Bass designed some of the most iconic corporate logos in North America, including the Bell System logo in 1969, as well as AT&T‘s globe logo in 1983 after the breakup of the Bell System. He also designed Continental Airlines‘ 1968 jet stream logo and United Airlines‘ 1974 tulip logo which became some of the most recognized airline industry logos of the era.
Here’s his title sequence for The Man With The Golden Arm, made in 1955:
“I know who you are; you’re the same dumb pilgrim I’ve been hearin’ for twenty days and smellin’ for three!”
Jeremiah Johnson (Robert Redford) is a disenchanted ex-soldier who leaves civilization behind and settles in the Rocky Mountain wilderness. Determined to survive on his own, Johnson wishes to be left in peace. But, after crossing paths with a band of Indians, he must learn the ways to the untamed land and defend himself in order to gain the respect of its original settlers. Directed by Sydney Pollack in 1972. With Will Geer, Delle Bolton and Josh Albee. The film has been said to have been based in part on the life of the legendary mountain man Liver-Eating Johnson, based on Raymond Thorp and Robert Bunker’s book Crow Killer: The Saga of Liver-Eating Johnson and Vardis Fisher’s Mountain Man.
Spotted by Señor Bayliss and best viewed full screen: From the makers of All.I.Can comes the new feature film: INTO THE MIND
Blur the lines between dream state and reality, as you perceive the world through the minds of many. Into the Mind contemplates the experiences passed between mentors and peers to paint a philosophical portrait of human kind. What drives us to overcome challenge? How do we justify risk? What forces are at the core of a mountain addiction? Unique athlete segments over a multitude of mountain sport genres depict the connectivity of Earth, and window into never seen before moments. Explore how we begin our perception of self, construct the foundations of confidence, and are ultimately led up the path of self-actualization.
As Buddha once said, “The mind is everything. What you think you become.”
Into The Mind is about becoming.
facebook.com/sherpascinema Directors: Dave Mossop and Eric Crosland
Producer: Malcolm Sangster
Music: A Tribe Called Red – Electric Powwow (Available for free at electricpowwow.com )
Original Score by Jacob Yoffee, Sound Design: Cody Petersen
“The birds are outbursts of raw, maternal energy.” Slavoj Žižek from his upcoming film, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, an investigation into what psychoanalysis can tell us about film (I just like what he says about Mitch). More clips here.
Zizek rocks. Here’s him on why Love is Evil (which is pretty darned brilliant).
Slavoj Zizek, 59, was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He is a professor at the European Graduate School, international director of the Birkbeck Institute for Humanities in London and a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana’s institute of sociology. He has written more than 30 books on subjects as diverse as Hitchcock, Lenin and 9/11, and also presented the TV series The Pervert’s Guide To Cinema.
When were you happiest?
A few times when I looked forward to a happy moment or remembered it – never when it was happening.
What is your greatest fear?
To awaken after death – that’s why I want to be burned immediately.
What is your earliest memory?
My mother naked. Disgusting.
Which living person do you most admire, and why?
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the twice-deposed president of Haiti. He is a model of what can be done for the people even in a desperate situation.
What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
Indifference to the plights of others.
What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Their sleazy readiness to offer me help when I don’t need or want it.
What was your most embarrassing moment?
Standing naked in front of a woman before making love.
Aside from a property, what’s the most expensive thing you’ve bought?
The new German edition of the collected works of Hegel.
What is your most treasured possession?
See the previous answer.
What makes you depressed?
Seeing stupid people happy.
What do you most dislike about your appearance?
That it makes me appear the way I really am.
What is your most unappealing habit?
The ridiculously excessive tics of my hands while I talk.
What would be your fancy dress costume of choice?
A mask of myself on my face, so people would think I am not myself but someone pretending to be me.
What is your guiltiest pleasure?
Watching embarrassingly pathetic movies such as The Sound Of Music.
What do you owe your parents?
Nothing, I hope. I didn’t spend a minute bemoaning their death.
To whom would you most like to say sorry, and why?
To my sons, for not being a good enough father.
What does love feel like?
Like a great misfortune, a monstrous parasite, a permanent state of emergency that ruins all small pleasures.
What or who is the love of your life?
Philosophy. I secretly think reality exists so we can speculate about it.
What is your favourite smell?
Nature in decay, like rotten trees.
Have you ever said ‘I love you’ and not meant it?
All the time. When I really love someone, I can only show it by making aggressive and bad-taste remarks.
Which living person do you most despise, and why?
Medical doctors who assist torturers.
What is the worst job you’ve done?
Teaching. I hate students, they are (as all people) mostly stupid and boring.
What has been your biggest disappointment?
What Alain Badiou calls the ‘obscure disaster’ of the 20th century: the catastrophic failure of communism.
If you could edit your past, what would you change?
My birth. I agree with Sophocles: the greatest luck is not to have been born – but, as the joke goes on, very few people succeed in it.
If you could go back in time, where would you go?
To Germany in the early 19th century, to follow a university course by Hegel.
How do you relax?
Listening again and again to Wagner.
How often do you have sex?
It depends what one means by sex. If it’s the usual masturbation with a living partner, I try not to have it at all.
What is the closest you’ve come to death?
When I had a mild heart attack. I started to hate my body: it refused to do its duty to serve me blindly.
What single thing would improve the quality of your life?
To avoid senility.
What do you consider your greatest achievement?
The chapters where I develop what I think is a good interpretation of Hegel.
What is the most important lesson life has taught you?
That life is a stupid, meaningless thing that has nothing to teach you.
What is the true call of the wild? Here we travel down a very special river and are introduced to a wide variety of the animal kingdom who all contribute their name for the sake of music.
