Est. 2003
The blog of one Michael Heilemann, expatriated Dane coming to you out of New York City. Half machine, half grapefruit, Interface director at Squarespace, design lover, film enthusiast, Star Wars historian, creator of the Kubrick and K2 themes, and holder of opinions, many of which are shared on his Twitter account.
Went to see a 35mm archival print of Sorcerer at the Brooklyn Academy of Music today, followed by a Q&A by the master himself, William Friedkin. The Q&A went on for about 52 minutes, and is a great listen for anyone with a passing interest in the film (and if you don't have a passing interest in Sorcerer, what kind of person are you anyway?).
Sound quality is so-so; apologies.
Completely unrelated, you should read Kitbashed.
From a storytelling point of view, from a directing point of view, there is one thing I associate with what he does, which is calm. There is such an inherent calm and inherent trust of the one powerful image, that he makes me embarrassed with my own work, in terms of how many different shots, how many different sound effects, how many different things we’ll throw at an audience to make an impression. But with Kubrick, there is such a great trust of the one correct image to calmly explain something to audience. There can be some slowness to the editing. There’s nothing frenetic about it. It’s very simple. There’s a trust in simple storytelling and simple image making that actually takes massive confidence to try and emulate. #
I've fallen in love with a miniatures game again. Great game, beautiful models. Check out this strangely exciting, and well done playthrough.
I've finally started publishing bits and pieces of my three-year long project on the influences and inspirations of Star Wars. You'll find it over at its brand new site, where over time I'll publish a stack of videos, posts and essays that until now have lived a sheltered life in the belly of a pretty massive Scrivener file.
Stuart Freeborn working on Chewbacca for A New Hope, sometime in 1976.
The man behind the apes of Planet of the Apes, Chewbacca (I wrote about his work), Yoda and of course E.T., has died at age 98.
Had the absolute pleasure of giving a short talk (about following your fucking bliss) earlier today here at New Adventures, in amongst a crowd of speakers the boots of whom I would not be fit to polish.
Fridkin on the French Connection chase:
“[Stunt driver] Bill Hickman drove the car at 90 miles an hour,” Mr. Friedkin recalled. “I was in the back seat holding a camera over his shoulder, focused on the street ahead. There was a camera in the front seat looking out the window, and another one on the front bumper. The reason I handled the camera was because the camera operator and the director of photography both had families with children, and I didn’t.” [...]
“We took off, with Billy telling Bill Hickman, ‘Give it to me, come on, you can do it, show me!’ ” Mr. Jurgensen said in an interview. “We had a police siren on top that people could hear, so that those who were able to get out of the way, could.”
There were no permits and no planning — just sheer nerve. “After 26 blocks, from Bay 50th to Bay 24th Street, I ran out of film, but I knew I had enough,” Mr. Friedkin said. “The fact that we never hurt anybody in the chase run, the way it was poised for disaster, this was a gift from the Movie God. Everything happened on the fly. We would never do this again. Nor should it ever be attempted in that way again.” #
In case you missed it, the new 'signature' blu-ray release that came out late last year fixes the pastel madness of the previous blu-ray release.
I drove my family completely crazy with this thing, some 25 years ago. Age. Shit. More at Space 1970
From Easy Riders, Raging Bulls:
The Sorcerer trailer Bud Smith cut played in front of Star Wars at the Chinese Theatre. Says Smith, “When our trailer faded to black, the curtains closed and opened again, and they kept opening and opening, and you started feeling this huge thing coming over your shoulder overwhelming you, and heard this noise, and you went right off into space. It made our film look like this little, amateurish piece of shit. I told Billy, ‘We’re fucking being blown off the screen. You’ve got to see this.’”
Friedkin went with his new wife, French actress Jeanne Moreau. Afterward, he fell into conversation with the manager of the theatre. Nodding his head toward the river of humanity cascading through the theater’s doors, the man said, “This film’s doing amazing business.” “Yeah, and my film’s going in in a week,” replied Billy nervously.
“Well, if it doesn’t work, this one’ll go back in again.”
“Jesus!” Friedkin looked like he had been punched in the stomach. He turned to Moreau, said, “I dunno, little sweet robots and stuff, maybe we’re on the wrong horse.” A week later, Sorcerer did follow Star Wars into the Chinese. Dark and relentless, especially compared to Lucas’s upbeat space opera, it played to an empty house, and was unceremoniously pulled to make room for the return of C3P0 et al.
