In the month of June, Joe Valdez “takes over” programming of the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles with a series of double features on his favorite film themes.

Here’s Part 1 of a bill featuring super heroines.

Supergirl (1984)
Directed by Jeannot Szwarc
Screenplay by David Odell, based on the character appearing in comics and magazines published by DC Comics
Produced by Timothy Burrrill
124 minutes (international version)/ 114 minutes (U.S. theatrical version)

Years before anyone had heard of Comic Con or knew what a “fanboy” was, Alexander and Ilya Salkind gambled $35 million — roughly $140 million in today money — that audiences would welcome an expansion of the DC Comics universe with a girl powered spin-off of their Superman film franchise that starred Christopher Reeve. Warner Bros. changed their minds about producing Supergirl and though TriStar agreed to distribute the picture in the U.S., when critics and audiences got a look at it in November 1984 the response was so middling that the Salkinds got out of the Superman business. A trifle silly and very definitely flawed, Supergirl doesn’t fly as high as Richard Donner’s Superman or Superman II, but it stacks up as the best super heroine adaptation anyone’s made yet (Barbarella, Red Sonja, Catwoman and Elektra are the also-rans).

It isn’t required that you be an 8-year-old girl or collect My Little Pony to enjoy the charms of Supergirl, but it probably wouldn’t hurt. Those who venture further are likely to find Supergirl’s sorceress adversary and the hunk they covet to both be super silly. Mysteries such as how Supergirl changes into her costume are left unanswered, but director Jeannot Szwarc evokes some of the charm of Hans Christian Andersen; contrary to the line on Supergirl, it’s no more campy than The Little Mermaid is campy. The picture is as lavish as it is elegant, with a triumphant musical score by Jerry Goldsmith, a candy color look by Alan Hume and spectacular crane and wire work, each and every one as astounding as anything in Superman. 19-year-old Helen Slater and costume designed by Emma Porteous are a sight to stop a train.

On the satellite world of Argo City, Kara Zor-El (Helen Slater) visits Zaltar (Peter O’Toole), an architect who has “borrowed” the city’s energy source, an orb known as an omegahedron that creates the illusion of life. When the orb is lost in the vastness of innerspace, Kara hops aboard an innerstellar capsule to retrieve it. On Earth, the omegahedron falls into the hands of a would-be sorceress named Selena (Faye Dunaway), who lives in an abandoned amusement park with her daffy sidekick (Brenda Vaccaro). On Earth, the blonde haired Kara discovers physical and intellectual abilities comparable to those of her cousin Superman. To fit in, she disguises herself as a brunette student named Linda Lee and enrolls in “Midvale High School” in Illinois.

Sharing a dorm room with Lucy Lane (Mauren Teefy) — kid sister of Lois Lane — Linda develops her powers of super strength, X-ray vision and super hearing. Meanwhile, Selena uses the omegahedron to throw a love spell on a beefcake landscaper named Ethan (Hart Bochner) and when he bumbles off, sends a bulldozer through Midvale to bring him back. Supergirl saves the town, but the witch’s spell makes Ethan fall in love with Linda. She traces the omegahedron to the old amusement park, but is unable to retrieve it from Selena when Ethan shows up and she has to protect him. Her powers growing stronger, Selena banishes Supergirl to the Phantom Zone. Reunited with the exiled Zaltar in the barren prison dimension, Supergirl looks for a way back to Earth to save both her adopted planet and her home world.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 192 users: 26% for Supergirl

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

What do you say?

Dogma (1999)
Directed by Kevin Smith
Written by Kevin Smith
Produced by Scott Mosier
130 minutes

Should I Care?
Hijacking various Judeo Christian symbols and myths to comment on the hypocrisies of religion, Kevin Smith’s fourth film certainly isn’t lacking in ambition. What it does lack is the resources and craftsmanship to pull any of its ambitions off. But en route to the kind of bug-eyed badness rarely seen in major motion pictures, Dogma hits a few bumps in the road: it’s provocative, it’s fearless, it’s in a class by itself. This cultural satire seems infused with the reckless abandon of the Delta fraternity from National Lampoon’s Animal House, who’ve decided they’re going to be thrown off campus anyway, so they mind as well take as many members of the status quo down with them as possible. That’s not to say Dogma is funny or should even be muttered in the same breath as Animal House, but you almost have to give it an incomplete grade. It’s all attitude — with some sound arguments directed toward religious lemmings — in search of a movie. “Incomplete” sums it up.

There seem to be endless pages of myth Smith forces his characters to explain for purposes of plot; none of it’s funny and none of it really moves the story anywhere. For the female lead, the filmmakers lobbied for and were saddled with Linda Fiorentino, whose barroom languor is a laugh killer (Janeane Garafalo would have been ideal). Smith’s trademark Jay & Silent Bob characters — fixtures at the corner store in laughers like Clerks — seem awkwardly dropped into a film that takes place around churches and engages in spiritual debate. As in any Kevin Smith film, the ones oriented around brutally honest and wackadoo dialogue (Chasing Amy) are quite good, while the ones with characters exchanging gunfire (Mallrats) are woefully bad. For a film with spurts of intelligence and the determination to inspire discussions of God, Dogma is inexplicably a member of the gun club. This approach ends up being a bullet to the head of what might have been a great film.

So, What’s This About?
After successfully persuading a nun in an airport that religion is a fraud, Loki (Matt Damon), the Angel of Death, cast down from heaven by God, and his buddy Bartleby (Ben Affleck), a journalist who got Loki drunk centuries ago and convinced him to quit his job, learn that a Catholic church in Red Bank, New Jersey looking to boost attendance has offered to forgive the sins of all who pass under its arches. This is the loophole in religious dogma that the renegade angels have been waiting for in order to escape banishment in Wisconsin. Meanwhile, an Illinois abortion clinic worker named Bethany (Linda Fiorentino) struggling with her faith is visited by the Metatron (Alan Rickman), the herald who does the Supreme Being’s talking because to hear the actual voice of God would cause human beings to explode. The Metatron gives Bethany the task of stopping Loki and Bartleby, whose return to heaven would invalidate the word of God and destroy all existence.

Accompanying Bethany in her journey are two “prophets”, Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Kevin Smith), New Jersey dope peddlers on a business trip to suburban Illinois in search of the town from the John Hughes movies. Dropping naked from the sky is Rufus (Chris Rock), the thirteenth apostle still upset he was omitted from the Bible; among Rufus’ revelations is that Jesus was black. In a strip club, the gang meets Serendipity (Salma Hayek), the muse. Bethany learns that she was chosen to save mankind because she is the Last Scion, the last surviving heir of Jesus Christ. Plotting against her is the demon Azrael (Jason Lee) who God cast out of heaven for refusing to take sides against Lucifer; as Azrael sees it, the end of existence beats spending any more time in hell. Azrael is assisted by the Stygian Triplets, who under the guise of street hockey punks have incapacitated God, a skeeball fanatic who took human form and was caught by the imps on the New Jersey boardwalk. The fate of mankind now rests in Bethany’s hands.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
Kevin Smith was working in a convenience store in his hometown of Red Bank, New Jersey when on his 21^st birthday, he went to see a movie: Slacker. Impressed that Richard Linklater made a critically acclaimed film in his hometown for next to no money, Smith answered an ad for an eight-month program at Vancouver Film School. There, he met Scott Mosier. Dissatisfied that the course was all theory, Smith dropped out after four months, but made a deal with Mosier that whoever finished writing a script first would get help from the other to make the movie. The result was Clerks, which Mosier produced and Smith wrote, directed and co-starred. It was shot in Smith’s workplace on a budget of roughly $27,000, self-financed using eight credit cards, portions of Smith’s college fund, the sale of his comic book collection and insurance money he and his buddy Jason Mewes collected when a flood damaged their car. Nearly rated NC-17 for its sexually frank dialogue, the comedy was acquired by Miramax Films and launched Smith’s film career.

Smith had already begun scribbling notes for another script. Titled God, he was influenced not only by certain comic books or standup comedians who commented on spirituality, but his own irreverence for his Catholic school education. Retitled Dogma, the technical challenges of the project spurred Smith and Mosier to get more experience before producing it. A poorly received mainstream comedy for Gramercy Pictures (Mallrats, 1995) and an enthusiastically received indie romantic comedy distributed by Miramax (Chasing Amy, 1997) followed. With the cache to attract an all-star cast and as much as $10 million in financing from Miramax, Smith finally produced Dogma. But the work in progress received such an outcry from the Catholic League that Disney sold the picture back to Miramax. Lions Gate Films stepped in and pushed Dogma to respectable box office and the best reviews of Smith’s career.

How’d They Do It?
During his stint at Vancouver Film School and before he wrote Clerks, Kevin Smith was scribbling notes for a script he hoped would spread the word of God in the way Smith knew best. In the liner notes for the special edition DVD of Dogma, he wrote, “All I knew was that I wanted to talk about the differences between religion and faith, and that I had to employ the Plenary Indulgence loophole as a plot device. The idea of the Plenary Indulgence had fascinated me since childhood, when my parish celebrated a Centennial. We received a special dispensation from the Pope decreeing that on the day of the parish’s hundredth anniversary, those who walked through the front door of the church would have all sins erased from their souls, giving them a clean slate, as it were. You might not think this would mean much to an eleven year old kid, because how much sin could he possibly be steeped in? But being educated in a Catholic school can make a kid feel like even the Venial sins (the tiny transgressions like white lies and hurtful sentiments expressed behind your parents’ backs) are one-way tickets to Hell.”

Smith cited his Catholic education as an influence, as well as the comic book Mage by Matt Wagner and the comedy of George Carlin and Sam Kinison, who reached into their Catholic roots for material. The initial idea was for the protagonist of God to be a high school jock. Rufus the 13^th Apostle and Serendipity the Muse were also there. In the summer of 1994 — after Miramax picked up Clerks but before it was in theaters — Smith started a first draft of what he was now calling Dogma. “A high school jock no longer, Bethany became a woman, and she was a stripped in a nudie booth joint, where she met Jay and Silent Bob (enthusiastic clients, to say the least; hilarity ensues). Arazael was introduced only in the last thirty pages of the script, after having been referred to as ‘the Shadowy Figure’ most of the time. At the end of the flick, in an effort to keep Bartleby and Loki from passing through the archway, Bethany blew up the church (imagine the shit I would’ve gotten from the Catholic League for that). But aside from those major differences (and pages and pages of dialogue; the first draft — dated Aug. 4, 1994 — was 148 pages long), everything’s pretty much the same as it is in the finished film.”

As far back as Clerks — when Smith slipped a title card into the end credits that read: “Jay and Silent Bob will return in Dogma” — he planned on making the film. It didn’t happen right away. “Scott Mosier (my producer) and I decided, after reading the first draft, that this was not a flick we wanted to tackle as our sophomore foray. We agreed that it was beyond us (probably still is), and that it’d be best to let it sit on the back burner, until we had enough talent to handle it properly. So we went ahead and made Mallrats in ’95, and during the course of that year, I took another pass at Dogma — this time adding an orangutan for Jay and Bob to hang out with, as well as shifting Bethany’s job from a strip club to an abortion clinic. In ’96, I took another pass at the script, this time dropping the orangutan and rewriting the flick to include Joey Lauren Adams as Bethany (we were dating at the time). Following that pass, I started writing Chasing Amy, and summoned Ben Affleck to Jersey (you could do that in those days) to read the first thirty pages of the script. He asked for something else to read on his way back to Boston, as thirty pages of Amy wouldn’t cover the trip. I gave him Dogma.”

Ben Affleck became vocal about playing Bartleby in Dogma. Smith polished the script with that in mind, as well as Jason Lee performing opposite him as Loki. Chasing Amy would be screened to raves at the Sundance Film Festival in January 1997 and Miramax gave a green light to Dogma at a budget of roughly $6.5 million. By that time, Jason Lee’s schedule had filled up. Smith turned to a buddy of Affleck’s named Matt Damon, who’d shown chemistry with Affleck in the dailies of a yet to released film Smith had godfathered at Miramax titled Good Will Hunting. Linda Fiorentino took a break from the press tour for Men In Black in the summer of 1997 to campaign for the part of Bethany. Impressing Smith and Scott Mosier with her grasp of Catholicism, the role was rewritten for an actress in her mid 30s. Smith offered Holly Hunter the role of God, but having just portrayed an angel in A Life Less Ordinary, the actress demurred. Alan Rickman was a fan of Chasing Amy and once he joined the cast, suggested his friend Emma Thompson play the Supreme Being. Thompson agreed.

Assuming he’d cast Samuel L. Jackson as Rufus, Smith was sold on Chris Rock after meeting the comedian. For the role of Serendipity, Miramax encouraged Smith to meet with Salma Hayek. “Salma Hayek was a meeting that I initially didn’t want to take. Serendipity had to be whip-smart, and I wasn’t sure if Salma was that at all. Imagine how stupid I felt when I found out she was a Poli-Sci major who could quote the Bible, chapter and verse. Add to that the fact that she was incredibly adorable and very sweet, and I went from resistant to slavishly devoted.” Smith chased George Carlin to appear as Cardinal Glick. The comedian’s manager maintained that the part was just too small for Carlin to work into his busy schedule. Booked with Carlin on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, Smith slipped him the script; Carlin would agree to join the production. Emma Thompson chose to stay in England and have a baby. With God uncast, Smith would offer the role to Alanis Morissette, who had turned down the part of Bethany coming off a concert tour but was now game to join the cast.

In addition to loading the picture with bankable names — actors the studio expected to slash their fees for the creative privilege of working on cutting edge material at a prestige company like Miramax — Smith and Mosier were given an experienced director of photography. They had met David Klein at Vancouver Film School and used him to shoot Smith’s previous three pictures, each of which were savaged in various corners for looking terrible. No one accused Wes Anderson of making shoddy looking films and his director of photography Robert Yeoman came on board Dogma. Smith recalled, “Yeoman was really kind about the other films. Because I was like, ‘What did we do wrong? Why do they look so bad?’ And he was like, ‘Well it’s not like you did anything wrong, you just shoot everything against the wall. You know, and like, you line up people and shoot ‘em against a wall. If you just kind of go to the right, go to the left, you’re getting some depth and suddenly it opens up a little bit more.’ And he said, ‘That’s something we should definitely go for on this movie. More depth, left and right.’”

Dogma commenced shooting April 1998 in Pittsburgh, a city the filmmakers were drawn to for St. Peter and Paul Catholic Church, which served as location for the climax. In addition to the challenges of shooting a 165-page script in roughly 50 days, Linda Fiorentino and Kevin Smith would both admit difficulties working together. Smith commented on the message boards of his View Askewniverse website, “The interesting thing is, I never had to give a line reading to Alan Rickman unless he asked (which was maybe once or twice). Instinctively, the man knew how things should sound. We never had a problem. Linda, however, would sometimes read a line from another movie altogether, and for the first few days of shooting, her energy didn’t match the text nor anyone else’s in the cast. It was like she was in a different flick.” Smith added, “And while, as I’ve said, I don’t regret casting her, like Chief Brody said in Jaws 2 I never need to go through that hell again. Honestly, I gave very few line readings on Dogma. Linda was the only person who complained about it because she was pretty much the only recipient.”

A pair of Dogma test screenings were held December 1998 in Philadelphia. The only major criticism was that at two and a half hours, the film was running too long. A screening at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1999 compelled Smith to cut two scenes: a musical routine in a strip club where Serendipity inspires her customers to break into the theme from Fat Albert, and a speech by Jason Lee, who’d agreed to appear as the evil Azrael. While Smith’s fan base eagerly awaited his fourth film, the New York based Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights — which opposes “anti-Catholic” depictions in the media and counted 350,000 parishioners as members at the time — were not amused. President William Donohue commenced a petition drive to pressure Disney to sever its affiliation with Miramax Films due to the studio’s perceived track record of insulting their faith.. The Catholic League had targeted ABC with one million signatures in opposition to Nothing Sacred, a sitcom about a hip priest played by Kevin Anderson. The series was canceled in 1998 after 20 episodes.

In April 1999, Disney CEO Michael Eisner sold Miramax co-chairmen Harvey and Bob Weinstein back their political hot potato for $14 million, allowing them to seek another distributor. In Peter Biskind’s book Down and Dirty Pictures, Smith lamented, “We had Matt and Ben following Good Will Hunting, a movie that made $125 million, plus won them a writing Oscar. MGM watched it and passed. Columbia watched it and passed. Universal watched it and passed. Edgar Bronfman Jr. watched it himself, and was just like, ‘There’s no way we can put out this movie without seeing our stock drop.’ The unsung villain of all this is Blockbuster Video. Because Blockbuster has made it their mandate that they won’t shelve an NC-17 film, and then you have a company that takes up 85 percent of the video business, maybe more, it’s tough. Every distributor who’s looking to the ancillary market to make money or make up what the film didn’t make theatrically, has to take that into consideration.” Lions Gate Films — gambling on prestige films like Gods and Monsters or Affliction deemed uncommercial by Hollywood — agreed to distribute Dogma.

Promoting his film on The Charlie Rose Show in November 1999, Smith elaborated, “The Catholic League I think is upset because it was a Disney movie initially. This is my feeling. The film was a Miramax movie and by virtue of that it was a Disney film. The Catholic League as you know is an organization, they’re heat seekers; they love to go after stuff that raises their profile. Doesn’t necessarily go after things that are really, intentionally attacks on the faith, or the church, they go after things that they feel attacks them as Catholics. They feel that Disney attacks Catholics constantly, whether it’s with Nothing Sacred — the TV show that was on ABC a little while ago — or Priest — the Miramax movie that was out a few years ago — or Disney’s same-sex health benefits policy, or the alleged gay day they have at Disney World every year. Always going after Disney. And we were just the ripe, luscious opportunity for them to go after Disney, that week. We were kind of the target du jour.” When the film was screened at the New York Film Festival, hundreds of Catholic demonstrators picketed the Lincoln Center.

Critics returned the best reviews of Kevin Smith’s career. Marjorie Baumgarten, The Austin Chronicle: “Dogma is like an underground comics version of the eternal struggle among the inhabitants of heaven, earth, and the hell below. As the writer and director, Smith adopts a ‘what if’ stance, skewing some of the tenets of Catholic theology to create a storyline that looks at the religion from the other side of the rabbit hole. The film is funny, contentious, blasphemous, and surreal.” Ella Taylor, L.A. Weekly: “The screenplay is another foul-mouthed rehearsal of Smith‘s near-Dickensian genius for the slacker patter of his generation. Yet though Dogma plays like a live-action comic book for boys, it’s also shot through with wisdom at once juvenile and wizened, coupled with a sweetness of temper…” Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun Times: “If the film is less than perfect, it is because Smith is too much in love with his dialogue. Like George Bernard Shaw, he loves to involve his characters in long witty conversations about matters of religion, sexuality and politics. Dogma is one of those rare screenplays, like a Shaw playscript, that might actually read better than it plays; Smith is a gifted comic writer who loves paradox, rhetoric and unexpected zingers from the blind side.”

