Jefe's House

Dig the Om lapels.

Go, iTunes for showing the Concert for Bangladesh free this past weekend to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the concert held on August 1, 1971 at Madison Square Garden in New York.  I’ve had the triple album on vinyl for years but had never seen the movie.

Highlights include George Harrison having to explain up front what a sitar is, and for the audience to behave during the Indian music part led by Ravi Shankar, Ali Akbar Khan and Alla Rakha. Just shows how culturally far the US has come musically since 1971.  Today instruments like the sitar and the sarod are commonplace in American rock and folk music.

Then there are the ubiquitous Coke cans (I’m guessing Coke donated refreshments backstage or footed part of the bill for the MSG rental?). It’s hard to believe the product placement is accidental. Billy Preston’s seen with one just before hopping up from his keyboard to go into a dance frenzy (must have been the caffeine), then Leon Russell’s seen with one at his keyboard just before belting Jumpin’ Jack Flash.  There are just these Coke cans sitting around on the stage everywhere that get nicely framed by the cameras when they go in for closeups of the artists.

Also amazing is how many of them are smoking (tobacco) cigarettes. Today they’d probably have to hide that from the cameras to keep the film from getting an NC-17 rating.

Eric Clapton is humble as usual.  For the most part the musical performances aren’t stellar (the simplest and most polished-sounding was George and Eric’s duet on Here Comes the Sun) but that wasn’t the point.  The concert was quickly thrown together and they all did it for free to raise money to aid the grim humanitarian crisis in Bangladesh brought about by their war to break away from Pakistan (who can blame them?) and by the world’s largest tropical cyclone hitting them at the worst possible time.

If you download the concert (the album, not the movie) from iTunes they’ll make a donation to the George Harrison Fund for UNICEF.  Or just go to concertforbangladesh.com and donate any amount there. For the month of August all funds raised will go toward famine relief in the Horn of Africa. That’s the famine in Somalia you’ve been seeing on the TV news every night for days.  Why not chip in a little and help them out?  It’s what George and Ravi and Eric and Billy and Leon and Ringo Starr and Bob Dylan and Badfinger would want you to do.

[image via concertforbangladesh.com]

Peter Falk and Gina Rowlands as the unforgettable Nick and Mabel.

Sad to read today that Peter Falk had died. Most people know him as Columbo but a relative few know him from such films as John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence. Most Columbo fans also don’t know that he helped finance this independent uberfilm with earnings from playing Columbo.  Why would  he do that?  So he could act, naturally; something for which Columbo didn’t much allow.

Peter Falk in Wings of Desire

It’s unfortunate that he’s better known in Europe than in his home country for his stellar non-Columbo roles (see Wings of Desire) but such is the wonderworking power of television.

Thanks, Mr. Falk. I grew up with you in more ways than one.

[image via filmref.com and peterfalk.com]

Last night I stumbled upon this blast from the past, a short promo video I cut together for in-house use as a preshow warmup  before the premiere screening of Lady in a Box in 2006.  This short music video is assembled from rehearsal outtakes and on-set bloopers.  Featuring Sarita Choudhury, Sean Hayden, Luke Rosen, John Lordan, myself, and behind the camera Peter Olsen.

http://www.brain-on-fire.com/lady/breathless

Enjoy.

I’ll be appearing next Tuesday, March 8th at 6:30pm at the NYU Bookstore at 726 Broadway, New York City, corner of Waverly Place, to give a free, 30-minute talk on the fine art of subtext and writing naturalistic dialogue (in fiction as well as film and theatre) and signing copies of my previous plays Tesla’s Letters and Medicine, Man, both of which will be on sale at the bookstore.  I was asked to do this by NYU’s most excellent School of Continuing & Professional Studies to help promote their writing program where I often teach Playwriting I: The Fundamentals and The Art & Craft of Dialogue as an Associate Professor in Creative Writing, in addition to my screenwriting courses across the street at my alma mater NYU Tisch School of the Arts.  Don’t be a stranger now.  More info HERE.

From gawker.com

The Hollywood Films Financed by Qaddafi Cash

by Adrian Chen

Know why Hollywood shouldn’t take money from the son of a repressive North African dictator, no matter how nice he seems? His dad might one day go even more batshit crazy and order the mass murder of his own people when they start demanding freedom. Then you’re going to look like shitheads.

