California
California is a state in the Pacific Region of the United States. With 39.6 million residents, California is the most populous U. S. the third-largest by area. The state capital is Sacramento; the Greater Los Angeles Area and the San Francisco Bay Area are the nation's second and fifth most populous urban regions, with 18.7 million and 9.7 million residents respectively. Los Angeles is California's most populous city, the country's second most populous, after New York City. California has the nation's most populous county, Los Angeles County, its largest county by area, San Bernardino County; the City and County of San Francisco is both the country's second-most densely populated major city after New York City and the fifth-most densely populated county, behind only four of the five New York City boroughs. California's $3.0 trillion economy is larger than that of any other state, larger than those of Texas and Florida combined, the largest sub-national economy in the world. If it were a country, California would be the 5th largest economy in the world, the 36th most populous as of 2017.
The Greater Los Angeles Area and the San Francisco Bay Area are the nation's second- and third-largest urban economies, after the New York metropolitan area. The San Francisco Bay Area PSA had the nation's highest GDP per capita in 2017 among large PSAs, is home to three of the world's ten largest companies by market capitalization and four of the world's ten richest people. California is considered a global trendsetter in popular culture, innovation and politics, it is considered the origin of the American film industry, the hippie counterculture, fast food, the Internet, the personal computer, among others. The San Francisco Bay Area and the Greater Los Angeles Area are seen as global centers of the technology and entertainment industries, respectively. California has a diverse economy: 58% of the state's economy is centered on finance, real estate services and professional, scientific and technical business services. Although it accounts for only 1.5% of the state's economy, California's agriculture industry has the highest output of any U.
S. state. California is bordered by Oregon to the north and Arizona to the east, the Mexican state of Baja California to the south; the state's diverse geography ranges from the Pacific Coast in the west to the Sierra Nevada mountain range in the east, from the redwood–Douglas fir forests in the northwest to the Mojave Desert in the southeast. The Central Valley, a major agricultural area, dominates the state's center. Although California is well-known for its warm Mediterranean climate, the large size of the state results in climates that vary from moist temperate rainforest in the north to arid desert in the interior, as well as snowy alpine in the mountains. Over time and wildfires have become more pervasive features. What is now California was first settled by various Native Californian tribes before being explored by a number of European expeditions during the 16th and 17th centuries; the Spanish Empire claimed it as part of Alta California in their New Spain colony. The area became a part of Mexico in 1821 following its successful war for independence but was ceded to the United States in 1848 after the Mexican–American War.
The western portion of Alta California was organized and admitted as the 31st state on September 9, 1850. The California Gold Rush starting in 1848 led to dramatic social and demographic changes, with large-scale emigration from the east and abroad with an accompanying economic boom; the word California referred to the Baja California Peninsula of Mexico. The name derived from the mythical island California in the fictional story of Queen Calafia, as recorded in a 1510 work The Adventures of Esplandián by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo; this work was the fifth in a popular Spanish chivalric romance series that began with Amadis de Gaula. Queen Calafia's kingdom was said to be a remote land rich in gold and pearls, inhabited by beautiful black women who wore gold armor and lived like Amazons, as well as griffins and other strange beasts. In the fictional paradise, the ruler Queen Calafia fought alongside Muslims and her name may have been chosen to echo the title of a Muslim leader, the Caliph. It's possible.
Know ye that at the right hand of the Indies there is an island called California close to that part of the Terrestrial Paradise, inhabited by black women without a single man among them, they lived in the manner of Amazons. They were robust of body with great virtue; the island itself is one of the wildest in the world on account of the craggy rocks. Shortened forms of the state's name include CA, Cal. Calif. and US-CA. Settled by successive waves of arrivals during the last 10,000 years, California was one of the most culturally and linguistically diverse areas in pre-Columbian North America. Various estimates of the native population range from 100,000 to 300,000; the Indigenous peoples of California included more than 70 distinct groups of Native Americans, ranging from large, settled populations living on the coast to groups in the interior. California groups were diverse in their political organization with bands, villages, on the resource-rich coasts, large chiefdoms, such as the Chumash and Salinan.
