…to have a great main-title screen, but it helps. I’m talking about great typography, great composition, and even a little razzle-dazzle (“First National Pictures, Inc. Presents Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Stupendous Story of Adventure and Romance–THE LOST WORLD”).

Also note the “busy-ness” of Golden Age main titles. The Thin Man‘s title screen includes not just the name of the movie but five of its stars, the director, the producer, the MGM name and logo, a copyright notice, and MGM’s old “Controlled by Loew’s Incorporated” bug. And in the background you can see a mockup cover of the original novel, with author Dashiell Hammett’s name clearly visible. And it’s elegant, not cluttered-looking at all. These days, a studio will commission graphic-design specialists to create snazzy logos for a film’s print advertising, and even give these designers screen credit in the film, but only use a plain, small-print typeface for the on-screen title itself.

When you see a beautiful title screen, you know the filmmakers have at least made an attempt at classic showmanship. If you just see the movie’s name in some common desktop-publishing font, why bother watching the rest?

THE FIRST Cartoon Law of Physics: “Any body suspended in space will remain in space until made aware of its situation.”

SOMEONE NAMED ONLY ‘MICHAEL’ has a lot of profound things to say about the differences between “movie people” and book people.” I read books, and even write them, but I’ve never considered myself comfortable among the proponents of what I’ve called “the writerly lifestyle.” This essay tells me why, at long last.

BRITAIN’S BOOK PUBLISHERS are reportedly slashing the number of new books they’ll put out, so they can concentrate on (1) established bestseller names and (2) “‘good-looking’ first-time novelists who are more marketable.”

I’m immediately reminded of the bleak Brit movie Morvern Callar. Its heroine, a sexy young party babe stuck in a small town, wakes up to find her struggling-author boyfriend has deliberately OD’d. She sells his novel manuscript, under her byline, for big bucks. The movie never directly says, but clearly implies, the boyfriend’s book would never have sold if publishers didn’t get the chance to stick Ms. Morvern’s cute face on the back cover.

WE’VE NOT HERETOFORE discussed the Lord of the Rings movies, except to bemoan that their merchandising rights are controlled (and have been humongously exploited) by John Fogerty’s least-favorite record mogul Saul Zaentz. But the current New Yorker has a fond but not fawning essay comparing the films, not unfavorably, both to Tolkien’s original books and to Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle operas. Along the way, the essay gives particular praise to the one member of the films’ creative team with the closest New York connection, composer (and original Saturday Night Live bandleader) Howard Shore.

EVEN THOUGH I HAVEN’T posted any new pix to the site since I began the novel writing marathon/sprint, I’ve kept taking them. Starting today, a non-chronological sampling.

First off, Monday night’s visit to Scarecrow Video by self-proclaimed B-movie schlockmeister and Troma Films cofounder Lloyd Kaufman, plugging his new book and forthcoming DVD Make Your Own Damn Movie.

Kaufman’s minimal-budget horror comedies aren’t always funny and are rarely horrific. But, unlike so many other exploitation parodists, Kaufman has always kept his films brisk and entertaining. He’s one of the last old-time showbiz promoters. His public speaking style is exactly like his filmmaking style–the Troma films, the Troma promos, the Troma branding, and Kaufman himself are of one unified whole. He and partner Michael Herz have stayed in business and independent for three decades by making a consistent product that never goes out of style; by incessantly promoting even their oldest titles; and by maintaining a roster of trademarked costumed characters, which generate merchandising fees and which don’t depend on costly star actors.

In the lecture’s most entertaining segment, Kaufman recounted a filmmaking workshop he’d run at the Rhode Island Film Festival. He and his students had to film part of a decidedly non-Tromaesque student-written script, a talky love scene between an Israeli boy and a Palestinian girl. Kaufman showed two versions of the scene. The first version was acted as written. The second was done “the Troma way,” with histrionic overacting, harsh camera angles, and an out-of-nowhere gore stunt stuck in.

It was a cute joke, but it also made a point: “The Troma way” isn’t the only way to make an indie film. But then again, neither is the Tarantino way, or the talky-love-scene way.

…inspire entertaining reviews…

It ran a list of whom it thinks are today’s 40 best film directors. David Lynch made #1; the Coen Bros., Michael Moore, Errol Morris, Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away), David Cronenberg, Todd Haynes, and Gus Van Sant are also on it; and Spielberg isn’t!

…to Art Carney, the long-enduring actor who went from The Honeymooners to the original Broadway cast of The Odd Couple to a slew of ’70s and ’80s comeback films.

Unfortunately, none of the initial online obits for Carney I saw mentioned perhaps his most poignant role, that of real-life Wash. state curmuddgeon and volcano victim Harry Truman in St. Helens.

OF ALL THE RECURRING THEMES in late-’40s film noir, perhaps none is as haunting and foreboding as the films’ repeated references to bowling. Really.

Have now seen the first three discs of the four-disc DVD set,
The Looney Tunes Golden Collection. You’ve probably seen ost of these 56 classic shorts repeatedly all your life. But with the DVDs you can go beyond the familiar gags and characters, and deconstruct the cartoons into nearly every detail.

