Wednesday, April 24, 2019

Grant Guy multimediates

Life Is Good


1 comment:

  1. Eric Dolphy helped make the bass clarinet a jazz instrument, extended the vocabulary and boundaries of the alto saxophone, and was among the earliest significant jazz flute soloists. He also sometimes played the baritone and soprano sax, clarinet and piccolo. In addition to using an array of extended techniques to emulate the sounds of human voices and animals, his improvisational style was characterized by the use of wide intervals. In the early 1960s he played in Charles mingus' groups; Mingus said Dolphy "mastered jazz. And he had mastered all the instruments he played. In fact, he knew more than was supposed to be possible to do on them." At 36 he collapsed into a diabetic coma in his hotel room in Berlin and was taken to the hospital; without giving him a blood test the doctors assumed that he was a junkie, gave him some detox medicine, and did not treat him for his diabetes.
    Alfred Hitchcock directed over 50 feature films, for which he won 2 Golden Globes bestowed by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, 8 Laurel Awards from the "Motion Picture Exhibitor" magazine, and 5 lifetime achievement awards, including the 1st British Academy of Film and Television Arts Academy Fellowship Award and an American film Institute Life Achievement Award. He was nominated for 5 Academy Awards for Best Director; his "Rebecca" was nominated for 11 Oscars and won for Best Picture of 1940, beating out his own "Foreign Correspondent" for that honor. He hired model Tippi Hedren to make her acting debut in his 1963 film "The Birds" and became obsessed with her: jealous and resentful when he saw he speaking to male colleagues,he isolated her from the rest of the crew, had her followed, whispered obscenities to her, had her handwriting analyzed, and had a ramp built from his private office directly into her trailer. For a scene in which she was attacked by the birds, he put her in a caged room while 2 men wearing elbow-length protective gloves threw live birds at her for a week, and, to keep them from flying away from her too soon, he had 1 leg of each bird attached by nylon thread to elastic bands sewn inside her clothes. Though she rebuffed his advances, she was till under contract to him and was then cast in "Marnie" (1964). No longer speaking to her after he asked her to touch him, he referred to her as "the girl" rather than by name. When screenwriter Evan Hunter submitted 2 versions of the script, 1 without a rape scene, Hitchcock told him, "when he sticks it in her, I want that camera right on her face!" and replaced him with Jay Presson Allen, who claimed that the scene "was his reason for making the movie."


    ReplyDelete

Join the conversation! What is your reaction to the post?