In Motion Pictures (2012) liner notes

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Liner notes

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In Motion Pictures

A slight but fond reminiscence

Moon Conway

In my more than fifty years cranking the handle of the alibi machine here in Hollywood, it has been my lot to represent many fakes, frauds and just a few genuine talents.

I've served as a drinking buddy, bail-bondsman, father confessor and beard to some of the most romantically irrational leading men and mixed-up glamour girls in motion picture history.

Among my more minor clients, it is hard to think of someone more confounding and preposterous than the subject of this musical compendium.

I first met Elvis Costello in 1978, when I went to collect him from Los Angeles International Airport in my 1967 Venetian Blue Eldorado.

He was arriving directly from an Australian tour on which his barely coherent, 35-minute performances had resulted in the audience hurling torn-up seats at the stage.

All I knew was he wore horn-rim glasses, like my mentor, Phil Silvers, and had something to do with the current "pink rock" craze or so the telex read.

I was therefore somewhat surprised to find him in the Arrivals Hall, sporting a monocle like Eric Von Stroheim, dressed in jodhpurs and clutching the kind of megaphone favoured by directors of the Silent Era.

This was either a rather heavy-handed prank or the Antipodean telegraph had genuinely led him to believe that he was actually being engaged to direct the political and media satire Americathon rather than just making a fleeting musical cameo appearance.

"Hello, old man," he said, in a grandiose but slightly effete English manner, that would have made me want to sock him on the jaw, had he not already been falling-down drunk.

I drove him to the Chateau Marmont, pushing him into his suite and told him to sleep it off, as he had a 5 a.m. call.

At 3 a.m. my telephone rang.

I could barely understand what I took to be some kind of strange Northern English accent but then there seemed to be loud hillbilly music blaring in the background. I listened through girlish laughter, although I could tell that there were also women at the shindig.

"I'm in somewhere called "Ox-Cart," at a party."

The shrieking almost obliterated his location, as he continued in a slurred and whining voice...

"Is Ox-Cart anywhere near the studio? Butterbean and Cranky are on their way over."

And then the line went dead...

My heart sank. I knew he was lost in every sense.

Needless to say, the party later turned out to have been in North Hollywood and not Oxnard and he had simply been awaiting the arrival of the musicians, Paul Butterfield and Rick Danko.

Rather more remarkably, he was somehow delivered to the set with seconds to spare.

Admittedly, he was a little pale and disheveled and had a bloody nose but was otherwise every inch the forgettable English pop star, "Earl Manchester," who was just talented enough to lip-synch a three and half minute song called, "Crawling To The U.S.A."

So why didn't I drop him right there and then, well, I suppose time heals all wounds and then there was the money.

You see a short while later, my very good friend Steven Spielberg called requesting the use of an Elvis Costello song appropriately called "Accidents Will Happen."

I thought there was no harm in brokering the deal.

"Steven, my dear boy," I said to the director, wincing to myself for having employed this affected manner of address that I'd picked up from my client, "Don't you know that movies about little green men went out of fashion in the late '50s?"

There was a stony silence.

I didn't press my luck and as a consequence found myself settling for a rather paltry fee for my charge, minus, of course, my usual 20% commission.

It was a rare mistake but one-hit-wonders were two-a-penny then, or so I thought.

Still, when the early buzz about the movie started to build, I crept into a matinee at Grauman's Chinese Theatre with some trepidation.

What if the "E.T." came out tap-dancing and singing the song at the top of his lungs? What if "Accidents Will Happen" accompanied the cute little squishy creature as it shot across the screen on roller skates, like Barbra Streisand in What's Up Doc?

I needn't have worried, as the song was barely recognizable, being sung under the breath of Elliot's brother as he raids the refrigerator after football practice.

These two music mishaps set the scene and the tone for Elvis Costello's life "In Motion Pictures"; a strange blend of grand folly, good fortune and unlikely inspiration.

Needless to say, I continued to receive the deranged phone calls at what I came to know as "this ungodly hour."

