The marathoner whose life was saved by a photo at the 2013 Boston Marathon runs the race this year. Plus: Mike Kelley, Coachella, Heritage Square crash, and Friedkin's "Sorcerer."
5 classic Easter eggs from your favorite animated movies
On Easter Sunday, little kids will be searching under bushes and inside closets for hard-boiled, chocolate, and marshmallow Easter eggs. But Off-Ramp animation expert Charles Solomon says animation fans can find Easter eggs every day of the year — provided they know where to look in their favorite movies.
"The beauty of these films is we try to layer them. We try to make them very thick … you know, like a very good deli sandwich. So that audiences won’t just watch it once and then forget about it. They’ll go back and look at it again, and again, and again. And every time they look at it, they see something else; they spot something new." —Disney Animator Tom Sito
For animators, an Easter egg is an in-joke, a caricature, or some other surprise hidden in a movie. Disney animator Eric Goldberg says the practice goes back at least to the 1930s: "You can look at 'Ferdinand the Bull,' for example, from 1938, and there’s a scene where all the characters are caricatures of staffers. There’s Ward Kimball, there’s Art Babbitt, there’s Freddie Moore, and at the end, the matador himself is Walt Disney. If Walt can take a joke, then so can we."
(Walt Disney himself was caricatured in the 1938 short "Ferdinand the Bull.")
1. In the classic Warner Brothers cartoon "Rabbit of Seville," the cast is listed on a sign at the entrance to the Hollywood Bowl: Eduardo Selzeri, Michele Maltese and Carlo Jonzi. That is: producer Eddy Selzer, writer Mike Maltese and director Chuck Jones.
Watch "Rabbit of Seville," set at the Hollywood Bowl, complete with crickets!
2. At the end of "One Froggy Evening," the demolished building whose cornerstone holds the box with the singing frog is named for sound effects artist Tregoweth Brown.
(In this scene from Warner Bros.' classic "One Froggy Evening," great sound effects are timed to occur as the Easter egg pays tribute to the short's Foley artist.)
3. When animation artists are designing minor characters for a film, it’s easy and fun to draw family members, the boss, or the guy in the next cubicle. In "Aladdin," Disney animator Tom Sito was assigned to animate himself.
Sito is Crazy Hakim, the discount fertilizer dealer seen at the end of the song “One Jump Ahead.”
John Musker, who co-directed "The Great Mouse Detective," "The Little Mermaid," and "Aladdin," calls Easter eggs “the spice in the soup.”
(L-R: Co-directors John Musker and Ron Clements always put themselves in their movies, as in this scene from "Hercules.")
But despite his success, he doesn't always get his way. "In 'Aladdin,'" Musker says, "when Jafar was opening the Cave of Wonders, he originally said, 'Rasoul Azadani!,' which was the name of one of our layout supervisors; he’s Iranian. And one of our creative executives said, 'No, no. You can’t put his name in the film.'”
4. Easter eggs can also serve as homages. Brad Bird put his mentors Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, the last of Disney’s “Nine Old Men,” in both "The Iron Giant" and "The Incredibles."
The trick is to place Easter eggs where they won’t distract regular audience members, but where fans can find them and get the reward.
5. The “Rhapsody in Blue” segment of "Fantasia 2000" is a whole basket of Easter eggs. If you single-frame through the sequence where a crowd pours through the revolving door of a posh apartment building — named The Goldberg — you’ll see caricatures of director Eric Goldberg, his wife Susan, other artists who worked on the film … and a bustling bearded character who resembles a certain animation critic.
(A scene from Disney's "Fantasia 2000." That's Charles Solomon on the far right. Animator Eric Goldberg is the small man wearing a bow-tie whose head is obscured by the purse.)
Listen to our bonus audio for exclusive interviews with Tom Sito, John Musker and Eric Goldberg as they talk about Easter eggs and the art of animation.
Editor's Note: In the first version of the audio segment, Rabe used an excerpt of "Long Hair Hare," instead of "Rabbit of Seville." We regret the error.
Byzantium: Heaven and Earth and Constantinople, too—at both Gettys
Heaven and Earth: Art of Byzantium from Greek Collections, is at the Getty Villa through August 25. Heaven and Earth: Byzantine Illumination at the Cultural Crossroads, is at the Getty Center through June 22.
What civilization lasted 1,100 years, almost into Columbus’ time, that hardly anyone thinks of as a civilization? Byzantium. It was a Yelp-5-star civilization that bridged Ancient times to Modernity, and it’s now showing at both of the Gettys.
