#algernon and cornelia

[camilleseydouxs]

@barbararomer: About last night. Love these two gorgeous talented beings. ❤️ Bravo to @andreholland for his brilliant, inspired, mesmerizing Othello! To end this Peace Day with a minute of silence at the Globe was profound and deeply moving. @julietrylance 

[assonance13]

[alittletoosaintjust]

Text excerpted from the first fragment of Saint-Just's Fragments sur les institutions républicaines, translation is my own (so usual terms and conditions apply) + full text, painting names, etc. can be found under the cut!

Full text is as follows:

"Scipio was accused; he exonerated himself by setting his entire life before his accusers: he was assassinated soon after. Hence the Gracchi died; hence Demosthenes passed at the feet of statued gods; hence they immolated Sidney, Barneveldt; hence end all those who are made formidable by an incorruptible courage. Great men do not die in their beds."

Paintings (in order of appearence, with links to where they're sourced from):

Scipio Africanus Freeing Massiva - Giovanni Battista Tiepolo

The Generosity of Scipio - Jean II Restout

Cornelia, Mother of the Gracchi, Pointing to Her Children as Her Treasures - Angelica Kauffman

Demosthenes Practicing Oratory - Jean-Jules-Antoine Lecomte du Nouÿ

Portrait of Algernon Sydney - "I.W."

Johan van Oldenbarnevelt - Michiel Jansz van Mierevelt

Robespierre - Anonymous

Saint-Just - Pierre-Paul Prud'hon

[clive-owen-and-the-knick]

THE KNICK: haunting quality of a fever dream from which you didn’t want to wake

Typhoid Mary and the birth of ‘contact tracing’ – as seen in The Knick Want to know why ‘tracing asymptomatic carriers’ works? Then watch Steven Soderbergh's brilliant, gory historical drama

“ But Thack laid on his back was the perfect fade to grey. The Knick had finished as it started: with the haunting quality of a fever dream from which you didn’t want to wake. “

New York has been paralysed by a wave of deaths, caused by a fast-acting and unrelenting infection. It strikes indiscriminately, targeting the wealthy as ruthlessly as the downtrodden. Scariest of all, this is a hidden killer. By the time you discover you’re sick, it’s often too late. Survival is a roll of the dice.

Such is life as apprehensively lived in Manhattan today, indeed in the rest of the world. Which may explain why we’re all glued to movies such as Contagion and Outbreak, and Netflix’s documentary Pandemic: How to Prevent an Outbreak. But it was also a key plot point from a little-watched television drama that ran in 2014 and 2015. A storyline that was, in turn, based on the real-life case of a lethal outbreak in New York at the turn of the century.

Steven Soderbergh’s The Knick was the prestige-TV equivalent of one of your five-a-day. And it came just three years after he directed Contagion, about a Covid-19-style outbreak. More importantly, it was about the birth of modern medicine: the painful and gory gestation of practices we take for granted now.

Yet the Knick (now available on demand through Sky) explores advances in brain surgery, anaesthetics, infant mortality rates and, most significantly from a 2020 perspective, the battle against infectious diseases such as typhoid and tuberculosis, which we see claim a baby in its cot.

The setting is a baroque New York hospital, The Knickerbocker (based on a real hospital in Harlem which finally closed in 1979). The year was 1900: a time when moustaches were huge, syringes even bigger, and surgery had more to do with lopped-off limbs than hip replacements.

The Knick was a period caper with a very modern pulse. Soderbergh used it as a vehicle to address such eternal themes as addiction, racism and the struggle between head and heart (not to mention the importance of a perfectly maintained ’tache).

It starred Clive Owen, one of the go-to-actors for tortured intensity, as a maverick surgeon with the fantastically old-fashioned name of Dr John “Thack” Thackery. We see him forge ahead in areas such as skin grafting (he grafts skin from a patient’s arm to her nose), placenta previa surgery and hernia repair. He was a pioneer working in a time of unprecedented medical advancement.

As was the real-life surgeon upon whom he was loosely based. William Halsted was the house physician at New York Presbyterian Hospital, where he introduced such innovations as patient charts, and invented the painful-sounding Halsted mosquito forceps – “a ratcheted haemostat to secure and clamp bleeding vessels”. And he married the first nurse ever to wear gloves during an operation. He was, in addition, addicted to cocaine and morphine (then legally available), requiring a minimum cocaine intake of three-grammes daily.

With the cocaine and the clamps and the great facial hair, you can see why he was irresistible to Soderbergh and The Knick’s creators, Jack Amiel and Michael Begler. Their fictional version of Halsted was a classic flawed anti-hero. In a just world, Thack would have joined the ranks of the small screen’s great “difficult men”, alongside Tony Soprano, Walter White and Don Draper.

Thack was portrayed by Owen as charismatic, enigmatic, permanently dishevelled and moderately racist (there are tensions early on over the hiring of African-American doctor Dr. Algernon C. Edwards). He also romped with prostitutes – as was the fashion at the time –  and began the day with enough cocaine to floor a camel.

With coronavirus bringing humanity to a stand-still, Thackery is ideal company for an extended binge-watch. The killer infection plot surfaces midway through the first of its two seasons. It doesn’t directly involve Thack. He is otherwise occupied taking drugs and cavorting with nurse Lucy (Eve Hewson, daughter of Bono).

Investigating the deaths are two second-string characters, Health Inspector Jacob Speight (David Fierro) and Cornelia Robertson (Julia Rylance), society lady and head of The Knick’s social welfare office. They discover all the households struck down with typhoid , a bacterial fever caused by a pernicious strain of salmonella, have one thing in common: a County Tyrone cook named Mary Mallon worked there.

But how could a cook spread typhoid, which cannot survive the high temperatures associated with preparing food? Eventually they work it out: she’s passing on the fever through her signature room-temperature dish of peach melba. This leads to another question: if she’s knowingly spreading typhoid all over the Upper East Side, why doesn’t she herself show symptoms?

The answer lies in a cutting-edge new theory: that some individuals carry and spread infection whilst themselves not developing symptoms. It’s a condition known as “asymptomatic”. Today, we all know what that entails, but at the time it wasn’t universally accepted within the medical profession.

Certainly, the characters in The Knick struggle to get their heads around it. “She must be a filthy thing and as sick as a cesspool,” Speight says to Robertson as they rush to stop Mary – “Typhoid Mary”, they’ve dubbed her – from serving another dose of lethal peaches.

How did they find her? By tracking down all those who fell ill, and then the people with whom they interacted, and overlaying the data points on a map of Manhattan. In other words, by “contact tracing” – a concept which might have sounded dreary a few months ago, but which today is on everyone’s lips.

In the final confrontation, they head her off at the kitchen, and she’s arrested attempting to flee. (Some might say that the American actress, Melissa McMeekin, should also be in the dock for her dreadful Irish accent, which suggests a heavy viral load of Darby O’Gill and the Little People.) Scientific ignorance, alas, wins the day. Just two episodes later, Typhoid Mary is freed, when the judge refuses to believe that someone could transmit a lethal fever while immune to its symptoms.

These are, more or less, the facts of the real-life case of Typhoid Mary, an immigrant from the Old Country estimated to have fatally spread the fever to more than 50 people (via her delicious ice-cream, however, not peach melba). Yet there was no Hollywood ending for her, despite press baron William Randolph Hearst helping fund her defence at trial. She avoided prison, as she does in The Knick, but the Typhoid Mary name followed her around. And, though she found work under a number of aliases, people continued to die in her vicinity.

Mallon was eventually sent back to North Brother Island in New York’s East River – where we she see her incarcerated in The Knick – and lived out the last 23 years of her life in enforced isolation. After her death from a stroke in 1938 at age 69, an autopsy revealed a gall bladder riddled with typhoid bacteria.

The Knick itself would submit to the inevitable after two seasons and just 20 episodes. And yet despite low ratings, it wasn’t necessarily an obvious candidate for cancellation. The critics loved it, and Soderbergh, one of the most instinctive filmmakers since Spielberg, made it quickly and cheaply for HBO offshoot Cinemax. (Incredibly cheaply, in fact, considering the realism with which he brought to life turn-of-the-century New York.)

He shot each 10-part series in just 73 days – roughly one instalment per week. That’s a decent clip when churning out a 20-minute sitcom. But to produce gorgeous prestige TV in that time-frame was remarkable. The Knick, which was shot on location in New York, looked incredible. While clearly set in the past, there’s something grippingly vivid and urgent about it. It’s the very opposite of starched, stagey period telly such as Downton Abbey and HBO’s own Boardwalk Empire.

