Giv­en the length of the aver­age hair­cut, it sur­pris­es me that I don’t see more short films built around them. Tamar Simon Hoffs knew the advan­tages of the hair­cut-based short film, and she put them to use in 1982, dur­ing her time in the Amer­i­can Film Institute’s Direct­ing Work­shops for Women pro­gram. The Hair­cut’s script has a busy record exec­u­tive on his way to an impor­tant lunch appoint­ment. With only fif­teen min­utes to spare, he drops into Rus­so’s bar­ber shop for a trim. Lit­tle does he expect that, with­in those fif­teen min­utes, he’ll not only get his hair cut, but enjoy a shave, a mas­sage, a glass of wine, sev­er­al musi­cal num­bers, romance real or imag­ined,  and some­thing close to a psy­cho­an­a­lyt­ic ses­sion. He goes through quite a few facets of the human expe­ri­ence right there in the chair — minus the time-con­sum­ing “hot tow­el treat­ment” — and Rus­so and his col­or­ful, effi­cient crew still get him out of the door on time. Hoffs knew the per­fect actor for the star­ring role: John Cas­savetes. What’s more, she knew him per­son­al­ly.

The con­nec­tion came through her friend Eliz­a­beth Gaz­zara, daugh­ter of a cer­tain Ben Gaz­zara, star of the The Killing of a Chi­nese Book­ie, my own favorite Cas­savetes-direct­ed film. After read­ing the script, Cas­savetes agreed to per­form, “his only stip­u­la­tion being that his co-stars must be entire­ly rehearsed and ready to go, so he could just come in and per­form as if he real­ly was the cus­tomer,” writes British Film Insti­tute DVD pro­duc­er James Black­ford. “Even in a lit­tle film such as this, Cas­savetes was still search­ing for those per­fect moments that come from the spon­tane­ity of ear­ly takes.” You’ll even laugh at a few lines, spo­ken by Cas­savetes as his char­ac­ter begins to enjoy him­self, that must sure­ly have come out of his beloved impro­vi­sa­tion­al meth­ods. And we can cred­it the film’s sur­pris­ing end to an even more per­son­al con­nec­tion of Hoffs’: to her daugh­ter Susan­na, front­woman of The Ban­gles, then known as The Bangs. You can watch The Hair­cut on the BFI’s new DVD/Blu-Ray release of The Killing of a Chi­nese Book­ie, or you can watch it above.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Wes Anderson’s First Short Film: The Black-and-White, Jazz-Scored Bot­tle Rock­et (1992)

The Sur­re­al Short Films of Louis C.K., 1993–1999

Por­trait Wern­er Her­zog: The Director’s Auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal Short Film from 1986

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.

Nowa­days, most of us who still reli­gious­ly attend screen­ings of films by the most respect­ed Euro­pean direc­tors of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry have cir­cled the wag­ons: even if we far pre­fer, say, Felli­ni to Truf­faut, we’ll more than like­ly still turn up for the Truf­faut, even if only out of cinephilic sol­i­dar­i­ty. But in the fifties, six­ties, and sev­en­ties — or so I’ve read, any­way — dis­cus­sions of such film­mak­ers’ rel­a­tive mer­its could turn into seri­ous intel­lec­tu­al shov­ing match­es, and even many of the lumi­nar­ies them­selves would eval­u­ate their col­leagues’ work can­did­ly. At the Ing­mar Bergman fan site Bergmanora­ma, you can read what the mak­er of The Sev­enth Seal, Wild Straw­ber­ries, and Per­sona had to say about the mak­ers of movies like L’Avven­tu­ra, Breath­less, Ver­ti­go, The Exter­mi­nat­ing Angel, The 400 Blows, and Stalk­er.

Regard­ing Jean Luc Godard: “I’ve nev­er been able to appre­ci­ate any of his films, nor even under­stand them… I find his films affect­ed, intel­lec­tu­al, self-obsessed and, as cin­e­ma, with­out inter­est and frankly dull… I’ve always thought that he made films for crit­ics.”

