BITS & PIECES OF A MISPLACED LIFE: FILMS #16

WHAT NORA EPHRON LEARNED ABOUT FILM
SCRIPT WRITING FROM TOM HANKS

“…I learned from  Tom was a thing that’s really 
important, which is that scene after scene, you
 have to give the main actor something to play, 
he can never be passive in the scene, et. cetera, 
 even (or especially) when he’s sharing it with
 a very cute little boy.”

Nora Ephron . interviewed by Patrick McGilligan 
in Backstory 5: Interviews with Screenwriters 
of the 1990s
(June 2007)

**

ON THE COWBOY STAR WHOSE HORSE WAS NAMED TARZAN

Ken Maynard.  “Maynard, born Kenneth Olin Maynard in
1895, began working for circuses and carnivals at 16. 
As a young man he became a rodeo performer and a 
trick rider for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. By 
1923 Maynard was appearing in movies  and became a 
cowboy star. His horse  Tarzan appeared in literally
 dozens of movies, including The Demon Rider (1925),
 Overland Stage (1927) , Come on, Tarzan (1932) and
 Lightning Strikes West (1941)..;”

David Lemmo. Tarzan: Jungle King of Popular Culture  
(Jefferson,North Carolina : McFarland & Company,2017)

**

ON WHAT VIEWERS REMEMBER ABOUT  THE BIG
PARADE

“In my own film The Big Parade for years after its 
first showing and until this day, people speak of 
the moment the doughboy, played by John Gilbert, 
removes a heavy shoe from a pack on his back and 
throws it to his French sweetheart as a desperate 
token of his affection. Equal to this, they speak 
of the close-up in which the same girl in a impulsive 
move to slow the truck’s progress holds to a chain 
at the rear of the truck that is carrying her lover 
to war. The film is a mighty panorama of World War I
 decidedly in the spectacle category and yet the 
memory is of two close-ups. A hundred airplanes 
in a sweep over a battlefield is never mentioned.”

King Vidor.  King Vidor on Film-Making (New York:
David McKay Co., 1972)
**
FILMS YOU MAKE YOURSELF

“Very  few films are dreams, configuring and reconfiguring themselves in your mind on waking. These films, I think, 
you make yourself, afterwards, somewhere in the shadows 
in the back of your head. The Bride of Frankenstein is 
one of those dream films. It exists in the culture as a
 unique thing, magical and odd, a lurching story sequence
 as ungainly and as beautiful as the monster itself, that culminates in a couple of  minutes of film that have 
seared themselves onto the undermind of the world.”


Neil Gaiman. The View From the Cheap Seats (New York:
William Morrow, 2014)

**

THE QUOTATION EXPERT MARDY GROTHE ON THE TITLE
OF THE FILM - THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY

"Although the movie made “the year of living dangerously” 
a widely-known catchphrase, it’s not the origin.
Nor is the 1978 novel The Year of Living Dangerously by Christopher J. Koch, which the film version is based on.
The setting for the book and movie is Jakarta, Indonesia 
during the chaotic period that led to the overthrow of 
the country’s long-time dictator, President Sukarno.
Author Koch took his title from a speech Sukarno made 
in 1964.
 
"The President had a custom of giving a special name to 
each year in his annual “National Day” speech. In the 
National Day speech he gave on August 17, 1964, Sukarno
 named the upcoming year “the year of living dangerously.”
This reflected the challenges he knew he faced from his political enemies, who included both hard-line Communists
and radical Muslims. The multilingual leader’s name for 
the year was based partly on an old Italian phrase he was familiar with — “vivere pericoloso” (“living dangerously”).
Although Sukarno gave the speech in the Indonesian language, he inserted those Italian words after the Indonesian word for year, tahun, to create the name. The year ahead, he said, would be the “Tahun vivere pericoloso.”

http://www.thisdayinquotes.com/2022/01/dr-mardy-grothes-new.html

**

JOAN CRAWFORD & THE LETTER T

“After I divorced Franchot (Tone) I asked my maid 
to pick out all the T’s in my linens – acres of 
towels, meadows of bed linens. I don’t know how 
many hundreds of T’s the poor girl had carefully 
unpicked when, one evening, listening to the radio, 
she heard the announcer break in with a news bulletin:
 Joan Crawford has just married Phillip Terry! 
   The maid threw down the pillowcase she was working
 on and screamed, “I quit.”

Joan Crawford. My Way of Life . 1971

**

NOTES FOR A HISTORY OF FILMS & POLITICS

“I saw Reds in Oklahoma where I once witnessed people walking out on Fiddler on the Roof because it was about ‘A Bunch of Commies.’ I saw no one walk out on Reds.”

Jim Beaver in Films in Review (February 1982)

**

CARTOON CHARACTERS ARE NOT THE SAME
AS REAL PEOPLE, SO THEY SHOULD NOT
GET ROMANTICALLY INVOLVED WITH ONE
ANOTHER

Elmer Fudd
Fell madly in love with Ashley Judd:
"Oh kiss me, Ashley. You're so hot!"
"No," she said. "I am real and you are not."

LJP