Well, dear readers, I don’t know what happened, but sometime yesterday late afternoon I became an achy-breaky BK. I don’t know if all the stress and pressure just built to this or if whatever this is has been coming on and I’ve just attributed its symptoms to stress and pressure. Whatever, I got the chills, I couldn’t take deep breaths without launching into hideous coughing fits from which I thought I’d never recover, headache, and a completely achy-breaky body from head to toe. Add to that a tummy in turmoil and you have one achy-breaky BK. I’m planning to take a big gulp o’ NyQuil in a moment, and hopefully that will help me make it through the night. Speaking of making it through the night, I really thought yesterday might be one glorious day where nothing annoying happened – that lasted until one o’clock, when something majorly annoying happened. Still, it was the only really annoying thing, so there’s that. I am beginning to have song juggling problems with singers, as everyone tends to want to do the same five song. Since Mr. Menken and Mr. Schwartz have written so many great numbers, I’m hoping I can make people happy with other songs. But that’s what happens when you have twenty-six singers. In any case, I did just a few things, wrote a few things that needed writing, and then I finally just sat on my couch like so much achy-breaky fish.
Yesterday, I managed to watch three count them three motion pictures on DVD, all under eighty-five minutes. The first motion picture on DVD was entitled Someone’s Watching Me, a TV movie from 1978, directed by John Carpenter, starring Miss Lauren Hutton and Mr. David Birney. Most of Mr. Carpenter’s films leave me cold, and this one left me colder than most. It’s a standard-issue “someone is watching me from that high rise across the way” plot, with some of the poorest dialog you’ll ever hear, with some of the stupidest plotting you’ll ever see – you know the lazy kind of screenwriting, where the characters do what they do not because logic dictates that they do so, but because the screenwriter just wants them to do it. Most of that centers around Miss Hutton’s character, who behaves so stupidly throughout the film that you ultimately begin to secretly want her to get thrown off her balcony. It doesn’t help that Miss Hutton is just not a very good actress, or that appealing on the screen. Mr. Birney does what Mr. Birney does. The best thing about it was that despite them trying to convince you that these two facing high rises are downtown, the location shots were, in fact, filmed at The Shores in Ocean Park – the very apartment building I lived in for eight years in the late 80s to the mid-90s. The actual apartments were sets, but all the outdoor stuff was instantly recognizable, and I’m quite sure you could see my balcony on film. That location is also almost the precise spot where the Hotel St. Regis was, across from Pacific Ocean Park, and where I spent to much of my childhood (see the Kritzer books). The transfer was muddy and lackluster, but acceptable.
I then watched the second motion picture on DVD, which was entitled Bloody Mama, a film of Roger Corman. What a perfectly dreadful film this is – vicious, disgusting, ugly, humorless, and almost a complete waste of celluloid. I think at the time of its release the ads and trailers almost played it for fun, with a Bonnie and Clyde flavor. Bonnie and Clyde it ain’t. Shelly Winters plays it completely straight, and the writing of her character is terrible. A very young and think Robert De Niro is one of the Barker boys, with Don Johnson as the eldest son. The only time the film sort of gets interesting is when they kidnap Pat Hingle – his performance is the only decent thing in the film. Yes, Virginia, I hated every minute of it. Transfer is decent and nothing more.
I then needed something short to finish the night with, so I took out one of my favorite TV movies, Steven Spielberg’s Duel. I wish they’d put the TV version on the DVD, rather than the padded out version shown in cinemas in Europe. The two long added scenes slow the film. And the 5.1 remix is a dud – go for the original mono. But, the film is always great fun to watch, and Dennis Weaver gives a tour de force performance. The transfer is great, and you all know what a stickler I am for correct color – just look at the color of Duel and you will see a very close approximation of what films printed in IB Technicolor are supposed to look like. Look at the skies, then look at the Warners botch of The Searchers – it will be instantly apparent.
Well, why don’t we all click on the Unseemly Button below because this achy-breaky BK needs to hit the road to dreamland courtesy of Ny-Quil.
Today I shall try to sleep in, and then I shall try to do nothing whatsoever. I’m supposed to have an hour meeting with Cason, but it’s going to depend on how achy-breaky I’m feeling.
Tomorrow, I shall be mostly scheduling rehearsals for our performers, so we can make sure keys are right, that arrangements are working, and like that there.
It’s really daunting how much there is to do over the next three weeks. It looks like we’ve got about 250 people so far (audience), and I’m hoping we can double that over the next five days. I’ll be doing weekly eBlasts, too, as we add all our new performers. I’m talking to two more today, and they’re both great and we’ll see if their schedules work.
Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, do as little as possible whilst resting and trying to get rid of whatever it is that I’ve got. Today’s topic of discussion: It’s free-for-all day, the day in which you dear readers get to make with the topics and we all get to post about them. So, let’s have loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst achy-breaky BK shuffles off to the bedroom environment.