Michelan­ge­lo Anto­nioni, thought Bergman, had “nev­er prop­er­ly learnt his craft. He’s an aes­thete. If, for exam­ple, he needs a cer­tain kind of road for The Red Desert, then he gets the hous­es repaint­ed on the damned street. That is the atti­tude of an aes­thete. He took great care over a sin­gle shot, but did­n’t under­stand that a film is a rhyth­mic stream of images, a liv­ing, mov­ing process; for him, on the con­trary, it was such a shot, then anoth­er shot, then yet anoth­er. So, sure, there are some bril­liant bits in his films… [but] I can’t under­stand why Anto­nioni is held in such high esteem.”

Alfred Hitch­cock struck him as “a very good tech­ni­cian. And he has some­thing in Psy­cho, he had some moments. Psy­cho is one of his most inter­est­ing pic­tures because he had to make the pic­ture very fast, with very prim­i­tive means. He had lit­tle mon­ey, and this pic­ture tells very much about him. Not very good things. He is com­plete­ly infan­tile, and I would like to know more — no, I don’t want to know — about his behav­iour with, or, rather, against women. But this pic­ture is very inter­est­ing.”

You’ll find more quotes on F.W. Mur­nau, teller of image-based tales with “fan­tas­tic sup­ple­ness”; Mar­cel Carné and Julien Duvivi­er, “deci­sive influ­ences in my want­i­ng to become a film­mak­er”; Fed­eri­co Felli­ni, the sheer heat from whose cre­ative mind “melts him”; François Truf­faut, with his fas­ci­nat­ing “way of relat­ing with an audi­ence”; and Andrei Tarkovsky, “the great­est of them all,” at Bergmanora­ma. His com­ments on Luis Buñuel offer espe­cial­ly impor­tant advice for cre­ators in any medi­um, of any age. He quotes a crit­ic who wrote that “with Autumn Sonata Bergman does Bergman” and admits the truth in it, but he adds that, at some point, “Tarkovsky began to make Tarkovsky films and that Felli­ni began to make Felli­ni films.” Buñuel, alas, “near­ly always made Buñuel films.” The les­son: if you must do a pas­tiche, don’t do a pas­tiche of your own style — or, as I once heard the writer Geoff Dyer (him­self a great fan of mid­cen­tu­ry Euro­pean cin­e­ma) call it, “self-karaoke.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stan­ley Kubrick to Ing­mar Bergman: “You Are the Great­est Film­mak­er at Work Today” (1960)

Ing­mar Bergman’s Soap Com­mer­cials Wash Away the Exis­ten­tial Despair

Dick Cavett’s Wide-Rang­ing TV Inter­view with Ing­mar Bergman and Lead Actress Bibi Ander­s­son (1971)

How Woody Allen Dis­cov­ered Ing­mar Bergman, and How You Can Too

Tarkovsky Films Now Free Online

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.

“I love the smell of napalm in the morn­ing.” There we have undoubt­ed­ly the most famous quote of what must count as one of Robert Duval­l’s finest per­for­mances, and sure­ly his most sur­pris­ing: that of Lieu­tenant Colonel Bill Kil­go­re in Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la’s Apoc­a­lypse Now. As you’ll no doubt recall — and if you don’t recall it, min­i­mize your brows­er for a few hours and make your way to a screen­ing, or at least watch it online — Cap­tain Ben­jamin Willard’s Con­ra­di­an boat jour­ney into the Viet­nam War’s dark heart hits a snag fair­ly ear­ly in the pic­ture: they need to pass through a coastal area under tight Viet Cong con­trol.

Kil­go­re, ini­tial­ly reluc­tant to call in his heli­copters to back up Willard’s dubi­ous mis­sion, changes his mind when he real­izes that Willard counts among his own small crew famed pro­fes­sion­al surfer Lance B. John­son. The Lieu­tenant Colonel, it turns out, loves to surf. He also loves to blast Richard Wag­n­er’s “Ride of the Valkyries” from heli­copter-mount­ed speak­ers. “It scares the hell out of the slopes,” he explains. “My boys love it.”

