LUNCH TIME AT THE INSTITUTE FOR THE HIGH STRUNG

EXT.  INSTITUTE FOR THE HIGH STRUNG (formerly The Institute for the Terminally Self-Righteous and Abysmally Contrarian):

THERAPY LEADER: "That's enough group therapy for now, class. Hey, it's lunch time. How 'bout if I make some sandwiches?

PATIENT #1: "Whoa! Whoooooooa!!!!! Wait a freakin' minute! So what your tellin' us is that you're going to make sandwiches, and that we just supposed to eat whatever you make. Like...we're not even consulted! Am I the only one here who can see something wrong with that!?

PATIENT #2: "He's right! This isn't the Third Reich, you know. We have rights!"

THERAPY LEADER: "Oh, sorry. Would you prefer something else?"

PATIENT #3: "What I prefer you're not offering."

 PATIENT #4: "Will you all just pipe down and let the guy make some sandwiches? You crazy people disgust me!"

PATIENT #5: "Oh, it's Mister Sanity speaking! Well, listen up, goofball....You're just as whacked out as the rest of us!"

PATIENT #4: " Why you vile...filthy....if you weren't crazy I'd......"

PATIENT #5: "Is he right, Doctor? Am I crazy?"

DOCTOR: "No, no. You're just high strung, like everybody else here. A couple months on bland food and dreary, overheated rooms and you'll be just fine."

PATIENT #5: "Wha...? Y-you're condescending to me aren't you? What kind of doctor are you? You're just a quack!"

PATIENT #5: "Oh, there I go again! Are you sure I'm not crazy, doctor?"

DOCTOR: "No, no...of course not."

PATIENT #5 : "That's good. Then it won't matter if I've brought my gun to class."

DOCTOR: "Huh? Gun?"

 PATIENT #3: "Don't bother looking for it, it's right here. I saw it in your purse. First I'll kill everybody here, then I'll make the sandwiches the way I want them, then I'll take a bus into town and kill everybody there. This is going to be fun."

SLAP! ANOTHER PATIENT GRABS THE GUN.

PATIENT #6: "Whaddayou know about sandwiches?"

PATIENT #7: "Hit a girl, will 'ya!?"

PATIENT #8: "Oh my God! It's the clowns from the Institute for Deviant Clown Recovery  next door! They must have been attracted by the slaps!!!"

(SFX: SCREAMS AND SOUNDS OF SLAPS FROM INSIDE THE INSTITUTE)

ABOUT MARRYING AURALYNN

I don't mean ME married to Auralynn....I'm already happily married.... I mean one of the young men that frequent this site, and have by now doubtlessly developed a crush on this unique woman. I've known Auralynn for a while now, and might have some useful advice to impart. Let me think.....

...Well first off: babies.... I don't really know what she thinks about them, but I figure if she likes one, she'll love five...thus the picture.

Second: she loves architecture, especially if it's retro or funky. If you want to marry this girl you'll have to have an appreciation of style.

How did she get that way?  Well, it all started when she was a kid.

She had a pet named "Charlie." Charlie was a stylish goldfish who had a big, golden tail and who swam around all day looking as cool as could be. Auralyn watched him endlessly.

Inspired by Charlie's example, she chose the "artsy" path in life. 

She took lots of snapshots with her little kid camera.

She also watched a lot of those old Universal horror movies on TV. She acquired a taste for things retro.

As she grew up she realized that she was different than the other kids in the neighborhood.

When she became of age she left home to seek out other stylish people.


TO BE CONTINUED.........


BTW: The film stills are from a terrific film called "Amalie."

