Good news for Benchley-short fans, not to mention short Benchley fans, fans of short Benchleys, and all corresponding Friendster networks—oh, and Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant admirers, too. Warner Home Video just released two-disc special editions of Bringing Up Baby and The Philadelphia Story. That’s fine, as Kate would say. But are they yar? The special features sound first-rate, and what’s more, “Along with the Hepburn documentary, the [Philadelphia Story] edition includes a full-length documentary on director George Cukor, a humorous short from Robert Benchley and a cartoon.” High society, indeed! By the way, how stupendous is it that Grant made Philadelphia Story and His Girl Friday in the same year? Jude Law is a tower of eyefuls (as Gene Shalit once said of Jurassic Park, but he’s still a wee pebble beside the great cairn of Grant’s 1940 perfection. (Pauline Kael called him The Man From Dream City.) Even after you’ve consumed those many hours of goodness, you won’t run out of quality cinema. Warner’s also rereleasing these, continues Joe Holleman of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

—”To Be or Not To Be” (1942): Jack Benny and Carole Lombard, shortly before her death, star in Ernst Lubitsch’s anti-Nazi tale of a Polish acting troupe putting on Hamlet.
—”Libeled Lady” (1936): Talk about star-studded. This screwball comedy features Spencer Tracy, William Powell, Myrna Loy and Jean Harlow.
—”Stage Door” (1937): This story, based on an Edna Ferber-George S. Kaufman play, is about life at a theatrical boarding house. The cast includes Hepburn, Lucille Ball and Ginger Rogers.
—”Dinner at Eight” (1933): Also a Ferber-Kaufman stage hit, Harlow and Wallace Beery lead the cast in a story about New York socialites.

Oh DVD, you make my heart sing: you make everything groovy.

Born for the Part: Roles that Katharine Hepburn played [New Yorker]
Hepburn and Grant are timeless in Warner gems [St. Louis Post-Dispatch]
The Philadelphia Story Play Notes [Court Theatre]
100 Greatest Films [Tim Dirks, Greatest Films]

Categories: Benchley, Movies

The always painfully honest Seymour Hersh talks with The Louisville Eccentric Observer‘s Elizabeth Kramer:

“I’m always a journalist. I read the papers. I usually play off what’s going on today to make the points about where we are, which is not a good place. But, of course, I take questions. I’m dying to hear questions. And when you get out of the East Coast it’s always much more interesting because the questions are more open or sometimes more challenging. But the thing is, in general … there are a lot of people who really support and have every right to support this president down the line. They think he saved us from terrorism. And it’s hard to, often people don’t deal well with the facts. They resist certain facts.”
…
EK: What has it meant to have that forum, The New Yorker, and having sources talk to you?

SH: I don’t think they’re talking to me because I’m working for The New Yorker. I think that The New Yorker is one great advantage for people. They have a thorough [fact] checking system so that people know it’s never adversary. We’re never sandbagging people. We’re always up front about what we’re doing. That helps a lot.

Thanks to David S. Hirschman and the essential MediaBistro News Feed. If anyone deserves press credentials, they do.

Stream-of-consciousness Seymour Hersh blues [LEO]
Chucking the Checkers [Liza Featherstone, CJR]

Louis Menand on Hunter S. Thompson:

There is a lot of edge in the Thompson style, and this gets him compared with people like Lenny Bruce and H. L. Mencken, indignant savagers of bourgeois self-satisfaction. He also seems, by virtue of the “outlaw” accoutrements, to belong to the tradition in American writing that includes William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Henry Miller. But his true model and hero was F. Scott Fitzgerald. He used to type out pages from “The Great Gatsby,” just to get the feeling, he said, of what it was like to write that way, and Fitzgerald’s novel was continually on his mind while he was working on “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” which was published, after a prolonged and agonizing compositional nightmare, in 1972. That book was supposed to be called “The Death of the American Dream,” a portentous age-of-Aquarius cliché that won Thompson a nice advance but that he naturally came to consider, as he sat wretchedly before his typewriter night after night, a millstone around his neck. Still, it pleased him to remember that Fitzgerald had once thought of calling “Gatsby” “The Death of the Red White and Blue.”

Believer [New Yorker]
GBT’s FAQs [story of Uncle Duke, Doonesbury@Slate]
The Hunter S. Thompson interview [Freezerbox]
Hunter Thompson’s Political Genius [The Nation]
The Motorcycle Gangs: Losers and Outsiders [Thompson in The Nation, 1965]

A reformed Jeff Gannon covers the Oscars:

—Go ahead, Jeff.
—Mr. Eastwood, how do you think your film has influenced the debate on assisted suicide? Has the Hemlock Society endorsed it? Any plans to join?

