KH Martin

Well, so far as I know, Probst wasn't even available for interviews -- Netflix certainly never gave any indication. (And I"m pretty sure Probst only did part of ep2, as Messerschmidt's rep indicated he did part of 2 as well as the remaining 8.) Shoot, for the cover piece in DV on MINDHUNTER, I had to do my Messerschmidt interview by email, not even by phone, and well before ever seeing the show, so I was just having to send generic questions and talkpoints based only on the trailer and my knowledge of Fincher from having covered FIGHT CLUB and BUTTON. Not exactly ideal conditions.

Well, like I said, Probert did some sketches to illustrate Trumbull's idea and go beyond what he suggested, and these are reproduced in a few places like THE ART OF STAR TREK, so maybe you saw them there. My initial response to the movie was largely the same as yours, except a LOT more negative -- way too much of a s-l-o-w ripoff of THE CHANGELING, when I'd been hoping for BALANCE OF TERROR, or maybe THE IMMUNITY SYNDROME (that's the one with the big amoeba, but more importantly it is very character-centric on Spock and the Doctor, PLUS reuses the great music from THE DOOMSDAY MACHINE.) My shorthand perception (which actually ignores a couple of my favorites that aren't typical eps, like THE EMPATH and RETURN TO TOMORROW) of good TREK was, "ship fires its guns and Kirk gets his shirt ripped' and TMP had precious little of the one and none of the other. I was so ticked off I didn't even let myself get seduced by the cloud visuals, which in retrospect were some of the most beautiful shots ever attempted back then, but my positive takeaways were primarily just the Goldsmith score and (most) of the miniature work, which I still think is just gorgeous, especially given the time pressure involved. Don't know if you're aware, but a redshirt -- well, a helmeted security guy -- did get zapped in the rough cut, when the glowy thing invades the bridge, but Dykstra's group couldn't get the whole sequence done in time, so they dropped that portion, which happens before the probe wanders around the bridge and buzzes Chekov. It was the only time you'd have seen somebody shooting a hand phaser in the film, since the other scene, when Spock shoots vger antibodies that are mistaking Kirk for Rachel Welch, also got thrown away when Trumbull came in and started fixing the mess that was left for him. Ah, the coffee finished brewing!

Well, this is another story that has been retold so often the truth got buried. There wasn't ever a script containing what you mention here. But when Trumbull was unsuccessfully lobbying for an extension -- hoping to get the film's release postponed till Easter -- he suggested a way of plussing up the story at the end with what you describe, for which Andy Probert then did some very nice storyboard art. But there was no progress toward actually doing any of this, which would have meant opening up the stages and doing ANOTHER live-action shoot during post (that's in addition to the other shoots done in post, including San Francisco, Epsilon 9, the klingons and the Spock spacewalk) that would have involved the Enterprise bridge set and crew, probably the engine room (since the Klingons would have struck there, leading to a saucer separation) and I guess the Klingon bridge again as well. Also, although there are conflicting reports on this, I'm pretty sure the Magicam model was not able to do a separation of the dish section, so that'd've meant additional miniatures that had to match to what had looked so glorious in the previous two hours. Would have been a huge undertaking. And I think it was just a trial balloon on Trumbull's part anyway. I think Probert spent more time thinking about it than Trumbull did. I got to talk with Trumbull several years ago, and since I'm obsessed with this weird movie's twisted production anyway, I asked a few questions about this. His memory of that whole experience was mainly about how ill he became because of the workload. He remembered Andy Probert, but nothing about this idea at all, though it is well documented in some making-of books.

There's also a small Blockade Runner, separately machined from aluminum, used just for the first shot. No way to get far enough back from the big one to make it look small.

