Some Came Running

Hollywood To Tehran To Tokyo: The Journey Of "Like Someone In Love"

Tadashi Okuno and Rin Takanishi (in mirror), Like Someone In Love, 2014, directed by Abbas Kiarostami

Songs are a form of storytelling, so it stands to reason that most great or even good songs have at-least-good stories attached to them. One of the most popular songs by composer Jimmy Van Heusen and lyricist Johnny Burke, was, for instance, inspired by an argument that the songwriting team overheard their friend and collaborator Bing Crosby having with his first son Gary.

According to Van Heusen biographer Christopher Coppula, Burke and Van Heusen were dining at Crosby’s home; Gary, who was about ten at the time, was expressing dissatisfaction with having to go to school. The elder Crosby upbraided him, saying, “So you want to be a mule, be a mule.” Burke was thunderstruck. He and Van Heusen had been stuck for quite a while on their latest assignment, writing songs for an upcoming Crosby picture, Going My Way, directed by Leo McCarey. McCarey had instructed the duo to concoct a pop song version of the Ten Commandments, wisdom that Crosby’s priest character could infectiously impart to his young charges at the church’s school. “So you want to be a mule, be a mule” was not exactly “thou shalt not,” but it flipped a switch for Burke, and “Swinging On A Star” was born.

There’s no such lore surrounding “Like Someone In Love,” the beautiful ballad by Van Heusen and Burke that debuted in 1944, the same year as “Swinging On A Star.” In the midst of one of their busiest years, the team composed it, and a couple of other songs, for an RKO period comedy called Belle of the Yukon. An amiable trifle directed by veteran William Seiler, Belle stars Randolph Scott and Gypsy Rose Lee as a couple of quasi-grifters in the late-19^th-century Great White North. The juvenile romantic leads are William Marshall as Steve, a new-in-town piano player, and radio discovery Dinah Shore as Lettie, daughter of a saloon owner. About 22 minutes into the picture, Steve is tinkering with a tune at the piano and Lettie comes down the stairs; Steve says he’s been working on a song, and he plays the head of “Like Someone In Love.” Lettie says “It’s lovely,” and Steve says “Why don’t you try it?” She picks up the sheet music and starts singing. Two verses and two refrains later, you have a new addition to The Great American Songbook.

A confection in appealing Technicolor, Belle is one of those movies whose narrative evanesces even as you’re watching it; it must have been something of a tonic to U.S. audiences in the waning but still uncertain days of late World War II. It says nothing dishonorable about the great Randolph Scott to note that he more or less sleepwalks through his role; the part of “Honest John Calhoun” demands nothing more. If you’ve ever wondered why burlesque great Gypsy Rose Lee never had the film career of her sister June Havoc, Belle will answer all your questions in that department. Shore is the most engaging presence in the film. Her features are not those of what was considered a classic beauty at the time, but she’s terrifically attractive and projects a personality both earnest and sly. And she sings like a bird; as the performer who gave birth to “Like Someone In Love,” she delivers something absolutely beautiful. Oddly enough, though, the Van Heusen/Burke song from Belle that made a bigger splash, initially, was the now largely forgotten (but still delightful) “Sleigh Ride In July,” which earned the duo an Oscar nomination for 1945. (Belle was released on December 27, 1944, which apparently pushed it ahead for Academy consideration at the time.) “Like Someone In Love” became a hit in spring of 1945 via its recording by Bing Crosby.

Burke and Van Heusen were among Crosby’s favorite songwriters; they of course wrote the tunes for Crosby and Bob Hope’s Road pictures. In the final Road picture, The Road To Hong Kong, made in 1962, after the Burke/Van Heusen team dissolved, Hope’s character was named Chester Babcock—which had been Van Heusen’s birth name. (The one-time bordello piano player was known for, among many other things, making elaborately hilarious ribald sport of that birth name.) For his stage name, the composer “chose Van Heusen, the name of a famous line of men's shirts, because he felt it was a name associated with old money, elegance and class,” David Lehman notes in his book A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs. “What he didn't realize was that the Van Heusen line was the creation of a German-Jewish peddler named Israel Phillips."

Crosby’s rendition relocated the song at the crossroads of pop and jazz, as the crooner’s singing tended to do. About a dozen years later—on August 16, 1957, to be exact—the young tenor saxophonist John Coltrane, with bassist Earl May and drummer Art Taylor, recorded a version of the tune at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in Hackensack, New Jersey. There’s a peculiar notion among some younger folks about jazz musicians like Coltrane and Miles Davis—that they made their recordings of pop and musical theater songs out of some mission to apply a veneer of “hipness” to white bread or just plain white music. At its most extreme, this presumption posits that Coltrane cut his revolutionary version of “My Favorite Things” mainly to troll Sound of Music fans. This is mistaken thinking. What attracted Davis, Coltrane, Charles Mingus (his playful retitling of “All the Things You Are” notwithstanding) and so many other great musicians to these songs was a musical deftness that intertwined beguiling melody with a harmonic complexity that opened up all manner of improvisational doors. Van Heusen biographer Coppula writes of “Like Someone In Love:” “This tune, like ‘Darn That Dream,’ has enjoyed broad pop/jazz crossover popularity, with recording by Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, John Coltrane, Stan Kenton, Coleman Hawkins, and Stan Getz (among many others). The appeal to jazz artists is explained in part by the linear structure of Van Heusen’s melody, permitting the artist to utilize all variety of harmonies in a chromatic bass line. It offers a suitable vehicle for the artist to express his creativity in fashioning harmonies while providing an interesting enough melody in its own right.” Indeed, Coltrane’s rendition of the song begins with the saxophonist playing alone, as if in mid-solo, extrapolating on a phrase from the verse in a near-keening cry, and fluttering in that register for a couple of bars before the bass and drums come in and Coltrane states the theme itself.

Ella Fitzgerald recorded her version two months later, October 15, 1957, in Los Angeles. She and/or producer Norman Granz also titled the attendant album Like Someone In Love. The LP was made after one of her grandest masterpieces, the still-amazing four-LP Ella Fitzgerald Sings The Duke Ellington Songbook. This album is less thematically ambitions, but Fitzgerald’s singing is no less exacting or elegant than it ever was in this period. Burke and Van Heusen appear throughout, albeit in differing permutations; “I Thought About You,” by Van Heusen with lyrics by Johnny Mercer is here, as is “What’s New,” lyrics by Burke, music by Bob Haggart. “Like Someone In Love” is the sole Burke/Van Heusen tune. The orchestral arrangement by Frank De Vol is more Hollywood sound stage than Cotton Club or any other swinging locale; the impeccably tasteful De Vol never had the swinging brashness of a Nelson Riddle or the Debussy leanings of early Gordon Jenkins but he gets the song…as Ella, of course, also does. She begins the song with a bit of a fake-out after the string intro, singing the opening word “Lately” as if to explicitly rhyme it with “stately.” But the very slight hiccup she makes at “myself” lets her completely melt into “out gazing at stars” and from that point on the whole thing’s like a beautiful dream. Her version is still, arguably, the definitive vocalization.

