I'm having a huguesque moment here, but I happened to catch Herbie Rides Again (Disney 1974) yesterday and it has a number of interesting features from a synchro perspective. It is about the building of a twin tower corporate headquarters by a shopping mall magnate and the opening is an extended montage of very impressive controlled demolitions. The only building standing in the way of the construction is an old fire station inhabited by a grandmother who does not want to sell. Firefighters, demolitions, and twin towers. Worth seeing and dissecting.
Re: Hollywood Scripting
Posted: Thu Aug 22, 2013 6:59 am
by JackRiddler
We went to Herbie movies when I was a kid, loved those! Hmmmm....
Another one from the fwiw department, taken from the new "Seinfeld Dreamwashing" thread.
i blame people browsing RI on their tiny cell phone screens, make it hard to see when a post on a thread was posted.
Re: Hollywood Scripting
Posted: Thu Aug 22, 2013 2:39 pm
by JackRiddler
I blame having two big monitors. Too much going on.
Just to shift gears a bit, how does it feel to say, "I started that thread six years ago." Although your life unfurls and you're still doing the same thread about Fucking Seinfeld (fucking as adjective) I can imagine the good thing about RI is that no thread ever disappears. Quite a contrast to FB, where a post's effective lifespan is less than a mayfly's.
Bumping since I mentioned this in another thread. Been looking forward to seeing it and will continue to hope it materializes. Jack, any synopsis, notes, thoughts, highlights?
The following two images are stills from a 1968 Soviet spy movie, The Secret Agent's Blunder (Ошибка Резидента). The setting in both is a West German spy den / safehouse. The filmmakers really seem to have made an effort to associate these imperialist spooks with abstract modernist painting. Maybe it was just part of a domestic campaign against the bogeyman of bourgeois individualist art, but I wonder if it could have been a KGB "active measure" hinting at CIA cultivation of Abstract Expressionism. (The styles below aren't AE, to be sure.) In any case, it goes to show that scripts (per the thread title) aren't the only way to incorporate propaganda into a film.
For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art - including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko - as a weapon in the Cold War. In the manner of a Renaissance prince - except that it acted secretly - the CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years.
Re: Hollywood Scripting
Posted: Fri Sep 13, 2013 5:07 am
by coffin_dodger
Olympus has Fallen — Flat
About the time I was a teen-ager, Disney Animation fell into a rut. When I was a child, they had a long list of solid animated feature films — Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Peter Pan — that captured something of the mythic dimension of these old stories. Then sometime in the 1970′s, they started cranking out formula films that looked and felt more like Saturday morning cartoons than mythology. Their animation release schedule slowed to a crawl, and their live-action films were, if anything, even more formulaic and insipid than their animations. It wasn’t until Beauty and the Beast, in 1991, that they recovered something of the old Disney magic.
Recently, both Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas have predicted the imminent demise of the Big Blockbuster studio model, in part because the blockbuster films are in a rut, just like Disney was in the 1970′s. The big-budget Olympus has Fallen has been listed among the examples of the kinds of flops that are dragging down the genre...
If there are to be movies that cost a hundred million and more to make, why the hell aren't we seeing more like Cloud Atlas and none whatsoever like Olympus Has Fallen?
Re: Hollywood Scripting
Posted: Fri Sep 13, 2013 10:15 am
by coffin_dodger
JackRiddler wrote:If there are to be movies that cost a hundred million and more to make, why the hell aren't we seeing more like Cloud Atlas and none whatsoever like Olympus Has Fallen?
I wonder about the 'costs' of films these days. Most of them are done with bluescreen, then backgrounds and effects added later, right? I can't see how a film that is created in a relatively confined space (compared to days gone by) with a backroom full of graphics-wiz's sat at PC's can rack up $100's of millions of expense. Is it possible that these mega-budgets are just...well...lies? I hasten to add I know fuck all about the movie industry, beyond the shit it knocks out.
edited to add - by 'shit', I mean content
Re: Hollywood Scripting
Posted: Fri Sep 13, 2013 2:57 pm
by JackRiddler
No, costs are as great as they have ever been.
1) Stars cost lots of money! A hundred-million dollar budget will typically be giving 20 mil to the big star and another 10+ to the rest. Producers and directors and select creatives often get fat shares up front. This is the totally not-mysterious black hole into which much of the money disappears (i.e., it's not drug money laundering or direct payoffs to illuminati or made up books to sound impressive, it's Tom Cruise's salary).
2) There is still a preference for building sets and blowing them up for real, also for having armies of extras and minor speaking roles. It's often obvious where sets end and the CGI extensions begin.
3) CGI on the level you see nowadays involves thousands of intensive labor hours by hundreds of highly-qualified, very well-compensated specialists in teams who need to be extremely dedicated and careful. It's very easy for the illusion to fail. It does not just reproduce itself.
4) CGI is always in development, many films are still creating the technology for what they do. Not just for this reason, blockbusters can be in development for years and this eats up plenty in creatives, staff and overhead.
See Cloud Atlas, it obviously was a huge endeavor, probably more hours involved than Spiderman or whatever.
