Then It Could Be Told

Atom bombs are most effective in movies when they unleash dinosaurs, krakens, and mutant ants. Serious exploration of the Bomb and its applications are tougher to dramatize. Get technical with audiences and they switch off. Argue moral implications and you’ll empty theatres. Metro found out with a 1947 go at the Manhattan Project that ended with losses of $1.5 million. The Beginning Or The End may have been too close to the actual drop for comfort. Many spoonfuls of sugar were needed to make this medicine go down. When time came to dramatize the mission of Lt. Colonel Paul Tibbetts, the pilot who flew over Hiroshima, MGM knew better which blueprint to use. Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo wasn’t about atom bombs, but its set-up worked to the tune of $1.4 million in 1944 profits, and could easily be modified for 1952 application. Above and Beyond was less about the Bomb and more about secrets its architects kept from their wives. Putting over a story like this required getting out of laboratories and into kitchens. Telling it all from a woman’s viewpoint would cinch the deal. Metro marketing know-how followed up on cunning writers-directors Norman Panama and Melvin Frank’s shift of emphasis from nuclear force to the force of nuclear families, by far the greater concern of audiences done with war and disinclined to revisit one of its darker chapters.

Writers were hot to get Enola Gay off the ground again since Col. Tibbetts lent technical expertise to the novel that became Twelve O’Clock High. He’d also appeared by (minor) way of actor Barry Nelson among characters in The Beginning Or The End. Tibbetts was a natural and his Air Force superiors were ready to team with Metro to reveal the Best Kept Secret Of The War. Figured early was the importance of Tibbett’s personal story. Not only was this the better commercial option, it would also boost morale within the Strategic Air Command, where divorce rates among pilots were climbing higher than planes they were flying. If the Tibbetts could withstand pressures brought by so monumental a project as the Atom Bomb, surely military personnel in the audience could put right their own marital discords. You don’t find a lot of romance in war, said Tibbetts, but Metro was determined to shoehorn plenty of it into Above and Beyond. Realization of same inspired him to beg off on the studio’s offer to serve as technical advisor. I was too close to the forest to see the trees, said Tibbetts, who did at least approve of Robert Taylor as his screen altar-ego. They got on well, and Tibbetts admired the fact that, as opposed to someone like John Wayne, Taylor had actually served in the military. The Colonel evinced little interest or confidence in war movies. They’re a bunch of bullshit, he said. I found out right away that they took liberties. They made things up. Things about the flight --- at first I felt like correcting them, but they explained to me that this is the way movies work. To make it more entertaining, and to make it move along. So I just accepted that, and watched it as a movie. Like most men of action, Tibbetts cared less about Hollywood in any case. He’d never see Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, The Best Years Of Our Lives, or the much later Saving Private Ryan. He was impatient with actors and their yak-yak. There’s no use in wasting a lot of damn words when you can do something instead. MGM writers sought to lay a major guilt complex on the Tibbetts character over Hiroshima and weave the show around that, but military brass resisted. It was enough giving them marital strife to chew over, and Tibbetts, who had veto power over degrading and misleading aspects of any script, was surprisingly compliant over dramatization of his domestic woes. He’d later reveal that Above and Beyond really didn’t portray the tensions as bad as they were (the Tibbetts would divorce in 1955). As to guilt, he’d feel none. It was the Colonel’s job and he did it, a position Tibbetts would maintain right up to November 1, 2007, the date of his death at 92. If you give me the same circumstances, hell yeah, I'd do it again.

