EINSTEIN’S MONSTERS ( Martin Amis, the Bomb, and Thinking the Unthinkable )

“Einstein’s Monsters” is a collection of short stories and essays by the distinguished British author, Martin Amis (“Money”, “The Rachel Papers”). The book formed the basis for a radio drama project I developed in the early 90s for NPR, titled “Radio Einstein”. On this day, marking another year removed from the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, this essay is a reflection on his book, and how the nuclear issue hovers, ever-present, in our individual and collective consciousness (or maybe that should be un-consciousness, given how comparatively blasé people have become on the subject). You can listen to the audio sampler from the radio series here, or click on the embedded link at the end of this post.

Urakami Cathedral, Nagasaki

“I was born on August 25, 1949: four days later, the Russians successfully tested their first atom bomb, and deterrence was in place. So I had those four carefree days, which is more than my juniors ever had. I didn’t really make the most of them. I spent half the time under a bubble. Even as things stood, I was born in an acute state of shock. My mother says I looked like Orson Welles in a black rage. By the fourth day I had recovered, but the world had taken a turn for the worse. It was a nuclear world. To tell you the truth, I didn’t feel very well at all. I was terribly sleepy and feverish. I kept throwing up. I was given to fits of uncontrollable weeping….. When I was eleven or twelve the television started showing target maps of South East England: the outer bands of the home counties, the bull’s eye of London. I used to leave the room as quickly as I could. I didn’t know why nuclear weapons were in my life or who had put them there. I didn’t know what to do about them. I didn’t want to think about them. They made me feel sick.”

This is how the great British novelist Martin Amis begins his essay, “Thinkability”, which leads off his book, Einstein’s Monsters.

The short stories which follow are his attempt to find ways to write about nuclear weapons: what they embody, and what they do to us – physically, psychologically, sociologically, and all the other “-ally’s”. The stories are metaphors, allegories, psychodramas, fantasies embedded in a paradox. The paradox at the heart of the nuclear equation. Nuclear fusion and fission are derived from the primal energy of creation, yet they also give rise to such monumental destructive energy that they can end all creation. The life force is also the death force. As Amis acknowledges:

“Although we don’t know what to do about nuclear weapons, or how to live with nuclear weapons, we are slowly learning how to write about them. Questions of decorum present themselves with a force not found elsewhere. It is the highest subject and it is the lowest subject. It is disgraceful, and exalted. Everywhere you look there is great irony: tragic irony, even the irony of black comedy or farce; and there is irony that is simply violent, unprecedentedly violent. The mushroom cloud above Hiroshima was a beautiful spectacle, even though it owed its color to a kiloton of human blood.”

The “irony of black comedy or farce”, as Amis describes it, is what drives the most famous exploration of the nuclear nightmare in popular culture, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Originally, Kubrick had intended a more-or-less straight dramatization of the series of events in his film that lead to nuclear Armageddon. But, as he worked on the project, he came to realize that the darkness of his subject could only be adequately captured with the heightened irony and absurdist tone that characterize the finished movie. One of the film’s most famous lines perfectly captures the surrealistic absurdities that lie at the heart of any contemplation of nuclear issues, whether in fact or fiction. President Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers) admonishes General “Buck” Turgidson (George C. Scott) as he wrestles with the Soviet Ambassador on the floor of the U.S. Operations Control Room: “Gentleman! You can’t fight in here! This is the War Room.”

The film originally ended with a massive custard pie fight, a lovely allusion to the movies’ silent era, and an apt reductio ad absurdum of the nuclear stand-off.

Kubrick directing George C. Scott in pie fight

Kubrick directing George C. Scott in the pie fight

But Kubrick felt this farcical conclusion was perhaps a little too much, diluting the point he was trying to make — and he was right.

It would have trivialized a scenario that, for all its absurdity, was deadly serious, because underneath all the antic posturing, the possibility of an accidental first strike by America’s nuclear bombers was entirely possible. So Kubrick opted for a more sobering, albeit still surreal, conclusion. The maniacal, crippled Dr. Strangelove (Peter Sellers), knowing that a Doomsday Device of planet-wide annihilation has been triggered by America’s single wayward bomber, is so transported by his visions of mass copulation amongst the survivors (with multiple female partners allocated to each man) that he rises, prophet-like, out of his wheelchair, declaring “Mein Fuhrer! I can walk!” Cut to epic, beautiful shots of nuclear orgasm derived from documentary footage of H-bomb tests, with Vera Lynn crooning on the soundtrack the old wartime standard: “We’ll meet again / Don’t know where, don’t know when / But I know we’ll meet again, some sunny day…..”

Mankind (and let me emphasize the man part of that word – I suspect womankind, left in charge, would not pursue self-annihilation with such single-minded fervor) has always seemed to find something compulsively beautiful in the rictus of death. Why else would we have continued to celebrate obliteration so fervently in our literature and art? From the earliest myths which correlate love and passion with death (Tristan and Isolde anyone?) we have now moved, inexorably it seems, to the ubiquitous fetishizing of erupting death wounds, dismemberment, and other baroque, slow-motion tours de force to be found even in your average Summer PG-13 blockbuster. And this is not to mention the lingering shots of mutilation and the casual sadism we welcome into our homes without a blink on assorted TV procedurals and Game of Thrones. As a species we are as much in love with the look of violence and death as we are with the idea of it, let alone the practice of it.

Nowhere is this dichotomy between the beauty and horror of death presented more vividly, on a more epic scale, than in the biblical splendor of the atomic detonation, and the smoldering, shimmering afterglow of the rising mushroom cloud. Take a look at the carefully restored footage of America’s nuclear testing program of 30-plus years, gathered together in the documentary Trinity and Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie, and you’ll want to pop your corn and settle in for an evening of nuclear ‘shrooms. Viewing real footage of assorted atom and hydrogen bombs is beautiful, compelling, exotic and terrifying in ways that the slow-motion carnage and mayhem of the Matrix movies can only dream of being. Because this stuff is real, man! During the height of America’s above-ground testing program, families would traipse out into the desert with their picnics to watch the spectacle: a nuclear al fresco, if you will. Little did they know they were also investing in a future of mutant tumors, rebellious immune systems, and sometimes a slow-motion, radiation-soaked death incurred from drifting fallout (see the extraordinary book and website American Ground Zero).

When the scientists of the Manhattan Project witnessed the first atomic test in the Nevada desert, named in suitably Biblical fashion as Trinity, the beatific horror of what they had created, God-like, out of the building-blocks of creation rendered them, first, mute, and second, inclined towards prose tinged with a strain of scriptural poesy.

Trinity: .016 secs after detonation

Trinity: 15 seconds after detonation

J. Robert Oppenheimer, chief architect of the Bomb, himself quoted Hindu scripture: “Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds”.

Oppenheimer, hunched over the Trinity bomb, engaged in final preparations for the test

But, beneath all the hand-wringing and subsequent calls to disarm from some of the nuclear scientists, you can still sense the little boys within the fathers of Armageddon jumping for joy: “We did it!” they cry. As the cloud from Trinity arose from the desert sands, one of the scientists pronounced, more ominously, “Now we’re all sons of bitches”

In the months and years that followed the test, and the two subsequent atomic conflagrations in Japan, some of the Manhattan Project scientists, like Oppenheimer, began to more fully realize the ramifications of what they had wrought. They tried to jump off the nuclear band wagon as it picked up speed, to move the government towards disarmament. Miscalculating his political influence, Oppenheimer lived to see his security clearance revoked after a series of humiliating hearings in which he was accused of passing secrets to the Soviets. He never recovered, neither from the betrayals, nor the sense of his own culpability in bringing mankind one large step closer to its own doom, and died a broken man. Others in the scientific community, like Edward Teller (who testified against his old friend and colleague at those hearings), invested themselves heart and soul in the Faustian nuclear bargain.

Edward Teller

Teller, more than anyone, set the US on the road to creating and stockpiling ever increasing megatons of mass-destruction. Motivated by his early experiences as a refugee from Nazi oppression before the war, he was more inclined to view the Soviets as the new Reich. For Teller and his political allies, the threat of force had to be contained by the threat of greater force, and thus the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD, was born. Besides, the boys were hardly going to throw their shiny new toys out of the sandpit. They wanted to play, and play they did. Thus was also born this country’s epic program of nuclear tests that effectively irradiated the entire US with fallout over the course of decades. There were some in the medical community who raised alarms about the long-term effects this exposure would have on the population; their warnings (and careers) were duly curtailed by officialdom.

Photos taken from “American Ground Zero” by Carole Gallagher:

Teller himself remains a compelling, maddeningly enigmatic figure at the centre of the nuclear narrative. He was brilliant, zealous, paranoid, neurotic, messianic in his zeal for nuclear superiority, and, thereafter, for the so-called Star Wars missile defense shield; after giving birth to his babies, he then proceeded, Zeus-like, to find the most outré manner in which to eat them. If ever someone in real life embodied the flaws of a tragic figure like Lear or Oedipus it was Teller: tragic for himself, and for us.

In his essay “Thinkability” from Einstein’s Monsters, Martin Amis cannily zeros in on the strain of infantilism at play on the stage of the nuclear arms race:

“Trinity, the first bomb (nicknamed the Gadget) was winched up into position on a contraption known as “the cradle”; during the countdown the Los Alamos radio station broadcast a lullaby, Tchaikovsky’s “Serenade for Strings”; scientists speculated whether the gadget was going to be a “girl” (i.e., a dud) or a “boy” (i.e., a device that might obliterate New Mexico). The Hiroshima bomb was called Little Boy.

Rare photo of Hiroshima bomb from the ground, taken 2-5 minutes after detonation

“It’s a boy!” pronounced Edward Teller, the “father” of the H-bomb, when “Mike” (“my baby”) was detonated over Bikini Atoll in 1952…. It is ironic, because they are the little boys; we are the little boys. And the irony has since redoubled. By threatening extinction, the ultimate antipersonnel device is in essence an anti-baby device. One is not referring here to the babies who will die but to the babies who will never be born, those that are queuing up in spectral relays until the end of time.”

Hiroshima shadows….

Extending his observation of this strain of infantilism that suffuses nuclear history, Amis extrapolates a keen metaphor with which to conclude his essay. Remember this was written in 1987, before the fall of the Soviet Union; though in reality little has actually changed in terms of the political chess game (or should that be crap shoot?) which keeps us perpetually betting the house on a round of nuclear Sudden Death.

The world’s nuclear stockpile c.2011

“At the multiracial children’s tea party the guest have, perhaps, behaved slightly better since the Keepers were introduced. Little Ivan has stopped pulling Fetnab’s hair, though he is still kicking her leg under the table. Bobby has returned the slice of cake that rightfully belonged to tiny Conchita, though he has his eye on that sandwich and will probably make a lunge for it sooner of later. Out on the lawn the Keepers maintain a kind of order, but standards of behavior are pretty well as troglodytic as they ever were. At best the children seem strangely subdued or off-color. Although they are aware of the Keepers, they don’t want to look at them, they don’t want to catch their eye. They don’t want to think about them. For the Keepers are a thousand feet tall, and covered in gelignite and razor blades, toting flamethrowers and machine guns, cleavers and skewers, and fizzing with rabies, anthrax, plague.

nuclear missiles

“Curiously enough, they are not looking at the children at all. With bleeding hellhound eyes, mouthing foul threats and shaking their fists, they are looking at each other. They want to take on someone their own size…..

“If only they knew it – no, if only they believed it – the children could simply ask the Keepers to leave. But it doesn’t seem possible, does it? It seems – it seems unthinkable. A silence starts to fall across the lawn. The party has not been going for very long and must last until the end of time. Already the children are weepy and feverish. They all feel sick and want to go home.”

To me, this kind of passionate, imagistic, but precisely argued writing fully captures the folly of the nuclear situation, which is every bit as six-packed, witless and ghastly a barometer of the state of civilization as its namesake on the Jersey Shore. Einstein’s Monsters is more urgently and evocatively written than any number of memoirs, histories, philosophical and political discourses that have marked the silent nuclear countdown since August 1945.

Jonathan Schell

Amis was inspired first and foremost by the luminous, passionate writing of Jonathan Schell, whose classic The Fate of the Earth foretold the irradiated, polluted, slow stir-fry state of the world we now find ourselves living with, and in, for the forseeable non-future we’ve created for ourselves.

The rest of Einstein’s Monsters proceeds from the gauntlet Amis throws down for himself in the opening of his essay, “Thinkability”:

“Every morning, six days a week, I leave the house and drive a mile to the flat where I work. For seven or eight hours I am alone. Each time I hear a sudden whining in the air, or hear one of the more atrocious impacts of city life, or play host to a certain kind of unwelcome thought, I can’t help wondering how it might be.

“Suppose I survive. Suppose my eyes aren’t pouring down my face, suppose I am untouched by the hurricane of secondary missiles that all mortar, metal, and glass has abruptly become: suppose all this. I shall be obliged (and it’s the last thing I’ll feel like doing) to retrace that long mile home, through the firestorm, the remains of the thousand-mile-an-hour winds, the warped atoms, the groveling dead. Then – God willing, if I still have the strength, and of course, it they are still alive – I must find my wife and children and I must kill them.

“What am I to do with thoughts like these? What is anyone to do with thoughts like these?”

His answer is a sequence of stories which all latch upon the varied strands of the nuclear state, the nuclear argument, and the potential nuclear end-game. They explore the issues through beautifully rendered metaphors and allegories that bleed out into re-imagined Earths and states of being. In The Immortal, a man who is slowly dying, along with everyone else, of radiation poisoning, escapes reality by remembering his life as an Immortal being who has witnessed the entirety of the planet’s history. Thus the pettiness of human folly (and achievement) is put into cosmic context.

In The Time Disease, a future colony of pseudo Angelenos have traded in our current obsession for maintaining perpetual youth by any means possible for maintaining a state of premature aging (due to radiation and pollution) under a sky that is boiling with the same kind of nuclear tumescence the Manhattan Project scientists saw in the Nevada desert at the Trinity test. And this is fine by them, because to catch Time, to come down with Time – to become young again, to have hope – means you would have to acknowledge the possibility of Life. Given the impossibility of life continuing in any form we would recognize or desire in this putative future, this post-nuclear world, that would also mean the death of hope. It’s a fitting paradox from which Amis carves a dystopian future far more chilling than any of Hollywood’s creations.

