up and down, and the well-known flag standing to attention, that famous menace and what it would lead to - all of it was happening while people went on buying shoes and handbags and party dresses and gramophone records and ornaments and choosing a new car or a new wireless set, or just sitting in a café eating cream cakes.

Research from Brunel University shows that chess students who trained with coaches increased on average 168 points in their national ratings versus those who didn’t. Though long hours of deliberate practice are unavoidable in the cognitively complex arena of chess, the presence of a coach for mentorship gives players a clear advantage. Chess prodigy Joshua Waitzkin (the subject of the film Searching for Bobby Fischer) for example, accelerated his career when national chess master Bruce Pandolfini discovered him playing chess in Washington Square Park in New York as a boy. Pandolfini coached young Waitzkin one on one, and the boy won a slew of chess championships, setting a world record at an implausibly young age. Business research backs this up, too. Analysis shows that entrepreneurs who have mentors end up raising seven times as much capital for their businesses, and experience 3.5 times faster growth than those without mentors. And in fact, of the companies surveyed, few managed to scale a profitable business model without a mentor’s aid. Even Steve Jobs, the famously visionary and dictatorial founder of Apple, relied on mentors, such as former football coach and Intuit CEO Bill Campbell, to keep himself sharp. SO, DATA INDICATES THAT those who train with successful people who’ve “been there” tend to achieve success faster. The winning formula, it seems, is to seek out the world’s best and convince them to coach us. Except there’s one small wrinkle. That’s not quite true. We just held up Justin Bieber as an example of great, rapid-mentorship success. But since his rapid rise, he’s gotten into an increasing amount of trouble. Fights. DUIs. Resisting arrest. Drugs. At least one story about egging someone’s house. It appears that Bieber started unraveling nearly as quickly as he rocketed to Billboard number one. OK, first of all, Bieber’s young. He’s acting like the rock star he is. But his mentor, Usher, also got to Billboard number one at age 18, and he managed to dominate pop music for a decade without DUIs or egg-vandalism incidents. Could it be that Bieber missed something in the mentorship process? History, it turns out, is full of people who’ve been lucky enough to have amazing mentors and have stumbled anyway.

It was during the early summer of 1952 that I found myself in the small community park next to Stevens Institute of Technology. Although I had a job, I had only worked as a “soda jerk” for a little over a week before I started looking for something else. The Hoboken waterfront was still familiar to me from earlier years when I walked this way to catch the trolley or the electrified Public Service bus home from the Lackawanna Ferry Terminal. Remembering the gray-hulled Liberty Ships being fitted out for the war at these dilapidated piers, was still very much embedded in my memory. Things had not changed all that much, except that the ships that were once here were now at the bottom of the ocean, sold, or nested at one of the “National Defense Reserve Fleets.” The iconic movie On the Waterfront had not yet been filmed, and it would take another two years before Marlon Brando would stand on the same pier I was now looking down upon, from the higher level of Stevens Park. Labor problems were common during this era, but it was all new to me. I was only 17 years old, but would later remember how Marlon Brando got the stuffing kicked out of him for being a union malcontent. When they filmed the famous fight scene in On the Waterfront, it took place on a barge, tied up in the very same location that I was looking upon.

ORIGIN OF HOLLYWOOD On ride the masked men, wrapped in white sheets, bearing white crosses, torches held high: mounted avengers of the virtue of ladies and the honor of gentlemen strike fear into Negroes hungering for damsels’ white flesh. At the height of a wave of lynchings, D. W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation sings a hymn of praise to the Ku Klux Klan. This is Hollywood’s first blockbuster and the greatest box office success ever for a silent movie. It is also the first film to ever open at the White House. President Woodrow Wilson gives it a standing ovation. Applauding it, he applauds himself: freedom’s famous flag-bearer wrote most of the texts that accompany the epic images. The president’s words explain that the emancipation of the slaves was “a veritable overthrow of Civilization in the South, the white South under the heel of the black South.” Ever since, chaos reigns because blacks are “men who knew none of the uses of authority, except its insolences.” But the president lights the lamp of hope: “At last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan.” And even Jesus himself comes down from heaven at the end of the movie to give his blessing.

During this period, I served many celebrities, including Jennifer Aniston, Vince Vaughn, Gary Oldman, Leonardo DiCaprio, Juliette Lewis, Rob Lowe, Colin Farrell, Tom Selleck, David Spade, Thomas Haden Church, Sharon Osbourne, Brad Pitt, John Malkovich, Tara Reid, Toby Maguire and Diane Keaton. You know all of them, so no explanation needed. The hardest thing about serving such famous Hollywood icons, at least for the first time, is trying not to stare at them. It’s so otherworldly to see someone like Selleck, who’s not just huge -he’s bigger than life- and who you´ve watched on big screen and small for years… they are, invariably, taller or shorter than you’d imagined. And the women are either spectacularly beautiful or very ordinary without screen makeup. But you can’t stare. It’s verbatim by ownership. Brad Pitt was cool and very humble. He had a few Pyramid beers with a producer friend, and then took off on his motorcycle down Sunset Boulevard, heading West towards the Palisades. Am I saying that he was driving drunk? No. He was there for two hours and had two beers, so he wasn’t breaking the law. At least not with my assistance. He had been there many times before, I just hadn’t been the one serving him. I remember when he came in during his filming of Troy. He had long hair and a cast on his leg. Ironically, he had torn his Achilles’ tendon while playing Achilles in the epic film.

The American Dream is a term that is often used but also often misunderstood. It isn't really about becoming rich or famous. It is about things much simpler and more fundamental than that.

What some may not know is that Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t originally arrested for killing the president. He was first arrested for shooting and killing Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit. Oswald’s arrest came about on November 22, 1963, when a shoe store manager named John Brewer noticed him loitering suspiciously outside his store. Brewer noted that Oswald fit the description of the suspect in the shooting of Officer Tippit. When Oswald continued up the street and slipped inside the Texas Theater without paying for a ticket, Brewer called a theater worker, who alerted authorities. Fifteen Dallas police officers arrived at the scene. When they turned on the movie house lights, they found Lee Harvey Oswald sitting towards the back of the theater. The movie that had been airing at the time was War is Hell. When Lee Harvey Oswald was questioned by authorities about Tippit’s homicide, Captain J. W. Fritz recognized his name as one of the workers from the book depository who had been reported missing and was already being considered a suspect in JFK’s assassination. The day after he was formally arraigned for murdering Officer Tippit, he was also charged with assassinating John F. Kennedy. Today, the Texas Theater is a historical landmark that is commonly visited by tourists. It still airs movies and hosts special events. There’s also a bar and lounge.    The Texas Theater was the first theater in Texas to have air conditioning. It was briefly owned by famous aviator and film producer, Howard Hughes. Texas’s Capitol

The first known published text of the classic fairy tale "Beauty and the Beast" was written by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve in 1740 and collected in her compilation La Jeune Américaine et les contes marins. To say that the story met with favor is an understatement. By 1756, "Beauty and the Beast" was so well known that Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont wrote an abridged edition of it that would become the popular version included in collections of fairy tales throughout the nineteenth century (although Andrew Lang went back to de Villeneuve's original for his groundbreaking anthology The Blue Fairy Book, first published in 1891 as the beginning of a twelve-book series that would revolutionize the anthologizing of fairy tales for young read ers). Fifteen years later. Jean-François Marmontel and André Ernest Modeste Grétry adapted de Villeneuve's story as the book for the opera Zémire et Azor. the start of more than two centuries of extraliterary treatments that now include Jean Cocteau's famous 1946 film La Belle et la Bête, Walt Disney's 1991 animated feature Beauty and the Beast, and countless other cinematic, televi sion, stage, and musical variations on the story's theme. More than 4,000 years after it became part of the oral storytelling tradi tion, it is easy to understand why "Beauty and the Beast" continues to be one of the most popular fairy tales of all time, and a seemingly inexhaustible source of inspiration for artists working in all mediums. Its theme of the power of unconditional love is one that never grows old.

Beethoven and Paul McCartney cited dreams as the spark behind some of their musical compositions (including McCartney’s famous “Yesterday”). Some of the most recognizable sequences in film—sections of Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, Fellini’s 8 ½, Richard Linklater’s Waking Life—are translations of the directors’ dreams. Mary Shelley credited dreams with inspiring Frankenstein; E. B. White with Stuart Little.

Where men are forbidden to honor a king they honor millionaires, athletes, or film-stars instead — even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served — deny it food and it will gobble poison.

