The Auteurs Film & Cast Member Database
Urusei Yatsura Movie 2 Beautiful Dreamer
(original title: Urusei Yatsura 2: Byûtifuru dorîmâ)
Synposis – Not all is normal in Tomobiki, even by its standards. The students have been preparing feverishly for the first day of the student fair, which is scheduled to go on the next day. However, problems arise when some begin to notice that the next day simply will not come. As the students begin to try to find the reason for the problem, their beliefs about reality and the world of dreams are challenged. — animenewsnetwork.com
Director – Mamoru Oshii
Producer – Hiroshi Hasegawa, Hidenori Taga
Screenwriter – Mamoru Oshii
Editor – Seiji Morita
Music – Katsu Hoshi
Sound – Shigeharu Shiba
The Eiger Sanction is in colour and the language is English.
Quote:
“I guess the only form of entertainment I haven’t done is circus.”
Bio:
Gloria Mildred DeHaven (born July 23, 1925) is an American actress and a former contract star for MGM.
DeHaven was born in Los Angeles, California, the daughter of actor-director, Carter DeHaven, and actress, Flora Parker DeHaven, both former vaudeville performers.
She began her career as a child actor with a bit part in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936). She was signed to a contract with MGM Studios. Despite featured roles in such films as The Thin Man Goes Home (1944) and Summer Stock (1950), and being voted by exhibitors as the third most likely to be a “star of tomorrow’” in 19442, she did not achieve film stardom. She portrayed her mother in the Fred Astaire film Three Little Words (1950).
DeHaven also appeared as a regular in the television series’ and soap operas As the World Turns, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and Ryan’s Hope. She was one of the numerous celebrities enticed to appear in the all-star box office flop, Won Ton Ton, the Dog Who Saved Hollywood (1976), and has guest starred in such television series as Robert Montgomery Presents, Appointment with Adventure (episode entitled “The Snow People”), The Guy Mitchell Show, The Rifleman, Wagon Train, The Lloyd Bridges Show, Marcus Welby, M.D., Gunsmoke, Mannix, Fantasy Island, Hart to Hart, The Love Boat, Highway to Heaven, Murder, She Wrote and Touched by an Angel.
From January 1969 to February 1971 DeHaven hosted a morning call-in movie show, Prize Movie, on WABC-TV in New York City.
DeHaven has been married four times to three different men. Her first husband was actor, John Payne, star of The Restless Gun television series, whom she married on December 28, 1944, and divorced in 1950. Her second husband was Martin Kimmel; they were married June 21, 1953, and divorced the following year. She was married to Richard Fincher from 1957 until 1963; they remarried in 1965 and divorced again in 1969.
She has two children with Payne, daughter, Kathleen Hope (born 1945), and son, Thomas John Payne (born 1947). She has two additional children with Fincher, son, Harry (born 1958), and daughter, Faith (born 1962).
DeHaven has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6933 Hollywood Blvd.—Wikipedia
Quote:
“I don’t know why I did it [rejecting a role in “The Mountain”]. It’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever done. I have absolutely no explanation."
Bio:
Marla English (born January 4, 1934, in San Diego, California) is a motion picture actress from San Diego, California, who made movies in the 1950s.
English was originally signed to a contract by Paramount Pictures after winning a San Diego beauty pageant. She was paid $100 per picture to appear in such films as Red Garters (1954) and Rear Window (1954).
She received a major break when she was cast opposite Spencer Tracy in The Mountain, a film which was to be made in France. Marla was given a smallpox vaccine before leaving to go on location. She quickly developed a raging fever and decided to pull out of the movie. Paramount suspended English and replaced her with Barbara Darrow. Parade Magazine questioned English about her decision in September 1955. She said it was a very dumb move and was unsure why she decided against making The Mountain. A close relative told the publication that English had fallen in love with Paramount actor Larry Pennell. She became enraged when the studio would not give Pennell a role in the film so they could travel to France together.
English made mostly B-movie films throughout her career in Hollywood. Some of these include Three Bad Sisters (1956), Runaway Daughters (1956), The She Creature (1956), Flesh and the Spur (1957), and Voodoo Woman (1957). In 1955, she appeared with John Ireland and Pennell in Hell’s Horizon.