—Jeff, question?
—Mr. Rock, did you keep your word and bring a pound of weed to make the ceremony more watchable? Can we take that to mean you think marijuana should be legalized? Did you indeed relax beforehand by “doing a little cocaine, chopping up some E”? And do you have any for the press?

—All right, one more…Jeff.
—Mr. Pierson, as president of the Academy, do you think any of the films about genocide, abortion, a drug courier, or ABC’s close friend McDonald’s have a Slurpee’s chance in Savannah of winning any major awards? OK, what about Kate Winslet? Could we at least have Kate Winslet?

Tragedy tomorrow, comedy tonight!

One Billion [New Yorker]
Comedy Tonight [Gunther Anderson]
Farewell to Hemlock—Killed by Its Name [Assisted Suicide]
Rock Smashes Crystal [Terminal City]
Disney: Mouse or Multinational? [XRoads]
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind [Discover Kate]

More news from Shawnland:

Alan Cumming will play the notoriously dashing Mack the Knife opposite Edie Falco and pop singer Nellie McKay in the forthcoming Wallace Shawn adaptation of The Threepenny Opera set for Broadway’s Studio 54 next season.

Scott Elliott (Hurlyburly, The Women) will direct the Roundabout Theatre Company commission which will begin performances in Spring 2006, according to a Roundabout spokesperson.

Shawn (Aunt Dan and Lemon) translates and adapts the original German book and lyrics of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s classic musical Die Dreigroschenoper. Set in London in the 1800s, The Threepenny Opera concerns a notorious bandit who marries a girl, much to the chagrin of her father. The peeved patriarch does everything in his power to imprison his son-in-law in this political and social satire.

This looks great. I’ve seen two notable performances of Threepenny, one starring Sting in his naked-photos-in-the-rainforest days (good days), and one featuring film and stage star Lance Baker, a.k.a. my high school boyfriend. The latter was very good. The former was about as bad as a revival can be, though Sting looked great swinging through the cages onstage.

Remember, always, that it could be worse: Since last fall, there have been awful reports that Lance Bass is producing a new version of The Great Gatsby with Chris Carmack as James Gatz and, uh, Paris Hilton as Daisy. What, the young Robert Redford and Mia Farrow weren’t classy enough for you? Fitzgerald drank at—and was once banned from—the Seelbach Hilton Louisville; he later set Tom and Daisy’s, I mean Chris and Paris’s, wedding in the ballroom, so the Gatsby-Hilton association is deep. At least something is.

Mack’s Back in Town [Playbill]
The 50 Coolest Things About Louisville (besides the Derby) [Velocity]
Five Best: Hotels from novels [London Independent]
Paris Hilton: Is she the girl you love to hate or hate to love? [Rolling Stone]

Onion, tell it like it is:

Woman Dozing at Coffee Shop Has That Dave Eggers Sex Dream Again

IOWA CITY, IA—Freshly jolted awake from a peach-tea-induced nap, Sumatra Café patron Laurie Dubar said she had that same sex dream about bestselling author Dave Eggers. “I’m lying on the couch naked, and Dave is next to me, also naked, reading Salon on his laptop,” said Dubar, a 34-year-old Iowa Writers’ Workshop instructor. “Suddenly, he turns to me and says, ‘Could you help me edit a collection of short fiction?’ and I can’t control myself any longer.” Dubar said she always wakes up just as Sarah Vowell walks in wearing a kimono.

But Dave (may I call you Dave? I brushed your nubbly sweater once at Galapagos but I was too shy to speak, though I did write an op-ed about that night) is far away in San Francisco, plus married, and all we can do is try on shoes in our sleep at the store and keep dreaming. Childishly jealous no more, we yearn only to be one with it all. At a sane and respectful distance, we’re still here.

Woman Dozing at Coffee Shop Has That Dave Eggers Sex Dream Again [Onion]
Around the World in a Week [Eggers interview, New Yorker]
Dave Eggers on waiting for the right time… [Kottke]
You Shall Know Our Velocity [Book Club, Slate]
Sleep [McSweeney’s]
Letters of Affection [Miss Abigail]

From Calvin Tomkins’ March 29, 2004, profile of Christo and Jeanne-Claude:

At a lecture at the Pratt Institute in 1980, when someone asked why they refused to consider situating “The Gates” in an alternate location, [Jeanne-Claude] answered, “Sir, did you marry the woman you loved, or an alternate woman?” At the Bloomberg press conference last January, when a reporter pressed her to give a cost figure for “The Gates,” she told him, “Go and ask your mother if she could give an estimate for the cost of raising you.”

