Top Gear....?

Sunday evenings caused me a bit of a problem earlier this year. It's all to do with the television, you see.

There are two programs which conflict in their viewing. One is a ten-part period drama about a shopkeeper from the US who opened a department store in London. The other is Top Gear.

The first programme - 'Mr Selfridge' is ITV's attempt at creating something akin to Downton Abbey that they can show in prime time, get good ratings for, and sell to the American channels. It should become popular there as well. They've even included an American actor in it, the excellent Jeremy Piven. Normally I would look at this programme with a 'Meh' in my voice and switch straight over to the other side. But I have something of a vested interest in it, you see. During several months of last year I spent considerable time wandering around with slicked-back hair, 1920's clothes and a hat brandishing an old fashioned magnesium flash and plate camera playing the part of a press photographer on the show. So I have some skin in the game. We shot in Central London, Chatham Dockyards (where they built the exterior of Selfridges on a quayside) and in a carpet warehouse in North London which had all the interior sets. I even got to shoot at the Albert Hall where an extraordinary number of people/tourists wanted their photograph taken with me, but nobody actually asked why I was dressed like a 1920's character.

But on the other side is Top Gear. Lemme explain.

Top Gear is a sort of English institution. It's been going for several years and it is (or at least was) a motoring programme. Back when it first started it reviewed cars and had sensible pieces about the speed limit, fuel consumption and similar items relevant to the average motorist. It has been run by a veritable cornucopia of motoring journalists over the years, but is now presented by three gentlemen:.

First there is Richard Hammond. Known as the Hamster for his diminutive size. He is 'The youngest'.

Next there is James May -  "Captain Slow" - who was a respectable motoring journalist with Autocar magazine until he created an acrostic in one issue which led to his dismissal (read the letters in red on the article he wrote here). He is staid, traditional, and slow.

Finally, there is Jeremy Clarkson. He has been with Top Gear the longest - probably since it started. In fact I can't remember a time when Clarkson wasn't on the show. He has survived all manner of presenter reshuffles, program redesigns and media blunders. And he's still here. He is, of course, widely hated in various parts of British society - The Daily Mail, especially do not like him, and I can understand why. He is brash, opinionated, callous, loud and, sometimes, just plain wacky.

But he's the reason I, and many others, watch Top Gear.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I find him infuriating at times. His love of all things big, fast and gas-guzzling drives me up the wall. The Top Gear piece on electric cars was simply a hatchet job designed to ridicule anyone who owned one, and his christening of Porsche's "Caymen" as "A Cockster" has probably condemned that car to ignominy.

But he also has the ability to bring the show to life. He thinks nothing of diving head-first into the flights of excess that now form the show that is Top Gear. Whereas previously the show used to road test the new Ford Escort/Focus/ Sierra etc, the new Top Gear mentions them in passing and then moves on swiftly to the newest Ferrari, Lambourghini or (on occasion) Bugatti Veyron. Each of these cars is taken around the Top Gear test track (part of the new GTA 4 driving game) to determine which can lap quickest. And - in order to prove the superiority of the internal combustion engine - they regularly hold races where the presenters have to take different forms of public transport between two points and try and beat the car. Over the years they've done London to Paris, London to Verbieres and London to Gothenburg. Clarkson, invariably takes the car - pushing it to almost illegal speeds to win, and the other two guys are usually stuck sitting opposite each other on a train that is bound to get delayed at some stop out in the boondocks gifting Clarkson with the win. On the odd occasions that he doesn't win there's always a suitable explanation "It was the French" was the latest one.

But that doesn't matter. Because Top Gear isn't about winning or losing. It isn't even about cars. It's about wish fulfillment and entertainment. If you want road tests and MPG comparisons, and cars that you can buy in the showroom any day of the week you need to head over to a rival channel and watch Fifth Gear. Their show is excellent with quality presentation and great camera work.

But it isn't Top Gear.

Top Gear is about having fun in a way that may - tangentially - by related to cars. like the time Clarkson decided he could outrun a pack of hounds by playing the fox in a 4WD suzuki. Or the time they boys decided they could borrow some heavy duty mechanised equipment and destroy a house scheduled for demolition faster than a professional demolition crew. Or the time Clarkson decided that the best way to test a small car (at a viewers insistence) was to race an American muscle car round the inside of a shopping mall in Basingstoke.

The list goes one. None of these stunts has anything to do with real life. None of them is applicable to our day-to-day existence. They're flights of fancy. Whimsy, even.

But they don't half make exciting viewing.

And they make compelling, if infuriating, television.

They also make me wonder whether watching Top Gear and recording Mr Selfridge is sacrilege. Or whether doing the opposite is worse.
Photo Credit: Thomas Hawk via Compfight cc

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General Musings for the week April 17th 2011

Sunday evening and Monday morning saw me at the vets with the cat.

I had arrived home Sunday afternoon after a delightful trip to the local airfield for a drink and a sit outside in the sun watching the aircraft (I know, it's all go in my life), to find my cat lying listlessly outside the back door in the sun. Opening the door to him I realised he wasn't his usual, ebullient self and he moped inside and snuck away to sit under the bed in the back bedroom. A few moments later I went up to see him and realised he had been in a fight with something that had left him cut at a couple of points on his body. I left him under the bed for a while to see whether he would recover a little. An hour later he hadn't moved and I noticed that his right front knee/elbow had swollen up quite considerably so I called the vet to see if she could look at him that afternoon. It was now about 20 minutes before the close of surgery hours so I grabbed the cat carrier and went to pick the cat up.

Being the intelligent cat that he is, he worked out what I was doing and crawled right under the bed, laying in the most invonvenient place he could. I ended up crawling under the bed on my back, grabbing him by the scruff of his neck and dragging him out from under there. He didn't like that at all.

Five minutes later we were in the vets. The weekend vet took one look at him and proclaimed "Not another cat in a fight. That's all I've had this weekend!" She cried out again a few moments later when she checked the history: It was exactly one year ago that day when I had taken him in to see her after his last fight.

My poor cat was severely distressed at this point. His fur was shedding copiously, they shaved his leg in two places, took an anal temperature reading and gave him three different injections. Not a happy cat. The vet recommended either leaving him there that evening or bringing him back in the morning to have the wound lanced and flushed. I elected to take him home, knowing that he would be very distressed to stay in the vets overnight.

The following morning we had another game of hide-and-seek as he saw me bring the cat carrier out again. This time I cornered him in the bathroom and slipped him into the box. Down at the vets they took all his details and told me to leave him there, coming back at 2.30 to pick him up. I had checked the swelling on his leg and noticed that it was much smaller than the night before so I asked the vet to take a look at it to see if he really needed to have it lanced and flushed.

After a few moments of examination (plus another anal temperature reading and injection) the vet announced that he could probably go home and if the problem recurred I could come back in to have it dealt with.

Total cost for both vet visits: £102.65. Potential costs for staying overnight and having sedation, lancing and flushing: £500+

Good call, I thought.

In other news: Thanks to everyone who watched and commented on 27 Arbour Street, the Sci Fi London 48 Hour Film Competition entry I posted about last week. Unfortunately we didn't make the final 10 shortlist, but I think we did fantastically anyway.

If you're going to make a reality television show you want something that has the potential to have conflict, excitement, danger. That's why programs such as Trawler Wars and Ice road truckers are so compelling. So why would Sky premiere a new reality tv show called 'Hunks' about self-obsessed, vain male model types? Where's the danger in that? I can foresee another program where selective editing and VoiceOver build fake suspense to try and make the program more interesting.  Not that I'll be watching, of course.

Video of the week this week is a must for all movie fans out there. Peter Jackson - director of Lord Of The Rings and King Kong - has started filming on the Rings prequel "The Hobbitt". Being  a big fan of the internet - and being determined to avoid any unauthorised spoilers coming from the production - he has elected to create a regular series of videoas about the shoot. The first one has just been released. Enjoy!

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The Sci-Fi London 48 hour film competition.

I had the great pleasure, and privilege, this last week of directing a short film for submission to the Sci-Fi London 48 hour film competition.

For those who don't know, the concept is very simple. At 10am on Saturday each team is supplied with three random pieces of information 1) A film title 2) A prop and 3) a line of dialogue. Over the next 48 hours the team has to write, shoot, edit and submit a finished film of no more than 5 minutes duration which includes the elements received at the kick-off.

I had been working with a group of guys over the last couple of weeks who had decided that they would like to enter this competition, so we made the submission and our team was accepted.

The problem we had - of course - was that without knowledge of what the parameters were for the film it was very difficult to start any specific preparation. We were able, however to do things like scout for locations, sort out actors and equipment etc.

Having worked on similar things in the past I know that the key to this is to be as prepared as possible and to work out the best way of trying to get to the end result in the most efficient way. To that end one of our team contacted an actress he had worked with before. She had been in a feature film and appeared as a policewoman on Emmerdale so she had knowledge of the film environment. I also contacted a friend I had worked with on Warhorse to play the male lead and we were cast. Another member of the team had worked together with a friend of his who is a production manager for commercials etc and they had sourced a load of props and hired some equipment. We were going to shoot on the Canon 5D mark 11 and were able to source two of these along with hiring some lenses etc. We also had some fancy kit such as a Sachler tripod.

The problem we had was sourcing anything that could be used as a location. Looking at the past winner, shooting seemed to take place in one of two types of locations a) public locations such as Soho Square or the streets of London. Sometimes forest and meadows were used. b) Inside people's houses.

Graham - our production manager had scoured his extensive list of contacts and had identified a fantastic location just outside London. It was an abandoned gas turbine test facility and it had a very dilapidated steam-punk look about it with both interior and exterior locations we could shoot just about any sort of film on. I drove over there and spoke to security and they sent me the contact details of the site manager. My producer contacted him and we waited in expectation for a reply. Luckily enough the reply came back very, very quickly. No. We were unable to film there as it is a health and safety liability. The whole location is off limits.

Our plan B was then to look at places in London's Docklands area. This had a double advantage as it contained some very futuristic glass and chrome style buildings along with some older, dilapidated industrial locations that would look visually appealing. So the question of locations was settled.

The big day came and expectations were high. We all met in a Starbucks in Docklands to wait for our producer to text through the details of the challenge. Shortly before 11 we were told the following three pieces of information:

• Title: 27 Arbour Road
• Prop: A Circuit Board
• Dialogue: "He was bald and she was like a bloody parrot on his shoulder".

Lovely....

It is vital in things like this that we have a simple plan of action based on a simple, easily understood premise. Writing a script etc. was going to be out of the question considering the time we had so we sat down to brainstorm it. Luckily one of our crew was a sci-fi nut and he immediately started giving us some thoughts on directions to take etc.

We decided - after almost two and a half hours of discussion that our story would be as follows:

A young woman breaks into a facility where she helps a male friend of hers escape. They head back to her house at 27 Arbour Street. On the way back she realises that he is not the person she knew before and - when they reach their destination and he shows no sign of recognition - she gives him a kiss and a hug before reaching up the back of his shirt and pulling out a huge circuit board installed there. He falls to the ground and thick green liquid leaks from his mouth revealing that he is an android.

This was the basic premise uncovered after a number of false starts, redirections, additional thoughts and tantrums. Personally I like the premise but I did feel we spent too long trying to get to the end result.

On his way back from the Challenge headquarters our producer, Anthony, had diverted to an electronics shop and procured an old circuit board for us. A quick check of Google Maps indicated that there was an Arbour Street in Poplar - which was a five minute drive away, so we set off.

Arbour Street in Poplar is a residential location with terraced houses down one side and apartments down the other. There is a little park at one side and it is relatively quiet. Number 27 was there and had both a number and a worded plaque with the number on it which made it stand out a little from the rest. More importantly it had a new set of apartments being built right across the road from it which gave some excellent background to shoot the reverse shots. We spent nearly two hours there filming an emotional scene where our two leads get home and she realises he has no recollection of who he is and she will have to decommission him.

Heading back to Canary Wharf we spent the next 3 hours trying to find suitable locations around the site to make something appealing and filmic whilst still telling a story. I found a set of stars rising up from a dark underground area and this turned out to be useful for an escape scene later on in the film. We shot on grassland, running between skyscrapers and overlooking the old docks areas. It was an entertaining and thrilling day.

At one point we were shooting in front of a glass fronted building and using the reflection of the grass to show our escapees. Just as we finished the shot a security guard came out and told us we couldn't film here. I asked him why and he said that we needed permission. Discussion determined that even though we were not shooting anything of the building we still needed permission from Canary Wharf. I argued that Canary Wharf was public property and we didn't need permission, He was adamant that we did. As we had already got the shot we needed I wondered off, only to turn back 10 seconds later and find the rest of the crew in a discussion with a white-shirted guy who had appeared on the scene. As I went back to investigate I saw that he was wearing a security badge and was part of the overall site security rather than rent-a-cop security for a particular building. He explained that the whole 95 acre Canary Wharf site is actually private land that the public have permission to use. But as such it is not publicly available for filming on without permission. My producer stepped in and explained the nature of the shoot, the fact that it wasn't commercial and the fact that we only needed a couple more shots to finish with. He was really nice to us and said we could continue as long as we weren't too long.

We grabbed the remaining shots and headed to our final location.

Millenium Mills is an old factory building on the banks of one of the wharfs in Docklands. It used to be where flour was brought in and made into bread and other baked goods, I believe, and used the water as a means to transport raw materials in, and goods out. At the moment it is derelict and patrolled by security. My DOP, Russell, had recce'd the place the day before and was convinced we could sneak in and grab a shot. We did indeed sneak in, crawled under a gap in the fence, shot our two set-up's with minimal problem and made our way out.

As we left I went over the footage we had filmed in my head and realised we hadn't shot the actual removal of the circuit board yet. We looked around to try and find somewhere we could shoot it and Russell suggested a nearby public park. As we drove there we saw an absolutely spectacular sunset which we stopped and filmed before setting up for our final couple of exterior shots. It was very nearly dark at this point, however, so we had one of the production vehicles wheeled into place with it's lights on and covered them in an old opaque shower curtain I keep in my car for just such eventualities. With the low-light capabilities of the 5D's we were able to get some absolutely fantastic shots which looked amazing.

Just then a police car wondered over to see what was happening. Anthony and I wondered over to see what he was doing and the following conversation took place.

"Evening officer"
"Evening. How are you?"
"Fine thanks."
"Shooting some photos?"
"It's a bit of a short film we're doing. Shouldn't be-"
"Don't want to know. Don't want to get involved"
"You could turn the lights on for us and we could get you in a shot?"
"Nope. I'm outta here. By the way they'll be locking the gate soon. Don't get locked in"

And with a smile and a wave he was gone! It was only later that I stopped to think what the situation must have looked like to him: Here were six people gathered in a semi-circle on the grass around a couple who were in a passionate embrace on the floor and we were taking pictures of them in a public park after dark! I'm sure there's a term for that sort of activity, but I'm not sure what it is.