The death of time and the birth of something else: a watch from Hiroshima

In the early 90s I was planning a radio adaptation for NPR of Einstein’s Monsters, which was to blend the stories with interviews and archival recordings from the frontlines of the nuclear age. The author himself was very supportive of the project. Alas, we were in the early stages of pre-production when NPR decided to scrap all its drama programming, so the project was shelved. But not before we had recorded a demo to give a taste of the series to potential underwriters. This is what you can listen to here. It gives a pretty good idea of what the shows would have sounded like, and stands on its own, I think, as a meditation upon the nuclear problem.

I have always felt that Amis’s atmospheric language, full of rhetorical flourishes and brilliant wordplay, was, like Dickens, ideally suited to be spoken aloud. Therefore, translating his stories into the medium of radio seemed not only feasible, but also desirable. Radio is both an intimate, interior medium, and also the perfect realm in which to let the imagination roam. So it seemed perfect for these kinds of psychological, allegorical and fantastical imaginings that were rooted in humanity’s contradictory nature.

The nuclear issue is a subject whose implications for how we define our species, our place in creation, and our so-called progress through history, let alone our future, are so vast, so paradoxical, so antithetical, that they resist rational argument and easy conclusions with all the slow-burn lethality of fallout. But, just as radiation invisibly suffuses the environment, its tendrils reaching into the fabric of life, initiating its slow rot from within long before physical symptoms of poisoning become manifest, so the idea of nuclear destruction has likewise insinuated itself into our mental DNA. It lingers, it corrupts and, ultimately, it decays everything it touches. For those reasons, this is one of those subjects that demands an experiential argument as much as an intellectual argument to be fully grasped. Which is what Stanley Kubrick was trying to do in Dr. Strangelove, and what, in a smaller way, Radio Einstein likewise intended.

As Einstein himself observed: “The release of atomic power has changed everything except our way of thinking … the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind.”

Einstein and Oppenheimer

However, as Amis observes, our hearts have already been changed by the specter of the mushroom cloud, but not, alas, in the ways that Einstein was hoping for: “We are all Einstein’s monsters, not fully human, not for now.”

The warning is clear, but will we pay heed?

The signs are not good.

To listen to Radio Einstein, click on this link, or stream via one of the two panels below:

Radio Einstein:

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JAMES EARL JONES REMEMBERS ( Filming “THE COMEDIANS” with Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, and Alec Guinness )

Long before he provided the ominous tones for Darth Vader and created the most iconic-sounding villain in screen history, James Earl Jones made his mark in a number of major productions of stage and screen. It was his role in Jean Genet’s groundbreaking play The Blacks, first staged in New York in 1961, and running for a record-breaking 1408 performances, that led to one of his most memorable early film experiences.

James Earl Jones and Cicely Tyson in The Blacks

Polish poster for The Comedians

Peter Glenville

Peter Glenville, a leading British director of the time who had closely collaborated with Graham Greene and Tennessee Williams, was looking for a number of black actors to take roles in his forthcoming film of Greene’s The Comedians, set amidst the turmoil of ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier’s Haiti. Going to The Blacks, which was one of the top off-Broadway hits of the decade, Glenville was presented with an embarrassment of acting riches. Jones was not the only one to be cast in the film as a result of his performance in the play: joining him were Cicely Tyson, Zakes Mokae, and Roscoe Lee Brown. Also in the film was a young Gloria Foster, who later made a mark as the Oracle in the first two Matrix pictures.

For Jones, working on The Comedians was memorable both on, and off, screen. For rarely can a young actor have found himself spending time with such a luminous A-list cast: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Alec Guinness, Peter Ustinov, not to mention the legendary star of silent pictures, Lillian Gish.

Peter Glenville with the cast of The Comedians

Peter Glenville (c., standing) with the cast of The Comedians

A few years ago I produced an oral history of the life and work of Peter Glenville, and James Earl Jones kindly agreed to share his reminiscences with Susan Loewenberg, Producing Director of L.A. TheatreWorks, who commissioned the history on behalf of the Peter Glenville Foundation.

Peter Glenville directing Ustinov and Taylor

The segment about The Comedians was my favorite, enlivened by Jones’s commentary, his extraordinary presence, and that voice. (In a technical sidebar, that voice was so resonant with bass frequencies that the engineer had quite some trouble recording it without distortion).

Now you can enjoy his story too……

Narrator: Martin Jarvis. Voice of Peter Glenville: Simon Templeman.

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In 2008, TV’s best series on the arts, The South Bank Show, trained its telescopic sight on James Bond, to coincide with Daniel Craig’s second outing as 007 in Quantum of Solace. The result was one of the best documentaries on the film series of Ian Fleming’s iconic creation, and includes a rare interview with Sean Connery, plus some marvelous behind-the-scenes footage.

PART 1:

Ursula Andress and Ian Fleming on location for Dr. No

PART 2:

PART 3:

Fleming and Connery on location for From Russia with Love

PART 4:

Connery, Shirley Eaton, Fleming on set of Goldfinger

PART 5:

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The Wit and Wisdom of Nora Ephron

“Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.”

“That’s your problem! You don’t want to be in love. You want to be in love in a movie.” (Sleepless in Seattle)

“The desire to get married is a basic and primal instinct in women. It’s followed by another basic and primal instinct: the desire to be single again.”

“And then the dreams break into a million tiny pieces. The dream dies. Which leaves you with a choice: you can settle for reality, or you can go off, like a fool, and dream another dream.” (Heartburn)

“When your children are teenagers, it’s important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you.”

Ephron with sons Jacob (l.) and Max (front)

“I’ll have what she’s having.” (When Harry Met Sally)

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HAPPY 450th, BILL! ( How I Celebrated Shakespeare’s Birthday with Sir Ian McKellen )

We’ve all seen them – those fun pictures of fellow knights of the British stage, Sir Ian McKellen (aka Gandalf and X-Men maverick Magneto) and Sir Patrick Stewart (aka Jean-Luc Picard of the Starship Enterprise and X-Men leader Professor Xavier) hamming it up before the Super Bowl —

— and living it up, in and around the Big Apple.

It’s the unlikeliest bromance of the moment. It has grown out of this power duo’s Broadway performances of a hard-core theatrical double-hitter: Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land.

The shows have garnered rave reviews. No surprise here. Several of my most memorable theatre-going experiences have been courtesy of these two theatrical lions. In the RSC’s staging of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, directed by Trevor Nunn at the Barbican in the 1980s, Patrick Stewart was an unforgettable King. The scene where he realizes, on his deathbed, that the son he thought was a wastrel is actually going to be a great monarch (Henry V), and the two are finally reconciled, was indelibly moving.

Ian McKellen terrified in a studio-sized, in-the-round production of Macbeth (with Judi Dench) that has achieved a well-deserved legendary status (it was also directed by Trevor Nunn).

Some years later, in a Peter Hall production of Coriolanus at the National Theater, McKellen brought that difficult study in hubris to alarming light. I doubt I will ever see that tricky play done better.