At the top, you can watch the fruits of Willard and Kil­go­re’s coop­er­a­tion, an oper­at­ic napalm airstrike that takes the entire beach: not an easy thing to accom­plish, and cer­tain­ly not an easy thing to film. As any­one acquaint­ed with the mak­ing of Apoc­a­lypse Now has heard, the pro­duc­tion tend­ed to turn as com­pli­cat­ed, con­fus­ing, and per­ilous as the Viet­nam War itself, but not nec­es­sar­i­ly for lack of plan­ning.

At Empire, you can view the scene’s orig­i­nal sto­ry­boards and read along­side them a brief inter­view with Doug Clay­bourne, who on the film had the envi­able title of Heli­copter Wran­gler. Arriv­ing to the Philip­pines-based shoot (in “the mid­dle of nowhere”), Clay­bourne found Cop­po­la on the beach with a bull­horn, Mar­tin Sheen just replac­ing Har­vey Kei­t­el in the role of Willard, chop­pers bor­rowed from Pres­i­dent Fer­di­nand Mar­cos (who peri­od­i­cal­ly took them back to use against insur­rec­tions else­where), a com­ing typhoon, and “a lot of chaos.”

But Cop­po­la, Clay­bourne, and the rest of the team saw it through, achiev­ing results even more strik­ing, in moments, than these sto­ry­boards sug­gest. As for the unflap­pable Kil­go­re, well, we all remem­ber him rush­ing to catch a tan­ta­liz­ing wave even before the fight­ing sub­sides. After all, to quote his sec­ond-most famous line, “Char­lie don’t surf!”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Aki­ra Kuro­sawa & Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la Star in Japan­ese Whisky Com­mer­cials (1980)

Demen­tia 13: The Film That Took Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la From Schlock­ster to Auteur

Fran­cis Ford Coppola’s Hand­writ­ten Cast­ing Notes for The God­fa­ther

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.

What with all that has, over the past 36 years, grown out of it — sequels, pre­quels, toys, nov­els, radio pro­duc­tions, video games, LEGO sets, LEGO set-themed video games, con­ven­tions, PhD the­ses, and an entire uni­verse of con­tent besides — we can only with dif­fi­cul­ty remem­ber how Star Wars began. The whole thing came pre­ced­ed by the promise of noth­ing grander, more pro­found, or minu­tia-packed than a rol­lick­ing myth­ic space opera, and above, we have a reminder of that fact in the form of the first film’s orig­i­nal teas­er trail­er. “Some­where in space, this may all be hap­pen­ing right now,” intones its faint­ly haunt­ing nar­ra­tor. “The sto­ry of a boy, a girl, and a uni­verse. It’s a big, sprawl­ing saga of rebel­lion and romance. It’s a spec­ta­cle light-years ahead of its time. It’s an epic of heroes and vil­lains and aliens from a thou­sand worlds. Star Wars: a bil­lion years in the mak­ing… and it’s com­ing to your galaxy this sum­mer.”

Since noth­ing suits Star Wars quite like com­pletism, we’ve also includ­ed the teasers for the rest of the orig­i­nal tril­o­gy: The Empire Strikes Back, just above, and Return of the Jedi, below. “In the con­tin­u­a­tion of the Star Wars saga,” booms the more tra­di­tion­al voice-over about the sec­ond film over hand-drawn imagery of its scenes, “the Empire strikes back, and Luke, Han, and Leia must con­front its awe­some might. In the course of the odyssey, they trav­el with their faith­ful friends, droids and wook­iees, to exot­ic worlds where they meet new alien crea­tures and evil machines, cul­mi­nat­ing in an awe­some con­fronta­tion between Luke Sky­walk­er and the mas­ter of the dark side of the Force, Darth Vad­er.” By 1983, the time of the third pic­ture, then titled Revenge of the Jedi, the series had amassed such a fol­low­ing that the nar­ra­tor need­ed only rat­tle off the famil­iar heroes, vil­lains, and var­i­ous space crit­ters we’d encounter once again.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pho­tog­ra­ph­er Revis­its Aban­doned Movie Sets for Star Wars and Oth­er Clas­sic Films in North Africa

