Robin Hardy RIP

Robin Hardy obituary
Director of the eerily unsettling horror film The Wicker Man

Ryan Gilbey
Monday 4 July 2016 1

The director Robin Hardy, who has died aged 86, made only one film of note. But as this was The Wicker Man (1973), which terrified audiences without showing so much as a drop of blood being spilt, his place in British cinema history was always going to be assured. It tells the story of a puritanical Christian policeman (Edward Woodward) who visits an island off the coast of Scotland after reports that a young girl has gone missing. He is shocked to find his investigation impeded by the community, which is steeped in rituals and paganism. The chilling purpose of their secrecy is finally revealed in one of the great twist endings of all time.

Even before that pay-off, Hardy had sustained expertly an atmosphere of unsettling eeriness, in which the root of the unease could never quite be pinpointed. Count Dracula himself, the actor Christopher Lee, played the island’s leader, Lord Summerisle, but the horror on offer was of a more insidious variety than the sort peddled by the Hammer studio.

The Wicker Man arose out of meetings between Lee, the writer Anthony Shafferand the producer Peter Snell, during which they shared ideas, suggestions and research for a film inspired by David Pinner’s novel Ritual. Hardy then joined the project. “Tony and I were great horror film buffs and used to see lots of the original Hammers,” he said. “We wondered why it was that they always centred on pentacles, garlic, stakes in hearts and all those other things to do with black magic. We thought it would be fun to go back to the religion on which all this hokey witchcraft stuff was based – the old religion – and recreate a contemporary society that was pre-Christian.”

The beleaguered studio British Lion made The Wicker Man cheaply as a way for its new owner, the businessman John Bentley, to prove to the unions that the company was still a going concern. But the studio was sold to EMI, which hated the film and pruned it from 99 to 87 minutes before releasing it on the bottom half of a double bill with Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. With no press screenings arranged for The Wicker Man, Lee cold-called critics to persuade them to view it. He also accompanied it to the International Festival of Fantasy and Science Fiction Films in Paris, where it won the grand prix in 1974.

The reviews, when they emerged, were largely grudging. “The story turns into a barbarous joke, too horrible for pleasure,” wrote Dilys Powell in the Sunday Times, “but one must admire the playing and the distinction with which Hardy has directed Shaffer’s screenplay.” Margaret Hinxman in the Sunday Telegraph commended the film on its “genuine sense of what is horrific” but decided that it lacked “the satisfactory inter-relation of the ordinary and the extraordinary that marks the best fantasy fiction”.

Rumours that Rod Stewart tried to buy the picture in order to destroy nude scenes featuring his then partner Britt Ekland, or that the original negative of Hardy’s cut was buried in landfill beneath the M4, only contributed to the popular conception of The Wicker Man as a film maudit. It was in every sense a movie that refused to die.

Various versions surfaced over the years, among them a 102-minute edit on video in the 1980s and a 40th anniversary 93-minute version approved by Hardy as the “final cut” in 2013. Shaffer wrote a follow-up, The Loathsome Lambton Worm, which was never filmed, while Hardy directed The Wicker Tree (2011), a “spiritual sequel” adapted from his own novel Cowboys for Christ.

A 2006 US remake of The Wicker Man, directed by Neil LaBute and starring Nicolas Cage, was roundly mocked. In 2012, the National Theatre of Scotland produced a musical version, An Appointment with the Wicker Man, about an amateur dramatics society trying to mount a play of the film. But the influence of Hardy’s original endures. British directors including Edgar Wright (Hot Fuzz) and Ben Wheatley (Kill List) have paid explicit homage to the movie in their work, while the band Radiohead recently produced a video based on it to accompany their single Burn the Witch.

It would be fair to say that The Wicker Man eclipsed everything else its director did. Born in Wimbledon, south London, Robin was the son of Gordon, a member of the Indian civil service, and his wife, Veronica (nee Rimington). After attending Bradfield college, near Reading, Robin studied art in Paris.

He began directing for the National Film Board of Canada and for the Esso World Theater strand on the PBS channel in the US. Then he moved to London and with Shaffer co-founded the advertising agency Hardy Shaffer Ferguson Avery. After making The Wicker Man, he returned to America, where he made commercials and became involved in the historical theme park business.

He wrote novels including The Education of Don Juan (1981), directed the thriller The Fantasist (1986) and co-wrote Forbidden Sun (1989), about sexual repression at a girls’ school in Crete. He also wrote Winnie, a musical about Winston Churchill that was staged in London in 1988. At the time of his death, he wastrying to raise funds for a third Wicker Man instalment, The Wrath of the Gods.

He is survived by his fifth wife, Victoria Webster, and his eight children, Jeremy, St Clair, Zoë, Alexander, Dominic, Justin, Arabella and Tom.

• Robin St Clair Rimington Hardy, film-maker and novelist, born 2 October 1929; died 1 July 2016

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/jul/04/robin-hardy-obituary

For a little extra-curricular reading, you ought to see this:

The various versions of The Wicker Man

Steve Phillips

There can be few, if any, film fans in the world who haven't watched, at least once, a low-budget offering from Britain which popped up as a B-movie in 1973 – The Wicker Man. From these lowly beginnings, the film has steadily grown in reputation in the intervening years to become one of the principal cult movies of the last 40 years. Most aficionados are also aware that the film circulates in a number of different versions, but there is much confusion and misinformation about the exact differences between the various cuts. But first, let's find out why more than one version exists in the first place...

The Wicker Man began life in 1971 when three vague acquaintances: actor Christopher Lee, independent film producer Peter Snell, and writer Anthony "Sleuth" Shaffer, got together and started to discuss the possibility of working on a movie project of mutual interest. Shaffer discovered a 1967 novel called Ritual by David Pinner, and each of the three members of the group stumped up £5000 to acquire the film rights to the book. Shaffer set to work adapting the book but soon came across problems with its structure but, moreover, realised that the book simply wasn't exciting enough to be turned into a worthwhile production. (It might be suggested that somebody should have recognised these problems before the money was spent, but still...)

An old associate of Shaffer, small-time director Robin Hardy, who was convalescing after a heart attack, appeared on the scene and a quiet weekend was spent brainstorming some fresh ideas at Hardy's house near Maidenhead. During that weekend a framework was developed that ended up being very close to the finished movie.

The film would concern a battle of ideals between a devoutly Christian police sergeant from the Scottish mainland, and the older pagan beliefs of the locals on a isolated Hebridean island called Summerisle. The pagan ways of the islanders would be conveyed to the audience as they followed Howie's attempts to investigate the disappearance of a young girl. Howie would become ever more deeply embroiled in the bizarre ways of the locals, and eventually realise that the whole thing is a set-up: a trap to get him to the island. The community's crops have failed and the islanders want Howie as a human sacrifice to appease their gods and ensure bountiful harvests in the future. The ultimate point the film was to make is this – what does Howie's religion (albeit a more mainstream one than the islanders') actually count for if he is alone in a sea of different beliefs? Unless deities actually exist, the winner in a conflict of religions is simply the one that has the muscle to enforce his doctrine.

The pagan details were to be entirely authentic; Shaffer's main research source being Sir James George Frazer's 12-volume The Golden Bough which details how early myths, rites and pagan beliefs have fed into modern twentieth-century life. Hardy: "Everything you see in the film is absolutely authentic. The whole series of ceremonies and details that we show have happened at different times and places in Britain and western Europe. What we did was to bring them all together in one particular time and place. The wicker man itself is quite real. The Druids used the structure to burn their sacrificial victims. What we hoped would fascinate people is not that they would think these things are still going on in Europe, but that they would recognise an awful lot of these things as sort of little echoes from either out of childhood stories and nursery rhymes or things they do at various times of the year. There are so many Christian holidays that are celebrated where there was previously a pagan feast. Easter is one of them, originally it was a hare feast. At Christmas, you set up a Christmas tree because that was what the goddess Hera worshipped. Mistletoe is purely Druidic – it relates to the Golden Bough. My God, when you decorate your home for Christmas you are using nearly every pagan symbol there is!"

Read the rest here: http://www.steve-p.org/wm/

Last night's set lists

At The Habit, York: -

Da Elderly: -
Love Song
You've Got A Friend

Ron Elderly: -
Can't Help Falling In Love
Make You Feel My Love

The Elderly Brothers: -
The Price Of Love
I'll Get You
All I Have To Do Is Dream
True Love Ways
Sweet Virginia

Solo Sets from 'Phil' and Don' kicked off the proceedings on another busy night at The Habit. Given that Wales were playing Portugal in the semi-finals of Euro 2016, we had expected a quiet night, but players and punters turned out in good numbers. We were treated to covers of Paul Simon's Call Me Al and Neil Young's My My, Hey Hey (Out Of The Blue). A holiday-maker from the USA brought his collection of harmonicas and joined The Elderly Brothers on Sweet Virginia; during the after-show acoustic jam we indulged him with songs such as Baby What You Want Me To Do, Bring It On Home To Me and Need Your Love So Bad. Another late finish and another night of boozy, musical mayhem!

