The following is my contribution to The Class of ‘84 Blogathon convening here at This Distracted Globe.

The Terminator (1984)
Screenplay by James Cameron & Gale Ann Hurd and William Wisher (uncredited), story by James Cameron
Directed by James Cameron
Produced by Pacific Western/ Hemdale Film Corporation
Running time: 108 minutes

Should I Care?
After three sequels and a Fox TV series each decreasing in quality and relevance, what’s most striking about The Terminator is its mood of unrelenting bleakness. Though exciting, its B-movie budget restraints keep this from escalating into the all-ages action spectacle its spin-offs would happily aspire to. Instead, this is one dark cup of coffee, a lurid, appropriately ultra-violent and nihilistic sci-fi horror flick. While I wouldn’t call this James Cameron’s masterpiece — his follow-up Aliens has my vote — it does feel like his most honest, sacrificing none of its ideas in a concession for broad commercial appeal.

The cast may seem unremarkable, but Arnold Schwarzenegger’s less than half an hour of screen time is a model of efficiency. In hindsight, there was no better performer on the planet to play the Terminator, the most iconic screen role of Schwarzenegger’s life. Linda Hamilton & Michael Biehn aren’t great actors, but fit within the economics the director was rather fortuitously stuck with here. Cameron — who doesn’t get enough credit for his strength as a writer — forges an unusually potent relationship between Sarah and Reese, while making a drive-in flick look and feel like something much bigger. Brad Fiedel’s electronic musical score remains one of my favorite of all time.

So, What’s This About?
In Los Angeles of the year 2029, machines have risen from the nuclear apocalypse they initiated against mankind to wage a losing war against the survivors. In desperation, a cybernetic organism known as a Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) — part man, part machine — is sent back to Los Angeles of 1984. A soldier named Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) has followed the cyborg through time. Reese clothes and arms himself by breaking into a sporting goods store. The next day, the Terminator pays a visit to an unlucky gunsmith (Dick Miller) and begins assassinating the Sarah Connors in the L.A. phone book one at a time.

Waitress Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) realizes she may be in danger. She ducks into a nightclub and calls the cops, where Lt. Traxler (Paul Winfield) urges her to stay in public until they can get there. The Terminator reaches Sarah first. Reese manages to protect her and goes on to explain that the Terminator has targeted Sarah in order to eliminate her unborn son, who is destined to lead mankind to victory against the machines. Once captured by police, Traxler, his partner (Lance Henriksen) and a psychologist (Earl Boen) offer Sarah a far more rational explanation for her ordeal. This theory lasts as long as it takes for the Terminator to track Sarah to the police station and come after her.

Who Made It?
James Cameron grew up around Niagara Falls on the Canadian side of the border. He came to the United States when his family moved to Brea, California in 1971 and attended Fullerton College, scouring the USC library for information on film technology while putting himself through college as a machinist. Cameron would drop of school in 1978 and with $400,000 he raised from dentists in Tustin — looking to produce their own Star Wars — made a 12-minute special effects demo. This got the attention of Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, whose head of visual effects hired Cameron to do front screen projection work on Battle Beyond the Stars (1980).

With battlefield speed, Cameron was promoted to production designer and to head of a visual effects camera unit at New World. He was named second unit director and got the chance to work with actors on Galaxy of Terror (1981). Dismissed by his executive producer after wrapping Piranha II, Cameron would write The Terminator, with a production manager named Gale Ann Hurd polishing his script and producing. William Wisher — a college buddy — pitched in additional dialogue and after years of rejection due to Cameron’s non-existent directing resume, Hurd finally secured $6.4 million in financing from Hemdale on what became one of the most profitable and iconic movies of all time.

How’d They Do It?
Arriving February 1981 in Rome to shoot his first film as a director — Piranha II — James Cameron realized that his Italian executive producer merely hired him as a contractual obligation to New World. As soon as filming wrapped, Cameron was sent home and the film was recut without him. He recalled, “When I got back from Piranha II, I knew that I was never going to get offered another movie unless I came up with something myself. I had to write a film. That made sense for me as a director. I thought it had to have effects, which justified my existence on the project, but I had to not price myself out of the kind of budget that they were likely to trust me with.”

“I thought, how can I introduce that otherness, that element of wonder, into a low budget environment that can be shot on the street, very conventionally, very guerilla filmmaking. So, I thought, fine. It’s present day. It’s present day Los Angeles. It’s the back streets of L.A. So, what happens next? Maybe it can come from outer space. It can come from the future. From a narrative standpoint, it starts to limit your options. It starts to lay out a certain way based on those givens. So I had a given: a contemporary environment that was determined by budget. No big movie stars, so maybe the main characters can be kind of young.”

Cameron backed into the idea of a robotic hitman sent through time, arrived on the title Terminator and wrote a treatment and most of a first draft screenplay. Gale Ann Hurd had been a production manager at New World and co-produced Smokey Bites the Dust. She helped polish Cameron’s script, which he sold to Hurd for the price of $1, striking a pact that he would keep her on as producer, if she agreed not to go with a more experienced director. Cameron recalled, “Our strength in doing the movie was pooling our resources and forming an impenetrable barrier to anyone who wanted to take it away from us or change to concept.”

Gale Ann Hurd spent the next two years trying to raise the financing for Terminator. “Some actors turned down the film because Jim was attached as the director. Buyers approached Jim as the director provided he got rid of me as producer. I trusted him and he trusted me. We held out and were able to do it essentially on our own terms. I thought if I just persevered I’d get the movie made. My idealism and my naiveté carried me through at least two years of trying to get it together and keep it together. If I’d known then what I know now — some 23 pictures later — I’m not sure I would have persevered.”

Hurd zeroed in on an executive at Hemdale Film Corporation named Barry Plumley. “Of course, he wouldn’t return my phone calls. Practically no one would.” Hurd found out that Plumley was selling a desk. She needed a desk and when they met to complete the transaction, Hurd handed him a 48-page treatment for Terminator. Plumley called the next day to tell her that he loved it. Hurd had also mentioned her project to a comrade from New World named Barbara Boyle, who was now senior vice president of Orion Pictures. “Barbara talked Mike Medavoy into reading the script, talked him into meeting with Jim and me.” Hemdale agreed to finance Terminator at $6.4 million, while Orion came on board as U.S. distributor.

To play the Terminator, Cameron wanted a survivor from Piranha II, Lance Henriksen. The actor pitched in on the drive for financing.”I went into Hemdale decked out like the Terminator. I put gold foil from a Vantage cigarette package in my teeth and waxed my hair back. Jim had put fake cuts on my head. I wore a ripped-up punk rock T-shirt, a leather jacket and boots up to my knees. It was a really exciting look. I was a scary person to be in a room with. I kicked the door open when I got there and the poor secretary just about swallowed her typewriter. I headed in to see the producer. I sat in the room with him and I wouldn’t talk to him. I just kept looking at him. After a few minutes of that he was ready to jump out the window!”

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s name soon came up. Cameron recalled, “Arnold was never really slated to be in the picture. Mike Medavoy at Orion suggested Arnold play Michael Biehn’s character, Reese. I don’t think there’s anybody that would think that was a great idea. At that point in his career, doing 25 pages of expository dialogue and talking really fast and painting the picture of a future world we didn’t have the budget to actually visually create was not going to be Arnold’s strong suit, you know.” To play the Terminator, Medavoy suggested O.J. Simpson. Cameron immediately put The Juice out of his mind, but was intrigued with meeting Schwarzenegger.

Cameron revealed, “Over lunch I started thinking, This guy has got the most amazing face. I almost wanted to say, ‘Arnold, just stop talking for a second and be real still,’ but I was petrified. I thought, This guy would make a great Terminator. But he doesn’t want to play the Terminator. I went back to John Daly and said, ‘Forget it, it’s not going to work. But, boy, he’d make a hell of a Terminator.’ Anyway, the upshot is that the deal was closed that afternoon and we were making the movie after a two-year hold.” Schwarzenegger was already booked to spend the fall of 1983 in Mexico shooting a sequel to Conan the Barbarian, pushing a potential start date for Terminator back 10 months.

With the Austrian Oak on board, Cameron recalled, “What changed was the original concept as written — and the script didn’t change at all, not a single line of dialogue was changed — but the visual concept was that the Terminator was this anonymous character who could walk out of a crowd, just one face in a crowd, could walk up and kill you, for no apparent reason, except for what your life would mean in some future time. And that concept changed, because Arnold doesn’t vanish into a crowd. It took on a slightly more hyperbolic visual style, a little larger than life. It still played sort of realistically, but it became more nightmarish.”

Linda Hamilton was initially only in the running to play Sarah Connor. Cameron revealed, “She was among a number of actresses I saw. I think it narrowed down to her, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Rosanna Arquette. At the time, Jennifer Jason Leigh had only done a couple of TV movies. She is an awesome actress, but Linda was great in the part.” Despite auditioning with a Southern accent because he’d spent that morning reading for a production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Michael Biehn would be cast as Reese. After months spent storyboarding and designing the film — as well writing Alien II and First Blood Part II on assignment — Cameron finally called action on Terminator March 1984 in Los Angeles.

Cameron recalled, “The executive producer begged us to write more of the scenes as daytime, because of the perceived cost difference, but, you know, I plunged madly on. It seemed so important stylistically to keep the film in night, a night film, as much as possible. And so we kept it that way. And I don’t think it really impacted the cost all that much.” Terminator was shot mostly with a single camera by journeyman Adam Greenberg, while Stan Winston labored up to the hour to build a mechanical Terminator for the climax. Fantasy II Effects executed the special effects shots, including a stop-motion puppet animated by Peter Kleinow.

Barbara Boyle mused, “Now, everybody in town knew of that Terminator script because it had been all around. Everybody knew that it had a woman as producer who co-wrote the script with some guy with no credits called Jim Cameron and that he came with the package as the director, that’s why it hadn’t been picked up. That’s always dicey.” She added, “Hemdale was scared and why wouldn’t they be? The director didn’t talk much, he drew pictures. The producer’s only credit was as an associate on Smokey Bites the Dust. No one at Orion had confidence in the movie.” Seven months after shooting commenced and The was inserted in its title, Terminator opened October 26, 1984 in the United States at 1,005 theaters.

In its opening weekend, The Terminator was one of six new releases: the action comedy American Dreamer was from Warner Bros., Brian DePalma’s thriller Body Double from Columbia, the drama Firstborn from Paramount, the Paul McCartney starring Give My Regards To Broad Street from Fox and a horror compilation film titled Terror In the Aisles from Universal. To the surprise of most in the film industry, The Terminator debuted #1 at the box office. After adding 100 theaters the following weekend, instead of its attendance dropping, it actually went up. The low budget sci-fi flick would go on to earn $38.3 million in the United States and add $40 million overseas.

On At the Movies, Gene Siskel & Roger Ebert hadn’t even seen The Terminator before it opened. The critics bought a ticket just like everyone else and would split over whether the film was any good. Roger Ebert: “In fact, this is a surprising movie. It’s violent, it’s bloody, it’s sadistic, but it’s also well-acted and directed, it is R-rated — don’t go unless you like strong action pictures — but I must say, I did like it.” Gene Siskel: “Yeah, I was rooting for it, I mean, I thought, everyone’s talking about it and I saw it a little bit late and I was not impressed.” Siskel added, “As an action picture, I thought it was not particularly well made, but the love story, you’re right, is kind of nice.”

Emboldened by his success, James Cameron ran into trouble with outspoken science fiction writer Harlan Ellison. As Terminator was headed into production, friends had tipped Ellison off that its script bore a strong resemblance to two episodes Ellison had authored for the 1960s TV series The Outer Limits, “Soldier” and “Demon With A Glass Hand”. Ellison was later contacted by Starlog Magazine and notified that Cameron had boasted of “ripping off a few Outer Limits” to form the basis of Terminator. Hemdale would settle out of court, writing Ellison a check for $75,000 and amending the end credits of all future prints of The Terminator to acknowledge Ellison’s contributions.

Nonetheless, 15 years later Cameron was still proud of what he considered his first film as director. “So I think from the standpoint of the Hollywood mainstream, they got up one morning and opened the trades and went, ‘What the hell is this movie that’s number one this weekend?’ And, by the way, it was number one the next weekend and the weekend after that. It dominated the Thanksgiving weekend against a couple of big pictures, like Dune, for example, and 2010, which were big studio pictures. Actually, 2010 was a big studio picture and Dune was a high-end independent film. But these were megabuck movies and Terminator just steam rolled over them. And it had been done by these nonentities.”

Where’d You Get All of This?
“James Cameron – How To Direct a Terminator” By Thomas McKelvey Cleaver. Starlog Magazine, December 1984

“James Cameron Interview” By Kenneth Turan. US Magazine, August 1991

“The Making of The Terminator: A Retrospective”. 1992

The Directors: Take One. By Robert J. Emery. TV Books (1999)

Women Who Run the Show: How a Brilliant and Creative New Generation of Women Stormed Hollywood, 1973-2000. By Mollie Gregory. St. Martin’s Press (2002)

“The Terminator: Past Perfect” By Ben Braddock. SFX, September 2003

Coraline (2009)
Screenplay by Henry Selick, based on the novel by Neil Gaiman
Directed by Henry Selick
Produced by Pandemonium/ Laika Entertainment
Running time: 100 minutes

So, What’s This About?
Coraline Jones (voiced by Dakota Fanning) relocates from Pontiac, Michigan to the overcast Ashland, Oregon. While her parents (Teri Hatcher, John Hodgman) write a gardening catalog, Coraline sets out to explore the Pink Palace Apartments, a 150-year old mansion that’s been rented out to three tenants. These include retired vaudevillians Miss Spink (Jennifer Saunders) and Miss Forcible (Dawn French) and a Russian acrobat named Mr. Bobinsky (Ian McShane). Coraline also meets the landlord’s grandson, Wyborne “Wybie” Lovat (Robert Bailey Jr.) whose great aunt disappeared in the house years ago. Wybie gives Coraline a doll that looks eerily like her.

Wakened at night by Mr. Bobinsky’s performing mice, Coraline follows them through a door to an alternate reality, where her “Other Mother” (Teri Hatcher again) offers Coraline everything she could possibly want: delicious food, nice clothes, a lavish room, wondrous gardens. She discovers a mangy black cat (Keith David) from home has the power of speech in this reality. Coraline’s Other Mother invites her to stay in this perfect world forever, if she’ll permit buttons to be sewn into her eyes. Trapped in a mirror when she refuses, Coraline meets the souls of other lost children and learns that her Other Mother is actually a creature who abducts and once she grows bored with them, devours children.

