July 2nd, 2008
You are currently browsing the articles from Gyden Blog written on July 2nd, 2008.
Primatology’s loss was moviedom’s gain when, along about 1930, an overly neat maid tossed an 800-page monograph on baboons onto the fire, thus consigning Merian Caldwell Cooper’s careful research to the flames. Cooper, who’d been fascinated with apes all his life and had taken time from location scouting in Africa to do all that side work, apparently didn’t flinch, though neither did he ever try to reconstruct what had been lost.
Whether the maid kept her job, we do not know. But by all accounts, Merian Cooper was a man who seemed bent on racking up the life experiences of any dozen lesser souls, and yet treated his slower-moving brethren with due courtesy—the occasional communist or suspected fellow traveler aside.
Cooper’s life might make a film to put the Indiana Jones franchise to shame. He came from a Southern family that admired martial courage above all else; an ancestor had fought alongside the Polish cavalryman Kazimierz Pulaski in the Revolutionary War, and an old Confederate colonel who lived down the street told tales of fighting against Apaches and Yankees and Abyssinians, the last “the best soldier in the whole round world.”
Those tales proved influential. After service as an ace pilot in World War I—and spending time in a prisoner of war camp, from which he escaped—Cooper went off to volunteer for service with the Polish air force against the invading Bolsheviks. He was again captured and removed to the Soviet Union, where an American journalist who just also happened to be a spy helped his cause. That spy, Marguerite Harrison, was eventually caught—denounced to the Soviets by none other than Louise Bryant, to whom Diane Keaton lent such angelic visage in Warren Beatty’s film Reds.
Again Cooper escaped, and now he was ready for real adventure. He did a stint as a writer for the New York Times but, as Mark Vaz writes in his biography Living Dangerously, he “had other goals than to live out his life as an eyewitness and scribe to the ‘dingy horror’ of the news trade.” His head full of visions of a favorite novel, A. W. Mason’s Four Feathers, he made off for Abyssinia, met with the emperor, headed for the Andaman Islands and Borneo, and learned his way around a camera. Now in the company of budding filmmaker Ernest Shoedsack and Ms. Harrison, who had managed to get out of Russia, Cooper traveled to the Iranian desert to make what might be thought of as the first Discovery Channel film, a documentary of nomadic life called Grass.
The film, now on the National Film Registry, was a hit, as was a successor called Chang, its elephant stampede providing stock footage for many a jungle film to come. Then, after shooting his beloved Four Feathers, starring a young Fay Wray, Cooper showed a newly jobless producer named David O. Selznick a strange and immodest script for a film with a filmmaker hero who journeys off to the wilds and returns with the biggest ape the world had ever seen.
The film that resulted was King Kong, and with it all Hollywood was Cooper’s.
He made hay with that 1933 movie, which took filmgoers’ minds off the Great Depression and transported them into a world the likes of which they had never seen. With the capital thus accrued, he made other films as well, teaming up with John Ford as producer for a 20-year run of classics including The Lost Patrol, Fort Apache, and The Quiet Man and with Schoedsack for another strange gorilla movie, Mighty Joe Young, which gave a technician named Ray Harryhausen (who turned 88 last Sunday, and to whom we send birthday greetings) his first big break. Somehow, along the way, Cooper stole time enough to help found studios, production houses, and even a couple of airlines while roaming the war zones of the world.
Was Carl Denham, the showman lead of King Kong, Merian Cooper’s alter ego? Toward the end of his life, Cooper set to work on an autobiography that answered the question; he called it I’m King Kong. Seventy-five years after the birth of that great film, Merian Cooper, a filmmaker unlike any other, deserves remembrance and homage.
Watch the original trailer to King Kong below.
Written by Gregory McNamee on July 2nd, 2008 with no comments.
Read more articles on Uncategorized.
Primatology’s loss was moviedom’s gain when, along about 1930, an overly neat maid tossed an 800-page monograph on baboons onto the fire, thus consigning Merian Caldwell Cooper’s careful research to the flames. Cooper, who’d been fascinated with apes all his life and had taken time from location scouting in Africa to do all that side work, apparently didn’t flinch, though neither did he ever try to reconstruct what had been lost.
