“For me, the excitement of auditions, the camaraderie of actors in rehearsal, the tight and secret conspiracy against the world, which begins to grow between actors and authors and directors and is the essence of putting on a play–this, to me at any rate, is the really satisfying part of the whole process, and the only thing, I think, that ever persuades me to walk toward a typewriter once again.”
Moss Hart, Act One
Snapshot: a Stan Freberg commercial (II)
A 1962 commercial for Cheerios, written by Stan Freberg:
(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)
Almanac: Moss Hart on the “rules” of theater
“The frivolity with which all theatrical activity is conducted has one consoling feature–there are no rules of behavior that apply regularly to any part of the theatre. There is nothing that one can say about acting, writing, producing or directing that cannot be revoked in the next breath. Nothing is immutable. The logic of one year is a folly of the next.”
Moss Hart, Act One
Lookback: the limits of companionability
From 2004:
I like getting along with people–though I wouldn’t pay any price for it. But the truth is that my inclination to companionability has never been put to anything like a severe test. I have good friends whose views I think silly, but none who seem to me downright evil (and I believe in the existence of evil). I sometimes wonder what I’d do if I were to learn that a friend of mine had committed a cold-blooded murder. I like to think that I wouldn’t have befriended such a person in the first place, and that’s probably true–but human nature is complicated enough that I can’t say so with certainty….
Read the whole thing here.
Almanac: Moss Hart on laughter in the theater
“Laughter cannot be faked, no matter how much good will an audience has toward an author. For an audience, whether it consists of one person or one thousand, shortly becomes a valid one in spite of itself the moment the mechanism of listening starts to operate. Every author, unless he chooses to be willfully self-deluded, carries a Geiger counter in his inner ear that tells him quickly enough whether he has struck the false politeness of hollow laughter or the real thing. There is no mistaking it.”
Moss Hart, Act One
Yeah, I know, it took me long enough…
…but I finally tore myself away from you-know-what long enough to completely update the Top Five and “Out of the Past” modules of the right-hand column with an all-new set of picks.
Take a look, click on the links, and enjoy yourself.
FILM
Living in Oblivion. Mrs. T and I recently treated ourselves to a viewing of Tom DiCillo’s prize-winning low-budget 1995 indie flick about the making of (what else?) a low-budget indie flick. Two decades later, it remains one of the funniest and most knowing screen comedies ever made, with wonderfully well-judged performances by Steve Buscemi and Catherine Keener. Whit Stillman loves it, and so will you (TT).
HISTORY
Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. I only just got around to reading this Pulitzer-winning 2010 study of the Great Migration, in which Wilkerson talked to and looked at the complicated lives of three of the countless southern blacks who moved north in the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s to escape the nightmare of racism in the Deep South. It’s not so much a piece of formal scholarship as an exercise in historically informed storytelling, but on that level it’s a really remarkable piece of work, written with immense sensitivity and packed with a wealth of telling, near-novelistic detail. For once, the subtitle is no exaggeration: this really is an epic story (TT).