TV Gentlemen: Jon Hamm & Kyle Chandler

"Mad Men" Season 7's theme: Expanding some on a comment he made when the show's key art was released, Weiner says, "[W]e're acknowledging what happened to Don at the end of last season. That really did happen... The consequences of that activity were kind of what we're writing about on some level. What part is irrevocable?

People searching for clues in the cast photos (promo images) and their airport setting will come away frustrated: "We pick a milieu for the publicity photography every year where we can lean on the good looks of the cast and place them in an environment that puts people in the mood for the show. We love the contrast because there is zero glamor in air travel right now. It was just an environment to take pictures." Season 7 of "Mad Men" premieres Sunday, April 13 on AMC. Source: blog.zap2it.com

The various images feature Don (Jon Hamm), Peggy (Elisabeth Moss), Roger (John Slattery), and Megan (Jessica Paré) at the airport and aboard a plane. Does this mean change is in the air for the seventh season? Is a trip in their future, or is this more of a metaphor about the characters going places? Source: www.buzzsugar.com

Hamm's favorite episode of season 3 was "The Gypsy and The Hobo," in which his character's secret double life exposed to wife Betty. "It was beautifully written and shot." He's equally thrilled for pal Kyle Chandler's first nomination for Friday Night Lights. "I can't believe it finally happened. I was so happy to see him and Connie [Britton] recognized because they've been doing it so long and so great. I wish them the moon! Kyle and I had small parts in The Day the Earth Stood Still so we had a lot of time to get to know each other. But I may have lost his phone number, so if he reads this—please call me!" Source: www.tvguide.com

Jon Hamm — The only reason Jon Hamm doesn’t have a string of Emmy Awards himself is because Cranston keeps blocking him, but in the movie world, Hamm is outgunning Cranston with strong performances in dramas (The Town) and comedies (Bridesmaids) and killing it on other TV shows like 30 Rock, Saturday Night Live, and his British series, A Young Doctor’s Notebook. Source: www.pajiba.com

Gary Ross has signed on to write 'East of Eden,' the new adaptation of the John Steinbeck novel that has Jennifer Lawrence attached to star. Set in California's Salinas Valley before World War I, the 1952 novel tells of two families over the course of two generations, loosely alluding to the biblical tale of Cain and Abel, focusing on a father, his two sons, and the children's mother, whom they thought was dead. The book was famously adapted as a 1955 James Dean movie directed by Elia Kazan. That movie focused on the second half of Steinbeck's book and on the second generation. Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com

Kyle Chandler is ready to be back in the long-form narrative television business. He will now be starring in a Netflix series described as a “family thriller” about grown-up siblings. It sounds like it’s on some 'East of Eden' ish, centering on a responsible family man and his “black sheep” brother who comes back into the fold. Guess which one Chandler is playing? If you guessed “not the black sheep,” you guessed right.

Chandler has become the go-to good guy. It’s a side effect of his performance on Friday Night Lights: Who wants to see Coach Taylor turn bad? But it might feel limiting to Chandler in a cable TV climate in which antiheroes with last names like Draper, Soprano, and White tend to reign supreme. Or maybe Chandler likes playing straight arrows and finds that it’s just as difficult (if not more so) to portray a man who is capable of refusing temptation. He’s a hardworking actor who’s been on a million TV shows and turned in solid performances every time.

He logged modest hits with Homefront and Early Edition before gaining critical respect with Friday Night Lights. He’s also been on bombs like the Joan Cusack sitcom What About Joan and Rob Lowe vehicle The Lyon’s Den. He’s made a lot of TV movies. Although he’s been in movies periodically, like the George Strait and Lesley Ann Warren romance Pure Country and the excretory Peter Jackson remake of King Kong, it’s only recently that Chandler has become a secret weapon for movies in need of a white hat.

