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STREET DATE: 9/4
Jim Jarmusch
Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise, shot on leftover film stock from Wim Wenders's The State of Things, was a benchmark of truly independent filmmaking—so independent, in fact, that when Jarmusch and his crew needed $25,000 to finish the film (an enormous sum to the filmmakers), the entire project almost fell through. Then Jarmusch's friend actor-director Paul Bartel (Death Race 2000, Eating Raoul) came to the rescue—forking over the cash without even asking for a producer credit. Stranger's guardian angel, Bartel, who died in 2000, would years later shrug off his generosity, claiming that anyone would have done the same.
STREET DATE: 9/4
Jim Jarmusch
In the special Q&A supplement on the new Night on Earth DVD, Jim Jarmusch reveals that one of his inspirations for his five tales of five cabbies in five cities around the world came one night when he was in a New York City cab trying to get from Manhattan's Upper West Side to the Lower East Side. It turned out that the cabbie wasn't overly familiar with his cab's automatic transmission. So Jarmusch offered to drive the cab downtown himself, which he did, with the cabbie as passenger—much like what happens in the film's New York segment.
STREET DATE: 9/18
Byron Haskin
Robinson Crusoe on Mars's sober atmosphere and palpable evocation of the loneliness of its marooned hero are balanced by the humor of scene-stealing sidekick Mona, the monkey, played by Barney the Woolly Monkey. Offscreen, Barney proved equally memorable. On the DVD's commentary track, actor Paul Mantee (Commander "Kit" Draper) recalls that Barney could be motivated to eat on-screen only if the food was dabbed with banana or Coca-Cola. And Victor Lundin (Friday) remembers that the monkey had "natural idiosyncrasies," like a "loose colon" that would act up whenever the assistant director would call "Quiet on the set!" Lundin soon learned to keep Barney a few feet away from him right before the director shouted.
STREET DATE: 9/18
G. W. Pabst
Playwright Bertolt Brecht always wanted to maintain a critical distance between character and actor in his works; he abhorred the notion that an actor "becomes" a character onstage. Thus, the stage directions in Brecht and Kurt Weill's The Threepenny Opera call for songs written in the voice of one character to be sung by another. In G. W. Pabst's film, however, "Pirate Jenny" is sung, famously, by the legendary German actress Lotte Lenya, who does indeed play Jenny (onstage it was sung by the character of Polly Peachum), the first time the character ever performed her own song. Breaking Brecht's rules, Pabst nevertheless gave us an indelible moment, in one of Lenya's very few film roles.
STREET DATE: 9/18
Nathan Kroll
Although Martha Graham was a wonderful public speaker, she was quite nervous working from a script and appearing in front of the camera. When the time came to record her narration for Nathan Kroll's documentary A Dancer's World, featured on Martha Graham: Dance on Film, she locked herself in her dressing room and refused to come out. Kroll recalls in a commentary on the DVD that she eventually enlisted a friend, actor and producer John Houseman, to help her write a script she was comfortable with. The final narration for A Dancer's World shows Graham more at ease in her dressing room as she prepares for a performance, delivering pearls of wisdom about the difficult but rewarding journey to becoming a dancer.
Catherine Breillat
Catherine Breillat, whose latest film, the early nineteenth-century period piece The Last Mistress, will make its U.S. debut at this fall's New York Film Festival, has been depicting different forms of female desire on-screen for more than thirty years, and her 2001 film Fat Girl (known as À ma soeur in France) was one of her most gripping studies of sexuality, the shocking story of the coming-of-age of a teenage beauty and her sullen, overweight preteen sister. Also, in our upcoming release of Ingmar Bergman's Sawdust and Tinsel, look for Breillat's baroque essay on the film's main character, played by Harriet Andersson; in the 2002 Sight & Sound poll, Breillat listed Sawdust as one of her ten favorite films of all time.
Days of Heaven
Mala Noche
Under the Volcano
Eclipse Series 6: Carlos Saura's Flamenco Trilogy
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