Obvious things about a creative work you realize after the millionth time (OPEN SPOILERS POSSIBLE)

Of course, it needs to be something that the audience can understand. Most people don’t know the rules of poker. If the showdown is between a straight and trips, most of the audience won’t know who won. But if the showdown is between four aces and four jacks, most of the audience will know who won.

Sure, but by the same token, most people would recognize a pair of aces over a pair of jacks, too.

Part of the drama is setting up the other person with a seeming winning hand so that will bet big. If they only have a pair of jacks, they won’t be big even if you only have a pair of threes.

Full house is a fairly common hand, so you want something that the audience can understand that says “bet big - you will win”.

Funny scene but it’s not the one I’m remembering.

“What’ve you got?”

“Five Aces!”

“You can’t – I’ve got them.”

Okay, I could be wrong about this, but it did just occur to me.

In the movie Fame, the one about the performing arts school, a music student, Bruno Martelli, has an electric/electronic keyboard player, complex enough for three prog rock bands. One of the throughlines of the story is the constant friction between him and Mr. Shorofsky, the head of the music department, who is very old-school and seems to think that progress ended with “Mozart when he was two!” The last scene of the film is the graduation showcase, where the seniors sing, dance and play instruments. Including a modern-dance number, accompanied by a rock band.

Zuh? The way Shorofsky was always bitching about Bruno’s keyboards, you’d think he’d never seen an electric instrument before. So how did a rock band sneak in there? Well, it just occurred to me, perhaps the electric guitarists are there because of Bruno. Perhaps he was the trailblazer, and other students started gravitating towards rock/electric music, and it just flowed that way. The dance department doesn’t only do ballet, after all.

It’s been a long time since I saw the movie - but I think Shorofsky’s problem was not so much the idea of an electric instrument but the idea of a single person playing a synthesizer replacing an entire orchestra. ( I seem to recall him referring to it as masturbation , not music) That high school certainly had more musical groups than just an orchestra.

Well, he’s got a point there – that would put a lot of people out of work!

In the 1975 movie Smile, about a small-town teen beauty contest they have for the first time a small but live orchestra. One of the girls keeps missing her cues until the music director snaps and throws his baton at her. Dodging it she apologizes, “I’m sorry, Mr. [Director]. It’s just live music is so different than recorded.”

He collects himself, and takes a deep breath. “Yes, miss. It is that difference on which our livelihood depends.”

I love Smile. A very underrated movie. Michael Kidd was wonderful.

“Help others.”

Update for anyone interested: The booklet included in the box set has an interview with Steve Wilson who remixed the album:

Q: Looking at the credits, the original album was mixed by Roger Glover and Ian Paice. It would appear that the original mix reflects how those two musicians would have heard the rest of the band whilst performing.

A: Yes, Ritchie Blackmore is on the left [in the mix] and Jon Lord is on the right, which is kind of the opposite to the way that they’d be from the audience’s perspective on stage, but how Ian Paice would have heard them.

I was just going to say “Well, you get to pretend you’re in the band!”

Thanks for the information. Interesting to know.
I’m still puzzled why Rainbow’s live album On stage has the same stereomix with Blackmore on the left. This was produced by Martin Birch (not a band member).
But thanks for the info.

“Beat” + “beetles” = Beatles. Clever, right?

So “monkey” + “keys” = Monkees? I think someone did not quite get it. What is a kee, anyway?

Byrds (WTF???)

The Scorpions, etc.— that is fine, that is just an animal.

I think it’s just “The Beatles misspelled their animal, so we’ll misspell our animal, too.”.

It’s also wordplay on their most famous song, “Tern! Tern! Tern!”

I had a classmate in elementary school whose name was Penny Nichols. Never underestimate the capacity for parents to give unfortunate names to their kids.

Remember that the Monkees didn’t begin as a group of musicians who met one day and decided to see what they would sound like as a band. It began as a television show created by Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider who had just seen A Hard Day’s Night and decided to make a television show about a band. The name they first came up with was The Monkeys, apparently by thinking that monkeys were cuter animals than beetles. Later they decided that it was necessary to name them something that was not quite an animal name, so they changed the name to The Monkees. Rafelson and Schneider then hired lots of writers, directors, songwriters, musicians, and actors for the show. They chose the actors who played the four members of the band because they were good actors and reasonably good singers. They wanted them to be about the right age and to be able to play a variety of character types so that the band had various personality types. At first they didn’t play their instruments, but they learned how to as the show went on. They decided to have the show include various avant garde film techniques in its production. They rented (or maybe bought) a house on the beach of Hollywood, California to pose as the house that the Monkees lived in They then persuaded NBC to run the program and it was a hit for a while.