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JANUARY 31, 2008 |
VOLUME
2, NUMBER 2 |
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The 3rd annual Reel Teal Film Festival is
back! Hosted by Flicker Film Society (the only official film club at UNCW)
and the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. We are still accepting
films for this year’s festival event. We have received films of all kinds
from all over the country. Last year's event was very successful, packing the
Lumina theater at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington with
hundreds of people. If you would like to enter your film in Reel Teal Film
Festival, visit www.flickerfilm.org
and download the entry form. The entry fee is only $5.00 if you enter before
March 1st. After March 1st the Entry fee goes to $10, the final deadline is
March 31st. All entry fees will go towards the cash prizes for 1st, 2nd, and
3rd place and pay for other event expenses. The MORE entries received, the
bigger the CASH PRIZES. Don't wait till the last minute, if you're a
filmmaker go ahead and enter REEL TEAL FILM FESTIVAL 2008! If you're not a
filmmaker, then still come to festival events this year. We will be having
workshops and more on the 17th and the main festival event on the 18th! Keep
checking www.flickerfilm.org for
updates. Thanks- Flicker Film Society ===================================================================
The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival is
seeking volunteers for our 11th year. The festival will be April 3rd to 6th
in downtown Durham, NC. If you are interested in helping out this year, go to
http://www.fullframefest.org/involved/volunteers.php
to learn more and fill out an online application. There are many positions
this year, from ticketing to technical, driving to outreach. Team
descriptions can be found at http://www.fullframefest.org/involved/volunteers_teams.php.
Volunteer positions fill quickly, so please sign up soon. The volunteer
application deadline is February 29th.
Founded in 1998, the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival celebrates the
power and artistry of documentary film. Recognized as the premier documentary
film festival in the United States by both The New York Times and indieWIRE,
Full Frame is an important arena for documentary filmmakers — a place where
they can showcase their work theatrically in an environment that stimulates
conversation and community between filmmakers, industry executives and the
general public. Indy
Rides Again!
by Jim Windolf February 2008 When we last saw him, nearly 19 years ago,
everybody’s favorite archaeologist was literally riding off into the sunset
after having found the Holy Grail. This seemed as though it had to be the end
of the adventure series that had gotten its start with Raiders of the Lost
Ark, the big summertime blockbuster of 1981. But then, on the morning of June
18, 2007, Steven Spielberg, the director of the Indiana Jones movies, and George
Lucas, who came up with the idea for the franchise, found themselves facing
cast and crew on an empty piece of land in Deming, New Mexico. “How time
flies,” Spielberg said, raising a flute of champagne, in a moment captured on
video, which ended up on YouTube. “No one’s changed, we all look the same. I
just want to say: Break a leg, have a good shoot, do your best work, and
here’s looking at you, kids.” Before the day was out, the temperature had
reached 97 degrees. Probably no one felt the heat more than the star,
Harrison Ford, who, at age 65, was back in his distinctive costume. “It’s a
very bizarre costume, when you think about it,” Ford says. “It’s this guy
sporting a whip, who’s off usually for someplace really hot in his leather
jacket.” He says he got right back into the role once he suited up. “There’s
something about the character that I guess is a good fit for me, because the
minute I put the costume on, I recognize the tone that we need, and I feel
confident and clear about the character.” After 79 first-unit filming days, Indiana
Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was a wrap. Like the earlier
movies, it is a Lucasfilm Ltd. production distributed by Paramount Pictures.
Aside from the New Mexico location, the film was shot in New Haven,
Connecticut; Fresno, California; and Hawaii, with significant work taking
place on lots built at Downey Studios, in southeast Los Angeles. On May 22, the movie will hit approximately
4,000 U.S. theaters. The story is set in 1957, and this time Dr. Jones goes
up against cold- blooded, Cold War Russkies—led by Cate Blanchett in
dominatrix mode—instead of the Nazis he squashed like bugs in previous
installments. Making a return alongside Ford is Karen Allen, as Marion
Ravenwood, Indy’s pugnacious true love, last seen in the first film (since
retitled, rather inelegantly, Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark).
Rising star Shia LaBeouf joins the cast in a role that no one connected with
the film will confirm is the love child of Indy and Marion.
Once the final cut is locked, it will be
dubbed into some 25 languages for an ambitious international release. The
masses—lately thrilling to the lethally blank Jason Bourne, the totally
out-to-lunch Jack Sparrow, and that earnest wand waver Harry Potter—will be
asked once more to embrace a fedora- wearing hero of the 1980s with roots in
the jungle serials of the 1930s. It’s not a bad bet. Lucas, 63, and
Spielberg, 61, have made 13 of the all-time 100 highest-grossing movies, in
terms of worldwide box office, either separately or as a producer-director
duo. They are big-time spellbinders in a league with P. T. Barnum, Walt
Disney, and the Wizard of Oz. The Indiana Jones series alone has grossed more
than $1.18 billion worldwide—and that’s before you add in the comic books,
young-adult novels, and figurines. But once upon a time, in the faraway 1960s,
Lucas and Spielberg were upstarts banging at the palace doors. Hollywood was
run by men who were the age they are now, tough guys who weren’t going to
give way without a fight. At age 18, Spielberg sneaked away from the tram
route of the Universal Pictures tour and stepped onto a soundstage. He was a
movie- crazed kid who had already made a full-length feature, Firelight, an
8-mm. sci-fi extravaganza starring his sisters, and he wanted in. The next day he showed up on the lot wearing
a suit, his dad’s briefcase in hand. It was a disguise good enough to get him
past the guards. He settled into an empty office and “worked” at Universal
all through that summer of 1965, making himself known to the cinematographers
and directors, creating for himself an unofficial, on-the-fly internship.
