[Population: One] <A HREF="http://popone.innocence.com/ar

[bryant]

Weird idea, while drifting off to sleep:

A Lexicon of Lost Hollywood. Each entry is a movie review of a movie that was never made; each movie review must refer forward and back to other movies. You can make up actors and directors and screenwriters if you like, but they cannot be entries: they will always be defined only by the reviews of their movies. Or, if you wish, you can use the stars that we know.

The slots are not alphabetical: they are chronological. 1940-1945; 1945-1950; 1950-1955; 1955-1960; 1960-1965; 1965-1970; 1970-1975; 1975-1980; 1980-1985; 1985-1990; 1990-1995; 1995-2000. 12 slots. The secret history of Hollywood (and Bollywood, and the BBC, and Hong Kong) is revealed slowly as the needle of time moves forward.

Comments

[mgrasso.livejournal.com]

When do we start?

[that-cad.livejournal.com]

Ditto.

[mgrasso.livejournal.com]

You saw the fake filmography (http://www.livejournal.com/users/mgrasso/644686.html) I did for my Airportation (http://www.livejournal.com/tools/memories.bml?user=mgrasso&keyword=AIRPORTATION&filter=all)character, right? I'm ALL OVER THIS.

[ivan23.livejournal.com]

Very cool idea, man.

[kniedzw.livejournal.com]

I'm there.

[editswlonghair.livejournal.com]

Why start at 1940? I'd say start at the beginning... with Melies' 1896 snuff film "Theatre des Vampyres."

[gentlyepigrams]

Having just watched a DVD of early Melies, Pathe, Edison, etc., I think this is a great idea.

[bryant]

Is that the Kino one, or something else?

[gentlyepigrams]

It's this one: http://www.netflix.com/MovieDisplay?movieid=7773937

Having sent it back, I don't have it to look at, and it's not clear to me from skimming the page. I would assume so, because I don't think there are a bunch of series of early film shorts running around.

[bryant]

You'd be surprised! That's one from Image -- I was thinking of this one: http://www.kino.com/video/item.php?film_id=735

The DVD has been such a gift to film historians it's amazing.

[editswlonghair.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Kino does some amazing work and has a fantastic library.

[editswlonghair.livejournal.com]

Isn't Melies great? And I dig the idea of in his 'secret history' his first film was of a performance of the Theatre des Vampires from "Interview with the Vampire." That'd really set the stage for his later fantasies which, on their surface, are so sweet, innocent, and childlike, but like most fairy tales have an edge to them (the moon getting shot in the eye, a Turkish eunnuch getting sliced in half, etc).

Yeah, I'm going to have to participate in this lexicon if I have time.

Oh, and if you are a gamer who is also into silents, let me point you in the direction of a 24-hour rpg I did last month: 'Lights! Camera! ACTION!' I still haven't had a chance to actually run a playtest witha group, and I've thought of changes and revisions I'd like to make, but I'd love to get feedback!

http://homepage.mac.com/editswithlonghair/FileSharing15.html

[gentlyepigrams]

OMG, that's so cool! I am going to have to see if I can't get some people to play that!

[editswlonghair.livejournal.com]

Sweet! Thanks! If you do get to play, let me know how it goes!

And if I can get those revisions done in the near future, I will send you the updated rules.

[robotnik.livejournal.com]

How did I never see this before? Very cool. Off to read...

[telepresence.livejournal.com]

Awesome.

[ratmmjess.livejournal.com]

I am *so* all over this, if only because I want to allude to Howard Waldrop's fictional films. But, yes, must play this. Must, precious, must.

[sben.livejournal.com]

Dig.

I'd join if you needed, you know, more contributors.

[jeffwik.livejournal.com]

I like the idea a lot. I'd add a pre-1940 slot, maybe at the end -- see also Birth of a Nation.

[robotnik.livejournal.com]

Very cool idea.

And I ditto the request for a pre-1940 slot.

[bryant]

Balance: my observation that shorter Lexicons work better, vs. my desire to have the intervals be five years, vs. my desire to cover the entire history of Hollywood (pre-Code! My god!), vs. my uncertainty that it's fair to ask people to distinguish between 1925-1930 and 1930-1935.

