MCN Blogs
Ray Pride

By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

Posted Friday, June 3rd, 2011 - Comments Off on Situating Los Angeles In BEGINNERS: Mike Mills Footnotes His Swooning Love Letter
Be Sociable, Share!

Situating Los Angeles In BEGINNERS: Mike Mills Footnotes His Swooning Love Letter

One of the quieter, yet fantastically winning things about Mike Mills’ Beginners is how it casually moves through Los Angeles. On the Focus on Film website, Mills illustrates nine locations with stills and footnotes them in the most loving way. He shows all the tenderness that’s in his movie toward a city that seems in movies so often a location, seldom a setting. A sample from one of the nine pages: “The Health House was commissioned by the Lovell family and built in 1927. It is one of Richard Neutra’s most famous houses. But that is not why we picked it [for the father’s house]. It is gorgeously situated and the natural light that comes through is just amazing. It made sense, character-wise, that you would have this art historian man living there––and that would be the family house. Also I wanted to shoot in all natural light. And Richard Neutra is like the best gaffer in the whole world, with the light that comes through those windows. He has these built in sconce lights, and they create this amazing soft light. I love modern American architecture, and I know all about Neutra, so when Chris [Miller], my locations manager, showed me the house, I was, “You can’t be showing me the Richard Neutra Lovell House—we can’t get in there.” But luckily the recession really helped us, in that we could afford something’s we couldn’t normally afford. The Topper family has lived in there for, I think, like 40 years. So the house has a real patina, a real accumulation of stuff, like a real family has. The checkered bedspread that is in one of the scenes—that is just the Toppers’ actual bedspread. All the stuff that is in the kitchen, along the shelves, that is just the Toppers’ stuff. I love going in to locations and treating them in a documentary way.”

Be Sociable, Share!

Comments Off on Situating Los Angeles In BEGINNERS: Mike Mills Footnotes His Swooning Love Letter

Comments are closed.

Movie City Indie

Comments Most Recent Archives

Quote Unquotesee all »

It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon