"There Isn't Any Film Culture, Just an Awful Lot of Films"
(Orson Welles)

I haven't run notice of a Robert Birnbaum interview in a while, even though he keeps churning them out--and I use the verb deliberately, because they're like buttah!--so I'm quite happy to completely derail your plans for this morning by sending you to his conversation with film historian David Thomson, which provides me with my only likely chance to say The Whole Equation is merely the tip of the iceberg. Thomson issues some sentiments longtime Beatrice readers might recognize from the account of his dialogue with Geoffrey O'Brien:

"[A]s you know movie people are not overly critical of their own passion. It’s a hot bath they want to jump into and stay there. This is a book that in many ways raises questions and worries. About the overall achievement and culture of film. It asks the question, 'Is it really an art? Are we doing it justice when we treat it as an art? Or isn’t it something more complicated and a bit less than art?' So I think there are some people for whom film is a church who think that there is something heretical, possibly, in this book. And there is. I foresaw that there would be some people like that who were offended by the book. But for me it was a collection of things that had to be said."