This Savage Art

I would fight and fight hard to stay up. I had my Saturday night ritual. Start watching Saturday Night Live at 11:30 then wrestling at midnight, switch back and forth between commercials and if my plans worked out, watch a late night horror film like the original, silent Phantom of the Opera on PBS or channel 57. So much for plans. My seven year old body ached for sleep so I rarely made it. I missed the great George Carlin kick off the first SNL back in 1975. I never got to see his irreverent brand of humor set the tone for what would be one of the longest running sketch comedy shows on television. Well, set the DVR because in memory of this great loss to comedy and in my opinion humanity, NBC will be airing a rebroadcast of that first show.

Here’s what you need to know:

Saturday Night Live – Host George Carlin with Janis Ian and Billy Preston, Saturday, June 28th 11:30 EST

This post can also be seen at Big Screen Little Screen where I’m guest blogging.

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Seven words transcript verbatim.

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It’s all about story as we all know and have known. There’s no magic bullet and there’s no screenwriting book that’s going to give you the formula. A combination of life’s hard lessons learned, an instinct for what moves people and raw, unfiltered talent will always win. So let’s hand it to those out there who finally are coming around and realize everything I have just said to be the truth. Here they are:

• Producer Mark Gill tells us how fucked the independent film world is. But hey, there’s hope.
• Storytellers unite.
• Bad writing sucks. Let’s try to fix that, mmmmmkay. [via THND]

That should keep you busy thinking for a while.

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It’s time [it's always time] to load up your queue with everything that Hal Ashby has ever directed. While you’re doing that read this to understand why [via GreenCine.]

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Another ambitious project via David Fincher with a little help from F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Related: The cinematographer, Claudio Miranda’s site.

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[original design by william speruzzi]

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The Sopranos alum Terence Winter has been hired to work on not one but three projects for Scorsese including a new HBO series based on the book Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times, and Corruption of Atlantic City. [Hat tip to BSLS]

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While some sites are dicking around with reviews of Kung Fu Panda [I kid, I kid] there’s an avalanche of good stuff on the interweb today:

• A massive film resource database is here for all to enjoy. The Moving Image Source. Well…enjoy! [via The Reeler.]
• Writer/director/one of the reasons I pray to the film gods Paul Schrader and cinematographer extraordinaire Ed Lachman speak at BAM. [Video clips.]
• More Schrader. Notes from Kevin B. Lee on the underappreciated Light Sleeper.
• Steven Boone crashes Antoine Fuqua’s Brooklyn block party.
• How dare you disrespect Abel Ferrara!!!

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The recently released Blu-ray version of the Dirty Harry box set gets rid of all that ugly, ugly film grain. Bleghh.  Bad film grain, bad.

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The title says it all. This week there are three NYC events to check out.

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