I love Sorcerer. It's flawed, and is troubled by a less than stellar ending (and a great, but horrendous title), but it's still a masterpiece the likes of which aren't made any longer. A rough gem from a bygone era of film making.
In his (fantastic) biography on Sergio Leone, Something To Do With Death (p299), Christopher Frayling writes about Once Upon a Time in the West:
Stanley Kubrick admired the film as well. So much so, according to Leone, that he selected the music for Barry Lyndon before shooting the film in order to attempt a similar fusion of music and image. While he was preparing the film, he phoned Leone, who later recalled: 'Stanley Kubrick said to me, "I've got all Ennio Morricone's albums. Can you explain to me why I only seem to like the music he composed for your films?" To which I replied, "Don't worry. I didn't think much of Richard Strauss until I saw 2001!" Barry Lyndon could have been Once Upon a Time in Georgian England: the music, the choreography, the deliberate pace, the ritualized duels. Leone reckoned, though, that maybe Kubrick didn't quite have the common storyteller's touch to pull it off.
He liked White Men Can't Jump. It was on TV and I asked him if I should watch it, and he said, 'yeah that's a good movie, you'll enjoy it'.
What a week. Between being displaced from Manhattan by Frankenstorm Sandy, me having a flight out of JFK thursday, the seemingly non-stop tech industry news, with Forstall leaving Apple topping the roster and the 17th floor bucket brigade it's all a bit overwhelming.
And suddenly a new contender, out of left field, the announcement that Disney has bought LucasFilm for $4 billion dollars. Wow.
Shocking, though perhaps not surprising, if that makes any sense. On the one hand it's nearly impossible to imagine especially Star Wars without George Lucas at the helm, whatever you may think of the course he set. On the other, for what Star Wars is today, and considering the long-standing relationship between the two companies — Star Tours, break dancing Darth Vader, merchandizing cross over and of course Disney's extensive use of ILM on their feature films, like Pirates, The Avengers and John Carter — Disney is without a doubt the most fitting parent for a displaced Lucasfilm.
On second glance, it's a staggering deal. Remember, this isn't 'simply' Star Wars; it's all of Lucasfilm, including the Indiana Jones franchise, and films like Willow and of course Howard the Duck, as well as companies like Lucas Licensing, Lucas Books, ILM and Skywalker Sound and all of the rights associated with them.
I don't know whether that also includes films like American Graffiti and THX 1138 though I don't believe that's the case as they were produced by American Zoetrope. As for Lucas's student films, who knows? And what about the Skywalker Ranch facilities? After all Skywalker Sound lives in the facilities at Skywalker Ranch, whereas ILM and LucasArts reside in their (relatively new) facilities at the Presidio in San Francisco.
Also, consider that this means that Disney now owns not just their own extensive back catalog, but Pixar, The Muppets, Marvel and Lucasfilm, as well as the arguably most advanced production facilities in the world.
Wow.
It's shocking, but perhaps not surprising, because aside from getting up in years, Lucas has also been lambasted by his so-called fans in recent years, and as he himself said in a recent New York Times interview: “Why would I make any more, when everybody yells at you all the time and says what a terrible person you are?”#. And mind you, this is from the guy who for years never acknowledged the more, shall we say, verbal part of his fan base. Between the critical reception of the new Star Wars and Indy movies and the economic reception of Red Tails, it was beginning to look like a perfect time to cut your losses and finally retire into making those long awaited small personal films.
Although heralded ahead of time, Lucas handing over the Lucasfilm reins to Kathleen Kennedy was in itself a historical shift — she is certainly a fantastic choice for the part, having a hell of a pedigree to her name — but, for him to disengage entirely is so shocking precisely because his entire life has revolved around that very same control of his franchises and companies. The reason all of the Lucas industries exist at all is precisely because Lucas got burned by lack of control on his early films and struck back by constructing his own filmmaking empire in northern California.
My initial reaction to the announcement that Disney was already planning the seventh installment for a 2015 release, was that they had been too rash. But despite earlier beliefs to the contrary, it now seems that "Fox owns distribution rights to the original Star Wars, No. 4 in the series, in perpetuity in all media worldwide. And as for the five subsequent movies, Fox has theatrical, nontheatrical and home video rights worldwide through May 2020."# Which would explain why Disney is eager to get started on their own roster of films as soon as possible.
