Archives for January 2021

“A woman can be a man’s friend only in this sequence: first an acquaintance, then a mistress, and after that a friend.”

Anton Chekhov, Uncle Vanya

“The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionaries are philosophers and saints.”

Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History

James Earl Jones appears in a scene from the original Broadway production of August Wilson’s Fences, performed on the 1987 Tony Awards telecast:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“Finality is not the language of politics.”

Benjamin Disraeli, speech in the House of Commons (February 28, 1859)

From 2011:

For the most part I’ve only talked about it in passing on this blog, but a year ago I started writing a one-man play about Louis Armstrong and Joe Glaser, his longtime manager. (The same actor plays both parts.) The play, which grew out of the research I did for my recent biographyof Armstrong, is called Satchmo at the Waldorf, and a couple of weeks from now it will become more than just a furtive gleam in the author’s eye.

As part of my current residency at Rollins College’s Winter Park Institute,  where I wrote the first draft of Satchmo at the Waldorf last year, I’m going to be taking part in a public presentation of the play’s opening section, the first time that any part of the script has been performed, either in public or in private. I’m staging the scenes that we’re doing–it’ll be my directing debut–and Dennis Neal, a seasoned actor who lives in Orlando, not far from Winter Park, will be playing the double role of Armstrong and Glaser….

Read the whole thing here

“It is depressing to hear the unfortunate or dying man jest.”

Anton Chekhov, “On the Road” (trans. Constance Garnett)

In my latest Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I write about the appeal of widescreen films. Here’s an excerpt.

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We’ve all heard about the perilous state to which movie theaters have been reduced by the pandemic and how in-home streaming is the wave of the future. But is that necessarily so bad? Yes and no. Many popular films, especially smaller-scaled romantic comedies, do not profit decisively, artistically speaking, from being viewed on a 50-by-30-foot screen, the standard size of a large multiplex screen. What is mainly lost by home viewing is something else: the exciting and festive communal experience of seeing any film as part of an audience, which for many grownups is significantly diminished (notwithstanding the great popcorn) by the prospect of sitting in the midst of a noisy, inattentive, cellphone-wielding crowd. Anyone who, like me, has seen a hit film at a suburban multiplex knows that such has long been the aggravating reality of contemporary moviegoing.

On the other hand, some films—including many of the greatest ones—lose immeasurably from home viewing. I discovered this in 2017 when TCM Big Screen Classics started showing older studio-system films in theaters on a limited-run basis. The Big Screen Classic that opened my eyes to the incomparable pleasures of large-screen viewing was Alfred Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest” (1959), a thriller shot in VistaVision, one of several widescreen, higher-resolution filming processes introduced in the ’50s in order to help studios compete with TV….

Part of what makes the original VistaVision version of “North by Northwest” so compulsively watchable is that many of its most memorable scenes, in particular the ones shot in a deserted Illinois cornfield and on a studio mockup of Mount Rushmore, made use of the wider screen of VistaVision by being filmed on an exceptionally large scale. No matter how big a home TV screen you have, it cannot come remotely close to offering the all-enveloping experience of watching scenes such as these unfold on a wide screen in a darkened theater.

This is equally true of widescreen westerns like John Ford’s “The Searchers” (1956, shot in VistaVision) and Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West” (1968, shot in CinemaScope, an anamorphic widescreen process with an aspect ratio of 2.35:1). The immense wilderness spaces in which these movies are set are, in a sense, another onscreen character…

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Read the whole thing here.

Artie Shaw plays his “Concerto for Clarinet” with his big band in the 1940 film Second Chorus, directed by H.C. Potter:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)