We don’t let our kids use rocket launchers until they finish painting their rooms. We’re old-fashioned that way. Read about it at the Rightnetwork: No Icky Boys, Please!
Let’s be positive today. Nary a discouraging word, as they say.
O.K. I’m positive that Hollywood hasn’t made ten movies as good and entertaining as “Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House” in the intervening 57 years since it was made. Yup, I’m positive.
Hollywood is in a slump, according to Variety. People don’t plunk it down reflexively at the box office any more. Lots of head scratching up and down the Sunset Strip. Well, let me give you some hints, over there on the west coast, about why we’re not buying as much of this piffle as previously: It’s because it’s crap.
It always was crap, I know. When I was a kid, TV was in black and white, and had three or four channels. You watched whatever was on it. Period. And if you were home sick from school, propped up with pillows in the bed, fortified with those wonder drugs, aspirin and ginger ale, the one treat you got was the 11 inch black and white TV at the foot of your bed, and bad movies all day long.
TV, with only those three or four channels, still didn’t know how they could possibly fill all those hours. They’d show any drivel: Candlepin bowling for a couple of bucks, or maybe just a gift certificate. Community Auditions. Anyone who’s ever seen Community Auditions can’t watch American Idol. Once you’ve seen the spectacle of an overfed adolescent in a tutu twirling a baton to a lounge combo version of a Sousa march, nothing else will do.
But of all the dreck, Dialing for Dollars was king. Dialing for Dollars was a local show, where a bad radio announcer would host an interminable movie in the afternoon, and occasionally pause to pick bits of a shredded phonebook out of a rotating basket, and call the phone number on the scrap. At first, the available technology didn’t even allow you to hear the person being called, making the tableau seem even stranger than it was. If the person was home, and watching the movie, and could identify the movie, and knew the exact amount of cash they were giving away, they won a few bucks. Think of those odds. The unintentional comedy factor was pretty high; picture watching, watching mind you, a bad emcee count on his fingers and intone: One ring. Two rings. Three rings. Four Rings…
People would actually answer their phones back then, and talk to whoever was on the line. No call screening. No unlisted numbers. No cold call salesman. No answering machines yet. Hell, the host would still reach party lines occasionally back then. For you youngsters, a party line was a phone circuit that served several homes, because phone lines used to be precious, and expensive. The phone would ring slightly differently for each user, and your neighbors could pick up their phones and listen to your conversations if they felt like it. And so occasionally the host would be talking to three shut-ins at the same time, none of whom were watching his movie.
The host would mostly get elderly ladies, who didn’t know what day it was, never mind what the movie was, and started talking to the guy as if they were restarting a conversation they had started in 1936, and he’d sit there, politely trying to get an interjection in edgewise, always failing, and looking at the camera like it was an oncoming freight train. Finally, he’d get the question out, and the women would say:
“What did you say your name was, again?”
And he’d always say: “Buh Bye” sweetly, and they’d add ten bucks to the till, and he’d PUT THE PHONE NUMBER BACK IN THE BIN. Try, try again, indeed.
The more upscale local station tried a bit of class by showing the same dreadful movies at midnight on the weekends, but with a host in a tuxedo. He’d stand on a set reminiscent of a Busby Berkley musical, in bow tie and tails, and try to find something interesting to say about the movie. There was a problem. The fellow hosting the show used to be Bozo the Clown on Saturday mornings, and we all knew it. And try as he might to be urbane, many of us would always look at him and smirk. That poor fellow spent his whole rest of his life trying to be suave and sophisticated, but the greasepaint and fright wig always showed somehow, like a tattoo you got when you were young and drunk, and regretted for every waking moment for the rest of your life.