I'll Say She Is... The Marx Brothers are back onstage...

Matt Walters, Matt Roper, Noah Diamond, and Seth Shelden are Zeppo, Chico, Groucho, and Harpo

How a long lost Marx Brothers musical found its way back onstage
By Adam Gopnik

1 June 2016

On a recent Saturday morning at the Pearl Studios, on Eighth Avenue, the most labyrinthine of all Broadway rehearsal halls, one of the most beautiful and endangered of all New York sounds suddenly materialized: the shatter and thunder of massed tap dancers on a wooden studio floor. The chorus line of a new show was working on a new-old number, and the dancers, instead of being all-of-a-kind, post-Fosse giraffes and gazelles, had the pixie faces and powerful thighs you would see on chorus lines from the nineteen-twenties and early thirties. “We wanted that kind of casting-call variety of types,” one of the directors said. “We told the girls not to do any work outs for the duration of the run. They shouldn’t have muscle tone. Just muscles.”

The need to have a group of dancers who resemble their own great-grandmothers comes about because the enterprise at hand is a revival of a twenties musical—and not even so much a revival, in the manner of the current “Shuffle Along,” as a full-scale, quixotic reconstruction, as improbable in ambition as the remaking of a Giganotosaurus skeleton from two shin bones and a tooth worn down by time, of the lost 1924 Marx Brothers musical “I’ll Say She Is.” Having opened in May of that high Jazz Age year at the Moorish Revival-style Casino Theatre, to rapturous reviews—one in particular, from Alexander Woollcott, more or less made the brothers’ reputation—the show closed the following February (a fine run for the time), never to be seen onstage again. One of the legendary late débuts of American theatrical history (the Marxes were well into their thirties when they finally escaped vaudeville for the stage), “I’ll Say She Is!” contained—nice chance to use the tendentious form of “arguably” here—arguably the most influential of all twentieth-century comic sketches, the legendary “Napoleon” scene that, more than any other five minutes in comedy, began the line of absurdist pop humor that continued on directly from the Marxes to Ernie Kovacs and right through to Monty Python.

To call the musical “lost” implies that someone was looking for it. In truth, it was simply gone—gone into the same netherworld of fading programs and yellowing clippings that most other revues of the time have fallen into. Now it’s here again. The Quixotes who fought for its return are the New York writer and performer Noah Diamond and his wife, the director Amanda Sisk, accompanied by a gang of twenty- and thirty-something friends. Their windmill, for much of the past ten years, has been a full-scale stage revival, which they’ve now finally achieved, at the Connelly Theatre, on the Lower East Side, where the will open at last on Thursday evening. (For all the clichés of ascent from the tenements, that neighborhood was not really the Marxes’ haunt; they were strictly Yorkville boys, raised around 93rd and Lexington.)

The hunt to find “I’ll Say She Is” began when Diamond, as an adolescent growing up in the New York suburbs in the nineteen-eighties, fell in love, as awkward young men often do, with the mystique of the Marxes. “I was one of those kids,” he says. “Groucho was my God.” His worship extended to trying to woo girls with borrowed Grouchoisms. “Your eyes shine like the pants of my blue serge suit,” he would say to some winsome Thelma Todd of the eighties, a doubly baffling come-on: the girl had no idea what a blue serge suit was, and neither did he.

Infatuation ripened into impersonation. Diamond’s Groucho, which he has worked on for almost thirty years and showcased on many occasions, is genuinely uncanny, capturing the subtle truth that Groucho’s voice, far from being a machine-gun wise guy’s, is essentially soft and grainy, rising to its trebly heights only in feigned indignation. (Diamond also makes the interesting point that, while the original Groucho had to project his lines unamplified into a large Broadway theatre, we are now so used to hearing Groucho exclusively through his miked performances, in movies and on television, that he only sounds fully “Groucho” when miked onstage.)

“ ‘I’ll Say She Is’ always haunted me,” Diamond says. The Marx Brothers’ two other Broadway hits—the George Kaufman-penned “The Cocoanuts” and “Animal Crackers”—were adapted into movies while they were still running onstage. “I’ll Say She Is,” though, in its day, at least as famous as the other two, had just passed away: as a revue it had no appealing afterlife for other performers, and, so far as anyone knew, no script of any kind had survived; its score, written largely by the cartoonist and humorist Will B. Johnstone, with music by his brother Tom, had never been recorded.

The dinosaur shinbone, in this case, was a typescript of Johnstone’s, a well-thumbed old draft outlining the show’s scenes. It was not really a script but more what a contemporary screenwriter would call a treatment. Diamond also knew that a short film made by the Marxes in the early thirties, as a kind of teaser for their feature “Monkey Business,” reproduced, in only very slightly different form, one of the lost musical’s key scenes. Another key scene, the Napoleon sketch, survived as well, in a script that had remained in Groucho’s archives. There was also a single, soiled molar to build around: a version of the Napoleon scene that had, improbably, been made into a rather mediocre episode in a long-forgotten, cheaply made cartoon special in 1970, with the very elderly Groucho supplying his lines and Hans Conried doing the other brother’s voices. A disappointing delivery, but a delivery all the same. (Diamond also points out that the show’s revival is as much as product of YouTube as of Broadway—only in the digital age did the whole archive of the past become available.)

The rest of the dinosaur had to be recreated, so to speak, from imaginative reconstruction. Quote by quote, line-by-line, and joke-by-joke, Diamond reassembled the script, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. Note by note and syllable by syllable, he reassembled the score, recycling music from other Johnstone scores and melding it with that of his own lyrical mind. The musical’s songs, which were famously mediocre—Groucho himself called the score “the most undistinguished one that ever bruised the eardrums of a Broadway audience”—had nonetheless to be re-created, reconstructed, and quietly improved. The pre-jazz operetta, slightly ragtime music was, Diamond knew, essential to the effect: without that roistering tone, however dated, one can’t register the Marxes’ seismographic surprises.

Becoming the Marx Brothers, meanwhile, is more operatically ambitious than it might seem. The skills picked up during a decade on the vaudeville road have to be re-created, painstakingly, in months. In need of brothers to join him in the pursuit, Diamond enlisted Seth Shelden, a brilliant young intellectual-property lawyer who was just returning from a Fulbright fellowship in Latvia. Improbable though it seems, Shelden’s secret ambition had always been to become Harpo Marx. “There was something about Harpo that turned me on—not so much his mime but his wildness,” he said. Shelden not only mastered the art of chasing blondes, blowing klaxons, and making the Gookie—the legendary puffed-cheek and lolling-tongue face that Harpo copied from a cigar roller in Yorkville—but also had to learn how to play the harp. A young British actor named Matt Roper, enlisted to play Chico, had to learn how to reproduce a fiendishly singular accent—not an Italian accent but a New York Italian-émigré accent as rendered in caricature by an émigré New York Jew—as well as how to play “trick” piano, in the distinctive Chico style, with the left hand lolling and the right hand shooting the keys and kittening. (According to legend, Chico’s instructor in this art was one-handed.) For Zeppo, Diamond and Zisk chose an old friend of Diamond’s named Matt Walters, who is at once extremely handsome and oddly nondescript, in the Zeppo manner.

On that Saturday afternoon at Pearl, the cast was re-creating the Napoleon scene for one of the first times since it last played on Broadway, nearly a century ago. Its central premise is simple: Groucho is Napoleon, marching off to Russia and then returning, on quick trips, to check up on the honor and chastity of Josephine, who is besieged by suitors, in the form of the other Marxes, the moment the mustached Emperor leaves the room. “Forgive me, my Queen. I don’t doubt your love. When I look into your big blue eyes, I know that you are true to the Army. I only hope it remains a standing Army, “Groucho remarks. And, not long after, “Ten seconds I’ve been gone, and she is still vertical.” There are also some classic Chico quasi-meta puns (“I want to marry the Emperor. He’s the guy-a-that’s got the money.” “That would be bigamy!“ “Yeah, and it’s big-a-me, too.”)

The new Brothers execute the scene with uncanny perfection. Diamond has worked for years on his Groucho walk, which is not merely stooped but, as he says, a mix of lithe and awkward—the basic Groucho move being to dive forward into a scene or moment, then come up for air and take a breath, looking around suspiciously. Seth is a no-word-perfect Harpo, while the first Matt captures the strange, unearned belligerence of Chico, and the second Matt, becoming Zeppo, is a reminder that the Marxes were never quite as good again after they lost their one straight man. The object of the Marxes’ comedy is anarchy, but its subject is fraternity: they are in it together to the end. Zeppo’s inclusion in the family made the others less like clowns and more like brothers.