Five minutes later a park official informed us he was locking up and we convinced him to give us another five minutes to finish 'the shot' we were on. We actually managed another two shots after he left before heading back in pitch black to film the interiors.

We adjourned to Russell's apartment in North London. This would form the location for shooting the opening of the film, set in some sort of institute. The problem was - of course - that when we got there we couldn't find anywhere that actually looked appropriate for the filming.

However with a little bit of lateral thinking we solved our dilemma. The advantage of the Canon 5D cameras we were using is that the interchangeable lenses allow really tight shots to be used. Couple that with a glass panelled door at one end through which we could shoot and we were able to create a shot that looked almost as though we had planned it that way.

The cast wrapped around midnight and I headed home shortly after that leaving the techies to transcode the footage from Canon 5D format into something we would be able to use for the edit.

The following day I was back in North-East London ready to work on the edit. All the footage had been transcoded along with the sound recordings we had done on an additional machine. However the editors hadn't had time to log the contents of the footage to determine what was on it. This meant that finding a shot involved looking through all the clips to find the one we needed. Considering we had used two cameras and each camera had used two memory cards for recording it did mean we had a LOT of stuff to go through. The obvious learning for the next one is to either keep a very detailed shot log and slate each take, or to make sure when the footage is transcoded that we tag the scene in some way to make retrieval easier. I estimate that over the next 12 hours we lost around 1 hour from not having done that.

'Graham the production manager' became 'Graham the editor' at that point and spent all of Sunday putting together a great initial cut. Sure it needed tweaking, but it was well paced, had all the right emotional beats in it and would form a great basis for a final cut.

Considering the terms of the competition were that we would need to turn in a film of between three and a half and five minutes we were anxious to make sure we had, indeed, edited it to the required length. So - around 11pm Sunday evening - we ran the first rough cut through from start to end. It ran for seven minutes without credits!

The next 90 minutes were spent cutting, trimming, honing and retiming everything in the cut to get down to the requisite time. I was all in favour of cutting out complete sequences, but Graham (and Russ, the DOP) convinced me to focus more on shortening what we already had to let the story come through without doing a “Brazil” on it.

Finally - at around 1am Monday morning - we had a completed edit of 4 minutes 59 seconds with credits.

Now the hard work was to start. All the audio and colour grading had to be completed. Graham left (anxious to make sure he got some sleep before he started his day job on Monday morning), and Russ and I were left to try and sort out the sound.

Our first job was to synch up the audio from the dialogue scene. I had made a decision early on that there would be minimal dialogue and this was what actually transpired. We had, basically, about 90 seconds of footage with dialogue. This was recorded onboard the 5D’s but also it was recorded to a separate sound recorder (actually a Sony EX1). The problem was we had started editing without synching this sound and were now left with having to match up individual snippets of sound with the actors mouths. Fortunately our sound recorder had insisted on recording one complete take of the dialogue as wildtrack (i.e. just the sound, no acting, no movement, no visual) and we were able to use a lot of this.

Our final job was to add some sort of colour grade over the whole film. Using Magic Bullet Looks we were able to both colour match different camera views of the same take as well as grade the overall look of the film. We went for a fairly contrasty look with colour either saturated or desaturated depending on the nature of the sequence being filmed. The final shot was graded at 6.15am Monday morning at which point i went home and collapsed. I awoke at 11am and contacted Russell to make sure things were still on track.

Russ had encountered a couple of rendering problems with the colour grading. This had resulted in the render taking longer than expected and he was now struggling to get the thing done on time. I left him to it

Then everything went quiet.

The deadline of 1pm came and went and I heard nothing.

Finally, around 3pm he texted to tell me he’d left his phone at home, finished the movie, burned it to DVD and jumped in a taxi to get him to the venue. Two miles from the venue the cab had encountered heavy traffic and so - with very little time left - he had sprinted through London’s side streets, arriving literally with 1 minute to spare.

Phew!

Anyway, to anyone who was involved in the shoot who is reading this I would like to say: Well done everyone. Let's keep our fingers crossed for a good result and regardless of the outcome I think we did really well and should do it again next year!

UPDATE: Here is our completed film: 27 Arbour Street

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What are your top five movies (and why)?

For no particular reason - other than the fact that I wonder if anyone will rise to the challenge - I want to share my top five movies and why, with the hope that you will respond in the comments with yours.

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1. The Godfather:

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A classic of modern cinema  Powerful in the way modern movies tend not to be. So many memorable scenes, from the horses head in the bed through 'Luca Brazzi sleeps with the fishes', Sony's death at the toll booth,  Michael assassinating the cop and the don in the restaurant, right up to the finale montage of Michael settling all the family debts as he becomes godson to his sister's son. This is also a movie that set the tone for the definitive gangster flick. Elements of this movie were taken later by Scorsese and used in Goodfellas as well as any number of pastiches and rip offs. The language itself has fallen into the vernacular. How many times have you heard someone say 'I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse?' or the aforementioned 'sleeps with the fishes'?

This was, of course, the movie that brought Brando back from the wilderness. In a role he studio didn't want him the play he created one of cinemas most memorable characters and deservedly won an Oscar for it (one of three the movie earned along with nine additional nominations, although Brando refused to pick his up sending instead an actress playing a Native American in his place).

From first frame to last this is an absolute pleasure to watch and stands up very well to repeat viewings

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2.The Shawshank Redemption: 

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A severely underrated movie on it's release, Shawshank has developed a cult following which currently puts this 2 and-a-half hour long movie at the top of the IMDB poll of favourite movies of all time. Based on the Stephen King short story 'Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption' it makes for grim viewing potential. A movie about a wrongly convicted man and the life he leads with the inmates and wardens at the Shawshank prison, somehow it rises up above the limitations of the premise to deliver a movie which is both entertaining and uplifting. And it does all of this with virtually no sentimentality or saccharin. For a movie costing $25m to make and earning only $787,000 on its release weekend this has defied all expectations to become a seminal movie. And an absolutely superb one at that.

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3. Alien:

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"In space no one can hear you scream." So said the poster when this movie was released back in 1979. Audiences flocked to see this small movie and were blown out of their seats by the whole affair. From a pure scriptwriting point of view it is a shocker. Based on the old staple of a few people trapped in a confined place with a scary and deadly adversary, it is a plot which has been attempted many times since and not always with the same level of success. The beauty of this script is that the top billed people in the movie - people such as John Hurt and Tom Skerrit - were killed off early on in the action leaving you to wonder whether anyone was safe in this movie. When you were finally left with the relatively unknown Sigourney Weaver to save the ship (and the cat) it became something a little different. It added a frisson of excitement to the whole movie.

The setting itself is novel (for it's time). The spaceship was beautifully done and - with the help of H R Giger to create the alien and the look of the film - it became an instant classic. Why do I like it? It is well written, looks great and always entertains me when I watch it. What more can you ask for?

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4. When Harry Met Sally:

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This is a fairly controversial movie to have on the same list as 'Alien' and 'The Godfather'. After all it is a slight and light romantic comedy of the 'boy meets girl boy loses girl boy finds girl' variety. But where it distinguishes itself from the pack - and merits a place on my list - is through the writing and the peformances. Based on the lives of the director Rob Reiner and the screenwriter Nora Ephron it is a delicately balanced tale which carefully balances each side of the male vs female equation. The lovely little vignettes which separate the various scenes are all genuine stories gleaned throgh interviews with the Director although they are played by actors. Couple this with some great performances by the two leads (Who can forget Meg Ryan in the Deli? - "I'll have what she's having") and you have a heart-warming movie that isn't sentimental but warm and lovely.

