Texts for Filmmakers
Strikethrough indicates a poem has been used already by a filmmaker
Janet Leigh is Afraid of Jazz by Marsha de la O
Movie Extras by Greg Djanikian
An Unmarried Woman by Denise DuhamelThe Bride Goes Wild by Amy Gerstler
diamonds are forever by Brian Gilmore
And If a Man Comes With a Gun? by Stephanie GlazierBlink Once by Karin Gottshall
The Con of it All by Raza Ali Hasan[Box of Light w/Early A-Bomb Test] or [Portrait of my Kaiju Birth as Directed by Ishirō Honda]
by Dennis Hinrichsen
Variation on a Theme by Ridley Scott by Gerry LaFeminaAt the Movies With My Mother by Joseph O. Legaspi
Soliloquy with Honey: Time to Die by Laura McCullough
Enter the Dragon by John Murillo
Starring John Wayne by Bruce SmithSome Months After My Father’s Death by Sheryl St. Germain
Ode to Thelma Ritter by David Trinidad
T is for Tamil Filems & Thunderthighs by Divya Victor
Janet Leigh is Afraid of Jazz
by Marsha de la O
The voices that swim through the music
offering something forbidden, close-up,
the dark arms of the horn player, his skin
fitting him sleek as a shark suit, clasping
the sax lifting it as sound descends
in long sizzling lines like wires arcing out,
empty eye sliding up and back
to the halo of the spot, motes drifting.
It makes her want to run. Like it could tear her
apart, a man at each limb lifting her
off the bed at the Otay Mesa motel,
all of them dressed in black and the music
never letting up its dazzling spun-out
phrases. If she could run, she would, under
the shadowy arcade as the camera pans wide
but she’s hobbled by her tight skirt,
the staccato of high heels tapping
a rhythm on the uneven street,
her breasts heaving under cashmere,
dogcollar of pearls around her perfect
neck while the sea crashes in the near
distance. We know she’s doomed by music,
cloudburst of percussion on the windshield
then silence, the camera wheels around
and Bates Motel appears, lit up on the sign.
It’s the way every aperture turns
into another eye and the shower
won’t stop running until long after
she’s died. We know she’s doomed, chords
shifting darkly, but she persists,
carrying on with her share of sorrow,
changing into black lingerie and
skipping town if she has to, ending
finally there, wherever the
heart of trouble happens to be.
Movie Extras
by Greg Djanikian
They are always falling into crevasses,
Misstepping into wobbles of quicksand
Or marching as foot soldiers over the world’s
Edge to prove some tyrannical point.
Even with animals they are unlucky,
Snake-bitten, piranha-gnawed, mauled
By abominables, and the commonest dog
Turning on them as on evil.
If disaster follows them like a cloud,
The heavens burst, and they are
Borne away clinging, poor wretches,
To none but each other,
It is always so hero and heroine
Can come stepping blithely
Over mines and springes and rubble,
Stealing our hearts, wearing our faces.
Movie after movie, day after day
They die almost out of earshot,
Just beyond our affections,
Easily, without fanfare.
Who are they these strange expendables—
Victims of spectacular meteors,
Scorpions, cars recklessly driven, wars—
That the world should love to do them in?
They pass anonymously in the street,
Lean idly in doorways. Before the knife
Plunges, the bullet hits, they say:
Do not pity us, we could be anyone.
An Unmarried Woman
by Denise Duhamel
When I first saw it, I was a high school junior. Clayburgh was scandalous
dancing ballet in her tee shirt and panties, showing her teenage daughter
a wet spot on the bed after she’d made love to her husband, the girl’s father.
I was fascinated by her lip gloss and feathered hair.
I had a Fair Isle sweater just like hers and wanted the crazy cape
in which she wraps her new lover on a cobblestone street in New York.
I didn’t understand then, of course, that I would someday be divorced
after sixteen years of marriage, just like her character, throwing up
on a sidewalk just like she did, jittery in a therapist’s office,
having an awful blind date, eating dim sum with a stranger
who would try to kiss her in a cab. Instead of pirouetting
to “Swan Lake,” I jumped around the apartment, singing
along with Beyoncé and Pink. Back then, in 1978, I didn’t quite get
the point. I just liked Jill’s outfits—the skirt and tank in the final scene
that reminds me now of Sarah Jessica Parker’s ensemble in the opening credits
of Sex and the City. When her artist-lover gives Jill a giant painting
as he heads off to Vermont for the summer, and she carries it through Soho,
fumbling and twisting in the wind, you can’t help but root for Jill,
just as I am rooting for myself, watching this movie again on DVD
thirty years later, part of my post-divorce Netflix recovery.
