I was at the clapperboard for Orson Welles' drunk wine commercial (2021)
melmagazine.com
melmagazine.com
Sounds like he combined alcohol with a sleeping pill—never a great idea—and needed to take a nap. Unprofessional, but hardly the worst thing a star has ever done on set.
My favorite Orson Welles thing is this anecdote from Kenneth Tynan:
> Arriving, some years ago, to deliver a lecture in a small mid-western town, he [Welles] was faced with a tiny audience of listeners and no one to introduce him. He decided to introduce himself.
> “Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, “I will tell you of the highlights of my life. I am a director of plays. I am a producer of plays. I am an actor on the legitimate stage. I am a writer of motion pictures. I am a motion-picture actor. I write, direct, and act on the radio. I am a magician. I also paint and sketch, and I am a book-publisher. I am a violinist and a pianist.” Here he paused, and rested his chin on his hands, surveying the sparse congregation. “Isn’t it strange,” he said, quizzically but with clinching emphasis, “that there are so many of me—and so few of you?”
I.... am Unicron.
Dialog: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0DPW44-I3n4&t=30s
(Also, RIP days when Transformers had Gundam levels of animation budget)
The GI Joe movie was changed to un-kill Duke because of it.
I think he did pretty well. Other drunk/high actors get angry to grab people they should not. This appears to be tipsy-drowsy drunk, not shouty-punchy drunk. He still came to set. He was dressed. They got the shot in the end. All those extras (paid by the hour) were probably perfectly happy that it took longer than expected.
>> I told him that I had to put him on camera for insurance reasons, so that we could show that he was all over the place and that we couldn’t do the job — that way we’d have insurance coverage for the day because of the actor malfunctioning. He understood, so I helped him out of the vehicle; he held onto my arm and we walked in.
Being drunk is certainly unprofessional, but few modern celebs would push though, embarrassing themselves on camera, to satisfy the needs of the shoot. A drunk yes, but still a pro imho.
No, the sleeping pill just took too long to hit him. He probably took it on a full stomach or some other random gastro think slowed it down.
A few hours later, (about 6 after drinking all of the Mountain Dew,) I pooped. As everything moved in my insides, the caffeine finally hit me all at once.
So it's completely possible for a sleeping pill to sit in Well's stomach for a few hours before he finally absorbed it. I wouldn't attribute any malintent on his part here.
> ZWICK: You know, I have a story that I actually recalled after I wrote the book, but it's one of the most important stories in my life, and I'll tell it to you and see if you're interested. But it's - after the show, I was put on news programs, and I was asked to go on a local news program with Orson Welles. And you have to understand that Orson Welles was, of course, the spiritual father to this with his "War Of The Worlds." And I was in the green room with Welles, and he was in his wheelchair and not very communicative and actually rather cold. And I thought, oh, here's this opportunity to be with my idol. And he was not really forthcoming, and I just accepted it.
> And we went on with the show. And on the air, this news person begins to attack me and saying, well, how dare you do something like this and confuse people with actors acting as if they're news people? And Welles rises from his chair and says, you're an actor. You're just reading the news. How dare you attack this young man. And it was just one of those, you know, wonderful moments when things come full circle.
https://www.npr.org/2024/03/07/1236539789/a-hollywood-filmma...
(those are not the only professions, but they are central examples of the professions)
this strikingly contrasts with the relationship in capitalism between employers and employees; like professionals, employees assume an ethical duty to act in the interests of those who pay them; but, unlike professionals, employees must defer to their employer's judgment on what that means. as a consequence, it is often considered questionably ethical for them to not be entirely dependent on a single employer
freelance artists, such as freelance actors and freelance photographers, do not fit either of these categories very well. it's not clear that they have a duty to act in the interests of their clients at all, but their clients often may not be able to tell how well they've done their work. moreover, both professionals and employees usually have a duty to suppress their own feelings in service of their work, whereas artists' work is their feelings to a significant extent. certainly there is no professional college of actors needed to protect clients from incompetent or unethical actors; such a thing would be absurd. the sag, as its name indicates, exists to protect actors from their clients, not vice versa. it is a cartel (look the word up before arguing with me about this), not a professional college
so to me it seems like a category error to describe welles's behavior as 'unprofessional', like trying to assess the electrical conductivity of a social movement, or the color of television
Hollywood did so, so much cocaine back then.
There's this cool anecdote of Mel Brooks hiring him to be the narrator to History Of The World Part 1. Brooks paid Welles $25000 for five days of work, from 9 to 5. But Welles was done by 11:30 the first day, and it was "all perfect". So Brooks asked him what he would do with the money, and Welles said "Cuban cigars and Sevruga caviar. I would have included women but I'm getting just a little too heavy for that."
He chose Sevruga because in his opinion it was just as good as Beluga, and half the price.
As told by Mel Brooks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Hhwp4tm6Wc
The GOAT doing that: https://twitter.com/JFrankensteiner/status/17876944958421527...