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5. Toy Story:

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From the guys at Pixar who have yet to produce a bad movie my personal favourite is Toy Story. When it was first released almost 20 years ago it set the standard for computer generated animation. And - while the state of the art has moved on considerably since then -  Pixar have proved the old maxim that it's not what the movie looks like that counts, it's the story that really matters. The simple conceit of toys that come alive when the kids aren't looking and try to welcome a new Space Ranger toy who thinks he's real is an absolute classic.

This is another film which stands up to repeated viewings and it also added something which - to me anyway - is an absolute classic touch - the end-credit bloopers. Treating the animated film as if it was live action they had characters fluffing their lines, missing marks, running into the camera and dropping out of character mid-sentence. It was so successful a gimmick that they even created a separate set of bloopers to go onto later reels to encourage folks to go see the movie a second time. As with all the best animations the movie can be watched by children and adults alike, both of whom will read different things into the script. ('Laser envy' anyone?)

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SUMMARY

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Having looked back at my list one thing that stands out is that three of the top five are movies where the immediate sequel is widely regarded as being as good as - if not better - than the original. But as with all these movies the problem with sequels is they they don't have what the original had - originality. I loved 'The Godfather II', 'Aliens' and 'Toy Story 2'. They were all excellent films and fully deserve to be on my list of top movies. But they don't make the top five for that reason.

Honourable mentions: The Lord of The Rings Trilogy. The Terminator Movies (1 and 2 only). The Usual Suspects. Goodfellas, Fight Club, Leon, The Matrix, Some Like it Hot.

Over to you folks....

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Jurassic what..?

I watched Jurassic Park last night and - as with a number of Spielberg films - I was struck with two conflicting emotions-

1) Spielberg is a consummate film-maker able to hit all the right emotional high-points needed to make a really good movie.
2) There are so many huge logic flaws that the movie itself makes no sense.

Let me talk about the second point. Any movie has to create its own reality. The reality can be as far-fetched as needed as long as the rules are created and then adhered to. Jurassic Park sets its own reality using the 'amusement park ride' format near the start. They identify that dino DNA from mosquitoes in amber has been extracted, mixed with frog DNA, sequenced and used to hatch dinosaurs. Whether you think that is credible or not is irrelevant. The fact is THAT is the reality the movie makes and it sticks with it pretty well for most of the way.

Now let me explain the logic flaws that ruin the movie outside of that reality.

1) The arrival at the island. Why would you put a helicopter landing pad in the middle of the island where the approach has to be through narrow, steep valleys with huge windshear and a vertical drop down the side of a waterfall? If the helicopter landed near the park itself I could understand it but the visitors then have to take a jeep ride from the helicopter pad to the park itself. Does that mean that the amusement park is actually in the middle of the island? If so, why? The boat dock is obviously at the edge, the visitors eventually will be coming by boat (presumably) so why trek them through the island when you could station the park near the shore and turn it into a seaside resort as well? It makes no sense.

2) The Brachiosaur. As the jeeps head towards the visitor centre they cross a wide open stretch of land. On one side is a 20 story high Brachiosaur, on the other is a lake with other large dino's visible in the water and on the shore and yet neither Drs Malcolm, Grant or Sattler notice either of these until the jeeps stop and one of them glances to the side. It makes no sense.

3) The Visitor centre. Kinda small for a place meant to deal with large crowds visiting the island, don'tcha think?

4) The Raptors. The most dangerous animals on the island are - apparently - the Velociraptors. Deadly enough to need a special, ultra-secure cage built just for them. A cage which they position conveniently next to the visitor centre. Does this make sense? All the other animals are behind high electric fences with special double-access gates situated a car ride away from the visitors. But the Raptors? No, they're right next door. It makes no sense.

5) The T-Rex attack. In my mind one of the best set-pieces Spielberg has ever put together. I loved it when I saw it the first time and I loved it when I saw it last night. But here's the question. How can the T-Rex cross from the goat cage through the fence to the vehicles? We see later on in that sequence that if you go through that fence there is a huge drop on the other side. In fact the T-Rex throws one of the cars over it and into the top of a tree below. But didn't we see the T-Rex come across from the goat cage and rip the fence apart not 2 minutes earlier? It didn't appear to jump a huge gap, or climb any sort of incline or cliff to do that. So where did the drop come from? While we are talking about this sequence, when Dr Grant gets Tim out of the vehicle in the tree, if they just stood where they were on the branch, the vehicle would have fallen away  from them leaving them without a problem. However as soon as the car started to fall they chose to get underneath it and race it to the floor. It makes no sense.

6) The Lawyer: Everyone loves to see the lawyer get it in a movie. I'm no exception. The lawyers death by T-Rex was brilliantly staged. Escaping from the vehicle at the first sign of danger, hiding in the toilet and -... Hang on. A toilet? In the middle of a ride where the guests are not supposed to leave their cars (The Samuel L Jackson character says earlier on 'I knew we should have put central locking in the vehicles')? Why is there a toilet there? For the workers? If so why is it an elaborate 'guest style' toilet with signs  and multiple cubicles etc.? Why not a Porta-potty? It makes no sense.

7) The Boat. Imagine you are a ship's captain and you had the task of transporting a group of folks who work for a multi-millionaire industrialist. Now imagine you were supposed to leave your mooring in the middle of a tropical storm with hurricane force winds. Would you do that? Or would you tell everyone to hang tight and wait until the storm passed through? Personally I would hang around and wait. But the boat captain transporting the workers from the East dock on Isla Nublar decides to go in the teeth of the storm. It makes no sense.

8) Why the evacuation? The announcements clearly state that everyone who wants to go should be at the dock by a certain time and, conveniently everyone who works in the labs and the computer rooms goes - apart from Nedry, the Game Warden Muldoon and Samuel L Jackson. So why is there an evacuation? Especially when Hammond has brought his grand kids here for the weekend. Who's going to serve them food, or make the beds? And who set's out all the food that Lex and Tim eat when they get back with Grant? It makes no sense.

9) The siting of the dock. We've already established that the helicopter landing pad is situated in a weird place. But how about the East Dock? Apparently in order to get to the East Dock everyone has to go through the main doors of the park ride and through a number of the animal pens to get there (as Nedry finds out when he takes the petrol jeep and tries to find his way there). This wasn't the case for the helicopter pad where they were able to roam unrestricted across a large section of the island (other than the first gate immediately next to the pad). So why put the dock in a place where you have to travel through the park to get there? It makes no sense.

10) The Kitchen. I love the kitchen scene with the Velociraptors. Brilliant tension and great settings. But doesn't that kitchen look a bit big? I mean have you ever seen a kitchen that was so large? Ever? Especially as it wouldn't be needed for catering or a large number of people as we have already identified that the visitor centre is quite small. So why the huge kitchen? It makes no sense.

11) The Finale. Your four protagonists are cornered in the main atrium of the visitor centre. Two Velociraptors are boxing them in and are ready to pounce when suddenly... a T-Rex appears from camera right and grabs one of the Raptors. Where did it come from? Why didn't anyone see it? Why didn't it make that ominous 'thump.. thump' noise that it made on each of its previous appearances? I can understand why Drs. Grant and Sattler wouldn't see it -  after all they couldn't see a 20 story Brachiosaur until it was pointed out to them - but wouldn't the kids have seen it? It makes no sense. Then, to top it all off, the four of them run outside just as Hammond and Malcolm appear in a jeep to pick them up. Where did they come from? Up until then they were in the Emergency Bunker. Are we to take it that it was in a separate area to the visitor centre? If so, how did they get there without being attacked by the raptors? It makes no sense.

