“A picture that stays with you is made up of a hundred or more hidden things” with Alonso Duralde | The Movie Racket

23:29Michael Phillips:How does it go? How does what go? Over the banister leans a face, tenderly sweet and...

23:48Which, to lean on a despised cliche, is a character in the film. You know, I mean, the way that the family is placed within that space, the way that the space underscores everything that happens to them, and their joys, their triumphs, their sadnesses, whatever. And that's just one of the little ways in which Minnelli establishes the family home as this kind of sacred space that needs to be protected and maintained while the film is conspiring to rip them out of it.

24:19Michael Phillips:Gaze on the loveliest face in town

24:31Michael Phillips:Over the banister

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28:11Michael Phillips:I'm so glad you picked out an example from Mimi and St. Louis, because that's really the film he was kind of referring to most directly in his hundred or more hidden things quote. And I have to imagine Minnelli as somebody who just loved the rabbit holes of research, of making sure that, you know, I mean, he has every office he ever had at MGM. Maybe it was the same one for 20 some years. I'm not sure. Was apparently every square inch of the walls were covered in expensive art books that he had cut up and cut out and put, OK, this costume here. So, you know, it was appalling in one way and that he was ruining a bunch of art books.

28:50Michael Phillips:But assuming he paid full price, I think he did. But that's what he loved. And that does take him back to his younger days, right? I mean, I'm sure he was doing the same thing back when he was truly, you know, a visual artist for commercial hire. With books from the Chicago library. Yeah. I think my pick on Minnelli would be mainly because it's probably the most famous example in the Minnelli lore of his obsessive visual preoccupations. In Some Came Running, which was released in 1958, this is Frank Sinatra. It's set in 1948, 10 years before the film was made. This is James Jones' novel. Returning World War II veteran, kind of a drunk, goes back to a small town, stirs up trouble, and is met up, we learn, with this floozy from Chicago, played by Shirley MacLaine.

29:43Michael Phillips:And that word is unfortunately used constantly. That's basically the nicest thing that characters played by Sinatra and Dean Martin call her. But it's also a tremendously moving performance at its best, I think. McLean's working this. But the climax, big town fair in small town Indiana. And the fairground setting, very, very, very crowded with many, many, many extras. Nobody in Hollywood ever worked with extras or crowds, I think, better than Minnelli. And you can see that in studio-bound work, like the bandwagon, when you see something like the Shine on Your Shoes number, which takes place in the Times Square.

30:23Michael Phillips:Times Square, yeah. Arcade. Yeah, the arcade. And that is just a thing of beauty you can rewatch forever, based on how every single one of the dozens and dozens and dozens of extras in Shine on Your Shoes, literally just walking by watching Fred Astaire and Leroy Daniels dance. And why wouldn't they? Yeah, right. Exactly. Yeah. It's good entertainment that day. And some came running on location. Sinatra already patients wearing very thin with the retakes. Sinatra never won for more than one or two takes. Very complicated set, nighttime shoot kind of late. And then Minnelli looks up and sees the ferris wheel among everything else all this other stuff and he and he says wait he says okay we're going to shut down for a few hours i have to move the ferris wheel three feet three feet three feet sinatra now this is where the stories differ sinatra dean martin and shirley mcclain says sam giancana was down from chicago visiting uh their gangster pal they uh got on a plane and left It's like, that's it, I'm done.

31:33Michael Phillips:You know, and it took a couple days to kind of like, you know, come on back, finish the film, you know. And it sounds ridiculous. And I've watched that scene with that in mind, you know, and damned if he probably wasn't right, you know.

31:51Michael Phillips:I mean, I swear to God, it is so beautiful visually, and it's so deliriously over the top about what's happening in the story at that point. You know, it's about to end tragically for one of the characters. But the way this sort of innocent-seeming, you know, town fair setting turns into this expressionist nightmare. And you got Elmer Bernstein's score just pounding away in a great way with the specific addition of all the carnival lights and then this huge wheel in the background. I think, you know, I'll hand it to Minnelli. There it is. That was the hidden thing, you know. And it almost lost Sinatra off the movies.

