CineSage_jr
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Posts posted by CineSage_jr
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I have the laserdisc of WHEN THE LION ROARED, which is a pretty rare commodity these days; I suspect that Warner's has had some problems securing rights to all the clips and pieces of music in the docu (which has already suffered from Fred Astaire's insufferable widow, Robyn's, demands that much of the material concerning Fred be removed), and that's what's holding up a DVD release.
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Warner's casting only goes to prove that you're never too old to walk on water.
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Color or black-and-white, Allied soldier, or German? It sounds as though it could be A TIME TO LOVE AND A TIME TO DIE.
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Yes we are LONG OVERDUE for a new President!
Damn right; we haven't had one since January 20, 2001.
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20th Century-Fox did insure Grable's legs for $1M, but it was for the publicity value of emphasizing her most famous asset, rather than any money the studio would've recouped in the unlikely event that their star was run over by a train, or met some other bisecting calamity.
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The underrated SAHARA's one of my favorite war movies, and second-favorite Bogart film. The picture features a great score by Mikl?s R?zsa who, that same year, 1943, wrote a better score for Billy Wilder & Charles Brackett''s FIVE GRAVES TO CAIRO, a similarly-themed film that's even better than Zolt?n Korda's SAHARA.
PS: Unusual as it may be, the transfer of SAHARA that TCM shows actually looks better than the pre-recorded DVD issued by Columbia (they're obviously different transfers, and I've compared them side-by-side). You can save yourself $20 by recording the film the next time TCM airs it.
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Oddly enough, one film that now suffers for that clich? is LAWRENCE OF ARABIA. During the extreme high-angle long shot that David Lean employs of Lawrence and Doud on their camels emerging from the Nefud Desert after the rescue of Gassim from "God's anvil," the sight of them being met by Faraj on camelback strikes audiences as funny precisely because it evokes those god-awful slow-motion love-on-the-beach moments.
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This is the real face that launched a thousand ships.
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I have no problem with dissent in and of itself. If anything I applaud it. Hell, this post is dissentious and dissonant. Dissent is one thing, but the lockstep of Hollywood is something entirely different. The very nature of the present cultural conflict simply begs for even one decent treatment of the nature of the enemy. Yes, enemy. The material is so rich and inviting, but we get next to nothing from the creative types. It would make mega-bucks at the box office but they won?t touch it. Instead we get a parade of lackluster films (mostly flops, to the credit of the American moviegoer) that attempt to paint America?s warts as America herself. As I allude: the silence is deafening and speaks in a language that nobody can misunderstand.
The "enemy," in so far as there is one, isn't Arabs, or Iranians or Muslims, but the religious extremists among them -- a tiny minority. In that, they are no more an enemy than the home-grown religious extremists in American and European society, and by "extremists," I'm not referring to Muslims.
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Don't forget the two horror films made by Warner Brothers in the early thirties: DR. X and MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM. They've both been restored to their original beauty and look great on DVD. The muted hues of greens, blues and reds really enhance the ambiance of eeriness and fear. Look especially at the first scene in WAX MUSEUM and see how beautiful the colors were in the wax museum and all those costumed figures and then the fire destroys them all.
There are no blues in Two-strip Technicolor (which is why it's called "Two-strip": everything is a shade of red or green. The two strip-cameras contained only two black-and-white records, red and green, from which the dye-transfer matrices were made). An improperly adjusted television or video transfer can make some of the greens appear blue, but it's an illusion. An original dye-transfer print of a two-strip film, or a correctly-timed chemical print from a good negative source is conspicuously absent blues, which is what the development of Three-strip Technicolor addressed. If you watch a Two-strip showing on television, you must make sure that your set's "hue" or "tint" is set so there are no blues; it's the only way you'll get an accurate representation of what the film is supposed to look like.
It's also a misconception that the Three-strip photography, with its three black-and-white negatives was directly analogous to the number of layers used in the patented Technicolor dye-transfer printing process. There was a fourth layer used in the printing -- black -- that was essential in giving the images in Techniclor prints their unmatched sense of texture and contrast. It's something that modern chemical prints simply cannot match.
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From Hollywood we get only films that show America and its soldiers in the worst light, but nowhere to be seen is the modern day equivalent of ?The Mortal Storm?.
THE MORTAL STORM??? I doubt that many people in the modern Western world, including the U.S., need to be told that they probably wouldn't want to live in an Arab culture, which certainly wasn't the case in 1940, when right-wing isolationists and media outlets they controlled tried to suppress and downplay the crimes and atrocities being perpetrated in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Spain, occupied Europe, and Japanese-dominated Far East in order to keep the U.S. out of World War II and thwart Franklin Roosevelt's obvious desire to aid an increasingly desperate Great Britain.
