Lake Neuron

Well, I’ve been tagged for a meme by my soon-to-be-Tarheel sister-in-law. Here are the rules:

1. Pick up the nearest book.

2. turn to page 123.

3. find the 5th sentence.

4. post the next 3 sentences.

5. tag 5 people.

There were several books stacked up, so I cheated and picked the one I thought would be the most fun: “Preston Sturges by Preston Sturges.”

Does this mean you post starting with the fifth or the sixth sentence? I pick the sixth:

One of these flashed green to signal the lightning, the other flashed red for the thunder. My red and green signals were picked up by a stagehand sitting way up in the flies with one hand on a big iron thunder-sheet and the other on a knife switch that threw direct current into a sputtering arc for the lighting.

The first time Gus staggered on stage, the coagulated blood from his empty eye sockets waving below his chin, something went a little wrong.

I hate tagging people for memes. I never know who to tag, who doesn’t like being tagged, who will get offended if they aren’t tagged, and who will be offended because I didn’t notice that they already did that same meme two weeks ago. But, the rules are the rules: Art, Stacie, Jennifer, Kristi and Newscoma.

If you read this post in time, be sure and catch one of the funniest movies of the 1940s, “The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek,” this afternoon on TCM. It’s directed by Preston Sturges, whose autobiography I was posting about just recently.

Title	Content
Movie:	The Miracle of Morgan's Creek
Director:	Preston Sturges
Release Date:	19 January 1944 (USA) / Other Countries
Genre:	Comedy
Plot Outline:	After an all-night send-off party for the troops, a small-town girl wakes up to find herself married and pregnant, but with no memory of her husband's identity.
User Rating:	1,822 votes, average 7.8 out of 10
Runtime:	98 min
Awards:	Nominated for Oscar. Another 1 win
Cast:	...
Others:	Additional Details Close Move Title Content MPAA: County: USA Language: English Color: Black and White Aspect Ratio: 1.33 : 1 Sound: Mono (Western Electric Mirrophonic Recording) Company: Paramount Pictures Certification: Finland:S / Sweden:15 / USA:Unrated IMDBTag: Powered by IMDBTag & imdb.com Sound Mix, Aspect Ratio ...
Photos:	N/A
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Well, I finished the Preston Sturges tonight. In the process, during a couple of breaks from reading, I tinkered with my own magnum opus, making some needed changes to the passage about an emotional meltdown the hero suffers just before the end of the book.

The Sturges book was fascinating, even if it does give short shrift to the very classic films one wants to hear the most about. (I imagine that Sturges, while directing, had a lot less time to journal.) One interesting thing about Sturges is his blithe self-confidence, and how he used it to establish himself as a playwright, and then a screenwriter, and then (after many setbacks) fulfilled what has now become a cliche: “But what I really want to do is direct.” Meanwhile, he’s trying to run a restaurant and an industrial concern to sell a diesel engine of his own invention! Sturges had plenty of financial setbacks in his life, going, if not from rags to riches, than at least from the prospect of rags to riches and back, several times. But he always believed in his own potential.

I think I may need to summon up a little of Sturges’ hubris to bring this book to completion and see it published.

I got two autobiographical sorts of books for Christmas — one, about which I’ve already blogged, was Steve Martin’s Born Standing Up.

The other, which I’m now reading, is Preston Sturges by Preston Sturges: His Life in His Words, which (despite its name) was actually culled, edited and compiled from his journals by his widow Sandy Sturges.

Sturges directed several of my favorite old movies, including Sullivan’s Travels, which I usually list as one of my three all-time favorite movies (along with “Casablanca” and the Kenneth Branagh version of “Henry V”). I also love The Lady Eve and The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek.

The book is a delight. Usually, I get frustrated with biographies that spend too much time on the subject’s early life and not enough on the career or achievements for which the subject became famous. But Sturges turns out to have had a life as colorful as, and more unbelievable than, his wackiest comedies.

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I posted the other day about the fact that The Lady Eve is showing in Nashville this weekend. Well, Jim Ridley at the Nashville Scene posted this little clip:

Those of you in and around Nashville really need to head to the Belcourt next weekend for one of my favorite movies, “The Lady Eve”, as part of its series “Family Weekend Classics.”

It’s directed by Preston Sturges — which ought to be enough, right there — and stars Henry Fonda and Barbara Stanwyck in a screwball comedy. (Because when you think “Henry Fonda,” you automatically think “screwball comedy.”) Fonda is the straight-arrow, nerdy, science-minded heir to a brewing fortune (”The ale that won for Yale”) and Stanwyck is a con artist trying to take him for as much as possible. Hollywood being Hollywood, romance ensues, but Sturges is never going to take you directly from point A to point B without a hilarious side trip through points C, D and E.

If you’ve never seen it, it’s not to be missed.

Title	Content
Movie:	The Lady Eve
Director:	Preston Sturges
Release Date:	25 February 1941 (USA) / Other Countries
Genre:	Comedy / Romance
Tagline:	Eve Sure Knows Her Apples !
User Rating:	3,957 votes, average 8.1 out of 10
Runtime:	97 min
Awards:	Nominated for Oscar. Another 1 win
Cast:	...
Others:	Additional Details Close Move Title Content MPAA: County: USA Language: English Color: Black and White Aspect Ratio: 1.37 : 1 Sound: Mono (Western Electric Mirrophonic Recording) Company: Paramount Pictures Certification: Canada:PG (Ontario) / Sweden:15 / Finland:K-16 / USA:Unrated / UK:U IMDBTag: Powered by IMDBTag & imdb.com Sound Mix, Aspect Ratio ...
Photos:	N/A
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