This is happening to Matty Beckerman’s Natural Selection film production fund. Last year, 37-year-old Al-Saadi Qaddafi [pictured left], the ex-soccer player son of Libya’s Colonel Qaddafi, invested $100 million in the LA-based fund. At the time, Beckerman brushed off concerns about the Qaddafi connection: “Initially when people hear it they get concerned. But it’s money at a time when very little equity is out there.” Plus, Qaddafi was a natural partner because, “He’s seen ‘Lost’ 30 times.” (The dude also paid Beyonce $2 million to perform at a New Year’s Eve bash in 2009.)

A new Bloomberg article speculates that even as his father orders massacres, Al-Saadi may be able to “continue to push film CONT’D AT GAWKER.COM>>

A Job-Killing Plan for Art and Culture?
by Christopher Knight, LA Times

If you gave me a buck, and next year I returned $18.75 to you, would you think that was a good deal?

I would. With savings accounts, money markets and even stocks yielding just a few percentage points on investments these days, a return in excess of 1800% is pretty staggering.

Yet, that’s what happens with federal support for arts and culture. It pays for itself 18 times over.

Federal support includes partial matches to state arts agencies, underwriting the National Gallery of Art and the Kennedy Center in Washington, the nationwide programs of the endowments for the arts and humanities and much more. My colleague Mike Boehm reports that, all together, federal arts and culture spending currently totals about $1.6 billion a year, not counting construction budgets.

Meanwhile, revenues to federal, state and local coffers related to that spending totals $30 billion annually — more than 18 times the outlay. The income derives from taxes paid by the 5.7 million workers in the nation’s culture industry, many of whose jobs are sustained by federal support.

Pretty good deal — especially when stacked up against agribusiness subsidies, military expenditures and other corporate financing from Washington.

Nonetheless, congressional Republicans are once again proposing job-killing cuts to the federal arts budget. They aim to slash it, even zeroing out tiny agencies such as the NEA and NEH, as a report last week from the Republican Study Committee proposed. In these scary, economically strapped times, what passes for an argument is their claim that “we can’t afford it.” But the numbers show the argument is just fear-mongering bunk.  FULL STORY AT LATIMES.COM>>

Alright. I will blow my own psychic trumpet – if I can reach it.  Here goes…

ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT
Paris Hilton will become increasingly orange, and will be found dead from a cocaine-heroin cocktail overdose in the Malibu home of a close friend.

Martin Scorsese will make a new movie stereotyping Italians.

Robert DeNiro will phone in another comedy performance to keep the bills paid.

Woody Allen will make one more movie whining about the fact that his life is meaningless and his ego too fragile to take it just in case we haven’t been paying attention.  To prove his point, he’ll pull the negationist stunt of divorcing Soon-Yi and marrying one of his other children.

Charlie Sheen’s antics will continue to be hilarious. Oh, his TV show will also stay pretty funny.

Broadway will remain racially segregated, with investors maintaining that Separate But Equal works really well in theatre, so why tinker with it? Tourists will agree with them wholeheartedly.

Off Broadway will continue rolling out redundant domestic dramas about the trials and tribulations of white families, some of whom are struggling exploitatively with their homosexuality, some exploitatively with their children’s homosexuality, others with prescription drug addiction, still others with a general suburban ennui.  Hasn’t the gay community been stereotyped enough?

Off Off Broadway will remain the last bastion of truly cutting edge professional, noncommercially-driven theatre, which unfortunately most tourists either won’t learn about or will be too afraid to take their kids downtown or to Brooklyn  to see, or will continue in their mistaken belief that Off Off is synonymous with amateur.  To combat this, the tired phrase “Off Off Broadway theatre” will finally be dropped by the media and replaced with “independent theatre,” making it appropriately analagous to independent film.

BOOKS
Memoirs by overprivileged yet sheltered white ladies who traveled alone abroad for the first time, and had unlifechanging experiences which they contend were sublime, will finally stop being published.

SPORTS
NFL and SPCA legend Michael Vick, the OJ Simpson of animal abuse, will get caught in another imbroglio involving violent cruelty to a living thing weaker than himself, and it will involve illegal gambling. To help boost his reputation, Vick will open a Vick’s Pet Care pet-sitting service in Philadelphia.

JOURNALISM
“Aks” will become standard English for the proper way to spell “ask.”

The nonsensical “for all intensive purposes” will become an increasingly acceptable idiom, replacing the more traditional and more logical “for all intents and purposes,” which just sounds too old-fashioned even though it actually makes sense.

“Repel” and “repeal” will continue to gain acceptance as synonyms.

The nonexistent word “insiduous” will replace “insidious.”

No one will help us out of this mess, and schools will only reinforce these absurd grammatical changes.

