Hollywood jobs (NPR!)

Making breakfast this morning, I heard the latest installment of NPR's pre-Oscars spotlight on Hollywood jobs... this time, the role of the publicist (focusing on Steven Spielberg's publicist for 35+ years, Marvin Levy.  Even after listening for a few minutes, you can gain insight into how Spielberg is "Spielberg" in our collective consciousness.

Earlier this week, the focus was on the set decorator.  Going online, you can see that this is a series which Susan Stamburg has been building upon for several years, with pieces on jobs ranging from sounds effects to animal trainers to projectionists.

With the Academy Awards coming up this weekend (Psst!  Amour will take best foreign-language film!    Take it to the bank!), this is a great chance to go "behind the curtain" and hear about all those jobs you see as the credits roll (if you're groovy enough to stick around and watch them).  I got your best boy right here! 

For a menu of the Stamberg's entire series, click here to visit the NPR archive.  You can also subscribe to the podcast and download pieces to your mobile devices of choice!  And with that, it's time to go for a run...

re:booting (now with hulu+!!!)

After too long a layoff, it's time to dust off the blog and get to some writing.  The excuse, of course, is teaching a topics course on Television Studies (COMM 399) and the Film History (COMM 310) class, plus a few folks doing Global Cinema (COMM 371) with me independently.  All those classes have to blog too... So it's only fair I get back on the horse myself.

My goal is to offer up a post relevant to each of these classes per week.  Three posts a week this semester?!  Given my track record, that's a nice idea, but... We'll see.  The idea, of course, is to use this as something of a mental stretching exercise for other writing projects (ahem!)...

To jump-start things, I've made the leap to hulu+, and am really pleased with my initial results.  Streamed Night and Fog (1955), w/ an article tied to it in the latest Cineaste (a review of two new books) & an upcoming presentation in the topics class on The Holocaust and Film (COMM 399).  The opening shot / sequence of the film is going to be my object lesson to talk about film form and style (plot and story, framing / tracking) ...



I'm also well into a Swedish silent film directed by Victor Sjöström, The Phantom Carriage (1921), which shows up in the "alternatives to Hollywood silents" chapter in Gomery's textbook.  Love the beautiful use of double exposure, as you can see in this clip:


Both films are part of the Criterion Collection--one of the big draws for me personally going to hulu+ was the ability to readily access this back-catalogue.  Ideal for Film History courses, no doubt.

So: so far so good.  Now if I just had enough time to dive into Downton Abbey (2010- )...