Who Made It?
Neil Gaiman — celebrated author of the DC Comics epic The Sandman and the novel Stardust – had his daughter to thank for planting the seeds of Coraline, written over a decade and published to great acclaim as a novella in 2002. Gaiman was a fan of Henry Selick, the stop-motion maestro behind The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), and sent Selick a manuscript as early as 2000. Optioning the film rights for Selick was Bill Mechanic, former chairman of Fox and founder of the production company Pandemonium. Contractually prohibited from producing animated films by Disney — the studio where Mechanic had a deal — Coraline was initially developed as a live action feature, to no avail.

In May 2004, Selick accepted a job as supervising director with Vinton Studios, a Portland based animation company which found Coraline a little too dark for its tastes. But months later, Nike co-founder Phil Knight would move from an investor in Vinton Studios to buying the company outright and rebranding it as Laika Entertainment. Looking to make a move into feature films, Knight rolled the dice on Selick and Coraline with a production budget of between $60 and $70 million. The first stop-motion animated film shot in 3D, Coraline spent 18 months being meticulously filmed on 52 sets at Laika’s studio in Portland before opening to wide acclaim in February 2009.

How’d They Do It?
Neil Gaiman traced the origins of Coraline back to the unusual demand of a key demographic: his daughter. “It began in about 1989, 1990, somewhere around there. My daughter, Holly, would come home from kindergarten — she’d be about four or five years old — and she would climb on my lap because I would be sitting in my office writing and she would dictate stories and they were terrifying. They’d be about little girls coming home and finding out the evil witches were now impersonating their mothers. Normally the girls would then get locked in cellars and they would have to escape and try and find their real mother with the witches coming after them.”

Gaiman continued, “I thought I’ll go and find her some stories like this to read to her and nobody seemed to be writing any. I couldn’t find any so I thought, ‘I’ll write her one. I’ll write a story that Holly would like.’ And that was where it began. That really was the genesis. I sat down and I started writing Coraline, which was a name that I think I took from a typo. I’d been writing a letter to a friend called Caroline and I transposed.” Gaiman found additional inspiration from Victorian Era author Lucy Clifford, whose 1882 short story The New Mother concerned two misbehaving children whose mother is replaced by one with glass eyes and a wooden tail.

Gaiman revealed, “I finished the first draft nine years ago in 2000 and I gave it to my agent and said: ‘Please give this to Henry Selick,’ because I had seen The Nightmare Before Christmas and even though it was called Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas I was smart enough to understand that the main man was Henry Selick. I then saw James and the Giant Peach and thought Henry had something really interesting. Especially as a stop-motion director he was just beyond compare. He’s the best there is. I loved the fact that he seemed to understand that sometimes you can show sometimes bravery shines best in dark places.”

Published in 2002, Coraline was awarded that year’s Bram Stoker Award for Best Work for Young Readers, the 2003 Nebula Award for Best Novella and the 2003 Hugo Award for Best Novella. Selick took the property to producer Bill Mechanic, who’d founded Pandemonium after being forced out as chairman of 20th Century Fox, where Mechanic had championed Fight Club, X-Men and Ice Age. Working on an adaptation, Selick resisted developing the material as a live action film, feeling there had been too many talking critter movies and that bringing Gaiman’s dark faerie tale to life through animation might make it less disturbing for younger audiences. But Mechanic’s deal with Disney prohibited him from making animated features.

Selick recalled, “And Bill liked it, but for about two years we had to pretend it was a live action film. I even met with Michelle Pfeiffer, to be possibly in the role of the Mothers, but she didn’t really want to have any buttons on her eyes. And I said, ‘But that’s, kinda the point of the … ‘ Anyway, that was the early days. We kinda hit a dead end. We weren’t going to get to make the film. A scary film for children — it wasn’t going to happen.” Selick moved on to animate sea creatures for the Wes Anderson comedy The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) and in May 2004, accepted an offer from Vinton Studios, the Portland based animation unit behind the California Raisins ad campaign and the Fox series The PJs.

Founded by stop-animation pioneer Will Vinton — who’d coined the term Claymation and supervised the stop-motion effects in Return To Oz (1985) — the studio was looking to land financing for animated features that might compete with Pixar. “They were growing, transforming. They had an idea for a short film, Moongirl, and they asked if I’d direct it, and flesh it out. And I said that I was only going to move up there from California if I could bring Coraline with me. And they said, ‘Sure, why not?’ So I moved up there, did this short for them, Moongirl, and then said, ‘Well, it’s time to do Coraline.’ And at that time, the guy in charge said, ‘Well, actually, it’s much too dark’, and what changed was, Travis Knight.”

Travis Knight is son of Phil Knight, co-founder of Nike. After a short-lived career as “Chilly Tee”, a Portland rapper in the early 1990s, Travis Knight found his niche as a stop-motion animator at Vinton Studios. After The PJs was canceled and advertising jobs dried up, his father invested in the studio. In September 2003, Phil Knight bought the company, naming Nike executive Dave Wahl CEO and hiring Selick as supervising animation director. Renaming the operation Laika Entertainment, Knight shifted the studio’s primary focus from commercials to feature films. One year later, it was announced that Laika would bankroll Coraline, with Henry Selick adapting a script and directing. Focus Features — the specialty film division of Universal Pictures — acquired worldwide distribution rights.

In adapting Gaiman’s novella, Selick revealed, “I added a character, this neighbor kid Wybie. I set it in the U.S., because I wasn’t as comfortable with British dialogue. And then, over the years that it took to get this thing off the ground, other elements of the story took on a life of their own. I guess the main thing is there’s a delicacy, a subtlety, that Neil can really exploit with his beautiful writing that can’t all get on the screen. You can go and describe the Other Mother and say that her teeth were just a tiny bit longer, her nails a tiny bit more red, but I had to go bigger and broader at times. I also had to dial back the darkness. I didn’t want to go to the darkest tones of the novel quite so soon. I wanted to go lighter and then descend into it.”

One concept that was floated was to open Coraline with computer-generated animation and transition into stop-motion when the story shifted into the parallel universe. Selick recalled, “It was a nice theory, we actually did a test, but putting the two side by side, it just didn’t mean anything, it didn’t have much to say, you know, crucial time we’re on the razor’s edge: which way do we go, CG or stop-motion? Travis Knight, who’s one of the lead animators, weighed in with his important vote and said, well, if he’s going to animate on one feature, he wanted to do stop-motion, so I owe him a huge debt. We went the right way. Travis had a lot to do with that.” Coraline commenced what became an 18-month shoot May 2006 at the Laika studio in Portland.

According to Selick, 90 percent of the film was done practical, without using CG imagery. “Coraline is about seven inches tall as a puppet. There’s an invisible line in her face that we’ve painted out, between her upper face and lower face. The animation of her face is done through replacement animation, just like Jack Skellington, Miss Spider in James and the Giant Peach, the old Pillsbury Doughboy. Martin Meunier — very talented artist/ fabrication person I’ve worked with — came up with a new system using rapid proto machines to build on handmade sculpts of her face and give her an ever greater range of expressiveness. Georgina Hayns — or George as we call her — head of puppet fabrication builds these puppets. The armature underneath metal skeleton was by Merri Cheney, who I’ve worked with for over 20 years.”

Critics generally loved the film. Tony Scott, The New York Times: “Like the best fantasy writers Mr. Gaiman does not draw too firm a boundary between the actual and the magical, allowing the two realms to shadow and influence each other. Mr. Selick, for his part, is so wantonly inventive and so psychologically astute that even Coraline’s dull domestic reality is tinted with enchantment.” Michael Phillips, The Chicago Tribune: “Coraline may not be for all tastes and it’s certainly not for all kids, given its macabre premise. But writer-director Henry Selick’s animated feature advances the stop-motion animation genre through that most heartening of attributes: quality. It pulls audiences into a meticulously detailed universe, familiar in many respects, wacked and menacing in many others.”

Opening February 2009 in the United States, Coraline earned $75.2 million domestically and added $46.3 million in theaters overseas. It also won the enthusiastic support of Neil Gaiman. “It’s what I hoped Henry would make, which is Henry’s film. It’s very much a film of my book and it hits all the beats of the book and it expands a little bit because it’s not a very big book. But he instilled it with Henry’s wonderful imagination and he doesn’t stop anything.” Gaiman added, “It’s so strange because I think adults have a lot more problems with this kind of story than children do. It’s true for the book. It’s always adults that say to me that they finish reading the book at three o’clock in the morning and go around the house turning on all the lights. I never get that from the kids.”

Should I Care?
Selick is an animation connoisseur and seems to understand that the state of the art only moves as far as animators are willing to challenge their audience. Earlier in his career, Selick was a storyboard artist for Disney and worked on Return To Oz, a dark, exquisitely made fable that critics disparaged for being too scary for kids(!) This as if Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia and Sleeping Beauty — to name a few — were a trip to McDonald’s. With Neil Gaiman’s novella as a road map, Henry Selick has crafted his finest work yet. Less amusing than The Nightmare Before Christmas, the absence of musical numbers allows Selick and his team to descend into the imagination and angst of a child more vividly than any American animated film I can recall with the exception of Disney’s Alice In Wonderland.

Gaiman’s source material — liberally reworked by Selick — is a handsomely crafted narrative; there’s not a single dopey character or glib reference to be found here. The script doesn’t call for any cheap scares, but like Return To Oz, is a perilous and potent trip to the dark side. I don’t have any funny glasses and can’t comment about the film’s 3D attributes, but there’s no question that the handcrafted, slightly wonky effect of stop-motion animation — whether used in Jason and the Argonauts (1963) or Corpse Bride (2005) — is a shot into the nerve center of the brain. Bruno Coulais composed a delightfully spooky score, while alt rock kings They Might Be Giants — who composed four demos, only one of which Selick ended up being able to use — contribute a cool song.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Neil Gaiman Exclusive Interview — Coraline” By Matt Goldberg. Collider.com, 26 January 2009

“Coraline director Henry Selick on how not to mess up Neil Gaiman” By Ian Spelling. SciFi Wire, 26 January 2009

“Laika hangs dreams on Coraline” By Amy Reifenrath. Oregon Live, 4 February 2009

“Director Henry Selick on Coraline” By Debra Kaufman. Studio Daily, 6 February 2009

“Nike father-son duo lace up Coraline” By Peter Debruge. Variety, 6 February 2009

“Exclusive: Henry Selick on Coraline” By Michael Leader. Den of Geek, 7 May 2009

“Neil Gaiman Interview, Coraline” By Sheila Roberts. MoviesOnline

Coraline. DVD audio commentary featuring Henry Selick & Bruno Coulais. Universal Home Entertainment (2009)

Primer (2004)
Written by Shane Carruth
Directed by Shane Carruth
Running time: 77 minutes

By Joe Valdez

So, What’s This About?
In suburban Dallas, Aaron (Shane Carruth) and Abe (David Sullivan) divide their time between jobs as software engineers with toiling in Aaron’s garage in a bid to develop a get-rich-quick gizmo. While their partners (Casey Gooden, Anand Upadhyaya) seem content to fool around with the equipment, Aaron and Abe focus on creating a product that will dazzle investors and achieve their entrepreneurial dreams. They see promise in a miniaturized semi-conductor, but instead of merely reducing the weight of a weevil, in a matter of hours, their test object presents a coat of fungus that would typically take months to develop naturally.

Aaron hits upon building a box big enough to allow a person to also reverse the arrow of time, but Abe takes him to a U-Haul self-storage facility and from afar, shows him what appears to be another Abe entering the facility. The engineers discover that they’ve already built two coffin-sized boxes with the power to transport users several hours backwards in time, depending on how long the boxes are powered up and how long the traveler remains inside. Using their invention to double up on the stock market and in sports betting, Aaron becomes obsessed with traveling through time in an effort to control the events unfolding in his past.

Who Made It?
Shane Carruth studied mathematics and computer science at Stephen F. Austin State University in Texas. He spent a few days in the graduate program for math, but dropped out when he realized he’d mostly be doing research for other people. He recalled, “An entrepreneurial spirit took over, and I felt that whatever I did was going to be on my own terms, so I decided to make some money and apply that toward whatever venture I chose. I started writing software in C and C++ for a flight simulator at Hughes Aircraft and then got into Web work. I did back-end database design and then started consulting.”

Carruth had developed a love for narrative, penning a couple of short stories and getting half way through a novel. Realizing he had little taste for inner monologue and much preferred telling a story visually, Carruth spent three years in Dallas teaching himself screenwriting and filmmaking. Following the example of Robert Rodriguez and his book Rebel Without a Crew, Carruth cast, shot, edited and scored a 77-minute feature for the price of $7,000. The resulting film — Primer – was the sensation of the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, winning both the Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic and the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize with its $20,000 purse.

How’d He Do It?
“I’ve been asked whether, why I wanted to tell a story about inventors, or garage level inventors and to be honest, I knew what the story was way beyond, or well before, it had anything to do with science or science fiction. I was very interested in trust and how it’s related to what’s at risk, and I knew that I was going to have a story with a group of people — or what winds up being Abe and Aaron — who at the beginning of the film, or the beginning of the story, have this pretty conventional relationship and because of the introduction of this device or this power, changes what’s at risk.” After reading lots of scripts, Carruth “went to town writing”.

“When it came to production, I went to the few production houses here in Dallas. I asked them what they did and how they fit into the general scheme of things. I just asked a lot of questions from end to end about, you know, which cameras do what. Once I found out that cinematography was really photography with a set shutter speed, I got an old 35mm Minolta and bought some tungsten slide film, because I knew that motion-picture film for the most part was tungsten, and I used it to storyboard the entire script. It took a long time, because I didn’t know about photography. I didn’t know anything about depth of field or how to get the look I wanted.”

Carruth added, “I had to learn everything through the pre-production process. So I storyboarded and I set up my lighting, which wasn’t elaborate — it was mostly available light. I had read Soderbergh stuff where they talk about him using available light, which is true for the most part. So I thought I could get away with that, but I found there were some situations where I had to buy some florescent bulbs from Wal-Mart and set up a rudimentary bank.” He also opted to shoot in 16mm format instead of going digital. “Because the story gets so fantastical, I didn’t want to be experimental when it came to the medium itself.”

