This week: th existential horror of two-part movies, episodic TV trends, remaking the original Star Trek with a de-aged original cast, The Sopranos, and how to draft the standing army of effects technicians at the end roll of every modern film: all this and so much less on this week’s edition of Right Angle: Backstage!
65 replies on “Right Angle: Backstage 07/11/23”
Have you read or watched Richard Feynman?
For dramas that carried on episode to episode, one early adopter was Hill Street Blues in the 80s. Alias took the genre to a new level, even changing the design of the show so that as the climax ended one episode; Act One of the next concluded the previous episode’s action. Bring on whole seasons, please: Like Scott, I’d rather self-regulate entertainment consumption…cuz =sigh= The Hobbit .. yeesh
For Pixar fans, the blue yellow and red ball in the original lamp short “Luxo, Jr.” appears in some form in every Pixar movie.
In the movie “Dave” Ben Kingsley’s portrayal of the VP is almost assuredly a take on Truman. I do like that Truman took MacArthur to task about standing up when the President comes into a room. In the military you are always to respect the rank, even when you can’t respect the holder of the rank.
FDR married Eleanor because of who she was, her family would guarantee his making it to the Oval Office. I am sure that Eleanor knew exactly what FDR was up to with Lucy, she just wouldn’t bring herself to go down to that level.
Steve,
You need to turn the volume up on your,”word in edgewise microphone.”
“Empire Strikes Back” ending on a cliffhanger really ticked me off.
Sounds like he’s actually IN his coffee cup!
Can not hear Steve at all
I’m really hoping some theaters will offer Dune with both parts, back to back. Not that I don’t know the story in depth, but, I think it’d give it that one-movie experience Bill is talking about.
On Scott’s comment about binging streaming shows (though he didn’t say those words) does anyone really complain if someone sits down and reads a book cover to cover? Maybe if you don’t do your chores or homework or go to work, but I don’t recall being told to not binge read a book when I was in my teens.
Mark Gungor was the mentioned mens/women’s brains guy. (last name might be spelled wrong).
I have the Sky Captain movie.. I’ll have to watch that again ….
Carol Kaye. Phenominal bassist.
I guess that I have movie gender dysphoria, ‘cause when I saw Roy Scheider in Marathon Man, I said: It’s Chief Brody. 😉
Concur!
The only thing lacking in this entire recording was to increase Steve’s recorded volume.
I always like the possibly apocryphal story of Truman meeting MacArthur who I believe made him wait and then didn’t stand when he came in. And Truman saying something like ‘ I don’t give a good goddamn what you think of Harry Truman, but you’ll stand for the President of United States’
I watch a lot of British TV and I always check the actors age and if they’re alive and what age they died. I appreciate actors who’ve had one long-standing marriage and several children, which makes them sound normal to me.
(Pulling my cased, limited edition, leather bound copies of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings down off the shelf …)
The Hobbit is 317 pages.
The Lord of the Rings trilogy is a total of 1,215 pages.
In The Hobbit movies the makers of the movie added a lot of content that was not Tolkien’s writing. The movies were not faithful to the source material. They ended up with three movies thereby.
In the Lord of the Rings movies the movie makers had to skip content that was in the original works in order to fit everything into an applicable time span. Even with the omissions the movies were reasonably faithful to their source material. They ended up with three movies, which were quite long, thereby.
That tells you all you need to know regarding why the Lord of the Rings movies were a smash hit and The Hobbit movies were met with a considerable lack of enthusiasm.
As far as episodic vs. serialization of television shows is concerned …
The older form of individual, stand alone TV episodes are like short stories in printed literature. You get an entire story in one show. I like short stories a lot, I can read one at bed time and finish it. I read novels too, but I have a soft spot for a good short story.
The newer form of serialized non-self sufficient TV shows is more like a novel where you have to read the entire thing to get the story. In the past we would generally see this sort of thing as a two-part “Stay tuned for next week’s episode” or used as an end-of-season cliff hanger.
Frankly, I have no problem with either format.
Equally frankly, I NEVER binge-watch an entire series. I don’t have time for that in my allotted daily schedule. Not even on the weekends because I have better things to do than to sit in front of a screen all day.
I generally try to watch a movie on Sunday afternoon and I usually pick something older, like a John Wayne movie or other “classic”. Last Sunday it was “City Beneath the Sea” with Robert Ryan and Anthony Quinn. As a good example of “other”.
