Rushfield Babylon
Month
Why did no one will me this existed?
Probably the greatest version of the greatest song of the past 200 years performed by the greatest singer.
People need to talk about this more.
On Getting “Exposed” Green Lit:
James Toback: Well, including David Begelman who was running MGM/UA. He’d already turned it down. But I found myself with $2 million cash, which I won in Vegas. By the way, lest the IRS be listening, my net figure with Vegas is about minus $50 million, so please don’t tell me I made money that way, as anyone in Vegas will vouch. But in any event, I had that $2 million. This is 1981. I thought, ‘Christ, I’m not gonna hang around here any more pounding on doors chasing money. I’ll just bribe Begelman and get the movie done.’ So I walked into his office and with two suitcases –
Alec Baldwin: Filled with your Vegas winnings.
James Toback: Yeah, and let’s say without filling in the details, it got a green light.
Alec Baldwin: How much money did they give you to make the movie?
James Toback: Five hundred thousand, so I was at minus a million five. In other words, I paid a million five to have it done.
Alec Baldwin: He gave you a budget of how much?
James Toback: Oh, he gave me a budget of $18 million, of which I received $500,000.00. So my net for the movie was minus a million and a half.
Alec Baldwin: You were down a million and a half.
James Toback: Yeah, but I didn’t care. I wanted to make the movie.
”—James Toback on the making of “Exposed” discussed on Alec Baldwin’s podcast in what is now my favorite How It Got Made story in all Hollywood history.of my heroes, John Carpenter, on the making of Halloween as it turns 35. An excerpt:
You composed and played the music to this famed score all yourself. How did you coming up with such a spooky score?
JC: Well, the reason I became a composer was that I’m cheap and I’m fast. We didn’t have any money to hire a composer and an orchestra or anything like that. So, the main theme, the theme that everybody’s familiar with, was something my father taught me. He taught me five-four time on a bongo: ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba, ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba. He taught me how to pound it out, and so I just adapted it to piano with octaves: Ding-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding, and went up a half step. I had played around with that for years, just as – what could this be? On “Assault on Precinct 13,” I had one day to do the music. On “Halloween,” I had a total of three days. So, a lot of it was just different mood pieces. I didn’t score it from top to bottom. It was just a few pieces here and there of different moods and different feeling. So, I just banged it out, and it’s all improv. All this is just improvisation.
Grief, chance, guilt, marriage â and what drove Nelly Reifler, in 2003, to say goodbye to someone who was then very much alive.
On this anniversary, everyone should read my friend Nelly’s beautiful remembrance of her friend Elliot Smith.
I started on Instagram on a Throwback Thursday, figuring that it’d be harder to dislike photos of people as kids. As I marched down the feed, tapping the heart beside every photo, an elated, almost zippy feeling overcame me. All of these people would soon learn that I approved of them and would be forced to think about me. It felt powerful, like I was branding myself onto their minds. Then I came across hunnypot7’s picture. It was her usual softly-lit, pouty self-portrait. “Throwback to ‘09,” it said. It was a selfie masquerading as a Throwback Thursday. “That doesn’t count!” I said aloud. I didn’t want to like it. Moreover, I wanted to ask all 46 people who liked it how they could like it. But I liked it, and kept goose-stepping down the feed.
All social media is a platform for boasting, but the things they get up to over on Facebook would make even the most narcissistic sailor blush. I raised my virtual thumb to every humblebrag, political harangue, and comedy bit, feeling a giddy, albeit queasy rush, until I came across a status that gave me pause. A Facebook friend was using the opportunity of a recent tragedy to drop a celebrity’s name, and people were furiously liking it. I can’t like this sort of thing. I rationalized that I could like it purely for its ingenuity. There were so many likes, mine would just blend in, right? I liked it with my eyes closed and moved along, liking things that made no sense to like. Someone needed help moving, and I, along with thirteen other people, liked it. Someone else reposted something about a missing cat. I declined to like it. (There’s a clause in my liking contract for missing pet posts.) But seven other people did. Did they like that the cat was missing? Or do they just like cats?
