The new issue of Stay Thirsty, edited by Dusty Sang, is here, with articles on Cary Grant, Bascove's bridges, April Gornik, Stephanie Chase, much more.
https://staythirstymagazine.blogspot.com/
https://staythirstymagazine.blogspot.com/p/fine-romance-lehman.html
https://staythirstymagazine.blogspot.com/p/nicca-ray-nicholas-ray.html
https://staythirstymagazine.blogspot.com/p/april-gornik-paintings.html
https://staythirstymagazine.blogspot.com/p/eyman-cary-grant.html
https://staythirstymagazine.blogspot.com/p/bascove-kiosk-bridges.html
STAY THIRSTY: How do you feel about French cinema and its embrace of your father's [Nicholas Ray's] work?
NICCA RAY: I’m not as well-versed in the French cinema as I ought to be. But! The Cahiers du Cinema writers/filmmakers of the 1950s held Nick in the highest regard. When I interviewed the film historian and writer, David Thomson, he said, “In the 1950s the Cahiers du Cinema had started a policy of recovering American films, saying, ‘Oh look, these commercial films are great. Maybe they’re the greatest!’” My father felt misunderstood within Hollywood. His movies weren’t the critical box office hits that, say, Elia Kazan’s were. Nick, who had met Kazan in the 1930s New York theater and stayed friends with throughout his life, measured himself against Kazan. In France in the 1950s, when Nick was making On Dangerous Ground and Johnny Guitar (both box office flops) the Cahiers du Cinema, whose writers became the directors of the French New Wave, started championing Nick’s films, calling him an auteur. He was sort of a poster boy for their Auteur Theory. When I asked the Cahiers writer, Charles Bitsch, how the auteur theory came about he said, “The need came mostly because of the weight of the screenplay. Two or three screenwriters wrote the script and the director was just the technician making images to tell what the script was saying.” The Cahiers' folk said, Woah, hold on there. They saw that directors like Nicholas Ray, Alfred Hitchcock and Fritz Lang were more than technicians. They were the authors, not the screenwriters. Bitsch said to me, “You see further beyond the scene.” Nick used to say, “If it’s all in the script why make the movie?” Seriously, why? If you look at the body of Nick’s work (including his paycheck films) you will see his mark in the same way you notice an artist’s brushstroke. He had a painter’s eye and used light and camera movement to build a subtext that informed the scene. The French New Wave directors of the Cahiers du Cinema, Truffaut, Godard, Rivette, gave Nick authorship and were, I believe, the first to give him critical acclaim. In the 1960s, Henri Langlois, the founder of the Cinemateque Francaise, screened Nick’s films and the younger generation of filmmakers were introduced to and influenced by his work. I am forever grateful to the French for defining the auteur theory. I set out to find my father in his films. It was a place for me to start.