Busby Berkeley Dreams

by Jillian Butler, Ampersandology

Editor's note: I'm presenting a paper on Busby Berkeley at a conference this week, so thought I'd shake this one off in his honour. Enjoy! 

Look, I know. But I can’t help but name it—I got a thing for the chorus girl.

It keeps popping up in my fiction, a stutter of a motif. It’s my own regrettable nostalgia, mostly wrapped up in what it conveyed rather than what it really was—the yesteryears of the enigmatic dancing girl, guileless in her power over men and brightly smiling under the stage lights. But it was never true, really. It's a hyperreal performance of womanhood, never the real thing. 

Have you seen these creatures? They’re unreal. Smiles glued to their lips, pushing their uniform bodies through space. They're girlish little women, or else womanly girls. Do they have an inner life, their own agency? You'd never guess.


Their kind echo throughout history—the swaying hips of the burlesque, the eternal girlchild of Victorian soap ads, the dazzling performance of femaleness of the Hollywood chorus girl. Eternally young and appropriately blank. 

But dancing girls exist only as a collective noun: who ever talks about one dancing girl? They only exist together; when dispersed, the effect evaporates. And so they travel in packs, trapped in the forgiving limitations of the evening show. Rather than stand alone, the dancing girls are the seams in the self-contained logic of their musical numbers.

From LIFE magazine, 1958. 

Dispel your misplaced notion that these women a) really want to be up there on stage and b) are just delighted to be dancing for you—yes, you!—as they kick, twirl, gesture and hoof in perfect uniformity, trained within an inch of their life to follow the next. Dancing until they die--or turn 35, whatever happens first.

*

Busby Berkeley’s girls, meanwhile, didn’t even need that much: “I never cared whether a girl knew her right foot from her left,” he once said, “so long as she was beautiful.”

Footlight Parade, 1933

Berkeley, a man made famous by his unmistakable configurations of the female form in abstract space, was alarmingly unsentimental when faced with the legions of pretty girls that built his legacy. He’s not the first, either: look to the 1884 Electric Girl Company, a business model that supplied young girls whose bodies were outfitted in electric lights and ornaments. They were used for parties or as waitresses for the crop of modernity-obsessed restaurants, the perfect melding of technology and the human (female) body.

Then followed the usual suspects: the Rockettes, in the 1920s; Earl Carroll’s vaudeville revue “Vanities”; circus peep shows; burlesque shows that slowly showed more and more skin.

There is something beyond surreal in these chorus lines—the faces of these pretty young women, rather than approach uniformity, disturb me in the ways they are dissimilar; in other words, I am perturbed by the idea that I’m supposed to blend them all together and marvel at their sameness, as if someone in the costuming department expected the matching wigs and thematic outfits would erase anything unique or special about everything contained therein.

Earl Carroll was the creator of vaudeville’s “Vanities”, a precursor to the Berkeley chorus girl by more than a few years, had his own philosophy on the Platonic nature of these chorus lines:

“The following points of beauty are given careful consideration: color and texture of hair, brilliancy and size of eyes, regularity of teeth, general coloring, texture of skin, formation of hands and feet, posture and personality...”

But not even these high standards could always be met, as Carroll went on to note:

“There are times (and this was particularly true during the war) when it was necessary to engage girls who do not have all the necessary qualifications. We replace them when it is possible.”

There exists, if you’re curious, a record of the measurements of the “ideal chorine.” Gals, break out your measuring tapes—or, you know, roll your eyes. So the ideal chorus girl has:

-a six-inch wrist

-a twelve inch neck

-a nineteen and a half thigh

-a nine inch ankle.

Not to mention the highest standard of personal grooming. Rather than be repulsed at the blatant sexism on display here, I'm kind of charmed. I mean, they must have had their reasons, right? You can't blame anyone for having standards, even if those standards codify the female form into the gender expectations of an ice cube tray. 

Oh, wait. Never mind. I just remembered Berkeley’s stated goal when casting new chorus girls: his hope was that all the girls would be of uniform size, talent and comeliness—“just like pearls.”

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All That Jazz about my boy Roy

by Jillian Butler, Ampersandology





Oh, Roy Scheider. Never were you more resplendent than in this film. It shames me that there are people of my generation who think you're nothing more than Sheriff Brody in Jaws. But good news! It's time for....