She gave up her acting career in 1956 when she became engaged to San Diego businessman A. Paul Sutherland. English was just 21 at the time.—Wikipedia
photo for scott walker
quote: “I’ve become the Orson Welles of the record industry. People want to take me to lunch, but nobody wants to finance the picture…I keep hoping that when I make a record, I’ll be asked to make another one. I keep hoping that if I can make a series of three records, then I can progress and do different things each time. But when I have to get it up once every 10 years… it’s a tough way to work.” —in an interview for The Independent, April 1995
Scott Walker (Noel Scott Engel) is an American singer who has lived and worked in England since 1965. Originally discovered by Eddie Fisher and cast as a late-50s teen idol under his real name, he formed The Walker Brothers in the early ’60s and performed Phil Spector-influenced ballads. In 1967 the band broke up and Scott (taking the band’s name for his own) began a solo career. His heavily orchestrated versions of songs by Jacques Brel and others, delivered in a crooning style, became immensely popular in Britain and continental Europe. Since the 1970s his output has been sporadic, first touching on country and MOR sounds, then briefly rejoining The Walker Brothers, before heading off into experimental music, yet continuing critical respect to the present day.
His albums “Tilt” and “the Drift”, differ a lot from his earlier work.
His current artistic direction is extremely avant-garde and has been described as the “sound of nightmares”.
His musical evolution is examined in the acclaimed documentary film “Scott Walker – 30 Century Man” in which Walker gives a very candid interview about his creative process and allows access into the meat-punching and box-bashing recording sessions for 2006’s “The Drift.” —LastFM
quote: “Curiosity provoked me to lay a lot of our country stuff on our predominantly black audience and some of our black audience began whispering ‘who is that black hillbilly at the Cosmo?’ After they laughed at me a few times they began requesting the hillbilly stuff and enjoyed dancing to it.”
Charles Edward Anderson “Chuck” Berry (born October 18, 1926) is an American guitarist, singer and songwriter, and one of the pioneers of rock and roll music. With songs such as “Maybellene” (1955), “Roll Over Beethoven” (1956), “Rock and Roll Music” (1957) and “Johnny B. Goode” (1958), Chuck Berry refined and developed rhythm and blues into the major elements that made rock and roll distinctive, with lyrics focusing on teen life and consumerism and utilizing guitar solos and showmanship that would be a major influence on subsequent rock music.
Born into a middle class family in St. Louis, Missouri, Berry had an interest in music from an early age and gave his first public performance at Sumner High School. While still a high school student he served a prison sentence for armed robbery between 1944 and 1947. On his release, Berry settled into married life and worked at an automobile assembly plant. By early 1953, influenced by the guitar riffs and showmanship techniques of blues player T-Bone Walker, he was performing in the evenings with the Johnnie Johnson Trio. His break came when he traveled to Chicago in May 1955, and met Muddy Waters, who suggested he contact Leonard Chess of Chess Records. With Chess he recorded "Maybellene"—Berry’s adaptation of the country song “Ida Red”—which sold over a million copies, reaching No. 1 on Billboard’s Rhythm and Blues chart. By the end of the 1950s, Berry was an established star with several hit records and film appearances to his name as well as a lucrative touring career. He had also established his own St. Louis-based nightclub, called Berry’s Club Bandstand. But in January 1962, Berry was sentenced to three years in prison for offenses under the Mann Act—he had transported a 14-year-old girl across state lines.
After his release in 1963, Berry had several more hits, including “No Particular Place to Go”, “You Never Can Tell”, and “Nadine”, but these did not achieve the same success, or lasting impact, of his 1950s songs, and by the 1970s he was more in demand as a nostalgic live performer, playing his past hits with local backup bands of variable quality. His insistence on being paid cash led to a jail sentence in 1979—four months and community service for tax evasion.
