The overuse of the close-up is the unfortunate consequence of television's demand that the small screen be filled top-to-bottom and side-to-side with talking faces, since TV's never really been a visual medium (it's actually old-time radio dramas with largely irrelevant pictures, and can usually be followed by merely listening with eyes [wide] shut, whereas a film that is truly cinematic can be followed without having to listen to much of the dialogue). Now, with big 16 x 9 widescreen TVs there is the opportunity for television to expand into truly cinematic storytelling, but I'm afraid the damage has been longsince done. Modern directors don't understand that, as D.W. Griffith first realized over ninety years ago, the close-up is meant to be a trump card, and should be withheld until it can do the most good.

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Now there's a truly good musical from WB, but that was made a few years before JL sold the studio to Seven Arts in 1967. Later, WB was sold to Kinney, a company that started out as a chain of funeral parlors.


By the time it'd bought Warner Bros., National Kinney Co. had graduated to the ownership and management of parking lots, and it's probably a lucky thing that the Warner's lot wasn't turned into one, itself.

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That reminds me of the small funeral home that for decades stood next to MGM's Thalberg administration building. Repeatedly the studio tried to buy it in order to close it down. You see it had a working crematory and late at night they'd burn corpses.


I've been in that building many times after it had been turned into offices (it retained its sombre character, however. As Iunderstand it, MGM executives high up in the Iron Lungh (as the Thalberg Building came to be known) liked to gaze down at the mortuary's rear entraces as the stiffs were brought in and out. Many felt it was only appropriate that MGM purchase the mortuary, because the studio, thanks to Louis B. Mayer's paternalism, offered just about every conceivable service to its employees, from schools for the child actors, to barbershops, a restaurant, and masseuse, and an in-house mortuary would've made working for L.B. a truly cradle-to-grave experience.