SFFILM 61 Day 6: Chew-Chew Baby

The 61st San Francisco International Film Festival began last week and runs through April 17th. Each day during the festival I'll be posting about a festival selection I've seen or am anticipating.

Screen capture of Chew-Chew Baby from Universal DVD

Chew-Chew Baby (USA: James "Shamus" Culhane, 1945)
playing: 8:00 tonight at the Castro Theatre as part of A Celebration of Oddball Films With Marc Capelle's Red Room Orchestra

Chew-Chew Baby is the thirteenth of twenty-five theatrical cartoons starring Woody Woodpecker (after his debut in the Andy Panda 'toon Knock Knock) produced by Walter Lantz for Universal Pictures before Lantz had a falling out with Universal and first took his cartoons to United Artists, then stopped production for most of 1949 and 1950 (he returned to Universal in time to release a Woody cartoon in January 1951). It's the fourth Woody cartoon directed by former Disney & Chuck Jones animator James "Shamus" Culhane, who Leonard Maltin called "the best thing that happened to Woody, and to Lantz, in the early 1940s". The frenetic musical finale of Culhane's first Woody Woodpecker cartoon The Barber of Seville famously used a style of "fast cutting" inspired by Soviet montage. Similarly, Chew-Chew Baby uses an almost subliminal upside-down frame that seems borrowed from the avant-garde to make a gag have extra impact late in the cartoon.

You won't see Chew-Chew Baby on any list of SFFILM festival selections on their website or in the paper program guides sprinkled around town. The list of 16mm prints from the late, great Stephen Parr's Oddball Films collection screening tonight at the Castro hasn't officially been made public. I learned that Chew-Chew Baby is planned to be among them by listening to DJ Marilynn's March 26, 2018 episode of KPOO-FM's "Let Me Touch Your Mind" (archived here) in which bandleader Marc Capelle talks about some of the films his Red Room Orchestra has prepared musical accompaniments for, also including what I think are probably the 1989 Neutrogena infomercial Choosing a Sunscreen described here, and Denys Colomb de Daunant's surreal A Dream of Wild Horses, a frequent Oddball Films screening selection.

Chew-Chew Baby was screened at Oddball in a 2016 drag cinema survey curated by Kat Shuchter, and a few years prior at one of Parr's own Strange Sinema shows. Though I didn't catch these particular screenings, Oddball was one of the few Frisco Bay screening venues that regularly showed animated film prints, usually in excellent condition. Parr often talked of how much of his archive came from the deaccessioned collections of Bible Belt university libraries, where the sports films were run ragged and the art films totally pristine. Perhaps vintage cartoons fell closer to the latter category. I can't count the number of great ones I had the pleasure of viewing in his twice-weekly screening showcases before they ended in December 2016 (he hosted a few more shows in his labyrinthine Mission District loft in 2017, before he died in October.) Soon after Parr's passing, I compiled a twitter thread of fifty of my favorite films seen at his space, 48 of them for the first time. A good third of the list was animation (most of the rest of it falling into "documentary" or "experimental" categories) and it includes Pantry Panic, the third Woody Woodpecker star vehicle made by Lantz (prior to Culhane's arrival) and by my reckoning the only one from the 1940s I've ever seen projected in a cinema space- until tonight, that is.

Beyond sussing out a few of the Oddball Films collection prints screening, I'm not precisely sure what's going to happen at the Castro tonight. Crucially, I'm not sure if the prints being shown that already have music and dialogue (including Chew-Chew Baby) will screen with the Red Room Orchestra's musicians and spoken word artists' sonic contributions integrated into the original soundtracks, or presented instead of them. Either approach may have its own aesthetic appeal, but both approaches treat the Oddball collection less as in its role as a repository for curated screenings, in which films were usually shown as their creators (whether these were celebrated auteurs or uncredited artisans working on behalf of faceless creators) intended, and more in the spirit of its existence as a stock footage archive, supplying hard-to-find images (more often than sound) for documentaries and features, including SFFILM 2018 selections Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind, Won't You Be My Neighbor?, RBG and closing night feature Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far On Foot. Using existing art to create new art.

Purists may cry foul, but before they do I'd just like to talk about an amazing event at the Luggage Store Gallery on Market Street, where Stephen Parr and Other Cinema's Craig Baldwin faced off in a kind of "dueling archivists" presentation of their 16mm material, screening films in part or in full as they pleased, creating connections across their "sets" of each about an hour that helped unlock certain thoughts about media filmed in and about my hometown that had never occurred to me before, and that in many cases probably wouldn't had each film played out as intended by its makers. Parr showed certain favorites like A Trip Down Market Street Before the Fire, Blackie the Wonder Horse Swims the Golden Gate, Jerry Abrams' Be-In and the untitled home-movie footage known lately as San Francisco Excelsior: Low Rider Car Show in complete prints, but let an excerpt from Let's See: Lopsideland bleed into a section of San Francisco: Queen of the West which bled into some of USA Poetry: Allen Ginsberg & Lawrence Ferlinghetti (this last of which, incidentally, will screen for free in its entirety at the SFPL Main Library as part of a Poetry Month event I've helped organize on April 28th), a kind of editing-as-performance that would probably have infuriated a prior version of myself as much as soundtrack tinkering would have, but that I responded to deeply. This event happened to occur on the day Andrew Sarris died, as if to hammer home the point that filmmaker intentions are not the be-all, end-all of film appreciation and understanding. Like Baldwin (who projected an equally impressive "set"), Parr was an example of archivist as auteur.

So I'm opening my mind to have an experience guided less by filmmakers such as Culhane and Daunant and more by Parr's collector instincts and by the musicians who have been assembled. I was fortunate to have an opportunity to speak with one of them, experimental percussion master William Winant, about the musical portion of the presentation. I've seen Winant peform in various diverse capacities over the years, such as with my then-favorite band Oingo Boingo at the Warfield in the early 1990s, and with his own ensemble at the annual Chapel of the Chimes Garden of Memory solstice event in Oakland. And he was part of one of my favorite San Francisco International Film Festival live music/film events in recent years, the 2013 presentation of Paul Leni's Waxworks accompanied by Winant, Mike Patton, Matthias Bossi and Scott Amendola, which is why I wanted his perspective on tonight's event. He told me that event (which is documented on youtube, though I'm not certain the sound & image line up precisely, thanks to the difference in film & video frame rates) was "99.9% improvised" outside the cover of Jacques Brel's "La Mort" that ended the show. Winant said that tonight's show will be "completely different", as "everything is in song form. The lot of the stuff is through-composed. People will be reading charts, or people will be reading lead sheets, and basically, they're song forms, or jazz forms where the musicians play over lead sheets." He named Capelle, Dina Macabbee, Devin Hoff and Ben Goldberg as among the Red Room Orchestra members who have composed and arranged a song or multiple songs to be performed alongside each of the Oddball film prints.

