Antonioni

[ChristopherBanks]

Saw "Blow-Up" at the cinema last night. I'm not sure whether I liked it. It had some really surreal and nice sequences, but there were moments when you wanted to scream "JUST CUT THERE!" at the screen.

Isn't Antonioni the director that Orson criticised for being too languid in his editing?

[LA]

Yes, Welles said in TIOW "he thinks that, if a shot's good, it's going to get better the longer you look at it", or something to that effect. Of course, every director has their own pace.

[Rick Schmidlin]

Antonioni is one of the great flawed directors, L'Avventura, L' Notte, Il Grido being his best work and Zabriskie Point one of his worst. Ray Manzarek of the Doors told me that that Jim Morrison wrote L'America for Zarbriski Point and the Doors performed it for Antonioni in thier studio in West Hollywood, before they finished the song Antonioni went running out of the room and they never heard from him again.

[jaime marzol]

BLOWUP is the film that inspired me to get into photography. i was 12 years old when i saw it. i was sure i wanted to be around lots of tits when i grew up. and it worked. haven't seen it in years. recently, i think in steve cole's zeppelin book, i read that the streets, and 'the scene', was filmed right where it was happening, and that was page and the yardbirds playing at the party.

great doors story, rick.

[Dave]

Rick, that's a great story. Didn't Paul Rothchild pass on production of L.A Woman sessions because he thought Riders On the Storm sounded like Lounge music? My favourite music/film connection is the song The Weight by The Band, which was an hommage to Louis Bunuel films. Seems like a strange leap, but that's what Robbie Robertson says.

[Rick Schmidlin]

I also like low-up a lot as I was a Yardbird fan and thought the flick was cool (and still is). In regard to Paul n The Doors, he decided it was time to move on and producer PEARL for Janis. He was also offered to produce a new solo effort from another Morrison named Van, but didn't think the album would go over. He soon regretted it. Paul and I were close friends and he produced the audio for "The Doors Live At The Hollywood Bowl "long form video I produced in 1986 . Bruce Botnick who produced the "L.A. Woman" album was our engineer on the project. Bruce produced the audio for the special edition of "Elvis That's The Way It Is" that I proceed a few years back for TCM.

[jaime marzol]

i am also a yardbirds fan.

my best friend who was in the houseband at THEE IMAGE in miami (owned by kenny collier, the guy who promoted the miami morrison see-my-penis concert), knew the yardbirds, and zeppelin when they played as The New Yardbirds, and told me some great stories about them, and that gangster like manager they had who used to be able to beat up whole bar staffs to get the band's money.

we used to have these lunches when i was living in north miami, and within a short period of time they became kind of like an event. musicians who played with, broke bread, and shared drugs and women with people like alice cooper, hendrix, zeppelin, nugent, vanilla fudge, canned heat, soul survivor, would show up.

would be great to get these old dinosaurs together one day for a documentary about that era, which i missed by about 6 or 8 years, and which i find so interesting.

by the time i got into the music thing it was still like what oliver stone did in the doors movie, but the end was right around the corner. i think the band BOSTON was like the begining of the end of that era. then mtv slammed the lid on the coffin.

ah, ok, i'm through rambling. back to welles

[jaime marzol]

oliver stone depicted kenny collier like a used car salesman wearing a loud sportcoat, and cowboy hat. he wasn't anything like that.

[jaime marzol]

...........

jim morrison
to penis, or not to penis:

of the people who i kew, who were there that night, no one has conclusively indicted morrison for showing willy. the answers i've heard: i don't know, i didn't see it, i was not in the auditorium when it's supposed to have happened.

one of the doors offered the 'mass hallucination theory'. today he would get a fine. back then they wanted to put him away. the fbi was involved!

[Rick Schmidlin]

It did not happen according to my friends Robbie,Ray and John. It was a setup as far as I know which it not much. Jim put his tong to Robbie guitar and maybe scratched himself that was all they needed. By the way Ray is a big Welles fan and was the one who got me into Welles in the first place. Also the way I got Universal to GREENLIGHT "TOE" was because of all the Doors videos I produced for them.

[jaime marzol]

..........

on the morrison thing, it seems that way. morrison was the enemy of the establishment, and some overzelous officials got an opportunity to hush him up, and they tried to make the best of it, but morrison died before their wheel got rolling.

the fbi was not only worried about comminists, negroes, and homosexuals, now morrison's penis had taken a front row seat, sort to speak.

i remember in school teachers trying to steer me away from doors and hendrix, and introducing the class to blood sweat and tears. didn't work. i was into psychodelic rock. blood sweat and tears were like gary pucket and the union gap, bands for wimps.

i got a lot of cool yardbird stuff from KAZA, page and yardbirds doing DAZED AND CONFUSED live. yardbirds rehearsing LITTLE RED ROOSTER with sonny boy williamson, clapton and page playing. and a bunch more.

[Rick Schmidlin]

Teachers kept kicking me out of school for long hair. (I still have a long pony tail to rebel) There swore up and down I would never amount to anything. I was kicked out of high school so many times I have hold some kind of record. But I kept reading my film books and listening to Coltrane, Dylan,Woody,Gould, Clarence White, Charlie Patton and then came Kane....................................

[jaime marzol]

...............

with me it was that bbc/turner thing that welles did in 1982 that got me to look at kane again after 4 attempts to get through it, because it was in every film book. obviously the film books i was reading were overviews and didn't tell me much about the films.

orson's charm in that documentary seduced me, made me go out, rent kane and try again, and this time i got through it. then i went out looking for orson books. this was before the huge conglomerate bookstores, and the only orson book i found was the higham book, 'the films of orson welles'. not only did i feel like a rip-off was being perpetrated on the reader page by page, by how much space higham burned not to write, but later on after finding the frank brady book, and the james naremore book, i found out that higham's book was also a pack of meanspirited lies.

higham most have been an odd person, most writers take up a book as a labor of love on something they greatly admire, higham took on a subject to slander, and maligne. very odd.

i never got thrown out of school. in jr high it was dangerous, people got stabbed, busses were destroyed, teachers were bitch-slapped, gangs were running amuk, so you just watched yourself and didn't make waves. in highschool, and college, everyone was smoking pot and they were very friendly.

the teacher that tried to play blood sweat and tears for the class got a bitch-slapping, though i don't think it was related.

i've always though of contacting lesley megahey (a god among men) about the rest of the audio from that 1982 shoot, if it still exhists. they used 3 hrs, but they filmed for 9 hrs. it's the best orson documentary going. i was thrilled when i traded with jeff wilson for the bbc cut of that documentary, i think there is an additional 45 minutes or so.

[jaime marzol]

when i read about THE TRIAL in the naramore book, i called all around town to see what video store had it. there was no web then, just the yellow pages. i found it an hour drive from my house, that made it a 2 hr round trip. i made the drive, rented it, pirated myself a copy, mailed it back to the store. and i was pissed, i thought, 'man, i just drove 2 hrs to rent a a shitty movie. i thought it was awfull. within 3 or 4 months, i was hooked.

i don't think i liked any welles film the first time i saw it.

and now an interesting tidbit for a change:
a while back we were discussing the different versions of CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT, and i mentioned an arthouse screening i went to years before i aquired a video copy, and that i thought that arthouse version had more closeups of heads than the version of the jap laser disc. no one else here had seen or heard of such a version. a few weeks ago a friend who went to that screening with me spent a few days in town, we got together, watched a few films, CHIMES was one of them, that he hadn't seen since the screening, and he said the same thing; the version we saw at the arthouse had more closeups of heads, and he remembered different footage of when welles was on the makeshift thrown clowning like the king. he remembered some shots that were subjective angles where you could see all of welles. feet swinging, hands pounding on arms of chair, laughing like a big, happy baby.

glad to know i wasn't hallucinating.

if that copy of the film made it to 16mm, it's a pretty good chance it might be among the 75 or 80 vhs copies the library system has. you just have to wrestle librarians into submission to get them.