Alexander Payne (and Kurt Whats His Name), traveling through Nebraska. And they stop in Seward! And they go to the Rivoli! That was my Yale and Harvard. If you spend 30 hours with a movie director, you end up talking a lot about movies. A couple of times he makes Hollywood phone calls, like when he decides a certain best-selling book he’s passed on adapting might make a good film after all. He dials his assistant, asking her to buy it on Amazon — a used copy, he tells her twice. (Frugality: very Nebraskan.) But mostly the movie talk concerns other people’s films. Driving through Seward (population 6,964), we pass the Rivoli Theatre, where “Blue Jasmine” and “The Grandmaster” are playing. “They’re showing Woody Allen and Wong Kar-wai in Seward, Nebraska! Hip little town.” Out in Ogallala (population 4,737) a decade ago, he recalls, “I met a guy who remembered Coppola shooting ‘Rain People’ there in 1968!” Again and again he thinks of some decades-old obscurity he wants me to see — “Make Way for Tomorrow,” “The Naked Spur,” “The Bad and the Beautiful” (“the best Hollywood picture ever”), Japanese silent films from the sound era, Czechoslovak New Wave films printed on East German Orwo stock “that look sort of psychedelic.”
Posted on: Sat, 16 Nov 2013 20:14:14 +0000
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