Since 2014
Around an hour into the film, nurse Margie is making her rounds checking on the girls of the psychiatric hospital's day room. Lisa (Jolie), having already antagonized fellow patients, attempts to divert Margie for chit-chat but the nurse insists she's got to continue her rounds.
"Taking five minutes for me would be a dereliction of duty? Huh? What if I had a punctured artery? What would you do? You'd just keep going about your rounds? Ignore my wounds?"
"Lisa stop it…"
The drama escalates with Lisa grabbing the pen from Margie's clipboard and holding its point at her own neck.
"Go ahead, take one fucking step and I'll jam this in my aorta; go ahead !"
A head nurse (Whoopie Goldberg), having noticed the exchange from the nurses' station, comes to Margie's aid.
"Lisa, your aorta is in your chest."
After a pause and a sly look, Lisa relinquishes the pen.
"Good to know. I'll make a note of that."
originally posted February 3, 2015
Pen in the Neck
And the Academy Award for the film with the Best Supporting Ballpoint in a Dramatic Role goes to...Girl, Interrupted (1999, directed by James Mangold, based on the novel by Susanna Kaysen). The scene, involving a ballpoint pen wielded by Lisa, a diagnosed sociopath played by Angelina Jolie, plays out something like this ...
All but the keenest viewers may have missed the many ballpoint pen cameos on screens big and small over the years. Ballpoints are regulars in Hollywood productions, and not just as desktop set dressing or in pocket protectors. Sometimes the tone of a scene is expressed by a character's inattentive ballpoint doodling. Those doodles may expose important plot points. For roles where real drama is required, the pen itself can become a weapon, wielded with sinister intent by an antagonist or coming within reach of the protagonist to save a life in a nick of time.
Sketched in Stone
・Movie Titles YEAR, director.
Body text...
All but the keenest viewers may have missed the many ballpoint pen cameos on screens big and small over the years. Ballpoints are regulars in Hollywood productions, and not just as set dressing...
Angie nabbed the Supporting Actress Oscar by stealing the show from Winona Ryder in the starring role, but she couldn't have done it without that pen. Jolie's performance must've been an easy paycheck for the actress, who'd been estranged from her movie-star father (Jon Voight), married and divorced in 60 seconds (Jonny Lee Miller), experienced lesbian love (Jenny Shimizu), worn another lover's blood in a vial around her neck (Billy Bob Thornton), lip-smooched her brother on live television upon winning her Oscar, and now overcompensates for it all by adopting every child who catches her fancy, including Brad Pitt.
Product placement was already accounting for its fair share of screen time by the 1990s, so its surprising that there wasn't a brand name prominently visible on the pen. But the future Mrs. Brangelina brandishes it well, clicking it anxiously to expose and retract its ball point held to her neck during the antagonizing of poor nurse Margie. How else is an on-the-edge, institutionalized gal to entertain herself on the inside? (eight years in, as per expository movie dialogue.)
A later scene shows Ryder, playing the is-she-nuts-or-not aspiring writer Susanna, doodling late at night, but those doodles — including the ironic phrase "If you lived here you'd be home now" — appear to be drawn in pencil. Ryder in real-life will have her own is-she-nuts-or-not moment two years later, getting caught shoplifting in Beverly Hills・
originally posted January 23, 2015
Almost Famous Doodles
Cameron Crowe's high-profile auto-biopic film provides a low-profile glimpse at the humble origins of ballpoint brilliance. Early in the film, the transformative power of music marks a pivotal moment in a pre-pubescent boy's life. Young, impressionable William Miller (Michael Angarano, in a characterization of Crowe, who began a career as rock journalist while still a teen) is directed by flying-the-coop sister Anita (Zooey Deschanel) to a pouch full of vinyl-era record albums left under his bed as a present. As William leafs through the contents, examples of classic rock album cover art are shown; Led Zeppelin ll, Axis: Bold as Love (Jimi Hendrix Experience), Wheels of Fire (Cream). Art and music conspiring to literally rock impressionable minds...
William follows the instructions of big sis' strategically inserted note, to "listen to Tommy with a candle burning, and you'll see your entire future", kicking off an elaborately layered film montage anchored by hypnotic spinning record labels (vintage Decca, pictured) accompanied musically by the trippy intro chords to The Who's "Sparks". The sequence also conveys an age jump, cinematically and biographically, beginning with young William staring into the candle flame. Close-up pans of a looseleaf binder show doodles of teenage affection, obsession or allegiance; in William's (Crowe's) case Lester Bangs, Black Sabbath and the like. All the while, the Decca labels (several layers worth) spin round and round, closing with a ballpoint pen adding the final touches to a Led Zeppelin logo (pictured), leading to William a few years older (Patrick Fugit)...
All the era-appropriate references — the vinyl records, the soundtrack, the familiar blue, canvas-like, hard-cover looseleaf binder — amounts to a vivid early-1970s flashback. Crowe himself has described the film as "blowing a kiss" to the music industry in which he came of age. Seeing as this film's reel-life follows Crowe's real-life entry into music, it's easy to imagine Crowe himself doodling all-the-above onto his own grade school looseleaf binders. If Crowe could've fit a second ballpoint segue within the popular "Let's Deflower the Virgin" scene, the film would've been complete・
Almost Famous Coming-of-age montage stills, showing ballpoint pen doodles a la 1970s-era loose-leaf binder. © 2000 Copyright holder
All but the keenest viewers may have missed the many ballpoint pen cameos on screens big and small over the years. Ballpoints are regulars in Hollywood productions, and not just as desktop set dressing or in pocket protectors. Sometimes the tone of a scene is expressed by a character's inattentive ballpoint doodling. Those doodles may expose important plot points. For roles where real drama is required, the pen itself can become a weapon, wielded with sinister intent by an antagonist or coming within reach of the protagonist to save a life in a nick of time.
STARPOINTS COLUMNARCHIVE by K. Rie
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