Author: Robert Greenberger

Paramount Pictures’ Centennial Collection chugs along, mining the 1950s and Audrey Hepburn again with the release on Tuesday of Funny Face. The musical, with Fred Astaire and Kay Thompson, unlike the earlier offerings in the series, has not aged well despite the loving restoration of the visuals.

Pop culture in the 1950s certainly centered on glamorous celebrities like Hepburn and the films were experimenting with visual techniques to combat the rise of television habits but sometimes their subjects were treated outlandishly.

Maggie Prescott (Thompson) is the force of nature that edits [[[Glamour]]], er, [[[Mode]]], er, [[[Quality]]] magazine.  The magazine wants to shoot on location, to lend a patina of intellectual sheen to the usually vapid model who seems more interesting in exaggerated poses than anything natural. She and top fashion photographer Dick Avery (Astaire) spontaneously decide on a “sinister” looking bookstore in Greenwich Village, hail a few cabs, and go in search. They find a dark, dusty shop with a young bookseller, Jo Stockton (Hepburn) as the sole occupant.  They storm in, take over the joint and include her in one picture then lock her out of the store since she was objecting to their disruption of the place.

Later, Avery latches on to the notion that she could be the fresh face a new campaign could be built around. He convinces her that by agreeing to model, she could be taken to Paris where she could be exposed to the great philosophical thinkers, including Prof. Emile Flostre (Michel Auclaire), who influenced the naïve girl. She accepts and is whisked to Paris where she at first indulges her intellect then gives in to her beauty.  The rest of the film chronicles her struggle to find herself as she straddles two worlds, neither very well.

Adapted from the 1927 stage musical, the update retained but four songs, two of which are memorable standards.  The rest are entirely forgettable including the signature opener, “Think Pink”.

As a story, it mocks the Beat Generation on two continents and treats Flostre as a great thinker, but his mind appears to be on one subject which is getting in to Hepburn’s pants. The rest of the script is breathless but you keep stopping to wonder about the absurdity of booking everyone into separate hotels or no one giving Stockton a schedule so she would know what was expected from her. Also, Stockton seems to suddenly give up on her interest in philosophy in favor of being a famous model when she could do both, it never had to be an either/or situation.

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Watching the Watchmen
Dave Gibbons
Titan Books, $39.95In January 1985, DC Comics sent me to England to begin meeting with the talent working across the pond, reminding them of our needs and working environment.  Dick Giordano and Joe Orlando had been out a few years prior so this was like a booster shot, a tangible sign we loved them and wanted to keep working with them. Titan Books’ Nick Landau helped me organize two group dinners with the rising stars working for [[[2000 AD]]] and [[[Warrior]]] and it was first introduction to them all.

Apart from that, though, was an afternoon session with Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.  Alan’s work with [[[Swamp Thing]]] had already proven captivating and I was an instant fan.  Dave’s work was newer to me but I immediately liked his style.  Interestingly, Dave’s first issue as penciller of [[[Green Lantern]]] and Alan’s first issue as writer of [[[Saga of the Swamp Thing]]] were both cover dated January 1984, just months before I joined DC in the actual January 1984 so I had a year to know their work before meeting.

Both were brimming with enthusiasm for [[[The Watchmen]]], the project they were just getting started on and I had heard about in the hallways. We spent the afternoon sipping tea at the Tower Hotel as Dave pulled out pages of drawings and sketches while Alan talked through the themes of the series. If Dave’s chronology in [[[Watching the Watchmen]]] is correct, our meeting was weeks before the first script was delivered. By then, though, they already had the tag line “Who Watches the Watchmen?” and the bloody smiley face design.

This was going to be a sophisticated story, the like of which was just beginning to find a place amidst the more traditional good versus evil stories that filled the racks. That translated to cover design and even the gents’ notions of how to market the book.  Dave showed off designs for cocktail napkins and coasters that they’d imagine DC printing up to entice college kids and adults to be made aware there was something new to read.

Sadly, those marketing designs seem to have vanished but most of Dave’s other designs, sketches, notes, annotated scripts and paraphernalia was retained.  The result is this handsomely designed book that enhances your enjoyment of the graphic novel and keeps you enticed until the feature film finally arrives in March.

Gibbons writes honestly about the creative process, nicely explaining how things were done back then compared with today.  His recollections are vivid and explain much of what went into the process of conceiving something entirely new rather than rehashing the Charlton heroes (truth be told: I was the one to commission Dave to draw the characters for the aborted [[[Comics Cavalcade Weekly]]] for that very reason). Some of his personal thoughts about favorite characters, scenes, and moments would have been icing on a rich, delicious cake.

Chip Kidd’s design lets the work breathe and makes certain you can see the detail in the thumbnails or color guides.  He takes Dave’s traditional comic book approach to storytelling and enhances it with size and scope. My only quibble is that he lets thumbnails run in the gutters and spoils some of the clarity.  Also, it’d be nice to have seen more of Alan’s scripts and Dave’s notes to better understand the process.

Overall, the big is a huge visual treat and one of the few in-depth looks into the creative process behind any single title.  It’s really the first Making Of book for a comic book that I can recall and there’s no better series than The Watchmen to get the in-depth examination.

Every year, the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry names 25 films for historic preservation.  This year’s list was announced yesterday and we applaud the inclusion of several genre offerings including The Invisible Man and the first Terminator film.  The Perils of Pauline, the first movie serial, makes the list and is seminal for the way it influenced moviemakers and storytellers, notably comic book writers, ever since.

Here’s a look at this year’s list:

The Asphalt Jungle (1950)
John Huston’s brilliant crime drama contains the recipe for a meticulously planned robbery, but the cast of criminal characters features one too many bad apples. Sam Jaffe, as the twisted mastermind, uses cash from corrupt attorney Emmerich (Louis Calhern) to assemble a group of skilled thugs to pull off a jewel heist. All goes as planned — until an alert night watchman and a corrupt cop enter the picture. Marilyn Monroe has a memorable bit part as Emmerich’s "niece."

Deliverance (1972)
Four Atlanta professionals (Burt Reynolds, Ned Beatty, Ronnie Cox and Jon Voight) head for a weekend canoe trip — and instead meet up with two of the more memorable villains in film history (Billy McKinney and Herbert Coward) in this gripping Appalachian "Heart of Darkness." With dazzling visual flair, director John Boorman and cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond infuse James Dickey’s novel with scenes of genuine terror and frantic struggles for survival battling river rapids — and in the process create a work rich with fascinating ambiguities about "civilized" values, urban-versus-backwoods culture, nature, and man’s supposed taming of the environment.

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