I still think Jurassic park is one of the seminal films in movie history. The effects are pretty seamless even for a movie that was released 17 years ago. It marked the dawn of the new era of CGI movies. It is still the original and still the best. But this just goes to prove that there are a number of huge holes in the plot that appear if you just do a little bit of critical thinking.

For a more detailed list of errors, goofs and the like consult the IMDb entry for Jurassic Park .

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Cast in stone. Well, clay and silicone...

I tweeted recently that I was watching "Jaws". It's a classic movie and one which I can watch on a regular basis. The movie has numerous great scenes: The midnight swim at the beginning: The shark popping out of the water as Chief Brody pours chum in to attract it: "You're gonna need a bigger boat": The 'USS Indianapolis' speech. But I think the scene that most people tend to remember more than any other is the discovery of Ben Gardner's boat floating in the night mist and the head popping out from the bottom as Hooper dives under to investigate ¹.

Having seen the movie numerous times that scene always makes me jump. But last night it was a little different for me. You see last night was the first time I had watched the movie since having a 'life cast' made of my body.

Life Casting is a way of making copies of body parts for casting in silicone or rubber. It is used quite regularly in movies and television. Any scene where bodies are seen to be damaged, run over, crushed or displayed in a badly decomposed state ( a la Ben Gardner) are usually casts. Anytime an actor has to wear prosthetics for a scene these are usually made and modeled around a head cast. Having said that, the number of people who have actually had a full body life cast made is quite small. I am now one of that elite group.

Up around the back of the Shepperton Studios lot, along David Lean Road and behind the Korda Theatre, somewhere across from 'A' and 'B' stages is a small, dirty, slightly run-down set of single story, unheated buildings that are the home to Animated Extras. This is the company that does a large number of prosthetics, mannequins, articulated puppets and make-up effects for films and television. If you've seen a Paul W.S Andersen movie (Resident Evil or AVP, for example) they've probably been involved in creating some gruesome scene for it. The also created one of the tigers for the ampitheatre scene in 'Gladiator', severed heads and hands for 'Elisabeth I', the boar make-up prosthetic for Sir Ian Mackellen in 'Richard III' and numerous other films, television programmes and commercials. It was to these uncelubrious surroundings that I headed just before Christmas. As the rest of the productions that were filming at Shepperton had taken their Christmas break the place was pretty deserted. After wondering around for a few moments I ran into a stocky young man with a pleasing amount of facial stubble who introduced himself as Waldo.

Waldo explained the situation. For an upcoming feature film the director had requested a couple of prosthetic bodies be created. One of them needed to be a 'fresh' corpse that had just died and was seen to be in a reasonable condition. The other one needed to be older, thinner and decomposed. I was going to be the decomposed body. He showed me a picture of a similar body that had been made for a BBC TV series. I saw empty eye sockets, worms and decaying flesh. Cool!

Taking a full body life cast is a long and intricate endeavour. The material used to make the cast is an alginate similar to the stuff used to take dental casts for false teeth and crowns. However, despite common-sense opinions to the contrary, this product appears to defy the laws of general physics in that it works best when cold and then solidifies as it heats up (I would have thought the opposite would be true). It also needs to be set in plaster of Paris when it has solidified so that it can be used as a mold. The result of this is that it produces a heavy cast and therefore cannot be used as an 'all-in-one' mold. The day would therefore be split into multiple sections: The head: The torso: The limbs.

But first a trip to the make-up area. Nicky was a lovely young lady who specialised in make-up and prosthetic make-up and her first job was to fit me with a bald cap.

Bald cap's are extremely flattering (!) pieces of latex which completely hide the hair and are glued in there to stop them coming off. In addition to this the rest of the facial hair is then covered in some face cream to stop anything adhering to it and ripping it off when removed. Nice....

Having done this a number of times Waldo decided that the head was the best thing to start off with. There were a number of reasons for this: a) The head is, without doubt, the most daunting part for people who've never had this done before and should be done first to remove any anxiety and b) If the head is done early enough in the day there is always the possibility of being able to show a complete cast to the subject before they leave.

So Waldo talked me through the process. The whole idea was to completely cover every part of my head in alginate with the exception of a breathing hole to allow me to, well, breath. Normally head casts involve having holes cleared to one's nostrils to permit breathing and the rest of the head being covered. In this case Waldo wanted an open mouth pose and decided to block the nose with cotton wool. I laid on my back with my head on a specially prepared plastic covered board. Waldo asked me to close my eyes and mouth and take a breath. He then smeared cold alginate over them before asking me to open my mouth. This allowed a complete impression of the lips to be made. I opened the mouth and started doing my best 'mouth-breather' impression as more and more of the gelatinous gloop was added to my face. The bald cape was covered, the ears were covered, the nose, chin, neck and forehead were covered. Soon all sense of sound, smell and vision was gone.

I was dimly aware of movement around me and all I could hear was the beating of my heart and the rasping of my breath as I struggled to inhale through the partially open mouth - a mouth which was rapidly starting to fill with saliva! At this point the alginate started to set. The overall impression was actually one of peacefulness. As the alginate set, it started to get warm and the sensation was quite pleasant. The guys then started to add the pretreated bandage strips over the top which would form into a plaster of Paris cast.

As the plaster set, the weight of the cast became apparent. I was lucky in that I was being cast laying flat, however someone had gone in recently for the same treatment and had to do the cast standing up. The weight can get quite overpowering at times. Pretty soon my head was completely cast in alginate and plaster.

It's interesting to recall what was going through my mind at the time. Amongst other things I was thinking 'This is quite peaceful', whilst at the same time thinking 'I am completely encased in a rapidly hardening plaster cast with a small air passage as the only way of keeping me alive'. I can fully understand how claustrophobic people would freak out at having to do this. I could dimly hear Waldo saying things like 'Another 5 minutes and it will all be set, Gary'. I raised my thumbs to indicate my understanding.

After what seemed an eternity I was lifted up into a sitting position, the hardened alginate at the back of my head was sliced through with a blunt knife and the whole cast was eased off my head intact. Waldo and his team then put the cast back onto the wooden 'pillow' I had been laying on and nailed it in place.

The head was done.

As I sat blinking in the light, pulling bits of cotton wool out of my ears and nose, and removing the little bits of blue alginate that had solidified against my teeth and remained there, Waldo was pouring a special liquidised clay into the mold to create the internal impression. That would need to set and solidify before the mold could be taken.

Next we did the torso. The procedure is identical to the head. Waldo decided that we would go from mid-thigh to neck and out to the upper arms. This would provide enough overlap with the individual arm and leg casts we were going to do to enable a complete body to be made. Once again Nicky set to work with the Nivea cream and we coated all the hair on my body with it (bearing in mind that I was naked other than a pair of boxer shorts). Waldo decide to make extra sure that no hair would get trapped by applying a layer of clingfilm to my chest and coating that with cream. At this point I was starting to feel a little like a Christmas turkey being dressed for cooking.

Once again I lay on a plastic covered board and this time the guys started using the plaster of Paris to build up a little frame around my body to hold the alginate before they poured it. With two folks working on each side it still took around 15 minutes to build the 'cradle' before we could start pouring the gloop. Once the pouring started my whole torso ended up being encased as can be seen by the photo. This was slightly different to having the head done for a couple of reasons a) I could actually see and hear what was happening and b) the surface area being covered was substantially larger and therefore took longer. I think overall I spent about 45 minutes having the torso done. The 'bars' which appear across the torso are actually folded strips of material to create 'handles' with which to move and manipulate the heavy cast when it has been removed.

One further difference between this cast and the head cast was 'setting'. As the alginate warms up and sets it forms a hard outer case inside which the body could then start to move within it. Prior to that any movement (such as breathing) caused the alginate to flex with your skin. Now it stayed stationary. The upshot of this was that I could then start to break the vacuum caused by the substance and wriggle inside the cast. The feeling was a little weird, but I soon got used to it.

Releasing from this mold involved having someone lift the top part of the mold up and then pull it away to allow me to climb out of the 'bed' and into the (rather cold) ambient air. As Waldo started to nail the cast shut and attach it to the wooden base I prepared for my limbs being cast with a cup of tea and a biscuit.

The limbs were almost a non-event. Each arm was done separately after being attached once again to a piece of wood. Both legs were done at the same time with two people on either side dealing with the molding and casting.

By the end of the day Waldo had a head, a torso, two arms and two legs which was more than enough for a complete body to be made.

The next steps are for the molds to be used to produce a copy of my body. This will then be assembled, painted, individual hairs will be punched into it for realism and it will then be distressed with empty eye sockets, missing flesh and worms (Think of the decaying victims in the cinema sequence in 'An American Werewolf in London'). At some point in January or early February it will be wheeled onto a sound stage in Shepperton and filmed for the movie.

For those of you who are wondering how much a full body life-cast costs no-one was able to tell me the full amount, however a detailed head alone can cost upwards of £800/$1200 so use that as a starting point.

Thanks to Waldo, Nicky, and the guys at Animated Extras for looking after me for the day. You guys were great.

Oh, I never did get to see the completed head before I left. No doubt I'll see it in the film...

¹ Incidentally that actual shot was filmed in the editor's swimming pool with the fake head, a piece of the boat set and some Carnation milk added to the water to make it murky. It was shot after the rest of the film had been edited  together when Spielberg decided he wanted a shock earlier in the movie than the Brody-throwing-chum-into-the-ocean scene. For more on the making of 'Jaws' I recommend 'The Jaws Log' by screenwriter Carl Gottlieb .

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Rating movies, movie reviews and the search for the 'perfect' movie

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My good friend and fellow blogger Algo rants and raves about numerous topics over at his Wall Shadows blog, but mostly he reviews movies he has seen. He has developed a method of rating movies on a scale of 0 to 10. If you check out his site you’ll see that he has ratings for upwards of 120 movies (most of which have reviews attached to them) The ratings include the whole range of numbers (as you would expect) but with most of them playing in a '3' to '8' range.

But there are a number of movies that are rated at '10'. For example Billy Wilder’s ‘The Apartment’ is rated at a 10. As are ‘Metropolis’, ‘Seven Samurai’ and ‘The Dark Knight’. Algo and I have a running debate about these ratings (If you follow some of the comments you'll understand why).

Obviously Algo is perfectly entitled to rate his movies however he wishes (and it isn’t my intention to defame either his ratings, his site or his methodology), but it did get me thinking about what sort of a rating system I would put together and whether - in my rating system - there could be such a thing as a perfect movie, let alone 4 of them.

There are a series of questions I would have to ask myself if using a similar rating system. For example:

“Are ratings date dependent?” If I rate a movie as, say, 6/10 when I see it and then - in light of subsequent movies I watch - decide that this rating is inappropriate, can I go back and re-rate this movie? For me, for example, Donnie Darko was a fairly obscure and lowly rated movie (probably a 6/10) when I first saw it. Having re-watched it recently, and in light of watching subsequent disappointing movies by the same director, would I change the rating? Probably. I think it's now worth a 7 or an 8. What about remakes? Psycho (1960) vs Psycho (1998) are ostensibly the same movie shot-for-shot. So would they rate the same? Difficult to say. Probably not - the remake looses marks for originality. But if that is the case, what about the upcoming remake of ‘Clash of The Titans’? It is based on the same story as the 1981 movie, but the script is different (much different!). There is an amount of nostalgia for the first one but - from the footage I’ve seen of the remake (and I’ve seen about 10 minutes of roughly edited footage) - this will be a completely different movie. How would it rate against the original? That depends on your view of the original. I didn’t particularly like it and I welcome the remake, but others have the opposing view.

Do they rate proportional to ALL movies or just similar movies in the genre? I went to see a school production of 'Les Miserables' the other day. In the great pantheon of theatre productions it probably rated about  4 or a 5 out of 10. But as a school production it was easily the best, most ambitious and complex production I have ever seen and would easily rate as a 9/10 (or maybe even a 10/10). Would the same hold true for movies? For example would, say, a 9/10 for the original X-men indicate that this is a great movie by any measure possible, or would it indicate that this is a great comic-book adaptation movie? Does a 9/10 for a comic book movie meet the same criteria for a 9/10 horror movie?

What about other movies by the same director (Terry Gilliam, for example?) Are movies being rated with a view to whether they are the best movies per se, or the best movies by a given director? Let’s take Terry Gilliam. Would I rate, say, ‘The Fisher King’ as a 9/10 knowing that ‘Brazil’ is probably a better Terry Gilliam movie? Or would I be influenced by the fact that ‘Brazil’ had such a difficult gestation with all the Sid Sheinberg interference and the re-editing to create an unauthorised US version (“The Happy Ever After Ending”)? I’ve already mentioned the ‘Donnie Darko’ example above. Subsequent movies by Richard Kelly have proven to be a disappointment. Does this make ‘Donnie Darko’ an even better movie? What about David Lynch movies? He has some pretty weird flicks on the go. ‘Mulholland Drive’ is very watchable if a tad confusing, but Inland Empire is virtually unwatchable by all accounts. (Algo rated it ‘pigs/10’ and couldn’t get his head around it on first watching, although he did like it). How would these rate against each other?

Is there such a thing as a perfect movie? Perfection is something that can only be aspired to. Algo’s description of a 10/10 movie is “There are no perfect films. This is as close as you'll get.”. So should there be more than 1 perfect movie? Of course. If we are working on the basis that a 10/10 is ‘as close to perfection as can be achieved’ then there are obviously movies which achieve that in different peoples opinions. I love ‘The Dark Knight’ for example, but do I think it is perfect? No. Is it close to perfect? No. Is it good? Absolutely, but there are too many plot holes and inconsistencies in it for me to rate it that high. (See this video for a few examples). I would rate The Godfather as a 10/10 because it is a consummate piece of movie making with a great story, great acting and a technical proficiency that was unsurpassed at the time. So is Toy Story. Are their sequels as good as the original? Probably. Do the sequels rate a 10/10? No, because they were lacking the originality factor of the first movies. Of course perfection (or the approximation of perfection) is a very subjective thing. It is like the appreciation of beauty in a women. There are a number of people who are deemed to be ‘pretty’ according to popular opinion but who just leave me cold. (Scarlett Johanssen, Uma Thurman, Julie Roberts, for example). It is the same with movies. Looking at Billy Wilder’s movies, I don’t think he actually made a bad one. But comparing ‘Sunset Boulevard’ with ‘The Apartment’ with ‘Some Like it Hot’ is purely a matter of personal opinion. For the record I would rank them 1) Some like it Hot, 2) Sunset Boulevard 3) The Apartment. Are they 10/10 movies? No. But they are close.