Jill, today, is in the obituaries. Breast cancer, chronic lymphocytic leukemia—
how can that be? She looks so young and fresh as she ice skates
with her pals, runs along the East River where her husband steps in dog shit
and blames her. When I first saw An Unmarried Woman, I went with my friend
and, if I remember correctly, we were freaked out by the sex scenes
and barely acknowledged Jill’s bland teenage daughter
who would have been about our age. Afterwards, at Friendly’s, we talked
about the pickled herring arc. Jill’s lover tells the story
about how his mother threw a jar towards his father’s head
and how, as he watched the fish smash against the wall, he decided
to become an abstract painter. Towards the end of the movie,
the lover himself lobs a jar at Jill when she doesn’t do what he wants.
My friend told me her mother hurled a bottle of applesauce at her father
and when she missed, the stuff ruined the wallpaper.
That was just marriage, we guessed, sipping our frappes.
We put our hands over our hearts and pledged we’d never wed
even as the cute boys came in, crowding into a booth
across from us. We blushed and giggled despite ourselves.
Adults, we agreed, were crazy—we wanted no part of their messes.
The Bride Goes Wild
by Amy Gerstler
You Can’t Run Away from It and You Can’t Take It With You, Man of a Thousand Faces: The Children Upstairs, Brats; All These Women Up in Arms—Misunderstood Husband Hunters. It Started in Paradise—The Best of Everything: Ten Nights in a Bar Room, Men Without Names, The Exquisite Sinner High and Dizzy—Long Legs, Dimples, The Velvet Touch. Foolin’ Around, Just This Once, She Had to Say Yes. A Night to Remember. Don’t Tell. I Confess—I’m No Angel, I Am the Law! The Fiend Who Walked West, Breathless, Accused My Foolish Heart. The Pleasure of His Company Changes White Heat to a Cold Wind in August. But One Night in the Tropics, I Saw What You Did. Ready, Willing, and Able, Naughty but Nice, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. Miles From Home, Living it Up, She Couldn’t Say No—My Sister Eileen—Too Young to Kiss, Each Pearl a Tear. The Awful Truth: Ladies Love Brutes. The Good News: The Devil is a Sissy. So Tickle Me, Doctor X, Truly Madly Deeply. Keep Laughing. You Gotta Stay Happy. Naked, the Invisible Woman Cries and Whispers Nothing but the Truth, Too Scared to Scream.
diamonds are forever
by Brian Gilmore
we will live twice
both times w/
sean connery rolling
balls of thunder
and saying his name coolly:
bond.
james bond
and these are the days of
two movies for $1.50
and they don’t clear the
theatre after the show.
and our father is here with
us and has brought us
and this is a movie house
in our neighborhood
and sean connery always
gets the girl and always
wins his fights
and wears nice clothes
unlike me
all i do is
go to the corner and back
or down the alley for a post
pattern where my big brother
throws me the bomb and for
a moment i am charley taylor
and the place my family always
summers is wildwood, new jersey
or atlantic city (before the casinos).
it is the greatest thing when
we are there too
it feels like we will
all live twice
our family together on
the boardwalk or in that
hot burning sand
or swimming in that salt
water along the jersey shore
and lets not forget salt water
taffy because nothing is better
in the summertime than
salt water taffy at the jersey
shore except maybe
séan connery
on some raft
with some long legged goddess
and i still
watch those bond
movies these days
though none of the
new bonds are as
good or as cool as
sean connery
and the movies really
aren’t the same either
because the movie house
is not in my neighborhood
they clear the theatre at the
end of the movies
but most of all
my father is not around anymore
to take me to the show.
And If A Man Comes With A Gun?
by Stephanie Glazier
Ars Poetica
At the women’s shelter, the gardener, wrinkled
and with folded papers gets up to make his speech— kids eating
broccoli, their mothers journaling on benches after therapy, a story of
a woman with the sunflowers knowing, because of their beauty, that her life
would find its way. If this, then this.
Teaching in the morning, we review: a simile is a comparison using like or as, remember?
You are bright like sunflowers to me.
Personification is giving something non-human, human abilities. The toys in Toy Story
the book we read where the crayons quit, like that, I mean not like. That.
The radio tells me about the children in Texas, long stretching hours
in their seats and then no more.
Here, mine are a field of common light
no one thought to shoot today.
Gd let them be a field.
Let them be a field. Let them be a field.
