Category Archives: news

Peter Bogdanovich to Direct ‘The Inventor and the Tycoon’ Miniseries

Hot news out of the blue,  from The Wrap:

By Tim Kineally, June 5.

GETTY IMAGES

GETTY IMAGES

Project will explore the origins of cinema

“The Last Picture Show” director Peter Bogdanovich will explore the story of the first picture shows for his next project.

Bogdanovich has signed on to direct a TV miniseries adaptation of Edward Ball’s 2013 book “The Inventor and the Tycoon: A Gilded Age Murder and the Birth of Moving Pictures.”

The book explores the true story of motion-picture pioneer Edward Muybridge and industrialist-politician Leland Stanford, and their effect on the early days of cinema.

Bogdanovich is developing the project with Cohen Media Group, and is also serving as co-executive producer, along with Charles S. Cohen, Cohen Media Group president Daniel Battsek and Fred Roos (“The Godfather Part II”).

Bodganovich called “The Inventor and the Tycoon” a “fascinating story about the origins of cinema/beginning of movies and the amazing series of coincidences that led to that creation.”

Set in frontier-era California, Ball’s book explores how Muybridge — a murderer as well a technological pioneer — and his patron Stanford teamed to launch the age of visual media.

“Part of the screen art of Peter Bogdanovich is to make the American past look beautiful, feel intense, and to people it with rare characters,” Ball said of the adaptation. “Between Edward Muybridge, the murderer who gave us motion pictures, and Leland Stanford, the robber baron made in Gold Rush California, this 19th-century story has big American aura suited to his hands, and to CMG’s program for memorable, ambitious television.”

http://www.thewrap.com/peter-bogdanovich-to-direct-the-inventor-and-the-tycoon-miniseries/
How this news will affect the several plans for a feature film about Muybridge (one of which has already been filmed) remains to be seen.

Posted here by Stephen Herbert, with thanks and acknowledgement to The Wrap, and Getty Images.

 

From Kingston boy to Google Doodle

google-doodle-090412

Thursday, 8 May (this week) at 6pm I shall be giving  talk at Kingston Museum, Wheatfield Way, Kingston upon Thames, KT1 2PS.

‘How did the young bookseller Ted Muggeridge from Kingston become renowned photographer Eadweard Muybridge of San Francisco, and how did Kingston Museum become the home of arguably the world’s most important Muybridge collection?’

and…

‘How is Muybridge’s work relevant to artists and the media of today?’

Find out on Thursday.

 

Posted here by Stephen Herbert

 

 

Muy Blog: Eadweard Muybridge Selection 2009-2012

Muy Blog: Eadweard Muybridge Selection 2009-2012

Now you can read Muy Blog (or at least, some of it) in olde-fashioned printed form. It’s on Amazon. My thanks to all of those whose words and pictures have helped to make this book.

bookcovers1CLICK HERE TO GO TO “LOOK INSIDE”

“There’s more to Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) than a strange name and the fact that he shot dead his wife’s lover. Best known for his sequence photographs of humans and animals in motion, the ‘galloping horse photographer’ has left a legacy of scientific and artistic work that continues to influence visual media today. A spinoff from the website The Compleat Muybridge, is Muy Blog on WordPress, keeping Muybridge enthusiasts up to date with what’s happening in the wide world of Muybridge and his images. This souvenir selection is from the first four years of news, research and comment. Read about the modern Profilograph bronze sculpture technique that morphs a galloping horse into a four-dimensional artwork, illustrating time as well as space. Follow the 1895 commotion about the hugely expensive folio Animal Locomotion: “not one in twenty thousand would undertand it…” Enjoy the evocative lyrics of “Good Evening, Major” – almost the last words that Flora Muybridge’s lover would ever hear – from the engaging video by the band Accordions. Find out what connects Ronald Reagan, Muybridge, and Death Valley. Enjoy the zoöpraxographer’s influence on the cartoonists of the late 19th century. Follow the author as he goes “In search of Helios”. Was Eadweard Muybridge really ‘The Father of the Motion Picture’? Read about the exhibitions, the controversy, and The Smartest Kid on Earth. Catch up with Muy Blog in this handy printed form.”