Finally, though this is a particularly overstuffed piece, it seems like a good place for me to publish a letter I composed this past January, when the Roxie hosted a memorial for Parr that I was unable to attend. The memorial is available to view online, as is a wonderful video tribute to Parr called 275 Capp Street made by one of his collaborators, Adam Dziesinski. Here's the (slightly edited) text of my letter:

Sadly, the plane flight Kerry Laitala and I had to come back from our New England holiday trip just got cancelled due to a snowstorm, and were unable to book another flight until Monday, so we’ll be missing this event we’d both looked forward to so very much as a way to commune with friends and strangers who’d been so deeply impacted by Stephen as we had.  

Kerry, a filmmaker, had been honored to collaborated with Parr on at least a half-dozen showings of her own work, and of work they’d collaboratively curated from their own archives. Few San Francisco curators have been as loyally supportive of Kerry’s work over the years as Steven, and enthusiasm like his means a lot to a mid-career filmmaker trying to sustain an exhibition portfolio. 

I, a voracious cinephile, feel embarrassed I never attended Oddball until I moved directly across the street from it from 2010-2014, but during that time (and to a slightly lesser extent since) I went many dozens of times and felt so welcomed by Stephen and his staff. I’m glad I got to know him not just as a film lover but as a neighbor who at any minute could come over and borrow an unusual piece of AV equipment like it was a cup of sugar (I lived with musicians & these occasional lendings went both ways across Capp Street).

When Kerry and I met at the San Francisco International Film Festival in 2011 the fact that we quickly realized we had a few mutual friends was key to the encounter turning from a random flirtation to something deeper. Stephen was one of these few, and we so wish he were still around, not simply for the selfish reason that we’d want to let him know we’ve finally decided to get married this year, but because we know he had so much more to share with the world.

SFFILM61 Day 6
Other festival options: Today is the second of three screenings of Hong Sangsoo's unassuming little delight Claire's Camera, and the final screening not currently at RUSH status. Tonight also marks the sole SFFILM showing of Olivier Assayas's Cold Water, a 1994 film recently made available via DCP by Janus; I wouldn't expect another chance to see it in 35mm (the last in these parts was 2007) coming around soon, or maybe ever, so you'll have to shelve your anti-DCP biases if you want to see this in a cinema.

Non-SFFILM option: Speaking of animation, Oakland's all-digital New Parkway Theater is in the midst of an Animation Week and today's offerings include Marjane Satrapi & Vincent Paronnaud's Persepolis, which I can definitely recommend. Today they also screen Cowboy Bebop: the Movie, which I haven't seen, and (inexplicably) the particularly terrible dubbed version of Hayao Miyazaki's glorious Princess Mononoke. Wait to see that one subtitled.

The City Luminous: Spectral Canopy Variation (2015)

WHO: Award-winning filmmaker Kerry Laitala made this, and I actually assisted her on some of her studio shoots. I've mentioned Latiala on this blog every so often since before I'd ever met her, but in the past several years we've become close, as I've explained before. I don't want that to stop me from featuring her work here every so often. Hope my readers don't mind.

WHAT: A four-projector video installation celebrating the centennial of the 1915 Pan-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE), particularly its innovative lighting presentations. But don't take my word for it. Here's what Joe Ferguson had to say on the website SciArt in America:

Kerry Laitala’s The City Luminous: Spectral Canopy Variation is a collage of documentary material of the PPIE, intercut with expressionistic video segments. It features Laura Ackley, author of San Francisco’s Jewel City, as one of the Star Maidens of the PPIE’s Court of the Universe--one of the largest and most ornate courts during the fair. The installation also features dancer Jenny Stulberg performing a tribute to Loie Fuller--a pioneer of modern dance and theatrical-lighting techniques. 

Laitala’s piece cleverly reminds us that the works of innovative minds can be as impressive and inspiring now as they were a century ago. Her own work, though on a smaller scale, is no less affecting. Viewers pause in front of the glowing windows where her installation is projected before beginning their commutes home. Like those spectators a hundred years ago, they brave the chill of a San Francisco evening to glimpse at the possibilities of emerging technologies providing insight, hope, and beauty.

WHERE/WHEN: Loops from sundown to midnight tonight and tomorrow through the windows of the California Historical Society, on the corner of Mission Street and Annie Alley (between 3rd Street and New Montgomery). It's planned to reprise from December 21 to January 3 as well, but who wants to wait that long? UPDATE 6/29/15: The installation will remain up for one last night, tonight!

WHY: This weekend is an extremely busy one here on Frisco Bay. It's a particularly celebratory pride weekend (and the final couple days of the Frameline film festival). Huge numbers of librarians (and more than a few film archivists) from around the world are converging on San Francisco for their annual conference. There's a big gathering of poets, musicians, and even a few filmmakers from the Beat era. (ruth weiss, known to Beat cinema aficionados for her 1961 film The Brink, will be performing and David Amram will give a presentation about Pull My Daisy, which he scored, amidst the more usual documentaries about the scene.) The Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum is hosting its annual Broncho Billy Silent Film Festival (with the expected appearance of a genuine silent-era child star, Diana Serra Carey, alongside a 35mm print of the 1924 film she starred in as Baby Peggy, The Family Secret, showing Sunday afternoon). And then there are the usual screenings at your favorite cinemas, like the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, launching an Andrei Tarkovsky retrospective tonight, or the Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto, now in the second week of its new summer calendar. Yerba Buena Center For the Arts is screening a nearly-six-hour Lav Diaz epic not once but twice. There's absolutely no way for anyone do experience a fraction of all this.

But The City Luminous: Spectral Canopy Variation is less than a fifteen-minute loop, and it's free and convenient to any passers-by in the neighborhood. A few of the aforementioned activities particularly are in close reach; if you survive all 338 minutes of a political drama from the Philippines at Yerba Buena, you're just a block from Mission and Annie Alley and what are another fifteen minutes of viewing (with four screens visible at once from some angles, it's like watching an hour of movie in a quarter the time!) A.L.A. conference attendees are also right in the neighborhood.

I'm very proud of Kerry for having executed this installation, and I'll miss being able to see it as I wander in SOMA in the evening, although I'm excited to see the next four-screen videos in the California Historical Society's nearly year-long Engineers of Illumination series (Scott Stark kicked off the series in the Spring with Shimmering Spectacles and Kevin Cain more meditative The Illuminated Palace is set to open Thursday, July 2nd, followed by pieces by Ben Wood and Elise Baldwin; all five will then reprise for shorter stints in the final months of the year).

It's not the only art exhibit featuring my girlfriend to come down this weekend. She's also the subject of Saul Levine's film As Is Is, the namesake of a gallery show ending today at the Altman Siegel Gallery on Geary near Market Street in which it screens (as digital video) along with moving image portraits by Kevin Jerome Everson, Anne McGuire, Jem Cohen, Tony Buba and others.