Blink Once
by Karin Gottshall
At fifteen I was what’s called bookish—
I had a recurring dream of an owl
lecturing on the Surrealists,
and I always woke from it happy.
I spent that entire summer running
the projector in the library basement—
silent movies for the kids on vacation,
cold coffee and fritters on a table
for the grownups. The films were fragile
and old and everyone laughed
when Buster Keaton fell in love. I had
the whole day to think and my thoughts
all felt sculpted, I worked that hard
on each one—chiseled and rasped.
I spent evenings reading in my room,
listening to thunder. Sometimes a firefly
would stray through the broken screen
and I’d wake in the night to its beacon,
its clumsy flight. I’d say oh, Buster Keaton,
I’m still too young and our love
is forbidden. Your body’s a lamp
and I’m a boat far out at sea.
Can you wait for me, my moonbeam, my
daffodil? Blink once if you will.
The Con of it All
by Raza Ali Hasan
To the piano of ragtime music,
Paul Newman plunges his head
into a basin of ice and water.
A consummate conman, with Robert Redford,
he’s up and ready to take on the Mafia.
The Sting is on.
Hollywood redresses the wrongs of the world.
From my proscenium seat, it is Newman’s
awakening into action that catches
my imagination. Cool. So cool.
Outside NAFDEC cinema, Kipling’s
Great Game rages on.
Yet, I am barely awake. My basin
of ice cold water is going tepid.
The con of it all.
But to them it’s jazz. It’s all cool,
for jazz makes them look cool.
[NOTE: Kipling’s Great Game was the strategic power play between the British Empire and the Russian Empire for supremacy in Central Asia.]
[Box of Light w/Early A-Bomb Test] or [Portrait of my Kaiju Birth as Directed by Ishirō Honda]
by Dennis Hinrichsen
—I had visions when I was worm & so I put them everywhere // in green salt water // w/eyelid scribbles // whether this is me being born
or just after I can never tell // but I was radioactive // blue waves rippling on yellow // yolk of the brain already taking its double shape // echo & echo // so it heard itself in the dark // it mirrored the dark & dreamed // if a fetus dreams // it felt soothed // cable out of the belly tethering blood & blood // nothing to really see // boy part
not even boy yet // nothing to sell // not even girl // what exactly
is the price of a single heartbeat // eyes // a pair of lungs // Big World already matted // tower for tower // people running // decay setting in // the war cold // boxed in concrete // —O here it comes now—that blade of light to melt the eyes // singe lungs // air rushing out of me until
it was voiced // I heard it // I was its twin & so I sang // I sang to Mo-th-ra
Variation on a Theme by Ridley Scott
by Gerry LaFemina
In Blade Runner smoke seems to hover
everywhere, & despite the aura of lit up billboards
& brilliant windows, night might as well be perpetual
like the rain. Sure, it’s supposed to be L.A.;
it’s supposed to be 2019, too,
but it may well have been the Village, 1985,
the year they showed that film every Friday at midnight,
the year I exited the Waverly Cinema onto Sixth Ave
& into downpour. No thunder.
The girl who was supposed to join me, the one
whom I’d imagined for weeks, imagined kissing …
the one whose name I no longer remember,
never showed, though there was a phone message waiting
at home. No matter
how young I was
I knew better than to think the showers might cleanse that hurt,
the way Detective Deckard walked
those fictional streets as if stalked by his own horror.
How much protection can a trench coat afford?
In the movie the replicants are all trying
to live longer– in other words they’re just like us
& it’s Roy, designed to kill,
who, before he dies (Is it of natural causes?)
tells us that what he’s seen will be gone with him.
This is why we write it all down
& why old photos stand flat & mute on Deckard’s piano
& why Rachel, a replicant herself, is so confused.
She, also, has photos, has stories she can no longer believe:
The girl she thought she was
was someone else. So I think of all the little lies
I’ve tried to live
because in the end memory is just steam wafting
on a rainy night, the white billows visible
in the flow of a hundred windows in bloom.
I could say something overly romantic & sentimental
right now, suggest I walked toward dawn
because I was 17 & thought every slight was dramatic.
Or I could claim my best Casanova,
say I met another woman– Beth– & she took me home
& modesty prevents me from saying more.
But you know it wouldn’t be true. In the movie
& in that city some were trying
to remember & others longing to forget
& there was enough blame to assign to anyone who wanted.
At the Movies with My Mother
by Joseph O. Legaspi
Once again my mother and I have snuck out to a movie theater, leaving behind my siblings bruising themselves like ill-carted fruits on
a long journey and my father who remains
to be seen. In the dark and hush, we sit with
our hands greasy with the oil, sea salt and garlic of our fried peanuts while the flickering screen casts larger lives animated by distant puppeteers.