Like Patrick Stewart, I had the good fortune to work and hang out with Ian, in Boston and New York, though at the end of an earlier era, the 80s. And it was just as much fun. We may not have gone to Coney Island…..

…… but we did have the surreal experience of sitting in a wharf-side restaurant near Wall Street as the stock market crashed. As we sipped coffee and wrote our script, even the air was jittery.

I had persuaded Ian to work with me to adapt his one-man show, Acting Shakespeare (which he was touring around the States), into a 2-hour special for National Public Radio, to be produced under the auspices of my radio station, WBUR in Boston. The program would tell the story of Shakespeare’s life and examine the lasting appeal of the plays, through autobiographical nuggets, commentary and performances by Ian, and a range of interviews, historic recordings and music. It would then extend into a discussion of Shakespearean performance in America. It was somewhat unusual for a radio station in America at this time, even one in the NPR network, to undertake an enterprise of this nature. Radio drama of any kind, let alone something as ostensibly highbrow as Shakespeare, was hard to find on the dial. But our station manager, Jane Christo, thought unconventionally, and was a big fan of Ian’s work. It did not hurt that we were able to attract substantial corporate underwriting for the project too.

The program began, as had Ian’s one-man show, in really the only way it could, with the opening of Henry V, in which the audience members are exhorted by the Chorus to enter the world of the play through the full exercise of their imagination. Is there any finer call to arms for the theatregoer?

During the course of the program we interviewed a range of people who studied and performed the plays in America.

Joseph Papp in front of posters for his many legendary productions

Joseph Papp in front of posters for some of his many legendary productions

Joseph Papp, the iconoclastic director and impresario who had done so much to promote quality non-profit theatre in New York, entertained with his impression of Al Pacino doing Richard III, and his often irreverent but unique insights gleaned from a lifetime of producing the plays.

1964-June-17_31992_Hamlet-at-the-Delacorte-with-view-of-Belvedere-Castle_lg

Hamlet at the Delacorte Public Theatre (1964)

F. Murray Abraham illuminated the actor’s point of view. He talked about why he loves performing the plays, and how young audience members were in thrall to a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in which he was starring as Bottom.

F. Murray Abraham as Shylock, Melissa Miller as Portia, in The Merchant of Venice

F. Murray Abraham as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, with Melissa Miller as Jessica

Professor Marjorie Garber of Harvard University, a leading gender studies and Shakespeare scholar, brought to life many historical, academic and philosophical issues connected to the plays and their author (not least the fascinating question of whether Shakespeare was really an actor from Stratford-upon-Avon, or someone else altogether).

Edward de Vere, one of the leading candidates for being “the real Shakespeare”. The film Anonymous dramatized his story.

We also recorded a class of school kids who studied with the pioneering New England theatre company, Shakespeare and Company.

A senior figure with that troupe, Kristin Linklater, had coached Ian in speech and diction early in his career at the Royal Shakespeare Company, and she discussed the ways in which American performances of Shakespeare were often preferable to those by British actors.

Kristin Linklater leading a class

The program also looked at the ways in which Shakespeare has permeated the popular culture, from West Side Story to the pop songs of Sting. Interviewing Sting resulted in one of my more memorable encounters with a celebrity.

The former lead singer with The Police was doing a photo shoot in New York, and suggested I come to the studio and talk to him during a break. I remember walking into the lobby of an unassuming building in midtown, only to be confronted by 15-foot-high walls covered, floor to ceiling, with cover shots from Vogue and other iconic fashion magazines. I suddenly realized this was no ordinary photo shoot.

I was led to Sting’s dressing-room. On the way I glimpsed the rock star, naked save for his Calvin Klein briefs, posing for an effervescent, wiry photographer who spoke in a flurry of Italian-English. I did not know it at the time, but this was one of the legends of the fashion scene, Francesco Scavullo. When I later told my girlfriend (who was part Italian and a big follower of the fashion-world) where I’d been, she admonished me, half in American, half in Italian, for a) not knowing how fortunate I had been to be admitted into the presence of this legend (Scavullo, not Sting), and b) not taking her with me. When I then further revealed that throughout the interview Sting remained clad only in his form-fitting Calvin Kleins, I received a sharp jab of rebuke on my arm. Clearly I had seriously messed up for not allowing her the opportunity to see the rock star au naturel. It took a while for me to emerge from the doghouse. (And, ladies, the answer to your question concerning Mr. Gordon Sumner’s attributes is, “Yes, he is.”)

Francesco Scavullo with his photo of Sting

Francesco Scavullo with his iconic photo of Sting

One of the most memorable evenings of my sojourn in New York now takes on the hue, in retrospect, of an historical moment in theatre lore. Ian and I were laboring intently on the script, preparing to enter the studios of WNYC to lay down his tracks before he resumed his tour. We were under the gun, but nevertheless one day he declared that we were going to take a break that evening and go to the theatre.

“You wouldn’t mind doing that, would you dear boy? I’ve been told it’s a play we absolutely must go to,” he said as he peered over his half-moon spectacles. “Absolutely” is one of his signature words. His eyes betrayed that twinkle of mischief which the world has come to love in his portrayal of Gandalf. There is a part of Ian’s psyche that remains thoroughly that of an errant school-boy, “creeping unwillingly to school”. It is one of the reasons he is a great actor: he likes to play. On this occasion he was clearly in the possession of privileged knowledge he was not about to share, but he was relishing what my reaction would be when I discovered what it was.

Rehearsing Richard II (with Mark Strong)

Rehearsing Richard III (with Mark Strong)

Thus we found ourselves heading off to Sardi’s for dinner, New York’s most famous watering hole for the Broadway set. Of course, everyone wanted to come over to our table and pay their respects. Ian held court to the manner born, garrulous and friendly, but always ready with a biting quip. The possessor of a mind every bit as lean and quick as his performances, Mr. McKellen does not suffer fools, or the lazy opinion, gladly. He’s call you on your BS. You’ve seen him do this on the chat shows, where he has become a popular guest with hosts and audiences alike.

King Lear

We walked into the theatre and made our way to our seats at the front and center of the stalls. A murmur of excitement flowed through the audience – at this time McKellen was already a huge star in the theatrical firmament, even if he had yet to achieve the broader celebrity status that came with The Lord of the Rings and X-Men. He turned and shook people’s hands, and greeted old friends. Finally we settled into our seats and the play began.

An actor came out, thin with long black hair falling about his coiled shoulders.

From the second he took the stage I was riveted. His energy and intensity were extraordinary, and it was the kind of showboating role that makes a star. Now I could better imagine the galvanizing effect of Brando’s legendary performance in A Streetcar called Desire. I knew why Ian had insisted we come, and I felt like I was watching theatre history being made. After the show we went backstage and Ian introduced himself. I just stood by and watched, in awe. What a moment!

Walking home Ian commented: “You don’t see that every day – a star is born”, or words to that effect. True enough.

The actor’s name was John Malkovich, and the play was Burn This by Lanford Wilson. Also in the cast was the young Joan Allen, giving an equally powerful performance for which she won a Tony award. Amazingly, Malkovich only received a Drama Desk nomination. He was, as they say, robbed. But his stellar career was officially launched.