I counted myself as lucky if it was only 3am in London when he called and I could still decipher what the hell he was talking about.

On one occasion, he had returned from the screening of a rough cut of the classic British gangster movie The Long Good Friday and was full of bluster, talking in an erratic Cockney accent that I had never heard him speak in before that call.

"Fuck my old boots, I had to set 'em straight, I had to," he said, cackling like a madman.

"It was like a bad-fucking-episode of 'The-fucking-Sweeney'."

Which is not quite how cinema history remembers the Bob Hoskins vehicle about an East End gangster doing deals with the Mob while tangling with the I.R.A.

And so another great opportunity to place his songs "In Motion Pictures" went begging.

By 1980, my young firebrand was all but extinguished but at least now he was able to make nice on television talk shows.

He even managed to appear just once in the company of a genuine Hollywood legend without disgracing himself, when Elvis Costello and Frank Capra were both guests on the same episode of Tomorrow with Tom Snyder.

Admittedly, there was an interlude in the '80s during which my client and I were not on speaking terms.

This estrangement began when rumours circulated that he had provided the title song of a European art movie called Party Party, without my consultation.

Needless to say, the film failed to find a U.S. distributor and my personal bitterness about this betrayal meant that I made no attempt to see even a bootleg copy of the movie or hear the alleged song.

Film historians have since failed to turn up any extant prints of the film and the soundtrack recording seems to have been erased from the catalogue, so it is not included herein.

In those years between him being a novelty act or an overnight sensation — depending on your generosity — and becoming a legend or ending up in the nostalgia racket — depending on your malice — I truly believed he had lost his edge.

Then, one high noon in the middle of the decade, while I was at the Malibu beach-house that I held onto until my third divorce, he called me "collect" from a gas station on the edge of a Spanish desert, picking up as if we had been speaking just minutes earlier and not after years of silence.

He reeled out what sounded like some hysterical Salvador Dali dream sequence, describing how he had wriggled loose from a heavy tangle of ropes, after being tied to a chair by "Slim and Velma" and claimed that Joe Strummer had been in a shootout with some coffee addicts and his friend was still buried up to his neck in sand and was by now likely eaten by scorpions.

I told him to calm down and that I hadn't heard such drug-crazed gibberish since the days when Dennis Hopper used to call me from Mexico.

"He's here too and I think he's going to kill us all," he said with mayhem in his voice.

Then he started shouting in appalling Spanish, evidently at someone off in the distance, until I got tired of holding on and hung up on him.

Some months later, a package arrived, stained with what appeared to be melted chocolate or even dried blood and addressed in a shaky hand and seemingly written with an eyebrow pencil.

It contained a cassette recording that seemed to be purely instrumental until the deep speaking voice of the actor, Sy Richardson, entered, narrating another equally improbable tale.

It turned out to be a track entitled "A Town Called Big Nothing," from the soundtrack of Alex Cox's salute to the Italian Westerns, Straight To Hell, in which Costello also played a pump-action shotgun-toting butler called "Hives," who dies in a hail of bullets, Cagney-style.

To be frank, few artistes could so consistently turn victory into defeat. When asked to contribute to the soundtrack of Brokeback Mountain, his response was, "Gay cowboys? Who's going to believe that?"

Who else would take the opportunity to write a song with the reggae giant Jimmy Cliff and end up with a rock 'n' roll song?

Then again, Club Paradise, the 1986 movie for which it was written, also combined the equally improbably talents of Peter O'Toole and Twiggy.

Costello was occasionally tapped for on-screen roles but far from playing the poisoners or Peeping Toms that he dreamed of portraying, he was usually cast as "guitar player with glasses," that was until he adopted his trademark headwear, after which he went onto much greater fame as "singer with hat and glasses" in such films as Adam Goldberg's I Love Your Work and culminating in his skillful manhandling of Steve Buscemi's paparazzo character in Tom DiCillo's 2006 movie, Delirious.