Off topic perhaps, but I met his son once. I attended a party at the local junior college, the summer between high school and college. The college had always had the reputation as a place where wealthy people send their ne’er-do-well children to dry out and be babysat by the faculty, until they could ram them back into the real college that had expelled them for partying too much. My friends and I were just the poor local schlubs, very out of place, and must have looked like the dead end kids to these little inebriant fauntleroys. We were the guests of a lovely young lady who was dating a friend of mine. The movie host’s son was there, drunk as a lord, and began hitting unmercifully on my friend’s girlfriend, right in front of him. My friend could have disassembled the little blighter into his component limbs, and stacked them like cordwood if he’d had the mind to, but he was a gentle sort, and slow to anger. The little cretin eventually brought out what I’m sure he thought were his big guns: Do you know who my father is?
I butted in: “I sure do. He’s Bozo!”
This was not the answer he was looking for. He withdrew.
Anyway, eventually you saw every movie ever made- good, bad or indifferent. Occasionally they’d show a good movie like “Blandings,” by mistake perhaps. And you got a perspective on how hard it is to make a really good movie. It must be difficult, there’s so many of them, but so few worth watching.
What I suspect, however, is that recently they’re not really trying to entertain us anymore. They really don’t seem to care that a vast majority of potential viewers, me included, don’t need to see another movie about a hit man with a heart of gold. Forty five of them a year for the last ten years has fulfilled my need for comic murderers, thank you. I’d rather see stories about interesting and attractive people, like the Blandings.
“Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House” was made in 1948. It was essentially remade in the 1980s, with uneven effect, but still with enough of the original’s luster to shine on through, as “The Money Pit.” Tom Hanks and Diane from “Cheers” made a good comic team, and we own that one too and wqtch it occasionally. But Blandings is king.
Cary Grant is da bomb. Cary Grant is a movie star. Picture Tom Cruise sitting on a couch across from Jay Leno. That’s a very small picture, even if you have widescreen television. Now picture Cary Grant sitting across from Johnny Carson. They’re both too big for the screen, no matter how big it is.
Everybody in Hollywood is a homunculus compared to Cary Grant. He’s dead, and in black and white, and my wife still reminds me: “You know, Cary Grant is a babe.”
Grrr. Yeah, I know.
And unlike modern actors, he can act. Not Olivier acting. I mean, “Hamlet” isn’t in danger of breaking out in the middle of one of his movies. But you only need so much Hamlet in your life; somebody tell a joke, will ya? Cary Grant knew how to.
And Myrna Loy was a babe. She had the looks of the woman you would marry, and stay that way. She started her career as a vamp, but morphed into a matron eventually. The vamp always showed, though, like a glimpse of garter, and I still remind my wife: “Myrna was a babe, you know.”
Grrr. Yeah, I know, she says.
And Myrna knew how to deliver her lines for their full comic effect. Most actresses today sound like they’re reading that shredded phonebook I mentioned earlier, aloud. Without their glasses.
The story is and interesting cultural artifact about city folks building their house out in the countryside. It’s funny to hear them talk about Western Connecticut like it’s out on the prairie, and bucolic as Vermont. Mr. Blanding’s house would fetch tens of millions of dollars today. But the story is universal, for anybody that builds a house, and raises children, and works at a job. The humor is the sort that’s a lost art these days. It’s quiet, and self effacing, and subtle. Mark Twain used to rail against people that “told jokes.” He knew how to be funny, which is to tell a story in a humorous way, and avoided punchline fodder. And a movie, a comic movie, is just telling a story in a humorous way, isn’t it? It should be. This one is.
And it’s interesting to look through the actors who have small parts in the movie. They all know what they’re doing, and push the story along nicely. Only a a fetishist would recognize more than a few of them by name, but they all look familiar. Then you look up their resumes, and are amazed:
Louise Beavers, who plays their maid, and comes up with the advertising slogan that pays for that house, was in 163 movies!
Harry Shannon, the well driller, who has the best scenes in the movie, appeared in 149 movies. I vaguely remember him shooting at John Wayne, or shooting at the someone else with John Wayne, a few times.
Nestor Paiva, who plays an appraiser for 30 seconds in the movie, was in 186 movies.
