Tomorrow I'm flying to England on a special mission. I'm trying to meet Thelma Schoonmaker. Mrs. Schoonmaker plays quite an important role in my movie world as she connects two directors whose work I admire greatly. As editor she's been the right hand of Martin Scorsese for over forty years and has won three Oscars for Raging Bull, The Aviator and The Departed. For me even more significant is that she's the widow of Michael Powell whose A Matter of Life and Death and I Know Where I'm Going totally blew me away when I first saw them.
I've met Mrs. Schoonmaker before. In the late 1980's, still a relatively fresh kid, I was determined to meet Michael Powell at the Dutch Filmmuseum. I went to the retrospective in his honour and he signed his autobiography and a poster for me. I hung around and sneaked into the official ceremonials. I can still remember the strange tension I felt at the time, a sort of mixture of elation, awe and sense of voyeurism. Hopefully if I can renew my acquaintance with Mrs Schoonmaker this weekend I'll be more level-headed. I have an ulterior motive with this visit, but that needs to be withheld for the moment. In any case I'm sure I will attend a pretty British affair.
Okay, to the stills. Stills of directors are comparatively rare. Stills from movies can be divided in three groups. The first group consists of stills depicting scenes of a particular movie. The majority of stills belong to this group as there are made quite a few of them, sometimes running in the hundreds. With older movies these kind of stills can be recognized by a double set of reference codes (most often numbers). The first set refers to the production code, the second to a scene. Basically you can follow the plot of the movie by following the stills. For a beautiful example, buy the great book La Dolce Vita L'Album by Sam Stourdze which shows almost all French stills made for this classic film La Dolce Vita L'Album .
As directors are behind the camera and not in the scenes you won't find them in those, except of course when they have a cameo of sorts in a movie. I like this one as an example. John Cromwell was an A-list director in the thirties shooting pictures with stars as Bette Davis, James Stewart, Katharine Hepburn and Carole Lombard. Here he plays a bishop in Robert Altman's A Wedding (1978) with Lilian Gish.
The second group of stills are publicity stills. The still photographer assigned to the movie makes a set of photographs where the cast poses in stead of acts. Usually they wear their costumes or use specific props but they are not re-enacting scenes from the movie. These stills have a different coding than the scene code, often the number code start with a letter, like "P" or "PUB" for publicity or sometimes "F" or "X". Because directors usually don't pose, but rant & rave, stills of posing directors are quite rare. This one of William Castle is a beautifully stylized one. William Castle was famous for his publicity stunts to sell his teenage-targeted movies, for example attaching vibrating buzzers to theatre seats which would go off when an alleged monster appeared on screen during The Tingler (1959).
Here Castle strikes the perfect director's pose for The Night Walker (1964).
The most stills with directors will be found in the third group, the "behind the scenes"-stills. Behind the scenes the director is of course the Big Cheese and he will be represented as such. Often we'll see him (and very sometimes her) in royal serenity on his throne, the director's chair, or wielding his mighty weapon, the camera. Another popular representation is the one of the director actually directing his cast, gesturing with purpose, eyes full with intent and concentration. This wil be the subject of one of my later entries in this blog. As I'm off soon trying to meet the right hand of one of the biggest directors around, it's only fair to feature him as well at his directorial best for After Hours (1985) talking the scene or script through with actor/producer Griffin Dunne.
Obviously it is important for a director to stay on the good side with the producer. According to legend this does not happen too often. Maybe that's why stills of producer and director in blissful harmony are contenders to be the rarest stills of all.
One more reason to be very happy to have this still in my collection. My hero Michael Powell with famous producer J. Arthur Rank at the set of Black Narcissus (1947).
No comments:
Post a Comment