Now, just what the hell is that monstrosity? An early Mac? Maybe some postwar PC that ran on Windows 0000000.1? Could it be a protype laptop that a succession of crushed thighs sent back to the drawing board? No, it's actually a 1935 IBM Model 01, one of the first electric typewriters.
Here it is from another angle. Not to be confused with an iPad.
Of course, it's not the writing machine but the writer writing on the writing machine that matters, in this case playwright Lorraine Hansberry, born on this day in 1930 (she died in 1965.) In the following clip, Hansberry expounds on what kind of subject matter makes for the best plays:
Seemingly reductive but ultimately expansive, I dare say.
Except why dare say it when I can show it? Not the original 1959 Broadway production, which except for a few photos is lost forever, but the next best thing, the 1961 film version. Watch and listen as Sidney Poitier, Diana Sands, and Cleveland native Ruby Dee, all original cast members of that Broadway production, recite Hansberry's disquieting dialogue:
Very powerful scene, but if the always compelling Poitier is Lorraine Hansberry's idea of a "most ordinary human being", then where does that leave me?
I'm just below that big yellow dude, right scoop, center row, third from the left.
Singer, actor, and political and social activist Harry Belafonte died. Here he is being interviewed by Good Morning, America's David Hartman way back in 1981:
Hartman may not have placed a heavy burden on Belafonte with that question, but he certainly placed a heavy burden on this post! I mean, now I have to explain why Harry was an international superstar. I guess the best way to do that is by giving you examples of his singing, acting, and activism.
I'll start with the singing. Though he sang all types of songs in his long career, Belafonte was best known as a folk singer. What made him different from Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, or the Kingsmen Trio is that Belafonte often went outside the continental United States for his material. And why not? Though he was born in New York City, both his parents were Jamaican immigrants and Harry himself spent a few years as a child living with his grandmother in the ancestral homeland. And when he was there, he kept his ears pricked to the local sounds. And there's no more local a Jamaican sound than...
...CALYPSO!
A groupie.
Now, this dude's musical repertoire normally isn't anything like Belafonte's, yet when Harry appears on his TV show, Mr. Cole humorously holds his own as one of Harry's biggest hits becomes a duet:
Unless Jellystone Park is located somewhere in the Caribbean, I don't think that's who they were singing about.
You heard the man. He's leaving this place behind...
...and is heading halfway around the world:
Really, though, one country or one region of the world wasn't enough to hold Harry Belafonte down. As David Hartman pointed out in the video at the top, Belafonte was an international star...
...as this muppeteer would readily attest:
Belafonte later performed the song at Jim Henson's memorial service.
All right, enough with the singer (well, I guess you could never get enough of him as a singer.)
Let me move on to the actor, which is what he wanted to be in the first place. He only started singing at clubs to pay for acting school. Yet his film appearances were sporadic, and by his own volition, as he didn't like how blacks were often depicted in movies. What the movies had in store for him could be pretty odd at times. And there's no better example of that than...
...this film. Oh, it's a very good movie, a very good musical, an updating of Bizet's opera Carmen to World War II. Its two principal actors Dorothy Dandridge and Belafonte had already earned a degree of celebrity as singers by 1954 when this movie came out, which didn't stop director Otto Preminger from dubbing their voices during the musical numbers. Dandridge lip synced to a then unknown Marilyn Horne, and when Harry opened his mouth, what you heard was not him, but some dude by the name of LeVern Hutcherson. I'll admit Hutcherson did a fairly decent job of singing, but he's not the subject of this post. For that reason I'm not going to show you a clip from that film.
Instead, I'll show you a clip from...
...this film. Released 20 years after Carmen Jones, Belafonte plays mob boss Geechie Dan Beauford. Watch:
I think Marlon Brando just fell off the banana boat.
Of course in real life, Harry Belafonte was anything but a gangster, and that brings me to the political and social activist:
In 1960, Belafonte stumped for JFK.
Now, here's Belafonte with a man who never ran for any public office, yet brought about more change than many who have.
When Martin Luther King Jr. was jailed in Birmingham, it was Belafonte who paid his bail.
Belafonte, Charlton Heston (who hadn't yet gone over to the dark side), Burt Lancaster, and Sidney Poitier hanging out together during the March on Washington.
During a taping of her 1968 TV special, Petula Clark actually touched Harry Belafonte'sarm!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The sponsor, Plymouth Motors, asked that it be retaped. Clark refused, the controversy was reported in the press, and once the special finally aired, it got huge ratings.
Ironically, in that same year on that same network...
...this aired to considerably lower ratings. If the sponsor had only complained...
Belafonte and Coretta Scott King.
By 1985, Belafonte's chart-topping days were behind him, yet as one singer of many, he contributed vocals to a hit song, "We Are the World".
Belafonte was a longtime UNICEF ambassador.
Stumping for Bernie Sanders in 2016.
Grand Marshall in a gay pride parade.
Harry and Sidney at the NAACP Image Awards.
It goes without saying that all of the above has made some question Belafonte's patriotism.
As 1960s yielded to the 1970s, a term was coined to describe the present state of the American film industry: New Hollywood. What did that mean? Well, that it was different from Old Hollywood. Different acting styles, different camera angles, different cinematography, different art direction, different screenplays, and last but not least, in fact first and foremost in most people's eyes, swear words and nudity, not seen or heard in American mainstream movies prior to 1967. And people who made these movies were seen as rebels. What's so surprising is how often so many of these New Hollywood rebels--Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Brian de Palma, William Freidkin, Paul Schrader, John Carpenter, John Milius, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg--expressed their love for Old Hollywood films. And then there's Peter Bogdanovich (1939-2022.) As a programmer for New York City's Museum of Modern Art in the early-to-mid 1960s, a period of time when the idea of Hollywood once having had a "Golden Age" (roughly 1930 to 1950) began to take hold, Bogdanovich curated retrospectives of such filmmaker from that era as John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, and Orson Welles. He wrote about these directors, interviewed these directors, and actually became close friends with these directors. In particular, Orson Welles, whose last big hit was Touch of Evil in 1958 and was now spending the 1960s and '70s scrambling around looking for financing for whatever cinematic project he was working on, taking on all kinds of odd acting assignments along the way. So strapped for cash was Welles by 1972, Bogdanovich let him stay in his Bel Air mansion for a couple of years.
Wait a second. Bel Air mansion? The Museum of Modern Art pays THAT well? No, it doesn't. After having seen so many films (up to 400) and interviewing so many filmmakers, Bogdanovich decided he'd like to be a filmmaker himself, so he and his then-wife Polly moved to Hollywood. The major studios were closed off to him at first, but an independent producer and director by the name of Roger Corman was willing to give him a try. After doing a few bit parts in motorcycle and monster movies (originally an actor, he had been trained by Stella Adler, who also had taught Marlon Brando), Bog--
--hold on, my smart phone is flashing. Something to do with Sidney Poitier. I'll worry about it later--
--as I was saying, Bogdanovich got a chance to write (or cowrite with then-wife Polly) and direct 1969's Targets. An above-average, metafictional exploitation film that cannily contrasts the pending retirement of a horror movie actor with the real-world horror of a crazed sniper on the loose, it was a drive-in movie with a bloody drive-in movie climax. As is so often the case with B-movies, no matter how well-made, Targets came and went without much notice from the general public. However, the major studios DID notice Bogdanovich's talent. He signed some sort of contract and co-wrote and directed The LastPicture Show (1971), a not-so-nostalgic look at the 1950s. Like any New Hollywood movie it had swear words and nudity, but it looked like it had been directed by John Ford and was in black-and-white to boot! A big hit, it was followed by two more big hits, What's Up Doc? (1972) and Paper Moon (1973.) Peter Bogdanovich was a filmmaker to reckon with.
Or so everyone thought. His next four films were box-office flops, and a romance with a Playboy Playmate of the Year ended with a murder-suicide (though Bogdanovich himself was neither the murderer, murdered, or suicide.) He bounced back in 1985 with Mask. After that, well, Bogdanovich was pretty much like his old friend Orson Welles, scrambling around looking for the right comeback film. It never happened. Now, to put this in perspective, films fail at the box office for all sorts of reasons that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with quality of the product. Some of his flops have cult followings. Some may have cult followings in the future. For now, let's look at the movies that everyone AGREES were good, and have the box office receipts to back those agreements up.
If you blinked, you may have missed that tall elderly gentleman at the end. Well, here he is again as he puts the whole film in context:
Tell them Boris sent you.
OK, those were the hits...
And now, a movie that wasn't a hit and doesn't have a cult following (unless it has a cult following for the wrong reasons), but no mention of Peter Bogdanovich's' life or career or even his times would be complete without it:
Audrey Hepburn! John Ritter! Ben Gazzara! Actors whose mere presence could make any film better, even a so-so one like They All Laughed. However, their performances aren't what makes this movie an object of morbid curiosity, but rather:
As another Golden Age filmmaker (and Bogdanovich interviewee), George Cukor, once asked in a different context, What Price Hollywood?
(Yes, two posts in one. Don't blame me, blame the news cycle--Kirk)
1927-2022
Before Sidney, African American actors had to take supporting roles in major studio films that were easy to cut out in certain parts of the country. But you couldn't cut Sidney Poitier out of a Sidney Poitier picture.
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