Brandon’s Reviews > Roger Ebert's Book of Film: From Tolstoy to Tarantino, the Finest Writing From a Century of Film > Status Update

As a souvenir, John Waters took home a palm fraud from the Spahn Ranch, which perhaps once shaded Charles Manson, Shorty Shea or both (778).

I like John Waters irreverence: “Think of the lucky schoolchildren who get let out of class for smog alerts instead of blizzards” (771). I was never one of those children, but I can imagine how they feel, having survived Youth Corp and a disastrous football tryout at CSUN.

What a curious excerpt from Robert Stone’s Children of Light: a son gets even with his father by attacking the older man’s beloved scenes.

Julia Phillips memoir about winning Best Picture is so coked and sad. Nowhere to go but down.

For laughs, I reread Groucho Marx letters to Warner Brothers re: the studio’s objection to the proposed “Night in Casablanca.” What a lovely work of writ & lit.

How strange that Oscar Levant’s prose has little continuity between paragraphs. Ebert praises Levant’s one liners, and I did smile, but some paragraphs were sans smile. What beyond syntax makes words cohere in a sentence? How can theme be divided & distributed across paragraphs? Ignore counterpoint at peril of the self.

“[The] dump grew continually…there wasn’t a dream afloat …which wouldn’t sooner or later turn up on it, having first been made photographic by plaster, canvas, plaster lath and paint. Many boats sink and never reached the Sargasso, but no dream ever entirely disappears…. it troubles, some unfortunate person, and someday, when that person has been sufficiently troubled, it will be reproduced on the lot.”

The Hollywood section is the most cynical as it tells again & again how the movies lie & how we know it & how we justify it. The Budd Schulberg excerpt appears beside the Howard Koch excerpt. What a plot.

“(Caroline) had learned from hurst the truth was only one criterion by which a story could be judged….” (720) Cinema is at best a fragment of a fact.

“”Caroline… was attracted to the idea of film, not as an art, or as light, or as whatever everyone wanted to call so collective and vulgar a storytelling form, but as a means of preserving time, netting the ephemeral, and the fugitive – there it is! now, it’s past, gone forever.” as Hearst’s sister-in-law, Caroline’s being tied to the tracks seems symbolic.