While attending California State University, Long Beach, Spielberg continued
to visit the lot. On weekends he shot a 23-minute 35-mm. movie about two
young hitchhikers, called Amblin’. He won a real job on the strength of it,
as a director in Universal’s television wing. So there he was, a boy wonder
among grizzled veterans, turning out episodes of Night Gallery, Columbo, and
Marcus Welby, M.D., honing the craft he would put to use in a career spanning
everything from The Sugarland Express (1974) to Munich (2005).
Lucas was more of an accidental filmmaker.
As a skinny diabetic kid growing up in the dusty Northern California town of
Modesto, he wanted to be a racecar driver—in those days driving fast and
fixing cars were his chief talents—but his dream died soon before his high-
school graduation, when he flipped over in his own Fiat Bianchina. The wreck
almost killed him. After two years of community college, he applied to the
University of Southern California’s film school. He moved downstate against
the wishes of his strict father (who considered the film industry vile), and
soon made a name for himself with a series of prizewinning experimental
shorts. His U.S.C. films earned him a paid Warner Bros. internship that led
him to the set of Finian’s Rainbow, a musical being shot by just about the only
young director back then, 28-year-old Francis Ford Coppola, who pushed Lucas
to learn how to write scripts and create accessible movies. Lucas went on to
do just that on a grand scale, and he pulled it off largely outside the
system. With his considerable winnings he built Lucasfilm, his very own,
leaner version of Hollywood, now based in San Francisco’s Presidio and on a
large property in rural Marin County. In 1967, Spielberg had seen a Lucas short,
Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB, at a student film festival held at
U.C.L.A.’s Royce Hall. “I met George backstage,” Spielberg recalls. “I was
blown away by his short film, and Francis Coppola introduced us.” They met
again in the early 1970s, when Lucas was in L.A. to cast his second feature,
American Graffiti. A gang of young cinéastes was gathering at a Benedict
Canyon hovel that had been Lucas’s home in his U.S.C. days, and where he was
staying again while in town. Among the group was Spielberg, who was working
on his script for The Sugarland Express. “I’d come in at night after casting
all day,” Lucas says, “and that’s when we became friends.” As the decade
rolled along, blockbusters by Spielberg (Jaws) and Lucas (Star Wars—now
called Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope) changed the industry.
Lucas left Los Angeles the day Star Wars
opened in 1977 to hide out at Hawaii’s Mauna Kea resort, on the Big Island.
Spielberg soon joined him, and they talked over their plans. “I told him that
I wanted to, for the second time, approach [film producer] Cubby Broccoli,
who had turned me down the first time, to see if he would change his mind and
hire me to do a James Bond movie,” Spielberg says. “And George said, ‘I’ve
got something better than that. It’s called Raiders of the Lost Ark.’ He
pitched me the story, and I committed on the beach.” Lucas had first conjured the bullwhip-happy
archaeologist in the early 1970s, when he was living on almost nothing in
Mill Valley, north of San Francisco. It was right around the time he dreamed
up Star Wars and was honing the American Graffiti idea. “I have a tendency,
when I’m working on one thing, to doodle around and work on other things, to avoid
what I’m doing,” he says. Just prior to that, he had been working, with
brawny writer-director John Milius, on a script for Apocalypse Now (which
Lucas was going to direct, before the project wound up in Coppola’s hands).
“We started to prepare it,” Lucas recalls, “and there was no studio that
would go near it. The army wouldn’t cooperate at all. It was kind of a
hopeless exercise.” That’s when he had a vision of Indiana Smith
(as he originally named him). Here was a film hero who might be able to bring
back the cheesy excitement of the 1930s-vintage Republic Pictures serials
Lucas had seen on TV as a kid. “Saturday matinee serial—that was the initial
thought,” he says. With a little more care, better production values, and a
dash of irony, this type of thing could be transformed into something of
interest for a 1980s audience. Loaded with comedy and hairsbreadth escapes,
Raiders of the Lost Ark was the highest-grossing film of 1981. Ford, who had
played the cocksure, cynical Han Solo in Star Wars, made a perfect professor
of archaeology who’s not so mild-mannered when he goes off campus. The movie
spawned two sequels: the dark, over-the-top Indiana Jones and the Temple of
Doom (1984), made while Lucas was going through a painful divorce, and the
more tender and slapstick father-son picture, Indiana Jones and the Last
Crusade (1989), in which Indy wins the respect of his dad, a withholding
grump played by Sean Connery. But it wasn’t quite the last crusade. From
1992 to 1996, Lucas supervised The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, a TV
series which ran first on ABC, then on the USA Network, and won 10 Emmys.
