Tonight, the Gene Siskel Film Center will be hosting an extremely rare screening of Barry Gifford’s episodes of Hotel Room, directed by David Lynch. I’ve been told that the video transfer was personally supervised by Lynch, so it’s going to look terrific!
Tomorrow night I’ll be chatting with Gifford about his new book The Roy Stories. It’s 7:00pm at the Book Cellar.
Gravity [2013]
1. “Clear skies with a chance of satellite debris.”
2. A teardrop detaches from her eye and floats away.
3. Her knuckles half submerged in muddy red clay.
This movie is literally hair-raising. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a more suspenseful movie in a theater.
Laura [1944]
1. Vincent Price’s crisp nasality. “Would you care for a bite, lieutenant?”
2. She never quite gets around to lighting her cigarette but stubs it out anyway.
3. In-wall bedside radio.
Enjoy this outtake from Pause of the Clock. Tchavdar, the cinematographer, loses patience with me. (That’s a paddleball in the background by the way.)
Computer Chess [2013]
1. Split-screen skepticism.
2. “I wonder how much all those people paid for that conference anyway. At least I got my catharsis for free.”
3. She bends over. He peers into her cranium.
Yankee Doodle Dandy [1942]
1. “You know why? Because he’s the whole darn country squeezed into one pair of pants.”
2. The camera moves through the Broadway marquee streetscape.
3. FDR has a very large thumbnail.
Over the weekend I started logging the location sound rolls. So far I’ve logged 15 out of the 20 total. Basically what I’m noting are things like scene and take info, sound quality, and what I think of the performances.
As I’ve written before, we shot the film over a pretty long period of time, and the script went through quite a few changes. The “final” screenplay we worked with when we started didn’t stay final for very long. I think there were maybe three or four drafts altogether. Looking through my records I haven’t been able to unearth all of those drafts, so part of what I’m doing while logging these sound rolls is to reconstruct the actual scenes we filmed. Including scene numbers. Let’s just say I’ve made some interesting discoveries, including the fact that we apparently changed our scene numbering system partway through filming (!) But in the end that’s not necessarily that important, Pause of the Clock being what it is. The order and flow of the scenes is going to be quite different than when we started making the movie.
In the movie, I play a character named Rob; insomuch as I had any kind of strategy as an actor, I guess it was something like “be as casual and laid-back as possible.” With hindsight what that amounts to is that I sound like I’m stoned most of the time. Really, really weird, since at the time I was about as square as you could get. I think I’d had exactly one beer in my whole life, which was only because I’d gone on a family vacation to Canada and I wanted to shock my parents by ordering a Guinness in front of them. Anyhow, suffice it to say that as an “actor,” I contribute more cringe-worthy moments on these tapes than I’d care to admit. But I have to separate Rob the actor from Rob the filmmaker. Because from a filmmaking point of view, my awful performance might just be a winning element.
Delicatessen [1991]
1. Snail on the record.
2. Hula bounce.
3. “I would have liked to say my last goodbyes!”
“We’ll do that right now.”
Death Watch [1980]
1. “Some things are private?”
“Are they? Why?”
2. She assures her that the wig is real human hair.
3. Finally, he sleeps. Sitting up. He sleeps right through it.
Why this touching, understated sci-fi movie isn’t better known is a mystery.
Z.P.G. [1972]
1. Newspaper headline: LOS ANGELES KILLER SMOG 90,000 DEAD
2. Artificial blood spurts out of the doll’s neck.
3. Plastic handcuffs and pruning shears.