First the Romans took over the Greeks. Then 800 years later, the Greeks took over the Romans. Christianity came into the mix and the result was the magnificent Byzantine Empire, which once spread from North Africa all the way to Crimea. While Western Europe was foundering in the Dark Ages, Byzantium was a world center of art, literature and culture. And its story is largely forgotten in the deep dark gap in history between the ancient and the modern.
RELATED: Read up on Byzantium after seeing new double Getty exhibits
In a bid to remedy this, the Getty is hosting a rare doubleheader called Heaven and Earth. The art from several Greek museums is on display at the Getty Villa, while the manuscripts are at the Getty Center. This has never happened before. Nor has any art of the past millennium ever before been shown at the classically dedicated Getty Villa.
RELATED: Eureka! Huntington opens Archimedes exhibit with old text and new puzzle
Why now? Not that the recovery of the civilization of the Greeks who called themselves Romans isn’t much overdue. But the new consciousness or awareness of this rich and tumultuous Byzantine culture seems to spring from Greece itself.
“It was always there,” said Peter Poulos, an American-born official of the Bernaki Museum. “There are wonderful Byzantine churches all over Athens, built over almost every ancient pagan temple.”
RELATED: Getty to return illegally removed ancient manuscript to Greece
But in recent years, modern Greece has rediscovered this mighty culture that endured far longer than the glory that was Classical Greece. Byzantium continued that glory. That’s one reason Modern Greece wants to share this heritage to the world.
(Photo: Head of Aphrodite; Greek, 1st century; National Archaeological Museum, Athens)
The Getty Villa has on show more than 160 ikons, sculptures, and other works of art, many of which illustrate Byzantine art’s connection to the end of the Classical period. Classical art, the exhibit shows, didn’t dead-end with the Christianizing of the Roman Empire. It metamorphosed into the ideological emblem of Eastern Christianity—the Icon—the painted or mosaic symbol of the divine that developed over a millennium into a direct parent of European painting.
RELATED: See the Mike Kelley retrospective at MOCA at the Geffen Contemporary
One thinks of icons as compact. But the late 14th and 15th century icons on display here really are paintings, large pieces, oil on board, 40 and 50 inches high. And they use techniques that to me somewhat resemble the early International Gothic of Europe.
The intricate passages of this great art through the medieval world were indeed truly byzantine. Some of the most fascinating stuff here shows the Byzantine effects on the art of Central Asia and even East Africa—Armenian religious art and Christian Art of Medieval Ethiopia.
Oh, and did I mention that the Byzantines seem to have invented the fork?
Angels pitcher CJ Wilson's shocking confession: Racing is harder!
... actually, the confession is kind of refreshing. CJ Wilson, who won 17 games for the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim last season, says his other sport — racing cars — is harder than baseball, adding that it gives him perspective on the mound.
"Racing is much more terrifying, so it makes baseball less intimidating. When you've gone sideways or crashed into a wall at 120-mph, it's not a big deal if somebody scores a run. Racing definitely makes me a better baseball player.
The biggest part of it is that there's a 3-dimensional spacial awareness you get as a professional athlete that I feel like translates as a driver." — The Angels' CJ Wilson, who races as Chris Wilson
Drivers know how close they can get to a wall, how close to they can get to each other, how that extra bit of drift will give them the extra 2 miles an hour that will help them win a race.
RELATED: CJ Wilson's racing team
At the press luncheon for this weekend's 40th Long Beach Grand Prix, the country's longest race on city streets, Wilson said, "Street circuits are just absolutely insane." He referring to how close the fans are to the action and how close the cars are to each other. Also, he says it drives home, so to speak, the reality of racing. Some of the fans are from Long Beach, "and they're like, 'I've taken that corner before, I've stopped at that stoplight.' So they know how fast they can go, but when they see an Indy car going through here at 190-mph, they're like, 'that looks way faster than on TV!'"
RELATED: Check the whole LBGP schedule here
Listen to the audio for more of my conversation with CJ Wilson. Plus, I spoke with Long Beach Mayor Bob Foster, who remembers the race's first years when they had to cover the marquees of downtown's dirty movie theaters. And you'll hear from last year's winner, Takuma Sato, explaining why a street race like the LBGP is harder than racing on a standard oval track.
