Irresistible Charm: Robert Taylor, Kyle Chandler

"Acting daily with Miss Turner fascinated Robert Taylor. He took it as long as he could and when he discovered she was making no effort to ignore his attentions and in fact, was physically drawn to him, he knew he had to be with her alone. 'She became an obsession. I had to have her, if only for one night….'" -"Robert Taylor: The Man wih the Perfect Face" (1989) by Jane Ellen Wayne

"Rationality and reason now look like poor bets to save us on their own, although the contrary tendency to abandon them altogether is another dangerous dead end. Indeed, the whole arena of the ‘Imaginary’ has become more significant, as people are forced to seek out new ways of representing themselves and their identities and to recognise the way identity is learned and not given. But widening the sphere of experience and perception to include emotion and acknowledgement of desire —of the unconscious— requires a comprehensive revision of what it means to be a man." -"Sexual Difference: Masculinity and Psychoanalysis" (1994) by Stephen Frosh

"The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America" (2014) by Edward White - American culture, perhaps more than any other, is populated by dazzling personalities that, for a brief time, dominate the scene, shape the conversation, and then are largely forgotten. In a society preoccupied with the new and the offbeat, neglect and oblivion seem to be the price one pays for fame and success. Carl Van Vechten illustrates that phenomenon as well if not better than any other twentieth-century figure. With his camera, he captured the likeness of nearly every noteworthy twentieth-century African American creative genius, from Billie Holiday to Mahalia Jackson and James Baldwin.

Wherever he looked, Van Vechten saw the world in black and white. He was the opposite of color blind. Then, too, he took stunning photos of nearly every famous American artist and writer in the 1920s and 1930s, including F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein, but those portraits, they're less dramatic. Source: www.swans.com

A vital change in the characters made by Peter Jackson in "King Kong" (2005) is to Jack Driscoll. In the original "King Kong" (1933), Driscoll (played by Bruce Cabot) is the first mate of the Venture and a regular-Joe leading man of the era. Even though he thinks dames are quite a nuisance, Driscoll falls for Ann, famously played by Fay Wray.

Jackson splits Driscoll into two characters [in his new version]. One is Bruce Baxter (Kyle Chandler), who is a spoof of Hollywood leading men of the 1930s. 'Heroes don't look like me in the real world,' Baxter says. -"Masculinity and Monstrosity in Contemporary Hollywood Films" (2013) by Kirk Combe and Brenda Boyle

Kyle Chandler received one of the faux "Bruce Baxter" posters from King Kong (2005) as a souvenir. His wife hung it up in their bedroom.

F. Scott Fitzgerald is quoted during a toast in "Broken City" (2013): “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter - tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther... And one fine morning- borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

"Picnic" is about the impact of a young, unabashedly virile male on a tiny, repressed Kansas town during the Depression; its rhythms are full of yearning and languor. Scott Ellis invariably conducts them with a lighthearted beat. Ellis has found a powerful protagonist in Kyle Chandler. Physically imposing (that's highbrow for "a hunk"), Chandler also has an irresistible charm that makes his ability to unhinge an entire town plausible. As the young woman who abandons a respectable future for him, Ashley Judd only comes into her own in the final scenes, particularly the one in which she realizes her feelings for him doing an impromptu dance. She does not really project the bottled-up emotions driving her until then. Source: www.ibdb.com

It's nearly impossible to get Chandler to exert even a moment of self-congratulation about his game-changing run as Coach Taylor on FNL. Such an inbred grasp of humility no doubt helped the actor transform one of the great archetypal characters into a quiet study of self-conscious masculinity. As with Britton, the final season allowed for unexpected turns in Chandler's onscreen persona; we saw him, for the first time, challenged by the person who loved him most. Chandler made his mark. To see him triumph over flashier competition like Jon Hamm would be a true "full hearts, can't lose" moment. Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com

Coach Eric (Kyle Chandler) to Tami Taylor (Connie Britton): "I love you. I respect you. I am proud of you. I am in love with you completely. And you're a hell of a hot wife."

Coach Taylor became extremely embarrassed when it came time for any of the lovey-dovey parts. In fact, Season 2 was supposed to open with a Tami-Coach sex scene, but apparently, Chandler was so uncomfortable filming the bit that the producers deemed the footage unusable, and cut it out of the show. From then on, Friday Night Lights wouldn’t attempt another Taylor-couple love scene, and we now know who to blame. Damn you, Chandler. You couldn’t have pulled it together for us? That stings. Source: www.bustle.com

Sin City 2 - Teaser Trailer

Co-directors Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller reunite to bring Miller's visually stunning "Sin City" graphic novels back to the screen in Sin City: A Dame to Kill For. Weaving together two of Miller's classic stories with new tales, the town's most hard boiled citizens cross paths with some of its more reviled inhabitants. Sin City: A Dame to Kill For is the follow up to Rodriguez and Miller's 2005 groundbreaking film, Frank Miller's Sin City.

The cast includes Mickey Rourke, Rosario Dawson, Jessica Alba, Jaime King, Jamie Chung, Dennis Haysbert, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Christopher Meloni, Josh Brolin, Ray Liotta, Juno Temple, Jeremy Piven, Bruce Willis, Eva Green, Julia Garner and Stacy Keach. Source: www.ropeofsilicon.com

Joseph Gordon-Levitt recently sat down with IGN, where he spoke about his role in the new movie: “I loved working with Rodriguez, and actually doing that week on Sin City was really influential because a lot of the short films that we made with HITRECORD were made in a somewhat similar way to the way that Sin City is shot, completely on green screen. You've seen the first episode, so you've seen the one with Elle Fanning. That was shot very much like Sin City. We don't have a huge airplane hangar like he has. We have a corner of our office. [Laughs] We converted that into a green screen site. But you know, just having the actors performing entirely on green screen and then creating the world around them -the difference being of course that Rodriguez has his team of Troublemakers, whereas we put the green screen footage up on our site and anyone is open to contribute their illustrations and animations to get behind it.”

Boxing films: "Southpaw", "Killer's Kiss"

Enemy Featurette - Denis Villeneuve: The Web Of His Mind (2014) - A man seeks out his exact look-alike after spotting him in a movie. After proving themselves to be one hell of a team with last year's Prisoners, Jake Gyllenhaal and director Denis Villeneuve re-team for Enemy, which is currently available exclusively on DirecTV.

While we wait for the March 14th theatrical release date, check out a brand new featurette for the flick, which features interviews with Gyllenhaal, Villeneuve, and co-star Melanie Laurent!
Source: www.dreadcentral.com

Antoine Fuqua Closes Deal To Direct Kurt Sutter-Penned ‘Southpaw’ - Jake Gyllenhaal Set To Star: Antoine Fuqua (Training Day, Olympus Has Fallen) will direct Southpaw, the drama written by Sons Of Anarchy creator Kurt Sutter set in the boxing world.

Jake Gyllenhaal is now set to star as a welterweight champion who rises in his profession while his personal life falls apart. The picture, financed by The Weinstein Company, will start before the cameras this summer. Fuqua was looking at a number of projects to helm but decided on Southpaw, and his deal closed last night. Still to cast is the other lead, Titus ‘Tick’ Willis, a former fighter who was forced to retire after losing an eye and was on his way to becoming a pro trainer but retreated after his son was killed. This is a movie that could include some breakthrough performances as the script plays to cultural diversity. Source: www.deadline.com

Killer's Kiss (1955) revolves around Davey Gordon (Jamie Smith), a 29-year-old welterweight New York boxer at the end of his career, and his relationship with his neighbor, taxi dancer Gloria Price (Irene Kane).

Kubrick’s perverse story about a triangle of sexual obsession between a gangster, a dance-hall girl, and a prizefighter was produced before the art-theater marketplace had fully emerged, and it was filmed so cheaply that it has almost no direct sound recording or dialogue. The opening sequence borrows a few images from Kubrick’s earlier nonfiction short, Day of the Fight (1951), and later scenes are photographed with a hidden camera as the players mingle with the nighttime crowds on Times Square.

Throughout, Kubrick uses 1940s-style narration as a substitute for speech, and he often composes over-the-shoulder shots in order to hide lip movements. (He also stages conversations on telephones, which makes the work of dubbing much easier.) His cost cutting sometimes results in an abstract or symbolic effect, reminiscent of the avant-garde. Midway through the film, a flashback-within-a-flashback allows the dime-a-dance girl to take over the narration from the prizefighter: her elaborate story is illustrated by nothing more than the image of a ballerina dancing against a black limbo. The most impressive sequences of Killer’s Kiss employ the style of artful, New York–school street photography—especially in a protracted sequence in Times Square, where Kubrick digresses from the main action. -"More than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts" (2008) by James Naremore

Linda Darnell, Romantic Addiction, Kyle Chandler

Some individuals suffering romantic rejection were researched recently. According to Journal of Neurophysiology (2010), recovery from a breakup may be akin to recovering from drug addiction: Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers recorded the brain activity of adults who had previously been rejected. Upon viewing photographs of their former partners, several key areas of participants' brains were activated: the ventral tegmental area (involved in feelings of romantic love) which controls motivation and reward; the nucleus accumbens and orbitofrontal/prefrontal cortex, which are associated with craving and addiction (specifically the dopaminergic reward system); the insular cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex associated with physical pain and distress. "Romantic love, under both happy and unhappy circumstances, may be a "natural addiction" said [neuroscientist Lucy] Brown. "Our findings suggest that the pain of romantic rejection may be a necessary part of life that nature built into our anatomy and physiology." Source: jn.physiology.org

Linda Darnell began to struggle with her drinking. Her marriage to Pev Marley had fallen apart. Tumultuous, ill-advised affairs with domineering womanizers like Mankiewicz and Howard Hughes left her crestfallen and lonely. Bouts of deep depression followed. She was one of the world’s most famous beauties, but her world had begun to shrink. -"Noir’s Hard Luck Ladies: Linda Darnell" by Jake Hinkson

The screenplay credit for "It Happened Tomorrow" (1944) lists both Rene Clair and Dudley Nichols and a notation that it was "based on originals by Lord Dunsany, Hugh Wedlock and Howard Snyder, and ideas of Lewis R. Foster, with additional dialogue by Helene Fraenkel." According to Clair, the acknowledgement of various contributions was due to the fact that "In Hollywood, they are very cautious about story ideas because of the legal entanglements that can ensue if you get caught copying -- or even appearing to have copied. What happened here illustrates that point. In the early forties, Frank Capra had bought a screenplay... from two writers. Before he went any further on the project, he had the legal department research the property. The two scripts had the same device: the possibility of reading tomorrow's newspaper today. Since Capra knew very well that the Dunsany estate could have made trouble for him, he bought the rights from them... Eventually Capra sold the rights to Arnold Pressburger, who asked me to take over the project." (from The Films of Rene Clair by R.C. Dale, Scarecrow Press) Source: www.tcm.com

There is a 1944 film named "It Happened Tomorrow" with a synopsis of "Newspaper reporter given otherworldly access to news in advance finds himself in trouble in delightful comic fantasy" and which stars Dick Powell and Linda Darnell. The premise is very similar to that of "Early Edition", and perhaps the creators had it in their subconscious mind. Ironically, in Poland the show [Early Edition] was titled "It Happened Tomorrow."

Kyle Chandler as Gary Hobson in "Early Edition" (1996-2000): "Sometimes that's all a hero is - the guy who's there."

This writer first met [Kyle] Chandler almost 20 years ago while we were both living and working in Los Angeles. He was starring in the ABC series "Homefront," playing an athlete with a heart of gold in post-World War II America.

He later starred in the Broadway play 'Picnic' alongside Ashley Judd, about which he still rolls his eyes whenever it’s mentioned in conversation, as it was panned by critics at the time. Even then Chandler stood apart from the crowd in Hollywood from day one and still does. “Kyle had a great onscreen presence and was equally charming offscreen. Of all the folks in Hollywood that I brushed shoulders with, Kyle had to be one of the nicest and most humble actors that I ever had the pleasure of working with,” recalls Katy Brewer Copley.

“The character is a lot more stable and fearless than myself,” Chandler confides. “That’s one of the reasons I love acting, because I get to be who I’m not. There’s a lot of my life in that role, even though this is the first time I’ve ever played a married character and father in detail. I enjoy playing Eric because he’s such a strong character and he’s got his idea of right and wrong—his moral compass. I enjoy his humanity.” Beyond his good intentions, charitable ways, and family man persona, Chandler’s acceptance of flaws and the gritty part of life makes him real, good people and a real good actor. Source: societychronicles.com

-My fantasy is: I get to do over all the things in my life that I regret.

-Favorite performers: Evangelists and politicians.

-The three words that best describe me: I asked my wife to help me with this, and she said she can't come up with anything you can print. Source: articles.chicagotribune.com

"Homefront" is one of those shows that, quite honestly, was too good for American television, and subsequently suffered a premature, tragic death. Created by Mentor native Bernard Lechowick and his wife, Lynne Marie Latham, Homefront told the story of a collection of families in the fictional town of River Run, Ohio (based loosely on Mentor). While there was just enough Norman Rockwell ambiance and Glenn Miller music in the background to set the mood, its storylines quickly got gritty.

