This Girl is a. . .

Happy 10th Birthday

to the

Best Daughter in the World!

Taking Care

Madison Square Garden, May 20th, 1962. (Was Raymond Shaw waiting in the rafters?)

This magnificent document is just a normal speech on a normal day from a man arguing for a healthy labor movement, social insurance, community health, hospitalization plans, and decent housing.

"To break a union is to break yourself."

(For those who have a problem with the sound and video quality, go watch Obama in HD.)

Mailer in the Spring of '68

It should've been a Spring like any other Spring, as it should've been a political year like any other political year. It is the night of May 28th, 1968 in Manhattan and Norman Mailer is talking with Bill Buckley -- both men at the height of their literary and cultural power. One man calls himself a "left conservative"; the other is the Godfather of the American Conservative movement. Neither man knew it at the time, but everything communal, egalitarian, and progressive in the American spirit had crested and would never again reach high tide. Robert F. Kennedy would be assassinated in 7 days. And the next 46 years (and counting) would be a reactionary nightmare.

How self-satisfied was the intellectual Left on the cusp of its extinction.

Long and Winding Road

Eight necessary and recent lectures from the C-Span archives:

"The Kennedy Assassination and the CIA"

"Cuba and the CIA"

"Medical Experts and the Kennedy Assassination"

"Oswald, the CIA, and Mexico City"

"50th Anniversary of the Warren Report"

"Medical Aspects of the Kennedy Assassinations"

"Acoustic Analysis of the Kennedy Assassination"

"House Select Committee on Assassinations and the CIA"
 

Z?

Shane O'Sullivan has been one of our most honest and therefore most important documentary filmmakers dealing with the American Assassinations of the 1960s. His Killing Oswald (2013) was the finest (the only?) work of the 50th Anniversary year which did not swallow wholly the official Warren Commission line.

Since the 1960s, the 8mm Elm Street home movie taken by clothing manufacturer Abraham Zapruder has been held up as our best proof that more than one gunman was firing at Kennedy in Dealey Plaza, due to the destruction of the Single Bullet Theory caused by the Z-film's timing; and the explosive movement of JFK's head and body ("Back, and to the left") caused by the fatal headshot(s). But is the Zapruder film we have all seen, the real Zapruder film? A man named Dino Brugioni was a top imagery analyst for CIA's National Photographic Interpretation Center (he was the man who brought President Kennedy U-2 images proving Soviet nuclear missiles on the island of Cuba in October '62) and on the night of November 22nd, 1963, Brugioni was handed for interpretation an original negative of the Zapruder home movie. What he says he saw that night was very different from what we now see.

(Due to the bought-off chicanery of Dallas's Sixth Floor Museum, the Z-film was not allowed to be part of O'Sullivan's documentary.)

The heroic Douglas Horne guides us through a very sinister maze. 

An enhanced HD version of what Abraham Zapruder filmed that day. Or not. . .

Take Five

Happy 5th Birthday to the blog!

Swoon this.

The Greatest TV Show of All Time?

The show ran on the CBS television network from September 1957 through April 1963 for an astounding 225 episodes. (A radio show starring a different cast also played for four of those years.) Almost 40 episodes per season, at 26-minutes per, with many locations. (Current half-hour TV series: 20 to 22 episodes a year at 22-minutes each.)

And it is the best western series of all time. Of course, there are problems. Boone insisted on the often silly intros with him in 1870s San Francisco gentry garb, almost always coming on to a girl / rejecting a girl / or sighing with a "what can I do?" expression. (Thankfully these ficelles are not part of every episode.) And that's about it. Out of the 225, maybe 10 are stinkers. But the rest. . . .

No other series is more dominated by a single personality and consciousness than is Have Gun Will Travel by Richard Boone's. His greatness as both actor and director -- and his deeply humanist sensibility -- makes HGWT a model of popular and populist art. Sometimes that sensibility goes awry, wasted on chum. At its best (actually, at its average as well), it was a constant search for what was the right thing to do. Paladin himself is a western superman: brilliant, handsome, rich; a boxer, a gunman, a stud. Yet the character is almost completely devoid of narcissism. Or if it is there at times, it becomes the subject of the piece. In the candy-colored yet morally black-and-white world of the 1950s, this is an astonishingly complex show, in terms of meaning and character.

There are many glories beyond him. Along with his artistic domination, Boone's heart is generous as both actor and director. Some of the best HGWT episodes are directed by Andrew McLaglen, Lamont Johnson, and Ida Lupino -- and he completely gives them their lead. Very literate (sometimes too literate) scripts by the great Herb Meadows and Sam Wolfe (and Gene Rodenberry). An endless succession of special acting turns, by both leads and supporting players: George Kennedy many times, Charles Bronson (amazingly good) many times, Kam Tang as Hey Boy,  Ben Johnson and Ken Curtis fresh off the Ford lot, Charles Aidman, Strother Martin, Ed Nelson, Harry Carey Jr., Shirley O'Hara, Denver Pyle, Jacqueline Scott, June Vincent, on and on. Also, the very lovely Lisa Lu as Hey Boy's replacement, Hey Girl. (Lu's also in several episodes as characters other than Hey Girl, where she also burns a hole in the screen.) Such a slender beauty it's no wonder Henry Miller started stalking her after seeing HGWT.

