This past sum­mer, out came a trail­er for Mega­lopo­lis, the movie Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la has spent half of his life try­ing to make. It took the bold approach of open­ing with quotes from reviews of his pre­vi­ous pic­tures, and not pos­i­tive ones: when it was first released, Rex Reed called Apoc­a­lypse Now “an epic piece of trash,” and even The God­fa­ther was “dimin­ished by its artsi­ness,” at least accord­ing to Pauline Kael. But film-crit­i­cism enthu­si­asts smelled some­thing fishy right away, and it took only the barest degree of research to dis­cov­er that not only had Reed and Kael (who liked The God­fa­ther, as did most every­one else) nev­er used those phras­es, none of the quotes in the trail­er were real.

All this evi­dence of crit­ics per­pet­u­al­ly fail­ing to grasp Cop­po­la’s visions seems to have been fab­ri­cat­ed with an arti­fi­cial-intel­li­gence sys­tem. This was a piece of bad press Mega­lopo­lis could’ve done with­out, sto­ries of its trou­bled pro­duc­tion hav­ing been cir­cu­lat­ing for months. But then, Cop­po­la has endured much worse in his long film­mak­ing career, like the hell­ish, enor­mous­ly pro­longed shoot­ing of Apoc­a­lypse Now, or the fire-sale of Zoetrope, the stu­dio he found­ed, after the box-office dis­as­ter of One From the Heart. That he was able to get Mega­lopo­lis into pro­duc­tion, let alone com­plete it, counts as some­thing of a tri­umph in itself.

The Be Kind Rewind video above recounts the sto­ry behind Mega­lopo­lis, in essence “a sto­ry about Cop­po­la him­self, informed by his own ambi­tions, set­backs, times of for­tune, and times of loss.” When he com­plet­ed the first full draft of the script in 1984, he could have had no idea of what lay in store for the project in the decades ahead, not least its numer­ous derail­ments by his own per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al crises as well as large-scale dis­as­ters like 9/11 and COVID-19. The result, at a cost of $120 mil­lion Cop­po­la raised by sell­ing off part of his win­ery, is a spec­ta­cle that med­i­tates on civ­i­liza­tion, moder­ni­ty, and utopia that, even this ear­ly in its release, has drawn reac­tions of aston­ish­ment, deri­sion, and — most com­mon­ly — flat-out mys­ti­fi­ca­tion.

The film “alter­nates grandiose rhetoric about gov­ern­ment and the mod­ern city with bor­der­line screw­ball com­e­dy, quotes Mar­cus Aure­lius and oth­er ancient thinkers, papers over sto­ry gaps with sonorous nar­ra­tion by cast mem­ber Lau­rence Fish­burne, and fills the screen with super­im­po­si­tions, split-screen mosaics, and images that aren’t meant to be tak­en lit­er­al­ly,” writes Rogerebert.com’s Matt Zoller-Seitz. “Movies like this only seem ‘indul­gent’ because we’re so deep into the era where every­thing has to be unmit­i­gat­ed fan ser­vice, the cin­e­mat­ic equiv­a­lent of cook­ing the Whop­per exact­ly how the cus­tomer dreamed about order­ing it.” Mega­lopo­lis is, in Be Kind Rewind’s final analy­sis, “the apoth­e­o­sis of auteurism, unre­strained spec­ta­cle that ampli­fies Cop­po­la’s best and worst instincts on a mas­sive scale.” Per­son­al­ly, I can’t wait to see it.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la Breaks Down His Most Icon­ic Films: The God­fa­ther, Apoc­a­lypse Now & More

Fran­cis Ford Coppola’s Hand­writ­ten Cast­ing Notes for The God­fa­ther

George Lucas Shoots a Cin­e­ma Ver­ité-Style Doc­u­men­tary on Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la (1969)

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

Is Amer­i­ca Declin­ing Like Ancient Rome?

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

I don’t know about you, but my YouTube algo­rithms can act like a nag­ging friend, sug­gest­ing a video for days until I final­ly give in. Such was the case with this video essay with the tan­ta­liz­ing title: “Twin Peaks ACTUALLY EXPLAINED (No, Real­ly)”.

