KH Martin

Can't remember where I read it, but back in the 70s remember a mag indicating that Conrad Hall made 5K/week as DP on BUTCH CASSIDY. Might have been Super8Filmaker magazine, they actually had a lot of surprising and excellent info beyond just the low-budget how-to aspect (which in itself was wonderful.) I don't know that the inflation calculator is accurate for filmmaking, as when you look at how budgets jump up, it isn't a linear progression. It seems there's a huge jump in the late 70s/early 80s (average budget seemed to triple, and that was without counting in the 30/40 mil monstrosities like BLUES BROS and LEGAL EAGLES), and then it seemed like that happened again in the last 20 years, when productions were supposedly saving money using CGI instead of motion control miniatures.

The displacement made me nutso, till I started planning cutaways based on the idea of using a reaction shot that starts using that last second of dialog from the previous cut. If I had better actors and regular access to a quiet camera dolly ahem wheelchair, I'd have shot more dynamic masters rather than relying on cutting, which also minimize the fallout from the 18 frame separation. I would use Super-8 again in a second ... IF Kodak still made Kodachrome 40. I've got a film that is about 90% done from the early 80s that I could shoot the rest of now and it would actually work better, since the character is supposed to age a lot in the last two scenes and I could shoot it now with the main character at the appropriate age, but I haven't seen any Kodachrome emulations that really pull their weight. I absolutely loved the 40, even for low-light stuff, stopped shooting the regular Ektachrome 160 before 1980, though Kodak had other stocks (either the 42 or the 44) that were Ektachrome but pastel-like and very beautiful for certain functions. I shot a film where the parts on Earth were Kodachrome, but Heaven and Hell were on the 42, and Damn, it was like Fuji but better, almost Alexa-like in some ways, a softness that was very much apart from K40, great for special functions. Only downside was you had to have it processed at a real film processor (I think I went to Leo Diner in SF) instead of local sources, and I didn't know they chopped off the first 5 ft and the last 5 ft of every roll, which made a mess of my shooting plan.

No, not at all. I think the actor is a 'miss' and that model shot with the out of focus car in the fg was a little bit embarrassing, but I thought it was damned impressive overall. I haven't looked at the making-of stuff on it yet, mainly cuz I'm jealous, though as usual I wish folks would put this energy into something wholly their own rather than riffing on the greats.

A promo short for a BLADE RUNNER fanfilm. Most of this looks pretty damned amazing to me.

Didn't see a thread anywhere about it, but is anybody going to spend the six bucks/mth to watch the new STAR TREK DISCOVERY show when it eventually airs (slated now for May.) Found a report on trekmovie that Guillermo Navarro and Colin Hoult are the DPs on the show. I don't think Navarro has done TV before. Had been thinking the HANNIBAL DP would wind up on the show, but Navarro setting the look and Hoult following might be a good model too. I still find TREK in my mind running a poor second to TWIN PEAKS when it comes to anticipation (just blew through the whole original series once again during our recent snow/ice shut-in), but keep hoping against hope they can get TREK right. For me, only the original series and DEEP SPACE 9 are really good TV, and I only love three of the features.

Just started rewatching TWIN PEAKS in anticipation of the upcoming third season. Still a damn fine show! We recently watched both seasons of FARGO (dvd, not blu-ray, got em for less than 7 buck together used) and loved' 'em both. Also the last half season of HELL ON WHEELS just started streaming and we went through that in one day! Not the greatest wrapup, but the good far outweighs the less than good, and the visuals got better and better IMO.

That's a pretty good guess, there was an earlier script in which Tyrell is killed like the film, but then Batty says now take me to the real one, and you see that Tyrell was inadvertently killed previously and either kept on ice a la Disney or his consciousness transplanted into a dolphin. I think there are even storyboards for the latter.

Why would anybody consider imdb to be gospel. Man, they used to have John Dykstra listed as a supervisor on 2001, and I think he would have been a sophomore in high school!

I think trek fandom peaked just before SW came out, it was a huge insanity, with 30,000 attending a Chicago con in 76 or 77. And it certainly wasn't due to the vfx, but I think they were mostly adequate given the budget and the time pressures, which are not factors to count in with Kubrick on 2001. The fact you've got chattering matte lines eating a nacelle some of the time isn't a huge thing when, at least a third of the time, the stories work very well, and keep working well on the umpty-umph rewatching. BTW, I'd absolutely consider CHILDREN OF MEN as SF, because it is sociological speculation deriving from a what-if scenario. I hate the book but the movie is my favorite thus far this century.

I'm very far from being an Abrams fan, TFA is the only thing I've ever seen of his that i got all the way through AND rewatched and enjoyed. The thing about developing SF stories is that you can't just go off in the basement and do it yourself, at least not the way you could 25 years back, which is about when I started sliding into writing rather than trying to do zero-budget stuff. One thing that takes the enthusiasm out of my sails is when somebody actually manages to do something like what I've had in my own mind ... and while it is good or great, nobody sees it. FIREFLY is very very close -- in style and execution, though my version had MUCH better science -- to an idea I worked up in the early 90s, for which I have a whole file cabinet drawer of treatments and scripts and notes on how to shoot the thing. The fact FIREFLY and then SERENITY both failed to catch on, despite the Whedon cache, made me think that my thinking is far too 'niche' to be successful. Then again, a lot depends on the folks you are pitching to. When I pitched at STAR TREK THE NEXT GENERATION, i tried not to go too 'hard science fiction' because they had a tendency to just use that aspect as a hook rather than an in-depth approach, and I assume that is because they weren't dedicated SF readers. Out of about a dozen pitches, the one story I pitched that WAS 'hard science fiction' got shot down with, 'we don't do fantasy' -- which proved to me that the woman taking the pitch had no business being in that chair. I mean, she can say, 'picard wouldn't do that' and that's her opinion, and in a position of authority that op carries weight. But dismissing this one pitch as fantasy would be akin to dissing BATTLE OF ALGIERS because it was too glossy and melodramatic and didn't have enough musical numbers. (25 years ago this month and I'm still ticked about that.)

That's just one of many scenes in the novel that make me still think -- heretical though the notion may seem to most --you could make a very faithful adaptation of the book that wouldn't owe much to Scott at all. I've seen the movie 50 or 60 times (have watched the city overflights maybe 1000 times by now, practically wore out the laserdisc), but I've reread the novel every couple of years as well, and I still think they threw away a lot of terrific ideas (and you also got the lame stuff, like Scott being overliteral-minded and misunderstanding a writer's voiceover, which got him going with the whole 'Deckard is a replicant, how HEAVY METAL is that?' notion and cramming it into a form that didn't really comfortably contain it.)

I just checked deakins' site and he says specifically the 65 was NOT used.

Deakins has said that he thinks all the 4K cameras give you too much, so no surprise he is sticking with the older Alexas rather than getting with the 65.

Lynch and his first two co-writers (guys who did ELEPHANT MAN) wrote theirs from scratch, and I think ultimately there were about 7 drafts before he and Dino agreed on what was getting shot, all after discarding the Scott version, by Rudy Wurlitzer. My understanding is that they felt they were very close to the source material, and only eliminated stuff that would have resulted in a 7hr version, like the second guy who COULD have been Kwisatz (who is probably my favorite character in the book.) MediaScene Premiere magazine had a longish piece about the Wurlitzer/Scott DUNE and other attempts (including the Jodorowksy) during the 80s, and Harlan Ellison did a nice piece on DUNE as well (and he LIKED it!) For all the talk of the sci fi channel version being closer to the book, I actually found that to be way off the mark, especially with respect to Princess Irulan, and couldn't even finish watching it. The Lynch DUNE, even with the 'rain' nonsense at the end, is something I can watch a few times a year, and every 5 years or so I even watch the disowned longer version with the missing blue eyes stuff cut back in. I just wish they'd cast somebody charismatic in the lead (read recently that Rob Lowe turned Dino down, and even though I think Lowe's only strength is comedy, at least he'd have been a presence instead of a black hole all the other talent was stuck orbiting round and getting sucked in by, which is how I read Kyle in DUNE -- amazing his differences and growth between DUNE and TWIN PEAKS, though.)

He did DUNE instead of RETURN OF THE JEDI, after Ridley Scott walked away from that to do BLADE RUNNER. (scott's dune had a script with the main character sleeping with his mother to produce his weird sister -- don't think that would have played AT ALL in northamerica.) I do think it is funny that Scott's company is doing MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE, it is like he finally realized decades after BR that PKD source material is really choice for 'smart' SF adaptations.

A lot of folks credit this not-a-fan approach to be what made WRATH OF KHAN work, since Meyer's uncredited rewrite is what pulled the whole thing together. He barely knew from TREK, but did know where he wanted to go with it.

