I am very happy that one of my favorite book series is back in print, Sydney Taylor’s warm, funny All of a Kind Family stories about a turn-of-the-last century Jewish family in New York, inspired by Taylor’s own family. The title comes from the children — all girls, at least until a brother finally arrives later on in the series.
Born in 1904 on New York’s Lower East Side, Sydney Taylor was one of the first authors of children’s books centered on Jewish characters, and is especially known for the immensely popular All-of-a-Kind Family series. The Sydney Taylor Book Award is given each year by the Jewish Association of Libraries to a book for young people that authentically portrays the Jewish experience. Many thanks to Lizzie Skurnick Books for making this outstanding series available.
In honor of the 40th anniversary of Peter Benchley’s Jaws, the book that inspired the first big summer blockbuster movie, Oxford University’s blog has a great tribute by Kirk Curnutt, focusing on the novel, now almost, well, swallowed up in public consciousness by the behemoth of a movie from Steven Spielberg, then still in his 20’s.
The novel that scared a generation out of the ocean and inspired everything from Shark Week to Sharknado recently turned forty. Commemorations of Peter Benchley’s Jaws have been as rare as megalodon sightings, however. Ballantine has released a new paperback edition featuring an amusing list of the author’s potential titles (The Grinning Fish, Pisces Redux), and in February an LA fundraiser for Shark Savers/Wildaid performed excerpts promising “an evening of relentless terror (and really awkward sex).” Otherwise, silence.
The reason is obvious. Steven Spielberg’s 1975 adaptation is so totemic that the novel is considered glorified source material, despite selling twenty-million copies. Rare is the commentator who doesn’t harp on its faults, and rarer still the fan who defends it. Critics dismiss the book as “airport literature,” while genre lovers complain it lacks “virtually every single thing that makes the movie great.” Negative perceptions arguably begin with Spielberg himself. Amid the legendary production problems that plagued the making of the movie—pneumatic sharks that didn’t work, uncooperative ocean conditions that tripled the shooting schedule—the director managed to suggest that his biggest obstacle was Benchley’s original narrative: “If we don’t succeed in making this picture better than the book,” he said, “we’re in real trouble.”
It is good to see an argument made for the book, though Curnutt is frank that it is more an artifact of its era than the movie, which still feels timeless. But it had its power, at least for the then-10-year-old Curnutt.
Maybe it’s because my friends and I had great fun sneaking ketchup packets into the pool to reenact it, but Shaw’s blood-belching final close-up never haunted me as much as the novel’s Ahab-inspired image of Quint dragged to a watery grave snared in his own harpoon line. Hooper’s fate is even more macabre. As the ichthyologist is turned into a human toothpick Brody attempts an ill-conceived rescue by strafing the water with rifle fire. He manages to miss the shark completely yet land a bullet in Hooper’s neck. Long before reading Melville, I intuited that this was how a naturalistic universe mocked humanity.
By the way, author Benchley was the grandson of 30’s humorist Robert Benchley, noted wit (and an Oscar winner for one of his series of short films). And he was the son of Nathaniel Benchley, also a writer, whose book was the basis for another story set at the shore, the hilarious comedy The Russians Are Coming, The Russians are Coming.
Myers speaks very personally, about the impact on him as a child who loved books but sought in vain to find some semblance of the world he knew in them.
I needed more than the characters in the Bible to identify with, or even the characters in Arthur Miller’s plays or my beloved Balzac. As I discovered who I was, a black teenager in a white-dominated world, I saw that these characters, these lives, were not mine. I didn’t want to become the “black” representative, or some shining example of diversity. What I wanted, needed really, was to become an integral and valued part of the mosaic that I saw around me.
Books did not become my enemies. They were more like friends with whom I no longer felt comfortable. I stopped reading. I stopped going to school. On my 17th birthday, I joined the Army. In retrospect I see that I had lost the potential person I would become — an odd idea that I could not have articulated at the time, but that seems so clear today.