Star Wars Uncut: The Epic Fan Film

Star Wars as Silent Film

Star Wars Gets Dubbed into Nava­jo: a Fun Way to Pre­serve and Teach a Fad­ing Lan­guage

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.

Who killed Mar­i­on Crane? If you’ve watched Psy­cho, the best-known film by British mas­ter of cin­e­mat­ic sus­pense Alfred Hitch­cock, you have the answer. And giv­en that the pic­ture came out in 1960, even if you haven’t seen it, you prob­a­bly know the answer any­way. But today’s Hitch­cock-lov­ing cinéastes and enthu­si­asts of design have anoth­er impor­tant ques­tion to con­sid­er: who direct­ed Mar­i­on Crane get­ting killed? We pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured some­thing of a mas­ter class in edit­ing from Hitch­cock him­self in which he explains the mechan­ics of cut­ting togeth­er the “show­er scene” of the unsus­pect­ing sec­re­tary’s death. But that part of the process obvi­ous­ly began with all its com­po­nents — Janet Leigh, the raised knife, the cur­tain pulled off of its rings, the choco­late syrup cir­cling the drain — already cap­tured on cel­lu­loid. To know the ori­gins of this most famous sequence in Hitch­cock­’s oeu­vre, and one of the most famous sequences in 20th cen­tu­ry cin­e­ma, you have to begin with its sto­ry­boards, straight from the hand of graph­ic-design leg­end Saul Bass, who also put togeth­er the film’s title sequence.

“After Hitch­cock­’s death, Bass assert­ed that he had direct­ed the scene at Hitch­cock­’s invi­ta­tion — a claim defin­i­tive­ly con­tra­dict­ed by both Janet Leigh and Assis­tant Direc­tor Hilton Green,” writes Catholic Uni­ver­si­ty of Amer­i­ca Eng­lish pro­fes­sor Glen John­son on the com­pan­ion page to his Hitch­cock course. “Bass’s par­ti­sans have sub­se­quent­ly held that Hitch­cock mere­ly mechan­i­cal­ly filmed shots already laid out by Bass. Com­par­ing the sto­ry­boards to the filmed scene shows that to be untrue. On the oth­er hand, the most cru­cial ele­ments of the scene, such as the drain-eye match­cut and the track­ing shot that fol­lows it, are in the sto­ry­boards. That proves noth­ing about the author of the scene, how­ev­er, since Bass drew the sto­ry­boards after exten­sive dis­cus­sions with Hitch­cock about the design of the scene.” Though it appears that no sin­gle cre­ator “made” the show­er scene — or made any giv­en ele­ment of most motion pic­tures — its place in the endur­ing lega­cy of mid-20th-cen­tu­ry cul­ture goes undis­put­ed. Below, you can watch this so often quot­ed, imi­tat­ed, and par­o­died sequence play out in anoth­er form, com­bin­ing sto­ry­boards, clips, and mak­ing-of drama­ti­za­tion, in last year’s fea­ture film Hitch­cock:

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Alfred Hitchcock’s Sev­en-Minute Edit­ing Mas­ter Class

Alfred Hitchcock’s Rules for Watch­ing Psy­cho (1960)

Hitch­cock (Antho­ny Hop­kins) Pitch­es Janet Leigh (Scar­lett Johans­son) on the Famous Show­er Scene

A Brief Visu­al Intro­duc­tion to Saul Bass’ Cel­e­brat­ed Title Designs

21 Free Hitch­cock Movies Online

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.