The Sheila Variations

Rock. Stars.

Posted on January 12, 2016 by sheila

Keith Richards. Tina Turner. David Bowie.

Posted in Music, RIP | Tagged David Bowie, The Rolling Stones, Tina Turner | 5 Comments

He helped show what was possible. He embodied possibility. He was true to himself and part of that meant willingness to change. Not even willingness: he had to change, because he was alive. And human beings are not static. And performers must please themselves first. And as he changed, his persona broadened, and as his persona broadened, more and more people were drawn into it, more and more people could relate to it, were fascinated by it, felt the possibility in it. If he could be so flexible, then couldn’t we? Maybe? Maybe identity isn’t static. Maybe gender isn’t static. Maybe none of us are as trapped as we thought.

And so he moved forward, guided only by his own instincts, his own sense of what he wanted to express. He stood as an example of what it looked like to follow your own star. He was a true artist. I woke up to the news flooding Twitter and my first reaction was a sense of being lost, looking around me at an unfamiliar landscape, no street signs. “Wait … where am I now?”

A world without him? No. No.

I took to Youtube and started watching clips.

I came across this clip of David Bowie appearing on Cher’s television show, and the two of them do a lengthy medley together, standing on a little platform, dancing, and grooving on each other, taking turns.

Superstars.

In January of 2013, I went to the “2nd annual Elvis Presley/David Bowie Birthday Bash.” Elvis and Bowie were born on the same day, both were artists on the RCA label, and both the biggest artists on the RCA roster in their different eras.

The birthday bash took place at La Pouisson Rouge, a club on Bleecker Street. Doors opened at 10:30 p.m. I went by myself. (Seems like you could have found someone to go with you, Sheila? But it was January 2013. I had just come back my solitary trip to Memphis. I wasn’t really in a company kind of mood.)

It was one of the most unforgettable nights – certainly in my history of living in/near New York. It was a “scene” that I know exists but I haven’t really experienced – the downtown performance-art/burlesque/rockabilly scene – I haven’t experienced it because I go to bed at 10 p.m.

The roster was packed with New York artists: strippers and burlesque acts (male and female), a great rockabilly band who opened the show, and then performance artists, all of whom were inspired by either Elvis or Bowie. Everyone who showed up was dressed to the NINES. A lot of people in the audience were dressed up as either Elvis or Bowie, in the different phases of their careers. One guy was wearing a replica of Elvis’ head-to-toe gold suit. One guy was wearing a white jumpsuit and a cape. And the different Bowies were obvious: you could clock “which Bowie” someone was supposed to be. So you’d look over at the bar, and you’d see 25 Elvis-es and 25 Bowies crowding together trying to get the bartender’s attention.

I wasn’t the oldest person there, but it was a very young crowd on the whole (something that gave me hope). Every act who played performed an Elvis or a Bowie song. On the screen behind the stage, black-and-white footage played throughout the night: of Elvis’s Ed Sullivan/Dorsey Brothers TV appearances in 1956, or black-and-white footage of Bowie working in the studio in the 70s. That footage gave a ghostly effect: the faces of Elvis/Bowie LOOMING behind the various acts.

The party really didn’t get started until 1:00 in the morning, when the headliners (huge names in the downtown New York scene) started performing. I left at 2:30 a.m., because I live in Jersey and at that point it would take me two hours to get home.

It was an incredibly HIP evening, in terms of the crowd that was there. Like, these are cutting-edge people. There is still a cutting-edge, but you have to be willing to stay up until 2 a.m. to find it. However, my main takeaway from that night is that in reality, and, most importantly, in FEEL, the night wasn’t “hip” at all – and that’s what made it special. It was a night of TRIBUTE. People who weren’t even alive in the 1970s celebrating a man who had helped make their own life choices possible. Musicians who weren’t even born in the 1950s paying tribute to the musician who still inspired them. People who got on the Bowie train in the 1990s because that’s when they first started buying music, had, as all good obsessives do, gone back to the beginning, the genesis of the career, filling in for themselves what had happened before.

Here’s my Flickr album of that night. I think it gives a good sense of the vibe. Full immersion in two collective cultural obsessions.

No generation invents the wheel. We all stand on the shoulders of giants.

David Bowie was a giant.

