NME: BRITAIN’S BEST SMALL VENUES

Following on from Previous Post, picked up the latest NME to read about their now annual campaign to find Britain’s best small music venue. Last year’s winner was the Forum in Tunbridge Wells. By their definition, small venues hold 500 people or less. You can vote for your favourite at NME.Com/smallvenues

Many great small venues – always the best place to see music live – have closed down in recent years as the NME highlights. The situation is somewhat analogous to the record store situation. By bringing the issue to national attention, the value of these small venues will be recognised. People are beginning to realise that the future of music rests not on digital downloads and virtual experiences but on grassroots action. Live music and the local scene has become even more important in these benighted times.

NME2: GRANT GEE AND MICHAEL HOROWITZ

 

Pleased to see in the same issue tips to the hat for two of The Generalist’s favourite people, both of whom I have done extensive interviews with.

Following the NME’s cover story on the upcoming Stone Roses documentary by Shane Meadows, the paper features a Top 10 line-up of the greatest examples of rock movie-making. Included is Grant Gee’s very excellent Radiohead movie ‘Meeting People Is Easy’ which follows the band on their exhausting world tour in support of their 1997 album ‘OK Computer.’ Its unusual and insightful into the realities of global promotion. The band burn out in front of your eyes.

My favourite of Grant’s film to date is the brilliant Joy Division documentary he made with Jon Savage. You can read my excitable early review of the film.

My lengthy 2008  interview with Grant about the making of the film is on the AUDIO GENERALIST site.

Grant also shot and edited [with Mat Whitecross] the remarkable doc ‘Scott Walker: 30 Century Man’ for which David Bowie was Executive Producer.

Most recently I watched with great interest ‘Patience’, Grant’s most recent film following the journey the late writer W.G. Sebald made across Suffolk, which formed the basis of his now famous book ‘The Rings of Saturn’. Beautifully shot on b&w film stock , the subject suits perfectly Grant’s multilevel collage film-making approach. Three-quarters of the way through I remembered that I still had Grant’s number in my book (yes I still have a phone book). The number still worked, Grant was at home and a few days later we met up at the Lewes Arms for a catch-up. I’m sworn to secrecy at present about his next documentary project but it promises to be interesting. There’s a great 2001 interview with Sebald here. Also a great post on Richard Skinner’s blog on Max Sebald’s Writing Tips.

 

Good to also see the great British poet Michael Horovitz in the NME. He recently performed at the Albert Hall with Graham Coxon and Damon Albarn from Blur with Paul Weller (on drums!!). The results of their collaboration is a full album and single to be released on Record Store Day.

I conducted a long in-depth interview with Mike on 25th October 2007 which can be found on the AUDIO GENERALIST site. I was pleased to discover today that my interview is also linked via Mike’s Wikipedia site.

This followed my attendance at a launch event in September  that year for his magnum opus ‘A New Waste Land’. See full report and picture here. Mike has done more than any other single person to promote and develop poetry in Britain over the last 50 years at least. Hats off to this man.

RECORD STORE DAY 20TH APRIL 2013

 

The rise of Record Store Day, now in its sixth year, is an interesting phenomenon with wide implications.

The idea originated in the US as a reaction to the widespread closure of independently owned record stores due to a number of factors: the general shift towards downloading music from the net or shopping on-line plus the intrusion of supermarkets offering massive discounts.It seemed like the end.

According to figures from Almighty Music Marketing, more than 4,000 record stores in the US (including many record retail chains) closed between 2000 and 2010. They put the 2012 figure for surviving shops at 1,600.

Record Store Day is this year being celebrated by more than 700 indie stores in the US. Record Store Day has also spread to 20 other countries.

In the UK, according to the Entertainment Retailers Association, in 2003 there were 948 indie shops and privately owned small chains selling music. By 2007, this figure had fallen to 408 – a closure rate of one shop every 2.7 days. By 2009, there were just 269 left.

Record Store Day in the UK provided the focus that brought together indie labels, bands and shops in a 24-hour celebration. Participating shops sell specially-released records and host live events. According to Spencer Hickman of Rough Trade: ‘Its like an urban Glastonbury’.

Hickman believes the decline has been halted. In 2010, twelve new stores opened. This he believes is because indie shops have raised their game and found a niche in the market. That niche has a great deal to do with the rise of interest in vinyl records.

Hickman told The Guardian in an April 2011 story by Alexandra Topping headlined ‘Independent record stores increase for the first time in a generation’:

"The fact that we have seen new stores opening this year shows that there are still music lovers who want to buy physical music from people who are just as enthusiastic as they are. There are lots of people who still want music as an art form not just a download."

