If.... (1968)

Peter's Nite
Nora's pasta salad, gluten-free brownies

Lindsay Anderson bio at Screenonline:

Born in Bangalore, India, on 17 April 1923, younger son of a Scottish army officer stationed there, Anderson was named for Australian poet, Adam Lindsay Gordon, much admired by his mother. Educated at Cheltenham College, he announced there his intention to 'rebel' and spent the rest of his life carrying out this aim. At Cheltenham, he began a life-long friendship with writer-to-be, Gavin Lambert, drawn together by their love of American films; sixty years later, Lambert would write an elegant account of Anderson's (and his own) life and work.

Following World War 2 service as a cryptographer with the Army's Intelligence Corps, he read Classics at Wadham College, Oxford. Here, very significantly, he co-founded (with Lambert) the short-lived but influential critical journal, Sequence, in which he set down his passionately held views on such filmmakers as his heroes John Ford and Humphrey Jennings, on Hollywood musicals - and, with almost uniform severity - on the British cinema of the day, which he saw as irredeemably middle-brow and middle-class. In Sequence he indulged the luxury of 'saying exactly what [he] liked', and maintained the habit, sometimes to his own cost, for the rest of his life. He was not a man who changed his mind, and the passions of those early years informed the rest of his life.

John Harris on Lindsay Anderson via The Guardian:

Exactly 40 years ago, the film director Lindsay Anderson was preparing for the release of If..., the surreal story of a revolt in a public school in which the masters and prefects stood as signifiers for Britain and its atrophying establishment. This was 1968,and the cabal of libertines who drive the film's plot crystallised the political excitement that had been evident that year in London, Paris, Prague and Berlin. Their leader - all lips, hair and animal magnetism - was a character called Mick Travis, played by the young Malcolm McDowell. With good reason, his image has since been used on scores of record sleeves and club flyers, and tacked to successive generations of undergraduate walls.

Improbably, If... had been shot at Cheltenham college, Anderson's alma mater, whose cooperation had been secured via the crafty use of a 40-page fake script. "I kept saying, 'Why are they letting us shoot here? I can't believe it,'" says McDowell. "And Lindsay said, 'For God's sake, Malcolm - shut up! They think it's very nice, like a Tom Brown's Schooldays kind of film.'"

Eventually, the penny dropped. "Before the film opened," says McDowell, "they had to show it to the headmaster. It was the only screening Lindsay was not present at, which tells you something - and a week later, a letter arrived from Cheltenham college which sat unopened on his mantelpiece for at least seven years. I kept saying, 'Let's open it!', and he'd say, 'No! Put it back.' He didn't want to read the words, 'You betrayed us.'"

As a portrait of the rebel who retained a sentimental attachment to much of what he attacked, the anecdote has Anderson off to a tee - as I have been discovering over the past six months, working on a Radio 4 documentary that involved tracking down some of the people who were closest to him, as well as going back to the so-called Mick Travis trilogy: the three films that made Anderson's name - and, by the end, came close to destroying it.

If..., which won the Palme D'Or at the 1969 Cannes film festival, was the most brilliantly realised. O Lucky Man!, released in 1973, was more flawed, but an ambitious journey into our national character. To finish, there was 1982's Britannia Hospital, an unsatisfactory but fascinatingly swingeing attack on the NHS, trade unions, the monarchy, academia, science, television - and thereby Britain itself. It was released during the patriotic frenzy of the Falklands war, and according to one of Anderson's close associates, its outraged reception left him "a broken man". He remains one of British film's truly underrated talents, responsible for films full of an imagination and brio that most cinema long ago mislaid, but never quite accorded the reputation he deserves.

Anderson's last years were not as productive as they should have been, though in 1985, there came one high-profile and hilariously unlikely offer of work, when he was invited to film Wham! on their visit to China.
The result was a documentary Anderson titled If You Were There, which David Sherwin showed me on a portable TV at his home near the Forest of Dean: a rich, poetic, panoramic portrait of China's strangeness to the eyes of outsiders that George Michael thought wasn't "modern" enough, and Anderson claimed was guilty of one cardinal sin: there wasn't enough Wham! in it. To his annoyance, it was taken off him, recut and released as Wham! in China. "I do think that between them the Whammies have destroyed, or suppressed, an enjoyable, informative, entertaining and at times even beautiful film," he wrote in his diary.

