Day: September 6, 2008

Singin’ for your supper

Bette Davis pulled a neat trick when she took on the title role of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, managing to revive (and in some sense, reinvent) her career at an age when most leading ladies were left with no place in Hollywood. I knew that she worked hard to get the role, and worked hard to get it right (that kind of scenery-chewing doesn’t come easy), but I had no idea she went to such great lengths to promote the movie:

Poor dear. The spectacle of her performance in the movie was intentional, and quite briliant. This just makes me wince. You can almost see her gritting her teeth and thinking, “focus on the paycheck, focus on the paycheck”.

[Thanks to Café Muscato for digging up this gem.]

Badger

Badger by Howard

If you think you would enjoy an extremely cute but sad tale of a lonely badger living in a flat in South London (and really, how could you not enjoy it?), then you should buy a copy of Howard Hardiman‘s Badger. It’s really charming, I promise.

[Shameless self-promotional alert: I helped Howard put the final product together, since I’m such a fan of the badger. The book also features a little bit of a little typeface I designed.]

And people think I’m fussy?

I giggled at this passage that I just encountered in The Joe Orton Diaries:

Peter Willes rang up. ‘What do you mean by sending me such an atrocious script?’ he said. ‘What?’ I said. ‘All the “O’s” are out of line. I can’t read a script like that. Haven’t you another copy? ‘No,’ I said. “I’ll have to get it retyped,’ he said. ‘I can’t let the actors see a script in that state.’ ‘Did you read the script?’ I said. “A little.’ ‘What did you think of it?’ ‘I thought it rather dated,’ he said, ‘though that may have been the effect of the “O’s”.’

See? Good typography makes a difference.