In Wolf of Wall Street, Chandler’s Agent Denham is the movie’s conscience, giving its antihero a fairly matched rival that the audience can relate to. Denham is moral in a cinematic world where nobody else is, and he suffers the consequences for not selling out to the devil, embodied by Leonardo DiCaprio as Jordan Belfort (with Leo running at peak Jack Nicholson capacity). Chandler plays characters whose lot in life is humble, and who take satisfaction in doing their jobs well.

Interestingly enough, Chandler was actually in the running for the role of Sergeant Nick Brody on Homeland. As brilliant as Damian Lewis turned out to be, it’s tantalizing to imagine an alternate world where Chandler played Brody. The goodness that Chandler projects onscreen could easily be flipped on viewers who should know better than to trust appearances. Somebody should put Chandler in a Western already. Let’s get the Coen brothers to remake Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country with Chandler and Jon Hamm. Source: grantland.com

David Goodis: A Life in Black & White

DAVID GOODIS: A LIFE IN BLACK AND WHITE: Finally available in English in the United States! If you're a fan of classic noir fiction, grab a copy of Philippe Garnier's legendary biography of David Goodis (edited and published by Eddie Muller), on sale from Black Pool Productions (not available on Amazon). Source: blackpoolproductions.com

David Goodis is the mystery man of American crime fiction. A cipher even to people who knew him, Goodis would have vanished from the annals of America literature were it not for the extraordinary esteem afforded him by French readers. At a time when none of his books were in print in the United States (the 1970s)--all were available in France, lauded as classics of noir-stained existentialism.

A prodigious producer of pulp fiction in the late 1930s and early '40s, Goodis scored an immense success with his second novel, Dark Passage, published in 1946.

It was immediately snapped up by Warner Bros. and turned into a hit movie starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Goodis was promoted by Warner Bros. as the next big thing--the latest incarnation of Hammett. He struggled to live up to the hype, writing several unproduced original scripts and a remake of Bette Davis' 1940 hit The Letter, released in 1947 as The Unfaithful. But Goodis had his own ideas about what--and how--he wanted to write--as well as a few personal peccadilloes--that drove him back to his native Philadelphia, where he spent the next decade churning out paperback originals for low-end publishers.

And it's those books--dark, stream-of-consciousness nightmares (Cassidy's Girl, Black Friday, Down There, The Burglar, The Wounded and the Slain)--that are his literary legacy. Goodis was back in native Philadelphia, churning out manuscripts for Lion Books and Gold Medal Paperbacks, when he was approached by first-time film director Paul Wendkos to adapt his 1953 novel, The Burglar, into a screenplay. It's his only screenwriting credit after he'd left Hollywood.

After achieving international success with his directorial debut, The 400 Blows (1959), 27-year-old Francois Truffaut surprised the film world by choosing as his next project an obscure American paperback called Down There, written by Goodis in 1956. Well, everyone was surprised but the French. Their "New Wave" filmmakers often turned to the work of American crime writers for inspiration. They'd read translations of the novels in the Serie Noire, a line of crime novels wildly popular with French intellectuals. Adapting these books allowed a new generation of French directors like Jean-Pierre Melville, Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut, to honor an American genre they revered--in both its literary and cinematic form. Goodis may have had no literary cachet in the States, but in France he had a reputation as a poet of the urban demimonde, the master of existential despair. Source: www.noircon.info

“Ralph stood on the corner, leaning against the brick wall of Silver’s candy store, telling himself to go home and get some sleep.” That’s the opening line of The Blonde On The Street Corner, a 1954 novel written by David Goodis. Of course, Ralph doesn’t go home. Instead, he spots a blonde across the dark street and gawks at her. She eventually calls him over to light her cigarette, which he does. Now, at this point, one might expect that Ralph would be irresistibly lured into a tight web spun by this dazzling femme fatale, resulting in his eventual moral destruction. But Goodis doesn’t write that way. Ralph knows that she’s married. She propositions him right on the corner, but he rejects her. “I don’t mess around with married women,” he tells her. Then he goes home. Source: www.davidgoodis.com

While Goodis toiled in his little room at 6305 N. 11th Street in Philadelphia, filmmakers mined his ever-increasing wealth of material. OF MISSING PERSONS was made in Argentina and NIGHTFALL in Hollywood. Warner Brothers’ television division used one of his stories for an episode of their “Bourbon Street Beat” series and Goodis adapted a Henry Kane story for “The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.” The closest Goodis came to reigniting his Hollywood flame came in 1957, with the film adaptation of THE BURGLAR. Shot in the streets of Philadelphia by his friend Paul Wendkos, Goodis helped write the screenplay based on his own work for this inventive film noir.

Delayed after completion and overlooked upon release, THE BURGLAR didn’t fulfill the promise of a Wendkos/Goodis creative partnership. Goodis may have labored in the penumbra of obscurity in the United States, but his existential and essentially bleak portrayal of the empty American dream caught the attention of European intellectuals in general and the French Nouvelle Vague in particular. In 1960, Cahiers du Cinema writer-turned-director Francois Truffaut brought Goodis’s Down There to the cinema in SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER. Source: www.davidgoodis.com

Endless Summer, 1940s Tinseltown, Homefront

Hollywood and Los Angeles after World War II: In the heyday of film noir, from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s, the utopian aspirations that had driven the foundation and meteoric rise of the Hollywood studio system since World War I suddenly seemed fragile and liable to collapse. For the American Right, which had never much liked Hollywood on moral and political grounds, it came to appear as a Communist command post on American soil; for workers, it was a desperately insecure and often hostile place in which to try to make a living; and for the Hollywood moguls it was a dream they once had that was now threatened by industrial unrest, government regulation, and new technologies.

In a lengthy and spirited defense of the Hollywood film industry from its critics published in the New York Times on April 9, 1950, Dore Schary, then head of production at MGM, contended that many Americans viewed Hollywood as a “modern Babylon,” full of “white Rolls Royces,” “blonde secretaries,” and “houses full of bear rugs littered with unclad women.”

Americans loved Hollywood for its visions of stars on the silver screen but they understood the real place barely at all and viewed its inhabitants with mistrust. The apparent encircling of Hollywood by hostile voices stood in contrast to what seemed to be the continuing and unstoppable rise to greatness of Los Angeles, the city in which Hollywood was based but with which its relationship had always been ambivalent. Like Hollywood, Los Angeles emerged strongly from World War II, but unlike Hollywood, it seemed to progress onward and upward for the following twenty years as a result of prioritized investment by the federal government that had begun under the New Deal and continued with the expansion of the city’s vibrant defense, aircraft, and automobile industries, as well as its maritime trade. The postwar era was one of economic boom and relative political stability, characterized by Mike Davis as an “Endless Summer” in which the city consolidated its public image as a conservative, affluent, sunny, healthy, and reliable bastion of a certain kind of American comfort.

The key to the dramatic rise of Los Angeles and other Sunbelt cities in the postwar era was not only their identification of and innovation in new types of economic activity but the successful implantation of a new model of citizenship that was promoted by its advocates as a broadening of the benefits of capitalism to embrace the working class but that seemed to many the enforcement of a new political quiescence.

The historical record reveals that a remarkably straight line can be drawn between the determination of the Hollywood moguls to ensure the continuing profitability of their industry and the consolidation of a new rightist dispensation in American politics and society in the 1950s whose legacy remains with us today in many respects. Throughout the era, the Hollywood moguls and IATSE labor leaders in their pay used anti-Communist discourse to suppress the demands of workers and, in doing so, benefited from the fact that, as Ingrid Scobie has put it, “California led all other states in anti-subversive activity” both before and after World War II. This entailed encouraging investigations by the Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities of the California State Senate and by U.S. congressional committees such as the House Labor Committee and the House Un-American Activities Committee. This strategy in turn was a decisive influence on the formulation of the 1948 Taft-Hartley Act, which broke the power of militant labor in the United States as a whole and enforced a new vision of the worker as a shareholder in capitalism, which became a pillar of the postwar Pax Americana and the later rise of neoliberalism. -'A Regional Geography of Film Noir Urban Dystopias On & Offscreen' essay from "Noir Urbanisms: Dystopic Images of the Modern City" (2010) by Mark Shiel

-Tony Kirby (James Stewart): "It takes courage. You know everybody's afraid to live."

-Alice Sycamore (Jean Arthur): "You ought to hear Grandpa on that subject. You know he says most people nowadays are run by fear. Fear of what they eat, fear of what they drink, fear of their jobs, their future, fear of their health. They're scared to save money, and they're scared to spend it. You know what his pet aversion is? The people who commercialize on fear, you know they scare you to death so they can sell you something you don't need." -"You can't take it with you" (1938) directed by Frank Capra

Kyle Chandler says he would do his best to mimic these black-and-white heroes: "So, when I stepped into acting, it fit real well because I had played these characters already. Before my father died, but especially after, what do you do when you live on 22 acres and there aren't enough kids to play with?," he asks rhetorically. The answer was supplied by Ted Turner's first foray into broadcasting, a channel with a heavy Gable-Stewart-Cooper rotation. James Ponsoldt ("The Spectacular Now" director): "I feel like Kyle as Coach Taylor is sort of a throwback to a Gary Cooper, or a Henry Fonda, or a Jimmy Stewart: this profoundly decent bedrock of a great father and a great coach."

Peter Berg said to me one day, "Dude, how do you do it? You're constantly working, but no one knows who you are." I don't mind that too much. My biggest goals when I came out to Los Angeles were to be married and have a family, and be able to afford to live as an actor. That's what I do now. And little by little, I keep working with these people. This time it's J.J. Abrams and Steven Spielberg. I'm not going to question it. I don't know what I'm going to do next, and I don't care. Everything just keeps going. Like my pop used to say, "Just listen to your gut." That's what I do. In for the long haul; the rest is all just trappings. Source: www.aintitcool.com







"I gave them all up for you." -Jeff Metcalf telling Ginger she doesn't need to be jealous of all the women in his past: "Kids" episode from "Homefront" (starring Kyle Chandler and Tammy Lauren).

True Detective, Homefront Noir, Jeff & Ginger

-I think the big social novel is a crime novel. (James) Ellroy writes social novels, Dennis Lehane writes social novels. (George) Pelecanos writes social novels. As we increasingly become entrenched in this Age of Empire era that were now entering, the sort of — not desolation — but decrepitude and the pervasive feeling of systems not working that are some of the governing aspects especially of noir and crime fiction in general, I think that more and more becomes the medium where you can explore the various aspects of American society currently torn asunder. I think that the kind of noir stuff that actually has a plot can often be the most effective vehicle for delivering what are our most fundamental existential questions. -Interview with Nic Pizzolatto, the New Orleans-born novelist who is the writer-creator of HBO drama “True Detective”. Source: www.nola.com

Marty finds peace with his ex-wife and family, but only after he allows his macho facade to fall. It's only after he breaks down in tears, and shows that everything is not ok, that he can find some peace. Marty takes Maggie's left hand, and we see the wedding ring of her new relationship. And for Rust, the experience of this case, and being near-death after his confrontation with Childress, gives him a "belief" in life, hope, and love. He lets go of his nihilism. In the end, the murder of Dora Lange and all of the speculation as to what The King in Yellow is and what it means didn't really matter in the grand scheme of things. It was only part of the crucible by which these two detectives comment on life, have those views tested, and grow and change through the experience.

Is life an endless repetition where we'll taste all the aluminum and ash over again in a meaningless flat circle? Or is it an existence where things are connected in light and darkness, where we can only have some form of peace when we acknowledge our ignorance? The show doesn't provide a definitive answer to those questions. But the journey of the show's characters in trying to make sense of hunches and flashes of insight about a case mirrors our stumbling around in life trying to make sense of the best and worst moments. Source: www.dailykos.com

"Mob City" (2013) episode 6: Joe turns up at the Union Station and manages to subdue Leslie and hands him over to Rothman. Rothman then asks for the pictures Jasmine had took, which Joe had snatched from the locker. Joe demands Jasmine's safety before handing over the pictures. Rothman tells Joe he will set up a meeting between him and Bugsy Siegel. After leaving the Union Station, Joe tells Jasmine that he was the one who killed Hecky and tells her to leave on the next train out of town and never come back.

'Mulholland Falls' is a 1996 American neo-noir crime thriller film directed by Lee Tamahori and written by Pete Dexter. Jennifer Connelly plays Max Hoover's former lover, Allison Pond. Nick Nolte plays the head of an elite group of four Los Angeles Police Department detectives (based on the real life "Hat Squad") who are known for stopping at nothing to maintain control of their jurisdiction. Their work has the tacit approval of L.A.'s police chief (Bruce Dern). A similar theme is the basis of a 2013 film, 'Gangster Squad,' and a 2013 television miniseries, 'Mob City'.

The noir aesthetic derived from wartime constrainsts on filmmaking practices. Brooding, often brutal, realism was conveyed in low-lit images, recycled sets, tarped studio back lots, or enclosed sound stages. Home-front worries certainly made audiences more receptive to the darker visions depicted in film noir. A somber war-related zeitgeist grew out of harsh realities in America. As Hollywood reacted to war, elements vital to the growth of film noir began to coalesce. The Second World War created a complex array of social, economic, cultural, political, technological and creative circumstances, a catalyst for film noir. -"Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir" (2005) by Sheri Chinen Biesen

Through the surrealistic settings, David Lynch vibrates the past and present culture of Hollywood in "Mulholland Drive" (2001). The presence of authoritarian film moguls and graffiti-spattered restaurants eviscerates our impression of this idyllic dreamy place. Film-makers [and writers] like Samuel Fuller, Raymond Chandler and Polanski have of course established Hollywood as ‘capital of corrupt’, but Lynch’s vision is a notch above because he embraces the notion through an irrational storytelling method, which again remains contrary to the Hollywood tradition. Source: movierestrospect.blogspot.com

Jeff Metcalf to Ginger Szabo: "I like cheering. Who wouldn't? But that's not why I play ball. I'd play in an empty stadium... And if you want to be an actress just to have strangers can fall in love with you, then I don't get it. Because they wouldn't know the real you, and I know the real you, and I already love you, whether you're a movie star or not." -Jeff tells Ginger that acting is a "screwy" business ("Sinners Reconciled" episode from "Homefront" TV series) Source: lemongrrl.tripod.com

Spunky Ginger Szabo was a drugstore clerk who dreamed of becoming a movie star. After an ill-fated stay in Hollywood, Ginger finally got her big show business break in 1946 when she was chosen to be the Lemo Tomato Juice girl. She later appeared on WREQ (Lemo Tomato Juice Hour) with future husband, Jeff Metcalf.

Jeff Metcalf was a small-town guy who dreamed of being a major league ballplayer. He eventually did make it in the big leagues, joining the Cleveland Indians in 1946, but a leg injury almost cut his career short. Luckily for him, his future wife, Ginger Szabo, intervened and convinced his former coach to give him another shot at a tryout. Jeff persevered and won a second chance with the Indians when they sent him to their farm team in 1947. The road to love was not easy, though. Jeff and Ginger challenged each other each step of the way.

