The Making of Apocalypse Now Remixed/Revisited

in Film, Life | August 16th, 2012

In an inter­view aired on San Fran­cis­co radio last week, Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la acknowl­edged that he could no longer com­pete with him­self — that he could­n’t make the kind of films that made him famous dur­ing the 1970s. The God­fa­ther (1972), The God­fa­ther II (1974), and Apoc­a­lypse Now (1979) — they were big, sprawl­ing, mas­ter­ful films. And they some­times pushed a young Cop­po­la to the phys­i­cal and finan­cial brink.

The mak­ing of Apoc­a­lypse Now is a leg­endary tale. Shot in the Philip­pines in 1976, the pro­duc­tion ran into imme­di­ate prob­lems. After only two weeks, Cop­po­la fired Har­vey Kei­t­el, the lead actor, and replaced him with Mar­tin Sheen, who stum­bled into chaos upon his arrival. As biog­ra­ph­er Robert Sell­ers not­ed in The Inde­pen­dent, “Cop­po­la was writ­ing the movie as he went along and fir­ing per­son­nel, peo­ple were com­ing down with var­i­ous­trop­i­cal dis­eases and the heli­copters used in the com­bat sequences were con­stant­ly recalled by Pres­i­dent Mar­cos to fight his own war against anti-gov­ern­ment rebels.” And things only got worse from there. Mar­lon Bran­do showed up enor­mous­ly over­weight and not know­ing his lines. Then, dur­ing the dif­fi­cult film­ing, Sheen suf­fered a heart attack, and Cop­po­la him­self had a seizure and even­tu­al­ly a ner­vous break­down, appar­ent­ly threat­en­ing to com­mit sui­cide on sev­er­al occa­sions. Speak­ing about the whole expe­ri­ence years lat­er, Cop­po­la’s wife, Eleanor, said:

It was a jour­ney for him up the riv­er I always felt. He went deep­er and deep­er into him­self and deep­er and deep­er and deep­er into the pro­duc­tion. It just got out of con­trol.… The script was evolv­ing and the scenes were chang­ing — it just got larg­er and more com­plex. And lit­tle by lit­tle he got out there as far as his char­ac­ters. That was­n’t the inten­tion at all at the begin­ning.

Yes, it’s no won­der that Cop­po­la, now 73 years old, might not have anoth­er epic film in him.

Apoc­a­lypse Now hit the­aters exact­ly 33 years ago this week. And to com­mem­o­rate that occa­sion, we’re serv­ing up a short remix film, Heart of Cop­po­la, that weaves togeth­er scenes from the film, footage from behind the scenes, and audio of the great Orson Welles read­ing from Heart of Dark­ness, the Joseph Con­rad novel­la upon which Apoc­a­lypse Now was loose­ly based. (Find it in our col­lec­tion of Free Audio Books and Free eBooks.)

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Dan Philips Presents Sustainable Housing with Wildly Creative Designs

in Art, Design, TED Talks | August 15th, 2012

“Unique” is an overused word, so much so that it appears in overqual­i­fied redun­dan­cies like “com­plete­ly” or “very unique.” But, what the hell, I’m going to go ahead and call Dan Philips very unique. Philips, who has worked in army intel­li­gence, and as a dance instruc­tor and antiques deal­er, seems to have final­ly found his call­ing at age 64: build­ing cus­tom hous­es out of up to 80 per­cent sal­vaged and recy­cled materials—from con­struc­tion castoffs like old doors and odd-shaped beams to cat­tle bones, wine bot­tles, and license plates. In the TED talk above, Philips, a very wit­ty and engag­ing speak­er with a slight build and bushy han­dle­bar mus­tache, walks an audi­ence through some of his idio­syn­crat­ic designs, remark­ing on details like eggshells as dec­o­ra­tive but­tons, sal­vaged vin­tage appli­ances, his own low-tech solu­tions for laun­dry chutes and bath­tubs, and a sur­pris­ing­ly taste­ful “Bud­weis­er House.”