Meantime, here are some Long Beach Grand Prix highlights:
Friday, April 11
- 2:00 p.m. INDYCAR practice
- 4:00 p.m. INDYCAR All-Driver Autograph Session in INDYCAR Paddock (open to all spectators)
- 6:45 p.m. Concert starring Kinky
- 7:45 p.m. Motegi Racing Super Drift Challenge qualifying
Saturday, April 12
- 7:00 a.m. Gates open
- 11:00 a.m. Autograph session with Mario Andretti
- 12:00 p.m. Pro/Celebrity Race
- 1:15 p.m. INDYCAR qualifying and Firestone Fast Six
- 6:45 p.m. Concert with Paul Rodgers of Bad Company
Sunday, April 13
- 7:00 a.m. Gates open
- 10:15 a.m. Indy Lights Race
- 10:30 a.m. Autograph session with Mario Andretti, Dan Gurney, and Al Unser Jr.
- 11:30 a.m. Mothers Exotic Car Parade
- 12:00 p.m. SPEED Energy Stadium Super Trucks Race
- 1:43 p.m. "Drivers, Start Your Engines!"
- 1:50 p.m. Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach INDYCAR Race (80 laps)
130-year-old Heritage Square building damaged in car crash
Years ago, they moved a nearly 130-year-old train station to L.A.'s Heritage Square to save it from the wrecking ball. But early on Sunday, April 6, somebody ran into it with their car. Off-Ramp producer Kevin Ferguson went to the scene and talked with Jessica Rivas, Heritage Square's Manager of Education.
RELATED: 7 things to do this weekend that aren't Coachella
In the wee hours that Sunday morning, a man drove his compact Volkswagen through the museum's wrought iron gate—ripping half of it from its hinges. The gate landed about five feet from the entrance, then the car plowed into the Palms Depot building, which houses Heritage Square's gift shop and store.
Rivas said she didn't find out until the next morning, right before the museum opened.
"It was pretty shocking," said Rivas. "My store manager called me up and was very, very distraught. She was having a hard time putting her words together. I was trying to get her to calm down."
Despite the damage, the staff decided to keep the museum open. Later that day, the vehicle's driver returned to the scene to offer his apologies. "It was an interesting visit," she said. "We're grateful he came by and at least apologized. But it definitely is a small consolation to this whole thing."
Rivas said that while she hopes the historic wrought iron gate can be repaired, the historical elements inside the Palms Depot building will take a lot more work. A desk was nearly destroyed, antique items shattered and the store's windows shattered. "Our on-hand restoration guys says that not even historic window makers make windows of this size anymore. So we're talking a complete custom job just for the windows alone."
Along with attracting tourists and locals alike, Heritage Square also serves as Hollywood's go-to set for Victorian houses. You might have seen some of the Square's houses in Disney's "Saving Mr Banks."
Rivas said Heritage Square doesn't yet know how much all that will cost, but the museum will likely end up paying for some of the repairs out of pocket. People interested in helping out can donate through their website.
"One of the saddest parts is that this actually was just painted, about two weeks ago," said Rivas. "We had just restored this front portion, and now it's all broken."
Boston Marathon bombing: Studio City runner returns to race
In 2013, Off-Ramp host John Rabe talked with marathoner Renee Opell after she narrowly escaped the carnage of the Boston Marathon bombs. John called Renee again today and found out she's got her ticket for this year's marathon. Runners don't like it when you keep them from finishing what they started.
"We were having a glorious day, the weather was perfect, and we were moving along at a pretty steady pace," Studio City resident Renee Opell told us about running Boston Marathon April 15, 2013, with two friends. The group stopped to take a picture of themselves near the finish line. "Come on, let's go, we're almost done," Opell said. Then, the first explosion went off — just 30 yards away. But if they hadn't stopped? It's a cosmic question that Opell and her friends can't avoid.
"It is the best picture of my life, no doubt about it, and I kind of chuckle when I think about telling them to hurry up. But honestly, it kept us away from a bad place."
Now, Renee and her friends, Phil Kent and Jennifer Hartman, are in the final stages of prepping for running the Boston Marathon on Monday, April 21. Yes, they're going back. In fact, they were invited back by race officials.
RELATED: Listen to the complete Off-Ramp interview with Renee Opell in 2013
Did the three friends talk about the bombings over the past year? "We talked a lot about it right after the bombing, and for the weeks following. And for me personally, I had a little PTSD, and sudden noises certainly shook me up." But she knows they were fortunate, "and for my personal satisfaction, I look forward to going beyond the finish line this year."
