Latest news with #LastTangoinParis
Express Tribune
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Express Tribune
Joe Caroff graphic designer who created James Bond 007 logo and iconic movie posters dies at 103
Joe Caroff, the graphic designer behind the famed James Bond 007 logo and hundreds of movie posters, died Sunday in Manhattan at age 103, one day before his 104th birthday. His sons, Peter and Michael Caroff, confirmed he died under home hospice care. Caroff's career spanned more than seven decades, producing striking imagery for films such as West Side Story (1961), Manhattan (1979), Cabaret (1972), A Hard Day's Night (1964), and Last Tango in Paris (1972). He also designed Norman Mailer's debut novel cover, The Naked and the Dead (1948), at the age of 27. Despite the cultural reach of his work, Caroff rarely signed his designs and generally avoided self-promotion, leaving him less recognized than contemporaries like Saul Bass and Paul Rand. Among his many contributions, none proved more enduring than his work for the first James Bond film, Dr. No (1962). Commissioned to create a publicity logo, he sketched the numerals 007 and integrated the outline of a pistol into the number seven, capturing the essence of espionage. 'I knew that 007 meant license to kill; that, I think, at an unconscious level, was the reason I knew the gun had to be in the logo,' Caroff said in the 2022 documentary By Design: The Joe Caroff Story. With only minor modifications, the logo has been used across 25 official Bond films and countless merchandising campaigns. Throughout his career, Caroff described himself as a 'service provider' rather than an auteur, often prioritizing deadlines over recognition. His wife, Phyllis, recalled that he was never paid royalties for his designs, though the Bond producers presented him with a 007-engraved watch on his 100th birthday. Caroff's wife of 81 years, Phyllis, a Hunter College professor, died earlier this year. He is survived by his two sons and a granddaughter. When reflecting on his work, Caroff once said: 'I never made a big thing of it. It was a job, I wanted to get it done. I always met my deadlines.'
New Statesman
25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
How to do it like a movie star
When I think of classic movie sex scenes, I reach for the obvious. Good: the languorous marital congress between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie in Don't Look Now. Heinous: the 'butter scene' in Last Tango in Paris. Each tells us something about how sex works on film, reaching beyond the action on screen to the unconscious material we're picking up on. Despite the fact that Don't Look Now was filmed on a camera whirring as loud as 'a Singer sewing machine on methamphetamines' (Sutherland), everyone thought they were doing it for real because they were a couple in real life, and because the sex is stylishly intercut with footage of them dressing for dinner afterwards in a scene of affecting, mundane intimacy. Last Tango in Paris was developed from the sexual fantasies of its director, Bernardo Bertolucci. Its lead actress, Maria Schneider, had no idea that Marlon Brando was going to use a knob of butter in the simulated rape scene. The details weren't in her script – they'd been held back for a more 'realistic' reaction. Schneider's movie tears are real: she never fully recovered from the humiliation, and her protests over the years helped consign the film to the ick bucket. How many of us had ever thought about what's really going on in movie sex scenes? I know I hadn't. Game of Thrones started filming in 2010, and the actress Gemma Whelan (Yara Greyjoy) later described its copious rogering as a 'frenzied mess… They used to say, 'When we shout action, just go for it.'' Ita O'Brien, who'd come up through the world of movement and choreography in the drama schools of London, saw a gap in the market for an intimacy coordinator, paid to be on set to ensure that sex scenes 'deepen our understanding of characters', that actors and directors behave themselves and flesh-coloured garments remain in place. Just in time for the #MeToo movement, her work helped lift the veil on an area of cultural life that we see but don't see. Who came up with that move? The director? The co-star? Was the other actor OK with it? Could they say if they weren't? And why does that actor have no pubes? Was he told to shave them off? O'Brien has produced an exhaustive handbook of her work in the film industry which doubles up as a kind of intimacy manual for you and me. Once upon a time, movie sex scenes used to be our porn, but now we have actual porn for that. More now than ever, in our phone-filled life, the screen is a mirror, and in O'Brien's eyes the intimacy we see on screen can have a profound effect on 'real' experience. If sex is represented dishonestly, it makes us less honest and open with our partners, she says. Working as intimacy coordinator on Normal People and I May Destroy You, Gillian Anderson's Sex Education and Gentleman Jack, she has become known for sex scenes of a different nature: sex with periods, condoms, or with someone asking someone else if it hurts. All of this resonates with a younger audience raised on the alienating impossibility of pneumatic porn stars – the same generation, we hear year-on-year, who are having less and less sex. Sex gurus fascinate me: how did they end up there, making a living talking about something no one else can talk about? O'Brien is 60 and her biography is perfect: a childhood in rural Ireland, a Catholic girls' school – then dancing topless in a troupe in Asia. She endured regional panto where household-name comedians of the 1980s and 1990s would expect sexual servicing from their chorus girls, and her first TV job was on The Benny Hill Show, where she wore a Victorian dress with a hole cut at the cleavage in which Hill ('a very sweet man') stood his menu card. Now, a lifetime later, she resides in Kent, enjoying night-time stretching routines under the stars, and travelling the world spreading intimacy work in her tiny field of one or two. 