Back in 1977, San Fran­cis­co film­mak­er Ernie Fos­selius had the brain­wave to make a spoof of a movie that had just come out. It was a risky move. Nobody had any sense that Star Wars would become the world­wide cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non that it did. And just as George Lucas’s space opera earned stag­ger­ing amounts of mon­ey, so did Fosselius’s par­o­dy, Hard­ware Wars. You can watch it above. Made for a mere eight grand, the 13-minute movie became a pre-inter­net viral hit and a sta­ple on the fes­ti­val cir­cuit, ulti­mate­ly earn­ing over $1,000,000 – an unheard of haul for a short film. In fact, in terms of mon­ey spent ver­sus mon­ey earned, Hard­ware Wars end­ed up being far more prof­itable than Star Wars. And it’s con­sid­ered the most prof­itable short film ever made.

“I think a lot of the charm of that movie is the fact that we didn’t real­ly know what we were doing,” said Scott Math­ews, who donned a blonde wig to play the movie’s lead, Fluke Star­buck­er. The movie’s pro­duc­tion is so glee­ful­ly cheap and half-assed that you can’t help but be charmed by it. Irons, toast­ers, and tape play­ers are used in place of space­ships.

A can­is­ter vac­u­um clean­er stands in for R2D2, and Chew­bac­ca appears to be a Cook­ie Mon­ster pup­pet dyed brown. At one point, while on a desert plan­et of Tatooine, you see a beach-goer saun­ter­ing in the back­ground. And Star Wars’s famous can­ti­na scene is in this movie sim­ply a stroll through a crowd­ed tav­ern. If you know any­thing about the bar scene in 1970s San Fran­cis­co, you know that it was at least as weird as any­thing George Lucas man­aged to put up on the screen.

The often liti­gious Lucas report­ed­ly real­ly liked the movie, called it “cute.” He even invit­ed Fos­selius to voice the incon­solable sobs of Jab­ba the Hut­t’s ani­mal train­er after his beloved Ran­cor gets killed by Luke Sky­walk­er in Return of the Jedi.

Hard­ware Wars end­ed up launch­ing an entire sub­genre of movie – the Star Wars fan film. And with the advent of Youtube and dig­i­tal film­mak­ing tech­nol­o­gy, the abil­i­ty of nerds and mavens to make increas­ing­ly sophis­ti­cat­ed takes on Lucas’s uni­verse became eas­i­er and eas­i­er. One of the bet­ter, and old­er, ones is Troops. A mash up of Star Wars and the real­i­ty TV series Cops, the short shows the chal­lenges and the strug­gles of being an Impe­r­i­al Stormtroop­er. Check it out below.

via Film­mak­erIQ

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

How Star Wars Bor­rowed From Aki­ra Kurosawa’s Great Samu­rai Films

Frei­heit, George Lucas’ Short Stu­dent Film About a Fatal Run from Com­mu­nism (1966)

Watch the Very First Trail­ers for Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back & Return of the Jedi (1976–83)

Joseph Camp­bell and Bill Moy­ers Break Down Star Wars as an Epic, Uni­ver­sal Myth

Hun­dreds of Fans Col­lec­tive­ly Remade Star Wars; Now They Remake The Empire Strikes Back

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.

To know an artist, you must know all the work they ever made pub­lic. But to tru­ly, thor­ough­ly know an artist, you must also know all the work they nev­er made pub­lic. This notion, in our age of DVD delet­ed scenes, ded­i­cat­ed uni­ver­si­ty cours­es, and oth­er aids to com­pletist enthu­si­asm, has gained quite a lot of trac­tion. But how many cre­ators work­ing today give you the sense of only see­ing the tip of their pro­duc­tive ice­berg than did Orson Welles, whose rumored unseen or nev­er ful­ly devel­oped works some­times seem even to out­num­ber those in his impres­sive and (in the main) high­ly acclaimed canon? Sure, the man made War of the Worlds and Cit­i­zen Kane, but every­one knows those. What about The Dream­ers, The Deep, The Oth­er Side of the Wind — seen any of those? Now, thanks to Cinephil­ia and Beyond, you can see them, or at least parts of them, in 1995’s Orson Welles: The One-Man Band by Ger­man film­mak­er and seri­ous Welles fan Vas­sili Silovic.

