“We are an independent clothing store. Traditional English clothing with a contemporary twist.
Thursday 14 March 2024
Stumper and Fielding, Portobello Road. A quintessential Gentlemen's and ...
“We are an independent clothing store. Traditional English clothing with a contemporary twist.
Wednesday 13 March 2024
MERCHANT IVORY (2023) trailer | BFI Flare 2024 / The secret shocking truth about Merchant Ivory
‘I got you an Oscar. Why do I need to pay you?’
The secret shocking truth about Merchant Ivory
They were the box-office titans behind sumptuous
period masterpieces. Yet underneath, reveals a new warts-and-all film, they
were skint, stressed, prone to blood-curdling bust-ups – and ping-ponging
between lovers
Ryan Gilbey
Tue 12 Mar
2024 16.21 GMT
If you were
asked to guess which prestigious film-making duo had spent their career
scratching around desperately for cash, trying to wriggle out of paying their
cast and crew, ping-ponging between lovers, and having such blood-curdling
bust-ups that their neighbours called the police, it might be some time before
“Merchant Ivory” sprang to mind. But a new warts-and-all documentary about the
Indian producer Ismail Merchant and the US director James Ivory makes it clear
that the simmering passions in their films, such as the EM Forster trilogy of A
Room With a View, Maurice and Howards End, were nothing compared to the
scalding, volatile ones behind the camera.
From their
initial meeting in New York in 1961 to Merchant’s death during surgery in 2005,
the pair were as inseparable as their brand name, with its absence of any
hyphen or ampersand, might suggest. Their output was always more eclectic than
they got credit for. They began with a clutch of insightful Indian-set dramas
including Shakespeare-Wallah, their 1965 study of a troupe of travelling
actors, featuring a young, pixieish Felicity Kendal. From there, they moved on
to Savages, a satire on civilisation and primitivism, and The Wild Party, a
skewering of 1920s Hollywood excess that pipped Damien Chazelle’s Babylon to
the post by nearly half a century.
Merchant rose at dawn and stole telegrams that agents
had sent to their actors, urging them to down tools
It was in
the 1980s and early 1990s, though, that Merchant Ivory became box-office
titans, cornering the market in plush dramas about repressed Brits in period
dress. Those literary adaptations launched the careers of Hugh Grant, Helena
Bonham Carter, Rupert Graves and Julian Sands, and helped make stars of Emma
Thompson and Daniel Day-Lewis. Most were scripted by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who
had been with them, on and off, since their 1963 debut The Householder; she
even lived in the same apartment building in midtown New York. Many were scored
by Richard Robbins, who was romantically involved with Merchant while also
holding a candle for Bonham Carter. These films restored the costume drama to
the position it had occupied during David Lean’s heyday. The roaring trade in
Jane Austen adaptations might never have happened without them. You could even
blame Merchant Ivory for Bridgerton.
Though the
pictures were uniformly pretty, making them was often ugly. Money was always
scarce. Asked where he would find the cash for the next movie, Merchant
replied: “Wherever it is now.” After Jenny Beavan and John Bright won an
Academy Award for the costumes in A Room With a View, he said: “I got you your
Oscar. Why do I need to pay you?” As Ivory was painstakingly composing each
shot, Merchant’s familiar, booming battle cry would ring out: “Shoot, Jim,
shoot!”
‘You never
went to bed without dreaming of ways to kill Ismail’ … Ismail Merchant, left,
and James Ivory in Trinidad and Tobago, while making The Mystic Masseur.
Photograph: Mikki Ansin/Getty Images
Heat and
Dust, starring Julie Christie, was especially fraught. Only 30 or 40% of the
budget was in place by the time the cameras started rolling in India in 1982;
Merchant would rise at dawn to steal the telegrams from the actors’ hotels so
they didn’t know their agents were urging them to down tools. Interviewees in
the documentary concede that the producer was a “conman” with a “bazaar
mentality”. But he was also an incorrigible charmer who dispensed flattery by
the bucketload, threw lavish picnics, and wangled entrées to magnificent
temples and palaces. “You never went to bed without dreaming of ways to kill
him,” says one friend, the journalist Anna Kythreotis. “But you couldn’t not
love him.”
