BY ANDREW MOODY When I was a young teenager in the early nineties, I used to tape old movies on VHS and watch them early in the morning before school. I loved most of them, but certain titles, like Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), have stuck with me for decades. The first real example of a Hollywood movie about Hollywood, Sunset Boulevard still retains its … Continue reading Sunset Boulevard
BY ANDREW MOODY Released in 1969, the same year as the Apollo 11 moon landings, the Manson family murders, the inauguration of Richard Nixon, and the Altamont slayings, Easy Rider (prophetically for Hollywood and the wider world) opens with a cocaine deal. Cocaine had not yet taken over as the drug of choice for Hollywood stars and executives. This was one of many things that … Continue reading Easy Rider Fifty Years On
BY ANDREW MOODY Whilst browsing suggested titles on my Kindle, one book jumped out at me: The View From Babylon: Notes of a Hollywood Voyeur by the late Donald Rawley. My Kindle cost £60 and can hold more books than the Vatican Library. It knows me as a Rawley lover. Rawley was a Hollywood person, a screenwriter, poet and novelist who loved the intoxicating world … Continue reading The View from Babylon
BY ANDREW MOODY Millennial audiences see 70s movies as “old movies”, there are many that have never even heard of Chinatown, let alone obsess about how this could well be the most perfect film, above all of the masterpieces New Hollywood threw up in that decade before Star Wars mega bucks and cocaine took over the film industry. Back in the early 1970s, Hollywood was … Continue reading Chinatown
BY ANDREW MOODY Like Sleeping Beauty, Adolf Hitler wakes one morning in wasteland that used to house the Fuhrerbunker, smelling of petrol and with a splitting headache. He is impeccably dressed in his army uniform, and can’t quite understand why his final orders (total military harakiri) weren’t carried out. Soon he finds out it’s 2011 in Berlin, and, with the skill and courage only a … Continue reading Look Who’s Back
BY ANDREW MOODY Not only are Hollywood films and TV in general full of messages, most often conscious, it is the pictures that appear to be totally innocent of politics – sci fi, westerns, thrillers – that are by far the most effective delivery vehicles for political ideas precisely because they don’t seem to purvey them. Peter Biskind, to use Hollywood parlance, used to be … Continue reading The Sky is Falling
BY ANDREW MOODY Shirley Jackson had the inspiration to write a ghost story from two sources: firstly a book she was reading on Victorian psychic researchers (see John Gray’s The Immortalization Commission for a detailed critique on this dubious art) and secondly a horrifying-looking house on 125 street New York that she had nightmares about for months afterwards. Stephen King wrote in his classic assessment … Continue reading Hill House
BY ANDREW MOODY I think we are just insects, we live a bit and then die and that’s the lot. There’s no mercy in things. There’s not even a Great Beyond. There’s nothing. Frederick, an unloved, sexually awkward clerk whose hobby is butterfly collecting (with much in common with Norman Bates), falls in love with the sight of art student Miranda. After a massive win … Continue reading The Collector
BY ANDREW MOODY Michael Herr used his memoir and experiences as a war reporter to write the narration for Martin Sheen in Coppola’s masterpiece Apocalypse Now and co-wrote Kubrick’s most enduring film Full Metal Jacket with another Vietnam writer, Gustav Hasford, whose The Short Timers inspired the boot camp sequence. Herr said of Kubrick that had he not been a film director, he would have … Continue reading Dispatches
BY ANDREW MOODY On November 8th 1938, Adolf Hitler made reference to the mass hysteria caused by Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre radio production of War of the Worlds, as evidence of “the corrupt condition and decadent state of affairs in democracy”. “He hadn’t much else to say,” Welles wryly commented during a meeting with the original author HG Wells in 1940 after war had erupted … Continue reading Welles & Wells
BY ANDREW MOODY The general consensus in 2020 is that the HUAC hearings into Communist subversion that began in 1947 and saw many unfriendly witnesses (most famously what were known as ‘The Hollywood Ten’) blacklisted from the Hollywood industry were unconstitutional and fascist. Ed Harris and other notable liberals refused to applaud director and friendly witness Elia Kazan when he received his honorary Academy Award … Continue reading Hollywood Party
BY ANDREW MOODY Nearly twenty years ago, Australian cinema threw up a prison masterpiece inspired by the bestselling memoirs of legendary murderer Mark Brandon, “Chopper” Read. A terrifying, if rather charming chap, well over six feet, covered in prison tattoos and noticeably lacking in ears, Read delighted in his jailhouse celebrity well before he was a famous writer. Chopper still allegedly holds the record for … Continue reading Chopper
BY ANDREW MOODY During the second Gulf War, celebrity filmmaker Brian De Palma (a millionaire many times over) made a snuff film called Redacted, designed to sabotage the allied war effort. I call it a snuff film because it includes stolen military photographs of dead Iraqi citizens at the close. Suspiciously rated 15 in the UK, not only does the film unsuccessfully attempt to blame … Continue reading Redacted
BY ANDREW MOODY Witty, cleverly structured, argued and written, Frank Haviland’s BANALYSIS is driven by the same exasperated tone of the TV presenter in the classic 1970s movie NETWORK. “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” Once, the author hopes, just this once, the truth will finally be told about the way the world really operates. It is only easy … Continue reading Banalysis
BY JACK WIGHTMAN Since first lurking from the shadows, Vampires have endured drastic and frequent transformations. Some depictions include rebellious teens, sexy playboys, addicts, apathetic rockstars, twinkling teen heartthrobs, neighbours from hell, fodder for Lincoln, strippers, interviewees and so many more. These renditions are, for the most part, painful and draining. Nosferatu is simply the beginning. The origin of of one of movies favourite and most enduring monsters. In … Continue reading Nosferatu
For one entire month in the summer of 2014, felt artist Lucy Sparrow took over a rundown corner shop in Bethnal Green, East London, and filled it with more than 4000 hand-stitched felt replicas of everyday items that you’d ordinarily find in a local shop. Even the ice lollies in the freezer were felt lollies. The show was a huge success and visitors from all … Continue reading Lucy Sparrow: Shoplifting
