Jason Overbeck
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bentclouds.bsky.social
Jason Overbeck
@bentclouds.bsky.social
410 followers 280 following 1.5K posts
Editor/Assistant Editor working in film and advertising.

https://letterboxd.com/bentclouds/
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bentclouds.bsky.social
Local thrift store has “Dear Me,” Peter Ustinov’s autobiography, here’s the section where we talks about working on LOLA MONTES and calls Max Ophüls “a German giggler who lived in his own particular stratosphere of subtlety.” Enjoy.
DEAR ME • 277 other. We had lunch together since there seemed nothing else to do. By the time we were ready for coffee, the atmosphere had warmed pleasantly. Instead of regaling each other with tales of distant Haiti in some London club, we were resigned to sitting in distant Haiti and regaling each other with tales of London. We arrived back in England, which was slightly anticlimatic after our fill of exoticism. The house was beautiful, but hardly practical once there was a child. There were stairs and more stairs, up and down, and a never-ending series of redoubtable nannies, who never lasted longer than a week or two. The tensions in the house were often very difficult to take, and it was becoming abundantly clear that Suzanne had a dislike for many things English because of a particular prejudice which really had nothing to do with the English themselves, but with Canadians of English or Scottish origin. We went to France, where I had been engaged to appear in Max Ophüls's film Lola Montes. We left in my car, taking a nanny wearing a uniform, which included a gray velvet collar, the dirtiest article of clothing I had ever seen except on a recluse. Reluctantly I carried Nanny's largest suitcase to the car and noticed that its center of gravity kept shifting as I walked. I placed it on the pavement and asked her what was inside it. She blushed and refused to say. I reminded her that we would have to go through customs, and she might be forced to open it there. She began to vacillate, and eventually allowed me to open it. It contained a collection of glass milk bot-tles, inadequately washed out, which now contained London tap water, rendered opaque by the remnants of milk. "Well, I heard up in Edinburgh that the French water is undrinkable," she pleaded. It was quite clear that yet another nanny had outstayed her welcome. The film of Lola Montes was destined to become a classic. There were precious few signs of this destiny during its making. Max Ophüls was a rara… 278 DEAR ME ing his obituary for the Guardian, I wrote that he had the gift of manufacturing the smallest wristwatch ever known, and could subsequently insist on suspending it from a cathedral so that passersby could tell the time. The new "letter-box" format of Cinemascope was imposed on him for commercial reasons by the producers, but he whispered to me with the glee of a court jester that he had found a way of cheating them, and reverting to the beloved intimacy of the old small screen. "How?" I asked, thinking he must have found some contractual loophole. He held his hands up, far apart, and brought them slowly closer to one another. "Two pieces of black velvet," he whispered, and roared with uncontrollable laughter at the simplicity of his act of sabotage. Max was the first great poet of bad taste, in that he was the first to exploit Art Nouveau as a thing of beauty and style, not merely as a curiosity, the visible cancer of a decadent and dying society as my generation was brought up to believe it to be. He saw in its asymmetrical outbursts elements of controlled imagination that were eminently cinematic, and to borrow a phrase and even an idea from Calder, he made them mobiles with his camera, which never tired of laying pictorial ambushes for the human face. In his endless search for subtlety, he would ask you to register hatred or brutality without changing the expression of your face and then plunge you into shafts of darkness, or shoot you through a metal banister or a net curtain to obliterate every effect except your presence. He was a dictator in the image of a Prussian Junker, who found the most irresistible of all comic creations in this world, the Junkers of Prussia. His father had been a military tailor in Saar-brücken called Oppenheimer, who, like the Jewish tailor in Zuck-mayer's Der Hauptmann von Köpenick, kept barking at his studious son to stand up, with his shoulders well back. "Halt dich gerade, halt dich gerade, sonst kommst du mie zu Mili-… DEAR ME • 279 The old man was shrewder politically than the majority of officers he fitted. He believed none of the military optimism of the time that the war would be a short one, and since some cavalry regiments wore black trousers, Max remembered him calling up to his assistants — "Fix red stripes on all our tuxedo trousers; this war's going to go on a long time." Unfortunately he could not be expected to know that the cavalry would last a much shorter time than the war. Max loved officers of the Belle Epoque, their utter uselessness, their obligations toward virility, their statutory quick temper over imagined slights, their generous ability to make room for younger men by eliminating each other on the field of honor. And yet his comments were never destructive, and he handled the objects of his attention like rare wines, as though the absurdity of years could be destroyed by an excessive movement of the bottle in which these rare essences were contained. He was a tender despot, more than a little in love with those things his intelligence most disliked A most Germanic idea occurred to him during the huge circus scene. The rhythm of Georges Auric's lilting score was taken up by a series of dwarfs and Lilliputians, moving up and down on ropes like pistons or like wooden horses on a gigantic merry-go-round. The dwarfs were fairly comfortable, unless any of them happened to suffer from vertigo, because their massive torsos were firmly implanted in the leather harnesses. The Lilliputians were less serene, how-ever, since they were perfectly formed miniature people and they had some difficulty remaining immobile in belts that had been patently designed for dwarfs. One Lilliputian began to slip dangerously, and the belt tried to become a collar; only his arms preventing him from either sliding right through and dropping some thirty to forty feet, or else being strangled. The pathetic cries of his tiny voice could be barely heard over the caressing waltz. There was a g… 280 • DEAR ME him, appalled. He felt my presence, glanced at me with a guilty grin, and dissolved into his uncontrollable fit of silent laughter, taking the time to shout "Cut!" The point was, he had his shot. During another immensely complicated take lasting four and a half minutes and involving horses, tumblers, and trapeze artists, and with the camera moving on an endless complicated track, spiraling and dipping - 1, as the ringmaster, sent a dwarf off for a glass of water, which was not part of the meticulous planning. Surprised, the dwarf ran off to fetch it. Since he didn't know where to find it, it took rather a long time, and my irritation increased, as did the hoarseness of my throat. At last he brought it, 1 drank it surreptitiously while shouting out my lines, like a headwaiter having a secret nip, and gave the empty glass to the dwarf, drying my mouth with a large silk handkerchief which was part of my costume. It was as relaxed as the rest was formal. At the end of the take, Max Ophüls expressed both the quality of his despotism and of his magnanimity. Taking me aside, for once rather sad, he said: "Peter, the one thing I regret is that I didn't tell you to do that." I did one other film at that time, which was shot in Sicily, and its only remarkable feature was that the producers ran out of money after three days, a record even for Italy. But by then, I had already completed Romanoff and Juliet, a three-act play absolutely neoclassical in form. I had always remembered the joy of playing in The Rivals with Edith Evans, and I wanted to try my hand at something as direct and as undisguisedly theatrical, ignoring the famous "fourth wall" and employing asides whenever expedient. I remembered that The Rivals had entertained troops, some of whom had never seen a play before, much more than the low farces specifically aimed at their intellect. The theme was a variation on the tragic love of Romeo and Juliet, with Romeo as son of the Soviet Ambassador and Julie…
November 9, 2025 at 8:34 PM
bentclouds.bsky.social
Top five after “Various” which was the favorite. This list will probably change a bit once I’ve finished cataloging my 7” collection.

I should trim down by King Gizzard and Segall collections a bit. Not all of those are essential.
Bob Dylan - 40 Thee Oh Sees - 32 King Gizzard And The Liza... - 31 Ty Segall - 28 David Bowie - 25
November 8, 2025 at 8:50 AM
bentclouds.bsky.social
Crazy. I have this same notecard on my computer.
mama se mama sa mama koo sa mama se mama sa mama koo sa
November 8, 2025 at 1:56 AM
bentclouds.bsky.social
November 5, 2025 at 9:40 PM
bentclouds.bsky.social
Eleanor can’t bear to look.
Eleanor rooting for the dodgers.
November 2, 2025 at 2:53 AM
bentclouds.bsky.social
Good mail day with arrivals from @diabolikdvd.bsky.social. So many essential pinky titles being quietly released by Discotek, who seems to specialize in anime.
The Nice Guys (second sight 4K) Terrifying Girls’ High School: Women’s Violent Classroom (Discotek)
November 1, 2025 at 6:14 PM
bentclouds.bsky.social
Lots of great Halloween decorations in my area but this one spoke to me.
Beach Boys RIP
October 31, 2025 at 10:37 PM
bentclouds.bsky.social
This is my schedule for AFI FEST.

YOUNG MOTHERS vs YES was my only annoying conflict. They overlap and both have only the one screening. I grabbed YOUNG MOTHERS for now but I might switch…
OCT 22 2:30 - THE STRANGER 5:30 - FATHER MOTHER SISTER BROTHER 8:45 - REBUILDING OCT 23 12:15 - TWO PROSECUTORS 2:45 - ORPHAN 6:15 - YOUNG MOTHERS (or YES) 9:30 - CURRENTS OCT 24 1:30 - MIROIRS NO. 3 5:15 - LA GRAZIA 9:15 - HOW TO SHOOT A GHOST OCT 25 10:30 - GHOST ELEPHANTS 1:25 - MY FATHER'S SHADOW 4:10 - OLMO 6:00 - ROMERIA OCT 26 2:30- THE LOVE THAT REMAINS 5:10 - CASE 137 8:15 - THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE
October 4, 2025 at 4:59 AM
bentclouds.bsky.social
Or how about this THE FABELMANS (presumably?) crew shirt?
THE FABELMANS shirt
October 4, 2025 at 12:18 AM
bentclouds.bsky.social
Come on LA movie nerds. You know you need a vintage DEFENDING YOUR LIFE shirt…
Defending Your Life shirt
October 4, 2025 at 12:07 AM
bentclouds.bsky.social
Yes.
Eleanor and her baby
October 3, 2025 at 8:24 PM
bentclouds.bsky.social
#Top5FirstViews September 2025
1. A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN (Kazan)
2. SCENT OF A SPELL (Ikeda)
3. THE CANDIDATE (Ritchie)
4. NIGHT OF THE JUGGLER (Butler / Furie)
5. THE MARGIN (Borowczyk)

Damn good month. ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER was the best new release I saw by a mile.
A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN SCENT OF A SPELL THE CANDIDATE NIGHT OF THE JUGGLER
October 1, 2025 at 9:55 PM
bentclouds.bsky.social
This is actually my second copy of it. I grabbed this one because it was signed.
Richard Fleischer signature
October 1, 2025 at 12:07 AM
bentclouds.bsky.social
Picked up some interesting books at the local thrift store. The Fleischer is signed.
Paul Mazursky - Show Me the Magic Gene Tierney - Self-Portrait Richard Fleischer - Just Tell Me When to Cry Stanley Booth - Dance With the Devil: The Rolling Stones and Their Times
September 30, 2025 at 11:54 PM
bentclouds.bsky.social
Good mail day. Both Amazon and Barnes & Nobel have good Kino sales happening right now. I picked up some 4K upgrades for films I like quite a bit.
ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND BUG THUNDERBOLT AND LIGHTFOOT UHD
September 25, 2025 at 12:17 AM
bentclouds.bsky.social
Yawn.
Eleanor at the park
September 21, 2025 at 12:41 AM
bentclouds.bsky.social
Good mail day. Hope this lives up to the hype.
NIGHT OF THE JUGGLER 4K UHD
September 16, 2025 at 11:40 PM
bentclouds.bsky.social
Top Redford films that I haven’t seen. Probably going to watch THE CANDIDATE or JEREMIAH JOHNSON. Anyone want to make a strong case for any of the others instead?
Redford films I haven’t seen
September 16, 2025 at 10:14 PM
bentclouds.bsky.social
Let me check the integrity of my laserdisc player the only proper way: with my Milli Vanilli-sploitation porn MILLI VANILLA.
MILLI VANILLA
September 14, 2025 at 10:39 PM
bentclouds.bsky.social
So… i was at an estate sale today and this was $10.
TV/VCR
September 13, 2025 at 1:21 AM
bentclouds.bsky.social
Happy Birthday to the great Brian De Palma. Coincidentally, I’m reading “The De Palma Decade” by Laurent Bouzereau right now and I was very interested to read more about De Palma’s abandoned adaptation of “Cruising” and what he carved away from that script to put into DRESSED TO KILL.
The DE PALMA DECADE REDEFINING CINEMA with Doubles, Voyeurs, and Psychic Teens by Laurent Bouzereau
September 11, 2025 at 11:31 PM
bentclouds.bsky.social
I need to upgrade THE PLAYER, I keep forgetting to grab it during the Criterion sales. I have an all region PRET-A-PORTER in my discard pile, I didn’t care for it on recent rewatch, it’s yours if you want it.
Altman section of blu ray collection
September 10, 2025 at 7:12 PM
bentclouds.bsky.social
Perfect.
Talk Talk - Laughing Stock (1991)
September 9, 2025 at 2:35 AM
bentclouds.bsky.social
I hate this so much.
The funny thing is that "six-seven" doesn't really have a concrete meaning. It's intentionally nonsensical, used for playful or humorous effect, much like other viral slang such as "yeet" or "sus."
September 6, 2025 at 12:39 AM
bentclouds.bsky.social
#Top5FirstViews August 2025
1. LA CEREMONIE (Chabrol)
2. CHRISTMAS IN JULY (Sturges)
3. GENTLEMAN JIM (Walsh)
4. WHEN TOMORROW COMES (Stahl)
5. THE GANG’S ALL HERE (Berkeley)

Fantastic month of movies.
LA CEREMONIE CHRISTMAS IN JULY GENTLEMAN JIM THE GANG’S ALL HERE
September 2, 2025 at 8:22 PM