October 6, 2017: Funny how the first two times I devoted a Best Forgotten column to a movie (see here and here) Geraldine Page’s name showed up. Well, it’s happened again, as you’ll see in my just-posted look at 1969’s underappreciated What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? Could it be that Geraldine Page can do no wrong? While we’re asking big questions: whatever happened to closing up “what ever” as a pronoun? Hmm?
August 29, 2017: It’s okay: you can be a good punk and still like Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, which turns forty this year. Fleetwood Mac has always had an anti-arena-rock democracy about it: just as the Sex Pistols weren’t Johnny Rotten’s backup band the way the Stones seem to be Mick’s (forgive me, Keith), no single person in the Mac was permanently flanked by the other four. I have a host of other hopefully not dubious things to say about the band and its signature album in the out-in-two-days issue of V magazine, but today they linked to the piece online, so why wait two days? I’m providing a link here and now.
August 25, 2017: That’s not me with Dame Edna: that’s Stella McCartney. And Dame Edna isn’t gray, or even (technically) a lady. Confession: I was trying to seduce you so I could tell you that my first review for the New York Times Book Review has just run, in the issue dated August 27, available online today. See?
July 13, 2017: Evan Hunter (1926–2005) was probably best known as the screenwriter for Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), but I’m way more impressed by his refusal to write the glib honeymoon rape scene for the director’s follow-up, Marnie. About that notorious scene, which was used in the ultimately Hunter-less film (Hitchcock canned him), the writer later said,
“I felt it not heroic of the lead character to rape his wife when he sees there’s something wrong here with the woman, you know? She’s not being coy or girlish—you know, she’s terrified. And I felt this was wrong dramatically. And I also felt that I would have a hell of a time recovering him from this scene….I knew every woman in the audience would hate him.”
Well! That’s all I needed to hear. Hunter was clearly playing for my team, and I’ve been a fan—including of his beloved 87th Precinct mysteries, which he wrote under the pseudonym Ed McBain—ever since. Recently, I discovered the short-lived and unfairly unloved NBC crime drama 87th Precinct (1961–1962), based on the McBain books, and of course it’s the subject of my latest Best Forgotten column at The Awl.
May 11, 2017: Hey you! (Yes, you.) The Awl just posted “The Picasso in Her Closet,” my essay about a mom (mine), her friend, a mystery illness, a Picasso in a Crate and Barrel shopping bag, and a shamefully covetous daughter (me).
May 10, 2017: I confess to coming late to the Joan Didion Appreciation Society (membership: a squillion), but I’m now a proud figurative-card-carrying member, thanks to her new book, South and West: From a Notebook, which V magazine was swell enough to let me write about in V106, the out-now issue. (I’ll give you a direct link to the story if they post it online, m’kay?) Anita Pallenberg, Jackie Susann, Tippi Hedren, Joan—please keep letting me write about old broads, guys. (You know by now that I’m living in another time, right?)
April 3, 2017: Ninety-three, nine-five—let’s not preoccupy ourselves with her age. The crucial tally here is thirty-nine, the number of films made by Doris Day, who is worthy of celebration year-round. Today, on the occasion of Day’s birthday, Bright Lights Film Journal was nice enough to have me back with my annotated list of her films, which I’ve ranked from “Oh, Doris…” to “Oh, Doris!”
March 22, 2017: Let me be the first to say that the ’n’ in 1972’s Pete ’n’ Tillie, the movie I write about in my latest Best Forgotten column for The Awl, is an affront to the thinking person’s eyeballs. But if you watch the film (and you really should), you’ll find that the ’n’ is actually a satirical smirk at Hollywood’s promise of cute coupledom. While Walter Matthau, playing Pete, does the smirking, Carol Burnett, as Tillie, skips the cuteness: she spends much of the movie—hers and Matthau’s first together and easily her best—in a state of barely suppressed resentment. It’s a beautiful thing.
January 15, 2017: In just about my favorite assignment ever, V magazine had me write about Rosemary’s Baby, Ira Levin’s game-changing horror novel, which I had somehow never read, in honor of its fiftieth anniversary this March. Among the book’s many horrors: how little Rosemary and Guy Woodhouse had to pay for four rooms with two loos in midtown Manhattan in the 1960s. Anyway, I see that my Rosemary piece is out now in V, and I’ll let you know when they link to the story online, m’kay? M’kay!
January 13, 2017: Remember Roseanne’s old joke about how, if her husband comes home from work to find the kids still alive, she has done her job? I suspect that Marsha Hunt—the American singer, actress, and author—would be better known today as something other than the mother of Mick Jagger’s first child if she had followed Roseanne’s approach to parenting. In my latest Best Forgotten column for The Awl, posted just now, I write about Real Life, Hunt’s elucidating 1986 memoir, and the potential cost to her career of having been a good mom.