Happy Fourth!
As alumnus Ken White, president of the Peninsula Humane Society & SPCA, points out, “the few days following the Fourth are among the busiest for animal shelters, responding to reports of frightened, injured and lost animals.” In his regular City Brights blog on SF Gate he offers some reminders and tips for keeping our furry friends safe and secure this weekend. Thank you, Ken!
Tony-winning director receives rave review
The New York Times is praising alumnus Daniel Sullivan for the polished staging and expert direction he has brought to the local Shakespeare in the Park production of “Twelfth Night,” starring Anne Hathaway. Read the full review here.
I once owned a glitter glove
A vivid childhood memory: purchasing this album with my brother at the neighborhood Waxie Maxie’s in 1983. Racing home, ripping off the plastic, marveling at the fold-out of Michael with the tigers as the rhthymic beginning of Billie Jean cranked on our stereo…To this day I can’t recall feeling that same excitement about any other recording. Alumnus Ben Fong-Torres, one of the first to chronicle MJ’s career, has compared the loss to that of Elvis Presley or John Lennon. Click here to hear more on Jackson from the former Rolling Stone scribe.
Moneyball benched?
The AP reports that “Moneyball,” the film based on the popular Michael Lewis book, has been benched: Sony pulled the plug late last week after Steven Soderbergh turned in a rewritten script substantially different than an earlier draft by screenwriter Steven Zaillian (ZAY’-lee-uhn). That’s according to a source close to the production who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record. Read more here.
Zaillian, the SF State film grad who won an Oscar for his “Schindler’s List” screenplay, has scripted dozens of big screen successes. Was his “Moneyball” screenplay destined to be another home run? Check out the conversation on the Hollywood Elsewhere blog, where visitors are reading a PDF of the screenplay (supposedly Zaillian’s). We last spoke with Zaillian right before the release of “All the King’s Men.” For more on his career, click here.
In other writing/SF State-related news, alumnus Joshua Mohr is one of six new novelists discussing “what it takes to write and publish a debut” in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers magazine. Mohr, the author of the much praised “Some Things That Meant the World to Me” (Two Dollar Radio, ‘09), advises emerging writers not to think too much. He tells P&W, “Just write…You’ll have plenty of time to overanalyze everything during the revision process.” For more, pick up the magazine on newstands now.
Tune in tonight
Tonight, June 23, SF State’s Whirlwind Wheelchair International will be featured on a PBS Frontline/World program titled “Digital Dumping Ground.” You can find your local station schedule by clicking here. Whirlwind creates wheelchair designs specifically for people in developing countries, where a typical day can involve traversing steep curbs, rocky roads, muddy fields and other treacherous terrain. For more information, visit them online: www.whirlwindwheelchair.org/
Who knew a hangover could be so much fun?
If the economy has you down, “The Hangover” starring alumnus Jeffrey Tambor, is worth the price of admission and popcorn. Yes, it has some pretty raunchy moments (take the kids/your grandma to see Up produced by alumnus Jonas Rivera instead), but it’s also hilarious all the way through (I was still laughing as I exited the theatre) and even a little heartwarming when it’s all said and done. I give it three Gators out of four.
Five SF State sightings in your favorite magazines
The spring/summer issue of SF State Magazine hit alumni mailboxes earlier this month but it’s not the only publication offering news of talented SF State people. Here are my latest SF State sightings:
1. National Geographic
Finally got around to reading my April issue and found a fascinating article that discusses Assistant Professor Vance Vredenburg’s research on the mass extinction of amphibians.
… Vance Vredenburg is a biologist at San Francisco State University, and he’s been studying the mountain yellow-legged frog for 13 years, slumming in a tent on the mountainside for weeks at a time as he monitors 80 different study lakes. Today, mosquito net balled up around his neck, he contemplates ten dead frogs, stiff-legged, white bellies going soft in the sun…
Read the entire article here.
2.Poets&Writers Spied an SF State alum in Jofie Ferrari-Adler’s regular (and wonderful) Agents & Editors feature. The question he tossed out to a group of agents in the May/June issue: Can you sell short stories? Agent Maria Massie’s answer focused on alumna Robin Romm: On occasion. It’s hard. It always helps if there’s a novel coming. But if you’ve got a great short story collection, it will stand out. I represent a writer who was referred to me by an editor at a literary magazine. I read it and it blew me away. I sold it, it was published, it got great reviews, but it did not sell very many copies. But then the writer, Robin Romm, went on to write an amazing memoir that was just reviewed on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. She’s a fantastic writer and you never know where a short story writer is going to go or what stories they have left to tell. So, you know, she wasn’t making a lot of money in the beginning, but she’s going to have an amazing career.
3. Scientific American
Both the discoverer and the namesake for an…um…uniquely shaped mushroom are SF State alums. I’m referring to SF State Professor of Biology Dennis Desjardin and Robert Drewes, the curator of herpetology at the California Academy of Sciences. You can read all about it in this SA article.
What’s that you ask? Just how does it feel to discover a new species? Check out Desjardin’s new essay in SF State Magazine.
4.
Chefs John Clark and Gayle Pirie are two reasons why Foreign Cinema is one of the most renowned dining spots in the city, but who knew it was kid friendly? The two SF State alumni helped Foreign Cinema make 7×7 magazine’s annual Best of the City list for Best Kids’ Menu: You want oysters and Champagne; they want ice cream and a coloring book. It’s all at Foreign Cinema. We favor the patio brunch, where parents can nibble on a croque monsieur while the kids get crayons, a little coloring book made of Xeroxed drawings from The Larousse Treasury of Country Cooking and a prix-fixe menu, including fresh fruit, their choice of excellent French toast or grilled cheese, and ice cream. No compromising necessary. 2534 Mission St., 415-648-7600.
5.Wired The sharp eyes in our College of Creative Arts spied the work of alumnus Valdemar Duran in a Wired article focused on “permanent, quasi-sovereign nations floating in international waters.” Duran provided the accompanying (and very cool) illustration. Read the story here.
Where have you seen SF State people lately? Let me know: abee@sfsu.edu
Goodbye, David Carradine
Just heard the tragic news. Actor David Carradine, who studied acting at SF State in the 1950s, was found dead in a hotel in Bangkok. I exchanged a few e-mails with Carradine back in 2004. Here’s what he told me about his time at SF State:
Yes, I have many fond memories of what was then San Francisco State College. When I started there, the new campus had just opened. It was a gorgeous facility. I was a music major, there to learn how to write operas, but The Drama Department was in the same building and, as an actor’s son, I naturally gravitated down the hall. There I discovered Jules Irving.
He was both my first mentor and the reason I dropped out. I loved to sit in the theater and watch him work his magic on students. I could say “wreak the havoc.” He was quite mercurial, once, in the middle of an exercise, throwing a chair at a student, and when the boy caught it with an honest expression of surprise and fear, yelled, “That’s what I want!” The criticism he was most fond of giving was, “Interesting, but not believable.” That concept was drilled into me. You can never catch me “acting.”
For one of Irving’s classes I did a 30,000 word thesis on Hamlet. When I got it back, it was graded with an “A,” crossed out, and then a “B” and “Late” (one day). Below was the notation, “Pity, as this is a perfect paper otherwise.” I needed a two-point average to stay in school, and the “B” wouldn’t do it. I caught him in the hall and pleaded with him. He took the paper and wrote a “plus” beside the “B.” No thanks. It had to be a three-point grade. An “A minus” would do it. He was unmoved. So I walked out of college that day.
Always quit before they fire you.
During the crossover period at State from music to drama, I took a seminar in Jazz piano from Dave Brubeck, and audited Prof. Hayakawa’s course in semantics, wrote the music for a ballet, which was to be part of the spectacular student revue, and was cast as one of the conspirators in a student production of Julius Caesar. Neither of these came about, as I dropped out to play Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet at a Little Theater across the Bay, and went on to mount my own production of Othello in a converted church in San Francisco.
Jules Irving was against doing these extracurricular productions for all his students. He remarked to his class once that “Carradine seems to have a lot of time to waste.” Well, Jules went on to become the artistic director of Lincoln Center in New York. I went on to do a couple of seasons of Shakespearean repertory, and then, after two years in the Army, played two successive leads on Broadway. I came to California to do the short-lived but innovative series, Shane, and went on to play the lead in Marty Scorsese’s first Hollywood film, Boxcar Bertha, and straight from there to Kung Fu, the series. The rest is, I guess, history.
