A bustling seaport city on the west coast of Canada, Vancouver is a big movie production town. In fact, it’s the third biggest film production city in North America, right behind LA and New York. And yet you wouldn’t know it. Because Vancouver never plays itself. It always masquerades in movies as other cities — New York, Seattle, Santa Barbara and beyond.
Zhou shows you just how this deception gets pulled off, again and again.
It is the year 2019. The world is overcrowded. Decaying. Mechanized. Android slaves, programmed to live for only four years, are technological marvels — strong, intelligent, physically indistinguishable from humans. Into this world comes a band of rebel androids. Desparate to find the mastermind who built them, bent on extending their life span, they will use all their superhuman strength and cunning to stop anything — or anyone — who gets in their way. Ordinary people are no match to them. Neither are the police. This is a job for one man only. Rick Deckard. Blade Runner.
Thus opens the novel Blade Runner: A Story of the Future. But even if you so enjoyed Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner that you went back and read the original novel that provided the film its source material, these words may sound unfamiliar to you, not least because you almost certainly would have gone back and read Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the real object of Blade Runner’s adaptation. When the movie came out in 1982, out came an edition of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? re-branded as Blade Runner: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? — and out as well, confusingly, came Blade Runner: A Story of the Future, the novelization of the adaptation.
Who would read such a thing? Movie novelizations have long since passed their 1970s and 80s pre-home-video prime, but in our retro-loving 21st century they’ve inspired a few true fans to impressive demonstrations of their enjoyment of this specialized form of literature. “They’re special to me because when I was younger there were a lot of films I desired to see but didn’t get to, and the novelizations were sold at the Scholastic Book Fairs,” says enthusiast Josh Olsen in an interview with Westword, who describes his books of choice as “adapted from films, or early drafts of films at least, locked with short deadlines and printed cheaply and perfunctorily and end up being part of the movie’s massive marketing universe. Basically, it’s the literary equivalent of the McDonald’s cup from back in the day.”
And so we have Audiobooks for the Damned, Olsen’s labor of love that has taken over thirty of these novelizations (all out of print) and adapted them yet one stage further. You can hear all of them on the project’s Youtube page, from Blade Runner: A Story of the Future(an easy starting place, since the novelization’s scant eighty pages make for a listening experience considerably shorter than the movie itself) to The Terminator to Videodrome. And if you’d like to spend your next cross-country drive with such cherished kitsch classics as Poltergeist, The Brood, Over the Edge, or The Lost Boys in unabridged (and unsubtle) prose form, you can get them on their featured audiobook page. This all delivers to us the obvious next question: which bold, nostalgic Millennial filmmaker will step forward to turn all these extremely minor masterworks back into movies again?
Living in New York, it’s not unusual to encounter ardent theater lovers who’ve carefully preserved decades worth of programs, tickets, and ephemera from every play they’ve ever seen. These collections can get a bit hoarder‑y, as anyone who’s ever sorted through the belongings of a recently departed lifelong audience member can attest.
If theater is dead — as gloomy Cassandras have been predicting since the advent of screens — these monoliths of Playbills and stubs constitute one hell of a tomb.
(Go ahead, toss that 1962 program to The Sound of Music…and why not drive a stake through poor Uncle Maurice’s cold, dead heart while you’re at it? All he ever wanted was to sit, eyes shining in the dark, and maybe hang around the stage door in hopes of scoring Academy Award winner, Warner Baxter’s autograph, below. )
For those of us who conceive of theatre as a still-living entity, the New York Public Library’s recent decision to start digitizing its Billy Rose Theatre Division archive is cause for celebration. Such grand scale commitment to this art form’s past ensures that it will enjoy a robust future. Hopefully someday all of the approximately 10 million items in the Billy Rose archive can be accessed from anywhere in the world. But, for now, you can start with over 100,000 items. The comparatively small percentage available now is still a boon to directors, designers, writers, and performers looking for inspiration.
It’s also wildly fun for those of us who never made it much past playing a poinsettia in the second grade holiday pageant.
Truly, there’s something for everyone. The library singles out a few tantalizing morsels on its website:
A researcher can examine a 1767 program for a performance of Romeo and Juliet in Philadelphia, study Katharine Hepburn’s personal papers (ed. note: witness the many moods of Kate, above), review Elia Kazan’s working script and notes for the original production of A Streetcar Named Desire, examine posters for Harry Houdini’s performances, read a script for an episode of Captain Kangaroo, view set designs for the original production of Guys & Dolls and costume designs for the Ziegfeld Follies, analyze a videotape of the original production of A Chorus Line, and find rich subject files and scrapbooks that document the most popular and obscure performances from across the centuries.
You might also prowl for Halloween costumes. What kid wouldn’t want to trick or treat as one of Robert Ten Eyck Stevenson’s 1926 designs for the Greenwich Village Follies?
There’s certainly no shame in mooning over a forgotten star… for the record, the one above is Alla Nazimova in Salomé.
