#sam wasson

[universitybookstore]

New from Flatiron Books, The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood, by Sam Wasson.

[silezukuk]

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Το Τσαϊνατάουν, το φιλμ του Πολάνσκι, θα έβγαινε με μουσική του Φιλίπ Λαμπρό, η οποία άρεσε πάρα πολύ του σκηνοθέτη. Τελειώνοντας τα γυρίσματα, ο Πολάνσκι φεύγει για την Ιταλία, όπου έχει υπογράψει συμβόλαιο να σκηνοθετήσει μια όπερα. Απουσιάζοντος του αρχηγού, ο παραγωγός της ταινίας, ο σπουδαίος Ρόμπερτ Έβανς, χτυπάει το κουδούνι του συνθέτη Τζέρι Γκόλντσμιθ: «Σώσε με, η ταινία μου, η Τσάιναταουν, βγαίνει σε λίγο καιρό και δεν έχω την κατάλληλη μουσική». Ο Τζέρι, παρά τους δισταγμούς του, ολοκληρώνει το σάουντρακ της ταινίας σε ένα δεκαήμερο. Το 1975 η μουσική που έγραψε ο Γκόλντσμιθ ήταν υποψήφια για Όσκαρ —τον κέρδισε ο Νίνο Ρότα με τον Νονό νο 2.

Η μουσική του Φιλίπ Λαμπρό (Phillip Lambro): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AluXB_5IG8I και η μουσική του Τζέρι Γκόλντσμιθ (Jerry Goldsmith): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEJY6qZsjPY

[Διαβάζοντας το βιβλίο του Sam Wasson, “The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood.”]

[timelessaudrey]

“Everything you have read, heard, or wished to be true about Audrey Hepburn, doesn’t come close to how wonderful she was. There’s not a human being on earth that was kinder, more gentle, more caring, more giving, brighter, and more modest than Audrey. She was just an extraordinary, extraordinary person. Everyone should know that.”

Sam Wasson on Audrey Hepburn

[hmhbooks]

Need a gift for a comedy fan? Today’s book charts the meteoric rise of improv, covering everything from Second City and SNL to Caddyshack and the Colbert Report. And best of all, it’s out today, so there’s no chance it’s already on their bookshelf! 😂👏 Get IMPROV NATION here!

It’s Day 12 of HMH’s holiday gift guide! Every day until December 24, we’ll be sharing gift recommendations for everyone on your list.

[thatwritererinoriordan]

#76 of The 100 Greatest Film Books of All Time 

The 100 Greatest Film Books of All Time 

THR’s list of must-read tomes — determined by a jury of more than 300 Hollywood heavyweights including Steven Spielberg, David Zaslav, Liza

[aces-and-blackberry-blossoms]

Fosse, by Sam Wasson

This is going to be a very long post, because this book sort of hurts. This requires a bit of background. I walk weird. Always have. When I was little, I would walk and even stand on tiptoe. It felt natural. When I was around three my pediatrician recommended that my mom put me in dance classes. This would help strengthen and stretch my very tight Achilles tendons, and hopefully help me drop my…

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[darklingichor]

Fosse, by Sam Wasson

This is going to be a very long post, because this book sort of hurts.

This requires a bit of background. I walk weird. Always have. When I was little, I would walk and even stand on tiptoe. It felt natural.

When I was around three my pediatrician recommended that my mom put me in dance classes. This would help strengthen and stretch my very tight Achilles tendons, and hopefully help me drop my heels.

So in to ballet I went.

I loved it, I mean I wasn’t *good* at it, by any stretch of the imagination, but that wasn’t the point. I didn’t have to be the next prima ballerina to get the benefits of the exercises (and it did work, sort of. I don’t walk or stand on tiptoe anymore. I just tend to lead with the ball of my foot rather than the heel) and I never really wanted to be a dancer in the competitive sense. I wanted to do the moves and listen to the music. In fact, it never occurred to me that anyone was doing these classes for any other reason than for the fun of it, until I was thirteen, and the first class after summer break, the same teacher I’d had since I was six started the class by insulting all of us.

One girl had “horrid posture.

Another needed to work on something or other,

And I had “the worse turn out” she’d ever seen.

I looked down at my feet – My first position was the same first position I held three months before.

And it hit me “Ah! This is for real”

I was a little angry at how we were being spoken to, and unsure of whether I wanted do this in such a serious environment.

I became sure when I adjusted my first position and felt my left knee cap slide out of place with a flash of pain. First sign of a knee that would dislocate at a a wrong turn.

I quickly went back to my bad turn out and thought: “Nope.” Feeling my heart break a little. It sounds dramatic, but it’s true.

So that was the end of my classes. But I still loved dance and that’s why when flipping through channels a few years later and happening upon a scene where dancers were leaping and twirling to the song “On Broadway “ I stopped.

1979’s All That Jazz Directed by Bob Fosse.

This was the weirdest movie I’d ever seen, but I was entranced.

Now, it’s was 98/99 by this point.

I didn’t have the internet but I did spend a lot of time watching documentaries on any subject, and in an instance of coincidence meets the frequency illusion, I saw an interview with Ben Vereen where he tells a story about Bob Fosse.

Fosse? Fosse… That batshit movie with that freaky cover of the Everly Brothers!

I began to learn more, see more of his movies and musicals.

While I didn’t like everything I saw, or learned, I did like the dancing, and there was something in Fosse, and his wife/partner Gwen Vernon that I related to (I mean other than Bob had “no turn out” in Ballet and Gwen had to wear braces on her legs as a kid).