Berry was among the first musicians to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on its opening in 1986, with the comment that he “laid the groundwork for not only a rock and roll sound but a rock and roll stance.” Berry is included in several Rolling Stone “Greatest of All Time” lists, including being ranked fifth on their 2004 list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll included three of Chuck Berry’s songs: “Johnny B. Goode”, “Maybellene”, and “Rock and Roll Music”. Today – at the age of 85 – Berry continues to play live. —wikipedia
Summary for The Third Secret
A prominent London analyst seems to have taken his own life, causing stunned disbelief amongst his colleagues and patients. His teenage daughter refuses to believe it was suicide as this would go against all of the principles her father stood for, therefore she is convinced it was murder. She enlists the help of a former patient to try to get to the truth. The truth, however, turns out to be both surprising and disturbing. —IMDb
Summary for And Soon the Darkness
Jane and Cathy, two English women in their early twenties, are on a cycling tour of France. While traveling in rural France, they begin to disagree about the route. Cathy would prefer to take things in at a leisurely pace, while Jane is trying to stick to strict schedule. After arguing, they part ways. When her friend fails to rejoin her, Jane begins to worry and returns to the last place she saw her. Cathy has vanished. Alone and with a limited knowledge of French, Jane doesn’t know who to trust as she frantically searches for her missing friend. —IMDb
Amjad Khan has two pages in need of merging: http://mubi.com/cast_members/76237 AND http://mubi.com/cast_members/15005
Leela Naidu has two pages in need of merging: http://mubi.com/cast_members/14930 AND http://mubi.com/cast_members/75438
Amitabh Bachchan (http://mubi.com/cast_members/27868), Amjad Khan (http://mubi.com/cast_members/76237) and Jaya Bhaduri (http://mubi.com/cast_members/72182) need to be added as cast members of Sholay: http://mubi.com/films/sholay
Farida Jalal needs to be added as a cast member of Aradhana: http://mubi.com/films/aradhana
Shakti Samanta (http://mubi.com/cast_members/41773) is the director of Aradhana and not a cast member: http://mubi.com/films/aradhana
Sagar Sarhadi (http://mubi.com/cast_members/57259) is the director of Bazaar and not a cast member: http://mubi.com/films/bazaar
Lekin (http://mubi.com/films/lekin) has a duplicate page: http://mubi.com/films/lekin—2
Gazal (http://mubi.com/films/gazal—2) has a duplicate page: http://mubi.com/films/gazal
The Chess Players (http://mubi.com/films/the-chess-players) has a duplicate page: http://mubi.com/films/shatranj-ke-khilari
Laaga Chunari Mein Daag (http://mubi.com/films/laaga-chunari-mein-daag) has a duplicate page: http://mubi.com/films/journey-of-a-woman
Munna Bhai M.B.B.S. (http://mubi.com/films/munnabhai-mbbs) has a duplicate page: http://mubi.com/films/munna-bhai
Sadhana (http://mubi.com/cast_members/237740) has a duplicate page: http://mubi.com/cast_members/40104
Vyjayanthimala has several pages in need of merging, and the correct spelling of her name is “Vyjayanthimala”: http://mubi.com/cast_members/33721 AND http://mubi.com/cast_members/235826 AND http://mubi.com/cast_members/238305 AND http://mubi.com/cast_members/270722
Still for Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp (http://mubi.com/films/aladdin-38-the-wonderful-lamp)
Still for Aah (http://mubi.com/films/aah)
Still for Baat Ek Raat Ki (http://mubi.com/films/baat-ek-raat-ki)
Still for Hare Rama Hare Krishna (http://mubi.com/films/hare-rama-hare-krishna)
Still for Hum Paanch (http://mubi.com/films/hum-paanch)
Still for Jewel Thief (http://mubi.com/films/jewel-thief)
Still for Silsila (http://mubi.com/films/silsila)
Still for Solva Saal (http://mubi.com/films/solva-saal)
Still for Neel Kamal (http://mubi.com/films/neel-kamal)
Still for Shagoon (http://mubi.com/films/shagoon)
Still for Patthar Ke Sanam (http://mubi.com/films/patthar-ke-sanam)
Still for Fakira (http://mubi.com/films/fakira)
Still for Swami (http://mubi.com/films/swami)
Still for Pestonjee (http://mubi.com/films/pestonjee)
Still for Main Azaad Hoon (http://mubi.com/films/main-azaad-hoon)
Still for Bazaar (http://mubi.com/films/bazaar)
Still for Anamika (http://mubi.com/films/anamika)
Still for Koshish (http://mubi.com/films/koshish)
The Beach Boys are an American rock band, formed in 1961 in Hawthorne, California. The group initially comprised brothers Brian, Dennis and Carl Wilson, their cousin Mike Love, and friend Al Jardine. They were managed early on by the Wilsons’ father, Murry. The band’s leader, composer, arranger and producer, Brian Wilson was responsible for writing most of the band’s early singles and albums. After signing with Capitol Records in mid-1962, Wilson wrote or co-wrote more than two dozen Top 40 hits including “Surfin’ Safari”, “Surfin’ USA”, “Surfer Girl”, “Little Deuce Coupe”, “Be True to Your School”, “In My Room”, “Fun, Fun, Fun”, “I Get Around”, “Dance Dance Dance”, “Help Me Rhonda” and “California Girls”. These songs and their accompanying albums were internationally popular, making The Beach Boys one of the biggest acts of their time. The band’s early music gained popularity across the United States for its close vocal harmonies and lyrics reflecting a Southern California youth culture of surfing, cars, and romance. By the mid-1960s, Brian’s growing creative ambition and songwriting ability would dominate the group’s musical direction. The primarily Brian-composed Pet Sounds album and “Good Vibrations” single (both released in 1966) featured a complex, intricate and multi-layered sound.