It is a beautiful show to look at, with a stark sheen. (Many cinematographers are credited, with Stuart Thompson grabbing most titles.) Much of the music is by Bernard Herrmann or based on Herrmann cues. Plus the immortal Johnny Western theme song.

If one comes to knows the series well, what's most remarkable is the continual changes in tone. Alternately leisurely, calm and quiet (and at times very funny); titles tight and tense as a Tohlakai drum; plots so dense they are opaque; stories where nothing much happens at all. We come back, though, to the show's awesome star. No actor has ever surpassed his engagement and commitment to a weekly role. His humor, strength, and charisma get more unique and impressive with each passing year.

One of the many great ones, from Season 2 (April 25, 1959): "The Man Who Lost"

Jeopardy '97

Oliver Stone:

I look back on Jeopardy as one of my highlights during a strange time in the '90s when I was having an enormous amount of fun. I was so bored at this point with the number of interviews, appearances, and junkets that I had to do. I don’t know how anyone can convey the torture of having to do fifty interviews in a day, repeating yourself about a film. These are the kinds of things that drive you insane, so I suppose in rebellion against that kind of mindset. I was on Jeopardy as a charity effort with Arianna Huffington and Wolf Blitzer, and I was trying to pick up this Korean girl in Washington D.C. who I was meeting for the first time, and these first time things can be very exciting, so she was in the audience and I had decided that morning to take ecstasy. I was on it on Jeopardy, and I was totally enjoying the show in a way that neither of my two co-contestants possibly could. In fact, Wolf was so uptight I was laughing even harder at his “projection” of intelligence. Arianna, a graduate in art history apparently forgot everything that day because she got zero points as I remember. I think I lost everything and won it back several times, and at the very end I whipped Wolf Blitzer with a question that I thought was ridiculously simple, but neither of these two could remember the painter of the “Last Supper.” I think a first grader could’ve figured that out, but I jumped on it and I won. The secret of Jeopardy is how fast your finger can get to the button. That millisecond makes a difference. Ecstasy gave me the power that day, but I couldn’t stay in the box however. Alex Trebeck kept telling me to get back into that box; he’s lucky I did. Anyway, I had a great night afterwards with that wonderful Korean girl who actually worked in a relief organization in Africa. All these Washington girls work in relief organizations… good hunting ground.

Including actual 1997 commercials!

Garner

The great man has died, at the age of 86. His best and most characteristic work -- stripped and stripping of attitude, generous-hearted, funny, warm, intimate, always engaged and always skeptical of authority -- was on the small screen. (See below.) But he also brought his rare gifts into movie theaters as well, into works impossible to imagine without him: The Americanization of Emily, Victor / Victoria, The Great Escape, Grand Prix (his favorite), Promise, Twilight.

For those of us brought up on late-20th Century dream images flowing from an at-home TV set rather than from a movie palace screen, he was Our Mitchum. Less mysterious and recessive, funnier and less dark, James Garner embodied for a less transcendent generation the transcendence of never copying the manner of someone else: that one must work at a moral art, which then makes it suitable for oneself. And, like Mitchum: a man must be caught dead before he takes himself seriously.

As Bret Maverick in "Day of Reckoning," from February of '58.

Rooney

Mickey Rooney died earlier this month, at the age of 93. Best (and most mistakenly) remembered as the way-too-hyper Andy Hardy goofball always trying to put on musicals in his dad's barn (this at a time when he was the most popular movie star in the world), Rooney was something beyond that as well: he was one of the best and most subtle character actors of classical Hollywood.

This revealed itself, of course, when he stopped being popular, in all those B-grade noirs and TV appearances he did after the war and into the 1960s.

One of his best: Each man trying to outrun his past, by returning to it: David Janssen at his warmest and most intimate; and a middle-aged Rooney, very special. "This'll Kill You" from January 18, 1966. TV noir at its best, directed by Alex March. (With the young and luscious Nita Talbot.)

And, as himself, an appearance on the smartest and classiest show of its time, from May of '57.

Mayfair

Happy Birthday to me. And Happy 50th Birthday to the 1964 New York World's Fair!

This was it. The zenith moment of the American Century. Opening five months to the day after Dallas broke the back of that Century, the Fair embodied all that was lost and would never return again: a belief that, in the words of the fallen martyr: "Our problems are manmade - - therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man's reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable - - and we believe they can do it again."

It was a moment on the cusp of Tonkin Gulf, on the cusp of the first urban riots soon to explode in Harlem, before the murders of Schwerner, Goodman & Chaney, before the take-off of Johnson / Goldwater, before the fall of Khrushchev. . .The martyr was to open the Fair; rather, it was opened by one of his killers, Lyndon Johnson.

Here's a glimpse of the Fair through the NBC lens of the ever-droning Edwin Newman. Watch closely: you'll never see the likes of this again.

LHO

A brilliant and moving primer on the man who didn't shoot anybody, no sir: Shane O'Sullivan's Killing Oswald.

Guess Who Was Behind This Junk?

[For the answer, please click on it.]