Some of you have some explaining to do

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Rod Serling interviews

C/- i09.com . He really did talk like that.

Bedside reading

A friend lent me a book, Writing With Hitchcock: The Collaboration of Alfred Hitchcock and John Michael Hayes, by Steven DeRosa. Hayes worked with the director on four movies - Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, The Trouble With Harry and The Man Who Knew Too Much. After their working relationship ended - bitchily, on Hitchcock's part - Hayes went on to write the screenplay for, amongst other things, Peyton Place - without which we would never have had Twin Peaks. DeRosa's book had me on page 10 of the introduction:

The politics of the studio system and the widening acceptance of the auteur theory downplayed the significance of the screenwriter's contribution to the art of filmmaking. Frank Capra's most successful films were all scripted by Robert Riskin, yet few people are familiar with Riskin's name. Similarly, Ernst Lubitsch collaborated with Samson Raphaelson on nine films, and John Ford collaborated with Dudley Nichols on eleven. Again, these screenwriters never received the recognition enjoyed by the "auteurs" for whom they wrote. But the director who has been most often canonised as an auteur is Hitchcock.

The first part of DeRosa's book is about the creation of the screenplay for Rear Window, based on a short story by the remarkable Cornell Woolrich. The account maps out in detail how Hayes' treatment for the film - itself based on an earlier treatment by Joshua Logan - ilustrates the basic premise of Woolrich's story - a man who thinks he has witnessed a murder - by adding characters and elements that expose and develop the plot. For instance here's Hayes on the character of Jeff's nurse Stella:

I like a character like that to act as a Greek chorus, to tell us what might happen and to go for comic relief. Because you can't have unrestrained suspense all the time.

Before coming to film Hayes worked in radio, with over 1500 scripts to his credit and a reputation as 'the fastest writer in Hollywood.'

'I would say Hitch worked with me more on To Catch A Thief than he did on Rear Window certainly. But still, he realised that I worked better if I was uninterrupted and he didn't interrupt me too much... We just discussed in general terms story and character, and he let me go and write until I finished. We did have lunches together and I'd tell him what I was doing, and he was patient enough to wait for it.'

After the screenplay was finished Hayes and Hitchock broke it down into shots together. Hayes was also on set during filming. In 2002 Hayes was interviewed about the experience by Chris Wehner:

CW: In Rear Window there isn't your typical strong villain and the protagonist is bound to a wheelchair, so how difficult was it to maintain a level of tension and suspense?

JMH: Having non-typical characters was of no real hindrance to the establishment of tension and suspense. In reality, there was a lot to work with. With a non-typical villain, you had the built-in opportunity to engage the characters in a "It couldn't be him. Could it? He's just a regular fellow" form of banter, just as much as having the protagonist limited in his physical actions helped the suspense of, "How in the world is he going to defend himself, if need be?" Writers sometimes habitually overdo it in how their characters move, act, and depict themselves. Grand flourish in a villain works for Bond movies, I suppose, but, in the world you and I live in, true villains don't act as such. At least not on any level you or I may have experienced. There's a form of everyday villainy that is largely forgotten now in cinema. And that's what audiences can align best with-what it is they see and know in everyday life.

That interview is archived on a slow-loading page here.

Hot sauce

(Curse of the Crimson Altar, Fondue Cookery, Le Samouraï, Pellegrino - the builder's friend.)

The past is a grotesque animal

Srsly: interview with one of the best bands in the world. Courtesy of New York Magazine.

Also: drinking. But not on Tw*tter, hence the link.

They really are that good. In an age when nobody writes lyrics, Of Montreal are the bomb.

The Horse is dead

Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid is on now. Impossible to estimate how much I love a Western. I was raised on them by dint of the timeline: there was nothing else on. Five Card Stud was the first movie I ever left feeling depressed, and I wasn't even that old when I saw it. Since then that bad, sad-in-the-belly feeling has been my benchmark for all manner of art. If it's the Five Card Stud feeling then what I saw may not have been bad or good, but it moved me.

Westerns, like jazz and sci-fi, have become absorbed into the mainstream. I never enjoyed western novels, with the begrudging exception of Pete Dexter's Deadwood -- which is no relation to the TV series. But I refer to Westerns again and again, in Electric, in several short stories ('Running Hot & Cold' and 'Oilskin').

I grew up in the age of the counter western: El Topo, the Sergio Leone westerns (which we watched as the real thing and never considered ironic), John Wayne as the old guard -- gunfights as martial arts epic, a genre which my generation also understood. Prose was the stuff in between: the moody contemplation. I'm less certain now. But I still love the pics: the stretch of vistas, the changing climate, the rules.

For everything, almost

Well, a lot of it, anyway. Big ups JLG. So fucking overdue.