“Nowadays we don’t like watching an old man, especially an old man in love,” the Iranian film director Abba Kiarostami says in a making-of documentary included on the Criterion Collection edition of his 2012 feature Like Someone In Love, the picture that would be his last. It was the second that he shot outside of his native country, a French/Japanese co-production. It tells a necessarily incomplete story of an elderly academic, a young prostitute he awkwardly procures for an evening, and the disturbed, possessive boyfriend of the prostitute, who the professor meets even more awkwardly on the day following the night of his assignation. Kiarostami, as seen in photographs, exuded the kind of cool one associates with certain cinematic masters, aided in no small part by his ever-present sunglasses. But in interviews, it’s clear that the character with whom he most identified in this film is the decidedly not-chill Takeshi Watanabe (Tadashi Okuno, playing his first lead in his early eighties after, according to Kiarostami, a career of bit roles and extra work), the widowed professor who is, among many other things, hugely clueless about sex workers, even a sex worker as ingenuous as Rin Takanashi’s Akiko. “When I started searching for music for the moment the girl enters the old man’s apartment,” Kiarostami told Dennis Lim in an interview for the New York Times in 2012, “it came naturally that as someone from my generation, he would listen to jazz. The first album I took off my shelf was Ella Fitzgerald and I just bumped into this song, ‘Like Someone in Love,’” In pre-revolutionary Iran, Western music was widely known, and the artistic cognoscenti of Tehran was well-versed in jazz, as was the case in other cosmopolitan centers throughout the world. Kiarostami scored his first short film, 1970’s Bread and Alley, with a Paul Desmond version of the Beatles tune “Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da.”

Kiarostami (who presumably held on to his jazz record collection after the revolution, whose regime’s animus to all things Western very definitely extended to music) went on to explain to Lim that he also thought that song title would be a better title for the film itself; in script form the movie was called The End. “The phrase itself sounds good to me too,” the director continued in his conversation with Lim. “There is nothing determined and definitive about love. It’s better to say that we are like someone in love rather than asserting that we are in love. Death or birth are definitive; love is nothing but an illusion. We have in this film four people who are like some people in love.”

Akiko arrives at Takeshi’s apartment in a confused rush, and doesn’t even take off her coat after he invites her to have a seat in the living room of his cozy, book-lined apartment. After Takeshi tries to make small talk with Akiko—their conversation, while amiable, is also nearly mortifyingly awkward—she hops into his bedroom. A Duke Ellington & His Famous Orchestra rendition of “Solitude” plays softly on Takeshi’s stereo. Takeshi follows Akiko into the bedroom, seats himself on a chair facing the bed, and we see a soft-focus reflection of Akiko in the dresser mirror next to the chair. Takeshi tries to lure her out of bed…with the promise of a soup he’s cooked, a specialty of her region (he knows where she’s from because her pimp, a former student of his, told him). While we can’t see Akiko’s face, we can practically see her wrinkling her nose as she tells him, “I’ll hate that. My Gran made it all the time when we were little.”

He’s a little crestfallen; he gets up and goes back into his study/dining room. He’s been getting vexing business-related phone calls all evening, so he unplugs his desk phone. He looks out his front window. Some interesting stuff happens with the sound mixing; the noise form the street outside, including a honking horn, is foregrounded, and the strains of Ella Fitzgerald singing “Like Someone In Love” almost seep in to the audio track, very nearly inaudible at first. As Takeshi putters around, the song gets louder, and more distinct, but it never reaches what one might call an aggressive or even definite volume. Nevertheless, Takeshi turns down the volume on his amplifier. And the phone rings again—the landline in the bedroom is still plugged in. Takeshi, concerned with letting Akiko sleep, goes into the bedroom and disables the phone. A clock on a shelf above the bed indicates that it’s 11:30 at night. Who’s calling at this hour?

Takeshi leaves the room after tucking Akiko in, so we can assume they did not sleep together, but he still looks pretty pleased with himself as he drives her around the next morning (taking her to her college, where she has an exam), smiling as he watches her put her grey leggings on. Soon enough Akiko’s sweaty, strung-out looking boyfriend Noriaki (Ryô Kase) enters the picture, and everybody acts with spectacularly bad judgment. “When you know you may be lied to, it’s best not to ask questions,” Takeshi says to Noriaki even as he sort-of masquerades as Akiko’s grandfather. The flimsy webs of deceit escalate a situation that ought never have come into being in the first place, and when Akiko expresses worry, Takeshi sings “Que Sera Sera” to her, in Japanese translation, and elicits one of her final (slight, tentative, and, hell yes, awkward) smiles in the movie.

The movie ends in Takeshi’s apartment, with a wounded, traumatized Akiko sitting in his living room and Takeshi scrambling around, with Noriaki raging outside, letting them know that he knows that they are (still) lying: “Don’t pretend you can’t hear me.” Things are going from bad to worse both on screen and on the soundtrack. As Noriaki yells, the microwave in which Takeshi was warming milk for Akiko beeps to signal the end of its heating cycle, and then continues its periodic reminder beep. A rock comes through the front window, and the shattering of glass is terribly disturbing, as is Takeshi’s disappearance from the frame. And at this time the Fitzgerald recording of “Like Someone In Love” comes on again, louder than it was the first time it was heard. “Lately I find myself,” Fitzgerald sings, as all three characters in the scene seem as lost as they’ve ever been. Is the music diegetic or extra-diegetic? While it’s not likely that the stereo has somehow turned itself back on, there’s so much madness going on that this is not entirely outside the realm of narrative probability. The credits begin to go up, and the screen goes black, and soon Fitzgerald sings “sometimes the things I do astound me.”

Kiarostami told Dennis Lim, “I’ve said before that fortunately or unfortunately, I’m unable to be a real storyteller. I’m sure that we can never be the witness of a story from its beginning to its end. I would say that this film doesn’t have an adequate opening and it doesn’t have a real ending either, but it also proves my idea that all films start before we get into them and they end after we leave them.” The filmmaker presses this point more insistently in Like Someone In Love than in any other film, including his previous feature, the spectacularly knotty and moving Certified Copy.

“Like Someone In Love” was conceived and written in Los Angeles, recorded there years later by Ella Fitzgerald, and then many years later than that, Abbas Kiarostami pulled that Ella Fitzgerald album off of his shelf at home in Tehran. And subsequently played its title song on the stereo of an imaginary elderly man in the vicinity of Tokyo/Yokohama, where American jazz is well-loved by substantial (albeit possibly quickly disappearing, these days) pockets of its population.

It is an incidental irony that the song’s composer Jimmy Van Heusen, an aviation enthusiast from the thirties on (despite the fact that he did quite well both professionally and personally in Hollywood, he never much liked the place, and would fly himself back to New York between movie assignments), safety-tested American fighter planes for Lockheed prior to and in the early days of World War II.