For the time being, however, his bent was literary and religious rather than balletic. He loved, and what seventh grader doesn’t, the abstracter foxtrots and more metaphysical twists of a Dostoevsky, a Gide, a Mailer. He longed for the experience of some vivider pain than the mere daily hollowness knotted into his tight young belly, and no weekly stomp-and-holler of group therapy with other jejune eleven-year-olds was going to get him his stripes in the major leagues of suffering, crime, and resurrection. Only a bona-fide crime would do that, and of all the crimes available murder certainly carried the most prestige, as no less an authority than Loretta Couplard was ready to attest, Loretta Couplard being not only the director and co-owner of the Lowen School but the author, as well, of two nationally televised scripts, both about famous murders of the 20th Century. They’d even done a unit in social studies on the topic: A History of Crime in Urban America. The first of Loretta’s murders was a comedy involving Pauline Campbell, R.N., of Ann Arbor, Michigan, circa 1951, whose skull had been smashed by three drunken teenagers. They had meant to knock her unconscious so they could screw her, which was 1951 in a nutshell. The eighteen-year-olds, Bill Morey and Max Pell, got life; Dave Royal (Loretta’s hero) was a year younger and got off with twenty-two years. Her second murder was tragic in tone and consequently inspired more respect, though not among the critics, unfortunately. Possibly because her heroine, also a Pauline (Pauline Wichura), though more interesting and complicated had also been more famous in her own day and ever since. Which made the competition, one best-selling novel and a serious film biography, considerably stiffen Miss Wichura had been a welfare worker in Atlanta, Georgia, very much into environment and the population problem, this being the immediate pre-Regents period when anyone and everyone was legitimately starting to fret. Pauline decided to do something, viz., reduce the population herself and in the fairest way possible. So whenever any of the families she visited produced one child above the three she’d fixed, rather generously, as the upward limit, she found some unobtrusive way of thinning that family back to the preferred maximal size. Between 1989 and 1993 Pauline’s journals (Random House, 1994) record twenty-six murders, plus an additional fourteen failed attempts. In addition she had the highest welfare department record in the U.S. for abortions and sterilizations among the families whom she advised. “Which proves, I think,” Little Mister Kissy Lips had explained one day after school to his friend Jack, “that a murder doesn’t have to be of someone famous to be a form of idealism.” But of course idealism was only half the story: the other half was curiosity. And beyond idealism and curiosity there was probably even another half, the basic childhood need to grow up and kill someone.

When people are deeply “in” a film, you’ll notice that nobody coughs at certain moments, even though they may have a cold. If the coughing were purely autonomic response to smoke or congestion, it would be randomly constant, no matter what was happening on screen. But the audience holds back at certain moments, and I’m suggesting blinking is something like coughing in this sense. There is a famous live recording of pianist Sviatoslav Richter playing Musorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition during a flu epidemic in Bulgaria many years ago. It is just as plain as day what’s going on: While he was playing certain passages, no one coughed. At those moments, he was able to suppress, with his artistry, the coughing impulse of 1,500 sick people.

RAND proved formative. Some of its employees joked that it stood for “Research And No Development,” and its intellectualism was inspiring to the young economist. The think tank’s ethos was to work on problems so hard that they might actually be unsolvable.9 Four days of the week were dedicated to RAND projects, but the fifth was free for freewheeling personal research. Ken Arrow, a famous economist, and John Nash, the game theorist immortalized in the film A Beautiful Mind, both consulted for RAND around the time Sharpe was there. The eclecticism of RAND’s research community is reflected in his first published works, which were a proposal for a smog tax and a review of aircraft compartment design criteria for Army deployments.

It was always surprising to me how ferociously the public mourned a beautiful stranger — especially one from a famous family. Into that empty form they could unload the grief and regret of their own lives, be rid of it, feel lucky and light for a few days, comforted by the thought, At least that wasn’t me.

A strange and discordant mix of roles followed. I liked one film I did, The Humbling, because I did it with Barry Levinson. It was based on the novel by Philip Roth, who I met at a party in New York. I found Roth there, sitting in a chair, and he was very serious when he looked at me. I said, “Hi, Mr. Roth. I’m Al Pacino.” He had a look on his face that was haunting. In a cold, impassive voice, he said, “I. Know. Who you are.” I just thought to myself, Well, I’m famous. He’s seen me in films. Maybe he saw The Godfather, I don’t know. But I loved his writing and was a real fan, so I kept spouting to him. I said, “I’m doing a film of your book The Humbling. And it’s very funny.” In that same funereal voice as before, he said, “It’s. Not. Funny.” I said, “No, I know, it’s not really funny. But to get through the drama, sometimes you need a little funny.” Again, he said, “It’s. Not. Funny.” I said, “Sure. Okay. You’re right. It’s not funny.” And I backed out of the room into the street.

Wonder Woman has lacked the publication, television, and film presence of her fellow superheroes.

