Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-1962)

Viewers who turned their television dials to CBS on the evening of October 2, 1955, were greeted with Charles Gounod's "Funeral March for a Marionette" played against a simple caricature of a rotund man in profile. After a beat or two, a silhouette appeared, a man also in profile, walking toward the drawing until becoming aligned with it. The silhouette lingered, Gounod's music twiddling away with the silhouette, forever linking the two. Then:

Good evening, I am Alfred Hitchcock. Tonight I'm presenting the first in a series of stories of suspense and mystery called, oddly enough, Alfred Hitchcock Presents. I shall not act in these stories, but will only make appearances, something in the nature of an accessory before and after the fact, to give the title to those of you who can't read and to tidy up afterwards for those who don't understand the endings.

And so began the director's foray into television, a medium which, in his words, "brought back murder into the home – where it belongs."

The 1950s are generally remembered as docile years — picket fences and two-and-a-half kids and gin-and-tonics served under the sunny and grandfatherly smile of Dwight Eisenhower. When we think of 1950s television we tend to think of wholesomeness, sitcom fare like Leave It To Beaver. But lingering right underneath that serene illusion of the decade are darker elements, witch-hunts and duck-and-cover exercises done in the fear of nuclear annihilation. The darkness of the decade, or at least its moral ambivalence, is embodied wonderfully by Alfred Hitchcock Presents, one of the most sinister shows to run on network television. And that's all the more surprising when you consider that it debuted a full two years before Leave It To Beaver.

Lew Wasserman, a personal friend of Hitchcock as well as his agent, is credited with the idea of putting Hitchcock on television. And why not? It would be a clear opportunity for Hitchcock to cash in on the name he had spent years connecting with mystery and suspense. The director tried to launch a national radio series during the 1940s but never had much luck, and television was the new mass-media machine of the 1950s. Hitchcock was well known and generally liked (artistic respect, we now know, would have to wait a few years, and it would require this television show to reach the masses completely). Shrinking his popular aesthetic in scope and length to easily digestible episodes on home televisions seemed to have success written all over it. His contract was financially pleasing, and the rights to the episodes would revert to him after they ran.

Hitchcock's bank account benefited wildly from his television show, and he became more popular than ever, reaching a wider audience than merely his films, and for once, he was part of the show, not just a mind behind a lens. But what is not given much credit is how seriously Hitchcock took the television project. He was a savvy marketer — often heading up the publicity projects for his own films — and could have simply lent his name and image to the series, turned over the reins to any random person, and let the money come in. But no doubt part of the show's tremendous success comes from the fact that Hitchcock also lent his mind.

The first four seasons of Alfred Hitchcock Presents total 268 episodes, each thirty minutes. The final three seasons, totaling 93 episodes, were expanded to sixty-minutes and the program was retitled The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. It would be disingenuous of me to say I've seen all of the episodes; but I have seen many, enough to discuss the show at large, including the eighteen total directed by Hitchcock. This essay, an installment in my retrospective on the director, will primarily be about those episodes and the show's historical effect and reach.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents is another argument in the ongoing case that Hitchcock — the man and the mind — was like a lightning bolt, the likes of which we may never see again. Biographer Patrick McGilligan says the television series was "an enterprise that might have consumed a full year's attention for a man less well organized, less brimming with ideas and energy." The 1950s were Hitchcock's prime film-making years, and he had a similar drive in launching the show. Less than six months after the idea for the show was hatched, it premiered. Varying accounts exist of how intensely Hitchcock was involved in the show; obviously we know he wasn't ghost-directing in his free time, or participating in extensive re-writes or re-edits as he did with his films, but the extent to which he participated in the show's development was often undersold, primarily by Hitchcock himself, who preferred to defer credit to his long-time assistant Joan Harrison. (This was characteristic of the man whose films hardly bore his name as a contributing writer.)

Harrison produced more than 250 episodes of Presents, and without question was the chief ringleader behind the scenes. But with Hitchcock's name attached, he also put in grueling hours to make sure it reached success, particularly during the first two seasons. McGilligan notes that the director was involved in story and personnel choices and served as a liaison between the show and the network. As the series continued past the first two seasons, he delegated more authority and responsibility, but through to the end he was still working weekends to approve stories and writers and screening final episodes for any post-production suggestions. "A television show, like a souffle, reflects the taste of the person who selects and mixes the ingredients," Hitchcock once said. "It matters a great deal, for example, whether onions or garlic are used and when arsenic is added."