One sees at once why the Napoleon scene became legendary overnight—apart from still being extremely funny, it has the edge of randomness, the pure absurdity, that made the Marx Brothers seem, on that opening night as ever after, so modern. Of the great movie comedians, Chaplin is rooted in Dickens and the nineteenth-century stage; Keaton, more cinematic, in a kind of melancholic Civil War stoicism. Only the Marxes seem contemporary with Dada. There is no logic or pathos or point or even much structure to it—the fourth wall is broken, then restored, and then broken again. Napoleon’s appearances and reappearances from the Russian front are as arbitrary as a Magritte drawing—and the scene’s moral, to the degree that it has one, is the nihilistic one that runs true in comedy from Aristophanes to Sid Caesar: all authority is always ridiculous, and man (and woman) runs by appetite alone. All of Monty Python’s non sequiturs and sudden stoppages—“the sketch is now over”—begin here, as does most of the pure burlesque aggression of a Mel Brooks, whose historical kidding, as in the “2000 Year Old Man” skits, starts here, too. Its modernity was such that the playwright Thornton Wilder once claimed that the Napoleon scene was referenced in “Finnegan’s Wake,” in the lines, occurring early in the book, “This is the three lipoleum Coyne Grouching down in the living detch”—with the brothers turned into the three lipoleum (Joyce having presumably edited out Zeppo), and Groucho transformed into a participle. (On hearing this news, a flattered but bemused Groucho wondered how Joyce could have heard of the play: “Did some New York policeman on his way back to Ireland to see his dear old Mother Machree encounter Joyce in some peat bog and patiently explain to him that at the Casino theater on 39th and Broadway there were three young Jewish fellows running around the stage shouting to an indifferent world that they were all Napoleon?”)

A few days later, the entire company had removed to the Connelly Theatre, one of those surprising proscenium theaters that still linger in the area, and they’ve since been through many rehearsals and previews, approaching this week’s opening. Watching them, Jorge Luis Borges’s famous story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” comes seeping back to a viewer’s mind. The point of Borges’s fable is that if “Don Quixote” could be written now, fresh, though word for word the same, without a “Don Quixote” in the past, its meanings would all be entirely different—at once less riotous in comedy and much richer in allusion. Comedy gets dampened by distance; reference expands with time. The same is true of “I’ll Say She Is.” The jokes in the first version obviously came from the anarchic breeze of the Marxes blowing past the conventions of the musical revue of 1924. Now, Noah Diamond has had to re-create the wheezy bits in order to allow the re-created Marxes to explode them—but , long freed from the conventions of the wheezy bits, we appreciate their loving re-creation every bit as much as 1924 did their destruction. This leads us to be patient in a way that perhaps softens the madness of the comedy.

The young Marx Brothers

The original Groucho was, above all, an outsider. What he really wanted to be was not a comedian but a writer, poor guy (Richard Avedon said once that his portrait of the older Groucho was the most perfect study of a Jewish intellectual he had ever made), and his complete freedom from love me/need me, the performer’s curse, is what makes his performances still so astonishingly fresh. He breaks through the fourth wall, of proscenium illusion, but, even more importantly, he breaks through the fifth wall, of the performer’s desire to be loved. There is a hair-raising photograph of the four Marxes in their youth (reproduced in a book that Diamond wrote about his quest, “Gimme A Thrill”) that shows them hungry and beautiful and looking exactly like either an anarchist cell or a gathering of Futurist painters, or maybe both. That ravenous energy is irreproducible. Now Groucho onstage seems lovable, not because Diamond softens his edges but because the past is invariably softened and smoothed by the ocean-wash of time. Groucho’s leer was once pure lust—now it is lust plus time, and lust plus time is longing.

Noah Diamond knows this. What occurs in his revival—no matter how diamond-hard the action or exquisitely achieved the comedy, no matter how charmingly retro-right the music and dance—is the intrusion of filial piety. “We love the Marx Brothers, love them sentimentally, emotionally, with all our hearts,” Diamond has said, and that love, which of course the brothers could not feel for themselves, fills the space. What will survive of us is love, Philip Larkin once wrote, and in a weird, unsentimental way, this is necessarily true: only a steady infusion of softness can keep alive even the most hard-edged of forms, and the softness of retrospective love blurs comedy’s boundaries even as it reproduces its shapes. Yet, if the laughter is touched with longing, it is still laughter, and it is still loud. For the moment, Diamond and Sisk can look on, proud and astonished parents, at the most Marxian of sights: an audience in New York, grouching with joy.

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-a-lost-marx-brothers-musical-found-its-way-back-onstage

Michael Cimino and Caroline Aherne RIP

Michael Cimino: a great of a great period in American film
The director of Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, The Deer Hunter and Heaven’s Gate – said to have ended 70s American New Wave – leaves an indelible mark

Peter Bradshaw
Sunday 3 July 2016

The last time I saw Michael Cimino was actually the first time I ever saw him – at the Venice film festival in 2012. He was presenting a new, digitally remastered version of his 1980 epic Heaven’s Gate which famously flopped horribly prior to an agonisingly slow and still disputed process of critical rehabilitation. The Venice event allowed Cimino to luxuriate in the way this film was now admired in Europe.

I was invited to a party on a palazzo terrace overlooking the Lido where Cimino was going to be present. The excitement was palpable. This was the modern Howard Hughes of American cinema, rarely seen in public, rumoured to be addicted to cosmetic surgery, understood to be only interested in his new career as a novelist. When I saw him I could hardly credit it: a tiny, elfin figure who remained seated in the corner, holding court to a group of admirers. He had big, dark glasses that he never removed, an inscrutable smile and an immobile helmet of dark hair. He resembled a miniature, androgynous version of a semi-retired rocker: nothing like the tough, rangy guy photographed in the 70s. I didn’t dare approach him.

Like Kubrick, Cimino had by this stage amassed a huge list of unrealised projects – of which the most important was his doomed plan to film Crime and Punishment. But unlike in Kubrick’s case, creative internal exile had been forced on him by failure: the overreaching calamity of Heaven’s Gate became known as the act of legendary hubris which brought down not merely a studio but – it is alleged – the whole spirit of the 70s American New Wave. After that disaster, everyone was more cautious, less inclined to indulge folies de grandeur. But Cimino can certainly claim to have been one of the greats of this great period. He had already given us an authentic American tragedy and essential anti-war document: The Deer Hunter.

Cimino had started as a director of commercials and from there made the bold move into writing screenplays, co-writing the cult sci-fi masterpiece Silent Running. But his great breakthrough was Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, his excellent western thriller with Clint Eastwood and Jeff Bridges. Eastwood had bought the script from him and sportingly allowed him to direct – thus giving him the career springboard for The Deer Hunter.

The “Vietnam movie” was becoming an accepted genre, much criticised for focusing on American angst and being uninterested in the experiences of the Vietnamese. Arguably, The Deer Hunter fell into that template – and the famous “Russian roulette” scene is an invention, with no relation to historical fact. The Viet Cong never did anything like this to American POWs. But as creative licence goes, it is inspired – a blazing, horrifying image of the random death-dealing of war and the grim fact that soldiers try not to think about as they go off to battle: not all of them will die but some definitely will. Only five chambers in the revolver are empty.

The Deer Hunter is superb in that it balances home front drama with wartime action and gives each equal weight. Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken and John Savage play Pennsylvania steelworkers who like to hunt deer – an activity which seems clearer, nobler and more rational than the chaos of warfare. Meryl Streep is the woman with whom more than one is in love. The men respond to the call-up to Vietnam and there is a daringly, brilliantly protracted “wedding” scene which precedes their departure for war – and of course it is a kind of funeral for their way of life. They are far from the world of protest, hippyism and flower power.

The emphasis on patriotism and sacrifice is what is so striking about The Deer Hunter. And it was only on watching it again recently that a very simple thought struck me: Vietnam was different from the Iraq wars because for Vietnam, America had the draft. Men of fighting age had to go – just like they had to go in the second world war.

Two years later, Heaven’s Gate took up these ideas again: how America was shaped by violence and war. This movie was about the Johnson county war in late 19th-century Wyoming, in which small farmsteaders were driven off their land by the big ranchers – an agribusiness pogrom. Heaven’s Gate did not quite succeed in balancing visual giganticism with human poignancy and loss the way The Deer Hunter did. It was more operatic, more of an old-fashioned western in the John Ford mould. It didn’t capture the public’s attention the way Cimino hoped – and he was entitled to suspect the American critics were exacting a price for their extravagant praise for the previous film – but it was thrilling and bold cinema nonetheless: a flawed masterpiece.

After this, Cimino’s career fizzled out with a handful of under-par movies. It was a painful anti-climax for this tremendous talent.

