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Michael Gaughn

Review: California Split

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California Split (1974)

review | California Split

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Pretty much Robert Altman’s last uncompromised effort, it can take a while to settle into this movie’s groove but it’s a great ride once you’re there

by Michael Gaughn
May 26, 2022

California Split came right after The Long Goodbye and Thieves Like Us and right before Nashville—in other words, during that period when practically no one knew what to make of Robert Altman anymore and when most people, even during the directionless era of early ‘70s filmmaking, were ready to write him off. This is Altman at his most uncompromising and elliptical—which, with him, were pretty much the same thing—when he was really making his audiences work to keep up with him but was rewarding them well if they rose to the challenge.

Nashville would be kind of a concession to prevailing tastes and would restore some of his luster. But then something went awry and Altman spent the rest of the ‘70s and all of the ‘80s just wandering from one ill-conceived, half-baked and, for the most, not very interesting project to another until he hit on The Player. In a sense, California Split is his last film at his strongest.

You can forget about heroes & villains here—fortunately, the return of that delusional and ultimately oppressive worldview was still three years off at the time. But you can forget about anti-heroes, too. Altman tended to eschew most of the accepted gestures of his era and just did what he wanted to do. If he referenced fads, it was usually to skewer them. 

His is some of the most mature filmmaking to ever make it into the mainstream—which isn’t to say it was hugely mature but just more so than the puerile fantasies of most filmmakers. There has always been something fundamentally adolescent about American cinema, going back to its roots, so it’s not too surprising that, since the early ’80s, we’ve seen one wave after another of increasingly more childish directors. The big difference from the past is that we now tend to laud the most emotionally retarded of them as our most serious artists—which is an accurate enough reflection of the state of the culture, but one that ought to scare instead of sustain us, and should send us scrambling back to Square One. It’s not.

The above isn’t the bitter digression it might seem but crucial to understanding Altman’s importance. Looking at his peak from 1970 to 1975 and comparing it to the present really underlines how far we’ve devolved and how much we’ve lost. Yes, the audiences are way bigger now, but they’re also way more stunted, thuggish, almost primal, uninterested in edification but happy to just be manipulated and shocked and placed under the culture’s thumb, deadening their nerve endings along the way.

Altman’s characters are rarely mainly good or bad but are almost inevitably to a great degree compromised, and lost. While that expressed a somewhat elitist view of society, it was also an acute one—a mirror not a lot of people want to look into, but a self examination necessary for achieving any kind of integrity and meaningful self-worth. Not surprisingly, it’s what the broader audience has always disliked most about Altman’s work. 

Altman tries everybody’s patience during the first half hour or so of California Split, making you wonder why you should care about Elliot Gould or George Segal—or Ann Prentiss or Gwen Welles. What you pick up on early on is that it’s a film about gambling, that the two male leads are good at it and that they’re bonding but their lives beyond the tables are nothing but a mess. And that ends up being pretty much the whole film. What makes it compelling is Altman incisively capturing the world at that somewhat unsavory and desperate level and then setting Gould and Segal in motion within it while resorting to as few clichés and trendy devices as possible, which helps it all feel like not just another movie.

Early on you get you get the sense, as you often do in Altman, that he doesn’t care that much about the technique. But that always turns out to be the wrong place to go because, just because he’s not flashy in the usual sense doesn’t mean he doesn’t have virtuosic control over his material. The way he develops characters, builds scenes, and creates the overall arc of a film really has no precedent, but it’s all accomplished masterfully and in a way that kind of creeps up on you from behind.

What I saw on Amazon Prime seemed remarkably true to how this film should look. This is another one of those HD offerings, like The Apartment and the other titles I mentioned in my review of that film, that looks exceptionally good on Prime. Nothing really happens to make you aware of the presentation or to suggest it’s in any way distorted or otherwise compromised. It’s perfectly apt to the material at hand. And California Split is a dazzling study in grain, in how it can bring an energy and interest to the frame, a nuance that’s lost when it’s inexcusably damped down or scrubbed away.

But I have to add this footnote to my comments in The Apartment review: Step carefully. While many of the movies on Prime do look way better than they did until recently, there’s tremendous inconsistency from title to title, and a lot of them are lemons. Amazon says Detour is in UHD, but it’s not. It looks just as bad as it did as a public-domain closeout on VHS. The Man with the Golden Arm is unacceptably washed out and fuzzy. So is Tom Waits’ Big Time. And on and on. 

The sound in California Split is clean enough but there’s nothing particularly interesting going on there—but it seems like there should since this was the first time Altman used multitracking to capture overlapping or simultaneous dialogue. There’s not a lot of lateral separation when this occurs in the mix, even when the characters speaking are placed some distance apart in the frame, and sometimes the balance just feels off between the voices. This was probably all in the original mix but there were moments that seemed flat-out wrong. 

In a world of brain-dead action flicks, of pervasive gun-toting empowered females, of one-dimensional beings running around in their footie pajamas, I realize the audience for Altman is small. But you have to think of it as the equivalent of the monks who kept literacy alive in the Middle Ages, point toward the things that can give us sustenance and hope in a dismal age, and pray that, somehow, this too will pass, with something more enlightened eager to be born on the other side. Altman would have laughed his ass off at the suggestion that California Split should be seen as a beacon of hope, but such is the world we’ve come to create, who we’ve come to be.

Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtablemarketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.

PICTURE | Another one of those HD offerings that looks exceptionally good on Prime. Nothing really happens to make you aware of the presentation or to suggest it’s in any way distorted or otherwise compromised. 

SOUND | The sound is clean enough but there’s nothing particularly interesting going on there—but it seems like there should since this was the first time Altman used multitracking to capture overlapping dialogue

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Review: The Apartment

The Apartment (1960)

review | The Apartment

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Not up with Billy Wilder’s very best work, but something of a revelation—for unexpected reasons—when viewed on Prime

by Michael Gaughn
May 23, 2022

I’ve never been a big fan of this 1960 Billy Wilder portrait in dour but, unable to sleep one night last week and with nothing else inviting on Prime, I decided to give it another shot—and was surprised to find myself engaging with and through it in ways I never have before. It will never be one of my favorite films, but I walked away with a lot of respect for the movie Wilder meant to make and a deep fascination with what he inadvertently captured along the way. 

Movies about New York might be our most accurate cultural barometer; they tend also to be the most nuanced views of who we are a whole. And that’s largely because no other city seems to be swayed and jolted by—or more forcefully influence—the societal currents more overtly or dramatically. Just consider films like The Naked City, Sweet Smell of Success, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Taxi Driver, or Manhattan. No other city is as evocative on film, or more readily acts as magnet for our emotions or biases or preoccupations. And I say that knowing The Apartment is about as New York as Wiener schnitzel, but I’m talking about capturing the essence of the city at a certain moment in time—even though most of this film was shot on soundstages 3,000 miles away. 

New York and American culture were both at their peak in 1960. The previous five years had seen the emergence of a kind of renaissance, with pop and serious culture achieving as good a symbiosis as two such antithetical forces can ever hope to achieve. Its hub was Manhattan; its influence was national—global, too. Pop was inflecting things like high-end design and fashion, classical music, and gallery art in ways that would have been unthinkable at the beginning of the decade, and things like serious music and architecture and foreign film were being embraced—admittedly somewhat tentatively—by the mainstream, resulting in an unprecedentedly fecund cross-pollination. 

