Skip to main content

Redux: The Best Time for Bad Movies

Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter.

IMAGE VIA THE PARIS REVIEW ARCHIVES. PHOTOGRAPHS BELOW BY HILTON ALS.

“With a picture that doesn’t work, no matter how stupid and how bad, they’re still going to try to squeeze every single penny out of it,” the legendary director Billy Wilder remarked in 1996, in the Review’s first-ever Art of Screenwriting interview. “You go home one night and turn on the TV and suddenly, there on television, staring back at you, on prime time, that lousy picture, that thing, is back!” How many filmmakers might have been quietly struggling with similar emotions on Sunday night? We wouldn’t want to speculate, but we certainly did tune in to the Oscars. This week, why not revel in the kind of old-school glamour that’s beyond good or bad? Deborah Eisenberg’s story “Taj Mahal” dissects a cast of Hollywood actors, directors, and other eccentrics; the poet Chase Twichell conjures the anarchic spirit of a darkened theater in the afternoon; and in words and a series of ravishing photographs, Hilton Als allows himself “to dream the kind of movie [he] would make” about James Baldwin, Nina Simone, and his late sister. And don’t miss Wilder’s account of what Claudette Colbert said to her director, Frank Capra, when they wrapped the film that won her the Academy Award …

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, poems, and art portfolios, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door.

INTERVIEW
The Art of Screenwriting No. 1
Billy Wilder

I remember those days in New York when one writer would say to the other, I’m broke. I’m going to go to Hollywood and steal another fifty thousand. Moreover, they didn’t know what movie writing entailed. You have to know the rules before you break them, and they simply didn’t school themselves. I’m not just talking about essayists or newspapermen; it was even the novelists. None of them took it seriously …

Pictures are something like plays. They share an architecture and a spirit. A good picture writer is a kind of poet, but a poet who plans his structure like a craftsman and is able to tell what’s wrong with the third act. What a veteran screenwriter produces might not be good, but it would be technically correct; if he has a problem in the third act he certainly knows to look for the seed of the problem in the first act.

From issue no. 138 (Spring 1996)

PROSE
Taj Mahal
Deborah Eisenberg

Grainy rather than glossy, melancholy sepia lighting, the lighting of loss—the movies Anton ended up making in Europe weren’t too different from the ones he had made in America. There were the misleading clues, the tightening spirals of danger, approaching footsteps, neighbors inexplicably appearing, reflections in mirrors or puddles or windows, obstructed views …

The European movies were as misinterpreted as the American ones had been, and briefly they were as popular. Then audiences in both Europe and America moved on to simpler, noisier, and less troubling movies.

From issue no. 214 (Fall 2015)

POETRY
Bad Movie, Bad Audience
Chase Twichell

Matinées are the best time
for bad movies—squad cars
spewing orange flame, the telephone
dead in the babysitter’s hand.
Glinting with knives and missiles,
men stalk through the double
wilderness of sex and war
all through the eerie
fictions of the afternoon.
The audience is restless,
a wicked ocean roughing up its boats.
It makes a noise I seem to need.

From issue no. 124 (Fall 1992)

ART
Director’s Cut
Hilton Als

One book I think about a great deal when I consider all this—movies as escape, stories as reality, race as just one of life’s interesting impossibilities, my sister and her understanding of aesthetics as a trick and a truth—is James Baldwin’s book-length essay The Devil Finds Work. There Baldwin describes his relationship to movies, both as a spectator and as a writer of film scripts. (Spike Lee incorporated some of Baldwin’s original adaptation of The Autobiography of Malcolm X into his scenario for Malcolm X, released in 1992.) I’ve long thought The Devil Finds Work would make a great American movie in the old Columbia Pictures style: Jeffrey Wright or a young Morgan Freeman, say, dressed as Baldwin in a white shirt and tie walking through a museum of pictures and commenting on some of the stills and the stars that mattered to his young gay self: Bette Davis, Sylvia Sidney, and the like.

From issue no. 223 (Winter 2017)

If you enjoyed the above, don’t forget to subscribe! In addition to four print issues per year, you’ll also receive complete digital access to our sixty-nine years’ worth of archives.



from The Paris Review https://ift.tt/ArTN5a8
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dressing for Others: Lawrence of Arabia’s Sartorial Statements

Left: T. E. Lawrence; Right: Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia (1962) In the southwest Jordanian desert, among the sandstone mountains of Wadi Rum, there is a face carved into a rock. The broad cheeks and wide chin are framed by a Bedouin kuffiyeh headdress and ‘iqal, and beneath the carving, in Arabic, are the words: “Lawrence The Arab 1917.” If you are visiting Wadi Rum with a tour guide, you can expect to be brought to this carving. You may also be shown a spring where Lawrence allegedly bathed, as well as a mountain named after his autobiography, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, whose rock face has been weathered into a shape that does, from some angles, look a little like a series of pillars. I am familiar with the legend of T.E. Lawrence—fluent Arabist, British hero of the Arab Revolt of 1916, troubled lover of the Arab peoples—as well as with the ways the Jordanian tourism industry has capitalized on this legend. Nevertheless, I am still surprised when I hear someone mentio...
Post a Comment
Read more

23 Notable Kiswahili Novels

Kiswahili is spoken widely in Eastern Africa and parts of Central Africa. The language has morphed into different dialects spoken in these countries and is well documented in a rich literary tradition. Even though this collection centers on 20th century fiction, the Kiswahili literary tradition spans various genres and time periods. Swahili novels known as […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2TFnCfP
Post a Comment
Read more

The Beautiful Faraway: Why I’m Grateful for My Soviet Childhood

At 10 I wanted to be an artist, practiced a hysterical form of Christianity, talked to trees, and turned a sunset at a local park into a visionary experience. My great-aunt lured me to Evangelical Christianity with the strangeness of Gospel stories where Jesus always ended up angry at his disciples’ failure to understand. I sympathized with being misunderstood, and latched on. Besides, Christianity was a forbidden fruit in Soviet Russia so I had to worship in secret. This was unnerving but also alluring. I was a breathless romantic who wanted to be surprised by a knight on a white horse. From the early ‘80s to the early ‘90s, my childhood was formed by the images, atmosphere, and allusiveness of Soviet songs. I grew up in an artistic family where emotions flew high. I was the kind of imaginative child who could spin an entire tale from an oblong stain on the kitchen table. But there’s more to it than that. My family was not always idealistic or romantic, especially not in New York in...
Post a Comment
Read more