Directed by Damon Gameau Tropfest Australia ( world’s biggest short-film festival, 700 entries, 16 finalists)
I mean, I liiiike it and all that. Shame he didn’t go into full chopsticks with the dolphin chorus. Nice idea though.
Tropfest website says: ‘The winning film is a branch into animation by Underbelly and Balibo actor Gameau, with a catchy lyrical and poetic narrative. The film was shot in his mother’s spare room for just $85 and on a liquid detox diet with his girlfriend by his side – somehow they are still together. “I’m quite new to stop animation, but I find it a quick and versatile way to express any idea that may be lurking in my head,” he says.’
Cinema is full of hyped-up heroes and explosive action but Sonny and BBH teamed up with St John’s Ambulance to bring some real life drama to London filmgoers. In Popcorn, a cheesy pre-feature commercial goes horribly wrong until a resourceful audience member steps up to the mark.
Read an interview with director Jeff Labbé here on the Beak Street Blog.
We have to be very clever about those things. You have to remember that it’s only a few hundred years, if that much, that artists are working with money. Artists never got money. Artists had a patron, either the leader of the state or the duke of Weimar or somewhere, or the church, the pope. Or they had another job. I have another job. I make films. No one tells me what to do. But I make the money in the wine industry. You work another job and get up at five in the morning and write your script.
This idea of Metallica or some rock n’ roll singer being rich, that’s not necessarily going to happen anymore. Because, as we enter into a new age, maybe art will be free. Maybe the students are right. They should be able to download music and movies. I’m going to be shot for saying this. But who said art has to cost money? And therefore, who says artists have to make money?
In the old days, 200 years ago, if you were a composer, the only way you could make money was to travel with the orchestra and be the conductor, because then you’d be paid as a musician. There was no recording. There were no record royalties. So I would say, “Try to disconnect the idea of cinema with the idea of making a living and money.” Because there are ways around it.
(Via the excellent Kottke.org)
And from the same interview, on developing one’s own style:
I once found a little excerpt from Balzac. He speaks about a young writer who stole some of his prose. The thing that almost made me weep, he said, “I was so happy when this young person took from me.” Because that’s what we want. We want you to take from us. We want you, at first, to steal from us, because you can’t steal. You will take what we give you and you will put it in your own voice and that’s how you will find your voice.
And that’s how you begin. And then one day someone will steal from you. And Balzac said that in his book: It makes me so happy because it makes me immortal because I know that 200 years from now there will be people doing things that somehow I am part of. So the answer to your question is: Don’t worry about whether it’s appropriate to borrow or to take or do something like someone you admire because that’s only the first step and you have to take the first step.
Sort of a Clockwork Orange for the 90s: a camera crew follows a serial killer/thief around as he exercises his craft. He expounds on art, music, nature, society, and life as he offs mailmen, pensioners, and random people. Slowly he begins involving the camera crew in his activities, and they begin wondering if what they’re doing is such a good idea. It’squiteadarkfilm.
“You can tan while you make love. When you’re through you’ve got a brown ass.”
“If you kill a whale, you get Greenpeace and Jacques Cousteau on your back, but wipe out sardines and you get a canning subsidy!”
“Once I buried two Arabs in a wall over there… Facing Mecca, of course.”
Put on some headphones, hit full-screen and press play.
The guy. Does not. Stop. (until 8.00)
Shot in a single take, this is a classic example of cinéma-vérité. The length of the film was limited by the short capacity of the 1000 foot 35mm film reel, and filmed from a (supposedly) gyro-stabilised camera mounted on the bumper of a Mercedes-Benz 450SEL 6.9.
It’s amazing to look at the other cars as the driver passes them. And the streets are so empty (probably as much because of the time of day it was filmed at.
Also a big fan of the fact that the Google-ad on it is for “speeding offence lawyers” and laser eye surgery.
“My very worst injury ever, the one that almost killed me, actually occurred on a very routine stunt. I was shooting Armour of God in Yugoslavia, and was still recovering from the jet lag of flying twenty hours to get there. The stunt was simple-just jumping down from a castle wall to a tree below. The first time I tried it, the stunt went perfectly, but I wasn’t satisfied with the take. I tried it again, and the second time, I somehow missed the branch I was trying to grab. Whish! I fell past the tree and onto the ground below. Actually, there was a cameraman down there trying to capture a low angle, and if he hadn’t scrambled out of the way, I would have probably landed on him. We would both have been hurt, but not badly. Instead, I hit the rocky ground head first. A piece of my skull cracked and shot up into my brain, and blood poured from my ears. The production team quickly got on the phones to try to find the nearest hospital that could do emergency brain surgery, and eight hours later, I was going under the knife. The operation was successful, and I recovered quickly-even though there’s a permanent hole in my head now, with a plastic plug there to keep my brains in”
“While I was shooting a fight scene in Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow, my arm was accidentally slashed by a sword that should have had a blunted edge. Blood went everywhere, and I fell down screaming … and the camera kept rolling! That’s real pain you see in the movie!”
“I broke my ankle while jumping onto a hovercraft in Rumble in the Bronx. After the bone was set and a cast was put on, I was told to stay off my feet until it healed. But I had a movie to finish! I went back to the set and put a sock on my broken foot, painted to look like a sneaker.”
Outtakes from one of my favourite Jackie Chan fights, from Young Master:
Francis Ford Coppola on 
“While I was shooting a fight scene in Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow, my arm was accidentally slashed by a sword that should have had a blunted edge. Blood went everywhere, and I fell down screaming … and the camera kept rolling! That’s real pain you see in the movie!” 
Dysonology 