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Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Annie Hall; Wes pines to revisit his many unwritten essays, including the one about love and nostalgia in Woody Allen films. We discuss whether Mike Nichols used crack, and the way Google’s algorithms mercilessly hunt Wes down to forcibly dose him with information about the director, all because of a few searches. Wes couldn’t get through Clue, but that may be due to the variability of his many movie moods, and in any case Erin’s Madeline Kahn impression captures a redeeming attitude. We discuss My Favorite Wife (my favorite life?). It’s great, but it bogs down halfway through. By contrast, Annie Hall‘s use of free association helps it navigate the precarious second act, and keeps it brisk (despite its exceptionally long shots, on average of 14 seconds). Erin is reading a new biography of LSD aficionado Cary Grant, called A Brilliant Disguise, according to which director Leo McCarey‘s car accident changed him forever. Also, McCarey apparently admitted on his deathbed that his greatest frustration in life was never sleeping with Irene Dunne. Probably a frustration for most of us, but fortunately we get to enjoy the eidetic romantico-comical pairing of Dunne and Grant. Throne of Blood is so much more than samurai yelling at each other: there’s the incredibly creepy and insidious Lady Macbeth character, who motivates her husband by stoking his paranoia in a way that involves more psychological realism than the original play. Not to mention the transplendant, sing-songy witch, which in turn reminds Wes of Beverly in Abigail’s Party by Mike Leigh (played by Alison Steadman): wonderful, trippy, darkly comic, but ultimately indescribable. Erin recently watched Elevator to the Gallows to celebrate the birthday of Jeanne Moreau, and is reading Great Expectations (coming to (sub)Text as soon as Wes has the time to re-read it). But David Lean’s adaptation of the novel disappoints: Alec Guinness looks like a pimp, and a nightmare vaudevillian Miss Havisham looks like she’s on ludes. We humblebrag about two recent positive reviews, and post-game our first ad, wondering whether this was the first time a conversation about a poem was made possible by the selling of drugs. So support us on Patreon, and you’ll be doing your part to keep pills out of poetry and where they belong, in the medicine cabinets of Mike Nichols, Cary Grant, and Miss Havisham.
Transcript
0:00 Erin: Welcome to Postscript, the subtext after show where we talk about things related and unrelated to the week's episode. This is Erin O'Luanaigh.
0:07 Wes: And this is Wes Alwan. Okay, so we just recorded on Annie Hall. That's like a dream come true for me to. You know, I always wanted to write something about it, but of course, that hasn't happened. But just to have a public conversation about that is great.
0:20 Erin: Yeah. What would you write about if you could write about it? What would be the. Just the idea of nostalgia.
0:26 Wes: And actually, there's an essay I want to do kind of with regard to Woody Allen films in general, because I think that sort of finds its way into everything he does.
0:33 Erin: That's great. Well, I really enjoyed what you had to say about that. It was really enlightening.
0:37 Wes: Likewise. Likewise.
0:39 Erin: Oh, we need to talk about how Mike Nichols used crack according to an upcoming biography.
0:46 Wes: So. Yeah, so for listeners, we have, like, a little slack to communicate, and we have some channels. Like, we have, like, a reading and viewing log in our Postscript channel. I just threw up this thing about Page Six. I don't know what publication that is, but Mike Nichols use crack upcoming biography claims. I basically, I get these in my Google News feed because in preparing for the Graduate episode, I must have Googled him. And therefore, now I must, you know, Google News must inform me every time something happens with respect to Mike Nichols. And, like, I get alert after alert about one salacious detail after another from this new biography. So. And you said, I doubt this very much.
1:29 Erin: Yeah, I do doubt it. But, you know, he was very productive.
1:35 Erin: You mentioned in a different Slack channel that you couldn't get through Clue.
1:42 Erin: Could you explain that, please, and give your defense before sentencing?
1:46 Wes: I just. I hated it.
1:49 Erin: What? Okay, you have to be. First of all, you gotta be a little bit drunk.
1:54 Erin: Second of all, you've gotta be in a big group of people.
1:57 Erin: And third of all, you need me to do my Madeline Kahn voice along with Madeline Kahn and everything she says.
2:03 Wes: So now you have to do that voice. You can't just.
2:06 Erin: I hated her so much. I just. Sorry.
2:12 Erin: It's great. It's a great. Yeah, it's really campy. And it takes a little work to kind of, like, get on the wavelength of the movie. But if you're not on the same wavelength, it can be hard to get there.
2:22 Wes: Maybe it's a mood thing, I think.
2:25 Wes: My reaction to movies actually varies significantly according to my mood. Usually Annie hall, for instance, is A transplantent experience.
2:34 Erin: I thought it was more Kafkaesque, but I mean that as a compliment.
2:38 Wes: Yeah. This is the first time it wasn't. It might have been just because I had to do it and I was taking notes to the whole thing and pausing, you know, and just like, oh, God, yeah, I've turned this into work now. And I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it. It's just in the past. Every viewing has just been this. For me, that's kind of sublime. But. So, yes, I can give Clue another try. I can pick up where I left off and see what happens.
3:00 Erin: You know, it's a movie that comes in at, like, a very high pitch. It's, like, you know, hard to meet that craziness and the zaniness of the movie if you're not kind of gelling with it. So I. I kind of understand that. I think I've probably turned it off before because I was just like, oh, I can't do this right now. Yeah, that reminds me something that you watched a while ago, but we never talked about. And I was just curious to hear your reaction about my favorite wife. I know that was a while ago now, but did you like that?
3:26 Wes: Yes, I really did. I loved, like, the first half, and I can't give all the details on this, but I thought it got a little bogged down. So what I think happens in a lot of movies is, like, act two is really hard to sustain. It's, like, sometimes twice as long as Acts 1 and 3. And it's a sort of. A lot of transitional stuff before, you know, as you get into the third act and things really start with. You get a lot more momentum towards the climax. It's a place where screenplays generally bogged down. So it's not an uncommon thing. And I'm. You know, I think it's part of my impatience now. And so it's partly my problem. Although, like, the second act, I think, is one. One thing that Annie hall does really, really well, in part because it's. I think free association works very well. We didn't go a lot into it in the. In the episode, but the. You know, a lot of the transitions in the movie, it's not just moving forward in time. One thing happens after the other. It's. It's mental free association. And I think somehow that gives more momentum to the second act because there's kind of a psychological urgency to it. So coming back to this movie, I just. I think I'm. Towards the end of the second act, I was getting impatient, but I loved, loved, loved the first half of the movie. And I was pausing occasionally to try to do my. To practice my Cary Grant accent, which I'm not going to try to do here. I can do little Christopher Walken, but I can't do Cary Grant.
4:49 Erin: Yeah. I mean, one of the things, though, about Annie hall, it's just like, it's so fast, you know, it goes so quickly. It so speedily chugs along. And it's so inventive.
4:58 Wes: It does. But by the way, the shots are, on average, 14 seconds long, which is very, very long.
5:04 Wes: Most movies are four to six seconds or something. But it does chug along, as you say.
5:08 Erin: Yeah, yeah. And the inventiveness of it is amazing. But. Yeah. So my favorite wife is.
5:16 Wes: I think it's my favorite life.
5:19 Erin: Sorry. Yeah. It was supposed to be directed by Leo McCary. And so part of the reason why that movie is so disjointed is because Garson Kanan ended up having to step in and direct it unexpectedly. And so it was actually. It was a huge disappointment, I think, for Irene Dunn, like, creatively, because she thought that it was going to be as inventive and fun as the awful Truth. And she actually complained about the exact same thing that you're complaining about. But one of the things that I read. So I've been reading this Cary Grant biography that just came out.
5:52 Wes: Did he do crack as well?
5:54 Erin: No, he did do lsd. I mean, but that's pretty well documented. But anyway, the reason why. So he got into a car accident, Makary. Because he was driving drunk at 95 miles an hour when he slammed into a 1924 Packard. It was. It was really serious. It said the accident report lists multiple burns, gouge wounds, lacerations and contusions, broken bones and a possible skull fracture.
6:19 Erin: Then there was this little sort of ending part to this section on my favorite wife in this book, which really shook me to use the term that the kids are using, which is that. Well, first of all, he emerged from the accident kind of like never being the same. But also that Makary and Irene Dunne, she was a very devout Catholic, happily married, but the two of them had this, like, weird, sexy vibe between them where she, I guess, was, like, kind of interested in him, and he was super interested in her. And it said that he went to his deathbed saying that the fact that he had never slept with Irene Dunn was the greatest frustration of his life. And I just, like, could not get over that. Anyway.
7:04 Wes: Yeah, well, it's the greatest Frustration of my life as well. I never even met her.
7:11 Erin: I just couldn't get over that. But anyway, yeah, so as you were telling me that you had watched My Favorite Wife, I was reading that, going, oh, my God. Just couldn't get over it.
7:21 Wes: This is a new biography of Cary Grant.
7:24 Erin: It is, yeah. It's Cary Grant, A Brilliant Disguise by Scott Eamon. A couple of biographies came out about him just recently, and there were two of them that were reviewed by David Thompson recently, I think, in LRB or tls, one of those places. And he said that both of them are kind of essential. So once I'm done with this, I'm going to have to go read the other one, too.
7:48 Wes: Can you do a Cary Grant accent, by the way?
7:51 Erin: No, I won't do it publicly. I kind of got this impression. The scene where Diane Keaton and Woody Allen are on the roof, she had to have been doing an Irene Dunn impression. And I looked it up, and I guess in an interview she did say that she was doing an Irene Dunn impression during that. That whole thing.
8:14 Erin: I think it's very. She gets the cadence exactly right in that.
8:17 Wes: So interesting.
8:19 Erin: Yeah. Everything goes back to Irene Dunn and Cary Grant. What can I say?
8:24 Wes: They are the, er, romance. So I also watched Throne of Blood, which I thoroughly enjoyed, even though in the beginning I'm like, ugh, am I really gonna be. Just watch samurais. Am I really just gonna watch them yell at each other for two hours? So much yelling. But it's amazing. Wow. It's just such a mesmerizing. I mean, I guess a lot of it is in the visuals, you know.
8:47 Erin: Yeah, it is very. It's like you go into a Zen state when you watch it.
8:51 Wes: The Lady Macbeth character is so creepy. And because she's so. You know, she has a kind of very passive, on the surface demeanor, but her manipulativeness is, you know, so insidious. It makes more sense than overtly than Macbeth, than in Macbeth. She's trying to make him paranoid. Right. She's giving him plausible reasons to be, you know, get them before they get you kind of thing. So it's more nakedly about self preservation in a way that she's appealing to his idea that as he rises, the only way to preserve himself is to be ruthless, Something like that. Whereas in Macbeth, it doesn't quite make any sense, you know, this idea that there's an urgency to killing Duncan just because there's a prophecy. So. So there's a. There's a greater realism involved But I just find her so creepy in a way that it's quite gripping.
9:45 Erin: Yeah, she's really great in that.
9:47 Wes: And the same with the witch.
9:48 Erin: Yeah. Oh, so weird. Yeah, I like that little hut too. It's really.
9:54 Wes: What is it, a spindle? Yeah. And just the way the. The witch talks and the kind of sing songy.
10:01 Wes: Yeah. Oh, and by the way, I watched something called Abigail's Party. Have you ever seen that?
10:05 Erin: No, I haven't. Never even heard of it.
10:08 Wes: This is a trip. It's basically a filmed play that was on BBC, but it was. It was a successful play in the 70s, I think. 77, same year as Annie Hall. I. I'm so predictable in my. My taste. It's all like late 60s, 70s, early 80s, and then everything else, I just can't.
10:26 Wes: Doesn't do it for me as much, with some exceptions. But. But it's a. It's directed by Mike Lee.
10:33 Wes: I think it was a. It was a play at the Hampstead Theater before they did a recording of it for BBC's Play for Today. I don't even know how to describe it. They call it a. It's Wikipedia. They describe it as a suburban situation comedy of manners and a satire on the aspirations and tastes of the new middle class that emerged in Britain in the 1970s. So Abigail is someone who actually doesn't. Never appears in the play, but the main character, Beverly Moss, is just out of this world. And I don't even know how to describe what she is exactly. You just have to see this. You know, it's like so darkly comic. There's not a lot of laugh out loud moments, but it's intense and you're sort of on your. On the edge of your seat. So anyway, yeah, you should.
11:19 Erin: Where. Where can I find it? I'm really interested in.
11:22 Wes: Well, unfortunately, it's not really. Well, actually. No. YouTube. YouTube.
11:27 Erin: YouTube. Okay.
11:28 Wes: It's free on YouTube. But otherwise, who's in it?
11:30 Erin: Is there anyone good in it?
11:31 Wes: Yeah. So it's. Allison Stedman plays Beverly.
11:35 Erin: Oh, no way. The Mrs. Bennet.
11:40 Wes: Exactly. Right. Pride and Prejudice. Yeah, I forgot that Tim Cern plays Lawrence.
11:45 Erin: I don't know.
11:46 Wes: Janine Davitsky, who didn't have much of a career. Yeah, I don't think many of these people had much of a career. Okay, I will watch it with you again. I would love to watch it again. So maybe we could watch it together.
11:56 Wes: It is dark, so hopefully you won't hate me after we're done watching it, but.
12:00 Erin: No, that's okay.