Also, that article mentions that back when Disney first acquired the rights to use the Star Wars characters in their parks, Lucas sold the rights $1 million a year, in perpetuity. That's almost unbelievably cheap; but maybe he simply saw it as a way to keep up the steam to the Star Wars engine? After all, while the special editions were sold as Lucas finally fulfilling his vision, in reality the continued meddling with the movies probably has a lot more to do with keeping Star Wars alive as franchise. Remember, Lucasfilm Licensing is the company that makes the dough; the films themselves, while certainly profitable, are incidental to the real cash cow.
Either way, the rights for Star Wars as we know it must be a gordian knot of epic proportions. After all, is the theatrical edition the same as the special edition, or the blu-ray edition? And while Fox retains the distribution rights, what does that mean in terms of updated versions? Or indeed un-updated versions? The inevitable discussions around a properly restored theatrical release are already exploding across the internet, and while some take Fox's distribution rights to mean that they control the print, there's nothing that has indicated that to be the case so far. And keep in mind, that Fox has done right by most of the major franchise films otherwise in their catalog, the likes of the Alien franchise, releasing some of the best possible blu-ray sets on the planet. They were not the ones holding back a theatrical release.
Just on the topic of restoring the original films to their original glory, Disney has matured over the last decade as a feature film company with Pirates, John Carter and The Avengers, but it is still largely a kiddy-pool company. It seems content to serve up the stuff kids want, which in turn forces parents to dig up the wallet. Great strategy, obviously, but not one that is conducive to progress on the whole 30-40-year-olds getting their beloved theatrical release out in any kind of modern, restored format.
But in the long term, unless Lucas left behind stipulations about maintaining the movies in their current deplorable state, I think chances are good that we'll see some sort of arrangement over the next few years. Either near the end of the current format cycle, or as an opener for the new one.
Whatever the case, lawyers and decision makers at Disney and Fox are going to become well acquainted with one another over the next few years as they page through the yacht catalogs together.
Disney's a good home, exactly because the pantheon of 70s and 80s movies that Star Wars was surrounded by — the ones that Lucas and Spielberg in particular were making — were themselves heavily indebted to the spirit of the kinds of movies Disney built the mouse house on. The loss of course is that the main canon of the movies, were always 'personal' films, in the sense that they came from Lucas. That was the hallmark of many of those early blockbusters; that they were personal films, conceived and willed into life by sheer will by their creators. But that's a side of Star Wars, and I think of Lucas in general, which with every subsequent release became more and more at odds with the business side of LucasFilm.
It's a precarious situation, which I think receives too little in the way of understanding from the more cynical 'fans'. But consider just how big the LucasFilm empire is, and that the movies themselves are the fuel that keeps the engine going.
Also, just as an aside, it's fun to note how interconnected all of this is. Not only has Disney and Star Wars had a lot of crossover merchandising for years, but Pixar sprung from Lucas's first attempts at digital filmmaking, Marvel jumped into bed with Star Wars for the comic books as early as the late 70s and The Muppets have had several similar Star Wars crossovers (and of course a certain 3' green jedi master).
It's also worth keeping in mind that Disney's treatment of The Muppets seem to have been vindicated by the latest feature film, which was a big success, as was I think it was fair to say, their take on The Avengers. John Carter may have bombed, and while it isn't a great film per se, it wasn't for lack of commitment on Disney's part, which poured all the money in the world into it and gave Andrew Stanton largely free rein over its production and marketing!
Between the recognition of Star Wars having long since moved from being the magic trilogy of movies many of us grew up with, into a broader all-media entertainment brand, and the A for effort and pretty good execution Disney has shown over the past decade, I don't see any reason to not be optimistic about their future endeavors with it.
Will it be my Star Wars? Probably not, but then again, what would?
This summer, in Paris, I picked up two old reprints of Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon comics (pictured on the right), and a few days ago I bought the new, stunning reprint from IDW (on the left). And the difference is just staggering. Not only were the panels rearranged for the old edition, but the colors are horrendous and the text is actually slighly different between the two! I have no idea why, but there you go.
But, worst of all, the panels in the right-hand edition have actually been recropped from the original. Pay attention to the first panel, which has been cropped, and the panel with Zarkov in his lab, which has been extended.
New recreation of the Blade Runner soundtrack on its way.