When it came to casting, Carruth met with around 100 local actors, most of which he found either “a little too theatrical” or unprepared. “In the end, only one professional actor ended up in the movie. The rest were either family members, or friends-of-friends. It’s funny because I’ve heard several nice comments specifically about the acting.” After finding David Sullivan to play Abe, Carruth settled on playing Aaron himself. In the summer of 2001, Primer commenced a five-week shooting schedule around Dallas. With nearly 40 locations (and permission to shoot in about 10 of them) Carruth resorted to spaces he had access to, like his brother’s apartment.

Recounting his expenses, Carruth stated, “It was a few thousand for the camera rental, a couple of thousand for processing, and then, of course, the cost of film stock. I called around and managed to get a lot of expired stock donated.” $7,000 would not cover the transfer from Super 16 to 35mm; a friend loaned Carruth the cash for that. “I had a few offers from certain bodies to pay for the blow-up, but they demanded that they be credited as executive producers and that their credit show before everyone else’s. I didn’t think that was fair to me and everyone who worked on the film for free before it was a ‘Sundance’ film. Luckily, my friend Scott Douglass saved the day.”

Trying to find a movie in the footage Carruth had shot proved the most daunting task of getting Primer seen. He recalled, “It took two years to edit and compose and loop and Foley and all that.” He admitted, “It really got to me when someone asks what I did for a living and I realized I didn’t have a good answer. And it was just, I don’t know, it was like I’m in my apartment alone all day editing this thing that I’m calling a film but it wasn’t actually a film yet. So yeah, there’s a couple of times where I just gave up and decided I was going to go back and get a job and actually have a good answer to what I did for a living. That was going to be that.”

Screened at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, Primer became a sensation in Park City and among critics as well. Dana Stevens, The New York Times: “At a certain point, Mr. Carruth’s fondness for complexity and indirection crosses the line between ambiguity and opacity, but I hasten to add that my bafflement is colored by admiration.” Marjorie Baumgarten, The Austin Chronicle: “It’s hard to always know what Primer is saying or where it’s heading, but it looks fantastic while it unfolds and you won’t be able to forget what you’ve witnessed.” Carina Chocano, The Los Angeles Times: “Frustrating as I ultimately found it, Primer is undeniably geek heaven. For everyone else, it’s a nice antidote to big-budget bogusness.”

Primer won a North American distribution deal from THINKfilm and opened October 2004 in the United States. Never expanding beyond 31 theaters, it scooped up $424,760 domestically. Carruth commented on his debut film’s passionately baffled reception by stating, “My favorite films are the ones that can’t be tidily summed up, yet I walk away with a sense of the core. I wanted to make a film like that. As I was writing, my brother would say, ‘It’s confusing.’ I would ask, ‘Well, what do you think is happening? Just take a guess.’ He always got it right. He’d say, ‘No, no, I get it, I just don’t think anybody else would.’ But that’s exactly what I was going for. I wanted it to be right on that line.”

Should I Care?
If you had to prepare a primer on viewing Primer, the consensus Carruth and most of the audience reached was that watching the audacious, mind bending flick twice really seems to help. Really, really helps. Some have compared it to Memento in that respect, but I didn’t find it nearly as accessible. Carruth does a yeoman’s job resisting genre temptations or Hollywood bullshit by grounding the film with geek-speak in all its hyper focused and argumentative glory. Without the sci-fi, this is a striking portrait of garage inventors, right down to their sleeping habits, uniforms and paranoia once they strike on an innovation braced for huge success.

Carruth is a highly intelligent and skilled storyteller who in the middle of his tale, not only walks out on the audience, he shuts off the lights and leaves it up to us to find our way out of the story. The effect is either invigorating or insulting, depending on your personal taste. Regardless of how baffling the finished film, Primer is mandatory viewing for anyone flirting with the DIY aesthetic. The film looks stunningly sharp for the money, has good performances and a decent music track. If a software engineer with less than $10,000 can make a movie this successful in the suburbs of Dallas, anybody can.

Your thoughts?

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Shane Carruth” MakingTheFilm.com, 7 March 2004

“Mad Math: Bending Time with Primer Director” By Polly Shulman. The New York Times, 19 October 2004

“Interview with Shane Carruth” By Rebecca Murray. About.com, 22 October 2004

“From Math to Movies” By Steven Wallich & Wayne Slater. IEEE Spectrum, November 2004

“Primer: The New Whiz Kid on the Block” By Amy Taubin. Film Comment. 2004

Primer. DVD audio commentary by Shane Carruth. New Line Home Video, 2005.

By Joe Valdez

What the *&#! Are They About?
In a bachelor’s pad near Regent’s Park in London, a Dalmatian named Pongo (voiced by Rod Taylor) attempts to break the monotony of a spring’s day by introducing his “pet” — solitary song man Roger Radcliffe (voiced by Ben Wright) — to a suitable mate. Selecting an attractive woman holding the leash of a female Dalmatian named Perdita (voiced by Cate Bauer), Pongo drags Roger through the park and forces the humans to collide into each other. Wedding bells soon chime for Roger and Anita (voiced by Lisa Davis) while Perdita gives birth to 15 Dalmatian pups.

The litter attracts the attention of Anita’s chain smoking, fashion disaster schoolmate Cruella de Vil (voiced by Betty Lou Gerson). Roger summons the nerve to turn Cruella’s offer for the litter down, but later, two thieves dognap the pups. When Scotland Yard is unable to link Cruella to the crime, Pongo takes matters into his own paws, issuing a “twilight bark” for help. Word reaches the countryside, where an old sheepdog and tabby cat trace not just 15, but 99 Dalmatian pups to de Vil’s crumbling mansion Hell Hall, where she intends to turn the pups into a fur coat.

When his highly developed nose earns him a job as poison checker, a rat named Remy (voiced by Patton Oswalt) finds his pleas that their kind do little more than steal garbage falling on the deaf ears of his father (voiced by Brian Dennehy). Remy’s tastes lead him into a farmhouse kitchen, where TV introduces him to the philosophy of renowned chef August Gusteau (voiced by Brad Garrett) that “anyone can cook.” Remy’s expedition to the kitchen for saffron with his trash compactor brother Emile (voiced by Peter Sohn) results in the clan being driven from the attic. During the exodus, Remy is sent floating down a storm drain atop Gusteau’s book.

Realizing he’s in Paris, Remy arrives at the kitchen of his late mentor’s famous restaurant, now run by the temperamental Skinner (voiced by Ian Holm). Witnessing the disastrous attempts of bus boy Linguini (voiced by Lou Romano) at making soup, Remy intervenes. The soup is such a hit with customers that Skinner demands Linguini create his wonder again, under the watchful eye of chef Colette (voiced by Janeane Garafalo). Remy pursues his culinary dreams through Linguini, helping the boy win over food critic Anton Ego (voiced by Peter O’Toole), as well as win Colette’s affection. Reunited with his family, Remy is unsure which world he belongs to.

Writing
Playwright Dodie Smith and her taste for black & white led to her future husband presenting her with a Dalmatian in 1934. She named the dog Pongo. One Hundred and One Dalmatians had its genesis in a comment one of Smith’s friends made about Pongo, recalling that as a puppy, his fur would have made a nice coat. Envisioned as a children’s play at one point, a novel was published to great success in 1956. A scene in which the puppies disguise themselves as Labradors by rolling in soot was enough to compel producer Walt Disney to option the film rights in late 1957.

Disney assured Smith that her story would go into production following the lavish Sleeping Beauty. To pen an adaptation, Disney turned to Bill Peet. Before he would author children’s books like Chester the Worldy Pig, Peet began his career with Disney in 1937 as an “in betweener” assisting with final drawings. Peet supplied character sketches for Dumbo and soon became a senior writer-illustrator with the studio, co-authoring and storyboarding Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan and Ben and Me. Disney’s faith in Peet was so strong that for the first time in studio history, one person was entrusted with adapting and storyboarding an animated feature.

One Hundred and One Dalmatians is credited with being the most contemporary animated feature Disney had yet produced. I seem to remember Lady and the Tramp (1955) being quite modern too, but its creative departure from the fantasy musicals that Disney had banked on in the past was quite a novel approach. The writing contains nice doses of wit early on — with human behavior being commented on by a pet — and has mystery and suspense in the last half hour. None of these engines feels particularly sustained, but I did enjoy the film’s sly mockery of television, via the shows and ads (Kanine Krunchies) the Dalmatians are obsessed with.

Animator Jan Pinkava was standing in the kitchen in early 2000 with his wife when he had an idea for a movie: a rat who wants to become a chef. Pinkava had written and directed Geri’s Game — the Academy Award winning Best Animated Short Film of 1997 — for Pixar Animation Studios. Pinkava shared his story outline with Pixar story artist Jim Capobianco and the pair started on a screenplay. When Pinkava made his pitch to Pixar in March 2003, chief creative officer John Lasseter loved the fish-out-of-water concept. Pinkava continued to hone the script and by the summer of 2004, turned to writers Emily Cook & Kathy Greenberg for help.

To co-direct the untitled project, Pixar brought in Bob Peterson — who’d rewritten Finding Nemo — to whip the story into shape and allow Pinkava to focus on character and set design. Peterson assembled a story reel, but when it was presented to Pixar in late 2004, the studio saw a brilliant idea that was struggling to be realized as a feature length film. A second story reel presented in late spring 2005 was deemed rich in atmosphere, but still flat in story. Animator Brad Bird — whose film The Incredibles was playing like gangbusters for Pixar — had spent two weeks doctoring the screenplay when in June 2005, Pixar asked Bird to take over as director.

The outrageousness of the concept and challenge of finding a way to make audiences care about a rat both appealed to Bird. Rewriting the script, he kept most of Pinkava’s characters, killing off Gasteau and making him a spirit guide of sorts. Instead of an entire family of rats, Bird simplified things by giving Remy a father and brother only. He was taken by a minor character named Colette and expanded her part, making her an ally to Remy and Linguini. The result is an enormously sophisticated situation comedy. Not lacking in his yen for eye-popping action sequences, Bird is supremely acute when it comes to the fabric of relationships.

Writing edge: Ratatouille

Casting
Celebrity voices have been increasingly relied on in animated features, whether the star brings anything worthwhile to the character or not. One Hundred and One Dalmatians belongs to an era when animated characters were brought to life with great voices instead of bankable ones. Rod Taylor brings a dash of sophistication to the voice of Pongo, while it’s impossible to imagine the need for Bette Davis or Joan Crawford to voice Cruella de Vil when Betty Lou Gerson is intensely hilarious in the part. Disney veterans J. Pat O’Malley, Martha Wentworth and Tom Conway also lent their vocal talent to the film.

Characters don’t come to life in animated films with the ingenuity and craft of animators; Walt Disney had built the best animation unit in the world. Frank Thomas designed the character of Pongo and was responsible for a beautiful scene where the dog reacts to Roger bringing a stillborn pup back to life. Ollie Johnston was tasked with the character of Perdita. Marc Davis — whose drafting table had been the birthplace of Bambi and Tinkerbell — designed Cruella de Vil, one of the most memorable animated characters of all time. Thomas, Johnston and Davis were all part of the “Nine Old Men”, the core animation team responsible for building Disney.

With Pixar’s preference for developing characters both two dimensionally and three dimensionally, designers Jason Deamer, Dan Lee and Carter Goodrich sketched character drawings, which were molded into clay by sculptors Jerome Ranft and Greg Dykstra. The concern that audiences might find rats gross had been dealt with by designing them to walk on two legs. When Brad Bird came on board, he used Bambi and Lady and the Tramp as touchstones, insisting that animals act like animals and not humans. A year spent observing rats in terrariums at Pixar helped animators capture muscle movements and anatomy much more realistically.

Bird arrived on Patton Oswalt to voice Remy after switching on his car radio and hearing the comedian’s bit on Black Angus Steakhouses; to Bird, Oswalt seemed to be this big personality coming from a smaller body. Janeane Garafalo’s attitude and acting chops perfectly fit for the voice of French chef Colette. The verbal dexterity and wit of both performers goes a long way to making Ratatouille so entertaining. Peter O’Toole — rarely if ever employed as just a voice actor — is tremendous as the insufferable food critic. Ian Holm’s French accent is nearly unrecognizable as Skinner, as is John Ratzenberger, whose voice appears as the head waiter.

Casting edge: Even

Production value
Sleeping Beauty had cost a fortune for Disney and underperformed at the box office in 1959. To avoid shuttering his animation division, Disney was looking for a way to cut costs. Ub Iwerks — animator, technical innovator and Disney’s business partner from the earliest days of the studio — suggested that office copiers from Xerox that were appearing on the market might be used to transfer an image onto an animation cel. The Xerox lens could take a picture of a pencil drawing and transfer it onto a plate, which could be dipped in toner and transferred onto a clear cel. This would eliminate the time consuming and costly need for an ink department.

Animators were thrilled that their work would no longer pass through ink tracers and responded with inspired character work; Cruella de Vil’s entrance is one of the grandest ever for a Disney character. Art director Ken Anderson brought a particular look to One Hundred and One Dalmatians: angular, abstract, modern. Layout stylist Ernie Nordli went over some of Anderson’s backgrounds and softened them up a bit, but the results were a radical departure from the lushness of Lady and the Tramp or Sleeping Beauty. Painter Walt Peregoy used color styling to give a mere impression of shapes like doors or furniture.

Disney stalwarts Wolfgang Reitherman, Hamilton Luske and Clyde Geronimi directed One Hundred and One Dalmatians with each supervising the completion of individual sequences. Xerox color had yet to be invented, but with so many of the characters designed to be black & white anyway, the process suggested by Ub Iwerks turned out sublimely well suited to the material. The stark, black lined style beautifully signals that we’ve arrived in a bold new age of animation, with the opening credits sequence in particular bouncing with a jazzy, energetic feel. I’m not a big fan of abstract art, but got a kick out of the Picasso influences that run throughout the film.

Director of photography Sharon Calahan and production designer Harley Jessup were both retained when Pixar brought on Brad Bird to rewrite and direct Ratatouille. Both were major forces in dictating the look and feel of the film. Calahan suggested that the rat world would feel cool and the human world warm. She studied food photography — both good and bad — and arrived on a slightly warm illumination to not only make the dishes look appetizing, but to make the human world feel inviting to Remy. Subdued colors among the characters and props helped highlight the richness of the food, which ends up coming off like a character.