‘Vinyl has provided an unlikely lifeline in the independent music market. Of the 232 exclusive releases as part of Record Store Day, 220 are on vinyl with just 10 on CD and two on cassette.’

Unable to find more up to date figures at present but in Brighton, my nearest city, we lost two record shops in 2012 – Rounder Records and Borderline. This leaves two shops still operating – The Record Album, a leading specialist in vinyl film soundtracks and Resident.

UPDATE:

Thanks to Union Music Store who forwarded me the following information from the ERA which provides some up-to-date statistics.

There will be more than 200 participating stores across the UK and Ireland. In 2012 there were more than 450 exclusive releases; expected to be more than 500 in 2013.

Vinyl sales have been growing for the past five years and in 2012 increased 15.3% over 2011’s sales on the back of 44% increase the previous year.

 

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Years ago someone told me that 1,200 high school kids were given a survey. A question was posed to them: Have you ever been to a stand-alone record shop? The number of kids that answered "yes" was... zero.

Zero? How could that be possible? Then I got realistic and thought to myself, "Can you blame them?" How can record shops (or any shop for that matter) compete with Netflix, TiVo, video games that take months to complete, cable, texting, the Internet, etc. etc? Getting out of your chair at home to experience something in the real world has started to become a rare occurrence, and to a lot of people, an unnecessary one. Why go to a bookstore and get a real book? You can just download it. Why talk to other human beings, discuss different authors, writing styles and influences?  Just click your mouse.  Well here's what they'll someday learn if they have a soul; there's no romance in a mouse click.  There's no beauty in sitting for hours playing video games (anyone proud of that stop reading now and post your opinion in the nearest forum).  The screen of an iPhone is convenient, but it’s no comparison to a 70mm showing of a film in a gorgeous theater.  The Internet is two-dimensional…helpful and entertaining, but no replacement for face-to-face interaction with a human being.  But we all know all of that, right?  Well, do we?  Maybe we know all that, but so what?

Let's wake each other up.

The world hasn't stopped moving. Out there, people are still talking to each other face-to-face, exchanging ideas and turning each other on. Art houses are showing films, people are drinking coffee and telling tall tales, women and men are confusing each other and record stores are selling discs full of soul that you haven’t felt yet.  So why do we choose to hide in our caves and settle for replication?  We know better.  We should at least. We need to re-educate ourselves about human interaction and the difference between downloading a track on a computer and talking to other people in person and getting turned onto music that you can hold in your hands and share with others.  The size, shape, smell, texture and sound of a vinyl record; how do you explain to that teenager who doesn't know that it's a more beautiful musical experience than a mouse click?  You get up off your ass, you grab them by the arm and you take them there.  You put the record in their hands.  You make them drop the needle on the platter.  Then they'll know. 

Let's wake each other up.

As Record Store Day Ambassador of 2013 I’m proud to help in any way I can to invigorate whoever will listen with the idea that there is beauty and romance in the act of visiting a record shop and getting turned on to something new that could change the way they look at the world, other people, art, and ultimately, themselves.

Let's wake each other up.

 

SEE ALSO:

 

‘Record Store Days: From Vinyl to Digital and Back Again’ by Gary Calamar and Phil Gallo [Sterling Publishing 2009] is an illustrated history of US record stores, a narrative that ends with a chapter on the foundation of Record Store Day. The book has an intro by REMs Peter Buck

 

 

 

This is the documentary and the book of ‘Last Shop Standing’ by Graham Jones. Graham was one of the founders of Proper Music Distribution and spent 20 years visiting records shops all over the UK. Alarmed by the rapid decline of record retail, he set out to make one-last tour of 50 of his favourite shops, which are recorded in loving detail. The book, published by Proper Music Publishing in 2009, led to the documentary which came out in 2012. It ends on a positive note.

‘Sound It Out’ is a partially crowd-funded documentary about the very last record shop in Teesside, a bleak industrial area in the north-east of England. Directed by Jeanie Finlay it brings home the value of the indie record shop to the local community. Tom who runs the shop has an encyclopaedic knowledge of music and obviously cares about his quirky customers, which includes a guy who has seen 400 Status Quo gigs. Its a delight.

See Also: ‘Independent record shops say they are open for business’ by Andrew Glover [BBC News/16th Jan 2013]

‘Independent Record Shops: 10 of the best in Britain’ The Guardian/24 March 2013]

CORPORATE & POLICE INFILTRATION OF CITIZEN’S GROUPS

We all know that the police and intelligence agencies monitor activist groups and campaigns and that such activity has increased since 9/11. Less is known about the activities of corporate spies and their crossover links with the state surveillance network.