And Jason Robards (Senior) knew how to work. He appeared in no fewer than 206 movies, and then had a son to be in a few hundred more.
And you know why they worked like that. They were professional, and people that knew how to write and produce movies knew enough to use accomplished and dependable actors, and tried mightily to entertain us. They still do entertain us, though they’re all dead now.
It’s the live people in Hollywood that have forgotten how, or never knew.
I’ve become prominent, internet-wise, among people looking for “Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House.” That’s fine by me. Me and my wife would rather be associated with Cary Grant and Myrna Loy as any other two people, I guess. Here’s the first thing I wrote about them, about a year ago:
Good day to ye.Let’s be positive today. Nary a discouraging word, as they say.
O.K. I’m positive that Hollywood hasn’t made ten movies as good and entertaining as “Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House” in the intervening 57 years since it was made. Yup, I’m positive.
Hollywood is in a slump, according to Variety. People don’t plunk it down reflexively at the box office any more. Lots of head scratching up and down the Sunset Strip. Well, let me give you some hints, over there on the west coast, about why we’re not buying as much of this piffle as previously: It’s because it’s crap.
It always was crap, I know. When I was a kid, TV was in black and white, and had three or four channels. You watched whatever was on it. Period. And if you were home sick from school, propped up with pillows in the bed, fortified with those wonder drugs, aspirin and ginger ale, the one treat you got was the 11 inch black and white TV at the foot of your bed, and bad movies all day long.TV, with only those three or four channels, still didn’t know how they could possibly fill all those hours. They’d show any drivel: Candlepin bowling for a couple of bucks, or maybe just a gift certificate. Community Auditions. Anyone who’s ever seen Community Auditions can’t watch American Idol. Once you’ve seen the spectacle of an overfed adolescent in a tutu twirling a baton to a lounge combo version of a Sousa march, nothing else will do.
But of all the dreck, Dialing for Dollars was king. Dialing for Dollars was a local show, where a bad radio announcer would host an interminable movie in the afternoon, and occasionally pause to pick bits of a shredded phonebook out of a rotating basket, and call the phone number on the scrap. At first, the available technology didn’t even allow you to hear the person being called, making the tableau seem even stranger than it was. If the person was home, and watching the movie, and could identify the movie, and knew the exact amount of cash they were giving away, they won a few bucks. Think of those odds. The unintentional comedy factor was pretty high; picture watching, watching mind you, a bad emcee count on his fingers and intone: One ring. Two rings. Three rings. Four Rings…
People would actually answer their phones back then, and talk to whoever was on the line. No call screening. No unlisted numbers. No cold call salesman. No answering machines yet. Hell, the host would still reach party lines occasionally back then. For you youngsters, a party line was a phone circuit that served several homes, because phone lines used to be precious, and expensive. The phone would ring slightly differently for each user, and your neighbors could pick up their phones and listen to your conversations if they felt like it. And so occasionally the host would be talking to three shut-ins at the same time — none of whom were watching his movie.
The host would mostly get elderly ladies, who didn’t know what day it was, never mind what the movie was, and started talking to the guy as if they were restarting a conversation they had started in 1936, and he’d sit there, politely trying to get an interjection in edgewise, always failing, and looking at the camera like it was an oncoming freight train. Finally, he’d get the question out, and the women would say:”What did you say your name was, again?”And he’d always say: “Buh Bye” sweetly, and they’d add ten bucks to the till, and he’d PUT THE PHONE NUMBER BACK IN THE BIN. Try, try again, indeed.
The more upscale local station tried a bit of class by showing the same dreadful movies at midnight on the weekends, but with a host in a tuxedo. He’d stand on a set reminiscent of a Busby Berkley musical, in bow tie and tails, and try to find something interesting to say about the movie. There was a problem. The fellow hosting the show used to be Bozo the Clown on Saturday mornings, and we all knew it. And try as he might to be urbane, many of us would always look at him and smirk. That poor fellow spent his whole rest of his life trying to be suave and sophisticated, but the greasepaint and fright wig always showed somehow, like a tattoo you got when you were young and drunk, and regretted for every waking moment for the rest of your life.