Different strokes, I wish 2001 was a half hour longer. I guess it was 18min longer at first, but then Kubrick made some cuts to the centrifuge, the first EVA, and probably to the space station docking. The first time I saw ST-TMP it seemed endless to me, but by the time there was a widescreen laserdisc version available, I had gotten converted to really digging the movie (in spite of all the many MANY things wrong with it, which I think have been discussed here under an old split-diopter thread.) I really wish there was a 4K restoration of this, because TMP and 2001 are probably the first movies I'll watch in UHD (well, BLADE RUNNER too) when they're available. TMP really needs to be fixed up, and there's only so much that can be done, because the VFX elements are mostly all gone, there's no way to recomp the shots like they did for BLADE RUNNER's FINAL CUT.

The Dykstraflex was programmed to move WHILE the exposure was underway, so it wasn't a traditional move-then-shoot stop motion setup; it was specifically designed as a continuous move so there'd be motion blur, as if they were shooting a moving object in realtime, so as to NOT give that staccato effect. (EDIT ADDON: I'm talking about the original film; I don't know how the recreated opening shot from SW that was made for an IMAX film years later was accomplished; maybe that one WAS done with conventional stop-motion, though if so I don't see how they could have gotten the sense of speed as well as scale, unless that shot wound up strobing like crazy.) The only traditional stop motion dimensional animation I'm aware of in the film are the creatures on the 'chess set' aboard the FALCON, though most of the Walker shots in EMPIRE are realized with traditional stop motion (the stuff with the animals being ridden in Empire is 'go-motion' where there IS motion blur being added by the camera in additon to the work of the animators in conventional stop-motion work.)

Yeah, plus long exposure times. Also an electronic follow focus. They had a tilt focus thing that let them keep the title crawl in focus, too. My fave shots in the original SW are probably when the Falcon comes roaring out of the sun at the end ... the flare edge on the ship is just awesome. Also really like when the Falcon 'backs out of the garage' in the death star escape. Still amazed that was a programmed move, it just has this handmade feel like it was a highspeed shoot with a model being spun or thrown. I've never been that thrilled with the movie itself, but I find it to be a miracle of film editing, even now, and there are a few action vfx sequences that I've rewatched dozens of times. Motion control work for models got very refined over time; 20 years later, I think mo-con was at its zenith with SPACE COWBOYS and EVENT HORIZON and STARSHIP TROOPERS, and then it, like the baby, got thrown out with the bathwater by most, in favor of doing nearly everything with CGI, instead of the mixing of techniques that made so many 90s flicks work so well.

Agree with you on most of this, but really Richard Edlund is the guy who did the most to make this shot happen, from producing a proof-of-concept to determining the lens chosen. A couple of the modelmakers spent several weeks detailing the underside of the 3ft star destroyer, and that is a big part of it as well. Dykstra's achievements on the film are enormous, but Edlund's contribution is massive too. I've been messing with a screenplay about the formation of ILM, based on my old CINEFEX article (along with about 15,000 words that got cut from the article), for a VERY long time now, and figuring out the specifics of who did what and when plays havoc with screenwriting, because it is like a push-me/pull-you in terms of reality vs. three-act structure. I used to describe the script, A LONG TIME AGO IN A GALAXY WITHOUT CGI ... (aka A LONG TIME AGO IN A VAN NUYS WAREHOUSE ... ) as RKO 281 meets BARBARIANS AT THE GATE by way of GROWING UP BRADY, but to be fair, it is nowhere near as compelling as BARBARIANS, which is why I keep fussing with it. The material is often compelling, and there are a few tidbits of history that got left out of the official version (still can't get a response from the guy who wrote THE MAKING OF STAR WARS about one particularly odd omission.) One of the toughest parts is writing it so that you don't wind up with trademarked visual elements creeping into shots, since that would make it a huge signoff for Lucas and/or Disney. My conceit is that a director could shoot a lot of this stuff from the perspective of the miniatures being photographed, so you see the crew and the Dykstraflex rather than the spaceships ... after all, everybody already knows what the vessels look like ... and by shooting the pyro models obliquely, I'm making it more about people ducking the flying debris than the shot itself.

