Creative Camerawork

Larry Hagman was often asked for autographs by his fans but, unlike other stars, he would always ask the person to either sing him a song or tell him a joke in exchange of this signature. He explained that he was “getting something back” from the autograph seekers. (He eventually stopped the joke-telling custom because fans kept coming up with off-color jokes.

Shelly Manne’s definition of jazz musicians: “We never play anything the same way once.”

Bill Murray: “One of my habits is I don’t do exactly what you want me to do.”

“Gilda showed up and she’d already had cancer and gone into remission and then had it again, I guess. We hadn’t seen her in a long time. And she started doing, ‘I’ve got to go,’ and she was just going to leave… It felt like she was going to really leave forever. So we started carrying her around, in a way that we could only do with her. We just kept carrying her; we did it in teams… upside down, every which way — over your shoulder and under your arm, carrying her like luggage… We worked all aspects of it, but it started with just, ‘She’s leaving, I don’t know if you’ve said good-bye to her.’ And we said good-bye to the same people ten, twenty times, you know. And because these people were really funny, every person we’d drag her up to would just do like five minutes on her, with Gilda upside down in this sort of tortured position, which she absolutely loved. She was laughing so hard we could have lost her right then and there.”

2012/12/02
Categories: Parallels . . Author: mrdplus . Comments: Leave a comment

“I was born into a family of farmers. Farmers don’t talk very much, the ones that I’ve known, anyhow. They sit around the table, have dinner, and very little is said. That doesn’t mean that they are not thinking, but they are thinking in other terms. They are not thinking in the conventional word terms. They are thinking in terms of the essence of things—what a tomato looks like, what is the texture of a peach, what a horse can do in terms of power, what the sun feels like, or what the quality of moonlight is. They are thinking in these terms, I think, more than they are in the terms of words and the social implications of words… I think that is a wonderful and fortunate beginning for a person who is going to become a composer. This is because music is not a word language but a time-space language… It’s a matter of subjective identification and transference.”

“I don’t think one really decides to be a composer; it sort of happens… I got into music, I suppose, because I was drawn into it, and I think probably this is the only real way to do it. I think life has to draw you into things. I don’t think you make decisions about things.”

“The temper of the family has to be fairly even. If people are having tantrum fits, squalls, and all that sort of thing, then the creative work just goes down the drain because it doesn’t work. It requires a certain serenity and a certain kind of happiness… When I’m working very hard, I want somebody around who is very simple, very direct, very earthy, very matter of fact—like a peasant. But when I’ve finished work and I want to play, then I like somebody who is a sophisticate, who has been all over and knows many things, who is a fine conversationalist and is amusing, and who likes good food and all the arts, and all the fine values. I find that when I’m working very hard, my values are rather coarse in the sense that farmer’s would be—not coarse in a moral sense, but coarse-grained, rather. The people that I prefer to be with are people whom I can count on, people who are rather solid, not very full of subtleties. There is nothing that annoys me so much as subtlety when I’m profoundly interested in something else.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zq67ZBdC558

2012/11/27
Categories: Parallels . . Author: mrdplus . Comments: Leave a comment