Role Models by John Waters

First things first: I love the cover. Love it. The crude line drawing, the touch of green on his socks, the framed pictures scattered about at his feet, the bright white background that will undoubtedly get a little dirty as time goes on (I'd probably be annoyed by this if it were any other book). It's perfect.

Role Models is a collection of essays about the people who have inspired John Waters, and it's a pretty varied group of people: Johnny Mathis, Tennessee Williams, former Manson girl Leslie Van Houten, local Baltimore eccentrics such as a lesbian stripper named Lady Zorro, amateur gay pornographers, and so on. The writing is very conversational, as though you're having a chat with him (albeit a very one-sided one). On the one hand, it's not exactly new territory if you're a Waters fan, but it's still entertaining.

One of the more memorable, if rather divisive, chapters concerns Waters's friendship with Leslie Van Houten. He befriended her in the 80s after interviewing her for Rolling Stone, and has advocated for her release ever since. Which is where the preachy parts come in, but they don't really bother me (I think he makes a pretty convincing case). What might be my favorite passage in the book is found in that chapter: "When the cops finally caught the hippy killers and I actually saw their photos ("Arrest Weirdo in Tate Murders", screamed the New York Daily News headlines) I almost went into cardiac arrest. God! The Manson Family looked just like my friends at the time!...'The Manson Family' were the hippies all our parents were scared we'd turn into if we didn't stop taking drugs."

David Holzman's Diary by L. M. Kit Carson

I came across this screenplay for David Holzman's Diary at a street vendor's table. The movie is scripted, but attempts to mimic an off-the-cuff diary entry--the title character, David Holzman, films himself, thinking that by observing the patterns occurring in his life, he will come to some greater understanding of their meaning.

Of course, it doesn’t really turn out that way, and he ends up scaring off his girlfriend, Penny (pictured above), in the process. It's an interesting look at how people react to being filmed: Penny is upset and disturbed by David’s project, while others don’t seem to mind, playing up for the camera.

The movie version features some rather innovative technical effects considering when it was made, such as a sped up montage of images from David’s evening TV viewing, and voiceovers accompanying photobooth pictures. These black and white images appear throughout, which make for a visually appealing book.

Here's the main character testing out a fisheye lens--the effect, as he walks while holding the camera above his head, makes you feel a bit off-kilter while watching it.

It's kind of a strange movie to read as a script--I wish there were more essays, other than the very brief introduction, whether about the impetus for making the film, or its thematic content. Regardless, it's a nice little companion to the movie, and as I stated before, the black and white stills that are reproduced throughout the pages look pretty cool.

Story by Robert McKee

I had to read this book for a screenwriting class, which was happening right around the same time that that awful movie Adaptation came out. In the movie Nicolas Cage goes to one of Robert McKee's screenwriting seminars (though it's not actually McKee; he's played by the actor Brian Cox) and manages to arrange a one-on-one with him. I'm not sure if that's why the teacher chose this book for the class—he specifically mentioned Adaptation when introducing the book—but it's actually a pretty great tool if you're trying to write a screenplay. I guess that's what I'm trying to say—even though the author is portrayed in a terrible movie (I realize a lot of people really like it—they're just misguided), his book is pretty useful for people who wish to avoid writing terrible movies.

Pictures at a Revolution by Mark Harris

The five movies nominated for Best Picture of 1967 were Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?, and Dr. Dolittle. Pictures at a Revolution profiles each of them from conception to release and beyond, providing not only the stories of the making of each individual film, but a broader picture of Hollywood in the 60s, not to mention the overall culture and atmosphere of the era. That year marked a kind of turning point for American film-making, heralding the coming decade of the 70s--and some of the best movies to ever have come out of the Hollywood system. The five nominees nicely represent both the new and the old, the generational divide sharply on display.

The book provides a fascinating if not exhausting look at how hard it is to get a film produced, as well as the rather arbitrary forming of the cultural landscape and icons of the day. At one point Bonnie and Clyde was to be directed by Jean-Luc Godard, who wanted to film it in New Jersey in the middle of winter with Elliott Gould starring as Clyde Barrow. (I actually kind of wish that had come to fruition.)