Off topic perhaps, but I met his son once. I attended a party at the local junior college, the summer between high school and college. The college had always had the reputation as a place where wealthy people send their ne’er-do-well children to dry out and be babysat by the faculty, until they could ram them back into the real college that had expelled them for partying too much. My friends and I were just the poor local schlubs, very out of place, and must have looked like the dead end kids to these little inebriant fauntleroys. We were the guests of a lovely young lady who was dating a friend of mine. The movie host’s son was there, drunk as a lord, and began hitting unmercifully on my friend’s girlfriend, right in front of him. My friend could have disassembled the little blighter into his component limbs, and stacked them like cordwood if he’d had the mind to, but he was a gentle sort, and slow to anger. The little cretin eventually brought out what I’m sure he thought were his big guns: Do you know who my father is?I butted in: “I sure do. He’s Bozo!”
This was not the answer he was looking for. He withdrew.
Anyway, eventually you saw every movie ever made- good, bad or indifferent. Occasionally they’d show a good movie like “Blandings,” by mistake perhaps. And you got a perspective on how hard it is to make a really good movie. It must be difficult, there’s so many of them, but so few worth watching.What I suspect, however, is that recently they’re not really trying to entertain us anymore. They really don’t seem to care that a vast majority of potential viewers, me included, don’t need to see another movie about a hit man with a heart of gold. Forty five of them a year for the last ten years has fulfilled my need for comic murderers, thank you. I’d rather see stories about interesting and attractive people, like the Blandings.
“Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House” was made in 1948. It was essentially remade in the 1980s, with uneven effect, but still with enough of the original’s luster to shine on through, as “The Money Pit.” Tom Hanks and Diane from “Cheers” made a good comic team, and we own that one too and watch it occasionally. But Blandings is king.Cary Grant is da bomb. Cary Grant is a movie star. Picture Tom Cruise sitting on a couch across from Jay Leno. That’s a very small picture, even if you have widescreen television. Now picture Cary Grant sitting across from Johnny Carson. They’re both too big for the screen, no matter how big it is.
Everybody in Hollywood is a homunculus compared to Cary Grant. He’s dead, and in black and white, and my wife still reminds me: “You know, Cary Grant is a babe.”Grrr. Yeah, I know.And unlike modern actors, he can act. Not Olivier acting. I mean, “Hamlet” isn’t in danger of breaking out in the middle of one of his movies. But you only need so much Hamlet in your life; somebody tell a joke, will ya? Cary Grant knew how to.
And Myrna Loy was a babe. She had the looks of the woman you would marry, and stay that way. She started her career as a vamp, but morphed into a matron eventually. The vamp always showed, though, like a glimpse of garter, and I still remind my wife: “Myrna was a babe, you know.”Grrr. Yeah, I know, she says. Myrna knew how to deliver her lines for their full comic effect. Most actresses today sound like they’re reading that shredded phonebook I mentioned earlier, aloud. Without their glasses.
The story is and interesting cultural artifact about city folks building their house out in the countryside. It’s funny to hear them talk about Western Connecticut like it’s out on the prairie, and bucolic as Vermont. Mr. Blanding’s house would fetch tens of millions of dollars today. But the story is universal, for anybody that builds a house, and raises children, and works at a job.
The humor is the sort that’s a lost art these days. It’s quiet, and self effacing, and subtle. Mark Twain used to rail against people that “told jokes.” He knew how to be funny, which is to tell a story in a humorous way, and avoided punchline fodder. And a movie, a comic movie, is just telling a story in a humorous way, isn’t it? It should be. This one is.
