Word: burtons
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Because he tends to dress like a mortician and has made a fair number of films that romanticize gloom, Tim Burton has emerged as one of those directors who are not just makers of myths but subjects of them too. The most prevalent Burton myth is that he is dark and possibly a little disturbed. In addition to his clothes and movies, there are eerie bits of biography to support this view, like the fact that Burton's parents blacked out the windows of his childhood bedroom, apparently to save on heating bills. (Burton grew up in Burbank, Calif...
Cross the wires of the Burton myths, as Hollywood studios often do, and--it's alive!--you get Frankenstein's multiplex monster, a developmentally arrested auteur capable of turning out an almost consistently profitable brand of kooky horror. Naturally, Burton loathes these myths. "You get pigeonholed very easily in Hollywood," he says, "even if you do something they were leery of to begin with. I try not to think about it, but, oh, it kind of drives me out of my mind...
...Burton, 45, has no desire to be understood outside of his movies, but he wouldn't mind being, as he puts it, "un-Burtonized." His new movie, Big Fish, will probably help matters. Big Fish has chimerical elements, but they're in the service of a life-affirming story about fathers and sons, the kind of thing Steven Spielberg keeps returning to. (Spielberg was at one point attached to direct the film, as was The Hours' Stephen Daldry.) The movie stars Albert Finney as a man on his deathbed who recalls his younger self, played by Ewan McGregor...
...count, the un-Burtonizing process turns out to be fairly easy. Burton's home in north London (he has lived off and on in London for several years) is neither a cave nor a haunted mansion but a series of four cottages in a sylvan courtyard that he and actress Helena Bonham Carter, his girlfriend and the mother of their new son, lovingly renovated into a single cozy home. It is the kind of place Hansel and Gretel would run to. Inside, a coal fire hisses softly, and Burton, in clothes of muted color, but color nonetheless, sock-slides...
...passed largely unobserved at Harvard, from what I could tell. Sure, some students probably reflected on their own as they went about their day. But most simply enjoyed a Tuesday off: they slept in, caught up on coursework, watched the preview screening of the new Tim Burton film and nursed hangovers from the Harvard State University party the night before. There was, after all, little in the way of commemoration to remind us why classes were cancelled...