And as for "showing America and its soldiers in the worst light," it's our very freedom to do exactly that that shows our society in its best light, since most Muslim cultures would not permit that, or any other, kind of overt dissent.
When will your kind learn that this was a nation founded on the very concept of free dissent; that the Founding Fathers and all those ordinary people you like to think of in the bland, blind and rather ignorant abstract as "patriots" were determined to carve out a society divorced from the monarchic absolutism and despotism of the British Crown -- or die trying.
Criminy.
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I'm glad that I don't have to live on the same block with one of these narcissistic Christmo-terrorists.
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Clark didn't "pass on"; he and his teenage son, Ariel, were killed by an unlicensed, drunk driver who crossed over the center divider on Pacific Coast highway in Malibu in April, and slammed into their car head-on.
Clark was a really sweet man, with an interesting r?sum? of films to his credit (ranging from the undeservedly notorious PORKY's, to the undrerrated Sherlock Holmes film MURDER BY DECREE, to what most consider his masterpiece, A CHRISTMAS STORY. Everyone who came into contact with Clark liked him very much, and he is missed.
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The story you describe has been filmed two or three times. Titles used include Paradise Lagoon and Male And Female. The origional source is a stage play, The Admirable
Crichton, by J.M. Barrie (The "Peter Pan" guy). It was filmed under that title in 1957.
Though nervous that audiences might mis-read the original title as "Admiral Crighton," and think it a naval story, Adolph Zukor was aghast that C.B. DeMille would change Barrie's title for his 1919 film, and terrified that Barrie would be so offended that he'd refuse to sell Famous Players-Lasky- Paramount the rights to any more of his plays.
When Barrie learned what DeMille had done, he sent a cable to the director, saying that he wished he'd thought of Male and Female as a title, as he liked it better than his own, since it more succinctly captured the point of the play's story: the breakdown and reversal of long-enshrined social class distinctions when hidebound "civilized" people are confronted with the need to merely survive in primitive conditions.
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Yup, that's Blore looking, as he said so memorably, very whumsical.
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Word has come of the death of director-producer Frank Capra, jr, at age 73. A very lovely man; I remember meeting him at his father's memorial in late 1991 or early '92.
Frank Capra Jr. dies; son of film legend, producer, studio boss
By Dennis McLellan, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
HOLLYWOOD (LA Times) -- Frank Capra Jr., son of the legendary Hollywood director, who rose through the ranks to become a movie producer and for the last decade was president of EUE Screen Gems Studios in Wilmington, N.C., has died. He was 73.
Capra died Wednesday of prostate cancer in a hospital in Philadelphia, his son Jonathan told The Times on Thursday.
In a Hollywood career that began as a second assistant director on TV series such as "Dennis the Menace" and "The Rifleman," Capra became an associate producer on films such as "Play It Again, Sam," "Marooned" and three "Planet of the Apes" outings.
He then produced films such as "Billy Jack Goes to Washington," "Born Again" and "An Eye for an Eye." And from 1981 to 1982, he served as president and chief executive of Avco Embassy Pictures.
Capra first came to Wilmington in 1983 to scout locations for "Firestarter," a 1984 horror film starring Drew Barrymore that he produced for Dino De Laurentiis' company.
De Laurentiis was so taken with the area that after the film was shot at the Orton Plantation in nearby Winnabow, he began building a studio complex near the town's airport.
When the George Cooney family bought what by then had become Carolco Studios in a bankruptcy auction in 1996, Capra returned to Wilmington to become president of the renamed EUE Screen Gems Studios.
He remained president of the studio, which has nine soundstages and is said to be the largest film production center east of California, until his death.
"We saw the added benefit to have a producer who was simpatico with the needs of filmmakers and fellow producers in the production process," studio owner Chris Cooney told The Times on Thursday. "The Capra name was synonymous with brilliance and high quality, and he really brought that standard to our studios."
Bill Vassar, the studio's executive vice president, said Thursday that Capra "was our ambassador to Hollywood."
"He could open any door," Vassar said. "He knew his way in and out of the film industry; he knew the culture and he knew the people. And not just the people who ran it; he knew the producers, the directors, the directors of photography. And when people came here to work, he was out there roaming the lot."
Describing Capra as "very giving," Vassar said that "he was a great teacher and taught film studies here at the University of North Carolina Wilmington."