John Malkovich and Joan Allen in Burn This

A few days later Ian and I entered what were then the newly refurbished studios of WNYC to record his scenes and linking text. As with the writing process, Ian was completely collaborative and openly solicited my advice on his acting and presentation. It was a somewhat daunting experience for a comparative neophyte to be asked to guide one of the greatest actors of his generation, but Ian was intent on scaling back the pitch and scale of his performances so that they worked for radio. His conversational manner as host occasionally veered towards being more “BBC-like” than one normally heard on American radio, not surprisingly, but that hardly seemed inappropriate in a program about Shakespeare hosted by an Englishman.

Rehearsing Macbeth with director Trevor Nunn and Judi Dench

We wanted his commentary to feel comfortable and unintimidating, like a fireside chat, with hot tea and scones to hand. When it came to the play extracts he completely understood how one could go small and intense, rather than big and theatrical, honing in on the psychological thrust of the speeches. Radio is wonderful for this kind of “interior” approach to drama, and it also allows an actor to mold and color the language in a way that the demands of projection in a large theatrical space often preclude. Only occasionally did we shift into a proscenium, or to be more accurate, thrust-stage mode, when a scene like the opening of Henry V would be aurally placed within a theatre setting through the use of sound effects and artificially added reverberation. I particularly enjoyed doing Prospero’s Farewell from The Tempest (opening Part 2 of the program). Ian brought out all the lyricism and melancholy in the speech, and I backed it with the Norwegian composer Arne Nordheim’s music, drawn from his ballet of the play. It lent just enough of an otherworldly, eerie quality to those extraordinary words in which the playwright expressed his intention to retire from the stage.

“I’ll drown my book….” McKellen as Prospero at the opening of the London Paralympics

In another standout sequence, Ian plays a pivotal scene from Hamlet, involving the arrival of the traveling players at Elsinore, Hamlet’s family castle, taking all the roles. The listener is able to go right inside Hamlet’s head as he launches into the soliloquy “Oh what a rogue and peasant slave am I”.

To get this kind of “interior” quality of sound one has to speak as close to the microphone as possible. In this way one removes all the room resonance, so the voice is completely isolated. The problem is that in the process of doing this, every little mouth noise, lip smack, pop and breath is picked up by the microphone, and can distort the recording. We were working in the days before digital editing and mixing, so the only editing we could do to remove unwanted pops and distortions involved actually cutting the tape itself. Tricky stuff, and especially so when there is such a wide dynamic range as there is here. When Hamlet explodes with frustration in the middle of the speech, McKellen had to back off the microphone and the engineer rode levels so he would not distort. Listen to the completed scene (contained in the following clip). I think you will agree that it is a masterly piece of microphone technique allied to brilliant acting.

Ian McKellen as Hamlet (1971)

Once the sessions in New York were completed, Ian disappeared for the rest of his tour. (While he was on the West Coast he interviewed the Craig Noel, who had run the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego for decades).

Craig Noel in 1980

I was left with a mountain of recorded material to whittle down to two 1-hour shows. I disappeared into the editing room with my indefatigable engineer, David Greene, and his trusty razor-blade.

The author (l.) and engineer David Greene (r.)

One of the interesting things that happens when one works on an audio project like this is one comes to learn in intimate detail every tic and inflection of someone’s voice, their particular habits: the way breaths are taken, the way certain combinations of consonants and vowels can sound out oddly, and how even well-trained voices can reveal the layers of their background. McKellen grew up in the north of England and had a strong regional accent as a young man, but in order to pursue a career in theatre at that time (the late 50s and early 60s) it was mandatory that he not have anything other than a proper Queen’s English kind of voice. He rigorously trained away the accent of his boyhood, but as David and I labored over the tapes, those characteristic northern sounds would occasionally reveal themselves within the words. Fascinating. There were also certain, shall we say, bad habits or tics that even the most well-trained voice will fall into, and I will admit to certain moments of levity when we came across these McKellen aural signatures. Put it down to the punchiness that every editing bay plays host to.

Rehearsing Coriolanus in Greece, with director Peter Hall

Taking Coriolanus on tour in Greece, with director Peter Hall

What many people do not realize is how much of what they hear on the radio is not people speaking off the cuff. In fact, the reporters, interviewees, and commentators on fully produced programs are mostly edited before the shows hit the air to remove unwanted mistakes, pauses etc. (except when it is a live news show, like All Things Considered, though here it is mostly only the hosts who are live; the rest are mostly live on tape). In the days before digital, this kind of editing was done with a razor blade, cutting the master tape. To be a really good editor is a considerable art, with little room for error – you can only reassemble minute pieces of cut tape so many times. My editor on this show, David Greene, was one of the best editors I have ever worked with. Every session was a master class in how to cut tape. It wasn’t just a question of editing interviews for content: David would clean up odd little mouth noises and tighten the rhythmic flow of speech. Here you have to be so careful, because if you overdo it to get rid of redundant “ers” and “ums”, you can disrupt the speaker’s natural flow and rhythm of speech, and the end result can sound choppy.

King Lear

Finally, with all the elements in place, we mixed the show. Now you might think this would be a hi-tech affair, with multi-track tape and a state-of-the-art mixing console. Far from it. At the time WBUR had yet to gain the luxurious facilities it currently enjoys. We only had several ¼ inch decks, and Betamax video decks for digital playback. The mix was all coordinated manually, with David and myself literally leaping from one source to another as different sound elements were cued in. It may have been crude, but it worked.

As Richard II (1968)

With a certain level of anxiety I sent Ian the finished program for approval. He had a few salient notes, but declared his satisfaction, and the program aired on April 19th, 1988, in time for Shakespeare’s birthday on the 23rd, on over a hundred stations across the land. The response was so overwhelmingly positive that NPR ran it again the following year on even more stations.

King Lear, with Sylvester McCoy (aka Doctor Who) as the Fool

King Lear, with Sylvester McCoy (aka Doctor Who 1987-1989) as the Fool

An interesting coda to this whole experience came a few months later. Ian made worldwide headlines by publicly coming out. He was one of the first celebrities in the acting world to openly declare his homosexuality, and it was an act of considerable bravery at that time. It turned out that he had been seriously mulling over whether to do so or not throughout his American tour, when we had been working on the program. In San Francisco he had been staying with the writer Armistead Maupin (whose Tales of the City was a landmark work in chronicling the impact of the AIDS crisis on the gay community), and this was when he finally reached his decision. At the time, his coming out was partly driven by a desire to protest a new law discriminating against homosexuality being promoted by Margaret Thatcher’s government. McKellen has remained active in support of LGBT rights, recently adding his signature to those of 27 Nobel Laureates who wrote an open letter to Vladimir Putin to protest Russia’s policies of active discrimination against, and criminalization of, this community.

We had chosen to end the program with a speech from Henry VIII, a play that scholars believe, while attributed to Shakespeare in the First Folio, was actually written in collaboration with his contemporary, John Fletcher. Sir Thomas More confronts a mob of rioters who are protesting against the flood of immigrants entering London. In retrospect I can see how More’s condemnation of discrimination and intolerance would have resonated with Ian as he pondered his decision to come out.

