The working life of Museum of London

Way back at the beginning of this project to make a montage of Pirates on Film for Pirates: The Captain Kidd Story, I planned to divide it into four themes around which to structure the AV. Well: the best laid plans of mice and curators, etcetera…. Once we had all our material, it didn’t take more than the first test screening based around these themes to show they would have to go out the window. It just didn’t zip. Or zing. It wasn’t fun, and if you can’t achieve that with pirate films then something has gone wrong. It was definitely back-to-the-drawing board time.

Mark, the production team editor, who wasn’t long-suffering at the beginning of the project, started to become so at this point. Every few days I had sent him another DVD saying ‘can we have 01.02.32-47’, where he’s making her walk the plank’, and he would patiently splice the section and make it usable. He had put together the film edit with a lot of time and care and now was facing doing it all again, with deadlines looming.

Using the sophisticated method of little bits of paper arranged on a board, we managed to devise a new edit, based on the much simpler themes of Epic, Scary and Fun (which pretty much sums up the genre). Armed with suitably sweeping music to set it to, and some tweaks and revisions along the way, the team arrived at the final version. We think it does zip and zing now, and it’s much more fun. It’s been a great learning experience and Simon, Mark and Caroline were wonderful to work with.

So at the end of the project, and now the exhibition is open, I’m left with a deep appreciation of the joy of pirate films. In the interests of sharing that, I would like to hand out some imaginary awards to mark the fine efforts of artists past. To quote Jane Austen, these chosen by ‘a Partial, Prejudiced and Ignorant Historian’ on a shamelessly personal basis.

Ladies and gentlemen, a drum roll please for……The JOLLY ROGERS.

Lifetime Achievement Award – Let’s get this out of the way first. Of course, this award can go to none other than the legendary, the epitomising, Errol Flynn. He will be the ultimate swashbuckling hero for many years to come. Always having fun, with a wink and a grin, never taking himself too seriously, flying through the air with the greatest of ease, stealing ships and hearts in equal measure.

Best Classic Film – Douglas Fairbanks is sometimes forgotten as an early screen hero. His silent 1926 film The Black Pirate is sort of the archetype of pirate films. Filmed in early Technicolor, the sepia tones lend the screen compositions an almost painterly, moving beauty. There is lots of texture and dirt in the film too, the kind the bright 1950s productions lost, which evokes superb atmosphere and not seen again until the 1970s. It has the classic scene of leaping down the sail with a knife. Moving and complex, it’s worth watching, and easily found on sites like YouTube.

Best Woman Pirate – I’m torn here between Maureen O’Hara’s elegant fighting captain in Against All Flags (1952), and Jean Peters’ rough, gruff, tough Anne of the Indies (1951), so they’re going to share the award. Both stand up for themselves and are proper pirate captains. Peters especially, with a role very loosely based on real pirate Anne Bonny, is very much mistress of her crew and boasts Blackbeard as a mentor. O’Hara does some wonderful sword-fighting looking both fierce and lovely.

Best Long John Silver – There are about 15 screen versions of Treasure Island, and Tom Wareham – the exhibition’s lead curator – and I are agreed that without a doubt the best Long John Silver is Charlton Heston in a 1990 version directed by his son, with young Christian Bale as Jim Hawkins. It was made for TV and is hard to get hold of but really is worth it. The eighteenth century is authentically realised and Heston captures Silver’s blend of charm and menace perfectly without ever veering into caricature.

Worst Pirate Lead – Sterling Hayden in The Golden Hawk (1952). As wooden as the planks of his ship, seducing a string of women using no apparent charisma or appeal, stiff as a mast and rattling out lines like musket fire. This is the least believable hero pirate I saw, with a sidekick of a really bad hairstyle.

Most Original Pirate – Within the genre of pirates in general it’s easy to become stereotyped and keep to conventional line. This award goes to Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean films for managing to do something truly original with the pirate character and blow many of the stereotypes out of the water. Of course in doing so, he’s created a whole new set, which just goes to show how successful he’s been. Androgynous, ambiguous, double- and triple-crossing, never wholly good or bad, he walks more lines than a ship’s rigging. All that and guyliner too.

Best Screen Pirate – This may be a controversial award but I stand by it. I was looking for a pirate with flair, one who is truly menacing and cruel – but also funny and maybe a bit sad. He needed to be a man of action, not afraid to fight in any way shape or form, even when wearing fabulous costumes. He needed to have a scurvy pirate crew of which he was absolute master. He needed to be a bit over the top, flamboyant, and excessive (what is the point of an everyday pirate?). He needed to embody all of the wonderful, dark characters of pirate history in quite a classic way. And be really attractive, even, dare I say, totally hot. Many would argue for Captain Sparrow, but I maintain the rightful winner is……

Jason Isaacs as Captain Hook in the 2003 film of Peter Pan. My vote for best pirate in the history of cinema. He scares small children, kills his crew wantonly and takes his shirt off.

Blog author: Hilary Davidson.

Catch-up on Hilary’s previous Pirates on Film posts here.

In advance of our Gladiator Games in July, and following on from our last post detailing the filming of our upcoming Streetmuseum Londinium app (click here to read), we have the latest news from our gladiators in training as they took the opportunity for a little extra practice and helped out a friend who wanted to run the London Marathon dressed as a Roman Legionnaire!

On the weekend of the royal wedding the gladiators from Britannia were performing at Flag Fen Bronze Age Centre in Peterborough.

Following their scheduled Roman shows, and after the public had left the site, they took the opportunity to squeeze in a little extra training before the Guildhall Yard shows on 30 & 31 July.

The routine between a Thraex and Hoplomachus is beginning to take shape and everyone was pleased with the results.

Testing of new large scutae (shields), planned to be used in the games, were also supported by two Provocators.

The routines are still mainly rehearsed un-armoured and as soon as a combat sequence is mastered, the armour gets added.

Our gladiators also recently heard from Tim Rees, who wanted to run this year’s London Marathon dressed as a Roman Legionary.

Britannia were only too happy to support Tim by lending him some ‘classic’ legionary kit from the Flavian period (late 1st Century AD).

Tim ran in improvised caligae (Roman miltary sandals) – without the hobnail base! He also found the wool tunic worked brilliantly, as when wet, it kept him nice and cool.

Tim completed the marathon in just under 5 hours and was pleased to report he did not walk a single step.

Catch up on previous Gladiator Games blog posts here.

Our Licensing Manager, Harriet Berry, shares further details of some the images from our collection recently licensed as greeting cards, on sale not only at our museums but around the country.

Today the focus is on iconic London photographer Henry Grant

There are nine iconic Henry Grant images in the new licensed greetings card collection, including those pictured here.

Henry Grant (1907 – 2004) was a London based photographer who started to work for a  news agency on Fleet Street in the 1940’s and pursued a career as a photojournalist. He was particularly skilled at capturing spontaneous moments of London life.

In 1986, the Museum acquired an archive of 80,000 photographs from the photographer.

You can discover other cards newly available via this licensing agreement in Harriet’s first blog on the subject here and there is still a chance to enter our competition to win a set of all 21 cards in the range. Simply post a comment below or tweet us with suggestions of a key Londoner from history you would send one of these cards to and why and the best suggestion as judged by our Retail Team will win!

Competition closes 6pm on Monday 23 May 2011.

Part of the interesting thing in working on an exhibition like Pirates: The Captain Kidd Story is that it takes you into whole new areas of working life. While I love cinema and films, I’ve never been involved in using film clips or the whole complicated rights and permissions side of it. When I finally decided on my list of films that I felt best encapsulated screen pirates I turned to our fantastic AV production team: Simon, Caroline and Mark.

We sat down with the list then started to work out what we could actually get. This was Caroline’s job as researcher. She started hunting down each film: who made it? Who originally owned the rights? Who owns the rights now? This last one is really important because we were looking at a lot of older films. Studios close down and their back catalogue changes hands, on and on until they often end up with one of the big companies like Sony or Warner. The more recent a film is the more complicated the rights can be. I thought it was important toinclude Cutthroat Island (1995), for example, because Geena Davis plays one of the few women screen pirates of modern times, and quite a proper one who swashes and buckles and everything (though one could also argue for the inimitable Miss Piggy starring in Muppet Treasure Island the following year, who definitely has the better frock). However, it turns out the film’s rights are owned by five different people. It just wasn’t possible to come in on time and under budget if we got in contact with all of them so we used a still from the film instead. Even so – Geena in trousers or a dress? Which image is most representative of what this movie brings to the history of pirate films?

