Ask Mick LaSalle:
Why we need the word “actress.”
Dear Mr. LaSalle: These days many people speak of women who act as “actors.” I’m glad to see that in your review of “Clouds of Sils Maria” you stuck with “actress.” I can live without poetess, but I think actress deserves a complete rehabilitation.
Michael Biehl, San Francisco Dear Mr. Biehl: “Poetess” isn’t a useful word, because it doesn’t matter if the poet is male or female. “Doctoress” and “lawyeress” aren’t necessary for the same reason. Those terms would be condescending, but there’s nothing condescending in “actress,” because the distinction doesn’t imply something lesser. The history of actresses is at least as exalted as the history of actors. And the word is useful, because some roles require a man and some require a woman. To say “We need a female actor” is not only clumsy, but it employs a euphemism for something that’s already understood to be great. When you think of people like Meryl Streep or Annette Bening, or the great women who worked with Ingmar Bergman, or any of the women of the classic era, to call them “actors” would be a demotion. I do understand, though, the origins of using “actor” for women who act. It comes out of the drama schools. The idea is, if the people in an acting program are collectively known as actors, why then are the women referred to by a different name? And I suppose that, for a young woman, the phrase “I want to be an actress” sounds embarrassingly wide-eyed and hopeful compared with “I want to be an actor.” But once she becomes successful, saying “actor” sounds as affected as “actress” once sounded naive. Hello Mick: Why do trailers give away nine-tenths of the plot? This makes even the best of movies boring when all you are doing is waiting for the next scene from the trailer.
Belinda Berry, Walnut Creek Hello Belinda: I know. It’s weird. After seeing “The Imitation Game,” I saw the trailer for that film and was amazed to see every shift and dramatic turn revealed. It’s awful, and I don’t understand it, but there must be a marketing rationale for it, because trailers have been giving away entire plots since the silent days. Dear Mick: Some picture credits go to RKO Radio Pictures. Why RKO and why Radio Pictures?
Ed Carlson, San Mateo Dear Ed: David Sarnoff of RCA (Radio Corporation of America) put together a merger of the Keith-Orpheum chain of theaters (vaudeville and motion picture) with FBO Pictures, a small movie studio owned by Joseph Kennedy. This gave Sarnoff a studio and distribution, and RCA already had the sound-on-film technology. Sound on film, incidentally, was an improvement over what Warner Bros. was using in films such as “The Jazz Singer.” They used Vitaphone, which recorded sound onto a big phonograph record that had to be synced perfectly with the film. That was cumbersome and required lots of skill on the part of operators. With the RCA technology, similar to the sound-on-film technology that Theodore Case had developed, films could never go out of sync. Anyway, Radio Pictures doesn’t refer to a type of motion picture, but to RCA, which owned the studio. Hey Mick: There is never a photo of you to accompany your column. Is this due to editorial direction, or, like me, was your mother frightened by a large animal just before your birth?
Allen Grant Gardiner, Hayward Hey Allen: Unless you count my father, there were no large animals around to frighten my mother at the time of my birth. We just don’t run photos to accompany the columns in this section of the paper. But if you do an image search for me on Google, lots of pictures, good and bad, will pop up. Better yet, if you go to YouTube, you can find at least two dozen videos of me, starting at age 29 and going on up through infinity.