This is a nice little interview with Stuart Gordon, the writer and director of Re-Animator (showing at IFS this Thursday on All Hallows' Eve). Although the camerawork is terrible, he has great things to say about making movies, the value of a good script, and how you can never lose money on a horror film if you just make it cheaply enough.
Re-Animator did well enough at the box office that director Gordon and stars Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton reunited to make another Lovecraft movie--From Beyond (1986). Here's Combs talking about that experience:
Bruce Abbott was such a clean-cut dude in Re-Animator (1985):
But in the sequel Bride of Re-Animator (1989) he starts flirting with the mullet:
By the early 90s, Abbott's transformation is complete:
(For those of you with less-than-stellar German skills, that's the intro for the CBS series Dark Justice, which was part of CBS' Crimetime After Primetime slot after the 10pm news--just before the advent of late night talk shows. Interestingly, the first season was shot in Barcelona, and Abbott joined the series when production moved to Los Angeles for season two).
Steve McQueen's newest film 12 Years a Slave is going to win big at the next Academy Awards. It's an amazing, gut-wrenching film, and doesn't pull any punches by portraying slavery as pure misery, punctuated by sadism, violence, and cruelty. I looked around the theater from time to time and saw people with their heads in their hands. During some of the more horrific scenes, other patrons walked out.
I guess it took a British filmmaker to tackle the issue head-on, since we Americans have had the cinematic opportunity for over 100 years, and just can't quite get around to making a clear-eyed movie about the Peculiar Institution.
I think it’s fantastic. Alamo Drafthouse has a tough no-texting rule, and they’re sticking to their guns, even with a major
celebrity.
If texting could be done during a movie without bothering
me, I’d have no problem with it. But a cell phone screen lighting up during a
movie distracts me and pulls me out of the movie, just like somebody kicking the back of my seat, or a pair of people who insist on talking during the
movie.
For that reason, I’m anti-texting—no exceptions. If you
want to text, or operate your cell phone in any manner, leave the theater.
Based on the amount of texting I see during movies—even at
major film festivals—this is not universally accepted. Many people don’t seem
to think texting during a movie is a problem at all.
I think texting during a movie destroys the film watching
experience, and is rude to the other people in the audience. What do y’all think?
"Dune" spaceship concept by British artist Chris Foss
In exchange for a daily gourmet meal, Orson Welles was going
to play Baron Harkonnen.
Mick Jagger agreed to play Feyd.
Salvador Dali signed on to play the mad Emperor Shaddam IV.
Pink Floyd, over a meal of hamburgers, was convinced to
contribute to the soundtrack.
Moebius drew the storyboards.
H.R. Giger designed the Harkonnen Castle.
Alejandro Jodorowsky, the director of El Topo and The Holy Mountain,
was going to direct.
And it almost, almost,
happened.
Premiering last month at the Telluride Film Festival, Jodorowsky’s
Dune tells the unbelievable story of how Dune was almost made in the early 70s.
In 1974 a French consortium obtained the film rights to the
novel, and asked Alejandro Jodorowsky to direct.
Jodorowsky (left) with Sardaukar (middle)
Jodorowsky being Jodorowsky, he didn’t see this as a mere
directing project. This was a spiritual quest, and he needed Holy Warriors to
help him make "the most important picture in the history of humanity." (Jodorowsky never thinks small.) Although now in his early 80s, Jodorowsky comes through in the
interviews as an intelligent, cheerful, charismatic (and somewhat twisted)
personality large enough to charm and seduce the best talent of the day to join
his crusade.
Jodorowsky and the French backers spent an enormous amount of time and money in preproduction coming up with the look and feel of the movie. They hired British artist Chris Foss to work on spaceship and hardware design (he'd painted a number of science fiction book covers), and French illustrator/comic book artist Jean Giraud (AKA Moebius, one of the creators of Métal Hurlant, known in this country as Heavy Metal) to draw character sketches and the storyboards. H.R. Giger began working on the Harkonnen Castle (based on Moebius' storyboards). It was all compiled into an immense, full-color book of conceptual art and the complete storyboards that was bigger than a phone book. Copies of this book were given to all the major studios. Sadly, only two copies remain--and Jodorowsky owns one of them.
Character sketches by Moebius
I’m not a big fan of the modern push in documentaries to use
CGI to sex up still images, but Jodorowsky’s
Dune uses this technology well by animating Moebius’ storyboards—not a
lot, but just a bit—to give you a sense of how the film would have played out.
And the effect is riveting. You walk out of the documentary feeling pleased,
entertained, exhilarated, and sad—sad that such an amazing vision never got made into a movie.
I’ll not spoil the surprise as to why that incarnation of
the movie never made it into production, but it is heartening to see that the effort wasn’t a total
waste. Some of the proto-Dune alumni (Giger, artist Chris Foss, writer Dan O’Bannon)
were later reunited in the late 70s to work on another science fiction film—Alien.
This documentary is a fun ride, and I heartily recommend it. It looks like it's still making the festival rounds, but keep an eye out for it.
