Well, dear readers, I can officially say that the City of Studio is like an oven. You walk out the door and it’s like walking into a pizza oven. It is oppressive and disgusting, not necessarily in that order. Thankfully, the home environment stays fairly cool until about noon, at which time the home environment becomes oppressive and disgusting, not necessarily in that order. At that point, it becomes necessary to turn the air conditioning on. That cools things down in about fifteen or twenty minutes, after which I turn it off. Apparently this never occurs to other City of Studio denizens, all of whom have their oversized central air on full blast twenty-four hours a day. And what happens when those entitled, selfish sorts do that? Yes, the power goes out for the whole neighborhood, even affecting the entitled, selfish sorts, not that it would ever occur to them that they had anything to do with it. That happened twice yesterday, the two outages about thirty minutes apart and lasting for only about six minutes each. Nothin’ says lovin’ like something from the oven, but in the case of this heat I’d say the Pillsbury doughboy has his head in his nether regions. In short, it’s like an oven here. Even now, at almost midnight, it’s probably ninety degrees outside.
Other than that, it was a perfectly pleasant Saturday. I got up early and then did The Broadway Radio Show with Mr. Donald Feltham. That show will be running today so do give it a listen. It’s all about Follies and I think I say something interesting at some point, and I do reveal one piece of upcoming news. That took about an hour and fifteen minutes, then I went to the Coral Café in the Bank of Bur, where I had a chicken salad sandwich and cole slaw. After that, I went to a donut shop that had been recommended to me and there I got a mini-cinnamon roll and a mini apple fritter – my little Saturday treat. Then I picked up two packages, after which I came home. One of the packages contained the final item in this Hitchcock scripts batch o’ stuff I’ve gotten, this one the first draft of The Man Who Knew Too Much, which, like To Catch a Thief, weighs in at almost 200 pages. It came with two pages of notes from Hitchcock to screenwriter John Michael Hayes. Said notes obviously came way before the first draft, as they were still hammering out the plot points and characters, talking about two characters in particular that don’t exist in the first draft screenplay or the film. And in the notes, the mother, father, and son all have different names than were used in the first draft screenplay. The screenplay assigns the correct first names to them (Ben, Jo, and Hank) but at that point the last name was MacKenzie, which got changed to McKenna. Mysterious Louis Bernard is Louis Bernard and although there is quite a bit of extraneous dialogue in the first thirty pages, the scenes are basically what ended up in the film, and a good deal of the dialogue remained the same. At this point, the Draytons were called the Addisons. I’d love to know how all these name changes evolved – that sort of thing fascinates me.
I did a teeny-tiny bit of work on the computer, but decided I really just wanted to relax, as I’d only gotten about five hours of sleep. Then we had the two power outage things, which meant each time I had to reset the microwave clock and the oven clock. And the two outages made the central air behave weirdly, so I had to shut it down and start it again, at which point it was fine. Then I pondered whether to upgrade to Mountain Lion, the new operating system for Mac. It’s only twenty bucks, but I’m always very nervous to do that stuff. I may end up calling tech support and have them on the phone with me while I do it – that way should anything go awry, they will be right there with me. We shall see. I always think it’s best to wait a few weeks anyway, till they work out the bugs. Then I sat on my couch like so much tired fish.
Last night, I watched the first episode of season two of Cracker. Each season seems to be three films that were shown in either two or three parts. This episode was the best of them so far – just superb writing and acting and directing. There was one big shocker moment in the show. The guest star was Robert Carlyle, someone I’ve seen in a lot of stuff, including the original Full Monty film. It’s such an interesting series due to the extreme occasional unpleasantness of its leading character, Fitz. He’s quite the jerk throughout this series, but he’s very good at his job.
I also watched the American Masters documentary about Johnny Carson on Blu and Ray. It was very well done, the interviews were interesting, and the clips were, of course, great, including some I’ve never seen. It was a very moving portrait of a very interesting man.
After that, I went to Gelson’s and got some snacks (I probably ate way too much yesterday, but I’ve been very good for a week now, so I just felt like doing it), ate the snacks while nosing around the Internet. I did get a slightly annoying e-mail from someone I would rather have not gotten a slightly annoying e-mail from, but I was happy to send a slightly annoying response in kind. It was, in fact, my pleasure.
Well, why don’t we all click on the Unseemly Button below because I really must get a good night’s beauty sleep.
Today, I shall prep our eBlast, I shall begin a new set of liner notes, I shall enter some e-mail addresses into our eBlast list, I shall eat something very light but amusing, but mostly I shall relax.
Tomorrow I’ll be up at six to announce the new Kritzerland title, which any fan of great Golden Age film music will have to have, then I do a podcast with James Marino, Peter Filichia and Michael Portantiere. I may also go and say hello to Alex Rybeck, who’s in town doing a master class thing with Sara Lazarus. Some folks are meeting up at Greenblatt’s (a terrible deli) and I’ll probably just run over there to say hi. The rest of the week is gathering music and getting it to singers (we still have one gal to cast), doing errands and whatnot, meetings, meals and then getting ready for my trip to the city that never sleeps.
Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, prep, enter e-mail addresses, start liner notes, eat, and relax. 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 topics and loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst I hit the road to dreamland, after which I’m told, we will have a slightly cooler day and less of the oven.