Pump Up the Volume Still Reverberates 30 Years Later

Generation X readily acknowledges the films of John Hughes as bedrock cultural experiences of their ’80s and ’90s youth. At the same time, a number of other films would represent a darker undercurrent of that generation’s experiences, far away from fictional Shermer, Illinois, including Tim Hunter’s River’s Edge (1986), Michael Lehmann’s Heathers (1989), and Allan Moyle’s Times Square (1980). Put off by parts of his Times Square experience, Moyle resolved not to direct again, but ten years later, he was back behind the camera for a film he’d written about alienation, depression, the burden of expectation, the exploitation of kids by school officials, and a primordial version of today’s internet culture. That film was Pump Up the Volume, a film both uniquely of its time while being many steps ahead of it.

Moyle first drew notice for 1980’s Times Square, a film that he co-wrote the story for and directed. The movie was produced by Robert Stigwood, famous for managing The Bee Gees and Cream, producing for the stage with shows like Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar, and producing films like Saturday Night Fever and Grease. Aware of the punk and new wave scenes that had already coalesced in New York City, Stigwood saw an occasion to produce another huge double-album soundtrack. Moyle just wanted to tell his story about two young women finding solace in each other and music. Frustrated to the point of quitting over Stigwood’s demand for more musical sequences, Moyle quit the movie before it was done. Stigwood got his musical scenes, but also cut some of the more emphatic lesbian overtones of the relationship between the two main characters. The resulting soundtrack turned out to be a tremendous artifact of its time, featuring acts like The Ramones, Roxy Music, The Cure, XTC, Lou Reed, The Patti Smith Group, Gary Numan, Talking Heads, and Joe Jackson. The film has since developed a cult reputation, but the overall situation and its failure drove Moyle from movies for a decade.

When he returned, it was with a script that he had originally started as a novel. The story concerned a pirate radio personality who was connecting with a teen audience by being real and foul-mouthed while playing music that related to an outsider sensibility. SC Entertainment out of Toronto decided to develop the movie, and they managed to talk Moyle into directing again. Still reluctant, Moyle said he’d walk if he couldn’t get the right lead; that turned out to be Christian Slater, who displayed some of the qualities that Moyle was looking for with his turn in Heathers.

The trailer for Pump Up the Volume (Uploaded to YouTube by Warner Bros.)

Released in August 1990, Pump Up the Volume is definitely of its time. It exists in a space just prior to the advent of the World Wide Web. While pay services like Prodigy and CompuServe were in use, there were still wide portions of the U.S. that hadn’t even heard of email. Comically large “Zack Morris” mobile phones existed, but weren’t remotely in the kind of widespread use that would follow later in the ’90s. That’s part of what makes the pirate radio station concept so appealing; teens really did listen to the radio in the ’80s, and that, along with both mainstream and underground music magazines, was one of the ways that kids (especially those in outsider social groups) learned both about new music and social issues. Ads in magazines like Maximumrocknroll and other avenues enabled a healthy tape trading culture, wherein teens would mail each other music or videotapes of concerts and club shows to facilitate the spread of bands they liked.

And that’s reflected in the broadest theme of the film: communication. Mark Hunter (Slater), a smart new student whose father works for the school district, is a loner and has trouble connecting, so he creates his shock-jock persona, alternately called “Happy Harry Hard-On” or “Hard Harry” and begins talking about everything that’s bothering him personally and socially behind the anonymity of radio and a voice modulator. For Mark, it’s initially about the release, but then he begins to realize that people are actually listening.

This taps into and opens up a wide range of problems as seen through a variety of other teen characters. One character struggles with the weight of academic expectations that’s been put upon her, and begins buckling under that pressure. Another finds himself expelled for suspicious reasons and protests to get back into the school. When Mark calls a listener, he winds up trying to talk him down from committing suicide, but fails. This activates the parents of the community, but they still miss the point that they aren’t connecting with their own children. What’s worse, people in the school administration have actually conspired to kick out kids that are struggling on standardized tests in order to make the school look better (and to keep receiving funding). These were real issues. They’re still real issues.

You can read Mark’s radio show, the affinity that kids have for it, and the broken communication between generations as a fairly savvy forerunner of internet culture. You can substitute “amateur radio” for “YouTube” or “TikTok” or “Snapchat” and still tell elements of the same story. That’s one of the reasons that film was strikingly different and remains resonant, because as good as John Hughes was at presenting outsiders, this hits in a more cutting way.

On The Sam Roberts Show, Christian Slater said he wants to be remembered for Pump Up the Volume. (Uploaded to YouTube by notsam)

Moyle also managed to be ahead of the curve with his soundtrack, just like he was with Times Square. In the keynote address that he gave at South By Southwest (SXSW) in 2013, Dave Grohl hilariously recalled how absurd it seemed in 1990 that Nirvana and alternative music might break through to the mainstream, going as far as to read the Billboard Top Ten songs of that year. And yet, that’s the kind of music that fills Mark’s show and the Pump Up the Volume soundtrack. Moyle and company understood that outsiders connect to outsider music, and thus the film was populated with songs by The Pixies, Soundgarden, Sonic Youth, Concrete Blonde, Cowboy Junkies, and more. Ironically, a number of those bands would begin experiencing broader awareness that year, and some, like Soundgarden, would burst into actual stardom during the following year’s alternative explosion. Concrete Blonde’s contribution was a cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows;” in the film, Mark uses Cohen’s version to open his radio shows until the climactic scene when he uses the cover. The album peaked at #50 on the Top 200.

Ultimately, the film was not a huge success in theatres. Like a number of movies of the time, it found a second life on video. Moyle stayed in film this time, and would go on to make another music-centered and much-loved cult classic in 1995, Empire Records. The thing that remains important about Pump Up the Volume is that it tried to be about something, and it succeeded. It shows that teens have a much deeper life of complexity and problems than parents and authority figures give them credit for, and that simple and non-judgmental communication, no matter how loud, might be the best first step to alleviate those issues.

Featured image: The DVD and film soundtrack of Pump Up the Volume (Photo by Troy Brownfield. Film & DVD ©New Line Home Entertainment/Warner Bros.; CD & Soundtrack ©MCA Records/Universal Music Group; writer’s nearly indestructible Guitar Amplifier ©Charvel).

Review: Tesla — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

Tesla

⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Rating: PG-13

Run Time: 1 hour 42 minutes

Stars: Ethan Hawke, Kyle MacLachlan, Eve Hewson, Jim Gaffigan

Writer/Director: Michael Almereyda

In Theaters and Streaming at Video On Demand Cable

As the new biographical film Tesla unspools onscreen, there is a neat bit of synchronicity in realizing that, if not for the central character, you might not be watching a movie at all.

For while it is true that Thomas Edison is largely credited with helping invent the movies, it was his archrival Nikola Tesla who not only single-handedly devised the system of sending sound and pictures over the air, but who also invented the technology that still transmits electricity across long distances from power plants to transformers to the wires leading into your TV.

Ethan Hawke, one of the screen’s great chameleons, plays Tesla, a Serbian immigrant who arrived penniless on these shores in the late 1800s and promptly set about transforming the world — first as a staffer at Edison’s New Jersey invention factory and then as an associate of another giant of the early electrical age, George Westinghouse.

Like many singular geniuses, Tesla was not known for playing well with others. He was sullen, surly, and downright antisocial. Such characters can often be difficult to endure onscreen — why should we invest two hours of our lives in someone who seems congenitally incapable of forging human relationships? — but Hawke succeeds admirably in bridging the chasm between us and the inventor.

True, Hawke’s Tesla seems to grunt his words rather than enunciate them, and even as he is pursued by some of the most desirable women of the age (including kazillionaire J.P. Morgan’s daughter Anne, played with smoky appeal by The Knick’s Eve Hewson) Tesla clearly prefers the company of the enormous sparks that crackle from his electric coil. At times, Hawke’s Tesla seems so physically twisted by his obsessive internal focus he threatens to literally fold in on himself. But Hawke’s remarkably physical performance elicits more sympathy than aversion. He is a man possessed, for sure, but he’s under the spell of both interior demons and the mysteries of a natural world that only he seems capable of comprehending.

Such a man is, of course, doomed to be chewed up by the world of commerce, and Tesla runs straight into the maw of America’s aging Boy Wonder, Thomas Edison. Kyle MacLachlan puts his perpetually cherubic face to excellent use here as the Wizard of Menlo Park; it’s a cheeky mask that barely conceals the all-consuming vanity that drives him. Sizing up Tesla, Edison realizes he’s dealing with a world-class genius — and he spends much of the rest of his life ruthlessly trying to bury him.

For a time, Tesla finds success under the wings of Westinghouse — played with surprising spirit by comedian Jim Gaffigan — but once again, soulless Big Business crushes the man who can envision sound waves that split the earth but who can’t see the danger of a rogue contract clause.

Befitting its maddeningly eccentric subject, Tesla is a decidedly off-kilter biography. Writer/director Michael Almereyda (Marjorie Prime) lets the story unfold largely chronologically, but occasionally he’ll throw in a time-bending curve, as when his narrator — Tesla’s frustrated paramour Anne Morgan — calmly produces a MacBook laptop computer to show us how many hits you get when you Google “Tesla.”

The gimmicks don’t always work — the film at times becomes as haughtily self-aware as Tesla himself is painfully clueless.

It might have been nice to see a film made about Tesla in the 1960s, the golden age of overblown biopics, when David Lean might have splashed Omar Sharif as Tesla across a giant screen, bedding heiresses and sending lightning bolts screaming into the Colorado foothills.

Such a film might not have been as authentic to the true person as Tesla is — still, it might have done more justice to the epic influence he’s had on all of our lives.