But a big slot for pre-1940. Hm.

[kodi]

I would find it a more satisfying division to have two big slots, one ending in 1929 as sound became the standard, and one ending in 1939 with The Wizard of Oz.

[bryant]

Hm, good point.

[jeffwik.livejournal.com]

Maybe divy up by decade, rather than five year: pre-1929, 1930-1939, 1940-1949, 1950-1959, 1960-1969, 1970-1979, 1980-1989, 1990-1999, 2000-present is nine rounds. Could elevate one or two decades, split them up into two five-year rounds -- 1940-1945, 1946-1949 or 1960-1965, 1966-1969 or both. That's nine, ten, eleven rounds, which isn't bad.

But I like putting pre-1929 at the very end, rather than the beginning. And maybe best to start off with the 2000-present round, but that notion I feel less firm about endorsing.

[bryant]

Decade is too big. No 2000-present round, either... nobody's making good movies these days anyhow.

[bryant]

Decades are too big because actors tend not to stay in a phase of their career that long, that is.

[jeffwik.livejournal.com]

That's a fair point. Maybe best to stick to, say, pre-1980.

[bryant]

Maybe, yeah. I'd hate to lose 1999, the legendary best movie year ever, but perhaps it's inevitable.

[robotnik.livejournal.com]

I disagree, and vote for decades rather than 5 year blocks.

Not sure why the phases of actors' careers is relevant here. The more salient fact, it seems to me, is that one might well have a sense of how 1940s movies and 1950s movies differ, but only true film geeks will feel strongly about how 1940-1945 movies and 1945-1950 movies differ.

(Different decades differ, of course. I admit there's a kind of break between early 70s movies and late 70s movies, but I don't feel the same kind of significant split in the 1980s for instance.)

Broad categories are also good because people are going to have to assign decades to movies based on the title alone when they create forward links.

If you've got a half dozen or more players, I'd say they'll cover the range of a decade and the kinds of movies made in that decade pretty well.

BUT it's your baby.

[kodi]

I'm of two minds on the matter. If I were tasked merely with "break the history of film into useful periods," I would go through and look for epochal events to serve as dividing features, like with arrival of sound from 1926-29, and the arrival of Technicolor in 1939. It's a nice, fast way to wrap your head around a period, by connecting it with something you're already familiar with.

The problem with that scheme for something like this, though, is that it's easy to go from using the events as landmarks to using the events as the defining element of the period. HUAC is a great dividing line - there were a lot of films made after 1947 that just would not have happened before 1947. But thinking of 1947-54 as "The HUAC Era" shoves Olivier's Hamlet and the first 3D films into a closet from which they might never escape.

On the other hand, trying to identify those epochal events is a really fun exercise. If I were dividing the history of film into roughly decade-sized chuncks, I would put my dividing lines at 1929, 1939, 1947, 1958, 1966, 1977 and 1991.

[bryant]

Hm. I had this half-formed idea that you might want to imply a history of an imaginary actor through his or her imaginary films. But maybe that's biting off too much.

I had, of course, being the snob that I am, been thinking about this for "true film geeks." Trainspotters. Otaku. What's the American English word for that? Geek has too much connotation, I fear. And did you ever notice that otaku means something different in English than it does in Japanese?

1920-1930
1930-1940
1940-1950
1950-1960
1960-1970
1970-1980
1980-1990
1990-2000
2000-present
pre-1920

[telepresence.livejournal.com]

I'd argue that there are at least stuctural things worth exploring in a 2000-present period.

[jeregenest.livejournal.com]

I've found that 8 rounds are really the perfect number for a Lexicon. 9 is stretching it.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Count me in, if you get it up and running, and have room. Are the reviews by reviewers, or critics, or film historians/academics?

[bryant]

Your call. Choose a persona and use it throughout the Lexicon. Any of the above is OK.

It would not horrify me if someone chose the persona of an Ain't It Cool reviewer.

[mgrasso.livejournal.com]

Dibs on the Pauline Kael analogue.