Thanks to James Kaplan (whose excellent Vanity Fair profile of Jimmy Van Heusen you might want to read next) and to Brook Babcock, keeper of the flame.

In memoriam Abbas Kiarostami, 1940-2016.

At Maxwell's

Saturday evening my wife Claire and I took the ferry over to Hoboken to see The Feelies play its final sets at Maxwell's, the indie rock venue of myth and legend that will cease to be such at the end of the month. It was a sold-out show and The Feelies played beautifully, as they do. These days the band doesn't have an opener, rather they play two sets of generous length with a break between them. During the break, Claire and I joined the scrum at the foot of the stairwell that leads down to the basement, which is both storeroom for various restaurant supplies and a makeshift dressing/rest area for the bands. I said hello to various band members—I've been both a fan of and friendly with The Feelies since my college friend  Bob Nickas introduced me to their music around 1977—and caught up a bit with Barre Duryea, another old friend who worked as a roadie and guitar tech for The Feelies for about a decade, then with Patti Smith for another decade, and now runs the music stage for Conan O'Brien's show. 

Dave Weckerman, the band's percussionist, spotted us chatting and came over. "I opened one of my old journals the other day," he began immediately, "and right there on the page I opened to was an entry for April 13, 1980, a Sunday night. It said 'The Feelies played tonight for the first time at Maxwell's, a small rock club in Hoboken, New Jersey.' I also noted the band's tally, which was six hundred and fifty dollars." Dave paused. "A princely sum at the time." 

Dave also came upon a clipping of one of the narrow vertical column  ads the club would run in papers such as The Village Voice advertising a gig he was involved in. "Mr. Baxter was opening for the Violent Femmes. I think it was the Violent Femmes first New York area show, or something like it. It was a Thursday night. And that week...well, the ad ran like this. Tuesday night, The Replacements. Wednesday night, 'From England,' The Fall. Thursday night, The Violent Femmes and Mr. Baxter. Friday night, The Fleshtones. Saturday night, R.E.M. And The Fall had the black 'Sold Out' bar over their name. And R.E.M. didn't."

"I remember that Violent Femmes show," I told Dave.  "And I could never remember why I went, because I wasn't so interested in them that I was going to check them out on a Thursday night, even if John Zorn HAD produced their first album. If Mr. Baxter was opening, that makes sense." Mr. Baxter was a twisted rockabilly duo/occasional trio fronted by Larry Henchey, a very talented singer/guitarist, with Dave on drums. They did a cover of "Dr. Robert" that was very Gang of Four by way of The Cramps, and other good things besides. My band's keyboard player produced an EP by them that never saw official release but which I was one of two rock critics to vote for it in that format's "Best" category in some Pazz and Jop Poll or other. 

"Do you know that Peter Hook book, not the one about Joy Division, but about The Hacienda?" Dave went on. "There's this part where he's talking about New Order's first American tour, and he says they first came to a club in the town of Maxwell, New Jersey!"

"That was when they were just a trio," Barre recalled.

"And I couldn't go, and I was fascinated," Dave said. "I was talking to someone who went, and I asked, 'Well who SINGS?' and he's like, 'The guitar player, Barney...' and 'What did they play?' because they didn't have any New Order songs yet. I have a picture of Frank at that show"—Dave indicated a friend standing nearby—"and he's over by their equipment cases that still have 'Joy Division' stenciled on them."

"Their equipment got stolen at that gig." 

"Maybe Frank did it."

A little later in the break we hung outside with Steve Fallon, who got the whole thing started. Reminiscing, Steve mentioned Pat Clark, who roomed with him for a while back in the day; I remembered Pat fondly, not only because he was a sweet guy but because  he had bestowed a pretty cherry gig on my band at his short-lived joint, the Silver Dollar, in Elizabeth or some place like that. He deemed us "dark psychedelia" on the flyer, which we liked. Opening for us was a duo called Drunk Driving: Peter Missing on guitar and vocals and Bob Bert on drums. Bob's wife, Linda, who like Pat is no longer with us, was the most enthusiastic booster of all the boosters in the audience, dancing around and throwing confetti during both sets. Anyway, Steve was remembering how Pat would bring home burgers from the local White Castle and reheat them in the oven with them still in their cardboard containers, which Steve found problematic. 

Most of the other reminiscences are not, as they say, for publication. The second set was also inspired, with a particularly impassioned cover of Patti's "Dancing Barefoot" one of the highlights. (In the first set they covered "Who Loves The Sun" and "Ticket to Ride," warming various particular cockles of hearts.) We actually decided not to stay for the entirety of the show; for some reason, we thought it apt to head back to Brooklyn while the music was still playing. 

Flip-flop horror: A cautionary tale

As a sort of olive branch to Dana Stevens, and an amplification of her thoughts on the topic, I offer this possibly horrific long anecdote. 

Why did I even start wearing flip-flops in the first place?

It’s an interesting question. In theory I, like so many other self-proclaimed persons of taste and refinement, find them objectionable. By the same token, I rarely if ever have found my eye wandering to the exposed toes of my fellow humans. Strangely, the habit began with a pretext that related directly to pursuit of enhanced physical fitness.

I am Romina Puga

For the record, I am firmly with Jesse Eisenberg with respect this ridiculous dustup, and I don't think what he did to the fluffy little Romina Puga falls under the category of "berating" at all. I also think Puga's response to it was repellently opportunistic. My advice to any self-described entertainment journalist who does "schtick" is, when in the cattle call situation of the movie-promoting video junket, to give a little heads-up to the publicist or the talent before you start rolling, so the talent at least has the benefit of some knowledge and hence the opportunity to play along if he or she wishes. Eisenberg is clearly caught off-guard by Puga's arguably ostentatiously breezy style right off the bat, and registers more trying-to-regain-balance bemusement than actual hostility for the rest of the encounter. For Puga to try and turn this around and act as if Eisenberg maliciously ripped her a new one is utter bullshit.

And yet. I understand, in a sense, her pain. In spring of last year, I was assigned by my MSN editors to do a round of video junket interviews for 21 Jump Street. I don't consider myself particularly telegenic, and the video junket format isn't my favorite way to conduct interviews. But as Hyman Roth says in The Godfather Part 2, this is the business we've chosen, and as an aging white male ostensible film critic in the twilight of print and all that my feeling is that maybe I ought to take every available opportunity to diversify my skill set and earn income. Although, like I said, in my gut I pretty much know I'll never be an entirely acceptable on-camera presence until I at least get my horribly dingy teeth replaced. And maybe grow some fucking hair.

I enjoyed the movie version of 21 Jump Street, and I was particularly amused by the way it toggled between coarse homoerotic male bonding jokes and relatively sophisticated meta humor. This suggested, in my mind, a question, that I mentally filed away prior to the day of the junket. The actual day of said junket was not an auspicious one, generally speaking. It was a gray and chilly and rainy day in early March, a Saturday at that, and my call to show up at the swanky hotel where the interviews were being staged was nine in the morning. To top all that off, I was starting to get a cold.