Whether the maid kept her job, we do not know. But by all accounts, Merian Cooper was a man who seemed bent on racking up the life experiences of any dozen lesser souls, and yet treated his slower-moving brethren with due courtesy—the occasional communist or suspected fellow traveler aside.
Cooper’s life might make a film to put the Indiana Jones franchise to shame. He came from a Southern family that admired martial courage above all else; an ancestor had fought alongside the Polish cavalryman Kazimierz Pulaski in the Revolutionary War, and an old Confederate colonel who lived down the street told tales of fighting against Apaches and Yankees and Abyssinians, the last “the best soldier in the whole round world.”
Those tales proved influential. After service as an ace pilot in World War I—and spending time in a prisoner of war camp, from which he escaped—Cooper went off to volunteer for service with the Polish air force against the invading Bolsheviks. He was again captured and removed to the Soviet Union, where an American journalist who just also happened to be a spy helped his cause. That spy, Marguerite Harrison, was eventually caught—denounced to the Soviets by none other than Louise Bryant, to whom Diane Keaton lent such angelic visage in Warren Beatty’s film Reds.
Again Cooper escaped, and now he was ready for real adventure. He did a stint as a writer for the New York Times but, as Mark Vaz writes in his biography Living Dangerously, he “had other goals than to live out his life as an eyewitness and scribe to the ‘dingy horror’ of the news trade.” His head full of visions of a favorite novel, A. W. Mason’s Four Feathers, he made off for Abyssinia, met with the emperor, headed for the Andaman Islands and Borneo, and learned his way around a camera. Now in the company of budding filmmaker Ernest Shoedsack and Ms. Harrison, who had managed to get out of Russia, Cooper traveled to the Iranian desert to make what might be thought of as the first Discovery Channel film, a documentary of nomadic life called Grass.
The film, now on the National Film Registry, was a hit, as was a successor called Chang, its elephant stampede providing stock footage for many a jungle film to come. Then, after shooting his beloved Four Feathers, starring a young Fay Wray, Cooper showed a newly jobless producer named David O. Selznick a strange and immodest script for a film with a filmmaker hero who journeys off to the wilds and returns with the biggest ape the world had ever seen.
The film that resulted was King Kong, and with it all Hollywood was Cooper’s.
He made hay with that 1933 movie, which took filmgoers’ minds off the Great Depression and transported them into a world the likes of which they had never seen. With the capital thus accrued, he made other films as well, teaming up with John Ford as producer for a 20-year run of classics including The Lost Patrol, Fort Apache, and The Quiet Man and with Schoedsack for another strange gorilla movie, Mighty Joe Young, which gave a technician named Ray Harryhausen (who turned 88 last Sunday, and to whom we send birthday greetings) his first big break. Somehow, along the way, Cooper stole time enough to help found studios, production houses, and even a couple of airlines while roaming the war zones of the world.
Was Carl Denham, the showman lead of King Kong, Merian Cooper’s alter ego? Toward the end of his life, Cooper set to work on an autobiography that answered the question; he called it I’m King Kong. Seventy-five years after the birth of that great film, Merian Cooper, a filmmaker unlike any other, deserves remembrance and homage.
Watch the original trailer to King Kong below.
Written by Gregory McNamee on July 2nd, 2008 with no comments.
Read more articles on Uncategorized.
They don’t write ‘em like that anymore.
Songs, I mean. I’m no true student of music, not even of popular music, so what follows is the result of my own inconsistent observations. I’ll be happy to be better informed by commenters.
It’s a commonplace to think of the early 20th century as the glory days of the popular song. Created for the musical comedy and variety stages, nurtured by such impresarios as Florenz Ziegfeld and George White, and later disciplined by the procrustean 78 rpm phonograph record, the American popular song went forth to conquer much of the world. The men, and a few women, who wrote the music and words became and remain – or do they remain? – household names: Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, Hoagy Carmichael, and all the rest.
World War II must be unique among the wars of humanity, recalled almost as much for the music of those years as for the actual business of fighting. Or does it seem so only because it is still within living memory, along with having had the benefit of mass produced recordings? Discuss.
But it seems as though sometime in the 1950s the golden age of songwriting came to a quiet close. There were still songwriters of talent and taste, but they were certainly fewer and farther between and often they seem to have been favored by small cliques of admirers rather than by the generality. I’m thinking of the likes of Leonard Cohen here.
