This is me 20 years ago. I am filming (and sleeping) in this rental house with friends. The Puffy Chair has recently premiered at Sundance. I am in a healthy relationship with the love of my life. After years of relentlessly pushing myself through the struggle, everything is finally working. I look so happy. Everyone can see it and is commenting on it.
Not long after this picture is taken is when I have a nervous breakdown. I don't see it coming. It brings me to my knees. Thankfully, the story ends well. I'm able to build myself back up with therapy, medication, exercise, consistent sleep, etc. In some ways, that breakdown was a gift to help me become the person I am now. It certainly made me a kinder, gentler father/husband/friend/collaborator/mentor. But it almost broke me.
Today is the last day of Men's Mental Health Month. Please remember that you can't always see what's going on from the outside. Sometimes it looks "happy." Check on your loved ones. Check in with yourself. And if you or someone you know is heading somewhere scary, @988Lifeline is a text/chat/call away.
After the release of "The Producers" (1967), Mel Brooks got lots of letters from almost every Rabbi in New York condemning the movie [for its depiction of Hitler] & asking him to think twice before making a movie like it again. Brooks wrote back to every single Rabbi explaining, "You can't get on a soap box with Hitler. You've got to ridicule him. You got to bring him down with laughter. There is no way to get even." He wrote to make them understand the real intent behind the "Springtime for Hitler" scene. And he got a few letters back saying, "Maybe you're right, you know? It was OK."
(Mel Brooks' interview with Conan O'Brien, 2013 & "Mel Brooks says his only regret as a comedian is the jokes he didn't tell", Terry Gross, 2022)
John Goodman lives in New Orleans and around a decade ago I checked him out at a grocery store I worked at.
He seemed kinda grumpy, so I asked how his day was going.
"On a diet. It fucking sucks.” Then he left
First look at ‘HEADS’, a new stop-motion animated film from Mackinnon & Saunders, the studio behind ‘Fantastic Mr Fox’.
The film follows a dystopian world where severed human heads can live independent from their bodies & where the poor can sell their heads.
told my teenage coworker i’m going to a concert next week and he went “you’re probably gonna go see some old shit like simon and garfunkel” and he was right i’m seeing paul simon
If my wife is in the bathtub for too long our little white freak of a dog comes and lays like this and makes weird smacking noises with his mouth . He is so awesome
Three of the people who made this film died of the same cancer: the director, his wife, and one of the lead actors. All three had been on the same set.
Stalker was shot on a river in Estonia. Just upstream from the set, a working chemical plant was dumping poison straight into the water. That white foam you sometimes spot drifting past on screen is the actual pollution.
The first death came in 1982. Anatoly Solonitsyn, who plays the Writer in the film, died of lung cancer at age 47. Tarkovsky was next. He died of the same cancer in Paris in December 1986, age 54. His wife Larisa, who was also the film's assistant director, died of it in 1998. The sound designer Vladimir Sharun, who was on the same set and survived, has been saying since 2001 that the river killed them. No medical study has ever proved that. But three of the same lung cancer from one crew is hard to wave off as bad luck.
Tarkovsky shot the entire film once in 1977. Took him a whole year. When the Soviet lab developed the footage, it came back ruined. A year of work, gone. He had a heart attack. The Soviet film board wanted to shut the project down right there.
So he tried something. He told the board he was making a two-part film. They gave him more money. He fired his cameraman, brought in a new one, and reshot the entire film from June to November 1978.
Stalker is based on a novel by two brothers, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. They had also written the script. Tarkovsky put them through nine rewrites of it. The original location was supposed to be in Tajikistan, but a 1976 earthquake destroyed the area and forced the whole production to move to Estonia.
Stalker came out in May 1979. In the film, the "Zone" is a contaminated wasteland around a fourth bunker, with a wish-granting room hidden somewhere inside. Seven years later, Reactor Four at Chernobyl exploded. The contaminated land around the real reactor became known as the Zone of Exclusion. Today, the people who illegally smuggle tourists into Chernobyl still call themselves stalkers, named after the film.
Stalker is now considered one of the greatest films ever. The shot you are looking at right now is from a movie that, according to the people who made it, took the lives of the director, his wife, and the actor who plays the Writer.
found an obscure soviet-era georgian folk singer and her voice is angelic, it’s absolutely ethereal. there’s almost nothing written about her life in english. none of her music was released during her lifetime and she passed away in 1977. it’s truly a hidden gem.