First of all, before, dur­ing, and after 2017’s Twin Peaks The Return, the­o­ries were as inescapable as the cat memes on the Twin Peaks Face­book groups. After the mind-blow­ing Episode 8, they went into over­drive, includ­ing the bonkers idea that the final two episodes were meant to be watched *over­laid* on each oth­er. And I high­light­ed one in-depth jour­ney through the entire three decades of the Lynch/Frost cul­tur­al event for this very site.

So when I final­ly clicked on the link I balked imme­di­ate­ly: Four and a half hours? Are you kid­ding me? (You might be say­ing the very thing to your­self now.) But just like the nar­ra­tor says, bear with me. Over the week, I watched the entire thing in 30-minute seg­ments, not because it was gru­el­ing, but because time is pre­cious and there is a lot to chew over. By the end, I was rec­om­mend­ing the video to friends only to find some of them were already deep inside Twin Perfect’s analy­sis.

So here we are, with me high­ly encour­ag­ing you to invest the time (pro­vid­ing you have watched all three sea­sons of Twin Peaks and Fire Walk With Me), but also not want­i­ng to ruin some of Twin Perfect’s the­o­ries, which he lays out like a pros­e­cu­tor, walk­ing us through a gen­er­al the­o­ry of Lynch.

How­ev­er, I will make a few points:

• In 2019, we post­ed a video in which Lynch explains both the Uni­fied Field The­o­ry and Tran­scen­den­tal Med­i­ta­tion. There are at least two major sequences that Twin Per­fect sug­gests reflect the Uni­fied Field.
• Lynch’s obses­sion with elec­tric­i­ty and fire is essen­tial to the the­o­ry.
• The One-Armed Man’s quote “I mean it as it is, as it sounds,” dou­bles as Lynch’s approach: Twin Per­fect does a mas­ter­ful job show­ing many, many exam­ples where Lynch is direct­ly explain­ing his use of metaphor and sym­bol to us. Some­times that is straight into the cam­era.
• We now know why Sea­son Three fea­tured a three-minute shot of a man sweep­ing up peanuts from a bar floor.
• I’ve always felt that The Return was an explo­ration of the dan­gers of nos­tal­gia, and this essay con­firmed it for me. There was some­thing miss­ing at the cen­ter of the Third Sea­son, indeed.
• Twin Per­fect reads all quotes from the direc­tor in a mock-Lynch voice. For some this will grate; for me it was A BEAUTIFUL THING (wig­gly fin­ger ges­ture).

Twin Per­fect puts much more effort into this than most grad­u­ate stu­dents:

I have been work­ing on this video for two years, writ­ing and research­ing and edit­ing. I’ve been read­ing and watch­ing and lis­ten­ing to every cre­ator inter­view and AMA, every DVD extra and fea­turette, every TV spe­cial, every fan the­o­ry, blog, and pod­cast — any and all Twin Peaks-relat­ed posts I could find — try­ing to hone and pol­ish my script to be the best I thought it could pos­si­bly be. I focus-grouped my video with peo­ple, chal­leng­ing them to poke as many holes in my argu­ments as they could so that I could bet­ter illus­trate my ideas. I tried my best to cre­ate some­thing oth­ers would find of val­ue, some­thing that would add to the ongo­ing mys­tery and spark new dis­cus­sions about my favorite series.

Are there some prob­lems with the the­o­ry? Sure. But for every “I don’t know, man,” I said to myself, he imme­di­ate­ly fol­lowed it up with some­thing spot on. I think he deserves that MFA in Twin Peaks Stud­ies.

So brew up some strong cof­fee and cut your­self a slice of cher­ry pie, and get stuck in.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Lynch Directs a Mini-Sea­son of Twin Peaks in the Form of Japan­ese Cof­fee Com­mer­cials

David Lynch Draws a Map of Twin Peaks (to Help Pitch the Show to ABC)

Three Days in Twin Peaks: An In-Depth Jour­ney Through the Evoca­tive Loca­tions of David Lynch’s TV Series

Watch an Epic, 4‑Hour Video Essay on the Mak­ing & Mythol­o­gy of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts., You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills.