Laitala's The City Luminous: Spectral Canopy Variation is one of several moving image works she's premiered or will be premiering this year to mark the PPIE centennial, most of them named for one of the original night-time lighting effects presented by Walter D'Arcy Ryan at the fair a hundred years ago. She'll be presenting more of these works at an Oddball Films soiree on July 9th, and at a free show at Oakland's Shapeshifters Cinema on July 12th. These will be multi-projector performances with live soundtracks from local experimental music duo Voicehandler. Among the performances will be reprises of Spectacle of Light, their collaboration which won an audience award when presented at the 2015 Crossroads festival this past April. Three of Laitala's 3D chromadepth works will also screen at these shows, including Chromatic Frenzy, a piece that recently screened in Brooklyn as an apertif for Jean-Luc Godard's Goodbye to Language as part of a 21st Century 3D series. Kerry also asked me to perform a live keyboard accompaniment to a single-channel 16mm film called Side Show Spectacle at the July 9th Oddball screening. I hope you can make it to one or both of these upcoming shows!

HOW: The City Luminous: Spectral Canopy Variation screens as four video files projected through four separate, synched video projectors.

My Fair Lady (1964)

Screen Grab from Warner Home Video DVD

WHO: Audrey Hepburn stars in this, although her singing voice was dubbed by Marni Nixon.

WHAT: The nearly fifty-year-old screen adaptation of the phenomenally successful Broadway musical, directed by George Cukor. According to Mason Wiley & Damien Bona's tome Inside Oscar, it was so popular at special screenings arranged in Hollywood for Academy Award voters that "when the Academy turned away crowds at one showing, so many people came back for the hastily scheduled 11 P.M. showing of the three-hour movie that there was another mad scramble for seats."

Needless to say, the film swept the Oscars that year, winning nine awards including Best Picture. Hepburn, however, was left off the nomination list. Julie Andrews, who'd played her role in the original Broadway and West End productions, won the statue for her screen debut Mary Poppins, an award often attributed to payback for Jack Warner's choice to replace her in the film with an actor whose singing voice was ultimately not used. Marni Nixon performed on screen opposite Andrews in the following year's Sound of Music, and dubbing of star voices in musicals became a more clandestine affair from then on.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens today through Sunday at 7:30, with additional 3PM showings on Saturday and Sunday, only at the Stanford Theatre.

WHY: The force behind the Stanford Theatre for the past twenty-five years, David Packard, has often named Audrey Hepburn as his favorite screen performer, and My Fair Lady in particular has been one of his theatre's top draws over the years he's been running things. But it also kicks off a late-summer calendar filled with classics and rarities that should draw any casual or hardcore fan of Hollywood's "Golden Age" to Palo Alto at least a few times over the next two and a half months, if not multiple times a week. 

The best news is that the Stanford will be open every single day from now until (at least) October 12th. Mondays and Tuesdays every week pair a film starring the recently-departed Mickey Rooney with another feature; several 1930s Tarzan films and a few Deanna Durbin vehicles (I highly recommend His Butler's Sister on September 1-2) among them. Wednesdays are reserved for weekly silent film screenings featuring live accompaniment by organist Dennis James; these are not the usual warhorses but infrequently-seen comedies with Reginald Denny, Leatrice Joy films, etc. The only one I've seen before is the heartbreaking The Goose Woman, directed by the underrated auteur Clarence Brown. Thursdays and Fridays match a Basil Rathbone-as-Sherlock Holmes mystery with a Warner Oland-as-Charlie Chan one (though the Swedish star's yellowface performances can be off-putting at first, these films often feature wonderful performances by the Asian-American actors portraying his sons), with an episode of the Kirk Alyn-as-Superman serial made by Columbian in 1948 as a bonus. Finally, Saturdays and Sundays will feature rotating double-bills of somewhat better-known films starting with Roman Holiday and Queen Christina (August 9-10) or The Black Cat and Dracula (September 13-14). Some of these are extremely rare to see on the big screen any longer, although I can't really imagine who would want to ever see something like Around The World In Eighty Days, for example (at three hours, the only weekend offering besides My Fair Lady not showing on a double-bill) on a television.

Some of the films that I'm personally most excited to see at the Stanford over the next ten weeks include James Whale's One More River (Aug. 16-17), John Stahl's Only Yesterday (Aug. 30-31), William Desmond Taylor's Up The Road With Sallie (Sep. 17), the local-interest Charlie Chan at Treasure Island (Sep. 25-26), and William C. de Mille's For Alimony Only (Oct. 8). I've never seen any of these before.

HOW: The Stanford Theatre is the last local theatre I know of (besides far more occasional screening venues like the Paramount) to pretty much exclusively screen 35mm prints. They do resort to a 16mm print on the rare occasion (the last time being more than two years ago) that something necessary for a series can't be found on 35mm.

Psycho (1960)

WHO: Bernard Herrmann wrote the music for this.

WHAT: When Alfred Hitchcock first planned out his ideas for Psycho he imagined no music at all accompany the now-famous "shower scene". But at that time Herrmann's stock with Hitchcock was such that he was allowed to persuade the director to let him score that scene with what has now become one of the all-time iconic music moments in movie history. Just hearing one note (maybe two) of Herrmann's dissonant strings is all it takes to evoke the shock and dread of this scene for anyone who has seen the film- and many who haven't. The rest of Herrmann's score, written only for a string ensemble, is brilliant as well. For more on Hitchcock & Herrmann's approach to music and sound in Psycho read this article at FilmSound.org.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight at Davies Symphony Hall at 8:00, and at the Vine Cinema & Alehouse in Livermore at 7PM on November 7th.

WHY: Last month I attended a concert at Davies Hall, home of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, in which the Symphony performed famous musical excerpts from Jaws, Star Wars, Schindler's List and other movies made during my lifetime, with their composer John Williams behind the conductor's podium. Steven Spielberg was on hand to discuss his career-long collaboration with Williams and give a cursory introduction to how music makes its mark on motion pictures. 

Most of the pieces were played without any visual accompaniment outside of the spectacle of seeing a celebrity conductor and a world-class orchestra in action, or whatever images from the films or other associations might dance in our minds' eyes. But for a few of the pieces a screen hung above the orchestra, allowing us to look at clips from Close Encounters of the Third Kind while a suite of music from the film played, or clips from a wide variety of swashbuckling adventure films from throughout cinema history while a rousing piece from Spielberg's animated The Adventures of Tintin was performed by the orchestra.

But the most unique surprise of the evening, for me, was a side-by-side comparison of one continuity-intact sequence from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade screened twice in a row. If you know the film, it was a version of the "circus train" sequence that had been specially prepared so that sound effects and dialogue were audible but the originally recorded music score had been digitally "scrubbed" out somehow. For the second viewing of the scene, the orchestra performed the music live, occasionally coming close to drowning out an individual line of dialogue or sound effect, but gloriously conveying a sense of rollicking adventure and excitement. 