Many people could argue that a certain amount of this activity is vital for national security, to track down extremists planning to cause widespread harm to innocent people. But evidence for the widespread infiltration of environmental, labour, human right and other such protest groups has raised big questions about our civil liberties.

A recent book adds to our knowledge: ‘Secret Manoeuvres In The Dark: Corporate and Police Spying on Activists’ by Eveline Lubbers [Pluto Press. 2012]. There is a lengthy review by Katrina Forrester in the London Review of Books. The website for the book has many more.

Source: justicdenied.org

The issue was brought into the headlines when Mark Kennedy was unmasked. Kennedy, posing as Mark Stone, infiltrated activist organisations in 22 countries during 2003-2010. [ A chronology of his activities can be found on POWER BASE] What was most shocking was the fact that he had a long-term activist partner and had had sexual relations with other activists.

Forrester writes: ‘There was nothing unique about his case. A number of undercover police officers have even had children with activists. In December 2011, eight women – all of whom were deceived into having relationships with infiltrators – began legal action against the Metropolitan Police. Many of these tactics are amounting to state-sponsored sexual abuse.’

See:

‘Police spies: In bed with a fictional character’ by Paul Lewis and Rob Evans [The Guardian/1 March 2013]

‘UK police under fire for seducing activists. stealing dead infants’ names’ [RT/1 March 2013]

‘British MPs have condemned practices used by undercover police, including sleeping with those they were investigating and using dead infants’ names for their covert identity. The MPs have called for legislation to regulate undercover work.’

You can download a pdf of the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee interim report on Under Cover policing here.

‘Undercover police must be allowed to have sex with activists, says minister’ [The Telegraph/14 June 2012]

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In the famous McDonald’s case, the company hired two teams from separate agencies  - 7 individuals in all - to infiltrate Greenpeace London. At some of the meetings, there was as many spies as activists. This in turn raises the important issue of when spying becomes incitement.

Such civil agencies, with names like Threat Response International and Cyber-Sleuth, did compile detailed databases of activists, information that may have been sold to the police.

The Metropolitan Police’s Public Order Intelligence Unit sends out its Forward Intelligence Teams to every protest and every march in Britain. Forrester writes: ‘the FIT teams justify their information-gathering as necessary to prevent unlawful direct action, its part of a much broader operation to document the make-up of activist movements.’

Lubbers makes the argument that most activists are part of what she calls ‘civil society groups’ that exist to ‘promote democracy’.

This is a counter to the slur promoted by the National Domestic Extremism Unit – established by the Association of Chief Police Officers. The whole concept of ‘domestic extremism’ leaves a nasty taste in the mind.

 

SEE ALSO:

Swiss food giant Nestle fined for infiltrating activist group’ [The Independent/30 Jan 2013]

‘Infiltrating the Campaign: Corporate Spies in Activism’ [off corporate coast.com/30 Nov 2012]

‘Infiltration of activist groups by police and government agencies is not confined to the UK. The Sydney Morning Herald revealed that in Australia, Minister for Energy and Resources, Martin Ferguson, pressed Attorney General Robert McLelland in 2009 to use “the intelligence-gathering services of the Australian Federal Police” to find information of potential protests that might disrupt coal mining operations. In reply to the urgings of Minister Ferguson, McLelland stated that the Australian Police Force “continually monitors the activities of issues-motivated groups and individuals who may target establishments through direct action, or action designed to disrupt of interfere with essential services.”

This article has documented a few cases where spies working for corporate intelligence organisations have been unmasked, however the likelihood that there are numerous, as yet undetected, corporate spies infiltrating environment groups is very high, if not certain. Though there are examples where blunt tactics have been used by spies that have been detected with relative ease, the fact that there are highly skilled spies targeting activist groups should be cause for considerable concern.’

COINTELPRO 101 is a 56 minute educational video which can be viewed here 

READ ABOUT COINTELPRO – covert operations by the FBI  from 1956 to 1971 aimed at surveying, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting domestic political organizations.

THEN READ ‘THE RETURN OF COINTELPRO: Government Infiltration of Activist Groups.’

DIGITAL WAR: GANG OF FOUR

 This post was triggered by a fascinating article in The Economist about the battle between Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google for dominance of the digital world.

 Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google says that in his view, these are the only four really significant technology companies. According to Daniel Soar in the LRB (see below), Schmidt warned that not all four could survive. So who would be the first to blink as they all converge to compete in the same arena – the cloud ?

