Sunday, September 30, 2012

Carmegeddon 2 Adventure

Interstate 405, one of the busiest freeways in this country, was shut down again for construction/demolition this weekend.  Angelenos were warned to stay off the roads or use public transit.  We live by the beach.  The Cinerama film festival is across town in Hollywood.  We took public transit.

Redondo Beach was once a streetcar suburb of Los Angeles.  A light rail line once ran diagonally across the LA metro area grid of streets that took riders directly from our neighborhood to downtown in less time than it takes today to drive on the freeway and in about half as much time as it takes on today's roundabout mass transit system.  Grrr.

Anyway, here we are waiting to transfer from the green line (an elevated train) to the silver line (a bus on a dedicated bus lane on the freeway and then on regular surface streets).  Notice both TFN and Bad Dad reading on their kindles.
And transferring from the silver line to the red line (subway).This is the best of the blurry photos that Bad Dad took.  I'm carrying knitting in the white bag.  Iris is wearing Simplicity 2689 (top) and Kwik Sew 2666 (pants) and I am wearing Simplicity 2938 (top) and Vogue 1247 (skirt).
Hollywood, baby!
We watched the sole surviving print of The Wonderful World of the Brothers GrimmRuss Tamblyn, the only actor to have worked in two cinerama films, regaled the audience with reminiscences about the experience and explained some of the technical difficulties from the actors' viewpoint.  He sat a few rows behind us with several of his West Side Story costars, including Rita Moreno

The screening ran long because it was interrupted by technical problems.  With three cameras and three aged strips of film, the likelihood of problems grew geometrically.

During intermission, we looked at the special camera used for cinerama filming and spoke to the film editor for all of the cinerama films and the son of the inventor of the camera.  Do you know the connection between cinerama and Cold War U2 spy plane photos?  Stay tuned.

BTW, the movie plays fast and loose with history.  Listen to what University of Michigan's professor Eric Rabkin has to say about the Brothers Grimm.

1 comment:

  1. I took this class (or one very similar to it) when I was an undergrad at Cal. It was one of my favorites and I still consider sci-fi to be vastly under rated as literature. I heard Ursula LeGuin give a talk about writing then that was most helpful when I was teaching writing. You've inspired me to take a Coursera class

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