However, Brian would soon lose control of the band because of problems with his mental health and substance abuse. This led to the cancellation of the anticipated follow up to Pet Sounds, Smile. Subsequently, although they released a number of highly artistic albums (in various musical styles, with different line-ups) in ensuing years, particularly in the years 1967–1973, the group never managed to reclaim its mid-1960s peak when The Beach Boys challenged The Beatles both in terms of commercial and critical appeal. Since the 1980s, there has been much legal wrangling among the group members over royalties, songwriting credits, and use of the band’s name. Following the release of their studio album Stars and Stripes Vol. 1 in 1996, a number of versions of the band, each fronted by a surviving member of the original quintet (Dennis and Carl Wilson died in 1983 and 1998, respectively), continued to tour until the announcement in late 2011 of a full-scale reunion—including Brian—for 2012 along with the band’s twenty-ninth studio album That’s Why God Made the Radio, released on June 5, 2012.
The Beach Boys have often been called “America’s Band”, and Allmusic has stated that “the band’s unerring ability… made them America’s first, best rock band.”The group has had 36 US Top 40 hits (the most by an American rock band) and 56 Hot 100 hits, including four number-one singles. Rolling Stone magazine listed The Beach Boys at number 12 on its 2004 list of the “100 Greatest Artists of All Time,” the highest ranking for an American rock band. The group is also one of America’s best-selling acts, having sold over 100 million albums worldwide since their debut in 1961. Brian Wilson, Carl Wilson, Dennis Wilson, Mike Love, and Al Jardine were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988. Since the 1990s many of the group’s later albums and singles have been re-evaluated by critics and fans with albums such as Sunflower, Surf’s Up and the finally released Smile albums being seen as worthy successors to their earlier output. —wikipedia
Quote:
“I made these movies purely out of love of film making, with no profit motive in mind. I would describe them as expressions of the way an artist approaches a canvas.”
Bio:
In 1940 Lloyd M. Williams was born in Brooklyn, New York. His first interest in motion was with marionettes. He became involved with photography and by the time he was thirteen was making films. During high school Lloyd was an usher at Cinema 16 in New York City, the only venue exhibiting 16mm experimental movies. Inspired by the poem by Lewis Carroll, and the work he was seeing, Lloyd made Jabberwock and won the Silver Medallion at the Cannes Film Festival, 1959.
Lloyd entered New York University majoring in Film, Television & Radio. They’re Off was made at the NYU Summer Motion Picture Workshop, which Lloyd directed in 1959. In 1960 Lloyd worked with Mary Ellen Bute on The Boy with Green Hair. He produced Ursula while he was a student and won the Bronze Medallion at Cannes in 1961. The Creation is more directed at radio and television commercials than at religion, it points out mankind’s blind belief in both.
After graduating in 1962, Lloyd moved to Chicago to work for the Fred Niles Film Company. He was an assistant director for TV commercials for many familiar household products. Returning to New York, he worked for Ogilvy Benson & Mather, an advertising agency on Madison Avenue. Lloyd designed commercial story boards and became an assistant producer of television commercials, and a member of the Directors Guild of America.