Kevin Smith’s fans and the free publicity pushed Dogma to $30.6 million at the U.S. box office. Smith credited his cast for that. “At least in that first weekend, because we had, like, almost a nine million dollar opening weekend on only twelve hundred screens, you know, we didn’t have the typical kind of two thousand, twenty five hundred screen opening most films have. But this is a niche film. You know, this is a true independent film, which is why it sucks so hard to see it kind of get snubbed at the Spirit Awards this year. This represents everything that independent film is: It was shot on the cheap. It was a movie that lost its distributor and had to find another distributor, a distributor that is a very — a true independent distributor, not owned by somebody else, Lions Gate. People were working inexpensively and the content is not subject matter that appeals to everybody. Yeah, it’s very funny — hopefully — it’s entertaining, but it’s still about religion for God’s sakes, and who goes to see movies about religion anymore? Particularly ones that aren’t big budget.”

Where’d You Get All of This?
Dogma (Special Edition). DVD audio commentary by Kevin Smith, Scott Mosier and Vincent Pereira. Columbia Tristar Home Video (2001)

Down and Dirty Pictures. By Peter Biskind. Simon & Schuster (2004)

“OnFilm Interview: A Conversation With Kevin Smith and David Klein” By Bob Fisher. Kodak, November 2008

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

Drag Me To Hell (2009)
Written by Sam Raimi & Ivan Raimi
Directed by Sam Raimi
Produced by Ghost House Pictures
Running time: 99 minutes

So, What’s This About?
In Pasadena, California, 1969, a migrant couple frantically seeks the help of medium Shaun San Dena (Flor de Maria Chahua) to dispel the demons that began harassing their son after he stole from a gypsy. 30 years later, Los Angeles loan officer Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) strives to overcome a few personal demons of her own. With her professor boyfriend (Justin Long) offering emotional support, Christine covets a management position at the bank where she works. Hoping to demonstrate to her boss (David Paymer) that she can make tough decisions, Christine denies a decaying gypsy named Mrs. Ganush (Lorna Raver) an extension on her home loan.

After a violent encounter with Mrs. Ganush — in which the crone snatches a button from her coat and breathes a curse on it — Christine visits a storefront psychic named Rham Jas (Dileep Rao) who sees an evil spirit haunting her. Following an attack by an unseen force at home and a freak sickness at the office, Christine revisits Rham and learns that her tormentor is the Lamia, a demon that will plague the owner of a cursed object for three days before dragging their soul into hell. He suggests Christine appease the Lamia with an animal sacrifice, but when that fails, she comes up with $10,000 for Shaun San Dena (Adriana Barraza) to vanquish the Lamia.

Who Made It?
Sam Raimi grew up in Birmingham, Michigan. While his older brother Ivan Raimi would go on to become a practicing doctor of osteopathic medicine, Sam dropped out Michigan State University after three semesters to raise money and shoot a feature version of a 32-minute horror movie demo Raimi had patched together with his roommate Bruce Campbell starring and brother Ted’s roommate Rob Tapert producing. Titled The Evil Dead (1981), the hyperkinetic no budget flick grew into a cult classic. Raimi helped inspire the careers of Joel & Ethan Coen, who co-wrote Crimewave (1985) with Raimi. The tongue-in-cheek Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn (1987), the superhero adventure Darkman (1990) and the special effects romp Army of Darkness (1992) followed.

Sam and his brother Ivan had written a short story about a gypsy hex they referred to simply as The Curse. As Sam Raimi’s directing career made a build toward prestige with A Simple Plan (1998), The Gift (2000), Spider-Man (2002), Spider-Man 2 (2004) and Spider-Man 3 (2007), Raimi hoped to produce The Curse through his production shingle Ghost House Pictures, with another director taking the reins. Unable to interest anyone, Raimi opted to direct the film, making a return to his low budget spooky roots with Nathan Kahane and Joe Drake of Mandate Pictures financing a comparatively low budget of around $30 million. Sneaking into theaters Memorial Day 2009 under the title Drag Me To Hell, the B-movie became one of the most critically acclaimed films of 2009.

How’d They Do It?
Ivan Raimi pinned the genesis of Drag Me To Hell to an exercise he and his brother Sam gave themselves. “We started writing this so far back. We were working on Darkman, I believe, at the time. We’d reached some sort of impasse, and we had the weekend off, we decided to do something else. We challenged ourselves to write a short story in the time we had. It was something that might be meant for a half-hour TV show. That was the beginning of Drag Me to Hell. We wanted to write a gypsy curse story. A story of what somebody would do if they inadvertently got cursed and the lengths they would go to to remove the curse. I think I was dating a bank teller at the time and that’s how the woman became a bank teller.”

He continued, “It got shuffled to the bottom of the trunk, and we always wanted to work on it. Every now and then we’d dust it off and start working on it. Eventually, Sam had this company, Ghost House Pictures and said, ‘Yeah, we should work on it for Ghost House.’ So it became more earnest. It kept going in slightly different directions. It was always a little story. Every time we had a B-story, we’d work hard to integrate it into the A-story, but it never wanted to be that. It always wanted to be the very simple, nonstop story of a curse and the clock’s ticking and what to do to remove it. It went through a lot of permutations but eventually got back to what it was originally intended to be. It’s almost completely an A-story. There’s not much subplot or subtext.”

Sam Raimi recalled the origins of Drag Me To Hell by stating, “My brother, Ivan, and I had written this short story in 1989. Then just a few years ago, in 2002, we adapted it into a screenplay. I have a horror movie company called Ghost House Pictures, so I thought, why not make it into a full-fledged screenplay for the new company? We wrote it in mind with me to produce and for another director to come in and shoot it. Unfortunately that meant cutting the script so it could be made on a smaller budget. And as I started cutting, I realized that’s not why I was in it. I wasn’t there just to make a movie. I wanted to make this movie.”

He continued, “We did the most minor amount of research and discovered there are different demons that exist in many different cultures under the name of ‘Lamia’. In one culture, it’s this baby-eating God. In another, it’s a snake. In another, it’s a very sexy, but evil woman. And we thought, how interesting that they all have the same name, yet they’re all different. Maybe they’re just telling different stories about the same thing? Maybe we can tell our own story about that demon and call it The Lamia? What we really have at the core here is a timeless story concept that was used in this film, along with many others: the idea of a character that commits a sin of greed and has to pay the terrible price for it. It’s a morality tale that many churches have told, throughout the ages. So it’s a tried and true, old horror story in the book, basically.”

Ivan Raimi — who practices osteopathic medicine at Saint Joseph Mercy Livingston Hospital in Howell, Michigan — elaborated on his and his brother’s creative process. “When we write, we’ll have a project that’s assigned to us, or Sam and I will come up with some very basic concept that we try to turn into a couple pages, then together we’ll work it into a five-page story, then we’ll maybe make it into a ten-page story. Then we roughly outline it as well as our limited brains can, then give it a three act structure. But we’re not super structure guys.” He added, “Occasionally, he’ll write a little bit on his own, or I’ll write a little bit on my own, but when we write together, it’s sort of an extension of playing. It’s like being a kid when you’re making up stories. That’s the advantage of working with your brother.”

Sam Raimi commented on the partnership. “I’ve worked on many scripts with Ivan. He’s a doctor by day and a writer by night. We’ve actually spent a lot of time together, writing sometimes on the Spider-Man films, Darkman, Army of Darkness, and we have a great time being together. So it’s really both great family time and great work time for us. Unless he tries to rewrite me. The quality of that family time goes down a little bit, proportional to the amount he wants to rewrite me.” In December 2007, it was announced that Sam Raimi was returning to the horror genre by directing Drag Me To Hell for his Ghost House Pictures banner. The company had produced American remakes of The Grudge (2004) and The Grudge 2 (2006) and the vampire flick 30 Days of Night (2007).

Through Ghost House’s partnership with Mandate Pictures, roughly $30 million in financing was scared up. To play the cursed heroine, Ellen Page — who in December 2007 was being celebrated by critics and adored by moviegoers for her performance in Juno — was cast. Mandate had already booked the ingénue to play a supporting role in the mystery Peacock and the lead in Drew Barrymore’s directorial debut Whip It. Despite efforts to get Drag Me To Hell rolling in mid-March to accommodate her schedule, a two-week delay in production forced Page to drop out. Alison Lohman — who’d experienced an Ellen Page year in 2002-03 with pivotal roles in White Oleander, Matchstick Men and Big Fish — was cast instead.

Drag Me To Hell commenced filming May 2008 in Tarzana, California, the site of an empty bank building that was transformed into “Wilshire Pacific Bank” by Steve Saklad, art designer of Spider-Man 2. Director of photography Peter Deming had shot Evil Dead 2 for Raimi before serving as David Lynch’s DP on Lost Highway and Mulholland Dr. Supervising the special makeup effects were Greg Nicotero and Howard Berger of KNB EFX Group, who also met Raimi on Evil Dead 2; the company has since become the premiere makeup effects team in Hollywood. Nicotero commented, “Visual effects are fun, but there’s just something about a bunch of guys pulling cables and moving a puppet around. Sam is still enamored with that.”

