Jean-Claude Carrière was a French novelist and screenwriter famous for scripting The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, The Phantom of Liberty and The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
I give you the toilet scene from The Phantom of Liberty, it makes you wonder if Buñuel scripted it alone or he asked Carrièret to assist him.
Christopher Plummer was a Canadian actor best-known for his part in The Sound of Music.
In my universe, Plummer played parts in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, The Man Who Would Be King and Harrison Bergeron, an admirable adaptation of the wonderful short story by Vonnegut.
In Harrison Bergeron, Plummer is John Klaxon. Klaxon is the benevolent tyrant of the intelligent elite that gives the masses the illusion that they rule.
There seem to be quite a lot of differences with the short story, but I have not had time to check them out.
Update: I re-read the short story, which is only 6 to 7 pages long so there is barely opportunity to compare. In the short story the parents of Harrison are watching television, their son having been arrested some time before. The parents are watching television. All of a sudden the son is seen on television interrupting a ballet performance. The son speaks to the people, imploring them to free themselves from their handicaps. He ‘marries’ a ballerina and is subsequently and tragically shot.
The 2009 short film 2081 follows the short story faithfully.
The film version, with Harrison becoming part of the elite, is reminiscent of V for Vendetta, one of the best films of the 21st century.
Sophie was a Scottish singer-songwriter and record producer.
She is known for such songs as “It’s Okay to Cry” (2017).
Hilton Valentine was an English guitarist, member of the The Animals.
Valentine played the electric guitar arpeggio introduction to the Animals’ 1964 signature song “The House of the Rising Sun”.
Arik Brauer was an Austrian artist, co-founder of the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism.
The work of Brauer strikes me as uninteresting.
Maybe I’m too harsh on this whole school of Vienna, but the only artist of that school who really impresses me is Johfra Bosschart.
Alberto Grimaldi was an Italian film producer known for producing The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Last Tango in Paris, but more importantly for us, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom by Pasolini.
That Sodom film you don’t need to see to form an opinion about. It’s better just to read about it and let it lead you to the manuscript by Sade on which it was based.
That book has the lines:
“How many times, damn it, have I not desired that one could attack the sun, deprive the universe of it, or use it to set fire to the world”.
But I digress.
Guem was an Algerian musician, composer and dancer.
Guem is best known for his cult dancefloor recording “Le Serpent” (1978).
“Le Serpent” is a sibling to “Jingo” (1959) by Candido Camero, “New Bell” (1972) by Manu Dibango and “Road Close” (1984) by Tony Allen, who all died last year.
Larry King was an American talk show host iconic in the 1990s. He was called the father of talk show democracy and was instrumental in the development of infotainment.
His whole era is captured by the superb documentary Spin.
In that documentary, he can be seen talking to G. W. Bush on the merits of the drug Halcion at 5:40.
Phil Spector was an American musician and record producer known for his Wall of Sound sound production.
The Wall of Sound was a very dense sound with little room for details of individual instruments, exemplified in recordings such as “Da Doo Ron Ron” “Be My Baby” or “Baby, I Love You”, all released in 1963.
There is, Phil Spector: He’s a Rebel, a documentary from 1982 on Phil Spector, without his cooperation , in which Albert Goldman is recorded as saying:
“Rock ‘n’ roll is basically institutionalized adolescence. And the bottom line of rock ‘n’ roll is that it’s a baby food industry and Phil found a new formula for baby food.”
I thought that was quite funny.
Michael Apted is a British director famous for a body of diverse films.
I give you Up (1964 – today).
The Up Series is a series of documentary films that have followed the lives of fourteen British children since 1964, when they were seven years old.
So far the documentary has had eight episodes spanning 49 years (one episode every seven years).
The children were selected to represent the range of socio-economic backgrounds in Britain at that time, with the explicit assumption that each child’s social class predetermines their future.