Stephen
Soucy, who directed the documentary, doesn’t soft-pedal how wretched those sets
could be. “Every film was a struggle,” he tells me. “People were not having a
good time. Thompson had a huge fight with Ismail on Howards End because she’d
been working for 13 days in a row, and he tried to cancel her weekend off.
Gwyneth Paltrow hated every minute of making Jefferson in Paris. Hated it!
Laura Linney was miserable on The City of Your Final Destination because the
whole thing was a shitshow. But you watch the films and you see no sense of
that.”
Soucy’s
movie features archive TV clips of the duo bickering even in the midst of
promoting a film. “Oh, they were authentic all right,” he says. “They clashed a
lot.” The authenticity extended to their sexuality. The subject was not
discussed publicly until after Ivory won an Oscar for writing Call Me By Your
Name: “You have to remember that Ismail was an Indian citizen living in Bombay,
with a deeply conservative Muslim family,” Ivory told me in 2018. But the pair
were open to those who knew them. “I never had a sense of guilt,” Ivory says,
pointing out that the crew on The Householder referred to him and Merchant as
“Jack and Jill”.
Soucy had
already begun filming his documentary when Ivory published a frank, fragmentary
memoir, Solid Ivory, which dwells in phallocentric detail on his lovers before
and during his relationship with Merchant, including the novelist Bruce
Chatwin. It was that book which emboldened Soucy to ask questions on screen –
including about “the crazy, complicated triangle of Jim, Ismail and Dick
[Robbins]” – that he might not otherwise have broached.
The
documentary is most valuable, though, in making a case for Ivory as an
underrated advocate for gay representation. The Remains of the Day, adapted
from Kazuo Ishiguro’s Booker-winning novel about a repressed butler, may be the
duo’s masterpiece, but it was their gay love story Maurice that was their
riskiest undertaking. Set in the early 20th century, its release in 1987 could
scarcely have been timelier: it was the height of the Aids crisis, and only a
few months before the Conservative government’s homophobic Section 28 became
law.
“Ismail
wasn’t as driven as Jim to make Maurice,” explains Soucy. “And Ruth was too
busy to write it. But Jim’s dogged determination won the day. They’d had this
global blockbuster with A Room With a View, and he knew it could be now or
never. People would pull aside Paul Bradley, the associate producer, and say:
‘Why are they doing Maurice when they could be making anything?’ I give Jim so
much credit for having the vision and tenacity to make sure the film got made.”
Their films were dismissed by the director Alan Parker
as 'the Laura Ashley school' of cinema
Merchant
Ivory don’t usually figure in surveys of queer cinema, though they are part of
its ecosystem, and not only because of Maurice. Ron Peck, who made the gay
classic Nighthawks, was a crew member on The Bostonians. Andrew Haigh, director
of All of Us Strangers, landed his first industry job as a poorly paid
assistant in Merchant’s Soho office in the late 1990s; in Haigh’s 2011
breakthrough film Weekend, one character admits to freeze-framing the naked
swimming scene in A Room With a View to enjoy “Rupert Graves’s juddering cock”.
Merchant even offered a role in Savages to Holly Woodlawn, the transgender star
of Andy Warhol’s Trash, only for her to decline because the fee was so low.
The
position of Merchant Ivory at the pinnacle of British cinema couldn’t last for
ever. Following the success of The Remains of the Day, which was nominated for
eight Oscars, the brand faltered and fizzled. Their films had already been
dismissed by the director Alan Parker as representing “the Laura Ashley school”
of cinema. Gary Sinyor spoofed their oeuvre in the splendid pastiche Stiff
Upper Lips (originally titled Period!), while Eric Idle was plotting his own
send-up called The Remains of the Piano. The culture had moved on.
There was
still an appetite for upper-middle-class British repression, but only if it was
funny: Richard Curtis drew on some of Merchant Ivory’s repertory company of
actors (Grant, Thompson, Simon Callow) for a run of hits beginning with Four
Weddings and a Funeral, which took the poshos out of period dress and plonked
them into romcoms.
The team
itself was splintering. Merchant had begun directing his own projects. When he
and Ivory did collaborate, the results were often unwieldy, lacking the
stabilising literary foundation of their best work. “Films like Jefferson in
Paris and Surviving Picasso didn’t come from these character-driven novels like
Forster, James or Ishiguro,” notes Soucy. “Jefferson and Picasso were not
figures that audiences warmed to.” Four years after Merchant’s death, Ivory’s
solo project The City of Your Final Destination became mired in lawsuits,
including one from Anthony Hopkins for unpaid earnings.
Soucy’s
film, though, is a reminder of their glory days. It may also stoke interest in
the movies among young queer audiences whose only connection to Ivory, now 95,
is through Call Me By Your Name. “People walk up to Jim in the street to shake
his hand and thank him for Maurice,” says Soucy. “But I also wanted to include
the more dysfunctional side of how they were made. Hopefully it will be
inspiring to young film-makers to see that great work can come out of chaos.”
Merchant
Ivory is showing in the BFI Flare festival at BFI Southbank, London, on 16 and
18 March
Tuesday 12 March 2024
How Kate manipulated the royal Mother's Day family picture / Even Photoshop Can’t Erase Royals’ Latest P.R. Blemish
NEWS ANALYSIS
Even Photoshop Can’t Erase Royals’ Latest P.R.
Blemish
A Mother’s Day photo was meant to douse speculation
about the Princess of Wales’ health. It did the opposite — and threatened to
undermine trust in the royal family.
Mark
Landler
By Mark
Landler
Reporting
from London
March 11,
2024
If a
picture is worth a thousand words, then a digitally altered picture of an
absent British princess is apparently worth a million.
That seemed
to be the lesson after another day of internet-breaking rumors and conspiracy
theories swirling around Catherine, Princess of Wales, who apologized on Monday
for having doctored a photograph of herself with her three children that
circulated on news sites and social media on Sunday.
It was the
first official photo of Catherine since before she underwent abdominal surgery
two months ago — a cheerful Mother’s Day snapshot, taken by her husband, Prince
William, at home. But if it was meant to douse weeks of speculation about
Catherine’s well-being, it had precisely the opposite effect.
Now the
British royal family faces a storm of questions about how it communicates with
the press and public, whether Catherine manipulated other family photos she
released in previous years, and whether she felt driven to retouch this photo
to disguise the impact of her illness.
It adds up
to a fresh tempest for a royal family that has lurched from one self-created
crisis to another. Unlike previous episodes, this involves one of the family’s
most popular members, a commoner-turned-future queen. It also reflects a social
media celebrity culture driven in part by the family itself, one that is worlds
away from the intrusive paparazzi pictures that used to cause royals, including
a younger Kate Middleton, chagrin.
“Like so
many millennial celebrities, the Princess of Wales has built a successful
public image by sharing with her audience a carefully curated version of her
personal life,” said Ed Owens, a royal historian who has studied the
relationship between the monarchy and the media. The manipulated photograph, he
said, is damaging because, for the public, it “brings into question the
authenticity” of Catherine’s home life.
Authenticity
is the least of it: the mystery surrounding Catherine’s illness and prolonged
recovery, out of the public eye, has spawned wild rumors about her physical and
mental health, her whereabouts, and her relationship with William.
The
discovery that the photo was altered prompted several international news
agencies to issue advisories — including one from The Associated Press that was
ominously called a “kill notification” — urging news organizations to remove
the image from their websites and scrub it from any social media.
Mr. Owens
called the incident a “debacle.”
“At a time
when there is much speculation about Catherine’s health, as well as rumors
swelling online about her and Prince William’s private lives,” he said, “the
events of the last two days have done nothing to dispel questions and
concerns.”
Kensington
Palace, where Catherine and William have their offices, declined to release an
unedited copy of the photograph on Monday, which left amateur visual detectives
to continue scouring the image for signs of alteration in the poses of the
princess and her three children, George, Charlotte, and Louis.
The A.P.
said its examination yielded evidence that there was “an inconsistency in the
alignment of Princess Charlotte’s left hand.” The image has a range of clear
visual inconsistencies that suggest it was doctored. A part of a sleeve on
Charlotte’s cardigan is missing, a zipper on Catherine’s jacket and her hair is
misaligned, and a pattern in her hair seems clearly artificial.
Samora
Bennett-Gager, an expert in photo retouching, identified multiple signs of
image manipulation. The edges of Charlotte’s legs, he said, were unnaturally
soft, suggesting that the background around them had been shifted. Catherine’s
hand on the waist of her youngest son, Louis, is blurry, which he said could
indicate that the image was taken from a separate frame of the shoot.
Taken
together, Mr. Bennett-Gager said, the changes suggested that the photo was a
composite drawn from multiple images rather than a single image smoothed out
with a Photoshop program. A spokesman for Catherine declined to comment on her
proficiency in photo editing.
Even before
Catherine’s apology, the web exploded with memes of “undoctored” photos. One
showed a bored-looking Catherine smoking with a group of children. Another,
which the creator said was meant to “confirm she is absolutely fine and
recovering well,” showed the princess splashing down a water slide.
Beyond the
mockery, the royal family faces a lingering credibility gap. Catherine has been
an avid photographer for years, capturing members of the royal family in candid
situations: Queen Camilla with a basket of flowers; Prince George with his
great-grandfather, Prince Philip, on a horse-drawn buggy.
The palace
has released many of these photos, and they are routinely published on the
front pages of British papers (The Times of London splashed the Mother’s Day
picture over three columns). A former palace official predicted that the news
media would now examine the earlier photographs to see if they, too, had been
altered.
That would
put Kensington Palace in the tricky position of having to defend one of its
most effective communicators against a potentially wide-ranging problem, and
one over which the communications staff has little control. After a deluge of
inquires about the photograph, the palace left it to Catherine to explain what
happened. She was contrite, but presented herself as just another frustrated
shutterbug with access to Photoshop.
“Like many
amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing,” she wrote on
social media. “I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion the family
photograph we shared yesterday caused.”
Catherine’s
use of social media sets her apart from older members of the royal family, who
rely on the traditional news media to present themselves. When King Charles III
taped a video message to mark Commonwealth Day, for example, Buckingham Palace
hired a professional camera crew that was paid for by British broadcasters, a
standard arrangement for royal addresses.
When
Charles left the hospital after being treated for an enlarged prostate, he and
Queen Camilla walked in front of a phalanx of cameras, smiling and waving as
they made their way to their limousine.
Catherine
was not seen entering or leaving the hospital for her surgery, nor were her
children photographed visiting her. That may reflect the gravity of her health
problems, royal watchers said, but it also reflects the determination of
William and Catherine to erect a zone of privacy around their personal lives.
William,
royal experts said, is also driven by a desire not to repeat the experience of
his mother, Diana, who was killed in a car crash in Paris in 1997 after a
high-speed pursuit by photographers. Catherine, too, has been victimized by
paparazzi, winning damages from a French court in 2017 after a celebrity
magazine published revealing shots of her on vacation in France.
Last week,
grainy photos of Catherine riding in a car with her mother surfaced on the
American celebrity gossip site TMZ. British newspapers reported the existence
of the photos but did not publish them out of deference to the palace’s appeal
that she be allowed to recuperate in privacy.
Catherine
and William are not the only members of their royal generation who have sought
to exercise control over their image. Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, posted
photos of themselves on Instagram, even using their account to announce their
withdrawal from royal duties in 2020.
Catherine’s
embrace of social media to circulate her pictures is a way of reclaiming her
life from the long lenses of the paparazzi. But the uproar over the Mother’s
Day photo shows that this strategy comes with its own risks, not least that a
family portrait has added to the very misinformation about her that it was
calculated to counteract.
On Monday
afternoon, Catherine found herself back in traditional royal mode. She was
photographed, fleetingly, in the back of a car with William as he left Windsor
Castle for a Commonwealth Day service at Westminster Abbey. Kensington Palace
said she was on her way to a private appointment.
Gaia
Tripoli and Lauren Leatherby contributed reporting.
Mark
Landler is the London bureau chief of The Times, covering the United Kingdom,
as well as American foreign policy in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. He has
been a journalist for more than three decades. More about
Mark Landler
Monday 11 March 2024
BARBOUR of South Shields and the Herd Groyne Lighthouse / River Tyne. / VIDEO:Herd Groyne Lighthouse scale model 1:16
Saturday 9 March 2024
WUNDER-CRAMMER
INTERIORS
WUNDER-CRAMMER
Ever
wondered how much you can squeeze into a petite end-of-terrace house where an
open fire is the sole source of heating? Well, here’s your answer. Furniture
restorer Guy Marshall’s mid-19th-century cottage in north Shropshire is all of
one room wide and two deep and yet he has still managed to accommodate an
abundance of mainly Georgian antiques, including a rather handsome four-poster.
Brimful, certainly; but it’s also beautifully – ahem – Marshalled
By Ros Byam
Shaw
Photography
by Jan Baldwin
15 November
2023
View of the
living room where a portrait of William Pitt hangs alongside a fireplace
Ten years
ago, in his early forties, antique furniture restorer Guy Marshall bought his
first house, an end-of-terrace cottage dating from 1850 in a quiet side street
of a town in north Shropshire. Plain and modest in size – its frontage to the
street is little more than three-and-a-half metres across – it fitted his
budget, and his three further requirements: ceilings high enough for his
chinoiserie long-case clock of 1705, a bedroom big enough for his 1800
four-poster bed, and a usable fireplace. Guy didn’t like much else about it.
The
double-glazed windows had to go, and he replaced them with single-glazed
multi-pane ones. Up came the fitted carpet that covered the concrete downstairs
and the chipboard upstairs. He disconnected all the radiators, including the
heated towel rail in the downstairs bathroom, and dismantled the fitted
kitchen. And he made a simple wooden chimney piece for the fireplace.
Tucked into
the corner, beside a mid-18th-century tea table, a faux-marble Solomonic
pedestal bears a plaster bust
To say the
house can accommodate a four-poster and a tall clock might give the wrong
impression. It really is as small as it looks from the outside. A side entrance
opens into a hall not much bigger than a chessboard. Steep stairs rise to the
left, the bathroom door to the right is firmly closed (he plans to rip out the
modern fittings) and ahead is the kitchen built over the old backyard. Through
an open doorway is the front room. At the top of the stairs another diminutive
landing separates a box room, which might better be described as a walk-in
cupboard, from the bedroom, which is entirely filled by the bed. That’s it.
After
moving in, Guy met a lady in her eighties who had been brought up here with her
parents and brother. The house had yet to be extended at the back. There was
one room downstairs, one upstairs and a privy in the backyard. Her father
worked as a cobbler in a windowless cellar below the living room. She cried to
see its transformation from the cramped slum dwelling of her childhood. Her
reaction is hardly surprising.
A painted-pine glazed cabinet houses a selection of 18th-century Leeds Pottery creamware and, on top, a toleware egg boiler. The cutlery tray in front is late Georgian
Inside this
humble shell Guy has created a world of old-fashioned beauty, such that
stepping through the front door is like opening a cardboard box to find it
lined with Spitalfields silk. The two tiny downstairs rooms, slightly hazy with
wood and hand-rolled cigarette smoke, are filled by a notably refined array of
furniture, paintings, prints, rugs, clocks and china, mostly 18th-century, some
rare, some damaged, all covetable.
Convenience
is secondary to aesthetics. The kitchen has been invaded and more or less edged
out of existence by a Georgian chest of drawers, a grandfather clock and a
serpentine sideboard. What you might call the business end has been shunted
into a corner, where it cowers behind a damask-covered screen: essentially a
Baby Belling cooker on top of a fridge, directly above which hang four
luminous, gilt-framed oil paintings.
Hidden by a
velvet-covered screen, Guy’s kitchen consists of just two appliances: a ‘Baby
Belling’ cooker – a present from a friend, the decorator Libby Lord – and a
fridge. Above them hang a country oak wall cupboard and a selection of oil
paintings
In the
adjoining living room two wing chairs loosely dressed in ticking face the
fireplace – now the only source of heat in the house – which is flanked by a
bureau and a bookcase. There are three tripod tables, four broad-seated dining
chairs, a cellarette, a padded stool, a bust on a fat marbled column and the
chinoiserie longcase, its top grazing the ceiling. A glazed corner cupboard is
stuffed with blue-and white pearlware, walls are closely hung, and the various
surfaces are arranged with a choice selection of Georgian china. Full, but not
cluttered.
Found in
pieces in a saleroom, the c1800 oak four-poster bed is now replete with
hangings made from old velvet curtains, as well as an 18th-century portrait of
a candlelit boy and a patchwork bedspread hand-stitched by Guy some 20 years
ago
Every
object, from a chaste creamware jug to a 1730 walnut chair with its unusually
fine ‘cresting’ (more like it can be seen at Chatsworth), is placed for
symmetry and balance, creating a rare feast for the eyes; rich without being
indigestible. In the room above, Guy demonstrates a sort of back flip across
the bed to reach the inlaid chest of drawers on its far side – edging round the
posts inevitably knocks a picture crooked. He bought the bed in pieces ‘tied up
with baler twine and covered in sheep muck’ and used antique velvet curtains to
form the hangings and canopy. He also made the bedspread, a patchwork in large
squares of old fabric. ‘I sewed that by hand, 16 hours a day for a week,’ he
says, ‘to keep myself busy when I stopped drinking.’ The quilt is a nightly
reminder of recovery.
A selection
of Georgian engravings and mezzotints lines the walls of the tight staircase.
With no space for fitted bookcases, this is made narrower still by the stacks
of books piled on the right of each tread. Glimpsed on a chest of drawers
through the bedroom door is a c1740 ebonised-pearwood bracket clock
‘I went
through a rough patch,’ he says, ‘living in a series of bedsits and rented
flats. I even lived on the road for a few years after I was expelled from
boarding school. I had a copy of the poems of WH Davies in my pocket and
thought it would be romantic.’ Although he rebelled as a pupil, it was his prep
school, situated in a grand Georgian country house with some of its contents
still in place, that sparked Guy’s love of antiques. ‘My father was in the
army, so we lived in quarters with hideous military furnishings. I started
buying antiques when I was 12.’ The habit remains, fed by Ebay and contacts in
the trade who appreciate his taste, craftsmanship and respect for patina. ‘Even
when I was homeless I needed a few nice things to lay out and look at – an old
lighter, an antique cigarette case, a netsuke I kept in my pocket. Physical
comfort has never been as important – another prep school legacy!’
Friday 8 March 2024
RALPH LAUREN | The Polo Gazette | Requiem for a Speed Racer
It seems
Ralph Lauren and Lacoste are seen as “Preppy”(upper middle class) in many
European countries, is it the same in the UK or are there other brands instead?
Socio-economic
Hey
guys,
Definitions
Preppy:
I would say “preppy” would be associate with the upper middle although not
exclusively. When I think about preppy in global terms would be private school,
private university and working a working a high paying job(law, finance) in a
big city.
Class: I
know the class system in the UK is different than in other countries, but I’m
using these terms much more in terms of wealth.
US:
Brooks Brothers(Old Prep), Vineyard Vines(New Prep)
In the
US I have seen people at elite and private universities wearing Vineyard Vines
a lot. Like frat guys, trust fund people and those in high paying jobs.
Europe:
For instance, in many European countries an American brand like Vineyard vines
is unknown because they primarily serve the local American Market. The same
happens with Brooks brothers.
Ralph
Lauren meanwhile is seen as a more “International brand” even though it’s
American. It seems in some European countries it would be the equivalent to
wearing Brooks Brothers.
The same
with Lacoste though Lacoste doesn’t seem to have a historically solid
reputation as RL since they outsourced their production lesser quality
manufactures but at least they’ve been trying to make a comeback.
Spain:
Has their own local “preppy” brands like Scalpers and Pompeii.
How is
it in the UK? So far the only brand which I found is Baracuta. The G9
Harrington Jacket would fit on the aesthetic I’m talking about. But where do
you guys get your Polo’s? Fred Perry’s has many negative associations. At least
some people from Europe(not the Uk) told not to wear it since it’s associated
with right wing groups..etc