The television show gave Hitchcock, who had a penchant for short fiction, an outlet for hundreds of story ideas that couldn't be adapted into films. He preferred the simple, single-engine driven plot that keeps a short story pushing forward, and relished the twists that often came at the end. If stretched too far and unsupported with more details, Hitchcock believed short fiction could become tedious for a two-hour film; not so with thirty minutes. Since the launch of his directing career, he had been collecting favorite tales and stories. Much of what appears on Alfred Hitchcock Presents came from published works — the likes of H.G. Wells, A.A. Milne, Rebecca West, Julian Symons, V.S. Pritchett, Eric Ambler, John Moritmor, Roald Dahl, Stanley Ellin, Belloc Lowndes, Ray Bradbury, and Cornell Woolrich. Even with films, the director preferred the published world to the original world; adapting a published work required less story development, thus allowing the director to focus more exclusively on the cinematic rendering of the material. The show also gave opportunities to emerging and established directors, like Robert Stevenson, Ida Lupino, Robert Altman, George Stevens Jr., William Friedkin, and Robert Stevens.

At the end of the show's first season, the New York Herald Tribute wrote that "the best thing about Alfred Hitchcock Presents is Alfred Hitchcock presenting," a sentiment which I think holds up nicely even today. It's a remarkable feat that, as he was in the midst of directing his masterpieces, Hitchcock appears in every single episode of the series as its host. We hear stories of the director as a jokester and huckster on the sets of his films, and his films are often morbidly funny, but if you want to see Hitchcock pushing the boundaries of humor, you needn't look any further than any random episode of Presents. His droll wit, often self-inflicted and regularly cruel toward his network and his advertisers ("Crime does not pay, not even on television — you must have a sponsor," is one of his best lines), is utilized to great success. An actor he is not, but a performer — ah, yes, he is a performer. The man who fed him his words was James Allardice, a former journalist, television writer and playwright, who ghost-wrote most of Hitchcock's lines during the openings and conclusions of the show. It was a fruitful and productive relationship; Hitchcock loved a particular anecdote about a high school play Allardice wrote, in which an electric chair set under a sign that read: "You can be sure if it's a Westinghouse." (Not too difficult to understand why they got along so swimmingly.)

What of the show itself? It is great fun, with episodes often coming across like pressurized Hitchcock films. The hand of the director can be sensed behind nearly every aspect of the series, and the themes and motifs that recur throughout the show are Hitchcockian to the nth degree: murder, suspicion, betrayal, guilt, voyeurism, doppelgangers, crime. The plots are curved and twisted; although Presents predates The Twilight Zone by four years, the two are often connected simply by the skewed angle on humanity and the frequent moralistic twist endings. Presents is hardly political and rarely as fantastical, but no doubt it was a great inspiration for Rod Serling, whose show would also run on CBS. Hitchcock himself introduced to the show's attitude in the first episode as "striv[ing] to teach a lesson or point a little moral, advice like mother used to give – you know, walk softly but carry a big stick, strike first and ask questions later, that sort of thing."

The pilot episode, called "Revenge," has the Hitchcock sensibility in the plot and construction. A woman (Vera Miles, who's ravishing in an over-large white button-up draped across her swimsuit-clad boy) has suffered a mental breakdown and her protective husband moves her to a trailer park adjacent to the California coast. When she claims to have been attacked in their home, he seeks revenge, attacking the man she identifies as her assailant. All is well until she ... identifies another man as her assailant. The episode is a stylish debut, with close-ups and selected lighting, the camera positioned at oblique angles, and a great murder scene partially obscured and partially reflected in a mirror.

The rest of the first season's episodes (of which Hitchcock directed four) play out the same way. One Hitchcock-directed episode, "Back for Christmas," has a murderous husband undone by his wife's kindness. Joseph Cotton appears in the episode "Breakdown," a heavily stylistic episode where a man experiences a car crash and is completely paralyzed except for his single little finger. The story relies on many point-of-view shots — a rarity in television — and a haunting internal monologue to achieve an eerie feeling of inescapability and doom. But the crème de la crème of Hitchcock's work in the first season has to be "The Case of Mr. Pelham," which actually is the sort of thing Serling could have worked into The Twilight Zone. Starring Tom Ewell, the "case" is actually of doppelgangers. Pelham is an aloof and distant man of wealth who grows anxious and paranoid as he begins to suspect someone is impersonating him, not merely at certain moments of importance but in the mundane moments in life.