32:33Michael Phillips:Grandpa, they'll never tear it down, will they? Well, they'd better not. I can't believe it. Right here where we live.

32:48Right here in St. Louis.

32:53Michael Phillips:Let's go to another example off the Manelli Cannon. and maybe a little bit loosely term this one the older pick, you know, but yeah, what do you have? Give me another one where the hidden things mean something to you. Well, that bitch Orson Welles, for whatever his thoughts about Minnelli, I thought of one in Citizen Kane that I love, which is when he is trashing Susan's room after she has left him at Xanadu, the focus is his rage, his impotent fury, and knocking all the things off the shelf, and of course eventually finding the snow globe with the cabin in it. But if you're paying attention, everything in Susan's room is like a little tacky.

33:33Like it's not classy in the way that Kane, who has been sent through boarding school and sort of refined, you know, knows how to make his house to be very schmancy. So like it's not her in front of the giant ornate fireplace, you know, doing jigsaw puzzles. This is her little space where she can buy her own knickknacks and tchotchkes and whatever. And both she and Cain come from poverty, but she wasn't sent to finishing school. She wasn't taught to be the great lady of the manor. And so her taste is her taste. And it's not what would be considered, you know, the glamorous, stylish thing that this wealthy woman would be expected to have in her room.

34:15And so you're not focusing on those things. You're focusing on him throwing them. but if you look you're like okay this is this tiny bubble of identity that this woman was allowed to have in her own bedroom that anywhere else in this house would have been considered inappropriate and she probably was never asked and she was never given any license to like put in her own choices or her own decorations and stuff and so i think in a very minelli way this is a way in which the set deck and the props are revealing character.

34:55Michael Phillips:Rosebud. That's a great example in that it's a lot of hidden things adding up to a thing that is obviously not hidden, her bedroom. But it says an awful lot, and we should credit, I'm looking it up for the first time here, the art direction and production design. It's credited to Van Nist, Paul Glass. B-O-L-G-L-A-S-E as the supervising art director and Perry Ferguson as the art director slash designer. And you know that Wells was certainly all over those discussions. Yeah. My memory of that is that your description of it and my memory of it is it's a sort of a sadly infantile room. Do you know?

35:32Michael Phillips:Yes, for sure. It feels a little like somebody who's kind of, you know, just a little... It's a teenager's room, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And it's sad in a way that's clearly deliberate, I think. and yeah, it does fit. Yeah, interesting. Interesting about that scene too. Maybe that scene has got a lot of hidden things going on in that the least hidden thing, as you say, is Wells' as Kane. Kane's destruction of the bedroom. It's the one time he just loses it in the film. Whereas, you know, I mean, he's got many moods and very mercurial combustible and all of it. But when he came off the first take of that, he said, it kind of took him a while to shake it.

36:09Michael Phillips:I think the quote's something like, I really lost myself in that. And you could tell, it's as if as an actor, he had never experienced a lack of control or calculation. I wonder about that. You know, he just kind of went with it. And, you know, it's a hell of a scene. But I like everything going on. I like finding out everything that might be going on behind this enormous foreground. Yeah, yeah. No, there are a lot of little things to look at there. And Van Ness Polglaz, by the way, was a legend at RKO. He had done Top Hat and Suspicion. He later went to Columbia where he was art director on Gilda.

36:45He did Hitchcock's Mr. and Mrs. Smith, which is a personal favorite. Worked on King Kong even. So, yeah, he's a biggie. And that is one of those names that would never exist in the latter half of the 20th century. So whenever I see it in an opening credits, it sticks with me. Like Van Ness Polglaz. It's like, I just rewatched, they did a VistaVision series at the Academy here. And so I went to see White Christmas. This is in LA, I wish you said. In Los Angeles. Yeah, sorry. And the color consultant or something is this guy named Farsio Eduard. And I'm like, these are names. We don't have these names anymore.

37:19Good names.