Yeah, I think Jupiter is just a large painted globe in OUTLAND, they didn't do CGI for planets till 2010. I think the problem in OUTLAND fx-wise is that they were, to use a phrase I remember from a magazine, trying to produce post-STARWARS look with pre-2001 fx ... no motion-control, etc. Some of the better shots just used double exposures, no matting, to place the descending shuttle together in frame with landing gantries that are at the frame corners. So basically we're talking SPACE1999 approach to everything, which was often the case in the UK, since they didn't get motion control over there till ALIENS, so far as I know. (why they didn't just do the fx stateside? Maybe a money thing -- though OUTLAND had a healthy budget at the time. I remembered the budget being reported to be close to 30 mil, though I checked just now and the numbers I'm finding are in the 16-18 mil range.) It's almost like The Ladd Company projects were allergic to motion control, given this was their first film and THE RIGHT STUFF, done a couple years later, wound up limiting its use to just some of the orbiting capsule shots (but I think Kaufman's on-the-fly/no frills fx approach worked wonders there.) Plus I remember that the modelmakers just about died when Hyams had the whole base spray-painted white with coarse spray that obliterated most of the detailing like scribe lines that they put into the thing, and the coarseness of the paint is such that you can sort of see the pebble-effect in some of the extreme closeups on the introvison shots (like when Connery is walking behind what look like teacups or rocket nozzles -- the scale is utterly blown. Apparently they couldn't get a good exposure with the gray coloration (you'd figure they would have tested the approved prototype with wedges and lighting before commissioning the whole base model be done in that color), and couldn't go to a longer exposure, so making the thing white was the only option.

If/when we get a SF equivalent to THE WIRE, I will be utterly amazed. I still can't believe we got THE WIRE at all, and that is after six viewings in eight years (I managed to miss it completely during the original run.) Then again, I went through the new TWIN PEAKS three times before I let SHOWTIME drop last week, so I feel sort of, well ... quenched, right now. CARNIVALE, THE WIRE, DEADWOOD, plus some short-lived UK shows like THE HOUR and THE GAME ... it's like all those countless theatrical disappointments in the last 20-30 years have been offset to a large degree for me. I really still do miss the Kodachrome look of blue skies and deep shadows that are actually silhouette-black, and I massively miss seeing well-photographed miniature effects, but the powerful storytelling on some series has really overcome these handicaps. I'm one of those few who actually think HIGH CASTLE improved 2nd season, but I find the look of the show a little off-putting. I watched about 20minutes of the new TREK and just didn't see the point.

One of the zillions of screenwriters on that film was a guy who had been trying to get a remake of QUATERMASS AND THE PIT (aka FIVE MILLION YEARS TO EARTH) off the ground, and I think he wound up doing this just because they were going to step all over that UK film's principal conceit (that we ARE the martians.) That's a terrific science fiction concept, but it just got shoehorned into this mess of a movie, wasting it.

Yeah, I was talking with the DP of ALIAS GRACE the other day, and when I told him that Netflix wouldn't let Dariusz shoot film for OKJA, it just about blew his mind.

I like SOYLENT and the original WESTWORLD and a lot of SF pics that don't look too SF ... one I am especially strong on is DEATHWATCH, with Harvey Keitel and Max Von Sydow. Only tiny things indicating it takes place in a slightly futuristic time (made back around 1981 or so), but kind of like a science fiction version of NETWORK, and way too smart to find a big audience. CHILDREN OF MEN really delivered the goods for me this century, but for other SF, I'd say EX MACHINA maybe (liked it but only saw it once, should see it again), because I think Garland might be a guy to watch for SF films, he has another coming soon. He and the ARRIVAL/BR 2049 guy might be The Ones.