Barbary Coast was rather a mess when Howard Hawks took over direction of a film initially assigned by Sam Goldwyn to William Wyler. Hawks was famous—and sometimes notorious—for rewriting scripts on the set, inviting his actors to contribute lines. At the same time, he was loath to cede his authority, or to allow actors to take over a production. Meta Carpenter, Hawks’s secretary and sometime script supervisor, vividly recalled how curt—even insulting—the director could be. “Shut up, Walter,” Hawks barked after Brennan apparently offered one too many suggestions. Carpenter never forgot the sight of the deflated actor, who took a day to recover from this rebuff. But Walter was resilient and adaptable. He later told his granddaughter Claudia that he survived the exhausting work of filmmaking by taking catnaps during breaks. He could sleep anywhere on anything—even a coil of rope.

This would be the only chance I had to utter those famous last words like you see in the films. Ahem. “Your head is fairly oversized your highness,” I sniggered. “BEGONE!” he roared, as the crowd exploded into a fit of laughter, despite the situation. Even B.B. cracked a smile. I turned away, stepping into the water tunnel. Never to return.

Riddle: Who am I? The most famous thing in the film industry is neither an actor nor an actress. It's not even a cute You Tube kitten. It's totally anonymous. Everybody asks where it is. Nobody can locate it. It appears in probably more than 5,000 movies! Who am I? I'm 'The package'.

5th Street between First and Second Avenue is often used as a backdrop for films. Very close to the red house is New York’s most famous police station, Precinct 9, which has been filmed very often. “Our façade is often in the camera’s view, or camera people climb up the fire ladder in order to shoot from up above. Then I get 200 dollars.

You’ve probably heard of the “butterfly effect.” This is a famous proposition of chaos theory, which says that when a butterfly flaps its wings in South America, it can set off a chain of events that ends up causing a typhoon in Southeast Asia. The truth is, you create your own butterfly effect, whether you know it or not, and you do it all the time. One of my favorite butterfly-effect stories is the film It’s a Wonderful Life. A small-town businessman named George Bailey reaches the edge of despair, and decides his life has no meaning and makes no difference. On the brink of suicide, he’s visited by an angel improbably named Clarence, who walks George through an experience of what the world would look like if he had never been born. (Which is exactly why we quoted a great line of Clarence’s for the epigraph of the last chapter, “The Ripple Effect.”) George gets quite an eyeful. And so would you, if you had a Clarence come along and take you on the same tour of your life. But outside Hollywood, there’s no Clarence to provide that clarity. It’s something we need to learn to see with our own eyes.

The ghastly mother-in-law is well represented by a little comedy film of 1952: No Room for the Groom, directed by Douglas Sirk, the fine German director more famous for his melodramas that humanely criticize American morals and values.

Barbara Eden Primarily known as the star of the classic 1960s sitcom I Dream of Jeannie, Barbara Eden remains one of television’s most distinguished and identifiable figures. Her feature film credits are also extensive, including Flaming Star in 1960, The Brass Bottle in 1964, and Harper Valley PTA in 1978. She has starred opposite many of Hollywood’s most famous leading men, Elvis Presley and Tony Randall among them. She was very real, but also a little bit magical, like an angel moving around the world helping people wherever she went. And we got to see her children, Prince William and Prince Harry, grow up to young manhood. I know they were very proud of their famous beautiful mom, as I’m sure she was of them. Surely, she was an inspiration to all of us, everywhere. And it may not be generally known, but Diana donated to charity many dresses she had worn on important occasions so they could be sold to raise funds for the needy. She had impeccable taste in her clothes, which often were copied and began global fashion trends of their own, helping the careers of many young British designers.

Barbara Eden Primarily known as the star of the classic 1960s sitcom I Dream of Jeannie, Barbara Eden remains one of television’s most distinguished and identifiable figures. Her feature film credits are also extensive, including Flaming Star in 1960, The Brass Bottle in 1964, and Harper Valley PTA in 1978. She has starred opposite many of Hollywood’s most famous leading men, Elvis Presley and Tony Randall among them. We cannot help but wonder what might have been, how much more she might have accomplished, if granted a different destiny.

Bogart’s a hell of a nice guy until around 11:30 pm,” former comedian and Hollywood restaurant owner Dave Chasen famously remarked. “After that, he thinks he’s Bogart.

(Alfred’s sister, Olive Deering, was famous in those years for her sentiments during her filming of the endless DeMille epic The Ten Commandments: “Who do I have to fuck to get off this picture?”)