There is an interesting point made by Schmidt or Soar (its not clear) that the previous ‘gang of four’ – Intel, Microsoft, Dell and Cisco – were selling gadgets and services to corporations and businesses. The new four are selling to ordinary people.

THE GENERALIST has written a lot about Apple [See Previous Posts] but not about the others, hence this post to try and get a clearer picture of where we are in the great digital scheme of things.

This is the interior of Amazon’s giant fulfilment centre at Rugeley in Staffordshire, UK. It is the size of nine football pitches. Photo: Ben Roberts. For a report on Amazon’s labour policies and working practices read Amazon Unpacked by Sarah O’Connor [Financial Times magazine. 8th Feb 2013]

Amazon has been in their headlines in the UK at least over their failure to pay taxes but there is an even bigger story which is less well known.

‘The Amazon Economy’ is an investigative series by Barney Jopson, US retail correspondent for the Financial Times. It is available as an e-book.There’s a long detailed audio interview with Jopson by Tom Ashbrook for ‘On Point’ on 909.wbur, Boston’s NPR news station.

In brief, Amazon may have 85m customers per month in the US alone but there are not huge profits in retailing. According to the blog Urbanomics they may have generated a revenue of $48bn  in 2011 but they only made a net profit of $631m.

The company came to the view that it was more profitable to offer business services to other companies and this is the tactic they have been aggressively  pursuing. They have become a major utility supplying back-end functions to American retail businesses.

There are now 2m retail businesses selling stuff through Amazon who fulfil the orders through their global network of warehouses - 34 in the US alone by the end of 2012. Their cloud computing business Amazon Web Services is the data engine behind such companies as Spotify, Netflix and Dropbox.

In a traditional business model, all these core processes would happen within the corporation. By offering these services Amazon is in effect ‘unbundling’ the corporation. This makes it cheaper to start up a business but it means that Amazon gains a lot of control over a company’s customer relationships.

 

 

Google, the company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin began life as a research project at Stanford in 1996. The company’s unofficial slogan is ‘Don’t Be Evil’. According to a lengthy Wikipedia entry:

‘Google has been estimated to run over one million servers in data centers around the world and process over one billion search requests and about twenty-four petabytes of user-generated data every day.’

There is a separate Wikipedia entry on Criticism of Google, summarised as follows:

‘Google Inc. has been suspected of possible misuse and manipulation of search results, its use of others' intellectual property, concerns that its compilation of data may violate people's privacy, censorship of search results and content, and the energy consumption of its servers as well as concerns over traditional business issues such as antitrust, monopoly, and restraint of trade… Much of the criticism pertains to issues that have not yet been addressed by cyber law.’

To get up to speed on Google and its activities there are two really good places to start:

‘It Knows’ by Daniel Soar [London Review of Books/6th Oct 2011] is a lengthy review of three books on Google. There’s some extraordinary facts in here.

For instance, Soar spells out some of the implications of Google’s stated  mission ‘to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’. This would have to include the contents of more than a trillion web pages and every video uploaded to the public internet.

Also ‘the complete contents of every one of the more 33 million books in the Library of Congress’ and ‘the contents of the approximately 129,864,880 books published in every recorded language since printing was invented.’

What gets really scary is what Google knows about you and whether the company is selling this data to advertisers. Google makes more than 95 per cent of its money through selling advertising. Soar claims they are not. He argues that the information Goggle has is too valuable to give away.

‘The reason is that Google is learning. The more data it gathers, the more it knows, the better it gets at what it does. Of course, the better it gets at what it does the more money it makes, and the more money it makes the more data it gathers and the better it gets at what it does…what’s surprising is that there is no obvious end to the process.’

‘Google’s Android phones are being activated at the  rate of more than half a million a day. Google suddenly has a vast and growing repository of spoken words, in every language on earth, and a much more powerful learning machine.’

Soar concludes: ‘Google is getting cleverer precisely because it is so big…Its clearly wrong for all the information in all the world’s books to be in the sole possession of a single company. It is clearly not ideal that only one company in the world can, with increasing accuracy, translate text between 506 different pairs of languages. On the other hand, if Google doesn’t do these things, who will?’

One of the books Soar reviews  was ‘The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry)’ by Siva Vaidhyanathan There is a lengthy podcast interview with Siva by Nora Young on CBC Radio in Canada. Recorded in 2011, you can listen to the full interview here

There’s a great detailed piece on the evolution of Google’s Street View on TechCrunch in March 2013:

Inside Google Street View: From Larry Page’s Car To The Depths Of The Grand Canyon

See also: The End of Google Reader

2012 saw the disastrous launch of Facebook on the stock market. In 2013 the big media story on Facebook concerns the company’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg’s ‘Lean In’ campaign.