Anderson died in August 1994, after suffering a heart attack while staying with friends in the south of France. A memorial celebration was held at the Royal Court, where David Storey dispensed an opening introduction to the evening. "He was a man with a set of values seemingly in place since birth," Storey said. "They were values by which he observed, scrutinised and judged everything around him, [and he had] an appetite for a world nobler, more charitable and above all more gracious than the one in which he found himself." If that description jars against Anderson's legendarily acerbic side, you do not have to look far for a more salty kind of remembrance; Malcolm McDowell, for example, later recalled that Anderson had expressed the hope that his gravestone might feature the inscription: "Surrounded by fucking idiots."

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Black Beauty (1971)

Pamela's Nite
Special guests: Tess and Fiona.

Mark Lester on starring in Black Beauty via Daily Mail:

We had two ponies playing the young Black Beauty, with the famous white blaze on their foreheads, and I loved spending time with them. Patrick Mower [now Rodney Blackstock in Emmerdale] played the cruel squire. He was a nice bloke and a good laugh but I couldn't work out why my mother, who had accompanied me to Ireland, was so excited to meet him. I didn't realise Patrick already had something of a reputation as a heart-throb.

Although in my memory that summer seems to stretch on for ever, as they do when you are a child, I was there for only about three weeks. After that the cast and crew left for Spain to shoot the rest of the film.

I can't recall what I was paid for Black Beauty but I do remember in 1967, when I was making Oliver!, proudly telling the Daily Mail's Lynda Lee-Potter that I was earning £200 a week and banking the lot with a view to buying an E-type Jag! I made my last feature film, The Prince And The Pauper, in 1976 when I was 18. I'd never really seen acting as a long-term career.

I became an osteopath and today I have a successful practice in Cheltenham. I haven't acted in three decades but there is a possibility I may return to the screen. I have been asked to play King Harold in a film called 1066.

Swimming Pool (2003)

Stuart's Nite.

François Ozon on his film, via fm.com:

Q: This is your first movie in English. What motivated you to take this step?

FO: Once I made the lead character an English author and cast Charlotte, I thought it only natural. Also, I thought it would be fun to try to direct actors in English. I do speak the language but have not completely mastered it. Since Charlotte speaks fluent French, I didn't think it would be too complicated. The language did become a game in that, first, I wrote the script in French. Then I had it translated. Going from French into English, the script evolved, because some of the nuances in French did not translate exactly into English. We had to find equivalents.

Q: That's another part of the creative process, which Swimming Pool addresses as a whole.

FO: Yes. People are constantly asking me, "How is it possible for you to make one film after the other? Where does your inspiration come from?" To answer that question, I had the idea of projecting myself onto the character of an English writer instead of talking about myself as a director. So then the exploration became, how does a writer find inspiration and create a story, and what links that story to reality?

For her work, Sarah Morton needs to be alone, to lock herself away in a comfortable house and follow a strict regimen with rules that she imposes on herself. Then, suddenly, reality comes knocking on her door. Her first reaction, of course, is to reject it and to withdraw into herself. But then she decides to let this reality enter into her project. Sooner or later, the artist is forced to make a pact with reality.

Q: Sarah is an English mystery writer. Why, and how, were you so specific?

FO: Because I think it is not the style that is most important, but rather the narrative - the intrigue and the accumulation of clues that ultimately lead to the murderer or the solution. Writing a screenplay is similar in that all of the elements are put into place so that they can be brought to life during filming. In filmmaking, I like throwing the spectator off guard, going someplace unexpected.

Ever since Agatha Christie, there is a tradition of English women writers who like to describe particularly troubling or horrible characters and situations. I met with François Rivičre, who has studied these writers and gave me some insight into their psychologies. A number of them drink too much, have repressed lesbian tendencies, and are fascinated by perversions.

Before we started the film, I sent the script to the author Ruth Rendell and proposed that she imagine the book that Sarah would write in Swimming Pool. She answered me right away with a very sharp letter; she thought I had the nerve to ask her to write a novelization of the script, and she let me know that she has never needed anyone's help with her writing. Charlotte was amused by this and told me this was exactly how Sarah Morton would have reacted.

Q: Did you work closely with Charlotte Rampling to create the character of Sarah Morton?

FO: While the character of Marie in Under the Sand fed off of Charlotte's personality, this time the character is completely invented. In real life, Charlotte is very far from Sarah Morton.