You're not scared, I asked? "I have no trepidation," Opell said Tuesday. "I'm very excited to go back and run the race from start to finish this year. I never felt that I would stay away from a marathon."
RELATED: BAA confirms expanded field for 2014 Boston Marathon
And neither do the 20 additional people from her local running group who will be accompanying them —as well as the 9,000 other runners who will be racing this year in Boston.
She laughs in agreement when I ask if this is a big middle finger to the terrorists. "Absolutely. You can't squelch a runner. We're gonna show up; we're gonna show them. And I think the country is counting on us to do that as well."
Angels Flight railway in limbo in downtown LA
Off-Ramp host John Rabe walks up - and then down - all 153 steps along the Angels Flight funicular railway with Los Angeles Downtown News reporter Eddie Kim, as Angelenos and tourists await the fixes that will let the "world's shortest railway" open again.
The Los Angeles Downtown News headline reads "Will Angels Flight Ever Roll Again?" — and that says it all. The 113-year old two-car funicular railway is the last remnant of the old Bunker Hill. It's in a bunch of noir movies, and when tourists come to downtown LA, the 50-cent ride on the Angels Flight is one of their required stops.
But since the railway reopened in the 1990s after a thirty-year hiatus, it's been shut down more than it's been open to the public. Most recently, it was closed because of an accident this fall that caused a derailment but hurt no one.
Regulators want two big changes, as Eddie Kim outlines in the paper:
The CPUC and NTSB want to see the creation of a track-adjacent walkway for use in future evacuations. They also want to see the installation of end-gates on the rail cars that are tall enough ... to prevent a passenger from being ejected in the event of a sudden stop.
(Angels Flight) Foundation President John Welborne contends that important mechanical and electrical systems have been revamped and that the railway is ready to operate safely ... “We and outside experts have been looking at the two remaining issues since the CPUC gave credence to the recommendations in the October NTSB report,” Welborne said. “Angels Flight will be up and running safely as soon as we address those recommendations.”
Read Eddie Kim's article in the LA Downtown News
Meantime, we walk.
Mike Kelley - a (too short) life in full at MOCA Geffen Contemporary
Off-Ramp host John Rabe talks with curator Bennett Simpson about "Mike Kelley," the new exhibit at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, on view until July 28. It's the latest and biggest iteration of the traveling show that acts as Kelley's artistic biography.
Mike Kelley's suicide in South Pasadena in 2012 shook the art world, but it hit the LA scene especially hard, because Kelley had been an integral part of it for 35 years, as a brilliant young art student who arrived here, fully formed if prickly, from Detroit. He did performance art in the punk clubs, taught aspiring artists, then hit it big in the 1980s but kept living in his modest home in South Pasadena, and kept creating almost until he died.
The exhibition includes more than 250 works, occupying all of The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA and an additional gallery at MOCA Grand Avenue. But the body of Kelley's work is not just impressive in size - almost no medium has been left untouched.
"He worked in pretty much anything he wanted to: painting, sculpture, video, installations, drawing, photography, sound. He was a great writer and a great lecture," said Simpson. "He was a polymath."
Kelley's work brings an imaginative and dark humor to themes like family, home and sexuality. He often incorporated stuffed animals or other childhood relics into his pieces, like in the poster you may have seen promoting the exhibition around Los Angeles. It features mugshots of seven sadly worn stuffed animals and one of the artist himself, looking equally glum.
"He dealt with basic themes: home, the relationship of the artist to society, families, sexuality," said Simpson. "He is one of the few artists I can think of to deal so explicitly and so imaginatively with class structures and class relations."
One of Kelley's most well-known pieces is a tapestry of stuffed animals and crocheted blankets titled MORE LOVE HOURS THAN CAN EVER BE REPAID AND THE WAGES OF SIN (1987). After his death in 2012, a spontaneous memorial was created by grieving friends, colleagues, students and fans who adorned the walls of an abandoned car port in Highland Park with blankets and stuffed animals as a tribute to this piece. The original work is now on display at the MOCA retrospective.
"It hits you in the gut and it's also smart. And it kicks you in the butt and it laughs out loud," said Simpson of Kelley's colorful and imaginative work.
RH Greene reevaluates Wm Friedkin's 'flop,' 'Sorcerer'
UPDATE 4/7/2014: Cinefamily is showing a restored version of "Sorcerer" April 16 - 24, with a special appearance from Friedkin himself on April 16.
