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 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'.
One day perhaps, you'll get some sort of insightful blog post from me. But that day is not today!
For years people have been telling me they just don't see what's so great about 'Citizen Kane.'" Now they tell me they just don't see what's so great about "Vertigo." My answer will remain the same: "You're insufficiently evolved as a moviegoer." Or, more simply, "You're wrong."
Took a couple of years, but we finally have an answer to: "What's wrong with this picture!?"
While the Hollywood marketing departments have committed creative suicide long ago, and are now being run seemingly by a batch of monkeys — admittedly relatively well-trained, but monkeys nonetheless — there was a time when artists like Drew Struzan helped shape the magic of cinema from well before the audience saw the first frame of the film. He is arguably the greatest poster artist to have worked in Hollywood, and his style is indelibly linked with many of the great movies of past decades, in the minds of the film fans who've grown up in his epoc.
Well, there's a documentary in the works, and while it's almost done, it's run out of money, and needs your help to crawl the last couple of feet across the finish line.
Q: A critic who admires your work very much said that, in The Trial, you were repeating yourself…
Welles: Exactly, I repeated myself. I believe we do it all the time. We always take up certain elements again. How can it be avoided? An actor’s voice always has the same timbre and, consequently, he repeats himself. It is the same for a singer, a painter…There are always certain things that come back, for they are part of one’s personality, of one’s style. If these things didn’t come into play, a personality would be so complex that it would become impossible to identify it.
“What you learn from that first [film] - and I don’t call it ‘trial by fire’; I call it ‘baptism by fire’ - is that you are going to have to take all of the responsibility, because basically when it gets right down to it, you are going to get all of the blame, so you might as well have made all of the decisions that led to people either liking it or disliking it. There’s nothing worse than hearing somebody say, ‘Oh, you made that movie? I thought that movie sucked,’ and you have to agree with them, you know?”
...and five more thoughts on filmmaking from David Fincher.
I guess I should. More on eBay.
The Maltese Falcon (1941):
Wilmer Cook: Keep on riding me and they're gonna be picking iron out of your liver.
Sam Spade: The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.
My mistake. Four coffins.
Vulture has learned that it was in fact John Carter director Andrew Stanton — powerful enough from his Pixar hits that he could demand creative control over trailers — who commandeered the early campaign, overriding the Disney marketing execs who begged him to go in a different direction. “This is one of the worst marketing campaigns in the history of movies,” a former studio marketing chief told Vulture before the film opened. “It’s almost as if they went out of their way to not make us care.”
I have to say, I was optimistic for a long time about Carter, but that was inarguably a horrendous marketing effort. But it's not like the film itself wasn't somewhat unfocussed and bland. A damn shame too; as it plunges into the abyss, it probably takes with it any hope of a space opera revival in the cinema. That said, I actually thought that the teaser trailer was the highlight of the marketing campaign.
Well into my twenties, there was nothing I wanted more than to somehow work on the kinds of movies I had grown up with, and which I love to this day. And aside from perhaps Apple (which may finally be outgrowing it's underdog appeal somewhat) which other companies have had the same kind of mythic quality as Lucasfilm and its subsidiaries? Pixar for sure, but then that came out of Lucasfilm, and who knows if Jobs would have been able to return to Apple if he hadn't taken Pixar on to great success after he bought it from Lucas?
Lucas is most known as a myth-maker in terms of his role as a creator of Star Wars and Indiana Jones, but it's remarkable how well he managed to position not just his films, or himself, but also his companies in a way that made them seem like places Willy Wonka himself would be envious of. I love the franchises and the 'fantastic cinema' Lucas and his peers brought to the forefront back in the 70s and 80s, but I have an equal love for those companies and the work they did back then. Work which often outshined the films in which it was featured by a mile.
All of this is a long way of saying that the single best book out there on this subject (no, seriously), Michael Rubin's Droidmaker, is finally out for Kindle (and coming for ePub), and if you haven't already picked it up, you should run on over and pick it up now, cancel your evening's appointments, and find your favorite reading spot for a history of the digital age in entertainment.