And he makes it clear that it is just as important for children to read about characters of other races as it is to read about their own.
Books transmit values. They explore our common humanity. What is the message when some children are not represented in those books? Where are the future white personnel managers going to get their ideas of people of color? Where are the future white loan officers and future white politicians going to get their knowledge of people of color? Where are black children going to get a sense of who they are and what they can be?
I promise now that the newspaper and this website will not be reviewing any book which is explicitly aimed at just girls, or just boys. Nor will The Independent’s books section. And nor will the children’s books blog at Independent.co.uk. Any Girls’ Book of Boring Princesses that crosses my desk will go straight into the recycling pile along with every Great Big Book of Snot for Boys. If you are a publisher with enough faith in your new book that you think it will appeal to all children, we’ll be very happy to hear from you. But the next Harry Potter or Katniss Everdeen will not come in glittery pink covers. So we’d thank you not to send us such books at all.
As Myers said, books give us an idea of who we are and what we can be. They also teach us empathy for others. They can do this best when they reflect the world as it is, made up of people with many differences and many connections.
Buzzfeed has a list of 16 movies coming out in 2014 that are based on books, including two crime novels by Gillian Flynn. Gone Girl is the story of a beautiful young woman (Rosamund Pike) who disappears on her wedding anniversary, with her husband (Ben Affleck) first seen as devoted and distraught but then beginning to look like a suspect. In Dark Places, a woman who survived a terrible crime as a young girl (Charlize Theron) is paid by an oddball group of murder fans to return home and find out more about what happened. Flynn says she’s changing the end of “Gone Girl” in the movie version — probably a wise choice. YA classic The Giver, by Lois Lowry, is the story of a dystopic future, starring Meryl Streep, Jeff Bridges, and Taylor Swift. More recent YA favorites The Fault in Our Stars and Divergent will both star Shailene Woodley.
Interview: James Udel Takes Us Behind the Scenes in The Film Crew of Hollywood
Posted on January 13, 2014 at 3:59 pm
James Udel is the author of a magnificent new book, The Film Crew of Hollywood: Profiles of Grips, Cinematographers, Designers, a Gaffer, a Stuntman and a Makeup Artist. He goes behind the scenes, interviewing ten people who created movie magic from 1950-85 in films starring everyone from Steve McQueen and Jerry Lewis to Tom Hanks and Roman Polanski. This book provides a celebratory back story to the production of classic films such as “Little Big Man,” “Chinatown,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “King Kong,” “The Searchers,” “Bullitt,” “Catch-22,” and “The Hustler.” I was thrilled to get a chance to talk to him about the unsung heroes who do not care about credit or fame — their only concern is telling the story.
I love to hear about the crew — these are people with extraordinary talent, artistry, and skill. But what impresses me most about them is their passion for solving problems.
These people are largely unsung, unappreciated, unless they get to the head of their department.
If they do everything perfectly, nobody notices because they’re paying attention to what the characters are doing. If they make one mistake, though, everybody is distracted by it.
There isn’t a single craft that I can say, on the movie set or a TV show, that I don’t have some interest in or some desire to know a little bit more about. If you’ve ever been in a room with ten other individuals and tried to work in a committee to get anything done, we all know what that requires. Now imagine multiplying that and you now have 100 people, plus actors, in a room, and we’re all going to work on the same idea of making Tom Hanks look great and let him do his thing and walk 12 feet, say 32 words, and then we’re going to cut. For three and a half minutes, 100 people are absolutely focused, every ounce of their body, on making that shot as good as they possibly can. And that’s what we do, over and over and over and over again, all day long, until the hours add up to days and the days to weeks and weeks to months and months to years.
Tell me how this book came about.
I was working on a movie called “Being John Malkovich” in 1997, and really cutting to the chase, I was hurt at that time. I had some soul-searching to do, because I still really needed to be involved, as I do now, with making movies. Some friends of mine suggested I go out to the Motion Picture Home, and I did, and I fell in love with all these great old folks out there, the original people who did those movies from 1950 on. Started to think, “This stuff’s golden; I’d really like to write this for somebody or get this idea out there.”
After a documentary was kind of shuffled to the side, I started writing a column for Below the Line Magazine under the banner of “Footnotes,” which I’d pitched to them. That was doing interviews with some of the original grips that I worked with from my union, and then from other unions around town, different crafts, and then putting those stories into a human form so I could tell people just how much of an individual’s life was given to making motion pictures, and how much of their early life lent itself to being able to do this. There’s always a formula to it. It’s really interesting how no matter what somebody does, by the time they get to L.A. or movie making, they have all these skills that come together to make it happen.
One of your interviews was about the Steve McQueen movie, “Le Mans.”
I interviewed a man named Gaylin P. Schultz, who was a key grip extraordinaire, and he worked for the Mirisch Brothers, going back a ways. They came to him and said they’re going to do this movie “Le Mans.” It was Steve McQueen’s baby, and he wanted to be seen doing his own driving at excessive speeds, with no stunt doubles for the most part. They wanted to actually film this race with a major movie star in it. Now, this had never been done before. The French Racing Commission at first said, “No, no, you’re not getting anywhere near this thing.”
But Steve McQueen and a bunch of other people prevailed, and they actually let Gaylin Schultz become part of the pit crew, and he designed specialized cameras and rigs that could literally float the camera one inch off the ground at 170 miles an hour. He devised camera mounts that could put the camera inside of the racecars with Steve McQueen, so that there was no denying that this was the guy driving the car. Every bolt had to be safetied, every nut had to be countersunk. Literally, Gaylin put on a suit and worked as part of the pit crew, and instead of changing the film magazines out, they swapped out entire cameras with quick release bolts and a pneumatic gun. So it looked exactly like everybody else, what they were doing when you see a race car being worked on, except that he was swapping cameras out.
Gaylin, being a genius of a mechanical engineer, had to work with the racecar drivers to get the balance of these rigs specifically lined up so that they wouldn’t create vehicles that couldn’t be controlled. At first, he told me the guys were a little bit leery of him because he had these extended camera mounts that were six feet off of some of the cars. Some of the drivers really dug him and they trusted him, and once they saw this stuff go around the track a few times and none of the bolts fell off, they started to trust him.
Steve McQueen was always the magic quotient to when you’re getting a film like this made. If you can look at it today and think of who else out there could get a movie like this made today, it would have to be somebody huge, like Tom Cruise or somebody like that.
I’m sure that Steve McQueen had some credibility with the drivers because he really knew something about driving.
Absolutely. Everybody understood that McQueen was this guy. And interestingly enough, Gaylin met Steve McQueen while doing “The Thomas Crown Affair.” Another incredible film, right? Gaylin was putting a rig on a very rare Ferrari, and McQueen was behind him, watching him, and he didn’t know it, watching him work – and he was working delicately, trying not to leave a single mark on the car, which he did. At the end of him putting this camera on the car, McQueen looked at him and said, “My goodness, man. You’re an artist, Gaylin. Here, I’m Steve McQueen.” And a friendship was started that from there on out.
Sometimes the crew has to have courage to disagree with the director or producer, don’t they?
In a creative situation, as you know, there’s always discussions. You can call them disagreements, but depending upon how you state your point, other people may or may not listen to you. Daniel C. Striepeke, who was a makeup guy that I interviewed, was working on a mustache for Robert Redford. That was going to be very specific. The director had an idea of what he wanted, and Striepeke and the other guys had an idea of what they wanted, and ultimately, when he grew the mustache and they did the tests, they decided upon it, and Redford decided upon which mustache they were going to use. It was a big deal. Three weeks after the movie came out, Striepeke is walking down Sunset Strip, and almost every guy has a Robert Redford mustache. So he calls the director up and said, “Hey, by the way, old boy, I hate to tell you, but have you stuck your head out the window today?” That was an argument that was absolutely won, pitched and won, and then later reinforced.
What surprised you the most in doing those interviews?
What surprised me the most is how connected every one of these 10 people were. And I picked icons. If you go down the list, these men were all at the top of their game when they played. What I was surprised about was the depth of concentrated life experience that went into making the skill level of each of these folks that came into the mix. If you look at a guy like Carl Manoogian, who was Jerry Lewis’s right hand man, Carl, Lewis and most of these people came out of World War II. They were the greatest generation of filmmakers, and they were the folks that won the war. So when they came back stateside, they were looking for occupations, and they weren’t scared of anything because they had already faced the Depression and World War II. So Hollywood didn’t frighten them very much.
You look at a guy like Carl Manoogian, he was the right hand men of Jerry Lewis, doing movies like “Cinderfella,” “Who’s Minding the Store?,” “Nutty Professor,” you name it, and Jerry wouldn’t do a movie without him. And what was surprising is that movie stars and directors and people who are really, really good at what they do making movies always latch onto these amazing icon crew members, and they all have a home of their own, either with a group of directors or an actor or two. They nurture this relationship, and it’s a trusting relationship that nobody out there knows about. It’s a trust relationship with those actresses and actors that it’s far beyond anything most people would understand.
Gene LeBell, for instance, he was raised at the Olympic Auditorium. His father was a famous surgeon in Hollywood in the 1930s, died of a broken neck of a freak accident while on the beach. Gene was from a very wealthy family, and then his mother had to send him to California Military School. So Gene LeBell, who missed his dad horribly – he was the love of his life – was crying a lot when he first got there, and a couple of bullies picked on him. The first thing he did was he wrestled one of them to the ground and put him on a headlock and choked him out. Gene was only six when it happened. And he became a world famous wrestler – and he’s the nicest man you’ve ever met in the world. He doesn’t have a violent bone in his body for real. But this was something that happened to him; he went to hide in the stables after getting in trouble for fighting with the bullies, and an old Cossack who was in charge of the horses took pity on him and taught him how to ride bareback. Twenty years later, he gets a job riding bareback in the movies. That kind of stuff. When he was 12, his mother asked him to change the bulbs at the Olympic Auditorium because the regular maintenance guy hadn’t come in, so Gene was up climbing 50 feet up on these catwalks, changing lights out. He said it made him feel like a grownup, to be able to help his mom.
I think if there’s anything that you can derive from each of these interviews, it’s a level of passion for the art and craft that is undeniable.
, the book that inspired the first big summer blockbuster movie, 
.
, former Library of Congress National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, wrote about a troubling issue in the New York Times: the 
is the story of a beautiful young woman (Rosamund Pike) who disappears on her wedding anniversary, with her husband (Ben Affleck) first seen as devoted and distraught but then beginning to look like a suspect. In 
, a woman who survived a terrible crime as a young girl (Charlize Theron) is paid by an oddball group of murder fans to return home and find out more about what happened. Flynn says she’s changing the end of “Gone Girl” in the movie version — probably a wise choice. YA classic 
, by Lois Lowry, is the story of a dystopic future, starring Meryl Streep, Jeff Bridges, and Taylor Swift. More recent YA favorites 
and 
will both star Shailene Woodley.
(with Jason Bateman) and 
(with Pierce Brosnan and, again, Rosamund Pike). There will be a book club favorite (
with Helen Mirren) and big prestige prizewinners about real-life journeys (
, directed by Angelina Jolie, and 
, starring Reese Witherspoon). Time to get to the library!
. He goes behind the scenes, interviewing ten people who created movie magic from 1950-85 in films starring everyone from Steve McQueen and Jerry Lewis to Tom Hanks and Roman Polanski. This book provides a celebratory back story to the production of classic films such as “Little Big Man,” “Chinatown,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “King Kong,” “The Searchers,” “Bullitt,” “Catch-22,” and “The Hustler.” I was thrilled to get a chance to talk to him about the unsung heroes who do not care about credit or fame — their only concern is telling the story.