Arguably, 21 Jump Street costars Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum might have had it a little worse. For their interviews, they dressed in costumes they wear to comic effect in the film, that is, the black shorts worn by police officers who patrol on bicycles. The joke in the movie being, they go through all this training and think they're gonna be totally badass and their first gig out of the academy is bike patrol in a local park. Ar ar ar. So here these two guys are at nine in the morning on a Saturday in silly outfits. Maybe it was their idea. I don't know. I choose, for some reason, to believe that it was not.

Perhaps that reason is their demeanor as I was brought in to begin my interview. In addition to the shorts and clingy shirts, Hill and Tatum wore dark wraparound sunglasses. We exchanged greetings that struck me as extra-perfunctory before I sat down.

As it happens, I'm friendly with both a director and an actor who've worked with Hill in kind of notable contexts, and I'm also on terms with a director with whom Tatum has profitably collaborated. My relations with these other people are arguably not intimate, but they're also on a level higher than that of cordial acquaintance. So I thought about dropping a name or two, if it could get things off on the right foot. And then I thought better of it. Because I didn't want to be that guy. (Even now, I worry that I'm being that guy just by mentioning it. God, no wonder I drank.)

Would that I had. Maybe it would have been worse. Anyway, as we began rolling I asked Hill, "As both a star and producer on this movie, did you keep tabs on the ratio of homoerotic male-bonding jokes to self-reflexive ones?" Or something along those lines. Delivered in what I hoped was my best hail-fellow-well-met jocular tones. And even from behind the shades, I could see Hill's genuinely withering contempt as he answered, "I assume that was some kind of attempt at humor, and I'm going to ignore it and just say I had a great time making the movie."

Now what the viewer is not privy to while watching these manufactured snippets is that each journalist doing these interviews is allotted a very specific time limit, and that time limit doesn't allow for reshoots. And when I say specific, I mean very—two minutes to the second, in some instances. So when my admitedly silly—but then again I mean what the hell, THEY were the guys sitting down in biking shorts—question got that response, my strong burning sense of humiliation mingled with a kind of panic. I had unwittingly wasted maybe thirty seconds of time, which means I had to scramble to get anything usable in my remaining minute and a half with the fellows. Even in the best of situations with these things, in which the talent is genuinely enjoying the exchange and you're actually able to get good stuff, there's a publicist off to the side giving you the throat-cutting sign. And yes, the talent has to sit there for the better part of an entire working day doing the same thing in two-to-five minute patches. How badly do you want to be famous? Badly enough to be cool with doing that? Because maybe you should try it some time.

I couldn't call to restart the session so I just switched to automatic inane innocuous pilot, and salvaged the encounter, but as anyone who looks at the footage will note, nobody involved in the exchange is particularly interested in simulating even a simulation of chumminess. 

Was I angry? Fuck yeah. I was furious. I got up and showered and shaved and dressed and schlepped to Manhattan on a rainy miserable Saturday morning when I could have been sleeping in with My Lovely Wife so I could be insulted by Jonah Hill? Seriously? When the video posted, I put up a blog post here and I alluded to the shutting-down and I remember feeling as if I was being incredibly restrained while so doing. One of the professional associates of Hill with whom I am friendly sent me an e-mail which in effect said, that's too bad. Which it was. And the point is: that's all it was. Too bad. It wasn't the end of the world, it wasn't cause for me to nurse a grudge against Jonah Hill (for all the good that would do). It's just a minor anecdote concerning an interaction that took place in a context that in most respects has very little to do with what constitutes the real world for either Hill and myself. Puga's reaction to the Eisenberg incident only has validity if one accepts the idea that she and Eisenberg have some sort of gnuine relationship to each other. They do not. Similarly, my day-to-day life has nothing to do with Jonah Hill's. All any of this means is that if one wants respect within the context of one's profession, one ought to conduct oneself professionally. That's not a guarantee that respect will be given, but at least it gives you a leg to stand on. Be an entertainmnent journalist, or be Rupert Pupkin. You can't have it both ways. 

And finally, as "Freeman" put it in Bonfire of the Vanities, "be decent to each other." And Romina Puga, buy a goddamn paper notebook or something. 

New avenues in De Niro research: Grace Hightower's coffee

So. I've submitted the manuscript of Anatomy of an Actor: Robert De Niro to the editors at the book publishing arm of Cahiers du Cinema. The book is part of a series (Karina Longworth's consideration of Al Pacino is out soon, and Longworth has started a Tumblr devoted to the book; I might do same myself, or something, when the time is appropriate and I Oh Christ do I have to think about it right now) that's pretty strictly formatted: General introduction, essays on ten films that encompass the whole of the performer's career until now, outro (or "Conclusion"), ten sidebars, and supplemental materials such as biographical chornology, filmography, and footnotes footnotes footnotes. But of course in writing about the ten individual films one does contextualize by discussing other movies, and so in the short time I had to write the book I ended up extremely immersed in the man's work. Thank God for Amazon Instant Video, and by the way, Ivan Passer's Born To Win is actually worth your time if you haven't seen it already. After a little bit I started developing a slight resentment. Then I began to feel like Steve Brody in the Looney Tune Bowery Bugs, at the point when he fails to put two and two together on discovery that all of his tormentors throughout the cartoon have been Bugs Bunny in various disguises. "Everybody's turning into rabbits!" he laments before diving off the Brooklyn Bridge. Substitute "De Niro" for "rabbits" and you get where I was coming from. I won't go into the details of a dream I had in which an appendage...well, as I said, I won't go into the details. 

The book doesn't mention De Niro's personal life all that much, which was good for me given that the two De Niro biographies I worked with were highly problematic anyway; when I started this project I learned that my pal Shawn Levy is working on a proper De Niro bio, and I regret it wasn't available to me as it would have been an excellent resource. (See Shawn's superb bio of Jerry Lewis and you'll understand what I'm saying.) But given the extent to which certain of De Niro's career decisions have been affected by changes in his personal life, and by his increased visibility as a public person, and so on, some things are discussed. I'm not sure if I necessarily would have made room for a mention of the below discovery had I made it before finishing the book. Said discovery occured at the Court Street branch of Union Market, a grocery much favored by the Young And Awful Parents Of Gen-X-and-Y Driven Bourgeois Brooklyn. What can I tell you? It stocks a lot of good, albeit pricey, stuff, and it generally plays vintage Blue Note fare on its sound system, which is nice. (And sometimes, as when the "free" section of Herbie Hancock's "Survival of the Fittest" came up on  one Sunday morning, this music makes the Young And Awful Parents Of Bourgeois Brooklyn a little uncomfortable, and they're not sure whether admitting to their discomfort will make them seem unhip, and their psychic gyrations in this respect are a wonder to behold. Unless I'm just projecting. I could be.) It was in the coffee section. New among the offerings of Stumptown and Peet's and all these new concerns whose rubber-stamped-logos-on-plain-brown-paper-bags contain beans as costly as gold I saw a shiny deep purple package and on closer inspection discerned it was a product from Mrs. Robert De Niro. 

