For Peter Bogdanovich, Raoul Walsh “was the epitome of good, solid, craftsmanlike, unobtrusive, vigorous and forthright picturemaking. In the best American tradition…. The man I knew was a lot like his movies too—unpretentious, adventurous, funny, tough, warm—he called me ‘Pedro,’ and when he went blind toward the end of his long life and I’d ask him how it was going, all he ever said was, ‘Pretty tough, Pedro,’ and left it at that. There was no bullshit in his pictures either.” Bogdanovich has begun revisiting his notes on those pictures: “We’re going to go through all the movies I saw 1952-1970 which Walsh had anything to do with, 72 in all, listed in the order they were seen. The ratings and comments are from the card-file I kept through those years.”
“Until the 1970s, academics interested in film seldom paid close attention to Hollywood as an industry.” So begins a fresh entry from David Bordwell in which he sketches the evolution towards where we are now and places particular emphasis on Tino Balio and Douglas Gomery: “These two scholars, I think, more or less invented the rigorous historical study of Hollywood as a business enterprise…. Now there are many people working to show how industrial factors interact with filmmakers’ creative choices.” As for Balio’s new book, Hollywood in the New Millennium, “you could not ask for a more concise, reliable map of where Hollywood is today.”
For the Independent, Tim Walker talks with David Lynch, who tells him: “It’s a very depressing picture. With alternative cinema—any sort of cinema that isn’t mainstream—you’re fresh out of luck in terms of getting theatre space and having people come to see it. Even if I had a big idea, the world is different now. Unfortunately, my ideas are not what you’d call commercial, and money really drives the boat these days. So I don’t know what my future is. I don’t have a clue what I’m going to be able to do in the world of cinema.”
Andy Rector posts Jean-Claude Biette’s short 1967 piece on Peter Emanuel Goldman’s Echoes of Silence (1965).
New York. Crispin Hellion Glover is at the IFC Center from tonight through Thursday. At Hyperallergic, Allison Meier considers his work as “the producer of experimental films that lunge voraciously into taboos.”
Tomorrow evening, Light Industry will be screening three films by James Scott, who’ll be at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia on Wednesday.
In other news. The Los Angeles Film Festival‘s wrapped and presented its awards (scroll down). At Variety, Pat Saperstein reports on the award-winners at the Palm Springs International Shortfest; John Anderson was there for Thompson on Hollywood.
Lists. The Telegraph‘s Tim Robey has a few words on each of his top 20 films of all time. And Michael Smith presents “a highly subjective list of what I consider to be the 50 best living film directors.”
In the works. “Jim Carrey and Owen Wilson are reportedly teaming up for the heist comedy Loomis Fargo,” reports Todd Rigney for the Inquisitr. “The film is the latest effort from Napoleon Dynamite director Jared Hess. He’s working from a script from former Saturday Night Live writer Emily Spivey. Lorne Michaels will produce the flick.”
Kickstarter project. A Matter of Time is a doc-in-progress that’ll tell the personal story of Kathryn Calder of The New Pornographers whose mother was diagnosed with ALS (also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease in the US and Motor Neurone disease in the UK).
More browsing? Mike Everleth has this week’s “Underground Film Links.”
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