THE BATTLE OF SHAKER HEIGHTS

Directed by Kyle Rankin and Efram Potelle; written by Erica Beeney; director of photography, Thomas E. Ackerman; edited by Richard Nord; music by Richard Marvin; production designer, Lisa K. Sessions; produced by Chris Moore and Jeff Balis; released by Miramax Films. Running time: 90 minutes. This film is rated PG-13.

This film is the latest result of that HBO series, in which competitors win a chance to make a low-budget movie, financed by Miramax, on the condition that their behind-the-scenes agonies be filmed for a making-of series detailing the squabbling and posing and bullshit going on.

I did not watch the HBO series beyond a few minutes.  These are the kind of earnest and rather dim, but very self-important, young folks that live in the apartments around me here on Laurel, just above Sunset.  They are tiresome.  Or maybe I'm just an old grump.  My next-door neighbor is forever traveling out to Pasadena to audition for American Idol, and when he's not I hear him singing scales and catches of pop tunes.  Harriet-the-Cat hides under the bed. 

Of course I do have normal neighbors - a woman in her eighties who speaks to me in Yiddish, the Russian resident manager and her husband, the ninety-four-year retired MGM historian who speaks six languages fluently and plays scrabble by the pool in French with Claudine, my neighbor who grew up in Toulouse.  Just folks.

Back to the topic....  This HBO series was unwatchable for me.  Watching young folks make dumb decisions and get upset and treat each other really badly is something I left behind when I got out of teaching twenty years ago.

The movie from the HBO series, The Battle Of Shaker Heights, premiered down the street at the Arclight last week.  I saw the searchlights from my study window.  All the folks mentioned above were there giving interviews.  I skipped it.

By all accounts it is not a very good movie.  Not awful.  Not compelling, according to the reviews.

Someone once said to me that movies were essentially an adolescent art form.  Yep, that seems right.

Perhaps when it goes to cable television I'll watch it.

But given where I live perhaps I should take the industry more seriously.

This last Tuesday evening, the 19th, I went with a friend to the Hollywood Bowl for a concert.  We went to see, under the stars in that canyon, a performance of Vivaldi's Le Quattro Stagioni (The Four Seasons).  Pleasant stuff from eighteen-century Venice.  And the cloudless evening was sweet - in the seventies.

The details?  The Los Angeles Philharmonic or really, the Los Angeles Philharmonic strings with a harpsichord.  The conductor?  JoAnn Falletta late of the Long Beach Symphony and quite good.  The solo violins?  Soloists from the Philharmonic, one per "season,"  - Michele Bovyer, Akiko Tarumoto, Jonathan Wei and Stacy Wetzel.  All pretty astounding, with Bovyer the best.

But concerts at the Bowl are odd.  The crickets are nice, but the LAPD helicopters passing over now and then can be disconcerting (pun) as they whack their way across the sky to check out another Escalade being carjacked or this or that gang shooting.  

And the acoustics are always a problem.  First is the usual outdoor-distance problem.  You see the conductor give a decisive downbeat, but you don't hear the result for a half-second or more.  Your ears and eyes don't agree.  So you look away from the stage after a bit.  Well, light and sound travel at vastly different rates.

Then there is the amplification.  This is chamber music and not meant for large outdoor amphitheaters.  So everything was sent through probably the best outdoor sound system in the world.  You could hear the attack of the bow on the strings, the spatial separation was extraordinary, and the sound was detailed and full.   Great realism.

But it was so good that if you closed your eyes it sounded as if the ensemble was twenty feet way, and slightly above you.  Open your eyes and they're more than a hundred feet away and well below you. 

The Bowl has, over the last decades, added giant absorbing and deflecting spheres that hang, big and white, over the stage.  The sound was improved, but one thinks of the spheres that chased Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner, that surreal television series from the late sixties.   And now there are two large white speaker towers flanking the stage, each three or four stories high.  Great speakers.  Odd architecture.

Well, they will tear down the Bowl in the next year and rebuild it once again.  We will see how that comes out.

But every time I go to the Hollywood Bowl I think of Bugs Bunny there, doing the imitation of Leopold Stokowski and driving that fat tenor crazy - do you know that cartoon?  Actually that cartoon is Warner Brothers' reaction to Disney's Fantasia, where Leopold Stokowski actually conducts at the Bowl, with Mickey Mouse involved somehow.  Mel Blanc and the guys at Warner Brothers are making fun of the pretentious Disney folks. 

But the Hollywood Bowl?  It's a silly place.

Here is the odd thing.  Vivaldi is popular today, Vivaldi is known today, only because of Hollywood.

Who is the most recorded violinist in history?  Louis Kaufman. 

This man was the concertmaster, the principal violist, for almost every Hollywood film from 1934 to 1973.    Gone With the Wind.  Casablanca. Wuthering Heights.  Ben-Hur.  Laura.  When the strings swell, he's leading them.

Kaufman died in 1984 and his widow, Annette, completed and edited his memoirs, which are being published this month under the title A Fiddler's Tale: How Hollywood and Vivaldi Discovered Me (University of Wisconsin Press).

As she says, "When Louis recorded 'The Four Seasons,' Vivaldi's name wasn't even in most musical histories."   The Vivaldi connection came about "by happenstance." 

"It wasn't that he looked for it.  Eighteenth century Venice was far from our thoughts."  The Vivaldi was a last-minute substitution, suggested by CBS conductor Alfredo Antonini, for a Lev Knipper concerto that Kaufman had been scheduled to record.  His December 1947 version won France's Grand Prix du Disque in 1950 and was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2002. (Naxos is scheduled to re-release the Kaufman Four Seasons on CD early next year.)

So if you are sitting in the St-Chapelle cathedral in Paris listening to one of the free concerts, which are almost always Vivaldi, you are listening to music that would have remained lost but for this guy out here in Hollywood.

Annette Kaufman is 88 and still lives in a two-story house in Westwood, over by UCLA, where she and Louis Kaufman lived for most of their 62-year marriage.  Lloyd Wright, whose father was Frank Lloyd Wright, designed the house for them in 1934.  

A bit of history.