Ignoring animated films like The Aristocats that had previously used Paris as a locale, art director Harley Jessup referenced live action movies from the 1950s like An American In Paris, searching for an idealized look of the City of Lights. But he also drew heavily on Parisian geography to design the sets. Gusteau’s is adjacent to the Place Dauphine. Linguini’s flat was located in Montmartre. The location of the Eiffel Tower through windowpanes was accurate to wherever the scene was supposed to take place. Rooting the look of Ratatouille in Paris resulted in a muted color palette that stands apart from the toybox colors of previous Pixar films.

One aspect you can always bank on with Brad Bird is how imaginative and exciting the action sequences are going to be. This was evident in the “Family Dog” segment of Amazing Stories, on to The Iron Giant and is true of his two animated features for Pixar. This is a ceaselessly entertaining movie, but in addition to the madcap chases are wonderful moments observing human behavior. I particularly like the French lovers Remy spies while moving through the walls; one moment the femme is shooting at her lover and the next, they’re embraced in a kiss. That’s Brad Bird and the type of social observation you don’t see in other children’s films.

Production value edge: Ratatouille

Music
Most of Disney’s animated films up to this point had stopped to break into song and dance, but One Hundred and One Dalmatians broke with form by integrating its songs into the story. Mel Leven wrote all of these. “Cruella de Vil” ranks right up there with “You’re A Mean One, Mr. Grinch”. I had it stuck in my head for days and was not worse off for the experience. Leven also wrote the tune “Dalmatian Plantation” that closes the film and the hilarious “Kanine Krunchies” jingle. George Bruns composed the score and instead of a classic orchestral approach, his upbeat, jazzy compositions bring a freewheeling, modern vibe to the picture.

After working together on The Incredibles, Brad Bird commissioned Michael Giacchino to compose the musical score for Ratatouille. The collaboration resulted in Giacchino’s first nomination for an Academy Award. The composer brought in French singer Camille to lend her remarkable vocals to the song “Le Festin”, which can be heard twice during the film to magical effect: the montage when Linguini is ceded ownership of Gasteau’s and again before the end credits. Giacchino’s musical ingenuity and range is evident during Skinner’s chase of Remy through across the Seine and is a delight throughout the picture.

Music edge: One Hundred and One Dalmatians

Cultural impact
Arriving in theaters January 1961, audiences lapped up the contemporary approach of One Hundred and One Dalmatians. It became the #1 grossing movie of the year and endures as one of the most popular animated features in the Disney library. Each re-release — in January 1969, June 1979, December 1985 and July 1991 — outgrossed the previous, totaling $144.8 million in the U.S. and $71 million overseas. It inspired two live action versions starring Glenn Close as Cruella de Vil: 101 Dalmatians (1996) and 102 Dalmatians (2000). More importantly, the Xerox process and the commercial success of the film saved Disney’s animation studio.

Ratatouille was the 8th animated feature from Pixar and the first that the pioneering studio greenlit in Emeryville without the input of Walt Disney Pictures. Some speculated that the marketing challenges of a movie with an unpronounceable title, about a food preparing rat, would mark the end of Pixar’s streak of commercial smashes. Opening June 2007, the picture grossed $206.4 million in the U.S. and $414.9 million overseas; only Finding Nemo and The Incredibles had a better box office run. It was bestowed five Academy Award nominations, the most for any Pixar film up to that time. Brad Bird won an Oscar for Best Animated Feature.

Cultural impact edge: One Hundred and One Dalmatians

Winner: One Hundred and One Dalmatians

One Hundred and One Dalmatians has endured as a great entertainment and pioneering achievement in the arts in a way that Ratatouille — sensational while it’s playing, a bit harder to recall quite as fondly months after the viewing experience — just can’t measure up to yet. Brad Bird is a genius, but I think even his fans would admit that some of the greatest animators in history were engaged to bring One Hundred and One Dalmatians to life.

Your thoughts?

What the *&#! Is This About?
In Los Angeles – overpopulated and choked in pollution – of the year 2019, the Tyrell Corporation leads the field of robot design with the “Replicant,” a being virtually identical to a human, but superior in strength and agility, and at least equal in intelligence. After a mutiny in an off-world colony, Replicants have been declared illegal on Earth, where they are tracked down and “retired” by special police known as blade runners. One of these blade runners administers an empathy test known as the Voight-Kampff to Tyrell employees in an attempt to screen out possible Replicants. One of his subjects – Leon (Brion James) – is pushed too far by the test and shoots the officer. Ex-blade runner Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is summoned by his old captain (M. Emmet Walsh) to hunt down four Replicants – two male and two female – who have arrived in L.A. for reasons unknown.

Paired with a cop (Edward James Olmos) who speaks an amalgam of French/German/Hungarian, Deckard goes to see Dr. Tyrell (Joe Turkel). He learns that a new model of Replicant – the Nexus 6 – has been implanted with memories so real that it may actually believe itself to be human. Designed to develop its own emotional responses, the Nexus 6 has been engineered with a 4-year life span. Tyrell has Deckard administer the Voight-Kampff Test to his secretary Rachael (Sean Young). Deckard realizes that she’s a Nexus 6. Rachael does not react well to news that she’s an artificial being and seeks Deckard out in an effort to cope with this. Meanwhile, the other escaped Replicants – combat model Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer), assassin Zhora (Joanna Cassidy) and pleasure model Pris (Daryl Hannah) – befriend a lonely robotics designer (William Sanderson) in attempt to infiltrate the Tyrell Corporation, seeking reprieves on their lives and the meaning of their existence.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
Philip K. Dick capped a prolific decade that included 19 novels, 27 short stories and a Hugo Award in 1963 with the publishing of his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?‘ in 1968. In a phone interview with Paul M. Sammon a little more than a year before his death in 1981, Dick discussed the novel’s genesis. “It stems from an interest on my part in the problem of differentiating the authentic human being from the reflux machine, which I call an android … Where for me, the word ‘android’ is a metaphor for people who are physiologically human but psychologically behaving in a non-human way. I got interested in this when I was doing research for Man In the High Castle and I was studying the Nazi mentality. And I discovered that although these people were highly intelligent, they were definitely deficient in some manner in appropriate affect, appropriate emotion that would accompany the intellectual process.”

After struggling as both a flamenco dancer and a screenwriter in the 1970s, Hampton Fancher thought he would take a shot at being a film producer. Fancher recalled, “I thought I would produce a movie. And this guy – Jim Maxwell – who’s a close friend, knows me well, said, ‘You might, I think science fiction’s gonna happen.’ And he said, ‘Do you know who Philip K. Dick is?’ I said, no. He said, ‘Well there’s a book called Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?‘ And I said, okay, I’ll read that. I read it. I didn’t like it that much. But I thought, okay, that’s commercial. Here’s a thru-line: bureaucratic detective chasing androids. In ’78 or so, my friend Brian Kelly, he had $5,000. He said, ‘Maybe you could get an option and that might be a good commercial project that you could get behind, and, you know, make some money.’ That’s all we’re talking about, is making some money.”

Brian Kelly zeroed in on producer Michael Deeley with the project. Deeley recalled, “I’d been pursued for about two years by Brian Kelly – who’s a very close friend of mine – who had this idea in mind to make a movie, based on Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? And I’d first read it and thought: this wasn’t very interesting.” Fancher’s take on the material was cerebral and dialogue driven, a cautionary tale of over population and ecological disaster that largely took place in rooms. Fancher pressed ahead anyway, first with a treatment, then several drafts of a screenplay. “The intellectual aspects of the screenplay were taken from my response to the death of animal life on this planet, and what that meant. That’s probably the thing that saw me through the first draft, was I had a passion about that, and so my affection for the project was consistent.”

On the strength of Hampton Fancher’s adaptation, Michael Deeley ultimately agreed to produce the film, opting for the title Dangerous Days. His first choice to direct was Ridley Scott, who was mixing Alien in England at the time. Scott recalled, “I said, ‘I don’t really want to do another science fiction, I’ve just finished one. So, but I’ll read it.’ I read the script, which was Hampton Fancher and it was called Dangerous Days. And I turned it down.” Scott’s friend and associate Ivor Powell had gotten a hold of the script and had a different reaction. Powell recalled, “And I said, ‘Listen, I think we should give this a second thought. I really think this is powerful and emotional and really interesting.” The idea stuck with Scott and when he was unable to crack an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel Dune for producer Dino De Laurentiis agreed to direct Dangerous Days. Hampton Fancher had never cared for that title, and appropriated one from William S. Burroughs that he liked better: Blade Runner.

Filmways agreed to finance a budget, but Deeley recalled, “We’d spent about two and a half million by the time it became perfectly clear that the world we were building was much bigger than twelve and a half million dollars. Much, much bigger.” As sets were being constructed, Deeley brokered a three-way arrangement to secure alternate financing and keep the project alive. Producer Alan Ladd Jr. – who had a deal with Warner Bros. – put up $7.5 million for U.S. distribution rights. Singapore movie mogul Sir Run-Run Shaw also invested that sum, for the film’s foreign rights. Another $7 million came from producers Jerry Perenchio and Bud Yorkin, who received TV and home video rights and agreed to finance the completion budget, should Blade Runner go over schedule.

Meanwhille, Hampton Fancher was struggling to conceptualize what Ridley Scott wanted to see. Scott recalled, “The hunter falls in love with the hunted, except they never go outside the apartment. It’s very interior. I want to take them outside the door. Once we go outside the door, this world has to support the thesis that she’s android, humanoid, robot.” He added, “We got up to a point where Hampton was just getting exhausted. Go back to the anvil, back to the anvil, back to the anvil.” David Peoples was approached to deliver a shooting script. Scott added, “Peoples I think is more – and I mean this in the best possible way – is simpler? Hampton is more cerebral. And for the most part this was very cerebral. And I thought, actually, bringing in something like Peoples would maybe create some fresh air in the corridors to make it move. Because my danger as a director is I tend to get very cerebral and get engaged with darkness and detail.” One of Peoples’ contributions ended up being the idea that Roy Batty would save Deckard’s life.

After Dustin Hoffman spent several months attached to the role of Deckard – moving further away from the filmmakers’ vision as time progressed – actress Barbara Hershey mentioned to Hampton Fancher the name Harrison Ford. A visit that Michael Deeley and Ridley Scott made to England to watch dailies from Raiders of the Lost Ark – then shooting at Pinewood Studios – won them over. Ford recalled, “I remember that I read a script, which I thought was interesting. At the first version that I read of it, of the film, had some issues, I had some issues with. There was a voiceover narration attached to the original script, and I said to Ridley that I played a detective who does no detecting. How about we take some of this information that’s in the voice-overs and put it into scenes, and so that the audience could discover the information, discover the character through seeing him in the context of what he does, rather than being told about it. And some of that survived, and some of it didn’t.”

With conceptual designer Syd Mead creating the industrial look of the film – cars, streets, buildings and neon – Blade Runner commenced shooting March 1981 on the Warner Bros. backlot in Burbank. Working in the American film industry for the first time, Ridley Scott mused, “There’s nothing worse when you’ve done two and a half hours of commercials – and I know I’ve got a very good eye – in three seconds I can give you a set-up, having walked in the room without ever seeing it before. So I don’t like discussion. I know exactly what I want, and I want to walk in and say ‘Do it.’ That’s the director’s job. The director’s not meant to stand there and consult with half a dozen people in the room.” In addition to Scott’s brusque communication skills, filming nights under heavy rain and smoke effects wore down the crew – many of whom quit – as well as some of the cast, with Harrison Ford seething through most of the shoot.

A test screening of Blade Runner was held in Dallas in March 1982. Production illustrator Tom Southwell recalled, “Everybody was expecting a heroic follow-up to Raiders of the Lost Ark or Star Wars and the way it was advertised on television – with only the visual effects shots of a flying car going over a futuristic city and sort of a fight sequence – doesn’t prepare you for the traumatic, emotional side that there is in the film that kind of leaves you sort of broken.” Specific objections raised at the test screening were that the film was too confusing, too dark, too slow and ended too abruptly. Scott addressed these concerns by filming a brighter ending, with Ford and Sean Young escaping to the pristine countryside, and inserting voiceover narration by Ford to help audiences along with the plot.

While its visual design won acclaim, many critics were left with a bad taste to the overall film. Janet Maslin, the New York Times: “Science-fiction devotees may find Blade Runner a wonderfully meticulous movie and marvel at the comprehensiveness of its vision. Even those without a taste for gadgetry cannot fail to appreciate the degree of effort that has gone into constructing a film so ambitious and idiosyncratic … But Blade Runner is a film that special effects could have easily run away with, and run away with it they have. And it’s also a mess, at least as far as its narrative is concerned.” Pauline Kael, the New Yorker: “Blade Runner doesn’t engage you directly; it forces passivity on you. It sets you down in this lopsided maze of a city, with its post-human feeling, and keeps you persuaded that something bad is about to happen. Some the scenes seem to have six subtexts but no text, and no context either.” Roger Ebert, the Chicago Sun Times: “Blade Runner is a stunningly interesting visual achievement, but a failure as a story.”

In June 1982 during its first weekend of release in the U.S., Blade Runner opened big; only E.T. was drawing a bigger crowd. But as word of mouth spread – and audiences flocked to Rocky III or Star Trek II - the film’s commercial prospects sank. Grossing $32.6 million in the U.S., Blade Runner was not only deemed a commercial disappointment, but a creative disappointment by some of the people who’d worked on it. In 2007, associate producer Ivor Powell recalled, “For me, it’s still – emotionally – falls short of total satisfaction because I just think there is an emotional logic and a sort of a narrative logic that doesn’t run as true as I feel that it should do, and in a sense I felt that what we made was an incredibly beautiful looking – as one would expect with Rid – but it’s almost like an art movie.”

Accordingly, Blade Runner became a staple of midnight screenings on college campuses or at revival houses. Then in 1990, a work print seen only at test screenings in Denver and Dallas was briefly exhibited in Los Angeles. Popular demand for a definitive version of Blade Runner led to Ridley Scott being permitted to supervise a “Director’s Cut” in 1992. The much maligned voiceover narration and the upbeat ending were both removed and 12 cryptic seconds of Deckard dreaming of a unicorn was inserted. In addition to audiences who’d missed it, critics who’d seen Blade Runner and given it a lackluster appraisal started changing their assessment. By 2007, Roger Ebert had begrudgingly added Blade Runner to his list of Great Movies, amending his 1982 review by writing, “I have been assured that my problems in the past with Blade Runner represent a failure of my own taste and imagination, but if the film was perfect, why has Sir Ridley continued to tinker with it, and now released his fifth version? I guess he’s only human.”

Commenting in 2007 on the reception of Blade Runner, writer-director Frank Darabont mused, “’82 I think was owned by E.T. It’s a brilliant film, I’m taking absolutely nothing away from it, but it was definitely happy comfort food. It always will be. It’s one of the best examples of that kind of film ever. I’m not damning it with faint praise. It’s wonderful. But I think that everyone was so plugged into the happy comfort food at that time that they weren’t giving movies like Blade Runner a chance, or John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing.” Also in 2007, special effects supervisor Douglas Trumbull summed up what he finds enduring about Blade Runner: “We’re in a movie business where most movies are disposable commodities. They’re the summer blockbuster. I’m not going to name what they are, but they come and go in weeks and, bye bye. Nobody wants to resurrect them. Nobody wants to see them again. So the ones that are really truly well made – the kind of Casablancas of science fiction – survive, and get seen over and over.”

Should I Care?
Instead of reassuring the audience with a hopeful vision of the future, Blade Runner is an emotional downpour. The atmosphere is choked with smoke and rain. Animal life is endangered. The background dialects are impenetrable. Citizens with the means have fled Earth. Those who’ve stayed behind struggle to relate to each other as humans because in the film’s vision of the future, we’ve replicated life beyond the point to retain what it means to be human. The strengths and weaknesses of Blade Runner come down to it being one of the grandest art films of all time, second only to 2001: A Space Odyssey. The story never adheres to a straightforward detective mystery. Where the Replicants are or how Deckard finds them is the least interesting business in the picture.

What Fancher and Peoples do so well in their script is pose questions about what it means to be human, and where we might be headed if we continue to lose sight of that. Rutger Hauer, Brion James, Daryl Hannah and Joanna Cassidy perform some of the finest work of their careers as the Replicants – the real heroes of the film – as does Harrison Ford, who brings the right amount of downbeaten sleaze to his role. Blade Runner is deliberate and comes close to paralyzing the viewer with stimulus overload, but Ridley Scott’s eye for detail and his design genius are never in question. The stunning cinematography by Jordan Cronenweth and haunting electronic score by Vangelis add immensely to the well-deserved re-evaluation of Blade Runner as a classic.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner. By Paul M. Sammon. HarperPrism (1996)

Dangerous Days: Making Blade Runner. Blade Runner (Five-Disc Ultimate Collector’s Edition). Warner Home Video (2007)

What the *&#! Is This About?
On the 16th of November 2027, London wakes to the following news: “The world was stunned today by the death of Diego Ricardo, the youngest person on the planet.” For 18 years, women have been infertile, and no one has been able to explain why. In the absence of all hope, anarchy has overwhelmed most of the world, but Britain “soldiers on” by banning all immigration, rounding up and deporting any asylum seekers. A group calling themselves the Fishes have organized an anti-government insurgency in support of immigrant rights, and are blamed for a bombing that almost kills Theo Faron (Clive Owen) as he’s ordering his morning coffee.

Theo was a political activist in his youth, but following the death of his son and the dissolution of his marriage has become a low-level bureaucrat. He remains largely apathetic about the future of the planet. The only thing Theo looks forward to are visits to the Bexhill area – which in addition to housing a refugee camp – is home to his friend Jasper (Michael Caine), a retired, ganga smoking cartoonist who cares for his wife (Philippa Urquhart), a photojournalist who experienced something so horrific, possibly in New York, or possibly at the hands of British intelligence, that she remains in a catatonic state. Returning to London, Theo is abducted by the Fishes, who he discovers are led by his fugitive ex-wife Julian (Julianne Moore).

Julian implores her ex-husband to help them smuggle a girl past security checkpoints and to the coast. Theo’s cousin Nigel (Danny Huston) has government financing for a project called Ark of the Arts – spiriting the masterpieces of the art world and relocating them to London – and it’s believed he can help. Theo is offered £5,000 for his services, but the only travel permit his cousin can obtain stipulates that the girl remain under Theo’s supervision. With the aid of an insurgent (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and a nursemaid, Theo realizes that the girl he’s transporting, Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey) is carrying a child. Julian hopes to deliver her to the Human Project, a think tank who as legend would have it, is working on mankind’s cure for infertility.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
Published in 1993, The Children of Men was a change of pace for mystery writer P.D. James. She imagined a world of the year 2021, where global infertility has brought civilization to its knees. James had come across a newspaper article that mentioned human fertility in the west had declined in the last 20 years. Not long after, she encountered another article, which stated that most of the life forms that have existed on earth have since died out. The author recalled, “And I thought – suppose it happened to human beings, suddenly, all in one year? What kind of world would it be? What would it mean for the way people lived, their motivation? It is almost unimaginable, what it might do to human beings.” She added, “I suppose it is a sort of moral fable; I don’t like to describe it as science fiction.”

Talent agent Hilary Shor read The Children of Men two months after delivering her first child. With her partner in the newly formed Hit & Run Productions – Tony Smith – Shor brought the project to producer Marc Abraham of Beacon Communications (later Strike Entertainment). Due to the detailed requests of P.D. James – her book be developed only as a feature, the story had to be set in England – it took a year, but Beacon finally negotiated the film rights. After a pass by Paul Chart, Shor hired Mark Fergus & Hawk Ostby to adapt a screenplay. Fergus recalled, “We had done A Scanner Darkly for our first writing assignment – not the Richard Linklater one that ultimately got made. We were hired by Jersey Films to try to crack that book, and I think we had a lot of success with that adaptation so they said, ‘Hey give these guys a shot at Children of Men because it seems to be one that’s not going anywhere.’ We just read it, and we said, ‘Oh my God! This is Casablanca!’ It’s the perfect love triangle. It fit that mold and that’s when they got excited and thought, ‘Wow this could actually be a film.’”

After two years of writing, Fergus & Otsby had a draft that was good enough to be sent to Alfonso Cuarón, a Mexican director of two widely praised but little seen Hollywood films: A Little Princess and Great Expectations. A low budget Spanish language feature he’d shot in his native country – Y Tu Mamá También – had yet to be released. Cuarón recalled, “The truth of the matter is I didn’t respond to the material. I was not interested in doing a science fiction film and also the book takes place in a very posh universe. I respect, I love P.D. James. I enjoy the book, but I couldn’t see myself making that movie. And, nevertheless, the premise of infertility kept on haunting me for weeks and weeks and weeks.” Cuarón was committed to shooting Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, but promised the producers he’d tackle The Children of Men next.

Ignoring the Fergus & Ostby draft – as well as one by David Arata, which Cuarón referred to as “a generic action movie” – the director co-wrote a script with Timothy Sexton, who was tasked with adapting the novel, while Cuarón sketched his own ideas for what he wanted in the movie. “When I started working on the film I met with the art department and they undusted all the old rejections from science fiction movies they had done, they were so excited to do this movie that took place in the future. They started showing me all these amazing things. Supersonic cars, buildings, gadgets and stuff and I was like, ‘You guys this is brilliant, but this is not the movie we’re doing. The movie we are doing is this,’ and I brought in my files. It was about Iraq, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Northern Ireland, the Balkans, Chernobyl and I said this is the movie we are doing. The rule I set is this movie is not about imagination, it is about reference.”

Referencing The Battle of Algiers and the lead actor in a movie they liked called Croupier, Cuarón & Sexton finished their adaptation and sent it to Clive Owen, who recalled, “He was very high on my ‘directors I would love to work with’ list and even some of his films that were not as commercially successful I think are very special. When he first sent me the script I wasn’t sure about the part, I didn’t quite know why he wanted me to do it. It’s a highly unusual lead part, you look at that character and there are very unusual traits that he’s got. It’s not the kind of part where you can do your thing as an actor, it’s about sacrificing yourself to Alfonso’s vision and not getting in the way of it, which seemed more important than doing any sort of acting.” Cuarón added, “I’m thankful that this movie didn’t happen before Harry Potter. For two years I was working on Harry Potter in London – which is very different from being a tourist. Suddenly, you’re inside and witnessing the social dynamic. I can’t claim to understand the Brits, but at least I witnessed the class system, for instance, and other subtle things.”

With Cuarón’s freshly minted prestige and Julianne Moore, Michael Caine and Chiwetel Ejiofor joining the cast, Universal rolled the dice on Children of Men and its $72 million budget. Shooting commenced November 2005 in London. Cuarón recalled, “All the time we were shooting, we kept saying, ‘Let’s make it more Mexican’. In other words, we’d look at a location and then say: yes, but in Mexico there would be this and this. It was about making the place look rundown. It was about poverty.” Children of Men premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 2006 before opening in the U.K. and Spain that same month. Universal bumped its release in the U.S. back to Christmas Day, supposedly so the picture could vie in awards contention.

The Hollywood Reporter’s Risky Biz Blog wrote that the studio was in fact orphaning Children of Men. “While many critics were impressed by the film’s virtuosity and bravado, the industry types were seeing a downer film that was going to lose money. The movie is a brilliant exercise in style, but it’s another grim dystopian look at our future – like Blade Runner or Fahrenheit 451 – that simply cost too much money (between $72 and as much as $90 million, I’ve heard) to make a profit.” Brandon Gray of Box Office Mojo said at the time. “These pictures tend to be box-office disappointments. A lot of them develop an audience later on television or DVD. They grow in esteem over time.”

Critics wasted no time lavishing the film with acclaim. Manohla Dargis, the New York Times: “Children of Men may be something of a bummer, but it’s the kind of glorious bummer that lifts you to the rafters, transporting you with the greatness of its filmmaking.” Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly: “It’s a work of art that deserves a space cleared for its angry, nervous beauty.” Derek Elley, Variety: “Picture more than delivers on the action front – not in bang-for-your-buck spectacle but in the kind of gritty, doculike sequences that haul viewers out of their seats and alongside the main protags.” However, the overwhelmingly positive ink was not spun into box office gold.

Nominated for three Academy Awards – Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography (Emmanuel Lubezi) and Best Film Editing (Alfonso Cuarón, Alex Rodriguez) – Children of Men was ignored on its release, grossing $35.5 million in the U.S. and $34 million overseas. Responding to an interviewer who mused that the film was too dark, Cuarón stated, “It pretty much depends on your own sense of hope. What we wanted to do at the end was to give a little glimpse of a possibility of hope. A very small glimpse. So you invest your own sense of hope in the story. After you go through this journey of what I consider to be the state of things, outside our green zones, then at the end is the question: Do we have a possibility of hope? I personally believe yes. Hopefully people believe that the movie is a very hopeful movie.”

Should I Care?
With bursts of documentary-like photorealism, Children of Men depicts one of the most subliminally disturbing visions of the future ever rendered to film. The only thing that doesn’t provoke a visceral reaction may be the pedestrian title, which P.D. James may have resorted to because Apocalypse Now was taken. “That movie really stayed with me” can be used to sum up any of the great films of a decade, but where Children of Men is most pronounced is in its verisimilitude. In this depiction of Things To Come, the future is not flying cars or robots. It’s Cuba. Fashion and technology have been frozen for 20 years. Infrastructure is in decay. Solders stand on every corner. Trash bags and stray dogs line the streets. Billboards advertise euthanasia kits under the brand name Quietus (“You decide where”) and remind citizens “Suspicious? Report all illegal immigrants”.

While the conceit that Theo would go on the run with Kee rather than hand her over to the authorities constitutes what is known as a plot hole, instead of being badgered by gaps in the narrative, I was absorbed by the reality of the environment being portrayed. The randomness of terrorist atrocities, suppression of human rights, impunity of death squads and dwindling flicker of hope bleed into a sort of nightmare you know you can wake up from, even though it seems a little too similar to the world we’re living in now. Alfonso Cuarón demonstrates not only technical virtuosity, but maintains a strong moral conscience in the story. Along with director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki and the art department, Children of Men may replace Blade Runner as the dystopia that other filmmakers rip off for the next 20 years.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
“Mistress of Morality Tales” By Jan Dalley. The Independent, 20 September 1992

“Children of Men Feature” Time Out London, 21 September 2006

“Alfonso Cuaron Discusses Children of Men” By Rebecca Murray. About.com, 20 December 2006

“Alfonso Cuaron on Children of Men” By Brad Brevet. Rope of Silicon, 22 December 2006

“Tribeca Film Festival conversation with Mark Fergus” 11 February 2007

What the *&#! Is This About?
In the town of “Castle Rock,” Maine, a powerful electrical storm sends a tree through the lakeside home of graphic designer David Drayton (Thomas Jane), his wife (Kelly Collins Lintz) and their nine-year-old son Billy (Nathan Gamble). Surveying the damage the next morning, David tells her, “It’s just stuff, you know. We’re safe, that’s all that matters.” His wife appears anxious about a strange mist drifting off the mountains and headed toward them across the lake. Father and son are more interested in a tree belonging to their obstinate attorney neighbor Norton (Andre Braugher) that has flattened the Drayton boathouse. The men put aside past differences when David offers Norton a ride into town for supplies. Taking Billy along, they pass an army convoy. The soldiers are stationed at a base in the mountains known to the locals only as “the Arrowhead Project”. The convoy appears to be in a hurry, prompting Norton to comment, “Maybe their power’s out too.”

At the Food House, David chats with a teenage clerk (Alexa Davalos), amiable assistant manager (Toby Jones), Castle Rock’s resident nutter Mrs. Carmody (Marcia Gay Harden), schoolteacher (Frances Sternhagen) and realtor (Susan Watkins). David also observes an MP abruptly cancel leave for three soldiers. Everything at the store comes to a dead halt when an air raid siren sounds. A monstrous mist overtakes the town on the heels of a panic stricken local (Jeffrey DeMunn) who makes it to the store covered in blood. Warning the others to shut the doors and not to go outside, a shopper decides to make a break for his car. Disappearing in the mist, the last that’s heard of him are his terrified screams. One theory voiced is that the mist may be a chemical explosion from the local mill. Mrs. Carmody believes this is the end of days. Norton tries to keep the crowd calm, while David is more focused on trying to calm his hysterical son.

