Hello!

Here’s a well-documented bit of film production history that might appeal: an in-detail web page explaining the creation of a practical radio-control prop for the horror comedy  Gremlins  —  Gizmo’s Pink Corvette,  for his madcap midnight ride through a department store in snowy Kingston Falls.

Here in Los Angeles, any celebrity in a pink Corvette brings back memories of spottings of the ubiquitous Angelyne. But that’s another story.

In the article, photos document the construction and the shooting, and the multiple cars and Gizmos needed to support the workings of the radio-control prop. RC fans will be interested to see how much equipment could be crammed into a ‘Barbie Corvette’ toy.

It’s an unexpected extra laugh in the movie, but we didn’t guess how much work and planning was involved. The little article from ‘Gremlins.com’ covers the scene’s inspiration, too. Director Joe Dante was thinking of a gag in a WB cartoon, naturally.

We’re now beginning the second half of 2025, and I don’t know whether I want time to slow down or speed up … but I was eager to put up this poster-show of notable discs reviewed in the first half of the year. I’ll look at this grid of disc covers and think, “I didn’t get to see all of that one,” and follow that thought with, “Now can I find it?”

Last New Years’ I decorated a grid for 2024 with a photo of a disc shelf here at CineSavant Central … it proved popular. I like rummaging through titles on shelves, too. The image here can be blown up much bigger. I couldn’t get rid of the reflections this time, so it’ll be a quiz game challenge to read them all.

It’s one shelf of about 8 dedicated to film noir. Note that they’re two discs deep. All the horizontal titles need to be incorporated into the (non-existent) filing system. What do I do with older DVD versions … sometimes I want them to compare, as I just did with Danger: Diabolik. Does Tim Lucas back in Cincinnati really have some amazing system that allows him to find anything?  His place must now be more of a museum than the Ackermansion was.

The ‘favored’ titles for the first half of 2025: I could watch any of these, any time. For the last one I’d better be careful who’s in the house.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

Trailers from Hell’s very own Joe Dante will be front and center tonight with Ben Mankiewicz on TCM’s ‘Two For One’ show … which we won’t be missing.

The show is a special discussion setup with special guests. Joe will help introduce Charles Laughton’s  Night of the Hunter — a movie that can be talked about forever — and then an obscure oddity called  The Fool Killer. I stars a young Edward Albert, and Anthony Perkins as a ‘philosophical axe murderer.’

Joe clearly wasn’t asked to pick a title from a pre-chosen list. He’s a major booster for The Fool Killer:  In 2019 he and producer Jon Davison promoted it at an ‘alternative screening opportunity’ at the American Cinematheque, in a series he called Joe Dante’s 16mm Spotlight.  Another title Joe showed in the series was the then- hard to see  Ladybug Ladybug.

We reported on the screening at an old  CineSavant Column … so we’ll be primed and ready for The Fool Killer tonight.

Twenty years ago when friend Randall William Cook was in New Zealand directing second-unit for Peter Jackson’s King Kong remake, the rumor flew about that Jackson was so ‘into’ the original Kong that he commissioned, in the middle of production, an in-house project to re-create the legendary lost ‘Spider Pit’ sequence, which was supposedly so gruesome that it was cut before the movie was publicly screened.

The ‘Jackson Spider Pit’ project was indeed finished. For most of us it premiered on Warners’ first 2005 DVD of King Kong. Jackson’s WETA crew even ‘resurrected’ the Styracosaurus that chased Carl Denham’s sailors at the log bridge.

The animation is purposely done to match the original film’s 1933 style, with (I think) WETA creative personnal playing the unhappy victims of spiders and lizards. They even included the background continuity detail of a lizard climbing up the cave wall, to match the lizard that almost grabs Jack Driscoll as he hides just below the giant ape.

This Youtube encoding isn’t the best, but it shows how Jackson’s animators matched the style — the animation models are pretty good, too.

C’mon Warners, where’s a fab 4K remaster for the original 1933 8th Wonder of the World?   (Can I be more of an ingrate?)

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello! …

Here’s a rare treat … an original promo to raise interest for the late ’70s stop-motion project Timegate, with input by Jim Danforth, John Morgan and Randall William Cook. They’ve accessed some film clips to emphasize that it’s ‘in production.’ Some of the best material is an animatic of storyboard art by Cook himself.