A love story with tenderness and heartbreak. Ladies, take a couple of hankies with you. You’ll need them, warns Hedda Hopper at the trailer’s conclusion. Above and Beyond was designed to serve its women customers first. Metro’s boxoffice was dependent upon that. The less discussion about bombs the better, lest the show itself bomb, and no need getting excited about planes switching from shot to shot, or staging the Enola Gay’s take-off in daytime when the actual flight left at night. Such nitpicking was confined to war buffs and kids that built airplane models, and besides, Girlfriend and Mom made the decisions about what they’d all go to see. 1952 was long before moviegoing became the near exclusive province of adolescent boys. Pictures lacking femme interest paid for such oversight in (lost) turnstile dollars. Above and Beyond had trouble enough for action minimized in favor of interior drama. This topic was too serious to tread lightly upon. You’d not have the turkey shoot pay-off of a Sergeant York or bombs taking out picturesque factory models as in Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. There could be no exhilaration when this payload was dropped. Downplaying the devastation avoided downer exits and bad word of mouth. Stars Robert Taylor and Eleanor Parker helped overcome audience dread of the subject matter, plus there was genuine fascination with long delayed unraveling of what had gone on in connection with the military’s biggest hush-hush operation. Fullest Air Force cooperation guaranteed positive depiction of all service branches. Taylor/Tibbetts readjusts a few brass hats with character establishing insubordination during the first act, but that’s to reassure us that he’s the right guy for this mission. Scientists at the top-secret base are tentative eggheads who’d sooner scuttle the project than gamble on its success, typical of movie intellectuals whose usefulness ends when bugles sound.

The US Air Force got on merchandising board with Metro and pushed recruitment in lobbies nationwide. Are you tough enough to go "Above and Beyond"? Uniformed personnel stationed or residing nearby would be encouraged to attend local openings, and Air Force bands were available, provided the band’s appearance constitutes a part of a serious, dignified, semi-civic ceremony. Original crewmembers from the Enola Gay participated in the campaign. MGM’s pressbook actually listed home addresses for a number of them and advised exhibitors in those areas to make contact for possible appearances on radio, television, and in newspapers. The Real Col. Tibbetts (as shown here in a news plant) made a number of dates to promote Above and Beyond. Many of these were in tandem with Robert Taylor, whose guest spot on Ed Sullivan’s Toast Of The Town was one of the first occasions in which a studio contract player went on television to promote a picture currently in release. Taylor also canvassed nationwide on behalf of Above and Beyond, including the stop shown here with Cleveland exhibitors. Women love the idea of "secrets", said publicity, and toward making hay with that, showmen were encouraged to utilize the Sealed Lips Bally. Use a girl to advertise your picture on the streets. Seal her lips with tape. In furtherance of the assault, placards they’d carry would read: Sh-h-h-! I’m the Only One Who Knows the secret Robert Taylor is Keeping from Eleanor Parker in "Above and Beyond" --- Now At Leow’s. Interviewers at corners inquired Should A Husband Keep A Secret From His Wife? As to how many confrontations and scuffles this stunt provoked, I don’t know. Above and Beyond was produced at a fairly economical (for 1952) $1.3 million. There were domestic rentals of $2.6 million, and foreign rentals of $1.4. Eventual profits of $1.1 million gave MGM one of its larger hits of the season.

Tina Brown

Lunch at the Magazine Lifetime Achievement Awards where Tina Brown was inducted into the Hall of Fame. I was there having worked for Tina at Vanity Fair and the New Yorker and have always been a huge fan. The world of magazines seems so much duller without her. She has also always been a champion of photography, which is how we got together.

Our greatest coup was the famous 1985 Vanity Fair cover of the Reagans dancing - a cover credited (by others) as saving Vanity Fair when the sharks were circling and advertisers were scarce. It gave the magazine credibility and buzz and went on to become one of the most famous magazine covers as well as a cultural touchstone. So here's the inside story....

At my previous job as picture editor of the London Sunday Times Magazine, I had become friendly with Michael Evans - a talented photojournalist who became the chief White House photographer for Ronald Reagan. I had put together a special issue on Michael's most intimate White House pictures that got picked up around the world. So two years later when Tina came up with idea of a story about how the Reagans loved to dance my connections got us 60 seconds with the first couple as they left their private quarters en route to a formal White House dinner. I chose Harry Benson as the photographer because there's no-one better in a sticky situation. Tina was there to report the story.