If the intent was to show how 'flat' a Spielberg action scene is in the absence of his composer's contribution, it didn't have that impact on me. Williams is a terrific film composer, don't get me wrong. But I found the scene no less gripping, and indeed found more gravitas to its evocation of urgency and physicality, when stripped of its underscore. Whether or not such gravitas is appropriate for an early sequence in an Indiana Jones film is certainly debatable. I've probably seen too many Jean-Pierre Melville films to have a sensible answer, but I did very much enjoy this enhanced peek into the moviemaking process.

I'd seen entire films screened at Davies Hall before, both with the San Francisco Symphony performing (as with The Gold Rush in 2010) and with an outside group using the space (Philip Glass presenting Powaqqatsi in 2006) but these are, music aside, completely silent films. I was aware of the fact that the Symphony had in recent years performed live alongside screenings of sound-era films such as Psycho, Casablanca, and The Matrix, but last month was the first I'd gotten to see the technology in action, and was curious to learn more. Knowing there were four days of Alfred Hitchcock screenings coming up starting with tonight's reprise of Psycho and continuing with Friday night's premiere presentation of the "score-scrubbed" Vertigo with live symphonic accompaniment, I decided to inquire with the symphony about the series. Here's what SF Symphony Director of Artistic Planning John Magnum had to say about the year-long series this week launches at Davies.

We’ve been doing films as part of our Summer and the Symphony concerts for a few years now, and we’ve had a terrific audience response to them. We heard from our audience that there was an appetite for more of these projects throughout the year, and so we thought we’d pilot a four-concert series in 2013-14. To launch the series, we put together a week of performances around the films of Alfred Hitchcock, and the starting point for that was actually the world premiere of Vertigo in concert, which seemed perfect for San Francisco. 

We have a list of films that we know are out there, available for performance with orchestra. We also have some ideas of other films and projects that we’d be interested in producing. We want to have a balance between full-length films, and mixed programs with highlights from various movies – it’s half and half this season, and we’ll probably have about that mix going forward. And of course the basic criteria is that the film is known for having a great score – Bernard Hermann in the case of Vertigo and Psycho, great classical pieces for Fantasia, and so on.

There are a few producers working with the studios to create the projects, which we then license from the producer for live concert performance. In a couple of cases, we have worked directly with the studios or a creator’s estate, which basically accomplishes the same thing. This is an area that other orchestras are interested in as well – Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, for example, as well as some of the European orchestras and presenters – so there are new projects in the pipeline for future seasons, too.  

The Symphony's Hitchcock week has been recently profiled by Thomas Gladysz, The Saturday "Hitchcock! Greatest Hits" program focuses especially on Dimitri Tiomkin's music for Strangers on a Train and Dial 'M' For Murder, as well as Herrmann's for North By Northwest (including the main title, the drunk driving scene, and the Mount Rushmore finale.) It's filled out by two scenes piece from Vertigo and To Catch a Thief (music by Lyn Murray), and of course Charles-Francois Gounod's Funeral March of a Marionette, which became synonymous with the Master of Suspense from its use in the Alfred Hitchcock Presents television series.

Unlike the Symphony's silent film presentations (such as that of Hitchcock's The Lodger tomorrow night), these programs are not ideal for purists or for newbies, but for fans of a film interested in experiencing it in part or in full again on a large screen in a unique way: with live musical accompaniment from a terrific ensemble, If you can't make it to the Hitchcock series, the Symphony will screen Singin' in the Rain with live music December 6th and 7th.


HOW: Tonight's digital presentation of Psycho at Davies Hall. will be a version with the original music recording "scrubbed" off the soundtrack while sound effects and dialogue remain. Herrmann's score will instead be performed by the San Francisco Symphony with Joshua Gersen conducting. The Vine Cinema screening will be the original 1960 version, sourced from a Blu-Ray.

Meet Me In St. Louis (1944)

WHO: Judy Garland starred, and met her second husband Vincente Minnelli while being directed by him, in this film.

WHAT: The movie that earned an Oscar nomination for a song including these lyrics sung by Garland:

"Clang, clang, clang," went the trolley,
"Ding, ding, ding," went the bell,
"Zing, zing, zing," went my heartstrings,
From the moment I saw him I fell.  

"Chug, chug, chug," went the motor,
"Bump, bump, bump," went the break,
"Thump, thump, thump," went my heartstrings,
When he smiled, I could feel the car shake.

WHERE/WHEN: Today through Tuesday at the Stanford Theatre at 7:30, with an additional screening today at 3:35.

WHY: Perhaps this isn't the best week (or the best summer) to sing about public transportation. If a less optimistic film about American transportation, The Magnificent Ambersons, was playing on a Frisco Bay cinema screen somewhere tonight I'd surely highlight that instead. But Meet Me In St. Louis is a wonderful film to see in a glorious Technicolor 35mm print, if you can get to a theatre showing one.

The Stanford is one Frisco Bay film venue that isn't near any BART station, though that doesn't mean transit there and back won't be impacted by a probable strike. I'm crossing my fingers that BART management will be swayed by public pressure and pay serious attention to the (from what I've come to understand) sensible demands of its workforce, and make a reasonable counteroffer that can avert another strike. Since that doesn't seem likely to happen, I like many other car-less cinephiles may find myself privileging screenings at my local neighborhood theatre over those at more far-flung venues for a while.

HOW: 35mm print, on a double-bill with Apartment for Peggy.

Strange Days (1995)

WHO: Kathryn Bigelow directed this after Near Dark, Blue Steel, and Point Break, and before The Weight of Water, K-19: the Widowmaker, The Hurt Locker and the controversial Zero Dark Thirty (which is still showing in a few local theatres).

WHAT: I've never seen Strange Days but I remember when it came out well; I was a college radio DJ at the time and gave at least a spin or two to the title track to the soundtrack, a cover of the Doors classic performed by New York City "industrial" metal band Prong, with Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek playing along. In fact another band's version of the Doors song was originally supposed to be used in the film and appear on the CD. But in the cutthroat world of placing songs on mid-nineties soundtracks to would-be blockbuster films, it was decided that a Sony-signed artist should be given the pride of place on the Sony-released soundtrack, so the Wax Trax-affiliated Sister Machine Gun's version was nixed in favor of Prong. (Their version can be heard on the CD Burn -- if you have a CD player that can rewind from the beginning of track 1, that is). Of course, the movie flopped financially, doing little to help Sony, Prong, or Manzarek. It's only been in recent years that I've begun to hear cinephiles recommend it as a neglected example of pre-millennial science fiction that prefigures The Matrix and other cyberpunk-inflected films.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight only at the Castro Theatre as an almost-midnight movie. Listed star time: 11:30 PM

WHY: We've lived through the Y2K switchover, we've lived through the year 2012, and we've even lived through The Matrix Reloaded (not necessarily in that order). So perhaps it's just the right time to revisit this on a big screen with a charged-up audience. Seeing a movie at the witching hour at the Castro Theatre is always a treat, and certainly not an everyday occurrence. The next movie to play this late time slot at the venue will be on April 19th when Brian De Palma's Carrie makes an appearance, in plenty of time for the Senior Prom. Much of the Castro's April calendar has in fact been revealed on the theatre website, or (in the case of April 25th and a couple of May dates) on the San Francisco Film Society's. Take a look and see what strikes your fancy.