Paperback: 206 pages
ISBN-10: 1494844184
ISBN-13: 978-1494844189
Product Dimensions: 22.9 x 15.2 x 1.1 cm

About the Author
Stephen Herbert is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture, Kingston University, London. Kingston is Muybridge’s home town. A Muybridge specialist for more than 25 years, he has lectured widely on the history of optical media and his contributions have appeared in academic journals, encyclopedias, magazines, books, films, tv , radio, and on the web. His web site The Compleat Eadweard Muybridge, together with Muy Blog on WordPress, cover the world of Muybridge in all its forms – historical research, modern artworks, digital re-imagining, and much more. Zoetropes and other ‘scopes and ‘tropes are celebrated at The Wheel of Life [stephenherbert.co.uk/wheelHOME.htm] The wider world of 19th-century motion pictures is the subject of Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema [victorian-cinema.net]. The Projection Box, established in 1994, publishes and sells monographs about pre-cinema, the magic lantern, early and silent film, and optical entertainments.

Rumpus in Kingston

Nude beginnings: Riverside Kingston development to pay tribute to Kingston photography pioneer Eadweard Muybridge

5:00am Friday 24th January 2014 in News By Ross Logan, Chief Reporter [YourLocalGuardian.co.uk]

Images taken by Eadweard Muybridge could soon be a familiar site along Kingston riverside.

riverside

The Riverside Kingston development this week. Muybridge’s images will be seen on the large white panel to the right of the picture

Artistic images of women posing nude for legendary photography pioneer Eadweard Muybridge could soon become a familiar sight along Kingston’s riverside.

The company behind the new Riverside Kingston restaurant development, next to Kingston Bridge, has announced bold plans to commemorate one of the town’s most famous sons by emblazoning its building with stills from his Human Figures in Motion project, carried out in the mid 1880s.

The oversized black and white photographs would greet visitors coming into town from Richmond over Kingston Bridge, as well as those travelling along the Thames.

phonehttp://www.kingstontour.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/photographs/phone-boxes.html

Developers Canadian and Portland Estates hope that in time, the projection will become as recognisable a landmark as David Mach’s Out Of Order phone box sculpture in Old London Road.

Kingston-born Eadweard Muybridge broke new ground in photography

Greg Miles, head of promotions and animation at Canadian and Portland Estates, said: “Eadweard Muybridge was born and died in Kingston and became a pioneer of photography and the moving image.

“His work is internationally recognised and contributed hugely towards the development of film, which has a vast influence over our lives.

“Kingston owns one of the world’s largest collections of Muybridge’s images and we believe this is something Kingston should celebrate and we wanted to honour the beauty and importance of his work on our building.”

Phase one of Riverside Kingston is due to open in April, bringing five popular restaurant chains to the town for the first time – Cote, Busaba Eathai, CAU, Comptoir Libanais and Bill’s.

Muybridge is credited with revolutionising still photography through his famous motion sequence technique, which paved the way for motion pictures.

Despite the cultural nod to Kingston’s heritage, Kingston Society chairman Jennifer Butterworth was not impressed by the proposal to beam his work across the Thames.

She said: “What is being proposed will only make bad worse.

“It doesn’t matter if the ladies are nude or not.

“We objected to the Riverside sign [on top of the building] and we object to anything more making this site look like a cinema show.”

[end of article]

** So, several years after a major retrospective of Muybridge’s images graced the walls of the Tate Britain art gallery, his photographs are still objected to on the grounds that they represent a “cinema show”. Not only are we still fighting the prejudices against film as art, we’re back to the 1970s struggle to have photography recognized as art. It might not be appropriate to have these pictures on the site suggested, but the objectors will need to come up with some better reasons for rejecting the internationally renowned work of Kingston’s famous son.

