Not sure how theaters can afford such luxuries, but this looks to be a pretty trippy ride:

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/10/one-possible-future-for-movies-projecting-them-in-270-degrees/280471/?utm_source=pulsenews

From Page to Screen with Soylent Green

http://moviemorlocks.com/2013/10/06/68381/

The 70s "Dune" that Almost Was

"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.

Darkness Falls on Portland

“All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl.”

-- Jean-Luc Godard

Kathie Moffat: Don’t you see you’ve only me to make deals with now?

Jeff Bailey: I build my gallows high, baby.

-- Out of the Past (1947)

Last weekend, Nathan Bamford (Portland’s newest IFS blog correspondent) and I took a wrong turn down by the tracks and ended up at the NOIR CITY Film Festival.

Now that the rains have returned to Portland, the night streets are blue and oily, with reflections shattered--like broken dreams--by passing footsteps. The City, corrupt and silent, waits for you to make your move.

Among the highlights: newly-restored versions of Try and Get Me! (AKA The Sound of Fury, 1951) and High Tide (1947), which were preserved through the efforts of the festival’s parent organization, the Film Noir Foundation.

The Great Film Purge, Part III

At the Telluride Film Festival this year, only a handful of movies were projected from 35mm film—the lion’s share, of course, were digital projections.

I was a bit puzzled when I talked to an arthouse theater programmer at the festival, who mentioned that he was having trouble getting 35mm prints from distributors. I also noticed this problem in Portland earlier this year, when my local theater, Cinema 21, cancelled a proposed mini film festival because they couldn’t secure the 35mm prints.

“What’s the problem?” I asked him. “Now that most theaters are projecting digitally, why are distributors holding onto their 35mm prints? Shouldn’t they be handing them out freely, now that demand for celluloid is so low?”

The programmer shook his head and explained that although distributors refuse to say why, he believes 35mm prints are being dumped to save on storage fees.

If true, this would be the third Great Film Purge.

The first Great Film Purge happened more or less continuously from the beginning of film in the late 19^th century to the beginning of the Television Era in the early 1950s. Studios routinely dumped their films in these decades because they were thought to have no commercial value at the end of their theatrical runs.

The second Great Film Purge took place at the beginning of the 1930s, when silent films became unpopular (and hence, unprofitable) with the introduction of Talkies.

The Film Foundation, an organization founded by Martin Scorsese to support film preservation and restoration, notes on its website that “[h]alf of all American films made before 1950 and over 90% of films made before 1929 are lost forever.” The loss of cinema history wasn’t just bad luck—it happened on purpose.

“Most of the early films did not survive because of wholesale junking by the studios” says film preservationist Robert A. Harris. “There was no thought of ever saving these films. They simply needed vault space and the materials were expensive to house.”¹

Not all films were simply thrown out. In the case of older black and white films on silver nitrate film stock, the prints were often dissolved to recover the silver content.

This is another example that underscores how the film industry’s rush to digital projection is only about saving the industry money.

If original prints and film elements are lost, nothing will be left to digitally transfer. Or, existing digital transfers will simply be processed over and over again to produce “restorations”. When 8K, 16K digital projectors become standard, will there be an option to go back to the original prints and film elements and get the cleanest, highest-quality source possible?

Robert A. Harris again:

One final point on this subject. Once materials are preserved properly, that does not then mean that the original nitrate should be junked. I have to assume that today's technology will be constantly supplanted in the future with new means of creating even higher quality preservation materials. You never want your finest surviving asset to be a dupe when you can have the luxury of going back to an original element.¹

And yet, the industry may be purging their film archives. Again.

1. Robert A. Harris, public hearing statement to the National Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., February 1993.

Bringing Kung Fu to the Masses

This semester I helped my friend, Gerard Donaghy, make a documentary about a local Portlander who found a cache of extremely rare 35mm Shaw Brothers kung fu films in a shuttered Vancouver theater, and now screens them locally at the Hollywood Theater.

The Sound Design of Oblivion

    I caught Oblivion this weekend with a friend, and found myself pleasantly surprised. Filmed in 4K, with stunning visual design, it is well worth the $15 to see in IMAX.
  The plot is a bit of a hodge-podge of numerous science fiction films from the past (director Joseph Kosinski, here redeeming himself from Tron: Legacy, seems to prefer the term "homage"), but stands well on its own and keeps enough intelligent plot twists coming to maintain  an effective and involving narrative throughout the two hour plus running time.
  The jaw-dropping world design is ably assisted by a synth-heavy soundtrack credited to M83, as well as lush and immersive sound design. Sound is almost a character unto itself in a science fiction movie, and to Kosinki's credit, he pulls it off with aplomb.
  Here's a short video covering the sound and music design of Oblivion, featuring Kosinski and several of his collaborators: