CineSavant Column
Hello! Fall is finally here, and this underprivileged Californian has to wear socks and shoes again — where’s the justice? Where’s The Endless Summer I was promised?
Onward to the links of the day. David J. Schow hits us a good one right off the top – – a YouTube link by ‘Cinema Massacre’ called Thinking 4th Dimensionally at Bronson Cave. The first thing to do is skip the first 2.5 minutes, much of which is an annoying ad.
From that point forward the 18-minute piece is gold. Filmed after Bronson Caverns was sealed off with stupid fences, the film includes scenes of the excavation that created the quarry. We then see what must be hundreds of film clips using the quarry and the caves. I’m still proud of CineSavant’s article on the Caverns, but this piece shows the location to be more ubiquitous than even we knew.
The show is one long special effect, showing exactly the angles used in dozens of movies. It’s good, and very accurate. Curiously, the host leaves out one of the East entrances to the caves. Has it been filled in?
And we definitely enjoyed running once again into Aaron W. Graham’s 2005 Senses of Cinema article Little Shop of Genres: An interview with Charles B. Griffith, about Roger Corman’s most creative, funniest screenwriter.
Griffith had the sense of humor that Corman loved but couldn’t self-generate; his early films are some of the hippest of the late 1950s. We hear about his background and mostly his work for Corman, but he did other things as well. The anecdotes are often telling, offering alternate perceptions of people like Bruno VeSota.
We believe Griffith’s testimony when he admits things like being punched out by Lawrence Tierney. He doesn’t say what provoked Tierney, or was any provocation really necessary? Griffith finishes with a description of the screwy finale he wrote for Barbarella, that was discarded in editorial.
Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson