For his post, I originally intended to list only films I’d actually seen, which are the first eleven title below. Normally I’d say that’s how you ought to do it, but when I started reading up about some of the ones I hadn’t seen for whatever reasons, I felt I the need to include them as additional titles. Those five films are at the end of this post. I plan to see the ones available for streaming, but for now I’ve just got my fingers crossed that they’re as good as I’ve heard. I’m sure there are many other docs from last year that I don’t even know about. Well, what can you do?
Eno (Gary Hustwit, director) Brian Eno is a genius, musically and otherwise. If you read his interviews or listen to him speak, you know his brain is wired up in ways that elude most of us. This film is unique, a “generative” documentary that changes each time it’s shown. I don’t understand how it works, but it does. I saw it at Film Forum three times on separate days. Some scenes didn’t change, but enough did to keep it interesting. I don’t know how they’ll handle a streaming or home video version. Seems like they’ll have to pick one version out of the near infinity of possible combinations. But to the extent that any iteration let’s you inside Eno’s head, it will be interesting. The two trailers below are different enough that I think it’s worth seeing both.
Film Geek (Richard Shepard, director & writer) This deep dive into Richard Shepard’s life as a hopeless film geek growing up in New York City’s movie houses in the 1980s is a real trip and a treat for fellow film geeks such as myself. His belief that Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980) is a great film is inexplicable to me, but other than that, I was with him all the way. This is a very personal account. The way he describes his relationship with his rather shady father is quite moving at times.
How to Come Alive with Norman Mailer (Jeff Zimbalist, director & co-writer) Excellent study of the controversial, larger-than-life author who, like Ernest Hemingway, was a personality in his own right. An often brilliant writer, Mailer had a take-no-prisoners approach in his public life. He could be appalling and charming, often at the same time. He wanted to be taken seriously, yet often played the clown. This film gives us examples of all this, while becoming quite moving by the end.
Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger (David Hinton, director) Excellent documentary about the great filmmaking team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, narrated by the always enthusiastic Martin Scorsese. This is an excellent account of their lives and films. I learned a lot. One of the best things about it is that it makes you want to see these films again.
Merchant Ivory (Stephen Soucy, director & co-writer) This would make a great double feature with Made in England. As with Powell and Pressburger, we learn a great deal about James Ivory and Ismail Merchant, and the 44 films they made together from 1961 until Merchant’s death in 2005. It makes me want to see their films again, too, included the many I hadn’t been aware of.
On the Adamant (Nicolas Philibert, director & co-writer)
Edited from Jordan Mintzer’s review in The Hollywood Reporter:
“The observant documentaries of Nicolas Philibert often focus on either a single character or location — the latter usually a French public institution — exploring them with painstaking detail and plenty of compassion.
“For his eleventh feature, On the Adamant (Sur l’Adamant), the 72-year-old filmmaker spent months aboard a barge anchored on the Seine in Paris, chronicling a mental health care facility that caters specifically to its patients’ creative needs. What emerges is not only a depiction of psychiatric treatment administered with plenty of warmth and enthusiasm, but a portrait of several individuals who, despite their noticeable disabilities, are capable of producing original and moving works of art.
“Like Frederick Wiseman, Philibert never provides voiceover or explanatory titles in his movies, and rarely do they feature interviews (though his latest includes a few talks with patients). They are more like discreet immersive experiences, and therefore the opposite of the shock-and-awe docs currently popular on Netflix and other streamers.”
Available for streaming on Kino Film Collection and rental on Prime.
Soundtrack to a Coup D’Etat (Johan Grimonprrez, director & writer) This is my pick for the best documentary of those I saw last year. It’s a history lesson that plays like a jam session. The ideas and detail ricochet off the screen. You’ve got to pay attention. I’ve included as many quotes as I have because I hope to at least partially suggest the importance and depth of this film, and give you a sense of it. Don’t be mistaken, this is not a music documentary, though the music here is wonderful.
Per the IMDb description: “Jazz and decolonization are entwined in this historical rollercoaster that rewrites the Cold War episode that led musicians Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach to crash the UN Security Council in protest against the murder of Patrice Lumumba.”
Per Alissa Wilkinson, New York Times: “In making Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, the director Johan Grimonprez used every instrument cinema affords. His documentary is rhythmic and propulsive, with reverberating sound and images juxtaposed against one another to lend more meaning. The result, in a word, is marvelous.”
PerWikipedia: “To retain control over the riches of what used to be the Belgian Cong, King Baudouin of Belgium finds an ally in the Eisenhower administration, which fears losing access to one of the world’s biggest known reserves of uranium, a metal vital for the creation of atomic bombs. Congo-Léopoldville takes center stage to both the Cold War and the scheme for control of the UN. The US State Department swings into action: jazz ambassador Louis Armstrong is dispatched to win the hearts and minds of Africa. Unwittingly, Armstrong becomes a smokescreen to divert attention from Africa’s first post-colonial coup, leading to the assassination of Congo’s first democratically elected leader. Malcolm X stands up in open support of Lumumba and his efforts to create a United States of Africa while also reframing the freedom struggle of African Americans as one not for civil rights but for human rights, aiming to bring his case before the UN.
“As Black jazz ambassadors are performing unaware amidst covert CIA operatives, the likes of Armstrong, Nina Simone, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, and Melba Liston face a painful dilemma: how to represent a country where segregation is still the law of the land.”
Per Phil Concannon, Little White Lies: “To make moves in Africa, the Americans needed a smokescreen, and the most fascinating strand of Grimonprez’s film shows how many of the greatest jazz musicians of the era – Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Nina Simone, et al – were often used as unwitting stooges in CIA operations. …This musical angle ensures the film bounces along to a vibrant, eclectic score, but it also helps Grimonprez organise and structure the enormous wealth of archive footage, soundbites and quotations that that he uses to tell this complex story.
“…Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is as exhilarating and illuminating a history lesson as you’ll ever have.”
P.S. There are several clips in the film of Malcolm X speaking to the camera. I must have never heard him actually speak before, because I was stunned by the clarity and persuasiveness of what he said, and his incredible charisma. Just another way Soundtrack to a Coup D’Etat gives the audience electric jolts.
Available for streaming on Kino Film Collection and rental on Prime.
Steve! (Martin): A Documentary in 2 Pieces (Morgan Neville, director) Morgan Neville has made many films, including 20 Feet from Stardom (2013), The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble (2015), Won’t You Be My Neighbor (2018), and Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain (2021). This one is simply wonderful, a total gas. Part 1 is Steve Martin then, part 2 is Steve Martin now. Part 2 includes a lot of Martin Short. He and Steve seem like a really weird married couple. But it’s great to go back and remember where he came from as he became “Steve Martin,” a wild and crazy guy. I’d forgotten that for a time he was about as big as you could get, rock star famous filling huge arenas. It’s fascinating to see how he evolved over the years, always maintaining a high level of creativity and freshness, always on his own terms. Which is what Neville has done in working with obviously a huge amount of material, archival and new.
Sugarcane at Film Forum. (Directors: Emily Kassie, Julian Brave Noisecat) Per Wikipedia, this film “…follows an investigation into the Canadian Indian Residential School System, igniting a reckoning in the lives of survivors and descendants.” It’s a tragic story of a search for truth and accountability.
Uncropped (D.W. Young, director) I love this film. I’d been seeing James Hamilton’s photos in the Village Voice since I moved here in 1977, but didn’t know who he was. It’s great to see the person behind that work and get to a sense of him. Uncropped really took me back to that time in the city. He’d covered war zones and civil unrest in Central American countries, Haiti, Grenada, and Tiananmen Square, but his main focus was the film, art, and music scene in New York City in the ’70s and ’80s. Always nice to see artists at work.
Will & Harper (Josh Greenbaum, director) Will Ferrell met Harper Steele on his first day at Saturday Night Live in 1995, where Harper was a writer. They connected and havebeen good friends for 30 years. When Harper told Will he had transitioned to female gender, they decided to take a 17-day road trip across America to talk about it. And film the journey while they were at it. The result is very funny, as you’d expect, but also serious and touching.
I saw a total of 350 films in 2024, both new and old, 218 in theaters and 132 streaming or on video discs. I’ve come up with 30 films that are the best of what I saw, or at least my favorites. I don’t claim that all of these are great films (though some of them are), but they got my attention and engaged me in one way or another. Sometimes it’s just a performance, a feeling, more often it’s the whole package. You’ll also notice that most of these films were written or co-written by their directors. I think this makes a difference in the result. My picks for the top two films of the year are The Brutalist and A Complete Unknown. The rest are listed in alphabetical order.
In the interest of economy and attention spans (mainly mine), I will be keeping comments to a minimum..
The Brutalist (Brady Corbet, director & writer) I’d wanted to see this at the New York Film Festival last year, but couldn’t get tickets to the numerous screenings. I’m glad I had to wait, because we were fortunate enough to see it in 70mm IMAX, with the image filling the entire IMAX screen. This format definitely added to the experience. The Brutalist has an epic scale and narrative, and I was amazed to learn that it apparently cost only $10 million dollars to make. When super hero movies now routinely have budgets north of $200 million, $10 million seems like a joke. Something’s not right. Whatever, it looks and sounds great. The music score by Daniel Blumberg is of immense importance. Adrien Brody, and especially Guy Pearce, give stellar performances. The entire cast is excellent. There’s an event later in the film I have mixed feelings about, but that doesn’t diminish my feeling that this is a great piece of work, an achievement that brings to mind Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master (2012).
A Complete Unknown (James Mangold, director & co-writer) I was apprehensive, but it turns out this is a great movie. James Mangold is an excellent director. Films of his I’ve especially liked include Copland (1997), 3:10 to Yuma (2007), Logan (2017), and Ford v Ferrari (2019). Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023), not so much. Mangold really scores with one. Timothée Chalamet is completely convincing as a young Bob Dylan, both in appearance and in his singing. Edward Norton is great as Pete Seeger. Covering the years 1961 to 1965, the film focuses on arguably the most formative years of Dylan’s career, when he became Bob Dylan. Being of a certain age, as they say, myself and some of my Minneapolis friends have a lot invested in our love of Dylan and his music. A Complete Unknown did not disappoint.
Anora (Sean Baker, director & writer) Neck-snapping rollercoaster ride with sharp turns and jolts, going almost too fast for the curves. After 20-30 minutes of sexual acrobatics, it becomes the screwball comedy it intended all along. Something very endearing about all this. Mikey Madison in the title role is really great.
The Bikeriders (Jeff Nichols, director & writer) When I first heard of this film and then saw the trailers that seemed to run for months in advance of the release, I wasn’t sure I wanted to see it. But the presence of Tom Hardy, Austin Butler, and Jodie Comer in the cast was very promising. Then I learned that Jeff Nichols was the writer and director, which sealed the deal for me. I’ve been a big fan of his work since seeing Shotgun Stories (2007) and Take Shelter (2011), both starring a stellar Michael Shannon. This is an exceptional film, on a different level than what I might have expected, definitely not The Wild One (1953) or Roger Corman’s The Wild Angels (1966). Tom Hardy is great, and Jodie Comer plays a character unlike anything I’ve seen her in before.
Conclave (Edward Berger, director) Great performances from Ralph Fiennes and Stanley Tucci, as well as Isabella Rossellini, who shines in a brief but important role. Terrific Vatican thriller, could be set in medieval times except for the cell phones. Not sure the final reveal works, but hey, it’s a very good film.
Emilia Perez (Jacques Audiard, director & co-writer) With all the attention it’s getting and a bunch of Oscar nominations, this film can’t be ignored. It has musical numbers with people singing and dancing, but somehow doesn’t feel like a musical, certainly not a traditional one. The premise is both way out there and timely. Zoe Saldaña is outstanding.
Flow (Gints Zibalodis, director & co-writer) Simply wonderful. I loved it. A refreshing and unusual aspect is that all of the characters are animals – cats, dogs, birds, fish – and none of them speak, plus they largely behave the way the creatures they are would, which is atypical for animated films.
Hard Truths ((Mike Leigh, director & writer) Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s character Pansy is hard to take at times. Most of the time, actually. She’s just too much, but the pain and loneliness and damage behind her extremely hostile behavior invites empathy and compassion. Authentic, lived-in performances from all. There’s nothing casual about Mike Leigh’s films.
His Three Daughters (Azazel Jacobs, director & writer) Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olson, and Natasha Lyonne are all great as three daughters who’ve come together in a deathwatch for their father.
The Old Oak (Ken Loach, director) Edited from a previous post: Loach is a great director whose films reflect committed humanist, social, and political concerns. My favorites include Kes (1969), Land and Freedom (1995), My Name Is Joe (1988), The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006), I, Daniel Blake (2016) and Sorry We Missed You (2020). Loach is nearlyt 89 years of age, and The Old Oak is strong evidence that his craft, skill, and sensitivity have not diminished in the least. His films are about everyday people, working class, the common man (and woman). Working with his frequent collaborator, screenwriter Paul Laverty, Loach has created a deeply heartfelt film.
The Order (Justin Kurzel, director) Didn’t even know this film existed until the day before I saw it. There was virtually no advertising that I was aware of. It’s a gem. Jude Law is excellent as a burnt-out FBI agent who in 1983 gets re-energized by his pursuit of bank robbers in Idaho who are in fact white supremacists stealing money to fund an armed revolution. Based on real events, The Order resonates with current times in disturbing ways.
A Real Pain (Jesse Eisenberg, director & writer) Didn’t think I’d want to see this, based on the trailer. Seemed like Kieran Culkin was going to be really annoying. But when we saw it at the New York Film Festival, I liked it a lot. It’s more than a comic, quirky road movie.
The Room Next Door (Pedro Almodóvar, director & writer) The fact that this film and especially Tilda Swinton did not get any Academy Award nominations is inexplicable to me. She gives a truly great performance here.
The Substance (Corolie Fargeat, director & writer) Gets nuttier and nuttier until it’s so far over the top by the end that you can barely believe what you’re seeing. Boy, talk about body horror. Demi Moore has been getting a lot of praise for her fearless performance, and I’ve liked Margaret Qualley since seeing her in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. And no one who remembers Dennis Quaid’s bug-eyed portrayal of Jerry Lee Lewis in Great Balls of Fire should be surprised by his performance here. I found him really repulsive, but I guess that’s the character. Acting!
Tuesday (Daina Oniunas-Pusic, director & writer) After I saw this film last June, I noted that it was “Amazing! Like a weird folk tale or fairy tale, but very real.” Had not seen anything quite like this magical realism look at dying and letting go. Very unusual and quite moving.
The Vourdalak Adrien Beau, director & co-writer) Very unsettling vampire film. Robert Eggers’ misbegotten remake of Nosferatu could have used some of what makes this one so effective.
Okay, time to take a breath. Stay tuned for my selection of best (or favorite) feature films and documentaries from last year, coming in a few days. Meanwhile, I think I’ll close this out with David Lynch. — Ted Hicks
Most of these filmmakers are contenders for Academy Awards this year. A number of them turn up in more than one roundtable, so there’s bound to be some repetition. This is a lot of material. Pick and choose what looks interesting to you. Running times are indicated.
That does it for this one. More to come from the trade publication Variety, pairs of actors and directors just talking about what they do. These will be up soon. Stay tuned. — Ted Hicks
This is the tenth edition of “On Set, Off Camera,” closing out 2024. As with previous editions, it consists mainly of shots of actors and directors caught in off-camera moments during the making of a movie, sometimes off-set, at home and elsewhere. Some of these are candid and some are obviously posed, but I think they’re all interesting.
Stanley demonstrates the “Kubrick Stare,” which can be seen in A Clockwork Orange (1971), The Shining (1980), and Full Metal Jacket (1987). This is actually a thing. You can read about it here.
I think for many of us there is one person who was hugely important to us at a formative time in our lives. This may have been a teacher, a coach, a family member, or just anyone who came along at the right time. For me, that person was Maxine Steig, who I had for English in my freshman, junior, and senior years in high school. She was tremendously important to me. She made me feel that my weird interests were totally okay. For an Iowa farmboy in the 1950s, this was a big deal. _________________________________________________________
In 1959, the school in Nemaha (pop. 184 in 1950) that I’d attended for first grade through junior high, merged with the school in nearby Early, seven miles away. Mine would be the first graduating class of the newly-named Crestland High School. Even consolidated, this was a small school. There were thirty-two of us in my freshman class, which would be reduced to twenty-eight by the time we graduated (twenty-four boys and four girls, interesting ratio). For those of us coming from Nemaha, we had to get used to a new building, classrooms and classmates, and new teachers. Plus there was just the thing of now being in high school.
I don’t remember other classes and teachers in any detail, but Mrs. Steig entranced me from the beginning. I was surprised to find out only a few years ago that she was born and raised in Sac City, an Iowa town about ten or twelve miles southeast of Early. I think I had the idea that she’d come from some cosmopolitan place far beyond Iowa. She was funny, engaging, and quite special. She brought so much to us, such as the world of Charles Addams, The Catcher in the Rye, Broadway plays, and much, much more. I mean, what was she doing here?
I’d been intending to write something about Mrs. Steig for some time. Five years ago I exchanged emails about her with Gary Davis, a classmate I met in first grade in 1951 and have known ever since. Here’s what he wrote then:
Thoughts about Maxine Steig. She was from a Sac City family. She married Butch, whom she claimed, tried to run her over with a car more than once. She hated birds and claimed to speed up to hit them with her car. She wrote a cookbook about eating wildlife (including crows.) She lived in Storm Lake. She died young from meningitis. She led art discussions in her English classes. She agreed to read “From Here to Eternity” if we would read “Julius Caesar.” She loaned precious plays to Ted. She had a hearty laugh. She wore powerful perfume or body powder. She encouraged me to start reading classical philosophers and that turned out to be my major academic interest all the way to the Ph.D. level. When our classmate Maynard was summoned from class because his father had just committed suicide, she reminded us that Thoreau had written that “most men live lives of quiet desperation.”
And from another email from Gary:
I was telling somebody the other day about how Mrs. Steig collected play scripts and she enjoyed reading them the way other people would read a novel. She is the only person I’ve ever met who did that. There must be others but they probably didn’t live in Storm Lake. The bottom line for me is that she pushed me to reach higher and try harder. So did Dutch Bryan, Bill Hall and Slater Brockman. For living on the edge of the world, we had a pretty good bunch of teachers.
I don’t remember Mrs. Steig loaning me copies of plays to read. Gary may be thinking of the Charles Addams cartoon collections from The New Yorker that she brought to class. I don’t think I’d ever seen any of Addams’ work before, and probably hadn’t seen The New Yorker either. I was completely knocked out by the cartoons and hooked right into Adams’ sensibility. She loaned the books to me to take home, saying she’d never loaned them to anyone before. She knew I would appreciate them. Of course, that made me feel special.
I found out early on that Mrs. Steig had known my mother and her two sisters and their mother in Storm Lake, a larger town north of Early where they grew up. Mrs. Steig also lived there. I don’t know or can’t remember how they met, but it felt like a connection with her my classmates didn’t have.
In 1971, when I was back at the University of Iowa after four years in the Air Force, I got a call from my mom telling me that Mrs. Steig had died from while on a trip to California. Meningitis. This was quite a jolt. She was still young, only 59. She was born Maxine Abernathy in 1911. I found out recently that her mother had died in 1918 at age 27, when Maxine was only 7. Something else I hadn’t known. She was an only child, like me. In retrospect, this feels like another connection, however tenuous.
*** Update – March 28, 2025. A few days ago, I heard from Mrs. Steig’s granddaughter, Beth, after she found this post online. She had one correction, which is that Mrs. Steig was not an only child, but had a sister, LaVon, who was six years younger.
Mrs. Steig oversaw the high school newspaper, the Cadet Bugle, which appeared either weekly or every two weeks in the Early newspaper. Sometime early in my freshman year, Jean Miller, who was a sophomore and editor of the school paper, came to my desk in study hall to tell me Mrs. Steig thought I should be on the paper’s staff. This hadn’t occurred to me, but I thought, why not, I was always writing stuff anyway.
We’d work on the paper in Mrs. Steig’s office, which was just off the study hall. Her office became a space where some of us would go, ostensibly for the paper if anyone asked, but mainly to just hang out with her. She happily indulged us. I think she was engaged and stimulated by those of us she found interesting (I’m assuming), just as we were stimulated by her.
I was on the school paper all four years, and took over as editor in my senior year, after Jean Miller graduated. I had a regular column I called “In My Opinion.” Yeah, okay, maybe a little presumptuous. Unfortunately, or perhaps not, none of these early journalistic efforts have survived.
Below, my first year on the paper, 1959. Mrs. Steig is standing in the center, looking on, while I’m third from right, staring right at the camera, not even pretending to look on like everyone else is.
Below is from 1962 during my tenure as editor. I’m at right, the only guy wearing a tie.
Below, also from 1962, a shot of me supposedly working on an editorial. No explanation for the shirt I’m wearing, but it must have seemed like a good idea at the time.
Mrs. Steig told us that every Christmas she made dinner using the Cratchit’s dinner menu from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, as per the following:
Roast goose: The centerpiece of the meal, served with apple sauce and mashed potatoes. Sage and onion stuffing: A flavorful addition to the goose. Christmas pudding: A “speckled cannon ball” pudding that was hard and firm, and decorated with Christmas holly. Gravy: Made in a saucepan ahead of time.
Per Wikipedia: The Cratchit family’s dinner is part of a vision that Scrooge has of what would have happened if he hadn’t changed his ways. Scrooge eventually does change his ways and sends the Cratchit’s a turkey as a gift.
I don’t know if Mrs. Steig went with the goose from Scrooge’s vision or opted for turkey. I also don’t know if she actually did this every year, or if it was just a story she liked to tell. Either way, it’s pretty cool.
She told us her house in Storm Lake was haunted, that she’d hear noises. I can’t remember what else she said about how it was haunted, but she sounded quite serious. I was there several times over the years, but sadly, no such spectral evidence produced itself. Still, I’d like to think she could attract such paranormal happenings.
To follow up on Gary Davis’ earlier comment that Mrs. Steig collected and read play scripts, I can attest to the collecting part. One of the rooms in her home had built-in book shelves filled with published play scripts. Plus lots of books in general.
Haunted or not, her house, which was at 414 Terrace Street in Storm Lake, was nearly impossible to find. This may reflect more on my poor navigational skills than anything mysterious, but it seems somehow right that it wasn’t easy to get to.
One day I brought in a Japanese bayonet that that my Uncle Russ had brought back from WWII, which had somehow ended up with my dad. Can’t remember if this was for something we were doing as a class, or if I just thought Mrs. Steig would get a kick out of seeing a bayonet. I pointed out oil residue still on the blade. She said she thought there was some blood as well. An example of her macabre humor.