But in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, The Deer Hunter and Heaven’s Gate we can see the work of a real American artist: ambitious, passionate, historically engaged – and magnificent.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/jul/03/michael-cimino-deer-hunter-heavens-gate-american-film

Buono estente
Caroline Aherne obituary
Award-winning writer and actor best known for The Mrs Merton Show and The Royle Family

Stuart Jeffries
Saturday 2 July 2016

Caroline Aherne, who has died aged 52 of cancer, was responsible for some of the most distinctive and memorable comedy creations of the 1990s. From Mrs Merton to The Royle Family, her characters were waspish but warmly observed, and gave audiences an all-too-rare taste of comedy that reflected their relationship with television and love-hate feelings about celebrity. She was one of the few members of the British comedy pantheon not to be male, metropolitan and privileged, and her work often drew on her background.

Aherne made her name with The Mrs Merton Show, a chatshow featuring the eponymous horn-rimmed, chintzy-sleeved northern housewife who fired faux-naive questions at her hapless celebrity guests: “What first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?” she once asked his wife, Debbie McGee.

The Royle Family, the sitcom she co-wrote with Craig Cash, was groundbreaking in its portrayal of a working-class Manchester family watching TV in their front room. It was a sitcom that drew on the British tradition of 1950s kitchen sink dramas and the films of Mike Leigh, but it was more compassionate than either. The writer Jimmy McGovern said of it: “There is great love in that family, but it is never stated. That’s so true to life.”

Though the sitcom cannot be said to have ushered in a new era of comedy drawing on working-class experience – British TV comedy remains, with a few exceptions, as dominated by ex-public schoolboys as it ever was – it did pave the way for at least two subsequent TV series. Paul Abbott, creator of Shameless, the Channel 4 comedy drama set in a low-income northern milieu, said he owed his show’s success to The Royle Family. More recently, Gogglebox, Channel 4’s documentary series observing viewers watching television – narrated by Aherne – owed an obvious debt to its sitcom precursor.

There was more to her comic armoury than Mrs Merton and Denise Royle, though they were her best-known characters. In the 1990s sketch programme The Fast Show, Aherne played the Mediterranean weather girl Paola Fisch (catchphrase “scorchio!”), and a cheeky checkout girl who insulted customers. The comedy series Dossa and Joe, which she wrote and directed in the early 2000s while in self-imposed exile in Australia, focused on a couple who had been happily married for 40 years yet found their marriage floundering after retirement. The show was a critical success but a ratings flop.

Aherne was born in London to Irish immigrants, Bert, a labourer on the railways, and Maureen, a school dinner lady. When she was two, the family moved to Wythenshawe, Manchester. The Royle Family may well have been inspired by the Aherne family, with her father serving as unwitting prototype for sharp-tongued, moaning Jim Royle. She recalled later: “My dad was always going on about the immersion, and about lights being left on. ‘It’s like feckin’ Blackpool illuminations,’ he used to say.”

Both she and her older brother Patrick were born with a rare cancer of the retina, retinoblastoma, that caused Patrick to lose an eye, and left Caroline almost unsighted in one eye. She became the family joker, impersonating TV characters like Margot and Barbara from The Good Life and celebrities such as Marti Caine and Cilla Black. “Nobody else in the family was like that,” Patrick said. “But she was funny from the time she was really little.” As a teenager, Caroline watched Mike Leigh’s television play Abigail’s Party (1977) and resolved she would become a writer like him.

Precociously intelligent, she scored 176 in an IQ test and received nine As in her O-levels at the Hollies Convent grammar school. She studied drama at Liverpool Polytechnic, and in the late 1980s took a job at BBC Manchester as secretary to Janet Street-Porter. During this time she began to develop an act on the Manchester comedy circuit, with characters including Mitzi Goldberg, lead singer of the comedy country and western act the Mitzi Goldberg Experience, and a nun called Sister Mary Immaculate, whose ambition was to kiss the pope’s ring.

Mrs Merton was developed in collaboration with Henry Normal, then a performance poet in Manchester, Craig Cash, with whom she presented a show on the Manchester radio station KFM, and the comedian Dave Gorman. But it was the late Chris Sievey, the man behind the outsize-masked comic character Frank Sidebottom, who ensured that their creation made it to the big time. Sievey asked Aherne, a friend of his brother-in-law, to voice the part of Frank’s neighbour Mrs Merton on his album 5:9:88 (1988), and later on his Piccadilly Radio show in Manchester.

The following year, Sievey invited her to reprise the character in Frank Sidebottom’s Fantastic Shed Show (1992) on ITV. She was supposed to be Sidebottom’s sidekick, but Mrs Merton overshadowed him and was so well received that Granada TV commissioned her to make her own comedy vehicle.

The result was The Mrs Merton Show, which ran from 1995 to 1998 on the BBC. It had an audience composed of real-life pensioners and an in-house band, Hooky and the Boys, led by her first husband, Joy Division and New Order bassist Peter Hook, whom she married in 1994. The couple divorced in 1997. The Royle Family ran for three seasons from 1998 to 2000, followed by specials until 2012. Mrs Merton and Malcolm, with Cash as a 37-year-old son still living at home, had a single series in 1999.

For all that she was feted by critics and garlanded with awards, Aherne struggled with fame and with her health. In 1998, at her mews home in Notting Hill, west London, she tried to take her own life. She was treated for depression and alcoholism at the Priory clinic in 1998, and was also treated there in 2002. In addition, she suffered bladder cancer related to her eye condition. In 2014, as part of a charity drive to raise money to treat other patients suffering from the disease, she announced she was suffering from lung cancer.

In 2001, she announced she was quitting showbusiness, because she no longer wanted to be famous. She moved for a while to Australia, returning in 2002 to collaborate with Cash one last time, on Early Doors, a fondly observed sitcom about the regulars of a Manchester pub, but she quit, leaving Cash to write and star in the hit show that some critics misguidedly called the British Cheers.

In later years, Aherne never equalled her earlier successes, still less the celebrity that came from writing and performing in two hit TV shows. She eschewed the media spotlight and lived quietly at a house in Manchester not far from her mother’s home.

She wrote such dramas as The Fattest Man in Britain (2009) and The Security Men (2013), as well as taking minor roles, such as a barmaid in a comedy called Sunshine (2008) with Steve Coogan. She also narrated programmes including Pound Shop Wars (2014), a BBC1 documentary, and voiced some of the characters in CBBC’s animated series Strange Hill High (2013-14). Perhaps fittingly, one of her last TV roles was to narrate Gogglebox, the weekly Channel 4 documentary series in which TV viewers watch other TV viewers watching TV.

She is survived by her mother and brother.

Caroline Mary Aherne, comedy actor and writer, born 24 December 1963; died 2 July 2016

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2016/jul/02/caroline-aherne

Geoffrey Hill RIP

Sir Geoffrey Hill by Keith Grant, 2015

Sir Geoffrey Hill obituary
Poet and academic with a passion for the history and landscapes of England
 Sir Geoffrey Hill captured in a portrait by Keith Grant, 2015. Photograph: Chris Beetles Gallery

Robert Potts
Friday 1 July 2016

Sir Geoffrey Hill, who has died aged 84, was one of Britain’s finest poets in the second half of the 20th century. His was among the handful of names discussed in relation to the poet laureateship in Britain in 1998, after the death of Ted Hughes; and while it is hard to imagine Hill accepting such a dubious honour, or the post being awarded to so demanding a poet, he would not have been an inappropriate choice.

Hill had an unusually powerful sense of, and care for, the history of England; a sense above all of its bloody battles, religious schisms and civic institutions, and of its landscapes, especially those of his childhood. In his prose poem, Mercian Hymns, he conflated his Midlands childhood with King Offa’s Mercia, identifying his own birthplace as that of modern England.

Born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, Geoffrey was the son of William, a village policeman, and his wife, Hilda. “If you stood at the top of the field opposite our house,” he once recalled, “you looked right across the Severn Valley to the Clee hills and the Welsh hills very faint and far off behind them.”

Hill identified himself as working-class – indeed was “glad and proud to have been born into the English working-class” – and commemorated his maternal grandmother, who had spent her life making nails, in poem XXV of Mercian Hymns: “I speak this in memory of my grandmother, whose childhood and prime womanhood were spent in the nailer’s darg ... It is one thing to celebrate the ‘quick forge’, another to cradle a face hare-lipped by the searing wire.” Critics who accused Hill of nostalgia, conservativism, and reactionary and monarchist politics tended to ignore or misunderstand his passionate care for the nameless and forgotten victims of power, across all countries and all centuries.

Educated at Bromsgrove county high school, Hill was an excellent student, and – although “somewhat apart”, in the words of Norman Rea, a contemporary – played football, acted in school plays, and became a prefect. One of his roles was to introduce a piece of classical music in each morning assembly. As Rea recalled years later, it was a task he performed “with enjoyment and aplomb ... He demurred only once, in a stage-managed gesture, when he felt that to introduce Danny Kaye’s Tubby the Tuba, even for educational ends, was rather beneath him. With a sudden, winning smile, he delegated that task to the headmaster.”

