Archives for March 6, 2004

“Ballet is the one form of theater where nobody speaks a foolish word all evening–nobody on the stage at least. That’s why it becomes so popular in any civilized country during a war.”

Edwin Denby, Dance Writings

Our Girl (who says hi) and I just got back from seeing the Paul Taylor Dance Company perform Taylor’s Sunset, Dream Girls, and Promethean Fire at City Center. If you’re in New York, go. If not, eat your heart out.

We’ll both be blogging about tonight’s performance at some point in the next day or two, but not just yet. Aside from having a lot of catching up to do, we’re planning to watch L’Atalante before crashing.

In the meantime, here are a few fresh links for you to chew on:

– SlowLearner looks at the high cost of playgoing in New York from the perspective of a budding playwright:

Sometimes reading Time Out New York puts me in despair. One of the reasons I moved to New York was all the theater, right? Just about everything goes up here at some point. I can catch everything, see what everybody is up to – a nonstop showroom of all the latest thoughts and innovations in playwriting, staging, design, and performance.

Of course they all cost about sixty dollars.

Okay, that’s not fair. I go to plays all the time that cost fifteen dollars. Showcases, Off-Off-type stuff. Some of which is terrific. But I’m always aware when I’m paying fifteen dollars to get into a play that I’m about to see one of those labors of love that will lose the laborers themselves at least several hundred dollars and probably several thousand.

So I understand why the producers of new plays by Tracy Letts, Doug Wright, Nicky Silver, Alice Tuan, Charles L. Mee, Wallace Shawn, A.R. Gurney, Bryony Lavery, Howard Korder, Craig Lucas, or Paul Rudnick might want to charge a bit more than fifteen dollars admission. They’re trying to run a business. (No snickering in the back, please.)

Here’s the thing: between the basic expenses of my existence, the non-theater things I do for fun, the occasional steep requirements like air travel, shoes, or dental work, and the various fifteen dollar plays I attend because the people in those plays came and saw my fifteen dollar play, I can really only go to one of these $50-60 deals about once every six weeks….

– Superfluities, another playwright-blogger, has a funny take on my posting from yesterday on bad theatrical press releases:

As a former publicist myself, I see his point about the hopelessly reductive nature of a press release which has the potential of rendering the most sublime into the most banal. Who would see these plays?

* Two homeless men wait for a man who never comes. Then they do it again.

* A family of actors sits around talking for four-and-a-half hours before they’re interrupted by their drug-addict mother.

* An architect falls in love with a girl a third his age, then jumps off the roof of a church.

* A Danish prince can’t decide who to kill, then kills everybody. (This world premiere production explores the ways we change, the compromises we make, and the price we pay for our life choices.)

O.K., I give up–point taken!

– While we’re in a theatrical mood, here’s a story from the New York Post that needs no comment from me:

For the glittering first-night audience at “Fiddler on the Roof” last week, the sudden death of Jerome Robbins’ sister just before the curtain went up was a terrible tragedy.

But for the show’s musicians, it was a chance to grab some overtime.

In what is surely the most ridiculous example of union overreach since the stagehands used to make producers pay for someone to raise the curtain on shows that had no curtain, the musicians at “Fiddler” have put in for overtime for the opening-night performance, which was delayed due to Sonia Cullinen’s death in the theater that night.

According to union rules, if a performance runs more than three hours, musicians are entitled to overtime. “Fiddler” was supposed to begin at 6:30 p.m., but it was delayed for almost an hour as paramedics tried to revive Cullinen, 91, who had collapsed in the aisle….

All together now: eeuuww!

See you tomorrow. Jean Vigo awaits.

I’ve mentioned it before, but I can’t plug the Inflation Calculator often enough. It’s a Web site that allows you to adjust for inflation any given amount of money (in American dollars) in any year between 1800 and 2002, in either direction. If that sounds boring, think again. I use the Inflation Calculator at least once a week in my work, and I can’t tell you how many times I used it in writing The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken.

Here’s an example: I was reading a biography of Benny Goodman this morning, in which it was mentioned in passing that Goodman paid Cootie Williams, one of the top trumpeters of the Swing Era, $200 a week in 1940. O.K., fine–but go to the Inflation Calculator and within seconds you’ll know that in today’s dollars, Williams made $2,493.29 a week, or $129,651.08 a year. That’s pretty serious money now, even more so for a black jazz trumpeter playing with a white dance band in 1940…and you didn’t really know how good a salary it was, did you?

That’s what makes the Inflation Calculator so useful to anyone writing about the arts. Unless you’re an economist, you’re likely to have only the haziest notion of what a dollar was worth in 1940, or 1840, or even 1975. (What cost $200 in 1975 cost $701.80 in 2002. Surprised?) Yet that kind of information is indispensable to understanding the implications of, say, a novel about life in 1940, or a biography of a painter that tells how much a particular canvas sold for in 1928. It changes the way you think about the past.

Enough said? Bookmark the Inflation Calculator today. Use it. You can always find it in the “Sites to See” module of the right-hand column.

Supermaud is in tomorrow’s Washington Post Book World. Go see.

My recent Wall Street Journal piece
about Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game, which I declared to be the greatest movie ever made, has drawn quite a bit of reader mail. One person wrote to say that he preferred Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante, and asked what I thought of it. Another wanted to know what my Top Five films were.

As it happens, Our Girl in Chicago gave me a DVD of L’Atalante for Christmas. I had to put it aside–things, as you know, have been a trifle hectic of late–so we decided to watch it together last night after coming home from Paul Taylor. The pairing turned out to be serendipitous, since L’Atalante, though it has dialogue, feels more like a silent film (which isn’t necessarily surprising for a movie made in 1934). The words are mere props for the unfolding imagery, and most of them could have been flashed on title cards without impairing the overall effect. It’s a perfectly lovely film, sweet and unaffected and very, very French, and it made me think of The Triplets of Belleville, another oh-so-French movie in which the journey matters far more than the arrival.

A keeper, in other words, though it didn’t crash my Top Five list. David Thomson, who ranks it in his own Top Ten, catches its essential quality nicely: “It is love without spoken explanation, unaffected by sentimental songs; but love as a mysterious, passionate affinity between inarticulate human animals. A fairy tale about plain, even ugly people, its intensity is always to be found in its images.” All true, which probably explains why I still prefer The Rules of the Game to L’Atalante. I’m a writer, after all, and I’ve never doubted for a moment that the place of words in non-silent film is pivotal, far more so than most film theorists are prepared to admit.

Whit Stillman, who makes wonderfully talky movies, once said to me:

Some visual purists still think film is pictures at an exhibition. They seem to forget that we’ve been making sound films ever since the Twenties. Talk is incredibly important….Of course you have to be very careful with it, and I understand why all the screenwriting gurus warn against too much dialogue, but I think they’re making a mistake. Even action films often have very good dialogue, though there isn’t necessarily a lot of it. What’s the charm of a buddy comedy? Just to see two guys shooting bullets? It’s what the two guys say to each other that matters.

I agree. When I want to immerse myself in wordless narrative, I listen to a symphony or look at a plotless ballet. This isn’t to say that wordlessness can’t be a tremendously effective device in narrative filmmaking (remember the first scene in Rio Bravo?), but it is a device, an effect, not the normative condition of the medium. Exceptions don’t prove or test a rule: they define it. Jerome Robbins once made a terrific ballet without music called Moves–but he only did it once. Similarly, moving pictures cried out for sound, and once it came, the silent movie vanished overnight. I don’t think that was a historical accident, much less a mistake.

And what about that Top Five list? Well, I don’t know whether I really care to oblige my curious correspondent. In my experience, it’s usually not that hard to pick a One Best–absolute excellence is by definition self-evident–but no sooner do you venture below the pinnacle than all sorts of other factors crowd into your viewfinder. When Time asked me to pick the best dance of the 20th century, for instance, I didn’t have to think twice before choosing George Balanchine’s The Four Temperaments, but I found it much harder to decide on two runners-up, though I finally opted for Paul Taylor’s Esplanade and Antony Tudor’s Jardin aux Lilas. Up to a point, the problems of choice multiply as the list grows longer, though eventually they subside. I suspect that most serious moviegoers’ lists of the 50 greatest films (as opposed to their 50 personal favorites) would overlap substantially, but their Top Ten lists would wander all over the map.

For me, The Rules of the Game is the obvious Greatest Movie Ever Made, and I expect a lot of other critics would agree with me, or at least consider it a completely plausible candidate. Beyond that, I have my doubts. Right at this moment–and no other–I’d be inclined to follow it up with Citizen Kane, Vertigo, The General (a silent film, please note!), and…er, um…I don’t know. The Searchers? His Girl Friday? Chinatown? I simply can’t tell you. The greatest opera ever written is The Marriage of Figaro, except when it’s Falstaff, but what’s the fifth greatest? That’s a party game, and a good one, and if you’re in the right mood it’s also a way of clarifying your own feelings about art–but nothing more.

I’ll end by quoting myself. This is a snippet from “Living with Art,” the essay I wrote for Commentary about my collection of prints:

Living with art teaches you things about the criteria of quality that cannot be learned in any other way, things I am still in the process of learning. If I had to guess–and it is nothing more than that–I would say the finest piece I own is Milton Avery’s March at a Table, closely followed by Isle au Haut and Piazza Rotunda. But there are many times when I would rather look at Grey Fireworks, Stuart Davis’ jazzy Any as Given, or the gossamer untitled Wolf Kahn monotype that now hangs over my mantelpiece. This never-ending cycle of looking and experiencing is one of the most instructive aspects of living with art. To see a painting or print on a daily basis is to learn from hard experience what makes some works of art durable and others ephemeral. Experienced collectors speak of how certain paintings “go dead on the wall,” meaning that their appeal fades over time and with familiarity. So far, all 15 of my pieces are still alive and well, but I never cease to be fascinated by how my preference for one over another shifts from day to day.

So it is with the making of Top Five lists as with the watching of L’Atalante and The Triplets of Belleville: all the fun is getting there.