That’s because Soderbergh filmed in natural light as far as possible. He was able to do so thanks to cutting-edge RED digital cameras, equipped with new “Dragon” sensors designed to work in low levels of light. Even when it was grim and gloomy outside, he could shoot using natural light. “Every once in a while, an actor would walk onto the set and say, “Are you guys bringing any light in?’” Soderbergh told Fast Company in 2014. “And we’d go, 'No, that’s it'.”This produced the occasional strange side-effect. Looking back over footage, for instance, Soderbergh would suddenly sense something amiss. He’d freeze the frame and zoom in. And there it was: because of the fading light, the actors’ pupils were massively dilated. 

Bravura directing was accompanied by powerhouse acting from Owen. As far back as his break-out 1990s hit Croupier, he was always a coiled spring when on screen. All that repressed tension spewed to the surface in his portrayal of Thackery, a brilliant man wrestling perpetually with demons. “It was very, very challenging and very, very demanding, and Steven [is] really fast and very concentrated,” Owen said in a 2014 interview with Indiewire. “We did the 10 hours in just over 70 days, or seven days an episode. There’s some incredibly difficult technical stuff there. All the operation stuff that’s logistically very difficult… Sometimes we’d shoot up to 13 or 14 pages a day."And yet, Soderbergh was supposed to have retired when he made The Knick. In 2012 the director of Out of Sight and Ocean’s Eleven had publicly stepped away from filmmaking. A few months later, he received a pilot script by comedy writers Amiel and Begler. His ambition at the time was to become a painter – a mission he expected to occupy all his free time over the next several years. “I was aware that the 10,000 hours required to become just good would take years of steady, applied focus,” he said. “I was basically ready to do that. I was taking painting lessons from [naturalistic wildlife artist] Walton Ford and having a great time learning things, talking to him and watching him work.”

When he read the screenplay for The Knick, and was riveted from the opening page. “I was the first person to get ahold of the script for The Knick and I just couldn’t let that pass through my fingers. It’s about everything I’m interested in. Everything. I was the first person to see it. And I thought, 'I have to do this'.”

Amiel and Begler had knocked around the industry writing disposable chuckle-fests such as the 2004 Kate Hudson vehicle Raising Helen. The idea for The Knick came when Begler had a turn of poor health. “I was having medical issues. I was researching alternative medicine, and was also frustrated,” he recalled to Indiewire in 2010. “I was thinking: What were my options 100 years ago? I can go online and find out so much different information now. Too much, even.

“But what do you do in 1900? On a whim, Jack and I just bought a couple of medical textbooks from eBay. We opened them and it was just incredible. And yes, it was a horror show. I couldn’t believe the things I was reading: people drinking turpentine to help a perforated intestine.

“My jaw hit the ground. The further we dove into this world, the more crazy s--- we saw. There was too much good stuff here. Once we saw that it was about medicine, then we started to look at what the world of 1900 was like. The world was changing so fast, with so much to play with.”

That “crazy s---” was searingly translated to the screen. The Knick is striking in that it’s set in a world only a few steps removed from ours. Thackery and his colleagues are recognisably modern doctors, not medieval quacks or shamans. Yet their practices also feel like butchery by another name. As antiseptically filmed by Soderbergh, The Knick often has the unflinching quality of an avant-garde horror film.

Thackery injecting cocaine into his genitals (all his other veins having collapsed) and performing a bowel operation using “a revolutionary clamp of his own design” are, for instance, among the highlights of the pilot. Episode four, meanwhile, sees the good doctor trying to save a woman from a botched self-administered abortion. The three-minute sequence contains more gore than all the Saw movies laid end-to-end.

The Knick finished in bravura fashion, too. As season two came to a conclusion, it was unclear if it would be renewed. So Soderbergh gave Thackery a wonderfully ambivalent send off. He recklessly attempts surgery on himself – without an anaesthetic – only for the experiment to go awry. There are a lot of entrails and lots of blood.

“My peripheral vision seems to be going… body temperature has begun to drop,” he says. “This is it… this is all we are.” And then his life flashes before him. Has the most brilliant surgeon of his era expired on his own operating table?

Soderbergh later revealed the plan was to kill off the character and that a third season of The Knick would have time-jumped to the 1940s (he wanted to film it in black-and-white). But Thack laid on his back was the perfect fade to grey. The Knick had finished as it started: with the haunting quality of a fever dream from which you didn’t want to wake.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/0/typhoid-mary-birth-contact-tracing-seen-knick/

[thegothicalice]

Can you recommend urban fantasy books that you think are some of the best? (I'm more a medieval fantasy type of person so my experience lies there) I know you've said you don't read horror much but what are some of your fav titles?

I mean I did list a couple urban fantasy authors in the last post 😆 but Seanan McGuire and Jim Butcher-

Holly Black and Charles de Lint-

Maggie Stievater, Cornelia Funke, and Melissa Marr-

For horror, even if I don’t read as much of it, I still read often. Caitlin R. Kiernan, Richard Laymon, Anne Rice, Dan Simmons, Clive Barker, H.P. Lovecraft, Nancy Collins, Brom, John Saul, Algernon Blackwood, Stephen King (though not that much), Richard Matheson, Shirley Jackson, Henry James, Poppy Z. Brite (I’ve only known their work under that name)... but those are so scattered around that taking bookcase pictures would be a nuisance.

[bookbeani]

The Ultimate List of Book Recs

Here is a comprehensive list of books I recommend by genre/age group, because I felt like it. Asterisks indicate my favourites. Feel free to ask about/discuss any of them! 

Fantasy

Adult

The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang*

The Queen of the Tearling by Erika Johansen*

A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin*

Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay*

Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay

American Gods by Neil Gaiman

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

The Way of Shadows by Brent Weeks

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke

A Natural History of Dragons by Marie Brennan

Vicious by V.E. Schwab*

A Darker Shade of Magic��by V.E. Schwab

Uprooted by Naomi Novik

The Queen of Blood by Sarah Beth Durst*

Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire

The City of Brass by S.A. Chrakraborty*

Young Adult

The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman

The Rithmatist by Brandon Sanderson

Half A King by Joe Abercrombie

Heartless by Marissa Meyer*

An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir*

The Forbidden Wish by Jessica Khoury*

An Enchantment of Ravens by Margaret Rogerson

Middle Grade

The Name of This Book is Secret by Pseudonymous Bosch

Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer

How to Train Your Dragon by Cressida Cowell

The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo*

Magyk by Angie Sage*

The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan

Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine

Inkheart by Cornelia Funke

The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M. Valente

Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones

The Glass Sentence by S.E. Grove*

Contemporary

Adult

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn*

Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn*

Zone One by Colson Whitehead*

If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

Young Adult

Saints and Misfits by S.K. Ali

Beauty Queens by Libba Bray

My Heart and Other Black Holes by Jasmine Warga*

Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli

Under Rose-Tainted Skies by Louise Gornall

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

Tash Hearts Tolstoy by Kathryn Ormsbee

Sci Fi

Adult

Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

Young Adult

The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer*

The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E. Pearson

All Our Yesterdays by Cristin Terrill*

The 5th Wave by Rick Yancey

Poetry

The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson*

Historical Fiction

Adult

The Map of Time by Felix J. Palma*

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

Young Adult

And I Darken by Kiersten White*

Salt to the Sea by Ruta Sepetys

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld

My Lady Jane by Cynthia Hand*

Worlds of Ink and Shadow by Lena Coakley*

The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzi Lee

Middle Grade

The Marvels by Brian Selznick

The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick*

Classics

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis*

A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte*

Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde*

The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux*

East of Eden by John Steinbeck*

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens*

The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo*

Les Miserables by Victor Hugo*

Dracula by Bram Stoker

The Stranger by Albert Camus*

Emma by Jane Austen

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley*

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

[rkoradiopictures]

thanks so much @thevintagious for tagging me!

