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The Midlife Remix

Hi there, I’m Kirby Ferguson! I’m best known for the series Everything is a Remix. I’m pivoting away from free content creation for financial and personal reasons. I’m seeking financial stability and personal fulfillment in the second act of life. I’m thinking aloud about all of this here. I might later revise, discard or ridicule anything said.

Dusting off the old film nerd hat

Happy Monday friends!

I’m currently going full-blast on my upcoming ChatGPT video course and doing everything possible to ship that sucker by Christmas. For this mailing, I’m gonna keep things light and dust off the old film nerd hat. 

I don’t put the film nerd hat on much anymore because I just don’t watch that much stuff anymore. This is mostly because of parenting, but it’s also because… I mean, what is that there to watch? The field seems weak. (This pre-dates the Hollywood writers’ strike, by the way.) 

Perhaps because of this, I subscribed to The Criterion Channel recently, thinking there’ll be some great new stuff there and if not, at least I can watch some great old stuff. I found some of both.

Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb

Turn Every Page is an absolutely precious documentary that captures two literary lions late in their lives, Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb.

Caro is one of the true genius authors of the last century. He’s written just two mammoth non-fiction works: The Power Broker, about the New York urban planning titan, Robert Moses, and a still-ongoing five-volume series about Lyndon B. Johnson.

The other subject of the doc is Caro’s prolific editor, Robert Gottlieb, who not only edited everything Caro wrote but many of the great authors of the last five decades. Fun fact: he edited the term “catch-18” to become the now-famous “catch-22.”

The doc is a fascinating glimpse into the collaboration between a great writer and an elite editor who makes him even better. Fun fact: the topic of the nerd fight these two had for decades… semicolons. 

Gottlieb passed away earlier this year at 92. He’ll never read the final volume of Caro’s Johnson series, which still seems years from completion.

The greatest video essayist you’ve never heard of

Through Criterion I stumbled on a rarity: a video essay doc. Not only that, it’s called Lynch/Oz, and it’s about the connection between David Lynch and The Wizard of Oz… that is some Gen X film nerd catnip right there.

The film is an anthology featuring a number of different writers and directors and it’s definitely a mixed bag. And because Lynch never talks about any of this stuff, the results are entirely speculative.

Lynch/Oz still had its moments and I wanted to know, who made this? The answer: Alexandre O. Philippe. Don’t know him!

I did a web search and saw he made another video essay-ish doc, Memory: The Origins of Alien, which I loved. I then realized that Philippe has actually created a body of documentary work that is mostly video essay-ish in format. Who knew? Not me!

I immediately devoured Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on The Exorcist then 78/52: Hitchcock's Shower Scene, which yes, is just about the Psycho shower scene. This is an entirely sensible framing because the shower scene is clearly a distinct creation within the film. The doc’s title is a reference to the shower scene having 78 camera setups (!) and 52 edits.

(Another film-within-a-film classic is the scene now known as “Victor Takes a Trip” from The Rules of Attraction. This was a stunner in 2002 and the film itself remains underrated.)

If you love Psycho, The Exorcist, or Alien, those docs are must-watches. And if you love Lynch and/or The Wizard of Oz, you’ll enjoy Lynch/Oz too.

Other Discoveries

• Spaceship Earth is the utterly fascinating story of eight misfits who spent two years quarantined inside a self-engineered replica of the Earth’s ecosystem called Biosphere 2. (This event inspired the 1996 Pauly Shore comedy Bio-Dome.) Thank you to Michael Garfield for the recommendation.

• Come and See is a great Russian anti-war masterpiece I’ve somehow never seen.

• I’ve also started watching Scavengers Reign, an imaginative sci-fi series about being stranded on a weird and extremely hostile planet. Seems to have clearly drawn inspiration from the stoner cult classic Fantastic Planet.

And back to it I go, folks! All you Americans have an amazing Thanksgiving!

Hope everybody’s well! Later!

k

P.S. You can still pre-order Al for Creating Content 2024 at a discounted price!

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