Featured image: Ethan Hawke in Tesla (Photo by Sean Price Williams, courtesy of IFC Films)

Review: Made in Italy — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

Made in Italy

⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Rating: R

Run Time: 1 hour 34 minutes

Stars: Liam Neeson, Micheál Richardson, Valeria Bilello, Lindsay Duncan, Yolanda Kettle

Writer/Director: James D’Arcy

I’m all for any film that manages to pry a gun from the hands of Liam Neeson.

Made in Italy, the story of an estranged father and son rebuilding their relationship as they attempt to renovate an old family estate in Tuscany, isn’t up there with such classic father-son dramas as Life Is Beautiful, Big Fish, and Bicycle Thieves — but neither is it Taken, or The A-Team, or Commuter, or any of those other slam-bang shoot-’em-ups that make a lot of money for Neeson, but ultimately waste the talents of the man who is easily one of our most gifted screen actors.

Neeson plays Robert, a world-famous painter who abruptly retreated from the art world following his wife’s death in a car crash. He’s also backed away from his son Jack — played with earnest abandon by Micheál Richardson — to the point where the pair hardly speak, even though Jack is a successful art gallery manager.

Well, he was a successful art gallery manager — until the opening scene, when his business is abruptly yanked from him by his vengeful ex-wife Ruth. Jack decides to try and buy the gallery back from her, but that would mean cashing out his half of the family’s Tuscan villa — which would also mean approaching his distant dad.

Robert is surprisingly amenable to the plan, however, and just a transition scene or two later we are in sunny Italy, where the once-grand, now-dilapidated home awaits them. They get straight to work hauling weeds and painting — bickering endlessly but, admirably, never walking away from a tiff. Writer/director James D’Arcy — making his first feature film — offers a story with twists we can see coming like meatballs with spaghetti, but he has lucked into a cast that can still add some paprika to his otherwise bland piatto principale. Among the supporting players, Lindsay Duncan, the spirited English actress who was so spellbinding as the ever-hopeful wife in 2013’s Le Week-end, makes the most of her part as a pithy real estate agent and possible love interest for the artist. Not so fortunate is Yolanda Kettle as Jack’s bitter ex Ruth, who is so relentlessly angry we can’t help but think Jack did something absolutely awful to her.

We never do learn what happened between them — a major missing element in Jack’s backstory — but of course the entire film is building up to the revelation of why Jack and Robert have drifted apart. The moment arrives, fittingly, in the film’s best scene, a wonderfully acted dialogue that takes place in a dusty upper room, a place where Robert has secretly assembled an artist’s shrine to his late wife.

Shredding their facades of cordiality and tearing open their decade-old wounds, father and son brawl, bawl, and ultimately embrace not only each other, but the shared tragedy that has shaped their lives. It’s an extraordinary scene played with an intensity — and filmed with a tight focus — that reminded me of that shattering finale in Mike Nichols’ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, Neeson and Richardson seem to be mining some vein of emotion that extends far beyond the movie set.

And of course, they are: Until this film, Micheál Richardson has been known as Micheál Neeson. They are father and son, and in 2009 Liam’s wife and Micheál’s mother, Natasha Richardson, died in a skiing accident. Now, dear reader, be advised your humble reviewer happens to be one of a rare breed who spends little time trafficking in celebrity news and gossip, and so I had not the slightest idea that these two actors were in any way related until I set about writing this review. I don’t think an artist’s craft should be judged by his or her private life (hence my stubborn appreciation of Woody Allen), but knowing what I know now, I am tempted to re-visit Made in Italy for a second look.

One scene can a movie make, and this one, coming just under the wire, makes Made in Italy more memorable than anyone might have expected.

Featured image: Liam Neeson and Micheál Richardson in Made in Italy (Courtesy IFC Films)

The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Still Doing the Time Warp 45 Years Later

Having performed in both the touring and London productions of Hair in the early 1970s, Richard O’Brien combined his love of science fiction, horror, and comic books with his stage background into writing the musical The Rocky Horror Show. The play rapidly grew in popularity, moving from theatre to bigger theatre in England. When the opportunity came to take the tale to the screen in 1975, little did anyone involved know that their film would still be playing around the world 45 years later. I would like, if I may, to take you on a strange journey . . . this is the story of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

O’Brien was born in England in 1942 and moved to New Zealand with his family in the 1950s. After college, he went back to England in 1964 and began working on stage and in film. O’Brien played both an Apostle and Leper in the London production of Jesus Christ Superstar; the director who cast him was Jim Sharman. Sharman would cast him again, and O’Brien shared his idea for They Came from Denton High, a musical send-up of the things that he loved, like 1950s science-fiction movies. Sharman came on board as director and gave O’Brien the idea for a new name: The Rocky Horror Show. In June 1973, the show kicked off at London’s Theatre Upstairs; it quickly became a hit, moving to bigger venues until making it to the U.K’s equivalent of Broadway, the West End.

Lou Adler was already a big name in American music when he saw Rocky in London. Adler had produced Carole King’s Tapestry, the Monterey Pop Festival, and six hits for The Mamas and The Papas, including “California Dreamin’.” He bought the U.S. theatrical rights, taking the show to the Roxy in L.A. Soon after, Michael White, who had produced the London shows, Adler, O’Brien, and Sharman were collaborating on a film version. Adler and White produced with Sharman directing and co-writing the screen adaptation with O’Brien.

The trailer for The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Uploaded to YouTube by 20th Century Studios)

In terms of casting, several members of the London cast made the jump to screen. Tim Curry (Dr. Frank-N-Furter), O’Brien (Riff Raff), Patricia Quinn (Magenta), and “Little Nell” Campbell (Columbia) had all been in productions in England. The ostensible lead roles of Brad and Janet were trickier, as studio 20th Century Fox wanted American actors in the parts; those ended up being filled by Barry Bostwick and Susan Sarandon. Charles Gray, a two-time Bond villain, played the criminologist/narrator and Jonathan Adams was cast as Dr. Scott. Marvin Lee Aday, better known as Meat Loaf, was a veteran of Broadway’s Hair and had played Eddie in the L.A. cast; he reprised Eddie for the movie, two years before the release of his massively successful Bat Out of Hell album. Background character Betty Munroe (whose wedding Brad and Janet attend early in the film) was played by Hilary Labow, which was the screen name of Hilary Farr, known today as the designer on the long-running renovation series Love It or List It.

Much of the Gothy, classic horror mood of the film came from the location at Oakley Court. The estate had been used in several Hammer Studios films, including The Brides of Dracula and The Plague of the Zombies. In Sharman’s direction, you can occasionally note some of the same wide angles and sudden zooms prevalent in Hammer features, which were meant to echo styles prevalent in the genre. Richard Hartley produced the soundtrack and handled musical arrangements on the songs that O’Brien had written. The soundtrack lists 21 official numbers, although “Once in a While” came from a deleted scene and “Super Heroes” was only seen in the U.K. until the eventual video release.

A portion of “Sweet Transvestite” from The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Uploaded to YouTube by Movieclips)

The film opened 45 years ago this week in London, with the U.S. opening a few weeks later. It was not an immediate success. Outside of L.A., it was quickly pulled from theatres. Tim Deegan, a Fox executive, suggested an alternative strategy; figuring that the film might do well on the midnight circuit, as John Waters films had, Deegan got the ball rolling in New York. The Waverly Theater became ground zero for a cult phenomenon, fostering audience participation in the form of recited remarks and props. Audience members began coming to the show in costume, and screenings started to have live casts that would act out the film as it ran on the screen. Within a couple of years, the movie had become a legit cult sensation and defined the notion of the “Midnight Movie.”

The movie has actually never closed, making it the longest-running release in the history of film. Some fans and film history buffs were concerned about the status of the film when the Walt Disney Company finished its acquisition of 20th Century Fox in 2019. However, even though Disney “vaulted” a number of Fox titles, they were conscious of Rocky’s status and fandom and decided to keep it in release so that the screenings would go on.

A portion of “Hot Patootie Bless My Soul” from The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Uploaded to YouTube by Movieclips)

So, just what has made it endure? At the top, the music is insanely catchy, particularly “The Time Warp.” The notion of attending a movie as a sort of costume party is fun, and the props and interaction make it a shared experience that you can join in over and over. But a deeper undercurrent is that Rocky Horror celebrates the outsider. It’s been embraced by the LGBTQ+ community, theater kids, punks, goths, comic book fans, horror and science fiction fans who get the in-jokes, and more, all of whom find connection to the film. Its influence has reverberated through the years, turning up in sitcoms like The Drew Carey Show or a 2010 episode of Glee or in films like The Perks of Being a Wallflower or Fox’s 2016 TV remake. It has endured for four-and-a-half decades, and there’s no sign that it will go away anytime soon. One supposes that it’s comforting to know that as much as some cult phenoms come and go, there will always be a light over at the Frankenstein place.

Featured image: UA Cinema Merced. The Rocky Horror Picture Show, opening night, January of 1978.
(Photo by Robin Adams, General Manager, UA Cinema, Merced California, 1978.
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.; Wikimedia Commons)

The Worst Movie Musicals Ever

The history of the movie musical comes packed to the rafters with classics. You’ve got Singin’ in the Rain and The Sound of Music. There’s Cabaret and West Side Story and an armada of Disney films led by Mary Poppins. From The Wizard of Oz to Hedwig and Angry Inch, it’s easy to name beloved films that are powered by amazing music. But, like every other genre, the musical has seen its fair share of sour notes. 40 years ago this week, the critically reviled Xanadu hit theaters. And while people all over the world still enjoy a number of the Olivia Newton-John and ELO songs contained in the film, it stirred up enough dislike as a movie to inspire the creation of the Golden Raspberry Awards. In that spirit, and with full awareness that someone out there probably loves each and every one of these, here are the Worst Movie Musicals Ever.