37:20Michael Phillips:Well, nobody names your kid Cedric in this country anymore. Right? And we're all the poorer for it. This must be fate, Alonzo, because my example is also Wells, although from a different film. Okay. And I do wonder if what Wells was saying, not so obliquely, about kind of dismissing Minnelli a little bit as a window dresser, was, A, pure envy at the success that Manelli was having pretty quickly in Hollywood, just as Wells' star was fading already because of the controversy over Kane. The butchering of Ambersons. Yeah, which is the film I'm looking at, Magnificent Ambersons. Problematic, hugely problematic film in that it's not all his.

38:05Michael Phillips:It's a lot of its... Robert Wise. Not to grind through it, but yeah, Robert Wise, the editor, took over filming after Wells took off to Rio to shoot Carnival time for the documentary. It's all true, right? To help the war effort. And in fact, they had a pretty rough preview screening in Pomona? I think so. I think so, yeah. And TCM was saying that they thought that there might be an actual Wells print that was sent to him in Rio by RKO. And then I never heard about it again, so I guess that'd be out in real favor. I hope so, but the film is not entirely his, and really only about maybe three-fifths of it works the way Wells wanted it to.

38:45Michael Phillips:But— What's there is churse. What's amazing is just amazing in there. And the two quick scenes I'm going to point out as the hidden things example of Minnelli's. The first one comes in this goodbye sequence after this long, grand, the Ambersons ball, beautiful orchestra dancing, the town's most celebrated and richest family, the Ambersons. And this is in the late 1800s, right? And it's a goodbye sequence where two generations are saying goodbye to each other. You have characters played by Dolores Costello and Joseph Cotton saying goodbye. and you could clearly the feelings are strong between these two and then their children played by tim holt and ann baxter are also saying goodbye tim holt playing the most problematic character you know this is the total numb nuts uh george minifer but a problem i think he's kind of a drag on the film in general but uh tim holt that is but the the staging of this goodbye largely in shadow and like not just shadow but silhouette where characters become sort of these striking cutouts of themselves against the dark of the hall and a little bit of light coming from outside.

40:02Michael Phillips:It's a magical culmination of about a minute and a half long take. And it's one of those longer takes that you do not notice. It's not a showy long take. And it's just elegant and really staggeringly kind of natural and fluid. And then it ends with, okay, they hit their marks, you know the actors and there's a moment of foreground you have the one generation background you have the other and it's kind of a belligerent exchange between tim holden and actually says no i'm going to be outside with a cutter at 10 a.m tomorrow so be ready it's just no be there and then just pause and she just kind of smiles and says yes i will lucy about that sleigh ride i want to look at that damn automobile carriage of yours gene i'm coming fanny you'll get a ride that thing tomorrow.

40:48Michael Phillips:I want to see if it's safe. Good night, Isabel. Good night, Eugene. You'll be ready 10 minutes after 2. No, I won't. Yes, you will. 10 minutes after 2. Yes, I will. And then the moment's over and it made me realize, okay, that's one goodbye. This entire film is a series of goodbyes. The first scene, which I adore, it's like one of the great first minutes of any film, I think. This whole kind of just introduction to what life was like back then. And it's slightly comically stylized. It's a streetcar sequence. The whole thing about the street waiting for the streetcar and telling the girl what to make for lunch.

41:24Michael Phillips:Yeah, exactly. And it's all, that's another single take. In that case, it's still a camera. But that's also, it's a goodbye to an era. And there's a scene later with Ray Collins who plays kind of one of the most kind of amiable of the Ambersons, Uncle Jack, now destitute, saying goodbye to now older and also kind of bereft and essentially broke young George who's now grown up. Life and money both behave like loose quicksilver in a nest of cracks. When they're gone, you can't tell where or what the devil you did with them. And it's a goodbye in a train station. That's another one. It's a goodbye, goodbye.