You wanna talk pricey? $12.99 for a 10-ounce bag. But I bought it. How could I not. 

Let's get into the coffee first. On opening, one encounters a pretty nice looking bunch of beans. I took a picture of those, too. 

I threw said beans in the Krups burr grinder and brewed up a big pot for myself and My Lovely Wife. 

It's pretty fruity," My Lovely Wife observed. Whenever I hear anyone say "fruity," I think of Mrs. Bates protesting to Norman about being displaced from her bedroom, but I let it go quick and— agreed—it did have a ripe but acidic sweetness to it. "Do you prefer the African bean or the South American bean?" My Lovely Wife asked. I had to admit that as much of a coffee connoisseur, I mean HOPELESS AND ABJECT COFFEE ADDICT as I am, I hadn't given the matter much consideration before. I guess when it comes right down to it I DO prefer the South American. The best cup of coffee I've experienced in recent years was from a Honduran bean harvested by Those Fucking Hippies at Ritual Coffee. Scarfed it down in San Francisco, brought home a bag, haven't been able to find another since. As it happens I'm not crazy about the fruitiness for which African coffees are renowned; I prefer something a little more robust. Although I'm extremely partial to the Tanzanian peaberry. I contain multitudes, clearly.

Anyway, none of this is to say that the coffee from the Rwandan bean that's the signature of Hightower's brand was bad. It's highly flavorful—complex, as the reviewers like to say. I could totally see it, personally, as a dessert coffee, if I was back on dessert. 

The other salient feature of the Grace Hightower/Coffees of Rwanda brand brings us back to the packaging. Which is shiny and has a weird design (I don't think that extended ampersand really works, frankly) and features a shit ton of copy. On one side there's copy that begins, "There is a place called Rwanda." On the other side a couple of paragraphs signed "Grace Hightower De Niro," beginning "We believe that doing good business means doing good for the communities in which we work." On the back, a sticker that, in this case, tells the story of Buf Café founder Epiphanie Mukashyaka; below that, on the package itself, an explanation of the "Signature Series."  If all this copy doesn't keep you engaged while the coffee brews, or if you want to learn more (and my feeling is that the people behind the product are going for the latter) there is of course a website for you. 

I don't point this out to make fun. It's pretty clear this business idea emerged from a philanthropic impulse on Hightower's part, and a laudable philanthropic interest at that. What's interesting is the way that this enterprise so neatly slots into the contemporary Way Of Doing Things. Anyone who's tried to get a business off the ground or publish a book or do something along such lines is invariably told that regardless of how strong your idea might be, it cannot be launched without a PLATFORM. A celebrity, or the wife of a celebrity, or the partner in a celebrity marriage that has already established its philanthropic bona fides, already has, it is universally acknowledged, a viable platform. Once that's established, the individual with the platform will be told that he or she needs to construct a narrative. This is regardless of whether the venture is charitable or profit-driven; narrative is all, even if it's made up. In Hightower's case, the possible narratives have deep roots in recent history and of course the chosen narrative is the one that is all about hope. One that also, here, tends to assuage non-climate-change-related concerns about the ethics of coffee consumption. At least until the contrarian perspective on that starts coming into vogue, as it may be. (I read a headline somewhere the other day about how "foodies" were actually morally reprehensible, or something, but you know I almost never have been able to hear or read the word "foodie" without throwing up so I skipped the actual article.) Until then, if you're looking for a fruity and complex coffee that supports a growth industry in a particularly fraught part of Africa, I give Grace Hightower's brand a thumb's up.

How I was a dick to Clive Davis. Twice.

In commemoration of my friend Tom Carson's engaging review of Mr. Davis' latest book, The Soundtrack Of My Life, I relate this anecdote. 

I guess it was 1994. I had been a pop music columnist for the New York Daily News for a while, so I got asked to a bunch of music events, but by this time I don't think I had the column any more. Nevertheless, I got an invite to a very special—I believe the word "intimate" was used—private mini-concert by Carly Simon. The main reason it was special was because of Carly Simon's oft-cited reluctance to perform live. Another was that it was being held at Fez, a cozy, some might say funky, even, spot below the chi-chi Time Cafe on Lafayette Street. 

Why did I go? I wasn't the world's biggest Carly Simon fan, as many readers may have inferred quite some time ago. Then again, it WAS in a sense an honor just to be invited. And there would be an open bar. And at the time I was a lot more insecure about my position relative to New York night life than I am now, so there was that. The issue of there having nothing better to do that evening may have been pertinent. I went, and I went stag. 

The reason I place the show around 1994 is because her band had Doug Wimbish, of the Sugar Hill session band and further fame, on bass, and he had played on Simon's album of that year, Letter Never Sent. He sure is a good bass player. Anyway, the invite hadn't been kidding about an open bar. It was wide open, including the top shelf stuff, and I could not believe that I was sitting at a little table with a couple of people I didn't know and belting back the Macallans like there was no tomorrow. Soon enough I was feeling fine, and even singing along with some of Carly's greatest hits. "Do the Mashed Potato with a new attitude..." Aw yeah. She plays for like a half hour, 35 minutes, and then off she goes, and of course the place goes wild, clamoring for an encore. She makes the crowd wait good and long before she comes back out, and when she does come back out, she's got Clive Davis, who at the time was the head of her label, Arista, with her. And again, everybody's going nuts, and he's grinning, and she's grinning, and everybody's standing, and Carly and Clive are motioning for everybody to sit down (I myself was still sitting, swilling in my Scotch) and be quiet for just a minute. Once everyone's sitting down and shutting up, Clive takes the mic, and the first thing he says is, "I probably don't have to tell you who I am."

And the crowd lets out an appreciative chortle. And I have to tell you, I don't think my timing was ever better, because I waited just a microbeat and a half after the chortle died down and I bellowed, "Who are you?" And a couple of people laughed, and a couple of people gasped, and Clive looked annoyed and continued with his speech.

Cut to May of 1996. I had spent the late winter/early spring of that year in Dublin, Ohio, working as a freelance consultant for CompuServe, and after that I thought it would be a swell idea if I took the money I had earned and, instead of paying taxes with it, going to Paris with it. Through a series of circumstances too tortuous to be profitably related here, my traveling companion is Young Rosemary Passantino, a one-time rock critic herself, who was accompanying me on a purely platonic basis (her live-in boyfriend is even going to pick us up from Kennedy when we get back—I remember that return flight being the last time I smoked on an airplane). On our first night there we decided to visit the legendary nightclub Crazy Horse, because you haven't really lived until you've seen an elaborately choreographed stage show featuring a dozen identically proportioned nude young women. Anyway, the only reservation we could get was for the midnight show, so we had time to kill after dinner, so we went to the Virgin Megastore on the Champs Elysee. It was around 11:30, near closing time. I was gonna check out with some Lester Young double CD set (called Le Quintessence; I still have it, it's real good). And I notice, standing on the marble floor of the grand lobby, a familiar figure. 