10. Xanadu (1980)

The trailer for Xanadu (Available on YouTube via YouTube Movies)

Perhaps the biggest problem for Xanadu’s detractors is that its disparate elements just never really hang together. Gene Kelly brings in a classic vibe, and the attempt to blend the ’40s and ’80s is commendable, but seeing Kelly frequently just reminds you how much better old Gene Kelly musicals were. The Greek mythology elements come off as more of a distraction. And frankly, there’s just way too much roller-skating. It’s also hard not to laugh when the nightclub they’ve been creating turns out to look like the set of Solid Gold. Bonus Track: dancer and actress Sandahl Bergman played one of Newtown-John’s Muse sisters two years before she made a big impression in Conan the Barbarian.

9. Cats (2019)

The Cats trailer (Uploaded to YouTube by Movieclips Trailers)

Here’s a caveat: time may move this up the list. Let’s face it: regular Cats is nobody’s favorite musical. Yes, Betty Buckley and Elaine Paige slayed “Memory” on both sides of the Atlantic, but that’s it. The basic story is this cat does this, this cat does that, no one likes the cat that has sex until it’s time to ritually sacrifice her, and so on. (Note to self: A Midsommar musical would be awesome.) But what really sets the film apart is the complete Uncanny Valley-ness of it all. Somehow, Marvel can make a tree and a raccoon into tactile, emotionally believable characters, whereas the unholy mélange of cat and human in Cats look like cut-scenes from the PlayStation I era. It’s just inherently bad. Bonus Track: Taylor Swift only has three words of dialogue.

8. Can’t Stop the Music (1980)

The Can’t Stop the Music trailer (Uploaded to YouTube by Shout! Factory)

It’s the fictionalized origin story of the Village People, starring the Village People! It was also the other half of a double-feature with Xanadu that inspired John J.B. Wilson to create the Golden Raspberry Awards; Can’t Stop the Music was the first winner for Worst Picture. Plot-wise, the movie is a disjointed mess as it tries to follow multiple plotlines, like a romance between Valerie Perrine and then-Bruce Jenner (Jenner’s film debut, roughly 25 years before coming out as trans and taking the name Caitlyn), the struggles of Steve Guttenberg’s songwriter, the recruitment of the six Village People, and more. The only well-known VP song in the film is “Y.M.C.A.;” it appears during a musical number set at the, of course, Y, and features full-frontal male nudity (something that generally never happens in a film not rated R). Bonus Track: The director was Nancy Walker, best known as Rhoda’s mother on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Rhoda, and character Rosie for 20 years of Bounty paper towel commercials.

7. Grease 2 (1982)

The Grease 2 trailer (Available on YouTube via YouTube Movies)

Producer Allan Carr was a successful producer of films like Grease, a Tony and People’s Choice Award winner, and an agent that discovered talents like Mark Hamill, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Olivia Newton-John. He also produced Can’t Stop the Music, Grease 2, and that career-killing Snow White/Rob Lowe Oscar number, so . . . win some, lose some? You can hardly blame anyone for wanting to follow the insanely successful Grease with a sequel. On the other hand, the original film had the bedrock of the stage musical to build on. And on the other, other hand, it’s just bad. The lone bright spot is Pfeiffer, who had the distinction of being one of the few elements that wasn’t savaged by critics. Bonus Track: Male lead Maxwell Caulfield went on to a different kind of musical immortality as Rex Manning in Empire Records.

6. The Pirate Movie (1982)

It’s the 1980s, so that must mean it’s time for dueling . . . Gilbert & Sullivan adaptations? One uses the original name of the stage musical, The Pirates of Penzance, and the other opts for, simply, The Pirate Movie. One has Kevin Kline, Linda Ronstadt, and Angela Lansbury, and the other stars the guy from The Blue Lagoon. One failed because of a bad business decision, and the other failed because, well, it’s The Pirate Movie. The film starts badly, by shoehorning in a “let’s start in modern day and make it a dream, sort of” premise, and goes more wrong from there. Bonus Track: 1983’s Penzance with Ronstadt was cut off at the knees because Universal tried to simultaneously release it in theatres and pay services; subsequently, many theatre chains boycotted it, destroying its box office chances.

5. Rock of Ages (2012)

The trailer for Rock of Ages (Uploaded to YouTube by Warner Bros. Pictures)

Would you go into a musical thinking that Tom Cruise is going to be the best part? That’s nothing against Cruise, who has proven that he’s literally willing to hang off of a plane to entertain us. But the absence of musical work on his resume turned out to be an advantage, because nobody expected that he’d be that good as hair-metal god Stacee Jaxx. Unfortunately, nothing in the rest of the movie lives up to that. There’s not really even a chance for a transformative breakout hit, as it’s a jukebox musical filled with previously known hits with only one original song. Another strike is that Mary J. Blige doesn’t get a number of her own. Possibly the biggest letdown is that the movie trades the spirit of the stage show (which is, “hey, this brand of rock is kind of silly, but huge fun”) for treating it all like a big goof. If the filmmakers aren’t convinced, then no one else is. Bonus Track: While a number of well-known rockers appear in cameos, so does pop star Debbie Gibson, who hit #4 on Billboard’s Dance Club chart just last year with “Girls Night Out.”

4. Nine (2009)

The Nine trailer (Uploaded to YouTube by Movieclips Classic Trailers)

Nine is the rare case of a movie that gets a ton of award nominations (including four Oscar nods) but ultimately no one seems happy about it. The creative pedigree is astounding. Based on Arthur Kopit and Maury Yeston’s stage musical, which was itself inspired by Federico Fellini’s 8½, the film was written by Michael Tolkin (The Player) and Anthony Minghella (The English Patient) and directed by Rob Marshall (Chicago). It stars Daniel Day-Lewis, Penelope Cruz, Marion Cotillard, Judi Dench, Sophia freaking Loren, Nicole Kidman, Kate Hudson, and Fergie. And yet . . . blah. Maybe it’s because 19 of the original songs were excised. Maybe it’s because the story of a director’s mid-life crisis just didn’t connect with audiences. Maybe it’s not even that bad, but just seems egregious in the face of SO MUCH TALENT going nowhere. Bonus Track: Remarkably, given their status as Italian icons, Loren and Fellini never did a film together, though she did present him with his Honorary Oscar in 1993.

3. From Justin to Kelly (2005)

The Golden Raspberry Awards went in hard on this one, calling it “Worst ‘Musical’ of Our First 25 Years.” Kelly Clarkson won the inaugural 2002 season of American Idol on Fox; Justin Guarini was runner-up. They found themselves contractually obligated to do a movie for 20th Century Fox, and this utterly terrible spring break musical was the result. Sure, we understand that they called Kelly’s character “Kelly,” but her movie last name of Taylor means that she inexplicably and distractingly shares a name with Kelly Taylor of Fox’s 90210 franchise. Much of the plot is a series of contrivances to keep the two leads apart, which makes little sense. It’s really not good.  Bonus Track: Clarkson has of course had 28 Hot 100 hits since, and Guarini has stealthily appeared for years as Lil Sweet in an ongoing series of Dr. Pepper commercials.

2. Shock Treatment (1981)

How do you follow the success of The Rocky Horror Picture Show? Apparently, you can’t. It had the original director (Jim Sharman), the original writers (Sharman and Richard O’Brien), the original songwriter (O’Brien), two of the original characters (Brad and Janet, though played by different actors), and several members of the original cast as new characters. But it just doesn’t connect. While the idea of a whole town inside a studio dominated by constantly running TV programming is ahead of its time, it never totally comes off and you constantly wonder as a viewer why O’Brien and Patricia Quinn aren’t just their fantastic Riff Raff and Magenta selves again. Bonus Track: Jessica Harper, who replaced Susan Sarandon as Janet, had the female lead in another frequently panned musical, Phantom of the Paradise; however, she was also the lead in the horror classic Suspiria and appeared in its 2018 remake.

1. The Apple (1980)

The trailer for The Apple (Uploaded to YouTube by Movieclips Classic Trailers)

Apparently 1980 wasn’t exactly the best year to try a musical. Director Menahem Golan co-owned The Cannon Group with his cousin, Yoram Globus. They made some cheesy but popular films, like Breakin’, American Ninja, and Missing in Action. They were also responsible for disasters like Superman IV: The Quest for Peace and the famously bad 1990 version of Captain America that never made it to American theaters. The Apple somehow tries to combine a future version of the Eurovision Song Contest (here, the 1994 Worldvision Song Festival) and a parable of the dangers of the entertainment industry with, wait for it, The Bible. You have analogues for Adam, Eve, and The Devil (Mr. Boogalow, who owns a label, of course). You have variations on temptation scenes (title song The Apple, which includes a sort of tour of Hell with dumb as anything lyrics “It’s a natural, natural, natural desire/Meet an actual, actual, actual vampire”). The climax of the film is The Rapture. Seriously, this is a real movie. Utterly crazy doesn’t even really cover it. But sadly, it’s not an eminently rewatchable kind of crazy. It’s just terrible.

Featured image: (Aleutie / Shutterstock)

Review: Rebuilding Paradise — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

Rebuilding Paradise

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Rating: PG-13

Run Time: 1 hour 35 minutes

Director: Ron Howard

In Theaters July 31, Streaming Soon

An explosion of horrific immediacy launches Ron Howard’s documentary about the aftermath of the 2018 Camp Fire, a wildfire that consumed the town of Paradise, California. Making ingenious use of terrifying phone video footage and anguished audio recordings, Howard recreates the chaotic hours when some 24,000 residents went from dropping their kids at school and getting ready for work to racing for their lives through the very gates of a fiery, smoke-choked hell.