Hill went on to Keble College, Oxford, where he read English, gaining a first (1953). Subsequently he taught at Leeds, being elected to a professorship in 1976, and then at Cambridge, where he was a fellow of Emmanuel College (1981-88).

At Oxford, he met the American poet Donald Hall, who told Hill that he was taking over the editorship of the Fantasy Poets and asked him to submit a manuscript. Later, Hall recalled receiving the poems: “I could not believe it. You can imagine reading these poems suddenly in 1952. I read them and I was amazed. I remember waking up in the night, putting on the light and reading them again. Of course I published them.”

The volume was For the Unfallen. It remains a powerful book, astonishing as a young man’s debut; ornate, rhetorical, grandiose in its subjects and themes. Genesis, the very first poem, takes the creation myth as its own creative occasion, beginning: “Against the burly air I strode, / crying the miracles of God” and ending:

By blood we live, the hot, the cold,
To ravage and redeem the world,
There is no bloodless myth will hold.
And by Christ’s blood are men made
free
Though in close shrouds their bodies
lie
Under the rough pelt of the sea;
Though Earth has rolled beneath her
weight
The bones that cannot bear the light.

For the Unfallen, eventually published in 1959, and all Hill’s subsequent books, dwell on blood and religion; his treatments of violence range from Funeral Music (from King Log, 1968), a remarkable sequence on the astonishingly violent battles of the Wars of the Roses, to his careful and sensitive elegies for Holocaust victims. From his earliest poetry he was intensely interested in martyrs, whether of the religious controversies of the 16th and 17th centuries, or totalitarian regimes of the 20th; and he aimed at a scrupulous weighing of the appropriate words by which their witness could be mediated. By making historical atrocities more immediate, and refusing to abandon the memory of the dead, Hill was also tacitly calling attention to more contemporary political predicaments.

His poetry was deliberately unfashionable – Hill emerged at the same time as the Movement poets, writers such as Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis, and the contrast between them could not have been greater. Hill’s work was steeped in history (and occasionally myth), unashamed of intellectual and scholarly breadth; Movement poetry was cautious, rooted in a defiantly ordinary contemporary English postwar vision, scornful of “pretension”.

Nonetheless, Hill’s beautifully cadenced verse, with a recondite vocabulary enjoyable for its very strangeness, was unignorable, and he found a place in anthologies throughout the years.

He also published three volumes of essays, The Lords of Limit, The Enemy’s Country, and Style and Faith (all included in the Collected Critical Writings of Geoffrey Hill, 2008), which are object lessons in the importance of scrupulous reading, and equally scrupulous writing. His essay on Ezra Pound’s fascist broadcasts, My Word Is My Bond, is a highly significant rendering of Hill’s own ethic, and manages to be both rigorous and sympathetic in its judgments.

By the time his Collected Poems were published in 1985, the blurb in the Penguin edition confidently presented the polarised judgments on Hill alongside each other, commenting that Hill had generally “encountered either baffled goodwill or baffled resentment”. There were sympathetic commentators – Christopher Ricks, for many years, and Peter Robinson – who gathered together intelligent, informed appreciations of work that required a certain amount of research and exegesis for its proper appreciation. Hill could be a distant, exacting, curmudgeonly and sometimes ungrateful figure in those days, even to those who wished him well; though he also had unswervingly loyal relationships with friends such as RS Thomas and David Wright.

Illness, and a period of poetic inactivity, preceded Hill’s move to Boston in the US in 1988 to teach theology and English literature. He did not publish another book until Canaan in 1996, after which the books poured from him. He returned to England in 2006.

In his last years, when volumes came so much faster, Hill professed himself amazed at his youthful patience. From the 1950s to the 1980s, Hill might work at a phrase for weeks; but having had a heart attack in the late 1980s (and again in 2001), he had begun to feel, in his own words, “If I don’t do it now, I never will: there is that sort of urgency.”

After he went to the US, he was diagnosed as having suffered, since childhood, from chronic depression, and “various exhausting obsessive-compulsive disorders”; and the prescription of Prozac transformed his life. Hill had, in his critical work, written with sympathy and tact of the religious writers who suffered from neurasthenic difficulties, and later was quite open about his own case, speaking about it in interview, and in the poems.

Prozac he described as “a signal / mystery, mercy, of these latter days”. Another factor in his eventual happiness was surely his marriage in 1987 to Alice Goodman. With her, he had a daughter, Alberta; he also had four children, Julian, Andrew, Jeremy and Bethany, from his first marriage, to Nancy Whittaker, which had ended in divorce.

Goodman was the librettist of John Adams’s operas Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer. In 1990, she was received into the Church of England, and in 2001 was ordained as an Anglican priest. Hill described his wife as one of the few people whose comments on his work he would always listen to – “99% of the time she’s right” – and introduced Hill to some diverse and surprising influences, such as the poet Frank O’Hara and the choreographer and dancer Mark Morris, whom Hill startlingly compared to Dryden. In Speech! Speech! there are a handful of subtle, tender lines that are surely addressed to his wife, and about his happiness: “Ageing, I am happy ... Togetherness after 16 years? You’re on.”

Hill’s last work had a mixed reception. The quartet of books from Canaan to The Orchards of Syon (2002) constitute a modern Pilgrim’s Progress, Hill’s epic conflation of autobiography, theology and history, rendered in defiantly modernist style and startling in its juxtapositions of the contemporary and the eternal. It is work that will undoubtedly take a great deal of time and a collaboration of commentators and critics to fully appreciate; but in its extent and ambition, and its ethical commitment, it already stands out amid the typical English poetry of its time. It seems certain that his work will survive long after the work of more fashionable poets has faded from view.

As professor of poetry at Oxford (2010-15), Hill delivered 15 lectures on writers from Shakespeare to Larkin, occasionally making sharp remarks about the state of contemporary poetry and the current poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy. He was knighted in 2012.

He continued to write – he had a lead essay in the Times Literary Supplement in March this year, on Charles Williams. For the first time in 40 years, he had also begun to play the piano.

He is survived by Alice and his children.

• Geoffrey William Hill, poet and academic, born 18 June 1932; died 30 June 2016

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jul/01/geoffrey-hill-obituary

Here's a review of Hill's Broken Hierarchies (2014) by Terry Kelly:

http://fridaynightboys300.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/geoffrey-hill-broken-hierarchies-review.html

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #356

Scotty Moore RIP

Scotty Moore obituary
Rock guitarist who in the mid-50s helped create Elvis Presley’s revolutionary sound

Adam Sweeting
Thursday 30 June 2016

If the mythology of the rock’n’roll star began with Elvis Presley, then Scotty Moore, who has died in Nashville aged 84, could claim to have invented the role of the rock guitarist. Moore was one of the creators of the revolutionary sound that launched Presley’s career in the mid-1950s, and the discs that they cut together in the early years of Presley’s career stand today almost as the Ten Commandments of rock’n’roll. As Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones put it: “All I wanted to do in the world was to be able to play and sound like that. Everyone else wanted to be Elvis, I wanted to be Scotty.”

Moore’s great adventure with Elvis began on 5 July 1954, when Sam Phillips, boss of Sun Records, assembled Moore and the bassist Bill Black to join the 19-year-old Elvis for what was supposed to be an audition. However, their spontaneous performance of Arthur Crudup’s That’s All Right, with Presley’s voice riding confidently over Black’s thumping bass and Moore’s lithe guitar licks (enhanced by an echoing “tape slap” effect), was so fresh and powerful that Phillips released it as a single.

It was a local hit in Memphis, and the start of a rocket-powered ride. By the end of 1955, Moore, Black and Presley had been joined by the drummer DJ Fontana (their band becoming known as the Blue Moon Boys), had become a sensational live attraction, and had released a batch of singles including Good Rockin’ Tonight, Baby Let’s Play House and Mystery Train. Moore cited Mystery Train as one of his favourites, and its crisp, propulsive guitar work is some of his best. He preferred to play Gibson hollow-body guitars, and described his playing as “just a combination of several different styles rolled into one. I was a big fan of Merle Travis, of Chet Atkins with his thumb and finger styles, and a lot of the blues players.”

After Elvis signed to the RCA label in late 1955, the pace of touring and recording accelerated frantically, as they created a stream of classic hits including Heartbreak Hotel (featuring an eerie solo from Moore), Hound Dog, Don’t Be Cruel, Too Much and Jailhouse Rock. The group also appeared with Elvis on TV shows and in the movies Loving You (1957), Jailhouse Rock (1957), King Creole (1958) and GI Blues (1960), made after Elvis returned from the army.

