T.S. Eliot’s Classic Poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” Gets Adapted into a Hip Modern Film

in Film, Poetry | February 1st, 2017

T.S. Eliot’s mod­ernist poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” gives us a psy­cho­log­i­cal por­trait of a neu­rot­ic char­ac­ter who elo­quent­ly per­se­ver­ates on the nature of his exis­tence and the weak­ness of his will. The poem is a dream, but not an erot­ic one. Prufrock’s libido is too tied up in knots of self-doubt and self-con­scious­ness for that. Though he moves through a high class broth­el, he hard­ly ever seems to touch anoth­er per­son, ask­ing him­self repeat­ed­ly, “Do I dare?”

“I am no prophet,” mus­es Prufrock, his name con­jur­ing a kind of gaunt Puri­tan­i­cal fig­ure who fears that “the eter­nal Foot­man” and the women who come and go are laugh­ing at him. Prufrock is pathet­ic and ridicu­lous, and he knows it. He escapes from the hell that is his life (the poem opens with an epi­graph from Dante’s Infer­no) with elab­o­rate sym­bol­ist day­dreams. He is a dandy­ish ver­sion of James Thurber’s Wal­ter Mit­ty.

You may be for­giv­en for see­ing few of these qual­i­ties in the cen­tral char­ac­ter of “A Lovesong,” a short film by direc­tor Lau­ra Scrivano and star­ring Daniel Hen­shall (from the AMC series TURN: Wash­ing­ton’s Spies). They are not there. The project sup­pos­ed­ly arose from Henshall’s own fas­ci­na­tion with the poem. But in this adap­ta­tion of it, Prufrock—if we can call Henshall’s char­ac­ter by that name—seems to have no trou­ble with his libido.

Henshall’s soli­tary fig­ure is pen­sive, brood­ing, and hip—a whiskey-sip­ping Brook­lyn flâneur—mov­ing between a seduc­tive night­time New York and a sleep­ing lover in bed, recall­ing per­haps Prufrock’s ref­er­ence to “one-night cheap hotels.” The film is a unique inter­pre­ta­tion of Eliot’s com­men­tary on mod­ern alien­ation, one per­haps suit­ed to our moment. Yet, we would half-expect that any con­tem­po­rary Prufrock would wan­der the streets lost in his smart­phone, fret­ting over his lack of suf­fi­cient “likes.”

For con­trast to this styl­ish reimag­ing of “Prufrock,” we can hear Eliot him­self read from the poem just above.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

T.S. Eliot Reads His Mod­ernist Mas­ter­pieces “The Waste Land” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

Young T.S. Eliot Writes “The Tri­umph of Bullsh*t” and Gives the Eng­lish Lan­guage a New Exple­tive (1910)

T.S. Eliot’s Rad­i­cal Poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Read by Antho­ny Hop­kins and Eliot Him­self

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Meet Theda Bara, the First “Vamp” of Cinema, Who Revealed the Erotic Power of the Movies

in Film, History | January 27th, 2017

Read­ers of a cer­tain gen­er­a­tion, asked to envi­sion a vam­pir­i­cal­ly allur­ing lady of cin­e­ma, may find their imag­i­na­tions going straight to Elvi­ra, Mis­tress of the Dark. But the tra­di­tion of the sil­ver-screen “vamp” goes much deep­er, reach­ing all the way back to the silent era. The term itself was first coined to refer to The­da Bara, not exact­ly a house­hold name now, but then in a league with Char­lie Chap­lin and Mary Pick­ford. She was one of the most pop­u­lar per­form­ers alive.

Bara revealed to a gen­er­a­tion of movie­go­ers the sheer erot­ic pow­er of cin­e­ma, an accom­plish­ment you can glimpse in the clip above of 1915’s A Fool There Was, the pic­ture that made her an icon. The minute she arrives on screen, writes The Guardian’s Kira Cochrane, “it becomes obvi­ous why she was so pop­u­lar — why she went on to have songs writ­ten about her, chil­dren named after her, a per­fume and even a sand­wich (minced ham, may­on­naise, sliced pimen­to and sweet pick­les on toast — served warm) cre­at­ed in her hon­our.” Her face, though it may not seem so notable at first, soon “comes into its own — so much so that when you learn that her char­ac­ter’s malev­o­lence has led one man to jail, anoth­er to beg­gary, and her most recent vic­tim to a very pub­lic sui­cide, you believe it.”

