You got the job, kid.

Sticking with the Woody theme, watch this (oh, and to see the marquee for the old Regency Theater, never mind Tower Records, brings back fond memories):

Via Kottke…

David Kamp on The Birth of Bond.

Tomorrow at BAM check out one of the Marx Brothers’ classic Paramount comedies: Horse Feathers (1932).

From High to Low…

You talk about penance and you send this through the door.

Dumb fun from the Eighties. Movie is a quote-factory for nerds of a certain age (guilty).

Also loved the books when I was growing up.

Might be Chase’s best movie.

[Picture by Alex Kittle]

From the wonderful Scouting NY site, here’s Annie Hall (part one).

It lacks a cohesive structure…

Rest in Peace, Frank Pierson.

“At each level you reach, you have to tear up what you have done before, which cost an enormous amount of psychological and emotional energy. That makes the process of screenwriting very, very difficult. And I don’t know any screenplay that I have ever worked on where I did not go through ten to twelve or sometimes sixteen drafts before I showed it to anybody.”

[Quote via The Poor Dancing Girl She Won’t Dance Again]

A new DVD set of “The Gold Rush” has just been released. It includes a 1942 sound cut of the movie. Cool.

[Photo Credit: Sid Avery]

Sam Adams has a wonderful interview with Bob Balaban over at the A.V. Club.

I like this part:

AVC: Speaking of great directors, your role in Close Encounters was as translator to the scientist played by François Truffaut, and the sense from your diaries is that you played a similar role offscreen.

BB: It was so much fun. You can only imagine [having] one of your favorite directors be absolutely dependent on you for eight months of shooting. I could speak fairly good French, and he really didn’t like to speak English. He would bring me scripts, I would translate them, and we would have discussions afterward. He didn’t like reading the scripts in English, so I would read them and describe to him what it was, and what was going on. It was great. Truffaut was great with kids, also. At one point—I’m sure I’ve said this in my book, and three or four thousand times already—Truffaut said for him there were literally two things that interested him in all of his movies. That was it. He said life was short—how prescient he was, because he died eight years later. But he said, “I’m never going to have enough time to make all of the movies I want. So I can only make movies about men and women and their relationships, and children and their relationships. That’s it, that’s all that interests me.” That’s everything in the world, but it also rules out a huge amount of things. It mostly rules out anything mechanical. At one point, he was asked to direct Bobby Deerfield, I think. He said, “Too much ‘vroom vroom.’” What he really meant was it wasn’t about men and women falling in love, or children.

Fascinating. To have such a firm grasp on what you want to make movies about and then to do just that.

Check out this piece of inspiration from the Swedish artist, Anders Ramsell:

On Friday night, the Film Society at Lincoln Center presents a midnight showing of the greatest concert film ever made. New print too.

Wrong movie, I know—still, check out this letter by Gene Wilder over at Letters of Note.

Over at Unlikely Words check out a link to Scott Raab’s latest Q&A with his old pal Bill Murray:

SR: Your Second City teacher/mentor Del Close is a guy I’ve never read enough about. What was it that made him so influential?

BM: Well, he was a guy who had great knowledge of the craft of improvisation. And he lived life in a very rich manner, to excess sometimes. He had a whole lot of brain stuck inside of his skull. Beyond being gifted, he really engaged in life. He earned a lot. He made more of himself than he was given. Came out of Manhattan, Kansas, and ended up hanging out with the Beats. He was incredibly gracious to your talent and always tried to further it. He got people to perform beyond their expectations. He really believed that anyone could do it if they were present and showed respect. There was a whole lot of respect.

SR: Sounds like a great teacher.

BM: He taught lots and lots of people very effectively. He taught people to commit. Like: “Don’t walk out there with one hand in your pocket unless there’s somethin’ in there you’re going to bring out.” You gotta commit. You’ve gotta go out there and improvise and you’ve gotta be completely unafraid to die. You’ve got to be able to take a chance to die. And you have to die lots. You have to die all the time. You’re goin’ out there with just a whisper of an idea. The fear will make you clench up. That’s the fear of dying. When you start and the first few lines don’t grab and people are going like, “What’s this? I’m not laughing and I’m not interested,” then you just put your arms out like this and open way up and that allows your stuff to go out. Otherwise it’s just stuck inside you.

…SR: Did you and Bruce Willis get along on the set of Moonrise Kingdom?

BM: I got along great with Bruce Willis. He’s different, though. He’s rolled as a movie star for a long time, so it’s a little different for him coming into Wes Anderson’s world, where no one gets movie-star treatment. Life really does change when you go on one of Wes’s films — you gotta sit back and relax. But Bruce absolutely delivered. He was really game. It was like, Let’s play. Sometimes you get people that don’t want to play — they just want to perform, to act. He’s a movie star, I’ve been a movie star — we don’t have to take this so seriously. So we’d play. We’d goof up a take just for the fuck of it. He delivers one of the biggest laughs of any movie I’ve ever been in. And it really took a movie star to do it. The casting of Bruce was perfect. This movie is really funny. This movie’s gonna be big. Big.

Then stick around for a mess-o-links to other stuff about Murray.

[Photo Via: Monster Fresh; thanks to Kottke for the links]

Show business folk

by Albane Navizet

over at Everyday I Show.

“Drugstore Cowboy” came out shortly after “Sex, Lies and Videotape” in the summer of 1989. It was a strong year for movies. Scorsese’s short, “Life Lessons” was released that spring. Later came “Do the Right Thing,” and “Casualties of War,” “The Fabulous Baker Boys,” “Sea of Love,” “Glory,” and “Enemies: A Love Story” to name just a few.

“Drugstore Cowboy” was the first movie I saw at the newly-opened Angelica movie house on Houston Street. I saw it again uptown and the movie gripped me.  I saw it again on TV last year. It holds up.

I think it’s Matt Dillon’s finest performance. Kelly Lynch is fantastic as well.

Here’s P. Kael’s blurb for the New Yorker:

Nihilistic humor rarely bubbles up in a movie as freely as it does here. Set in Portland, Oregon, in 1971, the story is about two couples who live together and travel around the Pacific Northwest robbing hospitals and pharmacies, grabbing fistfuls of pills and capsules. They’re like a junkie version of Clyde Barrow’s gang. The director, Gus Van Sant, takes us inside a lot of underground attitudes: the druggies are monomaniacal about leading an aimless existence-they see themselves as romantic figures. They’re comic, but they’re not put down for being comic. The picture keeps you laughing because it’s so nonjudgmental. Van Sant is half in and half out of the desire of adolescents to remain kids forever. As the gang’s 26-year-old leader, Matt Dillon brings the role a light self-mockery that helps set the tone of the film, and Kelly Lynch is strikingly effective as his wife.

“Fat City.”

Now, there’s a case of a fine book and a fine movie.

They are shooting “42” at the legendary Rickwood Field.

Our pal Jeb Stewart sends these pictures.

I dig the inflatable crowd.