They survived the Ginger's brief, ill-fated stay in Hollywood, Jeff's flirtation with a baseball-loving barmaid, Ginger's career ambitions, and a thousand other misunderstandings. But watching them make up was always the fun part. There was never any doubt at any time how much they really loved each other, and in the end, they were finally married in memorable way : on a train, with Jeff on his way to joining the Indians' farm team. Source: lemongrrl.tripod.com

Kyle Chandler has enormous appeal, yet he hardly strikes the one-dimensional note we tend to expect from anyone labeled a hunk. His Jeff Metcalf is a rarity: a decent guy whose actions aren't easy to predict. "He's pretty upstanding," says Chandler. On TV most upstanding guys end up seeming like wimps. Chandler somehow avoids that pitfall. "As for why he's not a wimp, I guess because the acting is so damn good and realistic," he adds with a laugh. -The Observer Reporter (1992)

-"I think that sense of humor is important in marriage. A sense of humor gets people through marriage." -Kyle Chandler

Kyle Chandler (Flower of my heart) video

Kyle Chandler (Flower of my heart) video

No FNL movie, Peter Berg's 50th birthday

Connie Britton, Peter Berg, Kyle Chandler and Aimee Teegarden

Our clear eyes got a little misty and our full hearts deflated a bit when we heard that the long-rumored "Friday Night Lights" movie is probably never happening. Kyle Chandler has said he thinks the show ended perfectly as it is, and executive producer Peter Berg (Happy 50th birthday!) recently declared the project dead. Though Jason Katims did write a script for a possible "FNL" movie, he doesn't think it will happen, either: "It's a matter of getting everybody onboard and everybody available, so at this point, unfortunately, it doesn't look likely. I was hoping to do it."

We were hoping to watch it, too. But then again, we have to agree with Chandler: The "Friday Night Lights" series finale (which earned Katims an Emmy in 2011 for drama series writing) wrapped up the show's storylines so elegantly that we almost want that to be the last time we ever see Coach and Tami and the Dillon gang. So since we'll probably never see it, Katims wouldn't mind telling us what was in that script he wrote, right? We couldn't get him to divulge many details, but he did reveal to us that the main plot "was going to be the next chapter in Coach's life, the next coaching chapter in his life."

Remember, last we saw Coach and Tami, he was coaching a new high school football team in Philadelphia while she settled in as dean of admissions at a nearby college. So would that mean no Dillon, Texas? Or would Coach's team end up in some kind of playoff game that brings him and his family back to their old stomping grounds? We really shouldn't torture ourselves like this, should we? Source: tv.yahoo.com

'Friday Night Lights' was a great movie, and the TV show. After five shots at it, five seasons, as it went on, it got smaller and smaller and smaller, and it almost got canceled. We were up against 'American Idol' the first year and it got moved,” Chandler said. "[Producers] Jason Katims and Pete Berg and those guys kept it alive, kept the material so fresh, and ended the thing so perfectly. I think that's a tribute to those guys. I like the ending of the show as much as I like the whole thing in the sense that it was just done so classy, it was just done so well. Hats off to those guys." -Kyle Chandler

"The coaches were aware of the gripes, but the bottom line was that Boobie had the talent and they did not. Like it or not he was the franchise, unless, for some reason, they did not need him anymore The negotiations became more and more tense, and the Carter contingent changed its mind. Forget the thought of ever playing in Texas Stadium in the white suburb of Irving. Think now about playing in the Cotton Bowl, deep in the heart of Dallas. The Permian side was momentarily stunned. Of all the places Permian wanted to play the Carter Cowboys, the Cotton Bowl was the last. Its location, a little east of downtown Dallas, made it a magnet for the city’s black community. The two sides finally agreed to play the game at a neutral site in Austin at Memorial Stadium of the University of Texas.

The coaches gave their pre-game speeches in the locker room. 'I knew at that moment I’d given everything I had to give, total commitment. Not holding back anything. Like being truly clean and truly free as far as maximum effort. It’s an emotional feeling, an emotional high that is basically unparalleled.' That was their great cutting edge. That’s what made them different. And they would not give it up, not against the Carter Cowboys with their 4.4 flyboys and their All-American hotshots and the wild-eyed fervor of their fans fueled by all those Kafkaesque court battles to stay in the playoffs, not against anyone." -"Friday Night Lights: A Town, A Team, And A Dream" (2000) by H.G. Bissinger