(A new revival of director William Friedkin's notorious 1977 box office failure Sorcerer has contributor RH Greene thinking about other ambitious cinematic flops from the "New Hollywood" era, and how time has been kind to them. Sorcerer screens May 9 at the American Cinematheque's Aero Theatre. Greene says a first-ever DVD and Blu-Ray release is currently rumored to be in the works.)
The New Hollywood Directors of the 1970s are remembered for making great movies, including The Godfather, Jaws, Taxi Driver, The French Connection, and Annie Hall. Their failures were equally legendary. In 1980, Deer Hunter director Michael Cimino made a Marxist western called Heaven's Gate. The film flopped so mightily it took down a studio.
Two years later, Francis Coppola released One from the Heart, a small romantic comedy that somehow metastasized into one of the most costly failures of all time. But if there's one New Hollywood movie that has hubris written all over it, William Friedkin's Sorcerer might be it.
The title is oblique, but suggested to audiences a follow-up to Friedkin's mega-hit The Exorcist, which Sorcerer emphatically is not. It's an existential parable about four desperate criminal anti-heroes hired to haul decomposing dynamite through a jungle, and there is nothing like a hero to root for.
Sorcerer was a runaway production; Friedkin overspent his approved budget by around 700%. It's also a remake of a French masterpiece, and it therefore virtually invited critics to make invidious comparisons.
Last but not least: the film's first 20 minutes are in various foreign languages. With subtitles. And oh yeah. Sorcerer is also one of the great American films of its time.
Released in 1977 during the summer of Star Wars, Sorcerer was chased out of theaters to give Luke Skywalker more screens. In a sense, Star Wars never relinquished those movie houses, because Sorcerer is exactly the kind of challenging studio fare the Star Wars phenomenon rendered all but obsolete.
Star Wars is pure escapism, while Sorcerer is a riveting cinematic essay about the futility of human purpose -- an anxious spectacle of emptied men caught in postures of jeopardy and despair. It's a film about Purgatory, not even Hell, about lost men who expiate their crimes through suffering. Or try to, anyway.
The audacious bleakness of the vision is matched to riveting, hallucinatory imagery, including: a broken-nosed bride, reciting her vows beneath two black eyes. Two oversized trucks slow-rolling across a rope bridge while it heaves beneath them like a wakening monster; and Roy Scheider's unraveling gangster Jackie Scanlon, ranting like Ahab as he veers through a dead volcanic landscape weirder than the Moon.
In Billy Wilder's Sunset Blvd., forgotten silent movie star Norma Desmond grieves for a lost era saying, "I'm still big. It's the pictures that got small." Sorcerer is still big too. As is Heaven's Gate, by the way. And Warren Beatty's Reds. And Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie. And many another alleged fiascoes perpetrated by the screen lions of a bygone time.
Say what you will: the blunders of the New Hollywood era took raw risks in the name of art and originality, claiming what Orson Welles called a primary right of the artist, which is the right to fail. How riveting they seem in the time of John Carter and Battleship. And how remarkable that directors like William Friedkin occasionally failed themselves all the way to a masterpiece.
Climbers gather in Pasadena for the North American Tree Climbing Championship
This year, Pasadena hosted the 2014 North American Tree Climbing Championship, a regional that decides who goes on to the international competition—the Olympics of tree climbing. The climbers are professional tree trimmers — they prefer you call them arborists, though. The trimmers compete in categories like speed climbs, and grueling work climbs.
Chad Brey, a tree trimmer from San Francisco, has climbed trees competitively since 1998. Last year he placed sixth. To him, tree climbing is an art form. "
When you watch the guys here and also on an international and chapter level, there'll be certain climbers where it's like aerial ballet," said Brey. "The way they move is just very eloquent, very smooth, very efficient."
"There are sometimes opportunities to make some really sweet, smooth moves from the tree and just be able to jump from one end to another end," said Brey. "Sometimes it's just more of the enjoyment for yourself."
Every sport has its legends, and even veteran climbers can get starstruck. Like Jacob Claassen: "I was pretty blown away because it's all the guys I see in Arborist magazine," he said. "There's guys there that've won the internationals eight times. Basically legends to me. It feels great to be a part of that group."
Brey, the trimmer from San Francisco, ended up winning the Masters' Challenge. That means he'll go onto August's international competition in Milwaukee.
"The last time I was at internationals was in 2007, so it's been quite some time," said Brey. "I'm really excited to participate and play with all the climbers and do my best."
If you're interested in catching an event, contact your local ISA chapter.