Status Updates From Когда я был Атосом

One has to wonder what Boyarsky's proposed but financially frustrated idea for a 'fourth series' was - surely not the bizarre resurrection plot that Khilkevich eventually filmed as "Cardinal Mazarin's Treasure", subsequent to the publication of these memoirs?

The amount of incidental information I have acquired is a amazing; I had not previously heard of Marshal Budyonny until Smekhov ruefully alluded to him in the context of his own lack of horsemanship ("not blessed by old Budyonny")

At one point I put an enormous amount of effort into trying to translate this poem ("Kino-horoscope") into plausible English.
Alas, without going back to my pencilled notes the obscure bits are still obscure!

The fascinating thing is that now, twenty years later, the "Kinopanorama" broadcast in question is actually available to watch on YouTube, and I've seen it (in fact, if it hadn't been for the poem he quotes here I should never have encountered this book!)
So we can compare his memories with what actually happened - e.g. the reason why Starygin was the main butt of teasing was that he had declined to turn up...

It turns out the allusion to Strizhonova was nothing to do with Musketeer hairstyles, but simply the fact that Oleg Strizhonov played Athos in Smekhov's previous film of "20 Years After".
It seems odd that in his introduction of Igor Starygin he never mentions that it was not only not the first time they had worked together, but not the first time they had acted together *in Dumas* - Starygin was Raoul to his Aramis!

The pure hell of trying to shoot the sequels as 'commercial' films in the 1990s compared to the state-funded production (however low-budget) they had been used to :-(
Sponsors, racketeering, endorsements, co-production, constant negotiation with the 'generous and hand-shaking' manufacturers from Budapest or Berlin... the costumes made in Moscow were all stolen in Tallin, and had to be sewn again in the hotel.

Unexpected appearance of Vysotsky as a family friend!

He describes the film as a cross between a musical and a Western, where instead of singing cowboys there were singing musketeers ;-)

(The phrase "s vesternom" - "with a Western" - had me puzzled for some time as I had assumed it was a piece of Russian vocabulary! )

They shot five hours of reunion dinner-party footage, but the vast majority of it was unusable because everybody was talking at once with their mouths full, teasing one another like schoolboys, or reminiscing about in-jokes...
I did think when I watched the programme that I'd never seen so much enthusiastic eating going on in the background of a documentary before - apparently in the foreground as well!

I probably shouldn't read any of this camel stuff (and discussions of how the director wanted to change Dumas' ending) as it is spoilers for the final film that I haven't seen yet and want to watch...

Ah, he does explicitly talk about the filming of "20 Years After" - that's what you get for reading chapters out of order!

The horses hired at Tallinn were so unmanageable that he suspected them of being part of a general sullen conspiracy against the incoming film unit, who had been "numbered among the enemies of the Estonian nation" - the latter may well have been true :-(

The nornally bumptious Mikhail Boyarsky was overcome by a sudden inferiority complex in the presence of his elder brother, who had arrived on tour with his theatre company and whom he felt to be far more Smekhov's intellectual and cultural equal than his own plebian self :(

Apparently the make-up department were under orders to 'fix' his unsuitable nose before he could be allowed to audition for his first attenpt at a screen role; he refused and went off to a provincial theatre assignment instead. (He notes that he wouldn't have succeeded in getting the role agaibst the eventual candidate anyway ...)
One suspects they may have thought it 'too Jewish' :(

Well, that anecdote came out a lot more happily than I thought it was going to after starting off with getting Igor Starygin very drunk immediately before they were supposed to sing, and when he was supposed to be on the wagon... But everyone enjoys themselves, and the audience insist on doing it again.

I'm not sure that Boyarsky flying in to Moscow through a dangerous snowstorm while he was supposed to be ill in bed, in order to arrive hours after the end of a party for which he had already been excused, is so much a staggering feat as an incredibly stupid one :-O

I'm not clear *how* "Bo'Yartagnan" managed to patrol the exhausted column of actors and crew with youthful energy during their return - surely not on an equally exhausted horse, and presumably not on foot behind the vehicles!

Ouch. After the end of filming, Athos' elderly horse was shot and eaten...

Hah - I actually did understand that anecdote correctly in the documentary! Aramis' horse objected on the occasion when his rider had *not* had anything to drink the night before (and therefore was presumably rather less relaxed than usual...)

He wrote a filk about useless administrators and sang it through the loudspeaker system at the end of filming: "do not meddle in the affairs of bards, for they are subtle and quick to anger , and your name scans to Greensleeves" :-D

A little more detail on the famous Baba Yaga anecdote: he didn't actually convince the woman with his eloquence, he simply dumbfounded her for long enough to make a dash past and vanish into the aircraft cabin, where crew and passengers connived to hide him temporarily in the tiny cupboard that held the spare uniforms until the plane had safely taken off :-)

He does admit to a certain amount of theatrical snobbery at the time so far as the filming was concerned :-)

He's quite right: a good director can make a film using amateur actors or no actors at all (documentary, silent cartoon), but that simply isn't feasible on stage, where everything needs to happen in real time aand nothing can be hidden.
Although they don't ask you to do stunts involving roofs, dog-sleds or rivers on the stage either :-)

A quite untranslatable joke about the adopted-from-English term for 'TV episode/series' sounding inappropriately like the native Russian word for 'grey' or 'drab' - we ought to be calling them 'vividnesses' not 'dullnesses' :-D