While filming a 1993 episode in which Ford made a cameo appearance, Lucas
happened on something that gave him the idea for a fourth movie installment. He
mentioned it to the actor, who wasn’t too impressed. Lucas later told
Spielberg about his new concept, only to find that the director wasn’t so hot
on the idea, either, although generally warm to the notion of a fourth film. But Lucas was adamant. It was this idea or
nothing.
Tucked into a corner of the Universal
Studios lot is a cluster of two-story, Southwestern-style buildings. This is
the Amblin Entertainment production house, the place where Spielberg works
when he’s not shooting a movie. The little campus is populated with union
carpenters, development girls in funky hats, and nervous Hollywood courtiers
who wait their turns in a clay- tiled foyer. When Spielberg meets you in his
homey conference room, he looks you in the eye and asks interested questions.
He’s affable, cheerful, engaged—“present,” in L.A. parlance. It’s easy to
picture him running a sane, happy movie set. At the time of our interview,
he’s between sessions of editing the new Indy. “I’m in my second cut, which means I’ve put
the movie together and I’ve seen it,” he says. “I usually do about five cuts
as a director. The best news is that, when I saw the movie myself the first
time, there was nothing I wanted to go back and shoot, nothing I wanted to
reshoot, and nothing I wanted to add.” My glance strays to a side table, where
headshots of actors under consideration for his likely next directing
project, Chicago 7—about the conspiracy trial that grew out of protests at
the 1968 Democratic convention—lie on the surface. Among them I spy Will
Smith, Taye Diggs, Adam Arkin, and Kevin Spacey; Sacha Baron Cohen (as Abbie
Hoffman) and Philip Seymour Hoffman (as William Kunstler) are also linked to
the project, which has a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin. (It should be noted here
that Chicago 7 will be partly based on Chicago 10, a new documentary produced
by Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair’s editor, and Brett Morgen, the film’s director.)
After Chicago 7, Spielberg will probably go on to direct Lincoln, with Liam
Neeson in the title role. A lot has changed since the last Indiana
Jones movie. For one thing, Spielberg, known in the 70s and early 80s as a
director of hugely popular but lightweight pictures, brought his famously
fluid camerawork to the darker Schindler’s List (1993), Amistad (1997), and
Saving Private Ryan (1998). With Artificial Intelligence: A.I. (2001),
Minority Report (2002), and War of the Worlds (2005), he made science fiction
that hit harder than E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) or Close Encounters
of the Third Kind (1977). At the same time, action movies went through a
major evolution. A bald monk flew. So did Keanu. Jackie Chan chopped necks
while moving like Astaire. Travolta wiped blood off a windshield. Spidey
killed baddies between bouts of emo-boy angst. Batman got the Christian Bale
treatment (thin, dark, intense), and a computer-generated Yoda battled
Palpatine. Jason Bourne crunched the bones of his pursuers in films that came
out great despite looking as if they had been edited in a Cuisinart. In this
atmosphere, can Indy compete?
Rather than update the franchise to match
current styles, Lucas and Spielberg decided to stay true to the prior films’
look, tone, and pace. During pre-production, Spielberg watched the first
three Indiana Jones movies at an Amblin screening room with Janusz Kaminski,
who has shot the director’s last 10 films. He replaces Douglas Slocombe, who
shot the first three Indy movies (and is now retired at age 94), as the man
mainly responsible for the film’s look. “I needed to show them to Janusz,”
Spielberg says, “because I didn’t want Janusz to modernize and bring us into
the 21st century. I still wanted the film to have a lighting style not
dissimilar to the work Doug Slocombe had achieved, which meant that both
Janusz and I had to swallow our pride. Janusz had to approximate another
cinematographer’s look, and I had to approximate this younger director’s look
that I thought I had moved away from after almost two decades.” Spielberg promises no tricky editing for the
new one, saying, “I go for geography. I want the audience to know not only
which side the good guy’s on and the bad guy’s on, but which side of the
screen they’re in, and I want the audience to be able to edit as quickly as
they want in a shot that I am loath to cut away from. And that’s been my
style with all four of these Indiana Jones pictures. Quick-cutting is very
effective in some movies, like the Bourne pictures, but you sacrifice
geography when you go for quick- cutting. Which is fine, because audiences
get a huge adrenaline rush from a cut every second and a half on The Bourne
Ultimatum, and there’s just enough geography for the audience never to be
lost, especially in the last Bourne film, which I thought was the best of the
three. But, by the same token, Indy is a little more old-fashioned than the
modern-day action adventure.” The script, Spielberg says, can provide the
blockbuster pace. “Part of the speed is the story,” he says. “If you build a
fast engine, you don’t need fast cutting, because the story’s being told
fluidly, and the pages are just turning very quickly. You first of all need a
script that’s written in the express lane, and if it’s not, there’s nothing
you can do in the editing room to make it move faster. You need room for
character, you need room for relationships, for personal conflict, you need
room for comedy, but that all has to happen on a moving sidewalk.” When it came to the actual shoot, Spielberg
reports, he and his star were able to get their Indy legs back a day or two
into filming. “I mean, we’re both older,” he says, “and we both look a bit
older, I think, certainly, but at the same time Harrison needed to recapture
the caustic, laconic spirit of Dr. Jones, and certainly he was going to have
to manage the action, and he did both of those things amazingly well,
certainly far beyond what I expected.” In a separate interview, Ford says he was
just glad to come through filming unscathed. “In the first one, I tore the
A.C.L. in my left leg,” he says, “and then, in the second one, I ended up
with a bad back injury and had to have surgery in the middle of filming. But
in this one, I was pretty much uninjured.” That’s not an easy feat,
especially since Ford was doing many of his own stunts, and part of Indy’s
appeal is his tendency to get the crap beaten out of him. “I always wanted to
make sure the audience understood the pain,” Ford says, “so that they could
participate and enjoy the triumph. That was always a very big part of my
ambition for the character, to allow the audience to see his fear, allow the
audience to have a chance to see him work his way through the problem, not to
be one of those characters that you know is going to succeed. I guess you
know that Indiana Jones is finally going to succeed, but I think you don’t
know how many bumps he’s going to take before it happens.” While Spielberg feels at home in Hollywood,
Lucas is more of a loner. Because of his distaste for L.A., his suspicion of
its guilds and executives, he works 400 miles to the north, on his 4,000-acre
Skywalker Ranch, where olive trees grow in neat lines atop a ridge and
grapevines cover hillsides. The main house, an idealized version of an
American family home circa 1930, stands off by itself. Lucas occupies an
upstairs corner office, which has the feeling of a master bedroom but with a
large desk taking the place of a bed.
At nine a.m. he is holding a can of Diet
Coke. He looks like an undersize bear. When he starts talking about Indiana
Jones, a character he acknowledges is not dissimilar to Han Solo, his
enthusiasm rises, breaking through his natural reserve. “It’s a classic movie
archetype,” he says. “Clark Gable played that role forever, the same role,
which is the freelance cynic who eventually comes around, whether he’s a
newspaper reporter or a pirate. Humphrey Bogart would play it with a little
bit more of an edge. Harrison plays that part really well and can play it
with a certain amount of humor, which makes it really charming. And the idea
originally for both Han Solo and Indiana Jones is he’s in over his head all the
time and kind of treading water. In Solo, he’s got a lot more bravado and
he’s actually better at what he does. He can actually handle it. Indiana
Jones gets in over his head and he can’t handle it. It’s only by sheer,
last-second skill, or luck, or whatever, that he actually gets himself out of
it. You can’t create a character like that without knowing that someone like
Harrison can have the right, befuddled, oh-my-God-I’m-gonna-die look. And
you’re right there with him. He’s Everyman. He’s us. ‘That’s exactly what I
would look like if I were in that situation.’ And it’s an honest look. It’s
not contrived. A lot of those guys now try to copy that, the better- looking
movie-star types who try to do it. In the end, Harrison is a movie star
because he’s a character actor. He is like Clark Gable, who was also a
character actor, and Humphrey Bogart, who was a character actor. Those people
were not Adonis, superhero guys. But that’s why they’re so endearing. That’s
why everybody loves them. That’s why they’re so much fun to watch on-screen,
because they’re vulnerable.” The Bourne movies, the last two of which
were directed by United 93 virtuoso Paul Greengrass, have made an impression
on Lucas also. The series seems to have become the new action-movie gold standard,
or at least a widely admired point of reference in filmmaking circles. Lucas
says he appreciates the Bourne movies for their relative believability. “The
thing about Bourne,” Lucas says, “I would put that on the credible side,
because he’s trained in martial arts and all that kind of stuff, and we know
that people in martial arts, even little old ladies, can break somebody’s
leg. So you kind of say, O.K., that’s possible. But when you get to the next
level, whether it’s Tomb Raider or the Die Hard series, where you’ve got one
guy with one pistol going up against 50 guys with machine guns, or he jumps
in a jet and starts chasing a car down a freeway, you say, I’m not sure I can
really buy this. Mission: Impossible’s like that. They do things where you could
not survive in the real world. In Indiana Jones, we stay just this side of
it.” The first building block of any Indiana
Jones movie, according to Lucas, is something called the MacGuffin. The term,
popularized by Alfred Hitchcock, refers to an object or goal that kicks the
story into action and drives it to the third act. Hitchcock held that the
less specific the MacGuffin the better. In his 1959 suspense classic, North
by Northwest, the men chasing Cary Grant are after microfilm containing
“government secrets”—that’s all the audience learns about why the film’s
villains cause the hero so much trouble—and Hitchcock considered that to be a
perfect MacGuffin, because it was so wonderfully vague. While Lucas agrees
with his predecessor on the importance of the MacGuffin, his conception of
the device differs significantly from Hitchcock’s. Rather than seeing it as a
gimmick with the function of getting things rolling, Lucas believes that the
MacGuffin should be powerful and that the audience should care about it
almost as much as the dueling heroes and villains on-screen.