Posted in Music, RIP | Tagged David Bowie | 29 Comments

Sight & Sound Cover Interview with Quentin Tarantino by Kim Morgan

Posted on January 9, 2016 by sheila

The interview with Quentin Tarantino that is Sight & Sound‘s February 2016 cover story is not the first time my friend Kim Morgan interviewed the director. In 2009, she and Tarantino talked about Inglourious Basterds for her great site Sunset Gun. That one is an absolute feast for movie-fans, but the interview about Hateful Eight in Sight & Sound looks to be even better. It runs to 10 pages, first of all. The two have a great rapport as encyclopedic movie fans (both of them appear to have seen everything). Sight & Sound‘s new issue is out in print right now (look in your local bookstore with a good magazine rack). Another impetus to buy the print copy is that my friend Keith, who was my guide in all things X-Files, who binge-watched the entire series with me over 2015, has a piece in Sight & Sound as well about the relationship between Mulder and Scully. So although none of this is about me at all I honestly feel like I am sitting at the cool kids’ table.

As a teaser, Kim posted an excerpt on her site. Not to be missed and I can’t wait to read the whole thing.

One observation from Tarantino should be suffice to whet your whistle:

Brian Keith is excellent. I’m a big fan of Brian Keith in all of his Phil Karlson movies too. With the rise of the great 70s leading man, with the rise of Elliott Gould, Jack Nicholson, Donald Sutherland, Dustin Hoffman and George Segal, the one thing that took a hit were people like that Brian Keith leading man.

Yup.

Posted in Directors, Movies | Tagged Quentin Tarantino | 2 Comments

Gearhead Heaven: Elvis’ Car Museum

Posted on January 8, 2016 by sheila

Elvis was born on this day in 1935, Tupelo, Mississippi.

1956 Cadillac Eldorado

1962 Lincoln Continental

1969 Mercedes Benz 600 Limousine

1955 Pink Cadillac Fleetwood sedan

1973 Stutz Blackhawk

1956 Lincoln Continental

1960 Willys Jeep

1976 Harley Davidson Electra Glide

1971 Stutz Blackhawk

1960 Rolls Royce Silver Cloud

1966 Rolls Royce Silver Cloud

Posted in Music, On This Day, Personal | Tagged Elvis Presley, Memphis | 6 Comments

Keith Richards on Elvis Presley: “It Was Almost As If I’d Been Waiting For It To Happen.”

Posted on January 8, 2016 by sheila

Elvis was born on this day in 1935, Tupelo, Mississippi.

From Keith Richards’ wonderful Life:

I think the first record I bought was Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally”. Fantastic record, even to this day. Good records just get better with age. But the one that really turned me on, like an explosion one night, listening to Radio Luxembourg on my little radio when I was supposed to be in bed and asleep, was “Heartbreak Hotel”. That was the stunner. I’d never heard it before, or anything like it. I’d never heard of Elvis before. It was almost as if I’d been waiting for it to happen. When I woke up the next day I was a different guy. Suddenly I was getting overwhelmed: Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, Little Richard, Fats. Radio Luxembourg was notoriously difficult to keep on station. I had a little aerial and walked round the room, holding the radio up to my ear and twisting the aerial. Trying to keep it down because I’d wake Mum and Dad up. If I could get the signal right, I could take the radio under the blankets on the bed and keep the aerial outside and twist it there. I’m supposed to be asleep; I’m supposed to be going to school in the morning. Loads of ads for James Walker, the jewelers “in every high street,” and the Irish sweepstakes, with which Radio Lux had some deal. The signal was perfect for the ads, “and now we have Fats Domino, ‘Blueberry Hill,'” and shit, then it would fade.

Then, “Since my baby left me” – it was just the sound. It was the last trigger. That was the first rock and roll I heard. It was a totally different way of delivering a song, a totally different sound, stripped down, burnt, no bullshit, no violins and ladies’ choruses and schmaltz, totally different. It was bare, right to the roots that you had a feeling were there but hadn’t yet heard. I’ve got to take my hat off to Elvis for that. The silence is your canvas, that’s your frame, that’s what you work on; don’t try and deafen it out. That’s what “Heartbreak Hotel” did to me. It was the first time I’d heard something so stark. Then I had to go back to what this cat had done before. Luckily I caught his name. The Radio Luxembourg signal came back in. “That was Elvis Presley, with ‘Heartbreak Hotel.'” Shit!

That passage reminds me of George Harrison’s answer to the question: “What are your musical roots?” He said that he had no musical roots. The only “root” he could think of was hearing “Heartbreak Hotel” through an open window when he was a kid.

Another excerpt, this one about “the rhythm of the tracks”:

There’s something primordial in the way we react to pulses without even knowing it. We exist on a rhythm of seventy-two beats a minute. The train, apart from getting them from the Delta to Detroit, became very important to blues players because of the rhythm of the machine, the rhythm of the tracks, and then when you cross onto another track, the beat moves. It echoes something in the human body. So then when you have machinery involved, like trains, and drones, all of that is still built in as music inside us. The human body will feel rhythms even when there’s not one. Listen to “Mystery Train” by Elvis Presley. One of the great rock-and-roll tracks of all time, not a drum on it. It’s just a suggestion, because the body will provide the rhythm. Rhythm really only has to be suggested. Doesn’t have to be pronounced. This is where they got it wrong with “this rock” and “that rock”. It’s got nothing to do with rock. It’s to do with roll.