Summary
The only thing to say about movie ratings is that they are, by definition, subjective. I used to say - back in the old days of watching Barry Norman on Film 72 to 98 - that if Barry rated a movie highly I would be sure to avoid it. His taste in movie was almost diametrically opposed to mine. However now that Jonathon Ross is sitting in the presenters seat I find that his views align more with mine than Barry’s did (although it could be said that his views are not radically different to Barry Norman’s, but my tastes have changed as I have aged). So it is with movie ratings. Algo has a set of ratings, and a world view, that differs from mine. It doesn’t make any of his ratings incorrect. It just makes them different.

And we love and cherish the difference. If everyone thought the same it would make the world very boring - although it would make movie marketing a lot easier.

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Movie quiz (The male edition) - The answers

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Here are the answers to the movie quiz posted last week. Remember a couple of these were tricky!

1) Benjamin Braddock - Dustin Hoffman - The Graduate
2) Albus Dumbledore - Richard Harris - Harry Potter And the Philosophers/Sorcerers Stone
3) Captain Benjamin Willard - Martin Sheen - Apocalypse Now
4) Roy Neary - Richard Dryfuss - Close Encounters
5) Ray Ferrier - Tom Cruise - War of the Worlds
6) Capt. John Miller - Tom Hanks - Saving Private Ryan
7) Amon Goeth - Ralph Fiennes - Schindlers List
8) Matt Hooper - Richard Dryfuss - Jaws
9) Bud Fox - Charlie Sheen - Wall Street
10) Craig Schwartz - John Cusack - Being John Malkovich
11) Sam Witwicky - Shia LaBeouf - Tranformers
12) Joe Buck - John Voight - Midnight Cowboy
13) Harris K. Telemacher - Steve Martin - L.A. Story
14) Tommy 'Five-Tone' Messina - Danny Aiello - Hudson Hawk
15) Rupert Pupkin - Robert de Niro - The King of Comedy

How many of you got John Cusack as Craig Schwartz? What about John Voight as Joe Buck (not the American Football announcer!)

If you didn't try the female version of this and would like to, here is that quiz.and here are the answers.

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Who on Earth Is that ? - The male edition: A movie quiz.

I recently did a quiz here on the Musings Cafe which asked you to identify a movie character and name the person who played that character first, and in which film. That quiz was focused on female actors. At the time I said I would do a quiz focusing on male characters.

So here goes.

Remember the rules are easy: For every name below identify the name of the actor who first played this character, and the name of the first film that character appeared in.

1) Benjamin Braddock
2) Albus Dumbledore
3) Captain Benjamin Willard
4) Roy Neary
5) Ray Ferrier
6) Capt. John Miller
7) Amon Goeth
8) Matt Hooper
9) Bud Fox
10) Craig Schwartz
11) Sam Witwicky
12) Joe Buck
13) Harris K. Telemacher
14) Tommy 'Five-Tone' Messina
15) Rupert Pupkin

There are a couple of real teasers in there (10 and 12 in particular) so put your thinking caps on.

Answers at the end of next week.

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A retrospective on... Raiders Of The Lost Ark

It’s been almost 30 years since the first Indiana Jones movie - “Raiders of The Lost Ark” -  was released. In the intervening years the character has gone on to bigger and better things - including chasing alien skulls and avoiding gophers in last years 3rd sequel - but most people remember the original with a great deal of fondness. From the spectacular opening scene with the little gold buddha and the rolling rock, to the fight under the flying wing aircraft, the capture in the snake-infested Well of Souls, the valiant escape by shooting the sword-wielding attacker, being smuggled aboard Katanga’s boat and shimmying across to the submarine when the German’s boarded it, to the climax at the end when the Ark is opened and the faces melted, to the final shot of the ark disappearing into seemingly endless warehouse of similar boxes. Absolutely classic!

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Greening up the film set

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As regular readers will no doubt know, I have spent a lot of time recently on film sets. Whilst there I tend to do a couple things during my down time: I focus on the process issues that arise as a result of the slow and cumbersome way that films are made (and money wasted) nowadays and I look at wastage from an environmental point of view to determine what could be done differently.

Having spent a long time on film sets and around locations and production bases, I have identified a number of items that should be focused on by film companies. My hope is that a little bit of time focused on these items will save them both money and effort, but will have no detrimental effect on the quality of the films being made (regardless of whether you think that’s a good thing or not)

Let’s have a look at the current issues that arise with a production:

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Will the real Avatar trailer please stand up?

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A few thoughts on Avatar

Like a large proportion of the civilised world I am anxiously looking forward to the December release of James Cameron’s “Avatar”. A movie destined to change the way we think about movies (or so the hype would have us believe).

The publicity machine has been gearing up over the last few months or so starting with Avatar Day in August where cinemas across the US showed select clips from the movie totalling about 15 or 20 minutes in length. Since then there has been the main trailer - which was underwhelmingly received in general - along with a number of smaller trailers destined for television.

The general opinion of folks who have seen the footage in 3D (and I don’t count myself in that group but do include a close friend) is that it is a game changer. A lot of the previous problems associated with 3D - discomfort in watching, convergence issues etc - have gone leaving you with a fully immersive experience allowing you to experience the beauty of Cameron's location planet Pandora completely.

This is all well and good but what’s the story going to be like? I read a very early treatment of Avatar which was circulating on the internet and - like a lot of James Cameron movies - it was very detailed, visually stunning and well thought out. It is, at heart, an eco tale (and as such maybe an allegory for man’s destruction of his own planet), but told with Cameron’s typical style and flair. Remember this was a guy who took a love story set aboard a disaster movie about a sinking ship and parlayed it into the highest grossing movie of all time. My respect for this man and his abilities is of the highest level and I will generally watch anything that he’s involved with.

The problem that I have has arisen as a result of the latest TV trailer I’ve just seen. And it all relates to  Fight Club.

Fight Club is a David Fincher movie that came out in 1999. I was an avid theatre-goer at that time and saw the trailers for this movie for several months in advance. You may recall that they showed a lot about the ‘fight’ part of Fight Club, including a bronzed, Adonis-like Brad Pitt wondering around an underground room giving out the rules of ‘Fight Club’ ('The First rule of Fight Club is that you do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is that you DO NOT talk about Fight Club’) There was a lot of blood, a lot of fighting and a brief glimpse of Helena Bonham-Carter wondering around looking distinctly non Merchant-Ivory. Other than that there wasn’t a huge amount about the plot or anything else.

I stayed away from the movie. As did quite a lot of people. It wasn’t particularly well received on it’s theatrical release. It came and went and I forgot about it. A year or so later as I was building up by nascent DVD collection I came across the 2-disc Special Edition DVD version and - being a fan of special editions - bought the film. Finally I got around to watching it and was completely blown away by the movie. It was nothing at all like I had expected. The fighting was only a minor part of the movie and the Brad Pitt character - Tyler Durden - was absolutely mesmerising. It’s now one of my all-time favourite movies.

But the trailer was atrocious.

As I look back on it now I realise that the reason I didn’t watch this movie in the cinema was because the trailer was totally misleading. I wonder how many other people had the same problem.
(For a great dissertation on the link between 'Fight Club' and 'Calvin and Hobbes'. Click here)

Which brings me back to Avatar.

The previous trailers I have seen have been gung-ho ‘military on the move’, smash-em-bash-em type trailers meant to appeal to the key demographic of 18 to 24 year old males. They’ve shown military hardware, buff fighting men, lots of monsters and beasties and the hero being heroic. However the new trailer is different. The new trailer is.. softer. More feminine. The music has been toned down and has an ‘E.T.’ sort of quality to it - gentler, soothing, peaceful. Sure there are still shots of monsters and fighting and military hardware, but we’ve seen them before. The new shots are more of plants, and forests, cute flying insects, and the Na’vi. And every shot I see like this makes me think that one of the trailers we are seeing is like the trailer for ‘Fight Club’ - misleading. Am I seeing a trailer for a film that is a gung-ho military action adventure set on a pretty planet, or am I seeing a trailer for an Eco- friendly, touchy-feely, love story between two smurfs that is book-ended with a couple of battle sequences? Which trailer is accurate?

