David Hare has been writing for the theater since the 1970s, has served as Royal Dramatist to the Royal Court Theater in London, has been the Associate Director for the UK’s National Theater, is an accomplished director of both theater and film, and was knighted in 1998. That’s a pretty impressive resume on its own, but in the past few years he’s also become known for writing successful adaptations of novels.
In the past few years he’s adapted Michael Cunningham’s The Hours and Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections for film, and his latest is Bernard Schlink’s The Reader, which pairs him again with director Stephen Daldry. I spoke with Hare in Los Angeles, just after he’d (thankfully) recovered from losing his voice.
Long-missing footage from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis has, apparently, been found. Berlin-based David Hudson at GreenCine breathlessly passes along the online preview to a story that will run in Germany’s ZEITmagazintomorrow. Hudson’s English-language parsing of the preview is a must-read, but the short version is that a copy of “the long version” of the film––which may or may not be Lang’s original cut, but which seems almost certainly close to it––has been discovered at Buenos Aires’ Museo Del Cine.
David says he’ll have more details after buying the magazine tomorrow; in the meantime, there’s a gallery of stills from the new/old footage. I’ve screencapped two of the eight images; the more vivid one is up top, and a scratchy and almost spectral-looking still is below the jump.
Missing things like this is why I should never go on vacation. I learned of the video above via a Screenhead post which popped up in my RSS reader, but for reasons unknown to me, no longer exists.
The gist: David Lynch went to Berlin to talk about transcendental meditation. At a press conference, Lynch was joined on stage by “Raja” Schiffgens, Germany’s leading proponent of TM, who announced that Lynch’s foundation had recently purchased Teufelsberg, a large hill in Berlin constructed out of rubble from World War II, with the intention of building a TM center on top of the hill. The Raja then went into a spiel about how the center would neutralize negativity and help create “an invincible Germany…invincible against all alien influences” When asked by an audience member to explain this concept of invincibility, the Raja compared Germany’s quest for invincibility to that of a soccer team (?), to which another audience member responded, “Adolf Hitler wanted that too.” The Raja’s comeback? “Yes, but unfortunately he didn’t succeed.” That’s when all hell broke loose.
I’m not sure if the Hitler fracas had anything to do with this, but if my Babelfish translation of this article is in anyway accurate, Lynch and co. have since been denied permits to build on the Teufelsberg. Lynch has since issued a statement in response to the hullabaloo, which reads in part: “I don’t want to have anything to do with Hitler. We all know he was not a good person who did terrible things.”
Based on Paul’s recommendation, on our last day in Telluride I went to the encore presentation of People on Sunday. Though I wholeheartedly agree with Paul’s endorsement of Sunday’s fully-modern depiction of courtship, I was equally taken with its utopian treatment of working class leisure. People on Sunday is as much a love letter to the proletariat as the films of the Bolshevik giants, but politics are ultimately pushed aside for a celebration of a pursuit of happiness that’s in some way about transcending social class. As a snapshot of the last wave of youthful abandonment before the Hitler era, it’s a heartbreaker.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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