Jon Zelazny > Status Update

Congratulations, Jon!!!
Your story is on my reading list!

Nice work, John. It reads like a movie. I even learned to listen for a melody,

Thank you, Tom. Thank you, Violeta.

The story is actually an excerpt from my unpublished novel CONSTANT MOTION, an epic relationship saga of the British Ballet during the thirties and forties. It's so nice to have even a piece of it out in the world.

Now I understand why you don't write reviews of the books you read. You are saving your arrows. After reading this I wish you would write reviews too.

C'mon, 85 reviews out of 230 books ain't bad! I'm more prone to comment when my opinion differs from the majority. Or when I read something relatively obscure. Or books I don't enjoy enough to finish. I try not to comment when I don't have anything particularly insightful to add. Like, what can you say about HARRY POTTER that a zillion other people haven't observed before?

I agree on that. I'm thinking the ones that show up on my feed are just star ratings.

Let me say also that it led me to your website. I love your favorite movies year by year. How you found and were able to sit through that many silent dramas to find good ones is worth a presidential citation.

Other than the Keaton and Chaplin, I don't meet up with you until about 1931 where I'm good for about 50%.

Ah, thanks for stopping by & glad you enjoyed it.

I got turned on to silents by my high school Film Studies teacher, who showed us THE BIRTH OF A NATION, THE GOLD RUSH, and THE GENERAL, then I chatted with Lillian freakin' Gish that same year after a screening of WAY DOWN EAST.

When I moved to L.A., they actually had a Silent Theater. I saw a lot there in the nineties, early aughts. A guidebook of sorts was Kevin Brownlow's silent film history volume WHEN THE PARADE'S GONE BY. I then went to work for a director who revered Fritz Lang, so I started checking out a lot of German silents: Lang, Murnau, Pabst, Riefenstahl, then we spent untold hours dissecting them.

The silent that really grabbed my three-year-old was THE THIEF OF BAGDAD (1925). We watched it again and again, and she'd direct me to act out her favorite scenes with her. PETER PAN (1925) was another big one for her. At nine, Marilee still like silents; we have a lot of fun improvising our own dialogue. A recent discovery for both of us was Lubitsch's THE MARRIAGE CIRCLE, easily on par with any of his thirties or forties classics.

Marilee also got to share her love for the classics on her little gig for the Motion Picture Academy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qqSC...