Reading · Art for Ad's Sake

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This has been bouncing around Twitter a bit for the last few weeks – probably pre-Oscars to be honest, as part of the PTA for-your-consideration hype-up (well deserved).

But it’s well worth a watch if you work in and around advertising and you browse in and around LinkedIn and have seen the recent ‘beef’ regarding eduction vs. experience.

This bit of Director’s Commentary does a nice job of sitting on the fence and eating a big old slice of cake.

Paul Thomas Anderson famously quit film school early on, I’m not going to look it up because I want to keep typing, but I feel like it was something about his tutor getting all sniffy about PTA loving Die Hard, or some other kind of slightly schlocky movie.

Anyway, being a big old movie nerd, PTA got his eduction by watching movies before making them himself. And listen, fair play because what a career that’s been by the way.

“You can learn more from John Sturges’s audio track on the ‘Bad Day at Black Rock’ laserdisc than you can in 20 years of film school.”
Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997.

Screw education, I just need experience, I’m going to listen to John Sturges drop knowledge bombs.

Formats don’t equal rules.

“If you had widescreen, that meant thousands of extras, thousands of togas, amphitheaters with Christians being mauled by law and so on. They said, ‘What are you going to do with all this space?’ I said, ‘Well, the idea of a man in a black suit standing against this empty space. Doesn’t that tell you something? Isn’t that better the bigger the screen is?’ No, they didn’t understand it.”

Film isn’t real.

“And the great terrible problems of how do you do close-ups? Well, obviously they weren’t problems at all. It’s a technique like making films technique. Films aren’t real anyhow. people’s close-ups 20 ft high who’s got a 20 foot head. They’re flat – so it’s technique.”

Find your own tricks.

“He (Spencer Tracy) would memorise the lines and he wouldn’t look at them for five days. So that when he looked at people, he was hanging on to them as if he was listening to it for the first time – because in fact he was. He wasn’t that sure of what they were going to say. What an actor.

It’s all technique. And that comes with time and practice.

A Bad Day at Black Rock was John Sturges’ 21st film. A career which started in 1932 as an editor in Hollywood before working for the US Army’s in-house film agency during WWII making propaganda.

He’s an advocate of the school of hard knocks approach.

Great. Fuck institutions.

Except, that filmmaking –much like commercial creativity- is a team sport.

Bad Day at Black Rock was written by Millard Kaufman, a university educated ex-journalist, screenwriter with enough intellectual and emotional principles to once lend his name to the famously blacklisted Dalton Trumbo.

It’s based on a story by Howard Breslin, a journalist who graduated with a BA in Arts degree summa cum laude from the prestigious and private Manhattan College.

The score was composed by André Previn who was the product of both Berlin and Paris conservatories, the first of which he enrolled in at aged 6. He won four oscars and is perhaps one of the most famous film composers of all time.

So hey, wadda-ya-know. It takes a village!

If you want to stick two-fingers up to the system and make your own rules, sometimes it helps to team up with a bunch of people who know the rules inside out. That way, when you break them you don’t look like a total dumbass.

Well, that was a long intro for what was intened to be just a simple bits and pieces ‘curated’ edition of this newsletter…

Here’s some stuff I’ve foraged.