The big new Facebook devlopment is Graph Search, a new semantic search engine. To get it you have to sign up for the waiting list on Facebook’s site.

To understand better how Graph Search operates, see Actual Factual Graph Searches by Tom Scott. Here’s one example:

Read  more: ‘With Graph Search, it’s Facebook vs Facebook’ on Wired site [15th March 2013]

SEE ALSO: Review of ‘Who Owns The Future’ by Jaron Lanier  Have we given up too much power to the big digital corporations?

STÉPHANE HESSEL: TIME FOR OUTRAGE

Stephane Hessel, former French resistance fighter, great philosopher of rebellion and thinker about humanity recently died aged 95. A remarkable man.

In 1948 he helped draft the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

 In 2010 he wrote a  small pamphlet Indignez-Vous!, which sold 4.5m copies in 35 countries. It was translated into English as 'Time for Outrage'. It was picked up as a source of inspiration by the the Occupy Wall Street and Indignados movements.

He compared the 21st-century struggle against what he described as the "international dictatorship of the financial markets" to his generation's struggle against oppression as a young man during the war.

See:



Video interview on Democracy Now website

Guardian obituary

Indignant? We Should Be  and Obituary [Financial Times]

SILVER SCREEN: SUNDANCE FESTIVAL 2013

A conversation with Lisa G  on her return from this year’s Sundance Film Festival has prompted THE GENERALIST to check out their catalog and website in detail to see what’s out there and what’s coming up.I planned to look at the new films – documentaries and features – entered in competition but immediately got distracted by THE SUNDANCE YOUTUBE SHORT FILM SCREENING ROOM and discovered these three outstanding animations. Brilliant.

FAST FILM: A work of genius by  Virgil Wildrich and team. The filmmakers printed out some 65,000 individual images from 300 films, folded them into paper objects, arranged them in complex tableaux, and then brought them to life with an animation camera. A journey through film history in 14 minutes. They wanted to create an animation in a way that can’t be done on the computer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

8 BITS: A fight between an 8-bit superhero and a high-def boss, in a retro-gaming world. Superb homage, brilliantly realised. See www.8bitsmovie.com/.

 

THE RAFTMAN’S RAZOR: Two young teens obsess about a comic superhero who just sits in a rubber raft, shaves himself with a cuthroat razor and then does nothing. A mixture of old style comic book animation and live action, this spoof on the old world of comic books is a little gem. Directed by Keith Bearden.

SILVER SCREEN: DVD COMMENTARIES

Arnie listening to his own commentary on ‘Total Recall’

If your any kind of film fan or a full-blown cineaste or film geek (the term ‘film buff’ has now passed out of the language), the audio commentary provided as part of the package of extras on DVDs has become a talking point and something of an art form. When done well, it provides a brilliant insight into every aspect of the movie-making process; if badly, it is either not worth having or often highly hilarious.

It is interesting that the idea of having an audio commentary predates the DVD. IT seems generally agreed that the first ever audio commentary featured film historian Ronald Haver on the 1984 Criterion Collection laserdisc release of the original ‘King Kong’. It begins: "Hello, ladies and gentlemen, I'm Ronald Haver, and I'm here to do something which we feel is rather unique ... the ability to switch back and forth between the sound track and this lecture track."

Laser discs, first came on the market in the US in 1978, in competition with existing Betamax and VHS cassette tape formats, offering higher quality vision and sound. Always a niche market, it was largely replaced by DVDs by the 1990s. [Good Wikipedia history here]. The DVD itself may itself become an obsolete format in due course as more and more people turn to downloading movies from the Net. At present, such services as Netflix do not provide extras with the download. Will the audio commentary pass out of fashion ? We’ll have to wait and see.

Many directors are keen and happy to provide a detailed commentary on their films but there are a number of famous holdouts. Woody Allen never watches his films after he’s finished making them so is unlikely ever to comment. A good post on moviechopshop is ‘5 Directors who don’t do Commentary Tracks and the films they should deign to discuss’  - namely Spielberg, David Lynch, the Coen Brothers, Quentin Tarantino and Terrence Malick.

Below are some of my favourites. I have also scoured Google (so you don’t have to) and brought together some of the best Top 10 lists and other writings on the subject.

