Music by John Williams

 Year 17, Day 221 - 8/09//25 - Movie #5,105

BEFORE: Of course, I'm going to watch any documentary if it's tied to "Star Wars", I think I've proven that time and time again. The real question is, why did I not put this one next to "A Disturbance from the Force", which used archive footage of all the main actors from the first film? For that matter, why not link this to "Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story" or "Tom Hanks: The Nomad", since there's probably archive footage in here from "Saving Private Ryan", too? 

Well, it all comes down to the IMDB listings, when I put my chain together there are some films where the list of people interviewed AND/OR appearing in archive footage are rather incomplete. So when I watch them I keep notes of who appears and compare that to the IMDB listings, and I update whenever I can, but the IMDB is a little funny about archive footage, sometimes the lists get updated, other times not so much. So when I construct the chains I have to work with what I have at the time, and I wasn't 100% sure that Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford would be shown here, but, you know, the chances were pretty darn good. But I could only depend on what I could confirm. Thus, Henry Mancini carries over from "Blake Edwards: A Love Story in 24 Frames". 

Wouldn't you know it, there's a new doc about the making of "Jaws", because it's been 50 years since that film's release. That would have been a great thing to know a few months ago, but I had no idea then about what I know now. So last year I included "If These Walls Could Sing", which showed John Williams and George Lucas recording the "Star Wars" soundtracks at Abbey Road, then THIS film is part of this year's Doc Block, and I'll have to delay the "Jaws" documentary until next year, it just arrived too late. I already see where it might fit in, though, but I'll also have to take a look at who's in the archive footage they used. So the process continues - 

I've got another super-rare Double Birthday SHOUT-out today, this one's completely accidental and only made possible because I updated the IMDB with a list of who's in all of that archive footage. So Happy Birthday to Eric Bana (seen in footage from "Munich") and the late Robert Shaw (seen in footage from "Jaws"). Well, the odds were in favor of SOMEONE having a birthday today. 

THE PLOT: Follows the life of legendary composer John Williams. 

AFTER: Well, this shouldn't have just been a movie full of clips, but I guess there was just no way to avoid that. Somebody really tried, like in the middle there's an examination of the leifmotifs from the "Star Wars" soundtracks, and before that they really got into some music theory about why THOSE five notes worked in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and what made the "Jaws" music so scary, but by the end, this just devolved into a montage of one clip after another, because we're just running out of time and we have to get "Munich" and "The Witches of Eastwick" and "Empire of the Sun" in here somehow. Plus "Lincoln" and "Amistad" and "JFK", God forbid we leave anything out and get hate mail. 

Really, you could just have someone read a list all the names of all the movies that John Williams worked on, and that would probably be movie-length. I'm not sure who has the most credits listed in the IMDB, but John Williams has 1,262 titles in his listing. Maybe some movies are listed twice, but hot damn, that's still a lot of movies. My own listing has just 44 titles, and that took me over 30 years to build up - and again, there's some duplication, like if I produced a film and also was a voice actor for it, it counts twice. I may have wasted a few decades of my life, I'm not sure. Maybe I should have doubled down on the voice acting thing and made that my primary gig, some of those cartoon actors have an astonishing number of credits. 

I mean, for me, it begins and kind of ends with "Star Wars", because like J.J. Abrams, I was that kind of kid who, if I couldn't get to the movie theater to see "Star Wars" on any given day, I would sit by the stereo with the headphones on and listen to all four sides of the soundtrack, and picture the movie in my head. (Again, this was before we had VHS tapes.) But I wondered as a kid why they mixed up the tracks on the record, and they weren't in the same order as the music pieces were played in the film. This is kind of where the OCD started, maybe. I figured that maybe it had to do with the timings, like some tracks were longer than others so they had to even out all four sides on the two discs, this I could get behind because it meant that things needed to be balanced out. But still, the track titled "Rescue of the Princess" appeared before the "Cantina Band" track, and sure, that probably bugged the hell out of 10-year old me. 

Now, bear in mind that John Williams had a successful music career before he ever scored a movie, he released jazz piano albums in the late 1950's, under the name John Towner or John Towner Williams. Then he kind of got involved with TV themes, he played on that "Peter Gunn" theme that Mancini wrote, then got to compose music for "Lost in Space" and "Gilligan's Island" (again, I don't know why anyone would admit to that, but whatever) and from there I guess it was just a short hop over to movie soundtracks, first comedies like "How to Steal a Million" and "Fitzwilly", then "Valley of the Dolls" and "Goodbye, Mr. Chips", and that led him to blockbusters like "Fiddler on the Roof", "Earthquake" and "The Towering Inferno". So he was already on the third iteration of his career and well-known in Hollywood before a young Spielberg ever came knocking on his door. 

So of course, then came "Jaws" and that led Spielberg to recommend him to Lucas for "Star Wars", and then really, forget about it. "Star Wars" was simply THE biggest hit in movie history, and so you'd think that there would be nowhere to go from there but down, but you would be incorrect. Within the next two years John Williams composed and conducted the soundtracks to "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and "Superman", then came "Empire Strikes Back", "Raiders of the Lost Ark", and "E.T." and he just kept going and going like there was no stopping.

I remember when he took over as the Boston Pops conductor after Arthur Fiedler died, this was the top news story in Boston, for sure. But there was some scandal and pushback when the job went to a popular movie composer. Apparently according to this doc some of the older symphony orchestra players never warmed up to him, and after just four years, Williams quit the job over creative differences. They had a really hard time replacing him, so he came back fairly soon, I assume this also meant that those older orchestra members were sacked, or at least encouraged to retire. 

In addition to all of the albums that were released by the Boston Pops, Williams kept working on movie soundtracks - "Empire of the Sun", "Born on the Fourth of July", "Always", "Presumed Innocent", "Home Alone", "Hook", "JFK", "Far and Away" - this list is starting to sound like that Billy Joel song "We Didn't Start the Fire"...  

"Munich", "Home Alone", "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone,"

"Lincoln", "The BFG", "The Terminal" and "Fitzwilly" - 

"The Fabelmans", "JFK", Ron Howard's "Far and Away"...

"Jaws 2", "Superman", then came "Catch Me If You Can"

Sorry about that, I'm done, nothing rhymes with "Fiddler on the Roof" or "Return of the Jedi"

The theme from "Schindler's List" turns out to be Itzhak Perlman's "Free Bird", in that no matter where he goes, around the world, people request that he play it. Jeez, people, there's no need to yell this out during a classical performance - plus you know he needs to save that for the encore, that's just how concerts work.  

At some point in his career, he stopped going by "Johnny Williams" or "Johnny Williams Jr." because it seemed a bit childish, almost unprofessional, and he got advice that it would look better in the credits if he was just John Williams. This led some people to believe that it wasn't the same guy who composed music for "Lost in Space" and "Gilligan's Island" who did the much more serious work on "Star Wars" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark". Nope, same guy. Someone else probably should have given him advice that if he wanted to remain looking professional, he shouldn't have accepted jobs like "Home Alone", which is a very lowbrow slapstick comedy. But apparently this is a man who just can't say "No" to a project, thus leading to his stranglehold on the market. 

This is maybe what leads to the suggestion that John Williams is somehow the only person who is keeping the tradition of orchestral music alive for movie soundtracks, which just can't be true. Sure, he might be the first person that a connected director might call, but that doesn't mean he's the ONLY name on the list. What about Hans Zimmer? He did classical-type stuff for "Pirates of the Caribbean" and he seems to have also had a long and storied career.  Howard Shore's soundtrack for "The Lord of the Rings" movies, John Barry's work for "Dances with Wolves", Ennio Morricone, etc. Sure, maybe Mr. Williams is the top dog, but that doesn't mean there aren't other dogs in the pound. 

Still, it's great to see John Williams getting recognition, and it's great to see that he's still active, he goes to Tanglewood for three weeks every summer, and they just named a music building after him on the Sony lot - he's been nominated for 54 Academy Awards, which is a total second only to Walt Disney, and he's won five. 25 Golden Globe noms and four wins, 71 Grammy Award noms and 26 wins, six Emmy noms and three wins - and yet somehow he never felt the need to compose something for Broadway just so he could get the EGOT. He's also the oldest person to ever be nominated for an Oscar, at age 91. He's now 94, so really, I'm glad I got to this film now because I don't think the guy's buying any green bananas, if you know what I mean. 