Excerpted From Chapter One “Rock of Ages” floated lightly down the first floor corridor of the Hollywood Hotel’s west wing. It was Sunday morning, and Hattie Mae couldn’t go to church because she had to work, so she praised the Lord in her own way, but she praised Him softly out of consideration for the “Do Not Disturb” placards hanging from the doors she passed with her wooden cart full of fresh linens and towels. Actually Sundays were Hattie Mae’s favorite of the six days she worked each week. For one thing, her shift ended at noon on Sundays. For another, this was the day Miss Lillian always left a “little something” in her room to thank Hattie Mae for such good maid service. Most of the hotel’s long-term guests left a little change for their room maids, but in Miss Lillian’s case, the tip was usually three crinkly new one dollar bills. It seemed like an awful lot of money to Hattie Mae, whose weekly pay was only nineteen dollars. Still, Miss Lillian Lawrence could afford to be generous because she was a famous actress in the movies. She was also, Hattie Mae thought, a very fine lady. When Hattie Mae reached the end of the corridor, she knocked quietly on Miss Lillian’s door. It was still too early for most guests to be out of their rooms, but Miss Lillian was always up with the sun, not like some lazy folks who laid around in their beds ‘til noon, often making Hattie Mae late for Sunday dinner because she couldn’t leave until all the rooms along her corridor were made up. After knocking twice, Hattie Mae tried Miss Lillian’s door. It opened, so after selecting the softest towels from the stacks on her cart, she walked in. With the curtains drawn the room was dark, but Hattie Mae didn’t stop to switch on the overheard light because her arms were full of towels. The maid’s eyes were on the chest of drawers to her right where Miss Lillian always left her tip, so she didn’t see the handbag on the floor just inside the door. Hattie Mae tripped over the bag and fell headlong to the floor, landing inches from the dead body of Lillian Lawrence. In the dim light Hattie Mae stared into a pale face with a gaping mouth and a trickle of blood from a small red dot above one vacant green eye. Hattie Mae screamed at the top of her lungs and kept on screaming.

LUCY and Desi. Lucy and Ricky. As far as the public knew, the private life of the Arnazes closely resembled that of the Ricardos on the TV screen; a camera crew just dropped by once a week to film a half hour of slapstick and tender kisses.

suddenly these doors burst open and the two boys came out and they were so excited. They were hopping up and down waiting for their mum and dad to come, and Diana whisked past the hand-shaking people and her whole face lit up, and she took her hat off and she scuttled down the whole length of the yacht as fast as she could and was hugging them and kissing them. Fincher’s photograph is one of the most famous ever taken of Diana, her arms outstretched, William launching himself into her embrace. She asked Fincher for a copy which she displayed in her dressing room at Kensington Palace. But it wasn’t the only picture on that roll of film. And then a few seconds behind her Prince Charles did the same thing. He came down, he was hugging and kissing the boys too. But the sad thing was that all the pictures that were used were her with her arms out, and nobody ever used a picture of him. I think he got a bad press with the children at that time. Everybody kept saying, ‘Oh, this awful father’ and everything, which wasn’t true. He’s always been a lovely father. But I think he wasn’t seen with the children and she was – and in a lot of high-profile places like Thorpe Park. And so people tended to see that and think, Where’s he? all the time.

The SS Usaramo discharged her enthusiastic passengers in die Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg, Germany, in the Spring of 1937. We no sooner arrived in Mannheim when we heard of the Hindenburg disaster, which happened on May 6, 1937, in Lakehurst, New Jersey. Tensions were running high and many people believed that the magnificent German airship had been brought down by an act of sabotage. From 1934 through 1938, Nazi Party events were held throughout Germany, especially at rallies at the parade grounds in Nuremberg. Many films were made there to commemorate these events, the most famous of which is Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. Amazingly, many people in Germany had become fanaticized and believed the vile propaganda that was being generated by SS leader Heinrich Himmler and his revoltingly talented staff.

I realize this is quite a surprise, as a live performance wasn’t in the program tonight,” Alex said. “And if you know me, you know I’m not famous for my patronage of the arts—or my singing skills.” Soft laughter rippled through the crowd, along with a few knowing looks. Alex waited for the chuckles to die down before he continued, his gaze burning into mine. “Whether it’s music, photography, film, or painting, the arts reflect the world around us, and for too long, I only saw the dark side. The seedy underbellies, the ugly truths. Photographs reminded me of moments in time that never lasted. Songs reminded me that words have the power to rip one’s heart out. Why, then, would I care about art when it was so terrible and destructive?” It was a bold statement to make in front of London’s art world, but no one heckled. No one so much as breathed. Alex had us all under the spell of his words. “Then someone came into my life and upended everything I thought I knew. She was everything I wasn’t—purehearted, trusting, optimistic. She showed me the beauty that existed in this world, and through her, I learned the power of faith. Joy. Love. But I’m afraid I’ve tainted her with my untruths, and I’m hoping, with all my heart, that one day she’ll find her way out of the darkness and into the light again.