Searching for a blanket in the storeroom, David hears something outside attempt to rip down the loading dock door. A mechanic (William Sadler) copes with the disaster by trying to get the store’s generator working, with a bag boy (Chris Owen) eager to go outside and clear whatever’s blocking the duct. When David is unable to convince them that this is a bad idea, the door is raised; tentacles slither inside, tear into Norm’s skin and drag him into the mist. When confronting Norton with this, the attorney’s logic prevents him from accepting it. He organizes a group to venture outside for help, but a rope one of them ties to their waist only makes it 300 feet before returning a torso. As Mrs. Carmody begins spreading her Old Testament gospel of a stern and vengeful god – slowly converting frightened followers – David, a third grade teacher (Laurie Holden) and a few others start worrying more about the monsters inside the store than the ones in the mist.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
The Mist began with a phone call Stephen King received in 1980 from his literary agent Kirby McCauley. King recalled, “Kirby McCauley was putting together an anthology called Dark Forces and he wanted all these original stories from people who wrote in the genre. I said, ‘You know, Kirby, I don’t think I can do that because I’m blocked, I’m not writing anything.’ And I hadn’t. I had just finished three books. There was Carrie, ‘Salem’s Lot, Night Shift, and I was kind of stuck, really. I happened to be in the local market one time and a lot of people were shopping. I looked at the front windows and thought, if something bad happened, those windows would all blow in — because that’s the way I think. It’s not necessarily a good thing, but it’s been a profitable thing over the years.” The resulting story – The Mist – unblocked the author and a slightly re-edited version appeared in King’s 1985 short story collection Skeleton Crew. At 155 pages, it qualified as a novella.

A couple of years later, Frank Darabont was getting his feet wet as a screenwriter. He recalled, “Nightmare on Elm Street 3 was my very first credit as a writer and there was The Blob remake and there was The Fly II. I remember sitting on the set of Nightmare on Elm Street 3 one night and thinking I’d love to have something in my pocket that I could nurse along and try to get made as a director.” Darabont had taken advantage of Stephen King’s “Dollar Babies” initiative, in which the author makes available to student filmmakers the movie rights to select King short stories for the fee of only $1. In 1983, Darabont directed a short based on The Woman In the Room. Searching for a feature length project, it came down to either The Mist or Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption. In choosing the latter, the emotionally resonant 1994 prison drama starring Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman earned seven Academy Award nominations and set Darabont on the path to prestige.

Darabont’s company Darkwoods Productions entered into a first-look development deal with Paramount Pictures, which was where the filmmaker brought The Mist in 2004 when he was ready to return to his horror roots. Darabont recalled, “What always appealed to me about it was, okay, here’s this story about monsters, very basically, on the surface of it. Underneath, Steve King was telling a completely different story. He was telling a story about the fragility of human behavior under pressure. What he was saying was that civilization has a very thin veneer and it can crumble very quickly, especially when you apply fear. And people turn against one another when subjected to stress and fear. It winds up being great sociological context for how we are as a species, how screwed up we are, how fearful we are.” Paramount agreed to put up $30 million to produce The Mist, provided Darabont reconsider the ending he’d written, which was … downbeat, to say the least.

Darabont concluded, “Obviously not a studio movie. That’s the ultimate horror for a studio, is a horror movie that might actually horrify people. You give ‘em something that might upset the audience they run screaming in the other direction.” He added, “Through this whole set of circumstances I wound up with Bob Weinstein at Dimension. He was the only guy who said, who had the balls to say, ‘Yeah, I love this ending, I love this movie, let’s make it.’ With the understanding of course that it had to be done very quickly and very inexpensively. Let me put it this way: A lot of great horror movies that I love, that I grew up watching have a tradition of being done under extreme duress of time and on very, very low budgets. And I thought, okay, if we’re really going to embrace what I love – horror movies – let’s embrace that tradition as well. Let’s embrace the tradition of shoot it as fast as you can, shoot it as cheaply as you can.”

In October 2006, it was announced that Dimension Films would bankroll The Mist, with a spring 2007 start date. The budget was roughly $17 million. Casting the lead, Darabont’s first choice was Thomas Jane. “I had met him a few times and he read for The Green Mile I always remembered his work. I’ve seen roles that he’s done, smallish roles in other movies. He’s one of those guys that I just knew had way more depth that he’s generally been elicited to show in other roles that he’s done. So I called him and I said, ‘I got this script and I’d love for you to play the lead. Let’s read it and let’s discuss it.’ And our very first conversation once he’d read it was, ‘Tom I think you have more depth than something like Deep Blue Sea allowed you to show. What I don’t want is a square-jawed action hero here. What I want is a really flawed, well intentioned guy who loves his son and it’s a movie about a guy trying to protect his little boy. As far as you’re concerned that’s what the whole movie is about. Are you ready to take that leap?’ And indeed it was something he had been hungry to do.”

The rest of the cast quickly fell into place. Darabont recalled, “Jeff DeMunn and Bill Sadler, both of them were those roles, and Laurie Holden, she was also always in my head for the role of Amanda. Others you have to think about a little bit, and there’s where you really have to depend on a great casting director, is, okay, who’s going to play Mrs. Carmody? Who’s going to play Billy? Where do we find a nine-year-old boy who’s got that kind of ability? Deb Aquilla and her associates, they found Nathan Gamble and she brought him to my attention and we hired him immediately. It was Deb’s inspiration to cast Toby Jones as Ollie, which I couldn’t be more delighted with. Toby’s a brilliant guy and gave us a fantastic performance, but he’s not the obvious actor. I’m also the very grateful beneficiary of a lot of good will, so I get to work with people like Andre Braugher and Marcia Gay Harden who wouldn’t necessarily be lookin’ for a horror movie to do, but suddenly, bam, they’re there.”

Darabont added, “We prepped the movie in six weeks, folks. I’ve never prepped a movie in less than five months, but this was part of the spirit of this movie: Get in, do it, don’t over think it, don’t second guess, do it fast, do it loose, and that’s pretty much the way it went.” Darabont signed up for a crash course in guerilla style filmmaking by directing an episode of the FX cop drama The Shield in late 2006. The experience proved so invigorating, Darabont tapped the show’s cinematographer – Rohn Schmidt – and camera operators Bill Gierhart and Richard Cantu to shoot The Mist. Filming commenced February 2007, mostly on a soundstage at StageWorks of Louisiana in downtown Shreveport. Nearby Cross Lake doubled for lakeside Maine, while the exteriors of the Food House were shot in the Louisiana town of Vivian.

Opening November 2007 in the U.S., even critics who admired The Mist seemed to object to it, in part. Anthony Lane, the New Yorker: “The Mist is itself a supermarket of B-movie essentials, handsomely stocked with bad science, stupid behavior, chewable lines of dialogue, religious fruitcakes, and a fine display of monsters.” Marjorie Baumgarten, the Austin Chronicle: “The Mist has extended passages that pause to preach, to demonstrate the dark impulses of irrationality, magical thinking, and mob mentality. Sadly, these interludes only take away from the magnificent moments in which the stunningly crafted beasties in the mist … come out to prey.” Justin Chang, Variety: “Much nastier and less genteel than his best-known Stephen King adaptations (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile), Frank Darabont’s screw-loose doomsday thriller works better as a gross-out B-movie than as a psychological portrait of mankind under siege, marred by one-note characterizations and a tone that veers wildly between snarky and hysterical.”

In April 2008, Eugene Novikov – who ranked The Mist among the best films of 2007 – opened the floor on website Cinematical to a discussion of what viewers thought about that ending. John: “In regards to the ending: it’s one of the better twist endings I’ve seen in a while. Nowadays, I feel like twists or reveals have become cheapened by how frequent they have become in movies, and most of them just happen to trick the audience. But with The Mist, the twist ending was surprising AND thought-provoking.” Gary Triestman: “Balderdash and hogwash! I saw The Mist yesterday, and am utterly pissed at the ending. Pissed not such because it was bleak and useless, it was, but because it absolutely did NOT fit into the personalities, drives or character motivations of the people who allegedly assented to being sacrificed.” Okie: “I thought the ending was perfect. Its what made me recommend this movie to so many people. Most don’t like the ending because they don’t think they could ever do that to their child. But the alternative was definitely worse.”

The Mist would gross $25.5 million in the U.S. and $31.5 million overseas, then quickly dissipate from theaters. Even a two-disc DVD – which supplemented the theatrical version of the film with a black & white version closer to Frank Darabont’s retro vision of the material – did little to spark a reevaluation of the film. Less than enthralled with many of the flicks based on his work, Stephen King mused, “This movie has echoes of political and religious situations that we find ourselves in now, it raises a lot of interesting topics that have been debated in the press and current events over the last couple of years and all of those things obviously played a part when Frank got around to writing the screenplay and directing the movie, casting the movie – which is part of direction – but they’re not for me to say, other than to say he and I share some political convictions. As to what they are, the viewer who comes to the movie with an open mind and a clear eye will see that for themselves.”

Should I Care?
The Mist tries to be a provocative movie, one I was supposed to love or hate with a passion and occupy no middle ground on. While that’s true of he ending, as time passes, the film has actually inched into a twilight zone for me; not the failure I originally thought it was, but ultimately, not up to snuff with the nihilistic freakshows that inspired it, like Night of the Living Dead or John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing. But for all its flaws – and there are a gaggle here – it’s not easy to put The Mist out of your mind. For one thing, instead of the usual bag of bogeymen, Stephen King’s source material unleashes an ecosystem of hideous animals – equipped with tentacles, stingers, beaks, acid webs or giant pincers – that disturb on some primal level. Along with The Shining, this may be most terrifying story King has ever concocted.

Frank Darabont was inspired to adapt this material with the same thrift store economy Alfred Hitchcock brought to Psycho, but the results here are more amateurish than masterful. The abbreviated schedule not only handicaps the extensive makeup and digital effects, but turns what might have been an atmospheric and profoundly disturbing story about mass hysteria into a blunt, condescending and at times silly moral sermon. The Mist is short on B-movie nastiness and long on message. Ugh. Superbly cast in spite of the script’s high handedness – with local actors Robert Treveiler. Melissa Suzanne McBride and Kelly Collins Lintz doing outstanding work – the story might have been better realized with a more elegant, less in-your-face approach. The controversial ending is a failure simply because Darabont rushes headlong into a Big Message at the expense of credibility. The results are similar to trying on a bomb vest and plunging the detonator to see what happens.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
“An Exclusive Interview with Mr. Frank Darabont!” By Edward Douglas. Shock Till You Drop, 16 November 2007

“Stephen King and Frank Darabont Step Out of The Mist” By Brad Balfour. Pop Entertaiment.com, 23 November 2007

“When Darkness Came: The Making of The Mist” The Mist (Two-Disc Collector’s Edition). Genius Products (2008)

Synopsis
Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the citizens of Southern California brace for an invasion. In a spoof of Jaws (with the same stuntwoman, Susan Backlinie), a nude swimmer goes for a dip in the ocean, but instead of a shark, a Japanese submarine surfaces, dangling her on the periscope. The captain (Toshiro Mifune) is in search of something honorable to attack in California and settles on Hollywood, despite the objections of a German officer (Christopher Lee) that his crew will never find it. We’re next introduced to a busboy (Bobby Di Cicco) who dreams of winning a Jitterbug contest with his sweetheart (Dianne Kay). Serving coffee to a U.S. Army tank crew – which includes Dan Aykroyd and John Candy – the busboy’s dance moves upset one of the tank crewmen (Treat Williams) and a food fight ensues.

Army Air Corps pilot Wild Bill Kelso (John Belushi) lands his P-40 at a gas station in Death Valley. In search of a squadron of Zeros he believes he lost over Fresno, Kelso succeeds only in blowing up the gas station. We then meet the stoic General Stilwell (Robert Stack), who’s been assigned to protect California from attack. Stilwell’s aide (Tim Matheson) recalls that the general’s smoldering secretary (Nancy Allen) is aroused by planes and schemes to get her airborne in one. Meanwhile, the Japanese sub crew wanders ashore, where they abduct Christmas tree farmer Hollis Wood (Slim Pickens) to help them locate Hollywood. Also part of the insanity is a homeowner (Ned Beatty) whose lawn turns into an artillery range, two civilians (Murray Hamilton and Eddie Deezen) stuck on a ferris wheel, and Colonel Mad Man Maddox (Warren Oates) who’s convinced the Japs have an airfield in the alfalfa fields of Pomona.

Production history
Graduating from USC Film School, Robert Zemeckis & Bob Gale interned at Universal Studios. They wrote an episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker that made it on the air (in January 1975) but what they really wanted was to write and direct their own movies. One of their scripts was about a radical group that steals a Sherman tank and threatens to blow up the corporate headquarters of an oil company. “The Bobs” got their spec – Tank – to John Milius, a USC alum who’d been awarded a four-picture deal at MGM following the success of The Wind and the Lion. Zemeckis recalls, “He wasn’t crazy about the story, but he liked the way we wrote and he said, ‘Have you guys got any other ideas for any other movies?’ And we immediately came up with this outrageous concept of hysteria on the home front during World War II. I have to credit John; it was my recollection that John thought of the title, and he said, ‘Hey that’s a great idea and we’ll call it The Night the Japs Attacked.’”

Gale recalled their meeting with Milius by stating, “And we told him we had come across in the research for Tank, we’d come across this very fascinating historical event where the city of Los Angeles – it was actually February 1942 – thought that there was an air raid, that Japanese were bombing L.A. They blacked out the city for six hours and thousands of rounds of ammunition were shot up at the sky at nothing. And we thought it was just a wonderfully absurd historical event, could make a great movie.” Milius – whose deal at MGM stipulated two pictures he’d write and direct, and two pictures he’d produce – had researched General “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell for a script. “And it was Milius who said, ‘Yeah! We can put General Stillwell in this movie! He could be running around, being the voice of sanity in all this insane stuff.’ … So he hired Bob and me to write one of the pictures that he was going to produce and he said: ‘The title of it should be The Night the Japs Attacked.’ And for the first year and a half of it or so, that was what the title was.”

Zemeckis & Gale wrote two drafts of The Night the Japs Attacked for MGM, but production chief Dan Melnick was not amused, particularly by the word “Japs” in the title. Undeterred, Milius raved about the project to a buddy of his named Steven Spielberg, who recalled, “The first time I heard about 1941 it was called The Night the Japs Attacked. And I heard it during an afternoon when I was skeet shooting with my friend John Milius and our then two protégés Bob Zemeckis & Bob Gale. And the two Bobs had come up with this crazy screenplay they had written and they told me about it. And I think what got me to want to read the script was they described at one point the scene where the Japanese they think they’re attacking an important strategic target but in fact have targeted Pacific Ocean Amusement Park and blow the ferris wheel, which rolls down the pier and into the water … And I must say there’s a part of me in my nice conservative life that is probably as crazy and insane as Milius and the two guys who wrote that script that really got me attracted to the project.”

Immersed in pre-production on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Spielberg committed to direct what he was calling The Rising Sun next, inviting Zemeckis & Gale to the soundstage in Alabama where he was shooting his UFO epic to work on the script. Zemeckis recalls, “It was the opposite of a disciplined type of collaboration. It was an outrageous collaboration and we were just sort of topping each other with how we could just put more outrageous spin on every incident that we wrote. And of course Bob and my mission was every time Steven would get an idea, no matter how outrageous it was, we worked very diligently and spent hours and days to try and figure out a way to actually fit it into the structure of the story. So it basically just kept accumulating. That’s why I call it the kitchen sink. We just kept throwing everything into the screenplay, including the kitchen sink until it just became this mountain of gags.”

Spielberg vowed “I will not make this movie if it costs a penny over $12 million” so many times that it ended up (as a joke by Zemeckis & Gale) on the title page of the script. But as the gags piled up, so did the budget. Columbia Pictures – now run by Dan Melnick – partnered with Universal Pictures to finance what would be Spielberg’s fourth feature film at a production cost of $26 million. Columbia attained international rights, while Universal was set to distribute the picture in the United States. Meanwhile, the script continued to undergo changes. Zemeckis recalls, “Mine and Bob’s, our first intention when we wrote the early drafts of the screenplay was that it was supposed to be a very black, black comedy and it was very dark and very cynical. And a lot of that was tempered by Steven and a lot of the cast that came in, so the film shifted from this very dark satire to more of a screwball comedy.”

Wild Bill Kelso was a minor character who flew in at the very end of the script, but was inserted into much more of the action once John Belushi took the role. The character of a farmer – who bumbled onto the Japanese after they wandered ashore – didn’t even have dialogue, but once Spielberg cast Slim Pickens in the part, Zemeckis & Gale were tasked with beefing up his role as well. Dan Aykroyd, John Candy, Tim Matheson, Nancy Allen, Bobby Di Cicco, Toshiro Mifune, Christopher Lee, Ned Beatty, Lorraine Gary, Murray Hamilton, Eddie Deezen, Warren Oates and Robert Stack (taking a role John Wayne and Charlton Heston both turned down) also joined the cast. Once the film’s immense miniature and physical effects work was factored into the schedule, 1941 took 247 days to shoot, wrapping in May 1979. The final budget would rest at $31.5 million.

When 1941 was ready to go before an audience in October 1979, Spielberg chose the Medallion Theater in Dallas, the scene of wildly successful test screenings for all three of his feature films. But as his latest entertainment began to unreel, audience satisfaction evaporated. Spielberg recalls, “That was a preview where, you know, people laughed and tittered at the beginning of the film, then as the film got noisier and more confusing and more riotous, the laughter became just kind of wonderment and wonderment became kind of amazement and I even saw people holding their ears. I actually looked over the whole preview audience and midway through the film – I had never seen this before at a preview – audiences, at least twenty percent of the audience, had their hands over their ears. I’ve seen audiences covering their eyes during Jaws, but never over their ears. That’s a whole new experience for me. And I knew we were in trouble at that point.”

1941 garnered varying degrees of praise from critics like David Denby in the New Yorker, but the bad news was plentiful. Vincent Canby, the New York Times: “It may possibly be that Mr. Spielberg has chosen gigantic size and unlimited quantity as his comedy method in the awareness that he has no gift whatsoever for small-scale comic conceits. The slapstick gags, obviously choreographed with extreme care, do not build to boffs; they simply go on too long. I’m not sure if it’s the fault of the director or of the editor, but I’ve seldom seen a comedy more ineptly timed.” Frank Rich, Time Magazine: “While it was generous of Spielberg to employ so large a percentage of the Screen Actors Guild, the huge cast almost immobilizes the movie. It takes too long to establish who everyone is and to knit all the plot strands together. Even though the film is relentlessly busy – there seems to be a physical gag in every shot – it has little of the director’s usual narrative drive. The movie’s story does not so much move forward as gradually selfdestruct.”

John Milius recalls, “We all knew that it wouldn’t get good reviews. We knew when we made the movie that it was politically incorrect and we loved it for that. As matter of fact the term that we used at that time was ’social irresponsibility’ … We even had a Latin motto: ‘Civitas Sine Providentia,’ which means ‘a citizenry without prudence.’ And that was the idea, that this movie was truly socially irresponsible and that’s what we really loved about it. So we knew that critics would hate it because they were all gunning for Steven anyway.” 1941 grossed $31.7 million in the U.S. and $60 million overseas, but the revenues paled in comparison to Jaws or Close Encounters of the Third Kind and stigmatized the film as one of the biggest box office letdowns in memory. The film industry did bestow three Academy Award nominations on 1941: Best Cinematography (William Fraker), Best Sound and Best Visual Effects.

In the intervening years, an appreciative cult following has sprung up around 1941, which was released on laserdisc in 1996 and DVD in 1999 with a behind-the-scenes documentary by Laurent Bouzereau and 28 minutes of additional footage restored to the running time. Around the same time, Spielberg – who remains refreshingly candid about the failings of 1941 – offered his post-mortem: “Power can go right to the head. I felt immortal after a critical hit and two box office hits, one being the biggest film in history up to that moment. But 1941 was not a screw-you film, I can do anything I want, watch me fail upward. I was very indulgent on 1941, simply because I was insecure with the material. It wasn’t making me laugh, or any of us laugh, either in the dailies or on the set. So I shot that movie every way I knew how, to try to save it from being what I thought it actually became, which is a demolition derby.”

Opinion
If a movie is supposed to be a better union formed between material and a director, then 1941 is one of the all-time Hollywood marriages from hell. Below the pandemonium of glass breaking, houses crumbling, buildings exploding and bodies flying, there is evidence that Robert Zemeckis & Bob Gale set out to write a comedy that simply mocked truth, justice and the American way in an acidic, outrageous and frequently juvenile manner (for further evidence, see Used Cars). There’s a sly, “everything is not all right” sensibility buried in 1941 that may be responsible for winning it admirers, particularly in Europe or among people who’d read the Huffington Post. But Zemeckis didn’t direct this movie; Steven Spielberg did and in hindsight, this arrangement works out about as well as a geek taking a cheerleader to the prom. Actually, the results are more like the twister from The Wizard of Oz hitting the prom.

The scenes in 1941 dealing with children or vintage aircraft seem to elicit a sparkle in the eye of Spielberg, the greatest director of boys’ adventure movies of all time. But most anything involving his principal cast – particularly humor – flies around the room like a balloon with the air farting out of it. An end credits curtain call featuring most of the actors screaming sums up the approach here; nobody is given a character to play or the encouragement to deliver anything in an unhurried, unforced manner. Dan Aykroyd, Murray Hamilton, Slim Pickens and Wendie Jo Sperber (as a Jitterbug contestant with the hots for servicemen) are a lot of fun to watch, but they aren’t at any time permitted to be funny. John Williams – who Spielberg credits with writing a march for Belushi rivaling the one from Raiders of the Lost Ark – turned in a fantastic musical score for what amounts to a giant model train wreck.

© Joe Valdez

Sources
The Making of 1941. Directed by Laurent Bouzereau. 1941 (Collector’s Edition). MCA/Universal Home Video (1996)

Steven Spielberg: A Biography. Joseph McBride (1999)

Easy Riders and Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘N’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood. Peter Biskind (1998)

Synopsis
Supercop Jack Slater (Arnold Schwarzenegger) responds to a hostage situation involving the axe wielding Ripper (Tom Noonan). Slater saves the city, but loses his son in the standoff, which is all revealed to be the set-up for Jack Slater III, an action spectacle that 11 year old Danny Madigan (Austin O’Brien) sits through for the sixth time rather than go to school. Danny’s friend is a retiring projectionist (Robert Prosky) who invites the kid back to the theater at midnight to check the print of the latest Jack Slater epic. Danny gets through English class by imaging Slater machine gunning his way through Denmark as Hamlet. He promises his widowed mother (Mercedes Ruehl) to get his head out of the clouds, but instead, sneaks out to the theater, where Nick presents him with a magic ticket Houdini gave to him when he was a kid.

During the projection of Jack Slater IV, the ticket transports Danny into the middle of a car chase in the move. Slater is on the trail of a Sicilian drug lord (Anthony Quinn) and his wily henchman Benedict (Charles Dance). Danny tries to convince Slater that they’re in a movie: all the women look like models, everyone’s phone number begins with 555, and at LAPD headquarters, cops are paired with their polar opposites, including a cartoon cat named Whiskers (voiced by Danny DeVito). Danny is introduced to Slater’s sexy daughter Meredith (Bridgette Wilson) but his encyclopedic knowledge of the movie world attracts the attention of Benedict, who confiscates the ticket and moves through the screen into Danny’s world, where bad guys can actually win. Slater follows Danny through the screen to stop him.

Production history
After graduating from Wesleyan University in 1990, Zak Penn & Adam Leff were trying to break into the film industry as screenwriters. Their first script was about a giant rat run amok in Manhattan. Next they wrote a noirish thriller about blackmail in the Hamptons, but after that first effort failed to interest an agent or a buyer, Penn recalls, “The smart thing we did was having the foresight not to send out the second one.” For their third effort, Penn & Leff rented dozens of action movies and produced a list of plot conventions, like “What holiday is the film taking place on?” “Do the hero’s wife and child get kidnapped?” “Does he have a Vietnam buddy? (Because your war buddy always betrays you.)” Their script – titled Extremely Violent - was about a fatherless 15-year-old who steps through a crack in a movie screen to enter the cartoonish world of his idol, LAPD cop Arno Slater, who the boy assists with his inexhaustible knowledge of movie clichés.

In October 1991, Penn & Leff and several of their friends took to the phones to get the word out on Extremely Violent. The script landed in the read pile of Chris Moore, an ambitious agent at Intertalent who agreed to represent the screenwriters. The first buyer Moore approached was Carolco, the company behind Total Recall and Terminator 2. Carolco passed. Before word of mouth soured, Moore submitted the script to five other buyers. One was producer Steve Roth, who had a development deal at Columbia Pictures. Speaking to the New York Times about the project in May 1993, Roth recalled, “It had a wonderful first act when this disenfranchised kid is sucked into the movie.” Within 24 hours, Roth passed Extremely Violent to Barry Josephson, Columbia’s vice president of production. After six days of negotiating with Moore, Columbia optioned Penn & Leff’s script for $100,000 against $350,000 if it ever got made into a movie, which was now going by the title The Last Action Hero.

The only actor anyone could imagine playing Arno Slater was Arnold Schwarzenegger. After Twins, Total Recall, Kindergarten Cop and Terminator 2, “Arnold” was now the biggest movie star on the planet. The front-runner for his next picture was the comedy Sweet Tooth, in which Schwarzenegger was to play the Tooth Fairy, with Ron Underwood standing by to direct. Other contenders included Crusade (a medieval epic to be directed by Paul Verhoeven), Cop Gives Waitress $2 Million Tip (ultimately starring Nicolas Cage and released as It Could Happen To You), Sgt. Rock for producer Joel Silver and Curious George for Imagine Entertainment. The Last Action Hero found a place at the front of the pack. Schwarzenegger recalled, “Having a kid come into a movie awakened certain fantasies I had as a kid in Austria. What would it be like to sit on John Wayne’s saddle, or have him come with this huge horse right out of the screen? The script had a great concept, but it wasn’t executed professionally.”

Columbia shelled out $1 million for Shane Black – author of Lethal Weapon – to rewrite the script. Black brought in a USC buddy named David Arnott to work with him. Arnott stated, “Usually, someone wants you to rewrite something because it’s bad. This script was a gold mine of an idea. The writers played four variations on a theme. We thought, ‘Wow, there are 400 more possibilities.’” While Black & Arnott got to work in February 1992, Columbia slipped the Penn & Leff draft to director John McTiernan, who didn’t find it very good. Taking a look at the rewrite in July, McTiernan changed his mind. “What drew me is the wacko sense of humor Shane Black & David Arnott brought. Shane had done enough service in the salt mines of action movies to ridicule them in an acid way. The script had so much venom that I loved it. I called Arnold and said: ‘This thing is great. You have to read it.’ Arnold was about to commit to the Tooth Fairy, and he held up.”

McTiernan and Schwarzenegger both expressed reservations about the third act of the Black & Arnott draft. Schwarzenegger recalled, “They had created rhythm and pace and staggering action scenes. What I felt was missing was bonding between this kid and his hero.” The star agreed to commit to Last Action Hero if Columbia could add an emotional layer to the script by putting William Goldman on the payroll. Goldman – one of the most respected script doctors in Hollywood – declined, finding the script too violent for his taste. After a personal plea from Schwarzenegger that he was off the movie unless Goldman intervened, the scribe accepted a fee of $750,000 for four weeks work. Among his contributions was changing the boy’s age from 15 to 11, and making Jack Slater more vulnerable. Or as McTiernan quipped, “Goldman gave Arnold a character to play, and he excised 150 toilet jokes.”

In addition to Black & Arnott revising Goldman’s work. McTiernan turned to Larry Ferguson to provide some additional dialogue, while Carrie Fisher came in to flesh out the character of the boy’s single mother. With a budget of $60 million – which Columbia anticipated would ultimately settle in the $80 million range – Last Action Hero commenced shooting November 1992 in Los Angeles. Schwarzenegger had been lobbied by Joel Silver to produce the film, but Barry Josephson and Columbia chairman Mark Canton took a hands-on role producing Last Action Hero themselves. Canton’s faith in the project was so huge that he wrote NASA a $500,000 check to affix the studio’s logo and Schwarzenegger’s name to an unmanned rocket that was to be fired into space. Canton also settled on June 18, 1992 as a release date. Even after Universal announced it was opening a picture they had called Jurassic Park one week ahead of that date, Columbia boldly stood its ground.