HOW: Strange Days is the culmination of a MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS triple-bill entitled "Mentors Matter"; the other two films in the trio include Rocky III and Léon: The Professional, neither one of them a film I have particularly fond memories of, but perhaps that's all the more reason to re-evaluate them now. All three screen in 35mm prints.

A Chairy Tale (1957)

WHO: Sitarist Ravi Shankar, along with tabla (Indian percussion) master Chatur Lai, composed and performed the music for this short film.

WHAT: By the time Shankar came to Canada to record the score for this film, co-directed by the National Film Board's head animator Norman McLaren and by Montreal filmmaker Claude Jutra, he'd begun to tour in Europe and North America and his scores for Satjajit Ray's films were already beginning to be heard by international film festival audiences, but his name was still nearly a decade away from becoming a household one outside India. His collaboration with McLaren and Jutra was one of his earliest collaborations with artists in the West. It's a delightful piece, and although Jutra's performance as a man having a disfunctional relationship with a piece of furniture is quite memorable, I don't think the film could work without Shankar's expressive score. The film is a must-see for anyone interested in cross-cultural collaborations of the 1950s, and of course for fans of Shankar, Jutra or McLaren.

WHERE/WHEN: 8PM at Oddball Films tonight. Seating is limited, so it's best to RSVP by e-mailing or calling ahead at (415) 558-8117.

WHY: With 2012 receding in the rear-view mirror, it's an ideal time to remember some of the luminaries who left this world during the calendar year. Frequent Oddball curator Lynn Cursaro has put together a program to tribute some of the personalities we're just going to have to learn to do without in 2013. The afterworld roll call includes (but is not limited to) Shankar, who died just over a month ago, Chris Marker, who died in July and is represented with his groundbreaking sci-fi short La Jetee, Davy Jones, whose February passing inspires an opportunity to bring out rare outtakes from his band the Monkees' television show, and author Maurice Sendak, whose work inspired Gene Dietch's 1975 animation In The Night Kitchen, and who since May has been exploring That Great Night Kitchen In The Sky.

HOW: All of the above will be screened on 16mm prints from Oddball's extensive archive. It says a lot about the depth of the collection that Cursaro was able to locate relevant works to honor each of the above-mentioned individuals. I understand she has more up her celluloid sleeve that aren't mentioned in the program announcement.

Festival of Horror

There isn't a day between now and Thanksgiving in which at least one film festival can't be found somewhere here on Frisco Bay. This has actually been the case since the United Nations Association Film Festival began on October 18th. It ends tonight, while the Chinese American Film Festival ends tomorrow, and the San Francisco Film Society's French Cinema Now series runs until this Tuesday, October 30th (I can recommend the closing night selection Sister by Ursula Meier of Home notoriety, who will be on hand for the screening. Check Film-415 for more suggestions). The upstart Silicon Valley Film Festival comes to Santa Clara beginning Halloween night, and the venerable American Indian Film Festival begins here in San Francisco two days later. Before that's over, SF IndieFest's 11th Annual DocFest will have begun its two-week run at the Roxie and other venues. In the midst of all of these festivals are... more festivals, like the California Independent Film Festival in Orinda and Moraga, and the SFFS's Cinema By The Bay and New Italian Cinema here in Frisco proper. I count twelve in all, and that doesn't include Not Necessarily Noir III, the excellent series running through Halloween, where I've already seen brilliant neo-noir gems like To Live And Die In L.A. and Miami Blues as well as an extraordinarily rare 35mm print of Monte Hellman's 1974 Cockfighter. Perhaps I ought to think of that as a festival, as it self-identifies as on the Roxie website, as well. Anyway, after this dozen-festival (or baker's dozen?) streak ends on November 21st, we're likely to be in for a month or two of comparative festival drought, with only the Another Hole in the Head genre film festival and the touring Found Footage Festival detected by my feelers until Noir City opens in late January. Noir City's full line-up will be revealed at a December 19th Castro Theatre double-bill screening of as-yet-undisclosed titles. 

With two big writing deadlines (for forthcoming publications, more details later) and other activities, October's been busy enough for me that I haven't been able to go out to the cinema as much as I'd normally like, much less post on this blog. Because I've got big plans for celebrating Halloween with a family member's wedding on that day, I won't be able to see any of the horror movies playing during the last few days of October, like the double-features playing the final two days of Not Necessarily Noir III, the one playing Tuesday at the Castro Theatre, the screening of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (and the Cameraman's Revenge) with live organ accompaniment at Davies Symphony Hall that night, or the screenings of the original John Carpenter Halloween at the Balboa Theatre Tuesday and Wednesday.

Luckily for a busy groomsman like myself, there will be many opportunities to celebrate Halloween belatedly with plenty of special horror movie screenings throughout November and even into December. Of foremost interest is probably the Stanford Theatre, which has just extended its published calendar until the end of next month, continuing with the Universal Pictures centennial celebration it began in September by moving from the 1920s & 30s into the 1940s. As I mentioned in my last post, Universal horror rarities Werewolf of London and Secret of the Blue Room will screen on Halloween, but also on the following day before being switched out for a print of the famous Lon Chaney, Sr. silent Phantom of the Opera on Friday, November 2. Now we know that Universal's 1943 Phantom starring Claude Rains will play November 3-4 alongside Cobra Woman, a film that rarely gets labeled a horror movie, but that in my mind connects directly to RKO supernatural thrillers of its era like Cat People and The Leopard Man.   November 14-16 brings a double-bill of the Karloff-less 1940 reboot The Mummy's Hand and the Lon Chaney, Jr. star-maker The Wolf Man from 1941. The rest of November at the Stanford showcases Universal's range, bumping a Hitchcock thriller (Saboteur) up against a W.C. Fields farce (The Bank Dick), placing a Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes favorite (The Scarlet Claw) with an Ole Olson/Chic Johnson vehicle in which they make a cameo (Crazy House) , and devoting double-bills to Robert Siodmak noirs, or Abbot & Costello musical-comedies. A complete Deanna Durbin retrospective is promised for December at the venue.

Back to horror movies, the Napa Valley Film Festival is showing two of the scariest ones ever made alongside documentaries about them. Stanley Kubrick's The Shining screens November 7th just after the Frisco Bay premiere of Rodney Ascher's much-anticipated investigation into the film's cult and scholarly following Room 237, while George Romero's Night of the Living Dead screens after the last of three showings of what looks to be a more traditional making-of documentary, Year of the Living Dead. Less "traditionally" a horror movie, but no less horrific, and (in my view) no less great a film than Romero's, is Ted Kotcheff's Wake In Fright, which similarly finds one man up against a threatening army of individuals who want to turn him into one of their own (in this case brain-numbed alcoholic Australians rather than brain-eating zombies). It currently screens in 35mm at the Opera Plaza through at least November 1st. It also plays at the Shattuck in Berkeley, but I'm not sure that venue still has 35mm projection equipment on hand after a recent digital makeover, which I've been told has also left the California Theatre without 35mm capability, and the Embarcadero with only one of its screens 35mm-capable.