Stephen Herbert

http://www.yourlocalguardian.co.uk/news/10959924.Nude_beginnings__Riverside_Kingston_development_to_pay_tribute_to_Kingston_
photography_pioneer_Eadweard_Muybridge/

Eklund on Muybridge

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Michael Eklund is growing out his beard for his new role in the upcoming feature about early 20th century photographer and filmmaking pioneer, Eadweard Muybridge.

Photograph by: Arlen Redekop , PNG

 

Hollywood North: Michael Eklund pioneers a new look

for Vancouver-shot feature Eadweard

By Mark Leiren-Young, Special to The Vancouver Sun June 27, 2013

If there was a Leo Award for “best beard,” actor Michael Eklund would have won by acclamation.

Instead, Eklund got to show off his old-style face bush when he recently accepted an award for Best Performance by a Male in a Feature Length Drama for his role in Errors of the Human Body at B.C.’s annual film and television prize party earlier in June.

Eklund was already riding high on the success of The Call — Oscar winner Halle Barry’s surprise box office smash — where he played a serial killer who kidnaps Abigail Breslin (an Oscar nominee for Little Miss Sunshine).

Said Eklund, “Yes, they are both as beautiful and cool in real life.”

Both movies — along with a third film, Ferocious — debuted in theatres in the last three months.

Talking to The Sun in the lobby of the Westin Bayshore during the awards ceremonies, Eklund explained that his current facial fur is meant for his new role in the upcoming feature about early 20th century photographer and filmmaking pioneer, Eadweard Muybridge, which goes to camera in and around Vancouver on Canada Day.

The movie is directed by Kyle Rideout and produced by Josh Epstein, who co-wrote the script. Eklund said the low budget project was love at first read.

“When they first sent me the script I had no idea who they were or who this Eadweard Muybridge character was. After I turned the last page of the script I felt I needed to know everything about this mysterious sweaty-toothed madman, as well as the talented artists who wrote it and sent it to me.

“You do not read too many scripts like this. Every actor knows that feeling when they find it. For me, it was beautiful yet dangerous, soiled and yet whitened. All these words also describe the man who was Eadweard Muybridge. I was ready to sink my own sweaty teeth upon the goal to find out more.”

Currently known as Eadweard, the film will feature over 150 extras, 40 actors, 50 locations, period costumes, animals, children and “a stage coach squished with passion,” Eklund said. “The word ‘collaborative’ sums it up perfectly as the whole community seems to be involved.”

Epstein said that not only did the local film community embrace the making of the movie, the theatre community did as well.

“We’re making a $3 million dollar movie on a very, very low budget so we’ve been getting amazing resources from a lot of the theatre companies in town: The now defunct Playhouse, the Electric Company, the Arts Club, Studio 58, Playhouse Theatre, Chemainus the Renegade Arts Society, and also theatre lighting people and costume people,” Epstein said when interviewed last weekend at the Jessie Awards, where the popular stage actor (last seen in the Arts Club’s remount of The Craigslist Cantata) performed a song-and-dance number celebrating the Vancouver theatre scene.

“It’s sort of a mesh of film and theatre people helping us out. It’s a highly ambitious, epic indie film. Very epic.”

A native of Saskatoon, Eklund recalled falling in love with the movies as a five-year-old when his mom took him to a Sunday matinee, “planting the seed of magic inside of me.”

Determined to perform like his matinee idols Eklund spent the next decade auditioning for school plays — and not getting cast.

Unable to convince the world he was an actor, Eklund enrolled in art school to study painting. It didn’t take long before he was dropping out, packing his stuff and his dreams in a U-Haul and heading West to Vancouver to take a shot at stardom.

Eklund credited persistence and “the power of being so naive” for landing a top agent despite a complete lack of acting experience.”

The agent wasn’t the only one who saw potential — practically every casting agent in B.C. did.

Over the last few years Eklund has been featured on almost every major series shot here including Smallville, Supernatural, Intelligence and Alcatraz.

Eklund saw his latest role as a chance to explore the origins of his passion for moviemaking.