And it’s interesting to look through the actors who have small parts in the movie. They all know what they’re doing, and push the story along nicely. Only a a fetishist would recognize more than a few of them by name, but they all look familiar. Then you look up their resumes, and are amazed:Louise Beavers, who plays their maid, and comes up with the advertising slogan that pays for that house, was in 163 movies!Harry Shannon, the well driller, who has the best scenes in the movie, appeared in 149 movies. I vaguely remember him shooting at John Wayne, or shooting at the someone else with John Wayne, a few times.Nestor Paiva, who plays an appraiser for 30 seconds in the movie, was in 186 movies. And Jason Robards (Senior) knew how to work. He appeared in no fewer than 206 movies, and then had a son to be in a few hundred more.And you know why they worked like that. They were professional, and people that knew how to write and produce movies knew enough to use accomplished and dependable actors, and tried mightily to entertain us.
They still do entertain us, though they’re all dead now.It’s the live people in Hollywood that have forgotten how, or never knew.
Hiya.
Have you folks seen Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House? It’s a great movie from 1949 about an ad executive from New York City and his family that move to the “wilds” of Western Connecticut, and the adventures they have building a house there. It’s great fun, and still has a lot to offer the modern viewer. The foibles are universal, and the relationship between the owners and the contractors really hasn’t changed much in the intervening fifty years or so.
There’s a scene in the movie where Mrs Blandings (Myrna Loy) collars the Painting Contractor, and goes over the color scheme for the interior of the house. It’s priceless. Benjamin Moore liked it so much they made the scene into a television commercial a few years back. Having been on the receiving end of the same transaction countless times gave it the frisson of recognition you get with something familiar in a movie, well portrayed.
Mrs. Blandings recounts to the contractor, who never says anything more than a few mumbled words and grunts of agreement, the litany of adjectives, moods, and elaborate examples she has for the colors in the house. She describes butter, and a certain apple, and supplies him with a piece of thread, and points out a tiny dot on a scrap of wallpaper, and so forth. The descriptions are so involved and specific, in the vaguest sort of way, that the contractor seems barely able to drink them all in. Of course the white for the kitchen is “not a cold, antiseptic hospital white, but not to suggest any other color than white” to Mrs Blandings.
The woman leaves, and the contractor’s previously solicitous face grows blasé, and he turns to his foreman, and asks: “Got that Charlie?” The man points to all the rooms, one after another, and reels off: “Red, Green, Blue, Yellow, White.” They exchange “Oh, Brother” looks. Priceless.
Look, they’re just colors. They name them after things, and moods, and so forth, but trust me, when the contractor goes to the paint store, it’s still “give me a gallon of #285 in the flat latex.” The fact that you call it “Essence of Euphrates Washed Babylonian Sand of Ninevah” won’t change that. It’s just tan.
Houses are getting to be big plastery spaces. The amount and complexity of the millwork and flooring shrinks all the time, and people are relying on color more than ever to differentiate rooms, and add interest, so it’s important to choose them wisely. And it’s not all that easy.
The human eye is the most sensitive in the animal kingdom to minute differences in color. I doubt that ability is some vestigal leftover from Paleolithic times to see berries on bushes far away. Humans are constructed to be sophisticated animals. And what you look at affects how you feel. So paint your walls pleasant colors, in good combinations, or you’ll be sad, perhaps miserable. And if you’re miserable already, painting your house like a Goth Rocker’s dungeon is unlikely to help you any either.
Let’s take it from the top, shall we? Everything you think is a “warm” color, generally speaking, is as about as warm as Pluto in winter, at night. “Warm” used as an adjective for color has become an absolute good, like everybody’s children being “above average.”
Black’s cold, and any grey made with it usually is too. Red’s cold, usually although everyone will tell you it’s a hot color. Hot ain’t warm. Most pastels are cool tones. Neon colors are called hot, but usually are cold looking too. You’ve got to get those earth tones in there, or the color is cool to the eye.
I remember a fellow I used to work with, many long years ago, that taught me how to mix colors with pigments. The rack of pigments was different than what an artist uses, and I’ve noticed that artist’s brushes are way too small to get your living room done in time for that dinner party you’re throwing too.