The films of Jan Svankmajer are frequently labeled as horror films, justifiably so, I think. There's little more cinematically unsettling than the visceral visions on display in films like Alice, Little Otik, etc. The Yerba Buena Center For The Arts devotes most of November in its screening room to the Czech animator, and is screening works by a perhaps-similar animator named Nathalie Djurberg in the galleries through January. The aforementioned Another Hole in the Head (HoleHead) festival has moved its festival from its traditional early-summer slot to bridge November and December, specifically in order to improve its position in the festival marketplace for for horror films particularly (undoubtedly the fest has made some spotty picks in the past), and is bringing such titles as The Killing Games, Road To Hell, and Deadball. The latter is HoleHead favorite director Yudai Yamaguchi's return to the scene of the crime of his first feature, Battlefield Baseball: the baseball diamond. San Francisco Giants fans should turn out in droves to see a splatter movie about a pitcher with a literally deadly arm, but note: one of Yamaguchi's previous film projects put him afoul of a Yomiuri Giant in 2005.

Atypically, the HoleHead offering I'm probably most curious about is actually not a film at all but the opening night party entertainment: a one-man Oingo Boingo cover act that goes by the name Only A Lad but is also known as Starbeast II. Oingo Boingo was one of the bands I saw perform live as often as I could in my high school and college days, seeing them six times before frontman Danny Elfman devoted his musical attention exclusively to composing film scores. It was a band formed out of the ashes of Los Angeles theatre troupe the Mystic Knights Of Oingo Boingo, whose sensibility was (so I understand) best documented by the 1980 cult-film oddity Forbidden Zone, which will screen at Terra Gallery before the opening-night party in a new colorized version. Director (and Danny's older brother) Richard Elfman will be in attendance to answer questions like: "why would you want to colorize Forbidden Zone?" He is known to be an excellent raconteur, and I confirmed this at an in-person screening (of the original version) at the Lumiere Theatre in 2004. Certainly one of the most memorable screenings I ever took in at the Lumiere, which sadly closed its doors as a Landmark-operated theatre just over a month ago, with no indication that it will find a new tenant to operate it in the time since.

Since Forbidden Zone really is no more a horror movie than The Rocky Horror Picture Show is (its relationship to the weirdest pop culture artifacts of the 1930s is not dissimilar to that of Rocky Horror's relationship to 1950s drive-in movies), let me steer back on the track I keep veering off of: horror movies showing after Halloween. The Pacific Film Archive's November-December calendar actually includes a number of horror or borderline-horror films on it. Barry Gifford will be on hand on the last Thursday in November and the first two Saturdays in December, for a five-program tribute to his screenwriting career including the often bone-chilling Lost Highway and more collaborations with David Lynch and international autuers. And the continuing fall tribute to pre-nouvelle vague French filmmaking includes a pair of eerie, supernatural-themed classics and one authentique horror movie, Georges Franju's unforgettable Eyes Without A Face. One last note: when I first saw that the PFA would presenting three new restorations of diverse, masterpiece-level works by avant-garde filmmakers on Halloween night I wrote it off as counter-programming. But I recently remembered that Vincent Price narrates one of the three, the lovely Notes On The Port Of St. Francis by Frank Stauffacher. It's good that the horror movie master's sonorous tones will be able to entertain an audience that evening, even if I'm going to have to miss it myself.

SFIFF54 Day 12: Claire Denis Film Scores

The 54nd San Francisco International Film Festival is in its final week. It runs through May 5th. Each day during the festival I'll be posting a recommendation and capsule review of a film in the festival.

Tindersticks: Claire Denis Film Scores 1996-2009

playing: at 8:30 PM at the Castro, with no further screenings during the festival.
distribution: not applicable; this is a live event.

For each of my other daily festival previews this year, I've been singling out a single film to focus my writing, even if it's part of a shorts program. Yesterday, the film I wrote on didn't actually show- though its 1935 remake did (what an evening it was!). Today, instead of focusing on a single film, I'm going to talk about a program as a whole. That's because tonight's Tindersticks event won't involve the screening of any film in its entirety; instead, clips from ix films for which the British ensemble has provided musical scores, will be shown at the Castro in versions with music stripped out but dialogue remaining, but accompanied musically by the composers live on the stage.

Dennis Lim has aptly investigated the working relationship between the great French auteur Claire Denis, and Tindersticks, who have provided the score for all of her feature films since 1996's Nenette And Boni (pictured above), save for two: Vers Mathilde, her only documentary in this period, and 1999's Beau Travail which understandably took a different approach to music than Tindersticks might have been able to provide, at least not so early in the collaboration. I'm interested in tonight's event for a number of reasons. Foremostly, because I love most every Denis film I've seen (and thanks to the recent PFA retro that's nearly all of them), have always thought the aural contributions from Tindersticks played a large role in this affection, and want to hear them perform the music live. I'm also curious about the technical side of the event: how is this going to work to have dialogue and image at a music event, or should I say a louder-than-usual musical score at a film event? Will there be improvisation, or will the music be just as heard in the films? Finally, I'm hoping that foregrounding the musical aspect of some of Denis's films for an evening, might help me understand a bit better just what is working in the Tindersticks scores, that makes them seem so unique, and what is their precise contribution to making her films so unique. I'm expecting an evening that will be much-discussed by local cinephiles for many months to come.

SFIFF54 Day 12
Another option: The Journals of Musan (SOUTH KOREA: Park Jung-bum, 2010) I haven't seen this first feature by an assistant director to Lee Chang-dong on the recent Poetry, but Adam Hartzell has called it "poignantly pessimistic", and other reports from festgoers who attended prior screenings have me intrigued.

Non-SFIFF-option for today: Moulin Rouge at the Red Vic. I don't even like this movie, but the fact that it's playing on 35mm at the Red Vic makes it of interest. What else was I going to pick on a Monday? The digital screening of Top Gun playing in every single AMC Theatre across America tonight? (Which might be more popular than expected, after last night's news.) I could mention the double-bill at the Stanford but I already mentioned it on Friday.