Trade, intermarriage a
Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard is a French-Swiss film director and film critic. He rose to prominence as a pioneer of the 1960s French New Wave film movement. Like his New Wave contemporaries, Godard criticized mainstream French cinema's "Tradition of Quality", which "emphasized craft over innovation, privileged established directors over new directors, preferred the great works of the past to experimentation." As a result of such argument, he and like-minded critics started to make their own films. Many of Godard's films challenge the conventions of traditional Hollywood in addition to French cinema. In 1964, Godard described his and his colleagues' impact: "We barged into the cinema like cavemen into the Versailles of Louis XV." He is considered the most radical French filmmaker of the 1960s and 1970s. Along with showing knowledge of film history through homages and references, several of his films expressed his political views. Since the New Wave, his politics have been much less radical and his recent films are about representation and human conflict from a humanist, a Marxist perspective.
In a 2002 Sight & Sound poll, Godard ranked third in the critics' top-ten directors of all time. He is said to have "created one of the largest bodies of critical analysis of any filmmaker since the mid-twentieth century." He and his work have been central to narrative theory and have "challenged both commercial narrative cinema norms and film criticism's vocabulary." In 2010, Godard did not attend the award ceremony. Godard's films have inspired many directors including Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Brian De Palma, Steven Soderbergh, D. A. Pennebaker, Robert Altman, Jim Jarmusch, Wong Kar-wai, Wim Wenders, Bernardo Bertolucci, Pier Paolo Pasolini. From his father, he is the cousin of former President of Peru, he has been married twice, to actresses Anna Karina and Anne Wiazemsky, both of whom starred in several of his films. His collaborations with Karina—which included such critically acclaimed films as Bande à part and Pierrot le Fou —was called "arguably the most influential body of work in the history of cinema" by Filmmaker magazine.
Jean-Luc Godard was born on 3 December 1930 in the 7th arrondissement of Paris, the son of Odile and Paul Godard, a Swiss physician. His wealthy parents came from Protestant families of Franco–Swiss descent, his mother was the daughter of Julien Monod, a founder of the Banque Paribas, she was the great-granddaughter of theologian Adolphe Monod. Relatives on his mother's side include composer Jacques-Louis Monod, naturalist Théodore Monod and pastor Frédéric Monod. Four years after Jean-Luc's birth, his father moved the family to Switzerland. At the outbreak of the Second World War, Godard was in France and returned to Switzerland with difficulty, he spent most of the war in Switzerland, although his family made clandestine trips to his grandfather's estate on the French side of Lake Geneva. Godard attended school in Switzerland. Not a frequent cinema-goer, he attributed his introduction to cinema to a reading of Malraux's essay Outline of a Psychology of Cinema, his reading of La Revue du cinéma, relaunched in 1946.
In 1946, he went to study at the Lycée Buffon in Paris and, through family connections, mixed with members of its cultural elite. He lodged with the writer Jean Schlumberger. Having failed his baccalaureate exam in 1948 he returned to Switzerland, he lived with his parents, whose marriage was breaking up. He spent time in Geneva with a group that included another film fanatic, Roland Tolmatchoff, the extreme rightist philosopher Jean Parvulesco, his older sister Rachel encouraged him to paint, in an abstract style. After time spent at a boarding school in Thonon to prepare for the retest, which he passed, he returned to Paris in 1949, he registered for a certificate in anthropology at the University of Paris, but did not attend class. He got involved with the young group of film critics at the ciné-clubs. Godard held only French citizenship in 1953, he became a citizen of Gland, canton of Vaud, Switzerland through simplified naturalisation through his Swiss father. In Paris, in the Latin Quarter just prior to 1950, ciné-clubs were gaining prominence.
Godard began attending these clubs – the Cinémathèque, the CCQL, Work and Culture ciné Club, others – which became his regular haunts. The Cinémathèque had been founded by Henri Langlois and Georges Franju in 1936. At these clubs he met fellow film enthusiasts including Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, François Truffaut. Godard was part of a generation for, he has said: "In the 1950s cinema was as important as bread—but it isn't the case any more. We thought cinema would assert itself as an instrument of knowledge, a microscope... a telescope.... At the Cinémathèque I discovered a world. They'd told us about Goethe, but not Dreyer.... We watched silent films in the era of talkies. We dreame
Sondra Locke
Sandra Louise Anderson, professionally known as Sondra Locke, was an American actress and director. She made her film debut in 1968 in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Locke went on to star in such films as Willard, The Outlaw Josey Wales, The Gauntlet, Every Which Way But Loose, Bronco Billy, Any Which Way You Can and Sudden Impact, she had worked with Clint Eastwood, her companion for over 13 years. Locke's autobiography, The Good, the Bad, the Very Ugly – A Hollywood Journey, was published in 1997. Sandra Louise Smith was born on May 28, 1944, in Madison County, Alabama to New York City native Raymond Smith serving in the military, Pauline Bayne, a pencil factory worker from Huntsville, Alabama, her parents separated before her birth. In her autobiography, Locke noted that "although Momma would not admit it, I knew Mr. Smith never married my mother." She had a maternal half-brother, Donald from Bayne's subsequent brief marriage to William B.