"Clive Davis!" I say. "What are you doing in the lobby of the Virgin Megastore in Paris just before midnight?" Clearly chuffed to be recognized, he says, "Where else is there to be?"

"Say," I ask as I sidle up to him, "you remember that nice little Carly Simon thing at Fez a few years back?"

"Sure I do. Great show!"

"It really was! And remember, before the encore, when you had a few words for the crowd and you started by saying 'I probably don't have to tell you who I am'?"

Clive looked a little wary now. "Uh-huh!"

"And there was this drunk guy in the back and he yelled out, 'Who are you?'"

"Yes..."

"That was me! I was that guy!"

And Clive just looked at me. 

"Anyway, it was great meeting you!"

After we had left, and were walking to the Crazy Horse, Rosemary was all like, "What'd you have to go and alienate Clive Davis like that for?"

And I'm like, "Oh, right, because he was ready to ask us to cruise around with him in his limo all night."

"You can't be sure of that. Maybe he wanted to hang out with some nice Americans."

Maybe he did. Who knows? If I had played my cards differently, perhaps I  could have been Mrs. Clive Davis today. But no. I had to be a dick.  

The auteur is present

Last night, the 25th of February, was a big night in the big town, culture-wise. Bjork was doing her "Biophilia" show at Roseland. Philip Glass and his ensemble gave a perhaps not-to-be-repeated-in-this-lifetime performance of his amazing three-hour-plus work, Music In Twelve Parts (the Glass equivalent of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier or Young's Well-Tuned Piano, essentially), at the Park Avenue Armory. And over at Lincoln Center, there was a special screening of Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret, after which Lonergan and select cast members spoke of the shot-years-ago critical cause celebre. Jaime Christley, one of the most crucial of the film's champions, was there (I was at the Glass concert myself, which was SO AMAZING), and he tweeted later that Lonergan himself chastised a viewer who was loudly crinkling a candy wrapper during a crucial scene. This reminded me of a couple of things, chiefly of Frans Liebkind saying "You are ze audience, I am ze author, I OUTRANK you." Although I imagine that the candy-wrapper crinkler wasn't aware at the time that he was being shushed by the director.

Back in 1987 I was working at Video Review magazine, and some time during my then-one-year tenure there I had been introduced to the work of director Andy Sidaris. Sidaris was then the king of more or less direct-to-video T&A action movies, which invariably featured super-busty former Playmates awkwardly carrying guns and taking on drug-dealing bad guys so pockmarked they made Robert Davi look like a Proactiv spokesmodel. The movies were invariably ruthless in keeping their female leads as frequently topless as possible; it seemed these fetching freelance investigators were constitutionally incapable of discussing the day's events without explicitly stating that it would be best to do so naked, in the hot tub, and then taking action to make it happen. Never any lesbian action, though; Sidaris pictures were also kind of ruthlessly hetero-normative, as they say. 

They were also, it might go without saying, entirely ridiculous, and risible. So when a bunch of the Video Review guys, most of us in our highly glib twenties, were invited to an actual screening of a new Sidaris picture, which I believe was Hard Ticket to Hawaii, pictured above, to be followed by a press dinner at a deli across the street with the director himself, we were all over that. It was at a small screening room on Park Avenue, and there wasn't enough room in a single row for our entire party to fit, so I sat one in from the aisle in the row behind my boys...and about 40 minutes or so into the movie, which we had been wisecracking and giggling at MST3K style for the whole time, an older gentleman of Greek extraction took the seat on the aisle, next to mine.

It was Andy Sidaris. And he did not understand what was so funny. "Cool it guys," he addressed the row in front of him. Looking at me, he asked, "What are they laughing at?" I actually felt kind of bad, and shrugged. "The big twist is coming up," he said with some enthusiasm.  You have to give Sidaris this: in addition to copious enormous boobies, his fast-moving films were packed with explosions, action, and, um, plot twists. I think the one in Hard Ticket involved a giant cheap fake animatronic cobra emerging from an exploded toilet. Nothing funny about that. 

Fortunately it was dark enough in the theater that Sidaris could not later identify the party of gigglers, and he amiably regaled my colleagues and I with tales of his days shooting professional sports, and how he had directed all of the football sequences in M*A*S*H, and what a no-talent prick sonofabitch Robert Altman was. 

Now for the funny part. In the fall of 2001, I'm in the same screening room, in the same row, in the same seat, about to see a pre-release, pre-New York Film Festival screening of The Royal Tenenbaums. This is the cut that ends with the Anthology recording of The Beatles' "I'm Looking Through You," and it's always bugged the crap out of me that that music had to be changed for the release. In any event, who comes along and takes the aisle seat next to me but Wes Anderson. 

"This is really weird," I said to Anderson. "I've only ever sat directly next to a director at a screening of his film once before, and it was in this same screening room, and I was sitting in this same seat."

"Who was the director?" Wes asked me.

"Andy Sidaris."

"Who?"

I began to explain, but then the lights went down.

Apes-ma

I'll admit that I got Planet of the Apes much more than I got 2001: A Space Odyssey in the year I first saw both films, which was in fact the year of their releases, that is, 1968. I have no problem admitting this because I was eight years old going on nine at the time, and of course it totally follows that what Planet of the Apes was selling was a lot easier to "get" for an eight-year-old. That said, I will tell you that I can still remember, without googling, the name of the then-15-year-old prodigy who wrote an exegesis on the Kubrick film that inspired Stanley himself to rave: "What a first-rate intelligence," that name being Margaret Stackhouse. I read about her, and her writings on the film, in that sui generis mass-market paperback The Making of "2001: A Space Odyssey" and have been nursing a major inferiority complex ever since.

Anyway, back to Apes. Yeah (SPOILER ALERT), the Statue of Liberty. That really messed our minds up but good. But even more nightmare fuel came with Beneath The Planet of the Apes,the bleakest, creepiest, most outright sad and nihilistic of the series. I'll never shake the mental picture that forms my recollection of Chuck Heston pressing down on the button that will bring nuclear ruin to our planet YET AGAIN, his actul heart seeming to beat its last as he holds it in his actual hand (the one that's not pressing on the big button) even as he does so. Fucked up, man. Weirder still is that this truly inspired and Dante-esque vision occurs in what is for all intents and purposes a completely tossed-off sequel directed by Ted Post, a guy I identified as a hack of hacks when trying to discern just what it was that distinguished Magnum Force from Dirty Harry. Just goes to prove what the surrealists said about how you never really can tell about these things. 