Years later, in New York to do a movie, I met Amy Irving, whom I had always had a crush on. I tried to tell her the story about her father and me, thinking it would create a bond, but she cut me off, saying, “I’m not gonna listen to nothin’ bad about my daddy.” I feel the same way, though I wish I could have gotten to know Amy.
I’m still into music. Recently, I’ve formed a new band, The Soul Dogs. We’ve been playing around L.A. I still have to write that opera.
Any former classmates of Carradine’s out there? Care to share any memories? Send me an e-mail: abee@sfsu.edu
6/05/09: This just in from Joseph McBride, associate professor of cinema at SF State:
David Carradine was a son of the equally eccentric — and uniquely brilliant — character actor John Carradine, who made indelible impressions in a number of John Ford classics, including THE GRAPES OF WRATH. I interviewed David Carradine for Daily Variety in the 1970s about an independent film project he was directing, and he was affable and expansive, but when I tried to interview him on location for BOUND FOR GLORY in central California,he wouldn’t talk. He was notoriously moody with the press and the public. I was fortunate enough to have a chance to play a brief scene with him in the Roger Corman film CANNONBALL. As a reporter at the finish line in the road race, I asked Carradine, “Mr. Buckman, tell us how you won the race.” He replied with his best glower, “I drove fast.”
Carradine was marvelous in offbeat action movies such as Corman’s and Paul Bartel’s DEATH RACE 2000 and in Quentin Tarantino’s KILL BILL movies. In such films his brooding presence adds layers of edgy depth and charisma to the action. Carradine’s theatrical training at what was then San Francisco State College gave him the steady underpinning of technique that never deserted him, even when he was at his most unsteady personally. He won the respect of Ingmar Bergman, who cast him as Abel Rosenberg in the uneven but unfairly maligned THE SERPENT’S EGG, about the early incubation of Nazism. And Carradine was brilliant as the great American folksinger Woody Guthrie in Hal Ashby’s BOUND FOR GLORY.
As I wrote in Film Comment magazine about his performance in that film, “Carradine’s Woody Guthrie is abundant with charm and sensitivity, yet with an undercurrent of mangy meanness and animal ferocity — in sum total one of the few convincing portraits of an artist ever put on the screen. Unlike Ken Russell’s Byronic artist figures, characters out of a bygone Romantic age, Carradine’s Guthrie is a reserved, uncertain, slowly developing twentieth-century folk artist whose evolution can be detected in small increments emerging in the course of experience.”
On the night I spent on location for BOUND FOR GLORY near Stockton watching the shooting of the squatter camp sequence (the first time the Steadicam was ever used in a feature film), I asked Woody’s second wife, Marjorie Mazia Guthrie, what she thought of Carradine playing her husband — who was short, unlike the lanky Carradine, but equally feisty — and she replied, “I”m enough of a believer in change to respect the fact that David has to be David. I like what my young kids said about him — he has ‘Woody’s vibes.’ If he has that, I can’t complain, can I? I told David, ‘We don’t need another Woody, we need you.’”
That’s how I’d like to remember David Carradine. For a time, at least, he had Woody’s vibes.
Up, produced by SF State grad, is a soaring success
Pixar’s Up rose to the top of the box office during its opening weekend and the film is currently registering a whopping 98 on Rotten Tomatoes’ Tomatometer. That’s good news for the film’s producer, alumnus Jonas Rivera. This SF State Magazine article explains how Rivera gave a “boost” to Cars as well as Toy Story and Monsters, Inc. As for his latest Pixar triumph, look for more information here: The San Francisco Examiner and The San Diego Tribune.
One more SF State connection to Up: alumnus Delroy Lindo provided the voice for the animated dog named Beta.
Congratulations to the Class of 2009!
Today at Cox Stadium, more than 8,000 grads donned purple caps and gowns as they said goodbye to San Francisco State and hello to the real world.
Actor Jeffrey Tambor, a 1965 drama grad and six-time Emmy nominee, quipped, “I think there are a lot of teachers in heaven rolling their eyes right now about me being the alumnus of the year.”
Tambor’s advice for the Class of 2009: “Love yourself. Keep your voice authentic. Don’t settle. Love your partner in life, your kids and your fellow man. And remember as George Bluth said, ‘There’s always money in the banana stand. ‘”
Check out the University Web site for full coverage of Commencement 2009.
Click here to listen to Tambor’s address.
