7/23/22
Newsletter50
The Crack of Dawn
[I found the image of an ass crack disturbing this early in the morning]
It’s just starting to illuminate outside my window.
The reason that most songs for the past 125 years or so are 2 ½ to 3 ½ minutes long is that is the length of a 78 rpm record. 78s were in use from about 1900-1950 when the LP or Long Playing record was introduced. And though they could then get 20 minutes per side, the length of songs remained the same.
Up to the lithium ion batteries we use in everything these days, every single kind of battery was invented by Thomas Edison in the early 1900s. He really, really wanted to make an electric car, but couldn’t come up with a battery that lasted long enough.
In 1988 I lived in a cheap, shitty apartment in Hollywood and was being paid $500 a draft to write and rewrite Lunatics: A Love Story, which I would make the next year, but I didn’t know that. My rent was $400, so I was broke most of the time. ’88 was a presidential election year. So, performing my civic duty, I went to an old folks home in Hollywood and voted. I came home to my shit-hole and called my father. I asked, “Did you vote?” He said, “Yes.” I asked, “Did you vote for Bush [Sr.]?” He said, “Yes.” I said, “Well, I may have no money and you do, but I just voted for Dukakis, so I canceled out your vote.” My dear old dad said, “Fuck you!” and hung up on me.
John Casavettes is considered the father of independent cinema in America with his film, Shadows, in 1960. But the true father of American independent cinema was Joseph von Sternberg (real name, Jonas Sternberg). In 1925, after working his way up on film crews to the position of assistant director, and having saved $5,000, von Sternberg shot an interesting, artsy, tiny little love story called The Salvation Hunters, set entirely on a barge in the Hudson River, which was abandoned so it was free. Luckily for von Sternberg, the Hollywood movie industry hadn’t yet become the cloistered, insulated, paranoid, and downright stupid, business it is now, and he was able to get some important people to actually watch his movie. Among them was Charlie Chaplin, who was extremely impressed with the film, von Sternberg’s ingenuity, and von Sternberg himself. Since Chaplin was the co-owner of United Artists [an upcoming snippet], they bought the film for $20,000 and gave it a limited release. One of Chaplin’s partners in UA was Mary Pickford, who immediately hired von Sternberg to write and direct her next film. And that’s where the dream of making a cheap independent movie that leads to a Hollywood career began.
It is day, but so far there ain’t no sun.