Tall Talk and a Triple Issue

At the end of last week, the future of Turner Classic Movies looked worse than tentative. This week saw a turnaround. Warner Bros. Discovery reversed its decision to fire Charles Tabesh, the senior vice president of programming and production who has been with TCM for twenty-five years. The team is still considerably smaller than it was just a few weeks ago, but Paul Thomas Anderson, Martin Scorsese, and Steven Spielberg have agreed to help curate the program. While it may be hard to imagine the three high-profile directors with demanding day jobs getting into the nitty-gritty work of round-the-clock programming, their support has got to be a boost to wounded morale.
- Boots Riley, founder of the hip hop group the Coup, has followed up on his debut feature, Sorry to Bother You (2018), with a series for Amazon, I’m a Virgo. Jharrel Jerome plays Cootie, a thirteen-foot-tall Black teen who falls in with a band of politically engaged Oaklanders. The show “electrified me with its madcap wit, blazingly original vision, and white-hot (but also constructive!) rage against the machine,” tweets Devika Girish, flagging the latest episode of the Film Comment Podcast in which she and Clinton Krute talk with Riley about American communists, the WGA strike, working in an industry run by megacorporations, and of course, I’m a Virgo.
- Anyone who’s experienced a film by Lucrecia Martel won’t be surprised by the way she describes her relationship to sound in her conversation with Rory O’Connor at the Film Stage. “Our entire culture has faith in vision more than the other senses,” she says. “If we had based ourselves on sound instead of image we would have wound up in a different place, especially regarding the idea of time. So imagine you’re in a cinema, that’s a volume, and then the images are running over a flat surface, but everything that surrounds you—everything that’s tactile, that touches you—is the sound.” When O’Connor asks Martel what film she’s seen that might have triggered such ideas, she names What Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), Robert Aldrich’s campy thriller starring Bette Davis and Joan Crawford: “It’s a spectacular movie.”
- In the 1960s, the Gay Girls Riding Club “became a notable presence in the burgeoning lavender demimonde,” writes Ed Halter for the New York Review of Books. Metrograph is currently streaming five of the raucous, low-budget parodies made by the private Hollywood social club, all of them recently restored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive and the American Genre Film Archive with the help of queer film historian Elizabeth Purchell. What Really Happened to Baby Jane (1963), a spoof of Aldrich’s movie, “was a particular hit,” notes Halter, “though it was listed sub rosa in ads as a ‘classic GGRC Gothic satire,’ perhaps to avoid lawsuits—testimony to the healthy word-of-mouth reputation the group must have had among queer audiences.”
- A recent viewing of a worn VHS copy of Harvey Keith’s Mondo New York (1988) has prompted a breezy primer from John Menick on Kim’s Video, pre-Internet home viewing in general, and the mondo subgenre of exploitation movies, many of which were “shot through with distorted imaginings of a non-white world, a largely fictional place populated with ‘savages’ rendered inhuman and sexualized. Sometimes the whole affair was dressed up with a bogus world-weary political angle. (‘Look how awful things are in Africa!’) Sometimes, no such bad faith was needed. Mondo chased the buzz of shockumentary thrills—thrills as conceived by white people for white people. That dreary project never completely dies.”
- Heading into the long weekend, you might want to take the new triple issue of Offscreen with you. It opens with editor Donato Totaro’s playful video incorporating clips of commentary on cinema from Alfred Hitchcock and his fleeting cameos in his own films and then buckles down with essays on architecture in the work of Fritz Lang, Andrei Tarkovsky, and David Cronenberg. A section on documentaries features fresh writing on films by Peter Watkins, Laura Poitras, Jacquelyn Mills, and Werner Herzog, and the issue wraps with new book reviews.