Unlike real animals, the Warner Bros. critters don’t die when you dissect them. Instead, they become even more fully “alive” when you discover the sheer beauty within each element of the films.

The stills galleries display original pencil drawings of the characters, their expressions and subtle nuances frozen in time; as well as the background paintings, stunning oil and pastel landscapes suitable for framing on their own.

The “Music-Only Program” feature plays some of the cartoons with only the music-and-effects soundtracks, so you can fully appreciate Carl Stallings’s magnificent scores and Treg Brown’s ingenious sound effects.

Behind-the-scenes segments (including the entire 1975 CBS documentary The Boys from Termite Terrace) and commentary tracks explain some of the studio’s production methods and inside jokes.

An episode of the unseen-in-years Bugs Bunny Show, which aired on ABC primetime from 1960 to 1962, offers a rare peek at the original Warner animation team’s last great project. (Warner now says the Bugs Bunny Show‘s color negatives were inadvertently destroyed in the late ’60s, and it only has the complete episodes in black-and-white prints. But those can now be digitally colorized, so why aren’t they?)

Audio-and-stills snippets from a Mel Blanc recording session let us in on how the voice genius created some of his hundreds of memorable character shticks.

And thanks to the miracle of digital video, you can freeze-frame or slo-mo the complete cartoons themselves. You can learn for yourself how the characters were made to move, about the difference between “ones” and “twos” (inserting a new drawing in every frame of film vs. only in every second frame), about the character poses and color schemes and frame compositions.

The first disc includes a videotaped intro by legendary Warner director Chuck Jones (who died several months before the discs’ release). In it, he defines the Warner cartoons’ humor as “icons of America’s folk hero tradition.” The characters, “flexible and confident and eternally young, are embodiments of America’s robust national spirit and character.” That’s a good definition as far as it goes—Bugs, Daffy, & co. were created in the depression and WWII years, and, like Warner’s best feature films of the time, were driven by a punchy, aggressive, industrious pulse.

But what really makes the Warner cartoons eternal is also what makes them different from all the bad-boy comedy of recent years—the craft, the artistry, the precision.

Steve Martin famously said, “Comedy is not pretty.” In the case of the Warner cartoons, Martin was dead wrong. This comedy isn’t just pretty; it’s truly beautiful.

…and good reviews thereof, I’ve managed to see only 11 of altreel.com’s “50 Worst Films of the 1990s.” And I actually liked seven of those.

from Absolute Write: “Please contact the authors if you’d like to reprint articles on this site.  All copyrights are retained by original authors.  And plagiarizers will be rounded up, handcuffed, and stuck into a very small and humid room wherein they must watch Mariah Carey’s GLITTER over and over again.”

…who passed away earlier this month at age 76, was one of the perennial fringe figures on the Seattle entertainment/journalism scenes. The former editor of the freebie tabloid Fun Weekly, Goldman established and kept his name on movie publicists’ lists. He kept getting onto studios’ press junkets to NY and LA even in his latter years, when Goldman’s only outlet for his always-positive reviews was a cable access show.

Goldman was like the fictional reviewer in the old Spy magazine, billed as “the publicist’s best friend,” who could be counted upon to call any piece of Hollywood tripe the next surefire Oscar hit. It can now be told that Goldman particularly loved junkets if they involved an opportunity to interview a hot young male starlet.

But at his center he knew he was on the periphery of a multi-billion-buck industry, and he knew his self-appointed place was to say and do what the studios wanted him to. It was his unbridled enthusiasm-for-sale that made him the colorful character he was.

…at least until today. Here, some random action shots from Sunday. Above: “Le Petite Cirque.” Below: A break-dance contestant practicing prior to his turn onstage.

And some civilians getting in on the act on the big lawn.

Following all this, I saw two and a half sets of the One Reel Film Festival. In these days since the rise and fall of movie dot-coms like AtomFilm, modern U.S. live-action shorts, at least the ones booked for this series, mostly fall into a few main categories, including but not limited to:

• Film-school demo reels, showing off the director’s slickness qualities for the purpose of getting hired in Hollywood;
• Earnest polemical statements, forcibly introducing sociopolitical concepts the director doesn’t know you’ve already heard a thousand times (did you know that advertisements are trying to get you to buy things?);
• Sincere if repetitive homages to other filmmakers or existing pop-culture reference points.

The cliches were particularly fast-n’-furious in the “Sex Ed” set, five unsubtle films in which I learned that:

• Straight couples are inane;
• Straight men are lechers;
• Gay men are sanctimoniously political;
• Lesbians are cute and sassy; and
• Prostitutes are abused waifs.

There’ve gotta be better up-n’-comin’ film and videomakers out there, and I hope to find some.

FROM THE RIDICULOUS to the sublime, Sunday was the last night for the grand old Sorry Charlie’s piano bar. The space has been bought by some hipster capitalists who plan to revamp it into something nice and retro-elegant, but it just won’t be the same.

On closing night, the place was jammed with fans ranging in age from the barley legal to the barely walking. We were united in our love for the place, for the participatory good times shared over the years, and especially for the artistry and geniality of our host lo these many years, the great Howard Fulson. He’s been a piano player with good taste, in a dive bar that tasted good.