MY FAVORITE MOVIE GLOBES
My wife is into horses. She practically grew up on horseback. She doesn’t own a horse anymore, but she still loves them. Sadly, most of the horses she sees these days are in movies or on TV. Sometimes, as we are leaving a movie theater, she’ll say, “Wasn’t that horse beautiful?” And then I will rack my brain in an effort to recall when it was that a horse appeared on screen. Usually I fail at this, and then I have to ask her, “What horse?” And she’ll say something like, “When Patrick Dempsey and Amy Adams were walking in the park. There was a police horse behind them in the distance. It was really lovely.” Naturally, I never saw the police horse because, like nearly everyone else in the theater, I was watching Patrick Dempsey and Amy Adams (in truth, I was probably only watching Amy Adams, but that’s another story). I am tempted to make fun of my wife for this behavior of hers, but I can’t. Because I do it too – not with horses, but with globes.
I have mentioned before that I have a thing about world globes. I collect globes. I sometimes sit up late at night and look at globes on the internet. Most normal men look at naked women on the internet late at night. But I look at globes. Well, sometimes I look at naked women too. But the point is, I am as obsessed with globes as Julie is with horses. And often, when we are leaving a movie theater together, I will make a comment to Julie like, “Did you see that incredible globe in the murderer’s living room?” And Julie will say, “I knew you were going to say that.” That’s the difference between us. I never notice the horses in movies. But Julie notices movie globes and then waits for me to mention them afterwards.
There are a few truly iconic movie globes. There is the giant inflatable globe that Charlie Chaplin plays with in The Great Dictator. After the opening credits of Casablanca, the first thing we see is a spinning globe. And, of course, every Universal film opens with the appearance of the studio’s spinning globe logo (I sometimes wonder why the studio wasn’t called Global). But it isn’t the handful of iconic movie globes that most interest me. I love the ones that appear just briefly in hundreds of relatively obscure or, at best, modestly successful pictures. There is a classy-looking globe standing next to the Dictaphone machine in Joan Crawford’s writing room in the 1952 noir thriller Sudden Fear. The Dictaphone machine plays an important role in the film. Sadly, the globe does not. Many old Sherlock Holmes movies have a scene set inside the study of a respectable upper-class English home. And almost always there is a beautiful old floor globe somewhere in that study. Two eye-catching globes appear in Guillermo del Toro’s 2004 film Hellboy. The first is the glossy floor globe that Professor Bruttenholm (John Hurt) keeps in his office at the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense. The other is a massive globe (with orbiting moon, no less) that appears near the altar in the secret laboratory that lies beneath the mausoleum of Rasputin (Karel Roden). The film Pretty Persuasion features a nice floor globe in the office of Headmaster Charles Meyer (Michael Hitchcock), but the movie is so heavily populated with beautiful females (Selma Blair, Rachel Evan Wood, Jane Krakowski, Elisabeth Harnois, Jaime King, etc.) that I barely noticed it. And in the documentary film Endurance, a beautiful floor globe appears behind polar historian Roland Huntford as he speaks to the camera about Ernest Shackleton’s 1914 trek across the Antarctic.
Lately, globes seem to be popping up on screen with greater and greater frequency. The last three months or so have seen the DVD release of at least a dozen films in which globes appear. The Nora Ephron film Julie & Julia, released on DVD in December, deserves special mention. This film features not one, but three globes. One of these sits beside the computer of the writing desk at which Julie Powell (the character played by Amy Adams) composes her daily blogs. Whenever we see Powell at work, we see the globe sitting there beside her. Perhaps it is there to remind her of the potential audience for her blog posts. Powell and her husband Eric live in a tiny 900-square-foot apartment in Queens, but their living room nonetheless has two globes in it. The other one is on a shelf beneath a movie poster advertising a 1950s creature feature. A third globe appears in Eric Powell’s office. It is the biggest and most impressive of the three. But if Nora Ephron called today and offered me one of the three globes in Julie & Julia I would eschew the big, impressive globe in Eric’s office and chose the small one that sits beside Julie’s computer. Like Julie Powell, I am a blogger. And I am also a huge fan of Amy Adams. Therefore I would take the globe that sits next to Julie/Amy whenever she is seen composing her blog entries.
Curiously, no globe is ever seen in any of the far more luxurious digs occupied by Julia Child and her husband Paul (Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci) in the film’s other storyline. This is odd because we are told that, during World War II, Paul served in the military as a map specialist. Julia brags that he practically won the war single-handedly with his mapping skills. Perhaps the absence of maps and globes is Ephron’s clever way of telling us that Paul can no longer bear any reminders of the war.
Also released on DVD in December (and also starring Amy Adams) was Night at the Museum II: The Battle of the Smithsonian. The film’s opening credits sequence ends with a shot of the giant illuminated globe that resides above the reception area of the Museum of Natural History in New York City. The film ends with another shot of that same globe. But the globe in the film that intrigues me most appears on a pile of loot pilfered from the Smithsonian’s archives by Kahmunrah, the evil pharaoh portrayed in the film by Hank Azaria. It’s a small globe and doesn’t get much screen time. But it has a nice color and a classy look to it. I wish I could inspect it more closely.