Back in 1985, Costello had been perhaps prophetically cast as the inept magician "Roscoe Deville" in a scene in which he played opposite Joanne Whalley-Kilmer, the future captain of the Titanic and the sometime voice of "Thomas the Train" in Alan Bleasdale's dark comedic screenplay No Surrender.

Most of Costello's other on-screen and theatrical music successes of the '80s and early 90s were to be found on the small screen, yet it is in the realm of the unlikely cinematic moment that Costello's improbable career "In Motion Pictures" is best remembered.

Who can forgret hearing "Miracle Man" during the seduction of Michael Corleone's daughter in Godfather II?

Who did not chuckle indulgently upon recognizing the almost inaudible "My Mood Swings" playing on the Dude's headphones during his trip to the dentist in The Big Lebowski.

And who can deny the tawdry thrill of "I Want You" being laced through Michael Winterbottom's movie of the same name, starring Rachel Weisz?

When the writer/director Neil Labute's hero, Harold Pinter, fled the opening night of the stage production of his play The Shape of Things with bleeding ears, due to the deafening Smashing Pumpkins soundtrack, the director pragmatically resolved to employ different instrumental motifs for the film adaptation.

"Lovers Walk" is just one of sunnier Elvis Costello songs that were edited to create much of the underscore, although Harold Pinter's opinion about the music remains unrecorded.

Time passed and Costello songs were now used in slightly ironic ways or as signposts to a time and place in everything from The Wedding Singer to High Fidelity — which oddly enough featured the Costello recording of "Shipbuilding" and not the song of the same title.

Occasionally, new original songs were commissioned, such as "You Stole My Bell" from the Nicolas Cage vehicle The Family Man, or "Oh Well," a co-write with Q-Tip for Darnell Martin's "hip-hop opera" in which Costello also took not one but two unlikely supporting roles, as both a school teacher and a public defender.

My client was also sometimes engaged to sing other people's songs for the movies.

An earlier rum-soaked session in Barbados produced an atmospheric version of Ray Davies' "Days" which eventually found a home in Wim Wender's equally mysterious Until The End Of The World.

Being a master of disguise, Costello performed "Let's Misbehave" in the Cole Porter biopic De-Lovely, although few recognized him, as his costume seemed to combine that of the bandleader Paul Whiteman with the hairstyle of Hermann Goering.

However, the most unlikely piece of casting against type came not on-screen but when Richard Curtis offered to "ruin his career" by employing Costello as an unambiguous romantic balladeer over the closing titles of Notting Hill.

The rendition of the Charles Aznavour/Herbert Kretzmer song "She" was recorded at Abbey Road Studios while luminescent images of Julia Roberts were projected onto a giant screen hung above the orchestra.

"She" was briefly tipped to reach No. 1 in the U.K. charts before settling at a more modest placing at No. 19.

It was, however, a hit around the world from Brazil to the Philippines and remains Costello's calling card in a number of countries in which exposure to the rest of his catalogue triggers everything from bemusement to outrage. Still, it hasn't all been glory.

Some of Costello's finest moments ended up on the cutting room floor.

"Life Shrinks" was a song written for the English language remake of the French cinema classic The War of The Buttons but left unused due to a contractual dispute.

That film might have brought an earlier musical collaboration with film composer Rachel Portman which was not fulfilled until she provided the dramatic string arrangement for "Sparkling Day," the end titles song of the much anticipated 2011 romantic drama One Day.

Another curio that remains in the vault is Sean Penn's performance of "Sulphur To Sugarcane," a song originally composed with movie mogul T Bone Burnett for Penn's politician character to perform as a campaign song in the remake of All The King's Men.

Likewise "The Coward Brothers," as they prefer to be known, wrote "The Crooked Line" for the closing titles of the Johnny Cash biopic Walk The Line after the producers discovered that none of Cash's original songs would be eligible for Oscar nomination.

As ever, The Cowards fell out over money, the song was not used and their feud continued.

However, it was in the company of his brother Henry Burnett that Costello came closest to cinematic immortality when they were nominated for an Academy Award for their composition "The Scarlet Tide," sung by Alison Krauss in the Anthony Minghella motion picture Cold Mountain.

Unfortunately, they did not prevail, being beaten to the Oscar® by a song from some flick about goblins.

The composition has nevertheless gone on to have considerable independent fame, being recorded by or performed in the company of Emmylou Harris, Joan Baez, Jenny Lewis, Kris Kristofferson, Lucinda Williams, Rebecca and Megan Lovell of Larkin Poe, a trio of Rufus Wainwright, Renee Fleming and Kate McGarrigle and The Sugarcanes with a thirty-piece Welsh Male Voice Choir.

The most lasting of such songs is surely "God Give Me Strength," co-written with Burt Bacharach for Grace Of My Heart, Allison Anders' portrait of a semi-fictional Brill Building songwriter.

While Costello's other contribution to the movie — a Holland/Dozier/Holland styled, social commentary song "Unwanted Number" — remains otherwise unrecorded, "God Give Me Strength" began an inspired period of songwriting with Burt Bacharach eventually yielding the twelve songs contained on the 1998 album Painted From Memory. It is a collaboration that continues to this day.

So what has this life "In Motion Pictures" amounted to and why did I stick with my client all these years?

Well, despite the calamities, the binges and the unwelcome telephone calls, the songs of Elvis Costello have played a small and sometimes almost imperceptible part in the films of some of the greatest directors and money-spinners of our time: Steven Spielberg, Joel and Ethan Coen, Francis Ford Coppola, Wim Wenders and Brett Ratner.

It was my favorite director of all, Robert Altman, for whom Costello wrote "Punishing Kiss," which Annie Ross performed in Short Cuts and in whose last released film, The Company, can be heard Costello's surprisingly tender 1978 solo recording of the Rodgers and Hart song "My Funny Valentine."

In my rare dark hours of self-doubt, I am briefly illuminated by the reflected glory of these songs as they accompany the action on the silver screen.

It should also be noted that due to his little known obsession with Ida Lupino, Costello has always been quick to place himself at the service of the shamefully small number of female directors working in cinema, including Lisa Cholodenko, for whose Laurel Canyon Costello provided "Revolution Doll," Allison Anders, Darnell Martin, Lone Scherfig and Risa Bramon Garcia.

The last listed was the director of 200 Cigarettes, which employed several Costello songs in the soundtrack and featured a big cast of young, established and then upcoming actors from the turn of the Millennium, including the brothers Affleck, Kate Hudson, Paul Rudd, Christina Ricci and Martha Plimpton.

Elvis Costello appeared once again "as himself" and as the love interest of Janeane Garofalo in the final scene.

It was also the second movie in which Costello appeared with Courtney Love, a minor piece of trivia with which you are almost certain to be able to win a small wager, even though the combination was never destined to rival the chemistry of William Powell and Myrna Loy.

Speaking of the more mythic Hollywood era, you'll find Chalkie Davies' beautiful, if wishful, archive portrait from 1980 on the cover of this collection, in which Costello assumed the costume of a Hollywood detective.

I fear that regardless of the drag and greasepaint he donned for the occasion, Elvis Costello will always be closer to the sly buffoon in a B-picture than a flawed film noir hero.

Despite all the hubris and bad behaviour, my former charge will likely be remembered more as a pair of familiar glasses glimpsed fleetingly in the background action of someone else's masterpiece.

Thank goodness that we now have In Motion Pictures to recall those occasions when his peculiar talents were in accord with the flickering shadows, galloping tintypes and lingering dreams of those imaginings.

Yours through the magic of celluloid and sound,
— Moon CONWAY, Theatrical Agent and Publicity Advisor To The Stars and Other Heavenly Bodies.

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In Motion Pictures (2012) liner notes


Moon Conway's liner notes for In Motion Pictures.

Images

In Motion Pictures album cover.jpg

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