Looker

Read 'Em and Weep

I've been seeing posters for Shoot 'Em Up in the subway every day lately—Clive Owen's sultry scowl! Paul Giamatti's ginormous rifle! Monica Bellucci's waxy cleavage!—and though the movie looks kinda fun, the editor in me is outraged by the ad campaign's lax punctuation:

Fortunately, I'm not alone. This guy in L.A. is even angrier.

As a public service, here are two posters showing that Hollywood was once willing to render "'Em" in actual English—with an apostrophe rather than an opening single quotation mark. New Line, take note.

It's All True

I never tire of Orson Welles minutiae, so I was happy to stumble upon the following. In Lost Property, Ben Sonnenberg's chronicle of his dissolute youth (he eventually cleaned up his act and started the literary journal Grand Street), he tells of going out with Kenneth Tynan in Málaga in 1961:

That night at La Consula we spoke to Orson Welles and his wife, Paola Mori. Ken was telling Orson that he admired Alain Resnais' L'Année Dernière à Marienbad. "Then you are a cunt," Orson said to him. I was flirting with Paola Mori. She was beautiful and young, she told me that Orson often left her alone with their little daughter, Beatrice, and with Becky, Orson's daughter by Rita Hayworth. Ken was saying that he admired L'Année Dernière because of Orson's own films. "Then you are even more of a cunt," Orson said.

Don't bother looking for Tynan's version in his diaries; they start in 1971.

The Kid from Brooklyn

A few months ago, for an assignment, I read a very funny book called How To Make a Jewish Movie, by Melville Shavelson. Long out of print, it describes Shavelson's misadventures while shooting Cast a Giant Shadow in Israel in the mid-'60s with Kirk Douglas, Yul Brynner, Frank Sinatra, and a thousand unruly extras. A great thing about the book is that Shavelson—who also spent decades writing for Bob Hope, and eventually directed everyone from Danny Kaye and Lucille Ball to Cary Grant, Sophia Loren, and Paul Newman—was clearly a mensch, an all-around nice guy who didn't let success (hits, Oscar nominations, being buddy-buddy with John Wayne) go to his head. He proved it in his gracious responses to my e-mails. In April, a few weeks after his ninetieth birthday, he published a cheekily titled memoir, and last week, I'm sorry to say, he died.

A line from one of his e-mails that I wound up quoting was "My old friend Julius Epstein, co-writer of Casablanca, always said the Academy should stop restoring old negatives and start destroying a few. Cast A Giant Shadow might be a candidate." Here's a line I didn't quote: "Too much time is now spent viewing and discussing film. Life itself is much more important." Maybe if I'm lucky enough to reach ninety I'll think that, too.

Terror Train

Yesterday Gawker posted the trailer for Wes Anderson's new movie, The Darjeeling Limited, declaring in their famously injurious deadpan, "Wes is really taking things in a new direction this time." But they goofed and called it The Darjeeling Express. A commenter upped the ante: "Murder on the Darjeeling Express, in which Anderson's precious characters get offed one by one, is a film I could get behind."

I second that.