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Stately Wayne Manor

@statelywaynemanor.bsky.social
1.2K followers 901 following 15 posts

Recovering cineaddict, ongoing cat-parent

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Stately Wayne Manor @statelywaynemanor.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Looking at photos, it's always interesting (to me) to think how much time separates Now from Then and work backwards; we stand in the same relation to those telephone operators as they do to the world just before the First World War, the world of the Tsar, the Kaiser, and the last passenger pigeon.
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Stately Wayne Manor @statelywaynemanor.bsky.social · 03/07/2026
Saw this one for the first time at a film festival about 20 years back, went in stone-cold and knowing nothing about it - I was totally blown away. Spicy take: better than *Andrei Rublev* (I'd need to rewatch both before dying on that hill).
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Stately Wayne Manor @statelywaynemanor.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
Jazz seems to like to live dangerously on the diamond, as evidenced by his continued disdain for cup-wearing, even after the recent foul-ball-to-the-nuts incident.
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Stately Wayne Manor @statelywaynemanor.bsky.social · 08/06/2026
Keyes watches glumly as Walter is led into the gas chamber
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Stately Wayne Manor @statelywaynemanor.bsky.social · 08/06/2026
As far as I know (not certain), the footage didn't survive; nor did the scene that was to be at the end of *Double Indemnity* where Keyes attends Walter's gas-chamber execution (there is at least one surviving still from that scene), an ending that I can't imagine tested very well.
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Stately Wayne Manor @statelywaynemanor.bsky.social · 08/06/2026
Studio executives in 1977 were completely flummoxed by George Lucas' weird sci-fi nonsense, but that fact that it kept testing through the roof with preview audiences made them think they might just have a hit on their hands, and to market it accordingly. 3/3
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Stately Wayne Manor @statelywaynemanor.bsky.social · 08/06/2026
Billy Wilder, a master filmmaker, cut entire sequences from his movies (Sunset Blvd. was going to begin with corpses in the morgue discussing how they'd died!), sequences that he'd already shot and edited, based on the fact that preview audiences laughed in the wrong places, or not at all. 2/3
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Stately Wayne Manor @statelywaynemanor.bsky.social · 08/06/2026
Absolutely! And for a lot of filmmakers, it's important to be able to screen a new movie in front of a live audience to see exactly what works and what doesn't, and to adjust based on audience reaction. 1/3
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Stately Wayne Manor @statelywaynemanor.bsky.social · 15/05/2026
He and his first wife wrote a charming book about their cats, *The Cats in Our Lives*. Big-time cat guy (always a plus).
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Stately Wayne Manor @statelywaynemanor.bsky.social · 27/03/2026
One thing Hitler got right was killing Hitler.
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Stately Wayne Manor @statelywaynemanor.bsky.social · 01/11/2025
"Too soon to say." - Zhou Enlai
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Stately Wayne Manor @statelywaynemanor.bsky.social · 11/01/2025
Borges (who admittedly had a weakness for Victorian prose) wrote a short essay about Omar and Fitzgerald, treating them as two halves of a single poet, separated by time and temperament.
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Stately Wayne Manor @statelywaynemanor.bsky.social · 29/12/2024
A lot of classic Warner Bros. montages (those glorious stock-footage assemblages) were done by a young Don Siegel, who went on to become a fine action director, and who mentored Clint Eastwood during the filming of *Dirty Harry*, letting Clint direct one sequence.
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Stately Wayne Manor @statelywaynemanor.bsky.social · 20/09/2024
David Thewlis in *Naked* (1993)
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Stately Wayne Manor @statelywaynemanor.bsky.social · 18/09/2024
"The ref kept penalizing Tyson for ear-biting, but he never once penalized Holyfield for ear-biting!"
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