One of the first movies I saw on tape. Friend had a birthday party and they had a Beta copy of it.
I still don’t like it as much as a lot of other people do, but I get how it became popular.
Movies about making movies have been common since at least the 1940s:
I had never seen Singin’ in the Rain until a year or so ago. I was pretty surprised it was about sound being added into movies and the struggles of transitioning from silent to talking films.
And songs. It’s about a bunch of songs.
Many people when watching Singin’ in the Rain don’t realize that the song wasn’t written for that movie. It appeared in Hollywood Revue of 1929, Babes in Arms, and Little Nellie Kelly before then. It appears in A Clockwork Orange, Babylon, North by Northwest, and Pennies from Heaven since then.
Babylon is another movie about making movies.
People who make movies sure do like to make movies about making movies.
Show business kids making movies of themselves, you know they don’t give a fuck about anybody else …
- D. Fagan/W. Brecker
Oh, and also the recent Minions and Monsters. Among many many others, of course.
Then there’s the subcategory of movies about making movies where the movie being made in the movie is the movie itself:
Adaptation
Seven Psychopaths
Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story
Most of the songs, including the title song, were written by Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed in the late twenties through the mid-thirties. It’s sort of a jukebox musical.
And even more, they positively love to give awards, usually to movies about Hollywood and making movies.
The Academy Awards: the world’s largest employee appreciation awards.
I saw La Bola Negra last night. IMO it’s bloated Oscar bait. They could have cut a half hour without losing anything. I don’t usually mind long movies, but while watching this one I kept wondering when it would get to the point. On top of that, both the story and the storytelling were contrived. The acting was good, as was the cinematography, but overall I didn’t like it.
I hadn’t seen a good old Universal horror movie in a long time (Svengoolie ran The Wizard of Oz on Halloween. I guess they paid a lot for it, so they want to get their money’s worth. But couldn’t they have followed up with something like Zardoz?)
In any event, I pulled out my Universal Horror Legacy collection and watched The Bride of Frankenstein. Great flick. Ernest Thesiger steals the show as Doctor Pretorius. John Balderston wrote the basis for the screenplay that was eventually used, although Carkl Laemmle insisted on two more writers to “punch it up”.
The film moves with greater speed than the original 1931 film, in part because they finally got a composerv who could write a compelling score, Franz Waxman. (Cinefantastique did a cover story about him many years ago – he claimed the scores saved a lot of the Universal horror ilms, which weren’t, he claimed, setting the right atmosphere.) This film has multiple music motifs, including the Bride;'s theme that reminds me of “Bali Hai”. They got Colin Clive back to play Dr. Frankenstein, although Mae Clarke was too sick to play his wife, so we got Valerie Hobson instead. Boris Karloff was back as The Monster, but he lost his cadaverous look in part because his success enabled hi to eat better and in part because the need to speak meant that he had to leave in the dental plate, the absence of whivch had made is face look hollow. Jack Pierce also altered the makeup to give the impression that he’d gotten burned in the windmill fire. They also got Dwight Ffrye back. Although his charcter FRitz was killed in the original film he’s back as a virtually identical character, Karl.
What struck me , especialy after watching the “archives” that arean extra on the disc, is how much was cut out of the film. The studio stills imply several cut scenes, and there are plenty of internet sites about them
– The cut “Billy Barty” baby. One of the humunculi that Pretorius pulls out is only seen in a rear shot, and clearly shows a miniature baby in a high chair. Apparently Billy Barty played the baby. I’d heard about this one many years ago.
– The Burgomaster’s death – A couple of the stills show the haughty , self-important Borgomaster about to be strangled by the Monster. In the film he gets his comeuppance when he’s forced to flee from what he regards as simply a madman. But apparently they had an even more gruesome fate in mind. There are a couple of other death scenes partly or completely cut. This was apparently at the request of the studio, which thought to body count was too high, and wanted it brought down. These cuts did a lot tto bring the running time down from 90 to 75 minutes
– Dwight Frye’s cut-down role. Frye apparently playted a villager as well as Karl, and he even gets a line in the film. There was a subplot about him murdering someone and blaming it on the monster that was completelt excised.
The film also has the great scehe with the hermit (spoofed in Young FRankenstein by Gene Hackman). I also love the opening scene with Mary , Percy Shelly, and Lord Byron in the mansion on a hill during a storm (Una O’Connor is briefly there, too, hyolding a couple of dogs on a leash). Their discussion prompts Mary to tell the sequel. All too often this sequence was cut when they showe the film on Saturday nights, alloewing them to run more commercials. Knowing as I do the history of the writing, this scene looks wonderfully ludicrous – there were more than the three of them, it wasn’t a grand palace with sky-high winows, and twenty-something romantic entanglements and hormones played a large part. But it woulda been nice if it unfolded that way. And the storms are deerfinitely part of the historical record.
One thing I hadn’t appreciated before is that a very significant stretch of time frequently occurs between adjacent scenes. When they bring Henry back to the family home, his father is still alive and well (as we saw in the first film, and the dialogue in this one confirms it). But in the first sene with Doctor Pretorius he greets Frankenstein as now being the Baron himself. Clearly the scee with Pretorius, which appears at first sight to be sety on the night of the windmill fire, actuallly takes place many days or even weeks later, and Dr. Frankenstein is still recuperating from his injuries, and the old Baron has died. It’s the same with many later scenes – quite a bit of time passes while the monster is staying with the hermit, and so on.
I saw Star Wars: Episode 4 on Sunday. Now, I’ve seen the film several dozen times before, of course, including twice on the big screen, but this time, the screening was at the Charles Bronfman Auditorium in Tel Aviv, and the John Williams soundtrack was played live by the Israel Philharmonic. Let me tell you: I know every moment of that movie and every note of the score by heart, but hearing the music played live - and so well - was something completely new. The first time the Force Theme played, during the double sunset scene, the audience broke out in spontaneous applause. And we had 2nd row seats! I could actually see the special screen the conductor was using to sync with the movie.
Assault on Precinct 13 1976 Austin Stoker, Darwin Joston, Laurie Zimmer
Prime
John Carpenter wrote, directed, created the soundtrack, and edited the film. He was practically a one man production company. 
The film he made with a 100,000 budget is pretty amazing. The low budget doesn’t detract from his creative vision.
Carpenter borrows heavily from Rio Bravo, (assualt on a police buildiing) and Night of the Living Dead. (A mob of unspeaking, souless people that just keep coming.)
I recommend watching. It’s a great introduction to John Carpenter and his potential as a influential director.
Maximum Overdrive (Tubi)
Not sure what I can say about this. It’s campy, it’s cheesy, Stephen King says that he was coked out of his mind when he directed this, but it is a fun movie. Earth passes through a comet’s tail and machines come alive, killing and terrorizing humans along the way. A group of people hole up at a truck stop while semi-trucks, led by one with the Green Goblin’s face on it, circle the building through the night. Fortunately, the truck stop’s owner has a cache of LAW rockets, grenades, and guns in the basement and the humans fight back and escape to the marina and a sailboat.
It’s not great but like I said, it’s a fun movie. AC/DC provide the soundtrack, the drawbridge scene and sequences with trucks wrecking things are amusing, and it has a number of familiar faces in it including Emilio Estevez, Pat Hingle, and Yeardly Smith. For his one and only time in the director’s chair, King could have done a lot worse.
The story was adapted from a early King short story, Trucks , which reprinted in the collection Night Shift. Apparently it was adapted again as a TV movie entitled Trucks in 1997, which was more faithful to the story (and better directed), but I’ve never seen it.
Klara and the Sun (theaters).
A sweet movie about a robot and the family which adopts her. The two main characters are teenagers, but this isn’t really a teenager movie, if that makes any sense.
Yeah, I think King doesn’t even remember directing it. He is not a fan of this movie.
Yeah, but it has his best “role” as an “actor”, including the line
“This machine just called me an asshole!”