In col­lab­o­ra­tion with the auteur’s long­time com­pan­ion Oda Kojar, Silovic digs into the Welles archives and bring to light evi­dence of all sorts of projects unre­al­ized, unfin­ished, or sim­ply unre­leased. The New York Times’ Stephen Hold­en writes that Silovic’s film “offers tan­ta­liz­ing excerpts from Welles’s lat­er works along with rem­i­nis­cences by Ms. Kodar of their nomadic life togeth­er. As Welles dashed about the globe pur­su­ing act­ing jobs and financ­ing for his projects, he tot­ed around a 16-mil­lime­ter edit­ing table and a giant suit­case of equip­ment that made him the film-mak­ing equiv­a­lent of a one-man band. Many of his small­er projects might be described as ambi­tious home movies filmed on the spot wher­ev­er he hap­pened to be.” We see bits and pieces of an incom­plete thriller, a clip from the pilot for a pro­posed tele­vi­sion talk show, some of “the sto­ry of an aging, fero­cious­ly inde­pen­dent film direc­tor (played by John Hus­ton) wrestling with the Hol­ly­wood estab­lish­ment to com­plete an icon­o­clas­tic work.” We even get a glimpse, as if you still need­ed evi­dence that Welles led a sto­ried life, of a chat he had with the Mup­pets.

You can find some icon­ic, com­plete films by Welles in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

via Cinephil­ia and Beyond

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lis­ten to Eight Inter­views of Orson Welles by Film­mak­er Peter Bog­danovich (1969–1972)

Watch The Tri­al (1962), Orson Welles’ Worst or Best Film, Adapt­ed From Kafka’s Clas­sic Work

Watch Orson Welles’ The Stranger Free Online, Where 1940s Film Noir Meets Real Hor­rors of WWII

The Hearts of Age: Orson Welles’ Sur­re­al­ist First Film (1934)

Orson Welles Explains Why Igno­rance Was His Major “Gift” to Cit­i­zen Kane

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Words like “adorable” and “cute” don’t come read­i­ly to mind when talk­ing about Dan­ish direc­tor Lars von Tri­er, but that’s exact­ly how you can describe the stop motion ani­mat­ed film he made when he was 11 years old. Sure, you can also describe the two-minute short — Turen til Squash­land: En Super Pølse Film (The Trip to Squash Land: A Super Sausage Film) — as creepy and vague­ly unset­tling, adjec­tives much more com­mon­ly applied to the film­mak­er.

Von Tri­er is, of course, cinema’s reign­ing bad boy. His Antichrist is a scar­ring descent into mad­ness filled with bad sex, talk­ing fox­es and hor­rif­i­cal­ly graph­ic self-muti­la­tion. Any­one who’s seen the movie will nev­er look at a pair of scis­sors in the same way. His 2011 movie Melan­cho­lia is a glo­ri­ous ode to depres­sion and glob­al anni­hi­la­tion; a beau­ti­ful anti-rev­el­ry on how much every­thing in the world sucks. And his most recent movie, Nympho­ma­ni­ac, is a 4‑hour long movie — divid­ed in two, Kill Bill style — fea­tur­ing some of the most joy­less unsim­u­lat­ed onscreen cou­plings this side of the Paris Hilton sex tape.

Turen til Squash­land, on the oth­er hand, is about a sen­tient sausage who rides a black whale to res­cue a bun­ny rab­bit. The film was shot by the tweenaged Tri­er (he added the ‘von’ to his name in film school) on his Super 8mm cam­era in 1967. In terms of tech­nique and design, it is shock­ing­ly good. The short has a naïve sweet­ness that Wes Ander­son often aspires to while hav­ing the uncan­ny dream-like qual­i­ty of an ear­ly David Lynch movie.

