morning computer split screen

A split screen shows two tightly synchronized, “impossible” shots of the same scene: a moving POV camera showing what the central character is looking at, and a stationary wide shot, both framing the entire action simultaneously. The deliberate positioning of the static, detached view above the erratic, close-up subjective POV of the central character lends an uneasy feeling to it.

You don’t expect many surprises on a memoir book tour—unless, of course, you’re Barry Diller and you drop a nuclear-grade anecdote about Robert Altman’s “Popeye” being less a film shoot and more a Mediterranean coke-fueled fever dream (via Entertainment Weekly)

During a Q&A at New York’s 92Y, where Diller was promoting his new memoir “Who Knew,” Anderson Cooper asked the former Paramount CEO to name the most coked-up film set he ever visited. Diller didn’t even blink: “Popeye.”

Yes, that “Popeye” —the deranged 1980 musical oddity where Robin Williams muttered into his prosthetic chin as Shelley Duvall gave perhaps the most Olive Oyl performance in the history of Olive Oyls. A movie that plays like it was directed by someone who’d just crushed a Scarface-sized mound of blow

Sarah Maldoror refused to settle. In 1970, when the Guadeloupean-French filmmaker was living in Algeria with her partner, Angolan poet and revolutionary Mário Pinto de Andrade, she went to Guinea-Bissau to make a movie about the freedom struggle against Portuguese colonial rule. The project, titled Guns for Banta, was funded by the newly independent Algerian government, but when Maldoror returned and presented her first cut, the authorities were appalled at her choice of a female protagonist and her use of jazz, which was viewed as an American (and therefore imperialist) export. Maldoror was enraged, and cursed out the officer who delivered the news, calling him “capitaine de merde” (literally, “captain of shit”). She was given 48 hours to leave the country with her family, abandoning the footage she had shot, or she would face death.

morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.

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