Hollywood

Remembering the music of Hollywood tunesmith Harry Warren

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By Michael Stevenson | host WRIU 90.3 FM

Below is a replay of the September 30th episode of Picture This: Film Music on the Radio. The show airs every Sunday at 6 pm on WRIU, Kingston, 90.3 FM, also streaming at wriu.org, and available on a number of free, downloadable apps that you can find out about on the website, WRIU.org.

On this episode, we celebrate the one and only Harry Warren, eminent composer of literally dozens of hit tunes written for movies from the early 1930s through the late 1950s.

Harry Warren (born Salvatore Antonio Guaragna; December 24, 1893 – September 22, 1981) was an American composer and the first major American songwriter to write primarily for film. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song eleven times and won three Oscars for composing “Lullaby of Broadway”, “You’ll Never Know” and “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe”. He wrote the music for the first blockbuster film musical, 42nd Street, choreographed by Busby Berkeley, with whom he would collaborate on many musical films.

Over a career spanning six decades, Warren wrote more than 800 songs. Other well known Warren hits included “I Only Have Eyes for You”, “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby”, “Jeepers Creepers”, “The Gold Diggers’ Song (We’re in the Money)”, “That’s Amore”, “There Will Never Be Another You”, “The More I See You”, “At Last” and “Chattanooga Choo Choo” (the last of which was the first gold record in history). Warren was one of America’s most prolific film composers, and his songs have been featured in over 300 films. [Source: Wikipedia]

LISTEN TO THE PROGRAM:

PLAYLIST:

  • “We’re in the Money” (m. Harry Warren, l. Al Dubin) performed by Dick Hames
    “- You’re Getting to Be a Habit With Me” ((m. Harry Warren, l. Al Dubin) performed by Doris Day
  • “With Plenty of Money and You” (m. Harry Warren, l. Al Dubin) performed by Dick Powell
  • “I Only Have Eyes for You” (m. Harry Warren, l. Al Dubin) performed by The Flamingos
  • “Lullaby of Broadway” (m. Harry Warren, l. Al Dubin) performed by Bette Midler
  • “Chica Chica Boom Boom” (Warren, l. Mack Gordon) performed by Carmen Miranda
  • “Y Csy ti pamietasz?” (Warren, l. Mack Gordon)
  • “I Yi Yi Lik You Very Much” (m. Harry Warren, l. Gorman & Leslie) performed by Carmen Miranda
  • “Jeepers Creepers” m. Harry Warren, l. Johnny Mercer) performed by Louis Armstrong
  • End Title: “An Affair to Remember” (1957) (m. Harry Warren, l. Mack Gordon)
  • “At Last” performer (m. Harry Warren, l. Mack Gordon) by Etta James
  • “Sweet and Slow” (m. Harry Warren, l. Al Dubin) performed by Maria Muldaur
  • “You’ll Never Know” performed by Alice Faye (m. Harry Warren, l. Mack Gordon)
  • “You Can’t Say No to a Soldier” (m. Harry Warren, l. Mack Gordon)performed by Joan Merrill
  • “There Will Never Be Another You” performed by Joe Williams w Count Basie Band
  • “Chattanooga Choo Choo” (m. Harry Warren, l. Mack Gordon) performed by Glen Millier
  • “I’ve Got a Gal in Kalamazoo” (m. Harry Warren, l. Mack Gordon) performed by Glen Millier
  • “That’s Amore” (m. Harry Warren, l. Mack Gordon) performed by Dean Martin
  • “Dormi, Dormi Dormi” (m. Harry Warren, l. Mack Gordon)
    performed by Jerry Lewis and Salvatore Baccaloni
    “Zing a Little Zong” (m. Harry Warren, l. Mack Gordon) Bing Crosby & Rosemary Clooney
  • “Rose of Rio Grande” (m. Harry Warren, l. Ross Gorman, and Edgar Leslie) performed by Sidney Bechet
  • “Nagasaki” (m. Harry Warren, l. Mort Dixon) performed by Django Reinhardt & the Quintette du Hot Club of France
  • “Lulu’s Back in Town” (m. Harry Warren, l. Al Dubin) performed by Leon Redbone
  • “About a Quarter to Nine” (m. Harry Warren, l. Al Dubin) performed by Al Jolson
  • “The More I See You” (m. Harry Warren, l. Mack Gordon) performed by Chris Montez
  • “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe” (m. Harry Warren, l. Johnny Mercer) Judy Garland
  • “She’s a Latin From Manhattan’ (m. Harry Warren, l. Al Dubin) performed by Bobby Short

Mackendrick and Odets’ “Sweet Smell of Success”

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The Sweet Smell of Success
The Sweet Smell of Success

By Paul Cronin | The Criterion Collection

In 1969, director Alexander Macken­drick retired from the film industry and became founding dean of the film school at the newly established California Institute of the Arts. Passionately interested in the pedagogy of cinema (“Film writing and directing cannot be taught, only learned, and each man or woman has to learn it through his or her own system of self-education”), he became one of the art form’s most legendary instructors. Aspirant filmmakers from around the world chose to study at CalArts because of Mackendrick’s presence, and even today, copies of his carefully composed classroom notes—which he called “my life’s work”—remain prized possessions among CalArts graduates, who speak of their mentor with veneration.

Though he was reluctant to use his own films in the classroom, one notable exception was Sweet Smell of Success, which served as the basis for one of his most penetrating handouts. In the extract that follows, Mackendrick describes how the original screenwriter on the project, Ernest Lehman, author of the short novel on which the film is based, fell ill and was replaced by Clifford Odets.Odets had been a leading Broadway playwright who, in the thirties, delivered to the progressive Group Theatre collective such works as Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing!, and Golden Boy (see Barton Fink, whose title character even looks a little like Odets). As a Hollywood screenwriter, he had worked on the script for Hitchcock’s Notorious and on early drafts of what became It’s a Wonderful Life. Handed Lehman’s script, Odets chose to rework it completely into one that, while structurally based on the original, is a much more densely packed affair, bursting at the seams with expressionistic dialogue.

 

 

Yet for all the genuine sparkle of Odets’s memorable dialogue and the structural reinforcements he made to the story, let’s not lose sight of the fact that Sweet Smell of Success can also be a thoroughly visual experience. Years after the film’s release, Mackendrick would tell students that “cinema is not so much nonverbal as preverbal. Though it is able to reproduce realms of dialogue, film can also tell stories purely in movement, in action and reaction.” When we turn off the sound and let the pictures of Sweet Smell of Success do the talking, we see just how much information is gleaned through the camera, the lighting, and the blocking of the actors. As former Mackendrick student and writer-­director James Mangold explains, “While Sweet Smell is a film brimming with rapid-fire dialogue, it is almost completely decipherable as a silent film.” Assisted in no small part by cinematographer James Wong Howe’s crisp, glistening, high-contrast location photography, his low-angled, smoke-filled framing and technique of washing the walls “with oil to get the glitter,” Mackendrick understood how much of the storytelling’s heavy lifting could be done with blocking, costumes, lighting, props, and the camera.

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Why people talked funny in old movies

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This speech pattern isn’t completely British or completely American.

By Todd Perry

There’s a distinct accent that American actors and broadcasters used in the early days of radio and in pre-World War II movies.It’s most obvious in old newsreel footage where the announcer speaks in a high-pitched tone, omits his “Rs” at the end of words, and sounds like a New Yorker who just returned from a summer holiday with the British royal family. This speaking style is also heard in the speeches of Franklin D. Roosevelt and just about any performance by Orson Welles.

But today, this accent is all but nonexistent, prompting the question: Did Americans speak differently before the advent of television?

The video below, “Why Do People in Old Movies Talk Weird?,” reveals the secret of this distinct inflection known as the Mid-Atlantic accent and why it was so prominent in early 20th-century American media.

 

Source: Cool video reveals why people talked funny in old movies – Good

Ricky Gervais Rightly Debunked the Loudest, Most Self-Inflated Hypocrites Around.

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The morning after Ricky Gervais let loose on his celebrity audience at the Golden Globes was bound to be a stormy one on social media—not to mention the DM’s of Apple, Amazon, and Hollywood Foreign Press executives. Predictably, many chatterers accused the comic of spreading right-wing talking points, of being just plain unfunny, and, for good measure, of transphobia. To my mind, the most striking response came from the Los Angeles Times’s television critic, Lorraine Ali, in a charge repeated by the New York Times: “Forget the escapist magic of Hollywood,” Ali wrote. “Nihilism was the name of the game.”

Talk about missing the point. Gervais was doing something comics have done through the ages: reminding us that the glamorous emperors might be naked, and the loudest singers in church the most corrupt. “Apple roared into the TV game with The Morning Show, a superb drama about the importance of dignity and doing the right thing, made by a company that runs sweatshops in China,” he said in one particularly spit-out-your-coffee zinger.

Gervais’s politics are not easy to pigeonhole. He hates Trump, disdains climate-change deniers, and ridicules religion, calling himself a “godless ape” in his Twitter bio. Clearly, he has no love for corporate America. But he also finds elite identity politics and celebrity self-regard absurd. His heterodoxy means he is bound to offend some of his audience whenever he steps on stage. And so he did on Sunday night: “No one cares about movies anymore,” he riffed in his opening monologue to the assembled notables. “You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world. Most of you’ve spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg.

”Finding this funny—and millions of us did—requires thinking your average Hollywood bigshot is no more knowledgeable or interesting on the great issues of our time than my great aunt Gladys, even though they genuinely think they are. It also requires believing that Hollywood machers have considerable power and money, which means that their opinions, unlike my great aunt’s, have the potential to matter. Like all self-inflated hypocrites, they need debunking.Let’s admit that punching up, Gervais-style, usually comes with a whiff of envy. That’s especially true when it comes to Hollywood’s powerful, who have the added advantage of beauty, world fame, and wealth. Celebrities are to us as Olympian gods were to the ancients; the public wants to pore over details about their clothes, Los Angeles mansions, Aspen chalets, Cabo vacays, love affairs, yoga teachers, facialists, and plastic surgeons. We normal folks can only press our noses against the glass of dazzling parties like the Golden Globes—the name itself carries mythical undertones—with flowers flown in from Ecuador and Italy and a 100 percent plant-based meal, knowing that we will never be allowed in. It’s not fair.

And that’s exactly why Hollywood royalty should stay humble and respect their place in the cultural ecosystem. They are not politicians or Middle East scholars or historians or even ordinary people with an ordinary set of beliefs. They have uncommon power as a result of skills or gifts for which they have been celebrated and handsomely rewarded. They have every right—some might say, every obligation—to spread those rewards to the less fortunate: to fight the fires in Australia and help earthquake victims in Haiti and orphans in Darfur. But to use their position to lecture us about issues that they in all likelihood know about only from what they’ve heard on a friend’s podcast while running on the treadmill is something close to an abuse of power.As if to illustrate Gervais’s point, several actresses took the stage to spread their wisdom to their captive audience of more than 18 million. Patricia Arquette descended into an incoherent rant: “In the history books we will see a country on the brink of war. The United States of America, a President tweeting out a threat of 52 bombs including cultural sites. Young people risking their lives traveling across the world. People not knowing if bombs are going to drop on their kids heads and the continent of Australia on fire. I beg of us all to give them a better world. For our kids and their kids, we have to vote in 2020 and we have to get—beg and plead for everyone we know to vote in 2020.”Michelle Williams, a talented actress, decided that her gift endowed her with the perception to speak for America’s nearly 160 million women. Referring to the need to protect abortion rights, she urged women to vote in their “own self-interest.” “It’s what men have been doing for years, which is why the world looks so much like them.” Reese Witherspoon tweeted to her compatriot: “Thank you for being a champion of women, you are an inspiration!” Note to Reese and Michelle: you are “championing” barely a half of American women. The rest are ambivalent or in firm disagreement with you. In politicized times like these, there’s an in

Source: Ricky Gervais Rightly Debunked the Loudest, Most Self-Inflated Hypocrites Around.