So I’ve been missing for a couple days, for reasons due to this big life/career/job change thing I’ve been alluding to for a few months. Hopefully, at some point in the next week or two I can find time to actually talk about it, but right now I’m working 12-15 hour days (20 hours on Tuesday: left Wednesday at 5:10 AM, returned at 9:45 AM), and there just isn’t time.
But I did want to bring everyone’s attention to some fantastic programming this weekend on the cable network Trio. You’ve heard of Trio, right? Come on, Trio!!! Hmmm, no? Well, maybe that’s why it doesn’t have too many viewers and NBC is considering shutting it down. But they shouldn’t because it’s actually a great channel, which I happened to be watching Tuesday night while putting together this big scheduling board at work. I was watching this documentary about how “New Coke” was the biggest marketing mistake ever, and suddenly I see this commercial saying that this weekend Trio will be running a marathon of films from “The American Film Theatre.”
What is The American Film Theatre? Or rather, what was it? The Walter Reade ran a retrospective a couple years ago, which is when I first heard of it. Trio has been running the films since January.
Oh yeah, but what is it? Well, in 1973, producer Ely Landau thought it would be a good idea to take some of the great works in the history of theater and film them. He wasn’t looking to just record theater performances with cameras facing a proscenium stage, but he also wasn’t looking to make traditional movie out of these plays either. He wanted to give the audience a sense of seeing the play and not necessarily as movie adaptation of the play. Basically, these films were shot on theater-style sets, but because the camera isn’t simply shooting a stage, it’s as if the audience is constantly moving through the action.
These films utilized top directors and actors of the time. Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, for instance, was directed by John Frankenheimer and starred Lee Marvin, Robert Ryan, Frederic March and a very young Jeff Bridges, and Tony Richardson directed a version of Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance with Katharine Hepburn.
Starting at 8 AM tomorrow morning with a pre-official American Film Theatre production of Anton Chekhov’s The Three Sisters and running through a Sunday night/Monday morning 1 AM showing of Lost in the Stars, Trio will show 14 Ely Landau/American Film Theatere movies. The films are also on DVD — you can buy them in three box set collections. Whether this weekend on Trio (sigh — with commercial interruptions) or on DVD, give some of these films a try. I’m sure they’re not all great, (but Iceman Cometh definitely is), but they’re an interesting approach to adapting theatre to the screen; a simple and relatively inexpensive way that I wish someone would consider returning to.
Out of Focus 