He feels he had an excellent one in Raiders
of the Lost Ark. The much- sought-after Ark of the Covenant not only held the
Ten Commandments but also functioned as “a radio to God” and possessed enough
Old Testament power to smite those who looked on its treasures. If the Nazis
were to gain control of it, instead of good old Indy, well, you can imagine
the consequences. But a first-rate MacGuffin is hard to find, and Lucas says
he was not completely satisfied with those he had for Indiana Jones and the
Temple of Doom (the sacred Shankara Stones, which, for reasons no audience
can keep straight, must be retrieved in order to save kidnapped village
children from an Indian death cult) and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
(the life-giving Holy Grail, which comes in handy when Indy’s dad is dying). “I’m the one that has to come up with the
story, and the MacGuffin, the supernatural object that everyone’s going after
… ” Lucas’s voice trails off. He is seated in a favorite chair, its cushions
lumpy and dented. “The Ark of the Covenant was perfect. The Shankara Stones
were way too esoteric. The Holy Grail was sort of feeble—but, at the same
time, we put the father in there to cover for it. I mean, the whole reason it
became a dad movie was because I was scared to hell that there wasn’t enough
power behind the Holy Grail to carry a movie. So we kept pushing to have it
function on some level—and to make it function for a father and a son. To make
it that kind of a movie was the big risk and the big challenge, but also the
thing that pulled it out of the fire. So, at the end of it, I was like, No
more of these, baby. We’re done. I can’t think of anything else. We barely
got by on the last one! “At that point I had kind of retired,” he
continues. “I was raising my kids, I was running my companies. The last thing
I wanted to do was go off and do another one of these things. And it stayed
there for quite a while, until I was doing Young Indiana Jones, and I was
actually with Harrison, shooting a little piece for it, and I was up in
Wyoming, where he lives, and I came up with this MacGuffin, which was sitting
there right in front of me, and I said, ‘Well, why didn’t I ever see this
before?’ ” When Ford and Spielberg both rejected the
idea, Lucas dug in. He hired screenwriter after screenwriter to make his
MacGuffin the linchpin of a new Indy story. “So this went on for 15 years,”
he says. “And finally we got to a point where everybody said, ‘Look, we’re
not doing that movie.’ And I said, ‘Well, look, I can’t think of another
MacGuffin. This is it. This works. I know this works.’ And then we stopped. I
just said, ‘O.K.,’ and that’s about the time I started Star Wars again. But
then Harrison was kind of interested. And I said, ‘I won’t do it unless we
can have that MacGuffin. Without the MacGuffin, I will not go near this
thing.’ ” Ford can laugh about Lucas’s obstinacy now.
“He’s a stubborn sucker,” the actor says, “and he had an idea that he kept pushing
into script form, and then they’d run it by me, and I’d usually rebel, and,
finally, you know, one script came along that really struck me as being
smart, not working too hard to give reference to the other films, but that
carried on the stories we had told so far in a logical way. The character was
allowed to age, and we found ourselves in a different period of time, and
what I read was a great script, so I said, ‘Let’s go, let’s make this one.’ ” The eventual shooting script bore the name
David Koepp, a writer-director whose screenplay credits include War of the
Worlds, Spider- Man, and the first two Jurassic Park movies, which were
directed by Spielberg and leaned heavily on Lucas’s Industrial Light &
Magic special-effects shop. An earlier pass, which Spielberg loved and Lucas
didn’t, was written by Frank Darabont, the writer-director of The Shawshank
Redemption, The Green Mile, and The Mist. I ask Lucas if each version had
made use of the prize MacGuffin. “Mmm-hmmm,” he says. “They’re all the same.”
And then (spoiler warning) Lucas gets a
little more (spoiler alert) specific: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the
Crystal Skull will apparently nudge our hero away from his usual milieu of
spooky archaeology and into the realm of (spoiler Code Red) science fiction.
“What it is that made it perfect was the fact that the MacGuffin I wanted to
use and the idea that Harrison would be 20 years older would fit,” Lucas
says. “So that put it in the mid-50s, and the MacGuffin I was looking at was
perfect for the mid-50s. I looked around and I said, ‘Well, maybe we
shouldn’t do a 30s serial, because now we’re in the 50s. What is the same
kind of cheesy-entertainment action movie, what was the secret B movie, of
the 50s?’ So instead of doing a 30s Republic serial, we’re doing a B
science-fiction movie from the 50s. The ones I’m talking about are, like, The
Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Blob, The Thing. So by putting it in that
context, it gave me a way of approaching the whole thing.”
As New Age devotees already know, fossilized
skulls made of quartz crystal actually do exist. But are they truly, as those
who believe in their powers claim, pre-Columbian objects of Mayan or Aztecan
origin? And do they really harbor supernatural properties, like the “skull of
doom,” supposedly dug up by early-20th-century archaeologist F. A.
