Sexy Mensches

From Mia Farrow's memoir What Falls Away, about the tension between Roman Polanski and John Cassavetes on the set of Rosemary's Baby:

One workday, while we were waiting to shoot, Roman was discoursing about the impossibility of long-term monogamy given the brevity of a man's sexual attraction to any woman. An impassioned John Cassavetes responded that Roman knew nothing about women, or relationships, and that he, John, was more attracted than ever to his wife, Gena Rowlands. Roman stared at him and blinked a few times, and for once had no reply.




Interviewer: With History of Violence, did you want to address sexuality in a different way than you had in the past?

David Cronenberg: No, not really. Sexuality is of interest to me for all the obvious reasons — plus the body-specific reasons — but I have to forget about my other movies when I'm making a movie. The sexuality comes out of the characters and out of the plot. There are two sex scenes, which are interesting because they take place between a married couple that have children.
You don't see that anymore. It's either adolescent sex or forget it, whereas anybody who's married knows that sex gets more interesting and more complex and deeper as you get older. So I was interested in that.

In the original script, there were no sex scenes. I added them. I felt in some ways you could call this movie Scenes From a Marriage. I have to know about the sexuality involved in that marriage if I'm really going to understand it.




And Ernst Lubitsch:


Who had an astonishing imagination for innuendo, and also made a romantic, complicated and bittersweet depiction of marriage in this subtle film:




Of course the star of the Heaven Can Wait remake (script by Elaine May) deserves at least an honorable mention:



He's got at least one out of two.
From Peter Biskind's new biography of the conquistador, Beatty's phone technique:

Never identifying himself, speaking in a soft, insinuating voice rarely raised above a whisper, flattering in its assumption of intimacy, he asked them where they were, with whom, where they were going next and would they be sure to call him when they got there.

One morning he called Leslie Caron at 5am, waking her. According to her, he said: “You’re sleeping! You’re not thinking about me!”

Dress up your Lingerie

"Let me see your underwear."

After a slap, rivals decide to swap positions in The Smiling Lieutenant

Lady Windermere's Flan (Elizabeth David Part I)

My favorite author is a
cookery writer: Elizabeth David.
Her writing was evocative and humble to the physical details that she was describing. Like the following description, pinpointing a stage previously unidentified in cooking terms, of the exact temperature at which a mackerel should be poached:
They must cook very gently indeed, the liquid not even simmering but merely shuddering.

She was bossy but trusted her readers' imaginations and their judgement; she had faith in their taste (which could be developed through the process of following her recipes with thorough consciousness.) As she irately wrote to the editor Judith Jones when Jones complained about a recipe leaving too much stuffing:
Inconsistencies are inevitable in a cookery book and preferable, I think myself, to absurdities brought about by overzealousness in the matter of literal renderings....I don't think one does any harm in crediting one's readers with a little imagination and knowledge of their own.

David also avoided the two most hideous traps of a cookery writer: purple prose and whimsy. Her humor, in fact, sometimes came across as the stern voice of schoolteacher--or a Mary Poppins figure--who created so much indulgence and pleasure but was too dignified to associate herself, or her work, with such frivolous joy:
Anyhow the combination of the soft apple puree with the light crisp crust is excellent; it's known in my household, I am sorry to say, as Lady Windermere's Flan.


At that, let's shift from E.D. to Ernst.
I think the perfect syllabus for a beginning filmmaking class would be solely Ernst Lubitsch's 1925 silent Lady Windermere's Fan. That's it. It's a perfect film, and it utilizes all of the medium's unique strengths.

Like Elizabeth David, Lubitsch had a lyrical style, with grounded charm and too much intelligence to ever fall into twee whimsy. One of his greatest skills--and so much of what is identifiably Lubitschian--was his trust and dependence on the imagination of his audience.

Arnaud Desplechin has remarked recently on being greatly influenced by the Lubitsch silents in his approach to filmmaking. Desplechin lets the actions of his actors trump the written script, but feels that it's important for this script to be very good and thorough before it can be thrown away. He has commented that there was excellent dialogue often written for these silent movies even though you never hear it, and that the intertitles then abbreviate the script.