Would you be pleased

To find a nation of such barbarous temper,

That, breaking out in hideous violence,

Would not afford you an abode on earth,

Whet their detested knives against your throats,

Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God

Owed not nor made not you, nor that the claimants

Were not all appropriate to your comforts,

But chartered unto them, what would you think

To be thus used? This is the strangers’ case;

And this your mountanish inhumanity.

It was the perfect humanist note on which to end this personal look at the greatest of all literary humanists, granted by one of our foremost practitioners of the actor’s art. Working on this show was one of the singular delights of my radio career.

You can listen to the complete broadcast of Speaking for Everyman: Ian McKellen Celebrates Shakespeare’s Birthday here:

PART 1

PART 2

In Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus (1974)

In Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (1974)

Here is a video of Ian analyzing Macbeth’s “Tomorrow and Tomorrow” speech.

AND, on a lighter note, for Stewart/McKellen fans this is essential viewing:

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THE MAN IN THE MACHINE ( Kraftwerk Live at Disney Hall )

One of the most momentous discoveries of my musical life happened almost by accident. I was a teenager at boarding-school, just hanging out one afternoon, when one of my friends sauntered by.

“Read about a pretty cool album in this week’s New Musical Express. You should check it out.”

He ambled away down the corridor, and after a few minutes returned with a copy of the music broadsheet. On the cover were four men dressed in red shirts and black ties, hair plastered down, heavily made up, their faces locked in expressionless sideways gazes, arranged in a highly stylized shot that reeked of both Teutonic totalitarianism and mechanistic macho.

“I think this might be right up your alley”. No, he wasn’t making a crack at my expense. My friend knew that I was heavily into avant-garde classical music, and especially the German avatar of progressive and electronic music, Karlheinz Stockhausen.

He opened the paper to the feature review. It was of an album called The Man Machine, and those four men on the cover were its creators – collectively known as Kraftwerk.

From the moment I started reading about this band I realized this was music I had to investigate. I inhaled the article. I was only just starting to listen to pop and rock seriously; up until then I had been strictly into classical and jazz, assembling a semi-improvisatory ensemble when I was 12. But recently I had discovered Pink Floyd and David Bowie and was getting really fired up by these new musical worlds. By the time I finished the article I knew I had to have the record, and headed down to the local record store as soon as I could. That record is still with me, one of my prized possessions, albeit with one chewed corner courtesy of a family pup who bypassed Bach and Basie in favor of Krautrock, discriminating fellow that he was. On a good system this record sounds like you are inside the man machine. Those analog synths and drums are fat. None of the reissues or even the American pressing comes close to the sound of that original English pressing.

I will never forget the first time I played the album. It was on headphones and I didn’t just listen. I was absorbed into the music, and into a sound world unlike any other. The electronic canvas was so rich it felt organic, and the short, motivic melodies were immediately catchy. The occasional human voices, often fed through a range of processing devices, were flat and mechanistic, yet also oddly imbued with real feeling. There was a sense of melancholic machine chanting. The B-side led off with a number that is the closest the group has ever come to a conventional single, The Model. The song plays on how we objectify feminine beauty, turning models into remote, almost technological creatures: infinitely desirable, and infinitely unapproachable. It is an incisive piece of musical observation, made all the more poignant for the yearning that lurks just beneath the surface. That yearning is transmogrified into something both familiar and otherworldly in the next song, Neon Lights, a tour de force of electronic expressionism. I think it is their greatest track, a road song of the modern urban experience, driving through canyons of steel with the neon lights of the city dancing and dazzling the senses. Cascades of shimmering synthesizers ripple over a relentless march beat and a simple, haunting melody, again tinged with melancholy.

Neon lights

Shimmering neon lights

And at the fall of night

The city’s made of light.

Many a time I have found myself on a freeway, sometimes with a light or heavy rain to deepen the electric shadows, with that music playing on the stereo or in my memory. I am sucked into a netherworld of strange, Metropolis beauty. (Metropolis, not surprisingly, is the title of another track on the album: an apt hommage to Fritz Lang’s silent epic which defined the modern cityscape on film, in our heads, and finally in reality).

The Tower of Babel in Metropolis (1927)

Metropolis live

I still hear details in that record that I’ve not heard before, it is that well-crafted. At the time of the album’s release I was not alone in the opinion that this group was creating something unique, not just in pop music, but in music, period. I immediately bought their earlier albums, Autobahn and Trans-Europe Express.

I quickly discovered that Kraftwerk were sui generis, and today they are hailed as the most influential group ever, even more so than The Beatles. And it’s not just the music which continues to ripple through practically every genre, even non-electronic music. (Listen to Philip Glass or Steve Reich and Kraftwerk is right there at the heart of their work. No surprise then that their appearance at Disney Hall is part of a citywide celebration of musical minimalism). Kraftwerk’s stripped-down sense of design, for example, was a huge influence on Peter Saville, who designed covers for Joy Division and New Order, and spawned a million imitators.

Peter Saville’s cover for Blue Monday single

At the time these record covers were the complete opposite of Roger Dean’s visual fantasias for Yes, as was the music. Everything was stripped down to the essentials. Repetitious and hypnotic rhythms were so carefully layered that they avoided any of the dead-hand quality of their numerous imitators. Melodies were short and mesmeric, and full of romantic yearning. Kraftwerk’s tunes are some of the most memorable in pop. That romantic quality evokes the human in the machine, and it is in that domain that Kraftwerk’s music breathes and finds its staying power. The only other techno act that I think approaches that quality is Massive Attack, but it does so with more conventional vocals laid on top of the electronic palette.

In the Kling-Klang studio

The thing about Kraftwerk is that it’s a band whose work still sounds incredibly modern at the same time as feeling timeless. No matter that you can hear the evolutions in electronic instrument technology from album to album. (Techno Pop, formerly Electric Café, is suffused with the new digital technology of Yamaha’s DX-7 synth, and was the least well-received of their albums, though in its new remastering it is redeemed). Timeless, indeed, as the masterworks of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and Wagner that came out of Germany’s classical tradition. But it was in reaction to that tradition that Kraftwerk crafted its distinctive sound and ethos.

After the war, German musicians wanted to do, and be, anything so long as it was far away from the German classical tradition which had been heavily tainted by its co-option by Hitler into his promotion of the Aryan ideal. Young musicians needed to turn their back on centuries of German high culture, but they also shied away from the popular forms of their conquerors. Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider started Kraftwerk in 1970 within the loose umbrella of the Krautrock movement, and their early albums used conventional instruments and free-form improvisation seasoned with the spice of electronic manipulation. But their compositions were essentially conventional in method and execution.

That all changed with Autobahn, whose single A-side concept piece was an electronic realization of the aural and aesthetic experience of crossing Germany via the new freeway system that had no speed limit.

It was a revelation, both for what electronics could now do, and for its reinvention of what a pop record could be. And it was as potent in its ideas — of sound as movement, and vice versa; of engagement with technology as romantic — as it was in its execution. Its successors were no less influential. In particular, Trans-Europe Express, which did for rail travel what Autobahn had done for motorways. Together with The Man Machine and Computer World, these albums created a sense of what it felt like to exist as a human being in the late 20^th century: one’s humanity slowly leeching away from the organic experience of life, through the mediation of technology, into something both immediate and distancing, something “other”.