So when we look at our cell phones—as almost everyone does countless times every day—we stare directly into the face of a scientific invention made, in part, upon Hedy Lamarr’s invention. It is a tangible reminder of her life, beyond the films for which she is more famous. And who knows whether the cell phone as we know it today would have been constructed without her work?

I realize this is quite a surprise, as a live performance wasn’t in the program tonight. And if you know me, you know I’m not famous for my patronage of the arts—or my singing skills. Whether it’s music, photography, film, or painting, the arts reflect the world around us, and for too long, I only saw the dark side. The seedy underbellies, the ugly truths. Photographs reminded me of moments in time that never lasted. Songs reminded me that words have the power to rip one’s heart out. Why, then, would I care about art when it was so terrible and deconstructive? Then someone came into my life and upended everything I thought I knew. She was everything I wasn’t—pure-hearted, trusting, optimistic. She showed me the beauty that existed in this world, and through her, I learned the power of faith. Joy. Love. But I’m afraid I’ve tainted her with my untruths, and I’m hoping with all of my heart, that one day she’ll find her way out of the darkness and into the light again.

1950 crime film, Side Street. The original had a famous car chase in and around Wall Street, shot from choppers and the tops of buildings. This time, they’re using drones, and we’ll be closing half a dozen streets over the weekend for the shoot. I haven’t met the director yet, just the DP and some assistants, but the lead was there—Leonardo DiCaprio!

Bikram malati famous actor Indian Nepalese cinema YouTube Bikram malati show on release film krodh (2019)

ANYONE WRITING ABOUT Francis Marion immediately confronts the task of sifting fact from folklore. The mythmaking began with the first and highly embellished biography of him, written in 1809 by Mason L. “Parson” Weems, the same man who fabricated the famous story of George Washington chopping down the cherry tree. The romantic tradition continued with the Walt Disney television series that ran from 1959 to 1961, starring Leslie Nielsen as the Swamp Fox, and took another turn in 2000 with the popular film The Patriot, in which Mel Gibson portrayed a Rambo-like action figure loosely, if inaccurately, based on Marion. As stated on an interpretive marker at Marion’s gravesite in Pineville, South Carolina, much about the Swamp Fox remains obscured by legend, even though his achievements are “significant and real.

There’s another level at which attention operates, this has to do with leadership, I argue that leaders need three kinds of focus, to be really effective, the first is an inner focus, let me tell you about a case that’s actually from the annals of neurology, there was a corporate lawyer, who unfortunately had a small prefrontal brain tumour, it was discovered early, operated successfully, after the surgery though it was a very puzzling picture, because he was absolutely as smart as he had been before, a very high IQ, no problem with attention or memory, but he couldn’t do his job anymore, he couldn’t do any job, in fact he ended up out of work, his wife left him, he lost his home, he’s living in his brother spare bedroom and in despair he went to see a famous neurologist named Antonio Damasio. Damasio specialized in the circuitry between the prefrontal area which is where we consciously pay attention to what matters now, where we make decisions, where we learn and the emotional centers in the midbrain, particularly the amygdala, which is our radar for danger, it triggers our strong emotions. They had cut the connection between the prefrontal area and emotional centers and Damasio at first was puzzled, he realized that this fellow on every neurological test was perfectly fine but something was wrong, then he got a clue, he asked the lawyer when should we have our next appointment and he realized the lawyer could give him the rational pros and cons of every hour for the next two weeks, but he didn’t know which is best. And Damasio says when we’re making a decision any decision, when to have the next appointment, should I leave my job for another one, what strategy should we follow, going into the future, should I marry this fellow compared to all the other fellows, those are decisions that require we draw on our entire life experience and the circuitry that collects that life experience is very base brain, it’s very ancient in the brain, and it has no direct connection to the part of the brain that thinks in words, it has very rich connectivity to the gastro- intestinal tract, to the gut, so we get a gut feeling, feels right, doesn’t feel right. Damasio calls them somatic markers, it’s a language of the body and the ability to tune into this is extremely important because this is valuable data too - they did a study of Californian entrepreneurs and asked them “how do you make your decisions?”, these are people who built a business from nothing to hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, and they more or less said the same strategy “I am a voracious gatherer of information, I want to see the numbers, but if it doesn’t feel right, I won’t go ahead with the deal”. They’re tuning into the gut feeling. I know someone, I grew up in farm region of California, the Central Valley and my high school had a rival high school in the next town and I met someone who went to the other high school, he was not a good student, he almost failed, came close to not graduating high school, he went to a two-year college, a community college, found his way into film, which he loved and got into a film school, in film school his student project caught the eye of a director, who asked him to become an assistant and he did so well at that the director arranged for him to direct his own film, someone else’s script, he did so well at that they let him direct a script that he had written and that film did surprisingly well, so the studio that financed that film said if you want to do another one, we will back you. And he, however, hated the way the studio edited the film, he felt he was a creative artist and they had butchered his art. He said I am gonna do the film on my own, I’m gonna finance it myself, everyone in the film business that he knew said this is a huge mistake, you shouldn’t do this, but he went ahead, then he ran out of money, had to go to eleven banks before he could get a loan, he managed to finish the film, you may have seen

Create your 3D Female Fantacy Warrior Character Model and Texturing by GameYan Studio. 3D Game Art Studio are among the most popular entertainment medium for people worldwide and take them into a highly interactive fantastic world that can exist only in imaginations. What are 3D games without the famous 3D character Modelling who have awed a generation? We are experts at creating 3d characters that appear extraordinarily appealing and more than graphics. Our main focus is on the 3D character Modeling and rigging for game development, Movie and short films, cinematic video content, TV advertisement & commercials animation content. Our Professional Team Of Artists Can Develop Variety Of 3d Art Content For Movie And Video Games Along With Low Optimized Characters For Mobile And Virtual Reality Interactive Games. In our modern digital workflows we use software like Autodesk Maya and ZBrush to get that same effect. This combination of tools is like working with digital clay—we are able to create a base model of the design and then sculpt on more complex details and anatomical notes. Once a Game Character Modelling Studio is finalized it’s ready for rigging and the rest of the animation pipeline. This art of modeling and Character sculpting studio characters is a wonderful blend of the technical and creative sides of the brain and a highly rewarding profession. Our team amazes you with their 3D character Models talent and expertise. We break the boundaries with our real to world 3D characters and animations, delivering a near-to-life gaming experience to the game players. Our team of highly skilled and creative 3D artists and developers generate 3D character models using the latest techniques and trends that give your game a competitive edge in the market. With our groundbreaking 3D Character Modeling Services, we deliver fantastic 3D Character Modelling for Games with the highest level of image quality with low poly game character resolution.

With Bob Dylan, Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver, and convicted Watergate lawyer Charles Colson proudly declaring to be 'born again,' Newsweek and Time called 1976 'the Year of the Evangelical.' The most famous 'born-again' Christian in the United States that year, however, was president-elect James Earl Carter. That same year, Francis Schaefer wrote How Should We Then Live, explicitly arguing that proliferating pornography, accelerating abortion rates, prohibition of prayer in public school, and other examples of 'secular humanism' were the work of Satan. It was the mission of evangelical Christians to save the country from Satan by taking back their government. Schaefer was central in bringing evangelical Christians to politics, but he was a reclusive intellectual theologian living on a mountaintop in Switzerland. His clarion call would not have been distributed so extensively without an infusion of money from Nelson Bunker Hunt. The rotund international oilman bankrolled a documentary adaptation of How Should We The n Live. A phenomenal success, the film convinced thousands of evangelical Christian that a culture war was afoot, and they had an obligation to take the fight to Satan by abandoning any past reluctance to engage in politics.

also included attacking other prominent politicians and even assassinating the famous film star Charlie Chaplin

We’re eight around the table. After we finish the soup the others stop talking, and she and I carry on. We’re discussing a film, which I liked, so I defend it. But she insists that the actor, a famous leading man, gave a terrible performance. Though I’m not drunk I can’t help it, I say: “Do you realize you have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about?” She doesn’t reply, and after that she erases me out of her evening. The others exchange embarrassed glances. I’ve never exploded like that at a small dinner among friends. The husband looks at me, gelid.

There is no such thing as real and fake life. Because it is the same role of an actor in a film which will make him famous, in the so-called real life.

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.

