Hollywood and Natalie Portman Demonstrate Commitment to Fundamental Values

Whenever we see a threatened community in this chaotic world stand fast and united in support of fundamental values I think it is important to celebrate the event. So many of our friends and institutions have thrown away everything that they used to stand for in order to make a fast buck.

Hollywood is not normally considered a shining pillar of integrity but I believe that is a misunderstanding on the part of outsiders.  Hollywood as a loosely-defined creative community has always had and continues to have a set of core values that are shared across the community and evolves with time.  These values have survived mergers and acquisitions,  new distribution technologies, government antitrust lawsuits, drought, war and pestilence. One of these core values is that there is always money to be made by the cheesy exploitation of women. Let us review a particularly creative use of this principle.

A few years ago, a well-known author of "weird fiction", Jeff VanderMeer, published three novels in a series called the "Southern Reach".  The first of those books, Annihilation, was optioned by Scott Rudin to turn into a movie. He hired the director of Ex Machina (2015), Alex Garland, to write the adaptation and direct the film. The book (and presumably the film) is unusual in many ways and one way that is important to us is that all the protagonists are women. The movie is the story of an expedition of scientists to an area where a strange event occurred many years ago that has cut this area off from the rest of the country.  There have been previous expeditions and they did not end well. So what we have here is a film where the four main characters are all strong and interesting women. The movie stars Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Tessa Thompson. The book is told from the point of view of one of the members of the expedition, the Biologist, played by Natalie Portman.

Nice posture, Natalie! 

As you know, Hollywood has often been accused of perpetuating demeaning stereotypes of women, and failing to provide serious roles for actresses who want to get their next academy award nomination.  So this movie provides an excellent opportunity to refute this sadly somewhat valid criticism of Hollywood.

This film, Annihilation (2017), has finished principal photography and still has a long way to go before it is released but Hollywood realizes it is never too early to start marketing a film. One time-honored way to do this is with interviews by various news media of the star(s) of the film.  And since the film is about four intelligent and adventurous women, it would make sense if that marketing also communicated some of these ideas.

And so an article/interview was created and placed in the New York Times Style Magazine.  It is an interview by email (that social media hook!)  with Natalie Portman by a writer in which they discuss the first short film that Natalie has directed.  They discuss many topics including Natalie's upbringing in Israel, the work of various eclectic authors of fiction, and so forth..

Now we get to the heartwarming, even inspirational, part of our story.  Ms. Portman discusses her movie and her childhood in very intelligent ways, certainly combating the stereotype of women in Hollywood. But I had not realized how financially challenged Ms. Portman was. You see, not everyone in Hollywood makes those multi-million dollar salaries.  Apparently, Ms Portman was or is so poor that she did not own any pants. Nevertheless they bravely went ahead and photographed this wonderful and talented person practically bare-assed naked.  Fortunately, Ms. Portman was able to hold up her part as these pictures clearly show.

It would have been easy for Hollywood to turn its back on a core value and portray Ms. Portman as a politically correct, bisexual, blue jean lesbian styled modern feminist and be acclaimed by one and all, but our producers and the studio are made of sterner stuff. The cheap exploitation of women and sex to sell a film is like "Motherhood and Apple Pie" to the rest of us. It is important. Hollywood did not let us down.

See this fabulous article here.

Are you going to just lounge around all day in your underwear?

An Example of the Genre of the Making of VIsual Effects Films

One of the weird phenomena that surrounds the tremendous "success" of visual effects, is the self-destructive documentary that describes how the effects are done as part of the publicity of the film, no matter how irrelevant the visual effects may be to that film. Whatever movie it may be, it has a documentary about how the visual effects were done. First the premise of the documentary is silly, the visual effects are anything but glamourous yet the documentary will almost always make them seem so.  Second, it is self-destructive because telling everyone how we do the work is like a magician revealing how the trick is done, it takes away the magic. How "special" will "special effects" be if everyone knows about how we do what we do? Third it is often lies, that is often not the way the effects were actually done. So that is good at least, you see we didn't tell everyone how we did the work, although we did tell them how we often do the work, just not that particular shot which was complicated and annoying and who would want to be bored with the actual details? Besides maybe the details of how that particular shot was done would reveal a mistake or maybe that bold new technology that we were using to sell the show didn't actually work all that well, and had to be augmented by animators and technical directors fixing every frame, and how much fun would that be to tell the movie-going audience who doesn't really care about the boring details anyway?