On Trans Europe Express people remember the epic title track and its extension, Metal on Metal, but they forget about the haunting Hall of Mirrors, a meditation on identity and celebrity with glistening synthesizer figures rippling against a pointed refrain (“Even the greatest stars discover themselves in the looking-glass”), and the elegiac Franz Schubert, a techno call-out to Germany’s most lyrical and poetic composer, who in the here and now is buried beneath the literal and aesthetic railroad tracks of the new Germany.

It is often claimed that hip-hop begins with Afrika Bambaataa’s 1982 club hit Planet Rock, which quotes from Trans-Europe Express and Computer World. I remember hearing this on the dance floor of London’s legendary Camden Palace, and being blown away both by the fact that I knew where the melody and rhythm had come from, and that they now existed in this cool new context.

But back to The Man Machine, which I think is Kraftwerk’s most fully realized and perfect record. This was the album in which the individual members of the band finally disappeared into their conceptual creation. They became their own robots, literally using mechanical alter-egos in videos and live performance.

This week I revisited this album in vivo, so to speak, as part of the band’s 4-day trip through their complete oeuvre in live performance in the iconic performing space of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles.

Two modern icons working in tandem, so to speak.

Only Ralf Hutter of the original band still remains, one of four “operators” onstage (Fritz Hilpert, Henning Schmitz and Falk Grieffenhagen), all standing behind minimalist work stations (one of whom “mixes” the 3-D visual component of the show in real time).

Quite apart from the excitement of finally seeing one of my favorite bands in action, I couldn’t wait to see how music that is so essentially “canned” would work as a live show. Stripped of the crowd-pleasing elements of the typical live rock or pop show, like barnstorming guitar or drum solos, I wondered how well the Kraftwerk aesthetic of complete control and pre-determination would play for an audience.

Kraftwerk in 1981

It took about a minute for my doubts to evaporate. First of all the sound, the best I’ve ever heard at a live rock show, was both muscular and delicate, subtle and forceful, going as deep as any bass I’ve ever heard. And it travelled through the space – around, about, and in and out. No doubt those famous Disney acoustics had a hand in rendering the Kraftwerk sound so vividly and precisely.

Whatever elements were pre-programmed, nothing about the musical performance felt canned, and the personality of each member of the band clearly emerged in the ways in which familiar musical lines were varied, embellished, speeded up and slowed down. In a nice touch at the end, each player had a chance to improvise at his work station, and I was left wishing they had done a little bit more performing on the musical fly.

But it was the visuals that added a whole new dimension to the Kraftwerk experience. On a large screen behind the four band members (who wore black suits with grids on them), a mixture of ultra-high tech and almost retro video, fully exploiting the ability of 3-D imagery to pluck at your eyes, created a fully integrated “happening”.

In fact, the whole evening felt closer to a piece of performance art than to a concert, which is no doubt one of the reasons why these events have been mostly presented in museums and architecturally significant spaces rather than stadiums. Viewing and hearing the Kraftwerk oeuvre as a whole one was struck not just by its originality and uniqueness, but by its prophetic nature.

Everything about how technology has come to shape our lives was there in this extraordinary music, created years before this phenomenon fully came to pass. Nowhere was this more evident than in a sequence from Computer World.

Here, patterns of fluorescent numbers flashed by and undulated towards us in sensual waves, while the music alternatively spiked and caressed, threatened and lulled. It all perfectly caught the dichotomy of our love-hate affair with personal technology.

The most chilling note was sounded with the performance of Radioactivity from the lesser-known album of the same name.

Against a deeply funky groove, the names of nuclear incidents like Chernobyl and Harrisburg flashed on the screen, and then —

Germany has committed itself to going nuclear-free within a couple of decades. In a nice twist of fate, the country that originated modern mechanized warfare with the objective of cultural subjugation and annihilation has become more sensitive to the lessons of technological misdeeds than its conquerors. Maybe the rest of us, those who are inclined to forget the lessons of history, and are unwilling to accept the prophecies of climate science, are indeed destined to dance with Death into oblivion. If so, it will be in beautiful buildings like Disney Hall, and all to the techno stylings of a generation of musicians who confronted the dehumanizing legacy of their forefathers by seeking the man in the machine, and vice-versa. It is an irony at which Mr. Hutter would no doubt smile.

And in the world of Kraftwerk cover bands —

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IN A HOLLYWOOD STATE OF MIND

Living and working in Hollywood one is inclined, somewhat more than the general population, to suffer from a variety of movie states of mind. After all, wanting to escape reality is what brought us to California in the first place, and the Hollywood in our heads is substantially preferable to the reality. (Have you ever been to Hollywood and Highland, where they’ve turned the gates of Babylon from D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance into a mall? And that’s the upscale bit of Hollywood!).

hollywood-and-highland-5-intolerance-movie-set

Old Hollywood Babylon —

— and New Hollywood Babylon

Hollywood is also intrinsically hyperbolic and, since making movies is actually a pretty arduous process, I’ve heard grown men who have Oscars in their cloakrooms liken it to war. Ridiculous? Maybe not so much. A little mental meandering can be a healthy counterbalance to too much Hollywood reality. (Or unreality).

In fact, going from that blissfully innocent initial movie idea (“How about a shark terrorizing a resort? We can build a mechanical Great White, no problem, and film it in the real ocean so we don’t have to fake it. Easy!”), to actually opening a film is kind of like finding oneself in the third act of The Shining. During the required three plus years it takes to get a film made one mostly feels like that film’s seven year-old endeavoring to elude the unwanted homicidal attentions of an axe-wielding paternal figure (a Freudian mash-up of the studio, investors, critics, paying public).

The only way to offset the seemingly inevitable drop of the blade is to take one’s life into one’s own hands and, like little Danny, run out into the petrifying night, and lure the enemy into a frozen maze from which neither of you may return in one piece.

Of course I exaggerate. No one would work in movies if it was really like that. (Yes they would! They want to meet movie stars!) It’s really no worse than being a lawyer or member of Congress. (Where are the axe murderers when you really need them?).

So, getting back to my point about Hollywood’s denizens entering into Hollywood states of mind, let’s consider some possible favorite choices.

The writer – for example – is susceptible to Sunset Boulevard. He’s found himself floating face down in a swimming-pool so many times he’s forgotten how he ever got there (or how to stop it happening again).

Of course, writers live mostly in their heads anyway, and in Hollywood that can be a nice place — all that sun, sand and, well….

What’s in the box, Barton?

Yes, any writer who’s gone through what is politely called Development Hell will feel a particular empathy with Barton Fink. The prospect of seeing John Goodman’s gun-toting psycho charging down a spontaneously combusting corridor screaming “I’ll show you the life of the mind!” will almost seem like a relief compared to another round of studio notes.

The producer – a much-maligned creature in movie lore – might veer between two possible models of how to go about getting the show on the road. There’s The Bad and the Beautiful, in which a group of filmmakers reflect on how they were aided in their careers, and then terrorized, by the Machiavellian producer played by Kirk Douglas, who will charm, swarm, cajole and bully to get his way.

And then there’s The Producers, wherein the titular characters set out to make a deliberate flop out of an all-singing, all-dancing Nazi musical, and end up with a smash hit.

