Tag Archive for 'movies'
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We’ve just returned from a screening of Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, at Cinemateket with Jan Harlan – Kubrick’s brother-in-law and the film’s director – in attendance. The documentary itself, supreme as it is, is available on DVD; however, the Q&A session with Jan Harlan isn’t. A shame, as Harlan was both funny, honest and insightful about Kubrick and his filmmaking.
Which is why I recorded it.
Afterwards I asked him what had become of the 18 hours of material shot, I believe by Kubrick’s (later estranged) daughter Vivian, for Full Metal Jacket. Unfortunately it seems the sound was lost for most of it, and what remained is what made its way into this and the Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes documentaries. Shame.
Update: Thank you Jay Goodman Tamboli for normalizing the audio for me.
Foreword
The creation of Star Wars is comprehensive mythology onto itself, populated by rarely documented anecdotes, the likes of “the Millennium Falcon was inspired by a hamburger, with the outrigger cockpit being an olive off to the side” (1) or “My original inspiration for Chewbacca was my dog Indiana.” (2), compelling enough to be repeated until they’re so prevalent that they must be true, and are accepted even by hardcore fans and Lucasfilm itself. Unfortunately sometimes they’re embellished truths or half-truths, sometimes entirely false and in pretty much all cases oversimplifying a truly interesting, and luckily exceptionally well documented creative process.
And that’s what this is about; the creative process. Cultural touchstones like Star Wars might seem to have sprung fully formed from the minds of their lauded creators, but as in all creative endeavors, movie making, web design or this very post, nothing could be further from the truth. Creation is a process, and strangely, by looking at how everyone’s favorite plushy first-mate sprang into existence, we can learn a lot about any collaborative creative endeavor.
Unfortunately, perhaps because of the verisimilitude of the disciplines needed to make a film like Star Wars come together, the making-of narrative is surprisingly fragmented and often incomplete. A quick look at the bibliography needed to put together this post should give a good idea of just how fragmented. And once you’re down the rabbit hole, you quickly learn that nothing found there can be taken at face value. Quotes, drawings, photos and diagrams lack sources, are undated, some old, some new, some so distorted as to be pure fiction and most of it entirely out of context.
But while the official sources are often great, compiling from many different sources to dispel myths about Boba Fett’s ship, Slave 1 or tell in staggering detail the creation of the film from beginning till end as in the case of books like ‘The Making of Star Wars’, there are still plenty of dim, and in some cases even seemingly purposefully blacked out areas in the development of Star Wars. Just ask Michael Kaminski!
The story of how Chewbacca came to be is one of those. A fascinating look at what happens in the space between idea, page and screen.
Continue reading ‘George Lucas Stole Chewbacca, But It’s Okay’
Gruber linked to these great minimalistic Star Wars posters, giving points for using the Falcon twice. I would note that seeing as the blockade runner was the prototype Falcon, in spirit the Falcon is actually the center of all three posters.
What a piece of junk…
It isn’t quite an official announcement, even if every single film blog out there is treating it as such, as per usual, but it does seem more and more likely that that Guillermo Del Toro is directing with James Cameron producing, an adaptation of HP Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness.
Continue reading ‘The ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ Screenplay. Some Mountains, Madness Aplenty…’
For all its flaws as a film, it’s still a magnificent visual spectacle; even if the compositing at times leaves something to be desired. This video was filmed back in 1983 and put online by Sean Young, quite admirably. To think of all the similar gems like this, hiding in private collections in the hills of Hollywood. It’s enough to make my eyes water.
Having the entire day laid bare before me, my biggest problem seems to be where to begin? Talk about a luxury problem, huh?
It’s honestly not an easy thing to come to terms with.
On the one hand it makes sense to start working full time with something as soon as possible, to secure some funding for the lean times.
On the other hand, since I’ve got a handful of months funded, what better way to burn through them than on the things I’ve been daydreaming while I’ve been stuck in a 9 to 5?
And I’ve had a lot of those day dreams. I mean, a lot.
A couple of years ago two guys from Io went to visit Skywalker Ranch as guests of Matthew Wood. I convinced them to let me post this video of theirs, from the visit:
Which of course goes hand in hand with our visit last year.
Update: As fate would have it, Philip Bloom just posted a new video from the countryside around the ranch:
I accidentally started a new blog today, called Look at this fucking Hollywood production, on which my first post is about Predators.
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.
I always feel obliged to link to Michael Kaminski’s articles on Star Wars because a) he has no RSS feed and b) because they’re so freakin’ good! This time he’s written an article I’ve personally wanted to read for a long time, which pulls together everything available about Marcia Lucas (which is at the same time more than I’ve found in the past, and less than one would think was available). Insightful and heartbreaking.
I bought this beautiful poster from Martin Ansin last year, but didn’t receive it until just the other day (it’s a long way from Uruguay). I can’t wait to put it up on the wall I’ve got in mind for it.
PS: You can contact Martin if you’re interested in buying his posters. Both the art and the print itself are phenomenal.
It’s been a while since I was last properly hooked for a film, but I gotta say, Inception is looking bad ass.
We visited the Ranch during our three-week US roadtrip a few months ago, and I’ve been longing to go back ever since. Nestled in the hills a 40-minute drive north of San Francisco, hidden from view of the road and comprising all the land around it, as far as you can see, and about ten times more, Skywalker Ranch is without a doubt the geek haven.
Blessings of the state. Blessings of the masses.
THX 1138 is certainly not the most accessible film of all time, but for my money it remains not only timeless, but both engrossing and devastating. It’s as uncompromising in its portrayal of a fundamentally alien society as it is in ignoring and avoiding traditional narrative structures and science fiction tropes.
Like every sci-fi internet geek, I’ve been in love with Neill Blomkamp’s short films for years. I had high hopes for his Halo adaption, which unfortunately will never see the light of day now. But, at least he got to make District 9, which I just saw today, and which almost makes up for the loss of Halo.
I’ve got little else to add to what every other reviewer has said, except that it was a great film from start to finish, even though I would personally have liked some more characterizations of the bad guys, than the at times over-much action scenes. It’s not that I dislike the action scenes, but the the soldiers taking pleasure in the misery of the prawns, the cold and cynical corporation heads; these people very much exist in the real world, and especially with the commercialization of war in Iraq, their motives, other than the fairly 2 dimensional stuff the film serves up, would have been a great addition to an already very relevant film.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some packing to do.
No, this isn’t turning into a Star Wars blog, but there’s some sort of odd nexus going on right now, where unseen footage keeps popping up all over the place at such a rate that it’s hard to keep up.
StarWars.com has previously written about the all-white proto-fett, but today went ahead and posted parts of the 20-minute never-before-seen footage of Ben Burtt, Norman Reynolds and Duwayne Dunham showing off a prototype, all-white, Boba Fett costume. It’s awesome.
PS: Duwayne Dunham isn’t as well-known as Ben Burtt or Norman Reynolds, but it just so happens that I’ve been re-reading Droidmaker, as a sort of research for our roadtrip, and just yesterday, I came across Duwayne on page 82.