A Farewell To Arms And To Double Bills

In 1970 my friend Tom Olds and I anticipated the future by creating mashups of song lyrics and anything else we felt like citing from the horizon. I'm reminded of this 'cause RockCritics.com just reposted an extraordinarily fun Phil Dellio piece from the late '90s on the art of the double bill; as Phil says in a comment, double bills were antiquated then and they're science fiction now. But perhaps their impossibility makes them fodder for fancy and fantasy. In any event, it inspired me to write a short Phil imitation of my own as a comment, which I'm reproducing here. Before that, just a quick nod to rock critic Greil Marcus who, as Phil noted, once cast himself not as a frustrated musician but as someone whose secret ambition was to be a DJ; I'm thinking of me and Tom (when I handed a mashup* in to Mrs. Singer in 11th grade I wrote at the bottom that I'd always wanted to be a DJ) but also that real DJs invented hip-hop, which along with disco and dub and techno and on allowed producers and remixers and makers of sound collages to indulge their inner DJ; also the art-world ferment starting with the '50s allowed artists to act like mini curators within their work; so, anyway, a tribute here to real artists who rarely get their due: DJs, magazine editors, layout managers, anthologists, art curators, and that vanishing species, the film programmer.

*It's in my book as "The What Thing."

My comment:

Frank Kogan
MARCH 30, 2021 AT 6:53 PM

It is my sad duty to report that a theater in San Francisco once ran a double bill of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and A Farewell To Arms.**

I doubt that there was any cinematic justification for this, though I've seen neither film (and neither Farewell) so I can't say for sure. I'm not conjuring up any great affinities between Poltergeist and either Gilda or The Mortal Storm (those constituting the entirety of my Hooper-C. Vidor-Borzage viewing), but it's been a while.

As you might imagine, my attempts to create a genius playlist segue between Sevyn Streeter's “Before I Do” and Eric Church's "Before She Does" were not successful.

Double bills I'd program: New York, New York and Eclipse for using similar montages of disconnection as their endings (and to see if there are other similarities); All The President's Men and Moneyball (former way better than the latter, but where the latter is great — the segment in the Cleveland Indians' office — it shares the President's sense of "paranoid architecture"***/uneasy office space); The Kremlin Letter and any other Richard Boone performance (movie or TV episode) that Phil thinks would pair well with it (barely know Boone; like him a lot in The Tall T but it's a character going in a different direction from the one in Kremlin, and I want to preserve Tall T for a bill with Mr. Majestyk as the two movies that successfully embody an Elmore Leonard universe); Lonesome Cowboys and Beware Of A Holy Whore.

**Okay, this was before I lived there and I haven't fact-checked the claim. But the person who said so was saying it as if it actually truly happened and even pointed out the theater to me: not a rep theater but a cheapy likely to show Texas Chainsaw type stuff.

***Think it was Sarris who used the phrase "paranoid architecture" in regard to the District Of Columbia in All The President's Men.

I'm guessing that several cities may still have a stray repertory movie house; and film festivals can allow programmers to do their work. Where else? Streaming is undermining the importance of a network TV evening lineup, though I suppose such lineups are still running strong on cable news. Where do compilers and juxtaposers get to practice their trade these days? Home pages? Playlists? Or are the algorithms taking those over too? Maybe it's down to those who run Twitter polls. Well, radio stations still exist.

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