OW Celebration links and info of interest

[Bri]

Congratulations to Christian McKay for his BAFTA nom for "Best Supporting Actor!" (Full list is here: http://www.bafta.org/awards/film/film-a ... 49,BA.html)

This is good news for those crossing your fingers for the Oscars (nominations to be announced the morning of Feb. 2). As we all know, the entertainment press likes to use these award shows as a "forecaster for the big event" and if history is any indication, it may just reflect. Obviously, "Me & Orson Welles" is probably more recognized by the BAFTAs because of its British ties, but still, it's a step in the right direction.

If nominated, McKay has some pretty steep competition, but my vote goes out to our boy Orson! Let's raise a glass and wish him luck!

[Glenn Anders]

Excellent, Bri: Christopher Waltz seems to be Christian McKay's main competition.

If both Academies would read the ignorant nonsense Quentin Tarantino has Waltz utter, as quoted by Larry French on our Main Page, it should remove Waltz from contention with McKay, certainly give a horse laugh to the idea that INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS be seriously regarded as an example of Original Screenplay writing!

Onward to February 2, 2010!

Glenn

[Glenn Anders]

Perhaps your complaint is an argument for ignoring the awards entirely, which I think has merit as a policy. I'm not sure of the logic of condemning a performance because of perceived flaws in the script but logic is elusive anyway. Very few meritorious films win the awards they deserve.

Peter, logic is never elusive -- if it is truly logic.

What I'm saying, in regard to INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS, is that Waltz's "brilliant" SS Colonel Landa must utter a colossal load of tedious, yet precious B.S., in the passage quoted:

"I’m glad you see it my way.
"Besides, not putting a bullet in the back of a fifteen year-old girl and allowing her to escape are not necessarily the same thing. She’s a young girl, no food, no shelter, no shoes, who’s just witnessed the massacre of her entire family. She may not survive the night. And after word spreads about what happened today, it’s highly unlikely she will find any willing farmers to extend her aid. If I had to guess her fate, I’d say she’ll probably be turned in by some neighbor. Or she’ll be spotted by some German soldier. Or we’ll find her body in the woods, dead from starvation or exposure. Or, perhaps… she’ll survive. She will elude capture. She will escape to America. She will move to New York City, where she will be elected President of the United States."

[The S.S. colonel chuckles at his little funny.]

--------------------

Too arch by 'arf!

In fact, just plain stupid.

Good luck to Christopher Waltz.

I have a friend who can write better dialogue than the above. In fact, he has -- and about a similar subject.

The speech makes the lines Christopher McKay speaks from the screenplay of ME AND ORSON WELLES sound very good, indeed!

I think you may be right about the Academy, Peter. Half of them, given all their auditions, or the online screenplay short courses they've taken, probably think that RESERVOIR DOGS and PULP FICTION are the greatest films to come out of Hollywood. But BAFTA people could be a different matter. I would count on them having a greater appreciation of logic, normal speech patterns, and the English language. Besides, to be a little crass, Christian McKay is a home lad, a RADA Grad, and he is coming from relatively nowhere, as Orson Welles did.

We'll have to see.

If I'm right, now, I want you to be "nice." You'll have to persuade your gracious wife to send me an extra cheque next month.

I could use it!

The wagers of sin, Peter.

Regards.

Glenn

[Glenn Anders]

Peter: I know nothing of your family. I would not know you had a wife if you had not brought her up repeatedly here. No offense intended.

To quote the immortal words of George W. Bush [in regard to Haitian aid]: "Some people want to send blankets, some water. Just send cash!"

If Christopher McKay wins Best Supporting Actor at BAFTA, you send the money! You have my address. You started that whole thing, I didn't.

Is that fair?

Glenn

[Glenn Anders]

Peter: Then, just stop endlessly quoting this stuff.

I have no interest in your family, certainly not in your wife!

This is crazy. The matter you refer to, which you originally brought up, is now nearing three months old.

I thought this Bri's thread was about BAFTA (and by extension, the Academy Oscar picks).

I think that Christian McKay has a real chance to win the BAFTA Award, a slim one to win an Academy Nomination. You think neither.

We'll know next month!

Glenn

[RayKelly]

http://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerfriedm ... at-cannes/
From Forbes.com:

Norman Lloyd is probably best known to American TV audiences for playing Dr. Auschlander on “St. Elsewhere.” He hasn’t worked since 1983, but Lloyd is coming to the Cannes Film Festival. He’s going to give a Master Class, conducted by film reviewer Todd McCarthy, on Thursday, May 26th. Two other luminaries from the film world will give Master Classes–director Philip Kaufman and composer Alexander Desplat. But Lloyd’s should be memorable. Lloyd first started acting in the 1930s, and directing in the 1950s. He made an appearance on “Modern Family” on TV in 2010. But he worked with both Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles. He’ll be the most popular person in Cannes, trust me. More to come…http://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerfriedm ... at-cannes/

[Roger Ryan]

Definitely sounds like a highlight.

I have to assume the Forbes reporter meant that Lloyd has not worked as a producer since 1983. One glance at IMDb proves that Lloyd has worked steadily as an actor up to the present.

[RayKelly]

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/movies/ ... aplin.html

The Los Angeles Times, May 25, 2012:

If modern film history has a voice, it is Norman Lloyd's. An actor for more than 70 years, Lloyd has worked with -- and known as friends -– filmmakers as diverse as Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock and Jean Renoir.

A peerless raconteur with an impeccable memory, the 97-year-old Lloyd had a capacity crowd at the Cannes Film Festival (including directors Alexander Payne and Abbas Kiarostami) in the palm of his hand as he answered questions from critics Todd McCarthy and Pierre Rissient about his long career.

Lloyd's best-known work (unless you count his TV stint on “St. Elsewhere”) was his first appearance, a key role as a Nazi spy in Alfred Hitchcock's 1942 "Saboteur." His character famously plunges off the Statue of Liberty. But before he ever came to Hollywood, Lloyd had a distinguished stage career that included a place in Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre and the role of Cinna the Poet in Welles’ 1937 production of "Julius Caesar," which Lloyd remembers as having, in Welles' celebrated staging, the contemporary feel of "political melodrama written the night before."

Once in Hollywood, Lloyd became extremely close to Renoir, the son of painter Auguste Renoir, after appearing in the director's 1945 "The Southerner." Though dismissed by studio head Darryl F. Zanuck as "not one of us," Renoir earned the admiration of Chaplin as well as Welles: "They both said he was the No. 1 director," Lloyd recalled.

Perhaps the most moving story Lloyd told involved Renoir in his declining years. The director embarked on a project of seeing all his films. When he'd viewed them all, he said to Lloyd: "'When I started to make films, I was determined at all cost to be as unlike my father as possible. But having seen all my work, I realize that what I've been trying to do all my life is imitate my father,' Lloyd shared, before adding, "What an amazing statement from a man near the end of his life."

Lloyd's close association with Hitchcock led to his working as a producer and director on the classic TV series "Alfred Hitchcock Presents." As the Cannes audience sat spellbound, so to speak, Lloyd recounted going to see Harold Pinter's 1960 "The Caretaker" and talking to the British playwright about possibly writing for the Hitchcock show.

As it turned out, Pinter had a TV script already written, which was sent on to Hitchcock to consider. His epigrammatic response: "I don’t do that sort of thing."

[RayKelly]

From TIME - May 26, 2012
http://entertainment.time.com/2012/05/2 ... z1w2mIoTtY


Cannes has plenty of visiting stars: people everyone knows of but needn’t. And there are people not so famous that anyone would benefit from knowing. One of these is Norman Lloyd, the actor, producer and director of movies, stage plays and TV shows whom the Festival honored Thursday afternoon with a spotlight presentation in the Salle Buñuel. A vital, charming 97, Norman knew virtually every famous person whose name would be printed in boldface in eight decades of entertainment and gossip columns. Because he also remembers everything, and is pleased to share it all, the 90-minute conversation sped by with the grace and propulsive force of a Kenyan marathoner.

Norman is so famously unfamous that the 2007 documentary on his life was called Who Is Norman Lloyd? But film buffs of a certain age know that he played Fry, the villain in Alfred Hitchcock‘s 1942 espionage thriller Saboteur. At the movie’s climax, his hand grasped by good-guy Robert Cummings, Fry dangles from the top of the Statue of Liberty before the seams of his jacket come undone and he falls to his death. (Norman recalls that when Hitchcock showed writer Ben Hecht the movie, Hecht said that Fry “should have had a better tailor.”) Viewers of ’80s prime-time drama remember Norman as the crusty Dr. Daniel Auschlander on seven seasons of St. Elsewhere.

Tom Fontana, the St. Elsewhere producer who later shepherded Homicide and Oz, has called Lloyd a combination of Peter Pan and Father Time. At the Thursday session, which was moderated by The Hollywood Reporter’s Todd McCarthy and legendary Festival facilitator Pierre Rissient, he was more: a one-man data bank of film, theater and TV history, a veritable juke box of anecdotes who possesses the born raconteur’s gift of telling each anecdote as if for the first time.

He mesmerized the crowd with tales of playing tennis and swigging Scotch Old Fashioneds with Charlie Chaplin; and of working with the young Elia Kazan , whose directorial sorcery was evident to Norman from the start; and of directing the 1952 TV classic “Mr. Lincoln” on Alistair Cooke‘s Omnibus — a five-part drama written by ex-TIME Cinema critic James Agee, with second-unit shooting directed by the 24-year-old Stanley Kubrick. Norman sold these stories in a clear, strong voice that is itself a relic of a more glamorous age. That “mid-Atlantic accent” of soft “r”s and melodic cadences was favored by pre-Brando stage actors; today it can be heard today only on black-and-white oldies on Turner Classic Movies. But if you were to ask what part of England this distinguished thespian is from, the answer would be Jersey City.

Born there, and raised in Brooklyn, Norman Nathan Lloyd got his first break in 1932 at the Civic Repertory Theatre run by Eva La Gallienne. The London-born manager-star advised Norman that vocal versatility, especially for classical roles, would get him more work. From this advice emerged the Norman Lloyd we heard at Cannes. In 1935 he married the Broadway ingenue Margaret (Peggy) Craven, who the year before had appeared in a production of Romeo and Juliet, starring Basil Rathbone and Katherine Cornell, and featuring Orson Welles, then 19, as Tybalt. Norman and Peggy remained happy honeymooners for 75 years, until her death last August 31.

After acting in plays staged by “The Living Newspaper” unit of the WPA’s Federal Theatre Project, Norman joined the Mercury Theater run by Welles and John Houseman, Norman relates the adventure of their 1937 production of Julius Caesar — which changed the setting of the William Shakespeare assassination play from ancient Rome to Benito Mussolini‘s Fascist Italy — with such gusto that his listeners live in that thrilling theatrical moment as vividly as Lloyd does. ”It had the effect of being a political melodrama that had been written the night before.” He played Cinna the Poet, “an intellectual liberal” mistaken for another Cinna by the Fascist mob. His death scene is still recalled as a thunderclap of theatrical magic.

Financed in part by Clare Boothe Luce, the wife of Time Inc. tycoon Henry Luce, Julius Caesar led to a four-play Mercury Theater season that landed Welles, then 22, on the cover of TIME. The “Marvelous Boy” (the magazine’s cover line) got all the credit for Caesar’s sensational staging, but Lloyd credits Houseman for “an amazing editorial sense — this wonderful taste” that the producer would later use working with Herman J. Mankiewicz on the script for the Boy Wonder’s first movie, Citizen Kane.

Norman was scheduled to appear in the Mercury movie project Heart of Darkness, based on the Joseph Conrad novel; but that fell through, and he returned to the New York theater for more work and steadier income. The role of Fry in Saboteur brought him back to Hollywood and triggered a professional friendship with Hitchcock that spanned nearly four decades.

His next movie role, in 1945, was as the supporting villain Finley in The Southerner, co-written by William Faulkner and directed by Jean Renoir, the French auteur revered by critics and filmmakers alike. (Norman: “Both Chaplin and Welles said he was No.1.”) Renoir, son of the Impressionist master Pierre-Auguste Renoir, told Norman of his determination as a young director to cut his own distinctive path: “With every shot, I was determined to be as unlike my father as possible.” Toward the end of his life, Renoir rescreened his 50-plus features — “And I realized I was trying to imitate my father.”

Norman got into producing by the misjudgment of other smart people. Bertolt Brecht, Germany’s premier playwright, then working in Hollywood, had written the theater epic Galileo; when Welles, Kazan and producer Michael Todd (later Elizabeth Taylor‘s husband) all turned it down, Norman produced the play’s first American staging in Los Angeles. In 1948 he brought Brecht in to director Lewis Milestone‘s production company, then producing the film Arch of Triumph., a political parable of Eastern European refugees in prewar Paris starring Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman. One of the lines Brecht contributed to the script — “Since the people are displeased by the government, the people must be replaced” — was so tart and telling that the film’s financiers cut it.

Political timidity was the order of the day. The House Committee on Unamerican Activities had hauled 10 Communist writers, producers and directors to Washington and sent “the Hollywood Ten” to jail for contempt of court. Since Norman’s name was on a list of the darkly suspected — ”I was in a book called Red Channels with… everybody,” he recalled — he got gray-listed, returning to Broadway to direct the iconoclastic Greek-classic musical The Golden Apple, starring such young comers as Kaye Ballard, Portia Nelson and Jerry Stiller.

In Hollywood, Hitchcock wanted him to produce the 1957 thriller series Suspicion, but the NBC brass balked because of Norman’s gray-listing. The stringently apolitical Hitchcock simply said, “I want him,” and Norman was approved. As he recalls: “Three words changed it all.” Norman worked with producer Joan Harrison on the half-hour Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which ran from 1955 to 1962, and was in charge of its three-year successor, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour: choosing the stories, writers and directors. Hitch rarely overruled them, except for the time they managed to get a script by the young (later Nobel Prize-winning) playwright Harold Pinter. Hitch’s response after reading it: “I don’t do that sort of thing.”

Occasionally, Norman hired himself to direct the Hitchcock anthology show. In fact, he directed more episodes than Hitchcock did of Presents (19 to 17) and of Hour (three to one). Among Norman’s assignments were perhaps the best remembered stories of each series. From Alfred Hitchcock Presents: “The Man from the South,” the Roald Dahl tale in which Steve McQueen makes a bet that his cigarette lighter can work 10 consecutive times, and Peter Lorre hovers over McQueen with a hatchet in case the lighter misfires. On The Hour: “The Jar,” Ray Bradbury‘s story about the mysterious contents of a jar that Pat Buttram buys at a carnival.

To any middle-aged lover of the popular arts, there’s no mystery to Norman’s charm (though the recipe for his vital longevity remains a family secret). He’s a unique, perhaps the last, link to a world of glamorous artistic achievement; and he is open, eager, avid to share his wisdom. His memoir Stage of Life in Theater, Film and Television (available in used copies or on Kindle for about $10) is mandatory, and delightful, reading for anyone who’s got this far into this story.

In person, he’s even better. Mary and I were lucky enough to meet him at a dinner 20 years ago at the Santa Monica home of perennial Manhattan baby Phyllis Jenkins and her husband George Jenkins, the eminent production designer of stage and screen. An evening with this group, or with Phyllis’s other friends Jane Wyatt, Dorothy McGuire in L.A. or, back in New York, Arlene Francis and Martin Gabel (both of whom worked with Norman at the Mercury Theater) was a command performance of show-business charisma and conviviality.

It happened that, while in Cannes, Norman was staying at the Hotel Splendid, our home for our 39 Festival sojourns. I peppered him with questions about the old days; he had a dazzling vignette for each. At the end of our chat, Norman gifted me with one last story. When I mentioned the Broadway producer Jed Harris, an invisible coin slipped into the Lloyd juke box and out came this fable, which I synopsize with none of Norman’s pearly precision:

On a scorching summer day at the old Empire Theater on Broadway, long before air conditioning, George S. Kaufman came to Harris’s office to vet a script. Opening the door, he found the great entrepreneur utterly naked. Kaufman said nothing about Harris’s lack of attire for the two hours they worked away. When he rose to leave, Harris said, “George, don’t you have anything else to say? “Yes,” replied Kaufman, “your fly’s open.”

The man who told that story — and so many others that, in sum, constitute an informal history of 20th century entertainment — deserves his name in boldface. Thank you, Norman Lloyd!

[Wellesnet]

Beatrice Welles appeared at the Michael Moore-founded film festival in Traverse, MI this past week, introducing "Citizen Kane" and "Chimes at Midnight".
A tweet from someone in attendance.
>>Beatrice Welles yesterday said that Donald Trump compared himself to Citizen Kane + admired her dad Orson "because of his taste in skirt"

Going to the fest also inspired this letter to Orson, by Mark Cousins:
http://www.traversecityfilmfest.org/a-letter-to-orson/

[Wellesnet]

Robert Kroll filed this report on Traverse: http://www.wellesnet.com/beatrice-welle ... -festival/

Beatrice Welles was joined Michael Moore for the screening of KANE. Philip Hallman of the University of Michigan joined her for the CHIMES screening.
KANE drew 500 people for a Wednesday noontime showing. Extras chairs were needed for the crowd at the Thursday afternoon screening of CHIMES.

[Wellesnet]

Welles's relationship to Shakespeare to be celebrated:
http://www.wellesnet.com/orson-welles-a ... woodstock/

[Wellesnet]

http://welleswoodstock.com/2016-schedule-2/

[Wellesnet]

Review of the festivities:
http://www.wellesnet.com/orson-welles-w ... lebration/

[Wellesnet]

Woodstock, Illinois considers mural featuring Orson Welles, ‘Dick Tracy’ and ‘Groundhog Day’:
http://www.wellesnet.com/woodstock-illi ... ndhog-day/