Where I’ve Been, And Where I’m Going
October 7, 2022 § Leave a comment
For the past couple of years I’ve been writing a Substack newsletter, which is why you haven’t seen new posts here. At Substack, Under The Hollywood Sign covers many of the same subjects I’ve covered on WordPress: film, TV, Japan, history–while allowing me to earn money through subscriptions. I’ve also been able to branch out into other areas, notably travel and genealogy.
If you’re interested, you can sign up for only $5 a month at hopeanderson.substack.com. If you can’t pay, there are occasional articles to read with a free subscription–most recently “‘Fight Club’: Still Brilliant After All These Years”. I look forward to seeing you there.
-Hope Anderson
The Return of Peter the Hermit
September 27, 2021 § Leave a comment
I’ve written many times about Peter the Hermit, the first of the Hollywood mascots and a vigorous self-promoter. Although he died in 1968, Peter is well remembered by people who knew him as children in Hollywood and Laurel Canyon. During his lifetime, Peter’s image appeared in paintings, prints and sculptures as well as photographs, both professional and amateur.
Today I heard from Allison Burnett, who wrote:
It gets even better! I just bought an old oil painting of this same photo! I also own a gorgeous photographic portrait of Peter, signed by Peter. That’s how I recognized him in the painting. I would love to post the photo here, but there doesn’t appear to be a way to do that.
Here it is:
For my previous posts on this unique Hollywood figure, type “Peter the Hermit” into the search bar.
Going to the Movies, Post Pandemic
July 21, 2021 § Leave a comment
On Monday I saw a movie in a theater for the first time in over 19 months. I can’t blame this gap on the pandemic alone, since the last movie I saw publicly was on January 3rd, 2020, when Covid19 was still a Chinese problem. The truth is that I’d been watching at home for years because almost everything–screeners, art films, comedies and dramas–was online. During that time, horror movies and the Marvel juggernaut took over the theaters, leaving me cold. To the extent that I ventured out to the movies, it was to rarely seen films at UCLA Film Archive and the American Cinematheque.
Yet in the nineties, I watched at least three movies a week in cinemas, and scores each year in screening rooms. After Pacific Theaters opened ArcLight Hollywood in 2002, I went there for most new releases, watching them on its fourteen screens or at its flagship Cinerama Dome. For the next decade and a half, I could be found at ArcLight more than any place except home and the gym. And since my gym was located in same complex, it’s not an exaggeration to say that I lived at Ivar and Vine.
The first movie I ever saw at ArcLight was “Training Day”, for me the greatest film of both Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke. “Training Day” would have been memorable in any setting, but it was a late show in a completely empty theater that made my teenage son and me feel we were in the world’s biggest screening room. The last movie I saw at ArcLight, “Pain and Glory”, was also exceptional, but by 2019 my visits were few and far between. The exception was “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”, which I saw three times at the Dome in its first five weeks. In October of 2019 I saw Robert Eggers’ “The Lighthouse” at the Dome, never imagining it would my last movie there. But in April of 2021, ahead of California’s reopening, Pacific Theaters announced that ArcLight would close permanently due to its pandemic losses.
The sight of a boarded-up Cinerama Dome was depressing enough for the past year, but its continued shuttering is a blight that symbolizes Hollywood’s slow recovery. Now AMC is rumored to be buying Arclight, including the Dome. If it does, I expect even more action and horror movies, with the odd documentary or foreign film for the rest of us.
No wonder there’s a boom in home theater construction. What used to be a perk of top actors and film executives is becoming a necessity for any homeowner with the room and cash. In Los Angeles, home theaters are the new home gyms: once exotic, now commonplace. Both bring what used to be a public activity into the private realm, which is both a solution and a problem. Though I don’t miss the reek of nachos and the increasingly uncomfortable seats at ArcLight Hollywood, I do miss the laughter, gasps and occasional drolleries of strangers around me. These reactions often enhanced the movies I watched, making me see them in a different light. Home theaters, for all their comforts, can offer no such surprises.
Naomi Kawase’s “True Mothers”: Japan’s Superb Entry for the Academy Award
March 10, 2021 § Leave a comment
This review contains plot spoilers
At the outset “True Mothers” seems almost a cliché: a happy couple with an adopted child get an unexpected jolt when his desperate birth mother suddenly appears. Fortunately, nothing is as it appears in Naomi Kawase’s masterful film, and the great pleasure of watching is its uncertainty. What begins as the story of a mother, father and five-year-old son keeps shifting, beginning with a red herring and ending on a surprisingly hopeful note.