Certain film commentaries are widely recommended, the most amusing being the in-character commentaries for ‘Spinal Tap’ and ‘Tropic Thunder’  and the so-bad-its-good commentaries by Arnold Schwarzenegger on ‘Total Recall’ and ‘Conan the Barbarian’. Roger Ebert's commentary on ‘Citizen Kane’ and Michael Jack’s  on ‘The Seven Samurai’ are widely praised as are David Fincher’s on ‘Fight Club’ and ‘Seven’

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THis whole post was triggered  off by listening to the highly detailed and completely full-on commentary by Italian cinema expert David Forgacs, for Bertolucci’s extraordinary film ‘The Conformist’. It provides an absolute wealth of information which deepens one’s appreciation of this masterful film. [The disc I have came via Lovefilm . You can buy it from Arrow Films here and it apparently comes complete with a feature length doc on Bertolucci and a comprehensive booklet. More on this film later.

Another gem is the Sony Pictures disc of Antonioni’s strange and extraordinary movie ‘The Passenger’ starring Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider. The film was  originally released in 1975 but didn’t come out on DVD until 2006 This carries two different commentary tracks, one by Nicholson himself, which is brilliant, and another featuring screenwriter Mark Peploe in conversation with Aurora Irvine. Both give valuable insights into this mysterious film that pays repeated viewings.

 

‘Ride The High Country’ directed by Sam Peckinpah stars Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea legendary figures who had appeared in more than 100 Westerns between them.  The commentary track features the knowledge of three Peckinpah experts Paul Seyfor, Garner Simmons and David Weddle. The film came as part of Sam Peckinpah’s Westerns Collection, a box set which includes ‘The Wild Bunch’, ‘Pat Garret and Billy the Kid’ and ‘The Ballad of Cable Hogue’.

 

Bringing things into more recent times, ‘The Libertine’ is I think one of Johnny Depp’s best acting roles as the dissolute rake based on the real-life character of Lord Rochester. In this case its the director Laurence Dunmore who takes you through the film, and providing a really interesting perspective on working with Depp and on the issues and difficulties of shooting modern movies. A very professional and interesting performance.

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These are the lists I liked best. I learnt a lot and am looking forward to checking some of these out, including Hunter S.Thompson’s on ‘Fear & Loathing’

The Best and Worst DVD Commentaries www.dontpaniconline.com

A long ‘Must-Hear Commentary List’ on www.ukign.com

‘Good DVD director’s commentaries’ on www.askmetafilter.com

Five Rules for Great DVD Commentaries on www.ifc.com

The Film Babble blog’s round-up of Great DVD Commentaries begins with ‘The Passenger’. A well-written and interesting survey.

Long list of reader recommendations on the Empire film magazine site.

CinemaSlave’s post Audio Commentaries or Bust is seriously intense

AVCLub has put a lot of work into his ‘Now with extra farts! 25 1/2 gimmicky DVD commentary tracks’. Its good stuff.

Even The Guardian got in on the act with a list of films that only get better with a good DVD commentary.

I like Racking Focus’ take on the subject and he has some interesting choices on his list ‘The 10 Best DVD Audio Commentaries’

It informs us that ‘On the special edition DVD release of HIGH NOON there’s a commentary track from family members of the film’s composer, writer and director. Each track is unique and provides the viewer with a different perspective on the film they believe they’ve come to know.’

Matt Glasby gets provocative with this ‘Is this just me…or are DVD commentaries a waste of time’ in Total Film

I enjoyed ‘Interesting Audio Commentaries’ by Ambrose Heron on Film Detail

Finally enjoy Rob Brydon’s spoof tv show ‘Directors Commentary’ two episodes of which are available on YouTube here and here.

SILVER SCREEN: EASY RIDER, RAGING BULLS/BISKIND & BERTOLUCCI, SCHRADER & SCORSESE

Watching ‘The Conformist’ and listening to the commentary, took me back to the book and the DVD of ‘Easy Riders, Raging Bulls’ – the seminal account by Peter Biskind of the rise of the New Hollywood and the Movie Brats of the 1960s and 1970s. [The book was first published in 2008 and the documentary, directed by Kenneth Bowser and narrated by William H. Macy, came out in 2003]. Both still stand up although much has happened to the participants in the story since that time. Dennis Hopper has died, for instance.

The link with ‘The Conformist’, released in 1970,  comes when the commentary quotes Paul Schrader, who says of it:

‘It’s a real filmmakers film. Screening this film is almost like re-checking the dictionary. Its just how you can do things. ‘The Conformist’ is  the first gunshot in the revolution back to visual style in American films. You saw that in  films by Coppola and Scorsese. Bernardo wrote the bible and we all paced through it.’