Deming concurred. ““Sam loves B-movie stuff. He really embraces the wind out of nowhere and the camera shaking and the inventive, interactive lighting. He eats that up.” Raimi maintained he didn’t have other movies in mind specifically during the making of Drag Me To Hell. “I was just trying to make this story as dramatic and fun as I could. Our goal was never to follow any trends or even to try to give the audience what we thought they would want. We always tried to please ourselves — myself and my brother Ivan Raimi — when we were writing the script and in doing so, hoped that we would please the audience.” Additional scenes were filmed at Cal State Northridge and Union Station, while most of the interiors were shot on the 20th Century Fox lot in Los Angeles.

With Universal Pictures acquiring domestic and international distribution rights, Drag Me To Hell was screened March 2009 at the South By South Film Festival in Austin and at the Cannes Film Festival just before opening in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France and Israel in May. While more than a few horror buffs expressed reservations about the film’s PG-13 rating, Raimi explained, “I definitely, when I was writing the picture with my brother Ivan, didn’t want to rely on what I had relied on in the previous horror films, the Evil Dead films which was outrageous amounts of violence, blood and gore. I wanted to go in a slightly different direction with this one so I said, ‘Let’s try not to have any of that if we can, blood and violence and gore.’”

Critics jumped out of the theater praising the film. Jeannette Catsoulis, The New York Times: “At a time when horror is defined by limp Japanese retreads or punishing exercises in pure sadism, Drag Me to Hell has a tonic playfulness that’s unabashedly retro, an indulgent return to Mr. Raimi’s goofy, gooey roots.” Michael Phillips, The Chicago Tribune: “This hellaciously effective B-movie comes with a handy moral tucked inside its scares, laughs and Raimi’s specialty, the scare/laugh hybrid.” Marc Savlov, The Austin Chronicle: “Raimi pairs his love of Three Stooges-style physical comedy with moments of pure gross-out schtick and ends up with one of the purest and flat-out satisfying horror films in decades.”

Considered a marketing challenge — with a PG-13 rating that may have alienated horror fans and subject matter that definitely turned away families — Drag Me To Hell still grossed $42.1 million in the United States and $40.7 million overseas. Echoing the response of many who discovered the film, Sam Raimi enthused, “It was the most fun I’ve had in 20 years directing pictures. It was great to make a horror film where we had money to hire the best technicians in their fields. I had the luxury of not freezing to death when I was making the movie or filming it myself like in the first Evil Dead film, which was shot in 16mm and we didn’t have money for heat. I remember washing fake blood off my hands with hot coffee because we didn’t have running water there.”

Should I Care?
When watching a film directed by Sam Raimi, I almost expect to see characters depart in a puff of dust accompanied by rocket sound effects, like Looney Tunes. Whether your point of entry are the spastic Evil Dead trilogy, the Sharon Stone quickdraw epic The Quick and the Dead (1995) or the artificially flavored Spider-Man series, Raimi approaches movies less as art and more like a carnival funhouse, which over time, like the Looney Tunes, sort of makes them art. Drag Me To Hell is the latest coaster from a ride operator who’s had 30 years and over a billion dollars of expertise shelling out intense amusement. Never for a moment scary, this movie does have a moral, a mind and an old school style that gives the horror genre a desperately needed shot in the arm.

Framing a story against the economic recession, mining folklore for inspiration and delivering one of the best shock endings in recent memory, Drag Me To Hell has replaced A Simple Plan as my favorite Sam Raimi movie to date. Plenty goofy on the surface, there are strong ideas under the current here (Patton Oswalt theorized the movie was an allegory for anorexia!) I liked the suggestion that the westerners were seemingly oblivious of the supernatural world that the Mexican, Eastern European and South Asian characters had a hunting blind into. Whether there’s any subtext here or not, the movie is fun as hell, abetted by Christopher Young’s terrific musical score and an Oscar caliber sound mix that makes squishing gums, creaking gates or gust of wind outright characters in the film.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Raimi Hell Bent on Thriller” By Michael Fleming. Variety, 19 December 2007

“Sam Raimi Interview for Drag Me to Hell” By Matt Elfman. ScreenCrave, 27 May 2009

“Sam Raimi has horror in his clutches” By Gina McIntyre. The Los Angeles Times, 28 May 2009

Drag Me To Hell – Production Notes

“Sam Raimi Interview, Drag Me To Hell” MoviesOnline

“The Script Doctor” By Denis Faye. Writers Guild of America

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)

Trick ‘r Treat (2009)
Written by Michael Dougherty
Directed by Michael Dougherty
Produced by Legendary Pictures/ Bad Hat Harry Productions
Running time: 82 minutes

So, What’s This About?
In “Warren Valley, Ohio” on Halloween Night, a Yuppie couple (Leslie Bibb, Tahmoh Penikett) are paid a visit by a demonic trick ‘r treater with a burlap sack for a head. In the first of four tongue-in-cheek horror tales to follow, a junior high school principal (Dylan Baker) poisons an obnoxious candy seeker and attempts to dispose of the body before his young son finds out. Three sexually aggressive party seekers (Lauren Lee Smith, Moneca Delain, Rochelle Aytes) get separated from their more precocious friend Laurie (Anna Paquin). Costumed as Little Red Riding Hood, she soon draws the attention of a psycho killer dressed in black.

Four adolescent trick ‘r treaters (Britt McKillip, Isabelle Deluce, Alberto Ghisi, Jean-Luc Bilodeau) let an outcast named Rhonda (Samm Todd) join their expedition to the local quarry. The trick ‘r treaters intend to make an offering of eight pumpkins to the eight children who as legend has it were driven off the quarry by a homicidal bus driver; their ceremony does not go as planned. Finally, the reclusive Mr. Kreeg (Brian Cox) wants to be left alone on Halloween, but receives a visit from the burlap headed trick ‘r treater, who’s been wandering in and out of all the stories. The imp seems to have retribution on its mind for All Hallow’s Eve.

Who Made It?
Michael Dougherty was born and raised in Columbus, Ohio. He attended New York University, graduating in 1996 from Tisch School of the Arts. Dougherty spent three years toiling on Nickelodeon’s Blue’s Clues, while an animated short he’d written and directed titled Season’s Greetings made it to television. Director Bryan Singer read a spec script Dougherty had written titled Trick ‘r Treat — expanding the character and themes from Dougherty’s short — and introduced him to aspiring filmmaker and screenwriter Dan Harris. After moving to L.A. independent of each other, the duo won jobs writing X2 (2003) and Superman Returns (2006) for Singer.

Championed by late makeup effects maestro Stan Winston — originally slated to produce the film — Trick ‘r Treat was developed by Legendary Pictures, the Burbank based production company behind Superman Returns, Lady In the Water and 300, co-financing and co-producing in partnership with Warner Bros. Bryan Singer of Bad Hat Harry Productions came on board as a producer in the fall of 2006 and was present on the set of Doughtery’s live action directing debut in Vancouver. Despite overwhelmingly positive word of mouth, Warner Bros. backed away from giving Trick ‘r Treat a theatrical release, finally rolling it out on DVD in October 2009.

How’d They Do It?
Seasons Greetings (1996) was a 4-minute, hand drawn and hand colored short film, which writer-director Michael Dougherty spent nine months drawing with pencils and paper at NYU. Each frame was colored with magic markers instead of paint with fellow film students helping him color many of the cels. The short — about a trick ‘r treater with a burlap sack for a head being menaced by a stalker — was broadcast on MTV’s Cartoon Sushi and Sci-Fi Channel and played a few film festivals. As Dougherty brainstormed ideas for short films or short stories he noticed they all ended up being about Halloween.

Dougherty recalled, “So I started thinking, well how neat would it be to put them all together into one movie and I guess it was kind of my way of cheating and saying here’s, look, here’s my feature film screenplay, it’s an anthology movie. But then they also started interweaving and it became one movie, just with a lot of characters whose lives start intersecting. I realized I could take this character and make him the next door neighbor of that character and make these trick-or-treaters show up at the door of this guy and so it all ended up coming together. And Sam became a character that wandered though all of their stories.”

He continued, “The first story is really just about a father and a son and introducing the son to the holiday and its traditions. The next one, it’s a group of kids who are between ages 12 and 15 and it’s when you break away from your parents and you’re walking around the town by yourself trick-or-treating. And then the next one, you’re in your twenties and the holiday becomes about nothing but partying and having sex and trying to find the hottest costume possible. The fourth one is the twilight years, when you’re old and alone and celebrating the holiday by yourself, which hopefully none of us end up like, but it’s kind of these weird four seasons of Halloween in a sense.”

Dougherty’s spec script — Trick ‘r Treat – became his calling card to meeting the director of The Usual Suspects and X-Men, Bryan Singer, in 2000. After working with his writing partner Dan Harris on drafts of X2 and Superman Returns, executive producers Thomas Tull, Jon Jashni and William Fay of Legendary Pictures were prepared to give Dougherty a shot making the transition from screenwriter to director of Trick ‘r Treat. Dougherty revealed, “I think the transition was made easier by the fact that Bryan Singer always had me and my writing partner Dan Harris on set throughout X2 and throughout Superman Returns and it’s interesting to realize how much I picked up just from osmosis.”

Dougherty added, “In terms of preparing, interacting with the crew, knowing how to set up a shot, getting your coverage, etc. I think I’m blessed in that I’ve had Bryan to show me the ropes as well as my writing partner Dan who directed a feature film a few years ago called Imaginary Heroes. They’ve both been available to give me pointers and tips and help me out. As well as Alex Garcia; he’s been on the set of Bryan’s movies and produced his TV projects. It’s been good, but I definitely know that those two movies, Superman Returns and X2 were basically boot camp. I’d be twenty times more terrified doing this if I hadn’t been on set for 131 days on each of those two movies.”