Intellectual Crush of the Week! 

And tag Roy Scheider: you're it. 

Th above still illustrates everything you need to know. In All That Jazz (1979), Scheider stars as Joe Gideon, a thinly-veiled allusion to director/choreographer Bob Fosse. He's a self-absorbed, drug-addicted alcoholic womanizer, and he still comes off as an okay guy. Please notice: the man is wearing a sequined Brando t-shirt, and  yet remains the sexiest thing of all the things.


Let me repeat that: he wore a sequined t-shirt. You never doubt the Sexy. 

I've aways suspected Roy Scheider never got the credit he was due, mostly because when his obits ran, all news outlets to tag him with was the "star of Jaws." It's their loss, because Scheider was so much more. In my mind, he's usually the highlight of very good films, and the redeeming factor in many bad films. He singlehandedly made me watch Marathon Man---I refused for a long time, you see; I have a thing about dentists. 



He fights! He punches! He wears suits and puts Dustin Hoffman in sexy danger! Amazing. He's still the thing I remember most of that film, and he was on screen for all of what, 20 minutes? 


Though the latter half of his career was tepid at best, watching him in All That Jazz is a revelation: as Gideon tunnels further and further into addiction, Scheider plays his sad resignation straight, with a wry self-absorption. His downward spiral becomes so much more moving to me than if it had been typically sentimental or realistic, because Gideon is the Dream Factory. 


It's funny, but watching Scheider in All That Jazz again I was reminded of a modern take on the perpetual screw up: Hank Moody in Californication. Moody drinks, sleeps around and constantly lets down the figures of love and stability in his life, like Gideon. But where Moody murders audience sympathy for his half-hearted failure to live up to any expectations set for him, Scheider's performance makes it clear that Gideon's worst enemy is his own resignation to that same failure. Scheider said of Fosse, who Gideon is basically based on:

Fosse, I think, came to a high point in his life, with an Oscar, a Tony and an Emmy, and asked himself, "Do they think I'm really that good? They don't know I'm really a sham, a hoax, a phony, a lousy human being, not much of a friend to anybody and a flop ... they don't know I'm covered with flop sweat". That's an expression Bob uses a lot -- flop sweat.

Basically, Gideon gives up on himself before anyone else even thinks to, because he's the only one who knows the whole truth, that's he's a phony and no-good. Whether or not that's true, you feel it in Scheider's performance, that he's in on his own big secret. It's a terrific performance, one of his best. And definitely his sparklyist. 


Let's face it, Scheider was a true blue original. In his youth, he'd been a boxer (ooh!), a frat boy (oh.) and a member of the Air Force (...oh?). He was lean, with a strange, angular face that was never quite handsome. But he had a rough, salty edge to him, an old soul even in his youngest days on the screen. I love watching his performances because they sparkle with a hard wisdom. This man has seen a great deal and survived more still. And he's always thinking it through. 





Also, he makes all the illicit things he does in films (smoking, killing people, appearing in Jaws sequels) seem actually like a terrific thing to do. See, I'm pretty shallow, is what I'm saying. 

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Hal Ashby FTW.

by Jillian Butler, Ampersandology





I wish this story was true. In fact, as far as I'm concerned, it is now. 


Hal Ashby FTW. 


When I say I could watch AFI tributes all day long, I'm not remotely joking. What a delicious notion, that all the great screen legends that watched endlessly like each other just as much. I get the feeling that the Dustin Hoffman, the Diane Keaton, the Warren Beatty who survives into the film history tomes won't hold a candle to these visions of friendship and candor. 


Oh, movies. You're making me blush. 

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Remixing the Year in Film

by Jillian Butler, Ampersandology


Every year around this time, I wait for one of these. The 270 films of 2010, remixed into awesomesauce. 





There's another one due to come out as well (creativity loves diversity) from a user named Kees on YouTube, who makes one every year. He (or she) never fails to blow me away) Here's the promo for this year:





Oh, in case you missed it, here's 2009: 





And 2008: 





My favourite part of any awards show is the overlong film montages, especially the ones that try to encompass all of film history. Sometimes they make me cry. It's all so beautiful and surreal. I could really watch compilations like this all day, but I have work to do. I just really enjoy people sometimes, you know? 

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