Halfway through a frantic 10-week post-production schedule, Columbia scheduled a test screening of Last Action Hero for May 1. Buoyed by a rough cut he’d seen on the Sony lot, Mark Canton eagerly assembled the studio’s top brass at Pacific’s Lakewood Center Theatre in L.A. McTiernan was on hand and as the lights went down, Schwarzenegger slipped into the back of the theater with his wife Maria Shriver. What the audience experienced was little more than an assembly. Running 2 hours 18 minutes, it had a temporary sound dub, as well as a temp score and unfinished effects shots. McTiernan recalls, “I had great trepidation about showing the movie. It was literally in a state that you don’t even show the studio executives. What we were showing was what the editors show the director ten days after finishing the shoot.”

A source who was there told Premiere Magazine, “The movie laid there like a big fried egg.” Another audience member described Last Action Hero to Entertainment Weekly as ”Willy Wonka with guns.” Schwarzenegger and McTiernan had both suggested to Columbia as early as November 1992 that the release be postponed to give them more time to work on the film, or at the very least, get out of the way of Jurassic Park. Even in the wake of the poor test screening, that idea was nixed. McTiernan recalls, “The studio folks assured us that the movie was more likely to make money this way, that the amount of money that the studio would see would decrease by about $10 million per week of the summer than you cut off. I’m not about to argue with things like that.” Shane Black came in the next day to punch up an action scene in the third act and to clarify some story points, like what Benedict was doing in the real world. Additional shooting was under way just seven weeks before Last Action Hero was due in theaters.

Though Mark Canton had confiscated the test screening cards and refused to release the score, the Hollywood rumor mill quickly filled the vacuum. Word spread that Last Action Hero was a disaster. The rocket launch scheduled for May was postponed, then cancelled. On June 4, gossip columnist Jeffrey Wells wrote an article for the L.A. Times titled “Phantom Screening: You Haven’t Heard the Last of Action Hero.” Wells credited unnamed sources from a screening he alleged took place late May in Pasadena. Columbia denied the screening ever happened and retaliated against the Times by barring all employees from speaking to the newspaper. Entertainment Weekly, Time Magazine and The Wall Street Journal – which ran a story titled “Pundits Predict Losing Battle For Last Action Hero” – all weighed in on the film’s misfortunes before its June 18 release.

Critics actually waited to see Last Action Hero before rendering a negative appraisal. Though both Gene Siskel & Roger Ebert pointed thumbs down on At The Movies, Siskel conceded, ” … this is a most ambitious project that works quite well in fits and starts and then drags on for what seemed to me like an extra thirty minutes, wearing out its welcome.” Vincent Canby wrote in the New York Times: “Last Action Hero is something of a mess, but a frequently enjoyable one. It tries to be too many things to too many different kinds of audiences, the result being that it will probably confuse, and perhaps even alienate, the hard-core action fans.” Last Action Hero was not the box office calamity many had predicted, pinching out $50 million in the U.S. and hitting $87.2 million overseas. The final budget was $87 million, with marketing costs of $30 million.

According to John McTiernan, Schwarzenegger took the reception of Last Action Hero especially hard because the star had been developing his chops as a real actor by learning to sustain long takes. “He could never have done that before. It made him very vulnerable, and he was very proud of it. I only know about it because I had spent a year trying to figure out what every twitch of an eyebrow meant on his face. And to be rejected so soundly when he had allowed himself to be so naked, it sort of, like, broke his heart, but I suppose that’s too flowery a phrase. It broke him up terribly.” Late that summer, Schwarzenegger was candid about the film’s reception. “First, I learned that in my case, if you don’t give the people a very clear comedy or a very clear action movie, somehow the two don’t mix together. It was clear that Twins was a comedy; it was never promoted as action.”

Speaking to Hollywood Interview in March 2008, McTiernan offered his post-mortem on Last Action Hero. “It’s largely unedited and large portions of it still appear exactly as it was when it left the camera. It wasn’t ready yet. I don’t know that I’ll ever get the chance to go back to it. It’s like having a model with an extra 20 pounds on her. There’s a really neat movie in there. In order to get a sense of fun that was clear to the audience, it needed tightening, and it needed another month in editing to do that.” In January 2005, Zak Penn mused to UGO.com, “The irony about Last Action Hero is that two kids wrote a movie that was making fun of Hollywood movies that was about an audience member going into the movie and destroying it because it was so stupid, then was rewritten and directed by the same people that it was parodying. I hated it when I first saw it because it was so painful, but I think it actually plays better now.”

Opinion
It’s high time that Last Action Hero had its status upgraded from “turkey” to at the very least, “work in progress”. While the film is most definitely flawed, it’s so imaginative at turns that I’d go as far to say this is a must-see for movie fans, particularly lovers of ‘80s action cinema. Its exuberant wit is most evident in Slater’s lieutenant (Frank McRae) whose hysterical exclamations include, “I got the Chamber of Commerce doin’ cartwheels in my cocoa factory!” Danny pulls Slater into a video store at one point, where no one seems to know who “Arnold Schwarzenegger” is because Sylvester Stallone played the Terminator. In another funny bit, Danny scribbles the f-word on a piece of paper, and when Slater is unwilling to say it out loud, the boy notifies him the reason he can’t is because they’re in a PG-13 movie.

Even in its unfinished state, John McTiernan seems to have a much better sense for what’s amusing than most action directors trying their hands at comedy (Steven Spielberg comes to mind). But the longer the straight on action stuff plows ahead without making fun of itself, the more listless Last Action Hero becomes. The movie grinds to a halt once it crosses back into the real world, where it’s just too overcast to jibe with the tom foolery that came before (Ian McKellan stepping down off the screen as Death from The Seventh Seal is quite cool, at least). This is worth a look purely out of appreciation for what the potential of the film medium can be. Michael Kamen composed a terrific, self-aware musical score, while Sharon Stone and Robert Patrick reprise their roles from Basic Instinct and Terminator 2 in cameos that come and go almost too fast to fully register.

© Joe Valdez

Sources
“Five Writers + One Star = A Hit?” By Aljean Harmetz. The New York Times, May 26, 1993

“How They Built the Bomb” By Nancy Griffin. Premiere Magazine, September 1993

Buyer Beware!
The versions of Last Action Hero available for rental on both Netflix and Greencine subscription services are delivered in the dreaded “Pan and Scan” format, which distorts the frame of the movie to fit television screens. Movie lovers who want to see Last Action Hero in its 2.35 : 1 theatrical aspect ratio will have better luck at their local video store.

Synopsis
Victorious at the National Sheepdog Championship, Farmer Hoggett (James Cromwell) and Babe the Gallant Pig (voiced by Elizabeth Daily) receive a parade on their way back to the farm. But as The Narrator (Roscoe Lee Browne) warns us, “The first hazard for the returning hero is his fame. The adulation can spin you quite giddy.” When Babe tries to help the boss repair a well, he sets in motion a disaster that injures poor Hoggett. Facing financial ruin, Mrs. Hoggett (Magda Szubanski) accepts a “generous appearance fee” for Babe to demonstrate his sheep herding skills. The pig is hesitant to leave the comforts of home, but the sheepdogs Fly (voiced by Miriam Margolyes) and Rex (voiced by Hugo Weaving) tell him that to save the farm, he has no other choice.

Arriving by plane in Metropolis – a city whose fantastic skyline includes the Hollywood sign, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Sydney Opera House, the Eiffel Tower and the World Trade Center – Babe’s conversation with an overzealous drug sniffing beagle leads to Mrs. Hoggett being detained by Customs and missing her connecting flight. Stranded in Metropolis for a week, the farmer’s wife is directed to an animal friendly hotel at the edge of a canal. The Landlady (Mary Stein) is sympathetic to Babe given that her uncle Fugly (Mickey Rooney) is a clown who uses apes in his act. But Mrs. Hoggett sets off a disaster in town and is jailed, while the Landlady also runs afoul with the law. Babe finds himself a pig alone in the city.

A pair of trained chimps (voiced by Steven Wright and Glenne Headley) advise Babe that it’s “a dog-eat-dog world and there’s not enough dogs to go around.” Accompanying them on a search for food, Babe is tricked into entering the domain of the Pitbull. In the chase that ensues, the dog plummets into the canal, but as the other animals turn their backs, Babe rescues the Pitbull from drowning, making an instant friend. He’s also reunited with Ferdinand the Duck, who hitched a ride from the farm with pelicans. When the hotel is raided by animal control and most of the animals captured, Babe, Ferdinand and a handicapped Jack Russell terrier named Flealick (voiced by Adam Goldberg) mount a rescue of their friends.

Production history
With no stars, little advance publicity and modest commercial expectations, Babe – an adaptation of Dick King-Smith’s 1983 storybook The Sheep Pig – became the surprise blockbuster film of 1995. With masterful digital effects putting words in the mouths of animals more realistically than ever before, as well as manic inventiveness and a message of courage, critics lavished the children’s film with praise. Babe received seven Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director (Chris Noonan). It also grossed over $250 million worldwide on a budget of only $30 million. For Universal Pictures, making Babe 2 became a foregone conclusion.

The studio granted creative reign to George Miller – the visually ingenious Australian filmmaker who co-wrote and produced the original – to make a sequel. With Judy Morris & Mark Lamprell, Miller authored a script, and stepped into the director’s chair for the first time in seven years. When Babe: Pig In The City commenced filming September 1997 on soundstages at Fox Studios, Sydney – far from the scrutiny of Universal – 799 live animals were involved, from pigs to dogs to chimpanzees to mice. Most of the cast went before the cameras one animal at a time over multiple takes until their performance satisfied Miller. Once Roger Ford’s lavish production design and visual effects by Rhythm & Hues, Mill Film and Animal Logic Film were tabulated into the budget, the cost tripled – to $90 million – what was spent on the original.

Because even a rough version of the film was so dependent on the completion of the visual effects, no one got a look at Babe: Pig In The City until two weeks before its release Thanksgiving Day weekend 1998. Put before a test audience in Anaheim Hills, California on November 8, Miller found it overwhelming. “We had to remix the entire film. It was so loud, it was a complete assault on the ears.” Universal assigned six of its top sound engineers to work twenty hours a day softening the sound effects and the musical score. A test screening several days later went much better, but when studio president Ron Meyer got a look at the film, he was not happy with what he saw. Meyer contacted the owner of Universal – Edgar Bronfman Jr. – who agreed that Babe: Pig In The City was just too dark for kids.

A reviewer at the Anaheim Hills screening wrote to the website Ain’t It Cool News: “Babe 2 faithfully follows the unwritten law of sequels, in that it is much darker in tone than the original (e.g. Back to the Future 2, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom). There are moments so unsettling that I would hesitate to bring a very young or sensitive child to this film. It definitely earns its PG rating.” Meyer took the unusual step of canceling the film’s premiere, which was set to benefit the Children’s Defense Fund and scrambled to suggest a kid friendly fix to George Miller. The director omitted the two uses of the word “damn” and nipped a shot of a goldfish suffocating – which was enough for the MPAA to change their rating from “PG” to “G” – but the alterations did little to change the perception that the film was too dark for kids.

For the most part, critics couldn’t have disagreed more. On Siskel & Ebert, Gene Siskel – who would rank Babe: Pig In the City #1 on his list of the 10 Best Films of 1998 – said, “This is a magnificent, towering achievement. We’re dazzled by it. You take any five, ten minute section of this picture and you think of the work that went into the construction – the physical construction – the wit of the writing, and the charm of course of Babe.” Roger Ebert agreed. “What I like about this movie is the story, the dialogue and the characters all use the effects, instead of being the victims of the effects, and every single shot in this movie is enchanting and delightful and magical in its own way. I sat there and thought, ‘It’s too bad adults are gonna stay away from this, thinking it’s some talking pig movie.’”

Peter Rainer wrote in New York Magazine, “As it turns out, the new Babe isn’t the horror show that was rumored. But it’s certainly more raucous and rough-edged than the original. Arguably, it’s even better.” The raves ended up having little impact commercially. Coming in fifth place over the holiday weekend, Babe: Pig In The City went on to gross $18.3 million in the U.S. and $50.8 million overseas. George Miller didn’t comment on the film’s disastrous reception, but his spokesman Johnny Friedkin maintained that Universal was aware of Miller’s resume and knew exactly what type of film they were getting. “You had to be mentally deficient to read the screenplay and not see what was in it. There shouldn’t have been any surprises.”

Following a string of commercial failures that also included Meet Joe Black, Out of Sight and Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, Universal chairman Frank Biondi Jr. resigned. Two weeks later, Ron Meyer delivered a pink slip to film division chairman Casey Silver. Writing an article titled “Studio slaughtered Babe 2” Roger Ebert commented, “Why is it bigger news that Babe 2 flopped than that Babe 2 is a great movie? Because the head of Universal got fired after the pig’s flop – by corporate bosses who thereby brilliantly made absolutely sure that the headlines about Babe 2 in its first week would be negative. Babe: Pig in the City is a magical, original, daring, wonderful movie, one of the year’s best. Take my word for it. I’ve actually seen it.”

Opinion
Babe: Pig in the City departs so majestically from the original Babe that its blueprint could be smuggled out of Hollywood and spread among rebel groups of filmmakers meeting in basements to plot the demise of the brand identity marketing empire that rewards repetition and resists originality at all costs. Never a director to retrace his steps or give moviegoers more of the same – as fans of The Road Warrior discovered with a gentler, more imaginative sequel in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome – George Miller applies that visionary approach to the Babe franchise and again, ended up being way ahead of the audience. Ten years later, Babe: Pig in the City is still not Babe, but it is a classic, one of the most exciting, creative and emotionally resonant films of the last 20 years.

Along with Roger Ford’s carnivalesque set design, cinematographer Andrew Lesnie shapes the storybook world of Babe with more wonder than all three The Lord of the Rings films combined. Technical craftsmanship – and the Rube Goldberg stunt sequences Miller gleefully unwinds on the audience – aside, the story is what resonates most. Babe’s rescue of the drowning pitbull reminds us that courage and sacrifice and a beautifully told story still stand for something. Babe is a hero is because – when given every opportunity to accept the bigotry or pessimism around him – he never loses his idealism, and makes his world a more loving place. A terrific tune over the closing credits – “That’ll Do” – features the vocals of Peter Gabriel and is written by Randy Newman.

© Joe Valdez