That's it, the end of the Doc Block for another year - I'm already finding ways to link docs for next summer, so we'll see what I can slam together for that during the off-season. It's kind of fitting that I ended here with a look at the summer blockbuster movies of the past - but come on, I've got THIS year's summer blockbusters to get to, both streaming ones AND the ones in the movie theater, which apparently people are still going to, only I don't really see much of a crowd when I go out on Tuesday afternoons. (Hey, money's tight, I have to go when tickets are discounted.). Which lucky actor from the 100 or so seen here will carry over to tomorrow's fictional film? 

Directed by Laurent Bouzereau (director of "Faye" - see, I really did come full circle!)

Also starring John Williams (last seen in "If These Walls Could Sing"), J.J. Abrams (last seen in "Spielberg"), Lawrence Kasdan (ditto), Kathleen Kennedy (ditto), Frank Marshall (ditto), Emanuel Ax, Kate Capshaw (last seen in "Faye"), Chris Columbus (last seen in "Stevie Van Zandt; Disciple"), Gustavo Dudamel, Ethan Gruska, Javier C. Hernandez, Paul Hirsch, Thomas Hooten, Ron Howard (last seen in "The Beatles: In the Life"), Karen Johnson, George Lucas (last seen in "A Disturbance in the Force"), Yo-Yo Ma (last seen in "Glass Onion"), Seth MacFarlane (last seen in "Logan Lucky"), James Mangold (last seen in "The Sweetest Thing"), Branford Marsalis (last seen in "Eve's Bayou"), Chris Martin (last seen in "The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart"), Elvis Mitchell, Anne-Sophie Mutter. David Newman, Thomas Newman, Itzhak Perlman (last seen in "Here Today"), Ke Huy Quan (last heard in "Kung Fu Panda 4"), Alex Ross, Alan Silvestri, Steven Spielberg (last seen in "Dear Mr. Watterson"), Helen Wargelin, Jenny Williams, 

with archive footage of Karen Allen (also last seen in "If These Walls Could Sing"), Irwin Allen, Robert Altman (last seen in "Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind"), William Atherton (last seen in "Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire"), Christian Bale (last seen in "The Wolfpack"), Eric Bana (also last seen in "Spielberg"), Daniel Day-Lewis (ditto), Melinda Dillon (ditto), Robert Shaw (ditto), Leonard Bernstein (also last seen in "Beatles '64"), Ray Charles (last seen in "Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary"), Gregory Hines (ditto), Cher (last seen in "Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything"), Tom Cruise (ditto), Goldie Hawn (ditto), Barack Obama (ditto), Christopher Reeve (ditto), John Wayne (ditto), Kevin Costner (last seen in "3 Days to Kill"), Daniel Craig (last seen in "No Time to Die"), Walter Cronkite (last seen in "Rather"), Macaulay Culkin (last seen in "Leaving Neverland"), Geena Davis (last seen in "Ava"), Laura Dern (last seen in "Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story"), Margot Kidder (ditto), Susan Sarandon (ditto), Bob Denver (last seen in "Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project"), Richard Donner (last seen in "Valerie"), Richard Dreyfuss (last seen in "Albert Brooks: Defending My Life"), Arthur Fiedler, Carrie Fisher (also last seen in "A Disturbance in the Force"), Harrison Ford (ditto), Alec Guinness (ditto), Mark Hamill (ditto), Peter Mayhew (ditto), Ralph Grierson, Rupert Grint (last seen in "Knock at the Cabin"), 

Alan Hale Jr. (last seen in "Johnny Dangerously"), Tom Hanks (last seen in "Tom Hanks: The Nomad"), Richard Harris (last seen in "Smilla's Sense of Snow"), Bernard Herrmann, Djimon Hounsou (last seen in "Rebel Moon - Part Two: The Scargiver"), Jason Isaacs (last seen in "Sweet November"), Ben Kingsley (last seen in "The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Three More"), Jake Lloyd (last seen in "Jingle All the Way"), Jack Marshall, Zubin Mehta (last seen in "Pavarotti"), Liam Neeson (last seen in "Memory"), Sam Neill (last seen in "Thor: Love and Thunder"), Alfred Newman, Lionel Newman, Julia Ormond (last seen in "Rememory"), Peter O'Toole (last seen in "Call Me Kate"), Seiji Ozawa, Gregory Peck, Joe Pesci (last seen in "8 Heads in a Duffel Bag"), River Phoenix (last seen in "My Own Private Idaho"), Sydney Pollack (last seen in "Made of Honor"), Andre Previn, Daniel Radcliffe (last seen in "What If"), Kathryn Reed, Dorothy Remsen, John Rhys-Davies (last heard in "Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom"), Daisy Ridley (last seen in "Ophelia"), Barbara Ruick, Roy Scheider (last seen in "Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print"), Sissy Spacek (also last seen in "Faye"), Daniel Stern (last seen in "The Next Three Days"), Isaac Stern, Morris Stoloff, Oliver Stone (last seen in "Val"), Shirley Temple, Toots Thielemans, Henry Thomas (last seen in "Dear John"), Topol (last seen in "For Your Eyes Only"), Kenneth Wannberg, Emma Watson (last seen in "The Bling Ring"), Franz Waxman, Esther Williams, Johnny Williams Sr., Robin Williams (last seen in "Martha"), Samantha Winslow.

RATING: 7 out of 10 golf games with his daughter (which apparently each take about four hours, thankfully they don't let him on the course until the real golfers have gone home)

Blake Edwards: A Love Story in 24 Frames

Year 17, Day 220 - 8/08/25 - Movie #5,104

BEFORE: Nearly at the end of the Doc Block now, just one more after this one, then I can finally get to something fictional this weekend. Of course, I cheated, I've been out to the theaters twice to see "Superman" and "Fantastic Four", because hello, big comic book fan here, and I need to keep up on the latest. I will get to one of those reviews very shortly, the other will have to wait. 

Initially this was going to be the final film in this year's Doc Block, you can see it shares three actors with "Faye", this year's kick-off film, because originally the Block was designed as a big circle, so I could enter into it from any point and thus have some control over what the final film would be. I think I handled this properly, because once I flipped this with tomorrow's film, it gave me so many good options, and the rest of August just kind of fell into place after that, and I got to pick movies that I wanted to see, which is kind of the whole point, really. 

This film aired as part of the "American Masters" series on PBS, and I've learned to keep a close eye on what they're airing, both the newer episodes and also which ones from previous seasons they might be airing during Pledge Week. (That means editing out the pledge breaks, but, you know, whatever it takes.). I guess that PBS (or CPB) also keeps an eye out for docs about filmmaking, musicians and artists and either licenses those docs for airing or perhaps just buys them outright, I don't know how all that distribution stuff works. Thirty-plus years working in independent film, and honestly distribution remains a mysterious shrouded process, and I know who I blame for that. But anyway, this year I included several docs that aired as part of "American Masters", including "Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story", "Groucho & Cavett", and "Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse". 

I don't know if I could put together another Doc Block without the assistance of shows like "American Masters" - but the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is quite visibly being de-funded by our commander in chief, aka the Orange Nightmare, so whether PBS can continue to bring me (and you) quality programming is now very questionable. I donated some money a year or two ago when they aired that Tom Lehrer concert he did in Sweden, just to get a DVD of that show, but I should probably make another contribution soon, as I just recorded the documentary on Roberta Flack from "American Masters". Whatever maintains my access to more material, I should do. 

Robert Wagner carries over from "Biggest Heist Ever". 

THE PLOT: Explores the story of director, screenwriter and producer Blake Edwards, known for cinema classics such as "Breakfast at Tiffany's", the "Pink Panther" series and "10", also his marriage with Julie Andrews. 