Mitchell-Hedges? This is a matter of some dispute, right up there with the
existence of Big Foot or Atlantis. In the world of Indiana Jones, however, as
with the Holy Grail and the Ark, one goes with the legend. Crystal skulls have already appeared in four
Indiana Jones young-adult novels and as part of an Indiana Jones ride at
Tokyo’s DisneySea theme park. In an episode of the TV series Stargate SG-1,
they had alien origin. In Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,
it would seem, based on the above hints, that here, too, the crystal skulls
are somehow tied into things, or beings, not of this world. What Lucas
says—and he won’t say more—seems to support earlier Internet speculation that
the scenes filmed in New Mexico may be set at Area 51, the Nevada military
base which, according to conspiracy buffs and the creators of The X-Files,
has been the site of U.F.O. and alien research. No one outside of the filmmakers will know
for sure until May 22, but it would be pretty cool if it turns out that
Emperor Palpatine had dropped a crystal skull on Earth. Or maybe one was left
behind by the skinny dudes from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Or maybe
it’s, like, E.T.’s cell phone. :) Whatever, Lucas is convinced he won’t please
everyone. “I know the critics are going to hate it,” he says. “They already hate
it. So there’s nothing we can do about that. They hate the idea that we’re
making another one. They’ve already made up their minds.” At least the legions of Indy geeks will be
pleased, right? “The fans are all upset,” Lucas says. “They’re
always going to be upset. ‘Why did he do it like this? And why didn’t he do
it like this?’ They write their own movie, and then, if you don’t do their
movie, they get upset about it. So you just have to stand by for the bricks
and the custard pies, because they’re going to come flying your way.” Spielberg and Lucas both have Norman
Rockwell originals hanging in their workplaces, among them The Peach Crop
(Lucas) and a sketch of Triple Self-Portrait (Spielberg). That affinity makes
sense. Rockwell, the popular American artist, was loved in his own time by
millions of Saturday Evening Post readers and dismissed by serious critics.
But in 1999, 21 years after the artist’s death, New Yorker art critic Peter
Schjeldahl was quoted thus in ArtNews: “Rockwell is terrific. It’s become too
tedious to pretend he isn’t.” Collectors too are taking notice: a Rockwell
canvas, Breaking Home Ties, sold for $15.4 million at a 2006 Sotheby’s
auction. Spielberg and Lucas, similarly, have been
slammed. Like Rockwell, they take everyday moments and blow them up into the
stuff of myth. Also, as with Rockwell, it looks like their reputations will
only rise. If you check out the American Film Institute’s 2007 list of the
all-time 100 greatest American movies, you’ll see Spielberg represented with
Schindler’s List (No. 8), E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (No. 24), Jaws (No.
56), and Saving Private Ryan (No. 71), and Lucas making the grade with Star
Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope (No. 13) and American Graffiti (No. 62). The
first movie to combine their sensibilities, Indiana Jones and the Raiders of
the Lost Ark, checks in at No. 66. Movie-lovers can argue, but there it is: a
reasonable take on the American films that will make posterity’s cut.
Although Lucas is sometimes accused of
forcing actors to mouth wooden dialogue between the fantastic bouts of action
that fill his movie’s frames, he certainly has a penchant for populating his
huge stories with domineering fathers, virtuous mothers who die, the most
villainous villains imaginable, and naïve heroes who are not quite equipped
to win the day. Neither he nor Spielberg is sly or subtle, and neither one
shies away from the big moment—a necessary quality in making blockbusters. Ford, who has a closer working relationship
with both men than probably any other actor, has special insight into how
they do it: “First of all, they both have incredible chops as directors,” he
says. “They both are wonderfully capable film directors, and I think they
have an ambition to communicate their ideas. Strange as it seems, that’s not
always the case with directors. I think it derives from a kind of empathy and
an understanding of how the world works and how people behave. And I think
they also understand the culture so well that they are able to satisfy their
own ambitions for a film and at the same time include the audience in the
process. Neither of them is ashamed of making audience films.” The Indy series has succeeded, Lucas
believes, largely because of its reliance on well-made stories. “There’s a
difference between throwing a puppy on a freeway and watching what happens
and constructing a story,” he says. “You don’t just put your main character
in jeopardy and then that becomes entertainment. That’s why so many people
have failed at this. Even though they may make some money, it doesn’t get to
the level that the Indiana Jones films do. They’re a lot more complex than
that. They’re like little watches that have a lot of pieces in them.” And if
you don’t like the key piece at the center of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom
of the Crystal Skull—the MacGuffin—you’ll know who to blame. Jim Windolf is a Vanity Fair contributing
editor. __________________________________________________________________________ Talent
Agency in Cary!
(just
in case you didn’t know)
monalisatalent.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ To Cut Costs, NBC Universal Ends Pilots Networks like NBC have long relied on
big-budget pilot episodes of television series in an effort to attract
advertiser support for the rest of the season. But Mr. Zucker said the
pilots, the first episode of a show and whose production cost has shot up to
$7 million for an hour from about $3 million three years ago, were a poor
indicator of the future success of a series and many never move beyond the
pilot stage. "So you’re spending money on programs you’re not going to
get," Mr. Zucker said. He said NBC might still commission "one or
two" pilots a season, but would not do so as a matter of course.