If any of this sounds a bit quirk-for-quirk’s sake, it’s not (entire­ly). Philips is a man with a seri­ous pur­pose. As a New York Times pro­file put it, he is “fer­vent­ly com­mit­ted to his vision of build­ing for low-income peo­ple,” espe­cial­ly poor, sin­gle moth­ers (Philips’ father aban­doned his fam­i­ly when he was 17). A self-taught plumber, car­pen­ter, and elec­tri­cian, his vision—articulated through his Huntsville, TX com­pa­ny Phoenix Com­mo­tion—includes hous­ing that is not only struc­tural­ly sound, but also archi­tec­tural­ly beau­ti­ful. “I think mobile homes are a blight on the plan­et,” he says. “Attrac­tive, afford­able hous­ing is pos­si­ble and I’m out to prove it.” While many of his buy­ers default­ed on their mort­gages dur­ing the recent crises, and some of his hous­es have been “gentrified”—sold to upper mid­dle-class fam­i­lies attract­ed by the design fea­tures and ener­gy efficiency—Philips is still pleased that his con­struc­tion rep­re­sents the real­i­ty of sus­tain­able design with recy­cled mate­ri­als and a build­ing phi­los­o­phy that tran­scends the end­less vis­tas of bland nou­veau colo­nials, ranch homes, and shod­dy tract hous­ing that seems to stretch across every sub­ur­ban land­scape.

Click here for a slideshow of sev­er­al of Philips’ cre­ations.

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

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Julia Child Shows David Letterman How to Cook Meat with a Blow Torch

in Comedy, Television | August 15th, 2012

Julia Child would have turned 100 years old today. As an author and tele­vi­sion per­son­al­i­ty, Child intro­duced French cui­sine to the main­stream Amer­i­can pub­lic and turned cook­ing into a dai­ly adven­ture.

Child became fas­ci­nat­ed with French food after mov­ing to Paris in 1948. She stud­ied cook­ing at the renowned Cor­don Bleu school, and in 1961 co-authored the two-vol­ume Mas­ter­ing the Art of French Cook­ing. More than 2 mil­lion copies of the book have been sold, but Child is best known for her tele­vi­sion appear­ances on a suc­ces­sion of pro­grams, start­ing with The French Chef in 1962 and end­ing with Juli­a’s Casu­al Din­ners in 1999, just three years before her death in 2002 at the age of 92.

In 2009 she was the sub­ject of the film Julie & Julia, star­ring Meryl Streep. The movie is based on the real-life adven­tures of Julie Pow­ell, who was great­ly inspired by Child. “Some­thing came out of Julia on tele­vi­sion that was unex­pect­ed,” says Pow­ell in a video at Biography.com. “She’s not a beau­ti­ful woman, but her voice and her atti­tude and her playfulness–it’s just mag­i­cal. You can’t fake that. You can’t take class­es to learn how to be won­der­ful. She just want­ed to enter­tain and edu­cate peo­ple at the same time. Our food cul­ture is bet­ter for it.”

For a quick reminder of Child’s voice, atti­tude and playfulness–not to men­tion her con­sid­er­able skill with a blowtorch–we bring you her mem­o­rable late-1980s appear­ance on Late Night with David Let­ter­man, in which the resource­ful Child adjusts to time con­straints by chang­ing a sim­ple Amer­i­can ham­burg­er into beef tartare grat­iné.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

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Bukowski: Born Into This — The Definitive Documentary on the Hard-Living American Poet (2003)

in Film, Literature, Poetry | August 15th, 2012

Neglect­ed to mark the occa­sion of poet and nov­el­ist Charles Bukows­ki’s birth­day yes­ter­day? Then observe it today with a view­ing of the doc­u­men­tary Bukows­ki: Born Into This (avail­able for pur­chase here). The most in-depth explo­ration of Bukowski’s life yet com­mit­ted to film, the movie “is valu­able because it pro­vides a face and a voice to go with the work,” wrote Roger Ebert in 2004. “Ten years have passed since Bukowski’s death, and he seems like­ly to last, if not for­ev­er, then longer than many of his con­tem­po­raries. He out­sells Ker­ouac and Kesey, and his poems, it almost goes with say­ing, out­sell any oth­er mod­ern poet on the shelf.” A wide range of Bukows­ki enthu­si­asts both expect­ed and unex­pect­ed appear onscreen: Sean Penn, Tom Waits, Har­ry Dean Stan­ton, Black Spar­row Press pub­lish­er John Mar­tin, film­mak­er Tay­lor Hack­ford (direc­tor of the ear­li­er doc­u­men­tary titled sim­ply Bukows­ki), and Bono, to name but a few. “Excerpts are skill­ful­ly woven with the rem­i­nis­cences of for­mer drink­ing bud­dies, fel­low writ­ers and Bukowski’s sec­ond wife, Lin­da, the keep­er of the flame, whom he mar­ried in 1985,” wrote Stephen Hold­en in the New York Times. “With­out strain­ing, the film makes a strong case for Bukows­ki as a major Amer­i­can poet whose work was a slash­ing rebuke to polite aca­d­e­m­ic for­mal­ism.”

