May 9th, 2008
The Circle Game
I've seen a number of references lately to a "tree" chart that Rolling Stone published in the 1970s documenting all of Joni Mitchell's romantic liaisons in the music industry. She was quite offended by it, evidently. I want to see it, but I can't find it anywhere on the Internet. Is it possible that some censorship is in effect, or are my Google skills just feeble?
Carlton W King
Noel Murray is willing to risk the ire of a 65-year-old:
Carlton, I consulted my DVD-ROM of Rolling Stone: Cover To Cover, which contains every page of every issue from 1967 to May of last year, and I believe I've found the chart you're referring to. It's called "Hollywood's Hot 100," and it ran in the issue cover-dated February 3, 1972. It's a two-page spread—with no byline, tellingly—that lays out "Southern California's Aristocracy Of Amplification, a High Society whose membership comes from (loosely) half a dozen identifiable 'families.'" The intro goes on to explain, "It is almost as if rock & roll has been given the ultimate legitimacy of having its own haute monde. It is fitting it happened in Tinseltown. There is, of course, no way for these relationships to be absolutely accurate, comprehensive, or sensibly organized, but if you'll bear with us, dear reader, if you'll follow them flowing (and dotted) lines, that bouncing ball, if you'll track the trail of broken hearts, why, some patterns might begin to emerge sufficient to Explain all Mysteries."
As you might've guessed, "Hollywood's Hot 100" isn't just about Joni. It features dozens upon dozens of SoCal and UK rock stars, grouped by label or "scene," with lines connecting those who'd worked together or slept together. Joni Mitchell appears smack in the middle of the second page, represented by a lipstick print, and connected by arrows to James Taylor, Russ Kunkel, and each individual member of Crosby, Stills & Nash. On the surface, her depiction is fairly benign, but as "Kakki B" points out on the "Only Joni" newsgroup, "The majority of the connective lines on the chart signify musical alliances, with the romantic alliances being sort of secondary. Joni does not even rate her own box as a musician on the mostly male dominated chart. If you look at it from her perspective, you can see how she might feel marginalized, and made to look as if she were nothing more than those guys' star groupie." Given that Mitchell was reportedly irritated and offended by her own label's attempt to sexualize her with ad copy like "Joni Mitchell Comes Across" and "Joni Mitchell: 90% Virgin," this fan's assessment of her irritation makes sense.
As for why the chart is hard to find on the Internet, it's probably not so much a matter of Rolling Stone trying to pretend it never existed as the publication not seeing the need to put its complete archives online, especially when it's trying to sell DVD-ROMs. Also, "Hollywood's Hot 100" covered two pages of a tabloid-sized magazine back in 1972. It isn't the kind of thing that easily reproduces on a computer screen, as you can see:
But here's the Joni part, which you might find more useful:
Sex And Death
I have been searching for two movies, and apparently I am not using the right combination in my search. If you could help with either one, I would greatly appreciate it. The first is from the late '60s or '70s. I believed it was one of those movies that contained three short stories. What I remember is someone trying to kill someone else to get an inheritance. There is a painting on the wall (by the stairs, I believe) that is of the house and the cemetery nearby. When a young man first looks at the painting, he sees a fresh gravesite. When he looks at the painting again, he sees a corpse coming out of the grave. Then when he looks again, the corpse is walking toward the house. Each time he looks at the painting, the corpse is nearer the house. Finally, the corpse reaches the door. I believe the young man dies of fright, and that the butler was responsible for the paintings. The way it ends is, the butler looks at the painting and sees the young man coming out of his grave.
The second movie also contained three short stories, all taking place in France before the Revolution. The stories contain nudity and dealt with sex between the classes. One story was of an aristocratic couple not having any sex until one or both of them spy on their maid romping around naked and screwing a young man in the greenhouse. I believe the aristocratic couple is so turned on by this that they also end up screwing in the greenhouse. A second story deals with a maid coming to work at the mansion of a man she finds out has locked his son away ( I forget the reason given). She ends up screwing the son. You find out it is a game that the father and son have going, to see how long it takes to "seduce" a maid. I think they might even have alternated who was locked away. The story ends with the maid being dismissed, and as she is walking away from the house, she passes the new maid. I don't remember the third story.