42:00Michael Phillips:And there's something that Wells always had in everything from Touch of Evil to Chimes at Midnight to Back to Cane where it's all kind of just a bittersweet farewell, even if it's people being introduced for the first time. It's a very strange quality. You know what I mean? But it's those little things, like how are we going to depict this in a way that people can kind of remember it? Even if it's just holding that silhouette shot that's almost too much because it's so carefully designed. Right. But then it goes. And then you're back to, you know, real life, right? I love it. It's just the guy was a poet, you know.

42:38No, absolutely. I was just talking yesterday about how I think, you know, we talk about the Netflix effect and how movies there don't linger in the memory or stick in the culture the way that other ones do. And I really feel like we haven't parked long enough on how great the other side of the wind turned out to be. Huh. Disagree. Wow. Okay. Yeah. To me, I watched that movie and I think, oh my God, he was the 1970s New Hollywood before those guys weren't doing anything.

43:08Michael Phillips:Okay, real quick, explain for people who don't know that offhand. So this was Wells' legendary final unfinished film, The Other Side of the Wind, starring John Huston as a very Wellsian, Eminence Grease director, and Peter Bogdanovich as a very Peter Bogdanovich-y sidekick, you know, chronicler. and it was, it was ever finished. He, you know, ran out of money. It was the usual sort of thing that Wells was running into later in his career. And Netflix spearheaded this huge campaign to basically assemble the footage, put it together, match it to what Wells had in mind. There's a whole separate documentary on Netflix about how this movie got reconstructed.

43:46But anyway, we finally got to see The Other Side of the Wind a few years back. And for me, it's a revelation. I feel like all the things that we praised Altman and Cassavetes and people of that forthcoming era for doing, Wells was giving you in that movie. And had in his pocket ready to go. And yeah, I think it's a masterwork that because it was a Netflix event and didn't really play in theaters that we haven't really spent enough time talking about, you obviously don't feel that way. You know what?

44:15Michael Phillips:I have to see it a second time. Okay. I did see it twice when it came out because it really just took me the first time to even just get the hang of it because it's shot and edited especially in a way that is, I think, doing the, it's an honest attempt to approximate what was all the notes left behind and the style of the footage that existed, right? And to me, it was exhausting in a way that I'm not sure is entirely well, or entirely not. And we'll never know, right? Sure. I'll give it one more shot. Okay. All right. I'm not going to retract my opinion. I'm just going to park it. I'm going to park it.

44:49Michael Phillips:I'm going to park it over here. I'll park it over here. Okay. Now let's come up with our third of three examples from more recent examples of filmmakers, according to Vincent Minnelli, paying attention to the hundred or more hidden things that make up a good moment. I would point to the opening credit sequence of this year's film, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, where Jane Schönbrunn is giving you the idea of the Camp Miasma franchise having been a lengthy, long-running, culturally significant slasher moment like so many 80s franchises were, your Friday the 13th, your Nightmare on Elm Street, your Sleepaway Camps, and the amount of detail just in the opening credits where you get VHS covers for more than a dozen Camp Miasma movies.

45:36I don't want to make another dumb sequel in the Camp Miasma franchise. I don't want to make a remake of a remake of a remake. I want to make something that feels fresh and new. You get a board game with rules. You get—

45:50Michael Phillips:And the board game looks cuffed up, didn't it? Yes. Am I remembering that right? It's like a well-used board game. Yeah, it's been loved. You know, the Party City, you know, knockoff costume of the killer of the Miasma movies. He's like, I cannot wait to get that movie on Blu-ray because I have to pause and pause and pause because there's so much to look at there. And that's literally the first three minutes, you know. Right. Throughout the whole movie, there is an insane amount of thought that has been put into the world building here of the creation of this franchise and its history and how it has impacted the two lead characters.

46:27But just that opening credits, I was gobsack. I've seen the movie twice and both times like, stop. I need to read these rules, you know? I want to see all the things. And so I was really, I love the amount of work that gets put into something that just flies by your eyes.

46:42Michael Phillips:That's such a good pick. And two things I think really, in the context of what comes later, really make all that detail amazing. A, that filmmaker is savvy enough to not continue that sort of visual density when it doesn't matter, when it becomes much more about the two women at the center of it. And it doesn't have that, what I would call the Baz Luhrmann weariness. Sure. Too much information. Not my filmmaker. But that's amazing. And I love that that's the kind of detail, the hidden thing on top of the hidden thing that's in plain sight. It goes quickly, as you say. It didn't cost money. It cost time.