Elkins. When Bayne married Alfred Locke in 1948, Sandra and Donald adopted his surname, she grew up in Shelbyville, where her stepfather owned a construction company. Locke was a class valedictorian in junior high, she attended Shelbyville Central High School, where she was again valedictorian and voted "Duchess of Studiousness" by classmates, graduating in 1962. She enrolled at Middle Tennessee State University, majoring in Drama, she was a member of the Alpha Psi Omega honor society while at MTSU and appeared onstage in Life with Father and The Crucible. Locke held a number of jobs, including as a bookkeeper for Tyson Foods and secretary in a real-estate office, she worked in the promotions department for WSM-TV in Nashville when she lived there for three years and modeled for The Tennessean fashion page. At age 23 she changed the spelling of her first name to avoid being called Sandy. In 1967, Locke won a nationwide talent search for the part of Mick Kelly in a big-screen adaptation of Carson McCullers' novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter opposite Alan Arkin.
Prior thereto, she had acted in television commercials and starred in some half-dozen theater productions for Circle Players Inc. Heart was released to critical acclaim in the summer of 1968, garnering Locke the Academy Award nomination, as well as a pair of Golden Globe nominations for Best Supporting Actress and Most Promising Newcomer, she won "Most Promising New Star of the Year" at the Show-A-Rama film exhibitor convention. Her next role was as Melisse in Cover Me Babe titled Run Shadow Run, opposite Robert Forster, it was announced that she would play the lead in Lovemakers, a film adaptation of Robert Nathan's novel The Color of Evening, but no movie resulted. Locke was offered Barbara Hershey's role in Last Summer, but her agent turned it down without telling her. Shortly afterwards she passed up the lead in My Sweet Charlie, which won an Emmy for its eventual star Patty Duke. In 1971, Locke co-starred with Bruce Davison and Ernest Borgnine in the psychological thriller Willard, which became a box office hit.
She was featured in William A. Fraker's underseen A Reflection of Fear, held the title role in The Second Coming of Suzanne, winner of three gold medals at the Atlanta Film Festival. Locke guested on television drama series during the first half of the 1970s, including The F. B. I. Cannon, Barnaby Jones and Kung Fu. In the 1972 Night Gallery episode "A Feast of Blood", she played the victim of a curse planted by Norman Lloyd. Lloyd acted with her again in Gondola, a three-character teleplay with Bo Hopkins, remarked that Locke gave "a beautiful performance – her best ever."Her career reached a turning point in 1975, when she took a supporting role in The Outlaw Josey Wales as the love interest of Clint Eastwood's eponymous character. This was followed by a lead role alongside Eastwood in the hit action film The Gauntlet. Over the course of their personal relationship, Locke did not work in any capacity on any theatrical motion picture other than with him except for 1977's western The Shadow of Chikara.
The home invasion film Death Game, though released after they became an item, was shot in 1974. In 1978, Locke and Eastwood appeared with an orangutan named Manis in that year's second highest-grossing film, Every Which Way But Loose, she portrayed country singer Lynn Halsey-Taylor in the adventure-comedy. Its 1980 sequel, Any Which Way You Can, was nearly as successful. Locke recorded several songs for the soundtracks of these films and performed live in concert with The Everly Brothers, Eddie Rabbitt and Tom Jones. Locke starred as a bitter heiress who joins a traveling Wild West show in Bronco Billy, her only film with Eastwood not to reach blockbuster status, she cited Bronco Billy and The Outlaw Josey Wales as her favorites of the movies they made together. The couple's final collaboration as performers was Sudden Impact, the highest-grossing film in the Dirty Harry franchise, where Locke played an artist with her own code of vigilante justice. Eastwood directed Locke in the 1985 Amazing Stories episode "Vanessa in the Garden".
