THE WORLD OF SMOKING VIDEOS

I haven't drawn anything for the site in a while so I thought I'd look up some good smoking scenes on YouTube and draw them. To my surprise I didn't find any! Maybe it's because I got distracted by all the bizarre offerings on the sidebars. More on that in a minute! Anyway, here's (above)the best one I found, from one of the Dr. Mabuse films. It gets boring after the first minute but the opening pan of the smokers is brilliant!!! When I was a kid eating in restaurants was like that.





Here's (above) why I got distracted. There's a kazillion clips on the sidebar menus showing girls smoking. Nothing else, just girls sitting there smoking! A lot of them are goths and they blow smoke right at the camera just to let you know who's boss!






Here's another girl smoking. This one amazed me because it proved that urban men and women exist in different worlds. In the clip a girl sits down and smokes nervously beside a TV set, under some plastic leaves. What kills me is that she has complete confidence that tens of thousands of men will be interested in seeing her do that... and the weird thing is, she's probably right. After all, I watched.

What strikes me is that if I sat there with a cigarette, doing the exact same thing, NOBODY would watch it, not even my mother. Not even me! I don't know what lesson there is to be learned from this, but I thought I'd pass it along anyway.





Here(above)was an even bigger distraction! A girl blows smoke into the viewer's face while commanding him to send her money! She promises to use the money to treat her boyfriend to dinner at the viewer's expense. Believe me, she's serious! I had no idea this stuff was going on! I'm dying to know if she's making making money at it!

I won't go into all the other genres I discovered, all with a connection to smoking. There's tons of clips of close-ups of long-nailed women smoking and there's lots of "smoking ands": smoking and socks sites, smoking and shoes, smoking and glasses, smoking and pets, smoking and underwear...everything!





Here's (above) a really good clip of Jerry Lewis trapped in an elevator with a smoker. I posted this before in another context but it won't hurt to reprise it here.





I'm still marveling that the girl makes all that money with the "you-vile-worm, send-me-your-money-clips." Just to clear our heads, here's (above) a clip of a guy twirling a cigarette around his fingers like a baton. I swear I'm going to learn how to do this with a pencil! Every artist should know how!

APACHE DANCE, ANYONE?

What do you guys think of Apache Dancing? That's the dance where the sleazy boyfriend beats up his prostitute girlfriend because she won't share her money with him.

Everybody associates the dance with France but I'll bet it got started in Spain. The Spanish have a flare for this sort of thing. Look at Flamenco and Tango...or is tango purely an Argentine dance?

Here's (above)a must-see apache dance from TouTube. Don't be put off by the silly beginning. It heats up real fast.





For purists here's (above) a clip from a Parisian apache from 1934. Nifty, huh?

A HAT FOR SAYING, "NO!"

I got myself a Halloween present this year, which is pictured above. It's a Spanish "No" hat! When you shake your head "no" the little balls shake back and forth and even make a cool thunking sound when they hit the brim. If you want to see it just try to borrow some money from me some time!

The problem with the hat is that it's no good for saying "yes." Of course you can sometimes say yes without using the word. If a guy asks "Would you like me to stop standing on your foot?", you might say, "No, no! Stand no longer on my foot!" That's three no's! Or you can lie sideways and shake your head no, which will appear as yes to him. Aaaargh! I'm getting confused!

WHEN STARS CHOOSE THE SCRIPTS

Big stars have more power in the film world than ever. I'm not sure why. Maybe it has to do with the changing ways that films are financed. Overseas money is more important now and foreign backers are even more star conscious than Americans. Or maybe it has to do with a cultural shift. Whatever the reason, you have to please the big stars to get a film made now and the way to please big stars is to write the kind of script they like to play.

What do stars like? Stories that are about them! The plot's irrelevant. What matters is the character dynamics. So what if the city's going to blow up if somebody doesn't find the nuclear bomb? Who cares? What the star cares about is that their character comes off as strong and appealing, with a wide emotional range for reviewers to comment on.

The kind of scripts that stars like determine the kinds of films that get made. For comparison, here's (below) a picture gallery of films made in the era when studio bosses picked the scripts:

These are my kind of films, real stick-to-your-ribs stuff. And here's (below) an example of the kind of scripts favored by studio bosses:




The studio chiefs had pretty good taste! I love the lines, "I'm gonna kill you right now, Lone Ranger!" / "Oh, no you ain't, Cal steward."

Well, that was then and this is now. Here's (below) a gallery of pictures from the star power era:

See the difference? Stars like those intimate, psychological, Stanislavskian scenes. When they pick the scripts the film is always about emotional confrontation. In the old days when two characters had a disagreement one hit the other guy, and the guy fell down dead. Nowadays it's more nuanced. Here's (below) an example of the kind of script actors like:

Stars are running the show now so you better get to like nose-to-nose psychological confrontation. You're going to be seeing a lot of it!

MY BEST HALLOWEEN EVER!

No, the best one wasn't this year, unfortunately. The best one occurred years ago when I put on a Halloween show in my living room for my kid's Indian Guide den (Den? Troop? Coven? I'm forgetting what they were called). Actually it was the night before Halloween and I and a few Guide dads and cartoonists were the actors.

We put on three short plays...three...and two of them were serious EC-type horror dramas requiring costumes. No rehearsal, and I was writing them almost up to the minute when the makeshift curtains opened and it was time to perform. I also had to make food for everybody. Now THAT was stress!

One of the plays was about an astronaut who murdered his friend on the moon (above) because he thought nobody could ever find out. I'd rented a spacesuit from Western Costume, the people who outfit Hollywood movies. It looked great! It was the 50s kind with rings around the joints and a big, round helmet. Here's (topmost, above) a black & white picture of the suit from "Destination Moon."

The reason I'm writing about all this is to say that even though that day was one of the most stressful and exhausting I've ever had, It was the one that delivered the most fun in recollection. It really is true that it's better to give than receive. I'll bet it was fun to watch the play but it was even more fun to put it on...fun when I look back on it I mean.

That show also made me think about building an outdoor stage for my kids in the backyard. I love the one in this picture (above) that I got from a picture archive. What a great design! Don Selders, Rod Scribner's assistant animator, told me that Scribner built one of these for his kids back in the day.

I hate to say it but I never made a stage. I made the mistake of asking my kids if they would ever use it and they were appalled. Both swore that they'd rather die first. Stupid me, I should have made it anyway. Think of the memories that might have been.

I did get them one of these little Creative Playthings puppet theaters, but that was a mistake too. They never used it and never played with the puppets. Never, ever buy one of these little puppet theaters! They look great but they're too tiny to hide behind...the kids see everything you're doing, and that ruins the illusion of reality.

I did get some use out of the puppets. I'd have the puppets kiss the kids good-night when they were tucked in. Unfortunately this got them so excited that it always ended up keeping them up longer. They always wanted to beat up the puppets and, since it was my hand that was being mauled, the puppets had to fight back to defend themselves. It ended up being a brawl every night. Believe it or not, this (above) is a more practical puppet theater. It's adult height so the kids can't reach the puppets and try to kill them. By the way, that's not me in the picture.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN, EVERYBODY!!!!!!!!!!!!

A LITTLE HALLOWEEN READING

Holy Cow! It's Halloween already!!!!!!!!!!! Aaaargh! I was so absorbed with work that I completely neglected one of the best holidays of the year! What follows is too little, too late but I refuse to let Halloween pass without at least some recognition here!

Fortunately I stumbled on a site by a guy named Karswell who has great taste in all things horrifying. I'll loot Karswell's site and shake out the bag here, on the floor of my own blog. If you like what you see check out Karswell's site:

http://thehorrorsofitall.blogspot.com/2007/10/man-who-died-again.html

Karswell collects pre-code horror comics. I don't have the bandwidth to reproduce whole stories at a decent size, but here are a few samples. Some of what I reproduce here gives away the ending of the story. That doesn't bother me much because I usually value set-ups more than payoffs, but that's me. If it bothers you then don't read any farther.

OK, I open up with an excerpt (above) from "The Sewer Monsters." In the part we're missing, it's the eve of the French Revolution and a man is about to be hanged for a crime he didn't commit. Fortunately for him the Revolution breaks out and he manages to crawl into the Paris sewer system with the rope still around his neck. His eyes are bulging and his neck is broken from the near-hanging but at least he's still alive. Under the streets he discovers a race of fungus people who've lived in the sewers for centuries. Here's (above) a page from the middle of the story where he rouses the fungus people to wreck havoc on Paris.

Here's (above) an excerpt from "The Greatest Horror of Them All," a story about a guy who discovers that his loving girlfriend was all along a hideous monster.

Here's (above) an excerpt from "The Flat Man" where a guy is run over by a bulldozer and survives.

Skipping a bit of story, the flattened man is so angry about what was done to him that he devotes his life to crime. He's perfect for it because he can effortlessly slip under locked doors. Eventually he becomes rich and decides that he wants a wife. The wife angle is sheer genius! As we all know, every monster wants a woman!

Here's (above) a single panel from Basil Wolverton's "Brain Bats of Venus." I include it because the idea of walking around with a brain bat on your head, controlling everything you do, is just so cool.

Here's (above) the final panels of "The Modern Designer," about a deranged lamp designer who deals with a scheming wife.