Other networks are making similar
calculations. A senior executive at one of NBC’s competitors said Tuesday
that "we will definitely do fewer pilots than we have before." This
executive, who asked not to be identified because the network has yet to make
its plans public, added that it had cut the number of scripts ordered for
next season in half. Mr. Zucker was in London during a stop on
the way to the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. He
addressed NBC Universal’s 16,000 worldwide employees in a "town
hall" videoconference - the first time, he said, that the company had
conducted such a meeting from London. NBC Universal, which is 80 percent owned by
General Electric, with 20 percent held by Vivendi of France, has been trying
to build up its international arm, with Mr. Zucker setting a goal of
increasing its revenue from outside the United States to $5 billion in 2010
from $2.8 billion in 2006. The company also said Tuesday that it had agreed
to purchase a 26 percent stake in a unit of New Delhi Television of India
that owns several ******************************************************************
CAN YOU ALL SPREAD
THE WORD!!!! HIS CLASS IS AMAZING!!!! J.D. LEWIS AND THE ACTOR'S LAB HAVE OPENED AN OFFICE IN
CHARLOTTE. STUDY WITH ONE OF HOLLYWOOD'S TOP ACTING COACHES. CLASSES
ARE SCENE STUDY AND COLD READING. STUDENTS ARE ALSO PUT ON A BUSINESS PLAN. WHEN YOU ARE READY TO STUDY WITH A PRO, A CELEBRATED ACTING
TEACHER AND DIRECTOR... CALL FOR INTERVIEW (704) 372-7080 __________________________________________________________________________ Sundance
Reviews
By Mike
Willden THE FILMS: Frozen River written
& directed by Courtney Hunt Courtney Hunt's debut is an emotional tense
and excellently portrayed story about two lonely women who in desperate
states begin dangerously smuggling illegal immigrants from Canada into
America. This is a perfect example of a shoestring budgeted debut that hits
all the right chords and packs one hell of a punch with its subtlety. Melissa Leo's portrayal of poverty ridden
Ray is the highlight of the film. Ray is covered in tattoos and looks like an
ex biker mamma who's marriage to a gambling addict has turned her hard, yet
her love for her sons is truly evident even in dire circumstances. With her
dream home (a doublewide trailer) on the way and no money to pay for it, she
becomes desperate for a way to make ends meet and raise her two sons all
alone. On a search for her husband who has abandoned the family a few days
before Christmas, she finds his car at a gambling parlor on the Mohawk Indian
reservation between New York and Canada. She meets Lila, a widowed Native
American struggling to cope with the death of her husband as well as the loss
of her son to her mother-in-law.
Director Courtney Hunt accepts the Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic
for her film 'Frozen River' at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah,
on Saturday, Jan. 26, 2008. (AP Photo/Amy Sancetta) What starts as a feud and gunfire between
the two ends up with their quest to smuggle Illegal Immigrants into America
from Canada over a frozen river. Based of real accounts with a cast of mostly
unknowns or little know actors the lush and desolate images of the iced over
river and frozen New York country side paints a picture of despair which
matches the 2 leads emotional states perfectly. Wonderfully written and
carefully executed the film allows it is open spaces and tight directing to
open a place in our hearts for these hardened women and their stories. I was
so engulfed in their struggles that I was brought to tears and distress
myself watching these women risk their lives to provide for themselves. One
sequence particular with a baby left on the ice had me at the edge of my
seat, fearing the worst. Their decisions sometimes are rash and not very
smart, yet understandable given their circumstances. It is films like this
that make Sundance what it is today, the premiere venue for strong,
emotional, and important independent cinema. Roman Polanski: Wanted and
Desired directed by Marina Zenovich This documentary about the trial and
conviction of unlawful sex with a minor committed by famed director Roman
Polanski gives a fascinating history lesson as well as a lesson on the power
of the media and press to tamper with the judicial system. Wanted and Desired
is portrayed with fascinating archival footage of the trial interwoven with
clips from Polanski's films and tell all interviews with all the key figures
involved. As it touches on the key events of Polanski's life that led up to
the crime, as well as the trial itself, we are able to sympathize with
Polanski, yet not condone his actions. The facts are simple; he seduced a
13-year-old girl to have sex with him after a photo shoot while drinking wine
and taking painkillers. Was it wrong, of course it was, yet after the brutal
murder of his wife and unborn child by the Manson family and his European
upbringing (which does not look at sex with minors as harshly as we do here
in America) we are able to see the crime from his perspective, even if we do not
agree with it. The most fascinating part of the film is the
controversy behind the scenes of the over sensationalized trial. We have a
Hollywood loving, press hogging judge who for image sake taints the judicial
system, as we know it. From interviews by both the Prosecutor and Defense
Attorney, we learn that the Judge went as far as scripting out arguments
between the lawyers and even asking for advice on Polanski's sentence from
friends and reporters. After psychiatric test come back requesting parole, and
even the victim and her mother requesting no jail time, a bizarre sentence
was given, and served. However, after being released from chino after 42 days
of a 90-day prison stay for more psychiatric evaluations, the Judge continues
to make unethical decisions concerning the case. Pressured by the media which
has pegged Polanski as a member of the occult (going as far as reporting he
had a part in his wife's murder) and his own image continues to go after
Polanski personally, after the prosecution has even requested time served as
enough. With more threats of jail time and continuing humiliation, Polanski
flees to Paris never to be seen in America again.
