The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies
David Thomson
Language: English
Pages: 608
ISBN: 0374534136
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The definitive story of the medium that defines our times
The Big Screen tells the enthralling story of the movies: their rise and spread, their remarkable influence over us, and the technology that made the screen as important as the images it carries.
But The Big Screen is not another history of the movies. Rather, it is a wide-ranging narrative about the movies and their signal role in modern life. The celebrated film authority David Thomson takes us around the globe, through time, and across many media to tell the complex, gripping, paradoxical story of the movies. He tracks the ways we were initially enchanted by movies as imitations of life―the stories, the stars, the look―and how we allowed them to show us how to live. At the same time, movies, offering a seductive escape from everyday reality and its responsibilities, have made it possible for us to evade life altogether. The entranced audience has become a model for powerless and anxiety-ridden citizens trying to pursue happiness and dodge terror by sitting quietly in a dark room.
Does the big screen take us out into the world or merely mesmerize us? That is Thomson's question in this grand adventure of a book, vital to anyone trying to make sense of the age of screens―the age that, more than ever, we are living in.
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old money entered the mass media in its early days. This is movie business, of course, with television some way away still, but it is also the thing Noah Cross (John Huston) swears to protect and possess in the movie Chinatown (1974): “the future.” It is also a portrait of a great operator: in the same years, Paley finessed a Crossley opinion poll that said NBC was doing far better with the listening public than CBS by mounting his own write-in response (in his favor). By the early 1950s, Paley
in 1958, Une Histoire d’Eau, and Truffaut had once told Godard a simple story—about a thief who kills a cop and tries to hide out in Paris with an American girlfriend. Godard thought it might make his own feature debut. So he raided the petty cash at Cahiers and caught a train to Cannes. Once there, he told the story to Georges de Beauregard, a producer, and got Chabrol and Truffaut to assure de Beauregard that he could use their names—“story” by Truffaut, with Chabrol as “artistic supervisor.”
this was a film in search of a radical reappraisal of moviemaking. When the look proved too gentle or pleasing, Godard would embark on a savage editing to deconstruct the old fluency or pleasure. He had promised the lead part, Michel, to Jean-Paul Belmondo, and he talked the actor out of a bigger picture on offer in return for a mere $800. For the American girl, Patricia, however, he suddenly thought of an American star, or a quasar, who happened to be there in Paris. Jean Seberg had been
together—and save the world? That was a momentary prospect in the early 1970s, when inchoate issues of desire (the pursuit of happiness even) sometimes seemed to rest on the fate of cinema. It is what leaves Kael’s cry of recognition close to tragic now. Just two years earlier, Bernardo Bertolucci had made a masterpiece, The Conformist (1970), from a novel by Alberto Moravia. It is the story of Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant), a tense and masked young Italian in the age of fascism, who becomes
Yorker, October 21, 1967, and in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, pp. 47–63. On Roger Corman, see Roger Corman, How I Made a Hundred Movies and Never Lost a Dime (1998); Roger Corman, ed. Paul Willemen, David Pirie, David Will, and Lynda Myles (1970). On Peter Bogdanovich, he has done so much, but it is worth stressing his earliest, groundbreaking works, the monograph interviews with Orson Welles (1961), Howard Hawks (1962), and Alfred Hitchcock (1963) done for the Museum of Modern Art in New York. On Bob