Monthly Archives: September 2008

Sep082008

There’s a Car in My Lobby

I walked into my place of employment this morning to find a Smart car sitting in the lobby. The rather smallish lobby. Of my 100-year-old office building. A car.

With a parking ticket on the dashboard.

Apparently it was driven right through the front door — which is not particularly grand or spacious, I must add — sometime over the weekend.*

You know, there are a lot of things about working for an advertising agency that frustrate the hell out of me. But there are a lot of really awesome things as well. Like finding automobiles in front of the receptionist’s desk on a Monday morning…

* For the record, the door was open at the time — no broken glass or anything like that.

Sep062008

Go, Jack, Go!

Just thought I’d mention that my friend and webmaster Jack Hattaway is currently — as in right now, even as I type this! — riding in the Lotoja Classic, a bicycling marathon that runs from Logan, Utah, the northernmost community of any size in this state, through southern Idaho and onward to Jackson Hole, Wyoming (LOgan TO JAckson, get it?). That’s a distance of 206 miles over three mountain passes in a single day; according to this Wikipedia entry, the cyclists will climb some 10,000 total feet and finish 1,800 feet higher than where they began.

Jack told me yesterday that his goal is merely to finish, not to place, and he’s hoping to do it in roughly 13 hours. His lovely wife has been sending me regular text-message updates on his progress; the latest was about an hour ago, and it indicated he’d just left Montpelier, Idaho, with 136 miles to go.

I hope it doesn’t sound too lame and unmanly to say that I’m very, very proud of him for even attempting this. Only a couple of years ago, he was just another overweight, out-of-shape, fast-approaching-middle-age schlump like myself. Then a series of converging issues convinced him it was time to make some changes in his lifestyle, and now he’s riding in a fracking cycling marathon. It’s been an amazing and inspiring transformation.

I’m rooting for you, buddy, and looking forward to posting the news of your success!

(Official Lotoja Classic website here, if anyone is interested…)

[Update: The last message from Mrs. Jack arrived at 8:21 this evening. It read, “Jack finished in 13:39:58.” Incredible… way to go, man!]

Sep052008

Those Summer Nights When We Were Young…

I’m having one of those downer days when I’m feeling nostalgic, wistful, a bit melancholy… yes, I mean moreso than usual, you bunch of smart alecks! One of these days, I oughta…

Anyhow, I’ve been thinking the last couple of days about relatively obscure songs that I used to like and haven’t heard in many years, trying to remember their titles and track them down in some form or another. Here’s one of those songs, Dennis DeYoung’s “Desert Moon,” which seems to perfectly match my mood today. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this video before now. It’s pretty cheeseball, what with the bad acting, occasional patches of banal dialog, and DeYoung’s purple big-block-plaid shirt (actually, I always liked those large-patterned plaids back in the day, but even I have to admit that it looks pretty dated in 2008). Still… I like the song, and on days like this when you can feel the summer heat gradually draining out of the world and autumn lurking just over there in the shadows, I like to listen to this sappy old stuff. Maybe you will, too…

Sep042008

Metropolis Rediscovered!

The previous entry reminds me of an item I meant to post some time ago but let slide, another story about a cinematic treasure turning up in an unexpected place. This time, it’s a complete print of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, which has not seen in its long-form version for 80 years.

Sep042008

Unseen Film Footage of Marilyn Monroe Up for Auction

I love stories like this: behind-the-scenes film footage of Marilyn Monroe playing with Tony Curtis on the San Diego beach location for Some Like It Hot has surfaced… in Australia, of all places. It’s a two-and-a-half-minute reel of 8mm that was shot in 1959 by a sailor Marilyn had met and invited to the set; the reel, still in its original Kodak box, was passed on to the sailor’s daughter after his death, and she’s now putting it up for auction, ostensibly because she thinks it “might be of some significance to the film world.” (Um, yeah, and the fact that similar amateur footage of Marilyn on the set of The Misfits was auctioned for $60K earlier this year had no bearing on this magnanimous gesture? Sure…)

Regardless of the motivation behind the auction, I hope the footage is made available to the public after the sale. I’m not a huge Marilyn fan — I’ve never bought into that particular cult of celebrity, for some reason — but I do enjoy glimpses of the stars “off-stage,” as it were, especially from the days before behind-the-scenes material was commonplace. Also, Some Like It Hot is one of my favorite films, and this footage is reportedly in color, which will be interesting to see as the movie itself is black and white.

It just amazes me that treasures like this are lurking out there in people’s attics and closets…

[Incidentally, the photo up there at the top has nothing to do with this story, aside from it being a picture of Marilyn Monroe, but it’s one I’ve been meaning to post up for a while. It amuses me to see that even an icon of the stature of Humphrey freaking Bogart was still just a guy, and got caught doing exactly what any other guy would do if they found themselves sitting next to Marilyn Monroe…]

Sep032008

The Man Behind the Dreaded “Floating Head” Movie Posters!

As with so many other things that were much, much cooler twenty or thirty years ago, movie posters these days are pretty uninspired. It used to be that even the lowest-budget drive-in fodder was advertised with beautiful, colorful painted-art collages. That was before Photoshop and rock-bottom-line thinking took hold in the industry, though. These days, the dominant aesthetic — if you could call it that — is all about headshots of the cast. Here’s a video introduction to the master of that particular craft:

See more funny videos at Funny or Die

Oh, yes, another classic collectible is born. I think I’ll stick with the vintage stuff, thanks.

Via.

Sep022008

In Memorian: Jerry Reed

Well, they do say that Hollywood deaths always come in threes…

I just learned that singer, songwriter, and sometimes-actor Jerry Reed has died. He had a respectable career in country music, of course, including several big hits on both the country and pop charts (this was back in the 1970s when you could do that, unlike the rigidly segregated musical categories of today). But I think most of the obituaries you read are going to focus on his role as Burt Reynolds’ sidekick in the Smokey and the Bandit films. I know when I heard the news, the image that flashed through my mind was of Snowman sitting behind the wheel with his loyal basset hound Fred riding shotgun.

Despite my recent affirmation of SamuraiFrog’s opinion that we should do away with the term “guilty pleasure,” I have to admit I’m a bit sheepish when it comes to revealing my affection for Smokey and the Bandit. People often seem to be struggling not to roll their eyes when they hear the title, and I suppose I don’t blame them. After all, it’s basically just a 90-minute car chase, leavened by silly sight gags and vulgar one-liners. Worse, its success was directly responsible for many of the worst crimes committed against American culture in the late ’70s and early ’80s, including (but not limited to), two really lame sequels; scores of bad, low-budget movies and television shows about “good ol’ boys,” truck drivers, CB radios, and stupid law enforcement officers; the resulting destruction of countless perfectly good (and frequently classic) automobiles; and, of course, the exponential increase in the size of Burt Reynolds’ head. I always worry that admitting I’m a fan says something about me that I really don’t want people to assume. And yet… and yet I just love the damn thing.

Sep022008

In Memoriam: Don LaFontaine

One of the best-known voices in the world has fallen silent. Don LaFontaine, the voiceover artist most people knew as “the movie-trailer guy,” died over the weekend at the age of 68, from a collapsed lung. According to his bio, LaFontaine recorded the narration for roughly 5,000 trailers over the years, as well as countless TV ads. He even parodied himself — and his usual catchphrase, “in a world where…” — in episodes of The Simpsons and Family Guy, as well as a recent commercial for Geico Insurance.

I heard LaFontaine’s deep, occasionally intimidating voice nearly every day for the five or so years I worked at that multiplex I’m always waxing nostalgic about. Every couple of hours, when the next round of shows was starting, it would boom out from the auditoriums, sometimes even after the doors were closed. He was as much a part of the atmosphere in that place as the smell of popcorn and windex. I remember I used to have this embarrassing fantasy that one day I’d hear him say my name in a trailer, something along the lines of, “From the bestselling novel by R. Jason Bennion comes a film of exquisite awesomeness…” Ah, well. C’est la vie, I suppose.

Here’s a video clip that I’ve seen in a few places around the ‘nets today, a brief bio of LaFontaine that feels like something made for an awards show (the Oscars perhaps? I haven’t been able to find out…) and includes a fair amount of the man himself chatting about his life and career. It sounds very much like he was just a guy with a unique talent who stumbled into a niche that he was able to make his own. He also sounds like he was a very cool guy:

If only I’d known that he was willing to do things like voicemail intros for random strangers!

There are a lot of voiceover artists out there and I’m sure many of them, if not most of them, are very good at what they do. But I doubt we’re going to hear a single voice as universally recognizable — and recognized — as LaFontaine’s for many years.