Detective Works

Saw this tweet and immediately wondered if I could use the newspaper Paul Newman is reading to identify the date the photograph was taken^†. Turns out, yeah, I could.

I looked at the headline on the upper left of Newman's paper, and I was able to make out most of the words: "JOHNSON... RESERVE CALL-UP TO ASSIST SAIGON"^‡. And there it was, the top result: July 14, 1965.

To put a bow on the find: inside that link was a photo/reproduction of the exact front page Newman is holding in the original image, with that article highlighted.

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A further bit of fun:

The guy getting Newman's hair correct is Jay Sebring.

I figured I could use that information (Newman and Sebring working together) to confirm that the photograph was indeed taken during the filming of Harper (1966; penned by none other than William Goldman). Turns out, no, I couldn't. And the reason I couldn't is Sebring wasn't credited as working on that movie. Or, for that matter, on any Paul Newman joint, on Bastille Day, 1965, or any other.

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The moral of the story: Sometimes searching pays off. Sometimes it results in an interesting whiff.

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† The likely date, that is – there remains the bizarre off-chance that dude was reading an earlier day's paper.

‡ The ellipsis elides "weighing" which was too tricky to make out and was, fortunately, unneeded.

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A Recommendation and a Laugh

I have a second job helping people online. Recently, we had a chance to converse with some of the people for a bit of time, and I sent many messages back and forth with another movie buff. She recommended Polanski’s 1966 movie Cul-de-sac, so I watched it. It’s stunningly good; Hitchcock meets Peckinpah, in a rural French farmhouse. Anyway, it includes this, which continues to chuckle me:

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Organization Fun (Part 1)

If your work closed for about three weeks it gives you a shit-ton time to do stuff. If, like me, you have more than a decade of photos (more about that later) and movies to organize, hey, you should get to them.

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First, movies:

Back when iTunes sucked more and did absolutely everything for all kinds of crufty, everything’s-an-iPod-right? reasons, it functioned differently in really only one way that matters to me: the way it displayed movies.

How it usta was

I’m fundamentally bothered by disorganization and I’m a movie buff and I’ve always collected (hoarded) movies (VHS → DVD → digital copies). Remember Delicious Library? I bought it a decade ago just so I could organize my books and DVDs virtually, too….

Because iTunes would allow one-sheet style cover images, I would modify the data of each of my movies by finding and including posters (or, in worst cases, something similar – DVD art, lobby card scans, whatever else). This made iTunes display my collection in a way that looked, A, amazing, and, 2, like something from a well-stocked movie house – rather than a collection of random thumbnails of random sizes uglily displayed in a way that was surprisingly difficult to browse.

Sadly, it no longer does this.

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All horizontal and shit

As with the TV layout, iTunes now displays everything – or at least TV and movies – inexplicably sideways. This means, anything not downloaded from the iTunes Store just shows up with any random thumbnail from the show/movie. This is ridiculous. And none of the art I added is worth a bucket of piss in hell or whatever that saying is.

They don't want it to be like it is but it do

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That said (complained about), looking for interesting posters each time I added a movie to my collection did get to be tiresome. Turns out, for a lot of movies, there just aren’t good posters. For a while, I considered mending this by creating a Penguin Books-style template that I could fill in any way I pleased (maybe with pointillized stills from each movie, etc.). But, as I’m not a graphic designer, I never had any idea as to what this would look like. And I never wanted to start it before figuring that out, because having it change over time would annoy me. (The Criterion Collection did this a couple times back in their DVD-release days and I could never get beyond the cases not all matching on my shelves.)

But sometimes fate – in the form of software updates – forces one’s hands. And that’s what happened with the new TV app’s appearance and iTunes’ dissolution. Confronted with the entirely new display-style, and the slate having been wiped clean, I had to find a solution, because those thumbnails just aren’t gonna fly at all.

So this is what I came up with:

Solutioned

That’s 200-point Futura Bold, where size allows – and the largest possible size where it doesn’t. The colors are vaguely reflective of the movies where I could think of a way to reflect some aspect of the movies – the orange and black of Harley Davidson’s logo; the blue-and-gray/silver of the police. And different shades of black, white, and/or gray for movies in black and white.

This accomplishes two additional somethings: There’s a bug when scrolling the Library view where the titles sometimes don’t appear. That bug can live as long as it likes; my solution covers it. And, because I’m using grayscale for black-and-white movies, it’s much easier to scan for them or to ignore them when scanning for something in color.

So there you go – some productivity. Takes less time than looking for posters. I can make and exportefive to ten of them in just a few minutes. And if I want to change them, it’s basically just minor adjustments to a few layers in Photoshop. (I probably should’ve used Illustrator….)

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I started this organization and post back when my company was closed for three weeks (originally planned for just two, before a third week was added). It was then open for two weeks, minus weekends which were inexplicably closed. And now I’m a week into a month-long closure. So, yeah – I’ve taken my time finishing this post. I’m about halfway through with the task itself.

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Movies, great and small.

Lately, I’ve been rewatching some great movies (Dog Day Afternoon, Three Days of the Condor, Hannah and Her Sisters, Kind Hearts and Coronets, Brief Encounter). And, incidentally, the occasional not-so-great ones (Serpico). Below is a screen-grab of the title card from Yasujiro Ozu’s marvelous and under-praised Munekata Sisters (宗方姉妹, 1950), the latest movie I rewatched.

View fullsize

The story follows two sisters not connected to each other so much as orbiting a common center of gravity - a man named Hiroshi. Setsuko, the elder sister, and Hiroshi were once in love, but never married. Today, Mariko loves him - but she denies her own love attempting to reunite him with Setsuko. (In this way, the sisters’ situations mirror each other, but only vaguely.)

The movie plays as a comedy interwoven with deep sadness (this is an Ozu picture, after all). (Or maybe it’s the other way around: the first time I watched it, I found the movie much funnier than I did this time.) Mariko, Hideko Takamine, brings lightness and humor to the film, offsetting her older sister’s destruction. She’s lively and young, sticking her tongue out, frog-like, whenever she’s uncomfortable, yelling and running off when offended or embarrassed. She’s cute and fun, charming and youthful.

Setsuko, who owns a failing bar and supports a failing husband, long ago lost whatever she had that resembled Mariko’s zest. Life and its responsibilities (or the consequences of her decisions), have left her stoic and struggling, unhappy and adrift. When she and her husband have a fight, late in the movie, she barely breaks on the outside, but is crushed. It’s a subtle performance by Kinuyo Tanaka, counterbalanced by Hideko’s comedic skills.

While this isn’t Ozu’s masterpiece (or, considering the artist, one of his masterpieces), it is exquisite - and recommended.

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