I also host a “movie night” on Saturday night where one or more friends will come over and have a couple drinks and smoke a cigar (things you cannot do in a commercial movie theater, as a rule, though there are theaters that serve alcoholic beverages at highly inflated prices) while we watch a movie in my home theater.
The point here is that I don’t sit down and binge-watch anything. I just don’t have any interest in prioritizing the days of my life that way. I will watch an episode or two several nights in a row but that takes up all my “TV time”. So I usually watch something current and something I have in storage, one hour long TV show each.
YMMV and that’s fine with me. I don’t really care how other people choose to spend their discretionary time. But not all of us have become binge-watching zombified couch potatoes. I don’t know how many days, weeks, months or years I have left in my life and there are things I’d rather do than watch a screen for hours and hours. Even though I have a quite nice, not excessively fancy but wholly adequate home theater with Dolby Atmos capacity on down to stereo. That’s a toy, I play with it for my amusement, I don’t waste my days playing with it.
BTW, I put this home theater together when it became clear that my physical mobility and stamina were never going to revert to what they were when I was just a few years younger. My reasoning was that I would have something to do when I couldn’t do other, more physical pursuits. Even then, I still find a way to get outside as much as I can manage.
I’m going to go mow the lawn right now and that takes about 2.5 hours or a little more. With a commercial Dixon ZTR 62″ mower and a Kubota tractor with a 72″ finish mower deck on the three-point. It’s a big lawn. I like this time outside and it’s one of the things I can still do because I sit down the whole while.
I still do as much of the maintenance on the equipment as I can stand to do and only call my mechanic if it’s something that is beyond my capacity. Yesterday I spent the entire day working on the Dixon Kodiak ZTR for instance.
Don’t become a couch potato if you can avoid it. It’s not good for you.
“… cased, limited edition, leather bound copies of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings down off the shelf.”
Snob. I’ll have you know that MY leather-bound limited editions were autographed by Tolkien myself!
LOL, and thereby proportionately increased in value no doubt!?!
My copies were a Christmas present from my little sister who is my only sibling. Sis knows how to pick great Christmas gifts. It’s always a great joy on Christmas morning to find out what mostly useless and absolutely wonderful thing she’s picked out this year.
A sister like mine can only ever improve the life of her elder, curmudgeonly brother.
For those who haven’t seen the Wrecking Crew. Spoiler alert from a 15 year old movie. Glen Campbell started his career as a member of this group of studio musicians.
That guy could play.
Going back to Bill’s comment on The Sopranos, and the sea-change in TV:
That actually started much earlier. I remember Babylon 5.
Any dedicated fan of B5 can recall the story buidling of a 5 year arc.
One of my favorite memories is of a throw-away line from the third episode that is paid off in the final episode of the series, 5 YEARS later!
That’s some dam fine storytelling!
I need to re-watch B5 again, its on my list. One thing I remember reading about the series is that the way season 4 ended and how some of 5 was written wasn’t the way it was originally planned. The show was almost cancelled either during or just before season 4 so they had to hack that to shorten the story, then got a reprieve so they could do season 5.
I’m a Trekkie (but ony through Star Trek Enterpise), and never thought I’d love another scifi show, but I found Babylon 5 in its first-run syndication and could hardly believe how great this show is. J. Michael Straczynski put together and created a masterpiece.
Watched precisely zero of Twilight. Never got the appeal of that lead actress either. She has less emotional range than a statue.
Star Trek beyond was well done and an interesting concept.
I heard a quote about the actress but can’t remember from where: “She has the range of emotions from A to A.”
Is that better or worse than a statue?🤔
Ha, also accurate.
Also never got the people who were trying to tell me how beautiful she is.
Just one more reason to tell young people to get off my lawn.
A to A is probably worse. Great sculptors can create statues that definitely have emotion. See below from da Vinci’s La Pieta.
So maybe emotional range of a statue carved by a hack is more apt.
I tried, since I like vampire movies and books. Always interesting to see how they handle the magic or science of a moving, undead body. I got about 15-20 minutes into it and wondered if I was watching some teen drama or what, and ejected the disk. Netflix, so it was essentially free.
I have heard men’s and women’s brains compared to waffles and spaghetti. Same principle.
Now I’m hungry…
I like the copper wire analogy better since a jumble of bare wire would consistently short to different paths.
If you like “The Wrecking Crew”, make sure to watch the documentary “Muscle Shoals” about the FAME recording studio in Muscle Shoals AL and their inhouse band, The Swampers.
Really amazing the artists that went down to this little swamp town to record their music.