Cooney said Capra also was "a tireless advocate to get the legislation passed through the state to attract filmmakers to film in North Carolina. Because of those efforts, North Carolina is enjoying a robust economic boost due to the film activity in the state."
Born in Los Angeles on March 20, 1934, he was one of Frank and Lucille Capra's three children.
With a father who directed film classics such as "It Happened One Night" and "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," young Capra could expect stars such as Clark Gable and Jimmy Stewart to drop by for dinner.
It wasn't until he was 12, however, that he got to see his father at work.
"My mother was very dead-set against us visiting the sets," he told the Star-News of Wilmington in 2006. "She didn't want us to become studio brats."
But in July 1946, Capra, along with his brother and sister, were driven to a studio ranch in the San Fernando Valley, where their father was filming "It's a Wonderful Life," which became a Christmas classic. There, spread out before them in 90-degree summer heat, was the town of Bedford Falls -- 75 stores and buildings over four acres and all covered with artificial snow.
"That," Capra recalled, "was when I realized my father could make magic."
Movies were not on his agenda after graduating from high school, however.
He studied math, geophysics and other sciences for a year at Caltech -- his father's alma mater -- before transferring to Pomona College, where he graduated with a bachelor's degree in geology in 1955. His transition to film began when he started writing and directing technical documentaries for the Hughes Tool Co. He later spent three years in the Army Signal Corps making training films and teaching combat motion picture photography.
Last December, Capra participated in what has been an annual tradition in Wilmington: a holiday screening of his family's own 35-millimeter print of "It's a Wonderful Life" at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where he introduced the film and shared his memories.
"My father said he put more of himself in that film than in any other picture," he told the Star-News. "It spoke to his beliefs about the worth and value of the individual, how one guy discovers how much his life meant, no matter how modest it seemed to be."
In addition to his son Jonathan, Capra is survived by his wife, Deborah; children Christina and Frank III; his brother, Tom; his sister, Lucille; and a granddaughter.
Funeral arrangements are pending.
Instead of flowers, the family asks that donations be made to the Frank Capra Jr. Film Studies Scholarship Fund, c/o Marla Rice Evans at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, 601 S. College St., Wilmington, NC, 28403.
Frank Capra Jr., Movie and TV Producer, Dies at 73
By MARGALIT FOX
NEW YORK (NY Times) -- Frank Capra Jr., who never wanted to go into his father?s business but found in the end he could not resist its pull, died on Wednesday in Philadelphia. He was 73 and lived in Wilmington, N.C.
The cause was prostate cancer, said Bill Vassar, the executive vice president of EUE/Screen Gems Studios in Wilmington, of which Mr. Capra was president.
A film and television producer, Mr. Capra was a son of the noted Hollywood director Frank Capra, whose best-known film, ?It?s a Wonderful Life,? was released in 1946. In the last two decades the younger Mr. Capra was known for helping to make North Carolina into an important center for film, television and commercial production. In the mid-1980s, he helped to found EUE/Screen Gems there, becoming its president in 1997.
Mr. Capra first came to the Wilmington area in 1983, when he was producing ?Firestarter? (1984), an adaptation of the Stephen King novel. He needed an antebellum mansion to burn down, and found one nearby in Winnabow, N.C. The owners, not surprisingly, demurred, so Mr. Capra built a replica on their property and burned that down instead. He was taken with the area and later persuaded Dino De Laurentiis, who had financed the film, to build a studio there.
Among the projects filmed at EUE/Screen Gems during Mr. Capra?s tenure are ?Black Knight? (2001), ?Domestic Disturbance? (2001), ?Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood? (2002), ?A Walk to Remember? (2002) and the television shows ?Dawson?s Creek? and ?One Tree Hill.?
Mr. Capra, who began his film career in the 1960s, was the associate producer of three ?Planet of the Apes? sequels and ?Play It Again, Sam? (1972), written by Woody Allen. He later produced ?Billy Jack Goes to Washington? (1977), ?Born Again? (1978), ?The Black Marble? (1980), ?Marie? (1985) and other films.
Frank Warner Capra Jr. was born in Los Angeles on March 20, 1934, to Frank Capra and the former Lucille Rayburn Warner. His was a completely normal childhood, he often said in interviews ? if normal entails having Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart and Barbara Stanwyck round the family dinner table every now and then.
Planning to be a scientist, Frank Jr. earned a bachelor?s degree in geology from Pomona College in 1955. Combining his education with the family trade, he got a job making technical documentaries for the Hughes Tool Company. (Owned by Howard Hughes, the company was the corporate parent of Hughes Aircraft.) He later served in the Army Signal Corps, where he made training films and taught combat filmmaking.