Posted in Music, On This Day | Tagged Elvis Presley | 4 Comments

Review: Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party (2015)

Posted on January 7, 2016 by sheila

I interviewed writer/director Stephen Cone about his film Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party, which opens this Friday.

I also reviewed the film for Rogerebert.com. It’s a terrific film.

Posted in Movies | Tagged coming of age, reviews | Leave a comment

My Interview with Stephen Cone, Writer/Director of Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party

Posted on January 6, 2016 by sheila

I interviewed Stephen Cone, the talented Chicago-based writer and director of Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party, a wonderful ensemble film opening this Friday.

The interview is now up at Rogerebert.com.

Posted in Directors, Movies | Tagged coming of age, drama, interviews | 3 Comments

A Little Movie Questionnaire

Posted on January 5, 2016 by sheila

Trav S.D., my old friend from high-school who has since turned into a vaudeville-expert, silent-film-expert, and successful author (Chain of Fools – Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to YouTube, and No Applause–Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous – plus his blog is awesome), has nominated me for The Liebster Award. Which basically means: Pay it forward. Someone nominates you, you answer the questions, and you pass it on to nominate others. I don’t think I will nominate others, however: if you read me, feel free to consider yourself nominated.

1. What was the first classic film you ever saw?

I’m honestly not sure. Probably The Wizard of Oz, although it may have been Miracle on 34th Street, It’s a Wonderful Life (regular Christmas-time broadcasts), The Secret Garden (prophetic of my later Dean Stockwell obsession), and also all of the Shirley Temple movies, appointment-television for us kids whenever they would show up on Channel 56 (which was all the time). God bless channel 56. I mean, that’s where I saw everything, when I was still in grade school. For all the passion around film vs. digital and aspect ratio – and, you know, these are worthy conversations – but I became a movie fan through watching Old Hollywood classics on grainy, staticky fuzzy black-and-white television, with a screen maybe 12″ across. Interrupted by commercials for Cocoa Puffs. I’m not saying it was ideal, but I fell in love with movies anyway.

2. Who do you think is the queen of screwball comedies?

Carole Lombard. Irene Dunne.

3. And who’s the king?

Cary Grant. William Powell.

4. If you could go back in time to a specific year in Hollywood history, what year would that be and why?

1939. One of the greatest movie-years of all time.

5. Which two stars do you wish had worked together in a movie?

Elvis Presley and Barbra Streisand, in her re-make of Star is Born. Elvis was her first choice for her co-star (the role that went to Kris Kristofferson), and it is the great “What If” of Elvis’ career. A mature Elvis, opposite Barbra? It would have been dynamite.

6. All about Eve (1950) or Sunset Boulevard (1950)?

Nope. Will not – refuse to – choose.

7. Have you ever been on the TCM cruise? If so, how was it?

No. Sounds like fun!

8. Does anybody in your family share your love of the classics?

Sure. I come from an extremely artistic literate family, whose interests have always reached back before the contemporary scene (although the contemporary scene is a lot of fun too.)

9. What is your favorite decade in terms of movies and why?

It’s a toss-up between the 1930s and the 1970s. So many of the movies that shaped my personality/taste came from those decades of enormous upheaval. In the 30s, you had the wild-west period of Pre-Code movies, followed by a swift crackdown. But the movies in the late 1930s started to work within those ridiculous parameters (often racist, sexist parameters) in truly subversive ways. Also, the 1930s allowed for the rise of Cary Grant, one of my favorite actors of all time. The 1970s was my childhood and while I was too young then to watch any of the movies being made during that decade, the sensibility did filter down. When I watch those movies, I am reminded of the MOOD of my first decade of consciousness. But I have to give a shout-out to the 1950s, because the James Dean films, and the Marlon Brando films, were such an “A-ha” moment about the possibilities in acting, that I actually made life-choices, big ones, based on those movies.

10. What is your favorite book about Hollywood?

Oh, I don’t know. It’s not really my thing, although I devoured Hollywood Babylon in high school. I love trashy salacious autobiographies of movie stars. Lana Turner’s being the Grand Pooh-Bah. Ginger Rogers’ autobiography is great too. Mary Astor’s. Pauline Kael’s voluminous collections of reviews and articles also give a great context for “Hollywood” and its continuum, as do the reviews of James Agee. My parents had the Roger Ebert review books around the house and I read them cover-to-cover before I had seen barely any of the movies. He gave a great perspective on the continuum, that movie art was not invented in 1977 with you-know-what. Any well-written biography gives a portrait of the industry, John Wayne, Howard Hawks, Charlie Chaplin, John Cassavetes. I have a soft-spot for “making of” books, although that’s just a side glimpse of the industry seen through one particular project. My favorite of that genre: The Cleopatra Papers. Invaluable.

11. If you could have witnessed the shooting of any movie, which movie would you choose?

One of those big crazy out-of-control projects. Heaven’s Gate. Apocalypse Now. Waterworld. Intolerance. Cleopatra. I would want to see something GRAND and CHAOTIC and OPERATIC. Movies where the shoot itself became almost a bigger story than the movie itself. And if not that, then some of those Roger Corman biker movies of the 1960s.

11 Random Things About Me

I recently did one of these, only it was 35 facts. But here’s 11 more. FASCINATING, I know.

1. In my first year in New York, I lived in a small apartment on West 63rd Street where I didn’t have my own room, just a bed in the living room with a curtain around it. My two roommates were loud rambunctious dancers with the Joffrey Ballet, who woke me up when they would come stumbling home drunkenly at 3 a.m. For ballet dancers, those boys PARTIED. They were probably 19 years old. I had found a want-ad for a roommate on a bulletin board at Actors Equity, and I needed to move quick, so this was what I got. I only lived there for about 5 months, and the whole thing seems like a semi-humorous bad dream.
2. I love American history. The fact that I would live to see Hamilton take over Broadway is amazing to me, since I’ve loved him and that time in history since I was a kid, and to see it alert teens (and others) to the fascination of that period – something they’ve been deprived of in the atmosphere of “all of those guys were oppressive Dead White Males and so why should we listen to anything they have to say” narrative – is so gratifying. It’s about time.
3. I just read Rick Yancey’s The 5th Wave in four days. I could not put it down. That kind of book is really not my thing but I found myself swept away by it, as well as transported back to being a 15-year-old and how much I would have LOVED such a book then. I’ve already ordered the second installment in the series, The Infinite Sea.
4. My nieces and nephews call me “Auntie She She.”
5. Manhattan Murder Mystery is my favorite Woody Allen.
6. I haven’t really grown up. I have not “put away childish things.”
7. I am so thankful that I read Ulysses under my dad’s tutelage. He was always a phone call away to discuss anything I found confusing.
8. I still own a hard-cover dictionary. I prefer using that to look up words, not the Web.
9. I took an acting workshop with Ellen Burstyn that was one of the most memorable experiences of my actress life, although not quite as world-shattering as the one I took with Lee Strasberg’s son, John Strasberg.
10. I think Jensen Ackles is one of the best actors working today, and nobody outside his small fan-base even knows who he is. He’s like a genius actor who only appears in community theatre productions in one small community. Well, at least I know about him.
11. I can hear my cat Hope purring from the other room. She is embarrassingly and noisily content.

Posted in Movies | 33 Comments

R.I.P. Vilmos Zsigmond, Part II

Posted on January 5, 2016 by sheila

Glenn Kenny has a beautiful tribute to the work of this legendary cinematographer. Zsigmond not only worked in a flexible way, adjusting his style to the material, he was a personal artist: he shared with us how he saw the world, how much he understood light and what light meant to any given atmosphere (so many people take light for granted), and his ability to morph into the mindset of the director and the story.

American cinema of the 1970s, with its influential and distinctive diversity of style, helmed by exciting new directors like Hal Ashby, Brian De Palma, Robert Altman, John Boorman, Michael Cimino, Steven Spielberg, was helped along in the look/feel of the images by two emigre cinematographers, Vilmos Zsigmond and László Kovács. Both hailed from Hungary. They were friends. The Russians rolled into Budapest in 1956 to crush the revolution against Soviet rule: it was a brutal crackdown, enraging other nation-members of the USSR who thought the the USSR was way out of line. (The crackdown enraged the world, who looked on helplessly. Elvis dedicated his performance of “Peace in the Valley,” in his final appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1957 to the people in Hungary, calling for Americans to make donations in support of the Hungarian people. Ed Sullivan listed the address to send donations, and millions of dollars poured in. Recently, because of that support 50 years ago, a park in Budapest was named for Elvis, and he was also granted posthumous Hungarian citizenship. Like I keep saying, stating the obvious, Elvis is everywhere), Kovács and Zsigmond, two cinematographers, roamed the streets, filming the violent crackdown with an Arriflex camera and the last of their 35-mm film. They smuggled the footage out of the country (footage which would soon be seen around the world, and is still part of our collective – or it should be – understanding of that crackdown). Kovács and Zsigmond transported their footage by train as far as they could go, then jumped off, and walked into Austria on foot. Eventually, they moved to America. They both got their start shooting biker pictures for Roger Corman (an unofficial film school for so many people). A documentary was made about their friendship, and my friend Matt Zoller Seitz reviewed it for The New York Times.

So let’s rack up the major projects shot by these two emigre-cinematographers from Hungary.

And let’s take particular note of the fact that they continued working on major projects even after the heyday of the 1970s subsided. And their style adjusted to the story. THIS is artistry, as well as professionalism. Style is sometimes obvious, and style is sometimes invisible, but no less valuable to the story.

László Kovács
Easy Rider
Five Easy Pieces
The Last Movie
What’s Up, Doc?
The King of Marvin Gardens
Paper Moon
Shampoo
New York, New York
Paradise Alley
Frances
Ghostbusters
Mask
Say Anything
My Best Friend’s Wedding
Miss Congeniality

Extraordinary.

László Kovács died in 2007.

Vilmos Zsigmond
McCabe & Mrs. Miller
Deliverance
The Long Goodbye
Scarecrow
The Sugarland Express
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
The Deer Hunter
The Rose
Heaven’ Gate
Blow Out
Real Genius
The Witches of Eastwick
The Bonfire of the Vanities
Jersey Girl
Melinda and Melinda
Black Dahlia
Cassandra’s Dream

Again: extraordinary.

Here’s an interesting 1980 Rolling Stone interview with Vilmos Zsigmond, after he finished shooting the wildly out-of-control ambitious Michael Cimino film of Heaven’s Gate (a movie shoot so out-of-control that it brought down one of the oldest production companies in America, United Artists, so out-of-control that an entire book was written about it.)

One of Vilmos Zsigmond’s last films was Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks (2014), starring Gena Rowlands as an old lady who decides to take dance lessons and realizes that she had given up on having new experiences, and starts to live a bit more adventurously. It’s not a very good film, mainly because the script had not been sufficiently adapted from the theatre-script, but Rowlands is great in it (and it’s fun to see Rita Moreno too as Rowlands’ nosy downstairs neighbor in their Palm Beach old folks’ condo-complex.) The film was clearly shot on a relatively low budget. It takes place mostly in interiors, showing its roots as a theatre production, and it’s pretty uninteresting in terms of the visuals, not a lot of flourishes with the camera. Scenes have a dead quality. I went to a SAG screening of the film, with a QA with Rowlands afterwards. They filmed the entire thing in Hungary even though it takes place in Florida (hence, all the interiors), so they needed to light those scenes as THOUGH the rooms looked out on the beach with all that free-wheeling ocean light. There is one scene (and it’s worth it to see the film just for this moment), where Gena Rowlands’ character, an old lady who thought she was done with life, or at least done with new things, sits in a chair in her condo and stares out at the burgeoning red/gold/purple of the sunrise. She is so relaxed, so peaceful, and filled with thought, feelings you can’t name. It’s one of the few moments of pure silence in the film, justified just by the fact that we always want to have the time to watch Gena Rowlands thinking about things.

But part of the magic is how Zsigmond filmed it, and the glow of the light on her face, intense and deep rich golden, the warmth of it, in the moment you can actually feel the warmth. I went into the film not knowing anything about the shoot itself, and when it was revealed that they filmed the whole thing in Hungary, that that light was not natural but created in the studio, I was frankly shocked, thinking back to that scene of the light on Rowlands’ face. I didn’t know Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks was filmed in Hungary and I never would have known, because of that LIGHT. I looked for a screenshot of the moment but of course one doesn’t exist because no one saw the movie.

Zsigmond was working with such artistry even on second-rate material because that’s who he was as a cinematographer.

Also he’s the kind of guy who knew he had to do right by Gena. And he did.

R.I.P. to one of the all-time greats.

Posted in Movies, RIP | Tagged Elvis Presley, Gena Rowlands | Leave a comment

R.I.P. Vilmos Zsigmond

Posted on January 3, 2016 by sheila

One of the best cinematographers to ever practice the craft. A genius. He shot Deer Hunter, Deliverance, The Long Goodbye, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Close Encounters of the Third Kind … I mean, that alone would put him in the history books. These are some of the most influential films ever made, especially in that decade, and how they LOOK is a huge reason why. He worked up until the end. One of the last films he shot was Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks, starring Gena Rowlands.

A giant has left the earth. Some of his shots rank as my favorite of all time.