“Are we going to die?” a motorist asks a cop who has just informed her all routes of escape are engulfed. “My house is burning,” a patrolling cop reports as dash-cam footage reveals a ball of fire erupting under a cloud of smoke. “Please, God, help us! The windows are melting!” an unseen driver screams as she rolls uncertainly by the shells of burned-out cars.

And finally, after what seems like an eternity, an escaping family’s camera catches a glimpse of blue sky beyond the cloud of smoke.

“We’re going to make it!” the dad yells triumphantly. From the back seat comes the sound of a little boy crying hysterically.

It’s as powerful a 15 minutes as you’ll ever see open a film; Howard’s domestic answer to Steven Spielberg’s D-Day sequence in Saving Private Ryan — only in this case the cinematographers are ordinary people who had the presence of mind to record for posterity what could have been their final minutes.

Howard’s actual camera crew doesn’t arrive in Paradise until a week or so after the flames have burned themselves out, while the town’s displaced residents are still finding places to stay — sitting shell-shocked on cots in a gymnasium, settling in the basements of distant relatives, camping in tent cities on football fields. Their eyes are empty, their mouths slightly agape in did-this-really-happen disbelief.

But the director isn’t interested in telling a story of hopeless tragedy. With a faith in human resilience that has marked his films from A Beautiful Mind to Apollo 13, Howard seems assured of Paradise’s resurrection even before its resident are. Focusing on a handful of indelible characters, he chronicles their slow realization that even after everything changes, life goes on.

One of them is Steve “Woody” Culleton, himself a story in resurrection, the self-described “former town drunk” who dried out, turned his life around and eventually became mayor. Beloved by his fellow Paradisians, he’s among the first to declare he’ll never leave the town, and even before the ashes have cooled has already drawn up plans to rebuild his home.

We patrol the streets of Paradise — indeed, to a large degree only the streets remain — with local cop Matt Gates, an incredibly cool guy who should be played in the narrative version of this film by Deadpool’s Ryan Reynolds. It is he who witnessed his home collapse in flames while on patrol, but he wonders aloud, “I don’t know if it’s worse to have lost your house or be one of the few whose homes came through it.” In one of the film’s few lighter moments, he gestures to an empty lot he’s passing. “It’s cliché, I know,” he says. “But that used to be the donut shop.”

Another is Superintendent of Schools Michelle John, who despite the fact that some of the town’s school buildings are now smoking rubble, determines Paradise will retain its educational identity, setting up makeshift classrooms in houses, barns, and shopping malls. We meet her devoted husband Phil, who surrenders hereto the endless hours of duty while gently reminding her to eat and sleep. “You’re no good to anyone if you’re sick,” he cautions her as they sit in the living room of a distant cousin who has taken them in. As if to prove to the scorched landscape that Paradise will not be bowed, John vows to hold the high school graduation on the football field — intact after the fire but surrounded by towering dead trees that first need to be brought down (and which FEMA, helpful but a tangle of red tape, resists accomplishing on time).

The story of Paradise’s rebuilding is not a litany of improbable success stories. Many people leave town forever, unable to face the memories of that awful morning. At the moment of her greatest triumph — the football field graduation she dreamed of — John is struck with unspeakable personal tragedy. And even good-natured Officer Gates discovers the personal price a community-wide calamity can inflict when you’re not looking.

But this is a Ron Howard film, and in Paradise he has found the real-life crystallization of what he has proclaimed throughout a life on film: In the end, the human spirit will always rise, quite literally, from the ashes.

Featured image: A home burns as the Camp Fire rages through Paradise, CA on Thursday, Nov. 8, 2018 (Photo by Noah Berger) (provided by Bill Newcott)

Review: A Most Beautiful Thing — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

A Most Beautiful Thing

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Run Time: 1 hour 35 minutes

Narrator: Common

Director: Mary Mazzio

Now streaming on XFinity VOD; on Peacock September 1; on Amazon Prime October 14.

The best documentaries lull you into thinking they’re taking you for a nice float on a lazy stream — then abruptly suck you into a chasm of Class 5 rapids that have you holding on for dear life.

That’s the kind of ride we get in director Mary Mazzio’s new film, which starts out as the inspiring tale of America’s first all-African-American public high school rowing team — but has much more on its mind than warm feelies.

It’s the 1990s on the West Side of Chicago, where gang violence is tearing apart the student body of Manley High School. Enter a white Chicago businessman named Ken Alpart, who naively convinces administrators that what the school really needs is a rowing team. He puts a sleek crew shell on display in the cafeteria, offers free pizza to anyone who signs up — and waits to see who comes through the door.

What he gets is a random collection of rival gang members, kids barely holding onto their lives, much less their grades. We meet them in the present day: Grown men, now nearly 40, scarred by their harrowing youths. Foremost among them is Arshay Cooper, who recalls for us his daily adventure walking five blocks to school — and having to wear his baseball cap a different way each block, so as not to get jumped by the local street gang.

The guys laugh as they recall their first time sitting in the low, easily-tipped boat — terrified they might end up in the water.

Some were ready to quit before they got started until, as Cooper recalls, he asked them, “How can you deal with gunshots all day long in your neighborhood and you’re scared to sit in a boat?”

From here the narrative seems to be going just as we’ve hoped: On the water, the guys find a peace they’ve never known before. The former sworn enemies become a team. They enter their first competition, fail miserably, but learn from their mistakes. Finally, at the biggest race of the year, they not only earn the respect of other rowers, but they are celebrated by the entire city of Chicago.

It’s an engaging, feel-good story that seems tailor made for a Hollywood remake — you could probably do the casting yourself.

But something seems a little off here: We’re barely halfway through the film’s run time, and the kids are already graduating from high school. They say farewell to their rowing adventure. Everyone goes their separate ways.

Now what?

It is now 2018, and the old teammates have just learned that an assistant coach from their high school days has suddenly died. They gather for the funeral, and Cooper hatches an audacious plan: Why not have a reunion row? It doesn’t take long for everyone to get on board with the idea.

It’s a decision that makes the second half of A Most Beautiful Thing even more inspiring than the first. For one thing, virtually none of the guys is anywhere near rowing shape. For another, it goes without saying none of the kids went on to Ivy League rowing glory; they returned to the ’hood where the familiar litany of misfortune awaited many of them: drugs, crime, poverty, and imprisonment. Skillfully and respectfully, Mazzio unfolds each man’s history, exploring the inner city dynamics that stacked the deck against them from the start (she cites a study that reports children from neighborhoods like these suffer higher rates of PTSD than combat soldiers).

Still, after a rocky start, the old teammates rediscover their rhythm. Cooper — who wrote the book on which this film is based, is a sought-after motivational speaker and has become something of a legend in the rowing community — even enlists Olympic rowing coach Mike Teti to whip them into shape.

But Cooper has more than a rowing reunion in mind. Recalling how the sport brought gang rivals together, he hatches an outrageous notion: Why not invite four members of the Chicago Police Department to row with them?

Now, Mazzio has just spent the last hour or so illustrating the tortured relationship between the cops and the ’hood. At this very moment, one of the guys is wearing an ankle bracelet after a run-in with the law. But they trust Cooper and reluctantly agree, leading to some of the most remarkable scenes of awkwardly effective bridge building you’ll ever see.

Finally, the team decides to enter one last official race, returning to the waters where they found high school glory. By now we’re beyond worrying about whether they’ll win or lose. We’re all friends here.

It’s hard to imagine a more stormy sea than the one this country is navigating right now, but the inspiring men from Manley High School have a couple of lessons for us all: First, don’t assume that everyone who’s not on your side is your enemy. And second, it’s possible to find common cause with just about anyone, even if you have to keep them at oar’s length.

Featured image: Richard Schultz/50 Eggs Films

Review: The Truth — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

The Truth

⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Rating: PG

Run Time: 1 hour 46 minutes

Stars: Catherine Deneuve, Juliette Binoche, Ethan Hawke

Writer/Director: Hirokazu Koreeda

I usually don’t have much patience for films about how hard it is to be a movie star — I hear Starbucks is hiring — but there’s no denying the thrill of seeing the great Catherine Deneuve as a fading screen goddess coming to terms with movie mortality.

The French film legend plays Fabienne Dangeville, a bygone screen siren who has written her memoirs. It’s a selective account at best that scrupulously makes her look good at the expense of just about everyone she’s ever known — and that includes her long-suffering daughter Lumir, played by another uncontested member of French film royalty, Juliette Binoche.

Lumir lives in America — ostensibly to facilitate her screenwriting career but clearly to also keep an ocean between her and her mère. But now she has come roaring across the Atlantic to Paris in order to have a showdown over the book, which sugarcoats Lumir’s miserable childhood at the whims of a career-obsessed mother.

To make matters worse, Fabienne is currently filming a cheesy sci-fi flick in which she plays the elderly daughter of a beautiful young mother who never grows old — just the sort of role that reminds her (and her fans) of just how far she is past her sex symbol prime.

This is the kind of material you’ll often find young directors tackling to entice some past-their-prime actor to emerge from semi-retirement and pull out that tedious “Getting Old Sucks but I’ll Make the Most of It” routine. But The Truth is from the skilled hand of Hirokazu Koreeda, whose Oscar-nominated Shoplifters was one of the most sensitively realized films of 2019. Koreeda’s talent for treading the fine line between sentiment and mawkishness is on full display here: Deneuve’s Fabienne, flinty-eyed in the face of aging, never plays for our sympathy; in fact at times she seems ready to throw us out the door along with everyone else who’s ever cared about her. And as the daughter who partly wants to reconcile with her mother and partly wants to leave her stewing in her own soufflé, Binoche matches each eruption of self-centered bitterness with a dose of off-handed remedial dismissal.