12:01 Wes: What about you? What have you been? I know you. Well, we already talked about the fact that you're reading Great Expectations. Oh, yeah, I finished that, which I don't. I started. I don't know that I'm going to get done in time for the next one, so we'll have to talk about what the next episode is going to be.
12:15 Wes: Yeah, I could try to like force myself to try to get it done in two weeks. I'm a little nervous about that.
12:20 Erin: No, no, no, no, you should enjoy it.
12:22 Erin: Maybe we could do another movie. Could we do a back to back movie or would that be.
12:27 Wes: Yeah, so let's think about a movie.
12:28 Erin: Yeah, yeah. Because we've done some heavy stuff in a row, so. Yeah.
12:33 Wes: So what are you, what else are you reading or watching?
12:36 Erin: Let's see. Well, yesterday was Jean Moreau's birthday, so I watched Elevator to the Gallows again. Rewatched it since I finished Great Expectations, I watched the David Lean adaptation of it, which I had never seen and which I really did not like. I know it's supposed to be a classic, but I didn't like it. John Mills looked like he was 40 playing a 20 year old pip and Alec Guinness was like, oh man, what an unattractive young guy he was. I mean, that's not like relevant to anything, but he just looked like really weird through the whole thing. Yeah, he's attractive when he's older. Yeah, I thought, you know, I mean, Obi Wan is fine and obviously his movies in the like 50s are hilarious. I wasn't really paying attention, but he just looks so weird. His, his head looks like an egg in this. It's very strange. But anyway, and they, I was annoyed by, you know, at the beginning I was like, wow, you know, they're really staying close to the book like this. Performances weren't exactly what I had envisioned, but the settings were all like really vividly drawn from the book. And I was really impressed because for the first 25 minutes or so I thought, wow, if this is a 90 minute movie, how are they going to do everything justice the way that they're doing it right now? In the first 25 minutes it was like word for word out of the book. Not quite, but everything was happening in order and with a lot of attention paid to it. And then everything started kind of collapse. And I wasn't happy with Ms. Havisham. It was like she was on Lewds or something. She was like relaxed and in the book she's such a vibrant, like, crazy, almost like a vaudevillian kind of. Kind of nightmare character. And she was way too dignified. And then the ending was all messed up, and so I got more and more upset. And it was also, like, really boring in the middle, which it is in the book at all. So I was really disappointed. And then I tried watching a BBC adaptation of it with the one with Charlotte Rampling playing Miss Havisham, and it was awesome. All screwed up. Whatever version they have for free on Amazon was, like, skipping. And there were these pink slashes through the picture.
14:48 Erin: Yeah. And then we tried switching to the second episode and seeing if that was any better, and it was not the second episode. It was weird. Anyway, I'm gonna have to try and find some other longer BBC version of it to watch, though none of them were as highly rated on IMDb anyway as the David Lean, which is obviously considered a classic, though I don't really know why. I mean, it's beautifully shot, but it's disappointed.
15:14 Wes: Are you reading anything else?
15:16 Erin: Well, I'm. I'm about to teach Pride and Prejudice, so I've been rereading that again. And otherwise, no, I'm kind of in a fallow period right now. I would like to go straight into another Dickens, but I. I think that if we record on Great Expectations, I'm going to get confused if I go into another one too quickly. But, yeah, I really whetted my appetite for a long. Another long novel for the long winter stretch. So I might do Bleak House after we record on Great Expectations. Maybe Bleak House is my favorite Dickens. Haven't read it since I was in high school. Maybe I like this idea that I'm getting into all these rereads of these long novels. They feel so luxurious and wonderful to slip into at night, you know, in bed. And I'd been staying up way later than I should have just because I couldn't put it down.
16:07 Wes: We got two nice reviews recently.
16:10 Wes: What a wonderful podcast. Wes and Erin are two erudite but equally humble, personable hosts. I don't think I've ever been called humble before.
16:19 Erin: Well, you fooled this person. No, that's what I do.
16:23 Wes: That's what I do. This. Fool people. Anyway, very nice to get those views. We had our first ad.
16:31 Wes: On Auden. Second. Our second Auden episode.
16:35 Wes: That was kind of a trip to do that. Is that the first time, like, conversation about a poem has been sponsored by drugs. It's a word we weren't allowed to say in the ad itself.
16:49 Wes: Sell enough drugs, you can keep doing poetry.
16:55 Erin: Should have been a brave New world episode, but.
16:57 Wes: Oh, well. Yeah. Okay.
16:59 Erin: Well, all right.
17:01 Erin: Thank you, thank you.