'My expertise has led me to the point where I can walk out and help create a sex scene as a body dance where everyone feels safe and everyone feels empowered,' she says. Her long list of intimacy guidelines is now in place throughout the film industry, though some points remain ambiguous, such as the instruction that tongues should be avoided in kissing as standard practice 'unless the director feels it would serve the scene better to use tongues'. There is no dirt in this book, on O'Brien herself, or specific actors, or films. The most interesting story is that of Dakota Johnson, who starred in the Fifty Shades of Grey films and, these days, promotes a line of ungendered sex toys. But there are universal truths about sex and intimacy. 'In explicit sexual scenes, we nearly always see spontaneous penetration after perhaps 30 seconds of kissing. Is that how it happens in your life? No!' Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe She points out that intimacy is first and foremost about a relationship with oneself; that desire in long-term relationships is reactive rather than spontaneous, for men as well as women; that it's normal to feel like you can't be bothered. When she asserts that no real human is able to activate instant 'sex mode' at the end of a long day, I thought of couples in films who get back to the flat and slam each other into the wall. She believes that 'Tuesday sex' – her word for average weekday sex that isn't great and isn't crap either – is the stuff of life. 'It's the same when you go to see a play. Nine times out of ten you might just vaguely enjoy it – and then once in a while it will absolutely hit the spot.' There are surprising sketches of differently shaped organs, entire sections devoted to deep breathing and chakras, and a nine-step guide to walking barefoot in the garden (point seven: 'It is good to have tissues or a towel with you to clean your feet ready to put your socks and shoes back on.') But the urge to mock reflects the very problem she's trying to get to grips with – our embarrassment, our struggle to access a sensuous relationship with ourselves, to know what we want and then ask for it. It is largely unsexy to read about – just as Tuesday sex isn't something you'd actually want to watch. Or is it? Maybe one day it will be. O'Brien is evangelical about her work, foreseeing 'a utopia where society is shaped around communication and authentic connection'. She imagines a fundamental change in ethics as we teach actors to mirror the most empathic conversations about intimacy in their words and movements on screen. Yet I confess that all the way through this book I was muffling an adolescent snigger. If film stars get too good at this stuff – if every kiss is deeply workshopped and consensual, and every sex scene choreographed 'to build an increasing intensity of heat, so you can see the stages of a sexual encounter rather than an instant reaction', then there will be a whole new kind of chaos in the movie industry, and a whole new kind of film. [See also: Bridget Jones's hollow feminism] Related
New York Times
26-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Last Tango' Derailed Maria Schneider's Life. A New Film Takes Her Side.
In a 1983 interview for a French television show, the actress Maria Schneider was asked whether she would mind if the program broadcast a clip from 'Last Tango in Paris,' a film she had made 11 years earlier. 'No,' she said, pleadingly. 'I'd rather not.' Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, that movie depicts the heated sexual relationship between a young Frenchwoman, Jeanne (Schneider), and an older American expat, Paul (Marlon Brando). What ended up making 'Tango' more infamous than famous was a scene in which Paul forces himself on Jeanne, with the help of a smear of butter. That scene would haunt Schneider, who died at 58 in 2011, the rest of her life. In a 2007 interview, she said that the moment had been sprung upon her with no warning: 'I felt humiliated and to be honest, I felt a little raped, both by Marlon and by Bertolucci.' It's easy to see why this posed a moral and ethical problem for the director Jessica Palud, whose new film, 'Being Maria,' stars Anamaria Vartolomei as Schneider and Matt Dillon as Brando. 'That was the big question mark when we started writing our film: Do we re-enact the scene or not?' Palud said in a video interview from France. 'Everybody I talked to who had known Maria mentioned the trauma caused by that scene, so I just couldn't avoid it.' 'Being Maria' starts with Schneider observing her father, the well-known French actor Daniel Gélin (Yvan Attal) on a set. She is fascinated by the world of filmmaking, and right away we are conscious of the importance of who is watching and who is being watched. When, not long after, the 19-year-old Maria is cast in 'Tango' and becomes the focus of attention, Palud felt it was important to continue to concentrate on the woman's gaze. 'I didn't want to reproduce Bertolucci's camera — it's not a remake of 'Tango' — so I tried to change the scene's point of view and do it from her perspective,' the director said. 