“I discovered that Eadweard Muybridge was a man who could stop time, a man obsessed with freezing motion. His work unknowingly was creating and inspiring the basis for moving pictures. He was the pioneer of film. And without him and his work the actual film we are making based on him could not have been made.”

Posted here by Stephen Herbert

‘Muybridge’ shooting next week

sara_canning_a_pSara Canning           Getty Images

From The Hollywood Reporter:

“The Vampire Diaries actress Sara Canning, Ian Tracey and Jodi Balfour have joined the cast of the untitled psychological drama centered on Eadweard Muybridge.

Michael Eklund is starring in the Canadian indie, which is being directed by Kyle Rideout and produced by Josh Epstein. Rideout and Epstein were behind Wait for Rain, a short that won best science fiction/fantasy at last year’s Comic-Con International Film Festival. The Muybridge project is their first feature. Also joining the cast are Christopher Heyerdahl and Torrance Combs. The movie begins principal photography next week in Vancouver…….

Canning will play Muybridge’s wife, while Balfour will be one of the photographer’s models who became the focus of some of his very first nudes. Tracey will portray the founder of Stanford University who enlists Muybridge’s services to win a famous bet over whether a horse had all four hooves off the ground while galloping. Canning stars in Primeval: New World, the North American version of the hit BBC sci-fi show. Tracey has appeared in the popular Canadian sci-fi show Continuum and appeared in Man of Steel and A&E’s Bates Motel. Balfour is one of the stars of CBC’s acclaimed show Bomb Girls.”

Gary Oldman to film ‘Flying Horse’?

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From indiewire.com

“Gary Oldman Eyeing Ralph Fiennes & Benedict Cumberbatch For His Sophomore Directorial Effort ‘Flying Horse’

NEWS: BY KEVIN JAGERNAUTH

It has been seventeen years since Gary Oldman dropped his feature length directorial debut and cult fave “Nil By Mouth,” but he hasn’t yet followed it up anything. Not that he’s been short of ideas. Back in 2011, he said he wanted to team up Colin Firth for an unnamed remake, while in early 2012 he said he had a project about a sex addict he wanted to direct. Well, the good news is that Oldman does have a new directorial effort cooking, and the surprising part is that’s none of those.
Instead, it’s a biopic of Eadweard Muybridge called “Flying Horse,” and even more, he’s seeking his “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” co-stars Benedict Cumberbatch and Ralph Fiennes to star. Penned by Oldman, the movie would tell the story of the photographer instrumental in helping to develop motion pictures. But the movie will focus on the more tabloid part of his life, with Muybridge mudering a theater critic who was had an affair with his wife, and fathered a child in the process. Scandal!

If all goes to plan, Fiennes would take the role of Muybridge, Oldman the smaller role of his attorney and Cumberbatch as the adulterous Harry Larkyns. Scheduling and all that fun stuff needs to be worked out, but the aim is to start shooting in early 2014 (which is also when Cumberbatch is due on the set of Guillermo Del Toro’s “Crimson Peak”).

But it’s exciting news that Oldman is getting back behind the camera, for a story that also inspired an opera by Philip Glass entitled “The Photographer.”

[Posted here by Stephen Herbert] see also:

https://ejmuybridge.wordpress.com/2013/03/19/michael-eklund-to-star-in-muybridge-movie/

auction: Author’s Edition of Animal Locomotion

quinns-2
Plate from Eadward Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion: An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements, 1872-1885, 11 vol. Author’s Edition folio. Est. $12,000-$15,000. Waverly Rare Books image.More Information: http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=63067#.UbBgsY6t76I[/url]
Copyright © artdaily.org
…
…
“Waverly Rare Books to auction Author’s Edition of Muybridge’s 1887 Animal Locomotion. FALLS CHURCH, VA.- On June 20th, Waverly Rare Books will auction an extraordinary photographic rarity – an Author’s Edition folio version of Eadweard Muybridge’s (British, 1830-1904) Animal Locomotion: An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements. Initially published in 1887 as an 11-volume set, Animal Locomotion contained a total of 781 plates.
…
Thirty-seven sets were produced and subsequently purchased by major art institutions, museums and libraries in New York, Boston and Philadelphia. The Public Edition of Animal Locomotion contained 100 plates and was issued by subscription for $100. “The subscriber would examine one of the complete sets in a public institution, then chose his or her favorites,” explained Waverly Rare Books’ director, Monika Schiavo. The Author’s Edition, which is the centerpiece of Waverly’s June 20 catalog auction, originally consisted of 21 plates selected by the author or editor from Muybridge’s complete series of animal locomotion plates. Of those 21 plates, one plate (Plate 465) is missing, leaving 20 plates. “Generally, a single lost plate can reduce a book’s value considerably, but in cases where the book is highly valuable, as is the case with this one, the loss in value is nowhere near as great, as buyers would have few – if any – alternatives,” said Schiavo. Citing auction comparables of the past, Schiavo noted that an Author’s Edition with 21 plates, personally inscribed by Muybridge, sold at Swann Galleries in March 2010 for $48,000.
…
A copy of a Public Edition with 54 collotype plates sold for $14,900 at Sotheby’s in November 2008. Its condition was a question mark but “likely to be very poor, given the catalog description that said ‘Fragment only – Disbound,’” Schiavo said. In 2007 an album with 100 plates in faux morocco wraps with some dampstaining, minor handling wear, chipping to edges, and library markings sold for $45,000 – triple its high estimate – at Skinner, while a collection of 50 plates sold at Bloomsbury’s in 2012 for 38,000 pounds (approx. $58,200). Other auction records indicate that some individual plates have sold for as much as $5,000.
…
Described by the Washington Post’s Frank Van Riper as “The Odd Genius Who Froze Motion,” Eadweard Muybridge was one of the most influential and eccentric photographers of all time. His instantly recognizable work merged the art and science of photography in a series of stop-action film sequences that paved the way for the modern motion picture industry. Muybridge’s prescient images have been collected and exhibited by the Tate Gallery, The Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Waverly Rare Books, a division of Quinn’s Auction Galleries, will offer the Eadweard Muybridge Author’s Edition of Animal Locomotion: An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements on June 20, with no reserve and a $12,000-$15,000 estimate. Waverly Rare Books’ June 20 auction will begin at 5 p.m. Eastern time. The preview begins on June 15 and continues through and including auction day (see website for hours). The gallery is closed on Sundays. All forms of bidding will be available, including absentee or live via the Internet through http://www.LiveAuctioneers.com. For information on any lot in the sale, call 703-532-5632 or e-mail monika.schiavo@quinnsauction.com.”
…
…
(Posted here by Stephen Herbert)

A lecture by Eadweard Muybridge, this Saturday

MuyInvite

 

http://www.othercinema.com/calendar/index.html

ANALOG CHURCH SAT 12/8: ROURKE + WOOD + KATELUS + RADIOPHONICS +
Indulging our love for forgotten formats and media archeology lore, Jeremy Rourke & Co. debut two live musical performances, The Biography of a Motion Picture Camera and The Paperman May Charleston. Ben Wood, in the apparel of none other than Eadweard Muybridge, affords us a charmed glimpse into those halcyon days of the Magic Lantern. Doug Katelus, as Hammond organist for the night, offers his 16mm Help Keep Film Dead, on the last days of Monaco Lab. Lori Varga, as high priestess for tonight’s “church,” powers up her 4 projectors in Beyond the Frames of Light and Strange Sound. PLUS Russ Forster with an in-person tribute to Bill Lear, inventor of the eponymous jet AND the 8-track tape! AND a half-hr cut of the BBC‘s Alchemists of Sound, on the UK Radiophonic Workshop, boasting Doctor Who composer Delia Derbyshire.*$7.

[Now that’s what I call a “mixed programme”.]

Posted here by Stephen Herbert