BuySoundtrax Records seeks to rectify that, with this new recording faithfully recreating the original music from the film, which proved a difficult task. Vangelis' score was composed entirely by performing on keyboards and recording it directly, so no written transcriptions exist. Edgar Rothermich was charged with reverse engineering the score–listening to the original music and a 1982 album mock-up and transcribing it by ear. He also had to recreate the sound of 1982 synthesizers and decipher if noise heard was due to recording on tape or stylistic choices by the composer.
This works with both the simulator, as shown here, as well as actual iOS devices. Though if used with actual iOS devices, plug it in to the computer and go to Settings - Safari - Advanced and turn Web Inspector on. Beyond that, it's exactly the same. And it rocks. Hard.
I was watching the Amazon Kindle event as I was eating my breakfast, and aside from it being a great event, one thing in particular jumped out at me as pretty sound business advice, especially in today's world, where starting businesses without knowing how to make money from them seems to be the order of the day (and the perfect way to spot whether you should trust a service):
When did Amazon last make a move that screwed you over as a customer in the name of profit?
…
No, I can't think of anything either, because their profit is making you a happy consumer! How novel.
And while I do think Jeff Bezos is overplaying the competitiveness of the Kindle Fire versus the iPad (by a lot), at least I trust the company because I understand our relationship.
Some part of me can't help but admire the purity of the clusterfuck that is Twitter's continued downward trajectory from startup wunderkind to some sort of bland, wannabe ad-driven media company.
It's incomplete, but I can't help but draw comparisons between Twitter's alienation of their original users and ecosystem to, because I am me, Star Wars.
Despite what George Lucas says, the continuing alterations to Star Wars have been driven by business reasoning, not some artistic auteur need to see the vision completed. And in both cases, the original fan base is the one getting run over, while the unwashed masses get to enjoy Jar Jar and Justin Bieber, respectively.
Never mind the irony and complete lack of insight it takes to essentially lock out third-party developers — the very people who practically invented modern-day Twitter (thinking anything else is delusional).
Now Twitter considers its website the canonical Twitter. John Gruber recently asked an Apple representative about why clicking a Twitter notification sent you to the website rather than to the client app, and learned that Twitter had specifically requested that be the (unalterable) behavior. And now it's effectively getting rid of its desktop client.
I understand that Twitter wants to control the stream with regards to showing ads, and I can even understand why they clamp down on their API to safeguard their social graph from hostile takeovers. I get it.
But aside from the development cost of keeping a desktop client alive, something which they haven't given two shits about for years anyway, why not keep the client? They control its stream as much as anywhere else. It's completely in their control. Arguably more so than the website which given a touch of CSS is out of their control.
It may take years, but if it really is Twitter's intent to kill the desktop client, it will definitively mark the end of my use of the service. The API changes hurt me on principle, but killing the desktop clients actually hurts my practical use of Twitter as a service. Most days I'll have the client open on my secondary monitor and occasionally glance at the stream to see what's going on out in the world as I work. Contrast with Facebook, which I open maybe twice a day unless I specifically receive a notification.
Which do you think I interact with more often?
And despite their best engineering efforts, having to wait for the browser to load up Twitter.com will forever be considerably slower than the instant action of switching to the client. Never mind that I don't give a flying intercourse about 'Who to Follow' and 'Trending Topics' nonsense that is continually shoved down my throat. #foiegrasjokehere
I get the attempt to control the stream in an effort to monetize it. I get the need to control the third-party space from the risk of a 'trojan horse'-like hostile takeover.
I don't get how the desktop client can't be a part of that. I don't get how this will help the Justin Bieberification of Twitter. But most paradoxically, I don't understand why Twitter has started sending out "What's going on with your Twitter" emails when the whole fucking service is supposed to be about that!
In closing, Twitter, you have gone insane, and you should seek professional help.
PS: How are mentions and DMs read/unread status still not synced? How are billions of tweets every day without the capacity to to flip a fucking a bit? Man up.
FOSS Patents has a great post about the Apple vs Samsung verdict, summarizing:
Samsung has issued a statement that claims this jury verdict is a loss for consumers. But things are more complex than that. There can be no reasonable doubt that Samsung and Google have engaged, and continue to engage, in "copytition" (competing through copying) rather than wholly-independent creation. Somewhere the courts have to draw the line and afford some degree of protection to innovators. I don't always agree with Apple's claims, and I don't like all of Apple's patents, but the kind of disregard for other companies' intellectual property that Samsung and Google effectively propose is certainly not the answer.
RIP Neil Armstrong.
