“You’re not only wrong, you’re wrong at the top of your voice.”

What do this film and Mr. Magoo have in common, you ask? The answer is Millard Kaufman, creator of the myope and misanthrope at the respective centers of each. Spencer Tracy plays John J. Macreedy, a WWII veteran with a paralyzed arm making an unscheduled stop in the remote desert town from which the film takes its name. 

The quietly hostile locals with a secret to keep don’t…

“We’re all in it together.”

Terry Gilliam’s tale is a cautionary one - a statement that applies as much to his magnum opus as it does to the making thereof. As outlined in the book The Battle For Brazil, Gilliam’s conflict with the studio is the stuff of legend and many of the subsequent wounds he suffered for his art were self-inflicted (a motif that plays out over and over again in the filmmaker’s storied and long-suffering career). Just as…

“I can’t lie to you about your chances… But you have my sympathies.”

While Steven Spielberg and George Lucas enjoy the lion’s share of the credit for changing the extent to which popular cinema could resonate with their respective blockbusters, Jaws and Star Wars, the films that made them household names are rooted in a decidedly established aesthetic. Ridley Scott, on the other hand (along with his brother Tony and directors like Alan Parker and Adrian Lyne) led the way in…

“Oh, there’s nothing to see really. We’re just inside a Chinese dragon.”

In the heat of the 70s new wave, as the industry was pivoting radically to attract the counterculture, Peter Bogdonavich and his largely unsung production designer/wife Polly Platt went the other way, embracing their respective loves of John Ford and Howard Hawks to create an extraordinarily iconoclastic trio of films, bookended by the austere black and white midwestern treasures The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon. In between, they made…