In between, we see flashbacks of Satoko (Hiromi Nagasaku) and Kiyokazu (Arata Iura) Kurihara’s struggle with infertility (male, for a change) and their decision to adopt via an agency called Baby Baton, which they discover via a documentary. Impressed by the dedication of its founder, Shizue (Miyoko Asada), the Kuriharas apply, are accepted, and travel to the agency’s island headquarters to pick up their infant son. They also elect to meet his birth mother, a fourteen-year-old named Hikari (Aju Makita), who gives them a letter to read to the baby, called Asato .
Five years later Hikari telephones to demand the child’s return or, alternatively, hush money for not revealing the child’s adoption to his school. The Kuriharas call her bluff. According to Baby Baton’s rules, they have told Asato, his school and the neighbors that he is adopted, an important factor in a country with a long tradition of adopting the children of relatives, friends and colleagues, but little history of adopting the children of strangers. Meeting Hikari in person, the Kuriharas initially doubt her identity, since she barely resembles the middle schooler they briefly.
The film then shifts from Tokyo to Nara, and in flashback becomes Hikari’s story. At fourteen she falls in love with a schoolmate and conceives before the onset of menarche. (Here again there’s a surprise: the boy is kind, also in love, and heartbroken by the events.) By the time Hikari knows she’s pregnant it’s too late for an abortion and—having also seen the documentary–she elects adoption via Baby Baton.
Again and again “True Mothers” defies stereotypes and expectations. The island is tranquil and beautiful, Shizue is kind and motherly, and the other girls—young bar hostesses and sex workers impregnated by customers—are friendly. Hikari’s real troubles start when she returns home to Nara, where her narcissistic mother is concerned only for the family’s reputation and her daughter’s high school entry exams. Devoid of comfort and love, Hikari flees back to the island, discovers Asato’s adoption papers and makes her way to Tokyo. A school dropout and runaway, she ekes out a living near the high-rise apartment where her son is growing up. (Even here there’s a surprise: an employer who not only provides a place for her to live but looks out for her safety and well-being in a perilous time.)
Naomi Kawase, who directed and co-wrote the script with Izumi Takahashi and Mizuki Tsujimura based on Tsujimura’s novel, is the first Japanese woman director to reach the Oscars, an overdue honor for someone who won the Caméra d’Or at Cannes in 1997. Now, nearly thirty years into her filmmaking career, Kawase will direct the official film of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. She’s a worthy successor to the great Kon Ichikawa, whose “Tokyo Olympiad” has been the gold standard for sports films since its release in 1965.
“Some Things About Yukio Mishima” and Other Recent Posts
February 11, 2021 § Leave a comment
While my newsletter requires a subscription, there are occasional free articles like “Some Things About Yukio Mishima: Remembering A Literary and Political Conundrum, Fifty Years On”. Here’s an excerpt:
| Yukio Mishima…at the time occupied a similar position to Norman Mailer’s: as a serious man of letters with an outré persona that enhanced his fame while detracting from his work. As obnoxious as Mailer could be, Mishima was by far the weirder of the two. While Mailer was busy throwing punches and feuding with fellow writers, Mishima was obsessively pumping iron, establishing a coterie of young right-wing militarists and having himself photographed as St. Sebastian martyred by arrows. Not that I knew these things at the time, since I was eight. |
Check it out at https://hopeanderson.substack.com
Other articles:
Cannibalism: The Ultimate Career Killer: Armie Hammer and the Necessity of #MeToo
Some Things About Yukio Mishima : Remembering A Literary and Political Conundrum, 50 Years On
The Endless Appeal of Writers’ Schedules: And Why They Don’t Matter
What I’ve Watched in Lockdown: A Confession
The Tokugawa Period Origins of Tokyo’s Nightlife, and Why They Matter in “Midnight Diner”
July 7, 2020 § Leave a comment
Although Netflix’s “Midnight Diner” tells universal stories of love, life, death and reversals of fortune, its setting–a tiny back alley eatery in the nightlife district of Shinjuku–is not only very Japanese but traditional to Tokyo. Both the restaurant and its customers have deep roots in the Tokugawa Period (1600-1868), specifically the Genroku Period (1688-1703). This brief era marked the flowering of urban culture in the new capital of Edo, the hallmarks of which–restaurants, bars, and all manner of nightlife, licit and illicit–still thrive in Tokyo today.
