Cantara Christopher in Sadie (Bob Chinn director, Mitam Productions, 1980) as Indexed in the Database of the British Film Institute; and “Pictures of Lily” by Pete Townshend

This isn’t the picture of me at the BFI Database. It was sent to me by “John Fairfax”, who saw my posting on Twitter about my last feature film and my irritated comment about how I thought the British Film Institute had mixed me up with another (probably Asian) actress. And the dear chap actually went through the grueling task (in the name of research, of course) to find proof positive that the girl in the sarong in the other screenshot is not me, mostly because of the arms, hair, and height. And he sent it to me! So here I am in Sadie, a softcore version of Maugham’s story “Rain”, entertaining two men on the island, presumably Borneo. The bloke in the cap is my husband Doc, the only one on the island allowed to touch my goodies.

Sadie, 1981Above: The Who and Pete Townshend’s love song to sex workers everywhere, “Pictures of Lily”.

This was not only my last feature, but the last film of any length (including loops, shorts etc) I did during my screen days in San Francisco, before I got pregnant and eloped with the father of my child to New York’s East Village.

For years I’ve talked about my porn career like it was a lark—a daredevil stunt I pulled and lived to tell the tale. I certainly was never more physically beautiful than when I was in my early 20s, and really, I’ve got to tell you, it is a kick in the first flowering of old age to know that somewhere, somehow, even now yet still, someone is probably doing the stroke dance with one of your pictures. Because as long as a buck can be made from it, porn will never disappear.

Now here comes the freakin’ British Film Institute to spoil my fun. Now I have to consider myself a lousy but legitimate actress rather than a pretty good porn one? Do you Brits have to put a damper on everything?




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Mrs Maisel and Lenny Bruce

To all the randy fellow fans of The Marvelous Mrs Maisel (Amazon, 2017-2023): Are you ‘shipping this couple so bad like me? Here, by the way, are the two essentials for getting to know the real Lenny:

  • How to Talk Dirty and Influence People (full pdf, 1965) [https://bit.ly/lennybruce1]
  • Lenny Bruce at Carnegie Hall (full audio, February 1961) THE VERY CONCERT RECREATED IN SEASON 4 EPISODE 8 by the wonderful and deeply sexy Luke Kirby (whose portrayal, by the way, won the approval of Bruce’s daughter Kitty) [https://bit.ly/lennybruce2]
Screening Room, SF 1979Above Rachel Brosnahan playing struggling stand-up comic Midge Maisel and Luke Kirby portraying the once long ago very real Lenny Bruce: Real Lenny performing the actual concert at Carnegie Hall, 1961.

Find some of Lenny Bruce’s other gigs on my YouTube playlist here




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Rita Moreno and Jack Nicholson in the Ultimate Penilingism Scene in Carnal Knowledge (Mike Nichols director, AVCO 1971, rated X) Just for an Old Boyfriend

After Kevin (whose family attended Mass at the same church in Wilmington as Joe Biden’s) took me to this Jules Feiffer-penned movie playing at a local Manhattan arthouse he had me re-enact it. We kind of looked like this. Oh, I got him there.

(sensual sitar music playing)

carnal-knowledge-jack-nicholson-rita-moreno-1971

Louise: I don’t think we’re going to have any trouble tonight.
Jonathan: You don’t?
Louise: No, I don’t.
Jonathan: Are you sure?
Louise: You wanna bet?
Jonathan: How much?
Louise: A hundred?
(he takes bill from pocket, gives to her; she puts it away)
Jonathan: You sound pretty sure.
Louise: You’re a kind of man…why shouldn’t I be sure?
Jonathan: What kind of man am I?
Louise: (slowly, seductively, kneeling between his legs) A real man. A kind man. I don’t mean weak kind the way so many men are. I mean the kindness that comes from an enormous strength… From an inner power so strong that every act, no matter what, is more proof of that power… That’s what all women resent. That’s why they try to cut you down. Because your knowledge of yourself and them is so right, so true, that it exposes the lie which they, every scheming one of them, live by. It takes a true woman to understand that the purest form of love is to love a man who denies himself to her. A man who inspires worship. Because he has no need for any woman. Because he has himself. And who is better, more beautiful, more powerful, more perfect… You’re getting hard. More strong, more masculine, more extraordinary, more robust… (smiling) It’s rising. More viral, dominating…more irresistible… (happy laugh) It’s up. In the air.




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Update On Conductor John Wilson’s 2020 Gigs: Britten’s The Turn of the Screw (March); Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No 4 in Santiago (April); and Massenet’s “Meditation” (Chandos, February)

CANCELLED: Opera GlassWorks’s fully-staged production of Benjamin Britten’s chamber opera The Turn of the Screw scheduled to open 11 March 2020. More information on my later posting, “Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw with Peter Pears and the EOG, 1954; and Wilton’s Music Hall, 2020, Filmed by Opera GlassWorks and Conducted by My Beloved John Wilson”.


EXTRA! My beloved John speaks in this half-hour BBC4 radio show about the re-staging of Turn of the Screw at Wilton’s Music Hall, 2020


AVAILABLE 30 JAN 21: Opera Glassworks’s TURN OF THE SCREW streamcast at Marquee.tv


CANCELLED: During Easter Week, the holiest week of the year for observing Catholics, John in Santiago, Chile conducting a me-tic-ulously chosen student orchestra, culminating in a concert on Easter Sunday consisting of the always-favorite Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No 4 and Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No 3.

John Wilson with Onyx Brass 1, 2021NOTES for John’s new CD Escales (Chandos, Feb 2020) can be found here.


RECORDED: Lastly, re “Meditation” above, that short symphonic intermezzo between the scenes in Act 2 in the opera Thaïs (1893) by Jules Massenet, which my beloved John conducts on his February 2020 album from Chandos (10th cut) and in which Andrew Haveron performs his violin solo like an angel…

Gazing now at John with love and longing and taking this to a private place. Everybody, go away.



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“The Bad and the Beautiful” by David Raksin, Arranged by Angela Morley, and Performed by The John Wilson Orchestra Conducted by My Beloved John Wilson

My bonny John was 30 when he recorded, with the orchestra that bears his name, this achingly tender theme.

I saw The Bad and the Beautiful (MGM, 1952) for the first time in New York when I was 20, at one of those great cinema art houses, the Little Carnegie I think. Anyone remember that fabulous nosh pit in the lobby of the Little Carnegie? It was set up to resemble an outdoor Parisian cafe, complete with wrought tables and chairs, painted scenery, etc… Here after the show my date treated me to a glass of cabernet and a flaky meat pasty, the leftovers of which the waiter wrapped up for me in a square of foil he molded into the shape of a swan.

The Bad and the Beautiful 2What do you do when you’re a passionate actress still in love with a wounding bastard who’s a screen genius? You make the damn movie.

As for Bad+Beautiful: Cast headed by Lana Turner, Kirk Douglas, Gloria Grahame, Dick Powell, Barry Sullivan, Gilbert Roland, Walter Pigeon. Vincent Minnelli helmed. MGM, 1952 (trailer here). 5 Oscar wins. To feel the full effect, get your heart stomped on by a Hollywood louse before viewing.

The Bad and the Beautiful
Soft Lights and Sweet Music, album
Classic Angela Morley Arrangements
The John Wilson Orchestra
John Wilson, conductor
Vocalion, 2002

*Oscar-winning transsexual composer-arranger Angela Morley (1924-2009) has quite a story herself, which maybe I’ll get to in another posting. For now, here’s a 1977 article in the Independent that should whet your interest.




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My 2012 Memoir, A Poet from Hollywood: Love, Insanity, Stephen Gyllenhaal, and the Creative Process

Reprint, originally published 2012. Available free, permanently, for download here from PINY Press; and for online reading at Academia, Issuu, or Scribd.