I knew the Reagans were friends of Frank Sinatra and so the night before the shoot, I made a tape of Sinatra singing "Nancy with the Laughing Face" and smuggled a Walkman and a miniature set of speakers into Harry Benson's bag. The pirate sound system made it through security and when the Reagans stopped in front of Benson's backdrop I hit play. The Secret Service looked stunned but dared not interrupt as Ron and Nancy spontaneously broke into dance for the whole song (cover!) and ended with a heartfelt smooch (double page spread!).

It was the kind of collaboration that makes magazine work so exciting. Or as Tina said in her speech, "Sometimes you have to be lucky, and sometimes you have to be prepared to be lucky!"

Sandmen

It never occurred to me how prevalent the subject (or backdrop) of sand is in photography until I was riffling through Christies catalog for their February 20th New York sale of photographs. There was sand everywhere! The above photograph by Wynn Bullock (estimated at $3,000 - $5,000) is of course a reference to the justly more celebrated Edward Weston image (below) which even printed posthumously is estimated at $7,000 - $9,000. There are sand pictures by Ansel Adams, Harry Callahan, Robert Frank, Michael Kenna, Herbert Matter, Anna Mendieta, the Westons - Edward and Brett, and Gary Winogrand. (I'm disqualifying Lucien Clergue because anyone who makes a living photographing women on the beach with wet sand up their bum does not deserve to be in this particular hall of fame.)



Anyway ... I happen to own several of Weston's "Nude on the Dunes" pictures (very dry sand) and as well as being some of my favorite pictures, they hang in the hallway between my bedroom and my childrens' rooms. I'm very careful about what art gets hung in my own home but these pictures are so brilliantly conceived and the figure so integrated in to the ground of sand that neither my children or any of the many children who have passed through our house on play-dates have ever given it a second thought. I remember a house featured in a magazine not so long ago where the most provocative, graphic, and X-rated art was hanging on the wall and the couple's young children were pictured romping around in decorative magazine fashion, and I thought there has to be some kind of line, doesn't there?


Anyway back to sand. Aside from Weston's dunes one of the greatest sand pictures is the Australian photographer Max Dupain's "The Sunbaker" (above) taken in 1937, the year after Weston's pictures.


Last in the round-up of sand pictures is Richard Ehrlich (above and below) whose extraordinary pictures taken in 2003 of the Namibian ghost town of Kolmanskop I just recently discovered. In brief, Kolmanskop sprang up in 1908 after diamonds were discovered in the desert sand. By 1920 Kolmanskop was a booming mining town with 300 German expatriates and their families - a hospital, gymnasium, casino, bowling alley, and power station. Houses were built and decorated in beautiful colors with great artistic sensibility, presumably to offset the lonely existence in the middle of the desert. By 1928, however, the diamond deposits dried up and the town was abandoned to the elements. The skeletal remains of the houses are now left to sand and time, with every room constantly shifting and re-emerging as the wind shifts. Wow - talk about earth art!

Winter Wildflowers: Violets

This week as part of the Winter Wildflower blog-a-thon at Wildflower Morning, we were asked to come up with some literary connection to wildflowers. I remembered that I had just the thing for this entry.

I recently read a really interesting book about flowers. 100 Flowers and How They Got Their Names by Diana Wells was a quick, fun read and was packed full of interesting tidbits about how both garden and wildflowers got their names.

According to the author about the violet:
Common Names: Violet, pansy, heart's-ease, Johnny-jump-up, love in idleness
Botanical Name: Viola

She also relates the story of how violets became associated with love. Let's just say it has something to do with the Greek gods Zeus, Hera, and a heifer.

She includes literary connections to violets by referring to works that violets play a part in like Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. She also relates a story about violets that has to do with Napoleon.

