FOURTH CENTURY

Yes! It's that time of the week again when -- yawn, yawn! -- I remind you to tune into David Puttnam's Century of Cinema, the fourth episode of which airs on BBC Radio 2 this evening.

When Lord Puttnam and I made this series, back 1999, it was broadcast as celebration of the first century of cinema and this installment finds us discussing some of the tried and tested popular film genres that were the life-blood of the movie industry over those years.

We look at westerns, musicals, comedies, epics, sci-fi films and war movies, with Fred Zimmerman talking to me about High Noon and why he cast Gary Cooper in the role of the beleagured sheriff and Robert Wise telling me why he didn't cast Claude Raines as Klaatu the alien in The Day the Earth Stood Still -- hands up anyone who can remember Klaatu's three-word message! -- and why The Sound of Music is the perfect musical. Ken Annakin recalls working on The Longest Day and Richard (Notting Hill) Curtis pays tribute to the comedy of the Marx Brothers.

Other movies that get a viewing include Apocalypse Now, Saving Private Ryan, Lawrence of Arabia and Some Like It Hot while David himself recalls the triumph that was Chariots of Fire.

You can hear David Puttnam's Century of Cinema - 'Reel 4: Something for Everyone' - on BBC Radio 2 at 10:30, and, if you miss the transmission this evening, it can be heard again for seven days via the BBC iPlayer.

And, until the transmission of tonight's episode, you've still a few hours left to catch 'Reel 3: Hollywood Incorporated', which looks at the great studios, their history and their movies.

KISSY-KISSY

It's rather frustrating, but having recently seen Disney's latest animated film, The Princess and the Frog - opening in UK cinemas nationwide today - I don't unfortunately have the time (due to a fearfully pressing book deadline) to write about it in the kind of detail I would, normally, find hard to resist! Still, at least it saves you having to read an interminably long post!

The film, loosely based on the Grimm Brothers' fairy tale, 'The Frog Prince', is relocated in Jazz Age, New Orleans and features a non-princess princess (it's all part of the plot, look it up on Wikipedia!) named Tiana and has been hailed as a landmark (or lambasted for being behind its time) for the fact that it features the first African-American Disney heroine.

However, as it happens, Tiana is not the first black character in a Disney animated film and she has several non-white predecessors including Pocahontas, Mulan, Lilo and Esmeralda.

The film is significant for another, less debated, reason in that it is the first hand-drawn Disney film since the studio chucked out all the pencil-wielders six years ago and turned animation over the digital whiz-kids of Pixar. Personally, I like Pixar animation and I like traditional hand-drawn animation and it is to the credit of Pixar (now Disney) supremo, John Lasseter, that he has brought back those traditional animation techniques to the studio whose fortunes were founded on that very art form.


The Princess and the Frog is a good yarn, rattlingly well told, filled with strong characters, great music, one or two frights, a typical dollop of Disney pathos and is, all in all, vibrantly brought to life in a medium that - due to the success of such films as Toy Story and Little Nemo - has been too long neglected.

And, for what it's worth, I think Tiana is portrayed as a proactive, self-determining character who'll provide a positive role-model for any child of any colour, since what she represents is the importance of what we all are beneath the skin.

Can't stop to tell you more, but on tonight's Radio 2 Arts Show - at around 11:30 pm if your Horlicks hasn't kicked-in by then - you can hear me interviewing the film's directors, Ron Clements and John Musker (who also gave us The Little Mermaid and Aladdin) and afterwards discussing the film with the show's host, Claudia Winkleman. And, as usual, it'll be there on BBC iPlayer for the next seven days.

Just one word of warning!


Before trundling your tots off to the cinema to see The Princess and the Frog you should be aware of a news story revealing that, last month, FIFTY children in the US (mostly girls under the age of 10) were taken to hospital suffering with salmonella poisoning after kissing frogs!

Both the American Veterinary Medical Association and the Association of Reptilian and Amphibian Veterinarians (I didn't know reptiles and amphibians could become vets!) issued statements warning parents of the dangers of allowing children to handle and kiss frogs.