The Apartment embodies all of that—and because it both expresses and feeds from that phenomena, it shows how volatile the various elements were, and how brittle the balance. It also shows—mostly unconsciously—the emerging forces that, within a couple of years, would shred everything the culture had achieved and open a massive wound that still hasn’t healed, and may never heal.

Consider some facts: Jack Lemmon’s character is a junior accountant at a Manhattan insurance company. His weekly pay is $94.70. He has a one-bedroom apartment two and a half blocks from Central Park for which he pays $85 a month. At one point, a switchboard operator—a white female—asks for cab fare back to her apartment at 179th Street in the Bronx. At another point, Fred MacMurray tips a bootblack a dime for a shine. Most people in the present would be incapable of processing any of that information, let alone of putting it in context. It all reads like intercepted transmissions from some alien civilization. And yet that was us, once.

I’m not being nostalgic, just accurate. You can’t watch this film and not sense the tremendous gulf between those two eras, these two worlds. Which underlines the fact there is just no way to see The Apartment the way audiences did at the time—they were different beings. But it sure is fun to try.

This is thought of as a comedy, but only about 10% of it could be labeled that; maybe about 30% could be considered romantic comedy. The rest is pretty damn serious, and troubling. And Wilder shifts the tone constantly, sometimes from scene to scene, sometimes shot to shot.

Re Wilder: Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard are constantly near the top of my ever-fluctuating list of favorite films. But he was starting to get shaky by the mid ‘50s. Ace in the Hole is too self-consciously and relentlessly cynical. Sabrina has its moments but it’s uneven, and there’s something about the ‘50s preoccupation with pairing up Audrey Hepburn with middle-aged men that’s just downright creepy. Some Like It Hot is just shrill. Kiss Me, Stupid and One, Two, Three, which came after The Apartment, are even shriller. From then on, it just gets bleak. The Apartment was the last time Wilder was in effective control of his art, and there’s a certain irony in the fact that it always seemed to be drama that brought the best out of him.

Jack Lemmon is, almost throughout, too Jack Lemmon-y. But there are moments when he’s allowed to act beyond his patented preppy nebbish routine and be something other than a caricature—mainly in the quiet exchange between him and Shirley MacLaine after her suicide attempt where his restraint makes the scene’s emotion palpable. Surprisingly strong is Jack Kruschen as Lemmon’s neighbor, Dr. Dreyfuss, who starts out as a stock-company Jew but who brings a surprising amount of nuance and depth to his performance as the film plays out. The scene where he tries to revive MacLaine, alternately slapping her, waving smelling salts under her nose, forcing her to drink scalding coffee, and talking her back from the other side of the void, is the movie’s pivot, is still wrenching to watch, and is masterful on the part of all involved.

For all the bubbly music cues, brightly lit office interiors, and flippant banter, this is a very dark film—literally so with Joseph LaShelle’s quietly riveting cinematography, which often allows for little more than telling pinpoints of light. Not only is it dark, it’s shot in 2.35:1 Panavision, which I doubt a single other soul was doing with black & white domestic comedies at the time—

And I have to pause for a second and tip my hat to Amazon Prime. Something wonderful has been percolating there for about the past year, and that ungainly behemoth of a service really seems to be hitting its lumbering stride. Older HD films were almost unwatchable on Prime until recently—A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, for instance, used to alternate between blurriness and massive attacks of pixelization. But it looks terrific now—so does The Band Wagon, so does The Conversation, so does The Fisher King. And Dennis Burger stumbled across To Catch a Thief in 4K HDR last week—for free. This serious uptick in quality and this kind of access have to have the other online purveyors shaking in their heavily subsidized booties.

The Apartment looks similarly great. And this is in lowly 1080p. Apparently a 4K digital intermediate was created just recently, and I’m keen to revisit the film if it gets a higher-res re-release. But, for now, this version gets just about everything right.

Except for some of the audio. The original mix was mono; what I heard was stereo. And it features so much badly done hard panning that I at first assumed it originated from the time of the film’s release. Maybe that’s the case, or maybe some well-intentioned soul in the present was trying to mimic early ‘60s ping-ponging, but the choices were so radical they pulled me out of the film more than once. 

As I said up top, I can’t say I love this film, but I do admire it, and I found the experience of filtering the past and present of the culture through it, if not enjoyable exactly, then intriguing and unsettling and ultimately gratifying. You should watch The Apartment, if you haven’t seen it or haven’t seen it in a while. It’s got some real meat on its bones; and it’s an invaluable snapshot of a both tangible and illusory but undeniably decisive, invigorating—and I would argue, squandered—moment in time. 

Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtablemarketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.

PICTURE | The Apartment looks great, even in lowly 1080p. A higher-res release from the recently struck 4K intermediate would likely look better but, for now, this version gets just about everything right.

SOUND | The stereo mix of the original mono features so much hard panning it can pull you out of the film at times

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Review: Rear Window

Rear Window (1954)

review | Rear Window

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The 4K transfer exposes both the good and the bad of Hitchcock’s best-known film, but ultimately offers a satisfying way to re-engage with a classic 

by Michael Gaughn
September 19, 2020

As I mentioned in my Psycho review, more has been written about Hitchcock than any other filmmaker—and more has probably been written about Rear Window (1954) than any other film. It and Vertigo (1958) are often considered his most accomplished efforts—a conclusion I would vigorously dispute, but not here. Rear Window has gotten the most attention because, between the two, it’s the squeakier wheel.

It’s undeniable that this hubristic exercise in artifice, or stagecraft as cinema, would have completely unravelled in the hands of a lesser filmmaker. And it remains impressive how much Hitchcock is able to make the pure contrivance of his elaborate set a big part of what makes the film so engaging. You almost don’t care that it’s the epitome of mid-’50s Broadway set design. There’s something about its sheer physicality that makes everything that’s presented on it feel convincing.

Because Hitchcock was relentlessly ambitious, his reach constantly exceeded his grasp, so Rear Window has more than its share of shots that don’t quite work, storyboard concepts that had to be triaged in post, characters that could have used a little more development. Thelma Ritter’s part is ridiculously overwritten, and you can feel her pausing for laughs that faded it into the void more than five decades ago. Grace Kelly is just a little too Grace Kelly, with a patrician accent that can’t help but grate on modern ears.

The film works mainly because of the ingenious way Hitchcock makes the set, with its vignettes, convincing as projections of Jimmy Stewart’s various states of mind, making the film from early on feel dreamlike. And it works because of Stewart’s performance. He, pre-World War II, was a good, even great, actor—his work in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is jawdropping, even today. But he was also kind of lightweight, sometimes clownish. After the war, there’s an undeniable sense of experience behind his eyes that he was able to employ deftly in his best roles—like in the Anthony Mann westerns, in Vertigo, and here.

Not that his performance is flawless. As always with Hitchcock, there are weak moments in the script and in the direction that cause Stewart, adrift, to lapse into his patented Stewartisms. But in the hands of a more traditional Hollywood pretty boy type, L. B. Jeffries snooping out of the back of his apartment could have seemed just comic, or even diseased. Stewart creates a perfect tension between making it all seem justified and also the dangerous preoccupations of a troubled soul.

The 4K HDR presentation is a must-have for anybody who even thinks they care about movies—not because it smooths over the flaws but because it presents everything honestly, the good and the bad. Seeing Rear Window in any other format inevitably puts you at a distance from the film, which inevitably places you at too great of a distance from what’s going on in the apartments across the way. You need to see it at this resolution to get pulled back into the film, so it stops feeling quaint and again becomes relevant and compelling.

