Star and Shadow Soap Opera
From The Star And Shadow Cinema Wiki
hello pals. I am in the process of writing the Star and Shadow Cinema Soap opera. Its is going to be based at the good old ship Star and Shadow and have as its main characters selected volunteers playing themselves. The other main characters are dead film directors hanging about the cinema like a bad smell. I have a list of them below. Please feel free to add to them. What I am most after though are insights into their personality. So if you know anything about them from watching docs/ reading biogs etc please add your comments to them and it will help me use some of them in the script. THANKS!!! Debbie x feb2010
USA/HOLLYWOOD
John Hughes - dead, going on 16.
Cecil B DeMille
John Cassavetes - his son is an embarrassment (director of my sisters keeper)
Billy Wilder - hard boiled
Robert Aldrich
Dorothy Arzner
Maya Deren -
Tod Browning - ran away from his middle class family to join the circus.
Sam Fuller
Jim Henson - always talking through other things. psychologically must be shy to express himself directly.
Walt Disney - frozen. whelled around by lackeys. Nazi sympathiser and all round bigot. Actually hates dwarves.
Charles Laughton - one great film wasted talent
Russ Meyer
Ed Wood - the 'worst director'. Heterosexual transvestite.
D.W.Griffith
Eric Von Stroheim - walks around in riding breathes and a monocle into leather whips and wild orgies with naked women and boys.
Robert Altman
Frank Capra
Charlie Chaplin
Buster Keaton
Michael Curtiz
Victor Fleming
John Ford
John Huston
Joseph L. Mankiewics
Leo McCarey
Sam Peckinpah - violent and in slow motion. followed around by that Hong Kong director who is influenced by him so much. Comes out of the closet in the afterlife.
You could add Howard Hughes to the list. He wasn't really best known for his films but he did make them, and if you've ever seen The Aviator you'll know he was a bit...mental. He had very extreme OCD and was also obsessed with not paying taxes. He would live in a hotel in one state for 3 months, then move to another hotel in another state for 3 months, all so he wouldn't have to pay tax. That was the least of his craziness though. You should read up on him a little because he was totally eccentric, he once spent 4 months living in his home cinema.
MUSICALS
Mark Sandich
George Sidney
Busby Berkeley
Vincent Minelli
BRITISH
Hitchcock
Stanley Kubrick - loves categorizing and collecting things Also, Stanley Kubrick...I'm not 100% about this, but I'm pretty sure he was scared to fly, that's why most of his later movies were made in England.
Terence Fisher
Carol Reed
David Lean
Powell and Pressburger
John Schlesinger
Don Siegel
Douglas Sirk
Joseph Von Sternberg
Orson Welles
Robert Wise
Donald Cammell
FRENCH
eric rohmer
Jean Vigo - anarchist and romanticist
Jean Cocteau - playful poetic camp
Jean Renoir
Jacques Tati - silent despite being in the sound era
Francois Truffaut
GERMAN
Leni Reifenstahl - constantly trying to deny being a Nazi
Rainer Werner Fassbinder - a cruel lover?
Fritz Lang
F. W. Murnau
OTHER EUROPEAN
Ingmar Bergman - had nervous breakdown mid career (wrongful tax evasion arrest!)
Sergei Eisenstein - a verbose bore
Tarkovsky - very fussy!? and a temper?
Fellini - fanciful of circuses, voluptuous women
Bernado Bertalucci - dirty old man
Luis Bunuel
sergio leone
ASIA
Akira Kurosawa
Satyalit Ray