The Ballad of Jeff Metcalf: Jeff Metcalf had been established as a good-hearted lover of sports who dreamily talked about one day playing professional baseball, but his character wasn’t designed to lead the series. The series ends with Jeff and Ginger getting married in an improvised ceremony as the train for Kansas (or maybe Texas) pulls out of the station, both destined for bigger and brighter things in the future. By the time Homefront’s second season began in the fall of 1992, Jeff Metcalf was the heart of the show. Source: theclevelandfan.com

According to Lynn Marie Latham (creator and Executive Producer on "Homefront"): “When Kyle Chandler and Tammy Lauren started working together, we asked them to come into the office and look at Preston Sturges’s films. We asked Kyle to look at Cary Grant and asked Tammy to look at Barbara Stanwyck, and how the timing was in the ’40s. They came back with this incredible comedic timing. I think they’re brilliant actors.” According to Homefront's camera intern Dena Thompson, “Kyle studied Jimmy Stewart’s acting closely and modeled some of his mannerisms after him. Jimmy was Kyle’s favorite actor, and he often imitated him on the set.”

Dena Thompson: “Whereas Jeff was so honorable, Kyle could look at you with such mischief and say things to you that would knock a lot of women off their feet. Tammy had to be pretty strong to resist laughing, or crumbling. I remember one afternoon shooting for [episode #23] ‘Spanish Moss,’ where Kyle and Tammy were sitting on the bed discussing patterns for china or silverware, or something. Kyle was leaning in, giving her this look, while he teasingly said over his shoulder to a crew member, ‘She is a dish, isn’t she?’ He was a terrible flirt!”






When the writers of "Homefront" first brought together Jeff Metcalf (who had fallen in love with his brother's fiancee), and Ginger Szabo (who had been jilted by her GI beau), the pairing was only meant to last a few episodes. But the incredible chemistry between the two actors, Kyle Chandler and Tammy Lauren, was unmistakable from the beginning. Sparks flew every time they shared the screen. They scrapped plans to break up the couple and went full steam ahead with the romance. Though they didn't start off as main characters in the show, Jeff and Ginger nonetheless stole the hearts of nearly every fan, and eventually the story of their tumultuous, tempestuous relationship became the focal point. Fans couldn't get enough of their sexy, funny, charming banter, and even years after the show's cancellation, fans are still in love with this couple. Source: lemongrrl.tripod.com

-"I have met Kyle several times. I was always struck by his soft-spoken graciousness, a Georgia boy still, with those pointed shitkicker boots sticking out several miles. When Pete Berg, who is my cousin and who created the series Friday Night Lights, based upon my book, offered him the role of head coach Eric Taylor, Kyle did not register a heartbeat of excitement. He thought he was too young for it and worried the show would become a small-town Texas version of Beverly Hills, 90210.

I had my own worries: Coaches have been portrayed ad nauseam; originality seemed impossible. But confirming Pete's instinct, Kyle's combination of authentic toughness and authentic compassion hauled you in. His unique performance showed that sensitivity is a form of strength." -Buzz Bissinger (author of Friday Night Lights: A Town, A Team, And A Dream)

-You've done some directing of your own, on "Friday Night Lights" [S5, Episode 'Texas Whatever']. Any urge to direct your own film?

-Kyle Chandler: "I don't want to say I'm never going to direct again, but directing's hard work. I worked with [director and acting coach] Milton Katselas and he studied under Elia Kazan. Kazan said there's only one good thing a director needs and I was like, "Wow, what is that?" and the answer is "Everything." I just don't know everything." Source: news.moviefone.com

Best Beach: "Crescent Beach on Siesta Key, Florida. The sand is like powdered sugar because it's made almost entirely of quartz. It's right on the Gulf of Mexico, and it has a great vibe."

"Right before my father passed away, he gave me a book. I wasn't much of a reader, so I put it away and forgot about it. But 20 years later, we found the book up in my toy chest when my mom was moving out of the house. It was The Three Musketeers, and I'll be damned, I wished I'd read it when I was a kid. It has everything you want to read about as a young man: honor and duty, battle, friendship and mystery, and of course beautiful women in distress." Source: www.menshealth.com

Noir Performances: Acting Degree-Zero, 16th Annual Festival of Film Noir

In his Introduction to "More than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts", James Naremore recalls watching noir as an adolescent. Singling out Lizabeth Scott’s “unreal blondeness and husky voice in Dark City” (William Dieterle, 1950). For Marc Vernet, film noir is defined by the familiarity the spectator has with the actors, noting that our attachment is in large part due to the actors and actresses who serve as a “central point of reference,” becoming “a sort of tribe, an extended family all of whose members we know and in the midst of which we are pleased to find ourselves from time to time.”