And there’s something galvanizing about seeing a familiar star escaping the confines of her best known role, the only one for which she is remembered, truth be told…
For me, the hands down pearl of the collection is the telegram at the top of the page. Former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt sent it Gypsy Rose Lee to herald the re-opening of Gypsy, the musical based on her life.
For the uninitiated, telegrams were once an opening night tradition, as was staying up to read the review in the early edition, hot off the press.
More information on visiting the archive, online or in person, can be found here.
Most film-lovers must long for the next Stanley Kubrick, a new thematically adventurous, aesthetically rigorous, big budget-commanding, and take-after-take perfectionistic cinematic visionary for our time. But some film-lovers believe our time already has its own Stanley Kubrick in David Fincher, director of such highly acclaimed pictures as Fight Club, Zodiac, The Social Network, The Game, and Seven — excuse me, Se7en. And just like Kubrick, Fincher didn’t start off at that level of the game. No, his career first gathered momentum with commercials, a bunch of music videos for the likes of The Motels, Paula Abdul, and Rick Springfield, and of course, Alien 3 — excuse me,Alien3.
So what exactly went wrong with that critically savaged yet (we now realize) auteur-directed chapter of the Alien franchise? That question gets addressed in detail early on in the latest multi-part video essay from Cameron Beyl’s Directors Series.
You may remember that we featured the Directors Series’ previous essay in April, but if you don’t, it shouldn’t surprise you to learn that it examined the Kubrick oeuvre. Beyl ended it with a declaration of his own membership in the aforementioned Fincher-Is-Our-Kubrick club, and cinephiles all over the internet thrilled to his announcement of Fincher as his next object of analysis.
To date, five episodes of The Directors Series: David Fincher have come out, which deal with Fincher’s career as follows:
“Baptism By Fire” (Rick Springfield’s music videos and The Beat of the Life Drum, assorted music videos and commercials, Alien 3)
Even though the series hasn’t yet reached The Social Network, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and Gone Girl, you won’t come away from the case Beyl has assembled so far unconvinced of Fincher’s influences, preferences, and obsessions: crime, decay, punk, obsolete technology, architecture, surveillance, corporate and personal wealth, unusual illustrative visual effects, colors like blue and orange in high contrast, nihilism, predecessors like Ridley and Tony Scott — the list goes on, and will go on as long as Fincher’s career does. It says a great deal about his filmmaking skill and style that his work has become so widely known for both its overwhelmingly “gritty, grimy” and overwhelmingly “cold, clinical” look and feel. But if any director can ever arrive at this sort of towering, contradictory reputation, Fincher can, and if any video essays can explain how he did, the Directors Series can.
If there is any contemporary figure out there that resembles Charles Foster Kane, it is that real estate mogul and unlikely GOP front runner, Donald Trump. Like Kane, Trump was educated in, and thrown out of, some of the most elite private schools out there. Both have huge, larger-than-life personalities that readily turned them into media icons. Both had tumultuous relationships with women that ended up tabloid fodder. Both ostentatiously flaunted their wealth. And both have grandiose political ambitions.
Above you can watch The Donald expound on Orson Welles’s masterpiece in a clip directed by none other than master documentary filmmaker Errol Morris. Trump is remarkably thoughtful in this piece compared to the campaign trail where he often sounds like a WWE barker channeling Mussolini. He comes to the movie from a vantage point that most of us just don’t have; namely, he knows what it’s like being obscenely wealthy.
Citizen Kane is really about accumulation. And at the end of the accumulation, you see what happens. And it’s not necessarily all positive. I think you learn in Kane that maybe wealth isn’t everything. He had the wealth; he just didn’t have the happiness. The table getting larger and larger and larger with he and his wife getting further and further apart as he got wealthier and wealthier, perhaps I can understand that…. Wealth isolates you from other people.
At the end of the piece, Morris asks Trump to give Kane some advice. His response, delivered with a smirk, is pure Trump – i.e. bombastic and misogynist. “Get yourself a different woman.”
The segment comes from an aborted project by Morris called Movie Movie, where he envisioned putting modern figures into the films they most admire. So imagine Trump actually in a re-enactment of Kane. Or, as also almost happened, imagine Mikhail Gorbachev starring in a reenactment of Dr. Strangelove. It’s a damned shame that Movie Movie never got made.
Below you can see more of Trump along with Gorbachev, Lou Reed, Walter Cronkite and others talking about their favorite movies in a video made for the 2002 Academy Awards.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
Earlier this week, we featured pioneering German animator Lotte Reiniger’s animated silhouette films, for which she adapted old European stories like “Cinderella,” “Thumbelina,” and “Hansel and Gretel” into a striking visual style — striking now, and even more striking in the 1920s — similar to traditional Indonesian shadow puppet theater. Her work draws plenty of material from folktales, but not just those from in and around her homeland (Germany). For her most ambitious work, for instance, Reiniger looked all the way to Arabia, adapting stories from no less venerable a source than One Thousand and One Nights. The 65-minute result, 1926’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed, stands as the earliest animated feature film. (See a nice clip above. The complete film lives on DVD/Blu Ray.)