Moore was born on a farm near Gadsden, Tennessee, son of Mattie (nee Hefley) and Winfield Scott Moore. With three older guitar-playing brothers and a father who played the banjo and fiddle, he started playing the guitar when he was eight. In 1948 he joined the US navy, and served in China and Korea before he was discharged in January 1952. His oldest brother ran a dry-cleaning business in Memphis, and he gave Scotty a job in the hat department. Aiming to make a living in music, Moore formed a country music group, Doug Poindexter and the Starlite Wranglers, which made a recording of Moore’s song My Kind of Carrying On for Phillips’s Sun Records.

After Phillips put Moore together with Presley, Moore also became Elvis’s manager in 1954, but he was edged out by Colonel Tom Parker. When Presley signed to RCA, both he and Parker enjoyed huge financial benefits, while the band were paid a wage. Moore said that in 1956 he earned $8,000, while Elvis became a millionaire. During the making of the film Loving You, the musicians threatened to quit when they discovered they were being paid less than the minimum scale for actors. Afterwards, they were paid per performance rather than receiving a salary.

When Presley was drafted into the US army in 1958, Moore worked at the Memphis label Fernwood Records, and played on and produced Thomas Wayne’s single Tragedy, which reached No 5 on the Billboard Hot 100. With the Scotty Moore Trio, he cut the instrumental Have Guitar, Will Travel. He resumed work with Presley after his return from the military, playing on the album Elvis Is Back! (1960) and appearing regularly on his albums until How Great Thou Art (1967).

However, the now middle-of-the-road Presley was increasingly preoccupied with making movies, and Moore boosted his income by working as a production manager for Phillips in Memphis. In 1964 he made the solo album The Guitar That Changed the World, comprising instrumental versions of Elvis’s hits, but it sold poorly. He parted company with Phillips and moved to Nashville, where he founded the studio Music City Recorders and started Belle Meade Records. His final work with Presley was on a 1968 comeback NBC television special.

Thenceforth he concentrated on engineering and production. He engineered Ringo Starr’s album Beaucoups of Blues (1970), as well as singles by Joe Simon. In 1979 he played the guitar on Ral Donner’s album I’ve Been Away for Awhile Now, a musical tribute to Presley after his death. He played on the Carl Perkins album 706 ReUnion: A Sentimental Journey (1992); and on the Elvis tribute album All The King’s Men (1997) alongside Fontana, Richards, Jeff Beck, Ronnie Wood and Levon Helm. His memoir That’s Alright, Elvis, co-written with James Dickerson, was published in 1998.

In 2000 he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and, last October, into the Memphis Music Hall of Fame, with Richards accepting the award on his behalf.

Moore’s longtime parter, Gail Pollock, died in 2015. He is survived by five children, Donald, Linda, Andrea, Vikki and Tasha.

• Scotty Moore (Winfield Scott Moore III), guitarist, producer and songwriter, born 27 December 1931; died 28 June 2016

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/jun/30/scotty-moore-obituary

The Somme - lest we forget

Last night's set lists

At The Habit, York: -

Ron Elderly: -
Streets Of London
My Home Town

Da Elderly: -
Out On The Weekend
Heart Of Gold

The Elderly Brothers: -
Crying In The Rain
The Sound Of Silence
When Will I Be Loved
Then I Kissed Her
Out Of Time
Medley: High Heel Sneakers/It's All Over Now

After holidays and following Neil Young's tour of Europe, The Elderly Brothers made a welcome return to The Habit on what turned out to be a busy night. With plenty of players and, eventually a bar full of punters, there was the usual eclectic mix of musical styles on show. Our host was interrupted during his closing song with a rousing chorus of "Happy Birthday To You" as the clock struck 12 and celebrations continued until chucking-out time.

Happy 90th birthday to Mel Brooks...

A day late we know, but we hope he doesn't mind...

Celebrating Mel Brooks On His 90th Birthday: A Classic Routine

Michael Dale

28 June 2016

Everyone thought he was crazy when Mel Brooks told them he was going to make a movie about a Broadway musical called "Springtime For Hitler." But "The Producers" now considered a satirical masterpiece, won the fledgling filmmaker a 1968 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and turned his career around.

While he's best known today for hilarious films like "Young Frankenstein," "High Anxiety" and "Blazing Saddles," and for his later in life Broadway success with THE PRODUCERS and YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN, during the 1950s Brooks was primarily known as a sketch comedy writer. His Broadway debut came penning scenes for the revue Leonard Sillman'S NEW FACES OF 1952, which featured his bit where a small-time crook, played by Paul Lynde, was upset because his son (Ronny Graham) wanted to be a musician instead of following in his footsteps.

He then turned to television, joining Carl Reiner, Neil Simon and Larry Gelbart on the writing staff of Sid Caesar's "Caesar's Hour," before heading back to Broadway as co-bookwriter of SHINBONE ALLEY, a musical based on Don Marquis' stories of "archie and mehitabel," about a poetry-writing cockroach and his alley cat friend.

His book for the 1962 musical ALL-AMERICAN (score by Charles Strouse and Lee Adams) had Ray Bolger playing a European college professor who takes a position at a football crazy American university and uses mathematical equations to turn their sorry football team into winners.

During this time, Brooks' outrageous personality and energy made him a popular television guest, especially when he and Reiner teamed up for routines where Brooks was interviewed as a 2,000 year old man.

In this 1967 clip from the Colgate Comedy Hour, Brooks and Reiner are introduced by Dick Shawn for a set that includes an explanation of how applause was invented.

http://www.broadwayworld.com/article/Celebrating-Mel-Brooks-On-His-90th-Birthday-A-Classic-Routine-20160628

Happy 90th birthday to funnyman Mel Brooks

28 June 2016

A tip of the hat to funnyman Mel Brooks, who turns 90 today! The director of  "Blazing Saddles," "Young Frankenstein" and "The Producers" is one of the few people alive who've earned an EGOT: an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony.

He was born Melvin Kaminsky on June 28, 1926 in Brooklyn. He began his career as a comic and a writer for the early TV variety show "Your Show of Shows." Along with Buck Henry, he created the hilarious '60s spy spoof series "Get Smart."

He went on to direct some of the best-known comedy films of all time, including "The Producers," "Blazing Saddles," "Young Frankenstein," "Silent Movie," "High Anxiety," and "Spaceballs." He won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for "The Producers" and received nominations for the screenplay for "Young Frankenstein" (which he co-wrote with Gene Wilder) and for the song "Blazing Saddles" from the film of the same name.

The Broadway adaptation of "The Producers" starring Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick ran from 2001 to 2007 and won a record-breaking 12 Tony Awards.

Brooks was married to Oscar-winning actress Anne Bancroft from 1964 until her death in 2005. Their son Max Brooks wrote "The Zombie Survival Guide" and "World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War," which became the hit Brad Pitt film.

Here's some of the ways you can celebrate Mel Brooks's birthday today:
Join the Mel Brooks Blogathon
Follow Mel on Twitter. (He describes himself as "Writer, Director, Actor, Producer and failed Dairy Farmer.")
Read "The 10 Funniest Lines From His AFI Tribute"
Watch the career-spanning documentary "Mel Brooks: Make a Noise" on Netflix or PBS
Listen to Mel Brooks recreate his classic 2000-Year-Old Man character as he talks about what Times Square was like back then
Buy "The Mel Brooks Collection" on Amazonhttp://www.examiner.com/article/happy-90th-birthday-to-funnyman-mel-brooks

Quentin Tarantino talks music and films

Quentin Tarantino's Jukebox

For the first time since Hitchcock, moviegoers have embraced a film director whose name denotes a genre in itself.

Transcending his reputation as a maker of violent movies, Quentin Tarantino is also recognised by his fans and admirers as an exceptional soundtrack producer. True Romance, Natural Born Killers, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, Kill Bill... Tarantino selected all the tracks himself. In the first of two programmes, the enfant terrible of American Cinema reveals his musical obsessions and his influences, and talks us through the contents of his virtual jukebox.

Music is a critical element in many movies, but never more so than in Tarantino's - he plunders his own backstory, remembering the tracks of his youth, as well as often making references to - and featuring music from - cult movies and television.

This intriguing documentary (coming to you from the red leatherette banquettes of Quentin's favourite virtual diner in LA) not only forage in the annals of great popular music, they provide a unique insight into the way music can infuse a film, and the way a film can bring music back from the dusty vaults.

Also featuring Mary Wilson of the Supremes, Vicki Wickham (manager of Dusty Springfield), film producer Laurence Bender, music & movie critic Paul Gambaccini, film editor Sally Menke and music supervisors Mary Ramos and Karyn Rachtman.

Presented by conductor/composer & film-music historian Robert Ziegler.

