SO ALIVE In 1996 Keir Bloomfield got his first sole screen credit as a writer. Granted, it was on a low-budget, a very low-budget, movie that the producers guaranteed would be seen on oil platforms and tuna boats the world over. But it was a credit and it was his.…
Category: Writing
Cameron Crow: Having created Norma Desmond, what did it feel like making the movie? Was she a living, breathing person to you? Billy Wilder: Yes she was, yes she was. Yes, absolutely. Suddenly there is a person there, not just on paper. She was a real character, who had lived,…
There’s a lot of things having a fever will do to you, and now that it’s past I can say one of the benefits was an extremely strong remembrance — like a sense memory. It goes like this: I was home from college on a break, I was sleeping in…
I know my father served from almost the start of World War II until 1946 when it was all over. He was nineteen and studying pre-med when he enlisted. He told me that the carnage he witnessed during the war caused him to study something else, entirely, when he came…
Oasis: The bookshop on Fifty-second Street and Fifth Avenue in New York which stays open till midnight. Dietrich: In the German language: the name for a key that opens all locks. Not a magic key. A very real object, necessitating great skill in the making. The actress Marlene Dietrich spent…
I have a thing about how Los Angeles is portrayed on film and in books. An author who makes me laugh, perhaps because of his dour satiric streak, is Evelyn Waugh. He visited Hollywood in 1947 to discuss a film adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, loathed the place, and ended up…