![oldhollywood:
Sissy Spacek & Martin Sheen on the set of Badlands (1973, dir. Terrence Malick)
Sheen: “One night I got a call saying that [Malick] decided to use me and would I be willing to do it. And I said, ‘Why sure, I’d be happy as Larry’. [The next morning], I was driving along Pacific Coast Highway and I was listening to a Dylan song called Desolation Row..and suddenly it dawned on me what had just happened - that I had the role of my life. And I began to weep uncontrollably with joy and I had to pull off the side of the road and just stop and reflect on what was happening. And it was one of the most profound moments of my life because it was the realization of a dream that I never thought would happen to me.”
Spacek:”It was a very passionate kind of working experience. No one was making any money and everyone was there because we were desperate to work on the film…It was probably the first film that I felt creatively engaged in. Terry would ask me questions about the character. I felt like I wasn’t just an actor for hire…After working with Terry, I was like, ‘The artist rules. Nothing else matters.’ My career would have been very different if I hadn’t had that experience.”
(via)](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m43b5yuKl61qzdvhio1_1280.jpg)
Sissy Spacek & Martin Sheen on the set of Badlands (1973, dir. Terrence Malick)
Sheen: “One night I got a call saying that [Malick] decided to use me and would I be willing to do it. And I said, ‘Why sure, I’d be happy as Larry’. [The next morning], I was driving along Pacific Coast Highway and I was listening to a Dylan song called Desolation Row..and suddenly it dawned on me what had just happened - that I had the role of my life. And I began to weep uncontrollably with joy and I had to pull off the side of the road and just stop and reflect on what was happening. And it was one of the most profound moments of my life because it was the realization of a dream that I never thought would happen to me.”
Spacek:”It was a very passionate kind of working experience. No one was making any money and everyone was there because we were desperate to work on the film…It was probably the first film that I felt creatively engaged in. Terry would ask me questions about the character. I felt like I wasn’t just an actor for hire…After working with Terry, I was like, ‘The artist rules. Nothing else matters.’ My career would have been very different if I hadn’t had that experience.”
(via)
1930s imagining of 1980s New York in the sci-fi musical Just Imagine (1930, dir. David Butler) (via)
Designed by art director Stephen Goosson, the city set was an elaborate miniature model that covered a ground area of 75 x 225 feet and whose tallest tower measured 40 feet.
Just Imagine’s New York was primarily inspired by architect Harvey Corbett’s prediction that 1970’s New York would resemble a “very modernized Venice” and by the futuristic urban designs presented in Hugh Ferriss’s 1929 book, The Metropolis of Tomorrow.
Ferriss’s drawings of the ”business center of the future” (pictures #3-5) provided the most direct inspiration for Goosson’s sets. Broad superhighways establish a geometric ground plan that extends upward through overlapping levels of bridges, streets, and terraced walkways. The grid of streets and bridges is pierced by huge freestanding skyscrapers surrounded by lower setback buildings, a design Ferriss created as an analogy to the natural world of “towering mountain peaks… surrounded by foothills”
The opening scenes of the (otherwise mediocre) film, which feature this cityscape, can be seen here.
More on the building of the Just Imagine set. Collection of Hugh Ferriss’s futuristic city sketches here.
Priest’s Speech from Synecdoche, New York
“Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true. There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make. You can destroy your life every time you choose. But maybe you won’t know for twenty years! And you may never ever trace it to its source. And you only get one chance to play it out. Just try and figure out your own divorce…
And they say there’s no fate, but there is, it’s what you create. And even though the world goes on for eons and eons, you are only here for a fraction of a fraction of a second. Most of your time is spent being dead, or not yet born. But while alive, you wait in vain wasting years for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something to make it all right, but it never comes. Or it seems to, but it doesn’t really.
So you spend you time in vague regret or vaguer hope that something good will come along, something to make you feel connected, something to make you feel cherished, something to make you feel loved. And the truth is is, I feel so angry! And the truth is, I feel so fucking sad! And the truth is, I’ve felt so fucking hurt for so fucking long and for just as long, I’ve been pretending I’m okay, just to get along!
I don’t know why. Maybe because…no one wants to hear about my misery…because they have their own. Well, fuck everybody. Amen.”
Billie Holiday, 1958. Photographer: Dennis Stock (via)
“I’ve been told that nobody sings the word ‘hunger’ like I do. Or the word ‘love.’ Maybe I remember what those words are all about. Maybe I’m proud enough to want to remember Baltimore and Welfare Island, the Catholic institution and the Jefferson Market Court, the sheriff in front of our place in Harlem and the towns from coast to coast where I got my lumps and scars, Philly and Alderson, Hollywood and San Francisco, every damn bit of it.
All the Cadillacs and minks in the world - and I’ve had a few - can’t make it up or make me forget it. All I’ve learned in all those places from all those people is wrapped up in those two words. You’ve got to have something to eat and a little love in your life before you can hold still for any damn body’s sermon on how to behave. Everything I am and everything I want out of life goes smack back to that.”
-Holiday, quoted in Lady Sings the Blues (1956)
1910’s-era movie theater etiquette Public Service Announcements (via 1,2)
Most early movie theaters had only one projector so “etiquette slides” were used to divert the audience while reels were being changed. These glass slides often featured lighthearted instructions for proper behavior while viewing a film.
The Holy Mountain’s “Cathedral of Ice” (1926, dir. Arnold Fanck) (via)
The 50 ft. tall cathedral was constructed from ice painstakingly shaped for months on an armature of metal pipes.
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“Stanley was very sweet and kind to me…He’d always drive me home. [On one] ride home I said, ‘Why are you always so nice to everyone?’ He said, ‘Honey, nobody’s going to get anything out of this movie but me.”
-Chase, 2001 on Stanley Kubrick during the filming of Killer’s Kiss
"(Source: oldhollywood)
"Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.
