They say Seinfeld was about nothing. But the clip above puts that sense of nothingness into perspective. Running six plus minutes, the montage assembled by LJ Frezza presents “A supercut of empty shots. A New York without people.” Essentially moments of pure nothingness. When you’re done, you can graduate to some more existentialist ideas — some fun, some substantive — in our archive.
On January 13, 1931, the Society of Beaux-Arts Architects held a ball at the Hotel Astor in New York City. According to an advertisement for the event, anyone who paid $15 per ticket (big money during the Depression) could see a “hilarious modern art exhibition” and things “modernistic, futuristic, cubistic, altruistic, mystic, architistic and feministic.” Attendees also got to witness more than 20 famous architects dressed as buildings they had designed, some of them now fixtures of the New York City skyline.
A 2006 article in The New York Times notes that the event, now considered “one of the most spectacular parties of the last century,” was covered by WABC radio. A few photographs remain (like the one above — click it to enlarge). As does a tantalizing short bit of video.
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Born in Philadelphia, Brenner started out a documentary filmmaker, but eventually launched a career as a comedian. His big break came on January 8, 1971 when Johnny Carson let him do nine minutes of standup on The Tonight Show. Carson apparently liked Brenner’s observational comedy routine. In years to come, Brenner made a record-setting 157 appearances on Johnny’s show, sometimes as a comedy act, sometimes as a substitute host. Above you can watch the very first of those funny appearances.
After the infant Herzog survived a bombing that covered him in rubble, his mother, understandably fearing for her children’s safety, fled to the mountains. The remoteness of his upbringing sheltered him in some ways (“I did not even know that cinema existed until I was 11”) and not, in others. (“At age four, I was in possession of a functioning submachine gun and my brother had a hand grenade.”)
When he says that hunger was a prevailing theme, I dare you to disagree.
Dire predictions, and yet he fills me with cheer every time he opens his mouth. I swear it’s not just that marvelous, much imitated voice. It’s also a comfort to know we’ve got a prolific artist remaining at his outpost from a sense of duty, gloomy yet stout as a child in his belief that an ecstasy of truth lies within human grasp.
In 2012, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) unveiled a sprawling, exhaustive exhibit on Stanley Kubrick. And it had just about everything you might want on the great director. Early photographs he took for Look magazine in the 1940s? Check. The blood soaked dresses of those creepy twins from The Shining? You got it! Sketches, notes and documents about Napoleon, the greatest movie he never made? They had a whole room for that. For those cinephiles who worship at Kubrick’s altar, LACMA’s exhibit was akin to a visit to the Vatican. There were more holy relics there than you could shake a monolith at—oh, and they had one of those there too.
The exhibit wrapped up in June 2013. If you missed it and you are jonesing for more Kubrick memorabilia, take heart — LACMA designed an app in conjunction with the exhibit for the iPhone, iPad and Android and you can download it right now. For free. The app is about as sprawling as the exhibit (and it will take a bit of time to download) but it features hand drawn notes from Kubrick, behind-the-scenes pictures from all of his movies, and interviews with the director, plus ones with the likes of Elvis Mitchell, Christopher Nolan and Douglas Trumbull.
The only thing that the app and the exhibit didn’t cover is the ever-growing number of insane conspiracy theories surrounding his work. Want something about how The Shining is really about a faked moon landing or how Eyes Wide Shut is really about the Illuminati? Look somewhere else.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.
David Bowie and Cher: the combination sounds so incongruous, but then you think about it and realize the two could hardly have more in common. Two singers of the same generation, close indeed in age but both (whether through their sensibilities or through various cosmetic technologies) perpetually youthful; both performers of not exactly rock and not exactly pop, but some oscillating form between that they’ve made wholly their own; both masters of the distinctively flamboyant and theatrical; both given to sometimes radical changes of image throughout the course of their careers; and both immediately identifiable by just one name. The only vast difference comes in their performance schedules: Bowie, despite releasing an acclaimed album The Next Day last year, seems to have quit playing live shows in the mid-2000s, while Cher’s continuing tours grow only more lavish.
Long before this current stage of Bowie and Cher’s lives as musical icons, the two came together on an episode of the latter’s short-lived solo (i.e., without ex-husband Sonny Bono, with whom she’d hosted The Sonny & Cher Show) television variety show, simply titled Cher. On the broadcast of November 23, 1975, Bowie and Cher sang “Young Americans,” at the top, “Can You Hear Me,” just above, and bits of other songs besides.