Now this book, goes more in depth than anything else I have seen or read. I think I get why I relate so much. Bob Fosse had the worse case of imposter syndrome. Never thinking he was good, always worried people would see through the ol’ razzle dazzle and see he wasn’t good enough for all that they had him doing. He was painfully insecure.

In Bob that manifested in being a workaholic, developing a dependence on uppers, and trying to sleep with everyone.

I just get paralyzed by my imposter syndrome, so my struggle wouldn’t make a good movie, but I get it.

The book hurts a bit because I know that insecure feeling. The author speaks with people who worked with, knew and or loved Fosse, and about his eyes down posture, the getting trapped in his own head, the worrying about worrying when there’s nothing to worry about.

I have had all of this.

In my first years in college I would study for one class for hours, convinced that if I didn’t I would flunk. My goal wasn’t straight A’s, it was to avoid failure.. Then I’d get a perfect score on a test, and wonder how the hell that happened. A fluke, obviously.

I had a friend in high school, I had known for three years. We hung out at least three times a week. We were walking and talking and when I looked at him, he stopped.

“Are you wearing contacts?”

“No, I could never put my finger that close to my eye.”

“I thought your eyes were brown.”

My eyes are on the blue side of grey.

He told me that he didn’t realize until that moment how often I looked down.

I remember once when I was around 16, I had the thought “Huh, I think I’m done with all my homework, it wasn’t that hard.” And that was, at once followed by “Then you have forgotten something.”

So yeah, I think when watching All That Jazz, and then some of his other movies, I saw myself in there.

This book is structured as a count down to Fosse’s death, which is very fitting.

Each chapter is titled for how many years we have to cover before Bob dies of a heart attack in 1987.

It is more in depth than anything I am ever seen or read about Fosse. Sometimes that’s good when in the early years we hear about the things that shaped him, namely being a sickly kid, falling in love with dance, working the burlesque clubs with a dance class friend as a double act between the women’s’ shows, as a teenager. Doing all of this to bring in money for his large family, and to loved.

I liked the detail when he was developing his style, when he was starting to make movies, and when he made All That Jazz.

But it could be tedious too, namely when it goes into details of every show. Not the ones that made each show different, the ones that were the same. The same arguments with writers and backers, the same arguments about the sexual content in the shows.

Of course he was a genius dancer, chorographer and director, and the book does try to analyze it. The problem is that in my opinion it’s nearly impossible to do that with Fosse’s work. You have to see it to understand it. Even this books says something like that near the end.

A good chunk of the book deals with him personally.

There’s a lot about Fosse that is problematic. I knew some before I even read this book (which honestly does its best to soften the edges without ignoring them all together). He was a master manipulator, and just because there were some people he hadn’t slept with didn’t mean he didn’t try.

Flirting and being charming is one thing, but this book recounts several times when his efforts of seduction fell flat, or caused anger. I’m surprised that there was only one episode of the Kneecap -Neuter Two -Step.

This and other biographies paint Bob as a contradiction. Brutal taskmaster at work, but so empathetic to the dancer’s life, it *pained* him to reject someone’s audition. He worked his dancers and actors hard, but almost always left them feeling like he was doing it for them, rather than having them do it for him.

He was a loving father, even if his work life made him distant.

He was a committed friend, and it seems like is friendships is where he really lived When his best friend Paddy died, it broke his heart more than any other loss.

And in his romantic life…

There ‘s a line in Christopher Moore’s Fool where self described “Hornbeast” (“but my horns are tender…”) Pocket says of his many sexual conquests: “I have loved them all, and learned many of their names.”

That line kept running through my head while listening to this book.

Bob Fosse seemed to have had an insatiable sexual appetite. The book talks about his years in therapy, Freudian psychoanalysis. And it made him realize that abuse he suffered as a teenager working as an MC in Chicago’s seedy burlesque clubs, had something to do with this, and his absolute inability to stay faithful to the women he loved.

Makes sense, but knowing the why’s behind this behavior that gave him and those around him pain, didn’t help him change it. Neither did the uppers and downers that his doctor gave him. There were limitations in therapy back then.

But, in an odd way he *was* loyal to three of the most important women in his life.

His relationship with his second wife Joan, emotionally overlapped with his relationship with third wife Gwen Verdon, until Joan died.

His relationship with Gwen overlapped with his relationship with long time partner Ann Reinking. There were others but these three loomed large.

He love all of them, In different ways.

Joan had helped make him as a dancer, and he cared for her long after they divorced. Gwen was a constant, they would separate, but never divorced she was there at ground zero when he developed his style, they had a daughter together. She was there when he died. She was his partner. Ann was his foil, they would argue, it seems to me like she would challenge him keep him on his toes. Basically long after he stopped being lovers with these women, he remained friends, and like I said, that was a higher honor. The “Friendzone” for Bob Fosse was like Mount Olympus, you may have had to go through all kinds of shit to get a place there, but once you were there, it was a better place to be.

He could also be spitting viper mean, both personally and professionally. Especially if he thought that he was being slighted.

I sort of feel like I should say that learning about the darker sides, made me like his stuff less, but I can’t. I still adore the Alley Dance scene in My Sister Eileen.

I still love the moves in Chicago.

I still cry at the end of All That Jazz, when Joe Gideon looks at his wife and says “At least I won’t have to lie to you anymore.” And crying, she sticks her tongue out at him.

I enjoyed this book and the subject a lot.

[wepicy]

Happiness Quote By Sam Wasson, “Have another drink honey, it was right there all along.” - Sam Wasson,