Throughout the series, Hitchcock ran afoul with the ambiguity of the episode endings — namely whether characters who committed crimes were receiving proper punishment for their deeds. Untethered with the Production Code, Hitchcock was still stuck with nervous advertisers that didn't want to run commercials along successful murders. Where an early episode like "Revenge," the series pilot, would directly imply punishment for the characters in the stageplay, later episodes had to state explicitly what was coming. In "One More Mile To Go," a country man who murders his wife is antagonized by a police officer on a motorcycle who is determined to have the man fix a broken taillight. Normally it'd be as easy as popping open the trunk — except, of course, the dead wife's body is in the trunk. "One More Mile To Go," a Hitchcock-directed gem from the second season, pushes boundaries; after the man murders his wife, he cleans off the weapon and burns a blood-stained handkerchief and decides how he's going to load the body into the car, all while the orchestra swells and sighs with music of unbridled romance. In the end, as the officer escorts the man to the police station where the resident mechanic "will have that trunk open in no time," Hitchcock zooms the camera in on the broken taillight, oval-shaped and flashing on and off to look like a blinking eye. And there the episode ends: a vague impression that the man is caught, but he's alone on a country road and already murdered once, so who knows?

In many instances, the story within the episode would literally take away all possibility of punishment and let the perpetrators get away with the crimes. Hitchcock, as you might expect, would need to toss something onto the ending, but would deflate the safety of punishment with bad jokes. In "The Perfect Crime," from the show's third season (tied with the first season as the best), Charles Courtney (played by Vincent Price) gets away with murdering a lawyer named John Gregory (James Gregory) and using the remains to make a vase out of "special clay." Except, as Hitchcock explains in self-consciously pathetic narration:

I regret to inform you that Courtney did not retain his last trophy very long. He was caught. A charwoman knocked over the precious vase breaking it into pieces, a few of them identifiable as, uh, bits of Mr. Gregory. You see, the gold fillings in his teeth had resisted the heat of the kiln. But all the good doctors and all the good police couldn't put Mr. Gregory together again.

He might as well be rolling his eyes, and by the time we arrive at the lame pun, Hitchcock understands no one except the advertisers really care. The same sense of safety in the ending is elusive in what might be the show's most famous episode, "Lamb to the Slaughter," directed by Hitchcock and adapted from a Roald Dahl short story where a pregnant woman (Barbara Bel Geddes), upon hearing the news that her husband is leaving her, kills him with a frozen leg of lamb. If it's not the best example of the show, it's certainly among the most perverse. The woman deceives the police from start to finish, and even though the lead detective essentially solves the mystery, he can't pinpoint the murder weapon. "For all we know it could be right under our noses," he says as he and his crew sit down to dinner — a perfectly cooked leg of lamb, as a matter of fact. The ending here, with the woman cackling at her masterwork, is blunted by criticism with another Hitchcock tacked-on anecdote: "she would have gone scot-free if she hadn't tried to do in her second-husband in the exact same way." It's a wonder anyone who had trouble with the on-screen murder ever found that excuse satisfying.

These are only a few of the hundreds of episodes in a series that is quite worth your time, and, as the cliche goes, still better than most of the stuff on television right now. As I said above, the first and third seasons are probably the show's strongest — the strongest episodes directed by Hitchcock and the strongest episodes not directed Hitchcock, which still carry the hallmarks of the director. The series is a curious and rewarding departure from his longer, more nuanced cinematic artwork, but because he never let the show venture too far away from his watchful eyes and ever-spinning mind, you know it has the quality the Hitchcock name is known for.

Continue reading »

3-D or not 3-D, that is the question

Monsters vs. Aliens opens in theaters this weekend, the first of what Jeffrey Katzenberg promises will be an all digital 3-D output from the animation division at DreamWorks. So far, the film is receiving rather tepid reviews from people I admire, but I want to see it anyway, for two reasons: 1) I adore animated movies; and 2) I adore '50s sci-fi films (and the more cautionary and politically charged they are, the better). I could debate the merits of 3-D for the next year on this blog; for the record, I think it's utterly ridiculous and artistically distracting, although I find it oddly appropriate that this film, an homage to the creature features of the '50s that were originally burdened with silly 3-D, should be the first from DreamWorks to explore the third dimension.