Frank Pow­ell, direc­tor of A Fool There Was, “took a chance on a 29 year-old The­da (she lied and said she was 25)” by ask­ing her to star, writes Messy Nessy’s Addi­son Nugent. “It’s the sto­ry of a devot­ed fam­i­ly man who, while on a ship to Eng­land, meets a beau­ti­ful stranger referred to only as ‘The Vam­pire Woman.’ This mys­te­ri­ous crea­ture cor­rupts his soul, destroys his fam­i­ly, drains him of all of his mon­ey and dig­ni­ty, and even­tu­al­ly caus­es his demise.”

And so the for­mer Theo­dosia Good­man — with some assis­tance from Fox Stu­dios’ PR team, who “plant­ed false sto­ries in the press and invent­ed a fan­ta­sy back­sto­ry for her” — swift­ly became a new kind of femme fatale for this new artis­tic and com­mer­cial medi­um. These dan­ger­ous young women, write the New York his­to­ry pod­cast­ers the Bow­ery Boys, “were the spir­i­tu­al chil­dren of the pri­or gen­er­a­tion of new­ly empow­ered women who fought against the con­straints of Vic­to­ri­an soci­ety. A few years lat­er, as anoth­er vein of female pow­er (the tem­per­ance move­ment) helped bring about Pro­hi­bi­tion, these young women would be called flap­pers, care­free and fueled on the pow­ers of jazz and ille­gal alco­hol.”

Dur­ing her dozen-year-long screen career, Bara made some forty films in total, most of them lost in the Fox vault fire of 1937, includ­ing the 1917 epic Cleopa­tra, a few frag­ments of which you can see in the video above. Her final appear­ance, in 1926’s Madame Mys­tery, both par­o­died the vamp image she could nev­er quite shake and saw her bid farewell to the world of silent cin­e­ma. “Before pic­tures grew up and start­ed to talk, we had to trans­late all our motion into pan­tomime,” said Bara her­self in a lat­er radio inter­view. “We had to express jeal­ousy, hate, love, or devo­tion all in pan­tomime, and at the same time keep pace as the direc­tor guid­ed us just as a metronome guides a pianist.”

The vamp, as Bara played and defined the fig­ure, expressed all those emo­tions with a fear­some vivid­ness, and she “became so syn­ony­mous with the term that she is now referred to as the orig­i­nal on-screen vamp,” writes Cochrane, “the woman who made per­for­mances such as that of Louise Brooks in Pan­do­ra’s Box, Bar­bara Stan­wyck in Dou­ble Indem­ni­ty and Lin­da Fiorenti­no in The Last Seduc­tion pos­si­ble.” Or as the orig­i­nal vamp summed up her own lega­cy, “To be good is to be for­got­ten. I’m going to be so bad I’ll always be remem­bered.”

A Fool There Was will be added to our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch After the Ball, the 1897 “Adult” Film by Pio­neer­ing Direc­tor Georges Méliès (Almost NSFW)

Broke­back Before Broke­back: The First Same-Sex Kiss in Cin­e­ma (1927)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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George Orwell’s 1984 Is Now the #1 Bestselling Book on Amazon

in Film | January 24th, 2017

George Orwell’s clas­sic dystopi­an nov­el, 1984, has sud­den­ly surged to the very top of the Ama­zon’s best­seller list. Though first pub­lished in 1949, it’s back with a vengeance. And George only has the new admin­is­tra­tion to thank.

We’ll have more on Orwell’s 1984 tomor­row. In the mean­time, enjoy some great 1984 picks from our archive below:

Hear the Very First Adap­ta­tion of George Orwell’s 1984 in a Radio Play Star­ring David Niv­en (1949)

George Orwell Explains in a Reveal­ing 1944 Let­ter Why He’d Write 1984

A Com­plete Read­ing of George Orwell’s 1984: Aired on Paci­fi­ca Radio, 1975

Hux­ley to Orwell: My Hell­ish Vision of the Future is Bet­ter Than Yours (1949)

George Orwell’s Har­row­ing Race to Fin­ish 1984 Before His Death

Note: You can down­load Orwell’s 1984 as a free audio­book (or two oth­er books of your choice) if you sign up for Audible.com’s free tri­al pro­gram.  Learn more about Audible’s free tri­al pro­gram here.