With Bryan Singer and Alex Garcia of Bad Hat Harry Productions as producers, Trick ‘r Treat commenced filming November 2006 in Vancouver. Singer was reportedly on set throughout the film’s nine-week shoot. Also working with Dougherty was NYU alum Breehn Burns, who’d come on board as a concept artist and would also design the film’s comic book panel title sequence. Of Burns, Dougherty added, “He referred me to a storyboard guy named Simeon Wilkins, who’s a young guy who has an amazing resume. He worked on The Ring, Monster House, he just finished Beowulf for Bob Zemeckis, and we click really well too.”

Scheduled for release October 2007, Halloween came and went without Warner Bros. giving audiences Trick ‘r Treat. Legendary Pictures screened it December 2007 at the annual Butt-Numb-a-Thon in Austin, Texas, an invitation-only film festival hosted by the architect of Ain’t It Cool News, Harry Knowles. Avid dispatches from film geeks who’d seen the movie would trickle through the popular website for the next two years. “Massawyrm”: “Horror fans are going to have a ton of fun with this and I fully expect this to take its rightful place as the holiday classic that gets pulled out every year, much the same way Halloween was for many of us in our youth. It is a film very much about the holiday and its spirit, and it captures that wonderfully.”

Warner Bros. began to license Trick ‘r Treat T-shirts, graphic novels and action figures, but the studio was at a loss over how to market the movie. Dougherty mused, “I remember having a conversation with, you know, an executive who shall remain nameless about this, and he said, ‘Oh, it’s a horror movie.’ And I said, ‘Well, yeah.’ He goes, ‘Well, we’ll target the Saw and the Hostel demographic.’ And I said, ‘No, no, no, that’s not them.’ ‘Well but they’re the horror audience.’ ‘No, they’re not this horror audience.’ Horror itself isn’t just a genre. There’s so many subgenres to it, just like there’s so many types of comedy. You have your Wayans Brothers comedies and you have your Judd Apatow comedies. Very different audiences. And so, sometimes it can be difficult to try to explain horror as a genre to people.”

Despite successful screenings at Screamfest L.A. in October 2008, Comic Con in July 2009 and recently at L.A.’s New Beverly Cinema, Warner Bros. shuttled Trick ‘r Treat onto Video On Demand and DVD in October 2009. Reviewers were effusive with praise. Bill Gibron, Pop Matters: “Almost too clever for its own good, Trick ‘r Treat is a really good film. In fact, it’s so unusual in its practical F/X approach and retro direct to video charms that a second viewing is definitely needed before confirming its almost masterpiece status.” Alex Billington, First Showing.Net: “There hasn’t been a horror movie this original and this inventive since Wes Craven brought us Scream in 1996. I guess it only took twelve years to finally find the next great horror franchise.”

Commenting on his film’s winding road to release, Dougherty suggested it was caught between two business models, one dying out, the other taking its baby steps. “We’re reaching a day and age where the generation of kids growing up expect to have the option of going to the theater or watching a movie at home. I think that window is going to close completely, soon. But I think, in the meantime, I think it’s smart for distributors to look at that limited-release fan demand method of distribution.” He added, “Why not try to open it in two cities and let the fans post on Facebook or send out tweets about getting it in their hometown? I really wish we could have tried that model with Trick ‘r Treat, but by the time the decision had been made it was too late.”

Should I Care?
Here’s a movie stoked by such an outpouring of love from its target demographic that I’m left to ponder whether I even saw the same film the fanboys did. Trick ‘r Treat isn’t really for people who read reviews, it’s for the people who love those movies that aren’t screened for critics. It’s also blatantly the work of a first time screenwriter and director. At 82 minutes with credits, Doughtery gets in a hurry introducing too many characters without giving us a reason to care about a single one. Some of his ideas are sketchy and poorly executed. Burlap head — referred to as “Sam” in the credits for reasons that are never explained — never makes the leap from doodle to compelling screen creep.

There’s a segment here — the film’s best — about 13-year-olds trick ‘r treating that recalls those Saturday afternoon, kids on a mission movies I grew up with like The Goonies or The Monster Squad. That’s nice, and so is Breehn Burns’ gorgeous title sequence with comic book panels illustrated with scenes from the movie flipping by. Douglas Pipes supplements this with a fantastic musical score that easily surpasses anything Danny Elfman has composed in 16 years. Trick ‘r Treat isn’t a bad movie. I can name 10 recent horror movies that were a lot worse. But if this is destined to become a Halloween standard, I’ll be watching It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Superman Returns Writers Ride a Wave of Success” By Torquin Hedd. Moving Pictures Magazine, July 2006

“Quartet are in for Treat” By Pamela McClintock. Variety, 9 November 2006

“Trick ‘r Treat: Writer/Director Michael Dougherty, On Set in Vancouver, BC Canada” BloodyDisgusting.com, 11 January 2007

“Director on what the long-delayed release has meant for Trick ‘r Treat” By Patrick Lee. Sci-Fi Wire, 28 July 2009

“Q&A: Trick ‘r Treat writer-director Michael Dougherty” Heat Vision Blog. The Hollywood Reporter, 8 October 2009

Trick ‘r Treat. DVD audio commentary with Michael Dougherty. Warner Home Video (2009)

By Joe Valdez

What the *&#! Are They About?
Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) and her husband Guy (John Cassavetes) move into the 7th floor New York apartment of a recently deceased old woman. They ignore the advice of a close friend, who tells them about the Bramford Building’s “unpleasant reputation around the turn of the century”, including a couple of notorious tenants who practiced witchcraft there, earning the building the nickname “Black Bramford”. Before they even meet their neighbors (the Castevets), the couple can hear them bickering through the thin walls. Rosemary later meets a reformed junkie named Terry who was cleaned up and taken in by the Castevets.

After Terry is found dead on the sidewalk of an apparent suicide, the nosy Minnie Castevet (Ruth Gordon) invites her new neighbors to dinner with her husband Roman (Sidney Blackmer). Guy is won over by the energetic couple, while Rosemary is suspicious of the strange potables and desserts Minnie tries to push on her. Guy’s acting career suddenly heats up and he suggests they have a baby. Following a strange dream the night they conceive, Rosemary is urged to leave her obstetrician for one the Castevets recommend. Weight loss and paranoia follow, leading Rosemary to believe those around her be to a coven of witches keenly interested in her baby.

While digging for antiquities in northern Iraq, Father Merrin (Max von Sydow) unearths an ancient stone carving of a demon, strangely buried with a modern day St. Christopher medal. The discovery causes grave alarm for the priest. Across the world in Georgetown, Maryland, film actress and single mother Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) hears something strange in her attic, leading her to check and make sure her 12-year-old daughter Regan (Linda Blair) is all right. Also in D.C., Father Karras (Jason Miller) wrestles with guilt over abandoning his elderly mother and questions whether he still has the faith to be a man of God.

Regan is diagnosed as hyperkinetic, which her mother is made to believe by doctors explains “lies” her daughter has been giving about her bed shaking at night. Chris experiences poltergeist activity as Regan’s behavior becomes more unsettling: spouting vile obscenities, running down the stairs backwards on her hands, and masturbating with a crucifix. A homicide detective (Lee J. Cobb) investigates a church desecration and the bizarre death of Chris MacNeil’s director, while Chris looks to the church for help. They turn to Father Karras, who reaches out to Merrin to help him expel whatever evil has taken hold of the child.

Writing
Bitten by a sting of commercial failures as a playwright, Ira Levin — whose debut novel A Kiss Before Dying was published to great acclaim in 1953 when Levin was 22 — found inspiration in his wife’s pregnancy for a second novel in 1967. Rosemary’s Baby would sell 5 million copies in the U.S. William Castle — the schlock movie director and promoter whose gimmicks included sending inflatable skeletons flying over the heads of audiences during House on Haunted Hill and rigging seats to shock moviegoers watching The Tingler – was sent the novel in galleys form and anticipated that a film version might be his bid for respectability.

Having already bet the farm acquiring the film rights to Rosemary’s Baby, Castle took on a partner in Paramount Pictures, whose young head of production Robert Evans loved the material, but had no interest in producing a William Castle cheesefest. Evans wanted Polish filmmaker Roman Polanski to direct. Knowing Polanski was an avid skier Evans lured him to the States under the ruse of directing Downhill Racer. Agreeing to adapt Rosemary’s Baby instead, Polanski consulted with production designer Richard Sylbert, a New York native who spent 30 days honing a shooting script with Polanski after he’d completed a first draft.

Ira Levin — who later authored The Stepford Wives — has been accused by some of being a hack, but for me, Rosemary’s Baby is a brilliantly executed study in paranoia; every character Rosemary encounters seems to have a vested interest in her pregnancy, or could they just be trying to help? Whether it was the fact that he was a committed agnostic, or just felt that it was better filmmaking, Roman Polanski also resisted supernatural thrills and instead, gave his adaptation an intense psychological edge, keeping us guessing until the end of the movie whether Rosemary is in danger from witches, or just experiencing some pregnancy related dementia.

William Peter Blatty was enrolled at Georgetown University in 1949 when his New Testament class covered a case he’d read about in the Washington Post, detailing the alleged exorcism of a 14-year-old boy in Mount Rainer, MD. A Catholic whose faith was wavering at the time, Blatty sold the idea of The Exorcist to paperback publisher Bantam Press, which commissioned a novel and ultimately sold it to Harper and Row. Published in 1971, The Exorcist was a runaway hit, selling 13 million copies in the U.S. alone. Blatty adapted a screenplay and attaching himself to the project as producer, saw every studio in Hollywood turn his bestseller down.