MY PERSONAL MYTHOLOGY

"I have often had the fancy that there is some one myth for every man, which, if we but knew it, would make us understand all he did and thought."  William Butler Yeats  I heartily concur. I think all of us have a personal mythology that guides our lives. I'm not talking about religion or a thought-out philosophy. I'm talking about a strong, almost unconscious intuition about life and how we fit in to it. Maybe it's a fragment of a story that explains things for us, and it's different for every person. I thought it might be fun to try to articulate some of these suppressed stories, and see what they look like when dressed and cleaned up. My own myth is that I'm Odysseus and the forces I meet in the world are represented by colossal monsters and beautiful sirens. My intuition tells me that the world is a beautiful but menacing place and that there are people who would kill me if they could, not for any rational reason, but because they're driven by forces they don't understand any more than I do. I also believe that the world is full of Siren-like temptations that, if I gave in to them, would fatally weaken me. A personal myth often seems silly when you put it into words, and mine is no exception. When given articulation it seems more passive than I'd like it to be, as if I'm doomed only to react to things and never to heroically prevail. On the other hand, maybe those negatives testify to the authenticity of the story. Maybe it comes from some common primal depth where survival is the ultimate value and where we all feel dumb panic and awe at the grand and magical nature of the world. Maybe, I'm not sure. At parties and restaurants over the years I've heard other personal myths that are different than mine. Many years ago a guy told me that he saw himself as a soldier ant who had to keep the other ants in line. I overheard a girl say that the love of friends is the ultimate value, no matter what sacrifices are called for. Last but not least...I don't personally know anyone who buys into this myth, but I know that it's out there because of biographies I've read...is the myth that kill or be killed is the rule. Mess up others before they mess you up. That sounds pretty harsh, but in the hands of someone who believes in reason and kindness it can produce someone with the necessary toughness to succeed. Interesting, huh?

ON VACATION TIL TUESDAY!

And talking about vacations: have you seen the new Twizzlers commercial? Isn't that girl chorus in the background great? I wanted to hear the whole song so I looked it up on the net and this (below) is what I came up with......



....it's the title music to the Chevy Chase film, "Vacation." It's by Lindsey Buckingham. Wow! The perfect song for a vacation movie!

Oh, man!!!! I hear this music and I want to put my family into a convertible and head out to the Coast Highway. Americans are soooo good at this kind of music!

See you on Tuesday morning!!!!!!!!!

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BTW: I could have sworn that I'd heard that opening instrumental before, then it came to me...it was exactly the same as the start of the Boogie song in "Billy Elliott". It turns out I was wrong, but since I went the trouble of looking it up, and since we have some dance fans here, here's a link to the YouTube video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYx-DrCKlsE

MACK SENNETT: GENIUS

Unbelievable! Finally...FINALLY...TCM is doing a whole month (four Thursday nights) of Mack Sennett films.  This is a major event since Sennett may have single-handedly invented slapstick film comedy, and had an immense influence on other genres as well. Now we get to see the evolution of his ideas.

I imagine that readers with a dramatic bias would prefer to study Hitchcock or John Ford rather than Sennett. That would be a mistake. Sennett was the leading theoritician of film comedy and comedy is the very heart of the film medium.

By way of an example, here's (above) Chaplin and Marie Dressler, two discoveries of Mack Sennett. I'm guessing the film is Tillies Punctured Romance but I might be wrong. Notice how the comedic set-up makes a more vivid impression than the one found in most photos of drama.

See what I mean (above)? Filmed drama simply doesn't have the pictorial juice that comedy does.

The film medium favors comedy. Who knows? Maybe someday we'll have holographic films and the medium will favor drama or documentary...maybe. All I know is that right now it favors humor. Maybe that's why successful dramas like Raiders of the Lost Arc and horror films like Drag Me to Hell are half comedies.

I don't mean to say that comedy is useful just because it's funny...it's also a simplifying and organizing principal in a story. If you want a laugh you're forced to use a certain kind of pacing and a certain kind of camera placement and a certain kind of lighting. As soon as a filmmaker commits to humor half his filmic problems are solved. Where do you put the camera? In the spot that gets the biggest laugh, of course.

