BITS & PIECES OF A MISPLACED LIFE: FILM #28

THE QUEEN OF POVERTY ROW

According to Richard Lamparski, in his seventh  Whatever Became of Series..., "Poverty Row was a group of studios on and around Gower Street in Hollywood that produced low budget movies . Columbia Pictures, where Ms. (DOROTHY) Revier was under contract,was considered a 'poverty Row' studio until the mid-thirties. "
  Dorothy Revier, who appeared in such films as The Martyr Sex
(1924), The Fate of a Flirt (1925), Stolen Pleasures (1927), and Leftover Ladies (1931), was given the title "The Queen of Poverty Row".

Richard Lamparski. 2nd Annual Series: Whatever Became of Series...? (New York: Bantam Books, 1977).
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ON USING FEW ACTORS IN MOVIES

"One of the blessings of movies was to liberate us from the lighthouses and remote cottages of the theater. Using few people is as difficult for a movie director as using a great number of people. One always knows that a young movie-maker is impossibly ignorant when he says he's going to do something simple like a monologue; that's probably even more difficult to do successfully on the screen than an epic battle of angels is to do on the stage.

Pauline Kael. "A Sign of Life" in The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael (The Library of America, 2011)

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THE WRITER STEPHEN WOLF HAS A WEBSITE- mrstephenwolf.com

One of the articles you can read on it  is his excellent piece on "Twenty Great Downtown Movies” . The excerpt below is from his appraisal of  Oliver Stone"s 1987 film WALLSTREET:

"What’s best –or worst—about the film seems how little has changed, how the same things in the film are still happening only by other high rollers. Stone may have been trying to capture a certain time and place, but unhappily –and like all great art—he caught what seems to be a universal story downtown, run by people making decisions over our 401k, and there’s plenty of great lines besides the film’s most noted. “You see that building?” Gekko says as if spoken today by Trump, “I bought that building ten years ago. My first real estate deal. Sold it two years later, made an $800,000 profit. It was better than sex. At the time I thought that was all the money in the world. Now it's a day's pay.”

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ON SMALL FILMS

"When he was told that his last picture , Harold Pinter's Betrayal was a little picture, (SAM) Spiegel said, "Is it, really? Do you worry in a painting about the size of the canvas?" Pinter himself  said of Spiegel's major films, 'When I say that he made all these films, I mean what I say. Total responsibility. Total dedication."

Andrew Sinclair. Spiegel: the Man Behind the Pictures (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1987)
Among films produced by Sam Spiegel are Lawrence of Arabia, The African Queen, Bridge on the River Kwai, and On the Waterfront.
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ON VERY SMALL FILMS

Flip books --"a kind of Lilluputian movie." 
                                        Michael Innes

THDE OPENING OF ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT IN BERLIN

"The Nazis thought it decadent and unpatriotic, but for unknown reasons the Reich Film Censorship Board passed it for public showing. At its Berlin premiere the Nazis caused a riot. They released thousands of white mice and exploded tear gas and stink bombs . Three members of the audience were killed and twenty-two injured before the police arrived to restore order."
Andrew Sinclair. Spiegel: the Man Behind the Pictures (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1987)

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MOVIES & THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

For a short period in American culture, telephones were humorously referred to as "Ameches," an allusion to the fact that Don Ameche played the role of the telephone's inventor in the 1939 movie -- The Alexander Graham Bell Story.

ON SCREEN PHONE NUMBERS

"Consider the use of the on-screen telephone numbers. The display of an actual telephone number on screen as part of a dramatic entertainment has been ruled legally actionable, as it may constitute invasion of privacy. Film and television have adopted for display the telephone exchange 555, which is never actually assigned  and thus cannot incite the litigous."

David Mamet.  Bambi vs. Godzilla (New York: Pantheon Books, 2007)
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WILLIAM GOLDMAN & GUNGA DIN

"...My favorite movie of all time is a comic-book movie: Gunga Din. (I have seen it sixteen times, still start to cry before the credits are over..;)
William Goldman. Adventures in the Screen Trade (New York: Warner Books, 1988)
William Goldman's choice of Gunga Din should be his favorite movie is no surprise because his first novel got its title -- Temple of Gold -- from that film:
"...he takes a bugle and starts to climb this temple of gold."
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From Gunga Din

"The screams of the Thugs as they fell into the canyon were taken from the screams of the sailors falling off the log into the spider pit in King Kong."
iDMb Trivia
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THE MAKING OF SUNSET BOULEVARD

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZvdKjKL7hQ

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Woody Allen has more Academy Award nominations (16) for writing than anyone else, all of them are in the Written Directly for the Screen category.
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THE CLAW RETURNS

The Claw Returns.
Everytime I turn around
A new monster returns.
South of the Slot,
Wholesale destruction,
All Day, all night
Must not be discounted,
Virgins dismembered, 
Warehouses burned,
Rodan's acidic  saliva, 
Dissoloves naked politicians
Passing bad laws.. 

The Claw Returns.
We wake up to new horrors,
Headlines blaring:
POETRY READERS PANIC
THOUSANDS FLEE CITY:
Splash panels of blood,
Body parts on display
In the drive-thru car wash
While bug-eyed aliens
Relish culinary hopes,
A massive holiday picnic
Of human cole slaw.

 The Claw returns:
 A 12 part serial.
 Consider yourself warned.

Louis Phillips