Today’s newsletter is about keeping track of the movies with watch on pizza night.
One star = Everybody really liked it, would watch again.
Two stars = Everybody loved it, feels like a classic.
Read the rest here, and get Meg’s dough recipe here.
Seeing the strings attached
Director Steven Spielberg recently talked about regretting editing the guns out of the 20th anniversary edition of E.T.:
No film should be revised based on the lenses we now are, either voluntarily, or being forced to peer through…. I should have never messed with the archives of my own work, and I don’t recommend anyone do that. All our movies are a kind of a signpost of where we were when we made them, what the world was like and what the world was receiving when we got those stories out there.
Film writer Eric Vespe posted a 2011 interview in which the director comes at the subject from a fan:
[Viewers] understand when they see a movie and they suddenly see something that could have been done much better today and could have been corrected in the DVD/Blu-Ray transfer, they really appreciate seeing the strings attached.
If somebody put out George Pal’s War of the Worlds and took the strings off the machines I’d be very upset. When that machine crashes in downtown Hollywood, and you see the strings going from taut to slack, that’s the thing that allows me to both understand this movie is scaring the hell out of me and at the same time this movie is a creation of the human race.
Emphasis mine. (Show your work!)
That bit about the strings the signs of the human hand made me think about the way AI blends images together — you can’t see the seams!
The seams are what is so good to me about collage. The seams show the different origins of the material. They tell me that a human made it.
And to a certain extent it’s true for all the art I like: the imperfections — the seams and the pops and the strokes and the scratches and the dogs barking in the background — they humanize the work for me and bring me closer to it.
My prediction is that AI will — at least in a certain portion of the population, anyways — lead to a hunger for the handmade, for signs that the thing you’re watching/reading/listening to is “a creation of the human race.”
Why don’t you hire an assistant?
When I wrote about using an AI as an assistant a few weeks ago, I mentioned that I’ve always resisted hiring an assistant.
Last Friday the kids selected Frankenstein (1931) as our pizza night viewing. It’s a wonderful movie, directed brilliantly by David Whale.
I laughed a lot at this scene in which Dr. Frankenstein sends his assistant, Fritz, to go steal a brain for the monster. Fritz drops the “normal” brain in the lab so he takes the “abnormal” brain instead. This scene was later parodied in the also-brilliant Young Frankenstein (1974).
Some trivia: Fritz does not appear in Mary Shelley’s novel! Fritz was invented for an 1823 adaptation by Richard Brinsley Peake for his play, Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein. In the early scripts for the 1931 movie, Fritz was mute, and, supposedly, this scene with the brains was only added late in the process. (Fritz also tortures the monster and, in general, makes things worse.)
Shelley’s Frankenstein is often mentioned these days as a cautionary tale about artificial intelligence, but read another way, the 1931 version of Frankenstein is a cautionary tale about hiring an assistant to do your dirty work!
In Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Skin in the Game, he writes about “one of the best pieces of advice” he ever got: “to have no assistant.”
The mere presence of an assistant suspends your natural filtering—and its absence forces you to do only things you enjoy, and progressively steer your life that way. (By assistant here I exclude someone hired for a specific task, such as grading papers, helping with accounting, or watering plants; just some guardian angel overseeing all your activities). This is a via negativa approach: you want maximal free time, not maximal activity, and you can assess your own “success” according to such metric. Otherwise, you end up assisting your assistants, or being forced to “explain” how to do things, which requires more mental effort than doing the thing itself. In fact, beyond my writing and research life, this has proved to be great financial advice as I am freer, more nimble, and have a very high benchmark for doing something, while my peers have their days filled with unnecessary “meetings” and unnecessary correspondence.
Taleb also writes, of trying to “optimize” the writing and art-making process in general:
Anything you do to optimize your work, cut some corners, or squeeze more “efficiency” out of it (and out of your life) will eventually make you dislike it.
Of course, art history is full of assistants and whole workshops full of helpers, and many of the great artists were at one time apprenticed to a master.
Maybe that’s the important point: making a distinction between assistants and apprentices.
Because they eventually want the master’s job, apprentices have more skin in the game…
The making of Lilo & Stitch
Somehow, it took me 21 years to see Lilo & Stitch. A huge pizza night blockbuster with our crew.
It is so satisfying to me when you see something and you think, “This is so unlike everything else… how did this even get made?” And the answer turns out to be: “Well, it wasn’t made like everything else.”
In “An Oral History of Lilo & Stitch,” the writer Bilge Ebiri tells the story of how the movie came to be. Basically, it was done for a tiny (for Disney) budget, with a tiny (for Disney) crew, in a “secret hangar” in Florida, far away from the eyes of Disney leadership in Burbank. They’d just worked on Mulan, which was sort of a nightmare, and this time they wanted to do things differently:
We said, “Okay, here’s the deal. We have a lot less money. We have less time. But we want to figure out how we can make this movie so that everybody goes home at night to have dinner with their loved ones. Everybody gets a weekend. We’ll figure out how to make this and be happy doing it.” That became the spirit of making the film.
They did wild stuff like going old school and choosing to use watercolor backgrounds like in the 1930s. The only trouble was, almost nobody was alive who knew how to do it. Luckily they went to see Maurice Noble, who painted backgrounds on Snow White:
Maurice Noble was one of my heroes, and he was in his 80s. He used to work for Disney in the ’40s and ’50s. He could hardly see. One great technique that he told me about: There were these rocks in Peter Pan, in the Mermaid Cove, with beautiful rock texture. I asked, “How’d you get this texture?” He said, “The secret is sea salt — very coarse-grain sea salt.” Now, I had tried to get that texture so many times, and I knew about the salt technique, but I never knew you used sea salt. So all the lava rocks in Lilo & Stitch — it was all sea salt. It came right from Maurice Noble.
They also went on location in Hawaii because they didn’t believe you could really get the light and color right without visiting:
One day we were sitting on the beach at night having dinner by the ocean. The sun was setting and the waves were coming in. The water was turquoise, but the sea foam was pink. “How can the white foam be affected that much by the color of the sky, but not the water?” You’ll see in the surfing scene, we did that. Most people would’ve just done the water with white foam or grayish blue foam. We made it pink because that’s what we saw.
The whole piece is worth reading. (It reminded me a lot of reading about the making of Mad Max: Fury Road. That movie really shouldn’t exist. It is what it is because of the process of making it.)
In fact, now I’m wondering if that’s one way you know something is great? When you say: “How does this even exist?”
Spooky season viewing
October is two days away. One of our favorite things to do in my favorite month is watch old spooky movies every night. We have a very specific kind of spooky movie that we love: black and white flicks from the 1930s and 1940s.
A great starting point is to just make your way through the old Universal Classic Monster movies: I especially like Frankenstein (1931), Island of Lost Souls (1932), and The Black Cat (1934).
You can’t go wrong with director James Whale. He made Frankenstein (1931), The Old Dark House (1932), The Invisible Man (1933) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935).
I also really like the movies of producer Val Lewton, especially Cat People (1942) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943).
Probably my all-time favorite halloween movie is Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932), which must be seen to be believed.
A lot of the really good stuff is from the “pre-code” era: in between the advent of talkies in 1929 and the “Hays Code” of 1934. A lot of these movies go hard and are still pretty shocking: the original King Kong (1933) is a great example.
Hitchcock works for spooky season: I really love Rebecca (1940) and Strangers on a Train (1951).
For a lighter tone, check out I Married A Witch (1942) and Arsenic and Old Lace (1944).
A great person on Twitter to follow for these kinds of recommendations is @nitratediva.
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