Video essay­ists don’t nor­mal­ly retire; in most cas­es, they just drift into inac­tiv­i­ty. Hence the sur­prise and even dis­may of the inter­net’s cinephiles when Tony Zhou and Tay­lor Ramos declared the end of their respect­ed chan­nel Every Frame a Paint­ing in 2016. We here at Open Cul­ture had fea­tured their analy­ses of every­thing from the work of auteurs like Mar­tin Scors­ese, Jack­ie Chan, and Michael Bay to how clas­si­cal art inspired cel­e­brat­ed shots to the thoughts and feel­ings of edi­tors to the use of Van­cou­ver in film. Now, near­ly eight years after their last such video essay, Zhou and Ramos have returned to YouTube.

The new Every Frame a Paint­ing video explains the tech­nique of the sus­tained two-shot, and, as IndieWire’s Sarah Shachat writes, “charts — in under six min­utes — the tech­no­log­i­cal and indus­tri­al trends that have put it more or less in favor with film­mak­ers and its util­i­ty in con­tem­po­rary film­mak­ing as a show­case for two actors’ chem­istry. This is stan­dard. Zhou, who nar­rates the series, still can’t avoid feel­ing like an unseen char­ac­ter with­in the essay and also the film school TA we all wish we had.” What’s more, it incor­po­rates footage from Zhou and Ramos’ own short film “The Sec­ond” to more direct­ly approach the film­mak­ing chal­lenge of “need­ing to change cov­er­age plans for an out­door scene when you’re los­ing the light.”

As implied by its name, a two-shot con­tains two actors, and a sus­tained two-shot con­tin­ues unbro­ken for the length of a dia­logue between them. We don’t see so many of them in recent pic­tures, Zhou explains, because they were cre­at­ed in a time when “film was expen­sive, so it encour­aged film­mak­ers to rehearse more and con­serve their takes.” Now, “dig­i­tal is cheap­er, so peo­ple don’t real­ly pick one angle and shoot it; they cov­er a scene from as many angles as pos­si­ble,” recon­struct­ing it out of bits and pieces in the edit­ing room. Act­ing styles have also changed since the old-Hol­ly­wood days, with all their “ges­tur­ing and mov­ing around” that increased the two-shot’s visu­al inter­est.

Yet today’s film­mak­ers ignore the pow­er of this dis­used form at their per­il: “The sus­tained two-shot is the com­po­si­tion that best allows two per­form­ers to play off each oth­er, and try as you might, you can­not repli­cate this feel­ing with edit­ing.” And indeed, it’s only one of the effec­tive ele­ments of twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry film that have only become more dif­fi­cult to repli­cate amid the prac­ti­cal­ly end­less array of options afford­ed by dig­i­tal tools and media. One hopes that Zhou and Ramos will cov­er a vari­ety of them in Every Frame a Paint­ing’s lim­it­ed-run come­back — and even more so, that they’ll put them to good use in their own nar­ra­tive film­mak­ing careers.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Every Frame a Paint­ing Explains the Film­mak­ing Tech­niques of Mar­tin Scors­ese, Jack­ie Chan, and Even Michael Bay

The Alche­my of Film Edit­ing, Explored in a New Video Essay That Breaks Down Han­nah and Her Sis­ters, The Empire Strikes Back & Oth­er Films

How the Coen Broth­ers Put Their Remark­able Stamp on the “Shot Reverse Shot,” the Fun­da­men­tal Cin­e­mat­ic Tech­nique

The Most Beau­ti­ful Shots in Cin­e­ma His­to­ry: Scenes from 100+ Films

A Salute to Every Frame a Paint­ing: Watch All 28 Episodes of the Fine­ly Craft­ed (and Now Con­clud­ed) Video Essay Series on Cin­e­ma

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.