Watch these clips not just for the performances, and not just for the outfits — costumes, really, especially when you consider Cher’s even then-famous variety of artificial hairstyles — but for the video effects, which by modern standards look like something out of a late-night public-access cable program. An especially trippy set of visuals accompanies Bowie’s solo moment on the episode below, singing about the one quality that perhaps unites he and Cher more than any other: “Fame.” And lots of it.
Since Vivian Kubrick was in grade school, she worked as a collaborator with her famous filmmaker father. She had cameos in a number of his movies including 2001: A Space Odyssey and Barry Lyndon. She shot the behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of The Shining at the age of 24. And she composed the score for Full Metal Jacket under the pseudonym of Abigail Mead. Kubrick seemed to groom his daughter to be his cinematic heir. And then in the late 90s, that all stopped. She cut off all contact with her family.
Kubrick’s family was initially cagey about what happened to her, saying simply that she was living in LA. But then in 2010, Kubrick’s stepdaughter Katharina opened up. “We weren’t lying, we were just being economical with the truth,” she told The Daily Beast. “Because if you say, ‘My sister has become a Scientologist,’ where do you go from that?”
The Church of Scientology’s policy of disconnection is one of its most controversial practices. It’s not clear if Vivian formerly disconnected with her family but she did reportedly attend her father’s funeral in 1999 with a Scientologist minder. When her sister Anya died of cancer in 2009, she did not attend that funeral even though they were, by all accounts, inseparable growing up.
The rift between Kubrick and his daughter became final when he asked her to score Eyes Wide Shut and she refused, as “They had a huge fight. He was very unhappy,” recalled Kubrick’s wife and Vivian’s mother. “He wrote her a 40-page letter trying to win her back. He begged her endlessly to come home from California. I’m glad he didn’t live to see what happened.”
Recently on her Twitter feed, Vivian posted a series of photos of herself on the set of her father’s movies. One picture shows an eight-year old Vivian clutching a baby chimp used on 2001. Another shows her hanging out on the milk bar set of A Clockwork Orange. “I helped cut out those Styrofoam letters on the wall,” she writes. Another picture shows Vivian sitting before a 16mm Steenbeck, editing her documentary on The Shining. And, most poignantly, one of her picture’s shows Vivian and Kubrick embracing on a deck chair.
“In Memory of my Dad,” she writes. “Who I loved with all my heart and soul… Dad and Me on the back veranda of Abbots Mead.”
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.
We live in a golden age of television, not just because technology lets us watch shows whenever we like, however we like — thus freeing shows from the tedious need to repeat past events every episode, or worse, to forego the idea of an overarching story entirely — but because technology provides us so many ways to talk about the shows as well. When else, for example, could a critic like Matt Zoller Seitz make the kind of thoughtful video essays he does for so wide an audience? He doesn’t even labor under the obligation to write only about current programs, and you can see the fruits of that freedom in his new video essay above. “A Lie Agreed Upon,” produced for the tenth anniversary of the debut of HBO’s Deadwood, examines the still-resonant neo-Western series created by television auteur David Milch, its genesis, its artistic accomplishments, and what it still has to say about society. “If you’ve read my work,” writes Zoller-Seitz on his blog at RogerEbert.com, “you know I never miss an opportunity to work Deadwood into the conversation, as a legitimate point of comparison with other shows or films or because I just love talking about it.”
Zoller-Seitz channels this critical compulsion into “a stand-alone, nearly half-hour-long piece, co-produced with HitFix, that looks at the show’s style and major themes, as well as its roots in different genres, including the Western and the gangster picture.” On that page, you can even read the essay’s annotated script, which gives you a look at the thought behind this short but rich exegesis on “one of the greatest dramas in American television history,” a show that, though originally conceived for an ancient Roman setting, flawlessly made the transition to a story of “the founding of civilization” in post-Civil War South Dakota. Going from “lewd farce” to “comedy of manners” to “political drama,” Deadwood holds fast to the theme of the basic truths, real or imagined, around which society coheres. After running down the series’ rough-and-tumble cast of characters, most of them addicted to one primitive Old West drug or another — booze, laudanum, hope — Zoller-Seitz paraphrases Milch’s own thoughts on the subject: “A community’s collective agreement on certain principles can be yet another kind of intoxicant — perhaps the most powerful one of all.”
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