In 1986, Locke made her feature directorial debut with Ratboy, a fable about a youth, half-rat, produced by Eastwood's company Malpaso. Ratboy only had a limited release in the United States, where it was a critical and financial flop, but was well-received in Europe, with French newspaper Le Parisien calling it the highlight of the Deauville Film Festival. Concentrating exclusively on directing from that point onward, Locke's second foray behind the
Black comedy
Black comedy known as dark comedy or gallows humor, is a comic style that makes light of subject matter, considered taboo subjects that are considered serious or painful to discuss. Comedians use it as a tool for exploring vulgar issues, thus provoking discomfort and serious thought as well as amusement in their audience. Popular themes of the genre include death and violence, disease, sexuality and barbarism. Black comedy differs from blue comedy which focuses more on crude topics such as nudity and bodily fluids. Although the two are interrelated, black comedy is different from straightforward obscenity in that it is more subtle and does not have the explicit intention of offending people. In obscene humor, much of the humorous element comes from shock and revulsion, while black comedy might include an element of irony, or fatalism. For example, an archetypal example of black comedy in the form of self-mutilation appears in the English novel Tristram Shandy. Tristram, five years old at the time, starts to urinate out of an open window for lack of a chamber pot.
The sash circumcises him. Literary critics have associated black comedy and black humor with authors as early as the ancient Greeks with Aristophanes. Whereas the term black comedy is a broad term covering humor relating to many serious subjects, gallows humor tends to be used more in relation to death, or situations that are reminiscent of dying. Black humor can be related to the grotesque genre; the term black humor was coined by the Surrealist theorist André Breton in 1935 while interpreting the writings of Jonathan Swift. Breton's preference was to identify some of Swift's writings as a subgenre of comedy and satire in which laughter arises from cynicism and skepticism relying on topics such as death. Breton coined the term for his book Anthology of Black Humor, in which he credited Jonathan Swift as the originator of black humor and gallows humor. In his book, Breton included excerpts from 45 other writers, including both examples in which the wit arises from a victim with which the audience empathizes, as is more typical in the tradition of gallows humor, examples in which the comedy is used to mock the victim.
In the last cases, the victim's suffering is trivialized, which leads to sympathizing with the victimizer, as analogously found in the social commentary and social criticism of the writings of Sade. Among the first American writers who employed black comedy in their works were Nathanael West and Vladimir Nabokov, although at the time the genre was not known in the US; the concept of black humor first came to nationwide attention after the publication of a 1965 mass-market paperback titled Black Humor, of which the editor was Bruce Jay Friedman. The paperback was one of the first American anthologies devoted to the concept of black humor as a literary genre. With the paperback, Friedman labeled as "black humorists" a variety of authors, such as J. P. Donleavy, Edward Albee, Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Vladimir Nabokov, Bruce Jay Friedman himself, Louis-Ferdinand Celine. Among the writers labeled as black humorists by journalists and literary critics are today Roald Dahl, Kurt Vonnegut, Warren Zevon, Christopher Durang, Philip Roth.
The motive for applying the label black humorist to all the writers cited above is that they have written novels, stories and songs in which profound or horrific events were portrayed in a comic manner. Comedians, like Lenny Bruce, that since the late 1950s have been labeled for using "sick comedy" by mainstream journalists, have been labeled with "black comedy". Sigmund Freud in his 1927 essay Humour puts forth the following theory of black comedy: "The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer, it insists. Some other sociologists elaborated this concept further. At the same time, Paul Lewis warns that this "relieving" aspect of gallows jokes depends on the context of the joke: whether the joke is being told by the threatened person themselves or by someone else. Black comedy has the social effect of strengthening the morale of the oppressed and undermines the morale of the oppressors. According to Wylie Sypher, "to be able to laugh at evil and error means we have surmounted them."Black comedy is a natural human instinct and examples of it can be found in stories from antiquity.
Its use was widespread from where it was imported to the United States. It is rendered with the German expression Galgenhumor; the concept of gallows humor is comparable to the French expression rire jaune, which has a Germanic equivalent in the Belgian Dutch expression groen lachen. Italian comedian Daniele Luttazzi discussed gallows humour focusing on the particular type of laughter that it arouses, said that grotesque satire, as opposed to ironic satire, is the one that most
Box office
A box office or ticket office is a place where tickets are sold to the public for admission to an event. Patrons may perform the transaction at a countertop, through a hole in a wall or window, or at a wicket. By extension, the term is used in the context of the film industry, as a synonym for the amount of business a particular production, such as a film or theatre show, receives. Box office business can be measured in the terms of the number of tickets sold or the amount of money raised by ticket sales; the projection and analysis of these earnings is important for the creative industries and a source of interest for fans. This is predominant in the Hollywood movie industry; the term is attested since 1786 from sales of boxes. The sense of "total sales" is attested from 1904. A folk etymology is that this derives from Elizabethan theatre, where theatre admission was collected in a box attached to a long stick, passed around the audience. However, first attestation is about 200 years making this unlikely.
There are numerous websites that monitor box-office receipts, such as BoxOffice, Box Office India, Box Office Mojo, ShowBIZ Data and The Numbers which provide detailed information for many movies but have less and incomplete data for older movies due to the history of how box office reporting evolved in the U. S. and the availability of this information prior to the introduction of the internet. Although other publications have published box office data over the years, the longevity and regular reporting of Variety makes it a significant source for older box office reporting for the US market and US films. During the 1920s, Variety reported box office grosses for films by theatre for certain U. S. cities. In 1946, they started to publish a weekly National Box Office survey on page 3 indicating the performance of the week's hits and flops based on the box office results of 25 key U. S. cities. During the 1930s, Variety published charts of the top performing films of the year and has maintained this tradition annually since.
In 1946, they published a list of All-Time Top Grossers with a list of films that had achieved or gave promise of earning $4,000,000 or more in domestic rentals. They would publish an updated all-time list annually for over 50 years in their anniversary edition each January; the anniversary edition would normally contain the list of the top performing films of the year. Some publications such as BoxOffice magazine published box office performance expressed as a percentage compared to regular films Some of the early annual reports from Variety used this format. From the 1930s, BoxOffice magazine published a Barometer issue in January giving the performance of movies for the year expressed as percentages; the first issue of The Motion Picture Almanac in 1929 used this format to rank money makers. In the late 1960s, Variety used an IBM 360 computer to collate the grosses from their weekly reports of 22 to 24 U. S. cities from January 1, 1968. The data came from up to 800 theatres which represented around 5% of the U.
S. cinema population at the time but around one-third of the total U. S. box office grosses. In 1969, they started to publish the computerized box office compilation of the top 50 grossing films of the week based on this data. "The Love Bug" was the number one in the first chart published for the week ending April 16, 1969. The chart was discontinued in 1990. In 1976, Marcy Polier, an employee of the Mann theater chain, set up Centralized Grosses to collate U. S. daily box office data on a centralized basis rather than each theater chain collating their own numbers from other theater chains. The company became National Gross Service Entertainment Data, Inc.. Except for disclosures by the studios on successful films, total domestic box office gross information for films was not available until National Gross Service started to collate this data around 1981; the collation of grosses led to wider reporting of domestic box office grosses for films. Arthur D. Murphy at Variety was one of the first to organize and chart that information and report it in a meaningful form.
During the 1980s, Daily Variety started to publish a weekly chart of the domestic box office grosses of films as compared to the Top 50 chart in Variety, based on a sample of key markets. The focus of a film's performance became its box office gross rather than the rentals that Variety continued to report annually. Prior to the tracking of these grosses, domestic or worldwide box office grosses is not available for many earlier films so the only domestic or worldwide data available is still the rental figures. In 1984, EDI started to report Canadian grosses as well and by 1985 was reporting data for 15,000 screens. In 1987, EDI set up a database of box office information which included data on certain films back to 1970. By 1991, all U. S. studios had agreed to share their complete data reports with EDI. In 1990, EDI opened an office in the UK, moved into Germany in 1993 and Spain in 1995 reporting box office data for those markets. EDI were acquired by ACNielsen Corporation in 1997 for $26 million and became Nielsen EDI.
In December 2009, with its acquisition of Nielsen EDI for $15 million, measurement company Rentrak became the sole provider of worldwide box office ticket sales revenue and attendance information, used by many of the websites noted above. For a list of films which are major box-office hits, see List of highest-grossing films. Films that are considered to have been unsuccessful at the box office are called box office bombs or box off
Pretty Poison (film)
Pretty Poison is a 1968 psychological thriller/black comedy film directed by Noel Black, starring Anthony Perkins and Tuesday Weld, about an ex-convict and high school cheerleader who commit a series of crimes. The film was based on the novel, it has become a cult film. Dennis Pitt is a disturbed young man on parole from a mental institution who becomes attracted to teenager Sue Ann Stepenek, he tells her that he is a secret agent, takes her along on a series of "missions". Things, turns out disastrously when Dennis takes Sue Ann along to sabotage a factory on imaginary orders from the CIA, during which the couple encounters the factory's night watchman, as Sue Ann knocks the watchman unconscious and drowns him. While Dennis is wracked with guilt over both what he has done and what he has allowed to happen, Sue Ann is excited by the "adventure" and entreats Dennis to run away with her to Mexico. First, they have to get rid of her disapproving mother. However, as the couple return to Sue Ann's home for her clothes and are interrupted by the arrival of Mrs. Stepanek, Sue Ann realizes that Dennis is incapable of killing a person, so she shoots her mother and orders Dennis to dispose of the body.
But instead, he calls the police. Dennis knows that the police will take Sue Ann's word over his, so he makes no effort to defend himself in court and takes the blame for their crimes. Sue Ann, betrays him without a second thought, sending him to prison for life. Dennis is more than happy to be locked up, as it keeps him away from Sue Ann, of whom he is now quite frightened. While Dennis refuses to tell his skeptical parole officer Azenauer the truth, he asks him to "see what Sue Ann is up to" in hopes she will be exposed for what she is; the film ends with Sue Ann meeting a young man and lamenting to him that the people who took her in after her mother's death won't let her stay out late. But Dennis' parole officer is indeed watching. Anthony Perkins as Dennis Pitt Tuesday Weld as Sue Ann Stepanek Beverly Garland as Mrs. Stepanek John Randolph as Morton Azenauer Dick O'Neill as Bud Munsch Clarice Blackburn as Mrs. Bronson Joseph Bova as Pete Ken Kercheval as Harry Jackson Don Fellows as Detective The novel She Let Him Continue was published in 1966.
The Los Angeles Times called it "an interesting if not overly impressive debut."The novel was optioned for the movies. Lawrence Turman agreed to act as executive producer for producer Marshall Backlar and director Noel Black, who had just made the short Skaterdater together. Skaterdater had been made for $17,000 and sold to United Artists for $50,000, winning the Palme d'Or for Best Short Film at the 1966 Cannes Film Festival, being nominated for an Oscar for Best Short Film. Turman described the novel as "a hip horror story about today's alienated youth." Black said it was about "a Walter Mitty type who comes up against a teenybopper Lady Macbeth."Turman had just made The Flim Flam Man for 20th Century Fox and obtained finance from the same studio. Lorenzo Semple Jnr was hired to write the screenplay. Turman says Semple turned in a "magnificent script in six weeks." Tuesday Weld signed to play the female lead with Anthony Perkins as costar. It was the first film. Black recalled he cast Perkins after seeing him on stage in The Star-Spangled Girl.
"He had enormous charm and intelligence, the qualities I wanted to come through in the role he would be playing," said the director. "I was looking for the young Tony of Friendly Persuasion and Fear Strikes Out, not Psycho, although commentators made the comparison between Norman Bates and the character in Pretty Poison." The film was shot on location at Massachusetts. Filming was difficult, with problems between Black. Actor John Randolph recalled that, "Noel knew how to set up shots. Tuesday Weld was neurotic as hell, she would cry. She hated the director, she permitted that hatred to color everything she did."In 1971 Weld would call the movie her least favourite: The least creative experience I had. Constant hate and dissonance. Not a day went by without a fight. Noel Black, the director, would come up to me before a scene and say,'Think about Coca Cola'. I said,'Look, just give the directions to Tony Perkins and he'll interpret for me. Black reflected: Tuesday and Tony got on professionally, though she resented how much more in tune he was with me than she was.
He was the quintessential professional. Though he had made 20 or so movies and this was my first, he listened to everything I had to tell him. What he brought was a personal sense of humanity and dignity, which gave the character a sympathetic quality. Beverly Garland was cast as Weld's mother. "I loved the part," she said later. "I felt it was one of the best things I'd done... I thought. Noel Black did a great job, but the studios got upset with him because it took a long while to shoot. Studio people kept arriving and saying,'You're taking too long' and they had him under a lot of pressure... Noel had some camera stuff that took time, he went to great pains with that movie and the studio got upset with him. But I think the movie shows that he took the time." Fox had difficulty securing a release for the film in New York so instead opened it in Los Angeles in September 1968. The Los Angeles Times reviewer called it "a small, thoughtful exploration of degrees of madness and of sanity."However the film flopped.
When Fox did secure a New York
Avant-garde
The avant-garde are people or works that are experimental, radical, or unorthodox with respect to art, culture, or society. It may be characterized by nontraditional, aesthetic innovation and initial unacceptability, it may offer a critique of the relationship between producer and consumer; the avant-garde pushes the boundaries of what is accepted as the norm or the status quo in the cultural realm. The avant-garde is considered by some to be a hallmark of modernism, as distinct from postmodernism. Many artists have aligned themselves with the avant-garde movement and still continue to do so, tracing a history from Dada through the Situationists to postmodern artists such as the Language poets around 1981; the avant-garde promotes radical social reforms. It was this meaning, evoked by the Saint Simonian Olinde Rodrigues in his essay "L'artiste, le savant et l'industriel", which contains the first recorded use of "avant-garde" in its now customary sense: there, Rodrigues calls on artists to "serve as avant-garde", insisting that "the power of the arts is indeed the most immediate and fastest way" to social and economic reform.
Several writers have attempted to map the parameters of avant-garde activity. The Italian essayist Renato Poggioli provides one of the earliest analyses of vanguardism as a cultural phenomenon in his 1962 book Teoria dell'arte d'avanguardia. Surveying the historical, social and philosophical aspects of vanguardism, Poggioli reaches beyond individual instances of art and music to show that vanguardists may share certain ideals or values which manifest themselves in the non-conformist lifestyles they adopt: He sees vanguard culture as a variety or subcategory of Bohemianism. Other authors have attempted both to extend Poggioli's study; the German literary critic Peter Bürger's Theory of the Avant-Garde looks at the Establishment's embrace of critical works of art and suggests that in complicity with capitalism, "art as an institution neutralizes the political content of the individual work". Bürger's essay greatly influenced the work of contemporary American art-historians such as the German Benjamin H. D. Buchloh.
Buchloh, in the collection of essays Neo-avantgarde and Culture Industry critically argues for a dialectical approach to these positions. Subsequent criticism theorized the limitations of these approaches, noting their circumscribed areas of analysis, including Eurocentric and genre-specific definitions; the concept of avant-garde refers to artists, writers and thinkers whose work is opposed to mainstream cultural values and has a trenchant social or political edge. Many writers and theorists made assertions about vanguard culture during the formative years of modernism, although the initial definitive statement on the avant-garde was the essay Avant-Garde and Kitsch by New York art critic Clement Greenberg, published in Partisan Review in 1939. Greenberg argued that vanguard culture has been opposed to "high" or "mainstream" culture, that it has rejected the artificially synthesized mass culture, produced by industrialization; each of these media is a direct product of Capitalism—they are all now substantial industries—and as such they are driven by the same profit-fixated motives of other sectors of manufacturing, not the ideals of true art.
For Greenberg, these forms were therefore kitsch: phony, faked or mechanical culture, which pretended to be more than they were by using formal devices stolen from vanguard culture. For instance, during the 1930s the advertising industry was quick to take visual mannerisms from surrealism, but this does not mean that 1930s advertising photographs are surreal. Various members of the Frankfurt School argued similar views: thus Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their essay The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass-Deception, Walter Benjamin in his influential "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction". Where Greenberg used the German word kitsch to describe the antithesis of avant-garde culture, members of the Frankfurt School coined the term "mass culture" to indicate that this bogus culture is being manufactured by a newly emerged culture industry, they pointed out that the rise of this industry meant that artistic excellence was displaced by sales figures as a measure of worth: a novel, for example, was judged meritorious on whether it became a best-seller, music succumbed to ratings charts and to the blunt commercial logic of the Gold disc.
In this way the autonomous artistic merit so dear to the vanguardist was abandoned and sales became the measure, justification, of everything. Consumer culture now ruled; the avant-garde's co-option by the global capitalist market, by neoliberal economies, by what Guy Debord called The Society of the Spectacle, have made contemporary critics speculate on the possibility of a meaningful avant-garde today. Paul Mann's Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde demonstrates how the avant-garde is embedded within institutional structures today, a thought pursued by Richard Schechner in his analyses of avant-garde performance. Despite the central arguments of Greenberg and others, various sectors of the mainstream culture industry have co-opted and misapplied the term "avant-garde" since the 1960s, chiefly as a marketing tool to publicise popular music and commercial