I hate myself. I try not to hate Lucas, but I sure do hate myself for once again being drawn into his egomaniacal web of not-quite-truths and self-congratulatory crap.
So Lucas exclaimed in an interview a couple of days ago that really, the fan-brouhaha over the ‘Han shot first’ change to the special edition back in 1997 was in fact one big misunderstanding, and that in actual fact…
The controversy over who shot first, Greedo or Han Solo, in Episode IV, what I did was try to clean up the confusion, but obviously it upset people because they wanted Solo [who seemed to be the one who shot first in the original] to be a cold-blooded killer, but he actually isn’t. It had been done in all close-ups and it was confusing about who did what to whom. I put a little wider shot in there that made it clear that Greedo is the one who shot first, but everyone wanted to think that Han shot first, because they wanted to think that he actually just gunned him down.
Which sounds surprising, and for a moment made me question just what I’d been seeing all those times I’ve watched the original Star Wars over the years. Was I that blind? Did Greedo actually shoot first?
No, of course not. Lucas has an unbridled penchant, not for lying, but for not telling the full story (see elsewhere), so just to thwart this notion in its cradle, here’s how that scene looks today on the recently released blu-ray, with both of them shooting at the same time:
Notice how ILM had to not just make Han move his head, but also added smoke to Greedo’s gun. If the original intention was for him to also shoot, you’d think that it would have been done practically on-set; you know… like Han’s gun smoke.
Here’s the original, in which Han is the only one to shoot, and afterwards the special edition, in which Greedo shoots first:
So even if he did have an original intention for Greedo to shoot first, why was it changed twice? Appeasement of the fans perhaps? I’ll call that one a misfire.
So maybe the original was simply cut wrong, leaving what seems like it would be a pretty important shot on the cutting room floor?
Wait, let’s have a look at the workprint, famous for having been rejected because of its slow and meandering editing. Surely if this was simply a kerfluffle over a missing wide shot, it should be in here? Skip to 6m30s.
Nope.
Alright, alright, I know what to do. Let’s go to the fourth draft screenplay–the shooting draft–that surely will reveal the original intention:
Han: Over my dead body.
Greedo: That’s the idea. I’ve been looking forward to killing you for a long time.
Han: Yes, I’ll bet you have.
Suddenly the slimy alien disappears in a blinding flash of light. Han pulls his smoking gun from beneath the table as the other patrons look on in bemused amazement. Han gets up and starts out of the cantina, flipping the bartender some coins as he leaves.
How about that.
Lucas doesn’t seem to give enough credit to movie goers, believing that they think of Han as a cold-blodded killer, when in reality they clearly understand that this is a now-or-never moment, and that Han is in the line of business where if you have to shoot, shoot! Don’t talk.
In either case, there’s no denying that the Han of the original Star Wars doesn’t quite gel with the character portrayed by Harrison Ford in Return of the Jedi, and perhaps that’s really what Lucas has a problem with; not to get too cynical here, but there’s no denying that Lucas turned Lucasfilm into a merchandising company, and that the difference between the two versions of the same character is remarkable. One is a scoundral, the other is not.
Either way, can we just have the goddamn theatrical release back already?
Stanley wanted me to choose the stills that would be necessary for publicity. Movie promotional images were always produced by unit or special photographers on the set who photographed what they saw. Stanley held, correctly, that these traditional film stills weren’t an accurate representation of what was on screen and he prevailed with the studio in the unprecedented process of taking the images directly from the film. (Stanley, who had begun his career as a photographer for Look magazine, always had strong opinions about the medium.)
Mike Caplan on the preparation for, and first screening of, A Clockwork Orange.
I don’t know that George Lucas is actually a ‘very reasonable person’, but this is funny nonetheless:
Says Lucas of his problems with Universal: “I’m a very reasonable person. Ask me to cut tits for a GP rating and I’ll do it. But they wanted to take ‘graffiti’ out of the title — they thought people would think the movie was about feet.” #