As I was saying, the fellow amazed me, in that he could make most anything, colorwise, out of most anything else. He knew his color wheel, and more important, he knew how to make it work with the traditional palette of pigments that painters use.
I lived in a dilapidated but architecturally interesting apartment. I wanted to paint the built in shelves in one room a rich, dark grey color that I saw my coworker making. He said sure, I’ll make you some, and scanned the mismatched mess of half-used cans that were left from failed samples proposed to the owners of the large house we were working at. He picked up a can of light rose colored paint.
This I had to see.
Thalo Green, the opposite on the wheel, and all the red in the pink disappeared. Light grey now.
Raw Umber darkened it, and gave it a richer tone.
Raw sienna warmed up the color, which was flirting with a kind of purplish tone.
He pondered a moment.
A drop of burnt sienna, and we were done.
Really rich, warm color. Not “warm” like everyone bandies about for things like blue, which is pretty much glacial, by the way, but earthy, complex, sophisticated…
Okay, I almost lapsed into Myrna Loy territory there. But it was a handsome grey. It must have been, Jimmy Carter was President back then, and I still remember it to this day and wax poetic about it.
And so I learned how to make those colors, and what makes them tick. And I’ll give you some easy advice on how to get rich, interesting, um, well, warm colors for your walls: Throw away all the color brochures you’ve got. There’s generally upwards of 2000 colors in those color wheels, and they’re nothing but trouble on roller skates, I’m telling you. Just because you’re sophisticated and don’t decorate like you live in a trailer park doesn’t mean you’re ready to navigate through that, any more than having a driver’s license means you know how to weld a monococque automobile chassis. You need an editor, and fast. And if you think that you’re always going to get good advice from your decorating magazines, go to the library and look at the back issues from just five years ago. They look pretty terrifying when the bloom is off the rose, generally.
Instead, go to a paint dealer that sells exterior paint, in any brand that has something called “Historical Colors.” Some have interior colors, but get the exterior colors too. they’ll work, and the colors can be mixed in any product.
Ben Moore’s good, and familiar, but many other manufacturers will fit the bill. Cheap paint generally has two problems with it. The paint itself is fine, but the materials the manufacturers supply with it, like color selectors, stink, and the pigments they use are plastic looking and used in overly simple formulas to make unsophisticated colors. The trouble with cheap paint is that it’s just as good as good paint, and so will last a s long as the good stuff, and look bad the whole time.
Pick your interior colors out of there. They really are all warm in there, because back when they were making the paint colors that are mimicked in the Historical Colors, the pigments needed to make electrifying colors were scarcer than good advice is now, and they got interesting effects by juxtaposing interesting colors next to one another, not by tossing in screeching pigments like chrome yellow and candy apple red and so forth.
Get a quart of anything you’re thinking of buying more than a gallon of. Paint a portion of the wall, say, three feet square, and look at it for a couple of days. Forget the postage stamp sized strips of colors you get at the displays in the Home Depot I warned you about yesterday. Even an experienced pro has trouble using those to pick colors appropriately, and the presence of several closely related but different colors on the card can throw you way off. The exterior color selectors generally have suggested color combinations too, and you can find related colors to paint your millwork, and to thrust in front of the person who’s asking you what color your couch pillows should be too.
I worked at a very old house when Ford was president, and it was painted a medium grey, with a sort of dull coral pink front door. It poked you right in the eye, but each color taken alone was almost somber. It was the juxtaposition that made them jump out at you. It’s hard to achieve that kind of sophisticated and subtle interaction, so let someone else do the legwork for you, someone that knows what they’re doing, and studies colors for a living. Like all good executives do when making decisions, have a few excellent choices placed in front of you, and choose from those. Just don’t tell the designers that you’re using the exterior chart for interiors, or they’ll excommunicate me.
But I assure you, the clerk in the store will just nod and smile when you specify exterior colors in interior paints, and the formulas work just the same.
I bet he’s mumbling, under his breath the whole time he’s mixing them, too: “Red, Green, Blue,Yellow, White.”
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