Was it rock ‘n’ roll and the triumph of the drumset? Maybe. But what about jazz? Since the late 1920s jazz musicians had grown to favor popular songs, finding infinite ways to play in and around familiar melodies. But in the immediate postwar years jazz began to turn away from the pops in favor of unorthodox harmonies and structures. Many bebop pieces, and a great many more jazz “songs” since that time, consist of a riff rather than a melody, the riff serving as a starting and ending figure, while in between the emphasis was on increasingly free solo work.
You may have had occasion to hear an elevator-music rendition of some classic rock song and noticed how the arranger struggled and failed to keep it interesting through three choruses. It makes for painful listening. The great majority of pop songs of the last fifty years have to be heard in the original or not at all. Not so with the best of the Beatles. Surely one of the primary reasons that the Beatles hold such an eminent place among contemporary popular musicians is that they, meaning chiefly John Lennon and Paul McCartney, had a strong sense of melody and wrote songs that could be played, sung, and listened to with pleasure by others.
Current music I hardly know at all, and what I hear grates. But this is hardly different from my parents’ reaction to rock ‘n’ roll in the ‘50s (although Mom did think Ricky Nelson was kinda cute). So I’m in no position to make a knowledgeable judgment of it. But, if I’m not mistaken, melody continues to be a rara avis.
Is the pop song dead? And if it is, what killed it? I have a nasty suspicion that the answer may be “art,” as in what it is that virtually every individual musical performer now evidently believes he or she is doing.
Written by Robert McHenry on July 2nd, 2008 with no comments.
Read more articles on Uncategorized.
They don’t write ‘em like that anymore.
Songs, I mean. I’m no true student of music, not even of popular music, so what follows is the result of my own inconsistent observations. I’ll be happy to be better informed by commenters.
It’s a commonplace to think of the early 20th century as the glory days of the popular song. Created for the musical comedy and variety stages, nurtured by such impresarios as Florenz Ziegfeld and George White, and later disciplined by the procrustean 78 rpm phonograph record, the American popular song went forth to conquer much of the world. The men, and a few women, who wrote the music and words became and remain – or do they remain? – household names: Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, Hoagy Carmichael, and all the rest.
World War II must be unique among the wars of humanity, recalled almost as much for the music of those years as for the actual business of fighting. Or does it seem so only because it is still within living memory, along with having had the benefit of mass produced recordings? Discuss.
But it seems as though sometime in the 1950s the golden age of songwriting came to a quiet close. There were still songwriters of talent and taste, but they were certainly fewer and farther between and often they seem to have been favored by small cliques of admirers rather than by the generality. I’m thinking of the likes of Leonard Cohen here.
Was it rock ‘n’ roll and the triumph of the drumset? Maybe. But what about jazz? Since the late 1920s jazz musicians had grown to favor popular songs, finding infinite ways to play in and around familiar melodies. But in the immediate postwar years jazz began to turn away from the pops in favor of unorthodox harmonies and structures. Many bebop pieces, and a great many more jazz “songs” since that time, consist of a riff rather than a melody, the riff serving as a starting and ending figure, while in between the emphasis was on increasingly free solo work.
You may have had occasion to hear an elevator-music rendition of some classic rock song and noticed how the arranger struggled and failed to keep it interesting through three choruses. It makes for painful listening. The great majority of pop songs of the last fifty years have to be heard in the original or not at all. Not so with the best of the Beatles. Surely one of the primary reasons that the Beatles hold such an eminent place among contemporary popular musicians is that they, meaning chiefly John Lennon and Paul McCartney, had a strong sense of melody and wrote songs that could be played, sung, and listened to with pleasure by others.
Current music I hardly know at all, and what I hear grates. But this is hardly different from my parents’ reaction to rock ‘n’ roll in the ‘50s (although Mom did think Ricky Nelson was kinda cute). So I’m in no position to make a knowledgeable judgment of it. But, if I’m not mistaken, melody continues to be a rara avis.
Is the pop song dead? And if it is, what killed it? I have a nasty suspicion that the answer may be “art,” as in what it is that virtually every individual musical performer now evidently believes he or she is doing.
