{"id":111,"date":"2004-03-25T23:45:05","date_gmt":"2004-03-26T06:45:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.doubleperf.com\/blog\/archives\/2004\/03\/25\/willis_talks.html"},"modified":"2004-03-25T23:45:05","modified_gmt":"2004-03-26T06:45:05","slug":"willis_talks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.doubleperf.com\/blog\/archives\/2004\/03\/25\/willis_talks.html","title":{"rendered":"Willis Talks"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I attended my first evening at the <A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.bu.edu\/com\/filmtv\/cinematheque.html\">B.U. Cinematheque<\/A> tonight, a crowded and hellishly hot affair that featured a screening of the Harvard Law School classic <I><A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0070509\/\">The Paper Chase<\/A><\/I> followed by a question and answer session with the film&#8217;s director of photography, Gordon Willis.  Willis is a luminary in the world of cinematography, having had a hand in the <a title=\"Gordon Willis chosen to receive the ASC Lifetime Achievement Award\" href=\"http:\/\/www.theasc.com\/awards\/history\/pr\/9_gordon_willis.htm\">best work<\/A> of Francis Ford Coppola, Woody Allen, Alan Pakula, and other directors in their 1970s heydays.  The film was ok, I guess, nicely shot but strange, in that 1970s kind of way, when relationships on screen don&#8217;t seem to make any real sense to me.  I think Timothy Bottoms really only had one <A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0067328\/\">really great movie<\/A>, and this wasn&#8217;t it.  Now he&#8217;s too busy playing <A HREF=\"http:\/\/tv.zap2it.com\/tveditorial\/tve_main\/1,1002,271%7C80418%7C1%7C,00.html\">W<\/A> to do anything else.  I expected to see more familiar faces among the crowd of law students; besides Edward Herrmann, only Blair Brown stood out, and I didn&#8217;t even recognize her until I saw her name in the credits; whatever happened  to <A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0092336\/\">Molly Dodd<\/A>? After the film, Willis was interesting, and the questions were good, for a change.  He said something like &#8220;Don&#8217;t confuse motion for accomplishment&#8221; or something like that; it seemed useful at the time, but I can&#8217;t remember it exactly, now, which isn&#8217;t that helpful.  People were interested in his interactions with Marlon Brando and Barbra Streisand, and Woody Allen came out as the easiest director to work with.  On a final note, check out <A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.mcsweeneys.net\/2003\/08\/02willis.html\">this<\/A> typically entertaining McSweeney&#8217;s piece (why did the <A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.freewilliamsburg.com\/august_2002\/mcsweeneys.html\">store<\/A> have to <A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.doubleperf.com\/blog\/archives\/2004\/01\/25\/menhatten.html\">close<\/A>?) about stalking Gordon Willis.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I attended my first evening at the B.U. Cinematheque tonight, a crowded and hellishly hot affair that featured a screening of the Harvard Law School classic The Paper Chase followed by a question and answer session with the film&#8217;s director of photography, Gordon Willis. Willis is a luminary in the world of cinematography, having had [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.doubleperf.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.doubleperf.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.doubleperf.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.doubleperf.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.doubleperf.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=111"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.doubleperf.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.doubleperf.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.doubleperf.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.doubleperf.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}