Well, GRAVITY was pretty slight fare, and certainly didn't look beyond its premise (what you wind up with at the end of GRAVITY is a far stronger notion - what do we do after ALL the satellites go down?), I thought the execution was amazingly good on the tech end of things. And I'm very hard to please when it comes to VFX. Except for the casting of the INTERSTELLAR lead (I'm of the opinion that INCEPTION AND INTERSTELLAR would have benefitted enormously from having John Hamm as the star of both films) and a few extremely wonky plot points (how DOES that little shuttle manage to take off from a planet with a gravity higher than earth and fly back up to orbit under its own power?), I found INTERSTELLAR to be a very solid film, one that pretty much stole the thunder from Kosinski's planned remake of THE BLACK HOLE. My credibility issues over INT disappeared on the 2nd viewing, as it kinda makes sense to me now. Personally, I'm very partial to sf films that let you see some dirt get under the fingernails, so we're agreed on that aspect. I spent a long while developing a kind of AntiStarTrek universe, where if you have a non-interference directive for your gov't exploratory force, it is basically just cover for looking the other way while the private sector exploits new planets. I'd say FIREFLY was pretty close to what I spent a long time working on, except my concept had much better science (but the characters weren't all as interesting.) To get some real texture to the thing, you wouldn't have this easy warp drive, but a system that leaches heat out of your ship the longer you are going FasterThanLight, which lets you get into a pea-jacket-while-sipping-coffee-on-the-bridge feel to shipboard scenes. I've also been making notes about a near-future asteroid mining story, in the vein of Allan Steele's writings. Kind of OUTLAND-like to a degree, but with my take on how the folks would behave (one of Steele's books has a US-surveillance-from-orbit program scuttled by the dockworkers, who are ex-bikers and various other types who don't like the idea of gov't window-peeping.) Have always thought Tom Hanks should have followed up FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON with HOW THE SOLAR SYSTEM WAS WON, with Arthur Clarke's unused ideas for 2001 (there's practically a whole book's worth of them in Clarke's THE LOST WORLDS OF 2001) as a basis for depicting the next century in manned spaceflight, and this is kind of in that vein. There's enough wealth in platinum out in the asteroid belt to change the whole way we do commerce here, somebody just needs to mine and/or tow that stuff back to Earth.

Not getting the 'what would you have shot?' line. Do you mean what story I'd have chosen to tell instead? I agree with you wholeheartedly about avoiding the default 'universe at stake' stuff, but it seems to me that if you're going to retell a good solid story, you have to support what works about said story ... and by changing the environment and thus the populace, OUTLAND largely invalidated the premise. Instead of a town full of sheep, you've got a rowdy bunch, and yet none of these folks will step up? Really? You could have modified it just slightly to show Con-Am as having some monstrous hold on all parties (like some threat to turn off the air on the masses if they supported Connery, to suggest one right off the top of my head, which became the ticking clock they finally applied to get TOTAL RECALL's third act to the point Arnold would sign off on it), and that might be enough to hang the moment when Connery goes to Io's council elders and gets the expected non-response from them. In fact, it could have thrown some blame onto Connery's Marshall, if Con-Am had already punished somebody to set an example, so he should maybe feel guilty for even ASKING for help. I remember reading that The Ladd Company had Hyams rewrite the thing five or seven times before they green-lit this, and it makes me wonder if the rewrites dumbed it down (sort of a tradition with SF movies, from what I've read about MY STEPMOTHER IS AN ALIEN, SUPERNOVA and MISSION TO MARS, to name a few that went through 35-45 rewrites), or if it always had these sorts of idiocies in it. None of this should invalidate one's enjoyment, just call into question how worthwhile the whole enterprise is. I mean, I absolutely LOVE the movie ACTION JACKSON, but there is almost nothing in the whole movie that withstands any scrutiny at all. The moonlight is so bright that you have a shaft of smokey light coming down via a skylight into a house at night, the lead character can defy gravity like THE MATRIX or as if he is channeling Tom Cruise, and ... well, there's nothing defensible in the whole movie, but I still watch it at least a couple times a year, and I laugh myself silly at it (NOT with it.) So I'm not knocking OUTLAND as an attack on anybody, just pointing out that when you make a science fiction film, you should have the same respect for the audience that any other picture SHOULD demonstrate, and not just dismiss complaints with, 'go along with it, it is sci-fi.' (which is also what I remember people dismissing complaints about the 06 CASINO ROYALE with, saying you have to go with it, it isn't supposed to be it is Bond -- even though the movie's alleged grace was that it was playing straight, which means you shouldn't be able to play THAT particular card as a defense.) That's the surest way to guarantee more dumb crap, and we already get SO much dumb crap.