But what's prompting this discussion isn't exactly regarding the merits. My conundrum is that my lovely wife, who also adores animated films, has had a depth-of-vision issue her entire life and can't see the cinematic 3-D effect. The solution's not difficult: naturally, if we go, we'll go see the standard projection version of the film, which is available at one of our local theaters. (After all, if it were me in her situation, I know she'd want to see the standard release — there's no reason for both of us to get the short-shrift when a better, more viable version exists.)

More importantly, and perhaps not surprisingly, this has me thinking about artistic intent. On DreamWorks Animation's end, of course, the intent is to rake in as much cash as possible — one shouldn't ever doubt a studio's motive — but what about the intent of the animators? Is seeing the flattened version of an animated movie that is meant to be seen in 3-D doing a disservice to the creative vision of the crew?

This problem is along the same lines of the should-I-read-the-book-first debate, something I've had much experience with the last few months. I see myself as a writer first and a film lover second (or concurrently!), and in all high-profile scenarios, I defer to the original text. I wanted to read the graphic novel Watchmen before seeing the film, and after reading the novel, I'm hesitant that I should actually see the film. I had to wait to see Revolutionary Road until I finished Richard Yates's novel, which my wife gave me as a Christmas gift. However, when I finally saw the film a few days after finishing the book, it felt surprisingly stiff, as if a cast and crew suddenly materialized and began an impromptu remake of a film I had already seen. (I still liked the movie and have committed myself to watching it again in a couple months after cleansing my palette with other novels.) Hell, I even wanted to re-read Maurice Sendak's Where The Wild Things Are before watching the awesome trailer released this week, and that's just a trailer.

I'm a stickler and it's long plagued me that I can't have it both ways. In two forms of something that is essentially the same, someone's creative vision will be sacrificed because, if you're like me, you're incapable of washing away the first impression of an astounding work of art. Richard Yates or Sam Mendes — whose vision should I embrace first? Zack Synder, the so-called "visionary" director of Watchmen, actively (and quite pompously) promoted the idea of foregoing Alan Moore's graphic novel until you've seen his movie. And while that's not the reason I'm avoiding the film, it went a long way toward emboldening me to tell him to go screw himself.

And now I find myself in the same boat with 3-D, which was originally invented as a ploy to lure young people into seats and is, yet again, being used to lure young people into seats. But 3-D, regardless of our personal opinions on its worth, is part of the process here, if what I've read about Katzenberg is to be believed, and I don't think it's out of the question to treat the 3-D of Monsters vs. Aliens the same way you'd treat other cinematic characteristic. The goal of any art lover should always be to see the work as it was originally meant to be seen. I can tell you the print of Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks" that hung in my college dorm room never did justice to the actual painting that hung on the walls of the Art Institute; that is even more so for my Jackson Pollock print. Film lovers should take special considerations to see movies as they were meant to be seen: widescreen when it was made in widescreen, black-and-white when it was made in black-and-white, with the proper sound balances (mono or stereo), and, often times, seeing it on the big screen as opposed to television or computer screens. And can't that be said for 3-D?

This discussion is more simplistic than the novel-or-film-first debate because what's at stake is not character development, plot continuity, emotional depth, visual cues, and authorial intent — although, I suppose, it's worth noting that 3-D can be distracting and thus impair a viewer's ability to follow the film. Still, since I'm teaching a class in the creative process this semester, I can't help but wonder what an animator who worked on Monsters vs. Aliens would advise me to do. All subjective criticism of the film's plot and humor aside and focusing exclusively on the form, how will my experience be altered if at all?

Continue reading »

The Great Dictator (1940)

d. Charles Chaplin / USA / 124 mins.


The Great Dictator was Charles Chaplin's first film with spoken dialogue, and boy, did he have a lot to say. Audiences knew from his previous film, Modern Times, that he had a few political bones in his body, but the difference between the degree of politics in Modern Times and The Great Dictator is as loud as the difference between silence and sound. This film blows out the doors and windows as far as satire is concerned: the world's most recognizable comedian unleashed his scorn on the world's most treacherous tyrant.

