Category: Movies

The Best Movies That Should Be Made Into TV Shows

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IndieWire recently asked critics to pick the Best Movies That Should Be Made Into TV Shows.  Of all the movies suggested, I liked the idea of Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins Devil in a Blue Dress being turned into a series.  If it did well then other Easy Rawlins’ yarns would be ripe for the picking.

If I was to suggested movies that would make great tv shows, I’d suggest these three for starters…

  • The Expendables (where team members were actually expendable)
  • Sin City (using Miller’s stories)
  • Night of the Living Dead (focus on different stories/casts each season from the first few nights of the zombie outbreak)

21 Things We Learned from “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three” Commentary

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Rob Hunter and Film School Rejects present 21 Things We Learned from The Taking of Pelham One Two Three Commentary.  Here are three of my favorites…

7. The novel doesn’t spend much time at all with the transit cop character played here by Walter Matthau as Lt. Garber, and the book actually has a separate character named Garber as well. The actor loved the script, written by Peter Stone — who had written two previous films co-starring Matthau — and once he expressed interest they began beefing up the role.

19. Sargent recalled it being a “golden safety rule” during filming that no one get close to the electrified third rail despite the mostly confident belief that it was powered off by the transit authorities. There was apparently always a risk that someone might turn it back on again by accident or because they were unaware that it was off for a reason.

20. They rightly point out that today’s action films would rarely allow the villain to take his own life. “He would have to be shot eighteen times by Walter Matthau, and then fall and then a train would run him over, and that would propel him into the street where he’d get hit by a bus.”

 

9 Tough as Leather Facts About “Rawhide”

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Me-TV presents 9 Tough as Leather Facts About Rawhide. Here are three of my favorites…

EASTWOOD WORE HIS ‘RAWHIDE’ BOOTS IN ‘UNFORGIVEN.’
No need for a wardrobe department when it comes to Clint. To bookend his career as a cowboy, Eastwood wore his same Rowdy Yates boots in his Oscar-winning 1992 masterpiece Unforgiven.

LOADS OF SOON-TO-BE-FAMOUS FACES APPEARED ON THE SHOW.
That’s Bewitched star Elizabeth Montgomery taking aim in “Incident at El Crucero,” in a guest role that would foreshadow her gig as Mrs. Sundance. Star Trek crew members Leonard Nimoy and DeForest Kelley appeared on the Western, too. Sitcom legends Buddy Ebsen, Barbara Eden, Alan Hale, Jr., June Lockhart, Gavin MacLeod, Marion Ross and William Schallert also pop up — just to name a few. Then there’s Martin Landau, Frankie Avalon, Anne Francis, Peter Lorre…

TWO EPISODES WERE SLAPPED TOGETHER TO FORM A MOVIE, UNTIL EASTWOOD PREVENTED ITS RELEASE.
Rawhide finished its run in the first week of 1966. By that year, Eastwood was a star of small and big screen. The classic Spaghetti Westerns A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) revolutionized the genre. To further capitalize on Eastwood’s fame, Jolly Film, the studio behind A Fistful of Dollars, pieced together a couple old episodes of Rawhide, primarily “The Backshooter” with Louis Hayward and Slim Pickens, and labeled the flick The Magnificent Stranger, the original shooting title for A Fistful of Dollars. However, Eastwood sued and had the 1967 film withdrawn.

21 Things We Learned from Rob Reiner’s “Misery” Commentary

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Rob Hunter and Film School Rejects present 21 Things We Learned from Rob Reiner’s Misery Commentary.  Here are three of my favorites…

2.  James Caan was not his first choice for the film, and he instead was turned down by Robert Redford, Warren Beatty, William Hurt (twice), Richard Dreyfuss, and others. “But at the end of the day you can’t imagine anybody else playing the part.”

13.  Bates was stage-trained and preferred excessive rehearsals while Caan is more “instinctive and naturalistic,” so they had to balance the rehearsal time to make it less than she wanted and more than he wanted.

18.  The novel has Annie chop off Paul’s feet and cauterize the stumps, but they opted to simply hobble him instead by having her break his feet with a sledgehammer. Their thinking was that they wanted him to be victorious in the end, and losing his feet would be too high of a price. “It was pretty darn painful to look at, so I don’t think we compromised it too much.”

 

 

The Making of the Spanish Language Version of “Dracula” (1931)

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In 1931, as Universal Studios was preparing to film the now classic Dracula starring Bela Lugosi, it was decided that a Spanish version would be made at the same time.  Although the Spanish version would feature a different cast, the same screenplay and sets would be used as the English version.  Lugosi’s Dracula would film during the day and then that evening the Spanish crew would come in and film.  By all accounts the Spanish Dracula is excellent.

You can learn more about The Making of the Spanish Language Version of Dracula (1931) at Old Hollywood Films.

20 Things We Learned from the “Atomic Blonde” Commentary.

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Rob Hunter and Film School Rejects present 20 Things We Learned from the Atomic Blonde Commentary.  Here are three of my favorites…

3. The man seen running through the street in the opening is the film’s stunt coordinator, Sam Hargrave, “who’s also a good actor” and plays the soon to be dead James Gasciogne. He does various stunts throughout the film including the car flip.

15. The “one-take” stairwell fight scene features multiple hidden (or digital) edits including the motion blur of Lorraine throwing a guy to the floor at 1:12:04 and a handful of whip-pans that follow.

10. The book holding the cassette tapes at 32:53 is also in John Wick.

 

“The Thing” Got the Cinephilia & Beyond  Treatment.

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John Carpenter / Horror fans are going to love it that The Thing Got the Cinephilia & Beyond  Treatment.

Click on the link and you’ll find…

  • the Original Script
  • John Carpenter interviewed by Erik Bauer, Creative Screenwriting, January/February 1999.
  • Dean Cundey ASC discusses the making of director John Carpenter’s 1982 sci-fi horror classic.
  • STARLOG 060—JOHN CARPENTER DIRECTING THE THING
  • STARLOG 058—BILL LANCASTER ON SCRIPTING THE THING
  • STARLOG 059—AN INTERVIEW WITH DP DEAN CUNDEY
  • JOHN CARPENTER WITH ENNIO MORRICONE
  • FANGORIA—THE THING ARTICLES
  • The Incredible Effects of The Thing, Cinefantastique issue
  • THE THING: STORYBOARDS
  • and much more!