By the way, I hope you noticed "mostly girls", but obviously not exclusively!!

Here (if you've not already seen it) is the trailer...

THIRD CENTURY

Your weekly reminder to tune into David Puttnam's Century of Cinema, the third episode of which will be broadcast on BBC Radio 2 tonight.

As you will have gathered, when the series originally hit the airwaves in 1999 it was as a celebration of the first 100 years of cinema and in this episode we talk specifically about the Hollywood film factories where so many of the century's greatest movies were made.

MGM it was said had more stars than there were in the heavens above, and like all of the other great studios - Twentieth Century Fox, Paramount, Universal, Warner Brothers, RKO Pictures, Columbia, Walt Disney - they each had their hallmark style and stars.

Margaret O'Brien, Dirk Bogarde and Angela Lansbury tell us what it was like to work under the studio system and we find out that the tycoons who ran these studio came from just about every trade and business other than filmmaking.

Nevertheless this motley crowd of immigrant glove-salesmen and junk-dealers with such improbably namers as Samuel Goldfish and Edgar and Archibald Selwyn (the men behind Goldwyn Pictures) became the great studio bosses who were, as David Puttnam says, "responsible for America's sense of self-identity..."

The question in 1999 - and it is still relevant today - is whether those studio names with their famous logos and fanfares mean what they once meant back in those formative years of movie-making.

You can hear David Puttnam's Century of Cinema - 'Reel 3: Hollywood Incorporated' - on BBC Radio 2 at 10:30, and, if you miss the transmission this evening, it can be heard again for seven days via the BBC iPlayer.

And, until the transmission of tonight's episode, you've still a few hours left to catch 'Reel 2: Right Directions', which explores the talents of the people who make the movies.

COURT OUT!

Leaving the Royal Academy the other month, I noticed the foundation stone commemorating the creation of the Annenberg Courtyard - or, I should say, CO(U)RTYARD!

Take a closer look at the beginning of the second line...


Now, I'm sure the stone mason said that he absolutely meant to put the 'U' inside the 'O', but I don't believe it! And, what's more, adding that funny 'T' in 'WALTER' proves nothing more than that he spotted the mistake before got to line five!

Top image uploaded via flickr.

BIRTHDAY TEA

Today is Lewis Carroll's 178th birthday!

What better way to celebrate the creator of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-glass and What Alice Found There, than to toast his memory with a nice cup of tea?

And how better to enjoy that tea than out of one of the best Christmas presents of last year - thank you, Sheila and Roger! - a mug with a vanishing Cheshire Cat!

Now you see it...


Now you don't!


Apart, of course, from that lingering grin!

Time for a top-up...?

"Take some more tea," the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.

"I've had nothing yet," Alice replied in an offended tone, "so I can't take more."

"You mean you can't take less," said the Hatter: "it's very easy to take more than nothing."

"Nobody asked your opinion," said Alice.

 

"I want a clean cup," interrupted the Hatter: "let's all move one place on."

LEWIS CARROLL

(Charles Lutwidge Dodgson)
1832-1898

SECOND CENTURY

In the second part of David Puttnam's Century of Cinema, broadcast on BBC Radio 2 tonight, DP and I look at the filmmakers.

The series originally aired in 1999 to celebrate the first 100 years of cinema and in this episode we talked to the people who make the movies: writers, directors, composers and producers.

Among those featured in the programme are writer/director Woody Allen, writer Richard Curtis (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill), producer Charles Gordon (Die Hard, Waterworld), directors Stephen Spielberg, Fred Zimmerman (From Here to Eternity, A Man for All Seasons) and Robert Wise (The Sound of Music, The Day the Earth Stood Still) and, from archive, Alfred Hitchcock and Frank Capra.

You can hear David Puttnam's Century of Cinema - 'Reel 2: Right Directions' - on BBC Radio 2 at 10:30, and, if you miss the transmission this evening, it can be heard again for seven days via the BBC iPlayer.

And, until the transmission of tonight's episode, you've still a few hours left to catch 'Reel 1: Star Billing'.