A Poet from Hollywood small



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My First Music: “I Have Confidence” from The Sound of Music by Rodgers & Hammerstein and the Day I Moved to NYC, 3 June 1973

And right around the time in history James “Smiling Cobra” Aubrey was turning MGM’s historical music scores into LA landfill and my beloved John Wilson was home in Gateshead falling out of his baby chair in excitement over the brand-new BBC news theme, forty-five years ago today—even down to the day of the week—I fled Minneapolis for New York and took a shared room at Sage House, a genteel women-only boarding house on 49 West 9th Street in Greenwich Village, New York.

With 2 meals a day included it came out to $33 a week. You read that right. A place in Greenwich Village, breakfast and dinner, for thirty-three dollars a week. Try to imagine the mischief I got into with all the money I had left over from my weekly paycheck from my first job as a solfeggist at ASCAP, that it’s summer in NYC, it’s 1973, I’m eighteen, cute as a button and old enough to drink, and gorgeous men are everywhere. And imagine too that I’m singing a song (in my heart and sometimes aloud while bounding down the street) that every American girl of my generation inspired by Julie Andrews sang:

I have confidence in confidence alone
Besides which you see I have con-fi-dence in meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Sage House NYCAbove my old abode: “I Have Confidence” sung by Sierra Boggess backed by John Wilson and His Eponymous Orchestra , 2010.




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The Equalizer Comes to New York’s East Village, Plus Stewart Copland’s Theme Music

With the coolest theme on American TV, The Equalizer introduced Copeland’s stunningly unique sound to the mainstream audience. In keeping with the series’ mash-up concept of “tradition merged with New Age high tech,” Copeland’s musical accompaniment would, one: with the exception of hero Robert McCall himself, forego the Wagnerian structure of identifiable leitmotifs, and instead choose to score the city of New York itself as a primary character; and, two: fuse classical structure with the combo of  “percussion carrying melody and synthesized strings” attached to world rhythms. Copeland’s would be a coldly ethereal yet dense “urban ballet” sound inexorably linked to the modern cityscape. This sound would influence composers such as Hans Zimmer and Thomas Newman.


610 East 9th Street NYCThey shot several episodes in my old neighborhood, the East Village, at great risk to star Woodward (two heart attacks and once he fell through an apartment building roof–not ours thankfully). That’s 610 East 9th Street, where we lived 1981-86. Rent for our 4-room inc full kitchen and full bathroom, 2 bedrooms and 1 living room, facing street: $250/m. You read that right. $250 a month.


Copeland was born in 1952. The son of CIA officer Miles Copeland, Jr (who appears as a character in Norman Mailer’s epic spy novel Harlot’s Ghost), he took up the drums at 12, was raised internationally in Cairo, Beirut, the US and England; and throughout the 1970s alternately worked as road manager and backup drummer for various groups until founding in 1977, along with Sting and Henry Padovani (later replaced by Andy Summers), the English progressive rock band The Police. After The Police went on extended hiatus in 1986, the drummer with a composer’s sensibilities dove headlong into scoring—to this day, one of his most notable works is as musical voice of The Equalizer, on which he composed 51 of 88 total episodes of the series.




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My New York: 13 Essex Street, The Lower East Side, 1976

Here in the same neighborhood on 13 Essex Street was my second apartment in New York; fourth floor walkup, one bedroom, tub in kitchen, $85 a month.

And tell me what street
Compares with Mott Street in July

“Manhattan”
music by Richard Rodgers
lyrics by Lorenz Hart
sung by Ruth Tester
and Allan Gould, 1929

13 Essex StreetThis picture’s from the 90s. When I lived here in the 70s, the boutique was a kosher grocery that stayed open till 11pm. Above: Ella!

From the 1925 revue Garrick Gaieties. The song was introduced in the Gaieties by Sterling Holloway (eventually a Rocky and Bullwinkle stalwart) and June Cochran.




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