So of course I was hooked on the Apes saga, such as it was, but it isn't as if I didn't notice when the series shifted from a Heston/James Franciscus focus to a Roddy McDowell one. Nothing against Roddy, of course. But still. It was interesting to see how the subsequent films found themselves inadvertently balancing overt cheese with very confused ruminations on present-day "Black Power" activity. We continued to want to believe, but I dunno, Ricardo Montalban as a kindly circus chimp handler wasn't really making it for me. By the time Battle came out, this then-13-year-old just couldn't take it seriously. Wouldn't it be amusing, I thought, if the Apes films were made into an opera cycle, like that Ring thing? "This is the battle for the battle for the battle for the battle for the planet of the apes!" I sang, to the tune of the overture of Bizet's Carmen. "With Caesar as our leader/we know we cannot fail/For with Caesar as our leader/we found the Holy Grail!" I further extemporized. Why not? Since this was to be an operatic work in the Wagnerian tradition, it made sense to link it back to certain themes in that composer's work. As you can imagine, I raised a bit of an eyebrow when I saw that Simpsons episode with the Planet of the Apes musical in it. I am reasonably sure that nobody I went to Dumont High School with went on to write for The Simpsons.

Anyway...I'm not a religious man, but I always thought that a remake of the first Planet of the Apes film was kind of a lousy idea for the simple reason that it represented an irreproducible result. It's like at the end of the 1957 Looney Tune Show Biz Bugs where Daffy finally elicits applause from the vaudeville house audience by, as the saying goes, suiciding right on the stage; as his soul ascends to heaven (surely that can't be correct?) he laments to Bugs that the problem with this trick is that you can only do it once. Hence the essential uselessness of the Burton version, even though everyone is clearly putting something resembling their best foot forward. As for Beneath, I don't know that Hollywood would have the balls to even try, recollecting that the motivating factor behind the original was less balls than profit taking. But the subsequent Apes films strike me on principle as recombinant fair game. Still, I wasn't expecting much of anything from Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which is one reason it's one of the most pleasant surprises of the summer. Another reason is because it's kind of awesome. I wasn't able to discuss it in these terms in my review of the film for MSN Movies, but as you are know doubt aware, I've seen a fair amount of films, and one side effect of that is I don't get a whole lot of "holy shit!" moments in a theater anymore. And by "'holy shit!' moments" I mean parts where I'm watching the film and something happens and I go back in my seat and I say, "Holy shit!" Hopefully not too loud because I don't like to disturb my fellow moviegoers. Anyway, I recall counting at least four "Holy shit!" moments watching this. That's one for every $2.50 or so of your moviegoing dollars. Not bad.

Two anecdotes on the problematic nature of referentiality in the arts

I believe I have related these anecdotes before, in somewhat different form, in different venues. I hope that given their ostensible relevance to topics being touched on in the thread for the post below this one, I might be forgiven for repeating them. 

In September of 1977 Sire Records released Blank Generation, the debut LP from Richard Hell and the Voidoids. I purchased this later-to-be-termed "seminal" document, and, as was my custom at the time, pored over the album artwork for long minutes on end. Of particular interest was the collage that took up one whole side of the inner sleeve, which contained a lot of pictures of Hell preening in sunglasses, a reproduction of Voidoid guitarist Robert Quine's old Berklee College of Music ID card, and at least one photo of Jean-Luc Godard. And a picture of a neon sign of Godard's name, torn in half and placed on far-apart positions in the collage, with "GOD" close to the middle and "ARD" in a corner. 

Sometime in late '77 or early '78, the Voidoids played at The Show Place in Dover N.J., a strip club by day that became a rock-and-roll club on weekends. It was a convenient out-of-town gig for CBGB groups that didn't have a Manhattan booking on a given weekend, just a 45 minute drive from the city. By then an enthusiastic Voidoid fan, I took my 18-year-old self to the show (as none of my Chicago-and-Journey-loving high school buddies wanted anything to do with such music). It was highly enjoyable, although I was a little confused that Hell and his band chose to cover "I'm Free." What happened to no more Beatles and no more Stones in 1977? I was later able to suss out that this was hardly Hell's own position but at the time I was thrown for a loop. Anyway, as was also my custom, I hung out after the show to have a few words with the band, because at the time I truly believed (among other things) that punk rock was all about destroying the false hierarchies that separated the artist from the audience and creating an environment of revolutionary unity, motherfuckers! What an idiot. Anyway, I got "backstage" (a long room right next to the men's room entrance, and there was Hell on a couch, flanked by two bottle blondes in fishnets. He was ready to get his something on, it looked like, but first a word with a fan or two. A quick word.

So I asked him about the Godard connection—what it was about what Godard did/does and what Hell did that made him feel an affinity of sorts. Only I didn't put it that way. I put it more like, "So, why do you like Godard so much?" To which Hell just grinned and shrugged and said, "I dunno, man, I just think he's a cool guy!"

Well, all right then. Hell and the bottle blondes kind of tittered at me as I fumbled for the next thing to say. Eventually I fell into chatting with Quine, who took pity on me and couldn't have been nicer. We discussed Berklee ("the only thing I learned there was how to use my pinkie;" also, "everybody there just wanted to play in the Tonight Show band") and Coltrane (it was from Quine that I learned of the existence of two separate issues of Ascension). From this encounter I learned that sometimes people make "references" "just because." Interestingly enough, many years later Hell became a film critic of sorts, for Black Book; in this respect he wasn't really much better at explicating the reasons for his enthusiasms than he had been decades before. He did manage to get across on proclamations of authenticity, however. (Funnily enough, there was one time when I was listening to the Hell compilation Spurts on my iPod as I entered the Sony screening room, and there, as I was hearing Hell yowl "Love Comes In Spurts," there sat the much older Hell himself! Neat trick, I thought; I'll have to try conjuring another musician thusly. Next screening I went to I had Wayne Shorter on as I came in; Mr. Shorter, alas, did not turn out to be in attendance at the event.)

This taught me that sometimes people make references not for any pedagogic or otherwise instructive reasons, but just 'cuz. This next story, more to the point at hand, is about a reference that wasn't a reference. January of 1998 I'm at the big ballroom of Caesar's Palace with David Foster Wallace, Evan Wright, and Nathaniel Welch, watching that year's Adult Video News awards. I am downing the Jack-and-Cokes, as was my custom (for his piece on the awards, Dave would make that Grand Marnier and Coke, which, it strikes me now, would have been a good drink for the Erotic Connoisseur to tout), and looking around the room, and on the walls there are various posters and banners announcing upcoming events at this very ballroom. One of which events is titled, as it happens, Kontakte. I don't know why. But I tap Dave, and I indicate the poster, and I say, "I didn't know they were big on Stockhausen in Vegas." And Dave looks at me blankly and says, "What are you talking about?" And I say, "You know, Stockhausen. The German composer. Kontakte, he wrote that. You name one of the characters in an Infinite Jest footnote after him." Dave reflected for a moment. "Oh, that's the name of a composer? I wasn't aware of that. I had just heard the name somewhere and thought it sounded cool." I expressed some incredulity. "But it works so perfectly in the context of being an actual reference to the guy, I can't believe you really didn't know who it was." Dave was hardly coy or disingenuous about this stuff: "You know, it's funny, but if you are in the habit of making references in that way, sometimes things can just fall into place without your necessarily being aware of them." At which point we went back to looking at all the pretty girls getting awards and stuff. In any event, it just goes to show: you can be too sure. But you can never be too unsure. 