”—Stacey Woods underwent what is probably the hardest voyage a member of Gen X can take - she spent a week liking things. .
Jack Shafer has an interesting column today discussing the conundrum that despite there being more political information available than ever before, Americans seem to know less about the world than they ever have. This corresponds exactly to the principle frequently set out here of The Backlash Era. I will call it Rushfield’s Paradox - that in this era despite more voices than ever being heard, there has never been more uniformity of critical opinion. Never have there been more people declaring as one that Breaking Bad is a masterpiece or The Newsroom a “disaster.” Never have dissenters from these views been less tolerated.
Careful readers will recall I have postulated that this effect is not despite the multiplicity of voices but because of it. At some point, when the din gets so heated (and the character limit so brief), considered give and take gives way to a dictatorship of the loudest, with the victorious side drowning in volume all dissenters.
The master of despair told me how it’s done
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Myst was supposed to change the face of gaming. What is its legacy 20 years later?
I talked to Rand and Robyn Miller, the creators of Myst, whose 20th anniversary is today.
This was something I’d been wanting to write about for years, so I’m glad to have been able to do it in such depth and to get to talk to two childhood heroes of mine in the process.
Extremely important must read journalism from Tumblr’s own Emily Yoshida. Thinking about this game still scares the hell out of me.
The stars were out in force, but even more in evidence were Emmy’s fallen.
The saddest awards show of them all.
CRITERION CARAVAN #20: A Story of Floating Weeds
Dir: Yashijuro Ozu (1934)
Here I am at last, making my way chronologically through all the Criterions available streaming online for some insane reason, and finally I have come to the end of the silent era. I said that once before, but it turned out there was still one more waiting for me, but this time, this is it.
So Ozu we know is perhaps the greatest humanist director of all time. He takes these very just mundane stories and you’re sitting there and watching it and saying, well, this seems a lot of fuss about a couple going to visit their kids for a weekend, and you get fed up and start saying, can we get on with it already, and then all of a sudden you’re bawling like a two-year old because its so sad, these people are just longing for this human connection and just want to be with their family and they can’t for all sorts of dumb reasons.
ASOFW is one of those too. The ne’er do well head of a touring kabuki troop comes back to the town where he left behind his mistress and son, who thinks he’s just an uncle. Kabuki masters are a fickle lot. They can’t be tied down you know, being artists and subject to so much temptation you know. But now he sees his son has grown into a fine young man and feels left out, even if he gets to take him fishing now and then. He doesn’t seem to miss the mistress much, but it’s hard to go around with your son thinking you’re his uncle.
That’s pretty much it and it ambles along a little tediously until it becomes incredibly poignant and heartbreaking. The stuff of workaday tragedy and all.
Ozu liked the story so much that he remade it 20 years later as a talkie. You might like that one better. I can’t say because it will probably be 20 years at this pace until I get there on my Criterion Caravan. But if you’re in the mood to go silent, frankly, it’s such a touching, simple film that you won’t even remember that they weren’t talking during it. Besides that they wouldn’t’ve been speaking english anyway.
After dinner, Tim wanted to walk along the water to watch the performers and the fireworks. I was freezing cold, as Tim predicted, so we stopped in a tourist shop to get a sweatshirt. I finally found one I liked, looked at the tag, and made a comment about how pricey it was.
Tim got loud with me. He said I was forgetful and irresponsible, and that I should have listened to him. He said he didn’t understand what was wrong with me, and that it was no wonder I couldn’t save any money. I usually shut down immediately when I feel attacked, but I know how that annoys Tim even more. So I tried to stand up for myself, but this only pushed him further. Feeling defeated and unsure what to do, I shut down. I walked out the door towards the taxi station.
”—This will make such a great scene in the movie.
Is it a truism that to turn your life into a public internet experiment your life must be so grotesque in the first place that the experiment is inapplicable to any non-Gargoyle?