"When Napoleon was banished to Elba, he said he would 'return with the violets.' When he did return, Josephine was dead, and he picked violets from her grave before being exiled again to St. Helena. They were found in a locket, along with a lock of hair, when he died."

We are going to keep this little book handy as we enter the spring term and our study of garden flowers. Each flower has a small illustration at the beginning of the chapter. I highly recommend it for anyone who is interested in short accounts for many common flowers. I got my book on bookmooch.com but you can find it used on amazon.com for less than a dollar.

Barb-Harmony Art Mom

Some other flowers included in the book: dahlia, daffodil, daylily

Fish Tales

It won't be my usual practice to post runway shots, but every time I see pictures from Jean-Paul Gaultier’s collections they seem as much art as fashion. In particular the amazing mermaid outfit (above) from last week’s Spring 2008 collection gave me a real jolt! Adding to the theatrics of the show, when the euphoniously named model Coco Rocha first appeared on the runway, she was in full mermaid tail and walking on two coral crutches! She then unzipped her fin and undulated down the catwalk, her bustier recalling the famous cone bra Gaultier originally created for Madonna (for whom he still designs).

With the exception of the intentional outrageousness of this costume, the rest of the collection looked beautiful, wearable, and unlike the valentine song - quite photographable. When people complain about how fashion photography is in the doldrums (a very common complaint) perhaps some of the fault lies in the lack of photogenic-ness of many of today’s clothes.

This is never something Gaultier could be accused of. Having now passed through the “bad boy” phase he was invariably called out for in the early Madonna era – he now stands as the heir apparent to Yves St. Laurent in terms of his position in French culture. In addition to his own label, he is now also the creative director of Hermes, but he still likes to have fun as his own website amply demonstrates if you care to fish around!

Winter Wildflower Identified: California Wild Radish

Thanks to my blog reader, Shelly, I have now been able to identify my winter wildflower as California Wild radish. (see my original entry) I appreciate all her efforts to help me figure out what my find was. When I had originally observed this plant from 60 mph along the freeway, I did think it was mustard. It wasn't until I got out of the car and looked up close at it that I realized that it wasn't just yellow like mustard and that the flowers were very different and a variety of colors. The article that I linked to above explains that many times it is mistaken for mustard.

California Wild radish (Raphanus raphanistrum)

More interesting reading on the California Wild Radish. This will fit in with our current study of biology very nicely. I love it when we can make connections like that.

Thanks again Shelly,
Barb-Harmony Art Mom

Average Pictures

Life is not fair. For over a decade Chicago based artist Jason Salavon has been experimenting with over-layering and averaging images to come up with composites that explore iconic american typologies. Kids posing with a department store Santa Claus, high-school yearbook portraits, pictures of homes for sale, playboy centerfolds. The photographs are intellectually provocative, and visually engaging, but for some reason Salavon's work has never made it into the red hot center of contemporary art. It's too bad because they deserve to be.

Here are some of works. Above, the first of his "Every Playboy Centerfold, The Decades" from 2002. The series presents the mean average of every Playboy centerfold by decade from the 1960s to the 1990s. Below you'll find the rest of the series - the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.




Two years after Salavon's"Playboy" pictures were made, Idris Khan graduated from England's Royal College of Art and began to make it big-time with his own layered multiple exposures of re-photographed images. I'm not saying Khan was even aware of Salavon, and I'm actually a big fan of Khan's, but the right school, the right gallery, and the right timing can make all the difference.

Salavon's 1999 picture below from the series "Homes for Sale" takes 124 photographs of homes for sale in the 5 Boroughs of New York and digitally combines them using both the mean and the median. (Compare with some of Khan's pictures from the link above.)

"The Class of 1967" and "The Class of 1988" (below) are amalgamations of all the graduating men and women in both Salavon and his mother's Fort Worth Texas high school classes. Half dream, half memory, you can almost recognize the individual before they slip back into the ur-portrait of their particular generation.