Name: Natalie

Zodiac: Gemini

Orientation: bisexual

Height: 5′ 6.5″ i believe

Nationality: American

Favorite season: Summer

Favorite fruit: bananas

Favorite book: hattie big sky, the picture of dorian gray

Favorite flower: dahlias, lilies, calla lilies

Favorite color: blue, green, and yellow

Favorite scent: fresh laundry, chicken, toasted bagels, brownies

Favorite animal: birds (esp sparrows), various rodents (chipmunk, squirrel, degu, hamster), dogs (chihuaahuaaas)

Coffee, tea, or cocoa: tea and cocoa

Average hours of sleep: 8-12

Cats or dogs: they’re both cool, i prefer dogs because i’ve actually had one i guess

Favorite fictional character: Naruto Uzumaki, korra from lok, aang, zuko, and iroh from atla, peppa pig, Basil Halward from the picture of dorian gray, Leslie Crosbie from the Letter, Frank Gallagher from Shameless, Deanie from Splendor in the Grass, the grinch, steve, eleven, jonathan, and hopper on stranger things, lance from voltron, victor nikiforov, Clyde from Electick children, Al Capone, richard, van alden, and rothstein on boardwalk empire, algernon and cornelia from the knick, edward scissorhands, and more

How many blankets: one

When my blog was created: 2012?

Followers: 420 i’m not even kidding 

i tag @musicmusnt @sixhoursoda @usernamethatisspooky @misstheatricality @kakashiisama @fem-sasuke @iceywolfj @bigmunchkins

[huntzbergered]

@the universe

WHY is it ONLY my ships that are so catastrophic??

I’m not even joking when I say the tv world conspires against me.

Explain how a tragic af, almost entirely dark and jaded show like The Leftovers can end up with a happily ever after for a ship I never shipped, one that I s2g had NO hope whatsoever for three continuous seasons. None. Because the show wasn’t about relationships making it??? It was about coping and my god were Nora and Kevin destructive af.

BUT THEN a show like Rectify which is supposed to be reconciliation and HOPE and LOVE ends up burning the ONE AND ONLY ship I had!!! The one and only. And they were good together, holy shit. They were healthy; they understood each other and fought alongside each other for what, a decade???? So explain how Billy comes out of nowhere in the fourth season and it’s BILLY who ends up with Amantha and not Jon who has been the man by her side, there for her and her entire family for four goddamn seasons !!!!! AHHHH I’m going to lose my mind. I couldn’t even concentrate on that beautiful series finale because I was in anguish over how Jon/Amantha, the ONE stable relationship for the majority of the show just crashed and burned as if out of spite @ me

🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄 I’d like an explanation on why tv hates me.

[jbergren]

School of Motion Alumni Holiday Card 2017 from Traci Brinling on Vimeo.

This one is a long one, but very worth it. 97 School of Motion Alumni contributed to this one, definitely holds the record so far (2 years in the making :)) Added bonus we are providing the project files for these so you want to make sure you see all the amazing work these animators did. So sit back, grab a drink and enjoy!

Credits - in order they appear in the video...

Title card concept and design – Ewa Niedbala | Sweden Title Animations – Traci Brinling Osowski | Boston, MA

