Harness My Zebras

"Harness my zebras - gift of the Nubian King."
So sayeth Mary of Magdala, who was a bit miffed that her fave hunk was off gallivanting around the countryside with some carpenter.
Oh, the shame.

Which means that the big old fashioned Hollywood epics have been showing again somewhere in the recesses of memory, as well as on the tv, and on my wall. That video projector I gave myself for Christmas has reignited my on again off again affair with one of my first loves, the Hollywood movie; as well as the offshoot subgenre, the Hollywood Movie Spectacular (usually with special effects for things like giant apes, cataclysms, flying carpets, various and sundry miracles, etc.).

A little over a week ago, my attempt to gain useable space in my DVR resulted in watching the 1924 silent version of 'The Thief of Bagdad'. I have the 1940 version waiting as well, he bragged with a happy feeling that found visible expression in a sly smile of delight. It's been years since I've seen either. The silent version is a sort of major Hollywood studio super colossal big budget auteur epic. Produced by its star, Douglas Fairbanks, the director's credit is given to Raoul Walsh but it was Fairbank's project all the way. (He wrote the script under a pseudonym.) The releasing studio was United Artists, which had been formed a few years earlier to give greater artistic control of its product (and, needless to say, financial participation) to its principals; Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford (Mrs. Fairbanks at the time), Charlie Chaplin, and D.W. Griffith.



How big is that set? See along the bottom area of the picture? Those little forms are actors.

The sets, among the largest ever built, were constructed for Fairbanks' 1922 production of 'Robin Hood', and said to be 10 stories in height. They were redesigned into an art nouveau Bagdad by William Cameron Menzies. The walls of old Bagdad were later re-used for the gate to King Kong's part of Skull Island. The set was ultimately burned to ashes as a stand in for Atlanta in 'Gone With the Wind'. Those scenes of that particular epic, by the way, were directed by William Camron Menzies. It is said that among the old sets burned for 'GWTW' were parts of a set used in the silent 'King of Kings'. I have not yet figured out if the silent movie Jerusalem was another redressed variation of Nottingham/Bagdad revisited or just how the 'King of Kings' (via DeMille and Paramount studios) got into that conflagration. When I was in my teens, I read that the Kong gates were originally from the Babylon set of the 1916 epic 'Intolerance'. I've since read that the Intolerance sets, which were left standing after filming ended (i.e. the money ran out) were taken down in 1919. I guess Hollywood history is a lot like Hollywood versions of history. A major shopping center, which includes an 'event' theatre (where tv shows like the Academy Awards are staged) now sits on the site that was once ancient Babylon (at Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenues in Los Angeles), while Nottingham castle/Bagdad (and maybe Jerusalem) were at Santa Monica Blvd. and North Formosa Avenue, several blocks to the southwest. 


Nottingham Castle on the Pickford-Fairbanks lot.



Two years after the set was built for Robin Hood, it became Bagdad.

 

As a by the by kind of thing, Pickford and Fairbanks had purchased the former Jesse Hampton studio for their productions. It later became the United Artists lot. In the sound era, Joseph Schenck and Samuel Goldwyn filmed there, adding offices and sound stages for productions like 'Wuthering Heights'. The dual ownership status became a problem after the land and studio buildings were left to various inheritors. The courts, in settling the various claims and lawsuits, forced a sale. For a time it was owned by Warner Bros. An independent rental facility known as "The Lot" now occupies part of old Bagdad. Other parts of the former Pickford-Fairbanks studio are now used for an apartment house, a water processing plant, and various retail stores. Among the productions which filmed there are "The Best Years of Our Lives", "The Bishop's Wife", the Roy Rogers tv show, "Guys and Dolls", "Some Like It Hot", 'The Apartment",. "West Side Story", "Apocalypse Now", and in some odd turn of fate, "Robin Hood - Men in Tights".

 

The Fairbanks 'Thief' is a heck of a lot of fun, but it is definitely best seen on as big a screen as possible. Camera positions constantly shift from intimate close-ups of the principals to shots intended to show the enormity of the sets; human figures are so dwarfed in some shots that one might assume the humans were miniatures. They weren't - the sets were that big. It doesn't help that the aspect ratio is assumed to be 1.33:1 (which is what is listed on the Internet Movie Database). At the time, a 1:1 ratio was common. Printing the film (or showing it) using 1:33:1 thus cuts off a small portion of the frame. Usually, it is the top of the frame that goes missing in such situations. With the Fairbanks Thief, however, the height is kept for effect, while the bottom of the picture frame is impacted. For example - in the shot below the thief, while trying to become worthy of the hand of a Princess, is tempted by sirens in a scene of only a few seconds duration, part of a larger underwater sequence.