AMERICA’S OBESITY CRISIS
The discredited 1970s’ 4-4-3-2 nutrition plan will be resurrected by the US Department of Agriculture as a normal, healthy diet given that most Americans adhere to it anyway. Did you know that pizza with everything is a healthy meal, containing items from the milk group, meat group, fruits & vegetables group, and breads & cereals group?  So is a Whopper.

WORLD
There will be continued violence in the Middle East. There will be continued violence in Africa. The sky will continue to be blue, the trees green.

European anarchist groups will continue to work together with increasingly sophisticated coordination, destroying the economic system, plunging us into their much hoped for post-apocalyptic, feudalistic society.  They will declare the date to be Year Zero. Farms will be seized and “collectivized,” after which mass starvation and gang violence will rule the day. Frazzled anarchist leaders will then call upon the police and military to restore order, and then they will request loans from multinational banks to rebuild all the roads, trains and hospitals they destroyed in order to liberate all of us.

POLITICS
Millions of working Americans will begin to feel and appreciate the benefits of Obama’s healthcare plan but will continue to complain that socialist Obama has screwed up the country.  Obama, unfazed, will prepare for a 2012 landslide reelection.  I also predict that I will be one of those voting for him again.

A major world leader will announce not only a cutesy belief in the possibility of extraterrestrials, but will insist with all seriousness during a press conference that he has seen ETs himself. The Vatican will immediately back him up. This will all be part of preparing us for 2012 when things are really gonna get all alieny up in here.

SCIENCE
Bigfoot sightings will become increasingly fashionable. A theoretical link between Bigfoots and the newly announced ETs (see above) will gain ground among top scientists.

Happy New Year, everybody. God bless us, every one.

[image via psychic-junkie.com]

While I’m discussing Medicine, Man and Tesla’s  Letters now being available on the Kindle, I may as well discuss THE GOLDEN HORSESHOE:  A LECTURE ON TRAGEDY.  I conceived, wrote, directed and performed this 75-minute  autobiographical  tragicomedy about family skeletons, Nietzsche, Elvis and a trip to the Underworld in 2003. It came about because I had met Michael Wiener, an amazing performance artist of whom I was a big fan, at a party once. Doubtless I had consumed many martinis, and began blathering on to him about something or other.  At one point he stopped me and said, as I recall it, “You’re a good storyteller. You should come and do something sometime at this show I co-curate at the Gershwin Hotel.”  I was flattered, said sure, didn’t think he was serious.

Six weeks later I got a call from Michael’s co-curator, famed artist and Andy Warhol cohort Neke Carson, asking if I was interested. I said sure, and that I had a whole spoken-word, true story kind of thing worked out.  He said great, why don’t you come by in two days and tell me more about it.  In truth I had no idea what I’d do, so I thought – What’s the best true story you’ve got, Stanley?  What’s the (continue reading…)

In your mourning for the great Tony Curtis please throw up a little prayer for another Hollywood legend of sorts, Sally Menke, known primarily as “Quentin Tarantino’s editor.” I still have fond memories of my first year as an NYU Tisch Film & TV undegrad interning for Sally in her at-home, SoHo editing suite around 1988-89, thanks to her friendship with my incredible production professor and future friend Carol Dysinger.  Fresh off the turnip truck, I really felt like a bigshot.  Sally was the editor for hit TV show The Equalizer of which I was a big fan. I remember bringing home some 35mm frames of Edward Woodward from the trim bin to add to my memory box.  I probably still have them tucked away in an envelope someplace where by now they’re cracked, brittle and turning to dust…

Thank you, Sally, for your patience and kindness with this nervous, bungling kid.

Sally Menke: 1953 – 2010

By Brian Brooks and Nigel M. Smith (September 28, 2010)

Quentin Tarantino’s longtime film editor, Sally Menke, was discovered dead early this morning near Griffith Park in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Times reported that Menke had gone hiking in the morning, and friends alerted police after she failed to come home. Her body was found by searchers in Beachwood Canyon.  Born in Mineola, New York in 1953, Menke graduated from the NYU Film program at the Tisch School of the Arts… CONT’D AT INDIEWIRE.COM>>

[photos via museum.tv and indiewire.com]

Very cool that an Oscar Micheaux  (1920s director and screenwriter, including the 1925 silent Body and Soul featuring a true US hero, Paul Robeson) was issued this summer.  I spotted it at the post office today and had to buy a sheet. Now I just have to sit back, relax, and wait to need to mail something.  And then — look out.

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[image via harlemworldblog.wordpress.com]