'So we see her watching the crew, and the crew watching her. Her 'no' and her tears are real, she isn't acting anymore. We see the entire crew just waiting for the director to say 'cut.'' Palud (who got into the film industry as a 19-year-old intern on Bertolucci's 'The Dreamers' some two decades ago) had secured the original 'Tango' screenplay from the Cinémathèque Française archives. She could see for herself that the notorious scene was not in it, confirming Schneider's version. Naturally, work proceeded very differently on the 'Being Maria' shoot, which involved an intimacy coordinator, but the filming was still harrowing for Vartolomei. 'I couldn't stop crying that day — I think I had completely internalized Maria's anger, the violence of that scene,' the actress said in a video chat. 'Sometimes you tell yourself, 'Come on, you'd be trying to fight him off.' But you can't, it's a man twice your size and the violence is such that you feel completely alone. That's when I understood where Maria's sorrow came from: loneliness.' 'She was so shy that she could close herself off and had an inaccessible side,' Vartolomei added. 'She was really mysterious. That's why we rehearsed a lot — we were trying to find her. I struggled grasping her and even having portrayed her, she remains somewhat mysterious to this day.' Dillon, reached by phone, was open in his admiration for Brando, who meant a great deal to him as an actor, and he did like 'Tango' as a film. But he also acknowledged that something had gone very wrong. 'Having started acting at a very young age, I'm very sensitive to the exploitation thing,' Dillon said. 'So I had these kind of strange, paradoxical feelings going on.' The 'Tango' episode is a relatively small part of 'Being Maria,' but it is clearly pivotal, as it is in the book that inspired the film, 'My Cousin Maria Schneider.' In it, the journalist Vanessa Schneider offers an intimate take on an older family member whom she saw regularly while growing up and greatly admired. The book, delicately and affectionately, traces a tragic arc from Maria Schneider's childhood with a father who only started connecting with her when she was in her teens, through her attempts to shake off 'Tango,' her descent into heroin addiction and her efforts to find herself as an actress and as a woman. 'She suffered from what happened on the set and then from what happened when the movie came out,' Vanessa Schneider said via video from France. 'For puritanical viewers, she was an easy woman who made pornography. It was brutal for her, especially since it wasn't at all in her nature — she was pretty modest, reserved and fairly conservative in certain respects.' After 'Tango,' she turned down most scripts involving nudity, her cousin said. 'This created a reputation as someone who was difficult to work with,' Vanessa Schneider added. 'Then drugs came into the picture and she got this reputation in the industry as someone who wasn't reliable.' Schneider's own favorite among her films was the Michelangelo Antonioni drama 'The Passenger' (1975), in which she was magnetic opposite another American star, Jack Nicholson. The New York Times's Manohla Dargis called it Antonioni's 'greatest film' when it was rereleased in 2005. Whenever an interview would steer her toward 'Tango,' Maria Schneider often offered to talk about 'The Passenger' instead. Mainly she landed supporting parts, most notably in the 1979 drama 'La Dérobade' ('Memoirs of a French Whore' in the United States), for which she was nominated for a César Award (the French equivalent of an Oscar). Over the decades, a certain mystique has developed around the actress. 'It's a combination of things,' Vanessa Schneider said. 'Tango' was 'incredibly successful around the world. Entire generations saw it. Maria also had a strong personality, she was charismatic and had an impact on a lot of people.' 'They may not have seen many of her movies,' she continued, 'but for a generation she was emblematic thanks to her look, her voice, the way she expressed herself — you could tell she was outside the norm.' Schneider's reputation has also been restored thanks to the rediscovery of the directness with which she discussed the manipulations and violations filmmaking can involve, long before #MeToo and cases like the prosecution in the French courts of the director Christophe Ruggia, who was convicted in February of sexually assaulting the actress Adèle Haenel, who was a minor at the time. Commenting on the reaction to her film, Palud said, 'Many interviewers in France were telling me, 'It's wild, it sounds like something you'd hear in 2024.'' But, she noted, 'most of the words in the film are Maria's. It's what she said in the 1970s and '80s.' This may explain why Schneider seems to be in the zeitgeist. The director Elisabeth Subrin made the César-winning short 'Maria Schneider, 1983' (2022), in which three actresses re-enact the TV interview from that year. Last year, feminist groups and individuals asked the Cinémathèque to provide context around a planned screening of 'Tango,' which ended up being canceled altogether. And in January, the Parisian one-woman show 'Alone Like Maria' drew parallels between the experience of its star, Marilou Aussilloux, and that of Schneider. The late actress is casting a long shadow. Palud's film doesn't cover Schneider's childhood or years of illness. 'I wanted to end on a strong image,' the director explained, with Maria looking at the camera, saying that she's listening to us ('Je vous écoute'), and, in effect, encouraging us to speak. There was something 'almost political' about the scene, Palud added. 'My movie is like a report, unadorned: What do we do with this?'