Well, don't get your hopes up TOO high. For me it is a guilty pleasure, eased somewhat by Connery's presence (and relative daring - he actually shows a lot more softness here than he ever had previously, especially in a scene on a handball court, while mostly being a tough SOB.) But the plot is absolutely rubbish, because transposing HIGH NOON to a rough-n-tumble mining colony doesn't play. As Harlan Ellison pointed out in his lengthy and devastating critique on this one, the kinds of folks in this environment would hardly all be the 'we don't want to get involved' meek townsfolk of the Zinneman film. And that's not getting into any of the science errors and other messups. I still watch this every couple years, mainly because of Connery and because I like a lot of the modelwork and some of the sets. But that's in spite of its many flaws, and one of those I have to watch alone, because even though my wife likes Connery a lot, and can even watch a few other Hyams pics like STAR CHAMBER and even 2010 (but not CAPRICORN ONE, damnit!), she can't overlook all the problems in this one.

It may be Hyams' lighting rather than Goldblatt's. According to CINEFEX (issue 4 or 5, I forget which), when the model unit got underway (concurrent with production), Goldblatt took over miniature shooting and Hyams did all the main unit stuff (this was the film right before Hyams starting DPing his own shows, starting with 2010.) OUTLAND looks a lot like 2010 to me ... maybe a bit less smoke, but both seem very Louma-based in terms of movement, and often lit just with in-frame practicals (usually creating a very unflattering look for actors, but Connery kind of transcends that.) For fans of THE WIRE, the guy who played Freamon on that show is one of Connery's deputies in OUTLAND, though you'd barely recognize him. I don't know that it would be any more useful than the blu-ray, but there was a large-format Fotonovel for OUTLAND, same as the ALIEN one in size, if you want to put some physical images together. I think it goes for ten bucks or so on ebay most of the time. Back at the time of release, there were a few genre mags covering OUTLAND ... Cinefantastique, Starlog and Fantastic Films ... but none of them gave it the mega-treatment that THE THING, THE BLACK HOLE, WRATH OF KHAN, BLADE RUNNER, TRON and others received. They all covered the IntroVision process, but not a whole lot about the live-action that I can recall (guess Hyams should have hired Syd Mead earlier!)

Personally, I saw no need to remake the Eastwood film, but did do an interview with the DP. http://www.creativeplanetnetwork.com/news/shoot/southern-gothic-philippe-le-sourds-beautiful-menacing-beguiled/619435 They did make one 35mm film print, but I don't know if/when they ever screened that. I saw it at a screening, with what I suppose was very much less-than-ideal projection, so I'm guessing the picture looks better at home on BluRay.

You've only got another ten days or so till the studio-imposed moratorium on talking about BR VFX lifts. That's why we didn't get into it for my ICG article, because the editor wanted it running in the October issue, not the November one. But I'd be surprised if this whole 'what the VFX were executed at' aspect isn't addressed in pretty much every VFX story. It's funny, this business with 6K and 8K and all that. 15 years ago, I remember reading that 6K and 8K texture maps were used on the remake of SOLARIS in order to finish at 4K, and I figured that was why it was (back then) just about the only totally credible CGI spacecraft work in film. But I went back just now and checked the couple of tech articles online about the film, and there's no mention of those texture maps, and I only found one reference to Cinesite's space CG work being finished at 4K.

