Hang Bunting or Crepe?

 

Luther Looking for a 2025 Auditorium Where Seats Are All Filled. No Luck So Far.

Greenbriar Turns Twenty Today

Had You Tube come along thirty, even twenty, years ago, I’d be all over it, influencing daylights out of loyal viewers. You got to know when not to take some dives. Vlogging showed up too late for Greenbriar. Besides, I prefer working with words, because as Luther Heggs said, words are my work. How many have stuck out two decades here? Part of goal was to make North Carolina seem a mecca for film life. It was in terms of collecting when that revolved around 8, 16, and 35mm. I celebrate these because someday there’ll be nobody left who will. Has Greenbriar been a “nostalgia” site? Not by design. Longing looks back suggest “footie pajamas,” as cotton-made and insubstantial. What age is Golden to exclusion of others? Usually it's when we grew up, or for fans of a Classic Era, the generation or two before we were born. I'm nostalgic if at all for last night when I watched San Antonio, just out on Blu-Ray from Warner Archive, this time to reflect on history shared with this Errol Flynn super-western. San Antonio went a likely twenty years after 1945 sans color, Dominant’s 1956 reissue a first, albeit black-and-white 35mm, TV stations the same year getting monochrome prints only. I estimate mid-sixties before it showed up in color on the tube (atn. Lou Lumenick, is that correct?). First exposure for me was Charlotte’s Channel 36 in 1972, a tepid transmission compared with glory of Blu-now. A station employee from Florida snuck me a 16mm print in the early eighties which looked OK by diminished Eastman color standards. You took these things as you found them. As of yesterday I have San Antonio fresh as 1945 saw it, maybe an improvement, sharper certainly than that format could have managed what with IB images softer and registration problems inherent to the process. Great how High-Def transforms a movie to a masterpiece after years making peace with stunted substitutes. Times good? No, better.

I Bet the College Park Looked Like This Before They Finally Tore It Down

Forgive freestyle stream of random as how else to cope with twenty years at this? Yesterday on You Tube was a commentator I respect who called current moviegoing, movies themselves, a “zombie” art form like opera and ballet. Fighting words? He’s not alone to lament passing of the communal experience, the “magic” of sardining inside a cinema. How meaningful is such loss if you have almost as big a screen at home and no interruption unless you create it yourself? Darkened space commands attention, but do half-watching watchers with digital doo-dads respect darkened space? That’s me honestly wondering, for what do I know not having sat through a theatrical feature since Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, where much as I liked the movie, more of attention was on dim projection the bane of digital. Do cinemas fill up anymore? All I’m hearing is how empty they are. A friend who has worked at theatres since 1977 says his six plex is running on fumes. He recently had twenty people spread across six screens for an entire weekend. People have said since silent days that film was finished, a worse crisis perhaps in the fifties, but something always came to the rescue. What now, or is such a save past possible? There are documentaries a-plenty at You Tube about paradise that was movie palaces, interviewees basking in childhood clover. How close are we to where nobody’s left to remember that? I used to think plenty would be around always to first-hand recall B westerns and serials (did I expect them to live forever?), but alas, none but some of us survive to thrive on a gone generation’s memory of Ken Maynard and Spy Smasher. I missed their bliss of moviegoing when it really was blissful.

Crowds to me were useful for observing reactions to a classic revival like King Kong in Winston-Salem, or King Kong vs. Godzilla when-new at the Liberty, latter occasion for nearly being thrown out after my group was wrongfully lumped in with misbehavior of others seated too close by (I remember those guilty boys, have confronted several over years since, all recalling the event but none repentant). Over time at Greenbriar forge, my writing remains, as A.I. identifies it, “wayward.” Ever searched for yourself on AI? If you’ve done anything online, you’re there. AI draws from countless mentions made of any/all active sites. Reactions and opinions from everywhere digital are sifted and summarized, some unexpected, many surprising. I’m called “slightly distracted,” my grammar “loose,” but “deliberate and intimate,” whatever that amounts to. Suggested improvements for Greenbriar come courtesy Microsoft Word which offers to “Re-write this with Co-Pilot” for virtually every sentence I type. No use trying to fix me, however. Co-pilot makes prose acceptably conventional, if bloodless. And what if I like being wayward and slightly distracted? AI says my stuff is not academic in style or content, to which I reply, Thank You sirs, may I have another? One learns to live with bad habits baked in. Sic transit gloria mundi, like Latin talkers talk.

Do we still read books? Many don’t or won’t. Some swear off on receipt of high school diplomas. Ann snapped corner shelves at Greenbriar HQ over Christmas. Favorites among books sit there, some dating far back, many I pore through often. A few were got when new and have sentimental in addition to info value. From the top there are four by Kevin Brownlow. Probably nobody that tied onto film at a young age missed Brownlow. Santa brought me The Parade’s Gone By in 1968. Has anyone noticed the wonderful aroma its pages have, or is it just my copy? Also there is Hammer Films: The Bray Years, by Wayne Kinsey. He has written innumerable books about Hammer and is a leading authority on the British studio. The Filming of the West by Jon Tuska tells of westerns both “A” and “B,” a pioneering book on the topic. Shelf below has Michael Barrier’s history of animated cartoons, unsurpassed so far. Then there are two about the dawn of sound, Douglas Gomery and Scott Eyman the respective authors. City of Nets by Otto Friedrich tells Hollywood 40's story in revelatory detail. I sat part of Christmas Eve revisiting it. Kings of the B’s has terrific text plus interviews conducted when pioneers were still around to talk. The Great Movie Stars by David Shipman was actually two volumes, this one about “The Golden Years.” Firm but fair,  Shipman was the only interviewer Deanna Durbin agreed to speak with during her retirement. There is the Orson Welles book by Peter Bogdanovich that Welles cooperated on, and then three books about John Ford, all fine. Inside Warner Bros. by Rudy Behlmer is indispensable, as is Karl Brown’s Adventures with D.W. Griffith. More from Behlmer: Selznick and then Zanuck memos, both, as with Warners, worth memorizing. The Real Tinsel, The World of Entertainment, and An Illustrated History of the Horror Film are basics (but why do I have a second copy of Kings of the B’s … afraid I’d wear the first one out?). Movie-Made America and City Boys by Robert Sklar are outstanding. W.C. Fields from James Curtis sums that subject up beautifully. Lastly to mention is Robert Ray’s A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema: 1930-1980, which probably has more highlights and underlining than any book I’ve got, except possibly What Made Pistachio Nuts? by Henry Jenkins. Greenbriar is cocktail peanuts beside these tall drinks.