That’s a lot of family drama, and it could become a bit overwhelming if not for the welcome presence of Ethan Hawke as Lumir’s good-natured husband, Hank. Even when the mother-daughter tempest is raging at Category 5, Hank keeps an even, bemused keel — largely because he doesn’t speak a word of French.

It all builds up to the filming of a climactic scene in Fabienne’s movie-within-a-movie, in which her character must offer an emotional, self-revelatory speech to her screen mother. Until this point, we’ve been suspecting that Deneuve, one of the great screen divas, might be slumming her way through The Truth, a film that has asked to this point only that she channel the fragile emotional state of a 76-year-old former sex siren.

But she proves otherwise in this one remarkable scene, offering a breathtaking master class in conveying a script’s text, subtext, and subliminal text as Fabienne suddenly comes to realize the truth that can reside in even the most pedestrian words.

After 63 years in the movies, she knows what she’s doing.

Featured image: Scene from The Truth (courtesy IFC Films)

Review: Radioactive — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

Radioactive

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: PG-13

Run Time: 1 hour 49 minutes

Stars: Rosamund Pike, Sam Riley, Yvette Feuer, Aneurin Barnard

Writer: Jack Thorne

Director: Marjane Satrapi

Streaming on Amazon Prime

Tackling the life story of pioneering nuclear scientist Marie Curie, Rosamund Pike continues her recent explorations of tough-to-pin-down historic women — pithy females who tossed aside their cultures’ expectations and plunged stubbornly forward, either failing to hear the cries of objection or simply choosing to ignore them.

In A United Kingdom she played Ruth Williams, a London woman who defied the social norms of two countries when she married an African king in the late 1940s. She chain-smoked and growled her way through A Private War, painting an uncompromisingly coarse portrait of war correspondent Marie Colvin. And here in Radioactive, playing the Mother of the Atomic Age, Pike strikes yet another defiant pose as a woman who, despite her obvious brilliance, battles at every turn to make her mark in the male-dominated scientific world of the early 20th century.

It’s a startling performance that commands virtually every moment of the film’s run time, as Pike’s Curie runs into one institutional blockade after another.

Unmarried and fighting to keep her position at a Paris laboratory, in one early scene Curie storms into an all-male (of course) board meeting to demand more lab space — and ends up fired. Facing professional ruin, Pike’s face swims with conflicting emotions: fury, surprise, hurt, and dread fear. But even as her expressions flit from one state of mind to another, she seems to grow in stature to the point where the guys with the cigars — and we — begin to wonder if she’s going to leap at them from across the conference table.

So prickly is Pike’s Curie that we almost gasp in astonishment when she lowers her stoic resolve long enough — but just barely so — to fall in love with and marry Pierre Curie, an uncommonly open-minded fellow scientist (Sam Reilly, channeling the same suave charm that made him the perfect alt-world Mr. Darcy in 2016’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies).

Iranian director Marjane Satrapi — Oscar-nominated for her animated film Persepolis — knows she’s got a good thing going in Pike. When’s she’s not simply turning the whole film over to her star she’s taking devilish delight in depicting the world’s turn-of-the-century radiation mania — depicting with dark glee such products as radioactive toothpaste and chewing gum. Of course, the fun is all over when Marie, Pierre, and their fellow scientists start coughing up blood, signaling the awful realities of unchecked radiation.

Screenwriter Jack Thorne (Wonder, The Aeronauts) makes the risky choice of repeatedly flash forwarding to the decades following Curie’s death, reminding us of the world her discoveries created, from the atomic bomb to radiation therapy to Chernobyl. Indeed, at times he literally injects Madame Curie herself into these scenes, a ghostly witness to her complicated legacy. It doesn’t always work — Curie’s life is compelling enough without resorting to a tricked-up narrative — but the ploy does serve to remind us that although the events here unfolded more than a century ago, some of the modern world’s most profound dilemmas harken back to that dusty, irradiated laboratory in pre-World War I Paris.

In any case, all is forgiven whenever Pike is on the screen. History is always more fun when filmmakers leave the rough edges intact, and Radioactive does just that — thanks mainly to the superb work of an actor who thrives on showing those edges in stark, supremely human, relief.

Featured image: Rosamund Pike in Radioactive (Photo Credit: Laurie Sparham; StudioCanal/Amazon Studios)

Caddyshack Turns 40: Nine Things You Didn’t Know About the Cinderella Story

EPSN thinks it might be the funniest movie ever made about sports. Some point to it as another example of how Saturday Night Live incubates talents that are suitable for the big screen. And others consider it the best of the “slobs vs. snobs” subgenre of comedy. However you score it, Caddyshack has been one of most popular and most loved film comedies (almost) since its release 40 years ago this week. In honor of its longevity and continued hilarity, we’ll shoot a (front) nine full of things you didn’t know about Caddyshack.

1. It Was Created by Caddies

Caddyshack star Bill Murray is regular on the Celebrity Pro-Am circuit (Uploaded to YouTube by PGA Tour)

Writer and co-star Brian Doyle-Murray had the idea for the film based on his own experiences working as a caddie. His brothers John and Bill Murray had as well, as had their friend Harold Ramis. Brian, Bill, and Ramis had all been members of the Second City comedy troupe; Ramis also worked with Bill Murray on The National Lampoon Radio Hour and was one of four writers credited on Murray’s film, Meatballs. Douglas Kenney, who had founded National Lampoon magazine and co-wrote National Lampoon’s Animal House with Ramis and Chris Miller, came aboard and collaborated with Ramis and Doyle-Murray on the screenplay for Caddyshack. In 2002, the Murrays and their fourth brother, Joel, created and appeared in the Comedy Channel series The Sweet Spot, which featured the brothers playing golf at top-notch courses.

2. What Ramis Really Wanted to Do Was Direct

With his background writing for SCTV, National Lampoon, and two successful screenplays under his belt, Ramis was able to assume the director’s chair. Doyle-Murray took the role of caddie supervisor Lou Loomis, while Kenney would take a background role as one of Al Czervik’s (Rodney Dangerfield) hangers-on. The small scale of Kenney’s role was similar to his turn as Stork in Animal House, which he assigned himself and where he had only two lines; he’s the one who ultimately leads the marching band into a dead end. Brian and Bill’s brother John pulled double-duty on the film, appearing as a caddie extra and working behind the scenes as a production assistant.

3. Chevy Chase Was a Logical Fit

The “Be the Ball” Scene (Uploaded to YouTube by Movieclips)

Although Chase had passed on the role of Otter in Animal House (which was played by Tim Matheson), he agreed to join Caddyshack. Kenney was one of his closest friends, and he’d worked with Ramis and Bill Murray on The National Lampoon Radio Hour. An original member of the Saturday Night Live cast, Chase had also been the first to leave and find film success. By the time that he shot Caddyshack, he’d already had a hit with Foul Play. For his part, Murray was still on the show and would work shooting his scenes in the film around his SNL schedule. Doyle-Murray was also still working for SNL as a writer and would later be a full cast member.

4. There Are Too Many Palm Trees in Florida

Production began in the fall of 1979. Rolling Hills Country Club in Davie, Florida served as the location for the shoot; today it’s called Grande Oaks Golf Club. Ramis chose that location because it was one of the few Florida courses that didn’t have palm trees. The director was particular about that because he wanted the movie to feel like it could be in the Midwest. One downside of shooting in Florida was that the production had to contend with delays caused by Hurricane David, which briefly touched Florida on September 3.

5. The Film Made Rodney Dangerfield a Movie Star

Rodney Dangerfield was already established as a stand-up comedy star before Caddyshack. Dangerfield broke out after an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1967. He would regularly return to that show and became a popular guest on programs like The Dean Martin Show and The Tonight Show (where he was a guest 35 times). In 1969, he and Anthony Bevacqua created Dangerfield’s, a comedy club in New York, which became one of the home bases of HBO’s Young Comedian Specials. Dangerfield’s stand-up background and Chase and Murray’s grounding in sketch comedy made them all quick on the draw with improv, an environment that led to their roles getting expanded and improvised bits (like Murray’s flower-destroying fantasy monologue about playing at Augusta) making the final film. For his part, Dangerfield was launched into leading his own film comedies like Easy Money.

6. We Should Probably Get These Two Together

The “Mind If I Play Through?” Scene (Uploaded to YouTube by Movieclips)

The movie was already shooting when Ramis realized that two of the biggest draws in the film, Chase and Murray, had exactly zero scenes together. That may not have entirely been by accident, as Chase and Murray had famously had a contentious run-in backstage at SNL when Chase had returned to host the show. Nevertheless, Ramis, Chase, and Murray went to lunch together and worked out the scene where Ty Webb (Chase) plays a late-night round through groundskeeper Carl’s (Murray) place.

7. The Gopher Has Some Star Wars in Him

John Dykstra won an Academy Award for special effects work that he did for Star Wars, but he had already been famously pushed out of Industrial Light and Magic by George Lucas for budget and scheduling issues before that film was finished. Dykstra would go on to create special effects for a number of other high-profile projects, including the original pilot and theatrical film for Battlestar Galactica. Dykstra’s team created the gopher and his lair while also handling lightning and other visual effects in the film.