Chaplin had been told he and Adolf Hitler had more than a few physical similarities. Both were short, with dark hair and the toothbrush moustache that the latter stole from the former. Both were actually born within days of each other, too, but that's obviously where the similarities end. You couldn't have two more unalike characters, which is precisely why Chaplin was the best person to sharpen his harpoon and set course to deflate the tyrant. In the film, Chaplin plays two characters: one is a Jewish barber, injured during World War I and stricken with amnesia that metaphorically resonates when he is reintroduced to society. When he returns to his old barbershop, he finds the word "JEW" painted in the windows and police patrolling the ghetto. This is thanks to Adenoid Hynkel (Chaplin again), the infantile, pompous, and ruthless dictator of fictitious Tomania. With a wink and a nudge, the credits coyly warn us in the beginning that "any resemblance between Hynkel the dictator and the Jewish barber is purely coincidental," as if after seeing Hynkel we're going to be concerned with the fact that he looks like the barber; by the time we meet Hynkel, similarities with the barber are the last things on our minds. It's an utterly unveiled send-up of Hitler, with Chaplin caricaturing all the megalomaniacal qualities to the nth degree.

I've read a large selection of criticism that suggests The Great Dictator isn't as good as Chaplin's earlier films, specifically The Gold Rush, City Lights, and Modern Times. Well, of course it's not. There aren't many films out there that can claim to be as good as that trifecta of silent masterpieces — and "silent" might be the imperative word there. Comparing Chaplin's silent oeuvre to his sound films is a logically flawed starting point. We're tempted to say that the romance of The Great Dictator doesn't blend as seamlessly into the film as a whole as the romance in The Gold Rush or City Lights. That's a perfectly acceptable complaint (and one that I'll actually second), but at the risk of sounding like a Chaplin-in-sound apologist, I don't re-watch The Great Dictator for the romance, just as I don't watch A Night at the Opera for its silly romance that distracts from the genius of the Marx Brothers. In a way The Great Dictator is doing things Chaplin had always done and also never done before. He pantomimes, he gets hit on the head with a cast-iron skillet, he dances until he falls down; that is the Chaplin standard, something he did better than almost anyone in his silent films. But Chaplin's humor became Chaplin's humor because it had a certain heart to it; that heart is unmistakably romantic in The Gold Rush and City Lights, and partially romantic in Modern Times. Between 1936 and 1940, his heart (like many in the western world) re-situated itself. The Great Dictator is a satiric dirty bomb. Now he could rely on dialogue to move the plot, and for once, dialogue to make a joke. What this film shows is that Chaplin hadn't yet found the perfect way to write the dialogue of innocent love (he'd never fully reclaim it, but Limelight comes close), but he had discovered more important ways to let his comedy speak for itself, literally.

So, as Chaplin's first film with spoken dialogue and full barrage of sound effects, The Great Dictator shouldn't be expected to keep the same company as his earlier silent works. Certainly Chaplin employs a few nice bits here that would have played as well in a silent film (a dud artillery shell spins around and follows the barber as he inspects it; Hynkel and the graceful ballet with the globe balloon; the barber shaving a man in perfect rhythm to Brahms; etc.), but aside from the very skillful slapstick, most of the humor here is strictly dialogue driven. The key to the joke lies in the vocal inflections: the innocent wonder in the barber's dialogue; Hynkel's germanic-based rants of pure gibberish and the meek translations that follow, followed by the dictator's trying-too-hard-to-be-indifferent voice later. Other characters are blessed with good voices, like the overblown high spirits of the idiotic Herring (Billy Gilbert, in a parody of Hermann Gorring); the deadpan delivery of Garbitsch (Henry Daniell, in a parody of Joseph Goebbels, in a name that must be said outloud to truly enjoy). These are characterizations and jokes Chaplin was not able to do before. In one scene, Garbitsch visits Hynkel to discuss the complaints of the masses. Hynkel wants to know what they have to complain about.

"The quality of the sawdust in the bread," Garbitsch says.

"What more do they want?" Hynkel responds. "It's from the finest lumber our mills can supply."

It seems to be requisite in every review of The Great Dictator to mention Chaplin's own thoughts about the production. He became increasingly uncomfortable as production went on and Hitler began to squeeze Europe tighter and tighter in his vice grip. Chaplin wrote later that if he had known the full extent of the Nazi Party's evil, it would have been impossible to make The Great Dictator. But that sort of analysis has always set a little uneasy with me. Would the film have really been impossible to make? I doubt it, and although I'm no Chaplin biographer, I doubt Chaplin meant it would be truly impossible. For a man as gifted as Chaplin, nothing seemed impossible, but I'll grant him it would have been more difficult, just not for the reasons we most commonly assume. It's because Chaplin would have been more self-conscious, and self-consciousness limits comedy. The fact that he wasn't entirely bound makes the film as casually acidic as it is. (This is not to say he wasn't bound at all; to the same extent he was, as others were, since the closer it came to 1940, the more information about the inhuman horror reached the citizens of the world).