In Biskind’s book, which carries many passages which dwell on Schrader’s tortured upbringing, violent fantasies, drug use and abuse of friends and lovers, Schrader again pays homage to Bertolucci in his own unique way.

‘Everyone was under the sway of Bernardo Bertolucci’s ‘The Conformist’. Continues Schrader: “You looked at  Bertolucci, it was just like he took Godard and Antonioni, put them in bed together, held a gun to their heads, and said, ‘You guys fuck or I’ll shoot you.’ ”

Bertolucci’s Director of Photography on ‘The Conformist’ and many other of his films was Vittorio Storaro. Coppola imitated many of the shots from this film in ‘The Godfather’ movies as well as copying much of the general look and style. He later hired Storaro to make ‘Apocalypse Now’ for which Storaro won his first Oscar. Bertolucci and Coppola became friends in the run-up to and during the making of Godfather 1. Brando went straight from making the Godfather to working for Bertolucci on ‘Last Tango in Paris.’ Bertolucci offered De Niro a part in ‘1900’ after seeing Scorsese’s ‘Mean Streets’

These connections are further explored in ‘Why Bertolucci’s ‘The Conformist’ deserves a place in cinema history.’ by John Patterson on The Guardian film blog.

 

Discovered this great piece on Bertolucci, written by MANOHLA DARGIS for the New York Times in December 2010 to coincide with a major retrospective of his work at MOMA in New York featuring virtually everything he had ever made. When the retro came to the BFI in London four months later, David Gritten did this interview with Bertolucci for The Telegraph

SILVER SCREEN: ARCHIVE SCHRADER, DE NIRO & SCORSESE

Two great pics of Schrader. (Left): Bob Seidemann’s photo accompanying an article by Michael Goodwin, published in the Village Voice [Sept 6th. 1976]; (Right) Great shot by Anton Corbin accompanying article by Ian Penman in the NME [2nd Oct. 1982]

Just rescued a box of damp material from my basement with some classic material, clips and stills from the NME days when I was writing a lot about film. Some real treasures.

DE NIRO

 

 

Top Left: Original film still with signature [film unidentified]  (Top Right): US Press Ad for ‘Raging Bull’; (Centre): Original film still from ‘The Last Tycoon’ directed by Elia Kazan. De Niro is dancing with Ingrid Boulting; (Bottom Left): Rare press ad for ‘The Swap’ (1969) which contains an early performance by de Niro; (Bottom Right) The cover of the VHS for ‘Line of Fire’ aka ‘The Swap.’

This is a rare press ad announcing that Principal Photography on ‘The Deer Hunter’ would begin on June 20th 1977. I think it appeared in the Hollywood Reporter. This artwork is credited to Don Perri

SCORSESE

(Top Left): Ragged original print. Have no idea who Scorsese’s partner in this picture is [Picture credited to Paul Schumach/Metropolitan Photo Service; (Top Right): a publicity still of Scorsese on the set of ‘Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.’: (Centre); Scorsese on the set of ‘Alice’ [original print]; (Bottom); Great shot of Scorsese and Brian de Palma. Original print. No identification credits.

Couldn’t resist including this pic which accompanied an interview by Sheila Johnston with Scorsese [The Independent/ 12th Feb 1993] on the occasion of  the rerelease of ‘Mean Streets’ in the UK on the 20th anniversary of its original release. Scorsese’s breakthrough movie is still my one of my favourite films of all time – mainly because I went to the very first screening of the film in Britain at a preview studio in Mayfair along with a small bunch of other critics and it totally blew me away. I’d been to see a press show of ‘Rocky’ that morning – which I loved. But ‘Mean Streets’ was something else. Stunning.

According to Johnston’s great piece, Scorsese had been working on the script for seven years and when he got the green light had only 26 days to shoot the picture and only six days and nights in New York, where he was working with a student crew. The rest of the film was show in LA using one of Roger Corman’s crews. I did not know that. I really love this quote from Scorsese:

“Henry Hill [the gangster turned FBI informant whose story Scorsese filmed in Goodfellas] told me that the real-life head of the Mob played in the film by Paul Sorvino never went to the movies, he didn’t have a phone. He lived like a medieval lord in his villa in Brooklyn. And one night they sort of kidnapped him and took him to see Mean Streets – it was their favourite film because it depicted their lifestyle accurately, they thought. At the same time, the head of the FBI task force that caught this whole Mob told me that the task force’s favourite film was Mean Streets.”

