Kill Fee

If I had not seen it with my own eyes this past week at MoMA, I probably would not have believed it possible that one movie could contain this and this.

Those legs.
More than all the slinking Cyd Charisse did with Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire, it’s the manic heights she scales with Kirk Douglas in Vincente Minnelli’s careening Two Weeks in Another Town that I’m thinking of. I wish there were a clip of her first scene in the film floating around youtube.
I’m pretty […]

From Don Siegel’s The Killers (1964).
“I like what you’re doing with the car. Just stick with that.” Ronald Reagan delivers that line like he’s taking direction from David Lynch.

From “Swann Song,” Judith Thurman’s account of Yves Saint Laurent’s final haute-couture show in 2002:
There was plenty of cerebral whimsy to offset the noirish sex play: feather minis suitable for a showgirl’s wedding to a peer; a minuscule suède tunic from the sixties worn with high-heeled waders; swanky cocktail dresses that exposed a nipple; a […]

Sydney Pollack, Film Director, Is Dead at 73, New York Times
From Tootsie to Eyes Wide Shut, Michael Sragow, Salon
Sydney Pollack, 73; Oscar-winning director and producer, Los Angeles Times
“God forbid you should lose your standing as a cult failure.” YouTube

Here’s a link to my write-up in the Los Angeles Times of the Norman Mailer memorial last week at Carnegie Hall. I got to run on a bit about D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus’s Town Bloody Hall, a documentary of a 1971 debate about Women’s Liberation, which features a slew of literary celebrities as well […]

A review of Richard Schickel’s Film on Paper: The Inner Life of Movies in the Los Angeles Times: link.

Over at Newsday, I have a list of great Hollywood novels–one of my favorite literary genres. The painful part was choosing only five. Here they are.
Other contenders include:
Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann
The Last Tycoon, F. Scott Fitzgerald (also the Pat Hobby stories)
The Goodbye People, Gavin Lambert
What Makes Sammy Run, Budd Schulberg
After Many a […]

A review of Geoffrey Nowell-Smith’s Making Waves: New Cinemas of the 1960s and Vanessa R. Schwartz’s It’s So French! Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture in The Los Angeles Times: link.

Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini
Here’s a link to my review in Bookforum of two recent studies of censorship and film: William Bruce Johnson’s Miracles and Sacrilege: Roberto Rossellini, the Church, and Film Censorship in Hollywood and Thomas Doherty’s Hollywood’s Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration.