Previews and Reviews that are Z's Views
Twilight Zone: “The Thirty Fathom Grave” [Season 4, Episode 2]
Original Air Date: January 10, 1963
Director: Perry Lafferty
Writer: Rod Serling
Starring: Mike Kellin, Simon Oakland, David Sheiner and Bill Bixby.
The Overview: Beware of Spoilers…
The crew of a navy warship hears tapping from inside a submarine sunk 20 years earlier… and one of the ships crew members is starting to behave strangely.
Rating:
Mathew Baugh and Listverse present 10 Facts About Tarzan That Will Surprise You. Here are three of my favorites…
Tarzan Was Not Raised By Gorillas
Everybody knows Tarzan was raised by gorillas. It’s part of the established Tarzan lore . . . right? Well, this is a common misconception. In fact, it’s so common that a number of movies have gotten it wrong.
Tarzan was actually raised by a species of ape unknown to science. These creatures resemble gorillas in size and strength, but they differ in other ways. These great apes often walk upright, hunt animals, eat meat, and have a spoken language. They call themselves the “mangani,” and Burroughs describes them as “huge,” “fierce,” and “terrible.” He adds that they’re “a species closely allied to the gorilla, yet more intelligent.” Thanks to their smarts and strength, the mangani are “the most fearsome of these awe-inspiring progenitors of man.”
Edgar Rice Burroughs Killed Jane
The first actress to play Jane Porter was Enid Markey in Tarzan of the Apes. Unfortunately, Ms. Markey was a brunette, which went against Burroughs’s image of Jane. In the novels, Jane is actually a blonde. (She isn’t British, either. She’s actually from Maryland.) It didn’t help that Burroughs hated Markey’s performance. In fact, he supposedly hated it so much that he killed off Jane in his next story.
In the first chapter of Tarzan the Untamed, Tarzan is away from home when World War I breaks out. When he returns, he finds that German soldiers have looted and burned his home, killing many of his servants and friends in the process. And shockingly, they’ve murdered Jane.
Tarzan Auditioned For A Tarzan Movie
Edgar Rice Burroughs had a love/hate relationship with Hollywood. He loved the exposure and extra income, but he hated the way movies changed his character. He particularly disliked Elmo Lincoln, the first movie Tarzan, who was afraid of heights. Lincoln was also a beefy man with a 132-centimeter(52 in) chest in contrast to the lean, athletic Tarzan of the books.
Nor was Burroughs happy with Johnny Weissmuller (pictured above), the most famous movie Tarzan. He wanted Tarzan to be articulate, but Weissmuller’s version could barely speak English.
The author took out his frustration in Tarzan and the Lion Man. In this novel, our hero rescues a movie crew filming in the African jungle. Along the way, Burroughs mocks the actors, directors, and moviemaking in general. But the coup de grace comes in the last chapter. After his adventure, Tarzan visits Hollywood, and he’s taken to meet a casting director:
“The casting director sized Clayton up. ‘You look all right to me; I’ll take you up to Mr. Goldeen; he’s production manager. Had any experience?’
‘As Tarzan?’
The casting director laughed. ‘I mean in pictures.’
‘No.’
‘Well, you might be all right at that. You don’t have to be a Barrymore to play Tarzan. Come on, we’ll go up to Mr. Goldeen’s office.’
They had to wait a few minutes in the outer office, and then a secretary ushered them in.
‘Hello, Ben!’ the casting director greeted Goldeen. ‘I think I’ve got just the man for you. This is Mr. Clayton, Mr. Goldeen.’
‘For what?’
‘For Tarzan.’
‘Oh, m-m-m.’
Goldeen’s eyes surveyed Clayton critically for an instant; then the production manager made a gesture with his palm as though waving them away. He shook his head. ‘Not the type,’ he snapped. ‘Not the type, at all.’”
Twilight Zone: “In His Image” [Season 4, Episode 1]
Original Air Date: January 1, 1963
Director: Perry Lafferty
Writer: Charles Beaumont
Starring: George Grizzard, Gail Kobe and Katherine Squire.
The Overview: Beware of Spoilers…
Jessica is in love with a man with a mysterious past that gets uncontrollable urges to kill.
Rating:
Mathew Jackson and Mental Floss present 10 Hush-Hush Facts About L.A. Confidential. Here are three of my favorites…
1. THE SCRIPTING PROCESS WAS TOUGH.
Writer-director Curtis Hanson had been a longtime James Ellroy fan when he finally read L.A. Confidential, and the characters in that particular Ellroy novel really spoke to him, so he began working on a script. Meanwhile, Brian Helgeland—originally contracted to write an unproduced Viking film for Warner Bros.—was also a huge Ellroy fan, and lobbied hard for the studio to give him the scripting job. When he learned that Hanson already had it, the two met, and bonded over their mutual admiration of Ellroy’s prose. Their passion for the material was clear, but it took two years to get the script done, with a number of obstacles.“He would turn down other jobs; I would be doing drafts for free,” Helgeland said. “Whenever there was a day when I didn’t want to get up anymore, Curtis tipped the bed and rolled me out on the floor.”
3. JAMES ELLROY DIDN’T THINK THE BOOK COULD BE ADAPTED.
Though Wolper was intrigued by the idea of telling the story onscreen, Ellroy and his agent laughed at the thought. The author felt his massive book would never fit on any screen.“It was big, it was bad, it was bereft of sympathetic characters,” Ellroy said. “It was unconstrainable, uncontainable, and unadaptable.”
10. ELLROY APPROVED OF THE MOVIE.
To adapt L.A. Confidential for the screen, Hanson and Helgeland condensed Ellroy’s original novel, boiling the story down to a three-person narrative and ditching other subplots so they could get to the heart of the three cops at the center of the movie. Ellroy, in the end, was pleased with their choices.
“They preserved the basic integrity of the book and its main theme, which is that everything in Los Angeles during this era of boosterism and yahooism was two-sided and two-faced and put out for cosmetic purposes,” Ellroy said. “The script is very much about the [characters’] evolution as men and their lives of duress. Brian and Curtis took a work of fiction that had eight plotlines, reduced those to three, and retained the dramatic force of three men working out their destiny. I’ve long held that hard-boiled crime fiction is the history of bad white men doing bad things in the name of authority. They stated that case plain.”
Twilight Zone: “The Changing of the Guard” [Season 3, Episode 37]
Original Air Date: June 1, 1962
Director: Robert Ellis Miller
Writer: Rod Serling
Starring: Donald Pleasence, Liam Sullivan and Philippa Bevans.
The Overview: Beware of Spoilers…
Professor Ellis Fowler upon being forced to retire feels that he hasn’t had the impact he hoped his career would bring. Fowler decides to commit suicide but before he goes through with it, he is visited by people from his past.
Rating:
Say the name “Jordi Bernet” to most comic fans and they’ll respond, “Torpedo.” That’s because Bernet is most famous for the art on the Torpedo crime stories.
Torpedo may come to mind first, but I’ll bet many won’t forget the awesome Bride of Frankenstein piece Bernet created.
Source: Steve Niles Tumblr.
Once a week Joblo.com posts Awesome Art We’ve Found Around the Net. As you can imagine, they post awesome art that they, well, you get the idea.
I always enjoy seeing what JoBlo has found because with each post they list the artist’s name and a link to more of his/her art. If you check it out you’ll discover amazing artists like Dave Rapoza who did the Lobo piece above.
Twilight Zone: “Cavender is Coming” [Season 3, Episode 36]
Original Air Date: May 25, 1962
Director: Chris Nyby
Writer: Rod Serling
Starring: Jesse White, Carol Burnett, Howard Smith and Donna Douglas.
The Overview: Beware of Spoilers…
Harmon Cavender [White] is an angel who has yet to earn his wings. He’s given one last chance by improving the life of woman [Burnett].
Rating:
Howard Chaykin has a new –
I’m in.
But you don’t know what the comic is about. You don’t even know what it’s called.
I’m in.
Listen –
Ok, tell me.
THE DIVIDED STATES OF HYSTERIA is set in the aftermath of a dirty bomb that wipes New York City off the map, as what will come to be known as the Second American Civil War shatters the domestic landscape in isolated pustules of violence…and a team of five private contractors is charged with stemming this tide of rage and bringing the bombers to justice.
Guess what?
What?
I’m in.
Source: Bleeding Cool.
Roger Cormier and Mental Floss present 15 Big Facts About Sanford and Son. Here are three of my favorites…
5. FOXX WORE MAKEUP TO LOOK OLDER.
Foxx, who was nicknamed “Chicago Red” because of his hair color, was only 49 years old when the series began; Fred Sanford was 65. He complained that a lot of people assumed he was Fred’s age.
8. FOXX BASED THE HEART ATTACKS ON HIS MOTHER.
“Fred Sanford is Mary Sanford, who is my mother, but you can reverse personalities into male or female,” Foxx told Sammy Davis Jr. on Sammy and Company. “My mother would do the same thing … she would have heart attacks when I was a kid, I remember. When she wanted something done she could hardly breathe—she had emphysema, she had cancer, she had lumbago, she had whooping cough.”
9. LAWANDA PAGE WOULD HAVE BEEN FIRED IF IT WASN’T FOR FOXX.
LaWanda Page was the only actress Foxx wanted to play Fred’s sister-in-law, Esther. Page was too nervous to give an audition producers liked, but Foxx insisted. “They were going to let me go,” Page told Jet magazine in 1977, “but Redd said, ‘No, you ain’t gonna let her go. That’s LaWanda and I know she can do it! Just give me some time with her.'”
Twilight Zone: “I Sing the Body Electric” [Season 3, Episode 35]
Original Air Date: May 18, 1962
Director: William Claxton and James Sheldon
Writer: Ray Bradbury
Starring: Josephine Hutchinson, David White, Vaughn Taylor and Veronica Cartwright.
The Overview: Beware of Spoilers…
George is a widower raising three children on his own. When George decides to purchase a robot that in all aspects looks like a grandma to assist with the children. Two of the three children accept the robot but the third child rejects her with terrible results.
Rating:
Spies…
Thieves…
Ballerinas… uh, Excuse me?
Yep. Ballerinas.
Prima by Jen Van Meter, Rick Burchett and Eric Newsom tells a story set in the 50’s of a…
…dance company—comprised entirely of former spies—righting the wrongs of the Cold War.
Save a dance for me.
Source: Bleeding Cool.
One of the best horror movies ever made, The Creature from the Black Lagoon was filmed in glorious black and white.
It’s rare to see color photos of The Creature, but you can if you click over to Geek Tyrant: Awesome Color Photos from Creature of the Black Lagoon!
Twilight Zone: “Young Man’s Fancy” [Season 3, Episode 34]
Original Air Date: May 11, 1962
Director: John Brahm
Writer: Richard Matheson
Starring: Phyllis Thaxter, Alex Nicol and Wallace Rooney.
The Overview: Beware of Spoilers…
Alex Walker and his new bride arrive at the home in which Alex grew up with his clinging mother. Alex’s mom recently died and they are there to sign papers to sell the home. Alex begins to have second thoughts much to the despair of his new wife.
Rating:
