William Castle's memoirs of Amelié

Last night I finished reading William Castle's memoir, Step Right Up: I’m Gonna Scare the Pants Off America.  It doesn't go into much biographical detail, starting off with his roots in theatre, and moving on to his career in Hollywood fairly quickly.  He was a director, and later a producer who quickly established himself as a master of marketing.  He was best known for promoting his films with gimmicks that enhanced the B movie offerings of horror and thriller fare.  He had genius ideas, like a device installed in the theatre seats that would goose you at key moments during the screenings of  The Tingler - a movie with Vincent Price as a mad scientist discovering there was a little creature in the base of your spine that would GROW and kill you if you were scared and didn't scream the fear out.  Totally ridiculous idea, but I bet it was super fun feeling like a little monster was loose in the theatre and it just jabbed you, then screaming your head off in a theatre full of other folk doing the exact same thing.  His movie gimmicks were popular, and got people lining up to see his shows.   His first gimmick was for Macabre, a movie he produced and directed himself that he showed to Warner Brothers when he was shopping for a distributor.  They stole his promotional idea of insuring the audience if they died of fright watching the show.  He threatened to sue, but nothing came of that except Jack Warner apologised and offered to buy Macabre.  Castle dropped the suit, seemingly out of respect that Warner begged him to, but he didn't bite on the sale since the offer only covered his $90,000 cost of production.

There's much more, but I'm gonna leave it at that.  He was a showman who brought the fun to the movie house.

I watched the beginning of Amelié.  I was very much enjoying it up to the point where she leaves the memorabilia box in the phone booth, then I lost interest.  I think that's OK, especially for rewatching movies, just seeing the bits you like best makes sense. 

I used to like watching the opening of Bram Stoker's Dracula - Gary Oldman over the top dramatical in his grief and tragedy.  Shakespearean mang! 7 minutes or so of sassifying Hammerhorrorfisted heaven.  Best I could find is these youtubes, broken into 2 parts and even pathetically pixelated, they can still barely contain the grand guignol majesty of the scenes.

Anyhow, Joe noticed the plot of Amelié, at least that beginning bit, was similar to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.  I noticed that they both had Aspergerian qualities especially the sensual attention to detail and the intense focus on surface and the now.  I think many of the characters in Amelié are on the Asperger spectrum, at least the way the film is shot gives a immediate sensesurround approaching the experience of what it's like to be autistic and find the world a little overwhelming.  And that's perhaps its main appeal; we get to go yeah, it's a beautiful world we live in.  Amelié performs psychic surgery and reattaches a sense of wonder you may have not even noticed you'd lost.