In 1964 Lloyd won a Fulbright to study cinematography in France and while in Paris began shooting sequences for Line of Apogee. Electronic music pioneer Vladimir Ussachevsky thought so much of the film he composed the original electronic score.
In 1975 Suzanne Ciani, famous for the electronic sound heard around the world, the Coca Cola Pop ‘n Pour, composed the sound track for Rainbow’s Children.
“In Rainbow’s Children Lloyd Williams reveals the dreamer awakening; erotic displacements of dreams are transformed into the erotic realities of life itself — although still poetically suffused with a dream like languor which the filmmaker cannot escape. The texture of flesh, the ambiguity of longing and the colors of psychedelic apotheosis all merge into a languorous ecstasy which Lloyd Williams is adept in translating into the medium of film. All the varieties of film technique: slow motion, multiple-exposure, fast motion, camera in full flight and frozen image, he uses for the revelation of his intense fantasy, whether from dreams or from real-life or from hallucinated contemplation. His work shows that the dreamer is, indeed, awakening into a whole new world of erotic fantasy, muted with desire. If hard core films shock you, the films of Lloyd Williams will caress you.” — Quote from Charles Boultenhouse, Screening the Sexes by Parker Tyler, publisher Holt, Reinhart & Winston.
In the mid seventies Lloyd served as cinematographer for Rosa Von Praunheim and began shooting film with his protégé, Adrian Salsgiver. But in 1979, Lloyd’s Bolex movie camera was stolen. Lloyd picked up a Bolex again in 1997 to act as cinematographer for Adrian. Adrian taught himself computer film editing and used Lloyd’s old and new film to create Rainbow’s Child, completed in 2001. In 2003, Lloyd and Adrian collaborated on a digital movie, The Kingdom of UUFH, documenting the 31st and final Renaissance Faire of Huntington, NY.
Lloyd made other 16mm films not yet digitized. Special thanks to Jonas Mekas for the safekeeping of Lloyd’s film.
Lloyd lives on Long Island and is an active member of the New American Cinema Group.—lloydmichaelwilliams.com
Quote:
“When I arrived in New York in 1935, I was amazed at the difference in scale between the people and the buildings.”
Bio:
Rudy Burckhardt (1914, Basel – 1999) was a Swiss-American filmmaker, and photographer, known for his photographs of hand-painted billboards which began to dominate the American landscape in the nineteen-forties and fifties.
Burckhardt discovered photography as a medical student in London. He left medicine to pursue photography in the 1930s. He immigrated to New York City in 1935. Between 1934 and 1939, he traveled to Paris, New York and Haiti making photographs mostly of city streets and experimenting with short 16mm films. While stationed in Trinidad in the Signal Corps from 1941-1944, he filmed the island’s residents. In 1947, he joined the Photo League in New York City. Burckhardt married painter Yvonne Jacquette whom he collaborated with throughout their 40 year marriage. He taught filmmaking and painting at the University of Pennsylvania from 1967 to 1975.
On his 85th birthday, Burckhardt committed suicide by drowning in the lake on his property.—Wikipedia
Marvin Pentz Gay, Jr. (April 2, 1939 – April 1, 1984), better known by his stage name Marvin Gaye (he added the ‘e’ as a young man), was an acclaimed American singer-songwriter and musician with a three-octave vocal range, who achieved major success in the 1960s and 1970s as an artist for the Motown Records label. He was shot dead by his father on April 1, 1984.
Starting his career as a member of the doo-wop group The Moonglows in the late 1950s, he ventured into a solo career after the group disbanded in 1960, signing with Motown Records subsidiary, Tamla. He started off as a session drummer, but later ranked as the label’s top-selling solo artist during the 1960s. He was crowned “The Prince of Motown” and “The Prince of Soul” because of solo hits such as “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved by You)”, “Ain’t That Peculiar”, “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” and his duet singles with singers such as Mary Wells and Tammi Terrell.
His work in the early- and mid-1970s included the albums, What’s Going On, Let’s Get It On, and I Want You, which helped influence the quiet storm, urban adult contemporary, and slow jam genres. After a self-imposed European exile in the early 1980s, Gaye returned on the 1982 Grammy-Award winning hit, “Sexual Healing” and the Midnight Love album before his death.