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 and BlueSky.

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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David Lynch Explains How Meditation Boosts Our Creativity (Plus Free Resources to Help You Start Meditating)

in Creativity, Film, Health | January 17th, 2017

David Lynch med­i­tates, and he med­i­tates hard. Begin­ning his prac­tice in earnest after it helped him solve a cre­ative prob­lem dur­ing the pro­duc­tion of his break­out 1977 film Eraser­head, he has con­tin­ued med­i­tat­ing assid­u­ous­ly ever since, going so far as to found the David Lynch Foun­da­tion for Con­scious­ness-Based Edu­ca­tion and Peace and pub­lish a pro-med­i­ta­tion book called Catch­ing the Big Fish.

It might seem non­sen­si­cal to hear an artist of the grotesque like Lynch speak rap­tur­ous­ly about voy­ag­ing into his own con­scious­ness, let alone in his frac­tured all-Amer­i­can, askew-Jim­my-Stew­art man­ner, but he does med­i­tate for a prac­ti­cal rea­son: it gives him ideas.

Only by med­i­tat­ing, he says, can he dive down and catch the “big fish” he uses as ingre­di­ents in his inim­itable film, music, and visu­al art. You can hear more of his thoughts on med­i­ta­tion, con­scious­ness, and cre­ativ­i­ty in his nine-minute speech above.

If you’d like to hear more, the video just above offers a near­ly two-hour pre­sen­ta­tion at UC Berke­ley with Lynch as its star. You’ll also hear from out­spo­ken quan­tum physi­cist John Hagelin and Fred Travis, direc­tor of the Cen­ter for Brain, Con­scious­ness and Cog­ni­tion Mahar­ishi Uni­ver­si­ty of Man­age­ment. Some of what they say might make good sense to you: after all, we could all use a method to clear our minds so we can cre­ate what we need to cre­ate. Some of what they say might strike you as total non­sense. But if you feel tempt­ed to dis­miss all as too bizarre for seri­ous con­sid­er­a­tion, you might med­i­tate, as it were, on oth­er things Lynchi­an: back­wards-talk­ing dwarves, sev­ered ears on sub­ur­ban lawns, alien babies, women liv­ing in radi­a­tors, sit­com fam­i­lies in rab­bit suits. He’s cer­tain­ly pitched us weird­er con­cepts than med­i­ta­tion.

For some sec­u­lar intro­duc­tions to med­i­ta­tion, you may wish to try out some of these resources.

–UCLA’s Free Guid­ed Med­i­ta­tion Ses­sions

–Insight Med­i­ta­tion Center’s Free 6‑Part Intro to Mind­ful­ness Med­i­ta­tion

–Stream 18 Hours of Free Guid­ed Med­i­ta­tions

–Med­i­ta­tion 101: A Short, Ani­mat­ed Beginner’s Guide

–Philoso­pher Sam Har­ris Leads You Through a 26-Minute Guid­ed Med­i­ta­tion

–Moby Lets You Down­load 4 Hours of Ambi­ent Music to Help You Sleep, Med­i­tate, Do Yoga & Not Pan­ic

This post orig­i­nal­ly appeared on our site in April, 2013.

Relat­ed con­tent:

David Lynch Talks Med­i­ta­tion with Paul McCart­ney

Dai­ly Med­i­ta­tion Boosts & Revi­tal­izes the Brain and Reduces Stress, Har­vard Study Finds

Allen Gins­berg Teach­es You How to Med­i­tate with a Rock Song Fea­tur­ing Bob Dylan on Bass

 

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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The Scores That Electronic Music Pioneer Wendy Carlos Composed for Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and The Shining

in Film, Music | January 17th, 2017

Back in Sep­tem­ber, we fea­tured Every Frame a Paint­ing’s video essay on how bland and uno­rig­i­nal so much film music has become. As the essay makes clear—and as the Coen broth­ers and Carter Bur­well revealed in a recent round­table—part of the prob­lem is the ubiq­ui­ty of “temp music”—the music direc­tors and edi­tors use as tem­po­rary scores in rough cuts. Some kind of iner­tia has trapped Hol­ly­wood com­posers into copy­ing clas­si­cal works, and each oth­er, in ways that often verge on pla­gia­rism.

In con­trast to this ten­den­cy, some direc­tors sim­ply find that their temp music is so com­pelling that they are com­pelled to keep it. In per­haps the best exam­ple of this, Stan­ley Kubrick tossed out Alex North’s score for the final cut of 2001: A Space Odyssey and kept the music of Richard Strauss and Johann Strauss, of Ligeti, Khacha­turi­an, and oth­ers. North famous­ly didn’t find out until the film’s pre­miere. Com­par­ing North’s mild score with, for exam­ple, Thus Spake Zarathus­tra, we can hard­ly fault the director’s choice, but he could have com­mu­ni­cat­ed it bet­ter.

This episode might have deterred anoth­er Kubrick com­pos­er, Wendy Car­los, who end­ed up pro­vid­ing music for two of his best-known lat­er films. Fans of both Kubrick and Car­los will be grate­ful that it didn’t, though the expe­ri­ence became a frus­trat­ing one for Car­los, who often found her music nudged out as well. Nonethe­less, her con­tri­bu­tions to A Clock­work Orange and The Shin­ing are indis­pens­able in cre­at­ing the dread and hor­ror that car­ry through these cin­e­mat­ic mas­ter­pieces. As you can hear in the open­ing title music for both films, at the top and below, Car­los’ synth scores set up the near-unbear­able ten­sions in Kubrick­’s worlds.

In fact, Car­los came to promi­nence by doing what many a film com­pos­er does, inter­pret­ing the work of clas­si­cal com­posers. But her rework­ings of Beethoven, Bach, and Mozart are unique, made on ear­ly Moog syn­the­siz­ers, which she had a hand in design­ing while a stu­dent at Colum­bia University’s Elec­tron­ic Music Cen­ter in the six­ties. Her album Switched on Bach, released the same year as 2001, won the com­pos­er three Gram­my Awards, put Baroque music on the pop charts, gar­nered the high­est praise from no less a key­board author­i­ty than Glenn Gould, and “made elec­tron­ic music main­stream.”

The album also put Car­los on Kubrick’s radar and he hired her and pro­duc­er Rachel Elkind to com­pose the score for 1972’s A Clock­work Orange. Much of the music Car­los wrote or inter­pret­ed for the film wound up being cut, but what remained—the haunt­ing arrange­ment of Hen­ry Pur­cell in the film’s open­ing title, for example—has become insep­a­ra­ble from the clas­si­cal and futur­is­tic ele­ments com­min­gled in Kubrick’s adap­ta­tion of Antho­ny Burgess. Car­los’ com­plete orig­i­nal score has since been released as a CD, which you can pur­chase. The first track, “Timesteps,” as the album’s lin­er notes inform us, was both the only orig­i­nal com­po­si­tion that made it into the film and the first record­ing Car­los sent to Kubrick.

As Car­los her­self writes on her web­site, she found the abridge­ment of her music “frus­trat­ing… as these were among the best things we’d done for the project.” Eight years lat­er, dur­ing her work on The Shin­ing, she would almost suf­fer the same fate as Alex North when she and Elkind wrote a com­plete score for the film and Kubrick—writes site The Over­look Hotel—“end­ed up using only two of their com­plete tracks, ‘The Shin­ing’ (Main Title), and ‘Rocky Moun­tains.’” As with 2001, the per­fec­tion­is­tic direc­tor instead decid­ed on sev­er­al clas­si­cal compositions—from Ligeti, Pen­derec­ki, Bar­tok and oth­ers.

And who can fault his choice? As The Cin­emol­o­gists observe, his use of music has end­ed up inform­ing hor­ror film scores ever since, as Bernard Hermann’s Psy­cho score had twen­ty years ear­li­er. But Car­los was soured on the rela­tion­ship and vowed nev­er again to work with Kubrick on anoth­er project. Yet again, we can be grate­ful for the col­lab­o­ra­tion. Her music for the title sequence (with Elkind’s dis­tort­ed voice)—so weird­ly, dis­so­nant­ly ominous—provides the per­fect accom­pa­ni­ment to one of the most com­plex open­ing sequences in film his­to­ry.

In this case also, we can hear what Car­los intend­ed, with the release of two vol­umes of Car­los’ “lost scores” that include her Shin­ing com­po­si­tions along with those from A Clock­work Orange and Tron. You can pur­chase those com­pi­la­tions here and here and read lin­er notes here and here. Car­los has worked hard to safe­guard her pri­va­cy, and you’ll find lit­tle of her music online. Yet her strange­ly com­pelling sound­tracks are well worth track­ing down in any form you can find them.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Clas­si­cal Music in Stan­ley Kubrick’s Films: Lis­ten to a Free, 4 Hour Playlist

Watch “The Cor­ri­dor,” a Trib­ute to the Music Video Stan­ley Kubrick Planned to Make Near the End of His Life

Watch a Shot-by-Shot Remake of Kubrick’s The Shin­ing, a 48-Minute Music Video Accom­pa­ny­ing the New Album by Aesop Rock

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Captivating GIFs Reveal the Magical Special Effects in Classic Silent Films

in Film | January 12th, 2017

The ear­ly silent come­di­ans were dare­dev­ils and mas­ters of phys­i­cal com­e­dy, but they weren’t *that* crazy. In a series of gifs that show the secrets of silent film­mak­ing, the trick­ery behind some of silent cinema’s most impres­sive shots are revealed. The per­son behind these brief ani­ma­tions is a poster from Red­dit called Auir2blaze.

Harold Lloyd did indeed hang from a clock face on the side of a build­ing in his clas­sic Safe­ty Last! (watch the scene up top), but as the gif shows, a mat­tress was only a few feet below, safe­ly out of shot. The angle of the cam­era, the edit­ing that had gone before, and the actu­al city scene unfold­ing in the back­ground all cre­at­ed the illu­sion that Lloyd was dan­gling many sto­ries above Los Ange­les.

Sim­i­lar­ly, Char­lie Chap­lin rolling back­wards on skates to the edge of a dan­ger­ous drop is magical…in that the mag­ic lies in the excel­lent real­is­tic mat­te paint­ing work that replaced a floor with ver­tig­i­nous open air.

As Auir2blaze explains, “The cra­zi­est thing about silent movie effects is that every­thing basi­cal­ly had to be done in cam­era. If you were film­ing mul­ti­ple ele­ments to cre­ate a com­plex shot that con­tained mul­ti­ple ele­ments and you messed up one part, the whole piece of film would be ruined.”

Which in turn makes these effects even more impres­sive. Not every spe­cial effect shot was a stunt. In anoth­er exam­ple, Auir2blaze shows how Mary Pick­ford (view on this page) was able to kiss her dou­ble on the cheek: They shot the actress sit­ting still, and pro­ject­ed the footage onto a screen cut out in the shape of the actress, which Pick­ford then kissed. One might say, “crude but effec­tive” until you think about the del­i­ca­cy need­ed to make the screen, and the brains behind these effects.

Many of these effects relied on large depth of field, which meant that sets and actors would have to be lit very bright­ly. In the world of film, cam­era lights can get very hot, and old movie sets must have been like ovens. (For more dis­cus­sion and film tech geek­ery, the orig­i­nal Red­dit page has many good threads.)

It shows that film­mak­ing has always been a magician’s art form, and that some­times a prac­ti­cal effect can be worth 100 times a computer’s out­put.

via Twist­ed­Sifter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

101 Free Silent Films: The Great Clas­sics

The Pow­er of Silent Movies, with The Artist Direc­tor Michel Haz­anavi­cius

Three Great Films Star­ring Char­lie Chap­lin, the True Icon of Silent Com­e­dy

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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How the French New Wave Changed Cinema: A Video Introduction to the Films of Godard, Truffaut & Their Fellow Rule-Breakers

in Film | January 11th, 2017

You could describe every act of film­mak­ing as an act of film crit­i­cism, and for no group of direc­tors has that held truer than those of the French New Wave. In one of the most excit­ing chap­ters of cin­e­ma his­to­ry thus far, the late 1950s and 1960s saw such new­ly emer­gent auteurs as Jean-Luc Godard, François Truf­faut, Agnès Var­da, Jacques Demy, Claude Chabrol, Éric Rohmer, Jacques Riv­ette, and André Bazin turn away from the estab­lished prac­tices of film­mak­ing and, by a mix­ture of incli­na­tion and neces­si­ty, start a few of their own.