The flaws are pretty egregious. Hitchcock, of course, endlessly obsessed over how to present Kelly, but there’s a shot at 29:51, during a sequence meant to scream “beguiling beauty,” where she looks like a walking corpse. Even more jarring is a closeup at 1:50:29 of the hapless Wendell Corey that looks like it was originally part of a wider shot that was ruthlessly enlarged on an optical printer. 

For whatever reason, cinematographer Robert Burks didn’t do as good a job here as he would on Vertigo, but for everything that takes you out of the film, there’s plenty to keep you engaged. Probably no other movie has better conveyed the feel of New York at sunset, or especially at three in the morning. And, while the HDR makes its presence felt just here and there, it is an absolute revelation during the climax. Anyone who knows Rear Window will know exactly where I’m going with this, but Raymond Burr being blinded by Stewart’s flashbulbs fell solidly into the “suspension of disbelief” camp until now. Presented in HDR, those white flashes become searing, making you feel Burr’s disorientation and sense of absolute loss. Rear Window is worth seeing in this form just for that moment alone. 

The audio is “only” DTS-HD Master Audio stereo. I used quotes because the thought of somebody mucking around with Hitchcock’s innovative and masterful sound mix to take it into the land of Atmos is both terrifying and nauseating. In the right hands, it could definitely enhance the experience—but who’s got the right hands? And I think there’s a good chance an enhanced sense of spaciousness could actually end up emphasizing the one-dimensionality of a lot of the stagecraft.

The mix here does a great job of allowing you to savor what Hitchcock originally wrought, where he used mainly volume, timing, and reverb to convey the sense of voices and other sounds heard in various spaces and from various distances away. The soundtrack, as is, is so strong it could almost stand on its own as a radio play.

But allow me just a brief swipe at Franz Waxman’s score, which is the weakest link in the film. It’s not that I don’t like Waxman—his work on Sunset Boulevard represents the pinnacle of the film-scoring art—but he’s just not in sync with this film at all. The opening theme—if you can call it that—is a hackneyed pastiche of Gershwin clichés—42nd Street meets The Naked City. But what makes it really fall flat is the sense of complete disconnection from the evocative use of source cues that makes up the rest of the soundtrack. I know Hitchcock was aiming for a kind of overture as the curtains literally went up, but he missed the mark.

And then there’s that song. Another of Hitchcock’s offerings placed on the altar of Grace Kelly, it was a great idea in concept—show a composer struggling to write a song to parallel Jimmy Stewart’s conflicted feelings about Kelly and then have it all come together as an example of songwriting perfection. Problem is, the song sounds fully worked out—and not very good—from the start. Had it been great, it could have really enhanced the film—and not made the salvation of Miss Lonelyhearts look like the worst kind of Victorian contrivance. But “Lisa” is a real stinker.

I’m not a big fan of Top 10 or Top 100 or whatever lists—they’re almost all laughable when they’re not outright dangerous. So let’s just say that Rear Window, for too many reasons to ignore, is an essential. Not only does it stand on its own as entertainment for all but the most jaded contemporary audiences, but its reverberations can still be strongly felt in filmmaking in the present. In 4K HDR, it becomes not just another movie, but a glimpse of the very wellspring of cinema.

Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtablemarketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.

PICTURE | This 4K HDR presentation is a must-have for anybody who even thinks they care about movies—not because it smooths over the flaws but because it presents everything honestly, the good and the bad

SOUND | The stereo mix does a great job of allowing you to savor what Hitchcock originally wrought, where he used mainly volume, timing, and reverb to convey the sense of voices and other sounds heard in various spaces and from various distances away 

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Review: Shadow of a Doubt

Shadow of a Doubt (1943)

review | Shadow of a Doubt

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One of Hitchcock’s very best films almost flawlessly presented in 4K HDR

by Michael Gaughn
May 9, 2022

I suspect it’s a rights thing, but the latest round of Hitchcock in 4K is a surprisingly weak lot. There can’t be more than a handful of people clamoring for The Trouble with Harry and Family Plot, and yet there they are. No Strangers on a Train anywhere to be seen. But there is one standout in the pack—Shadow of a Doubt, which, along with Strangers, may be Hitchcock’s best work.

I realize that last bit is an arguable, if not controversial, statement, but both of those films rank at the top for me exactly because they don’t exhibit the kind of bravura showmanship, bordering on P.T. Barnum, that’s generated such mass affection for his mid to late ‘50s concoctions from Rear Window through Vertigo to North by Northwest. Both Shadow and Strangers stay focused on the material, with the film technique always in proportion, never overwhelming it. As a result, you have a sense throughout both of completely developed characters in believable environments instead of specters drifting through stage-managed dreamworlds.

And let’s cut right to it: Shadow of a Doubt is the best 4K HDR Hitchcock release to date. It’s a still compelling, even riveting, work presented in a way that couldn’t be more true to how the film was made, without any jolts triggered by bad elements or overzealous hands at the knobs. If you want to see a Hitchcock film from the period when he was in full control of his artistry presented pretty much as he intended, this is it. 

And it isn’t a museum piece. Not only was Shadow about 30 years ahead of its time with the treatment of its protagonist, but in not only subject matter but technique feels surprisingly contemporary. Hitchcock sensed, in the midst of World War II, before the A bomb and before the horrors of the concentration camps became known, how that conflict would yield a more cynical world and used the Joseph Cotten character to develop a take on society that wouldn’t even begin to scratch at the door of pop culture until more than 10 years later in works like Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly and Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me. You can also sense the influence on the anti-hero films of the ‘70s, and on the far more adolescent and superficial take on dark that seems to have permeated the whole of current culture.

But there’s no raging madman here, no cocksure vigilante. Cotten’s Uncle Charlie is a sophisticated but damaged man in a smug and content society that can only survive sheltered from the realities of the larger world. It’s clear that Hitchcock’s sympathies lie with him, one of the many troubling aspects of a deeply troubling work. Hitchcock creates an idyllic microcosm and then gets you to pierce it by adopting the viewpoint of a misanthropic murderer. That’s old hat now, but he has such a firm command of his material that it still works, and, by contrast, shows just how shallow and silly the current efforts are.

This is probably Cotten’s best performance, here able to craft a role without being upstaged by Welles’ endless scenery chewing in Citizen Kane or baroque expressions of technique in Magnificent Ambersons. His Uncle Charlie is a compelling human being, the most rounded of the film’s characters, not some convenient bogeyman. That doesn’t mean, though, that Hitchcock denies he’s essentially evil. In fact, he underlines that brilliantly in the famous shot of the train bearing Uncle Charlie arriving in Santa Rosa vigorously belching a massive cloud of thick black smoke, like it’s in transit from the mouth of Hell, the noxious plume then settling over the town like a shroud. That shot is particularly striking in this transfer—especially the depth of the black cloud against the highlights of the sun-drenched All-American town. And it’s done while maintaining the balance of the overall visual fabric of the film. 

But here’s why Shadow of a Doubt is a great movie: While Uncle Charlie is fully developed, all of the other characters are fleshed out to nearly the same degree. And although Hitchcock’s disdain, if not contempt, for their small-town world is clear, he realizes he needs to honor that world in order to make Cotten’s troubling of it compelling. And he stays so true to its conventions that those other characters’ emotions are convincing throughout and are actually, at times, moving. You’d be hardpressed to find anything like that in any other Hitchcock film. You can sense he feels drawn to their sheltered society—or at least to the reasons why the characters find it so attractive—while knowing it’s a kind of Potemkin village that can never stand. (Lynch tried to adopt that same stance in Blue Velvet, deliberately exploiting parallels with Shadow along the way, but didn’t pull it off half as well.)