With Pascaline Chavanne, our costume designer, Charlotte and I looked at photos of Patricia Highsmith, Patricia Cornwell, P.D. James, and Ruth Rendell. They all have something masculine about them, and they all give the impression that life stopped in the 1970s. Charlotte agreed to cut her hair and to go in that direction. As Swimming Pool progresses, Sarah evolves in both her attitudes and her clothes. She blossoms, becoming more feminine and luminous.

Q: The author physically changes as she writes.

FO: Yes, I wanted to start off with the cliché of the old Englishwoman uncomfortable in her own skin - who was probably radiant in her youth. I also wanted this aging body to become an object of desire, maybe even more than Julie's.

Most importantly, I wanted Sarah and Julie's bodies to each take on the qualities of the other. Sarah undresses little by little, her clothes become more feminine, and a portion of life is reinstated. Julie, on the other hand, begins to lose her former artifice and move towards purity. She turns into a child again, whereas she begins the story as a very aggressive and sexual young woman. There is a mutual exchange between these two women.

I've created an unusual rhythm since we do not immediately step into the story proper. The establishing scenes are very important. First, in London, we discover Sarah in her daily little world - interacting with her publisher, her family situation as a spinster living with her father, her taste for alcohol…Then there is a second introduction to Sarah, which shows her setting up shop in Lubéron and settling into work.

This way, we step into Sarah's story - the way she works, the tangible methods of a writer who requires a specific environment what with her habits and her odd little ways. Swimming Pool adheres to the rhythm of the creative process: things fall into place bit by bit, and in the last half-hour everything speeds up. Then you're dealing with highly concentrated twists and emotions.

Q: The end of the film suggests that not everything Sarah's seen has been real.

FO: In the creative process, things are never simple: What is real and what is not? How do you differentiate fantasy from reality? This theme also echoes Under the Sand, where Charlottte's character kept mixing fantasy and reality. Although in Swimming Pool, everything related to fantasy is part of the act of creation, so it is more channeled and less likely to end up causing madness.

In terms of directing, I've treated everything that is imaginary in Swimming Pool in a realistic way so that you see it all - fantasy and reality alike - on the same plane. When you tell a story, or when you film it, your process of identification with your characters is such that you completely immerse yourself in their logic and their perceptions. It's as if you're experiencing the same emotions that they are.

Breaking Bad wins a Peabody!

The intent of the Peabody Awards is to recognize the most outstanding achievements in electronic media, including radio, television and cable. The Award is determined by one criterion – "Excellence." The Peabody Awards are presented only to "the best of the best."

First presented in 1941, the George Foster Peabody Awards recognize distinguished achievement and meritorious service by broadcasters, cable and Webcasters, producing organizations, and individuals. The awards program is administered by the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia. Selection is made each spring by the Peabody Board, a 16-member panel of distinguished academics, television critics, industry practitioners and experts in culture and the arts.

Today the George Foster Peabody Awards are often cited as the most selective and prestigious in electronic media. Each year, from more than one thousand entries, the Peabody Board selects the most outstanding works by unanimous vote. Though there is no set number of awards, no more than 36 have ever been presented in a single year.

Breaking Bad (AMC)
AMC, Sony Pictures Television, High Bridge Productions, Gran Via Productions
Bleak, harrowing, sometimes improbably funny, the series chronicled the consequences of a mild-mannered, dying science teacher's decision to secure his family's future by cooking methamphetamine.

Time Magazine in 1941:
A new type of accolade, which radio piously hopes will rank with journalism's Pulitzer Prizes and cinema's Oscars, was awarded for the first time last week. The trophies were four bronze medallions, each the size of a hockey puck. Their name: the George Foster Peabody Award "for conspicuous service in radio broadcasting." Selected for the first honors were: CBS (among chains), Cincinnati's 50,000-watt WLW (among big stations), Cleveland's 5,000-watt WGAR (among middle-sized stations), Columbia, null 250-watt KFRU (among small fry).

The idea of the awards was conceived by Lambdin Kay, public-service director for station WSB in Atlanta, and strenuously pushed by University of Georgia's publicity-minded dean of journalism, John E. Drewry. The University of Georgia itself awarded them, dubbing them after its late patron, Philanthropist George Foster Peabody, great & good friend of Franklin Roosevelt, who helped to found the Warm Springs Foundation.