All the preparation in the world!

Alfred Hitchcock's thing was planning. Scheming. Preparing. His job was to take a scenario, coax it through a writer into a script, and then figure out the geometry of the thing. Camera angles, lens lengths, the shapes and colors of the foreground and background. He took notes, he storyboarded, he imagined and decided and determined and produced. By the time the first frame was shot, he was essentially finished. He had produced a specific plan, and filming was just the tedious process of capturing all the little snips of colored thread so that they could be sewn into a suspenseful needlepoint later on. He didn't shoot coverage, he didn't run a dozen cameras so he could make up his mind later, he didn't waste film on anything; he just shot the plan. This way, if he was fired before the edit was done, the movie would still look like he planned, because there would be no alternate footage or angles to choose from. Actors - props that eat - were expected to know their roles, literally and figuratively, and do their best not to mess it up. (I don't think Hitchcock would go in for the creepy Zemeckis-favored animation thing though, that's giving whole staffs and departments worth of people the chance to screw up the performance.)

In theory, if you had all of Hitch's notes and storyboards and perhaps, in the spirit of planning, you discussed his intentions with him, he wouldn't even have to show up. Someone else could relay the same set of decisions, made in advance, follow the boards, shoot the plan.

So how did Gus Van Sant screw up Psycho? They not only had the original materials, they had the original film to look at! Maybe that's the trouble. Maybe too much effort was spent on imitating the original cast instead of acting. Maybe it was mis-cast. Maybe part of the problem was that it was shot in color - Hitchcock certainly could have shot it in color, and had already done several color films; the black and white was a choice.

So....what? Imitation is flattering, but lousy art? There was more method to Hitchcock's madness than met the eye? Does the meaning of the film change when the audience goes in knowing the surprises on which the original was hinged? Was the movie actually okay, just not able to stand its own weight, in the form of the original's legacy and the criticism that comes with touching it?

How it all works

Y'know how sometimes, Christmas with the Kranks comes out? In theaters? Well, in 1994, Tim Allen did Disney's The Santa Clause. Huge hit. Made it's money back seven times over just in the US, just in theaters. At the very same time, Home Improvement was the #1 show on television (produced by Touchstone (re: Disney)). AND, Don't Stand Too Close to a Naked Man, written by Tim Allen, published by Hyperion (re: Disney) was a best-seller. Just to top it off, Tim Allen would also give a voice to the new Pixar (re: Disney) cartoon, Toy Story.

So there you go. He can make whatever he wants. And he's earned Disney something in the neighborhood of 2 Billion Dollars doing it.

(this, from a comparatively uninteresting aside in James Stewart's Disney War, which is not unlike sitting at the foot of a gossipy ex-exec as he relates all the 'oh, yeah, and you'll never believe that THIS happened....' moments of corporate Disney from the 80s forward.)

The internet brings movies to ME

You can steal your movies, there's the bittorrent, and the cleverly concealed films on the youtubes, and sites like hulu.com are bringing more and more tv shows and full features to viewers both free and with some greater legitimacy, but for some films, you just need to go back to the VHS, or even the original film, when home video releases were never brought to light. That said, if anyone knows where or when I can take in a screening of the classic Demonstrating the Action of the Brown Hoisting and Conveying Machine in Unloading a Schooner of Iron Ore, and Loading the Material on the Cars, I'd be much obliged.

#1,280: The Doomsday Machine

Lately, I thought I was going to Tennessee to edit a feature film, but I now know I'm not.  

I thought a project involving video and internet-related gaming was done and gone, and it seems to have now resurfaced.  

I thought digitizing tapes of guys welding wasn't any fun...and I was pretty much dead on with that one.

There was a TV program, Mystery Science Theater 3000 - people making fun of old movies.  It inspired a community that I joined about seven years ago and have been grateful for almost continually ever since.  It also inspired its various creators and producers to keep on 'riffing' on movies long after the show was cancelled.  Rifftrax mainly involves the latter-day MST cast of Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett, as well as a variety of other guests producing audio-only tracks that sync with modern movies.  Cinematic Titanic is a shadowrama quinttet of Joel Hodgson, J. Elvis Weinstein, Mary Jo Pehl, Trace Beaulieu, and TVs Frank Conniff, taking on more MST-traditional older films (which the rifftrax guys also tried, under the label The Film Crew.)

I remember the summer I wanted few things as much as I wanted to work at MST3K, or a show with a similar spirit - it felt handmade, filled with a creativity and resourcefulness...it was written to the height of the writer's intelligence, and almost any given episode I might watch today contains a reference that I might not have gotten a week or a month earlier.

When Rifftrax came on the scene, it was exciting stuff.  Finally, a full dose of what we'd only had a taste of in the little gold statue / summer blockbuster preview, washing over us like a horrific flood of Kaluhah, ravaging the streets of our metaphorical Mexican border towns. I enjoy most of 'em, but they're not quite the same.  Sometimes they take what seems to be the easy way out, with a barrage of gay jokes or obvious targets (Jar-Jar bad?   Okay.  Got it.)  At other times, the riffs seem a little bit meaner than they used to, picking on the people involved for reasons not related to the film at hand, maybe.  

Cinematic Titanic arrived apparently after RT proved there was more money to be made from the MST concept.  As Joel said to Wired, "...every (MST3K) DVD set we release sells better than the previous one. Since the supply of those original episodes is finite, we wanted to give our fans something new..."  A cynical mind might see this project as a knock off money grab by the guy who invented the original.  

But, for all the speculating, I hadn't watched it myself.  Tonight, the CT crew did a live riffing of The Wasp Woman The Doomsday Machine, a barely comprehensible morality tale that shows the gruesome consequence of space rape.  And it was fun to see and hear the MST crew (Trace in particular) on stage.  The show itself was about as good as an okay / fair episode of MST3K.  Like RT, some riffs seemed harsher than they used to - maybe this is because they're coming from actual people instead of characters and puppets?  It did seem like a lot of the lines that made the audience say "Ooooooo!" were put in the Mary Jo's mouth to take the edge off by having a girl say it.  Many of the biggest laughs came from the use of classical, well-worn, time-tested jokes.  Two or three Yakov Smirnoff references ("Space! What a country!"), two or three more MST-based lines ("This is like watching somebody watch 'Manos: The Hands of Fate!'"), the 'send in a replacement to watch the movie that makes a bunch of generic observations' bit ("What a jerk!  This movie's old!  Look at that guy!"), and so on.

In the end, even though I generally enjoyed the show, I was underwhelmed, but I don't know what I'd want different, exactly. I'm sure I miss the host segments, and the riffs filtered through characters' personalities.  Maybe it's just the effect of trying to put the lightning back in the bottle that's left fans disappointed just about every other time a classic franchise is revived in some way.   I might need to spend some time with some classic MST to figure it out.

A glimpse into filmmakers' souls...

The thing that I really appreciate about the IMDB is that in addition to all the factual information about cast and crew, it provides a place for film afficianados to really dig into a film, dissect the deeper meanings and share insights into the true intent of the filmmakers: [Internet Version of the Ironic Cut] PS, I love how much Z-Rob hates Indy 4. Maybe I'll go see it again and buy two tickets. One for me, and one in Z-Rob's honor. (What? You're not reading the Z-Blog?)