The set for this scene took months to build - the art nouveau seaweed and jellyfish were made of cut glass.

Sadly, the bottom of the picture is cut off - I assume due to the wrong aspect ratio being used.

The art nouveau design definitely creates a texture  and feel that is different from all other film versions of the tales. It's old Bagdad in context of a slightly fevered Maxfield Parrish dream. I have read that Fairbanks initially wanted to hire Parrish to do the design work. Here's one of William Cameron Menzies sketches, part of a set he produced in a weekend's time to persuade Fairbanks to hire him.

 

Fairbanks was around 40 when production work began, and while he still looked pretty good, and wore costumes that accented his (ahem) assets, he was getting a little long in the tooth for such roles. Still, he had a field day jumping and dancing around enemies and situations with the abandon of his younger self. Most of the time it's a most enjoyable and naturalistic performance, marred only on a couple of occasions by old silent film pantomime techniques such as scratching the palm or grasping at the air to denote the thief's desire to obtain something for his own. It's not that such actions spoil any of the proceedings, it's more that such things are so startling in otherwise fluid storytelling that they become minor distractions.

 

 

The storyline rambles all over the place in a most delightful fashion as our hero undergoes transformation and various quests. (Well what did you expect? What good are heroes without quests?) Along the way are rival suitors, a hiss-able villain (an evil Mongol prince), descents into brutality (the whipping of a man over a minor bit of thievery, and a later whipping of the titular thief), dragons and other monsters (my favorite being a giant underwater spider), valleys of fire, a crystal ball, flying horses, flying carpets, armies from grains of sand - so much in fact that viewers have a tendency to offer audible gasps of astonishment, and mutter "What now?" or "You gotta be kidin' me" in sympathy with our hero as he approaches his next challenge.

The whipping of a small time thief

 

 Taking on an attacking underwater spider (from an untinted print)

 

 

 The Mongol villain (boo- hiss) (the following inter-title gives an idea of his evil ways)

 

 

 

 

The print shown on the Turner Classic Movies channel was easily the best quality I've seen on this title, made up from two sources, from what I gather. The tints seem slightly strong when viewed television sized, but blown up in projection are subtle, lovely, and add much to the atmosphere. This version had an orchestral score which utilized themes from Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade. From a quick look online I did a month or two ago, there are (I think) two versions out there on DVD/BluRay which have orchestral scores - one using a small orchestra in a reading of the original score sent to theatres (which used Rimsky-Korsakov) and the version I'm writing about which came form the Cohen group which has a Carl Davis score, which also utilizes the Rimsky-Korsakov themes.

When originally shown in the big city theatres, Fairbanks had the various movie palaces scented with perfumes, with extra atmospherics provided by performers who chanted the call to prayer, costumed to enhance an Oriental mood.

It was also fun to watch both the silent 'The King of Kings' (1927), and the sound 'King of Kings' (1961) later in the same week. I'd quite forgotten the physical brutality of the first part of the Nicholas Ray version. This time around, I kept noticing that playing Jesus Christ got a little iffy for the actors involved, as both productions are short on character development. Just the same, the silent version (as noted at the link above) opens with the zebra drawn chariot, and ends with the resurrection as the world explodes into two strip technicolor as though we have all landed in Oz. I saw the 1961 version in 70mm Super Technorama back when. (Super Technorama was an anamorphic widescreen process using film exposed to run through the projector in a vertical manner rather than horizontal - similar to Todd-AO. The idea was to provide widescreen without using lenses which could adversely affect the image. So of course they added anamorphic lenses to it.) When I first saw it, I thought it dwelled too much on the politics of the time, and wanted it to get on to miracles and stuff. Nowadays the political parts seem to go by rather quickly (Barabbas is a revolutionary plotting the overthrow of the Roman state in Judea). (There was, by the way, another movie released in 1961 with Anthony Quinn as "Barabbas". My memory of it is not clear, but clear enough that I no desire to refresh my memory of it.) Plus, the 1961 version has that glorious Miklós Rózsa score - one feels sanctified just by listening to it.

Last night I finally caught up with the Bing Crosby "Pennies From Heaven". I've got company coming, so I'll have to make reference notes later - along with notes on several other movies I've watched recently, either for the umpteenth time, or for the first, i.e. "Boyhood", "The Third Man", "Mark of the Vampire", the 1929 "Bulldog Drummond", "Dracula A.D. 1972" (and "Dracula, Prince of Darkness"), the 1933 "Alice in Wonderland", and a few others I am embarrassed to admit I can't think of at the moment. Hopefully, I'll remember what I wanted to note.

 

 

 


Easter Sunday

I've probably mentioned this before, but I miss the local tradition of a downtown Easter Sunday zombie walk. I think the last time I saw it was on Easter Sunday 2012. That was on April the 8th, and the main reason I remember is that I spent the morning and a good part of the afternoon assisting our engineer with setting up and wiring the new WVEW-lp studio. You know, it would explain a lot about these last few years if I were to assume that the zombies got me.

---------------------------------------

 

Curses! Sidetracked again!

 

 

On to other tasks. I shall have to miss today's chance to be brilliantly witty, charming, and possessed of... well, maybe just leave it as possessed.

 

And now (drumroll please) last night radio show. (Applause, cheers) (moves hands up and down, "Thank You, Thank You, that's enough now, thank you".)

 

As you may have guessed, it's a themed show chock full of secular Easter time stuff from ye olde days of radio, and commercially released sound recordings made on black shellac.

 

 As always, I hope any listeners enjoy the show.



 

Lost in 1939 and it's Eastertime too

April 1939 would have probably driven me slightly crazy as I waited to the New York World's Fair to open at the end of the month. Not that I would have gotten there opening day, but... come on, it's the World of Tomorrow. It was so futuristic that the opening was going to be covered on that newfangled television thing.

 

 

 

 

 

I could go on and on about that Fair. I'm a fan of such things. My father went to the '39 Fair. I suspect it was the only thing about New York that he ever liked. When I was a kid, I found his old picture puzzle displaying a map of the fair. Sadly, it was missing a few pieces. Dad didn't spend time talking about the past, and said he didn't remember much about it. He would have been 14 at the time. I went to the 1964 - 65 New York World's Fair on two different occasions. I was 13 and 14 at the time. Well, that is, as they say, another story. The main thing here is that it was Eastertime, 1939, and the World of Tomorrow was waiting. Well, okay, it always is, but the clouds on the horizon that time were getting very dark.

 

 

This week's radio show played a few for April, Spring, Easter, and gave a nod to Passover with a sequence devoted to Yiddish swing. The old Philco tuned in a few clips from Eastertime 1939 before settling down to listen to Benny Goodman's Orchestra, joined by Martha Tilton and Johnny Mercer on the Camel Caravan originally broadcast on April the 4th, 1939. As it was on opposite Fibber McGee and Molly, anyone whose folks chose Fibber can finally catch up.

 

 

 

As always, I hope any listeners enjoy the show!
                      

The April Fool

Most of my morning has been spent working on this post. Everything looked great, lined up the way I wanted, etc. That was in the Chrome browser that Blogger allegedly prefers. When I looked at it in the Internet Explorer Web Browser, it was a bit of a mess. I've spent two hours fighting to get the text and photos to line up properly. And I just can't seem to win this one. Sorry, I have other things to do and I'm leaving it the way it is.

The morning was appropriately groggy. So was I. The very first email I opened contained news that at the last minute the Vermont Views website, which was listing our community radio station (which I run) as "non-profit of the month" had changed its mind. As I sank into a resigned sigh, the words "April Fool!" entered in my consciousness. There was an audible low guttural growl which emerged from somewhere within my being. It's April. The poet called it "the cruelest month". The poet may have been right.

Over the last two weeks, I've started many a post for the blog, only to abandon them all for various reasons. I had a cataract removed and was laid low for three days by reactions to the surgery. One partial post was forsaken when there were problems at the radio station which resulted in the rest of my day, and most of the next, being spent in email correspondence. I no longer feel in control of my time. I wonder if I ever really was.



Unpacking at the new WVEW studio

Yesterday was Easter. I became a bit lost in reverie. I spent most of last Easter working with the radio station's engineer wiring our new studio It had been almost a year since the fire at the Brooks House which had taken us off the air.

Tuesday, April 10th, 2012 - logging into a computer to
turn on the transmitter and return WVEW to the air. 

We lost everything in the fire - our transmitter was in the studio and our antenna was on the roof. When something like that happens, the station is given one year to get back on the air or lose its broadcast license. Before we left the studio that day, I logged onto one of our new computers and used it to turn on our new transmitter which was now located (with our antenna) at a school on a hill on the outskirts of town. For a few brief minutes, we were on the air. I called Laura over at Austanspace and asked her to tune us in. She heard us. It was real, it worked. While we were working in the studio, the Easter Zombie Walk made its way through downtown. It's an annual local tradition. I hope it was held this year, I haven't been able to find anything on it - I had wanted to go out and photograph it. I made my way out to Austanspace's Shire for Easter dinner. That morning, I'd also put up an Easter blog post which addressed my love for those absurd biblical era movie spectaculars. I'd intended to do another one this year. How on earth did I get all that done? And that list of accomplishment is decidedly meager compared to what I used to accomplish on any given day  during my years in New York City. At any rate, two days later, after calling an early halt to the station's Board meeting, I ushered the Board members into our new studio, logged in once more to the transmitter, and returned our station to broadcast mode. This year, I accomplished - nothing much. And I was busy from the moment I got up until the moment I went to bed.