In the video, it was suggested that Caine would get in the back of other actors scenes. Of course the extent of it in the video is obviously parody.
But is there anything to it? I imagine an actor could, for example, cheat a bit in the two shots; look right at the camera while they are the speaker, then just shift a little bit while the other actor is speaking, not enough to be obvious, but just enough to catch the camera with a little bit more of their face…
What does happen often is impactful news will be delivered causing the foreground actor to turn to camera and contemplate as they rack focus from the background actor to the foreground. See also, a door slamming or an event happening just off camera.
It’s an easy way to get a nice little two shot of both actors faces
The deep details of the movie are fascinating. Schlock filmmaker gets a recent Oscar winner and an experienced but little-known in Hollywood actor to take on a very confusing story, which then debuts into a slow burn that gradually builds over more than a month to become one of the best movies ever? You would never sell that as a script because nobody would believe it, but it really is true.
A 101 approach to a filming a conversation is to
1. A wide shot establishing the actors geography in the scene.
2. a medium shot of both of them facing each other.
3. A “dirty” over the shoulder shot where the foreground actors head fills a third of frame with the focus on the background actor. This is usually as the conversation heats up, and focused on the actor giving the most exposition.
4. Close up single shots of each individual actor as they talk and react to the information
5. Finally a medium or wide as the actors leave the conversation. This would have already been filmed on step 2 or 3, but edits in at the end.
Financially this make sense as you generally light for one direction before “turning around” and moving all your lights to the other side and shooting in the opposite direction. It ensures that you get the most footage without have to spend lots of time moving lights over and over. It also allows you to get your highest paid actors off the clock sooner, as you don’t need them for the dirty or single shots. Everything about making films is trying to catch magic while not spending all your money.
It will take more time to light that entire path upfront, but then you are free to let your actors live in the moment without cutting and there’s no need for turn around. You get something feels more real, but you rely on your dialogue and your actors for the pacing instead of editing.
Typically you need “character” actors to pull this off which is a phrase that generally means “good at acting.”
The voice actor in this clip is the guy that voiced The Brain in Pinky and the Brain, as well as several other famous cartoon characters. Maurice LaMarche.
Now that I understand he was under the influence of a sleeping pill, slept it off, and finished the shoot perfectly in the most friendly and professional manner possible, I admire him even more.
He butted heads with suits all the time, as he did with the agency personnel, but with ordinary people like the cast and crew of this shoot he was always the most affable gentleman. Towards the end of his life he said "I want to be remembered as a good guy, not a difficult genius." And man, he lived up to that.
And Michael Palin's hilarious 'bearded man' performances, loosely based on OW ads:
It's really getting extreme
This constant attention grabbing destroys whatever narrative is being crafted.
Breastfeeding. So nice.
Now give that baby a chihuahua's head. Grotesque. And those teeth are sharp. But still, it's your baby. So you go with it.
Now give the baby spider claws. Then 20 eyeballs.
At what point do you reject your child?
You're right that using an ad blocker isn't worse than closing the tab when it comes to revenue that comes from actually clicking on the ads. And I can only assume that's how it works, I don't know.
What I was trying to say is that authors intend to share their content with ads. It's like having the ads there is what they're charging me for their otherwise free content. Not that I click on the ads. Not that I even read the ads. Just to have the ads there.
Half the time, it doesn't bother me too much, and I consume their content to their terms.
However, many sites are unreadable with so many ads. So, using an ad blocker would help me consume their content, yes. And since it's very rare for me to actually click on an ad, it wouldn't make much economic difference to them anyway.
The central point of my comment wasn't about this, though. It was that most of the internet isn't worth reading. So when I'm faced with content I'm not willing to "pay" for by having all the ads on my screen, it's okay to just let them go. It doesn't really matter. They won't be missed.
So I prefer to see the ads from those I keep reading, just because it's what they've implicitly asked to do by sharing their content.
Then again, this is not an advice. I'm not defending a point. That's just what I've been doing.
I wonder if it’s confusing their ad network.
I have no issues with ad supported anything. I do have issues with the ad tech being used to have ads on a website. The actors running them have been shown to do very bad things at various levels from running malicious code, to running video underneath an image just to juice their numbers for charging their customers more. Because of their historical behavior, I will do everything in my powers to block them.
Create an ad system that is not evil, and I'll allow ads. Until then...
I remember waiting for class in college and browsing stories and thinking that this was what the fire urn was going to be like for everyone. In some ways yes, but in most ways no.
That means losing 90% of "journalism" on the web at least, but that's fine. Most of it is filler for ads anyway.
A curated independent journalism fund could do wonders. I donate to my local NPR station because it's good and I want to ensure something widely accessible still exists, but they also need my money less than smaller outfits. Even if I don't read those smaller journals, I think it's quite important for them to exist as an option and for those who do read them.
Ad blockers are ethical.
How would that be legal?
But him, the director, yeah, he could approach talk, whatever. He's in another classssssssss, you see...