1. A Christmas Story | Jordan Bergren 2. a fire in the fireplace | Zach Christy 3. A good night sleep | Véronita Va 4. a Nativity | Wilson Lievano 5. A Partridge in a Pear Tree | Patrick Butler 6. Advent Calendars | Victoria Blair 7. Advent candles | Cornelia Ryås 8. Another spin around the great wheel | Nol Honig 9. Beer | Erlend Kristiansen 10. Books I'll never read | Justin Owens 11. Bundling Up | Margaret To 12. C9s (Lights) | Jake Bartlett 13. Cats knocking down ornaments ("Helpful" Cats) | Brad Eustathios 14. Chocolate Orange | Elliot Mosher 15. Christmas | Ryan Plummer 16. Christmas Carols! | Dan Melius 17. Christmas pudding | Donika Jordan 18. chrsitmas tree and lights | Jenjen Chen 19. Cinnamon Rolls | Kevin Snyder 20. Coal | Ashley Engelhardt 21. Cookies | Elaine Seward 22. Decorations | Erica Pead 23. Dogs | Jared Tomkins 24. Dogs in santa hats | Erin Bradley 25. Eggnog & Booze | Tristan Henry-Wilson 26. Netflix | Mike Bernard 27. Ewe (you) | Keith Morrissey 28. Family | Franklin Walters 29. Family christmas cards | Peter-Paul Rutjens 30. Fat pants | Earl Cabuhat 31. Feast Max Vellinga 32. Fireworks | Meliha Cicak 33. Fish(carp in a bath-tub) | Daniela Dlugosova 34. Football | Jeff Salvado 35. Friends | Roberta Scialla 36. Frosty & Rudolph | Austin Saylor 37. Gingerbread dudes | Ben Samuels 38. Grandma's gifts | Saul Yance 39. Granny asleep on the couch | Lucy Regan 40. Hand Knit Sweaters | Jenna Harrison 41. Holly | Ollie Mamaril 42. Homemade cannoli’s | Karen Fantasia 43. Ice Cream | Sara Walsh 44. In-laws | Don Lavender 45. Joy | Liv Engel 46. Kids | Algernon Quashie 47. Legos | Liam Clisham 48. Lights and Pine | Christian Prieto 49. Love | Ivan Stanimirovic 50. Mario Kart | Fiona Vane 51. Meatballs | Tony Agliata 52. Mince pies | Sam Burton 53. Money | Cristi Smarandoiu 54. Mulled Wine | Kelly Kurtz 55. Office party | Jessica Bern 56. Old Saint Nicholas | Dan Ito 57. packing the car/roadtrip | Kalika Kharkar Sharma 58. Pandas | Irina Almgren 59. Parols (Filipino Christmas Lanterns) | Amanda Bantug 60. Peace | Miguel Faber 61. Penguin | Giovanny Bautista 62. Pepper Jelly | Ali Walton 63. Pie | Ivan Witteborg 64. Pine | Andrea Schmitz 65. Presents | Chris Greene 66. Purrs | Valeria Searle 67. Rampant consumerism | Mair Perkins / Mair Bain 68. Rudolph | Hannah Guay 69. Santa Claus | Luke Brown 70. Shopping | Herry Koo 71. Skeletor | Patrick Emling 72. Skiing | René Andritsch 73. Smoking reindeer | Emma Elisabeth 74. Snow globe | Jeri Bailer 75. Snowballs | Natalie Wood 76. Snowboarding | LC Miranda 77. Stocking stuffers | Jeremy Rech 78. Sugar | Kevin Snyder 79. Thawing Frozen Fingers | Annemie Debicki-Kouwenhoven 80. The cat climbing in the christmas tree | Melanie Aratani 81. Tons of candy | Xisco Cabrer 82. Too much TV | Neil Lawson 83. Traffic | Greg Stewart 84. Resolutions| Mark Fancher 85. Travel | Eric Brackett 86. Tropical Fruit | Hayley Rollason 87. Turkey | Nassib Mourabet 88. TV | Aaron Keuter 89. Ugly sweaters | Anne Saint-Louis 90. Unwanted gifts | Rodrigo Domínguez 91. Video Games | Chris Gibson 92. Waiting | Samu Rintala 93. Watching Die Hard | Mathieu Durand 94. White Elephant Gifts | Dana Albert 95. Wine | Traci Brinling Osowski 96. Wrapping Paper! | Derek Goulet

Added HOLIDAY bonus - Here are the project files so you can see how that cool thing so and so did - give them a high five or better hire them for something :) drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ACahOyO6Ypnoybbionzw8IDcRehr_-sm?usp=sharing

[assonance13]

[clive-owen-and-the-knick]

The tales of Steven Soderbergh‘s efficiency are legion, but you might make the mistake in thinking he takes an industrial view of filmmaking. Instead, his approach is a product of his years in the game, a process to get the best results without any wasted time or resources, and a method that keeps things interesting for the ensemble of actors he works. But never has this been as pronounced as in the making of "The Knick," Soderbergh’s superb Cinemax series, which has seen him direct, edit, produce, and act as his own cinematographer across two full seasons.

“Actors love working with this guy, because they’re not sitting around all day waiting for the set to be lit,” second cameraman Patrick O’Brien told Vulture. "It keeps the actors on the boil, nobody leaves, and…you can power through the whole scene and it’s done,” the director added.

READ MORE: More Steven Soderbergh Facts: Everything The Director Watched And Read In 2014

And with the second season coming to a close tomorrow night with a powerhouse finale (seriously, don’t miss it), we’re exclusively rolling out Soderbergh’s collection of "useless" statistics. However, they act as a testament to his talent. It’s worth emphasizing again that he shot 20 hours of television, not to mention that he did it at a tremendous pace, averaging one episode per week (not bad considering it’s a period drama, and even more impressive when the industry average is twice that time per episode). And so, looking through the numbers it’s amazing to see that there was not one day where the time on set exceeded 12 hours (this includes a lunch break), and that the shortest shooting day was 6 hours (including a lunch break).