8. The Kenny Loggins Film Reign Begins Here

Kenny Loggins performing “I’m Alright” (Uploaded to YouTube by Kenny Loggins)

Kenny Loggins was already a music mainstay before Caddyshack. The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band did four of his songs in the 1970s, which is also when he formed his hit duo with Jim Messina. Loggins and Messina did seven albums in five years. He co-wrote the Doobie Brothers hit “What A Fool Believes” and wrote “I Believe in Love,” which Barbra Streisand sang in 1976’s A Star is Born. He contributed “I’m Alright” to the Caddyshack soundtrack, and it was used as the main theme of the film (and for the gopher’s memorable dance outro). He earned the nickname “The King of the Soundtrack” for his film work throughout the 1980s, which included hit songs for Footloose, Top Gun, Over the Top, and the less-said-the-better Caddyshack II: Back to the Shack.

9. The Hard Road to Classic Status

Harold Ramis on Caddyshack 30 Years Later (Uploaded to YouTube by American Film Institute)

The film was financially successful, but critics weren’t too kind. However, fans embraced it and it went on to an even bigger second life on cable and video. Critics reevaluated the movie over time as they realized how deeply funny and quotable it was. Bill Murray and Harold Ramis (on camera this time) reteamed the next year in Stripes, which was an even bigger success; Murray and Ramis did three more films together: Ghostbusters, Ghostbusters II, and Groundhog Day. Chase had major successes for the rest of the decade, including Fletch and three films in the National Lampoon’s Vacation franchise. Today, Caddyshack is regarded as a comedy classic and regularly places on lists of the American Film Institute, such as 100 Laughs and 100 Movie Quotes. The Murray brothers also own the Murray Bros. Caddyshack restaurants, two of which are still open in St. Augustine, Florida and Rosemont, Illinois.

Featured Image: Bill Murray attends Isle of Dogs New York special screening at Metropolitan museum on March 20. 2018. (lev radin / Shutterstock.com)

Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott: The Best Beach Movies

See all Movies for the Rest of Us.

Featured image: Bill Newcott appears in “Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott: The Best Beach Movies

Five Things You Didn’t Know About the Movie Ghost

On paper, it shouldn’t work. A romantic fantasy about a love story between a girl and a ghost with a psychic played by a comedian in a movie written by a horror guy and directed by one of the guys that did Airplane! with a 35-year-old song as its love theme. . . it sounds like a moviemaking Mad Lib. But when it opened 30 years ago this week, Ghost defied expectations by pulling its disparate elements together into a massive box office hit that garnered five Academy Award nominations and two wins, including one for Whoopi Goldberg. To recognize that unexpected achievement, here are five things you didn’t know about Ghost. 

1. The Writer Had Doubts About the Director 

The trailer for Ghost (Uploaded to YouTube by Movieclips Classic Trailers) 

Bruce Joel Rubin had two established screenplays to his credit prior to Ghost. 1983’s Brainstorm was a creepy science-fiction thriller that’s best known as Natalie Wood’s final film, and the sci-fi horror of 1986’s Deadly Friend was directed by scare icon Wes Craven. Rubin’s original drafts for Ghost were darker (for really dark Rubin, see his other 1990 film, Jacob’s Ladder), so he was skeptical that Jerry Zucker was interested. 

Jerry Zucker was part of the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team with his brother, David Zucker, and their partner, Jim Abrahams. The trio had found success with a deadpan style of humor that they used to great effect in Airplane! and The Naked Gun franchise. Zucker, for his part, was in the market for good scripts of any type. When he and Rubin met for dinner, they ended up fostering a strong collaborative atmosphere. A few laughs were added during their 19 drafts, but not at the expense of very serious ideas about the nature of love and what awaits us after death. 

2. Patrick Swayze Fought forWhoopi Goldberg 

Why tell a Whoopi Goldberg story when Whoopi can tell it? 

Whoopi Goldberg on Patrick Swayze (Uploaded to YouTube by Loose Women) 

3. The Movie Resurrected“Unchained Melody” 

“Unchained Melody” by The Righteous Brothers (Uploaded to YouTube by Righteous Brothers – Topic / Universal Music Group) 

The 1955 classic “Unchained Melody” got a new lease on life thanks to Ghost. The Alex North-Hy Zaret composition was written for the film Unchained that year, and three versions by different artists all hit the Top 10 in the U.S. (all three of those, plus one by Liberace, hit the Top 20 in the U.K. at the same time). However, the version that you most likely know, and the version from Ghost, is the 1965 cover by The Righteous Brothers (Bobby Hatfield and Bill Medley). The duo flipped a coin to see who got the lead; Hatfield won, and the song went to #4 in the States. 

During the 1980s, music by the Righteous Brothers had a good run at the movies. Their “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” was memorably used in Top Gun, and Medley’s duet with Jennifer Warnes, “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life” (from the Patrick Swayze film Dirty Dancing) was a major hit. When the song appeared in the film, Medley began asking for an official re-release, but was informed there were licensing issues. He and Hatfield simply recorded a new version and released it. However, the rights holder to the original released THAT version as well. Both Righteous Brothers versions of the song became chart hits in 1990, making them the first act to have two versions of the same song on the charts at the same time. The new version hit #19 and sold a million copies by the next year; the re-release went to #13 in the U.S. and stayed at #1 for a month in the U.K. 

4. Goldberg’s Oscar Made History

Whoopi Goldberg wins the Oscar (Uploaded to YouTube by Oscars) 

Goldberg’s turn as Oda Mae Brown, a charlatan psychic that becomes Sam (Patrick Swayze), the titular ghost’s, way of communicating with Molly (Demi Moore) drew rave reviews. Goldberg became only the second Black woman to win the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress (the first had been Hattie McDaniel for Gone with the Wind almost 50 years earlier). Writer Rubin also received an Oscar for Best Screenplay. 

5. The Ghost Legacy 

Financially, Ghost was a major win for Paramount that year; the $22 million film pulled in $505 million. That made it the #1 hit of 1990 and briefly placed it as the third biggest moneymaker of all time. While it was far from the first ghost-related love story (see Wuthering Heights, Greek mythology, 1943’s A Guy Named Joe, Always, etc.), it did represent a huge success in the supernatural or paranormal romance subgenre; successes always lower the curb, allowing other projects to get made. On into the rest of the 1990s and 2000s, a number of successful properties that relied on couples separated by supernatural circumstances prospered, including the paired TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, the Twilight series, and The Southern Vampire Mysteries (basis for the HBO series True Blood, which featured lead character Sookie Stackhouse in a number of difficult relationships with a variety of supernatural beings). There has been consideration of Ghost itself being remade or rebooted, with some discussion around the idea of an ongoing TV series floating just a few years ago. While some might consider it impossible to recapture what made the original film so popular, that’s never stopped Hollywood from trying to bring a classic film back to life. 

Featured image: Kathy Hutchins / Shutterstock.com

Coming Around Again: The Longest Running (and Longest Gaps Between) Hits

To say that 2020 has been an odd year would be an understatement on the order of “The Beatles were mildly popular.” One of the places that the strangeness of our lockdown year has been reflected has been at the movies. With regular theaters closed, drive-ins surged, frequently playing older films. That resulted in the unusual case of 1993’s Jurassic Park hitting the top of the box office again in June. That phenomenon leads to the following questions: what are the biggest gaps between chart toppers, whether at the box office, the record charts, or elsewhere, and what are the film and TV series that have stuck around the longest?

1. When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth

Jurassic Park stomped to #1 for three weeks upon its initial release in 1993. On June 22nd, lifted by drive-ins, the film took the top spot again 27 years after its original ride. Gone with the Wind remains the all-time box office champion if you adjust for inflation, and the 1939 film had three official re-releases (1989, 1998, 2019), but none of them cracked the #1 spot.

2. Cockroaches and Cher

 

There’s an old joke that goes that if there’s ever a nuclear war, all that’s left will be cockroaches and Cher. While that’s a loving, tongue-in-cheek tribute to the star’s longevity and resiliency, it also has a ring of truth to it where the charts are concerned. Cher hit #1 for the first time in August of 1965 with her then-husband Sonny Bono on their classic “I Got You Babe.” After a continuous run of hits throughout the rest of the 1960s, the 1970s (with three solo #1s), the 1980s, and the 1990s, Cher took “Believe” to #1 in March of 1998. That’s an amazing 33-year-and-seven-month gap between her first #1 and her most recent #1.

Other prodigious gaps between first and most recent #1s have been held by George Harrison (23 years and 11 months between “I Want to Hold Your Hand” as a Beatle in 1964 and “Got My Mind Set on You” in 1988), The Beach Boys (24 years and 5 months between “I Get Around” and “Kokomo”), Elton John (24 years and 8 months between “Crocodile Rock” and “Candle in the Wind 1997”) and Michael Jackson (25 years and 8 months between “I Want You Back” with The Jackson 5 and “You Are Not Alone”).

3. His Name is Series, Longest-Running Series

 

While the overall continuity of the James Bond series is in question, everyone generally treats the films as if they’re part of an ongoing mega-series. It’s the third-highest grossing franchise in movie history, behind only the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Star Wars. But the biggest weapon that Q never designed is Bond’s insane longevity. The first film, Dr. No, was released in October of 1962. If No Time to Die keeps its adjusted November 20, 2020 release date, then that will be 58 years and one month between the first and most recent installments of the series.

4. Call The Doctor!

Another British favorite that will seemingly go on forever is Doctor Who. There’s no question about Who continuity; everything is fair game, particularly when your main character is a regenerating Time Lord that is simply the same character in a new form with each re-casting. The Doctor’s first adventure aired in 1963. The original series ran uninterrupted until 1989. A TV film aired in 1996. The series restarted in earnest in 2005 and has been running ever since. The most recent season ended in March of this year. While the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic has put production dates everywhere in question, a special, “Revolution of the Daleks,” should air around the holidays, and the next season is generally expected to air beginning in 2021. If you simply use today as the metric for how long the single continuity of Doctor Who has been running, that’s 57 years of adventures in space and time.

