The Screengrab

Being a mime in the movie business usually entails getting punched in the face, but Dan Richter managed to parlay his trapped-in-an-invisible-box skills into a key role in “one of the most influential and important sequences in film history.” No, not the tennis scene from Blow-Up; you’ll remember Richter for hooting, beating his chest and – most famously – throwing a bone in the air.

Not only did Richter play “Moonwatcher,” the ape-man who invents weapons of mass destruction in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, he also choreographed the “Dawn of Man” sequence that opens the picture. “It so happened I was teaching private classes in mime in London at the time,” Richter told our man Bilge Ebiri at New York magazine’s Vulture blog. “Anyway, I was asked if I would go out and let Stanley pick my brain. I said, "If you give me twenty minutes, a stage, leotards, and some towels, I can show you how to do it."

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Back in 1970, Pauline Kael, reviewing Robert Altman's M*A*S*H, praised it for its "blessed profanity" and wrote, "I salute M*A*S*H for its contribution to the art of talking dirty." (Altman's father reportedly put it another way, warning members of the family to stay away from the theaters because "Bob made a dirty movie!") There's been a lot of cusswords under the bridge since then, so much that when a playwright-turned-moviemaker such as Martin McDonagh gives his actors some floridly profane lines to speak, it isn't even worth a concerned piece in the Arts & Lesiure section from the kind of writer who'd pitch a fit if language half as dirty turned up on one of his kid's rap CDs. So when somebody has managed to distinguish himself by cussing in a movie in a way that stays with you, a salute is in order. Andrew Dice Clay, watch and learn.

GONE WITH THE WIND (1939)


It may not seem like such a big deal now, but seen in context, at the end of a big old-style Hollywood movie, spoken by Clark Gable in response to a tearful lover's plea, it's easy to imagine what a shocker it must have been at the time. God knows that, sixty years later, my own grandmother was just starting to recover from the shock. You can just see the fabric of civilization starting to come apart.

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Released late last year as part of the Stanley Kubrick Director’s Series boxed set, the latest version of the Full Metal Jacket DVD boasts a commentary and interviews with various members of the film’s creative team, from actors Vincent D’Onofrio and Lee Ermey to executive producer Jan Harlan and steadicam operator John Ward. Several voices are conspicuously absent: I’m not sure what Matthew Modine’s excuse is, but Stanley Kubrick is dead, and so is Gustav Hasford.

If that last name doesn’t ring a bell, you’ve probably never stumbled upon Private Joker’s Homepage. Compiled and maintained by Hasford’s cousin, comic book writer Jason Aaron, this massive site is dedicated to the memory of the man who wrote The Short-Timers, the 1978 novel upon which Kubrick’s Vietnam epic was based.

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