Season of Light

It's truly Winter on Frisco Bay now, with temperatures to prove it. What better time to spend inside a movie theatre, being warmed by the heat of artistic achievement? Though it may be tougher to find time for culture in a December packed with holiday parties and shopping trips, the potential psychological and, dare I say, spiritual rewards, of seeing a good or great movie seem to be ramped up at this time of year. Why else do so many film companies release so many of the films they think will resonate with adult audiences during this season? (So they can position their films for critics' top tens and Academy Awards, you say? Don't be such a Scrooge!) This week Frisco Bay hosts at least two screenings likely to have a profound mood-altering effect on religious and secular cinephiles alike. I mentioned both in my last post but they're worth repeating. There's Thursday's screening of Carl Dreyer's 1928 The Passion of Joan Of Arc at the glorious Paramount, with a 22-piece orchestra and full chorus performing Richard Einhorn's Voices of Light composition as underscore. Seeing the trial of the Maid of Orleans enacted (almost entirely in facial close-ups) on such a large screen with such glorious music accompanying is likely to be the cultural highlight of the month (if not year) for anyone no matter what their religious affiliation, or lack thereof. Then on Saturday the Rafael Film Center screens Apichatpong Weerasethakul's very spiritually-attuned new film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives as part of a week-long International Buddhist Film Festival Showcase.

I haven't seen any of the other selections in the Rafael program of Buddhist-themed films (though I should note that the documentary Saint Misbehavin': the Wavy Gravy Movie will begin a week-long engagement at the Red Vic this Friday, before it screens at the Rafael on Sunday), but I have previewed DVD screener copies of two hour-long films playing together as part of the International Buddhist Film Festival's December 9-19 stint at the Yerba Buena Center For The Arts. Titled The Inland Sea and Dream Window: Reflections on the Japanese Garden, these two Nipponophile documentaries from the early 1990s will be presented in rare 35mm prints, and the cinematographer for The Inland Sea, Hiro Narita (who also shot Never Cry Wolf and La Mission among many other titles) will be present at the films' December 12 pairing.

The Inland Sea ties nicely into the Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives screening because the latter film's director Apichatpong has reportedly been planning to follow his Cannes prize-winning film with a project on Donald Richie, who narrates and briefly appears in The Inland Sea, quite appropriately since he wrote the 1971 travel memoir upon which it was based. Richie is of course best known to cinephiles for his writings on Japanese film, but in fact his writing on the country he's lived in since the late 1940s investigates more than just its cinema. The Inland Sea, both in book and film form, seeks a traditional Japan fading from view in the latter part of the 20th century, by journeying between the coastal towns bordering the Seto Inland Sea that separates the islands of Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu. One gets a good sense of the subject and tone of the documentary from Vincent Canby's New York Times review from 1991. But perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the film is how it straddles the line between time capsule and period piece. Richie wrote the following for a 1993 reprinting of the memoir:

It has now been over twenty years since The Inland Sea was first published, and nearly thirty since I began the journals on which it is based. During this time the area has much changed. Last year, when the book was made into a film, the crew could no longer follow all of my original route since large portions of it were now unrecognizably developed.

Yet, they discovered that by jumping one island over, as it were, they could parallel my journey of three decades before; they could find places where, mirroring the words of my text, the past had not vanished, not quite. The Inland Sea I wrote about yet exists--it is there, if you know where to look.

I do wonder if the same could be said today, now that nearly another twenty years have passed.

Both The Inland Sea and suitably titled Dream Window: Reflections On The Japanese Garden are enriched by a musical score from 20th century Japan's arguably greatest composer, Toru Takemitsu, who wrote music for films by Nagisa Oshima, Masaki Kobayashi, Masahiro Shinoda, Shohei Imamura, Akira Kurosawa (though not for any of the Kurosawa/Toshiro Mifune collaborations, like the seven playing the VIZ over the holidays), and many other directors before his 1996 death. His contribution to Dream Window is much stronger than to The Inland Sea, however. Not only is there more music, featured more prominently, but Takemitsu is interviewed on camera, and even the title Dream Window was taken from the title of one of his serialist compositions. Any Takemitsu fan should consider this film a must-watch; it's especially enlightening to be able to hear the man speak about the affinity he feels between music composition and gardens, and then hear a passage from one of his Messaien-influenced pieces, while an image from the garden at Sai-Hochi appears on screen.

Perhaps Toru Takemitsu's most fruitful if not frequent composer/director relationship was the one he had with Hiroshi Teshigahara, director of Woman In The Dunes, Antonio Gaudí, and Rikyu as well as other films Takmitsu scored. Teshigahara, too, appears prominently in Dream Window: Reflections On The Japanese Garden, not in the role of film director but as grand master of his father's Sogetsu school of Ikebana (flower arranging), and as a budding outdoor garden designer as well. Since the documentary was released between Teshigahara's final two films Rikyu and Basara: Princess Goh, the only two jidai-geki (period films) the multitalented artist made in his career, it's particularly interesting to hear him advise, "we have to think of what we can create for today's world. It would be pointless just to copy what went before."

Ultimately both The Inland Sea and Dream Window are likely to be satisfying viewing for anyone with a natural interest in Japanese culture, with added excitement for cinephiles curious to see legendary figures associated with Japanese cinema (Richie, Takemitsu, Teshigahara) speaking of matters separate from their involvement in film. They certainly make sense paired together (perhaps this was first done in a 1993 issue of the Buddhism journal Tricycle) by the International Buddhist Film Festival. Though neither film addresses Buddhism in a sustained and direct way (Shintoism is in fact more prominently dealt with in The Inland Sea), they both invite a kind of contemplative observational style that may appeal to Buddhist viewers, especially those who remember that the festival programmed Thomas Riedelsheimer's documentary on artist Andy Goldsworthy Rivers And Tides at a previous event. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Riedelsheimer had encountered Dream Window in particular before developing the rhythms he employed in that film.

Before I sign off, let me point out that Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is equally devoted to the sacred and the profane in December, as in addition to their Buddhist film series, the venue is also hosting a devious horror film series called Go To Hell For the Holidays From December 2-18. Dennis Harvey has previewed most of the titles, including Wolf Creek (the Australian film that was released on Christmas Day 2005 in the US). The only selection I've seen myself is the Thai film about the cannibalistic-minded noodle vendor, The Meat Grinder. I'll simply say it was just as gory and twice as atmospheric as I expected it to be.

Sean McCourt: The Boys

Last year, Sean McCourt interviewed for Hell On Frisco Bay the director of the English Surgeon, a documentary currently playing at the Red Vic. And on Friday, another doc that Sean caught but I missed will open on Frisco Bay (at the Metreon). Here's Sean:

Although Robert and Richard Sherman might not be household names today, chances are it would only take a fraction of a second for someone listening to one of their songs to instantly recognize it and immediately be transported back to their youth, all while singing along to every word.

For 50 years now, the Sherman Brothers have been writing some of the most well-known and beloved music ever produced for film, television, stage and even amusement parks. Ranging from Mary Poppins and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang to Winnie The Pooh and "It’s A Small World," the output of the two musically gifted siblings has been absolutely astonishing—and because of the fact that they have produced so much work together over the years, and the tunes are almost universally upbeat and inspiring for children, the true story behind their tumultuous personal relationship with one another is doubly fascinating.

The Boys: The Sherman Brothers’ Story is a new documentary looking at the lives of these two award-winning men, produced and directed by their two sons, cousins Jeffrey and Gregory Sherman, who didn’t know each other growing up even though they only lived a few blocks away from one another.

