Glenn Miller & His Orchestra / “In the Mood” / 1939 ____________________________ John Fraim Writing in the 2/23/23 issue of The New York Review of Books, Christopher Benfey (Mellon Professor of English Emeritus at Mount Holyoke) observes about the artist Edward Hopper, words that have come to dominate, and increasingly suffocate, our experience of Hopper’s paintings are “alienation, loneliness, voyeurism and the […]
Doing some dioramas based around cliches. A cliché is a phrase or expression that has been used so often that it has become trite or unoriginal. Clichés are often used in literature, speech, and other forms of communication as a way to convey a common idea or sentiment quickly and easily, but they can also […]
Rhapsody in Blue / George Gershwin ___________________________ (From the last page of The Great Gatsby) Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until […]
Fooling around on this little desk set of studio lights with the main Hollywood light modifiers in color filers and objects in front of cinema lighting like snoots, and soft lighting. Great little set of three lights and the modifiers for only 100. Anyway, took a shot of an Amaryllis Bulb that grows in the […]
Meeting on the train Overture from North by Northwest ____________________________________________________ North by Northwest A Unique Narrative Perspectives for Screenplays John Fraim In screenwriting professor Paul Gulino’s 2004 book Screenwriting: The Sequence Approach, written much to carry on the screenwriting ideas and theories of his mentor Frank Daniel at the USC Film School (at the time). One […]
The UC Berkeley Classroom of Professor Imma Galaxy. Alice Coltrane / Translinear Light (2004) Jagadishwar _______________________________________________ It’s an interesting time for me now. The final four months of 2022 were filled with intense, work to complete a book started in 2013, abandoned for almost a decade, and then completed at the end of 2022. Now, […]
Dachel Keltner (Professor of Psychology, UC Berkeley) On Amazon McCoy Tyner / Inner Voices “For Tomorrow” (1978) ___________________________________________________ Chapter One Eight Wonders of LifeAn Awe Movement Begins “The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to every one for hundreds of years, no one has left any […]
The Train Wreck Scene in The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) My friend Larry sends me the below communication between his professor and him for a course he is taking at USC on digital marketing. At the bottom I weigh in on his message back to his professor. Background: we had both just seen Steven […]
Poetical Passages From the Writings of Thomas Wolfe In an Introduction to “The Face of a Nation” by Thomas Wolfe (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1939), John Hall Wheelock shares a comment made by Wolfe that left Wheelock amazed. It was often repeated: “I’d rather be a poet than anything else in the world. God, what wouldn’t […]
John Truby The Anatomy of Genres: How Story Forms Explain the Way the World Works (2022) Review by John Fraim Spartacus Love Theme _______________________________ After the beginning of laying a three-act structure in Syd Field’s Screenplay (1979), the remainder of the 20th century was spent firming up structure, foundation and principles of screenwriting. The last decade of the […]