They fol­lowed these new rules to come up with pic­tures like Le Beau Serge, Breath­less, The 400 Blows, Last Year at Marien­bad, Cléo from 5 to 7, and La Jetée. Those and the oth­er movies of the Nou­velle Vague star­tled view­ers with their bold­ness of form and con­tent, but what of impor­tance do they have to say in film cul­ture today? Lewis Bond of Chan­nel Criswell, source of video essays pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here about film­mak­ers like Andrei Tarkovsky and Aki­ra Kuro­sawa, looks at the last­ing achieve­ments of the move­ment in “Break­ing the Rules.”

The mem­bers of the French New Wave told per­son­al sto­ries that reflect­ed per­son­al philoso­phies, shoot­ing doc­u­men­tary-style with hand­held cam­eras, cut­ting those shots togeth­er with pre­vi­ous­ly unheard of con­spic­u­ous­ness, and using a vari­ety of oth­er visu­al and nar­ra­tive tech­niques to estab­lish a new rela­tion­ship between films and their view­ers. “If you’re still skep­ti­cal as to whether the nou­velle vague inten­tion­al­ly toyed with the audi­ence’s expec­ta­tions,” says Bond over a selec­tion of fourth-wall-break­ing shots, “just look at how many times their movies direct­ly acknowl­edge them. The nou­velle vague want­ed to have the audi­ence test­ed as to what could be a movie and how they could push the bound­aries of sto­ry­telling, not just with their tech­niques but with their con­tent too.”

And what do we jad­ed 21st-cen­tu­ry view­ers and film­mak­ers still have to learn from all this? “Just watch the films. They’re so ahead of their time, it’s not dif­fi­cult to see” the influ­ence of their edit­ing on the Scors­eses of the world, their con­cept of the auteur on the Taran­ti­nos, and their cam­era move­ment on the Luzbekis of today. “The thing that the film­mak­ers of la nou­velle vague did was uti­lize one of the most impor­tant process­es I think there is for an artist: look at what works in your medi­um and think, ‘How can it be done dif­fer­ent­ly?’ Because if you don’t have any­thing new to say, what’s the point of say­ing any­thing?” And, now as in the mid-2oth-cen­tu­ry as in the cen­turies before cin­e­ma itself, if you do have some­thing new to say, you can’t say it by fol­low­ing the old rules.

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 and BlueSky.

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!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Intro­duc­tion to Jean-Luc Godard’s Inno­v­a­tive Film­mak­ing Through Five Video Essays

How Truf­faut Became Truf­faut: From Pet­ty Thief to Great Auteur

Watch a Video Essay on the Poet­ic Har­mo­ny of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Film­mak­ing, Then View His Major Films Free Online

How Aki­ra Kurosawa’s Sev­en Samu­rai Per­fect­ed the Cin­e­mat­ic Action Scene: A New Video Essay

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Inside the Creepy, “Abandoned” Wizard of Oz Theme Park: Scenes of Beautiful Decay

in Film, Life, Travel | January 6th, 2017

The roman­tic allure of the ghost­ly, aban­doned theme park is dif­fi­cult to resist. Case in point: The Land of Oz, above, a not-entire­ly-defunct attrac­tion nes­tled atop North Carolina’s Beech Moun­tain.

Deb­bie Reynolds, accom­pa­nied by her 13-year-old daugh­ter, Car­rie Fish­er, cut the rib­bon on the park’s open­ing day in 1970.

Its road was far from smooth, even before urban explor­ers began filch­ing its 44,000 cus­tom-glazed yel­low bricks, even­tu­al­ly forc­ing man­age­ment to repave with paint­ed stand issue mod­els.

One of its two founders died of can­cer six months before open­ing, and lat­er a fire destroyed the Emer­ald City and a col­lec­tion of mem­o­ra­bil­ia from the 1939 MGM film.