In District 9, a sci-fi thriller recently released on DVD, one of the aliens ponders a really cool holographic globe. But the globe in District 9 isn’t a miniature version of the earth. It’s a small reproduction of the alien’s home planet, which lies far, far away. He looks at it to remind himself of who he is and where his people come from. It’s one of the most poignant cinematic globe scenes I know of.
In Love Happens, another recent DVD release, the retired marine played by Martin Sheen keeps a floor globe next to the chair in which he watches TV. But Sheen’s globe appears to be a contemporary reproduction of an antique globe, and repros don’t interest me much.
In 500 Days of Summer, the actor Clark Gregg plays the supervisor of a greeting card company at which the two main characters (Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel) work. Gregg keeps a globe in his office. It appears to be a fairly contemporary model, probably made by the George F. Cram Company. Cram and Replogle are the two most prominent globe makers in America. But I happen to be a Replogle snob. Gregg can keep his Cram.
In Whip It, a film directed by Drew Barrymore and recently released on disc, there is a scene in which a character played by Ellen Page walks through a schoolroom where twelve globes are arrayed together on a desk. The scene is brief but it sent a thrill down my spine. Perhaps Ms. Barrymore is a globe-lover like me.
Sadly, the appearance of a globe in a movie is no guarantee of the movie’s quality. Earlier this month, Julie and I watched the Michael Mann film Public Enemies. More accurately, we tried to watch it. It proved too slow and self-impressed for our tastes. We turned it off after about an hour or so. But I did watch it long enough to see the globe in Herbert Hoover’s office. It was much more colorful than most globes of that time and place (America in the 1930s). I’d love to know more about it. Mann is a stickler for details, so I can only assume that the globe was an authentic antique or a repro made to look authentic. Perhaps Mann acknowledged the globemaker in the closing credits. I’ll never know. I didn’t make it that far.
Even worse than Public Enemies (much, much worse) was the recently released All About Steve, starring Sandra Bullock and Bradley Cooper. Julie and I tried watching it this evening. I love romantic comedies and can usually sit through even the most wretched of them. But I don’t think we lasted until the forty-minute mark of this one. It was dreadful. In the film, Sandra Bullock portrays a cruciverbalist (crossword puzzle creator) named Mary Horowitz. In her home office, there is an illuminated globe prominently displayed on one of the shelves. What’s curious about this is that a nearly identical illuminated globe appears even more prominently in an earlier Sandra Bullock vehicle, 1995’s While You Were Sleeping. Perhaps the two globes are actually the same globe. Maybe it is a globe that Bullock has owned since she was a child. If so, I would love to know the story of that globe – how she acquired it, why it means so much to her, etc. The globe’s story is sure to be far more interesting than the plot of All About Steve.
Julie has a peculiar ability shared by no other movie lover that I know of. In old low-budget westerns, directors often used the same nine or ten horses over and over again in scene after scene. Thus, when Tim Holt, say, or Ward Bond rides into Laramie, Wyoming, and ties his horse at a hitching post in front of a saloon, Julie will say something like, “That horse next to Tim Holt’s was in the livery stable back in Cheyenne.” This happens over and over again. Ward Bond could take a train to San Francisco and be greeted at the station by an acquaintance riding a horse that was last seen grazing in a pasture in Little Rock, Arkansas. Sometimes she’ll point out that one of the horses in the posse that is pursuing a gang of bank robbers, is also being ridden by one of the bank robbers. She has an uncanny ability to recognize the markings of a particular horse, even if the scenes in which the horse appears are separated by twenty minutes or more.
Recently we were watching a film called Wild Child, which stars Emma Roberts and the late Natasha Richardson. A handsome globe appears in an early scene that takes place in the office of the headmaster (Richardson) of an elite British boarding school. Later, as Roberts’ character is running through a hallway, we see the same globe again. At least I feel certain that it was the same globe. I turned to Julie and proclaimed, “That’s the globe that appeared in the headmaster’s office. They’ve just moved it around. Like one of those damn horses you’re always pointing out to me, the ones that are grazing in Dodge City one minute and pulling a stagecoach into Abilene the next. I’ve become as good at spotting globes as you are at spotting horses.” But Julie just shook her head no. “The school could have purchased a bunch of identical globes for each and every room. You can’t prove that it is the same globe.” I know in my bones that the set decorators of Wild Child (a cheaply made piece of cinematic fluff) reused the same globe in two different parts of the boarding school. But of course I can’t prove it. Not unless I can somehow manage to contact the film’s art director and pose the question to her directly. But, of course, I’m not that obsessed with all things pertaining to globes. Really, I swear I’m not. But if anyone out there knows the email address of Wild Child’s art director, could you please pass it on to me?