I heartily recommend. I have seen both documentaries and while I enjoyed both, I thought Muscle Shoals was a better experience.
I thought that Shoals was a bit overly dramatic. Still a good story.
May I also recommend 20 Feet From Stardom about back up singers.
Shoals did got down in some weeds. But still preferred it to Wrecking Crew. TWC ended up being an homage to the director’s dad and would have been better being broader.
Still enjoyed both.
Scott, please tell me how you found the most recent Stratosphere Studio on Youtube. I’ve done several searches and the most recent one I can find is from June 26th.
Also, it’s disappointing that neither Studio nor Lounge seem to be kept up to date here at BW dot com.
It’s on the BW channel, under “Live”.
There was an early 80s film called “Looker” with Albert Finney, James Coburn and Susan Dey. As part of the movie there was part of the plot that was removing actors from commercials by doing full body scans and digitizing them to optimize the ad impact. Now 40 years later, it is pretty doable.
I love that movie! The L.O.O.K.E.R Device, the special shades, all the implications of the technology, like hypnotizing people via commercials. The geo-political implications. That cool car chase! The subtly brilliant use of the Purloined Letter technique at the beach house.
Fun movie.
Trivia: They used automotive timing lights as the LOOKER guns.
Auto timing lights: Cheap, functional, available anywhere!
Ah, carburetors and distributor rotors….and timing lights… “Memories…..Like the corners of my mind…..”
“Ron”, thank you!!! With the onset of AI, I was trying to find that movie on IMDB and kept searching for “Scanners”, coming up with of course, nothing. I should have searched James Coburn instead. Saw it once, probably on the small screen years after it appeared in theaters, which made it all the more creepy to have it cut up with…..commercials! I have not had the chance to watch this backstage yet, but just had to thank you for the movie title.
As Phil pointed out it had a couple of interesting devices and twists. Liked how when they caused unconsciousness with the flashy thingy (way ahead of M.I.B) there was always an indication that time had passed.
It is actually one of those movies that could use a refresh with new tech. Though they’d woke it up and screw it up.
I haven’t watched Looker since we rented it on Betamax in the early ’80s. Gonna have to give it another… look.
Ooh, dad joke level of wit!!
Of course being of a certain age that one had a crush on Laurie Partridge helps the quality of the movie. But start with James Coburn and Albert Finney – come on that has to be pretty good.
That could have been the best casting job, wasn’t James Coburn cast as the Nasty in this film? Cold steely eyed nasty villain? His “Flint” character in the spy movies was played brilliantly too.
He was. Of course if they remade this today he obviously would have been the villain since he was the head of the evil corporation.
Thanks, Gents, for the recommendation of the documentary about “The Wrecking Crew”. Now, please tell me you’ve seen “Muscle Shoals” aka: Swampers.
All these years, I never understood what this lyric meant, but I will soon:
“Now Muscle Shoals has got the Swampers
And they’ve been known to pick a song or two (Yes, they do)
Lord, they get me off so much
They pick me up when I’m feeling blue
Now how ’bout you?”
THAT’S what that means???!!
*mind blown*
I didn’t know it either, until now.
It was either when these guys mentioned Muscle Shoals a while back or something else that clued me into the recording studio.
There are a few youtube channels I’ve stumbled upon that go into the story of a song and break down the lyrics. Rick Beato is one and “Professor of Rock” I think is another. Rick is more on the musicality and the Prof does more the song itself.
Both of those channels are in my go to list of things to watch.
Not being a guitar player, some of Rick’s are too technical but I enjoy his breakdown of the art of creating music.
If you do podcasts at all, Mike Rowe had Rick Beato on his a year or so ago. Here is a brief YT clip but the whole discussion is on Spotify and other streamers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6V1bi-fsrc
I get about 30% of what Rick Beato explains, but it’s still entertaining and a real peak into the mechanics of songs and artists we know and love.
Also a good watch is “The Charismatic Voice” where an opera singer listens to and dissects vocal performances from Tool to Rush to Heart and everything in between. Her take on Geddy Lee’s Spirit of Radio was classic.
I have seen her. Very good and her interviews are pretty good. Morgan James and Geoff Castlelucci were really good and favorites of hers. Covers a broad spectrum of styles, too.
Hadn’t read your post before posting mine, Rodger. MS was a really good documentary. The list of artist who went through FAME recording studios is really impressive.
I think that the underlying reason behind the two-part movie trend is, that by the time the second movie comes to theaters, you will have forgotten enough of the first installment that you need to GO BACK AND WATCH IT AGAIN! Now, you’ve paid for the first movie twice. Either rental or purchase, but they got you twice for one movie.
That and the older pattern of releasing the DVD, releasing a 2,3 or 4 part Boxed Set when the whole series was out, and the some collector or director’s edition a year later, to really soak up the money.
I love you guys and highly anticipate each video. Is Steve in the doghouse? Is he being punished for some transgression? Bill and Scott are coming through just fine, but Steve’s audio can barely be heard. Now I’m being shouted at by Bill and Scott just so I can hear Steve.
I am one of those women who watches an actor and instantly connects them to every other thing I’ve seen them in, lol. To be fair, I learned that from my Dad, who also makes all the connections. He’s 80, and may not remember what he did yesterday, but will tell me the life story and career history of an actor if we’re watching a show or movie together.
I raise my hand, Scott. Vampires don’t twinkle!
With regard to The Hobbit movies, PJ added characters from the appendices and other parts of Tolkien’s notes that were compiled in The History of Middle Earth in order to meet the studio’s requirement to make it a 3-movie deal. Azog the Defiler was one of those characters for which they gave him a main role. Tariel, on the other hand, was made up and that made me frown. Other than that, he did his best to stay true to the mythology. I blame the studios, but in all reality, they’re not that bad.
I’m against re-doing ANY of our old favorites. Especially by Disney. Hollywood has ruined enough of our beloved shows / movies.
Fyi: The Lord of The Rings was originally meant to be published as one big book of 2 volumes with volume 2 being The Silmarillion. It was decided to print three. But each printed book had two internal books in it.
Ok, I’m a Tolkien geek. I stopped counting how many times I read the Lord of the Rings at 28. No idea how many times I’ve read it, or The Hobbit, or The Silmarillion. At least 10 times each.
I’m overdue to read all of them again.
I’m an LOTR geek too! I first read the books when I was teen and have re-read them many times. I’m now 66 and it’s still my favorite.
Trivia: When PJ was filming the movies, I joined the charter fan club, (you’ll find my name in the fan credits of the extended versions of all three), PJ had a special printing done of the original 6 books. Of course, I purchased them! It was after that printing that they condensed the story down to 3 books. Obviously, I need to dust…
Ok, now I’m officially jealous. I actually read the books so many times that, since my first ones were paperback, one has lost both covers, and has tape holding about 3 pages of the appendix on to the rest.
Any additional reading occurs on my hardbound.
(yes, I read the appendices every time I read the book. Interesting info.)
I also started in my teens, and am now 68.
It was all quite accidental, to be honest about it. One day I was searching the net for something about LOTR and it returned a link to the movie website. I didn’t know anyone was making a movie at the time and I bookmarked it to keep tabs. It was a brand new site and only consisted of a couple of pages, but they had a picture of Bilbo’s hobbit hole and a bit about how PJ was going to stay as true to the story as possible. Later, I joined the fan club as part of a fundraising effort. As the website following grew, they decided to offer the members a spot in the credits for, (if I recall correctly), $300 per movie. I decided that was what credit cards were for and gladly handed them my card number. I don’t have any kids, so that’s my big legacy 😀
I kinda went a bit nuts after the movies released and started going to conventions and the like. Andy Serkis published a book about being Gollum and they held a book signing party at a book store in Pasadena. The lines were long to get in and I spotted a florist across the street. I decided to get him a bouquet of roses, so my friend held my place and I had the florist do an arrangement that included a dead plastic fish that I grabbed at the nearby Target. They weren’t taking the time to take pictures or personalized autographs, but they made an exception for me!
https://www.mediafire.com/file/ebyojg3r121rydu/AndySerkis_2011.pdf/file
Fun times, for sure…
You might enjoy the following link:
https://www.glyphweb.com/arda/
If you did the whole AI thing, bringing back the original cast of Star Trek, could we have aliens that aren’t an embarrassment?
I just binged on “Witcher”, second season. I enjoyed the first one and really like the lead character. The writing for the second season has got to be AI generated from an elementary stage in the craft. It interweaves obvious time-tested tropes to the point of hilarity. By the second episode I pointed it out to my brother and by the end we were anticipating the next line and laughing because our dialog was better.
I read both the Einstein Biography and Truman’s as well. Einstein’s first wife did the math and when he won the Nobel Prize he gave the money to his first wife Truman was loyal to everyone from his unit in WWI.
I didn’t. . .