Crip­pled by the gas cri­sis and insur­mount­able com­pe­ti­tion from Dis­ney World and its ilk, the Land of Oz closed in 1980, thus spar­ing it the indig­ni­ties of Yelp reviews and dis­cern­ing child vis­i­tors whose expec­ta­tions have been formed by CGI.

Its shut­ter­ing attract­ed anoth­er kind of tourist: the cam­era-tot­ing, fence hop­ping con­nois­seurs of what is now known as “ruin porn.”

An iso­lat­ed, aban­doned theme park based on the Wiz­ard of Oz? Could there be a holi­er grail?

Only trou­ble is…the Land of Oz didn’t stay shut­tered. Local real estate devel­op­ers cleaned it up a bit, lur­ing overnight vis­i­tors with rentals of Dorothy’s house. They start­ed a tra­di­tion of reopen­ing the whole park for one week­end every Octo­ber, and demand was such that June is now Land of Oz Fam­i­ly Fun Month. The Inter­na­tion­al Wiz­ard of Oz Club held its annu­al con­ven­tion there in 2011. How aban­doned can it be?

And yet, unof­fi­cial vis­i­tors, sneak­ing onto the grounds off-sea­son, insist that it is. I get it. The quest of adven­ture, the desire for beau­ti­ful decay, the brag­ging rights… After pho­tograph­ing the invari­ably leaf strewn Yel­low Brick Road, they turn their lens­es to the lumpy-faced trees of the Enchant­ed For­est.

Yes, they’re creepy, but it’s less from “aban­don­ment” than a low-bud­get approx­i­ma­tion by the hands of artists less expert than those of the orig­i­nal.

It’s safe to pre­sume that any leaves and weeds lit­ter­ing the premis­es are mere­ly evi­dence of chang­ing sea­sons, rather than total neglect.

What I want to know is, where’s the sex, drugs & rock’n’roll evi­dence of local teens’ off-sea­son blowouts—no spray paint­ed f‑bombs? No dead sol­diers? Secu­ri­ty must be pret­ty tight.

If creepy’s what the per­pet­u­a­tors of the aban­don­ment myth crave, they could con­tent them­selves with the ama­teur footage above, shot by a vis­it­ing dad in 1970.

Those cos­tumes! The scare­crow and the tin man in par­tic­u­lar… Buz­zfeed would love ’em, but it’s hard to imag­ine a mil­len­ni­al tot going for that mess. Their Hal­loween cos­tumes were 1000 times more accu­rate.

(In inter­views, the one gen­er­a­tion who can remem­ber the Land of Oz in its prime is a loy­al bunch, recall­ing only their long ago sense of won­der and excite­ment. Ah, life before Beta­max…)

The doc­u­men­tary video below should set­tle the aban­don­ment myth once and for all. It opens not in Kansas, but New York City, as a car­load of young per­form­ers heads off for their annu­al gig at the Land of Oz. They’re con­ver­sant in jazz hands and cer­tain Friends of Dorothy tropes, sure­ly more so than the local play­ers who orig­i­nal­ly staffed the park. Clear­ly, these ringers were hired to turn in cred­i­ble imper­son­ations of the char­ac­ters immor­tal­ized by Ray Bol­ger, Burt Lahr, and Judy Gar­land. Pre­sum­ably, their updat­ed cos­tumes also passed muster with Autumn at Oz’s savvy child atten­dees.

Still crav­ing that ruin porn? Busi­ness Insid­er pub­lished Seph Law­less’ pho­tos of “the crum­bling park” here.

If you’d pre­fer to rub­ber­neck at a tru­ly aban­doned theme park, check out the Carpetbagger’s video tour of Cave City, Kentucky’s Fun­town Moun­tain. (Though be fore­warned. It was sold at auc­tion in April 2016 and plans are afoot to reengi­neer it as as “an epic play­ground of won­der, imag­i­na­tion, and dreams.”)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Dis­ma­land — The Offi­cial Unof­fi­cial Film, A Cin­e­mat­ic Jour­ney Through Banksy’s Apoc­a­lyp­tic Theme Park

Dis­ney­land 1957: A Lit­tle Stroll Down Mem­o­ry Lane

Juras­sic Park Tells You Every­thing You Need to Know About the Dan­gers of Glob­al Cap­i­tal­ism

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Her play Zam­boni Godot is open­ing in New York City in March 2017. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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