The End of an Era
Don't panic this is not an obit!
The most genial Maitre d of Saint Germain, Francis Bonneau, has retired. From his post at Les Deux Magots he welcomed the international stars of stage, screen and music with the same smile and kindness that he gave us and the untold thousands of non-French speaking tourists who made the pilgrimage to Les Deux.
His presence was like sunshine on a cloudy day and I will sincerely miss him. If you have a memory of Francis please share it at Terrance@paris-expat.com
MURDER in BLACK & WHITE
Midcentury Los Angeles. A city sold to the world as "the white spot of America," a land of sunshine and orange groves, wholesome Midwestern values and Hollywood stars, protected by the world's most famous police force, the Dragnet-era LAPD. Behind this public image lies a hidden world of "pleasure girls" and crooked cops, ruthless newspaper tycoons, corrupt politicians, and East Coast gangsters on the make.
Beginning with Billy Wilder's DOUBLE INDEMNITY and continuing into the early Fifties with films like THE BIG SLEEP, CRISS CROSS and SUNSET BLVD. Los Angeles was the location for film noir with it's sarcastic private eyes, corrupt cops and very, very bad girls.
It took a while for filmmakers to learn how to make technicolor film noirs. At first it sounds oxymoronic but in CHINATOWn, THE LONG GOODBYE and L.A. CONFIDENTIAL they learned how to add colour without bleeding out the darkness.
Chinatown
Robert Towne wrote one of the greatest film scripts ever written as he fictitiously writes about William Mulholland and the diversion of the Owens River to Los Angeles to provide the water necessary to build a great city. The actual events occurred in 1913 but by moving the period to the 1930's he liberated production designer Richard Sylbert to dabble in the architecture, vintage cars and elegant wardrobes of the period. Nicholson never looked so refined.
R.I.P-Robert Towne
Robert Towne, whose screenplay for Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown” won an Oscar, and whose work on that and other important films established him as one of the leading screenwriters of the so-called New Hollywood, died on Monday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 89.
Mr. Towne’s Academy Award was part of a phenomenal run. He was nominated for best-screenplay Oscars three years in a row; his “Chinatown” win, in 1974, came between nominations for “The Last Detail” and “Shampoo,” both directed by Hal Ashby. He had also worked as an uncredited script doctor on “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967) and “The Godfather” (1972).
THE BIG GOODBYE
Here for the first time is the incredible true story of the making of Chinatown--the Holy Grail of 1970s cinema.
IN Sam Wasson's The Big Goodbye, the story of Chinatown becomes the defining story of the most colorful characters in the most colorful period of Hollywood history.
Here is Jack Nicholson at the height of his powers, as compelling a movie star as there has ever been, embarking on his great, doomed love affair with Anjelica Huston. Here is director Roman Polanski, both predator and prey, haunted by the savage death of his wife, returning to Los Angeles, the scene of the crime, where the seeds of his own self-destruction are quickly planted. Here is the fevered dealmaking of "The Kid" Robert Evans, the most consummate of producers. Here too is Robert Towne's fabled script, widely considered the greatest original screenplay ever written.
The Long Goodbye
Robert Altman's depiction of Raymond Chandler's private eye Philip Marlowe who is a 1940s anachronism living in the 70s who helps friend Terry Lennox out of a jam and is implicated in his wife Sylvia's murder. He also is hired by Eileen Wade to locate her dipsomaniac husband Roger, who frequently disappears when he wants to dry out.
Tapping into the Zeitgeist Altman cast broadcaster/author of BALL FOUR/outcast Jim Bouton as Terry Lennox, Clifford Irving's mistrees Nina van Pallandt as Eileen Wade and the towering, blustering Sterling Hayden as her perpetually inebriated husband.
And as you will hear in the clip below music was a key character as well.
L.A. Confidential
Director Curtis Hanson and screen writer Brian Hegelund fashioned a superb movie out of James Ellroy's epic novel about post war Los Angeles: it's surging multi-ethnic population attracted by jobs and weather, the power of organized crime to control prostitution, drugs that fueled a wide open demi-monde and the corrupt Protestant police force that was empowered to "protect and serve."
Café Terrance at La Coupole
Sunday July 7, 10:30AM-12PM
Coolest thing on a Parisian Sunday morning.-Sharon Roberson, Lexington KY
A Paris institution, Jim Bitterman, CNN
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