8/20/22
Newsletter78
The Crack of Dawn
It’s already getting light out.
In 1824 the British physician, Peter Mark Roget, read a paper to the Royal Society about an optical illusion he had observed, which he called “The Persistence of Vision.” He purported that images remained on the eye of one-sixteenth of a second after the image is gone. Roget’s theory was proven true 65 years later with the invention of movies. Early cameramen realized (without reading Roget’s paper), that if they cranked the camera any slower than 16 frames a second, it flickered. Therefore, the speed of silent movies informally became somewhere between 18-24 frames a second. When sound arrived in 1927 film speed was codified at 24 frames per second. Peter Mark Roget, however, is best remembered for his 1852 book, Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases.
Warner Bros. acquired an unproduced play called, Everyone Comes to Rick’s. In 1941 the play was adapted into a screenplay by the brothers, Julius and Philip Epstein, who turned in their first draft, then both of them joined the army. Although the executive producer, Hal Wallis, liked a lot of what the Epsteins had written, it didn’t make any sense. So, what did Warners do? They went into production. Wallis brought in the hotshot young writer, Howard Koch, who had made a name for himself a few years earlier by writing the radio play for Orson Welles’ radio version of The War of the Worlds, which scared the hell out of America. Howard Koch realized the script he was given to rewrite had no “McGuffin,” which is Alfred Hitchcock’s term for whatever it is that everybody is trying to get in a story, and it doesn’t have to have any real meaning. The McGuffin can be: the microfilm, or the nuclear secrets, or the long lost Maltese falcon, it doesn’t matter, but they have to be after something. So Koch invented the “letters of transit,” fictional papers that allowed anybody to travel anywhere in Nazi-occupied Europe. With this McGuffin the story finally made sense and the film was called Casablanca (1942).
In 1988 I was hired as a cameraman on a documentary called, Hawg Wild in Sturgis, about the annual giant biker rally in Sturgis, South Dakota. One of the many bands playing Sturgis that year (including Foghat) was Willie Nelson. We shot his performance at the Hell’s Angel’s ranch, and as we were setting up Willie and I exchanged a few friendly words. About ten years later I was sitting in the Bulldog Coffeeshop in Amsterdam, happily puffing away on a big spliff. Who should come walking in but Willie Nelson to score some weed. Willie got his weed, and as he was leaving I said, “Willie, we met in Sturgis, South Dakota, about ten years ago.” He smiled and said, “At the big biker rally, right?” I said yes, and he came over and shook my hand. Willie then shook hands with everybody in the Bulldog, took his weed and left. What a nice guy.
It's fully daytime now.