Although Westerners date the origins of restaurants (those independent of inns) to post-revolutionary France, when chefs were suddenly freed from the kitchens of the aristocracy, in Japan restaurants began more than one hundred and seventy years earlier, after the Tokugawa Shogunate instituted the sytem of alternate attendance (sankin kotai) to prevent its feudal lords (daimyo) from overthrowing it. Because after 1615 daimyo were required to divide their time between their fiefs and Edo, leaving their wives and children in the capital as hostages, a vast economic system grew up to support not only their travels but their substantial, non-productive retinues in the capital. Not only restaurants but all kinds of commerce, including shipping, banking, department stores, theaters, fine arts and crafts, have their roots in Tokugawa Period Edo, which by 1700 was one of the largest cities in the world. As the merchant class grew and prospered, its money and desires created something new and original: nightlife.
Those familiar with the woodblock prints and paintings known as ukiyoe–the “Floating World”–have seen the denizens of Edo’s vibrant nighttime culture: the geisha (literally, “arts practitioners”), kabuki actors, singers, dancers, storytellers, wrestlers, merchants, prostitutes, masterless samurai and revelers who flocked to the entertainment district of Yoshiwara. All of these chonin (townspeople) were inhabitants of what the great Japan scholar G.B. Sansom calls “the world of fugitive pleasures.”
That world lives today in mizushobai, “the water trade”, the wonderful Japanese term that denotes all the nightlife businesses, from bars and restaurants to theaters and nightclubs, as well as the sex trade. In contemporary Tokyo, mizushobai is centered in the Kabuki-cho section of Shinjuku, where “Midnight Diner” is located. Viewers will notice that apart from the annoying Ochazuke Sisters, three loud and embittered single “office ladies” who inexplicably show up for dinner in the wee hours, almost none of the regulars have daytime jobs. They include a bar owner (the cross-dressing ex-actor Kosuzu), gangsters (Ryu and Gen), a stripper (Marilyn) and a jolly retiree (Chu) who is Marilyn’s biggest fan. Other customers include singers, actors, sex workers, local police and criminals, both petty and non-petty. All are served without judgement by Master, whose house rules are simple: no fighting, no arrests, and–for customers who order off the menu–the supplying of any ingredients he doesn’t have on hand.
There’s a memorable Christmas Eve* scene in this one of this season’s episodes, when the regulars, most in festive dress, sit glumly at the counter. “Here we are, a bunch of social misfits with nowhere else to go,” says one of the men, at which point he is pelted with chopsticks hurled by Marilyn and one of the Ochazuke sisters. As heirs to the great Tokyo nightlife tradition, all of them know better: their restaurant is a gem, not a consolation prize. Underscoring that point is a large crate of crab legs brought by the younger of the yakuza, Gen, to make up for trouble he caused earlier. Master grills the crab, everyone chows down, and the Genroku tradition of urban pleasure lives on.
The cultural origins of Tokyo might explain the failure of the Korean and Chinese adaptations of “Midnight Diner”. Although China and Korea have their own urban cultures they didn’t originate four hundred years ago, and lifelong night owls are a more recent phenomenon. In contrast, Shinjuku is home to a substantial population that barely sees the light of day. Like Master, who can be seen enjoying a solitary pre-work cigarette on his balcony as darkness falls, their world is nocturnal–and deeply historical.
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*In Japan, Christmas Eve is celebrated the way New Year’s Eve is in western countries, with parties and without religion
Related posts:
Happy Holidays from Under the Hollywood Sign
December 16, 2019 § Leave a comment
Filming “Peg Entwistle’s Last Walk” in 2007/Hope Anderson Productions
Nearly eleven years ago, I began blogging at Under the Hollywood Sign to promote my documentaries and writing, and I appreciate your readership. Wouldn’t it be great if the hundreds of thousands of you who’ve read this blog would watch the films that inspired it, or read the eBooks that grew out of it? You could also give them as gifts.