And then there are the seemingly endless grace notes, the kind of thing a master artist does when he has an overabundance of energy and ideas but is so in sync with his material that he knows how to make every touch apt. Those accents, ornaments, and inflections are so abundant, there’s little point in citing many, and it would take a lot of the fun out of watching the movie to anticipate them here, but to highlight a couple: Hitchcock, feeding from his roots in German Expressionism, uses some angles and lighting (like looking down on Teresa Wright through the staircase balusters) that would seem gratuitous in any other film or in lesser hands but, because they’re acute extensions of the character’s frame of mind, ring true. Or the various startling ways he reveals Cotten’s character by having him engage directly with the camera, striding toward it when he goes to grab the newspaper from Wright’s hands or the slow track in on his profile as he makes his “silly wives” speech only to have him turn and look straight into the lens after the camera has come uncomfortably close.

There’s not a lot to say about the transfer exactly because it so well serves the material. There doesn’t seem to have been any attempt to “improve” the look of the original film (a frequent sin in 4K HDR transfers) but instead a deliberate effort to honor its visual fabric and keep the look consistent throughout. For the first time in a while, there was nothing here that at any point pulled me out of the movie, and someone deserves kudos for that alone. I didn’t realize until this viewing how extraordinarily well photographed this film is, and the transfer can take a lot of the credit for that.

What can I really say about the sound? It’s a stereo mix of the original mono that never draws too much attention to its stereo-ness—which, until it occurs to someone to make the original mono part of 4K presentations, is probably the best we can hope for. My only complaint is that the Dimitri Tiomkin cues can come on a little strong, especially during the otherwise low-key “chase” scene near the beginning. This disparity was probably in the original mix, but the presentation here is so dynamic it only heightens it. 

To sum up: Shadow of a Doubt is one of Hitchcock’s very best films presented in the best 4K HDR transfer to date of any of his work. Yes, watch it to savor the transfer, but also watch it to savor the film, which is one of those classics that’s so strong at the core that it feels untouched by time.

Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtablemarketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.

PICTURE | There doesn’t seem to have been any attempt to “improve” the look of the original film but instead a deliberate effort to honor its visual fabric and keep the look consistent throughout 

SOUND | The stereo mix of the original mono never draws too much attention to its stereo-ness, although the music cues can come on a little strong at times

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Review: Singin’ in the Rain

Singin' in the Rain (1952)

review | Singin’ in the Rain

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This most classic of classic musicals bucks the recent trend and actually proves to be well served by its 4K incarnation 

by Michael Gaughn
May 3, 2022

I’m a sucker for films about process. It’s one of the reasons why most fantasy films do nothing for me—when you’re in a universe where anything can happen and where credible cause and effect no longer pertains, yes, everything is possible but nothing is interesting. Showing process makes characters meaningful within a fictional world—it gives them a reason to be. The more convincing the process is, the more convincing the world portrayed becomes, and the more compelling the characters.

And process isn’t genre specific. It can range from heist films like The Asphalt Jungle to a financial-meltdown flick like The Big Short to engineering the end of the world in Dr. Strangelove. And then there’s the whole subgenre of show-biz process. A sitcom like The Dick Van Dyke Show still holds up because its backstage world is self-consistent; the characters’ wisecracks ring true because they’re comedy writers. 

Most musicals bore me because they tend to veer too much toward fantasy, leaving credibility behind. But there’s a sub-subgenre of show-biz-process musicals that tend to be more substantial than the rest, that give you something to chew on besides production numbers. And I don’t think it’s pure coincidence that the two best musicals ever—The Band Wagon and Singin’ in the Rain—both spring from the process mold.

I have to give the edge to The Band Wagon because basing it in Broadway culture, as opposed to Singin’ in the Rain’s more superficial world of Hollywood, lends it a more satisfying depth. Also, the dilemma of Fred Astaire’s character—cast back into a theatrical milieu that’s completely changed around him, trying to not just hold his own but transcend it—is more compelling than Gene Kelly’s need for a little bit of emotional propping up.

All of that said, Singin’ in the Rain still plays as well now as it did when it was released in 1952. And, yes, much of that has to do with the production numbers, which were the primary draw then and remain so now. But its longevity, and its energy, and its continued relevance owe just as much to its faithful, if arch, portrayal of Hollywood during its disorienting 1920s transition to sound. And for that we can thank the brilliant, slyly witty writing team responsible for so much other meaningful fluff, Betty Comden and Adolph Green (who also penned The Band Wagon, by the way).

One more thing before I get to the transfer: Process films lend themselves particularly well to satire (again, Strangelove), and Comden and Green, with their spot-on portrayals of show-biz worlds, were always able to lace their confections with a little dollop of well-placed acid—which also has a lot to do with their efforts’ relevance and longevity.

As for this presentation: Singin’ in the Rain is a legitimate classic (it’s kind of surprising how many illegitimate classics there are out there—products more of the zeitgeist and misplaced affection than of talent and craft), and truly classic films haven’t been faring too well lately in 4K HDR (witness Citizen Kane and The Godfather). So I was a little trepidatious about approaching this release, especially since the original negative isn’t around anymore to work from, which can be a warning of a bumpy ride ahead.

But, while it might not reach reference-level quality, Singin’ in the Rain is a pleasure to watch in 4K HDR. The experience is, for the most part, visually consistent, and the inconsistencies that do exist aren’t likely—with one particularly egregious exception—to pull you out of the film. The colors are sumptuous and vivid without lapsing into garish (which has been a problem with earlier home video releases of this film). In fact, the HDR grading lends them just enough subtlety to make the more visually heightened moments (like the deliberately gaudy montage of first stabs at musicals that leads up to “Beautiful Girl”) look appropriately exaggerated but never cartoony. 

The truly problematic spots seemed to be confined mainly to moments on either side of optical dissolves. For instance, the color palette collapses completely at the end of “Moses Supposes,” making Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor look like they’re suffering from some kind of vitamin deficiency. The particularly egregious moment mentioned above falls in the middle of the big “Broadway Melody” number as Kelly fantasizes about Cyd Charisse after she walks into a casino. There’s a long (almost one-minute) take after the dissolve as Kelly begins to dance with her, and the resolution is so jarringly low that it induced a DVD flashback. This is likely a product of the elements they had to work with, but the shot goes on for so long that you just can’t brush it off.

One last thing to gnaw on about the image transfer: I know this has become a critical saw, but HDR makes some of the shots stunning—for instance, all of the lighted signage in “Broadway Melody” and the medium shots of Jean Hagen and Debbie Reynolds as they stand on either side of the curtain at the film’s finale. This comes mainly from having plenty of highlights to accentuate within the shots. Here’s my query: Doesn’t the ability to do this throw off the visual balance of the film? What about all the other footage (the bulk of the movie) that doesn’t lend itself to creating a 3D-ish effect? I loved seeing the shots mentioned above looking so vivid, but it seems to me more to the point to stay true to the look the filmmakers intended. Something tells me we’ll look back at this first round of releases of old films in 4K HDR and find a lot of it gimmicky.