Based on what I've read, their choice of pilot director (CBS' call) is one of the prime calls that led to Bryan Fuller's ouster, as he and the director -- who had been aboard for several months before shooting began -- didn't see eye to eye on much of anything. Supposedly Fuller wanted Edgar Wright (which makes me think he'd've settled for Joe Cornish ... and that would mean he was looking at two of the folks being considered for the most recentTREK feature film.)

They've got at least three DPs on the show; I think Navarro only shot the pilot, but it wasn't like it was a 'shoot the pilot and wait to get a go-ahead for series,' it was more like first two eps of a 13 ep order (that expanded to 15 this last summer, I think.)

For me it is not just the volume of the lens flares (which is way above the gonna-max-out-for-me-about-first-DIE HARD level), but also the context. The last thing you need in a shipboard environment is glare, and since Abrams (except for most of Lin's much improved effort) it has been nothing but. The Abrams was worse than this because it was a bright white environ too -- if you look at the consoles, you see the people on the bridge are pretty much staring directly into lights around their displays, so obviously there is some kind of eye-dilation tech in place, otherwise everybody'd be dead because they wouldn't have been able to read the display. I think the lens flares in the first trek movie (mostly during VFX space exteriors) were exquisite, and the same for the luminous UFOs in CE3K, but here this is akin to poking you in the eye with a sharp stick ... it may get your attention, but it won't help you get the job done. Doing Klingons with the baroque texturing sounds like a let's-do-GAME-OF-THRONES-regardless-of-context call. It may look better than the leather-that-looked-like-inflatable-rubber that the klingons wore in TREK 6, but I actually think the stuff done in the first movie that was the basis for what was used in the third one, which wasn't much more that plastic tubing on a vest shape, looked very good. I'm a hard audience to please when it comes to Trek (I only really like three of the movies, and nothing at all except a big chunk of DS9 and about half of BEYOND since the 90s), but I'm actually getting slivers of pleasure from the last 2 ORVILLE eps, after the unmitigated awfulness of the first couple. Yeah, it is kind of like watching NextGen (of which I was not a fan), and somewhat dumbed down NextGen at that, and the lighting is godawfully undramatic, but it is trying to do right, and I admire the effort, if not the execution. All of this stuff seems pretty bad compared to FIREFLY, which got nearly everything right from the start, except the science. Could say nearly the same for the GALACTICA reboot, but their visual style was really hard on the eyes -- it seemed like they deliberately tried to make sure everything in any given shot was either over- or underexposed, with NOTHING looking normal, like they wanted the show to look like the PITCH BLACK planet or something.

I saw the last 2/3rds of the first episode and even though my expectations were very low, I was disappointed anyway. A lot of ridiculous lens flares and more dutch angles than you'd see in an old BATMAN episode or BATTLEFIELD EARTH. Dialog was horrible, klingons all spoke their lines like dentures were falling out. More glitz on their costumes and ship interiors than you'd find in a Trump building. I'm pretty disappointed with ORVILLE seeming to be written at a highschool level, but at least it has heart (by end of ep 3 anyway) and is free ... not buying into DSC, and that's based on the content, not even getting into the streaming issues (especially given that the platform apparently only manages to get to 720 and not even that on all systems.)

I did an interview with the DP for DIGITAL VIDEO that hasn't come out yet. He was won over to digital largely on the basis of director needing to shoot with so many cameras jammed into whatever cranny was available. He thought that using the 16 lenses with digital was kind of a 'best of both worlds' hybrid approach.

Here's a link to an article I did with the DP and VFX super on this one: http://www.creativeplanetnetwork.com/news/shoot/human-compassion-vs-corporate-greed-creating-complex-layers-netflixs-okja/618668