Is anything to be made of the fact that one of the present-day scenes in Midnight in Paris is set in Deyrolles, the remarkable taxidermy and fossil shop on the Left Bank? See
http://www.deyrolle.com/magazine/spip.php?rubrique93
and http://www.pbase.com/al309/paris1
For Allen (who, if memory serves, has a cameo in this scene), is this just a trendy place for wine and cheese, or is it an evocation of a fossilized past?
Which also makes one wonder about the enduring appeal of the Lost Generation as icons, more than as authors. Consider this shot from Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby, showing Times Square set off by a giant (time's?) Arrow Shirt ad (above a billboard for the Zeigfeld [sic] Follies). The model looks rather like young Fitzgerald himself, and he's gazing wistfully across Broadway at the non-existent "Hotel Sayre" (Zelda's maiden name):
http://images.hemmings.com/wp-content/uploads//2012/05/Gatsby-Times-Square-scene-2.jpg
Just to take things one step further, another marquee in the same image linked above is featuring the movie "Broadway Rose" (an inspiration for Woody Allen's Broadway Danny Rose?) directed in 1922 by Robert Z. Leonard (who would direct "The Great Ziegfeld," 1936), and written by director-to-be Edmund Goulding, co-starring Leonard's wife, Mae Marsh (to whom a young Ernest Hemingway claimed to have been engaged, with Marsh apparently knowing nothing of the engagement or of Hemingway at the time).
Back to Minnesota native son Fitzgerald, whose name now adorns the theater in St. Paul where Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion holds forth each week, and Keillor's slightly backhanded (though ironic) tribute to Scott, from a 2010 show:
http://prairiehome.publicradio.org/programs/2010/09/25/scripts/f-scott.shtml
So we beat on, indeed!
Don Larsson
___________________________________________________
"I don't deduce. I observe."
--Roger O Thornhill
Donald F. Larsson, Professor
English Department, Minnesota State University, Mankato
Email: [log in to unmask]
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From: Film and TV Studies Discussion List [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Norman Holland [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Monday, September 30, 2013 10:01 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [SCREEN-L] Midnight in Paris
Hi, I've posted my how-to-enjoy reading of MIDNIGHT IN PARIS at:
www.asharperfocus.com/midnight.html
All the best, Norm Holland
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