TAKING THE MONDRIAN

In my last post, I showed the work of a NHS loo-tiler in the school of Dutch artist, Pieter Mondrian whose iconic grid paintings were part of an 'art-ism' that he termed Neo-Plasticism. If you've ever wondered what Mondrian was getting at with his abstract compositions, here's how he described his artistic aims in a letter from 1917:

I believe it is possible that, through horizontal and vertical lines constructed with awareness, but not with calculation, led by high intuition, and brought to harmony and rhythm, these basic forms of beauty, supplemented if necessary by other direct lines or curves, can become a work of art, as strong as it is true...

As with all great art, Mondrian's paintings have inspired a variety of pastiches and parodies of which the best is unquestionably Mick Haggerty's 1976 composition, Mickey Mondrian...


You can explore the amazing and diverting graphic worlds of Mick Haggerty here

IN LIEU OF ART

AMAZING ART REVELATION!

Just discovered:
indisputable evidence of Mondrian's bog-standard day-job

Image: Art installation in Gent's Lavatory, St Thomas' Hospital, Westminster, London. Photo courtesy of David Weeks.

TALKING PICTURES

It's not often one of my old programmes gets hauled out for repeat let alone gets an overhaul in the process, but a six-part series - David Puttnam's Century of Cinema, which Lord David and I co-presented in the closing days of 1999 - is about to begin a repeat airing on BBC Radio 2, starting tonight at 10:30 pm...

Click to enlarge

Produced by my good friend (and brilliant producer) Malcolm Prince, the programmes have been immodestly described as a landmark series and I think (also immodestly!) that that is what it was, with interviews and contributions from many of the most powerful and influential people in the movie industry, some of the most astute critics and commentators in the business as well as a pantheon of film gods and goddesses, among them silent movie star Anita Paige, Richard Attenborough, Margaret O'Brien, Angela Lansbury, Michael Caine, Julie Andrews, Robert Redford and, in the last interview before his death, Dirk Bogarde.

The sixth episode in the series will be a new programme in which David Puttnam and I will consider the changes and developments that have happened in cinema over the last decade.

The first part focuses on stars and star-power and, if you miss the transmission this evening, it can be heard again for seven days via the BBC iPlayer.

PEAKE ACHIEVEMENT

You probably missed me (briefly) wittering-on yesterday on BBC's Today programme: I was hauled in, once again, as 'an expert' - this time to comment on the work of the writer and artist, Mervyn Peake, author of the 'Gormenghast' novels: Titus Groan, Gormenghast and Titus Alone...


As a former Chair of the Mervyn Peake Society and the person responsible for the Sony-Award-winning BBC Radio dramatisations of Titus Groan and Gormenghast (starring Sting as the villainous Steerpike) my opinion was sought - along with that of Peake's eldest son, Sebastian - on the recent discovery in the family attic of a fourth and concluding volume written by Peake's widow, the late Maeve Gilmore.


The opportunity to read this, as yet, unpublished manuscript was, for me, a most poignant experience, since 35 years ago, Maeve had shown me an early draft for the book and discussed its development with me. Now, at last, I was able to read the finished work...

Mervyn had begun a fourth book, Titus Awakes, shortly before he succumbed to the ravages of Parkinson's Disease, an illness that finally robbed him of his ability to write and draw and robbed the world of one of the most original creative talents of the Twentieth Century. Shortly after his death, Maeve began to develop a continuation of Titus' history from the fragments which Mervyn had left behind.

Now that final chapter in the Gormenghast saga has come to light and within its pages the conclusion to Titus' wanderings. Titus Awakes brings the history of the 77th Earl of Groan to an unexpected but totally satisfying denouement as the fictional character meets his creator and finds a resolution to his quest and, indeed, his being...

You can read the press accounts of Sebastian's discovery of the manuscript and an account of it's writing and content (along with snippets of my Today wittering) in the Guardian and the Telegraph.

Titus Awakes will, hopefully, be published in Peake's centenary year, 2011.