As for the audio: It’s surprisingly dynamic and palatable. But, as much as I know it pains some people to hear this, I have to say it again: This film was originally mixed in mono so it should be listened to in mono, no matter how deep your addiction to all those other speakers in your room. We can’t claim to care about the filmmakers’ intent, and support a booming market of director’s cuts, etc., and then just pick and choose which aspects of that we’re actually going to honor, based on our proclivities. (Sadly, as with The Godfather, the original mono isn’t an option with the 4K HDR version. You have to descend all the way to the lowly DVD-quality download to have that experience.)

But to boil all of this down to its essence: Singin’ in the Rain is well worth seeking out in 4K HDR because it still holds its own as both a musical and a classic film and provides a visual and aural treat despite a few unavoidable hiccups along the way.

Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtablemarketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.

PICTURE | It might not reach reference-level quality, but Singin’ in the Rain is a pleasure to watch in 4K HDR. The inconsistencies that do exist are, with one exception, unlikely to pull you out of the film. 

SOUND | The audio is surprisingly dynamic and palatable but, unfortunately—and inexcusably—there’s no option here for listening to the original mono mix

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Achieving Serenity

ACHIEVING SERENITY

How an impossible private cinema came to bloom in the Palm Springs desert

by Michael Gaughn
updated April 24, 2023

Serenity is a freshly minted 22,000 sq. ft. home nuzzling a golf course in Indian Wells, CA. Done in the kind of Mies-gone-wild style that’s become a signature look in expansive post-millennium west coast homes, it features a wide-open floorplan that’s as much about outdoors as indoors, and hinges its effect on a seamless flow between those two worlds.

The whole is infused with a very contemporary sense of play, best evinced on the lower level, which gives off a distinctive carnival vibe, with guests free to stroll from the sports-car collection past a two-story rotating wine tower and onto an elaborate dance floor, then pass a Zen garden on their way to the private cinema—a cinema, by the way, that really shouldn’t exist. And yet there it is.

Everything about Serenity, from broad strokes to light touches, is an effective extension and expression of the somewhat diametric dispositions of its owners—he a businessman with an engineering background, she an artist. And that melding of creativity and ingenuity, of art and technology, may be best realized in the theater, a space brimming with know-how, but all of it invisible, and all in the service of entertaining and being entertained.

photos | William MacCollum
video | Geoff Franklin, Be Film Inc.

CINELUXE SHOWCASE

Achieving Serenity

right rear | the car collection & wine tower
foreground | the dance floor
left rear | the cinema

The couples’ expectations for the space were all reasonable enough—but seriously stretched the limits of what current tech can do. They wanted a theater with exceptional picture and sound where they could watch movies without distractions but that didn’t disrupt the no-boundaries flow of the rest of the home, allowing guests to dip in and out freely. They also wanted it to offer a rather generous view of the adjacent Zen garden so the room wouldn’t feel like an outlier in the home’s defining indoor/outdoor gestalt.

Most of the above goes well against the grain of the widely accepted criteria for creating a home cinema, dicta chiseled in stone, sacrosanct and inviolable:

The room must be sealed off, admitting no light or sound. Reflective hard surfaces like glass and metal are forbidden. There must be generous, unimpeded wall space for the placing of speakers for surround sound. Strict symmetry is king. And no Zen gardens.

left | the subterranean Zen garden with a glass-floor walkway on the main level, above, and an open-air courtyard glimpsed at the far end 
right | the cinema

Achieving Serenity

left | the subterranean Zen garden with an open-air courtyard glimpsed at the far end, and with a glass-floor walkway on the main level, above
right | the cinema

The Serenity theater checks none of those boxes. In fact, it seems to thumb its nose at the age-old practices. It’s not that the owners were deliberately trying to transgress—they just wanted what they wanted. And what they wanted meant breaking almost all the rules.

walls & bridges

The hardest request to honor was the seemingly contradictory desire to have a movie theater-quality experience while also keeping the room open to everything around it. While it is possible to create a wide-open space that can deliver decent enough picture and sound, the light and noise from beyond its perimeter will inevitably compromise performance. The solution was to employ two retractable curtain walls, which allow the space to function both as a dedicated theater and as a more casual media room that readily welcomes strolling passersby.

Those walls also helped address another significant problem. The gated community where Serenity rests only allows for single-story dwellings, but the owners wanted their entertainment spaces to exist separate from their living area on the main floor, so they dug down instead. But to fend off subterranean gloom, large courtyards were placed fore and aft of the surface level to provide generous sunshine. 

That sunshine, as well as the artificial light from outside the theater, would easily wash out the image on the theater screen—an issue mostly resolved by closing the curtain walls. But what about being able to watch something when everything’s open, which was a big part of the ask? The traditional go-to would have been a projector/screen combo but, as Serenity integrator Jeff Williams relates, they would have needed a projector “the size of a small Volkswagen” to generate a picture bright enough to be seen in all that light. The answer was a 185-inch Samsung video wall, which creates a cinema-sized image viewable under just about any conditions.

Serenity is just one instance of the growing demand for flexible entertainment spaces that can achieve the picture and sound quality of a dedicated theater room while fitting into the more open flow of contemporary homes

design touches in the theater include dramatic uplighting between the seat rows, a bar area in the back, and custom-made Elite HTS love seats in red Valentino leather to match the color of the husband’s favorite Ferrari 

PROJECT TEAM

architect | Mark Whipple AIA

project manager | Ty Harrison
Whipple Russell Architects

integrator | Jeff Williams
Jeff Williams Inc. 

audio consultant | Robert Melendez
Triad Speakers

audio calibration | Chuck Back
Trinnov Audio

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A bigger challenge was how to get a full-blown 41-channel Dolby Atmos surround system to achieve peak performance in a theater where almost all the wall space was off limits to speakers—and where two of the walls are just curtains. Sure, there was enough room to accommodate everything up in the soffits and ceiling—just. But for the Atmos experience to work, a decent number of the speakers need to be down at ear level. It took some deft high-tech sleight of hand to make that happen.

Of the 35 Triad speakers deployed, 19 were designated for ear-level listening—a statement that sounds counterintuitive as hell given the conditions. But the Trinnov Altitude processor tasked with juggling the theater’s sound includes a function that can create the impression of a speaker being heard from somewhere other than its physical location. It’s similar to the illusion of stereo, where sounds seem to come from an area between the speakers. Here, the sound, run through the Altitude, can be rejiggered to create a convincing sense of being at ear height.

And this was all accomplished without leaving any clues that almost the whole of the soffit and ceiling is crawling with gear. As project manager Ty Harrison relates, “The designer obviously knows, and the homeowner knows, but people coming in for the first time would never know that.”

The Altitude also gets most of the credit for the room being able to have impressive sound whether the walls are open or closed. The processor creates detailed profiles of the space in both sonic configurations and then uses them to compensate for any of the various gremlins that could compromise performance. The theater changes automatically to the appropriate soundscape whenever someone triggers the wall.

testify

The execution of the Serenity theater is unique, but the impulse behind it isn’t. Serenity is just one instance of the growing demand for flexible entertainment spaces that can achieve the picture and sound quality of a dedicated theater room while fitting into the more open flow of contemporary homes. That wasn’t possible until recently, and this room would have to rank as one of the best executions to date.

And it is was all done without making it look like a science project but instead a very organic part of a very ambitious and elaborate but still, in its way, minimalist design. “It was really important,” says Harrison, “to focus the visual on just the video wall and the atmosphere of the room rather than walking into, you know, Speaker Central.”