About Saffron [Greek Products]
The Gate [Belle & Sebastian, via NoMoreLyrics]
The Gates Christo drapes [Ask a New Yorker a Question]

My mother (whose cartooning skills were praised by Edward Gorey himself) writes:

I’ve been reading “Annals of Justice: Outsourcing Torture” by Jane Mayer, in the Feb. 14 & 21 issue. Quite depressing—but a fraction of my day was enhanced by learning that there is a Pentagon spokesman named… (DRUM ROLL)

LT. COMMANDER FLEX PLEXICO!!!! (pg. 118)

Nobody could possibly make this up. Such a great name. Action figure potential? I don’t think I would care to be tortured by him, though. (Or by somebody named anything else, either.)

Or as Three Roses put it,

Every day, it feels more and more like the 80’s again. I cannot express how delighted I am to learn that the Public Affairs Officer for the US Pacific Fleet is none other than one Lt. Cmdr. Flex Plexico. Makes me feel like I’m living in an American Flagg! comic!

The ’80s are one thing (particularly if a temporary stay there includes a parked car and the young Nicolas Cage), dastardly yes-men quite another. Where have you gone, Peter Parker? The nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

Mayer piece: related [Agonist]
Judge Rules Guantanamo Tribunals Illegal [Watching Justice]
Wakka Ding Hoy! [Three Roses Informatics]
Photo Opportunity for Military Commissions Ceremony [DoD]
The Politics of Superheroes [Democratic Underground]
Mr. Sinister [Marvel Comics]

On pp. 10-11 (the Toyota Avalon ad with the mechanical Tilleyish butterflies) of the Anniversary Issue, which only just arrived—the sole downside to Brooklyn. I’m already happy.

I also note with my usual wonder that www.thenewyorker.com is still the property of some guy. Is this a battle on the scale of Dave Eggers v. the various McSweeney families (some of whom proved to be quite flexible), I wonder, or are Remnick and friends secure in the belief that if you’re smart enough to like the magazine, you’re smart enough to find the website? (That’s an idea whose time either will or has already come—websites so exclusive their acolytes have to hunt for them, like outlaw parties.) Still, the publication itself—”A web site for New Yorkers”—is, while full of useful links and sincere shout-outs to the NYC police force (“overall, the finest group of men and women in the entire country”), a gangly fifth cousin to its spiffy counterpart with its loud font clashes and iffy punctuation. As I type I’ve already convinced myself to root for the underdog, which I always do, so okay: Woof, Ed Kehoe! May your website prosper, and in 75 years let both of us be the subject of blogs! (Or whatever they’ll have in the future. Soon enough, all of this will just be accessible on the backs of our eyelids and iPods will be the size of a mouse dropping. I once saw a coin in the British Museum that was just a tiny speck of metal; woe betide those with holes in their pockets!)

A Heartwarming Tale of Staggering Generosity [Salon]

Greek Fractional Silver [DougSmith]

Type “Robert Benchley” into IMDb, and you get a delicious list of eighty films under “Actor—Filmography,” and fifty-three more (with overlap) under “Writer—Filmography.” There are thirteen more in which he plays himself (sometimes as Robert, sometimes as Bob). Hooray, you cry, I’ll go to Netflix and Move to Top of Queue! But when you arrive at the Robert Benchley page it is as bare as Ma Hubbard’s larder. Three films grace it: Foreign Correspondent, Hollywood Musicals of the ’40s, and You’ll Never Get Rich. Where is Week-End at the Waldorf, My Tomato, Flesh and Fantasy (a.k.a. Six Destinies), The Bride Wore Boots, The Major and the Minor, That Inferior Feeling, How to Sub-Let, The Courtship of the Newt, The Romance of Digestion, or—a troubling omission—The Sex Life of the Polyp? Some of these are shorts, and all the more reason whey they should be available on DVD. Not all of this is Netflix’s fault, but I have no doubt they could tighten the appropriate thumbscrews if they wanted to. Amazon has a better selection, but still Rafter Romance, no Stewed, Fried and Boiled, no How to Break 90 at Croquet. That Inferior Feeling, indeed!

Perhaps the most shameful absence is The Stork Club (1945), one of blonde genius Betty Hutton’s funniest movies, in which Benchley plays droll lawyer Tom P. Curtis. There’s a movement afoot to give Hutton a Lifetime Achievement Award (she’s 83 now), and after you see this (along with Preston Sturges’ superlative The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, on TCM this and next month) you’ll know why.

It’s not as though these are the only titles missing from Netflix, by the way. Careful now, my red-squared friend, or I may have to leave you for that highbrow Facets after all.

Benchley motion pictures [Robert Benchley Society]
Benchley films on TV this month [TV-now, via Benchley Society]
Living Legends of Classic Movies [ClassicMovies]