Well portrayed, even if at times it tends to
be a bit too favorable towards Polanski, Wanted and Desired leaves a harsh
indictment on the judicial system and Hollywood press. Whether you are
disgusted by his crime or not, there is no denying the mistreatment of Roman
Polanski's right to a fair trial. The Recruiter (formerly
titled An American Soldier) directed by Edet Belzberg Sergeant, First Class Clay Usie, is one of
the most successful recruiters in the history of the U.S. Army. He goes to
schools, sporting events, and parades searching "to fill the foxholes in
Iraq." Belzberg follows him and four of his recruits over a year and a
half on a quest to allow the soldiers to tell their story without bias or
agenda. It is actually quite refreshing to find a documentary about the
soldiers and military in America during the war in Iraq that has no political
motives. As Belzberg stays neutral, she allows for us as viewers to come to
our own conclusions based solely on the words and actions of the subjects. At times, the film loses focus and does
meander from subject to subject, yet it is captivating in its honesty. Some
truths are shocking, for example, Army recruiters during weekly evaluations
refer to their recruits as sales, and admit to using sales tactics to win
over the youth of America who are targeted as sales leads, and easily sold.
Yet there is no question the recruiters, especially Sergeant Usie, care about
the Army, and in their own ways love and respect each of their recruits, as
they become part of what they believe to be a powerful and unified group, The
United States Army.
The tactics and training procedures, which
can be cruel and inhumane, is no fault of the recruiters themselves who are
just passionate about their cause and following orders from the governing
military. If there is one fluently agreed upon theme from the film, it is
that the military and the government need a major reform to ensure better
treatment of these brave men and women. There is no denying that. There is
also no denying that the soldiers themselves are completely motivated to the
fight for freedom, each for different reasons, yet all stand as true examples
of patriots. Whether we agree with their lifestyle's or their choices, there
is no doubt that each of them are striving their best to both find themselves
and serve their country however they feel necessary. The only question is why
these determined young men and women not guided and led better by the
military organization that is sending them to fight. The best thing about this film is it could
be seen and appreciated by both conservatives and liberals as a touching and
truthful ode to the men and women who defend America by giving up so much of
themselves for what they see as the greater good. American Son directed
by Neil Abramson and Written by Eric Shmid I just happened to catch two Sundance film
screenings involving young soldiers preparing to go to Iraq. This narrative
feature is definitely the standout of the two. Nick Cannon plays Mike, a
Marine just finished with basic training that has 96 hours of leave for
Thanksgiving before being deported to Iraq. On his bus ride home, after being
surrounded by men for 7 months in basic training, Mike meets and instantly
falls for Cristina (Melonie Diaz) a beautiful college student on her way home
for the holiday as well. They converse and find they both are from
Bakersfield, and the chemistry between the two is electric. Both Cannon and
Diaz give the performances of their young careers as star struck lovers who
must put their newfound love on hold.
Nick Cannon stars as a 19 year-old Marine about to embark on
his first duty in Iraq.
As Mike returns home, his motivation for
joining the military becomes coherent. Mike has a step father he hates,
friends who do nothing but get high, party and sell drugs, a father who is
cold, a mother who is too busy, and an environment he knows will do nothing
but stifle his growth. The military seemed like the easy way out and the only
way to college and a career (especially now after seeing the recruiter I am
sure he was won over by their government imposed sales tactics). A standout performance by Matt O'Leary as
Mike's drug dealing best friend Jake is one worthy of recognition. After Mike
leaves for the military Jake feels ditched, lost and alone. Jake begins on a
downward spiral of drug using and dealing that leads him to the sad state of
mind he is in when Mike returns. Not only is the film critical of teens
fighting the war, but also critical of the violent and bleak culture forced
upon teens in America that leads to wasted youth. The production is loaded with stunning
performances by every single actor on screen, a brilliantly composed ethereal
guitar score, well- conceived cinematography, and a subtle yet startlingly
real and emotional screenplay. American Son is a modern twist on the coming
of age film during wartime and how it affects the family, friends, lovers,
and especially the young men themselves whose lives are put in danger and on
hiatus to fight a war they do not fully understand. |
||
|
RAVEN ROCK
FINAL AUDITIONS
Now Dillon and Harper must find a way to
reconnect as brothers and
FILM PRODUCTION COMPANY SEEKS TALENT ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Eno River Floodlight Presents: Mike Willden Consultant
- USA West Born in Utah in 1979, Mike Willden has had a
yo-yo child hood bouncing back and forth between living in Utah and North
Carolina. Mike lived in Utah until he was eight then moved to Gastonia North
Carolina for one year, then back to Utah, then at 12 back to Gastonia, then
Back to Utah at age 14. Then spent two years Back In North Carolina
From age 19-21 serving the people as a traveling missionary for the LDS
church, living in 7 different places in North Carolina in those short 2
years. Throughout his life he has always had a
strong tie to North Carolina, and a pure love of all forms of communication
and art. He has had experience in video editing, radio performance,
newspaper writing, and many other forms of communication. Currently, Mike is a student at The
University of Utah studying Communications and Education with a plan to teach
communications in High School. He is an avid film lover, attending over
30 screenings a year at the Sundance Film Festival and would rather be in the
darkness of a movie theater then anywhere else. Mike joined ERMP in 2002 as a consultant for
any ERMP projects in the western part of the United States. |