47:21Yeah.

47:21Michael Phillips:And imagination. Yeah, and imagination. So it's not about, yeah. Yeah. No, that's a great pick. Yeah, mine comes from Barry Jenkins' adaptation of If Beale Street Could Talk. Oh, okay. Which is beautiful in many ways, but I'm always quick to say it is not just. You know, it's not just a matter of like making it a beautiful, a word that honestly has almost no use in criticism anymore. Because it's like, okay. It's interesting, yeah. Yeah, colorful costumes. The word color, thanks for nothing, you know. But there's a moment in, it happens not in a real-time sequence, but it's just a little fragment of a montage where we're hearing the young woman in voiceover talk about falling in love with his childhood friend.

48:09Michael Phillips:And they're on the train, the subway together, just for a few seconds. And she's talking about the moment she kind of realized that there's no more beautiful person in the world for me. We were a part of each other, flesh of each other's flesh, which we so took for granted that we never thought of the flesh.

48:33And yet, it was no surprise to me when I finally understood

48:39Michael Phillips:that he was the most beautiful person I had seen in all my life. And the way Jenkins is kind of dealing with the shots, both of him and of her watching him, and the way that Nicholas Patel's music, which is music that has been recycled to death on YouTube as part of like mashups and everything, it's this beautiful piece called The Gape.

49:07Michael Phillips:It's a beautiful score anyway, very, very good composer. And there's just something about the way these certain notes, like there's a handful of notes that hit that line where she is really looking at him for the first time in this new way. And I thought, wow, you can look at it like the music is the hidden thing. We're hearing it. We, you know, we're aware there's a musical score, but in a work that organic, I think where the planning is and the fastidious kind of like visual quality of it is still have manages to feel like it's life and maybe a slightly idealized memory of what this story, which gets pretty rough, pretty tragic, has got its moments of beauty in poetry, just like all lives hopefully do, but sadly don't.

49:53Michael Phillips:To me, that was the hidden thing. I want so badly for Barry Jenkins to have made so much money directing Mufasa that he never has to make another Mufasa for the rest of his career. I wouldn't disagree. Yeah. But I also think that if a film director as good as Barry Jenkins can't bend that kind of corporate directive disguised as a movie into an idiosyncratic shape. I know he tried in many ways. And he's working with top flight people on the biggest budget you need. And you still just have a movie that looks like it. That's what it was. It was just a live, a quote, live action remake. It's not live in any way.

50:37Michael Phillips:I say, yeah, too bad. But yeah, that's mine. That's a good one. That's a great film. And yeah, I mean, that's a, you could just do a whole, the color stories of that movie, of, you know, the colorful costumes, but the specifics of the color, both in terms of capturing the period and of giving you character evolution. It's a rich text, that movie. Yeah. So, okay, in closing. Yes. And in sum, Alonzo, what do you think that Minnelli's very simple directive that movie making is made up of all these little things that people may or may not notice or even pay attention to in any way, maybe on a subconscious level.

51:19Michael Phillips:But what is the value of that kind of reminder or belief for a filmmaker working with any amount of money, no money, some money, lots of money? What can they learn? And what are we not seeing that Minnelli's advice would help. You know, my friend Laura Kim years ago co-wrote a guide for filmmakers called I Wake Up Screening. And one of her pieces of advice is you're going to have a lot of time where you are waiting for somebody to back this project. Use that time to rework the script. Rethink the script. And I think rethinking the script, not just in terms of the words on the page, but rethinking in terms of the world you are creating, the visual sense that you are creating.