We’re stowaways aboard a ship, I’d fantasize of our secret excursion (perhaps not so secret). Or Pinocchio, in search of his kind father, finds him in the belly of Monstro the Whale. Rarely
do we watch a film I wanted. My mother favors tearjerkers in which women suffer in martyrdom, fall from high grace, seek revenge, and reap moral redemption. In this communal, cavernous space
celluloid glow outlines each solitary audience, embraced by air-conditioning, drowsing into forgetfulness. I see my mother’s eyes are fires that could burn the unearthly core of a whale.
Soliloquy with Honey: Time to Die
by Laura McCullough
A box arrived today filled with honeys and a DVD,
Bladerunner, a beautiful violent movie. In the letter,
my friend chides me for looking away from violence.
He’s right, but I wonder whether turning away
is an act of resistance rather than cowardice, but because
I’ve cared for two people through death, watching
as one’s jaw slid down out of its hinge sideways
like a cartoon corpse, does not mean I know anything.
Bladerunner enacts the question of what it means
to be fully human. Replicant Roy Batty, embedded
with memories, gives a monologue, which has entered
the popular lexicon: I’ve seen C-beams glitter, he said,
and, I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.
Intelligent, handsome, struggling with emerging emotion,
he is real, yet temporary, despised, though the protagonist
comes to understand Roy is just like us in the end.
I wonder if honeys are like memory—all these moments—
distilled
from the places they came from. There are five in all
from different countries—including one from Morocco
which I open first, dipping a pinky and tipping it
to my daughter’s mouth. It tastes full of light crystals,
she exclaims, and I realize I am growing hungry
for what seems to be essentialized only through residues
of bodies that have lived and died,
leaving something
of themselves behind
off which I must learn to feed.
Enter the Dragon
by John Murillo
–Los Angeles, CA, 1976
For me, the movie starts with a black man
Leaping into an orbit of badges, tiny moons
Catching the sheen of his perfect black afro.
Arc kicks, karate chops, and thirty cops
On their backs. It starts with the swagger,
The cool lean into the leather front seat
Of the black and white he takes off in.
Deep hallelujahs of moviegoers drown
Out the wah wah guitar. Salt & butter
High-fives, Right on, brother! and Daddy
Glowing so bright he can light the screen
All by himself. This is how it goes down.
Friday night and my father drives us
Home from the late show, two heroes
Cadillacking across King Boulevard.
In the car’s dark cab, we jab and clutch,
Jim Kelly and Bruce Lee with popcorn
Breath, and almost miss the lights flashing
In the cracked side mirror. I know what’s
Under the seat, but when the uniforms
Approach from the rear quarter panel,
When the fat one leans so far into my father’s
Window I can smell his long day’s work,
When my father—this John Henry of a man—
Hides his hammer, doesn’t buck, tucks away
His baritone, license and registration shaking as if
Showing a bathroom pass to a grade school
Principal, I learn the difference between cinema
And city, between the moviehouse cheers
Of old men and the silence that gets us home.
Starring John Wayne
by Bruce Smith
And so despising the fuzzy catkins
and REM sleep and oxytocin
of poetry and the sawings of the cello,
most of all the cello sawings, and the gallows
humor and the teacup Jesus
and the succubus and incubus
of mom and dad, he dreamed
of a form, a conquering scheme
that would allow metaphysics and pleasure,
history and ecstasy, flower and terror.
He awoke to the big sky and obsession,
the justice and recrimination of the Western —
source of all his right/wrong and wide-eyed
boy to the gun play and genocide
that could not redeem him
by his death in the dust at high noon.
So he made his laconic man art
a bullet through the heart
in black and white
back lit, back shot,
a lot of shooting in the back
as a way of looking back —
nostalgic, Orphic, unwatchable,
American, simple, brutal.
[Published under the title “Devotion: John Wayne” in Devotions, (University of Chicago, 2011)]
Some Months After My Father’s Death
by Sheryl St. Germain
I am watching the movie Twelve Angry Men
because there is a character in it
who reminds me of him.
He is the one who wants to go to the baseball game
instead of decide on a man’s life,
he is the weak one, the one afraid to reveal
what he really feels, the one for whom everything
is a joke. He is not Henry Fonda,
the tight-lipped moral one.
The man is despicable, his weaknesses obvious
to all, as obvious as Henry Fonda’s goodness.