Useless or not, I think I need to seriously re-evaluate my time management skills. Check out the tally of facts and figures below.

Total Set ups: 1889 (25.52 daily average) – (Season One: 2081; 28.5 daily average) Total Scenes shot: 468 (Season One: 557) Total Pages shot: 495 5/8 (Season One: 539 4/8) Total amount of time spent editing: 235 hours, 26 minutes, 10 seconds (Season One: 465 hours, 30 minutes, 50 seconds) Most Set-ups shot in one day: 63 – A New Knick Record (Season One record was 60) (Day 71 in 11 hours 50 minutes – includes lunch break – Int. Surgical Theater -Thackery performs surgery — Season One record was Int. Surgical Theater – Christiansen’s Previa surgery) Number of Days more than 40 Set-ups were shot: 8 (Season One: 12) Total number of two-camera Set-Ups: 247 Total number of Set-Ups shot with one camera only: 1642 or 86.9% of the season. Least number of Set-ups shot in one day: 4 (Day 47- Ext. Knick – wrapped early due to bad weather – 4 hours, 12 minutes after call) Number of Set-Ups shot on a 18mm lens: 557 Number of Set-Ups shot on a 25mm lens: 470 (Season One: 0) Number of Set-Ups shot on a 35mm lens: 244 Percentage of Total Set-Ups shot on 18 and 25mm lenses: 55.8% Number of Set-Ups with Visual Effects: 176 (as shot) Number of RED Camera bodies used: 2 (Season One: 6) Number of times the word “Douse” appears in the script: 2 – one sexual; one refers to oysters and cocktail sauce (Season One: 8 – 4 sexual) Number of times the word “Heroin” appears in the script: 27 Number of time “Cocaine” appears in the script: 36 (Season One: 56 – a 35.7% decline in Cocaine use from Season One to Season 2) Number of Surgical Procedures performed: 18 Most Number of Pages shot in a day: 11 (Season One: 11 4/8 in 13.8 hours) (Day 56 – Int. Henry’s Hotel Suite – in 11 hours 42 minutes – including lunch break – runner up for second longest shoot day.) Least Number of Pages shot in a day: 2 7/8 (Day 19 – Algernon & Opal attend Carr’s speech. Cornelia searches Speight’s abandoned house) Longest Day: Day 71 -11 hours, 50 minutes (includes lunch break) (8a call – 7:50p wrap -Thackery performs surgery – also most set-ups shot in one day: 63 see above) Shortest Day: 6 hours, 40 minutes – 7:30a – 2:10p – (includes lunch break) (Day 16 – Ext. New Knick construction site -10 setups 4 6/8 pages and 2 scenes – runner up for coldest shoot day: 4 degrees at call) Number of Shooting Days: 75 (74 +1 second unit day – Boat Unit) Number of Shooting Days 12 hours or longer: 0 Earliest Wrap time: 2:10p (Day 16 – Int. Barrow’s Office – Thack’s Office – Knick Hallway – 7 hour 10 minute day) Latest Wrap time: 4:54 am – 9 hours, 54 minutes including lunch break – 25 setups. (Day 74 Last day of shooting – Night shoot 7p Call – Int. New Knick Construction Site) Most Episodes shot in one day: 6 – Day 30 (Season One: 7) Coldest Ext. Day Shoot: Ext. Woman’s Prison – Cleary and Harriet leave the prison – Location: Ft. Wadsworth, Staten Island – Wind Chill at call: 0 degrees. Most Creative Use of Location: Ft. Wadsworth, Staten Island for Nicaragua circa 1890. (Runner up: Yonkers for doubling San Francisco) Only Scene where the entire Principal cast worked together: Episode 7 Scene 44 Int. Ball Room. (First place winner for most cast members included in one single shot – Runner up for longest uninterrupted shot – Establishing the Ball – 3 minutes) Longest single uninterrupted shot: Episode 9 – Cornelia confronts her father – 3 minutes, 56 seconds (10 takes filmed; take 10 used in the show) Shortest shots used: Episode 10 – surgery scenes – two shots at five frames each Number of Breakfast Burritos consumed by Cast, Crew and Background: 1496 (Okay, that I made up but in fact would only be an average of 19.9 burritos per day so probably in the ballpark)

https://theplaylist.net/exclusive-steven-soderberghs-completely-useless-wrap-statistics-for-the-knick-season-2-20151217/