Will the real Avatar trailer please stand up?

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So you want to work in films?

 As regular readers of this blog will know I've been doing some work in film and television recently. In fact over the summer I was in three of the top four movies being shot in the UK along with prestigious TV shows such as 'Cranford', 'Larkrise to Candleford', 'The Legend of Dick and Dom', and my personal favourite ever job which was a music video for a long-time chart artist making a come-back in the new year. (I can't tell you much about it as I am under a non-disclosure agreement. But it was a lot of fun and should be out February time)

I've had a number of people ask me how to get into this business so I thought I would write a few words about the whole process.

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Film marketing and why it's all nonsense.

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I've written a couple of screenplays. But I have a problem: marketing them. Or to be more precise the movie companies will have a problem marketing them.

One story involves a number of dominant, strong women who are able to see through a sleazy male character trying to blindside them as he runs rings around his 'business' associates. They are all 'women of a certain age' and these would be dream roles for characters such as Michelle Pfeiffer, Meryl Streep etc.

The other movie is about a Machiavellian gangster who kills everyone between himself and the top role in his crime family including his brother, nephews and close friends who betray him.

Now here's the problem. Let's look at the market for these films. Traditionally the people who market movies split moviegoers into one of four groups: 1) Males under 25, 2) Males over 25, 3) Females under 25, 4) Females over 25. For a movie to be considered 'marketable' it has to appeal to at least two of these groups. Top summer 'tent-pole' films such as the 'Pirates of the Caribbean' franchise are aimed at all four sectors. Let me quote a New Yorker article on this topic

The collective wisdom is that young males like explosions, blood, cars flying through the air, pratfalls, poop jokes, “you’re so gay” banter, and sex—but not romance. Young women like friendship, pop music, fashion, sarcasm, sensitive boys who think with their hearts, and romance—but not sex (though they like to hear the naughty girl telling her friends about it). They go to horror films as much as young men, but they hate gore; you lure them by having the ingénue take her time walking down the dark hall.

Older women like feel-good films and Nicholas Sparks-style weepies: they are the core audience for stories of doomed love and triumphs of the human spirit. They enjoy seeing an older woman having her pick of men; they hate seeing a child in danger. Particularly once they reach thirty, these women are the most “review-sensitive”: a chorus of critical praise for a movie aimed at older women can increase the opening weekend’s gross by five million dollars. In other words, older women are discriminating, which is why so few films are made for them.

Older men like darker films, classic genres such as Westerns and war movies, men protecting their homes, and men behaving like idiots. Older men are easy to please, particularly if a film stars Clint Eastwood and is about guys just like them, but they’re hard to motivate. “Guys only get off their couches twice a year, to go to ‘Wild Hogs’ or ‘3:10 to Yuma,’ ” New Yorker Magazine

So let's look at my two scripts. The first one (which we'll call "The Tale of Margaret and her friends") will obviously appeal to the Older Women quadrant. And that's about it. The first movie (which we'll call "Richard and The Boys") will appeal heavily to the younger males and may appeal to the older male. Women, probably aren't going to enjoy it at all.

So by popular theory the second movie might get made but the first movie won't unless the budget was small- the audience isn't big enough to sustain a larger film (and associated marketing budget)

I like to think of myself as reasonably intelligent so is set about trying to solve this dilemma. The answer came fairly quickly "Why not merge the two stories into one and create a film that will appeal to everyone?" Surely a gangster movie with strong female characters fighting against the Machiavellian lead would appeal to everyone, right? Right...? I mean the young guys will like the action, explosions, blood, cars flying through the air etc. The older women will identify with the feel-good factor and the triumph of the human spirit. It's a sure fire winner, right?

OK, now here's the problem. I've already mixed the two together. The screenplay is actually a modern day reworking of Shakespeare's 'Richard III' with Richard Gloucester transposed to be a Mafia capo killing his way to the top only to be thwarted by the strong willed women of the piece. All the elements listed above are there: dominant, strong women who are able to see through a sleazy male character trying to blindside them as he runs rings around his 'business' associates. A Machiavellian gangster who kills everyone between himself and the top role in his crime family including his brother, nephews and close friends who betray him. It has appeal for both the younger male, the older female, the older male AND (possibly) the younger female as a result of the romance scenes where Richard woo's Anne over the corpse of her dead father-in-law. In theory it should tick all the boxes for the movie marketeers. But in reality they'll take one look at it and say 'Can't sell it!'

Why?

Because movies are marketed on the basis of comparisons with already existing movies. If they can look at something and say "It's 'Die Hard' on an Airplane" or "'Porkies' meets 'American Pie"' or "Spielberg Does Dinosaurs" then it's something they can easily figure out how to market. But for "It's Shakespeare done gangster style" there is no precedent. They can't market this as Shakespeare because it isn't "Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet" or even "Olivier's Richard III". They can't market this as 'The Godfather meets Shakespeare" because it will turn off each of the respective target audiences (Your 'Godfather' fans won't want to go watch Shakespeare and your Shakespeare fans won't want to watch a gangster movie)

Remember none of this actually has anything to do with the movie itself, or the quality of the movie. Look at something like Transformers : senseless, big budget, CGI with a weak story and some mediocre acting. But because it could be easily marketed (and it targeted at least two of the four demographics) it was easy to sell. But I don't think there are many people who would classify it as a 'classic' or 'great' movie. It's hardly "Lawrence of Arabia", "Chinatown" or "The Godfather" itself, is it?

But there's the rub. Can you imagine trying to sell 'Lawrence of Arabia' to a studio nowadays? "OK, So this story is about an intellectual in England between the wars who decides he wants to go help the Arabs. It involves a lot of camels, it's set in the desert and it's so long it has an break in the middle where we stick a card up saying 'intermission' and play some rousing music."
"Does it have big action sequences?"
"There's a battle which takes place on camels. Oh and they blow up a train. And some guy appears out of the desert and shoots a guy at a well."
"Who's the love interest?"
"There isn't one."
"Okaaaaay..... I'm not sure how we could market that. Can you bring it more up to date and set it in Iraq or maybe Afghanistan? Maybe add a few tanks, or Black hawk Helicopters? We could get Robert Pattinson in as a young army recruit and maybe Megan Fox as his love interest - she can be a female recruit who gets kidnapped by the Iraqi's....."

You can see how that conversation would go down.

No, the fact of the matter is that the Hollywood marketing men are leading the drive to create 'safe' content which may (or may not) actually make it's money back on a theatrical release. It is up to the independent distributors - with smaller budgets and a different marketing philosophy - to push forward something new and different. Take "The Blair Witch Project" for example. The premise is startlingly simple. "We take a few unknown folks, give them a camcorder and get them out in the woods acting scared." Can you imagine trying to sell this one at one of the major studios? Well it was a hit at the film festivals and had a wicked on-line marketing campaign using viral internet methods. And guess what? It was a hit. People went to see it. Even though it was shot on low-quality camcorder video and grainy black and white film. Even though it used 'shaky-cam' to such a degree that it made people sick. Even though it had no script and was improvised by the actors based on notes they received from the film-makers who were not actually a big part of the filming. People went to see it. In their thousands. It made more money per dollar invested than any other movie ever made.

And the studios would never have made it.

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