Part 1: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00lj8yt#play

Part 2: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00lnczw

Matthew and Michael Dickman interview 2016

‘The only way I could really talk about his suicide was in a poem’

When their half-brother took a fatal overdose, twins Matthew and Michael Dickman wrote a series of poems in his honour. Now, the collection is breaking taboos about suicide and inviting comparisons with America’s great poets

Alex Clark
Sunday 19 June 2016

If you go to interview twin poets about the death of their elder brother, and the work they have made jointly in response to it, your natural expectation is that the atmosphere will be serious, even sombre. And, indeed, my conversation with American writers Matthew and Michael Dickman, whose book revolves around the suicide, a decade ago, of their half-brother Darin Hull, frequently enters inevitably painful emotional territory, and the extent to which art is ever able to chart a course through it. But the morning that we spend together is punctuated with gusts of hilarity, irreverence, playfulness and informality, the alternating rainstorms and sunshine that flood the Bloomsbury streets outside an almost too neat pathetic fallacy.

The laughs begin straight away, as we’re settling down, and Michael – the older of the 40-year-old twins by two minutes, and a shade more reserved than Matthew – is pouring us coffee. One brother – I forget which now, because they both do it – calls the other “Chancho”. What’s behind that nickname, I ask. Ah, they reply; yes, they’d better explain. “Since high school we’ve called each other pig,” says Michael, “and then versions of it in different languages, like cochon or chancho, or the diminutive in Spanish, chanchito.” “Also, piggy, or Mr Pig,” adds Matthew. “Or Piggums,” rounds off Michael. They also have pig tattoos on their arms.

It emerges that “one of the only books we seem to have gotten through in high school” was William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, and Piggy was the character with whom they identified. “Piggy is heavier set, with glasses, and he gets picked on,” explains Matthew, “and my brother and I went through a period of getting really picked on a lot in school.” But even more touchingly, Michael recalls the moment at the end of the book when the schoolboy Ralph “refers to the now deceased Piggy as his one true good friend. And that was always true of Matthew.”

I’ve already apologised for talking about twin stuff the minute I arrived – how to tell them apart, etc. They’re used to it, they say, graciously. But now I point out that their affinity with Lord of the Flies is interesting: after all, before it descends into savagery, the novel delivers a version of the fantasy that all children have, of a sudden and decisive release from adult control, and the emergence of a world in which they can make their own rules. It is a mirror of the way people often view twins – bound together in a space of their own, and at some level immune to the demands of others. Is that a cliche?

“It certainly happened with us,” replies Michael, remembering the private language they had as toddlers (a paediatrician told their mother to put a stop to it). “There was never a question that we would have someone to play with, or who we would sit with in the cafeteria. Not that we didn’t have those terrible lonely moments for children growing up – but we at least had each other.”

Did they feel like that within their own family, too?

“Still!” laughs Matthew. “If all the family members get together for Christmas dinner or Thanksgiving, Michael and I – every time – will sequester ourselves in the kitchen, saying ‘Oh, we’ll cook for everybody because we love cooking’. We do love cooking, but just to get away from everything and have protection. And as the evening goes on, and people are in the living room drinking wine and suffering, once in a while they’ll come in to the kitchen and say, ‘Do you guys need any help?’ in this desperate way, you know, ‘Will you please save me?"

Michael: “Very little, actually.”

Matthew: “It’s way more self-indulgent – it’s more like we just want to hang out.”

Michael: “And you know, we have this sense of humour that we’ve been working on since childhood, which isn’t always shared with everyone at a family get-together.”

Hiding in the kitchen notwithstanding, their family ties are evident in Brother, a selection of poems from their previous books, collected here for the first time. The book – a “tête-bêche”, or “head-to-tail” edition, in which each poet’s work occupies a part of the book, which is printed upside down in relation to the other’s – is dedicated to their elder sister, Dana. Eleven years older than Michael and Matthew, she and Darin, who was born in 1968, were the children of Allen Hull, who some years later conceived the twins during a brief relationship with their mother, Wendy Dickman. He lived nearby, in Portland, Oregon, but never as part of their family; Wendy went on to have another daughter, Elizabeth, with a new partner.

As their half-brother, the twins tell me, Darin exerted an immense influence on them. Describing the first time he wrote about Darin’s death from an overdose, in the poem “Trouble”, Matthew explains: “The only way I could really talk about his suicide was by including him in this poem that is basically a long list of famous people who killed themselves. Because Darin was such a famous person in my mind and my heart.”

Trouble, which appeared in Matthew’s debut collection, All-American Poem(2008), also appears in Brother, and in the middle of a chronicle of the deaths of Marilyn Monroe, Ernest Hemingway, Sarah Kane and John Berryman come these lines:

“My brother opened / thirteen fentanyl patches and stuck them on his body / until it wasn’t his body any more.”

Elsewhere, in the poem Coffee, part of a sequence entitled Notes Passed to My Brother on the Occasion of His Funeral, Matthew writes:

“Once, I had a brother / who used to sit and drink his coffee black, smoke / his cigarettes and be quiet for a moment / before his brain turned its armadas against him”.

I ask them why Darin felt so “famous” to them. “We were raised without a father, and so I think there’s part of us that, through our older brother, got some of that energy,” says Matthew. “He would make you feel very special in his company. He was someone who had this really big, empathic heart – for years, he worked with troubled youth in different programmes. So he was, in our minds, always beloved, and complicated.”

“And he and Dana were just so cool,” chips in Michael. “Listening to the Cure, and smoking clove cigarettes.” Darin, who shared the twins’ love of skateboarding, took them from the “nice, family” supply stores to somewhere called Rebel Skates – edgy, sketchy, downtown. He and Dana added British bands such as Cocteau Twins and Joy Division to their playlists of punk and west coast rap.

Darin’s death came after problems with drugs and alcohol, but Brother is not coy about the manner of his death. “You know that our older brother killed himself: it’s not hidden,” Matthew says. “And it’s not really even hidden in our poems. And that’s something that I’m excited about with this book, because I think that the subject of suicide, at least in the States, is still one that there’s a lot of shame around, a lot of complicated feelings around; people keep it quiet.”

The poems themselves didn’t come for a long time. Neither of them, as Matthew puts it, “are poets who believe you experience something and you immediately need to write about it, or it needs to be a poem at all”.

While Matthew’s poetry has an expansive, free-associative, narrative style, Michael’s tends towards the spartan and oblique, appearing to portray an interior world under immense pressure, and it came as a result of a series of dreams he had in the immediate aftermath of Darin’s death. “About a week after he died, and for about a month or so, every night I had an intense dream about flies. This is very unusual for me. The dreams that I remember tend to be very boring: I’ll have a dream that I’m at a coffee shop, and I’ve ordered a coffee. End of dream.” Now, though, his nights were studded with human-sized “Hollywood flies”, or rooms packed with flies he had somehow to get through. Sometimes Darin appeared in them – “it was very exciting to have a sense of him, his physical body next to mine” – and then, abruptly, they stopped altogether. But their “residue” persisted, and eventually Michael began to write about them, conceding now that the dreams “might have just been a way to trick myself into addressing the subject matter in a poem”. The result is stunning, unnerving, disturbing. “At the end of one of the billion light years of loneliness”, the poem False Start begins, “My mother sits on the floor of her new kitchen carefully feeding the flies from her fingertips”.

It was Matthew Hollis, poet, award-winning biographer and poetry editor at Faber and Faber, who thought the Dickmans’ poems about their brother would work as a single volume, and, he told me, “connect far more widely than poetry sometimes does”. A long-term fan of their work, he sees in Matthew’s “long, rolling lines” the influences of Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg and Frank O’Hara, and in Michael’s shorter, more European-inflected work echoes of Wallace Stevens. But what united them, he was sure, was this deep, personal investment in describing their family’s loss.

The Dickmans discuss their work, and their lives, so openly and warmly that you can momentarily forget how painful it must be. How does it feel to them, to be sitting here, talking about it? “I’m very proud of this work,” says Michael, “and of this book in particular. And I also wish it never existed. So that is a strange position to be in.” Matthew agrees: “I would guess anyone who’s written about the death of a beloved would give up that book and any other book that they would ever write again just to hang out with them again.”

They’ve told me about the plays they wrote jointly, one for each of the 50 states of America (plus Puerto Rico and Guam), which began life as a scramble to help Michael finish a grad school class project that he’d left until the last minute. “I love that you call it a project!” laughs Matthew. What would he call it? “A scam!” They’ve also told me how once, when Matthew was in a college play, Michael went to watch. At the interval, Michael went to the toilet, as did the play’s director, who began to berate him for his poor performance.

Now, though, I want to ask them about the starriest experience of their careers. How did they come by their roles – as the ghostly “pre-cogs” – in Steven Spielberg’s futuristic Minority Report? They immediately pull my leg. Michael: “No one has ever asked us that.” Matthew: “It’s so weird.” I express astonishment. Michael: “I’m kidding.” OK, but how? They’re not quite sure how it came together, but after being involved in high-school and college theatre, they were briefly signed to an agency. In the first audition, they sat in fold-out chairs and shook. For the callback, they were told that Spielberg really liked their look, and “that a lot of the twins they had auditioned were really beautiful models, really handsome, like surf gods”, says Matthew.

Michael adds: “‘Spielberg loved how vacant your faces looked.’”

They roar.

Matthew: “‘Like nothing was happening inside your heads.’”

Michael: “‘Slightly weird-looking idiots!’”

They got the parts, and loved working with Spielberg, who treated them with great kindness, they say. As a thank you, they bought him a first edition of the poetry of Jewish-German Nobel prize winner Nelly Sachs, whose work the director had put on the cast and crew’s reading list during the making of Schindler’s List. Now, Spielberg asked Minority Report’s star, Samantha Morton, to hold the book, and read a poem at random to herself during the film’s closing scene, a fact that pleases them inordinately. The Dickman brothers: getting poetry into the most unexpected of places, with double piggy power.

Brother by Matthew and Michael Dickman is published by Faber, £10.99

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/19/brother-matthew-dickman-michael-dickman-interview

There's a terrific Terry Kelly interview with Michael here:

http://fridaynightboys300.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/terry-kelly-interviews-michael-dickman.html

And a review of Green Migraine here: 

http://fridaynightboys300.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/michael-dickman-green-migraine-review.html

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #355

Hard Day on the Planet...

Two Neil Youngs on a Tree Stump...

Three good reasons to remain in Europe

Re-discovering Ross Macdonald

On the 100th anniversary of Ross Macdonald’s birth, Linwood Barclay reflects on the mystery writer’s work

Linwood Barclay

The Globe and Mail

1 May 2015

Ross Macdonald: Four Novels of the 1950s
Author Edited by Tom Nolan
Publisher The Library of America
Pages 926 pages
Price $43
Year 2015

Back in 1970, when I was 15 years old, my bookstore was the twirling metal stand at the Shea’s IGA in Bobcaygeon, Ont., where my parents ran a cottage resort and trailer park. This was where I’d grab an Agatha Christie novel, or the latest Nero Wolfe mystery by Rex Stout. But on this particular day, what caught my eye was the Bantam paperback edition of The Goodbye Look, a Lew Archer novel by Ross Macdonald.

Six years later, when I found myself spending an evening with the man, having dinner with him, giving him a tour of Trent University, it would dawn on me what a pivotal moment that visit to the grocery store had been.

But more about that later.

On the paperback cover was a quote from a William Goldman article in the New York Times Book Review: “The finest series of detective novels ever written by an American.” That was good enough for me. I put down 95 cents and the book was mine.

The key word in that cover blurb was “ever.” Goldman, the famous screenwriter and novelist, was clearly implying Ross Macdonald’s work had surpassed that of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. He wasn’t alone in thinking that way. In the sixties and seventies, Macdonald (whose real name was Kenneth Millar) was seen to be their successor, a novelist who’d taken the conventions of the detective novel and enriched them with psychological insight and greater moral complexity.

Since Macdonald’s death in 1983, his star has faded somewhat, while Chandler and Hammett remain literary household names. But on the 100th anniversary of Macdonald’s birth, The Library of America is taking a welcome step to ensure that his work is given proper consideration.

It has just published Ross Macdonald: Four Novels of the 1950s – The Way Some People Die, The Barbarous Coast, The Doomsters and The Galton Case. The book also includes a detailed chronology of the author’s life and a selection of articles and letters by Macdonald that offer insights into his approach to his work.

The first two novels are of the hard-boiled variety, and owe much to Chandler and Hammett. But Macdonald believed he could do better than that, particularly better than Chandler, whose loose plots were designed to create good scenes, whereas Macdonald viewed plot as a vehicle for meaning.

His approach has evolved by the time he writes The Doomsters, about an escapee from a psychiatric facility who comes to Archer for help, and The Galton Case, in which a woman engages Archer to find her long-lost son. Archer himself is rarely the story. He’s not hired by old girlfriends with long legs and ample bosoms who now find themselves in a jam. As Macdonald himself had said, Archer was so two-dimensional that if he turned sideways, he would disappear. I wouldn’t go that far. Archer feels fully realized, has a strong moral code, a sense of decency. But he is also a device, a kind of gardener who unearths dirt to allow sunshine in and expose diseased roots. Unlike the earlier novels, where Archer often tangled with common thugs, inThe Doomsters and The Galton Case the detective’s clients are more upscale, but their sins run just as deep.

The latter is seen by many as Macdonald’s masterpiece, and it may well have been at the time, but his career highs would come in later decades with The Chill, Black Money and The Underground Man. The Galton Case, however, marked a period where Macdonald mined, in a more direct way, his own life for material. It explores his feeling of displacement that came from being born in the United States but raised in Canada. Plus, there’s the theme of the absent father: Macdonald’s abandoned the family when he was a boy; in Galton, Archer is on the trail of a young man named John who’s in search of his own. (Macdonald’s father’s name was John.) Many of the 18 Archer novels, and short stories (one called, interestingly, Gone Girl), are about disappearances, and it doesn’t seem to be reading too much into things to surmise that much of Macdonald’s writing was about finding what he himself had lost.

This Library of America collection is edited by Tom Nolan, who wrote the definitive biography of the author in the late 1990s, and is co-editor of the upcoming Meanwhile There Are Letters: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and Ross Macdonald.

Macdonald was a prodigious writer of letters. I know. I have a stack of them.

I was in my late teens when I wrote to my favourite writer, who lived in Santa Barbara, Calif., ostensibly to ask if he could point me to pieces written about him – such as a Newsweek cover story – for a thesis I was intending to write for a Trent English course. When, to my joy, he replied, I wrote back and made a request I now realize was a huge imposition. Could I send him the manuscript of the detective novel I’d written? He said sure.

I’ve often wondered why. Maybe it had something to do with my letter’s postmark. Ontario had made its mark on Macdonald. He’d attended Kitchener-Waterloo Collegiate (and later taught there; writer-broadcaster June Callwood was one of his students), studied at Western, married the daughter of Kitchener’s mayor (Margaret Millar would achieve fame as a crime writer before her husband hit it big), saw his first professional work published in Toronto Saturday Night.

We had many letters back and forth covering a range of topics, including that book I’d sent him, and a second one. (Neither of those novels was ever published, and we can all be grateful for that.)

In 1976, in the lead-up to the publication of The Blue Hammer, Macdonald wrote to tell me he was coming to Canada. Maybe there would be a chance to meet in Peterborough when he was visiting with Margaret’s family. The call came on a May afternoon. I’d just finished burying the fish guts from our cottage resort’s guests’ catch. Did I want to join them for dinner?

For most other kids in this country – I never played hockey – this would be like getting a call from Bobby Orr asking if you wanted to hang out.

I raced over and found him standing outside, as though expecting me. He was dressed in a sport jacket and nice slacks, looking just like his author photo on the hardcover of Sleeping Beauty I’d brought with me. He was reserved and soft-spoken.

He asked about my family. I told him about losing my father when I was 16. It seemed to hit home. “I’m sorry,” he said.

At his request, I’d brought along a copy of the skin magazine Gallery that included an interview with him he’d not seen. He peeked into the bag, blushed, asked that I wait a minute while he went inside and tucked it away into his suitcase.

I drove him along the road that hugs the Otonabee River, gave him a walking tour of Trent. We talked about writing and other things, but I can recall almost nothing specific of what we said. I think, maybe, I was in shock. I do remember telling him, over dinner at the home of his wife’s relatives, how much I loved the low-key, opening chapter of The Underground Man, where Archer befriends a troubled young boy feeding some blue jays.

“I’ll write another one like that for you,” he said, and smiled.

Not that he actually would have, but unbeknownst to him, he’d already written his final novel. Encroaching Alzheimer’s disease would end his writing career, and seven years later, he would be dead.

In my copy of his novel Sleeping Beauty, he wrote: “For Linwood, who will, I hope, someday outwrite me. Sincerely, Kenneth Millar (Ross Macdonald).”

Perhaps as much as I treasure that inscription are these words he wrote to me in a letter dated Feb. 28, 1976:

“This is a fairly complex discipline that you and I have undertaken, and it takes time to master or be mastered by it. Something like a lifetime, in my rather slow case, but worth the time, and we make friends on the way.”

Linwood Barclay’s new novel, Broken Promise, was released in July 2015

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/book-reviews/on-the-100th-anniversary-of-ross-macdonalds-birth-linwood-barclay-reflects-on-the-mystery-writers-work/article24220346/

You might also like this:

http://www.januarymagazine.com/profiles/nolan.html

Shut the damned door!

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #354