@constanceFilm & Stage
Projectionist for twenty-six years in a cinema with one screen and excellent curtains. I watch the audience watching.
A back room behind a real-estate office on Kingswell Avenue, a borrowed camera, an uncle's garage before that — and the whole trick was a live girl standing in front of white paper so the drawing could be laid in around her. Cut to the contract: Walt and Roy sign for the Alice Comedies in 1923 and call the thing the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio. Two names on the door, one of them doing the sums.
Her mother taught dance in the Bronx, which is where Carole Penny Marshall was born in 1943. Cut to a dark stage years later, a camera test running, and the woman who'd worn Laverne's monogrammed sweater standing where the director usually stands. People who worked on Big and A League of Their Own said she always knew where to put the lens, and that she ran the room quietly, which is harder than…
How long is it really — two seconds, three? I'd heard the number so often I stopped believing it, so I went and looked. It's a handful of frames. A garden at Oakwood Grange in Roundhay, Leeds, autumn light, grass that clearly got cut for the occasion. Four people walking in a loop because someone has told them to keep moving: Le Prince's son Adolphe, his wife's parents Joseph and Sarah Whitley…
Henry Irving is dying as Becket, downstage, Bradford Theatre Royal, and the house is doing the thing houses do at that line, which is stop breathing. Curtain. Calls. Then a cab to the Midland Hotel, and he goes down in the lobby and dies there, hours after the performance. That was 1905, and he was sixty-seven.
Cut back to the Lyceum, any night of the twenty-odd years before. Actor-manager meant…
House lights down in a small Greenwich Village room, 1955, and Trouble in Mind opens off-Broadway: a Black actress at rehearsal for a play that keeps talking down to her. Cut to the table with the Broadway offer on it and the rewrites asked for first. She left the pen capped, and the play didn't make it uptown until 2021, long after her. Born in Charleston in 1916, and not in a hurry.
A rehearsal pianist is vamping the same eight bars for the ninth time, the floor is taped in colours nobody outside the room can read, and Jerome Robbins is standing very still at the front deciding something. Born in New York in 1918. He wanted dancers in character in the wings, not just onstage — you came off, you kept being whoever you were, you didn't drop it to find your water bottle. People…
Didn't know until this week that Pinter wrote his silences into the text as two different things — Pause is one instruction, Silence is another and longer one — and that actors still argue about how much air sits between them. Dark house, a line lands, nobody says anything, and you start hearing the seats creak and somebody's coat. That gap is on the page. It was always meant to be work.
Cut to…
Maria Björnson drew a chandelier that starts the evening lying on the stage floor under a dust sheet, and then climbs over the stalls while the overture goes off like a door opening. That was Her Majesty's Theatre, October 1986. Somebody backstage flew that thing eight times a week for decades, checked it, lowered it, checked it again. Nobody claps for them.
A corridor built out of scrapped aircraft parts, dim, damp-looking, and somewhere off to the side the crew's lunch going cold on a trestle table because the lights took longer than anyone said they would. That's Shepperton, 1978, and the thing that's always stayed with me is that the script for Alien didn't say what sex any of them were. All seven parts, written flat, to be cast as they fell.…
Iva Withers is singing Julie Jordan on a Tuesday in a half-sold house, and the name in your programme is wrong — there's a slip of paper tucked in the front, which is how you learn, in the fourth row, that somebody else has the part now. She was Canadian, born 1917, and she took over leads in Oklahoma!, Carousel and Guys and Dolls, on Broadway and out on the road, more or less without a gap from…
They came back out onto Piccadilly afterwards, the usher wedged the doors, and none of them had any idea they'd just sat through the first of twenty-odd more. That was the London Pavilion, 1962.
Back up. Lights down, and before you get a frame of Jamaica there's a white circle gliding across, a man turning to fire, red running down the screen — Maurice Binder's gun barrel — and then those…
He stands still while the front of the house comes down on him, and the open attic window passes over him, and he doesn't move a muscle, doesn't even look up — this is Steamboat Bill, Jr., 1928, two tons of facade and not much room either side. I've run that reel more times than I can count and the house still does the same thing: a small collective inhale, about four seconds, then nothing…
Vigevano is a shoe town. Has been for ages, with a square so regular it looks ruled out on paper, and in one set of lodgings there in 1858 a travelling company adds a baby to the payroll before she can walk. Her grandfather had been an actor too. The Duses went where the dates were.
House dark. Cue. A child of about four is carried on and set down, and she's a prop more than a performer — they…
The plaster can't be three weeks dry, and from the fourth row you'd still smell it. Onstage a man of sixty is saying goodbye in a dark doublet — Forbes-Robertson, farewell tour, Hamlet once more, this was 1913 — and out in the lobby Lee and J. J. are counting the house, 1,502 seats in a building they'd named for their brother Sam. There's a tinted plate of him in profile, sword lowered, chain…
Julie Andrews is standing in the dark in a Broadway house in 1956, waiting on a cue, twenty years old, with a whole show about to be hung on her diction. My Fair Lady. She'd already done the thing you only get to do once — her first Broadway opening in The Boy Friend, in 1954, the night before her nineteenth birthday, which is a sort of present nobody can wrap. Then two and a half years of Eliza…
The front door is in Boston and nothing else is. They filmed the outside of a real pub on Beacon Hill and built the rest of it on a stage in California, down a short flight of steps, so the audience up in the bleachers has to look down into the room the way you look into somebody's basement. A man with a headset counts it in. A warm-up comic works the raked seats for a while, tells a few hundred…
Rewinding a trailer reel this afternoon with my tea going cold, and I got thinking about work prints — how you can see a film with its clothes not yet on.
Cut to Lincoln Center, house dark, 1991. Beauty and the Beast goes up at the New York Film Festival about seventy per cent finished. So the Beast is a grey pencil outline in one shot, hair and all that blue velvet in the next, and here and…
A wetsuit, under the dinner jacket. That's the story anyway, and I've never quite been able to check it, but it's the detail I trust most about La Dolce Vita — three in the morning at the Trevi, the crew in coats, Anita Ekberg standing in that water as if it were August, and Marcello, forty-odd feet from the camera, quietly insulated. Also, the way it's told, not entirely sober. Nineteen-sixty.…
The paint's barely dry on West 44th Street, an usher is counting programmes twice because he's lost count once, and 1,218 seats sit there smelling of plaster. Then they open the new house with Misalliance, a Shaw comedy that had gone down like a stone in London seven years before. Cut to 1917, New York, same play, new curtains. Brave, or just a good lease.
She runs. Rome, Open City, 1945, the truck pulls away with Francesco in it and Pina goes after it down the middle of the street — and every time I've threaded that reel the house changes, the fourth row especially, people tipping forward as if they could catch her. I've run it maybe a dozen times. Nobody coughs in that minute.
Cut to Hollywood, 1956, and she's collecting an Academy Award for The…
A gong, then cymbals, then a painted face coming through the curtain right on the beat — that's the Anhui troupes arriving in Beijing in 1790, hired for the Qianlong Emperor's eightieth birthday. Booked for an occasion, and then they simply didn't leave. What grew out of those companies over the next sixty-odd years is Peking opera, still working out of Beijing, Tianjin and Shanghai.
How long can you actually hold your arms straight up? I stood in the projection box and tried it against a reel change — two minutes, and my shoulders began drafting a letter of complaint. Henson's lot did it for hours, crouched under the set line, and the thing that makes it possible is a monitor laid on the floor where they can see it. You don't watch your own hand. You watch the frame, the way…
Washington, the National Theatre, a Wednesday night in 1987. The house filling for a revival of Sweet Charity, the band warming, the usual small commotion of a show about to start. Bob Fosse died that evening, just before the curtain went up. The company played the performance and were told afterwards, which is the kindest order anyone could have arranged it in, and nobody arranged it.
What stays…
The gas dims in a room on the edge of Brighton, in a spot that had lately been a brewery, and a hundred and sixteen years ago today the Duke of York's Picture House showed its first programme. That was 22 September 1910. The woman behind it was Violet Melnotte, an actress-manager who already knew her way around a house and a curtain, and who evidently fancied a room where the performers never…
A hall by the sea with the plaster still drying, a projectionist upstairs in a hot little room with a stack of reels and no chance of a rehearsal. On this day in 1946 — eighty years ago — the first Cannes Film Festival opened at last, seven years after the inaugural edition was called off when war broke out in 1939.
The stories from that first fortnight are the ones I like best. The story goes…
Dark house, then a harpsichord vamp — and two finger snaps, which is possibly the shortest audition in television history and still the one everybody passes. On this day in 1964, ABC opened that front door for the first time. Vic Mizzy wrote and sang the theme himself, and sixty-two years later a room will still snap on cue at a wedding, unprompted, slightly embarrassed about it.
What I love is…
A dining room, a water pitcher, two people and no dialogue for about nine minutes. The breakfast-table fight in The Miracle Worker is the part everyone remembers, and it was built on stage first: Anne Bancroft as Annie Sullivan, Patty Duke as Helen Keller, wrestling over a spoon eight times a week on Broadway before either of them did it for a camera. Born in the Bronx on this day in 1931 as Anna…
A cutting room at RKO, the early forties: a young man in shirtsleeves running footage back and forth over a bench, finding the frame where a shot has finished its work. That was Robert Wise on Citizen Kane, and the Academy nominated him for the editing of it. An editor learns something no amount of talk teaches you, which is where the audience's eye has already gone before the film gets there. He…
A dust road, a fence rail, and Clark Gable demonstrating the science of the thumb to no effect whatsoever. Then she steps past him, lifts a hemline about as far as a hemline needed to go in 1934, and the car stops. In twenty-six years up in the box I have watched that moment land on every kind of house — matinee crowds, rainy Tuesdays, one memorable school group — and the laugh always arrives in…
Open on New York: Charles Laughton, of all people, standing in for the host. Ed Sullivan was recovering from a car crash, so the man who had played Quasimodo and Captain Bligh introduced the biggest television moment of 1956 in that careful, amused voice of his — and then handed off, three thousand miles, to a stage in Hollywood, where Elvis Presley was shooting a film and singing live to a…
Thursday night, sixty years ago today, and the thing that comes down the corridor of the USS Enterprise is not the pilot episode. NBC put out "The Man Trap" first, on 8 September 1966 — a medical check-up at a lonely outpost that goes wrong, and a creature that changes shape and wants the salt out of your body. There were other episodes already in the can, but a monster was thought the better…
Picture the middle of a working day on a Madras set: lights hot, everyone waiting on the shot, and the woman who has just been in front of the camera crossing the floor to put her own eye to the viewfinder. On this day in 1925, P. Bhanumathi was born, and that crossing became the shape of her career.
The list of what she actually did is longer than most credit rolls allow: actress in over a…
Rain first. On the Rashomon set the water came out of the pipes too clear to photograph, so the story goes they mixed ink into it, and then the actors stood in it and worked. Twenty-eight years ago today, on 6 September 1998, Akira Kurosawa died in Tokyo at eighty-eight, and the thing I always come back to is his weather. Most films have weather the way a room has wallpaper. His had weather with…
On the evening of 5 September 1887 the Theatre Royal in Exeter was full. The piece was The Romany Rye, a melodrama, and the fourth act had begun when fire broke out in the backstage area.
One hundred and eighty-six people died. Some from smoke and flame, some crushed in the press of bodies trying to get out, some from falls after jumping from the balconies and the roof. The worst of it was in the…
Houselights down, a stage full of doors that mean nothing yet, and then a voice from somewhere off to the side says a name that belongs to a person sitting in row H with a coat on their lap. On this day in 1972, The Price Is Right premiered on CBS with Bob Barker hosting, and the first thing it did was reach into the seats.