It’s tempt­ing to parse Turen til Squash­land to gain some insight into von Tri­er’s lat­er auteurist obses­sions. Does von Trier’s ten­den­cy to place the vul­ner­a­ble and the love­able in the clutch­es of a cru­el and heart­less vil­lain start here? While the ever-adorable Björk ends up dan­gling from the end of a rope in Dancer in the Dark, the bun­ny in this movie thank­ful­ly makes it out alive. Cas­tra­tion is anoth­er reoc­cur­ring theme in von Trier’s work. Does that have any­thing to do with the free-range sausage pro­tag­o­nist? And does the talk­ing fox in Antichrist have its ori­gins in this movie’s trio of head spin­ning rab­bits?

The one ele­ment, how­ev­er, that has no con­nec­tion to his lat­er work is the short’s end, which shows a plac­ard read­ing “Slut.” That has noth­ing to do with his lat­est movie or von Tri­er’s com­pli­cat­ed rela­tion­ship with women. The word “slut” means “The End” in Dan­ish.

More ani­mat­ed films can be found in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Via Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Steven Spielberg’s Debut: Two Films He Direct­ed as a Teenag­er

Tim Burton’s Ear­ly Stu­dent Films: King and Octo­pus & Stalk of the Cel­ery Mon­ster

See Carl Sagan’s Child­hood Sketch­es of The Future of Space Trav­el

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.

Cinephiles cer­tain­ly know the name of Stan­ley Kubrick, and die-hard cinephiles just as cer­tain­ly know the name of Michel Ciment, the French crit­ic behind cel­e­brat­ed vol­umes on such auteurs as Elia Kazan, Joseph Losey, John Boor­man, Theo Angelopou­los, Fritz Lang, and, yes Kubrick him­self. Ciment has placed the direc­tor’s work, which includes the likes of Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and A Clock­work Orange, “among the most impor­tant con­tri­bu­tions to world cin­e­ma in the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry.” In an attempt to do jus­tice to the mind of his sub­ject while writ­ing Kubrick, he put in no small amount of time with the man him­self. At the top of the post, you can hear an assem­blage of mate­r­i­al from a five-part inter­view between Ciment and Kubrick orig­i­nal­ly aired on the French radio pro­gram A voix nue, itself pieced togeth­er from a series of con­ver­sa­tions between crit­ic and direc­tor record­ed between 1975 and 1987. So we ulti­mate­ly have here, as the per­son who put the clip on Youtube notes, “a recon­struct­ed hour of Kubrick talk­ing about cin­e­ma, chess, ESP, art, writ­ing, Viet­nam, his cat, the 18th cen­tu­ry, and even Fear and Desire.”

But with this fas­ci­nat­ing mate­r­i­al comes a caveat: “As the inter­views were broad­cast for French audi­ences, a French voice-over was added through­out the entire audio in post-edit. This meant that you’d hear Kubrick talk for about three or four sec­onds and then have a trans­la­tor jump in and repeat what he said in French at a loud­er vol­ume. Usu­al­ly the trans­la­tor would step in and cut off the first or last words that Kubrick was say­ing, or some­times just talk over the top of him.” The result, with the French most­ly excised and the Eng­lish remains stitched into a solid­ly Kubrick­ian hour, does make for “a very demand­ing and irri­tat­ing way to lis­ten to the inter­views” which “involves a lot of con­cen­tra­tion to fil­ter out the inter­preter and keep piec­ing togeth­er the flow of what Kubrick says.” Yet he does say plen­ty worth hear­ing, espe­cial­ly for those already famil­iar with his fil­mog­ra­phy. But if this audio does indeed wear down your patience, feel free to check out one of the less tax­ing ways to get a dose of Kubrick and Ciment: for exam­ple, the three con­ver­sa­tions on Bar­ry Lyn­don, The Shin­ing, and A Clock­work Orange so con­ve­nient­ly tran­scribed — in Eng­lish! — at The Kubrick Site. You can also lis­ten to Stan­ley Kubrick’s 1965 Inter­view with The New York­er here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Fear and Desire: Stan­ley Kubrick’s First and Least-Seen Fea­ture Film (1953)

Stan­ley Kubrick’s Daugh­ter Shares Pho­tos of Her­self Grow­ing Up on Her Father’s Film Sets

Stan­ley Kubrick’s List of Top 10 Films (The First and Only List He Ever Cre­at­ed)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.