Some might con­trar­i­ly con­sid­er Bukowski’s writ­ing glo­ri­fied wal­low­ing, a mere pro­fane exul­ta­tion of the low life, but Born Into This reveals that the man wrote as he lived and lived as he wrote, omit­ting nei­ther great embar­rass­ment nor minor tri­umph. Hold­en men­tions that Bukows­ki, “a pari­ah in high school, suf­fered from severe acne vul­garis, which cov­ered his face with run­ning sores that left his skin deeply pit­ted. He recalls stand­ing mis­er­ably in the dark out­side his senior prom, too humil­i­at­ed to show him­self,” and that for all his work deal­ing with late-life sex­u­al prowess, “he was a vir­gin until he was 24, the same age at which his first sto­ry was pub­lished. His descrip­tion of sex­u­al ini­ti­a­tion with an obese woman whom he wrong­ly accused of steal­ing his wal­let is a spec­tac­u­lar­ly unpromis­ing begin­ning to the pro­lif­ic sex­u­al activ­i­ty (described in his nov­el “Women”) that flow­ered after fame brought admir­ers.” Ebert asks the obvi­ous ques­tion: “How much was leg­end, how much was pose, how much was real?”  Then he answers it: “I think it was all real, and the doc­u­men­tary sug­gests as much. There were no shields sep­a­rat­ing the real Bukows­ki, the pub­lic Bukows­ki and the auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal hero of his work. They were all the same man. Maybe that’s why his work remains so imme­di­ate and affect­ing: The wound­ed man is the man who writes, and the wounds he writes about are his own.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

Charles Bukows­ki: Depres­sion and Three Days in Bed Can Restore Your Cre­ative Juices (NSFW)

The Last (Faxed) Poem of Charles Bukows­ki

Tom Waits Reads Charles Bukows­ki

Bono Reads Two Poems by Charles Bukows­ki, “Lau­re­ate of Amer­i­can Lowlife”

Charles Bukows­ki Reads His Poem “The Secret of My Endurance”

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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What Would It Be Like to Fly Through the Universe?

in Astronomy, Video - Science | August 15th, 2012

Of course, the ques­tion has crossed your mind, at least once: What would it be like to fly through the uni­verse? Now you can find out.

Accord­ing to NASA’s Astron­o­my Pic­ture of the Day web­site, the clip above offers per­haps the best sim­u­la­tion yet. The ani­mat­ed flight takes you through 400,000 galax­ies (each spot rep­re­sents one galaxy) and brings you to a point 1.3 bil­lion light years from Earth. And that’s just a small slice of the larg­er uni­verse. Miguel Aragon-Cal­vo and Alex Sza­lay (both of Johns Hop­kins) pro­duced the video along with Mark Sub­barao of the Adler Plan­e­tar­i­um using images from the Sloan Dig­i­tal Sky Sur­vey.

On a relat­ed note, don’t miss What the f#ck has NASA done to make your life awe­some?. It will remind you what NASA’s doing with tax­pay­er fund­ing.

Plus we have great Astron­o­my cours­es in our col­lec­tion of 500 Free Online Cours­es.

via Metafil­ter

Let us deliv­er intel­li­gent media to you. Fol­low us on Face­book, Twit­ter and Google Plus.

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The Wire Breaks Down The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Classic Criticism of America (NSFW)

in Literature, Television | August 15th, 2012

“But it’s f****d, because the man got to where he need­ed to be, and she was­n’t even worth it. Daisy was­n’t noth­in’ past any oth­er b***h any­where, you know? He did all that for her, and in the end, it ain’t amount to s**t.” So begins a scene of book-club dis­cus­sion of F. Scott Fitzger­ald’s nov­el The Great Gats­by (find in our Free eBooks col­lec­tion) in David Simon’s tele­vi­sion series The Wire. Being a dra­ma focused on crime, pun­ish­ment, and the dys­func­tion in soci­ety’s han­dling of both, The Wire sets this lit­er­ary analy­sis with­in prison walls. Being the most crit­i­cal­ly acclaimed work of Amer­i­can fic­tion to come out of the 2000s, it per­haps seemed nat­ur­al to ref­er­ence the most crit­i­cal­ly acclaimed work of Amer­i­can fic­tion to come out of the twen­ties — or, quite pos­si­bly, out of any decade. The fit turns out to be even clos­er than it seems: while Fitzger­ald has received acco­lades for his indict­ment of Amer­i­ca — specif­i­cal­ly, of the amor­phous promise, or the promise of amor­phous­ness, that is the “Amer­i­can Dream” — Simon and his col­lab­o­ra­tors have received acco­lades for theirs — specif­i­cal­ly, of the nature of near­ly every Amer­i­can insti­tu­tion cur­rent­ly oper­at­ing.

The book club’s leader asks what Fitzger­ald meant when he said there are no sec­ond acts in Amer­i­can lives. “He’s say­ing that the past is always with us,” replies D’An­ge­lo Barks­dale, a mid­dle man­ag­er in a drug-deal­ing empire and a char­ac­ter often sin­gled out for crit­i­cal praise. “Where we come from, what we go through, how we go through it — all that s**t mat­ters. [ … ] Like, at the end of the book? Boats and tides and all? It’s like, you can change up. You can say you some­body new. You can give your­self a whole new sto­ry. But what came first is who you real­ly are, and what hap­pened before is what real­ly hap­pened. It does­n’t mat­ter that some fool say you dif­fer­ent, ’cause the only thing that make you dif­fer­ent is what you real­ly do, or what you real­ly go through. Like all them books in his library. Now, he fron­tin’ with all them books. But if we pull one down off the shelf, ain’t none of the pages ever been opened. He got all them books, and he ain’t read one of ’em. Gats­by, he was who he was, and he did what he did, and ’cause he was­n’t ready to get real with the sto­ry, that s**t caught up to him.” H/T Bib­liok­lept

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Wire as Great Vic­to­ri­an Nov­el

Bill Moy­ers with The Wire’s David Simon

The Wire: Four Sea­sons in Four Min­utes

Hem­ing­way, Fitzger­ald, Faulkn­er - A Yale course in our col­lec­tion of 500 Free Cours­es Online 

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Famous Actors & Actresses Answer Revealing Questions on Inside the Actors Studio: A Compilation

in Television | August 14th, 2012

Overt­ly or covert­ly, inter­view pro­grams all have tra­di­tions. James Lip­ton, host of Inside the Actors Stu­dio for the past eigh­teen years, has cham­pi­oned per­haps the most overt inter­view-pro­gram tra­di­tion of all: the Piv­ot Ques­tion­naire. Orig­i­nal­ly wield­ed by anoth­er host, Bernard Piv­ot of the French lit­er­ary talk show Apos­tro­phes, the renowned Ques­tion­naire demands of the inter­vie­wee ten sim­ple pieces of infor­ma­tion: their favorite word, their turn-on, their turn-off, the sound they love, the sound they hate, their favorite curse word, the pro­fes­sion oth­er than their own they would like to attempt, the pro­fes­sion they would­n’t like to attempt, and what they’d like to hear God say when they arrive at the pearly gates. You can watch com­pi­la­tions of Lip­ton’s Piv­ot Ques­tion­naire seg­ments on YouTube, includ­ing the one above with Hugh Lau­rie, Ralph Feinnes, and Rus­sell Crowe. Their turn-ons, respec­tive­ly: eye con­tact, Shake­speare, a well-con­struct­ed sen­tence. Their turn-offs: finan­cial advice, envi­ron­men­tal des­e­cra­tion, false accu­sa­tion.

Or have a look at this one, which bears sim­i­lar­ly pithy insights into the inner lives of Daniel Rad­cliffe, Angeli­na Jolie, and Will Smith. Rad­cliffe would like to try his hand at jour­nal­ism; Jolie, explo­ration; Smith, sci­ence. Though Lip­ton cred­its the Piv­ot Ques­tion­naire to Piv­ot on air every time, its ori­gins lay fur­ther back in time. Piv­ot devel­oped his ques­tion­naire in response to Mar­cel Proust’s, a list of prompts meant to reveal the recip­i­en­t’s per­son­al­i­ty, includ­ing “Your favorite qual­i­ties in a woman,” “Your favorite qual­i­ties in a man,” “Your idea of hap­pi­ness,” and “Your idea of mis­ery” — per­son­al­i­ty-reveal­ing ques­tion­naires being very much the rage in fin de siè­cle Europe. While the tra­di­tion thrives to this day in Lip­ton’s for­mal­ly strict prac­tice, part of me would enjoy the reac­tions to see him re-intro­duce a Prous­t­ian prompt like “The mil­i­tary event I admire the most.”