"Jubilee" Jim Fisk

Today is the birthday of James (Jubilee Jim) Fisk. He was one of the Robber Barons of the Gilded Age. Born on the other side of the state, his family moved to Brattleboro when he was a child. His father became the owner and manager of a hotel on the corner of Main and Elliot Streets, known as the Revere House, in the days when Brattleboro was a resort town famous for its "water cure". At the age of 15, he ran away and joined the circus. There are reports that he made a fair amount of money by smuggling cotton during the US Civil War. He became a stockbroker working in the office of Daniel Drew, another famous thief of the financial world. (Drew's money founded a Methodist Seminary which expanded to become Drew University, which I attended in 1968-1969.) Daniel Drew was the kind of guy who used to have his cattle drink water to increase their weight just before their price per pound sale. His shady deals became known for using phony and unauthorized stocks, thereby lowering their value. Such stock were soon called "watered down" in his dubious honor.

At the offices of Daniel Drew, Jim Fiske hooked up with Jay Gould. Together they assisted Drew in manipulating the price of Erie Railroad stock, which they swindled away from Cornelius Vanderbilt. They eventually swindled the Erie away from Drew for good measure. They were openly allied with New York City's notoriously corrupt mayor "Boss" Tweed in the bribing of judges and legislatures. They also caused a financial panic which ruined many investors when they convinced President Grant to purchase and hold on to gold; they had the United States Assistant Treasurer in on the deal while they manipulated the price. For their offices, Gould and Fiske bought the Pike Opera House building at 23rd Street and 8th Avenue in NYC.

Samuel Pike had purchased much of the old Clement Clark Moore estate and built upon it a five story opulent 1,800 seat opera house which cost over a million dollars, unheard of at the time. Although the area quickly became a theater district, Pike was never able to lure patrons away from the Academy of Music on 14th Street. Within a year of its opening, Pike closed it. Fisk and Gould bought it and spent another million renovating the building, renamed it the "Grand Opera House", and became theatrical impresarios as well as financiers.

Pike's Opera House

Josie Mansfield

Now, Fisk had married young, and lived apart from his wife. She stayed in Boston with a close female companion. He also purchased a building close to the Opera House and had a secret tunnel built to connect the two. The apartment was for his mistress, Josie Mansfield, an actress.

Edward Stokes

  Mansfield's affections were soon shared with one of  Fisk's employees, Edward Stokes.  Stokes left his wife and children and moved in with her. Together, they attempted to bribe Fisk through the use of letters which detailed some of his underhanded dealings.  Fisk refused to pay up, and started a public relations battle. Stokes was arrested on charges of embezzlement. (It's a long story.) One year to the day of his arrest later, nearly bankrupt and ruined, Stokes shot and killed Jubilee Jim Fisk on the staircase of the Grand Central Hotel. Fisk was 36 years old.

Fisk's body was brought back to Brattleboro for burial in the Prospect Hill cemetery where a large monument was erected to his memory. The monument's central stone is surrounded by four scandalously underdressed (i.e. bare breasted) women, each of whom holds something connected to Mr. Fisk. One holds pieces of railroad track. One, a money bag. Another holds a steamship (another Fisk story). The last holds an emblem of the Opera House.

Fisk's story became the subject of a 1937 movie, "The Toast of New York", bears a great resemblance to part of the plot for the movie "Citizen Kane", and was the subject of several best selling books. Edward Stokes served four years of his prison term before being paroled. Fisk had given freely to charity and was in held in esteem by many - upon his release, there were numerous threats made against Stokes who spent the rest of his life looking over his shoulder and feeling hunted. Fisk's wife died in poverty in Boston. Josie Mansfield made her way to Paris where she married before returning to the states. The rest of her story is unknown. She was rumored to have lived under assumed names in Boston, and in New Jersey where she allegedly died, as per a report in the New York Times. There is one published report that she found her way back to Paris where she died at the American Hospital. There are also newspaper reports that, paralyzed and in dire poverty, she entered a convent in South Dakota to avoid the poorhouse, passed and was buried in an unmarked grave.

The Grand Opera House puttered on for many years, never very successfully. It was purchased and turned into a movie theatre, the RKO Grand in 1938. It continued operating until 1960 when it was  closed, slated for demolition when the Ladies' Garment Union began  redevelopment of the area into the Penn South residential apartments for union members and their families. Two weeks later, it burned to the ground. It was eventually replaced with a nondescript three story office building, the memories of Robber Barons, the Grand Opera House, Jubilee Jim, his mistress, and the Gilded Age long gone.

A current view of the corner of 23rd Street and 8th Aveue, New York City