The world premiere screening of the deeply moving film took place in San Francisco on April 25th at the theater in the Letterman Digital Arts Complex, George Lucas’ new high-tech headquarters in the Presidio, the former army base that will also be home to the new Disney Family Museum later this year.

The packed event, part of the 52nd annual San Francisco International Film Festival, brought out all sorts of film-goers, ranging from small children to grandparents, including a sizable group from Disney that filled the middle section of the seating area.

Composed of several different types of cleverly woven together footage, including current interviews, clips from films, vintage behind the scenes home movies, personal family photos and more, The Boys starts out by giving some background on Robert and Richard Sherman’s family, particularly their father, the famous Tin Pan Alley songwriter Al Sherman.

Providing a backdrop for some of the brothers’ early influences, the documentary makes it clear that the two always had different personalities and interests, which were only widened when the elder Robert went off to fight in World War II and was wounded in combat. His physical injuries and the emotional scars from his time in the European portion of the conflict are slowly brought up over the course of the film, shedding light on his outlook on life, particularly when it is revealed that he was among the first Americans to liberate the Dachau concentration camp near the end of the war. He is clearly still haunted by what he saw, and he talks about how creating joyful art helped "make the horror go away."

Robert and Richard Sherman, now 83 and 80, respectively, are interviewed separately throughout the film, with Robert now living in London, while Richard still resides in Southern California. Many of the sequences segue from current interview footage to nicely rendered, almost three-dimensional restored photos from the past, while the interviews continue as voice-overs. 

In addition to interviews with the Sherman Brothers and their sons, the film features words and thoughts from other family members and several people who have worked with them or admired their songs over the years, including Dick Van Dyke, Julie Andrews, John Landis, Angela Lansbury and Ben Stiller, who served as an Executive Producer on the project.
 
Tracing the story of their music career back to when they were getting ready for college, the film details how Robert had already made up his mind to major in writing, while Richard wasn’t sure what he wanted to do until one day while walking down the street he found himself with a tune running through his mind that he didn’t know where it had come from. Running home to the family piano to figure out how to play the melody he heard in his head, his father walked in on him, asked what he was doing, and when he was told, he immediately suggested to his son that he should become a music major.  
 
After the two graduated and moved back to southern California, they shared an apartment, living together out of economic necessity, with both concentrating on their own muses—Robert on writing a novel and poems, while Dick wrote and played music. One day their father suggested they work together on something, which they did; their first published song was "Gold Can Buy You Anything But Love," recorded by the legendary Gene Autry.

The documentary shows how this was the impetus for their continued teamwork, and then details The Sherman Brothers’ first big break with Disney, when they wrote "Tall Paul" for Annette Funicello in 1959.
  
Both brothers obviously still love Walt Disney and appreciate the opportunity that he gave them; as they talk about their first meeting with him, and how they got their job, they start to choke back tears a bit, and later on in the film they do the same when recalling the last time they saw Disney before he passed away in 1966. They relate the story of going to a movie premiere with him, and that at the end of the night, he came up to them and said, "Keep up the good work, boys"—something that he had never done before.

In a further touching tribute to Disney, the documentary then shows a still photo of him, with the camera panning towards the sky where a drawing of Mickey Mouse is crying. The scene then shifts to home movies of Disney throwing seeds to a flock of birds, all while the song "Feed The Birds" from Mary Poppins is played. Richard Sherman explains that Disney always asked them to play that particular song if they were in his office at the end of the week, that it was one of his favorites.

Among the interesting background stories and insider’s looks into how the some of the songs they wrote were originally created is one about how Jeff Sherman came home one day from school to find his father struggling to work on a new song for Mary Poppins. Robert Sherman looked up from his work, and asked how his son’s day had been, who related that he and the other students had to have a vaccination. Robert then asked if it was given through a shot, to which Jeff replied that they had "just taken a spoon and poured the medicine over a sugar cube" for them to eat. A current shot of Jeff imitating his father is then shown, nodding his head in thought, and then saying, "A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down…"

Many, many other clips from movies and songs are used throughout the lively 100 minute film, including Charlotte’s Web, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, Snoopy Come Home, The Jungle Book, and "The Tiki Tiki Tiki Room."

Interwoven into these wonderful snippets of their work is a gradual attempt at explaining the story behind the Sherman Brothers’ eventual personal estrangement—the case for one reason in particular is not made, but rather it seems that years and years of little things building up led to their current situation, among the factors being marital problems, financial considerations, and the general outward personalities of the two—who continue to work together across a long distance, thanks to advances in technology—but they just can’t seem to reconnect on a personal level for themselves, or for their families.

At the end of the documentary, the two filmmaker cousins show their trip to the recent premiere of Mary Poppins The Musical, and in voice-overs discuss how they had hoped that through the making of the Boys, they could convince their fathers to reconcile and re-form their personal relationship. A sequence of the two brothers greeting each other cordially on the red carpet is shown, but then one of the sons comes back on to finish the narration, saying "unlike a Sherman Brothers song, not all stories have a happy ending."
 
After the screening, Richard, Jeff and Greg Sherman appeared in person for a question and answer session, walking to the front of the theater to a standing ovation.

One of the questions posed for Richard Sherman asked about how he felt when he was riding "It’s A Small World," or was in a place where one of their songs was being played, and people were enjoying it, but didn’t know that he was one of the people who had created it. He said he a good answer for that, that he would share a story from his childhood—when he went to a big football game with his father, during halftime the marching bands came out and played "You Gotta Be A Football Hero," a song that his father had co-written. The crowd was all cheering along and clapping to the song, and as a kid he asked his dad how he felt, to which his father replied "It feels good, kiddo."

Richard Sherman then looked around at the audience at the Letterman Theater, smiled, and said, "That's how I feel, it's feels good!"

Another question asked of the two filmmakers was what they had learned while making the documentary. Jeff Sherman, Robert’s son, began talking about how he really started to get to know his father, but he started getting a little overwhelmed, and had to choke back tears. Richard chimed in, saying, "See, we Sherman’s are an emotional bunch!" which drew supportive applause.

Shortly thereafter, the three were talking about all of the people that helped them with the film, and Richard mentioned that two of the people in the picture had recently passed away after filming their interviews—he then started choking up himself, and he said, "See?"

Jeff Sherman then looked at his cousin, and said, “You’re next!” Greg looked over at him, back at the audience, and then grinned a little, pointing at his head, quietly staying, “Sports scores…sports scores,” giving away the fact that he was trying to think of other things to stop the flow of tears coming.
 
Overall, The Boys is a very well made documentary, and is a must see for anyone who grew up listening to the Sherman Brothers’ unforgettable songs, though it may not be entirely suitable for young children due to some of it’s highly emotional scenes.

The Boys: The Sherman Brothers’ Story opens May 22nd at the AMC Metreon in San Francisco.