Conquest of the Useless by Werner Herzog

First published in English last year, this is a diary kept by Werner Herzog during the making of his 1982 film Fitzcarraldo. The production of this film is legendary (it involved moving a 320-ton steamship over a mountain without the use of special effects), notoriously plagued with myriad troubles involving actors abandoning the project, Klaus Kinski's infamously difficult behavior (allegedly the Indians offered to kill him), grueling conditions in the jungle, and of course the task of moving a 320-ton steam ship over a mountain.

The text on the back (see above) is fairly indicative of the tone of the book: at once beautiful and bleak, somewhat hallucinatory and feverish. One of my favorite entries, hilariously terse, is from July 20, 1979: "San Francisco. Emptiness." Even July 13, 1980, "a beautiful, fresh, sunny morning," ends in tragedy when one of two newly hatched chicks drowns in a saucer containing "only a couple millimeters of water," the other one getting its leg and a piece of its stomach bit off by a "murderous" albino rabbit. "A sense of desolation was tearing me up inside, like termites in a fallen tree trunk." Oh, Werner, how I love your somber observations on the world. I'm reminded of a voiceover in the 2005 documentary Grizzly Man: "I believe the common character of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder."

Overall, though, the point of Conquest of the Useless is the attainment of a dream in the face of impossibility. So it kind of has a positive moral.

La Jetee by Chris Marker

Chris Marker’s film La Jetee is comprised of a series of still images, shot in gorgeous grainy black and white, accompanied with voiceover narration. So it seems only fitting that it has been adapted into a book.

Humanity has been wiped out by a nuclear holocaust. “The victors,” as they are called, have established some kind of underground penal colony, and have begun conducting time travel experiments using the prisoners as guinea pigs, in hopes of gaining information about the source of the catastrophe, and ultimately to change the course of history. One man in particular is chosen for his strong mental image of the peacetime world—he has been haunted by a childhood memory, in which he witnessed a man die—the logic being that “if [he] were able to conceive or to dream another time, perhaps [he] would be able to live in it.”

The book looks amazing*, and the story is thrilling and philosophically complex. Part photo book, part homage to the film, part science fiction novella with a pretty complicated time paradox—you really can't go wrong.

*Although it's admittedly hard to tell from the glare in these scans.

John Waters: Change of Life

I just went to the John Waters Christmas Show on Friday, so I thought I'd take a look back at Change of Life, which was published in conjunction with an exhibit at the New Museum of Contemporary Art about five years ago.

It originally had a dust jacket with the title on it but I liked the one underneath so much better that I threw the regular cover away. The image correlates to a series of photographs in the book.

Most of the exhibit consisted of these montages of photographs that Waters took of his television, juxtaposing various movie stills in one long strip, in a way creating a new film. Pictured above are sections of "Mental" and "Grace Kelly's Elbows."

"Puke in the Cinema" is a great one. What else would you expect from "the prince of puke"?

Also featured in the exhibit were various artifacts from Waters' collection, such as these vintage books. He actually made reference to books starting with "I" in the Christmas show—in fact, he went on to discuss how books are the best gift you can give, and that if someone gives you a book for Christmas you should reward them sexually. Which strikes me as an incredible marketing platform for the holiday gift-buying season. So Mr. Waters, as an employee of a book publishing company, I propose that next year you develop this idea into a full-fledged advertising campaign. I'm kind of serious. It would be far more interesting than the usual crap we come up with. 

Moving along...

More from his collection. The toy electric chair is pretty incredible.

Some vintage candies from his collection. I wonder why dingle berries never caught on...

And finally, perhaps the best part of the show was the screening of Waters' earliest films in constant rotation. I got to see Hag in a Black Leather Jacket, Roman Candles, and Eat Your Makeup, three films that I will probably never have a chance to see again (at the Christmas show Waters was asked by an audience member if he would ever release them; he said no). Eat Your Makeup, pictured above, is the best of the three—it features a young Divine as Jackie Kennedy, part of a reenactment of the Kennedy assassination.

Now I need to go watch some John Waters movies. I wish I owned a copy of Female Trouble—it'd be a nice addition to the holiday viewing I've been doing. Nice girls don't wear cha cha heels!

The Nashville Chronicles by Jan Stuart

Through interviews with its principle players, film critic Jan Stuart provides an oral history of the making of Robert Altman's Nashville. While it's not necessarily my favorite of Altman's films (I'd say it comes in third after The Long Goodbye and Brewster McCloud) Nashville is undoubtedly a brilliant movie, pioneering for its time, and crafted like few others--an exercise in improvisation to the extreme. Though there was a script, on the day before filming was to begin Altman reportedly announced to the actors: "You can throw away your scripts. You won't need them."

The book contains black and white photos throughout, though the quality is a little muddy.

Each chapter begins something like this.

The Films of Jean-Luc Godard

This little square book contains essays on Godard's films from Breathless to Two or Three Things I Know About Her. The book stops right before La Chinoise, which I think really marks a turning point in Godard's oeuvre, so I suppose one could say that this is an examination of his earlier (though still evolving) style of film.


The essays are a bit didactic for leisurely reading, though would probably serve as good food for thought after watching each film. They all begin with a brief summary of the plot, which is kind of annoying because they reveal the endings, and if you haven't seen the film you probably don't want to know that "the two are killed in a car crash" or that a character "falls to his death." They also tend to quote lengthy sections of the script, but in French with no translation.

Each entry contains a fair amount of still images from the films, which are often great photographs in their own right--for instance, the above still from Les Carabiniers.

I love this image of Jean-Pierre Leaud from Made in USA.

And this last image (on the last page of the book, opposite a blank inside back cover).

River of Shadows by Rebecca Solnit

River of Shadows is part biography of Eadweard Muybridge, an English photographer known primarily for his use of multiple cameras to capture motion, and the development of the zoopraxiscope, an early device for projecting motion pictures. But it is also a larger story about the acceleration and industrialization of everyday life in the nineteenth century, such as the birth of the railroad. Solnit uses Muybridge as way of looking at the connections between art, technology, and politics.

There's a hard to find film about Muybridge that I had the privilege of seeing a couple years ago that animates his motion studies (not, apparently, the way audiences would have seen his films via zoopraxiscope, as those had to be drawn). This book goes into a little more detail about his background, but there is little known about him. It seems he was a solitary and private man who devoted his life to his art.

Lulu in Hollywood by Louise Brooks

When I was in high school I went through an "old Hollywood" phase--not sure where that came from but I watched Mysteries and Scandals on E! all the time and my room was plastered with images of James Dean, Marlon Brando, Jean Harlow, Bette Davis, Clara Bow, Louise Brooks, and so on.

I'd seen and loved some of these actors' films (The Wild One, Rebel without a Cause, All About Eve, etc) but never any of the silents from the 20s--yet I still managed to fall in love with Louise Brooks. Maybe it was her image, her story, her attitude.

Lulu in Hollywood is a collection of essays written by Brooks (she was smart! maybe that's what I liked about her) detailing her early life, experiences in Hollywood, her rejection of Hollywood (a refusal to play by the rules--another great quality that appealed to me), and her life after she stopped acting in films altogether.

I've since seen and loved Diary of a Lost Girl and purchased Pandora's Box (though I haven't watched it yet), and they are both ahead of their time.

Okay, I know I said I hadn't yet seen Pandora's Box but the above still is from one of the first (maybe the first) lesbian scenes on film--so I feel pretty confident in my assertion.

As for the book, Brooks's writing is witty, unsentimental, and fascinating.

A Maysles Scrapbook by Albert Maysles

This fairly recently published monograph features beautiful "photographs/cinemagraphs/documents" (or so the subtitle goes) from the Maysles' illustrious and influential career. Mostly film stills, also included are production notes, ads, interviews, and other bits of ephemera.


I love the film canister endpapers, and how there is a different photo for the beginning and end.

"Albert behind his custom engineered 16mm camera" (per the caption in the book).

Scenes from Salesman: "Selling door to door in Florida"

An ad for Salesman, and a congratulatory letter from the Mid-American Bible Company, 1969: "From an entertainment point of view, housewives should find much fun in viewing it."

Stills from Gimme Shelter: "Audience at Madison Square Garden"

From Christo's Valley Curtain

And now we come to one of my favorite movies of all time: Grey Gardens. The New York Times recently posted a slideshow of the interior of the house when it was sold, and they are incredible.

Little Edie with David Maysles, as Big Edie looks on (see the mirror).

Still and press pack quotes from Grey Gardens (I love this scene!).

While I've showcased their more well-known films in this post, their whole oeuvre is covered in the book. Here, for instance, are stills from Russian Closeup, a short 16mm film chronicling the people and places encountered on a cross country motor scooter ride through the Soviet Union in the late 1950s.

This book is a great, well-assembled tribute to the Maysles' films, right down to the feel of the pages and the smell of the ink.