The wide-angled picture above was intended to open a parody of "The Christmas Carol" but my kid is visiting, and he's hogging the computer. I can't get enough time on the machine to shoot the story. Oh well, it's great to have him home for the holidays. I'll just have to put up something else. Too bad. Scrooge is the role I was born to play.
Well, let's see....what do you think of this (above)? This is one of a bunch of pictures that I shot on a whim at various times, and couldn't find a use for. There's some more here...hmmmmm.....
Egad! I'm Howard Stern (above)!
Let me try an experiment. I want to see if these pictures will take the same layout on the blog that I'm seeing when I type.
Jake the barber (above) encounters the girl of his dreams while on his lunch hour. If I were a photographer I'd try mightily to shoot candid pictures with themes like this, but I'd probably fail.The chance of capturing real moments like this must be one in a million.
Here William Buckley (left) interviews....
...Noam Chomsky (above)...
...and it's all observed by Robert Culp (left).
The Robert Culp is amazing!
ReplyDeleteThe very first picture had me cackling loudly.
ReplyDeleteI dunno, Eddie, I think the last one looks more like Ed Wynn
ReplyDeleteHey Uncle Eddie!Yes,Scrooge is the role you was born to play indeed!
ReplyDeleteSome of this pics are already useful for the characters (That was at first sight),more or less this way:
Ghost of Chistmas Past:Robert Culp
Ghost of Chistmas Present: Howard Stern
Ghost of Chistmas Future :William Buckley
Bob Cratchit: Jake the good citizen
Tiny Tim: Noam Chomsky
And the rest of pics is you of course as Scrooge using your your magic glasses provided by the ghosts for time travel.
haahahaahahah noam chomsky!!!
ReplyDeleteErvin: Ed Wynn!!!??? Geez...every year the roles I can play get older and older. I guess I'm the pathetic actor who wants to play young, leading man roles but only gets offered supporting roles like Dumbledor in the Harry Potter films.
ReplyDeleteDenise: Holy Cow! You're good at casting! Jake really would make a decent Cratchit and Howard Stern would be fine as a Ghost of Christmas present. Gee, it makes me want to do a comedy version of the entire story...but the story is already funny, even in the original.
Eddie,
ReplyDelete"A Christmas Carol" is "is already funny, even in the original"? You mean unintentionally? That its pathos is really bathos? I haven't actually read the original story, so I can't guess what you mean here.
Lester: All the Dickens stories I've read have been funny, even when they attempted to be completely serious. That's one of Dickens' strengths, that he was able to combine the two so well. Raymond Chandler did the same thing.
ReplyDeleteDickens was a novelist but his caricatured, over-the-top characters came mostly out of a stage tradition, and stage people knew the value of telling a story on two levels.
BTW: thanks for the nifty Christmas card!
Lester: there's a lot of humor (intentionally-Eddie's take notwithstanding) in A Christmas Carol.
ReplyDeleteIt really is a brilliantly written story and Dickens was far from some treacly sentimentalist. Scrooge himself has quite a dry wit and the narrator of the tale(that being Dickens himself of course) is especially witty and puckish with plenty of asides and skewering of the status quo....I realize all you did was express surprise that there are actual, real laughs in Christmas Carol, but since I've just been listening to both that and some of the Pickwick Papers (and laughing out loud at them), I get pretty worked up when Dickens is not given his due.
Not everything he wrote was along the lines of the death of little Nell. ; )
Jesus, spoiler alert, Jenny! It's only been 150 years and I'm still working my way backwards through the Western Canon! ;)
ReplyDeleteYou must do your Bill Cosby to go with your Robert Culp.
ReplyDelete"Dickens was a novelist but his caricatured, over-the-top characters came mostly out of a stage tradition, and stage people knew the value of telling a story on two levels."
ReplyDeleteDickens was very familiar with the world of the stage, and he gave readings of passages from his novels on stage -- I believe he may also have written, or co-written, stage adaptations of some of his novels.
Eddie,
ReplyDeleteYour welcome!
Jenny,
Oh, yes, Dickens' serious novels are often (intentionally) hilarious. I just couldn't tell, not having read the original story, I couldn't tell what he meant. Typically, the movies based on it are not funny at all. (Tho' there is one very funny moment in the 1951 Alastair Sim version: when after his enlightenment he is friendly to his maidservant and she is so shocked by the change she runs screaming out of the room. I laugh out loud every time!)
Even the first sentence in "Carol" is intentionally funny!
ReplyDeletethe culp's also got a little peter sellers in it.
ReplyDelete