So I was at the gym this morning and I put on TCM, as one does, and it took me just two shots to figure out the channel was showing Le Feu Follet, Louis Malle's 1963 proto-mumblecore movie (not really) and it's the dinner party scene before the blunt/sad ending, and Henre Serre, best known from Jules et Jim, shows up in a bit part and I think, "Whoa, he looks like someone."
And I remembered this photo, which was e-mailed to me yesterday by my frenemy Jeff "Captain Cockatoo" Wells, presumably to ride me because I don't much like the new movie that Elizabeth Moss and Mark Duplass co-star in (point of fact, I called it "yuppie puke" in an exchange with Jeff, which was more just to rile him up than anything else; that said, no, don't like the movie), and I thought, "That's kinda funny, I should do a blog post on that."
Because that's what it's come to at this blog, I guess.
Since I got you here I'll tell you my one meager Louis Malle story. It's sometime between 1986 and 1988, and I'm hanging out in Tower Video on Lafayette and West 4 in Manhattan. And one of the floor guys, a stout young African American fellow, is walking about in the laserdisc section, holding a copy of the laser of Atlantic City. And trailing behind him is an older gentleman, white, distinguished, short of stature, with salt-and-pepper hair and a bemused look on his face. The Tower employee says to another Tower employee, "This gentleman is looking for all of the movies on laser disc directed by a Lewis Mal."
A cinephile, I think, and I consider intervening. I then notice the older gentleman is wearing a brown leather quasi-aviator jacket, on the back of which is sewn on a large decal, bearing the logo of "FYI," the fictional television program on which the fictional sitcom character Murphy Brown worked. And then it hit me—the guy actually WAS Malle. Because he was married to Candice Bergen and all. At which point I got all sorta starstruck and didn't intervene after all.
Lest you infer that Malle was on some sorta ego trip, remember that in this period home video was only just becoming a really big thing, and prior to this the idea of the "director approved" video version of a movie was only forming. So I suspect that what Malle was up to was some catch-up.
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