[This Special Edition of ‘Mean Streets’ has a commentary by Scorsese]

SILVER SCREEN: MOVIES ARE MY LIFE/ SCORSESE, PETER HAYDEN & STEVEN PRINCE

 

There’s a long back story behind these pictures. Brief version is when I was working as Dick Tracy at the NME I wrote a story about Peter Hayden, a maverick mixture of danger and charm. The story he told was that he had been to Cannes to try and raise some money to make a film, when he went to a screening of ‘Mean Streets’. So knocked out was he that he forgot his own project and decided that he had to meet Scorsese. He went to his hotel apartment and got thrown out twice. When he came back the third time, Scorsese, admiring his chutzpah, had a conversation with him and they got on like a house on fire. By the end of the conversation Hayden makes a deal to distribute ‘Mean Streets’ in Britain. Thus began a long saga and a battle to try and get the film shown. The main distributor would only send it out as a double bill with ‘The Sweeney’. Hayden fought on, using guerilla tactics to promote the film, and they finally got a showing at the Odeon in Kensington High Street which was a complete sell-out as I recall. The huge blue poster they did was magnificent. Someone nicked my copy from the wall of the NME office. You know who you are!!

Hayden also managed to maintain contacts with Scorsese and, by some means, I can’t remember, ended up making this one-hour documentary, which was shot in the summer of 1977. That year Scorsese shot ‘New York, New York’ and ‘The Last Waltz’.

Hayden’s documentary was well regarded and is now a real cult item, as  it is virtually unavailable. I haven’t seen Peter for many years and just hope he is out there somewhere.

The two top images make up the promotional fold-out leaflet for the film. The photo is an original, mounted on card, damp stained. It shows Hayden on left with Steven Prince, shot presumably during the making of this documentary.

To explain who Prince was we need to go back to Peter Biskind’s book:

‘There is a famous scene in Taxi Driver where a gun dealer appears in Travis Bickle’s apartment with a case of pistols. Recalls Sandy [Weintraub, Scorsese’s producer and girlfriend 1971-1975], “I told Marty that not only do I know a guy who could play the part but he could bring his own guns.” Having worked for her father, Sandy had known “little Stevie” Prince since childhood. “He had been doing heroin on and off for years,” she continues. “He had black circles under his eyes that went down to his elbows.” Later he became indispensable to Marty. “If something went wrong, hopefully he was sober enough to take care of it.” Says [Jonathan] Taplin: “He was like a bodyguard, the doorkeeper. Sometimes – like that Dirk Bogarde movie The Servant – you had the feeling that he could appeal to Marty’s paranoias in such a way that he could make Marty do things. In that sense had had quite a bit of power.’

in 1977 Marty Scorsese also made a documentary entitled ‘American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince’. Released in 1978, it was premiered at the 16th New York Film Festival and was reviewed by Morna Murphy in the Hollywood Reporter [9th Oct 1979]. This describes the film as follows:

‘Prince’s affluent childhood is made real by the use of family movies and photographs of relatives accompanied by humorous anecdotes and descriptions. Most of the 54 minutes of film is spent in a friend’s Hollywood home, but there is little sense of confinement. Scorsese casually sets the stage, and from Prince’s rambunctious arrival to the reenactment of violent or tragic scenes from his life, there is a feeling of movement and of being witness to these events.

‘Prince himself is a handsome young man, with hooded, expressive eyes…His approach to life is frankly hedonistic and he talks of his years of addiction to heroin (“life juice”) with zest and candor. He proves to be a born storyteller with a knack for vivid description that makes one believe even his most outrageous stories implicitly. Only the contradiction in his final statement (did his dying father ask “Are you happy?” or “Are you having fun?”) raises the question of truthfulness. Is this slice of life or entertainment?” ‘

Still shot during the making of American Boy. Source: frequentsmallmeals.com

There is a great lengthy five-part feature ‘Understanding Scorsese: A Martin Scorsese Profile’ by Trevor Hogg on the Flickering Myth site.  Part 2 contains the following

‘American Boy: A Profile of: Steven Prince (1978) is a documentary Martin Scorsese produced about an ex-drug addict and road manager for Neil Diamond who portrayed a gun dealer in Taxi Driver. As Steve Prince talks about his family, the filmmaker intersperses home movie clips shot during Prince’s childhood. Some of the stories told have served as cinematic inspiration for the likes of Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction) and Richard Linklater (Waking Life). During the opening credits,Time Fades Away by Neil Young is played. A sequel was released called American Prince (2009) which was helmed by Tommy Pallotta.’

You can watch this film on MUBI EUROPE

or in six parts on YouTube