Movie thoughts and fiction updates.
This is evidence, I think, of my assertion that the early Best Picture awards were for expensive productions that made a lot of money at the box office, not awards for artistic merit. These were awards for producers (they still technically are), and producers were concerned with keeping down costs and maximizing ticket sales, and… Continue reading The Broadway Melody of 1929
The winner of the first Academy Award for Best Production (the award that, the next year, became Best Picture), William Wellman's Wings is a grand, epic, World War I adventure that operates on simple terms and flies high in that limited space, using a giant canvas to tell a tale of friendship in the face… Continue reading Wings
It really is amazing to think of how far cinema receded with the introduction of sound. By 1928, filmmakers like Murnau, Hitchcock, Ford, von Stroheim, Lang, and Dreyer were doing really interesting things with their cameras in terms of moving them, swinging them around, really embracing montage as a storytelling device, and doing really complicated… Continue reading Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans
Okay, so this requires a small bit of explanation. Erich von Stroheim was hired to write and direct a film for Gloria Swanson (acting as both star and producer), and Stroheim's tendency towards sadism eventually just angered Swanson enough that she had him fired from the production. Not wanting to waste any more money or… Continue reading Queen Kelly
Leaving MGM (and Irving Thalberg) behind and joining Paramount, Erich von Stroheim worked with his co-writer Harry Carr to come up with a tale set in Stroheim's native Vienna, a tale as large and expansive as anything he had told. The production ran on for nine months after having essentially recreated a large section of… Continue reading The Wedding March
David Vining, Author 