She Killed To Get Into The Party But They Were All Out Of Those Little Hotdogs When She Got There

Here are a few little pieces that may be part of little and big puzzles - or perhaps they're just little pieces, period.

The Best That You Can Do
It's London, 1983, and it's the day my photographs are supposed to be ready for me to pick up - the photographs of my day trip a few days before to Glastonbury, where King Arthur was supposed to be buried. So on my way to the store to pick up my photos, there's Arthur, standing there, staring at me, or more precisely, there's Dudley Moore, star of the 1981 movie, "Arthur". Here's the thing: there was a fence in front of a house, Dudley was standing in front of the fence, and the rungs of the fence were all cast iron and made to look like sword handles at the top. But the one Dudley was standing directly next to was missing the handle (broken off by someone, apparently). So, think of the legend of King Arthur and Excalibur, the sword in the stone, everyone trying to get at the sword. Dudley/Arthur had a very concerned look on his face - it really was a picture.

So then recently I'm once again watching the movie "Arthur", and suddenly I notice something. The movie came out in July 1981. Earlier in 1981, or possibly late in 1980, I was involved with trying to put together my own little avant garde movie project, "Two Hours In The Life of George Washington", intended as a 45-minute real-time movie about the father of our country having a sex affair (that was where the missing hour and fifteen minutes were intimated to be about - the whole thing was meant to be done in a style too absurd to be taken for real on any level). At one point Washington is walking through a horse stable (he is if the movie had ever been made, that is, which it wasn't), addressing each horse individually (they each had the name of a future American president, and he had something very special to impart to each). And there it was, in "Arthur", a comparable moment (by my standards) in a scene involving Dudley Moore and Liza Minelli. My experience tells me that the nearness in time of my attempted film project to the release date of "Arthur" is indicative of where the idea came from. Of course, my idea never got anywhere. Harley Lewin, a famous rock lawyer I had worked for as a temp once, expressed a little interest; so did Carl Zucker, who was Woody Allen's locations manager on "Interiors" as well as being someone I had once worked with; and finally, so did Ken Hanson, whose brother was a friend of Yoko's before she met John, as well as also being someone I had once worked with. Nothing happened though. Unless you count that Lewinsky business that followed in the '90s, but a connection to that is too ridiculous to even consider.

Third Sword In The Stone From The Sun
I brought together the below stills from two different films, the 2009 Joseph Gordon-Levitt movie, "500 Days of Summer", and my 1974 CalArts Film Class' student film, "Limbo" (starring Dinah Manoff, who was also in this class) for a specific reason even greater than the sheer joy of seeing people in gorilla costumes, or seeing L.A.'s famous Bradbury Building, or seeing both at once.




In several recent blogs I observed that, beginning with "Third Rock From The Sun," I seem to be a continuing influence on things involving Joseph Gordon-Levitt, star of "Inception". This time around I draw your attention to yet another significant similarity with relation to Joseph Gordon-Levitt and myself:

• The very last scene (i.e., the ending) of "500 Days of Summer", which was filmed at the Bradbury Building, involves two people competing for the same job.
  

• In "Limbo", also filmed in the Bradbury Building, the characters are there to compete for the same job as well.

Cut To Hat
I may very possibly have passed by Steven Spielberg today, which is significant because of my immediately preceding July 23rd blog ("It's A Matter Of Principle, Or Money, One Of Those"). Because of my previous experiences, I had already pre-anticipated that something might very possibly occur during my first non-commuting drive since that July 23rd blog that would be something I would regard as fitting in with that blog, owing to the special significance of that blog. This does not mean it was necessarily actually Spielberg I saw today, but it does mean I was meant to feel that it may possibly have been. He was wearing the identifiable Spielberg baseball-ish cap, had the salt-and-pepper beard.... he also had an expression as he spoke to the person next to him that slightly reminded me of when Dudley Moore was concerned about something back in 1983 London.