I'll be real interested to see how Sennett's techniques evolved. Here (above) he's got editing and story compression down to a science, but he hasn't totally figured out the principal of laughter release. When you build up an audience's good will you need a trigger to release the laugh.  This is where he toys with the idea of a slapstick trigger in what would later become The Keystone Cops. Good old Sennett...always thinking.

The Sennett films run every Thursday night during the month of September. In the Pacific time zone TCM's night begins at 5PM. Times for your zone can be had on the TCM site:

http://www.tcm.com/this-month/article/495622%7C0/Mack-Sennett-Thursdays-in-
September.html

BTW: Many, many thanks to Mike Fontanelli for telling me about the Sennett festival. I had no idea it was coming.

LIDOS PIZZA

There it is...Lido Pizza, affectionately called "Lido's" by the customers. John K discovered this gem of a restaurant years ago, and it's since become an animation hangout. Half the animation people in The Valley get their pizza here. And no wonder...Lido's makes it stringy and gooey, just the way cartoonists like it.

Maybe the restaurant is so good because it's built near sacred ground. The Bedford Falls set from "It's a Wonderful Life" was built in nearby Balboa Park.

Maybe the restaurant is simply scared to lower its standards. Mickey Cohen the famous Los Angeles gangster had a house near Lido's. That's Cohen (above) on the right. The area is full of history.

But I digress....

Katie and Milt kindly invited my wife and I to Lido's this afternoon and we did some serious chowing down.

That's Milt showing his appreciation for the cartoony pizza strings. I wish I could show you the womenfolk, but they refused to be photographed.

  

While the wives talked Milt and I kicked around ideas for a Basil Wolverton-type pizza eating sketch. Boy, Milt sure likes Pizza. He even talks to it.  

While we were talking I glanced over Milt's shoulder and was amazed to find familiar faces there.

Good Lord! It was cartoonist Mike Kazallah and his wife Tracy!!!! Tracy wouldn't let me take her picture. None of the women present could be persuaded to act in this story.

Cartoonist Mark Schirmeister was there, too.

I went over to say hello and was dismayed to see that I was interrupting an intense literary discussion.

MIKE: "I'm familiar with that book: "Delicate Riders of the Storm." It has a frail, almost tentative structure. but the eyeless fish, the gods of the rain...they're pure cliches."

MARK: "But don't you agree that it marks an advance in relationship? One observes rather quickly that something is right with it, and one is thus able to get one's bearings."

MIKE: "Aaaaaaah, but are those bearings the result of fresh perception? I find them immersed in the mystical communion of the romantic, which leads too often to disintegration."

MARK: "Hmmmm.....okay, I see what you're getting at. You're forcing an altered perception of the detail. The old points would be regained after the breakdown, the quality of the perception being then affected by the past experience of the breakdown. That's very clever. "

Yikes! I could see I was getting in the way, so I said good bye and rejoined Milt.

I don't think Milt even realized that I'd gone. He was still talking to his pizza.

Well, a good time was had by all. Lidos never disappoints.

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Sorry for the rambling structure of this post. I'm just too full of this afternoon's pizza to think clearly. 

THE BEST ELVIS IMPRESSION EVER!

Boy, Elvis.....what a guy!




If you're an Elvis fan then let me lay this on you...this...the best...THE BEST...Elvis impression ever! It's Jim Carey way back in 1983 in his first appearance on The Tonight Show. Geez, what a talent Carey was! What a talent Elvis was!!!!!!

My dream for the animation industry is that we would develop a few animators who could animate this kind of funny dance...maybe even make something funnier than Carey did here, though that's a tall order.

BTW: I notice that Jim Carey wears a version of the famous Theory Corner "Wrinkle Jacket" here. Good for Jim! He's a man of taste!

Also BTW: In 1983 Jim had his own TV show called "The Duck Factory." I'm told by a friend of one of the key writers on that show that I was one of the inspirations for the character. I don't know if that's true or not, but it would be great if it was.