I watch the movie again and again, loving
the black and white of it, soothed
by the sound of my father’s voice,
the careless pronunciation, the easy
shrugging of the shoulders at every crucial question.
I sink lower into the dark arms of the sofa.
Strange how comfortable the familiar is,
how we can even prefer it,
however terrifying.
Let it Be a Dark Roux: New and Selected Poems, Autumn House Press, 2007
Ode to Thelma Ritter
David Trinidad
There’s no one like you in the movies
anymore, Thelma, no lovable, middle-aged
character actress, gravelly voiced and
hard-boiled, with a sharp-tongued flair
for the cynical as well as the comical. You
could work miracles with a little screen time,
turning out indelible performances in a matter
of minutes: Bette Davis’s acerbic sidekick
in All About Eve, Jimmy Stewart’s down-to-
earth nurse in Rear Window, Doris Day’s
perpetually hung-over maid in Pillow Talk.
You played women with names like Clancy,
Aggie, Bertha, Birdie, Lottie, Leena, Della,
Stella, Sophie, Sadie, Maude, Mae, and Moe.
But what of you, Thelma? Online I find only
this mini-biography. Born in Brooklyn on
Valentine’s Day in 1905. Trained at American
Academy of Dramatic Arts. Stage career
mostly unsuccessful. Married Joseph Moran
in 1927; briefly gave up acting to raise two
children. Started working again in radio in
1940. Bit part in Miracle on 34th Street launched
noteworthy screen career. Appeared in thirty
films between 1947 and 1968. Died of a heart
attack in 1969 in New York. Thelma, six times
you were nominated for Best Supporting
Actress, and six times you lost. You, who
could save any movie with your wisecracks!
A Google search uncovers this little-known fact:
“Shirley Booth was not the first choice to play
Hazel. Thelma Ritter was. Miss Ritter wanted
the role badly, but due to illness had to bow out.”
Booth would win two Emmys in the early ‘60s
for playing television’s sassiest maid—your
rightful part. O elusive trophies! O tired heart!
You, who survived the Titanic in one picture,
would say sadly, world-wearily, in the next:
“I have to go on making a living so I can die.”
T is for Tamil Filems & Thunderthighs
by Divya Victor
It is not difficult to find love in Tamil Cinema— it is pulped
and milked and doused in this substance. Its symptoms are specific— sharing one Thums Up cola (and, for the particularly scandalous, with one straw); kissing a flower while pouting at your lover; feeding butter-creamed birthday cake to your lover’s mouth; accidentally ripping your lover’s shirt while patting her on the shoulder; slapping your lover until she realizes she’s your lover; strangling your lover until she succumbs to your good intentions— but the sentiment is universal: kithwomen love love but they need to be shown that they do.
From Tamil cinema we learned how to drop our eyes when strangers’ gazes glazed up and down our still skinned shins and to bite our lips when auto-rickshaw drivers and bus conductors licked theirs at us; how to pull up the sock, pull down the hem, pull up the neckline, pull down the lids; pull up the dupatta;
pull back, pull back, withdraw, withdraw, hold fire; how to walk backwards and out of a living room, modestly, with an empty coffee tray and a full bosom; how to twist free a wrist grabbed
by a greasy boss while also batting our lashes; how to stand for long periods in the rain in transparent saris weaving around tired, collapsing bodies in the studio— 1-2, 3, 4, 2-2, 3, 4. We learned these lessons with every vamp number (1960s), every record dance (1970s), every dream sequence (1980s), and every item number (1990s) that sold me on love as it sold me to it.
Silk Smitha and others like her, made of chiffon and Vaseline, slicked their way across their own brief filmi histories as contortionists on our celluloid pyres. They sweated through our screens as disembodied navels floating in a storm; as cleaving sets of breasts in steamy kitchens; as body shields for the children being dragged out to the street; as hooks or racks on which belts
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and bottles are tossed; as bulletproof vests for surly girlchildren speaking out of turn; as supine, crumpled things at the feet of something made of stone, or gold, or bone— husbands, johns, gurus, Shivas, Rams, and so on and so on.
And yet, there is what is left of them— Silk Smitha and her tribe— in my longing to see familiar bodies as I leave a cabaret at Roxy’s in Buffalo, snow-collared and highbuttoned. What
they gave back to kithwomen— their thunderthighs and lovehandles, their full clavicles and soft jawlines, their dusky armpits and salty stares before kith began paying for whitened and straightened imports dubbing their way into crotches and wallets— is a kind of company we keep in cold weather as we try Spinning® our way to the unimaginable legs that walk the miles imagined by others for our journeys.