Just another day at the office

But which of these two films represents how one should go about being a producer? Which one is the cautionary tale, and which one the blueprint for success?

The eternal dilemma of how exactly to go about producing hit movies is played out, second-guessed and dissected in the trades after every opening weekend. However, for every producer who yearns to cut through all the crap, Get Shorty will hold a special place in his or her heart for its gangster-turned-producer hero played by John Travolta because, deep down, every producer wishes he could make the odd recalcitrant collaborator/executive/critic/second-guesser an offer he cannot refuse.

The studio executive on the wrong end of Travolta’s pistol will always have Robert Altman’s The Player to console him. Tim Robbins’s sleazy protagonist does, after all, get away with murdering a difficult writer – and ends up marrying his victim’s girlfriend. (Add this film to the writer’s list of grievances).

The director who’s knocked around a bit channels Richard Mulligan’s beleaguered auteur in Blake Edwards’ sublime satire of Hollywood, S.O.B. (short for “Standard Operational Bulls**t”).

Driven to the brink of insanity by a mega-flop, Mulligan decides to wrestle victory from the jaws of box office defeat, and Robert Vaughan’s cross-dressing studio boss —

— by reshooting for an R-rating. How does he do this? Well, he persuades his star (and ex) Julie Andrews that her wholesome family-friendly image needs retooling (literally). To accomplish this he revamps his central MGM-style musical number as a porno.

Its climax (ahem) is Mary Poppins going all spring break on us (“You like my boobies?” a squiffy Julie declaims in a state of deshabillé).

That Mulligan gets shot to death for his pains —

— and is buried at sea in a viking helmet by William Holden and his buddies (after a spot of fishing) —

— is merely a tribute to his auteur credentials.

Actors adore All about Eve, Joe Mankiewicz’s paean to theatre folk, and dissection of the naked ambition (and unsheafed knife) lurking in the sweet smile of one’s understudy.

Cinéaste actors go nuts for Les Enfants du Paradis, Marcel Carné’s Dickensian canvas of a theater troupe’s lives and loves.

Why are we so fascinated by actors and movie stars? Because life is a performance, and we’re all acting a part — as Shakespeare so pithily pointed out. Movie stars just do it bigger and better than we do. David O. Russell’s latest, American Hustle, hardwires into our pop cultural obsession with everything actorly. It finds the intersection between performance and the con in the pursuit of the American dream, and milks the results for all their worth. And as per usual Russell pushes his cast out onto an emotional high wire — the resulting thespian high jinks and precarious balancing acts are glorious to behold.

But for me the film that maybe most perfectly embodies the surrealistic double-think a screen actor must hold in his head is Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. This is the one where a daydreaming projectionist —

— wanders into the movie he is screening.

Surviving a series of jump cuts that launch him from one perilous, and hilarious, scene to another —

— he ends up solving the mystery and getting the girl, because he entered the movie. Now that’s what I call commitment to a role. What an endorsement of film’s curative powers. (For a later spin on this idea, see Woody Allen’s Purple Rose of Cairo.)

But if you had to select just one film to embody all the obsessions of Hollywood in one convenient package, I suspect that would be —

But, I hear you say, that movie has nothing to do with the movies. Au contraire, I counter. It is, in effect, the ultimate metaphor for making pictures. Consider.

Jimmy Stewart falls in love with a fabrication, an illusion of a person, who in this case happens to be Kim Novak.

“Screen siren obsession” is, in my opinion, a completely certifiable medical condition; a symptom familiar to moviegoers everywhere since the dawn of moving pictures. (Erotic fixation upon fantasy figures lies at the heart of film’s mesmeric dance of seduction). Then, when Novak “dies”, Stewart sees another woman who reminds him of the earlier one, and proceeds to refashion her into a replica of his earlier love.

What he does not know is that both women are actually one and the same.

That he’s the victim of an intricate con-job to cover up a murder is largely co-incidental, and barely relevant to what the film is really about. That crafty Hitch – he made a movie about making movies, and the danger of trying to build real-world romances upon the flickering shadows of fantasy and obsession, projected or otherwise, with death as the trickster “I do”.

“So what!”I can hear many a movie guy say. So what if the gal’s a fake, the guy’s a basket-case, and no-one gets to say “I do”. We’re making movies! How great is that! I know people who would kill to do what we do.

Yup, in Hollywood, Vertigo is the one you come home to.

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( HOW MANY MILES TO ) BABYLON?

Grace Kelly b&w

BAB-Y-LON (noun): a city devoted to materialism and sensual pleasure (Origin: ancient city of Babylonia). (Source: Merriam-Webster Dictionary)

LA LA LAND (noun): The term either refers to Hollywood, Los Angeles or a state of mind synonymous with Hollywood that is out of touch with reality, focusing on dreams, fantasies or frivolous endeavors. (Source: Urban Dictionary)

“One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: that word is love.” — Sophocles

What do you say to the woman you love

Up there on the silver screen?

Where do you go at the end of the show

With nothing to hold but a dream?

What would you say to the golden girl?

How would you play the scene?

Oh, how would you play the scene?

Did your dreams come true as the years rolled by

Young king of the silver screen?

How does it feel to be tied and bound

To a fading movie queen?

What can you say at the end of the day?

How will you play the scene?

Oh, how will you play the scene?

How many kisses crossed your lips

Before your lips met mine?

How many lovers held your hand

Before your hand touched mine?

How many hopes, how many fears?

How many hearts, how many tears?

How many miles to Babylon?

Why do you gaze at the silver screen

Pretty girl in the second row?

How would you act if the man came down

What do you need to know?

It’s cold out there in the neon nights

How far do you aim to go?

How many kisses crossed your lips

Before your lips met mine?

How many lovers held your hand

Before your hand touched mine?

How many hopes, how many fears?

How many hearts, how many tears?

How many miles to Babylon?

Vocal by Mary Carewe.

Song and Video by Mark Ward.

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An excellent documentary about the making of one of the greatest rock albums of the 80s, and a highly influential one too. Peter Gabriel broke new ground in terms of integrating world music and the latest sampling and synthesizer technology into the soundscapes of one of his most adventurous albums. This documentary originally aired on British TV’s South Bank Show, and offers a unique opportunity to see this highly-regarded musician exploring new terrain. It is the best documentary I’ve ever seen about how a rock album is created.

And follow this link for a superb archive of photos taken by Larry Fast, who contributed synthesizers to this and several other Gabriel albums, during the sessions and the resulting tours.

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HOLLYWOOD ( and all that )

hanging out and hanging on in life and the movies (listening to great music)

EINSTEIN’S MONSTERS ( Martin Amis, the Bomb, and Thinking the Unthinkable )

JAMES EARL JONES REMEMBERS ( Filming “THE COMEDIANS” with Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, and Alec Guinness )

The Wit and Wisdom of Nora Ephron

HAPPY 450th, BILL! ( How I Celebrated Shakespeare’s Birthday with Sir Ian McKellen )

THE MAN IN THE MACHINE ( Kraftwerk Live at Disney Hall )

IN A HOLLYWOOD STATE OF MIND

( HOW MANY MILES TO ) BABYLON?