5. Hang on, Marshal Dillon; Detective Benson Is Here

For many years, the issue of the longest-running drama on prime time American television wasn’t a question. That was Gunsmoke, which ran from 1955 to 1975. In 2019, that record was passed by Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, which started in 1999 and is ongoing at present; in fact, NBC has already given it a blanket renewal through a 24th season. The longest-running prime-time program overall is animated comedy The Simpsons, which launched in 1989 and is still running.

On the daytime side, the Guiding Light still holds the record for longest running daytime drama with 57 years on the books at its 2009 sign-off. That record will fall to General Hospital in the very near future. Had it not been for the interruption in production brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, GH would have passed it this summer. At the moment, a hard pass date can’t be established until production resumes.

6. Seriously, I Was Writing the Whole Time

Some writers seem to function at an inhuman level of output. For every George R.R. Martin, who takes years between A Game of Thrones installments, you have his pal Stephen King, who has averaged 1.4 novels a year since 1974 (plus 11 short story collections, 19 screenplays and five nonfiction works). Then you have the entirely opposite end of the spectrum where dwell writers that have a literal lifetime between their first and second novels. The big winner there is Harper Lee; 55 years passed between the release of To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman. On the technical level, the issue of what to call Watchman exactly is the subject of some debate; yes, it’s a novel, but it’s also really the first draft of what would become Mockingbird.

If you’re looking for the longest gap between an original novel and its sequel, then King might hold the record. It’s true that 59 years passed between the publication of Upton Sinclair’s King Coal and the follow-up The Coal War. However, Sinclair finished the sequel in 1917; the publisher didn’t want to put it out and it sat until 1976, eight years after Sinclair’s passing. King’s gap comes between the 1977 publication of The Shining and its sequel, 2013’s Doctor Sleep, which hit stores 36 years later.

7. Another Day in the 87th Precinct

When it comes to the longest-running series of novels, there are quite a few qualifiers involved. Some novels are franchises given over to other writers, or are based on characters owned by companies rather than individuals. That might account for characters like Doc Savage or Remo Williams/The Destroyer, that have hundreds of novels under their fictional belts. Then you get into series, like Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, with 40 books, or Agatha Christie’s 38 books centered on Hercule Poirot, or the exploits of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe in 49 books. Erle Stanley Gardner produced 82 Perry Mason mysteries between 1933 and 1973.

But the longest sustained series by one author appears to be the 87th Precinct series of novels by Ed McBain, which is the pseudonym of Evan Hunter. Between 1956 and 2005, McBain put out 54 novels that take place in one overarching continuity. Set in the city of Isola, a fictional analogue of New York City, the novels follow the cases of the Precinct, most of which involve Detective 2nd Grade Steve Carella.

It seems appropriate to give a mention here to Sue Grafton. From 1982 to 2017, she published “The Alphabet Mysteries,” a series featuring her detective Kinsey Millhone. The books were designed to be a series of 26, one for each letter of the alphabet (A is for Alibi, etc.). The series ran for 35 years. Unfortunately, Grafton passed away in 2017 before beginning the planned Z is for Zero. As opposed to writers like Robert Jordan, who worked with others to see that his Wheel of Time series would be completed after his death, Grafton disdained the idea of having a ghostwriter finish the series. In the Facebook post that announced her mother’s passing, Grafton’s daughter Jamie wrote, “Many of you also know that she was adamant that her books would never be turned into movies or TV shows, and in that same vein, she would never allow a ghost writer to write in her name. Because of all of those things, and out of the deep abiding love and respect for our dear sweet Sue, as far as we in the family are concerned, the alphabet now ends at Y.”

Featured image: Shutterstock

Great Scott!: Back to the Future Hit Screens 35 Years Ago

Some films catch lightning in a bottle; this one caught lightning with a clock tower. Thirty-five years ago, Back to the Future shrugged off troubled early filming (which led to the lead actor being replaced) and went on to become one of the most beloved comedies of all time. It was a massive hit, launching a franchise that included two sequels, an animated series, theme park rides, comic books, video games, and a stage musical while inspiring other shows like Rick and Morty. In honor of the 88 mph that Doc Brown’s DeLorean needs to achieve to time travel, here are eight things about Back to the Future that might have been erased from your memory.

1. Starring … Eric Stoltz?

When shooting commenced on Back to the Future in November 1984, Marty McFly was played by Eric Stoltz. The acclaimed young actor, known in the 1980s for such films as Mask and Some Kind of Wonderful, took the job because Michael J. Fox’s Family Ties commitments kept him tied up. That situation was exacerbated by the fact that Fox’s TV mom, Meredith Baxter Birney, was on maternity leave, necessitating more time in front of the cameras from the rest of the cast. However, a few weeks into filming Back to the Future, director Robert Zemeckis felt that Stoltz, while turning in fine work, was playing the comedic part too dramatically. Stoltz also had misgivings about his own casting, and he agreed to depart the project. Zemeckis went back to NBC, and the producers agreed to a situation whereby Fox could make the film while continuing to work on Family Ties; this meant that Fox spent many weeks filming scenes for the sitcom during the day and shooting the movie at night.

2. Huey Lewis Is Judgmental

The video for “The Power of Love” by Huey Lewis & the News. (Uploaded to YouTube by hueylewisofficial)

During the early scene where Marty’s band, The Pinheads, auditions for the battle of the bands, the nerdy bespectacled judge is played by musician Huey Lewis. Huey Lewis & the News contributed two songs to the film’s soundtrack, “The Power of Love” and “Back in Time;” in fact, a more metal, distorted version of “Love” is Marty’s audition song. “Love” became the band’s first No. 1 on the Hot 100 and earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song.

3. The DeLorean: The Punchline That Time Forgot

Zemeckis and his BTTF co-writer and producer Bob Gale chose to make the time machine from a DeLorean as because its already futuristic appearance would sell the joke of the car being mistaken for a UFO. The car functioned as a secondary punchline at the time because the DeLorean Motor Company had gone bankrupt a couple of years earlier, and its founder, John DeLorean, had been acquitted in a high-profile drug trafficking trial less than a year before the film opened. During the run of the film in theaters, DeLorean was indicted on fraud and tax evasion charges related to his company’s bankruptcy, but he was acquitted in those cases as well.

4. The Town Square Was Shot ’50s First

Zemeckis shot BTTF’s Hill Valley Town Square scenes on the backlot at Universal Studios. All of the 1950s scenes were shot first, with the set dressed for the period and painted to have a shiny, new quality. When those scenes were wrapped, the set was redressed in a more run-down, ramshackle appearance to capture the decline of the town for the 1980s scenes.

5. Chuck Berry Was Already a Hitmaker

The “Johnny B. Goode” scene from Back to the Future. (Uploaded to YouTube by Movieclips)

The film gives the comedic impression that Marty McFly helped invent rock-’n’-roll and ignite Chuck Berry’s career when he plays “Johnny B. Goode” during the “Enchantment Under the Sea” dance on November 12, 1955. The truth is that Berry already had a hit with “Maybelline ” earlier that year; with song sold a million copies. In fact, though it wasn’t released until 1958, Berry wrote “Johnny B. Goode” in 1955 as well; the opening riff on that tune was, well, swiped from Louis Jordan’s “Ain’t That Just Like a Woman .” Mark Campbell of Jack Mack and the Heart Attack provided Fox’s singing voice in the scene.

6. Biff Seems a Little Bit Familiar (Especially in Part 2)

Thomas F. Wilson played uber-bully Biff Tannen in different incarnations in Back to the Future and its two sequels. However, the adult millionaire Biff from the darker, altered future in the second film was based directly on a real, very familiar person. In an interview with The Daily Beast , Gale was asked about similarities between Biff and the 1980s public persona of a certain current president. Gale said, “We thought about it when we made the movie! Are you kidding? You watch Part II again and there’s a scene where Marty confronts Biff in his office and there’s a huge portrait of Biff on the wall behind Biff, and there’s one moment where Biff kind of stands up and he takes exactly the same pose as the portrait? Yeah.”

7. Stoltz Wasn’t The Only Actor Switched in the Series

It’s not entirely uncommon for parts to be recast as a series of films unfolds. However, the BTTF films had two other significant roles recast for completely different reasons. Crispin Glover memorably played George McFly in the first film, but couldn’t reach an agreement about a contract for the sequels. Actor Jeffrey Weissman was brought in as George, but make-up and other techniques were used to suggest a resemblance to Glover. Footage of Glover from the first film was repurposed in the second. Glover filed suit on the grounds that the producers used his likeness without permission. The case changed the way the Screen Actors Guild negotiates, with contracts now including sections that bar filmmakers from faking a likeness or resemblance without permission or compensation.

The other significant change was the role of Marty’s girlfriend and eventual wife, Jennifer. Claudia Wells played her in the first movie. Unfortunately, Wells’s mother was diagnosed with cancer ahead of the back-to-back shooting of the sequels. She declined the part so she could be available for her family. Elisabeth Shue signed on and played Jennifer in II and III.

8. BTTF Directly Inspired Rick and Morty

The extremely popular Adult Swim animated series Rick and Morty owes its existence to Back to the Future. The show was created by Justin Roiland (who voices both leads) and Dan Harmon (creator of Community). Harmon also co-founded Channel 101, a monthly nonprofit festival for short films; they pair met at an installment and later collaborated on The Real Animated Adventures of Doc and Mharti, a filthy parody of Doc Brown and Marty. When Adult Swim approached Harmon about creating a show for them, Roiland suggested that they take their Doc and Mharti dynamic and repurpose it, dubbing the new versions Rick and Morty. An in-joke in the series is that while they frequently hop between dimensions and alternate reality, Rick often comments that he refuses to do time travel.