Mr. Capra was a second assistant director on several television shows, including ?Hazel,? ?Dennis the Menace,? ?Gunsmoke? and ?The Rifleman.? He did the same job, uncredited, on ?Pocketful of Miracles? (1961), directed by his father and starring Glenn Ford and Bette Davis.
Mr. Capra?s first marriage, to Priscilla Anne Pearson, ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, Deborah, of Santa Barbara, Calif.; two sons from his first marriage, Frank III, of Studio City, Calif.; and Jonathan, of Wilmington; a daughter from his second marriage, Christina, of Santa Barbara; two siblings, Lucille Capra of Traverse City, Mich.; and Tom, of Palm Desert, Calif.; and one grandchild. Frank Capra Sr. died in 1991.
As a boy, Mr. Capra was allowed to visit the set of ?It?s a Wonderful Life? to watch his father work, a rare treat. In recent years he screened the film each December at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. The screening was scheduled to go ahead on Friday as planned, Mr. Vassar said.
Movie studio boss Capra Jr dies
LONDON (BBC) -- Movie mogul Frank Capra Jr, whose father directed Christmas classic It's A Wonderful Life, has died aged 73.
The producer, who helped build a major television and film studio, passed away at a hospital in Philadelphia after a long fight with prostate cancer.
"He will be missed as a friend and a colleague," said Chris Cooney from North Carolina's Screen Gems Studios, of which Capra Jr was president.
Screen Gems' credits include 28 Days and A Walk to Remember.
"With his Hollywood pedigree and extensive experience as a producer, Frank was the perfect ambassador to Hollywood," added Cooney.
Capra Jr was also was at the helm when teen soap Dawson's Creek was filmed at the studio, launching Katie Holmes' career.
He worked alongside his father on the 1961 Bette Davis film Pocketful of Miracles and, for the last few years, has screened his family's personal print of It's A Wonderful Life at the University of North Carolina in Wilmington.
Talking about his father's work on the film, he said: "He loved the idea of the story. He fell in love with that idea of the story about a man who could see the world the way it would have been had he never been born."
He added that Capra, who died in 1991, described It's a Wonderful Life as "the picture I was born to make".
Capra Jr's survivors include his wife Debra, daughter Christina, two sons - Frank and Jonathan - and a sister and brother.
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...THAT'S SOMETHING I'D PAY TO SEE!
As I wrote below, the film, and Hollywood's whole religious-epic cycle throughout the 1950s, was the studios' attempt to find politically "safe" material that would mollify conservatives' accusations that the film industry was a seething hotbed of Communist sympathizers and agents of Moscow.
As for your friend's reply to your inquiry about the film's concept, she's absolutely right: a real person of faith wouldn't need the intervention of technology to make contact with the Almighty, but she also misses the point that the radio broadcasts in the film were meant to touch the sort of Christmans Christians (and others), who only saw the inside of a church one day a year, if that.
Of course, I suspect that, if asked, your friend would also say that there should be prayer in the public schools -- as though any force, however hostile, can take the ability to pray away from someone (ask Sen. John McCain if, during his years imprisoned in the "Hanoi Hilton," his North Vietnamese captors were ever able to take away his, and his fellow prisoners' ability to pray, I'm sure he'd say a clear, unambiguous "no") -- conveniently ignoring the fact that what evangelicals agitate for is not prayer, but organized religious services (and absence of a member of the clergy does not make any less of one).
Then there's the matter of so-called "miracles," whether its attributing the ostensibly inexplicable survival of a child falling off a twenty-story building, or the perceived image of Jesus or Mary on the wrapping of a burrito, your friend would probably subscribe to the validity of such things, but I see little or no difference between the function of these sorts of cheap parlor tricks and roadside trinkets and the idea of God appearing on the radio right before the Great Gildersleeve.
You either believe, or you don't.
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In NOTHING SACRED, Walter Connolly's character's name is "Oliver Stone"; March's is "Wally Cook."
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There is quite a nice writeup on Mohr in the TCM database. I didn't realize he was the voice of so many animated characters I watched. I remember him from RED PLANET MARS and INVASION USA (which is better left alone!).
Peter Graves and Andrea King starred in THE RED PLANET MARS (1952); Mohr starred in THE ANGRY RED PLANET (1960).
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Oh please. Olivier had no method. His acting lacked emotional connection. He could only do Shakespeare--most of Shakespear's plays require one thing from actors: EXAGGERATION.