Warner Bros. had passed on The Exorcist when head of production John Calley was slipped a copy of the novel. So terrified reading it at night that he tried getting his dog to share the bed with him, Calley would pursue every major director of the day — Mike Nichols, Arthur Penn, John Boorman — to helm the picture. Each turned it down for technical or personal reasons. Blatty even pleaded with Peter Bogdanovich to direct before arriving on William Friedkin, whose kinetic, documentary-like approach had helped The French Connection win an Academy Award for Best Picture. Blatty felt a realistic aesthetic was just what his fantasy/horror picture needed.

Not caring for a 226-page first draft full of flashbacks, Friedkin compelled Blatty to adopt a straight forward narrative. The resulting script may have won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, but isn’t very cohesive. Father Merrin drifts into and out of the story, most of the characters share tenuous relationships and the dialogue is passable at best. Still, the result is one of the most visceral portraits of evil ever conjured. In addition to the phantasm of levitation, projectile vomiting and demonic possession, the story does deal with the crisis of faith and hopelessness in subtle and powerful ways, making the story that more unnerving.

Writing edge: Rosemary’s Baby

Casting
Seeking an all-American girl for the role of Rosemary, Roman Polanski wanted to cast Tuesday Weld. But Robert Evans — looking for a bigger name — preferred Mia Farrow, who was appearing on the popular TV show Peyton Place. While I think Weld would have been extraordinary, there’s no question that the nervy but beguiling Farrow went full throttle here and made Rosemary her own. Robert Redford was the first choice of both Evans and Polanski to play Guy and would also have been terrific, but legalities apparently kept him out of the cast. John Cassavetes brings much greater edge to the role of a struggling actor who might turn to the occult for career help.

In casting the supporting players — the sweet old faces who might possibly be witches — Rosemary’s Baby is in a class all its own. It’s impossible to imagine the film being as great without Ruth Gordon, who is nothing short of a force of nature in this; Minnie Castevet alternates between being one of the great little New York characters of all time, and the neighbor from hell. Gordon won a richly deserved Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Elisha Cook Jr. plays a realtor, Ralph Bellamy is Rosemary’s suspect obstetrician and newcomer Charles Grodin appeared as a physician whose best intentions only end up harming his patient.

The first actress Blatty sent a script to had been Shirley MacLaine, who’d been his neighbor in California and provided the inspiration for Chris MacNeil. Once casting began in earnest, the writer-producer’s first choice for Father Karras had been Marlon Brando, but skittish that The Exorcist would become Brando’s show instead of his, Friedkin turned to a capable list of actors who were hardly matinee idols: Ellen Burstyn, Jason Miller, Max von Sydow. This decision goes a long way to giving The Exorcist a realistic texture. Burstyn in particular seems cognizant of the frustrations and fears of a single mother and communicates both vividly.

The Exorcist wouldn’t be the masterpiece that it is without two actors. Radio and film veteran Mercedes McCambridge supplied the voice of the demon and it’s her vocal work — sounding like an ancient woman with a glass bottle jabbed in their throat — that makes The Exorcist so terrifying. The entire movie hinged on the casting of Regan. An above average child actor might have been cast here and the results would have been laughable, but Linda Blair’s ferocious, no holds barred performance is a standard bearer for any actor working under makeup. Strangely, Blair seems to make a much more convincing demon than she does a 12-year-old.

Casting edge: Even

Production value
Roman Polanski’s aesthetic for Rosemary’s Baby has been discussed ad nauseum over the decades. In the 1992 documentary Visions of Light, cinematographer William Fraker relates a great anecdote about Polanski moving Fraker’s camera to the left so that only Ruth Gordon’s back would be visible during a shot where she’s in a room talking on the phone. When that scene went before an audience, 1,500 people actually craned their necks around to try to peek inside the room. I don’t subscribe to the notion of Director As God, but Robert Evans and Fraker have both credited Polanski with pushing the film’s look and finding unusual ways to create tension visually.

Intricately designed by Richard Sylbert, Rosemary’s Baby was shot in 14 weeks: two weeks in New York for exterior shooting around the Dakota Hotel were followed by 12 weeks of interiors on the Paramount lot in Los Angeles. The dream sequences are like tiny art films in their own right. What surprised me watching this film again was how these sequences refuse to indulge in the psychedelia of the time. Watching Ken Russell flicks, I often feel like I’d enjoy them much better with pharmaceuticals. On the other hand, Rosemary’s Baby features some of the most textured dream sequences ever put to film, whether viewed sober or otherwise.

What began as a 105-day production schedule when shooting for The Exorcist commenced on a soundstage at 20th Century Fox studios in New York would stretch on for 200 days, back when it was considered insane to spend more than $1 million on a horror flick. But the bucks are on the screen. The opening sequence in Iraq gives the movie an ominous, almost epic feel, while William Friedkin’s decision to shoot a good portion of the film handheld certainly has a sense of immediacy to it. We’re constantly kept off balance and while the jarring approach has produced vomit in most of Friedkin’s films since, The Exorcist is a punch in the gut.

The makeup effects in The Exorcist were designed by Dick Smith, whose protégé Rick Baker also worked on the film and credits his mentor with being responsible for the state of the art of prosthetic makeup in film today. Beyond just making an actor look like a demon, Smith’s work was pioneering: the projectile vomit, the welts that appeared on Regan’s stomach spelling out HELP ME, or her head spinning around. None of that stuff had been done before and it holds up remarkably well. Smith’s work is so great that watching the movie again, it never really occurred to me that I was seeing special effects.

Production value edge: Even

Music
Neither Rosemary’s Baby nor The Exorcist feature the type of bombastic musical arrangements I’ve learned to endure in Jerry Bruckheimer type productions, thankfully. Instead of punctuating how we’re supposed to feel at any given moment, both films opted for very unconventional scores to eerie, even unsettling effect. Many people remember the lullaby that plays over the opening credits of Rosemary’s Baby, with a fine organ and string accompaniment floating underneath. There’s an elegance and bit of sadness in Krzysztof Komeda’s compositions for the film, subtle but extremely effective.

Lalo Schifrin was commissioned to compose the score for The Exorcist, but William Friedkin — who reportedly likened Schifrin’s score to “fuckin Mexican marimba music” — literally threw the reels out the door and brought in classical recordings he felt suited the movie better. These include “Night of the Electric Insects” by George Crumb’s string quartet Black Angels and portions of the 1971 “Cello Concerto” by composer Krzysztof Penderecki. Stanley Kubrick would later use Penderecki to great effect in The Shining. The spine tingling theme is “Tubular Bells” by Mike Oldfield and can be heard every Halloween in TV or radio advertising to conjure spookiness.

Music edge: Even

Cultural impact
Arriving in theaters June 1968, Rosemary’s Baby ultimately earned $15 million in the U.S. and finished the 7th highest grossing picture of the year. Today, it not only figures in debates over which horror films are the scariest ever made, but marked the beginning of a six year run for Robert Evans that would transform Paramount into the most prestigious movie studio in the world. The film was followed only by a forgettable made-for-TV movie in 1976 — Look What’s Happened To Rosemary’s Baby – in which Patty Duke played Rosemary and Ruth Gordon reprised her Oscar winning role, but does continue to be referenced in sitcoms and on cartoons.

No contest. The Exorcist was a box office sensation. Opening December 26, 1973, not even freezing weather kept audiences from lining up outside theaters on the East Coast. Through several re-issues, it would gross $232.6 million in the U.S. and $208.4 million overseas, making it the highest grossing R-rated movie ever in its day. Four sequels followed: John Boorman’s maligned Exorcist II: The Heretic (1975), the subpar Exorcist III (1990) written and directed by William Peter Blatty, Paul Schrader’s little seen Dominion (2005) and the version reshot by Renny Harlin, Exorcist: The Beginning (2004). The original is widely considered the scariest movie ever made.

Cultural impact edge: The Exorcist

Winner: Rosemary’s Baby

The Exorcist is the scarier movie. Rosemary’s Baby is the better film. I can watch it over and over and always find something new to savor — in the art direction, in the performances, in the story — while The Exorcist is not a movie I feel the need to revisit. Though in many ways superior, once The Exorcist is over, that’s all folks, it doesn’t resonate for me all that much.

Your thoughts?

By Joe Valdez

What the *&#! Are They About?
In the Pacific Northwest, John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) drifts into a small town in search of a buddy he served with in Vietnam. After receiving word that his friend has died, Rambo draws the attention of Sheriff Will Teasle (Brian Dennehy) who doesn’t care for the stranger’s dirty look or sullen attitude and shuttles him to the city limits. Rambo stubbornly tries to return to town, earning himself a trip to jail. There, Teasle’s deputies attempt to clean the prisoner up, triggering Rambo’s memory of being a prisoner of war.

Overpowering his captors, Rambo escapes into the chilly rain forest above town. The police learn that their fugitive is a decorated Green Beret, an expert in guerilla warfare tactics and survival. 200 National Guard troops are mobilized to help track him down and Rambo’s mentor Col. Traughtman (Richard Crenna) is sent in by the Pentagon to advise. Traughtman notifies the authorities that he’s not here to protect Rambo from them, but the other way around.

When a chopper carrying a cabinet minister goes down in Central America, a seven-man Special Forces team is sent on a rescue mission. Dutch (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is reunited with Vietnam buddy Dillon (Carl Weathers) who’s gone to work for the CIA and insists on participating in the operation. Rappelling into the jungle, the team discovers the skinned bodies of a Green Beret team that appears to have been sent in before them.