All my documentaries are available for sale (via DVD or Vimeo download) or rent (via Vimeo); the eBooks are available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble and other ebook sellers. All are linked through my website http://www.hopeandersonproductions.com
Films:
Under the Hollywood Sign
Peg Entwistle: The Life and Death of an Actress
The Jim Thompson House and Art Collection
Jim Thompson, Silk King 2015 Edition–Remastered with DVD Extras
eBooks:
Peg Entwistle and The Hollywood Sign
On Blade Runner: Four Essays
Women Directors Who Defied the Odds
March 8, 2019 § Leave a comment
In honor of International Women’s Day, here are links to some posts I’ve written about women directors in America. Despite some improvement, Hollywood remains a place where a first-time male director immediately gets to direct a big-budget action movie while a seasoned female director goes years between small projects. When will it change? When studio heads–almost invariably male–decide to expand their horizons.
https://underthehollywoodsign.wordpress.com/2017/03/08/hollywood-the-most-sexist-industry-of-all/
Why I Stopped Making Documentaries
March 2, 2019 § Leave a comment
The DVD Jacket for “Jim Thompson, Silk King”/Copyright 2015 Hope Anderson Productions
Recently the screenwriter and director Paul Schrader appeared on Seth Meyers to promote “First Reformed,” and spoke the truth about filmmaking today. “The good news is everyone can make a movie….the bad news is no one can make a living at it.”
I’m one of those people. When I started making documentaries twenty years ago, new technologies had opened the field to independent filmmakers by dramatically lowering costs. Instead of shooting on film, I shot on high quality digital video. Digital editing systems allowed me and my editor, Kate Johnson, to weave picture, sound, music and graphics as flatbed editing machines never could. Finally the Internet–even in those pre-streaming days–let me advertise the documentary, make filming arrangements, hunt for and license archival pictures and footage, and communicate with interviewees. As a result, “Jim Thompson, Silk King,” was finished in two years–fast by documentary standards, particularly as I continued to shoot interviews at home and abroad for many months after finishing principal photography in Thailand.
All these technologies were stunning, as was the speed at which they changed. My first film was shot on BetaSP tape and distributed on VHS. My second film, “The Jim Thompson House and Art Collection,” was mainly composed of footage from “Jim Thompson, Silk King,” but VHS was obsolete by the time it came out, replaced by DVDs. At that point I had to throw out all my VHS tapes for JTSK and order DVDs. By the time I started my third documentary, “Under the Hollywood Sign,” in 2006, I needed a new HD camera and mini HD tape, while Kate had a new Pro Tools editing system.
By 2015, distribution had gone online. I put my films–by then there were four–on Vimeo, but I still needed DVDs for customers who didn’t do downloads. That year I also issued a new, revised version of “Jim Thompson, Silk King.” Only thirteen years after the original was finished, it was technologically obsolete, and Kate had to re-digitize the original footage to create a new master. The re-editing process, which included new footage, music and DVD extras (one of which I shot partly on my iPhone), was so laborious that it took almost as long as the original film.
Technology had become a runaway train, and changes in cameras, tape, software and distribution format ate my profits. But it was the Internet that delivered the final blow: suddenly everything on it was free or nearly so, and no one wanted to pay for anything. At that point I realized that documentaries, much as I loved making them, were ruining me, so I stopped. You can find them for purchase or rent, on DVD or via download, at hopeandersonproductions.com
Remembering Nicolas Roeg, Cinematic Master
November 24, 2018 § Leave a comment
Nicolas Roeg, who died yesterday, was one of those rare directors whose style kept changing as his career progressed. Though none of his films looked like anyone else’s, they also didn’t look like his others. Perhaps for that reason Roeg seemed forever young, so much so that his age–90–came as shock to me.
Roeg was trained in the British studio system, and before becoming a director he was an esteemed cinematographer. (One of his credits is “Lawrence of Arabia,” on which he began as the second unit camera operator and ended as DP.) His first film as a director, “Walkabout” (1971), remains the gold standard for films set in the Australia, a feast of indelible images. But Roeg was more than a visual artist: in film after film, he explored themes of alienation, loss and expatriation. Often his characters are strangers in foreign lands: the children in “Walkabout,” the space alien in “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” and the couples in “Don’t Look Now” and “Bad Timing” are all far from home and vulnerable, and some are physically lost. Instead of rescue, they often meet disaster.
Roeg took risks with his casting, raising eyebrows by casting singers in leading roles. Mick Jagger and David Bowie made their acting debuts because of him (in “Performance,” and “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” respectively), while Art Garfunkel gave his best performance in the underrated “Bad Timing.” I recommend all his films, but my favorite remains “Don’t Look Now,” a high point not only for its director but its stars, Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie. In 2011, after visiting Venice for the first time, I wrote about it here:
Under the Hollywood Sign 
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