Finished with the Chinatown book, and if you ever want to destroy your love of Hollywood cinema, just read this. Oh, I was aware it was an awful, empty-headed place… but whatever romance I carried has been delt a serious blow.
According to the book, screenwriter Robert Towne was a bit of fraud, and a creep. Polanski and Nicholson were true talents, but also creeps (Polanski criminally so). Dunaway’s a jackass and an uneven talent, whose performance was created through the help of editing. Evan’s drug habit destroyed whatever artistic vision he had. Yikes!
Many executives, studio heads were clueless (after this Batgirl nonsense, y’all are thinking “no duh, same as it ever was”). Some had zero interest in film, they just wanted power, or prestige… or money. Once the TV people took over the movie jobs, that’s what it primarily became, a money game. It’s astonishing that some genuine talents, with a love of cinema are able to plow through the horsepoo and make something worthwhile.
I’m rewatching Chinatown right now, and thank goodness, it’s reminding me that brilliance can survive the wasteland. It’s replenishing my love for the movies, and this movie in particular.
(And Towne might have had his weak spots, but scripting dialogue wasn’t one of them)
Also, we used to live in Mary Shelley’s hometown and I’m still upset that the town does nothing to celebrate that. Most people who live there don’t even know that her grave is right there in the middle of town.
It’s amazing how little people know about what’s in their own towns. Speaking of graves, everyone knows that Colonel Sanders and Muhammed Ali are buried in Louisville, but they don’t know that Mia Zapata and George Rogers Clark are in the same cemetery. Or that Victor Mature is in a different cemetery a mile away (and his tomb is GORGEOUS). So I would totally visit Mary’s grave.
Cave Hill has some great stones there. And so many people came in to see Col. Sanders’ grave that they had a yellow strip in the road to guide people right to it. But the best one is just a few plots down from Sanders: that of Harry Collins, a businessman for Frito-Lays that also did magic. There are even steps leading up to his full-size statue, made to be even more inviting.
And one of the saddest there is this: a statue of a dog with his ball, looking confused at the grave of his owner just a short distance away.
I love Cave Hill (I’m local, so I’ve been often), and there are so many lovely touches. If you walk up to Collins’ stone and look close, you often find coins balanced on his hand…once there was even a bunch of those magic trick flowers!
The sculpture of Sandra Twist, the Lepping Pegasus stone, the Satterwhite Temple, and what I call the Sundial Monument are some of my other favorite sights. There’s also a particular goose at the lake with a distinctive brown specked bill who is super friendly and will come up to you and put his head in your lap looking for a snack. I named him Adrian for some reason.
To jump back on topic, the book “Your Guide to Cemetery Research” by Sharon Cormack is an absolute must for cemetery enthusiasts. It was published in 2000, so the web resources are out of date, but it’s great for iconography, preservation, and other graveyard related information.
The Wrestling by Simon Garfield (1995, updated 2012). An oral history of British professional wrestling. There are a lot of interviews with a lot of gnarled old barstewards, not all of whom get along well, even after all these years. All the anecdotes you could want from the surviving faces, heels and managers of a scene that was already on the way out when Michael Grade made his infamous decision to cut it entirely from the TV schedules.
The one unifying theme is that everyone, and I mean everyone was terrified of Les Kellett. Beloved by the fans as the funny little old guy, he was in fact a violent and deeply weird sadist (on and off-duty) that nobody wanted to share a ring or a dressing room with.
It’s strange, I never even considered the UK having pro wrestling. It makes perfect sense that they would, just something I’ve never thought about. Doesn’t seem like it ever came to prominence here in the States.