Fourth, anyone who knows the world of visual effects knows that it would be extremely unlikely for one of these documentaries to be in any way humorous, satirical, sarcastic or self-critical. Not in a 100,000,000 years. With a few exceptions, people in visual effects are deadly serious. Tell a joke, go to jail. Use a big word, they think you are making fun of them (seriously). At least in this country.

So it is to the UK that we must turn for the best commentary about visual effects I have seen in any media, and it is in the form of a mock documentary looking back at primitive visual effects as they were done at the end of the 20th century as part of a 2006 BBC show called Time Trumpet.

Did he really say working with actors is like "herding zombies"?  Oh my!

Avoiding annoying and unnecessary spillage of beer on the set.

Notice how they call a green screen stage a "CGI studio". I think it is somewhat funny that computer graphics has become so famous that people think that a standard visual effects technique is or must be "computer graphics". Nevertheless, this is one of the best satires I have seen about visual effects.

The documentary is at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjhBf4vlTw0&list=PLPVUAquAnllvLn_lcO2BSuUoXwguvRtfS&index=1&feature=plpp_video

Information about Time Trumpet is at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Trumpet

The Mystery of the Original Star Wars Trailer

This is a post about the mystery of the first or original Star Wars (1977) trailer. I saw this trailer about a year before the movie came out, then never saw it again. All the billions of people I knew who worked on the later films at ILM and Lucasarts never saw this trailer. I think I have found it on Youtube, but first I want to explain what it was.

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, a low budget science fiction film with the odd name of "Star Wars" was being made. Its director had made a successful film in a completely different genre, but this was not the same, and very few people knew what to make of it. Generally the people who read the script and the people who were working on it did not think it would do very well.

But a number of things happened that changed that.

One of those things is something that was very unusual back in 1976 but is common today: the premarketing of the film at various fan conventions, such as science fiction conventions or ComicCon. A friend of George Lucas from Film School, whose name is Charlie Lippincott I believe, went to science fiction conventions around the country: Worldcon, Westercon, etc and gave a presentation and showed footage from the film on 16 mm.

Back then, people had never seen anything like this. We had been fed garbage from the studios like Logan's Run (1976) and otherwise treated with contempt.

I happened to be at the 1976 Westercon by LAX that year and I saw the presentation. We made him show the trailer twice and this is what I recall.

1. There was no John Williams music. The score for the film had not been composed yet, so they used a basic tone repeated to give some suspense, 2. There was a voice over saying things like "the story of a boy, a girl and a universe" and "coming to your galaxy this summer". 3. There was a shot of a little robot falling on its face (this was R2D2 and this shot was not in the final movie), 4. There was a shot of some strange older guy with a glowing sword in a bar, 5. There was a shot of a spaceship being attacked by smaller spaceships, the camera POV was moving as if it was in one of those smaller spaceships, 6. There was a shot of two people jumping over a chasm with a rope in classic swashbuckler style.

R2D2 is starting to fall.

Bang!

We thought it was great and we all went to see the movie the day it opened. That plus the Time Magazine feature on the film generated enough business so that lines wrapped around the block at the 50 theaters in the 50 cities that the film opened in.   The publicity and word of mouth of that first weekend / week of business started the snowball rolling.

No big deal, nothing strange here, except that this hugely successful film, with all the paraphenalia and media and all my friends working at ILM and no one ever saw that trailer again. No one. None of my friends at ILM or anywhere else had ever seen this trailer. It was easy to tell. You would ask if the trailer had John Williams music and the answer was always yes. This trailer had completely disappeared.

Today, I came across a very bad quality dub of something that claims to be an original Star Wars trailer.

It might very well be. It has the elements that I recall, and it has things I do not recall. But this was a long time ago, so I am going to say that this might have been the trailer, or something very close to it. Now was it worth the wait? I am not sure, it is hard, very hard to put yourself back 30+ years and remember what you were like and what the world was like.

But if this is the trailer I remembered, then the mystery is explained.  It is filled with shots that never made it into the final film as well as what I think are early visual effects tests that also never made it into the film.

Here is the trailer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gvqpFbRKtQ