One of my strongest memories is when Mrs. Steig read J.D. Salingers’s The Catcher in the Rye aloud to us over several class periods. She read everything except the times Holden Caulfield sees “Fuck you” written on walls at his school. She’d get right up to it, then stop and say there was a word she wasn’t going to say. But she read everything else. In retrospect, this was a pretty edgy thing to do in the high school of a small town Iowa farming community in 1962. She also brought in art prints that she’d put on the walls. Some of these were nude studies. I’m sure all this contributed to her being “let go,” i.e. fired, a few years after I graduated. She must have known she was pushing limits, but that broadening our view of the world was worth the risk. Given the time and place and our circumstances, we weren’t likely to be exposed to stuff like this, at least, not in an academic setting. Of course, in today’s climate she’d probably get arrested for this kind of activity, or burned as a witch.
The only time I can remember Mrs. Steig getting really angry with us was when the word “fairy” was said in whatever context, there would be giggling laughter like it was a big joke, mainly from the boys. I’m sure we had a vague idea of what it referred to, but we didn’t really know anything. It always triggered a strong response from her, and I’ve never forgotten that, either.
It was only last week when I was looking through school yearbooks that I found something Mrs. Steig had written in mine in 1959 after my freshman year. I’d totally forgotten about this. It was on the very last page, just before the endpaper of the back cover. I’d normally be unlikely to see it, because everything else was before that. I know I must have seen it at the time, but there was something a little spooky about finding it just when I was about to start writing about her. I’m hesitant to include her message, since doing so might make it look it look like I’m bragging. Well, maybe I am, but I’m really happy that she would write this.
I think Mrs. Steig was probably a better teacher for students she took a real interest in, who she felt would appreciate what she had to give us. I remember how devastated I was to learn that we wouldn’t have her for sophomore English. Instead, we were to have a Mrs. Alice Brown. She was doubtless competent and nice enough, but about as exciting as her name implies. That’s probably unfair, but I’d been so spoiled to have Mrs. Steig as a teacher, that it was hard to accept. She was exciting, and fun to be around, especially if she shined her light on you.
She was one of two teachers who had the most influence on me. The other, interestingly enough, and for very different reasons, was Bill Hall. Mr. Hall was the high school principal. He also taught physics and algebra, but I never had any classes with him. Some time ago, when I was thinking about Mrs. Steig, I tried to think of who else had been important to me. I surprised myself by realizing it was Bill Hall. There were other teachers I liked and enjoyed being around, but this was different. I would never have thought of him as exciting, as I did Mrs. Steig. Most of us never tried to get away with anything or put something past him. We knew that wouldn’t fly. He was strict, but not unfair. He carried an authority I respected rather than feared. I just realized I could be describing my dad, Milt Hicks. I learned by their example how to behave in life, to do the work and stay on the right side of things. My dad died in 1975 a month before his 58th birthday.
I may have dropped by the school after I graduated to see Mr. Hall when I was back on college breaks or in the summer, but don’t remember doing so. The next time I saw him so was in 2013. That year the class behind mine held a reunion and invited our class as well. I was thrilled to learn that Bill Hall would be there. It was great to be with him after all this time. As I write this, he’s still alive at age 98, so it’s unlikely, but not impossible, that I’ll ever see him again.
I think that about does it. I’ll close by thanking all the teachers in my life, in school and out, then and now. Hopefully, I’m still learning. Thinking back to something Gary wrote me about Mrs. Steig that applies to Bill Hall as well, which was that she pushed Gary to reach higher and try harder. I like that. — Ted Hicks, Class of ’62
This is Part Two of “On Set, Off Camera – Ninth Edition.” As before, it consists mainly of shots of actors and directors caught in off-camera moments during the making of a movie, sometimes off-set, at home and elsewhere. Some of these are candid and some are obviously posed promotional shots, but I think they’re all interesting.
Frances Ford Coppola, on location for Apocalypse Now (1975). Below that, Dennis Hopper, Martin Sheen, with Coppola looking through the camera lens. At bottom, the crew executes a tracking shot during the helicopter attack on the village.
Werner Herzog on location for Fitzcarraldo (1982). Below at left, Herzog with a camel while shooting Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970). At right, Herzog with Les Blank behind him at the Telluride film festival in 1982 (photo by Mark Ryan).
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Films etc. 