These notes accompany the screenings of Howard Hawks’s </i>Bringing Up Baby</a> on March 2, 3, and 4 in Theater 3.</p>
Today’s posting is on Howard Hawks’s Bringing Up Baby, but more on that in a moment. Last week, in praising George Cukor’s Holiday as a product of the Hollywood studio system, I got off onto a bit of a rant about how bad American commercial films have become since the demise of that system. I was completely unaware that Mark Harris covered a lot of the same ground in the February issue of Esquire, in a piece called “The Day the Movies Died.” Harris had much more space, and he knows a great deal more about contemporary Hollywood than I would ever want to know. Although he holds Inception in much higher esteem than I do, the points he makes about the replacement of storytelling skills and character development by technological gimmickry are essentially the same. I promise you I did not know of Harris’s article before I wrote mine. Honest Injun! Cross my heart!

Posts tagged ‘Hollywood studio system’
Howard Hawks’s Bringing Up Baby
George Cukor’s Holiday
These notes accompany the screenings of George Cukor’s </i>Holiday</a> on February 23, 24, and 25 in Theater 2.</p>
George Cukor (1899–1983) was not the kind of auteur who was stylistically flashy, and his philosophical point of view was not rigidly defined by a dogmatic personality. His talents were more subtle, but, nonetheless, genuine. Cukor’s Holiday was adapted from the Broadway success by Philip Barry, who went on to write The Animal Kingdom and The Philadelphia Story.
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