October 30, 2025
"During the boy’s screen test, the director asked him to strip to his swimsuit. 'When they asked me to take off my shirt, I wasn’t comfortable..."
"I wasn’t prepared for that. I remember when he posed me with one foot against the wall, I would never stand like that.
'When I watch it now,' he said, 'I see how that son of a bitch sexualized me.'
He told The Guardian that Visconti was 'the sort of cultural predator who would sacrifice anything or anyone for the work.'"
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36 comments:
It's what they do. Hell, fucking Caravaggio did it.
He fell off the cliff five years early.
Read the book. Meh.
As long as he felt sexualized but wasn’t actually sexualized he got a good deal out of it if he got paid.
When they asked me to take off my shirt, I wasn’t comfortable... I see how that son of a bitch sexualized me.
"Well, I guess I just had my first taste of the filthy side of this business!"
The list of degenerate artists is long and distinguished.
A pretty dull Thomas Mann story and a relentlessly boring movie.
Among other things, the film led to a brief fling at 21 with Carrie Fischer, who had his photo in her wallet in Paris? Seems like Visconti did him a favor. But not clear of it led more boys and men than girls and women to hit on the straight teen, which I suppose in the seventies could have been bad for him.
I saw “Death in Venice” after it came out in the early 1970s, and liked it very much especially because it made good use of the Adagietto (fourth movement) of Mahler’s 5th Symphony.
I watch it again in 2021 because its theme (contagious death) mirrored what was happening with the Covid 19 stuff. That led me to the “Beautiful Boy” documentary from the same year. I remember Visconti’s “beautiful boy” comments from when the film as first released Ann’s thought they were a way of gathering publicity. Bjorn seemed to have a mixed/odd life.
The Influence of Eighteenth Century Comic Fiction on Thomas Mann essay
“Ann’s” should say “and”
The only really interesting thing about the novel was the extent to which boosters in Venice tried to cover up local epidemics. Bad for business!
Unfamiliar with Death in Venice, I found in Wikipedia that it was referenced in Grey Gardens by Rufus Wainwrigh, who I just encountered for the first time on your blog today.
That guy's almost a girl but that's a fairly impressive dingus.
The Big 70 keeps creeping up. I hope 70 now the new 50 or 40 or 14. If there's is a God it seems like he's the teacher who tells you to turn in your exam paper just when you were getting your best ideas.
If the kid doesn't get sexualized, you're filming something other than Death in Venice.
Liked death in Venice - probably the only thing that Mann wrote that I truly liked. Maybe he's better in German.
The movie is incredibly beautiful and incredibly boring.
“ Unfamiliar with Death in Venice, I found in Wikipedia that it was referenced in Grey Gardens by Rufus Wainwrigh, who I just encountered for the first time on your blog today.”
yes I noticed that too. It’s a pure coincidence.
I think it would be difficult to cast the boy in "Death In Venice" without sexualizing him.
“I think it would be difficult to cast the boy in "Death In Venice" without sexualizing him.”
Then don’t film the stupid thing. It’s entertainment. It’s the least important thing we exchange money for.
He later said he’d felt sexualized by the director
Ned Beatty said the same thing about John Boorman after 'Deliverance' came out.
Or charlotte rampling (you know the film)
Or charlotte rampling (you know the film)
Deliverance 2, We's Kin Folk?
The dance of art where Brando uses butter. The Northwestern Theater grad in LA who needs some money. These are the boundaries of art and porn.
I think that was a different film but you get the gist
Also the gal in the last tycoon with deniro
Tadzio, do you like operas about Turkish prisons?
Like a fiend his dope Or a drunkard his wine. A man will have lust for the lure of the mine
Well, thank God for AI. Pretty soon it will be possible to cast all these movies with AI figures. No one in the entertainment industry can be trusted with the production, casting, or direction of young, eager-to-please actors. Plus from what I could see that young man wasn't all that good looking. I'm sure AI could come up with a more worthy representation.
Eve Marie, I agree with you.
The book (or novella) is much less sexual than the movie. Partly, its just the different between the mediums. You can write a novella from the stand point of the lead character and say things like "He was so beautiful. I looked down the beach and there he was".
And its just a sentence in a paragraph of text. But in a film its so old perv looking at a young boy for 2 minutes.
And in the novel the lead character isn't just "obsessed with a boy" - its just one piece of a big picture. But in the movie, it overshadows everything else.
Movies cant get inside people's head. Everything has to be literal. And surface.
Mann was probably an in-the-closet Gay, which explains a lot about his life. But the weird sexual attraction to the boy, was probably lost on a lot of people before we become so gay aware.
You can read the novel - certainly I did - as the obsession with the young boy as a yearning for his lost past. The boy represents life, beauty, and youth vs. the decay and death of the professor's current life.
If they added an evil Big Brother who made everybody wear masks, and the government actually caused the disease, that would be a good movie.
Elvira Madigan was a beautiful filmed but dull movie that came out of Sweden in the late 1960s.
If Andrew Mountbatten Windsor could go back in time and become a "filmmaker", he'd still be a prince.
I would blame my parents too, if that had happened to me. I know there is tragedy in his early life, and he was raised by his grandmother, or something. This is on her in some ways also.
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