The room apparently serves its purpose well. The owners make it a point to do all their viewing there. According to Harrison, “They don’t even have a TV in their master bedroom. At the end of the day, they instead like to come down and unwind and watch a movie. That’s when they spend their most time together.”

The husband has made it part of another daily ritual as well. “At lunchtime,” says Williams, “he goes downstairs, makes a toasted cheese sandwich, and sits and watches The Golf Channel and one news broadcast. Religiously.”   

As for whether Serenity measures up as a “true” home theater, Williams relates the time a fellow integrator drove from Scottsdale, four hours away, to show the room to a client: “The integrator, who does extremely high-end homes, said it was the best theater he had ever sat in.”

Taking all of the above into account leads to a simple and obvious conclusion: It’s now possible to dream big dreams confident they can be realized, completely and without compromise. The recently impossible is now very much possible.

Is Serenity the future? No—it’s the here and now.

photos | William MacCollum
video | Geoff Franklin, Be Film Inc.

Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtablemarketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.

a closer look

the speaker system

THE SOUND PROCESSING

THE HOME AUTOMATION

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Noah Kaplan–Bringing Entertainment & Design Together Again

Noah Kaplan Interview--Complete

Noah Kaplan—Bringing Entertainment & Design Together Again

A deep dive into how Kaplan and his company are at the forefront of the effort to make entertainment tech not just attractive but major statements in design

by Michael Gaughn
April 22, 2022

As much an artist as an entrepreneur, as much musician and music lover as speaker maker, Noah Kaplan has seen his business—Leon Speakers—grow rapidly, as both a presence and an influence, exactly because it’s the antithesis of an electronics behemoth. A creativity-driven craft operation that’s as much local as international, Leon is the speaker-company equivalent of a microbrewery. (No big surprise to learn, then, that Kaplan shepherds one of those as well).

But there’s little point in providing deep background in this intro since a lot about Leon emerges in the interview that follows. Just know that the artistic impulses that define and drive its efforts have synced up nicely with the larger movement to bring design back to home entertainment, making Leon one of the most significant forces in the push to make components not just visible but forms of expression, and, ideally, works of art.

PART 1

The Leon Speakers founder is a leading force in the movement to reintroduce a long lost sense of style into luxury home entertainment

“For decades, the prime directive when it comes to luxury home entertainment has been ‘hide it all away’—an edict that’s caused all the various gear purveyors to find ingenious ways to make everything from speakers to electronics to projectors virtually disappear. Problem is, it has also often led to unfortunate compromises in performance (although you’d never know it to look at the marketing). Maybe even more unfortunate, it’s resulted in some huge lost opportunities for making innovative design statements in the home.”    read more

PART 2

The man behind Leon talks about the other companies helping to drive the movement to make entertainment tech fashionable again

PART 2

“In our previous conversation, Leon Speakers’ founder Noah Kaplan described how his efforts are grounded in the work of innovative mid-century industrial designers like Dieter Rams, who found ways to turn pieces of entertainment technology into compelling design statements. Picking up the ball again below, he discusses the contemporary companies that share his don’t-hide-the-gear approach to not just integrating but showcasing technology in the décor of design-conscious homes.”    read more

PART 3

On translating the desire to bring design flare back to entertainment tech into real-world product

PART 3

“Having, in Part 1, discussed the movement to free entertainment technology from its anonymity by transforming it into distinctive design statements and, in Part 2, limning some of the companies that are helping propel that effort, Leon’s guiding spirit and tech-design evangelist here talks about his own contributions to the cause, citing examples of how he’s put his theories—and inspiration—into practice.”    read more

PART 4

The interview concludes with a glimpse of a time to come when entertainment tech will once again fully embrace innovative design

“As we wrap things up, Leon Speakers‘ Noah Kaplan neatly brings things full circle, weaving together all the threads he laid out in the previous three installments. The focus here is primarily on the future—not just of Leon but of home entertainment in general as it continues to spread out, in increasingly sophisticated forms, throughout the home, and thanks to more nuanced and responsive technology and design, evolves from an often awkward add-on to an integral and stylish part of the domestic environment.'”    read more

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Noah Kaplan–Bringing Entertainment & Design Together Again, Pt. 4

Noah Kaplan Pt. 4

Noah Kaplan—Bringing
Entertainment & Design
Together Again, Pt. 4

by Michael Gaughn

capturing the spirit of the ’70s, without the kitsch, at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio

a custom python-skin design for Wu-Tang Clan’s Raekwon “The Chef”

“We’ve got to show that technology companies today are as interested in how things look, how they’re sourced, how they make you feel,
and how they’re end-of-lifed”

The interview concludes with a glimpse of a time to come when entertainment tech will once again fully embrace innovative design

April 21, 2022

As we wrap things up, Leon Speakers‘ Noah Kaplan neatly brings things full circle, weaving together all the threads he laid out in the previous three installments. The focus here is primarily on the future—not just of Leon but of home entertainment in general as it continues to spread out, in increasingly sophisticated forms, throughout the home, and thanks to more nuanced and responsive technology and design, evolves from an often awkward add-on to an integral and stylish part of the domestic environment. 

—M.G.

You mentioned that the mandate with Muscle Shoals was do to a ‘70s-based design. That era’s kind of dangerous because no matter how you approach it, it can quickly descend into kitsch. How do you avoid that when you’re approaching a style like that or something similar?

That’s where subtlety plays in. We always call it a drip. We don’t ever want to go into full IV mode. I’m super conscious of that when we’re designing. Our designers are working on stuff usually five to ten years, so we’re always designing for ten years on. We have some super crazy concepts, but we’re making sure it’s a very slow progression. So first let’s add new materials, then a color choice or a fabric choice. And then let’s add design options, like trim options. But in most cases still, especially in American design, we’re working with very subtle and simple styles. 

Now, we do make sound sculptures that are full-scale expressions of ourselves. And the customer who wants a sound sculpture is somebody who loves art, so they want that piece to pop. Another customer might want a product that makes them feel something at the same time that it fits the right aesthetic of their home design, but they also don’t want it to yell at them. So it’s a tightrope still, giving people what they want while also pushing the boundaries just a little. Because you always know who the customers are who want you to totally trash boundaries and just create. But that’s three or four times a year compared to the ten thousand times a year when we create for the people who need stuff everyday. 

Theo Kalomirakis always reminds me that during the pinnacle of his career, in the ‘90s, he had client after client who just wanted to play. And if he could sympathetically get them on the same wavelength with him, that they were going to be creative and were going to play, that’s when he did his best work. By the 2000s, those people started to go away. Most of his clients just wanted glorified screening rooms and it wasn’t creative anymore.

I like those words “sympathetic” and “play”—two of the things we try to find all the time now. If I get to get on the phone with a customer, which is rare, look out. We’re goin’ there. Like when we just did that thing for Raekwon, who wanted that python skin and so I’m finding that python skin. That’s what we want. That’s a desire. I had a conversation with a customer this week who’s moving to an amazing place in LA but has no idea what to put in there. She showed me with her phone, and she had not one piece of art. And so I’m, like, you wanna play?

So, like Theo, I’m always looking for that one person who wants to go and dig deep. Because I think intrinsically all people do. We’re ready to reconnect with a little bit more of our soul; we want to find something that makes us feel good. And what I really love about what Theo does—he’s creating an escape room, a playhouse. Sometimes we get too serious about stuff. It’s not that serious, and you should be allowed to make mistakes. You should be allowed to build something and then not even like it. We’ve built whole apartments with customers and, not because of us, they didn’t like it when it was done. And, you know what? No worries. Let’s find what you do like.

