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About
Karina Longworth is the film editor of the LA Weekly, as well as the co-founder of Cinematical and the former editor of SpoutBlog. She recently returned to her hometown of Los Angeles after twelve years split between various other cities, most recently Brooklyn. This blog, when she remembers to update it, will be mostly about that.
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Lillian Gish in Way Down East (D.W. Griffith, 1920)
How they shot this scene I don’t even know.
From Bright Lights:
…in Way Down East’s climax…Lillian Gish, David Barthelmess, and Billy Bitzer’s beleaguered camera submit to an actual, godawful blizzard, brusquely defining itself on screen by allowing little more than ten feet visibility. Ice forms on Gish’s eyelashes, and, when she collapses in a drift of real snow, the actress, we learn, had actually fainted from the exposure, and this before being told to collapse all over again on a real ice floe on a real, freezing river […]
There’s no doubt that the irreducible actuality of the blizzard/ice floe sequences is the major reason they complete Griffith’s vision so successfully. The cold and the dim light especially challenged Bitzer and his camera, but as a result, the often-compromised photography has its own visceral integrity. As for the performers, the blizzard shoot was bad enough for Gish, but the weeks of photography on the river had both actors submitting to further dangers and potential frostbite.
Shooting Anna’s rescue in ferocious weather and on real, bobbing ice floes — and visibly threatening the actors’ lives in the process — is thereby something of a stunt, just as making a movie is, fundamentally, a stunt. But in D. W.’s hands, it’s a stunt with an expressive intent that’s both intuitive and considered.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kxetirdtvP1qa9nkoo1_500.jpg)
Lillian Gish in Way Down East (D.W. Griffith, 1920)
How they shot this scene I don’t even know.
From Bright Lights:
…in Way Down East’s climax…Lillian Gish, David Barthelmess, and Billy Bitzer’s beleaguered camera submit to an actual, godawful blizzard, brusquely defining itself on screen by allowing little more than ten feet visibility. Ice forms on Gish’s eyelashes, and, when she collapses in a drift of real snow, the actress, we learn, had actually fainted from the exposure, and this before being told to collapse all over again on a real ice floe on a real, freezing river […]
There’s no doubt that the irreducible actuality of the blizzard/ice floe sequences is the major reason they complete Griffith’s vision so successfully. The cold and the dim light especially challenged Bitzer and his camera, but as a result, the often-compromised photography has its own visceral integrity. As for the performers, the blizzard shoot was bad enough for Gish, but the weeks of photography on the river had both actors submitting to further dangers and potential frostbite.
Shooting Anna’s rescue in ferocious weather and on real, bobbing ice floes — and visibly threatening the actors’ lives in the process — is thereby something of a stunt, just as making a movie is, fundamentally, a stunt. But in D. W.’s hands, it’s a stunt with an expressive intent that’s both intuitive and considered.
Last night I met up with my old friend, Famous Artist Brendan Lott, at Dan Sung Sa on 6th street in Ktown. I live on 9th Street, but pretty far west of there, so I thought it would make more sense to take the Purple Line than to walk. I thought wrong, and I ended up arriving pretty late. I got there, and Brendan was already set up with sojo and slightly spicy cabbage/bean sprout/potato soup.
“You can smoke here,” he said. He was sitting at the counter, under a sign with crossed-out cigarette. All around us, young, attractive Koreans puffed Marlboro reds. Brendan doesn’t smoke, but he seemed more charmed than annoyed.
I had read the above Jonathan Gold piece when I first moved into the neighborhood last month, so I knew that magical things had been done to legally outfit Koreatown establishments for smoking, but it wasn’t until last night that I found time to go out and see it for myself. Having been in one of these places, I still have no idea how they make it work. To Brendan’s left last night was a wooden beam, half-assedly constructed to look like a tree — as if all they need to claim that the entire indoor restaurant is actually an outdoor patio is an obviously fake gesture towards nature.
Anyway, I loved it. The seafood pancake and pork ribs were pretty amazing. The omelette and fresh sea squirt were not.
Full disclosure, I guess: Jonathan Gold and I are technically co-workers.
The best part of this is the sad trumpet (wah-wah) and the very-nearly-adult-contemporary sax flourishes.
The Afghan Whigs - “Miss World” (Hole cover)
February 5, 1936: At the New York premiere of Charles Chaplin’s Modern Times, riot police are called in to control the crowds trying to see the stars attending the festivities.
February 1, 1937: During Clark Gable’s birthday party on the MGM lot, Judy Garland sings “You Made Me Love You,” a song she’ll perform in Broadway Melody of 1938.