Dee
A.V. Club team-up powers, activate! Christopher Bahn slowly lurches toward the answer to your first question:
The story is "The Cemetery," from Rod Serling's Night Gallery. Airing from 1970 to 1973, Night Gallery followed a similar format to Serling's better-known, earlier anthology series The Twilight Zone, but with a focus that leaned more on tales of horror and the macabre, featuring a mix of Serling-written stories and adaptations of works by writers like H.P. Lovecraft and Richard Matheson. Each episode usually featured a number of shorter stories, linked by an introduction narrated by Serling as he stood in the gallery of the series' title, looking at a ghoulish painting linked to the story. As Serling put it in the first episode, "Each is a collector's item in its own way—not because of any special artistic quality, but because each captures on a canvas, suspends in time and space, a frozen moment of a nightmare."
"The Cemetery" was the first of three stories that formed the pilot for the series. (The second segment, "Eyes," has the distinction of being Steven Spielberg's TV directorial debut.) Roddy McDowall stars as the young nephew of an old, dying artist, whom he kills by leaving the window open on a cold night in order to get his inheritance. Ossie Davis plays the butler who's secretly responsible for the apparently mystical movements of the painting. You can find a detailed synopsis on this page at tv.com. The first season of Night Gallery is available on DVD, and there's also a pretty good fan website covering the basics of the show at nightgallery.net. (Our Denver editor, Jason Heller, also points out that the idea of a monster that only moves when you're not looking at it is also used in the recent Doctor Who episode "Blink." It's possible that "Blink" was inspired by "The Cemetery," though I haven't been able to confirm that one way or another.)
Oh, and here's the end of the episode, though sadly, the sound and visuals are pretty badly out of sync:
Tasha Robinson steps in for the second half of the tango:
As to your second question, Dee, there's a lot less information available out there on it, since it's kinda amateurish foreign-import softcore rather than the debut episode of a well-regarded series by a well-regarded master of suspense. Basically, you're lucky I had Cinemax (a.k.a. Skinemax, a.k.a. Softcore Central) in college, and I happened to catch part of what you're describing. The anthology with the maid-seducing game was called The Secrets Of Love: Three Rakish Tales. It consists of screen adaptations of three erotic stories by well-regarded, pre-20th-century French authors: Guy de Maupassant, Marguerite de Navarre, and Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne. At least one of the installments, de Navarre's "La Fessée," or "The Spanking," was apparently edited down from a longer version made for a French TV show called Série Rose; at least one source online claims all three episodes were, which would explain the uniformly high production values.
I never saw the first story you're describing, with the aristocratic couple, but it's called "The Greenhouse." The maid-seducing story is called "The Pupil," since the supposedly imprisoned young man gets into the maid's petticoats by pretending he knows nothing of the female body or this thing called love, so she volunteers to educate him. "The Spanking" (which is the short I used to track down the anthology) seems to have been the one the Internet cares about, to the degree that it cares at all; there's marginally more information on it. As far as I recall, that story involved an aristocratic woman who's been reduced to servant status, getting brutally whipped for sleeping with the help. So she and her lover scheme to have the lover seduce their master's wife—the bitchy mastermind behind the beating—and have her get caught. The piece ends with the master whipping his wife, as well. (The lover, who was probably a stable-hand or some such, gets off scot-free; he claims he thought he was getting into bed with the cook, and the master gives him a sort of "Boys will be boys" shrug and blames the wife for taking the cook's place.) It doesn't seem like Secrets Of Love is available in the States, but as I recall, you aren't missing much, apart from some really terrible English-language dubbing.
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