I feel like we have such a creative industry. All the people we work with are super creatives, and willing and able to start the conversation of, “Hey, I know that’s what you think you might want, but did you know?” Because a lot of people don’t have awareness. And here’s the scary thing: If I asked a hundred people to name five artists, I don’t think they could. Some people might say Van Gogh, but how about one that’s alive? If I asked them to name one architect, I’m not sure they would know. I don’t judge people for that. I just know there’s so much more depth out there than that. So like Theo, I’m always want to play with those thoughts as a way to find someone’s soul. And that’s a really deep, interesting way to design and build stuff for people. That’s what’s cool about architecture and art and design to me.

Let’s talk about the next 3 to 5 years. How do see things playing out, and how would you like to see things play out? What do you think are the trends?

I think the trend actually is going to be in learning—learning like how different trades interact with each other, because as technology infiltrates everything, we’re actually shifting really deeply into IT. And you hear a lot about wellness—about Kelvin lighting and how it affects your health and your mood. That’s a great trend. I want to work in an industry that makes you feel better, not worse. And so I love these multidisciplinary things happening.

I was on a call the other day with an integrator who was saying the usual thing of, “We’re always called in last, so we’ve got to train designers and architects to bring us in early.” And I said, “What have we got to train you on?” We have to start learning more about the terminology of architecture and design, the history of design. Through that, we’ll get to this next zone where design and technology are finally remarried. We’ve got to show that technology companies today are as interested in how things look, how they’re sourced, how they make you feel, and how they’re end-of-lifed. We talk often enough about how this can be a sustainable practice. It doesn’t have to be all about growth and this maniacal big, bigger, bigger.

The future will be more about the wellness of an overall space, which is super interesting to me. So I’m working closely with an architect out of Paris, Daniel Pouzet, who’s one of my favorite designers—a very naturalistic designer. And he’s really thinking about what is going to make the client’s life better through design. So I became obsessed with the idea of, if you see an object that makes sense to 

Kaplan introduces a Leon Ente SoundTile speaker system created in collaboration with artist Mike Han

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

this sound sculpture, custom designed for an Ann Arbor, Michigan cafe, won a BORN award for its combination of functionality and aesthetics

Kaplan with Theo Kalomirakis

related article

a sampling of Daniel Pouzet  left | the Villas at the Nay Palad Hideaway in the Philippines   right | the Nest Rest and the Swing Rest

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you and resonates with you and makes you feel better, it’s going to add to your overall wellness, it’s going to relieve your stress. We can’t overlook how much stress we’ve all been under. And everyone’s spending so much time at home. That trend’s going to continue.

So what are we going to put our energy into? Are we just going to keep buying commodity things off Amazon? Probably for a few more years, but eventually we’re going to let all that stuff go and think about those few things we actually need or desire. So I’m thinking about everything from how the digital landscape is changing, about how we’re going to present NFTs and new art forms all the way to simple things like what materials can we build with that can be additively manufactured—printed on demand. We’re meeting with a company in Ireland to help us with additive manufacturing because I want to create a sustainable business that doesn’t have a giant environmental footprint.

The trend that makes me nervous is when I see conglomeration, which can hurt the spirit of design, because something that was super important to a founder can become unimportant to another group of people. So I hope there’s a move to independent businesses, creative companies flourishing, small, new entrepreneurs coming up—the next person who can inspire us to repropagate ourselves. But in terms of any trend toward one thing, we all know that the trend is moving in the direction of design.

Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtablemarketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.

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The Strange Journey of Tom Waits

The Strange Journey of Tom Waits

The Strange Journey of Tom Waits

also on Cineluxe

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A casual encounter with an early Waits album leads to a radical reevaluation of the arc of his career

by Michael Gaughn
August 29, 2020

Last Sunday evening, I had a chance to do something I hardly ever get to do—devote all my attention to listening to some music. After uncorking a Portuguese red I’d never tried before and flicking on a single, small incandescent lamp, I unsheathed and cued up Side One of Tom Waits’ Nighthawks at the Diner. 

The whole exercise felt a bit like a ritual, and I guess you could consider it the musical equivalent of comfort viewing—going to one of the very few things that has always made me feel grounded to reaffirm its ability to ring true no matter how much the world has changed around it. 

A 1975 Bones Howe-produced two-LP set recorded in front of a live audience at LA’s Record Plant, Nighthawks is Waits in full hipster mode, from the period when he was using his faux Kerouac routine to disarm audiences while going up hard against the pop-music mainstream. You were far more likely to know him at the time for Rusty Warren-type retreads like “The Piano Has Been Drinking” and “Pasties and a G String” as the epic “Tom Traubert’s Blues.”

The first cut, “Emotional Weather Report,” is an extended monologue-quasi-song with Waits resorting to every corny Vegas-comic gag to ingratiate himself, winking so hard the whole time that you can’t help but grin. “I’ve been playing nightclubs and staying out all night long, coming home late—gone for three months, come back and everything in the refrigerator turns into a science project.” “I’m so goddamned horny the crack of dawn better be careful around me.”

But parts of the song that had just struck me as laugh lines before—“with tornado watches issued Sunday for the areas including the western region of my mental health, and the northern portion of my ability to deal rationally with my disconcerted emotional situation—it’s cold out there”—felt strangely bittersweet, veering toward wrenching, this time around. 

Then, as Nighthawks slipped into “On a Foggy Night,” I had a kind of epiphany. It’s common knowledge Waits went through one of the most radical transformations in pop-music history, but it didn’t hit me until then that it was far more a maturation than any kind of rebranding. Once you go beneath the jokey surfaces, there’s actually an amazingly consistent through-line to his work. Songs like Nighthawks’ “Better Off Without a Wife” and 2002’s “All the World is Green” might seem to exist in completely different worlds, but just shift the emphasis a little here and there and the actual distance between them is so slight it’s barely there at all.

A lot of the stuff on Waits’ initial albums might seem gaggy and trite, but view it through the lens of everything he’s done since Swordfishtrombones and you realize how fundamentally poignant those early efforts are. They don’t have the rigor, incisive, often bitter, irony, or unflinching moral probity of his later work, but they aren’t just the throwaway ditties of some one-trick booze-addled clown. 

Then, around the time of “Warm Beer and Cold Women,” I was graced with another seeming insight—that not just his later efforts but the whole of Waits’ work stands at the pinnacle of the American songwriting tradition. Realizing how much Nighthawks honors and feeds from everything that preceded it, in a way then-popular stadium rock never could, made me realize how early on he blew past his contemporaries. 

Most pop performers write songs, but they’re not songwriters. Never having fully immersed themselves in either the history or the craft, instead donning and shedding styles the way they’d try on designer Ts, they not only don’t have a good grasp of the basic mechanics but lack the reverence and awe that would inspire them to match or exceed the best efforts to date. But it’s clear in retrospect that Waits is, and always was, a master, able to pluck the most vital, fertile, and redolent elements out of the musical stream until he was eventually creating songs where every turn of phrase was a perfect evocation of a different aspect of the American tradition, pivoting seamlessly from, say, Hoagy Carmichael to the Delta blues to Kurt Weill to Big Mama Thornton to Stephen Foster to early Satchmo to Tin Pan Alley to a Salvation Army band without ever using any of it as a crutch, and making it all feel whole.

