Rushfield Babylon
Month
Q: How did you come to be the most distinguished man in America? Are you distinguished in real life?
A: No, no, no. In private life, I qualify very badly. I have no idea. I just do not know. The first movie I got an award nomination for, I played a pimp. But from there, I played all these good guys. I don’t think I’ve played more than one more bad guy after that, but I don’t know why.
Q: How do you prepare then for these distinguished parts? To play the president or God.
A: I do two things: I read the script and decide, if it can convince you, if you can do it. Then I have a conversation with the costume designer, and then you talk to the makeup artist. If you believe the way you look, you can do it. The clothes make the man.
On Hollywood’s cult of the Blackwing alerts us to the threat of “Stationary geeks” amongst us.
"I WON’T NECESSARILY CALL THEM FILMMAKERS" (!!!!!)
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c. the rise of digital and non-linear technology
if you didn’t see my previous post, here it is again:
as much as writers and directors want to take credit for the current quality of the medium, i would say that the development of non-linear editing, CGI, digital post-production, and ultimately, digital image capture - and the concomitant demands made on the material by the new flexibility they brought to the process - have had as much to do with the “golden age of television” as the ambitions of the creatives and the expansion of the medium through cable…
…and certainly more than the shibboleth that “tv got good because feature people got into tv” (which i consider to be bullshit of the highest order).
in the pre-digital era, there was simply ONLY SO MUCH YOU COULD DO with your time and money. one camera shooting a limited number of setups a day, maybe two cameras (if you were the top of the line), a string of editors working on film or linear, time-coded video: their time and ability to deliver limited by their working in an analog environment in which every change to the material was “destructive” - requiring the undoing of everything around it without the simple convenience of a “redo” button: the film equivalent of a typewriter, onion skin paper, scissors and elmer’s glue.
with digital - starting with non-linear/non-destructive editing - producers got results faster, were able to spend more time thinking the material through, seeing results in real time, and demanding both more footage to work with; as well as writing more complicated scripts to accommodate the growing visual palette promised by advancing technology.
Whenever anything happens in the culture we are always quick to attribute it first to the rise of an or a group of ubermensch geniuses, and then to our own sophistication and savoir faire compared to the rubes of yesteryear. As this very sagacious post makes clear, when the culture shifts in any significant way there are usually glacial forces fuelling that shift which the auteur or creative genius takes advantage of or lucks into more often than he creates out of whole cloth.
But I still don’t buy into the “TV today is better than film” argument. And won’t until someone can look me in the eyes and tell me they have watched a series through ten plus times.
Maybe not my favorite, there are so many greats to choose from. But I think whenever I have criticized or not liked something in a tweet, Tumblr or whatever, there is always at least one member of Generation Yay who chimes in: Who are you to say we’re not allowed to like this?
It’s as though they are ingrained so thoroughly from birth with the sense that every thought or preference they have is perfect and unquestionable, that the site of anyone even not liking a movie they like just freaks them the hell into a total panic and they turn into Joffrey screaming, you can’t tell me what to like!
I swear every single post or tweet I’ve written in the last three years there’s been one youngster who has responded with that.
Anyway, I’m a fan. Carry on Generation Yay.