52:04I think the more that filmmakers make the effort to do that, the more sort of treats and surprises they will find along the way. You know, I think of something like, for example, in Die Hard, there's that area where there's like a fuse box with a pinup attached to it, or a centerfold. And it's kind of funny the first time it happens. But then you realize it's an anchor for where he is in the building, so that when he traipses off down some hallway or up to the roof or down or whatever, when he gets back to that centerfold, you know in your mind where he is and what route he's been traveling. So it's a tiny thing, but it anchors the audience and the reality of the movie, and it gives you a sense of the geography of the action, you know.

52:49That is to say, also, as you mentioned, sometimes there are surprises. You know, the bit in Three Women where Shelley Duvall closes the car door on her own skirt happened accidentally. And Altman was like, oh, no, no, that's great. That's perfect for the character. Leave it. And it became a thing that the character did every time she got in a car.

53:07Michael Phillips:You can take hula dancing lessons now down at Macy's Salon of Dance. I might do it. I like it. It's only$12. I think it's sexy. So, yeah, I would say plan as much as you can in terms of just think about the minor details that are going to give the audience something about the character, something about the plot, something about the plot. the world in which the film is set, and then also, of course, the opposite of that is be open to improvisation and to happy accidents. Right, right. I think maybe if I knew more about production design, I'd be able to talk about it more accurately, about how that has to tell a lot of stories, you know?

53:51Michael Phillips:Yeah. Usually of more than one character, but in something like, go back to kind of the mid-50s, Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life with James Mason. And it's a very scary addiction story. And it takes place in what is supposed to be a normal, this is all in quotes, normal, suburban, middle American, middle-class American household. And as the story gets tighter and clammier and more sinister, you start to notice things like what's on the wall of this house? They've always been there because you've seen them in not in close-up, but they're prominent. Posters, travel posters of cities, grand European destinations of everywhere the wife, played by Barbara Rush, would love to go.

54:39Michael Phillips:And maybe has talked about going and is not going anywhere with this marriage. And especially with these recent developments. And that's a big symbol on the wall. That kind of metaphoric, bold stroke is usually not my thing unless it's in the hands of somebody who really knows how to depict it visually and keep the eye on the performances. Minnelli could do that at his best. Certainly, Nicholas Ray, you know, all these people. Yeah, and Minnelli's Designing Woman, for instance. You know, you have this conflict between—a very gendered conflict between Lauren Bacall and Gregory Peck. She works in fashion.

55:12He's a sports writer. Her apartment is impossibly chic, and his is kind of a rumpled dump, you know. And then the film, what solves everything is the inclusion of Jack Cole, legendary choreographer, as this guy who's part of her coterie of, you know, sophisticated urbanites. But he uses dance and choreography to kick the out of some gangsters. You know, so that male and female can finally coexist.

55:38Michael Phillips:I mean, it's so true that Minnelli always begged off on like, I'm not a fiercely autobiographical filmmaker in any way. I was a loyal studio executive and they gave me enough freedom to keep me happy and all that. And yet, there's so much of this going on in his films just about this sort of intuitive empathy with the outsider, with the marginalized. He did make tea and sympathy, let's not forget. Yeah, totally. Totally. I mean, that's, it's amazing. So, I guess the last thing I want to get you on, Alonzo, before we hang this one up, I think the value of what Minnelli is saying about the hundred or more hidden things that add up to hopefully scene by scene, moment by moment, that add up to something we still talk about on podcasts, right?

56:21Michael Phillips:Decades later. I think it's a great, simple, unpretentious way to kind of express the value of just like close watching, you know, keep an eye. I think it's great for - God is in the details. It's great for critics. It's great for anybody who wants to figure out why am I engaged? Why am I not engaged? Why am I drawn in? Why am I struggling? You know, why all that? And I think that's important now because as you mentioned earlier with the Netflix stuff, you know, I don't want to paint all Netflix projects as created equally mediocre. It's not true, but there is something especially galling to me about spending $150,$180,$200 million on an action picture.