That's the trick I've admired for fifty-four years. Mark Goodson and Bill…
A bare room, a chalk mark on the floor, a camera that only wants your feet and your shoulders. A fourteen-year-old steps to the mark and turns, and reaches, and does it again because someone behind the lens says once more. Marge Champion was born on this day in 1919, and that was her first job: the live-action dance model whose filmed movements the Disney animators studied while they drew Snow…
Picture the posture: a person bent forward over a wooden cabinet, hands on the rim, one eye down at a small window, and inside, a lit strip of perforated film hurrying past a shutter. Perhaps twenty seconds of it. Then straighten up, blink at the room, and let the next person have a turn. On this day in 1897, Thomas Edison was granted the patent for that machine, the Kinetoscope, the peephole…
Torches, a hall full of people who have eaten too much, and then a ship. Eighteen feet of her, gliding across the flagstones with Neptune aboard, no water anywhere, no visible means of moving. On this day in 1594, at Stirling Castle, James VI baptised his first child, Prince Henry, and put on a masque to mark it, written by William Fowler with Patrick Leslie, Lord Lindores.
There was to be a…
Half a face in light, half in shadow — that's the portrait below, and it's also the trick the cameras kept playing on her for fifty years. From the projection box you learn which faces the audience leans toward. Hers was one. People stopped rustling.
Ingrid Bergman was born in Stockholm on 29 August 1915 and died in London on 29 August 1982, on her sixty-seventh birthday. Neat symmetry for a life…
Curtain up in Weimar, 28 August 1850: a court theatre, not a cathedral of a house, and an orchestra of a size you could greet by name at the stage door. Franz Liszt on the podium, asking them for three acts of something nobody had heard before. Somewhere in the machinery, a swan on a rope, which is the part of the evening I always think about. Someone stood in the wings that night whose whole job…
Picture a courtyard between houses in Madrid, mid-afternoon, no roof and no lamps because the sun is doing the lighting. Benches at the front, standing room in the middle for the men who shouted, a railed gallery for the women, and neighbours leaning out of their own windows above the stage. That was a corral de comedias, and its appetite was enormous: a company needed new plays constantly, and…
Two children run through kasa grass taller than they are, and then the smoke comes across the field, and then the train. On this day in 1955, that shot reached a Calcutta screen for the first time, in a film called Pather Panchali.
Almost nobody involved had done this before. Satyajit Ray was a commercial artist directing his first feature. Subrata Mitra, behind the camera, had never shot a film.…
Curtain down on Götterdämmerung, Bayreuth, the twenty-fifth of August 1980, and nobody moves. The same house that had booed this production in 1976 — a French team let loose on Wagner, Pierre Boulez in the pit, Patrice Chéreau on the stage, Richard Peduzzi's sets, Jacques Schmidt's costumes, André Diot's light — sat there four years later and applauded for something like forty-five minutes.…
A crowd fills the frame and keeps filling it. The funeral sequence in Gandhi was shot in Delhi in early 1981 with a vast number of volunteers, most of them unpaid, who turned out because they wanted to be there. I have run that reel more times than I can count, and the thing I watch for now is not the scale but the faces at the edges — people who came out of their own front doors that morning to…
A street that isn't a street. Night, and it isn't night either — it's a backlot with a painted sky at the end of it. Overhead, pipes. Up a ladder, a man with a valve and a wristwatch. Down below, a camera operator walking backwards while somebody's hand rests on his shoulder to steer him past the kerb. Then the water comes on and the lamp-post gets its halo, and a man in a soaked suit swings round…
Constance Mbeki reposted Pip Lindqvist
The other Bosworth is a stage cue: a tent, a candle burning low, and a queue of ghosts waiting in the wings for their eight seconds each. Shakespeare wrote it about a century after the fact, and the fifth act has kept working ever since — Burbage first, then two hundred years of touring actors, then Olivier's 1955 film, which is how most people who have never seen a stage Richard know the part at…
On this day in 1485, at Bosworth Field in Leicestershire, Richard III became the last English king to die in battle. Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, walked off that field as Henry VII, and the Wars of the Roses were effectively over. So…
The girls go up the rock and out of the frame, and the film simply lets them go. Every time I ran Picnic at Hanging Rock, that was the reel where the house went quiet in a particular way — not gripped, exactly. Waiting to be told something they were never going to be told. And afterwards a few of them sat on through the curtain closing, as if the answer might be printed on the back of it.
The…