From my friend Oleksandr, a.k.a. Z --I loved this IMMEDIATELY There is a famous speech from film noir The Third Man: After all, it’s not that awful. You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace. And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

Conrad spent six months working for a cargo company in the EIC in 1890, three weeks of it aboard a steamship traveling up river to today’s Kisangani. There is no mention of rubber in the novel because Conrad was there five years before rubber cultivation began. Kurtz is an ivory trader. So whatever sources Conrad was using when he began work on Heart of Darkness in 1898, his personal experiences would at most have added some color and context. Hochschild will have none of it, insisting that Conrad “saw the beginnings of the frenzy of plunder and death” which he then “recorded” in Heart of Darkness. The brutalities by whites in the 1979 film Apocalypse Now were inspired by the novel, Hochschild avers, because Conrad “had seen it all, a century earlier, in the Congo.” In another example of creative chronology, Hochschild cites a quotation that he believes was the inspiration for Kurtz’s famous scrawl, “Exterminate all the brutes!” The quotation was made public for the first time during a Belgian legislative debate in 1906. Whatever its authenticity, it could not be a source for a book published in 1902.

Some imaginative Rebels play with their idea of their identity. One Rebel reported: “When I need to do repetitive chores, everything in me screams ‘Noooo.’ So I play a game I call ‘As If.’ I enact being somebody else or doing stuff while being filmed: e.g., I enact being a perfect butler, cook, interior designer, famous poet, cool scientist…sounds cheesy, but it works.” One Rebel combined the strategy of identity with the Rebel love of challenge: “To get things done, I trick my mind with a dare. I tell myself, ‘I’m a Rebel who can stick to a routine and follow through.’ This challenge excites me. It’s rebellious to be a Rebel who can do disciplined things that you don’t expect.

What do they know about Jelal?” Galip said. “Someone must have said, do an interview with such and such a famous columnist, he’d be super for your program on Turkey. And they would have written his name on a piece of paper. They’d probably not have asked his age or his description.” Just then, they heard laughter in the corner where the historical film was being shot. They turned around where they sat on the divan and looked. “What are they laughing at?” Galip said. “I didn’t catch it,” İskender said, but he was smiling as if he had. “None of us is himself,” said Galip, whispering as if he were imparting a secret. “None of us can be. Don’t you suspect that others might see you as someone else? Are you quite so certain that you are you? If you are, then are you certain that the person you are certain you are is you? What do these people want anyway? Isn’t the person they are looking for some foreigner whose stories will affect British viewers watching TV after supper, whose troubles will trouble them, whose sorrow will make them feel sad? I have just the story to fit the bill! No one need see my face even. They could keep my face in the dark during the shooting. A mysterious and well-known Turkish journalist—and don’t forget my being a Moslem which is most interesting—fearing the repressive government, politically motivated assassinations, and juntaists, grants the BBC an interview, provided that his identity is kept secret. Isn’t that even better?

Lesser is back in New York. He’d been in Paris for two months working as a gofer for the film director Maurice Barraque. To Lesser and his fellow Francophile cineastes, every one of Barraque’s films is a revelation. Beginning in the late sixties Barraque had directed and starred in his own films, all made for nothing, in circumstances that were as haphazard as they were abject. His best works were bolts of genius quickly written, hastily shot and never revised. He was a beautiful drug addict, a poet and painter of light and sound. Onscreen, he was as luminous a presence as the great beauties of European cinema who played opposite him. They worked for nothing, they expected nothing - half of his films were never finished. It was a career famous for disappointment and disaster: Cinema is haunted. We do not watch it, it watches us. But suddenly, late in life he’d had an improbable, unexpected renaissance and began churning out, year after year, small-scale diary-like films. He became almost respectable. All he required was a 16-mm camera, a handful of actors, a few rooms for them to move about in. And, of course, the streets of Paris.

THERE WAS ANOTHER, much bigger risk we took that first season. Based on a literal back-of-a-napkin pitch at a restaurant in Hollywood, ABC’s head of drama had given the go-ahead to a pilot from David Lynch, by then famous for his cult films Eraserhead and Blue Velvet, and the screenwriter and novelist Mark Frost. It was a surreal, meandering drama about the murder of a prom queen, Laura Palmer, in the fictional Pacific Northwest town of Twin Peaks. David directed the two-hour pilot, which I vividly remember watching for the first time and thinking, This is unlike anything I’ve ever seen and we have to do this.

On our single sheet of foolscap we’ve got the Big Beats. Now what? Fill in the gaps. David Lean famously declared that a feature film should have seven or eight major sequences. That’s a pretty good guideline for our play, our album, our State of the Union address.

Hence a man's reaction to Monarchy is a kind of test. (…) watch the faces, mark well the accents of the debunkers. These are the men whose taproot in Eden has been cut — whom no rumor of the polyphony, the dance, can reach – men to whom pebbles laid in a row are more beautiful than an arch. Yet even if they desire mere equality they cannot reach it. Where men are forbidden to honor a king they honor millionaires, athletes, or film-stars instead — even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served — deny it food and it will gobble poison.