The image below is a panoramic photograph of the Brooklyn Bridge taken from the deck of a Ferry crossing the East River in New York. At the time the photograph was taken the bridge would have been about seven years old.  John R. Connon, a Canadian living in New York, took the photo using his best known invention, the cycloramic panoramic camera, which was patented in 1887.

The image below is a still captured from SA’s panoramic music video of Macy Gray performing at a party full of old cinema and new media types, captured in Hollywood with me directing for Social Animal. Like John Connon more than a century ago, I’m also an immigrant from Canada working on new panoramic format advances while living in the ‘States. Coincidental, eh?

I’m excited to be collaborating with Norwegian animator Tom Idland. It is a pleasure to be adding new media characters to the Old Hollywood themed party in the Macy Gray 360 degree interactive video. All along, I’ve wanted to feature the widest variety of party guests that themselves represent various eras in traditional media and new media and for me the guest list has always included a pixelated character. Now Lucy (see below) will be gracing our dance floor, bringing that vision to fruition, or at least virtually so. Multifaceted Lucy is fun to work with. As Tom says, “So few ‘details’ but still so alive!” Velkommen.

Lucy dancing in 360º interactive music video

On the set of Social Animal’s 360-degree interactive music video, my friend Giuliano Bekor had me evoke Sunset Blvd’s Max Von Mayerling in an editorial spread for BlackBook Magazine. The video, which I directed and which was produced with my colleagues Matthew Forrest and Guy Shiffer, is the first of its kind in a new interactive format that I designed. It is technically, at the size of six Imax screens, the biggest music video ever shot. Most people, however, will engage with it on a much smaller screen online or on a personal mobile device. A few hours after these photos were taken, I will be directing the fabulous Macy Gray, who sings the classic song “Whatever Lola Wants” with the Deron Johnson Ensemble in a party scene that represents New Media’s arrival on the Hollywood scene. By moving the cursor, audiences will have the unprecidented ability to look around the room as they choose, checking out the party scene, which is populated by a variety of characters from the earliest days of cinema to the latest 3d avatars. These photos, whatever one may think of my modeling ability, seem oddly appropriate since Sunset Blvd, a favorite movie, concerns characters from the silent era who find themselves thrust into the new media of their time, talkies. Lets see if the addition of interactivity on video has as powerful an impact as the addition of sound had on the movies.

This is a wonderful film, one that I have wanted to see for years because I have heard about it so much. A lot of the critics who have written about it are conflicted: They call it a ‘flawed masterpiece.’ One of the flaws they often mention is the star, Martine Carol, shown here with her circus master, played by Peter Ustinov. One writer said that she simply projected mediocrity, not the intense sexual allure of a Garbo or Dietrich. She is criticized for being cold, lacking passion, and there are rumors that she was foisted on Ophuls by the ‘money men.’Looking at this picture, all that is a little hard to believe. Carol is stunningly beautiful, but they do have a point. She does project mediocrity in her role, and that is one of the charming and unusual things about the movie.

Lola was an adventuress, not a great artist or thinker. She was not a philosopher of les passions. She was a brash climber who knew how to exploit her beauty and sex appeal to extract vast sums of money from her lovers, although she died in near poverty. The movie does not make her into an archetype, a goddess or such, but portrays her as a, well, ordinary woman with some extraordinary endowments and a very driven personality. My favorite scene is when she first meets Ustinov, when she is near the height of her glory, i.e. before she becomes Mad Ludwig’s mistress. He comes to make a deal with her – he will take her to America to exhibit her in a circus show as The Most Scandalous Woman in the World. The housekeeper tells Lola, “He is bizarre – he scares me.” No matter, “Nobody scares me,” she remarks with a dismissive shake of her head.

He tells her she will make unimaginable amounts of money. She wants to be taken seriously as a dancer. “You cannot dance…If there are not enough scandals, we will invent more…Dance them if you must.” “I am not interested in talent, ” he tells her, “only in vitality.”

They understand each other – he orders her about, “Stand still…You smoke too much…” She obeys, for a while. Two performers, masters of the more vulgar aspects of showmanship. She refuses his offer, but he tells her it is always open, then he makes a pass at her. She refuses that too, advising him “Don’t be a fool, like the others,” as she wipes her lipstick off of his mouth. Throughout the scene, she is stunning, and he is absolutely captivating as the calculating, cynical impresario.

In the end, she will come to him, and the entire movie is told through the device of his circus show where she is exhibited as kitsch spectacle.