In 2008, the American music magazine Rolling Stone ranked Gaye at number 6 on its list of the Greatest Singers of All Time, and ranked at number 18 on 100 Greatest Artists of All Time, and he ranked number 20 on VH1’s list of 100 Greatest Artists of All Time. Gaye was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987. —wikipedia
could the admins merge these two cast members into one (into Khavn, not Khavn De La Cruz), please?
Quote:
“I was out for about 6 or 7 months [after heroin overdose], in East Elmhurst Hospital, and they gave me shock treatments and spinal taps and all kinds of things to relieve the pressure on my mind, to get my memory back, because I couldn’t remember where I was, I couldn’t remember anything about the piano or anything.”
Bio:
Malcolm Earl Waldron (August 16, 1925 – December 2, 2002) was an American jazz and world music pianist and composer, born in New York City.
Like his contemporaries, Waldron’s roots lie chiefly in the hard bop and post-bop genres of the New York club scene of the 1950s; but with time, he gravitated more towards free jazz and composition. He is known for his dissonant chord voicings and distinctive playing style, which was originally inspired by Thelonious Monk.
After obtaining a B.A. in music from Queen’s College, New York, he worked in New York City in the early 1950s with Ike Quebec, “Big Nick” Nicholas, and rhythm and blues groups. He worked frequently with Charles Mingus from 1954 to 1956 and was Billie Holiday’s regular accompanist from 1957 until her death in 1959. He also supervised recording sessions for Prestige Records, for which he provided arrangements and compositions of which arguably his most famous, “Soul Eyes”, became a widely recorded jazz standard. After Holiday’s death he chiefly led his own groups.
Waldron had a unique yet instantly recognizable playing style. He finessed thick and rich chords in the lower bass register; although sometimes compared to Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk for his dissonant voicing, his emphasis on weight, texture and frequent repetition of a single and simple motif as opposed to linear and melodic improvisation gave a heavy and melancholic color to his sound. Considered somewhat of an avant-gardist, his solo style – which often produced more of a wall of sound than a line of melody – was in stark contrast to more traditional and technical players of his time. Waldron became something of an unsung legend for his uncanny ability to play very slow, deep and even disturbing ballads bordering on sorrow, while he himself would sit perfectly motionless, stoic and stolid at the piano, his face devoid of all emotion.
Besides performing, he composed for films (The Cool World, Three Rooms in Manhattan and Sweet Love, Bitter), theater, and ballet. In 1963 he had a major nervous breakdown, and had to re-learn his skills, apparently by listening to his own records. Waldron’s playing style re-emerged more brooding, starker and percussive, combining bebop and avant-garde melodies, and at times weaving repetitive melodic motifs using just a few notes over a drone-like accompaniment figure.
After working on a film score in Europe he moved there permanently in 1965 initially living in Munich, Germany and in his last years he was based in Brussels, Belgium. He performed and recorded extensively throughout Europe and Japan in his later decades, regularly returning to the United States for bookings. His 1969 album, Free At Last, was the first ever release on the ECM label. In 1973, he collaborated with the German avant-rock band Embryo on an album of four somber, laid-back instrumentals titled Rocksession (released on the German label Brain Metronome records).
Through the 1980s and 1990s he worked in various settings with Steve Lacy, notably in soprano-piano duets playing their own compositions as well as Monk’s. After some years of indifferent health, Waldron was diagnosed with cancer in 2002. He continued to perform until his death in December 2, 2002 in Brussels, Belgium.—Wikipedia
More junk (I’m afraid to say this time)
..
Bwana Devil is in colour and the language is English.
Quote:
“…having a good start, not only do I fully intend to be the greatest architect who has yet lived, but fully intend to be the greatest architect who will ever live. Yes, I intend to be the greatest architect of all time.”
Bio:
Considered the most influential architect of his time, Frank Lloyd Wright designed about 1,000 structures, some 400 of which were built. He described his “organic architecture” as one that “proceeds, persists, creates, according to the nature of man and his circumstances as they both change.” As a pioneer whose ideas were well ahead of his time, Wright had to fight for acceptance of every new design. The famous American architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, was the son of William C. Wright and Anna Lloyd Jones in the United States in the small rural community of Richland Center, Wisconsin on June 8, 1867.
