I’ve been reading every night. Still.
- Composing Pictures started going a bit over my head but I held on until the end – it went beyond concepts I could artistically relate to or something. I was tired. I think like Preston Blair’s Cartoon Animation series, it’ll be one of those books that’ll make more sense once I actually need its advice. (I swear Cartoon Animation teaches me something different every time I read it.)
- Painting With Light by John Alton was great. Dense yet not overpoweringly so – empoweringly so, if anything. Makes me wonder how many of the suggested techniques (flags, gobos, etc) can be done virtually… and it’s actually kind of a delightful read to boot, especially the bit about taking a cruise. It turns out, bonus susprise hooray, that one of John Alton’s most acclaimed DoP gigs The Big Combo is in the public domain and free to watch on Archive.org. For a B movie it’s pretty solid and it looks awesome.
On Monday I woke up and watched Roman Polanski’s 1974 movie Chinatown. (Word to the curious: Never do that to yourself. Ever. That movie will sneak up on you and cut your heart out – and it’s a lot to handle first thing on a Monday morning.) Later that day I watched Dial M For Murder. The movies were worlds apart – both are pretty dark, but Chinatown’s just plain old gut-kickingly bleak while Dial M is darkly funny, even if by the end of it all I felt quite sorry for Grace Kelly’s character.
Looking back, there’s been something decidedly heightened and consciously theatrical in the feel of Casablanca, Dial M for Murder, Rear Window and The Maltese Falcon – these are pictures that want to show their audience a good time. There’s a kind of lightness to them compared with movies today – it’s not that you don’t ache for Rick’s heartbreak in Casablanca, worry about what’s going to happen to Grace Kelly in aforementioned Hitchcock films…
It feels like a slightly different contract between creation and audience these days. People got more cynical and broad-minded, maybe? I don’t know. What I do know though is that those old pre-1970s shows still work just fine on me, even as a patron of the 21st Century. Maybe it’s just that movies these days are over-committed to technical perfection, substance, spectacle and/or universe credibility. Maybe that’s why people don’t write cartoons much like they used to – because people don’t make films or cast actors like they used to either.
Also I want some sort of robotic pet that speaks in the dulcet tones of Peter Lorre. I may have mentioned that. If you don’t know who Peter Lorre is, here he is doing a rant sounding suspiciously like a certain future asthma-hount chihuahua. Also he was the basis for the stereotypical mad scientist from many Warner Bros cartoons. Anyway, imitations are one thing but all the little nuances and twists in his actual speaking voice are immensely appealing to me.
Anyway. Last night I was going to start on “The Writer’s Journey” (hey alright, monomythic writing and stuff) but I decided after watching noir all day I needed something more comedy-oriented. To that end, I read through a couple of impulse buys off Kindle (“Buy with 1-Click” is a fiend):
- Tex Avery: Hollywood’s Master of Screwball Cartoons by Jeff Lenburg – Enjoyed it, learnt a lot but wanted to give Tex manly hugs by the time I finished it. Probably not worth the ~$20 asking price but it was an interesting account of Tex’s career through Walter Lantz, Warners, MGM and beyond. I was possibly very slightly particularly thoroughly annoyed that Rock-A-Bye Bear didn’t rate anything more than a passing mention.
- What Are You Laughing At?: A Comprehensive Guide to the Comedic Event by Dan O’Shannon. A nifty book by a veteran writer that goes into a whole thesis of comedy via what it calls “comedic events”. Fascinating, insightful, and very likely true enough to be useful. Hopefully it sunk in.
Frankly more people who write comedy “how-to” manuals need to get their stuff published as e-books so I don’t have to wait more than a week to read what I buy. Oh well, they miss out.
Time to get tonight’s reading underway.