57:01Michael Phillips:Star-driven, just trying to give you a diverting couple of hours. Ryan Gosling in The Gray Man. Give me another one. Ryan Reynolds in Red Notice. Chris Pratt in The Electric State. Like, yeah, these films are featureless. I know you. You're the slow ball guy that's been chasing me. What do you got in the bag? You're American. What brings you to Rome? Gelato. Coliseum. Oh, it's beautiful. It's a beautiful place. First time? Yep. How was a fun foot chase, though, right? Lots of twists and turns, hijinks. Who knew it would end up like this? I did. And visually, I know it takes just as much time and work hours and huge teams of people to make a movie like that, as it did Minnelli or anybody else to make any kind of movie 50 years ago, 80 years ago.

57:52Michael Phillips:But there's something about the visual quality of these things that we have just begun to reckon with the cost of this kind of filmmaking, where you're sort of like smooching the color spectrum down low so that it works on your tiny little computer at home, all that. All the stuff that makes you sound like an old person cranking off about the way movies are today. But it's just a vision. This is a strictly visual thing. It's aesthetics that matter because you just think this is not the way an action sequence should look or move or be cut or any of it. One of the things I love about the new documentary Borman and the Devil is that, you know, yes, a lot of effort went into making a movie Exorcist II The Heretic that a lot of people hate.

58:35but you know it's at least unique and trying for something and taking big swings and ambitious and these movies cost way more and seem to be interested in far less right on

58:47Michael Phillips:Vincent Minnelli forever amen maybe not goodbye Charlie maybe not or a matter of time yeah right although I would love to see his cut I would love to see his cut of that and of On a Clear Day You Can See Forever ah yeah yeah yeah Minnelli look everybody you have to give everybody their latitude for not quite making it work, but thanks for making this work, Alonzo. Appreciate it. My great pleasure. Thanks for having me. Tell us briefly, we don't have time to run through your dozens of podcasts, but you've also written several books, many books, and your most recent? Well, I have a new edition of my, originally published in 2010, Holiday Film Guide, Have Yourself a Movie, Little Christmas.

59:25The premise is basically any kind of movie you like, there's a Christmas one. Whether it's musicals or slasher films or documentaries, there are Christmas movies for you. So check that out. And if you want to hear more about Vincent Minelli, I write about him quite a bit in my book, Hollywood Pride, which is a book I did for TCM and Running Press about the LGBTQ plus history of Hollywood, both characters on screen and the artists who made it happen.

59:48Michael Phillips:Excellent. I've not read that and I'm overdue and I'm glad I'm going to put that on the stack. I envy you getting to read it for the first time. To paraphrase what Roger used to say. All right, take care. Thanks.

1:00:07Michael Phillips:After we talked, I thought about something Alonzo said about the opening minutes of Jane Schaumbrunn's Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, about the amount of work a director can, and maybe must, put into something that sometimes adds up to just a second, maybe three, maybe five, of screen footage. I take Minnelli's Hidden Things as a reminder to myself not just to watch, but to see what I'm looking at or try. The questions bubble up from there. Why is this such a satisfying scene? What is it about this long take with the mobile camera interacting with everyone and everything else in the shot so much more gratifyingly right than that long take?

1:00:57Michael Phillips:Why am I engaged? Why am I thinking about why I'm not engaged? Why did Vincent Minnelli move that Ferris wheel three feet to one side for the climax of Some Came Running, when there was so much more going on in the frame? Well, all we can do is watch and think it through and then challenge ourselves to find something new in that shot, that moment, the next time. The Movie Racket is produced by Joe Dassault and for stringent contractual reasons, MP, that's me, the executive producers representing the great states of Iowa and Wisconsin, respectively, Adam Kempinar and Sam Van Halgren. Special thanks to this week's extraordinarily special guest, Alonzo Duralde.

1:01:42Michael Phillips:And please, for the love of all that's worth your time, check out the monthly Chris Klimek Spectacular Movie Deathmatch, along with our fellow podcasts, Film Spotting, Film Spotting SVU, and The Next Picture Show, all available at filmspotting.net, all over the place. And you know what else I'd do if I were you? I'd email me at movieracket at filmspotting.net with your thoughts, invective, praise, maybe an idea for a future episode. I'm Michael Phillips. This is a Film Spotting production.

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