An article at a page called Fandom  describes the movie a little bit more, and offers some good artwork and photos. The film’s problems were well known to the ‘animation crowd’ at the time; the late Michael Hyatt was involved, and wrote a long letter about it to the magazine Cinefantastique.

The promo has been up just two weeks; it was posted by Matthew B. Lamont.

Also posted by Mr. Lamont is Hoyt Yeatman’s UCLA Film School animation project, from about 1975, not 1977.

Hoyt built his own 16mm projection setup to do Ray Harryhausen-type animation; he reworked a Texas Instruments calculator to serve as a one-button exposure and lights trigger. He made the model and did most everything technical for the show. The live-action part of the film was shot at Vasquez Rocks, all in one day.

The result got Hoyt work in TV with George Schlatter, and his stop-motion exposure setup got him a job with Douglas Trumbull helping with the  CE3K mothership setup for Dennis Muren. Two years later Hoyt was a founding partner of a new visual effects company.

It wasn’t made for money — Hoyt knew he could never clear the music — but it was one of the more successful ‘calling card’ student films I ever witnessed. Thanks to Matthew Lamont … !

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

Deep in the lists of ‘Movies That Never Were’ rests the odd tale of the second sequel to Spielberg’s  Jaws. It ended up being a cookie-cutter franchise place-holder, but decked out in fancy 3-D … but only after another idea spent some time in pre-production. For a while the 2nd sequel was envisioned as a hot comedy take on the huge summer hit, a collaboration between Zanuck/Brown and National Lampoon.

Joey Paur’s website ‘geek tyrant’ gives us a rundown of the story, evidently lifted from a 2023 documentary called Sharksploitation. The nutty comedy project picked up some momentum before it was suddenly cancelled, a common fate for movies in development. Besides producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown, the lineup of conspirators left on the beach included the Lampoon’s Matty Simmons, writers Tod Carroll & John Hughes, plus director Joe Dante.

I’d say more info is needed … was there ever a script?  Joe Dante could have made the show into a Mad Mad World of crazy comedy … but might he have become typed as an ‘auteur director of fish?’  Paur ends by saying Universal should dust off Matty Simmons’ gory R-rated version and produce it now … except they’d probably have to rough it up just to get a PG.

We love Betty Boop … we loved her even when she had ears like a Basset Hound. Joe Dante forwarded this half-hour attempt to revive the famous character, in the form of an animated TV special.

Other Dave Fleischer characters are involved too, including Bosko and Koko the Clown. Experts would probably have more to say about shortcuts in the show’s animation, but all we saw was some hula dancing that looked to be rotoscoped from an original cartoon.

The show is a curiosity that apparently didn’t develop any further … it’s busy and noisy but the attempt to replicate the original style feels crude, and the laughs aren’t there, either. It reminds us that the original cartoons were made for adult audiences, not children. Randall Cyrenne at Animated Views had a little more information on the show, from 2003.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

I think we’re all looking for some sane distractions. Joe Dante circulated this page with some interesting, well-chosen quotes by a short list of stars, accompanied by good images.

The page is by Dean Brierly, the editor of Black & White magazine. The newest entry seems to be from 2015, and shows us some interesting things Robert Ryan had to say. Other names listed include Jan Sterling, William Holden, Lee Van Cleef and Ernest Borgnine, just to name four. Light reading, maybe, but relaxing in these days of high blood pressure.

And Wayne Schmidt forwards this BfI featurette about the revival of an original 1977 35mm Technicolor print of Star Wars, the original version that wasn’t yet part of a longer series. You know, this is the real, suppressed picture where Han Solo shoots first.

It’s amusing that the English restoration people make so much of the ability to see an original print from 1977, in perfect condition … it doesn’t matter that it’s not in 70mm and may not even have a stereophonic soundtrack. An older generation of film fans that haunted repertory theaters, the Director’s Guild, museum screenings, etc., were routinely exposed to vintage studio prints, sometimes in nitrate, that blew away what we could see on TV. It was an addiction.

The featurette is a good little primer on archive activities … and it proves that the Star Wars that conquered the world and won the Oscars is technically a ‘lost’ movie, buried by its maker. The BfI was able to access a preserved opening title crawl for their screening, with the original not-episode-IV text.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson