7/11/22
Newsletter38
The Ass Crack of Dawn
I got a bit of a late start, and the sky is already turning blue.
Sound came to the movies at the end of 1927. For the next five years movies were not scored properly. A jazz band would come and go between dialogue scenes. But two composers figured out how to properly score films by 1932: Max Steiner and Alfred Newman. Newman explained that music in movies should evoke an emotional landscape for the drama, or convey information. His example was of a shot of a ship on the ocean. If the music is “Rule Britannia,” the ship is British; if the music is “Stars and Stripes Forever,” it’s an American ship. The music is informing you. The big breakthrough score was Max Steiner’s music for “King Kong” in 1933, which is the first full-blown dramatic score. Alfred Newman ended up working at 20th Century-Fox for the next 35 years. Alfred won 9 Oscars and was nominated 45 times. Alfred’s brother, Lionel, was the head of 20th’s music department, and another brother, Emil, was also a Hollywood music director. Alfred’s son Thomas, and Lionel’s son Randy are both film composers.
James Clavell’s first screenplay was the 1958 film, “The Fly.” The next year Clavell became a writer-producer-director and began making low-budget films, and the best early one is “Walk Like a Dragon” in 1960 with Jack Lord. Clavell also wrote scripts for A-films he didn’t direct, like the huge hit, “The Great Escape,” and the not-so-huge film, “The Satan Bug.” James Clavell capped off his writer-producer-director phase with “To Sir, With Love,” a runaway hit in 1967 with a #1 hit title song. He followed that up with an extremely expensive, enormous bomb, “The Last Valley,” in 1971, which effectively ended his directing career. However, in 1962 he began writing novels, and his first book, “King Rat,” was a bestseller that was made into a terrific film 1965, not by him. His next book, “Tai-Pan,” was also a big bestseller, and was eventually made into a terrible film he had nothing to do with. His next book, “Shogun,” was a phenomenon. It’s a big book that was a giant bestseller that became a spectacular, enormously successful mini-series that he produced. He followed that up with three more gigantic books about Asia (all five books are called James Clavell’s “Asian Saga”). When James Clavell died in 1994, Jay Leno said in his monologue: “James Clavell, author of epic books like ‘Shogun,’ died yesterday. His obituary was 647 pages long.”
Speaking of “The Satan Bug,” when I was living in L.A. in the late 1990s, my sister Pam came out to L.A. for business and we had dinner. I met her at the bar of the Marina Del Ray Hilton, and she was speaking to an elderly gentleman. Grinning, Pam said, “Josh, I’d like you to meet Scotty.” I looked at the man and said, “Oh my goodness, James Doohan.” He said (without a Scottish accent), “You actually know my name. Most people call me Scotty.” Me being me, I said, “I also know your first film, ‘The Satan Bug.’” His eyes lit up and he said (I swear), “That was my first movie, and it starred that homosexual man.” I said, “George Maharis is homosexual?” Doohan nodded, then he and I discussed WWII for the next half hour. He was in the Canadian army and stormed the beaches on D-Day, which was far and away the most important event of his life. We never talked about “Star Trek.”
Finally, and I think this could possibly have some contemporary value, in 1967 the Motion Picture Academy dropped the Best Black and White Cinematography category from the Oscars. Almost all movies were then shot in color. Television also went to color. The nightly news that had shown black and white combat footage from the Vietnam War every night, was suddenly showing color footage of the war, and wow was the blood red. 1967 was the Summer of Love, and the beginning of anti-war protests all over the country. The Vietnam War quickly became very unpopular. In 1969 the Marines were withdrawn, and the war finally ended in 1973. Although there were many factors involved, one important aspect was the public-at-large seeing the war footage in color. Hypothetically, what would happen if we were allowed to see the grisly footage of all of these recent mass shootings? As a doctor from Uvalde, Texas told Congress, he was in the emergency room as the 9-year-old victims began arriving. The first two kids he saw had their heads blown off. Seeing the red blood of the soldiers in Vietnam hastened the end of that war; might not seeing the carnage of these mass shootings make an impression on the viewers?
It’s fully daytime and the sun is shining.