“For centuries Prince Achmed on his magic horse had lived a comfortable life as a well-loved fairy tale figure of the Arabian nights and was well contented with that,” Reiniger writes in her introduction to the picture. “But one day he was thrown out of his peaceful existence by a film company which wanted to employ him and many other characters of the same stories for an animated film.” And so, in 1923, it fell to her and a select group of collaborators to make that film. They labored for the better part of three years, not just because of the requirements of shooting each and every frame by hand but because of the experimental nature of animation itself. “We had to experiment and try out all sorts of inventions to make the story come alive. The more the shooting of Prince Achmed advanced the more ambitious he became.”
At that time, The Adventures of Prince Achmed did not, of course, even faintly resemble any feature yet made. “No theatre dared show it,” Reiniger writes, “for ‘it was not done.’ ” And so they did it themselves, screening the film just outside Berlin, which led to a show in Paris, then one in Berlin proper, by which point Prince Achmed and his magic horse were well on their way to a place in the animation history books. They nearly lost that place due to the 1945 battle of Berlin, when the film’s negative was lost amid the destruction, but the British Film Institute had made a negative of their own for a London screening, which eventually became the material for a restoration and revival. “The revival was done by the son of the banker who sponsored the film in 1923,” notes Reiniger. “He had assisted in its creation as a small boy. So it was granted to old Prince Achmed to have a happy resurrection after almost half a century” — and he continues to win new fans today.
The character we know as “Woody Allen,” the persona we see in his films, the stammering neurotic weighed down by existential angst and a desperate horniness laced with intellectuality, was created not in his movies, but in his stand-up, recordings of which have been in and out of circulation since 1964. (They’re now available here.)
The director is reportedly even more embarrassed of these recordings than his films–and anyone who has seen his sit-down with critic Mark Cousins can attest, he can’t even stand to watch his films–but maybe that’s about the performance itself, and not the material.
I say that because in the clip above, a routine that Allen loved enough that he often used it to end his sets in the 60s, we can see the nascent idea for his Oscar-winning 2011 film Midnight in Paris.
Riffing on The Lost Generation, he imagines himself back in time, carousing with Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Picasso, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and famed Spanish bullfighter Manolete. It’s a one-two-three-and punchline joke we won’t ruin, but it’s interesting that consciously or subconsciously, this idea returned some five decades later to be fleshed out into one of Allen’s best late-period films. Was he always thinking of this routine as a someday film? In interviews from the time of the film’s release, he never mentions the stand-up bit.
Creating art is often like composting, and one never knows what might float to the top after years of influences and absorption. Listening to his stand-up, one can find the joke that he recycled for Annie Hall (“I was thrown out of NYU my freshman year, I cheated on my metaphysics final in college, I looked within the soul of the boy sitting next to me.”).
There’s also this routine about a scary subway ride:
The scene was later recreated in Bananas with a young Sylvester Stallone.
Allen’s pre-film career, when he was writing for television and his own stand-up, when his goals were to “write for Bob Hope and host the Oscars” makes for fascinating reading, and we’ll leave you with this history from WMFU. Nerdist has more thoughts on the relationship between The Lost Generation joke and Midnight in Paris here.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
As an unapologetic member of the “Millennial” generation, allow me to tell you how to win over a great many of us at a stroke: just appeal to our long-instilled affinity for Japanese animation and classic video games. Raised, like many of my peers born in the late 1970s and early 1980s, on a steady diet of those art forms — not that everyone knew to acknowledge them as art forms back then — I respond instinctively to either of them, and as for their intersection, well, how could I resist?
I certainly can’t resist the sterling example of anime-meets-retrogaming in action just above: an 8‑Bit Cinema double-feature, offering David and Henry Dutton’s pixelated renditions of hugely respected Japanese animation master Hayao Miyazaki’s films Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke. In just under eight minutes, the video tellsboth stories — the former of a young girl transported into not just the spirit realm but into employment at one of its bathhouses; the latter of the unending struggle between humans and forest gods in 15th-century Japan — as traditional side-scrolling, platform-jumping video games.
Clearly labors of love by true classic gamers, these transformations get not just the graphics (which actually look better than real games of the era, in keeping with Miyazaki’s artistry) but the sound, music, and even gameplay conventions just right. I’d love to play real versions of these games, especially since, apart from an unloved adaptation of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Miyazaki’s movies haven’t plunged into the video-game realm.
And if you respond better to the aesthetic of classic gaming than to that of Japanese animation, do have a look at 8‑Bit Cinema’s other work, much of which you can sample in their show reel with clips from their versions of pictures like The Shining, Kill Bill, and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. I remember many childhood conversations about how video games would eventually look just like our favorite movies, animated or otherwise; little did we know that, one day, our favorite movies would also look just like video games.
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