6/21/22
Newsletter18
At 4:00 AM it’s not the ass crack of dawn; it’s the middle of the night. But this is when I awoke, so that makes it morning.
Speaking of waking, awaking, awakening, and awoken, I found the last line of Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” surprising in her use of that word. “He [Atticus] would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning.”
Every photo you see of a film director on the set they are wearing headphones. This is so they can hear the sound through the microphone. This idea was invented in 1946 by an unknown soundman on the first morning on the set of “The Best Years of Our Lives.” Director William Wyler had lost most of his hearing aboard a B-17 plane during WWII. He was deathly frightened his hearing loss would end his career as a director. He mentioned the problem to the sound man, and he said, “I’ll just give you your own set of headphones.” Now every director uses them.
Jim Gordon was a top studio drummer in L.A. in the early 1970s. He was a member of Eric Clapton’s Derek and the Dominos, and co-wrote “Layla” with Clapton. One day Jim Gordon showed up at his mother’s house, knocked on the door, she answered, and he promptly beat her to death with a hammer.
When Thomas Edison invented the Kinetoscope, or peep show, in 1895, which is 50 feet of film on a continuous loop, he had to decide the size of the film since there was no standard. He called his friend George Eastman at his newly-formed company, Eastman Kodak, and ordered celluloid film that was 35mm wide, with four perforation holes on both sides. This remained the standard of movie film for over a hundred years, until the recent advent of digital.
My first cousins moved to L.A. in 1968 and lived in swanky Bel Air. When my cousin Paul was thirteen years old he was in Martindale appliance store in Beverly Hills, turned a corner and came face to face with Cary Grant. Paul pointed at him and said, “You’re famous.” Cary Grant looked around, then said, “Woo, for a second there I thought you were talking to me,” and walked on.
I’m so musically out of touch that about ten years ago I discovered the Nirvana song, “Smells Like Team Spirit,” and had no clue who it was. In a roomful of people the song came on, and I announced, “These guys are good. I think they have a real future.” I was laughed at and ridiculed by everybody.
My sister gave me my first iPod for my 50th birthday (thirteen years ago). I put several thousand songs on it. When I listened to it on shuffle, it seemed to me that it was playing an inordinate quantity of Beatles’ songs. I thought that Apple must have put in a special algorithm to play more Beatles’ songs. I asked my friend John, who is a smart guy, what he thought. He asked, “Which band have you got the most songs of?” I said, “The Beatles.” He said, “That’s why.”
When Britain and France went to war with Germany in August, 1914, they were so unprepared that neither of them had any idea how to get their troops to the battlefront at the French-German border. The Germans were there in a week. It took the British and French troops a month of getting lost and driving in circles. Many French soldiers arrived at the front in taxis.
This is an attempt to correct an egregious bit of cancel culture. In 1915 Lillian Gish was eighteen years old. The biggest film director in the world, D.W. Griffith, offered young Lillian the lead part in the most expensive movie ever made, “Birth of a Nation.” Ironically, “Birth of a Nation” is inarguably the most influential movie ever made because in it Griffith invented the language of cinema that every filmmaker has used since then. It also has the Ku Klux Klan as the good guys, which now makes it culturally toxic. Lillian and her sister, Dorothy (also a movie star), were from Oberlin, Ohio. Oberlin College named their auditorium after the Gish sisters, but has now removed their names because Lillian was in “Birth of a Nation.” I ask you, at eighteen years old, having nothing to do with the film’s content, was she supposed to turn that part down? It’s ridiculous.
The sky is turning blue. Perhaps pennies will rain from heaven.