There's nothing inherently offensive here (at least to me), only an awful lot that's tremendously sad. Although his satire on Hitler is a bit one-sided, it often brushes the edge of darkness. When Hynkel says after the Jews he's going after the brunettes, it's impossible not to cringe at how close Chaplin's joke was to the truth. Taken as it is, in its 1940 incarnation, it's perfect for what it does, and wanting anything else is wading out too far into a catch-22 where we want Chaplin to deliver commentary on events of which he doesn't know the extent. It simply can't be both ways, and that's where I think The Great Dictator trips up many who do want it both ways. What's evident then is that, even if Chaplin didn't know the brutal and atrocious horrors of the European ghettos, he knew the projected path of fascism and what resulted is a movie as ridiculous as it is fearful of the bleak reality had been descending on Europe's Jews.

The film ends with an impassioned speech from Chaplin, delivered from the barber who has been mistaken as the tyrant. It stretches credulity—why doesn't anyone try to stop him? where did he find these words after so much innocence? Many think it shifts the film in a fundamentally large way and mucks up the ending; after two hours of making us laugh, Chaplin the professor takes over and delivers a lecture criticizing authoritarianism, tyranny, and senseless bigotry that ends in the deaths of too many. "It didn't work then, and it doesn't work now," Roger Ebert writes. Mark Bourne says: "Whether it's underwritten or overwritten is hard to say. Yes, Chaplin's appeal for reason and kindness is inarguable, yet as the speech rambles forth trying to open our eyes to too many ills at once, it's punctuated less by plain-speaking Lincolnesque oratory than by naive kumbaya. Its truths are swamped by airy truisms. His intent is honorable, no question. It's the execution that's so damned frustrating."

But I love the speech. It raises my pulse, and it makes me proud to love Chaplin. When the end of the film comes, Chaplin, as he did with the romance of The Gold Rush and City Lights, manages to convince me to turn off all the centers of my brain that deal with logic and the intricacies of filmmaking. When he takes that stage, confused to be Hynkel, he gives us a version of the world as it could be, and that bypasses my brain and speaks to my heart. Although I've read a tremendous amount of criticism against it, I've never read a proposal that moves me even a fraction of how Chaplin can.

As expected, Hitler and all Axis powers banned the film, although the tyrant's curiosity got the best of him and he procured a copy through Portugal and screened it twice. ("I'd give anything to know what he thought of it," Chaplin later said.) In places such as Franco-controlled Spain, the film stayed banned as far into the 1970s. But what may be unexpected is that it was Chaplin's most commercially successful film, and it secured five Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Original Screenplay, but won none. That's a bit of a shame, but it does disprove claims that it was a film ahead of its time. True, the full measure of its humor might only be recognizable this far removed from the age of propaganda and from the war, but it was by no means a failure upon its initial release. I think with time it's gotten better. For the absurdity of tyranny, I'll take Duck Soup, and for subverting Nazism with ridiculousness, I'll take To Be or Not To Be. But The Great Dictator is a film I simply cannot leave behind. It's an impassioned and courageous satire, balancing humor with tragedy, pathos with rationality, all while championing a world of peace and tolerance. Chaplin has a voice, a real voice in sound and in politics. He's brave, he's earnest, he's a prophetic dissident of the highest order. He wants nothing less than to the change the world. He didn't, but he was among the first to shoot an arrow into the eye of evil. As far as I'm concerned, that's a hell of an accomplishment.

Continue reading »

Update

I'm still here.

Teaching and writing short fiction in the last few weeks have distracted me from regularly updating. I took a vacation with my wife and left my computer behind. I recently re-watched The Great Dictator for my Chaplin series, and will be re-watching Psycho as I prepare to teach it Tuesday in my art-and-the-creative-process class. Just finished reading the graphic novel Watchmen for the first time, and I'm not sure I'll be seeing the movie. (I'm just too skeptical, maybe?) Synecdoche, New York and I've Loved You So Long are now at the rental gallery, so I have those to consider. Thanks to all who have been in direct/indirect correspondence, particularly your thoughtful comments. The blog machinery will begin to churn again soon.

Continue reading »