Scenes from the Cutting Room Floor

For this imaginative project, images by the renowned Los Angeles artist John Baldessari were the inspiration for a new work of fiction by novelist and screenwriter William Bentley.  First, Baldessari produced twenty photo-collages based on stills from B-movies, in a mode familiar to his admirers.  Next, Bentley imagined twenty scenes to go with them.  The result is a 200-page book that showcases Baldessari’s art and Bentley’s flair as a comic writer with a deep understanding of American movies. 

Arion’s painstaking craftsmanship is applied to this mock screenplay.  The text is printed from metal fonts developed to replicate the look of an old fashioned typewriter. The page format follows the conventions of Hollywood scriptwriters as to indentations, capitalization, and stage directions. The binding was hand crafted in leatherette to mimic a screenplay’s ring binder. In place of Baldessari’s trademark dots over the faces of B-movie actors, a die-cut opening in the print allows words from following text page to peek through as part of the image.