Demolishing History

L.A. Observed and L.A. Weekly report the beginning of the demolition of the Pickford Building on the former United Artists Studio Lot. A piece of Hollywood (and cinema, and art) history that is gone forever to satisfy the greed of some.

To express just what film history has happened here would take hours. In addition to silent film classics like Son of the Sheik, Sparrows and Thief of Bagdad films like Wuthering Heights (1939), Guys and Dolls, Some Like It Hot (1959), and West Side Story (1959) were also shot there. (Kevin Roderick)

The Charlotte Observer discusses why so many romantic movies end in drama:

“Gone With the Wind,” “Casablanca,” “Brief Encounter,” “Wuthering Heights” – the list of memorable, ill-matched film couples stretches on and on. (And not just straight couples, either: Think of the power of “Brokeback Mountain.”) (Lawrence Toppman)

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2012/04/04/3151097/loves-always-better-if-someone.html#storylink=cpy

The Guardian's Music Blog describes Loreen's song Euphoria like this:

Euphoria, Sweden's entry to this year's Eurovision, is the best kind of melodramatic nonsense: wrought declarations of love in the verses leading into - yes - euphoric house chords in the chorus. The live performance is probably better than the record itself, with Loreen doing some slightly Wuthering Heights-esque dancing in the wind before fake snow comes down and she does a weird kind of exaggerated 'belly laugh' motion and then a man comes on and starts dancing with her and it's all rather amazing. (Scott Mildenhall)

More Kate Bush references. The New York Times reviews a concert devoted to Kate Bush's music performed at the Lincoln Center (last January!) by Theo Bleckmann:

Dapper in a tri-tone sports jacket, vest and turquoise dress shirt, Mr. Bleckmann sang “Wuthering Heights,” a song from Ms. Bush’s debut LP, “The Kick Inside,” which channels Emily Brontë’s heroine Catherine, and here featured an angular piano solo by Henry Hey.  (Will Hermes)

Curiously, the Liverpool Daily Post announces that:

A homage to Kate Bush, starring Dutch singer Maaike Breijma, starts its national tour at the Philharmonic Hall next week.
The show is created by Liverpool promoter Spike Beecham, who discovered Breijma after a close friend saw her perform as Kate Bush at a festival in Belfast.
Fittingly, Bush’s only tour of UK and Europe, in 1979, was launched in the city.
Beecham says: “Kate’s fans have waited over 30 years to see what we believe will be the next best thing to the real thing. It seems only fitting to launch the show in Liverpool.”
Breijma resembles the Wuthering Heights singer as well as sharing her birthday. She will be backed by a band of top local musicians and dancers in a production designed by the team behind Lord of the Dance. (Laura Davis)

New York Jazz Diary added:

As a listener I was really grateful how well Theo Bleckmann also introduced the songs: it added a lot to my growing fascination with the wonder of Kate Bush. For example, he mentioned how Bush wrote the hit tune Wuthering Heights without never having read the book (just having watched the TV show)??  (Ines)

The Daily Herald (Illinois) reviews a local production of The Turn of the Screw:

Fancying herself another Jane Eyre and fueled by romantic fantasies involving her employer, the woman sets off to “seduce” young Flora (a mute character whom the audience never sees), and her canny elder brother, 10-year-old Miles (the enigmatic, wonderfully boyish Sandys), who arrives home having been expelled from boarding school for a reason neither he nor his headmaster will explain.  (Barbara Vitello)

The Chicago Tribune reviews the same production:

[Jeffrey] Hatcher [(the author of the play)] takes plenty of liberties with the original. But by splitting the roles between two actors, he also provides a cunning narrative hook for the audience. It's the governess onstage against the actor who plays everyone else, making us wonder whether she's the plucky heir to Jane Eyre she imagines herself to be, or if everything we hear is from a crazy woman. (Kerry Reid)

Another adaptation of the Henry James's novel is running in Dallas. The Dallas Observer says:

With hints of Jane Eyre in its depiction of childcare among apathetic landed gentry, The Turn of the Screw is also a cautionary tale about what happens when people can't talk freely about sex.  (Elaine Liner)

Gulf News talks about Wilkie Collins:

By 1857, the literary journalist Edmund Yates would place Collins fourth among contemporary English novelists, just behind Dickens, Thackeray and Charlotte Brontë. "As a storyteller he has no equal," Yates declared and readers have agreed: The Moonstone (1868) has never gone out of print, while The Woman in White remains as thrilling to read today as it did when first published in 1860. Until recently, Collins' other novels have fared less well, but many of them have now been reissued in the Oxford World's Classics series.  (Peter Parker)

Socialist Worker quotes Karl Marx on Charles Dickens:

And how have Dickens and Thackeray, Miss Brontë and Mrs. Gaskell painted them [the middle class]? As full of presumption, affectation, petty tyranny and ignorance; and the civilized world have confirmed their verdict with the damning epigram that it has fixed to this class, that "they are servile to those above, and tyrannical to those beneath them. (New York Tribune on August 1, 1854)

Emerald Barnes' Dreaming Awake Blog interviews the author Barbara Taylor Sissel:

When did you decide you wanted to be a writer and published author?  What kept you pushing towards your dream?  
I was around eleven, reading Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë when a scene in the book moved me to tears, Catherine and Heathcliff, their hopeless situation. Their whole world was so alive for me, as if I was there. The sensation was almost out-of-body and it thrilled me that a story could have such power. I’d had the sensation before through reading and many times since, but that particular time, I popped up my head and thought: I want to do this. I want to take readers out of themselves this way. I want to create a world where they can live for a while. I wanted to somehow pay forward the joy I found in reading books. That urge never really left me. I took detours from it, but the desire was there, a whisper in my ear.

Another Ebook vs traditional book article in the Galesburg Register Mail;  Bookanalia recommends Jane Eyre for book groups; Winnetka-Glencoe Patch shares a stenography anecdote quoting Wuthering Heights;  Página tras Página (in Spanish) reviews Jane Eyre;  Literary Arcadia and The Briarfield Chronicles post about The Tenant of Wildfell Hall; Guardiã da Meia Noite (in Portuguese) reviews Being Emily (we refuse to write the ineffable Portuguese title) by Anne Donovan; Kaya Scodelario Web has uploaded over a thousand screen captures of Wuthering Heights 2011; The Rumpus reviews The Flight of Gemma Hardy; Cendrillon (in Italian) compares Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë; jonnybraun posts a poem with Jane Eyre as subject; Kehoe78 uploads an original song inspired by Wuthering Heights for his school project.