A Blog of My Own

It’s an optical illusion! Just one of many cool ones to be found here.

Of the many striking things about Howard Hawks’ 1938 screwball classic Bringing Up Baby, one is how Katharine Hepburn relates with such comfortable familiarity to a leopard. You scratch your head and wonder how it could be. Many leopard scenes in the film are “cheated” one way or another (the production-savvy eye can detect those scenes when the leopard only seems to be with Hepburn or Cary Grant, through the magic of rear-projection or split-screen), but in some parts of the movie, it’s absolutely clear there really is a leopard walking free around Katharine Hepburn! And she really is making contact with it, and appears utterly relaxed! (There are no such fakery-free scenes involving the leopard and Cary Grant, who obviously had a healthy fear of the beast.)

Just off-camera was Olga Celeste, Swedish-born (1887) leopard trainer who had a career in vaudeville, and then performing daily at the Luna Park Zoo in Los Angeles from 1925-1931. She specialized in leopards, leaving other big cats to others. When the movies needed a leopard, she was the go-to gal. After Bringing Up Baby, she did the chores on Tarzan and the Leopard Woman (1946) with Johnny Weissmuller.

Baby actually has two entirely separate leopard “characters” in it, one gentle and one mean. (And of course an attendant mistaken identity in the plot.) I suspect they are the same leopard, with Celeste coaxing cuddliness or ferociousness out of the beast as needed for the part, but I can’t confirm this.

Bringing Up Baby is worth a look on DVD for another reason: the commentary track by Peter Bogdanovich. The younger director was in awe of Hawks, and during the course of the film shares many illuminating conversations he had with him about it, relaying Hawks’ words in an amusing approximation of the master director’s voice. For a good, and pretty thorough, essay on the film, check out this entry at moviediva.com.

Thanks to patients like Hope Davis and John Mahoney, In Treatment on HBO may be even better in season two than it was in season one. Some of the half-hour episodes are models of suspense — and models of what you can do to create suspense when you have nothing to work with but two people talking in a room.

The show this year is particularly good on the details. In one of the installments, a happy couple exits through the shrink’s waiting room while one of the show’s main characters is waiting to go in. The couple’s happiness seems a bit over the top, and that’s exactly the point. People often leave therapists’ offices with a false sense of security, like “everything’s going to be all right now.” (I found myself thinking, “Hmm, let’s give it a couple of days, and see how things are going for you then, shall we?“) And this short scene touched on another key therapeutic issue: the meaning a waiting patient can attach to the apparent happiness of an exiting one. We idealize the happiness of others, and think we are the only ones who suffer. So when we see someone leaving a therapist’s office apparently “cured,” we feel jealousy and deprivation; we ask, “If that’s happening for her, why isn’t it happening for me?” (And then we reassure ourselves by snarking, “If she’s so damned happy, why is she seeing a shrink?”) This particular form of psychic pain is one I haven’t seen dramatized before, which is just one of the breakthroughs In Treatment has to offer.

There are two kinds of unreal book store. One is Amazon, a fine virtual source, and the other is Borders, which is to books as spray cheese is to food.

The test of a real book store is, will you ever come across in it a book you never knew existed but now need to have? Amazon is great for books you already know exist. Borders is great for best-sellers. But in neither place are you likely to discover through pure accident a book that nobody is writing about, or to which your attention hasn’t already been drawn through other channels, and which you now must possess.

In Unabridged Books in Chicago — a great, real bookstore in the East Lakeview neighborhood — I found a new memoir by Tom Davis — of the erstwhile comedy team Franken and Davis — titled Thirty-Nine Years of Short-Term Memory Loss: The Early Days of SNL from Someone Who Was There. I haven’t even opened the book and I know how much I love it. There is no way I would know about it if I hadn’t happened to wander into Unabridged, and if Unabridged weren’t run by smart people who think a little like me and know that somebody like me is going to walk in and need that book. I haven’t seen the book written about anywhere. (Some guy named Al Franken gets most of the press these days.)

While I always knew that Franken was responsible for much of the twisted brilliance the pair contributed to the first five years of Saturday Night Live (as performers and as writers), it was also quite clear at the time that Davis had a sick genius of his own. But unlike Franken, he never “took off” as a solo and I never knew what became of him after that. I’m about to find out.

In this scary day and age when one walks into long-popular restaurants to find them 20% full, setting off sirens of doom in the head (and when one hears about businesses of all types which have weathered everything, including the Great Depression, now giving up the ghost), we should make note of places that are still, despite the odds, packing them in instead of packing it in. Last night after a movie at the local indieplex (Sunshine Cleaning — good flick, and one of the rare films these days not starring Kate Winslet), we crossed the street to a restaurant in Chicago called La Creperie. French, good wine and cheese, pates, escargot, and, of course, crepes. We went to this place frequently in the seventies, and have again become semi-regulars after a taking a two-and-a-half decade hiatus. It is absolutely unchanged since its opening in 1972. When we arrived, around 8:30, both the front and back rooms were filled to capacity, except for one table that happened to be a two-top, so luckily we could be seated right away. The restaurant remained full of happy wine-drinking, snail-eating patrons the whole time we were there, and when we left between 9:30 and 10, it was busier than before — now it was standing room only, with a crowd at the bar and small vestibule waiting for tables.

The snails were wonderful, fresh-tasting, bathing in garlicky goodness. The crepes were good as always. The wine was lovely. The continued success of La Creperie may have a lot to do with the fact that a twosome can dine in reasonable sophistication, have a cup of bisque, some snails or a salad after that, entrees, and a couple of glasses of good wine — and still get out of there for under a C-note, tax and 20% tip included.

Another reason might be it’s still owned and run by the couple who opened it in 72, when crepes were all the thing. (Can anyone say “Magic Pan”?) She’s from Joliet, he’s from France. Their story can be found by scrolling down a little here.