His early influences were his clergyman father’s playing of Bach and Beethoven and his mother’s gift of geometric blocks. He entered the University of Wisconsin at 15 as a special student, studying engineering because the school had no course in architecture. Wright left Madison in 1887 to work as a draftsman in Chicago.
In order to study architecture and learn the traditional, classical language, Wright, the country boy, had to go Chicago. Wright worked for several architectural offices until he finally found a job with the most cultured architect of the Mid-West, Louis Sullivan, soon becoming Sullivan’s chief assistant. That same year, in 1887, Wright carried out his first design, in a wooden version of the eclectic, Queen Anne Style, the Hillside Home School. His Charnley House of 1891 is a perfect amalgamation of these sources into his own version of Free Style Classicism.
While working on key buildings for Sullivan and Adler, to pay his many debts, in 1892 Wright also started an illicit practice of architecture at night, bootlegging houses away from the office and sharpening his own eclectic mixture of Sillsbee, Queen Anne and Sullivan classicism. Sullivan disapproved, and Wright set up his own office.
Just before his twenty-second birthday, in 1889, Wright married Catherine Lee Tobin, the daughter of a wealthy businessman, and together with Sullivan and his other contacts she gave him the cultural background he lacked; she gave him social polish as well. They settled in the exclusive, Protestant neighbourhood of Oak Park, west of the seedy part of Chigago.
In their sensitive eclecticism, Frank and Catherine fitted perfectly the comfortable assumptions of middle class life. For twenty years he brought up a thriving family of six children upstairs, and ran a thriving architectural practice of twelve or so draughtsmen downstairs. He was very much the father of both families, giving each one their central hearth.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s own house and studio, the Frank Lloyd Wright Residence, built 1889 – 1895 and later, became the laboratory for many of his experiments in domestic architecture. Here, in an idyllic American suburb, with giant oaks, sprawling lawns and no fences, Wright built some sixty rambling homes by the year 1900 (when he forged the “Prairie Style”). The Nathan Moore House, 1895, (rebuilt 1923 after a fire) is one of the best of this period – although Wright was later to think it one of his worst.
As an independent architect, Wright became the leader of a style known as the Prairie school. Houses with low-pitched roofs and extended lines that blend into the landscape typify his style of “organic architecture”. In 1904 he designed the strong, functional Larkin Building in Buffalo, N.Y., and in 1906 the Unity Temple in Oak Park.
After 1900 and his local success, Wright became immensely more ambitious and decided to take on the European avant-garde, whose work he must have known well through magazines. He fashioned a new form of horizontal streamlining – a word he claimes to have invented, and then helped form a group of architects, the “Chicago Eighteen,” which soon evolved into the “New School of the Middle West.” The Prairie House, such as the William E. Martin Residence, was the result of both efforts. Wright applied the same general principles of space and streamlining, used in his Prairie Houses, to public buildings. Even the “New Prairie Style” was conceived for domestic scale.
By the age of forty-one, in 1908, Wright had achieved extraordinary social and professional success. Yet a confusing doubt was beginning to grow, a malaise which had opposite causes not unconnected with the relation of modernism to Western traditonal architecture. During this time he was struggling with the idea that was becoming uppermost in his mind, the “Cause of American Architecture.” The idea is formulated almost as Baptist sermon by his father:
Personally, again, I have met little more than the superficial snap-judgment-insult of the artistically informed. I am quite used to it, glad to owe it nothing in any final outcome. But, meanwhile, the “Cause” suffers delay!
By 1907 with the “Cause” failing as he was formulating it, his despair with America began to grow. He started to shock the Mid-Western moral majority by flaunting married women in his grand, open car. Like a Secessionist “artiste,” he let his grow over the collar. He wore expensive clothes, flowing neckties, riding breeches and Norfolk jacket – not the attire for the Oak Park commuter. He had reached the height of his Prairie School Style.
Running of to Europe with Mamah Cheney, leaving behind his six children by Catherine and the two Cheney children, and their respective spouses, called on his deepest conviction – a rather exaggerated “Truth Against the World”? His Free Style Classicism coincided with Free Style ethics. This crisis produced a change in style, a change in philosophy. He started moving continously, sometimes hiding from the law, and building only thirty-four commissions in the next twenty-one years. The first thing he did was to retreat to his family homestead and build fortress for Mrs. Cheney and himself, (Taliesin – Welsh for “shining brow”) a defensive bastion in the wilderness from which they could fight off the onslaught of big-city morality. The “marrying” of the building and hill became the first principal of organic architecture, a principal he was later to contradict.
Unfortunately Wright also had another principal of architecture – one door for all purposes – that was abet the most tragic act that can befall anyone. A Barbados servant who, they said, was underpaid and driven mad by the unconventional lovers, had executed a revenge. He started a fire during lunch and stood by the only escape door, and then murdered, one by one, seven people, among them Mrs. Cheney and two of her children.
Wright himself was so overwhelmed that it took him ten years to recover his confidence and return to more stable existence. He remarried in 1922 to Mariam Noel, whos was his second wife.
He paid tribute to Mrs. Cheney, his greatest love, the one for whom he had thrown away a normal career, by building her the simplest grave. Wright built Taliesin Two on the ashes of Taliesin One and developed even further his defensive style. Tragedy followed tragedy. Taliesin Two was burned, and during the fire neighbours not only helped douse the flames, but helped themselves to some of Wright’s oriental art as well.
After Miriam Noel walked out on Wright, he met, quite by change, the woman who was to rescue him from further self-destruction: Olgivanna Milanoff, an Eastern European aristocrat and something of a romantic herself. They met in Chigago in 1924, at a performance of the Petrograd Ballet. Wright and Olgivanna were married in 1928, his third marriage.
Out of all Wright’s various troubles, several important things emerged from his chronicle of disasters: first in Olgivanna, he found the romantic attachment that could help, not destroy him.
Wright entered a long period of introspection, resulting in his mammoth work, “An Autobiography”, which was to result in his new self-assesment as the struggling and sometimes persecuted architect. Out of this grew a new style expressed in several western houses, a new romantic manner evolved from California. Fallingwater Architectural Essay/Tour was built in this period of time. While Wright was designing extravagant metaphors for millionaires trying to escape from the city, he was also trying to build inexpensive houses for the poor, in such a way as they might escape the city too.
During the Depression, he changed his style and image yet again, leaving “Wright the outcast romantic” for his new role as “Wright the grand, social visionary.” In the late twenties he became as respectable as he had been at the turn of the century. He gave countless lectures at major universities started his Taliesin Fellowship – a visionary social workshop in itself – and in his mid-sixties adopted the persona of the quick-witted social sage. He wished to supply an impoverished America (an impoverished self for that matter) with an answer to Marxist revolution. This he called by the metaphor “Broadacre City.” Although Wright believed in capitalism, he thought that the land, the means of production as social credit – capital itself – should be distributed, not concentrated into monopolies.
On January 17th 1938 Wright appeared on the cover of Time magazine; later it would be a two cent stamp. After his early experience with the yellow press, and then his success as the respectable architect, in the thirties, he started to realise the emergent rules of a commercial society. From this date to his death in 1959 he spent as much time given interviews, and being a celebrity, as in designing buildings. In the age of media stars – radio, film, soon TV – Wright mastered them all, and instinctively helped create the system with which we are still settled: the “star system of architectural heroes.” By 1950 Wright’s sure instinct for promotion had paid off professionally. But the media attention, the time, energy and personal involvement it demanded, executed their revenge. Most of the buildings produced in these years betray an excessive vulgarity, or overruling ambition, which the young Wright would have called ‘grandomania’, and most people today call kitsch.
Frank Lloyd Wright died on April 9, 1959, in Phoenix, Arizona.—oprf.com
New Still for “Honey”(2010)
New Still and Synopsis for Breather Khavn 2011
Synopsis: If films were time machines, what memory would you yank from your past and preserve? A tale of two men—one hopeful, the other desperate—“Breather” takes place in the last two weeks of the filmmaker’s life a month before his father died. Like a page torn from a diary that hasn’t been written yet, it is, for Khavn, an oddly contemplative retreat into the warm ache of nostalgia and the inevitability of abrupt goodbyes. - .MOV
Split these two cast members into separate profiles.
Etsuko
Cello – http://mubi.com/films/cello