January 31, 1943: Italian director Luchino Visconti’s gritty drama Ossessione adds the phrase “neo-realism” to the cinematic lexicon.
February 5, 1943: Producer/ “director” Howard Hughes’ controversial frontier drama The Outlaw makes a star of his buxom discovery, Jane Russell.
February 6, 1943: A Los Angeles jury finds Errol Flynn not guilty of statutory rape charges made against him by two teenage girls.
February 1, 1966: After a career that spanned 50 years, with successes on stage, and in front of and behind the camera, Buster Keaton, 70, dies of lung cancer.
February 2, 1969: “King of Horror” Boris Karloff dies of respiratory disease in his native England at 81.
If you’re reading this, you probably already know that in five days I’m moving back to my hometown of Los Angeles from New York, so that I can start a new job as film editor of the LA WEEKLY. I know I should be keeping my personal blog up to date during this time of Total Life Upheaval, but I’m having trouble finding the time, what with all the … upheaving. But, I did turn on Tumblr’s new Ask feature. If you use it to ask me a question that makes me laugh out loud and/or cringe, I will probably answer it.
Anybody want to come have dinner with me on the Upper West Side Friday night? I need to go to Seppi’s to say goodbye to the one man who’s always been there for me since I moved to New York in 2003: Danny Stiles.
Danny Stiles (above right, next to Jackie Mason) is a spry octogenarian who has a ridiculous old-timey radio show on WNYC-AM (yes, only AM) every Saturday night from 8-10pm. The official title of the show is Big Band Sounds, but Danny usually refers to it on-air as The Danny Stiles Music Museum, and to himself as the Vicar of Vintage Vinyl. He mostly plays rare recordings of showtunes and American standards, sometimes from movies, mostly from the 1930s and 40s. In between songs, he tells long stories, sometimes about movie stars, but mostly about his life and times in New Jersey and his sixty years in radio. Sometimes he forgets what he was talking about mid story. It is awesome.
I discovered Danny Stiles my first weekend in New York, in the summer of 2003. I listened to the show on long nights studying in grad school, whilst closing up the pasta factory that I worked at in 2004-2005, on dates, at the start of all-nighters working on my still unfinished book, and pretty much any Saturday night that I spent alone in New York, and there were a lot of them. I will still be able to listen to Danny in Los Angeles, on the internet, but it won’t be the same. Mostly because it’ll be at 5:00.
So, to get to the point: every Friday night at the restaurant in the Parker Meridien on W. 56th street, Danny Stiles basically does his radio show, but with a live band. It starts at 8:30, and this Friday night (my last before I move to Los Angeles), I’m going to go there around the beginning of his show to eat dinner and spend one last night with Danny. I have a couple other things I should be at later that night, so I probably won’t be there long, but if you want to come with me for dinner, and we know each other in real life (or don’t, but know each other well enough on the internet for me to not be scared to have you at my dinner table), let me know.
Physical media is an albatross. Or so Wiley wrote on my Facebook wall. Behind me on my dining room table is the pile of physical media that I’m firmly determined to give away before I move to LA. There is another pile—of 40-odd books, maybe 20 records, and some DVDs in one of those black sleeve folder things—that I’m having trouble moving over to the dining room table pile.
I know that Wiley is probably right, and that it would feel terrific to show up in Los Angeles with nothing but a suitcase and a laptop (maybe not even that—my Macbook seems to be nearing its expiration date), to start a new life without these physical reminders of my various old lives. I liked the light backpack bullshit part of Up in the Air.
Maybe I am an addict. Please, God, give me the courage to accept the things I cannot change … and also to give up the copy of A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again that I’ve had for over ten years and have already shipped back and forth across the country three times.
I do not, under any circumstances, need my tribble mittens where I’m going. But I don’t think I can bear to give them up.
Thanks to everyone who has contacted me and/or posted and/or tweeted the news. A crazy confluence of events conspired to make this happen. The weekend after my last job ended, I went to LA for four days to cover AFI Fest, and had an expectedly great time; a week after that, Scott Foundas announced he was leaving the film editor position at the Weekly; I sent in my resume, didn’t hear anything and thought I didn’t have a chance; I went back to LA to visit family and friends and on my last day in town took a meeting; exactly two weeks later, I’m packing up my apartment. It is surreal.
Things I want to do before I leave New York in three weeks (I’ll add to this list as new ideas come to me):
1) Become Foursquare mayor of Provini. done and done.
2) See my first ever Broadway show (ideally, A Little Night Music)
3) Find someone (or someones) to eat Momofuku fried chicken with. I found chicken eaters, but Momofuku has zero chicken reservations left between now and when I leave (January 15). Boo. Chicken fail.