AFTER: Unknowingly, Blake Edwards played a big part in establishing this blog in the first place, 17 years ago. I'd been recording films off of TCM for a few years and burning them to DVD, and I figured that process would take a little while, but eventually I'd have a copy of every film I ever wanted or needed and then a little part of my life would feel complete. Yeah, that feeling of fulfillment never happened, because it turns out there are new films every year, every week even, and some processes are just never, ever going to end. But part of that initial process back in 2004-2009 was getting all of the "Pink Panther" films on DVD. Once I had that series (and also the old "Planet of the Apes" movies) I figured, time to watch them all, but in the proper order. It seemed like every time I tuned in to a "Pink Panther" movie, it was always "The Pink Panther Strikes Again" - but suddenly I had the opportunity to watch every film from the beginning and figure out which ones were the better ones. Hmm, what other insights could I gain from watching films in the proper order?  And that was the inspiration, but look how much time I've wasted on sorting and indexing movies as a result, in some vain attempt to make some sense of it all. It became like cataloguing stars in the universe, you hope that you're making some form of progress, but deep down you also know that you'll never be done. 

Thematically, I've not kind of circled back to where I began this year, movie-making. This happened last year as well, where the first film was "Sly" and the last film was "Call Me Kate", and those two films were also linked, for some reason "Sly" had footage of "The Lion in Winter" with Katharine Hepburn, which, you know, shouldn't make any sense, but that's where we find ourselves. I picked the right place to split up the circle, because nobody would believe me if I pointed out that Stallone is a big fan of Peter O'Toole, because they would seem to be on opposite ends of the acting spectrum.  In the same way, I don't think Blake Edwards ever worked with Faye Dunaway, however it's a little easier this time to believe in the connective tissue between their movies. 

In a similar way, it might be hard at first to comprehend the relationship between Blake Edwards and Julie Andrews - she was a serious actress, known for playing the uptight nanny Mary Poppins and the repressed former nun Maria von Trapp, while he was known for slapstick comedies like "The Great Race" and "The Pink Panther", but when you learn how they met, two divorced people stuck in traffic, one going to their analyst and the other returning from theirs, there really can't be a more L.A.-based meet-cute, can there? And if you think about the fact that he directed "Breakfast at Tiffany's" with Audrey Hepburn, who also starred in "My Fair Lady", which began as a Broadway musical that starred Julie Andrews, perhaps it was inevitable that these two would get together at some point. 

But I recall that the "Pink Panther" movies were considered high comedy in my parent's house, they were shown pretty often on the weekend movie blocks on the three UHF stations in the Boston area, I think. This was years before streaming or even VHS tapes were a thing, so there weren't a lot of choices, you kind of watched whatever movies were on TV. Also my father never took us out to the movies because he believed that sooner or later, every movie would be on TV. I had to buy him cable TV when he retired because he still refused to pay for TV - then a year or two later they got rid of all antenna-based broadcasting and everything was cable, so I'm glad I got him switched over before he had to be. 

My mom, meanwhile, was the big Rodgers & Hammerstein fan, so we were forced to watch "The Sound of Music" just about once a year, I think when VHS tapes came out that was the first one we bought her, so she could watch it any time, but then of course when you can watch a movie any time, you rarely do. Probably she just waited for it to be on TV again and then sat there and watched it, but with commercials it was nearly four hours long!  I don't think any of us knew behind the scenes that the lead actress from "The Sound of Music" was in a relationship with the director of the "Pink Panther" movies, but then when Julie Andrews appeared topless in the movie "S.O.B." I guess everybody figured it out. Needless to say, my mother was super-shocked about this, but once I was old enough to rent movies, I made sure to check it out. I don't think I understood much of anything that took place in that movie, so I probably just fast-forwarded to the scene in question. 

What I failed to understand back then was that Blake Edwards put himself in all of his movies, or at least a version of himself, played by other people. There's a great resemblance to Woody Allen's filmography if you think about it - Woody played versions of himself in "Annie Hall", "Manhattan", "Stardust Memories" and "Hannah and her Sisters", then got other actors to play younger characters reminiscent of himself, like Seth Green in "Radio Days" or Jason Biggs in "Anything Else" or Owen Wilson in "Midnight in Paris". Blake Edwards really did the same thing by casting Dudley Moore in "10" or Richard Mulligan in "S.O.B."  This doc suggests that even Jack Lemmon in "Days of Wine and Roses" was playing another version of Edwards, though I guess when Blake realized this, he promptly quit drinking. Many of his main characters were writers or directors or artists in some way, all with personal problems and complicated love lives. Again it's like dreams where the dreamer is really playing all of the parts. 

At the age of 3, Blake Edwards' mother got re-married to a director of silent movies, so after moving to Los Angeles, he grew up playing on movie sets that weren't being used. So it's perhaps only natural that he became an actor after World War II, but a back injury led him to take up directing instead. His filmography is mostly hits with only a few misses - "Darling Lili" and "Skin Deep" and "A Fine Mess" are not well regarded, but when you balance them against "Breakfast at Tiffany's", "Operation Petticoat", "Days of Wine and Roses", "10" and the Pink Panther movies, I guess you've got to give him the benefit of the doubt overall. Look, I didn't care much for "Sunset", "Switch" and "City Heat" but I think they made money. 

I'm split now on the "Pink Panther" series because they kept making movies after Peter Sellers died, I think they should have just stopped in reverence to the actor who made them so funny. "Trail of the Pink Panther" was assembled out of leftover gags that weren't used in the first five movies, and then by "Curse of the Pink Panther" Inspector Clouseau was notoriously absent, and then they tried to replace him with Roberto Benigni as his illegitimate son. Yeah, nice try but I think the Steve Martin reboot later proved that wasn't really the way to go. 

I think he was ahead of the curve when it came to gender-based comedy - most people had never seen anything like "Victor/Victoria" before, where a struggling female performer decided to impersonate a female impersonator. So a woman playing a man playing a woman, you can practically hear the sound of people's minds being blown in 1982. But then on the other side of that coin we have the racial stereotypes of Mickey Rooney's Asian landlord in "Breakfast at Tiffany's" and also Burt Kwouk playing the crazy Karate trainer Cato in the "Pink Panther" movies. Add in a third mis-step, with Peter Sellers playing a clumsy Indian actor in "The Party". PBS felt the need to run a disclaimer about Asian stereotypes depicted in this film when they included this in the "American Masters" series, along with a link to where you could go to learn more about how those films were made at a different time. 

Blake Edwards received an Honorary Academy Award in 2004, but as you'll see in this doc, he just couldn't resist the temptation to try and turn it into a slapstick bit, with the help of Jim Carrey presenting the award and doing a really bad job at pretending that Edwards' motorized wheelchair was out of control. Well, that's really what Blake Edwards was all about, doing lowbrow comedy in a highbrow setting, but it just didn't always land. Most of the time, sure, but not always. 

If you get a chance, please DONATE to PBS, don't wait for the next pledge break. Your donations will help keep more episodes of "American Masters" coming and other important educational programming alive. 

Directed by Danny Gold (director of "The Super Bob Einstein Movie" and "If You're Not in the Obit, Eat Breakfast")

Also starring Julie Andrews (last seen in "Jim Henson: Idea Man"), Scott Alexander, Jay Chandrasekhar (last seen in "Easter Sunday"), Bo Derek (last seen in "I Am Chris Farley"), Geoffrey Edwards, Jennifer Edwards (last seen in "Hard Time: The Premonition"), Paul Feig (last seen in "Ghostheads"), Rian Johnson, Larry Karaszewski, Leonard Maltin (last seen in "Walt: The Man Behind the Myth"), Monica Mancini, Rob Marshall, Patton Oswalt (last seen in "A Disturbance in the Force"), Lesley Ann Warren (last seen in "Teaching Mrs. Tingle")

with archive footage of Blake Edwards, Colin Blakely, Peter Bogdanovich (last seen in "I Am Burt Reynolds"), Jim Carrey (last seen in "Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story"), Tony Curtis (last seen in "The Last Tycoon"), John Derek (last seen in "All the King's Men"), Peter Falk (last seen in "Faye"), William Holden (ditto), Natalie Wood (ditto), Steve Franken, James Garner (last seen in "Murphy's Romance"), Cary Grant (last seen in "Call Me Kate"), Larry Hagman (last seen in "Being Mary Tyler Moore"), Emma Walton Hamilton (last seen in "Switch"), Oliver Hardy (last seen in "The Real Charlie Chaplin"), Stan Laurel (ditto), Audrey Hepburn (last seen in "Pee-Wee as Himself"), Sam Jones (last seen in "Ted 2"), Burt Kwouk (last seen in "The Last Blockbuster"), Matt Lattanzi, Chris Lemmon (last seen in "Blonde"), Jack Lemmon (last seen in "Valerie"), Henry Mancini (last seen in "Quincy"), Dudley Moore (also last seen in "Jim Henson: Idea Man"), Richard Mulligan, Ryan O'Neal (last seen in "The Kid Stays in the Picture"), George Peppard (last seen in "Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed"), Robert Preston (last seen in "Ira & Abby"), Lee Remick (last seen in "Anatomy of a Murder"), Julia Roberts (last seen in "Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything"), Mickey Rooney (last seen in "My Mom Jayne"), Dick Sargent, Peter Sellers (last seen in "What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?"), Omar Sharif (last seen in "Becoming Mike Nichols"), Dick Shawn (last seen in "Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind"), Robert Vaughn (last seen in "Superman III"), Robert Webber (last seen in "The Sandpiper")

RATING: 6 out of 10 episodes of "Peter Gunn"

Biggest Heist Ever

Year 17, Day 219 - 8/07/25 - Movie #5,103

BEFORE: I must admit that over the last few weeks, maybe through the last third of this Doc Block, the days have all started to kind of run together for me. This is the annual summer slowdown, of course - the theater isn't closed, exactly, but there are very few events and this when there are improvement projects done, like fixing the roof or painting the place, and getting it ready for the coming school year. I've taken up the job hunt once again, and collected partial unemployment, however that has involved some in-person meetings across town with a job counselor, who has forced me to keep a digital record of everything I've applied for, and, well, it's been a lot. Nothing makes the summer pass by more slowly than scrolling through lists of online job postings for office jobs that I suspect don't really exist, and lately I've been looking at postings for jobs in pizza shops and cookie bakeries, just because that would at least be something to do, although there's the chance that those jobs will make me hate pizza and cookies, which sounds like a terrible fate. 

In two days things are going to change, though, I've got shifts again starting on Sunday, at about the same time I go back to watching fiction films and not docs. Right now I don't even care, give me a long shift working at a film festival, I just want to get out of the house and GO somewhere that doesn't cost me a lot of money. Somewhere I can earn some money would probably be better, though. Sure, I have a savings account but I hate to have to dip into it, I left it alone all during the COVID years and now I'm suddenly forced to transfer some money into checking - so perhaps even after I get busy again I shouldn't stop job-hunting, really a second gig would be most helpful right now, but it just has to be the RIGHT second gig, because I can't let it interfere with the primary gig. However now I'm getting texts from bots asking me to apply for other jobs I don't want, or suggesting interviews for jobs I didn't apply for. Please, I love the internet but I just hate when it wants to waste my time. 

Mark Cuban carries over from "Rather". 

THE PLOT: Morgan, a Forbes contributor and hipster rapper, and her husband Lichtenstein were arrested after being accused of conspiring to launder nearly 120,000 stolen Bitcoins. 

AFTER: You really have to feel a little sorry for the FBI agents in today's film, these are trained professionals who have prepared themselves for the possibility that they might have to watch videos of kidnappings, murders, even torture porn in order to bring criminals to justice - but instead they find themselves scrolling through a white rapper's TikTok videos, looking for clues in the background. Nobody should have to do that. The lead suspects in this 2016 Bitfinex crypto heist turned out to be this young and (mostly) unassuming Manhattan couple, who lived downtown in a FiDi loft. Well, some people say it's the quiet ones you have to watch out for - only the wife had a dark side on social media under the rap name Razzlekhan, and some of her rhymes were truly horrendous, in addition to being culturally inappropriate. 

Based on the film's interviews with their friends and colleagues, nobody seemed to know that this couple was sitting on several million in BitCoins that had risen in value after the heist to about $4.5 billion. Sure, there were signs, like the fact that they lived downtown, where real estate is at a premium, but that maybe could be explained by their dealings with internet start-ups, maybe one did pay off for Ilya somewhere along the way, and he cashed out by selling his start-up to a private equity firm or something. Their choice of pet should have been another tip-off, they doted on one of those exotic cats that cost a couple grand, like who even buys one of those? Like an ocelot or something, which I'm not sure is even legal to own in NYC. 

But all of the investigative threads kept leading back to this couple, they seemed to be at the center of a web of internet activity, based on the server details of thousands of crypto transfers from here to there and back again. So that's where the FBI found themselves, digging through the hundreds, thousands of this woman's videos that displayed signs of the extravagant lifestyle they were enjoying in Lower Manhattan, which really stopped being a party scene some time in 2001, nobody is really sure why. That meant spotting the leg massager under her desk and figuring out how much that cost, checking to see how much they spent on vacation travel to places like Turkey and Japan, and then costing out how much it costs to shoot a rap video these days. (umm, not much if you just use your phone and don't spend any money on improving your rhymes)

Worse are those videos where Heather talks to her followers, because she has exactly zero stage presence, she's not dynamic or engaging at all, she seems to be in some kind of daze or fog, like a foreigner who's having trouble with the English language almost. It's all very weird. How could she and her very, very much quieter husband have stolen so much money and then just sat on it for years?  This would be a bit like finding out that the cringey Australian white break-dancer at the Olympics was also planning to commit a terrorist act at the Games. I mean, sure, now everything makes a little bit more sense, but it's really also the absolute last person that you would have suspected of being capable of that.  

The whole crypto-currency thing turned out to be a double-edged sword of sorts. Everything in the digital wallets is encrypted, which means that someone would need a password with hundreds of characters to access it. (The whole encryption thing with block chain is somehow bad for the environment, but in a way that I never quite understand, something about using a lot of water?) But some hacker set up a system where they got an e-mail from Bitfinex every time someone logged in, and that e-mail contained their Account name and also the very very long encrypted password. And then one day in August 2016, somebody signed on, used all the account names and all the passwords, and transferred out all the Bitcoins.  

The other hitch is that crypto transfers are public transactions, everyone can SEE the money being transferred from one place to another, but without the passwords, nobody else can access it or move it or find out who it belongs to. So as the FBI guy says, it's like somebody walked into a bank, emptied the vault and then left the money out on the sidewalk, but whenever somebody tried to touch it, it suddenly re-appeared a block away.  Also they got caught on camera, but then somehow erased all the video of them stealing the money. According to an expert cyber-criminal, it would take a really expert cyber-criminal to do all this. Also according to him, the husband is related to a really expert cyber-criminal, so his theory is that the couple maybe had a little help. So it's possible that the story isn't over, Ilya is serving five years in prison and Heather got only 18 months and then three years of supervised release. 

Does the punishment fit the crime? I guess that depends on whether you use the value of the BitCoins when they were stolen, or the approximate value of what they were worth a few years later. Now, don't you wish you bought BitCoin in 2016? I had such a bad experience with buying stocks that I didn't trust BitCoin at all, but apparently even a schoolteacher who bought like five BitCoins back then is now a millionaire, so I guess that's on me. My boss did an NFT a few years ago, but I made sure he got paid for his artwork and then was out of the deal, because I just felt the NFT market was far too shaky. I think the bottom dropped out of the whole NFT market, but it still exists, and who knows, it may come back, but it still seems stupid to me. I guess I'm in the generation that's in-between, we're young enough to be on social media but old enough to not understand crypto. 

The people who had their BitCoins stolen were offered some compensation, however they were given new BitCoins at the level they were at back then, not equivalent to what the old BitCoins would be worth now if they were never stolen - and for some people, that's not enough and they won't rest until they get what they think they are owed. Meanwhile, Trump tried to create a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve for the U.S., using some of what was recovered from the Bitfinex heist. Great, that's exactly what we need, a financial safety plan for the country that could completely bottom out or disappear at any moment, and there's already a proven track record of a currency exchange being hacked, despite the hundred-character encryptions. Plus there's also a movie that tells people how it was done - seems like a solid plan. (#WCPGW?)

Bottom line, it's a shame that we can't arrest someone for making bad TikTok videos - as a society we should really look into closing that little legal loophole. Right, something about free speech, blah blah, that doesn't make it right. 

Directed by Chris Smith (director of "Wham!" and "Sr.")

Also starring Miguel Asuzano, Nick Bilton, Lynn Cannon, Frankie Cavazos, Cavier Coleman, Kitty Davies, John Giannoe, Hussam Hammo, Chris Janczewski, Brett Johnson, Sheel Kohli, Pierce Cameron Larick, Travis Lybbert, Gianni Martire, Martin Molina, Kyle Peevers, Ari Redbord, Zach Serota, Rachel Siegel, Dyrohn Southerland, 

with archive footage of Ilya Lichtenstein, Heather "Razzlekhan" Morgan, Awkwafina (last heard in "Kung Fu Panda 4"), Mike Myers (last seen in "I Am Chris Farley"), Mindy Sterling, Robert Wagner (last seen in "Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind"), Mark Zuckerberg (last seen in "Join or Die"), Clyde Barrow, Bonnie Parker, Jeff Sessions.

RATING: 5 out of 10 now-ironic Forbes articles about cyber-security

Rather

Year 17, Day 218 - 8/06/25 - Movie #5,102

BEFORE: Well, the Doc Block is winding down, after tonight I'll just have three docs left, then it's back to fiction films, and at this point I've almost forgotten what it feels like to watch one of those. Really, anything, sci-fi, comedy, superhero, I'll take ANY fiction film after watching all these docs about financial collapse, the Holocaust and Lynyrd Skynyrd's plane crashing. Things have gotten just a bit too real around here, perhaps you'll agree. Plus there have been so many docs about dead people - Sam Kinison, Paul Reubens, Barbara Walters and so on. I keep thinking that instead of lining up films with people's birthdays, I'll accidentally line up a doc with its subject's passing. Well, Martha Stewart is 84 and Dan Rather is, umm, 93 and turns 94 this Halloween. Perhaps I'm right to be concerned - hang in there, Dan, don't leave us just yet. 

Dan Rather carries over again from "Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse". You see what I did, right? The last three films were about print media - Ms. magazine, Martha Stewart's magazines, and then graphic novels about historical events. Thematically it's just a small hop over to TV journalism tonight, get it?  

THE PLOT: Chronicles Dan Rather's rise to prominence, sudden and dramatic public downfall, and redempton and re-emergence as a voice of reason to a new generation. 

AFTER:I was kind of raised in a CBS household, my grandmother wouldn't get her evening news from anyone but Walter Cronkite - he could do no wrong in her eyes. When he retired, I think she stuck with Dan Rather, I kind of remember when he took over the anchor desk, and he lasted a good number of years before he clashed with George Bush the elder and also walked off the set when his broadcast got held up by an important (?) tennis match. Well, you mess with the bull and you get the horns, which is probably something that folksy Texas Dan might say. 

Disaster was his muse, too - the first big story he reported on was Hurricane Carla, which hit the Texas Gulf Coast in 1961, when he convinced 350,000 people to evacuate rather than stick around. After gaining national attention and being hired by CBS, they kept him down South during the Civil Rights movement, and he talks in this doc about seeing the race riots in the early 1960's, which made him question his duty as a reporter to not get too involved, he wanted to do more for the cause but you know, just reporting about it probably did a lot of good. This meant he was based in Dallas when the biggest news story ever practically dropped into his lap in November 1963, of course I'm talking about the 95th birthday of former Vice President John Nance Garner.  

Just kidding - but that's why Dan Rather was in Dallas at the time of the JFK assassination, though he drove right through Dealey Plaza to pick up some film from a camera truck, parked on the other side of the railroad tracks behind the grassy knoll. Hmm. Hey, did you ever notice how Dan Rather managed to be in so many famous newsworthy places?  Somebody should probably investigate that. Rather also claims to be one of the first people to view the Zapruder film, then he kind of made himself a household name by reporting on the events that took place after, with Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald and then the national period of mourning. That got him assigned to the London bureau, but also he reported from Vietnam in 1966. The big problem there was that reporters were showing American viewers how horrible the war was, while LBJ and Nixon were telling Americans that it was all just one big misunderstanding, and it would be over as soon as the U.S. soldiers got it all sorted out. 

Nixon must have really hated Dan Rather, they did that uneasy half-joking sort of thing during press conferences, neither one willing to say to the other what they really wanted to say. Jeez, guys, get a room already. Rather must have really loved investigating Watergate, because as they say, he who laughs last laughs best, while the other guy gets impeached. Can some of today's reporters please take some notes here, we all know every damn thing Trump has done wrong, we know he was behind the January 6 coup, and now he's getting my favorite TV shows cancelled, in a blatant misuse of power. I know there must still be some reporters out there who remember how to do their job, unfortunately I think we're too far gone now, nothing the reporters can dig up could possibly get Trump impeached for a third time. Still, why not go for it? (cough) Epstein Files! (cough) Somebody hack the Epstein Files and print them! What the hell do we even HAVE Wikileaks for, if not that? 

My point is, JFK was killed, and who benefited? The war wasn't going well in Vietnam, and hwo benefited? Nixon was forced to resign, and who benefited? Dan Rather got promoted each time, and he was right there to take over when Cronkite resigned. Just saying. He held the anchor spot at CBS from 1981 to 2004, though they gave him Connie Chung as a co-anchor from 1993 to 1995, just like ABC made Harry Reasoner share the evening news with Barbara Walters a few years before. 

There's footage here of Dan Rather interviewing Fidel Castro, and my Spanish may be a bit rusty, but I think Castro was saying, "Can we hurry this up? I'm meeting with Barbara Walters at 2:00." Later Dan Rather is seen meeting with Saddam Hussein, and so I guess both he and Barbara had a knack for landing face-time with America's enemies, and that includes Dan keeping it light in a press conference with Richard Nixon. This doc also shows Rather traveling to Afghanistan during the Soviet-Afghan War, and then later during the first U.S. Gulf War, getting an interview with Saddam Hussein, and he interviewed Saddam again in 2003, like what could possibly go wrong there? 

It wasn't all fun and dictators, though, there's the older footage of Rather getting handled roughly and punched in the stomach during the Democratic National Convention in 1968 while Walter Cronkite sat safely at a desk on an upper level in the same building. Yeah, you can see what the pecking order was. 

Then his biggest stumbling block came when the story broke about George W. Bush's military record, how he might have been derelict in his duty and got the equivalent of a free ride during his time in the Texas Air National Guard, and not Vietnam, during the Vietnam War. The documents CBS was using to prove that Bush Jr. didn't fulfill his military obligations were called out as forged, even though the information within them was later deemed to be correct. But then nobody really remembered the facts of the case, they just heard "false docs" and assumed that CBS was wrong, when they were in fact right, they just couldn't prove it. So after 44 years at CBS News, Dan Rather was escorted out the door. I feel your pain, Dan, though I'm a bit late with the sentiment. 

Rather filed a lawsuit against CBS because of his dismissal - and by the time 2009 rolled around, there was more proof that George W. had in fact left his military service a year early. But the lawsuit was unsuccessful, and largely it was because the news is brought to us by large corporations, and those corporations don't want to upset the President, because that would be bad for business. Hey, does any of this sound familiar?  Like how Paramount agreed to cancel Colbert so the President wouldn't mess with their upcoming merger?  Just checking - go back to Rather's 2004 lawsuit and you'll see the start of the very slippery slope.  

The news was done with Rather, but Rather wasn't done with the news. He had a weekly one-hour news show, "Dan Rather Reports", that ran on HDNet (now called AXS TV), and then "The Big Interview With Dan Rather" after that. I recently watched his interviews with Billy Gibbons and Weird Al Yankovic, they're still playing in reruns. And then in his mid-80's, Rather finally discovered social media, and became a presence on Facebook and Twitter (now called X). Great, just what we all needed, another senior citizen on Facebook.  But at least he's still speaking out (or complaining, every senior citizen's favorite hobby) about political influence in journalism. Which is great, but I have to wonder if anyone is really paying attention at this point. 

Directed by Frank Marshall (director of "The Beach Boys" and producer of "The Special Relationship")

Also starring Samantha Bee, Tom Bettag, Douglas Brinkley, David Buksbaum, Andy Cohen (last seen in "Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything"), Mark Cuban (last seen in "Hustle"), Larry Doyle, Ronan Farrow, Jim Murphy, Wayne Nelson, Soledad O'Brien (last seen in "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot"), Rick Perlstein, Martin Rather, Robin Rather, Dana Roberson, Shepard Smith (last seen in "Rigged; The Voter Suppresion Playbook"), Howard Stringer, Margaret Sullivan, Andrew Young (last seen in "I Am MLK Jr."), Susan Zirinsky, 

with archive footage of Roger Ailes, Glenn Beck (last seen in "Capitalism: A Love Story"), Julian Bond (last seen in "Stevie Van Zandt: Disciple"), Tom Brokaw (last seen in "Martha"), Jimmy Fallon (ditto), Peter Jennings (ditto), Conan O'Brien (ditto), Bill O'Reilly (ditto), Charlie Rose (ditto), Morley Safer (ditto), George H.W. Bush (last seen in "Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything"), George W. Bush (ditto), Jimmy Carter (ditto), Fidel Castro (ditto), Bill Clinton (ditto), Walter Cronkite (ditto), John F. Kennedy (ditto), Martin Luther King Jr. (ditto), Richard Nixon (ditto), Nancy Reagan (ditto), Donald Trump (ditto), Laura Bush (last seen in "The Queen of Versailles"), Tucker Carlson (last seen in "Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution"), Johnny Carson (last seen in "Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print"), Ronald Reagan (ditto), Harry Reasoner (ditto), Dinah Shore (ditto), Dick Cheney (last seen in "The Special Relationship"), Brian Doyle-Murray (last seen in "Belushi"), Fred Friendly, Jean Grace Goebel, Sean Hannity (last seen in "Mike Wallace Is Here"), Mike Wallace (ditto), Jesse Helms, Magee Hickey, Hubert Humphrey (last seen in "WBCN and the American Revolution"), E. Howard Hunt, Saddam Hussein (last seen in "The Devil's Double"), Laura Ingraham, Alex Jones (last seen in "A Scanner Darkly"), Lyndon Johnson (last seen in "ReMastered: Tricky Dick and the Man in Black"), Megyn Kelly (last seen in "Join or Die"), Lee Harvey Oswald (ditto), Jim Lehrer (last seen in "Zoolander 2"), G. Gordon Liddy (last heard in "Rules of Engagement"), Mary Mapes, Scott McClellan, James McCord, Julie Chen Moonves, Rupert Murdoch, Edward R. Murrow (last seen in "My Mom Jayne"), Joe Piscopo (last seen in "De Palma"), John Roland, Jack Ruby, Joe Scarborough (last seen in "Irresistible"), Jon Stewart (last seen in "Trainwreck: Poop Cruise"), Garrick Utley, and the band R.E.M., 

RATING: 6 out of 10 Peabody Awards

Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse

Year 17, Day 217 - 8/05/25 - Movie #5,101

BEFORE: Well, I hit another century mark so I rewarded myself today, I went out to the real movie theater - a chain of theaters, yes, the chain I used to work for. If you're in their rewards program tickets are 50% off on Tuesdays, so I got to see "Fantastic Four: First Steps" for just over $10 - non-IMAX, non-3-D, non recliner, but you can't beat that price for a new release at a Manhattan theater. I also cashed in my rewards points to get $5 off my popcorn - so next week there will probably be a new rule that you can't cash in your points on Tuesdays, because I kind of gamed the system a bit. Anyway, I'll have to sit on the reviews for Fantastic Four and Superman for a bit, "Superman" I can link to a few days after the Doc Block ends, I think I can't run Fantastic Four until October. This year's theme will be horror films and a couple superhero films, I've fallen back on that before. But that's two months down the road, assuming I can link there. 

Dan Rather carries over from "Martha". He's only in the film for a couple of seconds in a news report, but that counts - I'm just glad that he's there at all, because there was almost no other way to link here - which seems a bit odd because I watched another documentary about comic artists, but those were comic STRIP artists, not comic BOOK artists. I guess maybe those two camps don't talk to each other?  

But wait, you say, Gary Panter is interviewed here, and he was seen in the Pee-Wee Herman doc - so yes, I could have come here from there, but then I wasn't sure I had somewhere to go after that, something with Dan Rather, obviously. But once I started moving things around, the chain started to fall apart, and I'd only JUST gotten these 47 films in the order I wanted them in, something that seemed to almost neatly divide them by category. Moving things around meant that even if I could build the wall back up again with the same bricks, then I'd be jumping from an actor to a musician to a cartoonist, and then to an athlete - that would be chaos. Which isn't to say that I managed to avoid chaos, but it's been chaos in an order that I designed and felt comfortable with, so that won out. The only changes I made along the way were dropping one doc and adding the Barbara Walters doc and the Ms. magazine one, other than that, this has all worked out like I planned it. 

THE PLOT: The life and work of the Pulitzer-prize winning cartoonist, Art Spiegelman. 

AFTER: Well, we're back on a topic I know pretty well, underground comics. I'm mostly a mainstream Marvel Comics guy ("Fantastic Four" was probably my entry point in 1981) and a bit of DC, just Batman and Superman books, but I used to read the underground stuff in college. I had a roommate who had some of the Freak Brothers comics and also Neat Stuff, so when I met Peter Bagge at S.D. Comic-Con, that was a big deal for me. From there I became aware of R. Crumb and other unsavory types, and tonight I learned that Crumb hung out with both Bill Griffith and Art Spiegelman, who's most famous for the graphic novel Maus, also countless illustrated covers for the New Yorker. Yeah, he worked on RAW, too, but I wasn't really a big fan, the book was oversized and I think most of it was over my head. 

Spiegelman also worked for Topps trading cards, and co-created both Wacky Packages and Garbage Pail Kids, two things that had gross appeal for kids, and probably if he didn't do anything else noteworthy, that might have been enough, it would have paid the bills anyway. But then that same guy wins a Pulitzer Prize for Maus, how is THAT possible? There's just something inherently genius about a serialized comic (later graphic novel collection) about the Holocaust where the Nazis are depicted as cats and the Jews as mice. (He tried using this as a metaphor for the KKK and Black Americans, then realized he didn't know much about all that, plus a white man writing about racism, not a good look.). He kind of describes the process here that led him to interview his father about surviving the concentration camps, I also think it kind of riffed off of Hitler calling the races he didn't like "vermin". Mice are vermin, so I see what he did there. 

Plus, you can draw mice getting exterminated, and it doesn't break the Comics Code, but then you remember what the mice are standing in for, and the point is made in a way that is both elegant and extremely blunt at the same time. Genius. Prize-worthy genius. When we were upstate a few years ago and we developed an affinity for shopping at antique stores (well, we are the right age for it now) in one shop I found a two-volume set of Maus, unopened, still in the shrink-wrap, and I didn't hesitate to buy it. It's somewhere in my basement library, I don't intend to ever open it and read it, but I'm glad it's in the collection, which I really should get around to re-organizing while I'm on summer break. I also should throw out all those old almanacs, they're pretty worthless now that there's no more Yugoslavia or Soviet Union. 

I know a couple people interviewed in this film, because I've spent the last ten years working in Artists Alley at the NY Comic-Con, and my ex-boss is friends with Peter Kuper, so I met him a few times and I remember seeing Molly Crabapple rising up through the ranks at indie comic events. My boss was also friends with Jules Feiffer, but I never got to meet him, and he passed away in January of this year. Anyway, it's a who's who of NYC illustrators here, I also remember that every few years there's been a scandal over controversial drawings that Spiegelman has made for the New Yorker covers, and yeah, we all know his wife works for the magazine and that was his "in", but he is also a great graphic artist. 

"Maus", of course, is part comic book, part memoir, part history, part autobiography, and tells two intertwined stories, one of the writer/artist interviewing his father about the Holocaust to make a comic book about it, and the other is the artist depicting the Holocaust events in that anthropomorphic animals-as-metaphor fashion. Spiegelman, the writer/artist, depicts himself in the book and details the process of researching the SAME BOOK that you're holding in your hands, so it's very meta, which is all the rage these days, maybe a little less so in the 1980's, but how the hell else could he tell this story without explaining why he's telling the story, and in such a way?  Sometimes comic books or cartoons are like dreams, in that the writer plays all the characters, or each character represents a part of his own psyche. 

After the release of the first collected edition of Maus (the first six chapters), Spiegelman found himself creatively blocked, so he seeks helps from his psychiatrist, who was also a Holocaust survivor - and the main character of the comic does the same thing in Vol. 2.  Spiegelman went to visit Auschwitz to gain some perspective, and so yeah, his character in the book did the same. In all instances, the process of making the thing was reflected in the thing itself, like that's something you're not supposed to do in documentaries, you don't show the casting director calling the famous people to set up interviews, you don't show the research you're doing, you don't show the editor going to the archive footage companies to license the footage of the Beatles on Ed Sullivan or John F. Kennedy riding in a car through Dallas. But here it was important for Art to re-connect with his father in order to get the very personal information that he needed, as for years the family wouldn't talk about the details of their ordeal, or how Art's older brother died, stuff like that. 

Really, the only other comic that even comes close to this in style was Harvey Pekar's "American Splendor" comic, because he wrote about his own life as a comic-book writer and artist, so everything of interest that happened to him ended up in the comic book, like what else was he going to write about, fiction is WAY too hard, but writing about everything you do is a great way to try and make some sense out of your own life, then putting it all in your comic is I guess what people did before there were blogs. Like Art Spiegelman moved from San Francisco back to NYC in 1975, but he didn't tell his father he was back in town until 1977, and we know this because he wrote about that in a comic book. 

There's no question about how influential this comic was, the doc depicts a number of illustrators like Chris Ware and Mariane Satrapi, who might never have made the comics they made if Art hadn't shown that not all comic books have to be silly ones made for kids. And yet there was some backlash over Maus, some Holocaust survivors objected to someone making a comic book about their tragedies - they really should read the book, though. And then some school boards in the U.S. started to ban the book because of it's profanity and violence, which, umm, is overlooking the whole point. I suspect that they really just wanted to ban the book because it's a Jewish book, or they're Holocaust deniers - but, you know, you can't just ban books because you don't like them, yet that's where we find ourselves in America sometimes. Books like this are necessary to ensure that nothing like that ever, ever happens again, only it probably did and it probably will again. 

The title of this documentary refers to key moments in Spiegelman's life - in addition to being raised by Holocaust survivors, his mother committed suicide when he was 20, and then later in life he was in NYC during 9/11, and then there were those New Yorker covers that reflected other tragedies like the Crown Heights riots, the pandemic (I'm sure) and various racially-charged police shootings. You know, basic NYC stuff, this city is a gold-mine if you're looking for material. I really should check out his book "In the Shadow of No Towers", which is all about 9/11. It mentions how the smoke that was coming from Manhattan smelled just like what might have come from the concentration camps in WWII - at the time I lived in Park Slope, Brooklyn, which was right in the path of that ominous cloud. But I have to wonder about Spiegelman's depiction of the Twin Towers collapse, in this doc he relates how he was taking his kids out of their school in lower Manhattan, and they were all walking to safety, away from the WTC, and he said that when he looked back he could see the glowing red girders of the building after the "gray parts" had fallen off. Umm, that's not how I remember seeing it that way, but I watched it collapse very quickly on TV, so I'm not really sure what to make of his eyewitness account. 

On the other hand, Spiegelman was one of the first cartoonists to print publicly that starting a war after 9/11 would be a bad idea - I agreed with that at the time but it seemed to be a minority opinion, but I knew deep down that was probably going to happen, no matter what. So maybe I'll try to get a copy of his 9/11 book before the event anniversary this year. Oh, yeah, forgot to mention that his played at DOC NYC festival, which made me add it to my list of must-sees, and I was happy to see it appear as part of PBS's "American Masters" series. 

Directed by Molly Bernstein & Philip Dolin

Also starring Art Spiegelman, Ivan Brunetti, Charles Burns, Hillary Chute, Molly Crababble, Jerry Craft, Robert Crumb (last seen in "Crumb"), Aline Kominsky-Crumb (ditto), Bill Griffith (ditto), Emil Ferris, Jules Feiffer, Jonathan Freedland, J. Hoberman, Flo Jacobs, Ken Jacobs, Peter Kuper, Francoise Mouly, Gary Panter (last seen in "Pee-Wee as Himself"), Trina Robbins, Joe Sacco, Marjane Satrapi, R. Sikoryak,Dash Spiegelman, Nadja Spiegelman, Chris Ware, 

with archive footage of Stanley Crouch, Adolf Eichmann, David Gregory, Harvey Kurtzman, Joan Lunden (last seen in "Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything"), Josef Mengele, Howard Safir, Ali Velshi, 

RATING: 6 out of 10 national book awards

Martha

Year 17, Day 215 - 8/03/25 - Movie #5,100

BEFORE: Gloria Steinem carries over again from "Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print". I'm doubling up on Sunday movies so I can send a birthday SHOUT-out to Martha Stewart herself, born on 8/3/1941. Then I'll skip Monday and be back on schedule by Tuesday. 

Speaking of scheduling, I saw Halloween decorations for the first time last weekend out on Long Island, so that's an indication that October is coming up real soon. I have to make a decision between two good horror movie chains - really, either one will work, and there's even a bit of overlap in the middle, so I could switch between them if I needed to. But no, indecision is the chain killer, so really I just have to PICK ONE and then see if I can link to it from the end of the Doc Block - which is in just FIVE days so I really need to make up my mind. OK, I'm going with the one with the most variation, it gets a lot of films off my horror list that have been there for some time - and as a bonus, I think I can work both "Kraven the Hunter" and the "Fantastic Four" movie into that mix. So that's how I want things to go. 

Next step, block out the number of slots - I've got 100 slots left this year, and it looks like I'll need 25 of them for the horror chain (maybe 24, but let's err on the side of caution). Let's say I watch another 25 movies in August, that's 50, half of what's left. Roughly I can estimate 30 films for September (30 days has September, yeah that tracks), 10 each for November and December, that would work, it totals 100. Now comes the harder bit, linking to October 1. 

I just went on a linking tear, and I only got enough to get me to the end of August - that's OK for now, it should hold me for two or three weeks, then when I get closer to Sept. 1 I'll try to link to the start of the horror chain - with 30 slots max for September, I should be able to link from anything to anything - plus I stopped my chain when I got to "Nickel Boys", there are a bunch of actors in that film that are all over my list, so again, there's just got to be a chain of 25 to 30 films that will get me from "Nickel Boys" to the first horror film - I just can't see it yet. Anyway, here are the (tentative) fresh links for the rest of August: Dan Rather, Mark Cuban, Robert Wagner, Henry Mancini, Ke Huy Quan, Alan Tudyk, David Corenswet, Glen Powell, Gralen Bryant Banks, Benito Martinez, Josh Brener, James Logan, Malik Yoba, Kim Dickens, Warren Christie, Andrew Airlie, Chris Gauthier, Holt McCallany, Michael Papajohn and Lucy Faust. You can probably tell that "Superman" is in that mix somehere, so is that film about the first SNL broadcast, and at least 2 time travel movies. That should be enough to keep me interested - and in about 3 weeks I'll try once again to close that gap - and if I can do it in less than 30 steps, then I'll just roll any extra slots over to November/December - I just never know how hard it's going to be to get from Halloween to Christmas.

THE PLOT: Covers the breadth of her extraordinary life through intimate interviews with Stewart herself, who opened up her personal archives to share never-before-seen photos, letters and diary entries. 

AFTER: Just a few days ago, I watched as Paul Reubens had some misgivings about opening up about his life for a documentary shoot, the interview questions got a little too personal for him, a man who'd spent most of his time in show biz keeping his personal life hidden. The same sort of thing happened with this film, for different reasons though. Martha Stewart had this reputation as a self-made billionaire (for a while, anyway) and letting anyone see that vulnerable side, the part of her that could get hurt when a relationship fails, that would run counter to her image. Hey, it's OK to have feelings and emotions, we've all been there when our lives fall apart or we burn them down and we have to pick up the pieces and start again. But once the interviewer here got too deep into her personal life, she stopped answering questions - she says, "Well, you have my letters, get what you need from that." So they did. 

But the situation was such that her relationship hypocrisy was pointed out, she's still pissed that her first husband cheated on her, and she doesn't want to confront the fact that she also cheated on him. Hey, it sounds like maybe they had more in common than they both realized - or it was just that the relationship had petered out and they were both just going through the same motions, which can make anyone vulnerable to infidelity. But by Martha's arcane rules, her cheating was OK because her husband didn't know about it. That's a bit odd - but then when it's pointed out that yes, he did no about it, her cheating is now OK because "it meant nothing". Well, how are we supposed to confirm that, and by whose standard is this nothingness measured? It's all a bit convenient, really, almost Trumpian in nature, namely deny everything and admit nothing, then attack, attack, attack. Or if you can't do that, then distract, distract, distract. 

Sure, her husband's infidelity might have been particuarly jarring because he cheated with a friend of Martha's, someone she allowed to stay in the guest house on their property while she worked through a break-up or some other personal issues. Then Martha went back to work on her magazines or her TV show, or on some trip, and she now says it was like she put out "a snack" for her husband. Well, maybe don't put out a snack if you don't want people to eat it, just saying. A man (or woman) is sometimes only as faithful as their options allow them to be. Plus, I think it's been a few decades, maybe just chalk it up to experience, and, I don't know, move on? Or look at the big picture, nobody really gets through their life these days without going through something like this a couple times, or a couple dozen times. It's how we react and rebuild that defines us - and really, what do you expect after the Decade of Free Love and then the Me Decade, you're going to end up with a lot of people having random sex because they're only thinking of their own pleasure. Also, forgiveness is a bit like money, you've got to spend some to get some. I don't think I could cheat because I'd be struck deep down with a feeling that my wife might be doing the exact same thing at the same time - plus, you know, I love her and stuff. 

Driven by revenge (mixed with ambition, let's say) Martha goes on to double down on her lifestyle brand and becomes maybe the first concrete example of an influencer - people were buying her cookbooks and then her magazines and then anything with her name on it - yes, even the stuff sold at K-Mart - so they could pretend to be sophisticated like her, perfectly perfect like her. Nobody really stopped to think that her perfect life with her perfect kitchen and her perfect garden might all just be a carefully cultivated image, and maybe things weren't so perfect at home after all. Who cares, as long as the Thanksgiving turkey is delicious and also wrapped in puff pastry for some reason?  

Former model, former stockbroker, former home renovator, former gardener, and then former caterer, you put all those things together, like Frankenstein-style, and that's how you build a Martha Stewart. It's kind of how I ended up doing what I'm doing (only for a LOT less money), because I had experience working in a movie theater, experience at managing events, and experience working as part of a team on film shoots. I use a little bit from each job, and now that I'm looking for a second gig, I'm looking for something similar, maybe at a film festival, that would be right up my alley. Still looking, but Martha didn't quit, she just kept re-inventing herself, just like Paul Reubens and Barbara Walters. Onward and upward, hopefully, until you're too old to walk around. 

There's way too much attention here spent on Martha's insider trading scandal and her trial, which led to five months of incarceration.  Really, it wasn't just the selling of a stock right before her broker told her that it was going to tank due to an FDA ruling, but also she faced counts of obstruction of justice, and making false statements about her actions - so it's bad to do it, but it's even worse to do it and then not admit it. OK, point taken. As a result, though, she lost her job as CEO of her own company, her seat on the Revlon board and her seat at the stock exchange. Well, as long as she's not still bitter about it - oh, wait, of course she is. I did enjoy the stories (told here in animated form) of Martha helping a fellow inmate with her garden, and also holding meetings with other inmates to give them career advice. I'm not sure how many of those inmates went on to become CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, though. 

When she got out she went on the comeback tour, with a new daytime television show and also a spin-off of "The Apprentice" (non-Trump edition), both produced by "Survivor's" Mark Burnett. The daytime show was seen as too campy, too goofy talk-show like, and so neither show lasted all that long. But just like Trump, she started merchandising everything like crazy, from wines to housewares to floor coverings. Then suddenly she was everywhere on TV again, from "Ugly Betty" to "Law & Order: SVU" to the Comedy Central Roast of Justin Beiber, where people found her shockingly funny, or funnily shocking. (Umm, you know somebody else WROTE those jokes for her, right?)

Somehow this led to her becoming friends with Snoop Dogg, and they were inseparable for a while, they were in commercials together and hosted the Puppy Bowl together one year, and yep, she came out with a line of CBD gummies at one point, too. Then in 2023 she was the cover model for the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition - wait, what? I guess she represented the graying of America, I mean, sure, she looks good for her age, but let's not get crazy, she was 81 years old! Now she's hosting a new cooking competition on NBC called "Yes, Chef!" so I guess the comeback is complete? Nah, it ain't over till it's over. 

Directed by R.J. Cutler (director of "Elton John: Never Too Late" & "Belushi")

Also starring Martha Stewart (last seen in "Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything")

and the voices of Jed Alexander, Lloyd Allen, Verda Appleton, Rita Christiansen, Simon Crittle, John Cuti, Kathryn Evans, Caitlin Flanagan, Sister Carol Gilbert, Allen Grubman, Elizabeth Hawes, Meg James, David Kelley, Frank Kostyra, Jonas Larsen, Memrie Lewis, Susan Magrino, Alan Mirken, Andy Monness, Isolde Motley, Pattie Sellers, Kevin Sharkey, Sophie Slater, Susan Spry, Kathy Tatlock, Gael Towey, 

with archive footage of Dan Abrams, Danny Aiello (last seen in "2 Days in the Valley"), Maria Bartiromo (last seen in "Inside Job"), Tom Brokaw (ditto), Justin Bieber (last heard in "Killing Hasselhoff"), Lewis Black (last heard in "Inside Out 2"), Mark Burnett, Charo (last seen in "Pee-Wee as Himself"), Jay Leno (ditto), Conan O'Brien (ditto), Dan Rather (ditto), Robin Williams (ditto), Julia Child (last seen in "Wolfgang"), Jane Clayson, Hillary Clinton (last seen in "Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything"), Katie Couric (ditto), Whoopi Goldberg (ditto), Kris Jenner (ditto), Khloe Kardashian (ditto), Billie Jean King (ditto), David Letterman (ditto), Paul Newman (ditto), Bill O'Reilly (ditto), Barbara Walters (ditto), Oprah Winfrey (ditto), James Comey (last heard in "MLK/FBI"), Joan Crawford (last seen in "Faye"), Jane Fonda (ditto), Pete Davidson (last seen in "Dumb Money"), Chris D'Elia (last seen in "Celeste & Jesse Forever"), Andy Dick (last seen in "Loser"), Jimmy Fallon (last seen in "Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary"), Jamie Foxx (last seen in "Luther: Never Too Much"), Bryant Gumbel (ditto), Snoop Dogg (ditto), Usher (ditto), Bill Gates (last seen in "Join or Die"), Merv Griffin (last seen in "My Mom Jayne"), Melanie Griffith (last seen in "Tom Hanks: The Nomad"), Kevin Hart (last seen in "Paper Soldiers"), Peter Jennings (last seen in "Stevie Van Zandt: Disciple"), Brian Williams (ditto), Julie Kavner (last heard in "A Walk on the Moon"), Steve Kroft (last seen in "Mike Wallace Is Here"), John Legend (last seen in "If These Walls Could Sing"), Natasha Leggero (last seen in "Old Dads"), Ludacris (last seen in "End of the Road"), Tyler Mathisen, Kate McKinnon (last seen in "Nyad"), Seth Meyers (last seen in "Will & Harper"), Bret Michaels, Shaquille O'Neal (last seen in "Jack and Jill"), Mariana Pasternak, Princess Diana (last seen in "Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story"), Bill Ritter, Charlie Rose (last seen in "Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution"), Jeffrey Ross (last seen in "The Wedding Ringer"), Morley Safer (last seen in "Jim Henson: Idea Man"), Tom Selleck (last seen in "I Am Burt Reynolds"), Charles Simonyi, Alexis Stewart, Andrew Stewart, Chrissy Teigen (last heard in "The Mitchells vs. the Machines"), Jeffrey Toobin, Samuel D. Waksal

RATING: 5 out of 10 plum puddings (home-made, of course)