Written by Robert McHenry on July 2nd, 2008 with no comments.
Read more articles on Uncategorized.
The Obama campaign has made two very interesting choices lately: the first was no refuse public financing (I’ve already posted about this), the second to start a web-based version of what the Bill Clinton campaign pioneered as the “fax attack.” The website is called ”Fight the Smears.”
It is a truism in national campaigns that the most deadly attack is the one that goes unanswered. Clinton understood this, and in his first presidential campaign his organization made it a point to respond immediately and comprehensively to every charge made by the Bush campaign. Bush’s charges were never able to gain serious traction, and Clinton was able to focus most of his efforts on offense rather than defense and rebuttal. It was smart, and it worked.
Obama seems to be taking this to the next level, establishing a venue where supporters can post examples of rumors, innuendoes, and charges that are making their way around the political world–either overtly as part of news stories or more covertly through the mysterious ways of cyber space. Obama’s campaign has pledged to offer the “truth” along with “the smear,” and indeed has already done so regarding charges made by Rush Limbaugh that there is a tape showing Michelle Obama using the word “whitey” in church; that Barack Obama is hiding his birth certificate; that he is a Muslim; and so on.
This is unprecedented, as no campaign that I know of has ever been so bold about publishing both the charges and the rebuttal. Visitors to the site can read all about the “lies,” as well as the “truth,” and can click on the “spread the truth” link which allows them to forward both to any email addresses they choose–and to do so with the assurance that the campaign doesn’t store or use those addresses. Visitors to the site can contribute evidence of charges, thus allowing the campaign to use the net awareness of its supporters to keep track of rumors.
It seems to me to be a brilliant tactic. It is consistent with his “new kind of politics” claims; it allows for—and indeed depends upon—voter participation; it enables his campaign to label all such charges as “smears,” and to rebut them. The only potential downside is that it risks spreading the rumors even while denying them (AdWatch is susceptible to the same problem). But even then, it seems to be the bet possible response to the viral rumors that can spread with devastating effect over the net.
It will be interesting to see if and how fast this tactic gets picked up by other candidates.
Written by Mary Stuckey on July 2nd, 2008 with no comments.
Read more articles on Uncategorized.
The Obama campaign has made two very interesting choices lately: the first was no refuse public financing (I’ve already posted about this), the second to start a web-based version of what the Bill Clinton campaign pioneered as the “fax attack.” The website is called ”Fight the Smears.”
It is a truism in national campaigns that the most deadly attack is the one that goes unanswered. Clinton understood this, and in his first presidential campaign his organization made it a point to respond immediately and comprehensively to every charge made by the Bush campaign. Bush’s charges were never able to gain serious traction, and Clinton was able to focus most of his efforts on offense rather than defense and rebuttal. It was smart, and it worked.
Obama seems to be taking this to the next level, establishing a venue where supporters can post examples of rumors, innuendoes, and charges that are making their way around the political world–either overtly as part of news stories or more covertly through the mysterious ways of cyber space. Obama’s campaign has pledged to offer the “truth” along with “the smear,” and indeed has already done so regarding charges made by Rush Limbaugh that there is a tape showing Michelle Obama using the word “whitey” in church; that Barack Obama is hiding his birth certificate; that he is a Muslim; and so on.
This is unprecedented, as no campaign that I know of has ever been so bold about publishing both the charges and the rebuttal. Visitors to the site can read all about the “lies,” as well as the “truth,” and can click on the “spread the truth” link which allows them to forward both to any email addresses they choose–and to do so with the assurance that the campaign doesn’t store or use those addresses. Visitors to the site can contribute evidence of charges, thus allowing the campaign to use the net awareness of its supporters to keep track of rumors.
It seems to me to be a brilliant tactic. It is consistent with his “new kind of politics” claims; it allows for—and indeed depends upon—voter participation; it enables his campaign to label all such charges as “smears,” and to rebut them. The only potential downside is that it risks spreading the rumors even while denying them (AdWatch is susceptible to the same problem). But even then, it seems to be the bet possible response to the viral rumors that can spread with devastating effect over the net.
It will be interesting to see if and how fast this tactic gets picked up by other candidates.
Written by Mary Stuckey on July 2nd, 2008 with no comments.
Read more articles on Uncategorized.