I’m not saying Waits stands alone above his peers and their successors. Randy Newman occupies similar ground. Both used novelty songs early on to win over audiences, lacing them with just enough irony to let the intelligentsia know they were fashionably cynical, but both have gone far deeper than their contemporaries, showing a decidedly unfashionable vulnerability and sentimentality that actually lifts their work to a whole other level.

Newman, of course, is pared down, almost diffident compared to Waits’ flamboyance and radical experimentation. But each is a fully formed songsmith and not the usual mercenary faddist. And, far too honest in their work, neither would stand a chance if they were starting their careers during these far more intolerant and censorious times. 

None of the above is meant to suggest that I drifted from listening to Nighthawks into some kind of brooding meditation. Whatever thoughts I had came unbidden, and flickered just long enough to jot them down here. Maybe they were just a product of my mood or a reaction to listening to early Waits against the backdrop of the strangely trivial and parlous present. Or maybe it was just the wine.

Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtablemarketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.

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Noah Kaplan–Bringing Entertainment & Design Together Again, Pt. 3

Noah Kaplan Pt. 3

Noah Kaplan—Bringing
Entertainment & Design
Together Again, Pt. 3

by Michael Gaughn

“I’m working on product lines right now that will completely change the way we think about screens”

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a sampling of Leon projects shown in a variety of design environments

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On translating the desire to bring design flare back to entertainment tech into real-world product 

April 13, 2022

Having, in Part 1, discussed the movement to free entertainment technology from its anonymity by transforming it into distinctive design statements and, in Part 2, limning some of the companies that are helping propel that effort, Leon’s guiding spirit and tech-design evangelist here talks about his own contributions to the cause, citing examples of how he’s put his theories—and inspiration—into practice.

—M.G.

Until recently, rooms and their functions had been relatively consistent, so interior design could afford to evolve slowly. But digital technology has really flipped that on its head. How do you manage that intersection of traditional design and constantly evolving tech?

The history of design and technology is really short, from about 1850 to 1890—the pre-Edison era to now. So you’re talking about a hundred and fifty years of really intense progress. And incredible technologies keep popping up—I couldn’t have predicted ten years ago that TV screens would be a hundred inches. When I’m talking to a designer, they’ll say, “Hey, the client wants a hundred-inch screen in the living room.” To me, that’s like saying, imagine you wanted a refrigerator in your living room. I’m not going to let you put that in without a cabinetmaker and without trim around it. So we’re trying to create ways where you can have authentic materiality around a product that’s a commodity. A screen is just the content now, whereas a Philco screen from 1950 was a furniture piece. It used to be that both the object and the content were important. The screen has become nothing but a black window, and our job as integrators is to make that thing sing and make it resonate with the space.

This reminds me of conversations I’ve had with Tim Sinnaeve from Barco about how flat panels used to be thought of as something anonymous that just hung on the wall when they’re not on, but how, just given their size, we need to completely rethink what their presence means in a room.

For instance, I design and create NFTs. We’re thinking about, “Where are we going to show them? O, wait, we already have amazing televisions and digital screens all over the house. Perfect. But are they artistic?” More and more, digital is going to become part of the normal vernacular of design, like where a luxury client will have a really broad NFT collection.

I’m working on product lines right now that will completely change the way we think about screens. Screens are a window. They’re an escape, they’re informational, and they have a lot of functionality. But, hell, they need a ton more design. Yves Béhar, who’s one of my favorite designers and creates for Herman Miller and other global brands, designed the Samsung Frame. And his first thing was, “This thing has to look good off.” That’s the job we all have now. And so that’s what’s cool about making parts that are discreet. But I’m imagining like even with an in-wall speaker, what if the fitting looked more beautiful? Or maybe it’s custom painted or made out of woven, braided brass or solid wood—whatever matches the style. I think it will be a slow introduction back to style, but a lot of vendors have to create tools, similar to Lutron, where you can easily show the vast array of styles, to help someone choose.

Is there one product you’ve created that best sums up everything we’ve been talking about?

One of our simplest products we do all this with, which is an everyday one for integrators, is the Edge Media Frame. I always hated hanging TVs on walls. I didn’t like the black screen, I didn’t like seeing down the side, I didn’t like that you could see the differentiation, I didn’t like the materials. Remember when TVs used to be, like, silver? It was painful.

With the Media Frame, we looked back to say, ‘What made a piece like this work with the home in the past?” The Edge is a simple way to frame, stylistically, and say, “Hey, instead of just seeing this black window, let’s put trim around it so you can’t see down the sides. Let’s clean up the edges. Let’s allow the customer to choose custom fabrics.” Instead of just seeing black metal or plastic, all of a sudden you’re seeing an explosion of color. People are using fabric now for the grilles on the soundbars. So they get to choose the fabric and the wood, and then, of course, they get to choose their TV and screen size—and now you can get to choose what’s on the screen. Right now, it’s just the Samsung Frame, but LG and Sony have their versions coming out that will enable the screen to become a player of images or art, of photography or NFTs or whatever you collect. To me that’s beautiful.

So our job as integrators is to paint a picture of a branded product that doesn’t feel store-bought. And now we’re talking about the exact marriage of design and technology, where multiple trades work together to make something seem beautiful and simple, because design, ultimately, is complexity solved. Our job as integrators, with something as complex as a media room, is to make the space feel comfortable and have nothing feel out of place.

Do you tend to design products with a specific style in mind?

Stylistically, I think a lot of people always picture really modern homes, and we’re always shown that most modernist home. But most people are a little more transitional about what they have. And it definitely changes from the Rockies to the coasts. What all our customers have in common is that they know what they love, they know what resonates, so they’re definitely design-conscious. Now, what kind of design? That is not for me to say. We have worked with designs that you would consider farmhouse all the way to super ultra Postmodern. So when I’m thinking about a period or style, what I’m looking at is the soul of the person. Because that’s what interests me about each house. That’s why I love building custom products for individuals, and that’s why we keep adding to these palettes of options. We learn from these people. 

I  was walking a house in Aspen and I was, like, “Whoa! We do not have anything that’s right for this house. We need to rethink everything. Look at how sharp the lines are, look at the contrast.” Right now, contrast is in. You’ll see houses totally clad in black, with warm wood—super-contrasty materials, super-long straight 

Leon’s designs for the legendary Muscle Shoals recording studio in Sheffield, Alabama use authentic designs and materials from the ’70s to evoke the era

lines, gigantic windows—stuff that makes it really difficult for the designers and integrators to work with. So I look at each style and see how do we fit into that, and how do we create products that have flexible parameters to be able to do that?

Like when we had to design for Muscle Shoals, we had to go back to the ‘70s to help them. They just wanted stuff that was period-centric. So we found cloth from the era. We built out of materials from the times. We tried to make the screen look bent and curved. We made the speakers out of multiple tones of brown, something we would never do today. So you’ve got to keep up on your trends. 

Coming Soon: Part 4—Looking into the near and distant future of designing entertainment tech

Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtablemarketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.

Noah Kaplan painting his portrait of Marvin Gaye entitled “What’s Going On?”

Part 1

Part 1

Part 2

Part 2

Part 4

the Samsung Frame TV wedded with Leon’s FrameBar soundbar

the Edge Media Frame is meant to overcome the bland anonymity of most video-display designs by creating a custom look that complements, rather than fights, a room’s décor

“What all our customers have in common is that they’re definitely design-conscious. Now, what kind of design? That is not for me to say.”

Leon’s designs for the legendary Muscle Shoals recording studio in Sheffield, Alabama use authentic designs and materials from the ’70s to evoke the era

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