Four Inside the Actors Stu­dio Piv­ot Ques­tion­naire com­pi­la­tions on YouTube: Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., John­ny Depp; Robin Williams and Antho­ny Hop­kins; Hugh Lau­rie, Ralph Feinnes, Rus­sell Crowe; Daniel Rad­cliffe, Ange­line Jolie, Will Smith

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Ayn Rand (Paul Ryan’s Moral Heroine) Instructs Johnny Carson on the Virtue of Selfishness, 1967

in Philosophy, Politics, Television | August 14th, 2012

Since Wis­con­sin Sen­a­tor Paul Ryan may soon be only a heart­beat away from the pres­i­den­cy of the Unit­ed States, it might be good to pause for a moment and con­sid­er the man’s val­ues. In par­tic­u­lar, it might make sense to get acquaint­ed with his stat­ed source of moral inspi­ra­tion.

“The rea­son I got involved in pub­lic ser­vice,” Ryan said in 2005, “by and large, if I had to cred­it one thinker, one per­son, it would be Ayn Rand.”

The Russ­ian émi­gré writer and philoso­pher Ayn Rand believed that self-inter­est was the great­est good and that altru­ism was unspeak­ably wicked. “Altru­ism is a mon­strous notion,” she said in 1981. “It is the moral­i­ty of can­ni­bals devour­ing one anoth­er. It is a the­o­ry of pro­found hatred for man, for rea­son, for achieve­ment, for any form of human suc­cess and hap­pi­ness on earth.”

Ryan was deeply impressed when he first read Rand’s books as a young­ster. “I grew up read­ing Ayn Rand, and it taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my val­ue sys­tems are,” Rand told The Atlas Soci­ety in 2005. “It inspired me so much that it’s required read­ing in my office for all interns and my staff.”

Rand called the Unit­ed States a “nation of mon­ey,” and she meant it as a com­pli­ment. “The words ‘to make mon­ey’ hold the essence of human moral­i­ty,” she wrote in a famous pas­sage in her 1957 nov­el, Atlas Shrugged. In Rand’s hier­ar­chy of virtue the Amer­i­can indus­tri­al­ist is “the high­est type of human being” and the needy are rab­ble. “Par­a­sites, moochers, loot­ers, brutes and thugs can be of no val­ue to a human being,” Rand wrote in 1963. “Nor can he gain any ben­e­fit from liv­ing in a soci­ety geared to their needs, demands and pro­tec­tion, a soci­ety that treats him as a sac­ri­fi­cial ani­mal and penal­izes him for his virtues in order to reward them for their vices, which means: a soci­ety based on the ethics of altru­ism.”

If Rand taught Ryan “quite a bit” about who he is and what his val­ue sys­tems are, then per­haps Rand’s state­ment above should tell us some­thing about Ryan’s cur­rent bud­get pro­pos­al, which would slash $3.3 tril­lion from pro­grams for low-income earn­ers over the next decade while pro­vid­ing a wind­fall for the wealthy in the form of tax cuts that would net an aver­age $265,000 a year for those with incomes greater than $1 million–over and above the $129,000 they would already receive from Ryan’s exten­sion of the Bush tax cuts. In Ryan’s bud­get the rich are released from their unjust bur­den as “sac­ri­fi­cial ani­mals” while the “par­a­sites,” “moochers” and “looters”–i.e. the elder­ly, the dis­abled and the poor–are taught a les­son in virtue.

For a quick primer on Rand’s philosophy–straight from the horse’s mouth–watch her 1967 appear­ance (above) on The Tonight Show Star­ring John­ny Car­son.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Stephen Col­bert on Ayn Rand

Mike Wal­lace Inter­views Ayn Rand (1959)

William F. Buck­ley Flogged Him­self to Get Through Atlas Shrugged

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