After assaulting a rebel camp, the squad — which includes a macho gunner (Jesse Ventura) and Indian tracker (Sonny Landham) — realize the story of a captive cabinet minister was cooked up to get them to strike the guerillas, who Dillon believes shot down the chopper of Green Berets. Heading to the evacuation site with a prisoner (Elpidia Carrillo), things go from bad to worse when the squad falls prey to a seven-foot tall, heavily armed and camouflaged alien big game hunter.

Writing
First Blood and the character of Rambo had their genesis in a 1972 novel by David Morrell, a Canadian born professor of English at the University of Iowa who experienced the effects of what became known as post-traumatic stress through students who were returning from the Vietnam War. Morrell’s action thriller was optioned by Warner Bros., where the best of many, many drafts was written by the team of Michael Kozoll & William Sackheim in the mid-1970s, when it was ultimately decided by the studio that audiences didn’t care much about Vietnam anymore.

By 1981, Sylvester Stallone had accepted a $3.5 million offer from producers Mario Kassar & Andrew Vajna to play Rambo. To keep the star aboard the project when he got cold feet, the producers encouraged Stallone to rewrite the script to his particular sensibility. The resulting story tapped into the rooting interest of the underdog that Stallone had developed so well in the Rocky pictures. Despite its superb visceral elements — including a frenzied pursuit through the Pacific Northwest rain forest and a claustrophobic sequence where Rambo is trapped in a mine — the original First Blood never veers into comic book territory, revealing both Rambo and his adversary Sheriff Teasle to be men of duty. Both are seen bending under the stress of their ordeal.

Predator began as a spec script written by Jim Thomas & John Thomas. Titled Hunter, their concept was human beings being stalked by a dilettante from another world, like big game hunters stalking exotic animals and returning home with a trophy, I guess. The Thomas brothers completed their script in September 1983 and sold it in early 1984 to Fox, where producer Joel Silver ultimately developed it as a vehicle for Arnold Schwarzenegger.

After an uncredited polish by David Peoples, Hunter would become The Predator during its production and ultimately, Predator. While the personalities of the badass Special Forces unit are allowed to bubble to the surface of a ceaselessly entertaining conceit, there’s not a terrific amount of suspense here, with Arnold’s triumph over the Predator never really in question. The inclusion of a female POW who comes along for the ride and a needlessly convoluted set-up do get in the way of the film’s roll licking factor.

Writing edge: First Blood

Casting
Behind his image as a monosyllabic he-man, it’s often overlooked how good an actor Sylvester Stallone can be. The original First Blood is one of the best performances of his career. It’s easy to imagine Rambo as an orphan; yeah, he’s a trained killer, but instead of emphasizing invincibility, Stallone plays the character’s loneliness and disquiet beautifully. Kirk Douglas was eagerly pursued to play Col. Traughtman and reported for work before bowing out when director Ted Kotcheff and the producers demurred over Douglas’ script revisions, which included Rambo dying at the end. The late Richard Crenna is no Spartacus, but does a credible job.

The Stallone flicks that are worth revisiting are the ones where Sly was given a great adversary — like Nighthawks, or to a much lesser extent, Rocky III and Demolition Man — and First Blood is no exception. In addition to being a tremendous character actor, Brian Dennehy takes what in the sequels would have been just a brutal redneck sheriff and here, gives him the texture of a real man doing a job. Never entirely likable, he’s never unlikable either, much like a real sheriff. Lisa Freiberger did a yeoman’s job casting Jack Starrett, Chris Mulkey, David Caruso and Michael Talbott as deputies.

Arnold Schwarzenegger was still pretty much developing his chops as an actor when he was offered the lead in Predator, but his sense of self, his ability to toss out one liners (“Stick around” as he impales a rebel with a machete) and physique made him perfect for this type of flick. But personally, I find Predator 2 a much better take; even though Danny Glover is playing a tough cop, he’s much more vulnerable and the outcome is called into greater question than if you have the Terminator as your hero.

Casting director Jackie Burch had room to maneuver with the supporting cast and this is where Predator goes into another gear. Carl Weathers — who briefly played linebacker for the Oakland Raiders – brings as much charisma here as he does athletic prowess. Producer Joel Silver had previously worked with Bill Duke and Sonny Landham, two heavies you would not want to fuck with in a bar, and brought them aboard. Jesse Ventura — a former Navy SEAL, bodyguard and professional wrestler — adds even more color to the film, while 7 foot, 2 inch tall Kevin Peter Hall was both menacing and graceful as the title villain.

Casting edge: Predator

Production value
One of the reasons First Blood is so fucking good is the approach taken by director Ted Kotcheff, best known for this film and the even more masculine North Dallas Forty, but who probably wouldn’t have been influenced by MTV even if it had been around a decade earlier. This is a classically mounted picture, with certain restraint taken to making things look and feel as real as possible, while delivering entertainment in the process. The cinematography by Andrew Laszlo — framed in anamorphic format — is nothing short of stunning, soaking up the mist covered rain forests of Hope, Canada.

John McTiernan had a B-movie called Nomads to his credit when he was hired to direct Predator. His energy and ideas are all over the picture — essentially a Tarzan flick with guns — but this is firmly a B-movie produced by a major studio. While makeup effects maestro Stan Winston saved the day by coming in near the end of production to redesign the creature, the shooting location is a slightly less than exotic Puerto Vallarta, Mexico and the optical effects dated. The film has some nice compositions, but the lighting by Donald McAlpine is nothing to rave over.

Production value edge: First Blood

Music
No contest. Jerry Goldsmith is my favorite film composer/ conductor in modern Hollywood, and his score for First Blood — commissioned between Poltergeist and Psycho II — is as emotionally rousing as his best. Chords of Goldsmith’s theme for this film, which put Mario Kassar & Andrew Vajna on the map as Hollywood players, would later be heard over the logo of Carolco Pictures during the early 1990s.

Alan Silvestri then and now is probably best known as the composer of Back to the Future, but always struck me as someone you approached if John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith were unavailable. His work for Predator is pretty serviceable, rising to the level the production probably had to pay a good composer. It might still be one of the more recognizable themes of the genre, right up there with Brad Fiedel’s work on The Terminator. It does get the job done.

Music edge: First Blood

Cultural impact
Opening in October 1982, First Blood was a huge hit with audiences, pulling down box office receipts of $47.2 million in the U.S. and $78 million overseas, back when tickets were three bucks. The decision not to kill Rambo off made somebody a billionaire; by the end of the decade, Rambo had spawned two cartoonish sequels and an actual cartoon titled Rambo: Force of Freedom. Rambo: First Blood Part II transformed David Morrell’s scarred war vet into a symbol of American military muscle, spawning bumper stickers, knives and bubble gum and name dropping into media addresses given by President Reagan, much to the chagrin of liberals.

Hitting theaters in June 1987, Predator also went over well at the box office, grossing $59.7 million in the U.S. and adding $38.5 million overseas. It helped Joel Silver on his way to becoming the Action King of Hollywood and for a brief spell, put John McTiernan at the top as well. An Arnold-less sequel attracted significantly less business in 1990, but the uber-equipped Predator seemed to resonate with genre fans, returning in 2004 (Alien vs. Predator) and 2007 (Alien vs. Predator: Requiem), sort of making him the Frankenstein Monster of the new millennium. A full “reboot” can’t be too far around the corner.

Cultural impact edge: Even

Winner: First Blood

Your thoughts?

What the *&#! Is This About?
In Antarctica, a Siberian Husky races across a field of ice. In the sky above, a helicopter appears, with a man on board shooting at the dog. The animal makes it to a United States research station manned by 12 men. These include a burnt out pilot named MacReady (Kurt Russell), who rather than let a computer beat him at chess, pours a bottle of Jim Beam into the wiring. The circling helicopter gets the attention of the men and when it lands, a man steps out babbling in Norwegian. He opens fire on the dog and when he hits one of the Americans, is shot and killed by the base commander (Donald Moffat). Fearing the Norwegian camp might be in serious trouble, physician Dr. Copper (Richard Dysart) has MacReady fly him there to investigate.

MacReady and Copper discover the camp gutted by fire and most of its inhabitants dead. They also uncover a block of ice that appears to have been thawed out, while outside in a burn pile, they find the remains of something that looks like it might have been human. The men take the specimen and stacks of videotape back for study. The men don’t know exactly what happened to the Norwegians, but are getting the drift that it was bad. After wandering the station all day, the Siberian Husky is placed in a kennel with the other dogs. There, it transforms into a hideous creature, part crab, part spider, part dog. By the time the men get there, the Thing has attacked and partially absorbed two of the dogs. The ill-tempered Childs (Keith David) blasts it with a flamethrower, but the Thing escapes into the ceiling.

The station biologist Blair (Wilford Brimley) theorizes what they’re dealing with is an organism that imitates other life forms, absorbing its prey and producing a perfect imitation. Studying the Norwegian tapes, MacReady flies to a dig site, where he finds a massive spacecraft buried in the ice. By the time the station realizes that the alien remains may not be dead, at least one of the men is partially absorbed by the Thing. Calculating that if it were to reach a populated area, the organism could infect all life on Earth within 27,000 hours, Blair smashes the radio. Isolated and unsure who they can trust, the men look to MacReady, who comes up with a test he believes will prove who’s who.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
Who Goes There? was a short story by John W. Campbell Jr., published under the pen name “Don A. Stuart” in Astounding Science Fiction magazine in 1938. The story concerned scientists in Antarctica who discover a spacecraft buried in the ice. They thaw out an occupant, only to find the alien has the ability to assume the shape and memories of anything it devours. The men are unsure who among them has been taken over by an alien. Campbell’s story became the inspiration for a Howard Hawks production released in 1951 as The Thing From Another World. The film version presented the Thing as a lumbering monster played by James Arness. The picture was a great commercial success and along with The Day The Earth Stood Still, ushered in an era of science fiction – sometimes provocative, almost always cheaply produced – in Hollywood.

25 years later, producer Stuart Cohen optioned the screen rights to Campbell’s original story. He brought in producers Lawrence Turman and David Foster, securing a development deal with Universal Pictures. Kim Henkel & Tobe Hooper worked on the project, but Cohen wasn’t impressed with the script they delivered. A classmate of Cohen’s from USC Film School named John Carpenter had been a fan of The Thing most of his life, particularly after reading the short story that inspired the movie while he was in high school. Having directed one low budget hit after another – Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, The Fog, Escape From New York – Carpenter was offered the job of updating The Thing for Universal. The director recalled, “The John W. Campbell story Who Goes There? was basically an Agatha Christie, kind of Ten Little Indians: This creature is in your midst and he’s imitating either one or all of us. Who’s human and who isn’t? And that kind of an idea really fascinated me. So we went in that sense back to that idea, with Bill Lancaster and his screenplay.”

Bill Lancaster recalled, “Well the short story itself was, I wouldn’t say it’s a really great, although it’s a very admired one in the science fiction realm. Back in the late ‘30s and I think it was the first story to deal with this shape shifting, body snatcher type element and all that stuff. Seriously, that’s not what 100% attracted me to the piece, it was more the ambiance and this, all the characters involved and the mood of it, and the enclosure, and elements of the paranoia. And the short story was a stepping stone to take advantage of all those elements. From the story and the film, I loved the idea of being trapped in Antarctica, these people working up there for whatever reasons, horrible winter, freezing conditions, cold, and there’s a monster lurking.”

With Kurt Russell heading the ensemble cast and a $13.7 million budget, second unit shooting for The Thing commenced June 1981 on a glacier above Juneau, Alaska. Interiors began filming August 1981 on the Universal lot in Los Angeles before the production moved to Stewart, British Columbia in December for two weeks of shooting the ice camp exteriors. Carpenter felt his challenge was making the Thing seem as real as possible. “See, I grew up as a kid watching science fiction and monster movies and it was always a guy in a suit. Or sometimes it was kind of a bad puppet, like It Conquered The World comes to mind right now, Roger Corman’s movie, this kind of vegetable monster, kind of going like this woodenly, and my fear was, they’ll laugh at us, you know, they’ll laugh at it, it’ll be a joke. I mean, even as great as the movie was – and Alien was a terrific movie – it’s still in the very end, up stood this big guy in a suit. I don’t want a suit, I want something that’s alive.”

John Carpenter turned to makeup effects artist Rob Bottin, whose pioneering transformations for The Howling had been devised the year previous when Bottin was only 20 years old. The director remembered, “He came in with a wild concept, which is that the Thing can look like anything. It doesn’t look like one monster, it looks like anything, and out of this changing shape, this imitation, comes all the creatures throughout the universe that the Thing has ever imitated and it uses these various forms. And Rob was very daring in his approach. Let’s say even sometimes I was doubtful as to whether he’d pull it off.” Rob Bottin recalled, “The interesting thing about The Thing, right, and the fact that it was actually done a long time ago, you know, people actually think that the imaging and special effects and creature work or whatever hold up to this day. Even in light of the fact that there are computer graphics and things now. And I think part of the reason for that is you just can’t beat wild imagination, you know?”

Director of photography Dean Cundey recalled, “One of the tricks of working with rubber – whether it’s a mask or a makeup appliance, or whether it’s a completely fabricated creature – is lighting it carefully so that it looks real, so that there’s a, so you don’t give away the tricks, the little seams and paint and wires and all the things that are necessary to make it work. And Rob was always very sensitive about his creatures, whether there was too much light on them. We always sort of joked that if it was up to Rob, he would build the creatures, you know, to be incredibly interesting and imaginative, and then not put any light on them, because he was afraid of showing them. So it was always a case of Rob wanting less light, less light. So we developed techniques of little tiny spots of light and shadows, and also that you never really looked blatantly at a rubber creature.”

When The Thing went before audiences for two test screenings, it became apparent that the film might have done its job too well. It was so unsettling, John Carpenter remembered a man running out of a screening to throw up. Kurt Russell stated, “A lot of the things though that bothered the audience – more than the monster – were the poking around the monster, you know, and poking around human beings that had been burnt.” Speaking in 1999, Carpenter put the film’s reception in historical perspective. “Two weeks before our movie comes out, they release this other movie called E.T. And there’s this burst of love all around this movie. I guess the country was going through a recession and there were tough times. Audiences wanted an up/cry and E.T. gave it to them. Two weeks later, out comes my movie. And my movie is exactly just the opposite of E.T. It is not an up/cry. It is a downer. It is the grimmest thing you have ever seen. Here I thought I had made this really great movie, right? “

Arriving in theaters June 1982, the picture was reviled by critics. Vincent Canby, the New York Times: “John Carpenter’s The Thing is a foolish, depressing, overproduced movie that mixes horror with science fiction to make something that is fun as neither one thing or the other … There may be a metaphor in all this, but I doubt it.” Pauline Kael, the New Yorker: “In its own putting-the-squeeze-on-the-audience terms, Alien was effective. This picture isn’t (except for an early episode with a husky trying to escape the hunters shooting at it from a plane). It appears to be a film of limited imagination with unlimited horror effects.” Roger Ebert, the Chicago Sun Times: “The Thing is a great barf-bag movie, all right, but is it any good? I found it disappointing, for two reasons: the superficial characterizations and the implausible behavior of the scientists on that icy outpost.”

John Carpenter added, “But even during the preview stage I knew something was wrong because I had this sixteen year old ask me what happened at the end – which one of them was the Thing? I told her she had to use her imagination. She told me she hated that. So I realized I was in deep trouble with that film. And I was right. The industry turned against me because they thought I had gone too far with the gore. I think it probably changed my career. I had made a deal during the filming of The Thing to make another film for Universal called Firestarter, a Stephen King novel. A friend of mine, Bill Phillips, had written a great screenplay and we already were scouting locations. Universal was so upset and so shocked by the reviews and the fact that The Thing had not made the kind of money they expected. I lost the directing job on Firestarter, even though they had to pay me my salary. I was in shock. I didn’t work for eight or nine months. I didn’t have anything. I thought my career was going to end.”

Hit by the hostile reaction and the film’s dismal $13 million take at the box office in the U.S., Carpenter’s career never made a full recovery. Looking back 17 years later, the director recalled, “My reaction, I was pretty stunned by it at the time because I made a really grueling, dark film and I just don’t think audiences in 1982 wanted to see that. They wanted to see E.T. And The Thing was the opposite of that. The thing that disturbed me about it was that the fans turned out hating it so much. There was a famous magazine back then called Cinemafantastique which was loved and hated by various directors and they had a cover with a story that said ‘Is this the most hated film of all time?’ which didn’t do a lot to assuage my ego, but I’m very proud of the movie. I’ve always loved it.”

Joining Carpenter in 1995 to record an audio commentary for the film’s release on laserdisc, Kurt Russell remarked, “There are some movies that you do – I’ve done more I guess than my fair share of them – and I do think that, you know, maybe that I sort of have to look at that and realize something; that I have a tendency to like movies that perhaps aren’t going to be accepted at the time and – if they’re done well though – they will be accepted later on. And I think that with the advent of video, that’s a great, I’m very happy about that because ultimately you’re making movies for the enjoyment of as many people as possible. And I like that there’s video and that people can take it and make their judgment later on and perhaps without the politics of the time or without whatever’s in the air at the time to set a tone to get in the way of just the project and just the story itself.”

Should I Care?
With Conan the Barbarian and Poltergeist both selling popcorn the same month The Thing was unleashed in theaters, only someone with selective memory would suggest that gore or visceral intensity were somehow responsible for its box office failure. But just as The Thing From Another World would still be a terrific movie without the monster, you could cut the violence out of John Carpenter’s remake and still find – with its unremittingly stark chords and pulsating doomsday pace – one dark fucking movie audiences just weren’t in the mood for at the time. It refuses to trump good over evil, clarity over ambiguity, and that becomes what is most troubling about it, as well as special. Now regarded as a masterpiece by many of the fans who rejected this dose of strong medicine on its original release, The Thing remains a masterwork of technical acuity, pioneering makeup effects and most of all story, which probes what it means to be human, and whether or not you’d even realize you were an imitation if the Thing took you over.

The apocalyptic vision of The Thing has grabbed hold of me and as the years pass, refuses to let go. The gothic lighting by cinematographer Dean Cundey, rich production design by John Lloyd and the ominous musical score by Ennio Morricone are all just perfect. The fact that the makeup effects still hold up as some of the most amazing ever captured on camera is a testament to Rob Bottin; without his imagination, the movie would not be nearly as nightmarish as it turned out to be. As for John Carpenter, this represents the director at the peak of his creative energy. While his career may have taken a different turn had the movie gone over well, The Thing has inspired directors Robert Rodriguez, Frank Darabont, Neil Marshall and others with its unmistakable tenor of doom and relentlessness. It’s still schooling the horror moviemakers of today.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
The Thing – Collector’s Edition. Universal Home Video (1998)

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

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)