Brando had a method: REALISM
And just what is "realism," anyway? If one subscribes to the notion that there is a objective definition of, and standard for, that term, then one would have to believe that there's only one way to play any scene or part, that deviating from that standard is hopelessly unrealistic, and that there's no point in anyone ever playing a part after some slob anointed the Next Great Realistic Actor has played it.
Yikes.
If you want real realism, I direct your attention to the Italian Neo-Realist school of filmmaking from the mid-1940s to the early-1950s that featured striking non-performances by largely amateur casts recruited from the street and fields of Italy by the likes of Vittorio DeSica and Roberto Rossellini. Still, since the non-actors were laboring to produce a piece of drama, rather than being surreptitiously filmed for a documentary, even that's not true realism, but it's the closest you're ever going to get.
As for Brando, he was just as mannered in his way as Gielgud or Olivier, only with different (and not entirely welcome) mannerisms. What one could term hyper-Brandoism probably reached its apotheosis in the tic-encrusted, butt-scratching excesses of James Dean. And while the Metohd did bring a welcome sense of detail, and of characters actually seeming to think about the lives they're living before saying or dooing anything (as opposed to the previous three decades of studio-contractee hystrionics that valued star magnetism over talent or dedidcation, it also unfortunately has led to the sort of under-cooked, over-detailed style of acting that makes today's films less and less rewarding.
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I didn't find it any more preachy than Wild Boys of the Road, Heroes for Sale, or any of the other the films with the NRA logo at the beginning which shilled for FDR's politics.
"Shilling?" Hardly, considering that the logo for Roosevelt's National Recovery Administration appeared on movies from studios whose management ranged from Centrist (Warner Bros.) to rabidly Right-wing (MGM). The NRA was, in any case, no more a reflection of FDR's "politics" than were the TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority), CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps), Rural Electrification Project, PWA (Public Works Administration), WPA (Works Progress Administration), of the Emergency Banking Act; Emergency Economy Act; Truth in Securities Act; and Home Owners' Loan Act that were part of the New Deal's attempts to pull the U.S. and the wider world economies out of the Great Depression.
Title I of the NRA Act (dealing with the drafting and establishment of a code system of fair competition for all industries that had the force of law and were exempt from antitrust provisions) was, in any case, declared unconsitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1935 ((several years ago I got a beautiful original small poster of the eagle logo from the Paramount Studios prop department).
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Brandon, the king of screen and Olivier, the king of stage. Sixty years later, Oliver?s name and reputation struggle to survive, whereas the opposite for Brando, whose impact in acting is regarded as the most profound for American as well as foreign actors. Why is that?
What utter nonsense. While the two actors' approach to their craft was diametrically opposite, each was, and remains, the epitome of his craft and respective school of acting.
PS: It's Laurence Olivier.
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There's no advantage to the look of film made from three-strip camera negatives versus those made with the monopack color negative that became standard in 1954 when the three-strip cameras were retired. It's the dye-transfer printing process Technicolor used that distinguished their product from later, chemical processes. If anything, the registration problems inherent in the three-negative black-and-white separation masters were a hindrance to making good-looking prints.
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You mean that, if I write here that your mother wears Army boots, your sister has her hands full when the fleet's in, and you, yourself, possess a significant amount of canine DNA, you cannot now read about it?
If igonrance is, in fact, bliss, then yours is a blissful existence, indeed.
Should Greer Garson have won her oscar?
in Hot Topics
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The irony is, of course, that Garson beat out Davis, who'd been a particular prot?g? (and lover) of William Wyler, who directed MRS MINIVER.
Garson's performance was, as you said, more subtle; the whole point was the the Minivers, as a "typical" middle-class English family, were forced to endure the war's ever-increasing and debilitating hardships with as much stoic resolve and the characteristic British "stiff upper-lip" as they could muster in the face of ever-increasing hardships, including the destruction of much of their home, seeing their oldest child go off to war, and the deaths of daughter-in-law Carole, and many of their friends.
Even though the film was made and released about halfway through the war, when the British people couldn't have known its outcome, it's really about the end of a way of life. Britain was never really quite the same after it had lost hundreds of thousands of its best sons on the battlefields of World War I (it slipped into the role of a second-rate power, behind the United States, something that's never changed), and that's subtly communicated by the performances in MRS MINIVER, especially Garson's and Walter Pidgeon's.
PS: Davis's character in NOW, VOYAGER was Charlotte Vale, not "Vail."