Caroline also negotiated the fees and timings we could use. Sometimes we got bulk deals; sometimes it was a flat fee of hundreds of pounds for no more than 15 seconds of footage, plus transfer costs. The equations started looking like this: Film + Cost + Permissions + Availability + Location of footage + Soundtrack clearance + Availability of still image = can we include it in the AV? What the answer was depended a lot on what was happening withall the other films at the same time. Confused? I was. Happily, at the same time I was picking the best 15-30 seconds of each movie. It’s a tough job but someone had to watch hours of pirate films. We are lucky that the 1945 film about Captain Kidd, the man at the centre of the exhibition, is in public domain so we used a lot of it to punctuate the more fictional stories. I was saved from the difficult task of having to choose the best bit of Captain Blood (1935) when we found a trailer – all the best bits pre-selected and with fantastic titles assuring the viewer of ‘THRILLING ADVENTURE’ and the like. After a hilarious afternoon in the office of a footage supplier, Simon, Caroline and I decided against some nifty ‘pirate’ dance numbers, mostly an excuse for scantily-clad chorus girls with swords. Theylooked a lot like the dashing lady below, almost unrecognisable as Joan Crawford circa 1932.

There are some pieces of footage I’m really please we secured. For me, it wouldn’t be the same without jolly Captain Pugwash and his crew. The estate of John Ryan kindly gave permission and I got to indulge in some nostalgia while watching all 30 of the animated shorts from 1974-75. They really stand the test of time.

There are some pieces that just couldn’t happen, including anything from Disney who are strict about clips permissions. Johnny Depp’s brilliant entrance in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) would have been wonderful, as would Captain Hook in the animated Peter Pan (1953), Peter Ustinov in Blackbeard’s Ghost (1968) and of course, Treasure Island (1950). We found ways to include them elsewhere in the exhibition though. Feel free to mentally add the films to the AV when you visit.

Eventually we got a list of film footage and film stills that we could work with. Now all we had to do was put them together into one AV film distilling a century of screen history into ten minutes. In the next post, I’ll discuss this then give out some Jolly Rogers – my personal version of the film pirates Oscars….

 Blog author: Hilary Davidson.

Catch-up on the final part of Hilary’s Pirates on Film blog posts here.

In advance of our Gladiator Games in July, and following on from our last post detailing the start of our gladiatorial training (click here to read), we are able to share with you a behind the scenes look as the Britannia re-enactment group take a break from their training to work on a film performance for our upcoming iPhone and iPad app Streetmuseum Londinium.

To complement the games, the Museum has joined forces with TV channel HISTORY™ to launch this free app, following the huge success of Streetmuseum launched in May 2010. The new app will bring Roman London to life using a combination of never-before-seen technologies, with users able to ‘excavate’ artefacts, view augmented reality scenes of Londinium and explore overlaid maps of the ancient and modern city.

Britannia’s gladiators were used in the filming  of one of these scenes of Roman London life for the app. Using ‘green screen’ technology, they recreated scenes of gladiators battling it out in the amphitheatre that once stood in the Guildhall Yard (the location for the upcoming Gladiator Games).

There are some different requirements when filming in front of green screen backgrounds, for instance sometimes you’re required to react to things that aren’t there and more importantly for the film makers, nothing must be too reflective, so armour has to be dulled down with grease or wax polish. If any large areas of green are reflected, then the odd appearance of what is jokingly called ‘holes in time and space’ can occur on the armour, making the special effects editor’s job very hard to patch up.

So the gladiators deliberately didn’t clean the armour before hand, and chose to wear padded armour on their limbs, to cut down chances of reflection. Larger shields were also ditched because of the chances of injury and damage to other props and camera equipment in the confined space. A net was chosen with larger holes to cut down the chance of a mesh effect in front of the background.

The film crew had sand delivered as a fighting surface, and after several rehearsals - the gladiators were ready to go!

You can see the completed scene in all its glory when Streetmuseum Londinium launches on iTunes on 25 July. Until then we can share an example of  Britannia’s film work with you in this extract from the children’s series Horrible Histories on YouTube (external link).

As I began to research further into the vast history of pirate films for the AV in Pirates: The Captain Kidd Story, four themes started to emerge: Captain Kidd, pirates from literary sources, women pirates, and charting the legends of pirates on film. I started to dig for buried screen treasure to fulfil these (a side effect of this whole exhibition has been awful puns in meetings and a tendency for staff to start arrrrrnswering the phone in piratical ways). It’s always nice to canvass people about what first comes to mind when you say ‘pirate film’. A friend of mine swore by a 1948 musical starring Judy Garland called The Pirate, just the thought of which made me giggle. There was a lot of ‘Will you include Captain Pugwash and are the urban myths true?’ and the answers are absolutely yes and absolutely not. There was some discussion with the lead curator on why the Dread Pirate Roberts from The Princess Bride (1987) is a key pirate from a cult film and yes it really is a cult film, what do you mean you’ve never seen it, here borrow the DVD immediately.

It’s been fascinating what I’ve found out on the way and I’m overflowing with pirate film trivia now. The earliest film I could find with a female pirate lead was 1916 so that trope has been with us nearly as long as cinema itself. Soon the whole project team fell for our pin-up poster girl Prudence the Pirate.  A contemporary review noted that Prudence ‘in her picturesque costume displays a pair of dimpled knees which would make Hebe herself jealous.’ Saucy stuff.

I counted that Errol Flynn played a pirate four times, and buckled swashes many more. I read his biography and realised his real life was more exciting than any film. It’s called My Wicked, Wicked Ways and I highly recommend it, though it would have been even better if Flynn had managed to call it In Like Me, his original title choice. I discovered that his real son Sean Flynn played Captain Blood’s screen son in an Italian production called – wait for it – The Son of Captain Blood (1964).

I waded through lots of chauvinist rubbish in search of decent female pirates who are consistently feisty and independent and don’t fall simpering into the hero’s arms at the end. The falling itself is not a problem; the simpering, quivering, and giving up a great job with respect, authority, income and excitement is. There’s a definite shift towards less empowered heroines and more traditional gender roles after the end of World War II. A coincidence? I think not. The low point is Hurricane Island (1952), when we never even get to see the woman pirate go a-pirating. Her role is all by repute and she loses her feist almost immediately.

Other curiosities came to light. Did you know Kirk Douglas directed and starred in a 1973 pirate-western called Scalawag, loosely based on a Robert Louis Stevenson story? That the full size ship Roman Polanski had built for his 1986 film Pirates, starring Walter Matthau, now berths in Genoa harbour as a tourist attraction? That Cheerios featured Captain Kidd in an animated commercial in the 1950s, vainly battling the Cheerios Kid? That Treasure Island has been filmed at least 15 times since 1918? That James Earl Jones leads as one of the very few black pirate heroes in Swashbuckler (1976)? That Yellowbeard’s pirate crew includes David Bowie with a fetching decoy shark fin (1983)? It goes on and on.

Eventually I ended up with a shortlist of films I really wanted to include in the AV. Then the fun began. Tune in next time to find out how a lone crew formed of a curator, a producer, a researcher and an editor battled mightily to plunder the riches of cinema archives and extract the jewels of movie pirates against the forces of budget, time and copyright permissions….

Blog author: Hilary Davidson.

Catch-up on Pirates on Film – Part 3 here.

My name is Hilary Davidson, and I’m one of the curators of the exhibition Pirates: The Captain Kidd Story opening at the Museum of London Docklands on 20 may. Usually, I am a curator of fashion and decorative arts. For the last year though, my working life has taken on a nautical air. As the exhibition draws near I’m going to share behind the scenes and blog about one aspect of all the work that goes into producing a major exhibition at our museums.

You know a project is going to be fun when you get to keep a picture of Johnny Depp on your desk for entirely legitimate, work-related reasons. Besides the morale-boosting qualities of Mr. Depp’s face late on Friday afternoon (like visual chocolate), his work in the Pirates of the Caribbean has given new life to the classic genre of pirate films I’ve been exploring for the last 6 months.

Pirates: The Captain Kidd Story  includes an audio-visual presentation about the history of screen pirates. These fantastic, swashbuckling, bodice-ripping, derring-do, cannon-firing, ship-battling, treasure-stealing, dashing, romantic, heroic, funny, scary, larger-than-life characters have been with us for escapist adventure for as long as film itself, first in black and white, then glorious Technicolor, all the way through to today’s CGI effects and Dolby surround sound.

They’ve shape our imaginings about pirates and created so many of the myths and legends (and stereotypes) that now instantly say ‘pirate’ to us. Walking the plank? Jolly Rogers on everything? Arrrrrrr? Swinging between ships? A hook for a hand? All fictional. Lots of these came from literary sources like Treasure Island, the definitive pirate novel, but, for example, Robert Louis Stevenson couldn’t have imagined that in the 1950 film of his book, actor Robert Newton would add his native Devonian burr to Long John Silver’s Bristol origins and set the pirate accent for ever after. Now on every September 19 on World Talk Like A Pirate Day , people everywhere imitate Newton’s scenery-chewing sea-cook.

I was given a brief for the audio-visual: around 10 minutes, energetic, fun, a montage of the history of pirate films. Great! But where to start? How do you assess the relative importance and pirateness of a film, and just how many are there? It turns out there are quite a lot. Between Wikipedia’s Pirate Films page and Rob Ossian’s list of films  – helpfully annotated – I was looking at well over 300. Even cutting out the duds and dross only reduced it by half.

Obviously anything to do with Captain Kidd was important (bet you’ve never seen Captain Kidd and The Slave Girl, 1952) and I soon decided to avoid smugglers and Cornish pirates as being less relevant to the exhibition’s story (a regretful goodbye to Christopher Lee in Hammer’s The Devil Ship Pirates, 1964). Also off the list were corsairs, Barbary pirates and foreign language films.

There are some standout films everyone remembers which had to go in. Lashings of Errol Flynn in Captain Blood (1935) and The Sea Hawk (1940). Burt Lancaster being buff and bold in The Crimson Pirate (1952). Douglas Fairbanks in The Black Pirate (1926), the epic that set the template for swashbuckling heroes. Some 1980s childhood adventure nostalgia in The Goonies (1983). Spielberg’s revisionist take on Peter Pan with Hook (1991). Disney’s influential classics Treasure Island (1950) and Peter Pan (1951) and the powerhouse of Pirates of the Caribbean (2003).

In my next post, I’ll explore the weird and wonderful film history that began to emerge as my research continued…

Pirates on Film – Part 2 available here.

As we prepare for our spectacular Gladiator Games in July, thanks to our friends at Britannia, we can share with you this insight as our warriors train for combat:

“We have undertaken our second major training session of the year as we prepare for the Guildhall show and we’re certainly moving things along.

At our training ground, we were able to mock up an area with ropes and spikes that should match the dimensions of the Guildhall arena.

We’ve also started to stream gladiators into categories, recognising where people’s strengths and skills best match the weapons and equipment to be used on the day.

In total 22 gladiators ( 11 pairs of varied age and size) worked through the heat of the weekend of the 16th and 17th April.

We have two promising recruits to the category of Retiarius gladiators to keep our senior Retiarius, Ferrox, company. They showed excellent promise with the net and trident.

Our biggest surprise over the weekend was a young lad who exceeded everyone’s expectations as one of the best Thraex gladiators we’ve seen. He has little experience (apart from playing rugby) but has proved swift and confident  with the curved sword (Sica) and was able to match a very experienced Hoplomachus to give a varied and exciting performance that had us all cheering!

We initially train with what looks like an odd combination of 21st century clothes and gradually introduce elements of equipment and armour.

We feel that comfort and getting participants used to the armour, belts and weapons is vital for a good performance.

We then sort our trainees into categories, let them work out a basic routine, then get them kitted up…

They soon realise how they are inhibited or indeed enhanced by what they intend to wear, then adjustments are made accordingly.

We finished the weekend with a full walk-through and individual combats to match the timetable on the day.”

Find out more about our gladiators via their website here and look out for further updates coming soon to our blog, as the gladiators undertake media appearances and visit their armourer’s workshop.

Today our final Big Issue vendor, Richard, shares a selection of the images he has taken capturing life on the streets of London as part of a joint project between the Museum of London and The Big Issue around our current London Street Photography exhibition.

Richard’s photographs now join those taken by Viv, Hazel and Mahesh with a number of images from across this project appearing in a forthcoming edition of The Big Issue. Images will then be selected to be displayed in the London Street Photography exhibition which continues until 3 September at the Museum of London.

The following five images from Richard highlight unguarded snapshots of moments that are in turn curious, busy, unusual, relaxed and, finally, tender.

“Curiosity”

“Rush hour on the bridge”

“Sound Man”

“Lovely day for a walk”

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Our Licensing Manager has been, over the last year, trawling through our vast and eclectic image collection to produce a fresh and varied range of greeting card images to be licensed and distributed through a partnership with Camden Graphics which is part of the UK Greetings family of companies.

The licensing deal will generate income for the Museum through royalties paid on the sale of each card.

This partnership will enable the Museum’s brand and collections to reach audiences all over the country, as the cards will be on sale in around 1,000 shops nationwide by the end of the year (and on sale in our Museum Shops and online from April 1st).

There are 21 cards in the collection, including textiles, ceramics, toys and a beautiful collection of nine black and white photographs by Henry Grant.

These images have been chosen to reflect the diversity of the Museum’s collections and we are now working on designs for Father’s Day and Christmas 2012.

Here is a small sample of four designs (front and back) from the collection:

For your chance to win a complete set of all 21 cards (worth over £50) post a comment below or tweet us with suggestions of a key Londoner from history you would send one of these cards to and why and the best suggestion as judged by our Retail Team will win!