Featured image: Thiago Melo / Shutterstock

Review: The Outpost — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

The Outpost

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Rating: R

Run Time: 2 hours 3 minutes

Stars: Orlando Bloom, Scott Eastwood

Writers: Eric Johnson, Paul Tamasy

Director: Rod Lurie

In theaters and streaming on Apple TV and Fandango

I have always had a problematic relationship with war movies, particularly those that are set within the living memory of myself and the people I know — and especially those of more recent vintage, the ones that depict the essential cruelty of combat in ways earlier films seldom did (Think of the D-Day invasion depicted in The Longest Day, told with almost newsreel-like detachment, versus Saving Private Ryan’s version, as horrific a 15 minutes as you’ll ever spend in a movie theater.)

Part of that, I think, comes from the fact that through the sheer randomness of my birth date, I never had to go to war, nor even contemplate the possibility that I might. That made me, from the start, an observer of war rather than a participant; leaving me with a simmering survivor’s guilt I’ve never been quite able to shake.

Beyond that, though, I still have trouble thinking of war movies as “entertainment.” The very word implies fun, or thrills, and that just seems wrong. The idea of getting my jollies from depictions of sacrifice on the altar of human folly seems inappropriate at best; immoral at worst.

So, for me, watching a serious war movie (not a cartoonish one like The Great Escape or The Dirty Dozen) is more akin to a meditative walk through a cemetery than a visit to an amusement park. I’m soaking in the atmosphere, but I’m not really having fun.

Which brings me to the based-on-fact The Outpost, as serious a war film as you will find, and as visceral. After a quick briefing via some terse titles, director Rod Lurie — working from a spitfire script by Oscar winners Eric Johnson and Paul Tamasy (The Fighter) — straps us into a buffeted helicopter, crammed together with a team of U.S. soldiers headed for a remote outpost in the mountains of Afghanistan circa 2007. The men’s faces, barely illuminated by red night lights, fill the screen, their expressions burning with varying states of resolve, confusion, and fear. It’s clear this is no milk run —particularly because the introduction has informed us the men are headed for what the brass candidly refer to as an “indefensible position” — a valley surrounded by steep mountains from which the enemy Taliban can fire at will. It’s just the first of a seemingly endless string of insane official miscalculations that would be the stuff of comedy if the implications were not so deadly serious.

We meet the guys, one by one, identified to us in no-nonsense fashion via their names superimposed on the screen. Aside from Orlando Bloom (The Lord of the Rings), the actors here are by and large not familiar to us —although their last names are: There’s Milo Gibson, son of Mel; Will Attenborough, grandson of Richard; James Jagger, son of Mick (!), and, most notably, Scott Eastwood, son of Clint, who proves himself to be quite the capable stand-in for his poker-faced dad as a no-nonsense sergeant.

Much of The Outpost is spent exploring the complex relationships among the soldiers; a rowdy, seemingly dysfunctional mix of frat hazing, passionate professions of fidelity, and varying measures of adoration and disdain for the Brass. There’s just one constant at Combat Outpost Keating: At any random moment, the surrounding hills can (and will) erupt in hails of enemy gunfire. Lurie’s masterstroke here is in taking that notion of randomness and tightening it around our throats.

After decades of watching war movies, we’ve grown to sense when a script writer is building up to a moment of violence — we’ve even become desensitized to the tricks filmmakers use to try and catch us off-guard. But even as Lurie allows long passages of relative peace to unspool, his actors never let up their sense of vigilance mixed with dread. When those bullets and bombs come flying, we may jump from our seats, but there’s never a moment of surprise in these guys’ eyes.

The Outpost features some of the most stunning you-are-there camera work I’ve ever seen. Cinematographer Lorenzo Senatore (Hellboy) ingeniously employs a camera-carrying drone that weaves in and out of the patrol formations. The uncanny result is a sense of being more than a fly on the wall: we’re a hovering spirit of Death, lingering on one set of haunted eyes, then moving on to the next, contemplating which of these souls we will claim next. It is one of the great artistic tragedies of the COVID-19 theater closures that most audiences will never get to experience Senatore’s artistry on the big screen it deserves.

Inevitably, those small but deadly skirmishes lead to a climactic battle as the Taliban tries to overrun the sickeningly vulnerable post. I will of course defer to anyone who has actually experienced battle, but even if this extended, pulse-pounding scene is one-tenth authentic in its representation of the sheer chaos and shockingly reckless heroism that accompanies it, The Outpost more than qualifies as one of the most important war films of the past decade.

Admittedly, there is one point when The Outpost threatens to dip into Kelly’s Heroes-like cliché: It’s the moment when Eastwood’s sergeant, seeing all is nearly lost, grits his teeth, Dirty Harry-like, and seethes “Not today!” — at which point he becomes a one-man fighting machine, rallying his comrades to follow him to inevitable bloody victory.

It’s a jarring moment, but it is also undeniably thrilling. In fact, it’s just the sort of thing we’ve been secretly hoping for: a hand on our shoulder assuring us everything is going to be okay. Sadly, that’s more than the real-life heroes depicted in this exceptional film ever got. Stick around for the end credits, during which CNN’s Jake Tapper — who wrote the book on which the film is based — interviews the real-life survivors of this, one of the 21st century’s most notable cases of U.S. military hubris — and the incomprehensibly dedicated men who were its devoted victims.

Featured image: Scene from The Outpost (Screen Media)

Ray Harryhausen Set the World in (Stop) Motion

A massively influential artist and filmmaker who inspired some of the greatest talents in the field, Ray Harryhausen was born 100 years ago today. He’s perhaps best known for his innovative work in stop-motion animation, particularly his own technique, dubbed Dynamation.

Stop-motion refers to the process of shooting one frame of a model, making adjustments, and then shooting another frame. As film moves at 24 frames per second, you created the illusion of motion. This technique was used by Willis O’Brien on 1933’s King Kong. That film inspired Harryhausen, and O’Brien became an early mentor, offering advice and critique of Harryhausen’s early work and encouraging him to take sculpture and art classes. After working on films for the Army during World War II, Harryhausen got his first featured job as assistant animator to O’Brien on 1949’s Mighty Joe Young. The film won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects.

The trailer for The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (which mentions the Post). (Uploaded to YouTube by Warner Bros.)

Harryhausen would push the envelope of effects in 1953. When he was given complete control over the effects in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, he was able to fully integrate his Dynamation process into the film. The technically demanding work involved shooting live-action backgrounds, then animating the stop-motion in front of those backgrounds to make it seems as if the action was occurring in a real-world location. Then the foreground action would be shot and added over the other footage, making it seems as if the live actors and backgrounds were existing in the same space, and interacting with, the models. On a theoretical level, it’s similar to what’s done today with shows like The Mandalorian, which shoot large chunks of scenes in a studio space called The Volume, employing previously shot footage that makes up a virtual background environment.

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms is near to the heart of The Saturday Evening Post as the original Ray Bradbury story ran in the June 23, 1951 issue. In fact, by the time that Harryhausen worked on the film, he and Bradbury had been friends for years. The original title of the film was to be Monster from the Sea. When the studio discovered that Bradbury’s story also featured an undersea monster drawn to a foghorn, they bought the rights and retitled the film after Bradbury’s short. Ironically, the story would later appear in anthologies as “The Fog Horn,” rather than the film name. Nevertheless, the movie was a major hit at the time, opening more opportunities for Harryhausen and allowing him to continue to innovate with his techniques.

Throughout his career, Harryhausen displayed his genius for creature design and animation in films like It Came from Beneath the Sea, Earth vs. The Flying Saucers, and 20 Million Miles to Earth. All three of those were produced by Charles H. Schneer and became the foundation of a long-lasting and successful partnership. The duo also worked together on a trio of well-received (and much-loved) films based on Sinbad the Sailor of Middle Eastern legends: The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958); The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974); and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977).

However, the film that Harryhausen himself thought of as his best was his 1963 collaboration with Schneer, Jason and the Argonauts. Directed by Don Chaffey, the film features several classic Harryhausen effects sequences. Empire magazine cited Talos from the film as the second greatest movie monster of all time in 2004. The film also contains the praised “skeleton army” sequence, winged harpies, and the many-headed hydra. Despite the advances in technology, the film retains a strong reputation; it was nominated for the American Film Institute’s Top 10 Fantasy Films list in 2008.

While some films were still using techniques that were similar to his, different methods pioneered by the very people whom he had inspired were replacing the kinds of effects that Harryhausen used. The list of those who say that they owe a debt to Harryhausen is staggering, including the likes of Tim Burton, Peter Jackson, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Guillermo del Toro, and Wes Anderson. Burton and director Henry Selick would collaborate on films like The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach that used stop-motion techniques. When Harryhausen passed in 2013, Lucas released a statement that included a simple but massive truth, “Without Ray Harryhausen, there would likely have been no Star Wars.”

The legacy of Ray Harryhausen can be seen today in a variety of ways. The various “walkers” of the Star Wars universe are a tribute, and Peter Jackson’s remake of King Kong was directly inspired by O’Brien and Harryhausen. With his wife of 50 years, Diana, he started the Ray & Diana Harryhausen Foundation, which curates his collection and promotes stop-motion animation; his daughter, Vanessa, remains a trustee. His models and work continue to be exhibited at major museums, while books and podcasts are devoted to his artistry. Over time, he’s accumulated everything from induction into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, to a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, to a special achievement awards from both the BAFTAs and the Oscars. The special effects of today may be so smooth as to almost be indistinguishable from reality, but it was the talent and inventiveness of people like Harryhausen that led, and by example continue to lead, the way.

Featured image: A scene from Jason and the Argonauts, where Jason combats a Hydra (Columbia Pictures / Public domain)