Roger Christian on Star Wars, Alien and Black Angel

Mar 11, '10  ·  0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Holy. Fuck. I’ll tell you, I know more about Star Wars than most people, but here’s a thing I didn’t know. Roger Christian (Set Decorator on Star Wars, Production Designer on Alien, director of Battlefield Earth(!), second unit director on Episode 1) directed a small film called Black Angel which showed in front of The Empire Strikes Back, funded by Lucas. That and a lot more in this extensive interview.

It has tons of awesome trivia stuff, like:

[Travolta] said every director that he put up for Battlefield Earth, he would first go to Quentin and ask his approval. And Quentin said ‘no’ to all of them. And [Travolta] said ‘When I mentioned your name, he screamed and yelled “Yes!”’.

I asked him what this was based on, and he said ‘Didn’t you know? The Sender, the first film you made, is one of his all-time favourite movies.’ So [Travolta] said ‘Right, I’m going to put you together with him!’, and he put us together on a plane from New York – we had to fly back from the premiere. So I was there on a plane with Quentin and he spent about an hour going on about my film The Sender. [laughs]

[Tarantino] told me that when he was a video assistant he’d seen [The Sender] on television and taped it. He said ‘When it first came out in the cinemas, I realised that the studios were just against you on this, so I took people every night to see it, because I knew it wouldn’t be in the cinemas very long.’

So he’d taped it from television, and when the video rental came in, he looked at it and said ‘They’d cut some of your scenes’. He said ‘On my own money, and I was only a video assistant, I went and re-cut it – and I cut back in the scenes that they cut out, from my television recording’ [laughs]. ‘And that’s what we rented out. I’ve still got the copy somewhere at home’.

How I never heard of this, I have no idea, but it restores my hope that there are still undiscovered gems for me to discover about Star Wars.

Update: There’s another interview at Den of Geek, in which Roger says:

… because Ridley pulled his Directors Guild rights to have a screening with an audience. They [the studio] were really not backing it. And at that screening people were running out – and I remember somebody broke their arm running out into the toilets – and they told me people were stuffing towels into the speakers in the toilet they got so scared. That screening made the film a hit, when it got out.

Using Thickbox in the WordPress Admin

Feb 27, '10  ·  2 Comments Tags: , , , , .

A complete guide to using Thickbox in the WordPress admin, despite the ingenious traps laid by the developers of the media manager and Thickbox itself. With this guide in hand, you too can shout out ‘Spaaaartaaaaa’ and kick bad code into a big-ass hole in the ground.

Continue reading ‘Using Thickbox in the WordPress Admin’

Presenting the Team Fortress 2 Scout

Feb 26, '10  ·  2 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Lessons from Driving on the Right

Feb 23, '10  ·  7 Comments Tags: , , , .

Via a @codinghorror retweet, a comprehensive article on the history of driving on the left versus the right side of the road through history and geography revealing first:

In the late 1700s, however, teamsters in France and the United States began hauling farm products in big wagons pulled by several pairs of horses. These wagons had no driver’s seat; instead the driver sat on the left rear horse, so he could keep his right arm free to lash the team.

And secondly:

An official keep-right rule was introduced in Paris in 1794, more or less parallel to Denmark, where driving on the right had been made compulsory in 1793.

First of all, suck it France. We may have made a short-sighted decision, but at least we were first.

But secondly, that was really quite a loss for horseback riders as well as bicycle riders — a mode of transportation that would rise to prominence about a hundred years later in the late 1800’s, and which is to this day remains the easiest way to get around Copenhagen — as both most commonly dismount to the left, which when you drive on the right, is into traffic.

Sweden found itself driving on the left side of the road up until 1963, even though all the countries around it had long since started driving on the right (Denmark for about 180 years). The practical implications in terms of import, compatibility with neighboring countries and so forth made the otherwise ‘right’ choice wrong, which the Swedish government reacted to, despite little apparent backup from their population at the time:

In 1955, the Swedish government held a referendum on the introduction of right-hand driving. Although no less than 82.9% voted “no” to the plebiscite, the Swedish parliament passed a law on the conversion to right-hand driving in 1963. Finally, the change took place on Sunday, the 3rd of September 1967, at 5 o’clock in the morning.

Today I’m pretty sure Swedes agree that despite whatever hassle it may have been at the time, the long-term benefits have been well worth it.

So as in an episode of GI Joe, what have we learned today?

Laziness and short-sighted solutions have a way of sticking around a lot longer than the reasons for which they were chosen. In those cases, dropping idealism for pragmatism can be a net win. And in the end, as Dick Jones said about Bob Morton, it really never is too late to erase that mistake.

A New Dance Called… Predator

Feb 19, '10  ·  Closed Tags: , , , .

So eh… That happened. And still it’s better than Aliens vs. Predator.

The Lost Drive

Feb 17, '10  ·  5 Comments Tags: , , .

With the exception of the two first seasons, it seems like a law onto itself that every season of Lost has to start a bit ‘off’. Not necessarily bad in any easily distinguished manner; merely ‘off’. And I think the same has held true for this, the last season, until now. Episode 3, ‘The Substitute’ was the episode to finally break in the season for us. I would love to find the time when once in the future we sit down and re-watch the show from beginning to end and find out what the deciding factors are. Something tells me there’s a recurrence amongst some of the directors and writers among who that special Lost-ness really thrives.

They may be better craftsmen, but above everything else, it seems, at least for me, that there’s also another thing that usually characterizes those best episodes. Namely that they’re the character portraits. The first two episodes of this last season were mostly plot-driven, catching up on events from the previous season and setting up the events that will drive this season. Getting the pieces lined up. ‘What Kate Does’, episode 2, had its moments, but was still, at least in my opinion, more concerned with plot than character, whereas The Substitute was almost entirely character-driven.

It certainly helps that Terry O’Quinn delivers such a fantastic performance as Locke, but the episode itself was also filled to the brim with narrative glee and one amazing scene after another, all centered around the character of Locke. Yes, there’s the whole alternate timeline to keep things fresh, but it’s still pretty impressive how even after five seasons, the Lost team manages to twist and turn the character in new and fascinating ways.

I could gush over Lost all day, I really could, but if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some Fringe forums to troll.