Ciao, Manhattan, or, the chocolate of reality gets into the peanut butter of fiction in "Sweet Smell of Success"

This post should be considered as a contribution to the above-depicted blogathon; please see here for further details. And please give!

Is Alexander Mackendrick's 1957 The Sweet Smell of Success really a film noir? The Clifford Odets-Ernest Lehman scripted picture isn't a crime movie per se, although it does feature a supremely slimy corrupt cop, a very nasty frame-up, intimations of incestuous feelings, and a constant stream of back-and-forth recriminations and resentments and sublimations of guilt and obsessions that it can't really be anything BUT a noir, can it? As The Siren herself put it when I was hashing out with her whether I was gonna discuss this picture for her and Marilyn Ferdinand's very worthy blogathon, "you've got fate, dark deeds, twisted motives, great shadowy cinematography, what's not to noir?"

Right. Of course there's also the problem that Sweet Smell has already been written about pretty much to death, and if you're a fan of it (and good lord, if you're not a fan of it, what are you doing reading this blog?) basically all you want to know about it right now is how good the new Criterion discs of it (standard def and Blu-ray editions) are, and they are very damn good indeed, by my estimation. In any event, there really isn't, to my mind, all that much new to say about the picture...unless I bring things into the putatively actual, and possibly personal. 

The picture establishes its snappy, practically breakneck, pace—and seedy/glamorous Manhattan milieu—in its credit sequence, which shows us a bustling Times Square as the latest editions of the Globe, the paper for which columnist J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) acts as "The Eyes of Broadway," are loaded onto trucks that will deliver that edition far and wide...and, in one case, to a newsstand literally around the corner from these loading docks, before the feet of hungry press agent Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis), who will be quite disappointed to see and mention of his clientele once again absent from Hunsecker's jottings. The avid amateur historian of New Amsterdam will know that newsstand is literally around the corner via a visual parsing of the locations captured by Mackendrick and James Wong Howe for their montage. By gum, those docks look very much like the ones that were on the ground floor of the old New York Times building on West 43rd Street between Broadway/7th Avenue and Eighth Avenue. There they are from street level facing west, behind Curtis' credit. 

If we need any further confirmation of the location, it's provided within a couple of shots; the visual closer is hard to catch when watching the film in a theater, but easy to nail with the tech capabilities of DVD. The trucks of "The Globe" have big ads on their sides advertising Hunsecker's column; but the prop department didn't cover every truck at that loading dock. And as one of the trucks moves out, another truck is visible...

...and this truck bears a plaque with the New York Times' "All The News That's Fit To Print" motto, and an advertisement for that paper.  

...and off the truck goes.

"I love this dirty town," Hunsecker famously intones a little later in the film, outside and a little down the block from the still-extant restaurant "21," over on 52nd Street. The town would get a lot dirtier in the coming years, and the trucks leaving the Times' loading dock would get a lot bigger. Across the street from the Times' building was a hotel first known as the Dixie, and then known as the Carter (and no, I'm not making that up); never exactly the Waldorf-Astoria, it was for a time the home of the frequently down-on-his-luck writer and race enthusiast known as Colonel Stingo, immortalized by A.J. Liebling in his wonderful book The Honest Rainmaker. By the early 1990s, what had been the hotel's ballroom, I presume, had become one of New York's truly great trannie dives, Sally's II, yclept Sally's Hideaway. It opened its doors at around five o'clock every afternoon, around the time the vast majority of the isle's transgendered population was just getting out of bed, really, save for a handful of stalwart gals whose circumstances necessitated a slight boost of spring to the step. Okay, I'm exaggerating/romanticizing a bit, but you get the idea. While a fair amount of business, that is, hustling, went on at Sally's from the late rush hour onward, its main function was as a place for the indigenous community, such as it was, to socialize. Which also kind of made it a great place for a non-transgendered heavy drinker and substance abuser to isolate, and watch life's rich and strange pageant go by. And so I did, on way too many nights than I sometimes care to recall.

For the trannie prostitute, Sally's was the prelude to Edelweiss, down the way west, next to the diner on 43rd Street and 11th Avenue, which was much more of a "real" nightclub, and had a more sex-tourist/regular-tourist friendly vibe to it. A friend of mine from the transgender world had strong connections to the larger demi-monde, and was frequently asked to act as docent to the celebrity class in their quasi-slumming activities; one night he was deputized with squiring Tim Burton, then-cohort Lisa Marie (this was 1996, around the time of Mars Attacks!), and Francis Ford Coppola to Edelweiss to see the gorgeous dancing Dominican not-girls. Lisa Marie went down a storm with the queens, as you might imagine; Coppola, apparently, walked around marveling at how "theatrical" it all was, and was frequently mistaken for a potential john by some of the working girls, on account of his having kept his overcoat on for the whole visit. Anyway. So on a particularly lucky night, any given girl working at Sally's could hook either a regular client or a new friend and get him to shell out consistent cash for blow, and drinks, and possibly some partying later. This entailed sticking around for the evening "show" at Sally's (lip-syncing in fabulous gowns, natch; my Southern belle pal Miss Gina Germaine really sold Reba McIntire's "Fancy," as you might imagine), waiting around for whoever was dealing the always badly stepped-on coke to show up, and, after that transaction was completed, skipping down to Edelweiss for several nightcaps or more blow or someone to bring to the party later or whatever. Except. (I bet you were wondering where the hell this was leading, right?) If you'd try to catch a cab from Sally's to Edelweiss between one and two-thirty or three in the morning, chances are you'd have to wait outside for some time, because taxi traffic was frequently halted by the fleet of now eighteen-wheeled trucks backing in and pulling out of the Times' loading docks. This activity led to considerable interludes of anxiety for both hunter and game, hustler and hustled; if the john started feeling pangs of conscience (I probably don't need to tell you that good number of these fellows were leading some form of a double life) or, you know, budgetary concerns, this break in the momentum of their, um, headlong rush into sybaritic degradation could conceivably provide them with an exit strategy, escape hatch, what have you. And the queen, left in a relative lurch, would have relatively short notice from then until closing time (which really just meant a dash to some after-hours joint in many cases) to find another sugar daddy for the evening. 

Yeah, it sure was a dirty town, and it still is, but not that way, not anymore. I always thought it was not insignificant that Sally's was padlocked for good on November 13, 1997, the night of the official opening of The Lion King. The photographer Brian Lantelme has a reasonably fabulous website commemorating the joint here. Its contents are not thoroughly NSFW, but still...you might be the type who worries that your work cohorts will take you for a trannie-chaser. Some of the people pictured therein are still my friends; and too many of those pictured therein have died.