While one of the least discussed elements, such statements present actors and acting as one of the most memorable, most captivating factors in reading film noir. For Foster Hirsch, the noir actor is significant for what he refers to as his or her “aromatic presence,” for bringing an aroma, a flavor, to the noir landscape that has the ability to both enhance and to taint. Populating the noir universe but rarely taking center stage, the performer is deemed to be supplementary, yet without the noir actor, the noirscape is bland, unscented, and uninteresting. Writing in 1986, Richard de Cordova noted that “the problem of performance in film noir has not been dealt with by anyone in any detail.” More than twenty years later, the topic of acting and performance is still largely absent from noir studies, with only a handful of essays and chapters published on the topic.

The noir actor has been described as “emotionally tight” and “ominously still,” employing an acting style that is “largely beneath-the-surface,” “minimalist, pared down,” and characterized by “immobility and silent invasion.” Hirsch observes the “mask-like faces” of actors commonly associated with noir with their “features frozen not in mid- but pre-expression.” In particular, he describes the “somnambulistic masks” of Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake, whom he classifies as “one step up from pure zombie,” referring to their “post-trauma, dead-end style” as “ideally noir.” Hirsch goes on to argue that Ladd and Lake, along with other key noir performers such as Fred McMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, and Humphrey Bogart, emote within a narrow range and thus “remain within noir’s zonal restrictions,” suggesting that constrained performance is part of noir’s generic specificity.

When it has been discussed in any detail, acting in noir has been considered according to contrasts. Hirsch has gone so far as to situate the “acting degree-zero” of the noir actor at one end of a screen performance spectrum with the “spontaneity” of the Method at the opposite end.

Robert Mitchum, for example, has been described by Mitchell Cohen as “the quintessence of catatonic acting,” and by Hirsch as a “noir sleepwalker... the ultimate somnambulist... frozen-faced, frozen-voiced.”

Bogart is widely regarded as the prototypical noir actor and quintessential “tough guy,” yet the stone-faced rigidity displayed in The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep that many critics have considered as typically noir is a long way from his physical and verbal eruptions in In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray, 1950), The Desperate Hours (William Wyler, 1955), and The Harder They Fall (Mark Robson, 1956). In these later films, Bogart’s performance moves between vulnerability and psychosis, a clear departure from the confident private dick he portrayed in the two 1940s’ films.

In Pitfall (André De Toth, 1948), for example, John Forbes’s (Dick Powell) angst results from his disillusionment with postwar society and discontentment with the “breadwinner ethic” in 1950s’ America. “You are John Forbes, Average American, backbone of the country,” his wife emphatically states to John’s dismay, portraying his Average American via sleepy, heavy-lidded eyes, a monotone voice, stiff face and lips.

In Crime of Passion (Gerd Oswald, 1957), Barbara Stanwyck’s performance moves from lively and animated to fixed and anxious as a result of her metamorphosis from energized career woman to bored housewife. The institutionalization of film noir as a cultural form, as opposed to modernism, already underwrites the ambivalent location of noir as both inside and outside modernism. Naremore notes, “like film noir, modernism is an idea constructed ex post facto by critics, and it refers to a great many artists of different styles, sexes, nationalities, religious persuasions, and political inclinations.”

This enables Paula Rabinowitz to discover unexpected connections between film noir and previous forms of popular art, for instance the photographs of Esther Bubley, made in the early 1940s, which set the tone for a noir sensitivity by depicting the changing situation of lonely but self-sufficient women in World War II America: “This dangerous autonomy, visualized in the snarl that comes invariably at the moment when the female takes control of the man and the situation, indexes the changing position of women accelerated by the Second World War.” -"A Companion to Film Noir" (2013) by Andrew Spicer and Helen Hanson

In March, the American Cinematheque brings film noir back to the big screen in Los Angeles! Co-presented with the Film Noir Foundation, our 16th annual Noir City festival will present three weeks of jaded gumshoes, femmes fatale and menacing heavies in gloriously gritty black-and-white. These evenings round up the form’s usual suspects as well as rarely screened gems, including the Foundation’s new 35mm restoration of TOO LATE FOR TEARS and new 35mm print of SOUTHSIDE 1-1000! This year’s astounding lineup of films shows the genre’s popularity around the world with evenings devoted to French (TWO MEN IN MANHATTAN, RIFIFI, JENNY LAMOUR), British (IT ALWAYS RAINS ON SUNDAY, BRIGHTON ROCK) and Italian (OSSESSIONE) noir.

We remember a trio of talented actresses who died in 2013 with noir nights devoted to Joan Fontaine (BORN TO BE BAD, IVY), Eleanor Parker (CAGED, DETECTIVE STORY) and Audrey Totter (TENSION, ALIAS NICK BEAL). We’ve also got tributes to actor Dan Duryea, writer David Goodis and director Hugo Fregonese, and more. Source: www.americancinemathequecalendar.com