Sir Christopher John Frayling (born 25 December 1946) is a British educationalist and writer, known for his study of popular culture.
He read history at Churchill College, Cambridge and gained a PhD in the study of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
He taught history at Bath University and in 1979 was appointed Professor of Cultural History at London's post-graduate art and design school, the Royal College of Art. Since 1996 he has been Rector in charge of the College.
His is the Chairman of Arts Council England, Chairman of the Design Council, Chairman of the Royal Mint Advisory Committee, and a Trustee of the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Christopher Frayling was awarded a knighthood in 2001 for "Services to Art and Design Education".
He has had a wide output as a writer and critic on subjects ranging from vampires to westerns. He has written and presented television series such as The Art of Persuasion on advertising and Strange Landscape on the Middle Ages.
He has conducted a series of radio and television interviews with figures from the world of film, including Audrey Hepburn, Deborah Kerr, Ken Adam, Francis Ford Coppola and Clint Eastwood. He has also written and presented several television series, including The Face of Tutankhamun and Nightmare: Birth of Horror.
He is especially known for his study of spaghetti westerns and specifically director Sergio Leone. He has written a very popular biography of Leone, Something To Do With Death (2000); helped run the Los Angeles-based Gene Autry Museum's exhibit on Leone in the summer of 2005; and has appeared in numerous documentaries about Leone and his films, particularly the DVD documentaries of Once Upon a Time in the West (1968).
Literature
* Napoleon Wrote Fiction (1972)
* Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula (1978, revised 1992)
* Nightmare: Birth of Horror (1996)
History
* The Face of Tutankhamun (1992)
* Strange Landscape: Journey Through the Middle Ages (1995)
Film
* Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone (1981)
* American Westerners (1984)
* Clint Eastwood (1992)
* Sergio Leone: Something To Do With Death (2000)
* Mad, Bad and Dangerous?: The Scientist and the Cinema (2005)
* Sergio Leone: Once Upon a Time in Italy (2005)
* Ken Adam: The Art of Production Design (2005)
Education
* The Royal College of Art: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Art and Design (1987)
* Design of the Times: One Hundred Years of the Royal College of Art (1996)
* The Art Pack (1998)
External links
* Guardian profile
* Frayling on BBC Desert Island Discs
Christopher Frayling
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Frayling
Once Upon a Time in the West (originally released in Italy under the title C'era una volta il West) is a 1968 Western film directed by Sergio Leone, considered by many to be his "greatest film". Its critical acclaim has led some to declare it the greatest "Western ever made". The epic film stars Henry Fonda unusually cast as the villain Frank, Charles Bronson as his nemesis Harmonica, Jason Robards, as the generally benign bandit Cheyenne, and Claudia Cardinale, as a newly-widowed homesteader with a past.
Leone said that his last three films, Once Upon a Time in the West, A Fistful of Dynamite and Once Upon A Time In America, were a trilogy based on "the three periods that touched America".
After making The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, Leone had intended to retire from making Westerns. He had come across the novel The Hoods by "Harry Grey" (a pseudonym), an autobiographical book based on the author's own experiences as a Jewish hood during Prohibition, and planned to adapt it into a film (this would eventually, seventeen years later, become his final film, Once Upon A Time In America). However, Leone was offered only Westerns by the studios. MGM/UA (who had produced the Dollars Trilogy) offered him the opportunity to make a film starring Charlton Heston, Kirk Douglas, and Gregory Peck, but Leone refused. However, when Paramount offered Leone a generous budget along with access to Henry Fonda, his favorite actor whom he had wanted to work with for virtually all of his career, Leone accepted this offer.
Leone commissioned then-film critics (and future directors) Bernardo Bertolucci and Dario Argento to help him develop the film in late 1966. The men spent much of the following year watching and discussing numerous classic Westerns at Leone's house, and constructed a story made up almost entirely of "quotations" from American Westerns (see below). (see Frayling)
Leone later commissioned Sergio Donati, who had worked on several of Leone's other films, to help him refine the screenplay, largely to curb the length of the film towards the end of production. Many of the film's most memorable lines of dialogue came from Donati, or from the film's English dialogue director, expatriate American actor Mickey Knox.
Why can't we have movies like these anymore? Movies with depth and wit and intelligence. Movies that have been thought over, not only in the screenplay, but also in the direction. We still do have spots of brillance appear off in the distance sporadically, but mostly we are subjugated to all frills, no freethinking fluff pieces of cotton-candy for us, to dumb us down in the cinema and insult us, as an audience and as a ticket-payer.
The lesson : Be selective. Always.
Till the next blog,
dr phibes
I reserve the right to be ignorant. That's the Western way of life. - Alec Leamas
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965)
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