I didn't think it was any secret that the Huycks, who rewrote AMERICAN GRAFITTI, also did a very extensive polish on GL's SW script, and are responsible for most of the glib snappy lines, including all of the Han/Leia stuff. Not saying the structure doesn't belong to GL, but don't give him credit for stuff that is clearly NOT in his wheelhouse. You take that snappy feel out of SW and you don't have SW and you don't have a phenomena arising out of it either. As far as that goes, the Guinness character was written as an old desert hermit, eccentric, and it was only after interaction with Guinness that Obi-Wan emerged in the form he took. I don't think SW really emerges as what was in GL's mind at all -- you only have to look at his oft-stated intention that it was supposed to look very diffused and soft yet be shot documentary style to see that what is onscreen has very little to do with his vision, which sounds like a terrible mix of the godawful LUCKY LADY (he originally had Unsworth signed to shoot SW) and the awesome-but-c'mon-use-this-technique-in-context MEDIUM COOL.

Not sure if this helps you, but Bruce Logan shot each of those title sequences separately, to keep with Kubrick's not wanting to dupe anything if at all possible. It's like 1400 frames of animation, too. He talks about it in CINEFEX83 or 84.

Shoot, I saw it first-run in LA at age 7-1/2 and I still haven't had an experience as overwhelming since! Saw it more than 20 times projected between 68 and 89, about half those viewing in 70mm. Last theatrical was the 35mm that circulated about 14 years back, and I remember one obvious shot in the last sequence that had to be from a different source, color and everything else was way off, but only that one image leaped out as being a replacement.

Only started watching two days ago and am already through 7 eps. Most recent surprise was something I guessed 5 eps back, but for most part am very entertained, and like that it seems to have a brain in its head and is about more than surface storytelling. Am most impressed with the performances by those playing hosts, there is some really subtle work, a lot of thought must have gone into it. Not sure about the rewatchability factor being high, though.

We just blew through THE CROWN, which I was sure was not going to be my cup of tea, but boy, it was always interesting! Never heard about this London Smog thing before in my life, you'd think it would be as well known as Arnheim with it being such a fatality-ridden disaster. I'm going to have to look up about the VFX, because I keep thinking there are a lot more than you'd believe at first glance.

Before it started airing, they put 2 eps on youtube and I loved them both, but of course Comcast isn't carrying the EPIX station up here, so I guess I'm stuck waiting a year or more for it to stream or go blu-ray. Was already excited about it after talking to DP (who shot the terrific THE LIVES OF OTHERS) and 2nd unit guy for Digital Video magazine article, but yeah, it looked to be the real deal. Had started in on GOOD GIRLS REVOLT too (which has a very weak first episode after the pilot, don't let it scare you off), and am almost through the season, but the week's events have put this in a historical context that is plain out uncomfortable for us to view, so we're holding off a spell on the last three eps. Also really enjoyed MANHATTAN (both seasons), despite the historical issues. THE WIRE is still a big go-to for us, while MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE is another current fave, STRANGER THINGS too (not so great 2nd time through), but our top pick for the decade thus far is probably the over-way-too-early two season run of THE HOUR, which we've seen every year. And speaking of shows that ended too soon, we still make time to rewatch CARNIVALE, FIREFLY and DEADWOOD.

Phil, I was just talking to a 1st AC on FENCES -- a 35mm anamorphic feature -- who is trying to get a group of producers to come in on a real study about costs for film and digital, with all expenses included in the breakdown. He is convinced that in a lot of non-VFX heavy cases, that the cost is probably very very close, though obviously the turnaround is going to be longer with film. One of the big challenges on FENCES was that they are having to train up on set about stuff like being a film loader, because the current skillsets don't seem to support an originated-on-film workflow. And I've gotten other recent feedback from DPs -- some on the young side -- who when they do get to shoot film (sometimes as a special event on an otherwise digital show) have to deal with crews who don't even seem to have second-hand knowledge of how to do it. Seems like cinematography is at the crossroads VFX came to near century's end, where motion-control and a lot of traditional toolsets got set aside in favor of the whole-cloth CGI origination, and that now we're really hurting as a result of the loss of that creative option.

Link doesn't work, but I gotta say, this looks interesting. It wouldn't be as good as Kodachrome, but features have been using this to give a period look (the upcoming FENCES shot most of its exteriors on 50D Vision3.) I've got an unfinished Super8 film from 1980 that I was toying with resuming a ways back, but the death of Kodachrome put the brakes on that. Now I may have to reconsider ... '37 years in the making!' The main character is supposed to age a lot during the film, and I was thinking of reshooting the ending with myself at my current age ... would be nice to see a comparison of K40 with this 50D stuff.

Very primitive computing effects combined with optical composting. http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/how-michael-crichtons-westworld-pioneered-modern-special-effects